The U.S.D.A. in its infinite wisdom pays farmers to NOT produce food.  To keep the prices high, the consolidation of growers of (let’s give a relevant example) sour cherries all stick their fingers to the wind and decide how MUCH of their harvest to pick on a given year.  This year, it’s 60%, which means that 40% of your crop is not to be sold and must rot on the tree.

Rot on the tree!

Well, we fruit renegades did a bit of patriotic tea-dumping and picked 150 pounds of cherries on the Fourth of July for our school.  We in no way even dented that 40% of this particular farm’s trees. Having the full support of the farmers, we pickers had to be surreptitious about it, parking our cars way out of view and picking in the dead middle of the orchard early in the morning.  At one point a plane flew over and I had a true Goodfellas moment, getting somewhat paranoid.

About a third of our harvest

So for the price of pitting them at another farm, we have a nice huge stock of cherries to make into snacks for the school.

KathunkKathunkKathunk:  This 1937 pitter can process a ton of cherries in an hour

Yay!  Another opportunity to show off my latent O.C.D.!

Drying fruit is a fairly straightforward affair.  Preserving vegetables, both as frozen and as dried, require a few more steps for you but fruit, thankfully, is easy-peasy.  Most of us have an oven, therefore, most of us can dry some fruit, especially if you’d like to try fruit leather.  In point of fact, fruit leather is the only thing I had heretofore tried to preserve, as I didn’t have a dehydrator of my own, either plug-in or solar.  The picture above is one of the school’s 3 dehydrators, liberated by yours truly for the upcoming blueberry onslaught.  Today, though, it’s strawberries.

Evapotranspiration is a mighty big word but it includes a concept (transpiration) you are probably already familiar with, even if you don’t think you are, and evaporation, which you already know.  All produce, all plants, transpire (wick water) as part of “what they do,” and the extreme form of this otherwise natural occurrence is dried produce, dried leaves.  There’s a certain formula of heat plus wind plus relative humidity and soil moisture that farmers look to to see how their crops are growing. On a global scale, evapotranspiration is how water is exchanged in the world (rain to trees/plants and back again), but in your kitchen or in your back yard, you can use it to help preserve your fruit harvest.

I am all in favor as you know of things you DON’T plug in to an outlet, and there are plenty of sites for solar food dehydrators out there.  Here’s one dear to my heart as it’s similar to the chicken tractor, plus it geeks out on the whole process of how it best happens (I do loves me some engineering).  Try this at home!!  Me, I am time-crunched this summer so the plug-in is the way I will go, for now.  These strawberries dried in six hours, and will keep for six months.

Nothing like a little O.C.D. with your project to get you wound up!

SO:  it’s fruit season in this hemisphere:  gotta make hay while that sun shines!  The non-fresh-fruit season is entirely too long in my humble opinion.  Freezing is the best way to preserve any fruit’s nutrients if you can’t eat it fresh. But like anything, freezing has an expiration date:  it is best to eat all frozen fruit within six months of freezing it.

We *love* fruit smoothies around here.  In point of fact, smoothies are the primary way we eat our fruit in the off-season.  I make our own kefir and yogurt, and it’s very easy to just run downstairs with the blender and grab a handful of frozen berries to whiz up for a treat.

Strawberries, cranberries and blueberries freeze wonderfully “dry,” that is, by themselves.  Cherries do too but one should pit them beforehand as trying to do it afterward leads to a wad of cherry mush in your hand.  The best way to handle these berries  is to get fruit at its absolute height of freshness, wash, stem and sort them and place them on cookie sheets.   As you can see one can go a little nutty with the sorting part.  Stick them in the freezer until hard then bag them up, squeezing as much air out of the bags as possible.  You’re now able to open the bags at will this winter and grab what you need, leaving the rest behind.

I also slice fruits like peaches and nectarines and strawberries and coat them with a bit of honey before bagging them up.  You could also cover sliced fruit with a bit of sugar or superfine sugar.  Coating them with a sweetener tends to help them retain their color and their flavor.  Making a syrup of one part honey to four parts hot water also works well:  the fruit is stored “wet” this way and keeps most of its flavor and nutrients intact.  And indeed one can freeze mashed or pulped fruit “wet” too, without sugar.

You know, most thawed fruit is but a pale simulacrum of its fresh self, so for the most part all my frozen fruit ends up in smoothies or cooked items.  I also treat freezing as a form of suspended animation if I have a huge harvest (like, the 30 pounds of cherries from last Saturday) that I can’t get to immediately:  pulling out the bag to make jam or baked goods is a true time-saver.  And I am always looking for more time….

On track to beat the 3.25 pound monster I grew two years ago?  Perhaps!

I am going to be completely boring and unimaginative and give you guys a reread of one of my favorite posts.

I’m a bit tired today:  we put away 26 quarts of strawberry, strawberry/rhubarb, and blueberry jam last night for the school’s snack pantry.  So much more to do!  But exciting nonetheless.

Today’s berry, bubbling in the saucepan:  gooseberries

Gooseberries.  Finally, we have enough to “do” something with them, after three years of off/on harvests, so I grabbed a bowl yesterday and headed outside.  “Do you want to pick the gooseberries with me?” I asked my daughter.  “Nah, too prickly.  Can I pick the strawberries instead?”  Smart child.

I get all misty when I think about gooseberries.  A green variety adorned our wedding cake, they and some golden raspberries and some very red currants.  The cake probably had no flour in it but was made instead with almond flour, honey, and lots of egg whites.  It was a perfect summer cake, perfect for me that is, an avowed cake-hater, especially of the wedding variety.

But today I made four pints of jam.  Because I am usually terribly time-crunched and have no patience to tip and tail these things, what I do with little fruits like these is cook them down and run them through the fine sieve on my food mill.  The skins and those nasty pointy stems are left behind, and I measure out the resulting juice and pulp and figure out how much sugar and pectin is required to make a small batch of jam.  I cook down other seedy fruits the same way:  damson plums, cherries and those aronia berries have seeds too small to reach but (in some instances) too vulnerable to the food mill’s crushing turns so they instead go into a chinois that has a pestle to wring the juice from the pulp.  It sounds like I might have a crowded kitchen and it is true, I do, but the chinois does come in handy.

I just adore fruit, and fruit jam is one way to preserve all this bounty.  I will mention a few other ways in some following posts.

Another day, another berry to blog about

I picked up some aronia berries at a friend’s house on Friday.  This species of native berry is very high in antioxidants, especially the black and purple varieties; it has been labeled a “superfood” for that reason.  The variety we picked, Aronia albutifolia, isn’t so very high in this magical property.  No matter.  The red, sweet, jujube-shaped fruits were plentiful, and I got a gallon with which to experiment.

Traditionally one of the fruit sources found in pemmican, these bushes or shrubby trees normally yield clusters of pea-sized fruit in the fall.  Well, MY calendar told me it was late June, so I kind of scratched my head about this a bit:  can these really be red aronia berries (also called chokeberries)?  It would appear that they are.  Some time ago, these eastern American trees got exported to Poland and Russia and it was there that they became cultivated enough to be used widely as a juice berry, and its progeny got tweaked enough to ripen in June.  Normal aronia berries, the shrub-borne black variety (A. melanocarpa) ripen much later and are entirely too tart to be eaten out of hand.

Personally, I am highly suspicious of anything that is labeled a superfood, a culinary “magic bullet” to cure all that ails a person.  I also think that many people who look to a food as medicine aren’t doing the hard work necessary to maintain basic good health.  Diet and exercise certainly go a long way to keep the doctor away. Eating a decent diet and getting up off the couch is just plain too hard for most Westerners: thus, let’s look for some tonic, hopefully found on my grocer’s shelf, that will offset all my couch-sitting, all those extra pounds around my middle.

I’m also suspicious of the purported health claims tagged on things like aronia berries.  If it were true that eating these things magically cured you from ever getting cancer, do you really think this would be the first time you have heard about them?

With my skeptical eye, then, I turned these into jelly early this morning (with some of our grape juice and fresh cherries to help flesh out the taste).  A little slice of medicine on my morning toast?  Doubtful, but tasty.

As I was making strawberry jam this morning, the estimation process I was going through reminded me that this was where I began, fourteen years ago.  I’ve made it fairly clear that I think the world would be a much happier place if nearly everyone had chickens and greenhouses in their back yards, and normally walked around with dirty knees, muddy boots and juice-stained hands.  Alas, not everyone shares my dream, but more than a few of you keep coming back here to read this blog, so…I’m going to keep blathering on about the things I hold dear, like making lots of strawberry jam.

I started small.  Granted, I started as a city girl:  each spring found me at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market trolling the aisles for the best price on the tiniest, tastiest strawberries for my year’s-worth of strawberry jam.  For myself, as a single person, four pints was sufficient to keep myself in jam.  Repeat the routine for raspberries, green beans, tomatoes and one trip per summer down to this neck of the woods for a bushel of peaches and I had (for me) a full larder, a full freezer.  My backyard garden helped with tomato and bean preservation, but my yard was far too shady and small to really have sufficiency in mind.

Fast-forward to five years ago:  we’re on a farm now, I am married and have a toddler.  The garden is in, the local fruit farms beckon with their wares, and I have started to go a little crazier in the stocking-the-larder department.  My initial aim was to have enough “usual” stuff to can and freeze, but I had no ambitions to be self-sufficient in certain things like onions, carrots, celery or even garlic.  I had dreams of a greenhouse, dreams of chickens, but this first spring I was happy just to have 1500 square feet of raised-bed gardens.  And this first spring, I put away two flats  of strawberries in jam.  Whew!  Thirty-two pints of jam!

Today I still harbor no ambition to be self-sufficient in fruit:  I can still forage or glean or even outright buy fruit at much less cost (labor) than it would take me to grow all of my own.   But vegetables?  Certainly, vegetables are do-able, and the amazing varieties of vegetables one can grow from seed should be reason enough to turn over some dirt to grow them.  Even onions and garlic became less daunting, and geez, I have even mastered leeks!  And I don’t think I will ever be satisfied with a store-bought carrot again.

Anyway, the point of all this is to just start small.  Go ahead and try to put away enough strawberry jam to last your household until next year.  Figure out how many row feet you will need to freeze enough dinner-side sized bags of green beans for a year.  Plant enough garlic to take you through from July to April, when the first heads of green garlic can greedily be pulled up and eaten.  It’s a fun game, and it will make you feel proud of yourself, seeing all those gleaming rows of jars, frozen bags, and braided ropes of garlic heads just waiting to be eaten.

The turkey family loves the new driveway ornament too

I would like to thank the tree gods for:

1. one-stop shopping for this year’s tomato supports for me
2. a neat and convenient place to practice one’s tree-climbing skills for my daughter
3. a ready source of firewood for my husband

but:  did that huge branch need to be so close to the house, AND did it have to happen when I was home alone in the kitchen a mere 15′ from where it fell?  Not that I am truly ungrateful, I’m just saying.

Daikon radish pickles: RECIPE NOW IN COMMENTS

Yes, it is that time of year again:  big pots of boiling water on the stove, zero counterspace available due to all the green and fruity produce coming in the door.

Interestingly, however, the preservation being done today (Saturday) is not being done for this family.  No:  the school garden is just as busy as our home gardens, and many of those lovely Asian vegetables planted in April are ripe and ready.  Likewise, it’s strawberry and rhubarb season around here, and we are on the cusp of the sweet cherry season.

The one thing I have discovered (and you will all probably laugh at this) is that WOW having lots of hands doing the work makes any task go so much more quickly.  I say this admitting that for today I am elbow-deep in making the second batch of kimchi and the first batch of radish pickles all by myself, but it is quite amazing how much fun, and how productive, those Thursday Weed and Feed evenings in the garden truly are.  So much gets done!  Makes me think I should have a team of my own here on the farm…

Other than working in the garden, another volunteer opportunity for the school community is what we’re calling “fruit tithing.”  One of the fun things to do with your kids in the summer is go to one of the myriad pick-your-own fruit places in the area: there are many, verging on hundreds, of these farms.  We are asking parents to set aside some portion of that fruit for the school.  We are having organized picking sessions with the school community too, but if folks want to go ahead and pick on their own, we’re giving them instructions on how to process and freeze these fruits to give back to the school.  It is all part of our Slow Snack initiative wherein we source local, organic, nonprocessed foods for the school-wide snack.

But what to do with all that fruit, of course, is yet another volunteer opportunity, and through the summer we are having canning parties at a local cafe/shop owned by a parent at our school.  So every two weeks, we will be jamming, jellying, pickling and sauce- and salsa-ing the contents of both our garden and these fruit-y gifts from the parents.

All of this is so exciting, I must say.  What started as a simple “let’s make the school snack a little bit more nutritious” a couple of years back has now blossomed into a greater notion that Food Does Matter, especially the food consumed by our youngsters.  Having them participate in the complete foodway that is seed-to-table eating is a knowledge base that we hope will serve them their entire life.  Will it discourage them from grabbing a Twinkie and picking up a spotty heirloom organic apple instead?  Well we shall just see.  We do know, though, that all habits (good AND bad) start early.

Part of last year’s squash haul

I guess I AM a bit obsessed:  on top of all the planting, weeding, and harvesting on the garden task list this week, harvesting the biennials’ seeds is also a top priority.  Spinach, beets, and three types of onions are ready to harvest, and then there are all those crazy lettuces that are likewise on the brink.  (And winter squash: I saved a few for seed of the ones that made it through the winter…it’s nearly past time to cut them open and haul out their seeds to dry.)

Seed-saving seems to have taken over as the subject of my blog posts, anyway…

Verily, I admit I save more than I use; it’s one of the reasons I have started seed-trading with local gardeners and even some online gardening friends.  The local angle is pretty great as seeds from the plants grown in this particular patch of earth will more than likely do well in other Michigan gardens.  But somehow the idea of seed-sowing over a wider patch of the world also appeals to me.  In point of fact, I believe I will start a limited seed trade with anyone who’s interested.  So, over the next…well, month or more, I hope to have a bit of a list on the sidebar of this blog for you to peruse.  All seeds will be open-pollinated, organically grown, and under two years old.

If you are interested, simply look at the list and email me and we’ll figure out a suitable arrangement for getting the seeds to you.   I might require some seeds from you in return, or maybe your first-born child.  You know.  Something equitable and fair.

Lettuces, gone to seed

Ostensibly, I understand how big things get in the garden.  Through years of trial and error, I *get it* that a blooming lettuce plant can reach 3′ tall and wide, and, should I wish to save seeds from this plant, I will need to allow that much space for the plant to do its thing.  Indeed, producing a plant for its seeds can be a lot more of a hassle than producing it for its food, mainly because of this land grab.  It becomes tough, say, to make the decision between saving the seed from one’s surprisingly frost-hardy oakleaf lettuce or yielding that same space to that tiny pepper plant growing in its shade in the new greenhouse.  Considering I didn’t expect that lettuce to survive our particularly freezing winter, that pepper must suffer!  (Is this a Sophie’s Choice kind of decision?  I am not sure.  There’s still plenty of time for peppers.)

Seed-saving can become an obsession in itself, of course.  Honestly, saving *all* the seeds from this one lettuce means I will be self-sufficient in oakleaf lettuce for 10 years and I still would never be able to use up all the seed!  YAY.  That makes me happy, frankly, in a hole-up-in-a-bunker kind of way, in a full-root-cellar kind of way.  And I like being happy,even if it means my pepper plant temporarily lacks proper real estate.

You know, I would say I trend more toward prude than its opposite, but, as a seed-saver and new poultry husbanding person, I have become more aware of sex in the flora and fauna around me.  There are two reasons for this, prudishness be damned:  one, I *need* to pay attention and two, birth/sex/death is really…not closeted in farm life.

So in the interest of the didyouknow, I will heretofore tell you that spinach is the only commonly cultivated annual vegetable that throws either male or female flowers.  I can just see your eyes glaze over as I reveal this tasty tidbit!  Wha? you say.  Well!  Most plants propagate by being a lot more AC/DC (that is, bisexual):  they circle back and forth between throwing male and female flowers, either to self-pollinate or to time the blossoming of the male flowers to correctly match up with the female flowers, with the pollen either being wind-blown or availing itself of a willing intermediary pollinator (birds, bees, etc.) between the male and female flowers.  Of course, it’s our human world that absolutely categorizes everything as “male” or “female,” and I think that’s where a lot of problems start, and not just for plants.

Male spinach with its tendrils, with female plants beyond

But back to spinach.  Either a seed produces a female plant, or it produces a male one.  If you let them go to seed, you hope for both to ensure yourself a nice set of happily fertilized ova.  And luckily nature does lend you a hand:  like most other species in the natural world, the chances of having either a male or female seed of two is roughly even.

Female spinach, with seeds

Hedgerows:  doesn’t that sound so very…English?  I confess to a certain admiration for the long gardening tradition of the British isles, and I readily admit having a huge crush on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.  But hedgerows.  I can’t claim to have hedgerows here in Michigan.  For one, our property lines only go back about 100 years (not nearly long enough for a proper hedge) and two, ours are poison ivy- and bramble-filled ditches, not something as tempting a foraging target as some misty Cotswold or Yorkshire hedgerow.

But it is the season for elderflowers, the pretty creamy-white blossoms of the black elderberry.  And–wonder of wonders–I have elderberry bushes in the hedges ditches around my property.  So!  Time to get out the scissors and the wading boots (all the better to fend off the poison ivy tendrils) and get snipping.

In honor of another Dorset bloke who’s a champion hedgerow forager, I made some of Hedgewizard’s elderflower champagne this week, as well as elderflower crepes.  It will be a while before the fizzy, nonalcoholic champagne can be sipped and enjoyed, but boy did those crepes get eaten quickly!  Our gooseberries are near ripening, too, so it’s time to try Hugh’s Elderflower/Gooseberry fool.

It is quite fun harvesting food from the farm I had no hand in growing, you know?  Just watch the poison ivy, which, alas, is not edible.

The girl models edible jewelry in the form of garlic scape bracelets.  That’s part of the first round of garlic drying on a rack behind her, a harvest of about 10 pounds of softnecks from my tiny first-year bulbil sets.  They didn’t get as large as I thought but this was still a successful experiment.

Many, many things bloom and ripen at the same time and it is quite a boon for both we food gardeners and the people our gardens feed.  Strawberries and rhubarb, tomatoes and basil, peas and spring onions are a few at the top of my head/tip of my tongue. And there are items we seasonal eaters absolutely look forward to all year:  for me, it’s that one big pot of asparagus risotto, that first gluttonous binge of shell peas, that first ripe tomato, warm in your hand.

Somehow, however, my convergence gets off track, and it’s (mostly) my own damned fault.  I mentioned that my potatoes went in late this year.  I also mentioned that garlic is ONLY getting the greenhouse treatment from now on because the heads so produced are exceedlingly large and (thanks to the time warp that’s greenhouse living) early.  This means, therefore, that my garlic scapes are going to miss the first grabbled potatoes by as much as a month.  SIGH.  This, this is a shame.  Tiny potatoes and minced garlic scapes!  Divine!

Scapes are little twisty miracles all on their own, of course.  The flower stem of rocambole or hardneck garlic, there is raging debate if they should be left on or chopped off to ensure bigger heads below ground.  Frankly, I have never noticed a difference in the head size of scapes that escaped.  But I do what I can to harvest them all.  They can freeze successfully, and even have a fairly long life in the refrigerator if you keep them in a damp towel.  I won’t go that far.  All my potatoes are gone (and this is no hardship; they’re staples 10 months of the year) so I actually (gasp!) purchased three local Russets from the farm stand down the road.

I couldn’t let those scapes go without a little spud love….

Okay I swear this will be the last poultry post for a while on this (ahem) gardening blog, but it was a big weekend around here last weekend.

Six appears to be the magic number.

She’s not exactly doing the Hovercraft thing, but her tail is quite fluffed out.  She was giving me the warning crackle the whole time I visited.

Here’s Chicken Patty with her six foster chicks.  She’s doing very well with them, though admittedly she was getting kind of bored in the dog kennel I had set up for her in my gardening shed.  So, I moved her and the babies out to the Chicken Tractor, which is (conveniently) set over the goose/turkey nesting box.  Considering the geese and turkeys have other sleeping arrangements, this works quite well for Patty and her little brood.  The babies are five slow-growing Cornish like their adopted mama and one little red broiler.

And Yoli, our goose, hatched six goslings this weekend, of the 9 eggs she was sitting.  Isn’t she just the prettiest bird?  Look at that refined, beautiful head of hers.

Here’s the back end.  Can you count three little legs?  Must be warm in there…