Trying to love kale and other autumn tales

Do you live in Vermont? If you don't or if you aren't here now, please come visit. This is the most beautiful time in this state where each season has its individual magic. This one, this last burst of color and light and clarity before winter's grays, this one is the best. We have a guest room, and we live right in the middle of all this beauty. I can't possibly capture it for you, photos don't do it justice, you'll have to come and see. It is a little bit frantic, full of an almost desperate need to fit it all in, to finish the last things before winter. Everything smells good, food tastes better...have I convinced you yet? Are you sick of my ravings about autumn yet? Well buckle up folks, we've got a few months to go before I sink back into seasonal affective disorder and I warn you, I may be prolific.

I came home from work today and hubby and I took a slow walk down the road, enjoying the cool air and checking out the leaves that seemed to change overnight. It was a nice walk, and we caught each other up on the events of the day. As we were coming around the curve of the road, two barred owls starting calling to each other over our heads, one on each side of the road. It was magical. Then one joined the other on the right side of the road and it sounded like they were chatting with each other- the calls were almost conversational. I'd never heard that before. It was a little spooky, a little exciting, and made it feel even more like fall. Why do owls feel like fall? I don't know, but see what you think. Here's a link to their call.

I spent some time in the garden with my camera today after the rain. Things are looking good- this spell of chilly air has made all the cool weather crops explode. The kale...I tell you, we've been eating kale since May, and I've never been a huge fan of it. It's nice enough in small doses. But we didn't plant a small dose. We planted an army of kale, and it has tripled in size in the last couple of weeks. So I'm trying to love it. Here's my first attempt, beginning with photos. And this recipe might help. I'll let you know.

I've been thinking a lot today about writing generally and about posting to this blog specifically. I never explained why I started writing this. So many blogs have some explanation of who the author is and why they sent their thoughts out into the world. Well, I've been thinking about it. Why do I write? Because I hope that you're reading. Because the idea that I'm writing to a potentially unknown audience thrills me unspeakably. I write for you known readers, Bill and Jenn and Dwight and Sara and Ralph and Tara, and the rest of you who have been checking in. And I write for those of you who I don't know who could possibly be reading (oh, the thrill of that!). And I want to share how I see my corner of the world. So much of that is food and growing and green things but it's also traveling and seeing friends and the sound of an owl on a Thursday night in September. This is my attempt to capture my life in ways that will resonate for me and hopefully for you. And your feedback has been so, so important to me. Thank you for that.

Blighted

I don't know why I thought we'd get away with it. Everyone else has succumbed to the blasted blight. The early summer's cool and rainy weather made ideal conditions for late blight. This disease hit northeastern farmers hard in the early days of the summer, wiping out tomato and potato crops completely. But the last month or so has been warm and dry, definitely not ideal conditions for blight. And the buzz has abated a bit. And as the big, fat Cherokee Purple beauties started rolling in from our garden, I really let myself think that we might miss it. I was injudicious with my tomatoes. I was flagrantly adding them to everything- white beans and sliced cherry tomatoes, salads of nothing but tomatoes, basil and olive oil, pot of beans simmering on the stove? Add some tomatoes. I forgot that they are rare this summer. And now they're all gone.

Friday of last week, we harvested a whole flat of tomatoes from the garden, handfuls of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, beautiful Cherokee Purples, and the start of the Gilbertie Paste- the tomatoes I was counting on to stock our basement shelf with canned tomatoes. We spent two days in Montreal with my in-laws and came home to half our plants dead or dying. Those two days we were in Montreal - and which I'll get to in a later post, there was amazing food there - were cool and rainy. On Monday, I took the day off to spend it with my in-laws. We went out to the garden to harvest some tomatoes and I was shocked to see how quickly everything had deteriorated. It was awful. I had to sit down and just look for a while.

The leaves were spotted with brown lesions and so were the stems on the worst looking plants. They looked pretty terrible, especially given that they were beautifully vibrant and heavy with fruit three days earlier. So my mother-in-law and I spent the day Monday picking green tomatoes, pulling out plants and bagging them, taking down the trellis, and cover cropping the bed. We also cut off the potato plants at the base and I'll harvest the potatoes in a couple of weeks, hoping that the disease hasn't made it to the tubers. If it has, we'll have potato mush in our root cellar this winter.

This breaks my heart in a million little ways. I know that there are worse things that could happen, but we had thirty tomato plants and they looked healthier than they've ever been for us before. The whole landscape has changed in the garden. It looks empty without the tomato and potato plants. The beans are the only thing left out there with any presence. It has taken summer and turned it into fall in one weekend. The work of garden clean-up that we'd normally do in October, we did at the tail end of August. There is one more flat of tomatoes sitting on the kitchen counter. I am trying to ration them, but they'll go bad before we can eat them all. That's right about when we'd start canning except there aren't any more waiting to be picked in the garden. Summer's over with an abrupt, unanticipated halt. And we'll hope for better things next year.

A part of me is glad to move on. To shift to the sweetness of fall and cooler air, to appreciate the culmination of a summer's work and to see the smooth earth, seeded with rye, waiting for the cold. The slow cooling period, the flaming trees and crisp air is like a final gift before winter sets in, something to tide us over between summer's lushness and the winter grey. But I'm not sure I was quite there yet. I was looking forward to the canning and even the fruit fly haze from too many tomatoes on the counter to eat fast enough. So I'll spend this weekend making green tomato chutney, fried green tomatoes, maybe a green tomato pie - I saw a recipe for that somewhere recently. And I'll freeze some more corn and then that will be enough. The onset of fall and the end of the garden for the year. Damn blight.

Photo credits to Ralph.

Alium wealth

Well, we thought that we were rich in onions with the harvest of our Walla Wallas. And indeed we are. The caramelized onions we made and ate on top of everything for a week. That was wealth. And the onions I sauteed last night with chard and fresh tomatoes and tossed with pasta. That was luxury. But I think we are reaching slightly ridiculous heights with the number of onions I pulled out of the garden today.

Remember those photos? The ones with the labels from my onion bed? Well, I pulled out the rest of the shallots- the ones that were sacrificed for the love of beans and are consequently puny. And I pulled the New York Earlies which were not early and not impressive in any other way either. And I pulled the four rows of Cortlands. They weren't as big as the Walla Wallas, but they'll be a lot harder, and a lot longer lasting in our root cellar. (The root cellar that I hope we'll have finished by the time the onions are dry and cured.)

When you open the door from our kitchen into the garage, the smell of aliums is overwhelmingly, overpoweringly intense. My hands were funky with the smell of onion. But we won't buy an onion for the next 9 months. Rich, rich, rich indeed.

(photo credit to my hubby, Ralph)

August bounty

Well, yes, I started the weekend a little cranky. I freely admit it. I don't remember why but I do recall that I was cranky all the way through Friday night and into Saturday morning. So I went out to the garden in an attempt to keep my pique to myself (as it wasn't spreading peace and joy throughout the land). And would you know...there I discovered onions? Walla Walla sweet onions, huge and round? It happened while I forgot to pay attention, and all of a sudden, they're ready for picking.

So I found an attitude adjustment in the midst of the onions. A whole garden cart full of onions, which represents only about a quarter of the eventual harvest. Just about nothing could have made me happier. Except that there were beets ready too. While they could have stayed there a bit longer to fatten even further, they were sort of victim to the beans.

The beans that are taking over the world out there, close cousin to Jack's variety. They've overtopped the original trellis, a wimpy four-feet tall. And they've since overtopped the second trellis I rigged up over the original one, another foot and a half higher. I underestimated their vigor. I mean, really, look at them above... what has the right to be so youthfully vital and vigorous in August? These things are still growing! I could build a third trellis on top of the other two and it would overwhelm that one in a couple of days. Amazing. So anyway, they were crowding the beets and I've been wanting to make pickled beets, so I yanked out all the blood-red roots and laid them in the grass for washing with the hose.

And so, it turned into a harvest weekend, rather unexpectedly. The summer that's been slow to yield finally produced. We even plucked the first full-sized ripe tomato, a sincere accomplishment in a year full of Late Blight and decimated tomato patches all over Vermont. Two eggplant and some more of the seemingly endless chard and kale plus some bonus potatoes growing out of the compost pile rounded out the take.

Perhaps it is obvious and everyone would feel this way, but reaping the bounty from all our hours in the garden gives me a measure of joy that's hard to compare to anything else and that doesn't diminish from year to year. Every time, it is a miracle when the damn bean plants once again over top whatever trellis I've built. Tying the onions into bunches to hang to cure in the garage, braiding the garlic to dry along with the onions, pickling beets in the late afternoon, and hubby coming in the back door with two fists full of potatoes gleaned from volunteer plants in the compost pile, these things all bring me immense pleasure. So, yes, I was cranky, but now, my hands are stained red from the beets (and from a minor mishap with the knife and slippery beets) and my pique has faded. I so love this garden.

(top photo credit to hubby, ralph)

Summer Eating

The thing that I love best about summer is how exercise makes all food taste just about transcendent. My husband and I spent yesterday canoeing the Lamoille River. It was a long, lazy paddle down a relatively swiftly moving river and the day was perfect. Sun all day long and bugs kept at bay with a steady breeze. It was a lazy paddle, but the four hours in the sun were enough to make us both ravenous when we finally hauled the canoe up the riverbank through a ridiculously luxuriant carpet of poison ivy.

Dinner at friends' house and it was perfect summer eating. Burgers on the grill, steamed beets from the garden dressed with balsamic and salt, salad that most of us didn't get to because we were so full after all the rest of it. Gin and tonics. Finished off with a long soak in the hot tub beneath a three-quarter moon. Summer indeed.

Deer in the Strawberries

This is the first year of eating our own strawberries from the garden and the thrill of finding new bright red berries among the leaves is definitely worth the year-long wait before you get fruit. Yesterday was the first real harvest and we ate half of it before I could take this picture. The plants look lovely, very upright and vibrantly green.

Apparently, the deer think the plants look like dinner. We went out yesterday to find that all the tops of the outermost row of plants had been munched. This has happened often enough in my life as a gardener that I no longer experience the sense of utter despair that first came when I discovered that a groundhog thought my unfenced garden was his pasture of plenty but it still makes me grind my teeth. We knew it was coming and we knew we were tempting fate by not putting a fence up right away. So here we are, contemplating a Saturday of digging post holes and running fence line instead of the bike ride we had planned.

But those strawberries are worth it. We made drinks yesterday afternoon with dark rum and tonic and mashed strawberries and swung in the hammock that Ralph gave me for my birthday while we enjoyed them. The strawberries soaked up the rum and were just about the best part of the day. We might try strawberry mojitos this evening- the mint plant on the deck is growing so fast I almost expect to see it unfurling new leaves as I watch. We'll deserve it after digging all those post holes.

Spring Bounty

The spring has been good to our garden. The early spinach we planted last fall wintered over nicely and we've been eating it for a month now. Onions are in and thriving, garlic is nearly two feet tall now. My beans (special Rancho Gordo beans that I saved from the bags of beans we loved best) are doing well and are nearly ready to be trellised.

But most impressive right now is the 100 feet of spinach ready to be harvested, washed, blanched, bagged and frozen. This seemed like a good idea in April. Ralph and I decided to plant a whole bed of spinach in mid April in the hopes we'd be able to harvest it before the tomatoes went in. Well the tomatoes are sitting in the grass next to the garage, ready to go in. And I'm looking at a sink full of spinach, with more on the counter in a big bushel basket and wondering, how exactly do you freeze spinach? There is, incidentally, more in the garden still waiting to be harvested.
Oh my.

Maybe not exactly the smartest time to figure it out, but very much my style, and I've pulled out the Ball Blue Book in hopes of some inspiration. The mini snails that we've been finding in the spinach are crawling out of the sink, headed for dry ground. And I'm here, procrastinating on the blanching and bagging part of the deal.

But I'm definitely enjoying the thought of spinach omelets with mushrooms, spinach pizza, sauteed spinach with lemon, garlic, and red pepper flakes, spinach salad, and green goddess dressing colored with spinach.

So best get on with it, eh?