I’ve decided to start up this blog again, in the hopes that it may interest, intrigue or inspire at least a few people to pick up a digging fork and a trowel and start gardening. The world is changing quickly, and the weaknesses of industrial agriculture are becoming inescapably clear. Not everyone can grow their own food, but many of us can, and food must and will become more local. Instead of a chicken in every pot, we need a flock in every yard, and a garden, too. So I’ll share my gardening challenges and solutions, as well as a few recipes and advice for storing all that produce. I have a degree in Soil Science and I’ve been raising and preserving at least some of my own food for 35 years now, so I have plenty of knowledge to share. Feel free to write me with questions.
This week, I’ll be doing some “putting the garden to bed” work – pulling up plants, doing a final mowing and trimming, and planting garlic. Garlic does best around here if it’s planted in the fall. It overwinters well, gets a head start in the spring, and by early July, I have a new crop. It’s an excellent antibiotic as well as one of my favorite foods, so I like to grow lots of it.
Garlic’s a heavy feeder, and likes lots of sun. The same is true of peppers, and I’ll be planting the garlic in the beds where my peppers grew this summer. So I’ll add a LOT of compost to the beds after I pull up the peppers, and then check the pH, to see if I need to add some lime, as well. Like most vegetable crops, garlic prefers a pH of around 6.5 to 7.0, and while many veggies do well under a relatively wide range of pH, garlic tends to be a bit finicky about it.
Now I need to deal with my bumper crop of sweet peppers, both green and red. Fortunately, peppers freeze very easily – you don’t even need to blanch them. Remove the tops and seeds, cut them in half and stick them in a freezer bag. Don’t cut them any more than you have to, though. The more cut edges there are, the more quickly the quality will degrade in the freezer.
I’ll use some of the peppers, and some of this year’s crop of garlic to make Mulligatawny soup in big batches that I’ll freeze. Here’s the recipe:
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves (or more) of garlic, minced
1 small onion, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 green pepper, diced
1 small apple, peeled and diced
1 cup raw, boneless, skinless chicken, cubed
1/3 cup flour
2 teaspoons (or to taste) curry powder
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
5 cups chicken stock
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup tomatoes, chopped (canned is fine)
½ cup mixed parsley and cilantro
Sauté the veggies and the chicken in the olive oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pot for 15 minutes. Add flour, nutmeg, cloves and curry powder, cook for a minute or two. Add stock and tomatoes, salt and pepper to taste, and simmer for 1 hour, partially covered. Cook up some rice, but don’t add it to the soup until you serve it. Then top with a tablespoon or two of parsley and cilantro.
