Fermentation

I finally made a good batch of fermented pickles.

Sadly the first batch I tried to make ended up getting moldy. Many people would just tell you to scrape it off and eat it anyway. I'm not about to do that with my health problems. I can't even eat a mushroom, I'm not about to try something that might have even small bits of mycotoxins in it.

But batch number two was totally clear. I haven't tasted them yet. I'm still working on my kohlrabi pickles (which are much easier to make).

Water kefir in bottled water with molasses, water kefir in tap water with date syrup, and milk kefir

I've been drinking milk kefir for a while now, but I decided to see what water kefir tasted like. Well it turns out I'm not a big fan. To be honest I probably wouldn't be a big fan of milk kefir all by itself, but I drink it in a morning fruit smoothie, and it really tastes good like that. But the water kefir tasted too much like vinegar to me. And too sweet. You would think tart and sweet would be good together, but to me the flavors just didn't work. So I've abandoned that.

I did learn something interesting from it though. I tried fermenting the middle jar with tap water. I knew filtered water wouldn't work as there aren't enough minerals in it to keep the bacteria alive. Some people say tap water doesn't work well because of the chlorine in the water. If it were just chlorine I could leave it on the counter to evaporate for 24 hours. But our water system uses chloramine which does not evaporate. The kefir made with bottled spring water worked just fine and smelled decent. The one made with the tap water smelled vile, like it was rotting. Ewwwww! I tried to revive it for a week by using good spring water on it and it never recovered. The symbiotic culture was damaged.

All I could think was if it was so obviously bad for the culture on my counter top, what in the world was it doing to my gut bacteria. I'd been drinking filtered water since my doctor told me to last fall, but I was still cooking with regular tap water. If I had chlorine in my tap water it would be fine as it would evaporate as I cooked and I'd be fine, but not with my tap water. So now I'm using filtered water for most of my cooking too.

All this and so much more leads me to be amazed at the irony of our current state of how we keep ourselves healthy. We poison our water so we won't get sick. We kill our parasites to keep us healthy, even though they are being found to help regulate our immune system especially as infants and in utero. We throw antibiotics at diseases to keep us healthy, and they kill off our precious gut bacteria. So instead of the chance of dying quickly from an infection, instead we die slowly from heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and auto immune diseases. Yesterday I was reading an article that was saying they discovered a bacteria that prevents us from getting type 1 diabetes. And this article is hardly unique. We are finding that our bacterial health is our health. Our physical health and even our mental health. Jeff Leach of the American Gut Project thinks that eating fermented foods isn't the trick to improving our gut, but eating a more varied source of food for our microbiome. And lots of it. Thank goodness I have a garden to eat from.

Gooseberry Jam

I had just under 6 pounds of gooseberries in my fridge. I decided to make jam out of it. I give gifts of jam to my neighbors at the holidays and gooseberry jam is nice as you can't buy it anywhere. I ran my gooseberries through the strainer. I should have had a nice photo of it up in action, but of course forgot about it until it was already clean.

My jam is pretty simple. I added sugar until it tasted like jam which turned out to be four cups. Though I'm a bit worried about that. I don't eat sugar much anymore and my tastes have changed. I worry that I might have made it too tart for the average American. I also added a few tablespoons of lemon juice and a tablespoon of cinnamon. I like to use my mongo big fry pan to make jam as it boils down fast.

My biggest problem with making jam is getting the gel right. I tend to over gel my jams even though I never use pectin. I think when I first learned, someone told me that when you drag a spoon through the jam it shouldn't go back into the trough right away. It kind of stuck with me. But the reality is a well done jam won't quite do that unless it has started to cool. The other issue is the fear of getting syrup instead of jam. But honestly jam that doesn't spread well is almost as bad. My last strawberry jam was like that. So I'm trying to be better. The reality is that I like soft jams, so I shouldn't be afraid of them. I hope I got this one right.

I got six half pints out of it. The last jar which I'll keep for myself is filled with foam as it was the last scraping from the pan. No matter how much foam one scrapes from the surface of the jam, more always seems to pop up. I know you can add butter to keep the foam down, but I don't like the idea of butter in my jam for some reason. Seems silly doesn't it as I've got nothing against butter on my toast before I add jam. This won't win any prizes at the fair. I doubt any of my jam would as I can see small bits of foam in every one, but I'm not going for looks. Taste is everything - and that gel issue. But still they don't look bad. The cinnamon really made my green gooseberries turn a pretty burnt red.

This and That

View from the kitchen window. Lavender!

I was a bit disappointed when I found my broccoli all needed to be picked yesterday. I really need to have two different varieties to keep me in broccoli longer. It does make it easy to freeze though.

My currant bushes are so easy to overlook. They ripen, but hide behind all that foliage.

Up close you can see them. So I picked the berries on this bush today.

I stripped them off the stems and froze them. I don't have time today to make jam, but I will sometime this summer I'm sure.

And my pink variety is almost ready to pick. It really likes to set a LOT of berries on just a few stems. It will make it much easier to pick.

Also today I sheared off half the chives. They were getting a bit ratty. I picked through them and kept about a quarter of what I cut.

I'm dehydrating them. I've never done that before. I couldn't cut them up into small bits or they would fall through even my herb screens. So I left them large and will cut them later. I hope it works.

There were a lot of weeds growing up through the ends of my beds so I've been slowly putting on some mulch. I collect leaves in the fall from the neighbors who put them in paper bags. I keep the bags and cut them up to mulch in these strange spots. It helps keep the weeds from my neighbor's side from getting out of control on my side. I can tie it to the fence and block them. He probably saw me doing this and now his side is dying. I'm sure he sprayed it. So now I'm half done and no more weeds to contend with. Should I finish anyway?

My melons last week got chomped down by slugs. Sigh. I resowed and they have come up again and seem to be doing fine. But I pulled the lettuce in the bed that I was letting go to seed. They don't need the competition when their season has been shortened so much.

My krautchi did bubble over. So it wasn't just the sugar that was an issue, it was the ginger probably. Plain kraut doesn't do that for me. So I took it down by half an inch. That seemed to be enough. I had the not very well fermented krautchi that I took out for lunch. Yum. Though it could have used some vinegar as it wasn't at all sour yet.

Lots of other little things have been done, most of which I don't remember except weeding. But I have noticed my peach tree is dropping fruit. Sad. But not unexpected. I went out the other day and collected and composted them. I'll probably go out and do it every couple of days until it stops.

Carrots and Krautchi

I had a lot of problems earlier in my carrot bed. Germination was fine, but the cutworms were very bad. Obviously a lot of cutworms eggs had been laid the previous fall. I planted them where my seed mustard was. The hope was that it would keep the nematode problems down. Mustard is a natural way to fumigate the land from them. I didn't anticipate that the cutworms would like the mustard so much though. I would guess that about a quarter of my crop was destroyed. Maybe a bit more. Not that you can tell from the photo, but I thin to about 3-4" apart. The cutworms thinned much father apart. And there is one sixth of the bed with almost nothing at all.

I noticed that some of the carrots were showing above the bed. Some years they seem to hide and I have to dig down to find them. But some years they show themselves. It was time to start picking. I won't pick them all at once. I don't need this bed for another three weeks. So I'll pick some. Once they are used up, I'll pick more.

I planted my beloved Mokum carrots of course. Many carrots taste bitter at this time of the year. Mokum is always sweet and tasty to me. It isn't a large carrot at 5-6" long (well by the book, I've had it grow to 8" one year). But I'm always on the lookout for another to plant near it. This year I trialed Nelson. It was described as a good summer carrot as it tastes good when the weather is hot. This one is 6-7" long.

Of course a trial means I have to know which carrot is which. Did I write it down where I planted each one? Nope. Not on the blog, not in my journal. Not on my planting map. I think Nelson was put on the northwest side. I think. Maybe taste would tell me which one was which. I know Mokum will taste sweet and delicious. If one is bitter, then I know.

I cleaned them up. I used a trick I used to use with my garlic when I had more than one variety. When you trim them, trim one higher than the other so you can tell them apart. I left some stem on the top of one. It really helps if you KNOW which one is which to start with though. The ones I think are Mokum were a bit shorter than the Nelsons, so that jibes. I tasted the one I thought was Mokum. Yup sweet and so delicious. It will be nice not eating store bought carrots anymore. I tasted Nelson. Also a really lovely carrot. Sweet, but not quite as sweet as Mokum. I think the flavor is a bit more complex though. Very nice. It is a definite keeper. Last year I tried Yaya. It was sweet enough without bitterness, but it lacked the depth of flavor that a carrot ought to have. It was insipid. Both Mokum and Nelson are very good. I think my summertime carrot trials are at an end. Unless some other blogger proclaims a summer carrot above all others, I'll stick with these.

And the mustard crop I used to keep down the nematodes worked to an extent. I did see a touch of damage, but not much. Definitely not worth the cutworm damage.

And as a quick update, I decided to use one of my Chinese cabbages to make a couple of quarts of Sauerchi, Kimkraut or something like that. I made it like you do sauerkraut. Chop up the vegetables and use a dry salting technique. Then jam them into jars. But I seasoned it like kimchi (or as much as I can without peppers). I used garlic, ginger, and cilantro. I didn't use any sugar or fruit to keep the fermentation under control. And I'll let them ferment for weeks not days. So it is more like an Asian flavored Kraut.

They joined the fermenting station in the dining room. I might make more this week with the last cabbage. It seems like a very nice way to preserve the cabbage. Tasty and long lasting.

Taste Test

Both my kimchi and my sauerkraut were ready for a side by side taste test. First though you get their smell. Kimchi has an overpowering smell to me. When I've been to the local H-Mart (Asian food megastore), I always stay out of the kimchi wing. It is just too much for me. My own isn't quite that bad as it is just one jar, but still it is strong. Sauerkraut's aroma is a bit more subdued. Either aren't really all that bad right now as I can open the windows and the smell dissipates. But in the winter I might not like it much.

Kimchi left, sauerkraut right

As for taste. The sauerkraut is OK. Kind of boring. It was a bit too salty. So I'll try a lower salt content next time. But very edible. The kimchi surprised me. For something with such an strong smell, the taste was quite nice. I could see eating this on a regular basis. Of course anything that has an underlying taste of garlic and ginger has to be good. I think next time I might drop the ginger just a bit. The cherries really didn't add much either. But I liked the turnips and carrots in the mix. And the sweetness was just right.

My problem with the kimchi though is storage. This is a way to preserve cabbage for me. Well and get some probiotics. But the kimchi when it ferments really goes for it. I left about an inch on top of both the sauerkraut and kimchi. The sauerkraut raised up a bit, but not enough to overflow. The kimchi overflowed a lot. I poured some liquid out to help out. But it just did it again. It was a very vigorous fermentation. But since I lost so much liquid, once it had cooled off in the fridge, the liquid sunk down to about half way up the jar. So I have no liquid covering my kimchi. I think it is necessary to keep it from growing mold in storage if I keep it for any length of time. I'm thinking I could cover it with a fresh brine, but if I do what percentage do I make so it still tastes good? Maybe 2%? Anyone have any clue?

I'm assuming the kimchi is such a vigorous fermenter because of the sugar that was added. I didn't add as much as a lot do. And I didn't add that much fruit. Next time I'll have to leave a lot of space on top to keep it under control. It would be interesting to make a mix that was flavored like the kimchi (garlic, ginger, cilantro) but fermented more like sauerkraut. I might really like that and it might not have the smell or the out of control fermentation. It might be time to play with my mix.

Preserving the Greens

I've read some posts recently about how people preserve their greens. Mostly it is all the same. Wash, blanch, cool, freeze. The differences are all in the details. I've found over the years what does and doesn't work for me. And some of what I do is a little different from the norm.

Four gallon wash pan

Washing seems simple. But it is really trimming and washing. I do most of my trimming outdoors at the same time that I pick. This makes the whole indoor time shorter. I like being outside most of the time. Here you see me washing my chard. However there are no stems on it. Those were removed while I picked. Any large annoying things are picked off too, like insects or the ever present maple barf that keeps coming down from the trees. I think that is over at least. Though I'll be pulling a lot of little maple seedlings soon. I always pick with a bucket by my side to toss in any waste. And anytime I'm under a row cover I weed around the plants. Once the greens are brought inside the leaves don't need much more than a quick rinse. Though I use a very big wash pan to make washing easier and I harvest right into my wash pan. And when I'm done with the water it gets tossed on my raspberry plants. They love the extra water.

Blanching is pretty easy. Toss the washed greens into a large pot of boiling water for 2-3 minutes depending on the crop. The difference comes when I remove those greens. I don't put a colander in my sink an pour. I have a really nifty tool to remove the greens from the boiling water. The water stays on the stove. I often do more than one batch at a time. If I put too many greens into the water at once the water never gets back to boiling before the time is up. It cools it down too much. So I do about 1 to 1 1/2 pound batches at a time. As soon as one batch is removed the next batch goes right in. For me, throwing hot water down the sink between would be a horrible waste of hot water not to mention my own time. Water takes a long time to boil.

I'm pretty typical on cooling my greens. A pot of ice water. Some people use their kitchen sink with ice in it. I cringe at that. Kitchen sinks have the most bad bacteria of any place in your house. I cut open my packets of raw chicken in my sink. I don't want to contaminate my nice greens. I often eat them by just thawing them out and eating them cold. I love cold greens (yes I'm weird that way). I do have to say though, now that I'm blanching a lot I've found I'm in love with my ice maker. I thought it was an irrelevant item when we bought it. But we couldn't get it without one. Now when I'm in big time blanch mode in the spring, I always have ice.

Once the greens are cold I put it into a mini loaf pan. Each one holds about a serving if I mound them up a bit and compress them. I like that they are rectangular. When I store them they take up less space in the freezer. These go on a cookie sheet and into the freezer for about five hours.

They are unmolded and 12 of them are stored together and vacuum sealed in a bag. I like these packets better than what I was doing last year which were individual packets. They take up a lot less space in the freezer and use less plastic. Though in 6 months we will see if the blocks still separate easily. I think they will.

If I eat only from the garden over the winter. I need four of these squares a day for me. I tend to eat two cups of greens each day and two cups of orange, white, or purple things. Right now I'm eating more like three cups of greens, but it is greens season. Color is harder to come by. I'm not getting things like sweet potatoes, squash, cucumbers, or carrots quite yet. So each packet represents three days if I never leave the house for food (I don't often), never buy food from the store, and I eat my vegetables like I should. Say I have four months that I need over our frozen winter. I'd need 30 packets. Ouch! That is a lot to store. I'm thinking with my current diet I won't get enough stored for the winter, but I'll do the best I can. So far I think I have 15. So about half way there.

Turnips are frozen differently than my greens

Greens aren't the only thing I've been freezing. But the others are small bits here and there. I've been freezing my strawberries when I have extra. Though I think they have started to slow down so not much more will be frozen on that front. Those I froze in half pound segments as I use them in my smoothies in that quantity. I froze a couple pounds of turnips when I had that big batch from under the broccoli. Slowly but surely the freezer is filling up. As is typical though I won't have enough to last the whole winter. I'll try but the garden isn't quite big enough for that. Nor is my freezer for that matter.

Morning Routine

Mizuna ready for picking

I'm starting to set into a routine with my greens now that so many are ready for picking. These greens are what I'm freezing for the winter - mizuna, spinach, kale, and soon to be chard. I pick them as soon as I get up in he morning. I only pick one bed, which so far ends up being a bit over a pound and a half. It has been cold in the morning recently. I keep forgetting to wear my coat so my hands get a bit numb with the moisture on the leaves. I bring them in. Photograph and weight them. Clean and blanch them. At this point I love standing over the stove as it makes me so much warmer. As soon as they are blanched and in their ice bath, I bring up yesterdays greens from the freezer to package up. I save some of today's greens for the evening meal and fill my now empty mini silicon loaf molds with greens and freeze them. I toss the wash and ice bath water onto the raspberries - though tomorrow it might be the strawberries. And let the hot water cool on the stove to heat the house a bit as it cools down. Then I make breakfast. It is a very calming and happy routine.

Mizuna after picking

I cut the leaves from one side one time, and the other the next

In other years I've done larger bouts of preserving of greens. This way is easier on me. I don't spend so long over the stove and the chore is done before breakfast so doesn't take up my day. This routine will only last for another couple of weeks as then the spinach and mizuna will get ripped out. Then I'll be left with just chard and kale. It will be hotter. I'll want to do larger batches if I can to avoid heating the house up so often. But my current routine is nice while it lasts.

Two sisters bed starting to be planted

And as to yesterday's garden chores, I planted up another batch of corn seed that I soaked for a day before planting. You can just see a corner of the one I planted a week and a half ago. It is up. The squash I planted on the end of that bed came up, but one damped off, so I'm chitting some more seed. The squash for this new bed will be butternut. I've got the seed soaking in a paper towel. As soon as it starts to send out roots, I'll plant them. I might need to put a cutworm collar around the seeds as I found two cutworms when I prepped the bed.

Kohlrabi starting to form

I also got under the row cover to the bed with the kohlrabi, Michihili cabbage, and some turnips. The bed needed weeding. I lost one kohlrabi to something. Since it was big and wilted and died I'm guessing root maggots. But the rest look great, so I'll have a lot of kohlrabi this year.

Preparing for Winter

Yes summer hasn't started yet and I'm getting ready for winter. Last week I froze one packet of spinach which I know isn't much, but it was a start. This week I've been doing more. Since one of my rhubarb plants came out, I used all the stalks to make rhubarb butter. A couple years ago I made this but it had a lot of sugar. I wanted something that had no more than a teaspoon of added sugar per serving of two tablespoons. Last years recipe had about three teaspoons of added sugar per serving. Sugar is something I've been trying to reduce to get well again. I'm at the point where I'm OK adding a bit of sugar, but not to the degree of a typical jam.

Personally I think it tastes really good. But my tastes have changed. When I make jam or butter, I tend to share them with my neighbors during the holidays. Will they like the more tart butter? Or will they dislike it? I think when I make strawberry jam (and it looks like it will be a good harvest of strawberries this year), I might make two batches. A small one for me and a bigger one for the neighbors.

Tart Rhubarb Butter

• 2 1/2 lbs rhubarb
• 2/3 c sugar
• 1/3 c OJ concentrate
• 1/4 c water
• 1 T cinnamon

Wash and chop the rhubarb into small pieces. Hopefully yours are redder than mine so your butter won't look like puke. Mine tastes good and is productive, but not all that pretty. Put it all into a large pan. I used a huge monster frying pan because it cooks down really really fast that way and I don't slave over a hot stove as long. Cook as long as it takes to get to the thickness you like. It will thicken up a bit, but this is not a jam and won't set like one. You have to boil out the water to make it thick. Transfer it to a smaller pan and use an immersion blender to puree it into a smooth butter. If it still isn't thick enough cook it down some more. Can it in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. Or at least that is how long I did it for. Rhubarb butter is not something on the USDAs list of things they have tested in their canning. 10 minutes is probably enough as that is the time for apple butter, but stewed rhubarb is 15 so I gave it that.

Today I'm dehydrating some sage. The sage is all in bud right now. Supposedly herbs are best picked before they bloom. I've done it both ways, but I needed to cut this one back anyway as it was starting to take over. Tomorrow I'll do another batch until I've gotten rid of most of the sage buds.

I'm going to leave the one in the herb circle though as I can see it from my kitchen window and it will be pretty. I don't think I need so much sage right now as to have to chop all the flowers off. I don't mind collecting some after blooming time. My chives are in bud too, but I only harvest chives when I want them for something. I've never dried them.

Symbiosis

Do you ever have one of those months where ideas from disparate sources converge? For me it was all about symbiosis though maybe coevolution would be a better term. It really started a while ago. My dad sent me a book, An Epidemic of Absence. I had it on my desk for ages. It is all about the hygiene hypothesis. Our modern diseases are very distinct from the ones we used to have trouble with. We used to have infectious diseases that killed us. Now we have immune dysfunction diseases that weren't prevalent before. Like allergies, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, obesity, auto immune disorders, and possibly even autism. The hygiene hypothesis states that we have these trouble because our immune system needs the microbes/parasites/viruses that we coevolved with. Without them we attack ourselves or things we don't need to like allergens.

The book takes it even farther than I had heard before. It says that we have given up some of our regulatory control of our body especially our immune system to our flora and fauna. We no longer have the capacity to control it ourselves. People living on farms are healthier especially if they have more contact with animals. Our immune system is trained even in utero. Our mother's contact with a diverse micro biota controls our chances of getting such diseases. It was a really fascinating book to read. Some of it was a slog and slow, but most flowed pretty well. A bit too much of it was anecdotal, but hey it is a book not a science study. Most books like that are way too anecdotal. This one at least puts in the footnotes (in the back not as you go).

About the same time my daughter and I were discussing social evolution. My daughter is autistic and never talks about middle of the road things. For her it is always about how much she loves her dog, her struggles with life, or about really deep issues facing the world. But she wanted me to read an article that talked about differing thoughts on evolution and about how some people in the way north couldn't understand Darwinism because their thoughts on evolution were more symbiotic than a bloody battle between organisms for a niche in the environment. To them evolution was coevolution. You don't live alone. Life is harsh. You live in web where everything relies on one another for life.

I have a spring vegetable bed that needs to be filled with something (as I can't eat legumes anymore and fava beans won't be grown). So I'm thinking fermenting cabbage might be a good way to deal with it and make sure it gets preserved. I've not liked sauerkraut in the past. I've never learned how to ferment things even though my parents did it when I was a child. But I've taught myself to like things I've hated as a child before. And fermented food is supposed to be good for gut health. So I bought a book called "The Art of Fermentation". I haven't read much yet, but he is reiterating everything above. We coevolved with microorganisms. He puts even a greater twist on the evolution. He asks whether we have domesticated these bacteria or garden plant or animal, or whether they have domesticated us. I've heard that debate before with dogs, but never with plants or microorganisms.

Along with the fermented garden vegetables I was looking into another fermented food. Kefir - a fermented milk. As a child my parents would make kefir, but I never did. I wasn't a great fan. But my tastes have indeed changed. To my morning smoothies I've been adding bought goat milk kefir from the store for the last couple of months. It has a wider range of probiotics than yogurt does. Over the last week I've been reading up on it with a thought of making it myself (not in the above book yet which I just started, but on the internet). I found that kefir is a really interesting piece of coevolution. Kefir is not made like yogurt, but has "grains" which are a symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast that hold together in a mass.

Scientists have tried to reproduce kefir grains from the microbiota that are in it, but can't. The ones there have evolved to work together and need each other to reproduce itself. In addition this colony of biota are symbiotic to humans. Without humans it wouldn't exist as it needs milk to grow and milk outside a mammal didn't exist until humans came along and started milking animals. The kefir preserves milk without refrigeration. Though today we preserve it in the fridge after producing it, it will keep a long time just sitting on the counter.

Many people state on their pages that it kills E. coli and other pathogens, but a very quick look at the literature will show you that is only sort of true. There are some strains of E.coli and other organisms (Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, and Yersinia enterocolitica) that have evolved to tolerate the high lactic acid content of kefir. Most strains it will kill, but not all. That being said there have been no outbreaks of illness due to kefir so it is a very safe form of cultured milk even though it is brewed on our counter at room temperature. In addition I found out that what you get from the store really isn't true kefir, but just a bunch of bacteria cultured much like yogurt. Often 8 or 10 organisms where kefir has more like 30. So I may have to get some grains and make it myself.

Over the last couple of weeks I've also been looking at mycorrhizal fungi for my garden. I'm still not sure what I'm going to buy. But I'd like to experiment with it. Michelle has raved about it in her garden. It might be an easy way to make my plants more healthy. Diseases run rampant here for some reason. They are much more common than at my last house. For those that don't know what mycorrhizae are, they are symbiotic fungi in plants. They grow on the roots the plant helps feed the fungi and the fungi helps provide nutrients for the plant.

If you haven't figured this out yet, I'm a nerd. I love science. One of the feeds that I read is from Science Daily. It gives me about 80 articles every weekday gleaned from all the different science publications and summarizes them and makes them available. I glance through them every day and I usually find a few that interest me. They rarely have ones applicable to gardening/farming, but yesterday there were two (here and here). Both about symbiosis. One trying to understand the symbyotic nature of the myccorhizea. The other about how we are disrupting the rhizobia bacteria, a symbiotic bacteria of legumes, by feeding nitrogen to the plants.

So this must be my year of symbiosis since it keeps coming into my life. Years ago I wrote a blog post about why I garden. I garden to be connected to the natural world. To be close to the web of life. To see the miracle of a seed growing. That growth feeds me, but also drops the seeds for the next generation. The post I wrote said that gardening was artificial, but maybe I shouldn't see it that way. Maybe I should see it as a natural symbiosis. We need those plants to eat and live. But those plants use us too. They get an easy ride as we water and weed them. We plant their seeds a perfect spacing apart. Not all of them get to reproduce, but they will be reproduced. We will make sure of it. The better they feed us, the more we will grow them.

Celebrating Chinese Cabbage

I noticed on Thursday that two Michihili cabbages were bolting pretty badly. How did I miss this? So I waited until Friday morning to pick them. Greens are always better picked after watering and in the morning.

The Napa cabbage (short ones) weren't destroyed by the earwigs for the first time in years. Was it the cold? Or was it the biochar (very ashy and probably repelled the insects early on)? They were just starting to get in though. I had to peel back a bit of the heads to get rid of them.

I had a question posed to me, weirdly on another blog, about harvesting Chinese cabbage that hasn't headed. Sometimes a head won't form before it bolts (like two of the three Michihilis this spring). I find it common for Michihilis to not form heads in the spring. Their heads are much more reliable in the fall. Occasionally Napas won't, but they are better than Michihilis and again, it is easier in the fall. But you don't need a head to have the cabbage edible. It is nice and sweet if it was blanched at all and even the dark green more prickly parts are good in soups. I'm guessing they are even better for you than the blanched parts. All edible and all tasty.

Nice blanched Napa cabbage on left. Unblanched Michihili leaves on right. Both frozen for the winter.

So you can eat more of that head than is traditional. I do tend to toss out the outermost leaves. But on the Michihili head above you can see I kept some of the dark green parts there. And I cut some off in the middle as the bottom was blanched and the top not so much. I also kept a lot of the larger more outer leaves which you see above. They were blanched (the boiling type of blanching this time) and frozen for winter soups. They will be perfect for that. And will have lots of flavor. That wonderful mustard flavor really tends to come out when a cabbage is bolting. If you are like me, that is a good thing. So I never regret my bolting Chinese cabbages. I celebrate them.

Though just to be clear I am keeping those nice heads too. Those are great because they store so long. I've wrapped them in towels in plastic bags in the fridge. Chinese cabbage can last up to about two months in the fridge. I've had some last longer. But better to eat them faster.

One of the bolting Michihili cabbages had a whole bunch of nice little flower shoots. These make good eating. The other was too destroyed by earwigs. I'd never had earwigs in the Michihili this bad before. The seed for the undestroyed head was from old seed from Mac years ago. I wish I knew what variety this was and where I could buy more. The Green Rocket sold by Pinetree doesn't grow as big and the earwigs love it like they do the Napa. So I'm still on a Michihili search.

After pulling (I left one Napa in and now I'm regretting it), I have a partially empty bed. My plan says to grow pole beans and bush beans, but I'm not going to grow many beans because I don't even know if I can eat them now. So instead I seeded some of it in carrots. As more of the bed gets harvested, I'll seed more carrots. I might put a few beans in later, but I'm not sure yet.

Food Storage

This morning I cleared the last of the lettuce out of this bed. It will have melons seeded in here in a few days, but earlier it was the radish, turnip, and lettuce bed. When I clear out a bed like this I get lot of produce all at once. It is nicer to be able to harvest just for a couple of days as it keeps my fridge more manageable, but sometimes I need to store large quantities of produce.

I use two big tubs. I don't wash the produce when I store it like this. And I put a towel on the bottom. This keeps veggies that need to be stored for a long time from rotting (from sitting in condensation), but keeps them moist.

Today I was also pulling out the overwintered kale and picked off all of the kale blossoms. This is one of my medium sized plastic containers that I use for storage. This container also has a towel on the bottom. A long time ago I cut down some old kitchen towels to just fit the containers I have and I use them constantly.

My fridge is now packed with all sorts of containers. Not as packed as it sometimes gets. I gave a lot away to my townhouse mates and when harvesting really brings in too much, I'll be emailing the neighbors and trying to get rid of it. Then I bring out my cooler to store things in until I can get them to pick it up. Gardening always seems to leave me with either too much or to little of things. Or maybe I just don't notice the times when things are just right.

Now that you are peeking into my fridge, you can see what I keep in there. Some things are kind of weird. Like on the top left, you can see a jar with almonds and water in it. I make my own almond milk. I used the last of my milk this morning so I soak the almonds for a day before I make more. I make my own for a couple of reasons. The first is because I walk and bike to shop. Carrying almonds home is easier, especially if I'm walking. Carrying liquids home can be painful on the shoulders. The other is that you can't find plain almond milk. Mine is nothing but almonds and water, but the commercial varieties insist on putting all sorts of weird things in it. On the top right shelf and all the way to the back you will see my seed collection in an air tight container. Or at least most of my seed collection. Yes I waste fridge space to store my seeds. If I'm desperate for space I can always take them out, but my seeds are precious. To the left way behind the tea is a small batch of ginger wine. Norma taught me to preserve my ginger that way. And I love the sake flavored with ginger for cooking too.

And my favorite thing in the fridge is the lower box of eggs. The other boxes of eggs are nice enough for store bought eggs (the farmers markets don't start for another week around here - June 11th for the Arlington one). But those are lovely pastured eggs from one of my townhouse mates' friends. She owns a farm in New Hampshire. Her eggs are better than any I've found at the farmers market. Even if I had my own chickens they wouldn't be as good as I just don't have the land for them to eat that many natural things. Yum. My husband won't be home for dinner on Wednesday and I'm contemplating making Dave's wife's spinach pie for the first time, but I'll need to get to the store for cottage cheese. I hope it happens.

Preparing for Winter

Yes it is springtime in Boston, but here I am preparing for winter already. We get about 3-4 months every year where the ground is frozen. So to eat from the garden during that time, I have to preserve my crop when it becomes available.

The first thing I did yesterday was pick the sage. It was starting to put out buds. This is often the time that is recommended to pick as the herbs are more flavorful then. I don't know if that is true or an old wives' tale. But the leaves are pretty tender and good then, so I do tend to follow that rule. This year I have a new dehydrator. My old one was just a heating element in the bottom. It had gotten pretty sad over the decades and part of the heating element wasn't working anymore. My new one is SO nicer compared to my old one. It has a thermostat and a heat distribution fan. It really drys things very evenly, especially compared to my old one. No more rotating the herb trays - either top to bottom or side to side.

My herb circle is starting to perk up. The oregano on the right is really taking off. It won't be long until it too gets chopped back for a harvest. The two types of chives I only use fresh, so I don't need to preserve them. On the left of the lower chives is where my dead rosemary used to be. I ripped it out and put in three little winter savory plants. I hope they do well. I don't even know what winter savory tastes like. Hopefully I'll like it. The thyme, especially the French thyme, barely made it through the winter. I might have to put in a new plant. I have another one growing elsewhere because it often likes to die. So I will probably layer it (if it hasn't done that itself) and replace it.

The overwintered spinach didn't do so well this year. It is bolting already and never gave me much of a harvest. I did pick what was good. Many of the leaves are deformed and unhappy. I wish I knew why it didn't do well this year. Usually these plants put out foot long leaves by this time of the year. I wonder if it is because I started them so early in the fall. I even got to harvest a bit then. I might have to experiment this fall and do half early and half later to see which gives me a better harvest.

This is the meager harvest that I blanched and froze. I still have some frozen spinach from last year that I'm eating up. If I could eat it fresh in salads I would, but overwintered spinach tends to be very high in oxalic acid and gritty because of it. I like to boil the spinach to get rid of a lot of it. I blanch for 2 minutes and then get it quickly in an ice water bath. Then squeeze the water out and put it up in one person servings - maybe 2/3 of a cup each.

The spring spinach is great for spinach salads and eating fresh. But it is being so slow this year. I hope it starts sizing up soon as I want a good harvest. Last year I got about 11 pounds. I'm sure I won't get nearly that much this year.

And I know I don't usually show off harvests except on Mondays, but aren't they just so cute. I way over planted the radishes and they all come in at once. So I figured I ought to pick some early. And then just keep it up until they are too old to eat. The largest is about 1.5" long and about a 1 cm wide. So they are small little things. But still large enough to enjoy.