gardening

Vernal equinox: The (cold) shoulder season.

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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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Attack of the greenhouse tomatoes.

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Most of the year we don’t eat tomatoes, because we know what they should taste like. Oh, we’ll buy a few Roma tomatoes to cut up into salads, but they just plain don’t taste like much.

I once described the flavor and texture as “ketchup-tinged oatmeal,” and I stand by that description today.

At this time of the year, though, we can have all the tomatoes we want. In fact, we have trouble keeping up.

Even eating them up to three times a day does nothing more than keep us from losing love apples to rot. The horror.

Which is why I’m thinking of it as an attack, a la “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small affiliate commission on items purchased through my links.)

My niece and great-niece came over for a lunch of Black Prince and Cherokee Purple tomatoes on DF’s fresh rustic bread with mayonnaise, some of our Red Sails lettuce and crisp bacon, plus fresh cucumber slices on the side. (More on those in a minute.)

This has been a year for some weirdly shaped tomatoes. That one in the illustration was uglier than sin, and twice as satisfying. Some of them look normal, but we’ve had quite a few gnarled behemoths that are hard to slice, but completely worth the effort. The flavor just knocks us out.

It’s hard to describe the taste of these heirloom varieties: sweet as sugar but with an underlying tomato tang. There’s a reason they charge $10 a pound for them at the farmers market here in Anchorage.

And there’s a reason we refuse to buy them. In part it’s because we don’t want to pay $10 a pound for meat, let alone tomatoes. It’s also because we can grow these beauties ourselves, and for a few short weeks we can gorge ourselves. More than a few short weeks, actually, because when the weather gets too chilly we’ll bring in all the greenies and let them ripen. Usually we finish them all by the beginning of December, at which point we start to dream tomato dreams once more. 

 

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Extreme frugality: Putting food by.

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We spent parts of yesterday and today putting food by. Specifically, we turned seven or eight pounds’ worth of rhubarb into fruit leather.

First we chopped and simmered, then let the soupy stuff drain through a pair of colanders before glopping it into the dehydrator. We saved some of the juice to drink as a tonic; anything that tart has to be good for us, right?

The rest of the juice was frozen into chunks (which I insist on referring to as “Rhubik’s Cubes”) and set aside for my homemade smoothies. Made with free rhubarb and raspberries, marked-down “red band” bananas, half a cup of bulk-bought rolled oats, an egg and a big scoop of my homemade yogurt, these things are cheap as well as healthy. (And since I’m having the second part of my dental implant work done next month, I foresee a few liquid meals in my future.)

The last of the fruit leather finished dehydrating this morning. Like the other batches, it was rolled up inside paper scavenged from two sources: cut-apart cereal box liners and waxed paper saved from my sister’s annual tin of homemade peanut brittle. Flavored with sugar and a bit of ginger, the leather is a tangy, chewy treat that I must stop sampling or there will be none left for winter.

A previous batch of rhubarb had been turned into a compote sealed in pint jars, to be added to future dishes of yogurt. Not sure how many hours it took to do all this, but to us it doesn’t matter. We don’t put a dollar value on our gardening and food preservation, for two reasons: 

  • We don’t get paid for every minute we exist, and
  • We enjoy the process of turning home-grown produce into something we can enjoy next winter.

Some people would rather buy their veggies than grow them. I get that. Not everyone has the physical ability, the time or the real estate to garden. And fact is, the average person buys most of their stuff. We pay someone else to raise meat and produce, bake our bread, sew our clothes, build our homes.

For us, gardening is entertainment – and we don’t have to dress up or drive anywhere to enjoy it. Watching tiny green shoots grow into delicious foodstuffs is a reliable annual miracle. If you’ve ever grown so much as a pot of herbs on the windowsill, you understand what I mean.

Preserving the results is a natural progression. Making raspberry jam, cutting up carrots for canning, picking peas to freeze, plucking greens to dehydrate, slicing beets to pickle, peeling apples to cook into sauce – it’s all fun for us, even when we get tired toward the end.

The greeny smell of dehydrating kale, the sneezy scent of cloves, the sharp bite of vinegar, the soothing aroma of slowly simmering apples all keep us going: This is sustenance. This is satisfaction. This is safety.

 

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Bringing in the weeds.

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We had a cooler-than-usual May, which made us reluctant to put things out early. It’s only in the past week that our planted lettuces were big enough to start semi-harvesting.

(Why “planted” lettuces? Because we’ve been startled by rogue lettuces – and Asian greens and quinoa – popping up everywhere. More on that in a minute.)

Longing to eat something, anything, that was fresh, I started bringing in the weeds in the first week of June. Some were actual weeds, such as the fireweed in the illustration. Epilobium angustifolium was consumed by Alaska Natives long before we got here. I’d been reading about its edible qualities and decided to give it a shot because nothing else was fresh at that point. (Except dandelions, and I find them too bitter.)

So I picked some of the smaller plants, sautéed them in olive oil with garlic and ate them on some of DF’s amazing rustic bread. They tasted mostly like oil and garlic. No surprises there. Underlying it was a slight sweetness, similar to cooked spinach.

Here’s an amuse-bouche view of how they turned out:

At first glance, my friend Linda B. thought it looked like an insect. It does, kind of.

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Does refinancing a car hurt your credit?

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Sometimes stuff happens: illness, job loss, divorce. When things get super-tight and you’re casting around for a cash influx your eye might fall upon that fairly new vehicle. Maybe you should sell it. Or you might wonder, “Does refinancing a car hurt your credit?”

Yes, it can. But in some cases it might be the best – or only – option for when things go sideways. (Looking at you, COVID-19.)

I tackled this topic recently for Self.inc. “Does refinancing a car hurt your credit?” covers the good, the bad and the WTF of this complicated topic.

On the face of it, refinancing a car isn’t a great idea. But sometimes it could be the right thing to do.

The most obvious reason to refinance is because interest rates dropped. This is especially true if you financed with the dealer rather than looking around for loan options. Given that the average new-car loan is $34,635 and the used-vehicle loan is $21,438, even a loan rate that’s just 1 percent lower will make a big difference over time. (Not-so-fun fact: The average used-car loan is 65.15 months long and the average new-vehicle loan is 69.68 months.)

You could even get some cash in-hand if you do something called a cash-out auto refinance, which is similar to a cash-out mortgage refi. If having cash is vital, this might be the right choice for you at this moment in your life.

For example, if you couldn’t make the rent during a COVID layoff, a couple of months’ worth of payments might stave off eviction. Or if you have credit-card debt at 18 percent and were eligible for a cash-out refi at a much lower interest rate, you would be able to pay off the card and improve monthly cash flow. (Ideally you’d use some of that money to start an emergency fund, because the only thing certain is uncertainty and we need to positions ourselves to punch back at it.)

As always, you need to look at the big picture – and to look at it from all angles. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. 

 

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National Agriculture Day begins at home.

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Today has been proclaimed National Agriculture Day, so what better way to celebrate than with a picture of dirt?

Whoops. That’s soil, not dirt. As a master gardener once told me, “Dirt is what comes out of your vacuum cleaner. Soil is a living organism.”

President Joe Biden proclaimed National Agriculture Day in order to recognize “our commitment to and appreciation for our country’s farmers, ranchers, foresters, farmworkers, and those who work in the agriculture sector across the Nation.”

Well said, sir. But may I suggest that we also appreciate the nation’s fruit and vegetable gardeners along with the big-time growers? After all, they are providing food for themselves and, often, for lucky relatives and friends.

And, dear readers: May I suggest that you join us? 

 

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Looking back at the garden.

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My dearest friend brought in the first snowball of the season today. (Note: “Today” meaning Oct. 18, when I started writing this but got sidetracked.)

He had no intention of tossing it at me. Wise man.

“I just thought it was funny that I could make a snowball,” he said.

DF was also glad that he’d (mostly) finished putting the garden to bed. All that’s left is to thin out a few rows of raspberries, a task I want to observe. If I have to do it for him some year, or even if I simply want to help, I won’t accidentally kill any healthy specimens.

And healthy specimens they were: We froze about 30 quarts, I made about 16 jars of jam and his grandchildren romped through the rows, eating as many as they could hold. Which is, of course, one reason we do this: We want those kids to know where food comes from, other than Safeway.

I’d every intention of writing this article in late summer as “A walk through the garden.” I even took pictures. Due to various Reasons the article never materialized.

When I looked at the tiny white flakes falling to cover grass and the beds, I decided to go ahead with the piece. I wanted to see those summer pictures again, both as a reminder of what was and what will come again next year.

 

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Extreme Frugality: Gardening edition.

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Note: This is one of an occasional series of articles on saving money.

Renee’s Garden sends me a press kit and a packet of seeds every year. This year’s freebie was a variety of gourmet kale called Purple Moon. Gorgeous stuff, and we haven’t grown kale for several years, so DF and I were pretty excited.

So is everyone else, apparently: Purple Moon is already sold out for the season.

(As a Renee’s Garden affiliate, I may receive a fee if anyone buys seeds through my link.)

It’ll be one of three purple plants in this year’s garden, joining red cabbage (which is actually a maroon so dark it might as well be purple) and purple carrots (part of a four-color carrot mix). Those deep colors are supposed to be full of antioxidants, which is great, but we mostly care about the flavor.

And the cost: It’s hard to beat free. For the first time ever I took part in the media seed program, paying only the postage for English and pickling cucumbers, edamame, sugar snap peas and onions. Will definitely be writing about these; we’re particularly intrigued by the edamame, since we don’t know if it will grow here (DF’s grandkids will be excited if it does, since they love the stuff).

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When the frost is on the punkin.

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Before I went to bed last night I felt a sudden disturbance in the force. Although I’d checked the weather forecast – twice! – and it predicted a low of 40, the word “frost” flashed into my brain.

I checked again, and still no suggestion of anything cold enough to kill an outdoor plant. This morning I opened my eyes to sun bracketing the blackout curtains in our bedroom, and vowed to pick the peas. Even though it had been cool and very rainy all week, surely some of the last stragglers of the season would be ready to go.

And then DF came home from church. “Frost,” he announced.

It was 38 degrees at the time, but apparently it’s possible for frost to form even when the temperature is technically above freezing. (This short piece by Tom Skilling explains how.) At the time, I wasn’t interested in an explanation – I just wanted to see if anything in the garden was still alive.

Specifically, I was wondering about the pumpkins.

Just for fun we put two pumpkin seedlings into the ground in May. After a slow start we got exactly one fruit, which turned orange surprisingly fast. Ultimately we wound up with four more, two of which also turned orange. Two of them were latecomers and had only begun to turn orange (or so we thought) when the temperature changed.

Every day DF and I would go out to take a look at the garden in general, but our favorite part was the smallish pumpkin patch. The bright orange shining through the leaves, and the steady growth of the green ones, filled us with inordinate happiness. We anticipated letting his granddaughters choose their own jack o’ lantern material, and to invite Orion, the free-range kid to choose one as well.

And now a stealth frost might have ruined that.

 

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Alaska’s worst garden pest? That would be moose.

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Gardening where I live, part 117: Last night I was  reading at the kitchen table when a brown blur crossed my peripheral vision.

A moving brown blur. A really big brown blur.

Turned my head to the left and yep, a cow moose was walking into our yard, followed by a tottery little calf. Right toward our garden full of young quinoa, lettuce, celery, tomatoes, strawberries and other plants.

 

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