WOWeeee, Congratulations, that is awesome. Mine have
a few blooms but not ready to bear yet ;-))

River,

Nice cukes! And a lovely little juicy tomato too.

I always have trouble spotting the cukes too. I swear, one day they are an inch long and then a day or two later they are quadrupled in size and I wonder how I "missed" spotting them earlier.

Did you plant some pickling cukes or are they all for fresh eating?

Dawn

I planted both just in case I want to put some up. I prefer the pickling cukes for that. My slicers havent put on yet. Honestly I don't know what I'm going to do with all this produce. I have little okras coming on now and TONS of cherry tomatoes. Tons of hot peppers. I give them away and then some to the nursing home but after awhile even they don't want them. I would love to set up a veggie stand but Enid is 30 miles away and with gas prices the way they are it wouldn't pay. I maybe putting the cart before the horse tho, too many things can go wrong. We are looking at putting in a well here in town because they are talking about raising our water prices. Watering the garden can become an expensive thing. We are going to go with the solar well. Has anyone had any experience with that?

Well, do you like to can, dry or freeze your produce? That's what I do. If you dry the cherry tomatoes, you can then pack them into zip-lock type bags and put them in the freezer. In the dead of winter, take a bag out of the freezer, thaw them out, and toss them into salads by the handful. They will be a little chewy, but the flavor is amazing. If they are too chewy to suit you, you can soak them in water for a while and partially rehydrate them.

They are easy to dry....cut them in half and dry them on a cookie sheet in an oven set at its' lowest temperature, "Warm", which usually is no higher than 200 degrees, or dry them in a food dehydrator.

One year, in a really hot, dry, drought-type year with VERY low humidity, I pulled up tomato plants (Principe' Borghese, grown esp. to make sun-dried tomatoes) and hung them upside down in the tornado shelter and dried them on the plant. You can't do that in a humid, rainy year though 'cause they mold, so I prefer to dry them indoors in a machine.

I wish there was a way to keep the harvest spread out more evenly over a longer period of time, but our weather makes that hard, so preserving the harvest is the best I can do instead. In the winter, it is fun to pull stuff out of the freezer and cook a garden-fresh meal. Does it taste better than standard frozen stuff from the grocery store? You'd better believe it. If you freeze your stuff quickly after picking it, it retains that "just-from-the-garden" flavor even after being frozen.

And if you feel like you don't get enough at one time to put up a big batch of stuff, there are recipes for small-batch canning and preserving too.

Dawn

River, those cukes look great! You might be surprised how far some people will come for fresh, home-grown produce! I'd try the stand, myself!

I had lots of lettuce this year. Of course, I just LOVE lettuce, and I can eat it with just a light salad dressing. But DH thinks he has to have tomatoes on his and they are so expensive that it kind of destroys your savings of growing your own lettuce. That was good marketing, pairing lettuce and tomato, since they don't ripen at the same time you're looking at buying one or the other. LOL So I gave a bunch of it away and now that it's beginning to get bitter, I have a lot that will probably end up in the compost bin. Next spring I won't plant so much of it.

Cukes are kinda that way, too. If you don't make pickles, there's really no way to preserve them so you can enjoy them year 'round. I really love sliced cukes with onion, sugar and vinegar, and also with onion, a half-and-half mixture of sour cream and mayo and some dillweed and a little garlic powder. YUM! But you can only eat so many cukes, eh?

Now, tomatoes -- that's another matter! That's a good suggestion Dawn had about drying them. I think I'm gonna give that a try this year if my grape tomatoes start producing well. I bought a dehydrator several years ago -- a big rectangular one that has about 12 racks. I used it a lot at first, then put it away when the novelty wore off. Now I've gotten it out again. Right now I'm just drying herbs, and I dried some spinach. You can dry leafy things without a dehydrator but I find the color stays better with. Other ways you can preserve your tomatoes are -- if you cut out the core you can pop them in a bag and freeze them. When they thaw, the skin slips right off and you can use them in cooking. Last year, I ran out of room in my freezer and had to can some of the frozen tomatoes. The end product isn't as pretty as if they had been canned right out of the garden, as they tend to fall apart, but you still have a usable product to cook with, or run through a blender, strain and then use as tomato juice. Have you ever had tomato preserves? Some people find the taste "odd", but I grew up with it, and it's something you don't see very often in the stores. It's very easy to make, and the preserves are very pretty in the jar. Some people make a jam that calls for tomatoes and raspberry Jell-O. Now THAT'S a taste I find "odd"! LOL To each his own.

I can testify about the dried cherry tomatoes, which Dawn suggested to me last year when I couldn't keep up with mine. I used them in all kinds of things over the winter, along with basil that I had pureed in a blender, froze in an ice cube tray and placed in a freezer bag.

I picked my first cocumbers yesterday also. I had been watching one for several days but on closer look I had two more the same size (about 7 in). When I walked in the door my husband, "Oow, bring me one of those". I washed them and cut the ends off and we each ate one like it was an ice cream cone.

I hope I get enough produce to worry about. Our weather has been a little wacky so far this year.

Pat,

I'm glad to hear that the dried cherry tomatoes worked for you. I certainly think their flavor in the winter is worth the work done to preserve them in the summer! : ) And, saving the basil in ice cube trays is a great suggestion also, and it works for most leafy herbs as well.

Carol, "A little wacky" is too kind! You and Ilene and Mick and a few others are surely having the most bizarre spring weather since.....well, at least since last year. LOL I'm glad y'all enjoyed your cukes, and I like cucumbers too, but I would have been just as happy with an ice cream cone, ESPECIALLY if I'd made homemade ice cream. (Which I haven't, but now that I'm thinking about it, I think we need to make some here one day soon.)

Dawn

Oh, homemade ice cream. I would never get ice cream if I had to make it in a big freezer anymore. Number one, I have to watch my sugar and DH can't have the milk, so there.

I discovered this tiny ice cream freezer at Wal-mart that I love. It is made by Rival ($30) and doesn't need ice or salt. You keep the keg in the freezer until you have everything mixed up and ready to pour in. You just plug it in and a little later you have homemade ice cream, or sorbet, or what ever frozen dessert you desire. I think it holds 3 pints, but I find that what I can fit in my blender is just abour right for the container. You can make your favorite type of ice cream. If I tell you what I make, you would say, "Yuck", so I won't bother.

I have found that almost every flavor is improved by the addition of a banana, even strawberry. It is quick to use and clean up, makes enough to enjoy but not enough to have to worry about any going to waste. We use it, wash it, and return it to the freezer (in a plastic bag) so it is ready for the next time. It will freeze the ice cream and still not be thawed by the time it goes back into the freezer.

We sure went from cucumbers to ice cream in one big swoop, didn't we? Gardening, oh yeah this is a garden forum. Well, you could grow the strawberrys, (or blueberries Scot and my favorite is banana pecan).

This is not quite as bad as we did the other day when we were discussing planting carrots in the "What to plant" thread. Very quickly George got to "carrots in heat" and I wondered how many internet hits Gardenweb got on that post. I started to tell him to say "carrots in season" but I decided they were "carrots out of season" so that didn't work either. I guess the reason I found that so funny is that the other night I was looking at "gardening" on YouTube, and one of the videos that came up was about nudiest at home, or something like that. I wondered if they were gardening, BUT didn't look to find out. Between the use of the English language, and Google, you can find yourself in real trouble quickly.

My mom used to make what she called "refrigerator pickles". I loved them. It was really the only way I would voluntarily eat cucumbers that weren't called "dill pickles".

Lisa

Ok, now let me get this down, just half the cherry tomatoes, put them on a cookie sheet, turn the oven on low (about 200)and dry. Pop them in a baggie. Now how long does this drying take appx? and do you put the baggie of dried tomatoes in the freezer? I am supposing they are leathery so mold is a possibility.

There are several ways to do it, and how long it takes to dry varies depending on whether you are doing it at 140 degrees, or 175 or 200 or whatever. They can dry in as little as about 3 to 5 hours at about 140 to 175 degrees or maybe in 2-3 hours if you speed-dry them at 350 degrees. Also, the size of the tomatoes makes a difference. Very small currant-sized tomatoes like Coyote, Red Currant, Yellow Currant, or Tess' Land Race dry more quickly. The medium-sized ones like Ildi, Sungold, Orange Santa, Sweet Million, Rosalita, Sweet One Hundred, etc. take a little longer. The larger ones like Large Red Cherry, Black Cherry, Husky Red Cherry, etc. take even longer.

You may want to coat the baking sheet with a cooking spray like Pam to keep them from sticking. (Some people like to use olive oil 'cause it adds a little flavor.) Some people dry them plain, but others drizzle them with olive oil or sprinkle them with salt or pepper or basil or an Italian Spice blend. You'll have to experiment to see what you like best.

Some people dry them until they are really, really dry....just short of being crisp and crunchy. Others like them a little less dry--sort of leathery. You do store them in the freezer to keep any possible mold from growing OR you can layer them in jars of olive oil and preserve them that way. I am sure you can google and find a recipe to do it that way as many sun-dried tomatoes are stored that way.

Some people speed-dry them at temperatures of 300 to 350 degrees, and some of them like to only partially dry them (mostly to intensify the flavor) and serve them within a week or two. (They'll keep in an airtight container in the refrigerator up to 2 weeks if done this way.)

I just slice them, put them on a cookie sheet and turn the oven to "Warm" which I think is 175 degrees on my old oven (just replaced the oven yesterday). The length varies with the size of the tomatoes.

You also can do it with plum (paste) tomatoes which are larger. If you do that, you might want to quarter them instead of halving them or it can take them forever to dry. Or, cut them into uniform slices.

I've linked one "recipe" for you and you can find more if you google. Several of my food preservation books describe how to to it, and of course, many people dry them in food dehydrators too.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Making Oven-Dried Tomatoes

The warmer your oven, the less flavor, IMHO. And they have to be watched very closely if you go as high as 350 because they can burn. If I were doing it in the oven, I'd choose the lowest setting possible.

I saw something somewhere about preserving dried tomatoes in oil -- not sure where -- that it's better to only make one jar of tomatoes in oil at a time as the tomatoes tend to try to float in the oil and the ones that have their heads above the oil may mildew.

I agree with Dawn about putting them in bags in the freezer after they are dry. The reason for this is that, even if you do dry them quite crispy, they tend to take on moisture from the air. I have yet to find a bag that keeps ALL the moisture out. And in jars, things tend to fade and stick together. It's just easier to keep them in the freezer, they don't take up a lot of room, they don't stick together and they don't require much in the way of thawing before use.

Mmmmmm - those dried tomatoes sound marvelous! I think my oven's lowest setting is 200 degrees, though. Will that work? Also, could you chop some garlic to dry with them? I love garlic and tomatoes, also basil and tomatoes.

Susan