The sweet smell of autumn

Autumn is right around the corner, and -- despite the 90 degree day that we are facing tomorrow --there is no more insistent a reminder of this turn of seasons than the scent of concord grapes. The arbor hangs thick with ripening fruit right by the door of the garage. I arrive home every evening to the heady scent of sun-baked grapes. The birds are getting a lot this year, and I am not sure I have it in me to make grape jam this season (especially since we never finished the jars from last year!). But the vines are worth it just for this sensory luxury of inhaling the scent of their fruit.

Concords can startle people with their scent, as for many their sheer grapey-ness conjures memories of Welch's juice and PBJ sandwiches and hard candies. There is no subtlety to the perfume of the concord -- it smacks you in the nose with its fruitiness. But I love the rich aromas that hit me as soon as I step out of the garage -- the ripening concords are a gentle salve to the wounds of a hard work day. We often find our son sitting below the small arbor, sniffing ardently as he maneuvers his trucks.

I arrived home today with a sense of relief -- my month of burdensome work hours is over and I can return to the normal pace of life. Leaving for the hospital before dawn, I have missed the quiet mornings in the garden with my son. The garden looks ragged and deflated, a horticultural reflection of my inner self right now. Fortunately both I and the garden will soon be renewed by late mornings and early afternoons spent outside, enjoying the fall weather.

The first of the figs

The first of the Kadota figs are ripening. They are soft and very sweet, but a little insipid when eaten fresh. They are best for canning and drying. Unfortunately, I only have one potted tree, so gathering up enough ripe figs at the same time to justify an afternoon of canning or dehydrating is a bit of a challenge. The first ripe ones will go to fresh eating, and once the "main crop" comes in (read: twenty figs) I may try my hand at a small batch of fig jam. Such is the plight of the backyard homesteader. No bushels of fruit for me; just enough for a small, tantalizing taste.

Better late than never

My strawberry patch had a second flush of ripe berries over the weekend. Given the wealth of fresh plums, cherries and peaches on our counter right now, I feared that the strawberries would go uneaten. What? Homegrown strawberries uneaten? Well, we find these July berries to be a little less luscious then the first June crop -- blander and drier, likely secondary to the inevitable heat and water issues of high summer. Come fall, they sweeten up again.

I had never gotten around to canning strawberry jam in the peak of the June harvest -- I made a refrigerator batch that was gobbled up in a day and then all the extra berries went to a friend with a weakness for late-night strawberry shortcake. I figured now was the time to put up some jars of preserves. If you are planning on serious strawberry preservation (either freezing or canning), June-bearing varieties are probably a better bet than everbearing. The problem with everbearings is that, after a relatively sizable June crop, they put out a few berries every few days. This is fine for garden snacking, but you rarely have enough ripe all at once to make a cobbler or a big amount of jam. I had read that putting some white-shouldered berries in jam is a good idea, because they have higher pectin levels, so I put some under-ripe berries into my jam pot. I had just enough to make 5 half-pints. If I hadn't also been canning apricot jam, it would have hardly been worth it to clean and sterilize all the equipment, let alone heat up my whole house with the water-canner!

I made a new recipe, strawberry balsamic jam, from Eugenia Bone's Well Preserved. This is the first of Bone's recipes that has disappointed. One, there's too much vinegar, making for an overwhelming sweet-and-sour effect; two, the balsamic gives the jam a very dark, unappetizing color; and three, the recipe inexplicably instructs the cook to scoop out the cooked fruit with a slotted spoon and just can that. I had trouble understanding how this made any sense -- the fruit had given up most of its liquid to the sugar syrup. I couldn't have filled one half-pint jar with the actual fruit solids. Bone tells the reader to can the syrup separately. Anyway, I canned everything together.

In the end, the jam tastes fine -- definitely usable, especially if I pair it with cheese or other savory dishes. It just doesn't have a bright, clean strawberry taste. Dialing back the balsamic to 2 tablespoons instead of 5 might really help the recipe, but I am too much of a scaredy-cat to mess with canning recipes. I never tinker with the ingredients or processing times and I never use amateur Internet recipes. I like to see that the recipes published in books have been safety tested per government standards, or whatever such bureaucratic nonsense. Normally I snicker at stuff like that, but I fear the botulism, and will take my canning recipes government-approved.

So here I am with five jars of "sophisticated" jam. Sigh. Classic strawberry jam may be simple and naive, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes "gourmet" recipes --in their effort to make foods taste more complex or nuanced -- end up overshadowing the key ingredient. Have we all become such fancy chefs in the kitchen that we can't serve up a simple dish? Next time, I'm just going to let the strawberries be strawberries, and save the balsamic for my salad dressing.

Preserving cherries

It is hard to face another canning project so soon after the flush of June strawberries. Early July offers a little bit of breathing space in my own edible garden. There is little to eat aside from young squash and the earliest of the cherry tomatoes, which are eaten immediately upon discovery. My blueberry bushes -- more likely candidates for preservation -- are young and only have a few berries on each one. There aren't enough to fill a hand let alone a pint jar! One would think I would take this time to relax and store up canning energy for the August pickles and tomato sauce. But no, the cherries caught my eye at the farmers market today. I couldn't resist.

A recipe from Eugenia Bone's canning book Well Preserved has been burning a hole in my recipe file for a while: Cherries in Red Wine. We are not heavy users of jam and jelly around here, so I clipped this more versatile recipe when I came across it last year. These cherries can be a dessert with, say, vanilla ice cream, or made into a savory dish with some shallots and a sprig of thyme. My husband had a duck breast dish in Paris that featured a cherry and wine sauce, quite similar to what I jarred up today. Please note that Ms. Bone has also corrected the original recipe to 6 cups of wine (rather than 2 quarts). Even with the correction, you will end up with excess wine syrup. It is tasty, but the citrus-clove flavor profile is more winter than summer time. I decided to toss it, but a truly thrifty person with more freezer space could probably save it and find a use for it as a sauce or drink base come fall.

Of course, the pain in the rear with cherries is the pitting, and my hands and nails are now stained dark. I now have five pints of cherries in wine, and they will be a welcome treat when the menu turns to cloves and rich wine sauces in late autumn. We had the first of the local corn for dinner instead. I had planned on leftover cherries for dessert, but after pitting four pounds this afternoon, I needed a break!

Strawberry breakfast

My son and I woke up today and went to pick strawberries in the still-cool morning. The first crop hung red and ripe from the plants, and in a few minutes we had a bowlful. We sat quietly, eating the berries, juice dribbling down our chins. Our neighborhood, normally raucous with music, cars and conversation, was still silent in the pre-six-o'clock-hour. This one moment -- of bucolic peace, of lush serenity in the midst of the inner city -- was worth the hassle of caring for these plants all winter. I went through a long season of mulching, of watching frost warnings and covering blossoms with bedsheets, for this....so that my son and I could eat breakfast together, from our own backyard, in contented togetherness.

Grape leaves

I invited friends over to dinner last weekend -- promising fare from my garden -- only to realize that my edibles were either fading out (rhubarb, lettuce) or still in their infancy (tomatoes, peppers). I scavenged beet greens, herbs and pea shoots, and then the grapevine caught my eye. The new vines were springing out all over their trellis -- lush and leafy, and threatening as usual to overtake the whole garage roof. I had cooked with brined jarred grape leaves before -- why not fresh ones?

My extensive cookbook collection yielded little information on preparation of fresh grape leaves, and even the internet yielded scant results -- a lot of "I'm planning to try this" articles, rather than articles speaking with the wisdom of hindsight. The most authoritative article, or at least the most confident, gave several different blanching methods. I picked young, undamaged leaves and carefully trimmed out the thicker stems and veins. As for blanching, I went with "plunge into boiling salted water, turn off the heat, and wait 3 to 5 minutes". Fishing them out of the water, they had the consistency of wet paper towel, although they didn't rip quite as much as I expected.

Now, the traditional Greek way to prepare these would be dolmades, those lemony packets of rice often served room temperature and slick with olive oil at Mediterranean restaurants. In retrospect, this would have been a good choice, if only because this preparation adds another hour of simmering to the leaves. But no, I had to be Little-Miss-Locavore. I spurned exotic rice and lemon in favor of home-preserved figs and local cheese. I rolled each leaf with half a brandied fig, a sprinkle of sea salt and a chunk of black pepper goat cheese from the farmer's market. I briefly considered grilling them, but it was 90 degrees and just the blanching had been so unpleasantly hot that I decided to keep cool and serve them as is. I wasn't in left-field with this approach -- I had found several recipes with similar serving suggestions, albeit with the more processed brined and jarred leaves.

I served them in the backyard, in sight of the original vines. The finished product looked nice, but the leaves were tough. No, they were beyond tough -- it was like chewing cud. My husband had to take a discreet walk over to the compost pile. The salty-sweet filling was very good, and it made me realize I just should have stuffed the figs with goat cheese and left it at that. What is the point of the grape leaf anyway? To bundle up a filling, like rice or meat, that would otherwise crumble out. The brined leaves add a sour-salty taste to dishes, but the fresh ones tasted bland and green and were tough to bite through. I'm not sure if grilling would have helped -- it might have just made the leaf tough and charred. So, there's a local food failure. I don't think I care enough about eating grape leaves to try again -- in the end they are just a finger-food delivery system for better tasting morsels. I can use lettuce or rice paper for that. Maybe one day I'll find a Greek grandma to teach me the age old ways, but my guess is that the wisdom lies in simmering them for a good hour before attempting to take a bite.

Spring slump

The kitchen garden is in a bit of a Spring slump this week. The rhubarb is looking raggedy and the asparagus is ferned out. The cold weather greens have been pulled for the table to make way for warm weather crops. The peas have barely started to bloom. While a few fruits are nearing ripeness, we are still a few weeks away from a real strawberry harvest:

This gives me little to use in the kitchen, beyond herbs and spring onions. The lush grapevines are also leafing out with abandon, so I may blanch some leaves and stuff them with a savory rice filling for dinner. This is not to knock my dear alliums. The chives and scallions make their way onto the table almost nightly. My current favorite is the flat, wide garlic chives:

For those with more of a savory than a sweet tooth, there is no more pleasant breakfast than these garlic chives, chopped, stir-fried, then folded into a few scrambled eggs.

If only these were my own eggs! Alas, I remain chicken-less. Fortunately, after shopping around the local meat CSA's for the past few years, and I have finally found one that satisfies me. For a very reasonable price, Grass is Greener Gardens has loaded me up with a wide variety of lamb, pork and beef cuts, as well as honey and eggs. No chicken this month, so the jury is still out on that one. So my breakfast this morning was seriously local: CSA eggs, Wisconsin butter, homegrown garlic chives and homegrown mint tea, sweetened with CSA honey. Perhaps I'm not in such a slump after all.

First fruits

The nights are still cool but my garden is full of sweet promise. The first of the fruits are starting to set: the strawberries, the grapes, the figs. Blueberry blossoms hang like porcelain bells from their thin branches. I think these are two year old plants, so I am advised by various authorities to not let them bear fruit. I assume this is in the interest of diverting energy solely to plant growth. I will probably let the berries mature on one of my three bushes, to give my son a taste and also in the name of science. I will be interested to see if next year there is any difference in the size and production of the plants.

Alpine strawberries

Ozark beauty strawberry

Kadota fig

Concord grape

The dessert table beckons, if my greedy family lets any fruit actually make it in the door. Usually the strawberries are gobbled while crouching in the garden, the morning sun glinting off the dew. I have more hope for the grapes; the texture is a little slimy right off the vine, so this late harvest will likely make it to the jam pot. As for the figs, I have a vision of home-cured prosciutto draped over a homegrown Kadota fig....a little taste of the Tuscan countryside right here on the west side of Chi-town. I will need a long, hot summer to see any ripe figs, and I am keeping my fingers crossed. Either way, I will have beautiful fig leaves to decorate my cheese plates and the romance of a potted fruit tree in an otherwise concrete-laden corner of my urban yard.

Oh, for acidic soil!

I just returned from a business trip to Portland and am now filled with acid-loving plant lust. The rhododendrons and azaleas were just beginning to bloom, in stunning colors from deep blood red to pale yellow. Set against the background of a mixed conifer forest, the plants were a sight to behold: glossy foliage and clusters of richly hued blossoms. Growing up in New Jersey, I had seen my fair share of big, healthy rhododendrons, but these West Coast behemoths were in a totally different class. I would post a picture, but I only had a cellphone camera, and won't besmirch the beauty of the plant with a hazy, poorly-lit image.

Hardiness issues aside, the thick clay soil of my little plot is not acidic enough for these plants to thrive. I could amend it rigorously, but methinks it is an uphill battle. I should probably just stick to the plants that do well in my "native" conditions (I write native with a cocked eyebrow, since I am unsure how native any soil in this area can be after centuries of urban disruption). Yet I know rhododendrons and azaleas, among other acid-loving plants, are thriving in areas near my house, like the Chicago Botanic Garden. I found their trick (and no, it's not a staff of professional landscapers): rather than conditioning native soil, the gardeners grow them above ground in raised beds.

But oh, for acidic soil! My little boy is a lover of blueberries, both real and literary, thanks to Robert McCloskey and his timeless Blueberries for Sal. When my son asked to grow blueberries, I was loathe to indulge him, for the above mentioned pH challenges of our area. Yet how could I say no to my budding homesteader? Encouraged by the pile of garden catalogs pushing "patio plantings", I now have three container blueberry plants living in big pots in my backyard. Along with the plants came some disks of sulfurous soil acidifier that we mixed in to the potting soil.

So now we wait....I'm not sure how old my son will be when we finally reap the benefits of these fruiting bushes, but for now we have Sal and her blueberry rival, Little Bear. We will pick with her in the bucolic Maine of the 1940's, and await the arrival of our own acid-loving fruit someday.

Early Spring

The chives are up! They are always my first edible sign of spring, cheerily growing despite frozen ground and wet, chilly air. This year they even beat out my earliest crocus. I have two large chive clumps, both of which need dividing. The soil is still too wet for me to start digging. I want to pot up one of the divisions, so that I can try to winter them over indoors next year. Right now I have only rosemary inside, and I am weary of working it into my weekly menus. Once I can harvest the chives, I will be posting my favorite recipes for my first spring herb. The other chive divisions will be given away or else scattered throughout my perennial beds, as I love the purple flowers. The only caution is their propensity to self-seed, and if you don't deadhead you will end up with many baby chives the next year.

Somehow, I don't mind pulling weeds when they are chives (maybe I can even use them for a "microgreen" garnish). My number one weed nemesis is quack grass. Along with the chives, quack grass is springing up in my perennial bed. I have been aggressively hand-pulling the rhizomes for three seasons, and I have effectively decimated the population. When we first moved in, the whole bed was an overgrown quack-grassy knoll with a dense mat of rhizomes. Thanks to heavy mulching, the rhizomes are now long and easy to grab, and I rip them out with abandon. I think of it as "aerating" the soil in my bed. To hope for complete eradication is folly, mainly because rhizomes lurk on the other side of the fence in my neighbor's yard and also under my two well established spirea shrubs. I would need to uproot my shrubs and maul the edge of my neighbors yard to really get the rhizomes out, and if I leave behind but a few snippets of rhizomes, they will inevitably pop up the next year.

I pulled the mulch off the alpine strawberries, and they look no worse for the wear. At first, I thought one had winter-heaved out of the soil, but it is actually just a dense underbelly of last year's leaf stems. I still can't tell if I needed to mulch them -- they are "alpine" after all -- but it didn't do any damage. The little baby plant that sprung up from fallen seed last fall is still doing well, so I plan to move it elsewhere. If I was nice, I would pot it up and give it away along with my chive divisions, but the berries are so delicious and small that I need every plant I can get. Even if I divide aggressively and the plants seed their little babies every season, I don't think I'll ever have enough for a bowl full of berries!

Finally, I had a longing look at my asparagus bed. Sometimes I get spears by Easter, but nothing is pushing through the earth quite yet. It is always a minor miracle the way the spears rocket out of the apparently dormant ground. There is a thick layer of composted manure blanketing the whole bed, and I have noticed that my habit of heavily layering the compost and manure in this area has raised it noticeably above the adjacent beds. All this care for a plate or two of asparagus, but what delicious plates! And who am I kidding? It rarely even gets cooked and onto a plate, as fresh-cut asparagus is a delicious raw snack. In a plot as small as mine, I focus on quality not quantity, and I would rather my son know the taste of the real stuff in small amounts, rather than enjoy weekly plates of imported spears. The asparagus has the added bonus of being quite ornamental once the harvest is over and the plants fern out. This year I am interplanting sweet peas -- Cupani's original -- to wind up the ferns. Not sure if it will work, but another garden writer wrote about this project enthusiastically. Given that this is the richest soil in my garden, it is a shame not to use it more. So the sweet peas will go in soon, but not before I relish the green snappiness of new-grown asparagus spears.

Pruning grapes

The abundant and still-falling snow has lulled me into winter complacency, so much so that I was startled to be facing the first day of March this morning. I probably should have pruned my grapevine in February. The grapevine must be pruned while still dormant, before early spring when the sap rises. One must find the ephemeral pruning window between the last of the bitter cold and the first hint of spring in the air. Here is the state of the concord grapevine pre-pruning, and admittedly I did some gentle debulking earlier in the winter:

As with most garden projects, I am forced to rely on books, the Internet and youtube videos for instructions on how to complete the task of pruning. So many books advise the new gardener to find an experienced person and watch them, learn from them. Unfortunately, I don't know a lot of wise old gardeners, and those I do know live far away. I could pay for the classes and workshops that pop up around the Chicago area, and I've done so before, but I have found I dislike the group learning scenario for garden topics. These workshops are usually packed with many people with even more beginning questions then me, or who are just *thinking* about gardening and haven't tried yet. I find it puzzling that some of these folks haven't done their homework beforehand (seriously, who pays $15 bucks for a seed starting workshop and then shows up not knowing that seeds come in different sizes?). Most irritatingly, I sign up for classes to watch a master at work, and it is usually hard to see the instructor. This is where I think belonging to a garden club would be a good idea -- I could easily find some willing mentors in the group. The problem for me with this, as with any club, is time: I work a very demanding job and have a small kid. The midweek daytime club gatherings just ain't gonna work, and weekends are for my own family and garden, not driving to yet another meeting.

Anyway, youtube is probably the best teacher for pruning grapes, outside of a real, living human being. Most of the book diagrams are designed for a more traditional wire trellis set-up, and I find many of the drawings quite difficult to decipher. I found the Dave's Nursery videos to be of particular use on youtube. Again, it did make me feel guilty about the flimsiness of my grape arbor...I should really have built a much sturdier structure along the side of my garage. I have compensated by keeping it tightly pruned to a few canes. At my next home, or if we wind up staying here past next summer, I will build a good strong arbor 5 or 6 feet deep, one ready to be well-laden with heavy bunches of fruit.

I read that Concord grape-type vines like long canes rather than short spurs, so I cut back to a few long canes, with 10 or 15 buds on each. This is the concord grape vine post pruning:

I should have been even harsher than this, but I left an extra branch of the central trunk, mostly because it served a structural purpose by tethering down my lightweight arbor. I pruned off all the canes though, so it should not tax the fruit growth on the other branches.

Finally, I realized I had a second forgotten grapevine stuck about four feet away from the concord. I am always startled to find that I have forgotten anything in my garden, since it is so small. There are days when I swear I know the contours of every leaf on every plant, since I have such a small space. When I put in the concord grapevine, I also bought another grapevine -- if memory serves, this was a buy-one-get-one bargain deal. I think it was a Niagara green grape; I can't be sure, since I lost the label. I stuck it in a suboptimal spot on the other side of the arbor and forgot about it while my concord took off like gangbusters. Last year, this three-year-old mystery vine took some serious damage in a windstorm, and I cut it back severely. I forgot I left it in-ground, and was surprised to see today that it had actually come back nicely. It didn't produce any grapes last season -- it didn't even prior to the damage -- so we'll see what happens this year. I decided to lean it back away from the arbor and train it along the neighboring fence, as the arbor can barely support the concord. This redirection again risked trunk damage -- looks okay for now, we'll see how it holds up. Per Martha Stewart's website, I pruned the branches of this one more severely, to only 3-4 buds.

If the Niagara grapes grow this season, it will be a nice bonus to have some table grapes in addition to the concords, which I use for jelly. A few sites state that it is commonly used for wines...maybe I can produce a bottle or two from my mini-vineyard!

Backyard fruit-o-rama

If you are looking to impress friends and relatives with your culinary green thumb, fruit is the way to go. Last summer, people who yawned at my piles of green beans and eggplants would invariably perk up at the sight of strawberries. "You GREW those?" they would ask, as if somehow this required a super-secret level of gardening prowess. Folks who gave not a second glance at my beautiful herb bed would rush over to the grape arbor and sigh with delight. This is all particularly amusing since these fruits are actually some of the easier things to grow in my garden.

I am a recent convert to growing fruit in a small urban area. Initially, it was hard for me to banish visions of rolling orchards, replete with hundreds of neatly planted trees. My garden can't even support one full-size tree, at least not without sacrificing the entire area to eventual shade. Even my research into smaller-scale backyard fruit growing intimidated me -- check out this local guy on the Midwest Fruit Explorers website!

An impulse purchase of a Concord grapevine started me off on my fruit forays, and the grapes were followed last year by strawberries and a fig tree. This year, I'm widening my scope even further. I have a sunny patio that my husband does not want me to remove, so I figure it is a great spot to launch some container-grown fruit experiments. Even if you have no yard and just a balcony, you can try some of these. And you'll get nothing but honor and admiration from your non-gardening friends -- the type of glory you will never receive for producing a cabbage, no matter how perfectly formed.

So, here are the 2010 fruit plans:

Tried and True

Strawberries (alpine and Ozark Beauty) -Last year was my first season growing strawberries, and they were a runaway hit. I am partial to the alpine strawberries, though the yield is so low, it would take a field to produce a pie. The Ozark Beauties were great, only problem being that a few weeks of neglect led to a lot of runners everywhere. Last year was my first summer, so we didn't get a full harvest in the interest of pinching back flowers to make the plants stronger. Even so, we did get a fall flush that was delicious. We'll see if they successfully overwinter -- I did mulch generously.

Concord Grapes - I love these grapes -- they are tasty in preserves and the leaves are beautiful, especially as they fade to an autumn gold. My only mistake was to plant them next to a flimsy plastic arbor. This is a seriously strong vine. Build a good arbor.

Fig - Carla Emery's quirky and essential Encyclopedia of Country Living gave me the inspiration to try a potted fig, and I posted in October about my container-grown fig tree. Admittedly, the fig had a tough first summer. I blame the lack of ripe fruit on the rain and cold -- from what I've read, figs this far north are a crap shoot. You'll get fruit, but only in warm, long summers will it actually ripen. The tree is overwintering in the unheated area of my basement, and receiving a bare minimum of water. I will haul it out of hibernation as the weather warms.


New experiments:

Blueberries - I'm from New Jersey, land of acid soil. Our childhood house had beautiful azaleas and rhododendrons as foundation plantings. Blueberries were easily found on hikes along the Appalachian trail. Here, with Chicago's Midwest alkaline soil, I can either amend aggressively or container-grow. I've opted for three different varieties, billed as "patio plantings". They come with some kind of special acidifier supplement I am supposed to add to the container. Any fruit will be better than the mealy marbles sold at the grocery store.

Cherries - I'm going for a dwarf tree billed as "small but mighty"... I will likely plant this in the ground, although it can also be a "patio plant".

Kiwi -I needed a new vining plant along my north fence, so I thought I'd try a hardy kiwi. I found one billed as self-pollinating. I wish I could have tasted a hardy kiwi before actually planting it...but I like regular ones, so hopefully they will come close. One alarm bell....my research revealed that the plants have a "catnip-like scent" - will this mean I will have more alley cats in my yard? At least that will keep away the rats.

Peach - Okay, this is my most embarrassing one -because I fell for the gimmicky "patio tree" that looks like one long skinny branch sticking out of a pot. I always stare at these in the catalogs...they look so wrong, yet I have been dying to try one. The price scares me...not sure I buy 25 bucks worth of peaches in a given season.

If I had the space, I would do raspberries, a quince tree and hazelnuts. But I will settle for (in a few years) a ripe fig and some kiwis...if the alley cats don't get them first.

Planning ahead

My Chicago ristra : the last of the garden chili peppers

The first of the 2010 seed catalogs have arrived, and I have been spending a good many hours poring over them. I have a very small garden, and this is the time of year when I feel the most regret: I could grow so many more types of vegetables, if I only had the space! Of course, in late August, when I can barely keep up with the weeding and harvesting of my tiny plot, I shudder to think of how I would handle even five more square feet. And most folks I know who do have larger garden plots also lament that they do not have enough space. No matter how big your plot, it may just be the nature of gardeners to always want more space to try other plants, other methods of culture.

The tiny garden forces me to consider my exact intention for the vegetables I raise. If only my intention could be to live largely off my own land! Self-sustenance, for reasons of size and time, are out of reach. For now, my efforts are largely divided into three categories. The first two were my most obvious starting place: growing things I cannot buy easily and growing things that taste significantly better than store-bought. Into the former category falls my herbs, rhubarb, and zucchini (for blossoms and young fruit). Into the latter category falls my tomatoes, strawberries and pole beans. After several years of buying wizened shallots at inflated prices, I am adding shallots to my garden in 2010. Since I can only find them occasionally, even at this inferior quality, file them under both categories. And, after my rousing success with strawberries, I am also trying out container-grown blueberries this upcoming year. They should be virtually guaranteed to taste better than the mealy, overpriced fruit sold in the nearby stores.

Finally, there is the category of vegetables I grow just out curiosity: asparagus, eggplant and hot peppers, for example. Heretical though this may be, I am unconvinced that these plants taste better than store-bought or offer any economic value. Yes, I know I can tell myself that there is an indescribable flavor added to anything one has produced from ones own land and efforts. And there is something to be said for the health benefits of moving off of the industrial agriculture grid in any way you can, even with a postage stamp garden. But from a sheer culinary perspective, I remain unconvinced. I grow them because I want to know how to, and I imagine that one day, when I try to go for a sustenance-level garden, I will need to know how to.

This final category offers the most flexibility, except with the asparagus, which, as a perennial, I am stuck with for now. I could dig it up, but it is very exciting to see the spears pushing up out of the ground. And even if it doesn't taste better than store-bought, it doesn't taste worse. I am, however, editing out the eggplant totally. And I am downsizing to one Thai bird pepper plant this year. No more serranos! I can buy them off the local farm truck for pennies. This means I have room for some heirloom carrots this upcoming year, as well as some cold-weather greens and onions.

The plant that I know I shouldn't grow -- but have become totally obsessed with growing over the past few years -- is horseradish. It can be invasive. It is unnecessary. I only cook with horseradish a few times a year: cocktail sauce for our annual shrimp boil and a spicy condiment for the occasional steak sandwich. It is not a critical part of my cooking repertoire, to say the least. But I really want to know what fresh-grated horseradish tastes like, and I am always a bit dubious of the sad little jar of the prepared root that I buy at the fish store. I certainly only need one plant, but my favorite catalogs sell them in packs of five or more. So, I will order it. I will foist off the extras on gardening friends, as I did with my extra asparagus crowns. Because I know gardeners. They can't truly say no, neither to seeds nor crowns nor rhizomes. They'll likely snap up whatever new plant is offered for the taking, no matter how small the garden. There's always a space somewhere -- and after all, they're curious.

Olives for the holidays

Fresh olives recently appeared at Caputo's, the Italian market a few miles from my house. I can't overstate my commitment to this store -- it is the only place in Chicago I have found reasonably priced and delicious prosciutto and fresh mozzarella. It also carries "hard to find" (read: available for a small fortune at Whole Foods) Italian staples like dried porcini, farro and salt-packed anchovies. Their produce, both in terms of price and selection, is second to none. You have to be choosy with it -- it is often sold on the edge of over-ripeness.

For several weeks, I have noticed ancient West Siders, who still greet each other and chat in Italian, picking over a wooden bin of these fresh olives. These are the same people who I regularly observe sniffing fennel and tossing iffy specimens aside with disgust, berating the butcher for a poorly cut piece of beef, and wheedling with the deli guy for a few extra scoops of the house-made ricotta. The olive-gathering intrigued me: how could I ignore anything meriting the interest of this group of well-aged foodies?

I walked over and began to talk to them. From kindly Korean grandmas at Chicago Food Corps to young barbacoa aficionados at Cermak, most folks are excited to have anyone ask their advice on the purchase and preparation of beloved foods. These guys were no exception, and I got a long, increasingly animated didactic on the correct way to cure fresh olives. One guy pulled me aside near the parsnips, out of earshot of the others, and confessed he had a three year-old batch still "working". If I wanted a taste, he'd bring some next week. I demurred, but bought a small sack of the olives.

Elisabeth Luard, the food writer and historian, offers a recipe for cured olives in her book The Old World Kitchen. She gives instructions to smash each olive with a hammer, which I'm sure would have delighted my toddler. I opted for the less dramatic approach: a clean slice with a paring knife down the side of each fruit. I packed the olives in brine (1 cup salt to 1 gallon of water) and left them in a jar, weighed down, to mellow for 6 weeks. At this point, I am supposed to taste them and see if they are ready. If so, I am to dress them in spices and lemon and serve them up, along with a nice glass of sherry, to transport my guests to Andalusia.

Olive season is late October to November, so six weeks of curing usually corresponds to readiness at Christmas time. My grandma always served a small dish of canned black olives as a snack before holiday dinners, so this will be my update of that tradition. Luard described these olives as "a pleasure to be savored under the silvery leaves of an ancient grove". Alas, it will be winter time, and unless tennis-shoe-and-plastic-bag-decorated power lines count as an ancient grove, I'm out of luck for finding the proper setting in which to munch these.

44 days

I mentioned in my first post that I was testing two recipes for a French cordial called Liqueur 44. The "44" refers to the number of coffee beans and sugar cubes that are added to a a quart of vodka or rum, along with an orange. It also refers to the number of days that the concoction should sit and infuse prior to sampling. So, forty four days have past, and my two brews have been decanted and strained into decorative bottles.

Lest you think I have hopped on the trendy train with home-infused cocktails, this is a traditional European recipe. And while food magazines like to present cordial-crafting as some new idea originating in the far reaches of Brooklyn, it is a time-honored peasant tradition (see the first post of this blog). I will admit this is my first foray into crafting an aperitif with ingredients that do not originate from my garden or a local source. Having just nipped at the results, I can't say I am persuaded to abandon my favored recipes for Thyme Liqueur and Quince Eau-de-Vie. Is it terroir? Likely not. These recipes are just more earthy and more interesting than the flavors of of Liqueur 44. Liqueur 44 is jazzed-up Grand Marnier.

The lighter colored bottle is from a recipe from Saveur. This recipe is the more straightforward of the two -- rum, orange, coffee and sugar. The darker bottle is from Susan Hermann Loomis' essential French Farmhouse Cookbook. It is vodka-based, and adds a vanilla bean and a peeled banana to the infusion. Both are a little cloying, as is store-bought Grand Marnier, if I must be honest. If I make it again, I will cut the sugar. There is not a pronounced coffee flavor in either, but there is indeed something taming the citrus notes in both. If I didn't know it was coffee, I would have guessed chocolate. Loomis' has an additional odd but not unwelcome undertone -- funky, overripe -- probably from the banana that slowly blackened in the vodka over the past month. I don't taste the vanilla bean at all.

I'll give the Saveur bottle away as a holiday gift - it is pleasant, beautiful and likely more welcome than another tin of cookies. Loomis' recipe will stay in my cupboard -by Thanksgiving or Christmas, maybe the funky character will be more prominent. My quince liqueur is still "working" as they say, and this is the recipe I would encourage you to try. Your guests can taste orange flavor anywhere, but quince flavor --pineapple and roses? lets just say quincey-ness-- is special. This drink is called a ratafia, an after-dinner drink, which according to Loomis, comes from the Roman tradition of ending a business deal with a drink -- rata fiat, "deal concluded". I'm not sure how many business deals I will seal with this drink, but many a cheery holiday celebration will be the more so for concluding with it.

Quince Liqueur

2 quinces, grated (including peels and seeds)
1 cup sugar
2 cups white rum

1. Put all ingredients in a jar, close tight and shake hard. Place in a cool, dark place.

2. Shake the jar every few days for five or six weeks. Strain into a bottle and discard the solids. Tastes better after several months of storage.

Strawberries to bed

I woke up this morning to find my raised beds heaved out of place by the overnight cold. One side of the strawberry bed had burst open -- the victim of a curious toddler having removed some of the reinforcing anchors. I had been waiting to mulch my strawberries. All my references had advised to mulch only after several frosts. But, I figured if it was cold enough to make the soil in my bed expand this forcefully, I should mulch now. I don't want my strawberry crowns to be damaged or heaved out of place. So, after a rib-sticking breakfast, my toddler son and I went out to face the 6 am cold with a pile of newspapers, and we layered them around the plants. Then, we spread a good 4 inches of shredded wood on top.

The traditional mulch for strawberries is barley straw, which I am sure is more picturesque than the newspapers and wood I used. Straw mulch was difficult for me to find, and I don't have a pick-up for transporting a big load anyway, so the bags of organic shredded wood from a local nursery were my compromise. I saw last season that the North Park Nature Village offers straw mulch for the taking. I worried that this free straw would bring seeds of the North Park prairie plants along with it, and I don't want troublesome weeds in my beds. Apparently the city offers free mulch as well -- from chipped trees -- but you have to take a lot, and some folks have reported insect infestations following its use. Strawberry care sources also suggest using leaves as mulch or just newspapers, but I have tried both in other areas of the garden and they blow away. And the newspapers look terrible -- soggy and depressing.

I have been surprised by how engaged my son has been in the care of the late fall garden. I thought he would only want to participate when big vegetables were growing and the soil was squishy and earthworms abounded. Indeed, whenever I see discussions of children's gardening -- Joe Eck being the one exception--, there is focus on rapid production of showy plants or easily harvested vegetables. But my son has enjoyed composting debris, layering mulches, and planting bulbs. This is a reminder to me that children too can enjoy chores and the excitement of planning for another season. If we only offer them radishes and sunflowers in "children's gardens", then how will they ever learn the peace of a spent garden, well-tended, or the subtle pleasure of a cold morning and sweet-smelling mulch? We worked together to spread a satisfyingly large pile of mulch around the bed, and I watched as he fit the rhythm of gardening into his own toddler life: "Good night, strawberries! Go to bed!" he chirped as he patted down the wood. "Don't let the bedbugs bite!".

Investing in long-term projects

I have been gradually clearing summer debris from the garden, and am forced to face my biggest folly of the summer: a plastic grape arbor. When I initially stuck the grape vine in the ground a few years ago, it was admittedly after a bargain-basement impulse buy at a big-box store. When the grape vine started to flourish, I knew I needed better support than the little trellis I had provided originally. But I balked at the time and expense of building a strong, solid wooden arbor. Was it worth it? We'd probably be moving in a few years, I was busy...I'd just get something pre-made. I spent a hundred bucks on a silly plastic arbor that was overwhelmed in one season and now has a laughable rigging of bricks, string and wire to hold it up against the forceful embrace of the vine. I spent more time agonizing over this piece of junk and rigging silly repairs for its flimsiness than I would have if I had just started the project right with a solid wooden arbor. In hindsight, I can't understand my fear about spending two hundred bucks and a weekend of work for something that would have lasted.

Similarly, I have been avoiding pursuing my latest obsession: espaliered fruit trees. Ever since I laid eyes on the magnificent examples in the Chicago Botanic Gardens, I have been itching to try it. The back of my house would be perfect to espalier a quince or apple, and it is a time-honored urban gardening technique. But, as each year goes by, I think, "I didn't start it my first year here, so what's the point? I'll probably be moving in a few years anyway, so I'll never get fruit from it, it will never look nice". In stark contrast to generations past, I simply assume I will be moving on at some point, that this is not where I will stay. Part of this is just our nomenclature of a first home... "a starter": a stepping stone to something better, to permanence. When I move to my real home I will start long-term projects.

I have tried the gardening techniques promoted by Mel Bartholomew in the "Square Foot Gardening" manual. His approach is particularly child-friendly and it offered a way to garden on a patio that my husband didn't want to remove. I did bristle at one of his many promotional points in his book, which reads more like an infomercial than a gardening manual. He talks about the "seven-year itch": it takes on average seven years for gardeners to improve existing soil and the average home-owner moves every seven years. "Seven years worth of effort lost", writes Bartholomew. His conclusion: garden in easily removable raised beds. Now, this makes no sense to me. It is not time lost: you have conditioned the soil, made it more animal and plant friendly, safer for children to play in, and composted waste that would have ended up as methane in in a landfill. And this seven-year outlook also assumes that the owner who follows will not garden or if they do, it has no direct benefit to you if you give them rich, organic soil. I believe there can be small acts of land stewardship, and improving urban soil is one of them, whether you are a renter or a fleeting owner of the tract.

I regret not planting fruit trees the first year I was here, or putting in a serious grape arbor that would have lasted twenty years. It stemmed from similar wrong-thinking about who would benefit and what the immediate reward for me and my family would be. And who knows....maybe with the economy and job availability this will morph from our starter home into a home in which we raise our family over decades. So maybe I will start my espaliered fruit tree project next year. If we sell in a few years, maybe a dedicated gardener will buy the house and continue on. Or maybe I will stay here long enough to see a mature tree, despite the best-laid plans. Or maybe the next owner will rip the whole damn thing out, but I will have gained skills that can be transferred to a new project, at a new house. And even the idea of gardening as stewardship is taking the short view. I meditate on the writing of Wendell Berry, who wrote:

"..Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years."

Three successful new plants from this summer's garden

As a gardener, this chilly time of year always threatens to become the winter of my discontent: I look back over my summer and consider the diseased roses, the cosmos that took over my beds, the pumpkin vines that were the victims of an accidental (so he says) mowing by my husband. In a few more weeks, after everything is mulched and composted, I'll have a change of heart and begin again with my grand plans for my little plot of earth. I did have three excellent showings this year by new plants in my garden. Of course, when you have a cramped urban garden, one's heart sinks a little when you gather three new things onto your must-have list. Adding to your list inevitably means editing out other plants, for as Joe Eck wisely advises in his beautifully written Elements of Garden Design, "The smaller the garden, the fewer will be the number of species that should find a home in it....the smaller the space, the more the eye will need to rest on ample, extensive masses of plants". Sigh. Here are my three new loves from Summer 2009, all of which are easy and rewarding:

1. Alpine strawberries

Thomas Jefferson had a passionate love affair with these small, delicate fruits; I first encountered them in Italy, covered in Prosecco as a light dessert. They are beautiful plants and delicious to nibble, a mix of intense strawberry and pineapple flavor. While the plant bears the fruit cheerily from June to October, the strawberries are quite small. I now appreciate that the dessert bowl I ate so quickly likely represented about twenty plants' worth of fruit.

I initially tried to grow these from seed a few years ago using a packet of "Mignonette Strawberries" from Renee's Garden Seeds. I was warned they were slow to germinate, but I never saw any growth but weeds in the intended patch for the entire spring and summer. So, this year, I secured two small plants in the Herb section of Grand Street Gardens. Both plants took well to the sunny corner of my herb patch and happily bore small, delicious fruits all season. I am going to mulch them with a generous layer of straw this winter, much like my Ozark Beauty strawberries. I do wonder if mulching is really necessary given the "alpine" half of the plant name. But I don't want to experiment and potentially lose the output of one of my plants next season.

2. Scarlet Runner Bean

My child loves birds, especially owls, but his little eyes linger lovingly on the hummingbird pages of the bird guide as well. I have a need for vertical growth, not just because I am short on space, but also because the back of my house faces a tall white expanse of garage. I had initially planned on growing hops up the garage wall this year, but all the mail-order sources I found had them on back order. So I decided to go for hummingbird-friendly annual vines, and the best one I planted was the Scarlet Runner.

The Scarlet Runner grew fast and furious, and my main mistake was putting in short six-foot trellises. Next year, I'm going to trellis the whole 12-foot wall. It produced beautiful but small red flowers, several vines of which I trailed from my flower arrangements with nice effect. Then it produced huge big flat green beans. Apparently you can pick and cook them like pole beans before they get fuzzy, but we were too busy with the Blue Lake pole beans we planted in the raised beds. Best of all -- especially for toddlers -- the mature beans are gorgeous: big, black and speckled with brilliant hot pink. They look straight out of a Jack and the beanstalk story. For this alone, they are a worthy addition to a child's garden: my toddler is now a committed seed saver after seeing what he gets to collect.

3. Lemongrass

I cook a lot of southeast Asian recipes for my family, and lemongrass was the perpetual ingredient challenge for me. On the west side of Chicago, we have some small Chinese markets and a large Korean grocery store, but I have yet to find a Thai or Vietnamese store. For that, we have to go all the way up to Argyle. So I was excited to see a small, cheap lemongrass plant at City Escapes. I stuck it on the "Asian" side of my herb bed, along with the perilla, the holy basil and garlic chives. It grew into a beautiful ornamental tuft of grass. This lemongrass was a culinary revelation: I was used to wrangling those tough dried-out tusks of lemongrass from the market. Not only was the flavor more intense, but it was easy to chop. I also got the grassy tops, which apparently are rare to come across if you don't grow it, even in Vietnam. Next year, I am going to use it as a grassy effect in my perennial bed....no one needs to know it serves double-duty on the dinner table.

Here is a recipe for the rare grassy tops, adapted from the invaluable cookbook Real Thai by Nancie McDermott:

Lemongrass-ade

A generous handful of lemongrass leaves, cut into two inch lengths with scissors
3 cups cold water
3 tablespoons super-fine sugar (or, if you want to be fancy, a 1/4 cup simple syrup)
Ice cubes

1. Pack the leaves into a blender then top with the water and sugar. Blend for 1 minute. Strain into a pitcher.

2. Taste, adjust for sweetness, and pour over ice.

My container-grown fig tree

My interest in fig trees began a few years ago when someone sent me an old copy of Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living. If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it. It is an eccentric collection of hippie back-to-the-land lore, with the life story of the author sprinkled amongst the entries. Carla wrote enthusiastically about planting figs in pots, especially in northern climates. When the cold hits, you can bring the pot into the cellar for the winter. In my Internet research, I also read the magic words for any garden experiment: "easy to maintain as long as you don't over-water". Yes, yes... any plant that thrives on my hatred of the hose is welcome in my plot.

I selected the kadota fig, as it was billed as sweet when eaten fresh and also dries and cans well. Several sites also mentioned that the bright green color of the ripe fruit makes "them invisible to birds". I am not sure if that's true, but given that the birds made away with most of my grapes last year, I was willing to test the theory.

The tree did great in the pot, placed in a paved sunny corner of my front yard. My harvest was nil this year. I'm not sure if it was due to the first year of growing or the cool "summer" weather in Chicago, but even though the tree grew about 25 figs, none of them ripened before the October cold hit. My son still liked pulling them off the tree and watching the milk white sap ooze out. Another problem may have been that I planted the tree in too large of a pot -- apparently with figs, this encourages leaf rather than fruit growth. Per instructions on various garden websites, I have stopped watering all together and am waiting for the tree to go dormant and drop its leaves. Then I will move it into the unheated area of my cellar and wrap it in an old blanket. Hopefully next year we will have a big enough crop to make some homemade fig newtons!

In honor of my baby tree, I did pick up some organic dried kadota figs at the market and I canned them in a brandy-laced simple syrup with a recipe from Eugenia Bone. They are seasoning now, and I plan on sampling the product at Thanksgiving. If they turn out well, I will post the recipe.