What are you growing inside this winter, and how do you do it? Have you had success in the past growing food indoors? Please share your ideas, tips and tricks with each other in the comments section below.

Do you have tricks up your sleeve for storing tomatoes into the fall and winter? What's the longest you've been able to keep your summer tomatoes around? If you've got any tips and ideas for storing tomatoes, please share them by posting a comment below.

See also: 

• Enjoy Fresh Tomatoes All Year
• Winter Tomatoes 

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Photo by L. Shat/www.fotolia.com

First, shell the corn from the cobs and winnow out any chaff. Dry the kernels in a low oven, then store in a tight container.

Grind the corn coarsely. Sift the ground corn to remove most of the finer flour (use it for cornbread, etc.).

Add salt and 4 cups of water or milk to each cup of coarsely ground corn. (Use your fingers to sift out most of the red material that will float to the top.) Cook the corn slowly in a double boiler or a heavy pan, for several hours. If you don’t use a double boiler, you will need to stir the mixture often. Add cheese and/or butter if you want, and serve the grits/polenta hot. One pound of cooked breakfast sausage mixed with four cups of the coarse cooked grits is excellent. Or some folks like to add mushrooms or tomato sauce.

For fried polenta, pour the hot corn into loaf pans and refrigerate. Cut slices about a half inch thick and fry in butter plus a little olive oil until brown and crisp on both sides (frying time is longer than for many foods, but the resulting crunch is terrific).

A chipotle pepper is a jalapeno that has been smoked, a food preservation method as old as agriculture itself. With a bumper crop of jalapenos, pimentos and roasting peppers in need of attention, I smoked two batches of peppers in my biochar trench, with wonderful results. Here’s my report.

The Site

Last fall, I dug a 1.5-by-8 foot trench in an area that had been overrun with perennial weeds. During the winter, I partially burned two small mountains of brambles and other hard-to-compost woody materials. This summer, I grew a successful crop of winter squash in the refilled trench, and reopened it for my pepper smoking project in mid-September. Some folks disapprove of all open burning, but I think most rural homesteads need a safe place to burn stuff from time to time. At our house, we’re experimenting with filling this need with a thoughtfully managed and monitored biochar trench. The terra preta soils of the Amazon, upon which the concept of biochar is based, were created over many centuries of successive smoulderings, so I am curious as to the long-term effects of fire in the hole.

The Fire

You can smoke peppers in a covered grill or smoker, but we don’t eat much meat so I have neither.  Smoking peppers calls for a cool fire that flavors and dries the peppers (as opposed to cooking them), so I built a small fire in the middle of the trench, and placed pairs of bricks covered with aluminum foil (for cleanliness) at both ends to hold my trays of peppers. I used apple wood saved from pruning, but you can also use hickory, mesquite, or other aromatic woods.    

Once the wood was burning well, I partially snuffed the fire with soil, placed the trays of prepared peppers (see below) on the bricks, and covered the trench with a piece of metal roofing. An hour or so later, when I saw only faint wisps of smoke coming from the trench, I restarted the fire with fresh dry twigs and a little more wood. My peppers got a total of three hours of smoking time.

The Peppers

In my first batch, I smoked large strips of jalapeno, roasting and pimento peppers on heat-proof roasting pans. There was no need to oil the pans (the peppers didn’t stick), but I did cover the peppers loosely with aluminum foil. This was mostly to shield them from scattered dirt as I moved the metal cover on and off. It would not be necessary in a smoker or grill.

After smoking for three hours, I continued the drying process in my food dehydrator. The big pieces curled so much that uniform drying was going to take a long time, and I didn’t want to lose smoke flavor from prolonged drying. Besides, the half-dried sweet and sweet/hot peppers tasted like mouthwatering veggie bacon, so I stopped at the half-dry chewy stage and stashed the peppers in the freezer. For my second batch, I cut jalapenos into rings one-third-inch thick. The rings seemed to absorb more smoke flavor than the strips, and they dried faster, too. Within a few hours, the chipotle rings were ready for cool storage in glass jars.

 

The Drying Process

Finishing off smoked peppers in your dehydrator is a very aromatic process best done outdoors. And please be advised: The smoke smell will linger in your dehydrator, even if you give it a good cleaning as soon as you are done.  The campfire fragrance will wane after a few days, but why fight it? The batch of spiced apples I dried after the smoked peppers filled the house with the combined aromas of cinnamon and barbecue — of the most delicious aromas of the food preservation season.

Barbara Pleasant 

From our surveys we know that MOTHER EARTH NEWS readers use mostly organic methods, but most of us have encountered some problems where organic options we’ve tried have not worked and we’ve been tempted to resort to heavy-duty chemical pesticides. If you have a pest problem you haven’t been able to solve, post a comment below outlining what organic remedies did not work for you, and maybe other readers will be able to suggest additional organic options to try.

 

In Santa Rosa, Calif., the folks at Grab n’ Grow have been making compost and planting mixes for 25 years, using organic materials generated in Sonoma County. In 2002, the company detected residues of a potent herbicide called clopyralid in a batch of compost. The next year, Grab n’ Grow manager Don Liepold and his wife saw the herbicide’s trail of destruction in their raised bed organic garden — lettuce that refused to grow, curled and wilted peas, and stunted, gnarled tomato leaves. 

As we reported in July 2009, clopyralid and its close cousin, aminopyralid, easily persist, sometimes for YEARS!, in hay, manure and compost. When contaminated materials are used in food gardens, tomatoes, beans and other sensitive crops develop curled foliage that looks like a disease, if they grow at all.

Both herbicides are manufactured by DowAgrosciences, which seems to have no moral or ethical problem selling products which clearly are polluting the public compost stream. Meanwhile, aminopyralid pesticides have been pulled from shelves in the United Kingdom. Liepold, the Rachel Carson Council and MOTHER EARTH NEWS think the U.S. EPA should take the same action here.

“I have been testing  and detecting herbicide residues and thus rejecting cow manure, horse manure, turkey mulch, rice hulls, mushroom compost and yard trimmings,” says Grab n’ Grow manager Don Liepold. “I spent $20,000 in lab fees in 2008, and am on the same track for 2009,” he says.

It is extremely difficult to keep contaminated materials out of commercial compost. “One load of contaminated grass clipplings can ruin a batch of compost,” says Eric Philip of Anatek Labs in Moscow, Idaho. Philip has seen so many positive tests for clopyralid residues in compost that he would not use untested compost in his own garden.

“When folks have plants die in their home gardens, their first assumption is that they did something wrong,” Philip says. But with pyralid-laced commercial compost becoming more common, contaminated soil amendments are often to blame.

The source of pyralid pollution can be impossible to trace. For example, a horse stable may use hay brought in from a neighboring state, without knowing that it is laced with pyralid herbicides. If the horse’s manure or stable litter ends up in a garden, disaster is ready to strike. It’s better to be safe than sorry. Liepold stopped making one of Grab n’ Grow’s most popular products, Mango Mulch, for more than a year because he could not find an uncontaminated manure supply. Now he’s getting it from two local organic dairies.

Testing for contamination is a slow, painstaking process that comes at a steep price of $350 (or more) per sample, so most commercially-made compost is not tested. 

Both of these herbicides were approved by the EPA before their persistence in compost was known, and before lab tests existed that could detect residues at damaging levels.  We think approval of these pesticides should be revoked before the damage gets worse.

To express your concern about this hidden danger to your garden, write to your senators and congressional representatives to make your voice heard. You can also contact Rick Keigwin, director of the EPA’s pesticide review division.

See our earlier report: Milestone Herbicide Creates Killer Compost for lots more background on this issue.

The Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello is a family-friendly, educational event that brings together a regional community of organic and sustainable gardening proponents, heirloom plant preservationists and seed savers. This year’s event will be held on Montalto, the “high mountain” that rises 400 feet above Thomas Jefferson’s gardens at Monticello and will offer food tastings, a seed swap, workshops, demonstrations and other hands-on-activities. We are happy to announce that two of our contributing editors — Barbara Pleasant and William Woys Weaver — will be sharing their gardening expertise at the festival.

The activities begin at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Charlottesville, Va., on Friday, September 11 with a full day of workshops on Saturday, September 12.

Learn more:

• Festival Announcement 
• Event Schedule
• Directions