The First Spring Broccoli Harvest

One of my first major acts as a person on the path to a sustainable lifestyle was to, of course, subscribe to Mother Earth News.  This magazine is the do-it-yourselfers Bible, with articles on everything from gardening and preserving to building your own solar panels or wood-fired hot tub (no kidding!).  I subscribed to their garden planning tool, entered my garden dimensions, and got to work moving around little icons for broccoli, squash,tomatoes, cucumbers, anything and everything.  What resulted was a beautiful blueprint for my garden with correct plant spacings, estimated planting times, and ideas for crop rotations.  Unfortunately, the incredibly helpful garden planner does not adjust itself for user error, including the inability to place rows and plants at appropriate distances from each other or thin seedlings whatsoever, because it was "a really healthy looking little plant, and you never know, one of the others might die . . ."  This resulted in my first year of the big garden transforming into a riotous jungle by June, with squashes growing in the watermelons and watermelons growing around the cucumbers and pumpkins growing on top of everything.  When Dad asked what exactly was the sort of plan that I was following for my garden layout, I emphatically pronounced that I had planned the garden exactly this way so that I would not have to weed so much and I attempted to huff away.  In reality, I stumbled through the knee deep undergrowth, tripping frequently while attempting to keep my wounded dignity intact.  This year, I tried to be a little sterner with the thinnings (something that I still find painful), and as of today I can actually walk through about 80% of the garden without being tripped up by sneaking sqaush vines among the broccoli.  It is indeed a personal triumph.

Yesterday, the boys and I deemed the bulk of the broccoli ready to harvest.  Greyson and 19-month old Eli backed their Gator up to the garden and loaded up for me.  We carried armful by armful of heavy-headed broccoli into the kitchen.  For the first time in my life I had harvested more broccoli at one time than we could eat at one sitting.  The point of my Mattamuskeet Momma experiment is to grow, make and otherwise locate as much local food as possible, and hopefully the bulk would be as local as our backyard.  In order to feed my family of 5 throughout the year, I needed to become a master at food preservation.  My one stop source for all things food preservation can be found at http://nchfp.uga.edu/  The National Center for Home Food Preservation.  Under "How do I freeze?"  I chose broccoli and followed the instructions.  Interestingly enough, one of the first steps was to immerse my broccoli in a brine of salt water to remove insects.  I gave the broccoli a once over and did not see any obvious bugs, but I decided to follow directions.

I heated up the water for the blanching process while the broccoli  enjoyed its brine bath.  As I started shuttling the broccoli from the sink into the waiting pots, I began to see little green floating worms every so often.  Now, I had just been congratulating myself on how bug-free my produce has been thus far this year without the use of any organic pest controls.  I turned to trusty Google and found the wormy green villains in countless webpages - the caterpillar of the Cabbage White Butterfly.  Nasty little things.

Regardless, I carried on with the blanching (three minutes in boiling water) until my broccoli florets were a beautiful emerald green.  Thankfully, any cabbage worms that made it through the brine bath were blanched a lovely pale shade of greenish-white, which made them quite easy to pick off.  I am attempting to be very Earth Mother cavalier about this, but honestly, the little buggers did trigger my involuntary gag reflex from time to time. I was thankful that I did not have an epidemic of the monsters.  From blanching, the broccoli headed into an ice bath to stop the cooking process.  

Though I know this is a  necessary step in getting the broccoli ready for the freezer, it also served as yet another soak to get rid of any potential blanched worm hangers-on.  I feel a little unsettled that none of my home preservation handbooks prepared me for the possibility of being made slightly nauseous during the noble quest to provide healthy, home-grown food for my family.  I will consider working on an article entitled "How to Freeze Broccoli, Not Worms" or "How to Freeze Broccoli and Still Want to Eat it Later."  Finally, after careful soaking, rinsing, dipping, shaking, and intense floret-by-floret scrutiny (Here's a tip for my future article:  "I find it helpful to shake the florets by the heads, not the stalks, so that any blanched cabbage worm corpses can fall freely into the ice bath, rather than getting hung up in the heads.  This avoids the situation precipitating into your 6 year old son finding  the worms among his broccoli and cheese at dinner and, after much shrieking, vowing never to eat vegetables again.").  After all of this, the end result was four gallon freezer bags of beautiful worm-free broccoli (99% sure about that . .  .)  

This process was indeed a learning one!  The conclusions of the Mattamuskeet Momma Spring Broccoli experiment were:

1) Do not eat a large breakfast before processing unsprayed broccoli heads.

2) Be prepared for the odor of cooked broccoli to permeate every corner of your home.  (Febreeze may not be quite as effective in this instance as is normally the case, and I am left with the odiferous blend of Lavender Vanilla and Comfort and Broccoli, which is definitely not comforting . . .)

3) Look into organic broccoli pesticide options (I hear Neem oil may work.  Row covers as well, but I am not yet into that stage of gardening)

3)Send your children into the garden early and often for a "Butterfly Hunt" armed with nets, tennis rackets, whiffleball bats, etc., in order to whack the white moths before they can lay their eggs.  

4) PLANT BROCCOLI IN THE FALL!!!.

Public Broccoli Enemy Number One