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.