but the steam canner is full of brandied peaches. Guess that’s a win.
Archive for the ‘gardening’ Category
The stove is a mess,
Saturday, August 28th, 2010Quick post
Thursday, August 26th, 2010For 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. . .
Peaches, peaches, peaches, PEACHES
Monday, 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.
Intervals
Saturday, August 14th, 2010Tomorrow 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.
Washington hawthorn
Thursday, August 12th, 2010Crataegus 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.
Robbing the bees
Sunday, August 8th, 2010Today 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
Other gardens
Thursday, August 5th, 2010Between 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!
Ghost apples
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
Today I finished spraying the fruit trees (and roses, grape vines and brussels sprouts) with Surround CP. Surround is made from white kaolin clay and food-grade wax – a wonderfully effective pesticide that coats leaves and fruit with a thin layer of what is essentially, porcelain. Insects are put off by the material, and those that ingest it, die. I’ve found it works well as a fungicide as well, protecting my hybrid fruit crops from the rusts and fungi carried by their wild cousins that grow rampant around my garden. The beauty of Surround is that it is completely passive, aside from the rather startling sight of ghostly grey foliage. I grow everything in close quarters and can’t afford to spray a poison on a tree that will kill the strawberries growing under the branches – and that’s aside from the considerations about my well, that is under the entire garden.
I chose a calm, sunny day – fortunately a day I had off from work, and my backpack sprayer and I made the rounds.
Pictured is a little Liberty apple tree with a sad backstory. This was one of my first fruit trees, purchased in 2004 when we were building the house. I planted it a safe distance from the construction and our septic field and planned to move it to a more advantageous position later on. Years went by and the spruce and pines grew up around the little tree that didn’t die, but did not get appreciably bigger either. I moved it in 2009 and you can tell from the photo below that it is still small. It bore for the first time this year and reminds me of a quince bonsai I saw at Longwood Gardens – a delicate structure with outlandishly disproportionate fruit.
The Bounty
Friday, July 30th, 20102010 is officially a wonderful garden year and a bountiful harvest. Everyone on the road agrees: tomatoes are early (sometimes I have only green ones in September), the Brussels sprouts are forming up nicely, the corn has tasseled out – even our Silver Queen. And the peaches, oh my.
This year I bought a pole bean selection from Fedco. The packet contained yellow, speckled, purple and brown beans and they’re all delicious. They are over-growing their 12′ stakes, but I can’t complain, really.
Perhaps the best part of this season is the longevity of many of our more fragile crops. We’ve had very hot days, but also cool nights and more rainfall than I’ve seen in July. The lettuce is still coming in and the second crop of turnips is off to a rousing start. My April planting of “Bull’s Blood” beet greens is still viable, and the mesclun that started in late March is just this week too far gone to make another salad. Now we’ll just have to wait and see about the first frost.
Pesto season
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010Pesto is one of the barometers of a Maine summer. Basil requires long days and hot afternoons to truly grow fat, glossy leaves that give off a distinctive, almost skunky aroma and some years we just don’t get that. 2010 is shaping up to be the best garden year in recent memory, and the pesto so far is A+.
I picked almost a kitchen-sized garbage bag of basil, mostly because I wanted to be able to start the recipe off with “a garbage bag of basil”. I prefer to harvest in mid-afternoon (the plants are free of dew and at their most fragrant), and I simply cut them back by two or three nodes. I use the stems and all, but I do remove blossoms and buds. They seem to make the final product slightly bitter.
Stuff the bowl of a food processor with leaves and stems. Drizzle with olive oil. Add 1/2 tsp sea salt, 1 clove garlic and 2 Tbs pine nuts (toasted in a frying pan first) per batch. If you will be adding all the batches together you can keep track and add all the seasonings at once at the end, but I find doing it by increments is easier. Process until smooth, adding more olive oil if necessary.
I have been amazed at the number of people who comment about the photos on this blog – generally about the objects in the background. Turns out food photographers are all about isolating the product – setting the stage with your recipe as the star, and not so much with the bottle of Chinese black vinegar that has nothing to do with the current recipe. As long as you read this blog, you’re going to see that vinegar on the back of the counter. Also the red wine, cassis, port and probably a roll of paper towels. I don’t set these photos up, sadly, I just live here.
Cook your favorite pasta, drain and pour into a large serving bowl. Mix in about a cup of pesto per 6 servings, and some grated parm or asiago cheese. If my mother isn’t coming over we like to add hot pepper flakes. Freeze the remaining pesto in freezer jelly jars to remember summer come some winter dinner.
