Relishing the Relish

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Just in time for the holiday season, I present one of my favourite holiday foods -- cranberry relish!  I know cranberry relish doesn't typically hit the top ten ten list of holiday treats, but it's a big deal at my house, and I try to keep a bowl of it around from mid-November through the end of December.

I have fond memories of Thanksgiving in my youth.  It was always a big family affair with many relatives and often friends, too.  My grandmother made the most delicious, melt-in-your-mouth rolls and my grandfather made cranberry relish (they also made fabulous stuffing).  I started making cranberry relish on my own when I moved far from family after grad school and needed some traditions to help me feel connected and grounded.  I didn't have a recipe, so I recreated it from childhood memory.  It has been a personal favourite ever since, giving me an easy, quick, healthy food tradition that adds brilliant colour to the dinner table and reminds me of happy childhood holidays.


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Ingredients:
1 bag cranberries
1 apple (sweet)
1 orange
1 c. frozen raspberries
3/8 c. sugar (more or less to taste)

Instructions:
Total time: ~30 minutes
Clean the fruits -- rinse, wash, etcetera.  Pour 4/5 of the cranberries into a food processor and chop into pieces; dump into a large bowl.  Core and chunk the apple; put the pieces in the food processor and chop.  Save out 1/5 and pour the rest in with the cranberries.  Do the same with the orange (rind and all, though you can remove the white strings).  Add most of the raspberries in with the raw fruit.  Mix in approximately 1/4 c. sugar, stir, and let sit.

Put about 1/2 inch of water in a small pot, add the saved-out fruit and 1/8 c. sugar.  Heat over medium until the fruit comes to a boil and the cranberries start popping.  Turn the heat down and allow to simmer until it turns into a lovely, red, sweet sauce, slightly thickened.

Pour the sauce over the raw fruit and stir well.  Eat immediately or let sit.  It ages very well.

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Small-Portions Harvests

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For a variety of reasons, our garden this year (as in many other years) yields "small-portion harvests" -- just enough during any given week to treat us to home-grown fruits and vegetables that subsidize the rest of our meals, but not enough to store away and preserve.  Every year I work towards a more productive harvest, and each year it does get a little bit better (except maybe this year -- drought, ya know).  Nevertheless, despite the frustrations, I am filled with gratitude and wonder at each small-portions harvest that comes from our land.

Isn't it beautiful?  Colours, textures, scents, and flavours....
Four kinds of tomatoes, 2 kinds of potatoes, husk/ground cherries, buttercup squash, and the inevitable egg (though the hens are starting to molt and egg production is decreasing).  Not shown are the Astrakom eggplant and the German Englischer custard squash (which have been suffering mold problems) that we already ate this week.

Many more tomatoes to ripen, more squash and eggplant, and at least 2-3 more buttercup squash on the volunteer vine that this one came off of.  Our best produce is grown from the compost pile.  If only my whole garden were as rich as our compost pile....

(I am considering for next year limiting the scope of my garden, so I can spend more time and have more earth to amending and enrich.  And if there's little planted, I can let the chickens in to help me out with that -- they would love that!)

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The Bramble Ramble

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Our house is bordered on one side by an overgrowth of bushes and trees and brush, some of it planted there when the house was built all those decades ago and allowed to metastasize, and some of it random growth.  Among that random growth (some would call it weeds) is a stretch of wild black raspberries which this year decided to produce a beautiful quantity of fruit.

 

Unfortunately, the recent near-drought has turned most of those juicy berries into sweet, crunchy seedpods.  However, because of all those beautiful berries and lush greenery, I was inspired to create a "bramble ramble" -- to clear out some of the over- and under-growth and increase the swath of bramble berry bushes. 

So I cleared growth from around the wild patch.  I traded with a neighbour some fresh eggs for raspberry canes.  I cleared more brush, dug out even more burning bushes, trimmed back trees, and created space.  Then I planted the bartered-for canes (along with a little compost from the chicken run).  I watered.  I waited.  I watered some more.

The canes that were alive when I planted them are thriving -- one is even producing more canes already!  I look forward to tearing out some more burning bush (they are seriously taking over our property) and adding more raspberries to the "ramble."  I'm even considering transplanting the gooseberries to this space next year, but I haven't yet decided about that.

Now I wait with patience for those delicious berries next year, and hope I get to them before the birds!

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Chickens & Salad (not chicken salad)

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Though my true gardening skill can be witnessed in the overgrowth of the rare delicacy known as crabgrass, this is what accompanied our grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner tonight.  Everything but the pecans were picked from the garden just minutes before dinner went on the table -- 5 kinds of lettuce, kale, spinach, basil, arugula, strawberries.  Delicious!

The girls love when I'm picking strawberries -- they eagerly await the ones the chipmunks started to eat and never finished -- you can see the corner of the strawberry patch on the left.  What you can't see in this picture is the rhubarb they demolished.  I'm hoping it comes back strong next year (especially considering that it has never been strong, which is kind of a problem, because it's rhubarb and it's supposed to be overgrown!).  
This is Clementine (buff orpington) and Mabel (silver-laced wyandotte) scrounging around the gardens for nibbles.

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Blueberries Are a Go

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In my previous blueberries article, you saw the prep work it took to create a space for the blueberry bushes we were receiving.  And they have been received (patriot, blueray, and jersey varieties), or rather, picked up.

After the space was cleared of the bounteous bushes, the soil had to be prepared.  I dug holes and a trench and filled them with stinky, fresh compost, burying that with dirt, and finishing the fill with more mature, bagged compost from the garden center and more dirt.  I planted four blueberry bushes where the land had been cleared (the patriot and blueray), and tucked them into their new beds with bark mulch.  The other two (jersey) I planted in the back of the yard, along with a miniature blueberry that had be floundering by itself in the front yard.







One week later, they are all leafing out, apparantly enjoying their new homes.  The two (three) in the back of the yard may not receive enough sun, but they should carry on perfectly well until I find a better place to put them (if a better place is indeed needed) -- I just had to get them in the ground somewhere, since there wasn't room in where the others were.



Now that the blueberries are in, I have been spending my time chopping up the branches of the bushes I removed; no small feat, that!  Amazingly, a bush that was 5 feet tall and 4 feet wide chops into a single wheelbarrowful of short twigs.  Cutting up the branches makes it easier to dispose of them in our heap of debris or in the composters.  (Unfortunately, at this time we don't have a chipper....)

Strawberries are coming along, as are the elderberries.  More on those later.

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April Vacation Week: Blueberry Prep

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Ground & soil preparation.  That's what it's all about.  When you're receiving new blueberry bushes in a couple of weeks and don't have anywhere to put them, it's time to think and prepare.

We are picking up 6 blueberry plants from the local grower Nourse Farms* in a couple of weeks.  And though our yard is fairly good-sized, finding the right spot for the blueberries was not a simple task.  We finally settled on a long, sunny space at the back of the house which, unfortunately, has been home to flowering quince and a burning bush of advanced age and size.  With depleted soil and big bushes in the way, preparation had to begin.

I have some experience pulling out shrubs by hand.  When we moved into our home six years ago, I spent the entire first spring and summer pulling out overgrown yews that had blanketed the shady front of the house (that space is now filled with ferns and astilbe and monkshood and toad lily and such).  I sawed, chopped, cut, dug, and pulled until I had removed at least five huge yews.  This time I had fewer shrubs to remove, but they were just as old -- and two of them were thorny.

Ornamental quince stumps.

Quince & burning bush branches.

First I removed the flowering quince.  Two plants that were in reality three or four.  They had been left to their own growing for a number of years (other than some minor prunings) and had tall, straight, thorny branches, as well as some decoratively twisty ones.  It took me three days to remove them and most of their roots.  (You should have seen the worms I found!  As big around as my thumb and twice as long!)  I dug some chicken compost from the chicken run and started layering it into the old, undernourished soil, along with not-yet-totally-composted compost and some purchased organic compost.  Layers of dirt and compost to fill in the holes left by the quince.

The burning bush before.

Burning bush after.

Next it was time to work on the 10 foot+ burning bush that sat at the corner of our house.  The branches are all gone and the digging has begun.  The first "real" root I ran into (about 30 seconds into digging) was a twist of two roots, which combined were thicker than my arm and much longer.  I don't know if you have experience with burning bush, but its roots go on and on -- I dig new roots from it out of the garden every year (that's where all the nutrition I pile into my garden every year goes), and they are never smaller around than my fingers -- and many of them are webby and difficult to dig through.

The dreadful weather has put a serious pause in my work -- I started over April vacation week, but have had nothing but rain and chill since with no opportunity to work more.  I think the burning bush will take multiple days of hard work, digging, hacking, chopping.  The chickens, at least, are looking forward to it.




*I love Nourse Farms -- they have blueberry picking in the summer and sell tons of fabulous fruit plants -- we purchased their strawberry collection a couple of years ago and this year purchased their blueberry collection.  We have also purchased gooseberry and elderberry plants from them -- which are legal in our Massachusetts town.

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