I've been wanting to try it out and see if it is a viable method for removing the skins from large batches of tomatoes. So I set out with a 20lb pail of ripe Roma tomatoes. I have a pleasant work counter and stool, so that I can sit at a comfortable height to do large food processing tasks. Here's the technique: use only ripe tomatoes, paste types work best, but it works for all varieties.
Scrape the tomato skin with the back of your pairing, or small kitchen knife. Scrape back and forth a few times, applying slight pressure, like you are shaving the skin, rotating the tomato to work around the whole fruit. You will start to see the skin wrinkle under the right pressure, and the texture of the tomato changes to that of a water balloon, as if there's a layer of water just under the skin. This method separates the skin from the flesh underneath. Then slice off the stem end and peel down from the top. The skin should come off easily.
I found this to be a method comparable to the boiling process, perhaps a bit slower, but no standing at a hot stove, waiting over a steaming pot for the water to re-boil. I certainly enjoyed the task more, and felt less worn out afterward. And sometimes that's more important than the length of time a task takes.
Naked tomatoes, ready for processing.
We've got whopping big potatoes this year, must be all the rain. And even this pound-and-a-halfer had barely a spot of hollow heart in the middle, solid potato all the way through, and enough to fill the dinner plate!
We're expecting a real Zero degree frost tonight, so the squash and pumpkins have been brought in to cure. We had a late crop, and there were a dozen or so of these little promising would-be squash. Not sure how much flavor they have, or how green they are, at best I'm hoping for something like zucchini. I figure I'll try them breaded and fried, after all, everything tastes good breaded and fried! If not, I'm sure the goats and chickens will make quick work of them.
We put our peppers, tomatoes and ground cherries in one long bed so that we can cover them easily. We procured some heavy plastic house-wrap from a mini-house mover. He usually has to pay to take it to the dump, so he's always keen to pass it along. It is very heavy duty plastic, we have also used it as the weather-proof layer to our board and baton barn roofs, and it has out-performed anything we have purchased. At least it's diverted from the waste-stream, it's hard to believe that plastic this heavy, with so much potential for re-use, is trashed after a single use.
The sunflowers have indeed bloomed in time to make seeds, I always forget how frost hardy they are. We are going to experiment with de-hulling the seeds this fall/winter.
The 
A late summer fruit, 
Of course, the local songbird population is also fond of these sweet fruits. This female Common Yellowthroat, of the wood warbler family, foraged in the same bush.
I got this lucky shot some time later.
I try to keep a profusion of late summer and fall flowers available for the insects. These flowering lettuce bushes would normally be a part of my seed saving regime, but we are going to start over with regionally appropriate seed varieties in our next garden, somewhere on the West coast, so these flowers are just for the bees. The last pollen producing flowers in the garden are the hardy broccoli flowers, I always leave the small side shoots to go to flower, they continue to bloom and attract bumble bees even after the ground starts to freeze, well into November, even early December.
A fennel flower, on it's way to seed, I hope. I started these fennel plants in March this year, determined to get some fennel seed from these slow-pokes, we'll see.
We experimented with a few hand harvesting techniques last year, and have come to settle on crude but effective, inexpensive kitchen knives as tools. Gathering a handful of stems, we cut the stalks near the heads, therefore bringing very little stalk into the storage bin. This reduces the amount of space needed to store the heads until we can thresh it all, and it also makes the 
But for now, we find this simple and steady pace is not too arduous or time-consuming to make hand harvesting our wheat possible. Side by side, we can cover 2000 sq ft an hour, so we can bring in our 1/6th acre in six hours of work, spread out over 3-4 days. We fill large feed bags lashed to our sides, large enough so that the bottom of the bag rests on the ground, and no weight is placed on our backs. And we empty these bags into a prepared grain bin, 8' x 4' x 4'. This way, we can thresh the grains in November and December when the rest of the harvest and winter preparation has slowed down.
And the quiet, meditative pace of the work allows us to share conversation and song, and the bond of working side by side. The greatest pleasure of harvesting by hand, rather than machine, is being able to witness the buzzing, hopping life in the midst of a sea of grain. These fire-engine dragonflies were mating on the bobbing heads, sparrows and wood warblers glean insects and seeds on the ground, grasshoppers catapult away from our sweeping hands, and the sky is abuzz with late summer song.
Our cultivated grains are not the only ones ripening. While thinking about the process our ancestors went through to begin sowing and selecting wild grains for their potential food value, my eyes began to scan for the ancient wild strains of our cultivated grains. In our garden we have these foxtail grasses, ancestor to a still cultivated foxtail millet from Asia.
As well as barnyard grass, ancestor to the proso millet we are growing. Both of these millet ancestors had been attracting small sparrows to the feast.
This flowering seedhead of bindweed is ancestor to buckwheat, domesticated in southeast Asia 8000 years ago.
And this lamb's quarters seed head is close cousins with, and ancestor to quinoa, a valuable and important high-protein staple of the Inca who called it "mother of all the grains". Because of it's ceremonial use, Chrisianizing colonists forced the South American Indians to abandon this quality food for the less nutritious and water hungry corn.
Our own proso millet was ready for harvest as well. The fan-like seed heads ripen gradually, from the top down. It is ready to harvest when the tops are ripe and the bottom grains have lost most of their green. Commercially, the crop is swathed and left to ripen in the field like hay. But it is often plagued by birds and rodents while ripening, and there was some competition for my crop as well. So I cut the heads and let them cure in the house, in a dry warm spot for a week or so.
The hulless oats, originally domesticated relatively late in the Fertile Crescent beginning 3000BC, were likewise, mostly cured, but with a few remaining green-tinged heads. Since it is a small crop, and many of the head were beginning to lodge (or fall over on the ground), and the birds were beginning to pay it some attention, I harvested a week early and finished curing it indoors. The oats are easy to strip off the stalk, and with a small crop, it can be done quickly and efficiently.
Syriphid Fly eating the nectar of a Calendula Flower.
Northern Leopard Frog, Rana Pipiens, this wet and soggy summer has been great for the frogs, never seen so many frogs and toads in the garden. Even found a young Wood Frog in the Zucchini. Plenty of bugs and slugs for them to eat this year.
Syriphid Fly tasting a Red Clover blossom. It's a great year for these Syriphid Flies too, there's dozens in the garden, the larva are predatious, often of aphids and other small soft bodied insects, but the adults are pure nectar eaters. And red clover is one sweet source of nectar. I use it as a natural sweetener in herbal teas.
The cutworms preferred the amaranth, quinoa and poppies over the cereals like oats, millet or popcorn, so they may deserve some 
Golden Amaranth. The grains seeds are the size of sesame seeds with a high protein content of 16%. I am also testing each of these grains as possible feed grains for livestock, so the high protein grains are attractive. Amaranth greens can be eaten as a cooked vegetable when young, so plant thick, and thin the plants out to about 2' spacing (livestock will love the thinnings as well). This variety can reach 6-8' high. The seeds are good cooked in porridge, added to granola, added to breads or baked goods, and can be popped as a snack, or sprouted.
Red Quinoa. At least 16% protein, and a whole protein at that, with all of the amino acids our body requires. It can be tricky to grow, seems to be more susceptible to drought, rust and aphids, and does not have the hardy characteristics of it's cousin Lamb's Quarters, which seems to thrive just about anywhere. It is also a longer season grain, and light frost will burn and kill seedheads.
Vicar Hulless Oats. Easy to grow and thresh for use in the kitchen. Similar growing requirements to regular feed type oats. We chose a heirloom variety, but it is not showing high resistance to rust, so in the future we would choose a more resistant modern variety. Only a few plants are as blighted as these ones, most of the crop will mature despite the rusted leaves, but it is not good practice to allow rust to develop in our garden as it will jeopardize our wheat crop. If we were staying for another season, we would most likely have pulled up all of the rusted plants and removed them from the garden.
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But they do need protection from the European Corn Borer. I would like to try putting mesh bags over each ear, in the early stages of development, to prevent the maggot from damaging the kernels. Left as they are, with the biological controls of natural predators, they take about 10% of my crop.
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The Pea Moth is the main pest of our pea crops, but they seem to prefer the higher sugar content of the shelling peas, and generally leave the dry peas alone. The dry peas are also more resistant to mildews, because they seem to mature and dry out before the long-fruiting shelling types.
Jacob's Cattle Baking Beans. A decent bush type baking bean. It's not the highest yielding type, but the beans are very good, smooth and flavorful.
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