Too Many Tomatoes

Magazines: Heirloom Gardener

2012-02-08T15:16:00.001-08:00

Besides seed catalogs, what is it that gets a gardener through the long cold winter? The answer: Glossy Magazines. And I have a new favorite, Heirloom Gardener. I subscribe to very few magazines, preferring to pick them up at the newsstand depending on how the issue strikes me. Then I usually copy articles and info I like for a ring binder, and give the issue away. I subscribe to Hobby Farms and Hobby Farms Home which I promptly share with my mother. I plan my errands around the release of Organic Gardening so I can check out the latest issue at the "fancy" grocery. Then a couple of months ago I happened to pick up an issue of Heirloom Gardener at Tractor Supply.

I was hooked! I had seen this magazine before back when it was a plain paper (boring) publication with illustrated covers and lots of practical advice. It is put out by Baker Creek which not only does great work offering heirloom seeds from all over the globe, but also hosts a very informative and busy gardening forum called I Dig My Garden. I used to spend quite a bit of time on that forum, and it is still a wonderful place to research questions and ask for advice.

The magazine has been revamped, glossed up, and is now offered at some newsstands, including Barnes and Noble and Tractor Supply. You can even follow them on Facebook. I was lucky enough to stumble across their first release to TSC and am now a subscriber.

Besides articles on gardening and vegetables, they feature other topics of interest such as cheese making, bees, poultry, apples, plenty of recipes and lots and lots of glossy photos! Next time you are at Tractor Supply, check for it. The Spring issue with the tomato on the cover is at the printer now and will soon be on news stands. Search for them on Facebook to keep abreast of the release date. See if you don't fall in love with this magazine too.

Candlemas / Groundhog Day

2012-02-02T05:35:00.000-08:00

As the light grows longer
The cold grows stronger
If Candlemas be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight
If Candlemas be cloud and rain
Winter will be gone and not come again
A farmer should on Candlemas day
Have half his corn and half his hay
On Candlemas day if thorns hang a drop
You can be sure of a good pea crop

It is very overcast here in Western NY today so I am hoping for a good pea crop. So I have come out of blogging hibernation to share these curious little facts...

For centuries people have been using animal prognosticators from bears to marmots to predict the coming of spring. There are even clashing calendar systems which state spring should start anywhere from Imbolc (Celtic St. Brigid’s Day February 1st) to the Vernal Equinox (established by the Roman calendar). Some years we go with the Celts. Some years the Romans.

The Romans looked to the Hedgehog. In America, we let a Ground Hog decide, in Serbia they watch the bears. If the bear awakens early from his hibernation, and is startled by meeting his shadow on the way out, he will be frightened back into his den and sleep for another 40 days.

Yawn... now back to my long winter's nap.

A found jewel...

2012-01-09T15:52:00.000-08:00

I stood in the produce department this evening, bagged salad in hand, perusing their offerings, deciding what to dress it up with. I had already decided on my favorite winter fruit, a pomegranate, but I had a fruit craving. I needed something else. The strawberries looked over ripe, the pears looked green, the apples siney like plastic. I was hemming and hawing over whether or not to take a chance on some tasteless grape tomatoes when I spotted this jewel...

There was only one left. I snapped it up. It may disappoint in the end, but at that moment, it was a visual feast. And not just for me. Like I said, it was the last one left. I was not the only shopper to be lured in by creative packaging and the memories of warm, sunripened cherry tomatoes.

It was Andy Rooney who said "The federal government has sponsored research that has produced a tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can't eat it. We should make every effort to make sure this disease, often referred to as 'progress', doesn't spread."

But, not every tomato grower in America has jumped on the "perfect round red tomato" bandwagon. Well, maybe they did, but some have finally jumped off. And I'm not talking about just your local farmer's market crowd. Some people are working out how to ship that homegrown heirloom tomato taste out of season. At the forefront of this movement is the UglyRipe crowd.

I had heard about these before I actually saw them in my own local store. And you won't see them very often. They come packaged in an individual flack jacket to protect them from bruising and then rotting. I saved the flack jacket as an oddity in case I ever have to ship a ripe tomato. It was pretty good. I would think it was a brandywine, and in the dead of winter, or any off season month (November through July) it tastes pretty good.

So, how were the little yellow sunbursts in my salad tonight? Not bad. Not bad at all.

Deck The Halls

2011-12-21T14:30:00.000-08:00

The evolution of the Christmas celebration as we know it has been a long and varied one. There are as many ideas of the meaning of celebrations at this time of year as there are people who celebrate. And this, the longest night of the year, is the perfect time to reflect on the bringing in of greenery, and the illumination of the darkest corners of our homes and hearts.

I love Christmas songs, particularly the old English ones like Deck the Halls and the Holly and the Ivy. I'm also a big fan of wassailing. So, as a gardener, one is curious as to what these plants and traditions mean. In ancient, pagan Europe and England, King Holly rules from MidSummer Night to MidWinter Night. King Oak ruled from MidWinter Night to MidSummer Night. Winter Solstice was the perfect time to celebrate these by bringing greenery in to remind us of life and growth. Holly boughs were brought into the homes, and Mistletoe, the parasitic plant growing in the Oak was also thought to have special qualities. Ivy was another evergreen plant in abundant supply in wintery northern climes.. The Holly was masculine, and the twining Ivy a feminine symbol.

Poinsettias, native to Mexico and Central America, were part of those Christmas celebrations long before it was introduced to America. Now, these fickle tropical plants, along with Paperwhites and Amaryllis are must have traditions as we force them into their showy displays at a time when they would normally be dormant.

My memories of decorations in my childhood always revolved around a Christmas tree. We also had a vintage nativity scene, a simple candelabra in the window, and of course, miles of paper chains. I was in my early twenties when I attended my first company Christmas party. It was held at the local town club. When I walked into this stately old club my first sight was an oak banister. They had decorated it by loosely twining fine grapevines around it. In the negative space created, there was gold tulle encasing white lights, angles blowing trumpets and doves.

I had never seen such an elegant and imaginative Christmas decoration. I was awestruck, and from that moment my thoughts of Christmas decorating shifted. I was no longer content with a tree. I longed for a banister to decorate. I've never gotten one, but I make due. The spandrel that divides our livingroom from the diningroom is the focal point, and other garlands are placed so as to compliment and balance the greenery throughout the house.

You can get quite showy with your greenery, but sometimes a simple boxwood wreath hung by a coordinating ribbon is adornment enough.

I enjoy the many color options that are offered for Poinsettias. This year I highlighted my graniteware collection with a creamy white one.

And where real greenery fails, there are many silk options to be had. I cut and combine floral picks and stick them into bare corners.

Over the sink, the usual vegetable prints are exchanged for botanical prints of seasonal plants, holly, winter pears, my favorite pomegranates, and the Colonial symbol of welcome, the pineapple. Silk bayleaf wreaths, which coordinate with the bayleaf garlands in other rooms, are hung on every pair of short cabinet doors.

Not even the bathroom is bare. The modern LED battery lights and candles make it possible for me to light up every nook and cranny.

Of course, the real thing is always best. My mother makes dozens of wreaths to give as gifts with sprigs of holly and rose hips tucked in. People look forward to this gift all year long and she enjoys shopping for ornaments to personalise each wreath to the person's decor or personality.

One year a friend of mine in Maine gifted me with a box of trimmings from her own yard. I used a centerpiece form purchased through the Colonial Williamsburg catalog to construct this centerpiece. When the pears become over ripe, just replace them with ornaments.

Colonial Williamsburg is a great source of inspiration for decorating with greenery and fruit. I page through their galleries each year looking for inspiration. In fact, it was Colonial Williamsburg which first popularised Candles in the Windows back in the 1940s. That is a look I've always enjoyed. It's amazing how elegant and festive the right sort of facade can look with careful placement of single candles.

Other sources of decorating are the idea galleries at Better Homes and Gardens and Martha Stewart.

White Flower Farms sell wonderful garlands. Sometimes I will buy one, cut an end off to use in arrangements, and hang the shortened garland for decoration. They also sell boxes of mixed greens if you have a hard time finding a local source. Williams Sonoma is another excellent source.

If you want silk greenery that you can use year after year, there are now many catalogs which supply excellent quality decorations. My favorites are Front Gate, Grandin Road, Ballard Designs, and Horchow Home.

One of my gardening projects for next summer is to plant evergreens for the express purpose of trimming for holiday centerpieces and garlands. We have a planting bed ready, and next spring I will be shopping for my own holly and ivy, and probably some box wood and other evergreens so stay tuned.

Some Things are More Trouble Than They're Worth...

2011-12-09T15:19:00.000-08:00

There are certain things that seem like a wonderful idea at the time, but in reality, are just more trouble than they're worth. You can either buy the finished product for much less than you can make it yourself, OR you are better off just admiring a picture of it. Please remind me of this moment of clarity if I ever show signs of doing the following:

Trying to grow my own Sweet Corn, Pumpkins or Watermelon.

Canning Tomatoes or making Sauce.

Planting more than two Zucchini plants at a time.

Baking cutout Christmas cookies.

I keep a list of cookie recipes that I've mastered, and I also keep a list of failures to never try ever again. Inevitably, every few years, my memory grows dim, and a photo like this in a catalog...

...will catch my eye. I will immediately send away for the cookie cutters. I will clip the photo for inspiration. And I will take several years off my life trying to achieve similar results.

And for what? To try to impress my mother, husband, extended family, friends and coworkers with my baking prowess when I present them with a picture perfect box of Holiday delights? Trust me, there is no baking prowess. My mother is already impressed with me, due in no small part to her claim on giving birth to me. My husband barely tolerates my flights of Holiday fancy as it is, and my coworkers know they must pretend to be impressed or suffer a 40 hour work week of bad (worse) temper. My friends would probably think me pretentious and talk amongst themselves while I'm occupied with my cutout cookies.

Alternatively, there are several recipes that are a lot less trouble than they appear.

Split Seconds, for instance, have a bit of a learning curve, but are remarkably easy, and they look so festive. Especially if you drizzle white icing over the finished cookies. I use cherry jelly instead of raspberry jam, and I apply it with a cookie decorator.

Hershey's Peanut Butter Blossoms. This dough is SO easy to work with. Very forgiving. But, if it looks like you are going to get more than 4 dozen out of the batch (I got 5) be sure to unwrap the extra kisses BEFORE you pop the last sheet in the oven! Time is of essence!

Pecan Turtles. A regional candy favorite. Add two tablespoons or heavy cream instead of water to your caramels. Very easy to make, not as messy as they sound and heavenly to eat.

Now, as for those cut out sugar cookies... I still have several refrigerated dough logs to work through. I think the wise choice would be to get out the snowman cookie cutter and apply the frosting with a broad knife.

Top 5 Things on My Holiday Shopping List

2011-11-30T15:00:00.000-08:00

Now I won't bore you with the details of my shopping list, but here are the top 5 things to have on hand throughout the Holidays.

1. Taste of Home Best Holiday Recipes or similar inspirational publication. Published annually, this magazine has great photos, fresh ideas and simple instructions. This is where I generally get my inspiration for my new recipes.

2. Gladware. You will always need some. Great for storing cookies in the freezer and sending guest home with leftovers. I always stock up this time of year.

3. Cookies. Whether you bake them yourself or buy them at the bakery, keep a few containers of cookies in the freezer. When surprise guests drop by, bring out a plate to thaw and by the time your guests have settled in they will be ready to serve. Of course, not all cookies thaw on a moment's notice, so choose wisely. I have two different kinds of cookies in the freezer so far, with five more planned. You don't even have to get fancy. Make some Toll House cookies with red and green M&Ms instead of chocolate chips or buy Pillsbury cookie dough to make cut outs and have fun just decorating them.

4. Paper Plates and Napkins. Takes the work and hassle out of cleaning up. We even serve Thanksgiving or Christmas Dinner on themed paper plates. After all the work you did in the kitchen, make cleanup a breeze by using disposable Holiday themed plates. I stock up when they go on sale at the end of the holidays, and use the odd and ends to give away cookies.

5. Poinsettias. Need a centerpiece? Need a last minute hostess gift? Flat out forgot to decorate? Poinsettias are the solution to your problem. Large or small, traditional red or subtle salmon, there is a poinsettia for every occasion. But unless you are good with house plants (I'm not) don't buy them too early or the lower leaves will begin to fall off. Grab one a week at the store and you will always have a fresh one, and the older ones can be pushed to the background to provide a back drop.

A few simple preparations are all it takes to make your Holidays run smoothly.

End of Season Arts and Crafts

2011-11-27T11:58:00.001-08:00

My mother came up with the most original use of garden scraps yet! Earlier this summer, she cut the stem end off an onion, and for some reason, set it aside on the window sill. A week or so later, she looked at it again and was struck by how closely it resembled a flower.

She spent the rest of the summer saving her onion ends, and hot glued them to a grapevine wreath form. Using white, yellow and red onions, she achieved a wide palette of color.

This was not the end of her creativity. She also gathered up dried artichokes from last year, and some "mummified" turnips that she pulled out of the garden after leaving them in the ground all winter. This wreath is now gracing the inside of my garden shed, as it obviously would not do well out in the elements.

I am finally getting to some of my own decorating projects. Today I made roller shades using this fun fabric I bought on Ebay... well over a year ago! By next spring the garden shed ought to be cutely decorated.

Tis the Season

2011-11-18T10:09:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving is fast approaching. This is the time for all gardeners and homemakers to shine. So you might wonder what I am making this year. And the answer is..... Reservations!

Yes folks, the Holidays are a stressful time. If you really want to enjoy them, you must pace yourself. I have done the big Thanksgiving dinner, the turkey, the sweet potatoes, the wonderful apple cranberry relish. I have even baked a few pies in my day. There have been long grocery lists, mounds of leftovers and huge piles of dishes. Every few years, someone in my family up and decides they want to put themselves through that. And in between, we make reservations.

What?!? No turkey leftovers? No pie? I assure you there will be pie. We will most likely spend the afternoon house hopping and sampling everyone's pies. But I solve the turkey leftover problem by buying breast only turkey, and cooking that for Sunday dinner now and then. It helps with that turkey leftover craving. Two people+one large turkey breast=sandwiches all week.

But there ARE things to be done. Now begins my "using up of my vacation" plan where I take every Friday off giving me time for holiday projects. Today's project was cleaning the fridge, and I don't mean just wiping the shelves. I get out the graniteware slop pot and take after the canned goods. Anything that has been in there since last Christmas has to go, along with stuff we really aren't going to eat after all. Must make room! Then, one shelf at a time, I scrub. I have a shelf soaking in the sink this minute. Not sure what is stuck to it, but it isn't edible. Our house will be full of impromptu guests for the next two months, and it is bad form to send someone to your fridge to get themselves a mixer and have your fridge either avalanche on them or growl at them.

And I've already been up early and too the grocery store. I have things on the side porch where it's cool, and they need to be organised into the freshly cleaned fridge. I keep a list on the computer each year, and as the sales and coupons start rolling in, I begin stocking up. I have enough crackers, cheeses, olives and such to throw together a little party platter at a moment's notice. They also had a good price on spiral cut hams, so the Christmas ham is already here. You also never know when you might need a can of broth, and it is a good time to refresh your baking supplies.

My list not only shows ideas of what to serve for a "Happy Hour" party vs a family open house, different people's drink preferences (so I know when to make sure I have OJ handy) and ingredients for special dips, but I also keep a list of failures. My family is tired of bread dip and stuffed mushrooms. Each year I try to introduce one new recipe. If they don't finish something one year, they don't get it again for at least three years.

Tim is a bit of a "social director". He feels the need to plan and invite and people have happily let him take that over. And if he is social directing, then I am cooking. About 7 years ago I told him if I never put together another relish tray as long as I lived, it would be too soon. So I have also learned to order out for things like that. It's on my to-do list. but right now, I have to go put my fridge back together and clean myself up because the rest of this day off is for relaxation. That is what the Holidays are about isn't it?

Preparing for spring

2011-11-16T18:17:00.000-08:00

Now is the time to be planting spring bulbs, so we can look forward to those bright harbingers of warmer weather. I have a unique bulb planting style. I like to "naturalise" by planting clumps of daffodils along edges and corners. I have very little patience for this, so I've developed a rather abrupt planting style. Those of you who know me in person will probably not be suprised by the word "abrupt".

I choose a grey, rainy day in November, when the ground is saturated and sloppy. I don my waxed, oil skin coat, and my knee high green shitkickers. And I go get the crowbar. Yes, the crowbar. No fussy, measured bulb dibber for me. Then I stalk around the yard jamming the crowbar into the earth like a stake into a vampire. Once it is in good and deep, I rotate it in a circle widening the hole until it is big enough to stuff a bulb down. When the bulb has been stuffed, I close the hole with my heel and move on.

I am a little more studied about planting in the landscape beds. Above is an old photo of some tulips. My favorites are the orangish "Daybreak" tulips. They first blossom orange, then fade to yellow. Home Depot carried them this year. Otherwise they can be a little hard to find. In the bes, I dig a sizeable hole, and throw a bunch of bulbs in. Bulbs really aren't fussy. You can set them in neatly, but even if you put them in upside down, they will sort things out.

This year I added clumps of daffodils to a new border along the back of the garden you have not yet seen. I put in a few splotches of color in the front beds with hyacinths surrounded by crocuses. And above are some paperwhites I was given last Christmas. As you can see, they've rooted well and are thinking about putting up some leaves.

I also planted garlic. I don't know why. I rarely use garlic. I will NEVER use a dozen garlic bulbs. But I planted them anyway, and they have come up nicely.

There are still a few things outside to be tended to. The catnip is almost dry enough to crumble off and be sewn into fabric scrap bags for kitty toys.

Here are the sunflower heads we harvested. I allowed them to dry for several weeks, making sure to keep them covered with bird netting, then removed the seeds for roasting. In doing so, I ruined all my fingernails.

To roast sunflower seeds, boil them in salt water for an hour, then season them and roast them in a moderate oven (350*). You can find several sets of instruction on the internet as to the correct salt to water ratio. I made several flavors, using a light coating of olive oil to stick the seasoning. I used taco seasoning, ranch dressing mix, onion soup mix, and a plain batch with just some salt. The instructions I found on the internet all said to roast for half an hour, but I ended up doing each batch for an hour and a half before Tim was satisfied with the crunchiness.

I don't care for them. If the hulls were removed, maybe, but it was hard enough to get the flower bits off them, much less the hulls. Next roasting project is pumpkin seeds. Those are a bit easier as they don't require boiling.

And I am still enjoying lettuce. This is what is growing under my row cover despite two significant snow falls and a whole week of frosty mornings.

Pear Cordial

2011-11-11T15:23:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite magazines is Hobby Farm Home. Maybe I ought to do a blog on the best gardening magazines. Anyway, Hobby Farm and Hobby Farm Home are the only two magazines I subscribe to. There are two other good ones, I'm considering since I almost always end up bringing each issue home. Anyway, in the November/December 2011 Hobby Farm Home, an article caught my eye. It is called "You're Cordially Invited" and it gives recipes for several fruit cordials.

Thanks to our new Governor, the 40 year law banning the sale of 190 proof grain alcohol in New York State has been lifted, and I no longer have to scrounge far and wide for Moonshine and grain alcohol. I can buy it at our local liquor store! So a new recipe piqued my interest. I made a copy of the Raspberry Cordial recipe for my step mother who was harvesting dozens of quarts of raspberries throughout the summer. The one that got me excited was Pear Cordial.

My mother has four pear trees, and for several years, they have produced bushels and bushels of pears. We have run out of pear ideas. Mom even went so far as to make pear pie, which, to quote my sister, "tastes like apple pie with something wrong with it.'

My favorite pear is the Bosc Pear which is a brown pear, with a rough, almost sand papery skin. It is tasty even when under-ripe. We eat a lot of them.

She also has a winter pear called Keiffer which takes a little more patience, but when you get it at the exact right ripeness, it is very good as well.

Making pear cordial is very easy. You will need 6 perfectly ripe pears, a gallon jar, some sugar, some high test alcohol, and some patience.

First you bring 3 cups of sugar and 2 cups of water to a boil, stir until dissolved, and let it cool to room temperature. Then you peel and slice 6 pears. Plop the pears in the jar, pour the syrup over them, add 1 tsp of lemon zest, and 2 cups of vodka. The article says if you are working with 190 proof grain alcohol, you should dilute it with an equal amount of water. Pffttt... as IF!

You put the jar in a cool dark place for 4 weeks, visiting it every couple of days to slosh it around. At the end of the four weeks, you strain out the pears through cheese cloth. It makes about 6 cups.

What you are left with is a deep chestnut liquid that looks remarkably like cider. The aroma is fruity. At first it was a little sharp, with the lemon zest taking over a bit. You are suppose to let it age 6 months, and in a week I already notice a difference as the flavors blend and mellow. I've been sampling it now and then by just dipping a spoon into it. It is very smooth, with a delicate pear flavor. Then you realise it packs a bit of a punch as it hits your palate. I think it will be good over ice. I wonder what it would be like served hot like Glögg?

In Which the Loader Becomes a Utility Sink

2011-11-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

My least favorite fall gardening ritual is the washing up. You pick a warm sunny day long after the garden has been put to bed, when you would much rather be sitting in a lawn chair with a beer enjoying the blue sky, and you do your best to disinfect everything with bleach water to minimise the carry over of bacterial disease from one season to the next.

Tim's large tractor loader is the perfect sink. The height is adjustable, and it holds lots of pots.

In fact, it is the ONLY thing that will hold water and the tomato ladders. I knock the dirt off everything, give it a pre-rinse, and set in the bleach solution to soak for as long as my patience holds out. About 10-15 minutes. The whole procedure takes two and a half hours. It's also a good time to sort through pots, throw out damaged ones, and take an inventory. Don't forget to disinfect anything else you will be using again including, permanent plant markers, grow through supports, reusable tomato ties and tools. I also send my gloves to the laundry, wipe down my kneelers and take a moment to sweep out and wipe down the insides of my cabinets.

Before it is over, pots and flats are spread all over the drive drying in the sun.

The garden is put to bed, the shed is organised, the leaves are mulched.

A clean slate for next season.

But I'm still into stuff. As a teaser, I can tell you that my arm is sticking to the desk right now from the syrupy sweetness of my latest anti-fruit wastage, make work program, and my fingers are sore from cracking pecan shells.

Why do we do this?

2011-11-05T15:32:00.000-07:00

So, in contemplating the resting of the garden in 2012, Tim and I have had a few discussions regarding the purpose of gardening. First of all, it is NOT cost effective. As a whole that is. Granted, you can grow a shit load of green beans from a couple dollars of seed with virtually no other work or worry. But, you can still get Prego s'ghetti sauce from the grocery for a LOT less time and money than you can make your own. And I like Prego. Hasn't killed me yet. I think the tipping point for me was the last weekend I spent dealing with the harvest. I was on my feet all weekend, in and out of the kitchen, keeping an eye on things, countless sinks full of dishes, multiple trips to the compost bin. On Sunday evening I had a quart of tomato sauce, a gallon of frozen beans, and an apple pie. My thought was ~ "the weekend is over, I'm tired, I could have gotten this at the store for under 20 bucks." Doubt began to creep in....

Most of the money we spend gardening is for our own fun. Honestly. And if you like to contemplate the folly of spending copious amount of money on a handful of food, order the book the $64 Tomato and enjoy. So, we spend a lot of cash making ourselves happy in the garden, and another driving force, is the innate and inescapable hunter/gatherer in all of us. Case in point: this year's apple harvest.

My mother went on to gather dozens of bushels more from my orchard and any other orchard in the county that she could gain access to. 60 bushels was the official count, but I don't think she kept very good records. With her daily roamings of the orchard, there are still bushels of apples sitting on her front porch.

She referred to this hoarding as a "temporary obsession to eliminate fruit wastage". But I assure you it is not temporary. To my knowledge, it covers at least three generations and will reoccur annually for months at a time like snow. It's novel at first, but then it consumes everything, and makes getting around inconvenient. In the throes of her fruit obsession, my mother is even driven to call my father, her ex husband, and demand he come and get some pears/apples/whateverwehavebushelsof. And he unloads his unwanted raspberry runners on her. We have come to call this the "fruit exchange". Let the fruiting begin.

The "Mother Load" of Pippins on it's way to the mill

Part of this obsession is driven by location. This would be a lot harder to do if we lived in, say, New York City. In that case, we would most likely gather and hoard street trash instead (and I'm not saying we haven't). We have this stuff just laying around, for one reason or another, and if we don't pick it up, someone is going to have to mow around it.

And because my mother just happens to live half a mile from my orchard to the west, and half a mile from an old fashioned cider mill to the east, the logical thing to do would be to pick up the apples and turn them into cider to give to everybody. And this can be fun. Especially when the cider goes hard. The weeks I spent drinking the gallons I brought to the office were especially pleasant. Particularly after the caps blew off.

My mother was aided and abetted in her "temporary obsession to avoid fruit wastage" by Elsie the Amishwoman. Elsie is a thrifty, hard working woman who will can anything that she can get her hands on. I have given her jars of jelly and such and I can tell you, Elsie returns the jars in the best way possible... full of something else.

Elsie's Larder Part I

Elsie's Larder Part II

My husband has reminded me that we are not Amish. It is not necessary for us to grow our own food. Heck, we're not even farmers. Well, I'm sort of a farmer, but he's not. And we're not Survivalists. If there is a cataclysm, we will not be repopulating the Earth. If the Global Economy collapses, we can survive off the grid pretty easily. I do have some turnip and rutabaga seeds lying around. We're not going to starve right away.

In the mean time, we garden for pleasure. We know that fresh green beans are far superior to the canned ones. It's fun to grow catnip and other herbs. Digging potatoes is oddly satisfying. There are certain specialties, like Wild Plum Jelly, homemade Pickles and Glögg that can only come from your own kitchen and are delightful to share as gifts. Those are the things that we do not fret over the cost and work of making. We garden so we can feel the satisfaction of nurturing a seedling, amending the soil and reveling in the unique taste of a fresh, sun warmed tomato from seeds saved for generations. As long as we can keep that perspective, we will garden on.

Iceberg Lettuce

2011-10-27T16:32:00.001-07:00

The only thing left in the garden now is the lettuce and a few young carrots. And tonight I picked my dinner salad out of the snow. At this point in the year, I am taking the whole plant and thinning out anything that will not be covered under my row cover to protect it from snow and frost.

What could be better than fresh, chilled, tender buttercrunch lettuce?

The garden is put to bed for the winter. The soil is amended with compost, the catnip is drying in the chicken coop, the sunflower seeds have been roasted, the chard has been frozen to be clipped for soups and sauces, and the carrots have been pulled and put up. A clean slate for the next year.

But, be forewarned, I have a pretty long list of things around the house that did NOT get done because of gardening and food storage. My six beds will be resting next year while we catch up.

And still...

2011-10-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

...with the beans.

Yesterday was October 1st and I was freezing beans. And my fingers, it just so happens, as I picked in a 45* rain. Will it never end?

The only things left in the garden, are two green tomatoes, half a dozen bell peppers, and the plants that need to be pulled. And maybe a summer squash. And some chard and carrots. And, of course, the lettuce. You're right. This is never going to end.

Fall Gardening

2011-09-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, I still have things growing. The temperatures have been below normal, and they even used the "S" word for this weekend's forecast. But there is still activity in the garden.

I am enjoying the fall planting of lettuce in the bed which held the first planting of cucumbers and bush beans. There are three short rows of carrots on the far end.

Tim and Neighbor Mike constructed an extra hoop house that fits over the lettuce. The cloth will give me frost protection down to 26*. Next summer I can replace the cloth for shade cloth and keep the lettuce cooler hoping to delay the bolting. I cut this cloth out of a larger sheet, hemmed the edges, and added gromets to fasten it to the frame.

There are still seedlings coming up and this bed will soon be a lettuce jungle.

The Nasturtium, which stops blooming in the heat of summer, always rallies and offers billows of bright fall color.

In the "paste tomato" bed, the only thing left is the Sungold which is being nursed along to provide salad tomatoes.

The third planting of bush beans is still lush. It produced a couple of gallons of beans to freeze, and now is keeping us in dinner beans. Now and then it gets ahead of me and I have to freeze a small batch. The Purple Queen beans are reverting to their pole bean ancesters and taking over the remaining cornstalks.

The "slicing tomato" bed still has some tenants, but they will be pulled this weekend. The bell peppers on the far side are going strong and I will have to freeze some.

The Serrano pepper looks very festive. We are going to try drying these.

The chard looks gorgeous!

But this is one ugly summer squash. The growing end keeps generating new growth as the old leaves die off leaving an ugly snaking stalk. I keep having to wind it around and back into the bed. Thre are still a few small squash coming on.

Plan for this weekend is winterization. I've done my "ungardening" gradually instead of all in one day. It feels like less work that way. But soon we will be battling leaves and anything left in the beds will just be an obstacle. The compost bin is full, but there is still work to be done to get everything cut down and protected, and the equipment clean, disinfected and ready for a smooth start in the spring.

An Exciting Day to be a Rock

2011-09-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

Imagine you’re a rock. You’ve just been sitting around since the last Ice Age. Doing nothing. Now and then an animal walks by. The animals change over time from wild to domestic, then you start seeing humans occasionally. The humans cut the trees and change the view, but for the most part they leave you alone. Now and then they run into you with something and make a lot of noise. Some of your neighbors have had pieces chopped off or have been pried out of the ground and hauled away. But not you. You’re a big rock.

Then one day a big machine comes and plucks you out of the ground. Talk about surprise! Next thing you know, you’re whizzing along at high speeds of oh, 3 or 4 miles per hour, over hill and dale. Whhheeeeee! That glacier was nothing compared to this. Then you’re dumped on a big pile of rocks. You’ve heard tell about rock piles and now, finally, you’re part of one. And that fetching igneous rock with the elaborate lichens that you’ve been creeping toward for the past, oh ten thousand years or so, is suddenly mere inches away. Yes, indeedy, it is an exciting day to be a rock!

In order to accommodate and encourage the farmer who rents our land, and anyone else who might want to brush hog it now or in the future, we spend a day now and then picking rocks. It's expensive and time consuming enough to keep the land in shape without adding the variable of ruining a blade or worse on a grass covered boulder. This year, the target was the area I've come to refer to as "Hell's Half Acre". I've seldom gone back there, as it's a good hike from any direction. In my childhood I remember it as being little grazed, rarely mowed, and generally avoided, usually chin high in weeds.

A few weeks ago I realised why. I made it back there on my rock scouting expeditions, and found that Bruce had actually managed to brush hog it. And it looked as if the glacier went through last month. I could stand in one spot and count at least a dozen boulders, some sitting right up on top of the ground. Obviously no one has ever picked rock back here. Add to that the fact that it appears that at one point a tornado came through and knocked the woods down because there are so many hillocks which are usually caused by root balls being turned up. This was not a place where the land was carefully cleared of rocks and stumps, and no one has ever plowed it. I can guarantee that! This must be what Bruce was referring to when he said he'd like to see a dozer smooth out some of the pasture. This must be heck to mow.

I took the day off. I was actually looking forward to playing outside all day. Tim drove one of our tractors out, 45 minutes, because we needed the big tractor with the back hoe. I got the easy job. I drive from rock to rock and Tim digs. There is still a lot of on and off and twisting and looking. The next day I simply could NOT turn my head to the left.

We worked for 7 hours (not counting drive time) and gathered 197 rocks ranging from the size of your noggin to the size of your large appliances.

Here is a photo of the BIG from our last rock day two years ago. And one of the rock piles from that day.

On to the next one...

Behind us, the boulders littered the pasture like dinosaur poop.

This was fun for the first, oh 4 or 5 hours. Really good fun. Lots better than sitting in an office! Then as 5 o'clock neared, we realised we were never going to see the end of the rocks, and we had two dozen not piled, and no good spot to pile them. We had added to 3 or 4 existing piles, and started 3 of our own in out of the way places. Last time we had piled the rocks near the gates and sold them. This wasn't plausible this time. The price of rocks would not have covered the diesel and time it took to get them near a gate.

So at 5 o'clock when Tim asked if that was all for today, I fibbed and said yes. There are two other areas we didn't get to, but those rocks have been there for a really long time, and they will still be there next year. Along with whatever else heaves up through with the frost. My uncle said one year he counted how many field stones went into a trailer load, did some calculations on the acreage, and estimated that my grandfather had moved over 750,000 in his lifetime. With those numbers, we've only just begun.

Imagine doing this without a tractor. I'm a pretty active person, and Tim works outside all day long, so we were ready for a day picking rock. I remembered to take some Aleve before I, uh leaved the house. We covered the outer path of about 50 acres. There was a lot of rock rolling and rock picking up. Some of them we just pried out of the ground with a spud bar. How this works is you are standing around, leaning on the bar (used to help roll the rock into the bucket) waiting for whomever is driving to get back from dumping a load of rocks on the rock pile, when you spot another rock hiding in the grass. You take careful aim and jab the bar into the earth next to the rock and pry. You watch the earth around to see how much of it moves, and by this you calculate the approximate size of the rock and your chances of getting it out by hand.

Sometimes you are still jabbing and prying when the tractor comes back, and you gratefully step aside and make room for the back hoe and the front end loader. My grandfather had no backhoe and no front end loader. He had a tractor and a trailer. His father before him had a stone boat and a team of horses. The folks before my family likely had a stone boat and a team of oxen. We have found ox shoes in the fields. Imagine clearing rock all day with a pry bar, a stone boat, and a team of oxen. It would take more than Aleve to get me through that!

Strawberry Rhubarb World Domination

2011-09-25T16:00:00.000-07:00

It was mere months ago when my strawberry rhubarb bed was fresh and manageable.

That has changed.

Despite pulling yellow leaves from the rhubarb each week, it has gotten HUGE and threatened to take over the world. The strawberries are right behind it sending runners through the wire of the cages with intent to blanket every useable growing space for a 3 mile radius. I've sort of let it go. It's something you can do every day, or once a season. It used to be easy to "renovate" my berry bed. I would just turn Tim loose with the lawn mower (deck at it's highest setting) and he would mow it.

The time to renovate a strawberry bed is just after the last harvest. My berries are supposedly everbearing, so I waited until now, since they should produce a second, smaller crop in September. They sort of did. It wasn't a harvest, more like an occasional "oh there's a berry. Is it worth going after?" I've opted to let the rows fill in between each other. I can easily reach through from both sides. We'll find out whether or not this is a mistake in regards to air circulation later. Now that things are under control, I may go back in there and work on it some more.

I trimmed the plants to 3-4" above the ground, but my main goal was containment. I ruthlessly pulled and weeded out all the runners on the sides and ends so the cages fit back over, and raked and tidied the mulch on each side. All is now in order. I will mulch them after the first frost in preparation for the snow.

Tired

2011-09-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

I'm tired.

I'm tired of fruit flies.

I'm tired of every basket and enamelware bowl, bucket and pot being full of potatoes and onions and tomatoes in various stages of ripeness. Apples in various stages of rot. And summer squash.

I'm tired of my tables, Hoosier, countertop and every available flat surface from the side porch on through to the dining room being covered in baskets, buckets and pots.

I'm tired of fishing peas/tomato skins/bean ends out of the sink drain.

I'm REALLY tired of cleaning my countertop composter. That is one stage of composting that is really.... vile.

I'm tired of washing pots/pans/strainers/casserole dishes and cookie sheets. And the stove top.

I'm tired of rearranging my freezer.

I'm tired of cleaning the tomato seeds out of the Foley food mill.

I'm tired of trying to optimize the usage of every bag, box, and bushel basket I've hoarded.

And I'm tired of my refrigerator looking like a disaster zone and being on my feet until 10:00 three or four nights a week.

But I'll never get tired of beautiful, colorful vegetables...

Or Mom's apple pie....

Or gardening in general.

But it sure is time for autumn.

After Apple Picking

2011-09-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a banner year for apples in our neck of the woods. Every wild apple tree you pass on the side of the road is loaded with apples. We have a Yellow Transparent, a Cortland, and a Macintosh in our backyard, but the crows and the squirrels stripped all but a couple of dozen apples off the trees. Not to worry, on my farmland we have an Orchard, and I was pleased to discover that there were much more than enough apples for us.

My Great Uncle Doug planted the orchard in 1938. When Great Grandpa Fred came on the farm around 1910, there were old orchards (as was common on farms then) on both "upper" and "lower" farms. Some farmers in the 19th century and turn of the century grew a lot of apples. Some were sent to apple driers in nearby Ashville and put in barrels and exported to Germany.

The orchard on my farm was across the cow lane from where it is now, on a two acre field. The severe winters of the 1930's and age killed off the old orchards. Some winters were so cold the trunks of trees would freeze and burst and that sounded "like rifle shots" according to my Grandfather.

Uncle Doug planted the new orchard with more modern varieties. It was one of very few, if not the only orchard in Busti planted that late. I think he ordered the trees from a mail order nursery. My uncle Norman used to have to count the trees and report the number along with how many bushels of apples he saved and how many he took in for cider to the government.

By studying an aerial photo I’ve determined there may have originally been as many as 84 trees, and fewer than 30 remain alive. My Grandfather never trimmed or sprayed it. One year neighbors with a cider mill rented it and trimmed it up and tried to put it in commercial condition for a year or two. I believe my Great Grandfather used to graze sheep in there to keep the grass down, and I remember my Grandfather keeping a couple of hives of honey bees in the back. Other than that, the orchard has been left to it's own devices and is in need of some clean up.

My uncle tells that in the 1970's they used to bag up many bushels of apples and have cider made in several batches. They brought it home in milk cans but put it in big 20 gallon earthenware crocks and kept it out in the snow to have cider into December. I remember them laying tarps under the trees to catch the windfall apples.

My Grandmother also canned and froze cider in gallon jugs: glass for canning and plastic for freezing. We drank a lot of cider! We also had applesauce made from the Yellow Transparents, and dried apples dried on cookie sheets beside the wood stove. My sister and I learned to make apple dumplings, and that was all the rage for a year or two.

They stored apples in baskets in the root cellar. A few times in the winter someone would have to go through the remaining apples in the cellar and cull the rotten ones. I remember the cellar smelling of dried leaves and the faint smuttiness of rotting apples.

The past few weeks I have been keeping an eye on the trees, and have been tormented by loads of ripe apples falling to the ground to be enjoyed by the deer and woodchucks. There are McIntosh, Cortland, a Greening for cooking, Double Red Delicious which are still starchy and hard, Red Spies, Northern Spies and one King tree which is covered with large pale apples.

These are BIG trees. You can only reach a few from the ground, and my attempts at picking them from the back of my horse (who knew I was picking apples and therefore wanted to help) were frustrating at best. Around here, if you want to get to something up high, you grab a Kubota!

I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall,
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised, or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
~Robert Frost

All this bounty makes us greedy. We hate to see it go to waste. But of course, there are only so many apples you can eat or cook in a week. So Tim immediately began to think of cider. He doesn't even drink cider! I drink plenty of cider in the fall. I began by warming it and adding a shot of Captain Morgan Rum for a spicy drink. There is a restaurant that we frequent who has put me on to a few other combinations. Add Butterscotch Schnapps for a drink that tastes like warm apple pie. Add Peach Schnapps and the peach almost totally takes over for a wonderful zingy peach drink.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
And I keep hearing from the cellar-bin
That rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking;

~Robert Frost

I actually do have an antique orchard ladder (they are narrow at the top) but that would have been useless in this situation. Mom's apple picker DID come in very handy. Although I knocked off quite a few, sending them pelting down on Tim and Mom's heads.

There's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now
~Robert Frost

Mom and I pose with our bountiful harvest.

I talked to my dad the next day and at Tim's insistence I asked him what had become of PaPaw's cider press in Kentucky. He didn't know, but he said he had one in the garage that had followed him home from a garage sale. It needed a new drum, but I told him I would stop by and see it because I know you can buy the new drums online.

How long do you think it takes a guy to load something very heavy into his truck and drive 7 miles? Before I knew it, my father was hollering my name through the screen door, and this....

....was sitting in our driveway. Never balk at a chance to get rid of some junk.

The mechanics of it are clean, well oiled, and crank with ease. It has a grinder which Tim didn't think would do much in the way of chopping an apple, until we dropped a couple in and were rewarded with a pile of apple shards on the driveway. An efficient grinder it certainly is!

But this will probably be next year's project. Tim naturally wants to sand blast it and pretty it up, and we still need a replacement drum, a pusher (for lack of a better word) for the top, and I'll be sewing some sacks to go in the drum.

After all that excitement, I began to cook apples. I made both applesauce and apple butter (more on that another time). And this is just the beginning! There are more apples ripening every day!

Thank You for the Cow Paths

2011-09-09T13:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Farmer who rents my land;

Thank you for the cow paths. When I walked the pasture today, marking boulders for removal, I was delighted to find that your cows have made paths. Granted, they are not in the same places that my grandfather's cows had them, but they are nice just the same. I am hoping with time they will become as deeply etched among the buttercups as I remember them and that they will fill up with the fine powder of dirt that feels good to toes or becomes slick in the rain and make a satisfying smack under bare feet.

There is a lot of work history in that land. There are pits that springs have carved around piles of rocks stacked by men generations ago who foolishly thought they could stop the erosion. Every now and then I come across an unexpected gully opening up beneath my feet in seemingly flat land, but most of the creek banks still feel familiar as they did 30 years ago.

I am surprised that the old fence line where we took out the wire this spring has blended in so well, and that the new fence line has already aged to match it's surroundings as if a clever decorator "distressed" it with golden rods and dried grass to make it look old. The pasture has already moved on and forgotten our hard work with a casual shrug at the whims of humans and their boundary lines. I think my newer coils of wire look nice on the old wire pile.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I had noticed the improvement. The pasture looks good, and somehow satisfied to be grazed by cows again. It has been nearly a century since my family arrived, and close to two centuries since settlers brought the first cows here. I wonder what will be here in another hundred years. I hope they keep the cow paths.

Sincerely,
Your Farmer Neighbor

Today's Theme: Out 'er Space

2011-09-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

We are, errrr... outta space.

My hod was in the basement full of potatoes. All my yard sale plastic strainers that I pick into were full of Shelly's extra tomatoes which she wanted not to have to deal with. But I found one more and heaped the beans in.

I realised after the beans were picked that , due to last weekend's lasagna making spree, I had no room in the freezer to put a tray (I am also, coincidentally, out of Gladware, but that wasn't a problem at the moment). After some juggling I made room, and realised that a gallon of beans was not going to fit onto one tray. But if I used the deep tray of the broiler, I could stack them and not have beans freezing to the bottom of the top tray.

In the meantime, on the other side of the kitchen, I was running out of both casserole dishes AND oven space.

And when I ground down all Shelly's surplus tomatoes, I was precariously near to running out of space in my 4 qt pot.

In the end (at 11pm), it all got into the freezer. It just took some engineering.

Early Mornings, Late Nights, Busy Weekends, Messy Kitchens

2011-08-31T17:17:00.000-07:00

Endeavoring to grow your own food, and put it up for the winter, is a pretty big commitment. I remember with fondness, the July heat wave which got me out of bed half an hour early (I am NOT a morning person) each day to water the garden for several weeks in a row. Now it is the late nights. It happens several times a week. You get home from a long day work and running some errands, sort the mail, grab a glass of wine, and head out the garden by six o'clock to pick some beans for supper. As you are picking beans, you realise there are more here than "just for supper". Five minutes turns into twenty. You go to the garden shed for another container.

Looks like another tomato evening. It was bound to happen sooner or later. If you get dinner started first, you calculate that you can get the tomatoes washed and cored and in the oven by 7. That means they will be done by 9:30, and with luck, you can grind them and simmer them down by 10:30 or so and have that last pot washed and put away before 11 pm.

Some nights you are faced with the biggest, heaviest, ugliest hod full of slicing tomatoes that have to be gotten rid of.

They still look kinda pretty all chunked up and ready to roast. But, by the time the movie or TV shows run out, you still have some pretty runny tomato sauce and you're just not interested in monitoring a pot of sauce until the wee hours of morning. This is one of the hazards of growing too many slicing tomatoes. So I tasted this runny sauce and I said to myself, "Self, what you have here is not tomato sauce. It's tomato soup."

And pretty good tomato soup at that. In fact, what this tomato base is begging to be is Minstrone Soup. Maybe tomorrow.

Another fact of heirloom gardening tomato season is the seed saving. Soon, my kitchen counter is full of juice glasses full of seed gel. There are even some on my window sill at work. I wonder what the cleaning crew thinks is in them? The gel must be allowed to mold to separate the seeds from the goo. It's not an attractive process. It breeds fruit flies. WHERE do they come form? It's NOT something you want to spill on your counter. Trust me. When disturbed it can stink to high heaven.

When the mold experiment has successfully concluded, rinse the seeds until all you're left with is seeds, and dump them through a tea strainer.

Arrange them on wax paper or paper plates to dry over night and put them in an envelope, or one of those minuscule zip lok bags that the extra buttons for your shirt came in. The paper plates are nice because you can write on them what variety you're drying.

The larger weekend projects continue. The potatoes are dug and the bed mulched and tilled for next year.

All the onions have been pulled, dried and braided for storage.

The potatoes are washed, dried in the wind, and stored in the basement.

But there are still potatoes in our future. This is what's left of the Great Potato Pot Experiment. There is only one plant in this pot, although I started with 6. I also started with two pots. The main lesson I learned with the Great Potato Pot Experiment is DON'T WATER THEM. They will do just fine on rain water alone, and will be quite happy waiting three weeks for rain. The one day I watered them I killed all but this plant.

And the bush beans are beautiful. The first planting was so discouraging due to the hot dry weather in July. The plants, beaten down by cycles of wilting and watering, allowed the bean tips to touch the ground. The yield was very poor, with small beans that were all curled from being stubbed against the ground. The plants looked anemic and miserable and I happily pulled them out way before their time and started lettuce in their place. The lettuce is shown in the potato drying photo. It will soon be ready to pick lightly, although you will notice, that after 4 months of gardening I didn't have the patience to plant the seeds in any sort of order. I just scratched up the soil, strewed them around and watered them in. I kept filling in the bare spots with the remaining seeds and now I have a pretty even crop coming up in various stages.

I have to say it... I'm looking forward to fall with it's mums and pumkins. There will be plenty of food and hibernation can begin.

Absinthe

2011-08-25T19:45:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have found a yummy "green when ripe" tomato! Which is great because I love the concept, but the last variety I tried tasted like... well, dirt. I got this variety in a trade. I was looking forward to it. It is a big, robust plant, and when the first one ripened, I was just going to slice it up for dinner.

The fits bite was so good, I stopped what I was doing and got out the bread and mayo! This ones is a keeper. It reminded me very much of the Ananas Noir, which I will probably forego next year in favor of Absinthe. The Absinthe was bred from crosses of Emeraude, Aunt Ruby's German Green (my former "dirt" tasting tomato), and Evergreen. One line of them is outcrossed to everyone's favorite Brandywine, and I'm not sure which version I have. Created by Alan Bishop in the mid 2000's, it is green, trending towards yellow when ripe with an occasional shot through of red. It is a medium, oblate, slicer, Beefsteak type, ripening midseason.

Now what attracted me first to this tomato was the wonderful name. As with most "heirloom" type tomatoes, half of the fun is the story and the name and any intriguing connotations it may have. Absinthe the tomato is well named although that is not it's sole attraction.

Absinthe, the alcoholic drink,has been portrayed as a dangerously addictive psychoactive drug and was therefore banned in the United States. According to Wikipedia, it is an anise-flavoured spirit derived from herbs, including the flowers and leaves of the herb Artemisia absinthium, commonly referred to as "grande wormwood", together with green anise and sweet fennel. Absinthe traditionally has a natural green colour but can also be colourless. It is commonly referred to in historical literature as "la fée verte" (the "green fairy" in French). Absinthe underwent a surge in popularity in the 1990s and the ban has now been lifted in the US. I first heard of it as the drink of choice by W.C. Fields character Egbert Souse' in the Black Pussy Cafe.

More from Wikipedia: Traditionally, absinthe is prepared by placing a sugar cube on top of a specially designed slotted spoon and then placing the spoon on the glass which has been filled with a shot of absinthe. Ice-cold water is then poured or dripped over the sugar cube so that the water is slowly and evenly displaced into the absinthe, typically 1 part absinthe and 3 to 5 parts water. During this process, components not soluble in water (mainly those from anise, fennel, and star anise) come out of solution and cloud the drink. The resulting milky opalescence is called the louche (French for "opaque" or "shady"). Releasing these components allows herbal aromas and flavours to "blossom" or "bloom" and brings out subtleties originally over-powered by the anise. This is often referred to as "The French Method."

photo courtesy Wikipedia

photo courtesy Wikipedia

So there you have it. An interesting and unique tomato named after an intersting and unique. drink

I Hoe-I Hoe and hope for potatoes

2011-08-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

Potatoes are a crop of anticipation. You don't know what your harvest will be until you start digging.

I have three kinds planted. Norland to the left, Kennebec in the middle, and Pontiac to the right. Norland is a 70 day variety, and the Kennebec and Pontiacs are both 120 days. The Norlands are beginning to get pretty ragged. Potatoes and tomatoes are both from the nightshade family, so they suffer from the same diseases. Septorial spec, and late blight usually begin working on them around the same time.

So I decided to dig some early potatoes. They have been in the ground 63 days. It's so much fun to scoop away the dirt and find perfect potatoes hiding beneath. I dug 2 plants and yielded 5 potatoes each.

I laid them out in the sun to dry along with some onions. The tops are just beginning to fall over so I am pulling them selectively giving the remaining onions room to grow.

Beyond them is my row of dwarf zinnias. These are really cute little plants. I love zinnias, but hate the mess they make when they topple over, so these are the perfect solution. They are Profusion Sunrise mix from Park Seed, with some Apricot Profusion mixed in.

The paste tomatoes are ripening well, and soon it will be tomato sauce time.

Besides onions, I have a lot of sweet peppers to add to the sauce.

The second planting of beans and cucumbers are doing fantastic. I pulled the first planting of both to make way for a fall crop of lettuce.

These are Sweet Success cucumbers. The plants are doing very well. They seem more compact than the Marketmore, as well as being resistant to mildew. But the cucumbers themselves are not as nice looking. They are very sweet, and there are plenty of them, but the skin is dark and coarse and has a lot of blemishes.

Here is the third and experimental planting of cucumbers... just HOW late can you plant them? These went in the third week of June direct seeded. The White Pearl are doing quite well, but the Marketmores right beside them are still pretty sluggish. They have put out a blossom or two, so I guess the experiment is a success.

This is the third planting of bush beans from the third week of July. They are doing fine, and the Gotta Have It sweet corn, which is so fussy to grow in zone 5, looks like it wasn't a waste of time after all. The bushy catnip on the end of the bed is attracting hoards of bumble bees.

I also have some very nice chard.

And these sunflowers are now over 10 feet tall.

Besides peaches, Aunt Pat and Laurie brought us this adorable little planter fashioned after a sink. I spent about 10 minutes at the garden center untangling this half price black eyed susan vine from a flat of pitiful leftovers, and it is really taking off. There are a dozen or more buds on it, and it will add some fall color to the patio.

Peaches

2011-07-31T16:25:00.000-07:00

Is there anything better than a visit from relatives when they bring you a taste of home?

Tim's Aunt Pat and cousin Laurie came to visit for Tim's mother's birthday. They are always so thoughtful and bring some appropriate gift for our home. And this time they also brought a bag of South Carolina peaches from a farm stand in their town.

Of course I had to eat one right away, and this was far and away the best peach I've ever eaten. I hear it is a good year for peaches, and these are so sweet I am not even tempted to add sugar. Mmmmmmm! And they smell so wonderful.

Peach is my favorite flavor. I am a sucker for peach lemonade, and peach ice tea. I love Olive Garden's version with the frozen peach slices instead of ice cubes. Ocean Spray makes a delicate flavored White Cranberry Peach Cocktail juice that I can't resist.

And the coffee shop in town makes a wonderful peach mango smoothie. I usually eat peaches fresh, but I also enjoy them canned now and then (if Mom goes to the trouble). I have been known to cook with them too. Below is a delicious recipe for Peach Salsa that I've served with grilled pork chops.

Peach Salsa

Plan to make this fruity salsa early in the day or the day before for best flavor. Serve this tasty peach salsa with grilled or pan-fried pork, fish, or chicken.

Ingredients:
•4 small peaches, peeled and diced
•Juice of 2 limes, about 1/4 cup juice
•2 teaspoons honey
•2 to 3 tablespoons diced red bell pepper
•1 tablespoon finely minced jalapeno pepper (optional)
•1 heaping tablespoon chopped cilantro
•1 small clove garlic, finely minced (optional)
•2 tablespoons finely chopped red onion or sweet onion

Preparation:

Combine all ingredients and refrigerate until serving time. The flavors are best if the salsa is refrigerated for 4 hours or overnight. Serve with grilled or broiled fish, pork, or chicken.
Makes 1 1/2 to 2 cups.

**Footnote: Today ended up being sweet pickle day. Even though we went through a lot of cucumbers entertaining this weekend, what with veggie trays and cucumber salad, we still had an over abundance. I'm getting better at estimating required amounts of brine and jars to match the cucumbers I have.

I've also perfected a system to keep the jars hot. When I remove them in the stock pot from the stove, I set a second low sided pot in the sink, empty some of the sterilizing water from the jars into the second pot as I remove them, then set the jars in the pot of hot water as I stuff them which keeps them warm. Then I just carry this pot out to the turkey fryer to process, and add water to the first stock pot returning it to the stove top boil a second batch of empty jars. Result: no broken jars, and no juggling hot jars on the way out the door.

It also helps tremendously to have Tim around to watch the water bath, operate doors, and keep asking "how long?" and "what's next?". It keeps me on schedule. Canning food is one of those operations that goes so much smoother with an extra set of hands.

Tomato Season

2011-07-28T17:28:00.000-07:00

Mmmmm... Tomato Sandwich for lunch. It sure improves my daily view of the world.

Tomato season has started up. Here is tomato number two, a Dr. Wyche's Yellow. The first official tomato was an Ananas Noir picked July24th, two days later than last year. I ate that one right away, and quite frankly, it wasn't that attractive, so no photo.

One thing I do have to say for the first tomato of the season is that I was surprised at the complexity of the taste. It was very acidic, and had several layers of flavor. It has been my observation that the first tomato always has an intense flavor. I don't know if that says something about the growing conditions, or just the nine long months since the last taste.

The weather has been perfect for tomato taste. Long, hot days with complete control over the amount of water, so no washed out flavor. I picked it in the evening. I've often wondered if that has an effect on taste too. Having a horse who has to have his sugar intake monitored has brought my attention to the fluctuation of sugars in plants through out the day. Grasses use the stored sugars during the night for growth and photosynthesis. So, the sugar content is lower in the mornings. Stressed grass stores more sugar, waiting for the next rainstorm to trigger a growth spurt. So, if tomato plants behave the same, one would draw the conclusion that picking the fruit in the evening, during a dry spell, would give you the most intense taste.

To my knowledge, no one has done a study on tomatoes. Why? Because, obviously, Big Ag is more concerned about tomato appearance and storability than they are about taste. I'll just have to continue my personal, non-scientific studies on my own.

Food Storage Tip

2011-07-27T17:17:00.000-07:00

Freeze your string beans individually by spreading them out on a cookie sheet.

Then store them in gallon size freezer bags so you can just reach in and take out how much you want. Saves space and bags!

The Rainmakers

2011-07-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

It was bound to happen sooner or later... On Friday morning, the 500 gallon rain water tank ran dry. I had been watering every morning since July 3rd. It was full at that point, and we have only gotten half an inch since then, which filled it most of the way. Luckily, the raised beds and intensive planting make water conservation a way of life. Everything is planted so closely together that if you water tomatoes, the run off is not wasted on the path, it waters the onions and peppers instead. We had been watching the water level closely all week, but when I heard the pump reverbing through the ground, I knew it had hit rock bottom and I'd better turn it off.

Tim took the opportunity for some annual tank maintenance. He hooked the shop vac up to the hole we keep the "dipstick" in, to pull fresh air through the opening, and went in to scrape and clean. That probably isn't OSHA's idea of correct "confined space" safety, but it kept him from asphyxiating.

There was a pretty good coating of rusty, organic sludge which he scraped off with a putty knife.

Then, using a Cool Whip container (an indispensable tool around here) he bailed about 15 gallons of dirty water out leaving us with a clean tank.

Then came the task of filling it. We do have a rain barrel full of water, but neighbor Mike, who does maintenance at a local company, has been collecting water for us. There is a cooling system at the shop which runs tap water through a coil and down a drain. Seems like a waste, so Mike brought a rain barrel to work with him, and recycled the water. We just wheel it up the walk on a dolly, and run a hose into the tank. At first, the water level is too high for the vent, so Tim keeps his finger in the dam.

Then Mike showed up with more water, and things became more streamlined. He just parked his truck up hill from the tank, and we got a longer piece of hose. They went back for another load, taking the opportunity to flush all the eye wash stations too, and recycle that water. They even rigged up a little chimney to screw into the vent hole, and began engineering other glitches out of the system. Next spring we will just stock pile rain water in barrels over at the down spout collector on the big garage, and fill and save them in case of draught.

Pretty soon our tank was full again. And guess what happened? Like today's title implies... it began to rain.

Endings and Beginnings

2011-07-19T17:49:00.001-07:00

To everything there is a season, and in the past two weeks I have bid goodbye to the spring delicacies and hello to new summer life. We are in the throes of a heat wave. In the past three weeks, we have gotten a scant quarter inch of rain.

The lush, sweet, garden peas were pulled out and composted

leaving the summer cucumbers and carrots behind (yes these carrots and cucumbers were hiding in that mass of peas. On the left, my second planting of bush beans is a week old and beginning to fill in. The Sweet Success cukes are larger than a finger and should be ready in another week. The first planting of Marketmores are still thriving with still no sign of powdery mildew.

Leafy green salads have made way for sliced cucumbers garnished with bright cherry tomatoes at the table. I sure miss that lettuce, and when it began to bolt I taste tested each variety to make sure it was beyond hope before I pulled it by the armload and carried it to the compost. I will be able to replant for fall.

Bright Lights chard and borage sentinels are left behind with a small stake marking where I planted the Eight Ball zucchini. Just past the borage, in the second bare spot, you can just see a young zucchini. Not that I need more summer squash. I have 6 Magda squash stacked up on my kitchen counter right now. From one plant.

The onions are ready to pull.

And the potatoes are doing fine despite the fact that I have been not been generous with water.

This beautiful, creamy White Lightening eggplant could be eaten now.

But despite being in the ground a full week earlier than last year, the tomatoes will not be breaking any records for earliness. Last year I picked the first Jap tomato on July 22nd. This one isn't even beginning to blush. On the flip side, the plants are more productive. The dry, warm weather and mild night temps have been perfect for pollination. Just my luck, they will all ripen at once.

Pickle Madness

2011-07-17T18:43:00.001-07:00

It's NINETY THREE DEGREES outside! Let's boil some pickles!

Pickle Day came early this year. Last year it was the first weekend in August, and in that post I expounded on the finer points of pickle making, but this is my second (or is it third?) go-round, so I am an X Spurt. Ah yes, I consult my blog, and this is my third try at pickles.

This time I decide to try dill first, simply because we still have sweet pickles left from last year, but we are out of dill. And here are the challenges I faced. I do this, dear blog-follower, simply so you can learn from my mistakes:

1. To achieve maximum yield from each cucumber, slice from the blossom end first. This lets you hold the stem with your fingers as you slice to the bitter end. Very smart. And yes, random samples from more than a dozen cucumbers prove the the stem end will be more bitter, if the cucumber, does in fact, harbor any bitterness towards... whatever.

2. You will always lose one jar due to some mystery flaw or mistake.

3. Always prepare more jars than you calculate you will need.

4. Always prepare more rings and lids than you did jars.

5. Something else, unanticipated, will still go wrong.

I introduced a new procedure into my plan. To avoid inundating the house with steam, I prepared my jars and rings in the dishwasher. Sheer bliss! This is not the first time I have used the dishwasher since it's ill fated inaugural run. Its the second. The first time was our Memorial Day Picnic. We generated enough dishes that night that I talked Tim into using the renegade machine. He rolled back the rug, grabbed a pile of towels and prepared for the worst.

He and Vivian watched the dishwasher closely for the entire 63 minute cycle.

Which was actually beneficial, since in my careful planning for pickle canning, I needed to know exactly when the dishwasher cycle would finish. And it worked out well. The dishwasher behaved herself (both times). The only water I had to boil was for sterilizing the caps and I got the brine good and hot. The canning bath was all set up outside in the turkey fryer, which Tim was in charge of. And all was going well until I ran out of brine.

Now the Mrs. Gages pickle mix packet said use 17-20 pounds of cucumbers (I had 7), and it would make 10 to 12 quarts. So I figured I had enough cukes for about, about 6-7 quarts. And that's how many jars I prepared. I stuffed 7 and a half quarts, and ran out of brine. Actually, I saw I was running out, and I added a cup of water/vinegar mixture before I even got there. Then, I had to top off the head room with more vinegar. And I still had cucumbers left. Color me confused!

Then one quart jar broke in the canning bath. Tim acted quickly, skimmed the floating slices off of the water and returned them to the kitchen. When I sent the second batch of stuffed jars out for Tim to cook, I had leftovers. Whattodo-whattodo?

I remembered in my box of canning supplies I had a Ball dill spice mixture that had instructions for refrigerating, not "canning" the pickles. I ran to the basement and retrieved this packet (I was sort of wondering what these spices would taste like anyway) and whipped up the water and vinegar mixture and added the spices.

These are all the supplies you need to make Ball's refrigerator dills. You boil the brine mixture, pour it over your cucumber slices, and wait for it to cool enough to stuff the jars. Perfect solution to my quandary! And they're good too. I gave Tim a still hot slice as I was packing the two jars. Let me warn you.... hot pickles pack quite a vinegar punch! He agreed they were good through a fit of coughing as the vinegar hit his sinuses. We are now stocked up with dill pickles for another year, Tim helped in the kitchen, the dishwasher behaved, and we are doing our rain dance because tomorrow is a 60% chance of rain!

I Got The Blues

2011-07-15T18:21:00.000-07:00

Blue is not just for flowers anymore!

Beautiful Blue Borage Brings Bees to the Beds

We have plenty of blue this year. Blue is really a novelty color in vegetable breeding, and growers are pulling out all the stops and developing some intense color.

The deep purpley blue of the blue podded peas is hard to capture on camera. It straddles the line between unique and grotesque.

The flowers are really the high point of these peas. The blue pods are pretty when fresh and new, but as they mature they darken to a morbid purple. It does make them easy to find on the vine. The peas are sweet enough, nothing to compare to modern sweet varieties, and the texture is rather dry and pithy. The pea seeds themselves are pale, and stand out a rather sickly shade in a plate of fresh cooked peas. This will not become a standby favorite of mine, although I'm sure I will grow it again just because it is interesting to watch. It falls in the class of ornamental novelty for me. Almost as pretty as ornamental sweet peas, way easier to grow, and edible as a bonus.

The garden is in full swing. We are eating squash, beans, peppers, onions and I've sampled the first of the Sun Gold cherry tomatoes.

The Purple Queen bush beans are a favorite of mine. (pictured with Magda squash)

Purple Queen is a beautiful dark green plant with stunning purple stems. The flowers are two tone purple, and the beans themselves are like frosted amethyst art glass making them easy to find, and a joy to pick. I try to pick these very early and slender as they quickly get coarse and over mature. Unfortunately, when you cook them, they turn regular boring green, leaving the cooking water a shocking lime jell-o green.

And look at this!

I picked these before supper, rinsed them and put them in a bag in the fridge. When I took them out, I noticed the water in the bag had turned a brilliant blue as if I had added food coloring. Fascinating!

Lots going on in the garden right now, and I think this might be a pickling weekend! Tim (who peels them and eats them like Popsicles) is not staying ahead of the cuke harvest and the onslaught is just beginning...

See the mishapen ones? That is from poor pollination. They are usually found tucked away in heavy foliage. Luckily, the honey bees have found the garden, and the borage/cuke row is a busy buzzy hive of activity. These cukes are all Marketmore. I have a second row of Sweet Success which is two weeks behind and just beginning to bloom.

When I'm not watering, picking and pickling, I will be doing my rain dance.

WE NEED RAIN BADLY! The 500 gallon rain water tank is half empty, and if we don't get the forecasted rain on Monday, Tim will have to bring the auxiliary rain barrel with the hand pump over to the garden. I long to wake up to the sound of rain on the window, roll over, and enjoy an extra half hour of sleep.

Our Bear Makes the News

2011-07-11T14:14:00.001-07:00

The Evolution of a Garden

2011-07-05T17:56:00.000-07:00

I am always so flattered by the nice compliments I get on this blog. I don't respond to each on individually, but let me say a collective "thank you". As most of you know, it takes a lot of dedication, TIME, sweat, brute force, planning and MONEY to get good results. I owe a lot to my creative and generous husband for helping to engineer this garden, and for financing most of it. If we figured in his time, we simply couldn't afford it. And besides Tim, I've gotten a lot of help and encouragement from family, friends and neighbors.

I was thinking this evening, sometime around 7pm when Tim and I settled in for round two of hulling peas, of all the time that goes into it. Of course, I consider hulling peas, into my collectible graniteware, with Tim and the cats for company, more of a hobby than a job, but this morning at 6am when I was standing in the garden in my pajamas with my eyes half open holding the water hose for the, I wasn't having any of those carefree, romantic thoughts. And by 8 pm as I washed up the pans and stacked the peas in the freezer, I was beginning to count the hours these meals have cost me. Yes, it will be quick and easy to grab a bag of frozen home grown peas on a dark February night, but there are hours of planting and weeding, and picking and hulling and cooking and freezing than go into that little plastic bag.

Tim has already begun to differentiate between the varieties of peas and the ease of hulling in direct correlation to the number of peas in each pod and picked a favorite pea. Survivor comes out on top, and Maestro isn't much trouble, but I don't think I'll be torturing him with Wando ever again. My vote, hands down, would be for the Sugar Snap Peas which don't require shelling, although if you don't take the time to pull the string out as you pick, you WILL regret it.

So, my point is (and I do have one)... I don't remember the moment or the reasoning behind it when I had the revelation that ... "I want a vegetable garden". I remember always having a garden growing up, but not that it was any particular work. My parents had the greenhouse, which virtually eliminated all gardening time. There simply was no time in the busy spring, but it seemed to get done anyway. We always had fresh food from our own garden, or my grand parents' gardens. But it happened naturally along with the watering of bedding plants, the milking of cows and the baling of hay. Not that it wasn't work. I spent plenty of time hauling water, pulling pig weed, husking corn and shelling peas. It just didn't seem like any big deal. It was just part of the rhythm of our lives.

Over the years, the importance of gardening began to fade. It was replaced by actual work as in a career, more hay baling, horse showing, traveling, days at the beach, hours spent in the hammock with a good book. Eight years ago, Tim had the wild idea to buy this house, which was next door to his own and install me in it while he remodeled it as a "rental property". At that point, we had been dating for four years and he was already accustomed to responding to my whims. So, when I decided I wanted to try my hand at some home grown tomatoes, he fired up the rototiller and turned me loose.

2003-2004

I started with a 3 foot strip right behind the house. This was a PERFECT spot to grow tomatoes. The south facing brown shingled wall held the heat and created a nice little microclimate. And I got a lot into that little space. 16 tomato plants, a row of green beans, a row of carrots, some pod peas, and a cucumber plant. It was then that I discovered "heirloom tomatoes". One of my favorite greenhouses sold heirloom varieties. I remember I had Brandywine, Arkansas Traveler, and Golden Boy among others. I enjoyed them so much, I started reading on the Internet and discovered TomatoFest.com, and the second year I tried my hand at starting tomatoes from seed so I could have one of every color of the rainbow.

2005-2006

That 3 x 24 foot could not contain my gardening enthusiasm, and I talked Tim into giving up part of his beloved lawn. We had just removed a dozen or so large evergreen trees and tamed the side yard between my house and his (seen here in the background). Naturally, I wanted the garden plopped right in the middle of the yard to get the most sun, but he wanted it tucked away out of sight. The roots of ash trees to the right robbed much of the moisture from my soil, and the odds and ends of snow fencing were less than glamorous.

But I had pretty good success with beans and peas.

I think this garden was carved into the earth using the small tiller, but obviously that was going to be too much work for the girlfriend of a man with too many tractors. As my gardening ambition grew, so too did the equipment. Tim bought a large PTO driven tiller for one of the tractors, 200 feet of no climb horse fence to replace the plastic snow fence and more T posts. We still had a gate made of snow fence, which was held closed by an iron rod woven down one side.

Tim solicited help from neighbors Mike and Shelly. When we were married in 2006, we chose to sell Tim’s larger newer house and keep the quaint, 164+ year old farmhouse that had belonged to his grandparents during the Depression. Mike and Shelly moved from their house down the street to Tim's place, and Tim moved in with me. We were very fortunate in our choice of immediate neighbors. Tim cared for our little house and it's elderly occupant long before he bought it and there are several shared areas between the two properties. It made sense to bring in friends and continue sharing. Since they were gardeners, they were a natural fit into the garden routine. My allotted garden space grew!

2007

I was growing tired of hoeing and tilling and had discovered “square foot” and “intensive” gardening techniques. I carefully measured 4 foot squares and planned which companions would be planted together. We moved the garden away from the nutrient and water hungry trees and further into the lawn where I'd wanted it to begin with.

I began to dream of the picturesque, low maintenance gardens I saw in magazines. I told Tim that when I grew old I would have a raised bed garden that didn't involve so much darn work. This piqued Tim's interest.

I still kept a lot of my tomatoes right behind the house where they flourished.

2008

Around 2008 my gardening began to get out of hand. It was a wet year and I battled weeds in the paths and general dishevelment. We were still removing the fence every year to till with the big tiller. The garden was beginning to feel like a lot of work. Each spring, we would hook up the 5 foot tiller and till the soggy winter soil. Tim would coach me over and over as to appropriate tractor operating skills and RPMs. We would wrestle T posts out of a shed, and Tim would pound them into the ground, measuring each space carefully. Then Neighbor Mike and I would struggle with the heavy, unwieldy 200 foot roll of fence. Each fall, we would take an afternoon and reverse the process, storing everything neatly away for the winter.

And despite the fact that I was packing more and more into it, the garden began to spill over into the lawn... I even had more tomatoes in large pots over by the garage.

2009

What a miserable year. Tim said if I would forego the work and hassle of gardening (as in setting up and taking down that fence and tilling twice a year.~ not to mention weeding and complaining) for one season, he would build me some raised beds. Of course I couldn't do without tomatoes. And eggplants, and peppers. And some basil. So I stubbornly planted a pot garden beside the in process garden shed.

But it was an awful year for gardening. It rained so much I had mushrooms growing in all the pots, and the bell peppers rotted on the vine before they ripened. The local Home Depot spread blight infected plants hither and yon. Friends pulled tomato plants and bagged them for the dump or burned them. The temperatures was so cool, nothing was setting fruit and I got ONE good tomato that year. The night time temps hovered in the forties all summer. I don't remember any eggplants setting at all, and like I said, the peppers rotted on the plant.
Over and over Tim and I and Mike and Shelly reminded ourselves that this was the best year ever to take a hiatus from gardening.

2010-2011

Ahhh... this is how I was meant to garden. True to his word, Tim set out in the spring to build a garden that both he and I could live with.

Once again, the garden spills over onto the surrounding land.

And becomes an entertaining haven.

So that is how my garden came to be. My gardening roots begin in a small strip of land right behind the house. Looking back over my brief garden experience, I see dry expanses of hard packed dirt, soggy jungles of weeds, and lots of hard labor. I also see a shared goal, many helping hands and a lot of satisfaction.

What Else is Growing?

2011-06-30T17:37:00.000-07:00

Everything! When I was looking through photos for this blog, I couldn't believe how much everything grows in a week. It's not only keeping me busy, it's already keeping us fed.

The first tomato to set this year was the Barlow Jap, as always.

And there are a couple of bell peppers of a usable size. This one is going into fresh salsa this weekend along with an onion, since those are just beginning to form bulbs.

Here is this year's version of the bush bean and cucumber bed. Last year I put the cukes down the middle, but they always head east (with the wind, and towards the morning sun) so I put them on the east edge this year instead of the middle. Minuscule baby slugs almost did in the transplants I bought, but some survived, and I filled in the gaps with seeds. The itsy bitsy teeny tiny (you really have NO idea) slugs were dealt with by scraping them off with my fingernails. I killed several dozen two nights in a row, drowned the mid sized ones in beer, and have kept them at bay with Iron Sulphate pellets which are working great and have also saved my pansies and lettuce.

I even have a little cucumber riiiiiight there.

I also planted very very short sunflowers in with the cucumbers, and allowed half a dozen Borage volunteers which were in the right places to draw pollinators in.

This is the Magda summer squash. There are two squash on there that will soon be ready to eat.

And on the other end of that bed is my lettuce. Blogger refused to put this photo in right. And the grow through grids are over the Borage. Last year the Borage was a jumbled mess, so we'll see if we can keep them tidy with grids. In the middle of that lettuce, is a plain old zucchini plant and along one edge is the third planting of cucumbers I really wasn't expecting the lettuce to last this long, but I only got bitter leaves once. If a plant starts to bolt, I pull it right away. And boy do we have lettuce!!!

That's what I get for not thinning it. But it really isn't a problem. I can hack at it with scissors, fill a bag to last us a week, and still not make a dent. I have seven varieties. These I got from Renee's Garden Ruby and Emerald Duet (Buttercrisp), Paris Market, and my favorite, Heirloom Cutting Mix.

I also got some transplants from a local greenhouse, and put in "Leaf Lettuce", Iceberg Lettuce, Buttercrisp and Romaine. Tim seems to like the Romaine the best with a little bit of the fancy stuff mixed on, but last night I gave him a bowl of pure Iceberg (the city boy favorite). I'm getting pretty good sized heads which is sort of a surprise.

So, lettuce is a HUGE success. I expect it will wear out at some point, and then the zucchini and cuccumbers can take over. If it doesn't give up, the zukes and cukes can provide filtered shade. You can bet I will be planting it again in the fall.

So we have been enjoying salads, fresh peas and a steady supply of strawberries. I've also been trying to use up my frozen green beans from last year so we won't have leftovers because the bush beans are blooming at it won't be too long before we will be enjoying them as well.

What's Growing: Garden Peas

2011-06-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

Peas are one of my most favorite garden crops. Not only are fresh peas so superior to canned, or even frozen peas, but I love the flowers and even the chore of shelling them. Tim once offered to help me shell peas, and afterwards declared the crop "too much work for too little food". But I love peas.

All week I have sat in my office and had, in the back of my mind, lush rows of peas, full of flowers, the pods dangling within temptations reach. Of course I would always rather be outside than stuck in my office, but I just can't get enough of looking at my peas.

This year I am growing 6 different kinds of peas. I have Survivor, a low growing "leafless" variety which has many tendrils in place of leaves, Maestro, which matured earliest, Wando, which I saved from the last of a fall crop in 2007, some sugar snap peas, and both a tall and bush variety of blue podded peas. The flowers on these are wonderful, ranging from pink to blue to lavender and purple.

The pods are truly bright blue, but you will have to wait until they mature more to see some pictures.

Today's harvest of peas, mostly Maestro. They took almost half an hour to shell, and were reduced to ....

... a little over 3 cups of peas.

I love popping open the a perfect, even row of peas.

• Peapods are botanically a fruit, since they contain seeds developed from the ovary of a (pea) flower. However, peas are considered to be a vegetable in cooking. More specifically, they are a legume.
• The wild pea is restricted to the Mediterranean basin and the Near East. The earliest archaeological finds of peas come from Neolithic Syria, Turkey and Jordan. In Egypt, early finds date from ca. 4800–4400 BC in the Nile delta area, and from ca. 3800–3600 BC in Upper Egypt.
• In early times, peas were grown mostly for their dry seeds. In modern times, however, peas are usually boiled or steamed.
• The pea is only green when eaten because it is picked when still immature. A ripe pea is more yellow in color. Eating peas when they are green became fashionable in the 1600s and 1700s but was described by the French as "madness".
• Thomas Jefferson grew more than 30 cultivars of peas on his estate.
• Just one serving of garden peas contains as much vitamin C as two large apples, more fiber than a slice of whole grain bread and more thiamine than a pint of whole milk.
• Peas are said to give relief to ulcer pains in the stomach because they help 'use up' stomach acids.
• A 100-calorie serving of peas (three quarters of a cup) contains more protein than a whole egg or tablespoon of peanut butter.
• In the mid-19th century Austrian scientist Gregor Mendel observed the pea pod leading him to create his principle of Mendelian genetics, the foundation of modern genetics.

The garden is growing like mad, and the recent rains have caused an amazing growth spurt. Soon I will be eating summer squash, and the beans are beginning to flower. I even have some pretty good sized tomatoes and bell peppers.

Besides the vegetable garden, we spent last Saturday landscaping in one side of the chicken yard. Only the brick walk to the gate, and surrounding landscaping to go.

And Thursday night we brought in a lot of dirt and began hilling the potatoes. They were growing at an alarming rate and were at least a foot tall. And it's a good thing we got it done because since that evening, we have had almost 2 inches of rain. There has been some sun, but any picking and tending I've had to do has been in between the rain drops..

Migrant Workers

2011-06-20T15:01:00.001-07:00

People often ask us about our honey bees. it is a well known fact that there are issues with the American honey bee population, so every gardener is concerned and spends an ample amount of time worrying over their pollinators or absence thereof. I have toyed with the idea of having a bee hive, and have read a few books on the subject. But so far our wide variety of pollinators, and our old fashioned bee tree has held us in good stead. But there is something unique about our bees. Or should I say that having not read up on old fashioned bee tree honey bees, I assume it is unique. Our bees do not winter over.

Sometime in the fall, the activity in the hive will cease. Come spring, there will be a disconcerting silence. But one day, usually corresponding with the blooming of the white clover, you will go to check the bee tree and it will be a hive of activity (excuse the pun). I have witnessed the exit of the swarm, and Tim was fortunate enough to witness their return.

Late last week I saw that my cucumbers have begun to bloom. Naturally, this made me anxious for the honey bees. I noticed around Friday or Saturday that the white clover in our large backyard had begun to bloom, but again, there was a worrisome silence. And then today, they were back. Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, or the Monarchs to Santa Cruz... the honey bees have returned to our garden.

Tim happened to be outside working on our old garage which is 50 feet from the bee tree when he heard a humming. Not a mechanical humming, but the sort of humming that stirs your primordial soul and sends quivers up your spine. As I mentioned, I've seen this process in reverse, and it is something you will never forget. In true "husband of dedicated Blogger" fashion, he hurried for the camera.

Since neither Tim nor I are experienced photographers, we often run into frustrations without point and shoot digital skills. Add to that the fear of being stung by thousands of agitated bees, and you can imagine the range of photos you end up with.

The bees came in for a landing, hovering in what I can only describe as a mini tornado. When the swarm comes in it is at least a dozen feet across, and fifty plus feet high. They headed straight for the bee tree, but it took them quite awhile to get organised. There is only one main entrance to the tree and the first comers land en masse on the bark while the rest continue their frantic circling outside.

Here their flight shows up as "flecks" of bees.

The clouds are peppered with bees.

The bees have a busy afternoon ahead of them. Besides queuing up to get in, there is a lot of housekeeping to do, and everyone has to choose their room, and unpack. It makes you wonder where they've been and how far they've traveled. I'm glad they remember about our white clover, and the inviting bee tree. I have also planted a host of enticing perennials and the borage will soon be in bloom. Welcome to my garden. I hope you stay awhile.

It's the Bearies

2011-06-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

Tim has been working on the chicken run so we can finish the landscaping and be done with the garden area once and for all. Yesterday he started laying nice smooth sand, which, in typical Tim fashion, he smoothed and raked. Then he said "we can see what sort of critters are running around out here.

This was not what we were expecting

I hurried up and picked all my strawberries which were inches away. no sense tempting Yogi into messing with Tim's lovely strawberry cages.

What is UP with Blogger?!?

Happy Anniversary

2011-06-12T13:22:00.001-07:00

As the strawberries have been ripening all this week, I have been sampling them and wishing I had some champagne to go with them. Because nothing goes better with strawberries than champagne. Since this is our anniversary, Tim went and got a bottle of champagne for me while I picked strawberries. Mike and Shelly happened to wander over just as we were popping the cork. They brought a card, more champagne and a great sign that will hold a place of honor in the garden shed. Shelly is better at remembering our anniversary than I am! I'm not good with dates, unless it's the last frost date.

There are still a lot of strawberries to ripen, and the good news is the anti slug measures have been working, and I haven't found one ruined berry!

The cats joined our afternoon of celebration, and ate too much catnip.

Vivian passed out under the horseradish.

Where to put the tater patch?

2011-06-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

There is a part of me who thinks that my garden is just a little too fussy and structured, and longs for a row to hoe. I guess you can't take the farm out of the girl. So I was pretty happy when Tim decided he wanted {me} to grow potatoes this year. He has the posts for the chicken fence in, so we can see what is left to landscape, and he asked if the slope on the other side of the water tank would be a good spot. Yup. Good enough. Since everyone in the Northeast has been waiting for the ground to dry, there were still plenty of seed potatoes to be had, so we undertook to farm...

Step #1: Make a plan. We are going to edge and mulch along the new chicken fence, and plant some of our "leftover" perennials, which means we need to decide on the shape of the bed for optimal ease of lawn mowing. We laid a garden hose out and moved it around until we were both happy. Then we marked off what part of this new plan would allow for the potatoe bed, and cut in that edge because if there's anything I can tell you about our landscaping plans is... "they change".

Step #2: If you have large tools (i.e. equipment) use it. I can't imagine stripping all this sod out by hand. I also can't imagine weeding if we just turned it in. Tim and I deliberately tried to ignore how many times we {he} have stripped, replanted, watered, and sown grass seed on this particular spot. This sod went straight over to the side yard where it will be used in the finishing off of the septic field which has been sitting bare headed waiting for the rain to stop long enough to be graded with the tractor.

Step #3: There just isn't much "top soil" on this bare slope. But not to worry, we always have a pile handy from our last change of plans, so Tim brought in some old garden dirt to add. I imagine I will have to bring more in throughout the hilling process.

Step #4: Quick Question: why does a machine work fine when you put it away in the fall, and then refuse to cooperate in the spring? Gremlins? Alas, there is always a reason, but it isn't always apparent. In this case it was as simple as a dried out belt and 10 minutes later we were in business. I'm always happy to have Tim try out the machinery first. It saves me from explaining why it doesn't work and it's not my fault.

Result: Tidy, well tilled Tater Patch.

I measured out my potato rows and carefully placed the seed potatoes, two eyes per tater, sprouts up. I had a few left over, but if we have a good year, this little patch ought to keep us in potatoes all year. The row closest to the RR Ties is an early red called Norland that we can use later this summer, and the other two are a red (Pontiac) and a white for storing.

After Tim spent a few hours stripping sod and tilling dirt for me (if I had done it myself dinner would have been way later than 8pm) he finally got back to his original project.

It seems most of the rain water was diverting down the over flow. So Tim dug a big hole and cut his plumbing apart. Turned out that one of the water inlets was close enough to the Y that goes to the bypass, and it was swirling in just right and heading itself right back out the divertor. Tim decided to raise the over flow line high enough that the entire line would have to back fill before it diverts (Unless we have the valve closed for winter). This resulted in a last minute trip to the hardware store, which had just closed. Undaunted, he took off across town to the big box store hoping to get things fixed and closed up before the hole filled with rain water. By the time he got back, it was already raining so when I looked out the window he was standing in the hole under an umbrella watching the water swirl. He ended up using all parts he had on hand and I got the pleasure of returning everything to the big box store.

We spent the whole day digging holes, stripping out carefully planted grass, moving mulch around, undoing and re-doing. Isn't that always the way it is? But we're pretty happy with the tater patch, and we're hoarding rain water again. All is well. Tim thinks I will have to hill my potatoes with my old fashioned hiller. Hmmm... I wonder if it will be as tempermental as the tiller? We shall see.

Regarding Blogger Comments (Michelle/Anita)

2011-06-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

I can't comment on Anita's blog either. Keeps giving me the sign in run around. It started yesterday and I haven't tried anyone else's.

I poked around in Blogger help, and apparently this is connected to the log in problems from last week and they're "rolling out a fix". That was 4 days ago. even my IT dept works faster than THAT!

Spring Gardening Project #4 Patio

2011-05-31T16:42:00.001-07:00

Tim and I debated what we would do with the area around the garden shed. Originally we were going to fence it all for the chicken yard. But I really need an area for an outdoor potting bench, and to keep some of my transplants. To be cost effective, we were going to gravel the area, but then Tim's networking finally paid off and and he found a pile of old city street bricks that needed a new home. He and our good friend John made a few trips, digging these bricks out of a pile of fill. In their short journey, Tim has had the priveledge of stacking them a few times so I'm sure he has become intimately acquainted with each one.

The "potting area" turned out more like a patio. So now I've sort of abandoned the idea of using it for gardening, and am trying to decide whether it would be more enjoyable to have a table with an umbrella, or just two comfy chaise lounges overlooking the garden where I can sit and sip Margaritas. You see, since Tim has been working on "Britaland" he has been distracted from finishing our front porch, and building a deck so we are in dire need of an outdoor entertainment area. I've even considered putting a water trough a.k.a. Red Neck "Hot" Tub on it.

We put it to use over the Memorial Day weekend inviting all our gardening neighbors for dinner.

Mike brought his bubbles to play with.

Here Shelly helps us aerate our yard with lawn darts

Bob and Trish's dog Daisy thinks we're ridiculous. Smile Daisy.

Mike gets fancy with his bubbles.

A bubble inside a bubble... you can do better than that!

Three in one!

And a tree!

Growing up in a Greenhouse

2011-05-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

In May my favorite activity is visiting every greenhouse for a 20 mile radius. And my favorite color is green. Why? Well because I grew up in a greenhouse! Literally.

My parents met at the University of Kentucky. They both emerged with degrees in Horticulture (you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think) , and within a couple of years, had returned to my mother's home town to buy the Busti Greenhouses. For about 5 years we actually lived IN the greenhouse. Our little 2 bedroom house was attached to the end of the two original greenhouses.

When we arrived, the greenhouses still had their original glass panes. The roofs were soon replaced with plastic because having loose glass panes falling on your plants and customers is rather inconvenient. But the greenhouses retained their vintage charm. I remember a concrete slab near the end of one house had a date in the 1920s scratched into it.

The center of our home was the Sales Room. Mom cozied up the sales bench by stapling bright plastic picnic table clothes over it. I would sit on the counter for hours blowing bubbles, sniffing flowers, and examining the bright pictures on the seed packs and boxes.

As I grew up I advanced to stapling boxes and punching the sales numbers into the old cash register. My family sold out when I was a teenager, but I returned during college to work in the summers. Memorial Day Weekend was our big sales time, but the two or three weeks leading up to it were utter mayhem as well. My mother planted hundreds of combination pots that were set out in the cemeteries on "Decoration Day". And, if the normal mayhem was insufficient, Mom would invite the radio station in for a remote broadcast, put on a pot of Marigold Chowder and dye her thumb green.

The existing, more contemporary, outlying greenhouses were inefficient, so one of the first things Dad did was tear them down and replace them with modern hoop houses or "Quansuts". We referred to them as "The Tomato House", "The Petunia House", "The Marigold House" and "The Pansy House" based on what dominated their contents.

I remember watching them scrape the ground level with the plow on our Allis Chalmers Model B, and I spent a lot of time with my own tiny tools digging in the mud.

I was three years old.

I spent my formative years playing in dirt. My inherited Marx farmsets were set up on the dirt and the animals grazed on freshly plowed fields full of perlite and peat moss. Each spring my Dad would "make dirt" which involved mixing the various contents and cooking the resulting potting mix to sterilize it. I still love the smell of warm dirt. Any dirt bin or wheelbarrow full of the stuff was my playpen.

This was the view out of the picture window in our dining room, hundreds of geraniums grown from cuttings. We grew almost everything we sold. We didn't ship it in from large wholesale growers. Everything was started in the warm and steamy seed room. My mother still has the weathered doors from the seed room hanging on her wall as rustic art. All the planting dates and amounts were entered in a grimy ledger.

My little sister got a chance to grow up in the greenhouse too. Mom put her out of harms way in her own "hanging basket".

My Dad shows Holly how to transplant Wizard Mix Coleus.

Greenhousing runs in my family. My father's father took a summer hobby (he was a shop and math teacher) and turned it into a full time job during his retirement. Above are PaPaw's Barlow Greenhouses in Shelbyville, KY. They are now gone, and Fletcher Lane runs to their west in honor of my MaMaw Mary Fletcher Hodges Barlow.

The inside of Barlow Greenhouses. In my eye, these modern houses were never as charming or esthetically pleasing as Busti's vintage houses.

THE actual honest to goodness original Rototiller™.

Much like all facial tissues are not Kleenex, and not all adhesive bandages are Band-Aids... Not all rotary tillers are Rototillers. PaPaw is tilling the soil inside the newly constructed tomato house. The dirt in Kentucky smells completely different from the dirt in New York.

Each spring I anxiously await the opening of the greenhouses. I walk methodically through each one looking for old friends and new varieties. Both the Busti Greenhouses and the Barlow Greenhouses have been flattened to the ground and erased, but their legacy lives on.

PaPaw and I in the geranium house. Dad is back in the upper left corner. Look at those clay pots and peat pots! How Retro!

Hey Mom, how come you're not in any of these pictures? Probably the same reason I'm not in any of my gardening pictures!

A week ahead of schedule?

2011-05-22T17:25:00.000-07:00

The tomatoes are in. Usually I wait until Memorial Day weekend, but the weather has been nice, with temps in the fifties each night (for almost two weeks now). I realised last weekend that I needed to get serious about hardening off my tomatoes. I put them out on the northeast corner of the house on Wednesday where they are sheltered from the wind. Wednesday and Thursday were overcast, but yesterday they stood up to their first half day of sun with very little if any bleaching. The corner I use get's full sun until about 2pm which works out well. I thought I was sunk on Wednesday when I noticed at the office the breeze was coming stiffly all day from the east, but when I got home I was pleased to see 18 straight seedlings with no windburn at all. In fact, I'm really please with my transplants this year. I got them timed just right and they are all healthy and vigorous. I didn't even break any this time. I also planted my first crop of bush beans. They could have gone in two weeks ago like just about everything else.

The onions are growing well.

Two rows of peas with a row of mixed radishes and carrots in the middle. The radishes are just starting to bulb. The pot of violas I won in a game at the Mother's Day brunch at the nursing home. I would have left them with Tim's Mom to brighten her room, but she is very allergic to pollen. I can't imagine having that misfortune!

The newest thing that's catching my eye in the greenhouses this spring are calibrocha (Million Bells Petunia) planted in mixed baskets which I think is a great idea. This red, orange and yellow one dresses up the corner of the garden picking the colors out of my bench cushions.

I spent a couple of hours Saturday morning getting the Amish going on the fence again. As I was walking back down the fence line, this picture caught my eye. The work team waits patiently with little Levi (who has bruised ribs from a fall on the stairs) lounging in the seat under his hat while Irven pounds posts. They don't mind if we discretely take photos, but they won't pose because that would be vain. Mom printed out my fencing blog so Elsie could read it. Elsie smiled broadly when she told me she thought I did a good job writing it. Then she sent me home with a bowl of rhubarb crumble!

My Mom took this picture later in the day. What fun!!!

Spring Garden Project #3 Strawberry Cages

2011-05-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

Tim thought this project up all on his own. For a disinterested non-gardener he does pretty well.

Here are the cages we had on them before. It did keep the deer from mowing them down, but obviously, the open ends were ineffective in keeping nesting rabbits from coming in and undermining the roots. Plus, they're a little homely.

So Tim enlisted the help of neighbor Mike, and they tidied the place up. Mike helped him bend the conduit, then welded the frames together. Tim painstakingly filled and sanded the corners. Then he primed and painted them and spent several days cutting and attaching the wire, carving up both hands and arms in the process. He says he's never doing this ever again.

The old cages served their purpose when the strawberries were in their original spot. They were fastened together so both ends were closed, and they didn't look half bad.

This is my old strawberry/rhubarb/horseradish/asparagus bed.

And this is the new one. There are three sections and I can easily lift them off and set them aside to get to the plants.

This row of strawberries was salvaged from the hard, rooty, shaded, clay soil of the old bed, and the second row was discount plants from a nursery last fall. The plants are easily five times the size they were in the old bed and absolutely loaded with buds and blossoms. If all goes well we should have a bumper crop. These plants are doing so nicely that I spend a lot of time standing there admiring them and scratching my head.

Spring Garden Project #2 The Cold Frame

2011-05-10T15:34:00.000-07:00

It was hard to guess whether Spring Project #2 or Spring Project #3 would be finished first. And it's Spring Project #2 by a nose!.. I gave Tim lots of picture of cold frames and turned him loose. And this is what he came up with.

We have plenty of sidewalk that was not being used, so we decided this would be a good spot. Our good friends John and Sandy who own a greenhouse and landscape business were unfortunate enough this winter to lose the greenhouses to the weight of the snow. But I made out extremely well inheriting scraps of the special roofing. I had saved a Plexiglas storm panel which would have worked well, but this stuff is the real thing! I have a mini greenhouse.

All that is left to do is install an automatic opener and a thermometer and it will be fully functional. Just the moisture of the wood and the gravel underneath fogged the surface right up. Tim sized it to fit 8 of my largest flats. Now I can start annuals and vegetables in here. I plan on picking up a load at the green house this weekend, and if we get a frost, I can just move any hanging baskets or potted plants in here. I am looking forward to discovering many new uses for my cold frame. Thank you Honey! You have out done yourself yet again.

Spring is here!

2011-05-09T06:02:00.000-07:00

I spent all of Sunday afternoon out in the garden with a sleeveless shirt! As promised, it was 10 degrees warmer in the garden!

Neighbor Mike launched the great asparagus bed building. He bought 75 crowns and has gone hog wild. He researched and dug and mixed compost with ashes and did a bang up job of constructinghis asparagus bed. All but one of my crowns have put up shoots, which are quite promising and hefty.

My Asparagus is up!

Mike's wife Shelly planted 297 onion plants. Tim was hard at work on Spring Garden Project #3, which we will be unveiling soon. Spring Garden Project #2 is also waiting in the wings. It's hard to tell which will be finished first. For a non-gardener, he sure comes up with excellent ideas.

Shelly's 297 Onion Plants

So while all this stuff was going on, what did I do? I added compost to one of the beds. Planted sunflowers, planted catnip seeds around the catnip plants, planted more borage, chased the cats out of the carrots, planted zinnias, planted a flat of Amaranth, chased the cats out of the catnip, snapped buds off of the horse radish and rhubarb, got the garden benches and tables set up, dragged the drunken cats out of the catnip and repaired the collateral damage to the pansies and peas, asked Tim to figure out a way to fence the catnip, sent the cats to the house, edged and mulched around the linden trees, made drinks for everyone... sat in the sun.

Ahhh... Spring!

My Rhubarb is blooming. I hate to snap it off!

My Day with the Amish or How I Learned to Roll Barbed Wire

2011-05-05T16:56:00.000-07:00

Besides my garden, I also own some acreage that was part of the family dairy farm farm. It was left to my sister and I by my grandfather and now I own it. He got it from his father before him. Our family has farmed this land continuously since 1905. It has fields and pasture, quite a nice woodlot, two unruly streams, and an apple orchard. While the fields have been in use right along, leased to the neighboring dairy farm, and the woodlot is under management, the large pasture has fallen into partial neglect. This year we will again be leasing the pasture to the same dairy which will help with the rest of the taxes and put the land back in use. However, it has been a long time since the fence was fixed. In the past two years I have spent quite a few lunch hours out there lopping off saplings and generally trying to restore order, but there is a lot of work to do on the fence itself before we turn two dozen wild heifers loose in it.

We have a nice Amish family that my mother and stepfather are quite close with. Irven spent almost two years working on stabilizing and weatherizing the two old dairy barns so we could save them. Elsie is one of my Mom's best friends and is a wonderful baker and gardener, and always a cheery spirit. Their children Levi, Anna, Rueben and Daniel are as charming as you can imagine. The whole family turned out today to work on the fence. Little Levi is quite the go-getter and diligently pulled staples for hours.

I spent the afternoon working along with them and got my first ride in an Amish wagon. I didn't think to bring my camera, but brought my vintage cell phone along to keep track of the time (I don't own a watch) and managed to snap a few very poor photos. I felt like I was on the set of Little House on the Prairie.

The wagon and some very bad fence

Back in the day, every landowner had a "dump". There was the "Metal Dump" and the "Glass Dump". These can be fascinating to dig through in the spring when the frost brings new treasures to the surface. My tidy self has always been rather bothered by the existence of these dumps. But I'll tell you, I have a new view! How convenient to have a dump, way older than I, conveniently located 12 feet from the fence line I was working on. Problem solved. This one is built on rocks. To the left is an abandoned hay rake.

There is wire in this dump that is older than my mother and I put together. We happily piled our coils on top. Now is the funny part. I was dismayed to find that my wire coils sprang open like Slinkys run amok. I was messing up my tidy wire dump! All the coils in there already were round and tight. The last thing you want is your wire coils springing open and entangling your livestock. So I began to study wire rolling. Mom and I had been coiling it like you would a water hose or a lariat. This was NOT working. I tried wrapping it between my palm and elbow like an extension cord. Nope. The wire was too brittle and broke into 2 foot lengths.

A perfect coil of Wire

Finally I discovered the proper technique. You roll it in front of you like a wheel or snowball hand over hand, it's hard to describe, but it works great. The wire catches on itself and forms a cohesive reel. You can even safely set it down without it rebelling. I quickly passed this new info on to my mother, and we happily coiled up all the old useless wire.

Figuring out the usefulness of a fencing tool for pulling staples took a lot less time. I showed little Levi my new skills, and he was unimpressed. Apparently Amish kids are taught how to pull staples and coil wire!

Anna and Levi struggle with a stubborn fence staple

I had a great afternoon fencing with the Amish. It beats sitting at a desk any day. We removed the old broken wire, pounded new fence posts and lopped off rose bushes and willow bushes. We waded through muck and tripped over hidden rocks. I got wound up in rusty wire and multiflora roses more than once (Rueben had to disemvine me), but my $2 gloves from Walmart and heavy clothes saw me through. I don't think I even snagged my favorite hoodie. It was wonderful!

I enjoyed it almost as much as the day Tim, Stepdad Richard and I spent digging rocks.

2008 Tim and I pull rocks (BOULDERS) so the land can be safely bush hogged.

The Monster Rock and the rock pile. This was not our only rock pile. On the other side of the pasture we found a spot where someone had filled in a well or treefall and there were 23 rocks the size of a large suitcase or more in ONE HOLE. I actually sold these rocks to a friend who has an excavating business and needed a quick fix for a retaining wall that had washed out. One rock was too big to move. We dug down about 4 feet and didn't find the bottom. Because it was right along the gas right of way we elected to leave it.

I feel so fortunate to have been born in the countryside with land to work. Farming is in my blood. Thank God I'm a country-girl!

Rain Rain Go Away

2011-04-26T15:52:00.001-07:00

This afternoon was hot and windy. 80 degrees with pretty good sun. It was amazing! The lettuce tripled in size, the chard appeared, and I see a few peas which is a relief because the first planting has been in the ground 17 days and I was beginning to worry about them rotting.

I had to go back to 2007 to find photos of a dry April. Thank Heaven (and Tim) we didn't have to till and put up fence. It just wouldn't have happened.

April 3rd 2007

And the BEST part about raised beds is that it will never look like this:

April 29th 2007

Another thing I've noted is the large number of earth worms that are in the leaf layer. Remember, I dumped chopped maple and ash leaves in each bed, then covered them with an inch of mulch. Whenever I dig in the beds, I find a lot of worms in that leaf layer just chomping away, doing their thing. And, if I find a worm out in the lawn, I run it over to the beds.

My seedlings in the house have been transplanted. I've started tomatoes from seed for 6 years in a row now. Each year I am worried about their spindly little necks, and I'm sure they will never grow up, but each year I still end up with a tomato jungle. The Japs were the best with 100% germination and stout, compact seedlings. Maybe there will come a time when all I start is a flat of them. Life sure would be easy.

Anyway, this afternoon was so nice that when I got home I started dinner, then ran right out to the garden to check on progress from the sun. And guess what happened? ....it began to rain.

Onions

2011-04-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

Alright, it didn't rain ALL weekend. It was nice for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. Sunny, windy just what we needed. After my house work was done I spent a scant 10 minutes planting onions before I headed to the front landscape beds to try to make the house look decent.

I bought the "Long Day Sampler" from Dixondale which contains Red Zeppelin (Red), Ringmaster (white) and Walla Walla (yellow). They come in a bundle of live plants which can be planted within the next 3 weeks.

I used my square foot grid and a peg which is the right size marked with the appropriate planting depth of 1 inch. All I do is poke 9 holes in each square and plug the onion plants in. It's very easy and sort of like playing tic tac toe. A few of them are smaller and need to have the soil sort of pushed in, but otherwise, round peg, round hole. Nothing easier.

Then I took a moment to plant some colorful pansies at the end of each bed. Pansies are my favorite. When I grew up in the greenhouse, the pansies were the first to flower, and were easy for little hands to pick and hold.

Vivian loves pansies too!

April Showers

2011-04-24T17:50:00.000-07:00

This week it has rained five and a half inches. I'm not sure if you can see that on my rain guage because..... that's right Ladies and Gentleman... it has rained so much it has washed the numbers of the damned rain guage.

Sorry if I've sounded gloomy lately. My husband tells me this will be the first time in 23 years that he has not been able to/had to mow the lawn in April. To top it off, we chose this past week to have our septic system replaced. So, this is the lovely view we see out the door first thing every morning. Mud.

On a happy note, the radishes and lettuce are up. Lookey... teeny tiny lettuce still too small to thin. I am so sure this lettuce crop is going to keep us in home grown salad for a couple of months.... See, I AM an optimist.

And the chives are up. I love chives. Luxurious grass that does not need to be mowed.

And the Thyme survived the winter. I think the Sage may have too, but it's a bit too soon to tell. Who'd've thunk it?

My Plans for Good Friday

2011-04-22T06:38:00.000-07:00

...Plant Onions..........

...or not.

Yes folks, it's a 'lizzard. In the last 5 minutes, we have accumulation...

This is NOT a good Friday.

Spring Garden Project #1 Rain Barrel

2011-04-13T17:38:00.000-07:00

We are experiencing an unusually wet and gloomy Spring. Soooo, we have advanced on our rain collecting equipment. The barrel is a donation from neighboring gardeners Bob and Trish. The fuel hand pump was lurking about. Tim surfed the net comparing down spout diverters and watching installation videos until he settled on this model.

And he installed it on the back of the big garage. That is over 1250 square feet of collection area. The barrel filled up in a matter of minutes! Tim is considering putting a second one in next to this one because he hates to miss out on free water.

And now, I can fill my watering can here instead of from the garden hose, cutting my walk to the far side yard landscape area by more than half.

Asparagus Bed

2011-04-11T16:41:00.001-07:00

This weekend I put in my second asparagus bed. The first one has been abandoned to lawn, sadly, in year 3 when I would just be seeing some decent sized spears. The new asparagus bed is on the slope between the garden shed and the garden with the other "perennial" foods such as rhubarb, strawberries and horse radish. There is a clump of horse radish on each end of the asparagus row. Well, actually there was a clump on one end, and the first thing I needed to do was get a second clump started. The big clump of horse radish is on the back corner of the house. This batch I salvaged out of what was the chicken yard, and is now lawn. Since then, Tim has tried to get me to get rid of that clump, and I keep digging it up and transplanting it. But, in typical horse radish fashion, it only comes back bigger and thriftier. It likes the corner of the house. Sunday I examined the new shoots, and found two or three off to the side. I began digging, got two small roots, and then hit on a 3/4" root that seemed to disappear under the house. I dug about 20" out before I gave up and broke it off.

Because I don't want this thing heading off in new directions already, I broke that in half, put some in the fridge for later, and planted the more manageable remaining foot long root at the end of where I want the asparagus row to be. I got out a string line, drove a spike in the existing clump, measured from the edge, and drove a spike in the second clump. Then I began raking the thick mulch away from my new row.

They say you should make a ridge down the middle of your "trench" so you can set the crown on the top of the ridge and arrange the roots down the sides, encouraging them to grow down deeper. I did this, then spread a cup or so of bone meal down my trench.

The asparagus crowns had been soaking in water for a day, and were ready to plant. I laid out a tape measure, and spaced them along my trench about 18" apart.

Then I placed each one on top of my ridge, arranging the roots.

Each crown should be covered about 2" to 3" initially, with more soil or mulch being added throughout the season. Interestingly enough, I've read that the depth of the crown is what determines the thickness of the shoots. The more shallow crowns produce the thinner shoots, and the deeper crowns produce the thicker shoots.

While I was diddling around in the asparagus bed, Mike and Tim were scraping and regrading Mike's driveway. There was quite a buildup if gravel, dirt and moss which required the box scraper to remove, and the bucket to redistribute and level.

Then Mike got the priveledge of using Tim's "Two Ton Rock Crusher". Actually, it's only one and a half tons. But I affectionately call it Two Ton. When you roll it down the road, any gravel in it's way explodes into smithereens. Tim fabricated Two Ton in response to being gravely disappointed in all commercially available lawn rollers. He bought one a couple of years ago, and after using it once or twice, returned it's mangled fragments to the dealership in disgust. He then set about building a more usefull version. But you have to be careful. If the lawn is too wet, it will crumple it up like a a throw rug.

Only Mike and Tim could turn driveway rolling into recreation. They look like they're having a good time don't they?

S'getti and Meatballs

2011-04-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

It's a sugar-coated ice cream world

It may have dumped 6 inches of lake effect snow on the garden today, but we can still enjoy meat balls and home made tomato sauce

Mmmm... summer....

Am I behind already?

2011-04-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

I find it rather boring to blog if I don't have a colorful picture to talk about. So, here is a photo of my lovely vintage general store seed box and some of my favorite garden themed collectibles. The seed box sits on top of my pie safe and that's where I keep all my seed packets from year to year, so I've been in and out of it daily this week.

I had in my mind that April 1st was plenty of time to start Peppers and Eggplants, with Tomatoes Mid-April, and then I read my blog from last year to find I am now two weeks behind. I guess this means hibernation is over. March was rather dismal this year. No warm temperatures or Spring rains. Just cold and snow, but finally the sun has come out. The daytime temps are still hovering around 40, but the ground is firm enough to walk on.

We spent last Sunday raking and tidying up the yard. There are still a few oak leaves lurking about, but the sticks are rounded up, the beds are tidy and the driveway has been raked and gravel added where needed. We had A LOT of mole damage in the lawn, so I will be setting a lot of mole traps.

This past weekend I planted some lettuce and chard directly in the garden. I used my home made version of this gardening grid that I had neighbor Mike fabricate for me out of shop scrap.

The rhubarb is up.

Mike and Shelly's Parsnips left in last fall are being dug, along with a few carrots. My seed orders are beginning to arrive. Time to get a flat of peppers and eggplants started. This year I decided to try something a bit different. Usually I plant directly into individual pots, but that means I am skipping one transplanting step and I could be getting my tomatoes planted a bit deeper and giving them a chance to develop a better root system. So this time I started with a flat of seed starting mix and no pots.

It can be hard to get the mix to absorb water. I solved this by slitting open the bag, adding hot water, and letting it sit over night. Then I glopped the damp mix into the flat and squished it around. There is a lot of extra room in this flat! When the seedlings are large enough to be transplanted into individual pots, I'll reuse the mix for some other potting project.

So right now I only have one flat of gardening going. By next week there will be two flats, lights, timers, the works.

Winter Hibernation

2011-02-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

I refuse to come out of hibernation just yet. To everything there is a season, and my gardening season does not start until March. But some of you may be wondering what we've been up to.

I started a new project. Upon a White Horse. After years (ok, decades) of wishing and dreaming, I finally purchased a Side Saddle. And I am endeavoring to teach myself to sit on it, which is proving no simple task.

I've also planned myself a dream vacation and will be spending one weekend in March staying at Hunter's Rest in Virginia and going Fox Hunting with the Old Dominion Hounds. Which, in this day and age would be more aptly called "fox chasing" so don't be worrying about those clever little foxes. They'll be just fine. After hunting, we will be going off to the Warrenton Hunt Point to Point Races to hob nob and tailgate with the Virginian horsey set. And, because "Virginia is for lovers", I will be towing my husband along with me.

Tim has not been strictly in hibernation either. For one thing, we're having a good ole fashioned winter, and while our snow totals aren't breaking any records, they are certainly keeping him busy plowing and shoveling roofs. Consequently, we are now into our 6th batch of Glogg, which IS a record breaker.

When he's not out plowing or shoveling, he has been in the house finishing up those little projects which can go unfinished and largely unnoticed for decades. He has painted and installed baseboard in the linen closet, repainted the laundry closet, and upgraded the cabinets.

And the pie'ce de re'sistance, he has finally hooked up the dish washer! We bought the dishwasher and put it in it's spot when we did the kitchen back in 2005. But it's never been hooked up. About 2 years ago I began using it as a storage cupboard for candy and light bulbs. Then last fall I began hinting the space might be more efficiently utilized if we just threw the darn thing out and put in drawers.

This week, Tim suddenly decided to hook it up. All went smoothly (too smoothly) at first. But when he turned the water on to it, the thing began to fill. For no reason at all. And it continued to fill. He ran it through a cycle, but it did not drain. Well, maybe it drained, but it also continued to fill. Until it reached a critical level, and then it began to drain. Out the door. And across the floor. And under the cabinets. And into the basement... you get the picture. No good dead goes unpunished.

So he turned the water back off, mopped up, and priced a new valve, because obviously this one was either defective or had found some way to malfunction in the past ohhhh.... 5 and a half years of inactivity. The next morning, just for giggles, before he headed to Sears for a part, he turned the water back on. And lo and behold, in the night, the dishwasher had awakened from it's slumber, found it's special purpose, and decided to work. No flood. Needless to say, this has made him more uneasy than he was before. He will not leave the house with the water to the dishwasher on.

While it will be nice for me to have a dishwasher, it really won't make much difference to me, since Tim does 99% of the dishes anyway, and I always make it a point to use as many pots and pans and utensils as I possibly can, when I prepare dinner, so that he will feel wanted and appreciated. What really excites me is the prospect of getting the end panel installed so I no longer have to look at the inner workings and insulation of the dishwasher every time I come into the kitchen.

But of course, we've been doing some garden preparation as well. I have thoroughly enjoyed trading seeds with some of our readership. I've met some very nice people, saved money on my seed orders, and gotten some rare and unique varieties I would never have thought to order, would not have been able to find. I'll be highlighting some of those between now and seed starting time in April.

Also, the neighborhood onion order has been placed with Dixondale Farms. What I like about these people, is that they categorise their onions by "length of day" growing conditions so you can choose from varieties that will do well in your area. They also give detailed information about storage times so you don't end up with all onions that will go bad in a month. Bob and Trish are in charge of onion recommendations, and they certainly have steered us well in that regard. I ordered the Long Day Sampler, and Shelly next door ordered two other long day varieties so we will have a total of 5 varieties growing in the garden to share. Now that's co-op gardening at it's finest.

Dumb Question

2011-01-07T15:58:00.000-08:00

Why would anyone want a throw pillow with the picture of a Japanese Beetle on it gracing the couch in their sunroom reminding them of Spring on the way?

I suppose they are more attractive than June Bugs.

Link to Catalog Page

Happy New Year

2010-12-31T01:00:00.000-08:00

In the Bleak MidWinter

2010-12-29T12:58:00.001-08:00

We have had over 5 feet of snow in December. At first it highlighted the raised beds nicely, and then erased them completely.

The garden shed remains snug and tidy, like a little gingerbread cottage.

And the snow continues to fall...

On Christmas Eve, the U.S. Mail brought a huge bundle of colorful seed catalogs. Usually we don't see them until after New Years Day. A fellow gardener, whose wife is a Postmaster, tells of her holding out on him as his seed catalogs sit in the back of her post office with their date stamp taunting him. Few things bring more joy and light to a gardener's winter home than those vibrant wish books.

As usual, I get a notepad and start jotting down ideas. Then I compare my wish list to my more practical shopping list written in August. Of course you have to allow yourself one or two impractical experiments each year. This year mine will be Blue Podded Peas.

Actually, this is sort of a practical experiment since you already know my views of being able to distinguish pickable parts from non-pickable parts. And the peas will fit nicely into my spring planting. Since the garden was under construction last spring, we missed out on all those early vegetables: Onions, Carrots, Peas, Lettuce, Chard etc. So that will be my focus this year.

I can not tell you how much I look forward to the start of gardening season. There will be no rototilling. No waiting for the mud to subside. No fence to put up. No rows to measure and mark. All I will have to do is stroll down the sidewalk, kneel beside my tidy little beds, already high and dry and prepared for planting, and poke the seeds in. Then I'll probably add a layer of fresh compost and voila'... instant garden!

I have already broken my list down by seed company. First I go for the specific varieties and harder to find items. Then I compare prices on similar items. Finally I fill up the gaps with the common things rounding out each order to make the most of shipping rates. You also have to watch for coupons. I am always suckered into Gurney's $25 offer. .... finally, you have to take into account the seed swap.

On my last post, Julie asked where she would find just a few seeds of sweet corn instead of half a pound. Well, some seeds keep quite well for a couple of years. Others are great for swapping and sharing with friends. For instance, in our neighborhood, Bob and Trish do the onion order. Shelly and I let Bob know what we want, and relinquish some control to his wisdom as Bob and Trish are far more experienced with Onions at this point. I've had great luck with the onion plants they have gotten me. I generally have extra of several kinds of seeds, and am happy to distribute my excess to anyone interested. If you still don't want a larger quantity of seeds, your best bet is to buy them off the seed displays at Garden stores and Big Box stores as those are packaged in much smaller quantities. I often pick some up when they are discounted to try varieties I would not have thought to order.

And some seed swapping is much more far reaching than the neighbors. Several people have expressed interest in planting my PaPaw's Barlow Jap tomatoes. I am still quite tickled to send out a dozen for free whenever anyone asks. And, as good seed trading etiquette dictates, they always reciprocate with a list of varieties they have to trade should I be interested. That's where my Blue Podded Peas are coming from!

I've been keeping an eye out on the gardening forums to see where the Barlow Jap has migrated through swapping and reswapping. So far, they have been grown in OH, PA, AL, NC and KY. Last week I sent some to TX and TN. And they have also jumped the pond and have been grown in Germany and South Africa. Now PaPaw would really get a kick out of that!

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T01:00:00.000-08:00

A Gardener's Christmas

2010-12-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

What do gardening and Christmas have in common? Well, in Western NY, not much. But with a little creativity, I've found I can combine two of my favorite things although, they are unlikely bedfellows. As I was flipping through decorating inspirations, I found this great Christmas tree on MarthStewart.com, and I realised I haven't done a blog on Christmas decorating.

Seed Packet Decorations

Looks like she stole the idea from my seed packet fence markers! Maybe I'll have to make some myself and do a complete garden themed tree. Of course, the seed packet thing has been done before. These are two blown glass ornaments I bought back in 2008 from Smith and Hawken. The best parts about these is that they feature the Card Seed Co packets from a town near here.

Last year I found this little box of tomato ornaments at the local antiques mall. I wasted no time snatching them up for $2.50. Red tomatoes are a perfect subject for Christmas ornaments, and they also came from Smith and Hawken.

My favorite is a set of three big Heirloom Tomato ornaments (Red, Green and Gold). They are suprisingly difficult to photograph, but here are two of them in a set. I just got the Pea Pod off of Ebay and it is just as wonderful.

I miss the Smith and Hawken catalog, and I'm looking forward to it's return this spring, but in the meantime Sur La Table is a great resource for gardening themed ornaments. These are the ones I purchased this year. I love the green Wellie boot. I mean, who wouldn't!

And bring back memories of those hot summer days slaving over a batch of pickles...

And now and then I find some fun ones around town. These fun farm animals on veggies were found a few years ago and lend a bit of farmhouse whimsy to my decorating.

With a little imagination, you could even incorporate some of your harvest into a holiday wreath

I love searching the internet for ways to cultivate my gardening interests in the deep mid-winter.

Grandma's Molasses Cookies

2010-12-03T09:42:00.000-08:00

I wrote this two years ago, before I began this blog, so this is somewhat of a reprise. But it goes in here great, just as these cookies go well with Glogg.

So my mission at Christmas, like so many women before me...is to keep the traditions alive. I've been longing for some of Grandma's Molasses cookies, and I thought for Christmas, it would be nice to make some and share with the family. Actually, I did not consider sharing until I read the recipe. Now I realize it will not simply be an act of family tradition, but a necessity.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my Mom to find the recipe. She promised she would. She also said she had a tub of Lard I could have. Lard? I don't really plan on using Lard. "Well, they won't be the same without the Lard".I give it a couple of days, contemplating the thought of baking cookies with Lard in the year 2008. After much thought, I relent. "OK fine, give me the Lard." Mom smiles knowingly "You're going to need the BIG Kitchenaid."

Today, I am happily off work and snowed in. 5 days 'til Christmas. A perfect day for baking. I had already read the recipe and bought supplies accordingly. In addition to the Lard, I bought a second bottle of Dark Molasses, in case one wasn't enough, 5 pounds of unbleached flour, and an extra jar of Cinnamon.

I wrestle the Kitchenaid out of it's cupboard. WHY do I keep this monster over the refrigerator? Oh, I remember, it's the only cupboard large enough. I jockey it over my head narrowly missing the blades of the ceiling fan thinking...why don't I remember to turn that thing off? Remember what happened to the toaster?

I start with the lard. 2 cups. My kitchen now smells faintly of bacon. I scrutinize the ingredients on the pail of lard, but it does not reveal what I already know to be true. Lard is pig fat. Granted, it has less saturated fat (the bad fat) than butter, while it also has more than twice as much monosaturated fat (the good fat) than butter. Still, this does not look (or smell) like the beginnings of a cookie recipe.

I glance over my shoulder to make sure my husband is still out plowing. 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 eggs, cream together... now the lard looks better even if it doesn't smell better. 2 cups of dark molasses. I was right, 1 bottle only has 1 2/3 cup in it. Open the second bottle. The smell of Lard is soon overcome by the molasses. My kitchen no longer smells like bacon, it smells more like the feed mill. 1 1/2c of unbleached flour mixed with 2 tbsp soda, 2 tbs cinnamon (am I reading that right? Tablespoons?) I open the second jar of cinnamon. 1 1/2 tbsp ginger, 1/2 tsp allspice, 1 1/2 tsp salt.

I mix that in and eye the mixing bowl. It is now dangerously full of batter. Yes, Batter. And the next step is 2/3 cup boiling water. This ought to be good. Although I pour slowly, the Kitchenaid, in a typical display of bad temper, splashes boiling brown batter on the wall and floor. THAT looks yucky. I leap for the paper towels before my husband comes in to see what looks like...well you know... all over the floor.

Now comes the rest of the flour. I am supposed to add 7 to 9 cups to texture. I dump most of the 5 pound bag of flour into a large bowl, and I can't see how 9 cups of anything are going to go into the already full mixing bowl. I get a scrap of paper and a pencil and start making hash marks to keep track of how much I've put in. Amazingly, through some phenomenon of science, the flour does not increase the volume of the batter but instead changes it’s viscosity. It disappears willingly into the batter thickening it to a dough.

The Kitchenaid groans. It's been through this drill before. It knows what's coming. I keep my hand on the top, testing the temperature of it’s motor as I add flour. At 7 cups (8 1/2 total, because we already put some in earlier) the dough reaches a familiar consistency. It has been over 20 years since I stood on a stool in the farm kitchen and watched this dough being made, but I remember it well.

Finally satisfied, I scrape the sides and the beater and set the bowl outside on the porch to chill. I turn my attention to my exhausted mixer and the counter. Not bad. Besides the batter-splatter incident, all went well. There isn't even much flour to clean up. I feel the mixer again, and consider bathing it with Absorbine and throwing a woolen horse cooler over it for an hour. A thorough sponging with plain hot water does the trick. It will survive and be ready for the peanut butter balls later.

I pause to collect my thoughts. The dough will need to chill at least an hour, then I will roll it into balls and press it with the sugared bottom of a glass to press each cookie down, and place a raisin in the center of each. The recipe doesn't reveal how many dozen it makes. We'll find that out soon enough. I'm sure it will be enough to share with the rest of the family. Those old farm wives didn't mess around. They made enough for a whole farm crew all at once.

After a break to create a Christmas centerpiece I began to bake. 350 degrees 8-10 minutes and DON'T burn them. Burnt ginger cookies are no good. (The recipe actually says this). A little trial and error and I settle on 9 minutes. My hands soon have that familiar sheen of lard.

I roll and press, remembering to double strike them to get extra sugar on them. They are soft cookies, and not burning the bottom means they will still be soft when you take them off the sheet. After 4 dozen I perfect the technique of getting them off without smooshing the sides and only have to eat four rejects. After 5 dozen I am considering putting the rest of the dough back outside and saving it for cookie day at Mom's.

After 6 dozen I lose count and begin to run out of room on the dining room table. After 7 dozen I decide I 've been on my feet all day and the peanut butter balls can wait until Sunday as well. The Kitchenaid, now cool to the touch, goes back in the cupboard. After 8 dozen I am looking at the rest of the dough and figuring maybe I should just throw it out. I scrape the last from the bowl and do a final count. Including the ones I broke and had to eat, 106 cookies. That's 8.8 dozen. Whewww!

They are sort of pretty all laid out on the table. Their sugary tops glimmer in a Christmasey sort of way. I think back over my childhood. Grandma almost always had these cookies in the jar. I would guess she made a batch like that once or twice a month. If she didn't make these, it was peanut butter cookies. What a lot of work. But completely worth it.

Now Thatsa Won Spicey Meataball

2010-11-29T13:21:00.000-08:00

Every year (or so) we buy a side of beef. The biggest problem I have with that is... what the heck do you do with half a dead cow? And I'm not a huge fan of beef anyway. This last time, we specifically told the butcher we did not want any more than 75# or so pounds of ground beef, and that they should find other more creative ways of dealing with the rest of it. Stew beef is always a lovely option.

When we went to pick it up, we had no less than ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY NINE pounds of ground. 129. Pounds. And I know I'm remembering that correctly, because I made mention of it on a chat site, and I can go back and check. That was a little over a year ago, and we still have 60 pounds or so lurking about the freezer. See, this is the problem with buying locally and in bulk. Why can't they make cows that consist only of rib eye steaks with one roast, #20 of stew beef, and #50 of ground. Richard, if you are reading this, may I suggest you look into Low Line Angus or some other tiny bovine?

So, naturally, we are getting a bit desperate for ways to use this ground beef. Thus Meatball Fest was conceived. This past weekend, while most of America was out scrambling around trying to get the best deal on a new flat screen TV, we were over at the neighbors making meat balls. I took a #20 pound tote full of beef out and put it on the side porch to thaw (I am a big fan of natural refrigeration), and Mike and Shelly gathered the other ingredients. We always have enough eggs we can collect up, even though Mom's chickens are moulting and a bit off their game.

Shelly had her mother's meatball recipe, and I had my Grandmother's Swedish Meatball recipe. We roughly divided the beef between the two, warmed the Glogg, put on Christmas music and popped open a bottle of wine. The meatballing commenced. We didn't have a firm plan of attack, but each of us fell into our favored tasks. Mike tried peeling onions which brought him to tears. I took over because they don't bother me. Shelly measured out ingredients and watched the timer, acting as referee between the many tasks to be done in a relatively small area. Mike mixed the large batches by hand. Tim worked the scooper keeping two roller's hands full, and ran trays in and out of the garage to cool.

Six hours later we had many dozen baked meatballs divied up into zip lock bags and back in the freezer. Through the Holidays and the winter, if we need a quick hors d'oeuvres or dinner idea, all we have to do is grab the appropriate number of bags of home made meatballs out of the freezer, and we're in business. I think next we ought to have a Korv stuffing party.

Grandma's Swedish Meatballs:

3 pounds of ground beef

3 medium onions diced

3 eggs

1 1/2 cups bread crumbs (I use the Italian seasoned ones)

4 shakes of black pepper

4 shakes of Allspice

roll into small meatballs, makes about 3 dozen

To cook them you have two options. You can place them on a cookie sheet and bake at 375 for 25 minutes. Or, you can lightly flour them, brown them in a frying pan, then put them in beef broth to simmer for an hour. When I serve them at the Holiday, I put them in a crock pot, cover them with broth, and put them on low.

Glögg

2010-11-13T15:08:00.000-08:00

Now that the beauty of autumn is past, and the temperatures are dropping, my interests have turned indoors to cooking, eating and home making. Neighbor Mike has gone on a bread making spree, thanks to my loaning him William Alexander's book 52 Loaves of Bread, and he loves to share. I've taken up making sweet, dark Anadama bread to trade him and I'm enjoying the rich butteriness of winter squash. I'm starting my mornings with hot tea, and finishing my evenings with hot cider or Glögg. The house has been filled with warm and delicious smells. What is Glögg? What do you mean you don't know what Glögg is! I can't believe you are missing out on such a useful winter elixir.

Many European and especially Scandinavian cultures have a traditional variation of mulled wine, usually red wine, heavily spiced, and served warm. King Gustav I Vasa of Sweden was fond of a drink made from German wine, sugar, honey, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and cloves and in 1609 it was called "glödgad vin", which meant "glowing-hot wine." This has been shortened to in Swedish and Icelandic to Glögg, Norwegian and Danish call it Gløgg, Finnish and Estonian have Glögi.

The American Swedes, particularly those native to our far corner of New York, have taken their Glögg a step further, and created a deadly concoction involving the highest proof grain alcohol they can get their hands on. It's potent stuff, being 1/3 moonshine. Now I'm "swedish" (half Swede), but my husband is Svedish, and when he introduced me to the family recipes for Glögg and Tom and Jerrys, I quickly concluded that his family's Swedish tradition was obviously to stay loaded from Thanksgiving through New Years.

The Glögg tradition starts in late summer with the outsourcing of grain alcohol. You see, the American Government has concluded that the public is not to be trusted with high grade alcohol. There are now only a handful of states where you can buy "the good stuff" which is 190 proof Everclear or Graves grain alcohol and our lovely state ain't one of 'em. The 151 proof version doesn't provide enough kick with the normal recipe, and the higher proof vodkas change the taste. In the past, I've been able to find Moonshine amongst some of my West Virginian coworkers, but the quality and proof varies greatly, so its easier to just import the store bought stuff. Around August or September, we start making calls to our contacts in Maryland, and the Carolinas to get the necessary ingredient.

The spices will be in the old, family owned Swedish bakeries and markets around the first week of November. But, we always put aside enough spices to start us out next year. The weather will likely turn before November, and we will ration whatever is left from last year's Glögg while keeping an eye on the calendar. You see, Glögg is important. We don't want to get caught without. And, now I see you can buy Glögg spices online through Amazon, and several other Swedish storefronts. But the local version has been unchanged for a couple of generations. The spice packets, are about the only part that is unchanged, as each family has their own subtle variation. The Johnson Family Cookbook has 4 markedly different variations.

So, what makes this precious firewater so special? Well, first, let me say that we serve Glögg in a 4 ounce glass. Few people are up to a second round. It's served steeping hot, just on the verge of boiling. Thus heated it will radiate fumes which make in unwise to inhale over your glass. If you have a head cold, it will clear it. If you have a chill, it will chase it. If you have insomnia, it will cure it. It is a necessary antidote to shoveling or plowing snow. It lends a warm, cozy glow to dark blustery evenings. It goes well with cookies.

The recipe starts with the spice packet containing cinnamon sticks, almonds, cloves, cardamon seeds, raisins and dried orange peel. Some people use the "fruit" version which includes dried apricots and prunes and perhaps some slices of apple, although I'm not sure about the wisdom of combining prunes and fuel grade alcohol. We use a double spice packet, dumping them loose into a stock pot with two quarts of water, and simmer them under cover for at least two hours. As a bonus, within 10 minutes, the whole house will begin to smell of cinnamon and cloves. I've found that it's a good time to let the Anadama bread dough rise on the stove top, while the spices simmer beside it.

After two hours, the water will have reduced by half, and the only real work begins. You have to strain out the spices. What I do, is use a slotted spoon to fish out the majority of the spices leaving just a little scrunge in the pot.

Then I strain the water through several layers of high quality cheese cloth which can be washed out to reuse again and again. Then, you rinse the stock pot, return the liquid to the pot, and the pot to the heat. Next you add the sugar. We use two cups because we like it sweet. After the sugar is fully dissolved, you can turn off the heat and add the wine and grain alcohol.

For wine, we use Taylor Tawny Port. We've also used plain Taylor Port, but it isn't as flavorful. This is also where the individual family recipes begin to vary. The most common variation seems to be the addition of Brandy, but I've heard other things too such as Sherry and even Rum. Honestly, the Tawny Port tastes very much like the finished product in milder form. We add one quart of the Tawny Port, then one quart of the grain alcohol. Two years ago, for our pre-Christmas party and hay ride, I made a terrific batch from the last bottle of Tim's father's collection using a 1940's bottle of grain alcohol with the brand name Pharm-X-O. That's right. Rubbing alcohol. We had to pick two neighbors up off the floor.

This is when the Glögg tastes the best... right off the stove. You have to be careful to take it off the heat at this point, or all the alcohol content will burn off. The fumes coming from the pot are flammable. You can touch a match to it, and it will burn quite vigorously with a mellow blue flame. Tim's father claimed this burned off the impurities, but really, it's just a party trick to demonstrate the proof of the alcohol. You can put the flames out by covering the pot.

You now have a $50 batch of Glögg to be distributed amongst your friends. As I said, it's best hot off the stove, but we put it up in any screw top bottles we can find to give as gifts, and we've found it keeps just fine for several years, although it does start to "mother" and produce sediment that needs to be filtered out. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a stock pot full of spice water cooling on the stove as I write, and I need to go and strain some spices and finish batch number three... yes, it's the second week of November, and we're already on batch number three. Yesterday, we sat in lawn chairs in the beautiful 50 degree sunshine, sipping mugs of Glögg and surveying the winter garden beds... wintertime dreaming of gardening.

Autumn Puttering

2010-10-21T16:29:00.000-07:00

Even though the season is over, and the garden is put away, there is still puttering to be done. We've washed the bench cushions and stored them away. Tidied up the shed. Removed the freezable chemicals and put them in the cellar. And cut new rings of woven wire to protect the shrubs from the deer.

We also put tree tubes around the smaller trees to protect them from rabbits, but not before the young four point buck scraped a couple of them up. So we put pruning patch on the worst areas, and put the tubes over. We also preemptively staked the mulberry trees which will not have the good sense to lose their leaves before the first snowfall. These trees really take a beating. They are obviously not suited to zone 5. Their first leaves always come out before the last heavy frost. And last year, they were still green in November, and the first heavy wet snow, we came out in the morning to find them laying flat. And I mean flat. But, we picked them up, shook them off, and tied them back up. And they seem to get over it all.

And the little Astrachan apple trees are growing by leaps and bounds. Next spring we'll take the tubes off and stake and fence them instead.

Now is also the time to putter about with soil conditions. There appears to be a calcium deficiency, as evidenced by our blossom end rot. Adding bone meal at the roots kept it at bay, but I went to the feed store and bought a couple of bags of ground oyster shell grit and spread it liberally. It will have all winter to leach through the soil, and in the spring, we'll work it in as we plant.

We are still enjoying fresh beans and peas from the garden. The Maestro Peas and Blue Lake bush beans are doing great. The Survivor Peas are a bit slow, and the Goldmine Beans gave up pretty quick. So next year we'll skip those varieties. This one Maestro plant is really rising to the occassion!

Putting to Bed

2010-09-27T16:20:00.001-07:00

The day after Ungardening is the Putting to Bed day. Now with the raised beds, we are going to try a little no-till lasagna gardening. Tim was mulching leaves in the lawn, and he rounded up quite a pile with the mower. I went out with the sucker/blower, and chopped them further, using two bags per bed. I think this looks very cozy and almost pretty with the golden brown leaf mulch. And, if I had not just spent half an hour blowing leaves OUT of the garden, I would have been tempted to leave the beds like this. But, I know better, and soon these chopped leaves would have been mixing with our fresh gravel. So, as I laid them down I watered them with the hose.

Then we rounded up Mike, and got out the little tractor for some more mulching. The gates were carefully measured so that the smaller tractor, complete with belly mower, can fit through with a little room to spare. We used up about half of our composted horse manure, throwing down a layer of an inch or so to hold the leaves in place, and get the composting started.

When we were done, it was not quite so pretty, but our beds have been replenished with organic matter, and should be ready to plant in the spring.

And now a little word about pests. This was my view out the window in the morning... 5 turkey jakes, and our truant fawn. He is the child of a doe who just wreaks havoc on our landscaping. Most of the summer I saw him with his grandmother and her two fawns. But quite often he would run through on his own. Why? Because his mother, the no good floozy, was busy wandering about eating my perennials and being a lousy parent. And still he's up to no good, running with the bachelor turkeys. His mother has a price on her head this season. And I expect nothing but trouble in the future from this little guy.

Rototiller and the Marigold Stomp

2010-09-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

Today was the big day for "Un-gardening". The tomatoes came out, and everything got cleaned up in preparation for the war against the falling leaves. In the past, this was a pretty labor intensive day. Neighbor Mike and I would roll up the 200 feet of no climb horse fence. Tim and I would pull the T-Posts with the bucket. Then, the rottotilling would begin. The rottotilling was actually the easy part since we had a 5 foot PTO driven tiller for the smaller tractor. But, the rolling of the fence alone diminished the benefits of the tractor tilling.

The garden was beginning to look a little rough with bacterial spec taking over several of the tomato plants, and leaves littering the walk. I started last week picking green tomatoes, and there are ALOT of them. Although they have stopped ripening on the vine in this cooler weather, they will continue to ripen in the dark after you pick them. The ones that don't get made into fried green tomatoes (my favorite dish while watching football) should be individually wrapped in newspaper so they will ripen, and you can continue to enjoy tomatoes for a couple of months. My mother has been known to stretch her tomato season as far as December!

First I went through and removed all of the twisty ties and tags. Next, you pick whatever you intend on saving. Then I began a vigorous pruning, removing all the foliage until all I had left were tomato trunks inside the supports. After the supports were removed, we pulled the roots out. I took the poles out of the pole beans, leaving large, spineless, blobs of foliage.

We filled the tractor bucket with most of the tomato waste and put that on the burn pile. The beans, clover, marigolds, and basil were destined for the compost pile. We have filled this compost tube several times this summer, and it breaks down at an amazing rate leaving plenty of head room. Here's a picture of Tim doing the "marigold stomp" trying to get the last wheelbarrow in. We have plenty of rain fore casted for this week, and I guarantee that tube full of garden trimmings will be reduced by half in a week.

We tried out best to rake up all of the fallen tomatoes, but I guarantee you there will be plenty of Sungold volunteers next year, just like this one which popped up in Mike and Shelly's cucumber bed mid-summer.

When it was all said and done, we were left with a row of parsnips and my fall garden which consists of beans, peas and carrots. I also have half a bed planted with lettuce that is just beginning to poke through the soil.

The garden looks much bigger with all of the beds empty.

Even with the garden gone, we now have to deal with a glut of produce. The best recipe to cope with this is Ratatouille which combines tomatoes, eggplants and summer squash among other things. Really it's a perfect dish for a day like this. Tim calls it "Rototiller" which is a pretty descript name since you chop up everything you find in the garden before you run the tiller through. I mean, what else do you do with a dozen Little Fingers eggplants?

My mother is very good at dealing with these garden combinations. She makes the recipes up as she goes, and she can turn this menagerie...

Into a meal like this....

And furthermore, her husband has adventurous taste buds, and he will eat it.

So for anyone who's interested, here's a recipe for ratatouille. Tim is getting reheated stew for supper, and I'm off to try my hand at frying stuffed squash blossoms!

Ingredients
2 onion, sliced into thin rings
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium eggplant, cubed
2 zucchini, cubed
2 medium yellow squash, cubed
2 green bell peppers, seeded and cubed
1 yellow bell pepper, diced
1 chopped red bell pepper
4 roma (plum) tomatoes, chopped
1/2 cup olive oil
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
4 sprigs fresh thyme
salt and pepper to taste
Directions
Heat 1 1/2 tablespoon of the oil in a large pot over medium-low heat. Add the onions and garlic and cook until soft.
In a large skillet, heat 1 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil and saute the zucchini in batches until slightly browned on all sides. Remove the zucchini and place in the pot with the onions and garlic.
Saute all the remaining vegetables one batch at a time, adding 1 1/2 tablespoon olive oil to the skillet each time you add a new set of vegetables. Once each batch has been sauteed add them to the large pot as was done in step 2.
Season with salt and pepper. Add the bay leaf and thyme and cover the pot. Cook over medium heat for 15 to 20 minutes.
Add the chopped tomatoes and parsley to the large pot, cook another 10-15 minutes. Stir occasionally.
Remove the bay leaf and adjust seasoning.

The Garden Shed

2010-09-09T17:40:00.000-07:00

The Garden Shed / Chicken Coop is finished. Tim and I each have one part of the project left. His is the chicken fence, and mine is the window shades in the garden shed to keep it cooler in the summer.

So here is the Before when we moved it from the house next door (that we sold to Mike and Shelly):

And the After:

It has doubled in size, and Tim has finished the walkway and the deck so that we don't have mud splashing up on the siding, and we aren't tracking in all kinds of dirt. You can't imagine how much dirt sticks to dewy work boots. Because of the electric lines being dug in, there has been a nice patch of dirt right in front of the door for months.

See the apple tree in the tube in the foreground? That is one of the scions I sent down to Horse Creek back in the spring of 2009. It is growing by leaps and bounds and we had to add to the tube to keep the deer from trimming it. The second one is in the foreground of the picture below and is growing, but not as vigorously.

The gravel right behind the shed will be part of the chicken run, and the mulched area is my "perennial foods" garden where I relocated my strawberries, rhubarb and horseradish. Next spring I will add a row of asparagus. I decided to leave my first asparagus bed where it was to see if it can't make a go of it since it seems to be improving now in year 3. The Rhubarb has more than quadrupled in size since transplanting, and the Horseradish has come back to life.

Tim went above and beyond the call of duty inside the shed. We chose maple cabinets from the discount outlet and bought a small refrigerator which is great for storing "excess produce". Aside from a few cucumbers, it mostly holds beer, wine and mixers. It does make it nicer to grab a refreshment when working or socialising outdoors, and cuts down on the foot traffic in and out of the house.

Tim removed the center of the face frame and reattached it to the right hand door so the base cabinets open all the way making it easier to tuck all my larger items away.

The long handled tools are hung on the opposite wall, and the third wall has commercial shelving for storage of tomato ladders, window boxes and other plant supports.

I have a few neat garden collectables to display in here, but we haven't gotten around to cutseying it up yet.

Late Summer

2010-09-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

Gardening is beginning to wind down for me this year. Our friends who had planted potatoes and winter squash are reporting record yields. One gardener says that his wife is weighing their potatoes at a little over 4 pounds a piece! I can't wait to see one.

My artichoke has blossomed. There is only one flower on this one. There were two other chokes started on the stem, but I didn't fuss over watering it, and they dried up. It is still a garden oddity, and visitors have enjoyed seeing what an artichoke looks like in "it's natural habitat".

The tomatoes continue to produce, with the Black Krim being one of the steadiest throughout the season.

This was my first year for Dr. Wyche, and this tomato will be my standard favorite for orange fruit. I see no reason to look any further. I prefer the taste over the Kellogg's Breakfast variety I grew in 2008, and they are not as large as the Kellogg's, and more to my liking.

The fall planting of peas, beans and carrots is doing outstanding. The beans are flowering, and the peas already have formed pods on the Maestro vines. They've even inspired the nasturtium to rally and bloom again. My first planting of bush beans, has continued to produce steadily. The past two weeks, I have often gone out to find that all of a sudden I need to pick and freeze beans. There are a little over two dozen plants still producing, and I've left them even though they are sprawling at the foot of the sunflowers in a miserable mess. In a few days they will be done, and the new planting will be on the verge of producing. That made just about perfect timing.

My sunflowers are over 10 feet tall. While I loved how they worked in the cucumber and bean bed, I think next year I will choose a shorter variety! I've had to go in there and lop off the spent stalks just to restore order.

This past Labor Day weekend, I made another larger batch of the wild plum jelly. After eating it for a few days, Tim proclaimed it was a little hard to spread. I have to agree. If I were judging it, I'd take off a few points for spreadability. Those half ripe plums have a lot of pectin in them. So for the second batch I decided to play mad scientist and mess with the recipe, something every book and article will advise against.

I started with 8 cups of juice instead of 5 and a half. I added the same amount of dry pectin, then when I had reached the 7 and a half cups of sugar, I tasted the juice and decided to add another half cup. The first batch was very sweet, and I wanted to preserve some of the plum's natural tanginess. After boiling it a minute, I tested the jell, and it just didn't seem to be adhering to the spoon at all. I put it back on the heat for another minute, then lost my nerve. I didn't want to play with the recipe too much, and my objective was to make softer jelly. I went ahead and processed the jelly, ending up with 11 and a half half pints. I had another half pint that I put into a pint jar with a plastic cap, and just set aside for eating.

When the canning bath was done, I had 11 plus jars of runny plum goo. The instructions always say to resist tipping your jars to see if they're jelled at risk of ruining the seal. All the lids popped almost immediately, though I admit I fiddled with the jars. After a couple of hours, I had given up hope. It looked like I had a whole bunch of plum topping, and I began to think of ice cream sundaes, and look up recipes for crepes.

Later I read one of the Ball brochures, and it mentioned that it could take up to two weeks for the jelly to set. TWO WEEKS? How could anyone wait that long? I went back to check the jars, now cooled for 5 hours, and lo and behold.... they had all jelled. Whew! What a relief! I dreamed of plum jelly all night, and for breakfast enjoyed two slices of toast spread liberally with the leftovers from the fridge. Mmmmm.... just the right amount of tart plumness.