“Movin’ right along in search of good times and good [food]
With good friends, you can’t lose,
This could become a habit…”

Just today, I noticed that the clouds are moving south, the wind is whipping around, the temperature has dropped, and a squash from the Farmers’ Market appeared in the kitchen while I was out of town — all sure signs that we’re movin right along from summer to fall. The garden is changing and so is the food in the kitchen, garden, and Farmers’ Markets.

The Amazing Vegetable-to-Soup Trick

With the end of the summer season comes the last summer harvests and a perfect time for warm soup.  If you are the proud owner of a kitchen that contains any particular vegetable-in-abundance, make soup out of it by sauteing onions and garlic, adding a little salt & pepper,  and throwing in the chopped vegetable-of-abundance along with 1/2″ of water.  If you added what might be “too much” water, now’s the time to throw in a chopped potato to help thicken the soup. Bring to a boil and and simmer for 30 minutes.  Then, make it smooth with an immersible blender.  (If you are still using a food processor or blender instead of an immersible blender, please see my notes below on why you should purchase an immersible blender.)  Add milk, soy milk, water, or stock as you blend the soup to thin the soup to the consistency that you like.  Before serving, add any fresh herbs — basil, oregano, cilantro, parsley, etc. to impart other flavors that you like.  If you have dried herbs, add those at the same time as you add the vegetable-of-abundance. This amazing vegetable-to-soup trick will work for almost any vegetable (squash, peppers, tomatoes, spinach, carrots, etc.)

Dilly Cucumbers

I can only think of a few vegetables which don’t sound so good to me as a soup (cucumber and lettuce come to mind — although someone thinks cucumber-dill soup sounds good.)  With the cucumbers-of-abundance (or green-beans-of-abundance), you can make dilly cucumbers (or dilly beans) by combining vinegar & water (1:2 ratio), dill, thinly sliced onions, mustard seed, salt & peppercorns.  Slice the cucumbers into rounds or add the whole beans into the vinegar/water mixture.  Adjust the vinegar/water ratio to taste. Let it sit for a couple of hours up to many weeks.  Yum!

Dehydrating Vegetables & Fruits

If you are tired of making soup, try your hand at dehydrating vegetables for use throughout the year.  Many people dehydrate tomatoes, but you can also dehydrate corn, beans, squash etc.  And, you can dehydrate all of those apples and pears that are coming in now as slices or as fruit roll-ups!  For more info on dehydrating, see August’s column about Tomatoes R Us.

Cover Crops

As the summer crops finish up and are pulled out, some gardeners sow winter gardens, others plant cover crops, and some do both.  For those of you who do neither, now’s a good time to start a new habit!

Winter cover crops are easy to plant and grow.  In return, they aerate your soil, add nutrients and soil structure, and create prodigious amounts of green material for your compost pile.  It’s a good deal all-in-all.  Your responsibilities are to sow the seeds and water them until the rain comes.  Then, you can sit back and watch the grass grow so-to-speak until your harvest the “green waste” in the spring for your compost pile.

The basic steps are:

• Prep the garden bed
• Sow the seeds
• Water
• Relax
• Harvest

 Prep the Garden Bed

Clear your summer garden bed, or choose a bed that you want to start using next summer.  If your soil is friable enough that you can plant seeds ½”  – 1″ deep, then you’re set.  If not, i.e., you have clay soil and your shovel or pitchfork rebounds off the top of it with a twanging sound, then you have a little bit of work to do first.  You’ll need to water your garden bed for maybe 2 hours, let the water soak in, and then try again to see if you can plant seeds ½” – 1″ deep.  Repeat the water-dig cycle until you can actually move the soil at least ½” – 1″ deep.  For future remediation, I’d suggest compost tea – available locally at Lyngso Garden Materials on specified days, or brew your own!

Sow Seeds

You can find cover crop seeds in person at Common Ground in Palo Alto or online at Bountiful Gardens.  They’ll both sell you a cover crop “kit” complete with enough fava, vetch, wheat, and rye seeds for 100 sq ft. of garden bed.  At Common Ground, you can measure out the bulk seeds yourself.  They have the amounts you need for 100 sq ft.  Just multiply by the number of square feet that you have.  If you are planting a lot of seed, ask for the bulk rate.

Take the vetch, wheat, and rye seeds and broadcast them over your garden bed.  Then, take a rake and “chop” in the seeds so that they are covered by the soil. The “chopping” motion is a motion that lightly covers the seeds (but not very deep) with soil.

 Vetch is a pea – so it will take nitrogen from the air and “fix” it into the soil in a form that plants can use.  It uses the fava and the rye & wheat as poles upon which to twine up and grow.  Wheat and rye are grasses and will produce a fair amount of green material above ground as well as miles of roots below ground.  That’s not to say that you can follow one root for miles (although that would be cool) but rather that many root threads (enough to make miles) grow and die leaving food for the soil-food-web critters (bacteria, fungi, arthropods, nematods, protozoa). How cool is that!

After broadcasting the wheat, rye, and vetch, plant each fava bean 1/2″ deep in the soil on 18″ centers.  The fava beans, in addition to being nitrogen-fixing plants, will dig with their roots 1 – 2 feet deep in the soil for you.  What a deal!

Water

Water the seeds every day until the seedlings start appearing in 1 – 2 weeks.  Then, you can water them every few days and eventually once/week.  Once the rains start in the fall, you won’t need to water the plants at all.

Relax

Sit back all winter long and watch your compost crop grow while it digs and feeds your soil.

Harvest

In the springtime, cut back the cover crops when they are in “mid-flower” to prevent the pods from forming and to allow them to stay in the soil longer digging and feeding the soil.  When you are ready to plant spring and summer crops, harvest the cover crop above the soil and place it in your compost pile.  Leave the cover crop roots under the soil to provide biomass for those soil-food-web critters.  If you like to eat fava beans – as some people do – let some of your fava bean plants go to seed and then harvest the beans for eating  When you allow the plant to produce beans, you reduce the net amount of nitrogen fixed into the soil because the plant needs some of the nitrogen in the soil to create the beans.  But, you still end up with a positive amount of nitrogen in the soil. Nature is very creative, indeed!

Live from Soup Central,
B.
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** The immersible blender takes 3 minutes to use, is fun, and washes up in another minute.  A food processor/blender solution takes much longer because (1) you need to wait for the soup to cool; (2) you have to worry about the soup burning you (not fun), (3) you need to wash the food processor/blender and additional bowls (which hold the blended soup).  In the end, it’s probably probably another 20 minutes plus the hassle. So, buy an immersible blender and continue to use it next summer to wow your friends with peach soup.