Garden Time

The garden is going in late this year. I should have gotten started weeks ago, but the weather was just so cold and rainy most of the time, so I kept putting it off. The surprise has been that some chamomile I planted in one of the large raised boxes along the north fence has taken off and reproduced itself, so there's chamomile in the box. There's also curly-leaved spearmint, which should make a wonderful mint tea. Last year when I kept having to replant my snow peas because the mice kept digging up the seed, I went to a nursery and got peppermint and spearmint in small plastic containers and then just set the containers in the planter boxes near the peas. Apparently, mice don't like mint, but peas are just fine with it.

I never actually planted the mint, and it sat out all winter, still in its little plastic containers. The peppermint plants died but the spearmint was more tenacious. The spearmint somehow escaped the plastic containers and dove into the fertile soil of the planter boxes. This spring, I have curly spearmint in every one of the three planter boxes. It's persistent, but it pulls up just fine, and so I have ample spearmint to help deter mice from the peas, and also spearmint for tea as well. I probably should have just planted it in the large planters in the first place, and let it share space with the veggies, as it's going to do from now on. Because of its persistence, it survived, thrived, and now has a place of its own. There's a lesson in that.

I had a great time clearing out the planters and making them ready for the seeds, so tomorrow I'll be able to plant some of the things, and do more weeding in the larger garden spot. The Huz says he has enough materials left to build one more large planter box, so I'm really looking forward to that. I love those planter boxes. They're easy to reach, easy to weed, out of the way of the yard, and grow wonderful peas and carrots (and mint, apparently.) We've had the other three for about two years now, and I'm excited at the prospect of finally having another box to play with. Plus, it'll get rid of a lot of the big pile of topsoil that's been sitting on my back patio for the last couple of years, waiting for a box to hold it.

Asparagus Time Again

I won't even say I lucked out, because this is just how manifestation works, and I've managed to learn how to manifest produce for little to no money. I just spent an hour and a half with one of my daughters, blanching and freezing asparagus for next winter. I had about fifteen pounds of bulk asparagus, and paid just $1.39 per pound for it. In addition to the tips that we froze, we also still have a goodly portion of the harder stalks, which we'll remove just the white part from, cook the green part down, and then puree into cream of asparagus soup. Very little is wasted, and that's a decent amount of food for a small amount of money. You'd think people would catch on to the fact that organic, local produce is worth the effort. Better yet was the kindness of the people who owned the small produce market, who agreed to sell me the random-cut bulk asparagus for such a great price, even though the farmer from whom they are getting their asparagus has disced most of his patches and had only minimal amounts of asparagus to offer this year. They only got the one box of random-cuts, but took it because, as they said, they knew someone would be able to use it.

Carrots

I still have edible carrots in one of my outdoor garden boxes, after leaving them there the whole winter. It was like having a little root cellar, and yesterday I went out and dug up several of the carrots that were still in the ground. Tonight I'm making them into soup.

Fresh carrots, available right out of the ground after a winter of being left outside, with new, growing green tops and everything. I'm not sure they'd be fantastic for just gnawing on as they are, but grated and made into carrot-and-dill soup, they'll be perfect.

The ability to pull carrots out of the ground after a winter's outdoor storage...amazing. The ability to feed my family a nutritious dinner without having to run to the grocery store...priceless.

Green Tomatoes

I just finished canning two batches of green tomato relish. The first batch was the standard recipe found in the older edition of the Ball Blue Book. The second batch was almost the same except for the chilies added just for the Huz, who likes things a bit spicier than I do. I now have 8 1/2 pints of the regular GTR, and 15 1/2 half-pints of the "hot" GTR. Despite the fact that all I had to do was add the salted vegetables to the special brine, boil it and hot pack it, the processing still took me several hours to complete. The good news: every jar sealed. That's a 100% success rate.

If you haven't heard of or tried green tomato relish, you should definitely try it. It's amazingly good; I made some last year just to try it and see what would happen, and the whole family liked it so much that they all wanted me to make it again this year. Not only is it a wonderful way to use those end-of-season green tomatoes, but I find that if I use this relish, I don't need to use ketchup (especially the modern kind of ketchup with all the high fructose corn syrup in it!) The green tomato relish has just enough of a tomato taste that it satisfies the palate that would otherwise want ketchup on burgers or hot dogs, etc. And then because it's also relish, it just seems to take care of the ketchup and relish taste both at once. And because the relish has mustard seed in it, it pretty much takes care of a mustard taste also. This kind of makes it the perfect condiment, because if you have it, you don't really need any others. All that from a few green tomatoes and a little investment of time. Keep in mind also that this is a relish not easily found in your typical big box grocery store.

Gadgets with Gaskets

We inherited a wonderful gift from the Huz's folks--his mom's 22-quart pressure canner. From what we remember our folks doing and the directions we got from the Ball Blue Book, we know how to can our own veggies. We have the equipment and the knowledge to do it safely, and with the availability of free produce from the community garden and gifts of fruit, etc. from friends and acquaintances, we've been able to put by a fair amount of food for the winter. I can safely say that we don't need any more jam! I would like to have the wherewithal to can peaches and applesauce next. Thanks to the community garden, we've nearly got enough beans, and were even able to put away a few pints of peas. With any luck, we'll get a decent number of tomatoes this year from our own garden, but we'll see how that goes. I need a certain number to be ripe all at once in order to actually process them as canned tomato sauce or juice.

The other challenges we've had other than coming in between bean harvests has been time to do the canning, and problems with our canner's gasket/seal. Our canner was made by the Mirro company prior to 1983, and requires a very specific gasket. We have model M-0622. All the info online says that the correct gasket for this canner was the S-9882 model. However, after so many of these gaskets failed and became rippled or limp, we got frustrated and contacted the company directly. They responded to the Huz's email and told us that the correct gasket for our model of canner was in fact the S-3440, not the other one. I tried to get this gasket through Ace, the only local place where they actually sell canner parts, and the only one they had in their inventory was the other one--the wrong one we'd been using and hating for so many years. So I went online and found the correct gasket and ordered it in. $14.00 and a few days later, we had a new gasket, which looks similar to the others but ever so slightly different. It's a little thicker, for one thing, and the rubber curves outward just a touch. We tried it today to see how it would do, and lo and behold, a perfect seal. No dripping water from under the sides of the canner lid, no hissing, no trouble getting the canner up to pressure. Perfect.

Now, why the original misinformation as to which seal was the correct one for this model of canner? It seems to be a relatively uncommon model of canner, but still.... Just in case anyone else has been experiencing this frustration, the correct gasket for the model M-0622 Mirro-Matic 22 quart pressure canner is the gasket formerly known as the S-3440, now known as just the 3440. It is available from a company called Red Mill, as well as a couple others. Google "pressure canner gasket 3440," and you should readily find a place to buy one online. Good luck, and I sympathize! This gasket actually works; trust me.

Be Kind to the Beans

We've had an interesting time this summer, both in keeping ourselves fed, bills paid, etc. The most interesting part is that we've been so blessed and so fortunate in the food department. The nearby community garden we've become involved with has provided us with nearly enough beans to get us through the upcoming winter months. We've canned many quarts of beans from that community garden, even though most of the harvesting happened when the beans were past their first flush of production. Fortunately the garden people waited and did not till over the beans as they'd proposed doing, for now they seem to be gearing up for a second production run.

The only trouble we've had lately has been that people are not careful when they go through the bean patch. They seem to think that it doesn't matter how rough they are with the bean bushes, and often they end up pulling up the entire bush, or breaking off so many branches when they go for the green beans that the poor plant ends up nearly dead afterward. It's a shame that people aren't better educated about where their food comes from or even in the simple concept that if you want a plant to produce more food for you over the course of a growing season, it's important to make sure you don't kill the plant the first time you harvest from it. It's frustrating to go along a row and see the swath of devastation someone else cut in their eagerness to get at a few fresh beans for their dinner. From what I've heard from others this year, many people don't have much of an idea how to grow their own vegetables, so they go by trial and error, as if this were a new technology they're learning. And many don't have any more idea of how to preserve their harvest than simply to stick food in freezer bags and throw them into the freezer, when often freezer space is at a premium for most folks. The few lucky ones, like the Huz and I, grew up with parents or grandparents who grew and canned their own vegetables. The rest are pretty clueless, I'm sorry to say.

Abundance

I've just finished reading a book on manifesting, mostly written for the benefit of the people who were a part of the Findhorn community in Scotland. Manifesting is the process of drawing to you either people, opportunities, or things that you need. It seems to work best when you are not anxious about the need or worried about a perceived lack of whatever it is. Often, when you proceed with confidence that you will get what you need, the universe just seems to provide it for you.

Recently for us, this took the form of apricots and cherries from friends, enabling us to make jam and pie filling, as well as eat some outright. No money changed hands; these things were provided for us because others had them and did not need them, and did not plan to use them--or they had so much in excess that they had some to spare. It's been the same with the lambs' quarters, many of which I blanched and froze and put away for winter, in lieu of the spinach we did not get this year due to last year's two fence-spraying fiascos. Gradually, things are coming to us as we need them, and I'm grateful for every leaf and every piece of fruit. While one cannot live on jam and pie filling, it's still food, and food which would otherwise have been a luxury item we would probably have had to decide not to buy this year.

Our heirloom mammoth melting snow peas are doing as well this year as they did last year even with the late start due to the mice eating the newly-planted peas. We're getting a few beans, and I'm hoping for a bumper crop even though I don't have as many bean plants as I'd hoped for. The Roma tomatoes look good, as do the Marmande and Marglobe, and while the beefsteaks are still smaller than we really need them to be, I'm hoping they give us at least one or two meals of stuffed tomatoes. Though the salad is almost gone and the spinach needs to be replanted now, the kale and collard greens are doing great, with large healthy leaves that make the memory of last year's loss seem much more distant.

The really great thing is that we started all of these plants from seed this year--even the four healthy little Rosa Bianca eggplants that I recently transplanted into one of the tall box beds. My only disappointment in planting from seed this year was that the lemon cucumbers aren't doing as well as they did last time, and the Principe Borghese seeds that I got from the wonderful free tomato seed people at Wintersown did not sprout at all, even when I replanted them. Finally, two of the Chinese eggplants they gave me made a late appearance, and now that they're big enough to survive it, I'm going to transplant them into the big box bed as well. Then I'm going to actually freeze a small bag of snow peas--very cool. We did not have enough last year to do more than eat them up as they came. Now I'm about one container ahead of what we're eating, and if it keeps on for just a little while, I should be able to get a few small bags of snow peas into the freezer.