Independence Days Challenge - Japanese Beetle Edition

I am glad that I am not a novice gardener this year. A significant number of my spring crops failed with all the wet we had in June. If I didn't know this for the simple luck of the draw (a bad one), I would be so discouraged that I would probably give up on gardening entirely. Nor would I know that replanting provides even odds for a fall harvest of some crops. As it is, I've been patrolling the garden with something close to anxiety, watching my second round of starts like a hawk. The gorgeous sunflowers are some consolation. Normally at this time I would be struggling to keep up with the kale, and putting as much of it away for the winter months as I could. It feels very odd to have as much time on my hands as I do right now. Not in a good way, either. Though it is allowing me to gather plenty of Japanese beetles by hand, much to the delight of the hens.

Though we treated with milky spore early this year, we are still seeing some damage from these supremely annoying, invasive pests. Nothing native eats them; there are no checks or balances with Japanese beetles. The girls however will happily eat as many as I can bring them. I tried putting a hormonal lure and modified beetle trap right in their pen, but I think the lure is old and ineffective. It was given to me for free by a relative. I find the beetles most often on my potatoes and comfrey, and on my husband's raspberries and grape vines. I've seen a few on other garden plants and there's a shrubby sort of plant in our weed patch that attracts them very strongly. I have to dump the beetles onto a light colored frisbee so that the girls can see the little pests, which otherwise are too well camouflaged on the earth. They love this special feeding time. I'm getting about a dozen beetles each time I gather, which is now at least three times per day. It's worth it since it lets me cut back on the purchased feed for the chickens. And oh, how satisfying to see my girls eat my pests!

Planted: Finished transplanting my last ditch efforts with the Tuscan kale and Savoy cabbage for this year. I'm on pins and needles about these fall crops since my spring brassicas failed entirely due to the June rains. What we'll do without a bumper crop of kale, I just don't want to contemplate. Trying again with okra too. Put in a few more snow peas and daikon radish seeds.

Oh! I was also inspired and deeply impressed with Julie's ginger harvest. It's technically too cold to grow ginger here, but I do love it. So I decided to try growing some in a five-gallon bucket, which I'll need to bring indoors for the winter. The experiment began just a few days ago. We'll see how it goes.

Harvested: The remaining 1/3 of my garlic crop, a few excellent cylindra beets, lots of herbs, Slobolt lettuce, the beginnings of the summer squash and squash blossoms, eggs as usual from the girls.

Preserved: Air dried a few zucchini just as an experiment. Also made a simple syrup with anise hyssop for mixed drinks (alcoholic and otherwise).

Waste not: Used a bunch of newspaper for lasagna mulching in a new area of the yard. Feeding the beetles to the girls instead of putting up with crop damage or resorting to pesticides.

Preparation/Storage: Priced some shelves for food storage in the basement, but the price is really more than I want to pay. Still looking.

Community: Not much. I've committed to helping can raspberry jam with an acquaintance, and promised some garden seeds to her too. I hope she follows through and lets me know when she's ready to can.

Eat the food: Used some of last year's roasted tomato sauce and summer squash from the garden for a squash tart. It was a hit. I'm going to try it again this week with the addition of pesto. Also made a chunky salad of beets, grilled zucchini, roasted corn kernels, avocado, garlic scape pesto and mayonnaise. It all turned the lurid color of beets, but it was really tasty and went very well in wraps with Slobolt lettuce from the garden. So four of the ingredients (half) were homegrown.

Read about Sharon's Independence Days Challenge, and you can participate too!

On the Pleasures of Being an Adult

I've been very bad lately.

As background, I'm more of a vegetable person than a fruit person. That is, I can easily go without fruit for several days in a row, and can easily go for weeks or even months without fresh fruit. Whereas going without green veg for more than a day makes me feel low and crave vitamins. This is a handy set of preferences, given my locavore ambitions, since fruit is in shorter supply and has a shorter season than the wide range of vegetables that grow in my area. While we've planted several types of perennial fruits, they take so much longer to mature than annual vegetables.

But, oh! when I get my hands on fresh local fruit ... I do tend to go to excess. This past week my husband brought back three pints of sweet dark cherries from the farmers' market. He called to let me know what he'd scored before he even came home. So I whipped up a pie crust and had it ready to roll by the time he got home. While he pitted the cherries, I rolled out the dough and picked some anise hyssop from the garden (on which, more to come soon) for an accent to the rich cherry flavor. As he stood there watching me arrange the filling in the pie he asked, "What's for dinner?" I gave him a quizzical look and answered, "With dessert like this, who needs dinner?" Arguments? None. Man, do I love being an adult!

Then, just yesterday, we returned a borrowed chipper to some gardening acquaintances. These are the sort of people you can never do any nice thing for without having them turn around and do something twice as nice for you. So I always go to them bearing gifts. Yesterday it was eggs from our hens and some sprigs of the aforementioned anise hyssop. They in turn sent us home with a pint of their homegrown blueberries.

Now, we're rather low on the few foods we still buy from the supermarket just at the moment. There were no leftovers from a proper meal that needed to be finished off. This is an unusual situation in our house. But I did have an extra pie crust from when I made the cherry pie. (I always make a double batch.) And I had two lemons in a nearly empty fridge. What else did we have? Well, eggs from the girls, of course. Is it obvious where this is going? It was obvious to me. Honestly, it hardly felt like I had any choice...

Lemon curd tart with blueberries.

This didn't quite end up being dinner, but it was a close thing I can assure you. Nor, let the record show, did I indulge in it for breakfast today. I had to finish off the few blueberries leftover after making that gorgeous thing. They disappeared rather quickly with my mueslix this morning. These are stupendously good blueberries, possibly the best I've ever had in my life. Now I'm really, really glad I put in those blueberry bushes this year. As for the lemon curd, it's surprisingly easy to make. (I use this recipe.) I know it's got sugar and butter and eggs in it. I'm well versed in the conventional dietary wisdom, thank you very much. But I challenge anyone to take a bite of freshly made lemon curd and tell me with a straight face that it's bad for us. Go on, try it! You cannot possibly condemn it. Lemon curd and fresh blueberries together are just so right.

Yeah, I could and probably should eat my fruit with less sugar. It's just that fresh fruit is such a rare commodity in my diet that I can't help but want to celebrate it. Summer is the season of sweetness, after all. The frugal angle? Well, I dunno if there is one, I just felt like sharing. But if it's really examined, the lemon curd-blueberry tart hardly cost me anything. I paid for organic butter, sugar, lemons, and flour. The eggs and blueberries were free (or nearly so). And I have a plan to grow my own lemon tree starting next year, hardiness zone 6 be damned! With luck, that will be one more product that becomes both homegrown and local for me.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

I'm a tea junkie. As for many people, my day cannot properly begin without a dose of caffeine. But unlike most Americans, my preferred medium is tea, rather than coffee. I'm every bit as particular and fastidious about the tea I drink as any coffee drinker can be. It should be good tea, well brewed, and served piping hot (except, of course, when it's served well chilled).

Now it so happens that one of my most favorite teas is sold by a company on the west coast, where my husband travels several times a year for work. This tea is not cheap, and I don't like to run out of it. So he had been buying several 4-ounce packages each time he was in the neighborhood. He's due for another trip out there, and I finally got it into my head to call the company and ask about a bulk discount. Lo and behold, I ended up placing an order for 5 pounds of tea and getting it at the wholesale rate, or about half the price of the small packages sold at retail prices.

When I spoke to the woman who handles wholesale orders, she initially said that anything over a pound would be sold at a 10% discount, and that there were no further discounts until ten pounds or more were purchased at one time. I didn't argue this, but I said I would be interested in five pounds, then asked if I needed to arrange for that much to be available at one time. At that point she simply offered me the wholesale rate for five pounds of tea, even though she'd just told me that I needed to buy ten pounds to get that big a discount. I didn't ask for clarification, just placed the order.

Needless to say, I'm pretty psyched about securing a large supply of my favorite tea at nearly a 50% discount. I have the space to store the tea in the freezer, and a vacuum sealer to keep the moisture out, so it shouldn't be a problem to buy such a large amount at one time. It made my day to get such a good deal, simply by taking the trouble to ask. The fact that a lot of packaging will be avoided is pure bonus. Moral of the story is: it never hurts to ask. A few minutes of my time on the phone saved us a tidy sum.

Now for the downside. I must acknowledge that tea is not a local product for me. I'm partially consoled by the fact that tea was an item famously traded over long distances in the age of rigged sailing ships. I admit to justifying some foodstuffs such as spices and the occasional citrus fruits in the same way. My husband is traveling to that area anyhow, which means we're not making a special trip just for this one purchase. Beyond that, I have to admit that I am simply dependent upon the stuff and really don't want to go without. Also, I don't know the fair trade status of the particular tea, which is probably not a good sign. It's not easy to be an ethical eater (or drinker) and keep the budget trimmed at the same time.

All this confessional is just my way of saying I'm not perfect either. Sometimes I worry that in focusing on the positive here on my own blog, I paint my life as far more ideal than it really is. My life is a balancing act of my own ethical standards just as much as anyone else's is. So I'm asking in hopes of receiving again - if any of you are serious tea drinkers and can recommend an excellent fair trade black tea, please recommend it in the comments!

Harvest Meal: Garlic Scape Carbonara

I'm counting this as a harvest meal even though only two of the ingredients were produced by us. They're important ingredients, and there just aren't that many ingredients in this dish, after all.

Spaghetti carbonara is a decadent dish that's often done very badly. Its sauce should be silken, but it traditionally includes no cream. It's very easy to get the flavors and ingredients out of whack too. My approach is to hold firm to the three eggs per pound of pasta rule, and to save a cup of cooking water, retrieved just before draining the pasta. This gets used to loosen up the pasta after the first servings have been removed. This is not a dish that holds well, so people should be seated and waiting at a set table while the cook finishes up the dish. It's also essential that said cook have all ingredients prepped and at his or her fingertips when the pasta is done cooking.

This particular variation came about because I harvested the last of my garlic yesterday. You may recall that I am experimenting this year with leaving the scapes on certain plants in order to see if this allows those bulbs to store longer. Since these scapes were more mature, they were also tougher. So I was only able to use the few uppermost inches of each scape. I snapped off the tough portions in much the way asparagus stalks are broken at the tough-tender juncture. I used this small harvest to substitute for the garlic cloves in a traditional carbonara. The dish came out with a gentle but bright green color, which reminded us of fresh mushy peas.

Garlic Scape Carbonara

5 slices smoked bacon, cut into 1/4" strips
3 eggs, beaten
3 oz. (by weight) garlic scapes, rinsed and patted dry
1 pound spaghetti or other long strand pasta noodle
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/4 cup grated pecorino cheese
freshly ground black pepper to taste
salt for the boiling water

Bring a large kettle of water to a boil and salt it generously. Meanwhile, cook the bacon strips in a skillet over medium heat until they are well browned.

Put the garlic scapes in a food processor and process until very finely minced. (Mince extremely well with a knife if you have no food processor.) Add the beaten eggs and process just until well combined. Put the mixture back in the bowl you beat the eggs in.

Combine the grated cheeses.

Cook the pasta (using the parboil method). Prewarm a large serving bowl in the microwave or with warm water. Just before draining the pasta, reserve 1 cup of the cooking liquid. (I like to put my measuring cup in the colander so that I cannot possibly forget this step.) Have all the ingredients ready to go by your serving bowl.

Drain the pasta very quickly, without trying to drain away every last drop of water. Place the pasta in the serving bowl and immediately add the beaten egg mixture. Toss the hot pasta with the sauce very well to cook the egg and coat all the noodles with sauce. Add the bacon and grated cheeses and mix again. If the sauce looks too thick and dry, add some of the hot cooking liquid to loosen it and toss again. Reserve the remaining liquid for leftovers.

Grind some pepper over the dish and serve immediately.


Be warned: this dish is not for anyone shy of garlic. This is one powerful garlic wallop, stronger even than the clove or two of bulb garlic that normally graces carbonara. You may want a palate cleanser after this meal. I know the cheeses blow this dish as locavore fare. And it's definitely not something we can enjoy every week from a nutritional or caloric perspective. But as cheap decadence, it's right up there. Serve it with a simple green salad, and don't fret too much about the calories.

July Frugal Action Item: Stay Cool Without Touching That Thermostat

Time for another monthly Frugal Action Item. I realize it's a little late in the year to address cooling issues for some of you out there. But here in the northeastern US, so far we've had a rather cool spring and early summer. Herewith are my suggestions for beating the heat on the cheap.

Get used to it. Slowly. Your body is designed to operate in a wide range of temperatures. It has multiple strategies for cooling itself down. But after a long winter of trying to keep you warm, it needs a little time to dust off the cooling system and get it running again like a finely tuned motor. Seriously. The adjustment takes about two or three weeks, and during that time you will be a little uncomfortable sometimes. The rest of the suggestions here will help. But if you give your body that time without confusing it by hanging around in AC all day, it will make the adjustment. Your blood vessels will distribute your body heat closer to the surface for better cooling. And your sweat glands will work more effectively. Eric Brende reports on this phenomenon in his book, Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology.

Lose weight This is a perfect example of the anyway principle. If you're carrying around an extra 25 pounds, you know you should shed it for so many different reasons. Keeping cool ranks around #14 on the list of reasons to lose weight. But it will help you feel cooler, as I know from personal experience. Fatty tissue holds in body heat. Your body will be better able to cool itself when there's less insulation.

Cooling herbs and foods Don't discount the old-time wisdom of drinking mint tea or other cooling beverages. Many herbs and foods have long been held to cool the body. Cucumber and watermelon are famously cooling. There are many tasty and safe herbs that help cool our bodies. Mint, lemon, oats, and pomegranate are considered refrigerant plants. Okra, garlic and oregano are diaphoretic, meaning that they promote perspiration. Chamomile and sage are vasodilators, meaning they help your blood vessels widen. This both lowers blood pressure and facilitates cooling. Try adding some of these to your diet in the summer months.

Cool drinks A glass of ice water costs almost nothing, and can cool you down more effectively than just about anything, short of submerging yourself in cool water. Consciously schedule cold drinks into your daily routine. If you work outside in hot weather you should have a cool drink anytime you feel thirsty, or at least once every hour. Even if you don't do physical labor, you could trade up your morning dose of caffeine for a cold version: iced coffee or iced tea. Sun tea is particularly cheap to make, and once brewed can hang out in the fridge for a few days as you drink it down. No fussing with brewing it every single morning. Same goes with regular tap water. Keep some in the fridge so you don't need to run the tap until the water gets cold. However, beware water intoxication - the overloading of your body with far too much water. This can be fatal. Make sure some of your beverages include some electrolytes, and use common sense, and you'll be fine.

Ceiling fans go a long way to making you feel cooler than the air temperature would suggest. You can run a ceiling fan all day and not use up the same amount of electricity as you would running an air conditioner for one hour. If your fan has a switch to change the direction of the spin, be sure it's set to turn counterclockwise as you look up at it during the summer months. The clockwise spin forces warmer air downward, and so is intended for the winter season.

Put your feet in a basin of cold water. If you don't have your own pool and you don't want to pay for the privilege of using one, you can still cool off by submersion. A basin of water just big enough to fit your feet in will provide a surprising amount of cooling power. I've been told that this method can actually prevent heat stroke for those who lose power during a heat wave, though I haven't seen any formal studies on this claim. I have tried it myself and been very impressed by how much cooler I feel just by soaking my feet. Of course, if your neighbors have a pool and offer to let you use it, dive right in.

Get a summer haircut. You know you can lose a great deal of heat through your head, which is why your mother always told you to wear a hat during the winter. If you've worn your hair long for many years, even if you usually wear it up, you may be stunned at how much cooler a short haircut can be. Even if you typically save by cutting your own hair in a simple style, one short professional cut in late spring will probably let you slide well into late summer if you plan to just grow it out for winter. Guys, for you, buzz cuts are the way to go, and you can save by doing them at home.

Wear as little as possible. If you're in the privacy of your own home, you can pretty much do whatever feels comfortable. Tank tops are my sartorial choice when at home in hot weather. Many women also swear by skirts made of light fabrics - cooler than any sort of pants or shorts, and these can be worn outside the home almost anywhere.

Hit the library for some free AC. You pay for it through your taxes, so you might as well take advantage. If you're letting your body adapt to warmer temperatures though, be aware that this may set back any adjustment it's already made. You can let your body handle the early days of summer, and save the library for an hour or two during the most scorching days.

Sleep as low as possible. If you have a multilevel home, sleep downstairs if you can. The lower rooms of the house are naturally cooler, since hot air rises. Sleeping on an air mattress on the floor will also help a little bit if you have only one floor. An air mattress holds less of your body heat close to you than a conventional mattress will. So if you've got one of these for guests, consider breaking it out when the hottest weather strikes. If you cool your house for more than a couple of months per year, you might even break even on the purchase of a new air mattress the first year, providing you really do run the AC less often.

Install an attic fan. This is one of the most cost effective house cooling measures out there. Attic spaces can easily reach above 100 F on a day that is sunny but merely warmish. Removing that hot layer above the living space will dramatically lower the cooling needs for the rest of the house.

Cook outside, or not at all. Summer is a great time for salads and lighter fare that needs little or no cooking. So steer clear of the boiling vats of water for pasta dishes, or an hour-long oven run for casseroles. Raw foods won't heat you up, nor the house. When you want a cooked meal, think about what you can do with a grill or a solar oven. It may take a little planning to cook this way if you're not accustomed to it. But if you make it a habit, it'll become as routine as anything else in your life. Remember that grilling doesn't necessarily mean a plate full of meat. Eggplant, peppers, asparagus, summer squash, large mushroom caps, and corn on the cob all make fantastic grilled fare. If you have an outdoor electrical outlet on the porch, you can plug in a crockpot or a rice steamer outside. Or you could run an extension cord outside if there is no outdoor outlet. No sense in heating up your kitchen if you don't have to.


Unless you're in the southern hemisphere, there's really no Alternative Action Item this month. Wrong season for you? Check out Staying Warm with the Thermostat Set Low, which in many ways is a mirror post to this one. If you're in the midst of summer and all of these suggestions are already old hat to you, then your Alternative Action Item is to add a new cooling tip in the comments!

Stay cool everyone.

Knee High By the Fourth of July?

Check!

Our popcorn shows promise. If the harvest is as good as this augurs, we should be able to go without buying our favorite treat for quite a few months. Maybe even an entire year.


In general, the squash is not doing all that well this year. I don't think they liked the heavy rain this month. But one volunteer vine that I spared seems to have bred true enough to be producing pumpkins. I'm optimistic that I'll get at least one triamble from the seeds Novella offered this past winter.


The comfrey plants have exploded in their second year and don't seem to have minded the rain at all. The beauty of this plant is that I can hack it back, and hack it back again to spread the nutrients it accumulates all over the garden. I just use the chop and drop method. The pretty but shy blossoms are much loved by the bumblebees and other bees. These plants will provide fertilizer and mulch to the rest of my plants for many years to come.


The chili pepper plants did not like the heavy rain at all. I think they were almost ready to call the whole thing off when the rain let up. My husband planted some early Anaheims that already have recognizable chilis on them. My poblano chilis are farther behind, with just a few tiny buds promising fruit. With luck, the plants will get weather they like better in the next two months. I'm hoping for a large harvest so that I can smoke some of the poblanos, thus turning them into ancho chilis. When fully dried, I'll try making my own ancho chili powder, like Hank did. This mild but flavorful spice makes it into a large portion of the meals I prepare.


One of the two varieties of soup bean that I planned to grow this year failed entirely. But the Cherokee Trail of Tears bean (which I also grew last year) did better. I've since learned that light colored beans in general are more susceptible to ground rot than dark colored beans. As it happens, the Cherokee Trail of Tears is a jet black bean, while the Hutterite Soup is a creamy pale bean. So I guess it's no surprise that one did much better than the other with all the rain we had. Nonetheless, I'm trying again with a different pale bean - the Flagrano, a flageolet type. Show above are some Cherokee Trail of Tears growing on one of the bean tripods I made with that bamboo we harvested early this year. This is an evening shot so the vines are shaded. But they're growing well. And look what they're sheltering behind there:


-My next crop of spinach. The beans will keep the worst of the heat off these little sprouts, which like cool temperatures.


Here is my experiment with potatoes this year. There are rumors of prodigious yields from individual potato plants if they are kept well hilled as they grow. Most of my potatoes are planted in trenches about 8" deep. Each time the plant gets 5"-6" of growth above the soil line, I bury them a bit more. But I can only hill so far before I run out of loose soil to mound around them. Thus the bucket experiment. Not only is it trivially easy to continue mounding a potato plant in a bucket, but harvest will be as easy as dumping the entire bucket into the wheelbarrow. No-dig potatoes!

Some people claim that only late season potatoes will yield significantly more if well hilled. Some say potato plants set all the tubers they will develop before they flower, and that hilling beyond that point is wasted effort. A few of my trenched potatoes are already flowering, so the hilling there is done. In the buckets I have German Butterballs, the only late season variety I'm growing this year, though I have German Butterballs in the ground as well. They haven't yet flowered, but the buckets are already completely full of dirt. I recorded the weight of the seed stock for these individual plants, so we'll see how they yield. Incidentally, the potatoes in the buckets didn't seem bothered in the least by the heavy rains, while those in the ground started to look a bit sulky. I drilled several drainage holes in each bucket before planting.


My Tuscan kale plants, which for two years have been very reliable and vigorous producers, just aren't growing for me this year. They were badly damaged by the slugs and then hammered by the rain. They don't seem to be bouncing back at all. On the other hand, the Brussels sprouts I put in a week ago where the garlic had just been harvested, just a few feet away from the kale, seem to be doing quite well. I'm going to try again with new seedlings of kale and some Savoy cabbage, hoping for a good fall crop. Tuscan kale has been a mainstay of our diet for the last two years, especially over the winter months. The prospect of no kale harvest this year is worrisome.


I'm quite the curmudgeon when it comes to flowers in the garden. It had better have some utility beyond looking pretty if it wants a spot in the best growing area on our property. Oddly, my husband likes pretty things just for the sake of beauty more than I do. Fortunately, flower mixes attract polinators and predator insects, so I will cede some territory to him for his pretty stuff. He drastically overseeded his allotment with all sorts of flowers. They are just about ready to explode into bloom. These are a few of the earliest blossoms. It should be quite a show in another week or so. I don't even know what's in there, but I hope some are perennials or accomplished self-seeders.


This is a small patch of the fall cover crop we planted last year that escaped destruction. It's a mix of hairy vetch (purple blooms) and rye (drooping grain heads) that we decided to let go, just to see what it would do. Turns out that hairy vetch is one of the few plants that harbor the minute pirate bug, a voracious predator. The rye looks like it's nearing maturity. Maybe we'll harvest a few stalks and see how the grain threshes out.


Finally, a mystery bug. Anyone know what this tiny iridescent orange - fly? wasp? - is that I found on a corn leaf this morning? There are a lot of them around, but I've never seen them munching on any plant. So my guess is that it's a predator of some sort.