Vegetable gardens can please eye as well as palate
March 26, 2009
‘Tis the season when everyone gets the urge to plant. And if you choose to grow vegetables, there’s no need to relegate them to a far corner of your yard, where they are sure to suffer neglect.
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A vegetable garden need not be an eyesore. It can be an oasis of beauty, pleasing your eyes as much as your palate.
Just visit or find a picture of Villandry, the famous French potager (”kitchen garden’’) near Tours, France, with its patterns of geometric beds filled with growing vegetables. Some beds are bordered with low boxwood hedges — 19 miles of them — and the whole garden is interlaced with white, gravel paths.
In fact, call your vegetable plot a “potager’’ and right away you might find it more charming.
When locating your potager, keep it close to your house, and consider that it needs at least six hours of full sunlight each day.
As the old saw goes, “Put your vegetable garden no further from your back door than you could throw the kitchen sink.’’ Or maybe even from your front door. (And that old saw dates back to when kitchen sinks were made of cast iron!)
Whether it is near or against your house, establish connections — visually and physically — between it, the house and the rest of the landscape. For instance, mimic in or around your potager some design element from your house or yard: a decorative fence, a row of clipped hedges, a piece of statuary.
Paths create visual and functional connections. Choose paving for paths that matches that of a nearby patio or echoes the pattern on a floor in a room looking out at the garden.
Straight paths have a formal air, if that’s the tone of your yard, while curving ones lend themselves more to informal settings. To further tie everything together, run paths from your house right up to and into the vegetable garden itself.
Paths, paving, fences, hedges, statuary and other “tie-ins’’ help overcome a common limitation of vegetable gardens: their often dreary appearance in winter, when, too often, they are just dirt.
These tie-ins can help carry the overall design of the garden through the winter. Create beds in your potager, perhaps geometric in shape, perhaps flowing; in either case, beds whose shapes create year-round patterns of beauty. Define your garden with hedging, arbors, fencing and paving.
Finally, remember, a potager isn’t only for vegetables. No rule says you can’t plant some ornamentals to help keep up appearances through winter. The shapes and lines created by small, densely twigged plants, such as potentilla, shrubby dogwoods and cotoneaster, as well as boxwood, heather and other small evergreens, make their statements year-round.
Come spring and summer, add vegetables themselves to your designer’s
palette: frilly red or green lettuces in all shapes, blue-green leaves of kale, a backdrop of feathery asparagus leaves. And some flowers — for distraction from those temporary bare spots where you’ve picked delicious vegetables for eating.
http://www.app.com/article/20090326/LIFE/90324049/1006
March 15, 2009
Interest grows in preservation
April class focuses on canning, other methods
By Tom Kaser
For The Chronicle
Even before the economy began contracting, there were indications that increasing numbers of Americans were rejecting processed foods in favor of preserving foods they grew or bought themselves, usually from local farmers.
That’s why OSU’s Wasco County Extension Service at Columbia Gorge Community College has increased its efforts to “train trainers” to show homemakers how to safely and efficiently do that.
“It’s easy for those who know what they’re doing,” says extension educator Fern Wilcox, the extension service’s primary trainer. “It can be dangerous — because of food poisoning — for those who don’t.”
Interest in home food preservation has surged, not just because it can save a lot of money, but also because more and more people want to eat wholesome, locally grown foods year-round, Wilcox says.
OSU’s Wasco County Extension Service periodically holds eight-week classes, usually meeting at 2 p.m. Wednesday afternoons, at which it trains Family Food Educators to show homemakers how to preserve food. The next class, which costs $50, begins April 1 in The Dalles. Application deadline is March 20. For information, call 296-5494.
The trained food educators appear at county fairs, farmers markets, and before service clubs, organizations, granges, church groups, mothers’ groups, 4-H clubs, and other organizations to demonstrate the do’s and don’ts of food preservation during the June-September food preservation season.
OSU makes sure they know their stuff. They must complete 30 hours of training and pass a competency exam.
“The whole idea,” notes Wilcox, “is for me to train these people to spread the word about food preservation, since I can’t do it by myself. It’s a good way to extend our service.”
Last year, Wilcox trained eight food educators, and they will be helping her train new volunteers this year.
One of the trainers’ most important services, especially at farmers markets, is to test the gauges on pressure-cooker lids.
“Pressure cookers are a valuable tool in preserving food, but sometimes their gauges go bad and the cooker doesn’t heat the food to a high enough temperature to kill bacteria,” Wilcox says. “You may end up with tainted canned food and not know it.” There are five cornerstones of the extension service’s Family Food Educators program: canning, freezing, drying, pickling, and jam- and jelly-making.
Canning is especially important because it can easily go awry, with fatal results, Wilcox notes.
“We show how to prepare the fruit or vegetable before putting it in the canning jar, how — and how much — to put in the jar, how to put the jars in a bath of boiling water, and how to apply the lid and ring so they will seal the jar.
“Safety should always be the No. 1 concern; you have to know what you’re doing. It’s not safe, for example, to put low-acid foods like beans in a boiling-water bath. For these foods, you should use a pressure canner to prevent anaerobic microorganisms from growing in the food.”
Freezing usually requires blanching the fresh produce first — dipping it quickly into hot water to prevent deterioration from enzymes. “Then you put it in a container that will prevent ice crystals from forming and freezer burn from happening,” Wilcox says.
“As for freezing vs. canning, your preference will probably depend on how much storage space you have. Some people prefer frozen foods because they have plenty of freezer space but not much pantry space. Other people have the opposite situation. And some people just prefer the taste of one over the other. I, for example, prefer frozen peas to canned peas.”
Drying, as the name implies, means removing moisture from the food so it can be consumed later without having to freeze or can it, Wilcox says, citing jerky as an example. Dried pears are particularly popular in this area, she added.
Pickling, using vinegar as the primary preserving agent, is another canning process, and it adds flavor to the vegetable.
Making jams and jellies involves chopping or mashing fruit so it assumes a spreadable state, then adding sugar and pectin, a natural thickener found in smaller amounts in ripe fruits. Jam and jelly containers, too, are processed in a boiling water bath.
Food preservation need not be difficult or expensive, Wilcox emphasizes, “especially if you shop garage sales and can find food-preservation equipment at a good price. The jars can be re-used each year, so once you’ve made the initial investment, canning becomes inexpensive.”
Statewide, OSU’s Extension Service has been disseminating information on safe food handling for 25 years. The overall aim of the program is to avoid food-borne illnesses, food waste, and medical bills from food poisoning.
When OSU’s Wasco County food preservation program began in 1980, it was called the Master Food Preserver volunteer program. It was later renamed the Family Food Educator program and enhanced to include nutrition education. The program is patterned after OSU’s Master Gardener program, which aims to sharpen home-gardening skills.
The OSU Extension Service brings a variety of university services and programs to local adults and youth.
http://www.thedalleschronicle.com/news/2009/03/news03-15-09-03.shtml