Port Potager

A couple weekends ago I saw a yellow pear on the ground. It's always a solid sign that fruits are ripe when they start falling off the trees of their own accord, so I went out to check the rest. Sure enough, the pears easily separated from their stems, so I walked away with a basketful: The green pears are our Moonglow pears, and this is our first-ever crop of them now that the tree is finally bearing. We chose this variety because they ripen early, in late August. This tree's harvest was meant to coincide with our late peaches to make peachy pear jam. Alas, our peach trees died and we had no peach harvest this year, so we'll have to find something else to do with our pears instead.  The funny thing about pears is that you actually have to pick them before they are fully ripe, and it can be hard to tell when they're ready (which is why that first one ended up on the ground). The stems will weaken to the point where they'll break when you bend the pear...

Though there's still between six and 12 inches of snow on the ground in most spots and we're nowhere near ready to plant any spring crops outdoors, we still have plenty of last year's harvest stores to enjoy for dinner. To wit: Along with filet or perch we had garlic green beans and sweet corn fritters. Despite not having a great green bean harvest last summer, we still had enough frozen beans to last through this long winter. We also still have a good deal of garlic, though some of it is beginning to sprout, which gives it kind of a greenish flavor.  The corn fritters were made possible by some frozen corn from our bumper crop of sweet corn this summer. These are basically pancakes with corn in them, but fried in a half inch of oil. Kirk made them from a recipe in The Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook , but there's a very similar recipe here . Just use regular salt and skip the sugar if you use fresh or frozen sweet corn from a farm — that's ple...

Remember our pear harvest ? I don't blame you if you don’t — it was a tiny crop of just five Anjou pears. They have been in cold storage since we picked them back in September. As I suspected we would, we kind of forgot about them in the crisper drawer. Now, pears are meant to last a long while in cold storage. In fact, they need to be held at low temperatures for several weeks before eating to help them ripen properly.  Still, they don't require almost five months in the fridge. This was made obvious by the bruised spots on them when I took them out last weekend. We lost one outright, and most of the rest had at least one soft spot.  Oops. Lesson learned for next year — start eating pears in December. And figure out a way to keep them from rolling around in the crisper drawer to avoid bruising as much as possible. Despite this stumble, our pears were usable and delicious. I'm not a fan of eating pears raw, but they are great in baking. To wit: ...

While not as impressive as our massive peach harvest , our first-ever pear harvest is in the books: That's all of it — just five Anjou pears. That may not seem like much, but pear trees typically take several years before they bear fruit, so the fact that we have any pears at all yet is pretty exciting. I also pollinated these myself with a paint brush back in the spring, since our other pear tree didn't bloom this year.  The pears aren't ready to eat yet, but they seemed ready to harvest because they pulled easily off of the tree. Pears have a two-part ripening process: first you have to chill them, then you have to allow them to ripen at room temperature before you want to use them. The best information I found was from Oregon State , and according to them, Anjou pears should be chilled for a minimum of two to six weeks, then ripened at room temperature for another week to ten days.  I put ours in the crisper drawer of our fridge, and set it for high humid...

Since we are in the midst of yet another mild winter weekend, we took the opportunity to go out and prune our fruit trees for the year. Late winter or early spring is the time to do it, so we are right on schedule with this annual task. Young trees that aren't bearing fruit yet don't need much, and this is all we ended up cutting this year from the 10 little trees in front of the house: On the left are branches from the peaches and nectarines; on the right are the very few apple branches we pruned this year. The only branches that we cut were ones that were crossed, a few water sprouts, and one or two on our biggest peach tree (the Reliance) that were ready to be headed back a bit. This summer will be the third season for most of the trees in our orchard, so we are hopeful about having some fruit this year. Here is a look at a few of our trees, post-pruning: Our big Reliance peach is probably the most likely to bear fruit this season, and the one that got most of...

After exploring Great Hopes Plantation , we continued on into Colonial Williamsburg proper to the Governor's Palace . After the tour of the inside of the building (which has been recently redecorated, by the way, to reflect what it would have been like with a family living there instead of just a bachelor governor), we went out to the grounds. In the South, colonial kitchens were housed in an outbuilding. Below you can see the (quite large) kitchen for the Palace: The brick kitchen buildings stand at the top of a terraced kitchen garden that extends quite a distance down the slope to a pond. It is hidden from passersby on the street by the brick wall. The Palace itself is behind what we see of the kitchen here. Not surprisingly, we see kale and collards in these beds, as well as some fruit trees on the ends that are going dormant (my guess was figs and peaches, but it's hard to tell when they are almost bare). This view of the kitchen is from the bottom of the...