Category Archives: Gardening

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

It Ain’t the Heat, It’s the Tomatoes

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“When your first tomato is ripe, take salt and pepper to the garden. Pluck the fruit from the vine. Cut into quarters, sprinkle it with salt and pepper, and pop it, a quarter at a time into your mouth. I shall be listening to your sigh of contentment.” Angelo M. Pellegrini

During a casual walk by the potting shed, I lean over and gather a cluster of Sweet 100’s and pop them, as instructed by Mr. Pellegrini, into my mouth. Later, that evening, Cindy makes a B.E.L.T. for dinner. That necessitates a quick trot out to the garden for a Cherokee Purple or perhaps a Sudduth Brandywine: constructed with two slices of thick homemade bread, Bacon, fried Egg, Lettuce and Tomato (B.E.L.T.). On another night it is a few Mr. Stripey’s, some wine, green pepper, onion, a handful of oregano and garlic, all in a slow simmer for a couple of hours, resulting in a terrific silky sauce for meatballs and pasta.

Yesterday, five gallons of Rutger’s thickly sliced, placed in the dehydrator yielded ten baggies of sun-dried tomatoes for the coming winter (with temps consistently over 90, I did so want to remember Mr. Winter). Over the past two weekends we have put up 20 pints of tomatoes, the aforementioned Rutger working best, with just the right ratio of pulp to juice. We have learned over the years that two people need about 40 pints to get from December to May, so we are half-way there!

Tonight, should it be cold tomatoes, basil, and garlic, tossed with olive oil and hot pasta… or, should we consider thinly sliced Early Girl with chunks of mozzarella, basil, and lots of crushed garlic on our pizza? Maybe, just a simple salad of thick slices dressed with salt and cracked pepper, with bread to sop up the juice? Then again, perhaps Cindy will make her gazpacho soup, served cold, composed of tomato, cucumber, green pepper, garlic and onions?

God, we do love the tomato and the season that brings them fresh to the plate.

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Reading this weekend: Another work by A. Pellegrini, Wine and the Good Life.

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(The above is a reworked version of an older post)

A Beautiful Day: lambs and apple trees

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An Arkansas Black, partially pruned

Standing on the orchard ladder, I reached high over my head and made an initial cut to a large branch. Removing it would allow the sunlight to filter through to the inner branches. This Arkansas Black is one of our more productive apple trees. It is also a handsome tangle of branches, seemingly budding out and growing in every conceivable direction.

While pruning can be the perfect meditative activity, initially it is a task of almost daunting proportions (one that would surely be made simpler if I pruned more often than every five years). But an afternoon spent slowly and methodically studying and removing unneeded growth can be a fine restorative, particularly after so many weeks of gray skies.

This rare winter day had us both outside all day, not for the chores that needed to be done, but instead for the sheer pleasure of marking every degree the low January sun traced across the Southern sky. We still had to slog through slurry and ponding water, the result of an unrelenting rain that has spawned a small cottage industry of memes (“Thank goodness it is raining; my mud was getting dehydrated”), yet under blue skies, with nary a cloud in sight, our spirits lifted even as the mud sucked at our boots.

A friend had come out earlier in the morning to help clear brush from a fence line and clean up the orchard. We finished before lunch. We then took some time to remove the water sprouts, those skinny whips shooting up from the base of a trunk, from the fruit trees. A bit after noon, we headed to the house for a bowl of soup. Even lunch was taken on the front porch, where we continued to marvel at the perfect weather.

The day had begun, as always, with the noisy coffee grinder whirring, followed by my turning out two dogs and bringing in a third. But even at five o’clock I could feel the promise of the day to come: stars blinked high overhead and Venus hung luminous in the East.

A little before sunrise and dressed for the chill, I pulled on my Wellingtons and walked out to begin the chores. The pigs needed fresh water, and I turned on the spigot at the well house. They squealed insistently, so as the water trough filled, I restocked their automatic feeders, both tasks that must be completed every three days.

Fifteen minutes later, with the water turned off and feeders filled, I headed to the barn to tend the sheep. Usually our first lambs are on the ground by December 31st. This year, for reasons long and complicated, the onset of the lambing season has remained uncertain.

Feeding time

I entered the barn to be greeted by the most pleasant of sights for a husbandman: a ewe quietly nursing twins. Their tails rotated like propellers in satisfaction as they greedily suckled, and their mother chuckled deeply in encouragement.

I knew then, even before the sun had cleared the ridge, that it was going to be a beautiful day.

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A note: I’ve added a new page on the header for the blog. It will link to a weekly picture update on the gardens and orchard for 2019. It is scheduled to come out each Friday. So, check back from time to time and see how my garden grows.

Ode to Greens

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For certain I love any greens, yes, even with eggs and ham. I’ve had greens ‘most every way, including in savory jam.

Were you to come join us in a sumptuous dinner, expect to have collards or turnips, in summer or winter.

Do all of these choices seem common and easy? Then let me present you with rabe and some creasy.

I confess a love for the following (it’s always a hit): minced pork roast topped with collards, then served over steaming hot grits.

Or, as a gratin fresh from the oven, all bubbly and hot. And what’s not to love about greens served in a pepper hot-pot?

Eating them fried or sautéed, the more simple is best. After eating a spinach Maria, I suggest a laydown and rest.

Done in a Dutch oven with a nice ham hock, or perhaps in a chicken or hearty beef stock.

If you have a pork shoulder, boned out, at the ready, then roll it up with greens, with your hands holding steady.

Nothing better on an evening with snow on the ground, than waiting on mustard greens to slowly cook down.

I eat ‘em with cornbread, then drink the pot likker. Or eat ‘em with boudin and wine, so please do not snicker.

And seated at the Cracker Barrel more times than I can count, I’ve had greens simmered with bacon in prodigious amounts.

But, my favorite of all, saved for the glorious end, is to pluck them and eat them while my garden I tend.