When pruning gives you lemons. . .

Careful pruning this year means that the Meyer tree is doing what all the other Meyer trees around here do -- pumping out lemons as though it's going out of style. This year, I went to BevMo and got prepared.

There are many different zesting options in my drawer. I tried two at first. The little strip zester seemed to be better at taking off only the yellow stuff, but even that got more difficult. I may have become impatient after a few tries, too.

Then I remembered a post somewhere on the internet about zesting essentially from the inside out. Tablespoon to the rescue.

If I aimed correctly, I ended up with a round bit of lemon and an empty shell.

Then the fun really started. In varying ways, I tried holding down the half shell and scraping out the white pith. Everyone is really serious about how you must get all of that white pith out, or doom will ensue. I tend to take stuff like that pretty seriously, and then spent all of the time (except for the brief errand run for chicken food) left obsessing about whether or not I was getting all of the stuff out.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

The peels didn't always stand up well to that kind of force, but my cutting board is well-oiled with pure lemon oil. My hands aren't super happy, though. The jar has many different bits of scraped peel on it. I aimed for the clearest yellow part of the piece to the right of the spoon in that picture, and mostly think I got there. We'll see.

So, in a few months (?) we'll see what I've made. Ellie and I were talking as I was buying the Everclear, and I was explaining that it's pure alcohol, famed for fraternity parties and making people extremely inebriated, but that it didn't have a flavor to interfere with the lemon flavor. So she said, "You're making alcohol that tastes like lemons?"

"Well, after the peels have steeped for about a month and a half, we'll add some simple syrup, you know, water and sugar boiled together?"

"So you're making super-alcoholic lemonade?"

"I'm not serving it to people by the TUMBLER!"

The funny thing is that I may not end up serving it to anyone. I'm the only one in the family who actually seems to like the nocino that I made, and even I rarely drink it. A digestif seems odd drunk alone, to me. Anyhow, the few times that I have encountered limoncello, in Sorrento, and other Italian towns, it wasn't exactly love at first sip.

In fact, I reacted a lot like the character "Ben" on Parks and Recreation in this clip. Just hated it. Like bad lemon-flavored cough medicine. To be fair, I'm also so-so on Lagavulin. . . So why make something that makes me want to wipe my tongue?

Well, it might be different.

And it might not.

But someone, somewhere may like it, and hey, it's a new thing to try, right?

Winter crops, summer crops

Two days of visiting Arctic weather have provided a lovely example of warm weather vs. cold weather crops.

Tomatoes,

peppers.

Note the unharvested, yet perfectly edible, fruit on both of those. Oh, goody, voices in my head, another stick to beat myself with! I may try to grab them, and yet . . I may not.

What I will most likely do, however, is serve a broccoli dish tomorrow, so as not to waste everything coming out of the yard.

The Big One

Our sadly neglected front yard apple trees put on a lovely show this year. I've been eating apples almost every day.

Sometimes it's been difficult to see them because they're hidden by volunteer Sun Gold vines, but the other day I was picking some tomatoes to force them on offer them to neighbors, and saw the apple of the season.

Yum.

The other Big One?

She seems to be having a lot of fun and studying hard at college. We were lucky enough to get to see her play in a casual tournament last week.

Watching my kids play remains one of the very most enjoyable things I do.

Harvest Monday

The Red Edition

Daphne hosts Harvest Monday on her blog. Go check out the wonderful things people are harvesting.

Some Principe Borghese drying tomatoes (already split and in the oven), some red bells, destined to be roasted red pepper soup, and a handful of strawberries. I actually picked about 1 1/2 cups of berries, despite them being not watered enough. Those Tristars are rock stars!

Every year I say I need to grow more bell peppers. No matter how many I plant, it's always true.

Harvest Monday

Imagine my surprise when the camera's memory card didn't only contain pictures of today's incredibly bountiful harvest.

You see, Eric and I had taken the younger children away for a short backpacking trip near Tahoe, which was wonderful, but I'd left the camera home, partly because it is kind of heavy and partially because I'd misplaced it. Oh well, I took lots of mental pictures: the eight year old ahead of us on a trail overarched by huge trees; the two kids playing teetertotter on a log caught between two trees; the perfect bijou lake; the clear water; Eric's face next to mine in the tent, even though I was all wrapped up in a sleeping bag and he looked a bit hot. . .

But today, after yesterday's post-trip bout of laundry, laundry, dishes, dishes, dishes, returning camping gear to the proper shelves, washing camp cook pots, was over, I headed out to say hi to the garden.

I came back with a lot of stuff. I took pictures of it. Then came the work of changing it from fresh food to storable food. Roasting. Soup-making. Giving some away to the kid with the sprained ankle when daughter called and asked me to bring an ice pack to the field. His mom said thanks. . .

And the day went by in this way. Finally, the house quiet, the kids down for the night, the dogs even quiet, I remembered -- I wanted to post my harvest pictures.

Instead I got these:

That's right. The cat one I took the day I left, but apparently the weekend was lots of Ultimate, as daughter #1's club team qualified for Regionals -- with a twelve year old on the field -- too bad Regionals is in Arizona, the weekend before her first college classes, and those of a teammate, and another teammate just sprained his ankle today. . . and apparently daughter #2 and I are going to have to talk about playing with fire in a wooden Victorian house because you know, when you're 13 and you do a LOT of declaring that you Are All Grown Up Now And Responsible, Thank You Very Much, then maybe taking pictures isn't the smartest thing in the world.

Let us turn our gaze away from the travails of rearing the young and look at rearing veggies. Whee! Tons of Principe Borghese for drying, behind them the Early Girls from one vine. Ripe red and yellow peppers, to roast and blend into the tomato soup that half of the Early Girls made today. A couple of Romanesco zucchini, two Marketmore slicing cucumbers, and a bunch of Persian Baby cucumbers. Lots of everything summer, in my garden.

Vegetables are easier, but they can't throw a Frisbee. Guess I'll keep both harvests then.

Variations on a bean

Dry beans, astonishingly enough, don't all ripen at once. I've been grabbing the pods as they dry and storing them in a paper bag. I'd sort of fluff the pods up from the bottom as I passed by, to keep them from mildewing.

"What am I doing in this bag?"
 

 It's an attempt at old-fashioned, foot-powered threshing.

Artistically done.

It's a two-footed crop.

Alas, this paper bag was no match for harvest stomping. We shifted to a different method.

The two of us sat on the floor and shelled beans and talked. I realized I remember doing something like this when I was very small with my grandmother. It was centering and quiet. We just chatted, compared the beans, talked about growing beans and anything else that came to mind. It was a lovely peaceful interlude.

Until my ankles started hurting from pressing against the floor.

Once we were all done, we lined up some of the more unusual beans we'd found. The purple one is one of about four or five that were shockingly purple. I don't know if they're a natural expression of these beans or some random pollen from a rogue purple bean patch, but I won't be planting those.

The white ones are just a hair lighter than the average bean, but still within range. What really surprised me were the dark, dark, dark ones. The one on the far right is almost dark-chocolate color. And the thrifty gardener in me celebrates any pod with five full beans! These beans are really big -- almost 2cm or so long.

One bag led to two full bowls of beans. There are many, many, many more beans drying outside. In fact, another one of the trellises fell down, so this afternoon's pastime will repeat.

What a nice way to spend some time, with delicious results.

Oh, I also made a few more pickles for the big kid. Just trying to keep up with the vines.

Auuuggghpricots

One trug full made this many, plus a quart or a pint and a half of syrup being reduced right now. So, guessing about the half-liter jars, about 11 pints.

It's unattractively whiny of me, but I'm starting to be the least little bit tired of canning apricots.

Now I'm going to unload the dishwasher and make zucchini bread.

June and July, how they fly

I make up blog posts in my head. This generally happens while I'm puttering on something -- picking berries alone, picking beans, cooking, and the only drawback to this is that moving the post from my head to the computer is often not done.

And thus, the portmanteau post. Imagine gorgeous, reflective prose about each of these events. Instead of the long, thoughtful disquisition on patience, and ripeness, and busyness, and preserving moments in jam jars, I give you annotated pictures.

June starts birthdays. Denise got a chocolate-peanut-butter triple layer cake, smuggled to the park in a box for surprising purposes.

Somebody turned eight in July -- and her strawberry cream cake, from Cook's Illustrated, was made with two days' worth of homegrown Tristar berries. Not only did it feed family, friends, and cousins, but some of us may have had slices for breakfast the following day(s). Ahem.

Ignoring the fact that the Blenheim apricot trees are simply loaded for bear, and I'm going to have to figure out how to manage thirty or so pounds of apricots, I ordered some cases of peaches to can. Ellie loves, loves, loves, canned peaches, and I told myself, "How hard can it be?"

 Equipment gathered and canning stations readied, the first day, when I had help, the peaches weren't ripe. Denise and Kevin and I went berry picking and made jam instead. The blackberries on the next island over from us seem to be three distinct varieties.

The little round ones are arranged on sprays of stems -- they remind me of fireworks. Lots of them, and they ripen all at once on a branch. They taste the least sweet. The middle ones have leaves that always look utterly blighted, but they taste good and I think they might be boysenberries. The right ones are classic Himalaya blackberries -- syrup-sweet, but only one or two ripen on a cluster at once. We get lots of those. They also grow in rather distinct bands along the fence. This is my regular picking area, so I spend a lot of time cataloging the patterns of growth and ripeness. This year is a Very Good Year for berries, what with late rain and lots of heat.

The day after next, they were. I rearranged all of the items.

 

And got to work. Blanching, peeling, splitting, protecting against browning, heating in light syrup, canning, filling, and finally processing in the pressure canner for three cases took me much of a day. Fortunately, I had my niece and nephews as company, too. They would have preferred that I play with them or watch them play, but perseverance was the day's watchword.

As I was staggering around wondering if it was, in the end, worth it, and whether or not I was just being weird and privileged and kind of obnoxious for actually buying organic peaches to can, instead of just buying stupid jars of peaches if the kid wanted them, I noticed the variety.

Hmphf.

Today, Denise and I decided that another trip to the berry patch was in order. Jam is always a good thing, right? We picked 32 cups of berries in about two hours. It will be the work of much self-control for me not to go tomorrow too. Maybe I'll post a general "Go and get those berries" notice somewhere, just to feel like they're not going to waste.

Since it was late, three batches of jam-destined berries are macerating under plates in the basement. One bowl is sitting in the kitchen, and one bunch just got cut into in this format

 

 The boy and girl tell me it's tasty. I was waiting for two things. One, for it to cool, and two, for the Frangipane and Apricot Tart to come out of the oven and be dessert for me.

 

 Apparently freezing or jamming or canning isn't the only thing I can do with them.

Collateral Damage

The honey harvest has begun here -- which is terrific, as far as my plans for honey sales goes. In years past, I have struggled with different approaches toward rendering the honey boxes bee-free enough to handle. I tried little bee escapes that fit in the hive covers, smelly almond extract on a fume board, and this year I'd seriously considered using the exit port on the shop vac as a bee blower.

Then I went to visit my friends' new (and utterly jaw-droppingly cool) urban farm store, Pollinate Farm & Garden. It's great fun, and I got to play Mad Gardening Scientist and mix up my own fertilizer, buy plastic refrigerator lids to replace the two-part ones on open jars of jam, and then I found it. A new bee escape board! I'd never seen any like this, and for $16, it seemed like worth a try. I put it on my first hive on Sunday.

In 24 hours, the first three honey boxes were almost completely clear of bees. A $4 butterfly net from the hardware store took care of any stragglers as they flew toward the light in the basement on Monday. By afternoon, I was uncapping and extracting and everything was going well. Two very honey-covered bees were wandering around on the frames, and I tried to keep them moving toward already-extracted frames, so they could be returned to a hive and maybe licked clean.

Unfortunately, I must have missed keeping track of one, because I thought, "That couldn't be a bee inside my pant leg, right? I'm getting paranoid." About five minutes later, though, it not only was a bee, but an unhappy one pinched against my calf, with predictable results. Honey-covered though she might be, she was perfectly capable of crawling.

Twenty hours later, I have 26 pounds of jarred honey and a very swollen leg.

I've decided that when I next talk to my doctor, I'm going to ask for an epi-pen prescription just as a precaution. Generally, I just figure that I'm a vigorous sweller and that's the way it goes, but as I get older being careful just seems reasonable, and this is very unpleasant, as far as swelling calves and ankles go.

So that for the first damage.

Secondly, I'd placed the same escape from the first hive on Monday under another hives' two honey boxes, first putting an empty super on so they wouldn't be crowded as they moved down. I figured I'd do one hive a day, giving me empty supers to replace as I harvested the others.

When I went out today to pull the honey boxes, they were nice and bee-free, but there was a layer of 40-50 dead bees on top of the escape board, and some bees dead in the mesh of the board itself. I felt terrible. I don't know if it was crowded, I left it on too long (less than 24 hours), or if something else went wrong.

And I don't know if I kill more bees with any other method, either. There are always some deaths; it's just inevitable. Even if I didn't do anything, some bees are going to protect the hive by stinging, and kill themselves that way. The escape cuts down on the aggression of the harvest by many degrees.

I don't know what to do. I didn't replace it on another hive because I can't be certain I'll get to it early in the morning. Taz has something wrong with an eye and has a vet appointment, and there's day camps to get ready for, etc. So I'll do well to extract and get another super ready for harvest. Plus, I'm running out of jars and lids. . . always the same story.

Harvest Monday for real

Almost all of dinner's vegetable mass is from the garden. Three kinds of kale (thanks, Michelle, the Lark's Tongue is doing well), a few beets and carrots from the front bed. As an aside, the neighbors
are not partaking enough of that bed. Better enlarge the sign.

I probably could have found enough potatoes to make mashed potatoes for tonight, too, if I had remembered. At any rate, we're eating and I'm cleaning out that front bed.

You can see many more harvest posts at Daphne's Dandelions today (and every Monday).

Harvest Monday on Sunday

This is the "I go away for the weekend and what?" version.

Thirteen eggs (no one is checking in my absence), the first ripe Katy apricot, and what turned into a couple of pints' worth of pickled yellow wax beans.

Apparently it really is summer.

Almost Earth Day

April 20th -- first ripe strawberry of the year.

Remembering to be grateful

My days seem to race by, filled with a mix of minutia and must-dos, with little time taken for reflection and prioritizing. Anyone who saw my garden could attest to that!

I try to be really generous in my thoughts and approach -- seeking to keep focus on the long-term things and realize that, yes, the house needs sweeping but if it doesn't get done perfectly or now, it will still be sweepable tomorrow, but the family member wanting attention probably does need it now.

Friends and family far away in the path of the hurricane, or close by in the sights of devastating disease help me keep my mind on bigger things. Our weather is not at all exciting, except in the memory of how a weekend spent bodysurfing under pure California sun has morphed into seasonally-appropriate gray fog, with rain on the way.

A quick run out to the chickens (who aren't Big Picture important, but can't check their own water) and I noticed this beautiful pepper hiding in the pepper bed. Holding its cool, blocky heft, I remembered to be grateful for all the sunshine that concentrated in its sweetness.

When we eat it on salad tonight I will be grateful, indeed.

Harvest Monday, Late October version

Yesterday all of the tomatoes got pulled from the long bed, and today I'll sort the green from the red and haul all the vines away. As always, I have more ideas for next year's tomatoes. Who knows if I'll implement them? They need better and taller staking -- like jumbo cages -- from the very beginning. Maybe I'll hit Denise and Kevin up for more bamboo and use that.

It's Monday again, though, and Daphne hosts Harvest Monday at her blog. Here's my contribution, and as always, it's partial. For example, I did not photograph the green-and-red-filled trug.

The peppers keep pumping out beautiful fruit. Here's the yellow and orange ones from yesterday. They must be roasted and sort of pickled -- on goat cheese over crusty bread, it's just divine. More peppers next year!

The chickens are routinely laying 6-7 eggs a day, and oddly enough, it's not too much. Half the family has eggs for breakfast, and then there's the weekly French toast breakfast. . .

Speaking of eating a lot of food, we are really feeling the price increases in things like milk and chicken. Our food bills are growing right along with the kids! Here's what I got out of a 5 pound bag of whole wheat flour, though:

Fortunately, the freezer means I can bake once a week, or maybe twice, and generally get close enough to the amount needed for toast with those daily eggs! I am going to have to get back to making baguettes, foccacia and ciabatta, though. Buying those is pricey.

What's coming out of your garden or kitchen this week?

Oct. 1, 2012 Harvest Monday

Daphne hosts Harvest Monday on her blog -- this is mine for today.

A big panful of Sungolds, ready for roasting (and I left lots buried in the foliage), a bit of Padrons for dinner tonight, a handful of late strawberries, four hot Chili Red peppers for the fermenting sauce, a bowl of Roma and San Marzano paste tomatoes -- hello, crockpot!, a single Early Girl, and two Fuji apples, of which there is only one left. Yum. Not pictured was the Kubota red I pulled off the dry vine today.

The garden is slowing down some, but the summer-planted kale looks good, the peas need staking, and the kale and carrot seedlings are doing well. We will eat again!

Sott' olio

Farmer's market red peppers, plus homegrown orange ones, roasted and peeled. . .

Folded into jars with their researved juices, vinegar and salt, then topped with a slick of greeny extra-virgin olive oil.

I can hardly wait for the winter afternoon when I open a jar, smear some goat cheese on fresh ciabatta, drop a couple of slices of pepper on top, and bite into summer.

Subtraction, Sauce, Strawberries and Spiciness

 Busy day yesterday. The Lone Remaining Homeschooler (all remaining children having gone or been sent to school or college) spent a lot of quality time with Khan Academy, wrestling with multiple-digit borrowing. She giggles iher way through the explanatory videos, and then works out the problems, squealing when she gets them right. It's a very cheery way to do math, and I do a lot of over-shoulder looking and helping, too. A nice balance.

While she was busy, I gathered everything I needed to do some canning. A recipe for fermented hot sauce sounded appealing, or at least appealing to make, if not to consume. I had a fancy pickling jar cookie jar from Target ready and available, plus lots of too-hot-for-me peppers. And, weeks late, I managed to harvest from the abundant apple tree down the street. Two shopping bags were all I could reach standing on the ground, and I fear I missed the peak of the harvest, judging by the amount of apples on the ground. Alas. Anyhow, I was set up for a fun morning of putting things in jars.

To make the sauce, first the immersion blender to chop things up. The thought of my plastic food processor being coated with high-octane pepper juice sort of distressed me, but this was a difficult substitution. It got easier when I pre-chopped the peppers. (Duh.)

A towel was supposed to prevent flying bits and clouds of gas. It worked, sort of. I still ended up coughing a lot.

Pretty soon it became obvious that there was not enough of the good red peppers to make a generous sauce. Sacrificing aesthetics, I grabbed every hot or semi-hot pepper I could find, and chopped them into the slurry.

Less attractive, huh? My trusty silicone spatula scraped everything down into a flattish disc.

Because there is no plate in the house which fits snugly in the crock/jar, I used a bag of brine to weigh down the mush.

That done and set aside, I turned my attention to the apples. I think these are some sort of Golden Delicious, and they are, in fact, delicious. I managed to get nearly all perfect ones and washed off the dust. Since this tree is completely neglected, I feel confident that they harbor no pesticides, and only a few pesty things besides dirt.

I didn't peel or cor them, just cut out bad spots like this and quartered them until my pot was full.

It took them over an hour to cook down at low heat -- and I did keep adding some water as scorching kept threatening. Stir, stir, cook, cook, over and over.

That was fun, and at the end I used the Foley Food Mill Denise had gifted me with to make the peels and seeds and any non-nice bits go away and leave me with lovely apple sauce. I asked the kids to taste it and they said it was fine, just the right amount of sugar. Funny, that, it was just apples! Win for me! I did add a touch of lemon juice and then canned it up. The one potful gave me four pints and a quart. Which I did not photograph. You've all seen canned goods.

By that time, Denise and Oona were here! Hooray! However, my house is no longer toddler-proof, and after 30 minutes of her opening the freezer and saying, "Ice? Ice?" I decided that the adorable 20 month old's talents could be better focused outside. Things to pick! Tomatoes, which will lead to another round of Things In Jars tonight.

Helpful toddlers are the very best kind.

One run through the pepper patch and the tomatoes were disappearing under Pizza my Heart in front, and Padron in back.

I complained about the hot bird-type pepper and Denise sagely said, "Tear it out, if you don't like it." Well. Hadn't thought too much of that one, so out it went. It was a big plant, shading the peppers around it and falling on one other plant. That poor wire cage was no match for it.

Between all three of us, though, we picked the plant clean. I'm going to try to give some away to the homeschoolers today, and drop the rest off at the food bank. Surely someone likes really hot peppers?

As a reward for all her hard work, Oona got a basket of just-picked strawberries.

Probably the best way to hook future labor inculcate a love of gardening, right?

Probably the best end to a productive afternoon I could have thought of.