Port Potager

Continuing around the garden to the swingset quadrant, we have our planting plan for the 2018 season: On the left, as always, is the asparagus . It’s not nearly as productive as it once was, so this spring we will try renovating it by resetting the crowns lower in the earth and adding some lime to counteract the soil acidity from a nearby evergreen tree.  Across the top are perennial grapes and herbs — nothing to see there.  Along the right side is space for Jenny Lind melons, which is a new variety of small, green fleshed melons. This is an heirloom variety popular among the Pennsylvania Dutch, and we got the seeds on a trip to the Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum last spring. There’s also a potato patch. Along the bottom is a very small length of trellised cucumbers, which will be for slicing. We have tons of pickles from last summer, so we won’t be planting any pickling cukes at all. There’s also an assortment of dill, arugula, beets and cauliflo...

This year’s drought wreaked havoc on our usually very reliable Concord grapes:   As you can see, they shriveled and died on the vine. At least the birds are enjoying a feast of raisins. On the bright side, our Catawba vines had never given us more than just a few bunches in the past, but they seem to love the dry weather: There are still some green ones in the mix, but with temperatures cooling and daylight waning, we picked them at the bend in the road between September and October. After we cut the ripe bunches and left them available for eat out of hand for a week, I decided we needed to process them. The fruit fly situation gets out of hand quickly if you let it, and these are seeded grapes, so they’re not that fun to eat anyway.  So I pulled every last one off of their stems and made Catawba grape jelly. There was just shy of three pounds when that project was complete, so I raided the fridge for some  Himrod grapes from earlier in t...

We’re missing a lot of big-ticket fruits and veggies in the garden this year: no peaches , nectarines or pears, thanks to pests last year and a badly-timed cold snap in late February. No cucumbers or green beans, thanks to a voracious (but since removed) groundhog. And everything is suffering from the drought, which is still a major player in the 2016 garden.  Despite the issues, our grapes are doing relatively well, since they tend to prefer drier conditions (not this  dry, of course, but they’re holding up). We have two vines each of four different varieties, and Himrod is the first to ripen:   Himrod is a white grape bred to do well in the Fingerlakes region, so it makes sense for our northern garden. It’s sweet with a musky-tart skin, and it’s a variety made for eating, not winemaking . Ours are seedless. Because they ripen so early — and because all  our grapes are green at this point — we haven’t timed the harvest properly in the past, ...

If you've noticed I've been having a little trouble keeping up lately, well … you're right. We're in the middle of a major (and overdue) kitchen remodel, and things are in a state of utter discombobulation around here: We're slowly putting it back together again, but in the meantime, we haven't been able to stay on top of our typical fall food preservation activities. Most things are already done: tomatoes are canned, green beans, okra and broccoli are frozen. But our fruit is just sitting around, waiting to be eaten. We have lots of apples and pears , and they are doing alright since they have a reasonable shelf life — though we'd love to whip up some pies! We're having real trouble keeping up with the small fruit: the second round of raspberries and a third round of strawberries , plus all of our grapes . Normally we'd be in high jam season right now, but we can barely get a dinner together, and it's no fun at all to do the dishes in...

Last weekend we discovered, midway through a fierce badminton game in the back yard, that our green grapes were ripe: They looked nice and plump, but the only way to to tell with a green grape is to eat it. If you're wrong, You will have the face-puckering experience of eating a sour grape. (That taste, by the way, is a combination of citrus-sour and tongue-smacking tannin.) We screwed our courage to the sticking place and tried one, this time with happy results. Our green grapes are seedless Himrods, and they have a complex sweetness that's a little floral and honey-flavored in addition to their fruitiness. They ripen early, so are good to go some time in August.  Alas, we did not figure this out before the birds did. When we looked more closely over the grape vines to find all the rest of our Himrods, this was all that was left: It's been an unusually active year for birds in our garden, especially blue jays . As we searched the arbor for our missi...

We're having a big year with the grapes. Not only did we finish the arbor , but we have also enjoyed harvesting at least a few grapes of each of our four varieties. Our best crop of grapes by far is from our Concord vines. Unlike last year's harvest of just  a handful of grapes , this year we have had literal bunches. We've been snacking on the them in passing for a week or two, and this week I brought in a little over three pounds: Too many grapes to eat before they go bad, so it's time to make grape jam! As always, I checked the Ball Blue Book first, but then went online to try to find a lower-sugar version. The last time I made a no-pectin jam from the Ball Book , it was good but way too sweet. These grapes taste so good off the vine — musky grapey-ness, but also lots of floral notes and a touch of acidity — that I didn't want to obliterate their flavor with all that sugar.  I found a low(er) sugar grape jam recipe at Epicurious , but I played...

Yesterday we harvested our first Himrod grapes! That basket is the harvest in its entirety. It's maybe about as much as you'd get in one bag of grapes at the grocery store, but for us represents several small bunches from two vines. We planted our grapes back in the spring of 2012 , and most vines have fruited this year. The Himrod vines are our second-best producer of grapes, and they are definitely our earliest to ripen. Since they are green grapes, the only way to tell was to taste them. A week ago I had some sour, pucker-producing taste tests, but now they are ready to go. Since there aren't that many, harvesting them was a snap. They are easy to see on our newly re-trained vines , and all it took was a few quick snips of the stems with kitchen shears.  These long, thin bunches bunches aren't packed full of grapes, and the grapes themselves are fairly small--about the size of raspberries. But they are sweet, with a just a little bit of tanniny t...

Last summer we (okay, this was really mostly Kirk's project, but I helped a little) built the grape trellis with some posts and bamboo . But we only built enough to support the vines at the time, and put off finishing the arbor that we had planned. Well, this past weekend we finally finished it up!  Again, this was mostly Kirk's project for the build. I collaborated on a few design questions, and I took some photos. The new addition is easily visible right now, but by this time next year that bright new wood should be greyed down to match the existing posts. The major design idea here was that the arbor would create a doorway from the garden to the lawn.  One aspect of the arbor that still isn't finished: We are also planning to install a small bench on either side of the side of the arbor, beneath the (eventually) shady roof and over the empty section of bed between the posts and the brick path.  The visual doorway created by the arbor als...

I'm not sure why (though I think our cool, wet spring may play a role), but this year we've been hit with a whole lotta bugs out in the garden. There was, of course, the plague of cutworms  and the rose slug scourge . There are also currently an absolute shit-ton of aphids on my chamomile , which has never happened before. That's not affecting the crop of flowers, although it is making picking them kind of disgusting, as I end up with squished aphids under my fingernails as I pinch off the blossoms. Luckily, several ladybugs have moved in to take care of them, so hopefully my next round of harvesting won't be so gross. Strangest of all, though, is what we found on our Concord grapes: Kirk's knee-jerk diagnosis was that we were facing an alien invasion, and that I should not bring the leaf inside the house ("That's just what they want you to do!"). I rolled my eyes, took my chances, and hit the internet. Based on actual facts and not scie...

This year's grape harvest: These are our Concords. Not all of of vines are bearing yet, but the Concords looked like they were going to do pretty well this year. But as September arrived, it became clear that we had a problem: See how we're missing a lot of grapes? They are on the ground, shriveled up. A bunch of the ones that are left have shriveled also. The handful of good ones in the first photo were about our whole harvest.  (I should note that they were completely delicious — sweet and so grapey that I finally understand what the flavor "purple" in medicine and candy is based on. Concord grapes have really excellent flavor. These plants have outdone all our others in vigor of growth this year also.) But. All of our grapes that are bearing are having a problem with the shriveled, unevenly-ripening fruit, and their leaves are turning brown and dying back as well: As near as I can tell, the problem here is black rot . This is a ...

We're making our way down the shore for the holiday weekend, and I have packed a lot of garden road food for the trip: Roughly clockwise from the top, we have cherry tomatoes, cantaloupe slices, strawberries and a few early-ripening grapes, green beans and carrots, peaches and apples, a box of salsa, and more green beans.  Also, I made sandwiches for the road — we're not a picket-line crossing kind of family (it's Labor Day weekend, y'all), so road food is going to be homemade today: Cucumber and dill sandwiches and caprese sandwiches with Ukrainian yellow tomatoes. And plain butter bread for Jonas, who inexplicably does not like sandwiches. But with all the snacks above, we should be in good shape!

All of the sudden, we have cucumbers. And not just one or two. Today I picked 5 1/2 pounds of the most perfect pickling cukes we've ever managed to grow.  And it just so happens that five pounds is the perfect amount for our gallon crock. Time to brine some pickles! Brined pickles are fermented, and we made our first batch last summer . Up until then we had always done a fresh pack with vinegar and canned them. Those are good, too — I do love vinegar! — but the flavors of a fermented pickle are much more complex. Fermented foods are also good for you , which make our pickle and sauerkraut crocks suddenly more trendy than Dutchy .  We liked last summer's brined batch well enough, but the seasoning wasn't our favorite. The recipe we used called for pickling spice, and the generic one we found was pretty heavy on the cinnamon. So this year I am determined to get the best spicy, kosher flavor with our brined pickles. I'm hoping for a classic here. Althou...