Posts from — August 2011

A great vegetable garden doesn’t have to take up the whole yard– as evidenced by Growing Hope‘s Clifford the Truck Farm.

You may have seen him at events around Ypsilanti or Ann Arbor. We caught up with Clifford at the MakerFaire last month at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.

Clifford reminds us that, with a bit of planning and ingenuity, a small garden can produce a load of food!

My mom’s side of the family comes from Michigan’s Thumb region which is known for its growth and manufacture of pickles and relish. Many of my cousins worked at “The Pickle Factory” for their summer jobs, and most of my aunts had a personal variation on a pickle recipe or two.

This recipe is one that Jan and I received on a 3 x 5 card when we were married coming up on 3 decades ago. It was hand-typed but unsigned so I can’t give proper credit. I’m also including the variation I tried this year that uses less sugar but a bit more spice for a hotter, more tart pickle.

Refrigerator Sweet Pickles

4 cups vinegar
1/2 cup kosher salt
4 cups sugar
1 tsp. turmeric
1 tsp. mustard seed
1 tsp. celery seed
5 onions, sliced
Cucumbers –about 9 medium, sliced

Put all ingredients, except onions & cucumber in a pot and bring to a boil. Let cool. Put sliced onions & cucumbers in glass jars and pour cooled mixture over them. Store in refrigerator.

20 Minute Jim’s Hot and Sour Pickles

4 cups apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup Kosher salt
1 cup brown sugar
1 Tbl turmeric
1 Tbl. celery seed
1 Tbl. mustard seed
1 Tbl. hot pepper flakes
3 large white onions, quartered and sliced
10 cucumbers, seven inches long

Follow the same process as above. Makes three quarts. Store in the refrigerator.

Refrigerator pickles are great for beginners because they are fast and easy. We get the pleasure of a pickle without all the fuss and steam of canning– although we are also big fans of canning our bounty. What’s your favorite pickle– spicy, sweet or sour?

This week I harvested garlic from the Raised Bed 20 Years in the Making, a 2 x 3 foot mini-garden we created out of an old shipping crate and filled with compost. Our experiment growing garlic netted a respectable harvest, not overwhelming, but enough to encourage another attempt next year. The yield was roughly 12 ounces of heads the size of a baby’s fist. I showed our harvest to Liz, a gardener friend, and she reminded me that smaller heads often keep better than the larger heads.

We had missed the perfect time for scapes, those curly tendrils that develop on the ends of the shoots. If you catch them while they’re still green and tender, they can be used pretty much like garlic. The scapes on our garlic had hardened into papery clusters like tiny garlic heads. I’m told they can also be used as seed but that they take a bit longer to grown into full heads– 3 years is what I’ve read! We’ll try that experiment next.

Conventional wisdom is to let the harvested heads sit outside for a couple days so they dry out and prepare for longer term storage.

20 Minute Jan tried her hand at a braid of garlic. Not too shabby.

I knew it was time to harvest because the tops had wilted, browned and fallen over. The condition of the tops made it a little difficult to find all the heads. Thus it was quite convenient to have grown the garlic in a raised bed because I was able to scoop into the fluffy soil and then actually sift out the heads using our compost strainer.

We planted our garlic in the mild spell of last November. As noted then, we’d missed the opportunity of using purchased “garlic sets” so instead used store-bought garlic separated into cloves for planting. This fall, we’ll use garlic sets for a point of comparison in our ongoing garden experimentation.

Garlic takes a good 9 months of growing time. We’ll plant more in this same bed in a couple months but for the time being I sowed a second season crop of beets. I hope the beets will also enjoy the soft, stone-free growing bed.

One of the unexpected benefits of participating in the Master Gardener course through the MSU Extension Office has been the group of gardening friends that I have made. This summer, working with fellow gardeners on community projects have been a deeply satisfying experiences for me.

One of the other bonuses is that gardening tips (and plants!) that these gardeners share with each other. A tip from Gloria has contributed to our producing some of our best basil ever this summer.

For the last few years, I have made a habit of pinching off blossoms on the basil plants when they started to appear in July. I know that for most plants, energy devoted to flowering means less energy devoted to growing; when growing basil, I definitely always want more leaves. It seemed, though, that the basil flowers appeared again pretty quickly after my too-gentle pinching back.

From Gloria, I learned that more drastic pruning was a perfectly fine idea. Taking the basil down a couple of leaf levels, while leaving at least two levels on the plant, encourages the basil to branch out more, ultimately producing more leaves.

The first time I did this significant pruning on our basil plants, which number about 20 this year, my trimming yielded enough basil leaves for two batches of pesto. This trimming also improved the basil plants, which now have more branching and more leaves and which have been slower in flowering again.

20 Minute Jim says: The up-side of all this rain is that our cucumbers are VERY happy. I’ve already made 3 quarts of refrigerator pickles – with an experimental low-sugar recipe – and numerous batches of tzatziki.

I pick them when they’re 6 to 8 inches long, maybe 2 inches in diameter. They tend to get bitter as they get bigger. My daughter said that this year’s cukes even tasted “sweet” though I am not 100% certain she was referring to their flavor. It might be some kind of young person lingo for approval.

Our experiment with growing cucumbers vertically has paid off, at least so far. Eight plants take up about 16 square feet though they are reaching upward to about 5 feet tall now. They’ve reached the top of the cages… I’ll report back what happens when they continue to grow throughout August!