How to Freeze Cantaloupe

Freezing melon is insanely easy to do. It takes no blanching or any other cooking. All you need are ripe or even over ripe melons, two knives, a chef's knife and a paring knife (my paring knife happens to be ceramic, that is why the blade is white. A stainless steel or carbon steel will work just as well), a cookie sheet or other flat pan, a freezer and some freezer bags (do not use storage bags, there is a big difference in results)

Cut melons in half using a 6" or 8" chef's knife

Take out seeds but leave as much of the placenta behind as possible. the cavity should be groovy, not smooth

Cut into sections, again use a chef's knife. Note the bad parts are still on

Remove the rind and cut off any bad/soft parts. I use a paring knife for this.

Cut into cubes using a paring knife

Put on a cookie sheet or other flat container in a single layer

Put into the freezer and let the melon cubes freeze and than put into a marked freezer bag when frozen (there is such a bag under the cookie sheet)

We use the frozen melons for several things-melon daiquiris, melon smoothies, melon ice cubes in drinks in the heat of summer (Eugene's favorite is melon cubes in iced tea spiked with lemonade), you can even use them thawed in fruit salad, though the texture is a bit different than fresh but the flavor is still there (unless you used storage bags instead of freezer bags, than the flavor may be off/stale from the freezer burn that will happen within a month of freezing. these should last at least 9 months in your freezer.

Freezing Asparagus

It's asparagus season here at the farm and this is the first year that our first 6 beds are producing 100%. And boy are they producing! We are cutting a lot more than we can sell (that will likely change this week as the Oxford farmers market will resume being held weekly instead of monthly. Between that, the store and the Farm Share Initiative I am sure in the coming weeks we will unload pretty much everything we harvest. But that has noty been the case the past 3 days. this means we are building up an aging supply of asparagus so instead of selling stalks I feel are too old I decided it is high time to put up some asparagus for the winter today and that is what I did with around 10 pounds of green and purple asparagus.

below are pictures of what I did.



Asparagus all ready to be blanched. What I have done is trimmed the ends to remove any tough fibrous parts and even things up. If the stalks are too long to fit in the pot of boiling water (which means they will not fit into the freezer bag) I cut the stalk in half.

Asparagus blanching in boiling water for 1 minute

After blanching the asparagus goes straight into very cold water. Ice water best, but a couple of changes of cold tap water will work. What you are doing is shocking the asparagus, getting as much heat as possible out of the stalks and stopping the cooking process.

I get as much excess water off the spears by using a salad spinner

Than they are packed into freezer bags (do not use "Storage Bags", they do not work to prevent freezer burn but freezer bags are pretty good) and almost ready to go into the freezer. I still have to open up a corner of the bag and suck all the air out so they are close to vacuumed pack. this step is important as it cuts down on freezer burn a lot. To do this, open the bag a bit, insert a straw and suck as much air out as you can than close the bag and put into the deep freeze.

How to freeze Zucchini

I found several large zucchinis this week so I decided that was a sign that it is time to freeze some zukes for winter use. I did not freeze any zukes last year and that was a mistake as I like to use them in pasta sauces throughout the year, including the 7 or 8 months we do not grow zucchini.

Here is how I freeze zukes.

You will need the following:
A large pan with lid for the boiling water
Slotted spoon
A large bowl or pot for cold water
Salad spinner
A cookie sheet
chest or upright freezer
Plastic freezer bags

Take any large (up to 18 inches) zucchini and cut it lengthwise. Scoop out the seeds and than cut it into pieces. I usually cut it into 1" cubes but other shapes work too. While you are cutting up the squash put a lidded pot of water on high heat and bring to a boil. When the zukes are deseeded and cut up and the water is boiling put about 1 cup (2 or 3 handfuls, depending on the size of you hands. Larger hands need fewer handfuls) of the zukes into the water and blanch for 1 minute. Remove from water using the slotted spoon and plunge into cold water. You can add ice to the water. I don't, instead I replace the water as soon as it gets warm with cold water from the tap (if it has been hot-above 95F- for several weeks than I will use ice as the well water will not be cold enough). A couple of changes of water will get the squash cool enough for our purposes. When cool, load into a salad spinner and spin dry and put on a cookie sheet. Repeat this until all the squash is blanched, cooled and on the cookie sheet(s). Put cookie sheet(s) into the freezer for at least 10 hours.

Frozen zucchini in the freezer ready to be bagged

When squash is frozen remove from coolie sheet(s) and put into labeled/dated plastic freezer bags, put the full bags back into the freezer and you are done

Roasted Peppers and Tomatoes

Yesterday I believe I finished putting up tomatoes for the year. I did my 3rd 5 gallon pot of sauce which yielded 11 quarts. That will go with the other 20 or so quarts of tomato sauce. I also did some salsa (I do not remember how many jars) and tomato juice (IIRC I have 21 or so jars of that.) Next on the agenda is apple sauce.

I have also been freezing. Right now peppers are the main thing I am freezing as they are coming in. I like to have at least 8 well packed gallon freezer bags of chopped sweet ripe peppers and a couple of bags of roasted peppers to get through winter. So far I have 5 bags of peppers and none of the roasted variety. I am thinking Sunday may be a good day to start a fire in the Webber grill and roast and skin a bunch of peppers. They are so good roasted. They add a wonderful smokiness to any dish you add them to.

Last year I was lucky to get 5 gallon bags. It was a bad pepper year for us-too wet I suppose. Those 5 bags were gone by April meaning we rarely had peppers all spring and most of the summer. I rarely will buy peppers at the store as ripe peppers simply cost too much for my budget (but I understand why they cost so much-a lot can and does happen to a pepper between green stage and full ripe stage and about 1/2 to 2/3 will not be sellable at ripe stage). But because I grow peppers I am used to being able to use a lot of them every time I cook with them.

This year has been a good pepper year and I should have more than enough to get through winter and spring. I already have about as many frozen as all of last year and we are still picking lots and lots of peppers and I will be freezing quite a few more in the next 10 to 20 days.

How to Roast a Pepper

Over a flaming wood fire (you can do this with charcoal but wood gives you a much better flavor and you won't have petrochemical residue left on the peppers from the fire starter. I guess a gas grill will work as well but again there is the flavor issue) put on as many peppers as you can fit. Let the flames blacken the peppers and split the skin. Turn every 15 to 30 seconds (this is fast cooking over high heat). When the peppers are black, flaky and ugly on all sides remove them and place in a paper bag to steam for a 5 to 15 minutes. Bring the bag of peppers inside to the kitchen sink. Take a pepper out of the bag and start removing the skin (which is charred). The skin should come right off. If it does not that means you did not cook the pepper quite long enough. Don't try to re-char it just take some extra time to get the skin off and next time take more time to roast the peppers. Cold running water will help in removal. Once the skin is off slice open the pepper and remove the seeds and the placenta (the thing the seeds are attached to at the top). Now, you can either use the roasted peppers right away or slice them into thin strips and place them on a cookie sheet and freeze them. Once frozen, pop the strips into a well market plastic freezer bag and store for winter use. These peppers can be used anywhere a smoky sweet flavor will work like fried potatoes, chili, macaroni and cheese, soups (I can see using these in a butternut squash soup).
Bon Apatite

Ah, Basil

Genovese basil just beginning to make flowers

Basil is one of my favorite market garden crops. This year we put in 250' linear feet which I can harvest 10 pounds at a time twice a week in high season. Harvesting 10 pounds is not as fun as it sounds.

Basil is one of our best selling crops. We sell it two ways, a small bag with approx an ounce of basil in each bag and the big bag with a 1/2 pound of basil for those smart folks who freeze pesto for winter use (something I need to do, I have a half pound of frozen pesto/garlic/oil (not really pesto but close) and I know from experience that is not enough to get us through winter/spring.

This year I grew two kinds-Genovese (regular basil) and Reuben, a beautiful red basil with no flavor. Fortunately, I grew very little Reuben compared to the wonderful green basil. Last year we discovered basil does well planted early in a hoophouse. We had a bunch of cucumbers damp off (die) so there was about 25' feet of space in one of the hoophouses so I started basil seedlings and got them transplanted in late April. By June 2006, we were harvesting. So, this year we repeated the basil experiment only this time it was planned and the basil got a whole 50' of space and was put in a bit earlier. It did not do quite as well as the unplanned early basil. Early on, the early stuff threatened to die outright (and some Reuben did die). It was a bit too cool for the basil. But soon enough it got warm enough and the daylight hours long enough and the early basil flourished. I just stopped harvesting it, because it has gotten pretty seedy. The main crop basil we planted outside of a hoophouse has flourished this summer. Though it too really wants to make flower tops, have sex and got to seed. That just means I have to cut it more often to keep the flower stalks at bay.

Now I am at the end of the basil season, plants want to make flowers/seeds and the temps at night are a bit cool for the uncovered basil. If I am lucky, I will get another 3 to 4 weeks of harvest before the plants are spent. Than I will pull them up and hang them in the barn to dry so I have dried basil all winter and spring to use and sell (there are some things that I feel dried basil is better than fresh, home made salad dressings and spaghetti sauce come to mind) before the fresh stuff next year is ready to cut.

Harvesting for Winter

I am waiting for rain that is not coming. A cold front is moving through the region this morning and it was supposed to bring a lot of rain our way but it seems that the rain has fizzled out. C'est la vie. The market garden will have to continue to depend on well water irrigation for now.

It is Wednesday and we have no markets to deal with today and we did not sell many strawberries yesterday at the Tuesday market so today I am going to make strawberry jam, something I have not done in years. I think I will also freeze some green beans and can the apple sauce Eugene made last night since it is going to be reasonably cool today and tonight.

A big part of gardening is being able to put food up for winter. This seems to be a foreign concept to most Americans and that is a huge shame. When I had a CSA, early on I would purposely give members a lot of food and instructions on how to freeze, dry or can the extra food so they would have pure local food in winter time, thus stretching their food dollars. In the ten years I ran a CSA I had maybe 3 members who got that idea. Wot a shame.

I take great joy in putting food by. Yes, it takes time and is often hot sweaty labor but come winter when we are feasting on beans, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, corn, pesto, dried herbs, garlic powder, peas, jams and jellies, applesauce, etc., it is well worth the work done in the heat of summer. It saves us boat loads of money in winter when money is always in short supply for us and we do not have to worry about where our food came from or with what it has been adulterated. That and it is very satisfying to have shelves full of beautiful jars of homemade food and freezers full of produce and chicken that we raised.

If you raise a garden and do not already can dry freeze and otherwise preserve your harvest you should start because otherwise you are not taking full advantage of what your garden is producing. If you buy at farmers markets buy extra and freeze or can it. If you belong o a CSA and cannot eat all the food each week, instead of giving it away or trashing it, put it up for winter. It takes just a few hours per week to do this. Your co-operative extension office will have loads of information on putting food by.

Ding Dong The Fridge is Dead

Eugene found the 30 year old fridge in the house (NOT to be confused with the 3 door commercial fridge) DOA yesterday at lunch. It had been acting funky for about 2 months. Doing things like flooding the bottom shelf with water, cutting off in the night and souring the milk, etc.. So we have known for a while that sooner than later it was gonna die. We even tried to get the fridge sitting in Eugene's mother's house which is for sale but apparently it is written into the selling contract that the fridge stays with the house.

So at lunch the unit finally gives up the ghost. Okay it was several hours before lunch possibly 12 hours before lunch as all the items in the freezer were pretty much thawed. So I tossed all the half thawed freezer items into one of our chest freezers and grabbed a cooler and an ice pack from the store and put all the highly perishables like milk, cream, etc., in that, ate lunch than took the stuff in the cooler out to the 3 door commercial fridge. Lucky we have such a nice fridge that really should not have household items in it but I would consider this a bit of an emergency so for the next 48 hours or so it will be cooling our food and produce for market.

After I closed the farm sore up for the evening at 7pm (really 6:30 because it was raining and I figured we were not going to get anyone else coming in to buy produce or pastured poultry) we drove into Richmond to HH Gregg's and bought a new fridge. For years I have wanted a home fridge that had no freezer box with it. I have 2 chest freezers and do not need the small freezer unit. I have long thought the tiny freezers associated with most home fridge units were stupid-too small for much of anything but ice and the freezer is often the cause of a home fridge breaking down. Working in a lot of commercial kitchens over the years I have noted that commercial fridges never have freezers tacked on to them. Freezers are always separate units and I have wondered for years why they do not make a home fridge that has no freezer.

Guess what, Frigidaire does. While discussing our refrigeration options with Jeff at HH Gregg's-we wanted something fairly cheap, under $500, but nothing less than 18.2 cubic feet of space (this includes freezer space) we noticed a fridge that did not have a freezer door. It also did not have a price so we asked Jeff to find out what it cost ($549). Jeff said since everything was on sale this week it was marked down to $469 and change. Eugene asked if he could give us a beer deal on he uni and we got he price down to $439 and I now own a fridge with no freezer-Woo Hoo!

We can pick it up today if we have time. Since tomorrow is a market day we will likely be busy harvesting most of the day. Than again, there really isn't all that much to harvest as we are in our early summer lull. We are done with most of the spring crops like lettuce and the labor intensive beans, tomatoes, peppers, melons, onions, garlic, etc., have not started to come in yet. And it's raining.

At any rate, sometime before Sunday we will have a brand new freezerless fridge in the house and I am quite excited!

Difficult Spring So Far

So far spring has sucked. It got way too warm way too early so we lost a lot of lettuce and spinach to bolting during the warm period. Than it got very cold and we got quite a bit of damage to the raspberries and maybe the grapes. We won't know for a few weeks if these crops will be alright.

Fortunately we are very very good at growing in cold conditions and have a lot of know how and paraphernalia to keep our crops alive when it freezes. That and we did not transplant the tender crops like tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchinis into the hoophouses the first week of April as planned.

Still, despite not losing much and finding that the strawberries in the hoophouse had not only survived the week of subfreezing conditions but are making berries, it was a very difficult week of not being able to do anything much in the garden because of all the snow, wind and rain and not knowing if we had done enough to save most of the crops. This has translated into big time stress. If enough damage was done to certain crops we lose a lot a of money and over a year of work establishing them.

Now the weather is a bit better, not much, but some. Yesterday we worked in high winds and snow/rain trying to keep row covers from bashing tender young plants which was a futile effort. We go out and tighten hem up and put more weight to keep them down and than turn around to see some of them flying again. We did get a hoophouse all ready for the cukes and squash that are getting way too big. We put down drip tape and landscape fabric. Now we have to wait for the black fabric to heat up the soil for 5 days or so and we can put the seedlings in the hoophouse.

Today has been quite nice, sunny and about 55˚F with light winds. This allowed me to folier feed most everything in the ground. Folier feeding is one way we fertilize crops. We use a combination of powdered, water soluble kelp and powdered fish emulsion with a dash of Dr Bronner's peppermint soap as a sticker. We were able to move the chicks to clean ground as well. They seemed to enjoy getting onto new ground with uneaten clover. If the weather were dryer we would move the birds daily but because it has been both wet and cold we have been forced to leave them be and have resorted to thickly bedding them to keep them cleanish and dry. The upside to this is we have some good material for the compost pile.

What to Do with Too Much Produce

It is nearly mid August and that means the market garden is in full swing. we are harvesting literally tons of food out of the garden right now. We are harvesting onions, cantaloups, watermelon, acorn squash, green peppers, eggplant, zucchini, basil, cukes, kale, chard, etc..

Things like onions are pretty easy to deal with. Harvest, put on the drying racks and ignore for a few weeks while they cure. Clean them up by removing the dirty layer of skin and the roots than store and/or sell. The winter squashes are also easy to deal with, harvest, wash off any dirt and let cure for a week or two than store.

The tomatoes are not so easy. They are easier to harvest than the long keeping crops but they also are a whole lot more perishable so that means if the sales are slow (and they are) they either have to be composted or made into something. We much prefer to make them into something rather than let them go to the compost. So today I made my first batch of tomato juice out of a wide variety of maters I found either sitting on the kitchen table (they were well on their way to conquering the table for all tomato kind) or going on their way towards compost material in the store about a bushel of tomatoes to be made into juice. The juice has brandywines, basinga, persimmon, moscovich, sunsugar, yellow taxi and big beef maters in it.

Right now it is heating up on the stove and soon I will add some balsamic vinegar, home made garlic powder, worcester sauce and a bit of salt to the juice to finish it and than get out the canner, quart canning jars, rings and lids and can it all up either tonight or tomorrow morning before market. Looks like I will have about 8 to 10 quarts of juice in the end.

Melons present many of the same challenges of the tomatoes, though they do not go bad nearly as quickly and right now are selling a lot better so there are rarely any that need processing this time of year. But a couple of weeks ago that was not the case and I was freezing melons about every day. Of course it is far easier to cut and freeze melons than it is to make tomato juice or sauce. For freezing melons all I do is cut the rind off and than cut the melon into 1" cubes and put them on a cookie sheet and put that into the freezer. When the melon has frozen I put the cubes into a plastic freezer bag and put that back into the freezer.

Basil has been another thing coming in heavily. The volume of the basil has been very very heavy, so much so that even with brisk sales I still have a lot left over. Last Friday I harvested about 6 pounds from one bed. Out of that I sold about 3 pounds and the rest I dried for winter use and sale. The next harvest I am thinking of making a huge batch of pesto and freezing that for winter and maybe even sell some.

Soon I will be dealing with a lot of ripe peppers and will freeze pounds and pounds of them as well as selling as many as possible.

This is the curse and the blessing of having a market garden. At times it produces well beyond what you can sell and than you get to put up food for the winter months when it is really hot outside