Fall Garden and Preserving the Harvest

We’ve been really busy here in the land of the Urban Hayseed.  I ended up taking nearly a week off from doing anything in the garden because of the heat, and now it’s payback time.

Now is about the time you want to be putting in your fall and winter crops so that they have time to grow before the cold stops them in their tracks.  At the same time, everything’s spitting out food like crazy, and it won’t keep if you don’t eat, freeze, ferment, and/or can it.

I finally got some time to go out there and plant a bed of carrots where the onions used to be…

The Onions, Not The Carrots

To imagine what the carrots look like, picture a patch of dirt.

I’ve also planted one bed with beets, turnips, and daikon… I put those together so that I could cover them to stave off the root maggots.  To imagine what that looks like, take your previous carrot image and put a sheet over it.

Our kitchen has been converted into a food processing machine at this point.  By that, I mean it’s a well-oiled… or… that is to say… oily… vinegary… purple-stained room in our house.

The most dangerous were the aronia and blackberry jelly adventures.  Aronia and, for that matter, blackberry juice, if you haven’t seen them, look something like this:

Horrible Stains Waiting to Happen

If you’ve made jelly, you’ve probably used a “jelly bag”.  It amounts to a thin cotton bag hanging on a relatively flimsy tripod.  During the blackberry making process, the bag slipped off– splashing scalding hot blackberry slag all over everything.  I had a map of Michigan in pink on my chest for two days.

Literally, every day I go out into the garden and bring back something like this:

Daily Squash Haul

Well, I think I was making some point about squash when I took that one, but you get the idea.

The cave is starting to fill with food…

Preparing for The Dark Times

My office has the distinct odor of vinegar and botulism from the fermenting that I can only really get away with if I contaminate my own space with it.

Fermented "Whatchagot"

Recipe: take what you’ve got, put in jar with brine.  Ferment.  I’m leaving out some details, but that’s the basic idea.

I did find a pretty good recipe for chocolate chip, orange, zucchini bread.  The kids shoved it into their mouths, all the while complaining “but it has ZUCCHINI in it!”  Shovel shovel…

One of your daily servings of vegetables...

As Wifey Hayseed says, “Whew.”

OK, so, the book… I’ve actually got a lot of material at this point, but I’m struggling with the overall direction.  Initially, I was going to do a “how-to” book on backyard farming. I wanted to do a primer for normal people.  The “You Don’t Have to Be a Hippie Space Cadet Or Biochemical Engineer Guide to Backyard Farming.”

As I’ve started writing, though, I’ve generated some good stuff on both the origins of the “movement” (a bit like Michael Pollan’s take in Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of my favorites), and my own process of moving from ADD-addled Silicon Valley MBA-type to perpetually dirty fingernails guy who wants to slap everyone who can’t hold a 5-minute conversation without looking at their goddamned iPhone.

That’s probably three books.  Still, I have to write one first, right?  I’d love to hear what you three people think.