Green Wizardries, The Harvest by Maxine Rogers
The first of the tomatoes are coming in and some of them are so heavy, they have fallen off the plants while they are green. We brought these few tomatoes into the house to ripen. Tomatoes keep very well indoors if you spread them out on newspaper in a single layer and put them stem side down. This stops them dehydrating and shrivelling. After a few days, they will ripen and can be used in salads or cooking and they can be dehydrated. Don’t use them for canning though. Use only vine-ripened tomatoes for canning.
The bulk of the tomato harvest will be coming in a few weeks so now is the time I make sure I have all my canning supplies. It is a mistake to wait until canning season is on to go shopping for jars and lids as there is not so much selection and, sometimes, supplies run short. I remember at our local hardware store, being shown the last three boxes of canning lids from the valley. We were allowed to purchase one box and we were grateful for it.
Since then, I have started to use Tattler reusable canning lids. These are similar to the canning lids used by very old ladies when I was a kid. They had glass lids and rubber rings that they could use, over and over again, until death separated their owners from the need to put up preserves.
The current reusable lids are plastic and the rings are rubber and they can be used in water bath canning, pressure canning and vacuum sealers. The lids are said to last indefinitely and the rubber rings are good for ten years or so. You can buy extra rubber rings for the lids. I like them and they are vastly less expensive than the single use canning lids. I bought mine over the internet.
On that subject, I was watching a video by a lady who was brought up in the Old Order Mennonites and when she was a girl, it was something of an occasion if her mother or grandmother opened a box of the metal self-sealing lids as they used those lids over and over again until they simply refused to seal. I have tried reusing the single use lids and they worked fine for me. That is just for general interest, it is not to be taken as advice.
Now is also a good time to make sure of having enough pickling spice on hand as it looks to be a good year for cucumbers. One of my nephews makes a great pickling spice mix and I must get his recipe to share with you. I don’t have to can dill pickles this year as I did a huge batch last year. We only planted a few cucumbers of various types that were given to us by a very sweet friend.
One of my favourite ways to serve cucumbers is my version of Sichuan cucumber salad as it is crisp and both hot and cold at the same time. It consists of a large Suyo Long cucumber sliced or cucumbers of anther variety if that is all you have. One teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of vegetable oil, one tablespoon of minced garlic, two teaspoons of cider vinegar, one teaspoon of soy sauce, one teaspoon of sesame oil, one teaspoon of sugar and a half a teaspoon of dried chili flakes. I just mix that all together and serve and it is wonderful now with the fresh, crisp garlic we just harvested.
The celery is also starting to be of a size to pick and preserve for the winter. I cut the celery into manageable lengths and blanch it for two minutes in boiling water, chill it in ice water and dehydrate it.
Most years, we are self-sufficient in celery. I have been growing celery seed for years now and my variety, whatever it is, is very hardy and trouble free. Celery seed was so expensive that I bought some celery seed as a spice to make pickles and tried to germinate some. It all came up and I gave away heaps of seedlings to the Garden Club. I am still propagating that same variety.
If you want to try growing celery for seed, you will need to lift about ten celery plants and put them into a greenhouse and mulch them heavily with leaves and throw some remay or an old blanket over them when it gets frosty as celery cannot endure a frost. If you can get them through the winter, they will go to seed and provide you with heaps of fresh, really vital seed the next summer. It is best to keep at least six plants of any variety for seed to avoid inbreeding depression. You may lose some plants over the winter so planting extra is a good idea.
