Freezer Salsa

I decided to make salsa with the rest of my school-garden-tomato-haul. I recently replanted our raised beds at home with winter crops, so the last of our summer pepper harvest was also used for this purpose along with our own garlic, and onions from a neighbor’s CSA share (she had so many onions that she begged me to take some!). I very roughly followed this recipe, omitting the cumin and using only hot peppers rather than a combination of hot and sweet.

Smell-o-vision would be good right about now

Since there are only two of us in the house at the moment, I don’t need to worry about having enough freezer space - there’s plenty of room. So instead of canning this salsa, I’ll just freeze it. The recipe reflects that, having less acid than usual, and I used jarred lime juice rather than fresh, and our own homemade apple cider vinegar, since I didn’t need to worry about food-safety-acidity-%. This made for a very casual salsa-making endeavor, especially with no water-bath canning to be done. I enjoyed the process a lot more, I must say!

I didn’t remove any of the pepper seeds or ribs, so this salsa has turned out a bit spicy! That’s ok - I’m the only wimp in the family, everyone else likes it that way. I used mostly 1/2 pint jars for this, so that we don’t have a huge jar of salsa sitting in the fridge for too long (and letting it go bad, therefore wasting it). They’re also the perfect size to share. Hooray for tomato season!

That Time of Year

April is distracting, isn’t it? The house finches are plucking coconut coir from my hanging baskets to make their nests, the yellow-faced bumblebees are in the borage, and the clematis ‘Montana’ is a froth of pink. Nature is in the midst of transition.

And so is the garden! This is the time of year when the tomatoes and pepper seedlings have to be taken out of the ‘greenhouse’ every morning, and returned back every night. It’s still too chilly for them to be put into the raised beds, so they need to be babied a bit. Oh, it’s hard to wait.

But they’re still too little, and the soil too cold. However, other things can be planted! I’ve removed the lingering cauliflower, cabbage, chard, broccoli, and beets; in their places I’ve planted potatoes (Yukon Gold, Huckleberry Gold, and German Butterball), pole beans (Rattlesnake, my favorite) and the dry beans from Rancho Gordo. I’ll wait until May to plant cucumbers, basil, and winter squash.

We’re still eating peas, both shelling and snap, nearly every day, along with asparagus (six years after planting the most recent batch of crowns, and we’re finally getting all we can eat). Artichokes are coming on, and the herbs are going crazy - the oregano and marjoram and sorrel just overtaking their beds, and the chives and culinary sages blooming beautifully purple!

And the flowers… well, the flowers are abundant. Borage, and poppies, and phacelia, and heuchera, and columbine, and salvias, and echium…. the list goes on and on, and I haven’t even told you about the fruit trees and bushes yet. Summer is coming!

What’s happening in your garden?

Fiddleneck Spring

My daily hiking practice has yielded views of wildflowers of all kinds, but the one I am definitely seeing the most is the humble fiddleneck (Amsinckia intermedia). These cheerful yellow flowers are part of the Boraginaceae family, the same family that gives us borage, forget-me-nots, and phacelia, which are also similarly prolific. Flowers in this family have an inflorescence called a ‘cyme,’ which has this distinct curved row of flowers, with the oldest one at the bottom and the newest in the center of the curve. Bees love flowers in this family, though it’s been cold enough here that I haven’t seen a ton of native bees out yet.

Unfortunately the fiddleneck, charming as it may be, is often considered a weed, because it is toxic to livestock - and the hills around here are not just available to hikers. Ranchers use them for grazing as well. The irony is that often our worst weeds grow in disturbed areas, and the hillsides are very disturbed - by those grazing cattle! So sometimes what we most detest is also caused by us, which is not news to environmentalists.

Regardless, I enjoy seeing the fields of sunny fiddlenecks when I’m out walking; a beautiful yellow sheen punctuated by the orange of poppies and the blue of Dichelostemma capitatum.

Well, I have some bad news. My peppers are pretty much all dead. I planted them waaaaay too early, but covered them in the hopes that they’d make it; unfortunately we had some serious cold snaps in early March and that spelled disaster for these heat-loving plants. I also had some sort of animal disturbance in one of the beds…. squirrels? the local marauding cat? Who knows. I’m pretty bummed by 100 dead pepper plants, considering they were babied by me, indoors, for two months. Ugh.

However, my tomatoes are looking just great. I’ve had good germination and they are getting quite tall and beginning to sprout true leaves. I’ll have to decide what to do with them soon. Do I take the pepper lesson to heart and pot the tomatoes up and keep them in the greenhouse for a while yet? Or do I ignore the pepper lesson, throw caution to the wind, and plant them directly into beds? Am I feeling more lucky with the weather now than I did in February?

Luckily, the Master Gardeners are coming through for me this year in a big way. Their yearly sale is going ahead as usual, just not in person. They will take orders on April 6 and have them ready for pick up shortly afterward. I’m planning on ordering a whole bunch of pepper starts! The proceeds go to their garden, where they grow produce for local folks who are facing food insecurity, so it’s a great place to buy your veg starts.

It's Time to Start Pepper Seeds (at least here in California)

I learned just in the last couple of years that it’s best to start pepper seeds long before starting tomato seeds. Tomatoes germinate and grow quickly, so if you sow them in March, they’ll be ready to plant out late April to early May. Peppers take a much longer time to germinate, especially, and their growth is also quite a bit slower. Last winter was the first time I started peppers in January, and we were eating our first ripe red ones by the end of June, early July. Which, in my opinion, is excellent.

My seeding trays fit 50 2x2 inch soil blocks, and I sow two seeds per block, to insure that I’ll get at least one viable seedling of each variety. In about a month, these will probably need to be potted up to 4” containers, and then in March it will be warm enough to take them outside to the greenhouse. That will leave my seeding table empty and available for tomatoes.

*** By the way, I have a ton of seeds left over, some from each year since 2018. If you’d like to grow your own peppers this year, please let me know and I’m happy to give you some seeds. The Johnny’s hybrid seeds, in particular, are a bit pricey, and I would rather have them be used than go to waste.

My seeding setup is quite simple: A table, a towel, a heat mat (for under the tray, to keep things warm for the germination process), and a light - that’s it. The seeds don’t need light until they germinate, but they need heat the entire time. Usually I set this up in our bedroom, but that’s where Tom’s “office” is this year, so I guess the living room will have to do.

We’ve had temperatures a full 20 degrees higher than normal this time of year, and there have already been wildfire starts in southern California, so it’s going to be a doozy of a year. No rain in sight, either. This weather does make us want to be outdoors all the time, so we’ve indulged that craving - getting compost dug and plants side dressed, brewing beer, pruning trees, and of course the ever-present chore of weeding. I used organic rice straw to mulch everything last year, and that was a mistake - I have rice germinating all over the place. However, I also have winter garden seeds germinating too! So that’s a nice side effect of this weather.

Our First Snake! *

*That we know of, that is.

This is a Western Sharp-tailed snake. It is endemic to the West from the Central Coast of California up through the Pacific Northwest. I found it under one of the bricks I use as vegetable markers. It’s about the size of a golf ball, all curled up like that, but these snakes only reach about a foot in length, so they are naturally small. It tends to like wetter areas in the garden, and guess what they eat? Slugs and slug eggs! This is so amazing. I could not have asked for a better first snake sighting. Yes, I’d like something to eat rats, and this snake won’t take care of that, but I sure do have plenty of slugs. I hope there are lots of these little snakes all over the garden!

Today was a great day. The sun shone! It was in the 60’s! I spent half the day doing classwork and half the day in the garden, which felt close to normal. Drunk on sunshine, I threw caution to the wind and planted out all my peppers. I have three 4x4 beds full of hot, sweet, and paprika peppers. The soil felt warm, the nights will be warm for the next ten days at least, and I think we are out of danger of frost. Normally our last average frost date is February 15, but we didn’t really have winter until March! And even as late as last night, it was quite chilly with snow down to 3000 ft. But tonight it all changes, and I’m hopeful that spring is well under way, now.

My mood is just so different on days like this, when I have some purpose to shape my activities. We are feeling very hopeful here in California that our curve is somewhat diminished; our governor was very quick to make social distancing recommendations very early in March, and we’re seeing some signs that that was a good decision. The battle is not won, however, and we also watch the news coming out of NY and Louisiana with heavy hearts. It was good to forget about the virus for a few hours. I hope you are able to do the same.