Row Covers for Fall

I have been using spun-bonded row covers for years on my fall garden. They keep greens and root crops fresh deep into the winter, even under snow. This year I decided to suspend them on hoops rather than lay them directly on the greens, for better air circulation. I made two kinds of hoops: plastic and wire. In this video you can see how I made the hoop houses or low tunnels for the row covers. The plastic tubing hoops are sturdier, but they are more expensive to make than the wire hoops.

Kiwi-Apple Chutney; Canning

I got some locally grown hardy kiwis from a friend with a large hardy kiwi vine, and I decided to make some chutney with the kiwis and some Arkansas Black apples I got from another local grower. I adapted the recipe below from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

It's okay to adapt ingredients and spices a little bit from a canning recipe, but you can't alter the amount of vinegar in the recipe: that determines the acidity of the batch, and the acidity has to be sufficient to make the recipe safe to can in a boiling water bath. So, I kept the amount of vinegar the same and just altered the ratio of kiwis to apples, and I substituted some balsamic vinegar and white vinegar for the cider vinegar called for in the recipe. (Most vinegar has about the same amount of acidity.) I also substituted chopped butternut squash for the raisins, because I didn't have any raisins. I figured the butternut squash would add some sweetness, as the raisins would have.

Here's what I ended up using. This recipe made five half-pint jars of chutney.

4 cups of chopped kiwis
5 cups of peeled, cored, diced apples
1 1/2 cup chopped onions
3/4 cup white vinegar
3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup peeled diced butternut squash
1 large clove of elephant garlic
1 teaspoon peeled diced fresh gingerroot
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper

Combine the kiwi, apple, onions, vinegar, sugar, brown sugar, squash, garlic and gingerroot. Bring to a boil and simmer for thirty minutes. Add the spices, and simmer another ten minutes.

Sterilize the jars and lids. Ladle the chutney into the jars, leaving a 1/4 inch clearance. Wipe the rim with a wet napkin. Put the lids and bands on the jars and place them in the canning kettle. Process for ten minutes at a rolling boil.

Remove the jars and cool on the counter. Check to see that they all sealed.

Soup Cooked in a Pumpkin

Ever since I saw an article in Martha Stewart Living years ago about gilded pumpkins containing soup, I've wanted to make a pumpkin with soup inside, minus the gilding, which just seems de trop. It turns out that Chef Marian, of The Victory Garden Cookbook, had a recipe all along in the chapter on pumpkins. Today I tried it, with an adorable small pumpkin that was given to me by a friend. It was grown by the farmers who run her community supported agriculture share.

It turned out to be quite easy to cook soup in a pumpkin. I made a little video about it. The pumpkin is a Tan Cheese pumpkin, and it's very tasty. You start out by cutting a top out of the pumpkin and scraping the seeds out, just as you do to carve a pumpkin for Halloween. You oil the inside of the pumpkin and bake it in the oven, empty, with the lid on, for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Then you take it out, add a little rice and sauteed vegetables to the inside of the pumpkin, plus chicken broth to fill the pumpkin, replace the top, and roast again for 45 minutes to an hour, with the soup inside.

First Sweet Potato of the Season

The deer have been getting in my garden and eating the sweet potato vines at night. They jump a four and a half foot fence to do this. All of the vines have been completely defoliated, but amazingly, the roots seem ok. I dug one up the other day and ate it. I guess it had had enough time to get big before the munching started.

I have spent the last few days increasing security around my garden, because shortly after they ate all the sweet potato vines, the deer started in on the okra plants. Who would have thought that they'd eat hairy old okra leaves? I looked up deer and okra, and found out that, lo and behold, people actually plant okra to LURE deer!  And to make them grow big for hunting season!

At first I tried the easy way to "increase security": putting pieces of Irish Spring soap in panty hose legs and hanging them around the garden. (I buy the knee-high panty hose boxes at Walmart especially for this purpose, and no other purpose.) This worked for one night. The next night, they were back in the garden, bad smell or no. And the soap truly does smell horrible.

So then I had to resort to a more labor-intensive strategy:  I wired long pieces of bamboo to the posts of the fence. Now the posts were sticking up about 2 feet higher than the top of the fence. So I could take some 20 gauge tie-wire and put two strands of that above the top of the wire mesh fence. Now the fence is effectively about 6 1/2 feet tall. This seems to be working: there was no deer snacking last night. As a further deterrent, I took a page out of my friend Wendy Williams's book and tied some aluminum pie pans to the two strands of wire above the old fence. They move in the breeze and make clacking sounds, which is supposed to scare the deer.

Deer are interesting. Keeping them out is kind of a psy-ops situation: you have to make the fence look scary to jump over, as if they might become entangled in it if they try. It doesn't have to actually be a strong fence, just a wiggly, stringy, high fence. Very light nylon mesh fences that are about 7 feet tall, and practically invisible in the landscape, apparently keep deer out pretty effectively. Deer aren't like cows, horses, or pigs, which would go right through a fence like that.

I think these deer are invading the garden for the first time in years because of several factors:  it is very dry, and there is very little lush vegetation around the neighborhood. There was a pasture full of Johnson grass hay growing all summer nearby, but two weeks ago it was all cut down and baled, and because there has been no rain, it hasn't grown back at all. So suddenly the deer became very hungry, and they saw a buffet full of their favorite foods--beans, sweet potatoes, and okra--on the other side of the garden fence.  Another factor might be the fact that deer populations were very low a few years ago when I built this fence. There had been an epidemic that killed a lot of them. But slowly their populations have been rebounding.  That's good, but to paraphrase Marie Antoinette:  let them eat grass!  There's plenty of that around my garden too.

Master Gardeners' Booth at the Putnam County Fair

On Friday I visited the Master Gardeners' booth at the Putnam County Fair in Cookeville. The indoor part of the exhibit shows all the shade plants that can be grown in our gardens in the Upper Cumberland.This rain barrel illustrates how you can save water from your roof for your shade garden.

There was also a canning kitchen set up inside the booth:

And a place for kids to play "farmer's market":

Outside, there was a demonstration of a square foot garden. These are made from wood frames filled with a special soil mix. They were very productive! One of the beds had a trellis on it with beans growing on the trellis.

Also there was a beautiful and productive herb garden, with several kinds of basil, a big sage plant, and other kinds of herbs.

There were lots of examples of ways in which gardeners can use containers for food and ornamentals. Carrots were thriving in this container:

These cute hanging containers had succulents in them:

We also looked around in the exhibits of prize-winning vegetables, because we had heard that there were some really big watermelons. The rumor was true. These two melons were almost three feet long!

Senfgurken

A funny name for a pretty normal pickle. I found this recipe in The Victory Garden Cookbook, a cookbook from 1982 based on the PBS show "The Victory Garden." It's a great cookbook for gardeners, because the chapters are organized by vegetable: all about bean, cucumbers, eggplants, and so on. So when you have a lot of something, you know where to go.

The cucumber chapter is revelatory. Did you know that you can saute cucumbers? Maybe you have done it secretly in your own kitchen (as Julia says, "When you're alone in the kitchen, who's to know?"), but you didn't know that Chef Marian Morash does it in her restaurant. Also from this chapter I learned that a cucumber salad tastes better if you lightly salt the cucumbers ahead of time and let them "macerate," as they say in canning books, for at least half an hour before rinsing and dressing them. There are also recipes for braised and stuffed cucumbers, which Chef Marian says are common in Germany and France.

Like my neighbors on Brangus Lane, Chef Marian is never one to waste food. (I threw a tomato at a neighbor the other day, when he made a remark that I considered borderline sexual harassment. It bounced off his belly and hit the ground. His only comment was, "You're wasting food." So I picked it up and ate it.) You know those big yellow cucumbers that are lurking under leaves in the garden this time of year? Don't compost them! Make senfgurken!



Chef Marian says that senfgurken is "the German answer to watermelon rind pickle." What was the question? Anyway, you peel and seed the cucumbers (saving the seed, of course, if it is not a hybrid cuke), cut them into 1" pieces, make a brine of salt and water, cover the cukes for 24 hours, and then make another brine of straight vinegar and spices. You simmer the drained, rinsed cukes in the brine for a few minutes and pack them into jars with the brine. Ok, I'll write out the recipe, since it's an old (sort of) cookbook:



Senfgurken (Adapted from The Victory Garden Cookbook)

4 large yellow cucumbers, 1# each
1/2 cup pickling salt
3 cups water

1 qt vinegar (I used cider vinegar, but Marian Morash calls for white vinegar)
1-2 cups sugar
3 T pickling spices
4-5 tsp mustard seeds

Peel cucumbers, halve, and scoop out the seeds. Cut into wide strips or chunks like watermelon rind pickle. Dissolve salt in water and pour over cukes. Soak 24 hours, drain, and pat dry. Combine vinegar, sugar, and pickling spices and boil 1 minute. Then drop the cuke pieces in the brine. When the brine returns to a boil, remove cukes with slotted spoon and fit them into sterilized jars, filling to within 1/2 inch of the top. Divide mustard seeds among jars. Cover with the boiling liquid to within 1/4 inch of the top and seal the jars. Process for ten minutes.


 

To save seeds from cucumbers:
Let the cucumber get very yellow. Leave it on the vine as long as possible, preferably until the vine is dead, but before it starts to rot. Then you can bring it inside and leave it on the shelf a while longer, until it really is beginning to rot. Cut it open and scoop out the seeds. Put them and all the liquid attached to them in a jar. Allow this mixture to ferment for five days. Rinse this fermented mess in a sieve, and dump the seeds out onto a paper plate. Let them dry on the paper plate until crispy, and store in a ziploc bag or a jar in the refrigerator.

It's best to get seed from at least five different plants if possible. Mark the ones you intend to save with a plastic ribbon so that they won't get picked or eaten.

Canning 101: Okra Pickles

If you've never canned anything before, okra pickles are a good place to start. It's so simple:  you sterilize the jars, cram the okra pods in the sterilized jars, pour the pickling brine over them, put them in the canner, and process for ten minutes. There's none of that long cooking and checking for "set" that making jam involves. You don't even need an official "canner":  I use a stock pot with a round cake rack in the bottom. I have found that the big pots with racks sold for canning don't work well on the small burners of most electric stoves. (They probably work great on wood-burning stoves, where the whole stove top gets hot.) I wired a round piece of hardware cloth to my cake rack to make it hold the jars a little more steadily.

The first thing you do in any canning session is you sterilize your jars. Put them on the rack in your canner and start filling it with hot water. The water should fill each jar.  Keep adding water until it reaches the top of the empty jars.  (When you fill the jars with product and put them back in, they will be about an inch under the top of the water.)

Meanwhile, sterilize your lids. Canning jar lids have two parts: the lid and the band. The lid has to be brand new; you can't reuse old lids. But you can re-use the bands indefinitely.  When you buy canning jars, they will have new lids and bands with them. If you already have some appropriate jars (don't use mayonnaise jars), buy a box of new lids, and bands if you need them. The lids and bands come in two sizes: regular and wide-mouth. For the okra pickles, I'm using half-pint jars, which use regular size lids.


Back to sterilizing your lids:  place the lids (not the bands) in a small pot and bring to a simmer. They don't have to boil; they only need to reach about 180 degrees. The same goes for sterilizing the jars. So when you see a lot of bubbles and steam but not a rolling boil, that's a simmer.  If you have a thermometer, you can measure the temperature, but it's not really necessary. These are the lids:

You will need some special tools for canning. You can buy a set that includes a jar funnel, a jar lifter, a magnetic lid lifter, and a plastic knife that you use to remove bubbles.  Here's my set. Isn't it cute that they all match?

So your jars and lids are sterilizing. While you wait, get the pickling brine ready.  I am using a recipe from an old Gourmet magazine that I found on the Epicurious.com site. But most recipes for okra pickles are pretty much the same. One thing about pickling and canning recipes: you can't mess with them too much.  The amount of acid in the recipe is critical to safe canning and spoilage prevention. So, don't change the amount of vinegar or water. You can change the seasoning of the brine, though: for example, you can use less cayenne, or add some other pickling spices.

The brine in this recipe is 3 cups of vinegar, 1 cup of water, some cayenne, mustard seed, dill seed, salt and sugar. You bring all that to a boil in a separate pot. It's ok for this to simmer for a while, while you wait for the jars to reach 180.

When the jars are hot enough, use your jar lifter to take one out of the hot water. (Now you see why you need a jar lifter!) Pour the hot water out of the jar and place it on a clean towel on the counter. Fill this jar as tightly as you can with 3 inch to 4 inch long okra pods, plus a garlic clove in the bottom. The tighter you pack them in, the easier it will be when you pour the brine in. Some of my okra was pretty long, so I had to select the short ones that would fit into the jar. You're not supposed to trim the cap off the okra entirely, but I trimmed some of the stems back a little to make them fit in the jars. If you like very hot pickles, you can add a hot pepper piece to each jar too.

Here are the packed jars:

Now all you have to do is ladle the pickling brine onto the okra pods in the jars. By now it should be boiling. Put the funnel on one of the jars and ladle the brine into the jar until it reaches 1/4 inch from the top. This is important: you don't want the jar to be too full, or have too much air space at the top either.

Now you see why it's good to really cram that okra in:  if it's too loose, it starts floating when you put the brine on. If it does, just cram a few more pods in until they sort of stay down.

Wipe the rim of the jar carefully with a very clean cloth or paper towel. Take your magnetic lid lifter, and lift a lid out of the hot water. Place it carefully on the jar rim, rubber side down. Make sure there is no little bit of spice or okra on the rim; this will prevent a good seal. Screw the band down on the jar to hold the lid in place. Use the jar lifter to put this jar in the canner, which is still simmering.

Do the same with all your jars. You can use the knife thing to remove any bubbles around the edge of the jar, but this is not really necessary with okra pickles.  It's something you have to do with jam, though. This tool also  has a handy measuring device on its end that helps you estimate what 1/4 inch clearance is at the top of the jar.

All your jars are back in the canner now:

Put the lid on and bring it to a rolling boil. Once it boils, start the timer. Boil the jars for ten minutes. Remove them from the canner with the jar lifter (now you're REALLY glad you have one of these!) and set them gently on the counter. In a few minutes you will hear the characteristic ping that the jar lids make as they seal.

Occasionally you may have a jar that doesn't seal. You can tell because when you press the lid in the middle after it has cooled, the little indentation will go down. The rest of the jars will already have that little dent down. No worries: just put that unsealed jar in the fridge and eat it soon. The rest of the jars can be stored on a shelf for six months or a year.

At first the okra pods will look as if they are floating too much in the brine in the jar. Don't worry. They'll "sink" later and look like the ones in the grocery store.

So this is the basic method for canning: sterilizing jars and lids; getting the product ready (which sometimes involves cooking it in a separate pot); filling the jars; processing the jars; and cooling the jars. I label the lids with a sharpie: I write the name of the product and the date on the lid.  Now that you know the basics, you can try almost any recipe. Start with The Ball Blue Book or The Complete Book of Home Preserving, if you don't have a canning cookbook. Both of these books have good general directions about canning.