Harvest Monday Freezer Fiesta

Sadly, we've still got snow on the ground and the cold frame hasn't unthawed.  I'm waiting for a nice thaw to go for the parsnips - but at least enough snow has melted that I can see their tops poking out.  The kale is still buried as well.  I'm definitely looking forward to our hoop house!  Tonight it was back to the freezer for me...

I whipped up a stir-fry to cleanse a bit after the holidays.  It is enormous, and will give me lunches for most of the week.  The green beans and broccoli and New Zealand spinach were delicious, sauteed with some garlic, ginger juice and an onion.  We added fermented soybeans (whole) and a bit of soy sauce as well.  I don't love ginger bits in my food, so made a juice about a month back that still tastes great.  I think I've found a way to add ginger flavor without having to pick strong ginger bits from my teeth.  I just boil the ginger for 30 minutes or so on the wood stove and then strain it.  A tablespoon in chai tea or stir-fries adds nice depth without overpowering the dish.

The Waltham butternuts are delicious this year - sweet and crunchy, good enough to eat raw.  Which is wonderful, because we have so many.  They are resistant to the borers and escaped the cucumber beetle so they are the main squash we have in storage.  We have almost no buttercups and only 4-5 acorns, but the spagettis did fairly well too.  I think 4 of them are larger than 3 pounds and the others closer to 2 pounds.  I roasted the seeds from this one to snack on.  More fibrous than pumpkin, but tasty and a satisfying snack while I cook.  I realized yesterday that the garage is just too cold at around 45 degrees and I've been worried about reducing their shelf life.  After the last few weeks of procrastination I finally brought all the squashes from the garage up to the cold bedroom closet where they'll be closer to their proper range of 50-60 degrees F.  We have two full boxes remaining.  They are snuggled in between towels but they did look better down in the garage where we stored them in an old bureau... which was much easier to access and choose from.

A few of the 'edible rape' stalks were pretty stringy, but the broccoli more than compensated.  I bought a few seed packets in Chinatown and wasn't particularly pleased with them.  I waited for rape and 'chinese kale' to bulk up but I think the hot weather coupled with the drought (repair to our community garden's water line) inhibited lush growth.

The piece de resistance - yummy peach cobbler.  What is easier than opening up a bag of frozen peaches, crumbling some flour, butter, brown sugar and oats, and baking for 30 minutes? Don't forget to check out Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions. 

First Harvest Monday

We are going to join Harvest Monday, at long last!  We've been watching and reading each week about all the other gardener's harvests, and this year I have a new scale for a gift.  It is a hanging weight scale and reads up to 120 pounds (good for the large harvests of roots, squash, etc).  I am also bidding on a postal scale for the kitchen, for produce under 15 pounds.

Tonight for dinner we searched the freezer and root cellar - to come up with a minestrone soup.  A quart of tomatoes, dried oregano, a mix of our dried beans, carrots, potatoes, fresh parsley, grated zucchini and an onion - all with a tablespoon of pistou per bowl.  The only thing from the store was the 1/2 cup of pasta to maintain our soup as a true minestrone.  I love emptying space in the freezer now since we've recently added 25 pounds of a beef critter from my father's farm.

We had the day off due to the storm and I organized my seed catalogues, finalized garden maps and plans and wrote up the 'shares' since we may have some other folks to feed from our garden this year.  I may post these examples of shares, although August and September are the most exciting.

Winter Lulls

We're nearing the end of this 24 hour storm - but I took these photos when we returned home last night from Maine just when the storm was starting.

Despite the storm the chickens were crooning and singing to us - happy we were home and clearly excited about holiday left-overs.  They had laid 15 eggs neatly in rows in their nesting box while we were away - and all that remained of the last monster summer squash (harvested in July) was the tough shell.  I'd given them something to peck at while we were away and they appeared to have enjoyed it.

Coldframe - end of December

I decided to harvest the last of the greens from the coldframe - mostly going for the bok choy as that recovers well from a hard freeze.  We made a simple stir-fry for dinner last night with the bok choy, tofu and a julienned kohlrabi.  The coldframes were almost an afterthought this year and we didn't cover them, the wood wasn't insulated and the glass was single-pane, fitting poorly with some gaps.  We also were using up old seed and didn't have great germination on the cold-tolerant varieties, so I transplanted summer varieties to fill in the space.  All in all - a good showing as we ate lettuces and salads as well as raab and bok choy into the end of December.  As a comparison I'm uploading an earlier and later fall photo of the same coldframe:

Coldframe - end of October

Coldframe - end of November

Raspberry arbor

With M.Mann's help we built the tiny arbor with mostly reclaimed wood (meaning its fairly warped and asymmetrical).  The structure is simple with 2 x 4 posts, lattice up the sides, and 2 x 6 lintels sculpted with the jig-saw.  I noticed that a friend had some OLD redwood stain, and with 2-3 coats the streakiness fades.  The footers are actually sections of a PT 4 x 4, sunk into a hole filled with rocks and a small amount of ready-mix quickcrete.  We get a fair amount of wind up through the floodplain and didn't want to find a demolished structure amidst the raspberry bushes.  The arbor will serve dual purposes - a beautiful entry to what will be the Japanese garden, and supports for the raspberries wires which will run along the beds on either side.  

Cold work days

An unrelated selection of photos... this one above is the parsnip bed.  With each successive frost (nightly now) they droop a bit and with the wind, they're catching all the oak leaves.  I'm excited to dig these beauties as December comes along.  These are the first parsnips we've grown and I love the idea that they only improve as winter deepens - when all the other crops are finished.  Apparently the greens are edible, but we've not tried them yet as there are still plenty of greens in the garden and cold frames to satisfy us.  A friend came to help with the firewood this weekend and we tasted the sorrel and New Zealand spinach periodically as we worked, each of which was more tangy and sweet after the frosts.

A dehydrator special - Chili! - using up all the peppers from the garden, along with some pintos and onions, as well as tomatoes that we've been ripening in the garage.  We started with about half a bushel of green tomatoes at the last harvest in late September and more than half of them ripened within a week.  The rest are lingering, developing some rotten black spots (probably too cold?), but the chicks love the lycopene in any form.  The ones that do ripen well taste wonderful after a month without that sweet garden-fresh tomato flavor.

We wanted the neighbors to feel free to use our 'leaf corral' so we built something visible from the road.  The slats are from a nearby fence that fell down and are woven with twine to remain sturdy through the winds and snow accumulation.  We managed to collect more than 50 brown bags of leaves from our environs which we dumped into piles over this past weekend.  We have coffee grinds on the squash beds and these are each topped with lots of leaves.  The remainder of the leaves are in piles wherever we have space, ready for winterization of beds as well as mulch for the coming gardening season.

Conor is picking our two loveliest heads of broccoli from a seed blend of Fedco varieties.  Fresh broccoli takes so little time to steam, a fact which we often forget!  Two or three or four minutes is enough for these tender stalks.  There's one more big head, but the rest seem to have slowed growth with these ever-so-short days...

Winter Crops

Kale trees

I'm always surprised by how much time passes between our posts.  Lately I've not been home during daylight hours, biking off to work at dawn and returning after dark.  I have a few more months until that changes!  On the whole, though, the passing of seasons is delightful.  The weather has warmed up again and we're having brilliant sunshine.  Tough on the root crops in 'cold' storage, which are sprouting, but nice for us.  We've been eating kale almost non-stop - it's so delicious now that the first few frosts have sweetened it up.  Tonight I had roasted portabella mushrooms stuffed with kale and salata ricotta cheese. Delicious. Our most wonderful recent kale success was a nice potato/squash gnocchi tossed in sage and kale butter.  The trees themselves:

We have so many kinds of kale:  Wintorbor, Red Russian, White Russian, Rainbow Lacinato, and some of the more common varieties.  The collards are also doing well, and we tried a few parsnips last night but they're still starchy and would benefit from a few more good frosts.