We seem to fancy ourselves as farmers in our former lives, perhaps not subsistence farmers. More likely amateur gardeners who manage to kill fewer plants than we set out to cultivate. This spring we decided to add several types of peppers (poblano, habanero, santa maria) and tomatoes (heirloom and cherry) to our repertoire. These, in addition to the various herbs Katherine tends to, the peppers that survived the winter months (purple jalapenos), and the prolific pear and fig trees on the property that produce ridiculous amounts of fruit. Our job this summer has pretty much been trying to find creative ways to use up the produce. Since the earth has been so good to us, it seems a real waste not to at least try to use the good stuff. With our first tomatoes and basil, we made a caprese salad and bruschetta.
Since then, we've had many more caprese salads and put tomatoes in just about every dish. Our farm share has also been prolific with tomatoes, so on top of our own tomatoes, we've had extra grape and slicing tomatoes too. Tomatoes are rapidly becoming NOT my favorite fruit. It's almost a chore trying to find tasty and different ways to eat them. The logistics of eating seasonally and locally.When we first moved into the house, we tended to leave most of the figs and pears on the trees or on the ground. Some years we would pick a bunch and share them with co-workers and neighbors. One year, we got out the ladder, picked the pear tree clean and took about 200 pears to the Salvation Army for its soup kitchen.
Needless to say, the folks at the Salvation Army were a little puzzled and daunted at the prospect of using up all the pears - as had we, which was why we were trying to get rid of them in the first place.Early on, our lovingly tended tomatoes fell victim to a blight that took a good half of them before they even ripened. Many of them started getting sunken black spots on their sides that spread to the entire fruit.
When I sent a photo of a blighted tomato to the university's head horticulturist to see if she could tell us what it was and how to stop it, she emailed me back to say, "I've never seen this! Let me do some research." That wasn't reassuring, especially since we'd gotten the tomato plants from her arboretum in the first place! We added some layers of newspaper and mulch to the tomato containers to keep the soil moist between waterings and since then, there's been many fewer blighted tomatoes but sadly, much smaller tomatoes. We're still not sure what we're doing wrong, but most of the tomatoes are pretty small, like golf ball-sized.
We seem to have very good luck with the produce we made no effort to take care of. Every time I pick a pear off the tree, five more come raining down. Every other day we pick a full basket of figs.
Unfortunately, neither is the sort of fruit that's easily given away (I took two bags of pears to work one day and it took three days to unload the whole thing. Same thing with the figs) nor are they easy to cook with. An apple pie uses up 10 apples at once. A pear tart, maybe two. And we're not exactly thrilled or eager to start making pear or fig preserves. We could eat them out of hand, but that's a lot of pears. And, to put it delicately, eating too many figs is just...dangerous.
