The End of Summer: Harvesting and Canning

Pasta with homemade pesto & homegrown parsley & tomatoes

Yesterday I took the last big batch of basil that I had harvested from my kitchen garden and whipped up some pesto. I had meant to freeze some of the pesto in ice trays but then couldn't find the ice trays because they had been stored somewhere I can't recall when we had the kitchen remodeled this summer. My son-in-law, whose recipe for pesto I mostly followed, freezes his pesto in a small jar to use as needed. For last night's dinner, I mixed the fresh pesto with warm pasta, Sungold tomatoes and parsley that I had gathered that day in the big garden and in my kitchen garden. What a yummy dish that was.

Adam adds arugula to his pesto, and I have done that, too, as well as making an all-arugula pesto. The last time I made arugula pesto, however, the pesto was so bitter that I threw it out. Perhaps the leaves had been too old and tough, or maybe I need to do what Adam does: include a small portion  of arugula and a larger portion of basil in the recipe (Adam also substitutes spinach for the smaller portion of arugula).

What is the best thing about gardening? Is it the winter planning, the leafing through gardening catalogs or, these days, scrolling online through gardening and seed source websites?  Is it watching those first seedlings magically appear? Or going out every morning to check on the ripeness of tomatoes? Or is it harvesting the produce, eating it fresh, or canning it for later?

This past weekend, in the middle of tomato canning, Tom said, "I love doing this!" The tomato canning continues over weeks as tomatoes ripen on the vines in the big garden and in the greenhouse. We grew a lot of yellow tomatoes this summer (Lemon Boy, Golden Jubilee, Big Rainbow) that Tom canned separately from the red tomatoes.

On the left, Tom's canned tomatoes; on the right, his canned beets

After we returned from our daughter's wedding in Georgia, I gathered grapes from the large vine that we've trained to grow on the chain-link walls of my Secret Garden room (a dog kennel left by the previous owners that I decorated as an outdoor room). Birds had eaten quite a few of the grapes--I often startled a juvenile robin among the grape vines this summer--but there were enough grapes left for sixteen half-pints of what I labelled our Lavender Blue Grape Jelly. I suggested to Tom that he add some lavender blooms from my kitchen garden to flavor the jelly.

a bunch of grapes on our grapevine

more grapes than apples this year (late freeze killed the apple blossoms)

Here at the foot of the White Mountains, an early freeze can take out a garden with tomatoes still green on the vine. Several days ago we had a couple of nights of predicted freezing temperatures, so I gathered all the peppers and many of the tomatoes, leaving a lot of green tomatoes, hoping that temperatures wouldn't drop so low as to kill the vines completely. We are still in the process of freezing and drying the bumper crop of poblano peppers. Tom has put to good use the dehydrator I bought for him a few months ago.

an anxious harvest before a freeze

a tomato galette I made with Sungold and Indigo Ruby tomatoes

My aunt Lynelle Sikora suggested that I make chow chow out of the green tomatoes, so we did a test run of a small batch this past weekend.  I knew I liked chow chow as I had grown up eating it as a side dish, but I wanted to make sure that we both liked it well enough to make several pints instead of a few half-pints. The end result was tasty, so I have decided to can more of the sweet tomato relish this week.

The tomato mix (green tomatoes, red and green peppers, onion, pickling and canning salt) stands in the fridge overnight. Then the mixture is drained before cooking it with spices.

green tomato relish mix cooking in the spices (light brown sugar, yellow mustard seeds, whole cloves, minced garlic, celery seed, red pepper flakes--I used three red peppers from my kitchen garden rather than dried pepper flakes)

a small batch of chow chow

After the next round or two of tomato canning, it will be time to clear the garden in preparation for next year. I will then clean out the chicken pen, raking up all the straw, chicken crap, and vegetable matter remaining from the scraps I and my neighbor have thrown to the chickens this summer. I'll fill up a wheelbarrow with the yard waste as well as the waste from inside the henhouse and spread it all on the garden. Winter's snow will pack it down, and in the spring, Tom and I will dig the composted chicken waste into the soil to feed another summer garden.

I still have a few herbs I hope to dry for the winter, and then my gardening for this year will be done. But our firewood gathering for the winter has just begun.

At Casa Malpollos: Chickens, of course

When I was a child, my father bought several unusual chickens, among them Turkens (Naked Necks) and Frizzles. There were others, but these are the ones I remember the most because they were so unusual,  so unlike the white Leghorns that my dad's mother, Margaret Cole Dugat, raised for meat and for eggs. Daddy wanted us to experience these unusual chicken breeds, and I credit, to some extent, a tendency to delight in the exotic and different to that early childhood experience of watching these chickens peck around the yard on our 8 acres of family land in Old River, Texas. Our home place had been carved out of woodland that was passed down through several generations and was situated on a hill across an oyster shell-covered road from my dad's parents' home and his birthplace. I and my siblings ran around barefoot all summer long, and as sharp as oyster shells can be, they did not penetrate the tough soles of our hardened feet.

These days, though I walk around bare-footed or sock-footed in my house all day when I am home, I can't walk barefoot onto the gravel-covered backyard that we now own without wincing and pussy-footing just as my cats do. The cats are smarter; they walk on the gravel for the minimal amount of time it takes to get to a smoother surface, such as the railroad ties that border the gravel surface or the larger rocks in the faux stream bed that winds through the back yard. 

As soon as Tom and I had a big enough place on which to raise chickens, I ordered a full run of chicks, choosing a mix of Silver-laced Wyandottes and Ameraucanas. This was the  late 1980s and early 1990s when we rented a small house on a large ranch in Bryan, Texas. The chickens, when grown, roosted in a small wooden henhouse that Tom built on posts. They ran free on the ranch during the day. Because I had ordered a straight run of twenty-one chicks, we had no way of knowing the ratio of hens to roosters until the chickens got old enough to begin demonstrating male or female behavior. There were eleven roosters in that run, and they gave the hens hell until we put all but one rooster in the freezer.

When we moved from Bryan, Texas, to Cloquet, Minnesota, we gave the remaining chickens to the young couple who rented the house after we did. We didn't have chickens again--Ameraucanas--until after we moved to Georgia in 1996. Of that batch of chickens, I chose to keep the prettiest rooster, who also turned out to be the meanest. Our daughter hated that rooster. It met an untimely death when it attacked Tom one day as he was carrying a large flat of tomato seedlings to the garden to be planted. 

the mean rooster in our backyard in Georgia

These days, however, Tom is a quasi-vegetarian (avoids meat except fish and crawfish and eats dairy products such as milk, eggs, and cheese) and I am a flexitarian in that I occasionally eat meat, so we are most interested in having laying hens. We had inherited some chickens from the previous owners of this house: one met death by hawk, two died of illnesses, and the roosters ended up being stewed with dumplings. Nine hens now roost in the henhouse: three from the previous flock and six Silver-Laced Wyandottes that we purchased as days-old chicks from a local feed store. The three old hens are a white Leghorn, a black hen that may be an Australorpe, and a red hen that could be a Rhode Island Red. They are almost past their laying years, with the red hen and the white Leghorn still laying eggs but the black hen not.

After a little bantam hen of the original flock was killed by a hawk one evening last fall, we hadn't let the hens out to free forage for almost a year. To make sure they don't become supper for some predator, we have to remain outside to watch them if we let them out of their covered chicken run. However, I like for chickens to have some freedom of the yard, and I was just waiting for the Wyandottes to get older and for me to find the time to sit in the yard to watch while they roamed. I found that time one day last week.

I placed a patio chair under a large juniper tree in the backyard and opened the chicken yard gate. No sooner had I returned to the chair to sit than a small hawk flew into the tree, landing on a branch right over my head. "Oh, no you don't," I screamed and startled the hawk. It flew away, and I moved my chair next to the chicken yard to keep a closer watch on the hens as they ventured out. 

A closer encounter between hens and possible predator occurred later when our cat Persephone (Persey) approached me, mewing for her evening meal. But neither of our cats seems interested in the chickens for food. Cassie is so cautious around them as to seem fearful at times. Persey's first encounter with the young hens outside the hen yard was almost anti-climactic, with the hens showing more interest in her than she in them. 

One of the Wyandottes checks out Persey

Persey seems to be avoiding a direct encounter with the hen.

More hens wander over to investigate.

Some kind of confab seems to be going on.

Eye contact is made and perhaps some secret deal struck between them all.

The meeting is over. Persey is outnumbered and outweighed.

Cassie watches more cautiously from a place in hiding.

I don't really view my chickens as pets, but I am fond of them. I feed them seeds that I have gathered from the stalks of cowpen daisies that bloomed wildly in the back yard in late summer, vegetable matter left over from chopping veggies for dinner, and greens that are going to seed in my kitchen garden. The hens hear my shoes grating on the gravel as I walk to the pen, and they come running, suspecting that I am bringing them something tastier than the gray laying pellets that fill their feeders. I have seen too many chickens slaughtered, have plucked feathers still warm from the hot water into which the limp, dead bodies have been plunged, to be any more than an enemy at truce. 

But even enemies can develop a cautious affection in the right circumstances. I watch these birds that are distantly related to dinosaurs and realize we are all evolving.

Up, Up, and Away: Making a Wedding Pinata

pinata by Anita, photo by Joe Le Doux

A couple of weeks ago, we flew from Phoenix to Atlanta to attend our daughter's wedding at the Trolley Barn. Mary-Margaret and her husband Adam had tied the knot earlier in March (on Pi Day) at a courthouse in Seattle, so the wedding event in Atlanta was the family and friends celebration, with Mary-Margaret wearing the wedding dress that my mother had worn at her wedding, that I had altered to wear at my wedding, and that Mary-Margaret had restored and altered for her wedding. Rather than throwing rice (verboten, anyway, at most wedding venues these days) or blowing bubbles or lighting sparklers at the end of the event, I suggested that I make a pinata. I had made a pinata only once before, years ago, for Tom's birthday, so the first task was to find really good instructions on, of course, the Internet. And pinataboy.com came through for me.

In my research, I discovered that pinatas are frequently included in weddings these days, with a hot air balloon being a favorite design, along with wedding cake-shaped pinatas and heart-shaped pinatas. I did a trial run on the shell, making a test pinata with a large punch balloon as the form over which to paste the the strips of newspaper. Pinataboy advises that punch balloons make an oval shape, just right for the design I had in mind--a hot air balloon, an idea originating  with my remembering the hot air balloon mobile Mary-Margaret had made for Adam a few years ago that now hangs in their apartment. I ordered a set of 12 punch ball balloons from Oriental Trading Company. That should be plenty, I thought, for my test run and final edition of the wedding pinata. Having those extra balloons was a good idea as I popped at least two of them by blowing them up too large, startling the cats.

Months before starting on the pinata, I had cut strips of paper from the free local news and market publication that gets thrown near my mailbox once a week. These strips of newspaper, soaked in flour paste, would create the paper mache layers of the pinata. I then created a hook from the pinata out of a clothes hanger, cut down to size. I punched the top of the clothes hanger through a rectangular-shaped piece of cardboard and bent the ends of the metal over opposite ends of the cardboard. All of this went into a box in my craft supply closet until I was ready to make the final shell of the pinata toward the end of July. (We were having our kitchen remodeled so I waited until most of that work was done before taking over the kitchen island again with pinata-making supplies.)

Here are a few photos I took of the process: 

The first layer of newspaper is taped to the balloon and over the cardboard on which I had attached the hook (the loop of a metal clothes hanger).

Here I have finished a layer of the flour paste-covered strips of newspaper, and I've placed a fan near the pinata to hasten the drying time.

I completed at least five layers of the flour-paste covered newspaper strips, with six or seven layers in areas that I wanted to strengthen (such as around the hook). Since mostly adults would be whopping away at this pinata, I wanted it to be strong enough to withstand several attacks with a pinata stick.

After finishing the shell of the pinata, I had to cut crepe paper streamers (also ordered from Oriental Trading Company) to size (about 6-10 inches, to be further reduced in size to fit the shape of the pinata design) and then to snip fringes in the streamer pieces. This is a tedious process; I much prefer the messiness of coating the strips of newspaper in flour paste and smoothing the wet pieces onto the pinata shell.

Finally, after days of working on the pinata shell, it's time to paste the crepe paper fringe to the pinata. One starts at the bottom and works upward toward the top of the pinata. The blue sticks you see there poking out of the bottom are wooden chop sticks that I punched through the pinata and then painted, to serve as holders from which to hang the basket of the hot air balloon.

Gluing the fringe is also rather tedious.  It didn't help that I got very sick for a week during this time. In the background, in front of the mirror, is the shell of the test pinata.

Almost finished with the fringe

A bit of bling for the top: satin ribbon, paper roses, and rhinestone stickers purchased from Michael's in Flagstaff

I recycled a small box for the basket of the hot air balloon, covered it with matching crepe paper fringe, added some satin roses and ribbons for decoration, and hung it from the painted chop sticks with red satin ribbon. 

Completed hot air balloon with basket

For the finishing touch, I wanted to add small dolls to the basket to represent Mary-Margaret and Adam. My first thought was to look for used Barbie dolls, but in a search on Etsy and E-bay, I couldn't find anything really appropriate, so I began looking for alternatives. I found the perfect dolls in Lottie Dolls, dolls created as alternatives to the weirdly proportioned Barbies, and ordered a "Fossil Hunter Lottie Doll" and a "Kite-flyer Finn Boy Doll." 

Lottie Dolls added to pinata

And so my work was done. I packed up the pinata, along with the goodies I had purchased to put inside (packages of seeds from Renee's Garden Seeds, packages of single serving tea from Tea Forte, pin-back buttons with photos of Mary-Margaret and Adam, and a few miniature Star Wars figures), and mailed it to the in-laws in Decatur, Georgia. There Adam's mom had gourmet candy, Star Wars-packaged jelly beans, and some more miniature figures to add to the fun. I didn't cut the access panel into the pinata until I arrived in Decatur and we were ready to stuff the pinata.

The pinata arrives safely in Decatur, Georgia, while the area is still feeling the effects of Hurricane Irma, six days before the wedding.

A young cousin prepares to hit the pinata (yes, we removed the basket and dolls)--Note the pinata stick, which I made from a one-inch dowel rod. I covered the bottom of the rod with turquoise-colored craft electrical tape for the handle and pasted matching crepe paper fringe on the rest.

Adam holds the rope while his friend and marriage officiant Joe takes a whack.

Taking aim

Finally, Mary-Margaret and Adam took center stage with the pinata.

Pinata bashing was a perfect end to a wedding that began with music performed by the wedding party with guitar and kazoos and wedding vows that included quotes from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.

Going into Fall: Garden Update

Here near the White Mountains of Arizona, the tomatoes in our outside garden began ripening in August after the cherry tomatoes in our greenhouse began turning golden and red in late July. Again this year, we have way more cherry tomatoes than we can eat right away so Tom began dehydrating them. They are very tasty dried, crunchy and tart-sweet, and I can't wait to try them in a pasta dish or soup this winter. 

The basil, which I planted in July, took a little longer to grow in the cooler monsoon weather. The plants certainly don't grow as tall here as they did in the warmer, wetter climate of southeastern Louisiana. Next year I'm going to try growing a few basil plants in our greenhouse, where this summer and last, tomato plants have pushed against the ceiling and walls, making the greenhouse a maze to negotiate. Later I plan to make some pesto with basil that I picked yesterday and today; the plants are beginning to bloom, but I've been pinching the blooms, hoping to encourage more growth in the last warm days of late summer.

I am very happy with my kitchen garden, which took a little while to take off in the cooler weather of spring and early summer. We will see if any of the perennials--rosemary, oregano, thyme, mint--will survive the winter.

kitchen garden in back yard

basil, orange mint, rosemary in kitchen garden

peppers, oregano, basil, thyme, parsley, tarragon in kitchen garden

In mid-summer, I planted sunflower seeds from a packet I had bought off a local hardware shelf, and those plants are now blooming. A couple of sunflower plants sprouted early in the garden, free sown probably by some passing bird, and those began blooming in the early summer. I love a garden that's a little messy with such surprises, unexpected blooms and wildly overgrown plants exhibiting their uncontained nature. 

sunflower surprise--Winds blew down one plant, but it continued to bloom

This past weekend I dug the potatoes that Tom planted in the early summer. The harvest was not quite as large as we had hoped from the one row that Tom planted of white potatoes he bought at a nursery in a nearby town and the few red potatoes he planted from a grocery purchase that had sprouted in our pantry. However, those white potatoes are very tasty cooked with the purple snap beans we planted. I add sauteed onions and garlic to peeled and diced potatoes and snap beans and just barely cover with homemade vegetable stock, cooking until the potatoes are soft and the beans still slightly chewy. Tonight I think I'll cook the potatoes with dill from my kitchen garden. 

The potato digging begins.

the first pail of white potatoes

The squash was very prolific and is still blooming though the blooms are fewer than earlier in the summer. Tom saved the seed from plants we grew last year, and at least one of the plants that sprouted seems to have crossed with gourds that I grew last year, a little too green-tasting for consumption so I am letting the fruits grow to see if they will harden like gourds. If the cross-pollinated fruits prove disappointing as gourds, maybe the chickens will like the seeds. The peppers we grew also produced well. I love cooking vegetable casseroles with various combinations of bell peppers, poblano peppers, squash, onions, tomatoes, and grated cheeses. 

Gardening ..... good for...

the body...

...and soul...

Enough at summer's end
(from my journal)

Cassie the cat chews on leaves of blue grama
in the shade of a pear tree planted
by a previous owner undaunted by 12-inch annual precipitation
in this Round Valley of volcanic mountains and ancient ridges of lava flows.
The leaves of cowpen daisy shrivel in the dry approaching fall,
summer's monsoon now a memory of moisture.
Cassie curls up in soft mounds of last year's hay I scattered
to mulch the wilder area of our backyard,
flags of blue grama waving above her in the breeze.
Her ears twitch at every sound--a neighbor's truck slipping into a covered drive,
a bird calling from a nearby, summer-long unmowed yard,
a small dog barking, and the dry whir of grasshopper wings.
As I sit here the pain in my jaw recedes, 
a lifetime of teeth problems willed away by quiet beauty.
For a little while, this moment, this blue sky, these fading flowers, 
and the companionship of a shade camouflaged cat....
are enough.

Anita

And When They are Old They will not Depart from It

I began gardening as a young child, hoeing weeds in my parents' garden, picking peas in my maternal grandmother's garden, and working in the flower beds of my paternal grandmother's garden. As a child, I wandered the fence rows of the eight acres we lived on in Old River, Texas, picking blackberries and nibbling on the seeds of peppergrass. Those eight acres were once a part of a much larger portion of land owned by some of my ancestors, the remaining of which my grandparents and an uncle owned, across the gravel-topped road of Woodland Lane from our house on a hill.

When I was a teenager, one of my first cousins became interested in gathering wild food; I think Karen had read a book by Euell Gibbons, the natural foods guy whom I remember from his claim that many parts of a pine tree are edible. Several of us tested that claim by brewing up some pine needle tea. It tasted terrible, even with added sugar. Then we crawled under a barbed wire fence to gather purslane (Portulaca oleracea) in a pasture next to my cousin's house. Karen had directions on how to cook this prolific plant native to India and Persia; though it's grown as food elsewhere, it's primarily considered a weed in the U.S., except for its cousin, the moss rose (Portulaca grandiflora), which is grown for its colorful flowers.

We boiled the purslane in a pot on my aunt's stove and added butter and salt. I remember having a chance to taste it--a flavor I compared to boiled okra--before my uncle "cottoned on" to what we were doing. He grabbed the pot and flung its contents out into the backyard. "You're going to poison yourselves!" he yelled, thus cutting short our culinary adventure. He was afraid that we hadn't identified the plant accurately.

I haven't eaten purslane since though I have often pulled it up as a weed.

However, those early gardening and foraging experiences have remained with me as I have long been an avid gardener. As college students in the early 1980s, Tom and I gardened in a small plot on land owned by Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. The university would hire someone to disk up the land and then divide the land into plots. Those of us who lived in married student housing were then invited to choose a plot on which to raise vegetables. We did this for two or three years and grew such a good garden that students toiling in neighboring plots were envious of our success. They were convinced that we had somehow managed to procure a naturally better plot than they--though our trucking in chicken manure from the Poultry Science department and my getting on my hands and knees to pull weeds were the true causes of our success.

So one year, someone rushed to choose the plot we had had the previous year, and, coming in later to the choosing process, we ended up with a corner plot that hadn't been improved. Not daunted, we improved that plot as well, and somewhere I have a faded photo of my twenty-something self standing among flourishing green corn stalks.

Tom and I have gardened together ever since those early days of our marriage as poor college students, from Texas to Louisiana, to Minnesota, to Georgia, and back again in those three states before our latest gardening experiences here below the White Mountains in eastern Arizona. Over the years we've tried new plants, such as mesclun mixes and arugula, some of my now-favorites for green salads, which I first began growing in central Texas. In the late 1990s in Georgia, we began experimenting with heirloom tomatoes, such as Green Zebra, Yellow Pear, and Cherokee Purple. I would slice up a colorful collection of heirloom tomatoes, season the slices with a little salt and arrange them on a white platter--a dish I called "tomato snacks" to encourage my young children to eat their vegetables. The colorful palette worked.

For almost 40 years, Tom and I have planned our spring gardens together, reviewing the stock of seed we have saved from previous years, poring over seed catalogs, drawing up ideas for new garden arrangements. I imagine that as long as we have a plot of land somewhere, we'll be gardening until we are unable to hold a hoe in our hands or press seeds into soil. 

our Arizona garden, early August 2017

the kitchen garden in mid-July

This is the first time I have grown hollyhocks successfully--and these came up volunteer.

This is one of several different pepper plants--getting big!

from Fall/Winter 2008, Atlanta Review