Tag: local food

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Kitchen Garden

Apple Cider Vinegar Day

Ten half-gallon jars of apple cider vinegar fermenting.

There was an opportunity to fill the apple cider vinegar containers so I took it. With an abundant apple harvest there are plenty to juice and turn into vinegar. I’ve written about vinegar-making multiple times in the last ten years. All I have to add is this is one of the best apple seasons since I planted the first trees in 1994.

The apple juice produced by these Red Delicious apples is quite good, even better once the impurities are filtered out. I have a couple of five gallon buckets of juice apples ready to convert and store in large glass jars. It tastes better than anything I buy at the store. Key to good taste is drinking it fresh rather than canning it.

Vinegar-making is the end of the garden harvest season. I’ll glean the garden a couple more times and pick more apples should I need them. The main work is done.

Last year I planted garlic on Oct. 15 and expect about the same this year. A neighbor with a pickup truck already took me to a local farm where I bought four straw bales for mulching. They are resting in the garage and ready to go once the cloves are in the ground.

This is a punk autumn because everyone but me is away and sick. On Monday I went to a pharmacy that had the just-released COVID vaccine and got inoculation number seven. I am determined to avoid getting COVID. This means avoiding most human contact of a duration over ten minutes. With our child living on their own and my spouse at her sister’s home for an extended stay, the chance of contracting the virus at home from one of them is close to nil. I restrict movement as best I can and wear a KN-95 mask when with groups of people. For good measure, I also got the seasonal influenza vaccination last week.

With vinegar fermenting on the shelf, I am at the point of apple season where I need a big project to use the harvest before it goes bad. In the meanwhile, if I want a snack, it will contain apples. Breakfast? Apples. Lunch? Apples. Supper? Baked apple dessert. We look forward to this time of year so I plan to enjoy it.

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Kitchen Garden

Home Breakfast

Breakfast made for guests and for myself once in a while.

If a person overnights at our home they are likely to be offered a breakfast of hash browned potatoes, scrambled eggs, and fruit in season. Add some coffee or homemade juice and it makes a fine breakfast. The meal in the photo includes tomato, a pear, and potatoes, all grown in our garden.

We haven’t had any overnight guests in a while, so I made the classic breakfast for myself. It seldom fails to satisfy and is a great beginning to a day.

Some mornings I have just toasted bread with apple butter or fruit preserves. Others, I re-heat leftover soup or make tacos. When bananas are ripening, I make a smoothie with aronia berries, kale, plant milk, protein powder and Greek yogurt. I don’t give much thought to breakfast until I’m preparing it. Patterns are well established and I know what to do.

Today I worked on a care package for our child. Mainly, we went back and forth via email with ideas and requests. While that was happening, I made half a dozen jars of applesauce to include.

Applesauce made Friday, Sept. 22, 2023.

It rained off and on all day today. I managed to get in my half-hour walk along the lake shore. None of the outdoors work got done. There was plenty of indoors work to replace it.

Saturday is the first day of autumn. I’d ask where did summer go? That would be a bit ridiculous because I know where it went. It went into the garden, which produced food for the kitchen. I ate well this summer, including our home breakfasts.

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Kitchen Garden

Late Summer Kale

Kale leaves from a single plant harvested Sept. 17, 2023.

Late season kale takes on a special quality when overnight temperatures get cooler or freeze. Toward autumn, I begin harvesting the whole plant and use the leaves until they are gone. Then I harvest another plant. The same goes for collards. I cut the stalk at ground level and take the plant to the composter where I sort through the leaves to pick the best for the kitchen. It’s another sign the season is turning.

Kale and collards are cold-hearty and can continue producing as late as November. The way things are going with weather, it could be until December this year. Occasionally, kale over winters.

Before joining Local Harvest CSA when we moved back to Iowa, I hardly heard about kale. I had never eaten it. When I worked on the farm beginning in 2013 I learned how to grow it. This year the bugs stayed away better than most years. Early season spraying with an insecticide containing Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki (Btk), a naturally-occurring bacterium found in soil, suppressed green caterpillars which love kale. 2023 was a great kale year.

I freeze my allocation of kale early in the season. Once the freezer space is full, we eat it fresh from the garden or donate it to the food pantry. The plants produce so many leaves we always have plenty. Most people don’t know about kale and some don’t care for it. Our typical uses are as an ingredient in taco filling, smoothies, and in soups. We consume a lot of those menu items here in Big Grove. There are few better sources of leafy green vegetables than a kale plant. We are supposed to eat more of that than we do.

The cruciferous vegetable patch was a success this year with plenty of cauliflower and broccoli for freezing, a half dozen red and green cabbages stored in the refrigerator, and kale and collards as much as we want. It works better to keep all of those varieties together in the same plot. It helps focus the attention they need for successful growing.

Summer’s end is rapidly approaching. This morning I looked out the dining room window without my glasses and could see fuzzy stars in the clear, dark sky. There was an impulse to get my glasses from the bedroom, yet I resisted and stood there trying to take it all in before summer slips away. The progress of the kale patch is one more marker of summer’s end.

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Kitchen Garden Writing

Apple Rush

Apple time 2023. Red Delicious.

My focus in the garden turned to apples. By weight, it is the biggest crop I grow. Doing something useful with them drives me to spend much kitchen time processing them. Zestar! and Earliblaze are finished with Red Delicious remaining to close out the garden season.

Of the four varieties I grow, Red Delicious hang the longest on the tree. When they produce, there are many, many of of them. Our needs for juice, applesauce, apple butter, dried apples, and fresh eating are modest compared to the quantity on the tree. I’m already looking for placement of most of them in a Community Supported Agriculture project.

Tomatoes are finishing and it has been a good season. Because of spring trouble getting seedlings to take, there weren’t as many, or as many different varieties, as I had hoped. The difference this year compared to last is that we used most garden tomatoes in our kitchen instead of giving them away. Tomatoes are a brief delight of summer. Once ours are gone, I expect to buy very few tomatoes at the grocer.

I took down the portable greenhouse and noticed a problem with the zipper at the access point. I don’t know if it will be usable next year but I folded it up and put away the frame. Replacing it will be a spring decision, although I likely will. The portable greenhouses are good for a couple of seasons.

I need to figure out fall garden plot preparation. Where will the burn pile be? Where will the garlic go next month? Where will tomatoes go next year?

The burn pile is important because I move it around to deposit minerals throughout the garden. Because we are in a drought I won’t actually burn anything until rain comes. There needs to be plenty of space to pile it high while we wait.

I plan to plant 100 garlic seeds and it will likely be in the plot where the garden composter currently lives. The pallets used to make the composter are getting old and deteriorated. I will likely move the composter to the west side of the garden. I hang my Practical Farmers of Iowa sign on it, so on that side, it may be more visible from the street.

Finally, there are tomatoes, likely the most important crop I grow. This year, deer were able to jump the fence and eat many small tomato plants. Next year I plan to return to a crowding method of tomato planting. By giving deer no place to land inside the fence, they can’t jump in, and the plants grow better. The issue is it crowds me as well. I liked having four-foot rows between the tomatoes this year. It made it easier for me to get among the plants to weed and harvest. It made it easier for the deer as well. I may have enough fencing to install eight-foot tall chicken wire around them next year. This may be the compromise I choose to keep four foot rows. Which plot will tomatoes go? I’m not sure yet, although I favor following the garlic.

As home life turns to apple processing, I enjoy the sense of closure it brings. In years when there are few apples, gardening doesn’t seem the same. In the coming days I’ll embrace the apple rush. Who knows how many more there will be?

Categories
Kitchen Garden

End of the Earliblaze Apples

Bowl of Earliblaze apples

I finished what I’m doing with Earliblaze apples this year. The trees produced so much fruit I could not keep up. There will be plenty for wildlife to eat well into winter.

Besides eating them fresh, I made apple cider vinegar and applesauce for storage. I have a backlog of apple butter and dried apples, so none of that this year.

There is a brief break in apple processing while I wait for Red Delicious to ripen, maybe a week or two. After they do ripen, it will be a mad rush to the end.

When I planted six trees at home I didn’t know much about growing apples. I knew I wanted apple trees, in part because of family stories of my Virginia ancestors. I picked varieties that would space out the harvest. That’s about it. There were four varieties planted in 1994 and two remain. My learning about growing apples came mostly from working for seven seasons as a mapper (person who directs guests) at Wilson’s Orchard beginning in 2013. It was an unexpected job, but one for which I am thankful.

Paul Rasch and Sara Goering bought Wilson’s Orchard in 2009. Chug Wilson had planted more than 100 varieties of apples before he sold to them. During my tenure I learned about many of them. I would come in well before my shift and wander through the part of the orchard where trees were planted to test how they did.

What I value most about working there is countless conversations I had with Paul about apple culture. If I had a question, he had an answer. I would bring in photos of my home orchard for his advice. We talked about everything apples. Learning with an experienced apple grower was a perquisite of the job. It was great!

Years like this one I’m on my own for apples. My trees produced so many I don’t need outside apples. What I’m saying is I’m now an irregular customer of Paul and Sara’s orchard. I buy a couple of half-gallons of sweet cider in season, and if they have Gold Rush apples, I’ll get some for storage. For now, I have all the Earliblaze apples we can eat.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

In The Summer Kitchen

Produce in our summer kitchen.

The orchard where I worked for eight seasons before the coronavirus pandemic has Red Haven peaches from the owner’s cousin in Michigan. They are among the best peaches I have yet eaten. I didn’t buy any this year because the pear tree we planted at our daughter’s high school graduation party is producing in abundance. Our pears are misshapen yet sit down and stand up sweet and delicious. I’ll save my peach buying for another season.

It is hard to keep up with the garden’s abundance. On the counter are tomatoes, pears, apples, squash, and eggplant waiting to be processed or cooked. In August, this could be a full time job. I truly want to can tomatoes for winter. Luckily, they have a reasonable shelf life and I can process them before spoilage. Half of the challenge in the kitchen is knowing what to process, how, and in what quantity.

Physical stamina is another thing. A person can stand at the counter slicing tomatoes for only so long without rest. I do it until my back gets sore and then stop and sit for a while. It extends the overall time to get things done. It also allows me to continue until the work is finished.

The way the harvest comes in makes for canning batches of two or three different items. I currently have apple sauce, tomato juice, diced tomatoes, and salsa verde ready to be processed in a single batch. We’ll see how the morning goes and whether there are enough tomatoes to make a complete batch. I know there are enough apples to make seven quarts of sauce for a single batch. Usage in cooking determines whether to put things in quart or pint jars. For example, tomato sauce is for pints, and whole tomatoes for quarts. Apple sauce is for quarts, apple butter for pints. Navigating through canning and food preservation is a learned skill.

Ten years ago, I preserved everything I could from the garden. That resulted in many extra jars of pickles, applesauce and apple butter. Unless there is a specific reason, I now limit my seasonal output to what we can use in a year or two. I do not see a future of canning pickles the way I did in 2016 when I generated 24 quart jars. Cucumbers are so abundant, I can make fresh refrigerator pickles that last for a year. The canned goods are tasty, but also too much when trying to process everything.

My cruciferous vegetable plot was an unmitigated success this year. I put up all my kale early in the spring and now pick fresh when I need it. Soon I’ll pick a couple crates for the food banks, but I don’t like to inundate them with kale. Same for chard and collards. We have frozen broccoli and cauliflower enough to last until spring. The broccoli plants are still producing small floret bunches.

When I’m busy in the kitchen, it is time for a batch of soup. The problem is the refrigerator and freezer are full, so there is no place to store a couple quarts of home made vegetable soup.

The rack of garlic is dry enough to process and clean. I’ll save the 25 biggest heads to break apart and plant as seeds in October and put the rest in a crate for storage on the lower level of the house. Because the garlic season lasts from October to July, I tend to forget about it. It is a mainstay in our kitchen where we use some almost every day.

There is no place I’d rather be than in our summer kitchen. When one grows a kitchen garden, meals are better and we engage in the process enough to forget our troubles. It’s where I’ll spend many of the coming days.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Peak Gardening Season

Not enough sugar for cider to make vinegar, so apple sauce.

I’m left alone to attend to the house while my spouse is helping her sister. She’s been gone three weeks, and a return date is uncertain. I made a care package of garden produce, a couple boxes of rags, and my labor for some heavy lifting last Wednesday. We had a good conversation about life after the work was done.

The main August activity centers on the garden. There is a lot of food to bring in and preserve for the future. It never seems a straight line on getting things done.

Apples are dropping at the rate of one every minute from the Earliblaze trees. I picked a bucket full, yet there is not enough sugar in them to make cider for vinegar. I guess I’ll sauce them. If it is a bit tart, we can add a sweetener when we open the jars and serve. This was not a good variety of tree to plant back in the 1990s and I have two of them. The Zestar! apples, from a tree planted a couple of years ago, made a great-tasting sauce. That jar is in the refrigerator for immediate eating.

The first round of hot peppers is in and needs processing. The goal is to make at least one quart jar of Guajillo chilies with garlic, maybe two. There are also Serrano peppers for eating fresh and another kind of refrigerated chili sauce. Jalapenos will be eaten fresh. Anticipating a fresh salsa, I bought a bag of organic corn chips at the wholesale club. Once we get past the hot times, there will be a surge of hot peppers.

There is a small patch of celery to bring in. These get sliced thinly and frozen in one cup batches for soup. The leaves are abundant. I put them in the food processor to chop them and then freeze with water in small batches in a muffin pan for soup flavoring. Nothing is so good as home grown celery.

Tomato canning is on deck for the weekend. There are a dozen quarts left from last year and it looks like I’ll need them to get through the year. I’ll have a separate post later about the tomato crop. The ones that are coming in from the vines have had excellent flavor.

It is more difficult to cook for one. I made a big cut vegetable salad and it lasted for days. A person can only eat so many vegetables. I’ve been donating to the food pantry, so that helps alleviate the backlog. Still, there is a lot to process this weekend before the vegetables deteriorate. Better get after it soon.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Sweet Corn

First sweet corn of the summer.

Sweet corn became available Saturday afternoon and we tried a dozen ears. About half of the ears were under-developed but the rest of it was as good as sweet corn gets. Since our standby outlet closed a couple years ago, only marginal corn has been available. It is unclear whether there will be enough good sweet corn available to put some up.

Our area, like most of the upper Midwest, is under drought conditions. This complicates farming with a residual effect on folks like us who rely on farmers for sweet corn. We aren’t going to go hungry.

I caught a deer in my tomato patch yesterday. When it saw me coming, it attempted to jump over the eight foot fence. It got caught and ended up bending the fence over to make its escape. The fencing system implemented this year is not working, although I am getting more exposure to deer behavior. Next year it will be better.

I delivered my spouse of 40+ years to her sister’s home on Sunday. They are preparing for a move after closing on a home at the end of the month. She will be gone for about two weeks, although these things are never certain. I reverted into some form of myself I don’t quite recognize. The main characteristics of this are changes in eating habits (spicier), and a weird feeling of loneliness when I realize no one else is home.

I’ve been preparing an editorial calendar for the 23 posts I will make on Blog for Iowa in August. I have outlines for half a dozen so far and feel there will be no shortage of topics. The trick is to make them relevant to August 2023. I’m not sure what exactly that means during the resurgence of Republican state governance. Well, I do, but I can’t post every day about what the Biden administration is doing.

It is hard to miss that Elon Musk directed Twitter to become X. It’s probably for the best as it drove me to become more of a lurker than a poster in social media. What am I worried about? Here’s a definition of media addiction:

Social media behavioral addiction is defined by being overly concerned about social media, driven by an uncontrollable urge to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas.

The Addiction Center website.

Musk X’d that out.

Soon I’ll harvest the rest of the red cabbage, celery and potatoes. Arrival of sweet corn is a sign we’ve turned to corner of the gardening season. As long as deer don’t eat the entire tomato crop there will be plenty to do in our kitchen garden. I’m ready for it.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Month Into Summer

Summer salad made mostly with ingredients from the garden.

Battle with squash bugs began this week. Egg laying is concentrated on the patty pan squash plants but they are throughout the squash plots. I am catching some of the egg clusters just as they are hatching. This year I am determined to get rid of them before I have to get rid of all the plants. Daily diligence in removing eggs and any squash bugs is the only way to do it without chemicals. Even that may not be successful. There were fewer eggs today than I found yesterday. I’m hopeful I can be master of my garden.

The main objective is to save the pumpkins and winter squash. A person can eat only so much zucchini and patty pan, so no loss there.

The onions are cured and ready for storage. I emptied the greenhouse Friday afternoon. Soon I will pack it away for the season. The main crops of peppers, eggplant and tomatoes are about to begin. There are many cabbage heads coming, kale, chard, and collards for leafy green vegetables. Potatoes will soon be ready to dig. There will be no shortage of fresh vegetables in our kitchen garden for a while.

There is more to life than gardening and eating the results. Not much more, though.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Donating the Garden

Eight crates of vegetables for the food bank.

I just returned from my Monday morning trip to donate to the food pantry at the Methodist Church in town. They are open Monday afternoons for clients and accept deliveries beginning at 9 a.m. I donated cucumbers, zucchini and patty pan squash today.

Donating food accomplishes a couple of things. Clients really need the food they get at the food bank. By donating there, I contribute directly to someone’s good. When I want to preserve something — kale, cucumbers, vegetable broth, cabbage — I don’t know the yield, or how much I will need. The food bank enables me to grow plenty of what I need of a specific crop and find a home for the rest. By growing different things — patty pan squash, for example — I provide produce that is a bit different from what other gardeners may be donating. That give clients more diversity in their diet. More than anything, My donations make me useful in society.

I grow a garden for the fresh food. Being able to donate excess makes it feel like nothing is going to waste. That’s a good feeling.