Sunday, October 30, 2011

Chilies Out the Wazoo

I'm starting to feel like all I grow are chilies. I find myself searching the net for more chili recipes. I found this Pumpkin Ancho Mole sauce recipe on The Splendid Table here. They also have a very tempting Peanut Butter Stuffed Pickled Chili Pepper recipe I'm seriously considering for a T-givs appetizer. Here are preserved chilies 4 ways:
They are from L to R: dried Pasilla bajio, a salty spicy garlicy chili spread, Pickled Habaneros & Fermented Chili paste.

I'm really liking these Fish Peppers dried and crushed. Even the 7yr old puts them on her food. They have a great flavor and are a mix of cool colors.
Before drying. 

And after drying. Chili flakes are always on our table.

Ready for processing: habaneros, corno di toro and serranos

I'm ALMOST done harvesting all of the chilies for the season. I still have my Bhut Jolokia in the garden hoping they will turn before the frost, which is delayed so far. Here's today's catch:
A mix of late-harvested chilies.

Also dug today were my Georgia Jet Sweet Potatoes. I only had 3 plants, but got a nice crop out of them. I think I will grow this variety again next year. This is a 5gal. pot for reference. 

The fall garden is growing well. Here are some various crops- rutabaga, cabbage, turnips, brussel sprouts and other stuff I can't remember right now. 


The kale is of harvestable size now.

Fall Projects: I built this Passive Solar Heat Collector and hooked it up to my bathroom window. The day I built it was in the low-mid 80's and before I even hooked it up it was passing 110 degree heat out of it. It seems like I get around a 30 degree heat difference between the air T going in and what is coming out. Of course, it only really works on sunny days, but it is really neat to have FREE heat and the 7yr old already knows about cool air sinking and warm air rising, so it was a good science lesson too. The only bad thing to come of it is my infected finger (from a drilling incident). 

The Maple leaves turned and started falling very abruptly this week
Happy Autumn. Happy Halloween.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Overwintering Chilies and Free Food

It is so hard to pull a gorgeous, fruit-laden chili pepper plant from the ground. I kept telling myself and conveying to the poor peppers that it was for the best. Had to be done. The celestial clock is ticking and soon there will be no more impending frost. There will be frost. And death. Pull out a fat stack of plastic pots, a trowel and begin digging. I'm starting to think it may be best just to keep them pot-bound year-round. It is less work and they are still productive.
Mustard Habanero

Why overwinter chilies? 1. Starting chili pepper seeds in my cellar of a basement is difficult without bottom heat added and slow at best. 2. If I start several peppers each year I can chose 1 plant to keep of the bunch and have a small collection of various plants so I don't have to buy 20-30 seeds and start that many of each variety every year.  3. It is super easy. 4. I have the space and a dirty cellar basement to make a gardening mess in and 5. Overwintered plants will produce earlier than new starts and 6. Having life, aside from cave crickets and the pet toad, in the basement is oh so nice in the middle of winter. 

How do I overwinter chilies? Before the fall frost, which is due for us around the 2nd week in October chose which plants to overwinter. With a trowel make a cut into the ground in a circle around the chosen plant. Have a pot ready. Nicely yank the plant out of the ground and put it in the pot. Add some garden soil or potting soil to replace what just fell off. Water the heck out of them since you just tore off a lot of roots. Harvest all the chilies off of them if you haven't already done so and put a marker in the pot if you want to know what you have. After a couple of days adjusting to the pot trim the plant WAY back until it looks like some dead sticks. If you have room and don't mind cleaning up dead fallen leaves you can skip the trim. Put in the basement under a shoplight set to a timer.  Just water when the soil is dry. They won't need as much water as they will not have leaves to lose water from. If you do not trim them back and do not harvest the chilies you will have to water it more, but you will have peppers around the holidays. This is up to you. 
In the spring, bring the chilies outside slowly once the threat of frost is gone and allow them 1 hr of direct sunlight per day until fully acclimated. Now they can be planted back into the garden.

Chilies freshly dug from the Garden (and a bougainvillea) 

Other things going on today- I planted some more seeds. The chickens got through a hole in one of the hoop houses so I had to resew with lettuces, old spinach seeds and corn salad.

A few things I have started from seed in pots for the fall garden- cabbage, kale, green onions, spinach and johnny jump ups (for the heck of it).


What is the best kind of food? FREE FOOD!!! It is important to remember to mention to a fellow gardeners/foragers what vegetables/fruits/fungi you LOVE and do not grow well/find. For me, it is eggplant. I cannot grow it well without pesticides (although floating row cover may work, it just didn't last year due to the stray cat wanting to sleep on it) and I refuse to use them, but I still LOVE EGGPLANT. I came home yesterday to a huge bag full of eggplant at the back porch. Hell yes!  Thank you Jodee. While I've never had enough eggplant to try this I did today. Here's how I prepped eggplant for freezing. I plan on using it later for eggplant parmesan. 

1. Slice your eggplant while heating a large pot of water on the stove to boil. Directions said to add lemon juice to the water. My guess is that this is to preserve color, but who cares! It will be covered in tomato and cheese delight later. I did dump a few splashes of white wine vinegar and salt in the water for whatever reason. It seemed like a good idea. Blanch for 4-5 minutes. This breaks down the enzymes that would otherwise cause aging in the fruit.

2. Strain in a colander and set the hot eggplant in a bowl of ice-cold water to stop the cooking process. Strain again.
3. Lay them out on a cookie sheet and put in the freezer. Once frozen put in a labeled freezer bag. I read that they keep 8-10months. 

A fellow coworker is a hunter. While hunting she also forages for wild plant/fungal foods. She came across a huge chestnut tree. She gave me a bag of chestnuts. I gave her a bag of Slippery Jack bolete mushrooms. It was a free food trade. How awesome. I've never made my own chestnuts and she can't find Slippery Jacks. Whallah! 

Eating organic gourmet food, for next to nothing. Life is good.



Thursday, October 6, 2011

Taking in the End

Now is the time to take in the view as shortly it will all be gone. Flowers, colorful leaves, seed heads black with promises, greenery. In one fell swoop the killing frost will steal our color palette leaving us with browns and grays for the long winter. No more blue sky morning glories with sleeping bumbles.
No more lustful aroma of the come hither Snail Vine.

No more red. No more red tomatoes to be eaten in the yard. No more figs full of sweetness.

Time to collect the Amaranth. Time to make pesto

Enjoy. Enjoy. Enjoy and prepare. I've started some new beds of various plans. I have 2 beds in the orchard dedicated to Winter Rye. Between the shade of the orchard trees, the dogs and the chickens all of the grass is gone. I'm not necessarily sad. The Winter Rye will have many roles. 1. It is a green manure so I've planted an oval bed around 3 fruit trees so in spring the greens can be turned into the soil and nourish the fruit trees. 2. The greens will either be eaten as much needed greens by the chickens in the spring/late winter or if having gone to seed. Either way, it is a cheap and nourishing food for the chickens as well. 3. Something we don't tend to think about is that plants are part of the food web for underground life (beneficial bacteria, fungi, invertebrate soil life) and having greenery above ground means there is food or habitat below ground. This may be one of our major mistakes in agriculture- leaving a field fallow. What happens to the soil life when there is no green above? Where do we ever seen fallow land in nature? Perhaps after a flood or volcano, but this doesn't last long. Nature abhors a vacuum. I'm amending the soil and thereby the life below. Feed your soil. I'm also running an experiment as one rye bed will be covered with plastic and the other not. Here is the one that will not be covered:
Two other beds (one with burlap, the other with plastic) will be for winter crops- carrots and mixed greens. I made these super cheap and easy hoop houses out of plastic conduit. The purpose of the burlap is just to keep the chickens out for now.
Other things I need to do is establish a given spot for my new vegetable- the potato onion (also called multiplier onions). Since I eat onions on a daily basis and because once established I will never have to buy them again (talk about cheap food) I need to prepare the perfect bed for them. I ordered them from Territorial Seeds. You can't find these just everywhere. I'm not sure why they are such a secret, but I suspect the older generation is more than aware of their existence. They are defined as having a more gourmet flavor, much like shallots, which I love so I'm looking forward to the first harvest. This is what they look like:

Since it is my blog, I suppose I can deviate away from strictly gardening and talk about wild foraging too. My Aunt Kathy found these mushrooms and gave them to me. They are called Slippery Jack because of the slimy coating on the cap. They grow under evergreens and apparently my grandparents use to eat them. These shrooms are in the bolete family. Instead of gills they are polypored underneath. I'm thinking about a mushroom barley soup tonight. These guys are a little dry, but I have fresher ones and these will rehydrate easily.


A few more pictorial documents below of life in the garden in early October: 
Baby Kale coming up.

Cotton plant! Just for something fun.

One of my assistant soil preppers- Scarlet.

That is all for today. Must get out and enjoy this ridiculously gorgeous weather we've had for weeks on end now.