And in other gardening news, I dragged myself to the seedbed, whipped off the row cover and saw this: A veritable forest of greens, Chinese cabbages, Japanese greens, beets, and chard. And not a moment too soon, I might add. Some things, such as greens, can grow all crowded up like that, but they do better with a bit of space between plants. Root crops, such as beets and carrots need to be heavily and rigorously thinned; otherwise, you don’t get anything worth even talking about. The weather this past week has been rainy and cool, but the sun has now come out and they just jumped out of the ground. Seriously – even cool weather crops like this will take a bit of sunshine and just run with it. I had a bit of one of the other beds available, so I dug up all the spinach, Japanese greens, Chinese cabbages and chard and spaced them out into the bed, with a 4-6″ spacing between each little plant. The chard seedlings have just come up and made their second set of leaves, so they were really tiny and had to handled very carefully but because they are relatively young, they will probably settle in quicker than the other little plants.

Since it is so sunny today, I gave them quite a bit of water and also covered them with some spun polyester row cover so that they won’t dry out and die. Another benefit of this row cover seems to be that if the ever-present ground hogs and bunnies can’t see what’s in the garden bed, it’s invisible. They’ve been very active out there but they have not gone after anything in the bed with the row cover on it. Tonight, I’ll go back out and rearrange the rest of the seedlings in the seedling bed and give them more space as well.

A few factoids:
1. Ginger was the very first spice from the East to be grown in the West. Ginger was introduced into Jamaica in 1585 to be grown and imported back to Europe.
2. India is the number one producer of ginger, growing over 380,000 tonnes in 2008.
3. The characteristic smell that we associate with ginger comes from mixture of zingerone, shogaols and gingerols, which are volatile oils and which can make up to 3% of the total weight of the rhizome.
4. Since so much attention is spent in Asian folk medicine to the use of ginger in various ailments, quite a bit of research has been done to the benefits of consuming it to treat everything from constipation to inflammatory diseases. Concurrently, science is paying just as much attention to ginger’s cousin, turmeric. Since both of these spices can be combined in curry dishes, eating Indian food can give consumers a double dose.

The ginger we buy in the fresh produce part of the grocery store looks like the photo at the top and is referred to (for obvious reasons) as ‘a hand’. It is a rhizome (other rhizomes you might be familiar with are German irises and cannas; potatoes are NOT rhizomes but are tubers and we will discuss that at another time) and it is this form of vegetative reproduction that makes it something that we, too, can grow at home (even here at Chez Siberia, as I will show you). Now, if you don’t want to do this with ‘store bought’ ginger, you can search on the internet for a domestic grower such as East Branch Ginger. I signed up for their newsletter so that I will not miss out when they start taking orders for 2013.

BUT, this is something you really can grow from something at the grocery store and here is how to do it:
First: Look for a hand with lots of little knobs on the fingers. These are what will end up sprouting. Make sure the fingers are firm and the skim is not wrinkly (that means it is drying out and I feel you won’t have as much luck sprouting them).
Second: Cut up the fingers into pieces, making sure you have little knobs on each finger. This is sort of like cutting up seed potatoes.

Third: Place the seed ginger pieces into a shallow container with growing mix that you can keep covered, moist and warm. Ginger will not sprout with soil temperatures lower than 55 degrees F so you might need to provide bottom heat for it. Optimal sprouting temperatures are, according to East Branch Ginger, 75-80 degrees F. I have an electric seed starting mat with a metal grid over the top, so I used that out in our unheated greenhouse. I literally used one of those plastic smaller bulk salad mix containers with a snap on lid that I get at the grocery store. Those are very useful for starting seeds because they literally are their own little greenhouses and once the seeds come up, you can just take off the lids.

Now, this is the first time I have done this (I have since found out from East Branch’s very informative newsletters that I pretty much did the right thing with this), so I had no idea how long it would take for the pieces to start sprouting. Even with bottom heat and light from the windows, it has taken a couple of weeks for the seed pieces to start sprouting. It’s also (and this is the same for other rhizome sprouting too) important that you don’t overwater the soil mix (it also helps if you don’t use growing mixes that are mucky; airy and well-drained are two good watchwords here) because it will make the rhizomes rot.

So, here we are several weeks later. The knobs have just started to sprout. It will be interesting to see how this goes. I’m very excited to see if we can get these to grow and reproduce into big ginger ‘hands’. I’m thinking that putting them into a growing situation like the ones I use for peppers might be the trick since are a tropical plant and need warm soil temperatures.

Just a note – for folks who grow the ground cover called ‘wild ginger’ or ‘Canadian ginger’ – this is not a member of the same family and thought the roots smell much the same, it contains compounds which are known carcinogens so eating them would not be a good idea. Stick with what you get in the produce section of the grocery store or from a reputable grower.

We all know it. It’s like flossing your teeth. And we don’t do it and we don’t do it and we feel guilty and then we go to the doctor and the doctor tells us we need to eat more fruits and veggies and we go round and round and do that dance and in the end… it’s still burgers and fries, right?

Right. And if we have kids in the house, it’s even worse.

So, here’s the deal — let’s start with what works, especially if you have kids.

First Principals: If you have kids at home and you don’t eat veggies, they will not eat veggies. If you have babies at home, then you have your best shot at getting them to eat veggies by feeding them veggies off your plate. Mommy and Daddy eat veggies – it’s safe for YOU to eat veggies.

Second Principal: If you have kids at home and no one eats veggies, then the job has to be more sneaky. I know a lot of people despise the whole ‘hiding veggies in stuff kids like to eat already’ scenario, but I have to tell you: It really is more important to get the good food into them rather than turn mealtime into a battle of wits and guilt. Later, you can separate out the carrots and onions and broccoli; for now, just get the good stuff into the family.

So, where to start?

Start with what they will eat. If you have a kid who will only eat mac n’ cheese out of a box (and goodness I think there are millions of those kids), chop up some broccoli really fine, ‘nuke’ it in the microwave with a little water, drain it and mix it into the mac n’ cheese and serve it up. Yes, the first time, you will get a dubious look and a ‘What’s this?” from Buffy and Junior. The answer: It’s parsley for decoration – can’t taste a thing but it makes it pretty. Eat it up!” Pretty soon, you can turn that into a broccoli n’ cheese on top of baked potatoes and then broccoli and cheese as a side dish and then good old broccoli by itself and then use it in other things like Chinese food and off we go.

So, let’s start with breakfast. Now, getting family members to eat a decent breakfast is almost like splitting the atom on the kitchen counter. If you can get people to grab something as they race out the door for work or the school bus, it’s almost a miracle. Here’s something easy, quick and fast. Literally, they can have this eaten and be wiping their mouths before they get on the bus:

Breakfast roll-ups:
What you’ll need: chopped up left over veggies from last night’s dinner. If you don’t have any, make it your business to zap some the night before and put them in the fridge.
Tortillas
Eggs
Grated cheese – anything will do – cheddar, Mozarella, whatever.
Something to wrap it up in – aluminum foil, plastic bag, whatever.

How To:
Scramble up an egg per person.
Lay out a tortilla, put in veggies, scrambled eggs and some cheese.
Roll up and nuke for 1 minute. Wrap and hand to the child or person running out the door with a napkin.

If you want to do this for a lunch, add a big handful of rinsed spinach or other greens to the tortilla (get a big bag of mixed greens at the grocery store, immediately rinse the whole thing well when you get it home and put into a big plastic bag – all ready to use).

How about dinner? Now, dinner requires more organization. I cannot emphasize enough that it’s worth doing things on the weekend to save you time during the week. No one wants to get home from work at 5:30 (or 6:30 or 7:00) and stare into the fridge and try to come up with something. Even getting veggies chopped and put into plastic bags will save you oodles of time on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. But, here are some time-saving, veggie-ful ideas:

Pizza (and by the way, the photo at the top is of the prepped veggies that I put onto a pizza crust for a fast dinner along with some tomato sauce and cheese): If your family eats frozen pizzas (and I’m not going to get into the whole judgement thing on this, ok?), then cut up more peppers, onions, and mushrooms and throw those on top with more cheese and bake per the directions. If your family will eat a ‘make your own pizza’ with home made or commercial ‘out of the dairy case’ crust, so much the better. More color means more veggies.

Spaghetti (or other pasta) with tomato sauce: Chop up onions, carrots, celery, broccoli in weeny chunks and cook through in the tomato sauce. Trust me: kids will eat this up.

Chinese stir fry: Peppers, onions, broccoli, carrots, celery, finely shredded cabbage. All good and kids will eat that up. Want to really surprise them? Make pot stickers full of veggies and serve with a dipping sauce by using egg roll wrappers.

Salad: I love bagged greens. I can’t say enough that I think bagged mixed greens in the produce section of the grocery store is great stuff. Buy a bag of that, some tomatoes, cucumber, and peppers. Rinse the greens well and drain, add the other veggies. Be adventurous and throw in a chunked up washed apple or an orange. Serve salad at every dinner. No exceptions even if you are serving other veggies.

We’re all busy – and sometimes it seems that it’s all we can do to put anything on a plate for a meal, which makes it very easy to get into the convenience food rut. But it’s worth putting a little prep time to put more veggies on the plate with everything else your family is getting.

You know you want to.

Now, the history of Upstate NY (where Aunt Toby lives) is very interesting in this regard – before the Midwest opened up in the later part of the 19th century, Upstate NY was basically one of the breadbaskets of the nation. Not only did farmers breed and select grains that grew best for them, but mills in places such as Rochester and Buffalo produced so much flour that they basically put New England mills out of business. Other regions of the country had their own specialty grains and flours as well – in the South, the wheat grown was softer, had less protein in it and was therefore better for making such items as cakes and biscuits. But with the centralization of grain growing in the Midwest part of the country (and therefore also the flour milling as well), grain growing in other regions almost disappeared. With climate change, crop failures and interest in historic grains growing, farmers in many regions have gotten back to growing their own regional grains and having them milled into flour.

Enter Cayuga Pure Organics, CPO which started as a small group of farmers in the Ithaca, NY area, interested in growing organic grains first for feed and then for human consumption. They partnered with other farmers and small businesses to form a milling company. I’ve been interested in trying out their bread flours because I frankly buy a giant bag of bread flour every year to make our own breads here at Chez Siberia. I’ve been more and more concerned about what’s in those big bags since they come from an area of the country where GM grain has basically taken over and I am very concerned about that. Cayuga Pure Organics grains are controlled – historic, regional, organic and non-GM. I thought I’d do a trial – my ‘big bag Midwest bread flour’ vs Cayuga Pure Organics bread flour, which is called ‘half white’. The protein in ‘half white’ is 12.7% which is smack dab in the range of protein for bread flours. Although my big bag doesn’t list protein content, I’m going to assume that it’s in the same range so that I can actually do a comparison.

Why do this? Well, one of the things I have read is that the grains that were traditionally grown in Upstate New York were what is called ‘soft winter wheat’, and one of the complaints about this type of grain is that supposedly the bread that is produced is not what we’re used to. Now, I’m not sure ‘what we’re used to’ is all that great, but I’m willing to see exactly what the results are going to be, in comparison to what we get when we use the ‘big bag of Midwest bread flour’.

I’m making both the same:
1 cup of hot water
1 T. yeast
¼ tsp of sugar
Enough flour to make a dough
Kneaded the same way and until the dough had the same consistency
Baked at the same time, in the same oven, at the same temperature.

Ready?

The top photo is what the two balls of dough looked like just after kneading and before being set to rise. The ‘half white’ is on the left; the ‘big bag bread flour’ is on the right. You’ll notice right away that the dough on the left is golden colored; the one on the right is white. I can tell you that the kneading was a very different experience. The ‘half white’ dough was a little bit sticky and dense; the ‘big bag bread flour’ dough was its usual mushy self.

Here is what the two balls of dough looked like after 30 minutes of raising. Again – a lot more character to the ‘half white’ dough and I can tell you that the second kneading was exactly like the first, with the ‘half white’ dough showing a lot more character and resistance than the ‘big bag bread flour’ dough.

Here is what the two doughs looked like upon being put into glass baking dishes — basically the same size. And here is what they looked like upon finishing their 30 minute raising. The ‘big bag bread flour’ one is marginally taller, but certainly not enough to get major points for that.

I put both dishes into a pre-heated 375 degree F. oven for 30 minutes.

And here is the result. The ‘big bag bread flour’ dough kept rising in the heat. You’ll see from the photo that it raised above the top of the glass baking dish. The ‘half white’ dough not only did not raise any higher; it actually almost looks as if it shrank a little bit. What caused that?

Let’s look at the crumb here – the ‘half white’ bread is a lot denser than the ‘big bag bread flour’ bread, which has a pretty loose crumb. Yes, I know that for many people, if the slice of bread doesn’t look like something that comes out of a plastic bag from the store, it’s not acceptable, but that is not an issue for us here. Both breads toast nicely and have good flavor and I can see that what I’d probably have to do to get a bigger loaf out of the ‘half white’ is more water and more flour to make a bigger ball of dough for the baking pan. The ‘big bag bread flour’ has a listing of ‘wheat flour and malted barley flour’, which sounds innocuous enough, but recent scientific findings show that the wheat which has been bread for commercial baking has all sorts of extra proteins and other things in it that the old traditional wheat strains do not.

I think I’d rather go with using more water and flour and the local flour made from local non-GM wheat.

Loose-fitting dress…has square neckline, front and back yokes, front and back outside tucks, back buttoned closing, side pockets ….

It also has, though not mentioned in the description, darts in the front which shape the side of the bust area as well as what they are calling ‘tucks’. Once I started to read through the instructions, I realized that I had no idea what tucks are and decided to do some internet searching and came up with this lovely site: Pleats, tucks and gathers which is as close to encyclopedic as I could find.

Now, in the instructions for this pattern, the description for what gets done in the front and the back is as follows:

“On outside, bring lines of small (dots) together; baste. Stitch to lower small (dots). Press tucks toward sides, as shown. Baste upper raw edges.”

Now, why are these ‘tucks’ and not ‘pleats’? And for that, I did a little demo (lucky you):

This is technically a ‘pleat’:
1. I have drawn the two parallel lines indicating the markings that would exist.
2. I have folded down the fabric on the left-hand line and ironed it down, matching the edge to the right-hand line.
3. I have sewn down the fabric close to the ironed-down edge.

This is pleating. Now, technically speaking I could have sewn this down right at the edge for just a little bit and left the rest free, like a knife-edged pleat.

This, on the other hand, is making a ‘tuck’:
1. Again, I have marked the two parallel lines.
2. I have matched up the two parallel lines, right side to right side and sewn them together at the wrong side. At the top, you’ll see I slipped in this very high tech instrument(the ball point pen) in the pocket formed by sewing the two edges of the cloth together.
3. I have now ironed one side down and sewn it down.

Wa-la. A tuck. Now, I made dresses for my girls when they were young where I just did steps one and two but not three, which made a very pretty effect, but in this case, they want you to iron all of these down toward the outside and sew them down.

Now, to be honest, if I had to do this all over, I’d have either used a different pattern or a totally different sort of fabric for the dress.
– This sort of tucks work best, I think, if you are using a rather crisp fabric such as light weight linen or voile. With the rayon crepe, I was wrestling with the lines, burning my fingers and getting very frustrated with the whole thing. I had a huge case of ‘want to throw this in the corner and walk away’ with this.
– what would probably have worked better with the rayon would have been a series of tucks such as I’d done on the girls’ dresses years ago, where I just matched up the lines and sewed it down at the wrong side; it’s a softer effect and would have worked better for the fabric.

Now, for those readers saying to themselves, “Well, silly woman, what was the fabric recommendation on the pattern?” I have to answer you with the list of fabrics suggested:
Crepe
Crepe de Chine
Voile
Silk Broadcloth
Lightweight Linen
Pongee
Pique
Challis
Single Knits

See: Challis, single knits, and crepe de Chine. I rest my case.

I’d already put seeds into one of the beds, watered them well and covered them up with a double layer of ‘Remay’(tm), which is a spun polyester row cover product. I had to double it up so that the holes (we’ve used this for several years running) in the cover would have another piece of polyester to mask them. It’s held down with very high tech stuff: A couple of broom handles and some rocks in strategic spots. The seeds had just started to emerge when the weather completely changed.

Nightime temperatures in the low single digits. Rain. Sleet. Snow. Wind. Icy goodness-knows-what. And that lasted for the next two weeks, followed by warmer (but still not warm – low 40s is definitely nicer than mid-teens, but with the wind, the wind-chill factor was definitely down there) temperatures during the day but still freezing temperatures at night. The daffodils were knocked down; one of the flowering bushes had already blossomed and the flowers were completely frozen out, the white blossoms turned into brown mush.

I figured it was all a loss.

I went out today – it was much nicer, in the high 50s, sunny and rather windy. And I steeled myself to lift up the row cover and see what was there.

bingo! We have a couple of winners. Every patch of seeds that I planted that were from the cabbage family (broccoli, chinese cabbage, kale, etc.) were up and although they were obviously crouched down and had not done a whole lot of energetic growing over the past several weeks, they were definitely alive. Plus, we have a healthy patch of spinach as well. The seeds from things from the beet family (beets and chard) either pooped out or never germinated but I can get more. I’m really happy to see that we had some survival there.

But – the reminder is this: all that stood between those seedlings and basically being frozen out and killed was a double layer of spun poly row cover.

Worth it? Yep.

Why do we want to do this?

Well, from a historic point of view, chopping up large lengths of fabric (which were literally bought with the sweat of numerous people’s brows) into much smaller shaped pieces of fabric was actually wasteful. People wanted to be able to use the length pretty much the way it came off the loom. The Japanese devised the kimono to be literally rectangular panels just the way they came off the loom. No cutting. No waste. Western designed clothing has more ‘innies and outies’ in terms of shaped sleeves and so on but even traditional Western clothing (such as the smocks worn by agricultural workers and so on) basically were just big rectangular pieces of cloth that were shaped to fit where they needed to fit, such as the shoulder area. Now, with the traditional agricultural smock worn in places such as rural England up through the end of the 19th century, the method usually used to make the stuff at the top smaller (that’s the technical term – bear with me, folks), was smocking. From a procedural standpoint, what you do with smocking is you pleat the fabric in the shoulder area with zillions of tiny pleats (usually by shirring it together with multiple threads passed through the cloth through regular intervals and then tying it off so that the pleats stay together in one big mass). The embroidery found on smocked garments is basically just a ‘safety-belt’ to make sure that all those little pleats stay tied together. Now, what smocking did for those smocks was that when the person wanted to pass the smock on or turn it to the less worn side or whatever, the whole business could be undone, the now big huge piece of fabric washed, repairs done, the fabric turned inside out and the whole thing done again. Very useful and thrifty.

Now, let’s just for a moment say that what you want to do is get the benefit of having extra fabric (especially in the front because you have a full bust, or are pregnant and have a big belly), but you don’t want all that extra fabric in the shoulder area. What to do? The yoke. A yoke actually is a rather thrifty device, doesn’t use much fabric itself, which fits in the shoulder area, but allows you to attach the much larger piece of fabric to it. Now, I think we are all familiar with blouse or shirt waist dress patterns which have a yoke in the front and the rest of the blouse is gathered into the yoke. This was a very popular device for giving (ahem) mature ladies more bust and tummy room. In the 1980s and early 1990s, yokes were also used with entire front bodices pleated into them, which didn’t do much for those of us who ordinarily need a ‘full bust adjustment’ (the dreaded FBA), but still was a way to put a lot more fabric in a smaller area.

In this Nipon dress example, let’s look at what the designer was looking to achieve here:
1. If you look back up to the pattern photo at the top, you will see that Those pin tucks are going all the way from the yoke attachment to the waist region. He’s obviously NOT looking to put extra fabric in the bust area. As a matter of fact, this gives the front of the dress an almost corset-like feature. It is, therefore, a smoothing device which leads the eye to see a smaller waist.
2. Once you get to the waist, the pin tucks stop, releasing the fabric to flare out over the hips, leading to a fairly graceful version of an hour glass.

So, in actuality, what Nipon has done here is that he has created a sort of ‘yoke extension’ with those pin tucks in the front – the release point is at the waist. The other point to note here is that I’m only discussing the front of the dress. In the back, there are pin tucks that are about 6″ long and which go from the hips up past the waist, again to pull the fabric in in that region at the back, but at the same time, leave room in the shoulder blade area for movement.

And speaking of shoulders (I have to get to this because this is actually a really important thing to remember about yokes, especially one such as this which is actually quite narrow), if you want to make this dress or something built like it (that is, with a narrow square necked yoke on it), you will want to do a muslin or two to make sure you get the fit exactly right. There are two crucial areas of fit with this sort of yoke:
1. Where the pivot point on your arm and shoulder are should be where the seam is. If you have a large bust and are fitting for that, you will notice that the yoke will basically end up falling off your shoulders.
2) The inside measurement of the yoke (the part that gives you the square neckline). Because I’m short and I have a big bust, that inside measurement was too large – great swaths of my bra were exposed. So make up a mockup, sew the shoulder and side seams together, put it on and see where that inside corner hits on YOU. I found I had to pull that inside corner in about a half inch on both sides, which meant that I also had to extend the outside edges of the yoke (at the underarm seams) OUT a half inch on both sides as well.

Next episode: I hate pin tucks.

Photo courtesy of PBS.org

Now, there are plenty of women who sew who are mining vintage pattern sites such as Vintage Pattern Lending Library, Folkwear, and Patterns of the Past to find patterns in styles that match what you see in the photo above. There are a lot of sewers who make costumes of all sorts, simply for the challenge (I mean now really, how much call is there for full-on Elizabethan doublets these days? Ditto for clothing of the 1860s, Victorian England and so on?).

Your Aunt Toby, however, is not a costume person (this said by the woman who just finished making a pattern, line for line, from 1930…twice). The intellectual exercise of building something like this from the inside out, to be worn once or twice, doesn’t hold a whole lot of attraction for me. I’m in awe of people who do it but I want to be able to wear my things multiple times so I invest my sewing time elsewhere. Which brings me to the topic (don’t you love my digressions..I could go on for days), which is this: What is it about this particular era which we find attractive. What makes people sigh over these clothes and make them want to recreate them. Or create something that feels like them?

Let’s look at Lady Mary in the center of the above photo. What is it about that dress that attracts? Taking away the length, which is period specific?
1. Square neck
2. Lace collar
3. Striped fabric
4. Little sleeves
5. Pieced bodice and skirt

What I really liked about that dress was the square neck. This is a neckline that is not seen much these days in women’s dresses and blouses but at this period, was very very popular. Another feature of the clothing (though not of this particular dress), particularly blouses of this period, were pin tucks (seemingly everywhere – skirt, bodice, and sleeves). Lady Mary wears a lovely blouse with kimono sleeves with pin tucks, a collar AND lace insertions, a veritable buffet of Edwardian style. So, how to get the look without the costume-ness?

Enter, stage left: Albert Nipon. Nipon was an American designer and manufacturer of women’s dresses in the 1970s and 1980s (he ended up in prison for tax evasion in 1984) and had a licensing agreement with Vogue Patterns in the 1970s. Many of his designs for Vogue during this period feature pin tucks. This particular pattern, number 1850, features pin tucks AND a square neckline (Ding! we have a winner!). Nipon’s dresses were always considered extremely feminine in design and he many times used design details such as collars, scallops and so on. His dresses were very popular and his designs paved the way for the excesses of the late 1980s and early 1990s in terms of almost explosive puffed sleeves (think Princess Diana), pleated everything, huge lacy collars and the almost little girl-like design in dresses of that period.

Am I going to make this dress? Yes I am. Am I going to try to recreate this in some sort of period-correct fabric? mmmmmmm…no. I have a lovely lavender rayon crepe which I think will look very nice. If I wanted to do this Dowton Abbey style, I’d have to go for some sort of thin linen or even cotton muslin type fabric. Although rayon (technically referred to as ‘viscose’) in some form or other had been available commercially in the UK by Courtolds Fibers starting in 1905, it was considered cheap goods (it was, after all, referred to as ‘artificial silk’), not very durable or color-fast. It was not until the 1940s that processes improved the fabrics. So, this dress will be reminiscent of that period, a figurative homage, rather than a literal recreation.

1939 NJ bean pickers (courtesy Lib. of Congress)

There are certain vegetables which are more efficient in terms of producing a lot of sheer stuff than other vegetables are. For example: We have 5 beds which are about 12-15 feet long and 3 feet wide. If I devote one whole bed of those into regular peas (not sugar snaps or edible podded or that sort of thing), I will probably end up with 3, 1 gallon bags of shelled peas for the freezer. Which is very nice indeed. If I plant Sugar Snap(tm) peas, because I will be using not only the peas inside but also the entire pod, I will get much much more to freeze. Compare all of that to if I plant, for example, tomatoes. In that same bed, I can probably plant 8-10 indeterminate tomato plants and even if I have a horrible summer, I’m going to get at least a bushel of tomatoes for freezing or canning in addition to all the fresh tomatoes I can eat through the harvest period.

So, it all depends on what you are gardening FOR, as well as why you are gardening. It’s a very big deal, actually because with people worrying more and more over the quality of their food, and the issues of BPA in commercial canned goods, and so on, there is more and more interest in gardening. And there is a certain amount of dissatisfaction from people when at the end of the summer’s work, they end up with half a dozen ziploc(tm) bags of frozen beans and broccoli in the freezer and have spent several hours boiling down tomatoes for sauce and end up with 3 jars.

They feel discouraged.

Here is where planning comes in.

There is nothing to say that you cannot have two garden plans. One for the at-home garden for fresh eating all through the summer and early fall months and if you have extra you can dry, can or freeze it. The second one is for real production, and for that, I suggest this: Make friends with your local CSA growers or the guys at the farmers market. They are growing a lot of stuff and you can make arrangements to either go out and do ‘u-pick’ at their farm (if they have one of those operations), make a bulk purchase (“I’d like to pick up two-bushels of paste tomatoes next week at the farmers market”), or buy extra shares on the CSA for certain things. Now, you will be wanting to check with all of these growers and ask about growing conditions, what they are using on the crops and so on. Then you can make decisions as to which grower to use. But it also puts YOU in the drivers seat in terms of ending up with what you want. If what you want is row upon row of canned tomatoes, peppers, beans, mixed squash and so on in your pantry for the winter (mmmmm), then you will want to partner up with your local growers for sure. It’s a better use of your time for those commodity veggies.

For the home garden, then, what you want are things which are best eaten as fresh as possible – greens, kale, snap peas, and corn.

OK, and sweet corn. I’m not a big fan of sweet corn but if you are, devote a bed to it. And be prepared to feed that stuff with compost and manure and fish meal and anything else you can lay your hands on. Corn is just voracious. I think you really have to love that stuff. But the problem with corn is this: There is a window of when it’s best to pick it, and you need to grow a certain number of plants of it in order for you to get proper pollination (what fills out the ears of corn), and production goes in this 10-80-10 sort of conformation (that is, you will have 10% harvestable early, then a bit later, 80% of it needs to be harvested immediately, and then it peters off to 10% again), which means that you need to either have a whole lot of friends over for a corn boil or be prepared to do a whole lot of canned or frozen corn at one fell swoop. And that 80% of the corn never, ever comes in on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. it’s always on Tuesday or Wednesday, and if you leave it on the plant for the weekend when you have time…..

Well, we all know what cardboard tastes like. This is why we don’t grow corn anymore at Chez Siberia. Freezing or canning cardboard doesn’t make it taste any better in January. It STILL tastes like cardboard. Mushier, but still cardboard.

So, here’s a tip: Sit down and plan out a couple of things.

First, what do you want to accomplish this year with your gardening? Fresh? Preserved for the winter? Both?

Second, what veggies do you and your family like to eat and eat a lot? I love chard – I adore eating it. I am literally the only person in my family who will eat it (sort of like mince pies, actually). One short row in the garden is plenty for me. We eat broccoli by the mile at our house. I can grow some of that here, but for freezing purposes, I need to partner up with my local U-pick person. So, I’ll grow a half a bed of that sort of thing here and do U-pick for the rest. We like salads and greens and Chinese veggies for stir fry – those are all very doable in the garden here at Chez Siberia, as well as tomatoes for the ‘fresh and a bit of canning and freezing’. If I check the pantry and decide that this year is tomato canning time, then again, I will partner up with the farmers market folks or do U-pick. I’m not a CSA member but I’m seeing the ads for ‘want to be a member of our CSA’ locally which means that if YOU want to be a member of a local CSA (that is “community supported agriculture” — you buy a ‘share’ of the production of the farm that year), you need to hop on that right now. If you want to find a CSA near you, go here CSA Finder.

Simple as that.

And then there is garlic, which I have written about several times here. With garlic, you can have volunteers all different ways. If you let your garlic bloom, it will form little bulblets in the flower heads and they shatter all over the place. The next spring, they will sprout but they are really too small and the garlic you get from them won’t be very big. But you can eat the garlic greens in salads and they are very good. Or, as in this case, you can end up with a big clump of garlic plants, which means that you missed a garlic bulb last fall and it’s overwintered, growing great clumps of roots and actually becoming very valuable. The garlic that you get this coming fall from these plants will be very very good.

But you have to dig them up. If you leave the clump, the plants will not have enough room to grow proper bulbs. As you can see from the photo, this has quite a lot of plants and most are quite large. In this case, there were 11. So, take your spade and leaving several inches around, dig up the plant and shake off all the dirt.

Separate them out and you’ll see that they will be all different sizes – right in line with the size of the original clove in the bulb. You don’t have to wash these off or anything. But you will want to loosen the soil in the bed so that it is nice and soft for you to replant the plants in.

Treat these just like any other plant you would be transplanting into the garden. if you want to add compost to the soil, do so and fork it in well to mix it with the regular soil. You won’t have to add any real amendments – as a matter of fact, it’s better that you don’t. But compost is fine. Space them out – 6″ around and make the hole with your hand – as far down as you can reach – and put the plant in, spreading out all those little white roots as you do so. Pull soil around the plants up to where the leaves start to branch off and firmly press down the soil around the plant. Then water well.

It’s worth making the effort – For 10 minutes work, I got almost a dozen garlic plants, which will provide me with 11 additional garlic bulbs this fall.