First snowfall transforms the garden

One of the things I love about gardening is that it makes me appreciate the changing of seasons more. A week ago, I posted about buttoning up the garden for winter. Today we're getting our first snowfall of the season, and I couldn't resist taking a few pictures to capture the transformation in the garden.

Here's the area near our front door. Our garden doggie looks cold.



And a more sweeping view of part of the front garden. I love how ornamental grasses look in the snow.



We bought four mosaic stepping stones from a tea shop in Southern California that was going out of business. My husband thought I was insane, but I insisted on moving them to Flagstaff; I just couldn't part with them. Here's a look they never had in SoCal:



When I first walked outside this afternoon, I was captivated by how cute the mums looked in the snow. I snagged these guys for $.50 per plant on closeout at Wal-Mart about a month ago, and they've been doing great. They should survive the winter just fine. Here they are being adorable little puffballs amid the white powder:







This post reminds me of another thing I love about gardening. No matter the time of year, no matter how nasty the weather or how neglectful the gardener, there are always spots of beauty to be found in a garden.

Don’t toss that turkey carcass! Make broth instead.

A belated happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

If you’re like me, you’ve been eating turkey since yesterday, and the turkey carcass is probably starting to look a little bare. But don’t pitch it yet! I like to keep a little bit of Thanksgiving with me all year long, by treasuring that extra stuffing-induced belly fat. Well, OK, I don’t really treasure it, but I do seem to keep it with me. I also keep a bit of Thanksgiving around in the form of turkey broth, which (most years) lasts me until the following Thanksgiving, when I use the last of it to flavor the Thanksgiving Day stuffing. Dontcha love it when things work out neatly like that? Yes, I used to alphabetize my records when I was a kid (note for those of you under 30: records are big round black things made of vinyl that play music for approximately 3 days till they scratch or warp or your best friend’s kid sister gets hold of them and turns them into something that looks like an Etch-A-Sketch. I may forgive her for what she did to my Pyromania album, but I’ll never forget.).

Oops, I digress. Anyway, back to broth-making. You can substitute homemade turkey broth for chicken broth in almost any recipe, which can save you quite a bit of money throughout the year. And broth is brain dead easy to make.

First, make it within a couple days of Thanksgiving. You don’t want your broth to taste like old, stale turkey.

Next, gather your supplies.

What you need

• A big pot. Big enough to hold your turkey carcass (and maybe your best friend’s kid sister).
• A turkey carcass (duh)
• Water - enough to cover the turkey carcass.
• A recipe. Grab a recipe for chicken stock from your nearest cookbook or Chef Google and scale it up based on the size of your turkey. Broth-making is not a precision operation, so don’t agonize about quantities of stuff.
• Whatever stuff your recipe calls for. I’ll give you a few hints that a lot of recipes may not include:
• You can use celery tops and bottoms and scraps for the celery. It’s a great way to use up stuff you’d otherwise compost.
• If you use white or yellow onions, you can leave the skins on. Just cut off the roots and any outer layers that are dirty or moldy, quarter what’s left, and throw it in the pot. The skins from yellow onions will help give your broth a nice yellow color.
• You can leave the stems on parsley. They’ll add flavor. Ditto for any other fresh herbs you use.
• Use your old, limp, sorry-looking carrots that have been in the vegetable bin since last Easter. As long as they aren’t moldy or rotten, they’re fine for broth.
• If you didn’t use them for gravy or doggie snacks, throw in the giblets, heart, and neck--but not the liver. The liver will make your broth taste liver-y. Blech.
• Don’t chop anything, just cut it into chunks. You’re going to strain your broth, so big pieces are actually better.

Here’s today’s pot o’ broth. Everything’s in the pan and ready to start cooking.

After you’ve boiled everything for awhile, strain the broth with a colander or big sieve. Line the colander with cheesecloth if you want clearer broth.

Here's the broth all strained and tidy:

Don’t throw the stuff you strained out away. Not yet, because you can boil it all again for a second batch of broth. Add new vegetables, herbs, etc., and boil this batch longer. You want the flavor and minerals to boil out of the bones. Strain it as before once it’s done.

Chill your broth and skim the fat from the top. Separate the turkey meat from the bones and soggy veggies. You can throw away the bones and veggies and use the meat for soup or something else.

Preserving your broth

Unless you have your very own Brady Bunch (RIP, Florence Henderson), you won’t be able to use that much broth all at once. That leaves you with a few options:

• Freeze the broth
• Can the broth
• Use the broth to make soup or something else that you freeze or can.

Freezing is easy, but you need freezer space to accommodate your gallons o’ broth. If that’s not a problem, freeze your broth in whatever size containers best suit the amount of broth you normally use at a time. If you use tiny amounts, you can freeze some in ice trays and put the cubes in a freezer bag. I usually freeze some in pints and some in quarts.

Canning broth requires a pressure canner. You cannot can broth or other low-acid foods safely in a boiling water bath. Most pressure canner instruction manuals include a recipe for chicken stock that you can use, or you can find one online. Note: if you look online, only use a recipe from a reputable source. Reputable sources include freshpreserving.com (the Ball and Kerr site), the National Center for Home Food Preservation, or any USDA Extension Service site.

Those last two paragraphs also apply to soups. You can use your broth in any soup recipe that calls for chicken broth. If you’re canning, just be sure you use a recipe from a reputable source. I know families are annoying, but killing them with botulism is a little extreme.

Here are a couple of recipes from trusted sources that you can try if you have a pressure canner:

• Canning Meat Stock, from the National Center for Home Food Preservation
• Homemade Chicken Soup, from freshpreserving.com

One final but very important note: If you’ve never pressure-canned before, follow the directions that came with your canner exactly. Also read:

• The Principles of Home Canning (National Center for Home Food Preservation)
• Using Pressure Canners (National Center for Home Food Preservation)

I also recommend the Ball Blue Book, which has both canning instructions and recipes.

Pressure canning isn’t scary (it’s actually really fun!), but it does carry some risks. If you follow up-to-date instructions from a reliable source and use appropriate equipment in good repair, you’ll be fine.

Now go get that carcass and make some broth!

The virtues of scrounging

One of the things I learned from my father1 was how to be a good scrounge. Scrounging or scavenging gets a bad rap in our culture; it’s seen as a sign that you’re poor or desperate or lack the dignity to go to the store on Black Friday and club other shoppers over the head with truncheons like everyone else does. I disagree. Baseball bats are cheaper than truncheons. Also, I see scavenging as a mark of intelligence and resourcefulness. Why pay retail for something you can scavenge for free? Certainly there are exceptions to that rule (condoms and dirty underwear come to mind), but there are 3 big benefits to scavenging, two personal and one environmental:

• You can save lots of money.
• Figuring out how to get stuff without spending (much) money or how to reuse stuff no one else wants stimulates creativity and ingenuity. My parents, especially my dad, grew up during the Great Depression. My dad’s family were Okies who lost everything in the Dust Bowl years and migrated to California, Grapes-of-Wrath style. They were dirt poor, so they learned to make do with the little bit they had in order to survive. That sucked, and I don’t intend to romanticize that kind of poverty (The only people who romanticize poverty are those who’ve never experienced it). But it did have one benefit: learning to make do, being creative about solving problems with what they had.
• Scavenging is good for the environment. You can keep stuff out of the landfill by reusing it. And if you’re scavenging for your garden, you’re reusing stuff to help you grow stuff, which should make your local insufferable-patchouli-coated-locavore-who-composts-his-own-poop bow in your general direction. Just make sure you stay upwind of his compost pile.

It’s easy to find uses for stuff when you’re a gardener. Here are just a few examples of stuff I’ve scavenged:

Plants. Lots of ‘em. Probably my favorite example is the three salvias that my husband found discarded at the curb on trash pickup day in Southern California. He’s also a veteran scrounge, so he brought them home. They looked mostly dead, but remember what Miracle Max said about being mostly dead? I watered them, and they came back. I planted them, and they flourished. I didn’t even need a Miracle Pill. That's them in the foreground of this pic:

We’ve also dug up plants from old housing sites and natural sites that were being bulldozed (all with permission of course). I naturescaped a creek bank in Portland with trilliums and other woodland plants salvaged from a forested site that was being bulldozed to build a school. Those plants would have cost a fortune at the nursery; meanwhile the ones on site would have been destroyed. And of course I’m not shy about asking for cuttings from people’s yards.

Organic matter. When I have new beds to build, or I need inexpensive organic mulch, I ask people for grass clippings (if the grass hasn’t been treated with herbicides). I’m on a pile of bagged leaves at the curb like jawas on a burned-out village on Tatooine. Pine needles are plentiful here, so I grab those too. I answer ads on Craigslist for free manure2. I offer to haul away people’s straw bales after Thanksgiving. Just last weekend, we bought some hay for our goats, and the feed store person offered us a big broken bale for free. The goats got some, and my compost bin got the rest. My husband was hauling a load of trash to the dump (no, we don’t reuse everything). He saw a guy there with a load of spoiled straw bales. The guy agreed to deliver them to our house instead, and I’ve been using them for mulch for the last 2 years. There are still about 6 left.

Landscape material. The free ads on Craigslist are a gardener’s gold mine. People give away rocks, soil, landscape timbers, railroad ties, fencing, and just about anything else you might want to put in a yard. I use cardboard as a sheet mulch, so I scavenge cardboard sheets from my local Sam’s Club. I’m not sure why they find it necessary to put a thin piece of cardboard between those 55-gallon drums of mayonnaise, but I’m glad they do.

Seeds. I’ve been known to ask people if I can collect seed from plants in their yards, and I’ve also been known to carry envelopes in the car for exactly that purpose (Girl Scout motto: Be Prepared). I got a huge white pumpkin for almost free at Home Depot on Halloween, not because I needed the pumpkin, but because I wanted the seeds. I don’t know if they’ll come true from seed--that monster might be a hybrid, or possibly the product of a nuclear accident--but I’ll take a chance and see. That's it on the far left in the photo below. I'll be butchering it this weekend for its seeds, because I'm ruthless like that.

I saw a cool warty pumpkin in a bin at Safeway just before Halloween that had rotted into a slimy mess. I asked the produce manager if I could have it. He seemed glad to be rid of it; I can’t imagine why (But the look on his face when I asked for it was priceless. That’s another benefit of scavenging: free entertainment.). I’m pretty sure it’s an heirloom, so it should grow true from seed. Digging the seeds out of the slime was a nasty job--thank goodness for latex gloves--but it’ll be fun growing some new pumpkins next summer from seed I didn't have to buy.

Crops. I canned 13 quarts of apple pie filling a few weeks ago, all made from apples we picked from a local dentist’s office. They have several trees on the property and don’t use the apples, though I'm sure they'd be horrified at the amount of sugar I dumped into the pie filling. You know, they're dentists. We’ve gotten permission to pick fruit from people’s yards a few times too.

So ignore the snobs and the stigma and get busy scrounging! You’ll have a bigger, better garden, the thrill of the hunt, and the satisfaction of getting something useful for free while doing your bit for the planet.

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1. Besides the First Law of Thermodadnamics: “Close the damn door! I’m not paying to heat the whole outside!” Dad would have loved global warming.
2. “Happier than a gardener in shit” is one of my favorite expressions. And of course, shoveling manure is a shitty job, but someone has to do it. Manure jokes: even shittier than Dad jokes. Sorry if my language offends; we gardeners are an earthy lot. Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.

Putting the garden to bed and taking stock

We've had an amazing fall here in Flagstaff. Our average first frost date is September 15, but I was harvesting tomatoes till about 2 days ago, when the warm spot in my front yard finally got below freezing. We seem to be getting our cold weather at last, so I hereby declare this weekend the End of Gardening Season for 2016.

It's been a good gardening year for me, when my enthusiasm for my favorite hobby rekindled, and I got to work on a bunch of projects (see the About page for my saga of gardening in Flagstaff to date). This year's accomplishments include:

1. Finishing the drainage ditch/dry creek bed in the front yard:



2. Hauling a crap ton of manure (tee hee. "crap ton" "manure" Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.) to attempt to create decent soil in our front yard garden. I still need to haul tons more, but the plants are already doing better (not that you can tell from these pictures; freezing temps killed off most signs of life).





3. Creating a container garden in a warm, sheltered corner by the front door, in hopes that I will have fresh herbs and green onions through at least part of the cold months. This plan is working so far; I harvested a big bunch of parsley for chimichurri last night, as well as a big bundle of green onions for topping baked potatoes.







4. Started constructing a new kitchen garden in a boring, formerly-unused corner of our front yard:





The new beds are filled with barn litter, straw and chicken manure from our coops, horse manure from a riding stable a few miles away, and old straw my husband scored from a guy at the dump. One of these days I'll write a post on frugal gardening and scavenging.

I'm using the Lasagna Gardening method, which I prefer to tilling. It served me well in Portland and Southern California; hopefully it will work just as well here. If you want to try it, here are a couple of books to get you started. The first one is the original Lasagna Gardening, and the second one adapts the techniques to smaller spaces. Both are excellent. And fall is a great time to gather materials for new lasagna beds!




And so another gardening year comes to a close. Time to celebrate the harvest and give thanks for our many blessings. Today I give thanks for the year that was, for the lessons I learned and the many joyful hours I spent in the garden.

Watermelon rind pickles!

I started learning to preserve around the time I started learning to garden--when I was about 4 or 5 years old. We lived in a one-bedroom milker's cottage outside of Tracy, California--my hometown. Tracy is in the San Joaquin Valley, which has some of the richest farmland in the world. We were poor, so we raised as much of our own food as possible--beef, chickens, turkeys, and, of course, vegetables. Some of my earliest memories are of trailing along beside my mother, planting hills of squash in what passed for our front yard.

One of the advantages of living in farm country is that you often have access to lots of produce in large quantities, whether you grow it yourself, buy it for cheap, or glean in the fields after the harvesters come through. So like most farm kids, I shelled a lot of beans and ate a lot of home-canned tomatoes, home-canned black-eyed peas, home-canned lima beans, and home-canned anything else my mother could get her hands on. As soon as I was old enough to be more of a help than a nuisance, I was enlisted as kitchen assistant. And so I learned to can.

When I was around middle-school age, we'd moved to town, but we still gardened, and every now and then Dad would still glean in the tomato fields. And I had graduated from kitchen assistant to tomato-canner-in-chief, since I was home all summer with "nothing better to do" (apparently watching The Price is Right and Family Feud didn't count as something better to do). So I got to can tomatoes--lots of tomatoes, tons of tomatoes, a positive plethora of tomatoes--in a hot kitchen in triple-digit heat. Thank heaven for our swamp cooler, or I probably would have passed out face-down in the pressure canner.

For some odd reason, I have fond memories of canning (masochism? Stockholm Syndrome?), so I picked it up as a hobby around the time my son was born over 18 years ago. I started with jam then bought a pressure canner and started preserving anything that would stand still long enough (my family have learned to stay out of my way when the canner and jars come out). I didn't have much of a vegetable garden this year--damn  grasshoppers!--but in my usual determined (deranged) fashion, I still found something to can. A few weeks ago, it was apple pie filling using apples gleaned (the nut doesn't fall far from the tree) from--I kid you not--a local dentist's office. They have several large apple trees on the property, and they let people pick the apples. I wonder what the dentist would have thought if he'd seen the 2.7 million pounds of sugar that went into my apple pie filling--but I digress.

After spending about 12 hours processing and canning apples, I never wanted to see another one of the dang things, but I still needed to feed my canning addiction. A trip to the local produce market revealed watermelons on sale. Watermelons. In Flagstaff. In November. Uh huh. But I couldn't resist pretending it's summer for a few more days, so I bought one. The watermelon itself was less than thrilling (duh, it's November), but it gave me an excuse to try something I've been curious about for years: watermelon rind pickles. I always figured they'd be nasty, but I tried some at a craft fair a couple of weeks ago and discovered they are delicious. And so, after an hour or so of peeling and cutting rind and 6 hours of brining and a couple hours of cooking, I have: 3 pints. 3 whole pints from the rind of an entire watermelon. *sigh* One of the hazards of preserving is losing heart when you see how much you started with, how much work you did... and how much you actually end up with. The cure is to crack open a jar and savor the delicious fruit of your labors.

If you want to make watermelon pickles, it's easy to find a recipe. I used the one in my Ball Blue Book, but you can find a bunch of them online, including some with illustrated instructions. There's a recipe on the Ball site that's similar to the one I used, only mine includes other spices besides cinnamon. And since they only need a boiling water bath, you don't need a canner--just a large pot. What are you waiting for? Get a watermelon and get canning!