Tomato Processing

         

On Friday, we received a delivery of fifty pounds of paste tomatoes, enough, when processed, to feed us for the winter. They were glossy and firm—just beautiful in their tomato-ness. I fondled them all evening. The cat climbed into the box lid for the night.

                On Saturday, I processed tomatoes. First, I sliced them thin, taking off either end, and placed them in the food dehydrator. In about seven hours, they were dry, like chips. We will eat these, broken into bits, on salads, out of hand on hikes, and tossed into soups and stews when we need a hit of intense flavor. Meanwhile, they sit on the shelf in a quart canning jar, like all of the other dried fruits.

                Then, I started a double batch of crockpot sauce, in my two old crockpots—one avocado green, the other burnt orange, both with the traditional dancing veggies around the base. I leave the lid on until the tomatoes break down and simmer, then take them off so that it cooks down.  If I stir it every hour or so, it is done in five or six hours. Then, while the sauce is still hot, I can it in pint jars, processing in the steam canner for 25 minutes.  The pings greet me as I lift off the lid. Each crockpot yields four or five pints of sauce. I usually make crockpot sauce from my own tomatoes, because they come in more slowly and it lends itself to small batch work, but this was a good chance to fill in a few gaps.

                Once the crockpots and dryer are full, and the dining room begins to smell of cooking tomatoes, I move onto roasting. Quickly, I slice the tomatoes in half or in thirds, place them cut side down on a sheet pan, and pop them into a 350 oven. In about half an hour, they have wilted down to a paste with skins that I scoop into half pint jars. Sometimes the skins char a bit, but that’s ok. The half pints are also processed in the steam canner—I give them about 15 minutes if half a batch sat out and cooled down a bit while waiting for the second tray. Roasted tomatoes are great for pizza and other spreads and I also use them in soups and pasta sauce when I don’t want the tomato to dominate. They are drier than sauce so can be used in more places. It’s nice to get a bulk box of paste tomatoes to roast, because the process is messy, with lots of sheet pans and tools, so I like to do it all at once.

                As I finish, I haul the boxes of jarred tomatoes down into the basement, where they rest with the other winter stores. Pickles, jams, dried fruits, juices on one side, beans, grains, and dry goods on the other.  Onions and potatoes under the stairs, squashes in the larder. I feel like the mid-western grandmother in Greg Brown’s old song, who puts the summer in jars against hard cold winters.

               

Equinox Rains

 

        

        The rains returned on Thursday evening, heralding in the equinox with thunder and lightning.  Because it has been such a weird year—smoke in the valley, school on line, all of our usual seasonal markers thrown off—I did not recognize the rain for what is was, the return of green grass in the fall that happens every year about this time. Usually these rains are slow and deep, reaching into the ground and waking up our dormant grasses, sending my vines on one last frantic climb for the sky, signaling to the bees that it is a good time to pack in the last pollen for the year.  After months of dry air and dust, we rejoice in the familiar moisture in the air, the damp sidewalks, the smell of earth. This year, the rain came with a huge loud storm that flashed and rumbled until 2 AM and pooled on the earth. Still, it washed away the smoke and ash, cleared our air and minds and returning a small bit of balance to our lives.

Wildfire

 Labor Day was clear and quiet. I spent most of the morning trimming back brush, raking up leaves and twigs, and making huge deposits to Mark’s compost area. He chopped up the compost and talked to the chickens.  We picked plums. The air was clear and bright, the sky blue. In the late afternoon, the phone rang. It was the emergency weather service, alerting us to a major weather event—strong winds from the dry east would be blowing in by evening. Fire danger was increasing rapidly, as the air currents would push the flames ahead of them. Be careful. I climbed our big ladder and looked east, over the houses in the neighborhood. I could see a line of grey in the distance, like a wall. By the time I returned from working at Stone Soup, the air was smoky and golden, but still. We went to bed with the windows open, as we had every night all summer.

When we woke up in the morning, the wind was whipping around the house, blowing dust and ash everywhere. There was a pile of debris in the tub, blown in from the bathroom window. We moved around the house, closing everything up. Mr Beezhold, our rabbit, wanted to run around, so I let him out. A few hours later, I found him cowering in the rosemary and placed him back in the hutch, behind a piece of plywood to reduce the winds. I vacuumed up dirt and ash that still retained a glimpse of the wood it once was, washed floors, went to meetings and wrestled with prep for online teaching. By mid-morning , the sky was a lurid orange and it was deeply unpleasant outside.

By Wednesday, the air was absolutely still. The sky was thick with smoke and haze. We brought the rabbit inside—Mark thought he was depressed and ill. We looked the cat in as well, so that she would not obsesses over washing her fur.  School began—a strange, short day—and the light was a weird greenish brown.  Because there was no sun or solar gain, the air grew cold and clammy as well as smoky. We all hunkered down. Even the chickens went to bed early.

By Thursday, evacuees were coming into town. First, large animals, because the Linn county fairgrounds was full. Then people, camping at the fairgrounds and in motels. They had all fled the flames, got out just in time, with a car full of quickly assembled gear. Torn between tears of loss and gratitude for surviving, they arrived. On Friday, they were shopping at the local grocery store for the basics, learning where to go for different needs. Parking together in the lots, cars huddled near one another for company.

Meanwhile, the world has been so still. No one walks their dog by the house. The bees and birds are somewhere, but not in the yard. Even cars are gone—it is like the first days of the pandemic, without the brisk walkers. Since March, we have consoled ourselves with “at least we can go outside, walk around, breathe in the air.” But, right now, we can’t even do that. We are inside—all of us, with our pets, our drying laundry, our families, yet again. The contrast between the stillness here and the violence of the fires is stark. We feel helpless. What can we do?

Outside, the ideological battles are heating up as the weather cools, the fires slow down—but not stop—and a bit of sun breaks through this afternoon. The fires are caused by bad management of the resource (we should be cutting down more trees and clearing up windfalls), by man being careless, by lightening strikes and the big winds. And this may be true, but…the underlying reason that the fires are so huge is Climate Change. Our winters and springs are wetter, so more growth sprouts up early. Then the summers are drier, pulling all of the moisture from that new growth and turning it into fuel. We have known about the science for thirty years, at least.  Science warns us—more and bigger fires, storms, floods. More chaos in the weather systems. When I was younger, I thought, we’ll do something about this before it gets to bad. We really won’t destroy our planet, our home, our lives. It won’t get that bad. But it has.

And so, there is a lot of mourning happening here in the Willamette Valley this week. Jobs gone. Lives lost—human and animal. Homes and fragile communities destroyed. Beautiful wild places burned until the soil is sterile. Some of this will return. I know the huckleberry fields will be amazing in about ten years. Some will not. Communities, ecological and human, if can so divide them, may be gone forever.  What we have really lost, although we don’t want to admit it yet, is the faith that the world will return to normal, be as it was before. Because it will not.

Spartan Garden

 

When the pandemic struck, we all returned to our root behaviors. Some hid in the house; some frolicked on the beach; some found new places to volunteer their time. I met a friend at the public library on the last day it was open and we decided to take on the school garden. A few days later, we wandered over to look at it. The garden had been well designed about five years ago, but it had not had consistent love and maintenance for several years. Different groups had planted veggies, or set up mason bee houses, or met on the circle of logs for class on a sunny morning, but it was haphazard. It felt, in some ways, that the last group just….left one day, planning to come back, but never did. There were condiments in the fridge in the shed, but the electricity was off. There were stakes scattered around, and hoses in various spots, like you would leave them to finish the job but had to go home for supper. And, because it was late March, the weeds were Growing and spreading everywhere.

We tackled the weeds first. Leslie worked in the beds and finished one before moving onto another project. I pulled two buckets of thistle every visit and then worked on the herb mound. We pruned out old raspberry canes and pulled out the asparagus ferns. We got into the tool shed, painted the door, and cleared that up one rainy day.  We move some strawberries. We identified the dreaded nut sedge, a new weed for both of us. Lush and green, it pulled easily, but left a small nodule behind to grow again. We nagged the school landscapers to mow around the garden and the planter strip in the neighborhood.  We quickly covered a third of the garden in some extra heavy black plastic, because there was no way we could get it all in order—that made a huge difference. Neighbors walked by to weigh in on things and we sent them home with strawberries and artichokes.

For the first month or so, we weeded and imagined how the school could use the space. It could become the center of the Sustainability class; we could supply the Foods classes with fresh produce; students could come out and draw the leaves and write about the scents of the herbs for English and Art class.  What should we plant? Would we be back in school this spring? Doubt it. This fall? In May, it seemed reasonable, so we planned to fall crops. We brought all of our extra tomatoes over to plant a rainbow of color and flavor.  I planted a few extra potatoes. Leslie started squashes, small pumpkins, and popcorn at home and planted them out. We filled another bed with sunflowers. We debated—the same crop throughout the bed? Or bed of random extra plants from our starts?   We did both.

By late June, it looked like a garden again. By late July, it was promising a good harvest in the fall, and we were still hopeful that students would be around, at least part time, to eat the tomatoes. There was football practice happening on the field and a group of sophomore boys helped us move the potting table out of the blackberries. Everywhere we looked, we could see progress. The paths were mulch. The grape vine was growing up the signposts. The apples were filling out. The herb mound was clear of thistle.

There will not be students in school this fall. We gathered in the garden yesterday to plan forward. We’ll take the tomatoes into the staff room and put out a donation jar and we may add some more of our own produce, because we need mulch and fertilizer, cover crop seeds and some potting soil for the spring. We nailed the timing—if school opened on Wednesday, we could have a tomato tasting on Thursday and the Foods class could make applesauce on Friday. That’s good to know for next year. And we are farmers and teachers—we have faith that the world will return to normal. Students and teachers will be back in the building. The lessons we have learned this spring in summer will inform our practices going forward.  We have hope. It is our root.