International edible gardening

shiney, I have a cottage - come on and put on my life vest and float, and sort of like one does in a solitary hot tub; let your brain slide into that cosmos reflecting aestivation, and just get one with the bites till they have been satisfied. (do wear swimming trunks) Be my fish whisperer.

I am going to repeat my processing of the garden's potatoes and carrots that I posted on processing the harvest because as far as I can tell almost no one reads either (Thank you Fern and Sheal). They were blanched in boiling water 2-5 minutes according to size, which the internet claims will make potatoes handle being frozen excellently. I have done this blanching and vacuum packing with other veg and they retain quality to an amazing level. I have one of those very small chest freezers in my laundry nook. (I keep my clothes washer under the house where it just drains onto the lawn making for a large area of gorgeous grass. Plants love washing machine discharge!



That pot is actually a pressure canner that I use to can pogies, but you will get that whole thing this fall when I can up another batch if I am still here. So it is huge, and dropping in the potatoes and carrots (forgot to put them out for the picture) in the boiling water does not stop the boil.

And then the cheap vacuum packer, amazing how excellently it preserves frozen things by keeping air excluded. No freezer burn. Meat can be kept frozen packed in a normal bag about 6 months before losing qualify - and then fast. Vacuum packed 2 years is fine. (I have a friend who shoots 100% of his meat - usually 4 deer and 5 hogs and he does this and says 3 years and the meat is still OK.) Also a chest freezer does not lose the cold air when you open it - has NO defrost cycle to heat everything, and is colder.

So this is one package - they are all similar but depending on which side is up look different.



And here are some - I made up 8 bags, each a couple pounds and each enough for a couple meals - just boil in a pot (add each according to size)(not in the bags) till they are done, they are just half cooked - if that. Blanching preserves color and quality by denaturing the enzymes that begin the breaking down of the sugars and color molecules.

And here are some stacked on a crab trap. This gardening is a silly hobby in many ways, but I do enjoy it. I used to enjoy building an engine, taking apart an antique door and regluing it, making stuff - now I dislike any tool using, too much of it in my life. I dislike fixing stuff - any construction; and now just like my gardens and water - and books (I am reading on the formation of monastic life in the fourth and fifth century.) (But I have some carpentry to do - it is needed to do some work)

 

Like a 'Rat on Acid' as we would have equated that to back in the 1970s. I have little bit of that brain problem too, but do go into the water, and have done hard work in temps up to 110F (43C) and like heat. It is sub zero I no longer deal with well.

 

Colne please don't take offence that many members aren't reading your posts. At this time of year it's very busy on GC. Although your posts are informative, longer serving and more experienced members are busy answering questions mostly for novice gardeners and new members. Some replies can take fifteen to twenty minutes to type up and that takes a sizeable chunk out of our time spent on GC. I have a reasonable general gardening knowledge and have spent 4 to 5 hours here on GC at a stretch answering posts, as other members have as well. As you know we have many other forums on GC apart from gardening and those of us that have other hobbies and interests get involved with those too.

As the summer season draws to a close it will be less busy and we'll all have more time to look at the less demanding threads and posts. I hope you understand.

 

What can one think of and plan for 23 hours a day? Are you a theorizer or pragmatist? Would you read Aquinas or Dawkins? (edit - Lewis or Pullman?)

I am a sort of home made Karmist - but probably through laziness of not tackling serious reading. I get it through observation that good are happier and bad are miserabler.

But it is storming here - thunder and rain - and a spell of dry just now so I can dash out and let the chickens out and give them their feed and treats. Birds do not care about getting soaked.

 

And I did go out - and picked another half gallon of berries, getting a few of the prime Jan that are so much smaller than the Kioa, and Today has been slow, rain mostly, thunder on and off - thundering and raining now.

And I took this, click on it and there is eight minutes gone you will not get back to use for better; but it has the kind of slouching about languidness of the day.......yawn... and then dinner with some peppers from the garden, and some garden carrots made into green split pea soup with a ham bone I had, tiramisu to end.

 

Hi Colne.....it's nice to see you getting some berries and knowing that the wildlife don't get everything! Hope the cherries ripen. You could make a fine jam or pie out of those.

 

Piffle. Also his religion was an Adult thing. CS was a total prodigy, extraordinarily exceptional in language and philosophy (he became both a Cambridge And Oxford Don!) He fought in the thick of it in the trenches, and was self educated with a tutor - an atheist one till - university.

Lewis wrote one of the best dystopian novels of the future darkness if man continues his slide into secular moral relativism. It is right up there with the other great three: '1984', Brave New World', and 'The Space Merchants'. I am of course talking of Lewis's "That Hideous Strength'. Even without the sort of Star Wars 'Dark Side' that forms the evil it is a tale of when secular rather than Christian morality rules so man's black side has no restraint. It is a fight being fought in the corridors of Whitehall now.

I get a kind of Marvin thing there

But life is very serious for the wretches who are crushed by it. To be able to not take things seriously is surely a great luxury. I am also not taking things seriously and feel bad about it - I potter about, cook big meals, fish a bit, just letting life slide by painlessly. I put out a certain effort (nothing at all compared to you) but it is of no purpose. I do need to work on discovering some need I can fill - what ever that could be.

And so; frog song. I went out for a minute as my spicy Thai spring roll filling cooked. (garden jalapenos) The hot rainy night with thunder and a kind of tangible wetness about the air had brought out the frogs into full chorus. Often the sound changes as I paused the recording and moved about a bit, I was trying to catch a thunder burst; hunting a total intangible - but this all is within a couple hundred feet of the house. The night was very dark with stars between black clouds and the sky lighting with flashes in the South and rumbles of thunder.

I do love the woods at night, I have spent vast time in them. As a boy and young man in London we were always out hunting in the local woods at night, we were fully night things and had no worries of any one catching us - I could run through the woods without a light like an animal. I am one of the few who has hunted wood pigeons inside London at night with a shotgun for my evening entertainment. (I was an expert with firearms and had excellent training - was completely safe - no risk to the people living about my hunting grounds. But then I went on to live outdoors for many years. And so I go out into the woods at night to listen to the creatures and made this simple recording, I do not even bother to carry a light still. No night birds unfortunately, they are mostly a spring thing with whippoorwills and Mocking birds singing all night.

 

Ennui

As only a bottle of pickled eggs can demonstrate fully: Bit washed out because I forgot to save the beet water to turn it all deep purple too.



I read a Nora Ephron book today - which shows a kind of deep insipid mode, and here is a minute of the rain...............

I am going to get back to my book on Monasticism and how it brought the Dark ages through the barbaric times to the Renaissance, and how nothing but Christianity could have done so - as nothing but Christianity did.

 

It was a lot of rain 3 + inches. When ever you hear the inches of rain on some local weather I wonder where they got the numbers, they are so low. I always have buckets sitting out, or wheelbarrows, and see how deep they fill.........and I fully understand tapering sides and surface area.

My tomatoes were brought down everywhere. I had them tied to canes, but since tying they have doubled in size, or given the volume a plant fills, increased on the square, the weight of water on their surface was too much. Every plant had branches laying down so I spent an hour with my ball of jute twine and some scraps of cane securing them again.

It was lovely out in the wet greenness a big rain brings with the exploding fecundity, weeds and trimmed natives just leaping out. I hardly can put my sheers back into their sheath as I walk around the trails with the green briar, ivy, and others having added so much growth. But it made me reflect on food gardening and gardening in total.

My father kept an allotment. Being a professional engineer and general neat and competent person his was beautiful. One year he grew 60 varieties! And after 6 years he gave it up, it was just too demanding and now he had done that. They had had a big garden, had grown all the stuff - had the hassle of over production. Enjoyed the aesthetics of producing these crops and flowers and moved on to just a tiny garden of flowers, some grapes, and a couple pots of tomatoes and greens.

I thought of that as I looked at the masses of tomatoes hanging, the peppers everywhere, squash and melon leaves trailing, asparagus ferns laying down from the rain...... And I wondered what I would do with all this stuff, this really great stuff - organic, vibrant, but lots and lots of it. I wondered if this year I get to where my parents got to in 6 years. These three years of making gardens, I produce tons of great stuff, it is very enjoyable, it is the tie to nature and life.........but.

All life is the travel from innocence to experience. We do not know something, not know how to do some thing, have not had formed thoughts on some concept - and then we experience them and know of them. That is life, it is the whole point. I am fascinated by the evolution of man culturally, comparative cultural histories and causes, basically history with a curiosity of the whyness coupled to the what and when. I will read and think on that all my life - but the majority of life's experiences we let go; we gain from them hopefully, and then move on to what ever is next.

And so I wonder about my gardens. There is a strong division between the pleasure of creating something - and then the pleasure of having it when created, which may not be what one antisipated. Obviously nature itself is sufficient to keep our interest - but at some point I will want to stop making more outside features and be less tied to them. That is what I was wondering on. For want of actually understanding philosophy I think it is an existentialism leaning feeling. Rational is not very applicable - it is more a 'what am I in relation to gardening' than 'what asset is having this garden' And I am not sure; although I know it consumes lots of time and resources, but as everything does.

Jan 19, 2014



I am off to take this picture again now - will edit

A few minutes later - the garden today.............

 

Heya Colne: what book on monasticism are you reading? I enjoyed Medieval Monasticism by C. H. Lawrence, quite a bit.

Give the surplus away. Anonymously, if you'd prefer that (I would), if you're looking for a need to fill. The scale of the effort matters less than the sincerity of it. You are part of all this, your preferences and solitary habits notwithstanding; there is no real way to avoid being a part of life, except in the mind -- and even in the mind, the separateness is only a seeming, not the reality.

 

I actually am reading Joseph Dahmus's 'History of the Middle Ages' and the first 150 pages are the establishment of Christianity first in Rome, then Byzantine Empire - then the East West schisms and struggles. Naturally the monasteries were the archive of past and present learning with the thousands of monks copying and illuminating, and the intellectual fathers writing and interpreting. Also he wrote of the foundation of monasteries and rules from the Syrian desert fathers - how all this scholarship amongst the barbarian world was the pillar of what the enlightened - and modern liberal, and scientific, West was built on.

The give stuff away is a bit of a chore - natural in the non-urban USA is not nearly so vogue it is in Europe. Land is cheap here, people grow their own if that is their interest. Most of the rest are happy with the regular sources. No, I do not really care to grow more than I need so I can give it out to a casually interested person. What I was getting at; as clearly as your last sentences, is I do not mind real loss because it is not a real issue. We get enough if a few percent of our potential crop is successful. And that is what usually is.

We have several friends, casual, but enough to socialize with and visit, that grow for the farmer's markets. They are into production and have the poly and fabric tunnels (for pests or early crops) and make gorgeous stuff. I would dread that sort of gardening. Then a couple friends who produce for their families with an unfailing efficiency. I have this pottering, casual, way that I like better.

First tomato today. First stink bugs on berries, tomato, beans........... real swines. Like weevils they are suck bugs with a long needle like snout that sucks juices and makes the fruit hard and lumpy. Think great big vegetable eating mosquitoes that stink massively if you touch them. Really stink. See - no chewing to take in surface sprayed poisons. One would have to spray the bug themselves - and they are like urban rats and resistant to homeowner type garden chemicals anyway.

You may get angry at me but I kept thinking of john Donne (mid 1600's)

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,
Say, where his centric happiness doth lie;
I have lov'd, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not find that hidden mystery.
Oh, 'tis imposture all!
And as no chemic yet th'elixir got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,
So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summer's night.
Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,
Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?
Ends love in this, that my man
Can be as happy'as I can, if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?
That loving wretch that swears
'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
Which he in her angelic finds,
Would swear as justly that he hears,
In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
Hope not for mind in women; at their best
Sweetness and wit, they'are but mummy, possess'd.

but it is the end:

Hope not for mind in women; at their best
Sweetness and wit, they'are but mummy, possess'd.

But off to bed again, good night.

 

But I did not post a picture - and fishing is what should be going on now. Now fish I can give away. Throwing a net if fundamental to understanding the water here. Here is my small 4 foot one I use to catch bait. This is catching some pogies for bait off my point. I used to throw fairly big nets easily but my rotator cuff tendons are basically used up and gone so cannot toss the heavier ones out, just drop them right down from a pier. Remember the surface area of a circle increased on the square (pi r2) so an 8 foot net is several times as big as a 4 foot.


And some pogies