Robin Hill Gardens – Page 83 – Be joyful though you have considered all the facts

Amie’s Art Gallery

Amie is drawing like a mad woman nowadays – wanting to become an artist and all that requires lots of practice – and she was taping her drawings all over our walls, with lots and lots of tape, of course. Fearing for our paint job, I gave her a large stack of cheapo IKEA frames purchased many years ago. So she has been framing and decorating the living room. I’ll take some closer-up pictures of them soon.

The little bed is at eye level with the wood stove, which it faces directly. It’s very comfy and Amie loves it for her retreat. The intention is, on cold winter days, to all of us be together in the living room, which will be the warmest place in the house. I like that idea of life contracting to a warm, cozy core as winter takes hold of everything around us.

This Is What I Grew Them For

Frietjes, Frites, Belgian Fries.

The Bintje, a very popular European potato but virtually unknown here in the States, is the best potato for fries. It has a starch solid content of about 20%, so it’s neither waxy nor floury. So what you do to bring out the best in it, is fry it twice.

Fry them in small batches in a deep-fryer, first at 320 F (or 160 C), for about 5 to 10 minutes – remove at the first sign of browning. It will come out looking like this:

Pretty greasy, but cooked through and soft. You gently dab off the grease with a paper towel – this is perhaps the only use for a paper towel in our house. Then you let them rest, preferably for a couple of hours. At this point you can freeze them and proceed on to the next stage whenever you want (I find that three months in the freezer is the limit).

Then you fry them at 375 F (190 C) for a minute or two, until they’re nicely brown and crisp.

The thing is, if you do this with a Russet or Idaho or Yukon Gold, it won’t work. The fries will stick to the frying net, they’ll get all mealy and won’t become crisp on the outside, and won’t taste of anything but the oil.

I had mine with an omelet and a dab of mayo. I know! Don’t worry, what with our Bintje harvest, we’ll only have two of these cholesterol laden meals this year, because if there are no Bintjes, there will be no fries.

Spudtacularly Disappointing

In the balmy 60F weather I dug up the last two potato towers. All in all there were three bins, 4’x4′ each and filled up to about 3′ high. In one I had put 2.5 lbs of Salem, in the other two 2.5 lbs of Bintjes each. I harvested 1 lb and 1.5 oz of (terribly tasting) Salems a few weeks back. Yes, that’s a negative yield. We might as well have eaten our $8 worth of organic seed potatoes. And today I dug up 6 lbs 10.2 oz of Bintjes (which were $7.5 for the 5 lbs of seed). At least I didn’t come out negative on the Bintjes!

That was one labor intensive, costly (all purchased compost, and the wood for the towers) and utterly useless gardening exercise. I’m so glad I blog. I was thinking, as I was seeing the disappointment growing on my digging fork, that I could at least get a funny blog post out of it. Well… funny…

Some of the plants had some tiny potatoes in the upper 2 feet of the soil, but most spuds were formed in the bottom foot, and most of these were undersized. I am guessing that if I hadn’t slashed down the blighty plants a month ago, or if they hadn’t caught the blight in the first place, I would have had a little bit of a larger yield, but not large enough to make it worth our while anyway. The soil was also wet and very heavy. Perhaps the tubers couldn’t grow even if they wanted to: too much pressure, especially from above (those useless 2 feet of soil). Maybe we placed the planks too tightly together, so there wasn’t enough drainage. But in the end I think we just don’t have the sun in that location for the sugars to be transformed into starches.

Well, two of the bins will be a depot for compost for more beds next season – they held blighted plants, however, so not for solanaceae.Â The third bin will become a large compost bin. I’ll cover them with straw and a tarp during winter.

So here is my final potato tally:

TOWERS (in shady part of garden)

– Bintje (8’x4’x3′): 5 lbs seed > 106.6 oz (6 lbs 10.2 oz) = RATIO 1:1.33

– Salem (4’x4’x3′): 2.5 lbs seed > 17.5 oz (1 lb and 1.5 oz) = RATIO 1:0.43

BEDS (in most sunny part of garden, all equal amount of sun)

– Banana fingerlings (3’x5’x1′): 1 lb seed > 8.6 ozÂ = RATIO 1:0.53

– Keuka Gold (4’x4’x1′): 2.5 lbs seed > 135 oz (8 lbs 5 oz) = RATIO 1:3.375

– Dark Red Norland (4’x4’x1′): 2.5 lbs seed > 61 oz (3 lb 10 oz) = RATIO 1:1.5

The Keuka Gold, which were great tasting, were the only success. Maybe I should stick to those next time? Maybe I shouldn’t grow potatoes at all next year?

Stories and Drawings of Amie at Just Four, and Jelly

It seems I’m no longer writing in my (analog) journal. Don’t know why, but in any case I am jotting down Amie’s sayings and doings on pieces of paper here and there. Here’s an effort to preserve them.

…

Amie had to have four shots at her four-year well-visit. We did two during that visit, and the two other ones a few weeks ago – the day before school started, actually. Each time Amie jealously guarded the tiny round bandaids that covered the puncture wounds. In the bath and shower she screamed, wanting to keep them dry. When one was hanging on by a thread and DH pulled it off, she became hysterical. We could never quite figure out why. It was a mystery, until today.

When she saw that the last banaid was coming half off, she started crying.

– Does it hurt?

– No.

– Then why are you crying?

– I want to go to school!

– Aaah, I see. But you just need the shot to go to school, the medicine. Not the bandaid.

Glad that’s solved. The connections they make!

…

(In the first drawing Mama is upside down because she is lying down on the bed and Amie is sitting on top of the door with a cat. The second drawing is of a Mama and Baba fish and their tadpole children. The other two are self-evident.)

Amie reiterated this morning that she wants to be an artist – she’s been practicing. DH asked her if she didn’t want to be what he is.

– What am I, again? he asked.

– A new scientist, she said. I don’t want to be a new scientist, but an artist, like Thhaam (grandmother).

(DH is a neuroscientist.)

…

We were having lunch when she suddenly said to me:

– Mama, when you were a little kid you were much older than I was.

– But when I was four years old, I was four, right? Same as you?

– Of course. Everyone has to be four years old at some point, after they’re three.

…

More about time. One day she also came to me to ask me, out of the blue:

– Mama, this day has never been, right? This time has never been before?

I told her the truth. I would have quoted her Jim Harrison, but kept it for later:

“We think of life as a solid and are haunted

when time tells us it is a fluid”

This must be the tenth time I read The Road Home. I love that voice.

…

We’re having a lovely Sunday. We got up at 10 (Amie loves to sleep in and we oblige) for our Sunday tradition (week 5) of DH and Amie making waffles/crepes. Then while listening to seventies music we munched and read, drew, sewed and surfed the net. Then we cleaned up the kitchen after last night’s party (we had a three-course feast with fish stew and risotto for ten). I finished the apple peel jelly (*) while DH chopped wood and Amie played outside in the newly warm weather. Then I split some more wood – I’m getting pretty good with the splitting maul. All this in our pajamas. Now we’re relaxing with a glass of wine, and soon we’ll have our dinner of leftovers.

…

(*) It was a bit of a chaotic business. First of all, the recipe in the Backwoods Home Magazine didn’t mention how many 1/2 pints the 5 cups of apple peel juice make. I doubled the recipe (and still have about 5 cups of juice left) and found I needed more than the 12 1/2 pints I had prepared. In fact, I had a whole quart jar left over (pic), for which there was no room in the canner. The recipe also didn’t mention to stir constantly while you let it boil hard for that one minute – I only found that out when reading another jelly recipe. I didn’t stir it at all… I remember our utter disappointment one winter when we opened the first jar of my mom’s home-canned crabapple jelly and found it still liquid, as well as the next, and the next…

Apple Peel Jelly and Wood Fire

3998903378_0a47329666 — first fire in wood stove

We lit our wood stove for the first time yesterday. The temperature inside was 62 F, so quite bearable, but we wanted to cure the stove while we could still open the windows, and get the hang of lighting a fire before the cold really kicks in. Going by this evening’s attempts, we’ll have to do a better job of sorting our wood, and splitting it a little more. Even after a year out there, some logs are still not dry enough.

dscf7427 — applesauce and apple peel jelly

I processed most of my half bushel of apples into unsweetened apple sauce. For some reason – because the canning book says “peel” and I am still such a novice that I feel I have to follow each instruction to the letter – I peeled the apples before boiling them. (Next time, no more, and that will save me a lot of time).

So that left me with a big mound of apple peels. Thinking of the vegetable stock I made earlier with peels and trimmings, I wondered if there was a “fruit stock” I could make with these peels.

I didn’t find anything like fruit stock, but I found an apple peel jelly recipe, over at the Backwoods Home Magazine – the irreverent jokes in which I enjoy a lot. I called up the orchard from which I bought the apples and they assured me their apples are pesticide free. So I stuck ’em in a pot (two pots actually, there was so much of it), boiled them with water for 15 minutes, and set them aside for a night. Tomorrow I’ll finish and can them.

I was thinking I never used to be so frugal with food. I used to prepare and eat my food without thinking much about it. Even after starting the garden, I never thought of what I was doing as frugal. More like taking control of our food supply, shrinking our ecological footprint, re-learning skills that might be needed in the future, etc.

Making jelly out of apple peels, though, that counts as frugal. I’m very curious to try the result.

Riot for Austerity, Month 11

Our Riot is almost a year old! It feels great to have come this far, and I can’t wait to tally up the yearly average. But first, month 11.

Gasoline. This went down a bit from last month because DH’s shuttle rides again.

9.55 gallons pp = 23% of the US National Average

Electricity. Our electricity went up a little because of all the canning on my electric stove. At 327 KWh of 100% wind produced electricity we used

9% of the US National Average

So we made the goal and are holding it there, but if we want to keep it at <10% over the entire year, we’ll have to come up with a solution for those big months, March and April, when the germination and seedling lights come on and stay on. Especially our hotbox – for germinating and growing on the heat-loving plans – will need an overhaul. What with the winter harvest and winter sowing I might also need less lights…

Funny, how nowadays when I wake up on a warm, windy day I immediately think: Laundry Day! On windy days I usually get two loads washed, on the line and dry by the evening.Â It feels good not to use that dryer. As the weather turns nasty we’ll be hanging our clothes to dry in the basement, but I do like the outdoorsy smell more than the basementy smell :)

Heating Oil and Warm Water. Same as last month.

13.6 gallons = 22% of the US National Average

Though there have been a few cold days and nights (one at 37 F), we haven’t turned on the heating yetÂ -and of course we’ll be doing the Freeze Your Buns challenge again. The Indian Summer is keeping us pretty warm at the end of this month, so we also still haven’t test run our wood stove. It sure is good to keep the windows wide open for a little while longer.

Trash. After last month’s headaches about whether to count our construction debris for the Riot – and many helpful comments from the Riot group – we’re back to normal.

8% of the US National Average

I don’t know what to think about the fact that the company I buy organic mushrooms from (at the grocery store) has changed their containers from recyclable plastic (green) ones to fully compostable (black) ones. I’ve been chucking them into the compost bin and have found they break down fast. Which means I can no longer use them for growing seedlings – and they were the ideal size and depth. Now, I have some doubts about the “biodegradable” claim. Not that the claim is false – obviously not, in this case. But I doubt whether the container ends up in compost bins. It’s like the “biodegradable diapers”: consumers feel themselves absolved of all guilt when they throw that thing in the trash can, from which it will continue to the (anaerobic and pitch dark) landfill, where it will not degrade at all. Now I worry that consumers may think they no longer have to recycle these mushroom containers, that chucking them into the household trash will be enough. And so the result will be opposite to what the mushroom packers intended…

Water. Our water usage went up from last month (17%) due to two factos: canning demands a lot of water, and we also sowed grass seed that needed to be watered twice a day 9for a month, after that, no more watering EVER!). We don’t have enough water pressure in our rain barrels to water the grass with those, so tap it was…

638.3 gallons pp = 21% of the US National Average

Consumer Goods. Some new clothes for Amie, the Winter Harvest Handbook and Back to Basics for Mama, and an ipod for DH’s birthday, how fast that adds up: $430.

52% of the US National Average

dscf7406 — garlic for honey garlic pickles

Food. I am estimating that we now eat 80% local, sustainably grown (a small but growing percentage of it homegrown), 10 dry bulk foods (granola, dry beans, flour, etc.) and 10% wet and conventional (cheese and coffee, especially). Not too bad by Riot standards,Â but of course this will change as the Farmers Market closes down…

(Also check our Independence Days efforts.)

Independence Days, Week 6

The Indian summer came, went, and came again. Last Friday we hit 37 F – cutting it pretty close – but yesterday it was 70F. It’s going to get cold again soon, though.

Plant. Moved (replanted) the 2 rhubarb plants, because in the end we chose their first bed as one of the beds to be covered by our winter hoop house. Planted 50 or so garlic cloves (3 varieties) next to the rhubarb. Sowed peas and planted onion sets for overwintering and early spring germination in outside beds. I’m investigating more winter sowing in containers here.

dscf7392 — some onions at least made it to scallion stage, the celery is thin but tasty, the carrots are small but super sweet

Harvest. From plants still going strong: Swiss chard, kale, peas, green beans, potatoes, parsley, basil, scallions, carrots and all the culinary herbs. Last ones: cucumber, eggplant, cherry tomatoes. Pulled most of the celery for mirepoix (with own and Farmers Market carrots and Farmers Market onions).

Preserve. 6 quarts of green beans, 3 pints of pickled cucumbers, 6 pints of peach pie fillingÂ making the (preliminary) total of jars to 101… PLUS (just in) 5 pints of Caribbean peach chutney – and that‘s the end of the peaches. So 106. Froze 5 lbs of mirepoix (I first cook it in butter, until just soft; I just love chopping it up; and I could cook it every day just for the smell of it). Froze 2 quarts of vegetable stock made form scrap (mainly celery leaves).

Waste not. We had a largish party, during which I was planning to do an experiment: I was going to set out paper napkins and cloth napkins and see which were most popular. Then I noticed I was out of paper napkins, so cloth it was, and the defunct experiment was the talk of the evening. We also used metal cutlery and recycled and compostable paper plates. The ashes from the 7-hour ribs went into a ash-bin for the compost and soil improvement. Filling a large bag of veggie “waste” (e.g., celery leaves) in the fridge: once I have enough I’ll make veggie broth and freeze or can it. For the rest, we continue on with our usual stuff.

Want not. Bought more canning jars (for some reason there weren’t many 8 oz jars in my Freecycle/Craig’s List hauls) – they were on sale this time. Our toothpaste was on sale too, so now we have enough for a year. But nothing else. It’s pathetic – I really want to be better prepared, for flu or power outage or whatever, but my self pep talks on the issue fizzle out so fast. I wish I had a buddy nearby to do this with.

Build community food systems. Chatted with farmers at the Market, getting on a first name basis and getting nice discounts too – I never ask for them, and when they’re offered, I always ask: “Are you sure? I know it’s not easy for you…” Some tell me about how they are just scraping by, and I also get to see how competition among the farmers at the market plays out. It’s very educational. I also went to a Transition Town meeting, and local food is of course a large part of Transition (more on that later).

dscf7394 — 100% homegrown "shepherd's pie" filling, to be topped with homegrown potato mash

Eat the food. Ate most out of the garden and whatever is left over from canning – one evening when it was just Amie and I, I had only green beans for dinner, almost an entire quart of them. Amie was so impressed: how can anyone eat so many vegetables!? We’ve eaten nothing from our canned stores yet: it will be special, cracking open that first jar.

dscf7241 — "See, I can do this, Mama, because I've seen how you do it!"

Canning Update

101 jars. Top row, left to right:

3 pints pickled cucumbers
6 8 oz cranberry peach preserves
9 8 oz fig preserves
8 pints apple sauce
5 pints basic tomato sauce
7 pints green bell pepper
7 8 oz peach salsa

Bottom row, left to right:

9 quarts green beans
6 pints peach pie filling
8 8 oz peach butter
6 pints peaches in light syrup
7 pints peach chutney
4 quarts + 1 8 oz apple sauce
16 blueberry jams – several recipes

Canning was one of the hurdles I cleared this season. As a teenager I witnessed my mom making and canning crab apple jam, but can’t remember participating. There really is nothing to canning, but it’s one of those old/new skills that was a bit intimidating to me. Nevertheless, wanting to work on our food self-sufficiency, I knew it was something I really wanted to do, so I started collecting jars early on, through Freecycle, Craig’s list and from the landfill. I still have many cases of empty larger jars. I only had to buy 8 oz jars, and lids and screw bands.

The shelves of the canning pantry were already there in our basement. I think the lady who lived her before us kept her own jars on them, because you can see some ring marks. I like it that they’re not deep, so I can see and check the jars at first glance. I’ll have to add some shelves if I keep this up, and also because I want to start adding things like flours, sugar, etc. The pantry is close to the furnace but the temperature fluctuations are minimal. Our basement is a constant 65 F, give or take a degree. It is always dark, except in winter, then I use the same space to grow my seedlings in winter: I will have to install a curtain for the pantry when those 16/24 lights come on

Like most of us in the States this year I was expecting a lot more from my garden then what I really got – bad weather and inexperience contributed. So I turned to the Farmers Market for produce (blueberry jam was my first attempt) and began hot-water bath canning in my large stockpot. I was already having fun when DH bought the high-pressure canner (the biggest Presto) for my birthday and helped me out on my first run, and then I was truly off. I use the Presto for the hot-water bath, since it is now my largest pot and it has a nice rack which keeps the jars from falling over.

I use the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving for recipes and instructions, as well as the manual for my canner. I use my glass top electric cook stove. It takes a lot longer to get that big pot of water boiling than on a gas stove, but that’s how it is for now. I have no trouble with the glass stove top as my canner has a flat bottom and I’m extra careful when I put it down (so as not to break the glass).

As I wrote earlier, canning (especially in a hot kitchen on a summer’s day) is heightening my appreciation for food production as much as growing the food does. Peeling, coring, chopping up, boiling, straining and processing 12 lbs of apples takes about 2 hours of work and comes to 4 quarts and 2 8 oz jars. A quick run to the shop takes 15 minutes and could come to hundreds of jars of applesauce!

Then there is the financial issue. Those organic apples at my Farmers Market were about $7 for a bag of 6 lbs (much cheaper than the apples the grocery store). So let’s say I made 5 quarts of sauce, that’s $1.40 per pint, which doesn’t calculate in the cost of the jar (okay, free in this case), lids and screw bands, electricity, water, sugar, spices, and my time. The organic applesauce in my grocery store comes to $2.64 per pint. I think the jar, lids and other ingredients can easily fit into that $1.24 difference… but not my time.

But that’s applesauce. On the one side there are the so-called more added-value foodstuffs, like fig preserves, salsas and pestos, which will come out quite a bit cheaper home canned if you can source the key ingredients cheaply. On the other side there are things like basic tomato sauce, which will be much cheaper from the supermarket shelves. My $1.99/lb organic tomatoes made a shocking $4 per pint home canned basic tomato sauce (so again excluding jar, other ingredients, electricity and time), while the supermarket organic tomato sauce is only $1.14 per pint. Another factor is organic vs. conventional: if the raw materials are the latter, then the price compared to non-organic store bought cans will likely be against the home canner.

So let’s say it all comes out in the middle, like the apple sauce: it comes to the same, except for the time. Then the question is: is it worth my time?

I believe it is, for a variety of reasons. I am preserving not just apples, but a skill as well. I enjoy working with food (especially if I’ve grown it, or if I’ve come to know the farmer who has). I fear that in the future the supermarkets might not be so well-stocked on applesauce and I want to know how to fill that gap myself. I can be certain of the “local-ness” and “organic-ness” of the raw materials. And I know exactly what went into my handwashed jars: the apples, sugar, spices, water and lemon juice of my choosing and making – no Bisphenol A, no neglected bacteria and other contaminants, no “manufacturing oils”.

Mass. Relocalization Conference: McKibben, Lappe, Mel King…

Heads up:

October 18

Roxbury, MA

The major goals of the conference are to educate, inform, and empower Massachusetts residents to take actions in their communities to help build the local infrastructure and institutions needed to provide economic security in a changing world. The conference will help clarify, catalyze, and coordinate the emerging efforts across the Commonwealth that are blazing the trail for community-organized energy, finance, banking, budgeting, healthcare, food, education, retail, service, manufacturing, and more.

click on image to see flyer.pdf

Winter Harvest

I bought the book. Nowadays when I want to buy a book I get it from the library first. After a couple of weeks of perusing and handling it, I might think differently about spending $15 on it… Not so with Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook. It’s full of hard practical advice and it’s beautifully made and I couldn’t wait to underline and make notes and set exclamation marks in the margins.

We are about to build a “cold house” (an unheated hoop house) out of pvc pipe and plastic cover, that will cover four beds (dark blue). Inside the hoop house each of these beds will be covered with an extra layer made of row cover. In these doubly-covered beds I’ll grow lettuce, spinach, broccoli, chard, kale, parsley, carrots, arugula, leeks, mizuna, mustard greens, scallions and beet greens.

Some beds (light blue) we’ll cover with row cover at first and an extra layer of plastic during the coldest months. This double protection is one of Coleman’s three components of the winter harvest. In those I’ll grow the most hardy crops (mache, mizuna, tatsoi, pak choi) for Winter and early Fall harvest, and I’ll tuck in arugula, pea, carrot, beet and onion seeds for overwintering and germination early in Spring.

I’ll try some of those crops in the small glass covered frame (dark blue in front of the house), which I want to convert into a hot frame, heated with decomposing horse manure. I just found out that my source – a horse owner right around the corner from our house – uses wood shavings for bedding, which Coleman considers detrimental to vegetable soil, so I might only use it in the hot frame, where it will not be mixed in with the growing soil but will only be used to heat that soil from underneath. I still need to find out exactly how that’s done… (Good news is that the horse is on no medication whatsoever.)

The hoop house will be light and portable and the idea is to get four people together in late Spring to pick it up and move it to another collection of four beds, where it will create a nice environment for the usual greenhouse plants, like tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. In the Fall we’ll pick it up again and move it to the Winter Garden beds.

This means I’m going to have to be a lot more careful about crop rotations than I have been. I must say that crop rotation is a problem for Square Foot Gardeners. This year’s problem with blight made that clear: if you had blighted potatoes and tomatoes scattered all over the place this year, you might not want to grow any Solanacaea at all next year. I did some SFG this year, but I think I will move to more conventional beds and row next season.

This is, of course, yet another grand experiment, but so worth a try. I had no spinach whatsoever in my first garden: my spinach seedlings bolted in Spring and I’ve been craving it ever since. If only the spinach works out, I’ll be happy!