Mid to Late September: Embrace Your Inner Squirrel
This week, we'll cover some easy strategies for preserving produce in bulk so you can enjoy it later. We'll also discuss how to prep bare garden beds for winter and next season, and share more options for including native shrubs in your gardening experiment to feed you year after year.
Preparing Your Soil for Spring
Fall is the perfect time to seed cover crops into bare garden beds. Nature will fill bare spots with "weeds.” By planting a cover crop instead, you control which plants move in and how they impact soil health.
Here are some more reasons for planting cover crops:
· To keep the soil moist and productive, improving organic matter and soil fertility
· To act as a living mulch, suppressing cool-season weeds and preventing erosion
· To create a better seedbed for spring planting
We don’t want to till the soil that we have worked hard to build up, because tilling will kill our friendly microorganisms! So the best way to plant cover crops is to follow these steps:
1. Loosen the soil, if it is compacted, with a garden fork but don’t turn it over.
2. Sprinkle seeds over the top of the bed and cover with a thin layer of soil or straw.
3. Water daily until the seeds germinate; then water weekly, as needed.
You might be wondering what kinds of plants you should use. Oats and crimson clover are our favorites.
Oats will germinate in the fall, then die back in the winter, leaving you with a light coating of straw to plant into next spring. Meanwhile, oats will hold some nutrients and increase organic matter in the soil. You could also add in some field peas to increase nitrogen in the soil.
Crimson clover is another cover crop that will be killed off by winter frost, so you can plant through it next spring. It's a legume, so gives you the added benefit of taking nitrogen from the air and fixing it in the soil for plants to use. The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education website has more details about planting crimson clover.
Stacey Murphy’s Dreaming Earth YouTube channel has a great video describing how to grow cover crops around plants that are still growing this fall in your garden beds. She uses crimson clover; you won’t need much for a small backyard garden, and you should be able to find the seeds at your local garden center.
Gardening Longterm: Beachplum and Persimmon
To continue our discussion of permaculture and gardening with sensitivity to the environment, we would like to suggest a couple of plants you could include in your yard that are easy to care for, adapted to native soils and climate, highly productive, and grow delicious food!
Beach plum has showy flowers that attract native pollinators and add beauty to the permaculture garden. It also has edible fruit, making it valuable for people and wildlife. This bush flowers from May until June. Fruits are ready to pick about mid-August. It’s a woody shrub that gets about 6 feet tall and 6 feet wide when fully grown. It enjoys full sun and well-drained soil with a neutral pH of 6-7. You will need two to pollinate and have fruit. But believe me, it is a no-fuss shrub.
Persimmon is a little-known, but oh so delicious fruit. Yes, it's native to the Northeast and is affected by almost no pests or diseases. It likes moist but well-drained soil and is very tolerant of dry conditions once it’s established. It prefers full sun but will do fine in 4 to 6 hours of sun.
Choose a cultivar that has the attributes you like, such as taste and foliage color etc. Many cultivars need two different varieties planted in close proximity to be very productive. We have tried Yates and Meander, but there are so many others to choose from. The Gardening Channel with James Prigioni can tell you everything you want to know about growing persimmon.
Permaculture and Edible Landscaping Resources
To keep you moving forward on a journey of exploring permaculture and edible landscaping, we have a few more resources to share:
The one book we refer to weekly is Grow Fruit Naturally by Lee Reich. It's organized alphabetically by fruit type and covers topics from planning and planting to pruning and harvesting.
Morag Gamble is a wonder from down under, and she has many resources from podcasts to classes to videos, where she succinctly shows how to get stuff done. Her “How to Make a No-Dig Garden” video will show you how to create a sheet-mulched vegetable garden that will keep all those beneficial microorganisms in your soil happy and thriving.
We’ve suggested before that if you’re interested in learning more about permaculture, watch the movie Inhabit. Another feature film that’s worth watching is The Biggest Little Farm. Though they do not use the term permaculture, the approach and practices in the film parallel it. It’s entertaining and informative!
Preserving the Harvest
When the garden is producing too much ripe produce to eat fresh, it's time to squirrel some away for the winter! Food preservation can sound intimidating, but don't stress. You don't have to become a master canner overnight. If you learn just one new preservation technique a year, think of how skilled you'll be in no time!
Here are some simple, tried, and true methods we use to preserve common produce. With all recipes, it's best to work in big enough batches to make the project worth your while. Don't forget that we shared how to roast and freeze tomatoes and pickle cucumbers (or zucchini!) in our Early August post.
Leafy Greens: Blanch and Freeze
If you're like us, you have too much chard and spinach to possibly eat right now. Fortunately, preserving it for soups, stir-fries, and smoothies this winter is easy, by using the blanch-and-freeze method. This works for any hearty leafy greens (like chard and spinach), but not lettuce, and you don't really need to preserve kale. Most kale plants are very cold tolerant through winter (temps down to 10 degrees), so you can leave them right where they are!
To blanch food, you cook it in boiling water for a brief period, then abruptly cool it in ice water to halt further cooking. With greens, our goal is to reduce the volume of freezer space they take up without cooking much. The Bon Appetitit website details the process, including pictures. And here are the steps we take:
Materials
Greens of choice (we usually pick into and fill a paper grocery bag for one batch)
Large pot
Large bowl of ice water
Large empty bowl
Metal colander, strainer, or large slotted spoon
Baking sheet
Airtight storage container for freezer (ziplock, silicone bag, etc.)
Steps
Fill the pot with water (deep enough to submerge a handful of greens) and set to boil.
Remove hard stems and ribs from greens and wash them. Cut leaves to bite-size.
Once water is boiling, submerge a large handful of greens with a slotted spoon and cook for 20-30 seconds.
Remove the greens and immediately submerge them in ice water for 1-2 minutes (while they're chilling, prep the next batch to boil).
Remove the greens from the ice water, let them drain slightly, and set them aside in an empty bowl.
Once all the greens have been boiled and chilled, grab a small, serving-size handful, squeeze out all excess moisture, and set it on a baking sheet. Repeat for all greens.
Freeze your greens portions on the baking sheet for at least 30 minutes before transferring them to your final storage container to keep the portions separate.
That's it! Enjoy your home-grown greens in chilis, stews, smoothies, and more all winter!
Peppers: Roast 'Em!
Who doesn't love roasted red peppers on pizza, pasta, and so much more? It's so easy to preserve your own from home-grown peppers or ones from a local farm, and the flavor is unbeatable! The Daring Gourmet website can help walk you through the steps with pictures, details, and more ideas.
Materials
Peppers (any size, type, and color. Red bell peppers are traditional)
Sharp knife
Baking sheet
Large paper bag
Airtight storage container for freezing (ziplock, silicone bag, etc.)
Steps
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
Cut peppers in half and remove the seeds and stem. Place the peppers cut side down on a baking sheet.
Position the pan on the top rack and bake the peppers until their skins are moderately charred and bubbling. For large bell peppers, this usually takes 15-20 minutes, and less time for smaller varieties. If you're using multiple pans, rotate from the top to bottom midway.
Cool peppers and freeze in a ziplock or other storage container as halves or cut to desired size.
Optional: to remove all or most of the peppers' skin, you can transfer the halves directly from the hot pans to the paper bag and close them in for 5-10 minutes. This will steam them, further loosening skins for removal by hand. You may not get all of the skins off, but that’s OK!
We hope you enjoy these sweet, caramelized strips of summer when you need a burst of cheer this winter.