Cold frame gardening

Here in my little town, we don't get our garbage picked up. 

Instead, you get to pay $25 for a sticker, and you can take anything you want to the transfer station and drop it off yourself. As long as you've separated out your recyclables. Don't mix aluminum and steel. Your plastic goes over here. And if you put a colored glass bottle into the clear glass container, you most certainly will get the evil eye and a "Elizabeth Warren Disapproves" bumper sticker slapped on your car while you're not looking by one of the Boy Scout/High School Volleyball Team/Middle School Band/League of Conservationists who are staked out near the gently-used motor oil drop off selling Oranges/Wrapping Paper/Cookies/Just Put Your Money In This Bucket Mister.  

Despite the gauntlet of disapproval-potential that I run every time, I enjoy my trips up to the transfer station. I throw the week's garbage, cans and bottles into the back of my old truck, and I head up. It's a bit of a social scene, and you never know who you're going to run into. Forget the garbage. It's all about the Swap Shed. 

Despite having dropped off some pretty good, perfectly usable stuff that I really needed to get out of my basement (including a small-ish table saw, a full component stereo system and speakers, lots of clean kids toys, and multiple sets of breakfast room chairs) I don't have great Swap Shed luck.  Friends of ours will find antique glass brewing carboys, new skis, and other treasures. Mostly, I find old push mowers, a warped particle board bathroom vanity, and maybe a wobbly office chair with a suspicious stain. 

Earlier this spring, though, I spotted a few old 8-light wooden framed windows. I snatched them up before others saw them, and tucked them away in my barn over the summer. They were the perfect ingredient to build a cold frame for my garden. 

I picked up a couple of pair of long, dual pane windows to make the sides later in the summer from an architectural salvage place, and with summer winding down, I cleaned up one side of the sunniest of my raised beds, and started putting together my cold frame.  

A cold frame is just a mini-green house. I wanted to hinge the windows both for access and to be able to adjust how much air & heat the plants got. The windows were framed to tilt up on either end, and spaced so that the whole frame covered about a third of my 8' x 16' garden, and let me extend the growing season into the cooler months approaching, plus start some of my plants a bit earlier in the spring time.

The windows tilt up from the outside, and let the air circulate. I took a break and my Bride wandered out to check up on me.  

"That looks great, sweetheart. But why did you do it wrong?"

"Than- Wait. What?" 

"I mean. Shouldn't it be tilted to let the snow and rain slide off better?" 

"Well. Yeah. You could  do it that way."

"And wouldn't it be easier to access things on the inside if the hinges were in the middle, so you weren't reaching across the whole thing?" 

"..." 

"But it looks good. For being wrong." 

I'd write the rest of that conversation, but it mostly consisted of some single-digit hand gestures and muttered swearing. 

OK. This was better, I admit. 

The angle isn't too huge, but it's easy enough now to walk around and reach in. And the windows capture and retain the heat enough to keep it a nice balmy temp on the inside and keep the frost out, even as we experience the first frosty days of autumn. (I left a couple of pepper plants limping along inside, just to judge how it held up. 

I gave the whole thing a coat of white exterior paint to protect it a bit, and filled in the gaps with a thick 0.7 mil plastic. The pairs of windows aren't really all the same size, so there's a little bit of tilt and step-angling in I had to do to make the whole thing square, but it rests on some 1" x 6" pressure treated lumber, and is remarkably rigid, considering. 

The whole thing is mobile - in the spring, I'll start plants in here, and then move it aside or up to the loft in the barn as the weather warms. But this will let me get a last crop of salad greens in through November or even the first part of December, depending on how the weather holds.  

I have started some late arugula and spinach inside, and things are looking good for a fall bounty of greens

So bring it on, winter. We're ready for you.  

Best swap shed find yet, I'm telling you. 

The sweet, final gasps of summer

Our tomatoes had been ravished by deer earlier this year. I walked out in early July, only to find them all cropped neatly off about a foot or eighteen inches off the ground. It was devastating. Most of my garden is only there so I have an excuse to plant tomatoes - nothing is so satisfying as slicing up a brandywine that you just picked and putting it on the plate. 

I was disheartened, but I tied up the fragile, abused stems to stakes anyway, and sort of forgot about it. I let the weeds grow around the tomatoes as an unintentional camouflage. I got on with things. And my garden got on with itself.  

The one thing that has performed exceptionally, insanely well were our fruit trees. We had already harvested pears and apples. And our peach trees have been flush with fruit for weeks.  Oddly, our apples were ready to pick weeks ago (early), but our peaches have taken some time to fully ripen (late).  In part, I think this is because we didn't thin the fruit at all - meaning the trees had to work a bit extra to bring them to full sweetness.  But oh, how sweet they are. 

We ended up picking more than a bushel (50lbs) worth of peaches off of three trees. Not counting the dozens of drops that we threw out to the pigs and the chickens. Peach cobbler. Peach pie. Peach ice cream (made by our neighbors, who shared our bounty).  As a Georgia boy, born and raised, I continue to marvel that we've gotten such great peaches up here in the frozen wastes of Yankee land. 

And meanwhile, our tomatoes had gotten on with things.  

I was picking peaches, and looked over into the scrubby, neglected tomato patch, and spied something red. Sure enough, the tomatoes had made a full recovery, and were heavy with fruit. Brandywines, sungolds, mortgage lifters - they're late to the party, but they're making a good showing in the last gasp of summer. And I'm not about to let them go to waste!  

An afternoon in the garden, dirty but happier for it, and with a peach cobbler in the oven, the Boy and I took a much enjoyed celebration on the porch, and had ourselves a little ukulele lesson.  

What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon?  

Pickled Pears

We inherited an ancient, 25' pear tree in the yard when we bought the house. It's clearly lost some major branches/trunk lines, is lopsided, and clearly past its prime. It sits over in one corner of the yard next to an equally-old and gnarled apple tree of unidentified variety. 

Every year, a few pears grow high in the branches, well out of reach of everyone but some brave squirrels. In the fall, the ones that have been missed will occasionally fall out of the branches to splatter down. Literally splatter. By the time they fall out of the tree, they're so grainy and gone that they burst into inedible little smears on the grass. 

However, for some unexplained reason, the tree put on a burst of youthful, showy production this year. I looked out and saw a tall, 6 point whitetail buck munching nonchalantly on something in the tree the other evening. When I walked out, I saw a huge number of small, perfect pears in the lower branches.  

I'm not sure of the variety. They're as small as a Seckel. But they're green turning russet like a Bosc. Not that it matters. I was so excited to see both this and the apple tree producing that we got to picking. 

Pears are only ripe for a few milliseconds. Then they go grainy and awful.   If you let them ripen on the tree, they're not worth eating. You pick them when they come off easily, and set them in a cool place on your counter. But not too long for these - they were destined to be pickled, so we still wanted them a bit firm.   

My Bride put these up (the picture at the top) using a combination of a recipe from the BBC Food website and a recipe in one of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage episodes (the Christmas one, I think).  

Here's more less the adjusted recipe used:  

• 1 lemon
• 10 cloves
• 2.5 tsp black peppercorns, lighltly crushed
• 1 small chili, halved, diced fine, seeds removed
• 1 tsp allspice berries, lightly crushed
• A bit of ginger, sliced thin
• 2 pints cider vinegar
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 2.5 lbs sugar
• 2.5 lbs pears

1. Zest the lemon and put in a pan with all the spices, sugar & vinegar over low heat. Stir until sugar dissolves.
2. Peel, quarter and core the pears.  (If this takes a while, toss the peeled pears with a little diluted lemon juice to keep them from browning).  
3. Add the pears to the pan and simmer for about 10 minutes.
4. Pack the fruit into sterilized canning jars, and pour over the warm syrup from the pan. Seal and put aside to finish.  

They'll be ready to eat in a few days, but even better if left to sit for a month or so before you crack open the jar.  

Pickled pears are a great side with pork tenderloin or other meats. Or just serve them in a small bowl along with a really nice set of cheeses. 

We'll set these aside to serve along with a nice glass of wine or four to our Christmas guests.  If we don't get tempted and dive into them sooner.