It was 20 degrees this morning. About time, too: This has been a weirdly warm fall, with temperatures in the low 50s as recently as the past weekend. Not that I like shivering when I get up, mind you, but it seems appropriate to the season.
Yet while putting the yard to bed today DF harvested the last of the green and red leaf lettuce. Planted right next to the house, it escaped the freeze. We ate some of the leaves on our suppertime hamburgers.
“The last of the outdoor harvest,” he noted. “Eating lettuce from the yard on October 16…Most years you think you’re lucky to be eating it on September 16.”
As I said: weirdly warm. Yet I felt a pang even as I snapped the crisp lettuce ribs between my teeth. Delicious – and the last. We’ll be blessed if we eat fresh salad again in June.
We also enjoyed sliced tomatoes from the eight surviving plants now in the kitchen. The love-apple branches yearn toward such light as comes in the windows, and lean toward the therapeutic light box I flip on each morning to stave off seasonal mullygrubs. The cucumber plants, unfortunately, are long gone.
For the first time since mid-May greenhouse is empty, save for some seedpods that I really must retrieve before they burst and scatter their contents. They’re from a couple of varieties of Asian greens; we don’t know their names, as they’re survivors from a mixed seed packet planted the summer after I moved in. What we do know is that they’re prolific and hardy, and go well in salads.
They go in the boiling bag, too, and into the dehydrator; we dry several kinds of greens to go in soups and stroganoffs. Most recently the dehydrator has been stuffed with the leaves of home-grown celery, whose stalks had been chopped and frozen by a great-nephew and me. Two gallon-sized Ziploc bags full of the fragile, pungent foliage are now stored in the room where quinoa stalks, brown and sere, await the harvesting of their tiny, protein-rich seeds.
Getting ready for winter
In late summer a moose entered the yard to eat the sugar snap peas almost down to the ground, and to gnaw off all the beet tops. The peas would have lasted up until last week, probably, had not Alces alces decided to turn those particular raised beds into salad bars.
We hadn’t planned to harvest the beets for weeks, but after those haircuts we knew they wouldn’t have grown any more. The result was eight pints of pickled beets, a zingy side dish that tickles winter-dulled palates. They also make a great sandwich with sliced hard-boiled eggs on well-buttered and toasted multigrain bread.
DF’s older granddaughter was really bummed about the snap-pea massacre, as she loved picking and eating the sweet and crispy things. Rose’s little sister, who turned a year old in June, was right there behind her. She can’t talk yet, but the first time she tasted fresh peas she immediately made the baby-sign gesture for “More! More!”
Both DF and I enjoy showing them where food comes from: raised beds, trellises, raspberry thickets and the apple trees we put in last fall. They were visiting a couple of weeks ago when he decided to pull up the carrots. As you can see from the photo above they were a variety called Rainbow.
He took Rose outside to help. Thinking ahead, I’d brought up a couple of baskets from the basement as an incentive. Sure enough, the child was delighted to have a special purple basket (from a long-ago Easter) in which to store Earth’s bounty.
And sure enough, she didn’t stick with the project for very long. Her four-year-old attention span drifted shortly after the harvest began. After pulling up four or five carrots she suddenly became Little Red Riding Hood, basket on arm and tripping through an imaginary forest. Except that this Little Red was chowing down on a crimson carrot, its foot-long foliage still attached.
I overheard DF talking to her about gardening, putting food by and saving seed for the next year’s garden. “We’re always getting ready,” he said.
Getting ready, eating well
It isn’t clear whether this lesson pierced the fairy-tale veil, but I expect repetition will make a difference. As she and her sister grow up we’ll invite them over to disinter carrots, kick over potato buckets, and stuff themselves on raspberries and strawberries. They’ll see us planning, hoeing, watering and harvesting.
And preserving: DF and I turned that carrot harvest into 29 pints of goodness. Initially, the cut-up vegetables looked more like fruit salad:
Sadly, they didn’t hold their color. After processing, they mostly look…like carrots.
The white ones are a little paler and the red-purple ones have a tinge of crimson. Generally they’re pretty uniform, which didn’t stop Rose from kvelling over the pint jar that DF took to her house. She cradled it like a baby doll.
When her mom pointed out that these were cooked carrots, not raw ones, Rose didn’t care. “We’ll put them in soup and they’ll taste like soup,” she said.
Our own soups have been pretty rich for the past few months, given the bounty in the boiling bag: peapods (my niece gave me a portion of her crop), carrot tops, Asian and dandelion greens, squash blossoms, celery stems, lettuce ribs, apple cores and cucumber ends. The house has been redolent with soup stock, turkey pot pies (which included some early, pre-moose-attack peas), rhubarb-raspberry compote, new potatoes boiled and served simply with butter and salt, apple pies hot from the oven.
Now we’re getting ready for winter, when soups will be darker and earthier, their stocks made mostly of potato and sweet-potato peels, carrot tops and onion skins plus the water from cooking various vegetables. They’ll nourish nonetheless, along with the bread DF makes every week (speaking of wonderful fragrances).
We’ll think of summer every time we open a jar of Rainbow carrots, or crumble greens into a curry, or lay pickled beets atop sliced and salted hard-boiled eggs, or enjoy the eye-squinting tartness of frozen raspberries. To quote author Ray Bradbury, these foods are “summer caught and stoppered…the medicines of another time, the balm of sun and idle August afternoons.”
He was talking about “Dandelion Wine,” but the idea is the same. Our preserved vegetables and fruits represent long, mild days and pleasantly wearying labor. The harvest isn’t huge, but it’s from our own dirt. That means a lot.
And there’s always next year for better potato growing, new breeds of squash, careful thinning of apple blossoms, an entire extra bed of quinoa. We’re always thinking ahead. We’re always getting ready.
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That was a beautiful post, hopeful and thankful. Repetition will keep Rose interested so she can plant and harvest for you some day. It is cute the baby loved the harvest.
I think my “bag o’ scraps” in the freezer was influenced by you. I got about a quart of chicken stock from it. And I’m doing a crockpot of beef bone broth. No garden this year in South Korea, but I did have some nice basil plants and actually rooted an oregano plant from a plastic container of fresh herbs. It’s spindly, but I have high hopes. Only thing I’ve canned since being here has been apple butter. We couldn’t eat a bag of apples (I miss free apples) and apple butter reminds me of Autumn in New England when I was a kid. We’re moving in February, so there’s a chance of having some yard or at least a deck. Maybe next year we can grow something ourselves.
Funny — I was just thinking about apple butter yesterday. In Seattle I made it in a slow cooker, using a bonehead-simple recipe (only three or four ingredients) that I found online. I don’t want to use up our precious apples making it, but I remembered that you can actually make apple butter from commercial applesauce — just add the spices and sugar and cook it the same way.
Maybe if I get too hungry for the stuff I’ll get a can of applesauce from Costco and have at it. Bonus: The cooking takes eight hours and makes the house smell wonderful.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
Ooh, I want to try the “apple butter from applesauce” recipe. Those would make great teacher’s gifts.
I’m kicking myself for not writing down the super-simple recipe I used years ago. Can’t find it now, but this one looks pretty close:
http://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/applesauce-apple-butter-364975
And if you really want to make it a fancy gift? Package it with a small plastic bag or container of biscuit mix; this recipe uses powdered buttermilk, so all the recipient needs to do is add some ice water, roll, cut and bake.
https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/mom-s-buttermilk-biscuits.aspx
Biscuits with apple butter….mmmmmm…..
Thank you, Donna!
I love this, how well you highlight the connection among us, our food and the seasons, while still offering practical advice on how to cook, savor and preserve the harvest.
Thanks, fellow Jersey Girl.
I turned one of my “sunshine lights” on to check my e mail and was delighted to find your blog there.
This one tasted absolutely delicious. Thanks for the summertime memories. My girlfriend and I were saddened last year to discover there would no longer be a community garden as we have shady yards. I vicariously enjoyed yours.
Glad I could help. Maybe you could do container gardens?
Bahaha, I love your winter prep! I’m drooling over your cool temperatures. Here in Texas it’s still in the 80s, which is fall weather to us. 😉 Those carrots look gorgeous! I love that you’re preserving them so you can eat healthy year-round. I need to get better at preserving our garden haul this year; we just planted our seedlings for a fall/winter garden.
I’ll be in Dallas, Texas next week, for FinCon17. Today I bought a pair of grownup-looking sandals to wear, instead of my usual Teva knockoffs. The experience was like retail porn for women. Walked in and saw the sandals I’d actually visualized and hoped to find on the clearance rack — and they were the Naturalizer brand, providing real support as well good looks. After walking around the store for a couple of minutes to confirm that these were, indeed, the sandals of my dreams, I took them up front to pay — and found out that an additional 25 percent discount applied.
I almost needed a cigarette afterward.
A week and a half ago, here in Denver, we had to dash out and winterize everything pronto. It went from mid 70’s to 4 inches of snow in less than 24 hrs. Then the next 24 hrs brought on and even colder freeze. I harvested all of my green tomatoes and made salsa verde for the first time. It was pretty bitter, so I freezed it in quart bags for spicy soups and pasole. You and DF are so admirably resourceful, fun to see and read about. Thank you for the continual inspiration.
Thank you, for reading.
Last year we had some green tomatoes that were clearly not going to ripen in the house, so we sliced and dehydrated them. They look like little wagon wheels, and are incredibly sweet. (Why wouldn’t they be? We’ve taken out all the water!) We throw them into soups as much for the interest as the nutrition.
Thanks for mentioning this! We just had our first frost on Monday night here in Syracuse, NY, and I brought in a few green tomatoes. Maybe I’ll try dehydrating them, since I’m not in the mood to fry them.
Loved this post…it went from 80* this past Sunday to frost on Monday night. After a weirdly HOT September, it’s finally starting to feel like fall. We’ll be shoveling soon.
Beautifully written. I enjoy when someone writes with such simple eloquence. Thank you. for the vicarious visit to your home.
Why, thank you.
We had to put up tall fencing to keep the deer out of our vegetable gardens. We were surprised & pleased that they didn’t jump over it. A bonus of the fencing is it has kept the rabbits out, too. 🙂 More fresh vegetables for us! BTW, I’m impressed with your ability to can, and in such large quantities.
Well, I did only half the canning: DF and I make a good team. He’s also better with the pressure canner than I am, although I’m getting over my (unfounded) fears that it will blow up.
Moose are amazing jumpers; to keep them out we’d need a 10-foot fence, which would just feel wrong. Next summer he’s going to put up a temporary barrier to deter them; there’s so much to eat at that time of year that they take the path of least resistance, i.e., the easiest food they can find and if they have to work to jump a fence they’ll just mosey along. We hope.
The carrots are beautiful and look very delicious. I never tried pickled beets with hardboiled egg on a sandwich, but I make redbeet eggs. I will have to try it. Funny that I never thought of that! Our used to be garden is now way too shady because of the trees on my cousin’s lot. Won’t let me cut them down, yet he lives in another town. They are all wild that came up on their own overy the years. Every now and then I stick something in front of my house in the flower bed, but that is so rocky that carrots always seem to come up crooked and weird looking.
The sandwiches are really, really good: The sharpness of the pickle mixed with the bland yet nourishing flavor of the egg. Although I will say that to some extent, beets always taste a little bit like dirt to me. I’ve learned to embrace that earthiness.
Multigrain bread with real butter, if possible. It enhances the frisson.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
Yummy! I’ve never heard of rainbow carrots before this, so pretty.
nummmmmmm
I always love your posts about life in Alaska, Donna. This one is just beautiful!
Thank you. I appreciate it. (And feel free to share the URL.)
This post made me feel all warm and cozy….and craving a tomato sandwich.
What a lovely post! For the first time in over 60 years (we are in our 80’s) DH and I did not have a garden. Next year I at least will manage to grow some beets – pickling store bought canned beets is NOT the same! Thanks for the memories.
Thanks! And while I’ve heard of people doing a quick pickle on canned beets, as a side dish, I expect it really isn’t the same.
Hope you get your beets and maybe a tomato plant or two.
Oh, now I’m longing for a gaarden in the spring! Or at least a few straw bales or containers, since most of our yard isn’t suitable for planting.
This year, we subscribed to a local CSA program and shopped at the farmer’s market. I mentally declared it the Year of the Vegetable, where we tried new veggies, new varieties and new techniques and generally tried to up the amount of produce in our diets. It’s been a mixed success, but a positive trend. Next year, I think, is the Year of the Grains. 😉
I am still getting tomatoes and lettuce from my garden in NY. I have been covering at night and uncovering in the late morning to help them finish growing. I have about 10 tomatoes that are that yellow/orange color and I am hoping that they will have enough time to turn before having to become window tomatoes. Tonight will be garden salad along with a bowl of chili…only in crazy NY weather.
I have never seen carrots with so many colors…they look yummy!
They are delicious. Carrots do well up here because there’s a ton of light but no real heat, which makes for sweet roots.
Still wish the colors held during processing, though. What a beautiful soup or side dish they would make.