Tuscan Kale Seeds Are In

The prolonged hot weather we've been having is moving everything in the garden along very quickly this year.  The Tuscan kale plants that I allowed to overwinter have already set their seed and matured it.  This seed, from plants I put in last year, represents three generations of survival here in southeastern PA.  Given the horrendous wet gardening year that was 2009, and our fairly impressive winter storms, this is a good start towards selecting for plants that will tolerate the wide swings that nature brings to this region.

I have enough seed to provide about a dozen of you with a small quantity of seed.  You'll need to let your plants go to seed in the second year if you want a larger quantity of seed.  But that will only mean that your seed is better adapted to your particular location as you save it year to year.  And the seed will be abundant.  This happens to be very easy seed to save.  Simply unfold a square of newspaper under the dry seed pods hanging off the plant, and rub the pods between your hands.  The seeds and some split pods will fall onto the newspaper.  Then you fold up the newspaper, keeping all the seeds in, and open it up somewhere cool and dim so all the insects can crawl away and the seed can completely dry.

Just so you know, this kale goes by several other names, including kale lacinato, dinosaur kale, and cavolo nero. In some parts of the US, if you plant this seed as soon as you receive it, you'll stand a good chance of getting a late fall crop.  Tuscan kale is pretty cold hardy and it takes a serious frost or two to shut it down for the year.  In my zone, 6b, about one half to two-thirds of the plants survive the winter with absolutely no help from me and go on to set seed in the next year.  I love the baby kale leaves I can harvest early in the spring from those plants.

If you're interested, leave a comment with your name and mailing address.  (I know I can legally mail seed to Canada, but I'm unsure about other countries.  If you can point me to references about the legality for your country, I'm game.)  I will delete all comments with personal information as I read them.  If you have something to say about this kale or seed saving other than asking for some seeds, leave a separate comment.  Oh, and whoever it was that wanted to trade some of your Russian kale seeds for some of my Tuscan kale seeds, I'm still interested.

We Eat from Glut to Glut

It's guest post time again.  My husband waxes lyrical, once again, on fruit:

I’d like to start out by saying I love raspberries (especially black). So when I found a wild black raspberry cane in the far back corner of our property last summer, I savored every berry. The one downside was that it was growing out of a pile of dirt for which I had other plans. I showed the cane to a friend and he said its life was spent. But he then proceeded to show me how to propagate the associated vines that had sprung from the main cane. So I started cutting, digging and planting my new wild black raspberry patch. The heartier cuttings bore fruit and it’s been a joy to find those luscious ripe berries hiding in the leaves just as in my youth. It was also a pleasure to see that even more would ripen on the cluster later. But now the season is nearly over. Daily harvest has dropped from almost ½ pound per day into the <50 gram region. When we were flush, it was black raspberry crumble for dessert. And one time it even included 12 of our precious new sour cherries. But the season is waning and it’s only enough to pour cream over, add a little sugar and eat with a spoon. Oh, delight! But the sadness of their passing is tempered by the signs of a massive wineberry harvest soon to come. On to the next season!

P.S. My wife found some excellent canvas forearm sleeves as protection when reaching in deep. Their effectiveness is profound.

(Kate says: the canvas gauntlets are from Fedco.  I expect them to really pay off in the blackberry brambles, which have much more formidable thorns than raspberries.)

Elderflower Cordial

Mmmm!  I'm thrilled to report that the two elder plants we put in last year have produced well already.  The one that died and came back from the root stock is much smaller than the real survivor, but both have set blossoms.  I was hugely excited to try making elderflower cordial from our own harvest.  (Despite the name, this cordial is non-alcoholic.) What little was left over when I'd filled my canning jars was just enough to pour over two tumblers of ice and mix with our good well water.  It's delicious.  Very different from the outrageously expensive bottled stuff from Austria that I used to buy.  Ours has more floral and green notes, and a more complex taste overall.  I think I honestly prefer ours on the basis of taste alone.  Add in the personal satisfaction, lower carbon footprint, and financial savings and there's no contest.  If I could make enough cordial, I'd drink this stuff every day of the year.

In making the cordial, I took instruction from The River Cottage Preserves Handbook.  Basically, it's elderflower essence with citrus zest and juice, plus sugar - a pretty easy recipe and procedure so far as food preservation goes.  I'm so enamoured of all things River Cottage at the moment that I actually pre-ordered this title before it was published, and paid full price for it, though admittedly by using a gift card.  The Preserves Handbook is no less impressive than the two other River Cottage cookbooks I've got.  Really an inspiring range of usual and unusual preserves, and very much geared to those who like to graze the hedges and forage.  Though originally published in England, there's not much here that seems out of reach to my mid-Atlantic American milieu.  I don't know that we have fruiting edible hawthorns or wild gooseberries, but everything else at least sounds familiar. If you're accustomed to following USDA recommendations for canning, the British methods of preservation set out in this book will seem either a little lax or refreshingly low on the paranoia scale, depending on your perspective.  I found it easy enough to follow the recipe to prepare the syrup, and then use the Ball Blue Book recommendations for canning other syrups.  I may try to squeeze in another batch of this cordial this year.  If I can scare up some crab apples (I think our neighbors have a tree) I plan to use some of our elderberries in the Handbook's hedgerow jam recipe later in the year.  If not, the recipe for Pontack, a sweet-sour sauce made from elderberries, sounds right up my alley.

The River Cottage Preserves Handbook mentions that there's a lot of variation in the scent and flavor of blooms from one elder to the next, and I can see even from our tiny sample pool that this is quite true.  The first batch of elderflower essence I made from the blooms of the smaller plant had a strong green-grassy aroma, not all that pleasant in fact.  I ended up throwing that batch out before adding any of the citrus or sugar; not much invested, so no great loss.  The blossoms on the larger plant smelled better on the branch, and I also took the precaution of removing as much of the stem from the blooms as was feasible before steeping them.  It made all the difference.  I look forward next year to trying batches from the two different elders we put in this year.  In the meantime, maybe I can find some gasket-topped bottles to store the cordial in.  That would be both prettier and easier to pour.

What are you canning these days?

Birthday Loot

I really like having my birthday in June.  In childhood, it often meant final exams on my birthday, but even then I appreciated the fact that it was six months from Christmas - the other time of the year I got presents.  A six month spread seemed like a good thing then.  Now I just like that I can count on fairly nice weather for my birthday.

I got a pretty sweet lineup of gifts this year.  Garlic scapes and the first tiny zucchini of the year.  Last year the only gift I wanted was a full weekend of my husband's help on a project.  We got the rocket stove built over that weekend.  I liked the gift-project idea a lot, so the only thing I asked for this year was this project:

Why, yes.  How observant of you!  The mailbox does swivel.

This is our new hand tool depot at the entrance of our main garden bed.  Out of all the materials that went into this project, only the concrete and the paint were bought new.  The huge mailbox was a craigslist score, with a busted hinge that my husband repaired.  The post we pulled out of a dumpster a couple years back, and the hardware to make the whole mailbox swivel was lying around the work table in the garage.  All told, our costs came to about $25.  I think the mailbox-for-garden-hand-tools idea was first published in an old Rodale book a few decades back.  Just goes to show that good ideas stand the test of time.  I had fun with the colors, as you can see.  I'm not terribly creative or talented as far as visual arts go, but I do like color.  I guess painting the bee hives earlier this year got me on some sort of paint kick.  It seems with the mailbox I was thinking Mediterranean.  Or something.  I love seeing the bright colors in the garden; it makes me happy. Now I'd like to tear out the hideous wallpaper in both of our bathrooms and splash some riotous colors around those rooms.  Alas, calmer heads will probably prevail on that front.

Having storage for my tools right in the garden itself will not only clear up clutter in the shed, but it will shave several minutes off my gardening routine on a daily basis.  I am all about making the task of food production easier and less time-intensive.  Invariably I end up making several trips to and from the shed to retrieve and put away tools as I need them and finish with them.  I could use a few extra minutes every day, couldn't you?

Even though the hand tool depot was my only requested gift, I also got a breakfast of waffles topped with our own black raspberries, plus the large garden hod I've been coveting for the last few years.  Pretty sweet!  My husband definitely knows my tastes.  Thanks, honey!

Sustainable Cooking: Curried Chickpeas with Tomato

I've made very little progress towards my goal of using our rocket stove and solar oven more frequently this year.  Of course I have excuses, and they're semi-legitimate, but they boil down to the universal excuses for everything that's wrong with our culture: I'm busy, and it's not convenient.  I'm working on making it more convenient to use either the rocket stove or the solar oven, but in the meantime, I need to just suck it up and cook out there anyway.

It helps that the heat has been infernal lately.  Who wants to cook inside with such weather?  So on Saturday evening I soaked a bunch of chickpeas.  On Sunday morning, I cleaned up the solar oven, and added a bunch of seasoning ingredients to the chickpeas.  The day was blazing hot and sunny almost all the time.  The dish didn't come out perfectly: I'd left a lot more liquid in with the beans than was really needed.  But they cooked through quite well and were tasty.

I wasn't working with a recipe, but here's what I did.  First I drained the soaking liquid the chickpeas were in and then recovered them with fresh water.  I chopped up about five cloves of garlic, and minced about an inch of a fat section of fresh ginger.  These were added to the soaking liquid along with a palmful of dried minced onion, and some spices, roughly in descending order of quantity: cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper, cayenne, and amchoor.  I also added a good drizzle of oil and a coarsely diced fresh tomato.  This left my cooking pot for the solar oven absolutely brimming.  It went into the solar oven around 9am, and as I checked the temperature in the oven throughout the day it varied from 150-255 F (66-124 C) as the outdoor temperature climbed to 94 F (34 C) and clouds occasionally scudded across the sky.  I only added salt when the chickpeas were done cooking.

Towards the end of the day I put some basmati rice to cook in the steamer out on the porch.  I also went out to the garden to rustle up a quicky relish to go with what is essentially a beans and rice dish: roughly equal parts fresh cilantro (including soft stems) and spearmint (leaves only) along with a whole scallion, a pinch of salt, and a bit of lime juice.  Everything whizzed together in the food processor, with the sides scraped down a few times between bouts of whizzing.  This crude relish isn't shown in the picture but it added a lovely bit of green both visually and taste-wise.  Very refreshing it was too, on a hot evening.  I think adding a zucchini or two to the chickpeas for the last hour or so of cooking would have added a nicer balance of veg too.

I'd make this again but definitely reduce the amount of liquid that goes in the cooking pot.  It worked as a somewhat soupy dish because the rice could soak everything up.  But more concentrated flavor would be better.  Cooking in a solar oven is definitely an experimental endeavor for me.  It's a bit like baking in that you have to set things up and then relinquish the possibility of intervention once the actual cooking begins.  Because the cooking containers are very nearly airtight, I'm having to learn how much liquid to add.  And this is an iterative process.  Also it seems to me that flavors in solar-cooked dishes are more mellow and more diffuse than I would expect from conventionally cooked food.  The flavors in this dish reminded me of leftover curry that had been cooked a few days previously - all the seasonings had spread themselves out and reached a point of equilibrium among all ingredients.  So I might also learn to be a little heavy handed with the seasonings as I continue with the solar cooking goal for this year.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Solstice!

An Unanticipated Addition to the Homestead

Farming friend has this wonderful knack of calling me up and saying, "Hey, do you want _____?"  What she's offering varies wildly, but it's always awesome, and always something I've never considered before.  Last fall it was the unloved bits from her hogs, which went into making my first batch of guanciale, or cured hog jowls.  They turned out really well, and I was sorry when they were gone.

This time she outdid herself.  She called me twice on Sunday with two of her characteristically amazing offers.  The first offer I'm going to hold in reserve, and write about it later if it works out. But secondly, she asked if I wanted a three-week-old turkey poult.  Now, as you know if you've read my blog very long, I have a policy of not turning down free handouts, which I think has a lot to do with why these offers keep coming.  However, farming friend's offers this time around were a bit of a challenge.  While I didn't want to say "no" to either offer, neither did I feel ready to say "yes" on the spot.  We'd never considered getting a turkey, so I really hadn't the slightest idea how to make that work.

This poult had either arrived as a hatchling at my friend's farm with a deformity, or had been abused by its flockmates.  In any case, it ended up blind in one eye, and was being picked on to the point that it was going to take some serious damage or be killed outright.  So farming friend isolated it in a separate brooder box, but didn't want the added chore of dealing with a single poult when there were so many other animals to attend to on a daily basis.  Of course, in principle I'd love to raise my own Thanksgiving turkey.  But I had so many questions!  Could the turkey stay with our laying hens?  (Not at such a young age.)  Do turkeys roost at night?  (Sometimes.  Our coop is very small, and the turkey will get pooped on by the hens if it's not up on the bar with them.)  Can it eat what the laying hens eat?  (Apparently not immediately; it'll need a higher protein feed for a while.)  Will the turkey take until fall to reach a good size for slaughter? (Pretty much.)  Will it be able to hold its own with the hens?  (Probably, once it reaches a certain size.)

Farming friend assured me that she would bring all that was required to take care of the poult for the next few weeks.  And that if it just didn't work out for us to keep it here, she'd take it back. With that sort of offer, I couldn't see any reason to say no.  So I said yes, and she came by Monday afternoon.  So now we've got a poult upstairs.  In a room with a door that latches securely (young cats in the house, you know).  It'll go outside in a week or two, in its own makeshift pen.  Right now it still seems to want the warmth of the heat lamp in its brooder box, despite the sultry summertime weather we're having.  When it's quite a bit bigger than it is now, I may try keeping it with the hens.  Farming friend figures they'd eat the turkey at this stage if they had the chance.  I don't know how fast it'll grow, but by its looks I'd guess it needs at least a month before it's bigger than the hens, maybe two.

This turkey is a Bourbon Red heritage breed turkey, so it'll put on weight slowly compared to the industrial standard, the broad breasted white.  We don't know yet whether it's male or female, which makes my decision not to name it that much easier.  I might - might - relent so far as to start calling it Thanksgiving.  Sex characteristics should begin to show in another four to five weeks.  Provided nothing goes wrong, we've got the main course for my favorite holiday meal all squared away.  I'm glad we've some experience slaughtering chickens already, because I don't think I'd want to start on a turkey.  If all goes well, I'll be able to try out Novella Carpenter's branch lopper execution method. 

A turkey was not in the homestead plan for this year, but what the heck!