Welcome back!

It's been a while since I have blogged.  I've had friends tell me recently how much they liked reading my bog so I am going to try and get it going again.

Today is my community garden's potluck dinner.  We all gather under the old mulberry tree and bring food made from the garden vegetables.  The past couple of years, one gardener has been growing hops so there should be home brewed beer tonight.

I am making potato salad with mustard vinaigrette.  I planted fingerling potatoes this year as in years past and the plants did very well.  Knock on wood, the potatoes have never had a problem with beetles.

This is going to be a very simple salad.  Potatoes, chives and vinaigrette.  The chives are from the front yard.  The herbal vinegar is something I made early this summer.   My garden friend Edouard gave me some purple basil plants.  They taste very strong and would not make a good pesto so I tried steeping the basil in red wine vinegar, along with other herbs from the garden - thyme, marjoram, oregano, chives.  It's a pretty red color.

The tomatoes are still producing.  I went out to West Virginia one day and helped on farmer Allan's  land.  In return, he gave me two 5 gallon buckets of tomatoes.  Here is what I did with them

The canning shelf!  11 quarts of tomato sauce, bread and butter pickles, dilly beans, pickle relish, strawberry jam, strawberry syrup, honey from my mom's bees.  The one disappointment this year is there are no figs therefore no fig jam.  All the fig trees in the city were killed off by the harsh winter.  Luckily the large fig tree at the community garden is re-sprouting from the ground.  In the long run, this is a good thing because it had grown too large for anyone to pick the figs from the top of the tree.

Here are just a few tomatoes picked from my garden this week,  I am going to dehydrate most of them to make tomato powder.

The potato salad!