LAKE MACBRIDE— Dust is still settling on life made turbulent by the harvest, new work, writing and commitments with friends and family during August. Top that off with talk about retaliation against Syria for using banned chemical weapons, and summer is ending with a bang, perhaps literally. It’s time to regroup and deal with the challenges.
A neighbor and I did a deal on raspberries yesterday. He provided eight pints to process, half into a spread for his morning toast, and half into what I want, probably the same, or maybe pancake syrup. After a shift at the farm this morning, raspberries, tomatoes and apples will all enter the canning mix. It’s now or never for the ones already picked. An eight hour canning session begins at 1 p.m. and I’ll locate my second canning pot to process two batches at a time. Times like this, I wish we had six or eight burners on our stove.
The garden has been on its own for three or four days. Tomatoes are ready, and not sure what else. When I return from the farm, I’ll empty the compost bucket and find out, picking tomatoes for sure, and likely Anaheim peppers.
There is a lot more to organize, and the food work is in the must-do, nature-can’t-wait category. There’s more work, my presentations on climate change Sept. 17 and 29, particularly. That’s not to mention finding replacement revenue for when the seasonal farm work ends soon. It looks to be a very busy autumn as we enter September.
LAKE MACBRIDE— There is a sense that the season has turned. Clutching the harvest, preserving it as best we can for winter, its abundance slips through our hands to compost, and with time, back to the earth.
Bones and joints are weary from farm work, that work displacing time normally spent in the garden, yard and kitchen. Fallen apples line the ground and the branches of the late trees touch the grass, laden with the developing fruit. In nature’s abundance we cut a sliver and sustain ourselves on its freshness.
It’s labor day in the U.S., but that matters little in nature’s calendar. The work of a local food system goes on, and paid work calls me again today.
Soon I’ll finish preparing the onions drying in the germination house for storage. After that, I will be ready for autumn and the acceleration of changing seasons into winter.
LAKE MACBRIDE— By 10 a.m. this morning I had cooked and cut sweet corn from the cob and made a large batch of hot sauce using five different types of peppers, onion, garlic and tomatoes from our garden. Waiting for the water to boil, I have one of five crates of tomatoes cored and ready to skin— the ones with bad spots are cut up and in another pot, to be processed into tomato sauce. That’s not to mention the buckets and buckets of apples ready to be made into something: apple butter first, then apple sauce, then more juice to can, and along the way some apple desserts. It has been and will be a busy day.
It is always a race against time and decay when preserving fruit and vegetables. Everything seems to come in from the garden at the same time and can intimidate. The secret is not to get wigged out, but do what one can to process the ones needing it first. That’s why I’m working tomatoes now. They were seconds when I started, and there are so many apples, they can wait and go to the farm.
In addition to the kitchen work, I delivered apples not good enough for recipes but great for livestock, and traded them for chicken eggs. Then off to the CSA to load the truck for tonight’s deliveries.
By the time I got home with the CSA share, it was time to clean up the kitchen so our house guest could prepare for a work potluck tomorrow. We made a simple dinner of corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes, steamed broccoli and freshly made apple juice. If your bones are weary at the end of a day, it isn’t all bad that they are weary from securing delicious local food for the dinner plate, made with your own hands and labor.
LAKE MACBRIDE— There’s a lot of work to do in a summer kitchen. One almost forgets that in addition to preserving the harvest, it is important to cook and eat in harmony with the season’s abundance. Yesterday at the the grocery store there were bags of two large loaves of French bread for sale at $0.99. I bought one, brought it home, sliced and toasted it, and topped each piece of bread with salad dressing, a slice of tomato, salt and pepper. As is said of good and tasty food, Yum!
On Wednesday, we were discussing abundance at the farm. Extra sweet corn, cantaloupe and cabbage were offered, along with small onions, seconds of potatoes and peppers. I took some of each and made a stew for dinner using potatoes, sweet corn, onion, peppers, potatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, carrot, celery and home made turnip stock: a fitting side dish for a meal of corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes. The cabbage was made into sauerkraut, and the cantaloupe were some of the best we’ve eaten.
This is not to mention the apples which are falling from the tree at a rate of a peck every hour or so. I got out the juicer and added apple juice to the vinegar jar, and bottled a gallon to drink fresh and add as the cooking liquid for apple butter— all using fallen fruit. There are lots more apples in buckets and bowls, and on the trees, and this is only the first variety.
Roma Tomatoes
In a household-based local food system, we are not consumers. We may purchase items in the grocery store and farmers markets, but the act of buying is not what we are about. It is more the act of processing that is central to a home cook’s food system, and it has ramifications that stretch throughout the food supply chain.
Some gardeners and growers are a bit stressed figuring out what to do with the abundance. Because everyone has lots of tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, etc., selling them would be at depressed prices. It is important for a home cook with a local food system to recognize this happens each year and be ready for it. Unlike city dwellers who escape the summer heat, people with home-based local food systems don’t take an August vacation.
When I use the phrase, “local food system,” it is with a micro perspective. Rather than being a socially engineered process, on a grand scale, that competes with the industrial food supply chain, it means how individual kitchens leverage food availability to stock the pantry with ingredients to use all year. It includes some shopping, but more importantly, gardening, cultivating trees, working for food, bartering and foraging. Food preservation includes refrigeration, freezing, canning, dehydrating and if one exists, root cellaring.
This is not a throwback to the invention of the Mason jar, first patented in 1858. It goes much further back to the cultivation of land and domestication of livestock. It is also a statement of how we live in a post-consumer society. The idea is to live well. If we are lucky, and diligent, we can.
LAKE MACBRIDE— As my portfolio of local food system work builds, there is not enough time to do everything that is needed for optimum results. Apples fall faster than they can be processed, and tomatoes sit on the vine, ripe and ready. The work commitments fill in time at five locations, and that leaves less flexibility in a schedule that used to be pretty open.
I just finished canning 36 quarts and 14 pints of tomatoes as juice, sauce and whole. The sauce is very expensive in that it takes a lot of tomato flesh to make a pint of the thick sauce. Hopefully it will enable me to make pasta and pizza sauce without reducing or adding tomato paste as a thickener. From last year’s first experiment it was a winner and worth it.
I was counting on a lot of slicers from the CSA, but there was blight and the production hasn’t been as good as in previous years. Luckily, I have plenty in our garden, at least for the moment.
When I come up for air, there will be other stuff to do. For now, swimming in all this work is invigorating and fulfilling.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Part of yesterday was clearing the dead and dying squash plants from the garden and planting turnips and transplanting butternut squash seedlings. It is dicey as to whether the squash will produce because of the timing of first frost compared to the 110 day growing cycle. Too, the abundance of squash beetles have nowhere to go without the zucchini and yellow squash plants, so even though they had not found the seedlings this morning, one suspects they will visit and if they like it, attempt to stay.
In that plot, the Brussels sprouts are thriving, as are the three kinds of peppers, Swiss chard and collards. This is the most bountiful year of gardening we’ve had.
In the cool downstairs await six bins of tomatoes and two of broccoli for processing. This is part of a work for food arrangement with a local organic grower. Combine it with the approaching and massive apple harvest and there will be plenty of work to do.
Yesterday I planted three trays of seedlings: lettuce, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi and squash. There is plenty of time left during the growing season for these crops to mature, and I am particularly hopeful about new cucumbers for pickling.
As summer races toward Labor Day and October frost, there is much to be done in the garden and in life. We have to eat to live, and because of this summer of local food, there will be no shortage there. It’s enough to sustain a life on the Iowa prairie, at least for a while.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Sunday was cooking day after finishing my work at the newspaper and the farm: the beginning of a long season of using and preserving the summer bounty. It began with figuring out what was in the refrigerator.
Three heads of cabbage are holding up reasonably well, but there is leftover coleslaw from last week. The idea is to make sauerkraut, feeling bullish on fermentation after the success of my pickle experiment. For now, I peeled the old skin from the outer layer and neatly arranged them on a shelf.
I boiled potatoes to use in breakfasts and a potato salad. The potato salad included potatoes (skins on), two hard cooked eggs, diced dill pickles, diced red onion, and a dressing made from salad dressing, yolks of the cooked eggs, yellow mustard and salt. It will keep for a few days if it is not eaten first.
Juicing half a bushel of apples made a sweet, but almost clear liquid. I need to add juice to the mother of vinegar in the pantry, but decided to wait until an amber colored juice came from the apples in my back yard. I bottled half a gallon of apple juice for breakfast and casual drinking, then drank some.
While gardening, I found a stray turnip and harvested it for the greens. I made soup stock with turnip greens, carrot, celery, onion and bay leaf. I used some of the stock to make rice, some to make onion soup and the rest waits in the refrigerator for the next project.
Onion soup is a mystery solved. I piled vast quantities of sliced onions in the Dutch oven with a layer of olive oil on the bottom. A sprinkling of salt and then a low and slow cooking until they began to turn brown. Just covering them with the turnip soup stock, I simmered until done. Soup was served with grated Parmesan cheese. The soup was as good as any French onion soup to be had at a restaurant. So sweet and flavorful with the simplest of ingredients.
The tomatoes are starting to pile up, there are potatoes aplenty, apples and sweet corn is due any week from the CSA. This year, I’m ready for all of it.
LAKE MACBRIDE— In a quest to use the bountiful zucchini, I found a juice recipe. Zucchini juice? Before you click on the next page in your reader, hear me out. The apple harvest is beginning to come in, and they are also basic part of juicing recipes. Organic carrots were on sale at the mega market, as they often are, and they are another essential part of juicing. Put the three together, run them through a juicer, and the result is a sweet juice that immediately creates a boost of energy. The zucchini flavor is masked by the sweetness of the carrots and apples. Mmmmm.
I know what some readers are going to say, that vegetables should be eaten in the form nature presents them, and not highly processed. They have a point. The rationale is that if the zucchini and carrot are fed through the juicer first, the fiber can be used as a cooking ingredient, especially in soup. Too, there is an abundance of apples and zucchini, and a glass of juice in the morning gets the digestive tract moving, if you know what I mean.
Undecided whether this is the next new thing, or a pit of hopeless and despairing zucchini abundance, all there is to do is recommend readers try it and decide for yourselves. I’ll be having a few more glasses before the season is over.
RURAL CEDAR TOWNSHIP— The onion harvest is in at the CSA, and more than two tons of white, red and yellow onions have been arranged in the germination house and barn to dry. Today begins the third day of trimming the excess leaves and arrange them for further drying. A few more four hour shifts and the project will be complete. Onions are one of the most popular vegetables, so the shareholders at the CSA will enjoy continuing to receive this bounty in their shares.
Trimming Onions
I filled the blank spaces in my garden’s cucumber row yesterday afternoon and gave the new patch a good watering. The zucchini are about done, the vines withering and yellowed. Same with yellow squash. There are butternut squash seedlings to plant, although I’m not certain they will make the 90-100 day window needed to mature— another experiment. Next weekend I begin paying work at a local orchard, helping with the weekend surge of city dwellers who come out for family entertainment and apples. That means this weekend will become a working time in the yard and garden, getting caught up on weeding, grass mowing, tree trimming, and preparing garden plots for the next iteration of planting.
White Onions
Fall crops will include turnips for the greens, radishes, lettuce and spinach for sure, adding to the most prolific of gardening years here in Big Grove. (Note to self: prepare more trays for germinating seeds).
My first crop of apples is getting close to ripe (there will be two harvests this year, plus pears), which means the CSA operator and I have to stay in touch with the work for tomatoes project so everything can get processed as it comes in at the same time. In my garden, the large tomatoes are beginning to ripen. We’ve been eating fresh tomatoes for about three weeks.
In the kitchen the storage space is filling up with onions, potatoes and apples, and the soup stock is getting used, making room for the approaching tomato harvest in a week or so. There is a lot to do before Labor Day.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Harvest season is accelerating, and there is more food available than we know what to do with. Through a complex system of work for food, gardening, barter and foraging, purchases at the grocery stores have averaged a ticket total of well under $20 consisting mainly of dairy, canned goods and sundries. It is down from an average closer to $100.
Last night we made a meal of a big salad that included lettuce, green peppers, kohlrabi, tomatoes and broccoli from our garden. The eggs came from bartering, the carrots from California, canned kidney beans from the grocery store, and everything else was part of my work for food deal at the CSA. That is, except for the dressing— balsamic vinegar of Modena (the less expensive stuff), first cold pressed extra virgin olive oil and salt and pepper. It is pretty exciting to have a salad with home grown lettuce in August, which is a result of my first attempt at sequential planting.
At the CSA, I picked half a bushel of ripe apples yesterday. On the kitchen counter a large bowl of them waits to be peeled and cut into slices for apple crisp. The apple harvest is going to be incredibly abundant this year, and will involve a lot of processing work. I am already thinking about grading the harvest into apples for hand eating, apple sauce and apple butter, juicers and livestock feed.
Likewise, with my work for food project with a second CSA, there will be an abundance of tomatoes for canning. We’ve been eating fresh tomatoes for a few weeks, and there is an abundance on the vines. We’ll be in tomato city soon.
The point in writing about this is to organize my thoughts and priorities. Without organization, the summer will be a hodgepodge of inefficiency. Too, if there is a chance to be a food broker, and leverage some of the abundance for sales, now is the time, despite being very busy. Even if a lot of other producers are thinking the same thing.
There is something about the transition of summer from celebration of Independence Day until Labor Day that is at the center of life. With the milder weather this year, cooler and wetter, we’ve had close to ideal growing conditions for home gardening. Every bit of food we can or freeze, is money in the bank. Now is the time to get this work done.
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