Planning the Tomato Crop

I can't think of any crop that's more important for happiness than home-grown tomatoes. They are one of the veggies that, in my opinion, money can't buy.

Last year I planted tomatoes three times. The first batch was killed by a surprise hail storm, the second by a series of late season freezes that even a couple of makeshift hoop houses couldn't withstand. The last batch made it through most of the season until we lost our agricultural water in July. Still, we ended up with enough tomatoes to supply our household for about 3/4 of the year. I say 3/4 but that's a guess. I still have some tomatoes in the freezer, and one jar in the cupboard as well, because I was so stingy with them throughout the year. Also, I bought fresh tomatoes from the store from time to time.

This year I want to go all the way. I want to grow enough to keep us up to our necks in preserved tomatoes for the entire year. And have enough to share. And enough green ones at the end of the season to store and use as they ripen. I'm not sure exactly how to calculate this amount except to well, just guess, and double the number of plants. I do know one thing. I'm going to keep better records this year, and actually measure output by variety if I can.

I'd love to hear how others plan their tomato crops.

Toad For Breakfast

Here's a happy collection: A few slices of leftover no-knead homemade bread; some fresh eggs from a friend's backyard chickens; butter I made several months ago, from local raw cream, and that had been hiding in a corner of the freezer. Quite naturally on a Sunday morning, my thoughts turned to toad-in-a-hole. Making it is simple. Use a biscuit or cookie cutter to make a hole in the middle of a piece of bread. Melt butter in a frying pan. Add eggs, cook, flip, cook some more. The best part is the little rim where the eggs meet the bread. And in my neck of the woods we eat this homemade salsa.

Using It Up

One of the prompts for Frugal February was a post I read somewhere, sometime, about the huge waste that is most people's experience with buying a chest freezer. That is, most folks fill it up, thinking they're being careful and frugal and all in all good planetary citizens. Then they lose track of what's the deep recesses of said freezer until too late -- all this fine food gets tossed away.

Last summer I canned and dehydrated and froze fruits and veggies from my garden. I purchased a quarter of beef from the finest grass feeding ranchers in the state, not to mention some similarly fine pork. I bought bulk grains, oils, and spices through my native nutrition community buying group. It was all in service of creating a functioning home economia, and the hope was that we would have the best foods, as local as possible, as organic as possible, bought and preserved or used in season. And I would get it all at the best price. Moreover, I hoped we would be less subject to the vagaries of a crazy economy and possible disruptions in food supply (whether from natural disaster, ordinary weather patterns, zombie invasion, or whatever).

But somewhere along the way I did a poor job of measuring. I think I simply stockpiled too much. I did not quite realize how much could be grown on a fraction of an acre in my climate, given good soil and lots of labor on my part. So I still have quarts and gallons and more quarts of frozen and canned fruits and veggies in store. Too much jam and jelly. Excessive amounts of beef. And there are other things that I've run out of all year long, things I've had to buy lower quality versions of because I didn't produce enough. So in the month of February, as I go through our cupboards and freezers, I hope to measure, plan, and reevaluate for the coming year.

Frugal February

I really should have made this post on February 1 but what's new about me running behind on every single thing in my life? February has always been a funny month for me, and for central Texas also. It's really the end of our short winter and I think it catches a lot of folks by surprise. We're worn out from Christmas, January just flew by. It's cold and gray; it's wet; it's icy; from time to time it's cold, wet, grey, and icy all at the same time. Just the perfect time to let myself slip into a funk of guilt and self-recrimination. Why did I spend so much at Christmas? How could I have eaten all that? Why is the house so cluttered? More generally it's also a time when central Texans actually start complaining about things like rain and cool weather. I mean, really, these are things we cry and gasp for in the dog days of summer and now we complain about them. Such ungrateful behavior and yet another reason to slip into a pattern of guilt and self-recrimination.

Last February I managed these gray days by declaring Frugal February and I'm doing it again this year. It seems like a good month to use up the stores I have on hand, to boycott shopping, to reset my spending patterns -- kind of like the way Ayurveda has you go on a fast to reset your taste buds to purer foods and rest the digestive system. Only I can promise, I shall not be going on a fast. Here are the contours of Frugal February: no shopping at all for the entire month. That's it.

OK, that's not quite it. An exception has been made, and I won't say who in my household has made this exception, except to say it wasn't me. Bananas will continue to be purchased during Frugal February.

But other than that exception, no shopping. Believe me, this will not be onerous. I keep such a huge store of emergency foods here that I suspect we could go six months without buying groceries. And as for non-food shopping like clothes, we could go far longer yet. What I hope to accomplish is to just rest my system, enjoy the freedom of bowing out of the spend/consume cycles for a while, and take stock of what we have. I hope to discover how well we're planned out little home oeconomia here. We'll see how well the winter greens and herbs from the garden hold out, and use up the last of my canned, frozen, and dehydrated garden foods from last summer. We'll see if monotony sets in. As I recall from last year, I came away feeling very refreshed and ready for the fine, fine spring ahead.

The Jig's Up, Spaghetti Squash

I first encountered spaghetti squash when a friend of mine was doing Weight Watchers, in the 90's, when the low fat craze was in full swing. She cut the poor squash in half, microwaved it, shredded its innards with a fork, and then served it with fat free marinara sauce from a jar. Is it any wonder I've had a hard time loving spaghetti squash?

But it turns out there is much to love about this squash. It's easy to grow, drought and insect tolerant, and most of all, stores forever on a counter top. Last summer I planted a single hill from some seeds I'd saved from a supermarket squash. Then I forgot all about that hill, moved some of my beds around, and rearranged my watering system. Somehow the spaghetti squash got left out in the cold, metaphorically. More literally, it got left in a spot that I completely forgot to water and often tromped across, dragged a hose over, and snapped of bits of vine.

Still, I ended up with dozens of squash. Dozens and dozens. I gave some away. We ate a few. And I filled a huge basket with about twenty of them back in July. We're down to four, after eating two of them last night as a main course, with garlic, butter, and parmesan. Which brings me to what I consider the primary virtue of spaghetti squash. Because they store forever, without canning or freezing, you can have fresh summer squash in February. That's right -- fresh, not frozen or canned, summer squash. Not winter squash.

It wasn't until I realized this that I started to really, really love spaghetti squash. You see, this squash had been sold to me under false pretenses. It was supposed to be like spaghetti. In fact, except that you can shred it with a fork and make something vaguely spaghetti shaped, there is no similarity.

Which is why I am announcing to all spaghetti squash everywhere that the jig is up. You are not spaghetti. You are squash. Stop pretending. Be proud of your vegetable nature. You are delicious, just like you are.

New Well

After a long, full day of helping supervise the guys who are drilling our new well, dogs are tuckered out.

Some stats:

The well is 185 feet deep.

The diggers tell me they hit top soil, white limestone, gray limestone, slate, and red clay, in that order.

It took about 4 hours to complete the digging.

I would have posted pics of the well, but there's nothing much to see. Just a capped off pipe sticking out if the ground. And the dogs are so much cuter.

The main thing, in my mind, about the new well is that it means we can garden again, on a large scale AND we can be more waterwise. Before, when we were on the community well, it was really hard to attach meters, for reasons I won't get into. So the first thing I'm going to do is investigate water metering systems and devices for measuring moisture in the soil.

Black Bean Chocolate Cake, Part II: A Warning

I've been making this cake for a good while now. I've made it for Widget Man and for company. I've taken it for a pot luck. I served it at a writing workshop once and people who had just met were licking their plates. In front of each other.

You'd think I'd have the recipe pretty much down by now.

You'd think.

But here's what happened. My eighty year old dad has been living with us for a little bit and he needs a fair amount of care. And I've been a fair amount of tired. But I wanted some cake! I mentioned making a cake to Widget Man and he wanted some too. So in a fit of greed and laziness, I used canned beans to make the cake. This was not my first fit of greed or laziness, and not the first time I've used canned beans for this cake either.

But this time, something went very, very wrong. So wrong that Widget Man took one bite of the cake, put his fork down, and looked at me with a very carefully neutral expression on his face. Then I took one bite and gagged. Then he felt free to make really loud gagging noises and bulge his eyes in a dramatic fashion. And I thought that was quite enough, thank you very much. No need to be rude.

The cake tasted, not to put too fine a point on it, like a big plate of crazy. I mean, not just bad, but crazy. Crazy because it was a moist, rich, chocolate cake, with icing and pecans, infused with the most intense flavor of bacon. Wait, not bacon: overwhelmingly powerful, fake bacon flavoring.

So I blame the canned beans, although the only thing on the label that looked suspicious was the word "spices." And let me reiterate that I've used canned beans before and the cake came out fine. Delicious, even.

And just in you want to use canned beans in your cake, I should tell you I've used Progresso brand beans with complete success in the past. I hate to name names but I will, for the sake of those who might want to avoid the shrieks of grief that accompany throwing an entire chocolate cake in the compost bin.

Window Farms

Most of my adult life has been spent gardening in very small spaces -- a tiny urban yard, a deck, a porch, a windowsill or two. Only recently have I had the luxury of gardening on several acres. And I still feel a great fondness for tiny gardens. They're smart; they're what most people can manage; they make peak oil sense; they can be really stinking cute.

So when I came across Window Farms I spent hours browsing through the site. Window Farms is a non-profit based in New York City helping folks grow food in really innovative ways. Do check it out.

By the way, my own little low tech window farm is shown here: some tomato starts.

Our Brothers and Sisters in Haiti

Here is a list of NGO's responding to the crisis in Haiti. A really good place to start if you're wondering where to send money.

Long Term Emergency Food Storage

Long term emergency food storage can be a bit involved. But this is really easy: order kits of dried beans, rice, and other grains. These kits come in cans and are supposed to last thirty years or more.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

This morning, standing in front of the yet-to-be-built kitchen backplash area, I made this to-do list:

• outline the final chapter for my novel
• finish designing a new writing workshop I'll be giving in January
• catch up on laundry
• clear out dead plants from the garden
• wrap Christmas gifts
• buy Christmas gifts

In addition, I'll be on call as assistant construction monkey while my husband builds our new kitchen backsplash today.

What I've done so far:

• outline my chapter
• one load of laundry
• breakfast with my husband
• chat on the phone
• stand in my garden and daydream about the spring planting

Later I'll go to a Christmas party at a friend's house.

Like most people, my to-do list is far more ambitious than I am. But while I was daydreaming about the next garden I was also thinking about non-specialization, about the coming year in which I hope to build more skills, learn more things, embrace more self-sufficiency. I want to keep this list do-able, though, unlike my daily lists tend to be. Here's what I have so far:

learn to really sew -- not just hemming, mending, straight seem stuff like I do now, but from a pattern

learn to really knit -- not just scarves, potholders, and washcloths, like I do now, but actual patterns

What else?

Just a Quick One

The single mandarine on our small potted tree. It's in a big pot on wheels and I roll it inside before freezes.

Roast Figs Two Ways

Our enormous fig tree normally gives us more fruit than we can handle -- plenty t0 can, dry, freeze, and give away. We normally don't do much of anything to keep animals away. The tree grows right by the back door and the dogs keep that area on SuperMax-style lockdown.

This summer however, the dogs were no match for squirrels and birds. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this was a desperate, starving season for the local wildlife. The drought meant our cove was bone dry and the creatures who call the normally lush, green surrounding area home got bold, drinking from dog bowls on our deck, lurking around trash bins, grazing in our front yard. Often I'd go out to the fig tree to see six or seven squirrels in it, bending the limbs with their weight.

So not enough figs to preserve, but we did get a few for snacking and dinners. Here's one of our favorite ways to have figs, as a main course, along with a salad, or as an appetizer:

--Split figs

-- On half the figs, sprinkle with brown sugar and a pat of butter.

-- Wrap the other half with a bit of bacon, jamon serrano, or prosciutto

-- broil on high until bacon is cooked and sugar/butter is sizzling

The Patient Gardener

Here's a dream: my own mangosteen tree. I've been dreaming about it since a recent trip to Costa Rica where we ate them by the bucketfull. Luscious, light, fragrant mangosteens. We brought back some seeds, but growing mangosteens is not a short term project. I was told it takes fifteen years for a tree to bear fruit. Hope they let me bring the tree with me to the nursing home.