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.