Dorie’s Different Reality

I think every culture in the Northern Hemisphere has a holiday or festival this time of year. And well they should celebrate, if there’s going to be a Harvest and enough to get them through the Winter! As I’ve said to Mike on many occasions, despite my gardening efforts, if we had to subsist on what we grow on our acre here, we’d starve to death.  First off, if we were colonial types, we’d need about 20 acres minimum. And I whine about weeding one puny garden bed! Not the best topography around here for a family farm either- full of rocks!  The best places to grow food now were under the sea back before all of us were around. I grew up in Southern California. Left more than 30 yrs ago- I don’t miss the traffic, or the lifestyle, but oh lord, I miss our garden- we could grow anything!

But now you may admire these grapes:

They’re the first harvest from the vines we planted two years ago. Only a couple of pounds. They taste really good. I imagine that in a normal year they’d be 3x bigger, but in dry years fruit runs small and very sweet. This bunch is going through my fruit mill to sieve out the seeds and I’m going to boil with some sugar for jam. There won’t be much, but I’ll put it in freezer containers and pull it out later for a “dead of Winter” treat.

An unexpected harvest is a second crop of rhubarb!  I got a “fabulous deal” on a bunch of rhubarb plants off of Ebay about three years ago. They came from a grower in South Dakota, where apparently rhubarb is green! Also, in Spring, it’s tended to go to seed early- but this year it surprised me and produced a Fall crop. I find the color troubling. I need to accept, that like apples, apparently rhubarb comes in more than one color. Last Spring, I slipped some red food coloring into the batch I made into pies! This batch is going to get pureed and cooked with strawberries. I have a recipe for a low-fat honey spice cake to try, and we’ll have strawberry-rhubarb sauce over it. But next year, I’m shopping around for some red rhubarb plants!
Those are peppers in the foreground. I’m embarassed to say the bright green ones are bell peppers, dry year version.  Of course, with watering they would have been much bigger. But with the drought, I didn’t even want to use the water on the peppers. Hope Santa brings me that rain barrel!
Now it’s time to cook!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 11:48 am and is filed under Gardening, Maryland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.