IN MEMORY OF CLEVER GRANNIES
by Robin Wheeler, Owner, Edible Landscapes

My imaginary friend Jim, who is in oil exploration, is rubbing his hands together again. Winter is coming, and think of all the fuel we’ll need to bring all our winter foods to us! He’s pretty excited.

In the “olden” days, our grannies grew their own food, and chose plants they could dig up through the snow (like beets, parsnips, cabbage and potatoes) or which kept well on shelves, like squash, onions, garlic and apples. Trying to live like this made people have to “think” and “plan”, which was a bit tiring, but the blue smoke that came out of their ears as a result of this process was a much more sustainable by-product than the new one that comes out of the trucks that feed us now.

It’s hard to go back to the olden days, (But, Aunt Em … I want to go home) but we can imitate parts of it by planning to grow more of these foods in our gardens, and by buying from our neighbours and from the Farmers Markets to maintain a “local foods” mandate. Unfortunately, our best intentions will go awry when we try to store our produce into the winter, because our vegetables are not properly “cured”, and might rot before we can eat them. Now, without digressing into all the possible jokes that “curing” a vegetable incites, I will tell you that it is actually a process that signals a plant to retain moisture – that dry times are a’commin and a thick skin is mandatory. If you give even a vegetable enough notice that it has to store water for a long time, it will do so, even though its human counterparts are incapable of the same behaviour. But I will not go there.

Mostly, since veggies are simple folk, the whole curing process consists of slowly drying them over a week or so, out of the rain and dew. For onions, garlic and shallots pull the plants out after the tops have died down, and leave them on the soil for at least a whole, sunny day, turning at least once. I think the sun kills certain soil borne bacteria that could affect them later. Then move them out of the dew (under a deck?) to somewhere where the late summer heat will continue to dry them for at least a week. Stash your garlic and onion family in small amounts in a cool but dry spot. My garlic lasted longest on the top shelf of a cool cupboard, in several small paper bags.

To cure potatoes, pick them in the heat of the day when the soil is dry, dust the soil off them, separate out the greenish ones for replanting, and find a darkish, dry, warm place around your home. Maybe it’s at the back of a shed, or under the deck. Spread your tators on paper or a cloth and continue your drying process for about a week. Check again for green ones, then divide the potatoes into small paper bags and put them somewhere cool, dark and humid, like low down in an outer wall closet.

Squash are wonderful veggies and undamaged ones will keep for months, but they need to be left on the vine and in the sun for as long as possible before you pick them to keep this way. If you buy yours from the market, put it out in the sun again during the day, or keep it on a warm windowsill, and turn it occasionally. It can live there until you eat it, or put it on a high shelf where the air is dry. If it gets damp, cold or dark it will begin to rot. When it starts to show mould, wipe it off, and eat that squash right away.

But that’s later. The other hoarding gestures that you can do at home are to snip off herbs during a dry day (rosemary, the mints, sage clumps) and dry them upside down for winter, and to pull seed heads of flowers you liked, and any remaining bean and pea seeds for drying. You can replant the flower seeds, or give them away, and you can save the beans or dry them for winter soup. Even a tiny amount of home dried beans, and just a couple of well-cured garlic can ease the unconscious angst of slipping into a new season unprepared. And you can always do more next year.

Your grandmother would be proud of you for preserving food without the use of fossil fuels, but Jim will be a little choked. We will bother Jim even more in the next issue of Momentum, when we look at ways to grow plants such as winter greens, that would otherwise take lots of fossil fuels to bring to us. Nyah hah hah!!!!

Sidebar

Low jigajoule jam
This is the quickest, most energy efficient way I have found to make blackberry jam.
Pick your berries well away from car-access roadways, because that yucky exhaust sticks to everything. You can tell a bramble berry is ripe because it will come off easily with a gentle tug. Pick only the ripest ones to cut down on sugar use later, but while you’re there, pick a good handful of unripe berries as well. They contain the most pectin and will help your jam to gel.

Toss your berries into a big, clean cooking pot with a splash of water and begin to cook them on medium heat for a few minutes until they begin to boil down. Mash them with a potato masher, and when you see fluid collecting on the bottom on the pot, drain it off, either by dumping the whole works through a sieve, or by carefully using a pot lid. Removing this fluid saves cooking it off with heat, and you can use the juice to drink or toss over ice cream. Put your strained berries back into the pot, turn the heat up slightly, and add almost half your bulk of your choice of sweeteners. (For 4 cups of berries, try up to two cups of sweetener). It sounds like a lot, but is less than recommended in the cookbooks! Exact amounts are hard to dictate since berry sweetness will differ, and so will personal tastes. Remember that when your jam is cool, it will not taste as sweet as it did when it was warm, and let that be your guide.

As for the sweeteners, chose between honey, berry sugar, organic cane sugar, or, for that old fashioned flavour, good ol’ “scrape it off the concrete floor with the rat poo” white death. Let your jam cook for several minutes with the sweetener, tasting as you go with a piece of freshly buttered toast, and then dump the finished product ceremoniously into clean, sterilized jars. Let it cool, and if you’re not eating it right away, pour melted wax over the top. If your idea of the word “sterilized” means rinsing the jar under hot water, store the jam in the fridge for extra protection.

Have that yummy summer taste for the dead of winter!

Ps – You can also evaporate off the liquid using good old sunlight, but the health department will get me for telling you about it.

Robin Wheeler is the owner of Edible Landscaping and author of the Gardening Book Gardening for the Faint of Heart.