Natural Process

There is an old apple grove not too far from where we live. Every year around this time we take our backpacks, hike into that old orchard, and almost always find our fill of these special fruits. They are special to us because in this long forgotten orchard there happens to be over twenty different varieties of apples and even a few pears scattered throughout the meadows. I'm sure that others must know of this place but we have never once run across anyone else picking apples. Nor does it appear that any apples have ever been picked by anyone other than the few black bears that inhabit this area. We have been gathering fruit here for over 10 years now.

These particular apples have an almost perfumy flavor to them, so very unusual.


Unfortunately, a family of beavers has set up camp in the meadows and has managed to flood the grounds around almost a third of the fruit trees so far, many of these are now dying. I suppose the good news would be that I have been saving seeds off these trees for several years now and have many of their offspring growing on my own property. Perhaps some of those trees will compliment our regular fruit trees and eventually produce delicious apples and pears similar to the ones in the flooded orchard.

Small, tart, golden crab apples. We had to wade through almost a foot of water to get to this tree.

Most of the apples we picked are being made into apple sauce as we can't help but bruise them. Between trying to get them out of sometimes 30-40' tall trees and hauling them around on our backs they never do make it home in the best condition. The huge variety of large, crab, green, gold, red, tart, and sweet apples make some of the best sauce. I will happily share this area with the beavers even if it means all the trees will be lost, anything would be better then losing it to another housing development, as we have many of our old stomping grounds. Progress, right?


Fully loaded and heading home with packs full of soon to be bruised apples.


So, for now, we will continue to enjoy these apples and this private place, perhaps we will need to search out new apple picking grounds while patiently waiting for our own little orchard to start producing. Nothing good lasts forever I suppose, we sometimes feel like the animals must, slowly being pushed farther and farther out as we attempt gather wild edibles.

This pear tree is almost 40' tall, and very thorny. I wonder how old it is?

The pears almost look like little apples, very small and very tart. I'll be planting a few of their seeds this fall.

Let's Eat Some Beets

So you don't like beets? Good news! You're probably in the U.S. majority - just not at our house. We absolutely love beets. We love the beet's fresh greens added to our daily salads or steamed with a dab of butter. We love to force a beet in the middle of winter on a sunny window sill and then cut the tops into a salad finishing it off with the grated root...yes, raw. Those roots are not too bad cooked either.:)

Your average disliked beet contains numerous vitamins (especially the greens), minerals, energy giving carbohydrates, sugar, fiber (most Americans could use a little more fiber), sodium, and fatty and amino acids that will help build the muscles necessary to raise your own beets. All of these compounds make your average homegrown, organically of course, beet a nutritional powerhouse that can single handily help stave off many of today's serious health ailments. How does that saying go "A beet a day keeps the Doctor away."...something like that.

We harvested well over 400 beets the other day and will easily consume them all before June of next year. Our beets are always harvested before carrots, parsnips, and Belgian endive as they tend to stick up out of the ground and too hard a frost could damage them. After cutting the tops off about 1" from the stem the beets are then layered in damp sand in coolers and totes in the root cellar. They will usually keep this way until late May sometimes June. The best of the greens are blanched and frozen and the rest go to the chickens. We grew cylindrical, bulls blood, albino, golden, red and yellow mangles, lutz, chioggia, and early wonder beets. None of our beets grew very big this year but most were of adequate size. Actually, the golden beets were once again pretty wimpy but I like them so much that I will continue to try and grow them in the future.



New to us, these yellow mangles seemed to do really well, although I have not tasted them yet.


Our two faithful standbys, cylindrical and chiogga. Chioggia is not my favorite but always performs well in our garden. I love cooking with the cylindrical beets, so very easy to work with.


One of my all time favorite beets - Bulls Blood. If hilled in these will often survive in the garden until spring, and the greens (reds) can be eaten all winter long. And because of the name our grandson loves to eat them raw and show off his "bloody" teeth.


Did you know that a simple way to make your own sugar is to simply cook your strained beets juices down until they are as thick as honey, cool to crystallize, and voila! Home grown sugar. I'm am going to try it this winter with my white beets.

The Forgotten Cardoon

Last night we incorporated a couple cardoon stalks into the evening meal. I diced up eggplant, red pepper, blue corn, onions, cut in half and cored a few meaty little Turkey tomatoes (one of my new favorites). The cardoons were then peeled, diced, boiled in salted water and later added to the rest of the mixture. My wife was in charge of salmon, generously donated by my in-laws (thanks!), baked with tomatillos and dill. We topped everything off with a zesty salsa and side of warm cornbread...it was delicious.



Cardoons, a biennial and member of the artichoke family, grow fairly well for us as long as they are provided with plenty of water. These large prehistoric appearing plants have saw-toothed leaves and ribbed stalks similar to celery. I started growing them a few years back as we hope to eventually start making some of our own goat cheese. Cardoons contain enzymes that can replace rennet in the cheese making process. Since we have yet to try our hand at cheese and still don't have a viable source of goat milk, we decided to make better use of this rather unusual vegetable and have begun to include it in our diet.


Traditionally, the stalks are blanched in the fall by mounding dirt or straw around them and tying or wrapping the upper portions in paper or any material that will keep the light away, helping to tenderize the stems. We have not tried this, and find that if watered properly the stalks do not seem to get very tough, and the inner ones are often palatably delicate.

In the kitchen, the leaves are removed and the back of the stocks peeled of any fibrous strings. Immediately after peeling and cutting the stalks should be put in cold acidic (salt, vinegar, or lime juice) water to keep them from discoloring. They can then be boiled for about 20 minutes at the cook's leisure. With an almost bittersweet flavor and texture similar to celery I plan to use them in stir fries, soups, or any of the funky dishes we tend to make around here. They are not bad raw either, especially while still young.


While this vegetable may not be for everyone, we hope to make better use of it in the kitchen and will be attempting to overwinter some in both the garden and root cellar this year.

A Spudlicious Endeavor

The potatoes have all been harvested and it didn't even rain! Usually when we harvest root crops around the last week in September and into October the weather is fairly miserable... rainy and cold. This time, for a change, we were able to pull all of the spuds in last weekend's sun, how nice.

This year's crop was not nearly as big or numerous per plant as in previous years due to the unseasonably warm summer and the fact that I used a lot less water...just to see what I could get away with. Fortunately, we planted quite a few more than normal with the hopes of supplementing our chickens winter diet with potatoes as well. So in the end we were lucky enough to get our biggest harvest ever, lots of potatoes just not really big ones.


We chose to grow 25 varieties this year because What Good is a Russet Without a Purple Majesty by it's Side!. I was happy with most of them but a few really underperformed: Red Lasota, Red Pontiac, and Adora. Those three will not be included in next season's garden as a couple are now perennial under achievers. One of my new favorite potatoes that we decided to try this year after reading about it on Throwback at Trapper Creek 's blog post Winter stores update is Viking Purple. All of them performed marvelously producing an abundance of uniformly sized potatoes. I will be growing many more of those along with my other two standouts Anna Cheeka Ozette and Russian Banana next spring.

We left our potatoes in the ground for several weeks to harden off after most of the vines had died back, this helps to thicken the potato skins which in turn increases the length of time potatoes can be stored. As we pulled our four rows the potatoes were placed in buckets to help keep the different varieties separate until I had a chance to go through and select the best looking ones for next year's seed potatoes.


The potatoes were then spread out in the dark of our basement to dry for a couple weeks and will eventually be moved into their permanent winter storage room where they will be sorted out on shelves to be used as needed. Our house was built in the 1930's and the basement has an old well in it providing the perfect combination of cold and humidity, good storage conditions for most root vegetables and tubers. We can easily maintain an average temperature of 35 - 50° in our basement from October through April of each year.

I'm looking forward to enjoying lots of potato and kale soup this winter and perhaps I will even find it in my heart to share a few, not as many as I had originally planned, with the chickens. They like their spuds served steamed and warm with no condiments on frigid winter evenings.:)

Morelle de Balbis

On a whim, we grew a couple Morelle de Balbis also known as a Litchi tomato this year with great success. The hardest part was getting the darn seeds to germinate, but once a few finally developed into little seedlings they quickly went on to grow into six foot tall thorny giants.


In Early July, after flowering, the fruit slowly started to develop. I was a bit unnerved when a few of the leaves started falling off until I finally realized they were shedding their leaves as new growth emerged...at least I assume that is what was going on. It would seem that there is very little information available on this plant. So far I have collected about a quart of fruit off each of the plants, not a lot but more then I had expected. The fruit really does taste like a cross between a cherry and a watermelon but is a bit on the seedy side.

Right now they are loaded with still maturing fruit, but with frost close at hand I have little faith that it will ever fully develop. Will I grow this extremely thorny plant again? Yes! But only a couple plants as they do take up a lot of room and really do not produce all that much in our short growing season. I will also NOT grow it so close to our garden gate as both of us are in danger of developing bald spots from ducking under some of the thorny branches. Who knows maybe someone will decide this is the next "superfood" and I can sell the seeds for $1.00 a piece.:)

The thorns are pretty nasty, Brer Rabbit would feel right at home in a patch of Litchi.


Picking this fruit without a pair of clippers is not all that pleasant...I learned this the hard way.


Even the husks have thorns, what a fascinating plant this turned out to be.

From a prior post, New Acquaintances In The Garden - Litchi Tomato aka Sticky Nightshade (S. sisymbriifolium)- A large plant that can grow around 5' tall and is covered in thorns. The prickly husk covered fruit is the size of a cherry tomato and supposedly tastes like a cross between a tomato, tart cherry, and watermelon. This "Wild Tomato" can be grown as you would any tomato but may not be a very prolific producer, nonetheless it certainly piqued my interest.

October 11 2009 Update-

It would appear that the litchi plant is also very hardy, ours has now easily survived five 29-31° nights and three nights of below 20° weather. The coldest weather caused the remaining fruits to become mushy but the plant itself still looks great.

Saving Seed - Belgian Endive & Red Giant Celery

Saving your own seed often consists of many challenges, and can definitely test one's resolve...and patience. I was thinking about this late yesterday afternoon as I was close to finishing the seed processing of two of my biennial garden vegetables. A project whose inception begin in early spring 2008 and was just now, almost 20 months later, coming to a conclusion. I was able to reap ample rewards of Red Giant celery and green & red Belgian endive seed, but what an amazing commitment of time for the seed saver.

As both of these crops are biennials I had to plant, grow, overwinter, and replant them in order to see them through until seed. I overwintered the majority in buckets of dirt in our root cellar, but also hilled some into the garden to see if they could manage the winter outside. They overwintered successfully both ways. The Belgian endive did great in the the cellar and undercover of snow. While I did lose half of the celery left outdoors those that lived put out more copious amounts of seed than their cellared brethren. You can see how we overwinter some of these veggies in an earlier post Forced To Provide .

The Belgian endive forms seeds that are firmly encased in their pod and can be very time consuming to remove if working with large amounts of seed. I start by cutting the seed stalks after the majority have finished flowering and many of the seeds are dry and leave them in a safe place out of the weather to finish drying for a couple weeks. They are then placed in a wheelbarrow and the seed is pounded out of them, I used a garden rake but any type of flail would work. After they had received a good thrashing as punishment for taking so long to produce viable seed :) I removed the larger debris and sifted the remaining chaff and seed through a strainer. This still left me with a lot of smaller chaff and dust surrounding the seed.

The blue flowers of Belgian endive attract a variety of insects like this sweat bee

All endive seeds are tightly encased, and quite difficult to remove in large amountsPounding the dry endive stalks with a rake in order to separate the seeds from their housing
Straining the smaller chaff and seed from the larger debris

I find the easiest way to remove the finer chaff from a large amount of seed is to simply use a fan, set on low for these lighter seeds, and carefully pour the seed from one container to another letting the fan blow the chaff away. This works especially great with wheat and flax seeds. Keep in mind that sometimes the chaff outweighs the seed and both may blow away in the wind if you are not careful. The fan speed and distance from the seed being poured has to be adjusted for different types of seed.

The finished product ready to be stored away for next season's gardening adventures

Red Giant celery, like most of the seeds I collect, is easy to clean while being harvested. The hard part is the time involved in retrieving the seed as each seed umbel drys at different times. So every third day finds me collecting the dry seed before it shatters and falls to the ground. Again, very time consuming.

Red Giant celery, an open pollinated heirloom that does well in our garden
Our overwintered celery began flowering in late June and a few are still blooming
Once dry, the seeds will easily fall off the plant if not carefully removed every few days

Celery seeds picked last night, they are easily cleaned as there is no real chaff

We have been most fortunate to successfully save the seeds off a number of biennial plants this year: certain flowers, carrots, beets, endive, celery, kale, broccoli, and a number of plants that have slipped my mind as of this post. It has been a seedy good year.

The Realization of Corn

I went to bed worried and woke up relieved as we missed the frost monster by all of 1° last night, talk about close. Normally it would not have mattered all that much since we do get frost around this time every year, but the next few days are supposed to be unseasonally warm bringing us back into the 90°'s and I am just not ready to part with my tender garden crops quite yet. Give me one more week for the end of summer to sink in and I will bravely trudge forward into fall with no regrets. Besides, we have too many tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants still on the vine and could use a few extra days in which to harvest them.


Last winter I blathered on about my garden nemesis, corn, in The Promise Of Blue Jade Corn. Well..."Yo Adrian, I DID IT!" Both my Painted Mountain and little Blue Jade corn not only grew up without falling over but actually provided us with numerous cobs of brilliant multicolored corn. Slightly mealy heirloom corn that we really do enjoy the flavor of and should make for an excellent corn meal.


We made sure the wind would not blow the corn over this year by running lines of cordage down the rows along each side of the stalks. This prevented the corn from falling over and provided such awesome fortification that even the wind was uncannily calm and only dared taunt us with few stiff breezes this summer. Ha!


I pulled most of the sun cured Painted Mountain corn and am allowing it to finish drying in the greenhouse while the Blue Jade gets another week in the field. Most of this corn will be used for cornmeal and next season's seed. I am even saving the husks to possibly weave as the original Americans did into baskets this winter. Don't hold your breath waiting for pictures of those, it will be a miracle if I even start on that project.


So I am quite pleased to actually have a crop of corn for the first time in three years. Between our new found successes with chickens and corn we may actually be getting good at this whole subsistence pattern lifestyle.:)

Askutasquash

Squash was originally known as askutasquash by the Narragansett Indians, but the Pilgrims, having difficulty pronouncing this word simply called it squash. Either way, it was an extremely valuable source of food for both peoples, and one that we also heavily rely on as a source of nutrition for a large part of the season.

This year's askutasquash grew pretty well for us considering the fact that the plants were not provided with very sunny locations to grow in, mostly due to space constraints. Last night we picked many of our smaller squash from an area of our garden that becomes shady and damp this time of year, not ideal conditions for squash. A couple had blemishes even though we put down boards to help keep them away from the soil. The majority had fully matured and still looked great, so we decided to harvest them while they were still in good condition. Our larger Hubbard, Kabocha, and some of the Spaghetti squash were grown in a different garden and have been left on the vine for a while longer as the plants still look pretty good.

Spaghetti and Kabocha keeping each other company ↓

This vegetable is always harvested by us around mid to late September just before any fall rains or frost can damage the crop. Normally at this time of year the vines have begun to die back and the rind has hardened to the point that it can no longer be easily pierced by our thumbnails. I leave a couple inches of stem on the squash as they perspire through their stems, and any without may begin to rot. Those that lack stems or have soft spots are always used first, and are usually the ones that we steam and freeze to be used as soup or in mashed squash dishes. The squash is then allowed to cure on our porch until the temperature drops below 50° at which point it is brought inside and kept cool and dry, right around 50-60°. Our acorn squash never stores very long for us so we try to use them first, I only grew a few this year because of that.

Large and reliable Blue Hubbard ↓

Over the years I have for the most part grown the same 8-10 types of squash, not really trying too many new varieties. I certainly do have my favorites though; Blue Hubbard, Spaghetti, Sugar Pie pumpkin, and Gold Nugget squash. I can always count on these four to outperform in the garden regardless of the conditions in any given year. That, and they hold up extremely well in storage, some a good 10-11 months. We are often still eating the prior season's perfectly good squash towards the latter part of June.

Cross between a Blue Hubbard and Gold Nugget ↓

Same crossed seeds, slightly different look ↓


We started growing Sugar Pie pumpkins and the little Gold Nugget squash about four years ago and have been very pleased with their productivity, tolerance for bad weather, and ability keep in storage. These have both been wonderful additions to the food garden and are very easy to manage in the kitchen. The little 2-5 pound Gold Nuggets grow on very compact plants making them perfect for tight spaces and have a surprisingly small seed cavity and lots of flesh, an ideal meal for two. We sometimes bake our squash dolled up with spaghetti sauce, herbs, ground cherries, and even a few elderberries (we just picked a gallon of these off our bushes), but more often then not we just grate them raw onto our salads enjoying their natural flavors.


Gold Nuggets growing on a compact plant, these were in a different part of the garden and can wait a bit longer before being harvested. ↓