Food and Flowers
Okay, 40 degrees and rainy doesn’t fix it. It’s been November for months and it looks like it’s going to keep right on BEING November right through February. Only thing for it is to work hard at getting the garden orders together, then go in the kitchen and bake something – like maybe bran muffins.
Let me start by confessing that up until a couple of weeks ago, I had not eaten a bran muffin for – I dunno – 20 years. Then my friend M., who prides herself on her bran muffins, gave us a whole plateful. VERY tasty. And very conveniently filling : have one of these mothers for breakfast and you’re all set until lunch. They were toasty tasting without being toasted, chock full of raisins, and reminiscent of gingerbread in their overtones of molasses.
Almost perfect, in other words, except for being just slightly sweeter than my ideal, and a bit less wheaty.
Reason suggests the way to deal with this is to ask for the recipe, then modify . We are not talking about fancy pastry here; muffins are among the most forgiving baked goods in all creation. You can almost always cut back some on sugar without destroying the crumb, and getting a stronger grain flavor is often as simple as upping the salt.
But no, that would be too… well, anyway, I started fooling around with recipes. Go to your cookbook collection and look up a few – turns out they call for differing amounts of every major ingredient: flour, bran, sugar, eggs, fat, you name it. Yield varies too: 8 muffins, 10 muffins, 9 muffins. For reasons that are probably related to the non-divisibility of eggs, there are very few recipes for 6 muffins or 12 muffins, numbers that are, as you may have noticed, favorites with makers of muffin pans.
I have every expectation that version 4 – coming up shortly – will finally produce my ideal bran muffin, and getting there has been half the fun. It will be posted here when it’s ready, so you can start playing too.
On the garden front, a few less-common catalogs:
Baker Creek Heirloom seeds: www.rareseeds.com. One of my favorites for the food garden. You have to read between the lines – the descriptions are sort of like olive grading, where giant is the smallest and they aren’t actually large until you get to super colossal. And Baker Creek is in Missouri, so they do much better with things like melons and eggplants than Northerners are likely to. But THAT at least they’re forthright about. The prices are fair. The service is good. And the selection is splendid: about 80 kinds of winter squash, really a lot of whacky eggplants, stuff like that.
Select seeds antique flowers: www.selectseeds.com. The name says it all, and although it IS mostly seeds, this is also a good place to get small plants of unusual tender things like blue-flowered thunbergia, a fancy ( and alas rather fussy) relative of good old black eyed Susan vine.
Arrowhead Alpines: www.arrowheadalpines.com. This guy is a master of that esoteric artform: the fabulously cranky plant catalog. It’s all text, no drawings or photos. No common names. There are no climate zones. Pot sizes are hinted at but not always given and not guaranteed. You pays yer money – which tends to be quite a lot of it, especially after you add in the shipping – and you gets what they have to send you. The kicker of course is that what they have to send you is all sorts of rare treats, grown by genuine plant nuts who really love their metier.
Responses.
* It’s almost too much to bear when you’re right in the midst of cleaning up and looking forward – eagerly! – to not thinking about the whole thing, but now is the time to prepare a few beds for early spring planting. The soil is usually too wet to work in March and April, optimal planting time for peas and sweet peas, so it really helps if all you have to do is set stakes and plant seeds. Choose spots you can reach from paths or lawn. Clean out all the weeds and put on a good thick layer of compost.
* The “get ready now” advice started with peas because they take up the most space ( and happen to be favorites of mine) but it also applies to onions, Bibb lettuce and fava beans.
* If you have spread straw mulch over newly planted garlic, marginally hardy flower bulbs, or recently divided perennials, it’s likely the rains have rewarded you with a lawnlike crop of young oats, and that they appear to be worrysomely hardy. Worry not. Even though frost doesn’t bother them, winter cold will kill them down.
After frost blackens the dahlia tops, wait for a dry day – hah! HOPE for a dry day – within the next week or so, before you dig up the tubers. Turn the clumps upside down to dry in the sun, then remove any damaged tubers and lightly brush off loose dirt. Pack in plastic-lined cardboard boxes, surrounded by packing peanuts. If you give each variety its own container, any old marking label will do, assuming you use indelible ink.
If you have had problems with carrot whitefly – those disgusting little worms that make tunnels – it’s best to pull carrots as soon as they’re ready, even though the standard advice is to leave them and simply harvest as needed. When the whiteflies keep reproducing, as they often do until serious frost, carrots that are gorgeous in October can be bug-riddled by Thanksgiving.
* It’s best to harvest big heirloom tomatoes like Brandywine and German Streak a little bit early: completely colored but not yet really dead ripe. This may sound nuts – why else are you growing your own – but most of these “unimproved” beauties are very vulnerable to cracking, even when there’s no last minute rain. Letting them finish up indoors for the last day or three won’t make them taste any less vine ripened; just be sure to keep them in a single layer, out of the sun and somewhere between 60 and 75 degrees.
* If you haven’t tested your soil for a long time – or ever – this is a good time to check things out and see if adjustments are called for. Organic amendments like greensand and lime need time to break down, so if you want their good effects next spring you have to spread them this fall.
* Goldfinches are very food-needy right now; they wait to raise families until wild seeds are ripe. Even if there are feeders around, your little black and yellow neighbors will be grateful – and gratifyingly in evidence – if you stop deadheading the cosmos.
The first corn is disappointing, starchy and less sweet than it might be, and I think I know why. We used up some older seed for the first planting and when – no surprise – germination was lousy, Bill ( who is in charge of the corn) just bought some tasty-looking new stuff and used it to fill in the blanks. ” Is it the same type?” I asked. ” Got me, ” was the reply.
But if corn with one kind of sugar gene cross-pollinates another, neither of them is likely to taste as good as it should. Fortunately, there’s lots of old fashioned Stowell’s Evergreen, a late white corn that takes forever and a day so it never crosses with anything. It also often gets frosted JUST when it’s about to get ripe – I think of it as a sort of autumn magnolia – but it’s yummy when it comes through.
The annuals that got cut back hard at the end of July have responded with textbook zeal, even though they got a lot less water than would have been good. State Fair zinnias in particular. Great big flowers on gigantic bushes and for once more or less mildew free. Too bad the only bouquets you can put them in are big blowsy “everything but the kitchen sink it must be August” monsters. The “all one kind of flower” routine works pretty well, especially if you have a nice clunky vase, and it’s very much in fashion these days…but long about now I always remember last year’s vow not to grow them any more.
* This is a good time to cast a cold eye on your summering houseplants and ask: would I buy this thing if I were browsing at the nursery? Would I buy it if it were on sale? Would I pick it up if it were sitting on the curb with a “free” sign around its neck? You know what to do if all answers are no. Most of the plants that remain are likely to need cutting back and re-potting before being moved to a shadier spot, which should be done fairly soon. There is still a fair amount of outdoor time left, but it helps to get them used to low light before they must go indoors.
* It takes at least 6 weeks – often more – for a baby winter squash to reach full size and ripen thoroughly , so before long it will be time to tip-prune the vines and remove new fruits and flowers. Plants that can put all their energy into just 4 or 5 large fruits are the ones that produce great squash. Just count back from your expected first frost date to find the optimum pruning time. The vine tips and baby squash are sometimes tasty, sometimes quite bitter. Try sautéing a sample in butter or olive oil before putting all that (potentially) high-end vegetable material on the compost heap.
* If you have been feeding roses, don’t forget to stop. Succulent young growth needs plenty of time to toughen up before cold weather, and you don’t want to encourage the plants to keep making more of it.
I did follow my own advice in the matter of the bush beans, planting only very short rows, but we are still being inundated. It’s all the fault of the obscene heat – it’s forcing the pole beans to start pumping ’em out much sooner than usual. These are late pole beans, they’re supposed to FOLLOW the bush beans, but evidently somebody forgot to tell them that. And of course like everything else you have to keep picking or they won’t keep beaning.
The thing to do at a time like this is to give ’em away, so I called the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley and sure enough, they maintain a huge list of pantries and soup kitchens – six counties’ worth – and are more than glad to help you find a few nearby. Their phone number is 845 534 5344, website’s foodbankofhudsonvalley.org, and the counties they cover are Dutchess, Orange, Putnam Rockland, Sullivan and Ulster.
It may take a couple of tries – last time I did this ( not around here) it took a while to find a place that could use garden extras: soup kitchens don’t always have enough workers to mess around with fresh produce, pantries can’t always store it. But this time there’s an easy solution. The food bank picks up leftovers at some farmers’ markets, so gardeners who coordinate it right can hand off the beans – or whatever else is in overflow mode – when they go to pick up eggs and cheese.
Dahlias always make larger flowers – with longer cutting stems – if you disbud them, and as they swing into high gear in late summer this small attention can really pay off. Just use your fingernails or a manicure scissors to remove the small side buds that form under each large one.
Summer squash should be starting heavy production long about now, so it’s time to start lifting those leaves. Neglected fruits don’t just grow tough and watery, they tell the plant – by their maturing seeds – that it’s okay to quit making more.
So the squash mantra is always “keep them picked to keep them coming ” … but don’t try to get ahead by picking them too soon. Zucchini looks cute when it’s finger sized, topped with a stiff, unopened flower, but it doesn’t taste like much at that stage. Ideal harvest time for zucchinis – and crooknecks, straightnecks, pattypans and cousas – is shortly after the flower opens ( shortly being defined as anywhere from an hour or so to 3 days).
In very hot weather, plants wilt at midday even when they aren’t thirsty, but if yours seem to be slow reviving , look pale, or show other signs of stress, that stress may be dry soil. Don’t be deceived by a damp top layer, dig down 3 or 4 inches to check. When watering is indicated, be sure to do it at ground level or use the sprinkler early in the day. Wet leaves and humid nights are a justly famous recipe for the spread of fungus disease.
Nothing like summer thunderstorms for reminding you the word microclimate is not to be taken lightly. There have been enough of them here to keep everything growing nicely – and knock down every tall stemmed flower except the stalwart cephalarias – but friends only a few miles away are moaning about the drought.
We are mostly moaning about the heat. A friend who lives even closer says this week’s garden tip should be to go to the movies, preferably at a theater that serves beer. This would be an excellent idea if I could just teach the cats how to deadhead annuals. Cosmos, zinnias, bachelor buttons, painted daisies, love-in-a-mist… seeds are forming everywhere and they will be the seeds of a flowerless September if I don’t get them cut off the plants soon.
We will also be strawberryless if the Tristars don’t get some tending soon. This tasty “day neutral” variety produces well into autumn if you keep the plants watered and weeded during the dog days. But that’s a big if when you’re eating peaches and cherries — and going to the movies.
