This has been a long winter. I can’t imagine living in Nova Scotia, Canada – where folks are still expecting several more months of bitter cold temps and snow. It’s a beautiful place, and the flora impressed me mightily – but they truthfully have only about 4 months of warmer weather (certainly not ever hot like here in north Georgia) and then it is cold again. Compared to them, I have it super easy. I mean really.

Still, to my mind it has been a long winter. It blew in cold and fast in October this year, whereas in previous years it would be mid-December and my friends and I would be wondering when we’d be needing to think about running the heat during the day.

Since it came so early, and was so cold so quickly, I didn’t manage to get my Fall tasks done. Trimming back the perennials after the first few freezes, raking leaves, spreading mulch, and getting pansies in the ground have all had to slowly get done on a few warmer days during the winter months, and I am still very far behind before I can start getting things prepared for Spring.

Winter does have its place, and I truly appreciate the chance to work on projects indoors that never have a snowball’s chance of getting done in the summer, when I am busy growing, weeding, picking and preserving all that wonderful food – or simply enjoying the warm weather and sunshine. This winter I have learned how to crochet, and have successfully made a scarf for a friend, and am partway through my first afghan. I’ve also found time to do some of my usual “nesting” as we slowly settle into normalcy around this house. I’ve painted a reminder, Arts and Crafts style, over the doorway in our dining room that reminds us to live in the moment. I’ve already found having this visual reminder to enjoy every moment of our lives very useful, as my husband and I both tend to get caught up in the million things that need doing, and forget to take a moment to appreciate what is beautiful all around us.

I love the warm coziness of my living room, with a nice little fire crackling in our woodstove and the teakettle steaming away on top, and I love curling up in a chair and reading a book. Not that I’ve managed to do that very much this winter, but it has been nice.

However, I am tired of it being winter. I miss seeing green outside. Indoor plants do help, and some of them have improved mightily with the attention they receive when they are my only babies to care for. Yet, I am tired of being cooped up, tired of being cold, a little tired of carrying wood indoors to feed the stove, and tending said stove several times a day.

My body is ready for fresh fruits and veggies, for sunshine and that gardening-earned tan, ready to turn soil and grow nice little plants. I’m ready for birdsongs to wake me in the early hours, to not dread getting out of the warm covers, for sunny days. I even am ready to pull a few weeds. How’s that for getting desperate?

Soon. It will all happen soon…

Last night, I realized the slugs were invading. I had to go out and collect the laundry off the line, and when I came back in and started putting the laundry away, I caught sight of something on my shoulder. I grabbed hold of it and realized I was holding a young slug, about two inches long. I briefly marveled at how it almost had the same cute face that a snail does, only bigger, before I sent him to flush heaven.

I then discovered it takes a remarkable amount of time and scrubbing to get slug-slime off of one’s fingers.

Later I went outside in my bare feet. I love the feel of fresh-cut grass under my toes, and my husband had just cut ours earlier in the afternoon. There was a slight breeze coming in from Gustav, a safe several hundred miles away, and I was enjoying the night air and looking for fireflies.

I stepped on a slug. So much for looking for fireflies.

Clearly something needed to be done. After taking another ten minutes to scrub slug-slime off my toes (GROSS!) I dug out the cheap beer that we buy solely for this purpose. I think it breaks down to about fifty cents a can, some brand nobody has ever heard of. We are winos, not beer drinkers, but I do wonder what a guest would think if they saw that in my pantry! I poured the stuff into a few old containers and put them down in several places in the yard (yes I wore shoes this time).

I poured myself a glass of Shiraz, then headed off to the shower.

Forty-eight slugs died in their cups last night. Forty-eight!

Remember that fellow who discovered his lawn was greener if he sprayed it with beer once in a while? Apparently I don’t, as I cannot recall his name. But I took his advice to heart and decided the slugs and beer might be just fine in my compost pile. May my plants be all the greener next year.

A few weeks ago I bought a used dehydrator for veggies and such. After reading through the book that came with it, I must say I am so excited to have this thing! I was initially only thinking of drying tomatoes and all kinds of herbs with it, but did you know, I can make “fruit leathers” (like Fruit Roll-Ups) too? As I read, I kept getting more excited. I can make crackers. Trail mix. Dry all my herbs with no fears of mold or mildew. My own energy bars for my 40+ mile bike rides…

This thing is going to get some serious use.

So on to Expriment In Drying #1: “Sun” Dried Tomatoes.

I have all kinds of great Roma tomatoes coming in, some larger on certain plants than others. A few plants have consistently been producing fruit that isn’t much larger than a cherry tomato – perfect for slicing in half on a salad, or for drying. So as hubby and I got dinner in the oven, I set to cleaning and slicing up several dozen tomatoes. I ran the machine for about 10 hours. If course, you do have to flip the screens, and the fruit, about halfway through to ensure even drying, which involved me getting up at 3am to fulfill this task. If I were smarter, maybe I’d pick a day I was at home and do this during normal waking hours, hmmm?

Not all of them were perfectly done though. The ones that were nice and crispy-rubbery dry I put into a bag. The others were really close to being finished but not quite – those I put in a jar with olive oil, some salt, some vinegar, and some herbs and put in the refrigerator. They should be really good in a few days in some pasta. I don’t want to keep them very long out of fear of Botulism or something awful like that.

Sun Dried Tomatoes #2

This time I sprinkled some salt, garlic powder and oregano on the tomato slices before drying. They smelled fabulous, my whole house smelled like good Italian food for hours. The results did not disappoint either… WOW are they good! Hard to not sit there and snack on them like a bag of potato chips. Then again, why not?

We’ve been on a bit of a blueberry bonanza here. We’ve gone picking twice and brought home about 6 gallons worth of blueberries. Some got frozen. Some went into muffins and pancakes. A good many became jam, and the jam is disappearing very quickly. The frozen ones go into our morning fruit smoothie breakfasts: 2 bananas, a handful of strawberries and a generous handful of blueberries, 8 ice cubes and a splash of soymilk).

I’m not sure that there’s anything tree-huggery about getting your hands on all the organic blueberries you can, but it’s definitely frugal. Blueberries are EXPENSIVE in the store, which is why we never have any. They’re so good for you too, being high in antioxidants - antioxidants being the current poster-child for preventing all kinds of diseases and cancers and general aging (who knows for sure?).

Blueberry jam, odd as it may sound, is actually really yummy and goes well on just about anything. You can use the basic recipe on the sure-jell box. I’m going to experiment with using apple peel as a natural pectin for my next batch, since we’re down to one jar already. Just by making my own jam I’m probably saving us some money - at $3.98/jar at the minimum for inorganic jam, I’m reusing old jars and am only footing the cost of sugar and the electricity to boil the mess for a minute.  Once you’ve made jam once, you wonder why you’d ever buy a jar of questionable origin ever again. It’s really easy, it doesn’t take long, and the results are fantastic.

I have been craving spinach for weeks already. Being one of my favorite greens and one I failed to grow enough of this past winter, I’m pretty well doomed to do without until the cool weather returns and I can grow my own - I just don’t care to pay for spinach out of season unless I have to. And now I know I need to grow at least three times as much if I want to have enough to freeze, seeing as how I tend to eat it all.

Cue a bit of magic here. While working at the organic market & bakery in town on Thursday night, the fellow delivering some produce off the truck asked if I liked spinach.

“Oh yes, I love spinach. Why?”

Turns out, he had a box of it that a client had rejected… along with a box of broccoli, romaine and a fruit none of us had heard of before (and that I cannot recall now, it’s just super-sweet and totally faboo). This was great news for the market too, which is in need of some unexpected cash. Pretty soon Cream of Broccoli Soup and Tofu-Spinach Lasagne will be on the menu.

Me? I got four bunches of both the spinach and broccoli to take home. Gratis!!! Of course, if we ate that much in greens in one week, we’d be turning green around here so I had to find out how best to preserve most of it.

Spinach is easy. The hardest part was making sure I got all the dirt off and picked out the less than great leaves. From there you just stuff it into bags and toss in the freezer. Done.

Broccoli is a little more work. You rinse it and cut it up into one-inch pieces, then set it in a bowl of water (the water should just cover it) and squeeze half a lemon over it, mix it in, let it sit five minutes. Then you need a pot of water and a steamer pan, and you steam the broccoli at full boil for three minutes, then immediately plunge the broccoli into a bowl of ice water for three minutes to get it to stop cooking. Then you pat it all dry, and finally bag it up. My steamer isn’t huge, so I had to do it in three batches, using a lemon and a half. BUT… it’s done, and I have broccoli for a few more weeks! And spinach!

Don’t forget to save the water from each part of the process - the water I rinsed spinach in even turned green, so my veggies got spinach and broccoli water to help them along a bit. Never hurts to have a few more nutrients. It also takes up more time, but the woodier stems of broccoli and the less than great pickings of the spinach were chopped up and tossed on my compost pile.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly weeds grow. Seems they show up too tiny to pull one morning, the next morning they’re HUGE. Of course they don’t really grow that fast, but it sure seems that way. One little rain and suddenly thousands of dormant seeds spring up all over the place, making my garden look untidy and competing with my vegetables for water.

I used to do marathon weeding sessions – you know, spend the whole of Saturday out in the hot sun yanking weeds that had two weeks to get established. Why two weeks? Because I could never bring myself to weed all day two weekends in a row. Working that way gave me heat exhaustion and dehydration all the next day, and I’d just be so sluggish (if not sunburned too) that all of Sunday would be wasted.

However, after years of gardening, I’ve finally figured out how to keep them under control. You know I won’t use herbicides (besides being horrid for the environment, they’re expensive!), and other than lawn clippings and fallen leaves, I don’t use mulch either. Wood chips leach nitrogen out of the soil as they decompose – a macronutrient most plants need lots of.

So what’s my trick? I get up early in the morning, make myself a cup of tea, and head outside. I weed only a section of my gardens a day – it only takes about a half hour – and work another section in rotation the next day.

It works out amazingly well. I can spare a half hour in the morning, and it turns out to be a peaceful and pleasant way to start off a busy day.