Processing Sunflower Seeds

Last week while it was dark and rainy outside, I decided to "process" one of my sunflowers. It has been hanging in the pantry to cure since mid autumn, and it was nice and dry and ready to be dealt with. Also, I had run out of sunflower seeds, which I usually toast and put on salads, and wasn't in the mood to drive all the way to Whole Foods to replenish my stash. Why spend money when I had a huge sunflower hanging right in the middle of the house?

I had a helper for the first and most satisfying part of the operation: getting the seeds out of the flower. Something about picking those seeds out and seeing just how many there are is very satisfying. Then we were on to phase two: hulling the seeds. My helper quickly lost interest as it became apparent that this is a tedious and SLOW process.

Before I even harvested my sunflowers, I looked into sunflower seed hullers, and it seems there isn't much available for the non-commercial, home sunflower grower. If you want to build a huller (or want to build one for me,) you can find instructions here. I was excited at first, but then I read the "tools required" part of the instructions: Table Saw. Drill Press. Band Saw. Saber Saw. Frankly, it would be easier and cheaper to patronize the bulk foods aisle at Whole Foods every week than build my own sunflower seed huller. This article gives a few at-home methods of hulling the seeds; the first two didn't work at all. Maybe I wasn't smashing the seeds hard enough?

I resorted to hulling my sunflower seeds like a squirrel - biting the shell to crack it and using my fingers to pry the inner part out. After an hour and a half I had just under 1/4 cup of edible seeds. Which, by the way, I couldn't in good conscience share with anyone else, since every single one of them had been in my mouth. Definitely not time effective. They sure tasted great, though. I earned those darn sunflower seeds! When every last seed had been cracked and opened up (and about a third of the seeds in the flower were just empty shells), I had about 1/2 cup of sunflower seeds. Again, neither time nor cost effective. My dreams of making my own sunflower seed butter had disappeared and I began revising my garden plans: maybe filling an entire bed with sunflowers doesn't make sense after all.

My husband tells me there is an old tabletop grain mill in the barn, which I plan to dust off and try using. Everything I've read indicates that is the most effective at-home way of hulling these yummy seeds. I still have three dried flowers hanging up, waiting to be processed. I'll let you know how it goes.

Tomatillo Sauce

Happy Friday! And it has been a happy friday over here, for no other reason than the fact that I had NOTHING PLANNED. For the first time in a week I was able to stay home and do more than dash around making sure the animals were fed. And this meant that I had time to tackle the enormous pile of tomatillos that has been hogging precious counter space since last week.

Last week I decided to thin the brussels sprout bed, and it became apparent that it was finally time to say goodbye to my lovely accidental tomatillo plants. They were ranging all over the place, knocking down brussels sprout plants, growing through the bird netting and blocking sunlight. So I pulled out the four plants and harvested every last tomatillo, even the teeny tiny ones. This required quite a few trips between the garden and my house with my pockets crammed full of the hard green fruits. (Now that I am writing about it, I wonder why it didn't dawn on me to take a bucket out there with me... though that would have required finding a bucket, which would have taken me down a long path of sequential events that would have distracted me totally from my initial mission: thin out the brussels sprouts. I guess pockets weren't such a bad idea after all.) I filled my only two mixing bowls with tomatillos, put the bowls on the counter, and launched back into the garden to finish tending the precious brassicas.

The only reason I processed the tomatillos today was because I wanted to make banana bread - the black bananas in the fruit bowl were threatening to ooze onto the table, so something had to be done. Since both mixing bowls were full of tomatillos, I decided to make something with them first (see what I mean about getting distracted? It seems I am in need of more vessels around here). A previous vote had shown that the family prefers the tomatillo soup to the tomatillo salsa, so I decided to process the tomatillos into the sauce needed for the soup. All. Six. Pounds. Of. Them.

That's right. Not only did those four accidental seeds that dropped into the brussels sprout patch grow gigantic beautiful plants, they ended up yielding approximately 9 1/2 pounds of tomatillos. And they would have continued producing if I hadn't needed to sacrifice them for the greater good of our winter harvest. I will definitely be planting tomatillos in the future. My freezer is full of tomatillo sauce just waiting to be made into stews for cold winter nights and i couldn't be more pleased. Such a nice way to start off the weekend.

Salsa Verde

It happened! I made and canned my first EVER batch of salsa using my accidentally-home-grown tomatillos. Fortunately, I did a bit of research beforehand and learned that you must use a recipe that is specifically for canning, since some fresh salsa recipes don't contain enough acid (vinegar or lemon / lime juice) to safely preserve the salsa in jars for a long period of time. I'm not sure exactly what will go wrong (I think botulism???) but everything I read contained the words "DANGER" and "DO NOT ADJUST THIS RECIPE" and other scary things that made even a recipe-changer like me walk a very straight line while making this.

The pantry finally contains ONE set of jars holding something I can eat. And eat it I will - does anyone else eat salsa straight out of the jar with a spoon? I pretty much expect to have heart burn for the entire duration of salsa season. Happy gardening!

Featured Gardener aka Bronwen's Beer Fridge

If you are anything like me, hearing about other people's gardens is the perfect inspiration to get you out working in your own. SO, I am starting a regular feature of gardeners I find inspirational. I'll start with people I know - most of whom live in the suburbs and are working with regular old back yards like most of you are. I like to call you urban farmers. I am so excited to have our first featured gardener on the General Farmer blog be my friend Bronwen! She is every bit as delightful as she sounds here, and has been wowing me with pictures of her many preserving feats, so I decided it was time to get the full garden story straight from her.

Please tell us a bit about how gardening fits into the history of your life.

I come from Wales, a lush green land where it rains pretty constantly. I grew up in houses with big gardens (that’s back yards to you folk!) but we never had veg patches. One house we lived in had nine apple trees and I was pretty much weaned on stewed apple (or apple sauce as you would call it!) and the house my parents still live in has two different apple trees, a Victoria plum tree and a very old quince tree which is in great demand and people reserve my mother’s quinces when they are just buds, as quinces are a dying breed. When we moved in, the previous owners left us with a legacy bed of gooseberry bushes. I don’t know if gooseberries are known over here [in America] but they grow on prickly bushes, look like hairy grapes and are sourer than the devil’s aftershave. The first summer we were there, we picked over 120lbs of gooseberries! We tried in vain to give them away and eventually my father took a machete to the plants and we gave up on our gooseberrying for good! There’s still one wild bush in the hedge but it grows red gooseberries which are not quite as offensive.

My husband’s family has always been gardeners. Many of the crops that grow so easily over here, like tomatoes, require a greenhouse and a lot of luck to grow back home and his father’s greenhouse was usually quite successful. They grew things like broad, runner, French and string beans, peas, courgette (zucchini), marrow, squash, pumpkins, carrots, broccoli, sprouts and cabbage – all things that can cope with the British climate.

And now we'd love to hear about your current gardening and preserving endeavors...

When we moved into our Milpitas [California] home, it came with beautiful old orange, lemon and lime trees. It’s nigh on impossible to grow citrus back home, and I cannot express the joy I get from watching tiny green balls turn into enormous ripe juicy sweet oranges even if I cannot eat them – I am fructose intolerant, which pretty much means no fruit eating. I like to share my Californian adventures with people back home and they cannot believe that I can go into the garden and pick an orange. Oranges come from supermarkets. Everybody knows that!

At the back of the house, we had what we named The World’s Most Boring Bushes. They were green and did nothing so we dug them up and bought a peach tree and an apricot tree because you can’t grow either back home - too much rain, not enough sun. As expected, they did nothing the first year. The second year, my sons and I were back in the UK when my husband harvested all 12 peaches and one apricot, so we didn’t really miss much. This year both trees went BONKERS! The apricots ripened first and there were hundreds! I had never seen so many. My little one adores apricots and worked hard to keep on top of the crop but there were just too many.

I had never jammed before. I made marmalade once. We called it Earthquake Lime marmalade as the first earthquake we experienced over here shook a laden branch of under ripe limes off our tree and I couldn’t bear to waste them. I was going back home that Christmas and managed to smuggle several jars home in my suitcase as Christmas presents! Jam was a new concept though. I sought advice from a friend in Florida who has her own jam business and she was happy to share her knowledge with me. I am not sure I approve of jam making in the summer as it was unbelievably hot in our kitchen and the standing and stirring was nearly my undoing, but the joy of seeing our home grown apricots turned into homemade jam is a feeling I will never tire of.

The only crop we do neglect is our prickly pears. Anyone local is welcome to come and help themselves to the tunas and nopales but they have to provide their own suit of armour and sign a waiver, as we will not be held responsible for the damage that monster cactus will inflict!

And how about vegetables?

We have big gardening plans under way. Our back yard is small and there was no room for a vegetable plot, but there was a long raised bed of money trees running all the way down the side of the house which my husband has chopped down. We are planning on replacing the wall and the earth this autumn so that by next spring we will have a raised veg plot. It gets great sun, is sheltered, and we have a lot of ideas. In the absence of a plot, we’ve done very well at growing tomatoes and carrots in pots and potatoes in black dustbins. Inspired by the happiness brought from growing things that cannot be grown back home, my boys bought a watermelon plant and a cantaloupe plant and we are proud to announce the birth of 4 tiny baby watermelons and 3 little cantaloupes. Their progress is being charted by being photographed with a variety of recognizable items so that people back home can see them grow. After all, watermelons, like oranges come from supermarkets so are never seen smaller than the average head!

Have you had any gardening / urban farming adventures you'd like to share with us?

Just as we finished making the last of the apricot jam, the peach tree went into over drive. I was sitting quietly minding my own business when I heard an eerie cracking noise followed by a soft THUNK, and one of the branches had given way to the weight of the fruit and was lying on my lawn. None of the fruit was ripe and there was no way I was going to let it go to waste, so after a quick Google, the kids and I set to, putting each green peach into a brown paper lunch bag and placed them on the deck in the sunshine.

After about 3 days, we started on a long and serious course of Peach Management whereby we had to check each bag (and there were 120 of them!) daily to see if they were ripe enough for jam. Meanwhile, the peaches on the rest of the branches, now propped up on wooden crutches, were ripening at an alarming pace and it was all we could do to keep up with them! Operation Brown Paper Bag managed to save about 75 peaches and we mixed them in with tree ripened beauties. Along with jam, I learned to can with the help of a lovely blog and now have a specially purchased jam fridge (like a beer fridge but just for jam!) in our garage, stuffed full of treasure!

I don't know about you, but reading that makes me want to get out and plant something! Or make jam... or buy a fridge on Craig's List! Thank you so much for sharing your garden with us Bronwen! (To see and purchase some of Bronwen's other creations, check out her facebook page!) If you'd like to be the next featured gardener, let me know in the comments section. I'm always excited to see what you are growing!

Purple Plum Harvest

The purple plum tree on my dad's property looks terrible. It hardly ever has any leaves and its branches are dry and brittle, the bark is scaly and the whole thing looks like it is on its last legs. But every year it produces an abundance of the most delicious BIG purple plums. Last year I missed harvesting them - I think between vacations and starting Kindergarten and the blue jays visiting we ended up donating most of the crop back to nature. This year I've been meaning to get out there for over a week and today it finally happened.

That crazy old tree has so many plums on it I am surprised the branches aren't breaking off. I reached up to shake one so the ripe plums would fall off and the entire branch broke off in my hand. I think I got one third of the plums on the tree and have enough for a double batch of jam.

Of course there will have to be plum cobbler, and a plum pie (per the request of my 3 year old - he always wants every fruit turned into a pie). But I must make jam - I can't resist the chance to add to my almost-full jam shelf.

While I was giving the plums their photo shoot, this happened:

Of course, I was happy to share. She snatched a plum off the top of my pretty pile and gobbled it right down. The other chickens got wind of her find right away and all came running, so I had to make off with my pretty plums before they all got eaten. I threw out some of the smaller ones for them, though. It's the least I can do after stealing away all their eggs this morning. :)

Kindred Spirit

Yesterday as I was standing in line at OSH to buy another set of jam jars, the lovely lady in front of me turned around, caught a glimpse of me, and her eyes lit up. "Making jam?" she asked with a bob of her white-haired head. I told her yes, the purple plum tree was ready to be harvested, at which point her equally lovely husband turned around and asked with great interest "You have fruit trees?" I told him the trees actually belong to my dad, but yes: two apricots, two white plum, one purple plum, an apple and a pear. They looked at each other and smiled.

She told me she has been canning "all her life," and that this year she "put up" peach, apricot, strawberry, and pineapple jam, as well as loads of canned peaches and tomatoes. You know someone is a hard-core preserver when they call it "putting up." We launched into an enthusiastic conversation about the best ways to can (she told me conspiratorially that she has been jamming apricots for years without lemon juice, which is a big no-no, but she has figured out how to do it carefully enough to avoid botulism, and since she's the only one eating it, it doesn't really matter anyways *wink*) and she told me that I should "cold pack" my tomatoes this year.

At one point in our hurried conversation (the line was moving fast at OSH) she said "It sounds silly, but I get the best feeling when I open my pantry and see all those jars and jars of preserves that I made. It makes me feel proud." I assured her that I don't think there is ANYTHING silly about that feeling - I get it myself with each new batch of jam. Then she told me a story about her friend's mother who lived during the depression. She had preserved all of their summer produce - jamming, pickling, and canning everything in order to have food to last through the fall and winter, since there was no money to buy food. Then a tragedy happened: the top wooden shelf holding the glass jars broke and all the contents fell down, taking each lower shelf down with it, until everything was left in a shattered inedible mess on the ground. She said that the family still talks about "the disaster" to this day - it is the stuff of legend: the day the harvest was lost. It made me think about how fortunate I am - I love to preserve the things we grow, and grow the things we eat, but I don't have to do it. If I run out of something I can just buy it at the store. Heck, we can drive through McDonald's if I get real crazy.

Probably the best part of my whole encounter with this woman was immediately realizing in her a kindred spirit. She was just as excited as me about making jam, asked me all the questions I would have asked her, and left with a smile on her face as big as mine. I know a lot of people who have made jam, but this was the first time I've met someone who gets all starry-eyed when thinking about the contents of her pantry. I love that something as simple as picking a bucket-full of plums and cooking them can bond two complete strangers with a 30-year age difference. And the icing on top of it all? I heard her tell her husband that I was "as cute as a button" as they were walking away. Nobody has ever called me cute as a button before. I don't think I will ever forget that woman - even find myself wishing I had come up with a way to see her again, maybe get a few pointers on canning my tomatoes.

Apricot harvest

This afternoon I happened to have time to both go to the bathroom AND look at myself in the mirror while washing my hands (fellow moms know what I mean) and noticed that my shirt was on inside-out. *sigh* I wonder if the people at the grocery store and bank noticed? Last night I made apricot jam. The kids and I picked a huge bag full a few days ago, and those things do NOT keep for long. By the time I started cutting them up about half had gone moldy. But I had more than enough for the 5 cups I needed. My dad has 2 apricot trees on this property and they are very sporadic producers (I think that is because he is a very sporadic pruner, but I could be wrong). We've had no fruit at all for the last two summers, but this year the trees made tons of gigantic delicious apricots - enough for the blue jays, wasps, AND all of us.

I used a packet of Sure-Gel that I had left-over from last year's jam making, but if you are going to make jam and you can find it, I highly recommend using Pamona's Pectin. It doesn't rely on sugar to make the jam set up, so you use about a third of the normal amount of sugar. This batch I made required 7 cups of sugar. SEVEN CUPS!!! And if you use less the jam won't set - you'll be left with jars of drooly sticky fruit sludge, which will be very disappointing. If I'd had some Pamona's on hand I think it would have asked for 3 cups.

This morning I woke up to 10 jars of jam on the kitchen table in the morning sunlight. They are the most beautiful color! I think this is my favorite color of jam... probably plum is my favorite flavor. The boys weren't quite as enamored with the color of our jam as me ... they were too busy discussing the rules of "whip tag," ie. does it count if you whip someone in the head as long as you do it softly, etc.

Making jam is so satisfying - keeping that home-grown fruit from going to waste by turning it into something that will last a whole year. I still have a bit of jam left from last year, so we're going to have to hurry up and eat a lot of toast or something. Or maybe give it away, or trade it for tomatoes since the dog keeps burying dead squirrels under my tomato plants. The non-jammed apricots are in the food dehydrator. I've never made dried apricots before, but one of the farmers nearby lays hundreds of them outside in the sun on screens every summer, so I figure it is a pretty fool-proof process (famous last words, I know). I'll keep you posted on how those turn out.