Author Archives: Hand in Hand Parenting

Growing the Perfect Pickle

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cucumbers

A & C Pickling Cucumber

An important part of the perfect pickle, the crunch, is impossible to recreate unless you have fresh pickling cucumbers on hand and pickle them at peak freshness. Or so I have been told. My family’s pickling tradition consists of my mother doing whatever was printed in The Joy of Cooking and turning out a jar or two of kosher dills if the mood struck her and the cucumber harvest was cooperative that year.

In Dirt to Dinner, we like to teach the kids as much as possible about their food, where it comes from, how to grow it, what it’s history is, and how to preserve it for later. So today we started four different varieties of pickling cucumbers in the raised beds in the back garden, where the soil is well warmed. ‘Bushy Cucumber’, from Seed Savers Exchange, a variety from southern Russia where it is recommended for your dacha garden because it grows a compact “bushy” plant. ‘Double Yield Cucumber’, a variety from 1924, that we ate fresh last year. ‘A & C Pickling Cucumber’, also from Seed Savers Exchange, a variety introduced in 1928, that says it produces very uniform fruit but shows some healthy diversity in the photo. And ‘The Pickle of Paris’ or ‘Cetriolino Piccolo di Parigi’ which I hope will produce small gherkins for pickling, but we’re not totally sure of, because all the printing on the packaging is in Italian.

Lemon Cucumbers

There were also some slicing cucumbers that we couldn’t do without. We started a few seeds for some of the good old ‘Straight Eight‘ cucumbers that have been favorites here for the last few years. We also planted heirloom ‘Lemon‘ cucumbers, donated by Botanical Interest. These plants grew very slowly last year but the fruits were delicious when they finally came. That should probably be a lesson to us not to start them so early in the year, but here we go again, planting them in March. Maybe in a few weeks I will start a few plants from these seeds inside so we can do a comparison of the harvests. We also started ‘Armenian‘ cucumbers from seed donated by Territorial Seed Company. We had a variety of Armenian cucumbers last year that did well and were delicious. In fact, these are my personal favorites for quick-pickling with salt, vinegar and herbs, or for dipping in hummus. They were grown in a very protected spot last year and did well. I’ll be looking for another sheltered corner for them for this season.

This summer we plan to try the Pick-a-Vegetable Dill Pickle recipe from the Complete Book of Home Preserving and these Garlic Dills from Food in Jars.

3/26/2010 Update

Our first direct-seeded cucumbers sprouted today, the ‘Bushy‘ variety from Seed Savers. The slicing cucumbers all started in pots are starting to poke up their heads today as well, ‘Lemon‘, ‘Armenian‘, and ‘Straight Eight‘s which were first and look strongest out of the gate.

What We’ve Got Growing for 2010

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Petit Pois Peas

The sunny weather has lots of folks asking what’s growing in the Dirt to Dinner garden. We are still enjoying the wintered-over ‘Tokyo Market‘ turnips, ‘King Midas‘ carrots, collards, ‘Rainbow‘ chard, ‘True Siberian‘ kale, rutabagas, lettuces, chicory, radicchio and parsnips.

The 2010 Pea Trial is well under way and at this point two contenders are pulling ahead, the ‘Petit Pois‘ and the ‘Gigante Svizzero‘ eaten as a shelled pea. We had one guest who swears by these peas eaten pod and all. Unfortunately, the early patch we are eating from was interplanted with the shelling pea ‘Telephono‘ so we can never be positive the shells of any pea picked there are going to be edible. The only variety we lost this year were the ‘Laxton’s Progress No. 9‘s’. We used a lot more netting and bird tape this year, and transplanted starts into several of the test beds. By the time the kids get back in April, we should have around ten varieties ready for a taste test.

Thirteen different varieites of tomatoes are growing under glass or lights; ‘Chinese Cherry’, ‘Big Beef’, ‘Aunt Ruby’s German Green’, ‘Blondkopfchen’, Grandma Jill’s ‘Ugly‘ ‘Homely Homer‘, ‘Roma Paste’, ‘Moonglow’, ‘Speckled Roman’, ‘Amish Paste’, ‘Costaluto Genovese’, ‘Cherokee Purple’, ‘Big Rainbow Striped’and ‘Tennessee Britches’. And the much beloved ‘Principe Borghese’, all six of them, are brazenly growing, without covers, right through the 42 degree nights. And while I wouldn’t recommend you try this at home, they look sturdy and healthy. I wouldn’t do this myself if we hadn’t had at least one Principe Borghese flowering by March 20th last year.

Eight different varieties of tomatillos are cuddled up on heat mats with the peppers; ‘Aunt Molly’s’, ‘Verde’, ‘Cossack Pineapple’, ‘Tomatillo Verde’, ‘Toma Verde’, ‘Purple Tomatillo’, ‘Purple De Milpa’, ‘Giant Cape Gooseberry’.

Now that the weather is so tempting, I can’t wait for the kids and Mackenzie to get back to growing in the garden!

Pepper Quest 2010

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Finally Found?

While we are planning what to put into the dirt for the next growing season, we are never too far from thinking about dinner. One of the things we certainly could have eaten more of last year was peppers. And this year we should have plenty of them; hot, sweet and in-between.

There are at least three popular ways to start your pepper seeds:

  1. Pop them in the dirt as-is. Keep them moist and very warm (as high as 85 degrees would work) and hope for the best.
  2. Soak them in water overnight before popping them into the dirt, etc.
  3. Soak them for 10 minutes in a 10% bleach solution, then plant them. This method is recommended for killing any possible disease that might be carried on the seed if, just as an example, perhaps you got your seed from an unknown or unusual source, let’s say.

We have trials of all three methods going right now using seeds from Guajillo peppers that are supposedly grown all over Mexico and very popular but which I could not find this year for love or money from our usual seed sources. My ever-resourceful husband found a handful of seeds from someone on eBay for us to try. And I drove up to Penzey’s in Menlo Park to buy 1 oz. of dried Guajillo’s for $2.09. I cut a slit in the side of one and now have enough seeds left over to go into business on eBay myself. Of course, we don’t actually know if the peppers will grow from either source yet.

Guajillo’s are moderately hot peppers for us, they rank at ~6,000 Scoville Units. We are also planning to try ‘Hot Lemon‘ peppers (5,000-30,000), Jalapeños (2,500-8,000), Anchos (1,000-2,000), Santa Fe style peppers (500-700), ‘Pizza‘ peppers (500) and the very hot Fuego F-1 Hybrid (60,000-100,000), even though we usually try to grow from open-pollinated seed.

The sweet pepper list is shorter, but also very important for fresh eating. Many of the Dirt to Dinner kids will happily eat sweet peppers right off the plants! This year we’ll try Yolo Wonder, California Wonder 300, Golden Star, Mini-Red Bells and a Tangerine Pimento. (If this one is anything like the Pimento we grew last year, I’m going to have to move it to the Hot list.)

We plan to be using our peppers in a variety of Mexican dishes since Mackenzie has been interning in Mexico for the last several months, for fresh salsa, for pickling, for drying and for smoking. We will also be canning ketchup, pasta sauce and barbecue sauces.

Pea Trials 2010

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Remind me next year that the ‘Oregon Sugar Pod‘ peas are going to need better supports than the split bamboo poles I stuck in around them before overwintering. They have grown at least a foot up and over the side of the raised bed and another two feet back down to the ground. (They are growing in the old potato bed, so it’s deep.) The packet says to expect 28″ vines but I’m getting a tape measure out for these guys. They have done well, and are a sweet treat when you’re working out in the garden, but they are getting a little moldy on the shady side after all the rain we’ve been having. We lost some pods to frost but the vines held on and continued to grow and produce flowers and new pods. I will definitely grow them through the winter again.

The other side of the same bed has ‘Cascadia‘ snap peas, which haven’t been nearly as productive. Welcome, certainly, but hard to find even though the vines look good and there seems to be no shortage of flowers. The pods are harder to spot, and some of them have been lost to a sort of rot that seems to start at the flower end in all this wet weather. I am keeping them picked and hoping they will make us more peas when the weather clears. I have another patch of them starting across the garden.

That patch of ‘Cascadias‘ is growing along with the last of my ‘Sugar Daddy‘ seeds. I have two plantings of ‘Sugar Daddy‘ growing in the center of this year’s potato bed, the ones I started in the ground and the ones I started in the house the same day and then transplanted. Unless transplant shock is a bigger setback than I anticipate, I’ll be starting my pea seeds indoors from now on. You should see what we have to go through defending pea seeds and shoots in the garden! I have nets and cages, row cover and bird tape, cat-attractors and anti-squirrel devices. The Pisello Nano, “dwarf peas,” ‘Piccolo Provenzale‘ I planted today are under glass to help them get established without being molested.

I also started a patch of ‘Amish Snap‘ peas from Seed Savers Exchange. These vines are predicted to grow 5-6’ tall and I put in the supports to hold them. I also have Pisello Rampicante (which I think means “Climbing peas”) ‘Telephono‘ peas starting under one of the teepees we used last year for beans. The kids planted seeds and then we were hit with crazy winter storms, so I filled in with transplants I had seeded indoors again. And there are seeds left in the packet which I may start tomorrow. They are growing alongside another Italian climbing pea variety called ‘Gigante Svizzero‘ or Swiss Giant even though the packet says this is an old French variety. It takes an international cast of thousands to grow peas around here. ;-) These are new for us, but they look like something in between a snow pea and a snap pea. I’m curious to see how they do.

And, of course, there are the ‘Freezonian‘ peas as well. I am trying to start a good-sized patch of them in the back garden this year. They will get a little shade there as things warm up, which might help them hang on longer if it’s warm.

That gives us ten varieties to try:

Snow Peas – ‘Oregon Sugar Pods’ and ‘Gigante Svizzero‘
Snap Peas – ‘Cascadia,’ ‘Sugar Daddy‘ and ‘Amish Snap‘
Shelling Peas, dwarf – ‘Petit Pois,’ ‘Laxton Progress No. 9,’ ‘Freezonian‘ and ‘Piccolo Provenzale‘
Shelling Peas, pole – ‘Telephono‘

Oh! And I am still hoping to get organic ‘Green Arrow‘ seeds from Seed Savers. They just looked so perfect in the picture. *Sigh* I know it takes a ton of vines and the right conditions for a home vegetable gardener to enjoy a big ol’ bowl of fresh peas swimming in butter, but I can still hope, can’t I?

Dark Days Dining – Passing the Husband Test

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My husband has declared my most recent creation straight out of the garden to be, “The perfect vegetable soup.” (You can see why I keep him around.) But the secret was actually a little trick I borrowed from his mother.

Vegetable Soup

The "Perfect" Vegetable Soup

I took my harvesting basket and a knife into the garden to see what I could find. We have dozens of broccoli shoots on plants I would have pulled out after the first head if the folks at Full Circle Farm hadn’t taught us better during our volunteer work day this winter. There’s also a nice crop of snap peas and snow peas–if you happen to find a time to pick them when the kids aren’t in the garden. ;-) I found beets, rutabagas, turnips and three or four different kinds of carrots. I am especially partial to the yellow ones in my winter cooking. They are a bright spot in the bowl that is surprisingly cheering this time of year. I also found plenty of oregano, thyme, chives, parsley and rosemary. And celery loves the wet weather we’ve been having.

I started with the traditional olive oil, carrots, onions and celery in the big stock pot and added in the rest of the root vegetables as I chopped. I also had some potatoes that needed to be used and I tossed in some sweet potato, trying not to waste that either. When the vegetables started to soften, I added in some chopped garlic. A few minutes later, I added two cups of chopped tomatoes, with the juice, half a cup of cooked kidney beans, the herbs, salt, pepper and four cups of chicken stock.

I let that simmer for half an hour while I cleaned and prepped the peas, broccoli and greens. Some of my broccoli plants are perfectly clean and healthy, but some of the flowerettes I have been picking are over-run with aphids, requiring a good wash and even a quick soak in salt water to clean them. I need to get out there with some soap and then go buy the kids a tub or two of ladybugs. ;-)

After the flavors had settled a bit, I brought the soup to a low boil and added in the rest of the vegetables and covered the pot for two minutes. But it still tasted too tomato-y. It was a bit harsh like Summer Sauce when you haven’t cooked it down yet. This is where my mother-in-law comes in. I consult with her on all culinary mysteries. She told me to slowly add some more herbs and red wine, tasting in between each addition until the soup was more balanced. Well, certainly never noticed *that* on the back of a Campbell’s label. I had a nice Cabernet in the cupboard that served well.  Three pours and some oregano later, I rested the soup overnight in the refrigerator.

And then I fed it to my husband. The same husband who, when presented with my recent homemade creamed chicory, burst out with, “That is truly awful!” Luckily the vegetable soup went over better. He liked it, Hey Mikey!