Food From the Late Summer Garden

Hello!

It is a cool and misty morning, and we are trapped between a slow front that is the end of Gustav and the fast moving rainstorm of Hannah. Hannah is a palindromic name which is cool. And it am pretty cheery, as I’m getting some days off this weekend. And I’m using this time to get what I can out of the garden!

This time of year, that means tomatoes!



Let me explain this photo: There are various tomato activities which can take place at this time of year. The large white bowl is filled with ends from sauce tomatoes which are oblong and not actually very good to eat. Sauce tomatoes are usually hollow and dry and don’t have a lot of seeds. They are good for sauce because the flavor is really concentrated, and also there is less juice so there is less boiling down to get thick sauce. The big saucepan is full of quartered sauce tomatoes which have to cook about ten minutes before they are soft enough to strain for sauce. In this case, I’ll take all the cooked tomatoes and dump them into a different bowl and clean the stockpot. Then, I dip cooked tomatoes out of the bowl and into a sieve and let the juice and pulp go back into the stockpot. I like to stir the cooked whole tomatoes around in the sieve with a metal spoon to really squeeze the liquid out of it. I guess those saucers and ricers are really great for this, but I’m here to say a sieve is fine.

In the teacups are seeds which are being saved. I’ve written about this before. Things to remember: no hybrids, soak in water a few days to loosen the pulp, good seeds sink, bad seeds float. Seeds still need to be tested sometime over the winter to prove they’ll sprout. This year, I put a good amount of space between my tomatoes rows to avoid any chance of cross pollination.

In the little china serving bowl are two kinds of salad or slicing tomatoes I grew this year. The pinky pink ones are called “Momotaro” and this was the first year the seeds were available from Japan. The red ones with the yellow ring around the top are “Cosmonaut Volkov” a Ukrainian heirloom which I grew because I loved the description on the seed catalog and I’m Ukrainian on my mother’s side (with a little Georgian, and I’m Irish on my dad’s side, so people just need to watch out!) Cosmonaut Volkov tomatoes are really red underneath and yellow around the stem. They are really fleshy and have few seeds and a lot of juice. Just a surprizing fruit.

I didn’t put these in the sauce because we’re having lunch at my grandmother’s house tomorrow, and one of my cousins is going to stop by. So, I’m going to make a very special tomatoes vinaigrette which it will I share here:

Apple Cider Vinaigrette

Stir together:

1/2 tsp. dry mustard
1 1/2 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. white pepper
1/3 c. cider vinegar
1/3 c. veg. oil
1/3 c. olive oil
a few Tblspn. puree fresh herbs (or just use parsley)

I like to go for a walk and pick a nice handful of different varieties of basils, oreganos, and parsley, even a lovage leaf or two would be okay. I throw them in the little mini chopper and then just add as much as I feel like having to the vinaigrette.
Cut tomatoes into bite sized pieces and let them sit in the sauce for a while before serving. You can throw more tomatoes in after they get eaten, and reuse the vinaigrette for a day or two.

I’m going to quit writing now, because I have things to do other than mess around with the computer. Though computer messing is quite fun. I need to pick some corn from the three sisters garden. Very exciting. I got an article from one of the local newspapers were a gentleman planted a three sisters plot at the Wilder Museum in Irvine, PA. Tho’ he used manure instead of fish. He had manure. I have fish. That’s why you pick what you pick!

Speaking of which. Don’t microwave corn. It’s a travesty.

Cook corn like Betty Crocker says:

Husk out corn. Put in a pot and cover with water till it floats. Add a few tablespoons of sugar and a little lemon juice. My aunt Teena just squeezes a whole half a lemon right in. I use bottled juice. Bring to a boil and boil two minutes. Turn it off and sit ten more minutes. Eat it. It’s good!

Speaking of which, and this is the last speaking of which: Freezing corn is almost exactly like freezing beans. Blanch the corn for a couple minutes while still on the cob. Run under cold water to stop cooking. Take a serrated knife and slice off the kernels. Toss them in your handy dandy sieve. (People should not have to go through life without a wire sieve, I swear, I use mine twenty times a day.) When the corn is drained, pack into zipper freezer bags and freeze. You can’t can corn without a pressure cooker. It will just rot in the jars and get you really sick. Corn relish is different, though, and you can just use a recipe and a boiling water canner for that.

All the Spring Things Are Happening

I know everyone always says it seems like spring will never get here, but, really, this year winter seemed especially long. After the January thaw, we really didn’t have any of those nice warm days that pop up in February. There were a couple of half days that were freakishly warm, but I spend most of those days down in the basement wading around and running the sump pump. How on earth you can get a flood in a basement on the top of a hill is beyond me, but this late winter and early spring, our happy home featured a spring fed pond plus a spring fed basement as the French drains reversed themselves and started sucking water out of the swamp and into the basement.

March was wet and rainy, too. In fact, it was one of the top ten rainiest Marches ever according to NOAA. I’m a big fan of the National Weather Service. They have great statistics and tolerably good forecasts and their storm warnings are better than what they have on the local weather, that’s for sure. I’m waiting with baited breath the final diagram of season snowfall total amounts. Last year we were in the 180 inch zone. It seems like we have had more snow this year, though. 180 inches sounds like a lot, but, in one of the big snow storms, you can get 30 inches just in a day or two. If that happens a few times, viola!

We got quite a bit just in March alone. It was like Mama Nature misread leap year and not long did we have an extra day in February, we had two Februarys March was so bad! And now, April is dry! Can we ever win? The almanac says heavy rain that last weekend of the month. We’ll see. I actually plunked down at the computer and started typing because it was clouding up out there, and one of the main items on my to do list is watering, and I’m hoping to get a little sprinkle instead, but now it’s looking sunny.

Seed starting has gone very, very well with just about everything making a good go of it, including a lot of seeds I gathered from plants in the fall. I see in “Organic Gardening” magazine there is a little blurb about ground cherries. I grew a few last year, and I thought they were kind of good. They look like Japanese Lantern plants but they have this juicy little berry in them that is kind of citrusy-caramelly tasting. I never got enough to make anything with them, but I did get enough to save the seeds, and they are coming along nicely. My tomatoes are in, and the earliest variety has already been transplanted. Alpine strawberry seeds that I saved and cold treated are growing, too, along with a few herbs and flowers.

There are a lot of good books on starting seeds, but actually, the seed packets themselves are good enough a resource. I use a combination of things for starting seeds. I prefer the peat cups just because it makes things easier to water from the bottom. I have a quart container I just dump water in plus a squirt bottle. When I plant seeds in peat cups watering is quick. If I’ve just thrown the seed starting medium into an old cake pan and added seeds, I generally mist them, and that takes longer and needs to be done more often. Peat cups are cheap, and I use quite a few of them. I tend to get the larger ones and plant four or five seeds in each one. And I keep everything in a combination of tin cake pans and cookie sheets and also a few “real” cookie sheets that are cheap at the dollar store.

My original cookie sheet plant tray was one of the “air” cookie sheets that were popular in the ‘80’s that were supposedly made to keep cookies soft and squishy and never let them burn. The sheet never let them brown, either, and you also couldn’t submerge it in water or the steam could build up inside next time you baked and make the cookie sheet EXPLODE! I’m not sure they have those sheets anymore, but it they ever try and bring that one back, remember the ‘80’s and just say no to air cookie sheets. Needless to say, the sheet has had a better career as a plant tray!

When the seeds start coming up, I start to thin them a little. I’ll pull out the slower ones or the smaller looking ones. It sounds mean, but you’re not a gardener unless you kill plants! After second and third leaves appear, then I start transplanting. I’ll transplant into anything. I reuse old plastic flats and cells from plants bought at the nursery, yogurt cups, more peat cups, clay pots -- they’re cheap and reusable, but it’s hard to control the amount of water plants get. With the yogurt cups, you need to take a hammer and nail and punch a hole or two in the bottom so water can drain. Last year, I transplanted a ton of tomatoes into styrofoam cups with the top inch or so peeled off. All I needed to pop holes in that was a sharpened pencil, and the tomatoes grow better than in anything else. Also, the nice white styrofoam made marking the plants really easy. If I have one complaint about the peat cups it is that there is no way to reliably mark the variety of plant in it. I’m planting about twelve different kinds of tomatoes this year, and last year I have fewer kinds and lots of trouble keeping them straight.


Okay. My embarrassing little secret is that I do not have a bed. I’ve been sleeping on a succession of second and third hand couches that I’ve gotten from different aunts and uncles for about ten or fifteen years now. But I do have a miniature greenhouse in my “bedroom”. In a week or two, when more of the plants have been transplanted, I’ll migrate the whole operation outside to the pop-up greenhouse. I use the same shelves and everything, only when I put them outside I take a couple of short t-posts and drive them in the ground and tie up the shelves to keep them from falling over. That happened to me the first year, and I’ve also had trays of plants flip off the shelves in high winds, too. But the greenhouse has been remarkable even with the amount of wind we get up here.

I’ve also lost plants to frost even in the greenhouse, so once my babies are outside getting used to being on their own, I’ll get up and monitor the temperature a couple times a night if I think it might frost. Last year, I hooked up two heat lamps in the greenhouse and ran an extension cord out there and that was enough to keep things warm. I don’t have anything fancy for lights. I got a couple clip on shop lights and put grow lights in them and have all of about twenty dollars invested in lighting for both indoor and outdoor planting.

My other big and kind of crazy project has been turning over ground for my planned Three Sister’s garden. I’m really excited about this, but I decided about a week ago that instead of just marking off a bunch of spots where I would be planting individual hills of corn, I was just going to plow under all the goldenrod and make the plot into a proper garden patch that I might be able to use next year or the year after. My big problem with that wording is that I have no plow. I have no tiller. I have a shovel and a motika. So I started shoveling. I squared up the plot and just started loosening the sod in strips. Then, I went back through and flipped the sod and gave it a chop or two and went back up the strip.

I’ve done this before. I’ve cleared a good sized garden patch out of thicker sod and more weeds and junk down the hill from the house. In that case, I removed the sod entirely and made a sod pile down by the compost pile and have been using up the sod little by little to patch holes in the yard where my uncle got his truck stuck in the fall bringing a load of wood. It was wet. We were pushing it bring the truck down and not just unloading onto the driveway. We should have listened to my aunt. I’m pretty sure we might have learned our lesson.

Anyway, down below, when I expanded my second garden, I added clover seed to the newly turned dirt and turned it again when the clover sprouted and got big. It was so incredibly easy compared with all the other garden digging I’ve done around here, and the quality of the soil was fantastic. So, even though I’ve left the sod in place up above here, I have still added red clover seed to the new dirt, and hopefully, it will rain or dew enough to get a good sprout going by early June which is when you put corn in up here.

The guy at the farm co-op said ten pounds of clover seed was enough to seed an acre. I got five pounds, which raised some eyebrows. Which also leads me to my second problem. Once I got committed to digging out the whole patch, I figured it is somewhere in the neighborhood of a tenth of an acre. I’m done with it. The cover crop is in. My arms are a little tired.


So, this is picture of the fence we put up the first year we were here. Behind the fence is my new patch. To the right is border of wormwood I planted around a flower patch of annuals last year, and I hope to put ground cherries in that spot this year.

Just a note: I was reading in the Independent yesterday -- which is a British lefty newspaper -- how there has been a three year study done scientifically on the productivity of Monsanto’s genetically modified soy bean seeds. According to the study, the GM seed produced on average under the same growing conditions ten per cent less than the non GM seed. With extra added nutrients, the farmer was able to bring the GM seed up even with the regular seed, but was never able to surpass traditional seed.

Scientists were able to explain the results of this study, and the US Dept. of Agriculture agreed, by the simple fact that it is easier and faster to improve plant productivity by traditional plant breeding methods, i.e. crossing the healthiest, most productive plants and planting those seeds, than by mechanically modifying the genetic makeup of the seed. Also, plant productivity is at the frontier of its possibility. The only improvements that can be made by any means will be very slight.

Please, keep this in mind and quote the results of this study to people who will claim that genetic engineering of plants is the way out of the coming food crisis. GM seed is simply a tool by which very rich companies are trying to gain control over the food supply by patenting varieties of seed which they claim to have improved. Speculation in the food markets and the interference of large corporations are some of the root causes of the growing food crisis, not some deficiency in the seed. These companies have tried and failed to do things like patent rice to force all rice farmers to buy seed from Monsanto instead of using saved seed. As ridiculous as it sounds, Monsanto has successfully sued farmers in Canada who replanted seed after Monsanto patented pollen blew onto their fields. These are bad, ruthless people who think nothing of starving whole countries, and I’m getting off my soapbox now to do some real work!

A Note About Baking Ingredients: Flours

Hello!

A quick update on seed saving:

So far, I've had mixed but mostly positive results with my saved seeds that I have been testing. My yellow Friench beans had nearly 100 Per cent germination rates, and it looks like the green Frenchies are going to follow suit. Two varieties of heirloom tomatoes: Amish Paste and Olpaka are showing more than 75 per cent germination rates. Another variety looks to have been a bad tomato, and hasn't had any little sprouters yet. But my broom corn, which will be the centerpiece of a really great garden of tall plants this year (if I can keep things from eating the sunflower seeds before they can grow) had good germination rates, too. However, it lookms like I will be buying watermelon seed this year, as none at all of the very many watermelon seeds I was testing have sprouted. I might try again and try and keep them warmer, but decision day as to what I will be ordering in terms of seeds this year is coming quick.

I had a lot of things that I was thinking about this week. Even though it is winter, there is a lot to do. We had a bout of actually cold weather, and it puts a little twist on the day, that's for sure. The animals have to be fed and cared for differently, and keeping the house warm is a challenge. But I decided to dip into baking, instead, and the reason is that I have kind of gotten back into my usual routine for that, and it's a good time to go over the kinds of things I use around the house.

I bake most of what we eat myself. Occasionally, I'll make crackers, but I do tend to buy those, and I do use cake mixes most of the time, though I can make a really good bunch of cakes from scratch. But I only buy bread when the schedule is a little hectic, and I really don't buy cookies unless I'm getting girl scout cookies from my cousin. Other than Carr's ginger cookies filled with lemon (those I recommend without reservation!), storebought cookies are just diappointing, and I figure store bought cookies have as much or more fat and sugar in them as homemade or even really nice bakery cookies. Why not have something that is actually good? Who really thinks those Chips Ahoys are better than even cookies from a mix?

When I buy cooking and baking supplies, I usually approach them in terms of catagories like fats, leavening, flour, sweetening, spices, seeds and grains. Then there is the extra stuff like chocolate and add-ins and things like that.

Flour is probably the most important ingredient, and while it seems like the simplest, in fact, I would say that my flour buying is one of the more complicated elements of my baking. Flour takes up the most storage space by far. For basic everyday cookies, pies and everything like that, pick a good brand name unbleached white flour. My sister uses Gold Medal. She bakes about once every week or so. She's a penny pincher and really a very normal person, and she gets good results with it. I prefer King Arthur. I think it takes less flour to make the recipes turn out, and it's really high quality flour. An additional benefit to King Arthur is that the all-purpose can in a pinch do double-duty as bread flour if the recipe just a plain old white yeast recipe. Don't try to substitute all purpose Kind Arthur for bread flour in like a crusty French bread recipe or sourdough or anything like that, but for a daily loaf, you can use the all purpose, which I would not try with Gold Medal. And I know for a fact from taking to my father about his failed baking experiments that you can't use things like Robin Hood for bread.

Which brings us to bread flour. I also use King Arthur bread flour, and it is amazing in recipes that call for higher gluten content flour. I have used other kinds of bread flour, but there is no comparison. Yes, it's expensive, but if you think what you pay for a "homestyle" white loaf from the bakery at the grocery store or even in the bread aisle, you are saving just by making your own bread. You should at least get the good stuff.

Wheat flour is in the midst of getting a bad rap. I kind of understand why. I know people with gluten sensitivity, and it is a hard thing. I switched from all wheat bread baking to a mixed flour content when my mother visited a homeopatic doctor who advised her to go on the Type A blood type diet. If you believe that kind of thing, the guidelines for eating by blood type suggest that wheat gluten is okay for type A's, but the other parts of the wheat can basically cause snot.

I don't like whole grain baking, especially with bread. I'm not good at it. Things don't turn out, and even if they do, I want things to taste the way I remember them tasting from when I was a little kid. Even though throwing in whole grain flour is good for you, there is more to eating (and to baking) than getting enough bran! I like kneading silky, squishy loaves of bread that are practically bouyant on the counter. You don't get that with whole grains. I know there are a few new whole grain baking books out there, but I haven't found a copy at the library yet, so that will have to wait for another day.

I've made a few nods to newer ideas about what people should eat and what I really want to eat. My compromise healthier bread loaf contains about one fifth high gluten wheat flour to help whole the loaf together and give it a rise. Other kinds of flour I always have on hand just to make the bread more interesting are: rye (stoneground is okay, dark is great), whole spelt, soy, and rice. My compromise for healthier cookies is oat flour. When I measure out flour for cookies, I'll put scant a quarter cup of oat flour in the bottom of a one cup measurer and fill the rest with white flour. Sometimes, I'll add a little brown rice flour to the cup. It's kind of gritty and grainy, but in a good way. If you use more than one fourth oat flour to make cookies, they'll just be too cakey and breaky and gummy and not well-textured, even though oat flour in cookies is very tasty. Oat flour shouldn't really go into bread, as it is too flabby and makes the bread fall too easy. If you want oat taste in bread, soak some rolled oats in hot water for an hour or two and stir them into the bread dough. When adding water to the flour for the bread dough, take into account the water you already used for the oats.

I've never used the Cornell flour formula, but for anyone interested, a gentleman named Clive McCay who was a nutritionist at Cornell University in the 1930's invented a combination of flour that supposedly boosts the nutritional content of baked goods. In the bottom of every cup of flour you add to any recipe place: 1 tablespoon of soy flour, 1 tablespoon of dry milk, and a teaspoon of wheat germ. There's no reason why this shouldn't work, but I don't bake with wheat germ or with dry milk because of allergies/special diets, etc.

Last, but not least, I use quite a bit of graham flour. We have pancakes every Sunday. I would suggest to anyone that they should develop "days" for certain foods, especially breakfast. Pancakes are a great breakfast, because they are "expandable". You can really easily double a batch, even in the middle of cooking if someone is really hungry that morning, if you have guests, or if someone shows up for a visit that you weren't expecting. Now, pancakes are the one thing that I have found that is actually improved by replacing half the all purpose while flour in the recipe with half whole grain flour. For that, I use graham flour, and the result is better than just white flour.

While I'm on the subject, while not really flour, cornmeal is also a nice thing to have around the kitchen. You can whip up cornbread with just the usual ingredients to have around the house. I don't care for white cornmeal, but I keep a can on hand for dusting the pan when I'm making round and free standing loaves of bread. I also use a little yellow cornmeal boiled or soaked in hot water as the base for my multigrain loaves of bread.

When stocking your kitchen, you need to ask yourself: how much do I really need? This is a really complex question, as well. I know it sounds corny and terrible and awful, but on the morning of 9/11, I had to ask myself, if there was a problem with the food distribution system of this country, even for just a few days, would I be able to help my family or would I be one of the people who are standing in bread lines whenever there is an acute crisis? I know, it's depressing to think about. I had to answer "no" at the time, and I decided to change my behavior and my shopping habits so that the answer was a little closer to "yes", if not a whole hearted "yes". Also, there is a little personality and geography involved. If you don't bake a lot, maybe just one five pound bag of all purpose flour is all right for you. My sister buys a bag at a time, and doesn't mind dropping by the grocery store when she needs more, even in the middle of rolling out a pie crust. Of course, she lives a block and a half from a large twenty four hour grocery store. I live thirty miles from the nearest 24 hour grocery (Walmart doesn't count) and almost ten miles from the nearest grocery store of any kind. So, I never feel comfortable when my all purpose flour bucket that holds ten pounds of flour isn't full. I also like to have at least ten pounds of bread flour in the bucket and ten pounds of all purpose and bread flour on the shelf in the basement. I'm less particular about how much of the other flours I have on hand. If I find Kind Arthur flour on sale, I buy a lot of it, just because it does tend to run high and doesn't go on sale that much.

So I would say: look at how much you bake and look at how much you would bake if for some reason you couldn't get flour at the store for say a week. Also, where do you have to store flour? If it's not relatively dry and secure, can you afford airtight containers or even just a few storage totes? I keep ten pounds of each bread and all purpose flours in my big plastic buckets, and the rest of the flour bags tied up in plastic shopping bags. As soon as I can get them out of the basement, I do, though, the vacuum sealer should help in being able to keep things nicer during long-term storage. I know there are a lot of lists of what you should have on hand if a crisis should arise, but, for me, cost is definitely an issue, so if I can keep about thirty pounds of just wheat flour on hand, I consider that okay. For a "normal" household with a little less preoccupation with a "survivalist" mentality, I still think you need to have one five pound bag of flour in reserve, no matter how much is left in the opne bag, just for the sake of conveinience.

Okay, after all that: what would you do if the country collapsed? talk, I'm going to share a couple of recipes. They both take all purpose flour, and they are good, basic things that anyone can make with good, basic kitchen ingredients.

Sunburst Yellow Cake

This is fine as cake and great as cupcakes. We used to get these in our lunches for school when money was short, and I always enjoyed them. If you want an idea of the sort of basics you should have in the kitchen, this recipe is a great place to start.

Preheat the oven to 375.
Grease and flour a 9x13 pan or put cupcake liners in a regular sized cupcake tin.
Cream:
1 1/2 Cups sugar
1/2 Cup Shortening or Margerine
Add: 3 eggs
1 teaspoon rum or Vanilla extract
1 cup milk
Sift together and stir in:
2 Cups Flour
3 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon nutmeg

Bake until tops spring back when touched.

Basic Pancake Recipe

This is bascially the same one that comes out of the 1970's Betty Crocker cookbook. I make it all the time, and it's really easy to remember: put in one of everything! This is the one where I substitute one half of the all purpose flour with some graham flour. The pancakes are a little more delicate to flip but they taste a lot better. Most of the recipes I use, I leave the salt out. For pancakes and biscuits, however, I use salt. Salt tenderizes the dough, and also, people are really used to Bisquick biscuits and pancakes which I find unbearably salty. A little salt, even a few dashes, will go a long way towards making the homemade biscuits and pancakes taste a little more like what people who are used to mixes expect!

1 Cup flour
1 Cup Buttermilk
1 egg
2 Tablespoons white sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda

Mix all ingredients just enough to combine. Fry in a greased skillet. My aunt uses butter or Blue Bonnet, but I prefer more oil. Martha Stewart says for fluffier and more tender pancakes: let your batter just sit for twenty minutes before you cook it, but Martha never had to put up with my mother hovering around waiting for her breakfast.

Seed Saving, Part 2

Hello!

Now that the holidays are mostly over, we're getting into that long stretch of winter. I was the happy recipient of some old peanut butter yesterday. We cleaned out the cupboards at my grandmother's house and got old nuts, fruit, seeds, and some lard, so I think I have all the stuff I need to make suet cakes again. As if I didn't have enough things to feed already, yesterday I took the deer block my mom gave me for Christmas down into the field below the house. It weighed 25 pounds, and I should have put it in my packback, because today my arms are sore from carrying it. I'll need to go and peek in a few days to see if anything has found it. I saw a wild turkey the other day, and I know there are still deer down there.

On Christmas morning, we saw about an eight or nine point buck the size of a cow just a couple miles from the house, and there are lots of tracks out back. Those hunters are slacking! I like the new combined deer season because the hunting season gets over and done with sooner and I don't worry so much about going out in the woods, but it seems like fewer people are hunting and fewer people are getting deer. I know a lot of people think hunting is cruel, but I'd much rather see a deer on someone's table than have to wrestle the dogs off deer carcass all winter long if when one dies out back. And I really, really am in favor of anything that get people up and out of their houses doing something active and real. Espcially if it involves making people appreciate the outdoors and also participate in getting their own food.

People always think it's a little funny that the first day of deer season in Pennsylvania is like a holiday. There is no school, and I made the mistake this year of thinking the farm co-op would be open on the first day of deer! I also remember that in sixth grade, as part of science class everyone at my elementary school took the hunters' safety course. If you think about it, it was a good idea because to hunt at that age, you needed the course, and, also a little firearms safety never hurt anyone. It wasn't like they actually did in class demonstrations.

For me, this is a really exciting time of year. The seed catalogs are coming! I lived in an apartment for the first ten years of my adult life, and some times it seemed like I would never get out. I kept a few houseplants and a little herb planter on the porch, but I always loved gardens. When I was a kid and we lived in a house with a big yard, my mom always grew flowers, and we had a lots of different gardens. Shade gardens, annuals, perennials, bulbs. We usually didn't bother with vegetable gardens. Though we did have a really nice old fashioned berry patch with gooseberries, currants, and rhubarb. The college where I went had a lot of amazing gardens which were tended by a retired English professor who showed up in lots of different classes to talk about the art of garden design. I was always very interested, as I had grown up in a gardening family, but I never had the opportunity to do any gardening for a long, long time after I was out of school.

When we moved to our place out of town, it was in the middle of summer and too late to plant anything. There were a lot of established herb patches, asparagus, some raspberries and currants, and a blackberry patch that bore really well. I was able to make a lot of blackberry jam that year, but that was about it. It took a lot of work just to "reclaim" some of the gardens that year, and the following spring, which is unbelievably three years ago this coming spring, I started a new strawberry patch, and planted a vegetable garden for the first time in the established garden up near the house.

This year, at the end of the season, I kind of dived head first into saving seeds from my heirloom varieties. I've been reading a little about it since I actually collected my seeds, and I'm kind of worried about cross pollination.

In the first place, the book that I was using as a guide just said, don't allow it, and didn't say why and also just had a section of cross pollination and didn't really mention it again except in a chart that said what would cross pollinate. If anyone is interested, the book is Seed Sowing and Saving by Carole B. Turner, and it's a really good book. It has a lot of information about how to handle seeds like cold treatment and how to test for germination and things like that. It even says how to make your own hybrids by hand pollination and has a great list of open pollinated seeds and sources.

To find out more about cross pollination and whether or not I should worry about the seeds I collected at the end of the season, I turned to a different book: Heirloom Country Gardens by Sarah Wolfgang Heffner. Now, Sarah explains cross pollination a little better, and also includes in a section on each type of vegetable how to avoid it. This is very useful, as there are really big differences between how different plants need to be treated if you are trying to save a particular variety for seed. Different varieties of tomatoes for instance, need to be kept only about twenty feet apart, and they probably will be safe from cross pollination. Peas need to be kept only five to ten feet apart. There are four varieties of squash, and within those varieties, they will cross pollinate, but not without. Unfortunately, just about every kind of pumpkin or squash or gourd that is common is Curcurbita pepo, meaning seemingly very different things like pumpkins, summer squash, and gourds will all cross pollinate, and the seeds are no longer pure. Sarah Wolfgang Heffner, who is not dramatic about other things, suggests that if you are growing squash specifically to propagate a particular seed variety, plant only one a year to ensure the seed remains pure.

There are some kind of fun facts in the Heirloom Country Gardens book, too. Carrots and onions are biennial seeders, meaning they will only bloom and make seed the second year. They need to be dug up in fall and replanted in spring, and if you are saving onions for seed, you can only plant one kind or they will definitely cross polllinate. And the onion has to be a mile away from other varieties to absolutely ensure seed purity! Also, though peppers really only need about five feet apart between varieties, if a bell pepper does cross pollinate with a hot pepper, the hot taste is dominant, so you can end up with hot bell peppers.

Now, I was not careful last year about keeping my bean plants away from each other, but even Mrs.-Super-Cautious Carole B. Turner says bean plants only need limited isolation. I saved Kentucky Wonder bush bean seeds and green and yellow French beans. The Kentucky Wonders are first year, but the French beans were grown from seeds I saved two summers ago. I might have some concerns for my tomatoes, which were planted even more freely than I usually do things, and my bell peppers were definitely planted really close to my salsa peppers. And I'm still looking for a good answer on my watermelons. I have a lot of seed from sun, moon, and stars watermelons which I planted mixed in with some funny French melons which were not even in the same species or genus. Most books just say "melon", so I don't know what is going to grow, if anything, if I throw those melon seeds in the ground.

In the middle of rounding up my million and a half seed catalogs -- I'm a heavy user, all the seed companies want me! -- I've been getting ready to test the seeds I did save to see what I need to order and what I can try and grow from saved seed. Seed testing is kind of fun, because it is almost like that wonderful time just thirteen short weeks from now. That would be eight weeks before the predicted last frost when seed starting starts!

Testing seeds is a pretty simple process, and like anything to do with gardening, labeling and documentation makes things even easier. First, pick out the seed and count out a good number of them. I usually go between fifteen and twenty, but I'm testing ground cherry seeds this week, and they are tiny and slow germinators so I picked out fifty of those. I use tin foil cookie sheets as a work surface, but real cookie sheets, cake pans or even a plate or a dish will do, but it should be waterproof. Get a paper napkin or paper towel and lay the seeds out neatly. You can draw grids on the towel and count the grids and just put one seed per space if you don't want to count seeds, but I like counting seeds. Make sure you label what it is you are testing and you should really put the date on, also. Cover the seeds with another layer of paper towel and mist with water from a squirt bottle. Cover the seeds with a sheet of plastic wrap and place them in a warm, light area. I live in Northwestern PA, and there is no warm, light area, at least not until the middle of May or so, so I use a shoplight with a grow lamp that I just clamp into place wherever, a few feet above the trays of seeds I'm testing.

Keep up with this set up fir about three weeks and note the number of seeds that germinate. At the end of the period, you need to do a little math, but it's okay! Devide the number of seeds that actually did something by the number of seeds that were tested. This will give you a percentage. If fifty per cent or more grew, you are in good shape. If anywhere from fifty to twenty five per cent germinated, you might want to sow a little thicker than you normally would to make up for the number of seeds that will not germinate. If fewer than twenty five per cent of the seeds germinated, you should probably toss those out and start over with purchased seed.

Some seeds need special treatment before they will germinate. Most of the time, that means they need to be exposed to cold for a period of time. Generally, these are flower or herb seeds that if they were growing in the wild, they would just get dropped on the ground. If the seeds germinated directly, they would be used up before winter. Since I like to touch on "useful" as opposed to "pretty" plants, I'll just mention that bee balm and echinecea both need to be chilled before they will germinate. To do this, you can package up the seeds and actually bury them in a trench for the winter, or refrigerate them for a few weeks. You can cold treat (also called "stratification") right when you plant by getting the seeds into flats and getting the planting medium nice and damp. Cover this with plastic and refrigerate the whole thing. In the interests of not filling the entire refrigerator with seeds flats, a basement window or stairway blocked off from the heat will do the trick, and I stratified polygonum on a shelf in the garage for a month or so in the spring, and that worked very well.

I saved quite a few alpine strawberry seeds which need to be kept in the freezer for about four to six weeks before they will grow. The Polygonum -- also called "Prince's Feather" or "Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate" -- is just a tall, strange flower that looks neat planted next to the snake rail fence in a little area which is starting to become the tall, strange plant garden, apparently. I mention it here because it needs both scarfied and stratified. That means, the seed coating needs to be sanded (with sandpaper) before it gets planted and chilled. Think of the seed getting eaten by a bird in the fall, passing through the bird, and sitting somewhere chilly all winter.

Right now, I have two trays of seeds getting tested. One variety of beans, three tomatoes, the watermelons, ground cherry, bell peppers, and broom corn. I'm also making plans to use my lower garden patch at the growing space for things I want to save for seed. Between seed saving and regular crop rotation and my congenital inability to measure anything in a straight line, my garden planning this year is looking pretty complicated. Luckily, I expanded my lower garden patch this year and really tried to work the soil a lot with compost and green manure before I even tried to grow anything in the new areas. Luckily, all I need to do for more space is grab my shovel and get working!

And one more thing! All these fancy and expensive books that I leaf through a grab one or two pieces of information out of and never really have to look at again? I'm getting them out of the public library. I just read a great news report that young adults ages 18 through 30 are the heaviest libary users. For gardeners, there is no better resource, since there are usually incredible tons of garden books in every public library. Lots of people give memorial donations to libraries, and they tend to ask for books that the people they are commemorating would like. At my local libary, there is an amazing collection of books on weaving and fiber all in memory of one person. There are the garden books, of course. The library where I used to work was like a fantastic repository for all things fish, to the point where if I had another request for a memorial book about fishing, I had a hard time finding one the library didn't have already. I had to laugh, because when I went to the library I use all the time now to pick up books on fish over the summer, I didn't find very many, and I had just kind of grown to think that all libraries had a whole shelf of books dedicated to fishing.

I digress! The point being, the public library is a fantastic resource. Even just the website for the public library is a great source or really good information. And you get free access to a lot of things that you would never expect. I'm currently using Rosetta Stone to learn Chinese. For free! At home on my own computer! There are also databases on periodicals, geneology, marketing, car repair, full texts of books from novels to really cruchy scholarly things. Even downloadable audiobooks. And if your local library doesn't have it, they will get it for you! They are remarkable people with limitless resources! Get your library card and go and learn something, already!

Pure Seeds

I had a very exciting weekend!
On Friday, I had a job! (I substitute teach.) On Saturday, I went with my Mom and my sister's family to the Erie Zoo and did Zoo Boo. It is really a nice thing to do and a major fund raiser for the zoo. And I got kisses from my favorite zoo animals: the llamas!

Sunday was the best, though, and my mother and I went to hear one of our longtime heroes Dr. Vandana Shiva speak at Mercyhurst College in Erie. We are both very inspired by her. My mother loves reading her inspirational words about the importance of reserving natural resources like water and plants for the free use of all peoples. I'm inspired by her political activism and her efforts to save the seeds of native species of food and spices in India, often raising the ire of international corporations who are trying to commodify the seeds and make the farmers dependent on purchased seed instead of saved seed. There have been countless thousands of farmer suicides in India because the farmers are being driven further and further into debt to buy seed and there are actually laws passed to keep people from practicing traditional farming and make them dependent on modern seed varieties which cannot be grown without expensive pesticides and equipment.

I'm an entirely nonmechanized gardener, getting into hopefully large enough growing to sell next year or the year after at local farmer's markets. In a way it is a choice, but there is no way that I could afford to buy gas powered equipment. I have a shovel and some hoes and rakes and cultivators that I got used from my grandmother and that's what I use. As I get larger scale, I'd like to stay committed to not using powered machines in my gardens, but my point is the cost of tools is the most prohibitive aspect of my current scale of gardening.

In honor of Dr. Shiva, I decided to write today about seed saving.

I'm a bit on my own here, so I've only done a little of this, but I read a lot and I have the internet, so a lot of this information came from many sources. The most important part of any project I start is the initial trip to the library, however. I was a public librarian for a few years, and just by having that job, I learned a lot about the resources available through the library. Please, use any opportunity and any project to stop by the library. Get to know the reference librarian and definitely explore the stacks. You can get tons of free or almost free information and give yourself a good background in almost everything you try before you start actually spending money on books, plans, materials, or equipment. Dr. Shiva advocates a traditional planting system where seven, nine, or twelve varieties of traditional seeds are planted mixed and co-supporting each other in the field. Because of different structures and plant maturation times, there is actually no way to do this mechanically. The plant varieties represent a complete diet which is also the traditional diet which has supported humankind up to this point.

In seed saving, you have to know that there are certain kinds of seeds you can save and others that you cannot. Don't try to save seeds from your fruit at the grocery store. Most grocery store produce is from hybrid plants which means that two varieties have been cross bred. The seeds probably won't grow, and if they do they will not grow "true". Hybrid plants are really useful for a number of reasons. They take on the hardier characteristics of their parent species and are often resistant to diseases and blights. Also, hybrid plants are often bred with shelf life in mind. They will not bruise as easily and they will keep a long time in storage, so they will still be fresh when you find them in the produce department.

There are drawbacks to hybrid plants, however. The first is, that you can't save the seeds. If you grow hybrid plants in your garden, you are dependent on the seed company every year for new seed. That's fine for hobbyist, but if you are economically dependent on the seed, it allows the seed companies to control the market. Secondly, hybrid plants may be tougher and the fruits and vegetables may last longer than the old varieties, but they are often not as tasty. Hybrid plants and storebought things become the normal thing that people expect, and the old varieties which were often tailored to a specific growing area might be lost. Loss of diversity is very bad in the plant community, even in the domestic plant community. Essentially, when you deal in "monoculture" -- planting lots and lots of the same thing all in one place -- you are actually jeopardizing the food supply. One disaster or one disease can wipe out everything. Planting many vareities of the same plant is better. If something like a drough happens, you won't lose everything.

I have saved flower seeds just about my entire life. That's a pretty easy one. You see flowers you like. if they develop seed heads, pop them off and scatter them somewhere else you want them to grow. There are more involved forms of seed saving, but that is basically the idea for anything that has exposed seeds.

Saving seeds from the garden for food plants is a little different. First, you need some source for the seeds. I order from a lot of different places: Pinetree Garden Seeds, Johnny's, Jung's, and Burpee are my main sources. Johnny's and Jung's are very strict about not allowing genetically engineered seed into their inventory. (Another day, my friends!) They have lots of varieties and also their testing facilities are in the northern US, so I know they grow their seeds under similar conditions compared to where I am growing. I'd like to get into seed exchanges and that sort of thing, but I just haven't yet. Mainly, because I've not had seed to exchange up until this point.

If you plan on saving seeds, make an effort to choose what they call "open pollinated" seeds. Also look for things like "non-hybrid" or "heirloom" seeds. These are all things that can be saved for seed. Dr,. Shiva referrs to these things as "pure seed", meaning a distinct breed of plant that has not been crossed with another variety.

Last year, I planted three varieties of green beans. I took a lot of grief for it from my uncle who has a very nice, well established garden with tons of different things growing in it. I grew a bunch of beans. I grew a bush bean and green and yellow varieites of skinny french beans. Saving peas and beans is bascially the same. After you get what you want from the plants, leave a certain amount of the pods on the bush and let them grow, grow, grow until they start getting yellow. Ideally, the seeds should be loose and dry inside the pods and rattle when you shake them. This year, I pulled my selected plants a little before that because we had a rainy patch and they were starting to rot in the field. Pull the plants up and sort them. Save really healthy, really loaded plants. The healthier the seed the healtheir next year's plants. Let them hang up under some kind of cover in a garage barn or shed until they dry the rest of the way. Last year, I shelled them out by hand after they were dry, but I've also read that you can put just the dried pods into a feed sack and stomp on them to break them up and sift out the chaff. That's what I'm trying this year

My slacker cats did not do their job, and little mouse got into the cupboard where I kept my seeds, and took, oddly enough only the bush bean seeds, so I had to rebuy some of those. They left the French beans alone, and quite interestingly, the Japanese beetles also do not like my French beans. So, other than my lost bush beans, I was able to replant the Frenchies without buying new seed. They were a little droughty, and the yellow ones didn't get enough sun, but really it did work.

Today, I went out into the garden and picked up some of the heirloom style tomatoes I had set aside for seed. I tried for really ripe or even overripe tomatoes for seed. I planted many varieties this year. Of hybrids, I had some grape tomatoes, new girl, wayahead, San Marzano (a big paste tomato), and a salsa tomato from Burpee that I used for a couple of batches of salsa and sauced the rest. My heirlooms were Amish paste and Olpaka, a Polish variety, and Radiator Charlie/Mortgage Lifter. These last are a bit of a disappointment to me, but a few of them my ripen enough to save fore seed and try again next year. They basically turned into mutant blobs. The Amish and the Olpaka's are little paste tomatoes. The Olpaka's aare really bright red and the Amish pastes are a little bigger and oranger. They both made really nice sauce, I mixed them about half and half with the round salad tomatoes. I used directions from the Ball canning jar company's canning cookbook, but any public library is going to carry a million and a half books on preserving food, and I'll save sauce for a different day.

To save seed from tomatoes, you need a knife, a spoon, a cup and a little water. Since I was saving two different kinds of seed, I also took a piece of tape and wrote on each cup what I was saving. Cut the tomatoes in half and use a spoon to scoop out the middle parts with the seeds. Add water to the cup and set it aside. Let the seeds soak for three to five days, Every day, you need to pour the water with the pulp off the top of the cups and add fresh water. Eventually, the pulp will be gone and the seeds will be clean. Viable seeds sink to the bottom! Pour away the seeds that don't sink!

Let the clean seeds dry on a piece of news paper or paper towel for a few days and pack them up.

This seems like a lot of work, but really, think how much work it takes to earn the three or four dollars it costs for a packet of seeds. Also, you are participating in the active preservation of a seed variety which may be hundreds of years old. There is also the idea that if you save seed from your garden and grow from the same line of seeds year after year, eventually those seeds will be tailored to take advantage of the conditions and soil composition which is local to your garden. It's an interesting notion, and I would like to see if thing do tend to get healthier in years to come.

Before you try and plant seed that you save, you really need to test for germination. I'll get to seed testing a different day. i like to do it in the middle of winter, a litle before the seed catalogs start arriving.

Also, I have quite a few other plants I want to save seed from this year including flowers, melons, and some non hybrid green peppers which will hopefully ripen up before the frost. look for further posts on saving these seeds and also on more advanced techniques like stratifying and scarifying. Planting season starts the end of March! That's just five short months away.

That's all for now!
Britt.