Category Archives: Edible Landscape

Country Wines and the Top Ten List

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Over the years I have written a variety of annual series on different topics: the farm breviary, the farmer’s alphabet, and a farm toolbox spring most readily to mind. There have also been a few aborted series, possibly to be returned to later. And, in all honesty, most have been done simply to help me with the process of filling out the fifty-two posts each year. Although I do hope they give value.

Fall wines: perry and crabapple.

This coming year and next I’m starting a new series on country wines. There will be twelve posts this year on using ingredients from the farm or field to create a wine (parsnip sherry, anyone?) And then next year there will be a short post each month on tasting the previous year’s creation and answering important questions. Such as, just how did that parsley wine hold up? And what should one serve with their carrot wine?

Of course, there will be the usual weekly posts on whatever else strikes my fancy or has a burr under my saddle. But please, for now, contain your excitement. Because today is my somewhat annual top ten summary of posts from last year.

This little blog, in 2020, garnered a little over 10,000 views, with 341 of those posts written over the years being reread at least once. Which, as I sit at my desk with a rooster crowing outside the window, is encouraging in that annoying Sally Fields type of fashion.

About the South Roane Agrarian and the Farm Breviary remain the top two viewed posts. But since they are separate pages on the site, I’ll discard them from the top ten.

This year’s top ten list contains a few older posts (although, God only knows, why “beef cheek pastrami” keeps showing up). But the rest are from this year.

Top ten posts from 2020

  1. Unsolicited Advice to a Nephew on Starting a Farm (2020)
  2. Neither Past Nor Future (2020)
  3. A Farm Toolbox: the pocketknife (2014)
  4. Using the Odd-bits: beef cheek pastrami (2016)
  5. A Great Divide (2017)
  6. What the Sunrise Will Show (2020)
  7. When It All Falls Away (2020)
  8. Waiting On the Egg Man (2020)
  9. Fatigue (2020)
  10. Hurricane Laura, Eight Weeks Later (2020)

And, an honorable mention, just because I’m delighted this one still shows up on the list.

  1. The Steen’s Syrup Republic (2017)

Next week? I try my hand at making a fig and muscadine raisin wine!

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Reading this weekend: Convivial Dickens: the drinks of Dickens and his times (Hewett and Axton). And, Durable Trades: family-centered economies that have stood the test of time (R. Groves). The latter was published by Front Porch Republic.

A Garden Worth Celebrating

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Crape Myrtle in the morning light

Holding two white-egg turnips with attached greens in my right hand, I fold the harvest knife with my left and slide it into my pocket. Walking back to the house from the garden, I mutter, “Take that, Monty Don, you pompous twit.”

Why waste my breath on Monty (real name: Montagu Denis Wyatt Don), you might ask? After all, here is a man I had not even heard of until a video of him showing off his spectacular two acres of British gardens went viral this summer. (Yes, I did share the video with a handful of fellow gardeners.) Could it be envy?

Casting stones from a glass house whose library contains books on the impossibly out of touch gardens of Prince Charles is a dangerous activity. Yet, stay with me as I pick up a hefty rock, throw my arthritic arm back into pitching position, and let it fly.

We need to share less garden porn from the Monty Dons and P. Allen Smiths and more stories and videos celebrating real working people and their gardens. Here in our valley, in that slanting patch of land between narrow ridges, people fed themselves long before the current crisis. They grew okra and beans and tomatoes and potatoes. They did not make a fuss, indeed, might even have been insulted if you called attention to their plot, as if you thought them incapable of creating a garden both tidy and productive.

Gardens in our valley are not for show. They are not tended by armies but by single soldiers. Yet there is a utility and a beauty to them, nestled against a barn or tucked away behind a pig paddock. They exist to feed the families who maintain them. But it is also clear that the caretakers take pride in their weed-free plots and find immense satisfaction in preserving their harvest, whether it be canning tomatoes, shelling beans, or salting cabbage into crocks.

The sight of a well-maintained vegetable garden next to a humble trailer or small clapboard house is both beautiful and inspiring. Far more impressive than the celebrity showplace is the garden with neat rows of beans cultivated by the man who works third shift to keep our modern lives running. Let us share that story, help that video go viral, hold that gardener up as worthy of celebration and emulation.

A Farmer’s Checklist for the Covid-19 Apocalypse

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  • Plenty of fast-growing turnip seed to close the hunger gap

    a small portion of the future ample supply of toilet paper

  • Meat in the freezer and meat on the hoof
  • A dozen laying hens with a convenient built-in system to make replacements
  • Hogs out in the woods
  • Bee hives
  • Four cases of mead under the stairs
  • Five half-gallons of honey
  • A full larder
  • A few hunting rifles and shotguns with a reasonable amount of ammunition
  • A gate that locks
  • A half-bottle of Irish whisky left by a guest last night at our St. Patrick’s Day dinner (Jim, check with me to see if it is still available after The Great Reemergence) 
  • A five gallon still and plenty of fermentation vessels
  • One ham curing under the stairs
  • Three farm dogs (two of whom are useless)
  • Already voted in the primary/no need to venture into the polling booth until November
  • Scythe
  • A mother-in-law cottage where future serfs can bunk
  • Medicinal herb garden
  • Apparently a too small supply of toilet paper
  • Hmm, no extra gasoline or diesel, which could be problematic (see scythe and serfs)
  • An exceptionally well-stocked library, perfect for those long lonely nights tending signal fires (or toilet paper for the illiterates who take over our farm)
  • Two chocolate bars and a bottle of Prosecco

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Reading this weekend: The Masque of the Red Death and King Pest (E. Poe). The Confessions of a Bookseller (S. Bythell)

Fall: A Season of Salvage

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I spent Saturday off the farm attending to personal business. So I leave you with this seasonal post from 2015. Enjoy!

There is a day each year. A day when you find yourself in the kitchen slicing the last of the season’s ripe tomatoes, a moment you have lived before, knew was in the cards. A day when the vines are still heavy with green tomatoes. A shortened day in which those green tomatoes will never fully ripen, destined instead for frying or making chowchow. How did that unstoppable summer deluge become a trickle and then a drought?

So begins fall, a chance to cherish what is passing before the weather turns to ice and snow — both too soon to dream of the fallow winter, when the cold months spoon next to the season of rebirth, that bare season, stark in its absence of greenery, when our native imagination colors in the palette of the riches to come, and too late to partake of the fresh bounty of the summer season just passed. The in-between season.

Fall is the season of salvage, of scouring the fields and paddocks for useful leftovers. In modern parlance, it is the sustainable season. A rush to harvest the last of the fruit to preserve in jams, jellies, chutneys, and wines. A time to take stock with some soul searching of Aesop’s Fables significance: Do we have enough firewood? Did we use our time well last winter, spring, summer in preparation for the next year? It is a time of movement, cattle to new pastures and forage to shelter. A time to glean the excess hens and roosters, butchering for hours to stock the larder for the gumbo and chicken and dumplings that will get us through the cold months to come.

Fall is a time of hog fattening. The cruel reward for an ability to gain 300 pounds in nine months comes with a knife wielded the week after Halloween. The bounty is delivered to us in sides of bacon, salted hams, corned shoulders, butcher’s wife pork chops, hand-seasoned breakfast sausages, headcheese, pates, and bowls of beans with ham hocks.

Fall is also sheep-breeding time. As the days and nights cool, the ram has his pleasurable work cut out for him, making sure all ewes are bred. We, servant-like, make sure the ewes are conditioned for lambing, in good health, hooves trimmed, attending to their every need. Meanwhile, last winter’s lambs are grazing in their own pasture, fattening before they fall under the butcher’s sword in the remaining months of the year.

Fall is the season of coming face to face with imminent and unavoidable death. It is the fever of the dying year, the mumbled words from the patient in the bed trying to get his affairs in order, to make amends. So much to do and so little time.

It is a season of contrasts, when we eat a ripe tomato while composting the vine it grew on, feed a pregnant ewe while fattening for slaughter her year-old offspring, crush grapes and pears while sipping the wine made last year. Past, present, and future are jumbled in this most hopeful season, when we weigh the year to come to see what is left in the balance.

Like a culture that prepares for a future generation, this work is undertaken for a year not yet born.

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Reading this weekend: On Homesickness: A Plea (Donaldson), an odd little beautiful book.

Harvest Time

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the harvest from this morning

I sit at my desk, this mid-August afternoon, listening as a three-gallon carboy of perry mead gurgles in the corner of the library. The steady baloop of escaping carbon dioxide in the fermentation lock is as good a signal as any that it is harvest time on the farm. Pears and apples are at their peak in the orchard, bending their tree branches low. As each branch is picked clean of fruit, it springs back skyward. In the hoop-house, the crowder peas climbing the sunflowers mimic the orchard fruits and weigh down the sturdy stalks with their vines and pods. Meanwhile, one row over, the eggplants and peppers … well, nothing stops their magic until Jack Frost pays a visit, and the postcard from Mother Nature says his arrival is going to be delayed this year.

The scuppernongs and muscadines are clamoring to be harvested; already, there are easily a couple of hundred pounds of fruit waiting to be plucked. Figs are coming on and the chard and turnips need to go in the ground for fall and winter. As the produce piles up on the counters and the porch, our kitchen goes into overdrive. Chutneys (sweet and savory), hedgerow jellies and herbed jams or preserves, meads and wines, compotes and sauces, dried fruits and leathers — all will be made within the next week or two. More buckets of peas to shell, pack in bags, and store alongside the blanched slices of eggplant in the chest freezer.

So much to do, so much to eat. Harvest time remains for us a season of satisfaction and joy, even after two decades. All the pleasures of a robust household economy married with a bountiful table. Nothing really matches, does it?

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Reading this weekend: Letters From a Stoic: the 124 epistles of Seneca