More on seed-saving

Very dear to me

The tone of my most recent post was rather flip. Granted, I do cast a jaundiced eye on most of the world, particularly the world of commerce (in this instance, seed catalogs), but on occasion I actually am reverential.

And today, I revere my seeds. Today I am back in my cold basement, cleaning and sorting seeds, shelling dried beans and the like. I look at what is in front of me and I feel positively giddy.

Especially with the winds howling and the snow blowing outside, I feel like I am the keeper of a vast store of botanical wealth. Seed-saving, like bread-baking and vineyard maintenance, are three very particular activities which connect me with the past. My great-great grandparents would know this feeling, and would know the value of saving the seeds of this year's harvest. They'd know the love and the satisfaction that goes into kneading and forming loaves of bread. They'd have enjoyed the small labor that is vineyard and orchard maintenance, especially considering the vast reward found in a successful harvest. They would be appreciative, in other words.

I will tell you this: there is not much in this world for which I would trade my hills of beans.

On seeds and seed-saving

'Mama, these flowers don't smell': the kid with the parsnip umbrels last spring: as you can see, I'll have enough parsnip seed next year

It's happening earlier every year: this inrush of seed catalogs into our mailboxes. Is it a good thing?

I wonder. I suppose the earlier they show up, they've got the advantage that we haven't wholly forgotten the previous garden season (and then buy accordingly). But then I wonder about this, too: I would think that a forgetful gardener, snow-deadened late in the winter season, would be the best customer. So happy for greenery would he or she be, the orders would be flying. I am quite sure, though, they've market tested all of this, and have decided the holiday stressed gardeners out there need to spend their money on seeds TOO.

Boy, I sound bitter. This is not the case. I enjoy getting these catalogs (within reason). Mainly, I enjoy getting them and huffily sniffing at them that "I would never plant THAT," and various forms of the same.

But over the last two years, I have become a seed-saver. This started small (as all bad habits do: it's just a little bit of cocaine, officer) and now, well, now I am a bit overwhelmed. I undertook the task of placing the darned things in some recognizable order last night, down in the chilly basement, accompanied by loud music and a big mug of wine. I'll say it was fun, but that may have been the wine talking. I will say I probably don't NEED to order any seeds this year, I have done such a good job preserving my last harvests. That is gratifying, but not...satisfying.

So, I will give in, probably in January, and order more seeds. In this, our hyperconsumerist culture, I could always...use...more.

Thoughts for Monday

For $1.98 per seed pack, these too can be yours!

"Eat responsibly. [E]ating is an agricultural act....(consumers of food) must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.... This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship."*

Wanna commit an agricultural act of your own? Our mailbox has already seen a couple of seed catalogs this year. When they arrive at your place, do a little bookmarking, and do a bit more mental gardening for next year: how about more vegetables? It will be so fun, and so very good to eat! And, well, it might just make you feel a bit more connected with your world.

*What Are People For? by Wendell Berry (New York: North Point Press, 1990)

Floral wonder

We had a HUGE dinner of just salad last night. It is getting mighty cold, so up came all the greenery that was still hanging on out in the gardens (I had it under some Reemay) and into the kitchen it went. Slight frost damage, but otherwise, yum.

Today, though? Today? VERY cold out there. That snow is gone, as I mentioned...but now it is a crackling 28*. I went to the garden after feeding those chilly chickens this morning, and was surprised by the blooms I found. Calendula is quite amazing. Though after today, it will be gone, too. (Big sigh.)

Cheapo garlic

Some naturalized cloves

Have you planted your garlic yet?

Like spring bulbs, garlic cloves are planted in the fall in this part of the world. My garlic is planted: I made a fairly large purchase from Filaree Farm last year, and saved some good-looking heads from this year's harvest to set out this fall. (Getting bulbs from a local farmer's market is also an idea: if they grow for them, they'll grow for you. Just make sure you ask if THEY have grown them!) But making a big purchase is not the only way to go about getting garlic.

Now, to be frank, growing big, beautiful heads of garlic is not always an easy thing to do. I'm getting rather boring by repeating how tough my clay soil is on most things, but let's just add garlic to that list, too, okay? But if big garlic is what you are after, then by all means buy your seed garlic from a knowledgeable place like Filaree: the catalog is long, and they will gladly make suggestions to you regarding your area. And growing place-appropriate garlic is important. Most of the allium family are sensitive to day length, so that store-bought California stuff will just not do all that well for you in Indiana. It's not you, in other words, it's the garlic!

But as I have mentioned here before, I just do not like waste. And occasionally, some of the kitchen's cloves will sprout, turning into rank little sulfur bombs as they do. My solution? Stick the danged things into a corner of the garden, and let them do their thing. They won't get big, they will spread (nicely, though), and...voila, instagarlic. I find I use it as green garlic, and I readily snip off the greens for a salad or soup topping, and, well, I will harvest a minihead and pound the snot out of it in the mortar just because.

On things going well in the garden

Par-cel cutting celery and wildling garlic greens

Two days in the garden can do wonders for one's spirits. (One's back, though? Ouch!)

There is much still green in the vegetable beds. It dips below freezing nightly now, so I am a bit surprised by all the photosynthetic fireworks still out there. The above has been my "new favorite thing," and really, something THIS green and showy, so late in the year? It's a tonic.

And it has been used as a tonic, too. This stuff is definitely more celery than parsley, taste-wise, but is used more like parsley, chop-it-up-wise: its leaves are a little stiff, but do cook down easily. I have planted oodles of it, and it's a good thing, too, as it's been the green of choice for all those jars of vegetable stock sitting in rows downstairs. I just adore it. It will go into the mounds of stuffing I am making for Thursday's big pig-out.

I didn't find it too tough to sprout, though I did plant it indoors very early, with the Italian flat-leafed parsley. It's a biennial, so...I only expect to get to use it through the winter; once the sun comes back in earnest next spring, it'll shoot into flower. But then again, I will have a bunch of seedlings to set out, and so it goes...

Happy pumpkin day

When one tends a compost pile (or two), on occasion it yields some rather tangible human benefits.

Every year since I have lived here, I seem to have "allowed" a squash seed or two to do its thing and grow in or around the compost area. The first year, it was cantaloupe: the most delicious, tiny netted fruits you can imagine. The second year, it was birdhouse gourds. This year? Pumpkins from our daughter's discarded seeds from last year's jack-o-lanterns.

I mistook them for something else earlier in the season, and actually ate a few of the tiny squash. Quite tasty!

But they've found a good use as future pies. And then again, there's an even better use: here, art by the 3.5 year old, carving and candles by dad. Spoooky!

On annuals

Zinnia, calendula, marigold and nasturtium

Every year, I plant rows of annual flower seeds. They get to be about 4" tall and then I scatter them willy-nilly all around the vegetable and perennial gardens. Usually, they don't do much all spring and summer: they kind of limp along, and, especially when interplanted with the veggies, I wonder "why did I devote the space to these wimpy things?" Well, it is because in late summer and all fall these things go NUTS.

Color and pollinator attraction is why they're in the veg gardens. In the perennial gardens, they act much like spring tulips and daffodils do: they tide things over as the clumps of green perennial leaves just sit there, flowerless. It's a good way to keep visual interest going, as your eye flits from color blotch to color blotch.

And then interesting things do happen. Look at what this calendula is doing (normally they're just single dark-eyed daisy-like plants). Isn't that just weird?

Cold-weather crops

My photographer husband just shakes his head when he sees my overexposed and fuzzy photos. This is a bed planted mostly in September.

Now that I have the greenhouse frame up, let's see what's putting down roots in the beds. The greenhouse itself is 20' long by 16' wide. I (will) have eight raised beds in there, all 6' x 3'. There's also one big back bed that's currently part of the herb garden. I will be removing much the oregano, tarragon, lavenders and marjoram that are in the back bed now and hopefully espalier a hardy citrus tree up the back wall. My two fig trees will overwinter in there, too.

SO here is the running list of the first four beds. (Two beds need to be built yet, and the other two are currently growing late-season potatoes (Katahdins and Russets) that I will not evict until November.) You can see how I have packed things in...

Chickories in many stripes: I fell in love with these bitter things when I lived in Italy after college. As a family, they prefer the cold, so I've planted the following: 1. Radicchio: The bunching/heading varieties never work for me, so I have lots of the leafy Treviso type both out in the regular garden and now in the new greenhouse garden. 2. Rosso Italiano: This is a type of dandelion. Its red stems and green, bunching leaves will go well in both salads and in sautees/soups. 3. Catalonian asparagus chickory: This wild looking thing looks like a white pinecone; you eat it before the leaves get big (thus its resemblance to asparagus), cut up like celeriac. 4. I haven't planted it yet, but frisee is always a hit in the salad bowl.

Spinach: I'm growing three types. This is something I will succession plant, too; my first batch (planted early September) is getting eaten now. The three types are 1. Space Hybrid, 2. Tyee Hybrid, and 3. Winter Giant.

Lettuces: Where would the garden be without them? Two types are up and running (1. Grand Rapids and 2. Winter Marvel Bibb). I planted two rows of mesclun Sunday.

Other greenery: This is a wide-net category! Technically, I can use the beet greens and chard as salad fillings, but there are other strange types of cold-hardy greens that have been sown in these beds: 1. Arugula (two types), 2. Erba Stella minutina (a tall skinny leaf thing similar to that dandelion I mentioned earlier) 3. Two types of mache/corn salad. This latter thing will be spread into the potato beds when I harvest them, as mache, a tiny rosette of a plant, loves the cold. 4. Likewise, claytonia loves the cold and will be planted later in the potato beds.

Root crops: These have been in the beds since last spring. It takes them a while to get going. 1. Parsnips 2. Scorzonera 3. Salsify. In September, though, I also planted 4. Lutz leaf beet for both its leaves and its root.

Brassicas: I optimistically transferred 1. four seedlings of broccoli (Piracicabia and Calabrese) to the beds in August, but these are being decimated by those nasty green caterpillar worms. I squish them daily by hand (ick), but I am losing the battle. Sunday, I planted a row of 2. Red Russian kale for salad fixings, and I also planted 3. purple kohlrabi: it will be an early spring harvest.

Onion family: There is one stand of 1. leeks that I planted last spring. I also seeded 2. a hardy bunching scallion in late July. This is a perennial plant, so I am looking forward to eating it all winter. It's quite zesty now! The tightwad in me grabbed some mealy looking 3. shallots left over from last year's harvest: these things were dried up and quite unpromising, but, well, a week after planting them? They're now 2" tall. I'm not sure how they'll handle the cold, though. 4. Chives. These have been in the herb bed for years. I hope they like their extended season.

Herbs: I transfered into one bed some 1. chervil, 2. wild arugula, and 3. rosemary. Chervil and this kind of arugula are wild self-seeders, so I have to watch it. I forgot my other 3. rosemary plant last year, leaving it in the ground over the winter: it lived, so I figure maybe this new plant will fare better in the warm-ish greenhouse. 4. Six plants of Italian parsley was interplanted with the tomatoes last spring. Then there're all the other herbs I mentioned that I will need to partially evict for my trees.

Other things: Ruby Red Swiss chard. This is up and running.

The other four beds might hold more of the same, and I will also add one row of carrots, though I'm doubtful they'll like the greenhouse.

All this dreaming-turned-near-reality is due to reading Eliot Coleman's book a few years back. He bought some of Helen and Scott Nearings' land in Maine (they, the original back-to-the-landers) and has been experimenting ever since. Anyway, he's convinced me to dream big. So we'll see how it all goes; stay tuned!

The dream so far. Excuse the construction debris.

Morning errands

Maggie has gone broody, so I brought her some food...

...but it looks like she'll have to share. I ended up putting those fake eggs in the right nesting box (from the kiddie kitchen section at Target: quite realistic, which is why I've marked them with an "X") under her to make her feel useful.

Every morning, between dropping our daughter off at school and starting work, I try to do one outdoor task. This morning, I headed east to the Fruit Exchange to get the birds some more scratch.

I adore the fruit exchange. It's our feed-and-seed shop, but it is also the regional fruit processing and storage facility. Normally, I can chew the fat with the guys who work in the warehouse. They look at me (I think) as an anomaly: when we first moved here, I was in there often to get supplies to beef up my compost piles (greensand, dolomitic limestone, cast-off fruit, moldy straw) so I guess I have rightly earned the reputation as "that organic gal." But today they were busy, far too busy to chat, and the place was hopping! Big semitractor trailers are rolling in, their trailers piled high with wood boxes filled with apples and pears. Conveyor belts were rumbling away in the now well-lit warehouse, with a few women sorting and dumping the beautiful red round fruit rumbling down it.

I got a peck of Cortlands for $3, got my scratch, and made for home.

Eat Local: Preserving tomatoes

This made 3 quarts of juice, 3 pints of sauce and 5 half-pints of ketchup

Tomatoes: Love them! Other than fruit jam, it's tomatoes that get the most processing around here. They are very versatile, as you all well know. There are loads of sites that will tell you how to process them, starting with the USDA. I'm just going to describe the ways I "put them by," as processing tomatoes is a task I take on every other day between mid-July to the middle of October.

Tomatoes are one of the few things most anyone can can. Boiling-water baths are great! However, for a few reasons, I have mostly abandoned my big black enamel pots when I get the glass jars out during Tomato Season. Instead, I use my pressure canner.

Clockwise from top right: cook pot, food mill, can funnel, can lifter and big pressure canner

Pressure canners, though huge, spendy, and somewhat spooky, are actually a lot more forgiving of the harried home-canner than boiling-water baths. One, they get a lot hotter (240*+ versus maybe 212*), and the actual pressure process allows you to add things to your tomato sauces that would be too risky to do with a boiling-water bath (it has to do with the acid level in the tomatoes themselves: any added onions, peppers, basil, etc. may tip the pH scale to Microbe City, which is not a city you would like to visit, trust me.). You can actually put nearly ANYTHING in jars and can it in a pressure canner. I have rows of cooked beans downstairs, as well as jars upon jars of stock. If I were a carnivore, there'd be jars of meat, too, as premade as soup or stock or chili or whatever.

Likewise, with a boiling-water bath process, you need to be monomaniacal about cleanliness, boiling both the jars and the sealing lids before you fill them (and fill them with HOT contents, while the jars are still HOT). Pressure canning? Not so much. YES the jars and lids should be absolutely clean, but they don't need to come out of a boiling pot before they're filled.

But back to the tomatoes. My larger heirloom tomatoes tend to have thick skins, so I try to get the peels off before I do my preserving. There are two ways to do this: one is by hand and the other is the Lazy Person's Way, with a food mill. By hand: Wash and score (make an "X") on the bottom of the tomatoes with a sharp knife. Place tomatoes in a pot of boiling water for about a minute or more; scoop them out and immediately plunge into a pot of iced water. You can use your knife and peel the skins off, core them, and then cook them. By the LPW: Wash and cut off rough spots of the tomatoes. Core them and cut into smaller pieces. Place in pot and cook until mushy. Run through food mill: I use the medium screen, as I like the pulp and can tolerate the few seeds that get passed through it. They're now ready to can.

In the beginning of the Tomato Season, I am much more fussy about separating the tomatoes by type (cherries for sweet things like ketchup, paste tomatoes strictly for paste, big fat watery ones for juice, etc; I also separate by color because I'm obsessive), but toward the middle of the season I am tired of all that and process maybe two-three quarts at a time with Whatever Is Ready To Go TODAY. This mix just ends up being simple sauce. In the winter, I will figure out what to do with that sauce when I take the jar off the shelf. Soup? Pasta sauce? Chili? It might need to be cooked down some (i.e., boiled off), but that can happen when I'm readying everything else for the meal.

But back to the pressure canner. This device allows me to make things like salsa, or the Glut Sauce I made the other day, or ratatouille, etc. with the 'maters. It usually isn't too much work to prep the tomatoes a la Lazy Person's Way whilst I do dinner prep, and while they're cooking down, or processing, I do my other cooking.

One thing about the pressure canner: it does take longer. Getting one load up to pressure, the processing time itself, and getting down from pressure sure takes lots longer than doing one boiling-water bath. Because I do my pressure canning in dribs and drabs while I do other things, this is no big deal. But when I have a bushel of things to put up? Yeah, either I set aside the whole evening to do it, or I get out those old black pots!

So: am I advocating that you all should run out and buy pressure canners? Absolutely not. I would say put it on your wish-list if you plan to do both as much, and as many, varied different kinds of food preservation as we do around here. But if you buy your produce in big quantities from the farmer's market, as I used to do as a city girl, those big boiling-water pots work just fine! For jams, pickles, and simple tomatoes, this may be all you need. For other stuff, though, yeah, pressure canning is the way to go.

Paper or plastic?

I've started packing things away for the end of this growing season.

One way to preserve the harvest, of course, is to preserve the next one! These are sprouted lettuces. I cut the stalks, place them blossoms-down in paper bags, and then hang them up (closing the bags first) on the walls and rafters of the potting shed. I don't deal with them, then, until early next spring, when I crush the dried blossoms to release the tiny seeds.

After I bag and hang the seed heads, I chop down the rest of the stalks to about 2-3" above ground. I cover the bed with a good 2" of compost, then another 5-6" or more of grass clippings. The worms appreciate the cover of the clippings and the food in the compost, and the lettuce stalks and roots slowly decompose and aerate the soil at the same time.

All this nonsense takes me about 15 minutes to do. I find I have an endless supply of lettuce seed, though, for a little bit of effort.

Geek notice: Lettuces do cross-pollinate, though the extent to which they do is debatable. This is the second year of these three particular types, and I have grown and harvested them side-by-side the whole time. They still appear to be that which they were originally (namely, Green Oak Leaf, Amish Deer Tongue, and Green Bibb lettuce), so I continue to grow them in the same bed.

The Return of the Salad

Yay Autumn! Cooler weather means cool salad greens.

I so looked forward to the day that those little seeds would sprout. Tender greens bolt into hot bits of cellulose here usually around the end of June. For years past, I have tried in vain to find something to substitute for those little bites for July-September. Malabar spinach, amaranth, chopped cabbage, some more stalwart Asian mustards...blah! So this year I gave in and went without.

Like awaiting that first tomato, the return of the Salad is something to be savored, to be...celebrated. So we did, last night. Bread, soup and...salad.

And the best part? The kid kept asking for more.

Comfort me with apples (and grapes)

It's a decent year for fruit here at Old Vines. We had a killing frost over Easter weekend, which locally did lots of damage to whatever was blossoming at the time. Apricots and plums were mainly affected, the latter here at the farm, too. Last year, frost got our grapes. (It's always something?) What it proves to me is we need to make sure we diversify.

We plan on expanding our orchard significantly this fall. Lots more different kinds of apples, with different bloom times. Other fruit trees, too, will join us: pears, peaches. And the Old Vines of the title of the farm? They'll stay, those 80 year old vines, but maybe I'll invest in some European varieties, too. You know, if I decide to make my own hooch.

Canning season, then, will extend into November! Yum. Grape jam, apple butter, apple sauce...

Mystery plant

I've begun to realize this blog must be very disappointing to lots of flower gardeners lately. Maybe people aren't "coming for the food."

SO! This beauty has mystified me. It's a perennial, it's about 4' tall, and...I haven't a clue what it is. It's blooming now (obviously), and I appreciate that, as many of the riotous July flowers have finished. Does anyone have a clue what it is?

Hills of beans

"Maxibel" haricot vert and Roma

Hardcore food processing has begun. The picture shows--and I am such a geek I weighed them--about 5.25 pounds of the skinny beans and 1.75 pounds of the fat ones (after processing). Beans get tipped and tailed, cut (sometimes), blanched, cooled, bagged and sealed with a FoodSaver, then put into the deep-freeze. This should last us a while.

I'm pleased with the haricot vert variety this year. VERY productive plants, and the beans don't get fat and lumpy. My usual rule is "do not sit down" when doing anything in the garden: you tend to get planted yourself. Each bush plant, though, was so laden with these beans I had to break my cardinal rule. The Romas are my favorite, and are great, especially, in minestrone. (Coincidentally, I made and processed about two gallons of that soup yesterday. It's also in the deep freeze, though I suppose I could've canned it.)

Earlier, I had mentioned how I have to relearn how long things take: initially, it is a shock to the system. Now, though, it is meditative, this "work." But frankly, I was so overwhelmed by the bean-y bounty I enlisted my husband's help! (Thanks, man.)

Today, it's corn, and Saturday, it's peaches. Yum!

On trying new things

This is the first year I have grown calendula. It's quite pretty, don't you think?

Thinking ahead

Buh-bye pretty things (white onion blossoms)

I spent Sunday afternoon in the garden. There was a lot of work to be done: I had to play sheriff and hand out eviction notices to a lot of plants! Actually, that is what it felt like, but this "tough love" is something I must do if I expect to get a second, or even third, harvest out there.

You see, I am a succession-planting fool. (I need the labels, believe me: nothing stays for long, including in my brain.) I haven't even harvested a tomato, yet I am thinking about September's crops. So, out of the garden came the seeding biennials (radicchio, parsnips, onions, leeks) and in went the second plantings of broccoli, rapini, and Asian brassicas. It may be early, but in went the first round of fall peas. And I also pulled a lot of the beets for canning. Throughout the season, I plant things like bush beans about once a week: bush beans are ripe all at once, so it helps to plant them weekly to keep the fresh ones rolling in. I do the same thing with lettuce and rapini, and beets and carrots. It was a fun and productive day.

So the modus operandi around here is "no soil left unplanted."

Friday photo

Hank wanted another digitalis shot. That's easy enough.

On bounty

Digitalis, second blooming

Summer is a time of heady excess. I dump a lot of my garden pictures in one folder called (unimaginatively) "Garden," where they are, for the most part, chronological. So in this I see the dearth of the gray snaps from winter and the overwhelming pictures that are the green of the growing season. What do I have to talk about in winter, I wonder, as now, well, there's TOO much to discuss. Like the little hairs on the foxglove above.

But I swear I have a form of ADD, gardening-wise, during the season of sprouting, too: What hairs.