Monday, August 31, 2009

Garden Bounty Beddy-By

Harvesting of summer vegetables is almost complete. Now we have to master the art of the root cellar. Our property has a sure enough root cellar on it – even though it could be argued that it’s not a cellar since it’s above ground. We used it as the world’s biggest doghouse for the world’s biggest dog (Think a white version of Clifford.) until the dirt floor got saturated during our very rainy winter. Now that our dog has a cave in Richard’s work shed, we can rethink the root cellar.

So, I bought a book on root cellaring. Who knew that, not only are vegetables rather particular about their growing conditions, they’re also particular about where you put them to beddy-by. It seems that our carrots need a bedroom that’s cold and very moist. Our white and red potatoes like cold and moist, but never freezing -- and not too wet. None of these arrangements will do for our butternut squash and sweet potatoes; they like to rest in moderate warmth with very low humidity. In my family, we didn’t have separate bedrooms for each kid. Now I have to create separate bedrooms for my vegetables.

We thought we solved the problem of the things that like just cool and somewhat moist conditions (cucumbers, sweet peppers, watermelons, and ripe tomatoes) by either canning or eating them. But canned vegetables have their own set of rules. They not only require cool (but not freezing) temperatures, they also like darkness. And if you store them with your white potatoes, the tops will rust right through.

And the rules for canning…Oye Vey! Tomatoes can be either raw packed or hot packed If you hot pack them, they take less processing time than if you raw pack them. Depending on how acidic the tomatoes are, and what ingredients you add to the tomatoes, you may require either hot water bath processing or pressure canning. If you’re pressure canning, you must know the altitude of your kitchen and whether your pressure canner has a weighted-gauge or dial-gauge to ascertain correct processing times. And little did I know that you have to let the pressure come down gradually, or all your canned product will boil out of the jars. Talk about “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”

Mamie has a real cellar and a real garage for storage of her garden bounty. We’re trying to improvise with what we have. The butternut squash is now proudly displayed above our kitchen cabinets. Since our root cellar is above ground, we think we need a mattress and blanket to regulate the temperature of our “taters”, so they’re currently in mesh bags waiting for Richard to build a crib full of straw for them. The carrots are in our RV refrigerator. We’re considering making them into carrot cakes and dilled julienne carrots, then freezing them. And Richard is designing an insulated shelving unit for root cellaring of our canned goods. We have until first frost (usually mid-October) to create a sweet potato nursery.

Mamie was talking about some folks who raised chickens and foster children. She said that the chickens had nothing to drink but muddy water and that they could hardly eat because their beaks were trimmed too short. She observed that anybody who couldn’t raise a chicken shouldn’t be allowed to raise a child. I’m beginning to think that parenting classes should start with the care of a potato – or a tomato.