Pretty Jars, All in a Row

The line-up: (front) Two bottles of dried Opalka tomatoes with basil and garlic in olive oil, sweet pickle relish, sweet pickles with tumeric, dried apple rings, dried tomatoes, and salsa. Back: (partially hidden) apple sauce, sweet icicle pickles, tomato sauce, apple-tomato chutney.




More, and more, and MORE canned goodies!

Feeling a Bit Like a Squirrel

Handsome Son amongst the tall trees.


Okay, Canners everywhere! Repeat after me!

"I am NOT a hoarder. I am NOT a hoarder..."

This fall I have been doing a lot of canning. It seems I am cooking down tomatoes for sauce like every minute I am home. I don't know how many times I set an alarm on my way out of the house lately and leave the parting words with Handsome Son, "Remember to take the tomato sauce out of the hot water bath and turn off the stove when the alarm goes off!"

My sister-in-law lent me her Foley food mill and it is very slick way to make sauce simply by washing and quartering the tomatoes, boiling them away and running them through her food mill.

It has also been a great way to process apple sauce.

She also lent me her five tray dehydrator. I have made some of the prettiest "sun-dried" tomatoes I ever saw from the Roma-style heirloom Opalkas that have been more than bountiful this summer. Some of these I stored in glass jars with a few grains of rice, others I submerged in olive oil with garlic or basil, or both.

I have also dried apple slices and experimented with a summer squash dried, salted, and herbed as a possible snack choice.

I still have potatoes to harvest. My goal was minimally 250 pounds. We planted about 90 hills between my potager here in town and the 75 hills at the family garden. We have been digging them all along since about mid-August. One of the twins jumped and shouted, "apples!" when the first 'Red Norland' popped from the ground.

I harvested about seven pounds from a couple hills here of 'Yukon Gold'. Almost too good to use so blatantly, I made french fries and hash browns from them. I cut the fries by hand and deep-fried them for Handsome Son.

He has started running and shooting around on his own after school in preparation for taking on the "tall trees" on the basketball court. Last season, nearly all our starters did not play football. In a small school conference, where the same kids meet up with the same kids from each school in every season playing a different game, that was unusual.

This year while the rest of his squad is fighting it out on the football field, Handsome Son shoots around with the younger brothers of his last year's starting squad, the "big man" surrounded by the shadows of last year's guards and forwards.

Fall is all about preparation and hoarding our resources. Instead of the Wildcats, maybe our mascot should be a squirrel.

My Grandmother's Kitchen

My maternal grandmother was an amazing cook. As a child, I liked her cooking best of all the places I was able to pull up a chair to a table. Her fruit pies were incredible, I liked the blueberry best. She made everything from scratch, and she canned.

Recipes were closely held by her. My mother swears her mother used no written recipes at all, that everything was in her head. My mother has some recipes like this, prepared so often there is no need for a written reinforcement, although there are cookbooks and cooking magazines scattered throughout my mother's house. My grandmother's cooking was like a family's oral history, passed from one generation to the next.

Unfortunately, as I child I barely glimpsed at this rich heritage. My grandmother who ran her kitchen like a German battleship, did not deem my mother worthy to inherit. I remember being sent from the kitchen in tears one late summer day after breaking a jar I was filling with sliced cucumbers.

My grandmother canned everything imaginable. She had racks built in her basement to hold this bounty. Going to the basement to fetch a jar of dill pickles was a bit like going to a grocery store, for all the efficiency of her ordered shelving, with jars lined up with precision, neatly labeled.

Her dill pickles were really crunchy, a feat not easy to duplicate, and which I have yet to achieve. Packed with these pickles would be a couple carrot and celery sticks, heads of fresh dill, garlic cloves, red peppers, and onion. In addition to spices, she also used alum.

I asked her what alum was, and I remember her telling me it was the crunch. We shall see.

My canning bible, 'Ball's Blue Book of Preserving' does not include a single recipe with alum. Today, with the Internet, I am able to find dozen of recipes for dill pickles using alum. Although, they will not be my grandmother's dill pickles, perhaps they will be close. I also know it is important to take a fork and pierce the pickles several times with the tines and removing a tiny bit of each end of the pickle is equally important to the crunch.

Today's recipe is a simple one from my childhood, a simple vinegary pickle:

Select a largish cucumber. Slice it into crosswise circular slices, 1/4" thick. Place in a plastic or glass bowl. Cover with cider vinegar. Weigh the slices with a small glass plate. Cover with plastic wrap.

The vinegary pickles will be ready to eat in one week.

Yet Another Snow Day in Zone 4 Central Wisconsin

Or "What to Do in the Garden in March, part 2"...

Sleep. We wish.

It's official. They canceled school. It's a snow day. That means my mother called and my brother can't make it to the farm to milk cows. Can my son come out and help Grandpa? He goes a bit grudgingly. It means here, in town, with such limited space, he has to shovel out my car and chip off the ice before he can get to his car. I don't have the heart to give up garden space to park his car next to instead of in front of mine. I already have my pick-up taking up space as it is.

I think we got about 3" of sleet, snow, and ice last night, another 2" to 4" of snow forecast for today.

So what to do in the garden in March? Not a lot apparently. I can usually count on frost-free, snow-free ground by the second week in April. That's not to say it won't snow. I just doesn't stay more than a day at that point. I did notice the snow had melted enough yesterday morning before this all began to see my garlic was 3" tall. It's a sign of spring to be sure. I had ordered a couple different kinds of garlic from www.wegrowgarlic.com last fall and planted them next to my deck the beginning of November.

I like to can. Canning, for me is a quality and value-added project: baby cucumber gherkins, roasted sweet red pepper spread, hamburger dills with big chunks of dilled onion, dilly beans with a couple of carrot spears in every jar, salsa, tomato juice and sauce. All these things call for garlic. Fresh is best, but at my "local" grocery store fresh is "produced in China".

Produced in China?

Well, last fall I decided I was definitely going to grow my own garlic. I was delighted that I could purchase my garlic starts from a Wisconsin company. We Grow Garlic grows more garlic than even I could imagine. And they seem really excited to do it. They have more kinds than I can quickly count. They COLLECT garlic. Do you know anyone who collects garlic?

I chose Thermadrone and China Purple. Later this summer, I'll tell you how they grew for me.

I did reserve a few of each for cooking through the winter. They sell garlic untreated, so eating or planting, whatever you choose to do with their garlic is fine with them. Mincing the cloves, I have noticed a milder note, more mellow garlic aroma. The darkly handsome male vampire from SyFy's "Being Human" might be able to sit next to me and ogle the blood coursing in my veins while I ate a bowl of pasta without developing hives.


Swiss chard 'Primo Rossa' and Cabbage 'Wakefield' stretching for the light.


Beautiful tomato 'Siberian' supposedly produced 52 days from transplanting.


Sweet red peppers 'Carmen' with onions growing behind.


Ornamental millet 'Jester' on left, Italian flat-leaved parsley and cayenne pepper. These seeds from Jung's had amazing germination (90% to 100%) compared with 50% I got on the sweet red 'Carmen'.


A 'Savoy' style cabbage with leeks growing behind. In the foreground, celery 'Tango' and the bare soil, seed planted on 3/21 for Dinosaur Kale. Tango had a very uneven germination. I have already pricked out and potted on a couple dozen celery which had developed their third leaves before these guys were hardly more than germinated.

Gardening in March for me consists of planning growing my garden. A couple years ago, I had my then 14-year old son help me build two light racks. I have a room I had originally planned as my upstairs bathroom when I bumped out a dormer and made the attic into a master bedroom loft. Budget issues have continued to leave this room unfinished. Vacant space too often becomes storage, especially in a home as small as mine without a garage or basement. My house is a scant 900 square feet, with my loft. I've managed to get a lot into a tiny space; I have a dishwasher, washer, dryer, fireplace, a 8' by 6' bathroom, a dining room where ten can sit down for pasta. The light racks fit beautifully into this space and almost make it worth the absence of a second floor bathroom.

The light racks hold 18 10" by 20" plant trays. I could pimp them up to hold an additional 10 plant trays, if needed. Right now, I have lots of little plants screaming for a cell-pack they can call their own. I have one position in one of the racks with a tray on my heating mat. I have found using a heating mat cuts my germination time by half. After about 90 percent of the seeds have germinated I move onto the next batch of seed I need to germinate.

Last night, I chipped four o'clock seeds and soaked them along with the colored cauliflower seed from Botanical Interests. Those will be planted today. I also have some Savoy style cabbage to prick out. I could start some coleus, and begonia cuttings. I have seeds started for a lot of things, cabbage, kale, onions, leeks, broccoli, that will go into the garden before last frost, which here is sometime around the third week in May.

I have found those kabob spears to work just perfectly to prick out and plant seedling. I think this step, after getting good germination, to be the most important in growing good strong transplants for the garden. To prick out, I prepare the next up size cell, going no bigger than 2" by 2". It is important that plants develop roots that fill the cells. I use the kabob stick to make a hole in the center of the cell and than draw down the root system of the seedling into the cell with the pointy end of my stick. I carefully press the soil around the seedling, fertilize if I so inclined and water. If the seedling is a difficult transplant I may cover the newly transplanted seedling with a clear dome to conserve transpiration. This is a great method for just a few seedlings planted in a mass planting like I did in a couple trays above.

If I am growing a lot of seedlings in a 256-cell-count tray, one seed to a cell, I may want to use a dibble to may the holes (or I have even seen these dibble racks that will make the holes a whole flat at a time. Simply pop out the cells, place a cell in the larger pots and press. seedling need to have good cohesion with soil to keep growing. Air pockets will air prune the roots. "Watering in" the seedlings helps get rid of air pockets.