Entry tags:
garden round-up
It's strange, how quickly my ideas about gardening seasons have shifted, just by adding the cold frame last winter. Now I expect that there will be salad greens ready for picking in a month or two, which I hope will be available through the winter and early spring again. And then we could be eating the scorzonera and salsify (two old-timey root crops) in May that are just poking up now.
For now, there's chard, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, broccoli & romanesco, and raspberries still going, plus a bin of potatoes and basket of garlic dug up and cured. And the food we preserved? There are still beets to pickle, but apart from that, here's the tally, from our garden:
3 pints of pickled beans
3 cups dehydrated tomatoes
1 pint dehydrated husk cherries (believe me, this represents a huge amount of work)
3.5 quarts of roasted tomato sauce
1 quart of pesto
1 quart tomato-beet sauce
2 quarts green tomato & husk cherry chutney
And from local produce:
9 quarts of peaches
10 quarts of applesauce
1.5 pints sauteed mushrooms
4 baking-sheet sized rolls of fruit leather from foraged "autumn olive" berries
Oh, and almost 100 pounds of grain from our grain share: wheat, barley, rye, oats, spelt, and popping corn, with milling corn and several varieties of beans to be delivered when fully dried. So far, the grain share has its ups and downs: we had a lovely trip out to Belchertown, talked with the farmers about this first-year CSA attempt, got a personalized hayride, fed calves and a tsunami of 5-week-old chicks by hand (o god the tickle!), went foraging. But, this being their first year, there have been glitches, like about 12% of the oats not relinquishing their hulls and having to be picked out by hand. And of course, it'll be a big adjustment, storing and using these grains when I haven't previously cooked with anything like this much. But I'm excited, for increased nutritional value and hopefully flavor, for eating locally and seasonally, for exploring another avenue of playing with food.
For people who like numbers, here are a few from this season:
- 8 pounds of peas
- 17 pounds of beans - the plants produced for about 4 months
- one day, I picked 12 ounces of husk cherries, over a pound of beans, and 12 pounds of tomatoes, of which over 5 pounds were the little plum Juliets
- another day, 6 pounds of cucumbers, of which 4 1/2 of them were lemon cukes
So I'm feeling a goal shaping up for this winter. I want to eat at least one thing every day, and ideally every meal, that we preserved, that we obtained locally, or that comes from our garden. Half the time I have a little mental tally going anyway, so it shouldn't be that difficult to notice...
For now, there's chard, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, broccoli & romanesco, and raspberries still going, plus a bin of potatoes and basket of garlic dug up and cured. And the food we preserved? There are still beets to pickle, but apart from that, here's the tally, from our garden:
3 pints of pickled beans
3 cups dehydrated tomatoes
1 pint dehydrated husk cherries (believe me, this represents a huge amount of work)
3.5 quarts of roasted tomato sauce
1 quart of pesto
1 quart tomato-beet sauce
2 quarts green tomato & husk cherry chutney
And from local produce:
9 quarts of peaches
10 quarts of applesauce
1.5 pints sauteed mushrooms
4 baking-sheet sized rolls of fruit leather from foraged "autumn olive" berries
Oh, and almost 100 pounds of grain from our grain share: wheat, barley, rye, oats, spelt, and popping corn, with milling corn and several varieties of beans to be delivered when fully dried. So far, the grain share has its ups and downs: we had a lovely trip out to Belchertown, talked with the farmers about this first-year CSA attempt, got a personalized hayride, fed calves and a tsunami of 5-week-old chicks by hand (o god the tickle!), went foraging. But, this being their first year, there have been glitches, like about 12% of the oats not relinquishing their hulls and having to be picked out by hand. And of course, it'll be a big adjustment, storing and using these grains when I haven't previously cooked with anything like this much. But I'm excited, for increased nutritional value and hopefully flavor, for eating locally and seasonally, for exploring another avenue of playing with food.
For people who like numbers, here are a few from this season:
- 8 pounds of peas
- 17 pounds of beans - the plants produced for about 4 months
- one day, I picked 12 ounces of husk cherries, over a pound of beans, and 12 pounds of tomatoes, of which over 5 pounds were the little plum Juliets
- another day, 6 pounds of cucumbers, of which 4 1/2 of them were lemon cukes
So I'm feeling a goal shaping up for this winter. I want to eat at least one thing every day, and ideally every meal, that we preserved, that we obtained locally, or that comes from our garden. Half the time I have a little mental tally going anyway, so it shouldn't be that difficult to notice...