People eat a lot: producing more and bigger

It's easy to grow some food, and growing your own makes a big impact on your diet, since you can grow the most delectable and interesting parts of your diet; summer tomatoes, basil, cilantro, green beans. Once you go beyond the glamous stars, and start producing the everyday and mundane, and filling in more of the background, every day, every month, then producing your own food means producing volume, storing, and much more cooking. Maybe I'm a gardener first, but I find producing the food is the fun part, while storing and cooking it is a lot of sorting dirty roots, peeling and chopping, standing over a hot canner of boiling water, and cleaning up the mess. And I don't even want to start on how unpleasant it is to "harvest" chickens.

Coming as I do from a normal backgroud, a fairly small family of light eaters, we'd cook meals that would produce leftovers but still quite modest quantities. I imagine familiies with 5 or more childen or teenage boys would have a very different perspective! One of my challenges has been to "think big". For example, my chili recipe made enough for two meals. But it's not that much more work to double it. Last time I ended up making 3 gallons of chili, which was perhaps a little over the top; 11 people barely ate half of it. But it freezes fine, and it's so nice to have some quarts of chili handy. It was a lot of peeling tomatoes, but with so much it's worth it to get the food processor out for the onions and peppers, and the kitchen only had to be cleaned up once.

The same is true of canning. Much of the work of canning is dealing with the hot water bath. I used to end up canning only a couple of quarts of sauce or quarters, a few pints of salsa. But it's much more efficient in kitchen work to can a full canner load (7-9 jars), or two loads. We got the larger 9-quart size canning kettle this year.

Getting more serious about producing food is the other part (the part that comes first, really). You need to have enough reliable if not exciting producers. I most enjoy growing interesting and exotic heirloom tomatoes, but the interesting colors, odd shapes and shy production just don't work as well for processing. It's been a road to learn to grow a bunch of dull but productive plants to get serious tomatoes, enough to make gallons of chili and gallons of salsa. Giving up growing a few of the intesting ones - but how many interesting tomatoes can you really eat? I'm more of a graze-on-cherry-toms-right-from-plant person, myself. The interesting tomatoes go into tomato juice which seems to even things out, I can even put a few green-when-ripe in there.


Lisa’s Vegetarian Chili

2 tablespoons oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 large red or green pepper, chopped
1 lb.Tofu, frozen, thawed, and crumbled
4 cloves garlic, mashed
15oz can tomato sauce
1 lb. Can whole or diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon salt
black pepper
1 tablespoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons chili powder, or more to taste
A little cayenne flakes, if desired
1 can corn
1 can black beans

Squeeze water out of thawed, crumbled tofu, and mix with part of the chili powder. Add a little liquid from the canned tomatoes and mix well, squeezing to let the spice color the tofu.

Fry onions and peppers in oil until soft and just starting to brown. Add tofu and garlic and cook a few minutes. Add other ingredients and cook for at least an hour, longer is better, until it looks like chili.

Serve over cornbread or rice and garnished with shredded cheese, chopped onions, and chopped jalapenos.

Notes:
- all quantities are general and I use fresh instead of canned when possible.
- Cook beans before adding, and peel and quarter tomatoes, but everything else can go in fresh.
- Using all fresh tomatoes increases cooking time.
- It's important to freeze and thaw the tofu before using, to get the right texture.
- I usually use a lot more chili powder but it depends on the quality of the chili powder you have.

Late in the non-lull of summer

Usually I have a lull in summer, between the time the garden is in and the tomatoes start to ripen. This year that didn't happen; I think knowing there's a lull it gets overcommitted before it starts.

It's mostly been animal activities that took up the slack. We had a batch of meat chickens, scheduled to be full size in the early august part of the summer lull. And they were. We're getting better at butchering, but it's still a lot of work and energy, never mind trying to cram them into the freezer. We were didn't feed them too much, so they ran out and had to wait for morning and evening feed; perhaps as a result, they grew large without any deaths, coming out in the 5.5+ pound range. There are still three left, along with the poor turkey.

We also acquired a ram from Eagle Point, three sheep from Phoenix, and a young buck from another place in Phoenix. Then one of the sheep and the ram turned up with health issues we had to deal with. Calla's been dropping off milk production, worryingly, but Lily did turn out to be pregnant and produced a kid a few days ago.

It was such a late wet spring and cool summer that the tomatoes are still not ripening; usually by this time we're up to our eyeballs... but we just get an occasional one. Very worrying. The peppers also look good but aren't ripe yet. It has been a stellar year for green beans, though; and the spring planted kale is nice looking, which is something I'm not used to in August. The basil that looked so bad in spring is looking fine now... the secret is to plant a lot, since only about a third of the plants survived. I've been better than most years about starting seeds in flats for fall crops; but it's been difficult to find time to plant the seedlings. And the cabbage worms really are hard on tiny little seedlings.

The yellow plums were late, but we got too busy (camping trip!) and missed most of them (the chickens liked them). There are more plums to come, and the apple trees are loaded. The peaches are just gone by, not as many as last year, but Jay and Lindsey enjoyed them a lot (I can't abide the fuzz, myself).

More on wheat

The winter wheat is harvested, and the spring wheat is nearly so. The differences between them are so great I am just fascinated - it's like that time some years ago when I realized that tomatoes were not boring red round bland mushy things but had flavors and colors and complexity. The differences between these two wheats are as big as between Brandywine and Green Grape! Well, maybe not, but that's the idea.

Since on closer look both wheats have awns, I've been calling the shorter many tillered one "East" and the taller, greener one "West". The East was ready first,
and threshed out (with great difficulty, a lot of straw to the amount of grain) to about 4 or so pounds, but the hulls are staying on the grains, so it's likely to go to the animals. The West wheat was/is MUCH easier to thresh; I expect yields will be similar, but we took a big clump for decorative purposes.

Side note: I think the spring wheat is much prettier for display than the West wheat. The spring wheat has a nice light tan color and is nice and fat, while West wheat has darker or blueish tones. The grain head pattern is similar for the spring wheat and the West wheat, with sticking-out awns instead of ones that lay flat; but besides color, the Spring has shorter stalks, and the heads are a fatter. Haven't counted the tillers.

Threshing hasn't become easier; the rubber trug on the porch, and pounding with a 2x4, sift out the straw, wind-winnow the grain, handpick the bits of stem. With the East wheat I did a lot of hand twisting and folding, but the West wheat's awns are too stiff for that, it hurts.

Back to awns; when I grew these wheats out the first time 2-3 years ago, I do remember one of them not having awns. So what happened? I can't believe they cross-pollinated, since each type has been very consistent within the patch. Perhaps a mislabeled jar? I must grow test plots of the originals too!

I've got another grain, presumably one I planted, growing in the circle beds, but I don't know what it is - maybe barley? It looks like something I planted, but I don't remember anything. It has truely naked seeds, not like the wheat that has an easily broken off covering. It could also be kamut, or even rye...

And the oats were harvested and threshed by rubbing in my hands, some work but no stabbing awns... came out pretty clean. It's a long way from dry, though.

On other notes, garlic is all harvested, cabbages are harvested, a new one for us, what fun! and the first tomatoes have ripened (polar baby, of course). Beet seed is ready for harvest, and there could be enough basil for pesto. I'm still fighting the squash bugs and cucumber beetles, but the green beans are already ahead of us. The chickens in the orchard are getting larger by the day, and the freezers are still full so we won't have anyplace to put them. Two more chicks hatched out, and unlike the first three these are very friendly and come running when they see us, which adds greatly to their cuteness factor. The dog had foxtail in her paw, one surgery at the vet, two weeks of swollen paw, another surgery by Lisa to remove the last foxtail, and she's finally better and can get the skunk-smell-removal shampoo that's been waiting for her.

Bountifulness

Hummus might not be what most people want for Sunday dinner, but I didn't have enough energy after a full day moving greenhouses, etc. to make falafel, my orginal plan (I'm haven't got a good recipe or techinque, but I keep trying). But to go along with it I made a salad, a kind of spring-variant greek salad, and it was something special about going out and harvesting for this.

There's fresh garlic (chinese pink, a very early garlic) for the hummus, but most of the rest of that was purchased. I did soak the chickpeas and cook them in the sun oven.

For the salad, I picked snap peas, broccoli, a few carrots, a walla walla onion and some romaine type lettuce. It was a special pleasure to walk around the garden and put this and that into the harvest bucket! After so long when it seems like more goes in than comes out... although we did just eat the last of last year's potatoes for lunch today, so I guess I shouldn't complain. For the salad, the harder vegetables got steamed a bit, and then some cider vinger and olive oil. We stuffed all in homemade pitas, and the flavors really were wonderful.

There's bounty all year in the garden or from the garden, if you plan ahead and accept the differences that the seasons bring. There's a special sense of bountifulness in fall, when the vegetables are root cellared, or dried, frozen, canned; or waiting patiently in the garden for harvest. And even in early spring, the bounty of salad greens and delectable green shoots and leaves. But the bounty of summer, the abunance of plants growing passionately with the all the different varieties of textures and flavors and shapes, well, it's hard to beat. For me as well, this is a time where the abundance does not come with directly-related pressure. We eat peas, broccoli, and sweet onions only fresh, lettuce we don't save, and carrots and garlic can wait much longer before being dealt with - there's no looming chore of putting-by, just picking and eating.

Not that I'm not hugely busy - trying to save the squash and beans from the quintuple threat of striped cucumber beetles, earwigs, slugs, spotted cucumber beetles and squash bugs. But more on that later.

Wheat

I usually grow a little plot of wheat. You can get 10# of wheat berries from a 5x20 plot, it's not enough to live on, but that is a few loaves of bread, and it's quite fulfilling. I also try different kinds of wheat (winter wheat, spring wheat, kamut, stone age, etc.) and different ways of growing it (plug trays, broadcast).

The kinds I grow are fairly easy to tresh and winnow, although it's hard to get all the bits of stem out of the grain. I suppose it adds fiber... We use an electric grain mill to make flour and from that bake bread. It's perfectly nice bread, perhaps a bit dark and heavy, even using 100% home grown wheat. But we like dark interesting breads.


Tall, non-awned wheat

I believe it is SS 791 from Bountiful Gardens. This from saved seed that I grew out from 2005-2006 (I think). It germinated slower than the other.



And this is the shorter, awned wheat. This, I believe, Hard Red Winter from Bountiful Gardens. (I could have these backwards).
You can see a little of the tall wheat to the left.

The last time I grew these varities, I don't remember a differnence in the plots, but the non-awned was a little easier to thresh, the grains were a little larger, but the yield was a little less than the awned.

This year, the difference is dramatic. Both were planted in the same bed, same number of plants (transplanted from 244-plug trays), at the same time with the same spacing, and treated the same (i.e. ignored). The awned wheat is been yellow and unhappy, while the non-awned grows tall and green. I counted tillers (stalks with seed heads) on a particularly healthy looking plant of each; the non-awned one had about 20 tillers, while the anwed one had almost 80! If I'd heavily fertilized the awned wheat, it could have really gone to town with production.

I think this is the heart of the "green revolution", both the good and the bad. Yes, the right variety when treated optimally will give you a much better yield. But equally, if you can't give it all the fertilizer it craves and demands, perhaps the old traditional varieties have a use. It's too soon to see how they will yield.

And I would never have though two types of winter wheat would be so different. I wonder if they taste different?