Eating Seasonally

Part of my blog and world is my garden. I have experiments, collect seeds, plant strange things out of season. But mostly, I have regular stuff for us to eat.
Here in So.Cal. we don't have normal seasons. We don't really have any appreciable rain, either. When you need heat, it is cold. When you need cold, it is warm. It is a confusing place to have a garden.
I have low chill hour fruit trees, but some of them don't get enough chill. The temperature has to drop below 45f to create chill. When a tree needs 400 chill hours, it needs to be below 45f for 400 hours. Sometimes, the nights get down that low for a few hours, but it would need a real winter child for several days to get close to chill hours. Many low chill trees need 200 hours or less.
Our apricot tree is supposed to be low chill. It has not made any fruit for the last 3 years and before that it had one good year. We think there may be some other reason why it fails to produce fruit, but weather is an important contributor.
On the other hand, the peach tree is a constant producer of large fruit in great quantity. It is about 20 years old now and still going strong.
So, this blog is about growing things in season and eating things grown in their season. Where I live, there is an abundance of seasonal produce and quite a lot of imported out of season produce. I also have the mystery seasons that make growing things possible at times when other areas cannot produce them. I am going to limit my blog to growing things in my own weird seasonal area and not talk about those short seasons to the north or the desert areas to the east.
What grows here and when?  This has taken me years to figure out and every year it is a little different. The summers have been scorching hot. Corn, peppers and tomatoes are just about the only reliable plants lately. And you have to water them with a precious resource. Corn takes a lot of water so I try to water at night when there is less evaporation. This time of the year means no root crops, no lettuce, no strawberries, no tender greens or peas, very limited selection. Most of the spring stuff is long over. This summer we had lots of overcast days that were still warm. We could grow squash, peas, beans, potatoes, kale and chard into July. Good variety.
I had snow peas and kale in abundance, but the overcast thing killed all the garlic and after a short time the squash started getting mildew. The ground was not warm enough. The tomatoes and peppers didn't do well.
In my grandmother's time, gardeners would grow a couple of acres of different things. I am limited to 4 8ftx4ft boxes. I have to select my plants and seeds carefully to maximize my planting area and I often will grow intensively. Every couple of years I empty the large compost boxes and chop up the compost, then space it into the garden beds. I try to do this between seasons. My grandmother grew lots of greens under a tree and potatoes, corn and other heat loving things in the sunny area. When she had too much of one item she would swap with another neighbor for other stuff. I don't have any neighbors who produce anything, so swapping is out.
This now brings us to the real issue of eating within a season- boredom. When you get snow peas for days on end, it becomes difficult to find new recipes. I have about 5 good recipes for snow peas. At the peak of the productions, we would have to rotate these recipes every 5 days for about 3 weeks. My husband just won't eat like that. Snow peas are not his favorite, but he will eat a few at a time- like in a salad or soup. Eating a whole dinner loaded with snow peas is not a happy thing for him. And tomatoes are O.U.T. out unless it is tomato sauce.
I did a lot of preserving and pickling. If you eat preserved fruit and vegetables are you cheating the eating in the season thing?
Back to the garden. I decided to skip planting a hot weather garden this year- no corn or tomatoes. I went on a vacation and came back to some scorching heat. When September started, I planted some half summer half spring items- radish, lettuce, spinach, pumpkin, kale, onions, green beans. All of them are doing just fine right now. Nights have been around 60f or warmer. Fog, yes, no rain, yes, but not destructively hot during the day. Things are looking good.
If you grow things out of the normal season, does it cancel your eat within the seasons efforts?
I have all these questions and no real answers- but if it grows where you are, when you are growing it, then it is in its season. So if I get strawberries this month, they are in season. And the items I pickled are in season as well. And the fruit I froze is in season as well. As the lines blur from season to season, it is not difficult to see that something from south America is very close to being in season in south United States. It doesn't seem to make any difference if you eat items from other countries.
I eat fresh when ever possible. I pickle, freeze and preserve excess since I can't trade with anyone.
To me the idea of Eating Seasonally is not well thought out. And probably not practical.

A Year of Spinning Cotton

I started this a year ago. I typed nothing. It is harvest time again.
In November 2016, I had managed to finish spinning the 2015 cotton while collecting the 2016 cotton. Whew! it was a lot of work.
Guess what? It is October 2017 and I have 8 more bags of 2016 cotton to spin and I have lots of 2017 cotton happening.
If I were a slave or peasant from Turkey, this would be my life- spin, pick, water, spin, spin, weave. A never ending stream of cotton, cotton seeds, and cotton spinning.  We are talking about the 1800s maybe in some parts of the world.
So why do I grow cotton. I often ask myself. I even took out some plants this last winter so there would be less. I think the answer is that I can't have sheep, it is too warm to wear wool here, it is too warm and dry to grow flax and process linen, and I like the idea of having something homegrown to spin.
But I have to say that I have not had as much time for spinning, weaving or knitting as I once had. And this is causing a yarn pile up.
I have decided that 2017/2018 is the year to weave out. I may not get the 2016 cotton spun before the 2018 harvest, but that is what happens. I only have so much time and so many hands.
But just so you know, I still love cotton.