A taste of summer

This year we had decided that once we bought the chest freezer, and were able to fit all our frozen garden produce in our own house, we did not need to rush to cook and can everything immediately. Josh had the intention of cooking up all the tomato pulp over Christmas vacation and making a big batch of pasta sauce, but somehow we got busy. Instead, every few weeks, Josh took out a bag and made a batch to last a week or so, and leftover sauce was frozen until the next time. We have had a steady stream of pesto, tomato sauce, chili and  pizza sauce as needed, and my supply of frozen tomato pulp is holding out nicely. I also have been tapping occasionally into the few bags of frozen beans I put aside. Not many lovers of cooked long beans in my house, so I have been mostly using those for myself.

The one thing I have not touched yet is the bucket of pickles. For a couple of months, my laundry room had a definite sulfurous smell. We consulted with my neighbour Iulia about whether the salt content was sufficient, and whether the smell was normal. She felt that everything appeared as it should. I suppose it was from the fermenting cauliflower in the mix. Other friends of mine who have made mixed pickles have generally sealed them in glass jars, so no odour escapes. Eventually, my laundry room lost the smell, but we were leery about opening the bucket. We will get there, and I will tell you how it turned out.

We still have plenty of hot sauce and Chow Chow pickles, which we are slowly making our way through. Josh wisely froze some of the hot sauce because we noticed that once it is close to a year old, it does start to go bad unless you can it and seal it. So far there has been no freezer burn.

The tomato sauce produced from last year's harvest has been far superior to the previous year, and I believe that my refusal to include all the tomatoes which ripened after picking in October made a huge difference.

I have been dreamily perusing my Vesey's seed and bulb catalogues, then looking out through the frost coated windows at my snow covered yard (sigh) and wait for spring.

Why I love to garden

It is now mid January. Two weeks ago we had a big snowstorm. We had 45 centimeters of snow fall in 24 hours. Being Montreal, the city was not paralyzed. It took a week and a half to clear the mountains of snow off the sidewalks and roads, but at no time were any roads unpassable by a single car no matter how small. The ski season kicked off early, including cross country skiing which relies on real snow, unlike the ski hills that have back up snow making machines. Sales of sleds, skis and related equipment did well.

I meant to take photos but I was too busy shoveling four feet of snow off the roof of my parent's home in the Laurentians and skiing to bother. I thought about blogging after the roads were mostly cleared, so I am sharing a link of some footage from Montreal instead, and some of my mom, Sandy Cytrynbaum's photography from the Laurentians.

http://live.montrealgazette.com/Event/Montreal_snowed_under_Dec_27_2012?Page=0

 Before the big storm, the temperature went up and it rained, then the temperature went down and the trees were coated with a thick layer of ice. After that the heavy snow pushed the branches down to look like a straitjacket on all the evergreen trees. The same applied to the roof of my parents' country home, which required a great deal of digging out to prevent it from collapsing on our heads. The night scene is the roof before...


We had a couple of fun days throwing down so much snow that the distance between the edge of the roof and the top of the snow pile was small enough for us to jump off the roof. To my children's disgust, I chickened out and used the ladder, but the rest of them and my husband Josh (part of whom you can see sticking out of the snow pile below) had a great time.

My parents are not really into garlic. I had given my mom a few heads of our garlic last summer. We easily ate a couple heads of garlic a week, and had none left by October from our harvest. My mom still had two heads of our garlic untouched up north, which we were delighted to cook up and quickly used up while visiting over the Christmas week. I missed eating really good fresh garlic. Even five months past harvest, that stuff is infinitely better than anything you can buy in a store.

 No matter how we try to capture the magical beauty of the sun shining through the layers of ice coating the branches of the naked maples, birches and beeches, it never really comes out in photos. We still keep trying.

 You can see the sparking snowflakes in the sunshine up close. From a distance, the sun tinged everything gold. I skied across the lake (below) and it was breathtaking. At -15 Celcius, it doesn't take much to take your breath away but this would have worked at any temperature.

 So my mom asked me why I am putting these photos on my garden blog. Simply because at this time of year, my garden (and my mom's, and Chloe's) are completely buried under several feet of this stuff. The world becomes white and silver and grey with hints of gold and even blue. Nothing is green. Even the "evergreens" are buried and struggling to lift their arms.

As much as I love the cold and the winter (and skiing and tobogganing), at this time of year, I MISS MY GARDEN!!!!

Happy Chanukah!

To all my readers who celebrate Chanukah, have a very happy holiday. For those who don't, please enjoy all the other upcoming festivals of light and love in this dark chilly December.

As my friend Anne commented, I haven't blogged much recently. That is because I have not done much related to the garden in a while. I have randomly rubbed seeds hither and yon from my hollyhocks, black eyed susans and cosmos. I am waiting to see what will pop up in the spring without me putting in new seed stock. I have not been swiping samples of seeds from the entire neighbourhood this year, but depending on how things sprout in the spring I may take up my old habits next year again.

We have yet to make tomato sauce, we are still using pesto from the freezer, and with the chest freezer we are not under pressure to liberate everyone else's freezers. Josh has been working on building our new kitchen cabinets so the sauce will wait.

We have had snow but then the temperature has been up and down so there is no snow on the ground. It rained today. I can see buds on some confused bushes. The garden looks pretty desolate, but the oregano, rosemary, lambeum, periwinkle, violets, anemones are still green. This amazes me, I would have expected the frost to have killed them. I did not check out the strawberries but they are probably sprouting new leaves as I speak.

I am not taking photos. It still looks too sad even with little pockets of green.

Getting ready for another year

I have just come inside after planting garlic. Thanks to my in-laws who agreed to spare us a bit of garlic last minute (I lost count but there were at least 190 usable cloves which is more than double what we planted last year. Possibly 220. I will let you know next July what comes out.) I went online a few weeks ago to see if I could order some garlic for planting and realized that it was way too late, every company had sold out. I planted either Red Russian or Music or a combination of both. They are both really good, tasty garlic, but Music is more resilient according to Chloe.

My nose is still running as I write. It is a cold, cloudy day in early November. Last week we had a lot of rain thanks to Hurricane Sandy who was on her way to oblivion when she passed Montreal. This meant the earth was wet and soft. I decided to wait to plant until the heavy rain was finished as I was not sure what it would do to the garlic. Josh and I spent some time this morning planning out our planting for next year, because we realized that we need to rotate our crops. I have been doing a bit of reading and consulting about rotating crops. My friends Jasmyn and Gu shared a great link which really is crop rotation for dummies.

http://www.todayshomeowner.com/vegetable-garden-crop-rotation-made-easy/#comment-118240

My challenge is that the past two years we did not put any thought into rotation and did not set the garden up well to do this in the future. We got really creative in our set up for next year to put rows in different directions and alternate rows of smaller plants like onions, garlic, basil and carrots in the areas where I had peppers and tomatoes. I needed to have a map before putting in the garlic and carefully mark out where I put the garlic so I can work around it in the spring. Chloe was in town staying at our house for a family Bar Mitzvah this weekend so she was very supportive with her ideas and advice.

Today also marks the first day in four months that I do not have any tomatoes on my tables or counters. This weekend Josh made a fantastic batch of salsa with some of the ripening tomatoes still remaining from the last harvest day on October 12. I have been throwing out the ones that were getting stiff or looking a bit off, and on Friday I dumped a bunch of the remaining green ones in the garbage. I am afraid to compost even the green ones because of our experience last year with forests of tomato sprouts from the compost. Josh also made a small batch of tomato sauce, a lentil dahl,  several litres of Chow chow pickle relish
(http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1836,153178-247202,00.html) and we even tried apple and green tomato crumble, inspired by the Joy of Cooking's apple pie recipe which recommends trying green tomatoes mixed in. We did not tell the kids what was in it. Orianne carefully picked out the tomatoes. Zara and Isaac assumed we left the peel on one of the green apples and ate it with no complaint. It did not detract from the cake, but probably would have been a better texture if we had used green beefsteak tomatoes or another softer, wetter tomato rather than the San Marzano which was a bit rubbery.

The rest of the tomatoes which ripened well have now filled my chest freezer to the top. We have a few bags of green tomato puree for soups but mostly red.

I will finish with a schematic of what we think our garden will look like next year.

Feeling picklish

So far we have made green tomato and corn soup and green tomato and vegetable pickles. I cannot give formal recipes because we did not measure anything, just threw it all together and adjusted the flavour until we liked it. But at least I can give you some ideas.

Green tomato and corn soup:
Green tomatoes puree, onions, celery, garlic, chipotle hot sauce, black beans, roasted red pepper, cooking sherry, olive oil, sesame oil,  rosemary, thyme, oregano, salt, pepper, lime peel, lime juice. grated cheddar cheese and hot pepper sauce added when served. This was Josh's idea of what a Mexican green tomato soup should taste like. We did not check out recipes nor have we ever tasted a green tomato and corn soup, so I have no idea if it is anything like traditional recipes. I am happy because it reduced the population of green tomatoes in my dining room and it tasted good enough for one dinner and two lunches last week. The kids did not like it, though, so the leftovers have been packaged and put in the chest freezer on top of the mostly repatriated bags of red tomato pulp and the new additions of green tomato pulp.

Hot Mixed Pickles:
Today I took on pickles. I got a recipe much like the one I just gave you for green tomato and corn soup from my neighbour Iulia last week, but was not comfortable "winging it" with pickles, so I looked up recipes. Unlike Iulia's though, nothing else I found was as simple. The others involved splitting or pureeing the tomatoes, using vinegar and salt, boiling and canning. Iulia's traditional Romanian recipe involves dumping washed whole tomatoes into a bucket with sliced carrots, celery greens, cauliflower, onions, garlic cloves, hot peppers, celery root with salted water and a bunch of spices: mustard seed, peppercorns, savory, thyme, rosemary. No cooking, no canning. She just leaves the bucket in the basement to pickle and takes out as much as she wants as needed. I set out this morning, harvested savory and rosemary and picked up some garlic, carrots and cauliflower at the grocery store. We just ran out of our own garlic : (  . I picked through all the tomatoes and separated the ones that have started to ripen from those that have spots or blemishes indicating possible bacteria infection and found the perfectly clean green ones. Once I had washed them, washed and cut the cauliflower, peeled and cut the carrots and onions and garlic cloves and dumped them all in a 20 litre bucket Josh picked up at a paint store, I called next door for help. Iulia was out, but her mother was visiting. Elena speaks some French but both of us have some limitations in vocabulary as neither of us usually cook in French. With a lot of miming and trial and error, she showed me how much of each spice to put in. Elena tossed in the hot peppers (I wasn't sure I wanted to try hot peppers in my first attempt, but Elena got excited when she saw the bowl and tossed some in). I am not sure there is enough salt in there. Iulia told me to put one tablespoon of kosher salt (that is coarse or pickling salt) for each litre of hot water, but Elena showed me to dissolve 20 tablespoons of salt into a litre of hot water (one spoon for each litre capacity of the container) and then enough hot water to fill up the bucket, which was not quite the same. She told me to swish the bucket around to mix the salt up and taste it, it should be salty but not too salty. I am going to invite Iulia over tomorrow to tell me if it is salty enough. I am not sure what too salty tastes like for pickles. She also told me to cover the top with celery leaves. I picked up more celery tonight, so will do that too.

Josh came home after I finished and asked me why I did not cover the vegetables with the liquid. It seems that they float, so adding more water still did not cover them completely at the top. Josh stuck a plate over the top of the vegetables to sink them under the brine. I am not sure that this is a traditional approach, but I will seek out more advice tomorrow.

Our next project: making and canning more hot sauce (using more green tomatoes in the process.

We bought a chest freezer!

 We finally decided that it was enough borrowing space everywhere, and took the plunge. I had been looking around Kijiji, but opted to buy new under warranty from the Sears liquidation centre one block away from my house. I had to wait for about a month because they had no chest freezers in stock. They only sell old stock or slightly damaged goods for a discount. Also because they are so close to my home, I have negotiated when buying large items there to borrow a dolly and walk it home, rather than spending another $75 on delivery. That makes it a better deal than what I found on Kijiji, and it is brand new. We have already reclaimed tomato pulp from several friends, as well as added a bag of frozen beans and some green tomato pulp which will be used to hot sauce or soups later.

Last night Josh tried making a green tomato and corn soup. A friend of ours suggested this as a way to use green tomatoes, said it was Mexican. Josh doesn't need much inspiration, he did not even look up a recipe but whipped up a nice soup flavoured with chopotles, roasted red peppers, limes and who knows what else. It was a bit thick, and the kids were not looking too enthused so I suggested we cook some pasta as a back up in case the soup did not make a hit. Then I looked at the thick soup, and the noodles, and suggested we try it as a pasta sauce. We added some of our home made hot pepper sauce and some cheddar cheese, and it was different, not bad at all. Today I had some straight up as soup in my lunch. I added the cheese and hot sauce again, and it tasted even better than last night.

I spoke to my mom and asked if she had any green tomato ideas. She floored me when she said that the Joy of Cooking has an apple and green tomato pie recipe. WHAT?? She said that she has used their apple pie recipe for years, and it has a line in it about trying to cut half the apples with green tomatoes for a change. I had to see it to believe it. She has an older edition than I do, and my copy is slowly dissolving at the ends so my index did not go far enough for me to find the page. She walked me through page by page (after the croquenbouche but not as far as Cherry tarts) until there it was, the suggested substitution in the apple pie recipe. We decided NOT to tell the kids, and Josh will do a small apple/green tomato crumble to test it out. I guess lots of people have been trying to recoup green tomatoes (like they do zucchinis) by trying to find creative ways to sneak them into all kinds of things.

A bunch of the green tomatoes have spontaneously started ripening. Josh and I are continuing to process and freeze what turns red for this week, but I really want to avoid diluting my tomato sauce with flavourless pulp like last year, so we are taking on the green tomato challenge more seriously.

I would like to highlight the amazing productivity of the single brown cherry tomato plant which Nathalie gave us as a gift when she stayed here with her kids last April. Last Friday when we harvested what was left of the garden, we picked all these from a single plant. They are turning red faster than the San Marzanos so we are eating/cooking/processing them, so the picture does not even represent the full crop. One plant, one day. Wow!

Green Tomato Olympics

 I have been carefully watching the weather the past few week because in Montreal, frost can hit anytime in October or November. We had a warm, dry summer, the best growing season in anyone's memory, and the promise of a long, warm autumn made it tempting to pay little heed to the danger of sudden winter. Such is life in this climate. Last week, we had a beautiful holiday of Sukkoth and happily ate outside every evening in our garden shed turned sukkah. We have not yet even taken it down, and our bikes have been sitting under a tarp in the yard, in the pouring rain this week, awaiting the return of the roof to the shed. I have been going directly to the garden every other day or so to pick anything that is ripening. I have not bothered the past two weeks to let tomatoes and peppers turn fully because it has been cold at night. Once picked, they ripen quickly inside. The yield has been slowing down despite the fact that the plants are still flowering. A frost was predicted for Friday night. Bad news for me, I had a really busy week. Sunday night through to Tuesday evening marked the end of the fall Jewish holiday cycle, and so I did not touch the garden. Josh, following a brief lay-off (one week) was fortunate to have been linked up to a company which does similar types of work to what he has been doing and started a new job midway through this past week. I had to hand my marks in for my course yesterday, and spent Tuesday night finishing my corrections and calculating final marks. I had an annual meeting for the organization where I volunteer on the board, and because of my course I left all the preparation for the last minute. I managed to harvest the ripening tomatoes and peppers before jumping into end of year reports, but had no time to pick everything that was left. My meeting was on Thursday night, and so Josh was home alone with the kids who had homework and there was no time for the garden. I checked the weather report twice daily, but it still predicted frost for Friday night. There was little for it. I had to find the time before the Sabbath started to pick what was left, and leave the taking down of the plants and frames for later.

Friday morning I woke a bit early, and so did my youngest daughter Orianne, so I co-opted her help and she picked hot peppers and I picked green tomatoes for fifteen minutes. I got most of the tomatoes off of one of the ten cages in that time. I also picked the one, tiny cucumber which I managed to save from the cucumber beatles. Based on the time it took, I figured with some help, I could finish the harvest in an hour and a half. That was approximately the time I would have from when I got home from work until the sun set. Not the way I prefer to prepare for the Sabbath, but there was not much choice. A good frost would destroy all that was left on the plants.

The last basil plant. We harvested the rest and made pesto.

Midway through my work day, I hear my colleague exclaim that it is snowing outside. Oh, great! There goes my garden. It was not much, just a few random flakes which dissappeared leaving nothing on the ground. In my haste to get to work after gardening in the morning I ended up taking my bike. Although I usually am a wimp about biking when it is close to zero, I would not only have been late for work but also would have taken too long to get home and finish my harvest before sunset. I was happy to see that I did not have to ride my bike through snow. I made it home in good time, and managed to get both Orianne and Isaac to help me outside. Time was limited and my wonderful children can be tremendous help when so inspired, but things did not bode well. Isaac wanted to go inside. I did not even let him put his schoolbag in the house or he would have made it back too late to be of much use. I brought out a small bin for peppers and beans, and a laudry hamper for tomatoes.

I was surprised that there were still plenty of tomatoes which were ripening, some fully red which I must have missed earlier in the week. Thursday was chilly but sunny so I was pleased that I left things until the last minute. Josh took care of making dinner and having the table set up so that I could run in and light candles and lose no time to finish the job first. How to get the kids to really help? We started out with a competition. I challenged them to count how many they picked and see who could pick more faster. I made sure they took a different patch each so they would not waste time sabotaging and fighting with each other. Isaac and Orianne got creative in making it a game. Two points for any ripening tomato. Rotting tomatoes counted even if they were thrown out. I wanted to make sure that they did not end up falling on the garden and growing infected seeds next year. There was one of the forty odd plants that was badly hit by the bacteria. The tomatoes which ripened on the vine were okay if I cut away the black part, usually the bottom half of the fruit, but the green ones were more likely to rot quickly when picked. Last week, at a party, I spoke to my garden consultant Claude about the tomatoes which were turning into bags of water on the vine, an affliction which affected one of the chocolate tomato plants, a beefheart tomato plant and a few of the beefsteak tomatoes too. He told me it was a potato fungal infection, to which some tomato plants are susceptible. It kills potato plants (aha! I wondered why my six potato plants died and left almost no potatoes underneath. I thought it may have been the cucumber beetles, but it seems another pest was at work.

Claude explained that this fungus strikes inside the plant and the plant may suddenly dry up and die, or in the case of the tomatoes, the problem is evident when the fruit rots before becoming ripe.

Getting back to my speed harvest, at first it was a competition, but eventually, the two of them decided that it would be faster and more fun to cooperate and just see how many they could pick. Honestly, I have no idea how many there are. Orianne and I had picked a lot before Isaac joined in and we started to count. I did not count mine, and the kids added extra points for colour, difficulty of removal when tomato was growing and stuck in the chicken wire, so their numbers are far from accurate, but they estimated well over a thousand. We raced into the house as the clouds were turning pink hauling our load and wondering what to do with some thousand green tomatoes just in time to light candles for the Sabbath.

Josh made chili for dinner, using the tomatoes I picked on Wednesday. It was wonderful. Tomorrow, I hope to buy the chest freezer that finally came into stock at the Sear's liquidation centre a block from my house, and we can collect all the bags of frozen tomatoes and bring them all home. Naomi commented that her freezer looks like a medical supply filled with transfusion bags. I hope Josh kept track of who has them all (I remember we gave some to Naomi, JT, Alan, Lisa and José but there may be more out there). I have been collecting ideas for green tomatoes. After the experience last year of letting my last harvest ripen in paper bags in the basement, I found that the resulting pasta sauce was not nearly as tasty as I had hoped. We decided this year to "go green" instead. So far, suggestions include pickled green tomatoes, green tomato salsa, Mexican green tomato and corn soup (if we can replace the sausages with something tasty and vegetarian), fried green tomatoes, tomato marmalade. Josh uses them for his hot sauces, and once the big pile of peppers finish ripening we should have enough to make hot sauce to last us the year. Looks like we will be busy for a while processing the harvest.

This morning when I got up, I looked out my window and all the tomato plants were wilted and looked like frozen lettuce. I was very relieved that I did not wait until Sunday to finish the harvest.

Josh and I have been discussing our plan for next year. I have been checking out a book by Nikki Jabour called The Year Round Vegetable Gardener which Chloe lent me, which has inspired her to garden under cold frames through the winter. This technique basically created mini green houses by putting windows or plastic on frames over vegetables growing in raised boxes, allowing you to continue harvesting plants right in the snow throughout winter, even in cold climates. I am not quite ready to go this route yet, it will take a lot of planning and organizing. First of all, our choice of produce this year were not good cold weather crops (tomatoes and peppers are tropical). Also, we have to build our garden differently. But I am starting to think about it, so maybe next year we can plan this out and experiment a bit. I also read about rotating our crops. I had not put much thought into this before, I have been thinking of finding the ideal place for peppers, the best spot for tomatoes, rather than thinking of the garden as a place that needs to be regularly changed.

Reading up on cucumber beetles, and the recommendation to move the cucumbers to another spot next year started me thinking on how to redesign the garden. Nikki Jabour had a whole section of her book with tips on how to organize your crop rotation based on what kinds of plants give or take different nutrients from the soil. She suggests alternating rows of different kinds of crops and switching them is yearly is a good approach. We had that in mind for the tomatoes and basil and garlic, but we failed to consider the size of the plants and their needs for light, and ended up with everything too close together. I moved all the basil once the tomatoes got too big. In fact, my garden was far less "according to plan" this year due to the massive number of surprise volunteer tomatoes. This summer we carefully threw all the tomato seeds we separated from the tomato pulp into the garbage, as much as this bothered my green soul, so we would not have a repeat next year. I can't even blame the "weed" tomatoes for the excess of green at the end of the season, as the early sprouted plants and store bought tomatoes provided as many unripe ones this weekend as the late sprouting volunteers. We need to make our decisions now because we plan to plant the garlic in the next few weeks. I am hopeful but have learned my lesson this year that no matter how well you plan, the garden is bound to throw surprises your way.