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/

The Great Bee Fake-Out

Last night we went to check on the bees, and found one hive almost ready to swarm, meaning that our queen had her little bee bags packed and was ready to kiss our hive goodbye, take roughly half the worker bees and settle a new colony.  Sometimes bees swarm because the hive is too “hot” or crowded.  Other bees are gypsies at heart – they just naturally want to swarm. And though the queen may rule the hive, it’s the workers who decide when she should lead them on a swarm.  The worker bees won’t swarm until a new queen is ready to take over the hive, and they can turn any egg into a future queen just by feeding it a protein called royal jelly.  In the hive we saw, there were eggs in eight queen cells, and they were all fully enclosed or capped.  That’s a lot of potential queens to duke it out for Head Honcho of the Honey Hive when they chew their way out of their cells in a few days.

The capped queen cells were the first sign that a swarm was evident.  The second indicator was the queen herself – when Jason found her, she was newly svelte and lean.  When the workers are really ready to go, they stop feeding their queen to put her on a crash diet, so she stops laying eggs and actually slims down enough to get airborne.  Normally those pampered royalty are so pleasantly plump that they can’t fly. 

But we’re selfish – we didn’t want to lose half our hive and the honey they would produce.  And we just so happened to have a vacant hive box in our beehive neighborhood (sadly, a previous colony of bees had been unable to pay their mortgage on time, so we had to foreclose on them).  But there was no way of knowing whether our nomadic queen would colonize in the empty hive or take her entourage to someone else’s property.  So we engaged in a little bee psychology and faked a swarm.  Jason found the queen, took her and half the colony to the empty hive, and basically made them all think it was their idea all along to colonize there.  In a couple of days, we’ll smush all the queen cells in before they hatch in the old hive, then reintroduce the remaining bees into the new hive.  If we just let the two half-colonies live apart, neither hive will produce enough honey for human consumption.  But if all goes well with the great bee fake-out, our reunited colony will produce plenty of what we affectionately refer to as “The Nectar of the Kopps.”

The Frozen Chosen

The weather may finally be heating up, but here at Kopp’s Crops we’re still freezing – freezing broccoli, that is.  The first sizable batch of broccoli crowns was ready to harvest this weekend.  With the Packman broccoli we grow, we always make sure to cut off the main crown of broccoli before it starts to flower.  Harvesting the first crown early enough means the plant will continue to grow smaller shoots of broccoli for most of the summer, providing a steady supply of the superfood for our dinner table.

After cleaning the broccoli & cutting it into Sacagawea-dollar-sized florets (and yes, we eat the “stumps” too), we blanch about a gallon at a time in boiling water for three minutes to kill any bacteria and stop the enzyme action that destroys that delicious fresh broccoli flavor.   We then quickly drop it in a sink full of ice water to stop the cooking process before the broccoli gets too mushy for anyone but the baby to enjoy.  Normally we soak our broccoli in salt water before processing to make sure to get all the bugs out.  But this year we seem to be vermin-free!  The nice thing about the blanching process is that even if we miss a bug or two, we find them before we bag & seal the vegetables – they wind up floating belly-up in the blanching water, like miniature Mafia snitches in the East River.

A couple of years ago we invested in a good quality vacuum sealer, which has paid for itself over & over in freezer burn prevention.  Freezer burn is caused when the outer layer of the frozen food loses its moisture and starts to dehydrate.  This can be caused by too much air in the freezer bag to begin with, or a small leak that lets the moisture out.  And today’s auto defrost freezers make it worse, because they are designed to remove moisture from the freezer (which is why you don’t get the ice buildup…solve one problem, create another).  The vacuum sealer solves both problems, by simultaneously sucking all the air out and melting the plastic together to get a truly airtight seal.  Which is a great improvement over the method Michelle can remember back in the “olden days,” freezing vegetables with her mom.  Back then, the process was as follows: put the veggies into thin plastic freezer bags bags, stick a straw inside, suck out all the air, try not to choke on the inevitably-inhaled broccoli bits, and then hope for the dexterity to quickly remove the straw and close the twist tie before all the air get back into the bag.  Repeat as necessary until all the bags are air-free or we pass out trying.

Rare Finds – The Fungus Among Us

You know that famous saying:  April showers bring May Morel mushrooms (flowers, mushrooms… whatever).  The meaty texture & succulent flavor of Morels make them a favorite of mushroom aficionados, and Jason has a few top-secret hunting grounds around the county where he searches for the little brain-shaped delicacies.  But last spring we were surprised and delighted to find a single Morel mushroom growing in the bark chips in our landscaping, of all places.  After we washed off that Morel and the others he’d found, we “planted” some more by pouring the water (and hopefully some spores) into the same spot of the landscaping where the soil appears to be conducive to mushroom growth.  It worked… this year we picked a dozen Morels there! 

 This week we got another pleasant fungus surprise – a whole forest plot of Polyporus Umbellatus mushrooms (photo at left), just a dozen yards from our back door.  We first thought they were the more common Hen of the Woods that we’ve found and enjoyed in past years.  But these lacy mushrooms, sometimes referred to as Zhuling, are exceedingly rare and highly sought after in Chinese medicine.  They are reputed to have anti-tumor, antioxidant, anti-viral and anti-protozoal  effects, enhance the immune system, treat urological disorders and chlamydia, and grow hair.   Now you know how Papa Smurf got that luxurious beard!

To preserve the mushroom for future recipes (or anti-something-or-another treatment), we cut them up and put them in the dehydrator for about five hours, and now keep them in airtight glass jars to keep them nice & dry.  Our philosophy is that you can never play it too with wild mushrooms – even though Jason knows how to recognize the edible vs. inedible mushrooms, we still double-check online whenever we find a new variety to make sure there are no dangerous “look-alike” impostors lurking about, ready to slip us a mushroom mickey.  We also always cook them before eating them – if nothing else, it makes them easier to digest.  And of course, the ultimate test:  Jason is the official mushroom toxicity tester.   For each new variety we find, he eats some first.  If by the next day he’s not violently ill, we deem them safe for the rest of the family.  Tomorrow is testing day for the Zhulings…wish him luck!

Popeye Would Be Proud

We had our second big harvest at the end of last week– three garbage bags full spinach.  Lawn & leaf bags, actually – the really big ones.  Which made us really happy until we realized that a) we had to wash all that spinach at least twice before processing to get rid of all the non-spinach matter, and b) that it was going to cook down to nothing in the jar, and leave us with a significantly less impressive-looking yield.   

We did the initial washing in a big washtub outside to get rid of the bulk of the dirt and sand (and avoid making such a big mess inside!).  Then it was into the house for a more thoroughly-scrutinized wash.   We swished small batches of leaves in a sink full of water to get rid of the rest of the sand, and then did a quick visual scan of each leaf on its way to the stock pot to pick out the icky spots and other things that we don’t care to include in our jars.  A partial list of the goodies we pulled out of the spinach this week:  clover, pollen strings, grass, more clover, a small bee, various assorted non-spinach leafy weeds, still more clover and one dead daddy longlegs.  Mmmm! 

After the spinach was squeaky clean, we wilted it in a little water, then packed the leaves fairly tightly into clean pint jars.  We’ll write more about the canning process in upcoming posts, but the unique part of canning spinach is the processing time.  Spinach needs to spend 70 minutes in a pressure canner at 10lbs of pressure, which is longer than most other foods.  Botulism risk, which is the biggest concern for inappropriately-processed home canned goods, increases with the surface area of the food inside the jar.  And it’s hard to find anything with more surface area than a jar filled with hundreds, if not thousands of spinach leaves.  Did we mention how those leaves cook down to nothing?   So two batches of jars meant two hours and twenty minutes of hanging out in the kitchen, making sure that the canner kept the proper pressure, all for a mere 32 pints of canned spinach.  Yes, you read that correctly:  3 lawn & leaf bags of spinach = just 32 pints of canned spinach.  Makes that 40-to-1 maple sap to syrup ratio look downright generous, doesn’t it?

Relishing the Radishes

Hard to believe, but the first crop of the season is done – rest in peace, radishes.  Or pieces, I suppose (keep reading, it will make sense eventually).  We always get a little overzealous with our radishes and plant too many, simply because they have the shortest maturity time, and the seeds can withstand the coldest temperatures, so they’re always the first thing we can eat from the garden.   Frankly, if they weren’t the first edible vegetable, we probably wouldn’t bother.  After all, how many ways are there to eat radishes?  Raw with a little salt.  Sliced in a lettuce salad.  Sliced in a spinach salad.  And partially sliced in that oh-so-artistic way that turns them into rosettes for a platter of veggies and dip.  Apparently they’re “too pretty to eat” that way, because we’ve never been to a party where they weren’t the last thing left on the plate, even after the last celery sticks have been grudgingly used to scrape the last remnants of congealing dip from the bowl. 

But given their nice firm texture, radishes seem like a vegetable we could either freeze or can; something to preserve them long enough to let the memory of monotonous radish-garnished salads fade, and make us want to eat them again.  Surely someone has figured out a way to preserve these things, right?  Food.com delivered, with a recipe we just had to try:  http://www.food.com/recipe/pickled-radishes-118828.  Unfortunately, the recipe doesn’t call for a hot water bath, so the jars aren’t sealed and shelf-stable, and will therefore be taking up some valuable real estate in the refrigerator.  But the food processor made short work of the slicing, and the jars turned out the loveliest shade of pink.  Eight hours later we tentatively tried the first one, and… yum! This recipe is a keeper, and officially cements the formerly-maligned radishes’ right to take up two full rows in next summer’s garden.