Preserving

Preserving

Posted by Heather Harris

June is hands down my favorite month. School is out, summer is in, the vegetables are growing, and fruit is ready to be jammed! It also used to be Portland dining month, but someone must have decided that was just overdoing it, and moved it to miserable March this year. After all, who needs an incentive to venture into town on a warm night and taste all of the local produce bursting out of the industrial chic cafes in June? But March? I'm thinking I might need a little help to get me to try the beet and parsnip confit.

But thank goodness, there is this beautiful thing called preserving, which means I can enjoy a lovely strawberry jam in March (if I managed not to gobble it all up by mid-July), almost as delicious as eating a fresh berry in June. Then I can bypass the early spring radish steak special altogether!

June is only half over and I already have cherries plucked from the yard, Rainier's snatched from a roadside stand on the Puget Sound, apricots and jalapenos from the grocery store, and strawberries the kids and I
picked at a local farm, all lovingly sweetened and pickled lining the shelves of our pantry. And my rhubarb was actually beefy enough after four years of cajoling to harvest and mix in with the strawberry jam! The vegetable garden is currently overflowing with kale, but kale marmalade doesn't sound too appetizing. You'll have to wait for Portland Dining Month 2015 for that treat.

An afternoon of canning can leave you a bit parched though, so I have two little recipes below without measurements (this is a gardening blog, not a cooking one) to refresh you after a hot, sweaty, and curse-filled day of canning, using the leftovers stuck with jam glue to your countertops. Just scrape it off and enjoy! Happy preserving!

God-jam Strawberry Vodka and Tonic

Muddle a few over-ripe strawberries in a tall glass with some mint (or whatever edible greenage you have laying around)

Pour on some vodka, amount depends on how the canning went. (Also refreshing without vodka, but who's day of canning went that well?)

Stir in a little lemonade concentrate.

Toss in some ice and top off with tonic.


Cherry Massacre (Very similar to above recipe)

Muddle those last few pitted cherries in syrup that you couldn't quite cram into the last jar with some mint or other greenage etc. in a tall glass.

Pour on some tequila (see how I mixed it up there!) Again, amount depends...

Stir in some leftover sugar syrup.

Put in some ice and top off with tonic.

Buried Roots

Buried Roots

Posted by Heather Harris

I planted bare root strawberries last weekend. Last weekend it was a sunny 51 degrees. Last weekend I didn't even have a coat on. Last weekend I thought, "This is the loveliest winter we've ever had. A gardener's dream!"  Today there are three inches of snow squatting on top of those delicate, naked little roots, mocking me and my naivete.

During all assumed planting disasters, I turn to the Internet. I do not do this when I'm actually planting. Why stop and consult the experts when there are cute little bundles of strawberry plants ready to be planted? How hard could it be? No, it is only when impending doom is before me that I decide to look up what I was supposed to have done before lovingly tucking the roots into the ground for burial.

This time I discovered that no one knows what they're doing. There was so much contradicting information on the proper way to plant bare root strawberries that I now know less than I did when I began. Soak the roots, don't soak the roots. Plant within 48 hours of getting the plants, wait till March. Trim the roots before planting, don't trim the roots. Mix in fifty-five soil amendments, leave the soil alone. So I did what all of us do when seeking a more informed opinion: I only looked at the facts that confirmed what I thought to begin with.

1. Plant the bare root strawberries right away. Check.

2. Make a hole a little bigger than the roots and leave the crown above the soil. Check.

3. Space them fourteen inches apart. Check ( Although I didn't measure it. Let's be real.)

4. Plant them in a raised bed. Check.

5. Plant local varieties. Tristars and Hoods, Check.

6.  Bare root plants can take alternating freezing and snow cover after planting. Hooray!

It turns out I'm an amazingly intuitive gardener! Just follow these steps, and I'm sure your bare root strawberries will turn out perfectly. And if not, just go look at someone else's blog and I'm sure you'll find the list you're looking for.