12 Steps to Whole Foods

Reaping a Gardener’s Rewards
• My two youngest picked all the green tomatoes and laid them on newspapers in the basement. Once we
had fresh tomatoes all the way until Christmas using this method of slow-ripening green tomatoes,
having left the green tomatoes attached to the plants as long as possible. I chopped some tomatoes and
froze them in small bags in the freezer, too, for soups and chili when it’s cold.
• I shredded all the zucchini (I hate to see it go to waste, and we’ll get it out when we’re no longer sick of
eating it like we are now). We put it in the freezer in quart-size bags, to make zucchini bread, fritters,
and pitas [all in this chapter’s recipes].
• I didn’t have much corn this year, but if I did, I’d cut corn off the cobs and freeze it for our favorite
black bean/corn/roasted red pepper salad [see Salsa Verde Salad on page 69].
Composting
As someone who eats a lot of plant food, you have many peels and other vegetable waste that should be going
to good use, providing recycled nutrition to your plants (and, later, you). Don’t throw any parts of any plants
away!
We have three compost piles that we rotate to make good soil supplementation for our garden. We throw
vegetable waste and grass clippings into the first one until we have enough, and then we mix that “green” layer
with the “brown” layer of leaves or sawdust. When our neighbors are bagging their leaves in the fall, we take
some home, poke holes in the bags, and let the water from rain and snow percolate through the bags to
decompose it, in addition to using our own (unbagged) leaves to mix with “green” compost. We “turn” the
compost with a pitchfork every month or two, to give it oxygen to assist in decomposition.
After we stop adding to one compost pile, we throw our clippings and peels into the second pile, while the first
one is decomposing for use in the next planting. By rotating the three piles, we have one that is ready to use in
gardening, one we are actively adding to, and a third that we’re not adding to, but still needs some
decomposition time.
Our compost boxes after 6 months of decomposition, about “half done.”
134 12 Steps to Whole Foods
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw