Now that there is snow on the ground and Thanksgiving has passed, I thought it would be a good time to look over the garden bounty that I managed to get canned and preserved this year. I was surprised by all my dedication!

• pickled beets – 57 pints, 2 quarts
• bread & butter pickles – 47 pints
• carrots – 22 pints
• strawberry-rhubarb preserves – 5 half-pints
• salsa – 24 pints, 8 half-pints
• pizza/pasta sauce – 21 half-pints
• applesauce – 3 pints, 5 half-pints
• garlic – 20 heads dried
• potatoes – huge bag full
• carrots and parsnips – couple handfuls
• cauliflower – gallon blanched and frozen
• broccoli – gallon blanched and frozen

And these don’t even include all the delicious fruits and vegetables I ate from my gardens all summer and fall. I’ve already planned my vegetable rotation for next spring. I call this a big success!

Now that I have harvested just about all of my vegetables, I wanted to share some photos of all the sustenance grown in my garden this summer!  I ate a lot of the vegetables and gave a lot of them away, but I also canned, dried, blanched, froze, or otherwise preserved a lot of them so I can enjoy them in the winter too.

As I patiently wait for the leaves to fall softly and welcome in the winter snow, I thought it would be nice to look back at the journey my flower gardens have taken this year. So here are photos that I took throughout the year. I hope for much more growth and filling in next year, but considering there were mostly weeds and dead grass when I started, the expanded gardens with new mulch and much more variety are something I’m really proud of!

Sometimes in the morning I like to wander through my vegetable garden in my pajamas to start my day with a smile. Yesterday I was wandering through the veggies in my fleece pajamas and wool socks because it was really chilly and I decided to “just pick the rest of the cayenne peppers and tomatoes”.  I ended up being outside in my pajamas for the next 8 hours winterizing all of my vegetable gardens and flower gardens and preparing the lawn for winter. Big surprise. I don’t do moderation very well.

I started by picking all the remaining cayenne peppers, green peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, baby bok choy, onions, and garlic. Then I pulled out the plants left in the garden, as well as the mint because it is so overgrown. It must be a weed because it is uncontrollable. After that, I removed all the stakes from the tomatoes and the netting over the strawberries. I laid out the last strawberry I found as a peace offering to the squirrels that have been raiding the strawberry patch. I have devised a new strawberry cage that I will build next year to put over the raised bed that will be the strawberry patch’s new home. The squirrels and birds will not be able to get the strawberries then.

Next, I dug up root vegetables in my pajamas. My hands were freezing in the cold dirt, but I didn’t mind. It seems like the sadness I feel while doing the final fall harvest helps me transition to winter by giving me a chance to be alone with my vegetables and thank them for all their hard work to grow into nutritious sustenance for me. Root vegetables are especially appreciated, because they’ll get me through the winter months with fresh-from-the-garden taste. As I pulled up my carrots, I was surprised because the few left in the ground were the ones I thought were small, but they were hiding their succulent fatness under the soil. I expected to have a few withered carrots, but ended up with lots of big juicy ones. My parsnips came up really gnarled, but perfect for the pork roast with carrots that I’m going to meld them with in the crock pot soon. Unfortunately, the warm summer didn’t bode well for the beets, rutabaga, and turnips. Maybe next year.

Then came this farmer’s favorite harvest of all – potatoes! My neighbor kids love this part, but they weren’t available so I had to “dig papas” by myself. I love digging up the potatoes because as I fold the dirt back, it reveals pockets of potatoes in all sizes just under the soil where they were hidden by the huge green shoots above. As I dig them up, I can’t help but exclaim out loud, “Oh, oh!” because it’s like finding treasure. The joy of pulling out those beautiful tubers makes me feel like a kid again.

After putting all my delicious vegetables in the house (including 2 tiny green peppers that I just had to save to show my mom because they’re so cute!), I sprinkled composted manure and peat on the root vegetable bed in preparation for the tilling that my uncle Marvin is coming to do on Saturday. By then, I had been working for about 2 hours and I was just getting into the groove, so I moved on to cut my flowers down. This is a much easier task with my new pruning shears, but it’s still a big job. I found out later from my mom that I can just use the weed whip that she got me at a garage sale, so I plan on doing it that way next year. Oh well, at least I didn’t use kitchen scissors like last year.

As I cut each beautiful stalk near the earth, I thanked my flowers for all the hard work they did this year to create roots and make my yard beautiful. When I had finished the side boulevard and was moving to the front one, I looked back to see one side of the yard ready for winter and the other just coming out of summer. I felt an immense sadness for the end of my gardening season and a few tears fell to my cheeks. I kneeled to cut back my new chinese lantern plant and let my hands rest on its vibrant orange lanterns. It is one of my favorites because my mom bought it for me this year with the gift certificate my dad gave her for her birthday. She doesn’t have a garden, so she loves to come to my gardens and talk to my plants. I saved the 3 beautiful orange lanterns because they were just too lovely to compost.

As I cut back all of my plants one by one, I thanked them for their beauty this year and promised them a long summer full of prosperity next year. I remembered why I loved each one of them and why I chose to put them in their very carefully thought out location. I gently removed all the delicate tendrils from my purple morning glories that had grown to adorn my vegetable garden’s fence and gate. Then I dug up the huge bulbs from the red canna lilies near the fence. They are to sensitive to make it through our winters, so I bring them inside to wash and dry them to preserve them for next summer. They had multiplied to become about four times as many as I put in last spring!

Once all the flowers were cut back, I called my mom to see if she could come over to help me rake the yard. I had been working outside in my pajamas for 4 hours and was really cold, so I finally took a break to put a jacket and my wool clogs on. I took down my slackline, washed out my charcoal grill with the hose, put away my chiminea and lawn chairs, and brought out the shovel and salt. My mom showed up with hot tuna sandwiches and chili. I showed her the adorable bell peppers and the chinese lanterns so she could squeal over how cute they were. Then we put on more layers and went out to rake the yard. I am thankful I was able to mulch all of my front yard and boulevards this year, because we only had to rake the backyard. I have a huge maple tree, huge oak tree, double birch tree, and an apple tree in my small yard, so there are tons of leaves. Despite having 2 artificial hips and 2 artificial knees, my mom is a raking machine. She can go at twice the pace of me, and laughs while she goes. As I was marveling at her youthfulness, she told me that she just likes to work. We raked the leaves into long furrows and then bagged them in huge bags that my neighbor Sally saves me from the hospital where she works. After they clean the newborn warmers, they wrap them in huge plastic bags, so I use these to transport my leaves to be dumped at the compost site. I plan on going to the compost site with my neighbor Rodolfo in his truck this weekend. I love this neighborhood, because it is my village.

After raking, my mom weed whipped along the fence and around my gardens in back. I borrowed the lawn mower from Rodolfo and mowed the hillside where the lilies are planted amidst very long grass. Then my mom weed whipped the hillside while I mowed the backyard. I felt like singing for no reason. Then I returned the lawn mower and helped my mom rake the hillside in between passes with the weed whip. The grass on the hillside was really thick because I planted lilies there in the spring with the idea that eventually they will crowd out the grass. In the meantime, the grass has gotten really long. My mom and I laughed as we worked. She is so thorough that she even got all the weeds growing in the cracks of the sidewalk, which will make it much easier for me to shovel snow when my shovel doesn’t get caught on those long weeds. By the time we finished bagging all the leaves and grass, we were freezing cold and exhausted. I had been outside working for 8 hours in my pajamas.

I was going to take a shower before we went out for dinner, but we figured it didn’t really matter. So we went to our favorite little diner called Magnolia’s and split the chicken fingers. While we were eating, I couldn’t stop thinking about how beautiful my mom is. The softness of her features and the gentleness in her eyes are something that I hope I remember long after she’s gone. I told her how much I love her and how spending time with her is so special to me. Maybe it is the dying back of summer’s plants and the mourning I do to help me transition to winter that reminds me to appreciate all that I have in this moment. When I’m exhausted and hurting, I know she’s in much more pain than me, but she works through it because she has Finnish sisu and she shows her love by helping me when I need her. I sure am lucky to have such a wonderful mom.

After dinner, my mom dropped me off with instructions to take an epsom salt to warm and soothe my aching body. I spent 2 more hours in the kitchen washing root vegetables and canna lily bulbs and chatting with my sister Senia who stopped by to pick up her herbs. Then I ran some laundry and dragged myself upstairs to take a hot epsom salt bath. The warmth was absolutely the best way to end my day as I listened to meditation music and soaked my weary muscles. That’s when I realized I had spent the entire day mindfully expressing gratitude to the earth, plants, and people who bring joy to my life. And that is exactly why I love this beautiful little plot of land that I live on.

On Friday, I shared a huge salad with all the fixings with my friends to celebrate summer’s bounty. I usually don’t eat many raw vegetables, but I do like to indulge in one meal that pulls together all those fresh-picked vegetables into a glorious salad. Afterwards, I had a bunch of chopped vegetables and decided to stir fry them with olive oil and a little leftover meat that I froze after a dinner out to a mexican restaurant. I ate the pork, carrots, broccoli, purple peppers, and onions with basmati rice and it was absolutely delicious. And the best part is that it only took me about 10 minutes to put together a healthy and wonderful meal. I’m going to do this more often!

The morning after making 47 pints and 2 quarts of pickled beets, I received a text from a patient telling me that the farmer’s market had pickling cucumbers and I should go check them out. I rolled out of bed with aching feet and dragged myself to the market to find buckets of tempting cucumbers that I just couldn’t pass up. So I filled a cloth bag with pickling cucumbers and onions and another bag with bell peppers and other treats and staggered to the car. After looking at my busy clinic schedule for the week, I realized that day was the only time I would be able to make pickles, so I got to work. My neighbor kids helped me by washing cucumbers, separating layers of chopped onions, removing bell pepper seeds, and putting remnants in the compost bin. Then I soaked the ingredients in salt water and went to buy more jars and brine ingredients.

The thing I love about canning is that I become relaxed as I focus on the motions of juggling huge pots on the stove, bowls of sliced vegetables, and dozens of jars. I always reminisce about my aunties and dream about what it was like to do canning on the farm where my mom grew up, using a wood stove and trying to “put up” enough food to feed a family of 14 in the winter. Using a huge yellow bowl that was my grandmother’s, I feel connected to her and all the women in my lineage of strong farm women. I smile to think of how proud they would be of me. By the end of a long, hot day, I was left with a spotless kitchen and 46 gleaming pints of bread and butter pickles. The recipe is from my auntie Barbara and has been a part of our family for as long as I can remember. What a gift that I can carry on these traditions, even though I’m a city girl, because I have the same independent, sustainable values that my strong aunties and grandmothers had!

My love of pickled beets started when I was around 9 months old and my parents brought me to Kansas  to visit my great-grandma Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer.  I was used to my mom’s homemade baby food and I wouldn’t eat the jarred baby food that they brought on the trip, so in desperation my mom gave me some mashed up pickled beets to try. I loved them so much that I wouldn’t eat anything else for the remainder of the trip. Then, when my sister Senia was born (14 months after me), great-grandma Sarah taught my mom how to make pickled beets because they have been a family favorite for as long as I can remember. Growing up, my mother didn’t do much canning, but she would occasionally bring home a jar of homemade pickled beets from my aunties in my mom’s hometown of Oulu, Wisconsin. As I’ve gotten older, the pickled beets don’t often make it to my house, so I finally had my auntie Nona teach me how to do canning and make my own pickled beets a few years ago.  I have been supplying my family and friends (for the pure joy of spreading the love of pickled beets!) ever since. Now that my auntie Nona and auntie Barbara are getting older, I’m taking over the role of sending the beautiful purple jars of love to them.

This past weekend, I taught my auntie Cindy to make pickled beets since she had never done canning and she loves beets as much as the rest of us. So we went to 2 farmers markets and bought all the beets we could find. Then we spent 9 hours on Saturday boiling, peeling, and slicing beets, boiling jars, making brine, filling jars, and finally water bath canning the beets. We talked and laughed until we were so exhausted that we just peeled beets in silence. We made 57 pints of pickled beets for ourselves and our loved ones and 2 special quarts for Nona and Barbara. We used modern canning tools that make the job much easier than my aunties experienced. We lovingly remembered my mom’s mother (who I never met because she died before I was born) as we used her old pitcher to pour brine into jars and thought about all the generations of women who came before us who loved to “put up” beets in this traditional way. By the time I went home that night, I was smiling from the connection I felt to all those beautiful women.

Canning season officially began for me today. I woke up to a kitchen full of fresh tomatoes, vidalia onions, basil, dried herbs from last year, and apples freshly picked from my tree. The thing I love most about canning is that I start with all of these wonderful ingredients, jars, lids, rings, numerous large pots, & various canning paraphernalia and I end with a clean kitchen and precisely packed jars full of beautiful produce that I can enjoy all winter. This is the ultimate experience of summer for me. Today I ended up with 12 half pints of pizza/spaghetti sauce (thanks to my uncle Marvin for the tomatoes & to Kate for the recipe) as well as 5 half pints & 3 pints of applesauce (thanks to my beautiful tree for providing bountiful apples this year).  I already made some strawberry-rhubarb preserves in June, but this is my official kickoff!

When I woke up this morning, I had a frozen sternocleidomastoid muscle in my neck and the thought of canning seemed very overwhelming. After using heat, ice, arnica gel, and heat again, I decided it was probably going to hurt all day. So I got started canning in the afternoon, thinking that maybe I wouldn’t do much canning this year. By the end of the 4 hours, I was thoroughly enjoying myself & hardly noticing my neck as I juggled pots of boiling water & bounced to the music. I even cooked up some Crispy Mung Beans and dried the sage out of my garden so I can use it for the Thanksgiving stuffing. I’ve been smiling all day thinking about how much my family will love their delicious organic treats at Christmas and dreaming about the new canning recipes I’m going to try this year to surprise them. Maybe being the only person in my immediate family who can carry on the family tradition of canning isn’t so bad!

I have been working all summer on mulching my yard so that I won’t have to use a gas mower anymore.  I am keeping the grass in my backyard because I can use my eco-friendly push mower back there, so the extensive boulevards on my corner lot have been my focus.  Yesterday I was planning to mulch 1 of the 2 side boulevards with my mom.  I figured that in an effort to practice a little moderation in my life, doing half of the job was more realistic than a marathon session of mulching.  When my mom arrived, she asked why we didn’t just do the whole thing in one day and be done with it, so after a little convincing me, we decided to do the entire thing.

Since my usual compost site where I get free mulch is closed on Thursdays, I found another place in Minneapolis where we could get enough free mulch to get the job done.  Between the two of us, we could haul about 400 gallons (2 cubic yards) of mulch in our cars.  So we drove out to the site and found the cleanest, most beautiful pile of mulch I have ever seen.  Then again, my appreciative eyes have had lots of experience with identifying good mulch and it is one of those things that quickens my heartbeat a little as I imagine the beauty I can create with such a simple recycled product.

I had a hard time not feeling overwhelmed at the beginning from the scope of our project, but then I realized that I wasn’t practicing mindfulness.  So I committed myself to not being irritable despite the hot weather and being loving towards my willing and patient mother.  That is exactly when I started enjoying myself.  Despite working in 80-90 degree weather with high humidity, we worked all day in the direct sun.  My neighbor Sally joined us right in the middle of the project when we started losing motivation and one of my patients stopped by to deliver some flowers from her garden for me.  Sally was telling me that long before meditation became popular, she went into her own little world while gardening and it has always been her meditation.  This is what I love about gardening!

We saw many neighbors throughout the day and enjoyed a lot of cameraderie.  We took many breaks to drink cool water and sit in the shade, but by the end of the day, we were both overheated and dehydrated.  It took us a total of 11 hours to haul the 1200 gallons (6 cubic yards) of mulch and lay it down on top of newspapers.  A special thank you to all my neighbors who donated their newspapers and encouragement on this project.  I’m so thankful to live in such a supportive neighborhood and to have a really energetic and loving mother.  I’m looking forward to this additional way in which I can make the world a more beautiful place.

You Know You’re Obsessed with Gardening When…

• You know the difference between mulch, compost, composted manure, fertilizer, peat, and dirt.
• Your neighbors recognize you in your pajamas and clogs from doing early morning watering.
• You take every single person who enters your house on a “garden tour”.
• You had to buy a special brush to clean under your fingernails at the beginning of the work week.
• People describe you as granola, earthy, and bohemian.
• You’ll spend a whole day canning in a 100 degree kitchen.
• People call you to see if they can come over to get some green onions instead of going to the store.
• You can fill an 18 gallon bin with mulch in under a minute.
• You bribe people to help you with tasks by promising them vegetables.
• Neighbors stop by to ask you questions, even when you’ve never met them before.
• You plan on buying a fuel-efficient SUV for your next vehicle so you can haul more mulch.
• You’ll drive 4 hours just to pick up composted manure.
• Your sisters come to you for plants instead of going to the store.
• You find yourself feeling leaves, flowers and trunks of trees wherever you go.
• When considering your budget, plants are more important than groceries.
• You always carry a pitchfork or shovel, gardening gloves, and bags in the trunk as emergency tools.
• You have a typed map of your gardens, including a desire list.
• You know what it feels like when your fingernails hurt from digging too much with your hands.
• You don’t understand why people have to lay around to get a tan.
• You’ll get up early to water the garden, but not to meet your friends for breakfast.
• You spend more time chopping your kitchen greens for the compost pile than for cooking.
• You know when official planting day is for your area & you know how to decide when it can be earlier.
• You can identify plants by their leaves or sprouts and quiz yourself on each plant when going for walks.
• You own a pitchfork, even though you live in the city.
• You rejoice in rain… even after 10 straight days of it.
• You take pride in how bad your hands look.
• You do laundry only when you need fresh gardening clothes.
• You have your relatives bring plants when they come to visit.
• You have a decorative compost container on your kitchen counter.
• You can give away plants easily, but compost is another thing.
• You drive around on recycling day to gather discarded newspapers for placing under mulch.
• When you go to the farmer’s market, you stay an extra hour to answer strangers’ questions by the seedlings.
• You’d rather go to a plant nursery than a clothes store.
• Your neighbor kids know how to put their food remnants in your compost bin.
• You ask for gardening tools for Christmas, your birthday and any other occasion you can think of.
• You can’t bear to thin seedlings and throw them away. You say they just want to live!
• You’re trying to revive the canning movement.
• You know how many gallons of mulch your car will hold.
• You can get to the compost site from memory, but still get lost on your way to your sister’s house.
• Your take pictures of your garden every week so in the winter you can plan which plants to add at what times.
• You know what zone you live in.
• You exclaim out loud when you find a new plant left on your deck for you by a neighbor.
• Your non-gardening sisters start rolling their eyes as soon as you start talking about your day.
• You start a blog because facebook’s status updates don’t allow enough words to explain your excitement!