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.

Now’s a pretty good time to start the summer’s tomatoes and peppers as well, so the seedlings will be sturdy, well-leafed and quite full by the time they go into the cold frame in late March to early April. I’ll wait another six weeks to start the cukes, squashes, beans and pumpkins, as they don’t go out until May. Won’t need many new seeds this year, just carrots and more beets. Going to try Johnny’s “Atlas” carrots this year because long carrots tend to come out of the ground looking like man-roots in my soil, and the Atlas carrots are short and round like beets.

As for beets, I have to say I’m impressed enough with the hybrid “Moneta” I planted last year. Nice red roots that peel and slice easily and greens that are excellent in salads or as side greens. They also keep well and are vry juicy. In these days of leftover radioactive contamination from Fukushima, beets are about the best food-derived blood tonic anywhere. And since the blood/lymph system is where radiation does its most immediate damage, that’s something to think about. High in antioxidants, vitamins A, C. B1 and B6, beets are reported to have anti-cancer properties and also contain ample amounts of iron, magnesium, potassium and calcium.

Beet juice is also a fine health drink, always with a sweetness that is very palatable. I’ve been slicing those and the leeks I finally finished harvesting last week for drying, as they’re too old to make good side dishes or salads. I’ll powder the dried slices when I powder dried leeks, celery, carrots and tomatoes to use as soup broths and veggie-based table salts. As they are sliced I’ve been popping them into a bowl of cold spring water with ascorbic acid (powdered vitamin C) until I’m ready to line them up on the trays for drying. The water turns the most gorgeous shade of deep red, and I’ve been using that water to make lemonade (from bottled lemon juice). It’s redder than cranberry juice, but pretty and the sweet allows me to use less sugar. So far nobody’s complained, and it just makes the juice healthier than it otherwise would be.

Because so much of the garden was allowed to go fallow last year due to a constant excess level of fallout from the Fukushima nuclear accident’s plumes, I’m hoping to make good use of the extra months this year. Will plant twice as many beets and peas, spring and fall. More leeks, more bunching onions, more carrots and squashes. And yes, I am going to once again attempt eggplant and artichokes, even though that never seems to work out well. You never know what the weather’s going to be like, and global warming isn’t making things any easier to predict. But a peach tree ‘volunteered’ from the compost bin last year and is already over 10 feet tall, I’m hoping it’ll bear this year. Apples, pears and grapes all suffered miserably in the heat last year, I didn’t get enough out of any of ‘em to bother harvesting. If the peach does fruit I’ll get more, along with plums and figs.

And it’s not just me. The USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] just last week released a brand new Plant Hardiness Zone map (pictured above) which reflects changes due to warming climate. I’ve gained a whole zone, so peaches and figs should do fine. If I gain another one I’m going for oranges!

Do check out the new zones for where you live [Map Link], because for many of us this represents a whole new plan for how we go about growing our food. We can start relying on the extra weeks and/or months of growing season to plan our crop rotations, and even choose different cultivars we may have always wanted to grow but couldn’t.

Since this is one of the warmer winters in many regions, get busy right now making those plans. If I waited until 6 weeks prior to last frost in my old zone (May 10), I’d lose 10 entire weeks of growing time. So Happy Paper Pots all you homesteaders out there! Let’s make 2012 a super-abundant year for our yards, gardens and croplands in the hope that this year, none of our neighbors – far and wide – go hungry.

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.

Rose hips are sort of a concentrated multi-vitamin, with an average of 20 times the vitamin C as oranges. They don’t turn red (and soften up) until after the first frost, which occurred on the up side of the hill weekend before last. They’re difficult to harvest, as they must be pulled from the branches carefully in order to avoid battle scarring from those pesky thorns. So I must say I was very glad for grandson’s volunteering to do that job, I usually wait until November to harvest and end up looking like I’ve been handling an ill-tempered badger. Rose hips also contain appreciable amounts of vitamins A, D and E, making them a very good wintertime tonic.

You can make a jelly out of them, but it seems to me that the heat of jelly processing is probably not the best way to preserve the vitamin content. Whereas steeping them for tea doesn’t expose them to high heat for extended periods. Always keep them whole prior to processing, as once they’ve been cut or ground they begin oxidation immediately. A good rule of thumb is that it takes ~1/2 pound of hips for 1 quart of syrup, though you’ll want to use half-pint jelly jars for the final product. Be sure to sterilize them as well as the lids. They do not require actual canning, but you’ll want to seal them while still very hot.

Some people who use the big garden-rose hips cut off the tops and tails, but this would be silly with little bitty wild hips. To remove as much of the long-dead petals and hairs at the top end, I simply rub a small handful between my hands to loosen it up good, before spray-washing. Once washed, put the hips into a grinder or blender and process to a kind of sticky pulp. Put this pulp into 2 quarts of rapidly boiling water, remove from the heat, cover, and let steep for 4-5 hours or overnight.

Strain through an unbleached coffee filter or jelly bag, try to get all the liquid you can out of it. Put this into a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat while slowly stirring in 1.5 cups of packed light brown sugar. Make sure your sugar is natural brown rather than dyed, as in natural form it retains quite a bit of the good mineral content. Reduce heat to a bare simmer and keep uncovered to reduce the liquid by about half, so that it’s quite thick. Pour this into the sterilized jars and attach lids. Allow to cool on the countertop, then keep in the refrigerator to preserve the vitamins C and A.

Use this syrup like honey to sweeten coffee or herbal teas, or just take a spoonful a day as supplement. You can mix this syrup with strong elderberry tincture if you have a cold or get the flu. It makes the tincture a little easier to swallow, but sugar does affect the potency of the tincture a bit. I prefer to use the syrup by itself as a tea sweetener, it adds a little bit of tart and a lot of sweet, especially for blackberry and mint teas.

And don’t forget to throw a few dried dogwood berries into the teapot when you’re steeping, these are also excellent sources of vitamins C and A. Here’s hoping the viral season is light this year, and that we all spend as few days under the weather as possible.

Some Helpful Links:

Foraging: Making Rosehip Syrup
Katey’s Rosehip Syrup recipe
Rose Hip Jelly, Jam Recipe

If you’re like me, having to wait until November 1st before the kids (or, in my case, the grandkids) will allow me to process the pumpkins, making simple but delicious meals out of what’s still coming in from the garden at this late date can be a challenge. There’s not much out there right now, mostly the last of the peppers, some scraggly red kale still struggling along as the fall kale is just now coming up, the herbs still being cut and slowly dried for winter, the potatoes still safely stashed underground to be dug as needed. Oh, and those pesky but delicious cherry tomato volunteers that become tolerated weeds depending on where they grow (and I’ll allow).

Nights are decidedly chilly now, though there hasn’t yet been a freeze. Days are gorgeously mid-October, the reds finally kicking in to add their richness to the yellows of the fall leaf color scheme, all but the oak leaves will be gone before Thanksgiving. The grandsons have been spending their school weeks in town since the semester started at the Community College due to a shortage of motorized gad-about(s) since the pickup died last spring. That leaves hubby and I with four actual days a week just to ourselves, something we’ve never enjoyed at any time in the 40+ years of our lives together. It can be quite a challenge to suddenly go from a lifetime of cooking for a fluctuating hoard to making dinner for just two light eaters.

Took me quite a long time to learn how to make a large spread where everything manages to get done and ready-to-serve at the same time. That’s enough trouble that I’ve never tried too hard if it’s not Thanksgiving. Usually the family can handle meals served in ‘courses’ where they eat whatever’s done now and then eat whatever gets done then. For just hubby and me having any more than two or three kinds of food at a time just seems like too much. So I’m not bothering at all with that. Tonight, for instance, I’m going to make “Comfort Food” out of what’s coming in. I’ll no doubt make more than the two of us can eat, but I’m not nearly as averse to leftovers as he is, so that’s okay.

What’s “Comfort Food?” For us it’s simple, tasty, warming and satisfyingly home-grown. The kids harvested a big bowl of ripe cherry tomatoes this past weekend which will have to be composted if I don’t eat or preserve them. And I’ve got so many ‘tomaisins’ at this point that it’s not worth the trouble to produce more. So it’ll be good ol’ tomato soup, using some of the late bells. Combine that with grilled cheese on fresh whole wheat sourdough from the bread machine, and baked red kale crisps. Should take about 30 minutes total to prepare – not counting the bread, of course – and most of that will be cooking time instead of dedicated prep.

Roasted Tomato Pepper Soup

• ~1 pound of ripe cherry or grape tomatoes
• 2 fresh leeks
• 1/4 red onion, chunked
• 1/2 cup chunked bell pepper
• 3 largish cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 tbsp freshly dried basil leaf
• 1 tsp. coarse sea salt
• 2 cups tomato or vegetable broth
• 3/4 cup whole milk
• 1.5 tbsp. olive oil
• fresh chopped chives for garnish

Wash and remove calyxes from tomatoes, place into an oven roasting pan. Add garlic cloves, chunked peppers, leeks sliced 1/2″ thick and onion to the pan. Drizzle with olive oil and mix well to coat all the vegetables. Roast at 500º for 20 minutes, stirring well after 10 minutes. When soft and slightly browned, put the vegetables and basil into a blender with some broth and puree to smooth.

Put the puree into a saucepan and stir in remainder of the broth and the salt. When it begins to bubble add the milk, stirring well. Don’t let it boil. Serve hot garnished with chives or shredded parmesan cheese, season with table salt and freshly ground pepper as desired.

Baked Red Kale Chips

These are easy and very tasty. Just wash and trim the stems from the kale, spin-dry or blot with paper towels. Put into a cake or roasting pan and toss with about a little olive oil to coat lightly. When you remove the roasted tomatoes from the oven, turn the temperature down to 400º. By the time you’ve processed the vegetables for the soup the oven should be cooled to that temperature, so pop the kale into the oven as you finish the soup. Bake for 8-10 minutes until the kale is quite crisp.

I figure we all know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich, so I won’t bother detailing that. The baked kale chips would work nicely as a side to baked winter squash too, or with pumpkin soup for other comfort food ideas once it gets to be November. Then there’s the old standby of potato-leek soup my family seems to live on all winter, or navy bean soup from dry. Your basic soup and sandwich with a tasty side, all hot and tasty and most welcome on chilly evenings.

What’s your favorite “Comfort Food?”

The rush of big heirlooms and romas were processed in August, most dried in the solar unit out on the front (southside) deck. Weather’s back up into the ’70s during the day after a couple of nights of high-30s and frost warnings, looks like the peppers and grape tomatoes survived to finish up before Halloween – more sun-dried tomaisins! I keep making them, they keep disappearing faster than they’re coming in. I’ve found they’re not just great on crackers (with fresh basil, red bell peppers and feta cheese) and pizza, but add lots of zing to pasta and rice dishes as well. Mostly, though, the kids eat them as late-night snacks by the handful, right out of the jar.

As soon as it’s too cold to garden any longer, I’ll be using some of the dry-dried tomato that I’ve turned into powder to make tomato, basil and rosemary fettucini. Fresh pasta is fun to make and freezes very well, great to pull out and cook up quick when unexpected guests drop by. For the leathery half-dried tomatoes I had to go looking for recipes beyond “the usual” diced and tossed into/onto stuff. Discovered Valley Sun, a California company that specializes in sun-dried tomatoes. The linked page offers some general ideas about adding dried tomatoes to just about any recipe for meat, poultry, seafood and vegetables.

Dried Tomato Pesto Fettucini

• 2 cups half-dried tomato quarters
• 1/2 cup slivered or sliced almonds
• 3/4 cup chopped fresh basil
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp. olive oil
• 1/2 cup Parmesan, Reggiano or Gruyere cheese
• 1 pound fresh rosemary-basil fettucini

Dice tomato quarters, toss in oil with basil and garlic. Saute slowly in a cast iron pan over medium heat until garlic is soft and basil is well wilted. Toast almonds over medium heat stirring constantly to keep them from burning. Remove from pan when slightly brown and set aside. Boil the pasta according to directions and drain. Return to pot over low heat, add tomato pesto mixture and the grated cheese, toss well. When this is all well heated, add the almonds and toss. Serve immediately, garnished with fresh basil and extra cheese.

Clams with Tihuana Pepper and Dried Tomato Broth

• 2 tins oil-packed clams (or oysters)
• 1 cup Chardonnay
• 1 cup clear vegetable broth
• 1/4 cup salted butter
• 1/2 cup diced half-dried tomatoes
• 1/4 tsp. sea salt
• 1 tbsp. crushed red pepper
• Lemon wedges

Bring wine and broth to a boil in a covered sauce pan, add butter, tomatoes, salt and red pepper. Reduce heat and add clams, cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Serve in bowls over a slab of toasted home made whole wheat tarragon bread with lemon wedges on the side, to be squeezed into the soup as desired.

Sun-Dried Tomato Appetizers

• 1 cup half-dried tomato quarters
• 1/4 cup basil herbed wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 cloves minced garlic
• 2 tbsp. finely chopped fresh basil
• 2 tbsp. chopped fresh oregano
• 1/4 tsp. sea salt
• Dash of freshly milled black pepper

In a small sauce pan heat vinegar and water together over medium low heat until barely simmering. Remove from heat, add tomatoes and cover. Allow to stand for 1 hour. Mix fresh basil and oregano together with the pepper and minced garlic. When tomatoes have soaked for an hour, remove from marinade and place cut side up on a cookie sheet and brush with olive oil. Sprinkle the garlic, pepper and herbs onto the tomatoes and bake in a 200º oven for 4-6 hours until somewhat ‘dry’ to the touch. Cut in bite-size pieces (3 per quarter of an average roma), insert toothpicks and serve on a plate with crackers and Chevre goat cheese.

Sun-Dried Tomato Dip

• 1/2 cup half-dried tomatoes
• 4 ounces softened cream cheese
• 4 ounces soft Chevre goat cheese
• 1 tbsp. olive oil
• 3 cloves chopped garlic
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil, or 2 tsp. dried basil
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh chives

Put all ingredients except fresh basil and chives into a blender and process until smooth. Mix in fresh basil and refrigerate until ready to serve. Sprinkle dried tomato powder on top, serve with dried crackers and fresh vegetables or French bread baguettes.

Hope these recipes for sun-dried tomatoes sound as delicious to you as they do to me, and I absolutely MUST remember to plant more basil next spring. Dried tomatoes are great additions to vegetable soups, chili and bean dishes, added to the cooking water for rice and just about anything else you might feed your family over the coming long winter. Dried tomatoes retain more of the original nutrients than canned tomatoes do, something to consider as cold and flu season hits. Dried tomatoes also make excellent straight from the bag or jar snacks when the family is gathered around the kitchen table to play cards or board games, though for this those little bitty grape tomato tomaisins are neater.

Now… out to the porch to see how the latest batch is coming along.

The current collapse of the world financial system has revealed some structural problems in our national economy that have flourished over a period of decades as corporate interests bought politicians and lobbyists to craft legislation to remove legal roadblocks to mass theft and market manipulation. And despite some changes in the D.C. political landscape, our government remains apparently helpless to do anything about corporate malfeasance on any level. With all the bad economic news dominating the public consciousness, some issues in the food supply sector are having a difficult time being properly correlated and attended to despite the serious level of danger they present to public health.

The food supply issues didn’t begin with the market manipulations on Wall Street and from there to exchanges all over the world. Though for many people the first alarms went off as the CDS fraud crashed the economy in 2008 and the financial players went looking for other markets to wreak havoc on. They seized on commodities – staple foods from the agricultural sector increasingly dominated by multinational corporations like Monsanto, ADM and Cargill. As a traceable beginning in 2008 to what this year became the “Arab Spring” movement across North Africa and spreading to the Middle East and southern Asia, food riots broke out in Egypt and Syria and portions of India as well as elsewhere when people could no longer afford to feed themselves and their families. Things have only gotten worse in the years since, and Americans are slowly waking up.

In 2011 a full quarter of the U.S. population are dependent on food stamps. As unemployment keeps on rising, the government strangely keeps slashing the food stamp budget to appease nutty Republican radicals who insist those hardest hit by the Great Recession are just “lazy” and undeserving of aid that might require corporations and billionaires to pay taxes. Why one of the political parties in our nation believes that Americans will quietly and without complaint starve to death in the streets in order to protect billionaires from paying as much of their income in taxes as their chauffeur does has never been explained by the financial sector’s pundits at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Major cognitive disconnect.

But serious food supply issues encompass much more than just market manipulation and governmental paralysis. Consider some of these issues while attempting to get a picture of how dire the overall situation is…

Honey Laundering: China’s at it again – Adulterating pet and human foods with melamine wasn’t bad enough – though one corporate scapegoat was executed by the Chinese government hoping to save its place as cheap ingredients supplier to the world – the latest food scam involves honey. Not just fake honey in those little bee-shaped plastic bottles, Chinese honey brokers are creating honey by mixing sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn/rice syrup, barley malt and a variety of unrefined sugars. Failure to police storage requirements has resulted in heavy metal contamination as well, primarily lead.

If you’ve been thinking about beekeeping for honey (and handy pollinators), this is the year to get busy on it. Extension services in many rural counties offer literature, evening classes, and instructions on building hives. Agents often know who in the area builds hives for sale, and aren’t shy of giving out that information. Many people who are trying hard to eat better and healthier are being taken in by the Chinese honey scam, and big food processors using that fake honey in their supposedly ‘natural’ food lines are risking their markets. Grow your own honey or buy locally from someone honest.

Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector – Late July brought the second largest tainted meat recall so far, when Cargill’s meat packing division recalled ~36 million pounds of ground turkey products tainted with a multi-drug resistant strain of Salmonella. The biggest recall was in 2008, when a slaughterhouse in California recalled 143 million pounds of beef due to allowing downer cows into the mix. The dangers to public health from e.coli, salmonella, listeria and other bacteria, and from adulterants and contaminates are high, yet our government doesn’t give the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] the power to force food recalls. Companies have to do this voluntarily, and they don’t often volunteer until people start dying and CDC tracks the source down.

If your family eats meat, now is the time to seriously consider raising your own or contracting with a neighbor who raises meat animals. A side of beef from a calf pastured for a year, dressed whole chickens raised happily free range, maybe rabbit stew meat, a slab of locally smoked bacon and/or ham… buying from known sources or doing it yourself could easily save your family’s lives. The more that control of our commercial food supply gets concentrated into the greedy hands of a few, the more danger is present overall. Avoid it like the plague it truly is.

The Nation has a good article looking at How change is going to come in the food system despite united resistance of the big corporate players to cater to public demands for better, less adulterated and far less fattening foods. There is a lot of good information in this article’s analysis to arm yourself with when next you try arguing with a friend, relative or acquaintance about the importance of healthy food and the severe shortage of it in our commercial food supply.

And finally, the good news. The New York Times informs us that vegetable gardens are booming in a fallow economy. We homesteaders have of course known this all along – and have done more than our share to get more people digging and grow the local markets – but we should always welcome mainstream coverage that helps to spread awareness. Recent movement in many states to allow the use of food stamps at farmer’s markets and bulk purchases straight from farmers are helping more people to get more and better food than they could purchase in the grocery store.

Many localities are also sponsoring seed exchanges through the Lions or Ruritan, sometimes through local Chambers of Commerce, 4-H and FFA clubs at high schools. These have committees in charge of getting open-pollinated seeds from local gardeners and farmers, packaging them, and then distributing them free in the late winter and early spring to local residents planning their season’s garden crops. Local schools and civic clubs are offering gardening classes and contacts to suppliers of tool exchanges, equipment like chicken coops and bee hives, and farmers who sell chicks, calves, kids and kits to those wishing to raise their own meat animals. Local butchers are making a comeback, and in many states the Extension Service offers classes all the way up to Master Gardening certification. So get busy, and get your neighbors busy making best use of all these developing local alternatives to Big Ag and Big Food, Inc. We will be a much happier and healthier nation for it, and probably much smarter as a people for our awareness and direct involvement in this most important aspect of everybody’s lives.

Links:

NYT: Vegetable Gardens Are Booming
How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System
Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector
Honey Laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey
Risks of tainted food rise as inspections drop

Bags and boxes and baskets of tomatoes. Romas and Abe Lincolns and some other determinate heirloom I forget the name of. All ruby red and threatening to rot if not processed immediately, no human being can eat enough tomato sandwiches to dent the load.

So it’s been days’ worth of boiling water to loosen skins, a quick cold water bath, peeling, seeding coring, chopping. Having to do it in shifts to give my hands enough time to recover, hoping they don’t turn permanently wrinkled from the effort. Putting up quarts and quarts of tomato juice for drinking just because I can, and we love straight, watery tomato juice. Other boiling pots containing onion ends, the last of last year’s dried leeks and celery, fresh spices, some cuke ends and peels, pole bean pods and such, the accumulated compost of a vegetarian household added to those tomato skins and seeds and cores and trimmings to make broth for soups and stews and greens and those big wintertime pots of beans. Then to can it all in jars and put it away for later consumption.

Canned quarts of quarters. Frozen bags of chunks. Fresh tomato basil soup and tomato sandwiches and good ol’ ‘mater pies… it’s a wonder we haven’t all turned into tomatoes ourselves! And for the bulk of the gleaned harvest (the field entirely organic), drying. The solar dryer has been full of tomato quarters and chunks for days now, as much as that very nifty south porch unit can hold. The sun dries them just enough to move indoors in the evening when the sun goes down, into the oven on its lowest setting of 160 degrees, propped a little open with a spare canning ring, to finish the job. Meanwhile flats of fresh quarters and chunks get prepped for the solar dryer when the sun comes up. Start the whole process over again. Ripest fruits first because this sort of thing takes days and these babies are indeed very ripe.

Perhaps some of my readers don’t know that a full bushel of romas dried crispy can fit into a single ~2 pound plastic coffee container. And the saved container doesn’t have to be sterilized or sealed in boiling water – dried fruits and veggies require nothing more than a clean and dry container with lid. Crispy dried foods don’t need refrigeration, will keep literally for years (though none ever last that long around here). Tomatoes especially lose volume when dried, as they are primarily water to begin with. When the water’s gone, they hardly take up any room at all. And the best part is you don’t have to parboil and skin tomatoes that you dry. Still have to seed and core, cut to quarters or chunks, but leave that skin on. Lots of vitamins in those, and once they’re turned into powder or rehydrated and cooked they do not present that pointy fresh skin problem that led to parboiling and skinning preserved tomatoes in the first place.

At the end of the processing I’ll grind the crispy-dry tomatoes into powder for all sorts of uses, and it’ll fit into a single recycled 12-oz. pickle jar. Which I keep in the freezer just because I can (doesn’t take up any real room in the door shelf) to add spoonfuls to soup bases and pasta sauces, or to sprinkle on salads and sandwiches, or to make flavored table salt for Thanksgiving guests. All one need do is remember that there really is the equivalent of an entire bushel of tomatoes in that jar of powder – it’s potent, you don’t need a whole lot.

Much of the rest of the harvest will only be half-dried, put into freezer bags and stored frozen. These can be used at any time for pasta sauces and some fancy dishes, pre-soaked in a marinade that rehydrates them and gives the marinade flavor to them. Half-dried they will take up twice as much room as the crispy dried, and must be frozen or refrigerated because there’s still enough water in them to cause spoilage. But again, they need no sterile jars or lids. Half-dried tomatoes can also be packed into jars of olive oil, and those need not be refrigerated because the oil will keep them from spoiling for a few months. Such jars (never more than pints) of sun dried tomatoes in olive oil with added rosemary or basil make excellent culinary gifts my family and friends look forward to during the holidays when so much feasting is going on.

I’m down to just a couple dozen tomatoes as I write this, they must be finished up tonight because I’m having to cut off whole sections that are beginning to rot. It’s definitely a lot of finger-wrinkling work, but this ample harvest should provide my family with tomatoes enough to get through the winter. Canned or frozen you get the plump body of tomatoes, but much of their abundant vitamin C content has been lost. That’s another great thing about dried tomatoes – they retain almost all of their original complement of vitamins without loss in processing or storage. Such things can be very important during the colds and flu season, when too many people don’t get enough C.

Here’s hoping my fingers survive without permanent wrinkling, and that your tomato harvest is every bit as abundant and busy as mine has been. Oh… and because my hubby and one of my grandsons have complained that my regular ‘mater pie has too many chunky tomatoes in it for them to really like as much as they should (they just don’t like the consistency), I did an on-the-fly recipe alteration this week that has worked out extremely well. Can’t keep those pies long enough to refrigerate and enjoy for breakfast (my favorite). I’m calling it “Fresh Tomato Custard Pie,” recipe below.

Fresh Tomato Custard Pie

• Enough skinned, seeded, cored and chopped tomatoes to provide a full 4 cups (per pie)
• 3 tbsp. corn starch
• 3/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/3 cup chopped fresh basil
• 1/2 tsp. dried basil
• 1 cup shredded mozzarella or mixed Italian cheese

Puree everything except the cheese together thoroughly in a blender or food processor until smooth and thick. Stir in the cheese and mix well. Pour this mixture into a prepared pie shell. You can cover with crust or leave open for pure custard pie. If you don’t have a top crust, sprinkle more shredded cheese on top.

Bake at 350º for 1 hour, or until the filling is semi-firm all the way through. If the crust isn’t golden by then, finish at 450º for another few minutes. Allow the pie to cool and set, at least 30 minutes. It is delicious hot (though a little runny), but I like it better cold and well-set. Excellent for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Enjoy!

In looking around for more information about edibles we can gather without having to grow them in our fields and gardens, I was again reminded of that voracious “Vine that Ate the South” – kudzu. We hear about how the leaves and tender vine ends are high-protein greens either for animal fodder (goats especially love it) or for pot likker greens you can make for dinner. There is usually a sort of side note whenever you read about kudzu that says the root starch is used in China and Japan as “food,” usually unspecified. Those of us who homestead in the south where kudzu has managed to claim millions of acres all for itself, should probably learn about all the ways this plant can be consumed. Not just greens, flower jelly and flower wine.

Originally planted as an ornamental, government and railroad workers planted it across the south in the 1930s for erosion control. It can grow up to 2 feet a day, cover everything in its path, and no known herbicide is ultimately effective against it. The roots can weigh as much as 200 pounds and extend underground to a depth of 10 feet, no topical herbicide is going to kill something like that. All parts of the plant except shallow, bark-covered smaller roots are edible, but it’s unlikely any homestead could consume enough spring shoots, vine ends, leaves or roots in a year to keep it from taking over valuable fields. A herd of goats is about the only thing known to actually keep it under control.

Kudzu has a long history in herbal medicine and shows some promise as a treatment for chronic alcoholism, high blood pressure and as a systemic alterative for colds and flu. But this doesn’t override its value as a wild food source. Roots are dug in the winter, after the kudzu has died back for the season. That annual die-back leads to a thick accumulation of fine compost that can be gathered at the same time and used as a garden amendment. Just be sure to sift first through a screen to remove seeds so you don’t introduce kudzu to your beds. Roots are best dug with a fork like potatoes. If you find a big one you may have dig out around it with a spade. You want the fat, deep roots. If all you can find are the tree root like shallow ones, remove the bark first and only use as powder.

Kudzu root can be used as a general root vegetable in soups and stews, stores well without drying in a good root cellar with your turnips and rutabagas. Or it can be sliced and dried, stored in jars like other dried produce. Once dry it is easily powdered in the usual manner to be used as a thickener for stews and soups, pies and quiches, or as a high protein vegetable-based flour.

It is the root flour that is most often used in Asia for a staple food item. In Korea and China it is mixed with arrowroot powder and made into pasta/noodles. Both the kudzu powder and arrowroot are starches, so cornstarch should work as well. The noodles are nearly transparent, highly nutritious and can be fortified with wheat or rice flour, potato or bean flour, etc.

Making your own pasta and noodles is quite the operation, but well worth it in the fall and winter when it’s not so hot and humid. My family likes home made herbed pastas, veggie pastas made with powdered dry tomatoes, greens, beets, etc. and such. Well dried home made pastas will keep just like store bought pasta, or can be frozen. This year I will be making noodles with kudzu as well.

“The Vine that Ate the South” offers us a highly nutritious staple food we should not overlook in our efforts to live self sufficiently off the land.

Following a useful group series called Living Simply: Zero Waste has me thinking about what goodies from the kitchen gets tossed into the compost pile and how much of it might be useful for some other purpose. The series deals with all kinds of waste, of course, the things that go into our trash cans versus what goes into recycling, etc. And readership includes mostly people who live in urban environments. Things like food packaging and general trash items, getting those down as far as possible by recycling things like used batteries, those ‘planned obsolescence’ disposable electronics, plastics, glass, etc.

We homesteaders who have to haul our own trash and recyclables to the “Inconvenient Center” whenever we’ve got time while the darned dumpster station is actually open are pretty good at doing the separating. Especially for things like metals that can not only be recycled, but which we get paid for by the pound. But the question of food waste is quite pertinent this time of year, as crops start coming in and spring beds are cleaned out for fall crop planting. Which I definitely need to do, and would have already done by now if it weren’t so blasted HOT. At any rate, let’s look at the various compostables for what they might be put to best use for, considering how valuable compost actually is for purposes of growing things.

Right now the peas from spring are done and the fall crop hasn’t yet been planted. But beans are coming in fast in large rushes. If you are growing pole beans like I am (take up less room, are way more abundant than bush beans), you may be growing varieties best purposed for shelled beans than your basic green bean. I have for many years tossed the pods from shelled peas and beans into the compost bucket, but it turns out you can fry them up into a nice finger food once you’ve removed the seeds.

Another good idea is to maintain a good tight-lidded container in the fridge to hold scraps from various vegetables – carrot, leek and onion tops and ends, broccoli and cauliflower stems, those pea/bean pods, tomato cores and skins, the tough stems of kale, collards and chard, potato and/or eggplant skins, fresh corn cobs, pretty much any actual food-food waste generated when processing for canning, freezing or drying. When the container nears full, put it all into a stock pot and boil it up with the addition of some fresh but less-than-presentable herbs (like older parsley, spotted sage, holey basil, etc.) for veggie soup stock. This can be strained and canned to keep all through the winter and used instead of water for meat-based soup stocks, gravies, etc., or just by itself as veggie stock for soups or for cooking dry beans and such.

You can salt it before canning so it’s ready-to-use, or omit the salt and add it later when you’re making something with it. Once the good flavor and valuable nutrients have been boiled out into stock, the leavings of course go right back into the regular compost. It’s like getting twofers from your hard gardening work, and well worth the effort. If you do the hot processing outside on the grill so it doesn’t heat the house, it saves energy and money as well.

If your homestead boasts some dogs – as mine does – you also know that dogs love vegetables as much as we do, and love leftovers even more. There are vegetables dogs shouldn’t eat, but about a quarter of their regular diet should be vegetable (and is in most dry dog foods). Vegetables for dogs should be cooked or steamed, though some like ‘em raw. Remove tomato and onion parts from your unsalted soup stock leavings and your dog will scarf it down no problem. Here’s a good source for pet nutrition, and another with info for home made pet foods.

When all is said and done, kitchen scraps can go into the compost as-is, along with the rest of the yard and garden trimmings, weeds and leaves in the fall. It all makes very good mulch and additions to our gardens, allowing us to grow more food. But the idea of us or our pets getting every bit of nutrition from our food crops is very good, and makes the entire system a whole lot more efficient.

As the economic situation gets steadily worse – the second recessive ‘dip’ is already upon us and once the economic indicators are recalculated we may already be in negative GDP territory. Now that the Congress has passed their very ill-conceived austerity program and put a “Gang of 12″ in charge of slashing and burning, we should be all the way into major depression by Christmas, with real unemployment pushing 20%. We need to be even more attentive than usual to getting the most out of our gardens and livestock, go ahead and plan for those winter crops we could grow in cold frames, preserve every last bit of food however we can, and hang on tight. It’s going to be a rough ride.

Toward that project, I’ll be blogging about grains this month. Grain is getting more and more expensive to buy, but few homesteaders without lots of flatland acreage and a tractor grow any of their own beyond sweet corn or field corn for the livestock. Grains being an important part of our (and our pets’) diet, I’ll be looking at the best and most productive grains to grow in the garden or along the edges of our yards and fallow fields, and how to process and use them. I’ll also be looking at wild grains that we may have access to, as well as local grains you may be able to barter for from a neighbor who grows wheat or barley. It will be important for us to have some poundage of whole grains carefully stored away to make it through until next summer. We are lucky, as many people will be going hungry before things get better. We have to be realistic, plan for this future, and get all our ducks in a row. So please stay tuned!

Useful Links:

Living Simply: Zero Waste
Foods Scrap Cuisine
Home Made Pet Diets
How to Compost Food Scraps
CalRecycle: Food Scraps Management
Frugal dilemmas: food scraps, or more food?

I’ve been looking into the various classified ads locally for livestock I want, to get an idea on budgeting first for proper quartering and actual animals. Chickens are of course a first choice. Also want bees, been looking at hives and queens for sale. If I can site them properly, bears shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Goats are sometime in the future, will need more fencing than we’ve got.

On those classified pages I discovered an awful lot of meat rabbits for sale, and remembered some homesteader friends in Virginia about 25 years ago who were big into meat rabbits. At the time we’d recently become vegetarian and I rejected the idea for our just-started homestead, but all these years later I think the ease of raising rabbits might make them an excellent livestock choice… so long as I don’t have to be the one who slaughters and prepares them for sale. There are surprisingly ample markets locally for good rabbit meat, especially organically raised. Even including some of the high-end eateries and B&Bs who are my regular fresh organic herb and sauce customers.

I ordered a book entitled Raising Rabbits to Survive, which promises to be a very handy reference and educational tool. Even better, the book comes with 5 supplemental books covering just about everything you need to know.

In the meantime and most serendipitously, I also encountered an interesting 5-part blog series about the same subject, which is immediately accessible. Looks like this is something my homestead should be seriously aiming for, before the year is out.

Many of you, like me, will remember raising and keeping rabbits as pets as kids back when we lived in far more urban areas, and think bout how rabbits as livestock could be a considerable cog in our self-sufficiency machinery as homesteaders. Because homesteading these days isn’t always about living way out in the country.

Rabbits are quiet, they don’t take up much room, and with proper care and feeding will readily reproduce on an amazingly quick schedule. You might be surprised that there’s a market for rabbit meat, but homesteaders I knew a quarter century ago raised meat rabbits as well as chickens and goats, for that very purpose. They never could manage to saturate the market. Go surfing through some of the internet’s ample offerings of food and recipe sites for “rabbit recipes.” You’ll get way more than just a camp version of rabbit stew. Things like honey roast rabbit, Chinese sweet and sour rabbit, fried rabbit in breadcrumbs, Louisiana Creole rabbit… the possibilities are endless.

One Rabbit Recipe site notes that rabbit meat is high in protein, low in fat, uric acid, cholesterol, sodium and calories. It is also easily digested and is recommended in diets that restrict red meat. Rabbit is all white meat, fine grained and has a mild flavor. It substitutes well for any recipe calling for veal or poultry. I haven’t personally eaten meat (other than fish) for about 40 years, but I’m not averse to growing rabbits as an organic meat offering if I don’t have to do the slaughtering. I’m fairly sure I could find someone locally who would do the job for a cut of sale price at any of a dozen local organic meats suppliers and cooperatives.

So. How easy or hard is it to go with raising rabbits as a homestead food stock? Apparently not that hard, or even terribly expensive. If you’re willing to do the work. Here’s an overview of the series by DawnG I mentioned, and hope interested readers will take the time to check each installment out. They each contain valuable and useful information.

Part 1 introduces the many good reasons to consider rabbits as livestock, and lists some of the downsides. Such as how difficult it is to not love them as pets. Which for many of us, might be overwhelming.

Part 2 talks about food independence on the homestead, even if you don’t plan to make money (or trade) on your stock. Very good rundown on the details of proper housing for the rabbits, food and watering details, and things to look out for. DawnG also suggests supplying your rabbits with toys, as their teeth grow perpetually and they need things to chew on as well as to play with.

Part 3 looks in depth at rabbit food, commercial and supplementals. She includes the proper protein/fiber ratio for producing the best meat, and varying feed requirements depending on season. Some of the supplementals are things our homesteads can provide quite readily for free, which means they won’t be an added expense. Grass hay, sunflower seeds, fresh or dried fruit, fresh veggies and herbs, weeds and lawn clippings, etc. I figure all the bruised and otherwise compromised fruit and veggies I usually compost could go through rabbits first. Then I could compost the droppings!

Part 4 looks at the best breeds to get as your original breeding stock, and what to look for in each one as to health and pedigree. I had no idea there were so many meat breeds, or that there are show rabbits, and stud rabbits, and an entire sub-business involved in selling such rabbits to other homesteaders for starting their stock. Maybe that’s something a vegetarian could go for as far as participating in meat production.

Part 5 gets into the nitty-gritty about… um… rabbit sex. How old your buck and does should be before you let them breed, what to look out for, what records to keep to ensure your best breeders are the ones producing stock (and not getting eaten), and how to care properly for pregnant does and fresh litters. Also advice on paying attention to mothering traits, culling does that don’t measure up.

All terribly interesting, not very expensive an investment, and something to seriously consider as part of our homesteading adventures. The economy isn’t scheduled to get any better for at least a decade, as social support systems are scheduled to be cut to the bone or entirely eliminated. Self and community sufficiency is only going to become more and more important in the coming years, we homesteaders need to be ahead of the game.

Links:

Raising Rabbits to Survive

Series: A Rabbit in Every Pot – DawnG
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Sigh. As the Kabuki in D.C. continues into yet another week/month of grandstanding on the budget and raising the debt ceiling, a good many of us homesteaders are watching our state governments engaging in the same kind of bad budgetary theater as summer hits hard (and early). This year it looks a lot like neither the weather nor government policies care to offer any help to rural America, where the ‘Great Recession’ is a whole lot more like a Great Depression.

In Washington the drastic budget cuts are of course not hitting ADM or Cargill or any other giant Agribiz subsidies – mostly used to grow bioengineered corn, soy, etc. for animal feed. Rather, cuts in the USDA, EPA and FDA budgets are targeted at conservation, extension, research, renewable energy and rural development programs. Less money for inspections and enforcement, less for policing big livestock operations, less for wetland set-asides, etc., etc., etc. The slashing goes on and on, and bodes ill for just about everything that counts in this world. As if this wholesale gutting of all programs geared towards sustainable agriculture, responsible land use, regulation of pollutants and development of alternative crops isn’t bad enough, they’re also slashing food assistance programs like WIC and food stamps.

The Rodale Institute has a very good overview of how the Republican’s scorched earth policy is targeting small-scale farmers, organic growers and specialty farm/homestead programs that have been important to those of us actually engaged in trying to live sustainably on the land. With $39 billion in cuts to conservation programs aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive areas and $350 million for the Organic Transitions Research Program, it seems quite obvious that today’s politicians don’t have much of an appreciation of what it takes to grow and market nutritious food.

Meanwhile, here at my homestead where the summer crops were planted late due to too much rain and some concern about fallout deposition of cesium from Fukushima (which was high in this area), the rain finally did slack off. To nothing. Haven’t had more than a few drops in over a month, and issues with the cistern have us on water rationing in the household – there’s nothing to irrigate with. That hasn’t been an issue most years given that average rainfall here is ample, but this year’s shaping up to be hellishly hot and dry. I can do nothing but wait and see which crops make it through to the next rainy spell, keep some potted seedlings in reserve to plant REALLY late if need be. If it’s to be a super-hot summer, it could last well into November. That’s enough time for most things, even if planted late.

Below are some good articles and resource collections so that we who will be most affected by what Washington (and our state governments) do about the coming second dip of the Great Recession. I urge all my readers to educate themselves to what’s happening nationally and locally, and get involved. Call your representatives. Write letters to the editor. Bring up the important issues at the farmer’s market and at church and at any other community meetings where people who are also affected can be found. Money is just paper and computer data these days. Wall Street’s paper is even less than that. But everyone has to eat, and if there are no food producers people will starve. Our land, our labor, our crops are much more imp We must speak out. We must speak loudly. And we must enlist all the help we can get.

Links:

Agri-Pulse Communications
Rodale Press
Rural Resource Guide [NC]
American Farmland Trust