Looking Back and Forward

Winter is very much upon us now. The day after New Year’s, the seed catalogues started arriving in the mail. I set them aside as I felt that was still a bit early to start planning. A month later, I’m ready to think about the garden again. Before I know it, it will be time to start some seeds indoors, even as the garden lies blanketed in snow.

I never did a final report here on the garden. I would call it a successful year, overall. The tomatoes produced quite well. I actually got enough to make pasta sauce. I found a Ball flavoring mix that made wonderful sauce. I fired up the canner and put away nine quarts of sauce to enjoy all winter.

So many tomatoes!

In late September, I went through and harvested the rest of the vegetables. The corn did not produce very well. The potatoes did not either. It’s always been less expensive and less of an effort to just buy corn and potatoes but I still like growing them myself. I’m about ready to give up on the corn entirely but I really like fresh-dug potatoes. We had a few meals from the Yukon Golds so it was not a total waste of time and space. Next year, maybe we’ll try something more exotic like purples or fingerlings that aren’t available at local stores.

So, it was not a bumper crop.

The garden did produce enough acorn squash and pumpkin to put in storage for the winter. We’ve gone through all the squash now but two pumpkins are still waiting to be used.

I was a bit disappointed that the Rattlesnake beans did not produce as well as they did last year. I did plant them in a different part of the garden that had a tendency to be a bit wetter so that might have had something to do with it. We did get a few that will make some nice bean soup on one of these cold days.

At least there were some beans to shell.

The herbs did very well this season. In October, I cut thyme, marjoram, and fennel seeds to dry. I also brought the parsley plant inside but it didn’t care for the transition, apparently. It went back out into the compost bin last month. I loved being able to step out my back door with a pair of scissors and get fresh herbs and I was actually able to do so well into late fall.

Thyme and marjoram hanging to dry.

Similarly, the chard just kept growing late into the season. Chard has got to be one of my favorite leafy greens (leafy rainbows?) to grow. It comes up quickly and just keeps going. I finally cut the last of it in early November. It probably would have kept going if I had let it but I was ready to get the beds ready for the winter.

The giant maple tree out in front of our house provides wonderful cover material for the garden. My husband processed the fallen leaves through the choppy leaf vacuum thing he bought for the purpose and spread it over the raised beds. In the spring with turn it under with other soil additives and be ready for another growing season.

The garden set for a long winter's nap.

And what shall we plant next season?

End of August Accounting

It’s been a good gardening season. Things have gone so well, in fact, that we plugged in the extra freezer in the basement to keep the surplus produce. 

One evening's produce gathering

 The zucchini and yellow squash produced very well. That shouldn’t be a surprise. The over-abundance of zucchini has become a well-worn cliché but we haven’t really had much luck with summer squash over the last couple of years. Last year the yellow squash did not produce at all and we only got a few zucchinis. This year, so far, we’ve picked 14 yellow squash and 21 zucchinis.

Squash plants in early July

Yellow squash and zucchini

 A couple weeks ago I realized the squash had a pretty bad infestation of squash vine borers. The poor plants looked terrible but they were and are still producing fruit.

Squash vine borer damage

We have eaten a lot of squash so far and given some away but we had way more than could be eaten fresh. So, into the freezer they went. I diced up the squashes, blanched them in boiling water for 3 minutes, dunked them in ice water, drained them, and then spread them out on towel-lined cookie sheets. After giving the squash pieces some time to dry, I removed the towels and put the sheets in the freezer. The next day, I broke up the pieces of frozen squash with a wooden spoon and put them in quart size zipper-top freezer bags. There are now six full bags in the freezer and a half dozen squash still in the fridge.

Frozen zucchini ready to be bagged

I made a double batch of zucchini muffins for the freezer too.

The green beans are not doing as well as they did last year but I’ve still manage to put away a quart size freezer bag full of them. The chard, on the other hand, has been doing very well since I managed to head off the leaf borers. I’ve put three full quart bags away in the freezer so far.

So much lovely, leafy goodness!

The cucumbers have also been very productive. They are sneaky, however. I’ll look at a cucumber and decide it’s slightly on the small size and decide to wait a day or two before picking it. A day or two later, it’s gotten huge! Fortunately, these cucumbers, no matter what the size, make great pickles. I will admit that I’m a lazy pickler. I’m a fan of making small batches whenever it is convenient. I don’t want to heat up the house with the canner or risk getting limp pickles if I screw up the process. So, I make freezer pickles. They are so simple and are delicious. So far this season we’ve picked 37 cucumbers and made 11 ½-pint jars of dill pickles, 7 of sweet pickles, and 5 of bread and butter pickles. I’ll probably be making some more this week as the collection of cucumbers in the fridge are starting to add up again.

Cool as a cucumber and ready to be pickles

Six 1/2-pink jars of dill freezer pickles

We’ve done a little fridge pickling as well. The beets and watermelon radishes are doing fairly well this year. We didn’t plant that many of either. The radishes are great on sandwiches but we worried we wouldn’t go through them quickly enough in their raw form. The solution was fridge pickles. Since we were doing the radishes, I figured we could pickle a few beets as well. We picked just enough for two ½-pint jars of radishes and one of beets. The radishes are crunch and taste good but I will say that they leave a definite funk in the air.

Just a few beets and radishes

Quick fridge pickled beets and radishes

We did do one bit of unplanned preserving as well. Early on when we first moved into this house, my husband built a trellis for wild grapes that were growing behind the garage. Last year, they didn’t do much but this year they produced enough that I thought I’d see if I could make a little jelly. Well, it did turn out to be a little jelly – just a ½-pint jar and a smaller jelly jar – but it turned out really tasty. The tartness of the wild grapes is really wonderful; not at all like the standard store-bought grape jelly. I only had one cup of juice so it took a little mathing to get the pectin measurement right but I’m calling this experiment a success.

Lots of grapevines on the trellis

Bunches of wild grapes

Draining the juice from the cooked grapes

Mmm...jelly!

Solar Food Dehydrator

Several years ago, when we still lived on the mountain, my husband and I saw a solar food dehydrator in Mother Earth News. (You can find a diagram of it online now at http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/solar-food-dehydrator-zmaz06aszraw.aspx?SlideShow=11) We thought it was a fantastic idea and decided to build one of our own. The magic of living at a lumber mill was that there were always leftover bits of wood and other materials lying around. We managed to construct the entire dehydrator out of scavenged pieces, hinges and all. We did have to buy a kit to make the two drying screens but that was all.

Homemade solar food dehydrator

The dehydrator is basically a big wooden box with a piece of glass on top. We started with an old window and then built the rest of the box around it to fit. Somehow, we found a sheet of metal that was nearly perfect for the reflector inside. We added screened holes for ventilation and doors on the back that could be opened to load the screens full of food and for ventilation. I’m pretty proud of the way it turned out since it was cobbed together from found parts. Best of all, it works wonderfully!

View from the back with bottom door open

Interior with two drying screens in place

Side view showing screened vent holes and top door propped open for airflow

We used the dehydrator quite a lot back then drying strawberries, blueberries, cherries, zucchini, yellow squash, and herbs. Since moving to the southern tier, we’ve used it once to dry a batch of wild hops but otherwise it has remained tucked away in the garage. That is until about a week ago. I had gone blueberry picking and thought it would be fun to dry some. My husband pulled it out of storage and gave it a good cleaning then I loaded it with some washed blueberries.

Blueberries loaded and ready to start drying

It was just my luck that I picked some of the only cloudy days so far this summer on which to get the dehydrator going. It needs extended, direct sunlight to function. You’ve got to turn it throughout the day to keep it facing the sun. After the first day of partial sun, the berries were just starting to dry.

Berries on the morning of day 2

Day two was actually sunny, so quite a bit of moisture was pulled out of the berries. Day three, however dawned completely overcast. I don’t like to keep anything in the dehydrator for more than three days. I worry that if the food isn’t dry by then that it might start to spoil. So, I brought the berries in and finished them off in the oven for about four hours. After all that effort, the blueberries had turned into just over a cup of dried berries and they taste great! It was very much worth it to drag our homemade dehydrator across the state with us.

Chewy, yummy dried blueberries!

Putting Up Our Harvest

Years ago, when we lived on the mountain, we had to buy a chest freezer to store all the extra produce from our garden. We have no plans on plugging that freezer in this year but we still have more vegetables from the garden than we can eat fresh. So, here are some of the things we did with the extra veggies.

So many tomatoes!

I intended to make a big batch of cucumber pickles when it wasn’t too hot out. Unfortunately, we had a very dry spell after a very wet spell and that stressed out the plants enough that the cucumbers went bitter. I felt really bad throwing dozens of cucumbers into the compost but they just weren’t edible. I did have a small heap of cucumbers from before the plants turned. There weren’t enough to warrant pulling out the water-bath canner so I made a small batch of freezer pickles instead.

I used the recipe for Freezer Dills in the book Farm Anatomy by Julia Rothman. (This is a great little book, by the way, with lots of basic information and beautiful illustrations.) The recipe is also available on Grit magazine’s website.  I have yet to try them but I’m sure they will be a wonderful treat when the snow starts flying.

Pickles in the freezer

I also decided to pickle turnips. I had not heard of pickled turnips before but the power of Google showed me that they were, indeed, a thing. So, I decided to give them a try. There are a bunch of recipes available online. I ended up using one from Eating Well. I filled two quart jars and look forward to trying them.

Turnip pickles

Back in June I made two jars of pak choi refrigerator pickles. We got into them last week. They are very vinegary (maybe a bit too vinegary for some people’s tastes) but they are really good on hotdogs. The white stem parts are nice and crunchy. I’m definitely going to plant more pak choi next year.

During the winter, I bring soup to work every day for lunch. During the summer, it feels odd to make soup but with all the wonderful fresh vegetables coming out of the garden I had to make a batch of minestrone soup. There are a lot of recipes out there for summer minestrone. The August issue of Cooking Light magazine has a good recipe and it happened into my mailbox just as I was wondering what to do with all my veggies. Homegrown carrots, green onions, tomatoes, squash, green beans and chard all went into my massive soup pot along with cannellini beans and ditalini pasta to make a wonderfully hearty soup. We ate some for dinner and I put the rest (three quart-bags full) into the freezer for later.

Bags of summer minestrone in the freezer

We are currently being inundated with tomatoes. I love fresh tomatoes on sandwiches and salads but it’s beginning to get out of hand. I don’t want to throw out any because I didn’t get to use them in time. So, today I made some tomato juice. I was going for tomato sauce but we didn’t grow sauce tomatoes so it was a bit more watery. No problem. The juice will be a great base for soups and sauces. All I did was cut up the tomatoes and simmer then for about 45 minutes. Then I pushed them through a sieve with a wooden spoon to get rid of the skins and seeds. (This is one time when I really miss my mom’s old food mill.) I then put the juice into zip-top sandwich bags in 1-cup servings. I laid them flat on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer. Once they are frozen, I will transfer them to a gallon size freezer bag.

From tomatoes...

...to tomato juice ready for the freezer.

And since I was heating up the house to process the tomatoes anyway, I decided to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. And yes, I did put two dozen of them up in the freezer so we wouldn’t just eat them all!

Mmm...cookies!

And a cardinal, just because.

Guess Who was in the Garden Again

We had a house rabbit for many years. I should have known from that experience that rabbits do not give up easily. Yesterday morning when I looked out the window on my way down the stairs, as I do every morning, I saw a pair of ears in the garden. So, I rallied the troops (my husband), put on my barn boots, grabbed my camera and headed outside. You know that little break in the fence I mentioned before? Well, that was the spot where the rabbit chewed through the mesh fence to get into the garden. We knew that it could easily chew through the mesh if it wanted to but I didn't think it would make the effort. I guess I was wrong. It got out through the same hole after a brief panic among the raised beds. As soon as it was out of the garden it settled down maybe 20 feet away and started chomping on grass. Apparently once it was outside the fence the two perturbed humans were no longer a threat.

The rabbit peacefully snacking on greenery after being chased from the garden.

So, as the rabbit went about its business, I scanned the garden. Nothing was sampled or disturbed this time. I must have seen it right after it got through the fence. The way the rabbit was eating greens from the lawn it was obviously hungry but it didn’t touch anything in the garden. Maybe it just didn’t like what I have growing. Who knows? My husband grabbed some wood strips and the stapler and we repaired the hole in the fence. We’ll see if the rabbit tries again.

A perfect little bunny-sized hole nibbled through the mesh fence.

Hopefully the repairs will keep the tricky little bunny out.

After the quick emergency fence repair I harvested some spinach, more arugula and all the pak choi. It had rained the night before so the greens were gritty with dirt. I gave them all my standard triple rinse then ran them through the salad spinner.

The day’s harvest

I froze a lot of the pak choi. I chopped it up, blanched it two minutes in boiling water and then plunged it into ice water. After letting it dry off a bit on some paper towels, I packed it into a quart freezer bag. I also fridge-pickled some of it in a simple brine of 1 cup of white vinegar, ½ a cup of water, 1 tbsp. of sugar, ½ tbsp. of salt and some fennel seeds. I’ve never had pickled pak choi before. I’ll give it a week or so and then see what it tastes like.

Two pints of pickled pak choi

I’m going to use most of this round of arugula for my lunches this week but I also used some in a salad today. I mixed four servings of cooked and cooled pasta with a can of rinsed kidney beans and a couple good handfuls of chopped arugula. I dressed it with 1 ½ tbsp. of oil, 1 tbsp. of lemon juice and some salt and black pepper and then sprinkled some freshly grated parmesan cheese on top. It made a great light meal for a hot, humid day and all the subtle flavors worked really well together.

Mmm, pasta with fresh arugula and beans