Port Potager

Our main raspberry harvest is just about over for the summer (though we should get a second flush of our everbearing variety in another month or so), but two weeks ago we were still completely inundated with them . We have gallons of raspberries sitting in the freezer, but I also found another great way to process a bunch of them: raspberry syrup, which is then added to one of the prettiest drinks around: It’s really easy to make. Just bring a cup of water and a cup of sugar to boil, then add 2 cups of fresh raspberries.  Bring the mixture back to a boil briefly and then take it off the heat. Let it steep for at least 30 minutes before straining into a pint jar: The straining process is pretty slow, but it keeps (most) of the seeds out. Raspberries are so delicate that they break down into a nice, thick goop pretty easily. Once the syrup has cooled, it’s ready to use for mixing some drinks! To make that easier, I highly recommend a flip-top spout lid...

Berry season is upon us! This is, as they say, just the tip of the iceberg. Over the past week we have easily picked 2 gallons of raspberries, and they just keep coming. For reference, those are ceramic pint containers in the photo. So 16 of those. Jonas has been eating about a pint of raspberries a day, and we still have too many. It’s not just quantity, either. These are the biggest, sweetest raspberries we’ve ever had. Kirk compares it to 2014, but I’ll have to take his word for it since the kids and I were in Costa Rica and missed all of the raspberries that year. The key seems to be a wet spring followed by lots of sunshine and no drought. Not that we can control that, but we’ll certainly take it when we can get it! These conditions create a raspberry jungle, though: Walking in that path will get you scratched even if you’re careful, so picking raspberries is not for the faint of heart. It takes a good two and half hours to get them all because there are so m...

 We have a little war going on in one of our garden beds: This is the blueberry bed, but all those green, healthy-looking plants are not  blueberries. They are raspberries, and they are taking over: Here you can see a sad, yellowish blueberry that’s been completely overrun by vigorous green raspberry canes. These canes have jumped — or rather, burrowed — from their bed under the grass path and into the blueberry bed.  And they’ve already managed to kill one blueberry bush entirely: We’ve struggled with blueberries ever since we planted them, and last year we replaced several . That was the year of the drought , though, and they haven’t done well: Though this one managed to put on some decent growth, you can see from the color that it’s not doing well. I suspect that we’ve never been able to get the soil acidic enough for them to thrive, and the discolored leaves are a sign that they are not getting the nutrients they need because the...

If you’ve noticed I haven’t written at all this month, I apologize. And if you didn’t  notice, well, I can only assume that you were as consumed with current events as we have been. It has been an incredibly long — and, to our minds, disorienting and sad — week. None of that has been made any easier by the fact that we are still without heat. I mentioned it in passing in my previous post , and our furnace is still broken. This is no fun at all.  So far we have managed to muddle through with space heaters borrowed from generous friends, and the house hasn’t dipped below 50 degrees inside — yet. We are still anxiously waiting for National Grid to send a crew to put in a gas line so we can switch from oil to natural gas. This will all be incredibly expensive, though we do live in a state with an excellent rebate program for energy-saving upgrades. But if we have to replace a furnace, we figured we should at least get a better fuel choice in the bargain. In th...

We often don’t have a killing frost here the first couple times it’s predicted, protected as we are by the ocean, which acts as a big heat source and keeps our temperatures slightly warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. In the game of protecting tender plants, those few degrees in either direction are crucial. This year, though, there was no flirting with 33 degree nights. The temperature dropped right down to 30 last night, and that did in the last of the summer fruits. We prepared to protect our leafy greens , and yesterday I also went through the garden to pick anything that looked big enough to be worth saving:  As a general rule of thumb, fruits will not survive a frost, but root vegetables will be just fine until a hard freeze, thanks to the insulating power of the earth. Leafy vegetables are a toss up: Basil gave up long ago and green beans are out, but arugula, cabbage, and kale are fine. Broccoli is also usually pretty tough, but we were planning on ...

Though we still haven't reaped many blueberries from our new stock , the raspberries this year are awesome. We even have black raspberries for the first time, since this spring we remembered to prune them properly. Black raspberries grow differently than red ones: The canes are more silvery, and when they arch over and touch the ground, they'll set new roots and form a brambly hedge. If you prune them back, they'll send out more side branches instead. We'll get to this one after the fruiting is done.  Black raspberries also spend a good portion of their lives looking an awful lot like red raspberries:   If you aren't paying attention and think that those pretty red berries are ready to eat, you will be disappointed in a particularly face-puckering way. Unripe black raspberries are almost inedibly sour. If you are  paying attention, though, you notice that black raspberries grow together in upward facing clusters, and this bit of knowledge will...

November always strikes me as the end of something. The World Series is over and baseball is done for the year, despite my best efforts to hang on to summer. Halloween and its accompanying burst of creativity is past. Daylight Saving Time has finally ended, thrusting us headlong into the dark days. Temperatures have dipped below freezing, ending the active growing season and leaving us casting about for something to do in the garden besides peeking under the tunnels and raking up leaves. Although we haven't technically had a frost, we did have some snow yesterday, so our remaining summer fruits are dead and gone. This was our last harvest basket: Tonight we ate the very last fresh tomato (in salsa form). There are no more cucumbers, and the supply of peppers and jalapeños is dwindling. We still have some eggplant, but Saturday's eggplant parm luncheon had some bitter bites, and we had so much of it this year that I think we might just compost the last few on the c...

Although most of our garden is devoted to growing annual vegetables, we do have several beds set aside for some perennials that come back every year. It's nice to have some (mostly) worry-free crops that just do their thing without much attention: Just add a compost top-dressing in the spring and enjoy the bounty. Here's how our perennial fruits and veggies are faring this year.  Our strawberry patch is three quarters of the way planted. The Tribute strawberries in the foreground were our first plants, and they are now in their third season. The lush patch in the middle are last year's Honeoye planting, and the dark compost section in the background marks our newly planted Seascape strawberries.  I have to say, I'm not that impressed with the Tribute strawberries. Their flavor can be kind of tart for straight eating, and the plants have not bounced back from this winter very well. In another couple years it will be time to replace them, and we will probabl...

Now that we've seen our third and second place cocktails, it's time to reveal the winer of the 2013 Iron Bartender Contest! (Drumroll…) The winning drink managed to make our iffy, homemade dandelion wine taste splendid. Not too sweet, not too tart, it's a fruity masterpiece, and won our contest by the judges' nearly unanimous assent. Without further ado: Ubarri Uberry Sangria Presented by Chrisann and Carlos Ubarri For the sangria base: 1/2 cup raspberries 1/2 cup blackberries 1/2 cup strawberries 1 lemon, thinly sliced 1 cup limoncello For the drinks: 1 oz. sangria base 1 oz. limoncello 1 oz. dandelion wine (chilled) 1 oz. Prosecco (chilled) 1. Prepare the sangria base ahead of time by adding fruit to a pitcher. Then add enough limoncello to cover, approximately 1 cup.  2. Chill the sangria base for at least three hours before serving. 3. To mix the drink, use the proportions of sangria base, limoncello, da...

Ahem. It was brought to my attention by one of our mixologists that I messed up the reveal of our drink winners. In my last post on the subject , I mistakenly wrote that the Drink of the Lion Fairy and The Rosemaryclaire were third place drinks.  Wrong!  These were, and deservedly so, our second place drinks. I made the correction as fast as I could, but if you are quick to click, you probably read my mistake. Oops and sorry.  So today, we'll look at the actual third place cocktails. Again, we had a tie for both third and second place, so there are two more great recipes to share. The Raspberry Beret Presented by Meredith Moore 1/2 cup raspberries, crushed 1 cup sugar 1 cup water 3 blood oranges, freshly squeezed 1/2 cup dandelion wine 1. First, make a raspberry simple syrup by combining raspberries, sugar, and water in a saucepan and heating on low until the sugar is dissolved, stirring as necessary. Allow to cool, then strain syru...

Summer raspberries are on their way out (although as half of ours are fall-bearing, we should have another round in September). But look what else we have:  Yup, it's a blueberry. It's one of only a handful we'll get this year. And here's where they came from: That tangled mess is on the side of our driveway that we ignore. Mixed up in a lot of weeds and property-line plantings are a scraggly blueberry and black raspberry . And it's bearing fruit, despite abject neglect: The cruel irony is that the blueberries that we spent money on and actually take care of in hopes of producing fruit look like this: What's that you say? You can't see any blueberry bushes? Well the two to the left of this bed are pretty much leafless, dead sticks. The one to the right has like ten leaves on two spindly branches. The other three are in slightly better shape. Here's the sturdiest of the bunch: It measures about 18 whole inches hi...

I can tell it's finally summer when, for lunch, I can just go outside and pick a handful of this and a handful of that. Today I ate cherry tomatoes and snap peas off their vines, without bothering to get a bowl. Then, when I did reach for a bowl, I brought these inside:  Our raspberries are just starting to ripen, and it turns out we also have some wild (or at least neglected) blackberries growing on the brambly, weedy side of our driveway. The kids were suddenly upset/jealous when I informed them that the picker of fruit gets first dibs on the eating of said fruit. Also, our first planting of green beans are ready for picking. These I promptly blanched and turned into green bean and feta salad , which is of course the only thing worthy way to prepare the first beans of summer. ¡Viva el verano!

Yesterday we planned to plant our newly arrived blueberry bushes in the beds we had prepared for them last fall . To our surprise, when we opened the package it wasn't just blueberries, but all of the small fruits we had ordered from Miller Nurseries . This turned our relaxing, light day in the garden into a pretty busy one — and a windy one at that. The weather the past three nights has dipped to just above freezing (so we continue to water and cover plants each evening just in case — a total pain), and during the day it has been sunny but incredibly windy. Not that much fun to be out in, but we had a lot to get into the ground. Before the planting even happened, though, Kirk replaced our broken fence sections . Those had been down for a year and a half, and we finally have managed to be good neighbors and get them fixed. They look all nice and new now (which looks a little strange in comparison to the old sections surrounding it), but it should weather into the same sil...

Today, after a month or so hiatus from gardening, we broke out all of our graph paper, catalogues, and reference books to begin planning for the 2012 garden:  We already had four giant (1 square = 6 inches of planting area) graphs drawn out and ready to go from last summer — one graph for each quadrant of the garden. That was pretty overwhelming, so we started with the easiest thing: planning the berry beds that are off to the side. Back in October we built them, filled them with dirt, and added sulfur to acidify the beds that will be for blueberries and cranberries. This is what they look like today, in their finished state: To the left is the raspberry bed. Down the center of this 22-foot long bed will be 8 plantings of raspberries: three  Latham (a red, midsummer raspberry), three  Fall Red (an everbearer from UNH that will produce in summer and again throughout the fall), one  Allen (a black raspberry), and one  Bristol (another black r...