Bottling the goodness

Jan gets very, very distressed when food goes to waste. Well, not enough so that he cleans out the refrigerator. But when Ella wastes food, or when garden produce goes bad. So this year, for the first time, he’s made a concerted effort to learn to preserve what I grow. ‘Cause, you know, that’s not my job. I just grow the stuff. What I grow is not nearly as important as my being outside nurturing plants.

His first foray into preserving was the pesto. That was a resounding success. So he bought a pressure cooker/canner, and set about making sauces from all of the tomatoes that I’m bringing in from the fields.

A red sauce for pizza, using herbs and garlic from the garden. A green sauce from the White Currant tomatoes, as a spread and special pizza or pasta sauce. A ranchero sauce using our tomatoes and peppers that we picked up at the Farmer’s Market. We’re in sauce heaven.

For practice, Jan also canned some cherries from Whole Foods.

It all seems to have gone very well. But you don’t really know, do you, until you open the jars several months down the line? And I’m having a heck of a time explaining the whole concept to Ella. She’s really not sure why in the world we would have yummy food in jars, and not crack them open and eat them!

Oven raising

The first post in this series, in which our heroes poured the slab, is here.

In this installment, the bread oven reaches skyward. Perhaps my favorite thing about this project so far is that it has drawn in so many contributors from the neighborhood. Frank found some free brick, Rick is driving his truck to pick up materials, and Ken is lending his brawn.

Ken was lured in at 8 AM, Friday morning. The walls were started with cinder blocks, then filled with rebar-reinforced concrete.

The sound of other people laboring brought Rick and Frank wandering over, to supervise, of course. (That’s Frank’s grandson with them.)

More blocks, more concrete, and a piece of metal across the span of the door to the wood-storage chamber, support the eventual structure above it.

Jan knocked and cut notches into the blocks to accommodate a piece of rebar laid around the perimeter of the top of the wall.

Then they filled all of the chambers of the blocks with concrete, tamping it down with a piece of rebar.

Around lunch time they filled the empty spaces completely, and smoothed the top.

Ella approves the final product, and Ken is released to his family at about 1 PM.

You thought that was it for the day, huh? But no. The masons reconvened after dinner, poured themselves some T&Ts, and grabbed the nail gun. That’s our boys.

I couldn’t really tell what they were doing, but they looked pretty cool doing it until the wee hour of 9:00 or so.

In the morning, I got a peek at the result of the carpenter’s elves. Apparently, they built a wooden structure to support the slab of the actual oven chamber.

The support is built in such a way that they can just knock the wood out from underneath the slab, once it’s poured and cured. (Insert smug smile on my husband’s face here.)

I have to say it. I’m impressed. I’ve already invited a couple from a few blocks away to come make pizza with us. That sounds gracious, but the reality is that they have the biggest, most gorgeous tomatoes in the neighborhood. I told them to show up with one big tomato in each hand.

August planting list

I’m putting this list up early enough that you have time to get your hands on the seeds before August. Man, after reading this list, I’m already hot. And wait until you see the list for September! Don’t these people know it’s hot!?

One more time, I’m tweaking my sources. I dropped Month-by-Month Gardening in Texas, by Dale Groom, for being too vague and treating Texas as one region. Not.

There are three references I’m using:
Texas Organic Vegetable Gardening, J. Howard Garrett & C. Malcolm Beck (he’s in Dallas)
Dallas Planting Manual, The Dallas Garden Club of the Dallas Woman’s Club (Dallas, again)
Collin County Master Gardeners

I also found a great little site this month that has a gardening calendar for central Texas. She says if you live north of Dallas, to move all of her dates one week later. She gives dates for fertilizing, composting, dividing plants and such. You can print the calendars for reference.

I’ve put an asterisk by the ones I think I’ll be planting.

DPM
-seeds:
arugula
beans*
broccoli*
brussels sprouts
cabbage
carrots*
collards
lettuce*
mustard
parsley*
spinach*
watermelon
-plants:
broccoli
cauliflower
tomatoes*
peppers

CCMG (I just love how specific they are with the dates.)
beans (after the 15th)
cauliflower* (after the 15th)
corn* (1st thru 15th – hurry!)
cucumbers* (1st thru 15th)
kale (after the 15th)
mustard
peas* (1st thru 15th)
potatoes, irish (thru the 15th)
rutabaga (if you plant this, tell me how you cook it)
squash, summer
squash, winter (after the 15th)
turnip

TOVG
beans, lima bush (after the 20th)
corn (after the 20th)
peas, southern
pumpkin
squash, winter (after the 10th)

An update on my July plantings:

OKRA – I took Lori’s advice (sort of) and kept the okra seeds watered daily until they germinated (she mentioned soaking them before planting). Much, much better germination, if also much more work. So I have plenty of okra coming up now. The plants are gorgeous; they’re related to hibiscus. You can tell.
PUMPKIN – I’m still battling it out with the squash vine borer. Every day she lays her eggs, every day I scrape them off. I think she’s winning, though, because my new seedlings are already wilty. Wench. I may give up on pumpkins and squash this year.
WATERMELON – these vines are going like gang-busters. We have tiny watermelons. Cross your fingers for me!
CANTALOUPE – these vines are growing a tad more slowly than the watermelons, and looking a little wilty. My arch enemy may have gotten to them, although I haven’t noticed the signs on the stems.
PEPPERS – I had two of these finally germinate, after about a month in the ground. I re-seeded in early July, but nothing yet. I’m keeping them watered, too, thinking that might improve the germination rate. So far, not.
LUFFA – something has eaten every little seedling. It’s eating the leaves bit by bit, and even taking bites out of the stems. I haven’t seen the critter, yet, but there is usually an ant or two on the leaves . . . any ideas? Looks like no luffa for me this season. Bummer.

Anyway, it’s a good thing that I have that new veggie bed. There’s so much to get in the ground this fall!

Oops! Almost forgot. The last week of August is also a good time to plant wildfower seeds. If you want lots of buzzing beauties come next spring, do it.

Making friends with failure

Gardening can be humbling. It’s such an act of faith. And I would submit that it’s very good for most of us to come to terms with our basic natures, be they obsessive or careless. I’ve often heard that the fastest path to personal growth is mindfully working through a close relationship with another person. But I think that gardening also pushes a lot of hot buttons for many of us, and gives us an opportunity to observe our (sometimes unhealthy) reactions to adversity.

All of this is by way of introduction to my potato harvest. (sigh) Jan loves potatoes. Especially little fingerling potatoes. So I bought Russian fingerling potatoes and put them in the ground. Lots of them. They grew and looked gorgeous. They took up a lot of space. We waited. Some of them bloomed. We waited. Finally, the vines started to die back. So we dug one up. I got half a pound of potatoes from that one vine. Not bad. Not fantastic, but not bad.

So I waited another couple of weeks, then dug up the rest of the vines. The first vine I dug up had very few full-size potatoes. What a bummer. Then the next looked about as bad. Quite a few tiny, marble or date size, potatoes, but few “fingerlings”. So I keep digging and collecting my marbles. And I’m talking to myself, trying to find a positive angle to having devoted so much space to these things for so long (months!). Um, lesson learned? Not positive enough. Hm, blog fodder? Ack. Improving the soil tilth? Lame. I don’t know.

In the end, I got one basket full:

Maybe 2-3 pounds. Jan says it’ll feed us for quite a few meals. And he actually loves sautéing the little marbles in butter, and eating them whole (he’s so feakin’ positive; it kills me).

I have since read that red potatoes do best in our climate. Maybe I’ll blame it on poor variety choice! Yeah, that’s it! Also, I’m going to give these potato bins a go. That way, I can put them in the backyard, and save the space in the front veggie beds for something more reliable and with a shorter season.

On a brighter note, an older woman walked by the house this morning while I was watering and called me the “tomato queen”. It might have been snarky; I can’t tell. But I choose to take it as a complement. A bit later, I met someone from the neighborhood who stopped to chat about the tomatoes. Our conversation wound around and we ended up talking about Austin. He waxed wistful about the Hill Country, then cheered me on, saying that it’s people like me that will bring more personality to this area. Yay! That’s the whole point! But it still doesn’t negate the fact that the primary recreational opportunity in this area is shopping. There’s just not much to be done about living where it’s flat and dry. Drink more, I guess.

Compost experiments

I am currently running two compost experiments. Well, they’re new to me.

First, I’ve started using partially-decomposed compost as mulch. I am desperately in need of mulch in this heat. And I don’t want to use anything too woody at this stage for a couple of reasons. First, I never use anything woody in my veggie beds, because I want to be able to dig the mulch into the soil when I harvest one crop and plant a new one. So I normally mulch with compost. But these beds are just eating compost so fast that it’s not acting as a mulch for more than a couple of weeks. I could use hay or straw, but I’d like something that looks a little more “mulchy”, since the beds are in my front yard. Second, even my ornamental beds are still in need of lots of soil-building, having been recently lawn, for the most part. So I am loathe to put down anything that won’t improve the soil in the short term. Woody mulches take too long to break down for the short-term improvements that I need.

So, out came the unfinished compost. This stuff is coming out of my middle bin. The only recognizable bits are egg shells, corn cobs, and the odd peanut shell. Oh, and some hay that I added when I turned it into the middle bin. The pile was a bit too “green”, so I added hay at that time, to balance with “browns”. It worked, and now the pile is nice-smelling and foresty. But still, I wasn’t sure if my next door neighbor would see the egg shells and give me a hard time. Or something. I don’t know, I just had this sense that maybe someone would call me out on a non-federation move. But no. Not a peep. Check it out:

That’s my new turk’s cap, with a nice, thick layer of unfinished compost cooling the roots. Just be very sure not to dig this stuff into the soil if there are plants growing already, or will be soon. When the soil life are busy decomposing large bits of plant matter, it ties up nutrients that the plants rather need. So as a mulch, this is a good idea, but not as a soil amendment, unless the bed will sit empty for a season while the compost breaks down further.

I’m happy with how this worked out, so I’ll give it a go in the front yard, next.

My next experiment is in response to the fabric scraps that we have at work. I haven’t been able to find a scrap fabric recycling facility that deals with small inputs like ours. So I’m going to see if I can compost the stuff. It’s all 100% cotton, most of it organically-grown, and smaller than 2″. I donate the larger scraps to quilters. Then Jan came home with four big bags of used coffee grounds from Starbucks. It’s free. Get it. It’s really good for our alkaline soil. Anyway, very dry brown fabric + very green coffee grounds = (hopefully in a timely manner) compost!

I’ll let you know how long it takes . . .

Mama’s new veggie bed

I’m so happy. My beloved husband dug a new veggie bed in the front yard.

The entire front yard was grass when we moved in last August. Well, except for a small garden bed right in front of the front porch. We had someone dig up the left-hand section in the picture above in the fall. Then Jan dug up the middle bed in the picture above this spring. Now he’s completed the final bed on the right-hand side.

With these three beds in full sun, I think I can grow pretty much all of the veggies we need. The exception will be potatoes, which I’ll write about soon. It involves so much emotional trauma that it deserves a post of its own.

The blue flowers in the front of the middle bed are blue plumbago. I put them there to counter the sometimes messy look of veggie beds. They bloom like crazy for a long time. Today I saw a lovely brown, yellow, and white butterfly eating from the flowers (no, it wasn’t a monarch). Plumbago will die back in a cold winter, here in McKinney. I’ll eventually have flowers in the front of each bed, attracting lovely beneficial insects to my veggies.

I would also like to add more structure to these beds, like bean teepees, a low fence, etc. But the veggies come first on my priorities list.

I’m lucky that most of my immediate neighbors are just as uninterested in grass as we are. Here is our neighbor Rick, directly across the street, mowing his lawn toupee while Jan was digging:

Grass accounts for about 1/20th of his yard. I love seeing his garden out our front windows.

Oh, and here’s a gratuitous shot of the crepe myrtles along the west side of our house, next to the driveway:

I don’t like crepe myrtles. When we moved in, I told Jan to find someone who wants these. Then they bloomed. Red. So they stay. The ones to the left get too much shade to bloom well. I’m currently planting all different kinds of mints underneath these. It’s a nice, contained bed, so the mints won’t escape.

Block printing/stamping

My primary focus at home, besides the fam, is gardening. But my primary focus at work is manufacturing baby products. During the last five years, I’ve realized that I have a passion for textiles. My current obsession is embellishments. Specifically, I’d like to master as many different embellishment techniques in our own production facility as possible.

Some techniques require either lots of hand-work or very expensive machinery, like embroidery and appliqué. Some techniques can be done very economically, even with homemade equipment, like screen printing. And some techniques seem to have been almost completely lost in the U.S., most likely due to expensive labor costs, like block printing.

So, the way my particular brand of logic works, I really want to start with the simplest method. I know the labor costs are high, but I have come to value human-powered work over all others in my daily life. They are the most satisfying personally, as well as in a work environment, as a manager of people.

Unfortunately, there is very little useful information about production block printing (or stamping, as it is more commonly referred to in a domestic, U.S., setting). I’ve tried approaching the only other firm I know of that is doing it domestically, but they declined to share any of their experiences. They said they are too busy, which I guess is a good sign. So, I wing it.

My first step was to see if I could come up with an ink that I don’t have to heat-set, which is usually necessary for wear- and wash-fastness. It’s not that heat-setting is all that difficult in a production setting. But if I can simplify the process in the beginning, I’d like to. I finally found one at Dharma Trading Company: Dr. Martin’s Craft Inks. Then I ordered a rubber stamp from Rubber Stamp Champ. They make custom rubber stamps in a variety of types and sizes. I ordered one for our care labels, thinking I can use twill tape and the stamp to make care labels as we need them. Or we can even stamp the care label directly into the item, if there’s a good spot.

I stamped some scrap canvas a bunch of times, then washed sections of the fabric after 24 hours and after one week:

The variations in the darkness of each iteration are due to my stamping, e.g. the darkest stamps were made first, then I stamped again without re-inking. But overall, the ink held up perfectly even after only 24 hours. The canvas I used is too course to take the stamp well, so it’s coming across rough and uneven. But overall, I’m very happy. I can see using this combination of techniques for any small-scale printing we want to do, including logos. Next I will experiment with something larger and a tad more artistic.

‘Maters!

Two new tomatoes came off the vine today, and our first large varieties of the season. Oregon Star is on the left, Oregon Spring on the right. Oops, I guess I should have included a ruler in the pic. The big one is about 3″ across, the other is about 2″:

I harvested them as soon as they were reddish all over, even though they aren’t quite ripe. Otherwise, the mockingbirds will get them. Notice the cracks in the tops. That’s from uneven soil moisture. In our 100 degree heat, it would take much more mulch and a drip irrigation system to keep this from happening. I’ve been dumping compost on this bed like crazy, and it’s been eating it so quickly. I just can’t keep up! For now, hand-watering will have to do, as I have so many projects going that drip irrigation isn’t anywhere near the top of the list. The cracks may be unsightly, but the ‘maters are still delicious.

As for the varieties, I picked them out of my favorite seed catalog, Territorial Seed Company. I started buying from them when I lived in Seattle. Unfortunately, they don’t generally have the best varieties for Texas (d’uh). But I buy from them, anyway. I bought seven varieties of tomatoes this year, and all but one are doing just fine, despite being chosen for taste, rather than adaptation to our climate. The one that didn’t cut the mustard is Gill’s All Purpose. They almost immediately showed signs of wilt, and are hardly producing. The others are (in order of tomato production):
White Currant*
Early Cherry*
Beaverlodge Plum
Jolly Elf
Oregon Star
Oregon Spring

The two with stars will be grown again next year. The others we will replace with something that performs better in one way or another. For instance, Beaverlodge Plum is a prolific producer, but the plants are stunted, so the total harvest isn’t as large as it might be in another region.

By the way, even though these guys aren’t adapted to setting in the heat, they have all manged to set pretty well. Maybe we’ve had enough nights dip below 70? I don’t know.

Here’s a pic of a mix of the first four tomatoes on the list:

The yellow ones are the White Current, the ovoid one at the bottom left is a Jolly Elf, the largest one is the Beaverlodge Plum, and the rest are Early Cherry. The nose is Lizzi’s.

Barquitos de calabacitas [UPDATED]

[Updated with pictures from the next time we made this dish.]

I hesitate to mention squash, because of all of the angst it causes me to ponder them. However, Jan made something so delicious last night, that I have to share. I bought yellow summer squash from a new organic farmer at the market last Saturday (I try to buy at least one thing from each organic vendor, so they keep coming to the market!).

First, Jan cut each squash lengthwise and scraped out the seeds.

Then he took garlic and onions from our garden, and sautéed them in olive oil until almost clear.

Then Ella insisted that a picture of her making a goofy face would be much more interesting than anything Jan might be doing.

To that, he added the squash seeds, and sautéed them until they softened a bit.

Then tomatoes from our garden, salt and pepper.

He spooned this mixture into the squash shells,

laid havarti cheese slices over the entire half-shell,

then broiled them until the cheese was nice and melted (a little brown around the edges of cheese – mmmm). (Sorry for the dark picture, but the flash kept glaring on the plate . . . )

They were divine. It only occurred to me to take pictures after I was already almost done. Sorry. I’ll try to catch myself if he makes them again.

Oh, and when Jan’s mother made these for Ella, she cut out a little paper triangle for a sail, and used a toothpick to make a mast, making a little boat (hence the name “barquito”).

Slab in mind; slab you’ll get

When Jan and I lived in Seattle, we had a great, close-knit group of friends (most of us single, and all of us child-less, so lots of time to bond). One day we were all at our friend Will’s house, brainstorming for a garden structure in the backyard of his new house. Will isn’t always precise with words (unless they’re related to software), and kept referring to the structure as a gazebo, just to have something to call the damn thing while we hashed it out. Our friend Chad, however, being a budding architect, and therefor very precise about such things (as architects are wont to be), was becoming increasingly agitated with Will for pigeon-holing what was surely destined to be Chad’s greatest design (or something like that; it wasn’t always easy to pin down the exact cause of Chad’s psychic pain). Anyway, Chad finally raised his voice and said, “Gazebo in mind; gazebo you’ll get!” At which point we all fell over guffawing. Jan and I still use that phrase.

I mentioned previously that Jan is building a bread oven in our backyard. I should also mention that this involves an entirely new set of skills for him (which is the best kind of project, no?). Mixing, pouring and shaping concrete, bricklaying, dome-building. So there is a certain amount of skepticism with which people view such a project, when the announcement is made. But I’ll tell you what, there’s nothing like getting up at the crack and knocking out a new concrete slab to make believers of your wife, friends, and neighbors.

He dug out the footprint of the foundation, then built a 2×4 frame, and laid rebar and mesh in the hole:

Next, he pressed our neighbor Rick into service by dragging him to pick up the pallet of dry concrete. Apparently, they tried lowering the entire pallet into the bed of the truck. The truck kept settling, and settling, and settling under the weight, until the tires looked like they would pop. So they lifted it back out and loaded half of the bags into the truck, leaving the other half for a second trip:

Jan unloaded the truck, while Rick heckled him from the sidelines. Rick lost a fight with a sidewalk curb in the middle of the night several months ago, and now has a metal plate in his wrist. He thinks that’s a good excuse to supervise the neighborhood projects for a while.

Lizzi needs no excuse to sit in the shade and supervise (by smell):

Everything to this point was completed by the day before. Jan also rented a cement mixer, which greatly sped the job. When the appointed morning arrived, the manual labor began:

Over the course of about 4.5 hours, the slab took shape:

And was full:

At this point, he let the slab sit for about two hours, then came back to round the edges with a simple metal tool (I’m just the reporter; I don’t know the technical names for these things). In hindsight, it should have been done after only one hour. It had hardened a bit too much to shape easily. Fortunately, two heads are better than one, and our friend Ken just happened to pop over to borrow some sugar. Now, you may remember Ken from my previous entry. He’s Jan’s bread-baking buddy, and has more than a passing interest in this little project. Anyway, he suggested that they spray the slab down to soften it up for shaping, and took a go of it himself:

Ken is the perfect edge-finisher-person. He’s downright meticulous.

Here’s a close-up of the edge. I have to say, they did a fantastic job:

So the slab is curing for several days, putting off lots of heat, on top of our high 90s temperatures. We’ve been watering it down several times a day.

After this, Jan will buy bricks and start building up. I think Ken put it best when he stood staring at the slab and said, “Wow. It’s really happening.”