Seeds of Change

This is, quite possibly, my favorite time of year.  Now that most things are finished growing (including the weeds), most of the harvest has taken place except for my tomato plants (which seem to have some delusion of immortality this year and persist in staying green on the vine for weeks), and life settles down into the dull roar of trying to get the farm ready for winter.  But there is one job left to be done....picking out and saving next year's garden.

As a kid,  I always thought that seeds needed to be purchased every year.  It was just what we did each spring - looked at the seed catalog and either ordered them or picked them up at the local do-it-yourself store, and while this always seemed to work, it never dawned on me that nature does a pretty good job of doing this for herself.

Almost everything in the garden produces a seed of one type or another that contains within it all the genetic information to pass on to the next generation of seeds.  Amazingly packaged into a tiny capsule that will often survive through a harsh winter and burst forth in the spring with no more than a little coaxing from sun and rain.  What astounds me even more is how, over the course of the last eight years, I have watched many of the species of plants that I like to grow, adapt themselves to this environment and take hold.  Nature's ability to adapt and survive amazes me.  Take the Impatient for example:  Most of these brightly colored, shade loving flowers are hybrids that originated in Africa - and it is a lot warmer in Africa than it is here so they are not expected to survive even a light frost - and yet, I have found that a few of my Impatient plants that I planted two years ago formed seeds that were able to reproduce viable plants and, what's more, they can now overwinter in an Iowa winter. 

My marigolds have literally taken over the gardens and though I curse them in the spring when they appear everywhere, I am happy to have them around at this time of year because they are hardy and can stand up to these chilly nights.  I used to collect these seeds, but now I just let them seed themselves and then I move them in the spring to the places that I want them.

Finding the seeds of any plant is typically not to difficult.  Peas and beans are easy, but I always chuckle in the spring when we are planting them and one of my kids stops and peers at the seed in their hands and says, "Hey mom, these look just like the peas we eat."  The most difficult thing I have found with peas and beans is the importance of not eating all of them - some have to be saved back for seed and usually it is best to pick the nicest looking of the plants to save.

Lettuce can be a bit more difficult to determine what is the seed, but that is only because we don't allow the lettuce plant to typically live out its entire life cycle - we eat it in its young and tender teenage stage.  After it gets too bitter to eat and starts to bolt, it will then form a weird looking flower and then those start to go to seed - save those and you will have lettuce seeds for next year.

Sometimes figuring out where the seed is on a flower takes a little time and observation.  So many gardeners will tell you to "dead head" things that are no longer blooming, which is fine but then you often miss out on the seeds.  Personally, I think this is a bit of marketing on the part of the nurseries that grow flowers - they would rather people didn't get their own seeds because then it cuts in on their business so they tell us to do things like remove spent flowers.  Yes, it makes your flowers look prettier, but then they don't reproduce, and there are several plants that have fairly interesting looking seed pods that you would otherwise miss if you cut them off as instructed.

 There are many horticulturists that will tell you that many of the flowers we buy, or seeds we buy are hybrids and will not produce "true" seeds, and this is entirely true.....the first few years.  But, what I have discovered, often through benign neglect, is that flowers and plants, if given half a chance, will revert back to a more natural variety that does produce seeds true to form.  I am often reminded of the line in Jurassic Park when Malcolm says to the scientists, "Life finds a way" and he is entirely correct.

So, I meander around the garden and pick a handful or two of seeds off of the flowers, or I cut open the nicest looking tomato and, before throwing it in the pot, I scoop out a few hundred seeds for next year.  Some of the plants I simply watch ripen and dry and then shake the seeds out where I want them next year and others I simply let fall and plan on moving them to a new location after they sprout. 



A seed is both a plant's last and final hurrah before being annihilated by winter, and it's boundless hope for the future.  It will have absolutely no knowledge of whether or not what it produced will ever come to fruition, but it produces them just the same.  And I collect them.  I am the bridge to the future for many plants - keeping them warm and dry through the cold winter months and them scattering them in the spring to start over.  And they, in their turn, take care of me and provide me with a bridge to my future in the form of food. 

There have been times, when stuck indoors studying for genetics tests, when I have wondered how Gregor Mendel, the Austrian Monk that established the basics for genetics, could have spent countless days and seasons watching pea plants.....now I understand.

The Better Half

Change is hard. Anytime something changes, even for the good, it causes stress in our lives and stress leads to any number of health problems. There have been several changes lately, albeit small ones, but changes none-the-less and my health is taking a hit.

School started for all the kids, including our youngest, which means that the house is now unusually empty whereas it used to hum with the activities of a small girl. My business is growing - slowly - but the changes that have come about from that will take a while to settle out into a more normal routine. My husband has started taking on more "side jobs" as though the full time maintenance of the farm wasn't quite enough to do....there have been a lot of small and, technically, good changes. But I am still tapped out. Kids brought home "the crud" from school - that first wave of viruses that they all seem to pass around and introduce to one another almost as fast as they introduce themselves to their peers. And, to top it all off, at some point in the last four days I have internalized all my stress and placed it in a nice sore knot in my neck which no longer allows me to turn to look at anything on my left. I try to keep telling myself that, maybe with a twenty minute nap, all things will be improved and I will have the energy to go out and actually accomplish something....anything.

So far, it hasn't worked.

But, thankfully, there is another person that lives with me and seems to have a supply never ending energy - my better half.  We balance each other out most of the time - I'm full of energy when he is at a low point and vice verse, but lately he has definitely been carrying the "home front" load that seems to totally put me over the edge.  With all that still needs to be done on the farm before the snow flies, we have had to select which projects to tackle and then try to take them on together.  "Many hands make light work"....unfortunately due to school projects and activities, the "many hands" are simply his and mine.  The focus of this last weekend was the grapes. 

Five years ago I ordered and planted what were supposed to be "seedless" grapes - not sure where it got screwed up, but every grape that grows on the arbor has seeds in it. What we didn't expect, however, is that they are some of the most flavorful grapes I have ever tasted.  After spending the early summer picking Japanese beetles off them and attempting to cover them when they spray the fields with Round Up, we finally get to harvest.  I trudged along with Keith, carrying the bushel basket and we set to work picking.  Before we were 1/4 the way through the row we realized that we were in for a lot of grape.

One bushel basket, two five gallon buckets and four large bowls later we had finally picked all the grapes.  Roughly 50 pounds came off our four smallish grape vines.  Then the real work began.  I try not to, but I end up counting how many times I have to touch each fruit of vegetable on the way to processing it - once to pick it, once to pull it off the stem, another time to clean it, and then crushing.  For each of those 50 pounds of grapes, each grape was touched approximately 4 times, and that doesn't even take into consideration that then you cook them, strain them, strain them again, mix it with sugar and boil it, put it in sterilized glass jars and then boil it again.  Then we take the second straining left overs, which is the pulp of the grape minus the skin and seed, and mix that with sugar and cook it on a cookie sheet to make fruit leathers.  This is a project that takes all weekend with two people working full time.  17 pints of jelly, 11 cups of jelly, 4 quarts of juice, 7 pints of jam, and 5 cookie-sheet sized fruit leathers later we were finally finished.

Don't get me wrong, I love it that in the middle of winter I will be able to take a quart of concentrated Concord grape juice off the shelf and mix up home grown grape juice for the kids, or eat a fruit leather while out for a hike in the woods, or spread a thick layer of jelly on a piece of bread, but right at this time of year, with a cold and a wicked pain in the neck, it is hard to be enthusiastic about the whole process.  We finished the dark purple, sticky sweet mess on Monday night at approximately 10:30 pm and then I headed off to work on Tuesday. 

On Wednesday....we went and picked apples....approximately #140 pounds of them, that, thanks only to the un-ending energy of my spouse, will be processed into quart after quart of beautiful, tasty applesauce.  Meanwhile, I take on the challenge of the tomatoes and processing as many of them as possible into marinara, pizza sauce and frozen tomatoes which will provide a winter's worth of spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce and chili, if we are lucky...and if my energy holds out.

Little Garden of Horrors

I'm not entirely sure when it happened, but at some point in the last month I completely lost all control of the garden.  The hot weather and humidity, while not good for the crops, apparently has no effect on the weeds. The spring always starts with the best of intentions to keep it well organized and weeded, but I have now come to realize that the weeds have become so thick that I will have to mow them down just to be able to get to the garden gate, much less through it.  Yesterday, while pulling weeds fiercely determined to find the ground under all the nightshade and crab grass, I unearthed a shovel that the weeds had absconded with - and not a "hand shovel" a full sized shovel!  It has become a bit of a jungle out there, and not in a good way.

 I start to envision being tripped up by the sweet potato vines and quietly covered over and devoured like some garden horror flick.  The tomatoes have out-grown their cages and are now about six feet tall and sprawling all over the ground.  My son and I tackled them yesterday and tied up the trailing vines as best as we could - they tend to get a little unruly at this stage.  I had him help me because, quite frankly, I was almost afraid of taking on that job by myself - I need someone to run for help after they overwhelm me.  Two hours and 18 tomato plants later, we emerged covered in tomato "dust" - the greenish/yellow iridescent pollen that made us both look like green wood nymphs and with hands so green they appeared black.  One project down....two million more to take on. 

Not only are the weeds and plants completely out of control, but the list of "to do" things becomes increasingly longer with more and more things to harvest and store. 

• The potatoes are still to be dug, dried, and then stored. 
• The peppers need to be harvested and then chopped and frozen, or grilled and then frozen. 
• The beans are to be picked, shelled, dried and stored. 
• The herbs - cut, dry, store. 
•  Tomatoes - harvested, processed either by making into marinara, salsa, pizza sauce, or frozen. 
• Strawberry patch - that just needs a good weeding and mulching so it is ready for next spring. 
•  Lettuce - almost time to plant a few more rounds now that it is cooling off a little again. 
• Sunflowers - seeds to be harvested, dried, brined and roasted. 

Just typing that list makes me tired and desperate for a nap.  I always think of Spring as such a busy time, but in all honesty fall is ten times worse in so many ways - why do I always forget that?  Maybe fall harvest is like child birth....there is something inherently built in our psyche that makes us forget how awful it was so that we will somehow be tricked into doing it again, and only as the pains of labor start does the memory come back.

I bought myself a present this year in preparation for the harvesting, freezing, processing, canning, storing nightmare that I am in building up to- a food processor.  If there is anything that takes a ton of time, it is all the chopping.  Most of the time I have done it manually, but when my typically marinara recipe starts by saying, "chop three large onions" and I would stand over a cutting board crying my eyes out for 40 minutes, well suffice it to say, it was never the highlight of the day.  The one that I purchased isn't very big, but it does the job and my kids fight over being the ones to push down the handle and chop the food.  I wonder how long that will last?

I am sure that at some point - probably into my thirtieth quart of marinara, I will stop caring about the weeds and the horrors that live in my garden and I will completely let it go to pot, venturing down there only to nab whatever produce I can before it is engulfed by the other viney vegetation.  Then I will stand on the porch and simply long for the first hard frost to kill it off and when that happens, then.....then I will take a nap.