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. 

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.