Putting up

The last few days have been spent preserving, as Rachel over at Hounds in the Kitchen puts it, "working in quarts and pints." Seven pints of tomato sauce are done, and tomatillo salsa is next on the list. The next good-sized batch of tomatoes we get will either be diced or quartered, depending on how big a pain it is to chop them once the skins are removed.

My dear friends Michael and Ann have recently purchased laying hens, and another family we know have been considering getting goats. While I know we are nowhere near ready for that (I would need to convince both Joe and the Gambier zoning board), part of me is a bit jealous. Mostly, though, I'm thrilled to have a slowly-growing group of friends who, in their own ways, are exploring paths that, if they aren't necessarily the same as mine, run close enough by that we can chat while we walk.

Grapes, part II

This was a delightful surprise yesterday. It looks like we'll be harvesting grapes - Concords, from the look and taste - this year. We have lived in this house for over eight years, and never once have we seen ripe grapes on these vines. We'll need to move fast so we can get them picked before the birds make a feast of them (as I suspect has happened in past years).

Grapes

A Squash Named Audrey II

We tried to convince the Munchkin to stand behind it, so you could get a true sense of scale, but the vines were a little prickly. It comes up roughly to his waist, and spreads eight feet wide in one direction, between five and six feet in the other. Not bad for his first foray into seed-starting.

Garden notes

We pulled our first cucumber from the garden yesterday. It was a teeny little one, with the spines still on, suitable for making cornichons, although this one didn't last that long. Judging from the number of blossoms, though, I should be able to put up a nice batch this year.

I finally pulled out the pea vines, and found a few stray pods while I was at it. Barely enough for one person to eat (and probably not very tasty at this time of year), but worth saving for seed.

The big surprise of the year has been the Munchkin's butternut squash. I'd saved the seeds from a squash we got through our CSA in 2006, and then promptly forgot all about them until they turned up in a baggie in the back of our spice cabinet this spring. (Hey - at least I labeled it.) I took a few extra peat pots, and let the Munchkin fill them with potting mix and then put all the seeds he wanted into them, figuring that if anything came up, great, but if not, it's not like we were counting on them. As it turns out, we got three seedlings, of which two survived the move to the garden, and are now huge, with gigantic star-shaped yellow blooms.

Another harvest from the garden

We brought in our first leeks this evening. They're still thin - roughly pencil-sized - but pulling them will make room for their brethren to grow big and fat. Another plus: at this size the greens are still tender enough to eat.

I also picked the remaining peas. There weren't many in this batch, so they will likely either a) be eaten straight from the shell without cooking, or 2) be frozen along with the bulk of peas we've gotten from the CSA, so we can devote our current veggie cooking to the items that don't save well, like chard and lettuce. Oh, the lettuce. We have the stuff coming out our ears. Three gallon-bags full, and the Munchkin won't touch the stuff. On the up side, we have discovered that he LOVES the bread-and-butter pickles our friend Bruce's mom made from summer squash. I'll be hitting him up for the recipe, you can be sure.

Two of the butternut squash plants are still going, although one is definitely a bit weak, and we have a cucumber plant with blossoms on it now. There are also about a bazillion blossoms on the tomatillos, which should make for some fun salsa-making in a few weeks. Anyone else have any good tomatillo recipes?

Garden notes for May

Yeah, I know it's June. I couldn't very well make my list of all the stuff that happened in May until it was over, could I? Moving on.

• The veg garden is half in. Snap peas are going gangbusters. Round one of the watercress is done, and round two is coming up. Honestly, I'm not sure if the watercress is worth it. I love me some caldo verde (which traditionally uses kale, but also works well with a mix of greens), but that's about the only thing we use it for, and it takes up a fair bit of space - space that might better be used for collards or something. We'll need to rethink that for next year.
• The indoor snap peas are doing OK, but not great. Tons of vine, not much actual fruit. After a few Google searches, I suspect that the potting mix I used is too high in nitrogen, and not enough in potassium and phosphorous. Luckily, the soil outdoors doesn't seem to be suffering the same problem.
• Our last frost of the year ended up being May 19 - nearly a week after my estimate, and one day after I planted the Frenso chilis and tomatillos. The tomatillos were up against the wall of the house and I think that helped protect them, but the Fresnos didn't make it. I'm going to start a new batch of seedlings today.
• We had a few irises, but not many. I suspect it's time to divide the clump and find some new homes.
• A pair of bluebirds have taken up residence in the yard. The Munchkin looks for them every time we're outside. A family of robins also built a nest in the hanging fern on the porch. It made watering tricky, but I wanted to keep the eggs safe. Toward the end of the month, we started hearing peeps from the nest, and most recently I saw three very small robins perched in a row on the electrical line to the house.
• In other wildlife news, there was a baby deer bedded down in the backyard for a few days. Gave us a handy excuse to delay mowing for a while.
• We cut two new paths (really 1.5) in front of the house. The main path runs from the porch steps to the driveway, and the second connects that path to the back patio. In the process, we also stripped the sod from two new beds in front of the porch. No plants or pavers yet - that's the next step.
• The leeks need to be thinned again, and soil mounded over them (to increase the amount of white).
• We have seedlings indoors ready to go outside. A few hills of cucumbers, some kung pao hybrid chilis, some basil, and (in a bit of a shocker) some butternut squash from seeds I saved three years ago. I had the Munchkin plant them. He put five or six in one tiny peat pot, and five of them sprouted! We also have seeds for Brussels sprouts, dill, and sunflowers. I'm thinking of starting the sprouts and sunflowers in pots, too, but dill evidently doesn't like to be moved, so I'll just need to keep an eye out to make sure I don't accidentally weed it out of existence.
• The parsley has vanished. I strongly suspect an enterprising bunny or groundhog.
• I'm already planning next year's larger-scale garden. Raised beds, definitely

What are y'all growing this year?

Peas Progress

Our snap peas continue to grow like crazy. Last weekend I upgraded accommodations for the six largest, moving the peat pots from the old roasting pan they started in, into a window box, and built a fishing-line trellis up the window, so they'll be able to clamber their way up. I basically just planted the pots whole, although I pulled off some of the peat at the top, so the soil could be level without adding more around the base of the seedlings.

Don't they look happy? The fishing line is just barely visible here - it actually looks a little like an electrical line off in the distance or something. Since I took this photo, I've had to add some extra support in the form of chopsticks poked into the ground next to the peas. That first step is a doozy, as they say, and the vines needed a little help reaching the bottom of the trellis.

The remaining seedlings are still chugging away in their little peat pots, save for one, which just has not been able to get beyond the sprout stage. My runt was one of the soaked peas, which surprised me a little. It sent up a teeny little green sprout, just like all the others, but never took off. The rest - soaked and unsoaked alike - have progressed nicely, and are about ready for new homes. One of those will join the window box, to replace a vine that met an unexpectedly sticky end. (Did you know cats like pea vines? Me either.)

The rest, assuming I can get the planting bed dug this weekend, will be moved outside in a week or so. Thanks to some truly glorious weather, I'm pretty hopeful about that. Other chores include buying more potting mix and peat pots, and (assuming the Munchkin has recovered from the bug he's fighting) planting another small batch with him, along with the hot pepper seeds.

So - is anyone else feeling the garden itch especially strong today?

Snap Pea Challenge Update

One week into the snap pea challenge, and we already have results!

Last Sunday, I planted twelve pea seeds in ten peat pots. Eight were pre-soaked for about 11 hours in room-temperature water, and four were planted straight in without soaking. Four of the pre-soaked peas were doubled up in their pots; this was actually an administrative error, as I grabbed the wrong number of peat pots at checkout, but it made for a nice experimentation opportunity.

Yesterday, we returned from a family wedding to discover that six of the eight soaked peas had sprouted while we were gone (either Saturday or Sunday), including three of the doubled-up ones. None of the unsoaked peas have come up, although a few look like they are close. It looks as though, all other things being equal, the soaked-pea technique may have an edge, and the doubled-up peas don't seem to have suffered any from crowding, although it'll also be interesting to see how strong all the plants end up.

Eventually, some of these plants will move out to a new garden bed on the south side of the house, so they can scramble up the dining room wall. The rest will be re-potted into a window box and left in the south-facing living room window, where, with any luck, they'll climb up the window. Although I don't have any sort of support in place yet, the plan is to make a trellis of sorts out of fishing line, criss-crossing the window. If it looks feasible, I might try the same thing outside. Ideally, I'll get to start another small batch of seeds in a week or so, with the Munchkin's help, so he'll get the experience of growing his own peas too.

Joe periodically teases me about my aversion to curtains. We live in the middle of a two-acre plot, so privacy - one of the very few reasons to cover a view of the outside, in my opinion - is not an issue. Who knows - maybe this will turn out to be a happy compromise!

Countdown to the gardening pre-season

Seeds and peat pots have been purchased, starting tips researched, and lighting options considered. I am officially all set for the 2009 Cold Antler Farm Snap Pea Challenge. Fancy joining?

Seriously, y'all - it's gonna be a good time. Swing through your local hardware store or garden center, pick up some seeds and potting mix, and join the fun.

One thousand words

I have been working on the same blog post for nearly two weeks now. Over the past few months, I have started down some sort of pseudo-homesteading path, and was feeling the need to articulate why I feel compelled to do so. Words don't seem to be adequate to explain it, though. One of my favorite homesteading bloggers, Jenna Wogenrich, summed it up by saying "It’s the honesty of knowing what I do everyday directly helps keep me alive." That doesn't quite work for me, since (given our local zoning laws) I am unlikely to start raising livestock any time soon, and the hot peppers and Brussels sprouts I'm planning for the garden are hardly what you'd call staples. Still, in that statement she gets to the immediacy of baking your own bread, growing your own veggies, being connected to the sources of your food, living a more self-sufficient - and yet, oddly, more connected - life. In her case that includes raising her own chickens; in mine, it involves a growing friendship with the farmers who raise the chickens, cows, and lambs we eat.

Food is obviously a big part of this impulse, but it isn't the whole thing. Professionally (if you can call "perpetual grad student" a profession), I pretty much live inside my own head. In our classes, we have endless debates about the finest semantic points, and what seem to be simple declarative sentences get dissected and analyzed until they have lost all meaning. There are days when this sort of work is fun, when the academic exercises feel like tricky mystery plots to solve. Then there are other times, when I feel like, if I don't get out of my brain and do something constructive, I'll explode. Writing filled that purpose for a while, and might yet again, but right now it's too tied up with all that theory. I swear I used to be able to write, but grad school has made it a paralyzing process. The homesteader's life, where the product of your work is concrete, practical, and immediately tangible, is becoming a much-needed respite from that, and one which may very well allow me to continue all that theorizing without going stark staring mad.

Which is all to say that, suddenly, it seems a little pointless to spend so much time attempting to intellectualize what is, at it's core, not an intellectual thing. Instead, I think this sums it up nicely: Who knows - maybe thinking in terms of pictures rather than words will help me keep this site from becoming a complete ghost town.

Magic beans

You know how you sometimes get those really cool-looking purple beans at farmers markets and the like? And it is always disappointing when you cook them, because they turn the same relatively boring green color as every other bean?

Try this recipe. You'll thank me. Even without the chive blossom vinegar, it rocks.

Another thing about autumn

Spring cleaning, shming cleaning. Fall is a great time to clean out the pantry, figure out what's there and what needs to be restocked, and vow to finally use up all those dry bean soup mixes this year.

Sometimes, the Munchkin helps.

Putting Up

Anybody who has known me for a year has probably heard me talk about how much I adore autumn. Partly this is just because it marks the end of summer. I've been trying to get better about appreciating aspects of each season, but to be honest I really only enjoy summer weather for about three weeks or so and then am ready to stop wearing shorts. Plus, although summer is always billed as vacation-time, all the travel that gets crammed into those three months turns out to be more exhausting than the scheduled routines of the rest of the year. Evidently, when we chose to have a child while living in a different state from the rest of our family, we should have started asking people to donate their frequent-flier miles as a shower gift. But I digress.

The other reason to adore fall is the process of canning, freezing, drying, and otherwise putting up food for the winter. My inner squirrel comes out. The thing I have been doing longest (and am therefore best at) has been pickling. It's pretty close to idiot-proof, and works with beans, beets, cucumbers, okra, and probably a gazillion other things. Unfortunately, my past pickling adventures have resulted in a cabinet jammed full of jars of various kinds of pickles. We simply haven't been eating them as fast as I make them.

So, this year there was a moratorium on pickling. That doesn't mean no preserving, though. I have put up a few pints of applesauce (I'm doing those a little bit at a time, rather than let the apples pile up), frozen a batch of roasted red pepper sauce (which might be cannable, but I could only find pressure-canner instructions), and frozen a sheet tray of jalapenos - some diced, some halved, and some sliced. I still have a handful of habaneros to freeze as well, but was waiting to get gloves first. It turns out that merely washing your hands is totally inadequate to remove capsaicin from ones fingernails - a harsh lesson to learn when you rub your eyes a few hours later. If you want the gory details, ask Joe. He is still laughing.

Unseasonably warm

As out-of-touch as I am with the cycle of the seasons of late, I am pretty certain that 54F is unusually warm for a January evening. Tomorrow we're slated to get into the 60s, which is downright ludicrous. Anyhow, given the balminess and the fact that the Munchkin took a three hour nap this afternoon, I decided to take on some long-overdue cleanup outside - specifically, cleaning up all the pots on the front porch. It's really easy to get blasé about them, since they are under cover and the odds are pretty decent that they would survive the winter anyhow, but the pots of dead plants (and a decidedly ex-pumpkin) just made the house look abandoned. Anyhow, the pots are now happily ensconced in the garage, and everything else is in the compost pile. If the weather holds for Tuesday, I might do some pruning around the yard. What else do real gardeners do in January warm spells? I also made brisket tonight for dinner. Other than using an extra garlic clove and substituting a few shallots when I ran short of onion, I actually stuck to the recipe, which is really unusual for me unless we're testing something for Cooks Illustrated. Anyhow, it was amazing. I'd chosen this weekend to do it because it takes four hours or so and I thought it would be nice for the cold weather. Well, it works in warmish weather too. And the beef was spectacular. If we ever get some freezer space back, I'll be ordering another one. Meanwhile, perhaps seconds are in order?