June 24th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

I’ve largely let my garden space go to seed, literally. I have more wildflower seed heads drying in the relentless sun than I think I’ve ever had before, and in parts of the yard that never before had wildflowers. I blame the good rains we had in Spring and my lack of mowing thereafter.

One of the neater volunteers in the spaces that weren’t mowed was a standing winecup (Callirhoe digitata.) Ive had this in my yard in the past, but in a completely different location, and not for the last 3 years. Another factor that may have helped was that my neighbor cut down two-thirds of an overhanging mulberry tree, and now I get a lot more sun in part of the back yard.

This weekend I finally dug the last of my potatoes – kennebecs, red pontiacs and Russian fingerlings. (All the seed potatoes came from The Natural Gardener.)

I got ten pounds of potatoes. My yield of the two big varieties was a little disappointing, as it was last year. Not sure if I could have done something to increase the size and quantity of them. Also, I may have waited too long – some of the larger specimens came up slightly rotten. In addition, a lot of the kennebecs and red pontiacs developed a lot of odd nodules, looking more like toads than potatoes. They seem edible, however. While I don’t know, I suspect this condition is related to the soil being too wet at times, causing swollen lenticles (described on this page.)

Still, I didn’t have any of the potato scab from last year. I had worked in a lot of compost to the potato beds this year. The change in pH (more acidic) from the added compost is supposed to inhibit the bacteria that causes scab.

Scab last year:

The Russian fingerlings, however, performed very well for the small space they grew in, and all of them seemed healthy. I will be growing more of these in the future since they yield small tubers that would be good for a variety of purposes – sautéed, roasted, grilled, etc.

This weekend the boy and I have been eating a lot of “taterpas” – lightly-sauteed coins of potato. I add a little garlic powder and coarse sea salt. Yum!

Coming soon, too, are my melons. I have five or six cantaloupes nearing the ripening phase, as well as a couple oblong melon that were SUPPOSED to be cantaloupe but look more like watermelon. I would have had one more cantaloupe nearing readiness, but I sacrificed it to science and cut it open. It was utterly green and NOT sweet.

The melon patch earlier this year… a view I really like (the house is nearly hidden!)

If that is a watermelon, I might have to donate it to someone. I’ve never been a fan. Though, maybe growing one of my own will convert me, much like when I started loving onions after growing them successfully.

May 29th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

I know this has zip to do with gardening, but I wanted to post it so I remembered it.

Besides, I gotta write about something even though I’m leaving my garden soon.

This one is good, mainly because the site is pretty.
http://smallnotebook.org/2009/07/10/homemade-chocolate-syrup/

But I’ve followed this one a couple times, and I like the results a little better:
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chocolate-syrup/

Maybe because it s a darker sauce, more like Ghiradelli?

April 29th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

This weekend I accomplished a number of things that have been long-standing to-do items in the realm of GardenAustin. Most notably, I made margaritas flavored with agarita berries. I’ve been wanting to do that for some time. I jumped in and did it this year, but it wasn’t easy.

As anyone who knows agarita will tell you, the leaves that protect this native shrub are the vegetal equivalent of a polearm. The berries are small and seedy, and well-protected. Picking them is a labor akin to willfully sticking your hands into a porcupine.

Old-timers will tell you to stick a sheet under the shrub and beat the branches with a stick to collect the berries, but this didn’t work for me. My particular plant is too dense to achieve such a thing. So I hand-picked about a cup and a half of the berries.

Juicing them was no easy task, either. Perhaps there is some form of juice-extracting wizardry out there, but I don’t have that. Instead, I used my garlic press.

Yup. Garlic press. The openings in it are small enough to exclude the seeds and trap the pulp, yet still extract the juices. It took about 30 minutes, but a cup-and-a-half of berries yielded about two ounces of juice.

Since agarita berries are tart like limes with a vaguely strawberry-like taste, I’d always wanted to use the berries instead of lime juice. That just wasn’t practical, though, with only two ounces of berry juice. So, the berry juice became an additive. A flavor.

The results were very good. Well worth the making of a Spring tradition.

My recipe was this:

… over ice.

Read the rest of this entry »

March 18th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

Today I planted two serrano pepper plants, two viva italia plants, and one roma tomato plant. I might have purchased more at The Natural Gardener today if it hadn’t been too close to the boy’s nap time and he hadn’t been melting down. At least he posed for a few cute candids before the melting began:

I’ve been harvesting three types of kale, swiss chard, and broccoli recently. I had a delicious meal of these with my friend Susan on Friday night. We sautéed the greens with garlic and olive oil, and then added garbanzo beans and a few other seasonings. I think we were both high on all the vitamins.

Also did some work on some structural stuff… added some brick to the walkways and removed more grass. I also created a small bed edging with beer bottles. I experimented with this a while back, but hadn’t used it anywhere until now.

Overall a pretty productive day, though it always seems there’s more to do.

This was an off weekend for CAMN classes, so I led a small group out on JJ&T for some fence monitoring. We logged 6.25 hours and repaired one intentionally-cut hole in the fence. Along the way, we heard a male golden cheeked warbler, saw a red and yellow striped snake hanging out underwater, watched two dung beetles rolling their prize, and saw numerous interesting plants. I’m really enjoying getting to know my fellow master naturalists, and enjoyed hiking with inquisitive, intelligent people.

And it was nice to see this after so many months of punishing drought:

Unnamed Creek

March 10th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

My rain barrels are full again! Not too surprising, really, but I had emptied them in preparation for this rain event. I made 10 gallons of compost tea with some of my stored water. Two 5-gallon buckets with a few ounces blackstrap molasses each, a shovel of freshly-dug compost each, and daily stirring. Hopefully, the vegetables enjoyed the foliar feeding they got just before the rain.

Oh, and I added a couple teaspoons each of bacillus thuringiensis v. kurstaki for the rampant worms that have been devouring my plants nightly. As early as the last week of February, I was seeing nasty cutworms. The last couple years, these have caused a lot of damage to my vegetable crops, and seem indiscriminate as to what they’ll eat… onion greens, broccoli, carrot greens, potato shoots, strawberry leaves. This year they seem even more numerous. And I’m seeing them as nocturnal pests, with two different behaviors: some cut the stems of plants, and leave the fallen plant. Others climb into the foliage and eat leaves. I can usually pick off the leaf-eaters, but the stem-cutters are harder to find. Sometimes I can poke around the base of cut plants and find a cutworm. Helps to have a good headlamp.

So, I’m trying the kurstaki. I read the caterpillars eat the microbe, which then releases crystallin toxins as the microbes multiply in the caterpillar’s gut. Sounds nasty. And fitting.

I finally finished removing the fire pit and replaced it with a sizable full-sun raised bed. I used spare cedar lumber, a few logs of cut juniper, and a block of sandstone to make it. My brand of economy leads to such eclecticism.

I had good help:

I filled the bottom with freshly-dug compost, and covered that with Natural Gardener Lady Bug soil. In one end, I planted three tomato transplants from my parents, Heinz, Ace and a large cherry. The other half will get cantaloupes, I think. I still want to plant a few more tomatoes, mainly indeterminate Romas or the Viva Italias I had last year.

Probably not much gardening this weekend… rain, and CAMN training. Tomorrow is spiders, insects and birds. Taught at Hornsby Bend. I’ve never been there, but I hear good things.

February 21st, 2012 by Marc Opperman

Finally got out into the yard this Sunday to do a lot of clean up and preparation work. Such glorious weather! I had the capable help of the boy almost all day. He helped move rocks around (mostly on the scale of pebbles), dig arbitrary holes, and occasionally pull a random weed or kale plant. There were more than a few lessons on what NOT to pull or stomp on, but I think they were mainly ignored or lost. Can’t tell which.

I did manage to transplant some little bluestem and prune back a lot of dead growth. Even ground up the pile while the boy was napping and made some really good material for the compost heap.

My project to remove the circular fire pit hasn’t really progressed. I started a few weeks ago and got as far as pulling out the bricks and shoveling up the gravel into my two wheelbarrows. They’ve sat in the same place, more or less, since then… twin mired messes of gravel and mud from all the rain. My wheelbarrows are likely to fall to rust before I get time again to put the gravel someplace useful.

I’m moving the fire pit because it sits in some of the best sunny space I have in the back yard. I think this will be my new tomato bed since every other place I grew them last year now has onions or potatoes in it.

Tonight I picked up Lukas and zipped over to The Natural Gardener to buy a few more seed potatoes. I had a few (potatoes I grew last season) but I think they had dried too much and maybe were no longer viable. Natural Gardener had all seed potatoes on clearance – this makes me think I’m late in planting. But I know I was abnormally early last year. I used a headlamp and did some gardening at night to plant them. I planted kennebec, red pontiac (both of which I had last year), and la ratte fingerlings. I’m only a day after President’s Day, so I think that counts as “between the Presidents’ birthdays.”

This weekend – more CAMN training. This week’s topic is mammology. Not to be confused with mammography.

June 3rd, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Sometimes I have a cheezy thing or two to say here, but usually it’s not about something edible. And I’ve never wanted to stray too far into the realm of food blogging. There are people – some of whom I count as friends – that do that far better than I can.

But I got a wild hair and decided to make mozzarella cheese. I was inspired by two things: a comment from my friend Dana (who remarked she wanted to try making her own mozzarella) and a bumper crop of tomatoes. The more things I can find to eat with tomatoes, the better. What’s better than fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil?

To make mozzarella (and I gather other cheeses, as well) you need a few basic ingredients – calcium chloride, citric acid, rennet, cheese salt and milk. For me, the timing of making cheese came as a gallon of organic whole milk was passing its sell-by date in our refrigerator. Normally, this wouldn’t phase me much, but I don’t drink whole milk – it’s for Lukas.

Rennet – a complex of enzymes used to curdle milk and traditionally taken from calf stomachs and now often made from plant sources – is a little hard to come by if you’re just relying on normal, local stores. Wheatsville, Sprouts and Sun Harvest don’t carry it. But a helpful lady at Wheatsville (and, come to think of it, my friend Phoebe) mentioned she thought Austin Homebrew Supply carried it.

Living close to their store, I dropped by. I hadn’t been in their new location on Metric, but the shiny gadgets, the yeasty smell in the air (or was it malty?) and the bins of chocolaty grains all took me back to the times I made a few batches of yummy brown ale. But I was there for cheese, and cheese-making stuff I found in their coolers. A $4 kit contained everything – plus instructions – I would need to make four batches of fresh mozzarella.

Other junk you need are a non-aluminum 6-quart stock pot, a kitchen thermometer (I used an analog candy thermometer), and a couple 5 quart microwaveable bowls. I didn’t have a stock pot big enough, but I found a nice enameled steel one at Target that wasn’t too expensive.

I could post all of the instructions for doing this, and rehash what’s already out there. The printed instructions from Homebrew worked well enough, and they have a helpful Youtube video for those of a more visual bend. I used both, and found the video a little lacking toward the end in terms of getting the cheese to the shiny, smooth, elastic ball it is supposed to become. At first I worried my analog thermometer had been too inaccurate during the curdling phase. My ball of curds remained crumbly and wet for some time until I figured out getting the whey completely drained helped, as well as making sure the curds reached a hot enough temperature to become elastic during the microwaving phase. Basically, when it was almost past my ability to stand the temperature while hand-folding the ball (about 140 degrees), the curds became elastic and the cheese was finished.

I ate some immediately, while warm. It was chewy, a little salty, and just a touch on the grainy side. But the graininess didn’t detract, and the warmer the cheese, the less grainy it feels in the mouth. With the rest of the cheese, I followed a suggestion to throw it in an icewater bath to help it maintain a smooth consistency. (This is a theme that seems to repeat itself in home cheese-making – rapid cooling.)

While straining the whey was tedious, I had already learned it was important to save it. It contains enough solids to make more cheeses – ricotta and a peculiar Norwegian cheese called mysost.

Returning it to the stove, I brought it back to a boil. Temperature and timing here are not all that critical. After boiling, I let it cool to 140 degrees and then used a metal coffee filter to strain the solids from the whey. The resulting solids are ricotta. Simple!

The third cheese, mysost, takes more work. Mainly, it takes about 5 hours to boil down (over medium heat) the gallon of whey into a mixture with a fudge-like consistency. Being vigilant about not scalding the contents towards the end is especially crucial, as is some vigorous mixer action before the mixture cools too much. Again, rapid cooling helps this cheese remain smooth, too.

But the resulting cheese is like nothing I’ve had. Pale orangish-yellow, salty with a strong sweet-sour overtone, and slightly chalky. I had cooled it rapidly in a cold bowl I had buttered, and the cheese became a solid block I was unable to carve out. 30 seconds in the microwave made it spreadable, but I don’t know if it will remain so at room temperature yet. It would be good spread on some sort of unsalted or lightly-salted cracker or a crusty bread. Jury is out on this one, though I’m sure some would love it.

But three distinctly different cheeses, all from one common gallon of milk. That alone impresses me. All said and done, I got 12 ounces of mozzarella, 1 ounce of ricotta, and perhaps 4-5 ounces of mysost.

cheese, mozzarella, mysost, ricotta