Mary Cook

seemed too soon to fall back on spaghetti our fave--especially since I like to put a little sausage in it and it seems like we've been eating a lot of meat lately, just finished off the last package of sausage. But I was advised to eat fish once a week, so I opened the last can of tuna fish, stirred in some mayonnaise and celery seed and finely minced onion and my husband is going to make tuna melts with it (I just made bread yesterday so fresh bread will help.) So maybe tomorrow I'll make spaghetti, and then a little more of the pound of sausage will likely go on a pizza soon, probably with leftover spaghetti sauce. Here's another leftover trick--open a quart of venison and add carrots and potatoes and onions and garlic and spice and celery, make a good stew. Also make enough dough for a two-crust pie. Then the next day--or a subsequent one--roll it out, dump in the leftover stew, adjust the liquid level if necessary, and bake. Two good meals that are both pretty easy.

Just gotta say--I disagree with a number of things in the last couple posts. I think it's a matter of geography (climate) and likely soil type as well. My carrots have done a lot better since I started planting them in rows--I used to just scatter seed in a block, which made thinning way more tedious. And planting them here and there among other things would make it far more difficult to keep them watered in the first weeks, which they need more than anything else. I've tried growing carrots in fall and got a good crop once, little or no germination the other two times--probably because in MY climate, it tends to be dry in late summer and early fall, wetter in spring and early summer. I forgot to mention in my earlier post that one key is to choose planting time with an eye on the long-range forecast; ideally you plant before a week of cloudy, rainy weather. And carrots can tolerate very cold temperatures, often surviving the winter, but a really hard prolonged freeze may cause the upper part, more exposed to the cold, to rot. A little mulch may prevent this. But you can't expect plants to actually GROW in winter--if they've gotten enough growth before hard winter sets in, some protection can allow you to harvest hardy crops all winter, or dig up root crops in spring.
What I'd like to know is why my carrots are often pale. I might try that Bolero someone recommended.

I had trouble for years--usually they did germinate, but weren't fit to harvest till fall and then would mostly be very small. Often pale as well. Here's what I do now: first of all I once read that if you plant your onions and carrots in alternating rows, each inhibits the fly that bothers the other. I tried it and it seemed to work so I keep doing it. The downside is that this means I don't plant the carrots till April, when the onions are up so the carrot rows are well marked. No wait--that's not first, first is soil prep, which I mostly do in the fall prior to planting in spring. I have clay soil, and I too have found that adding sand--I have added it to ALL my beds but especially for sure those that will have carrots. I add that after turning the soil with a shovel--I don't agree with the "tilling is a crime" idea, though I think it best to keep it to once a year. Then I add compost or preferably, leafmold, and probably sand. Then I work it with my hands till it's soft and smooth, no sizable lumps (I do this also for lettuce and spinach--other crops don't need a fine seedbed). Next, I grow Danvers or Red Cored Chantenay, two varieties that do well in clay. Then I have to water a lot because as others have said, it typically takes two or even three weeks for the dang things to emerge (yes I put a radish seed every foot or two to mark the rows) and they're planted shallowly. For me, they grow very slowly even after emergence--but when I yank the onions the first week of July and put down mulch between the now one-foot-apart rows, they seem to take off and grow faster. By then I've thinned them at least once.Mty best crop was last year, and I think it was because of the longest drought we ever had, from the beginning of June till the first frost in mid November. I watered them a thousand times or so, so they got ENOUGH water--but it was only in the rows, and probably didn't last long. So the worms or flies or whatever it is that makes those black tunnels in the top part of the carrot, barely hit at all--and therefore I was able to leave the carrots past early August, and they got bigger.

I clicked on this one for inspiration from reading others' posts, since I'm not looking forward to winter, now my least favorite season. And I second whoever said they enjoy the beauty of the first couple snows but then they want spring. I once wrote a poem about that, about how a February snow might look like a December snow but it doesn't get the same appreciation from me.
But now that I'm inspired, I'll name the greater energy I have when temperatures drop, and everything about wood heat--well, my husband does most of the work but I enjoy stacking firewood on the porch and then in its spot in the house, kindling and feeding the fire, having hot water that doesn't require burning propane, the smell of woodsmoke outside, and also using the oven a lot without feeling apologetic about the extra heat in the house. Looking through seed catalogs is another winter pleasure.

She said dent corn is primarily grown in my region, and that it had the culinary advantages of neither flint nor flour corn but the agronomic virtues of both Since yield is important to me and I mostly feed my corn to my chickens, that was my choice.

I think I should wait and see what my own mix does, first. I have generally stuck with dent because of what Carol Deppe says, though I imagine I COULD grow flint okay. One thing I'd like to breed for is resistance to the thing that causes moldy tips in a wet year. I've read that corn mold can cause, I think cancer. I still use some of those after chopping off the ends but maybe there's a genetic solution--ears tipped down, maybe?

Wow, Timothy, that's my plan too! Last year I grew Bloody Butcher and Blue Clarage in alternating rows; I didn't grow corn this year except a tiny bit of Green Oaxacan which can go in late, mostly to refresh my seed supply. Next year I plan to grow a lot of the BB X  BC mix and see what it does--I'm hoping for hybrid vigor and shades of purple.

I live on a land trust, so we technically don't own the land--we have a lifetime lease. We do own the improvements, like the house we built. We  could afford it because we didn't have to pay for the land, because it's in West Virginia where the cost of living is low--so are wages but we are both frugal people so we were able to save enough to build the house, and then my mother left me an annuity of $23,000--which paid for the off-grid solar system (also cheaper because my husband understand electricity and planned and installed it himself) with excellent timing as we were able to take off 30% of the cost in both federal and state taxes, which I would have had to pay on the annuity--now there's no state tax credit and the federal one is about to expire. My adult kids are self-sufficient so no expense there

Leigh--I question the "ripens before frost, therefore astringent" part. I think frost is irrelevant to the question of ripening and astringency, and that astringency means it isn't ripe. For the wild trees, even the ones in the open that have branches closer to the ground, most persimmons need to be picked up off the ground--and USUALLY their being on the ground means they're ripe. Not all, but you can generally tell because the ripe ones are orange and soft. For me, I have gotten the runs after eating persimmons off the ground, so now I use persimmon only cooked--baked actually, as my three recipes all involve baking. The grafted ones are significantly bigger and have fewer or no seeds. This is one of the things I'm wondering about the Asian ones--do they have similar seeds? I also wonder if there are any hybrids with much larger fruit than American ones but hardy to zone 6.

This is getting a bit off topic, as I question whether you can make a decent jam from persimmons...but my two cents on this question is that current wisdom is that fruit and others that are sufficiently acid may be water bath canned, but less acidic items must be pressure canned. I do both, depending on the item. But I agree that USDA is very conservative--I think the idea is that rather than one case of botulism resulting from someone who thought they followed the guidelines (but shaved a bit), they'd rather millions of housewives and househusbands putting unnecessary time and fuel into canning. When I can tomatoes--which to my tongue are less acid than they used to be, and I've been searching for a tomato that's both sweet and tangy--I do a 15 minute water bath, and also add a tablespoon of lemon juice to each quart. I also do a 15 minute water bath for jams and pickles. But this is partly because my understanding is that it takes 15 minutes of boiling to sterilize the jars--so might as well have them already filled. But 45 years ago, local women here in West Virginia told me they just canned tomatoes and jams "open kettle," meaning you got the contents boiling, the jars in boiling water, filled the jars and sealed them and you were done. And I did it that way for years with no ill effects. But like I say, if you have to boil the jars for 15 minutes to sterilize them, might as well fill and seal them first.
Here's my question for this thread--does anyone have experience with both Asian and American persimmons, who can compare them?