Putting aside Food in 2010 (pt 1 of 2)

It has been a few years since we started, oh say maybe 35,  but sometimes it feels like we are still beginning to understand how to put food by and how to have enough fresh food for year around meals from the garden.  So this post is to remind us what we did in 2010.

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We have a freezer, a canning pot, a pressure canner, canning tools, an apple peeler/corer/slicer, knives, chopping blocks, a mandolin slicer, a pressure cooker, jars of various sizes including wide-mouth quart jars and sealing lids, a kitchen stove, a barbecue, a dehydrator, a pantry, dry, dark, cool drawers, a compost pile, sealable plastic sacks and a vacuum packaging device.  All of these things have been used this summer to put food away.  The mention of the barbecue reminds me of the amusing sign we found in a Gold Beach motel patio.

We don't have an outdoor kitchen (yet), we still need more understanding about pressure canners and one day we will have a root cellar.   We do have lots of food growing around us and find it has become a daily opportunity to either plant, tend, harvest or put food by.  So what foods have been put away this summer and in what form?  Time to make a list, perhaps in no particular order but organized by food family.

•    Fruit and Berries:

1. Strawberries were made into jam that we had leftover from last year in the freezer.  They were ready for the last steps in the jam making process.  The sack of frozen strawberries, already partially processed, were like found gold, they were so valuable.
2. Raspberries were made into jam from the bushes out back.  We ate most of the berries fresh or in our summer breakfasts, so only a tiny amount got into jam this year.
3. Blueberries were found in the neighborhood, picked, washed, sorted and frozen on trays and then placed in quart bags in the freezer.  They are so good for breakfast and snacks and we put up 40# but I don't know if they will last!  Blueberries were also dried in the food dehydrator and seemed to have lost their flavor.  Freezing is better for us this year.
4. Peaches were purchased from a neighbor and once fully ripened, pits came out, skins off and cut into quarters to be canned in the pressure canner without the pressure gauge.  These 21 quarts will be appreciated over the next 11 months.
5. Pears were picked from our tree and individually wrapped in paper and stored in a dry, dark box in the pantry.
6. Apples were harvested from our trees, peeled, cored and sliced and cooked down into applesauce and frozen in jars.  We still need more apples and perhaps some apple butter.  We still have some jars of dried apples from last year in the cupboard.
7. Our Asian pears are still not quite ripe and we still wonder what is the best thing to do with them.  Last year we gave them all away but recently we learned that they can make a good sauce.  Hmmm.
8. Our table grapes are ripening fast and last year we froze some and they are enjoyable over the winter.  More will be washed, frozen on trays and then placed in quart bags next month, once they get their sugars up.

• Vegetables

1. Zucchini seemed to never end this summer and it started early.  Almost every day we picked zucchini and once we had enough for processing, we began.  Sometimes we sliced them the long way, oiled and salted them, put on barbecue for 10 minutes, placed them individually on trays in the freezer and then in quart bags in the freezer once frozen.  Other times we filled the dehydrator and ran it for hours in the sun and then put the almost paper dry chips into jars.  We usually choose to suck the air out of the jars after putting the dried zucchini inside.  Sometimes we put them in plastic sacks and vacuumed the air out.  Sometimes we just eat them... heheheh.
2. Eggplants came this year with a vengeance.  Thanks to our new ColdFrame (which is more of a hotframe in the summer) we got Asian Eggplant to set fruit in early September.  We treated it just like the zucchini.
3. Tomatoes are going mainly for sauces this year and how the sauces are made depends on the variety of tomato and how we want to work in the kitchen.  To me, the tomatoes take a lot of work and they, as with most of this work, have been Karen's speciality.
4. Peppers are still ripening and I expect we will harvest them, cut out the centers, cut into strips, dip in olive oil and barbecue them before freezing.  This worked great last year.
5. Squashes are still ripening but we have a dry, dark drawer (or two) waiting for their harvest in October.  We have butternut, acorn and delicato for sure (maybe others?)
6. Cauliflower was harvested, washed, cut up and dried in the dehydrator and also it was blanched, placed on trays in the freezer to freeze separately and then put into quart bags in the freezer.
7. Broccoli was harvested, cut up and blanched, frozen on trays and put into quart bags in freezer.

• Root Crops

1. Onions are drying in the shed and some are still in the ground.  I am not sure how we are going to process them - perhaps dry them separately, and then store in porous sacks somewhere dry, away from mice.
2. Shallots are still in the ground and probably will go into dry storage after we dry them and wipe off the dirt.
3. Leeks are still in the ground and will go the route of shallots and onions I believe.
4. Potatoes have been dug and eaten all summer.  New, fresh, baby potatoes are so awesome with the translucent skins and creamy taste.  Butter just confuses the lushness of these powerhouses.  The rest of the crop will be dug in October and put into dry storage.  We had trouble last year keeping them from sprouting and gave away a fair amount of our harvest.  We need to start digging on the root celler any day now!  Oh yes, we also sliced potatoes with the mandolin, placed on cookie sheets to freeze and then bagged them last year, no cooking.  These slices made great potato dishes with lots of fresh flavor and I bet we do something that again in mid-winter as they start to sprout again.. sigh.

Next post will cover leafy greens, herbs, nuts, meats and other things left out above.  This posting may be edited because I need Karen to check it to see if it is accurate.  Now that the list is on the screen, it is easy to see why we are so busy putting aside food in 2010.

The passing of a very old friend

He was just a foam dinosaur really.

The orange/red dinosaur clock that came into our kitchen, back when Emily was very young, died last week and I miss it.  It really never had a name.  It sat smiling like an apostle above the north facing windows in our kitchen for so long, and even though every appliance seems to have a clock in it, and so do the computers, the cameras and the phones, the Dinosaur set the time in my life.  It ran on a standard AA battery and was immune to our occasional rural interruption in electricity.  The hands and face were big enough to be read from anywhere in the room, once you got used to it.  This thing worked; it kept great time and I wanted it to live at least as long as I did.

Amazingly, it was in horrible shape. Look at it, the bottom is all scruffed up, the foam is falling apart.  This is more than strange, considering it only came down from the hanger twice a year to be moved forward or backward an hour and get it's battery renewed.  The face of the clock was dirty and fly specked.  The hands were slightly bent and the whole thing was ready to fall apart.  Occasionally the battery came undone.  Gravity?  Moisture? Earthquakes?  Who knows.  The foam is pitted and falling out in tiny pieces, such tiny pieces we didn't notice it.  Now that it sits on the counter with pennies over its eyes, all the hands pointed at 12, we see it has gone over the hill.  About 12 inches from tail to snout, the creature just fit into our decor.  Nothing like a wild colored children's toy, soft, foam, cutout dinosaur shaped clock for that modern (or classical!) interior design statement!  I suppose if we bury this clock (being a dinosaur and all) and wait a few millennia, it will turn into some kind of sludge that we can use for energy.    

It will be years before I stop looking up there for the clock.  Maybe someone has a replacement to suggest, something that brings the same ambiance to the country kitchen we spend so much time in.  Something that keeps good time and won't give up after just 30 years.

Christmas is only 6 months away!

Building our cold Frame - spring 2010

Even before we started the project, we decided to capture the major parts in photos and on film.  There was a lot about our cold frame construction and design that did not make it into my video.
However, to get an idea of what it looks like, try this link uTube Video - 5 minutes of cold frame info.  This brief write-up should help fill in any gaps.

We started raised bed gardening years ago after turning the soil each spring and battling the same weeds all summer and fall.  In fact, things are so prolific here in the Willamette valley of Oregon that we found weeds quite difficult to control.  Combine this with Karen's desire not to work in a bent over position, we built some nice and tall raised beds in about 2000.  These beds are about 22" tall and have done well for ten years.  We turn the soil annually with a spading fork and have very few weeds.  We covered the bottom with landscape cloth and hardware cloth to keep the thistles and gophers out of the beds.  We filled the beds with compost provided by a local recycler and found we need to add more each year due to settling and some soil leaving with the plants.

All was well until this winter when we visited our neighbors and found them eating fresh lettuce from their greenhouse.  Damn, that looked good in January and February!  After pricing a new or even used green house and thinking we wanted to build it ourselves, we settled on a constructing a large cold frame instead. When you think about it, they are a much more efficient use of materials as you have no human space to maintain - just plant space.  We researched the cold frame market and watched tons of videos on the web from other souls like us and determined, as is often the case, that the things we need are close at hand.  This video from a couple of growers in Washington   pretty much tipped it for us - we needed to use Solexx.  It seemed like a good product and we will know a heck of a lot more about it over the next few years.

In Brooks, next to I-5, a small company has a display of a variety of greenhouses and cold frames and they sell kits as well as manufacture a greenhouse covering called Solexx.   None of their kits fit our existing raised beds, so we visited them in March of 2010.  They were quite friendly and both of the owners sat down with us to discuss our problems and brainstorm solutions based on their experience, our needs and our budget.  They kindly sold us metal fittings to make a complete structure.  They said this was not usual.  They usually sell kits and rolls of Solexx to cover the structure.  We bought the parts and 22' of Solexx.  It all came to around 280$, kind of spendy for our budget but awesome for rigidity, length of life, ease of construction and quality of light for plants.
I had some 3/4" PVC schedule 40 pipe on hand already from installing our farm's plumbing system and used this for framing.  I also got special screws and a tube of GE Silicon to complete the materials list.

The video shows the construction and it was not too difficult.  Measure well and be sure to cut long to start.  The fittings are not all equal (some allow the pipe to go further into the fitting that others) and trial and error helped.  Once the frame was built and covered and the ends were sealed with silicone, we put it on the raised bed.  There it was easy to add the hinges, the small chains to keep it from tipping too far and, best of all, the automatic opener.  These auto-opener devices are magical.  I am still not sure how such a small cylinder can lift the 25# cold frame at such a precise temperature.  Since we setup the auto-opener, the inside the cold frame has never got above 80 degrees.  Some mornings it reaches 80 when it is still in the 50's outside.  As the video shows, we have a remote thermometer inside the cold frame.  

The vegies are loving it so much.  We think we will have the best peppers and eggplant ever this year and look forward to growing our own food all year long.  Almost every inch of the 32 sq foot bed can be used for growing plants up to 3' tall.  Now it's up to us, not the weather, to get good food onto the table for ourselves, our family and our friends.  And we still are growing a summer garden in other raised beds, including one 8'x18' dedicated to just squash varieties this year.

Feel free to leave a message on Utube about the video, the garden or something else that you are working on and we will do what we can to help.

Eidetic Fugue - Part four

When we returned from San Francisco, it was almost Thanksgiving. We decided we would open the shop on Monday, after the Thanksgiving weekend. We had no clue that the day after Thanksgiving was a big shopping day; well, it really wasn't quite as huge back in 1966. I'm sure stores were busy but it wasn't the monster thing with weird opening hours and people having breakfast shopping parties like in 2009.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we put the final touches on the shop. We put up a sample of each poster, including a few in the back room with a black light. In the windows were the fine albums we had purchased in the city - no one else in town had them but some knew of their existence. We brought back the first edition of a large alternative newspaper called Rolling Stone and it was full of news of the musicians we admired and listened to each day. We got the money box ready and got change from the bank on Friday. The stereo was all set up, the headphones were sitting in the rocking chair by the counter and we were ready for people. We even had a mostly empty display case, waiting for Salem people to bring in their home-made treasures to sell

Monday was exciting - at least for me. My parents were suffering through this part of my life but continued to support me in any way they could. I don't think they really knew what we were doing in the shop besides "opening a store" but I'm sure they had doubts about our success. Events in the coming weeks might allay some of the fear of our financial ruin and probably bring other new fears to light, like the legality of our merchandise. Mom stepped forward to help me with my clothing choices that first day and suggested that I wear a sports jacket on my first day as a businessman. It was a Harris Tweed that had been made to order in London for a ridiculously low price. I still have the one that was made for father and wear it when I want to keep warm, no matter what. I looked kind of sharp I guess, probably much squarer than I wanted. My hair was not long but I had some fuzzy muttonchops that were my claim to the new age.

We opened the door at noon, as per the posted hours on the door and our business cards. A few times as we were preparing the shop, some shy teenagers lurked around and eyeballed us, but no one stopped to talk until we opened. I guess we were pretty different than any other store in town.

There I was, a man with a store, sitting on a high wooden stool above the desk, eyeing the jail across the street and watching the people walk by. We were OPEN.

One of the first customers was a parent; someone with a teenager who had mentioned the shop. She looked around very uncomfortably and asked which poster was popular. Heck, I didn't know, I hadn't sold any yet, but I recommended the Janis Joplin one. It was a very cool poster to a 19 year old male. Janis was photographed in black and white, standing, smiling, covered with beads, black clothes, hair down to there and if you looked real close, you could see one of her nipples exposed. My first customer passed that poster by for a Greatful Dead concert poster, also very cool but without any exposed nipples. I got a copy of that poster out of the black light/storage room and carefully pulled out just enough plain brown wrapping paper out of slot in the desk, cut it, rolled the poster up in it, put two pieces of scotch tape on the ends and handed it to her. She paid with cash and that first dollar bill went on the wall behind me. We were in business.

Somewhere around 3 or 4, Mike and Bill came in and it was with great pride I pointed to our first dollar. This called for Pepsi's for everyone (free of course!) and the day began. It was that week that the local newspaper discovered us.