Port Potager

Our enormous Gala apple tree had another great year, and we are once again buried in apples . The tree is so tall that we can’t pick them all — even with a ladder! That leaves us plenty of apples to turn into wintertime treats. This year, I decided to make some apple butter. This is a common Pennsylvania Dutch treat that’s basically super-concentrated applesauce. You just keep cooking it, so that the sugars caramelize and the whole thing turns into a thick, brown spread. It’s excellent on toast, and you can also use it in other desserts . Making it is an all-day affair, even with the help of the  Crockpot . To start, I made the world’s laziest  schnitz, which should be cored, sliced and peeled apples.  As you can see, all I did was cut the apples into quarters (they’re small) and toss them into the Crockpot. I like the color that the red skins give to the apples as they cook down, and it’s much easier just to run the whole pile through a food mill once ...

We’ve had a bumper crop of small but serviceable Gala apples this year, but this is not a variety that stores for very long. That means we have to make a whole lot of applesauce and find other ways to eat them up before they become a fruit fly infested mess. Enter the apple cake: Last weekend Kirk made this cake courtesy of his friend Tressa’s recipe, and it is delicious. It’s like a nice, dense pound cake with layers of lightly spiced apples throughout: The photo above is of my breakfast leftover portion, but the original was also served with some vanilla custard poured over the top. It’s the perfect fall treat!  Tressa’s Apple Cake Ingredients: 2 tsp. cinnamon 5 Tbsp. sugar 3 cups flour 1 3/4 cups sugar 3/4 cup vegetable oil 3 large eggs 2 1/2 tsp. vanilla 3 tsp. baking powder 1/2 cup orange juice 4-5 large apples, peeled, cored and sliced Directions: Stir together cinnamon and 5 Tbsp. sugar. Sprinkle mixture over sliced apples and ...

September is here, and there’s been a noticeable cooling and loss of daylight hours. We finally have tomatoes — about a month late — and our orchard decided to ripen all at once. That means I had to pick pears, peaches and apples in one feel swoop. That’s really strange, but it’s been kind of a weird growing season.  On the bright side, our Gala apple tree is having a best-ever bumper year: That’s just a portion of the apples I’ve picked so far. The tree is still covered: It’s also hard to tell in the photo — since everything around the tree is also green — but this is no longer a dwarf apple tree. I can only reach about halfway up, so we’re officially in standard territory. We’ll need to bring out a ladder to fully harvest these apples. We definitely planted  a dwarf tree, but over time it looks like the root graft ended up in contact with the soil. This can cause the grafted stock to take root and override the dwarf root stock, and I guess that’s wh...

Over April vacation (so about three weekends ago now) we finally planted our new apple trees . It was a fairly long day that required first removing several of the older fruit trees that were either dead, dying, or unproductive enough to have lost their place: The biggest tree we took out was the apricot, seen above in a state of partial completion. It's a shame that this tree never actually bore more than a handful of fruit , because it was well formed, but oh well.  Once the old trees were removed, we planted the new ones in new holes, creating some more space as we went. Here's the new Winesap in the ground: All of our new plantings are cocked ever-so-slightly into the prevailing winds, which should give them a little extra purchase and hopefully eliminate the need for staking .  Once all four new trees were planted, we were left with a rather pockmarked front lawn of bare patches where old trees (and straight-up dead patches of neglected grass) we...

I’ve been doing a lot of freelance writing lately, and one of the places I write for is Fast Growing Trees , an online nursery based in South Carolina. One perk is that they sent me a free tree, our new Winesap apple:  It’s huge — bigger than me, and much bigger than Jonas, as you can see. In the past, we’ve always gotten bare root sticks, so this tree is definitely the biggest we’ve ever gotten in the mail. It’s also packaged with its rootball intact (and in dirt), so it saved me the trouble of heeling it in .  We’re definitely  planting these trees this coming weekend. Now that the weather is supposed to be a little warmer, and we have a supply of compost from the city yard, and  we have all the trees, it’s time to break out the shovels and get these in the ground to complete the orchard renovation .  I’ll definitely be interested in seeing if the bigger tree fruits faster, or if it just means that there’s more of it to acclimate and ...

Our new fruit trees arrived really early this year (March 18, actually). Like anything else, they come in a box: The trees are cushioned in some bubble wrap and come packed with a bunch of damp, shredded paper around their roots. As long as that stays wet, you don’t have to plant the trees right away. Good thing, too, since it promptly snowed .  I get that the ground is technically warm enough to dig in and plant these trees, but because we got them so early from the over-zealous nursery shippers, the snow — combined with our still-partially-frozen compost pile — has made it nearly impossible to plant them in a timely manner.  They can’t stay in a box in the basement forever (if you want them to survive, anyway), so I decided to heel them in while we wait for better weather and a more convenient day to plant. All you do is dig a wide, shallow hole: And then you pop in the tree at an angle so it’s mostly lying down. That protects it from the cold and...

We've been talking about it on and off for several months now, but this week we finally committed to plans for revamping our orchard. Now that everything is bearing, we've been able to see which varieties are doing well and which leave something to be desired. But what really gave us a push in the direction of making some choices about our trees were the losses we sustained last season. Our stunted Granny Smith was completely buried by the blizzards of 2015 , and it was broken beyond saving. We also lost our best peach tree to insect damage , and the other peach and nectarine can't be far behind. Despite our efforts at sheltering it , two very harsh winters in a row kept our fig tree from ever taking off. And even though our apricot is a fine- looking  tree, we've eaten a grand total of one apricot in the past five years . So we decided to cut it down and try something else, even though the tree itself is healthy. It's no small thing to cut down a tree, whic...

You may recall that the epic Winter of 2015  brought with it a lot of damage to our plants , especially those in the perennial border and the orchard. Our small Granny Smith tree was hit particularly hard, since it was, for a time, completely buried in a full Gronk of snow : When the snow finally melted, its massive weight broke every branch on the little tree: We figured it was a total goner, but since it managed to both blossom and set fruit (!!!), we didn't remove it. The result? One perfect apple: This is the one and only Granny Smith apple harvested from that tree ever , and it was a great one: extra large, crisp, and juicy. It's a shame the tree isn't worth saving (we have some orchard redux in mind for next spring, actually), but it was nice to see it put out one prefect piece of fruit.

This weekend, as always, we had a lot of picking to do. Our harvest is spreading across several tables and counters now. From the orchard we have lots of apples and pears: And from the kitchen garden we have an assortment of other (technical) fruits, including tomatoes, bell peppers. cucumbers, zucchini, and eggplant: The past two years we made and canned a delicious peach and zucchini chutney at the height of summer to preserve those outsized harvests. It's one of my all-time favorite foods, and I love it with some cheese, crackers, and pickles for a winter lunch.  This year we will not have any, so when our last jars are gone, we'll be out of that particular chutney for a few years, until a new peach tree begins to bear .  So we went back to the drawing board to find a new chutney recipe with ingredients that we actually have. Mid-September tomatoes and apples? Check. The Ball Book has a tomato apple chutney recipe , as does River Cottage . ...

This is the best time of year in the garden, because just about everything is ripening at once. It makes from some excellent eating in August and September. To wit: The burger was great, but the salad? This might be the best salad ever. It's at least the best salad you could make with all seasonal produce in the waning days of summer.  To make it, you need a bed of young (and therefore less peppery) arugula and beet greens. Thinly slice a fennel bulb, a couple radishes, a small red onion, and a small apple (we used our last Summer Rambo , a variety that ripens in August on our heirloom 4-in-1 tree ). Drizzle with olive oil and garnish with fennel fronds.  That's all there is to it — no dressing required, really. It's so flavorful just the way it is, and it's crunchy, juicy, and awesome. We're looking forward to repeating it with other fall apples (I picked a Macoun today!), so this is likely to be on our plates until we run out of fennel.

Over the weekend we finally  were able to get out into the orchard to prune the fruit trees. This is typically a task that we take care of in February . Usually we can count on at least one not-horrible day to shape the trees up. This year, not so much. There was just so much snow that we couldn't even get to the trees.  We've finally had some melting, though, despite the fact that it has snowed every single weekend since the end of January. This time it was just a light flurry and a dusting on Saturday, but still: snowy weekend number ten . Despite the cold and pesty snow on Saturday, Sunday was warm enough for Fletch to enjoy surveying out work from the front porch: And the orchard even has bare ground in spots. Most is still in the snow, and it was enough that I had to wear boots, but at least it was passable:  Since the trees are no longer fully dormant and the buds are beginning to swell, we only did the lightest pruning possible. Pruning en...

September is the most beautiful month here in New England, and we had a stunning day today. In addition to puttering around the garden and taking care of some basic chores, we took time to climb up to the top of the Plum Island lighthouse . It's not always open to visitors, so we were happy to take advantage of this once-in-a-while view of the Merrimac making its way to the ocean: Not only does September offer the best weather of the year, but it is also the month during which our garden is at its absolute peak of production. We still have all the fruits of high summer (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant), but we also have available just about anything we want from the fall garden as well (sweet potatoes, pumpkins, cabbage, kale). From now until frost (usually mid-October for us), we can have our pick of almost everything we grow.  For example, tonight's supper is a combination of summer and fall produce on one plate: We had very summery charcoal-grilled burgers ...

That's "Happy New Year" in Pennsylvania Dutch , the fast-dying dialect spoken by the frugal Germanic oldsters where I grew up. The tradition, which I've written about before , is to ring in the new year with a big plate of pork and sauerkraut for good luck. Judging by my Facebook feed , I am not alone in maintaining the tradition! Here's what we ate last night: Das ist gut! If you could use a little luck to start 2014 off right, you can't go wrong with this dish!  On the plate: Sauerkraut (fermented and canned —  here's how ) Applesauce (also homemade and canned —  more how-to ) Smothered Pork Chops (Kirk uses an excellent recipe from America's Test Kitchen , but we also modify it with whatever herbs and veg we have on hand — I believe chopped apples and some mincemeat were added to the sauce this time around. One part you should never, ever change, though, is the crumbles of bacon for garnish.) Mashed potatoes (You don...

Choose just one favorite pie for Thanksgiving? Impossible!  We all love pumpkin and apple, so every year we make two pies — even on the years when it's just the four of us. Because really, you can't have too much pie. You just eat the leftovers for breakfast for the rest of the week. And dessert. And maybe lunch. Anyway, the pumpkin pie is made from fresh pumpkins, and you can find full recipe and pumpkin processing details here . The apple pie was adapted from a Martha Stewart recipe . I looked at a few to get a sense of ratios, and decided to season this apple pie (4 Granny Smith and 4 Gala apples) with the zest and juice of one clementine, ground cloves, allspice, and coriander, plus brown sugar and a pinch of cinnamon. I purposely went with a less traditionally flavored apple pie, to differentiate it from the pumpkin. I liked it, but I think I should have given a bigger warning that this was different from your regular cinnamon-clove-nutmeg classic apple ...

This is the first of an occasional series, in which the kids guest blog about kid stuff. Today's featured author is Tiegan Trach: Tiegan is an 11-year-old middle schooler who normally wears modern clothing. Here's her account of making Sunday dinner last night with her brother. America Runs On Butter The cookbook that we used was Meals of Many Lands . The country/place we made was America and the food we made was Oven-Fried Chicken, Candied Yams (actually sweet potatoes), Green Beans, and Apple Crisp. We waited until it was fall so we could have sweet potatoes from the garden.  To make the Oven-Fried Chicken, we cut the whole chicken into pieces, brushed melted butter on them, and shook a few pieces at a time in a bag that had crushed cornflakes in it. Then we baked them for an hour at 375 degrees. To make the Candied Yams, we mixed brown sugar and salt in a pan with melted butter. Then we put the sliced, peeled sweet potatoes in the pan in one layer. ...

I never thought I'd say it, but I think we may have planted too many tomatoes.  For the record, this year we planted 48 tomato plants. This is down from 55 last year, but it still may be a wee bit more than we need. Ok, ok. I know that sounds like an absolutely insane amount of tomatoes. But remember, we don't buy any vegetables at the store. That means that we're planting a year's worth of tomatoes when we start those seeds in the middle of winter.  Although we only can eat them fresh for about two months of the year, we can sauce , dry them , and make some dishes to freeze to get us through the other ten months of the year. It can be a little hard to judge how much of something you're going to eat over such a big span of time, but going into our second winter of the No Buying Veggies Challenge lets us use what we learned last year. For example, last year we canned 20 quarts of tomato sauce, plus a few extra quarts of whole tomatoes.  Turns out ...

Our young orchard has four apple trees in it, and each one has borne a bit of fruit this year. Our best apples for eating fresh are ready right now: The bright red ones to the right are Galas ; the purplish-red ones with green undertones are Macouns .  Both are delicious, with good texture and crunch. Galas strike me as sweeter, while Macouns are somewhat more tart, with an almost spicy tang to their skins (which of course must be eaten — who peels an apple for lunch?). I love, love, love them. We only had a half dozen Macouns this year, and it's a somewhat finicky apple to grow, so we might never have huge crops. It's still worth it, though — if you can find them anywhere this fall, snatch up a big basket and eat them up while you can! Our Gala tree, as you can see, is doing quite well this year. I suspect that many of our apples ripened kind of early (it's only mid-September, after all, and we've been picking them here and there since the end of ...

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!