But here’s one that we work pretty hard at here at Chez Siberia that might work for you: Gonna Eat Better. And by that, I mean, eat in a more planned out way, which actually saves time, money and gives you better meals. And sometimes that means planning WAY in advance, and not just the ‘on the way out the door, yelling at someone still standing in the kitchen, “Hey, take something out for dinner, ok?”

Like, THAT really works, right?

So, finding ourselves with an abundance of eggs (when you have chickens…), the DH and I decided to make up some ‘quick/fast/last minute/no one remembered and this would have been the choice if they had” sorts of dinners: quiche. Now, this is an operation that does that some planning and prep; it also works a LOT better if you have a cooking partner to help you with the last minute ‘pour into the pie shells and get them into the oven” operation. If you don’t have a live-in person, this is also something that you can partner up with someone else with, cook everything up, divide things up and your friend goes home with quiches for the freezer also.

Part of this is going with what you do well and ‘outsourcing’ the rest. Aunt Toby, sad to say, can’t make pie crust for anything. I admit it. So, I went to the store and got 6 pre-made/in aluminum pie pans pie crusts. While I was getting the rest of all the ingredients chopped, cooked, mixed, etc., I put them all into a 450 degree oven for 12 minutes and baked them and then took them out to cool.

Here’s what I used to make 6 quiches:
3 dozen large eggs (give or take; we ended up throwing an extra egg into each quiche – anything to get rid of extra eggs and it all worked out), 6 eggs for each quiche.

½ cup of half and half for each quiche (you can substitute evaporated milk, heavy cream or whole milk)

1 cup of shredded cheese for each quiche (I used Swiss for the Lorraines; sharp cheddar for the broccoli and..)

2 cups of cooked veggies for each quiche (for the Lorraines, I had a combination of cooked onions/peppers and mushrooms; for the broccoli, I had a combination of the leftover onions/peppers, broccoli and a rather sad bunch of chard that I found in the vegetable bin that I chopped up fine and sautéed with garlic.

For the quiche Lorraine, I had some of what our pork raiser refers to as ‘cottage bacon’; it’s more like ham or Canadian bacon, really. We chopped it up, broiled all the fat out of it and put bits of that in the bottom of the pie crusts before we poured everything else in.

Team Directions: Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees F
Person 1: Put whatever is going into the pie pans in the bottoms (a little bit of the extra cheese, the ham, whatever. Put the veggies and cheese into a bowl, while…
Person 2: Mix up 6-7 eggs with ½ cup of the half and half (or whatever dairy product you are using) and bring that over to Person 1.
Person 1: Pour the egg/dairy combo into the cheese and veggies, give it a quick whisk around and pour into the pie crust.

The quiches will stand for the couple of minutes while each person is getting their parts done. No one can stand around, however. Person 2 will always be mixing up eggs and dairy so that basically as soon as Person 1 has poured a quiche, the next bit of egg liquid is there.

Pop all the quiches into the oven – as you can see, I did all six at once, which made them take longer to cook but got them all done at the same time. About 30 minutes into the cooking (if you have two rows like this), pull out the ones on the top and switch them around with the ones on the bottom. Cook for another 30 minutes or until a fork comes out clean – the custard has all set. The top will be a bit brown, which is ok.

Take out, put on racks or pads and cool. Wrap them however you want to wrap them. We put them into labeled ziplock™ bags, closed them up almost all the way and sucked out the air from that little hole and then sealed that opening. Then, we put them into the freezer.

Six dinners in the freezer. Each one will serve four (or the DH, me with one-quarter each and the rest for The Boy) with a salad.

Bon Appetit!

This year, I left two that I knew would work in the snow, kale and Brussels sprouts, and two experiments, chard and fennel. The experiments were a colossal failure: The fennel froze out completely and the chard rotted where the stems of the plant met the ground. Done.

But the kale and the sprouts are fine. The kale looks pretty ragged, I admit, but it’s still harvestable, cookable and edible. The sprouts look great; they were protected by the plants’ leaves, so they are looking fresh and green. Yum.

So, while you still have time to make out your seed order for 2011, consider trying out kale and sprouts for your garden this next spring. They are hardy (I put my seed into the ground late in March or early April under glass – you can use clean plastic over hoops too, if you have them; old windows over surplus timbers or cement blocks of you don’t) and actually very tasty. Something new to most families, for sure, but a definite way to extend the season for your garden.

And I got a call part of the way through the day from the DH about dinner and I told him to make sure we had broccoli because I wanted to “do Wendy’s™” as this is referred to in our house. This particular dish has been on my mind for several days for several different reasons:
1. It’s simple and easy.
2. More green veggies is always better.
3. It reminded me of when the Little Siberians were really little, the DH and I were not making a lot of money and going out to eat was an event that did not take place very often. This dish is an approximation (and I think it’s better, but that is just moi) of the famous baked potato dish from that fast food restaurant. My kids loved it then and still do.

Ingredients:
Potatoes, bakers are best, but any potato that is not labeled ‘waxy’ or ‘salad potato’ will work.
Fresh broccoli
Homemade cheese sauce (recipe below)

How to:

Scrub potatoes well, pierce in a couple of places with a knife and put into a 400 degree F oven to bake for 45 minutes. Don’t bother doing the microwave oven thing because they just..do..not…taste…the…same.

Wash and cut up your broccoli the way you like it. Whole spears, chopped up whatever, doesn’t matter, just don’t chop it up too small. Put in a good sized sauce pan with an inch of water and leave it for the last five minutes before serving to steam.

After the potatoes have been in the oven for about 30 minutes, start the cheese sauce:
Cheese Sauce:
Ingredients:
Two tablespoons of butter
Two tablespoons of flour
Two cups of milk (any will do, including skim)
One cup of shredded cheese – cheddar is best but you can mix cheeses. I would not use blue cheese though if you are feeding this to kids.

How to:
In a sauce pan, put the butter on a low heat and melt. Put in the flour and stir around. Once it starts to bubble a little bit, lower the heat and start putting the milk in a teeny bit at a time, stirring madly while to you do so. This will help prevent lumps.

Once you’ve put in all the milk, raise the heat a little bit – it will be less than half way but definitely warmer than low. The liquid will start to thicken up. Once it starts doing that, put in the cheese and stir until completely melted into the liquid. The liquid should be a lot thicker now. If it is not, add more cheese. Do NOT add more flour (at this point, adding ‘raw’ flour will just ruin the flavor..). Take off the heat and wait for potatoes and broccoli to be done.

When the potatoes have been in for 45 minutes, check them (I give them a squeeze, but you might have a different gauge for baked potato ‘doneness’). If they are finished, turn the oven down or even off and put the pot of broccoli on the stove. Bring it to a boil and boil for 5 minutes.

No more than five minutes, OK? Then take out, drain the liquid out of the broccoli and put everything in separate bowls and let everyone combine their meal the way they want to (some kids want the broccoli separate from the potatoes; some kids want everything together; some kids want cheese on the broccoli only. This way, they can do their own thing). Serve with a green salad or fruit.

And what do you use the water from the broccoli for? Put that in the fridge and save it to put in gravies, soups or casseroles.

Now, for a vegan alternative to the cheese sauce, I’d suggest making the sauce according to the recipe and substituting white beans and/or chickpeas for the cheese.

Enjoy.

That is the way it is with kale. Just eat it. Find a way to eat it that works for you, but eat it. The nutritional benefits of this vegetable are just so huge; if you can’t bring yourself to eat any other green veggie or leafy green, eat kale. (no, I am not on the payroll of the American Kale Conference or the National Kale Board or whatever lobbying group they have; as a matter of fact, that might be part of the problem. I don’t think anyone is actually doing PR for the vegetable)

OK. Housekeeping. What IS kale?
Kale is a member of the cabbage family (Brassica oleracea Acephala Group) and because it’s leaves do not form a head, it is considered to be closer to the ancestors of cabbage than any other member of the family.
In its current state of development (you can get flat and curly leafed varieties), this is a vegetable which has been around for thousands of years and is documented as being eaten by Romans in the 4th Century B.C.

Advantages of Kale
If you are a gardener in the northern part of the US, kale is something that you can start early, eat all summer, keep into the fall and even eat after it’s gotten a hard frost. As a matter of fact, the sugars in the plant actually are accentuated by frost, so this is an advantage in terms of having a fresh veggie out of the garden after everything else has seemingly been killed off. . . .

Kale freezes well. Kale will keep under the snow. I have dug up kale for dinners in January out of the snow. It is firm, green, crunchy and juicy. During the winter, when getting fresh veggies (except for those being trucked in from places like Florida, California and Texas) can be iffy, having kale out in the ‘deep freeze’ is definitely worth it.
Kale is dead easy to grow. All veggies in the cabbage family are just the easiest in that you do not have to worry about the temperature of the soil when you plant the seeds. As long as you can work the soil, you can plant kale. Kale seeds will come up between 45 and 50 degrees in the soil.

Benefits of Kale
Like all members of the cabbage family, kale is a powerhouse vegetable. It is an excellent source of Vitamin K, A, and C. It also is a great source of such minerals as copper, manganese, calcium and potassium. It is strong in antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients such as Vitamin C, beta-carotene and manganese as well as 45 different “flavonoids”, including kaempferol and quercetin which show anti-inflammatory action.

Kale is very high in fiber (which we know none of us gets enough of, frankly) and alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), which is the basic building block for all omega-3 fats.

Kale is an especially strong source of cancer-preventive nutrients called glucosinolates, which when the vegetable is eated and digested, convert into cancer preventing compounds in the body.
For more about kale and nutrition: kale

more kale

Adding kale to your diet
One of the issues in American dietary life is that we like our veggies dead bland. What is the most popular member of the cabbage family? Broccoli, which frankly has been selected over the past 50 years to be something people can pour cheese sauce over in order to get kids to eat it at all. If you want to walk on the wild side with broccoli, try broccoli raab (also referred to in Italian families as ‘raapi’), which is to broccoli, what hot Italian sausage is to a McDonald’s hamburger. THAT, my friends, is broccoli and is usually cooked with about 6 cloves of garlic.

No one is ever going to call kale a ‘shy vegetable’; it is strong no matter how you cook it (steaming is best, actually, but a bit of a sautee in a little olive oil will help with harnessing the Vit. B content). If you look at various European cuisines that use it, almost universally, you will see that kale is put in combination with other very strongly flavored ingredients:

Portugese Caldo Verde, a soup, combines kale with spicy sausages.
In Germany, the standard is to eat kale with mettwurst.

So, if you have a spicy stew or soup (like chili for example, now that we are coming into winter), adding several cups of washed, de-stemmed, chopped up kale leaves will give a tremendous nutritional boost and the kids won’t complain too much. We like to sautee kale with a little olive oil and onions, served with a little bit of slivered almonds or chopped walnuts.

Adding kale to your garden
It’s never too late!! I just ordered seeds for all sorts of greens, kale, chard, beets, etc. to have on hand for the early spring garden (soil temperatures in the 45 + range which is April here; depending on where you live, ‘your mileage may vary’). They arrived and I’ve got them in a ziplock™ bag in the back of the fridge to wait for their debut. It’s not really worth trying to start them inside since you can put them straight into the ground so early. The pictures of the kale here from my garden are of red Russian kale, which stands at this point almost 5 feet tall. If you want something smaller or with curly leaves, you might want to try dwarf Siberian kale or Tuscan black kale (which is actually not black but is a very dark blue green and is actually rather ornamental so if you’d like to move your landscaping toward more of an edible situation, this might be a great choice).

So, do just one thing: Add kale to ONE dinner this week. Does a body good™ and all that.

Done.

Nope.

Here at Chez Siberia, it ain’t over until…. Well, it ain’t over. We’ve still got broccoli, Brussels sprouts and kale in the garden which will hold. The kale will hold over the winter under the snow, so I will harvest anything higher than about 18” above the ground and once we start getting snow, I’ll make sure I cover it up. Then, I can go out and dig out fresh kale as long as it lasts. The other thing is that, really, for those of us for whom ‘sticking stuff into the ground’ is at least half the fun, right now is a great time. We’ve had the first killer frosts. The ground has started to cool down, so there are things we can put into the ground to over-winter until the spring.

So, today, we marched outside and planted garlic and multiplier onions which I had ordered from Territorial Seed. They always ship late like this, so it’s not as if I had garlic hanging around the house to dry out. There is nothing easier than garlic as long as you have a bed that has been dug over and soft. Just break the bulb into cloves, stick them in, flat side down, every 4” apart and literally forget about it until the spring. They will almost be the first green sticking up once the snow comes off the ground.

The other things I planted are more of an experiment. I’m with Thomas Jefferson in that I believe all gardening should be filled with experiments: growing new things, growing things that you’ve never grown before, trying things out, and trying things that should not work. Pushing the growing season envelop is almost something worth doing. You never know what will work.

I was looking at Territorial Seed’s catalog and they had a section for ‘cold season growing’. Now, Territorial is in Oregon, so their idea of the ‘cold season’ is when it rains more and drops below 60 degrees. But they had a couple of items that I thought, “What the heck – it’s just seed and if it works!!!”

So, I ordered Cascadia peas and Windsor beans. The beans are a type of fava and are rated hardy down to (wait for it…wait for it) 12 degrees F. Twelve degrees Fahrenheit.

I’m going to say that again: 12 degrees F.

Now, I’m not sure if they are saying that once the plants come UP, the plants are hardy down to 12 degrees F., but let’s face it, any plant that is hardy twenty degrees below freezing temperature should be able to handle frost in the ground. Right? Well, that’s the experiment.

I took the soil temperature – it’s down to 51.6 degrees F. We’re back to springtime soil temps now. I planted the peas and beans several inches down, patted down the soil, and then put 3 inches of aged composted stuff on top as mulch. I’m not sure what will happen – shoot, this is an experiment. The question really is this:

1. Will the beans and peas actually make it through the winter?
2. Will the beans and peas actually germinate and come up?
3. How will they do? Will they flower earlier? Will we get beans and peas really early in the spring? I saved seeds for both the peas and the beans and I’ll start them in the spring early and we’ll see if the fall-sown seed starts earlier, and gets us veggies earlier. Or if it’s just not worth it.

How do you deal with fall in your garden? If you’re from areas south of Virginia, you are probably able to grow a fall garden and get things started very early in the spring. But then again, if you are really far south, you may have to give up the ghost by the time May and the heatwave gets there. Do you think planting peas, beans, greens at this point is worth it for you?

And Aunt Toby is here today to tell you this: It’s worth it.

First – you KNOW what you have in your soil. You KNOW what you did or didn’t do. You don’t have any control over what was done to the field that the potatoes or onions in that 50 pound bag came in, how they were handled, how they were cleaned and washed, how they were stored, how clean the equipment was that put the potatoes or onions into those bags. What the warehouse or the delivery truck was like. None of that is under your control when you buy that bag in the grocery store.

But when you grow your own, however much you grow, everything is YOU. How much compost you put into the soil, how closely you planted the onion or potato sets, how much you weeded to get rid of competition, how much you watered (because you had a dry summer) or didn’t. When you dug them up. How you dug them up. How you cleaned them. How you store them. It’s all you. And if you want to make sure of as many bites that go into your mouth (and into the tummies of the rest of your family), growing your own is the best way to do that.

Second – the return on investment (or as our ‘friends’ on Wall Street call it, “ROI”) for veggies like onions and potatoes is huge. I’ll use this year’s onion crop as an example:

This spring, we planted about one pound of yellow onion sets (we use yellow Stuttgarter onions because those are hard, dense onions and store really well; red onions are great fresh but they do not store well), in a space 4 feet by 12 feet, with each set spaced 6 inches apart. We just dug them up yesterday (we actually could have dug them up earlier; the foliage had flopped down and died back but we had some rainy weather and you don’t want to dig up your onions when it’s all wet – they get slimy). That one pound (give or take a few ounces; I’m not exactly sure if it was just one pound or a pound and a half) of sets turned into onions which weighed about 35 pounds (again, give or take a pound either way because the scale I was using is not really exact). Depending on where you live, your best storage onion might be something different; what grows best in any particular area is highly ‘day length’ specific. In the northern half of the US, yellow Stuttgarter is the storage onion of choice. Also, please note: just jogging down to your local home/garden store might not be the best place to buy your onion sets. First: If it’s a large national chain, your local store will have the same onion sets that everyone else in the chain gets and this might not be best for your area, truly. Second, the quality of storage might not be the best. It might be better to go to the mail order outlets or the internet to find onion sets – many outlets have varieties that will not be available in your local store and they will be shipped to you when the time is right for planting in any case. Just a thought.

Again, let’s look at the numbers here:
Est. 1.5 pounds of sets
Payback: 35 pounds of onions
The only cost we had was for the sets, a little bit of weeding time (we mulch heavily so that keeps most of the weeds in check) and some watering time during the dry spell. We also were using a hose from one of our sumps which basically runs no matter how dry it gets so we did not have any extra cost for electricity from the pump. The amount of space was 48 square feet.

There are other vegetables that take more work, but I think onions are worth it. One note: Once you’ve harvested your onions, sort through them. Anything that ends up smaller than a golfball, put back into the garden. This will overwinter and you’ve got a jumpstart for the next year. Anything that has a thick/green neck still (referred to as a ‘bull neck’), eat right away. These don’t keep well at all. Anything that still has any green foliage in the neck, also eat right away. Once you’ve sorted out what you want to store, wash them well and get all the dirt off them and spread them out on screens or in wire baskets (we use the wire baskets from an old freezer), in a breezy dry place to dry. Then store in mesh bags in a cool dark place.

Enjoy.

I was not the only winner. The lovely Jennifer (I’m not sure of her permission on names, so for the moment, she’s just Jenn) of New York City also won and to be truthful, this class was really for someone like her (kitchen filled with equipment she didn’t know how to use; fridge filled with take out containers) rather than me (though one of these days I will get a class on soups and pie crusts, two things that Aunt Toby avoids like the Plague because I am truly not very good with either one), but I’ll take any day trip down to New York that involves good food.

Jennifer and I converged on Jyl’s new digs (she just moved from her large loft apartment to a much smaller place). The kitchen area was pretty typical ‘New York City Apartment’ sized, which means that it was, in total, about 8 feet wide by about 4 feet deep, just enough room for an L of kitchen counter with cabinets, a fridge, sink and a four-burner stove. More than once during the afternoon, we had to do the ‘kitchen cha-cha’ with Jenn and I rhumba-ing between the stove and the sink, with Jyl giving running instructions and commentary from just outside in the open livingroom/dining area. But all in all, we left with our heads full of ideas, new-found confidence on Jennifer’s part in terms of working with knives, ground meat, and entertaining (both of us – for all Aunt Toby loves to cook – I am also the person who immediately embraced taking my kids and their friends to bowling for birthday parties. Having people in my house gives me ‘entertainment performance anxiety’).

I will get into more details in future posts, but here is what we learned and came away with:
Flavored Simple Syrups – which we used in what I’d call ‘personal soft drinks’ – we used already made coffee and a raspberry tea concentrate as the ‘water’ in the simple syrup. But, you can also use the flavored syrups as part of personal cocktails with vodka as well. I have to tell you that the coffee one, even with just seltzer, was absolutely fabulous – sophisticated, refreshing.

Hummus – which we have discussed before here. Jyl reminded us (and it’s a fabulous idea to remember), that hummus can be made out of any processed dried bean, so if you want to use black, navy, pinto, kidney, etc. instead of chick peas, then go for it!)

Pesto – which we substituted hulled sunflower seeds for the pine nuts since Jyl’s neighborhood store did not have them that day.

Bruschetta – Given what time of the year this is, I think this is something – because it is so easy – that anyone can whip up as a ‘before dinner appetizer’.

In the oven toasts – using day old Italian or French bread, sprinkles of extra virgin olive oil and freshly grated Romano cheese. These can be eaten by themselves, or used for the pesto or the Brusschetta or the hummus. Certainly a better tasting and healthier choice than a ‘bag-o-chips’.

From Scratch Meatballs and Spaghetti with Sauce. This is heaven on a plate and Jyl showed us a very nifty trick in terms of serving it so that you do not get that icky ‘ooo, look, the sauce is getting all watery and separating’ thing on the plate.

Strawberry ‘shortcakes’ with sweetened whipped cream. This is a definite ‘fast and easy/support your local bakery’ sort of dessert where all you do is wash and slice up the strawberries and ‘marinate’ them a little bit in lemon juice and a little sugar, whip up some heavy cream with a little bit of vanilla and sugar and serve over slices of the best pound cake you can find.

In addition, and this was definitely great for the anxious (ahem, ME) entertainer, we also did a very fast run through on table settings (yes, I WILL treat myself to some ‘charger plates’ – they really did seem to upgrade everything terrifically), more colorful napkins (or perhaps I’ll get some fabric and make my own – this has to be the easiest sewing project..but sewing up hems on 8, 10 or 12 squares might get into the ‘mindless’ at some point. Probably better to have this as a ‘want to sew but don’t want to do anything hard’ project). And we did some ‘deconstruction/recycling/re-imagining’ of a flower arrangement that had, as we say here at Chez Siberia, gotten a little ‘tired’.

Lessons learned:
Planning is everything. It really is worth taking the time a couple of days ahead if you are entertaining, to think through what you want to make, the order you need to have things (the simple syrups actually needed to be made first since it starts with boiling liquid and sugar and needs to be thoroughly chilled when you want to make the drinks just before dinner). Even planning down to the what plates or utensils you will need and digging them out (always one of my anxiety points since I tend to keep things that we don’t use often in boxes in the basement).

Simpler is better. I haven’t thought of serving spaghetti and meatballs as an entertainment option ever. But Jyl is right – it’s one of those dishes that a) everyone likes, no matter what their age and b) even if you can get it in a restaurant, everything has been made way in advance and has to be reheated. It usually never even hits the tick on ‘good’ range. Making the sauce and meatballs from scratch and getting fresh pasta raises this combo to the almost ambrosia stage. Better a dish people already come to the table liking and present them a version that they will close their eyes while chewing than a fancy dish you’ve never made before that they will poke around on the plate.

Put your time and best efforts with stuff you can and like to do. If you are not a baker, find a bakery that does a really really good job.

We made everything that day with the following tools. No other gadgets or little fiddly stuff necessary:
Cutting board and good sharp knives
One stock pot for the sauce
One large frying pan to brown the meatballs
Smaller pot for the simple syrup
Small electric hand mixer for the whipped cream
Food processor
Cookie sheet to make the toast
Bowls

That is it – all you need.

Take it away, Jyl Ferris!!

But, what to do with them? Some of my most depressing moments in the kitchen (and as hard as it is to believe, Aunt Toby has moments of domestic self-loathing just like everyone else) have been in the middle of an August or early September heat wave, with the sauce on the stove and the canner going as well, and sweat dripping down my face (anyone wanting to excuse themselves may do so now), the sink full of washed tomatoes and three humongous bowls of freshly picked tomatoes sitting out on the counter. This is usually accompanied by the sound of the DH’s voice gaily wafting from the garden, “Hey – we missed a lot out here; I’ll pick them so the slugs won’t get them!”

Yep. Those are moments when a shower at the Bates Motel has a certain charm.

However, a bit of creativity and outright avoidance will get us through.
First: Drying.
One of the best ideas we had several years ago was to get an electric food dehydrator. We use this for just about everything that can be cut up and then used later, whether it’s fruit, veggies, onions, you name it. We had a lovely appetizer in an Italian restaurant on our last trip to Edinburgh, Scotland (vs Edinburgh, PA), which consisted of little tomatoes which had been dried and preserved with garlic in olive oil, accompanied by thin slices of mozzarella cheese. This works especially well with tomatoes such as Princip Borgese, but being a totally classless American, I did it with cherry and grape tomatoes. Same great ‘summer in a bottle’ flavor.

Second: Freezing.
Don’t ask me where we got this technique, but we’ve been using it for fruit for years and it works for really any veggie also that is not too watery (for example, it will not work with things like zucchini – to freeze summer squashes such as these, grate them up, squeeze out the excess water, bag up and freeze for things like baked goods later). What we do for tomatoes is slightly different but the theory is the same: Cut up the fruit in question, lay out on cookie sheets, leaving space in between, and put in the freezer. When they are completely frozen, take off the cookie sheet (you might need to pry them off with a spatula), put into bags or other freezer containers and seal. If you are using ziplock(tm) bags, close almost all the way and suck out the air. The fruit will still stay in separate pieces.

For tomatoes, there is just one small additional thing to do: once you’ve cut them up in pieces (and with a big tomato, you should be cutting it up into 6-8 pieces; with a plum tomato, probably 4 pieces), use a spoon and get out as much of the “gishy” gelatinous stuff inside as you can. In freezing this will be very watery when you defrost. But freezing is a great way to keep tomatoes for when you want to do something later. Later in the fall, when it’s cooler, the garden is done and when you need tomatoes OR, you actually want to do a bit of canning or make sauce or whatever, you just pull out the bags, throw the tomatoes in a pot and off you go. You can cook up whatever you want and serve or cook it up and using the directions on your canner, can it up then.
A bit of summer when you least expect it.

So, how do you know when they are ready? Well if you have soft necked garlic, the top of the plant just collapses and dries up. Once that happens, you are good to dig them up. If you have hard neck garlic (and these are obviously hard necked), the central stem dries up and turns white. Once that happens, the bulbs have matured and you can dig them up.

There are several ways to save garlic, but all of them start with cleaning and drying. Once you have dug the bulbs up, shake as much dirt off them as you can and rinse well. Put out in the sun and let them dry for a day. Some people save them in jars; there are methods of braiding the stems and the leaves. Here’s our method:
First: Make the decision of whether or not you are going to use any of this harvest to replant for next year. If the answer is ‘no’ then you can buy or order garlic stock from other sources. If the answer is yes, then look over the bulbs and choose the biggest healthiest one you have, split it up into cloves and plant into a prepared bed as far down as your hand can reach in soft soil. The best time to plant is right after the first frost in your area.

Second: Take the rest of your garlic, split into cloves and peel, break off the little root bit at the end, rinse off and put into some container that you can reopen, like a yoghurt container or a ziplock(tm) bag. If you are using a bag, you can suck out the excess air when you get to the last little bit to zip shut. Then just put into the freezer and use as you need them. Easy as pie and lasts seemingly forever.

In short, time to clear the decks to start things for a fall garden.

Even here, in Zone 3 to 4 (on the USDA map, it shows us as 5b; I hedge my bets and call it a 3 to a 4 given the topography), I’ve got a good 10-12 weeks before I give up the ghost on gardening. And with some judicious use of row covers and hardy crops, I can extend things past October as well. There is nothing like eating veggies from your garden on Thanksgiving Day.

Small digression: I just found this neato Interactive zip code-based USDA zone map here: zip code USDA map

Back to the matter at hand: Fall garden. The trick with a fall garden is to remember what you were growing in the early spring and repeat. Hot weather items like tomatoes and peppers are not something you can start in July and get anything out of by October – between the temperatures falling and the amount of sunlight falling, you are basically out of luck. But in terms of things like greens or cabbage family veggies, you are very much good to go:
Lettuces of all sorts
Mache
Kale
Mustard
Chinese cabbages/bok choy/ etc.
Peas
Chard
Just make sure that the bed is well watered when you sow the seeds and that you keep it well watered until the seeds sprout. And choose items with low ‘days to harvest’ dates.

In addition, you can still take a stab right now with items that need nice warm soil and with a bit of luck will be bearing as the end of the season arrives, such as beans.

If you have herbs growing in the garden and the plants are just going nuts, now is a great time to take cuttings and pot them up to bring them into the house for a window sill garden for the fall. Items like rosemary are sort of woody but if you use the new growth at the top and water it well, it should root for you. Additionally, items such as basil or mints are from the same family as coleus, which you can even root in a glass of water. What I’ll do with the basil above is to take a good 2-3″ cutting, dust it with a bit of rooting hormone and stick in some sterile medium in a nice shady place. Once it’s rooted, I’ll repot them up to take into my sun room for the fall and winter.

So, if you have an area in your garden that is past its best, needs to be weeded and cleared out or frankly just looks tired, here’s the drill for a fall garden:

Weed the garden thoroughly.

Using a garden fork, spade it over completely.

If you can get your hands on some compost, cover the area with several inches and spade that in as well.

Water thoroughly. And by that, I mean water it so that if you dug a hole several inches deep, the soil would be moist there. This will take a good bit of watering, trust me; this is not a ‘stand there with a drink in one hand and the hose in the other and when the drink is done, you are done.” If you have an oscillating sprinkler, set it on low in the evening, and leave it going for several hours.

Set your seeds in rows as thickly as you can – you will transplant them once they are up and have the second set of leaves.

If you are having hot, dry weather, tent the area loosely with newspapers or row cover or an old sheer curtain or something like that – this will keep the moisture close to the soil and will help prevent the soil from drying out. If the soil dries out, you will not get very good germination, if you get any at all. Sowing seeds at this time of the year is a little bit dicey – you really need to keep watering on a regular basis every evening or two unless you are getting regular rains (which no one is getting right now, so just take the time to do it – sit on the porch and watch the hummingbirds at the flowers and enjoy).

Seeds: If you ran through all your seeds this spring already, get thee to the local home/garden center, feed store, farm store or whatever and look for seeds. If you don’t see the display, ask the manager if it’s been put away and if there are any seeds left. You should be able to get some of this year’s seeds. They might not be at their best – they’ve been sitting out on the display since February or March – but if you keep the bed watered well, you should get some germination.

At the same time – and do this before you forget – you’ll thank me in the spring – go online to your usual sources. Whether it’s Parks or Burpee or Pine Tree Garden Seeds or whoever it is you usually use, check the site and see if they still have seeds available and order a whole list of lettuces, kales, cabbage family plants, Chinese cabbages, etc. Anything they list for early spring or fall planting. Order that NOW – and when it arrives, put the whole shebang, closed up, in a ziplock™ bag or a closed jar in your fridge. Now you have seeds to start with in the early spring. You will feel gloriously superior for being prepared.

Also – check sources for garlic bulbs and onion plants for growing. If you want to start garlic this fall, you will want to order early enough to catch the harvest (which is starting NOW) to have your bulbs ready to take apart to plant after your first frost. If they also have onion plants for planting in the fall (usually bunching onions work for this), get some of these and get them started this fall too – then you will have two good early starts for next year and you will have scallions to use and eat early in the spring.