July into August

When I started this blog, I had every intention of posting at least once a week. But life has a way of interfering with those "best laid plans of mice and men."

The end of July began a new venture - an experiment if you will. We opened a small farm stand at the end of our driveway hoping to entice summer visitors with fresh vegetables and homemade bread. The first week was a whopping success which kept me in bread dough up to my elbows. The subsequent weeks have been slower, but that has allowed me to put up lots of jars of raspberry jam. Yesterday I canned chicken broth and soon I will have to can green beans.

I've been picking cherry tomatoes by the dozen every other day or so. The other tomatoes are beginning to ripen, and I have found only two hornworms so far on the plants. (These are rather beastly fellows despite their good looks. They will destroy tomatoes overnight. I usually drown them in soapy water which seems the least disgusting way to dispose of them since they are anywhere from 2-4 inches long.)

The Japanese cucumbers were a trial vegetable this year. About 18 inches long, dark green, and spiny, they have a very good texture and flavor. I also tried bush varieties of pickling and regular cukes in the upper garden. The chickens have somehow managed to get into the kitchen garden and dug up all of the new cucumber seeds I planted over the last few days. I have now put up the white flag, and admit defeat.

Garlic, and now shallots, have been harvested, and in their place I planted some cabbage plants that Papa found along a walking trail in Waterville. Someone had dumped the seedlings along the path. Crazy what one can find if you keep your eyes open.

A Little Like Eden

I awakened this morning to a dull, dreary sky and the sound of gently falling rain. Not that I mind this at all. The inclement weather is a nice change after the week of Syracusan type heat and humidity.

The house is still quiet - the kids are still asleep. Soon Ed will come down with his characteristic 9 year old swagger to give me a morning kiss. Joey will be next, sitting in Papa's chair with his morning cup of coffee. Will is always the last to arise. And so the days go like clockwork.

The garden is lush and green and producing vegetables that delight the palate.We have been harvesting beet greens, broccoli, cauliflower,lettuce,and peas. The summer squashes are beginning to ripen, and yesterday I spied a costata romanesca that was near perfection. Cherry tomatoes are turning orange, and the first planting of green beans are 2 inches long.


Strawberry picking has become blueberry picking, and now the raspberries are ripening. Our efforts are "bearing fruit" in a very literal way.

I think I am truly becoming a "woman of the soil." (In reality, are we not all?) I find an intense pleasure in the sensual aspects of gardening - the feel and smell of good earth, the scent of impending rain on the air, the delightful aromas of dill and mint, the colors and textures of leaves, flowers, and fruit. It is an Eden-like experience. The parables of the seeds, the weeds, and the harvest all make sense when one is close to the earth.

It takes humility to have a small farm. It is not a coincidence that the 'root' of humility is the Latin "humus" for ground. Humility and earth go hand in hand. Not much is in our control - weather, weeds, insects, poor seed, and destructive birds (the geese are the worst!). We labor, and the garden bears fruit. It is an act of faith, emboldened by hope, and ultimately moved by and toward Love - love of the good earth, love of this beautiful life, and love of our Dear Father Who made it all possible.

Strawberry Fields. Forever. Please.

Doubtless God could have made
a better berry (than the strawberry), but
doubtless God never did.
-William Allen Butler

My William and I were discussing strawberries early in June as we weeded our expanded strawberry patch. Both of us agreed that there was nothing quite like the taste of a sun ripened strawberry picked and then immediately popped into the mouth. That is one of the many advantages we've discovered in growing our own berries. Our feeble effort with 50 barely surviving berry plants and a cold, wet spring 3 years ago has yielded hundreds of young plants that take up about 1/4 of the upper garden.

Not that strawberries are easy. We found that they need a lot of work - lots of manure, constant weeding, thorough picking, and slug control. (I say this with a wink, since we have never had success in the slug area. Except in feeding them, that is. We have tried everything - ducks, sharp sand, lime, the salt shaker, yes, even Papa's good homemade beer. They just keep on coming.) In the fall, they must be covered with a good layer of straw (thus their name), not hay or leaves. But the benefits are worth all the labor.

I am very grateful for the good year. We have heard that many growers were hurt by the late frost in May. Papa made a heroic effort and carefully watered all of the plants before the sun rose too high, thus saving our little patch. He had remembered the chapter in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book, Farmer Boy, when Father, Almanzo, and his siblings hurried out to the cornfield before sunrise to water the corn seedlings after a frost. One can learn a lot from good books.

Besides eating them fresh, we have had strawberry shortcake, strawberry-rhubarb sauce, and strawberry smoothies. (These have become a favorite with the boys.) I sliced up strawberries and put them over Edmund's pouf pancake yesterday, and he ate the entire pie plate full except for the slice he reluctantly "shared" with Tess. Over and over he kept exclaiming, "Yum!" I guess he liked it.

Tess and Mary have been wonderful helps with cleaning and cutting the berries. For years this was my job sometimes extending into the wee hours of the morning so as not to lose too many berries to spoilage. Yesterday we froze 8 quarts, added to the other 4 we had previously frozen.

Strawberry jam, of course, is a must, and I've tried four different types this year. William begged me to make freezer jam again, and so I made two kinds, one regular, and one lower sugar. These are softer in set, but have a fresh flavor and are simple to prepare.I did the same with the two cooked varieties, using one lower sugar recipe. I prefer the tarter jams myself. I've made strawberry-rhubarb jam in the past, but for some reason it is not as popular with the kids - unless I put it over freshly baked biscuits with a spoon of vanilla ice cream. And then there is my favorite...strawberry-rhubarb pie. Need I say anything else?

Spring on the Farm

Beauty is all around us if we just take the time to look. God's hand is everywhere, and I am awestruck, again, at how much He loves His little children, and hopes to delight us with His gifts. Well, I am delighted!

An Early Summer

"A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon;
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly."
- Rhyme from England

The month of May has been busy with baseball, soccer, graduations, and homecomings. Joey is playing soccer for Central Maine United, Will playing for CMU as well, and the Sidney Rec League, and Ed playing Sidney Minors. The girls both arrived home for the summer on Sunday. For a time our family is together again, and dinners are a jolly affair.

The extremely warm days of May have allowed us to plant earlier than usual. Papa gets up early to plow and dig new garden space. We need new areas to avoid spreading last year's blight. We have also enlarged the kitchen garden where I am experimenting with raised beds, old French methods, and newer methods of planting such as square-foot gardening. I found a site that also talked about companion gardening - putting certain vegetables together in a bed that actually have a synergistic effect on each other. Slowly, our knowledge base grows as we "stand on the shoulders of giants."

The strawberry patch on the hill has nearly doubled, if not tripled in size, due to the hundreds of runners that set last autumn. The plants are covered in beautiful white flowers, and if the weather cooperates we should have a large crop with some surplus to sell to summer visitors.

Our egg sales are steady. Customers want mostly chicken eggs - the duck and goose eggs are a little intimidating to those who have never tried them. The duck eggs are in abundance, since our little Khaki Campbells are bred for laying, and have been regular like clockwork laying four eggs a day. These I use in baking - the extra richness lends wonderful texture to baked goods and quiche. The boys have been delighted by Pouf Pancake for breakfast and piping hot popovers for dinner thanks to our ever generous "English ladies."

Our Rhode Island Red chickens have a streak of American democracy in their genes, and thus lay only when they feel so inclined, usually averaging eight to nine eggs a day. I have wanted to hatch a clutch of chicks, but the hens prefer the open field to the nest, and so I may have to wait to order some chicks online to increase the flock.

Our geese however have decided that motherhood is a vocation to pursue. I watched one morning as two of them carefully rolled abandoned duck eggs into their nests of grass and feathers. These eggs the ladies have been sitting on for well nigh a month. Checking any progress on hatching ducklings (the goose eggs are not fertilized) is a daunting task since the geese are very aggressive in defending their nests. Nips, bites, and chases by angry geese soon teach us to let nature take it course. I do hope, though, that at least one or two ducklings hatch. These I will let the geese raise if they are willing. I'm ready for the experiment!

Maple Syruping

"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold."

Robert Frost Nothing Gold Can Stay

Autumn

"There is no need to bewail the declining year.
Autumn is a glorious season in its own right,
and as pleasant as summer to spend in the garden."

- Christopher Lloyd

Today was indeed glorious. Despite the thickening clouds, the air was pleasantly warm. So I let the younger boys off for the afternoon, and headed out to the garden with baskets in hand to gather herbs and vegetables.

The string beans in the upper garden have all but finished producing and have become forage for the deer. In the kitchen garden, however, the bean plants are just beginning to fruit. The beans themselves are long and "sticky" with tiny little hairs, and sport an attractive purplish mosaic pattern on its skin.

I'm still gathering very small tomatoes from the blighted plants. These are more sun than vine ripened since most of the fruit has already fallen from the plants. The tomatoes I had found near the compost pile, however, have appeared to escaped the blight perhaps due to the fact that they were covered by weeds during the early growing season. Large green tomatoes still cling to the vines, and I can only hope that with a careful covering of floating row cover we may soon enjoy them.

I next cut parsley, basil, and applemint for drying. These herbs, I've discovered, dry very quickly if placed in a wire mesh colander and set in the oven for a day or two. Frequent stirring keeps the herbs crisp and helps maintain their color better.

One of my favorite activities of September is making wild grape jelly. This year I found several places on the homestead where the wild grapes formed thick canopies over small weed trees. I was able to fill my garden basket about 2/3 full, but will need to find more if I want to make jelly. Our St. Pepin grapes produced several nice bunches of sweet-tart grapes, and I added these to the basket "for complexity" of flavor. Yes, that is a picture of one "goodly bunche" at the top of this post.

The red onions faired poorly. Too little sun I think. Most of the bulbs I pulled were almost as small as when I first planted them. I will dry them and replant them next spring.

I also began seed gathering for next season. We had a very successful trial with saving a French lettuce seed from last year. It was my most vigorously growing lettuce, and just about every seed germinated. I gathered these seed heads again, and some of the buttercrunch. Both the Italian and curly parsley have finally entered the seed setting stage and I gathered several dry heads already. There are literally thousands of these seeds so I think I will be set for parsley for many years to come. I will continue to gather some dill seed for next year's pickling spice, but the remainder I will allow to self sow over the garden again this year. I found that those "wild" dill seeds that had overwintered resulted in stronger healthier plants. (These were wild only because I had dropped the bowl holding hundreds of seeds last Fall among the raspberries.)

The beets continue to be abundant, and I pulled a large basket full of the round and cylindrical veggies to can. But first, fresh beet greens for dinner. Yum.

A Blight Upon Your Plants!

The boys and I stood dejectedly in the garden. Before us lay the sixty-plus tomato plants that I had grown from seed and carefully nurtured as seedlings. They showed such promise in early June when we planted them out. Tall and green they stood, and their only enemies seemed to be the curious geese that nibbled their leaves.

Then came the blight - the all conquering blight. First the bottom few leaves turned spotted and yellow. These we pulled off, and covered the bare ground around the tomatoes with clean straw to prevent backsplash of the fungus from the dirt below. More and more leaves succumbed to this "spotted fever", and soon the small green tomatoes showed signs of scab. The plants no longer stood, but lay exhausted, their fruits attempting to ripen in the few hot days of August.

The newspaper headlines screamed of early blight disease that traveled from the south - Alabama to be exact - taking revenge on Northern New England tomatoes and potatoes. Fugicides flew off the store shelves. Garden bloggers gave advice on organic remedies sure to help. And still the plants died. No kitchen garden or farm was left untouched by this grim reaper that sent hundreds of thousands of plants to their funeral pyres. Disconsolate canners sigh and their canning kettles lie unused - jars and larders empty. "Oh, for the taste of one vine ripened tomato" is the cry heard from hundreds of lips - the sweet flavor but a distant memory as we force ourselves to by bland tomatoes in the produce section of the local grocery. In this war the South has truly won.