Last week I dug up ready potatoes that had been thriving in a small plot below our bougainvillea.  In the past two weeks the tops had turned yellow like straw and wilted to the ground.  I gave them one last watering, as recommended in various readings I’d read, and a few days later carefully scratched back the surface of the earth to reveal good-sized Purple Viking and Yukon Gold potatoes.  The sets of early March had in 80 days become about 15 pounds of good eats.

And eat them we have.  We pan-fried them in the mornings with butter, onions, and pepper.  We cooked and blended them with leeks for a fine soup.  We dribbled them with olive oil, dashed them with fresh rosemary (from the yard), and baked them.  We boiled them and diced them for crumbled-blue-cheese-prosciutto-dill potato salad, and tossed them in with a roast to soak and simmer all day.

We ate them baked plain because the fresh spuds are so flavorful they need nothing added.

At least as many potatoes still sit in the yard, ready for harvest.

This haul improves greatly on the six small potatoes we pulled last season (see “Small Potatoes” posted on August 20, 2009).  Poor soil and inadequate sunlight were the culprits then — problems that I remedied this spring by working plenty of mulch and compost into a fairly sunny plot before planting.  The 80 or so days they took to mature is about 20 short of expected, but done is done.  A new round of Yukon starters are in the ground for early fall eating, as well as a few rows of a russet-type potato we’ve never tried before called a Carola.

If this good return keeps up, we’ll have potatoes till Christmas.

The potato-surplus coincides fortuitously with our need to keep my wife off dairy till we can calm our mildly colicky baby girl.  We have plenty of potatoes to go with the meat in the mostly meat and potatoes diet that we’ll be sticking to for a few weeks.

It’s nice to find we have just what the doctor ordered right out the back door.

Last spring I took a chainsaw to it, slicing clean through one of the trunks.  I intended to cut the whole thing down, but stopped short when the pile of trimmings got high and I realized I had no plan for what to do with the space once cleared.  I decided wanting to cut a tree down wasn’t a good enough reason to do so.

And it’s a good thing, too, because it turns out it’s a Mulberry Tree, likely a Riviera or Kaester (M. nigra) variety.

In the past I’d never thought much about the heavy load of long, deep purple-black fruits that weighed the wide canopy down between April and June.  I assumed — for no good reason — that the berries were nothing we’d want to eat and left them to the birds.  Perhaps I didn’t think of homes as coming with something so huge and edible.  My mom, who grew up eating mulberries from the trees in her neighborhood, suggested the type of tree it might be, and with a little research I found her to be right.

That was last year.  This year, we made jam.

Our mulberries are the first crop we’ve had that realistically calls for preserving some portion of the abundant harvest.  The 20-foot-tall and 30-foot-wide tree grows multiple clusters of fruit on every branch, so harvesting takes time and a ladder.  It also takes a gentle touch, since the delicate berries would just as soon squish as be plucked whole.  A better method might be to lay out a clean tarp or expendable sheet and then shake the ripe fruit from the tree, but our space doesn’t allow for this.  I filled a massive bowl in an hour of picking and didn’t even make a dent in the overall yield.

It took two tries to turn it into to jam.

The first batch looked like tar, spread like tar, and chewed like tar.  I ended up stirring the fruit-sugar mix for 45 minutes seeking the illusive “jelly-like” consistency the recipe said would indicate a finished product.  Turns out boiling hot jam doesn’t ever really look like jam in a jar.  Kind of like melted anything looks different than if it wasn’t melted.  “Jelly-like” comes 24 hours later — after the mix has cooled.  I also tried to use the fruit’s natural pectin this time around, rather than an additive, by including 15 – 20 percent unripened berries.

The second effort, after some additional reading, was at a boil for fewer than five minutes, just long enough to dissolve the sugar-pectin mix.  Overall, making jam is relatively easy … when done right.

1. Clean the canning jars with warm soapy water, submerge the jars and lids in boiling water, then turn down the heat and let them stand in the hot water.
2. Mix four cups of de-stemmed (this takes a while) and crushed fruit with 1/4-cup of lemon juice and one teaspoon of calcium water in a large pot.  Bring to a boil.
3. Thoroughly mix two cups of sugar and two teaspoons of pectin and stir it into the boiling fruit mix.  Stir for two minutes then let it return to a boil.  Remove the not-jelly-like liquid from heat.
4. Pour the jam into the hot canning jars up to 1/4 inch from the top, clean rims and threads meticulously, and fasten the lids.
5. Return the filled jars to the boiling water and submerge for 10 minutes.  Turn off the heat and let them stand in warm water for five minutes.  Let them sit for 24 hours out of the water before eating or saving.

We now have two jars of mulberry jam ready for eating — or storing.  Unopened, they should be good for up to a year.  Opened, they should last about three weeks refrigerated.  I tried some on toast today, and it looks, spreads, and tastes like jam.  The mulberry is a surprisingly sweet fruit, and the jam is no different.

We shared some of this second batch with mom, and will make more when the last round of berries come ripe later this month.

Winter’s been good so far.  We’ve been able to eat a variety of vegetables from the yard fairly regularly: Bull’s Blood Beets, Autumn King Carrots, Little Gem Romaine Lettuce, Marvel of Four Seasons Butterhead Lettuce, Correnta Spinach, Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard, Mammoth Melting Sugar Peas, Green Sprouting Calabrese Broccoli.  It’s all tasty good stuff, but it doesn’t add up too fast when charting calories.  And, we’re looking at another lull in production, just like at the start of our cool season crop, with nothing really ready to eat for a little while.

We achieved the .5 percent Saturday night, sharing two soups with my parents, sister, and grandpa.  We cooked the split pea soup we made a month or so ago (see “A whole meal of food”, posted Dec. 8), and we tried a new potato-chard soup.  Chard is the only crop we have in abundance, so we’ve been eating more chard than I ever imagined — which is easy, because I never imagined anything about chard.  We have also experimented with a sauted chard and look forward to trying a chard-tomato casserole in the coming week.

Hopefully the chard will sustain us until the next round of winter crop comes in.

We have been saving snow peas for three or four weeks, dutifully blanching and freezing them until a combination of preserved peas and fresh-picked measured out to two cups.  We got there this past Sunday and made vegetarian split pea soup with our harvest.  Our friends Paul and Amy, who are always game for a good food experiment, helped shell the the 30 or so pods that made up the final, and fresh, bit of peas.  Then we cooked.  Then we ate.

The soup turned out excellent, made more so by the fact that this was our first meal where the primary ingredient came from the garden.  Every other edible from the yard has been either a side dish or a snack, but the peas were what the soup was all about.

Here’s the recipe (serves 4):

• 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil (more to drizzle)
• 2 large onions, chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon of fine-grain sea salt
• 2 cups split green peas, rinsed
• 5 cups water
• juice of 1/2 a lemon (reserve the zest)
• a few pinches of smoked paprika
• a few small broccoli trees or a handful of spinach (optional)
• 1/2 cube of vegetable bouillon (optional)

Add olive oil to a big pot over medium-high heat.  Stir in onions and salt and cook until the onions soften, just a minute or two.  Add the split peas and water.  Bring to a boil, dial down the heat, and simmer for 20 minutes, or until the peas are cooked through (but still a touch al dente).  Using a large cup or ladle transfer half the soup to a blender and puree.  Return the blended soup to the pot and stir in (you should end up with a soup that is nicely textured — and green).  You may need to thin (water or stock) or thicken (flour) the soup to your preferred consistency at this point.  Do so just a little at a time.  Stir in the lemon juice and taste.  If the soup needs more salt, add more a little at a time.  Ladle into bowls or cups, and serve each drizzled with olive oil and topped with a good pinch of smoked paprika and a touch of lemon zest.

We used a whole cube of the bouillon, which was fine and didn’t overpower any of the other flavors.  Next time we will use more broccoli — we only had two small trees available from the garden, so that’s what we went with.  The onions were tasty and not as overpowering as they were being sliced (Amy, Paul, and Sarah took to switching off to get the job done), but next time we will use a half-onion less.  To get the consistency we want, we are going to try adding one large potato, and maybe even another half cup of peas, leaving a bit more to the un-blended portion for taste and texture (Sarah is opposed to this revision, but the super-majority in the house prevailed).

And, as a final note, watch the lemon zest (finely-grated lemon peel) — even a pinch can leave you eating lemon soup with peas, rather than pea soup with a hint of lemon.  We might do away with the zest after the next long harvest leads us to another two-and-a-half cups of peas from the yard.