Winding it Down

Wasn't I just out showering under the stars? Still waiting for tomatoes to ripen? Now I'm on the back end of the gardening season, undoing a summer's worth of doing. 'Winding down' is really too gentle a way to describe it. If the beginning is a slow unspooling over the course of a few months – planting a little of this, trotting a favorite shovel out of the shed, adding another jug of something to the potting bench...staking this, pruning that – the putting to bed is more like a high-speed death spiral, a mad scramble to get everything put away, cleaned up, and battened down before the whole machine slams into winter.

It would be nice if I had pictures and prose to show for the last two months, but the reality of maintaining the garden and preserving its generous output while putting together a pair of training manuals for a bunch of new cars (my 'real' job) leaves little time or headspace for reportage. I've got a fine haul to show for my efforts, though.

It was a great year for tomatoes, even if the plants themselves got pretty mangey. I don't know whether to credit my addition of eggshells at planting or my decision to try a plum tomato bred for disease resistance (Granadero), but I had virtually no blossom-end rot (a sign of calcium deficiency) or other disfiguration. The foliage looked like hell, but the fruit was prolific – and delicious. Perfect flavor in all varieties.

I've got a good assortment of tomato by-products stored for the winter: 6 1-cup bags of oven-roasted cherry tomatoes in the freezer, 5 half-pint jars of tomato jam, 5 pints of salsa, 10 quarts of sauce, 5 quarts of whole tomatoes, 2 half-pints of tomato mostarda, and 6 half-pints of tomato paste. The paste was cooked down from the last 8 or so pounds of tomatoes I harvested ahead of the killing frost. They weren't quite ripe, so I spread them on newspaper on a sunny table and let them ripen a bit more. Tomato paste is so concentrated, it doesn't really mind if the tomatoes you start with aren't ideal.

Also socked away in jars: 2 & a half quarts of sweet chunk cucumber pickles, 2 pints of sweet onion relish, 2 pints of pickled tiny beets, 1 quart of pickled jalapeño rings, 6 quarts of sauerkraut (with another 8 quarts still fermenting, and about 4 quarts of shredded beets fermenting by the same process), and an assortment of sun-cooked jams (strawberry, lavender-rhubarb, raspberry, sour cherry – about 2 dozen half-pints all told). The jalapeños produced generously and early, and I ended up with a few pounds of prefectly red ripe specimens, some of which I roasted and puréed into some tasty not-too-hot sauce, and some sliced and candied with ginger and lime. I used the later green ones for pickling. The onions were big and many, so I caramelized several pounds. Because I couldn't find any reliable information for canning them, I froze them in small ziploc bags – a total of about 3 quarts. And one last batch of goodie got cooked up this afternoon and awaits canning this evening: a quart or so of thick, sweet Indian carrot pickle (chhundo). I'll be glad to be done with canning for a while.

My early planting of root vegetables – carrots, beets, and parsnips – grew enormous. The biggest carrots and beets were ideal for making ferments and pickles. The rest are stored in the root cellar for midwinter soups and stews.

The beds have all been cleared out now, the pots from the deck emptied and cleaned. We need to get into the shed and move the winter stuff forward (snow tires, snow shovels, snow shoes) where we can get at it, and start loading all the garden and yard paraphernalia to the back. By the way, my Tool of the Year Award (Gardening Division) goes to these rubber Tubtrugs:

Light, flexible, durable – and I can carry them with one hand. I carted dirt and plants and weeds around in them. I used the little one to port water out to my peach seedlings instead of trying to find enough hose to follow me out. I filled the big one with water and a little soap to clean all my seedling pots. And when it came to clearing the giant pots from the deck – which is kind of awkward, because the only access is through the kitchen and living room – rather than try to carry the full pots through the house, I emptied them into the big trug and carried them separately (much lighter).

I still have garlic to plant, and we need to get a few truckloads of sheep shit to spread around. We want to expand the planting area some more, using Charlie Nardozzi's lasagna method. The firewood's all split & stacked, and we've been running the woodstove on chillier days. Soon we can just kick back and wait for the snow to fly (and the seed catalogs to start coming in).

Comments

[T.J. Mora]

You make it sound so easy, can we do more? ~ Me!

[james]

You got some Carrots there, lady! I'll be putting things to bed right before the Snow flies.