I keep trying and not getting around to writing my own blog about projects I’m working on so I thought I’d use my five minutes as a “guest blogger” and stick to my theme by telling you about some of my fall projects. We finally had a frost here in my northern Midwest City a full month later than our September 25th average, and I’ve decided I better get to all of the fall projects I’ve been putting off for weeks. They’re some of my favorite tasks of the year so I don’t know why it’s been so difficult. An afternoon of time away from work has been extraordinarily helpful.
1. Seed Saving
Well, really my primary task was to clean out all of the ugly, dead, frozen things from the garden in front of the house. I have a neighbor who pays more attention to my yard than I do and has even been known to mow my lawn and cut back my plants that don’t meet her specifications. So, for the neighbor’s sake, I thought I’d relocate the in situ compost to the proper bin in the backyard. In the process, though, I collected some seeds from my scarlet runner beans to plant again next year. Though my trellising was quite inadequate this year, I’m convinced scarlet runner beans would look great climbing up the front of my house all the way to the roof. Now that they’re all cleaned out, my front gardens aren’t much to look at—I’m considering talking a friend into painting some faux plants on my foundation. Instead, here’s a photo of my saved scarlet runner bean seeds. Aren’t they gorgeous?
2. Salsa Verde
A few years ago, I was all excited about growing tomatillos so I planted a whole bed in my garden and, as anyone who’s ever grown tomatillos can imagine, I came to regret it. Even if I liked tomatillos, which it turns out I don’t, not much anyway, a whole bed, no matter how small the bed, is WAY TOO MANY (unless you have a good market). Tomatillos are prolific in a big way. Not only will one plant produce an unfathomable number of fruits that are incongruently both sickly sweet and bitter, there is no way you will possibly pick all of the fruit and they will self seed and come back many times over the following year again and again and again. So it happened that without planting a single tomatillo plant in my garden this year, I felt obligated during a recent afternoon in the garden to harvest a full paper grocery bag of the little buggers.
I gave away an armload to a friend who thought they might be good roasted with honey, my roommate made a triple batch of enchilada sauce, and I still have too many for my liking. I haven’t heard how the roasting with honey went, the enchiladas were quite tasty and I’ll be making salsa verde tonight. It’s really quite convenient that I also harvested a bag of jalapeno peppers during the same trip to the garden.
3. Garlic
Though she may have crossed the line in doing my gardening for me on occasion, it turns out that my neighbor may have a point. Last fall, after moving away from many years on a farm into an urban house with a very small yard, I tried to compensate by planting my backyard full of garlic. This summer, when the garlic should have been pulled out of the ground and hung in a cool place to dry, I was busy living my new, urban life and didn’t get to it. Today when I went to see if all was lost, I found that my undug garlic bulbs had actually sprouted into a second generation. I decided to make the most of my inattentiveness and try an experiment—will pre-sprouted garlic cloves survive transplanting just before winter? I dug a few clumps of new shoots, separated them and replanted them in a different garden. They’re well mulched to keep the weeds out while I’m ignoring them next year. We’ll see how it goes.
4. Horseradish
Another thing I inherited in my garden this year was a copious supply of horseradish. I’ve wanted to make horseradish sauce for a few years and never seem to get around to it so I decided this was my year.
It’s really a very easy process. You dig up the roots, clean and peel them, blend them with water, drain the water off, pack the mush in a jar and top it off with vinegar. Apparently, the longer the ground horseradish is exposed to air, the more hot and pungent it gets due to some enzymatic process. So, well prepared cooks who manage to top their horseradish mush off immediately will end up with a milder version while disorganized folks with too little counter space who wait at least three minutes to get the vinegar poured will have a hotter product. I have a heck of a lot of horseradish now so I hope it’s tasty.
5. Herbs
I was going to write a little more abut drying herbs and how I killed half of my houseplants this week but there’s not really too much to say. I’ll leave it at this: Herbs are super easy to dry. If you have a garden or know of a garden that you can snip a few herbs from (thyme, sage and rosemary have all probably survived the frost we’ve had to date), snip a few, tie a string around them and hang them upside down until they’re crunchy. When they’re completely dry, pull them from their stems and store them in a lidded glass jar (they get dusty if you leave them hanging from the curtain rod in your kitchen all winter.) This also works with bunches of herbs you buy from the grocery and don’t use all of.
And my poor houseplants. They’re dropping like flies. So far this week, I’ve lost my mint, a huge old aloe, and a lavender plant that had been doing SO well all summer.
Perhaps it’s the aphids that I found on my pretty indoor pepper plant.
