We’ve had a very, very nice September in Connecticut. It’s getting colder, but it’s been fairly sunny. These past few days as hurricane Kyle has brushed by, we’ve gotten a whole lot of rain.
It’s usually at this time of year that the garden starts to disintegrate a bit. The beans are done and turning browner. The cucumbers have finished (with some assistance from some powdery mildew), the tomatoes that remain are leaning and withered. The soil is picking up more and more determined weeds, thin and wilty ones that are only really plotting next year’s revival.
The grass mulch is spotty. The pathways are cluttered. The potatoes are gone!
And still the peppers remain. Sturdy, solid soldiers! Bent from the heavy rains a bit, but fruiting in long, green, red, and orange bunches. They are without question this year’s heaviest yielders.
While the new peas grow (a term used loosely… I’m not counting on much proliferation of peas for October) and some spinach and lettuce are producing, it’s just about time to call it a season.
And this year… it’s time to get some garlic going. Plant it in the fall, pull it in the spring. Something to look forward to.
This has nothing to do with gardening, but come on…
Fox has a new show coming out called Hole In The Wall. In this new show, contestants dressed in outfits that look like Tron compete to see who can match their bodies to shapes cut into big, moving stryofoam walls.
I’ll give you a second to think about that….
Now, given that we can put shows on the air about people trying to fit through holes, here are some other shows that I think should be made:
Pudding Or Not? Tune in to Fox on Wednesdays! The sticky gameshow that brings ickiness to new highs.. and lows! Blindfolded contestants dressed in nothing but tinfoil reach willingly into paperbags filled with… sometimes pudding, sometimes hillarity! [cut to clip. Blindfolded woman reaches slowly into a paperbag being held by Phil Donahue. "it's... it's.. definitely pudding," she screams. "Oh.. I'm sorry, " says Phil. "It's manure!" audience laughs...]
A Date With Death. ABC Family Thursdays. 16 desperate ladies. 3 suspicious men. Two of the men are normal guys. One is a psychotic, but handsome killer. Watch the courting and possible killing of one of these lonely ladies. They’re dying for a date.
Survivor McDonalds. Nickelodeon Mondays. Who has what it takes to make it through these grueling challenges? Who will survive… McDonalds. Nothing but value meals morning noon and night until there’s only one withered soul left standing. You want fries with that?
America’s Next Newscaster. Fox News Friday. 10 beautiful, white-toothed smilers read teleprompters and vie to be the next exaggerator to terrify America! [cut to clip. "Stay tuned. A deadly recall of the most common household item of all. You may be sitting on it, near it or holding it right now. We'll tell you what it is after these words." [next clip] “… has scientists baffled. Everybody who has ever eaten broccoli has died or will die.” It’s “breaking all the rules” news every Friday with Fox.
Pepper, peppers everywhere and some too hot to eat.
I have a crowded, crazily productive chunk of pepper plants. Only 8 in total, but they are yielding like mad. I’ve got some nice frying peppers, some nice red bell peppers, some kind of cool heirloom mild hot pepper, a nice heirloom sweet pepper and then two habeneros. The trick here in Connecticut with peppers is to (wait for it)…….. plant the things and then cross your fingers.
The growing season isn’t very long here, but neither is it too short. It’s a Goldilocks situation in that it may be just right. We had a moist summer, but it was warm. And these peppers are mad with life!
So, chop some junk up and make some salsa I say.
There are some awesome recipes out there. My friend and I opted for a fairly simple two-step approach.
Step 1: Uncooked. Chop up some fresh tomatoes, onions, peppers, a hot pepper, throw in some vinegar, salt, basil, cumin and whatever else you feel like. (Hint.. the more obscure the addition the better. Add some Honeycombs Cereal or some prunes or some curdled milk or some fur or whatever. When people love it you can say “Yep. It’s the secret ingredient that makes it so secretly special…”). Add it all to a bowl, mix it up and let it get cold. Eat it with, I don’t know, nacho chips. That’s clever.
Step 2: Cooked and canned. Chop up lots of tomatoes. Garlic. Peppers. Some hot ones…. watch it mister! Not too many hot habeneros! Some onions. Basil. Cumin. Cilantro. Cook it all. Add vinegar.. enough for canning action to kill the botulism. Add some salt and pepper. Sugar or honey a little. Cook. Can. Store. Eat. With maybe some nacho chips or something.
But when you see that thing and it’s in the dirt and it’s where a potato ought to be, well your mind fills in a blank. It goes something like this:
My Mind: Here’s the happy farmer digging for potatoes. Is he afraid of spiders? Nope. Good thing, cause there’s lots of them. Is he afraid of slugs? A little, but he’s confident he can outrun one. Is he.. ooh, there’s a potato.. got you you little sucker… thought you could hide yourself? No way.. not from this guy.. This guy is totally on the ball and totally zeroing in on potatoes. He’s the potato master! Bow to me… oohh there’s another one.. got it.. wriggly one. Soft. Hmm.. did it rot? Odd. Why does it have teeth? Jesus! It bit me! What the… mother@#%$@&… that potato bit me and now it’s scurrying away! Get it! I’ll be damned if I’m going to be the kind of potato grower that lets his potatoes grow and then grow teeth and then bite him and then scurry away! <dives> Got you.. holy @#$@… I don’t think that’s a potato. I’m so going to boil it anyway.
The potatoes did fairly well. Several pounds of a blue kind and a not blue kind. (Next year I’ll pay attention to the names!) There was a family of voles in there and they had been gnawing on some of them, but most made it through.
Dirty hands… dirty work.
A collection of some of the potatoes.
Just remember… if you grow your own potatoes, they aren’t supposed to bite.
What’s it like to not worry about every bite of anything? I don’t think I can remember. I enjoy food. My wife and I love nothing more than a nice meal out. We’re not devoted home cooks (busy busy!) but we do what we can and I am always shocked at how my wife manages to cook for us on her days at home when she has so many things to do! And each weekend we have at least one great meal cooked by our friend Chris.
Yet I still feel guilty or terrified of everything I eat! If I could lose some weight, I know I’d be healthier. But what an experience it would be to really eat something and not care…
Fits nicely with this post too over at A Sonoma Garden. What would you find in your grandmother’s recipe box? Would it be the unprocessed food treasure trove that you think or would it represent the signs of the times? The beginning of convenient processed foods?
When the Podchef Neal Foley was in town, I had a great time going out and sourcing local foods with him. The meal he cooked us was fantastic and the whole experience was very, very memorable. Sharing the night with our best friends and our new friend Neal seems to be what food is all about.
We all were particularly pleased that we could take some of the sting of the trip out for Neal who was in town because his mother had passed away. Gracious of him to cook for us and for him to spend most of the day with me as we wandered around a bunch of local farms.
This year I grew some gorgeous Borlotti beans. They are sometimes called cranberry beans and they are just beautiful on the plant.
Which is good. Because you can just leave them there to dry. And like all of us, they look lovely in their youth and then the world sucks their souls and they become withered, angry legumes ready for the soup pot.
You can pluck them in their youth and shell the beans for fresh use. Or you can freeze the beans. But either way you’ve got to unzipper them and pop them out. The pods are not edible (that I know of), but even the beans are pretty.
I picked a bunch and shelled them, but I left a whole lot more on the plant to dry. In a few weeks they’ll be ready to pull and save for the winter. Soups. Ham. Served cold with tuna.
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth, how love burns through the putting in the seed. On through the watching for that early birth when, just as the soil tarnishes with weed, the sturdy seedling with arched body comes shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs. -Robert Frost
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