Plums

 

This has been a bit of an odd summer here at Mucky Boots, at least for me. A taking stock kind of summer. I've been taking a close look, in as gentle a way as I can, at what I can realistically commit to on the garden front, given that my arthritis seems to be a more constant presence in my life. It's not only a question of  what I think I can do, but what I want to do. What am I good at growing? How much can we reasonably expect to eat? How can I cut back or adapt what I do to make it a joy instead of a constant game of catch-up?

Part of what's needed is a change in expectations, and I am happy to announce that I think, finally, I have graduated from the Remedial School for Perfectionist Gardeners. My garden hasn't been perfect for most of the year (so what else is new...) and I've been fine with that. Really.

After four growing seasons here, Kim and I are also taking a hard look at what's working and what's not, what we're good at and what we probably need to give up on. And first on that list, for both of us, is fruit.

We're pretty good at berries: strawberries, raspberries and especially blueberries. But we suck at growing tree fruit. We had big plans for our orchard, and added a number of trees when we first got here, but we have learned that growing fruit organically is tough: there's a disease and a pest for every season and every kind of fruit tree, and I think we've encountered them all. Throw in the demise of the grand dame of the orchard, our Pink Lady apple tree, and we're ready to throw in the towel. So we decided this summer that we would take out a few of the trees that are either dead or on their last legs and transition into more blueberries.

And then Mother Nature gave us this gift: plums.



We planted the Italian plum tree in the vegetable garden a couple of years ago. Last year it had one blossom. This year it had more, many of which transformed into fruit. And this afternoon, while seeing to the chickens, a lovely purplish-blue hue caught my eye and I realized the plums were ripe and ready to be picked. Not too many - about three pounds, I would guess. But they're everything a plum should be, the essence of plummy goodness.

All of which adds to my conviction that to be a Happy Gardener you should hope for the best, accept that this year's garden will be different from last year's, marvel in the miracles that present themselves every day, forgive yourself for the things that don't work, and be grateful for the gifts Mother Nature bestows.

Like a handful of plums.

Getting real in the garden

It's that time of year again: the 2013 seed catalogues have come in from my favourite suppliers and now it's time to figure out what the heck I'm going to do in the garden this year.

I really didn't know anything about growing vegetables before we arrived here, and so the last four years have felt like a big experiment, full of the novelty of any new adventure. But now it's time to get real. Or at least real-er. Not that it won't still be fun - it will. But I think I have enough data and experience now to be more realistic about what I can successfully grow. Here's what I'm thinking.

Thought #1: Alliums are the stars at Mucky Boots. The very first thing we planted even before we had moved in was garlic, and we have loved it from the start. There is nothing like home-grown garlic and onions, and somehow the conditions here seem suited for it. So we grow a lot of them: garlic, leeks and shallots, and red, green and yellow onions. I'm very happy with the varieties of red (Redwing) and yellow (Copra) onions in particular - they are indestructible in storage. It may not be the most economically wise thing to do, to devote such a large amount of garden space to growing things that are so inexpensive to buy, but we continue to do it because the quality is so much higher and because it means we get the satisfaction of cooking almost every day with something we grew.

Thought #2: I should only grow what I'm willing to eat. Take beans for example. In my first year's garden I grew lots and lots of beans. Pole beans and bush beans. Yellow beans, green beans, purple beans. Soybeans, filet beans and beans for drying. Consequently I preserved a lot of beans. I pickled beans, I blanched and froze beans, I dried beans. And I learned a few things - namely that there is only so much pickled anything I am willing to eat (I'm much more likely now to reach for something fermented than traditionally pickled), and frozen beans have an awful texture. So awful that most of that first year's frozen beans ended up being given to the chickens. I thought maybe I did something wrong (I blanched for a short period of time, then shocked with ice water, then used a vacuum sealer) so the next year I followed a different set of advice and didn't blanch, I just cut up and vacuum sealed. Still awful.

And the dried beans! My third year I wanted to see how much protein I could get out of the garden so I grew two different varieties of beans for drying. They did pretty well, and I'm happy to know it can work, but it was too much bed space and labour for the result. So last year I planted four measly feet of pole beans for eating fresh, and that was even more than we wanted to eat. This year: three feet.

On the other hand, I keep planting more and more carrots and more and more hardy greens, like chard, bok choy and (gasp!) kale. Between interplanting with onions and covering seedlings with remay cloth I seem to have found a way to produce pretty decent carrots, which we can't seem to get enough of. Ditto for the greens, which seem especially suited to our climate. I can grow them, we like to eat them - this is a recipe for success.



Thought #3: Pelleted seeds are wonderful.  Last year I planted my first pelleted seeds: carrots and lettuce. If you have grown either of those vegetables you know how tiny the seeds are. Which means, unless you have much greater dexterity and better eyesight than I do, a lot of thinning. With the right mindset this can be meditative, but it more usually feels like very fiddly torture. So when I saw seeds being offered with an organic pelleting I decided to give them a try. It's kind of like a candy coating on each seed, which makes them easier to space when you're seeding them in the garden. The seeds cost a bit more, but there's much less wastage. I'm sold on them, and will continue to buy them.

Thought #4: We live in a forest. We better get used to it. You can probably tell from this photo that our vegetable garden is in a clearing carved out from the surrounding forest. Which means it gets pretty good light, but not great light - which limits the kinds of things we can successfully grow. I've figured out we can grow pretty much anything, but not necessarily really well. Eggplant and peppers turn out puny, and winter squash seems to be a hit-or-miss proposition. So I've decided I need to be more strategic in my garden planning, and factor in the amount of sunlight each bed gets when I am figuring out crop rotations.

One crop that needs to be abandoned is grapes. There are three mature vines along one side of the vegetable garden, and we have yet to get anything resembling a harvest. There's just not enough sunlight. And they're grapes for making wine, not for eating, and neither of us is interested in wine making. To top it off, they contribute to the lack of sunlight for the vegetables. Verdict: they're coming down.

Thought #5: Berries are way easier to grow than fruit trees. When we moved to Mucky Boots we inherited a small orchard with three venerable apple trees (Pink Lady, Cox Orange Pippin and a crabapple) and a number of younger trees (cherry, Asian pear, peach and plum). We added a whole bunch more: pear, fig, more apples and plums. And we quickly learned that there is a disease and a bug for every season for every one of those fruit trees. It's hard to grow fruit!

Berries, on the other hand, seem to practically grow themselves. We have all kinds here - strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, gooseberries and red currants - and they all do well. Every year some types do better than others, but we've never had a bad year. Plus the investment of time before they begin to produce is much shorter. So we're going to replace the casualties in our orchard (between diseases and bears we have had a few) with more berries, not with more fruit trees. We're going with the flow on this one.

Five thoughts in one day. I better quit while I'm ahead.

Jam, jam, jam

The windows are a bit steamy these days thanks to all the canning that has been going on, starting with a wheelbarrow full of Cox Orange Pippin apples and 20 pounds of crab apples from the trees here at Mucky Boots.

And then there were those 45 pounds of Italian plums courtesy of my dad's plum tree.



Yes, you read that right: 45 pounds. Last week we spent an afternoon picking them and then two days making plum butter and a couple of kinds of plum jam. Kim, bless her heart, split and pitted somewhere between 850 and 900 plums, and together we cooked and mashed and stirred and processed, and now we have 50 half-pints of plummy sweetness filling the shelves in our cold storage room.



The crab apples have been made into juice, which has been canned until either I have time to make it into jelly or we drink it (which, since it is unsweetened, should send the Tart Meter into the red zone).

We have only just begun on the apples: one big bucket-full has given us almost two-dozen jars of dark, spicy apple butter, and there is an awful lot left to process. The rest will go to apple sauce or will be dried. And even though we'll have plenty for ourselves and to give away, we're feeling a little sad that this year's harvest is less than half that of previous years, because our beloved grand dame Pink Lady tree has succumbed to the massive damage done when a bear climbed it last fall to get the two apples we hadn't been able to reach at the top. As Harry, our master-pruner friend said the other week when he had a look, the tree had been living with a minor case of blight which speedily took over the tree once it was damaged, and now even the few limbs that survived the bear are dead or dying. The tree needs to come down, and that will be a sad, sad day at Mucky Boots.

As if to compensate, our other distinguished old tree, the Cox Orange Pippin, presented us with a bountiful barrow-full of big, fat apples. They are a more utilitarian apple than the Pink Ladies: they are naturally much drier, and consequently good for dehydrating and storing. They don't have the sweet, juicy flesh and amazing flavour of the Pink Ladies, but we're grateful for them nonetheless.



And so the pantry is filling up again with jars and jars of jam, jam, jam - far more than we could ever eat. But half the fun is giving them away.

Can you say "Christmas presents?"

Melon

I grew melons this year.

I still can't believe it. I can't believe it's possible to live in Canada and grow melons. I grew four of them, only the size of a softball but full of melon-y fragrance and taste. The essence of melon-ness.

Next year I'm trying pineapple.

Peach

I want to say we grew these, but the reality is the tree grew these. We really had little to do with it. The tree just did its thing, minding its own business, hanging out in the vegetable garden with the cabbages: it blossomed beautifully in the spring, grew fruit bountifully though the summer, and now, in early fall,  has presented us with fifteen gorgeous, juicy pounds.

We've already eaten a pound or two, more have gone into a crumble for dessert after tonight's supper, and some will be made into jam. A handful were earwiggy and were given to the chickens, but that doesn't feel like a loss. After all, the peach tree shades the entrance to the coop, so the chickens have been eyeing the ripening fruit hanging above their heads all summer, waiting for some to fall. It seems mean to whisk it all away without giving them a taste. And for them, the odd earwig is a bonus. 

(Want to know how fast can six chickens devour a peach? Fast.) 

Eating

All of a sudden there is food to eat in the garden. As Toni at Backyard Feast wrote recently, we wait and we wait and then all of a sudden there's a glut and we're wondering what to do with it all. In our case, yesterday, it was the shelling peas.

After last year's pea debacle (mice eating the newly sown peas, mice moving around the re-sown peas, peas collapsing in a chaotic tangle, Miriam unable to tell snow/snap/shelling peas apart because the mice mixed them all up) I was determined to get it right this year. I was never a drill-sergeant kind of teacher, but man, did I keep those peas in order this year.

The snap peas (Sugar Ann) have been delicious, as usual. The snow peas (Dwarf Sugar Grey) were a mysterious no-show: they just didn't germinate, even after resowing. And the two or three that did manage to sprout were spindly, feeble, non-producers. But what I was really waiting for were the shelling peas (Strike). Last year, in all the pea confusion, I picked them too soon, got them mixed up with the other types, and then gave up. This year I have been watching them like a hawk, gently squeezing the fat pods, trying to gauge the size of the peas inside. I was determined to get it right. And then, all of a sudden, when I checked them yesterday they were ready. All of them.

So I picked and picked. Three and a half pounds worth. And then I did something I've always wanted to do: I sat in the swing on the verandah with a bowl of peas in my lap and shucked. I looked out at the garden and shucked. I listened to the birds and shucked. I thought about my life and shucked. It was marvellous. Tonight they're going to have a starring role in some risotto. Yum.

That's not the only food-first this year. We also managed to beat the birds to our cherries. We have three cherry trees in the orchard, two of which are old enough to produce more than a token smattering of fruit. The first spring we were here the cherries all fell off because we weren't careful enough about watering. Last spring we tended the trees faithfully but lost all the fruit to birds, waiting for the darn things to get ripe. This year we finally clued into the fact they are not the same cherries we both grew up eating - deep, ruby red in colour. They're Rainier cherries, which are a rosy blush colour when ripe. So now I look back on last year and imagine the cherries being ripe, but us too stupid to know it, and the birds all sitting around waiting politely for us to harvest our crop, then finally giving up and saying "Well, if they're not going to eat them . . ."

Not this year. This year we have a ladder permanently stationed by the cherry trees so we can nab those babies as soon as they're ripe. The other day Kim picked a whole lovely bowl full, and I would show them to you, but this is all that's left.

And remember that purple broccoli that had me confused? Well, I checked my records and it turns out I actually did order purple broccoli seeds (Santee is the variety). And it's sprouting broccoli, so it doesn't form big heads - it's more like broccoli rabe. And it is purple - definitely purple. And tasty, did I mention that? And best of all, it stays purple when it's cooked, unlike purple beans which turn the most unappetizing grey-green.

Maybe I just haven't been at this gardening business long enough, but it still amazes me that I can plant some little seeds and then a few months later have a garden that is full of food. Tasty, fresh, nutritious food. It fills me with glee.

Anyone have any good recipes to use what's ripe in the garden, that don't also call for a lot of other ingredients that aren't seasonal at all? Share, please!

Convert

I haven't exactly been enamoured of our gooseberry bushes. We have six or seven of them and last year I was completely confused about when to pick them - they tasted awful when they were green and they tasted just as awful when they were red. Plus, as I wrote here, weeding around them was an occupational hazard. I wasn't sure these bushes had a future at Mucky Boots.

Well, I never did get around to taking them out, and last week I noticed the beautiful (if awful tasting) green berries hiding beneath the leaves and decided to give them one more chance. I went looking on the Internet and found Tigress in a Jam, who had a recipe just for me: Golden Jelly. It called for a couple of pounds of green gooseberries (which I learned are full of pectin) and some lavender sprigs, which are in plentiful supply around here these days. Perfect.

Except that when I went out yesterday to pick the berries, I found the birds had been there before me, and the most I could scrounge was about 3/4 of a pound. The end result didn't even fill a jar (which is why you can see the foam on top - normally this would be skimmed off while it cooked, but I didn't want to lose a single drop). But oh, it is lovely! Soft and fragrant and not too sweet. I am now a convert. I may even plant more gooseberry bushes, just for this jelly.

On the way back to the house after taking the jelly photo I saw this: William and Petunia. Bookends.

First strawberries of the year

And did they ever taste good!