Rule number 4: Eat leaves with holes in them

I would never be able to be self-sufficient in veggies if I wasn't willing to eat leaves with holes in them.  Lettuce leaves, broccoli leaves, cabbage leaves - all of them will have some bug damage.  Of course they will, I'm completely organic in my production methods.  But just because the leaves have been munched on by something else, doesn't mean you shouldn't munch on them.  They're perfectly fine - as long as you wash off whatever it was that was doing the first munching.  ;-)

I collected some of my spring cabbage today (1 lb of loose leaves) and here's how it looked:

I will make it into coleslaw and no one will be the wiser - except me.

One note on spring cabbage, kale, cauliflower and broccoli: so far I have had very little luck.  No cauliflower at all, and you can see how loose the heads of cabbage are.  I got a 1oz head of broccoli - the largest one I got this spring, woohoo (sarcastic).  I'm fairly frustrated at that, but it means I should plant more spring peas I guess.  I'll plant fall broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage and see how that goes.

Zucchini harvest and "keeper" recipe

This year the zucchini is coming early - two medium ones that weighed almost a pound and a half.  They are Black Beauty - this year the first to mature.  Lungo Bianco and Cocozelle are on the vine, but not near ready to harvest.

OK.  Nice...but what to do with them?  I've been wanting to make some different recipes (grilled zucchini can only take you so far) and our neighbor Lisa found a recipe on pinterest for Zucchini cakes - like crab cakes only with zucchini.  This is what I decided to try.  Lisa came over and we amended the recipe a bit - here's what I did:

The two zucchini above, grated
1 large egg
1 cup cracker crumbs
Chardonnay smoked salt (from our other neighbor Celia) - to taste
7 leaves chopped fresh basil
2 medium garlic cloves, crushed
1 extremely small onion, grated
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Squish the zucchini in your hands above the sink - getting the excess water/juice out
Mix all ingredients in a bowl
Heat non-stick pan and put tablespoon-full dollops into pan, flattening slightly
Brown and turn over, brown other side
Put on cookie sheets and broil on low for a minute or less - just to make a bit crispier

 After tasting them, we decide that this recipe is "a keeper"!  She thinks her sons will even like them, and took one home for them to taste test.  A great use of fresh zucchini, and it was so fast that it didn't even make the house hot.

Pet-able chipmunk

We spend a lot of time outside.  Our patio is another room during the spring, summer and fall - it is where we spend the majority of our time.  And we enjoy watching the birds, butterflies, bats, rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks as we eat, pay our bills, plant seeds, weigh our produce, etc.  On our patio we started feeding the chipmunks so they would become tame.  Last year we invited chipmunks to come eat sunflower seeds, scattering them near our chairs.  A short-tailed chipmunk took us up on our offer and started coming when she heard our voices.  This is Stumpy.  (So named because she has a short tail.)  She is the bravest, most brazen chipmunk ever.  She lets us pet her.  She is awesome.

This is the second year of feeding and petting Stumpy.  She now comes to the patio when she hears our voices and has even jumped up on our legs.  We think she is letting us know that she wants more sunflower seeds when she does that.  She has avoided cats, fought with other chipmunks, and generally become the ruler of the patio when sunflower seeds are to be gotten.  She is smart and wonderful and so much fun to feed.  How lucky we are to have animal friends!

Peas finally!

I've been wanting to do a blog about my lousy pea harvest this year.  I've been extremely upset at the small amount of peas I've harvested, sure that last year it was much better and these two types of peas must be horrid for the IL garden.  This year I planted Dakota and Serge, while last year I had Lincoln and Knight.  Same amount of space - 16 square feet.  Up to now I'd only gotten a tiny bit of peas - not more than 5oz of shelled peas at most.  For shame!  And the ones still on the vine didn't seem to be plumping up either.

I was intent on letting people know about this year's experiment and how it paled in comparison to last year's.  Ha!  How wrong I was! 

This morning, before blogging about it, I decided I had to harvest and then go back to last year's records in order to check my memory - and get the exact stats on last year's harvest.  This morning I harvested a lot actually:

One pound and 10 oz of peas in the shell, amounting to 10 oz of shelled peas!  Well, guess what, last year by June 25 I had only harvested 7 oz of shelled peas.  This year, by June 22, I had harvested about 15 oz!  Obviously my memory of last year's garden isn't to be relied on.  It's a good thing I keep detailed notes.  That's the value of record keeping - I've found that no matter how sure I am of remembering how good or bad the harvest was, I never really can remember.

Here is my setup: peach tea, scale, and basket of peas waiting to be shelled, with my handy harvest record notebook at the ready...

Last year I was finished with the pea harvest July 11 and I had harvested 1 pound and 5 oz total.  This year, it seems, Serge and Dakota are giving Lincoln and Knight a run for their money...we'll see how it actually turns out, using facts instead of my memory!

Dill experiment

We have so much dill this year.  And it's huge now, and flowering.  But there are no cucumbers yet for pickles, or haricots verts for dilly beans, or even carrots to pickle.  I'm worried the dill will be done by the time I'm ready to can all the year's pickles.  In an effort to avoid this potential disaster I've decided to experiment.  I picked a bunch of dill and am freezing it.  Dried dill doesn't work well in pickles - as my daughter found out, it turns the broth brown.  So this is a potential solution (besides using dill seeds, which I will apparently have plenty of).  I've got my fingers crossed!

Pressure

I don't know about you, but this is the time of year when I start to feel a slight bit of food-related pressure.  Harvest season is about to get into full swing, and I have social occasions planned.  I know this doesn't sound like something that would create stress (hmmm...poor thing, she socializes for goodness sakes!), but I want to be able to do everything.  For example, today I left work early to try to get some wild raspberries harvested before meeting friends for dinner.  When I got home there just wasn't the time to change clothes, water the melons, feed the birds, harvest our own raspberries and still have time to walk down the road for the wild berries before leaving for dinner.  And those berries need to be picked, after all, they provide us with our year's worth of jam. 

Tomorrow I'm going downtown on the train for a work meeting, then meeting more friends for a free concert in the park in Arlington Heights in the evening.  When am I going to get to the berries?  I love spending time with friends and family but there are plants to be checked on, weeding to do, and most importantly - the harvest to be picked.  It's the time of year when it seems like there's just not enough time in the day.  On the other hand, as I sit here typing, I  slowly realize that this pressure is nothing compared to high-tech organizational politics...so I think I'm getting a little too obsessive about all this.  Maybe the friends and family and farming go better together than I realize, it's the work that's getting in the way!  ;-) 

(By the way, if you're a folk music lover and you live in the area, you should come to Arlington Heights tomorrow evening - The Small Potatoes are playing and they are absolutely wonderful!  A bonus: they are our neighbors.) 

The planned garden

This blog is for my colleague and friend's husband, who was interested in my square foot planting method and all the produce I can get from a thoughtfully designed space.  Nate - I hope this is interesting!  While you've seen my garden plan here, I couldn't plant the garden exactly as I planned it.  Close.  But the self-seeded dill took over where I wanted to plant the peppers, and thus I had to move stuff around a bit.  The most important thing was to keep the good companion plants together - and not plant bad companions next to each other.

Here is what the garden looked like before I left for Florida:

On the nearer side of the garden, from right to left I have dill, basil, carrots, then peas, basil again, and onions.  On the far left, outside of the photo are the tomato plants.  On the far side (again right to left) are the haricots verts, next to eggplant, which are next to pepper plants and then the onions again. (Onions don't like legumes and so I needed to keep them away from this year's planting and at the same time I had to make sure they were in soil that I hadn't planted legumes in last year - apparently they really don't like peas and beans.)  And finally, once again, just outside the photo (but a you can see a bit) are the tomatoes on the far left.

Here's a picture of the entire garden (I take pictures from this angle all year long to record how the garden progresses):

In this picture you can see the tomatoes at this curvy end of the garden, along with nasturtiums which are interplanted with them.  They are great companion plants, and the nasturtium flowers make the tomato space look decorative.

This is the key: plant in the square foot style, and only put plants that like each other next to each other.  Generations of farmers have experimented with this for us - Louise Riotte, for example, who wrote "Carrots Love Tomatoes" - and I go by the rules they have come up with.  Why repeat the experiment when we can learn from others?  So far so good.

Self sufficiency doesn't mean austerity

This is one of the posts I had ready to put on the blog before I left. 

I've realized that some people think that because we're self-sufficient in veggies we must have relinquished our entire back yard to vegetable patches.  How wrong.

We have all kinds of beautiful landscaping, with flowers and trees and bushes.  It really doesn't take that much land for two people to grow all of their own veggies. Here in the foreground you see the rangpur lime and our new fountain - which the birds love!

Good intentions

You know what they say about good intentions.  While I don't think my own personal road to hell is paved with the good intentions to blog while on vacation, I still think of the saying when I get back home and haven't written anything in a number of days.  And I DO have good intentions - even before I leave I write a few posts and save them, thinking I'll just post them while I'm gone.  But something seems wrong about that.  I don't know what, exactly, but when I'm not in my garden, I simply can't blog about it.  I need to be looking out the window at it, or be in the basement with the grow lights, or have worked and sweated hard all day in it in order to blog about living sustainably and growing my own food. 

So I was in Florida for my birthday and my daughter's bridal shower.  It was wonderful - and I even made frittatas with her chicken's eggs, and her kale, basil and patty pan squash for the shower.  It was refreshing to be on vacation and still be eating out of a garden (my daughter's to boot). 

When I pulled into the driveway, Dianna and a friend of ours were out harvesting strawberries and raspberries.  They realized I was on my way home and I might be upset that no harvesting took place while I was gone.  It was too funny!  They were even weighing the harvest for me.  Now, I had been gone for almost 5 days, and you realize that it was in the last 30 minutes before I got back that a flurry of activity was taking place, apparently to keep me happy.  :-)  What they didn't know is that I had already resigned myself to zero harvest activity while I was gone, and I actually thought that my harvest on Wednesday of last week would be the last of the strawberries.  They got 5 oz! 

But now I'm back and after work today I watered the container plants, went wild raspberry harvesting, picked the last of the strawberries, and harvested lettuce and herbs for tomorrow's lunches.  While I love to go to Florida and see my mom, daughter, and granddaughter (I miss them terribly), it's still good to be home.

Onions that came up on their own

These were in the garden, growing from seed apparently, completely unexpected:

I love it when things just "show up" in the garden.  It's such a testament to life and the perseverance of nature.  Last year our neighbors had "volunteer" tiny white pumpkins grow out of their compost.  Our cilantro self-seeds all over the place, so does our dill, and this year we have volunteer lolla rossa lettuce in our broccoli and cabbage space, growing happily among the brassicas.  But this summer these two onions were the biggest surprise.  I've had lots of trouble with trying to grown onions in the past.  I planted from seed in the basement, they were spindly little things when I planted them in the ground, and then they grew only slightly larger than a marble.  But, in true mother nature survivalist form, one must have produced seed, because yesterday, in with the wild garlic in the herb garden, we found these two onions, both bigger than golf balls.  Once again, like the wild raspberries, no fussing no tending - and here they are, bigger than anything I've actually tried to grow!  Now that's too funny!

Grilled garlic scapes

You have to snip the scapes anyway - the beautiful "almost-flowers" of the garlic - in order for the heads to grow as large as possible.  Of course you use them.  They're garlic flavor on salads, in frittatas, etc.  But we found a wonderful new way to use them - grilled!  Here is a photo of the scapes prepared for the grill: lightly covered in olive oil with salt and pepper.  That's all you need.

2 minutes on the grill and you have a wonderful side dish.

Things that must be sacrificed

When you are trying to live as self-sufficiently as possible, you realize that certain things must be sacrificed. 

It's a Monday night and I am pulling into my driveway at 7:40pm.  I didn't take my walk today because I didn't want to get up this morning, and I didn't even walk the path at the office because my day was full of meetings and e-mail.  But because I have a 2 mile route and do a 16-17 minute mile I think I can quickly change, go, and be back while it's still light out.  Then I can pick the lettuce and herbs for tomorrow's lunches, and have a few minutes to walk around the yard at dusk to pull stray weeds and assess how the garden grows.

But as I walk from your garage to the house, I notice that the potted plants are really dry.  Even though I used the water from canning to water a few of them them last night.  And then I pass the strawberry patch - and there are a ton of ripe ones.  Some of them are quite large.  "Oh man, they really need to be picked," I think to myself, and then realize that there are probably raspberries in the back yard that should be picked as well.  I look up and notice that the birds need to be fed (they eat me out of house and home); then there's still that salad harvest for lunches tomorrow...

At this point, I know what is going to be sacrificed.  It's no longer even an option.  I will not be taking my walk today.

Worse - I realize that I have a lot to do, and very little time to do it in.  So, still in my work clothes, work shoes, jewelry etc. I get busy.  First, it's been so hot and dry that it's not only the potted plants that need water, but the vegetable beds as well, so I turn on the sprinkler.  While that's going, I start with the raspberries because I know there aren't many out there and it will be quick.  Then I move on to the strawberries.  The strawberries are actually a bit of a pain to harvest because I have to undo the bird netting, fluff the leaves and look hard for berries hiding close to the ground, and then re-seal the bird netting barrier.  I collect a half pound of strawberries; so far so good.

The next step is to feed the birds - they are completely out of food and MUST be starving! ;-)  Then I move on to collecting the lettuce and herbs and edible flowers.  The potted plants still need watering so that's next, but the sun is going down and I noted that the squash bed is really dry when I was getting the chives.  So I move the sprinkler and go inside to fill the watering can.  After about 10 trips with the watering can, in and out, the plants in pots are watered, and I can begin to relax.  The outdoor work is done.  It's 8:50.  I stand on the patio for the last 15 minutes of twilight, watching as the garden fades into the night and a spider builds its web on the solar light.  Then I turn off the sprinkler and go inside.

Yes, some things need to be sacrificed.  They're not the important things.  That's what the night whispered to me as I smiled and climbed the stairs to the house.

Canning class photos

What a wonderful day!  We took a tour of the house and garden, then harvested the mint:

Stirred...

And stirred...

And then we finished it up with a toast and high-five when the jars sealed!

The jelly didn't set up the way it should - but it's marinade so that's not the end of the earth.  Still I feel bad...I wanted them to take home the very best of the best.  Was the pectin too old?  I didn't buy new pectin, and had this since last year maybe??  Very good lesson for me!  Buy pectin only as needed - not ahead.  But none-the-less, what a fun day!  I am blessed to have such great people in my life!

Canning class today

Today I will be teaching a couple of friends from work how to can.  We are making mint jelly.  For pictures of mint jelly, how to make it, and a great pork recipe using it, see my previous post here.  It should be great fun. I will post pictures of it after we're done.

Wild raspberry harvesting

About a block down the street from us there starts some significant stands of wild raspberries.  They go on for a half mile down the road, on both sides of the street, interrupted sporadically by various city properties maintained in a well-groomed, suburban fashion (thus devoid of raspberry bushes).  This is the path I walk each day as I try to get my 2 miles of exercise in, so I monitor the ripening berries closely.  Once the berries begin to ripen it's time to start the harvest.  We, and our neighbor Lisa, begin daily forays down the street, baskets in hand, laughing and exclaiming at the prospect.  I wonder what people who drive by think, three women walking down the street, swinging their wicker baskets as if they are little red riding hood off to the forest.  Later all they see are our butts sticking out of the bushes, or one of us will pop out of the bushes onto the parkway in a leap to avoid more scratches.  I laugh thinking about the expressions of passers-by.

Dianna calls it "bleeding for berries" because we don't dress in shoes, long sleeves and long pants.  On the contrary, it's hot out so we are usually in sandals, shorts and tank tops.  Of course that means lots of gashes from the thorns, but we look forward to it every year.

We collect daily because this is our chance to collect enough berries for jams and jellies that will last us all year long.  Now, truth be told, Dianna and I don't eat that much jam or jelly - we are not really breakfast people and don't eat a lot of sweets so it wouldn't be hard to collect enough for us.  But Lisa has two teenage boys, and they eat a ton of jam.  Every year we get enough.  We can together and split the results.  Dianna and I give most of ours as gifts.

I don't know why, but this summer ritual is particularly close to my heart.  It is true sustainability.  We pay attention to what is happening in the wild,  and mother earth provides - without us fussing, weeding, pruning, watering...it's there if we just just look for it and take advantage of it.  We don't harm the plants and we always leave some berries behind, and the relationship is strengthened.  This is our connected roots.

Rule Number 2

Rule number 2 for self-sustainable living: Re-use freezer bags.  With all the freezing we do to put up food during the summer, we use a LOT of freezer bags.  When we're using the frozen goods up during the winter it's super simple to just flip them inside-out, wash with soap and water and let dry.  Roll them up and put them back in the pantry for the spring and summer. 

I have to admit that this is not my favorite task - I find it irritating and tedious (if, like I said, simple).  But I've gotten 3 years out of most bags, and all of them make 2 years, and it saves money and the environment.  I don't use tupperware to freeze whole or chopped veggies or herb cubes because I try to get as much air out of package as possible before storing - freezer bags just work the best for this. 

Photographer

So a local photographer got in touch with me after seeing the Connected Roots blog.  We've been in touch and he may come over this afternoon to see the garden and take some pics!  If the schedules work out, look for some professional pics up here soon!

Strawberry harvest

I am so excited!  This year is the best year for my strawberry patch.  It's just a row, about a foot wide and 12 or so feet long between the patio and the garage sidewalk, but I've already harvested almost a pound and a half of strawberries!  We've been eating fresh berries, but also I've been on a mission to freeze enough strawberries for strawberry rhubarb tartlets this winter, and some other winter enjoyment.  I think I have about a pound frozen now, so we will probably just eat the rest of the strawberries fresh.  I've never had enough to save before, this is the third year so it looks like it takes about that long before the production is really good.

Here's a photo of the 1/2 pound I harvested today - going into a freezer bag:

Of course it's still not enough production to start to think I can rely on my own fruit all year long like I rely on my veggies for self-sufficiency, but it's a start!

Tiny squash trying to fruit early

If this is any indication, we will have a bountiful summer and fall of squash:

The top is summer ball pumpkin, the bottom is yellow crookneck.  But there are tiny black beauty zucchini, lungo bianco zucchini, cocozelle zucchini, buttercup squash and spaghetti squash.  Not to say that these will actually grow large, often they fall off the vine well before maturity, but man, give them credit for trying this year!

Late spring evening

So tonight I got home late from work - it was 7 pm.  I took a walk, and then, as usual, toured around the garden.  I weeded a bit, whatever I saw and could easily reach, and harvested a few strawberries and peas.  I noticed that my currants are being eaten.  Friday they were thick, this weekend a bit less so, and today I knew they were definitely being devoured by something.  So I took a few minutes and put bird netting around the currant bush. 

Then I sat down in the twilight on the porch with a glass of wine.

The hummingbird came to the window feeder again, and a robin was rooting around in our garage gutter looking for the last of the day's meals.  Mamma sparrow swooped down to the birdhouse to tuck her babies in.  The squirrels and rabbits and chipmunks were already in their dens, but I was looking up - waiting for Sammy the bat to start his/her swooping into the garden for mosquitoes.  This is late spring life at Connected Roots Garden, and I'm so glad I come home to that.

Garlic scape frittata: recipe for the grill

I hate being indoors when it's nice outside and so I'm constantly looking for ways to make lunches and dinners on the grill.  Last night I made a great frittata recipe and cooked it on the grill as an experiment.  It worked!  Awesome!  So I thought I'd share; here's the photo, and the recipe and instructions follow:

Garlic Scape Fritatta
You will need 4-8 ceramic or metal ramekins for cooking on the grill

Ingredients:
8 or so fresh garlic scapes
1 handful of last year's frozen haricots verts, thawed
1 handful of last year's frozen summer squash, thawed
6 eggs
1 cube of frozen sage pesto, thawed
1 cube of frozen fines herbes (parsley and tarragon mostly) pesto, thawed
1 cube of frozen basil pesto, thawed
2 heaping tablespoons cottage cheese
grated sharp white cheddar (to taste)
 A little olive oil

Chop the garlic scapes.  In a tiny bit of olive oil saute the scapes, and while they are cooking chop the beans and squash.  Add them to the scapes and continue to saute.  In the meantime scramble the eggs, add cottage cheese and herb cubes and whisk vigorously.  Take the veggies off the heat and let cool slightly before adding them to the egg mixture.  Mix in veggies and cheddar cheese.  That's it!  Fill the ramekins (you can lightly grease them if you think the frittata will stick) about 1/3 the way to the top.  I used 6 ramekins, 4 were quite small and the other 2 were a bit larger. 

Now you can go outside!  Heat the grill to 350 and put the ramekins directly on the grate.  Check often  and look for the frittata to be puffy and when you touch the center with your finger it's solid.  I cut into one of mine just to make sure the center was done - I don't like undercooked eggs.

We ate ours as veggie sandwiches; they turn out the perfect size for an english muffins.

Rule number 1

Connected Roots rule number 1 for living the sustainable lifestyle: Never, ever, put your fresh veggies in the refrigerator.

Once you are harvesting, trust me, you will have something ready to eat tomorrow, so why not just pick it when you're ready for it.  Well, you say, I often have 4 zucchini ready at the same time, or so many tomatoes or beans that are ripe and need to be picked that I can't eat them all that night.  Happens to me all the time.  We eat all we want fresh, then I put up the rest.

Sometimes I only have a handful of beans that we didn't eat that night - but it only takes 5 minutes to boil water, blanch them, dry them and put them in a freezer bag.  Pop them into the freezer and you've started your preparations for winter.  It's so satisfying to think, in the midst of summer, that you are already preparing for the winter.  Tomatoes: core and freeze.  Even if it's just one extra.  Tomorrow another 5 will be ready to pick and maybe you'll freeze 2.  Keep doing this every day and by the end of the summer you will have enough frozen tomatoes to defrost and make sauce.  Do you know how much time it takes to core a tomato? 5 seconds.  Another 5 to put it in a bag and into the freezer.  In other words it doesn't take time out of your evening to do this every night, it's simple.  Zucchini is similar, but it takes a bit longer because I chop mine into pieces then blanch, dry and freeze.  This year I'm going to grate zucchini, measure it, freeze it in 2 cup measurements and have it on hand during the winter for soups, stir frys and zucchini bread.  I've heard you don't have to blanch it if you freeze it this way.

Here's a handful of beans I put by last year - I'm going to use them tonight in my garlic scape frittata.  We're not getting beans yet, so this second to the last bag will come in handy, and it's just the right amount.

The main thing to remember - no veggies in the fridge, put them in your mouth or in a freezer bag.

Pea harvest

Today I'm working from home so I could wander out in the garden and collect lunch.  The all-day rain yesterday meant a lot of growth, and of course a harvest of peas waiting on the vine.  I got 5 oz unshelled:

Part went on my salad, part will soon be frozen for winter consumption.  There won't be many, but it will be a sweet mini-treat in the depths of winter.