Finishing Up Last Year’s Food

Waiting for ‘Spring Enough’ to spend real time outdoors to clear and dig beds for this year’s spring crops can be maddening. I’ve folded up dozens and dozens of newspaper seedling pots, have some of them filled halfway in preparation for planting – which can be done as soon as the local garden supply outlets get their annual allotments of potting soil. They’re not used to doing that before Valentine’s day, I’m guessing the USDA’s recent re-figuring of our planting zone took them by surprise.

I’ve gone through the seed basket to see what I’ve got, what needs planting first, and what I need to order. I’ve pulled the crispy brown leavings of last fall’s crops, and turned the compost. I’ve dug several 5-gallon buckets full of old compost out for adding to the beds and covering the perennials (asparagus, strawberries, artichokes). And I’ve planned what will go where while trimming the dry stalks of last year’s herbs and splitting root systems to spread them out a bit.

But it got cold again, and too rainy to ignore. So I figured it was a good time to do what I’ve been putting off all winter long – finishing up the processing of last year’s crops.

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Leeks, Beets & ‘Extra’ Weeks

In this unusually mild winter where it’s looking a lot like it’s not going to freeze after February (actually, February itself is starting off in the 60s day and 40s at night), my recent attempts to clean out the beds so they can be prepped for early plantings has taken on a bit of urgency. Moon is waxing (rising) for the next 8 days, so I’ve been folding newspaper pots by the dozen while sitting here at the desk.

Waxing moon is for above-ground plantings, so I’ll be starting peas, collards, bib lettuce, spinach and kale over the next week. The little pots fit tightly into glass cake pans, which makes it easy to evenly water from the bottom, which encourages early root growth. These will go onto shelves built to the big south facing window in the library. From there the seedlings can go straight into the ground (paper pot and all) by mid-february. If it freezes after that the pea cage can be covered with plastic at night, and milk jugs with the top end cut off fit nicely over the new greens. A new rush of peas should be planted as soon as the moon turns waxing again.

Once the moon has passed full it will be time to plant seeds for root vegetables. Which for early spring are beets, bunching onions, leeks, potatoes, carrots and radishes. Now, radishes are best planted to ‘mark’ rows of direct-seeded crops beginning in April because they grow so quickly and can be harvested early as the primary seedlings get established. But I like to grow a row of radishes for the spicy little seed pods they produce after flowering, so those I’ll start in paper pots indoors and interplant in the bed with leaf lettuces around the first of March.

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Best Thanksgiving Perk: Cranberries

Thanksgiving is just over a week away, which means one of my absolute favorite fruits are now being sold fresh in bags – often on half price sale – at grocery stores everywhere. For Thanksgiving I use just one of those 12-ounce bags to make my famous Crackberry Sauce (regular whole cranberry sauce with a bag of frozen blackberries added). But I buy as many as I can afford when they go on sale so I can dry them as “craisins.”

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Another Autumn Goodie: Rosehip Syrup

My daughter went a little wild this year “trimming” back the grape vines that wandered over the fence that badly needs repair (rather than simply repairing the fence), so diminishing the ripening fruit that we got basically nothing from them this season. Ah, well. Happens every so often. They should be back in bulk next year, and I’m fixing the fence over the winter so she won’t be tempted to prune out of season. What she didn’t manage to trim into oblivion this year are the wild roses (sweet briar) bushes on the up-ridge side of the driveway. They can get out of control pretty easy, and always want to drape down into the driveway to cause scratches (and sometimes blood) to people who park too close.

So I’m the one who did the pruning this year, and I was very careful to hardily discourage growth on the driveway side, while encouraging growth on the ridge side. That allowed for a pretty good haul of rose hips this past weekend by my grandson. In previous years I’ve simply put the little hips – sweet briar hips are about half the size of dogwood berries, not the fat wild persimmon sized hips of garden roses – into a jar in the freezer to add to teas made over the winter. Especially the colds/flu tea we drink a lot of to keep the viruses away. But this year we made rose hip syrup, and I’m definitely a convert as I drink my morning coffee sweetened with it.

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More Things to Do With Peppers

In my last post I went into some detail on how easy it is to preserve peppers by pickling. And while I do pickle quite a lot of the range of hot peppers I grow every year to supply my heat-loving family and friends and allow for the several levels and types of hot pepper sauces I make for steady customers in my region, my favorite thing to do with hot peppers is to dry them.

The sauce and pot peppers, as well as sweet peppers and mild chilis like poblanos are usually frozen whole or chopped in zip lock freezer bags. It’s easy to break off a chunk and toss into any dish I’m making, and this is to my taste buds the best way to preserve sweet bells. But if you grow a lot of hot chilis like I do, there’s much more you can do through the culinary year with dried peppers than with frozen or pickled or otherwise canned.

I have found some good sources for detailed information on drying peppers and what to do with them afterwards, listed at the bottom of this post. I prefer to sun dry – in my nifty home-made solar dryer out on the front deck – but chilis can easily be dried in a commercial dryer, in the oven on its lowest setting, or in the sun directly if they’re kept whole. Flies and other insects don’t like to congregate on rip hot peppers left in the sun, as they will on tomatoes or other vegetables and fruits that are sliced and placed in the sun to dry. Thick-walled chilis like Anaheims, jalapenos, etc. take longer, of course. Fingerhots, cayennes, thai hots, etc. will dry hard and crisp in just a few hours of sun. Presuming you don’t live in a super high humidity environment, of course.

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My Peck of Pickled Peppers

As the various crops come in – for summer crops that is July through September in my zone 5 here in western NC – I’ll be writing about various methods of preservation. Two weeks ago it was tomatoes. Bushels and bushels of tomatoes. Last week it was the first pints of pear butter (the pears are by no means done falling, so there will be more). This week it’s peppers.

The main pepper crop will not be fully ripe until mid-September, but some bells, cayennes, thai hots, anaheims, poblanos, jalapenos, habaneros and hot banana peppers are making it into the house day to day. By the number of chilis on my pepper list readers may safely surmise that the family and friends of this homestead are fond of peppers with some heat to them. My menfolk subscribe to the culinary philosophy that a good pot of chili and/or beans is hardly worth eating unless it clears out your sinuses and makes you sweat. Things that chili powders, crushed dry peppers, pickled peppers and an assortment of hot sauces ranging from merely Cajun through 3-alarm and Nuclear all the way to Satanic are quite famous for providing.

Capsaicin and a range of capsaicinoid relatives produced by chili peppers are the compounds which provides the heat in peppers. These are classified as irritants to mucus membranes and increases secretion of gastric juices. The hotness (irritant level perceived as heat by nerves, even though the hottest peppers cannot really burn tissue) is measured in Scoville Heat Units [SHUs]. Bell and Cubanelle peppers rate a zero on the scale, with no appreciable hotness. Pimentos and regular banana peppers rate between 100 and 900 SHUs. Anaheims and Poblanos rate 1,000 to 2,500 SHUs, jalapenos 3,500 to 8,000, habaneros can weigh in at 100,000 to 500,000. The hottest peppers – the Peruvian ghost pepper , bhut jolokia peg the meter at a million SHUs or more. You do not want to take a bite out of one of these just to impress your friends at the bar.

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Pears, Pears, Pear Butter!

It’s that time of year again. That late August period when “the world’s biggest pear tree” and all its younger offspring start dropping those little rock-hard cinnamon pears of mysterious variety onto the driveway to be turned into pungent pear mash that draws literal herds of deer, any passing bear within sniffing distance, flocks of turkeys and gaggles of raccoons who can never quite keep up with the bounty.

The big pear tree is 60 feet tall and more than two feet in trunk diameter. It is at least that many years old, all that remains of the original orchard on the property. It’s gorgeous in bloom in the early spring, but quite a headache in late summer as it draws so much wildlife along with swarms of yellow jackets who feast on the mash and rotting fruit beneath the tree and its offspring. About the size of plums, these are not pears that one can readily eat straight off the trees, though they do tend to survive the fall much better than those big commercial pears do. Best I’ve been able to figure from the history of this homestead over 100+ years, the orchard on the high land was planted to support the corn in the bottom land, as part of the sweet mash destined to become moonshine – something of a claim to fame for this region for a bit more than 200 years all told.

Pears are a fruit that isn’t truly ripe until after they’ve been off the tree for a day or two. My pears are not soft even when ripe-ripe. That should serve as a caution to readers who want to try my “easy to do” recipe below for making pear (or apple) butter and are using those big, luscious commercial pears rather than these semi-wild old-timey heirlooms. Those big, soft pears will cook down to mush much quicker than mine.

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