Year of the Pepper

My first year of gardening was "The Year of the Cantaloupe." I learned that when the melons are ripe, they scream "I'm ready!" by setting sail a hypnotizing sweet smell on the prevailing breezes (kind of like the way the local grocery store pipes the rotisserie chicken fumes up to the main entrance right around dinner time, but with a great deal more magic.) Several years later, when I started mini-farming in central New York, there was "The Year of the Potato" and "The Year of the Carrot." The blue potatoes were big and beautiful. We ate the new red potatoes like candy and harvested many of them as they bulked up before fall. The next year the carrots were mediocre in the spring and summer, but when I left them in the ground until December and then dug them up from their snowy hiding place, I was sure I had discovered buried treasure. They were big, sweet and very, very pretty (for carrots).

This year I am rich in red bell peppers. I've never had much luck with them in the past. I think I got one notable yellow bell pepper several years ago from my "shade-grown" garden under a massive Norway maple behind our rented house. So far this year, we've eaten seven or eight and given away several more. There are at least 15 more out in the garden. I plucked green peppers earlier in the season from the eight laden pepper plants so that they would focus their energies on just two or three on each plant. The habanero, serrano and jalapeno plants aren't doing too bad, either. Perhaps the soil is very good there. Maybe it was the moderate weather (not too wet, not too dry). I think it helped that I was gone for two weeks and returned to the stoplight red fruits glowing like they were electrified.

Thus far, we've eaten them fresh or roasted them for burrito stuffings. I'm not sure I'll need to preserve any, but we'll see. Maybe I can do some roasting and freezing. Now, I'm just pinching myself that I have pounds and pounds of organic, sweet red peppers right in my back yard.

Vacation

We're doing some backpacking these next two weeks. I dried some tomatoes for the trip. I'm leaving the beans, that have been so productive this summer, to fizzle out. Also, the tomatoes are showing signs of late blight. (I get an ominous feeling when I go out there lately.) We'll see what's going on when we return in mid-September.

Here are some pictures from the trip:

Food

Two weeks ago, I sent Chris to the office with a large bag of summer squash as a stealthy attempt to implement my "trickle down squash" theory of gardening. The fact is that I am rich in summer squash. I go out to my garden and gather a pile of this golden fruit and bring it in to the kitchen for immediate use. If we can smuggle this stuff to office kitchen counters around the city, we'll be able to spread the wealth. Almost all of the squash was swiped by co-workers. Unfortunately, the papaya pear summer squashes were the last to be adopted. I think it's a matter of education. These little pear-shaped squashes are less watery than the traditional yellow summer squashes, and can be used in exactly the same ways. I used both kinds of squashes in the torte below.

Smitten Kitchen's Summer Squash and Potato Torte. I used our pink and purple potatoes and cooked it in the iron skillet.

Friday night's pepperoni-zucchini pizza. Underneath the toppings is a tomato sauce I cooked up with our yellow jubilee tomatoes from the garden (and froze until I needed it). It was amazing!

Cucumbers, tomatoes, feta, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil.

Tomato Horned Worms

First, I found these.

Then, I noticed this.

I was out in the garden, talking on the phone, when I started to notice little - no, big - poops on the tomato leaves. Distracted by my conversation, I wasn't predicting what I was going to find as I followed the stems upward. Whoa, momma! The first caterpillar I found was staring me right in the face when I finally spotted it. It always works this way, you finally find the culprit and then the signs are everywhere! There were four huge caterpillars. There's probably one left out there that will completely mow down the entire tomato patch tonight.

I wanted to feed them to the rooster.

But he (that polished off a pound of rotten potato salad and two-thirds of a loaf of bread) won't try them. I even tried 'the airplane' and the fake eating "num, num, num, num!"

Tastes Like Pickle

I don't even like pickles. I just ate two. They're crunchy, and if I liked pickles, I'd eat more. Okay, I might eat more. Everything tastes better when you make it!

However, I just discovered a more suitable use (for me) of my loads of cucumbers on Urban Veggie Garden Blog here. We had this for dinner last night. Chris said, "This is why you have a garden, isn't it?" Oh yes, oh yes. Feta makes it beta.

Some Minor Food Preservation Tasks

This is my first pickle adventure. I made 4 quarts using the Betty Crocker recipe I found in my cookbook. These are not fermented, they're "canned." I just boiled up some vinegar, water, and salt, and added it to the sliced cucumbers, garlic, and fresh dill waiting in the jars. I processed them in the boiling water bath for the 10 minutes the recipe said to (and then I plugged them into the wall). I added crushed hot peppers to two of the jars because peppers seem to make everything better. I haven't eaten them yet because you have to wait a week. It would be great if they taste good, but I really just hope they don't kill anyone.

And on that note, I will share another food preservation task I've been doing a lot of lately: freezing green beans. First, I'm kind of afraid of the pressure-canner. Really, I'm not sure that kind of equipment is for me. Sure, I've felled trees with a chainsaw and driven some really questionable pick-up trucks, but this pressure-canner stuff isn't something I want to jump into without a guru nearby. Somehow I've always known that I should stay from things that could explode. Plus, Chris and I decided to invest in a freezer for the deer (and other assorted small animals he kills) and the chickens we were raising. So that leaves me with plenty of space for frozen fruits and vegetables. Barring an extended power outage or the Peak Oil scenario coming true in the next couple of years, I think the freezing option is really the best. Frozen stuff tastes better and has more goodness left because you haven't boiled the hell out of it.

But you do have to do a bit of boiling to keep the natural enzymes from breaking down the vegetables and turning them into cardboard, even while they're frozen.

I start by rinsing the sand and Japanese beetle guts (I'll explain later) off of the beans.

Then I cut the stems off and slice the beans into shorter pieces so as to avoid flinging butter all over the dining room table and my face at dinner time. (Who am I kidding? We eat while sitting on the couch. All the more reason to avoid long bean pods, I suppose.)

These sexy beans are waiting for the water to get to a rolling boil.

Here's the set-up. Left: pot of boiling water with a strainer for easy removal of beans. (I tried picking them out with my fingers one at a time and decided there must be an easier way.) Right: big bowl of icy water. Get that water rollin' and dump in the beans. Boil for 3 minutes. Cool them in ice water for 3 minutes.

These beans are chillin'. Three minutes (or until I get done checking Facebook). Then I bag 'em into dinner-size servings, smoosh all the air out, and freeze.

I know: so simple. I don't care. I'm just learning how to do this stuff right. Thank goodness for the internets.

Rainy Day Retrospective

Hey, check this out: some "then" and "now" pics, along with some "Where's Waldo?" (Where's Molly? Where's the Llama?) and "Bobbing for Tomatoes" nonsense.

Carrots are covered so that the groundhog forgets that they're there. The broccoli stumps are still there just because I find it hard to give up. The lettuce needs to be pulled. Now's the time to plant my last batch of lettuce, spinach and maybe some carrots and radishes in the vacant spots.

The sad, half-harvested potato patch. Not the biggest success this year. But the beans to the left are going nuts! Actually, I really should be freezing more right now.

Bobbing for tomatoes.

The squashes got a pretty heavy dose of mildew, but they have fresh, new growth. No sign of squash-vine borers, whew. The sunflowers are 10 feet tall.

I want to add here that I've been thinking a little about my gardening style. This is the best any of my gardens have ever looked at this time of the year. I kind of like the overgrown heaps that happen in August and September. I get some pretty amazing stuff from very ugly gardens. I do love to see beautifully manicured and planned gardens, but I can't seem to make it happen.