Mistakes #364 and #365

Different kinds of produce have different winter storage requirements: potatoes can't be exposed to light because their skins get poisonous, onions and garlic must be in a dry environment to keep from rotting, some roots do better if rested on a bed of soil or sand. I'm guessing they're more at peace because this setup feels like home to them.

Squashes and pumpkins require a dry cool place (being Mesoamerican fruits), and ideally, some kind of pillow between them and the hard surface they are resting on. When my dry "cool" location threatened to freeze, squashes and pumpkins were moved. Pumpkins went inside, squashes went to the very moist root cellar.

Do not do this: do not forget your "dry cool" storage items in your "wet cool" space for three weeks, and expect them to be fine.

The pumpkins, indoors, are perfect. The squashes, not so much.

The other mistake wasn't ours.

Before the Vegan Bake Sale for Haiti happened, we notified every news outlet in the Hudson Valley (practically). The Beacon Free Press didn't list the event in advance (boo on you!), but showed up at the event to take a picture and ask questions. Well okay, they get some credit: better late than never, right?

Nope, this fab event didn't make the paper this week. That's because there was too much other important news, like a clown at the coffee shop (no kidding, the headline story!). It doesn't really matter, since the reason we'd contacted them was to get more people to the sale and raise more money for Haiti. But it does make you wonder.

Figs and Other Fruits I Don't Have

2009 is the year my fig tree died. It was given to me as a gift many years earlier, because I love the fruit and also love those big floppy elephant ear leaves. I think fondly of the short and stout fig tree that grew in my backyard "on base" (Davis Monthan Air Force Base, that is) when I was kid. It was a grand climbing tree, for me, since I'm scared of heights and was terrible at climbing trees. It thrived there, with no t.l.c.

I still don't know what I did wrong with my coddled fig: it survived last winter (pouting) indoors, by a cold, drafty window with a lot of southern light. She'd shed all her leaves in a tantrum in about March, and then come back strong. Soon after she made the transition to the porch in May, she up and died.

I work in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I've spotted several figs there that fruit year after year. I made friends with some of the neighbors, and helped them pick the fruit this year and planned to use some figs for the C.S.A. We decided that their cool cellar was a good place for storing them. I'd checked in a couple times, and they were holding up just fine. When I stopped by this week, I was told they all had recently spoiled. I'd waited one distribution too long, thinking because of the association of figgy pudding with Christmas, that these delicate fruits would last until the end of the month/year/decade. This lack of judgment goes in the annals of failures and mistakes.

Because of losing my fig tree, losing the figs harvested in Brooklyn, and having missed Southern Arizona's fig season, I'm taking this opportunity to pout about fruits I don't have.
Oh yeah, 'tis the season for want-want-want, so let's start with hardy kiwis. I'm reading the kiwi (a.k.a. Actinidia) chapter in Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden. Reading about them and their edible skins and their pop-in-your-mouth deliciousness is making my mouth water. Oh, I have plans to plant them, on a side of my house that needs its ugliness covered by pretty plants, where there's enough room for them to grow like crazy, as it seems they do, and in a place with lots of sunshine. But I have to build mega support for the vines, and house projects tend to back up around here. People get distracted by starting up C.S.A.s, by pickling for farm markets, by train commuting to paying jobs. Thus, walls that are halfway torn down stay only halfway torn down. So, though I feel very determined to get these kiwis going (soon, soon), I wish planting them were going to be as easy as walking down a shady road where the mowers never come and shoving pawpaw seeds one inch under the soil, all along that road.
So, even though I was just complaining about the California Rare Fruit Growers teasing me, part of me suspects I should turn my mid-winter fruit blues toward fruits I can't grow. Just look at them, pet the pages, drool, dream, and move on. (This month's mag features kumquats, which I will be eating in four days. But last month's cover showed Ecuadorian mystery fruits.) What fruits will 2010 bring?

Sigue Sigue Sputnik

In order for the wintergreens blog to be a well-rounded place, we need to discuss bruises, rot, mistakes, failure, crashes and burns. One such crash involved the gorgeous and alien-looking kohlrabi, a vegetable as wild looking as the glam band, and in this case, as short lived.I got a most beautiful batch of white and purple kohlrabi bulbs. Excited to preserve these crisp lovelies, I moved them into a barrel of salt brine, covered them, and waited. After a few days, they smelled fantastic, and the one I sampled was crunchy and flavorful. Left to ferment longer, I was left with a big barrel of stinky rot, a struggle to get out to the compost without gagging. Slimy purple and white and black, with the stench of a dead cow.

It was my first experience with vegetables rotting that I was attempting to ferment. Up until this moment everything I'd captured under brine had preserved well, and often taken on interesting and new flavor qualities. I wondered, does kohlrabi have some special reason it can't be fermented? Nope—others have done it successfully. Was there a rotten bulb in there that caused the rest to turn? Did I not pack it tightly enough, and leave air bubbles? Was there not enough salt in the brine? Was the barrel left in too warm of a place? I'll never know, but you can bet the itch to do it again, successfully, has got to be scratched. I want kohlrabi more than ever.Spectacular failure is okay sometimes. After the eighties, we just go on.