A
pair of hands sifts through the harvest of Cannellini beans;
12 feet of row netted just shy of 10 pounds. I am thinking a family
of four would use about 50 pounds in a year. But this is just one
of the many things we are harvesting from the garden this month.
I
used to think of August as nap time and in the heat of Southern
California's summer, it sure is inviting! Grab a cool drink, a
hammock and the Dodgers on the radio and listen for the muffled
sounds of snoring... But not anymore! Not since I realized that
growing the food was less than half the battle. Of course there's a
lot to do on that account, more will be revealed very soon, but
getting the harvest in and making good use of it is another important
part of gardening.
It's
hot work, but this week alone, I've harvested 10 pounds of those
famous Italian Cannellini beans (a dried bean sometimes referred to
as 'white kidney beans' but that doesn't do them justice!), about as
many pounds of peppers – mostly the sweet banana types that I hope
to pickle soon. As well as the tons of cucumbers I am hauling in. If
you followed my advice and planted Armenian cucumbers, you are
swimming in cucumbers by now and have come to realize the reason that
pickles have such prominence in our culture – pickles makes good
use of all these tons of cukes in a pinch! Which is probably why we
have so many pickling methods (from all over the world) as well so
many different recipes!
How
much you preserve of your harvest makes a huge difference in how well
you can eat from your garden over the long haul. When the season is
in full swing, like it is right now, dealing with the abundance is
the major focus of the home gardener.
There
are several ways to deal with fresh produce that will allow you to
eat from your garden long after the heat of August is gone. You can
dry the produce. This is the easiest way. Beans, like my
Cannellinis (above), are simply left on the plant until the pods are
crispy and ready to drop the white bean seeds on the ground. I come
along, gather them up and lay them in a dry, partly sunny location to
dry for a couple of days. In Southern California that should do them
nicely. Putting them away with too much moisture could result in
moldy beans by the time you want to use them in cooking. I give them
a quick two day stint in the freezer to kill any larvae that might be
lingering and then seal them up tightly in a glass jar until time to
use.
Juicier
veggies can be dried too, but they take longer and are a little more
involved. If you want to dry tomatoes, or peppers, pick up a good
book on drying. Look for a list of suggested books in Appendix K
to find one I recommend. Drying has the wonderful advantage
of not being dependent on the power grid to continue to be edible,
unlike freezing which is totally dependent on electricity. With
disaster waiting at the turn of the next power outage.
Likewise,
canning definitely cannot be done without careful consideration.
Pickling and making jam are a subset of canning and are not as
involved as other types of canning though they too need some
awareness and strict attention to sanitation. Pickling and jams are
easier because the high acidity or sweetness (pickling uses vinegar,
while jams and jellies avoid botulism with lots of sugar) keeps the
bad organisms from growing in your food without using a pressure
cooker. Get a good book on canning and pickling and discover this
whole different world you've missed!
I
grew up with canning and pickling as a part of the rhythm of life.
This was in Kansas and it would be 102ยบ
with the typical mid-Western high humidity. We'd be at Grandpa's
picking green beans, tomatoes, strawberries, beets, grapes and sweet
corn. Grandpa lived by himself and for his day-to-day cooking he
used a little electric hot plate which couldn't boil the vats of
water required for our massive canning adventures so we'd have to
fire up the big stove – a behemoth wood burning
stove! So there we would all be in Grandpa's kitchen, every window
open and every fan on high, working, and sweating, our butts off to
put all these vegetables and fruits into quart jar while Mom kept a
verbal tally for us, “That's 16 quarts of beans!” We did
strawberry jam, canned green beans (though by the time we got to eat
them they were 'gray' beans), sweet corn, strawberry jam, grape jelly
and pickled beets. It was hot work and I'm not suggesting that you
go through this kind of torture. Canning and pickling need not
happen all at once and involve a wood burning stove!
We
didn't ferment things, being or a certain kind of mid-Western
Christian persuasion, but fermentation has begun to make a comeback
in modern times, especially since recent discoveries are extolling
the health benefits of kim chi and other fermented foods. Making
alcohol has been one way of preserving grape juice and cider for
apples. It requires no refrigeration which is why these methods
predate electricity by more than a few years.
Now you can purchase
your own still for a couple of hundred bucks and be on your way to
compete with Old Bushmills or was that Old Kerosene? Kim Chi is a
fermentation of cabbage that preserves cabbage with salt.
At
this time, a gardener needs to keep the green (and yellow wax) beans
picked (they can be pickled as well) or they’ll stop producing.
Keep using the basil, continually pinching the flower tips –
flowers and the first pair of leaves and throw into whatever you're
cooking or a salad - the flowers are as edible as the leaves. Next
month, you can harvest whole plants and make pesto and this constant
pinching will cause the plant to grow into a vigorous small shrub!
Share the abundance of all your produce with friends, relatives or a
food bank. Nature isn’t stingy so carry on that tradition and
share too. Everyone needs a fresh homegrown tomato now and then to
remind us how blessed we really are.
Anything
planted into the garden in August can be seen as an act of
desperation. Mind you, you CAN plant, but, baring a spell of
unseasonably cool weather, it isn't going to be a cakewalk for you or
the plants. You'll both need extra water and both of you will
have a shot at sunstroke that could kill them much more readily than
you. At least, you should have the sense to move into the shade if
you notice symptoms of hyperthermia. Plants, on the other hand, have
to stay put. If you do plant on a hot day, it is good idea is to
find a way to shade your little darlings. A stick, about 18 inches
long, propping up a black nursery flat, with the flat to the south
of the plants is a tried and true way for many gardeners to provide
shade for their newly planted starts.
Remember
to consider how long your new plant is going to take to fruit. Will
it still be warm enough to set a crop? Right now in August, I would
plant only a very few varieties of tomatoes because most will begin
to flower in late November. Yes, I know there are warm days in
November, but how many? Can you count on enough warm days to get
tomatos from pollination to ripe before the cool nights cause it to
rot on the plant? I think that's a poor bet. Instead, I think we
should try to get cool season crops in before they really like to be
set out or on the other hand, perhaps grow a few quick summer crops
like beans.
What
to plant in the coming months is a great game gardeners love to play,
wiling away long, insufferably hot hours in the shade. It is best to
write down some of the ideas you're having for next summer's garden
now. while this year's experience is fresh, otherwise the harvest of
knowledge could be wasted. Of all the ways to learn gardening, the
most sure and least expensive is to keep a garden journal. It is so
easy now days and can be very inexpensive. If you have a computer, a
digital camera and a word processing program you are set up. It can
be a cheap camera (find a used one on eBay) and a free word
processing program, and your thoughts will be preserved for the next
year's garden. If that's not your bag, get a paper notebook, draw
your plans, paste in pictures from catalogs and write your
observations in a multitude of colors. Or use a combination! The
point is to write down things so you'll remember them and to find a
way to write them down that will give you enough pleasure to insure
you'll do it. A chair or bench in your garden is the most perfect
place to do this. Haul out a few catalogs, something cool to drink,
sit down in the shade with your notebook (computer or paper) and
think about the year gone by. It can be a meditation that is almost
as good as eating from your garden.
But
don't throw all your attention in to next summer's garden. Spend
some time now to consider what you will grow in our mild winters.
I'm looking through some catalogs seeking good varieties of cabbage,
broccoli, onion, lettuce and others. If I order them soon, I'll have
them by the end of August and I'll be starting little pots of
seedlings that will be going out into my garden by the beginning of
October. Check out Appendix K
where I've listed a few of the vegetables I want to grow along
with some varieties that I like. I'll order seeds to start now, and,
to save on postage, I'll also order seeds that I'll be using a little
later on.
No
matter what's going to happen, August is the time to
contemplate the fall and winter garden; in addition to the stuff
above, I'll plant seeds of artichokes (a perennial) and I’ll plant
several different heirloom varieties of sweet peas – maybe some
blends of antique varieties, two seeds per pot. I love the scent of
sweet peas and I've had a contest with myself to try to get red
sweet peas for Valentine's Day. So far, no luck. They just sit
there and sulk until March and then they flower – too late for
romance! That could be a theme song.
Consider
not only planting seeds from the seed companies, but commit to learn
how to save your own seed from year to year. It's not only fun
thing, but it makes you a much better gardener in the long run. It
helps our generation to connect with our past – my Grandpa, and
probably yours too, or at least his father, planted seeds they saved
from year to year. This saving of seed comprises a huge heritage in
our collective history that we today do not enjoy. Saving seeds from
the plants you grew, connects you with your plants and our collective
past in a whole new and delightful way that has a magic and
satisfaction that is close to sacred.
Saving
seed can be as simple as saving the seeds from your beans – bean
seed is the bean in the pod. Leave the pods on the plant until the
pod is crispy and viola! You have the seeds for next year. No fuss.
Dry them thoroughly, give them the freezer treatment, as above, for
two days and store in a cool dark place until next year! Other
plants can be more complicated but all are easily learned. By
leaving a few plants in the garden, you will provide forage for bees
and other insects that makes your garden a more integral part of
nature. It almost makes the free seed your bonus!
Allow
me to make a shameless plug for the Seed Library of Los Angeles
(slola.org) an organization that has its headquarters at The
Learning Garden. SLOLA provides free seeds to its members for a $10
lifetime membership – every meeting features a presentation on how
saving seeds of different types of plants and time to check out seeds
from the collection of several hundred seeds, almost as much as some
commercial seed houses!
Over time, these varieties of seeds will
become more adapted to the climate and soils of Southern California
and will become our own vegetables. This is important because the
coming years (if Global Climate Change is real) we will experience
some difficult years for all agriculture. If we learn to grow our
own food and there is a crop failure in the traditional crop growing
regions, not only can we be self sufficient, but we might be able to
provide famine relief for them as well. I know most of us don't
think of our gardens as a hedge against starvation, and maybe that's
too fine a point on it, but to me this is a reasonable scenario and
one that adds a sense of urgency to what we do. Growing your own
food and doing it well is a fabulous hobby and a worthy enterprise
without considering climate change, but there is that reality right
behind the curtain that haunts our day to day lives, much like the
threat of nuclear war animated society's thinking in the late 1950's
and early 60's.
One
of the oddities in the chart below is that often one vegetable will
appear in two columns, 'Start These in Containers' and
'Start These In The Ground' in the same month. This just
means that there are two ways to grow this crop – I will usually
use both to attain my goal of X number of plants. Some plants
planted directly will grow faster and be harvest-able before the
plants started in containers for transplant later – but, the ones
in the ground are more exposed and are likely to suffer a greater
percentage of depredation. Therefore, I average my desire for fresh
eating sooner with the reality of fresh eating later being a more
sound bet.
Others
are stated one month earlier in containers and are seeded directly in
the Garden next month. I will use both probably, again, to get the
results I want. Sweet peas started in containers in August will not
be any faster to flower than sweet peas direct seeded in September.
Usually I do both just to make certain I don't have a sweet pea crop
failure!
As
we get ready for the coming plantings of Fall, this is a good time to
introduce you to my own technological advancement, The Planting
Stick. It's not really complicated.
Observe
The Planting Stick. It is about nine inches long and once
was a part of a longer stick that was holding a vine or a small tree
upright in a 10 gallon nursery pot. Once the plant was planted, this
stake was removed (many are not and are available by simply scanning
your own or your neighbors front yard for anything that was planted
by some mow, blow and go guys recently). I cut it to nine inches
because that is the size I find works for me, a bachelor who lives
with a dog that doesn't eat a lot of vegetables.
The
stick is pushed down, lengthwise, on the garden ground
with an edge pointed down. It makes a straight indentation in the
soil and into that indentation, I drop seeds of whatever is the
veggie du jour today.
Carrots
are covered with a light sprinkling of vermiculite.
Vermiculite will hold moisture against the small seeds
and help them to germinate. Many of our soils will crust over after
being wetted and under that hard crust, carrot seeds will be entombed
never to see daylight. You don't need to use vermiculite with other
seeds – their plants can break through the crust. You'll use this
stick in the coming months, so get it ready. Guess how long you'll
want it – it's free so if you guess wrong, it's easy to start over.
Start
These In Containers
|
Start
These In The Ground
|
Move
to the Ground from Containers
|
Sweet
peas
|
Sweet
peas
|
|
Broccoli
|
|
|
Cabbage
|
|
|
Kale
|
|
|
Cauliflower
|
|
|
Fava
beans
|
|
|
Onions
|
|
|
Leeks
|
|
|
Refer to the text for exact dates.
Figs On the Grill
This is only a 'recipe' in the loosest
sense of the word, but it's worth your attention. Gardener's in the
Mediterranean Climate should be seeing figs getting ripe right now or
soon. Pick figs that are soft to the touch and slice in half. Put
face down on a grill until warm, flip over and warm on the back side
as well – you are not trying to 'cook' them so don't overdue it.
Just leave them long enough to heat through out.
Put
a dollop of a good stout, plain yogurt (I like to find yogurt labeled
'Greek') on top of each slice. Drizzle with honey. Eat carefully to
avoid falling of your chair.
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