Sacred Gardening

We have counted our blessings in our country garden now. Even though animals pretty much cleaned out my cukes and tomatoes (that’s an OLD picture), the jalapeños and sweet Italian peppers came in a bonanza. The pumpkins might make it, but if not, I’ve learned a good amount about how to fence to prevent digging animals.  We’re getting some butter beans and squash, and the rain barrels have been topped off by thunderstorms. Now it’s time to supplement our pantry with locally grown produce while the prices are cheap.  Just ask at any farmer’s market for a box of “canners” and you may get 25 pounds of good tomatoes for less and 50 cents per pound.  Act quickly and try the recipe for sauce I’ll include in this post.

In our city garden, I’ve actually harvested slicing tomatoes for the first time in a few years. It took some ingenuity and expense to surround the containers with hardware cloth and put a little chicken wire on top, but so far the squirrels are not eating the tomatoes: we are.  We’ll repeat that process on a larger scale next year, and although one ground hog died on a fiendishly hot day in one of my live traps, and two raccoons (likely rabid) and one fox (definitely rabid) had to be shot in the country, I’ve let the animals win this year until I put in better fencing.  They need the food, in any case, in the ongoing drought.

Rain barrels have been our garden-savers this year. We have about 170 gallons of capacity in town, so we can be lavish enough to water ornamentals as well as food.  Our basil and parsley have been welcome companions on our table, especially for Lebanese dishes like tabouli and the weekly pesto night.

All of these simply pleasures locally, despite the sickly heat and dry soil, come against the denouement in the Gulf as BP claims to have the situation at the Deep Water Horizon under control.  Let’s hope so, and even more importantly, let’s hope the public has a longer memory for this disaster than it did for Katrina or Prince William Sound.

While we cannot individually stop the flow of oil, we can, as individuals and families, learn from our gardens and lean on them, too. My advice in this post focuses on talking stock of where we live as the time of oil depletion approaches and making stock, in the form of a lowly tomato sauce, to get us through the dark half of the year.

A Vision of Transformation: A trip to the Short Pump area (I get there about once per year) showed me both the foolishness of our past practices and an odd hope. In a time when cars will be nigh impossible to operate, the “Towne Center” of such shopping malls may actually become just that. The sidewalks are already there, and multi-lane roads beg to become bikeways. As a locus for local production, the old commercial buildings will host workshops for making things, stages for cultural events, a farmer’s market, and a range of businesses selling with a post-oil economy will need: crafted metal, simple tools, salvaged electronics, locally crafted furniture. People will walk there or use whatever public transit emerges with the end of cheap oil.  It need not look shabby, like some half-wrecked Roman forum of the 6th Century. The artisans among us will have to bring forth new beauty and the craftsmen will build upon the bones of our 20th Century civilization.

Enough of the land remains unpaved around this particular suburban nexus to revert to farmland and feed a village-in-the-making. Will live theater come to the old cinema complex? Will live music be performed where piped-in music now plays? I think it will in some places, after a terrible time when the American Dream of Hyper-consumption gives way to a local and sustainable reality.

What happens at your suburb, city neighborhood, or small town will be up to you and those you know. Get to know them now.  And give thanks to the Goddess who spun the galaxies and, to me, left the rest in our hands, by using your hands joyfully to put away some of the harvest. Feed some neighbors, and they’ll be more likely to remember your name and be there to help if you ever need it (and we all will).

The recipe that follows uses many ingredients you can grow yourself or find from a local grower without too much difficulty. Making your own sauce and canning it, something our grandparents took for granted, can become a subversive and spiritually rewarding act.

Burdock’s Tomato Sauce

• 10 pounds tomatoes, cut into eighths
• 1 large onion, chopped medium to small
• 10 sweet Italian peppers or 2 bell peppers, chopped small
• 1 tsp dry hot pepper (optional)
• 1/2 cup dry basil (whole leaves stripped from stems)
• 1 tsp oregano (whole leaves stripped from stems)
• 1/4 cup honey (dark honey like buckwheat or sourwood are superb)
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 6 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped (or more, you nuts!)
• 1 tbsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp allspice

Add tomatoes to heavy saucepan. Press down with potato masher to make juice. Grind basil and oregano in a spice grinder or in batches between your palms and add to tomatoes. Add other ingredients, stir, and bring to boil.  Reduce heat to simmer, stir occasionally, and cook 2-3 hours (or more, depending on your stove) until sauce is thick and not watery.

Serve as-is over pasta or with sauteed okra, sausage, beef (cubed or ground) or cubed lamb, depending on your intentions. This sauce works great with Middle-Eastern dishes (use lamb), over pasta or gnocchi, or over rice.

Add meat (optional), pintos and kidney beans, plus chili powder (1 tbsp per gallon of saurce), plus a square of unsweetened baker’s chocolate,  to make delicious chili.

Canning Advice (and Philosophy):

The sauce can be canned; I put away at least a gallon every summer to get us through the winter. I add more salt to each pint or quart (usually 1 tsp canning or kosher salt per quart).

I use a pressure cooker because of the peppers and onions.  In fact, except for tomatoes and a few high-acid or pickled foods, I use the pressure cooker for everything, though I’m going to dry some figs this year as a first step in learning how to dehydrate fruit.

While a good canning pressure cooker seems expensive, ours has paid for itself after three years. Don’t use your cooking pot; it lacks the crucial pressure gauge.

A warning on canning: it is not an art. It is a science. Bacteria do not care one iota about your sacred or secular intentions.

Check your canner’s instructions or the USDA’s publications found at U Georgia’s site on preserving food . When using books, follow modern recipes online or in excellent books such as Susann Geiskopf-Hadler’s Putting it up with Honey (about all sorts of canning, not just with honey). Do not go by granny’s recipe or a 1950 cookbook. We know more today about the pathogens in fresh food, and the experts have changed processing times for both the boiling-water and pressure-cooker methods.

Canning like an artiste may result in a lingering and painful illness, if not death.

That fear may be why so many folks look at me as if something were growing from my head when I say “I’m doing my canning now.” They wonder why we don’t spend hundreds on a chest freezer or just go to the store.  One power failure ends the bounty of a freezer, and I can only imagine the expense of buying so much sauce, pickles, and veggies in winter. Besides, they’d not bring the pleasure or flavor of what we grew ourselves.

And, damn it, I make a statement, with every pint or quart jar, about my choices in a crazy society based on debt-driven consumption.

My pantry is my hope in a better future, as well as an insurance policy in case the lights flicker and go out for a while.