Hyacinths sprouted along the road—I suppose that in some past season, a neighbor pulled the flowers from their yard and tossed them toward the woods but missed. The plants have put on quite a show this spring, and I love the surreal textures and colors a camera captures with tight focus.

My home kitchen garden is well on its way which is weird because our last frost date is around May 23. With all the crazy warmth of late winter, perennials are weeks early and my soil is dry… seriously: it’s alarmingly free of moisture. So, for what I’ve planted, I’m watering regularly and looking forward to getting some mulch in place to help conserve what little water there is.

Because of the early start to the season, I feel casual toward the vegetable beds. I ignored them today and, to celebrate Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, I took Nutmeg for a walk capturing blossoms along the way. There are so many gorgeous displays in the neighborhood that I ended up cutting them into a movie (at the end of this post) rather than putting each one on this web page. If you feel so moved, please have a look. The video is three and a half minutes long and features scenes you’d see if you came with me for a walk where I live.

Photos accompanying this post are from my neighborhood as well.

Participate in Post Produce

While I enjoy Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, I always feel a bit out of place. My blogs are about growing produce and preparing it for meals. So, in the spirit of Bloom Day, I’ve started Post Produce.

On the 22^nd of each month—one week after Bloom Day—prepare a post about produce from your plot. Then, find my Post Produce post, and link to yours just as you link to your Bloom Day post from Carol’s blog, May Dreams Gardens. Here’s more about Post Produce. It’s great to see the goodies other gardeners are growing!

The pear trees I planted back in 2008 continue to look strong. They’ve thrown a lot of delicate pink blossoms against gorgeous purple foliage. After a similar display last year, the trees set no fruit, so my expectations are low. These started as bare root trees, and I understand it can take three or four years before they start producing. Though I planted them in 2008, I did so in autumn, so I have to start counting from 2009—the first growing season they spent with me. That gives me some hope they’ll fruit this year, but next year seems more likely.

I’ve featured this ornamental cherry tree in several blog posts over the years. The flowers are sensational, and the cherries attract all kinds of birds. Occasionally in late winter, a flock of titmice spends a few days picking the dried cherries. Shortly after I made this photo, a robin landed near me with a dried cherry it had just plucked off the tree. The tree stands at the end of my neighbor’s driveway and hangs over my yard. I hope it stays there as long as I live in this house.

Trees are maturing in the meadow where I pick black raspberries each spring. I noticed this one blossom last season, but didn’t see what fruit it produced. Perhaps it produced none. I’ll keep an eye on it this year as well… there may be jelly in its future.

Who wanted a walk? Nutmeg did! Sure, and she loves you. Ok, she hasn’t met you yet, but she’s convinced that everyone she meets is her best friend. Her enthusiasm can be hazardous to your health, so approach with caution if you see us around the neighborhood.

The Bloom Day Dog Walk Video:

Over the years, Your Home Kitchen Garden blog has presented some of the topics I wrote about in my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry it, Too. Brenda Haas talked with me about it on a special live broadcast of #gardenchat from the Garden Writers Association Symposium. Here Brenda speaks with a representative of Corona Tools.

While my home kitchen garden deteriorated from neglect (and nasty elements), I spent a week at the Garden Writers Association annual symposium. There, I had the great pleasure to meet Brenda Haas whom I’d known for more than a year on Twitter, but had never met in person.

Brenda manages a weekly online conversation called #gardenchat. At 9 PM EST on Mondays, gardening enthusiasts log on to Twitter and post questions and comments, creating dozens of wild, intersecting conversations. I always enjoy #gardenchat, even when the subject is ornamental plants, and it’s a great privilege to know its curator.

The #gardenchat Special

Brenda had scheduled a special #gardenchat broadcast to take place at the Garden Writer’s conference. For this, she did a series of interviews using Ustream.tv, and they went out live while a tweetup of garden enthusiasts took place in the next room. I was one of the interviewees!

The Youtube video embedded in this post is a big chunk of the conversation I had with Brenda at the conference. There’s a lot of background noise because there was a party in the adjacent room, but you can hear our conversation if you like. We talk about several of the topics I wrote about in Yes, You Can!

Technorati Tags: book, canning, preserving, yes you can

The homeowners here make no apologies; they planted a home kitchen garden in their front yard, so live with it. I’m glad I live in a community where food plants don’t offend people’s tastes.

There has been a lot of fuss recently about turning front yards into home kitchen gardens and I’ve been making a lot of it:

• I was happy to report in April about Ivette Soler’s, The Edible Front Yard, a book that encourages its readers to replace their useless lawns with home kitchen gardens that both look good and produce food.
• I posted in early July about the nonsensical government of Oak Park Michigan prosecuting Julie Bass for growing vegetables in her front yard.
• Most recently, I railed during a radio interview about the crime we’ve committed against our planet by planting lawns in every yard, and I explained my plan to replace my lawn with food. (The interview wasn’t yet in the archives when I wrote this post, but it should be there soon.)

During these months, I’ve enjoyed watching the progress of a new garden that appeared this spring in my neighborhood. Yep: it’s in a front yard. We walk past it occasionally on family walks with the dog, and I’ve watched the plants grow from seedlings into young adults. It warms my heart and I hope the homeowners expand their planting bed in the coming years.

Perhaps six weeks after I shot the earlier photo, I captured my neighbor’s home kitchen garden growing strong. Someone is going to have a lot of tomatoes to deal with, and that’s way more awesome than having to deal with a useless lawn.

Technorati Tags: front yard garden, julie bass, oak park, radio interview, vegetable garden

Near the farm stand and looking back toward the main road, you see a home kitchen garden of staggering proportions. A single Amish family plants and maintains this garden to feed itself and to stock the farm stand. I’m sure they spend an enormous amount of time cold-storing, canning, drying, and pickling produce to keep it through Pennsylvania’s cold winters.

My home kitchen garden is off to a horrible start this season on account of endless rain we experienced until mid May. I wasn’t able to plant anything because my garden soil was saturated. Seedlings I’d started indoors became leggy and weak, and I ended up planting lettuce on my deck rather than in my garden. Of course, just when the lettuce leafed-up, the rain stopped and temperatures soared into the 90s (Fahrenheit).

So, with my lettuce bitter and bolting, my brassicas failing, and my tomatoes and chili peppers still getting used to being in a garden rather than in seed-starting planters, strawberry season is upon us.

My Strawberry Panic

I grow enough strawberries for a bowl of cereal. So, I rely on local farmers to grow strawberries for me. As in every year, when the first local strawberries appeared at the farmers’ market, I cooked up strawberry shortcake and we had only that for dinner one night. Then life got in the way.

You might be able to see slight depressions in the soil rows between the plant rows. This furrow reflects the action of horse-powered tilling. A horse can walk these soil rows, pulling tools that turn the soil and prevent weeds from getting established.

For two weeks, I had no time to process produce, and I feared strawberry season was slipping away. In fact, produce vendors at the local flea market had no local strawberries last Sunday, so by Monday I had worked up a lather about having missed out. I went in search of a farmer (with a farm stand) selling strawberries.

Believe it or Don’t

Where would you go if you hoped to find a farm stand with fresh berries? My thought: Amish Road. I’m not kidding (my son thought I was kidding); we live within about five miles of Amish Road. And… Amish Road runs through an area where several Amish families have farms.

The first farm stand I found was one road over from Amish Road, and it had strawberries. But strawberries quickly became a secondary issue for me. The farm stand sat behind a roadside home kitchen garden that would make most kitchen gardeners green with envy. Of course, an Amish family may grow enough produce to eliminate their reliance on grocery stores… and this family grows enough to feed themselves and to sell to passersby.

That house at the far end of the kitchen garden isn’t the Amish family’s house. The white building on the left edge of this photo is where the Amish family lives. The farm stand is across the driveway from the front door of the house—I suspect so the family can work inside and emerge quickly when a car drives up to the stand.

The woman running the farm stand pleasantly told about hassles the rains had caused for them, and graciously gave me permission to photograph the garden plot. I couldn’t do the kitchen garden justice! It was at least 200 yards from one end of the garden to the other, and about 75 yards from side-to-side.

Simple Strategies for a Large Kitchen Garden

My photos reveal that the vegetable-to-weed ratio in an Amish home kitchen garden favors the vegetables. The reasons are simple:

• Rows between vegetables are wide and a horse can easily walk there without stepping on the plants. So, periodically, the farmer hooks a horse up to a cultivator and the horse drags the cultivator along the rows.
• Rows are very long. This lets a horse get up some speed while dragging its cultivator and it doesn’t have to make a whole bunch of quick turns. There’s poetic simplicity in being able to weed a year’s worth of peas in a single pass.
• Mulch keeps the weeds down with almost no effort. In this case, the farmer laid down a long sheet of plastic and poked holes through it for onion sets. The onions have grown up through the holes while the plastic has smothered whatever weeds might have taken root.

While I was shopping for strawberries, the Amish farmer was harvesting hay. It was an awesome load, and I couldn’t resist snapping a photo.

I love this kitchen garden and I admire the energy and intensity its Amish owners must have to plant it and maintain it each year.

Technorati Tags: amish, farm stand, strawberries, weeding

The last crocus flower in my yard apparently hasn’t noticed that all ther other blossoms have faded. Finally, spring is creeping in!

It’s mid-April, and I’ve planted nothing in my home kitchen garden! I’ve many seedlings literally dying to get out off their planters, but it has been cold and rainy, and working in the garden means wading in mud.

That said, today is Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Carol, over at May Dreams Gardens, came up with this idea that one day each month garden bloggers would showcase their flowers. I try to post photos of whatever food plants are in bloom in my garden, but today there are none. So… I stepped over the garden fence and shot photos where the ornamental plants grow. I hope you enjoy the results… and jump over to Carol’s blog to find other garden bloggers. You’ll find all kinds of blogs that post awesome flower photos on Bloom Day!

Pachysandra came with the house. These seem to be blossoms, but it’s hard to imagine wanting to pollinate such things… then again, pachysandra probably isn’t trying to attract me as a pollinator.

The main ornamental planting bed in your front yard opens the season with a modest display of crocuses which is finally giving way to daffodils and hyacinths.

Every daffodil I saw as a kid was yellow. Now daffodils are all about fancy color combinations. I like!

I once heard an artist suggest that you can improve your ability to draw objects by focusing on the empty spaces. If you draw all the empty spaces, what you didn’t draw will be the object. I was thinking about that when I created this photo in a forsythia bush.

Sure, it’s another forsythia photo… and there are plenty more. I like the way this one makes me feel as though the forsythia towers over me… though I know the blossoms are quite tiny and unimposing.

So many colors of purple! This hyacinth becomes surreal when I enlarge it to full screen.

Technorati Tags: bloom day, blossoms, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, gbbd

Most striking to me of the ultra-embellished exhibits was this long reflecting pool with modernistic light panels and an “alabaster” sculpture at the far end. It would take months to get this installed in your yard, buy I’m guessing the folks who assembled it at the show completed the job in a few days.

My seed-starting shelf is ready for me to start planting my home kitchen garden. I’ve cleared off the canned goods and hung the lights. In the meantime, we’ve had some late winter snow, so I feel very lucky that I’ve been able to attend this year’s Philadelphia International Flower Show.

The show is an indoor oasis in winter. If features many exhibits of all types of plants that experts have tricked into maturing out-of-season. Not surprisingly, there are many, many flowers. Happily, there are also exhibits of vegetable plants. I spent some time at the show on Tuesday and plan to return on Friday.

About the Philadelphia Flower Show

I live about 2 and a half hours from Philadelphia. As I drove 50 miles south, I saw that lawns were sprouting green and it made me a little sad since my town is under about eight inches of snow. The show floor was crowded, so it was pointless to have a destination in mind; deciding to move with the crowd helped keep my stress level low.

There were, of course, flowers at the Philadelphia Flower Show. They scented the air, and some formed eye-catching displays. A few got very close to my camera’s lens.

With all the flowers and other plantings, my favorite ornamentals were succulents and cacti; there were some gorgeous specimens.

The show’s theme this year is Springtime in Paris, and one vendor showing succulents had a sign that read something like, We thought they meant Paris, Texas. That amused me.

If your home kitchen garden is still under snow, please have a look around the Philly Flower Show. I’ve posted a few photos to give you a short respite from the cold.

Thank goodness, someone at the Philadelphia Flower Show appreciates food! The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society had an exhibit of edible plants that included some gorgeous Chinese cabbage. Something the exhibit taught me: when you grow vegetables in your greenhouse intending to transport them to a flower show, don’t plant peas. Pea plants are very delicate, and the ones at the show were more badly damaged than any in my home kitchen garden after the worst storms of spring.

Tulips and flowering trees lead up to base of an Eiffel Tower simulation. There wasn’t enough air space to handle the entire tower, but the structure is pretty convincing when you’re under it in the dim light of the convention hall.

Technorati Tags: cabbage, flower show, flowers, philadelphia, pok choi

The big squash is a neck pumpkin that grew in my home kitchen garden in 2010. The small squash is a homegrown butternut squash for the sake of comparison. Yes: seeds from that neck pumpkin may reach you by mail in February if you hop over to Your Small Kitchen Garden and sign up according to instructions there.

Your Home Kitchen Garden’s sister blog, Your Small Kitchen Garden is giving away food! Food? OK, it’s giving away seeds from which you can grow food. The promotion started a few days ago and runs until February 13, 2011.

Seeds for Your Home Kitchen Garden

Neck pumpkin, Pennsylvania Dutch Crook Necked Squash, Long-necked squash… get them all through the Small Kitchen Garden giveaway. Actually, these are all names for the same squash. Plants are very resistant to Squash Vine Borer and they produce fruits that resemble butternut squash only generally much larger. In fact, I’ve seen neck pumpkins that weighed more than 20 pounds!

Neck pumpkins are common in central Pennsylvania, but I’ve never seen them in other states. When you buy a neck pumpkin at a Pennsylvania farmers’ market or a farm stand, there’s a pretty good chance the farmer will ask, “Making pie?”

I pick tomatoes before they ripen. This one is probably an Andes Horn paste tomato. Minimally, it’s an heirloom paste tomato that tastes great raw or cooked. It’s mostly meat, nearly seed-free, and in my experience is hardier than some other popular varieties of tomatoes. Get 20 or more seeds to grow some of your own by visiting Your Small Kitchen Garden and signing up according to instructions there.

I’ve used neck pumpkin in pies, and I’ve also served it in all the ways I serve butternut squash. Butternut squash is a tad smoother and it has a richer flavor, but neck pumpkin tastes just fine.

My neck pumpkins grew to about 12 pounds this year, but the seeds I planted came from a 20 pound behemoth. The giveaway includes enough seeds from one of my neck pumpkins for you to plant at least one hill of squash.

Andes Tomatoes from Your Home Kitchen Garden

Also in this year’s giveaway are seeds from my crop of Andes paste tomatoes. I don’t know for sure that my tomatoes are of the Andes variety, but they match descriptions I’ve read and they look identical to photos of Andes. I started with seeds from some tomatoes a neighbor gave me, and the seeds I’m giving away came from my second year’s harvest.

Supposedly the model for the alien pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, blue hubbard squash can look quite gnarly. I’ll dissect this modest blue hubbard over the weekend so seeds have time to dry out before I mail them in February. You can get some of the seeds from this squash to plant in your kitchen garden. Visit Your Small Kitchen Garden Seed Giveaway to learn how.

I love these tomatoes. They are indeterminate and have performed extremely well in my garden… and they taste terrific.

Blue Hubbarb Squash

The blue Hubbard squash is among the most beautiful of squashes. It’s exotic, and you might even feel that a whole fruit is ugly. However, the meat of a blue Hubbard runs from blue/green toward the skin, to yellow toward the center of the fruit. It’s gorgeous.

The meat is also delicious, having a squashier flavor than butternut; I like blue Hubbard for my pumpkin pies and other baked goods, but it would be terrific mashed, grilled, or baked.

Technorati Tags: blue hubbard squash, free seeds, giveaway, neck pumpkin, paste tomato, tomato, winter squash

I don’t mean to mislead in the post’s main text; there are actually more than a dozen blossoms on my Christmas cactus. This shot captured just one blossom aglow with sunlight against the backdrop of my kitchen garden under snow.

It’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (read about it on Carol’s blog over at May Dreams Gardens), and my Home Kitchen Garden is under snow. When I limit my definition of “garden” to that plot of land where I plant stuff in the spring, I have nothing to share on this winter Bloom Day. However, I’ve always defined my garden as the entire collection of plants that I tend—wherever they may be.

So, this bloom day, as did Carol on her blog, I present my Christmas Cactus. This plant started as a cutting from my daughter’s cactus back in summer of 2008. So far, the only care it has received is watering. Oh, and I turn the pot from time-to-time. It’s kind of a practical joke. I imagine the plant when sunlight comes through the window the next day: “Hey! I thought I had my leafy stemmy things all pointing in the right direction, and now this?”

I love that you can see the anti-rodent fence that surrounds my vegetable bed in the background of the photo… and snow on the ground in front of it. The snow provides insulation for a thick layer of autumn leaves my kids raked onto the soil. The leaves will break down a little quicker now that there’s snow on them.

While there are no other flower blossoms in my home kitchen garden in January, I snuck in two other photos that were begging for attention. I hope you enjoy them.

All I know about the names of ornamental plants I learned from designing golf courses for the old Mean 18 game back in the 1980s and 90s. Drawing on that extensive education, I can say with authority that I have always liked pampas grass… and this stand of it looks pretty awesome even so far into winter. If it’s not pampas grass, please drop a note to Accolade, the company that produced Mean 18.

The sun sometimes streams through our living room window in late afternoon. One day last week (I know: not a true Bloom Day photo), it lit up this handmade ornament, and I captured a few shots. This one makes me think of flowers in someone else’s garden. Today I stowed the ornaments in the garage and started thinking seriously about spring gardening. Still 2 months before I should start seeds. Sigh.

Technorati Tags: bloom day, blossoms, christmas cactus, flowers, ornaments, pampas grass

Cookie press, jerky shooter… in my mind, it has become a cookie shooter. This very affordable kitchen implement is a caulking gun for cookie dough.

There is nothing to do with gardening in my home kitchen garden these days. It’s all about staying warm and trying to enjoy the holidays. We’re very big on Christmas cookies, and my wife usually bakes more than a thousand cookies of a dozen or so varieties. I also bake some, specifically two types of cookies I loved as a child: Cut out sugar cookies with stained glass windows, and spritz cookies.

This year, I set up my computer on the dining room table and visited with many imaginary friends as I mixed spritz cookie dough, shot cookies onto cookie sheets, and added dusting sugar and other sprinkles as decorations. I got a few questions from imaginary friends, and I offered that I’d upload photos to answer some of them:

Why do they call it a Spritz Cookie?

I don’t know. I like to believe it’s because the inventor of these cookies was Hans Spritz, a young baker in the mountains of Bavaria who, except for these cookies, has been obscured by time. I Googled the name, and one web site, The Cilantropist (a name that I love), provided a lot of personal history and way too much detail… but all it added about the name “spritz” is that it’s short for “Spritzgebackenes” which, with my limited knowledge of German, I translate to mean, Cookies invented by a man named Spritz.

A cookie shooter should come with several extruder plates that restrict oozing dough to specific patterns. The most seasonally-appropriate extruder plate for Christmas cookies creates little evergreen trees on the cookie sheet.

What is a Cookie Press?

While digging around the kitchen for my cookie press, I found a cookie press I couldn’t identify. Then I found the cookie press I’ve had for years, and I realized that the other cookie press was a “jerky shooter” that had come with a food dryer I’d used when I wrote my book, Yes, You Can to be published in the coming spring (the link leads to Amazon where you can order it now for delivery once it’s available).

A cookie press is a caulking gun for cookie dough. Instead of a rubber nozzle that squeezes caulk into a continuous snake or ribbon, a cookie press has interchangeable  extruder plates each intended to produce a unique design. Here’s how it works:

1. Fill the tube of the cookie press with a soft, sticky dough.
2. Put an extruder plate on one end of the tube and a pistol-grip plunger on the other.
3. Pull the trigger on the pistol grip until dough starts to come through the holes in the extruder plate.
4. Stand the cookie press on a cool, ungreased cookie sheet and pull the trigger once and then pause.
5. After a second or two passes, lift the cookie press straight up. Extruded dough should stick to the cookie sheet.
6. Decorate cookies as you wish before baking.

I Dub Thee Cookie Shooter

As a result of mistaking my jerky shooter for a cookie press, I decided that from that day forward, I’ll refer to my cookie press as a cookie shooter. Can’t help it, it just sounds right. You call yours what you like. If you don’t have one, look for them at department and cooking stores. One of my imaginary friends said she bought one last year for $9.99. This is a very low price to pay for a very useful kitchen implement. Amortized over the years I’ve owned my cookie shooter, it has cost about 60 cents per year. By the time they pry my cookie shooter from my cold, dead hand, I expect that number to be about 20 cents per year.

I prepared a video that shows how I work with a cookie shooter. Please have a look to get an idea of how this all works. As well, here’s the recipe I use when I make Hans Spritz’s famous cookies:

Ingredients

1 and ½ cups butter (Not margarine or shortening. Use butter or go home.)

1 cup sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ teaspoon mint extract (the more traditional recipe calls for almond extract)

4 cups sifted flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

Spritz cookies barely change shape when they cook, and they shouldn’t change color. If the darken in the oven, they’re likley to taste burned.

Beat the butter and sugar till they’re smooth. Add the milk, egg, vanilla, and mint extract and continue mixing. Stir the baking soda into the sifted flour and add it gradually to the butter and sugar. Continue mixing while adding and for a bit longer until you have homogenous very soft dough.

Divide the dough into four parts and add two drops of food coloring to each part—usually a different color for each. Use a strong-handled spoon to mush the coloring through the dough until each portion has uniform color.

Load your cookie shooter, shoot dough onto UNGREASED cookie sheets, decorate, if you like, and bake for 8 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. If the cookies start to darken, you’ve cooked them too long.

Let them cool on the cookie sheets. Then pop them loose with your fingers.

CAUTION: If you make your spritz cookies minty like mine, don’t store them with other types of cookies. All the cookies in a container will pick up the mint flavor after just a day or two of storage. This isn’t a problem if you use almond extract instead of mint extract.

Here’s a video that demonstrates how to shoot Christmas cookies onto a cookie sheet:

Technorati Tags: baking, Christmas, cookie press, cookie shooter, cookies, spritz cookies, video

A pot of diced green tomatoes and apples with raisins and a chopped orange, spices, brown sugar, and vinegar will thicken into mincemeat as it simmers for about three hours.

Frost has finished off my home kitchen garden, and that’s OK. I was really tired of tomatoes after a prolific season, but I was still silly enough to collect the green tomatoes that remained after the plants died.

Those green tomatoes, and about two dozen apples from my tree languished in bowls for weeks until this weekend past when I finally got around to making mincemeat. With Thanksgiving nearly upon us, and expecting a small group of college students hailing from around the world, I thought a traditional mincemeat pie would be in order.

Green Tomato Mincemeat

Actually, traditional mincemeat pie contains meat and suet (fat). I’ve never liked the stuff, but can tolerate it. Several of our guests this year are vegetarians. They won’t eat the turkey or the stuffing I cook in the turkey, and they most definitely would not eat traditional mincemeat.

This mincemeat has simmered for three hours and twenty minutes. While hot, it’s a bit runny, but as it cools it will thicken just like jam and preserves. A pie shell will hold about a quart of mincemeat, so I pack it into one-quart mason jars and cook it for 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. If you’re about to make pie, let the mincemeat cool before filling a raw pie shell with it. Add a full top crust, and bake at 400F degrees until the top crust is golden brown – about 30 to 40 minutes.

Fortunately, green tomato mincemeat actually tastes good. Some recipes suggest that you add suet when you make it, but thank goodness you get an excellent product when you use only tomatoes and other fruits. I made a video that shows how to assemble the mincemeat and to can it. You don’t need to can the mincemeat if you’re going to use it right away; store it in the refrigerator for up to a week, and use about a quart to fill a pie shell.

Mincemeat Worth the Effort

As I said: I’ve never been a fan of mincemeat. I’m a fan of this stuff. I’ve actually filled a small bowl with it and snacked on it happily at my desk. I’m looking forward to having a slice of pie on Thanksgiving. Prepping the fruits for the mincemeat could take about an hour, and cooking takes another three to three-and-a-half hours. Canning, if you heat the water in the canning pot as your mincemeat finishes cooking, adds another 20 to 30 minutes to the cooking time (process filled jars for 20 minutes).

Here are the ingredients you’ll need to make your own green tomato mincemeat:

• 3 ½ lbs green tomatoes
• 3 ½ lbs apples
• ½ lb or more of dried blueberries (Optional. I had some I wanted to use up.)
• 2 lbs raisins
• 1 seedless orange
• 1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
• 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons ground cloves
• 2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 4 lbs brown sugar
• 1 cup cider vinegar

The video runs just over 6 ½ minutes. If you make up a batch, please let me know how it comes out:

Technorati Tags: apples, green tomatoes, harvest, mincemeat, pie, tomatoes