Its great to be able to go outside grab a handful of tomatoes when a meal arrives.  I actually do not really like raw tomatoes (shudder, gasp – gardener treason!) but my kids love them.  Tonight for dinner I grabbed a cucumber, a handful of tomatoes and a bowl of blackberries (courtesy of our neighbor’s out of control bushes that are trailing over the fence) and had dinner.  Of course the protein of tonight’s dinner was frozen chicken nuggets, but no one’s perfect right?  Anyway it seems everyday there is another harvest of tomatoes to serve up and we may have permanently found a new place for our heat loving plants.

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Just mash together equal parts white wine vinegar and fresh blueberries, add some basil, and put it in a jar for a couple weeks. The jury is still out on whether this is a good idea… Alicia is looking at the fruit flies buzzing around it disapprovingly.

Blueberry-Basil Vinegar

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We approach canning for a practical standpoint.  Whatever will attract the most fruit flies is attacked first, hence the tomatoes canned on Sunday.  Blueberries are the next priority.  Yesterday I made a blueberry pie (with lard crust) and today it was syrup.  We are so overloaded with jams and jellies I am having to try different ideas for fruits.  Pancakes are a regular breakfast food around here so I figured syrup would get used up fairly quickly (like before next summer).  It’s also pretty easy.  Just crush and boil blueberries, run them through a food mill and then boil again with sugar water.

I used 8 cups of blueberries and got 5 pints worth, which seems pretty good. I used the proportions in the Ball canning book which I recommend.  We got it from the library last season and I added it to my Christmas list soon after.  Its a great book for coming up with ideas and it has all the basic info you’ll ever need as well.   Tomorrow I may make blueberry juice or I might  just freeze the rest for winter cobblers.

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We got home, and knew that if we waited, the project would loom over us all week, so we dove right in, canning them less than 12 hours after we picked them. We cooked down a bunch into a thicker sauce for pizzas, and canned the rest of them raw. The only downside to that method was the 45 minute processing time required for uncooked tomatoes.

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One of the most memorable flavors (and colors – that red is so vivid) from my childhood is this very jam, made not from a secret recipe but from the back of the pectin box. Funny how often I ask my mom for a recipe and she says, “Buy a packet of onion soup mix – it’s on the back.”

I can’t help but overload a peanut butter and jam sandwich with too much of this tasty jam, the peanut butter preventing it from finding purchase on one side of the bread, so instead it runs down my fingers and I’m forced to wolf it down in 4 bites. It’s safest to eat it over the sink if you don’t want to have jam all over your shirt as well.

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Installation detail; plant, dirt, frame, 2004, San Francisco, CA

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We had some free time this afternoon, so I dragged the kids out to the sidewalk to help me. Which meant that Hannah kept relocating the bucket and Robbie kept climbing up the mini ladder right behind me. I managed to fill their beach bucket about 2/3 full of the tiny apples, and then we came home and decided to make apple sauce.

I cut the blossom end off each apple (supposing it might help them cook more readily) and then added a little bit of water to the pot. They cooked up in about 15 minutes, and then we ran them through the food mill. It was a surprisingly efficient process – the food mill removed the skin and cores, but most of the volume went through with the sauce.

It was super tart, so I added about a cup of sugar. The best part about it was the pretty pink color it came out. There is so much skin on all those little apples, that the red pigment dyes the final product a nice bright hue. Some for the fridge, some for the freezer, and I’ve got my eyes on those other trees of tiny apples.

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I’ve been meaning to render the fat into lard. I found a really fantastic post about it from a blog called Homesick Texan (whose carnitas recipe I also have to try).

Fat gets a bad rap these days, but doing it the old-fashioned way at least eliminates the trans fats. I don’t really have a plan for it, so I poured it into a 9 x 13 pan, refrigerated it, and then cut it up and wrapped it in waxed paper like cubes of butter, ready for the freezer. Maybe I’ll try it in some pie crust, some biscuits, or maybe it’ll just be something to fry potatoes in.

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Being in Hawaii, there is all kinds of fresh, tropical fruit available anywhere you look. Starting with the back yard, but also extending to roadside fruit stands, farmers’ markets, and even tables out in front of people’s houses. The latter type is my favorite… they are unmanned, the goods are usually really cheap, and there’s a lock-box of some type to put your money into.

Below are a few of the fruits we’ve had here:
• White Guava (mild flavor, the seeds were really hard but a pain to spit out so I just swallowed them)
• The tangerines from the tree at the house where we’re staying
• Ice Cream Bananas (apparently you freeze them and then cut them open and eat like ice cream… it tasted like a frozen banana to us though)
• Don’t know what this is… we’ve been calling it an Ugly Fruit. It was only $1 (you can see the price written on it). We haven’t tried it yet but it smells good, which is a good sign.
• These are gigantic avocados. Still waiting for them to get soft.
• A hat-full of lemons and limes… 25 cents each

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We’re spending a couple weeks in Hawaii doing a housing exchange (not to brag). Word is that it’s still pouring in Seattle, so we’re not missing much, and I’m not worried about the garden burning up. Naturally, my first question upon arriving here in Maui and seeing the red clay soil was, “I wonder how well you can compost here.” It seemed like the natural solution to the hard, arid soil, but that’s just me, I suppose.

We are staying in a house with a big lot (over an acre, I’d guess.) And a view of the ocean (not to brag.) There isn’t much in they way of gardens here (besides a pot of basil on the deck) but it has two things going for it in the farm department:

1. Fruit trees – Tangerine, banana and papaya trees on the premises. We’ve had a few tangerines so far, and there are some ripe papayas that apparently we can pick with a bamboo trimmer. (They’re pretty far up in the tree).

2. Livestock – There is a flock of 10 or 12 chickens, from a couple months old to laying hens. Plus, the big bonus, 2 sheep that look like goats. They are a little bit too friendly at times (see the photo below; they think they own the table on the deck.) Our morning routine consists of feeding the sheep (Robbie is kind of getting the hang of it), letting the chickens out to forage, and refreshing their water.

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We did some research with the Forest Service and found out about places where there had been logging and burning happening in the last year, which supposedly yield good mushroom conditions the following season. Morels proved to be a fickle mistress, blending into the ground and demanding lots of time before rewarding us with a few impressive patches. The bulk of our haul (if you can call it that) came in groups, with a few random ones interspersed throughout the day.

The results of our initial trip: clearcuts were good, the burn zone didn’t give us anything (but might have been too high), and even higher up there was a lighter-colored morel that we only found a few of (but that were superior specimens.)

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- Carrie bought us these cacti from IKEA (I think as a housewarming gift) and surprise of surprises, they’re not dead. In fact, one is blooming a flower.

- Alicia found a sweet ’70s seed sprouting kit, and so we’re getting our health on and making sprouts. It works a lot better than the mason jar with a screen on the bottom that we tried last year.

- Trader Joe’s sells the most stunning basil plants for $3. So there is one sitting on the counter… it’s getting a little wilty and I’ve been watering it really well, so I don’t know what’s going on. But it’s looking a lot better than the waterlogged yellow basil we have going outside.

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Second Nature by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, in his first book from 1991, wrote the book that I should have read first while I was working on that project. It would have saved me a lot of trouble and thinking. His thoughts on the relationship between people and nature, people and plants, and people and land helped me see what it is that I am doing with this “project”.

When we first bought the house a couple years ago, we immediately did some terracing and reworking of the front yard so we could use the space more efficiently (i.e. make more garden beds). At one point I got tired of all the weeds I was removing and decided to leave a “natural garden” – just let whatever was growing, a mix of poppies and weeds, keep on growing. It only lasted a week or two, at which point the entire thing looked terrible, and I gave up on “nature”. Pollan talks about the exact same thing in his book, where he tried to let native plants grow into one of his flower beds, temporarily putting aside the idea that anything you haven’t planted is a weed. He lasted a little bit longer, but ended up realizing that the weeds had completely taken over and eliminated what little order he had set out to establish.

I still let sunflowers pop up wherever they will, and there are these stunning red poppies that show up everywhere in the late spring, but besides that I keep things pretty tame around here. The way Pollan writes about all the functions of our relationship to a garden, from the productivity of vegetables to the beauty of a composed set of plants, I began to realize that plants are one of the primary metaphors I’m looking at my life through these days. In many ways the entire project is out of my control, dependent on so many factors that have nothing do do with my efforts. On the other hand, the deep satisfaction that comes from seeing what happens when I put in a little bit of sweat and set the conditions right for something to grow… it always gives me hope that life isn’t necessarily a zero-sum equation. That in fact you might be able to reap far more from it than you deserve based on what you’ve contributed.

There is a story in the book about a scientist who planted a tree in 100 pounds of dirt, and only watered it for years. At a certain point, after the tree had grown to a significant size, the tree was removed and weighed and the dirt was also weighed. Only 4 oz had been lost from the dirt, and from that, a 120 lb. plant had grown. Water, sun, time. Somehow, these base elements produce far more than they should, year after year, and I in turn am fed and watered in watching it happen.

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Gardening in Planting Strips: The Seattle Department of Transportation removed the requirement to get a costly permit to garden in planting strips (areas that often have good sunlight for growing healthy vegetables).

Good news for everyone looking for a few more square feet (or the first few square feet) for their garden.

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We recently arranged to purchase half a pig from a local farm.  We’ve been wanting to buy meat like this for awhile and finally pulled the trigger (although not literally – we’re paying someone else to do that part).  This has necessitated clearing out the basement freezer to make room for a large quantity of meat that will be coming our way next month,  We had a couple of bags of rhubarb from last year’s crop that I just chopped and froze.  When the rhubarb was ready for harvest we had  a lot of jam (grape, strawberry, plum and blueberry), chutney (plum) and pie filling (apple) already processed and in our stockpile of canned goods.  Because of this I was at a loss for ideas for the rhubarb, which just ended up being frozen for later use.  “Later use” had arrived and I was still at a loss for ideas.  I ended up making a simple cobbler.  It tasted great, but had a little more green then I would have liked.  (Note the similarities between my dessert and slime).  I guess that is why strawberries are usually used with rhubarb. It did the trick though and  now we are one bag closer to an empty freezer for our coming pig.

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Then yesterday we ate our first salad of the year, thinning out the thick rows of lettuce. And despite the obvious cliché, it was different enough from our typical winter fare of crock pot meals to make us look up and say, “This salad is actually pretty amazing.” It was probably 15 minutes out of the garden, with a lemon-honey-mustard vinaigrette and some pepper, so light and tender that it just about melted in your mouth (in a way that wasn’t weird for a vegetable to do.)

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A bunch of the plants are in pots made from newspaper (thanks ReadyMade magazine) and ready for the seedling exchange I’m going to in a few weeks. We have tons of tomatoes, peppers, and squash, along with a couple different kinds of cucumbers and some swiss chard; way more than we have room for.

{ 2 posts today because I always get excited when I see we’re being linked from somewhere… thanks to Trudy’s friend Emily for finding this one from Apartment Therapy’s Re-Nest. Onward and upward! }

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Free plant story #2: Last November we were in Leavenworth for Thanksgiving. On one of our walks I noticed an entire hillside covered with hops (the plant that adds the bitterness and aroma to beer). I stole away for a half hour and scavenged a bag full of hops, and though they were pretty brown, they smelled really good. My extreme-brewing brother Alex was all for doing an experiment with them, but my scientist-brewing brother Ian was appalled at the sight. A few months later they remained unused, so my laziness decided for me that it wasn’t a great move to brew with them, and into the compost pile they went.

However, I didn’t only harvest expired hops that day. I also pulled up a couple chunks of root (hops spread like crazy and any part of the plant that touches the ground will send down roots). Over the winter I had a couple pots with these roots sitting in the back yard, and they just started sprouting. I installed some wires for the hops to climb on the side of the house, and by the end of the summer they should be 15 feet in the air, ready to make some tasty beer.

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We just enjoyed our last 2009 home-grown tomato this week! For the first time we tried hanging our tomatoes up to ripen indoors when the rains arrived last fall. Last November we cut the stems that had green tomatoes on them and hung them over our kitchen sink. We just cut 2-3 foot-long stems and strung them up in our kitchen window (which doesn’t actually get any sun). It was a big improvement over the previous year, when I pulled entire plants up and hung them in our garage — and then kept forgetting to check them.

I was amazed at how much time had passed between harvest and getting to enjoy the last of the tomatoes.

Leslie

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The Jersey Supreme asparagus that we planted last year is just starting to come up.

I keep checking the asparagus bed for signs of life, and finally today there were two tiny little asparagus spears poking out of the ground. Asparagus patches take a couple years to establish so we bought crowns that were supposed to be ready the next year and planted them last summer. Asparagus are kind of the divas of the vegetable world; I had to dig an 18 inch ditch to plant them in, let them grow some, then bury them up to their necks, so to speak, in more dirt. However, once they’re established, an asparagus patch will apparently last 10 years or more. With any luck, they’ll be our first edible crop this spring, and for many springs to come.

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“Egyptian Walking Onions are very unusual, heirloom onions. They are top-setters, which means that they produce onion seeds from the flowering green tops of the onion. They are called walking onions because the top-setters fall over and re-root themselves; literally ‘walking’.”

Apparently they are great to use like green onions when they’re small, and they also grow nice shallot-like bulbs. In addition to taking a walk around the garden. I’ll post some photos when I plant them.

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All it takes is a self-addressed stamped envelope to get some starter.

Came across this free sourdough starter offer… I think it’s actually from the Oregon Trail and 150 years old. I’m mailing off for it today; look for an update in a month or so. Sounds like a fun thing to try with our bread technique. Read the “About Carl” section… what a champ!

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At some point, one of the residents came out and was joking about how you know the garden nerds when they are huddled around a steaming pile of manure, shoveling in the rain, and exclaiming “I can’t believe how much God loves me!”

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Here’s an interesting bit of chicken lore: Did you know that chickens can’t taste pepper heat? That’s right! You can feed a chicken a fresh habanero pepper, and it won’t even flinch. Lizards and chickens are alike in that manner.

Just in case you were wondering…

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The most fun part of turning the compost is seeing all the worms at work… there are so many of them. I know this photo probably looks kind of disgusting to some of you, but it is an amazing sight to see hundreds of worms in each shovel-full. They seem to show up and as time goes on, there are more and more of them. By the time the compost is ready to put on the garden, we’re adding nice fertilizer plus a ton of worms.

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