Saving Seeds

Last weekend, Agata and I spent a day putting the garden to bed for the winter. It was a gorgeous fall day (the first one without rain in almost a week), and we spent the day harvesting, planting garlic, saving seeds and getting the beds ready for the spring.

Agata has been saving seeds for a few years now, but like so many tasks in the garden this was my first time. It was a remarkably simple process really - by this point in the summer most of the plants had gone to seed, and in most cases, it was just a matter of snapping off the seed pods, and carefully shaking out the seeds into a bag and labeling them. If the seed pods weren't ripe yet we brought the plant home to hang dry.

(bachelor's buttons, also known as cornflower)

For tomatoes and cucumbers, the seeds need to ferment in their own juices to mature. We saved some of the tomatoes and cucumbers that were too far gone for eating (which is what you want - huge, orangey-yellow cucumbers and overripe tomatoes), separated out the guts and seeds and left them to rot in small dishes on the balcony, keeping each variety separate. After a few days, we separated out the seeds from the fermented juice and mold by rinsing them off with water.

The seeds that are good quality are heavier and fall to the bottom, and the ones that are not mature enough or bad in some way float to the top. We spread the good seeds out on some paper towel to let them dry, and then packed them away for next year. Not pretty, but effective.

Beans and peas were easier. We made sure to save some of the beans on the vine, letting them get thick and woody and dry out. Saving the seeds just involved collecting the varieties we liked, shaking out the beans at home and spreading them out to dry and cure.

(rattlesnake pole beans and cranberry pole beans)

We tried lots of different varieties of tomatoes in the garden last year, and made sure to plant each variety far enough away from the rest that they wouldn't cross pollinate, so the seeds would breed true the next year. Of course we can't know for sure if it worked, but I wouldn't mind trying some made-in-our-garden hybrids, either.

We saved seeds from the plants that had worked well in our garden this year. I like the idea of saving the same strains of plants, year to year, as well as trying out new ones. One of the things I'm really loving about community gardening is that the garden itself will stay the same, even if we move in the spring. Planting the garlic felt like a promise - after the snow, spring will come and we can do it all over again. I'm jazzed.

(some decorative cabbage. Not edible, but pretty.)

As a side note, we're still in the market for a black tomato variety we love: any suggestions?

Purple Cabbage Salad

I'm a little wary of coleslaws. Perhaps it's unfair, but it's true. Maybe it's the fact that so many coleslaws are ruined by the copious amounts of mayonaise people add, (a plight shared by potato salad) but this cabbage salad won my heart. Its vegan, and colourful, and delicious. And did I mention toasted almonds? And currents? And that it lasts all week, and makes a great lunch? It's pretty much perfect, in my books.

I first found this recipe on Vegan Yum Yum - pretty much my favorite vegan cooking blog out there, although sadly, it looks like you can only access cached versions of the website. So by posting this recipe here, maybe I'm saving it from the ether?

Purple Cabbage Salad with Currants, Carrots, and Almonds

Makes 4-6 Servings

1 Small Head Purple Cabbage, about the size of a softball
4 Carrots, shredded
Sliced or Slivered Almonds, toasted
Dried Currants or Raisins
Dressing

2 Tbs Balsamic Vinegar
4 Tbs Seasoned Rice Vinegar
2 Tbs Water
1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Sugar
2 tsp Maple Syrup
4 Tbs Canola Oil

Combine and mix all the ingredients for the dressing. Remove any dry looking outer leaves from the cabbage, and finely shred the rest. A knife works just fine for this, but I also like using a hand held peeler - a trick I learned travelling in Poland, where they know everything there is to know about cabbage. It shreds the cabbage much finer then you can with a knife, which is nice for those of us who don't have a mandolin. Add as many toasted almonds, currents or raisins as you like - I like lots.

Enjoy!

Apple Cider

So recently, it came to light that a co-garden member had made his own apple cider press, and (having pressed all the apples he could) was willing to lend it out. Apple cider is awesome - especially with cinnamon and spiced rum - and so we quickly put our name on the list, and a plan was born.


Now, someone back in Peterborough's history clearly loved apples, and to this day there are apple trees growing all over the place, if you know where to look. No one I know here buys apples in the fall. Its wonderful.

We picked up lots of apples from the ground (which traditionally, are the apples you would use for cider), but couldn't resist doing some tree climbing. The apples were smaller then the ones you would buy from the store, but they were sweet, and awesome, and free. I think we filled every bucket and pot in the house with apples - and barely made a dent in the tree. We did a quick wash of all the apples in the bathtub, and then moved into serious apple cider production.

I cannot underscore how badass this cider press is. It had two main parts, a garborator, which is used to munch up the apples into a fine pulp, and a bin, where the actual pressing happens in a few stages: a) wrap the pulp in muslin bags, maybe 5 of them. b) sandwich those bags between plexiglass sheets (cutting boards, it turns out, works too). c) put your pulp/plexiglass many layered sandwich in your large bin, and d) stand on top of the sandwich and watch the apple cider pour out. There was originally a tire jack for this purpose, but no one could figure out how to use it, so we substituted human body weight instead.

Aaand it was that easy! Apple cider = apples, mushed up and squeezed. Presto.

Ok, so it wasn't pretty. It was actually a total disaster (the awesome kind). I could barely take this photo because my hands were so sticky (and the floors, and the walls..) and there was pulp flying everywhere. Unfortunately, non of the photos I took of the pressing process even remotely turned out. It might have been the pulp, the laughing, or the copious amounts of beer we were drinking at the time. It was a pretty glorious mess. But isn't that what the best projects are all about?

In the end, we made about ten gallons of apple cider. I'm not sure why, but our cider turned out strangely velvety - much more so then the apple cider you buy in stores. It could be because we were drinking it unpasturized, or maybe it was because of our somewhat unconventional pressing techniques. Either way, I like it!

About half of the cider headed home with friends of ours to become hard apple cider, and we made some of ours into apple cider molasses (post to come!), the rest we canned in a hot water bath for about ten minutes, with two tablespoons of lemon juice - so that even in the darkest days of winter, there will be hot apple cider and rum.

Elderberry Syrup / Foraging is Awesome

Recently, friends of ours tipped us off to a local spot to harvest elderberries just outside town. Today, Agata and her mom (cute!) went out together to see if they could find them- and, the huge bowls of berries on the kitchen table are any evidence, they managed just fine.

Not pictured above is the 5 gallons of elderberries that went home with Agata's mom, destined to become elderberry wine. We kept a big bowl for ourselves through, and decided (mostly because we're running low on jars) to boil it down into syrup.

Taking the elderberries off their stems was a pretty fiddly business, but once they were off the process was simple. We boiled the elderberries with just enough water to keep them from burning, and then ran them through a food mill to get out the bulk of the seeds. Then we returned the juice to the pot and boiled it down until we decided it was 'syrupy' enough, and added just enough sugar to balance out the tartness of the berries.

As a side note, elderberries were being sold at our local farmers market for $7 a quart last week. At that rate, we were probably boiling down the equivalent $50 worth of elderberries or something. Foraging = awesome.

Tomato babies

We had our first frost of the season on Saturday. I never thought I would see an end to the tomatoes, but now that their time has come, we can't seem to let them go. For the past two nights, we've been making evening missions to the garden to go tuck in the tomatoes, and the process has claimed every bed sheet in the house.

I guess we're hoping that that if we baby them for the next couple of days, it will get warm again and we can get another couple of weeks of tomatoes. Not that I'm not entirely sick of eating tomatoes, I am. When we're not canning them, or drying them in the oven, we've been giving them away to the fellows at the rooming house next door. They love to chat, and they love my dog, and they scared away a man trying to steal our bikes last week. That makes us friends.

Here's a picture of Agata with some of this weekend's haul.