Plum Jam And Pandemic Prickles

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Ann Lovejoy
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A gift indeed

Of Plums And Roses

This has been a very hard few weeks, and the best thing about them is that the neighborhood plums are ripe. Cooking, preferably cooking for others, is one of my favorite self soothing strategies. Thus, I’m making basil salt by the gallon (no joke), pesto galore, chunky chutney, fruit vinegars spunky with vanilla beans and peppercorns or cardamom pods. And jam. This week, I’m jammin’ every day, stirring fragrant pots of cut up fruit, melting down to velvety puree, cooking out the water until there’s just thick, delectable jam. Filling little jars, writing labels, packing the pantry with pots of summer. Just two ingredients (maybe three), plus heat, plus patience. It’s so simple, so basic, so pure, there’s almost not a recipe. But there is, and here it is:

Have on hand:
Wide, shallow pan for jam
Long handled spoon
Long handled tongs for jars
1-cup ladle for jam
Wide mouth funnel for filling jars
Canning jars, lids (about 6 pint jars)
Soup pot of simmering water for canning jars
smaller pot of simmering water for jar lids
cooling rack

Fresh Plum Jam

8 cups pitted, chopped plums
2 cups sugar
1 lemon or 1-2 tbsp lemon juice (just in case)

Put plums in a wide, shallow pan. Pour sugar over plums to coat and let it sit for an hour or so. Cover pan and turn heat on medium. As juice accumulates and sugar melts, uncover pan and stir occasionally. Use a potato masher to crush the softening fruit. As the fruit turns soupy, bump up the heat to a rolling boil and stir a little more often. As the jam starts to thicken, stir more often so it doesn’t scorch. The gelling point for jam is 220 degrees F, hotter than boiling, and you get there by evaporating off the water in the fruit. Along the way, taste a bit of your jam and add a little lemon juice if it’s bland (very ripe fruit can be blander, while including some less ripe fruit gives the jam some zip and more natural pectin as well). When you hit 220 F, arrange sterilized jars on the cooling rack with tongs, ladle them almost full (leave 1/2 inch head room), slap on a warm lid and twist on a jar ring. When you’re done, tighten the rings and put the jars into the big soup pot of boiling water (tongs!) for a boiling water bath (10 minutes). Remove pot from heat and put the jars on the cooling rack (tongs!). Now have a piece of toast, with butter and lots of jam. Take some jam to the neighbors. Make a pie with the rest of the plums.

Plum & Peach Pie

2 crusts for 9” pie dish
6 cups quartered and pitted plums
2 peaches, sliced and pitted
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour
Pinch of salt

Line a pie dish with 1 crust. In a bowl, gently toss fruit with sugar, flour and salt. Fill pie dish, mounding fruit high in the middle. Top with second crust, pinch crusts together along the edges and twist with thumbs (push up with one and down with the other) to flute the edge. Slash top a few times (I like to make happy pie faces). Put a baking sheet on the rack under your pie (spillage burns badly), bake at 425 degrees F. for 15 minutes, then 350 F for 35-40 minutes. Cool a bit before slicing. Serves at least one.

Pandemic Prickles

Today I was asked to write about the thorns and roses of this pandemic experience and found it more difficult than expected. I did everything up to and including cleaning the bathroom to avoid getting started and slowly realized that this request required me to think clearly about so many things I’ve been scrupulously blocking from consciousness. Lalalala I can’t HEAR you…. Partly it’s just too painful and fraught and partly it’s a function of shock. Personally, I’ve been in shock since early March and denial has been my coping tool of choice. But once I got started, it went fast, like this:

Thorns And Roses

Thorns? Thorns are easy. Thorns include so much I hold dear: Family, music, community. They have always been roses before but now, I won’t be able to visit my grandkids because school has started. Their parents teach in private schools, and my grandkids will be attending private school, so my kids feel it’s too dangerous for me. My heart weeps with loss and fear for them, not just me. Music; no singing with my beloved choir, no singing with Becky and Simon, a thirteen year joy and now a gaping loss. Community includes countless losses from tea and knitting to supporting the families of transgender kiddos, now isolated even further.

Thorns also include things that terrify and distress me; Pandemic. Embedded racism. Politics. Economic depression. Homelessness. Job losses. Healthcare losses. Too many people, including family and friends, people I know and don’t know, have lost so much more than I have. My heart weeps for them. Our beautiful, astonishing planet is suffering, dangerously damaged by human abuse and we don’t have the sense to cherish it instead. Broken heart in pieces on the ground. There’s more, but I’ve surely distressed you enough.

Oh, But The Roses

Roses are harder to count some days but this week I found a bundle of glorious roses in sunset colors, fragrant and tender, a gift from a young friend I love dearly. My daughter is a rose in bloom, slowly grounding into herself. While zoom meetings leave me limp and frazzled, I have learned that tempers remain calmer during challenging conversations than in face-to-face meetings, a definite rose in my meeting-rich life. My garden is a haven for me and for pollinators galore, which keep my tiny beds alive with joyful humming and buzzing, fluttering and chattering. I’m meeting friends for distanced, masked walks, hearing beloved voices and learning to read those expressive eyes, the tilt of eyebrows. Maybe best of all, I’m finding new richness in “empty prayer”, prayers stripped of words and thought, holding peace and healing. May the peace and the pie be with you!

 

 

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Harvesting & Heading For Autumn

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Ann Lovejoy
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Poppies are magical

Change Time In The Garden

It’s been a wild, weird year, both in and out of the garden. Here in my cool, Maritime PNW home, summer was a long time coming and now it seems like it’s almost gone. For those of us without the luxury of full sun, heat loving crops stalled out early and were slow to recover momentum. Greens and peas did great, yet they lingered so long that no sooner are they truly finished than it’s time to start them up again. Hearing stories from gardening friends all up and down the coast, it feels like we are in a bubble, isolated by weather as well as social distancing. With wildfires and heat waves all around us, here on the Island, we had exactly one hot day in the 90s. It was, however, a memorable event, culminating in an extravagantly gorgeous sunset quickly overshadowed by towering thunderheads that delivered a magnificent mini storm that included hail, a fierce downpour of rain, plenty of lightning and thunder loud enough to shake the windows. Boom! Otherwise, we’ve had the usual cool mornings, with the classic grey marine layer that takes all morning to burn off, followed by sunnier, warmer afternoons and evenings, then nights cool enough to warrant a blanket.

Though that is hardly a recipe for success with tomatoes, peppers, or beans, all are finally producing steadily if not with the overwhelming abundance of warmer years. As quickly as I clear the beds of early crops, I’m refreshing them with compost, since even fairly new edible beds need replenishment before asking the soil to nurture an autumn crop. I’ve finally got the miniature backyard under control (mostly), thanks to layers of heavy burlap coffee bags. Yesterday, I pulled some bags back, forked up any lingering roots, and spread a layer of compost. Several research projects have demonstrated that as little as half an inch of compost will begin to restore depleted soil to health. That renewed soil starts capturing and storing carbon almost immediately, so every compost mulch layer is a gift to the world. Since my inherited soil is truly exhausted, I’m spreading several inches over the bed areas before setting out my autumn starts.

Seeds Of Change

My grandkids are finally allowed to come over again, which nurtures my spirit though we must stay outside and wear masks. With several bins of craft supplies on the covered porch and a wide strip of linoleum on the wooden floor, they happily create toys, games, paintings, and assemblages that often include leaves, twigs, lichens and seed pods. Poppy seedheads are a prime favorite and yesterday they spent a happy hour collecting ripe pods and scattering the tiny seeds where they thought flowers would look pretty next spring. Columbine and Nigella seedheads were also dry enough to rattle (they know that means seed is ripe) so they scattered those around as well, waving the dry stalks like magic wands packed with promise of floral abundance. It feels important to introduce children to the rewards and pleasures of gardening, including the fun of free play among plants. There’s truth in the saying that we protect what we love, and kids who don’t freely experience the natural world are unlikely to grow up caring deeply about the planet in any but abstract ways.

Young or old, people whose outdoor experiences are limited to manicured parks and astroturf playgrounds are missing the vital elements of free play, seeing and learning about native and garden plants, watching birds, bees butterflies and critters going about their lives. As adults, we (or at least I) sometimes get so caught up in the productive aspects of gardening, whether in terms of weeding or harvesting, that we forget to pause to look and listen, to savor the sight of healthy foliage, flowers and fruit, and the sounds of happy bees and investigating birds. Right now, it feels like our country and indeed the world is at a crux point, a time when great change is possible. Though it isn’t given to everyone to be an agent of great change, all of us can actively work at passing along our skills and plant knowledge to younger generations. If you don’t have kids or grandkids of your own, borrow some! Take them outside and help them fall in love with the natural world. Show them flowers and fruit, show them birds and bees, frogs and fish. Then stand back and let them make their own discoveries, and let yourself be awestruck by every miraculous acorn or butterfly or seedpod.

Vinegars And Shrubs

If the tomatoes are ambling, nectarines and peaches, plums and blackberries are all racing from garden to table. Neighbors have gifted us with enough to make lots of jam and desserts, but I’m also making large supplies of fruit vinegars. Delicious in dressings or drizzled over sliced avocados or watermelon, tomatoes or lettuce, homemade fruit vinegars also make excellent shrubs, combinations of vinegars and fizzy water that can be further concocted into mixed drinks. Making them at home, you can avoid the cloying over-sweetness of commercial kinds, and it’s rewarding to combine fruits, or add spices or anything else that strikes your fancy. Around here, the top favorites include a single kind of fruit with the addition of a vanilla bean, cracked peppercorns, lemon peel, or even a cinnamon stick. Here’s the basic recipe and a few favorite variations to play with, but I encourage you to start with cider vinegar, which tastes and carries flavors far better than white vinegar (too harsh) or rice vinegar (too mild).

Basic Fruit Vinegar

2 cups cider vinegar
2 cups chopped fruit
3-4 tablespoons honey or sugar
1/3 cup water

Combine all ingredients in a sauce pan, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and cool, covered, then refrigerate for 12-24 hours. Strain and bottle. Makes about 2-1/2 cups.

Nectarine & Vanilla Vinegar

2 cups cider vinegar
2 cups chopped nectarines (about two)
3-4 tablespoons honey or sugar
1/3 cup water
1 vanilla bean, whole, lightly scored lengthwise

Combine all ingredients in a sauce pan, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and cool, covered, then refrigerate for 12-24 hours. Strain and bottle (I cut the vanilla bean in half and put half in each bottle). Makes about 2- 1/2 cups.

Plum & Pepper Vinegar

2 cups cider vinegar
2 cups chopped plums
3-4 tablespoons honey or sugar
1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon pink or green peppercorns

Combine all ingredients in a sauce pan, bring to a boil reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and cool, covered, then refrigerate for 12-24 hours. Strain and bottle, including half the peppercorns. Makes about 2-1/2 cups.

Posted in Annual Color, Care & Feeding, Climate Change, composting, fall/winter crops, Gardening With Children, Health & Wellbeing, Planting & Transplanting, Pollinators, Recipes, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living, Teaching Gardening, Vegan Recipes | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Heat And Light

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Ann Lovejoy
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My frog visitor chilling on the hottest day

Cooling Off When It Gets Too Hot

This weekend brought high heat to most of the West Coast, blasting people and plants with stressful temperatures and drying winds. A lot of critters were feeling the heat as well, from birds and bees to deer and bears. When I went out to water very early on Saturday, I was greeted with enthusiasm by a bevy of birds and even found a fine fat frog sitting up to her nose in my birdbath. It’s really just an old enameled bowl, plunked down in my miniscule “shade garden”, but it gets a lot of customers over the course of a day. Shade garden is a big name for a very small space; it’s merely a 60-foot by 10 inch strip on top of a retaining wall, yet it’s fascinating how much diversity such a seemingly inhospitable place can host. As an advocate of cramscaping, I’ve packed about 30 kinds of plants in there, from ferns and fuchsias to compact Pistachio hydrangeas and candelabra primulas, Chinese and Himalayan Impatiens, Disporum longistylum and Podophyllum difforme, hardy cyclamen and snowdrops, even some Solomon’s Seal. Birds and bugs and bees are common visitors, and now I’ve got a frog.

As an indicator species, I’m delighted that she is making her summer home with me. It means that despite the tiny size of my garden overall and the ridiculously teeny shade garden, there’s enough food and shelter for her here. No toxic pesticides, of course (!). Since our cats are strictly indoor critters with their own lovely catio/greenhouse/sunroom, she has only natural predators like crows and snakes, which so far haven’t made their way into the sheltered, partially covered shade garden. It’s a very small world, but perhaps it’s enough. I’ve added a nice smooth rock for her to rest on, and I’ll certainly be sure to keep the birdbath bowl just full enough so she can keep her head above water and stay cool when the heat is on.

Watering Well In Heat

Wise gardeners try to water deeply before a projected heat wave arrives. Containers especially are vulnerable to drying out fast on hot, windy days so if at all possible, set them in deep saucers. Once dried out, container plantings can be tricky to water well, since dry potting soil shrinks and lets water slide away without wetting soil thoroughly. Saucers catch the runoff and let it be slowly absorbed. Annuals are especially vulnerable to problems if allowed to dry out; tomatoes are apt to crack or get blossom end rot, while basil, cilantro, lettuce and spinach will bolt or die in despair. Naturally enough, different plants have different watering requirements as well, which can be tricky to keep in mind when watering before heat. Those squash and potatoes are still growing well, so they need consistent moisture, but oops, the onions and garlic are starting to dry out and don’t want more water at all. A friend confessed that she got so worked up about watering wrong as the temperature kept rising that she burst into tears, went inside, and took a nap. Good idea! When worry leaves us frenzied, it’s time to slow down.

Yes, watering methods vary in efficiency and wastefulness, but really, when the heat is on it’s more important to get the water to the plant than to worry about doing it right. It’s best to water early in the day, but if you can’t, then water when you can. Ideally, we’d all be using drip irrigation systems, but that’s not always practical or possible. If the only way you can water is by hand, make it a meditation and take it slowly. If too many plants are flagging and you’re feeling the pressure, water everyone lightly then go back again and again, counting slowly to 60 or 100 each time. At first, the water may pool up, but with repeated visits, the soil crust will soften, allowing the water to penetrate deeply. Check back later in the day, when the sun is off flagging plants, and see if they perk back up. If so, they’re actually hydrated enough but are flagging as a way to shed heat and reduce sun exposure.

Stay Cool And Keep Your Head

Like my neighborly frog, I’m trying to stay cool these days, both physically and emotionally. As each day’s news brings fresh shocks and shenanigans, many of us are stressed to the breaking point. Like my flustered friend, many, perhaps most of us are already so anxious and worried that any little thing can trigger impulsive reactions that are rarely helpful. Not too surprisingly, I’ve really been noticing this lately as I try to encourage thoughtful conversations about all sorts of things from community budgets to racism and white privilege. Some folks have suggested that perhaps this isn’t the best time to try to have uncomfortable conversations but it seems to me that it’s great; when we are already uncomfortable, we may be more aware of our deep feelings than when everything is going along just fine. (Remember that feeling? Barely?) And maybe it’s like watering on a hot day; do a little, move on, circle back and do a little more. There’s lots of ground to cover and the crustiness may be softening between visits.

So I’m interested in having important if uncomfortable conversations. Apparently for many people the openness to having meaningful conversations peaks in the young-adult years and dwindles as life tumbles us around. Apparently too, attending a lecture by an expert feels safer and less vulnerable than exploring our own ideas and opinions with others who might possibly disagree or even call us out on muddled or mistaken thinking. I miss them, though. I miss talking, listening, pondering, imagining with someone or several someones. With so many hot issues seething and bubbling up right now, I’m sadly noticing even less conversation and a lot more blaming/shaming and attacking. It’s especially counter-productive when people who are in agreement about many major issues tear each other apart over secondary or even minor ones. If we want healing for our nation, our community, our families, ourselves, let’s practice our conversational skills together.

How To Know A Conversation

While poking around on the internet, I found a very helpful short article about recognizing when we are having a conversation and when we are actually not. Please give it a read and, you know, let’s talk about it. Please. Let’s slow down, cool off, and talk.

View at Medium.com

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Beware Invasive Bugs

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Ann Lovejoy
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Southern Green Stink Bugs

Stink Bugs And Stinking Thinking

Last week I found what turned out to be invasive Southern Green Stink Bugs in the garden and now I can’t get them put of my mind; they seem like a perfect metaphor for the state of the nation and perhaps the world. As summer rolls on, I’ve been watching the way each day’s fresh new horrors pile up, obscuring those that occurred a month or two ago. The relentless arrival of more bad news every single day feels like a tactic designed to keep us anxious and enraged. The flood of evil takes our minds off pushing for real change as each successive concern washes away the previous ones. It feels important to stop and add things up, looking for core issues. It’s not difficult to find them, since most relate to racism, white supremacists, the war on the poor, kleptocracy, and/or the war on the environment. What these in turn boil down to is an old, old truth: the love of money really is the root of all evil. Read power for money and it all makes sense. When money is power, addictive wealth hoarding becomes an overwhelming obsession that kills off every spark of human decency and compassion. People in power get hooked and anyone or anything that interferes with their accumulation of more more more is seen as an obstacle to be removed, stripped of value. That thinking just stinks in my spirit, like the stink of cancerous lesions or rotting compost that’s not getting enough air.

I’ve been watching with dismay as a flood of new affronts push the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor out of the news and the Black Lives Matter movement out of America’s awareness. Even the recent release of the bodycam footage of George Floyd’s murder barely made a ripple in mainstream media and that’s no accident. The ongoing peaceful BLM protests in Portland and elsewhere get little coverage, though any violence is widely reported. Back in July (seems like years ago), there was concern that the largely white Wall of Moms and Dads With Leafblowers brigades were taking attention off the essential BLM message. I wondered about that too, but I also saw that, often for the first time, middle class white people who considered themselves progressive and not racist were directly experiencing and/or seeing on all kinds of social media the vicious treatment by the police, treatment that’s all too familiar to Black, Indigenous and People of Color. I heard many stories of wake up calls from folks who suddenly got a tiny, momentary glimpse of what it’s like not to have automatic White Privilege. The shock! The outrage! I’ve got very mixed feelings about this displacement, yet I’m also feeling that anything that acts as a significant and lasting wake up call to middle class white America is valuable and ultimately helpful. For a lot of us not-racist white folks, becoming actively anti-racist is clarifying and energizing. If it’s not a comfortable process, it is most definitely salutary.

Five Calls, Five Minutes

Wake up calls are especially enriching if they lead us to positive action. With so much to be worried, frightened and/or enraged about, it’s easy to let the floods of badness overwhelm our spirits. Depression and anxiety are at all time highs in America, and not just because the pandemic is warping our world. With more down time, many of us get caught up in obsessive news-following (who, me?), which is not designed to make us feel peaceful or powerful. One excellent way to deal with the multitude of issues is to take them just a few at a time. Among the best tools I know of for making sure that our protests and concerns are heard by people who can do something about them is Five Calls. This volunteer organization provides a full palette of important current issues from which to pick and choose. When you select a topic, you’ll get contact information for relevant elected officials as well as thoroughly researched scripts for you to follow or alter to suit your own ideas. I like the scripts myself, as I tend to choke up and start crying when I try to talk about SO MANY THINGS these days.

Calling works because all calls to elected officials are tracked by staffers, who record both the messages and the number of callers. It’s been amply demonstrated that a flood of angry callers can change the their thinking and change their vote. Also, the right has long established paid phone banks to fight against any and all progressive legislature and action, so it takes equal or more pressure to balance out the haters. Each call takes about a minute, so you can get them done with your morning coffee and feel like you are taking positive action, not just passively fuming.

To learn more and/or sign up for the app, follow this link:
https://5calls.org/

About Those Stink Bugs

If you’re freaking out about Asian Giant Hornets, bee killers that pack a bullet-like sting, calm down. So far, only a few have been found near the Canadian Border (Blaine and Custer), but Washington State Department of Agriculture entomologists are asking us to take pictures and report any possible examples. They are NOT asking us to kill bumblebees; sadly, over-enthusiastic folks have been waging war on the wrong insect, killing valuable, gentle bees that are prime pollinators. However, please DO be on the watch for Southern Green Stink Bugs (Nezara viridula), bright green, shield-shaped insects that develop black and white spots on their bottom half as they mature. I recently found some of these admittedly beautiful bugs on Bainbridge Island. When ID’d on line, I discovered that they are also being tracked by the WSDA as recent and worrisome invasive pests for farmers as well as gardeners.

I sent my pictures to Chris Looney, a WSDA entomologist, who confirmed the identification. When I asked Dr. Looney what to do about them, he suggested tossing them in a bucket of soapy water; of course you can also stomp them, but they aren’t called stink bugs for nothing. A few days later, I took a bucket of soapy water back to the bugs’ site and found that the handful I’d originally seen had produced scads of tiny babies, glossy black with bright white spots. Yikes! It took me an hour to trim back all the plants they were now on and vigorously shake the stems over the nearby sidewalk. This probably odd appearing activity prompted quite a few passersby to stop and ask me what the heck I was doing to those poor weeds. When I showed them the insects, they mostly squirmed and left rather abruptly. As I whacked the leafy stems, the bugs young and old fell of and scurried about and into the soapy water they went. Sadly, I’m very sure that I missed at least a few, which fell into the compost mulch in the beds.

Babies and Mamas

If you find any of these invasive bugs in Washington State, please report them here: invasivespecies.wa.gov/report.shtml

In Oregon and California, contact your State Department of Agriculture to report invasive bugs.

Don’t Dawdle, Act Now

Had I known in time what they were, I could have nipped this local invasion in the egg. Sadly, it took me a few days to go back and get pictures, then figure out where to send them. After getting a response, it took a couple more days before I found the time to deal with the stinky pests. I hate to think my dawdling may have costly repercussions but of course it certainly could. Acting quickly seems more difficult these days, as the pandemic, social distancing, and self isolating keeps our overloaded brains too busy to think clearly and act decisively. This morning, however, I read a news item that made me determined to get my act together. It was a poignant and painful first-person story from a Black woman who was sitting in a public outdoor space, looking at her phone, when a car pulled up and the driver yelled a racist epithet. It was clearly aimed at her, since she was the only Black person in sight. The white people around her, young, old, male, female, all totally ignored the driver’s abusive comment.

Nobody spoke up. Nobody said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” Nobody said, “That must feel terrible.” Nobody said, “What a horrible experience for you; it felt horrible to me too.” Nobody said a word or even gave her a sympathetic look. Where did this happen? When? It happened right here, today and yesterday and the day before. It happened right here, right now. Here’s my take away from this true story: May I never ignore an opportunity to speak up in support of anyone who is being abused or bullied. Never.

 

Posted in Health & Wellbeing, Hoarding, pests and pesticides, Pollinators, Social Justice, Sustainable Living | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments