7363 MEN How to Grow and Preserve Your Own Food

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BARBARA DAMROSCH; COVER: CORBIS/THE FOOD PASSIONATES

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Green Gazette

Lower blood pressure with hibiscus tea; Grow stevia: a healthy sugar substitute; Are old canning recipes safe to use?

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Top Gardening Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Here’s everything you need to know to grow crisp, delicious broccoli, carrots, spinach and more.

From rogue rabbits and 4-inch-long grasshoppers to clay soil and summer drought, veteran organic growers detail how they cope with vexing gardening problems.

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Instant, No-Dig Garden Beds

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Quick Hoops: Easy-to-Make Mini-Greenhouses

Create or expand your food garden with this simple, timesaving technique.

Stretch the growing season to savor fresh, homegrown veggies all year by using these nifty quick hoops in your winter vegetable garden.

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13 Ways to Beat the Heat

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Growing Salad in Winter

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Eat in Sync With the Seasons

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Food preservation techniques, instructions and recipes; Homemade season-extension gear; An A-to-Z guide to herbs; How-to for growing healthy, hardy kale; Free gardening app

Grow a Great Fall Garden

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Mother Earth News Online

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ELAYNE SEARS

News From Mother

As local as local can be

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Protect your crops from ol’ Sol’s relentless radiation, plus try these simple late-summer techniques for a bountiful fall harvest.

With a little preparation and careful selection of varieties, winter greens can be grown even through a snowy winter way up in the Rockies.

“Lunatic farmer” Joel Salatin explains how you can enjoy better food and support local farmers by buying meat, eggs and produce in season.

Pick for Peak Flavor

Knowing when to harvest each crop will guarantee the freshest, most flavorful and nutritious produce from your garden.

Learn to Can for Homegrown Flavor

Save money and enjoy delicious, homemade convenience foods all winter with this traditional food-preservation skill.

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Photo credits: Cover: Corbis/The Food Passionates; Fall garden: BARBARA DAMROSCH; Garden with outhouse: TERRY WILD

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Fearless Food Preservation: Pressure Canning Basics

Use a pressure canner to safely preserve food, and you’ll save money on groceries all year long. (It’s not as scary as you may think.)

48 TIM NAUMAN

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Choose Fermented Foods for Health and Flavor

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Freezing Fruits and Vegetables From Your Garden

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Dry and Freeze Tomatoes

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How to Dry Food

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Drying Herbs: Easier Than You Think

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Backyard Chickens for the Best Eggs Ever

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Keep Bees Naturally

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Grow Your Own Mushrooms

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Sweet Cider Roundup

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All About Growing Garlic

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Fall in Love With Spinach

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Additional Resources

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Master the art of fermentation to make your own cheese, sauerkraut, beer, bread and more.

Round out your food preservation regimen! Use these great freezing tips to turn your garden harvests into delicious, off-season meals.

When your tomato harvest is abundant, try these classic preservation techniques. When a tomato craving hits in December, you’ll be glad you did.

Dry your harvest to stock up on homegrown snacks and convenience foods for year-round eating.

You’ll never buy dried herbs again after you try these methods for drying your own herbs at home.

You can keep a few hens to produce homegrown eggs, even if you only have a small yard.

Learn how to use natural methods to harvest fresh, delicious honey from your own backyard.

With the help of a do-it-yourself kit, you can harvest the freshest, tastiest fungi.

Make your own cider using this advice, which includes instructions for converting a washing machine into an extra-large juicer.

Flavorful, nutritious and helpful in warding off vampires, garlic is one of the last crops to go into the garden. Discover types to try along with planting, harvesting and storing tips.

Had little luck with spring-sown spinach? The secret to spinach success is to plant this nutrition-packed vegetable at summer’s end.

Gardening advice, seed sources, tools and supplies, and more

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Photo credits: Canning: Tim Nauman; Fermented foods: Fotolia/Beta Artworks; Drying racks: Eben Fodor; Backyard

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Grow a

GREAT FALL GARDEN

Here’s everything you need to know to grow crisp, delicious broccoli, carrots, spinach and more.

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ith tomatoes, peppers and melons now hitting their late-summer stride, it’s easy to forget that autumn and early-winter gardens can be as abundant as those of spring and summer. Gardeners who seize the opportunity for a second season of growth will find the planning and planting well worth the effort.

The steps to a bountiful fall garden are simple: Choose crops suited to fall growing conditions, ensure your chosen site has organically enriched soil and adequate water, and start planning midsummer. If you don’t have seeds on hand, track down what you want with the help of our online Seed and Plant Finder at www.MotherEarthNews.com/ Custom-Seed-Search.

You can replace spring-planted lettuces, peas and brassicas (broccoli and its relatives) with new plantings that mature in fall. Seeds and transplants will take off quickly in warm summer soil, and they’ll appreciate cooler nights, too.

In your fall garden, look forward to peak flavor and performance from many crops that don’t prosper in summer heat. Lower temperatures are ideal for producing crisp lettuces without the bitterness or bolting that can occur in hot weather. Frost-kissed kale, Brussels sprouts and cabbage have a special sweetness. Carrots, beets and turnips also thrive in fall gardens and, after harvest, can keep in a pantry or root cellar so you can enjoy their goodness well into winter. Collards, mustard and other greens also like cool weather.

Favored Crops for Fall When deciding what to plant for a fall harvest, gardeners throughout most of the country should think greens and root vegetables, advises John Navazio, a plant breeding and seed specialist at Washington State University and senior scientist for the Organic Seed Alliance in Port Townsend, Wash., which conducts annual tests of crops and varieties to evaluate their cold hardiness.

Leafy greens (such as lettuces, spinach, arugula, chard and mâche), root

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Lead photo: Barbara Damrosch

Lacinato kale (left) and lettuce flourish in autumn’s cooler temperatures. If covered, they can last into winter and sometimes come back in spring.

veggies (such as beets, carrots, turnips, radishes and rutabagas), brassicas (including broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, kale and Chinese cabbage) and peas will all thrive in the cooler weather and shorter days of fall. In many regions, some of these cold-hardy crops will even survive winter to produce a second harvest in spring (see “Stretch the Season,” Page 16).

If you garden in the South or another area with a mild winter, you can grow all of those crops as well as heat-loving favorites. “Here, we can set out tomato transplants in late August,” says David Pitre, owner of Tecolote Farm, a certified organic farm near Austin, Texas.

Pitre also plants okra, eggplant, pep-

BARBARA DAMROSCH

By Vicki Mattern

pers, winter squash, cucumbers and potatoes in August and September for winter harvesting. Plant cool-season crops in the garden after temperatures have dropped — late September or later.

Fall is also prime garden season in the Pacific Northwest, where abundant rain and cool (but not frigid) temperatures are ideal for growing leafy greens, root crops and brassicas planted in mid- to late summer. The hardiest of these crops often hang on well into winter if given protection, such as row covers or cold frames.

(For full details on which crops to plant in your region for fall and winter harvests, check out our What to Plant Now pages

at www.MotherEarthNews.com/WhatTo-Plant-Now, or sign up for a free, 30day trial of our online Vegetable Garden Planner at www.MotherEarthNews. com/Garden-Planner. — MOTHER)

Hardy Fall Varieties After you’ve decided which crops to grow for fall harvest, zero in on specific varieties. “There are big differences in cold hardiness among varieties,” Navazio says. “Some are better able to photosynthesize at cooler temperatures.”

For the past several years, the Organic Seed Alliance has been conducting trials of as many as 170 varieties of 11 different crops for their quality and performance

in fall and winter. Among them, kale, radicchio and Swiss chard have been tested extensively and confirmed cold-hardy to 14 degrees Fahrenheit, with no protection. Several varieties stood out for the Alliance and market gardeners.

Broccoli. Opt for varieties that produce plenty of side shoots rather than just a single large head. “‘Diplomat’ and ‘Marathon’ can survive the heat of late summer and thrive when cool weather arrives in fall, producing a second cutting as late as Thanksgiving,” says Elizabeth Keen, co-owner of Indian Line Farm, a 17-acre organic operation in South Egremont, Mass. Carol Ann Sayle, co-owner of Boggy Creek Farm WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM

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Critters covet your fresh veggies. Control grasshoppers, such as eastern lubbers, with diligent handpicking, and keep out raccoons and other wildlife with secure wire fencing.

TOP GARDENING CHALLENGES and

Address garden challenges as they come, such as putting down weed-barrier cloth to combat severe weed problems.

How to Overcome Them

By Barbara Pleasant

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he perfect garden — free of all pests, weeds and weather surprises — does not exist. Nor does the perfect place to garden, because every climate is friendly to some crops and hostile to others. Thankfully, tackling gardening challenges, while frustrating at times, is part of what makes growing your own food such a lively adventure.

Smart garden troubleshooting is often crucial to successful food production, and working out the best solutions may require years of trial-and-error experimentation. To help you get a jump-start, we asked more than a dozen longtime

organic gardeners to share their expertise on tactics for solving common organic vegetable gardening problems. Following is a roundup of their collective wisdom.

Critter and Pest Patrol Dealing with insect pests, rabbits, deer, voles and other critters is perhaps one of the most frustrating and ubiquitous gardening challenges. Organic vegetable gardening can make this issue trickier in that you’ve wisely opted not to use harsh chemicals to keep such troubles at bay. In the case of critters, good fences can make for good harvests (and offer the kindest solution), and diligent monitoring for pests will prove well worth your time.

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From rogue rabbits and 4-inch-long grasshoppers to clay soil and summer drought, veteran organic growers detail how they cope with vexing gardening problems.

Irritating insects. An hour north of St. Louis, in New Douglas, Ill., Carol Lentz aims to check her plants for insect pests at least every other day. “Check the whole plant for signs of trouble, especially the leaf undersides,” she says. Squish any eggs you see, and handpick adult potato beetles, squash bugs and Mexican bean beetles and put them in a pail of soapy water to reduce their damage to plants and prevent a second (or third) generation.

Those darn rabbits. In Fargo, N.D., Joe Calvert says rabbits are second only to his short growing season on his list of gardening challenges. “Even in an urban environment, if you don’t have a fence around the garden, you may as well not even bother because the tender young plants are too tempting to rabbits,” he says. To keep rabbits out, add inexpensive poultry wire around at-risk beds or

around the bottom of a perimeter fence.

Fold 6 to 12 inches of the wire out from the bottom to fend off critters that may try to dig under the fence.

In the piney woods north of Covington, La., Carrie Lee Schwartz says containers are sometimes safer than an open garden.

“I hang delicate crops, such as lettuce and strawberries, in planters on my porch to keep them close to the kitchen and away from rabbits,” she says.

Pesky groundhogs. When Tim and Mary Ann Kirby began gardening near Pittsburgh, Pa., they had a diligent guard dog that chased away wandering animals.

“He has since died, and the critters have been a headache,” Mary Ann laments.

“We have a good fence, but it’s not enough to keep out groundhogs and raccoons.”

She says groundhogs were the more problematic of the duo, first devouring broccoli and then helping themselves to cantaloupe. In addition to having a guard dog around, a couple of strands of electric fencing low to the ground can help deter groundhogs. On many homesteads with big gardens, growers set up permanent post-and-wire fencing or rigid livestock panels, and then add poultry netting and electric fencing for further protection.

Grubbin’ grasshoppers. Grasshoppers can devastate organic gardens, particularly in areas with hot, dry weather. These long-legged leapers are especially damaging to lettuce, beans, corn, carrots, onions and cabbage-family crops grown for fall harvest. Among the best organic controls

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Photo credit - opener: Terry Wild

for grasshoppers are excluding them via row covers or screen barriers (get free used screen material from hardware stores that repair damaged screens), and employing poultry to patrol garden areas and snatch up the grasshoppers as snacks.

Hundreds of grasshopper species live in North America, and you’ll be dealing with a particular type. Melody Gould has been gardening in the Tampa Bay area for more than 10 years, where eastern lubber grasshoppers are often a food-grower’s foe. For control, gather and drown the hoppers in a pail of soapy water when they’re still showing the black-and-yellow coloring of youth. Gould explains that if you don’t catch them when they’re little, the lubbers will grow into huge, 3- to 4-inch grasshoppers that can clear all of the vegetation off a full-sized tomato plant overnight.

Oh, deer. The drought that has caused northeast Texas and other areas to shrivel has led to desperate hunger among wild things. “The shortage of greenery for wildlife has caused our worst gardening problems ever,” says Carole Ramke, who has been gardening organically in Kilgore, Texas, for more than 20 years. She had to build chicken-wire cages around her sweet potatoes — inside the garden fence — to protect them from deer. The deer started eating things they’d never eaten before, such as okra, watermelon vines, green persimmons and whole limbs of fig trees.

“Our smaller melons even had tooth marks from raccoons, coyotes and deer.

We were finally able to put a stop to the WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM

Photo credit - grasshopper: Dwight Kuhn Photo credit - raccoon: Dwight Kuhn

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Instant, No-Dig

GARDEN BEDS

Create or expand your food garden with these simple, time-saving techniques.

By Barbara Pleasant Illustrations by Elayne Sears

igging or tilling the soil before you plant is best, but it isn’t essential. Here are several ways to create usable planting space with no digging. Later on, when the season winds down and you have more time, you can turn this year’s instant beds into primo permanent planting space.

If your soil is hopelessly hard and infertile, line your car trunk with a tarp or old shower curtain, and head to a garden center for a load of 40-pound bags of topsoil. Slash drainage holes in the bottoms of the bags, then lay them over the area you want for your growing bed. Use a sharp utility knife or scissors to cut away the tops of the bags. Moisten well, then plant the bags with seeds or transplants, and mulch to cover the bags. (If growing tomatoes in bags, allow one bag of topsoil per plant.)

Easiest No-Dig Options

Straw Bale Solutions

The best way to start a new garden bed is by digging a new site to incorporate organic matter and remove weeds. But in a pinch you can just cover the area with cardboard or layers of wet newspaper, followed by several inches of grass clippings, shredded leaves, or weed-free hay or straw. Use a hand trowel to pull back the mulch, cut away sod, and open up planting holes for stocky transplants, including tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, herbs, flowers — whatever transplants you can buy will work.

In 2004, following the lead of horticulture professors N. S. Mansour from Oregon State and James Stephens in Florida, Rose Marie Nichols McGee and dozens of volunteers grew colorful salad greens in compost-enriched bales of hay and exhibited them at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show to promote the “Plant a Row for the Hungry” program. Since then, thousands of gardeners (including me) have tried straw bale beds, which have

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their pros and cons. You can put one anywhere, and if it’s kept moist all season, the area beneath the bale will show rapid improvement in drainage and tilth thanks to the work of big night crawlers, which thrive beneath straw bale beds. Bale beds can be costly and need a lot of supplemental water and liquid fertilizer, but they are still fun and rewarding to grow. Step-by-step instructions are available online from Nichols Garden Nursery at http://goo.gl/BTZZQ. To get large-scale “instant” results, use bales of straw or hay to frame a big raised bed (arranged in a rectangle, a 15-bale instant bed will have an 8-by-20-foot footprint). Fill the enclosure with as much soil, compost and any other free or cheap growing

mediums you can find; you’ll need a truckload or two. Allow several days of intermittent watering to thoroughly moisten the growing medium and the bales, and then plant vegetables inside and on top of your straw bale barge. As long as you can keep this setup moist (soaker hose coverage and mulch are mandatory), it will support a huge array of summer vegetables and decompose into a beautiful bed of organic matter in about a year.

The Frame Game

Other easy ways to create instant beds involve setting up a frame of some kind and filling it with growing medium. The frame can be temporary, made from plastic fencing or untreated boards, or you can build frames from scrap lumber, slender logs You can make new garden beds quickly with no digging or or stacked blocks or stones. Or tilling by using bags of topsoil, as shown here. Punch holes in talk to a fencing company about the bottom sides of the bags for drainage before you place recycling rails from discarded cethem on the ground and cut away the tops. Then you can plant directly into the soil in the bags and mulch the area to cover the bags. In fall, pull away the bags and reform the beds with a rake.

Seven No-Dig, New Bed Options 1.

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Lay down cardboard, mulch, set out transplants.

Plant directly into bags of topsoil.

Make frames with straw bales and fill.

Use wood frames and fill with compost or topsoil.

Build a “bird’s nest” from brush and fill.

Make “lasagna” — layers of leaves, peat moss and compost.

7. Build compost pile, add soil and plant.

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13 Ways to

BEAT THE HEAT

Protect your crops from ol’ Sol’s relentless radiation, plus try these simple late-summer techniques for a bountiful fall harvest.

By Barbara Pleasant Illustrations by Elayne Sears

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f you want to keep your garden productive well into fall, then late summer is a busy season that must be embraced.

Hot temperatures are as rough on plants as they are on gardeners, but here’s a roundup of techniques you can use to help you and your crops cope. And the sweat you invest when you seed beets or transplant broccoli will be richly rewarded within a few short weeks. Consider giving cool-season vegetables a second run in your garden. The late-summer planting list is a long one with plenty of choices — chard, spinach, lettuce, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, carrots, beets, radishes and turnips.

Sizzlin’ Summer

tie or staple the corners to wooden stakes. You can probably buy shade cloth at your garden center, or a 61⁄2-by-13-foot piece that blocks 50 percent of light is available for $22 from Lee Valley Tools. Scavenge before you buy. Old window screens make good shade covers, too, as do narrow panels of wood lattice. If plants are so tall that installing a shade cover over them would be impractical, simply situate a sun screen alongside them to shield their bases from afternoon sun.

Controlled shade may also help you grow lettuce and other leafy greens despite 90-degree heat. In a study conducted on two Kansas City-area organic

farms and at the Kansas State Research and Extension Center in Olathe, high tunnels covered with 40 percent shade cloth doubled the survival of transplanted lettuce seedlings and kept plants from developing bitter flavors. You can learn more about high tunnel culture at www.HighTunnels.org, www.HighTunnels.org hosted by Kansas State University.

Regardless of whether you use shade screens, be sure to remove weeds to reduce competition for limited moisture. Ripening fruits demand huge loads of water and nutrients, so you should pick thoroughly and often to make it easier for the plants to keep up with the business of staying alive.

By midsummer, you may find Some plants stop flowering and setting fruit when yourself thinking it’s all you can do temperatures soar. To keep them cool, use old to nurse tomatoes and other pet screens, lattice and sheets to shade vulnerable crops through a mean summer. We mature plants from the effects of midknow your pain! But even if you keep summer sun. Cover new seedlings the soil evenly moist by using lots with opaque covers to protect of soakers or drip irrigation hoses them from the sun until their covered with a thick mulch, many roots are established. vegetables will abort their blossoms rather than set fruit in extreme heat.

Temperatures in the 90s cause many beans to hold back flowers, and tomatoes, peppers and eggplants start having trouble completing the pollination process when temperatures rise above only 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

Commercial growers often use sprinkling to cool plants down. A late-afternoon sprinkling may be an excellent idea, but strategically placed shading devices are often more practical, more water-efficient and much less timeconsuming. For example, you can easily cool down the sunny sides of tomatoes by installing a short run of snow fencing or pre-assembled sections of picket fence along the south or west side of the row.

Shade covers made from lightweight cloth (such as old sheets) will also help keep struggling plants cool, though the covers must be held several inches above the plants to keep them from retaining heat. When using a cloth-type shade cover over plants, 30 MOTHER EARTH NEWS • HOW TO GROW AND PRESERVE YOUR OWN FOOD

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GROWING SALAD IN WINTER With a little preparation and careful selection of varieties, winter greens can be grown even through a snowy winter high in the Rockies.

By Clara Coleman Photos by Robbie George

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n a cold and rainy mid-September day, I planted tiny seeds in a patch of muddy earth and embarked on a seemingly contradictory journey of winter gardening in the Rocky Mountains, in Woody Creek, Colo. Crouched over my new garden — a 6-by24-foot raised bed surrounded by 24 bales of musty hay — I felt skeptical that it would succeed, despite reassurances from my father, Eliot Coleman. A long-time proponent of winter food production, he assured me that my winter garden would not only work but would amaze me with the simplicity of its care and the perseverance of its plants.

“The simpler, the better,” he always says, so I used spoiled bales from a nearby horse farm, perfect for making a well-insulated base, and a few old 2-by-4s to set across the top. Dad furnished a 20-by-30-foot sheet of still-usable greenhouse plastic sheeting, and that took care of my materials.

Even though the mid-September planting date seemed a little late for some varieties, given the cold mountain climate of my location, my dad assured me all the coldhardy crops we chose were worth planting. I do have the advantage of being on the 38th parallel north latitude, which means I get longer days and more winter sun than he does on the 44th parallel in Maine, or than his Dutch gardening friends and mentors do way up on the 52nd parallel in Holland.

We chose spinach, mâche (also called “corn salad”), arugula, tatsoi and a few other greens to plant. Dad says spinach will germinate and grow at temperatures only slightly above freezing; cold temperatures and short days keep it in prime condition. Mâche, which grows 34 MOTHER EARTH NEWS • HOW TO GROW AND PRESERVE YOUR OWN FOOD

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in a small rosette of tender leaves would be their inevitable fate outabout the size of a thumb, is anside this “garden wall.” Excitedly, other winter wonder green beI harvested my first delicious cause of its incredible resistance salad from the snowbound patch to cold. Historically, mâche was to share with friends and family a staple of French winter salads for Thanksgiving dinner. and was harvested wild in Europe As winter progressed and long before it was domesticated. snowstorms rushed through the I found that cold weather acmountains, I often would leave tually enhances arugula’s distincmy garden covered, with snow tive flavor, making it mild and piling up on top, for several days complex, as opposed to strong between pickings. Each time I and coarse — the common effect brushed off the snow and unof summer heat. In Dad’s Maine covered the garden, I was met garden, September plantings of with a green reward. The spinach arugula under protection are pro(‘Space’ and ‘Hector’ varieties) ductive until really cold weather and the mâche never faltered, hits; after that, he says, September proving themselves the hardiest plantings of arugula’s hardier wild of the 10 greens I grew. The arurelative, sylvetta (Diplotaxis tenuigula and tatsoi withered a bit in folia), can be harvested through subzero temperatures, but kept the winter months. From Zone on producing, and the bok choy 6 south, the regular arugula should be (‘Joi Choi’), by far my favorite, was similar adequately hardy all winter under protecto the tatsoi but didn’t bolt as early. The tion. Tatsoi, an oriental leaf vegetable, is baby leaves are the tastiest of all, and so quite hardy and has become a particular beautiful, too. favorite in the United States because its I also tried a red oakleaf lettuce (‘Dano’), shiny, dark-green leaves are as delicious as claytonia (in the purslane family), Swiss they are beautiful. chard, parsley and a mesclun mix. All Two weeks after planting, I discovered were less successful during the winter than very little seed was germinating. Frequent those my dad helped select, but as spring cold weather combined with limited exprogressed, all produced healthy crops exposure to the sun did not encourage the cept for the Swiss chard. I have not had seeds to sprout, and my impatience probmuch luck with Swiss chard during any ably didn’t help either. Each night I would season. (Find recommended winter-hardy cover the garden with the plastic sheet for crops at http://goo.gl/nLLGqn.) protection and warmth, and each mornBy March, my winter gardening jouring I would roll it back to prevent any tiny ney was nearing its end. After their fourseedlings from overheating. month-long hibernation, my little garden All autumn, as the tree leaves were greens appreciated every bit of the inturning yellow and falling to the ground, creasing warmth and sunlight. I removed I was covering and uncovering my growtheir plastic cover and continued to enBaby bok choy (above) is harvested by the ing number of seedlings and wishing with joy abundant harvests from the plants author from her insulated garden bed (top). all my might that they would grow large throughout spring. enough to make viable plants before the My dad’s cold-frame advice worked so long, dark winter arrived. well that I decided to build a walk-in greenhouse to make growing It wasn’t until late November, though, after a number of snowmy own greens in winter even easier in the future. storms and freezing nights, that I was finally convinced of the tenacity of my greens. By then, I had to brush the snow off the Clara Coleman is an organic farmer, writer and sustainable fourplastic covering to peek inside this quiet refuge, and every time I season farming consultant. Clara’s growing experiences in the did, I would see a veritable sea of greens — a welcome sight to my Rockies flowered into a 2-acre solar-powered farm at 6,200 feet skeptical eyes. The spinach, arugula, tatsoi and mâche all appeared elevation. Her dad, Eliot, is the author of Four Season Harvest like green sentinels standing up to Old Man Winter’s blanket of and The Winter Harvest Handbook. white snow. I was amazed to think that common hay bales and a thin sheet of plastic were enough to protect them from what WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM

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