torley manor

Yesterday I picked the first of our string beans. Only the yellow ones seem to be getting ready (the green ones are a little bit behind yet). Here is a photo of the first harvest…

It doesn’t look like much, but once they get going, they have a way of overwhelming your life. As I stated before, we froze enough beans last year to last us until just last week. At the point that we ran out of both freezer boxes and room in the freezer, the beans kept coming. Not to be wasteful, we continued to harvest them, eating what we could and handing off piles to our friends (at the height of all this activity last year, Jim joked that we must be eating string bean sandwiches at this point to make some variety. strangely enough, Peter told me earlier this week that he took some of the peas that I gave him, shelled them, put them between 2 slices of bread and had a pea sandwich. crazy!!) Judging by the look of the plants, it could be another bumper crop this year.

So keep your ears open and we’ll let you know if we need help avoiding getting smothered by our bean crop.

In 2004, we bought Torley Manor, a 1920s-era rowhouse-style home (though it’s freestanding) , and immediately did huge amounts of work on it. Eventually we lost a bit of momentum and just settled into living in our house. Now we work at a slower pace and I think I may curse the joint compound more now than I did before.

(A very dramatic shot of the manor and its neighboring houses, designed to look as though we’d be swept away by a tornado. January sometimes makes me unreasonable.)

Most recently, we’ve been dealing with the endless torture of repairing a ceiling following water damage from a roof leak. These are the things you know you’ll get into as a homeowner but somehow I pictured it happening when I was retired. I have no idea why. Probably because this is as retired as I’ll ever be, so why not start my retirement projects at age 26?!!

I considered taking a picture of the work in progress but I’m totally sick of joint compound and instead, I’ll talk about potatoes and how to grow them.

Andy and I tried to grow potatoes one time pre-Torley Manor days, in a five gallon bucket. It was a miserable failure, mainly because we didn’t put any drainage holes in the bottom of the bucket. Lesson learned.

Here are this year’s potatoes, in their boxes.

Turns out potatoes are basically the easiest food to grow, as long as you know just a few things:

1. The best yield comes by way of “mounding” or “hilling” your potato plants. The idea is that if you keep covering up the leaves with dirt, the plants will send more roots out to the sides. Roots = potatoes.
2. The thing is, potato plants can grow pretty fast and pretty tall. If you are diligent about mounding, you’ll get more potatoes. If you don’t ever bother to hill up the dirt around them, you’ll still get some potatoes that you grew all by yourself in your own damn back yard.
3. They are not fussy plants. If you want to eat tiny new potatoes, just dig around and see if you’ve got any yet. If you don’t have any, leave it alone. If you want bigger potatoes, just wait till the end of summer when the leaves start to die off and dig everything up.
4. Potatoes get weird shaped if your soil is too dense. Put some sand in that stuff.

Last year we did just one potato box with six plants. This year we built another box to put directly on top of the other box (you can see how worn the wood is from previous years and how gleaming the new box is), and still the potato plants are growing taller than the boxes. I am anxious to see how many more potatoes we’ll get this year.

To start potatoes, all you really have to do is let a potato get old and sprout. Then plant it. We like to get a little fancy and buy organic seed potatoes so we know for sure where our food has come from, but you can just use a regular old grocery store potato.

Grow, little bastards, grow!

If you’re like us here at Torley Manor, then your freezer doesn’t get used too often except for the occasional pint of Soy Delicious and/or roll of GimmeLean, and of course the obligatory tray of icecubes. Beyond that we aren’t usually much for the pre-prepared frozen foods, so we have plenty of room to freeze veggies from the garden for the long Pittsburgh winter.

This year we are getting an early start with a shipment of peas from my parents’ garden out in Quakertown. The two of them had eaten and frozen about all they could for the season, thus sending us off from our visit home with a grocery bag full of peas. Took 1/3 of the bag to Dirty Pete at work. The rest I sat back in the cafe and shelled tonight. We yielded 4 boxes. Not bad at all.

I know a lot of people when they think of storing food from the garden, they think of canning, which can be a bit more of a process. But with things like peas and string beans you can easily just freeze them. However, it is recommended that you prepare them first. For peas, simply remove them from the pod (tho’ you can freeze them in the pod if you want) and then you will need to blanch them, which is basically a process of cooking them very briefly.

The best way to blanch them is to get a blanching pot. Basically this is just a large cookpot that has a smaller strainer/collander style pot that fits inside it. In the larger pot, put water on to boil. In the collander pot, put your peas (or beans or whatever). When the water in the large pot boils, submerge the smaller pot in the boiling water. For peas, leave the peas in for about 1-1.5 minutes. Remove the peas and then immediately either rinse under cold water or dump into a pot of cold water for 1-2 minutes to stop the cooking process. Then pour the peas into freezer boxes (small takeout containers also work well for this, just make sure they make an airtight seal). Make sure you let everything cool off completely before sealing up and putting in the freezer.

Last summer we were able to fill the freezer up with frozen string beans and ate well throughout the winter (we are just finishing up the last boxes of last year’s crop, just in time for this year’s crop to arrive). Even if you don’t garden yourself, its worth buying up a extra big stash of goodies from your local farmer at the farmer’s market and stashing some good local produce in the freezer for those long winter months. Trust me – its much better than eating the frozen veggies from the supermarket or the veggies shipped in from halfway round the world in February.

Yes it’s true. We have a foosball table and we’re going to take you down.