Dehydrating Fruit

Another, very simple, method of preserving summer's bount:  dehydrating.  Slice fruit, place in dehydrator, remove when dry, and store in an airtight container.  What could be easier?

Here, I was cutting up stone fruit (cherries, nectarines, peaches, plums, and apricots) to freeze for jam and decided to stick some fruit in the dehydrator.  I just kind of free-formed the chopping session.  I'd cut a fruit in half, then slice one half for dehydrating, and chop the other half into chunks for jam.  Or I'd cut some nice, thin slices of fruit for the dehydrator and toss the rest of the fruit in the jam pile.  I ended up with enough for two batches of jam and a jar full of dried peaches, apricots, and plums, ready to be enjoyed all winter.

Don't think I don't have another four pounds of stone fruit waiting in my fridge.  It's fruit-hoarding season.

Slugs!

A few weeks ago, I noticed my green bean leaves were suffering a little damage--some holes chewed through here and there. I hadn't seen this damage last year, so I wasn't sure what it was or how serious it was. I peeked under a few leaves but didn't see anything that might be causing the damage.  I didn't worry further.

It then escalated fairly quickly into my black bean leaves, and soon all the bean leaves were chewed through and yellow. While I was planning on letting the black beans dry and die back, I still recognized this was a problem.  And then, as I was pulling out dead pea vines, pondering the damage, I discovered the culprit stuck on my jeans: slugs! 

Well shit.

I didn't have slugs last year, so I decided to research the best way to get rid of the little suckers. I turned to my Fearless Food Gardening book, which made a strong and likable suggestion--beer. 

So I decided to lay some beer traps in the garden. They would consist of solo cups from my cabinet and a six-pack from the store. I will digress here to say that I debated for awhile about whether or not to waste a good beer on the slugs. In the end, I preferred to waste a good beer and have five other delicious beers to drink later, rather than find five bad beers in my fridge needing to be emptied. 

Anyway, I brought my cups, six-pack, bottle opener, and garden tools to my plot and got started laying traps.  The instructions are fairly simple. 

1. Dig a hole

2. Place cup in hole

3. Cut rim of cup down so it sits at soil level (garden shears were effective for this)

4. Put cup back in hole

5. Level dirt to rim so that the slugs can crawl in easily

6. Hunker down and try to clandestinely open a beer in public in the middle of the afternoon

7. Pour beer in cup

See? Easy. I ended up making three of these traps and spaced them throughout the garden.

Since slugs are night creatures, I gave them two nights to crawl to their deaths. Then I checked the traps. The first one had one fly in it. No slugs. The second trap held a stick. I was a little disappointed. But the third trap--oh, the carnage! It was packed full of slugs and centipedes.  I know there's a good metaphor here with beer, frat boys, and mornings after, but my brain is just not functioning enough to come up with it.  Pretend I just wrote something witty.

So, I would count the traps as successful (other than the fact that I waited too long to set them up).  And, of course, I love anything that encourages me to add more beer to my gardening experience. 

Black Beans

Part seed saving, part eating!

I left my black beans on the vines until they got papery.  There is a distinctly different feel between a fully dry pod, and a not-yet-dry pod.  I like when things are simple enough for me to figure out.  I pulled off the dry pods, opened 'em up, and pulled out the black beans.  Any bean that didn't feel quite dry went in the dehydrator overnight.  Everything else went in a glass jar for the corn-and-black-bean quesadillas I plan on making next week....

For real, though.  I am pretty proud of these.  I grew my own black beans!  They look like real black beans!  Because they are real black beans!

+1 to gardening.

Saving Seeds

I love poring over the seed catalogs in the dead of winter, itching to get my hands back in the dirt and watching the green things growing.  Each year, I buy new seeds, ready to try another kind of tomato, or eager to try parsnips for the first time.  I have saved up quite a little stash of seed packets, half-full to nearly empty.  Containers and a 4'x8' plot don't leave me a lot of room to plant, so I can't use much seed, but I use up the seed packets bit by bit.  And each year, I jump with joy with the little seed packets arrive bound up in rubber bands.

But when you think about it, it's kind of silly.  

Plants make their own seeds.  All they want to do is create more plants, so they provide the way to plant and grow them in perpetuity.  (Unless, of course, you have a Monsanto terminator seed, engineered to do the opposite of what seeds have done for millions of years, or a legal agreement with Monsanto requiring you to buy more seeds every year, rather than saving them the natural way.  But I digress.)  Buy seeds one year, plant your plants, and then you shouldn't have to ever buy that kind of seed again.

This is another one of those common sense things that just took a little extra time to occur to me.  I was used to buying food at the grocery store, not growing it.  It appears there all year round, and I just go buy more when I want more.  Growing food takes a lot more work, but provides more fun, too.  But then I would eat the food, go back to the catalog, and plan to buy more for next year.

This year, I decided I wanted to start saving seeds.  Previous attempts were limited only to that one time I saved those heirloom tomato seeds from a farmers market tomato that made a delicious bruschetta.  (It grew a plant, but since I grew it this year, it was a bit of a failure, as were all my tomatoes.)  I read up on seed saving a little, but since most recommendations involved netting your plants and pollinating them yourself and god forbid never plant different kinds of types from the same family within fifty feet of each other (what am I going to do in a community garden?), I wanted to start small.  So I saved some peas.

Just as the internet advised, they stuck around on the vine until the vine started to dry out and die back.  The pods became paper, and the little peas rattled inside.  I opened the pods, dumped the peas in a plastic baggie, and now I'll have peas for next year.

Simple and yet exciting, right?  And maybe if I glue my own photos on the bag, I can make my own homemade, homestead seed packets to approximate the joy I get from the catalogs.

Too much?

Freezing Green Beans

This will sound silly, but the idea of freezing food was kind of revolutionary to me. I mean, we all buy frozen veggies or fruit from the store--frozen food itself wasn't new, but freezing my own? I just didn't consider it for a long time. We had a small garden for a few years growing up, but it didn't produce enough to save. We didn't go to farmers markets or buy fresh food in bulk, so we just didn't freeze anything. I know it's obvious to most people, but it just didn't occur to me until, one day, I made a smoothie with one of those Trader Joe's bags of frozen fruit. It suddenly struck me that I could make that bag of frozen fruit myself.

Now, I hoard fruit in the summer. I buy in bulk from farmers markets or from my grocery delivery service (local, ethical, and organic!), or pick from organic U-pick farms. I chop and freeze it for jams, crumbles, and smoothies. 

This year, the garden actually produced enough veggies that I couldn't eat it all fresh--specifically my shelling peas, snow peas, and green beans. So I blanched and froze the extra. 

I recognize this is an utterly basic homesteading skill that most people possess--homesteaders or not. But in case you've never done it, or you need a kick in the pants to freeze some of summer's cheap and glorious bounty for use in the dead of winter, here is how I preserved my green beans:

Set water to boiling in a medium saucepan. (This day, I happened to be cooking for the week, and was making a recipe that involved boiling beans.  I decided to be efficient and just chop more than I need, then reuse the water to blanch the extra beans for freezing.)

Grab beans by the handful and rinse. Group them together so the ends are all aligned. Chop off the ends. Turn the beans, align the other ends, then chop those off too. Toss this handful in the pot of lightly boiling water. 

These should boil for about one or two  minutes. I tend to toss in the beans, then grab another handful to rinse and chop. By the time I am done chopping the second bunch, the first is done boiling. They should be a nice, vivid green. I fish them out with a slotted spoon and toss in a bowl of ice water. 

This stops the beans from cooking. (I like putting a sieve in there so I don't have to fish through the cold water later.) Once cold, I put them in a freezer bag. 

This is a very high-tech operation, as you can see. 

The process tends to go pretty quickly and works for nearly any summer veggie, although some need a few more minutes to cook than others.  You can easily find recommended times online.

Happy blanching!