Eating what I grow

I'm deleting a few veggies from my garden this year... those I seldom eat although I enjoy them immensely, and those that are always iffy for me to grow (like melons, peppers and sweet potatoes). I'm finding it is less stressful to just buy those occasional things at the farmer's markets, as long as I know the vendor and how he or she grows them.

The things I will give more garden space are the vegetables that I can overwinter in the root cellar (mostly winter squash), or put up by either lacto-fermenting, freezing or canning... things like sauerkraut, green beans and tomatoes. Also vegetables that are far too expensive for me to purchase on a regular basis... such as fennel bulbs, leeks and shallots. 

This year I'm trying to grow some cipollini onions that are carried on many olive bars (in balsamic vinegar). I LOVE them but not at $9 a pound!

"Cipollini onions (pronounced chip-oh-lee-knee) were once a rare treat only to be found at fancy restaurants and the occasional gourmet market. We’re glad they’re finally getting their due attention...Now what exactly are they?

Their name literally means “little onion” in Italian, and indeed they are! Cipollinis are about the size of a golf ball with a flattened appearance. They’re thin-skinned and have translucent white flesh with more residual sugar than your average yellow or white onion.

Which makes them incredible for roasting or caramelizing. Roasted whole in the oven or cooked in a little butter on the stove top, cipollinis become soft and practically melt in your mouth. Those residual sugars caramelize and concentrate, leaving behind none of the astringent raw onion flavor.

Seriously, you haven’t had caramelized onions until you’ve made them with cipollini onions. Even you onion-haters out there might be swayed!" Source

Storing Potatoes without a root cellar

I hear from folks all the time who want to store potatoes for the winter, but do not have an acceptable spot in a basement, in a crawl space or the luxury of an old root cellar. Do not despair, here's one way that's cheap and easy to do, and time to plan in most of the country! (I also have some posts on root cellaring tips coming up after Labor Day.)

There might be a name for this, but my step-father just called them a potato storage "hill" (not to be confused with the hills people make around potatoes for growing). It is actually very simple, inexpensive, and effective. All you need is straw, potatoes and some dirt.

After you have dug the potatoes, allow them to dry in the open air a couple of hours to toughen the skins. Do NOT wash them! On a spot where the potatoes grew (or some convenient spot), put down a circular layer of straw about 8" deep. Make sure the soil underneath is tamped down firmly if you dug potatoes from there. The size of the circle depends on how many potatoes to store. If there are lots, you might want to make two or more circles of straw, and have manageable amounts per hill.

Place a layer of your dry potatoes (carefully) in a circle, but be sure there is about 8-10" of straw outside the circle of potatoes. Now start to build up a cone of potatoes on the circle layer, until you are as tall as the cone will go without the potatoes tumbling down. Place a section of plastic pipe, like 1" PVC plumbing pipe down into the stack of potatoes a few inches, and extending above the stack height about 2 feet. This will bring some fresh air into the potatoes over the winter to keep them healthy.

Starting at the bottom, cover the cone of potatoes with straw at least 8-10" thick, until the entire stack is fully covered with 8" or more of straw, even the top.  Next, dig some dirt from around the cone (dig far enough away from the cone so you don't disturb the cone and straw covering, but close enough to act as a drainage ditch for winter rains or melting snow). Cover the cone of straw with dirt as thick as will hold up, the thicker the better. Pack the dirt tightly around the plastic pipe and tamp all the dirt firmly with the back of your shovel. If your soil has a lot of clay, it will form a better protective barrier against washing away in rain.

One advantage of making several smaller hills is that you can dig out several pounds of potatoes from a small hill without disturbing (and having to re-build) the other hills.

Alternative:
This method above is not the best in some parts of the US, where it is just too cold in the winter. If your winters are really severe, or you don't want to build a hill, you could accomplish the same thing with several bales of straw stacked to form a well in the center. Fill it with potatoes and other winter vegetables like squash, pumpkins and turnips, then cover with more bales to form a thick insulated storage area, and cover the whole thing with a tarp. Access is easy by merely removing a few bales, retrieving what foods you want, and re-stacking and re-covering the bales.

Volunteers Do Pay!

I've posted several times this year about having volunteer winter squash (and tomatoes) in my flower beds. The tomatoes don't have their first blush of color quite yet (as this was written on July 30), but I have harvested some of the winter squash, shown above.

There are a few more squash still growing on the vines, but not as many as there were a few days ago when I accidentally severely damaged one vine with several small squash on it!

Right now the squash are 'curing' on the front porch for 3 weeks before going in the root cellar, and those volunteers will be a lovely addition to my winter fare this year.

Pretty good return from just letting Nature take over, huh?

ps, the plastic container on the left is a few blackberries I had just picked.

Storing Apples

Apples store quite well* in my root cellar although in the 4 winters I've been here, I haven't had many to store. On my recent trip to Charlottesville, I stopped at Drumheller's Orchard in the Blue Ridge foothills near Lovingston, VA. I have bought peaches there several times but this is the first year I have been up there during apple season. The folks there are super friendly and helpful; their peaches have always been outstanding so I assumed their apples would be also.

On my way up, I stopped for apple samples that fit my criteria: tart taste, and long storage time. I sampled the selections during my stay in Charlottesville, and stopped back at the orchard on my way home to buy 2 of the 3 varieties I sampled. 

I bought a half bushel of Albemarle Pippins, my favorite of the bunch. I would have bought a whole bushel of those, except the few remaining in the big wooden bins had been pretty well picked over. The other variety I bought was a half-bushel of Pink Lady apples. The taste was good but not quite as spectacular as the Pippin, although it keeps longer.

Since I often go for a week or two without opening the root cellar, sometimes food has spoiled from an overlooked bad spot. I didn't want that to happen with these apples, and the way to prevent spoilage is two-fold. The most important is to buy fruit that is unblemished and unbruised. The second thing is to wrap them individually so if one spoils, it doesn't affect all the others.

Pink Lady apple, ready to wrap

You can wrap the apples in newspaper, but if you do, be sure to avoid any with colored inks. (The colored inks contain heavy metals.) Our local paper has color on every page, even the classified, so I ended up buying tissue paper. The Dollar Store had packs of 40 sheets (20" x 20") for $1, and I cut them down to about 14" x 14" for ease in handling.

Most of my apples still had the stems so I had to place the apples on the tissue paper stem-up so the stem didn't poke a hole in the paper. (The objective of wrapping is to keep the apples from touching each other, so tears are a no-no.) Gently twist the paper corners around the apple, doesn't have to be tight, just enough to keep the apple inside the paper.

Stack them in a container to keep them off the floor. A cardboard box would work just fine.

Pink Lady Apples

Since I have 2 varieties of apples, I left a single apple on the top to identify the contents.

Albemarle Pippin Apples

I'm really glad I decided to wrap my apples. Close inspection revealed about a dozen Pippins that have tiny bits of damage, mostly some small nicks, but enough that I suspect they would not keep well. I cannot blame anyone since I picked them out myself. To be honest, it was a little dark in the apple house, and that bin was empty almost down to the bottom. I left the slightly damaged apples on top of the basket so I'd know which ones I need to use first.


Apples are now in the cool, dark root cellar, safe winter storage for several months!

*Note: Apples should not be stored with potatoes in the same room. As they age, potatoes release an otherwise harmless gas that makes apples spoil faster.