My garden is winding down. I’ve started pulling tomato plants that are in my way, leaving only the ones that have tomatoes that have a chance to ripen in the next couple of weeks, or ones with tomatoes big enough to use green.
The summer squash quit producing a month ago, and the winter squash vines are dying back on their own. I’m only picking one type of green beans for fresh eating, and letting all the rest dry for winter soups. Only the hardiest greens are left, and I just canned the second to last row of beets. The rest I’ll leave a little longer, and pick them as I need them for grated beets in salad or roasted beets with chicken. The kale and chard are going strong, and the carrots, leeks and parsnips get left in the ground until a frost makes them sweeter. The raspberries and ground cherries will go until the first good frost, then they will be finished, and their beds ready to be cleaned up and prepared for the winter.
The last group of meat chicks have left the green house, and I cobbled together a little pen for them. My son-in-law brought home some heavy woven wire caging from his work. They had been used to make cages around some machinery, but were no longer needed. They are all different sizes and shapes, and really hard to cut, even with my trusty Sawzall. I did cut some pieces to be all the same length, and bent them to fit inside a garden bed. I put them together with zip ties so they can be taken apart and moved easily. Together they make a strong arch in the bed, perfect for containing 15 smallish chickens. A blow-up camping mattress with an irreparable hole covers about half the tunnel, so the chicks have a place to be out of the rain, and under cover when they want. It also protects the heat lamp from the weather. On these chilly nights, the chicks enjoy the extra warmth.
As I clear out a garden bed, the chicks in their pen move in, eating all the little (and big) weeds, any leftover vegetable plants or fruit, and bugs, grubs and creepy crawlies in the top couple inches of soil. By the time the bed is clean of weeds and bugs, the chicks will have made a nice layer of fertilizer over the whole thing, because meat chicks are champion poopers. When they are moved on to the next bed, I’ll cover the clean and pooped-on bed with a heaping layer of fallen leaves to rest and renew itself over the winter. My neighbor already has brought over a large pile of leaves and grass and piled it near the garden for me. It makes me laugh, because he keeps thanking me for taking it off his hands, as if I was doing him a favor!
But even though the garden is producing less, there is still food to gather. In my tiny woods, wild grape vines hang from the trees, and right now they are laden with sour ripening berries. The birds like them as much as I do, so I am rushing to get to the bunches before them. I wash them and cook the grapes, and strain the juice to make wild grape jelly. Last year, my big basket full of fruit made 8 half-pints of jelly, with the skins and seeds going to the chickens. That was enough jelly for us, to round out the ground cherry, peach, and plum preserves and apple butter.
My daughter and granddaughter like to sneak off to play in the woods on these gorgeous early fall days, and they come home with purple mouths from eating the grapes, but they are sour and have big seeds, so they don’t eat too many. Once my jelly is made, the birds can have the rest.
Our summer-long drought seems to have finally broken, and we’ve gotten a few days of much needed rain. The pasture is blooming with late flowers we planted for our pollinator grant.
The rain has prodded the fall mushrooms to life, and on warm days, puffball mushrooms appear in our field, and grow to huge sizes in a day. While puffballs are not my favorite edible mushroom, they are fun to gather and cook. One large one can serve all of us. They have the texture of soft tofu, so I use them in similar ways. They make a nice cream of mushroom soup, and puffball slices freeze well. My daughter likes puffballs battered and fried, but the texture is so much like whipped egg whites that they fall apart during frying if I’m not careful. (When gathering mushrooms, be very careful. Some of them are very, very poisonous. **Updated information: Even the puffball has a mushroom that can be mistaken for it. Be sure your puffball isn’t actually a pigskin mushroom. It should be smooth and white throughout, with no yellow or black flesh at all.)**
Along the fence row on my neighbor’s side grows sunchokes, or jerusalem artichokes. My neighbor hates them because they take over his pasture if he’s not careful. I go and dig them out each fall, after the greens have died back. He thinks I’m doing him a favor when I dig them up, but I just enjoy getting a couple meals of the roasted tubers.
I soak them, and scrub them, and any too small to fuss with go to the pigs, who think they are a great treat. I try to get every root, but each year the neighbor’s pasture near the fence has the cheerful yellow flowers shoot up in the summer, just as many as before. They don’t grow on my side, because I let the pigs dig them out in the spring, when the piglets are tiny and cute, and willing to follow me around outside their pen. They love to dig up each root. I’ve offered to let them root on his side of the fence, but he says he’d rather not. That’s fine with me, because then I get sunchokes in the fall. I roast the cleaned and unpeeled tubers in butter or bacon fat along with carrots and parsnips. So, so good!
On the other side of our little village, the creek that runs at the end of my property crosses underneath the road. At that place there is a little brambly area that isn’t farmed. The couple that own the land allow me to go there and pick some of the plants there— jewelweed in the summer, and elderberries in the fall.
Usually I can get a bucket full of the berry clusters. These get made into a light syrup that is good for warding off viruses. It might not actually work any better than a placebo, but, like a cup of warm tea and some chicken soup, the act of giving it shows love and care.
I know where the local oak trees that have have acorns that are easy to soak and use, and I make a mental note of bright gold asparagus ferns in country road ditches. If I can, I’ll dig up some cattail roots before it freezes, since I found some growing by a pond that doesn’t appear to get agricultural run-off, and the owner doesn’t mind if I take some. I think wild food foraging satisfies that hunter-gatherer part of me. That little primal call that only whispers to me most of the year is louder this time of year, and I have the time to indulge it, and let it connect me to the land, and taste things that my ancestors enjoyed.