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Micro Greens.

Not a fan of the name – ‘micro greens’. I keep thinking that they’ll be tiny little plants and the only way you can eat them would be on a massive white plate with a small pile of them in the centre. Kinda 1990s era nouveau cuisine.

Aside from the name, though, they’re rather cool. We planted some pea shoots which, well, shot up and grew so fast we couldn’t keep up. Next time I’ll plant them a few every day.

We also have some baby kale, and something else that I didn’t recognize but tastes rather good.

If you like salad and live in Canada, like I do, then these grow light contraptions for micro greens are rather cool. As long as you stay on top of them, the greens keep on coming. The grow-op that we have also has a nifty contraption for keeping the plants watered. Once every two weeks you can fill a bin and the water wicks up. It’s brilliant.

And if you really hate the name ‘micro greens’ just don’t harvest them for a few days. They turn macro rather quickly. But then they get unwieldy and the flavour suffers somewhat.

A few days into the growing season.

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Every year, about this time

40 jars out of 5 boxes of tomatoes. I was going for more pulp, but there is a little water in there… Live and learn

Every year, about this time (Late August, September) I do a couple of things: I read, The Closing Down of Summer by Alistair MacLeod. It’s a melancholy reminiscence of a hard-rock miner, touching on all kinds of themes, but the one that I hear is the simple notion of leaving a comfortable existence behind and having to get back to work. Or ‘Back to porridge’ as my wife would say.

The other end-of-summer thing I do is I can some tomatoes. Yes, they’re actually in jars but somehow ‘jarring’ tomatoes makes me think that the tomatoes are going to do something to surprise me.

I’ll detail the process in a later post, but for now I have 40 new jars of tomatoes to go downstairs. Throughout the year, whenever we need tomatoes, up a jar comes. That’s pizza sauce, chili, any soup or sauce that requires tomatoes – here they are.

Ripe (actually, they sort of got away from me and I had about 10% of them spoil – never happened to me before), organic, perfect.

If I ran the numbers on the tomatoes, I would probably find that buying them by the case in actual cans would be more cost-effective.

But that’s not really the point. For me, the jars are a year’s worth of potential, waiting to be tapped. Like a pre-paid account at a resort or summer camp, I never have to worry about whether or not we have enough. There always seems to be another jar. Having a basement full of preserves is comforting. We’re ready as we can be for the coming winter. Well, we’re more ready now that the tomato cupboard is full.

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Ripe yet? It’s tough to know.

I have 150lbs on the back porch right now

Just like every year for the past several years, some of the families in the neighbourhood got together and ordered tomatoes.

Let me be a little more specific: Some of the Italian families who know the value of a basement full of tomato sauce took pity on me and allowed me to ride on their produce-ordering coattails. Apparently about 30 cases of Roma tomatoes showed up on Friday. Five were mine.

One of the neighbours has a food mill. She and her sister turn their tomatoes into passata (crushed tomatoes) with the mill, and they always allow us to borrow it, as who wants to store a food mill for 364 days of the year when you can rent one for a day with a decent bottle of red wine?

Here’s the issue: She gets to deal with her tomatoes first. We work around her schedule and every year it isn’t a problem.

Doesn’t mean I don’t worry, though. The tomatoes last year were perfectly ripe right off the truck. This year, not so sure. Not only were they about a week later than last year being delivered, they also needed at least a week to ripen up. It’s Tuesday. We have had them for 5 days. They’re looking pretty good.

Here’s the question: Do I trust the neighbour who thinks they need a few more days? Or do I trust my gut and do them early? I’m heading out of town this weekend so I either do them on Thursday (2 days’ hence) or wait until Monday.

Will they be too far gone on Monday? Will they be ripe enough on Thursday?

This is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night, you know.

I think I will wait until Monday. I just had one and although it was incredibly tasty, it still had a fair amount of crunch. I think there is still time.

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Local Strawberries

Not sure what happened to the fellow in the middle-right, there, but he was as tasty at the rest.

Sometimes they just don’t get any better than local and fresh. I love how the stems are still on them and they still have some dirt from the field.

Obviously a couple of these berries wouldn’t win any beauty contests, but contests are passé and we have more important things to do than get hung up on looks.

My goodness, they were tasty.

Berry perfection from just a few miles away.

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Arugula.

It was on the pizza, and it was oh so tasty.

My mother-in-law has this vegetable garden. I built her some raised beds a few years back. When I say ‘I’ what I mean is there was a crack team involving my brother-in-law who can actually build things and myself, doing a lot of the ‘support’ work. Like hauling seemingly endless yards of dirt.

My mother-in-law fills them with the most amazing collection of produce.

Including Arugula. It grows rather slowly in those boxes we built, but she has lots of room and as a consequence there is plenty to go around. Over the last few days it has been on pizza, in several salads and eaten straight. It has a lovely, soft flavour. What is even more galling, from a fellow gardener’s point of view, is that she has plants that are volunteers from the year before. And that arugula is amazing as well. I struggle to get anything going in my garden.

The produce is nothing like what you would get in a box. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with buying arugula from a store. In fact, I find it incredible that they can pick it, wash it, package it and move it hundreds of miles and it’s still fresh. But I do wonder if they grow a varietal that’s is prone to last, rather than taste good. Or I wonder if sitting in a truck for a few days would take the edge off of pretty much everything.

Regardless, it is amazing how much better it tastes fresh from the garden. I feel very lucky that we have access to it. And to her, too. My mother-in-law is a lovely woman. Her daughter is nice, too.

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Cucumbers. Well, they aren’t cucumbers, yet…

Brand-new cucumber plants. To be planted and then lovingly nurtured... And then who knows what will come next?
All 6 seeds germinated. I’m not sure what I’ll do with 6 cucumber plants, aside from have a lot of cucumbers…

My mother-in-law gave us some cucumber seeds. I planted 6 of them, and lo and behold, all 6 have germinated. I was asked to make (and I did) a sort of wooden obelisk (photo to come later, when it isn’t pouring with rain outside) upon which the cucumber plants can grow. The idea is that the cucumbers themselves will be kept out of the dirt and won’t be as likely to be ravaged by slugs and the like.

So, I’ll have lots of cucumbers. Apparently these plants are rather prolific.

And then what? It’s kinda like the proverbial zucchini plant. How do you know your neighbour has a zucchini plant? Well, they’ll arrive on a daily basis with gourds a-plenty. I fear cucumber is the same way, but you can’t grill them on the barbecue, you can’t make muffins or loaf out of them…

Pickles? Gherkins? Lots of salads? Not really sure what I’ll do if I have an embarrassment of cucumber riches, but I’ll deal with that if and when it happens. Currently, they’re about an inch high, so I best not get ahead of myself.

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Organics. The organic orchards do look pretty…

You can tell it’s organic because of the grass below the trees. In a ‘regular’ orchard the grass doesn’t grow because they put down some sort of pesticide to kill it. Not sure why they even bother.

Organic food is something I don’t know much about – of course, that never really slowed me down in terms of making comments. I don’t go out of my way to buy organic unless it is bananas which, for some reason unknown to me, always seem to last longer and taste better.

Here are a few issues with organic: One, the grocery store (nearby me, independent, they have local produce unlike the Safeway not too much further away that brings in produce based on their supply chains in the USA. We get cranberries from Massachusetts. We have some of the largest cranberry bogs in North America about a 40-minute drive from my house. Yeah) …anyway, my local grocer – has organic produce but because they fear that people will try to pass it off as non-organic and pay the lower prices – have it wrapped in all kinds of plastic and labels.

I would sooner eat food from a non-organic farm or not at all than have to deal with the sort of packaging they put on that stuff. It’s organic, but it’s also encased in plastic. Kind of ironic, really.

Generally, I like local, fresh, and recognizable produce. Seasonal is nice, too. Raspberries in January are going to be expensive and unimpressive, no matter how cool it is to see them in the store. How they grow them, pick them, package them, fly them from Bolivia to Vancouver, drive them to the grocery store, stock them, and mark them up for less than a zillion dollars a pint is beyond me. But I ask the same questions about Australian wine.

Back to organic. I have had great organic produce. I have had some really forgettable organic food, too. I just wish I understood it better.

The bananas, though. They’re tasty.

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