Christmas Day is past. I hope you had a happy one. We did. And our Christmas dinner was wonderful. Everything tasted so good. We had 21 family members to feed and we fed them from the garden. My brother-in-law, Ed, supplied most of it – the potatoes, green beans, corn and brussel sprouts. All grown in his garden. He grew the sweet potaotes too. They grow well in the sandy loam that we have around here. They were huge and tasted great. Still fresh and firm because he stores them in his basement which he keeps at about 50 degrees.
The salad was even home grown – spinach, butter crunch lettuce and Red Grape tomatoes that Bob grew in his greenhouse. Just picked the day before, so they were chock full of nutrition. Before we had this greenhouse available to us, I had often challenged myself to have my own homegrown tomatoes for Christmas. I would pick the biggest and most blemish free green tomatoes just before the first frost in the fall. Wrapped very carefully in newspaper and stored gently in a box in a cool place (which sometime was a cool closet), I would check them occasionally and take out any that were ripening or that had squishy spots on them. I usually ended up with only 2 or 3 by Christmas, but that was enough. Nothing in the supermarket could beat the taste of those tomatoes even though they had been stored closed to 2 months!
One of the pies was homegrown, too. My nieces had picked blackberries last summer from their yard, our yard and Uncle Ed’s yard.
Even the turkey was almost home grown. In Monroe County, anyway. It was one of the prize winners from the Monroe County 4 H Fair that my sister-in-law bid on at the auction.
Here it is the middle of winter and we’re still reveling in garden produce! This is the way to feast!
Bye for now,
Judy
large scale storage of sweet potatoes http://www.caes.uga.edu/commodities/fruits/veg/pubs/documents/sweetpotato.pdf
This may be a dumb question, but were the tomatoes red by Christmas?
Sounds like a wonderful feast!
Comment by Vanessa — December 31, 2006 @ 10:23 pm
Yes, some of them would have turned red before Christmas and I would have eaten them. Ones that were starting to turn orangish the week before Christmas , I would bring out early and put them on the windowsill to get some sunlight. then if the timing was right , they’d turn red by Christmas. Usually it worked!
Bye now,
Judy
Comment by Judy — January 2, 2007 @ 3:01 pm
It was a wonderful dinner. Reading about it just makes me want to re-live it again! Thanks for the delicious rendering of the meal.
Comment by victoria mcintyre — January 19, 2007 @ 10:12 am