Summer Canning

The morning is cool and quiet, cloudy. In the dining room, the red currants are draining; the gooseberries have been tipped and tailed. After breakfast, I wander to the basement, find the steam canner, gather the jars and long loops of rings handing on Christmas cords. Half way up the stairs, the lids are tucked in amongst the cleaning supplies.  Metal changes on metal as I dump everything on the kitchen table. It is time for the summer rituals to begin.

First, I boil the currant juice. Poured into half pint jars and sealed, we can drink the juice with fizzy water in the winter. Vitamin C. It is a deep red and stains the counter. The canner, with the usual quart of honey weight on the lid, rattles and steams. In the living room, NPR explains the news. While the currants seal, I make the gooseberry jam, boiling sugar and berries together, testing the transformation of juice into jam. It finishes just before the timer buzzes for the currants. Move quickly—trade the jars. Replace the lid, the weight, start the timer once more.  Clean up. Summer work on quiet mornings, before the day grows warm.

A Week in Garden Harvests

Radicchio

    

            I am in love with radicchio this season. I bought some seed this winter, when all greens looked good in the catalog (hence my overabundance of cabbages and broccolis) and started it in February, first in six-packs, then bumped up to a barrel in the yard and some four inch pots. It has been lush for months.  That has been one of its charms; whenever I harvest a full sized plant, I have popped another, from the four inch pot stash, into the hole. It keeps on growing without missing a beat. So far, it has been one tough plant, even when it was hot and dry a few weeks ago. It even repels pill bugs and earwigs!

                It is also a beautiful plant. Deep green leaves, veined with red on the outside. A cabbage-y, swirly leaf layout in red and white inside.  Some are more red, some more green.  When it first grows the true leaves, they have an adorable little twist to them, like the piping on a cake that turns inward to create the head. Layer upon layer of leaves build up on that twist, and the biggest lay down to frame the plant. So lovely.

                Radicchio is tasty, too. We started eating the young leaves in salads in late April. Lately, I have been harvesting the heads for sautéed greens. They are bitter but not spicy as mustard greens and they mix beautifully with kales and mustards. Last night, we ate them cooked with an onion and garlic, toasted pecans and raisins. So good.  Such a nice counter point to the ricotta pie that was left over from the night before.  This one is clearly a keeper.

Hand Splints, Heat Waves, and Climate Change

               My right hand is restricted by a plastic splint and it has been hot for several days. I am having flashbacks to 1988, when, using a hand scythe to mow down some big weeds in the side yard of my rental, I sliced open my right index finger. I knew right away it was bad. I grabbed my finger and hitched a ride to the emergency room with the guy living downstairs. A few hours later, I had stitches and a splint that held my finger immobile and extended for the next three weeks.  It was difficult to deal with my hair, but I quickly developed techniques for moving the mixing bowls at the bakery around and for pounding butter with the rolling pin.

                !988 was a really hot summer. Starting about the same time as my injury, the temperature in Portsmouth N.H. was over 90 degrees and humid  every day for six weeks (and Portsmouth is full of ocean breezes…).  Mark remembers it being hot in Tennessee. It was so hot and dry in the wheat growing west that the bakery had to raise prices that autumn when the cost of grain skyrocketed. It was hot. 1988 was also about the time we began to hear about Climate Change and its coming impacts on the world. It was scary stuff. “Is this what it’s going to be like with global warming?” we all asked. It was a general question, discussed on the news and over the counter. It was also non-partisan.  Almost everyone, democrat or republican, was aware of the science and part of the conversation.  And there was some movement to make changes to mitigate the worst of the damage. And then…

                It is thirty years later. Another accident. Another splint of plastic that causes my arm and fingers to sweat and swell in the heat.  And we are still talking about Climate Change. “Is this what every summer is going to be like? Hot, with wildfires all of August?” we ask. Unfortunately, the changes we need to make to mitigate the absolute worst effects of Climate Change are much greater than they were in 1988. If, in 1988, we followed Jimmy Carter’s lead, turned down the heat and put a sweater on, installed solar panels, insulated houses, invested in public transit, etc. we would be in a much better position right now. We could go gracefully into a new era focused on renewal energy rather than fossil fuels. Now, we have much more difficult decisions to make. Nuclear energy? What neighborhoods/cities/regions do we rebuild after big storms? Which do we let go? How do we support the huge rural population that lives throughout the country, the people who cannot walk to any services they need every day? What do we do about forest fires and the people who live in the woods? Not to mention the rest of the living beings on this earth. These are huge, complex, systemic questions. And time is running out. We do not have another thirty years.

               

One Handed Gardener

What you can do with one (and a half) arms in the garden:

1.       Weed

2.       Transplant (85% survival rate)

3.       Mulch

4.       Direct seed

5.       Hand water with hose or watering can

6.       Harvest strawberries

7.       Break up clods to prep beds

8.       Haul hoses around

9.       Trim out the beds, slowly

10.   Clean up drying bulbs

11.   Paint the plant signs

12.   Fertilize the berries

What you cannot do with one (and a half) arms in the garden:

1.       Set up the new irrigation system

2.       String up the bean vines

3.       Move a full wheelbarrow around

4.       Create a new rabbit fence

5.       Tie anything

6.       Turn compost

7.       Move the chicken coop

8.       Catch a chicken or a rabbit

9.       Take photos

What you should not do with one (and a half) arms:

1.       Pitchfork a bed

2.       Clean out the garden pool

3.       Haul hoses around

Despite limitations and with some serious help from Mark, the veg. garden is planted, irrigated, and mulched.

silence

so, i broke my arm avoiding a truck on my bike. my bike is fine: my head is fine, but i am working one armed....there will be a post soon on the challenges of putting in the garden one handed.:)

Stacking Functions

One of the principles of Permaculture is the idea of stacking functions—making one object do more than one thing in a design. For example, the fig tree in front of our house provides shade in the heat of summer, a privacy hedge between close-set houses, and way more figs than we can eat every fall.  When we are designing gardens, living spaces, or curriculum we want to ask ourselves—does this idea have more than one use? Does it meet several needs?  If the answer is no, we should go back to the planning stages.

In the garden, stacking functions looks like adding mulch to the garden beds when the plants are big enough to peer over the straw. Mulch  keeps the water from the soaker hoses close to the plants, reduces evaporation, cools roots in the middle of heat waves, and breaks down to add organic matter to the soil.

In the house, we may use one big table for food preparation and eating, doing housework, and as a desk. Or water may wash the clothes and then irrigate the front yard ornamentals.  

When I ask students to write a paper, I am looking for several skills. Can they write a thesis statement and follow through on the promise? Can they support their ideas with examples? Do they show a fundamental understanding of the book we have just (in theory) read? Does this book, and the lessons learned, help them become better students and citizens?

How does this relate to Climate Change? If we want our planet to survive, we are going to have to learn how to do more with far less. We have to design our living  spaces and cities to stack functions, to be flexible in use, and to reduce energy consumption. Stacking functions is an excellent place to start.