Weekend Harvest and Preserving RoundUp

Let's drop in on our weekend harvest and have a peek at the kitchen projects going on as well. The kitchen is one busy room these days, and there is always either a bubbling pot of water on the stove, ready for canning, or the same pot cooling off in order to be reused in the garden.

Every other night we have green beans with dinner, because every other day I harvest several pounds of these beauties.

I just learned this year that if you don't harvest the beans, the plant will stop producing new fruit. Interesting, yes?

We harvest and eat cherry tomatoes every day - Tom's gotten in to the habit of going out each morning before he leaves and picking a bunch. Then he slices them, adds a few leaves of basil and some fresh mozzarella and a little olive oil, and takes it to share with everyone at work. What could make business meetings better than a little Caprese salad to nibble on? Speaking of nibble, that's how I usually get my daily dose of cherry tomatoes - I just eat them as I work around them.

The large slicing and paste tomatoes get picked once a week on Saturday mornings, and I usually get around 10 pounds. This weekend I turned them, once again, into canned tomato paste. We use paste for our homemade spaghetti sauce throughout the year, as well as a tablespoon here or there in other braises or sauces. Kate used to eat it out straight out of the can, but she doesn't do that anymore, darn it. This stuff would be terrific straight out of the jar.

I pick the hot and sweet peppers once a week, unless I need them sooner for a recipe. This weekend, the sweet peppers were sautéed with shallots, garlic, and homemade chicken broth, then spooned over a grilled steak with sprinkles of gorgonzola on top. The hot peppers are still sitting on the counter. I've roasted and frozen dozens, and Tom has made enough hot sauce to keep everyone in our extended family happy for at least a year. I was debating what to do with them, when Adam came in to the kitchen. He tasted the pickles Tom made today, drank a little of my homemade apple juice ("tastes like liquid pie"), then saw the peppers. "Are those hot peppers, Mom?" "Yep." "Yesssssss. (fist pump)" Looks like he'll take care of those for me. This was after he toured the gardens and said, "Guess I'd better have a salad tomorrow, the lettuce is close to bolting." I love this kid.

Speaking of pickles, Tom picked a bunch of cucumbers and turned them into more pickles today. 

And I picked a huge amount of basil Saturday and made another six jars of pesto. We have enough pesto now to last us to next summer, I think.

I just checked the corn, and there are enough ears ready to have tomorrow night for dinner. The Delicata squash is nearly ready, just waiting for 'wiltage' on the stem, which is what I'm waiting for on the watermelons as well. The potato vines are starting to go brown, just need to let them die off further, and then I'll dig those up. As mentioned earlier, the romaine is starting to bolt, pumpkins are starting to take off, a second batch of collards is nearly ready for eating, and the butternut squash is coming along.

The flower garden is bursting with blooms. Here are some interesting ones I looked at today.

Columbine blooming in the woodland shade garden

Crocosmia, drought stressed but blooming anyway

Scarlet Flax in the North Pollinator garden

Native Gumplant in the woodland shade garden, there will be lots of this soon

a honeybee visiting a Scabiosa

Nicotiana, shy during the day, glorious at dawn and dusk

Penstemon

Salvia

another Salvia

Opened the lid on the hive today, all looked well - will open it further tomorrow. Don't like to get in there and bug them so much, but need to stay on top of the wax moths.

Apple Projects

Our apples ripen in the late summer, rather than autumn, so about this time of year we have a lot of apples to eat. We can eat a good amount fresh, but we don't have a good place to store them long-term, and this time of year there is so much produce to eat! Often the apples end up in the compost. I've always hated this waste and determined this year to mitigate it.

So I've had several apple projects. Back when I summer-pruned the tree, I had a ton of windfall apples, and with those I made pectin, which then was used to thicken our strawberry and peach jams.

A last weekend, I picked a couple of bushels and made apple pie filling, which was a true canning adventure. I used the recipe from Growing a Greener World, and it was complicated! I felt proud of myself for tackling this project. We have five jars of filling for pies this winter.

With the remainder of the apples, I thought I'd make applesauce. Our daughter Kate has Aspergers, and is very picky about what she eats, but she does eat applesauce every day at lunch. Unfortunately she likes those squeeze pouches that are ubiquitous now. She also likes the apple/banana blend that we get at Whole Foods. I dislike the expense and the waste of those packets, so I had hoped to get her involved in making homemade applesauce and putting a 4 oz jar of that in her lunch every day, rather than a packet.  But Kate was pretty clear on the fact that she prefers the pouches, and since it's one of the only dependable fruit products she'll eat, I'm not going to die on that hill.

Plan B - apple juice. Neither of the kids are big juice drinkers, but both will drink apple juice if it's in the house. And I thought some homemade juice might be a good alternative to lemonade or milk in school lunches. After all, no added sugar or any other junk - and seriously fresh and rich with vitamins. So I got cracking.

I used the recipe from our favorite canning book, though the recipe is for grape juice originally, the author just says you can substitute apples or cranberries or any combination of the three. It was a long process, but fun, and smelled good! and I ended up with four and a half pints of gorgeous juice (four for the canning shelf, the half for immediate consumption).

Isn't it pretty? But a lot of work for a very little result. Not sure this is the best use of our apples, either - still searching for the ultimate apple recipe. However, the chickens loved the cooked, discarded pulp at the end of this project.

There are a few apples left on the tree, so I had Tom throw together a pie crust last night, and we'll have a fresh apple pie tonight, as a celebration of the end of all summer camps. Both kids are now home from all their camps and we have August to tool around town and have some day trips and adventures.

Wax Moths

I've been sitting here at the computer for half an hour trying to figure out how to start this post. We opened the hive today to check on things, see how the bees are getting along since we re-leveled the hive and took out so much comb a couple of weeks ago. And there is plenty of honey, nectar, pollen, brood. There are lots of bees and lots of activity. I think maybe there are less bees than before; it's possible there was a swarm and I missed it, but it's hard to know. The upshot is that things look pretty normal. If not for the fact that as soon as we took off the lid we noticed crumbly bits of stuff on a couple of the bars, and one sort of humped oval of crumbly bits. When I scraped it with the hive tool, out came a larvae. A  wax moth larvae.

Devastating. 

We burned that worm, burned all the crumbly stuff we could get off the bars, found one more larvae and a little web and burned that. We removed all the superfluous bars that the bees hadn't built on yet, and even a few that had a little bit of building going on - we want to reduce their amount of defensible space. And that's about all we can do. We have to be hopeful that the colony will be strong enough to fight off these guys and keep the hive. Right now the comb looks fine. We'll need to check the hive every day for a while and see if we see any more larvae, because wax moths can destroy a healthy hive in a week.

Wax moths are almost impossible to get rid of once they are in your hive. They thrive in places where there is little or no winter freeze; they can overwinter for up to a year in larvae form. Many people put their frames and bars in an electric freezer to kill off wax moths, and we'll need to do that if the hive cannot resist them and fails. The larvae like old, dark comb, which is naturally near the front of the hive, where the bees built first (and so it's the oldest comb). That's also where the brood is, and where the queen is as well. The wax moth larvae like to make holes in the comb, eat the pollen but also the brood, and make a webby mess of the hive. 

And I guess I'm just discouraged, honestly big-time discouraged. Beekeeping is kind of kicking my ass. So much can go wrong, and there is so little we can do to help. I really, really don't want to lose another colony, but I've got to gird myself for that possibility. Something that makes me really sad is that wax moths usually attack weaker hives. This colony seemed so strong, so vital, building so quickly, just a couple of weeks ago. It does seem as though there are less bees, but I'm just speculating about a swarm, I really have no idea. And if the colony was weak it was because we had to take out some of their badly-built comb and have them build again. Ugh ugh ugh. I just feel terrible. And if we lose this colony to wax moths, we won't even get the bittersweet blessing of a honey harvest, because it'll all be ruined by moth larvae.

Here's an interesting (and heartbreaking) video from a guy who lost one of his hives to wax moths. 

We'll keep you updated.

First Corn!

I guess July is a month of firsts - the first peppers, the first tomatoes, the first beans, the first basil, the first melons, the first cucumbers.... and now the first corn!

How do you like to cook corn? When it's this fresh, sometimes I don't even cook it. But usually the family protests - hot, with butter and salt, please! - so I put it in a pot of water, bring it just to the boil, and then take it out.  Yum. We do like to grill corn, too - but I find that's better for older, tougher ears.
This corn was a variety from Renee's Garden called 'Casino' - I think I chose it because it promised to ripen early. Considering it got a haircut from the deer and had to rebound from that, I think it's been a great performer. It's a hybrid, not an open-pollinated, organic seed, though. By the way, I'm thinking of growing popcorn next summer as well as sweet corn... any suggestions? I've read good things about 'Dakota Black.' I might also grow a field corn for the chickens.

We'll have the corn with grilled steak tonight. I wanted to share my new favorite marinade recipe with you, from Epicurious. It's equal parts soy sauce, maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, and garlic. For instance for 1-2 pounds of steak, say flap steak (my new favorite cut), I use 3 Tbsp of each liquid plus 3 large cloves of garlic. Put it all in the blender and mix it up. Let it sit on the steak as little as 30 minutes or up to a couple of hours. Delicious!

In summer, I very much appreciate the simplicity of making some sort of protein or noodle, then adding a side or salad from the garden - whether scrambled eggs with a side salad of cucumber/tomato/rice wine vinegar, or spaghetti with tomatoes, basil, garlic, and olive oil, or stir-fried bits of pork with string beans, summer cooking is unfussy and fresh, and that's what we crave this time of year.

It's been too darn hot to do much in the garden this week, and I'm fighting a throat infection. So it's been a little lazy around here. Yesterday we did manage to get over to China Camp State Park in Marin County (86 degrees there while 108 at home, oh those micro climates!) which has an interesting history and calm, warm (well, warmer than the Pacific anyway!) waters to swim in. Dogs are supposed to stay on leash here, but every time we've been, there have been loads of dogs swimming with their owners, and we do that too. It's fun to have a place to swim with the dog. Kate brought a friend, and we had fun looking at rocks and boats and floating on boogie boards. If you haven't been here, I highly recommend it. The only downside is that all the trails (and there are many enticing ones) don't allow dogs at all. That's a huge bummer. But the parking fee is only $5 and it's a good picnic spot. The shore is rocky, so bring water shoes.

This weekend my job is to figure out how to free-range the chickens in the garden, without them eating everything or digging up all the dirt. I'd like to give the chickens more space to roam, and I'd like them to eat all the bugs I'm finding in my produce. But I don't want them messing stuff up too much. I'm thinking livestock panels might be the way to go, but I'll let you know what we decide. If you've got some advice for us, please share!

First Watermelon!

The corner of the South Garden where melons are growing has become an inaccessible place for humans. Watermelon vines have taken over everything, including some basil, a good chunk of the pollinator garden, and part of the cantaloupe bed. I need to get back there and weed, but it's nearly impossible. We noticed over the weekend that we had several ripening watermelons on the vine, and this morning I picked one up that weighed easily 25 pounds. It had a nice yellow spot on the bottom, which is a sign of ripeness, but the vine hadn't quite died back where it attaches to the fruit. Still, I removed it and brought it inside to see how things were going. We cut in to it, and it wasn't quite ripe. Almost! Maybe another week on the vine would have turned it a darker pink and made it sweeter.

So the chickens got this one. (A side note: I've always composted, and never felt like I was 'wasting' food if I did something like this, because it would go back in to my beds as compost at some point. However, it feels even less wasteful to give it to the chickens, who are much faster 'composters' than I am, and will eat less expensive grain, the more they are given garden scraps.)  In a week, I'm expecting more watermelon, some we can actually eat. Hooray! Last year I had melons in a part of the South Garden that didn't get as much afternoon sun, and we never did get a fully ripe melon. So it's exciting to have a bumper crop this year.

The potato vines are dying back, so I think it might be almost time to harvest potatoes, as well. We really need a root cellar.

For the past year, I've been sowing Tithonia, and they've finally bloomed. First I noticed a huge sunflower-like plant coming up, but with very very soft fig-like leaves, and I wondered, hm, what is that I planted? (I sow so many flower seeds, I forget what I've sowed; plus I sow so many new things that I may not recognize them until they bloom.) When they reached six feet, I despaired of them ever blooming and telling me what they were. But they were blooming when we came home last weekend, and they are simply delightful. Tithonia is a member of the sunflower family and is often called Mexican Sunflower. They like it hot and dry (perfect for here!) and the deer don't like to eat them. I was told they were a beacon for butterflies, and guess what I saw yesterday?

Look at that beautiful Monarch  Gulf Frittilary! She stayed around the garden for quite a while. I don't get a lot of butterflies here, other than those annoying Cabbage Whites, whose innocent flutterings distract humans from the fact that they are laying very hungry caterpillars on everything from my nasturtiums to my tomatoes. So when a Monarch/Gulf Fritillary shows up and hangs out, it's special. I'm hoping a Swallowtail might be next.

I haven't noticed bees on the Tithonia, though they are known to like it. I notice bees all over the cosmos. So far the bees seem to be continuing to bring in plenty of nectar and pollen. As we move in to an even drier, hotter August, I'll think about feeding them sugar syrup, but as long as I have a lot of stuff blooming, I can avoid that. However, it was 105 here yesterday and supposed to be even hotter today. Who knows how long we can keep up with all the flowers, veg and fruit, with our limited water ration? Better enjoy everything while we can!