5.14.2012

Preservation Proclamation

Friday evening I made a big pot of sorrel and potato soup from MizTrail's Easy Growing. It was excellent! Part of the issue with growing non-traditional honky foods is that I have to figure out a way to cook them and use them. Especially when they start coming in by the truck load. Note to self: having 3 sorrel plants for a family of 3 is more than plenty. Thanks in part to the potatoes, the soup was filling enough that it provided dinner for 2 (Mabel wasn't feeling experimental that night), Saturday's lunch for me, and a big enough batch for the freezer that we'll have dinner another night.



I spent a couple hours in the community garden on Saturday morning, first teaching a class (of 2!), then attacking the weeds* that had taken over. Currently the garden consists of 20 mounded rows, each 8' wide and 25' long. We've consistently had 3 people there working on Saturdays and 2 stalwarts who make it out a couple times during the week. Suffice to say, the uprooting of weeds has been much slower than the growth of new ones.


I brought some clear plastic to the garden to begin solarizing a couple of the beds. In return, I came home with a plastic grocery bag full of lamb's quarters, a giant cilantro plant that went to seed, and a bin of red wrigglers. Later in the afternoon I gave my own herb garden some TLC by giving one of the rosemary bushes a trim, uprooting and drying catnip (for our own use as tea), and dividing a few of my plants-gone -wild in preparation of unloading (errr...) giving them away.


This is actually a different batch of pesto than the cilantro pesto I made, 
but what can I say, it's Monday and I'm lazy.
To recap: we're now well stocked on rosemary infused oil, rosemary balsamic vinegar, cilantro oil, cilantro pesto, and coriander. I'm still deciding what to do with the lamb's quarters, we have a ton of lettuce to go through before I get to them.

All of this jabber is to get to the point of what my Mother's Day consisted of: preserving. Whether keeping herbs in oil, vinegar, or finding a way to freeze them, I've already got a nice stockpile and the summer growing season hasn't really started!



*Most of these weeds are edible, but we want more mainstream crops producing food for Friendship Trays.

1 comment:

Misti said...

Foraging seems to be making the rounds of blogs lately...I'm definitely interested but probably not going to pursue it anytime soon.

hmmm, freezing pesto in cubes, good idea.

One thing I have noticed with a garden is how much food you really need, and it isn't much at all!