Adventures in canning: Plum jam and pink grape juice

Yellow plum, blue plum, zinfandel jam...

A guest post from award-winning poet, essayist, and radio presenter, Molly Fisk. Molly gardens in Nevada City, California. Her beguiling radio essays are broadcast on KVMR-FM and collected on two CDs, Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace and Blow-Drying a Chicken. Read her new poetry collection, The More Difficult Beauty, and see Molly on her West Coast book tour.

For the seventh year in a row, I did not enter my plum jam in the County Fair. I watched the deadline approach and then waved when it went past.

Partly this comes from being caught up in the usual hustle and bustle — who has time to fill out one more form? And partly it’s because not much was ready to pick in early August, when the Fair entries are due.

Everything ripened late this year because of a cold wet May, and now, of course, it seems to all be happening at once. There are still peaches in the farmer's markets, next to the pumpkins, and strawberries, of all things — even a few plums are still on the trees. A friend of mine who runs a restaurant went picking at a secret location with some of her staff and brought me back her overflow of an amazing pink seedless grape, to the tune of twenty pounds or so.

My kitchen, which was spotless for two days due to my procrastinating about something else, is now full of big plastic storage containers of grapes, colanders separating pulp from juice, the Cuisinart with which I pulverized the plum skins to an edible size, water baths on the stove boiling jars and lids, and some open bottles of zinfandel, which I add to everything.

My four now-teenaged kittens have learned to play soccer with strawberries bobbing in the sink as well as grapes that have leapt onto the floor, and there are sticky pawprints on every conceivable surface.

I can't tell you how happy this makes me.

One of the things I miss from my upbringing is the chaos we could get up to in my parent's kitchen cooking together. My friend Peggy and I would pick blackberries all over town and then make jam and pies, or we'd go after plums in our and our neighbors' yards and my mother would make Chinese plum sauce.

Just the idea of people doing huge messy kitchen projects that will result in something, whether it's temporary, like dinner, or lasting, like 30 jars of jam to give away for Xmas, makes me feel as though everything's right with the world.

Everything, of course, isn't really right with the world.

What might become of us is up in the air and I think that understanding permeates almost everyones' thoughts in some way, together with confusion about what to do about it.

A friend just wrote a poem about the BP Oil Spill and included a line referencing the day it started, April 10, 2010: “If it was the end of the world as we knew it, we didn't know it.” Maybe the end of the world has already started. I, for one, can't tell. And maybe my jam-making frenzy is a futile effort to try to be safe when there's no way to be safe. I might put up enough jam this week for two years worth of peanut butter sandwiches, but knowing how to preserve fruit isn't going to do me any good when we're out of water, much less jars, lids, sugar and Sure-Jell.

What's going to do me the most good regarding an uncertain future is curiosity, love of living, and a respect for my own capacity to change. Which is why I'm boiling an insane number of grapes on the stove this morning.

I've never made grape juice before. Have you?

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Thanksgiving camellias

Camellia sasanqua Photo: Kenpei

White and red varieties of Camellia sasanqua are flinging themselves around Nevada County gardens right now. The small flowers on bending branches are the first course in the camellia feast we'll enjoy all winter.

Wishing you a Thanksgiving table full of food and flowers!

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My garden reminds me of a Bergman film

Death in The Seventh Seal (1956), directed by Ingmar Bergman

This afternoon I noticed cobwebs on the edges of the incense cedar. Then I saw the weeping cherry had strangely yellow leaves on three branches. As I raked up the dead grass on the back lawn it all seemed too symbolic, and I felt like I was in a Bergman movie full of ominous portent.

Meanwhile, the rest of Nevada County was bursting with ripe peaches and brilliant sunflowers.

I may be half-Scandinavian, but I want to ditch gloomy Bergman and find a new director. My garden could use a lively musical number by Busby Berkeley.

What's the opening scene in your garden right now? Who would direct your garden film this summer?

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Backyard Turkeys: The Next Wave in Gardening

Tom Terrific "displaying" for photographer Astrid Pryor

Meet Tom Terrific, the Narragansett turkey. He's a sociable guy, in fact you could call him a party animal. If he hears human laughter nearby he bowls over and gobbles happily, joining in.

Tom lives in a pretty garden in Grass Valley, California where he and his lady turkey hens stroll and peck. Tom likes to gobble to his neighbors while they're gardening, or talk through the fence to his Afghan Hound pals. If there's no one around he goes to his owner's side door, walks up the steps, and taps on the glass.

Tom strutted to his front fence to chat me up one afternoon. His friendly gobble and intelligent eyes were irresistible. I'd always heard that turkeys were dumber than a box of rocks, but Tom certainly wasn't.

Tom Terrific looks like he just came off a Thanksgiving Day place card. His ancestors and their cousins, the Bronzes, are the archetypal birds we see in illustrations every November.

Tom descends from a cross of English turkeys and the wild Eastern Turkeys in America. Narragansett turkeys boast black and white barred feathers (the striped effect) and sociable temperaments.

Temperament matters these days, as poultry has caught the American imagination and backyard chickens are all the rage. If you want to stay a four-toed, salmon-colored, clawed-foot ahead in the stylish living race, why not get a turkey now, before the rush starts in 2010?

The Narragansetts need your help, as they are losing the popularity contest to the Bronzes. The Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities is concerned.

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That Rose Campion--she seemed like such a nice girl!

Lychnis coronaria (Rose Campion) Photo: Stockxpert

Rose Campion. She sounds like a demure little plant, doesn’t she? Her Latin name is Lychnis coronaria. Again, nothing to give you a clue about her feisty nature.

Lychnis coronaria’s looks are nothing to write home about. She grows from a basal rosette of fuzzy, gray-green leaves and sends up many branching stems almost three-feet tall, with small, magenta flowers in early summer.

She’s no Homecoming Queen. So where does she get the tremendous self-confidence required to take over one of my perennial beds?

She came to my garden more than 15 years ago, as a gift to the previous owners. They were quite amused when she self-seeded in the shady edges near the back fence. She's a biennial, so one year would pass with few appearances from her, and the following year her flowers would be a happy surprise.

All that changed when she moved up in the world and got a toehold in a perennial bed.

No one invited her, she just showed up. Wanting to be polite to a new girl in the neighborhood, I let her hang out with the much prettier and more popular girls, the Tall Bearded Irises and herbaceous Peonies. Apparently the compost tea went to her head like wine.

Next thing I knew she was being rude to the perfectly nice Shasta Daisies, who never caused anyone any trouble.

Now she’s everywhere, grabbing attention as if she were Paris Hilton. I think she even has a Twitter account.

Only the mule deer seem able to ignore her.

Some of my gardener friends say they’d like her to come visit them, since she doesn’t mind the blistering foothills sun and doesn’t need a lot of water after the first summer.

Just watch out. She seems like a sweet little thing, but she’s a Mean Girl at heart.

© Daffodil Planter 2009. All rights reserved.

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Watering

At the Fountain, c. 1890, Theodore Robinson* (1852-1896)

Watering is not my favorite garden job.

I can never make it through unscathed. A simple procedure, such as moving the oscillating sprinkler into the center of the blue perennial border, will seem to be going well--when suddenly the hose arcs and strikes my shins, leaving a swath of mud on my pants just above the tops of my rubber boots.

I'm not as dumb as I look, and I finally realized there wasn't any point in doing "just a little bit" of morning watering in clothes I planned to wear into the world. It's one thing to visit Prospectors Nursery bedecked in mud, but agrarian-chic hasn't caught on in other venues.

Nevada County dirt is red and indelible. I'm an excellent laundress, but am defeated by local mud stains, so a new streak of mud is a sadly permanent addition to my wardrobe.

Pass me my watering can instead of a hose, though, and I'm as happy as a child with a favorite toy. I have an old-fashioned Haws galvanized-steel watering can, and using it makes me feel like the girl in the painting.

Time out from the 21st century. Time out from worrying about droughts or global warming. I'm focusing on the fine waterfall from the rose at the tip of the spout, concentrating on the balance of the can in my hand, admiring the plant I'm watering, and remembering why I chose it. Often a butterfly wafts past. The can is wet and I get a swipe of red mud on my pants. That's fine. Nothing can break my mood.

Watering is my favorite garden job--when I have a metal can in my hand.

*Theodore Robinson, an American Impressionist, lived next door to his friend Claude Monet in Giverny, France. This painting is in the collection of The Arkell Museum, Canajoharie, New York.

© Daffodil Planter 2009. All rights reserved.

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Asparagus: Fresh and fleeting

A guest post from award-winning poet, essayist, and radio presenter, Molly Fisk. Molly gardens in Nevada City, California. Her beguiling radio essays are broadcast on KVMR-FM and collected on two CDs, Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace and Blow-Drying a Chicken.

In spring a young man’s fancy turns to love, as the saying goes, but quite a few of the rest of us turn toward asparagus. Despite the evidence in your grocery store, it’s ripe only during a one-month window in spring. You’ll know that month has arrived when the price suddenly plummets.

Martha Stewart recommends snapping the ends off where they naturally snap, vowing that this is the tastiest part of the stalk. But she has 400 asparagus beds tended to I’m sure by Japanese master gardeners. The hoi polloi, which is another name for rabble, i.e. us, will often just cut off the last inch or so and not waste so much, figuring a little toughness is par for the course, in asparagus as in life.

I’ve done some longitudinal studies of asparagus-lifespan in my ice box. They generally last a week. Any longer and the stalks get floppy, the heads with their little cedar-shingle-like design begin to slime up. Martha Stewart, however, and Alice Waters and others in the know insist we eat asparagus as soon as it’s picked, and this time, I agree with them. Again, it’s hard on the hoi polloi to search out the nearest asparagus farm and buy directly. For some reason, we’re usually at work. But you can make a phone call to discover when your grocery gets its delivery, arrange to shop that day and eat the little darlings that night, and you’re getting closer — if you live in an asparagus-producing state, those stalks were probably picked no more than two days before.

The novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family spent a year eating what they could grow themselves or what was made nearby. Her entertaining account is called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Luckily she’d put in asparagus beds three years before, so they were producing — you don’t get any in the first couple of seasons. She said about eating in season that you start out delighted at your first taste, enjoy it for a week or two, and then start to wish you could eat something else. But you can’t. The beans and tomatoes are nowhere near ripe — you’re stuck with asparagus. Then suddenly it’s gone, you’ve eaten your last bite until next April, unless you’re going to buy those expensive ones from Chile that were bred for long distance travel, not flavor, and ruin your carbon footprint.

The big trend in gardening this spring is growing vegetables. We saw the White House lawn torn up for the purpose — backyards across the country are being roto-tilled as we speak. Nurseries are selling out of starts (the seedlings some people plant instead of actual seeds) — it’s a phenomenon, an intersection of the natural foods movement and the recession. This year I’m splitting my loyalties between an organic farm I support and a young friend just starting up on an acre she’s rented.

Don’t I sound knowledgeable about all this? In fact, I was raised a city girl in San Francisco — somewhere in the back of my brain I still don’t believe plants really come from seeds. But everyone says they do.

Scotch Broom, begone!

Fire is no joke.

Cytisus scoparius (Scotch Broom) is invasive and flammable. Fires (not earthquakes) are the natural disasters threatening Nevada County; our neighbor, the Tahoe National Forest, burned in the massive California and Nevada forest fires last summer. The conflagration came within a few miles of my town of Nevada City.

Citizens are banding together to tackle Scotch Broom, which is a significant fuel source. I'm impressed, and think this is a good model for other communities that face danger from flammable plants.

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It can get lonely out there in the garden.

Take my neighbor in the photo, who's clearly wanting to make contact with someone. I suspect that particular mountain lion is focused on pest control issues, and isn't in the mood to kick back and swap stories about how much snow we had two weeks ago--but I'm just guessing.

For neighborly chat and advice, it's great to be able to turn to garden bloggers in one's own neck of the woods. If this mountain lion had a garden blog, what would it be called? A Mountain Lion's Tale?

If the lion is as smart as I think he is, he'll find dinner and then afterward log on to Blotanical, the international directory of almost 1500 garden blogs.

With Blotanical he can use the site's map of the world to find other garden bloggers in the Sierra Nevada foothills. We're a fun bunch, and he could really get his teeth into our discussions about deer in the garden.

He can also check out countries that hold particular interest for him--no East African garden bloggers yet, but he might enjoy the videos of wild birds at the United Kingdom blogs.

If he wants to locate native plant bloggers who share some of his particular enthusiasms (manzanita, anyone?) he can type the plant name in to "search blogs" and he'll receive a list of posts about it.

Believe me, there are posts on "mountain lions" too, so that should give him something to chew on, these long winter nights.

Dinner Date in the Sierra Nevada Foothills

No, we're not having venison for dinner! Perish the thought. That's one of my dinner guests you're looking at. As you can see, she's enjoying an appetizer. 

Garden bloggers around the world are hosting fantasy dinner parties Saturday night, the brain wave of Veg Plotting. 

My fantasy dinner guests are all residents of Nevada County who spend a great deal of time in gardens: garden author Carolyn Singer, garden blogger Pomona Belvedere, and two mule deer. I considered inviting a mountain lion too (another of our wild neighbors) but was concerned that his social skills might be lacking.

Carolyn is writing a series of books on deerproof gardening (the first two volumes of Deer In My Garden are in print right now). 

The two mule deer would be chewing a series of plants in my garden, but there isn't much here to interest them, thanks to Carolyn. One of our perennial beds is in the middle of a longtime deer trail, so the deer hop the fence in, look around, and hop another fence out. 

Pomona is a scholar and a gardener, steeped in lore from garden literature past and present. She blogs at Tulips in the Woods.

Pomona pointed out the potential seating problems, so we will serve dinner buffet style in the living room, where the two deer can recline on sofas.

The menu for humans includes goat cheese pizza and salad; the deer will have organic roses and tulips (I think they like those), with a salt lick as a palate cleanser between courses.

I hope for a wide-ranging discussion on how gardeners and deer can peacefully coexist, with creative and productive gardens alongside happy habitats for deer. It's possible the deer will lodge some complaints about our dog who barks (but does not chase). 

With any luck we can end the evening with some hoof-tapping dancing!

First Snow in Nevada County

For our dear friend Wayne, who is traveling tonight under the bright moon. 

Heavy Frost in Nevada County

Heavy frost here in the foothills, ice on the decks in the morning, waiting for the first snow.