New Year, New Dreams

This is a dangerous time of year here at Kopp’s Crops – the time of dreaming, not doing.  The time of year when we’ve forgotten how tired we were of bees, trees, and veggies to freeze by the end of last summer, and we start thinking about expanding our operation.  When “what’s another 50 tapped trees?” and “I mean, is it really any more work to keep 20 hives instead of 10?” become part of the daily conversation.  Everything seems possible, and the reality of the work involved is far enough in the future that it seems manageable.  It’s seed catalog season.

Now that the Christmas catalogs and sales flyers have cleared out, the seed catalogs are weighing down the letter carriers’ pouches and filling the Kopp family mailbox.  The Jung’s catalog is our favorite – it’s like the seed version of the Neiman-Marcus catalog; page after page of stunning photographs that make us want to buy, buy, buy!  But just like the Neiman-Marcus one, Jung’s tends to be the catalog that we wish from, not what we buy from.  Last season, we bought many of our seeds in bulk – by the pound, not the teeny little envelope.  The cost per seed is significantly less, and we can store the extra seeds for several years.  As long as we keep the seeds cool & dry, the germination rate only decreases 2-3% each year.

Before we place any orders for the year, we need to get a handle on what our current seed stock looks like, so last week we pulled the leftovers from last season out of the cellar and took inventory.  After portioning out this season’s seed needs, we vacuum-sealed our 2013+ seeds to keep out moisture and keep the seeds from rotting.  Looks like we’ll be set on lettuce, carrots, beets and green onions for the next few years!  How many beets can you ougrow with a pound of beet seeds?  Let’s just say that we expect to be eating beets grown from these seeds at our daughters’ graduations!

Packing It Up for the Season

The garden isn’t completely toast, but it’s close.  Out of the roughly 25 total rows of veggies in the garden (some of which got replanted mid-season after the first crops petered out), only 3 remain.  We lost our last row of green beans when we failed to cover it before last week’s unexpected (at least by us) frost, along with our half row of eggplant.  The half-row of swiss chard is hanging tough & standing tall, along with the fall plantings of lettuce, spinach, and radishes that should be ready to start harvesting in a couple weeks if the weather holds out.  Our Brussels sprouts are still going strong, too.  Or as strong as we could hope – this is the 3^rd year we’ve planted Brussels sprouts, and the first year we’ve actually gotten edible sprouts on the plants before the snow flies!  The funny thing about Brussels sprouts (aside from the fact that our family actually likes to eat them, unlike 95+% of the US population!) is that it takes a solid frost to really make them really good – once they survive a good frost, they get a little less bitter.  Unlike Michelle, who gets more bitter after the first frost (Really?  Winter’s coming already?).

Everything else has been harvested and put away for winter. What can be canned is canned, what can be frozen is frozen, and what can’t be kept at all has been eaten at every other meal until we’re completely sick of it (that would be you, eggplant) or put at the end of the driveway with a big “FREE!” sign (yep, a sure-fired way to get rid of anything in our neighborhood).  We hung a cylinder made out of chicken wire in the garage to contain all the onions, and tied our garlic bulbs together into a big keep-away-the-vampires bridal bouquet that hangs off the top, along with a few sprigs of rosemary.  The potatoes are all in a big burlap bag in the cellar where they’ll stay nice & cool.  The baby reds don’t keep as well, so we’ll eat them first, saving the white potatoes until their eyes start sprouting white tentacles.  At which point we’ll give them to the girls to play “octopus adventure” or practice braiding & macramé. The sweet potatoes, including the football-sized one you see pictured below, keep best in a big bucket of dry sand.  This year we’re using a wide, shallow one, because last year we never finished the sweet potatoes – we got to frustrated trying to dig down to the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket full of sand.  Which brings us to the butternut squash – they just sit in neat little rows on the shelves in the cellar like bowling pins. Oh, there was that sorry attempt to can spiced apple rings last weekend, which ended with a big pot of spiced apple mush and curlicues of spiced apple peel, but we’re trying to put that behind us.  Let’s just say that our compost bin has a faint but lovely smell of cinnamon, cloves and overcooked apples.

For the Love of Tomatoes - Part 2 (Preserving)

We consider tomatoes the jewels of our garden.  Not just because they’re a beautiful ruby red color and look nice surrounded by platinum and diamonds.  Tomatoes are our most versatile, most preservable vegetable (or technically, fruit).  Tomato-based recipes are easy to can because they’re so acidic – they can be hot water bathed instead of pressure canned.  But because the newer tomato varieties are less acidic than some of the heirloom varieties, we add a teaspoon of lemon juice to any tomato-based product to ensure the proper botulism-preventing ph level.  Hot water bathing is just about like it sounds – we get a big pot of water simmering on the stove, then gently place our full jars into the water, making sure they’re fully submerged.  We bring it to a rolling boil so it’s like a little jar Jacuzzi in there with all those bubbles, and keep it rolling for the allotted time.  Our trusted source of all things safely canned is the University of MN Extension service (http://www1.extension.umn.edu/food-safety/preserving/canning/).  They’ve got a handy-dandy chart that has the appropriate canning times & pressures for just about anything you’d ever want to put in a jar.  Anything edible, anyway.

A few weeks ago we juiced the first ripe fruits to can 15 quarts of juice for the winter’s chili and meatloaf, and made 7 quarts of Mexican chicken soup for those winter nights we’re just too lazy to cook.  We experimented with tomato paste, too – we made a “bowl” out of unbleached muslin by rubber-banding it over a big pot, then poured in a gallon or so of juice inside and let the water seep into the pot, leaving thick paste behind.  We didn’t really have enough to can, so we just froze it in an ice cube tray to create 2 tablespoon servings to thicken soups this winter (and tonight’s hot dog chili!).  Finally, it was time to go Italian – we recently finished our second 18-pint batch of pasta sauce – 50 pounds of tomatoes (juiced), 5 onions (diced), one giant sprig of basil (chopped), a bunch of branches of oregano, a few bay leaves (we cheated a little here – the bay leaves were purchased)  and garlic, more garlic, and even more garlic (minced). 

But it’s time to break out the trumpets and play “Taps” for the tomatoes.  In preparation for an unusually early Minnesota frost last week, we decided to pull off all the even-close-to-being-ripe tomatoes.  We’re keeping a few in the hopes that they ripen enough to eat before they rot, but with the blight we’ve had, the odds are not good.  This weekend, we pulled all the plants & stakes out of the ground – leaving a depressingly bare patch between our late green beans and the fall crop of spinach, just now starting to sprout.  <sniff>  We miss our tomatoes already.  But it’s just a short 6 months until we start planting seeds for next year’s tomato crop! 

For the Love of Tomatoes - Part 1 (Growing)

It’s tomato season!  It’s tomato season!  It’s finally, finally tomato season!  Tomatoes are about the last thing in the garden to reach maturity (other than some squash and our Brussels sprouts), and the most anticipated.  But throughout their long, long growing season they’re a ton of work.  You say toe-may-to, we say toe-way-too-much-work!  When the plants get about 16 inches high, it’s time to start tying them to stakes so they don’t fall over under the weight of the growing tomato clusters, and we have to keep tying the upper branches as the plant grows through the summer.  But as we’ve found out the hard way, staking alone doesn’t guarantee upright tomatoes. 

Our tomatoes (stakes & all) toppled in wind storms, two years in a row now.  The plants don’t break off, but it does cause blight, which is caused by a fungus that is almost always present in a garden, in the soil. The fungus only infects tomato plants through the leaves, when the leaves of a tipped-over plant come in contact with the ground, or when it rains and mud splashes on the leaves.  This is why we prune back 20% or so of the bottom leaves of the plants, so that there’s less chance of fungus splash-back.  And because it makes it that much easier for our preschooler to find tomatoes to munch on during her daily garden visit.  She can’t yet fit an entire Roma tomato in her mouth at once, but it’s not for lack of trying.

We also need to “sucker” the plants throughout the season, which means we pinch off the tiny branches that start forming at the intersection of larger branches.   This reduces the number of branches so that the plant puts less energy into growing braches, and more into growing the tomatoes themselves.  We get fewer, but much larger, tomatoes this way.  By this point in the year (at least up here in the soon-to-be-frozen-again Tundra), any blooms at the top of the plant won’t have time to grow fully ripe tomatoes, so we also lop off the tops of the plants.  This puts even more energy into the existing green tomatoes, helping them ripen faster.  So basically we act like the Tomato Electric Company, diverting energy to the areas of highest demand.  Too bad that pesky blight is giving us “rolling brownouts”! 

The Source of the Sweetness

A couple weeks ago, we harvested the first honey of the 2011 season, our “Spring Flower” variety.  To determine what kind of honey we had, we took into account the color, flavor and known nectar sources within a two mile radius, which is the furthest bees will travel to find honey-making supplies.  We also noted what nectar was available at the time it was produced – nectar is the sugar source for honey.  The earliest nectar available to bees is from blooming maple trees in the early spring, but it’s usually too cold for bees to fly at that point.  So the first collectable nectar source for most bees is dandelions, and this was the main source for our spring flower honey.  Try not to let your hatred of lawn-dotting dandelions bias you against our honey – celebrate the fact that dandelions finally have a positive purpose in life!

After the dandelions are tapped out, there’s usually a lull in available nectar.  This is about the time of the year that they start thinking about swarming.  We can’t really blame them – if you suddenly cut off our food supply, we’d probably get ticked and leave, too.  Right now we’re in the thick of the main nectar flow, which typically runs from early July to mid-August.  During the prime season, it’s not uncommon for a strong colony to collect up to 30 pounds of honey each week - almost 4 gallons!  Our seven new hives aren’t producing quite this much because new colonies have to use their first nectar and honey to produce the wax to make their honeycomb.  The bees in our two older hives can recycle last year’s comb – very eco-chic of them.

We are eagerly awaiting our first taste of the mid-summer honey to find out what kind we’ve got.  Last year’s variety had what we delicately referred to as a “polarizing taste.”  Some less charitable tasters called it “reminiscent of dirty socks.”  It was a distinctly strong flavor that we couldn’t identify, and we had to reach out to one of our local honey experts to help us identify it.  Turns out we had buckwheat honey, which is highly prized by some (soiled laundry aftertaste notwithstanding) for its higher antioxidant content.  We still don’t know who within a 2 mile radius was growing the buckwheat our bees found, so we don’t know if we’ll end up with buckwheat honey again this year or not.  Hives are like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get!

Keeping Out the Riffraff

We know a couple who puts up a fence to keep their kids out of the garden.  But we'd rather our girls spend as much time in the garden as possible, so they learn to love vegetables and appreciate where they come from.  However, that doesn’t mean we want our garden to be quite so open and welcoming to other species.  Our first line of defense is a foot-wide border of wildflowers around the perimeter that creates a habitat for “good” insects like ladybugs that feast on the “bad” insects like aphids that chew holes in leafy greens to make our Swiss chard look like Swiss cheese.

But a few weeks ago we saw that we had a bigger problem:  hoofprints in the garden.  Hence, a fence.  To keep the deer out, we string fishing line between metal fence posts, which doesn’t seem like it would be strong enough to keep a big doe from busting through.  But whatever it lacks in strength, it makes up for in deer confusion.  See, the deer only come into the garden at night (sneaky little devils), and they can’t see the fishing line in the dark.  When they run up against it, it stops them in their tracks.  Since they can’t see it, they don’t know how to get around it.  After a few tries, they usually give up, which means we can leave a strategically-placed section open so we humans can come & go without having to open a gate.  At least that’s how it worked last year.  But now we apparently have track-star deer on our property; at least one has already jumped the fence to nibble on the sweet potatoes and green beans. 

At the ground level we need a tighter barrier to keep out the woodchucks, so we use 18” high chicken wire.  They primarily like to munch on plants that are members of the brassica family like cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cabbage (aka the "gas-producing vegetables").   How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a wood chuck could chuck wood?  We don’t know, but a he can really chuck up a garden!

Kopp's Crops in the Classroom - Saturday, July 30

Have our posts inspired you to start preserving your own food? Need more information on how to get started? Jason will be teaching a FREE introductory class in home canning, freezing and smoking at the Green Barn in Isanti on Saturday, July 30 at 10am.

The class is free, but preregistration is required and space is limited. Call the Green Barn directly at 763-444-5725 to register, or click on the link below for more information:  http://www.greenbarngardencenter.com/events-more/