Archive for the ‘horticulture’ Category
Thursday, 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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Saturday, 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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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.
Tags: garden, harvest, kitchen, orchard fruit, recipe, summer
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Thursday, 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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Thursday, 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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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.
Tags: garden, house, orchard fruit, summer
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Friday, July 30th, 2010
2010 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.
Tags: garden, harvest, kitchen, seeds, summer, weather
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Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
Pesto 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.
Tags: garden, harvest, kitchen, recipe, summer, weather
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Sunday, July 25th, 2010
Today was a perfect day for a garden club tour; a bit of rain and clouds to discourage the casual observers but not enough wind to damage the white begonias, cool enough to walk energetically in a heavy skirt and sensible shoes, misty enough so that I didn’t regret forgetting my hat. This particular garden had not previously been open to the public. The cutting and kitchen gardens are visible through the wrought iron fence from the street, but it was wonderful to get up close and personal with the sunken Italianate formal garden, the mossy pergola that faces the cove, and some really lurid roses that were nevertheless enjoyable under the low, gray clouds. Oh, and the shingle style dog house with slate roof, dutch doors and window boxes was just the right touch of surreal.
My pen dropped out of my pocket somewhere along the 1/2 mile entrance road, and my batteries ran out before the kitchen garden, but here are what notes and images I managed to take away:
Artichokes – beautiful plants and evidently productive here. The head gardener went on at length about daylight and temperatures requirements for full maturity, but honestly I wouldn’t care if I didn’t get a whole lot of fruit – the plants were striking in themselves. Of course, he doesn’t have that luxury.
Cold frames extraordinaire: I went over to look at some cold frames – 15′ x 2′ high on the short end, rising to 4′ and faced with glass panels. When I looked in to the frames, I realized that they had been excavated to a depth of 10′. There were ladders built into the walls at either end for access. With that much berming they must be very cozy even in early spring, and if I thought I could dig a hole 12′ deep on my lot I’d try it out.
Smoke bush in bloom with Madonna lilies rising through the mist of blossoms – quite a striking effect.
Datura was everywhere, and lent an exotic air to the otherwise common assortment of border flowers: ligularia, phlox, mulliens, begonias and thalictrum.
Tags: architectural landscape, Bar Harbor, garden, landscape, perrenial
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Saturday, July 10th, 2010
Today I went down to Southwest Harbor for a concert. The Southwest Harborites were also celebrating the annual Pink Flamingo festival (the lawn ornaments are considered native fauna) and the Coast Guard base was having an open house so it was a high time on the village main street. I took the back road down to Clark Point and stopped at this stand to buy a jar of pear jam.
The sign is quite well designed, with the whole positive/negative space thing going on, and “Antiques” is spelled correctly. What happened to “bouys”? Curse those pesky diphthongs!
I bought a jar of pear jam. I’ve tried to make it myself, and could possibly make gallons of the stuff from the Seckel pear tree’s bounty, but my trial batches were gritty and insipid. This jar from Maine’s Own Treats has a nice clear color. The contents list includes: Pears, Sugar, Applesauce, Apple Juice and Pectin. Applesauce sounds like it might be the secret ingredient. We’re going to try the jam out tomorrow on Sunday waffles and then I’ll decide if this combination is worth another experiment.
I like the “We’re Open” sign, too. There wasn’t a soul around – what changes when they’re closed?
Tags: garden, harvest, kitchen, neighbors, orchard fruit, summer
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