First Tomatoes of the Season!

Look at these beauties!

The big slicers are called Bloody Butcher. The cherries are called Isis Candy. I was supposed to wait until those turned red with yellow sunbursts, but they taste good right now so I couldn't wait!

Unfortunately some of the paste tomatoes have blossom end rot, so I'm watering more and adding more Epsom Salts, I'm hoping that will help the problem. Most of the paste tomatoes are ok though, so that's good.

I also harvested the first sweet peppers today!

Preserving Garlic and Shallots

We harvested our garlic crop on April 24, and our shallots on June 13. After 'curing' the harvest (letting it dry for several weeks on top of the chicken coop), the alliums were ready to store. I braided the garlic and hung it up on my canning shelf and have been using it ever since; today and this weekend I'm cleaning shallots and storing a bunch of them in mesh bags, then hanging them on the same shelf. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of shallot bulbs.

However, the more I read about the shelf life of garlic and shallots, the more I think hanging them long term in this corner of my house isn't going to fly. Commercial garlic growers store this their product just above freezing; old-timers used to store it down cellar, where it was dark and cool. The inside of our house is anywhere between 70-85 in the summer, depending on if it's night, or if the air conditioning is on, or if it's only in the 80's outside and the doors are open. The 'canning corner' is probably a few degrees cooler as its the darkest part of our home, but it's nowhere near actual 'cool.' So far, the garlic is doing fine - no sprouting, no funny tastes. But that probably won't last forever.

So I started looking up ways to preserve the harvest long-term. Alliums can't safely be canned in a water bath, as they are a low-acid vegetable, and heat changes the flavor anyway. However, they can be either pickled or frozen. I'm not interested in pickling - I want the garlic and shallots to taste the way they are supposed to taste, so I can use them in recipes. So freezing it is.

Today I started what will be a many-day process. There's no way around it, it's fiddly. But I really don't want this garlic to go bad - we use a lot of it in cooking, and it's really fun to use what we grew in our garden. It's the same with the shallots. Tom is allergic to onions, but for some reason not shallots, so I substitute them in nearly every recipe.

The garlic head can be frozen whole, but you can also separate the cloves, peel them, toss them in olive oil, and freeze them in a jar for many months. This appealed to me the most (handy for cooking!), so I searched for easy ways to peel garlic without smashing it. And you're not going to believe this, but I found a way. Check out this video from Saveur. I spent the morning doing exactly what he does, and it works! However I do not have two bowls of the same size, so I used cake pans. It still worked, but I had to shake it many more times than he does. Still it was a very handy method.

This pint jar contains six heads of garlic.

I still have two braids of about 10-12 heads each; I'd like to freeze half of that, so I have a lot more to do. I figure shallots can be done the same way, so that'll be next.

The cherry tomatoes are starting to change color, so soon we'll have tomatoes! Still harvesting berries, collards, romaine, and carrots every day; hot peppers are also producing regularly right now, and there is plenty of basil and cilantro. We're hungry for tomatoes and beans, though. I'll post pictures of the garden on July 1.

Strawberry Jam; or Who are You, and What Have you Done with Elizabeth?

When I was a kid growing up in suburban Maryland, we used to spend a significant amount of time picking produce, either from our own garden, or from a local farm called Butler's Orchard. From our garden would come tomatoes, beans, lettuces, peas, cabbages, corn. We didn't have fruit trees or vines, so we picked things like strawberries and peaches at Butler's Orchard. While the produce from the garden trickled in and mostly got eaten fresh (except for large amounts, like tomatoes), when we went to the orchard it meant hours of picking, with the result being flats and flats of berries, or buckets of peaches.

Mom would make jam from the berries, and can the peaches. She also spent a significant amount of time canning tomato products and making sauerkraut. I think I liked going to the orchard and picking, but the steamy afternoons in a very hot kitchen, blanching tomatoes and taking the skins off, put me off canning forever (or so I thought). My folks didn't believe in using air conditioning, so those humid sweaty days just seemed like torture to me. Still, I enjoyed going down to the basement and bringing up a can of peaches or tomatoes in the dead of winter. I appreciated what Mom was doing. I just knew I would never do it myself.

Hence my surprise at myself this morning, up and making strawberry jam before breakfast. As I stood over a steaming pot stirring foamy berries, I suddenly wondered what the hell was I doing. Pickles are one thing; but JAM? And was I actually enjoying the process? Hmmmm.

This isn't the first time I'd asked myself this question lately. Um, yeah, horse manure? Dad used to get loads of steer manure from the nearby farms and add it to his garden, and I used to roll my eyes and pinch my nose. Yuck, was my teenaged opinion. So how come suddenly I'm doing the very same thing he used to do? And how come I'm making jam at the crack of dawn?

I called my mom and asked her a few questions. Why, I asked, did you put up vegetables and fruit and make jam? Did you LIKE doing it? Or did you just feel as though you HAD to?

Well, she answered, it all started because of Dad's garden; we had SO MUCH produce, I just had to put some up. And I liked going to the orchard and picking, and I liked making jam. I knew that making stuff at home would taste better and be healthier than what I could buy in the stores. And yeah, I looked forward to that summer canning time.

Phew. Talking to her relieved my mind a little, I mean, I guess I was worried that maybe she felt coerced into doing it or something, like it was a chore she dreaded. I'm glad it wasn't. Because very surprisingly, I'm enjoying myself too. I like looking at my burgeoning canning shelf. I actually read Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Practical Pantry cover to cover and stayed interested. I think I might do more of this canning thing.

Making jam was fun. Tom made peach jam  a few weeks back, and I rediscovered that I like eating jam. Yesterday Kate mentioned that she'd like to make a layer cake with jam as the filling, and I thought, there's that pectin I made a while ago, and strawberries will be out of season soon. Next thing I knew, I was cutting up berries to macerate them in sugar overnight.

I have plenty of jam ready now to eat and use in the layer cake, or spoon over pancakes and ice cream. And I have four lovely jars up on the canning shelf for winter time, when we'd like a taste of strawberry. Also, the house smells incredible and has all morning. Win-win-WIN.

The shelf is starting to fill up. Soon, tomatoes!

Pickled Carrots

We have an abundance of carrots right now, so I decided to pickle a few of them. I'm 47 years old, and I just tasted my first pickled carrots ever, on Mother's Day at Full Belly Farm. They were a revelation - crisp and with that real pickle taste, but beautifully orange and with a sweetness that only comes from carrot.

I did a lot of searching for recipes; it seems that pickled carrots are something people are passionate about, and there are many personal tastes. I need to go on a hunt for dill seed (something we had trouble finding last year), but meanwhile I have coriander seed that Ruby from the Institute of Urban Homesteading gave me from her garden, so I decided to use that. I have garlic that we've grown ourselves, and of course I have peppercorns, sea salt (which stands in for pickling salt in a pinch), and cider vinegar on hand. (You need to use a vinegar that has 5% acidity; white vinegar is often called for in these recipes, but I prefer the flavor of cider vinegar and always have some here for broth and making Thieves Vinegar.)

First up, picking a big bunch of carrots. I finally got wise to planting carrots far enough apart. I'm not a huge fan of thinning, so instead I just planted the seeds about 1-2 inches apart. It worked. We have decent-sized carrots this year, since they weren't crowded, and I didn't have to thin, which I find tedious and wasteful.

The chickens get the carrot-tops and any carrots that are too small for this project. They LOVE carrot tops.

The carrots get washed and sliced to the size of the jar, then blanched for 90 seconds in boiling water.
Meanwhile I boiled the jars and warmed the lids, and then put a clove of garlic at the bottom of each jar, plus peppercorns and coriander seeds. After the carrots are blanched, they are added to the jars.

The jars are then filled with a boiling mixture of vinegar, water, and salt. I boiled the full jars for 10 minutes in a water bath. At the moment I'm using our pasta pot with the pasta draining insert, so the jars don't wobble around on the bottom of the pot and break. Mom bought us a canning rack, and I thought it would fit in our La Crueset pot and that could be used for smaller jars, but it doesn't fit. So we do need to buy a whole new canning rig.

Anyhow, I made do, and the carrots turned out great. They'll keep for a year, but they'll be ready to eat in a couple of days.

And last night, we had our first pesto of the season! The basil is very young, but there was enough of it, and I added some spinach for backbone. I used garlic from our garden, and walnuts instead of pine nuts. It was delicious. Nothing says 'summer' like pesto!

The Annual Load

It's becoming a once-a-year tradition to borrow Dad's truck and make a trip to Sienna Ranch for aged horse manure. They have more than they know what to do with; therefore, the property manager is more than willing to fire up the front loader and fill up the truck with this ultimate soil amendment. The hardest part of the trip is shoveling the manure out of the truck and on to our driveway. After that, it's just a matter of adding a wheelbarrow at a time to the garden, and hardly a month goes by around here that we're not adding a wheelbarrow of something to the garden, so that's no big deal. Anyway, it's beautiful stuff, if you like that sort of thing. Clearly I do. And the garden does, for sure. Every time I amend with manure, everything sort of gets a new surge of growth.

It's important to pile the manure right next to your front gate, because really, nothing says 'welcome' like a large pile of horseshit.

We took a trip up to Petaluma yesterday; we obtain all our grass-fed and pastured meats from Tara Firma Farms, and as members we were able to join them for some roasted pork on Father's Day. We enjoyed walking through the hills and fishing in their pond on a beautiful sunny day. We made some side trips to the Marin Cheese Company (stinky French cheeses for Dad, check) and Cottage Gardens (plants for Mom, check) as well as an extreme side trip to Oakland to Pollinate Farm and Garden (canning rack for me and Tom, check). 

Ok, out to the garden for me - that pile o' poo won't move itself.