The garden season officially ended today with gleaning that filled eight crates with tomatoes, apples, celery, Swiss chard, kale and hot and bell peppers.
I delivered a second 200-pound load of apples to the CSA for shareholders and the food pantry. While there, I picked up some potatoes, garlic, lettuce, a large squash, sweet potatoes and some onions.
With a hard frost expected early Saturday morning, I made a harvest soup with vegetables. Five quarts of it are processing in a water bath as I type.
Times like this, a list of ingredients suffices. Not as a recipe, but as a record of what went into the soup.
Fresh and canned tomato juice
Onions
Carrot
Celery
Potatoes
Kale
Swiss chard
Large winter squash cut into cubes
Bay leaves
Sea Salt
Orange lentils
Dried red beans
Pearl barley
Prepared organic vegetable broth
The draft toward winter is inescapable. Snow will soon be flying and subzero temperatures not far behind — and the comforting warmth of harvest soup.
The garden and trees turn to fall colors all at once — right now, as I write.
First frost can’t be far away, maybe next week. Leaves and grasses turn without freezing temperatures. The landscape assumes a warm brilliance.
Apple Harvest
I picked more than 200 pounds of apples Wednesday and donated them to Local Harvest CSA. Enough for shareholders to bake a pie or crisp, or even eat! The apple variety is Red Delicious.
The trees have never been sprayed, and grow as near organic as possible. Fruit sometimes develop black spotting which can be washed off easily. They are delicious in more ways than one.
I walked the garden, filling a bucket with bell peppers, Swiss chard, scarlet kale, celery, a few tomatoes, basil and oregano — what was available. Most of it became soup for dinner.
Beginning with a cup of tomato juice in the Dutch oven. I steamed a diced large onion, sliced chard stems, fine ribbons of kale and chard leaves, celery, turnips and carrots. Except the onion, all were grown in our garden. Once the vegetables softened I added savory, bay leaves, sea salt, dried orange lentils, barley and a can of prepared organic kidney beans. Tomato juice to cover. The pot boiled and I turned it down to simmer. While soup was on, I cooked a cup of organic rice. Plating was a scoop of rice in the middle of the bowl with soup ladled around it.
The next day I water bath processed two quarts of soup, along with three pints of apple butter and a quart of apple sauce. Because of the backlog of apple sauce and apple butter in the pantry, I’m making a limited amount, just to have this year’s vintage when previous jars are used up. There’s more than enough soup for winter into spring.
The tine of my apple peeler cracked, rendering it useless. I drove to the orchard to buy a new one, but in conversation with the chief apple officer, it turns out they had plenty of spare parts. He gave me a used replacement part which fit perfectly and put me back in business.
Cider, New and Apple Vinegar
We got to talking about apple cider vinegar.
This conversation began in 2012 with another friend, who also works at the orchard. He gave me some mother of vinegar which originated with his family in the 19th century. It’s still alive. The orchard used it to start a line of bottled apple cider vinegar to sell in the sales barn.
Today’s discussion was about whether or not to use brewer’s yeast. Jack, the source of the mother, has a large plastic container to which he occasionally adds new juice, but never any yeast. We decided that the yeast must have come from other sources, and therefore no new need be added. Since it works, and in a home kitchen we expect there to be variation in the level of acetic acid, I decided to forego using yeast for the time being.
Yeast is basically everywhere. As anyone who made sough dough from scratch knows, it needn’t necessarily be purchased from a store. Jack’s mother likely has yeast in it, although I rarely see bubbles forming after adding new apple juice. It makes vinegar and that’s the hope.
Fall’s progress is one of the best times of the year. Squirrels scour oak trees for every last acorn. Birds roost on tomato cages where vines still produce.
It takes a walk in the garden to remind us of Earth’s potential, providing soup for dinner and apples for the sweet and sour of life.
I slept for twelve hours last night fighting a cold I hope doesn’t turn into something else.
The big comforter kept me warm, and except for doing two loads of laundry around 1 a.m., I slept in four two to three hour parcels.
I feel achy, this morning, but the coughing reduced significantly. I’m easing into a day of writing, yard work and cookery. There is no other choice than to get to work.
The Social Security Administration sent us an annual statement last month. At the current benefits level, we should be fine if we can make it to full retirement age of 68. The current authorization is expected to fund it until 2041, in which year I will turn 90. After that, who knows if the Congress will address the program in a positive way. There’s a lot of living to do before then.
An acquaintance from working in the warehouse stopped at the orchard yesterday. He left as well, taking a part time job at a different warehouse store for $16 per hour. He said others have left. I’ll check the job out, and if accepted, and it fits my writing schedule, I may take it. All of those are unknowns — part of this week’s discovery. It was good to see him again.
Today seems like it will be alright. Not perfect — what day ever is — but serviceable. Perhaps a portal to potential unrealized in a turbulent world.
I connected with Local Harvest CSA last week. The farm looked great.
Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey stopped there with my state representative, Bobby Kaufmann. I spent a couple of hours chatting and collecting information for an article that appeared Saturday in the Iowa City Press Citizen.
The next day Susan provided three crates of bell pepper seconds to eat and preserve. The freezer and vegetable drawer are now full. The good news is there weren’t many clinkers among them.
Our garden kept me busy this summer, producing more than enough for our kitchen and some to give some away. Tomatoes, kale and hot peppers are in abundance. The rest of the Red Delicious apples will soon be harvested. I spent most of Monday in the kitchen preserving food.
The kitchen day began with picking a bucket of tomatoes and jalapeno peppers in the garden.
Cutting the bad spots from the tomatoes, I cooked them and made sauce using an old timey tomato juicer with a wooden cone. The byproduct was 1-1/2 quarts of juice which is chilling in the ice box, ready for soup.
Coring and cutting bell peppers into slabs for the freezer is straightforward. I freeze them on a cookie sheet, then bag them for storage. That way they don’t freeze together. Two bags left from last year were in good shape so I added six more — a full year’s supply.
A bag of roasted red peppers and one of jalapenos was left in the freezer from last year. After thawing, I cut the jalapenos in half and put both into the Dutch oven. Adding bits and pieces of pepper leftover from the freezing operation, once tender, the lot went into the food processor until the mixture reached the consistency of relish. I put the result into half-pint jars and processed in a water bath.
I make some applesauce each year even though there is plenty in the pantry. The labor produced two quarts which wait in the ice box until more jars are ready to process in the water bath.
The remainder of the first crate of Red Delicious apples was juiced. I spent half an hour managing vinegar, bottling what was finished from the two-quart jar started in the spring and adding new juice to the mother. There are three finished quarts in the pantry. I may never buy apple cider vinegar again.
When the sun set, the implements of preservation were scattered on the counter — clean and drying. Yesterday I used my hand tomato juicer, a sieve, an apple peeler, an electric juicer, the food processor, a turkey baster, the granite ware water-bath canner, and the usual lot of bowls, jars, lids and rings. Knowing what to do makes it easier with each passing year.
There is a sense that these days of harvest cookery can’t go on forever. Suffice it I’ll keep living them for as long as possible, trying to learn from every season.
Leaves are beginning to fall from the Green Ash trees. Those on the two early apple trees have been down more than a week. The garden is producing and likely will until the hard frost comes in mid-October.
This time, more than any in the year, is for work at home.
Today’s to-do list includes harvesting tomatoes and peppers, canning, and cooking gumbo. I prepared a lunch of sliced tomato, salt, pepper and feta cheese using blemished fruit. It’s a simple and satisfying repast.
For so many years, work was elsewhere. While downsizing I found a three-ring binder with papers from expense reports dated 1992. I was managing trucking terminals in Schererville and Richmond, Indiana, and starting recruiting operations in West Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Missouri. I would wake up on an airplane unsure of where I was, or where I was going. It was a busy time and there was little left for family. They were days of intangible hope for a future that included success. I don’t know what that means any more.
President Obama stopped at the Iowa State Library in Des Moines yesterday. The stop wasn’t on his formal agenda, but while there he submitted to an interview by Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer prize-winning author who lives in Johnson County. Obama reads Robinson and listed Gilead as one of his favorite books. It is pretty neat that one of our own has this kind of relationship with the president. Obama quoted from the book in his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney in Charleston last July.
I’ve been trying to read Gilead without success. Starting it three times over the last three weeks, I don’t get it. Maybe eventually I will. It’s one of the must read books produced by an author affiliated with the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where many less acclaimed books than Robinson’s have been produced. Maybe the time is not right. Maybe the president’s visit will encourage me to give it another try.
It’s two months to the 21st Conference of the Parties, or COP 21, in a suburb of Paris. Iowa environmental groups are wrangling for a unifying Iowa event just prior to the first day of the conference, Nov. 30. It seems a bit late to be planning as leaves fall, the harvest comes in, and we turn our attention to the work necessary to sustain ourselves. It’s important the parties reach an enforceable agreement. It won’t be the end of the world if they don’t. Or maybe it will.
The greatest evil for a sixty something is theft of time. There is only so much of it — all here and now. There is also a sense we must create value with this limited resource.
How shall time be spent downsizing?
There are boxes to open — lots of them — each containing artifacts of this life, and potential villainy.
“When Prometheus stole fire from heaven, Zeus took vengeance by presenting Pandora to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus,” according to Wikipedia. “Pandora opens a jar containing death and many other evils which were released into the world. She hastened to close the container, but the whole contents had escaped except for one thing that lay at the bottom – Elpis — or hope. That’s what I’m seeking as the downsizing of personal artifacts begins.
Sorting Station
There are two temptations leading to perdition.
The first is spending time with things that should be discarded. There was a reason to keep each one — such reasons eclipsed by the urgency of now.
The other is to discard something of value, an artifact worth keeping a while longer, with monetary value, or to pass along.
Some small percentage of the artifacts will go to our daughter, but we don’t want to load up her space with our junk. Too, some of the pieces will inspire new writing for this blog or other publication. There are books to read, artwork to contemplate, and relics of past lives wanting to be relived. I’d better make quick work of it or I’ll never finish.
It’s already going poorly as I was up in the middle of the night reading a history of World War I. I should know all of that by now.
We live in the only home we planned and built. When I arrived in 1993, ahead of the rest of the family in Indiana, the lot was a vacant remainder of the Kasparek farm with two volunteer trees and tall grass.
A deal on another lot had fallen through, and there was an urgency to find a place to settle. This lot, with its proximity to Lake Macbride was to be it.
I remember sitting on the high wall after the contractor dug the lower level from the hillside, before the footings were in. A cool breeze blew in from the lake — the kind that still comes up from time to time.
Like our home, the lives we built here are a construct — decisions made, things accumulated and behaviors played out. As we live each day we make it anew from materials with which we’ve grown familiar. Over the next month, the construct will be under review, with new energy once things are shored up against what is expected to be a tumultuous future.
Some parts of life here were well-decided. The large 0.62 acre lot allowed our garden to grow and flourish, producing more food than we can eat and preserve given a busy life.
Others just happened.
So this week’s pledge is to get started on more conscious creative endeavor in this place we built 22 years ago.
The Golden Delicious apple tree had been having trouble for a long time. Last night it took a hit as the combination of a fruit-laden branch attached to a disease weakened trunk broke off.
It was one of the last crop bearing limbs, so this winter the tree will have to come down.
It’s not a crisis. More a sign of what’s to come.
I planted six apple trees, including this one, after my mother-in-law’s funeral. The rest of the family drove to her home near Ames where I would join them once the bare root stock from Stark Brothers was in the ground. That was more than 20 years ago.
Since then, two more trees have been lost—this one makes three. The remaining trees produce enough fruit for our household which is loaded with cider vinegar, applesauce, apple butter and dried apples. We pick the best and leave or give away the rest. We’ll be fine.
Fallen Branch
After taking the photos, an hour in the kitchen produced juice for cider vinegar. I filled the two-quart jar that holds the mother for another season of fermentation.
We recently turned up a few old items of food. We have some vintage 2008 Duncan Hines cake mix, which I decided would be a reasonable vehicle to eat more apple butter. I made the lemon flavored one first. Squares of cake topped with vintage apple butter makes a delicious dessert. When I say “vintage apple butter” I mean the jars are labeled so the variety and circumstances from which the apples originated is known.
This morning I made a batch of tapioca. It’s not like pudding, but it is close enough that I plan to make more at least until the three boxes are used up. Not sure what prompted that purchase circa 2007, but the result, prepared according to instructions on the box was decent. If I can figure out the layers, it would be great to make a parfait. Perhaps to be served like ice cream.
The garden yielded a dozen cucumbers, the same number of Brandywine tomatoes, celery, green peppers and a few cherry and grape tomatoes. There is plenty of kale, but I’m letting the plants rest for a while before resuming regular harvest. No noticeable bugs have invaded… yet.
This report and its observations aside, it is a peculiar time.
The fallen apple tree branch is a reminder of the life’s brief span. Accepting the tree’s demise has long been avoided. Until this morning.
I accept it. Despite the downward curve of the arc, there is time to plant another tree. If not for me, then for whoever inhabits this plot of ground after we are gone. Looking forward to putting new stock in the ground.
Ingredients for this kale salad were grown within 100 feet of our kitchen. It is as local as food gets.
We enjoy garden produce in high summer — when nature’s bounty yields so much food we either preserve or give it away. Any more our household gives away more than it preserves because the pantry is well stocked with previous years’ harvests.
Friends and family talk about the “local food movement.” In Iowa it is being assimilated into lifestyles that gladly incorporate ingredients from all over the globe. This assimilation has taken the local out of local food.
From an intellectual standpoint, it wouldn’t be hard to replace food grown in China, Mexico, California and Florida with crops grown here in Iowa. The number of acres required is surprisingly small. For example, local farmer Paul Rasch once estimated it would take about 110 acres to keep a county of 160,000 people in apples all year. The political will to encourage home-grown solutions in the food supply chain doesn’t currently exist. Until it does, rational, local solutions to food supply remain in the ether of unrealized ideas.
A vendor at the Iowa City Farmers Market was recently suspended for violating a rule that produce sold there must be grown by the vendor. Just walk the market and ask booth workers from where they hail. Often he/she is an employee or contractor working for a farm seeking coverage around many Eastern Iowa farmers markets. Too often they are anything but local growers. What’s been lost in this commercialization of local food is the face of the farmer.
Knowing where one’s food comes from is a basic tenant of the local foods movement. I enjoy working with local growers on a small acreage to produce food for families. At the same time, I seldom purchase a box of cereal from the supermarket even though I’ve seen the grain trucks queue up to unload at the cereal mills in Cedar Rapids.
For example, my garden doesn’t produce enough garlic for the year. I’d rather buy a supplemental bag of peeled garlic cloves produced at Christopher Ranch in Gilroy, Calif. than cloves lacking discernible origin at a farmers market. I know how Christopher Ranch produces their garlic. Absent the face of the farmer, there is value in understanding food origins, and that means some percentage of a household’s food supply will not be local.
There is a lot of marketing hype around “organic,” “GMO-free,” and “gluten free” foods, and this has to be impacting the customer base of local food producers. If consumers feel they can get a reasonably priced, “healthy option” at the supermarket, why make an extra trip to the farmers market, except for the occasional special experience? Why wouldn’t one pick up a bag of Earthbound Farms organic carrots when local growers can never produce enough to meet demand? At the same time, marketing hype is just what the name suggests.
Food security and sustainability are complicated. Before the local foods movement came into its own, it already is being assimilated faster than one can say snap peas. From a consumer standpoint the local came out of local foods some time ago, and it may not be back.
In August 1993, as we trucked our belongings inside, I set up a wooden desk bought for a buck after returning to Iowa from Germany. It’s in about the same place today, with an accumulation of junk piled on it.
It is time to clear the old desk and get to work making something from the artifacts of a life.
I have been a reluctant downsizer, but it’s time. The process will involve writing — autobiographical writing. It will also involve shedding the detritus of hopeful projects that lost their luster.
Few people care about a single, ordinary life unless some broader lesson can be learned from it. Even I don’t care about much of what happened in my life. The main focus is always on what’s here and now, and to some extent, what’s next.
A few projects seem particularly important.
In 2013 I wrote “Autobiography in 1,000 Words.” I’ll expand that post to 10,000 or maybe 25,000 words. Brief enough to read in a single sitting, but more details.
Prioritizing my reading list will be part of the process. Last year I read a short list of books. If that is the future, choosing carefully from many options ranks high on the to-do list.
Since re-purposing in July 2009, my writing has been short form. Letters to the editor gave way to blog posts, and freelance work for the Iowa City Press Citizen provides an outlet. My topics have been catholic and need focus. I expect to continue freelancing as I have been, but funnel down blog writing as I go through the accumulation of artifacts. At my age some things are more important than others and there is not time for them all.
Since the digital photography era began—roughly in 2007 for me—thousands of images have been stored on computers and external drives in our house. I worry about the future of such images, so some photo printing is in the works.
The project end-game is a productive studio space. A place to go for creative endeavor that would include music, writing, reading and other outputs. If the space produces an income, that would be great, but I don’t have high hopes for that.
It’s time to be hopeful again, beginning not far from where I’m writing this post. I cleared a space on the oak desk last night, so the work has begun.
Journey Home 
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