Let the Harvesting (and Canning and Freezing and Fermenting) Begin
Donnie Johnston is hip deep in a two-acre crop of all good foods that grow in Virginia's soil.
By Donnie Johnston
COLUMNIST
My garden is immaculate for the last time this summer. There is not a weed nor blade of grass anywhere in the two-acre plot.
That is all about to change because the crops have grown to a point where they can no longer be cultivated without doing damage. Now they are on their own.
My peaches and cream sweet corn are chest high, so the blades are shading the weeds out and the watermelons are running to the point where I can no longer get the tractor and tiller between the wide rows. Like the corn, the green bean rows are overlapping and choking off the weeds.
But a few weeds will come, and I am at this point almost powerless to completely control them. It is just part of the growing process.
There has been very little gardening work the past 10 days with the exception of chopping a weed here and there and picking my daily bucket of squash (I have frozen several gallons in quart bags). But all that is about to change for time has come to start harvesting the fruits of my labor.
One early row of beans will be ready to can this week, and eight much longer rows will start maturing in about 10 days. There will be a lot of stooping and picking and hours sitting on the front porch snapping.
During big harvest years (and hopefully this will be one) I have neighbors and friends who show up to help and we get an assembly line going, some picking, some snapping and others washing cans and packing them with beans.
All that saves me time, but the one thing I can’t speed up is the pressure cooking. It still takes that cooker (seven quarts at a crack) time to build up steam, boil and then cool down, almost an hour for each cooking. But it eventually gets done.
I’m hoping to pickle beets (a fine crop this year) between the two pulses of beans. Canning and pickling beets is a hot and nasty job. Still, I love pickled beets (and they are good for you), so it is worth my effort.
The cabbage heads are about hard enough to make kraut, which I love on my hotdogs. Sauerkraut will last for five or six years, so I make a new batch only about every three summers. The job doesn’t take too long, except for the fermenting part, which lasts for several weeks.
The spring was cool and damp, so the cabbage did well, as did my peas (now frozen) and potatoes. You might recall that the 25-degree temperature on the morning of Apr. 9 froze the six-inch-high potato plants, but they, as always, came back and I should have a better than average crop.
That freeze, however, did a number on the peach crop along the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, from Roanoke north to Pennsylvania. Peach trees were in full bloom that morning and the freeze nailed them.
“It was not so much the 25-degree temperatures,” explained Eddie Williams, a friend who owns the biggest orchard in Rappahannock County. “Rather, it was the duration of the sub-freezing temperatures, which lasted from 10 pm that night until almost 8 am the next morning.”
Peach growers lost an estimated 85% to 90% of their crops, as much as $50,000 or more damage in my friend’s case. Fruit stand peaches will not be cheap this year.
But back to the garden. As soon as the beans are canned, the potatoes will need digging and then it will be time to can tomatoes, a process that will last for two or three weeks.
Yep, there’s a lot of work to be done over the next six weeks, but then harvesting quality food is why I dig and scratch in the dirt all spring. And none of the produce goes to waste. All three of my children get enough cans of beans and tomatoes to last their families all year and my neighbors also share in the bounty.
Of course, there is still time for disaster. One flood, one hailstorm, one deer herd —one anything — can turn feast into famine in a heartbeat. Farming is not for the faint of heart.
But right now, the crops look good and I’m eating well. Keeping my fingers crossed until the beans and tomatoes are in the cans, the corn is in the freezer and I’m eating fresh watermelons and cantaloupes.
So far, so good.
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