I have said in the past that there’s no such thing as too much pesto and I stand by that, but wow the freezer’s getting full and we sure do have a lot of garlic scapes.
We turned to the internet, like you do, and came across this recipe for pickled scapes. We won’t know just how good they are for six whole weeks, but I have a feeling we won’t think we made nearly enough.
Extracting honey is a sticky, messy job.
The first step is to scrape the cappings off the wax so the honey is free to flow when the frames are spun in the extractor. This can be done with a knife or, as above, with a scratching fork. I’ve done it both ways, and find the fork to be the better tool. It’s more precise, allowing me to leave more honey on the frame. I’m also a lot less likely to stab myself with it when trying to maneuver with my wax and honey and propolis-covered hands.
When the frames are spun, the honey collects in the bottom of the extractor tub. We position a double strainer beneath the tub, open the gate, and do our best to keep our tongues out of resulting stream of honey. Fingers are another story.
(photo courtesy of a friend)
Time is the hidden magic behind every beautiful garden you’ve ever seen.
When you first start a garden, it’s not going to look great. It’s going to look spotty and a bit sad, really. The trick is not to get discouraged but to keep plugging at it, planting a snowdrop from a neighbor here and a columbine from your friend there, dividing anything and everything and redistributing as if you know what you’re doing. For a few years you’ll wonder if maybe you’re just not great at making gardens, then, poof, one May your garden will spring to life. All those plants will suddenly look like they’ve been there forever, lush and thick and trying to outdo each other with flowers, and, if you’re anything like me, you’ll feel the itch to get started on another section of your yard so you can experience the ride all over again.
This little swath of bulbs is part of my daughter’s garden, a patch of land she claimed at seven years old and has tended for the sixteen years since. Some years it was meticulously cared for, others overgrown and weedy. These days it’s generally the neatest spot on our property.
“Might I have a bit of earth?” is the question posed by ten year old Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, and it sums up an almost universal longing. To have a bit of earth is to have a sense of belonging, of being part of the world. What I’ve learned from my bit is that ownership doesn’t necessarily mean, ‘this is mine’, but rather, ‘I care for this.’
Time got away from us this year. Word is that sugar season was short with our unseasonable weather, and we missed it.
But maybe not. I checked the ten day forecast at the beginning of the week and saw what looked like good flow weather. Cold nights, warmer days. Taps went in just in case, rigged with our high-tech system of old milk jugs and wire. We won’t have gallons of syrup, but I’ll be kicking myself a little less than if we got none.
My usual cure for my impatience with early spring – waiting to plant seeds, waiting for seeds to grow – is to buy myself a new houseplant.
Nothing fancy, just a little something to bring life and color and give me a bit of dirt under my fingernails. Cheap therapy. This year I went with a $4 Pothos. Not my favorite plant in general, but I was drawn to these leaves, which have golden spots that give the impression of being filled with light. Just what I need to get me through mud season.
Last year’s experiment with growing stevia left me intrigued by its sweetness but not sold on its aftertaste.
Happily, cold weather worked its sugar magic last fall and the aftertaste disappeared completely. Results of hanging those cold-snapped leaves to dry are good too, so stevia has now earned a spot in our pantry.
I don’t know whether we’ll get the 12″ of snow and power outages predicted for our area tomorrow, but I do know we’ll be eating well.
I did my usual storm-prep cooking marathon today, making everything I could think of that can be eaten as is or warmed on our propane stove. Dishes are done, laundry is clean, firewood is in the house. Throw it at us, mother nature, we’re as ready as we’re going to get.
This recipe makes 24 muffins. If you’re fairly sure you’ll have power over the next few days, you can bake half, stick the rest of the batter in the fridge, then bake the other half when you run out.
Blueberry Muffins
Preaheat oven to 400.
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
8 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
4 cups flour
2 cups milk
2 cups blueberries, fresh or frozen
Cream the butter.
Add the sugar.
Add the eggs.
Add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk, stirring til everything is well-combined.
Fold in the blueberries.
Pour into lined muffin tin and bake for 22 minutes.
After the first rush of excitement when the plant catalogs start pouring into the mailbox each winter, it’s easy to get a bit overwhelmed by the variety of plants available.
While it would be lovely to have the money and space to plant some of everything, that’s not reality for the vast majority of us. Sure, maybe you can plant twenty kinds of seeds, but planting twenty kinds of fruit trees is less likely to be an option. Everything in the catalogs is bound to look appealing in the dead of winter. Narrowing down the choices is part science, part art, and part deciding you’ve packed and repacked your parachute enough times and taking the jump.
In order to spread the costs out and avoid decision fatigue, my own approach has been to focus on one section of our property each year, all the while keeping my big picture in mind: grow a variety of food, plant enough to share, give the plants what they need, minimize labor, and aim for pretty.
The area I am working on this year has a mulberry tree and a small wisteria, each about fifteen years old. The mulberry fruited its first and second years, but hasn’t since. This was a disappointment, as mulberries are one of my favorite childhood foods, so I knew I wanted more mulberries. Other than that, I was open to anything.
For each plant I considered, I researched the following questions:
Will it grow well in my zone? (Zone 6)
When does it fruit? (I’d like to be harvesting continually, rather than all at once.)
How big is it? (Will I have room for it, and will it thrive among nearby plantings?)
Is it self-pollinating? (If not, I’ll need more than one.)
Does it have thorns? (I’m anti-thorn.)
What kind of soil and sun does it need? (Wet, hot, shady, dry?)
Do I want to eat it? (Just because I can grow it doesn’t mean I’ll like it.)
Do I like the way it looks? (I’d sacrifice looks for flavor if necessary, but it rarely is.)
Is there likely to be a market for excess? (Not a concern for everyone, but as I sell produce and preserves and hope to sell a greater quantity in the future, important for me to consider.)
I settled on three varieties of mulberry: Illinois Everbearing, Shangri La, and Weeping Mulberry. The Illinois is a large tree that begins fruiting in June. The Shangri La will fruit a bit earlier, beginning in May, and is mid-sized at about 20 feet. Smallest of all is the Weeping Mulberry, which is the kind I grew up with, making it more a nostalgic choice than a strategic one.
Along with the mulberries I’ll be planting two pawpaw trees, Sunflower Pawpaw and SAA Overleese Pawpaw. Again, one is a bit larger than the other. My objective is to create something of a food forest – a garden which mimics nature, where plants grow in layers, tall trees spaced widely to provide an open canopy, shorter trees, shrubs, and groundcover plants nestled around and under. Plants in straight rows may look tidy, but I want to garden as a participant in nature, not a director.
To begin my shrub level I chose three varieties of honeyberry (Blue Moon, Blue Pacific, and Blue Velvet) and to get started on the groundcover I chose wintergreen. The honeyberries will bloom early and the wintergreen late, extending my fruit harvesting season.
I’ll likely need more for the shrub layer, and will plant some bulbs and possibly some herbs as well, but we’ll be off to a good start this spring. All told, I’ll spend about $300 on this area. That’s about half as much as we spend each month on groceries for our family of four. Not small change, but I’d just as soon have my savings grow in my backyard as in the bank.
As a gardener, my internal calendar doesn’t quite match up with the one that governs other people.
Garlic goes in the ground at the end of October, marking the start of my new gardening year. I planted over 200 cloves yesterday, on what was luckily for me a gorgeous fall afternoon.
If you’ve never grown garlic, I recommend giving it a try. You can find all sorts of instructions for complicating the issue, but in my experience keeping it simple works just fine. Separate your garlic into cloves – don’t peel them – and pop them in the ground with the pointy side up. Give each one enough space to grow into a head of garlic. They’ll be ready to harvest some time in July, when the leaves of the plant begin to yellow and die.
Garlic from a grocery store may not sprout, as it is sometimes treated to prevent that from happening, so your best bet is to buy from a garden supplier. But if all you have access to is what’s at your local grocery, give it a try. Food generally wants to grow, and will if given a chance.
Abundance Acre 