Mendolonium

It started raining here last week, glorious cleansing rain with thunder and lightning.  I was nearly beside myself with glee as the first crack of thunder was unleashed.  The dramatic change from triple digits  and lemonade to rain and soup was the perfect beginning to fall.  I love fall…the cool weather, pies, sweaters, iced sugar cookies, boots, colored leaves, piles of pumpkins, and holiday after holiday.  In a few weeks I’ll be walking around the neighborhood with a junior astronaut and a toddler tiger.  Then in rapid fire we will have Thomas’ birthday, Thanksgiving, Fakemass, Christmas, and New Years.  I’m planning costumes, parties, meals, gifts, and the fall and winter garden.  It feels so cathartic to rip out the tired tomato plants and see new pea shoots emerging from the drenched earth.  It’s been a good few weeks.

Plant something (or take care of something you’ve planted):

• Peas
• Potatoes
• Shallots
• Lettuce
• Parseley

Harvest something:

• Tomatoes
• Bell Peppers
• Anaheim Peppers
• Carrots
• Eggplant – last for the year, I pulled the plant this week
• Raspberries
• Strawberries
• Grapes (from our next-door neighbors yard)

Preserve something:

• 2 cups tomatoes (dried)
• 4 half pints salsa verde (canned)
• 5 half pints of Sombrero BBQ sauce (canned)
• 30 half-pints grape jelly (canned)
• 14 pints applesauce (canned)
• 4 half-cups of roasted, peeled, seeded, and diced Anaheim peppers (frozen)

Waste Not:

• Nothing special, but with all the spent tomato and squash plants our compost pile is more like a compost mountain.  I am looking forward to all the compost we should have come spring.

Want Not:

• I honestly I am not wanting for anything.  I have been feeling incredibly fortunate lately.  We both have good jobs.  We’ve harvested 175 pounds from our backyard this year.  My pantry is full.  My boys are happy.  What more could I ask for?

Eat the food:

• We’ve switched into serious fall/winter food mode:  there’s been iced sugar cookies, butternut squash risotto, baguettes, and blueberry bread.

Build community food systems:

• Been participating more in RIPE Altadena, a local group devoted to exchanging homegrown produce (and eggs and dairy).  Today I went with the boys and traded some of our homemade grape jelly for about 10 lbs of oranges + giant pumpkin seeds.  Thomas and I are now plotting where we’re going to grow a giant pumpkin or two next year.  The seeds we received came from the cross of two 600 pound pumpkins!  I wonder how big ours will be?

I think that one of the things that sets gardening apart from farming is the ability to consume what you are producing in a nominal fashion.  For example, you might grow tomatoes in your backyard and enjoy them on sandwiches and in salads; perhaps you might even have enough to make up a batch of sauce.  And then there are those of us who grow more of something than we could possibly consume before it might rot.   By that definition, I have clearly crossed the line from tomato gardener to tomato farmer.  I look at the tomatoes covering my dining room table and alternately feel a wave of gratitude at our abundance and a wave of near-sickness at the thought of all the work to do “something” to the rest of those tomatoes.  Gardening is fun.  Farming is fun, but it is a hell of a lot of work too.  Come December though, when I am making an Italian feast for Christmas Eve, opening a jar of sauce canned this past August from tomatoes grown less than 100 feet away from my kitchen, I’ll be glad I’ve turned into a farmer.  For now, anyone have any favorite tomatoes recipes to share?

Over the past few weeks we’ve:

Plant something (or take care of something you’ve planted):

• Cut back the blackberry canes that bore fruit this year (blackberries bear on two year old wood) and thinned the remaining canes
• Pulled the sad looking squash plants that, quite frankly, looked like hell.  It’s always a bit shocking to me how a squash vine can go from looking abundant and healthy one day to brown, molding and listless the next.

Harvest something:

• Tomatoes
• Bell Peppers
• Anaheim Peppers
• Carrots
• Eggplant (I planted one single eggplant as an experiment this year and it has been amazing.  It is the “little eggplant that could”.  The variety is “Fairytale”.)
• Burgess Buttercup Squash
• Butternut Squash
• Blackberries
• Raspberries
• Strawberries
• Peaches

Preserve something:

• 4 pints plain tomato sauce (canned)
• 17 pints Italian tomato sauce (canned)
• 14 pints salsa (canned)
• 7 half-pints tomato ketchup (canned)
• 6 cups bell peppers (frozen)
• 12.5 lbs of Burgess Buttercup Squash (“root cellared” – in our case stored on the lowest shelf of our pantry)
• 5 lbs of Butternut Squash (“root cellared”)

Waste Not:

• All those dead squash plants are now on their way to a second life as compost.

Want Not:

• We’re planning our fall garden along with an exciting winter/spring project – a combination high density fruit orchard and play structure for the kids.  For the fall I am planning on planting:  potatoes, shallots, garlic, greens, kale, and enough peas to make a princess scream.  For the orchard we are researching low-chill apple and pear varieties along with nectarines and cherries.

Eat the food:

• Made my first souffle today (Thank you, Julia Child).  It turned out picture perfect and was devoured by all members of the family.
• Made crepes for the first time; also a resounding success with all four family members.

Build community food systems:

• Began exchanging homemade bread with small local goat dairy for fresh goat milk and cheese.  Our need to go to the grocery store keeps dropping – and my happiness keeps increasing.

What are your plans for the fall or is your mind still on summer?

Anybody else remember that song?  We are still rather fond of it at our house and it gets regular play on my iPod, even more so this week when we harvested our first peaches!  We don’t have millions of them, but it looks like we might get a couple dozen this year.  This is vast improvement over last year when the urban wildlife (a combination of rats, raccoons, and squirrels methinks) stole every last one of our nearly ripe peaches.  I might be a vegetarian pacifist, but after they stole my food I had some decidedly un-PETA like thoughts.  Happily this year, the rat population has been culled and while about half of our peaches have gone missing, the other half is now ready or nearly ready to be picked.  I plucked off six this evening and we devoured two of them mere steps away from the peach tree, fuzzy skin and all.  Besides the peaches we’ve:

Plant something (or take care of something you’ve planted):

• Green Beans (from seed)
• Sugar Pie Pumpkins (from seed)
• Waltham Butternut Squash (from seed)  I already have some ripening, but I decided that one can never have too many butternut squash.
• Cucumbers (Marketmore 76, from seed)  Sow bugs ate all my seedlings so I am trying again for a late crop.

Harvest something:

• Bell Peppers
• Anaheim Peppers  (We had a week of very hot weather which seemed to act as a catalyst for dozens of peppers to ripen.)
• Carrots
• Tomatoes (There are so many green tomatoes on the plants – very exciting – like the food equivalent of a stack of unread books.)
• Eggplant (Such a pretty plant with purple and white flowers and purple and white striped fruit.)
• Shallots (Grown from a few bulbs saved from last year’s crop.)
• Cannelloni Beans
• Burgess Buttercup Squash
• Blackberries
• Raspberries
• Strawberries
• Peaches

Seriously, all the above from our backyard!  How awesome is that?

Preserve something:

• 11 cups carrots (shredded, frozen)
• 2 cups cannelloni beans (dried)

Waste Not:

• Reusing plastic seedling pots as protective covers for newly sprouted seeds.  This year we have had a problem with sow bugs eating the leaves of newly sprouted seeds – especially squash and beans.  I cut the bottom off of a pot, place it a centimeter or so down into the dirt, and then plant a seed in the middle of it.  The plant emerges and grows up through the bottomless pot.  Once the plant clears the sides of the pot the leaves are out of sow bug territory and I remove the pot.

Want Not:

• Lately I have been feeling very fortunate and not wanting much of anything save perhaps an afternoon nap every day.

Eat the food:

• Cooked eggplant for the first time by making homemade Baba Ghanoush.  When I first looked up recipes for Baba Ghanoush I was disappointed to find that they all contained tahini – sesame paste.  Thomas is severely allergic to sesame so it is forbidden in our house.  I then found a recipe online for sunflower seed tahini and blended some up.  The sunflower seed Baba Ghanoush was delicious and we ate it all in one sitting with fresh homemade bread.  Even Thomas tried some and proclaimed in a somewhat surprised tone, “I like it.”
• Cooked Burgess Buttercup squash for the first time.
• Back in a really good groove of making bread approximately every other day – that’s about our rate of consumption.  I can only imagine how much bread I’ll have to bake when the boys are teenagers.  (I am not complaining, I love making massive amounts of food.)

Build community food systems:

• Does “sharing” half of my peaches this year with the squirrel and raccoon communities count?

How’s your summer going?

A couple of months ago we (read:  Thomas) finished off the cherries we canned two years ago.  So this past weekend we trekked out to a wonderful local cherry orchard:  Big John’s to pick organic heirloom cherries.  With two kids to wrangle and us not quite all feeling well (we were all felled by a nasty bacteria the past few weeks) we picked only thirty pounds of cherries, but what wonderful cherries they are.  So since my last update we’ve:

Plant something (or take care of something you’ve planted):

• Tomato Seedling (Furry Yellow Hog, from seed)
• Basil Seedlings x4 (from seed)
• Round French Zucchini (from seed)

Harvest something:

• Bell Peppers!!!
• Carrots
• Leeks
• Blackberries (I am pretty sure the squirrels are helping me with these.)
• Raspberries
• Strawberries
• Sage
• Cherries (from Big John’s)

Preserve something:

• 22 pints cherries (canned, in extra light syrup)
• 7 half-pints of “Black Forest Preserves” – a cherry chocolate concoction (canned)
• 1 cup sage (dried)

Waste Not:

• Jeff has been gathering all the broken, ripped, and mangled toys, books, and puzzle pieces from the house and is slowing repairing them one-by-one.  We are diligent about buying sturdy items, but after two boys some things are starting to look a bit worse for wear.
• Broke a jar of canned blueberries so I just had to make lemon-blueberry muffins.  Couldn’t let those beautiful berries go to waste.

Want Not:

• Been using our memberships to Kidspace and The Huntington to entertain the kids rather than toys.  Who needs stuff when you have outdoor fun?

Eat the food:

• Baked a cherry pie.
• Baking (and eating) lots of bread.
• Tried a new recipe; a quinoa-butternut squash casserole from Sharon’s book.  It was excellent.  Theodore, in particular, gobbled it up.

Build community food systems:

• I am planning to start a very local urban farming group focusing on our neighborhood (or folks who live outside our neigbhorhood, but could walk/bike/public transport nearby).  I am envisioning that the group would exchange home grown produce/herbs/eggs/milk/seeds (example:  I’ll trade you one pound of carrots for one pound of tangerines) as well as share farming wisdom.  I would also like to ensure that there is a social and community aspect to the group through get together – perhaps a potluck every other month?  If you are local and have an interest send me a message.  Regardless of whether you are local or not I would love ideas and input.