harvest season is upon us... time to preserve

A light picking of tomatoes tonight shall give the fruit flies a good time tonight... not really i put them in the fridge.  I wasn't up for stewing them down to add to my can collection tonight.

For canning i used this resource for reference.  The key thing i learned was to add lemon juice, a tablespoon per pint, as the acid is important for preservation.  That's why the first batch is in the fridge cause i did some "Man Canning"... Man Canning is like Man gardening... you just do it using your wits, passed down knowledge and a little bar stool wisdom.  Apparently botulism is a painful experience, but that's how you learn right.  I was never really a textbook guy rather more of a make it and then re make it kind of person.  For sure it is a long road learning life through a series of mistakes, but i have always been a fan of long roads... i like the scenery.  There is always the remote chance of stumbling on something unique, a weird kind of lottery prize.

I was actually on a beach the other day with a good man, it was a naked beach and we were a few of the only people there.  Now not a lot of men would sit naked beside each other on a beach but we did, as natural nudists would... we talked about many things, like making arrow heads out of glass melted in bonfires, and we got on to canning... and i heard the Parker theory on canning.  If the stuff in the can changes colour or shows activity over time, then this is a bad thing.  Indeed you can rely on observation skills, and you should of course when you are canning.  As a trained scientist my sterile senses are well honed, and of course liable centers on food preservation will error on the side of caution.  However i will not give away any of my canned tomatoes this year since it is my first time... i will give away my pickled beets, and my pickled kohlrabi as there is enough salt in sugar and vinegar (the acid) that I'm not too worried about poisoning people.  If i poison myself then it is a lesson to me, if i poison somebody else, then yes it still is a lesson to me, clearly a less painful lesson to me, but it just wouldn't be fair.

I still like my chances, i believe the thing to do is eat the batch i did without following the instructions early in the fall out of the fridge rather than let it hang around on a shelf for a few years.

It's weird how we have an innate mistrust of our abilities to preserve food... clearly an conspiracy to help convince consumers that the best and safest food is the one canned in a mega factory by people working minimum wage and sold in a reputable store that is trying to bust unions.

My point is we can do it, pioneers did it without running water, we can do it... have faith in yourself and continue, even though their not with you.  I have been making beer for a few years now and never had a bad batch... well there was that vanilla beer that was horrible, but it wasn't bad like make you sick bad.  Now my sister who is a classic consumer told me you can't make good beer at home... she said the same thing about pizza... i beg to differ.  Actually i differ and i am right.  You can't do anything if you believe you can't do it before you start... that is of course why gardening is the perfect introductory sport to self sufficiency.  Plant needs water, soil and light, it takes care of the rest.

Now why all this talk in a gardening blog?  I see it like this... the only thing more annoying than somebody who doesn't grow food is the person that grows it and then wastes it.  Think of it as preparation for the apocalypse... you know it's coming, of course the earth will be a toxic wasteland, but just in case it isn't you need to know how to survive.  You could also argue that if we all did this perhaps we could feed each other and be done with this insane consumer society, which of course isn't going to happen either given that our species is polluted with self serving hair trigger responding half wits.

OK, so we have to find a happy place as our planet goes swirling down the toilet, and it feels good to grow and preserve food.  Trust me on that one... make food not war, share food not hate, build food connections not walls, grow food not indifference, can tomatoes not shitty pop songs fronted by gyrating salespeople.

Go show up to a party with a big vegetable dish that you grew and people will say  "Oh my God that is amazing"... but really it is simple stuff, but next  to the consumer that brought high fructose cupcakes in a plastic container you can hold your head high.

Lets get back on point here...  how to attack your tomato preservation.  Some are just frozen in bags, some are reduced and canned and you will season it into what you want it to be when the time comes... will it be chile, will it be a minestrone soup, will it end up in a lasagna, on a pizza, on pasta.  My wife tells me you can salt and bake them and then freeze them to add flavour to a dish down the road.  Clearly you will want options down the road.  Sometimes it seems kind of silly because canned tomato products are pretty cheap, and given the labor and costs you might actually be losing money, but remember never let money be your barometer to happiness.  This is all just education for when you live on a farm in isolation and you don't have the options of buying what you want when you want, it's about the pride of being a maker, a doer, somebody who is not afraid to take their destiny in their own hands and pound something out.  Every year you do something you get better at it, it becomes less of a confusion and more of a fine art.  Always experiment... go down with your ships, it is the only way you really learn.

You see i set out this year to have a king hell tomato harvest, and this i accomplished... i have been giving lots away, but to me it would be the failure of failures to not see how far i can stretch this harvest to feed the family.  I often think how much farmland do  i need to feed us for the year... clearly i like the processed snack treats... i am a natural glutton.  But in my mind i see myself as an organic sustenance farmer... all i need is a forest, a wood stove a 10 acre farm and a 1000 acre barley field, and a 14 acre hops plantation.  I was joking a 100 acre barley filed should be sufficient.

How do you eat chard? Do you steam it and hit it with butter and parmesan cheese, or do you hit it with soy sauce?  I have chard by the truckload... perhaps i should pickle it.  Can you do that?  Of course you can do anything.

My purple heirloom beans are coming in now... i grabbed the seeds from a neglected garden last year... some silly fool just never picked them... i witnessed most of them just rot into the ground but i grabbed a few pods and that is what we are eating now.  I was late on the beans because i filled the garden with peas early in the season... i like the combo. I planted the beans when the peas died down and now is their time.  You have to love this long Oregon growing season, being able to space your crops out like that.

Also i noticed that my blueberries are really growing now that my house is not littered with squirrels who have the bad habit of chewing off the fresh growth.   It has made a huge difference... so remember if you have a neighbour who feeds squirrels you can stop that nonsense by trapping the bastards... just make sure the neighbour sees the squirrel in the trap... this will horrify the said neighbour and they will call the authorities and the authorities will tell the neighbour to make sure that the trapper kills the pest on their own property, which will in turn motivate the neighbour to make a plea deal to free the rodent on the condition that the stop feeding the rodents and your problems will be solved. 

Also never give up on killing slugs... if you were to call somebody a slug that would be an insult right? I rest my case.

Dirt under the old fingernails

When you are back from a few weeks "vacation" in the middle of the summer... lets just say the gardens need some attention.   Harvesting, eating and storing food. Weeding, decommissioning and making room for plants... and then filling in the holes.   There was a beet bigger than a softball... i do have a photo of it, but that would open the door to a photo downloading session that could cause all kinds  of setbacks in a night that has had many already.  For the record i was watching some NOFX videos on the Internet before i started this blogaroo.  A pretty tight hardcore punk band... you see i took a bamboo pole in the eye earlier today when i was in "savage attack weeding" mode and it reminded me of the song " Stickin' In My Eye".   Wonder how many garden blogs have plugs for NOFX in them, but i have no problem here.

I hereby classify strawberries as an invasive species... i guess i could google it but there is a band called the strawberries and it could lead me down a path. Like the one where you could go on about how the Strawberry Guava plant that is one of the most aggressively invasive species in Hawaii.

Never mind Hawaii let's think of the paradise called my back yard..There are probably about 100 hood strawberry plants in my yard that were yanked from the earth to give the beans some space to call their own.   Some of the beans of course took a hit but that is part of the score... farming never goes perfectly and sometimes you miss it and it just becomes some grand Darwinian experiment.

But that's when you step in... you see jungles don't necessarily make a good garden... every plant just rushing to go to seed, long an scraggly, trying to be the one that wins the battle for light... or at least stay even.  That's when it is time for some executive decisions... for example i sacrificed a broccoli plant to give room to some beans... they showed more promise... i chopped down the Kohl rabi that had grown massive, again to give room for beans, and i was worried about what to do with it but after some discussion with another local chef, i have decided i will pickle it.

Did i mention tomatoes... Holy Bleep, do i have tomatoes... all heirloom, all delicious... can you say the word sauce?  I did sauteed red onion, and then just reduce the tomatoes... let your conscience nip at you throughout the day as you randomly taste the bugger and fret, and ponder... and then realize... well well didn't Mark, the stay home dad across the street say he was making tomato based preserves today?  I wonder what he is doing?... he was of course in his kitchen working on his tomato preserves.  Hot damn, there was a food processor and a strainer and a few pots... i was instantly confused, the kind of soft feeling i might try to describe as screaming doubt, where the scream function is disabled  leaving only a quiet terror.  Poor old terror, a word that hit the big time and has grown afraid of it's own shadow. What the hell am i talking about? Actually I'm typing.

I think 6 Hood strawberry plants cost 4 bones in the nursery... meaning i have a bit over $50 in plants on my lawn about to get baked in the sun tomorrow morning.  I mention this more as a matter of reality than trying to be a money grubbing fucker.  It just is what it is... we pay for things that we don't need to, it's the thing about plant life... plants make seed or just expand, if the world was run right there would be no need for this buy plants nonsense.  This is one of the clear evils of the Monsanto enterprise, using a legal net to pollute and destroy the natural growing community.

I collected a bunch of pea seeds from the tail end of my peas... unfortunately for me my daughter was at a farm "potion" camp this week and came home and ground up the bulk of them to make a potion.  My cilantro went to seed and now i have a large jar of coriander.  The purple carrots i planted, perhaps a bit too tight in with the beets and peas, well some of them went to seed so we will collect that and try again next year under better circumstances.  

If you missed the food, go for the seeds.  In fact i have a big bag of purple spinach i harvested the other day, and i got the seeds from the community garden seed bank where somebody obviously let their plant go to seed last year.  You see the seeds were on a plant... just grab some and do it.   I should probably blanch and freeze the bag for later as i have more food than i can eat at the moment.

Mowing weeds and finishing plants gives rise to spaces in your garden... today i filled in the space with beet and carrot seeds... i should probably get some hot peppers from the nursery (listen to me) and file them in as well.  It is after all hot pepper season all hot an all outside... after all you can never go wrong with some hot peppers... if i had some hot peppers now i could pickle them with the kohl rabi and we would be having some king hell spicy cocktails come November.  Not that I'm much of a cocktail drinker myself, i stick with the beer. Speaking of that our Hops are coming to a fine conclusion.  The Zeus hops plant i put in last year shall have a fine yield but the others i put in this year will have to wait until next year to give a man the yield he desires for a fine brewing experience.

I think i fucked up the potatoes, put too much rouge straw on the plants and killed them... i planted more in the box and they are coming, but part of me wonders if this experiment should be just wiped out until next year.  Part of gardening is to live with nagging doubts, like any good life exercise, it just means you are thinking.  I've always been a fan a paranoia... too mean for some to stomach, but it makes for good comedy, and it helps embed your mistakes into your subconscious.  That's why we ride the big roller coasters right? To scare the crap out of yourself and get the adrenalin pumping... if there was only a free productive way to achieve this bliss...  of course there is but you have to move the scale... rather than whimpering 306 feet in the sky about to take a dive straight down into the earth, why not calibrate the success of your garden to that level.  Make a deal with yourself, if you don't grow enough potatoes for the fall then you will snap your hand in a rat trap... an very painful experience, it keeps a nice element of terror to motivate the gardener through these days of plentiful tomatoes.  Cause it would be easy to bask in the glow of many tomatoes, and just shove your potato failure to the back, but that would be wrong and unbalanced. Like in a game of hockey where you lose 7-6 and somebody tries to say well we scored 6 goals hurray for us... but you gave up 7.

I pickled 18 jars of beets, and 9 jars of kohl rabi and garlic and hot peppers, (store bought) and i have made enough kale chips that my shit's are now green and there is still more.  I was talking to people who say they don't have time to garden, and it's odd cause i don't have time to do anything but garden.  That's fine by me, my plants are my friends, i am their guardian.  Call me a tree hugger, i don't mind, plants make good friends, plants aren't emotional bastards, give them what they need and they will give you what you need, none of this barbed tongue bull shit, just pure science.  Don't get me wrong, i don't talk to my plants like some fools advise, because of course, plants don't have ears.  I imagine if you go and talk to your plants and hang out with them, one would hope you would have a hose in your hand and be actively watering the plants, or perhaps weeding around them and they would like that benefit, and perhaps the fool might think that talking to the plants made a difference.  For the record i have no scientific data to prove  that the specific act of talking to your plants helps... lets call it an educated guess.  Perhaps i have told this story before... neighbour in Vancouver lets people garden his yard and the plants aren't doing well (clearly due to shade issues), but they tell him that the plants need somebody to hang out with them, so if it would be OK with him, they could send a volunteer to sit in his yard a few times a week in a lawn chair to socialise with the garden.  Of course this put him off the whole program and on to a more paranoid version of this gardening scheme.  I imagine the people running the program probably believed this to be helpful because they left orbit a few years prior... if you know what i mean.

If you are talking to a plant  what do you say... i guess the plant isn't going to interrupt you with a more interesting story, so that could be good for the terminally boring.  The plant is not going to say "this story sucks, and you are a moron"... perhaps it might try to will you into watering it, but then a person who talks to plants might not notice the signs of drought as they are deep into a story about themselves and so happy that a chard plant is finally listening to their drivel...  the world has all kinds, and man gardeners don't talk to plants... perhaps they trash talk slugs at midnight before they murder them, but hey who's keeping score, besides me of course.