Slice, Chop, Repeat

Although we try to eat with the seasons, and eat locally where possible, we still use 1-4 peppers a week for much of the year. In winter, they come from greenhouses in Mexico and Holland, and that just doesn't sit right with us.

But it's not quite winter yet: it's harvest time. Even though peppers are supposed to be a summer crop, here in New Hampshire they don't start turning colors until mid-September. We've still got a whole slew that are racing the end of the season with lots of green still showing. But, amazingly enough, we have gotten some from our garden already, and have stocked up when possible at the Farmer's Market. We cut them and freeze them for later use. Break out the whetstone - I like a sharp blade for this kind of work!

Before:

After:

Blueberries

Yup, it's that time of year again. Time for Brynna to look Oh-So-Cute while blueberry picking.



Did I say picking? Well, perhaps we should have named her Sal.

Garlic Harvest

When I first put the garlic into the ground last fall, I didn't know when you are supposed to pull it out. My one previous attempt to grow garlic may or may not have made it to harvest time - we couldn't very well bring it cross-country from Minnesota. So, like most of this gardening stuff, I've had a bit of learning to do.

Cutting the scapes a few weeks back was important, because that tells the plant to not bother putting energy into the flower, and instead direct it into growing the bulb. A few times over the last couple weeks I've pulled the dirt away from one or two plants so that I could gauge the size of the bulbs, and they have definitely been getting bigger.

The next milestone in the growing was when the lower leaves of each plant started to brown and die off. Depending on who you read, after the bottom-most five or six leaves have died off, it is time to pull them. Letting things go much longer risks having the bulbs split open underground, at which point it can be difficult to 1) harvest them without breaking them and 2) store them for more than few weeks without spoiling. Having an intact skin around the whole head is important for storage.

I have also been told to avoid watering them in the last week or two prior to harvest - this can help them pre-cure in the ground and reduces the risk of having them split open. This I couldn't do, because the garlic is intermixed with other plants, and all those others have been in desperate need of watering during this scorcher of a week.

All this lead up to today: harvest day!

I quickly abandoned my small trowel and stuck to excavating with my hands. I didn't want to risk gouging anything!

After exposing the top of the bulb, I undercut a bit with my fingers, grab the neck, and slowly pull. The roots eventually give way, bringing a clump of dirt with them. Some shaking follows to clean the roots and return the soil to the ground.

Look! A double!

The total haul was nearly 20 heads large and small. I won't know for a while if the heads are divided into a handful of large cloves (good for cooking) or many small cloves (pain in the ass to peel!) until I start using them.

After a bit more cleaning I bundled the necks and leaves with twine and hung them in the garage. That's a nice hot and dry place where they can cure for a few weeks - turning the tough outer skin to paper, and sealing the delicious cloves inside. With nay luck, after they've cured, they should keep through the end of the year. I'll probably use the cloves from the largest head or two for planting next year's crop.

Scapes

Here's the first product of this year's garden: garlic scapes. These are the immature flowering stalks of a garlic plant. Snipping these off before they are more fully formed encourages the plant to put its energy into developing the bulb. Plus, they make for an interesting cooking ingredient. The most adventurous can use them as a 1:1 replacement for asparagus or green beans in some dishes.


I chopped these and used them in place of most of the garlic in the sofrito base for a cuban black bean soup earlier this week.

Harvest

What you see is a sample of the ongoing harvest from our garden. It's taken a lot of work, but is now (literally) bearing fruit. Geek that I am, I've been keeping stats on our yield. To date we've gotten about two dozen tomatoes, about twice as many tomatillos, and exactly two small red peppers.

The tomatillos have ranged from a few plum-sized ones at the start to much more numerous golf ball-sized ones now. It's been rainy the last day or two, otherwise I'd have another handful. These we've used almost exclusively to make salsa verde, which generally we use in a nice black bean enchilada recipe we've been making for years.

We planted four different varieties of tomato, but managed to get them a bit mixed up between the seedlings and the transplanting, so I don't know exactly what the red ones are. The orange ones, however, are Moonglow, an absolutely wonderful variety that is all tomato flavor and sweetness with very low acidity. We also have some brandywines that are very, very slowly making their way to full ripeness. If the frost holds off another few weeks, we should be able to get another dozen or two. Even though the weather has turned cooler of late, we still love to have fresh tomato and pretend it's still July.

I simply cannot explain the peppers: they have great soil, they've have abundant sunshine and hot weather, but also plenty of watering. And yet, the two peppers you see above may well be the only fully red ones we'll get this year out of eight plants. The plants themselves are stunted and stressed, not at all like our last experience with peppers, which by comparison was downright bountiful. Perhaps they got overshadowed by the voluminous tomatillos, perhaps they needed better staking and support, perhaps we should have started our seeds in March, rather than late May. Ah well. We use peppers in a lot of our cooking, so we will redouble our efforts come next spring.

Berry Baby

It is blueberry season here in New Hampshire, and we have certainly been doing our share to support the local farm economy. In addition to buying fruit at the farmers' market, we've also gone twice to a pick-your-own orchard and berry patch just north of town. They are open until 7 one night a week, and it makes for a pleasant evening outing.

B enjoys hanging out in her Ergo, accepting bitten-in-half blueberries from us every so often.


Here she is signing "more"!


Once we collect a couple of big colanders full of blueberries, we head up to the raspberry patch, which is on its last legs but still producing a bit. The raspberry bushes grow closer together, forming tight rows, so we feel comfortable letting Brynna out to roam.


She then heads off like a shot...


Because there are berries to be snatched!


Yum!


Tonight B spent the whole drive home thrusting her little hand up above her head, over the back of her carseat, demanding one blueberry at a time from our stash in the front seat. She would then chortle maniacally and stuff the berry in her mouth before insisting (loudly!) on another one. It's hard to get her to eat anything else these days—I think she might turn into a giant blueberry soon.

Fall Harvest

Today is Saturday, so we were at the farmer's market this morning. It's the last day for the outdoor market; they'll be moving inside to the fairgrounds until the spring. Although the weather was chilly (about 40, with wind, and grey skies horizon to horizon), there was still a tremendous bounty to be had. Behold:


We have cider, apples of two varieties, red peppers from several vendors, parsnips, turnips, red carrots, a single enormous sweet potato, spinach, pumpkins of two (cooking) varieties, a small sweet melon, small potatoes, leeks, garlic, red onions, swiss chard, Amish eggs, tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and butternut squash.

Brynna's getting in on the act as well, in these belated 12-week pictures:



We have not only what the market can provide, but a bit from our own garden, too. You may recall we had some success with peppers, and tremendous amounts of basil. Here was our garden a month ago:


The first few frosts have ended the growing season, though. Some of the outermost basil leaves were killed off, and the pepper plants started drooping as well. So, out with all of it. I had already made scads of pesto earlier in the summer, and there simply isn't enough bread, tomatoes, and mozzarella to consume all that basil fresh. So, I spent some two hours plucking the useful leaves from the uprooted basil plants, which were then washed and set out on the sunny porch to dry:



I'm not sure if this dried basil will be at all good, but it's something.

I also pulled the pepper plants and harvested what I could. There were a number of tiny bits that were far from ripe, of which probably nothing will come. I was able to get a half dozen decent sized poblanos, one or two purples, and two enormous-but-not-yet-ripe reds, and a whole bunch of other odds and ends.


These are in addition to some I wrote about earlier in the summer, plus about a dozen or so that I just plucked off for cooking with here and there. So, all-in-all, a pretty successful season for a first time.

Peppers!

I would not ever claim to be a gardener. I do a little gardening, but I think to claim the title, I would need to have more enthusiasm and aptitude for it. Nevertheless, I must say I am quite proud of this clutch of peppers I harvested from our garden today. We only have one picture-perfect Red Knight so far, but there are a few more on the way. The green ones are Poblano, a slightly hot variety that I am experimenting with sun-drying. The purple ones are, aside from their color, almost the same as ordinary green peppers. The long red ones are Jimmy Nardelo, one of the few chili-type peppers that is sweet, not hot.

There are still many of each variety that are growing and ripening. We'll see how far we can get in the next month or so before we have to start worrying about the frost.

As great as it is to have our own peppers, it is good we are not relying solely on these for the coming winter. We have instead been buying up large amounts at the farmer's market of late, cutting then freezing. Mostly we have focused on sweet red peppers, but have expanded into yellow bananas and the purple ones, which create a nice color blend. We have four or five large ziplocks frozen up already, with perhaps one or two more to come.

Thanksgiving

This post was supposed to have some pictures of our Thanskgiving Day spread in it. But, alas, I managed to botch copying them onto my computer, and then further bolloxed it by deleting them off the camera. Now, the images are theoretically still there - the data is still on the flash card, but there are no longer any references to them. Undelete programs exist, even ones that specialize in recovering photos from cameras. For a pair of run-of-the-mill photos, though, it didn't seem worth the $20-40 and hassle to pay for such recovery software.

No matter, I'm moving on. You'll just have to take my word that it was a nice looking spread. Quite large, too, considering that it was just H, Jasper, and myself this year. A tofurkey, green bean casserole, stuffing, squash and wild rice medley, and two pies. Two pies for two people (and a dog) seems just about right.

We considered having some classmates over, or otherwise making it larger, but really ended up liking this smaller affair. No timetables - we just cook and eat when it suited us. Heck, we even ate on the couch! We popped in The Lord of the Rings (Extended Edition) as we started cutting veggies at 10, and finished it about 12 hours later.

It has taken a turn for the chilly here in Minnesooooota. It was in the teens as I strolled into work this morning - one of about 10 in my office of 50 that came in today. Being a bit of a quiet day, I worked on something out of the ordinary. We have a $100,000 hi-speed video camera, the same kind that are used at White Sands for missile research. I was using it for something far more mundane. I may post videos at some point. In the meantime, check out what other people have done with those cameras.

Pomegranate

This is what the seeds from six pomegranates look like. These are very curious fruits, with a very curious heritage. I highly recommend giving them a try. We use these in one of our favorite recipes. It is a bit of work pulling the seeds from the husk, though. Pomegranates are in season now, more or less, so we bought these to pull the seeds and freeze them, so that we can enjoy it into the next year.

We try to be very consciencious shoppers, especially when it comes to food. We like to think that our purchasing habits matter in the grand scheme of things. Hilary is vegetarian (with vegan tendencies), I'm more or less vegetarian by extension. We buy from the farmer's market as we can. We have cut up and frozen lots of food from that market for the winter, on the belief that the energy used to keep it frozen is less than the energy used to grow, process, package, and transport the store-bought produce it offsets. Purchasing local is better for the local farmers, too.

It doesn't work for everything, though. We still eat chocolate, I still drink coffee. We bring back large quantities of Vermont maple syrup each time we visit the alma mater. Pomegranates are a tricky case, too - they certainly don't grow around here. The ones we just purchased were from southern california. Like I said, we try to be consciencious shoppers, but it doesn't work for everything.

More of the Harvest, pt II

In case anyone wonder what one does with two shopping bags full of freshly harvested basil, see the image at right.

More of the Harvest, pt I

So, it's the weekend again. Weekends start with the Farmer's Market first thing Saturday morning. This week, as in the past few weeks, we've been picking up stuff to store away for the winter - peppers and butternut squash. Also, with some more ingredients, we make ourselves some lovely salsa. I had a request for the recipe we use. In truth, I haven't got one, really, it's more a conglomeration of fancies. But, for those interested:

5-7 ripe tomatoes
2-3 sweet peppers (I have been using red bell and poblano, but you could experiment with Jimmy Nardello, banana, etc.)
1-2 jalapeno peppers (or other, hotter varieties)
1 large onion
4-6 cloves garlic

Olive oil
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro (about 1 cup chopped)
1/2 to 1 tsp. salt, to taste
1/2 tsp ground pepper, to taste
1/2 to 1 tsp ground cumin
1 Tbsp brown sugar or molasses

Quarter the tomatoes, remove the stem, de-seed, and dice into a large bowl. Dice the sweet peppers and onion and place in a separate bowl. Halve the jalapenos, remove the seeds and white flesh (or keep it, if you like it hot), dice finely, and add to the sweet peppers. Mince the garlic and add to the “pepper” bowl.

Chop the cilantro down and add to the tomatoes. Stir in the salt, pepper, cumin, and sugar. Add 1/4 to 1/3 of the diced veggies to the tomatoes.

Heat a skillet over med-hi heat. Add enough olive oil for sautéing. Saute the peppers, onion, and garlic until they begin to soften. Add the sautéed veggies to the tomato mix. Done.

ps - all this chopping goes easily with a freshly sharpened kitchen knife. Thanks to our generous benefactors (you know who you are).

Mad Basil

What started off in May as two small packets from the Seed Savers Exchange, and gradually became seedlings in window boxes, have now created a veritable basil bush outside our porch. For a time in July and August, when the weather wasn't too screwy, I would go out on a Saturday and harvest a salad-spinner's worth of fresh basil leaves. Now that the plants have gone rampant, that's more than two spinners' worth (compare the before and after, at right). There really is only so much pesto one can deal with, even when storing ahead for winter.

That is only part of our lay-in for the coming winter. The farmer's market is in full harvest swing now, and we are starting to gather what we hope will be the bulk of our produce for the coming winter. We aren't quite so ambitious to try canning, so we are instead freezing a great portion of it. We figure that getting locally-produced food and storing it in an energy-efficient chest freezer is probably a darn sight better than February imports from Chile, New Zealand, or even California. Butternut squash, zucchini, and green beans are only the latest installment. We have also prepared and frozen salsas fresca and verde, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and red pepper. Potatoes, more squash, carrots, and parsnip are coming. Onions and garlic will hang in the cellar. We will hopefully have better results than last year's lay-in: we had many a whole squash slowly rot on the shelf in the cellar, while the potatoes softened and the onions sprouted.

UPDATE 9/23/07: How much pesto, you ask? I took stock of it yesterday - most of it is in the freezer. In various containers and bags we have 3-1/2 quarts frozen. Over the summer, we probably ate our way through 1-2 quarts. So, consider a half-gallon milk carton, then multiply that by three, then imagine them filled with pesto.