My Favourite Tomato Varieties This Year + A HUGE August Harvest

Good morning everyone and welcome back to The Hobby Homestead. It is early to mid-August right now. We're really approaching mid-August and there's so much to harvest in our Ontario, Canada, suburban homestead garden. So much. That means there's also a lot of processing to do in the kitchen and also this is the time when I am desperately sowing seeds so that we get something out of our fall garden. So come along with me today while we do a bunch of fun harvesting and also some fun sowing, planting, so that we can get some more crops coming out before the frost comes or before the garden actually gets completely buried in snow. The seasons are about to change. The geese are flying. They get extra noisy this time of year as summer starts to wane. Things are going to change so let's get harvesting. This is a new tomato variety for me this year. It's called Drusba. It's okay. Smells very tomatoey. It is ripe even though it's kind of just light orange. It's not a bright red tomato. It's not fancy colors. Kind of looks like store-bought tomato coloring but it is nice and soft. And actually next week I'm really excited to be going to my friend Sarah's house at the Sunnyhill Homestead because she is doing a tomato taste testing party. So we're going to go and just like taste a bunch of different varieties that she has growing and I think that's a really lovely idea. But you know this one's just going to go into a basket with a bunch of other varieties and I'll have no idea what's what by the time we're actually cutting into them. I see our first giant orange tomato in here. The first one of the season. Get it out. This one was my favorite variety that I grew last year. It was new to me last year. So, so good. There was actually two varieties. One was called Gold Medal and one was called Giant Orange and I couldn't really tell the difference in taste or appearance. So I don't know if they're actually pretty much the same tomato. But I'm excited for this one. These ones are Buffalo Beefsteak. This was a tomato that I got seeds from I think Bessie's maybe at least 10 years ago. This was at my old house in our old garden and my wife Kim really wanted to select a tomato variety for the garden which was exciting because it's like you know when your partner starts to get interested in the thing that you're passionate about it's exciting. And she chose this one called Buffalo Beefsteak and it's a huge tomato. It was a hybrid seed and I have saved the seeds from it every year and it stays pretty much the same although this year I will say the tomatoes are quite a bit smaller. Who knows if that's to do with the seed saving or if that's just the climate we've been we've had this year or the weather we've had. I'm picking them slightly under right because I'm going away this weekend. By the time you see this I will be back home. I will probably have eaten through a lot of these but I'm bringing a bunch of tomatoes with me and this isn't going to be okay on the plant for another three days. So I'm picking slightly underripe tomatoes today. Other favorites of mine are Black Crim. This one is a beautiful beautiful tomato variety and this one is new to me this year maybe slightly on the underripe side but this is the Berkeley Pink Tie Dye. I got these seeds as a gift from West Coast Seeds and they are also very delicious and very pretty as they ripen more but Black Crim, Black Crim is one of my absolute faves. Here's an even bigger Buffalo Steak tomato. See it's a good size there. In the second row of my garden here we've got two beds along here with trellises. These are all Roma tomatoes so I'm growing these primarily for sauces and there are three distinct varieties. There are one or two like random ones that I threw in as well that I hadn't tried before but my favorites, my number one favorite is Amish Paste. This is a paste tomato. When you cut into it it's all flesh, barely any seeds yet it tastes delicious. The meatiness tastes like a wonderful slicing tomato that you could put on a tomato sandwich but it's so big it's great for sauces as well. It's so good, this tomato is so good. This one is just a very typical Roma. This is actually one I got from Bree at Urban Gardening Canada. She sent me some seeds a couple of years ago and I save them every year. It's just a very like standard Roma tomato so they make a standard sauce. I like having them because they're pretty resilient to disease so far in my experience and they're really prolific. They just put on a ton of these little things. So I grew both but I think going forward I might phase out the smaller Romas just because I just love Amish Paste so much. So we're going to go through and pick these. See this one is slightly under ripe. I'm picking it as well so that it doesn't split and when I touch them they just fall off the plant so they're ready. They're ready to come inside with me. There's also some nice eggplants over here. I think I'm going to leave these ones on. I have an eggplant in the fridge right now. I'm not an eggplant connoisseur or expert. I grow them every year and I make a little bit of food with them. Mostly just ratatouilles and I actually don't know what varieties I have anymore. The seeds have just been kicking around for so long. I know there was one that used to be white and then I used to have a big purple one. I'm pretty sure I have not saved seeds from these so I don't know how they would have crossed but those look like kind of a cross. They're purple and stripey. I'm going to leave those on the plant and let them get nice and big and then maybe just make baba ganoush out of them. But typically when I'm using eggplant from the garden I like to pick it young so that... stuck in the plants. It's a jungle in here. I like to pick it young so that I can eat the skins. You just grill it up with the skins and everything and they're tender enough. This Roma tomato is midnight Roma and it's a really really pretty Roma tomato. I like the color that it adds to my sauces and stuff but it's also been very slow to ripen. I've had no ripe midnight Romas. They're hard as rocks. That's not a problem I usually have. It's just this year it's really odd. All right I'm going to squeeze in here and get the last few. You can see how prolific these basic old Romas are. Can't go wrong with a very basic and prolific Roma that you know is going to do well in your climate. Leave the rest on. This tomato actually I haven't grown before. This is an ox heart which is also supposed to be good for sauces like nice and meaty like a Roma tomato but have a more complex flavor than some Romas. So I'm pretty excited for that one to ripen. Not sure I've had any ripe yet. Maybe. I can't remember. Oh my gosh. Okay this is our basket of tomatoes from the main protege area and I'm going to add to this too with some other tomato plants I have near my deck. First before the sun really kills me out here I need to pick peppers and carrots and beans and who knows what else. Let's just see how it goes. I'm leaving you amongst my luffas. Look at these babies. Oh I love growing luffas. We don't grow these to eat. Oh my gosh this trellis is gonna fall. We don't grow these to eat. We grow them for sponges so when you let them dry on the plant you can peel them and there's a beautiful sponge inside. Oh boy the sun is coming out fast. I better get picking. This is cayenne. This is a sweet red pepper. Oh boy. I wonder if shishitos could be good in salsa. Okay these are all shishitos. These are my lemon spice jalapenos. This is a king of the north which is partially red but uh we're bringing it up to their I'm gonna pick it now. These are nata pinos which are not hot and they actually freeze really well so I like to chop them up and use them for in chili and stuff like that in the winter and they're pretty good in salsa but the main reason I grow the nata pinos is that they are a fun garden snack. They ripen quickly and they're prolific and they have a really crispy thick wall a real classic green pepper taste but you get a hundred of them on a plant. I got more fish peppers. I'm picking them unripe. I'm going to pickle these I think. I've actually been breaking some of the branches off because these plants are getting way too big and I don't need that many of these peppers but these leaves are really really pretty. Really variegated. I don't know if you can see this because it's so sunny. Oh I waited too long to get out here. There were really really pretty variegated leaf on the fish pepper and yes I broke this whole branch off because there's too many. There's a lot more to harvest than I have time for honestly because I'm I'm heading out of town. There's some nice cucumbers. These are called mini whites. These ones are great for kid snacks. They love that they're white. They love that they're mini. There's another one there. To pick it or to leave it? I think I'm gonna leave it and it'll be less mini and less white when we get home. It'll be more like a yellow cucumber. Cucumbers are a hard one for me to grow here because cucumber beetles are, there's a lot of them and they spread cucumber mosaic virus which kills the cucumbers. I think I'll use you for carrots. So many baskets. Do you think this is enough for beans? I sure hope so. So we grow just a few cucumber plants and I stagger them. I plant one early spring like early mid-May when it's warm enough and then I plant one in late May, sow the seeds and then I sow another seed in late June and they they stagger. So I see another cucumber plant coming up over here. This plant here is my my final sowing of the year and I sowed it on June 24th. This is called Cool Customer. There's two seeds in the ground here and they are growing up on the old pea trellis. So we had peas here earlier in the spring and then the cucumbers are filling in and I don't see cucumber beetles on them right now so that's a good sign. You may recall from earlier in the season I sowed some carrots, a final succession of carrots in in this planter on my hill. Sprint carrots and the rabbits have just eaten every last carrot off. And yes the rabbits do get into my raised beds but they just tend to not be quite as destructive. I mean yes there's times when they'll mow down an entire crop of baby beets or carrots or whatever but usually they hop up and they nibble on a few and then they walk away. There's something about the fact that that carrot patch there was probably like a very safe looking hideaway under big plants and so the rabbits probably just hung out there and then they ate everything. My neighbors are having their roof replaced it sounds like. I can hear their workers up on their roof chatting away. So you probably can hear them too. I love living in the suburbs. Bean plant just like hit me in the face. I love living in the burbs because I have young kids we can walk two blocks to school in the mornings and they have all their friends in the neighborhood. Now they're drilling. They go biking and scooting and playing and they go backyard hopping and I love it but the noise I don't love. The cars the parties all that stuff. It would be nice to be able to step outside my door and have just the sounds of nature but rural properties around here go for multiple millions of dollars so not happening. And living in the burbs living this way in the burbs allows me to show other people that you don't need sprawling acres to grow food for yourself and your community. There our basket did fit all the beans and you may recall from an earlier video that I had this white fungus in my bean plants and I was a little concerned about it but also I've learned not to fight nature at every turn. So all I did was pull out the plants that had the fungus on it. It was just it was a white mold and I threw them in the garbage and I kept succession sowing around the garden in different places. So I have bean plants in different places and also we got lucky in that it lucky not lucky however you want to perceive it. We didn't get rain for a week and a half still haven't had rain we're calling for rain this weekend so let's see. So I have actually had to come out and water some specific beds that had younger plants in them or like my beets that were starting to plump up that kind of thing. I came in hand watered but the rest of the garden like those beans I did not give them any water so they have been dry now for a good week and a half and the fungus the mold is gone from that patch and they're starting to produce again. So things must have balanced themselves out which is great news. Here's our succession sowing of beans these ones were sown in I don't know was it early July maybe? These are all yellow beans so this is what I plan to make my mustard beans out of so if something goes wrong with this patch we just won't have mustard beans in the pantry this year but it's a good healthy looking row at this point and now I'm going to pull out the rest of the carrots and we can put something else in its place. That's a healthy looking carrot. I'm pulling the tops off right away. I already have a big bag in my freezer of carrot top pesto we just the kids don't like it I do so we're not going to go through it that fast. With these I'm just going to give them to the chickens. These ones I believe are scarlet knots according to the label but they're not very scarlet looking. They're still nice carrots though and I have bolero carrots in two other places for fall. Oh there's a little stubby guy with legs looks like a the bottom half of a mandrake just showing off all my carrots. These are a good size good shaped carrot they're not the biggest but they're they're good. I like these ones that are like crossed legs. Now normally I don't like harvesting all of this all at once it just doesn't make sense from like a an efficiency in the kitchen perspective because I'm gonna spend hours dealing with all this stuff now processing it. If I can break it down so like I only harvest what absolutely needs to be harvested at any given time that helps but because I'm going away I just need to get it all out into fridges into freezers processed in whatever way I need to. There's still a little bit more that I have to harvest. I've got more tomatoes over there. I have cucamelons. I always hit my head on those loofahs. I have cucamelons that are going a little nuts. I've got some squash so with both carrots and squash oh this one's a little funky. I wonder if it has a disease. It's kind of going warty which it shouldn't be doing. With carrots and squash if I have excess I like to shred them in the food processor and then portion them into bags and freeze those in like two cup portions for baking in the winter. Though I like to have those pre-shredded and ready to go. Oops well I broke this little zucchini when I picked it so we're gonna eat that today. I really should be harvesting cucamelons. You really got to get them like every day. These guys they're like whoop they look like mini watermelons but they taste like cucumbers. My kids enjoy them but honestly I'm getting really sick of them. We're all getting a little sick of them. I ferment them but I have a couple of pints of fermented pickled cucamelons already in the fridge and I know we didn't get through the amount that I made last year fermented. I also have some kohlrabi that needs to come out. These were so on April 21st oh my goodness and I sewed fennel in here and then forgot about it. Shoot I forgot to water my fennel seeds. They didn't germinate. That means at this point in the season I probably won't get fennel this year but it's okay. Look at these beauties. Those are some nice little kohlrabis. This goes to the chickens too. There you go girls. My oh my that's a lot of greens today. My shears. I saw them somewhere. It's nice if you can leave the roots in the ground. This is what happens when a kohlrabi gets overripe in the ground. Splits right open kind of like a cabbage just splits. This one's actually fine to eat because it just scabs over so I just peel that off like it's the skin. Interestingly this is the bed where the rabbits were born this spring. There was a nest of rabbits in here and absolutely nothing got sacrificed. None of the plants had to die. It was great like I still got all the plants out of it so I don't know live and let live. See now I feel like I have too much kohlrabi. I can't use it all. Load up the bag. There's still several in the garden I can harvest later but we got these ones for now. My camera overheated. That's fun. We don't usually have that problem here. So there's lots more that I would like to harvest. Whoop I missed a cucumber. Missed a couple cucumbers on this side. I think I'll leave this one to keep growing. Oh and this one I'll let those keep going. We'll get them when we get home. You can see we've got lots and lots of swiss chard. If I were harvesting this daily we would have so much food from it. Same with the celery. If I was staying on top of it we'd have so much celery because it'll keep growing. Oh my god it sprayed out. You harvest the outsides then it just keeps growing and growing and growing and so you get so much more and if you leave it the plant eventually will bolt. It'll flower and that's it. But I just I just can't stay on top of it this year. Whoops I just broke some celery off. Like my dehydrator is pretty full. I could dehydrate a bunch of celery or even freeze it for soups. Maybe I should. That's really nice celery this year. I'm gonna add to my to-do list. See this is just a baby celery that grew off the side of the main celery. Well I'm not picking swiss chard right now and I'm not picking kale right now. These are things that if I were picking them if I were picking them regularly we would have so much more food from the whole situation but I can't stay on top of it. Celery is one of those things I have been watering even though I haven't wanted to water the whole garden because celery will get really tough and bitter if it's dry and I haven't stayed on top of it enough so it's not as sweet and juicy as you get from the store but it's still good. It's good in soups and broths and all that so I do like to freeze it and pull it out as needed for those purposes. Here's where we're at. This is what I would say needed to get harvested today because I'm leaving for the weekend. Got a whole pile of kohlrabi, shishitos, cucumbers, hot peppers, nata pino, like green bell peppers and zucchinis, a basket of beans and a few cherry tomatoes I added on top, our big carrot haul, and our tomatoes. These are of different degrees of ripeness so these ones fell off and I'm just going to put them on the counter to ripen like these but then others need to be processed right away. Look at my fingers. Tomato and our celery which I'm going to freeze. I really wanted to sow seeds at the same time that I was harvesting like pull in plants and then put in seeds but I need to get these inside the house because it's getting really hot. I need to start dealing with this. This video is not going to be about processing food because it seems that people aren't that interested in it or that YouTube just doesn't know where to send that kind of content into the universe and so views tend to be a lot lower where I'm actually using the food that I grow. However that is a big part of homesteading and I think people do want to know about that so I've been pondering different ways to showcase what I do with the food and I think I'm going to do more of that over on Instagram so if you want to go follow me on Instagram you'll see more of what I do with the food like how I store carrots and all that stuff. My Instagram link is in the description below. I'm going to process some of this food and then I'm going to come back out to sow seeds later. Several hours have passed. It is now four o'clock. All that harvesting happened this morning so I spent a large portion of the day in the kitchen. A couple of hours getting everything put away. So now I find myself out in the garden with some seeds. There's not much that we can sow. It's mid-August and by early October we have our first frost so there's about six weeks left before our average first frost. Oh I can't believe it! But more than that our daylight gets very weak in September even like by the fall equinox it's it's very weak light and so things just don't grow fast. So what I'm planting today are things that can be ready to harvest within about a month maybe a little more than that. So for example I've got some kohlrabi here. This takes about 52 days to go from seed to a harvestable kohlrabi. If the conditions are right they do grow slower when there's not a lot of light so I've got to put it in like a prime location. But this will be my last sowing of kohlrabi and then the rest is just lettuce and spinach. I can't believe we're already at that point in the season where I'm just sowing lettuces and spinaches. That's all I have left that I can sow. I really want a greenhouse. So I've chosen to sow the west coast market mix. I got this seed pack from west coast seeds this spring and it was a delicious mix. I really loved it. Some really cool lettuces in there some of which I've let to go to seed so I'll be saving those individual seeds but I have no idea what varieties they are which is kind of fun I guess. And then uh alkindes seeds I tried is that how you pronounce it alkindes I tried to grow this earlier in the season and it did not form heads it's supposed to be a head lettuce I think yeah substantial heads up to 10 inches across it was fairly loose here I don't know if it's because it got too hot so I'm gonna try it sowing it now and then hopefully by the end of September we've got some nice big red heads. I get really into salads first thing in the spring when we haven't had leafy greens in a long time through the winter and then I tire of them as soon as they start to get bitter because the days get hot then I don't want salads anymore but then by fall by late September and into October I want salads so I'm gonna make sure I sow some lettuces where I can put a row cover on and also spinach. Spinach is my favorite this one is the giant winter organic. I have crossed this one with one called Popeye which I loved and those seeds do great as well so they're inside I didn't bring them out I'll sow some of those probably September 1st or like very end of August. It can be tricky sowing seeds like this in August this is the ideal timing when you think about when our frost comes and when the daylight gets weak because then you get a nice harvest before things stop growing but it also gets really hot and then things don't want to germinate. Spinach does not want to germinate in this heat so I have to think about where I'm putting this put it somewhere that's going to get afternoon shade to cool it just a little bit and then the next the next thing that you have to worry about when you're sowing seeds in August is maintaining your watering. Maybe it's a little silly for me to be sowing seeds right now when I'm about to go away for the weekend but it's going to rain on Sunday it's going to rain fingers crossed so I'm going to go ahead and do it. Let's I'm working on keeping my kale cut down like this so that the bottom leaves are off and then what you have is this like trunk that grows up and then you can actually plant stuff underneath and it's beneficial if you have things that don't want direct afternoon sun if you place it properly so I think I'm going to try to cram some things in here. I think I'm going to put spinach in here since this will be a bed that I cover with a plastic row cover that means that it's going to will be protected all throughout the winter. Lettuce even if you cover it it's not going to stay um it's not going to stay completely undamaged from the freezes it just prolongs the amount of time that you can be harvesting but spinach it can handle the hard freezes of winter putting way too many seeds in if it's covered so this will be my spinach bed. Oh did you find a gem that's really pretty. Wow I just sowed a bunch of lettuce seeds in this bed this is where we took the carrots out of earlier in this video. I thought I had my camera on and I did not so they're in the ground now and I'm going to cover them with some burlap to keep them just a little bit happier just while they germinate in this heat of August when rain is not a reliable thing that happens. There we go it is all watered in but I'm going to put some water on top of the burlap too so when I come back after this weekend this should be germinated and I can lift the burlap off. I still have to go find a little spot for my kohlrabi but it is hot the sun is blazing my camera's threatening to shut down again because the heat and the kids are now done being patient with me so I'm going to call it. Thank you for coming along with me today while we harvested and planned a little bit for the fall garden stuck some seeds in the ground. These are the patterns that we live by this time of year this is also a system that I use you know pulling out from the garden and putting something else back in so that something is always growing and something is always ready to be harvested until we're under three feet of snow. Anyway thanks for watching and I hope you come and grow with us.