Port Potager

During the winter (thanks to our No Buying Veggies Challenge ), the variety of available food is way  down. We are out of onions and sweet potatoes, and our greens are buried under several feet of snow. We still have a bunch of fresh pumpkins and butternut, potatoes, and leeks, plus frozen green beans, okra, and sundried tomatoes. That's just about it, except for various herbs and some dried peppers to spice things up.  So ... what to do? You can only eat roasted vegetables so many times before you get a little tired of them, not matter how tasty they are. Luckily for us. Kirk came up with some creative dishes this week to breathe some new life into our winter staples. Spicy Pumpkin Bisque 1 small pumpkin (the baking kind)  1 head of garlic, broken into cloves  1 Tbs. olive oil 1 cup heavy cream 2 Tbs. Peanut butter 1 small leek Salt, pepper, cayenne, and ground chipotle to taste 1. Cut the pumpkin in half, scoop out the seeds, and s...

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 ...

Despite the cool temperatures throughout most of August, we have red bell peppers! The long ones are "Valencia" and the more square ones (near the top of the photo) are "Ace," a variety we chose specifically because it will ripen to from green to red in a shorter growing season (which is what we have here in Massachusetts). It's exciting that so many of our Valencia peppers have gone red as well! There are still plenty of green ones outside, so we should be in a good way with both red and green bell peppers from now until frost. Last year we brought in a ton of peppers before the first frost, and they kept for several weeks on the counter — and even ripened to red while they sat. If we have that kind of luck again, we should have fresh peppers to eat through November. Still, it would be really nice to have peppers in the winter, so we decided to roast these red ones so we could freeze them. Since we had burgers on the grill on Sunday, we thoug...

I know, I know. How can I be thinking about frost on a day, during a week like this ? It's so hot that the ice rink down the street can barely keep it together for skating classes. Still, our average first frost date is October 15, and that's just 90 days from today. That all seems very far away until you start reading the backs of seed packets. When some of your cabbages take 90 days to mature, and your broccoli is looking at 75 days, it's time to get fall planting plans underway. If you care about eating once it gets cold and dark, that is. Our peas have just finished for the season, and over the weekend we pulled out the trellises to make room for some fall crops. Ditto on the garlic, which is harvested and curing in the workshop. That leaves us space to get cracking on our fall plantings, most of which I sowed over the past couple of days: I realize that empty dirt isn't all that exciting to look at, but that's where the action is. In ...

The grape trellis is finally finished, and the vines have been trained and pruned. Things are finally taking shape: We're training the vines in a pretty classic style to have a central leader with arms trailing out along the trellis on either side (known as a 6-arm kniffin). You can see here that this vine only just reaches to the top of the second rung this year, but in the future it should have three arms on each side fanning out from the center. (You can also see that we attached a new rain gauge to one of the posts — it has gotten a workout recently!) The posts of the trellis are 4x4 pressure treated (sorry, but cedar was like five times as expensive, and we like to pay the mortgage regularly) posts. They are 8-foot posts, three feet of which are sunk into the ground. Kirk dug a 40 inch hole and backfilled it with six inches of stone for a base, leaving five foot posts. Then he repeated that step eleven more times. That’s lots of digging, and I didn't hel...

Yesterday I walked through the garden and realized that we have more to harvest now than just salad greens and rhubarb. Those things are great and all, but look what I found: Chamomile flowers are ready be picked. These should last all summer long, and eventually I should have another nice, big jar of them to use for tea and some cosmetic purposes. Our first few strawberries are just another sunny day away from being ready to eat. This one is a little pink on the bottom, and still a little too firm — but we're close to having fruit! I am most excited of all that some of our peas are ready. The ones here in the photo are a couple days away from being ready to pick — the pods are are still flat on one end. I was able to pick a bowl full of fully ripe pea pods, though, which I shelled. They made a nice, surprise addition to dinner: Kirk made a curry with Swiss chard, chicken, and the peas. There is also cilantro on top — another herb that's big en...

Now that the ground has softened up, we can get to our parsnips again: They are still alive and perfectly well under the straw mulch. After frost and freezing, they are much sweeter, so if you can wait — and don't mind working in the cold and chipping through some semi-frozen ground at times — it's worth it. Fall crops like kale, arugula, turnips, and parsnips create a lot of sugar when the temperatures drop because sugars keeps the plants from freezing — and therefore from dying. Think of how juice just gets slushy when you put it in the freezer, and you have an idea of how this works as a natural protection. All of that extra sugar makes these crops worth waiting for, especially if you protect them further in a cold frame, tunnel, or under mulch. Nothing from a store tastes like these: If you've never had one, parsnips taste kind of like a cross between a sweet potato (ours do anyway — that's how sweet they've gotten), but with the texture and aro...

Yesterday was Faschnaut Day. What's that you say? You've never heard of this, and aren't sure how to even pronounce such a thing? Not from Eastern Pennsylvania, are you? You can hit up  Wikipedia  for a basic definition if you want, but basically faschnauts are the way the Pennsylvania Dutch do Shrove Tuesday. Faschnaut Day is always the day before Ash Wednesday, and was a traditional way to get rid of all the good stuff you're not allowed to eat during Lent: lard, fat, yeast, sugar, eggs, etc. I'm pretty sure the ones I had as a kid were made with potatoes and deep fried in lard, probably from a church basement somewhere. The bullshit free doughnut from Krispy Kreme  isn't even close. And don't get me wrong, I love my Hot Now too — all the more since we don't have a Krispy Kreme up here in Massachusetts. But it's not a faschnaut. So we made our own. Now with the No Buying Veggies Challenge, we had to forego making them with potatoes, b...

Bad news: We're almost out of sweet potatoes. We had a great, big harvest  and ate a whole lot of them over the past several months. We have one big one left for a curry this week, but the rest got mushy in storage. The ones we lost were all ones that were small and more like sweet potato strings than actual potatoes, so it wasn't that terrible of a loss. Still, it gave us pause. We are out of all types of potatoes and onions now, and the last of the cabbage is dwindling in the fridge. We were starting to worry about our No Buying Veggies Challenge as we head through the lean months of February and March.  Then this happened: Homemade noodles (thanks, pasta maker!) with peas (from the freezer), carrots, leeks, and cabbage (from the winter garden) sauteed in sesame oil and some soy sauce. It was so, so good. And fresh and green! And orange.  This made us feel much better about our No Buying Veggies Challenge, at least for now. We still have some e...

Last weekend we made an upgrade to our seed starting system.  Last year , we had all of our seed flats on top of our window seat benches, but this wasn't exactly ideal when the kids wanted to get to their toys inside. So we decided to build some shelves in the windows of our four-season porch. The challenge was that we wanted them to be removable, since we only need them for three to four months of the year. Here's what we came up with:  We got regular shelf brackets to screw into the (wide and sturdy) window frames. Instead of using the hardware that came with the brackets, we got some brass threaded inserts and new machine screws of the same size. The idea is that with the threaded inserts permanently in the window frames, we'll be able to screw and unscrew the brackets as often as we like without stripping out the wood. The shelf brackets also happened to come with plastic covers, which you can see above. They hide the hardware, and also are a bit soft...

Happy Thanksgiving! My observation of this, my favorite holiday of the year, began yesterday afternoon, when I began preparing our pie pumpkins:  Our squash harvest this year was kind of small: just these 3 pumpkins, and no butternut squash. I think we'll eventually feel that dearth over the winter as we run out vegetables to make it through our "no buying veggies” challenge: These guys store really well, without doing really anything to them at all. The processing only happens when you want to use it. Here's how: Cut off the top with the stem, then put that newly flat end down (for stability) and the pumpkin in half.  Use a spoon to scoop out the guts and seeds. Set those aside--we don't waste things around here! Scrape out any strings and admire the beautiful yellow flesh of the pumpkins. Put the pumpkin halves face down in a baking pan or casserole dish. Or both. Just make sure it's a dish with sides, to hold in the juices. Having ...

So when work gets boring, or difficult, or long, or soul-sucking, we start to talk about quitting everything and starting a farm. This often happens in the winter, when the memories of summer gardening are rosy, and the time spent indoors in the darkness of the short days feels endless. When we moved in late 2009 we looked at some places with much bigger lots, and considered a small farm, but in the end a nice neighborhood in walking distance to schools and a lovely downtown won out. We did end up with half an acre, which is far more land than most lots in Newburyport, and we've filled it almost to its farthest edges with orchard , garden , and chickens . We've managed to keep up our end of the "no buying veggies" challenge for about six months now, and haven't bought eggs for the last two months. With any luck in the berry beds and orchard next year, we could scratch all fruit (save citrus and avocados, which we really would be sad to do without) from the sho...

Among all the Romas we picked over the weekend were also some of the heirloom vining variety we planted this year. These are Rose tomatoes, a variety originally raised by the Amish: The two giant tomatoes are Rose. They weigh about a pound apiece! The Roma that I put next to them for scale is a totally average one — Rose tomatoes are huge! It's hard to tell in this photo, but they are more pink-red than the traditional orangey-red of most tomatoes. This is especially noticeable before they are fully ripe, as they turn from green to pink before they redden up.  They are also a vibrant pink-red when you cut them open:  As you can see, this tomato is almost all meat. This isn't even the best photo of that — there are lots of of times when we cut into it and see no seeds at all.  These tomatoes are delicious! They are less acidic (based on the fact they they don't sting my hands when I cut up a bunch), and sweet, and good. The only drawback is that they...

I've written about the process of freezing peas before, but it's worth a look back to compare the volume of peas from last fall to the amount we have now. Our pea vines got off to a very slow start this spring, and even though they still aren't all that tall, all of their energy seems to be going into pods. Last night we went out and picked a giant basket and shelled them (which took two adults and one child about an hour to do). Today I blanched and froze them. A small refinement to our process: instead of just dumping the peas directly into the bag, we added the step of freezing them on a cookie sheet. This helps keep them separated instead of freezing into one big ball. You do have to use a spatula to pry them off the cookie sheet, but it's worth the extra iota of effort. Here's a day's worth of harvesting this time around: Now that's from 54 row feet of peas, which is a lot more than the 13 we had last fall, but even so, the plants are al...