Devshirme

The “40 Days Of Blogging” project is a spiritual exercise, so it may seem strange that I am writing about my garden.  But food, and its cultivation, is a spiritual thing for a Christian.  If you are taking communion and ingesting the body and blood of Christ, then it makes sense that whatever else you put down your gullet should be as clean as possible.  Gardening, with the expected end product of healthy and healthful organic food is naturally related to this.  I normally do an end-of-the-garden report sometime at the end of September or beginning of October but that didn’t happen this year due to slacking off on my part.  But another reason is that the garden is still going on.

I miss my time each morning in the garden when the season is done.  I try to fill the void by homebrewing, growing mushrooms, etc. but it is very different than the normal warm weather routine.  But as I mentioned above, the garden is still a growing concern, although to a much lesser extent.  I decided to try to extend the growing season for a few crops by using cloches.  These plastic bells are basically mini-greenhouses, and allow the growing season to continue as long as there is sunshine.  I purchased three cloches and used them for the following crops – my parsley and oregano pots, which were transferred to the garden proper, and, on a whim, a random tomato plant that sprouted in the compost heap.  The tomato plant didn’t survive the early snowstorm, but the herbs are doing great – the oregano is particularly thriving.  These are minor things but it is nice to keep gardening at this late date.

This recipe was inspired by the late, lamented One Night Seafood dish at Bangkok Bistro, a great restaurant near BC that was a frequent Friday night destination for us while in seminary.  They changed the menu at some point and whatever replaced ONS was a little different and not quite as good, although everything is awesome there (they don’t seem to have a web site).  I was harvesting the remaining basil from the garden and was overcome by memories and a strong desire to eat One Night Seafood, so this is my attempt at it.

3 sprigs of basil, chopped

1 shallot, chopped

1 cayenne pepper, chopped

1 small head of broccoli or green cauliflower, chopped up

Soy sauce (preferably low sodium and gluten-free)

1 green onion, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, minced

1lb frozen seafood (I use Trader Joe’s seafood medley, but any kind of shrimp/scallop/squid combo will do, and it doesn’t have to be frozen I suppose)

Heat up a large frying pan on the stove, medium heat with a little canola oil.  Add the vegetables and seafood until the seafood is cooked (poke the shrimp until it is firm) and the broccoli/cauliflower is softened.  Add desired amount of soy sauce over the whole thing as it is cooking – I wait until some of the water from the frozen seafood has burned off.  You can serve this over rice if you wish but I find it filling as is.

The Wednesday before Memorial Day I planted our garden (you can see how behind I am in blogging, since it is almost mid-June) and things are going well.  I still need to get more herbs but for now here is what I have:

-Pickling cucumbers – this is usually a high-yield crop.

-Cayenne, habanero and bell peppers.  The cayennes are usually high yield well into the fall.  This is my first year growing habaneros.

-Buttercrunch lettuce and escarole.  The lettuce grows like crazy and I will probably plant and reap several harvests – they have a quick turn-around time.

-Tomato plants with basil planted in between to keep pests away.

-Pumpkin.

-Spinach and kale.

-Rosemary, parsley, thyme and Greek oregano.

-Strawberries.  Last year our plant grew all over the ground on the side of the house but with no yield.  I cut the branches off and took the pot indoors for the winter.  All of the branches took in the ground and we have been getting strawberries every day.

-The usual blueberry bushes and apple tree.  I didn’t plant musk melons this year – the experiment is over, and was a disaster.

-Some mystery plants.  I thought they were chives, which seem to just pop up here and there.  But they got huge and are getting ready to flower.  What are they?  Decorative onions?  Mutant garlic?  We will see.

That is it for now.  I will update with pictures when the rain stops.

The title of this post is not so much a reference to my little blogging sabbatical as it is to the events of Easter weekend.  If you were at the Saturday night service you may have noticed I disappeared after the “Christ Is Risen” part and then reappeared at the very end to give out eggs.  I also wasn’t around for the Agape service, although I again reappeared, this time at the reception we had for His Eminence and Bishop McManus.  Here is what went down…

Some people have noticed that I (discretely) text/check text messages during church.  I do this for several reasons – to check for emergencies, to communicate with PC members in the narthex (I would much rather someone text me than stomp up during the service and come into the altar), and other things.  I generally check two or three times during a service – nothing heavy.  I received a message Sat. night from our chancellor asking if I could go to a nearby church and finish the service for the priest, who had collapsed and was taken to the hospital.  I checked in with Fr. Dean, grabbed Chris (our seminarian) and took off.  It was a funny scene in the parking lot – many people were leaving after receiving the light, and in the middle of it so was one of the priests!  About halfway to our destination I talked to the president of the parish council at the church to which we were going and he said everyone had gone home.  I came back to Worcester, went to the emergency room, visited the priest – a mentor of mine who is thankfully doing fine now – and then came back to the Cathedral.  I substituted for him at the Agape service on Easter Sunday morning, and that was that.  It was definitely one of the most memorable Easters ever!

Bright Week was quite busy – in many ways, busier than Holy Week, where we just had services.  Poetry readings, several liturgies, funerals and baptisms, a genocide memorial service at the College of the Holy Cross, and many other happenings kept me running, and this week has been equally full.  I did, however, plant some early crops and start on the garden – more on that later.

The other day I blogged about creativity and acting in the image of God, and I mentioned gardening as one of the ways to be creative.  Even though it is early-mid December it got me thinking about my garden and how much I miss waking up every day in the spring, summer and early fall and working on the garden.  Whether it is watering, planting, picking crops, or just messing around and doing a whole lotta nothing out there, my time spent in the garden is truly rejuvenating to the spirit.  I realized I had not done my traditional wrap-up article on how things went, so here goes:

I had several tomato plants, including one in a topsy-turvy upside down thing.  I started from seed outside rather than from seedlings, so they never really got to be huge, but I did get a steady stream of small, rather ugly but organic tomatoes.  Next year seedlings.  We had several pumpkin plants stretching across the yard and over a thicket of plants, and we got three jack-o-lanter pumpkins (interestingly, this kind of pumpkin is yellow rather than the deep orange you associate with the name) of various sizes.  Definitely a success.  The blueberry bushes were disasters.  Last year we had endless, delicious blueberries.  This year we had about five and they were tart.  My gardening guru Karen says that it is probably because I never pruned the bushes; therefore, one of my late fall activities has been pruning them for next year.

The apple tree, on the other hand, yielded like the blueberry bushes did last year.  We had apples all summer long, and they were delicious.  The same with cayenne peppers – I was harvesting these all summer, and as winter approached I still had 30 or so green ones going.  I took them in, put them in a plastic bag so they could ripe, dried them out, and ground them into crushed red pepper, just like what you put on pizza or pasta.  I also had a steady flow of pickling cukes all summer.  They grew like crazy, and I harvested them when they got to a certain size so they wouldn’t get too seedy.  Eventually they all died out due to some thing that gets to the plants, but definitely a success.

I tried yet again to grow musk melons (similar to cantaloupe, which is not actually grown in the US) and had little luck – three small, rather bland ones that broke off early.  Apparently these guys need constant sunlight, and that just isn’t happening here in New England.  Garlic was a disaster because I didn’t cut off the flower and the stalk ended up breaking from the weight.  I planted a few potatoes that had eyes all over them, and this too didn’t really work out.  They were almost an afterthought – next year I will try harder.  The strawberry plant grew like crazy but no fruit – my understanding is it has to do this and then next year it will yield.

Later in the season I got two packets of lettuce seeds and planted buttercrunch and romaine lettuce.  Unbelievable – I had heads popping up within a week, and each day we were able to harvest a fresh head.  The buttercrunch worked out better than the romaine, and they both grew well into the fall, just like the peppers.  Next year I am definitely expanding the lettuce section.

What am I leaving out?  Let’s see…we had many potted herbs and spices, and they all did well – mint, chamomile, basil, Greek basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme, and…I forget the others, although I recall that there were two different kinds of mint.  And we had our usual harvest from the crabapple tree.  No surprise chives this year – last year some grew late in the season in an abandoned pot.

So how will I fill the gardening void over the winter?  By switching gears.  We plan to cook up another batch of homebrew soon – Russian Imperial Stout, a powerful beer that is very appropriate for a cold New England winter.  I have the mushroom log, which has been a disappointment, soaking, so we will see how that goes.  At some point we will make cheese and vinegar – I have kits for both – and I may try to make wine.  And, if Fr. Peter can convince me,  I will try to cook up a batch of mead.  I also plan to start the garden indoors in February by growing some seeds.  So all things considered, I should be kept well occupied with this stuff until I am back out there again in the dirt.

Two new Facing East podcasts are up over at the site as well as on iTunes.  In these two episodes Fr. Peter and I journey to a feed store as well as Whole Foods (which is, I suppose, a feed store for humans).  We will be meeting this Friday as well to record another…

Two new podcasts are up!  The first is a “lost episode” that includes our bizarre encounter with a graffiti-covered bus out in the country, while the second is about a trip to a farm.  You can check them out on the podcast site or on iTunes, where it is a free download (as it is on our site, of course).  If you get it from iTunes be sure to leave a comment!

Things are starting to happen with the garden.  We enjoyed our first green bell pepper the other day, and we have been harvesting herbs – mint, parsley, basil, thyme – and using them in different stuff.  I plucked my first red cayenne pepper – yum – this morning and also noticed that we have some cucumbers growing.  I did a second watering session in the afternoon (I don’t normally do two waterings but am this week due to the extreme heat), peeled back a leaf from the cucumber plant, and found one ready to go!  Here it is:

I have been shamefully neglecting the blog.  A lot of things have happened recently – festival, laity award dinner, all kinds of stuff – so let’s start fresh.  Coincinding with the first day of sun after over a week of rain and overcast days, our garden is fully up and running, so how about we start with that.  I moved the location this year from the side of the house (where the soil would get washed away during the heavy rains we often have here in Worcester) to the peninsula next to the driveway and my neighbor (and gardening guru) Karen’s garden.  I picked up compost from Hope Cemetery (they have a mountain of it for the taking) and spent spare time the past few weeks getting things ready.  Here is what I planted:  Cucumbers, cantaloupe, cayenne peppers, pumpkin, garlic and tomato in the main garden.  Next to the house, in the old garden space, I have pots with basil, mint, strawberries, bell peppers, sunflowers, parsley, cilantro, and another tomato plant.  In addition we have a pot in the back with two garlic plants, a TopsyTurvy planter (As Seen On TV!) hanging in the front, a small pot with thyme, the blueberry bushes and the apple tree.  I also have the mushroom log inside the house. 
The first thing I harvested was pussy willow stalks in the earliest days of spring.  You can’t eat these, of course, but they make for a nice decoration in the house or a gift when visiting someone.  I also harvested thyme, which grows early and often, and dried it out for seasoning use.  I have a bell peppers that should be ready soon and cayenne peppers which should turn red in the next week.  Sadly, I think we will not get too many blueberries, for whatever reason (last year we had a seemingly endless supply) but there are tons of apples coming out on the tree, so hopefully that will pay out.  The tree  has five different varieties of apples, and the granny smiths always come out first.