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.

A blog which has nothing to do with gardening

So, after sitting around in a classroom discussing the future of the "publishing" industry, I listened to an awesome new-ish album (2009) and read about how one local performer is DIY-ing her way to financial solvency: Amanda Palmer.

The concept is - the old model of paying artists was to have them "signed" (or for writers, "contracted") to a major label (or publishing house) which would then front the costs of producing and distributing your media.   Now that often that we as writers can create and distribute our media ourselves....do we need that big contract, that big signing?   Well, it certainly would be nice to get an advance..... but is there another way?

I liked this short description of how Amanda Palmer made money simply by promoting herself.  Of course, its a bummer that such a cool, off-beat punk-indie-rock-cabaret (caberet??) artist would not make money off her album.   But its fantastic that she is doing her own promotion, and getting contact with her own fan base directly.   As such a quirky (and dark) non-pop artist, there's always going to be a limited audience - so how do those of us interested in quality over popularity, innovation over selling out, um, sell ourselves?
read on for one possibility....
(I of course would prefer that I didn't have to auction off my stuff, but whatevs...)

http://www.suite101.com/content/amanda-palmer-saviour-of-the-music-industry-a130519

ps: the album is great.  Paste to browser to listen to a song....

http://ilike.myspacecdn.com/play#Amanda+Palmer:Guitar+Hero:44419473:s28038082.9144795.3088909.0.2.221%2Cstd_36382125cd664a549cad6ca3fb25527d

Annie Proulx, gardening and fiction

E. Annie Proulx: (2000) "All over this scratched and worn earth regional and rural cultures, the natural world, and the diversity of life itself are eroding and crumbling under terrific outside pressures. For more than a decade, through the medium of fiction, I have been trying to catch pieces of North American rural lives and ways squeezed in the pincers of change. For me everything begins with the great landscape—not scenery but soil and water, climate and weather, indigenous plant and animal life, geography and geology. Against this background human adaptation to, and exploitation of, that landscape in a particular time orders the personalities and characaters of my stories, shapes the stories themselves which must tumble out of the place portrayed. I am concerned as well with the growing gap between rural and urban attitudes and behavior, the rural perception of the economic forces that call out the marching orders."


This summer I started two blogs: one about my garden, and one about my writing and teaching.   I haven't wanted to write too much about the teaching, namely because I tell all my students (I can't believe I have students!) to look at my blog, and then where am I? 

But it's felt like a funny stretch for me, writing about my backyard and my devotion to my tomatoes, beans and peppers, and then also trying to keep up my fiction.  I've always placed these in two separate boxes - writing is indoors, public, and professional, while gardening is outdoors, a private and amateurish pleasure.   But I've known in my heart that they were linked, a kind of ying and yang.   Writing involves sending my mind fixedly far away from the here and now.   Gardening pushes exactly the opposite buttons - it is a radical rooting in the here and now - the smell of this tomato bush, the stink of the compost, the wet or dry dirt, the hidden bean harvest, the way my fingers learn to find little weeds and pull them out.  It's an immersion in sights, sounds and smells - tiny little lacewing insects, flies, worms, birds, caterpillars, rot or growth on a plant.   The information is here and now.  And the product is for my pleasure only: no matter how hard I work to preserve the harvest, it will go.   Eventually, no matter how delicious a meal is, it will disappear into the belly of one of my friends, to be absorbed into their bodies or gone forever. 

Writing is the opposite - it is sitting alone in a little room, the quieter the better, and the only senses triggered signal distractions: a tea kettle, cold feet, the phone ringing, someone at the door.   The world here has to come entirely from our mind.   And it's not to be enjoyed now - what we make now might disappear forever.  But the final product is a kind of everlasting pie - I can (hopefully) pass it around to a world's worth of "relatives" - and unlike a pie, enjoy it or not, it will last months, maybe years. 

Review of "Radical Homemaking"

So, in the inevitable crossover of my literary and gardening pursuits, I present for you a witty and charming review of a book I fully intend to read (just as soon as those dang beans are harvested, the tomatoes safely in their winter storage box, and  my entire herb garden moved!).

http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article08311001.aspx

Enjoy.


On an update note, this blog seems to have gone as my gardening goes.....super heavy and intense at the beginning of the season, then trailing off a little as August makes everything go crazy, and down to barest maintenance as school starts up and life gets busy in September.    The basic update:  the cool weather slowed down all my fall crops, but I'm still harvesting a little lettuce, beans galore, tomatoes and peppers.  I have ripe bok choi, but can't find the time to eat it.   I've made chili, tomato sauce, steamed beans, more tomato sauce, all sorts of middle-eastern style Tagine potato, eggplant and tomato and pepper dishes, etc. etc. in various combinations.    In general, I have it down to a science at this point:   beans are cleaned, tipped and tailed, and frozen in plastic bags.   Tomatoes are sliced in half, cored and de-seeded, sprinkled with olive oil, a little salt and maybe rosemary, and roasted on parchment paper in a 200 degree oven for 1-5 hours.   (1 hour for making sauce later that evening, when, cooled, the skins slip off pretty easy, 5 hours for bagging and freezing).   cucumbers and peppers are eaten ASAP.   It's nice now, that planting is all done and harvesting, cooking, preserving and eating are the biggest chores.   Looking out now for the first frost, so we can grab all the tender plants before jack frost does!

How to actually process tomatoes!

I'm re-posting the link to my friend Janelle's blog, where she actually tells you in some detail how to do the things I airily whisked onto my blog, not giving y'all the hint that I spent hours trying to figure out how exactly to (safely) dry, roast, freeze, puree and can tomato products.   It's definitely a learned art, and Janelle gives good directions.  (also bomb-ass pictures).

http://creativehomesteading.blogspot.com/2010/08/tomatoes.html

My only note of caution about preserving is to always follow a recipe and to never, ever try to preserve something in oil.   I had one book tell me to let my dried tomatoes sit in olive oil, to make "a delightful sauce for soups and salads".   I thought, ok, added garlic and it quickly turned moldy, thank goodness, because that turns out to be a fairly perfect botulism environment.   Vinegar kills just about everything it touches, and is safe (thus we have pickles, catchup, mustard and mayonaise), but if you want to make a flavored olive oil, I'd use it within a few days and store it in the fridge.   For the dried tomatoes, they might be acidic enough to be all right, possibly add some vinegar to the mix and nothing else,  but I'm still leery.   

More on canning soon - hopefully with pictures!

Preserving and Perservering

Beans

Well, it's August, and you know what that means: full on harvest time.  Yes, there are still many chores to be done, but I feel like in August the bulk of the work shifts to inside the house - what to do with the tons of produce we get.   This year we got a CHEST FREEZER, and so instead of having to stand over a hot canning bath if I want to keep something, I can just pop a lot of stuff in the Freezer.  Like those beans.  Cool.

And, in this garden, you win some, you lose some.  I think I got 1.5 beets, after all that fussing over them.  I (fingers crossed) will have 1 really nice canteloupe.   And the squash bit it, hardcore.   In general, my plants seem to be able to fight off most bugs that attack their leaves.   But we got squash vine borers, that get the part of the plant that goes into the ground, and pretty much finishes them off.   So no squash.

But we are pulling in 5-15 tomatoes a week, including some heirlooms, 3-4 cucumbers, and maybe 20-30 new beans every time I look outside.   The onions, potatoes and garlic are in, so I can cook with those, and the eggplants are producing on schedule.   Peppers - well, lots of green, we are holding out for red.   And I'm trying to coddle some late-summer lettuce, bok-choi and peas - so, in general, I'm feeling pretty well fed.

The food goes into stir-fries, pesto, tomato sauce and salad.   I also got ambitious with the tomatoes and beans:   The umpteen beans got turned into a sort of bean-based pesto type dip, that is really delicious, and frozen for future parties.  (Babs Kingsolver calls it "frijole mole" - most people seem to think it's: strange but good)
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/Frijole-Mole.pdf

Into the freezer can now go pesto, bean dip, tomato puree, roasted tomatoes, and whole beans.   I'll get to canning and pickling in a week or two, when it's a little colder.

And with the tomatoes, I"m trying it all.   I've peeled, cored and seeded plenty of my over-healthy romas to make from-scratch sauce, run them through my roma-3000 (or whatever it's called) to freeze the puree, and even bought extras to put away. - well, I bought about $10 of almost-ripe heirlooms at the farmers market to try preserving.   As per my book (The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food, by Janet Chadwick), I sliced the tomatoes up thin and left them in Dawn's food dehydrator until they became, and I quote, "leathery" and put them on my shelf, and also roasted a bunch at 225 degrees, with olive oil, to freeze (note to self: 6 hours waaaaay too long for thin sliced tomatoes to roast - anyone want burnt-up tomato chips?).

So, to all my friends who have cooked with me, and to Dawn who has suffered the effects of my vegetable mania ("OK, so I'll cook the carrots and the beets together, the beans on their own, we'll mash the potatoes, oh yeah and the corn, and what about a salad....?"), thanks for the help.    I'm excited for the cooler weather and some canning, because who doesn't feel good with jars and jars of home-grown food on their shelf?

Sunday in the garden + potato salad recipe

I spent this Sunday afternoon  as I've done for the past couple of weeks: in the garden.   There's lots of other stuff I should be doing on Sundays - writing, grocery shopping, paying bills or getting my car fixed.  Looking for work in the fall.   But there's something truly seductive for me about the backyard on a quiet weekend afternoon.   It's at the point right now where the garden needs a few hours of work a week, and then it will be more or less happy.   But its just a wonderful thing to do, on a day to myself, to give attention back to the plants that will feed me.  Last week I fertilized the nightshades, peppers, and vines, and planted about nine more feet of carrots to come up this fall.   Even out in the hot sun, I love puttering out there: stringing up cucumbers that are trying to grow upside-down, pulling crabgrass out of the beds, checking the tomatoes to find out that we have FIVE new super-ripe Roma tomatoes.    Deciding to cook them up into sauce, and invite a friend over for potato salad.  Pulling up a few big, bulbed out onions, tiny beets, yanking out a few purple carrots that after 2 1/2 months are finally big enough to eat.   Emptying out a couple potato buckets to find out how they did, pinching suckers off the tomato vines, harvesting basil or sorrell, or transplanting teensy, tiny little lettuce plants from the shady part of the yard.   After a week full of work and driving around, errands and deadlines, it's nice to slow down for a few hours, exist in greenspace, and tend to something - All this week, I'll know that my garden will grow healthier, and more food will be ready because of the work I put into it.  

Upstairs, I cooked the onions under low heat, skinned and seeded the tomatoes, and stewed them together for a little bit of sauce, along with salt, pepper and some basil.  Ate it for lunch over raviolis - without any extra sugar, the tomato sauce was a little acidic, but full of flavor.   Potato salad tonight was a little bit more complicated, but the basic idea is fresh, boiled potatoes, oil, vinegar, a little bit of mayo, and anything fresh from your garden you want to add....