Pickled Okra

I pickled some (more) okra last night.  Most of it came from the farmers' market, but I did do another quart of pods from my own diminutive set of plants.  I'm growing burgundy okra and it has turned out well.  Last year I tried to grow it but the deer got it all before it produced anything.  Output has been modest and has trickled in, so it has been a challenge to do anything with it.

At any rate, I had about a half pound of my own okra plus six pounds from the farmers' market.  Flipping over to the NCHFP, one can see that six or seven pounds of okra ought to net out to around eight or nine pints.  I knew that was wrong.  As I have noted elsewhere, I usually don't get as much food content into the jars as the guides say for whatever reason--and for some things, I have been waaaayy off.  I knew that I'd get more jars of okra than forecast--I expected about seven quarts.  It ended up being the equivalent of seven quarts; I did six quarts and two pints.  Interestingly, I upped the liquids to seven cups each of water and vinegar, and probably had about two cups left over--so the quantities of water and vinegar were okay.  I also increased the salt proportionately by another two tablespoons.


It wasn't possible to get any more okra into those jars.  I packed them very tightly and even crushed one or two.  Hopefully the end product will be okay. The jar with the burgundy okra is at the right front in the photo to the right.

Thoughts on Tomatoes

I've been growing tomatoes for a few years.  I've had a variety of problems at times, but usually gotten a decent crop.  Some years (like this one) I get a very good one.  As I mentioned in July, I dehydrate most tomatoes, but also can them sometimes, too.  This year I had enough at one time to can, but I went ahead and dehydrated the lot.

I usually have blight problems--generally early blight.  This year the blight is more limited.  Generally my tomatoes are pretty well done by now, but then they get a second wind in September and I end up with some green ones at the time of first frost.  This year I'm still getting tomatoes in mid-August and will dehydrate them, as well.


 I've never had too much trouble with blossom end rot, which can be attributed to calcium and / or dry growing conditions as the tomatoes are developing.  Sometimes my tomatoes get mushy while developing and I toss them; occasionally I get severe bug damage.  There are usually a few stink bugs on them when I go out to the garden, but the damage they have caused is limited.

Last year--for the first and only time ever--I had some tobacco hornworms and saw one that had been turned into a host by parasitical wasps.  Very gruesome, but I was happy to help the biological controls work.  Otherwise, the hornworms haven't been a major problem, either.

I've become convinced that there are subtle variations in growing conditions that influence what varieties do well.  I always grow at least two or three types--almost always heirlooms--and individual types seldom do well in two consecutive years.  Cherokee Purple is an exception; it has usually performed very well but this year my two plants have been duds.  One year Amish Paste was worthless, yielding one tomato from one plant all year; another year it produced abundantly.  I used the same package of seeds to start plants both years.  One year some heirloom start from Home Depot whose name I can't remember produced about 60% of what I got off of five plants.  This year Mortgage Lifter has done okay but it usually flops for me.  Homestead is doing well this year; it might be the unknown Home Depot plant from a few years ago or it might be new (you can tell my record-keeping is not 100% of what it needs to be).  I tried Nebraska Wedding, a yellow determinate variety, never worked for me despite trying two or three years.  I never got a single tomato.  One of my favorites for flavor:  Frankenstein Black.  I started it from seed a couple of years and it produced a decent amount.

It might be there there are other factors: seeds and starts (I've done both) are variable, so that might be what accounts for the problems rather than growing conditions. I don't know--it may be a combination of things, some observable and others not.  In a practical sense, it doesn't matter: the solution is the same.  Plant several varieties and at least one will probably do well.

Bread and Butter Pickles

A couple of weeks ago I processed some cucumbers.  My overall harvest isn't going to be all that great; the vines are not looking like they'll produce that much longer.  But I did get enough for a load of bread and butter pickles, my favorite.  The Ball Blue Book and Pickyourown.org have similar recipes, which I generally follow.  One exception is that I don't salt and ice the cucumbers; I just fresh-pack them, cutting the salt a little. PYO mentions draining and rinsing after icing.  The NCHFP site calls for icing beforehand, as well, but skips the rinsing step. So although I use a bit less salt, my finished product might have more salt in the brine.  I end up with a brine that is about as salty as what one would get by using Mrs. Wages' bread and butter mix.

My cucumbers this year were all yellow (Edmonson from Southern Exposure and Miniature White from Seedsavers).  The recipes above call for onion, so I added some white onion slices, using store-bought ones (I haven't grown my own onions yet).

The procedure is pretty simple: slice; mix the brine (with the various spices indicated, plus sugar); add the slices (onion and cucumber) to jars; pour in the brine, and process.  I got about 1.1 lb. of cucumbers per quart (when mixed with the onion).  That's a bit less than anticipated by the recipes above, which suggest around 1.5 lb. per quart (or per two pints).  As I have noted elsewhere, I'm usually not able to pack as much into jars as the recipes suggest.  Hot- vs. raw-packing matters, but in this case the recipes are for raw pack, as well.  I had two bowls of cucumbers, not the one suggested by the picture above.  All that notwithstanding, I'm happy with the results (shown below is also a jar of pickled okra I threw in; I used a different brine mix for that).

Pickled Carrots

I don't grow carrots in the garden.  I have done radishes, but never carrots.  I don't have tilled soil that goes down far enough to accomodate carrots. I got some Paris Market seeds one year (a shorter variety) but never planted them.

Nonetheless, if I ever do grow them, I may end up with enough to need to preserve them somehow.  Then again, maybe I won't.  Excuses falling by the wayside, I decided to try pickling carrots last month--just because.  The concept is interesting, and I like pickled vegetables.  I've done cucumbers (dill and sweet), dilled green beans, and asparagus.  All have turned out well. I've also done peaches.  I've bought commercially canned okra.  But I had never tried carrots.

As I mentioned before when discussing peach butter, I usually don't get very creative with canning.  Canning guides admonish against that as a rule, but the keys with any canning recipe are that if it's destined for a boiling water bath, the pH has to be below 4.7, and with either boiling water or pressure, the temperature has to get to the required threshold for the required time to kill pathogens.


The National Center for Home Food Preservation has a recipe for pickled carrots and Pick Your Own has essentially the same recipe.

I used peeled baby carrots (note that the NCHFP has a separate recipe for pickled baby carrots, but it's basically the same except that it substitues a volume measurement for the carrots instead of weight).  Because no pre-processing is involved, unlike most things I can, this was a quick job.  I just dumped the carrots into a couple of large Cinderella-style mixing bowls and looked over them to see if there were any that needed to be culled or trimmed (ever eat a bad carrot? They are not good). I used six pounds of carrots (two bags of three pounds each).  This is about ten percent more than two times the amount in the recipes referred to above, but I think the syrup mix was adequate the first time (i.e., 11 cups of vinegar with 2 cups of water).  By the time I did the second batch, I forgot that 11/2 worked so I upsized it in the same proportion, using 13 cups of vinegar and proportionally more water, plus an extra 1/3 cup of sugar and a bit of extra salt.  The second time, I probably had almost two cups left over. 

When I can, I run the jars through a dishwasher cycle, which cleans and heats them.  So I didn't even start processing until the dishwasher was running.  Getting the syrup mix up to boiling was relatively quick, and once I dumped the carrots in, it took a relatively long time to get it back to boiling for the three-minute simmer referred to in the instructions (six pound of refrigerated carrots really cooled things down).

The dishwasher was in its dry cycle by the time I got the carrots back to boiling, so I started filling jars as soon as I could.  The first time I did eight pints and one quart; the second time I did three quarts and three pints.  If you're counting, you see I got more the first time, at least in terms of jars.   In the first batch, the last pint was only about half full of carrots; the rest was syrup.

To fill each jar, I pretty much just followed the directions--into each empty jar went two tablespoons of mustard seed and one tablespoon of celery seed per pint, then carrots were ladled in using a canning funnel; I shook and tapped the bottom of the jar on the counter top to settle the carrots as compactly as possible.  Then I put in enough syrup to get the headspace to about 1/2".

Overall, they turned out pretty well.  People who have tried them have either grimaced and walked away after just one or two or eaten them with gusto.  They are somewhat sweet, as you might expect given both the flavor of carrots and the added sugar.

The other methods for preserving carrots include dehydrating and freezing, but both of those require blanching.

So now I have a bunch of carrots, but I've already eaten a fair number.  I don't think I'll have any trouble going through these in the next year or so.

Deer, Take II

Earlier I described a few ways I tried to keep deer out of my garden last year.  They were mostly unsuccessful.  One that was partly successful was a motion-activated sprinkler.  I set it to maximum sensitivity and it would fire a five-second blast of water when triggered.  It seemed to limit the damage, but there was one major problem: the hose bib in the back of the house is right next to the master bedroom.  I could hear the water start and stop for each five-second blast; it woke me up at night.  A couple of times it would fire twice in a couple of minutes; I'd get up and go outside to look; I'd see deer.  However, multiple alerts every night was not really going to work for me.   I only used it for a couple of weeks (if that) then gave up for the year.

So far, this year I am having success with a higher fence.  The original fence was four-foot chicken wire, with one foot bent horizontal as a deterrent to digging under the fence.  That is now buried under grass and thatch.  It works pretty well against rabbits, but doesn't deter deer.

So I drove in some more seven-foot t-posts (in addition to the ones from last year that I strung the twine on) and added another three-foot band of chicken wire.  I stitched it to the bottom section with the remants of the twine, plus some new line.

It's ugly.  It's not at all straight, symmetric, or anything else.  But it's working ok, so I'm not unhappy with it.  So far the only thing I've had to deal with is voles / mice (or whatever they are); they went after my green beans hard when they first started to climb the trellis.  Some Tomcat bait took care of them in short order; the bait was gnawed on; the bean damage stopped; and I smelled something rotting out there about a week after placing the bait.

For the gate I drove two posts and fashioned hooks out of nine-gauge wire I have for a future kiwi trellis.  I lashed the hooks to the posts with 16-gauge wire, then hung a section of welded wire fencing that is about four feet high and six feet long (I hung it sideways).  That's also ugly, but also working.

These pictures show the garden before anything was growing there.  Now it's more populated, with okra, cucumbers, Kentucky Wonder green beans on one of the trellises, tomato plants, some late-planted Blue Clarage, and lots o' weeds.  So far, other than the vole issue with the green beans, most has been well.  Stink bugs like the green beans and tomatoes, and Japanese beetles have been seen on the green beans and okra.  Those problems are manageable.  Deer that clear-cut the okra in one night are not.

Whole Wheat Apple Pie

I've long had an interest in making a whole wheat (w/w) pie crust.  I definitely prefer w/wt bread, and have made w/w brownies, cake, and other things.  Pie crust has been a challenge, however.

My latest attempt, version 3.0, didn't use 100% w/w.  I used a 50/50 mix with unbleached white flour as the other form.  The basic recipe is a cup of flour, 1/4 cup oil, lard, butter, or shortening, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 cup of water.  The standard directions for making a flaky crust are to use butter or lard and cold water, keeping the fat as solid as possible.

I ditched that and used sunflower oil.  I've done w/w "crusts" in which I've just mixed up the above ingredients without the water, made a friable, loose mix without much cohesion, and poured it into the greased pie pan that way, then patted it roughly into shape.  That obviously only works for a bottom crust, but can do a fairly decent job for a pie that normally only has a bottom crust, like pecan, pumpkin, or sweet potato.

For version 3.0, I went ahead and rolled it out with w/w flour-covered bottom and top layers of waxed paper.  In the dish, before the top crust, it looked like what's shown at right.  As you can see, my edges weren't that smooth.  My rolled-out crusts look more like an amoeba than a smooth-edged disk.  However, I more or less got something I could use.

The finished product was not that good (and as you can see below, definitely not ready for competition in the nearest county fair).  W/w flour is denser than white; I would say I ended up more with something like a stuffed-crust pizza (that happened to have cinnamon and apple slices as the filling) than a pie.  While it wasn't all that great, it was still usable.  I will probably lighten up on the w/w content next time.  I gave a slice to a friend at work, who thought it was fine.

This was not made with the Striped June apples.  I canned the filling last fall, following the recipe on the NCHFP site.  I made it sugar free, using Whey Low in place of sugar. It was mostly GoldRush and Stayman apples, with a few Arkansas Blacks and maybe a Yates or two thrown in.   That's a subject for another day.

In Praise of the Striped June

I harvested my Striped June (also known as Margaret) apple tree on Sunday (July 19).  This is an old tree, planted through the the diligence and foresight of the man who owned the land before me.  The total take was about 20 pounds, which is maybe a bit small for a mature semi-dwarf tree, but it was neglected for a long time before I began caring for it.  I've pruned it some, which has helped.  This year I neglected it; I didn't thin the crop much and didn't do any spraying (for disease or plum curculio, so I'm just lucky--for now--that the nasty bugs haven't found it).

Despite the name, it usually ripens in July.  Still, that makes it a summer apple.  It's an old variety.  The only way you'll get one these days is to go to a nursery that specializes in old apples, like Big Horse Creek Farm.  Striped June is somewhat tart/sweet.  Partly that might be due to harvesting a bit too soon, but the apples were looking good Sunday, with a few already on the ground.  So I picked it clean.  I'm not out there every day--this isn't in my back yard; it's a ways away--so there wasn't any viable alternative.  As you can see, the apples aren't exactly ready for retail.  Most have some degree of insect damage (though I've verified that mostly it's just a few small divots, not really affecting anything else), and many of them have sooty blotch and/or flyspeck.  Both of those are benign plant diseases that don't affect anything.  They can be rubbed off the skin with a wet paper towel and some diligence if you must, but as far as I know, they're harmless.  They certainly don't affect fruit quality, except for visual appeal.  I also see russeting on a lot of them, not all, and that doesn't bother me, either.

Here's an interesting thing about Striped June/Margaret: According to a Jurassic PDF from Auburn University I stumbled across one day, it's resistant to cedar-apple rust.  Look on page eight of the PDF (which, surprisingly, is searchable).  Early Red Margaret, which I assume is the same apple that I have, was found to be free of cedar apple rust way back in 1908.  I have cedars near where the apple tree is growing.  The woods have cedars here and there, and there was a huge one about 50 feet away from the tree, which I cut down with a friend.  There's still one within 100 yards.  And there are others.  I saw galls on the closest one.  The disease can travel some distance (it's transmitted back and forth between the two species, and others--like serviceberry--get involved, too).  I have another apple out there that has issues with cedar-apple rust, getting it every year (so far).  I planted a modern disease-resistant variety, GoldRush, another of the PRI apples I have, along with a few others.  GoldRush, alas, while resistant to some of the worst diseases plaguing apples, is susceptible to cedar-apple rust.  The new apple trees are too young to set any fruit yet, so we'll see what happens.  GoldRush did have a small one this year but it fell off (as do a lot of the leaves about now). At any rate, my Striped June has always been rust-free (at least for the few growing seasons I have had it).

So did the guy who planted it select it for that reason?  It might date back to the 1960s or so.  Given some of the other things I see out there, it was probably carefully chosen rather than selected at random from whatever was available in the nursery trade back then.

Some of the other resistant varieties in the Auburn circular are available if you look hard enough, but again, you won't find them at a big-box retailer (with the possible exception of Arkansas, which I assume is the Arkansas Black--that's a not entirely uncommon apple, but it's not exactly one of the major ones, either.  It's available from all or most of the nurseries I list at the left).

So now I have 20 pounds of apples to process.  I will probably dry all or most of them, but I might also do something else with some.  As a summer apple, I don't expect a long shelf life.

I never would have planted it, but I'm happy to have it.  I just need to make the time to make the most of it by ensuring none of the harvest goes to waste.