Harvest home.

For the past few weeks DF has been practicing the music for an ecumenical service that will take place near Thanksgiving. The song that sticks in my head most is “Harvest Home,” an 1844 hymn*. This quatrain in particular applies:

Come, ye thankful people, come

Raise the song of harvest home;

All is safely gathered in,

Ere the winter storms begin.

No storms yet, but it was 29 degrees when I got up the other day. We are thankful that all is safely gathered in.

It was a somewhat dismal summer for the second year in a row, and gardens were more than a month late in ripening. Some things didn’t produce well, or at all; for example, a local tree expert posted on Facebook that he didn’t get a single cherry from his five trees.

We didn’t get that many cherries ourselves: 28, to be exact. Then again, this is only the second year the tree’s been in the ground. Popular fruit-tree wisdom holds that “the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps and the third year it leaps.” However, I can’t hope for too much in 2025 because a moose got into the yard last week. It harried all three of our fruit trees before DF could scare it off the property by banging a hammer on a shovel.

This isn’t the moose that got into the yard, but I bet he knows the one who did.

Fortunately, we’d already harvested the apples the previous week. Moose can be real jerks.

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Strawberries are in season.

Let me be clear: In no universe would I mix tomato paste with strawberries. I’m simply using the can to illustrate the size of some of this year’s fruit. Aren’t they lovely?

How I wish blogs could share aromas, because our house smells marvelous right now. We are eating all the strawberries we want – and we want a lot of them – yet still have leftovers. The question was, “How can we preserve them without freezing it or turning it into jam?” The answer was, “Dehydrate them.”

Thus far we’ve dried a quart of these little beauties (see below), which means we sliced and dried about four quarts. That sounds onerous, but it really wasn’t. DF and I sit across from each other at the table, slicing and chatting, until the dehydrator is full or until we run out of berries, whichever comes first. Some people sit around watching TV or playing board games. We slice berries.

Why do this? Because we want every berry to have had a reason to ripen. I have never tasted berries like these before, either in New Jersey (where we picked them ourselves) or from Seattle farm markets. They’re as sweet and tender as the memory of first love and, as DF’s younger son marveled, “They’re red all the way through!

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The winter tomato.

DF tried to winter over a trio of tomato plants last fall. He pruned them back severely and put them under a grow light in the basement, figuring the cool temperature would keep them from sprouting too much new growth.

The no-grow tactic worked a little too well. by winter solstice, one of the plants looked extremely sad and the others were bordering on despair. So he brought the best-looking one upstairs, along with the light, and set it next to our kitchen table.

The plan was to coax it back to life, not to create food just yet. That way he’d have a nice big plant to put in the greenhouse in late May to encourage the seedlings he’ll be starting this week. Meanwhile, the green encouraged us during this particularly snowy and cold winter.

When the plant showed signs of survival, we rejoiced; when it started putting out flowers, we laughed and pinched them off. No chance we were going to pollinate those blooms. The focus was surviving, not thriving. And survive it has, putting out loads of new growth and so many blossoms that we gave up pinching. It could bloom all it wanted, but we weren’t going to hand-pollinate any of them.

A week or so ago during dinner, DF did a double-take. “There’s a tomato,” he said.

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Pain ’n’ torture.

Still at a loss for Big Idea pieces, so I thought I’d just catch you up with how life is going lately. (Hints: Non-summer, pain ’n’ torture.)

Spring never did show up, and summer has been noticeably absent as well. We’ve had only a few days of true sun since mid-June. That’s frustrating, because spring and summer are what keep us going through the darkness and the crummy weather the rest of the year. After last year’s snowier-than-usual winter, I’d so looked forward to those endless summer days. Dang.

The lack of sun means a lack of heat. The garden is doing better than we could expect, but not nearly as well as last year. (Then again, last summer was a drought.) At the end of June 2022, we were eating strawberries and cucumbers. I wish. Meanwhile, the potatoes think they’re in Ireland and are exploding with growth. The peas and carrots, however, are complete laggards. I am very disappointed.

The strawberry plants are awash with blossoms, but only two berries have ripened – and they’d turned moldy by that time due to the frequent rains. That was disappointing, but we hold out hope for the rest of the blooms. It can’t rain forever, right? Right???

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The spring that wasn’t. (And the cake that was.)

The winter of 2022-23 was colder and snowier than usual. DF didn’t mind the snowy part, since up to five days a week he used a senior-discount weekday pass at Alyeska Resort. Since I’m not into downhill skiing (or cross-country, for that matter), I declined to accompany him but was glad he was having such a good time.

I did not have a good time this winter. It was hard to stay positive through gloomy day after gloomy day, and super-easy to berate myself about that: You have a partner who tells you daily how much he loves you, and wonderful family and friends. To say nothing of a comfortable home, good food and a flex-schedule job you can do in your PJs. Why do you let the bad outweigh the good?

My mood has improved, because I finally was able to look deeply at what was really bothering me. Turns out it wasn’t just lack of daylight, but a combination of several other factors. Having been in therapy before, I was finally able to isolate those issues and look plainly at them. But this is an ongoing process, i.e., some days it was easier to eat my feelings than examine them. Which of course led to weight gain and additional dismay and also exacerbated a physical condition, which led to even more dismay/discomfort.

(Physical condition has been diagnosed. Won’t bore you with the details except to say that it is not life-threatening but will require physical therapy. On the bright side, that gives me something to blog about later on.)

But I knew none of this stuff mattered because spring was on the way! May and June are my favorite months here, and the nearly nonstop sun is a tonic that fixes just about everything.

Except that spring is still on the way. Maybe it got lost. Maybe it’s messing with us. Maybe it will show up in July. Whatever the reason, I’ve been referring to last month and this one “the spring that wasn’t.”

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Gardening: The definition of hope.

(Happy Throwback Thursday! This post originally ran on May 6, 2021. Since it was snowing this morning, I decided to re-read this post for its reminder of hope. And there IS reason to hope: We have celery seedlings popping up, and DF put tomato and marigold seeds into little peat pots this morning. Sooner or later, the snow will melt and the ground will warm up enough to accept plant starts. Hope it’s sooner.)

(Note: This was a gardening post I started to write and then dropped. It was begun in the second week of April and picked up again on May 3. Sorry for any confusion.)

It was nine degrees when I got up today. And we’re at sea level! And it’s April!

Then again, it was minus 18 in Fairbanks this morning. So I guess I’m still ahead on points, but come on.

Fortunately, DF bought flowers for his mom on Easter and thought they looked so nice he’d get some for us, too. They stuck around for a long time, and having them on the table to look at was a good antidote to weather-related grumblies.

Nearby is a miracle plant: a pot of snapdragons that we nursed through the winter. The foliage is a bit pale, but it survived despite low-to-no light levels. The plant had widely spaced buds instead of the usual tightly packed stems. As a result, each bloom was wide-open and on its own, looking as though it’s ready to take flight.

Sun and semi-warmth returned on April 21, so we put the snaps outdoors to take advantage. (Brought them in at night because cold.) On April 22, I got a photo of the first honeybee* of the year.

I think it was pretty confused: “Flowers? At this time of year?!? HELL YEAH!!!” 

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Easy(ish) food preservation.

Recently a neighbor offered me a Lowe’s-sized bucket of apples and a gallon of pie cherries. The former became eight pints of applesauce and the latter a 10-inch pie. At some point that day I got a Facebook message from an old friend; while e-chatting, I learned she, too, was elbow-deep in food preservation that day: tomatoes, corn and green beans.

The coincidence made me grin, especially since her early life goal was to become a big-city journalist and live the single-gal life. (She did become a journalist, but spent most of her career in a small town.)

I asked her if she’d ever pictured herself using a pressure canner, or was that something our moms did. Her response: “We are lucky we grew up the way we did, so we can survive. I rarely shop but when I do it’s only for what I can’t grow myself.”

Those are thoughts I’ve voiced myself. Growing up fairly broke got me through single parenthood and a protracted midlife divorce. Now I’m no longer jobless or broke, but the soaring cost of food (and other stuff) is making me really nervous.

Not everyone is able to (or wants to) freeze, can or dehydrate. But hear me out.

For starters, think about broadening your definition of “preserving” food. In my opinion, bulk buying, stocking up during sales, and combining sales with rewards programs are all ways to “preserve” food. As in, you’re making sure you have the groceries you need at the best prices you can find.

You’re preserving your budget along with the food. The money you don’t spend on grub is money that can go toward other essentials. It’s unlikely that many of us will starve in this country, but a whole lot of people will be mightily inconvenienced, in a couple of ways: 

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Relishing summer’s bounty.

A reader named Ringo apparently misses the garden updates, and asked whether we were still growing fruits and vegetables. Yes, and I’ve been taking pictures like mad – but still haven’t organized a major “looking at this year’s garden” post. As a stopgap, I’m going to write about relish.

Why relish? After all, we’ve frozen peas and raspberries, made rhubarb leather, and canned rhubarb compote and raspberry jam. We’ve eaten some very good tomatoes, lettuces, greens and strawberries. But the relish might be the best thing to come out of this summer, because we may have invented a new recipe.

Relish was never a huge thrill to me. It was just something to put on hot dogs and hamburgers. But last year our Chelsea Prize cucumbers, an English variety from Renee’s Garden Seeds, produced so heavily that I decided to look for a bonehead-simple relish recipe. (As a Renee’s Garden Seeds affiliate, I receive a small finder’s fee for sales made through my link.)

Found one, too. And then DF improved on it.

He improves on so many things in my life, as I’ve written before. When I described the relish recipe DF said, “You know what might be a good addition? Some jalapeño.”

We have pickled jalapeños in our fridge – a can we’d found in the dented-can bin, because that’s how we roll. So I diced up a bit of pickled pepper and added it to the mix.

The result was delicious: sweet yet pungent, mellow but with a peppery zing! that turns even the cheapest hot dogs into a decent meal.

Sometimes we nibble it by the forkful, like a salad. Which I guess it technically is, being made of cukes, onions, garlic, sugar, and mustard and celery seeds.

Our enjoyment of this humble condiment reminded me of a passage from Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine”: 

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Vernal equinox: The (cold) shoulder season.

Happy first day of spring, also known as the vernal equinox! Doesn’t our yard look…equinoctical?

At left is a view of our snow-covered garden, shot through the living-room window. The cage at the back surrounds our two apple trees, which look spindly now but will produce a startling amount of fruit once summer arrives.

Summer will arrive again, right? At this time of year it’s easy to second-guess the seasons. Yesterday it sure felt like spring, hitting 47 degrees – and on a day when the sun didn’t set until 8:14 p.m., it was easy to imagine that the best season had somehow sneaked up on us. That is, until I had to tippy-toe down our partially glaciated driveway to check the mailbox.

We mostly refer to spring as “breakup,” as in ice breaking up on a river or lake. Indeed there are huge puddles during the day as winter’s accumulation starts to disappear. But there’s still a lot of snow left, and we are ready for it to be gone.

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