Winter Luxury Pumpkin

Most. Delicious. Pumpkin. EVER!

All the cake

My Guy got a very nice job that pays well, has health benefits and will allow him to see us every night. It is in New York City, and far away from my garden. It is also close to many of my friends and my family. We aren't selling our house here in Maine, and I intend to spend most of the zone 5a gardening season here, but the early spring, late fall and warm winters of zone 7 Astoria will be spent in The City.

I can't express my sadness and happiness about this development. It's all tangled up, so my only recourse is to plan a tiny garden in our tiny front yard. It will be small plants that people walking by can enjoy. Highly scented flowers, flashy berry bushes and a espaliered quince against the stoop. I have a lot of plans.

Annual Tree Order

Every year I have ordered trees, there is always the thought "This is my last tree order. Next year I will work on..."

but every year there are more fruit trees that I can't resist. Is shopping for fruit trees something that shouldn't be done on an empty stomach, like grocery shopping? Should I only look at catalogs when stuffed full of apples/grapes/nuts/plums and cherries?

This year Would Be Different. Only one tree, a rare cider apple tree, where the apples aren't used for eating or cooking, but for adding tannins and depth to hard cider. Only one tree was good in theory, but in practice I ordered four.

Tree One: Dabinett Cider Apple - Late Fall. Medium bittersweet. Probably a seedling of Chisel Jersey, Middle Lambrook, Somerset, England. Most popular cider variety in Somerset today and the mainstay of Poverty Lane’s cider orchard. At the MOFGA cider workshop, Steve Woods told us, “If you’re going to plant one bittersweet, plant this one.” Medium-sized roundish fruit covered with sooty brownish brick-red stripes and blush. Looks rotten even when perfectly firm and ripe. Dense astringent juicy flesh. Sugar content fair and fermentation moderate. High quality well-balanced low-acid cider with a soft-tasting tannin. Pick last week of October, blend with other late varieties. Crops regularly. Grower-friendly tree with a spreading drooping habit, may require help in developing a strong central leader. Not pollen compatible with Chisel Jersey. Midseason bloomer. Z4-6. ME Grown.

This was the original tree that I had been planning to buy for about three years. I have a fascination with hard cider that isn't satisfied by commercial brands of cider. My Guy and I have been trying different kinds for a few years now, and nothing actually tastes like apples. At least not in a good way. So this tree is the base of what I hope will be the beginning of my own personal hard cider cellar. And also something to give to my friend Big Cat, as a testament to her years of friendship and her devotion to hard cider drinking.

Tree Two: Grimes Golden Apple - Fall. Unknown parentage. West Virginia, c. 1804. All-around excellent variety grown in old Maine orchards for over 100 years. Medium-sized roundish fruit with opaque yellow skin, scattered with grey russet dots and an occasional faint blush. Thought to be a parent of Golden Delicious. Tart citrusy crisp dense firm fruit is excellent for dessert and cooking: wonderful spicy fresh eating and wonderful apple sauce. Makes a thick sweet cider and a good single-variety hard cider: light and fruity. Tends to begin dropping fruits before you can pick them, but fret not; they’re ready to eat. Just collect them off the ground as they fall and use them up. Then pick the rest off the tree and store in the root cellar until spring. Productive, annual bearing, precocious. Highly recommended. In short supply; order early. Z4-8. ME Grown.

This is the tree I don't have room for, didn't intend to buy, but how could I resist? Can you imagine a whole tree filled with bright golden apples? Tart citrusy apples? Apples that just fall off the tree begging to be eaten? Two of my friends will really appreciate this apple. One for its name and the other who loves yellow apples more than red ones. My Guy, Miss Critterpants and I spent the day walking around the property trying to find a perfect spot for it. I think it will have to go at the edge of the lawn over by the barbecue pit/smoke house area. We can watch the grill and eat apples. My Guy can have all the prunings for his smoker and everything will be fine for this poor, unintended tree.

Tree Three: Stella Sweet Cherry - Midsummer. 2C-27-19 (Lambert x John Innes Sdlg. 2420) Canadian Dept of Ag Research Stn, Summerland, BC, 1968. The first hardy good-quality self-fertile sweet cherry. Large heart-shaped black-skinned fruit has juicy medium-firm black flesh. May be a disappointment to sweet cherry aficionados from the Northwest but could be like a dream come true for orchardists living in the warmer locales of Maine. Fruit buds are relatively tender. Upright spreading vigorous productive tree will grow to 25–30'. Self-pollinating, also pollinates other sweet cherries. Z4.

To replace my dying Black Gold Cherry. I trust Fedco when they say it is a zone 4 sweet cherry, and there has to be a sweet cherry tree in my orchard collection. It is of great importance that we have too many cherries to eat on an annual basis.

Tree Four: Ember Plum - Late Summer. MN 83 (Prunus salicina Shiro x P. americana (?) South Dakota #33) U Minn, 1936. Medium-sized roundish-conic slightly pointed mostly red-blushed fruit with a medium bloom. Rich yellow very firm but tender, meaty juicy sweet flesh. Recommended for cooking and fresh eating. Tastes and looks like an apricot. Low spreading vigorous tree. Underwood is said to be a good pollinator. Z3. ME Grown.

I'll share a secret with you, I love apricots and many of the people I love, love apricots too. Unfortunately, zone 5A is not a apricot-friendly zone. I already have two plums planted and a third wouldn't be too much of a strain space-wise. Fedco recommends that hybrid plums be planted so closely that their branches mesh. One more plum added to the mix makes a pretty grouping of three, and maybe I can nestle a little bench beneath the plum grove. And plum-apricot butter sounds so good! Plus apricot-plum jam, dried plums, three plum tart, all things made with apricot flavored plums!


This order brings the tree count up to:
5 apple trees (plus one chance seedling)
3 plum trees
3 cherry trees (one dying)
1 almond tree (dead)
1 grape vine

next year i swear, only one last apple tree. Another rare cider apple tree, and that's it!


And maybe a yellow grape vine, a couple of kiwi vines, some northern pecans or hicans, some white oaks for the back of the property, another almond to replace the dead one, three pear trees, and lingonberry bushes, and maybe a couple of wintergreen plants....

Apples up to my eye

The apple picking season is over, but my favorite orchard still has a whole harvest for sale out of their storage. I can't stop buying Northern Spy, Wealthy and Empire apples. Northern Spy and Wealthy are amazing to cook with. Pies, apple butter, crisps and crumbles keep marching out of my kitchen and the flavor of these apples really shines.

Northern Spy is an accidental seedling discovered in the early 1800's in either New York State or Connecticut, and one of its parents is Wagener. Wherever it came from, it is an excellent culinary apple and not too shabby to eat out of hand! The trees can take up to ten years to bear, so I am grateful for my local orchard for their foresight and love of pies.

I planted a Wealthy apple tree on our property two years ago, and we will probably be getting fruit in two years. Bred in Minnesota in the 1800's from a crab apple, it is cold hardy, disease resistant, and yummy. They keep all winter and are sweet, tart and addictive. The texture is like a firm McIntosh, good for pies, eating and even cider.

The Empire apple is a cross between red delicious and McIntosh apples. I don't really care for either of its parents, but I can't stop eating Empire apples. They are crisp and flavorful and are so dark red they almost look black. Snow White would have taken a bigger bite of this apple. Eve would have eaten the whole thing and gone back for another. Atalanta would have thrown a dozen races. I love these apples and eat about three a day.

Halloween

The Moon

The Moon is rising over the cemetery next door and shining in our windows through the cedar. Saturday is the actual full moon, but it is terribly bright tonight. It makes a monochromatic lace of tree, clouds and light. The kind of night to sit outside, with something warm to drink, and watch it rise and set.

Lil' Punkin

or maybe 1,800 lb plus pumpkin!

Broccoli

You may have asked yourself "Self, what do broccoli flowers look like?" Ask no more!

nervous

Tomorrow I am joining a group of women selling knit goods at the farmer's market. I am very nervous. Pictures coming soon

Fungus among us

The super dry summer was hard on the garden. It stressed the plants and made them susceptible to all sorts of diseases. The cucumbers and the summer squash were both hit pretty hard with powdery mildew. The cukes kept producing up to the bitter end, but they were kind of funny looking.

To prevent the mildew from coming back next year, I yanked all the plants out and bagged them for the dump. If they were composted, the spores would have been put back into the garden next year and the cycle would repeat.

I have read that corn meal added to the soil encourages the growth of a harmless fungus that crowds out powdery mildew and other nasty bugs. or maybe the corn meal feeds a fungus that will eventually feed on other fungi. something like that. So I added a cup or two of corn meal and some compost and planted about 36 cloves of garlic. Next week is my seasonal manure pickup, and I will mulch give it a generous mulching of manure and peat. and maybe some limestone if my soil tests come back saying the dirt is too sour.

you'll have to excuse my rambling post. I have a new job and between getting Miss Critterpants to daycare and the drive, I have to wake up a little bit before 5am. It's a difficult schedule for my lazy stay-at-home-Mom ways.

Today

Today is nine years since I walked to Queens from 17th and 5th. I will always be thankful for the company I had that day and the kindness of a friend who had volunteered to let us stay with him.

Sweet Cherry Demise

My Black Gold sweet cherry is dying a slow and horrible death from THE CANKER. Canker is a bacterial infection in the bark that can be pruned out and the tree survive, if the disease is in a twig or branch. However, my tree is the Mimi of the garden and is dying in a big dramatic opus of oozy sap and an infected trunk. koff koff hack hack big finishing aria and dead. I will be surprised if she makes it through the winter.

A piece of advice that I have taken is to always plant disease resistant trees because they are such an investment of time and money, and Black Gold cherry from Starks is not an exception. I do think because it is a Zone 5 tree, instead of my preferred Zone 4, it suffered winter bark damage which made it susceptible to Canker.

sigh.

So I spent many hours researching sweet cherries that were not only disease resistant, but hardy to zone 4 and happy on the east coast.

My results are as follows:

Kristen - zone 4, very winter hardy, good to moderate crack resistance (where the cherries split, not the cocaine-based drug. either way, it's good) It's an early season bearer and the fruit is moderately sized and firm, dark red. - my concerns are that it is an early season fruit, which usually means it blooms earlier in the spring and we can have frosts all the way to the end of May.

White Gold - zone 4b, well adapted to the North East, low susceptibility to cherry leaf spot and bacterial canker (CANKER!), self-fertile, mid to late season bloom. The fruit is light yellow and has a good flavor. - my concerns are, well there really aren't any. it's hardier than any other cherry, specifically resistant to the disease we have here and it pollinates itself! but it's yellow. and I kind of love red cherries. It's a stupid reason not to choose what would otherwise be considered a perfect tree, but still...

Sylvia - zone 4, good bacterial canker tolerance, cracking resistance varies widely, late season bloomer and the fruit is dark red, large and firm. It sounds great! Except it needs another late season bloomer to pollinate it. So there would have to be another hold hardy, late season disease resistant sweet cherry nearby

Hudson - zone 5, bred in the Hudson River Valley in NY, it is listed as very good winter tolerance, canker and crack resistant, late season bloomer, fruit is large, firm and mahogany red. it's zone 5! how winter resistant could it be? but if it could survive here, it would be a perfect pollinator for Sylvia. Sylvia and Hudson would make such a handsome sounding couple, but I may only have room for one tree.

On top of choosing a new tree, there will have to be a new planting site, because the bacteria can harbor in the soil. So, if I am choosing a new site on our property, maybe I can plant TWO sweet cherry trees! Sylvia and Hudson could be together with their branches lovingly entangled , and I would cover them with bird netting to give them privacy from those nosey crows that tend to hang about.

Citrus

Even though I am having difficulty keeping my cherries and apples alive and disease free, I am having wild imaginings of a greenhouse in which to keep a collection of rare and unusual citrus trees.

The trees that i have found are hardy (for brief periods) down to 10 degrees

Chinnotto Orange: an Italian orange tree, important in its country of origin for candy, marmalade and soda. Bitter orange. Self-fertile

Juanita Tangerine: named after the South Carolina woman who planted a grocery store pip and grew a tree that withstood 10 degree temperatures when ever other citrus around it died died died. It is tender and sweet and excellent eating quality.

Yuzu Lemon: a traditional Japanese citrus tree/shrub that is rare in the US. It has a complex grapefruit/lime/mandarin flavor and the zest is used in Japanese cooking and apparently the juice makes a really good cocktail. On the winter solstice in Japan, it it traditional to float the fruit in a hot bath to ensure health during the cold months (or so i have read on the internets). The fruit stores well in a cool dry place.

Bloomsweet Grapefruit: hardy to 10 degrees. A 15 foot tall tree that bears prolifically. Large and delicious fruit

Peach Butter

A late night canning session yielded two pints of thick, golden peach butter. The farmer up the road has a peach orchard that has a good yield every other year. This is an orchard of very cold-hardy peaches, with tall thin cedars planted as a wind break around it. Even with all these precautions, they still lost trees this past winter. It's a loss that our whole neighborhood feels.

Having fresh, local peaches is a luxury I can't properly explain to anyone who anyone who has the luck to live in the southern states near peach orchards. Anyone who has bitten into a warm fresh peach and had the juice burst down their chin falls in love. Peaches are such a warm weather commodity, and there isn't a whole lot of warm weather here in Western Maine.

When I was a little girl in Texas, my Pa-Paw would take us to the peach orchard to pick up a bushel basket of peaches. Ma-Maw would freeze them with sugar and fruit preserve and store them in her chest freezer for her sugar-crazed grandkids to eat. My Sister loved them especially. I hope that I can give sweet memories of fresh peaches to Miss Critterpants.

Gone Fishin'

We all went fishing on Wednesday night. Our neighbors took us out in their boat on Great Moose Lake for a little fishing. We were after white perch, which are overly abundant and don't have a limit set on them.

There are so many perch, all you have to do is drop a line in the water with something anything on a hook and you can catch one. In two hours, with three and a half people fishing, about two hundred fish were caught. They are kind of small and bone-y, but they are really delicious. My Guy caught and gutted almost eighty perch and we had a feast on Thursday.

I finally got over my fear of the deep fryer, and apparently I am some kind of deep-frying savant. Or beginner's luck. The fish came out perfectly done and super crispy in its beer battered goodness.

The beer batter recipe came from the 1976 "A Texas Hill Country Cookbook" that came from My MaMaw by way of My Mom and it is goooooooooood.

recipe as follows:

Beer Batter for Deep-frying Fish

1 12-ounce can of light beer (I used Miller High Life)
1 cup sifted flour (I didn't sift, and used about a cup and a quarter)

1 Tbsp salt

1Tbsp paprika (I didn't have any paprika, so a generous shake of chipotle)

now, I took the filets and made sure they were as dry as possible, dredged them in a mix of flour, salt and garlic powder, then dunked them in the beer batter. fried at 400 degrees until done.

then took the frying even further and cooked up some dill pickle slices. they were kind of weird, but anything fried flavor is good.

long time

Summer harvest is in full swing. there are more cucumbers and summer squash than we can eat. pickling. endless pickling, because no one wants any more cucumbers.

and one zucchini plant is plenty. holy cow it is almost more than enough.

We have eight raised boxes this year, and next spring we should have eight more. I have big plans for an asparagus box that is 4x12 and expanding on what we have this year. and potatoes. and paste tomatoes and an entire parsnip box. so many possibilities!

oomph.

Blueberry picking this morning. It's the end of a very dry season so the pickings are slim, only four cups in two hours. That isn't enough for jam, so I made it into the beginnings of cordial.

We found "Cordials from Your Kitchen", by Pattie Vargas and Rich Gulling, at our favorite antique shop and I have been itching to try some recipes. While I was reading the blueberry cordial recipe, I noticed the cranberry recipe on the adjoining page. Yanked out the lonesome bag of cranberries from the back of the freezer and started that as well. It will take about two months for both of them to reach drinkability.

Our massive harvest of shallots would be too much for the three of us to eat before they rot, so I have started brining about one and a half pounds of them to pickle. It is a two step brining before I can even get to the pickling part. Miss Critterpants helped me peel the cloves for the second step brine.

When I pulled the cranberries out of the freezer, I discovered the strawberries I had mashed and frozen last year to make into jam during the winter. Why not? Made strawberry jam laced with a little bit of grand marnier and finished at 11pm. Tired. Hands are a little sore and stained purple and red and I am a little sticky from all the sugar. Off to bed.

Pickles

Here is one day's worth of cucumbers from The Garden. It is about 4 pounds of mixed variety and sizes. I used the Spicy Crock pickle recipe from "Joy of Pickling" by Linda Zeidrich. It will be almost a month before the pickles are ready to eat, but if they are as good as she says they are, I'm willing to wait.

In two days, when more cukes have ripened, I am going to attempt my favorite pickle of all times. Half sour dills. I dream of pickles from the Lower East Side from barrels and from vendors whose families have made pickles for generations. They don't travel well, spilling brine onto my kind friends' luggages. This is my small attempt to get a piece of NYC back into my kitchen.

Also, I found a neglected and enormous cucumber hiding under the leaves. We ate it with dinner and it was good.

Shallots!

I clumsily planted shallots this spring. Chucked the whole head in, as opposed to separating the heads into cloves and planting the individual shallots. They grew anyway despite drought and poor planting, and look at the bounty of onion-y goodness! When they were yanked out of the ground, each head was surrounded by earthworms and sometimes even had a slug hiding at the base of the greens. Maybe with all the hot and dry, the plants kept the soil around them damp and pleasant for the critters?

I may be a real kitchen nerd and braid them into ropes and hang in the kitchen. Or maybe pickle some of them for eating with Thanksgiving turkey! Or maybe roast them and freeze for soups. What would you do with six pounds of shallots?

off to grandmother's house

Beets, cukes, pattypan squash, carrots, zucchini with the blossoms still on and baby leeks. Baby leeks may be one of the most wonderful things I have ever eaten. Use them in soup, fried with potatoes or thinly sliced in salads, delicate and amazing texture.

In a pickle

This is my first garden, and there is a big learning curve. This week has been a lesson in quantities. It turns out, 24 cucumber plants can be frighteningly prolific. Here is the haul from one day. The previous day was just as many and there seem to be more cukes forming faster than I can pick. It's early in the season and one of the four types I planted hasn't even begun to set fruit yet. These that you see are (from left to right) Calypso pickling cucumbers, General Lee slicing cukes and de Bourbonne Cornichon picklers. The Lemon cucumbers, which are the size, shape and color of lemons, haven't started up yet. The cornichon pickles are supposed to be picked when pinky sized, but grow so fast they are generally larger. The big vines are so covered in flowers you can barely see the green for all the yellow.

What is wonderful is how many bees there are flying around the garden, it makes me feel a little less panicky about bees disappearing off the face of the earth.

SoCal

Going to San Diego and the Land of Avocado between SD and LA was like walking on the moon. Mountains that were giant piles of rocks. I didn't recognise any of the flora. There were things that looked like aliums but huge and spiky like yuccas. Trees that resembled sycamores. sort of. and just the general desert-ness of the place caused a shift inside my head that I still am unable to shake. And there were lizards. And My Guy wore a tuxedo. weird wild place.

New Neighbor

Here, hiding in the broccoli and cabbages, is our newest neighbor.

Birthday Girl

Last night, Miss Critterpants planted a lollypop in her garden box. It grew beautifully. Happy birthday to My Favorite Girl!

Tile

We went to Monson to get slate tile. There is a quarry there and the slate is beautiful and costs the same as tile at the nearest "big box store". The company, Sheldon Slate, has been in business for four generations, and is in the same town as a delicious bbq joint. It was a good day.