Fruits and roots

Last weekend I harvested Jerusalem artichokes with friends at their community garden. These are generous plants, each stalk producing about five pounds of crunchy tubers. With eight pounds of chokes in my possession, I decided to plant a couple at the farm, store some in the crisper for later use—perhaps in a creamy gratin—, and pickle most in brine in the basement. The chokes have been burping like frogs in their crock now for about five days and are nearly ready to eat.

On the farm mom and I have been swimming in quince. My room at the farm doubles as the produce pantry, and while quince’s perfume is lovely when emitted by one or two set on the kitchen counter, I’m here to tell you that sleeping in the company of 20 pounds of quince is overwhelming. Its perfume gobbles up every particle of air much like bacon does on a slow Sunday morning. We’ve turned the fruit into quince paste and lemongrass/ginger/quince jam. 

Our apple orchard offered meager fruit this year, but we managed to harvest a few handfuls of Pink Lady apples and have benefited from the generosity of my little sister’s in-laws who dropped off a box of Red Delicious from their backyard tree. The abundance of quince (and this is only its first year in production) has more than made up for the lack of apples. Last week, we found ourselves with just enough apples to pair with the quince to make a large dish of hearty brown sugar and oat topped crisp. 

A new season for sure

This dark, wet, and cool season has slowed the pace of the garden. On Saturday we will have a work party at the community garden to get all of the gardens and shared spaces cleaned up for the season. For the most part my plot is in cover crop.  A couple of peppers, a tomatillo, several tomatoes under cover, and a few shell beans remain.  The refrigerator now fills with beans and cheese, while the crisper holds but a few carrots, beets and peppers. It is time to start shopping at markets again, and that is a strange thing to face after months of not purchasing produce.

On the farm,  I’m experiencing the change in weather acutely. The scale of the rural landscape is so different than the city where the flaming color of turning leaves is interrupted by the built environment, and where the sound of rain drops isn’t heard so much as the sound of car tires sloshing through the water filled streets. On the farm, I see acres and acres of yellow as the grape vines turn on the gentle hillside across the valley.  I see bands of bright green where fresh weeds shoot up from recently tilled fields. There are giant patches of dusty air where the filbert orchardist has begun the harvest. At night, I think I may actually be able to hear rain fall through a silent dark sky; nothing more than the sound of drops hitting tree leaves and the soft dirt of the land. 

Experiments

It was with great pessimism that I sunk a shovel in the ground last week and began to gingerly poke around for any evidence that my sweet potato experiment which started so many months ago was worth the time, effort, and space I devoted to it. A few weeks ago, I’d begun checking on them, moving the soil away from the base of the plants, poking a finger or two into the earth, revealing nothing save a pinky size tuber or two. So, I was quite surprised to dig up the bed and find that I actually have a crop of potatoes. They are now curing for a couple of months to convert starches to sugar. We ate a few straight out the ground, and confirmed what our friends at Ayers Creek Farm had told me, and that is that they taste like nothing really, but starch, until they’ve been cured. So, we wait.

It has been a month of mustering the courage to pull plants: the cucumbers, some peppers, some tomatoes, some beans. Even after gardening for many years, it is still hard for me to pull a plant when it has life in it, even if it is no longer fruiting or giving anything edible. But, it is necessary in a small garden like mine. It is the only way to make room for the next crop and ensure future harvests. Death makes way for life as the saying goes. So, out with the spent and in with garlic and shallots and cover crops and daikon radish and chicories and favas. The key is to plant something new right after pulling something out. It helps you get over the fact that you just terminated something.

This week I also dug up summer’s endive to bring indoors, blanch, and hopefully eat in the middle of winter. Here’s how to blanch endive (this is my first time, so take this advice with a grain of salt).

1. Dig up the roots, chopping off and discarding the greens to about an inch of the top of the root.

2. Put some sawdust in a bucket. Wedge roots into the sawdust, putting as many roots into the bucket as will comfortably fit.

3. Put more sawdust around the roots to cover them to the top of the roots. 

4. Put the bucket in the basement for a couple of months. 

5. In late November or December, bring the bucket to the kitchen sink and fill with water to saturate up to the shoulder of the roots. Cover the bucket with another bucket or tarp to keep light out and put in a dark place (perhaps under the kitchen sink). Within a few weeks new growth will have sprouted. Cut the chicons off just above the root and enjoy blanched endive in the middle of winter! 

Homemaker blues

A few days ago I went to the basement to put something in the chest freezer; an ordinary day, a typical walk down the basement steps. The green and red lights indicating that the freezer had power, were on. Everything appeared fine from the outside. I had no way of knowing that I was moments and a few footsteps away from discovering disaster. I opened the freezer and found it a  balmy 65 degrees inside. Our food was bloated, stinky and moldy.

Though it could have been much worse (last year our freezer held half a hog), we lost all of our summer U-pick berries, salmon caught by a friend in Alaska (thankfully it was vacuum sealed so the smell wasn’t what it might have been), soup stocks, and corn. We are left now only with our fleeting memories of picking and preparing these things. In the dead of winter, there will be no juicy fruit-filled cobblers and pies to remind us that summer exists, and no creamy corn chowder on a cool, damp day. 

I felt betrayed by the modern world, and so thankful that I’d challenged myself to can more this year.  My brain immediately began to search for someone or thing to blame, from the wiring in our old house to the manufacturer of the freezer to the store that sold it to us. I searched for great meaning in the act; perhaps it was a sign from the universe that I’d taken a wrong step somewhere and was heading down a terrible, dark path. 

Tom did the dirty work of cleaning up the juices that festered in the bottom of the cheaply constructed hunk of plastic and metal. He filled a garbage bag with our food. I wheeled over the trash can, and averting my eyes and head (in sadness and because of the smell), dumped our memories, work, and nourishment into the can, letting the lid drop hard. I wrestled with anger for a day or so, and then resigned myself to the fact that I just needed to accept this. For about a day I thought maybe I had. But then I thought, what if I choose to not swallow this? What if I don’t accept the fact that an appliance lasts a mere year and a half? What if I do hold someone accountable? I decided to fight.

In the mean time, these slow roasted tomatoes from my mom’s garden, and these grapes from her vines that we steamed into delicious concord grape juice, remind me that the earth continues in its abundance. I’ll not starve because of the freezer loss, but I can still be heartbroken.

On another note, I have a correction and update on my last post regarding stratifying cherry seed. I said that the seed is being kept cold and moist for cold stratification, when in fact, it is being kept warm and moist for warm stratification. The bags of seed and sawdust have been moved outside and are completely covered by a substantial mound of sawdust. They will live there, nestled in the sawdust for about 30-60 days, after which time they will be planted in the ground where winter’s wet, cold temperatures will induce cold stratification. 

Big pants farming

Tuesday was Day One on my parents’ farm, where I’m now working a couple of days a week. These are the ducks. Last spring, Dad got four ducks, which quickly became but one. I’ll spare the details and just say that this is a farm and one must get accustomed to seeing dead things on occasion. There are predators here, both the wild (owls and coyotes) and the tamed-wild (the family dog). So, Dad headed back to Gaston Feed where he bought 13 more ducks for good measure. He beefed up the pen and constructed a refuge island in the middle of the pond; he crossed his fingers. Four months later, and sans one that "failed to thrive" according to my mom, the ducks are going strong. They are quite a pack of talkers and eaters. Their favorite activity (if one can read enjoyment on a duck) is following me to the apple orchard, where they cajole me with insistent quacks into smashing apples into bite size pieces with the bottom of my shoe.

My first task on the farm was to propagate cherries by way of stratifying seed–Prunus Mahaleb (for sweet and sour cherry root stock) and Prunus Mazzard (for sweet cherry root stock)–to be exact, which this business is. 

My job was to expedite the sprouting process by fooling the seeds into behaving as though they’d experienced a couple of seasons. First, I took six 50 pound bags of cherry seed (pits) and divided each of them in half to make twelve 25 pound bags. Next, I tied the bags shut and meticulously labeled them with their variety, source, date and weight. I then lifted them into a giant water-filled trough where they soaked for 24 hours (a bit like soaking beans overnight). The next day, out of the water they came. I opened the bags and filled them with equal parts sawdust which I fully incorporated so that each seed was surrounded by sawdust (thus the term stratify); this keeps the seeds moist and cool for a period of time. Phase One in the process of cherry making. Stay tuned for the next step.

Back in the city plot things are beginning to look a lot like fall. I’ve scattered a cover crop of vetch, peas and rye grass in one bed; a fresh round of brassica starts are settling into another; shelling beans swell in their pods; and I have covered the tomatoes and peppers in plastic to prolong ripening. Soon, I’ll remove the bush beans that do little more than leak beans like a faucet that has just been turned off but still drips a bit for a minute or two. Thankfully, there is an inverse relationship between the garden and the pantry; as one empties, the other fills. 

Short on words, long on produce

The produce photos are piling up. At the same time, I find that I’m a little short on words, which is perhaps entirely normal when a life becomes utterly saturated with produce: the fridge, the freezer, the pantry, the garden, table tops, the basement, and the back porch. For a while we considered displaying our home-made canned pears, tomato sauce, salsa, jams and pickles throughout the house in the same way that others might thoughtfully place flower arrangements, family photos or trinkets. But after careful consideration, we realized the absurdity of this idea (seemed too much like something we’d see on the pages of Martha Stewart) and went with convention, placing them on some shelves in the kitchen. 

Here is the pictorial evidence of how things are shaping up around here.

Here are our beautiful shelling beans just days before the entire poorly built trellis came crashing down onto an out-of-control, land-hungry tomatillo (greed doesn’t pay). A simple case of poor construction on my part, heavy beans and strong winds. Tom came to the garden yesterday and helped prop the bean stalks back up so that they can continue their lives upright, and so that the tomatillo can continue its Manifest Destiny.

Last Sunday we went to GM Farm on Sauvie Island to pick peaches. But the peaches were done for the season, and as soon as we got out of the truck, rain drenched the fields. We took cover under the tented fruit stand. Tom looked away for a second and by the time he turned back around I’d managed to buy about 15 pounds of canning-ready pears and two heads of cabbage for kraut. It goes without saying that the rest of the day was spent in the kitchen doting on pears and cabbage. In the end we had about eight quarts of pears, and now one week later, we are beginning to make our way through our 1/2 gallon of delicious, tangy kraut.

Then there are the cucumbers. I don’t know that I’ve sufficiently expressed the role cucumbers now play in our lives. I believe I’ve now made almost every pickle imaginable from half sour to full, bread and butter, quick, spicy, mustard, kimchi, and sweet. Right now, I’m enjoying some I made with a friend last week; they’ve been in the basement fermenting in a crock since Tuesday. When most people are enjoying a cup of warm coffee first thing in the morning, I’m making my way down our decrepit stairs to the basement to check on (taste) a pickle and a pinch of kraut. This is what happens to you when you hand over the wheel of your ship to mother nature and a few seeds you planted last spring. You just aren’t in control anymore. 

I guess I had a few things to say after all.

Crescendo

I woke up this morning to a dark house and to the sound that car tires make on the street only when it has been, and still is, raining. I stayed in bed,  listening to the sound of the return of a season. 

It is no surprise. The angle of the light changed some time ago, and the sun inches its set up a bit each day. I burn bees-wax church candles in the evenings now to extend the light. And last night, Tom and I made plans that are only made when one has accepted the end of summer; we spoke of visiting pumpkin patches and stuffing pumpkins with warm wine-scented fondue. 

Summer is leaving me, and with it go balmy nights spent on the porch after dark, vegetables racing to outgrow each other in the garden, picnics, summer vacations, and the heady scent of a cantaloupe ripening on the counter. I’m a bit sad.

Tom staged these photos last week when things seemed to be at their peak. I have a feeling I’m going to savor them.

Bountiful summer

It has been a while since my last post. In the past three weeks a lot has happened to pull me away from the garden and from writing about it: weekend get-a-ways to beautiful wild places like Opal Creek, my little brother’s wedding on our family farm, and the emotional process of quitting my job of five years.

The garden persists despite my sporadic and cursory visits, when I barely manage to throw down a little water and fill my pockets with tomatillos and my arms with cucumbers. Harvests are coming not like a trickle, but like a giant gushing waterfall. The refrigerator is packed to the gills. We eat generous quantities of vegetables in all form and fashion for at least two, and sometimes three, square meals a day. I’ve lost five pounds, because who has room for bread or protein? And, in case you are wondering, yes, the pantry and the chest freezer are filling up too.

I’ve turned tomatoes and hot peppers into red hot sauce, cucumbers into bread and butter, sour, and mustard-scented pickles, and zucchini into cookies and chocolate zucchini bread. A twelve pound bag of tomatoes from a fellow gardener became six quarts of tomato sauce that will help get us through the winter. Plums from a friend’s fruit-laden tree rest in the dehydrator, slowly giving up their moisture so that I may enjoy them and the memory of summer in the dead of winter. Enormous 'Brandywine' and 'Kellogg’s Breakfast' tomatoes mingle with delicate pieces of fresh basil atop homemade pizzas.

So, what else is there to say? Anyone could have predicted this post. It is summer. The world is generous. I’ve just forsaken my day-job salary for happiness, and I’ve never felt so rich.

The ant and the grasshopper

A stretch of somewhat overcast days in the mid 70s have settled into the city. We’ve turned off the ceiling fan, the portable fan, and the window fan. We wear clothes again in the house. The world feels less volatile now, and in the garden things are more calm as well. No more frantic watering on a daily basis or trying to keep up with rapid-fire green beans. This week, the harvest was sane: Everbearing strawberries, tomatillos, a few more pale orange 'Kellogg’s Breakfast' heirloom tomatoes, and cucumbers. 

With an eye toward fall planting, we headed to the Elephant Garlic Festival in North Plains yesterday for garlic sets. After sampling more raw garlic slivers than my stomach could handle, we ended up with two hardneck varieties, 'Purple Glazer' and 'Chesnok Red'. In addition, we got a good dose of country fair complete with roasted corn (This is a ridiculous thing to eat in public, and so we took it as an opportunity for performance and made big messes of ourselves), soft pretzels and a pulled pork sandwich. All of this came with the option to be smothered in garlic butter, and who can say no to that? On the way home we meandered to Mike and Debbie’s Produce in Forest Grove for corn to put by.

The cucumbers have been brined and will soon make their way into mason jars. The tomatillos have been husked for salsa. The corn has been deconstructed; the kernels stripped from their cobs, packed and frozen, and the cobs simmered down into stalk that now sits next to the kernels in the freezer.  Like last year, I’m the forward looking ant. But this year, I’m vowing to not take on the worrisome nature of the little guy. The grasshopper knows a thing or two as well, and I’m going to keep his playful nature in mind as I get ready for winter. Pleasure, not worry, is my guide.

Talking about the weather

It is, at this point (day six of "hot"), redundant to speak of the heat. Save the lucky ones with air conditioned lives, we are sick of the oppressive mugginess and sick of hearing ourselves talk about it. 

Much like during the snow and ice storms of last winter, Portlanders are generally ill-equipped to deal with extreme weather such as this. We escape to climate controlled movie theaters and libraries, to the sprinkler in the park or the kiddy pool in a friend’s back yard. Mostly though, we just wait it out, complaining all the way. In less grumpy moments, we might even laugh at ourselves, in a sad sort of way, as we express our relief when the temperature drops to 98. 

Rarely do we experience a summer like this in Portland. Usually the whole damn thing passes with many of us still hungry for warmth and sun. Well, I for one am sorry for all my past complaining, and welcome at any moment, a reprieve.

But in the mean time, and on the bright side, some of the fruits of the garden are living it up. Corn loves the heat, so we’ve been eating as much of it as we can to remind us of the benefits at hand. The sun has also led to an explosion of perfect plums on the tree at our community garden. And so, I am also grateful to this particular summer for giving me delicious plum cobbler and plum ice cream. If truth be told, although it is sort of miserable, it is at the same time somehow wonderful. This weather has allowed all of us to feel a new way in this same old place, which is always pretty great.

Summer homecoming

As a child, I took my share of family road trips every summer. The six of us, four under 18 (with the occasional additional kid- friend), would pile into our Dodge Caravan and set out for the open road for weeks at a time. Vacation.

Summers were hot, and the caravan, without air conditioning. We were a sticky, somewhat smelly bunch. Our kitchen was a bright yellow cooler, from which we’d eat peanut butter and jelly or cheese and mustard sandwiches. Our dining room, rest areas or the car. I’m sure no family member will argue with me when I say that our trip soundtrack was a chaotic one: The hum of the tires on the road punctuated by the now and then rattling of something loose on the caravan; Dad commanding my brothers to sit on their hands, rendering them incapable of pestering my little sister with them; and on top of all this, the sweet sound of Lionel Richie or Kool and the Gang blasting through the not so super car speakers.

These trips were memorable for different reasons. Some were better than others of course, and I’m not sure they counted at all as vacation for my parents. One thing was for certain on each trip; if dad was with us (sometimes he stayed home to work on the farm) he was always looking forward to the day when the caravan would pull onto our dusty gravel road, returning him to his land. At the time, I figured he was worried about the farm. Worried that there had been a break in the irrigation line, that deer had munched on the rootstock, or that the crew hadn’t shown up. And while all of that may have been true, I realize now, after being away on my second vacation of the summer, that it was also perhaps love that made him long for home.

My garden welcomed me back to Portland like a porch light in the night. The bush beans had exploded; tomatillos hung like hundreds of tiny lanterns on the bushy vine; on the lowest branches of the Stupice vine I found my first tomatoes, which inspired unparalleled excitement even after years of growing tomatoes; and cucumbers lazed around like giant sea lions on a dock.

Overwhelmed by the abundance, I tried to focus on the task of harvesting as my mind bounced here and there thinking of what I might do first. Make salsa, dilly beans, pickles? In the end, I couldn’t decide, and so I did it all, practically at the same time. On my first day home I baked two loaves of bread, made a big bowl of garden fresh salsa, cleaned up the garlic for storage, made my favorite pickle from the Zuni Cafe cookbook, froze a half flat of blueberries picked on the way home, made fresh pasta and tossed it with dried chili pepper, lemon zest, cream and just-picked figs from a friend’s tree, and made currant preserves (Bar le Duc).

Tom and I did okay on our trip eating out of the bright yellow cooler. But much like my dad, I think I’ll always love coming home to places that greet me, and feed me, like this one.

Savoring summer

Yesterday we joined the masses at Sauvie Island Farms, picking the fields to fill our larder. In the mid morning sun, we walked the rows of marionberry thickets searching for dark, long fruit that would easily acquiesce to our plucking. As is sometimes the case when berry picking, opportunities for eavesdropping were equally ripe. Thick rows of canes give the illusion of privacy. 

Tom and I pick different rows in silence; Tom taking in the natural world, and I listening to snippets of the conversations all around me. A couple in the row next to me have the same conversation for about twenty minutes, which goes something like this: "These are too hard to pick. They poke you, and they are either too ripe or not ripe enough.  I’m going to pick the raspberries because they are easier." I wonder why these people have gone to the trouble of coming to the farm. Shopping at a grocery store might better suit them. 

When I’m about halfway down a long row, seemingly alone, the unmistakable smell of pot overwhelms me. For a moment, I wonder if they are growing weed under the cover of the berries. But then I come to my senses, reminding myself that pot probably doesn’t smell this way when it grows. Soon, I hear the equally unmistakable sound of people getting high—giggling.  I look up to find a trio of old men who look like they just arrived from Beaverton, and maybe from a game of golf. One is bent over taking a drag and it occurs to me that I should suggest that he offer some to the unhappy couple who can’t tear themselves away from the marionberries they claim to detest.

By 11:30am we were back in the truck and headed for town. Together we’d picked 10.5 pounds of marionberries and three pounds of green beans. As soon as we got home, I threw open the door to the back porch to let the breeze in, and got to the task at hand. By sundown I had four quarts of frozen marionberry pie filling,  four quarts of dilly beans and a loaf of bread for the week. My face glistened with sweat. Blobs of thick marionberry pie filling dotted the kitchen floor and the soles of my feet. The scent of hot sugar and vinegar permeated the house. It couldn’t have felt more like summer, and I couldn’t have been happier.

Why not take care of yourself?

The more I feed us by working in the garden and the kitchen, the more I wonder why we (humans) gave it all up to work outside of the home in the first place. Growing food is one of the most rewarding, challenging and important things I know of to do. 

Last year, I reduced my hours at work so that I could be outside more, rediscover natural rhythms, and learn more about growing food and stocking a pantry. I wanted to get back to the things I knew made me feel good and I wanted to know that I could take care of our basic needs, or at least a few of them. 

When I tell people that I work less (and make less money) by choice, they are often quite puzzled. When they learn that I make bread every week, they say things like "Why would you want to do that when there are so many great artisan bakeries in town?" or "Must be nice to have that kind of time." When I tell people I also make cheese on occasion, that I make stock once a week, and that I grow most of the vegetables we eat, I’m often labeled a foodie. 

These sorts of reactions make me wonder when taking care of oneself in this manner became "a thing." Not too long ago, living like this wasn’t really considered a lifestyle. It was simply life. And it certainly didn’t fill the pages of newspaper style sections like it does today. Blogs like this one would have been ridiculous had blogs existed.  I don’t want to be an outcast, but I don’t want to be a foodie either. There was a time when this was normal, and while I know we can never go back, how I’d welcome this to become the new normal.

For all the wrong reasons

I love the idea of jam. Last year I made half pint after half pint not because I loved jam, but because I loved the idea of jam. I told myself that although jam had never played much of a role in my adult life (I don’t know that I’ve ever purchased it in the grocery store), that surely I would eat jam if it was in the pantry, and homemade. But, by Christmas I had given most of it away as gifts, and anything left by the time the new year rolled around was put to use as hostess gifts or birthday presents. 

Last year, I loved the idea of jam so much that I froze peaches that didn’t immediately make it into jam so that I could be free to make jam any time I pleased throughout the year. Now, nearly one year later, several quarts of peaches stare at me from the back of the freezer. Determined to be rid of these before the next round of peaches arrive, and against my better judgement, I decided to turn some of them into jam last week. When the jam failed to set and I was left with a few pints of peach sauce, I decided to try my hand at peach butter. As it turns out, I love peach butter. Not just the idea of it, but the actual food. I like the deeper flavor it takes on after cooking for so long. I like the way it coats a piece of toast.

So I begin this season of putting food by with clarity. I will not try to make myself love something I don’t just because I can make it myself and think it romantic. I will not use the freezer as a tool for prolonging the life of something that I plan to preserve in some other fashion at a much later date. 

I’ll make the things I love. Because homemade might make it better, but it might not be good enough to make me want to eat it. 

A little bit every day

Extreme weather can teach a gardener a lot about growing food. Whereas most of the season a gardener might not notice the nuanced chemical processes occurring daily within a plant, the effects of a stretch of very hot weather are quickly apparent, and not often good. In my garden, the extreme heat of early July caused the tomatoes and peppers to drop their top blossoms, beet greens to wilt in the late afternoon heat, and pea vines to turn yellow and crispy. Beet tops recover. But the tomato and pepper blossoms are lost, and with them, the potential for fruit. This episode reminded me of how little control I have over the natural world. Humbled, I hope for the return of warm and sunny days so that new blossoms will unfold and new fruit will set in time to ripen. 

Now the middle of summer, harvests are constant, and at the same time I must begin sowing fall crops. Something must go to make room for the seeds which will feed us this fall and into winter. I bask in the bounty of summer but am mindful of hungrier times ahead. So here is what I do.

What’s in

Sweet Potatoes: A couple of weeks ago I received an urgent message from a friend who was on her way out the door for a long summer vacation. She had a small box of sweet potato slips that needed a good home. Unable to say no, I found some space and am trying to create a tropical environment for them. I constructed a small hoop house out of pvc pipe and perforated plastic. I water regularly to keep the inside of the house moist. The plants are responding well with lots of healthy growth, and yet I still feel as though I will only get sweet potatoes by way of a miracle.

Cilantro, Dill, Bush Beans: A second planting of these crops means we will have dill when the cucumbers are ripe (for pickles), and another round of beans and cilantro when the first plantings have been harvested.

What’s out

I’ve become increasingly interested in watching plants complete their entire life cycles. Not immediatly good for the eater who grows in a limited space, but important for me as I seek to develop a comprehensive understanding of how things grow. Eventually though, I’ve got to pull.

Red Orach: I removed all the remaining edible leaves, even if tiny, for salads, then clipped the flowers for arrangements and chopped the stalks into small pieces to compost onsite. One plant remains so that I can see it through from seed to seed. I’ll use its seed for next spring’s planting.

Peas: I cut the plants at the base (leaving the roots to rot in the ground), laid them in the pathways and covered them with horse manure (a sheet composting experiment).

Cilantro: Though we’ve been eating it regularly for about a month, this week I harvested about six cups at once and made pesto. To enjoy pesto year round, simply freeze it in ice cube trays. Once frozen, pop the cubes into freezer bags and use as needed throughout the year. 

Beets: I’ve read that high temperatures can make them woody, so I harvested all but one row which I’m leaving as an experiment to find out for sure.  I steamed half of the harvest, tossed them in balsamic vinegar, and put them in a bowl in the fridge where they are readily available for use in salads throughout the week. The other half is storing in the crisper. 

Garlic: The garlic is in its second week of curing. From the outside the bulbs look dry, but the skin is still drying around the individual cloves. I am guessing it will be another two weeks before it can be safely stored for the year.

Carrots: I’m harvesting a few a week now. They are perfectly formed and blemish free, though unfortunately not very sweet, so I’m researching varieties and growing conditions to see about improving the flavor of my next sowing.

A brief inventory

A fresh sunburn sits proudly on my shoulders, neck and chest. Tom and I take long after-dinner walks through the neighborhood, where kids play in the street until their mothers call them in only when the sun gives up its very last ounce of light. Gardens are watered by 6am to give plants the best chance of taking up water. The sometimes faint and sometimes overwhelming scent of burning charcoal wafts through SE Portland. Summer has arrived.

In the garden much has happened over the past month, and I have written very little about it. I’m finding it difficult to make myself sit down and write. I’m in the garden instead. I’ll try my best to jot down notes when I can as I know I’ll thank myself next year when I need to be reminded of what the 2009 season was like. Here is a quick recap of what’s been going on:

1. Tomatoes are producing beautiful green fruit. We now have about 11 plants, mostly because they kept being offered to me and I couldn’t resist.

2. We are now up to 10 pepper plants for the same reason. We’ve got several varieties including many italian types.

3. The red orach is getting very tall. I’m letting several plants go to seed so that I can see the plant’s entire life cycle (it is said to be very beautiful when it flowers) and to save seed.

4. Peas are growing like mad. I planted them too close to the tomatoes, which they now shade. A farmer friend suggested I release them from their trellises and place them on the ground—they are vines after all. I’ve done so, and the tomatoes appear much happier. But I’ve sacrificed my pathways for the peas, so now I must jump over them to access other plants. This has been a great learning experience in the importance of timing and placement.

5. Beets were slow to get going, but we are now enjoying perfectly formed deep red globes. Thanks to the floating row cover provided by my dad, we are also enjoying tender pest-free beet tops.

6. The garlic (both hard and soft neck) is now curing on the back porch under the shade of the ginkgo, with the frequent breezes of the last few days helping to dry them. The garlic got rust this year, which I’ve never experienced. The entire community garden seems to have contracted it. It has affected the leaves but not the bulbs, although I’m wondering if this may mean that they won’t store well. We may have to eat all 22 bulbs sooner rather than later.

7. I’m finding it  more and more difficult to  garden in the middle of a city park in the middle of summer. Half-naked dodgeball games with blasting music, back-to-back kickball sessions in the diamond adjacent to my plot, and bicycles locked up to the garden gate making it impossible to use the entrance, are all making me a little mad (both angry and crazy). Tom reminds me that this is a public park and that these kids are just having fun, and he is right. And I just want to be a gardener, having some peace. I understand that my expectations are askew for my particular situation. I’m idealistic. But until something else comes along, this is what I have to work with. In this park, I’m learning what is important to my gardening experience. And, I’m learning to go early in the day–dodgeball rarely starts before 2pm.

Gardens on the road

In 1871, the keepers of the wooden Yaquina Bay Lighthouse received their provisions by ship once a month. They cooked on a wood fired stove, enjoyed the luxury of running water in the kitchen (a rarity at the time), and grew produce in a small plot of land behind the lighthouse. Today, children of one of the local Newport elementary schools garden here. Giant globe artichokes, perennial herbs, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, celery, beets, greens and radishes abound nearly 140 years after the lighthouse was built.

 

Two blocks west of the Lincoln County jail, in the parking lot strip of a row of painfully ordinary county buildings, lies this garden. What at first looked like an average weed patch revealed itself to be a patch of food, complete with radishes, carrots, lettuce and corn.

Back home, my garden was well tended by Tom and my friend, Sarah. White currants, garlic, beets, blueberries, arugula, cilantro, strawberries, and peas welcomed me home.

Time out

I’m headed to the coast for a little over a week. I’m excited to go, but already missing my time in the garden. Thankfully, I’ve got a cooler full of garden greens and herbs to take along. Here are some shots of the garden this week. 

The long haul

I arrived at Joan’s shaded four square home just after 9:30am on Saturday. Joan had been ill and hadn’t been to the community garden for some time, but she had herbs she wanted to donate to the Colonel Summers Community Garden Herb Project, and I was there to pick them up. She gave me a tour of her backyard where I received useful advice about which herbs to plant directly into the earth and where, and which ones were so greedy that they’d need to spend their lives confined to pots.  After gathering the sage, oregano and parsley starts for the garden, I began to say thank you and good bye, when she grabbed her sun hat and a basket of tools. Only then did I notice the streaks of white sunscreen lining the edges of her silvery eyebrows. She wasn’t going to miss this. Joan was coming back to the garden. I later learned that the herb garden was her idea—one she’d been wanting to bring to fruition for years. 

Joan was the first to break ground, digging deeply and ruthlessly at the thickly rooted comfrey which had all but taken over the garden. She was also quick to point out the myriad invasive grasses with contorted roots that spread far and wide to the root zone of a beautiful pink peony and through the wire of the garden’s chain link fence. This all had to go. Not a speck of weed root could be left or our work would never be done—we’d be forever haunted by these garden bullies. And so, we, the somewhat lazy modern gardeners, persevered. We fought powerful and collective urges to hastily pull what we could of the weed tops, to leave much of the root unscathed, to cover up the evidence of our shortcuts with a bit of dirt so Joan wouldn’t notice. 

And for as much as we tried, our efforts still fell short of Joan’s. We really did give it our best, but there was no getting around the fact that we simply lacked a lifetime of experience. Joan has something many of us don’t. She grew up on the land, in rural Hillsboro, Oregon at a time when the town proper contained a mere 3,000 people. The landscape was rural and untainted by the countless strip malls and chain stores that now blemish its surface.  Joan was one of five children, and she wouldn’t have eaten were it not for the garden. 

Perhaps because of this, Joan gardens from a different time and perspective. From a time when a three-way soil blend couldn’t be bought by the yard and delivered. From a time when, for the average gardener, the path to good soil was longer than it is today. Soil was built over the span of years, not in an afternoon. It was built through steady work, cover crops, crop rotation and the addition of inputs from the family homestead, often in the form of manure from livestock, decomposing plant matter and kitchen scraps. Joan gardens with frugality and resourcefulness as her guides. But as frugal as she is with her external inputs, she is equally generous with her hard work, time, attention, and genuine love for growing food. 

Slow gardening won’t produce extraordinarily high yields right off the bat. It likely won’t make you the envy of your neighbors. It might not win you the giant tomato contest at the state fair. But it probably will help you develop an honest-to-goodness relationship with the land and an understanding of life—of a plant’s, the soil’s, an insect’s and perhaps best of all, your own. Kind of appealing, isn’t it?

Freezer wisdom

Yesterday, we picked the first fruits of the season from our garden; three plump strawberries. The arrival of even just a few of these early fruits means that it really is time to finish up the the frozen berries from last summer’s u-picks. 

Inspired by a rhubarb cream pie I made earlier this week, I made a raspberry blueberry cream pie with bags of fruit that were lingering in the bottom of the freezer. This pie contains the spirit of one particular Saturday last summer spent on Sauvie Island picking fruit with friends. It evokes memories of the angle and the heat of the sun on that day, and of our conversations about what we would make with the berries once we got them home. All of this just frozen in time until yesterday. 

In late fall, a full freezer imparts a wonderfully secure feeling to a home, providing a sense of bravado so strong that one might go so far as to secretly wish for a long, harsh winter. And although it is incredibly satisfying to eat from the freezer during the long, dark days of winter, I think perhaps the best freezer is a nearly empty one, for in its emptiness lies endless potential. 

Save two cuts of pork from Square Peg Farm, a couple of loaves of bread from the Grand Central Baking class madness, several quarts of peaches and a couple of bags of roasted tomatoes, the freezer is now nearly empty; the cycle is on the brink of renewal.