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.

Now, if you’d like to read that whole thing, go right ahead, but here are the three important bullet points:

By the end of March, 2009:
We’d had a very dry spring so far.
The Rhubarb was already up.
The soil temperatures all over the garden were in the 42-43 degrees F. range.

By the end of March, 2010:
Well, as you can see from the photo at the top, the rhubarb is already up .. again. I think we can safely say at this point that things here weather and climate-wise have permanently changed. When we first planted rhubarb at Chez Siberia in 19(ahem) 83, we harvested rhubarb toward the end of May. At this rate with the rhubarb up now, we will be able to start harvesting it by the end of April and it will be done by mid-May. Anyone can argue the point any way they choose, but this is, as they say in the computer programming ‘biz’, a ‘feature’, not a ‘bug’.

We have had another event much like last year, where we got a couple of weeks of warm sunny weather on top of a rather dry spring and winter. Unlike folks in the South and Southeast part of the country, who got hammered with snow storms this late winter and early spring, we got none of that. This goes along with the comment above. The storm track got locked into the southern areas of the country because the Jet Stream came down from Canada…and stayed there. What we got here were Canadian Highs: cold, clear and sunny. All the moisture got locked into areas which ordinarily release them to travel up with the Jet Stream up into the Northeast, which is why people in the South saw temperatures and snow that they had not seen in 30 years and Mi-Atlantic areas such as North Carolina, Virginia, Philadelphia, New Jersey et al. got storms that they were definitely not prepared to deal with. I just checked Accuweather and their long-range forecast guy is predicting that April is going to be warm. Very warm.

Soil Temperatures. Well, this week, we got something that is actually pretty common for us in March: The Freak March Storm. Now, I’ve seen these where, as in 1993, snow dumpage is measured in feet, not inches. What we got instead was rain, ice, and about a 1/2 inch of snow and very cold weather. So, when I went out to measure the soil temperatures, I could not even put the thermometer INTO the soil in the beds that were exposed. They were frozen solid. Before the storm, the temperatures in those beds were in the high 30s, with the temperature in the glass-covered bed in the low 40s. Today, that glass-covered bed is measuring 40.3 degrees F., so even with the freezing temperatures (this morning when I got up, it was 21 degrees F.), we did not lose very much heat out of the soil under that glass. If Accuweather is right, that bed might warm up very fast and be ready for me to put in things like lettuce, cabbages, broccoli, chard and so on next weekend. But it also means that we will have to get the glass off so that the sprouts don’t overheat.

Until the next time – keep a weather-eye out.

I took the soil temperature in that bed with the garlic – it was 32.8 degrees F. Barely above frozen. And yet – that garlic was not just up – it was darned up. Look at that leaf development. The ends – with the brown on them, are what came up last fall before the freeze. The green parts are all new – and grew up through the frozen soil and into the snow. Now, THAT’s determination. But it also shows that even in the depths of winter, under the snow, things are going on and growing in your garden.

Of course, seeing that, I looked around and saw that other hardy bulbs in the yard have started to come up as well – tulips, crocuses, daffodils. They will start to really take off once things warm up. But the garlic is a signal to me that I’d better get that tunnel built over one of those beds so that I can get the greens, chard, cabbages, broccoli, etc. planted once I can get the soil to hit 50 degrees. Warm enough for them. Not for Tomatoes, peppers, etc. – but definitely for the hardy early spring veggies.

MMMMMMMM, new greens. Looking forward to that.

Awful. Miserable. Interminable.

And I looked at the calendar this weekend and realized that we have a yard full of snow (which at this point is not very picturesque at all) and the entire section of the yard that has the vegetable garden beds in it has had a huge amount of snow shoveled on top of it from the driveway. Which means that even with this week’s glorious weather (sunny, in the 50s every day), while we’ve had some major melting, I’m not going to have a garden bed warm enough to tuck cool weather early season crops into.

Snow is reflective like that.

So, this morning, when I spoke to The Boy, I asked him to do me a bit of a favor and try to unearth one of the beds from the snow. Somehow, the snow, in the melting and then refreezing, etc. had become very icy and heavy, so he only got about half of it done and I had to finish up when I got home. But as you can see from the photo, where he’d cleaned off the snow, the dirt was nice and soft and un-frozen and I dug and scraped off the rest on the bed (though as you can see, there is a bit of snow still frozen there on top of the soil). Depending on what happens to the weather in the next couple of weeks (I might have to put some clear plastic over the bed to help things along), by early April, it might be warm enough to plant things such as:
Lettuces
Kale
Chard
Broccoli
Cauliflower
spring onions
Beets
Chinese and other cabbages

Having something green pop up will be absolutely wonderful.

Wednesday Update: I stuck my handy-dandy extra meat thermometer in the soil this afternoon and it measured 32.9 degrees F. So, we’ve got a whole lot of warming up to do to get that bed to 50 degrees. I’m casting about for whatever we have laying about to use as a frame to raise up and put over the bed that I can cover with a big sheet of plastic to act as a green house. More to come!

This photo shows something that is like that…only for growing transplants.

Baby plants need warmth, moisture and light. I have an unheated greenhouse which could provide a heck of a lot of light but sadly..no warmth. So, I transplanted the seedlings into 4 and 6-packs and put the whole deal into a big clear plastic bag, which I closed up with a rubberband. Before I did that, however, I made sure the grow mix was moist and I filled the bag with my breath.

No, this is not some sort of New Wave, Earth Mom, ‘fill them with the breath of life’ thingy.

It’s CO2. In fancy growing operations, they actually have CO2 generators to help the plants get a jump. Aunt Toby has a ferocious set of lungs and a plastic bag.

Actually, the DH last year got clear plastic domes that sat on top of the packs. And they sort of worked, but the seedlings kept drying out, so they were stressed and just did not do very well. And we kept asking ourselves, “How come this technology does not work for us? We never used to have this problem.”

The DH and I used to grow seedlings in plastic milk jugs cut in half length-wise inside a plastic grocery bag with a rubber band at the end. And when they got big enough, we’d transplant them into something bigger and put the plastic grocery bag on top. And after that they were big enough and it was warm enough to put them out in the greenhouse.

The problem with those plastic domes is that they did not snap onto the packs, so the seal was not very good – all the moisture was evaporating. I started seeds this time with that container with the snap-on lid from the grocery store that had salad mix in it.

Worked like the proverbial charm.

So, after I transplanted everything, I put the whole shebang into a big plastic bag, filled it with personal CO2 and sealed it up. Then I started more seeds in the salad mix box. And I put both things back on top of the grid on top of the heating pad.

Oh, and what did I start this time?

Aunt Toby is searching for the Holy Grail of tomatoes. After what happened last summer with Late Blight, I’m almost not caring about taste or texture, just plants that will not give up the ghost if we have a cool, wet summer. So, searching the literature, I planted:
Heiloom Striped German – from Johnny’s Selected Seeds Johnny’s Selected Seeds
Legend – from Tomato Growers Supply Tomato Growers Supply

Additionally, I’m trying to beat the whole business, since this is Late Blight, by growing Early Wonder — 55 days. I figure if I can get them out in the garden early under plastic, then if Late Blight hits in August, it won’t make any difference – I’ll have gotten my tomatoes by then. Source: Tomato Growers Supply

And, in a complete leap of international gardening detente, I got Stupice – 52 days!!! This is from Czechoslovakia and the supplier claims this is an extremely early cold-tolerant tomato. One of the really interesting developments over the past 10 years or so is the availability of tomatoes from such countries as Russia. ’s cold in Russia and they have what could coyly be referred to as ‘a short growing season’. This is another ‘get it in, get it growing, get it out’ experiment just in case we get another Late Blight thing. Source: Tomato Growers Supply

Now, none of these could possibly be referred to as a paste tomato. Ok, I admit it. I have not been able to find either a really short season paste tomato or a paste tomato that is Late Blight resistant. What I plan to do is start some and put them into grow mix in five gallon buckets on my deck. Blight is in the soil – sometimes you’ve just got to put the plants someplace where they won’t catch the infection.

Another seed I planted (and which I usually don’t bother with, frankly) are peppers. Tomato Growers Supply had some sweet peppers from Romania called Roumanian Rainbow which are 60 days. That’s really short. I usually have poor luck germinating and growing pepper plants, but I figured I would give it a shot and then do the same thing I did last year – grow them in grow mix and compost in plastic milk jugs. Literally the only peppers we got last year were from the ones we treated that way. if I’d put them on the black asphalt driveway, we’d have done even better, I think.

OK – Aunt Toby is already hearing the mumbling from people out there saying, “you’re starting these too early..” Yep. According to the books, I’m starting these much too early. Could not be truer. But one of the tricks we learned a long time ago with tomatoes (and no one can argue me out of doing it) is that we keep transplanting the seedlings into deeper and deeper containers, always right up to the bottom leaves. They grow this big thick underground stem with lots of roots. And when we plant them, we dig a big hole, fill it with compost and water and plant it right up to the bottom leaves. The plants don’t seem to go through so much shock that way and they just take right off, grow fast and we get tomatoes earlier. That’s why I’m starting them now.

So, until the next time…

No matter where you live, the economy stinks.
No matter where you live, the winter veggies you get are grown in California, Arizona, South Texas and Florida. And those areas have gotten hit very hard and have suffered huge losses this year. Prices have already gone up because availability has gone way down.

So, no matter where you live, you have probably already started to think seriously about a garden this year. And if you are like most of us, you have already put it in the pot on the back of the stove that’s in your head. You think you have time. That pile of seed catalogs is still next to the bed or the couch in the family room. You might even have your list clipped to the cover.

One small reminder:
Last year, by March, seed sellers were already reporting a) they were way behind on filling orders and b) they were running out of seed because the economy had started to make people feel they needed to have a garden to grow their own.

That was last year and we didn’t even have the winter crop destruction. Despite what the pundits have told us, the economy has NOT gotten any better (my measure of an improved economy is when I see the job listings in my local paper go up above the current one page on a Sunday). People are going to feel even more that they need to grow their own, grow more of their own, can and freeze, and get some sort of control over at least one part of their food supply. People have already started to order their seeds. I want you to imagine thousands upon thousands of seed orders winging their way over the phone, internet, and mail to seed purveyors across the country.

And your catalogs are still next to the bed.

We’re almost through January. Most of the seed producers and sellers are on the internet and accept all forms of payment other than elephant tusks. Pull out that seed list, do whatever comparison shopping you need to do between your two or three fav vendors. Go to the site or sites, pull out the plastic or whatever and order the seeds NOW.

OK, so you are not that far ahead. You are still in the “I think we should grow veggies (or more veggies) this year. If you’ve done this before, you know what to order:
1. What does your family like?
2. What will your family eat?
3. Order those things. It does not pay to order a whole bunch of things that your kids will turn their noses up at – if they will eat cherry tomatoes and you want to go wild, order a seed mix of cherries – that will give them what they like and will eat, but in a different set of colors. Easy extension. Move on from there.

If you have never, ever done this before and have a yard, then your hardest job is keeping your eyes in your head. You use the same items as above, but in a different format:
1. What does your family like that is easy to grow? Easy to grow things are: lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, squash, snap beans. These are seeds that you can literally dump into the ground and as long as you get some sun and water, they will grow and give you stuff to eat. Less easy things but still doable are: spinach, chard, anything from the cabbage family (cabbage of any sort, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards, etc.). These will sprout in cool ground but need thinning to about 8” to a foot apart (the seed package will tell you), but you have to give them some protection from the little white moths (use row covers, old sheer curtains, etc.). You can order seeds from one of the vendors on the internet or wait and buy from a seed rack at your local home/garden store, grocery etc. Most of the rack seeds are from growers such as Burpee etc. Ordering from them now will just get you your seeds now – you will be buying the same seeds off the rack when the distributers get them. The one thing is that people watch those racks like hawks – so ordering your own now might be a better idea in terms of making sure you get the seeds you want.
2. Tomatoes and Peppers. For first timers, or folks who live in cool season areas, my advice is to – go to your local nursery (not your local ‘extremely large home/lumber/has a garden area’ big box store. Your local grower is going to grow the sorts of tomatoes and peppers which will work in your area. If you have never grown anything but a houseplant in a pot before, then just spend the money and get a good solid potted cherry tomato and a couple of potted pepper plants. You will want to transplant these into something like a big 5 gallon plastic bucket each with some holes in the bottom. Use a commercial growing mix half and half with soil from your garden. That will give the pots weight and they won’t blow over. Put them into a sunny spot and make sure they get water on a regular basis. When the tomatoes turn their correct color (it might be red, pink, yellow, orange..the stake in the pot will tell you); you can pick peppers at the green stage or when they reach their final luscious color (they have more vitamin C then, actually; so it’s worth the wait).

Don’t know where to find seeds on the Internet? Well, you can always type ‘vegetable seeds’ into a search engine and see the zillions of offerings. Or, you can go to this site and use their section on seeds: Dave’s Garden Marketplace

I started these seeds last week. They were on top of a heating mat with a grid on top of a piece of plywood under a fluorescent fixture in my basement. But in years past, the DH and I have successfully started seeds on top of the following:
The top of a gas stove – the pilots were on all the time and kept the top warm
A screen with a trouble light underneath it pointing up
A screen with a chick warming light underneath it pointing up.

The point is that many seeds – most actually – need some form of bottom heat, as well as moisture and some sort of covering that will hold the warmth and the moisture in.

Until the next time…oh yeah..order the seeds, ok? And when they arrive – if you are not going to plant them right away, take a ziplock™ bag, put the seeds in them, and put the whole thing into your fridge – not in the back where they can freeze, ok? The crisper works fine.

This winter has been too long for everyone, everywhere. You name a location except on the Equator which has not had more than it’s usual taste of the winter this season and I’m buying tickets to ship the DH and me there, pre-paid express. I am damn tired of the winter too. And the seed catalogs coming earlier than usual has not helped the situation.

Therefore, Aunt Toby is making an executive decision and is starting seeds for a little window-sill garden. Something to get my hands in the dirt. Something to perhaps get some fresh greens on the table. Something to just see some seeds coming up (Aunt Toby has very simple needs…just seeing seeds coming out of the dirt is pretty exciting at this point).

Something I did (because I know myself pretty well at this point) last fall, was that I ordered seeds for things that germinate pretty easily in cooler soil, and then I put the envelop into the fridge and forgot about it. These were packed for the 2009 season but as long as you do not open the envelops, you’ve got a pretty decent shot of getting some germination out of them, especially if you store them in a cooler place. Some people store them in a screw-top jar in the fridge; I don’t go that far. Some seeds keep their potency better than others (tomatoes are one good example of a seed that can go through everything right up to a flamethrower and still germinate, which people who have used heat treated sewage sludge have found, much to their chagrin when tomato plants start coming up in their lawns).

So, here is my little experiment. I’m using one of those nifty plastic salad greens boxes that grocery store chains use. It has a lid that snaps down tightly, which will hold in the moisture and warmth. I poked a bunch of holes in the bottom for drainage and put in a mix of peat moss, pearlite, and vermiculite (it’s what I have at the house; a good basic seed starting mix will work; you want something nice and light) and moistened it with hot water (peat moss needs warm water otherwise it just lays there). My little experiment is that I also put an envelop of spinach seeds that we only used part of last season in. It’s from the 2009 growing year but it’s not as if I stored them very well once I’d used them; I just threw them in the fridge with the rest of the seeds. So, we’ll see how all of these same season seeds do. I planted a lettuce mix from Pine Tree Garden Seeds (they are from Maine) that we like a lot. It’s called Winter Lettuce and is a bunch of early greens that come up nicely. I’m also trying out a mix of basils because I can always use those, plus these poor neglected Spinach seeds.

I planted the seeds in their rows, marked them, damped them down from the top with a spray of warm water and snapped the lid on. Then I put them over a heating mat in our basement under a fluorescent fixture.

Let’s see how they do.

Housekeeping:
Horseradish: Armoracia rusticana, is a member of the cabbage family, along with mustard and wasabi. It’s perennial to Zone 2 and is grown for it’s roots, which contain sinigrin, which, when the root is damaged, gets broken down in about 3 minutes to allyl isothiocyanate (mustard oil). This substance remains as long as the grated up roots are put into vinegar.

Cultivation: This plant has been cultivated for its roots for thousands of years, is mentioned in ancient writings, but for medicinal purposes (which I suspect center around ‘clearing out the sinuses’ more than anything else). It’s use as a condiment is very popular in eastern European and traditional Eastern European Jewish cooking, where it is referred to as ‘chrain’ and comes in two ‘flavors’: Red (which is a combination of beets, horseradish and vinegar) and White (plain horseradish and vinegar). Red is theoretically milder, but you can’t tell by me.

Horseradish How-to:
The easiest thing to do is to get a fresh root from the produce section or a local farmer, wash it up, cut it up into chunks, quickly wrap in plastic wrap and then double bag in a ziplock™ bag and put into the freezer. Then, take out a chunk and prepare horseradish sauce whenever you want it. This is not like pickles. I could not find a single recipe for how to can this. Since it is easy enough to make (other than the total sinus and tear duct cleaning out part), using the frozen pieces as you go seems like a good idea. Here is how:

First – do this outside if you can. I did this out in our green house with two windows open and I still got hit in the sinuses, so at the very least, cross ventilation is a must. My father used to tell me that his grandmother used to make this by putting the grater and the bowl out on the fire escape, having him lower the window on top of her arms and stuff towels in the space around them while she grated.

Second – take your roots and wash them well, scrub with a veggie brush if necessary. At this point, they are still not pungent – I’m not sure why. Perhaps the sinigrin is not at the outer surface levels.

Grate the roots as finely as you can. I used a food processor and even that was not fine enough. Something that will really produce mush is what you want to use.

For every cup of grated up horseradish roots, add:
3 Tablespoons white vinegar
2 teaspoons of water
1.5 teaspoons of sugar or honey

I gave my son a taste of this and he coughed for a good five minutes, so I think I got the proportions right. Store in a closed container in the fridge and use as soon as you can on meats the same way you would mustard. Gifilte fish and other totally bland cooked fishes are a natural for this. Here’s a sauce to use on fish for baking:

2 Tablespoons of mayonnaise
1 teaspoon of prepared horseradish
Spread on fish just before you bake it. Done.

More on horseradish here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseradish

Sources for horseradish roots: Many web-based garden seed and plant growers offer potatoes, garlic AND horseradish. The roots are easy to grow, but are pretty invasive so dig a little plot away from the rest of the garden and make sure there is plenty of room and compost in the hole. Plant the roots several feet down. Harvest the roots when the frost kills the leaves in the fall. Separate out the smallest roots and replant those at harvest time.

This planning season (the winter, versus the planting season, which comes later), Aunt Toby and the DH are taking a really strategic position with regard to the garden. After experiencing “The Summer Without Tomatoes” (I think this has been trademarked), we decided that it was worth going to the experts to try to find a couple of varieties of tomatoes which would be resistant to blight. Now, I will give a certain amount of emphasis to the fact that summer 2009 was about as perfect a period for this disease as you could possibly find: not terribly warm and nice and wet. That stuff took off like wildfire. And seeing how I now have a small but growing pile of seed catalogs on the floor next to the bed (the night stand having been taken over by books long ago), it’s time to start looking.

But before doing that, I want to winnow down the selections because it is so easy to be seduced by the romance novelizations that the copy writers spin in the seed catalogs. I used to be charmed by the descriptions of cashmere sweaters in the Lands End catalogs, but nothing can beat the copy that comes from the word processors of seed catalog writers.

In our area (Upstate New York), our experts come from Cornell University, which is our land grant college. Every state has a land grant college. For a list, go Land Grant Colleges

Cornell University is a treasure chest of information and help and I recently found a site that just deals with plant diseases. Cornell Plant Disease Site
On the site, they have a whole search function by vegetable and on the tomato page, there is a, lucky me, a whole section on late blight. Late Blight
On the left hand side, you can search for ‘Disease Resistant Varieties” – and pick by crop again. The page on tomatoes scrolls down for days. Disease Resistant Tomatoes
I’m going to make the assumption that your land grant college or university has this sort of information tailored to your particular state and so you’ll be able to find what varieties are not only resistant but also those which will work well for you where you garden.
From there, you can pick your varieties and search through the catalogs (or go to the companies’ sites and search by variety there, which I think would be easier and faster).

One of the ‘culprits’ in the tomato blight saga of 2009 was the issue of home and garden centers basically all buying their garden plants from big central growers. In this case researchers were able to locate the grower, in Alabama, which had supplied everyone from Home Depot to Lowes. Buying your own seed, starting mix and growing your own is another way to limit the infectious possibilities.

And, the catalogs next to the bed?
Seed Savers Exchange
Vermont Bean Seed
Totally Tomatoes
Pine Tree Garden Seeds

Until the next time.

Well, we weren’t exactly going out to eat on a regular basis due to lack of discretionary income. And the Little Siberians (who were actually quite little at the time) dearly loved going out to eat, so to compensate, we used to encourage them to play a game called “Restaurant” (yes, I realize that the name is not exactly creative, but kids are pretty literal at that age), with all that this implies.

Together, they used to come up with a theme (‘we’re going to a French restaurant”; “we’re going to a French restaurant in Mexico” that sort of thing) and comb through the zillions of cookbooks that the DH and I had collected and would come up with a menu and a shopping list. They would decorate the table in their best “French restaurant in Mexico” sort of way; we would cook things up and then one of them would drape a wash towel over an arm, put on a crazy “Pepe Le Pew Meets Continflas” sort of accent and we would play coming to the door and being seated and so on. It was all very sweet and funny (though a little sad..sigh..but that’s a topic for another time).

One of the easiest and cheapest ‘restaurant’ themes that they came up with was “Beach Restaurant in January.” Now, on the surface, this makes no sense since no beach-front restaurant that I know is ever open in January unless you are someplace south of Myrtle Beach. But the idea was that we’d go on a picnic at a time of the year when it is beastly cold; we’re stuck inside, it’s hellishly gloomy and we’ve been eating far too much stew, chili and other hot stuff.

Now, there are many things that do not translate to ‘picnic’ at this time of the year because you just can’t get them – like locally grown tomatoes if you don’t live in warm areas. But, in our part of the world, there are things that are available, cheap, good – and we had not been eating them for several months so they seemed fun and unique and fresh.

So, if you are completely sodden with turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin everything, turkey left-overs in every permutation, combination and setting, here is something cheap and fun. The décor is up to you; truckload of sand, beach balls, and blanket optional.

Menu:

• Chicken Spiedies with rolls (or Italian bread – that is traditional)
• Potato Salad with hard boiled eggs and onions
• Cole slaw with carrots
• Apples and Oranges

How to’s:

Chicken spiedies are to our local area what Hot Wings are the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York. You will need: boneless chicken breasts, and something to marinate the chunked up chicken in. If you are lucky and your local groceria carries it, go for a spiedie marinade. If not, an easy one is vinegar, oil, and every sort of Italian spice you can lay your hands on. At this time of the year, one essential ingredient won’t be found in the garden and that is mint. Here’s a good recipe.

http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Sandwiches/Spiedie.htm

Ordinarily, spiedies are cooked on skewers on a grill but only the truly hardy would be out doing this in the winter, so you can grill them on your stove (5 min. on a side and flip). If you are stuck with an oven with a grill that does not work, spiedies can be cooked in a frying pan; just keep stirring them around until they cook. It takes so short a time that it’s really best to get everything else done and in the fridge earlier in the day and do the spiedies at the end. To make a sandwich, take a roll in one hand and the skewered meat in the other. Put the skewer inside the roll, grip tightly and pull off meat into the roll. Voila.

Potato Salad with hard boiled eggs.

This is the classic summer picnic staple. Yes, I know there are all sorts of potato salads from all over, complete with wonderful dressings and bacon and goodness knows what else. In our house, the only fancification allowed is perhaps the addition of a couple of stalks of chopped celery, but since this is a ‘reach into the fridge and pull out whatcha got’, no celery is to be found (except for the rather limp stuff that always gets forgotten in the bottom of the drawer and ends up on the compost heap or being fed to the chickens). You will have potato salad left over; that is the essence of potato salad. But the basic recipe is:

• 1 fist sized potato (not Idaho russets – go for red potatoes or some other boiling potato) per person.
• Eggs: count up the number of people to be served and subtract 2. That’s your number of eggs. Hard boil them – that is 10 min. on the boil.
• Onions: ½ of an onion that is slightly smaller than your fist. I like red ones as they are slightly less pungent than the white or yellow ones, but whatever you have will do. Chop fine.
• Dressing. We like a pretty spicy dressing at our house, but plain ol’ mayo will do. Put in enough (and it’s always more than you would think) so that the potatoes have a nice coating but not so much that you have soup in the bottom of the bowl. Our dressing for what ends up being 6 big potatoes goes like this:
• Mayo – about a cup
• Grated horseradish (comes in a bottle – red or white doesn’t matter): 1 big honkin’ tablespoon
• Something sweet. 1/8 cup of …left over cranberry sauce, apple sauce, etc. If you have nothing else, a teaspoon of honey or sugar will do.

Mix everything together and mix into the potatoes, onions and celery (if you’ve put that in).

Refrigerate and then serve.

Cole Slaw (see photo at the top).

Again, this is the classic stuff. No nuts, no raisins, no marshmallow peeps, just shredded carrots and coleslaw. The fam does not particularly like this when I’ve made it with the food processor – the individual pieces are too small and it gets mushy. Cabbage is shredded with a knife. Carrots shredded with a hand grater.

Basic recipe:

• Carrots: One big carrot per person. Don’t get them too big – once the leaf end gets above an inch across, they get sort of woody. Shred with a hand grater and keep your fingers away from the business end. This is not potato latkes – odd bits of skin and blood are not considered beneficial additions.
• Cabbage: If you are using both red and green cabbage, use about 1/3 of a head for each. If just one or the other, use a half a big head of the cabbage. Cut out the center core. Shred with a big knife so that you end up with long strings of cabbage.
• Put the cabbage and the carrots into a big bowl and mix up.
• Dressing: There are plenty of bottled cole slaw dressings – we find them rather sickeningly sweet. Our dressing is:
• May: one cup
• Ground black pepper
• 2 table spoons of something sour – vinegar will do, lemon juice is better, orange juice in a pinch.
• 1 teaspoon of something sweet – honey or sugar will do.

Mix up the dressing and pour over the cabbage and carrots. Mix together and refridgerate.

Dessert:

No one eats too much fresh fruit at this time of the year and at this point in our house, everyone is sick of things with baked fruit in them. Washed crunchy apples or big peeling oranges are just the ticket.

Enjoy.