First Pass on Early Spring Planting; Hungry Already! Is it Summer Yet?

Last weekend hand weeded about half the original "south 40" raised-bed of buckets of grass starts; after six or seven years of home compost, home worm compost and some store compost, and cover greens tilled under, the soil is now quite dark and crumbly, alive with worms. Great stuff!

Mid-week, we soaked some snow-pea seed we saved from last year's crop overnight and stuck it into a couple of long rows to beat the rain. A few seeds have floated up, but a quick finger poke has them back in the ground. Should be buckets of peas in a couple of months, and we will keep adding seeds every 3 weeks or so. Each new wave of plants should give us peas well into summer. Always fun to cruise the back yard for dinner, and steamed or stir-fried vegetables -- and especially the snow peas -- are really yummy.

Last weekend we also put a bunch of stuff into the ground.

Genovese Basil, about twice as much as last year, went in as seed. Until last year I had no luck with basil from seed, but these plants were champions. We whipped up and froze buckets of pesto (with HGO Garlic) in the fall, and if we are lucky, the new plants will be up and usable about the same time we run out of frozen stuff.

Kathryn thinned and transplanted last year's leek starts, and she should have plenty to grill up and put in her soup shortly; Hannah planted purple-seed green beans in her planter box, with second generation saved seeds. Spencer put down a watermelon patch, which we hand-tilled into the back lawn and surrounded with some of the river rock we collected on our permit a while ago.

We also took up a three-foot by 40 foot stretch of the front lawn with the mantis tiller, and put down two rows of corn (about a hundred plants), interplanted with Anasazi beans and sugar pumpkins, yellow squash and green squash. The plan is for the corn to act as trellis for the squash and beans. The beans will grow all summer and be picked and saved as dried beans for use in other dishes later; the squashes should be producing by late spring or early summer, and the pumpkins should be ready by August for eating (both savory, like squash, and sweet, as in pumpkin' pies) and saving for Halloween.

Leslie has tidied up her herb box and has several new and returning items to add to it.

If it dries up this weekend, will finish weeding up the south 40 and consider what to put in . . . I am tending to broccoli again, although last years crop was a big disappointment and I need to do some research to see what would be good as an alternate-year crop in that space.

We started the new year with only about 5 inches of rain on the season (since June 09) but have had 10.50 inches additional since January 1; nearly 3.50 inches in the last 24 hours.

All the other perennials -- especially fruits -- remain, and are beginning to show signs of spring. Mandarin oranges are fully ripe and quite delicious. What we have not eaten or handed out by March 1 or so, we may make into preserved fruit, or jam or marmalade. Might try juicing some too, but they are kind of small. Really fascinating juice though!

The scant five gallons of hard cider we put down late fall is nearly clear enough to consider bottling. It has promise, but it won't be clear what we have until at least May. This batch was all wild caught yeast, a strain that developed in a bottle of juice on the counter, which we cultured and then fed to the larger carboy. I actually drank most of the new cider that came from the wild caught (it was only a half-gallon) but came to my senses with enough yeast left in the sludge to feed and culture for the larger batch.

As we contemplate spring and summer harvests we are seriously considering two or three more of the hanging fruit dryers -- very effective and store nicely. I even dried racks of apples in my classroom over a rainy weekend -- which my students loved.

COMING SOON: What goes into the remaining South 40? How much of the back lawn will get tilled into river-rock raised beds? And will my neighbors complain if I put more of the front lawn into broom corn?

Fall Arrives for Real; Summer Recap Part II

Fall arrived for real last week. Two weeks ago daytime temps peaked out between 90-100 F; last week the morning low was 46F and the daytime high all of 67F or so. Good grief. But welcome to Southern California, neh? For the last two years Halloween has had a daytime high right around 80F, although one year not long ago it bucketed rain. Go figure.

We are recovering from numerous colds in the house, and trying not to cross contaminate, and so far I am the only one who has missed all of the bugs. So everyone is home, lallygagging about, resting up. In the cool overcast I am casually cleaning up outside for fall planting as my form of rest.

The basil we started from seed last April is still going great guns, and, in fact, had taken over a significant part of the raised bed. We pulled and cut back about half the basil, and topped the rest so it would not go to seed, and have picked and cleaned about 4 quarts of basil leaves. The job this morning is to make up numerous batches of home made, home grown pesto and freeze it up for winter enjoyment.

Took two of us nearly an hour to pick and wash the leaves, but the pesto should make up quick after a short trip to Trader Joe's to stock up on sheep's milk Parmesan cheese and pine nuts. We have plenty of HGO (home-grown organic) garlic.

Of course part of the clean-out is to ready space for fall garlic; five or six varieties on tap this year, more on that in a later post.

Granola Making Day . . .Mmmm!

Yesterday was granola making day. I hate to admit to it as it is such a stereotype, but its good, and really healthy, and really easy to make. We have "his" and "hers" flavors made from the same basic supply of organic rolled oats, olive oil and honey, baked on a tray in the oven. In "his" mix slivered toasted almonds go into the oven too, and the mix is cooked a little darker. Amusingly, the "hers" variety has, er, no nuts.

The "his" variety has, in addition to almonds, unsalted cashews, dried cranberries and organic raisins; "hers" uses a Trader Joe's "golden berry" mix with golden raisins, dried cranberries, blueberries, and cherrys, plus some additional organic brown raisins.

Really good as cereal with milk, as a hand snack, with a few dark chocolate chips as dessert, on top of or mixed into yogurt (especially the TJ maple yogurt) and vanilla ice cream. And as it happens the whole oats are pretty good for fiber and cholesterol reduction, if those items are a concern.

A Very Dry Summer Means Good Drying Weather

All the basil smell reminds me that we had a great summer drying things in the new hanging food dryer from Path to Freedom's web store. Figs, tomatoes, some grapes-to-raisins, all eaten already. Also, in the photo below, we dried more of that same HGO Genovese Basil, various HGO apples and HGO New Mexico Chili's. Also marjoram, and a wonderful lime-basil that has the unfortunate tendency to attract bees (lots of them!) when made into pesto and eaten outside. It's hard to keep up on the apples as people chomp them up almost as fast as we can dry them.

Our apples were done a month ago, and we canned up many jars of applesauce (plain and honey) and new apple butter. The Oakglen run should happen at the end of October, first of November, with cider and more apple goodies. Alas, it will be harder to air dry apples that late, but we might try the hanging dryer in the kitchen.

Speaking of Dry: Seeds Dry on the Vine

In addition I am reminded that we harvested dried coriander seeds, and dried celery seed (I let the celery get away from me, was slow to remove it, and found the seeds quite easy to harvest), as well as saved seed for planting from the "Bee" Basil. I still have a huge store of saved sunflower seeds, and really hope to get some in the ground at school in the spring. We enjoyed beans and peas all spring and summer from seed I saved last year. We have some pepper seeds saved too. It's really pretty rewarding to grow things from seed that you grew and saved, rather than having to go to the store each year for a new commercial packet.

Accidental Hard Cider, On Purpose

Last weekend we pressed cider, put 10 gallons down for fermentation, and have been drinking or have given away another six gallons of sweet mill cider.

Two years ago when we pressed we had a happy accident; three gallons got left in a carboy on the back porch on Sunday night, by Monday night the heat of the day had started the natural yeast fermenting and blown the stopper off, further exposing it to our local wild yeast.

Not knowing what else to do we let it work.

It sat on the back porch for a week, blowing its cork daily for awhile until I jammed a fermentation lock into it. Still we didn’t have time to get it into the house and settled, and since it had sat for several days in 90 F weather, with at least an hour or two of late afternoon direct sun, we figured it was pretty much ruined.

So we let it work.

By the next Saturday, we had a three-gallon carboy full of pretty clear cider with an inch of sediment working vigorously. Although we considered dumping it, it seemed to be doing fine, so we brought into the house, topped up the lock, and let it work.

We fussed and fiddled with the remaining 10 gallons we put down, adding honey and other exotic ingredients. Five gallons were undrinkable for nearly a year; the remaining five proved explosive (popping pint beer bottles from time to time in the basement) and not very good.

The little jug of forgotten cider, however, sat on its lees for several weeks (or was it months?), as we just let it work.

When it finally slowed up, and we racked it and bottled it, it had the best unmatured flavor of the bunch. And in fact as it matured it developed into a delicious, clear, sparkling, strongly apple-tasting cider with no hint of the usual yeast overtones that take months to die in the bottle.

That year, the day we pressed had been an unusually cool weekend. We had a fire in the fire pit, and the wood smoke wafted over us as the family washed and sorted apples and watched as the cider poured from the bottom of the press. Then, on the Monday after pressing, with our little lost three-gallon carboy sitting outside, unseasonable 90F + weather struck.

We had already resolved to try to recreate our happy accident, so it was lovely and fitting when, the Sunday of our big pressing. we had an overnight low of 45 F (!) and the Monday after it dawned 90F plus!

I left the cider in the heat again, although I did pop an air lock on sooner this time to avoid getting vinegar and general contamination (hoping that our wild yeast either came on the apples or lived on the press or settled during pressing).

Yesterday, I brought both bottles into the house after a week of sunshine-semi-pasturization. This morning, they are both working well, and clearing, indoors. Cross your fingers!

If all goes well we will be bottling 10 gallons on our semi-traditional Christmas Eve (or at least Winter Break) with good drinkable cider by February and great cider by March.

Or not. The brewing gods are like that; stay tuned!

The Mild Summer is Ending, Let the Preserving Begin!

Found an old horseshoe in the garage while cleaning some things out. Don't know where it came from, no one here has horses. And although the house is 104 years old this year, the garage dates from the 1940s.

For no good reason I put it up over the side door to the garage. Kinda jaunty if I do say so myself.

Fruit Fest, Part I

Things are coming ripe around here, and this year I vowed not to let the overabundance of fruit go to waste. So we have been doing lots of preserving, of various sorts.

Apples

We get three distinct crops of apples around here, depending on the variety.

Grannysmith's come ripe first, and get eaten out of hand first, as we have been watching the darn apples ripen all year. The Grannysmiths are done by the end of August.

They are great dried, and using our little core-it-slice-it-peel-it machine (hand cranked, of course) the apples come out in perfect little disks. (They actually come out in a spiral, but through the miracle of geometry the spiral becomes a stack of rings with a single downward stroke of a knife.)

We also eat and dry slightly under-ripe Winesaps and golden delicious. The goldens are more tart when under-ripe, and dry better when less ripe, and are not even bad out of hand. Once they are ripe they go mealy quickly, and tend to go browner when dried, so the goldens are mostly done too. (In point of fact, I have a few on the tree and many in the eating bin, right at this moment. )

The Winesaps go from green to mixed red and green, the redder they get the sweeter they get too. Since we have been eating and drying solidly since the first week of August, they actually have stayed on tree long enough to get good and red. They are a very white-fleshed, crisp, juicy apple, close to my favorites. They usually finish in the first week of September, but since that week will be pretty busy, I think they will come in to be dried then too.

Grapes

The Seedless purple Grapes have come on in great profusion this year; the neighbor harvested those on his side (at my invitation) several weeks before ours. We have been cutting and eating or giving to friends all summer, and the grapes have gone from tangy-tart to super-sweet. As the last 20 pounds or so were starting to drop, we cleaned the vine last week. But what do you do with all those grapes?
Well, for starters, the other half made grape jam. Yes, jam, not jelly. Came out so good we bought more jars and made a second batch. If you are lucky we will share.

Then, more as an afterthought and experiment than a serious effort, I laid some grapes out to dry in the sun. After about three weeks, we have a small batch of delicious home grown raisins!

If I had put out 20 pounds of grapes to dry, it would have been a failure; but like all our best experiments, we only made one tray, and will have about two cups of raisins. Still, watch out next year.

Indeed, the neighbor likes the grapes well, and we may have to plant more vines along the same fence in the spring. Alas, they do take two or three or more seasons to start producing well, but I think it will be worth it.

Stay tuned for Part II !

Grape Jam, Homemade Raisins, Both From Backyard Grapes

(The mini pumpkins are decorative, also grown here. Anyone have a recipe for mini-pumpkin? )