L Is For Longing

These days my longing--and I'm not the only gardener to feel this way--is for a killing frost.  The vegetable garden is in its late-summer, decadent, disheveled, yet curiously productive stage.

The squashes that I managed to save from the squash bugs are curing in the shed.  The vines, with their cargo of killer eggs, nymphs, and adult bugs are returning to the Earth somewhere out in the front field.  Meanwhile the  pumpkin vine, which somehow escaped the bug plague, is succumbing to a different scourge.  This one turns the green leaves first silver, then brown, but doesn't bother the pumpkins.

I have, for the first time in my gardening life, given up on the broccoli.  The thirty-two plants that I bought in a blizzard in March have not stopped to take a breath since I put them in the ground.  I have frozen all the broccoli that my freezer can hold.  I have given away pounds of the stuff.  Now I'm just letting it bloom its heart out, and as soon as I can spare five minutes I'll pull out all the plants and give them to those magicians, the hens, who will transmute them into eggs.

The tomato plants have died of some mysterious disease that killed them from the bottom up.  That has not, however, prevented them from producing quantities of fruit, many of which are still clinging to their parent's cadaver and ripening slowly. 

The beans, which as usual I planted late, are just starting to set fruit, and there is frost in the forecast for later this week.  I know I should leave the beans to meet their fate on their own, but my maternal nature  rebels against letting those tender babies freeze to death.  Since they're in a 4'x4' raised bed, it should only take me a couple of minutes to throw an old shower curtain over them.  And remember to take it off in the morning.  And put it on again at night, and take it off....

The coming frost, unfortunately, will not help where the kale and chard are concerned.  These will continue to haunt me well into November, demanding to be picked and washed and chopped and blanched and disposed of somehow.  Thank heaven for the local food bank, which gives meaning and raison d'etre to the otherwise absurd productivity of my nine 4'x4' beds.

I cannot figure out how so much food can come out of so little space--and no particular thanks to my gardening talents.  All I do is throw the used hen house litter on the beds in the fall, bung in some seeds and transplants in the spring, pull a couple of weeds while the plants are young, and then harvest until my arms give out.

Yesterday I gathered seventeen pounds of veggies for the food bank.  (Wolfie helped by breaking off a number of kale branches for himself and Bisou to munch.)  You think that finished my harvest season?  Alas, I barely made a dent.  I finally had to stop picking because of the mosquitoes, who were bent on storing up my blood for the winter.  As I walked towards the house I could hear behind me the whisper of the kale and chard, growing new leaves.

Greens, Endless Greens

We're deep into stick season here--you know, the weeks after the maples and the sumac and the Virginia creeper drop their leaves (sic transit gloria mundi) and all you see is gray sticks under gray skies.


In the vegetable garden, the beans, tomatoes and other fair-weather friends are long gone.  The raised bed frames have been installed, though, alas, not yet filled with dirt and compost.  All the raised bed frames, that is, except for the three that are supposed to go on the beds where stuff is still growing.

And what stuff is still growing so lushly and relentlessly that you'd think it's midsummer instead of stick season?  The two immortals, of course:  chard and kale.

Every week since June I have given the local food bank between five and eleven pounds of c and k.  I have shared the bounty with my friends and my dogs (the latter love to gnaw on raw kale).  I have blanched and frozen quarts of the stuff.  And still it keeps coming.

And because I know that any night now the winds will howl and it will get really cold--like, into the teens--and there will be no more fresh home-grown vegetables until next April, I feel compelled to keep harvesting while I may.

So it's chard or kale, kale or chard, every night.  I blend the green du jour into soups, fold it into omelettes, mix it with cheese in quiches.  Slather it with bechamel and hide it in casseroles.  Boil it with rice and feed it to the dogs.
  
Out of recipes as well as patience, I echo the exasperated cry of Henry II, who'd had it up to here with Thomas a Becket: "Will no one rid me of these turbulent greens?"

Any volunteers out there?

Summer Afternoon In The Kitchen

We're having what I call "hurricane weather"--low barometric pressure and high humidity that makes temperatures in the low 80s feel tropical. Not my kind of weather at all. Certainly not outdoor weather, or even cooking weather, either, but the chard was crying out to be harvested, and I had ten cups of chopped up rhubarb in the fridge that needed to be made into rhubarb bread. "If I get it done," I told myself, "at least I'll have a clear conscience the rest of the day." God knows there's nothing worse than a guilty conscience in hot weather.

While the six loaves of rhubarb bread were baking, I picked a basketful of chard, the technicolor kind that comes with stems of five different shades: white, yellow, orange, pink, and deep red. Along with the chard came a whole tribe of lightning bugs. This must be the year for them. At night the flashing in the front field is enough to give you a headache. Between the lightning bugs and the lightning storms, the owls and the Luna moths, the nights have been full of drama lately.

Three hours later, I now have three quarts of chard and six rhubarb loaves in the freezer, and a semi-clear conscience--semi-clear because I should have also frozen spinach and kale....

I tried a different way to bake the rhubarb bread: I put the pans in the oven without preheating it. I read that food tastes just as good that way, and you save energy. Normally the loaves bake 60 minutes at 350F. Today I put them in a cold oven, turned the dial to 350F and started timing when the beeper let me know that the set temperature had been reached. The bread was done 50 minutes later, and looks fine.

This is a very tolerant recipe, however, and I vary ingredients and proportions all the time, so I'm not surprised that it turned out o.k. I don't think I would want to start with a cold oven for things like meringues and souffles (should I ever feel inspired to make a meringue or a souffle).