Leaving for a month

I'll be leaving the Squashville Farm on Tuesday for nearly a month. I'm driving first to Ithaca for a conference on instructional technologies and to spend some time in Cornell University's Hip-Hop Special Collection. I drive back Friday, and fly out Saturday for Indiana, where I'll spend eleven days with my parents. I fly back and fly out immediately the next morning for Salt Lake City, Utah, to serve as a reader of US Government and Politics exams, a seven-day work assignment in which I've participated for the past seven years.

I didn't exactly plan to leave for this much time during the peak planting season. But life rarely works out as one might hope. Fortunately, my husband Jim and I are in our fourth year of raising food in northeastern New York, and have gotten a slightly better handle as to when in the growing season we should get certain plants in the ground. Over the past week, we have transplanted tomato seedlings, peppers, and tomatillas. The next three days call for basil, stevia, eggplants, more pepper plants, and one of our new experiments this year: okra. From there, Jim will transplant squash and plant beans, and probably more peas, unless I can sneak in a few minutes between now and Tuesday to get another row and another trellis into the ground.

But planting isn't my only concern. There's also a matter of harvesting what's growing now. Here's where the dilemma lies. For the first time in two years, our potted cilantro is actually producing the kind of healthy abundance that makes me cheer. Same with the arugula. The problem, however, is this: If we don't keep clipping leaves from the two plants, they'll bolt -- code in gardening language for "go to seed". And as the days get hotter and hotter, I'm afraid that starting new seeds may mean that we'll get little more than spindly plants that wither and dry up in the heat. The quandary is especially acute for cilantro, which is one of our herbs of choice for seasoning the jars and jars of salsa that we like to make when the tomatoes are at their peak. Only issue is that while the cilantro is blossoming, the tomatoes are far from flowering. They're small healthy little upstarts at this point that show promise of maturing -- sometime in mid- to late July.

After pondering the problem, I've settled on a strategy. I'm going to buy hydroponic tomatoes at the farmers' market tomorrow and make fresh salsa. That will allow me to put the existing cilantro to good use and hopefully encourage the plant to keep producing for a week. When I'm back home next Friday, I'll clip off more cilantro. In the meantime, while the temperatures are still somewhat cool, we'll start the third of our five seeding disks. And we'll start the remaining two after that in intervals of two to three weeks. I'm hoping that these strategies will keep the cilantro fresh and pungent until our own tomato plants start producing, and allow for the production of coriander seeds once the plants begin to bolt.

As for the arugula, the plan is to make pesto. I had thought that I would leave the plant intact so that Jim could make himself salads, but he's clueless when it comes to making salads. Speaking of which, salad greens take twenty-one days to mature. So my hope is to plant a bed of salad greens on Monday, and if all goes as planned, start harvesting them when I am back home.

Dilemmas like these might seem trivial, but they underscore in a lot of ways the issues that one considers on the journey of grow-your-own. Sure, if the cilantro bolts and the arugula starts to flower and turn tough, we can buy replenishments from the farmers who sell at the farmers market or, gasp, purchase bunches for a couple dollars at the grocery store. But why do that? Why not try and make your own crop last? Food -- even herbs -- straight from the ground tastes so much better than even the fresh-picked offerings that local farmers make. And we ourselves have invested a fair amount already in getting the plants to grow: pots, potting soil, seeds, water, and fertilizer -- not to mention time and labor.

On a related note, I was doing an inventory of the refrigerator as part of the countdown to departure. Because we eat fresh, our refrigerator usually doesn't hold a whole lot of stuff. What's in there is meant to be eaten within a few days. But last Saturday we bought a four-pound chicken, raised by our friends Dave and Liza Porter of Homestead Artisans and processed (farmer code for taken to the butcher) just a few days before we bought it. We enjoyed an exquisite roast chicken dish, and a stir fry -- leftovers of which are among the items in the frij. I also made a broth with the carcass, and used about half the broth tonight in a risotto. The issue is that half the broth remains along with a jar of mushroom broth -- the liquid left from reconstituting dried mushrooms, which is quite flavorful.

I asked Jim if he would know to do something with the broths. He cooks -- pretty well -- almost all the time so this is not a situation where I'm foisting domestic culinary skills on a man with a hunt-and-gather type mentality. At first he said he would. Then he thought about it and said he probably wouldn't. I suggested that I make some soups, and asked him if he would know to eat them. Again, at first he said he would. Then he worried that he might forget they were there. So between now and Monday, my other task is to figure out what to do with these broths so they won't go to waste.

One answer is to freeze them, and use them when I return. The only issue with that is that we have several jars of broths past frozen solid in our freezer that indicate to me that freezing something that really is best fresh is a way of wasting it. And so it goes.