What Next?

A friend just sent me info on the tainted Halloween candy scare. First there was the pet food problem, and now this. Here's an article on the situation. I'm just shaking my head over it all.

What did I say in a previous post? Stupid Homo Sapiens and their chemicals.

The family and I went to see Wall-E tonight, and while it was cute, it was also pretty frightening to contemplate. An Earth covered with garbage, while up in space, there's a spaceship like a luxury liner filled with fat, bloated humans floating around on hoverchairs with robots waiting on them hand and foot. Whoever wrote that did an amazing job of portraying a post-apocalyptic Earth while also telling a tale of romance, action/suspense, and redemption all at the same time. But when it was over, I wanted to go hit the treadmill and re-plant the garden even though it's late October. Which, I'm sure, was exactly the point.

Tonight the Huz and I took out three bins of recycling, and a large rolling garbage bin that was less than half-full. The neighbors had no recycling bin at all, their garbage bin was overflowing with trimmings from their trees and shrubs, and they also had several large black plastic bags full of more trimmings--all spilling out onto the street. I'm not even sure why anyone would put bags full of organic matter into the landfill in the first place. In the days before fossil fuels and global warming, people used to heat their houses with wood. What the heck happened that now we're stuffing perfectly good wood into bags and cramming it into the landfill where it can't even biodegrade?

I think I'm going to make some cookies and homemade candy for my kids, and check over the candy they do get Trick-or-Treating as carefully as I can, and...hope for the best. But I'm getting very tired of being disappointed in my fellow humans.

Looks Like Relish

Smells like relish, too. I admit I haven't tasted it yet, because with pickles you usually wait two to three weeks for it to finish pickling after you've processed it. But the jars all sealed and I now have nine beautiful pints of green tomato relish on my counter. The bad thing was how much of my time was eaten up by the process of making this stuff. The good thing is that assuming it tastes good, I now have all the relish I'll need for quite a while, since we don't use all that much, and I was able to use most of my remaining green tomatoes. It's nice that the early frost didn't make the garden a total loss. (No, that would be the Boy Scouts...oh, well.)

Apparently the homeowners' association is going to try to make some kind of amends for the damage the Scouts did with their stain, but they're hoping they can just clean the stain off the side of the house rather than repainting. News for them...it was oil-based stain on a porous surface. We can wash the stain off our bikes easily enough, since it didn't want to stick to the automotive paint or the steel, but we can't wash it off the leeks and green onions and probably not off the side of the house. Again, oh, well. At least they're willing to address the problem somehow.

I still have enough counter-ripened green tomatoes to make one more batch of that marvelous soup, and tonight we're making pizza with the sauce from the last of our vine-ripened tomatoes. Now that I've mostly dealt with the tomato issue, it's apples next. I need to find a place to pick up a case or three of local apples, and then I'm going to make major amounts of applesauce. I go through that stuff pretty fast when it's available, so I need lots of it to last me and the family until next fall. I think I want to make it out of yellow delicious apples--the stuff I made from our tree was amazingly good, and my teenager even decided she loved it. She devoured the last of what I had made, and now I'm starting to crave more. It makes Tree Top taste like some kind of pale imitation of applesauce. At least the apples will be pretty easy to process. I have the hand-cranked peeler-corer tool for the dehydrated apple chips, and the Squeezo will make short work of the squishing process for the cooked apples for applesauce. In fact, since I really don't need any other ingredients, I'm anticipating that the whole applesauce-canning project could be finished up in two or three days' time once I have the apples.

I do have a container of small Principe Borghese green tomatoes to do something with, and I'm thinking I may just dehydrate them the way I did the ripe ones. Given the dehydration process, I wouldn't think their lack of extra acid would be a problem in their preservation, so it seems like a good way to get a few more sun-dried (dehydrator dried) tomatoes. From the two heirloom Principe Borghese plants we had this year, we got an entire cereal-box-sized container full of dehydrated tomatoes. Not too bad.

The kids and I went out to the pumpkin patch this afternoon--same place we got our strawberries and the few blueberries I managed to go and pick a few months ago. Given our hectic schedule right now, we barely managed the pumpkin picking. We had about one hour today in which to go to the field, find pumpkins, ride the hayride back, pay for the pumpkins, and leave so we could get my younger daughter to her dance class on time. It felt a little rushed, which was a shame, but at least we got to do it in the first place. I also bought some little pie pumpkins for the Huz to process later. Maybe we'll do one pie for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas. I don't know. At least they'll be chemical-free pumpkin.

Green Tomato Relish

Thus far, we've been able to use quite a few of the green tomatoes we saved from the frost. We've had green tomato soup twice, and the Huz said if his mom would have had the recipe years ago when he was a kid, he wouldn't have minded about her wanting to use up the green tomatoes. And for the past couple of days, I've also been peeling, coring and chopping green tomatoes to make green tomato relish. It takes me about an hour and a half to get enough prepared and chopped for one quart, let alone four quarts, but after a very long couple of initial chopping sessions yesterday and two more such sessions today, (plus finally asking for a little help from the Huz) I finally got enough total chopped for my four quarts. It nearly used up all the green tomatoes that were still good, and we'll be able to use the rest of the green and/or indoor-ripened tomatoes over the next few days, so the annual bout of "what do we do with the tomatoes?" is nearly over.

The recipe for green tomato relish is from the Ball Blue Book, and it wouldn't be nearly so bad if it weren't for the need to peel, core and chop. My neck and shoulders hurt a lot from all the chopping, and for a while there, my right hand was starting to get sore as well. But the chopping is finally done, and the tomatoes, peppers, onions and cabbage for the relish is sitting there, salted, working on the second step of the process. We'll see how it all turns out. Based on the sheer amount of work involved in making it, this had better be the best darned relish ever.

Not Again!

After this summer's earlier garden vs. chemicals disaster, I had done what the extension office recommended and soaked down the beds to leach any chemical residue out of the soil. Then after it had had time to dry out again, I'd finally found time to transplant my Carantan leeks into the empty bed. They were looking really good. My spinach plants had bolted and re-seeded themselves, and I had a nice crop of baby spinach coming up. I also had a square of green onions that were getting to be a nice, usable size, and just as soon as I ran out of the ones in my fridge, I was going to pull some up. Then this last Saturday, the second disaster of the year hit. The name of this disaster? Boy Scouts of America. Eagle Scouts, to be exact.

They'd left a cryptic little note on our front door saying that they were going to be painting the fence along the main road in our subdivision--the one that is on the north side of my house. I didn't worry too much because I'd already harvested all the veggies I was going to be able to from the garden boxes on my side of that fence. I didn't worry about the east side fence because they didn't say they were going to be staining that. In any case, the Scout involved didn't even leave me a phone number to contact him if I had any concerns about his project. They did, however, warn us in that note to move anything that was close to the fence so it wouldn't be sprayed. So on Saturday when I was busy and there was no one at home to stop them, he and his group sprayed their stain on my north fence.

And all over the side of my house. And my east fence, which they hadn't said they'd be staining. And next to that east fence, all of my leeks, green onions, and spinach, not to mention the one chard plant that had come up following the earlier fence-cleaning disaster. The last of the food I was going to get out of my garden, toxic, poisoned, and wasted. Again! I'm even more angry about that than I am about the stain that can't be washed off the side of my house.

We can't just re-paint the area of the house that got splattered, either. We'll have to re-paint the whole side! I can't fathom how human beings can be so completely clueless and so destructive. That stain on the house alone represents more than a thousand dollars of damage, since we'll have to hire a painter to come and re-paint it. We don't have time to paint it ourselves, for heaven's sake, and the house is only, what...four years old? Did the Eagle Scout think that I could manage to move my house so it didn't get splattered by his stupid sprayer?

Who stains subdivision fences as an Eagle Scout project, anyway? That makes no sense. We don't even have a high percentage of elderly in our community who might be helped by such a gesture, and it's the homeowners association's job to maintain the community area fences, etc. Now they're going to get a big bill for the damage. I'm done playing Ms. Nice Girl.

Stupid homo sapiens and their chemicals.

It's Good

Green tomatos make a decent soup; who knew? I found a recipe online and finally tried it, and not only was it edible and no one croaked, but the soup actually got the thumbs up from all three family members. In fact, the Huz said he wished his mom had had this recipe 35 years ago when she was trying to find a way to use green tomatoes. It's great to have something to do with it, so it doesn't go to waste! That, and when money's tight, it's great to have just that much more food that I didn't have to buy from a store. Now I have to get some prepared horseradish so I can start making green tomato relish--and probably some green tomato ketsup as well.

The horseradish root I got this year came available locally in the spring, but I didn't need it until now, when I'm wanting to make green tomato relish. I think I'll see about possibly making the prepared horseradish when the root's available and then freezing it until fall when I need it for relish.

Frost

It froze Wednesday night, and Thursday I looked outside to see all my tomato plants, eggplants, squash plants, beans, etc. wilted. I was hoping for a couple more weeks of harvest before frost; in the past, frost has often waited until Halloween before coming, but not this year, dang it. We had a late, cold spring, and now just when my tomato plants were really coming on great with a huge bunch of tomatoes, now it had to frost before October was half over.

My family and I went out this afternoon and took everything we could; all the squash, the three cantaloupes that had volunteered over by the grape vine, the few beans that were left, the last of the tiny little lemon cucumbers, the baby eggplants that weren't through growing, and of course every tomato we could get, from the blushed, starting-to-turn ones to the completely green ones. I'll find something to do with those green ones; I've seen one recipe for chutney, and while I have no clue what one even does with chutney, I'm sure I'm about to find out. I can't afford to turn my nose up at anything that could be used for food.

Tonight I made more applesauce from the last of the bad apples that I'd picked off the tree or gleaned from where they'd fallen. It was almost another quart--not bad at all, really. And we did actually get a dozen nice, clean apples from the tree; the codling moths left us that many, which is almost three times the number we got last year. Now that I know the bug-killed apples make decent applesauce, I'll start collecting and using them much earlier next year, as soon as they're a decent size. The riper they are, the better, but even the not-so-ripe ones made okay applesauce. Hey, it's food, and non-chemically treated food at that. That's obviously why the bugs and birds have been liking it so much. At least the family got a few nice apples for our trouble. Much as I hate to say it, though, I may have to give up and spray next year. That tree had so many apples that I hate to think how many were wasted that wouldn't have been if not for the moths. We'd have had a bumper crop, just from one tree. I'll have to ponder that and make a decision by spring.

I'm bummed today, though. I hate to see the growing and harvest season end; I feel as though I've barely had a summer, and now it's over. Oh, well. We learned a lot with the garden this year, we found out what worked and what didn't, and we'll know how to do it even better next year. And we did get quite a bit of harvest from our tiny backyard garden spaces. Everything is as it should be...and the wheel turns.

Canning and Eggplant Harvest

Gary just canned two more boxes of peaches we purchased from a local farmer. We got thirteen quarts out of it, plus some peaches that were just blanched, skinned and soaked in juice, for use on oatmeal. He canned about six more quarts than that, but five of the lids were too old and they failed to seal. We're still eating those peaches, which now live in the fridge until they're used up. As we love canned peaches, it's not too much of a hardship, though it would have been nice had the lids still been okay to use.

On the same night as the peaches, I canned another quart of pickles from mixed green and lemon cucumbers, and one quart of tomato juice. I've found that one quart of juice from our tomatoes will either make a great soup (with water added) or will cook down into a decent sauce for eggplant lasagna or vegetable spaghetti. It is stretching it a little to make one quart into enough sauce for a big lasagna--two quarts would probably be better--but in a pinch, it'll do. The good thing about the eggplant is that it has some of its own moisture, so the resulting juice makes up for the lack of extra sauce when cooking, especially if you bake it with the top on the pan. My younger daughter was wondering when we'd have pasta lasagna again, and I told her we'd do it during the winter months, when there are no eggplants to harvest. It's nice to be able to have a slice of Ciabatta bread with fresh butter with your lasagna and not feel bad about all the carbs. A person could actually eat eggplant lasagna, cheese and all, and still lose weight. A gluten-intolerant person could also eat eggplant lasagna. Granted, it's missing that pasta taste that most people are probably used to, but it's delicious anyway and not so drastically different from regular lasagna that it can't be recognized as one.

On a related note, the last eggplant we harvested from our garden was even larger than the one pictured earlier in this blog, and I've just pulled up a carrot worthy of the Findhorn project.