Vegetable Garden

Our vegetable garden did rather better than expected this year. It's been a late, cool summer (which seems to have vaporized already) and I didn't figure we'd get much so I've been pleasantly surprised.

I have a hard time estimating how much we've harvested in pounds since it's trickled in little by little. I have about six quarts of pickles in the fridge (bread and butter, sweet and dill), a good bushel of kale blanched and frozen with more on the way, eleven half-pints of pickled beets (chiogga and bull's blood varieties) and approximately three pounds of beets in the freezer.

I'm still waiting on the tomatoes to ripen - pears and beefsteaks. Those won't be more than a few pounds at most (and I'm keeping my recipe for green tomato relish handy.) I have two softball-sized pumpkins I'm babying along (about halfway ripe) as well as two good sized acorn squash that I'm watching closely.

Our pole beans struggled all summer looking yellow and leggy. Now they are a nice dark green and lush. We've picked about half a pound of those with lots more tiny pods on the vines.

I need to work up the nerve and dig up the Potato Experiment.

I read somewhere that you can plant potatoes and then keep raising and filling the container with soil as the plants grow up. I had some Yukon Golds sitting around that were too old to eat so I built a small box and planted them. I started with two layers of boards, then added two more over the course of about two months. The plants have all died back and it's time to dig. It's been raining like crazy the past week so I hope I haven't waited too long.

The crop I'm most hopeful about is the parsnips. Those have done well all summer - at least the plants looked great. They are a very long-season crop - about six months. I can see the shoulders of the parsnips peeking up and they look like they are getting to a good size. They taste better after a frost so I'm going to let them go for a while longer.

I planted a handful other vegetables - cilantro, parsley, dill, a few different kinds of peppers and Valencia and Walla Walla onions. The cilantro grew great but we left it too long and now it's coriander (tasty but we just don't use that much.) Like the pole beans, the parsley lagged behind but is healthy and productive now. I think it wasn't really hot and dry enough weather for the bell peppers but we did get about six cayennes. The onions didn't do didley this year. They barely grew vertically and the bulbs are still size of pearl onions! These were probably too crowded. I bought a flat, one of those undivided trays) rather than individual starts and I don't think I separated them enough.

I had about six carrot plants that I started inside and transplanted. My friend Alix told me that carrots do not like to be transplanted and get pretty twisty and mangled.

Her theory may be correct....

So not a bad garden this year after all. We have about a month left before any serious risk of frost so we aren't done yet.

What were your gardening experiences this year?

Apple Butter

We have one tree that still has apples on it and I've been debating whether or not to try and use them in some way. They aren't the best apples ever - there's too many of them on the tree and so none are very big and they aren't super flavorful. Peeling and coring them wouldn't leave much in the way of usable apple. We've been feeding them to various resident and neighboring livestock - the horses next door learned pretty quickly that a person in the orchard means treats for them and all the goats come running, too. And Henry can't get enough. Even with the deer visiting periodically for a snack, there are still at least three bushels on the tree. Thanks to my parents, I can't stand to see food go to waste so I decided I'd have to do something with them.

I got to thinking about apple butter. I figured that might be a good route since it seems to mostly be a vehicle for cinnamon and sugar and less-than-perfect apples. (The recipe was probably a result of our predecessors' proclivity to use up anything remotely edible - along the lines of corn cob jelly and green tomato pie.) The best part of the recipe was that I didn't have to peel or core the apples but instead put them though a food mill after cooking which is way less work. And the peel has a good amount of pectin which helps jams to thicken up nicely.

We don't eat a ton of jams/jellies/preserves around the Haphazard Homestead so I asked my family if they liked apple butter. I got a couple of responses - "Nah, not so much" to "Oooo! Me! Me! Apple butter!! Yum".

On Thursday before he went to work, JD was nice enough to pick a few apples for me:

I had a few Red Delicious and a few other reds (from the tree we haven't identified yet) but mostly they were tiny green ones which I suspect are something like a Granny Smith.

The recipe said to cut off the stem and blossom end and chop them up, core and all.

And then boil them until they are soft.

Appétissante, no? Looks a little bit like compost tea in the making.

When they were cooked down a bit, I put them through the food mill to separate the skin, seeds and, um, gristle. (You know, that stuff in the core.)

Wow, that stove is really dirty, isn't it? I'm sure it doesn't look like that normally!

At that point, I basically had applesauce. A LOT of applesauce. Due to an unfortunate incident with not watching the water level in one of my pots,

I was running out of room. (This was especially bad as it was the good one with the heavy bottom which helps prevent food from burning - when tended properly that is.) So I employed our slow-cooker to keep the applesauce hot while I moved on with the flavoring and actual canning steps.

Bear in mind that this isn't even third of the apples chopped and cooked and food-milled at this point. And there were eight cups of apple pulp in the other pan. Yikes!

So to the pulp in the other pan, I added in four cups of sugar (!), two teaspoons of cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon of cloves and simmered it for a bit.

The pulp by itself was sort of a pale yellowy-brown. Immediately after stirring in the sugar and spices, it turned a much more appetizing shade, kind of, well, cinnamon colored. I'm not sure what caused such a rapid color change. It was only two teaspoons of cinnamon in eight cups of apple. The sugar hadn't had time to caramelize and it was just plain sugar, not brown sugar or that Sugar In The Raw stuff. Interesting.

At any rate, I simmered it for a little bit, until it seemed thick enough. I tested it using the saucer method (saucer in the freezer, spoon some hot jam on it, when the jam is room temp, draw your finger though the puddle, if the jam sea stays parted, it's done.) Don't ask me how long. It certainly wasn't the all-day affair that many of the recipes imply. I just guessed that it was done. (Although I worried all that night that I really hadn't cooked it down enough and would have to cook and process it all over again the next day!) (It was fine.)

I put the whole mess into five pint canning jars, put on (new) lids and (old) rings, tightened them finger-tight and processed them for ten minutes in a boiling water bath.

I did the whole process two more times and ended up with eighteen pints of apple butter!

To be sure the preserves were suitable for gifts, I had to test it of course.

The first batch was a mix of red and green apples and had the best apple flavor of the day. The second was all green apples and I realized after canning it that it probably could have used a little more sugar and some extra spices. The last batch was made of the smallest and greenest apples. Thinking of the second batch, I added in some extra cinnamon and cloves as well as some ginger and mace in the hopes that it would give it an extra boost. I haven't tasted that yet so we'll see. I kept tasting it and deciding it needed a little more. I'm thinking it will probably be over-spiced as the flavors will likely intensify after sitting on the shelf for a while. But I did label it “spiced” so the recipient should consider him- or herself warned (family members, I'm talking to you!)