Saving the Season

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Maria Langer

I start canning. Again.

Saving the Season is just the book I needed to come up with creative ways to store what I harvest.

My garden is neither small nor large. It would probably be just right for a family of four.

I am a family of one.

While it’s wonderful to be able to pull 75% of the food I consume right out of my own garden, it’s horrible to harvest far more food than I can possibly eat or give away. After all, my friends and neighbors have gardens, too. Although mine was a bit earlier than most, they’re all caught up and trying to give me zucchini, tomatoes, etc. Needless to say, my chickens are feasting on soft tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and other things these days.

Canning Tomatoes

Last year, I had what I thought was a pretty good crop of roma tomatoes. I set about canning them with my boiling water bath setup, which, because I have a glass-top stove, must be done on the burner beside my BBQ grill out on the deck.

Canning tomatoes is not fun. First you have to boil the jars and lids to sterilize them. Then you have to wash the tomatoes, remove the skins by scalding them in boiling water, dropping them into ice water, and sliding the skins off. Then chop them. Then put them in the prepped jars with a tablespoon of lemon juice to add acid. Then boil them for the required time in the canning setup.

It took me two hours to can two pints of tomatoes last year. I swore I’d never do it again. After all, what does a can of tomatoes cost at the supermarket? Why am I wasting my time canning mine?

Trying Again with Carrots

A few years ago, I’d bought a book at a bookstore up in Winthrop called Saving the Season. It’s all about canning and preserving what comes out of your garden. This year, I finally opened it when I was ready to “save” something I was taking out of my garden: carrots.

Yes, I grew carrots this year for the first time. I cannot believe how well they grew — even in my raised beds, which are only one foot deep! And as one batch was getting big, I planted another batch.

After pulling one or two carrots a week, I finally pulled the rest of the entire first batch. They were huge.

I soon discovered two things:

Carrots keep getting bigger if you don’t harvest them.
Freshly harvested carrots lose their stiffness quickly after harvesting. (I won’t tell you what they remind me of after just a few days in the fridge.)

I realized that I’d have to harvest them before the next batch was ready and use them as quickly as I could. Harvesting was easy. Just pull them out from their tops. I had a bunch of really large ones to work with. (Although I only want the orange part, my chickens really seem to love the green tops.) Unfortunately, I just didn’t feel like eating carrots.

The answer was to pickle and can them. The recipe I chose was “Picked Carrots, Taquería Style.” This would produce carrots like those that can sometimes be found at a real Mexican restaurant’s salsa bar. The best part of this recipe: not only would it use up all the carrots I’d picked, but it also called for red onions, jalapeño peppers, and garlic, all of which I also harvested from my garden.

One of my four pint-sized jars of Mexican pickled carrots.

So I put aside memories of peeling tomatoes and got to work following the recipe, dragging my canning setup out of storage in the garage, and prepping the four pint jars I’d need for canning. It went remarkably well, even though I never got the canner up to a full rolling boil. (The recipe said 30 minutes at 180° to 185° was fine.) Although my kitchen looked as if I’d just cooked for a party of 10 when I was done, I had four beautiful jars of pickled carrots that I could store in my pantry until I was ready to eat them.

I also had about a half cup of carrots with some liquid leftover. I put those in a jar in the fridge. This morning, I opened it up for a taste — I knew I wouldn’t like them hot so I didn’t taste them while I was making them. They were delicious.

Now I’m looking forward to that second batch of carrots to be ready to pull. I want to make another four jars to take me through the winter.

And beets….do I have a recipe for those? Let’s see….

Early August Check In

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Maria Langer

What I’ve been up to lately.

I know I haven’t been blogging much lately — other than to share my YouTube videos — and I apologize. I know a lot of folks come here to see what I’m up to and not necessarily to see big helicopters land in clouds of dust.

But regular readers should know why I’m not blogging: I’m keeping busy doing other things. Here’s a rundown of what I’ve been up to.

Cherry Drying

One thing I’m not doing lately is drying cherries with my helicopter. We haven’t had measurable rain here since June 28 and that’s the last day I flew.

This is both good and bad.

The good thing is that my helicopter is inching ever closer to the Hobbs meter number that will force me to bring it in for over haul. As I type this, I have 88 hours left until I must stop flying it.

If you watched my livestream video about helicopter operating costs, you’ll know that this required maintenance will cost about $250,000 (not a typo). I’ve been saving, but not that much. So I’ll have to go into debt to pay for that overhaul. (I hate being in debt.)

But because I’m hardly flying it at all, I realized that I can simply put the helicopter away for the winter and save those 80+ hours for next year’s cherry season, thus putting off the overhaul for a whole year. I should be able to save a bunch more money for it, thus reducing the loan I’ll need. It will also Eliminate the stress I’d feel trying to operate a helicopter tour/charter business when virus-related issues — social networking, the economy, etc. — might make it hard to bring in the extra cash I’ll need to keep up on the loan.

That’s the good side of this issue.

The bad side is that I like flying, especially when I can send someone an invoice when I’m done. Although I’ll get a few more flights in before I put the helicopter away — after all, I do have that YouTube channel to feed — it won’t be much.

Fortunately, all of my cherry drying contracts include a daily standby fee, so even if I don’t fly, I’m bringing in money to cover my personal and business costs.

Of course, the standby fee means I have to be on standby, available to fly 7 days a week during daylight hours. So since May 29, when my season started, I’ve been pretty much hanging around at home — or at least the Wenatchee area. (I guess a lot of folks are in the same boat with the virus running rampant throughout the country.)

During the busiest part of the season, when I had the most acreage to cover, I had four pilots helping me cover it. They left one-by-one as orchards were picked and there was less and less acreage to cover. The last one left about 2 weeks ago. Today I’m covering 34 acres by myself.

Here’s the view from my deck back on June 16; you can see four helicopters (including mine) parked in a cleared cherry orchard. The fifth helicopter was based in Quincy, covering one of my contracts there.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll have just one orchard of just 17 acres to cover until August 23. Even though the standby for just 17 acres is pretty low, I’ll stick around until all the cherries there are picked.

Cherry Driving

No, that’s not a typo. I spent a week driving cherries from an orchard to the packing house.

One of my clients was looking for someone to drive a pickup truck pulling a trailer full of cherry bins from their orchard to the packing house about 15 miles away. They knew I had experience pulling heavy trailers — after all, I lived near their orchard in my old 36-foot fifth wheel for several seasons in a row — so they offered me the job. I had nothing else that I had to do, I had to stay in the area, and I didn’t mind making a few bucks and learning about another part of the business. So I said yes.

The truck was a 2004 Ford F350 4WD diesel pickup remarkably like my old green truck (RIP). The trailer was a dual axel with 4 wheels per axel flatbed with a gooseneck hitch that had been customized to hold eight stacks of plastic cherry bins.

Here’s the rig I drove, nearly loaded, parked at the orchard’s loading area. Shade and mist help keep the area cool. Each bin of cherries is hosed down and then covered with a water-soaked foam pad to help keep them cool.

Cherry bins measure roughly 4’w x 4’d x 1’h and hold about 300-340 pounds of cherries. For the first bunch of runs, they stacked the bins 5 high so I was carrying 40 bins or 13,000+ pounds of cherries. This turned out to be the challenge: controlling speed for the first 8 miles of the drive to the packing plant, all of which was downhill.

Of course, before I left I also had to strap down those bins, which required tossing coils of ratchet tie-down straps over the tops of the bins and fastening them on the other side. It would not be good if I took a curve too quickly and the bins tumbled off.

One off my clients went with me for the first run so I’d know how to do it. I almost immediately got into trouble. The roads in the orchard are narrow and twisting and there was a hairpin curve I had to negotiate. I was so focused on the curve that I didn’t register the loose gravel in the middle of it. When I braked to slow (from about 10 mph), the wheels locked up and I came very close to sliding off the road into someone else’s orchard.

Oops.

Backing up uphill with 13,000+ pounds behind me on loose gravel wasn’t easy. I threw it into 4WD and had to use a foot on the brake while I pressed the accelerator to actually start backing up. I only needed to go back about 5 feet and managed to do it. Then we made the curve and were on our way.

I did not make that mistake again.

It took 45 minutes to get to the packing plant and they were stressful minutes. The setup had the braking distance of a freight train so I had to go very slowly any time there was a chance I might have to stop.

But then I was pulling into the delivery entrance and stopping at the entrance check point. I unfastened the tie downs while they took sample cherries and did a bunch of paperwork. Then on to the offloading area, where a team of forklifts took those 40 cherry bins off in less than three minutes. (And no, that’s not an exaggeration.)

On most trips, I came straight back, but on a few trips I needed to pick up (and strap down) empty bins or bins full of the foam pads they use to help keep the cherries cool in transit. Either way, the trailer was so light that I was able to get back in 30 minutes.

I made three runs the first day and two runs each of the next six days. I started at 8 AM — three hours after the pickers started because it took that long for them to fill 40 bins of cherries — and was usually done by noon — two hours after the pickers had finished and gone home. (They can’t pick cherries when it gets hot out and that week was very hot.) Although most loads had 40 bins early in the week, by the end of the week I was taking 44 bins (4 stacks of 5 and 4 stacks of 6). That’s nearly an extra ton. I got pretty good at controlling speed and handling the load and had no mishaps.

Along the way, I learned a lot about packing cherries. I think that was the best part of the experience; learning new things.

Cherry & Blueberry Picking

Like every year I’ve been up here during the summer — including years before I actually moved here — I always manage to get out for some cherry and blueberry picking.

I pick cherries after the growers have picked, “gleaning” what the pickers missed. I actually picked a lot more this year than I usually do, starting early with rainier cherries in an orchard near my home and, more recently, at the same orchard where I did my cherry driving. The key is to get to the orchard within a few days of picking; if you wait too long, the cherries are so far past prime they’re not worth picking.

My first batch of blueberries.

I pick blueberries at the same orchard where I did my driving gig. The orchard owners have about 400 blueberry bushes that they don’t harvest commercially. Instead, they invite friends to come pick when they like. The season lasts well over a month — the blueberries on a bush don’t all ripen at the same time like cherries or other tree fruit do — so I can go weekly and bring home enough to freeze and still eat blueberries all week. I usually bring a friend and chat while we’re picking.

I bring my pups along on these outings. Like Penny, they enjoy running around the orchards, sniffing for mice and other rodents. It’s good to get them out someplace other than home where they don’t need to be on a leash.

Getting Out On the Water

Amazingly, I’ve only been out on the water three times so far this summer, but all three trips were real wins.

The first outing was in my own little boat with two friends. I blogged about that here, so I won’t repeat any details.

The second was paddling with my friend Cyndi and her dog. This was Lily and Rosie’s first time out on a kayak and, at first, they didn’t know what to make of it. I had life jackets on both of them and had them tethered to the kayak with expanding leashes and it’s a good thing I did! Lily took two dives into the water and Rosie took one. In both cases — their first times swimming! — their life jackets gave them plenty of floatation and I was able to reel them in with the leash as they swam back to me. We paddled around the estuary at the confluence of the Wenatchee and Columbia Rivers. The water was high so there were lots of channels to explore. We even got a chance to stop on a beach where Rosie surprised me by swimming out to my friend Cyndi who called her from the shallows.

Here we are, paddling in the estuary. By this point, the girls knew the drill and stayed on board.

Here I am with Cyndi, holding up the six fish we caught.

The third trip was with Cyndi and her husband Matt on their fishing boat. I woke up at 2:45 AM so I could meet them at 3:30 for the hour+ drive to Pateros. We were on line at the boat ramp at 4:45 AM and joined the crowd of salmon fishers near the mouth of the Okanogan River upriver from Brewster by 5. I can’t believe how close the boats were to each other, trolling along on silent motors, pulling one sockeye salmon after another out of the river. We hit our limit of two sockeyes each by 8 AM and spent some time trying for chinook, which requires a different line setup and technique. After a half hour with no luck, we called it quits. I was happy! I took my two fish home and filleted them, freezing three large fillets and leaving a fourth for dinner. I also cooked up the bones for fish broth and made myself a nice salmon chowder with garden veggies and the trimmings from my filleting work.

Gardening

My garden is bigger and more productive than ever this year. This spring, I finally pulled out the last pallet planter I’d built, replacing it with one of the plastic cherry bins I’d bought as raised garden beds. That brings the total count to 11. (I have one more bin to install, but I need to do some deconstruction on a flower bed to fit it in; that’s an autumn project.)

Here’s one evening’s side dish, brought in from the garden. I washed and chopped all of these, then roasted them with herbs in the oven. Delicious!

What did I plant? Let’s see. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, onions (2 kinds), beets, radishes, scallions, tomatoes (3 kinds), asparagus, potatoes (3 kinds), sweet potatoes (2 kinds), peppers (4 kinds), eggplant (2 kinds), horseradish, spinach, carrots, strawberries, zucchini (2 kinds), yellow squash, pattypan squash, cucumbers, delicata squash, cantaloupe, watermelon, pumpkins, corn (2 kinds), green beans. Well, I didn’t plant the green beans — they planted themselves and have been doing so for the past four years.

Have you ever seen a red potato this big? That’s my hand under it — and my hands aren’t small. I pulled it out of my garden last week.

I’ve been harvesting a little of almost everything and planting more beets, carrots, scallions, and radishes any time a bed empties and onions every time I pull a row. The only veggies I buy at the supermarket now is salad greens and broccoli (because it’s all done now). Everything else comes out of the garden and, frankly, I can’t keep up with production so I’m giving a ton away.

The 11 chicks I got in April are just getting ready to start laying. I just started an egg subscription service for neighbors: $10/month gets you a dozen eggs delivered to your doorstep once a week — if you give back the cartons. When I have all 16 chickens producing, I’ll be getting a dozen eggs a day and will need to do something with them. There’s only so much quiche a person can eat.

Cooking

I finally found a brisket recipe I felt able to follow — with some modifications — and made this. Not bad for a first try.

Like most of the folks stuck at home this summer, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking. Some of it is an attempt to use up some of the produce coming from my garden or the orchards and blueberry patch where I pick fruit. Others are attempts to make something I’ve always wanted to try making.

The cake tasted even better than it looks, but what was I thinking?

When I make something that freezes well, I portion it out, vacuum seal it, and put it in my garage freezer so I always have a quick meal available on those days I don’t feel like cooking. I made a blueberry zucchini cake recently and wound up giving nearly all of it away to neighbors and friends. What was I thinking when I made a cake that big?

Other Stuff

I’ve also been making and selling jewelry, although not as much as I’d like. I think I’ll save that for another blog post.

I’ve also been doing a lot of video editing for my YouTube channel, but I’ll whine about that in another post, too.

But these are the main things I’ve been up to this summer. When the weather is nice, I’d rather do stuff outside than sit in front of a computer typing up a blog post and that explains why I haven’t blogged so much.

I will try harder to blog more in the future. I find that my blog posts are the best way I can remember the things that went on in my life years after these things happen. My blog is my journal and I really do need to stick with it.

The Seasonality of My Blog Posts

Posted on June 1, 2020 by Maria Langer

What you find on the home page varies depending on the time of year.

A few months ago, I was thinking about how I never blog about flying anymore. But a quick look at the home page and you’d think that flying is the only thing I blog about. What gives?

I realized that my blogging habits are seasonal.

I managed to get one trip in before cherry season started: I took the helicopter down to Oregon for some maintenance and spent some time on the cloudy coast with my pups.
In the winter, when I’m traveling and have limited access to the Internet, I often share quick “postcards” that feature photos of places I’ve been. Occasionally, I’ll do a deep dive into a topic on my mind that time of year. In recent years, I’ve been making and selling jewelry on my travels so I write about doing shows, finding supplies, and learning new techniques.
In the spring, after I’ve returned home, I write about springtime topics. Although I love traveling, after 3+ months on the road, I’m usually very glad to be home. I write about the remnants of winter, the weather, and the chores I need to do to get my garden and home ready for the time of year when I’m there.
One of the things I’m excited about lately is the GoPro Fusion camera I recently acquired. It makes interactive 360° videos, which have been a real hit on FlyingMAir YouTube channel. Here’s a screen grab from a recent video — isn’t this a cool angle?
In the summer, when cherry drying season is underway, I write a lot about helicopters and flying. After all, that’s what’s on my mind. I also dial up my video production for the FlyingMAir YouTube channel, which is quickly becoming a decent source of revenue to help cover my flying costs. Flying helicopters ain’t cheap and I occasionally whine a bit about that, too. I might also write about new cameras or video editing tools I use to get that work done.
In autumn, when cherry season is over and no longer have to stick around the house waiting for rain, I eventually hit the road on some sort of autumn vacation. Last year I did a photography cruise in the San Juan Islands, but this year the plan is to go to Alaska; I already got a good deal on First Class plane tickets to get there. When I’m not traveling, I’m prepping my home and garden for the winter and starting to pack for my winter travels, so I sometimes blog about that.

Keep in mind that the busier I am, the less I write in my blog. Sometimes I’m very busy. Other times, I might not be especially busy but I could simply be burned out. Remember, I’ve been blogging here since October 2003 — getting close to 20 years now! Maybe I’m just running out of things to say.

Here’s a morel mushroom I found in mid-May. I hunt for morels in spring and chanterelles in autumn.

I think I blog less now than I did years ago because I’m more active now than I was earlier in my life. I have freedoms now that I didn’t have when I was with my wasband, a man who had limited vacation time and didn’t like me having fun without him. I also have a lot more personal time to learn new things (for example, beekeeping in 2013, gyro piloting in 2014, mushroom hunting in 2016, jewelry making in 2018 and 2019) and build new skills (for example, basic carpentry in 2014; acting as the general contractor on the construction of my home, wiring my home and tiling my bathroom floor and shower stall wall in 2014 and 2015; jewelry scale metalworking in 2018). I do as I please and I do a lot. Who has time to blog?

What does all this mean to blog readers? Well, all it really means is that this blog’s focus will shift with the seasons. It’s summer now, so I’ll be writing a lot about flying and sharing lots of my videos. If the virus situation improves, I hope to get out to do at least one or two jewelry shows and I’ll likely write about that. And, keeping this in mind, I’ll do my best to write about things other than flying when they’re on my mind.

You might even get another political rant out of me. 😉

Getting a Closer Connection to My Food

Posted on May 28, 2017 by Maria Langer

Gardening, foraging, gleaning, making things from scratch.

This morning’s breakast: a frittata with home grown onions and broccoli, homemade cheese, and eggs from my neighbor’s chickens.

This morning, for breakfast, I had a frittata I made with onions and broccoli from my garden, eggs from my neighbor’s chickens, and Chaource cheese I made myself three weeks ago. (The only reason the eggs came from neighbors is because my 17 chickens aren’t laying yet.) I could have added chanterelle or gypsy mushrooms I foraged for and froze last autumn or morel mushrooms I forged for on Friday. (That would have been a waste of the morels.) Or I could have made blueberry muffins from scratch, using blueberries I picked and froze last summer and sweetened with honey from my bees. Or a smoothie made with those same blueberries, two strawberries from my garden (only two are ready right now), and yogurt I made myself.

It’s only recently that I’ve realized how much of my food comes from my own sources or resources. Last night, I made a batch of pickled broccoli stems with more of that garden broccoli and dill from my garden. The tomato sauce and pickled green beans I canned last winter are still forming the basis of pasta meals or snacks and hors d’oeuvres for dinner guests. The cherries I gleaned last summer are still in the fridge in the form of cherry chutney that goes very well with roast or grilled pork, turkey, or chicken. I’ve got five kinds of homemade cheese in various stages of ripening in my wine-fridge-turned-cheese-cave or refrigerator. I’ve got mead made from honey from my bees fermenting in my pantry closet. In my garden, the broccoli and onions are ready for harvest and I pick them right before I eat them. Soon I’ll also have tomatoes, peppers, green beans, brussels sprouts, cucumbers, corn, melons, zucchini, and potatoes, not to mention marion berries, ligon berries, and black-capped raspberries. And it I get back into the forest for a hike at just the right time, I can pick thimbleberries right off the bushes.

Chickens Eat Weeds
My chickens love to eat weeds. They’ll be making eggs in about 2-3 months.

I’ve discovered that I can turn weeds into eggs by feeding them to chickens and coffee filters into vegetables by composting them into a rich garden soil.

I spent literally hours traipsing through forest floors tangled with the debris of fires a year or more ago, looking for the morel mushrooms only found this time of year. Although I found a few — enough for a small side dish or pizza topping — I was competing with people who had a lot more experience than me and consider myself lucky to find ones they obviously missed.

It also takes a long time and makes a big kitchen mess to make cheese from scratch.

And gleaning cherries after harvest? Do you know how frustrating it is to see a perfect one just out of reach up in a tree and not be able to close your fingers around its stem?

Which is why people ask me why I bother. Why not just go to the supermarket and buy whatever’s there?

The only thing I can come up with is the feeling of satisfaction I get from knowing where my food comes from or what’s in it, and having a very active role in obtaining it, putting it on the table, and serving it to my guests.

Foraging for mushrooms, which I hope to blog about later in the week, is especially rewarding. When I say I spent hours searching, I’m not exaggerating. I went out into three different forest areas on four different days and came back with just five mushrooms, one of which is tiny. Yet the excitement I felt when I saw the biggest one cannot be overstated.

There’s something about having this closer connection to my food that I really like.

Next spring’s challenge: tracking down the wild asparagus that supposedly grows in the Chelan area.

What do you think? How involved are you in obtaining and preparing the food you eat?

Prepping for Winter

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Maria Langer

I get started on my winter preparation chores.

Thought I’d write up a quick blog post to review a few of the things I did yesterday to prep for winter and maybe list a few that still need to be done.

Winter in Wenatchee

I should start off by saying that winter in the Wenatchee area, where I live, isn’t as cold and nasty as you might think. Yes, Washington is in the northwestern corner of the country and I live at about 47.4° of latitude there. But as surprising as it might seem, our winters are just about the same as the ones I experienced in Northern New Jersey years ago, which sits at about 41° of latitude. Here’s some data from Sperling’s Best Places:

I’m finding it hard to believe that we have fewer sunny days than the New York Metro area, but that’s likely due to the winter when we get cloud cover 4 out of every 7 days (my estimate). In the rest of the year, it’s sunny most days. The rainfall numbers (8.8 annual inches in Wenatchee vs. 42.6 in Harrington Park) and precipitation days (64 vs. 113) tell the tale. We even get less snow.

One of the two main reasons I left New Jersey back in 1997 was to get away from the cold winters. (The other was financial; I can have a much better lifestyle out west for the same or less money.) So I think it surprised a lot of people when I made the move to Washington State. But there are a lot of things beside the weather to attract and keep me here — I’ve mentioned a lot of them elsewhere in this blog.

Still, the weather does dip below freezing in the winter here and, like in Arizona, it does it earlier than it did back east. It seems that the coldest days here are right around Christmas. (Back east, it started getting coldest around New Year’s day and didn’t let up until mid February.) I’ve experienced freezes here as early as November, which is why I start winterizing as soon as we get our first frost.

That was this past Tuesday morning.

Irrigation

Because of our “high desert” like environment, the only way to get a garden or leafy trees to grow is to put them on irrigation.

I’m a real pro at setting up drip irrigation — I did it at my Arizona home not long after we moved in and were able to do some sort of landscaping there. (Long story; not worth retelling.) The benefit of drip irrigation over sprinklers is that you can bring water directly to the plants that need it. That saves water and cuts down on weeds.

I have four irrigation systems at my Washington home:

My vegetable garden was the first one I set up. It runs from a battery-operated timer and provides water to the raised garden beds, a flower garden beside my shed, and the flower garden at the entrance to my driveway. I also ran the line under my driveway to deliver water to the first trees I planted on the south side of my driveway, including a handful of fruit trees (cherry and apple).
My front lawn was the next one. The only reason I have a lawn is because my dog likes grass. The lawn is small and is bordered by rocks and my driveway on three sides and a row of lilac trees I planted right in front of my home on the other. This system also runs on a battery-operated timer and it includes three pop-up sprinklers in the law and a bunch of drip lines for the lilac bushes and some marionberry bushes a friend gave me.
Two professionally installed irrigation lines on a programmable 4-zone timer provide water to the trees I’ve planted along the road and all the way down in my bee yard. I have over 1,000 feet of road frontage and the lines run almost that entire length. I add drip emitters every time I plant another tree.

The main thing to worry about with irrigation lines in the winter is that if you don’t drain them, they’ll freeze and possibly crack. That means tracking down leaks and doing a lot of repairs in the spring. I obviously want to avoid that.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been cutting back on the water being delivered to my garden, lawn, and trees, mostly by adjusting settings in the irrigation systems. When the weather finally turned full autumn last week, I shut most of them off completely. A friend in the area suggested giving everything one final soaking before winterizing. Mother nature is doing that for me: there’s a double storm system coming through the area that should be delivering lots of rain. So I shut everything down yesterday and winterized it.

What does winterizing entail? Here’s what I do:

Shut off the water source at the source. Three systems run from the “frost free” valve at my shed; the one from my lawn is a spigot at the front of my house. which has an internal shutoff valve.
Disconnect the water lines. This makes it easier for them to drain. Or for water to expand if there’s any left in the water line and it freezes.
Use an air compressor to blow out the lines. I bought all the equipment to do that last year: male and female hose fittings that can connect any hose fitting to my compressor. My compressor is a huge affair on wheels that my friend Bob gave me. I have it connected to a very long hose (also from Bob) on a reel I bought and installed my car garage. The hose is long enough — if you can believe this — to reach my shed about 100 feet away from my front door. So it took only minutes to run the compressor hose out there, hook it up to the various lines, and blow out each line. Then I cranked the compressor hose back in. Done.

Th only other thing I need to do is gather up and drain the hoses I’ve used around my yard, coil them back up, and store them in the shed until next spring. I’ll likely do that next week when the weather clears up again. They’re not at risk of freezing.

This Frankenstein’s monster is where the water comes into my building and goes all kinds of places — including a hose for the inside of my garage. I designed this crazy setup so I could actually drain all the water out of my pipes from one place.

Inside my garage, under the stairs where the water comes out of my slab and goes up into my home, my water lines also need a bit of prep. That’s easy. I have a ceramic heater that I place in front of the PEX pipes. I plug that into a Thermo Cube — a temperature sensitive outlet that turns on at 35°F and turns off at 45°F. So if temperatures get down to freezing inside my garage — which is possible once in a while — the heater will turn on and keep that area warm. No chance of pipes freezing.

The Garden

My vegetable garden this year was better than ever before. Until the tomatoes took over.

I planted and harvested sugar snap peas, beans, broccoli, brussels sprouts, peppers, onions, okra, eggplant, beets, corn, zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, various herbs, and potatoes. Everything except the brussels sprouts provided me with a good harvest. The sprouts were attacked by aphids and grasshoppers that I was simply unable to keep under control. The zucchini, yellow squash, and cucumbers were attacked by squash bugs, but I managed to get a good harvest before they came.

Here’s my garden in the spring, before the tomatoes and sunflowers took over.

I also planted just four tomato plants. Unfortunately, some “volunteer” tomato plants also started growing. These were from seeds of tomatoes that had fallen to the ground, likely at the end of the previous season. At first, I pulled them out. Then I potted some and gave them to neighbors and friends. Then I pulled more out. Then I thought, well, what’s a few more tomato plants?

I went away for a week in the beginning of August. When I got back, those volunteer tomato plants had pretty much taken over one side of the garden, making it impossible for me to reach the second batch of corn that I wanted to harvest.

And then the spiders moved in. Big yellow and black ones that an entomologist friend assures my are not harmful. There were at least two that I saw. Who knows how many more lurked in the jungle of tomato plant leaves? I made sure I always wore gloves when picking tomatoes.

And then I started taking pruners with me when I picked tomatoes. Ever time I picked a basket full, I’d lop off huge branches of the plants. I eventually regained access to my eggplant plants, which began producing again. The peppers were a complete loss, as was the corn. If my chickens hadn’t met an untimely end, they’d likely be eating back the plants. But because they’re gone, the tomato plants soon invaded the fenced-in chicken yard.

Out of control tomatoes and sunflowers in my garden. At this point, I’d already harvested much of my garden’s crops.

I should mention that there comes a point when your neighbors and friends stop taking tomatoes from you and you feel as if you eat another bowl of gazpacho, you’ll die of tomato poisoning (if there is such a thing).

When the frost set in the other day, I have to say that I was glad to see frost damage on some of those plants. I’d finally get rid of them.

But I will eventually have the task of cutting them all back and putting the plants in a compost pile. I’ve already been doing this a bit with grass clippings and other tomato plant cuttings. I put them in the raised planters I’ve already harvested from. When the snow falls, it’ll form a heavy blanket over each planter’s pile. Snowmelt will help break down the plants. In the spring, I’ll just use a rake to loosen up the previous year’s soil and new compost. Then I can add a half bag of fresh garden soil, work it in, and plant.

This year’s chore will be difficult. As soon as the frost kills the plants, I’ll get to it. I figure an hour or two a day through the rest of October will finish it up.

I almost forgot about the invading sunflowers. They grew all over my garden area and at the corner of my front walkway. They’ve been dying and I’ve been pulling them out for the past month or so. Still have a few to go. They go down to my big yard waste pile, which is a low area alongside the road just past my windsock. The quail are having a field day on the seeds that are dropping. I guess I’ll be fighting sunflowers next year, too.

The last of the potatoes from my garden.

In the meantime, I harvested the rest of my potatoes yesterday. This was the first time I’d ever grown potatoes and I started with a few from my pantry that had grown “eyes.” I followed the instructions I found on the web and put them in their own pallet planter. I never put that planter on irrigation — I just watered it occasionally. Next year, I’ll irrigate; I think I’ll get more potatoes that way.

The Lawn

Here’s what part of my lawn looked like this spring. The top part of this photo shows the dead grass raked out; the bottom shows what long grass looks like if left under snow for months at a time. Lesson learned.

I learned my lesson about the lawn this spring: if you don’t cut the grass down short before the snow comes, you’ll start the season with an ugly brown patch that requires a ton of raking to prepare for spring growth.

Even though I’ve turned off the irrigation, my lawn continues to grow — although more slowly than it did in the summer. So I’ll keep cutting it.

It’s not a big deal because it’s a small lawn. I have an electric mower that works very well. The whole job takes about 15 minutes, including prepping the mower and then dumping the grass clippings and putting the mower away when I’m done. I suspect I’ll keep at it until either the first snow is forecast or I go away for the winter.

Here’s what my lawn looked like this summer. Not perfect, but I’m proud of it. It’s the first lawn I’ve ever planted, grown, and tended to in my life. (And yes, that is a pesky volunteer sunflower along the gravel area.)

My Cheat

Oh, yeah — maybe I should have admitted that at the top of the post: I don’t stay here for the winter. I actually never intended to — even when I first saw this homesite and knew it was what I wanted. As far as I’m concerned, this is a three season place. When the temperatures begin to drop and that cloud cover moves in like a cold winter blanket, I’m out of here, headed to points south: Arizona and California.

I’m lucky to have a very good house-sitter who comes with her Doberman to keep an eye on things for me. She’ll be here for most of the time I’m gone and has family nearby to help her if anything goes wrong.

Still, I want to prepare my place so it’s easy for her to tend to — and worry-free for me. That’s why I winterize.

An Eclectic Mind

Web site and blog for Maria Langer, writer, video producer, jewelry artist, boat captain, and helicopter pilot. Blogging since 2004.

Tag Archives: gardening