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.

               

Pound Pears

                Mark and I made a pilgrimage to the local Pound Pear tree this morning and picked up sixteen very large, hard pears.  It was a bit of a workout carrying them home in our daypacks, but they did curve nicely around my spine, unlike the complete works of Shakespeare.

We love the pound pear—it has been around, perhaps, since Roman times, and there are documents going back to the 16^th century, at least. It is a Homestead fruit, planted as part of an orchard for winter eating. The pears are rock hard when they fall, ripe, from the tree and they never soften. It is not a fresh-eating, delicate fruit. But, it keeps. If you pick them before they fall,  they will last for months. Then, in late winter, you can stew it down on the back of the stove for some loose, sweet fruit on toast.  If I had space, I would plant one.

This particular tree is in the back of a local park, near some houses, on the edge of town. It must be the last tree from an old orchard. It is fifty feet tall and all of the fruit is far above our heads, even with a fruit picker. It’s unassuming, shaped like the other, younger trees in the area, and about the same height. You wouldn’t know there was anything different unless you walked close and spotted the pears on the ground in mid-November. They range in size from a large eating pear to two fists together. They are hard; many of them are still not bruised, even after falling from the high branches.  They do weigh a pound!  We hunted down the best looking ones, avoiding the splits and chomped edges.

When we came home, I hacked up five of them, whacking them hard with my knife, cutting out the cores and bruises, and tossing them into the crockpot. I added some fresh ginger left over from making cough syrup and a cup or so of water and turned it on. They will cook down for several hours until they soften. At that point, I will taste them and add a little sugar or honey, but they will be remarkably sweet on their own. The rest are tucked in the larder, waiting their turn for the pot. We will finish them up in our January oatmeal and yogurt. 

2015 Summer Harvest

All of the produce that we preserve comes from within ten miles of home; it is transported here by bicycle. The bold entries were grown on site. This, of course, does not account for all of the fresh produce we ate during the growing season.

Blueberries: 2 quarts dried

                   3 quarts frozen

Peaches: six quarts dried

15    pints canned

Apples: apple sauce 8 pints

              Apple butter 18 half pints (it turns quickly)

               Dried 4 quarts

               Juice 19 quarts

Figs: 7 quarts dried

Plums:  butter 6 half pints

              Pickled 6 quarts

Grape juice: 36 quarts

Beets: pickled, 7 pints

Tomatoes: roasted and canned 54 half pints

                        Dried 3 quarts

                        Salsa 10 pints

                        Longkeeper storage tomatoes 10 pounds

Cucumbers: It was a very good year…

                        Quick Dill 10 quarts

                        Senfgerkin 10 pints

Gooseberry jam 4 half pints

Potatoes:

            Blue three pounds—a mystery

            Yukon Gold 13 pounds, plus some early harvest

            Desiree 21 pounds

            Kennebeck 25 pounds

            Russian fingerling 26 pounds

Pumpkins and squash; six pie pumpkins and one blue Hubbard squash

                       

Why Dry?

            When I first began food preservation, I was very interested in applesauce and jam; they were both easy and familiar. I’d made applesauce back in high school, large pots of it, and froze it in “seal-a-meal” bags, laid in our small freezer like slabs of bacon.  There were hundreds of recipes for jam; once I figured out the slight shift in bubble structure that indicated the perfect “jamming” temperature, I was off.  Our shelves were lined with half pints of blackberry jam and pints of applesauce, followed by a foray into Dilly Beans. Life was good and I repeated the process the next year, adding home canned fruit—until we had a serious backlog of jam and pickled beans. Then I realized that we did not eat much jam and the canned fruit, except of peaches, was too sweet, unless we had an old batch of sour yogurt. And I was still buying dried fruit for work and backpacking trips. Something was off. I bought a cheap food drier and we have never looked back.

            Drying fruit makes far more sense than canning.

First, it is fast and easy. I can slice up a pile of apples (peal still on) after dinner, laid them out in the drier, turn it on, and go to bed. If I set the timer to turn off in six hours, we have dried fruit in the morning. I toss it into my vintage Magic Mason jars, check it off of the master list, and put it on the basement shelf. Italian plums and figs require a little push and spread motion to expose more surface to the air, but, overall, drying fruit is a one step process.

Second, it is healthy. I gather my fruit at the peak of the season and process it directly, with no added sugars or preservatives. Much of it is organically grown, either by design, in my backyard, or neglect, when I harvest from the abandoned alley trees around the neighborhood. Drying preserves all of the fiber, most of the nutrients, and all of the flavor. Mixed bags of dried fruit are our favorite winter snack; we both keep a stash in our desk drawers.

Dried fruit is tasty. We have all purchased pieces of fruit from the grocery store that are well traveled and know the consequences. Despite the fancy label, an apple in March often tastes dry and mealy and an orange is often a disappointment. A piece of dried fruit, however, is always good. Peaches and pears are sweet and flavorful throughout the winter when dried. Over the last few years, we have moved almost totally away from buying “fresh” fruit out of season, because of the dried fruit stash in the basement. Why bother?

Finally, dried fruit is flexible, unlike canned fruit. It travels well, so we take it backpacking and camping, as well as to work. We eat jars of dried fruit out of hand all winter long. When we long for “fleshy” fruit, I make compotes, mixing several types together with some warm juice to plump it up. I also toss handfuls into oatmeal and granola, muffins and scones, and pasta sauces.

When I first started drying, several friends asked about the carbon footprint of running the drier all day, and, it is true that our electric bill goes up in August. Wouldn’t it be more energy efficient to purchase the fruit that was dried commercially? Although I have not done any calculations, I am not convinced this is so. The fruit I dry travels less than five miles to my house, always on bike or foot. It is often raised without any summer water; it is not sprayed with chemicals. This reduces the carbon footprint considerably. Then, it is not shipped from the factory to the store, then to my home. We have also totally eliminated packaging. Finally, unlike canning, the jars and lids can be used over and over again. I have some lids with six or seven years of notes on them! When I consider all of these factors, I am not concerned about my drier. And, yes, I am interested in a solar drier, although I wonder if it would work given the dropping light levels and cool nights that come around at the peak of drying season.

 If I were beginning food preservation again, I would start with a drier, not a canner. I use my steam canner all summer long, processing pickles and roasted tomatoes, as well as canned peaches, applesauce, and grape juice. But the drier processes the most important foods we put up for the winter—all of our foraged fruits.

Lemon Icebox Pie: the perfect pie for a 98 degree day

8 oz cream cheese

1 can sweetened condensed milk

zest and juice of three lemons

Toss it all into the food processor and whirl until smooth. Pour into a graham cracker crust and set in the refrigerator overnight. Top with whipped cream.

Winter Storage

The end of August and beginning of September is harvest time here. The house was not designed to hold a wide variety of winter stores—we do not have a root cellar—so finding good storage places for all of the winter foods can be tricky.  This is where various foods are stashed.

Basement wall, warm and dry:

• All canned and dried goods, in mason jars
• Wheat, oatmeal, and barley in large tin containers (there ones that held Christmas popcorn mostly).
• Beans in mason jars.
• Bulk pasta and teas in the original containers
• Honey in mason jars

Basement by the door, cooler and damper:

• Apple crop, laid on one layer thick in seedling trays

Stairwell of the basement, constant temp:

• Potatoes, sorted by variety in bags and then resting in milkcrates
• Next years seed stock is in bags, tucked way back in so we do not eat them by mistake
• Garlic hangs above the stairs

Larder, which is an insulated space, vented to the outside, accessed in the stairwell:

• Squash and pumpkins
• 60 pounds of onions
• loose garlic
• longkeeper tomatoes
• Fruits waiting to be processed
• Seed tin

As the weather grows colder, the larder also holds:

• Greens from Sunbow
• Leftovers
• Soup for the week
• Box of oranges over Winter Solstice

Garden Beds:

·        Greens

·        Parsnips

·        Leeks

·        Sprouting Broccoli

·        Not carrots—slugs eat the tops and I can’t find them after early November.

 

Late Summer Pasta

Roasted eggplant (cubed, rolled in olive oil, and roasted in 350 oven for about 45 minutes)

Half pint jar of roasted tomatoes (I use the one that did not seal…)

Sauteed onion and garlic

Can of the Good Tuna from Sweet Creek

Fresh basil

Toss them all together and serve over whole wheat pasta with  lots of Parmesan cheese.

Harvest is in!

Homestead Harvest is in…and the tally is:

Pickled Beets:6 pints

Blueberries: 2 quarts dried

Plums: 8 pints canned

            6 quarts dried

Pears: 5 quarts dried

Apples: 7 quarts dried

            4 pints of sauce

            3 quarts of juice—already gone…

Grape juice: 23 quart

Figs: 5 quarts dried

Tomatoes: roasted 70 half pints roasted

7        pints of salsa

4 quarts dried

Green Beans: 7 pints canned

Honey: 5.5 quarts, so far

Jam: 3 gooseberry

            6 rhurbarb red currant

            6 peach

            7 grape

Pickles: senfgurten—5

            Olive oil—2

            Dill spears—8

Dried beans—1 quart of Indian Woman

                        1 quart of Scarlet Runner

We also have two trays of apples left, three dozen longkeeper tomatoes, jujubes hanging on the tree, squashes and pumpkins in the larder.

Pumpkin Bread:

You can use canned pumpkin and it is tidy-- or you can bake your own, store in in pint jars in the freezer, and haul it out when you need it. This makes two loaves: one for now and one for the freezer.

3 1/3 c flour-- half whole wheat

2 t BS

1/2 t BP

1 1/2 t salt

1 t cinnamon

1/2 t nutmeg and cloves

2/3 c oil

2 c pumpkin

4 eggs

2 c sugar

2/3 c milk

raisins, nuts, chocolate chips, apples...whatever is around

Mix dry together. Mix wet together. Mix the two. Bake in a 350 degree oven.

        

Voluntary Complexity

     

      Anyone who believes that we live lives of Voluntary Simplicity because we have a couple of hens in the backyard, some locally grown tomatoes on the shelf and one car in the driveway has not seen my schedule book lately. I am beginning to feel like an Honors Junior angling towards Stanford. They have colored coded planners, fifteen things happening in a day, and no time for the common cold, never mind a weekend off. Me, too. We are all  practicing Voluntary Complexity, not Voluntary Simplicity.

            I once lived a very simple life. My last year in college, I had a two room apartment with the bathroom down the hall. I shared the second floor of an old house with three dirty old men, literally. The front room held my bed, a bookshelf, rocking chair, chest of drawers, and record collection. There was a small open space where I could sit on the floor and spread out my notecards before beginning to write a paper. The kitchen held my other bookshelf, which functioned as the prep counter, a small table, tiny fridge, and my big desk with manual typewriter. I went to the Laundromat and grocery store every Saturday morning, baked my own bread, learned how to make soup, and decided meat was, really, too expensive for what you got. I spent my evenings reading eighteenth century fiction and New England history, my days working in the archives, attending classes, and hanging out with friends at lunch. I did not have a car, a cat, or a boyfriend. I agreed with May Sarton, who said that one could live well alone at twenty and again at fifty, and with Adrienne Rich, who talked about the need to choose how to live, alone or with a partner.  It was a good time in my life.

            Life now is far more complicated. As all teachers know—and the people who make decisions at least pretend to deny—any time you add a life to your own, it adds complication. Seeing 163 students every other day (and all of them on Friday) requires more tracking and more effort than seeing 81 of them every day for one semester, followed by 82 every day for the next. Just look at the pile of summer reading projects on my counter, waiting for Monday morning.  Over the fifteen years we have lived in this little house, I have added many lives to my own, starting with a “housebound” partner and two cats and moving outward from there. Every relationship adds complexity. Every volunteer action, every group, every meeting I attend, every student I stay in touch with years later, adds complexity. Sometimes, like at the beginning of the school year when everything converges at once, it is not a good thing. Sometimes I remember that little apartment fondly.

            But Voluntary Complexity has a positive side, beyond stress. Every connection we make strengthens our lives as well. We are tangled in a web and it provides a springboard and a safety net. Before school began, my friend Julia—the high school art teacher-- and I organized an Art Retreat for our colleagues and summer hiking partners. It was simple. Bring art supplies and picnic food, gather at my house for carpooling, and head to Alsea Falls. We found a spot with two tables, spread the excellent food on one, art supplies on the other, listened to Julia explain a little bit about watercolors, and dispersed.   Some people went for walks in the woods. Some settled in with a plate of food and notebook at the table. Some headed for the river to draw. I sat by the water, wrestling, as always, with perspective, then stopped. Amy sat in front of me, her feet in the stream, staring into space. I could hear seven year old Layne telling someone a story behind me, her voice mingling with the river. Another friend settled in nearby. Other families came and went. The breeze rustled in the dry August leaves. Back at the picnic table, I knew, were other members of my web, talking, patting the dog, and strengthening ties for the coming school year. As the day began to fade, we came together once more, ate, and packed up to leave. The evening was pale pink as we pulled out of the park. Doug firs sketched against the sky. The road a dark tunnel through the trees until we broke into the valley and headed north, towards home. Mary’s Peak, our home mountain, on the left, the Willamette River beyond the fields on the right. 

Drying Fruit for Winter Eating

One of the actions that lends complexity to my life in September is the desire to be Fruit Independent all winter. Over the years, we’ve learned that local, often scavenged, totally ripe fruit is infinitely better than fruit picked green and shipped across the world. I have a small food drier that I bought for thirty dollars at Bi-Mart and it works just fine. No need for fancy equipment.

drying plums

Keys to successful drying:

• Thin slices—apples, pears, peaches
• Spread it out a bit to expose more surface—plums, cherries, figs.
• Dry it whole—blueberries and raisins.
• Have patience—all of it. It takes longer than I once thought.
• Go for really dry. If the fruit is dry, you can put it in a quart jar, seal it with last year’s canning lid, and store it on the shelf with the canned tomatoes and pickles.  If you want fleshy fruit, make a compote.

            

Planning for Preserving

1. Survey what you already eat. Sounds obvious, but it is essential. If you can, save grocery receipts for six months to a year so that you have a real strong feel what you do—and do not—eat. This eliminates the 60 jars of jam on the shelf phenomena. Yeah, jam is easy and tasty and yeah, those blackberries are free for the picking—and may  be you are even saving the Pacific Northwest from being totally overrun by their vines by harvesting, but still, if you eat four jars of jam a year now, you are not going to suddenly eat thirty just because you made them yourself. I know—I had to stop making jam for four years to eat down the surplus. And no, you shouldn’t bring them to the potluck on Saturday night, either, as three other people are already bringing blackberry crisps. You know it’s true. 
2. Don’t Horde.  This is the opposite problem of making too many jars of jam. You make just three pints of pickled plums because it is the first year, and, because you are waiting for a special occasion, you never eat them all winter. A more extreme case—I went camping with a friend. We both brought along our half pint jars of tomato chutney that had been a Christmas present from a co-worker. We laughed. At the end of the two week trip, we both still had the chutney. Seriously, after all that work, EAT!
3. Preserve the surplus. If there is a lot of something, save it for winter, even if it was not on your list. Many fruit trees, especially the wild ones in alley, produce heavily every other year. Take advantage of the surplus on a good year, just in case the source is gone the next. I’ve made three types of cucumber pickles this year because Sunbow had a surplus of big cucumbers. (It is the year of gigantism, after all.)  If I do not horde—see above—we should discover some new favorite snacks this winter.  The corollary of this rule is: Distribute the surplus. If you have too much, pass it on. It is good garden karma.
4. Invest in two good preserving books.  You need one book for basic, don’t try and can in the compost pile, information. I really like Putting Food By. It feels like it was written by women from the mid-west, simple, practical, and solid. It is not fancy, but it is clear. The Ball Canning jar people have also put out a basic canning book. My other favorites are The Joy of Pickling and The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves. Maybe it is because the author lives about thirty miles from here, but she has recipes for all of the produce that appears on my table. Too many plums…let’s see what the Joy has to say about that….jam? leather? pickled? all three?
5. Buy basic equipment—keep it simple.  I use my tongs and funnel all the time, even when not preserving. I have a couple of solid potholders and cutting boards, which also double as trivets under hot pans. The most important piece of equipment I own is my steam canner.  I spotted it in the Territorial seed catalog one day over lunch.  I called Cottage Grove. The women who answer the phones at Territorial are great;  one assured me that she had been using one all season and it cut way down on processing time. Imagine no longer waiting for the big pot of water to boil! Or dumping out said hot pot when you are done or when a jar breaks during processing!  Electricity savings! Small batch canning! Rather than making pickles, grape juice, and 12 quarts of peaches in one day, I can run one batch of salsa and call it good.  The steam canner works for anything you would put through a water bath, but not for low-acid foods that need a pressure canning (ie. green beans). Best investment ever.

Remember—now it the time to plan to eat locally all year.

Roasted Tomatoes. We eat sixty half pints of these every year!

Slice sauce tomatoes in half or in thirds, aiming for about a half inch thick slices. Lay face down on a sheet pan—no oil needed. Place in 350 degree oven for about forty minutes, until  seriously relaxed. A little charring is ok. Scoop into half pint jars and process in steam canner for 30 minutes. Use on pizzas, as pasta sauce, in soups, etc. all winter long. 

Potato Harvest

This was my first post. As we just pulled 119 pounds of potatoes out of two 4 by 10 foot beds (a new record!), I thought I'd repost it. You really don't want to read my other piece for the week, which is how to call in a noise complaint. :)

            It’s been warm and sunny, but the light has shifted to golden and the potatoes are ready to be dug.  After lunch, I gather the wheelbarrow, six paper  bags, a water bottle, and a few hand tools and headed down the street to the second  garden.  Three raised beds are covered with dried, crunchy old potato vines. I push them aside, plunge my hands in, and haul out a huge red potato, followed by three or four small ones, pop them  into the bag, and move onto the next plant.

            Digging potatoes is like a treasure hunt. You know there is something down there—somewhere—but not exactly where or how much. There are always surprises—a huge potato that could feed a family of four, a migrant clump of red potatoes in the blue potato line, one that has dug itself deep down into the bed, below all of the others.  You never know. Slowly, the bags fill up and the scope of the harvest is clear. This was a pretty good one. The red potatoes did really well, but the rose fingerlings, usually a strong producer of complex, lumpy, knotty tubers, were sleek and thin this year. Why? Was it planting time? Water? The new beds? Or are the tubers starting to peter out, succumbing to disease?  I wonder as I dig, thinking about next year.

                Why do I plant potatoes every year? They’re cheap to buy, even the organic varieties at the market, and ubiquitous.  There are lumpy, dirty, and decidedly uninteresting as a plant. And, according to old diet theories, you shouldn’t eat too many—starch is bad for you.  But, for the last five years, I’ve planted five or six varieties of potatoes, first at the community garden and now here, in the second garden behind our rental. There are many reasons.

First, they are an excellent community garden crop. They don’t need hours of care, once planted, and no one knows what they are, so no one messes with them. Avery Garden has a harvest problem, but no one ever harvested my potatoes, buried under straw and dirt, hidden by dead vines.  You can go in at the end of the season and haul them all out in a morning.  The first year, the haul was much larger than I expected and my bike could hardly handle it. I barely made it across Western without spilling the harvest all across the highway. After that, I brought the trailer and Mark.

Then, there is the genetic component. I feel very close to my Irish roots when I dig the potatoes.  This is not something I had to study to learn, like I had to work at how to change the oil in my old VW Rabbit. It feels natural, like sliding bread out of the oven using a peel. I have done this before. Dug trenches, cut the saved tubers, buried them in the ground, weeded and watered, and pulled them out to the root cellar, to be eaten all winter.  I love eating  my own potatoes.

And that may be the crucial reason for this work. In a world that is rapidly sliding towards chaos—we are not going to be able to keep importing our food from around the world much longer—I am working towards a more direct food supply. I’m not participating in a Think Tank on Peak Oil. I am not fussing about carbon offsets to balance out my supply of tropical fruit through the winter. I am not depending upon others to feed me. In the small way, I am independent. We are, at my house, Potato Independent.  We will eat the potatoes that we raise and then, when they are gone, we will not eat potatoes until they come again.

So it’s warm afternoon, with fall coming on. The plum tree and grapevine down here are also calling me—but that’s another day’s work. Right now, I am hunting potatoes. One hundred and five pounds of potatoes, to be precise. And, when I am done, I’ll put them in milk crates and stack them in the space under the cellar stairs, where the temperature is always about the same, and be greeted by their earthy fragrance as I move up and down, putting by food for the winter.


Nova Scotia Potato Soup-- the best

Chop up onions and potatoes, twice as many potatoes as onions
Cover with water, barely
Simmer for hours-- a crockpot could be handy here. The longer it cooks, the sweeter the onions are.
When you have a lovely brokendown sauce, add a big splash of milk, a large spoonful of sour cream, some dill, salt and pepper. Taste.

Eat with fresh bread and green salad. For days....

Sunbow Riverteeth

It’s Winter Break and I’m in Greenhouse number two, cleaning out last year’s tomato plants, prepping the soil, and planting the greens I will be eating in May. Outside, it’s raining—not a Winter Mist, like we usually have—but a real rain with wind and dramatic clouds. Inside, I’m down to a tee shirt and wooly hat, flannel shirt and sweatshirt in a pile by the door. I’m alone, working peacefully. Occasionally, a gust of wind ripples the plastic and it rains inside.


When I run out of compost, I sigh…the compost pile is on the other side of the barns. I wrangle the deep wheelbarrow between the last glorious ruby chard, so beautiful that no one can cut it down—although it has contributed to several dinners—and the sawhorses holding seedlings. Push it out the door and across the plank which keeps it out of the mud. Past the mazy toolshed/farmstand/crop storage building, the old hoophouse turned comfrey patch, and housing for apprentices to the pile of decomposing leaves. It has stopped raining for the moment. I shovel compost into the barrow, pause, look up. Huge grey clouds race across the sky, wind whips through my hair and tee shirt, the air smells of earth, and ocean, and forest all at once, and Mary’s Peak looms over all.



It’s been a good summer for help at Sunbow. There has been a couple from Australia living there for several weeks and they like to get going early in the morning. When Mark and I arrive, the greenhouse work has already been done and we are heading out to one of the big back fields to weed and mulch. Harry is out at the back leaf pile with the tractor. We gather five gallon buckets, shovels, water bottles, hats, and head out past the quiet rustle of the wheat field, green gold in the July light. Five of us move down the rows, pulling the weeds, freeing the plants. They stretch towards the sun. Once the weeds are gone, we move in with buckets of leaves, piling mulch around their roots. We talk quietly to the plants, encouraging growth, and to each other—about the task at hand and the meaning of life and growing things. The sun slowly climbs in the sky. Time passes.

When the sun is overhead, we stop. The entire field is weeded and mulched. On the right, rows of leeks raise lavender globes high, producing seed for the next year. Further on, the wheat is ripening. Harry nods, pleased with the morning’s work.

“Imagine,” I say, “if we always had this many people—what it would look like.”

“We did, once,” he replies. “When we did all of the markets…there were ten or more people working every day.” I see, in his mind, all of the fields clean and producing food for the valley, and nod.






We have just been out to Summer Lake and we spent one night at a campground around a warm spring. “This is sacred ground” a sign by the entrance read. I looked around —piles of old farm trash, no potable water, slimy warm spring—who were they kidding? Just putting up a sign does not make your land “sacred.”



Two days later, I bike out to Sunbow. Warm June morning…I rattle in on the dirt drive between the eight foot high pampas grass clumps. On one side, the purple house buried in roses, on the other, the front field, filled with yacon, beans, corn, tomatoes, and, of course, weeds. There are weeds everywhere. In the corner, an old geodesic dome is slowly returning to the earth. Out back, wheat and garbanzo beans are growing. I hear a few chickens conversing in the pen as I park my bike by the high leaf piles and hunt for Harry.

“We’re weeding the tomatoes today,” he announces cheerfully. Okay. We walk out to the front field, push aside the pigweed, and find the plants. There they are, growing lustily in old leaves. I drop to my knees to weed. Sun on my back. Earth under my hands. Scent of tomato in the air.

Taking Stock

It is about time to take stock of supplies for the winter….

We have:

50 pounds or so of potatoes (not a good year)

Four long garlic braids

Five huge Boston Marrows and two smaller blue Hubbards

Two trays of Long Keeper tomatoes, which we’ll eat until Solstice or beyond



Greens still growing in the garden along with a few climbing zucchini, some huge leeks, and three cabbages that Hennie the Leghorn did not eat.



Almost a gallon of honey



15 quarts of grape juice

60 half pints of roasted tomatoes

3 quarts of dried tomatoes

12 jars of salsa (Sunbow tomatoes and Bina’s peppers)

12 pints of applesauce

4 quarts of dried apples

6 pints of blueberries

3 quarts of dried blueberries

8 pints of cherries

3 quarts of dried cherries

9 pints of blackberries

12 quarts of peaches

4 quarts of dried peaches

14 pints of various plums, canned

10 half pints of plum jam—it was a good plum year.

5 quarts dried plums

12 quarts of pickled plums

6 pints of pickled beets

4 quarts of dried zucchini



Lots of jams and chutney backed up from last year.There’s also dried figs and fig jam from last year—the season never warmed enough for figs this year.In a few weeks, we’ll add oatmeal and wheat berries, flax seed and carrots, onions all purchased in bulk from local farmers.

And today, the cycle started all over again as I planted garlic cloves—one for each week of the year, plus a few extra—and yellow storage onions in the first garden bed.

Signs of Hot Weather in the Back Yard

1. Panting chickens

2. Cats stretched out on the grass

3. The bees are all over the outside of the hive, not inside

4. The kitchen lamp has been moved out to the backyard table, along with all of our books

5. Steam canner is full of salsa

6. Tomatoes are wilting, even though they were just watered

7. The rhododendron has folded its leaves

8. The world is quiet

9. The hammock is the perfect place for a nap

Canning Mantras

There’s one of those ubiquitous nylon grocery bags hanging in my back hall. It’s the wrong size to fit in my bike basket and rather flimsy, too, so it’s been relegated to the bag that catches the reused clear plastic bread and bulk bags that we need when shopping at the co-op. A few weeks ago, I looked more closely at it (it was a gift…). There’s a quotation along the bottom—You don’t have to do everything, but you should do something – implying, I suppose, that taking a reusable bag to the grocery will save the planet. It won’t. It might, however, reduce the number of larger bags full of bags that you have hanging in the back hall…


.After grumping about greenwashing for a few days, I realized that it was becoming my mantra—but for food preservation, not global warming. One day last week, I had tomatoes that needed roasting, plums to be pickled and dried, AND apples for sauce all lurking in the back hall. It was getting crowded out there. You don’t have to do it all tonight, I muttered, especially since you have to sit in six hours of school meetings tomorrow, but you should do something. Tomatoes, I thought. Most likely to gather fruit flies over night. Four racks of tomatoes went into the oven and then into half pint jars. Pizza and pasta sauce and soup stock is now done. (There are 60 half pints on the shelf.) The next night, it was applesauce—eight pints. Friday night was plum night—pickled and dried. Tonight, the last of the dried plums… and peaches are waiting on the dining room table. Canned peaches, dried peaches, peach chutney for Christmas presents…You don’t have to do everything, I assured myself, but you do have to do something with those peaches tomorrow.

Summer in Jars

The canning season is here. The shelves have been cleared and surveyed, the jars sorted—pint and quart, large and small mouthed—new lids purchased, canning dishcloths, stained with last year’s blackberries and beets, found, and foraging has begun. A few weeks ago, Mark and I clambered about on a friend’s roof, picking cherries and watching a cold front blow in from the west. The next day, I pitted cherries until my hands were deep purple, choosing some for a pie, packing most into the dehydrator and the rest into jars for the winter’s granola and yogurt. Then rather than hauling everything back downstairs to the far corners, I transformed The Larder (a space half way down to the cellar) into the canning storage unit.

Today I pickled beets from Sunbow. It is cool and clear out with a nice breeze, perfect canning weather. Two loads of laundry are flapping on the line—t shirts, underwear, jeans and a lovely flowered tablecloth. The chickens are cheerfully fussing over whose turn it is to sit in the nest area; Agnes is turning into the yard’s labor coach and the entire neighborhood knows it. The house smells of vinegar and sugar and allspice simmering on the stove while I peel and chop the beets—once again, it looks like a massacree has taken place on the counters. Clean jars wait for the vegetables and brine; my steam canner—a wonderful invention!—waits for the filled jars. Old music plays in the radio. It is a perfect morning and this energy will go into the pickles and waft out again this winter, when I go looking for something with color to add to a pale dinner. Summer in a jar, as Greg Brown sang years ago.