Monthly Archives: September 2009

On sweet things

Posted on September 30, 2009 | 18 Comments

P1010310Get the biscuits!

When I was in New York earlier this month, the governor put forward an initiative to tax all sugary sodas by 18%.  “Sugary” is a relative word.   If you follow the sweetened beverage industry at all, you know that sugar is kind of hard to come by in a carbonated drink:  it’s all corncorncorn in the form of HFCS.  Indeed, any pop (yes, POP, as I am a Midwesterner) that actually contains sugar has been spun as a retro beverage, a throwback to better days:  it’s even hawked in old-fashioned small bottles.

My daughter and I are big fans of Antiques Roadshow, and on a rerun recently someone questioned the original purpose of a small chest their family owned.  It was a sugar safe.  Yes, I explained to our girl, at one point in time, cane sugar was so precious that one would lock it up in a chest, using it only for special occasions!

I thought of that chest when I roasted a ham in the smoker on Saturday morning.  The glaze with which I basted the meat was a sorghum/mustard/garlic glaze.  Way back when sugar (from cane or beets) was expensive, Southern and Midwestern families tended to grow their own sweetener in the form of sweet sorghum.  Sorghum is a tall, corn-like grass (minus the cobs) whose canes are stripped of their leaves and then put through a wringer to extract the juice.  Much like maple syrup, the resulting sap needs to be boiled/evaporated to get the concentrated end product, sorghum.  And fall was traditionally the time when the stalks were harvested, the evaporators fired up.  And as things would have it, the upside-down world we live in now has my jar of Indiana sorghum about eight times more expensive than the beet-derived Michigan sugar in the same pantry.

Is taxing sodas the answer to our ills?  I am unsure, mainly because, like cigarette taxes, the tax disproportionately affects the poor, the ignorant, and the addicted.  Perhaps if we ceased to subsidize corn production at the levels we do, we wouldn’t need these kinds of taxes.  Perhaps there’s something to that sugar safe, to the idea of growing your own sweetener, that shouldn’t be discarded too:  if it’s precious, you might not guzzle it.

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Posted in food, politics

On small garden hands

Posted on September 28, 2009 | 9 Comments

Gardening with children can be a wonderful thing.  Their enthusiasm is catching, as is their curiosity:  you want to see your garden differently?  Get on your knees and turn over leaves and rocks with a two year old.  Our girl is growing up in these gardens and it is a fun thing to watch.  And, even better, her help becomes more and more useful with time.

P1010273Sewing project

She’s admired the strings of dried peppers hung in the pantry for a couple of years now.  I pull what I need, grinding it or merely flaking it into a dish.  When the new peppers were tiny flowering plants this spring, she asked if she could string them when the time came.  Well, the time was this Sunday, when the peppers were quite ripe.  And quite ably, she strung three two-foot long strings for the pantry.

I sure hope she’s still willing to help at 14.

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Posted in food

A tale of four roosters, in Seven Easy Steps

Posted on September 25, 2009 | 13 Comments

This is the year that we decided to move our chicken ranching up a level by breeding our own meat and egg birds.  Raising chicks, though rewarding, is hardly any human’s idea of a fun time:  it’s an ordeal.  And frankly, there is no substitute for Mama Hen as far as chicken smarts goes.  There’s too much to learn and we humans are poor teachers in the ways of All Things Chicken.

Step One in this venture: we’ll need two roosters, one for our egg girls and one for our meat girls.

Step Two was to decide what kind of egg-laying birds we wanted to breed.  Our motley egg-laying flock currently includes six dual-purpose (egg/meat) breeds (Australorps (Maggie), Orpington (Sarah), Wyandotte (Helen), Rhode Island (Verloe), Plymouth (Letha), Black Sex Link (Mary Ellen)), and two egg-laying breeds (Leghorn (Pauline), Ameraucana (Phyllis)); all hardy souls that can be found readily in almost any American henyard.  We wanted to try to raise birds that were threatened with disappearing according to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, and were a hardy, low-maintenance, calm bird, so we selected the dual-purpose Speckled Sussex, a breed known for its curiosity and kindness.

P1010337The Colonel

Step Three is to decide which of the meat roosters will remain to be THE rooster.  Chicken Patty raised six adopted meat chicks this spring, of which three were cockerels.  They are all currently in the henyard and so far one white slow-growing Cornish (like mama Patty) is showing promise of being a gentle soul. Chicken Patty, two red broiler chicks (Nice Rose and Sister) and one more white slow-growing Cornish hen (Girly) round out the meat bird crop, and all will soon have their own coop and run.  SO:  The name for the new meat-bird rooster?  The Colonel, of course!

Step Four in this venture was the acquisition of five bantam chicks.  Bantams are diminutive chickens:  usually they are a third to a quarter the size of regular ones.  Because they were bred for their size, chicken traits common in other birds (eggs, meat) were not a factor, nor quite frankly has any bantam selected for docility.  In fact, they’re rather flighty birds, both literally (they can fly anywhere) and figuratively, as in, they’re unapproachable.  They’re a lot like our guineas, in other words; lots of sturm-und-drang.  One of the quite useful traits that hasn’t been bred out of bantam chickens is the urge to sit eggs and raise chicks.  Should any of our girls decide not to sit their (now newly fertile) eggs, I figured having a few banty hens around would help as bantams don’t care whose eggs they sit on.  Consider them the surrogate mothers of the henhouse, our Plan B for incubation and hatching.

P1000703Poor little Ellis

Step Five isn’t really a step, as I thought I had thought this through.  Of the six Speckled Sussexes we had, one was a boy, Ellis, and therefore destined to be Egg Chicken King.  However, he became sick!  His illness caused me to break the #1 House Rule (No Poultry In The House Unless Plucked and Gutted) and did time in my office in a cardboard box, enjoying his scrambled eggs, milk and cornbread. I didn’t hold out much hope that he’d live, though, and it breaks my heart because he was so pretty.  Indeed, he died, a few days later.  There goes my hope of having home-hatched Speckled Sussex chicks next year.

_DSC7237Michael Jackson

Step Six:  what in the WORLD am I going to do with five bantam roosters?  Only one crows, though, and is quite a terror.  He’s the cute white chick my daughter insisted upon buying this spring.  As putative songster king of five boys, I started calling him Michael (as in Jackson), way before His Weirdness’ death of course.  He even crows his name!  MiCHAEL JACKson.  Then, magically, we started to find little bantam eggs in the nestbox.  Apparently, the other four are girls!  (sigh)  And, unlike his namesake, our little Michael actually likes girls.

_DSC7235Mary Ellen

Step Seven:  WHY is the Black Sex Link pullet, Mary Ellen, crowing?  Ah.  I think we have found Ellis’ successor in the egg-bird rooster department.  Mary Ellen (whose name is sure to be changed, or not) is a nice calm bird, very attentive and solicitous of everyone but Michael Jackson (who terrorizes any and all birds).

So…maybe I will have mutt egg-laying chickens after all.  There are surely worse things, including raising the chicks yourself.

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Posted in chickens, etc.

On the balance of the equinox

Posted on September 23, 2009 | 11 Comments

P1010241In about a month, I might actually be able to find the paths in the garden again, too (butternut squash, beans, and grapes at the top)

Happy September equinox, everyone.

Depending on your hemisphere, this means it’s either the first full day of spring or the first full day of autumn for us all.  Fall, in the days before my greenhouses, was a point on the calendar where I felt the most mortally vulnerable.  Ack!  All my plants are winding down and dying on me, I would think…and I am of course winding down too!  But, now that I am a year-round gardener, the end of one thing simply means the beginning of another.  Bye-bye tomatoes, hello turnips.  Hello, escarole; see you next year, peppers.  And look at the promise of all those little seedlings!

What I need to remind myself is that the beginning of fall is not the end of something, it’s the balance of the calendar.  Equal day and night and all that, no extremes, just a slow slide into darker days, a slow fade from the time of doing outdoor chores in the light-filled 10:00 evenings.  And darker days mean more time with the oven turned on, as I am more inclined to bake and roast and make pots of stew, cure and smoke meats, and, of course, take care of the bounty that is Apple Season.

I do adore the smell of autumn, though:  the high sweetness of the ripe grapes and apples, the fecund mustiness of fallen leaves, the acrid whiff of burning leaves and woodsmoke.  It might not hold the verdant promise of spring within its scents but it does hold its own promise:  a bountiful Harvest, and thanksgiving.

Can’t you just smell the applesauce bubbling on the stove?

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Posted in weather

NO more Ms. Nice Guy

Posted on September 21, 2009 | 14 Comments

P1010236It has taken me years, but I believe I am a happy plant murderer now.

Perhaps it is a matter of scale:  scale up one’s garden considerably, there’s not much wiggle room for the slackers of the garden world.  If a seedling looks stunted compared to its fellows, then I pull it.  If half a tomato plant’s production of fruit has blossom-end rot, then I kill it.  If I don’t need any more broccoli out of a perfectly fine plant, then I uproot it.

And with this newfound bloodlust (okay:  if plants don’t have blood, should I say chlorophyll-killing lust?), I am a happier person.  I don’t have that groaning maternalistic impulse to save all seedlings, nurture all volunteers.  It’s liberating, this new relationship with my Felco pruners, these limber muscles normally utilized solely in weed-pulling.  I can now happily lay waste to any garden bed, regardless of contents.  And I did so recently!  All but the paste tomatoes are history, as are the eggplants, okra and tomatillos.  Whee!

This is so contrary to my upbringing and training that it’s quite remarkable.  But it’s a point of evolution most gardeners undergo, I suppose, especially we gardeners bent on year-round food production for our households, because succession planting and efficient use of space both outweigh the needs of any one individual, ailing plant.  And seed-saving likewise does not favor the slackers, the malingerers; instead, it’s all hurry-up-and-grow.  Then:  Quick death in my hands.

I would hate this to be a general policy toward everything, but accepting the full mantle of Plant Grower, Nurturer and Compost-filling Killer is not a terribly heavy burden on my shoulders.  It did take me a long time to get here, though.

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Posted in death

On being wrapped up

Posted on September 19, 2009 | 18 Comments

P1000186

Some of the 150 pounds are dehydrated, some in salsa, some in jam, but most are still frozen for future snacks

Passion is a curious thing.  Its pursuit, on occasion, excludes all other things, and this can be a problem.

I’m not doing any on-the-couch time, no analysis here, but my passion for good, real food has led me to be a bit nutty as far as volunteering for our daughter’s school goes.  I am not at the point of needing an intervention, but doing the school garden and rethinking how the school supplies, cooks, and distributes its food to the children has been a rather time-consuming affair for me these last few months.

Both gardens are weedy, but both populations (home and school) are well-fed due to my efforts, as well as the efforts of many others.

Here’s the passion:  I feel absolutely HORRIBLE, and sorry, for people who aren’t eating the way my family eats.  Is this some kind of epicurean snobbery?  No.  Simply, we eat fresh, whole foods, year-round.  Minimal processing, minimal transport, tasty simply by the fact that it’s real food, not too far from its origins.

Here’s a typical snack rundown for a typical school week:

  • Monday:  Fruit day.  Apples, pears, peaches and blueberries are in season.  These are served raw.  We’ll have apples throughout the year, but we have applesauce, peach and pear butter, and lots of frozen fruit for the rest of the year.
  • Tuesday:  Vegetable, Parent-instigated food day.  Roasted potatoes from the garden are next Tuesday’s snack.  Hummous and classroom-made pita, our jam with school-made crackers or oat cakes, etc.
  • Wednesday:  Muffin Day.  We make the muffin mix (actually, the kids make it and bag it) and a child from each classroom takes the bag home.  The basic mix requires you add two eggs, a quarter cup of oil, and some water.  You can add fruit or nuts or a crumbled topping as you wish, but the mix is nice by itself too.
  • Thursday:  Chips and Salsa Day.  We’ve made salsa for the year at my house.  Black bean/corn, regular, tomatillo (salsa verde), peach, and cherry salsas are in the pantry and in the freezer.  The chips come from a reliable manufacturer in Chicago, where our students practice their Spanish when they make the monthly order.
  • Friday:  Classroom-supplied Snack Day.  We have given each class suggestions, and the school has crock pots, hotplates, toaster ovens and electric griddles to use.  So, classes might make Stone Soup (where each child brings in something to add), or even make tortillas from scratch (or at least a bag of masa harina) for quesadillas.  Either way, this is a way for the children to directly participate and also to really see what it takes to produce a small snack for the entire class.

We have other irons in the fire, too.  We are getting a milk share, and will be using the milk to make yogurt, yogurt cheese, kefir and smoothies for Monday’s Fruit Day with the older kids.  The milk will also be used for baking.  (It won’t be directly consumed because it’s raw and we don’t want the hassle.)  Trips to a beekeeper and a cider maker and a maple syrup maker (sugarer) are scheduled for October.  I have a 20-gallon crock in the Upper School’s classroom (grades 5-9, 9-14 year olds) that is currently filled with brine and cucumbers, and in three weeks will be filled with shredded cabbage for kraut.

Where is your passion taking YOU?

Mine has been keeping me away from the blog, unfortunately.  I’ve been thinking of you lately, though.

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Posted in school garden, soapbox

On compost hubris

Posted on September 16, 2009 | 16 Comments

P1010217Land mine

In the category of Things I Will Not Repeat, I will give you a lesson in compost humility.

Before I left on our little vacation, I threw down some compost, about 3″ thick, on top of the two greenhouse beds where I had pulled up the resident tomato plants.  I didn’t dig it in; I was in a bit of a rush (as ever).  Well, a sick and sleeping child gave me the opportunity to get some gardening done when we returned from our trip so…I went after that compost, digging it in with my trusty wobbly three-tined cultivator.

I uncovered an egg in the compost.

“This must be old,” I told myself, as whole eggs next to never come out of the compost process whole, or if they do, they’re dried out, their contents a flaky memory on the insides of their shells.

I hit it with that trusty three-tined fork, and it exploded, KAPOW!  Quite a huge pop!  Kind of cool in a way.  And I didn’t realize it at the time but a blob of sulfurous rotten egg came flying and landed on my head.  The top of my head.

I thought rotten potatoes were gross.  And boy, am I glad I always have a large jug of thinned vinegar in the bathroom!  Half a gallon later, I was fresh as a daisy.

But yes:  I learned my lesson.  All eggs are potential stinkbombs.  Do not poke!

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Posted in nature

We’ve returned

Posted on September 15, 2009 | 7 Comments

P1010067Lights on September 11th, with me and the child atop an adjacent roof deck

It’s so fun to get away from the farm!  Quite hilariously, everyone we saw suggested completely non-urban things to see:  the High Line, Governors’ Island (free ferry), Central Park.  No, we insisted:  we need dirty sidewalks and jostling people and street vendors and no nature, thanks.  Other than the fact that it. rained. every. single. day, mostly all day, we had a good time.  Tom’s show was fun.  It runs until October 10th, so go see it!

(The above picture:  there’s a memorial held about 5 blocks south of the World Trade Center site atop a parking garage.  It’s pretty moving, as the columns really do look like the original buildings, albeit lots skinnier and taller.  Our friends invited us for dinner that evening; they live in Battery Park City facing this site.  And:  it stopped raining long enough for us to go up to the roof to see it.)

P1000951Girl with bag of booty on the TKTS stair

The one crummy thing about constant rain is that short people like a certain five-year-old I know will not be able to stay dry under a parent-held umbrella.  One trip to the Hello Kitty store in Times Square rectified this:  a nice bright yellow poncho kept her nice and dry.

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Posted in weather

The Art Report

Posted on September 9, 2009 | 8 Comments

UnreachableThomas Allen:  Unreachable, 2009

We’ll be stepping away from the gardens, pets and poultry for a few days.  Tom’s latest show, all new work, opens in New York on Thursday night.

He’s had a review in The Daily Beast!  Check it out.

“What, you’re going away during Tomato Season?” came the incredulous query from a friend.  YES!  Not that I can spiff up enough to get all the dirt out from under my nails, but indeed, it’s time for a trip to the city.  And our daughter, ever the budding naturalist, is itchy to see rats in the subway tunnels again.  “There are no rats in the country,” she said.  (Only because she hasn’t seen them, surely.)

So:  if you are in town, come to the opening, 6-8, at Foley Gallery in Chelsea!

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Posted in sweat

On long beans

Posted on September 7, 2009 | 4 Comments

Longtime readers know I adore beans.  In point of fact, I have never met a bean I didn’t like, though I suppose there are a few varieties I like only a little bit.  But as they’re ripening fast and furious on their vines, I thought I would mention one beloved bean in particular.

_DSC6332Pretty long, eh?

Vigna unguiculata (sesquipedalis) is a bean in the cowpea (black-eyed pea) family.  Also known as yard-long beans, asparagus beans, or snake beans, “yard” is a bit of an exaggeration:  the fully-grown pods reach only about 18-20″ (thus, sesquipedalis, foot-and-a-half).  They’re not particularly edible at that length though.  Instead, you should harvest them when they’re shy of a foot long.  I cook and eat them like regular green beans.  This particular variety, the red-seeded asparagus bean, is this lovely maroon color, which darkens when cooked.  They don’t taste like green beans, either, but have their own taste, somewhat nutty, and a bit more crunchy.

P1000693

I grow cowpeas too and their pods are nothing at all like these.  Their flowers, quite beautiful twinned orchid-like blossoms, are similar to the lowly cowpea.

They’re heat-loving, clambering vines, befitting their Southeast Asian origins.  It takes them a while to get going here in my non-tropical garden, but once they do, it’s time to get picking.  And eating!

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Posted in seeds

On August oaths

Posted on September 4, 2009 | 13 Comments

P1000709Greenhouse-grown ratatouille fixings

I am not sure about all of you, but August’s garden kicked my butt.

This entire year in SW Michigan has been as strange, weather-wise, as it has been elsewhere in the US.  So sure, let’s pick an easy scapegoat:  the weather!  Nothing I can do about the weather but complain, right?  But no.  Sure it was hot, sure it rained a lot, sure there were weather-related events stringing together long before August that worked against this gardener’s interests.  But other things conspired to keep me busy in places other than the garden this month.

And I suppose that’s it:  we’re always going to have obligations other than weeding the garden, right?  Than just getting out there and doing the daily tasks necessary to keep things running smoothly?

As Year Five of a summer garden, Year Two of a year-round one, I am getting a handle on any season’s ebbs and flows.  And what I realize now is this:  August is a busy time.  Busy for weeds, busy for bugs, busy for the human inhabitants of this farm.  If I am ever to come to a place of happiness with the August garden, I need to realize the limits of my time and try to use the warmth and enthusiasm of August’s weather to my advantage.  So: what does this mean?

It means that next year, nearly the only things I will have growing in the outdoor garden in August will be dry beans, corn, and winter squash!  They require NONE of my precious time.  I’ll have the fall-started crops, but I’m planning on cutting way back on summer squash, beets, and canning (green) beans.

So!  Tomatoes, cucumbers, take heed:  you will all be either July or September crops, no exceptions!

(do you think the tomatoes will listen to me?)

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Posted in weather

On garden worries

Posted on September 2, 2009 | 7 Comments

P1000732Wet Swedish Fingerlings, aching for harvest

I admitted to a friend of mine that I have been having some episodes of insomnia lately.  My cause for worry?  Not global warming, not the health-care fiasco, not a terrorist attack.  Nope.  I was worried about my potatoes.

What’s to worry about potatoes?  Plant one in the ground, you get back 8-10 potatoes:  that kind of math should cause me no worries, right?  Well, true to form, our August has been a wet one.  And wet soil can mean rotten potatoes.  So every nightly thunderstorm, every nightly sprinkle, CLICK my eyelids flash open and I worryworryworry.

The first year the skies opened up in August I was told “this is highly unusual.”  Normally our Augusts see about 4″ of rain, nothing to sneeze at, but every year since I was apprised of what is “normal” we have had, in some instances, more than twice that number, sometimes on the same weekend.*  And here, the last day of August, we’re 3″ above normal.  Time to get the spuds out of the ground, and it’s time to find the time to do so.

(*If something happens four years in a row, isn’t that, well, NORMAL?  Like most things, I think we need to adjust our thinking.)

It’s a pity.  Leaving them in the ground (without rain, that is) is a great way to store them.  I would simply harvest them before the frost.  Ah well.  I have harvested about 75% of them and, well, I can now sleep at night!

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Posted in weather