September 2nd, 2010
We have a lot of grapes this year. We had a lot of peaches, and the tomatoes are still flowing in, the elderberries, raspberries, blueberries, well, 2010 has been a good year for fruit. I’ve started making grape juice in self defense (we can only eat so much jam before the next grape harvest comes along). Then R. suggested making popsicles, so I ran right out and picked some molds up at the dollar store. They proved very unsatisfactory (there’s sticky grape juice all over the freezer now) so I turned to Amazon. The new mold was delivered this afternoon and I’ve already made and sampled a batch and, yowsa – greatest idea ever.
The new mold has a metal cover with slots for those ubiquitous wooden popsicle sticks. The receptacles are sturdy and the frozen mix slides out easily. It also came with a recipe using orange juice that I adapted for grape.
Popsicles
3 C juice, 2 Tbs fresh lemon juice, 1/4 C sugar. Pour in molds and freeze for about 4 hours. The directions suggest soaking the sticks in water for an hour first so they don’t float up in the cells, but I was impatient and skipped that step to no ill effect.
Delicious. I think I want these instead of cake for my birthday next year.
Tags: dessert, garden, harvest, orchard fruit
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August 28th, 2010
but the steam canner is full of brandied peaches. Guess that’s a win.
Tags: dessert, garden, harvest, kitchen, orchard fruit, summer
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August 26th, 2010
For quick tomato sauce. There is no stopping the inflow of harvest right now – the baskets practically fill themselves.
Working Girl’s Homemade Tomato Sauce*
Get out your largest stockpot and add enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Wash the tomatoes, pull off stems, cut away any blemishes and fill the pot. Add a Tbsp of sea salt. Cover and cook on medium low for about 30 minutes. Stir occasionally if you’re around. The tomatoes should be softened and shedding liquid. Turn off the heat, keep covered and let stand overnight.
In the morning, pour off the liquid and heat to boiling for a few minutes – say, while you make your yoghurt fruit shake and get ready for work. Turn off the heat, keep covered and leave for at least 4 hours, or until you get home. Pour off the liquid. Season to taste with salt, sugar, garlic and spices and put it through a food mill to remove seeds and skins and presto – wonderful, very fresh-tasting tomato sauce.
* Don’t blame me for the name. I learned this recipe from a woman I met on the steps of the Good Day Market in Portland. It was a radical idea for me, and I never stood over a steaming pot of tomatoes in the summer heat again.
I’ve never figured out what to do with the clear fluid that rises to the top (tomato water?) to be poured off. It doesn’t taste bad, exactly, but it needs something. Someday I’ll distill a batch and see what type of brandy could be made from tomatoes, but that’s for a day when I’m not working.
Now, back to peaches. . .
Tags: garden, harvest, neighbors, recipe, summer
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August 23rd, 2010
While we were away for a week in Canada, our peach trees were busy ripening their fruit. The weather has been hot and dry, so I lost about 1/2 a bushel to the ground and the red squirrels. That leaves about 2 bushels for canned pie filling, Peach Brown Veronica, peach puree (canned for Daiquiris and ice cream this winter), frozen peach slices and mmmmmmmm, oven jam.
Peach Oven Jam
Wash and then dunk the peaches, 5 or 6 at a time, in a large pot of boiling water for about 45 seconds. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon and let them sit in a bowl of cold water until cool enough to handle. The skins should slip off easily. Slice the peeled peaches into a bowl and add 1 tsp of lemon juice and 1 Tbsp of sugar for each batch of 5, and stir.I sliced up almost a bushel of peaches for this batch, but any amount is fine.
If you like, save the pits. They haven’t been processed and should sprout. I’m planning to plant a row in a distant part of the garden to see what comes up.
Next break the fruit into a uniform consistency in the wide setting of a food mill or a food processor. It shouldn’t be mushy. Add one C white sugar and 1 Tbs of lemon juice for every four cups of peaches (this is easy to do in the bowl of a food processor). Pour the mixture into a buttered large, heavy oven proof pan or several (I use two Crueset casseroles) and bake in a 300 degree oven for 1 1/2 – 3 hours, depending on the depth of the pan and water content of the peaches. Stir every half hour or so, more toward the end of the cooking time. The jam should darken in color and become almost translucent at the edges – like pie filling. My Blue Book says the mixture should “round on a spoon”.
Fill sterilized jars with the hot mixture and process 10 minutes in a steam canner. You could reference the Blue Book for regular kettle processing time. This recipe makes a wonderful, full bodied jam for toast or biscuits, but it’s also great on ice cream, as a cake or pie filling or drink mix. And a full stock kettle of peach pieces will net about 5 pints of jam – a fairly efficient way to store a lot of peaches.
Next, we’ll have to do something about the tomato situation.
Tags: garden, harvest, kitchen, orchard fruit, recipe, summer
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August 19th, 2010
Days 3 and 4: hiking trails that end at a 100′ drop, weird characters on the library keyboard, lemon cream blue berry pie, seals, Hole in the Wall, herring weirs, Fish Head, hiking trails that end abruptly at a 200′ drop, having Eel Brook Beach all to ourselves and the constant hum of the ferry, just off shore.
Tags: landscape, ocean, summer
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August 18th, 2010
We’re here! We almost missed the ferry, after planning to be there early, because we forgot all about Atlantic Time, which is an hour earlier, eh? Then our trip was delayed while the ferry crew heroically rescued three people adrift in the freezing Bay of Fundy after their boat overturned. Only one was wearing a PFD, but they all made it. “Too much speed and too much drink,” according to the rescue crew.
Then it was a short drive to a lovely cottage, and a walk down the hill to our own personal cliff.
Now off to discover some haddock in leek cream.
Tags: Grand Manan, summer, vacation
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August 14th, 2010
Tomorrow morning we head to Grand Manan for a busman’s holiday – time off for painters to paint! The rental has a terrific view but no wireless, so posts will be few and far between over the next few days. I’ve been working in the garden as much as possible these last few days before we leave, trying to put everything in stasis for 7 days. If the weather trends a little more cool and cloudy I may still have peaches and tomatoes to harvest when we return.
The garden in April of this year. . .
and now it is August.
Tags: garden, harvest, orchard fruit, summer
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August 12th, 2010
Crataegus phaenopyrum is a beautiful small and multi-trunked tree with pink flowers, red fruit in fall, and prodigious thorns.
The thorns are really immature branches, but that nicety doesn’t matter much in the real world. They are two inches long, needle sharp and sturdy enough to do real damage to mammals, thereby both providing songbirds with excellent nesting habitat and making them hazardous to the gardener. I am growing three specimens as a barrier fence on the driveway side of the garden. It was difficult to get a clear picture with all the green-on-green in the summer garden – there will be a follow up post in December that shows more structure.
These trees are very sensitive to salt so I don’t plan to use them next to the road, but they’ve survived along the driveway. The two trees in the foreground are 6 years old and have a main trunk caliper of 4″. I’ve pruned them to 8′ – do I wish I’d pruned them shorter? Yes, but I’m afraid that opportunity has passed a few years back – I’m not getting into the middle of these even with my long handled loppers. I’ll begin to tie the widest branches together to make a fence this spring, and at 8′ by 3′ deep I think it will be as effective against deer as Sleeping Beauty’s hedge of hawthorns was against the her suitors.
Tags: garden, house, summer, wildlife
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August 8th, 2010
Today is a beautiful August day in Maine and hey – I’m off from work – so it’s time for a honey harvest. The golden rod has been in bloom for about two weeks and there has been a lot of traffic into the hive with bright yellow pollen. The super on the big hive was full: nine frames of capped honey on both sides.
Today, instead of bringing the loaded frames back to the house, I decided to use the “California method”: knock the bees off each frame and scrape the loaded comb right into a strainer over a paint bucket. Then I propped the empty frames next to an empty hive and let the bees clean them up.
I kept the comb covered with a plastic bag and there were surprisingly few bees in it when I lugged the bucket (25 lbs!) back to the house. I’ve broken up the comb with a kitchen knife and the honey is draining nicely into the bucket, which has a petcock at the bottom. When it’s all done – it should take about 8 hours – I can pour it off into containers. Containers full of HONEY!
“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best — ” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.
– Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, A. A. Milne
Tags: beekeeping, bees, harvest, summer
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August 5th, 2010
Between the “dense fog advisory” and all my errands I did not get out to the garden today. I went up to Beech Hill Farm instead, to admire their wonderful combination of available labor and topsoil.
Beautiful, isn’t it? Beech Mountain shoulders along above Echo Lake, rising to a steep point at one end, crowned by a fire tower. The long, flat hilltop has been farmed for at least 200 years and boasts apple and pear trees, cleared fields and the hazard of old barbed wire in the woods. The College of the Atlantic bought (was given*) the Beech Hill Farm property a few years ago and their student farmers run the vegetable stand, assorted poultry, green houses and new in 2010 – a beekeeping operation. It was wonderful to see all hands on deck today, busy with August tasks like coping with all those tomatoes.
Then I went home and waded into the swamp to pick high bush blueberries. Who needs topsoil?
*Two COA alumni have contacted me to let me know that the farm and covenants were donated to COA – it wasn’t a purchase. Thank you, B and Anon!
Tags: garden, Somesville, summer
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