After a couple couple good frosts the carrots were ready to harvest. With Ella's help we pulled them all a couple days ago and now we'll store them in a plastic barrel with about an inch of water in the bottom. The carrots sit on a slate tile which is elevated from the bottom of the barrel on bricks. The micro-climate in the barrel maintains good humidity level which keeps the carrots crisp all winter long.
We grew a lot of different tomatoes this summer, some of which were heirloom varieties, thanks to our friend Will. When he was laid up after a knee surgery Will started a whole bunch of tomato plants and gave some to us. We lost track of which were which but they're all delicious. Now that they're finally ripening, after sitting in the sun in our spare room, we have to deal with them. We've got a batch of pasta sauce on the stove right now and yesterday I made ketchup - for the first time ever. I found a recipe by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame and it called for 6kg of tomatoes - perfect.
One of the heirloom plants yielded about 30 of these guys!
The toms were all sorts of colours from pink to deep red and yellow.
I used the apple sieve to separate the seeds and skins.
The recipe said it would take about an hour to cook the sauce, but it took way longer. A few glitches along the way and I got 12 bottles in the end. The spices that went in the ketchup included cinnamon, mace, celery seed, all spice, cloves, mustard, pepper, bay leaves, garlic and paprika. It's pretty good but if I were to do it again I'd lay off the celery seed as it's a bit strong. I think that because the ketchup took so long to reduce down to a thicker consistency it would have been best to remove the spice bag earlier.
We pulled the kale plants yesterday and today I blanched it and froze it.
