Midwinter eating!

Well, just because it's winter doesn't mean we have to be boring, does it?

This week in Boston Organics I got a beautiful, deep, luscious-red watermelon radish.  Sweet on the outside, spicy on the outside.   And, of course, citrus!

So what to do?   Make a lightly-pickled watermelon salad with citrus dressing!  Place up the sweet/spicy/tangy flavors of the vegetable itself.   Yum.

Ingredients:
1 large thinly sliced watermelon radish
1 small white onion (thinly sliced)
Juice from one small orange (about 1/3 cup)
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. fresh-ground black pepper
2 Tbs. olive oil (I used light-tasting)
2 Tbs. apple cider vinegar
splash rice wine vinegar (optional)

Mix everything together.   Store in a bowl in the fridge overnight (or for a few hours).   Eat!
Source:
http://kblog.lunchboxbunch.com/2010/10/meet-watermelon-radish.html

August Update

Well, it's the beginning of August and I am....at home.

Let me explain: usually, every year from August 2/3 - 15th, I am more or less out of commission - Dawn and I load up approximately half of our worldly possessions, hop in the car, drive 2 1/2 days out to northern Michigan, camp in the woods with a bunch of dear friends (and about 1,500 other like-minded ladies), get sweaty and dirty, then drive back home again.   By then, half the month has passed. Dawn usually has to go right back to work, and even if I have been off of work it still takes me a couple of days to get back into the groove of home, life and summer.  (i.e., I want to sleep for approximately 27 hours).   I get some food preservation done, but in a week or two, it's time to start getting ready for work/school in September.

This year, we skipped the trip.   I missed the feeling of being rejuvenated and sparkly about the whole world, but I finally realized why my late-summer/early fall garden usually goes straight to hell: August. Usually when we come home, the tomatoes are a mess, the squash has died, the weeds are rampant, the carrots are bitter and I have no more energy to deal with any of it.

This year in late July, instead of packing and shopping and cleaning for our trip, we bought string and 8 ft. poles and strung up our tomato wildness.  Dawn pruned the raspberry canes.   I harvested onions and garlic, pulled up our (meager) carrots, fed the plants, made compost tea, weeded and laid down straw on our paths, sifted compost and have actually started fall plantings!    (usually I try to do this, but don't get around to it until early September, and thus everything is only barely getting started by the time frost comes around).

What am I planting for the fall?   A second try at carrots, a second round of beans, some radishes, and today (this very day) I am going outside to plant lettuce and arugula for the fall right on the new moon!  (It is said among gardeners that planting on the new moon harnesses lunar energy to help plants sprout and grow faster - one is also supposed to harvest on the full moon!).

So, I missed a week of blessed-out connection to the land.   But I also got to not feel frazzled and crazed around the edges of the trip.   I saw family and friends.   I am slowly preparing for the fall.  I celebrated Lammas, a holiday on the pagan calendar, for the first time, with some local lady friends.  I never really appreciated Lammas before - it represents the midway point between the solstice and the equinox, so it doesn't have the energy of shifting daylight that the quarter-year festivals have, but garden-wise, its an important transition time nonetheless, and one that I usually miss.  (I think) it represents the first harvest of wheat - so it is the time to harvest things that you started sewing months ago, back when it first got warm (remember that)?    I was just finishing teaching a class that I started in early May, so it seemed extra appropriate - I could see how much my students' writing had changed over that time, which is a cool thing to "harvest".   It's also a nice reminder that it does take months to harvest things - the things we "plant" now (exercise, self-care, planning for the fall, meditation, stories I start writing) may not have immediate payoffs.   Sometimes by the time we get a payoff, we almost can't remember who we were when we started.   hmmm.

Last, I think for this important date, early August, it's a time when we can turn all the way around.   The stuff that we planted in the spring is now harvested and eaten or mature and ready to use.   Now it's time to start a new planting and look forward for the fall.

Garden-wise, August is also the time when everything is wet, damp and sweaty.   In this time, inevitably, the tomatoes have some kind of disease, the squash has some kind of mildew, and the grasshoppers are happily bouncing off of every surface, chewing through our leaves.   A period of intense rain in late July brought on the mold and mildew (and blossom-end rot on some fruits), but with sunny days things are evening out.   Also, although there are grasshoppers, there are also bees and dragonflies, ladybugs and tiny parasitic wasps whipping through my garden.   I let some of my herbs and even weeds  flower to provide food for these little helpers, and they pay me back by keeping  my plants well enough to grow.   My compost is fine and dirt-like, thanks to the little red compost worms who happily chomp through almost anything we put in there.    We are also at a period where I've harvested enough veggies that I'm starting to make entire meals (almost) just from the garden.   That is always the coolest to me.

Dried:
garlic & some onions

From the garden:
eggplants (A whole bunch of little ones!)
tomatoes (cherry, roma and regular)
beans (only some!  next year, the bean teepee returns so I can make dilly beans!)
kale (so much kale, mountains of kale)
beets
cucumbers (also few, we planted late)
basil (pesto city!)
hot peppers
squash (only one so far).
(one last) Napa cabbage.
(one last regular) cabbage (in the fridge).

Cruel, Cruel Summer

Well, my work part-time gardening is only paying off....medium.


So far, my straight up late start on some things plus an incredibly cool, wet and rainy summer plus my very shady backyard = not a whole lotta action.

So far we've harvested one cucumber, one eggplant, a handful of (sickly) roma tomatoes, onions, garlic, a bunch of tiny bitter carrots, a few peas and plenty of lettuce, nappa cabbage, arugula and herbs.    So greens = happy (except for my cabbage that has been eaten by ....something),   roots and fruiting plants = not very happy.
Right now my garden makes me think of mid-July, not early august:   squash and cukes are just flowering, we're just getting the first ripe tomatoes, tiny peppers forming, beans flowering, etc.

But today at least is hot and sunny...we'll see if things are able to take off.


The biggest pest I have right now is something, probably a rabbit, that ate my carrot tops and half of one of my cabbages.   I'm used to dealing with tiny pest problems (like bugs and slugs).  I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the big nibblers.  They've been in our neighborhood for quite some time, but I was hoping the cats would keep them away.

I have managed to make at least one *amazing* stir-fry dinner so far:

From our garden:  
garlic
onion
eggplant
nappa cabbage

From Boston Organic:
Mango
more onion
green pepper
ginger (amazing!  so juicy!)

From Trader Joe's:
Basmati rice
"Thai Curry Simmer Sauce"
chicken.


I grilled the chicken, cooked the rice, fried the eggplant, garlic and ginger in peanut oil in a big wok.   (cooked eggplant for over 1/2 hour a la Mark Bittman...it became creamy and delicious!) Threw in onions.   Peppers.  Cabbage.   red pepper.   Fresh mango.  Cut up chicken and stirred it in.   poured simmer sauce on top.  Delicious!   (also, I am very proud to now be able to grill a chicken breast *while* stir frying on the stovetop inside.  I am magical.)

late June salad recipe

Simple, but exactly what I've been eating.  I love arugula, so anything with it will be delicious to me.

(haven't made this yet, but wanted to keep the link because it looked so good!)

http://whatscookingamerica.net/Salad/caesarargulasalad.htm

Garden Mid-June

A million shades of green: yellow-green garlic blades and bluish kale leaves in the June garden.

Still raining...

Well, in the spirit of "it's always fun to read these things next year," I'll give the most obvious update: It's cold and rainy, and has been for days.    Like, low 50's cold.   Like, cold enough in June to put a cloche over my eggplants (i.e. a fairly large pot.   To keep them warm at night).   Of course this is my first year trying real (i.e. non-asian) eggplants, and of course it gets wicked cold right after I plant them.  

My tomatoes look cold, my peppers are shivering, etc. etc.  The drama of a spring garden.   Maybe early June is the season for whining.   (Example: I think the only time its been warm and sunny was for the long weekend when we went outta town and all the seeds I'd planted withered up from lack of water.  Wah).   

Updates:  I've been forcing myself to eat garden lettuce, knowing that even though it might grow bigger, I've often waited and had lettuce bolt or get bitter before getting to eat it.   So I harvest one plant or two plants per salad (one plant at this stage seems to equal two small servings).  The upside of this is that, since I planted the lettuce in the cucumber plot, the faster we eat the lettuce, the faster we'll be able to plant the cucumbers, if it ever gets warm again.    My arugula looks great, and I use it to supplement my (but not Dawn's) salads.   We also are eating radishes, green onions and herbs.   I planted my hot peppers and I'm avidly reading salsa recipes, excited to eventually use them - the older I've gotten, the more I like just a small amount of spice in my food.  And I did my annual carrot re-plant - you know, the one where my first, carefully curated, two-seeds-every-two-inches, hours-on-my-knees, carefully-dusted-with-fresh sawdust-and-watered-every-day planting yields about fifteen carrot sprouts after weeks of careful spa treatment.  And weeds, it yields lots and lots of weeds.  especially since my compost is "cold" instead of "hot" - which means that any composted seeds aren't killed over the winter.   So for the second planting I'm ripping up all the "volunteer" tomatoes, squash, crabgrass, purslaine and other randomness around my fifteen tiny carrot seedlings, painstakingly trying to preserve them agains the much heartier weeds.     Then I basically dig some lines in the dirt in the empty spots, pour out an ass-ton of carrot seeds, swirl them around a little and say, "good luck!"
  The beets are doing their usual thing of barely coming up and growing slowly.   Well, if they don't shape up, they are going to be bush beans before they know what hit them!  :)

Also, the teensy little potted apple tree I got a few years ago has its very first apples growing...so, so cool!

pictures to come!

Harvest Season

Harvest, 8/26

So....I haven't posted in a little while - BECAUSE I'VE BEEN GARDENING MY TAIL OFF!    And I've even got some other people involved in my capers (ie, fermenting...the final (?) frontier).   More on that later....

So....what happens in the garden (even a postcard-sized urban garden) in August to keep a girl too busy to blog?   Everything. 

Crudite season

It has been so ridiculously hot the last couple of days that even though some veggies are ready, I have been on strike from any recipe containing the words fry, boil, steam, grill or even cook.

Plus, with helping take care of Dawn (who broke her collarbone) I'm too lazy to even prepare a salad (and the lettuce is mostly done anyway).

Instead, I'm just eating raw veggies.  So far we've got tender new dragon beans (purple and yellow beans above), fresh-pulled purple carrots and a farmer's market cucumber.   Just add  Spicy Trader Joe's Hummus, tabouli, a loaf of olive bread from the Brookline farmer's market to make the meal seem more, well, meal-like.    There is plenty of time for slaving over the stove in September and October...now I'm going hunter-gatherer style until the thermometer goes back down below 90.

Carrot harvest

The Harvest begins....

Cold peanut noodles and the July Garden - stir-fry season

Cold noodles + garden veggies in homemade peanut sauce on a hot day

Well, I have about a million blog posts I intend to write, but for now a short one will have to do.   It's July, it's hot as balls up here in the northeast, and things are moving at their usual unpredictable schedule.   The tomatoes just grew out of their cages, but so far everything is green, green green.  Green tomatoes, tiny green peppers, green peas, dark green kale, bluish-green broccoli (still no heads), neon-green cabbage.   The hot weather stuff is still coming:  in what I think is a first for this year, no eggplants, beans or cukes yet.   We are late.

Garden Diary - frustration, salad days

Well, here it is June, for real now. Finally hot - classic New England non-spring: straight rainy cold into boiling heat.   So, conditions not so perfect.   But as David Mas Masumoto writes in his farming memoir "Epitaph for a Peach"  - we can't control the weather.   And we can't control the garden.   In fact, organic gardening, and growing food in general, is in a big way about letting go of control.   Of course, its way different to grow food for the table than for income - I don't have a season's worth of work on the line.   But still, after putting in work into a home garden, I wish I could guarantee that everything turns out perfect.

The good: despite the weather we have big, beautiful heads of lettuce that taste delicious with a little homemade vinaigrette - if we can eat them before they bolt.   There are herbs and green onions to sprinkle on food.

And the peas out front are finally flowering, but no pods yet.   Spinach, kale and bok choi still growing, but small.  carrots tiny.   Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, potatoes and beans all growing, but none even close to producing fruit or roots: the bigger ones are just starting to flower.

Even more frustrating, the backyard peas are small and will probably need to get pulled to make room for the cucumbers.   Only a few radishes balled up, and the beets are still teensy.   (Also, Trouble dug half of them up.  Sometimes she thinks the garden is her litter box, little jerk).  The carrots are patchy and it will take at least another month to see how they do.   Caterpillars are chowing down on the cabbages, and barely any of my beneficial-insect plants have flowered yet. Nothing in the broccoli department, and each green onion means one less big, full season onion.

Strawberries have come ripe almost all at once - delicious, but a time-limited proposition - we have to eat them before they go squishy.

In other words, despite lots of hard work, the garden produces some frustration along with produce.   But I've been thinking about this - about how working on this garden project is a lesson in humility.  A certain kind of manic energy, of perfectionism, will always be thwarted in a living project like this one.  And I have those qualities in spades, always rushing around, trying to plant something and fill in blank spaces where something failed, trying to cram another plant in, trying to prevent any kind of failure.  But another way of thinking might help us prepare better for reality - prepare for imperfection.  Yes, squash vine borers will inevitably seek a home in our zukes - yes, some tomatoes will rot on the vine because I run out of time or energy to preserve them.  Yes, some things will not grow or grow poorly, weeds will come up, and sometimes I'll forget or won't have time to weed, prune, water or feed.   These things could (and do) cause a little anxiety in a home gardener, especially for me, this season when I'm feeling so on top of my game and have put some much time into making things healthy and productive.   But a garden is good for teaching me a lesson about control - that we are not, in fact, in control.  There is the weather, there are insects, there are the plants themselves, and there is life, which sometimes switches up our priorities without warning.   We do our best, and then all we can do is wait and hope and appreciate what comes - and forgive ourselves if it doesn't.

Right now, I'm trying to exist in the here and now, in the salad days.  I could stress about how the beets aren't doing that well, or how maybe my decision to plant carrots between the spinach will make it hard for me to plant fall crops in that section.   Or I could eat lettuce.  Lots and lots of lettuce.  Truth be told, with a chopped green onion, a tiny radish, Boston Organic carrots, a head of our lettuce and bbq'd chicken on top, its something I made almost from start to finish.   And its lunch.  And just about the best damn salad I think I've ever eaten.

Recipe for vinaigrette, courtesy of Alice Water's Simple Foods:

Mix together 1 Tablespoon red wine vinegar,
pepper and salt
to taste.

Whisk in 3-4 Tablespoons olive oil.

pour over your salad and eat it.

Memorial Day, Redux, 2011

 It's funny, I thought this year was much colder and wetter than other years... (we just had our first stretch of warm, sunny weather in the last few days of May)...but looking back one year in the blog, I noticed a post with the same title as this one....apparently, last year memorial day was also the first time it got warm enough to put everything in the ground (especially tender stuff, like the tomatoes and eggplants.)   And I thought I was slacking.  Nope, turns out we just live pretty far north, in the scheme of things.   Reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (my annual re-reading), she talks about putting in tomatoes and harvesting lettuce in the first week of May.  I feel only pissy envy ("Well, if we all lived in Virginia, maybe we could all have an extra two months growing season, and maybe I could grow melons and okra and peppers that needed their own cages!).  

"upstairs" back garden: shade-tolerant

As it is, weather is a huge part of our limitations as gardeners up here, and getting to know, and possibly accept, the growing cycle, is a part of it.   I know I shouldn't be shocked by looking back to last year's May pictures, but when I remember last year's garden, I remember the July version - five foot tall tomato plants and every possible growing space filled with plants, or, less happily, weeds.   Its a big surprise to see how much last year's Memorial Day pictures look like this year's.  I guess I feel like I should be starting earlier, or the weather should be warmer - I should be ready to eat things by now.   But its just not time yet. 

My second attempt at a perennial border, May '11

Here's what I try to remind myself: June is when we harvest lettuce, peas, bok choi, broccoli (if we're lucky) and maybe some tiny carrots.   Beans, cukes and zukes won't be until July, tomatoes and eggplants at the very end.   And then the season goes until mid-september. Be patient, I try to tell myself, but it feels unfair.  It's exciting to be eating fresh-grown stuff right from the backyard - nothing tastes quite like it - but if we want to try to eat garden-fresh all year long, its a lot to bank on basically eight weeks.   This year I opened up a new bed and planted it full of Roma tomatoes for canning - two hybrid romas, two heirloom "paste" tomatoes.   It feels like a luxury to devote a whole bed just for canning (and don't worry, I'm trying to squeeze out every inch of space from it before the tomates get big), but I think its something I want - its been fun to make sauce from our home "cans" this winter, and it would be easier with more Romas, even if they are more "meaty", less spicy-juicy than some of their heirloom cousins.

This year I am trying to be mindful about where my gardening energy goes - I'm trying to think about what I really want to eat, not just how I can cram in the maximum number of plants.   And so far, it feels good.  I know that we can never get enough carrots, peppers, cucumbers or tomatoes, and I love my pickled, canned beans, so I tried to make space (or give space) to a lot of those.

Onions, lettuce, and tiny peas along the fence. 

I loved my tiny golden beets from last year, and now there is a beet patch.   But gone are chard and zucchinis, big broccolis and a huge sunny spot devoted to herbs.   The broccoli takes up a lot of space and barely gets going.  The Zucchinis always get borers.   The herbs have been moved to shadier locations, freeing up space.  And nobody ever ate the chard.   The carrots were planted all at once, instead of the whole-summer labor of love that used to be devoted to getting a new crop every two weeks, like the package recommends, and always ends up confusing me about what to harvest when.   We're working here for maximum satisfaction, maximum yumminess, for the least amount of stress and worry.  I've been putting lots of time into the garden recently, but that's because I have the time, and the weather is beautiful.  Later, I hope to not feel guilty about not doing enough or not eating enough of the produce.   If I don't get a second crop of lettuce or peas, I'll try not to fret.  Sure, I'll work my butt off canning tomatoes and making bean pickles (and possibly sauerkraut, this year) - maybe I'll coerce Dawn into drying some herbs.   But I'm planning on harvesting the lettuce young (no more waiting for it to reach "full size" and have it bolt) and the carrots all at once.  I'm not trying to plant in marginal spaces anymore - I'm letting those go back to weeds and groundcover (and a violently virile oregano plant), and not wasting time planting anything where it won't thrive.   I planted only potatoes and onions in my community garden plot - the kinds of things that can make it through a few hot days without any water, much less TLC.  I'll give away what I can't plant or eat.  Or at least, that's my plan.   In May, this is my intention: to enjoy what I can, and not sweat the small stuff if I can't.  (Let you know how it goes.)

Peas...soon w/ peppers and tomates

Garden diary:  By now, the carrot seedlings have shown their heads as have the beets.  Both are a little patchy.  The spinach is hardly growing, as usual, but the lettuce is big enough for a baby harvest, radishes on their way.   This year I planted a bunch of cabbages (where the herbs used to be), and they are looking good.  Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant in the ground, bean teepee still needs to go up. (pics from May)   Tasted first strawberry today- tart but very good.  


Here's some pictures from the May garden, before the sun came out.  

I'll have more of  the June garden soon...

Monkey

Dawn's front Raised Bed...in May.   Compare with May 2010....

Peas in the back. Party in the front. (radishes in the middle).  Cucumbers coming later.

Schlubby potato buckets (by now they've just sprouted)

Spinaches planted, w space for eggplant (I call this my "no dirt left behind" policy).

Keeping the Harvest.....

So it's been far too long since my last blog post, but now, the day before Thanksgiving, I finally have a little time on my hands.

The garden has been put to bed, almost.   Late to mid October, me and Dawn cut down the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beans, cucumbers and broccoli.   I pulled up the last of the carrots (some of which, left to grow the proper amount of time, actually got to a decent size!) and beets (ditto), pulled off the green peppers, hoping they'd go to red in our fridge, and gathered up all the green tomatoes to bring inside.

It's comforting, after a few years, to start to have a ritual.   Now I know when the heat goes on in late October (we can never make it to November 1!), upstairs comes the little wooden, three-shelved "onion box" I got at an unfinished wood store, with little mesh grates on the doors.   It lives in our back hallway all winter, our impromptu "root cellar" where we keep onions, potatoes garlic and winter squash.

The dried garlic and onions I grew are gone - I always mean to keep them longer, but they are so good, I always say, what the hell, what if they spoil, live for today, and they go into everything I cook between August and October and then they are gone.  :(  Every year I vow to plant more.

The last of the potatoes are hanging on, and I am carefully plotting their fate, planning my last few potato dishes with them in mind.  But we are moving into a different phase of year, here in New England, something I am slowly getting used to.   When I realized that tomatoes, eggplants and peppers were only fresh here for a few months (more like six to ten weeks!), it brought me down.  How the heck are you supposed to eat the lush, sweet, local produce everyone rhapsodizes about, when October-May practically nothing grows?

Well, some people use season-extenders, which I'd like to learn more about, just like everything else I'd like to get around to (sewing buttons back on my coats, selling my stand-alone Ikea closet from two houses ago on Craigslist, writing a novel).   Apparently, with the right cold frame, you can get lettuce in January (and I might believe it - my lettuce is still going strong!) but until then I'll have to stick to a tried-and-true old farmwife tradition: food preservation.

So, a few seasons into my New England gardening education, it suddenly dawned on me: old school (ie, colonial) housewives couldn't go to the supermarket in January to get food.  They knew this in the flush seasons of July and August, and that is where our very most basic "processed foods" come from: jams, jellies, pickles, ketchup, mustard, relishes and sauerkraut, wine and beer.   Who knows if the nutritious value was preserved (was it?) but at least they had a little variety.    It also explains the difference between what we know as "Italian cuisine"  and "German cuisine."    Italy is linked with tomatoes, basil, zuccinis, and other fresh veggies of every kind.   Well, guess what?  It stays warm in Italy for a lot longer than in Germany, which is famous for bratwurst, beer, and sauerkraut.  Or worse, Russian food, where tomatoes often barely make it to ripe at all.   This is actually where my ancestors come from, and it is known for hardy root vegetables: potatoes, cabbages and beets.   Black bread.    Why?   Not because they are unhealthful and hate salads, but because this was what was available.