Rhubarb Time

After dandelions and lilacs the next big garden harvest is rhubarb. And we've been madly harvesting. Avery loves to help- he gets to use a knife and whack off the leaves. Really, what's more fun than standing in the dirt and whacking things with knives? His enthusiasm is not diminished by the fact that he doesn't like rhubarb one bit. Actually no one in the family much like rhubarb, except me. And I love it. It's beautiful, for one thing. Big and lush and vibrant, when everything else in the garden is just peeping up in little green notes, there's rhubarb, shouting out from the corner. Hooray! It's spring!

This year, so far, I've made the usual rhubarb sauce- just cleaned and sliced rhubarb stems (no leaves-they're poison) and a cup of sugar for every 6 cups of rhubarb, simmer 20 minutes or so til it's all soft and mushy. Delicious with homemade yogurt, or ice cream, on pancakes, in muffins, by the sneaky spoonful when no one's looking. Mmmm! Spring in a spoon.

But I decided to try making rhubarb syrup this year too, and boy! am I glad I did. A rhubarb treat Miles and Aaron both like, even if Avery doesn't quite. I chopped up a bunch of rhubarb-12 cups, probably- and added 3 cups of sugar and 6 cups of water, and simmered that 20 minutes or so, til it was soft and mushy, then strained it through my mesh strainer. The loveliest pink liquid filled 4 quart jars. We drank this all weekend, syrup and sparkling water and ice. But if you were in the mood I'd think some rhubarb cocktails would be divine. I'm thinking black currant juice, vodka, rhubarb syrup, or rhubarb syrup, mint, white rum. Or rhubarb and sparkling wine, like a mimosa, only pink! We had rhubarb pie and rhubarb muffins, too, though I didn't make them.

Here is a recipe I'll be trying tomorrow. If you've never been over to smitten kitchen you should hop over right now! Anyway, this rhubarb coffee cake looks amazing.

I think I'm going to harvest more rhubarb and make jelly. I bet my kids will even like it, come winter and the blahs. A little spring time on their toast will start the day right, I think.

I always think of all those pioneers, relying entirely on themselves to survive, and how wonderful the fresh, tart, awakening flavor of rhubarb must have been. A long winter of dried or canned fruit and vegetables, and finally the spring and the emergence of fresh things to eat. Rhubarb, I think, tastes like salvation. Well, at least if you sugar it enough!

Garden 2009:The beginning

Here we are, in the garden! I know it doesn't look like much now, but it's full of hope and plans, if not quite yet food plants. Our dear friend Bob rather spontaneously rototilled the garden with Avery on Friday, on Saturday I laid out the pathways with newspaper and Aaron dug compost into the beds. On Sunday I planted potatoes, peas, carrots, spinach, lettuce, mesclun, nasturtiums, and put up the two tall bean trellises, two shorter cucumber trellises, and all 26 posts for the tomatoes to grow up. Hopefully this afternoon I'll plant radishes, green onions, turnips, chard, beets, beans, and put up the string trellis along the fence for the peas to grow up.
There's space in the garden ready for tomatoes, basil, pumpkins, spaghetti squash, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cilantro, and parsley, zucchini and summer squash.
The blueberries are all weeded and fed, and the raspberries are coming in green and strong, so we should have a good crop this summer. I haven't got the strawberry bed dug out yet, but I haven't given up hope completely for this year. Not completely, not yet. It seems like a tired excuse by now, but I forget how much longer everything takes when you have a baby strapped to your chest and a preschooler helping with every task!

frugality for the future

GARDEN:
Last year we had a good garden, but still I wasted a lot of space on things that don't quite work, or take up too much space for their yield. I'm circling items in seed catalogs right now with my garden goals in mind.
This year I want the garden to be chock full of (1)things the kids like to just pick and eat- tomatoes, broccoli, cucumbers, peas, green beans (2) things we eat a lot of- tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, turnips (3) things that are expensive to buy organic- broccoli, salad greens, carrots, cabbage, peas (4) things to easily put up for winter- tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, green beans. I like growing sweet and hot peppers, but they're abundant, cheap, and organic around here. Peanuts would be fun, but frivolous. Melons I always waste space on, I'm going to resist this year, if I can. They're cheap and all over the place all summer.
I also want to put in a strawberry bed, an asparagus bed, and plant some high bush cranberries or currants. I think a cutting bed of flowers would be nice, too, and a bed of annual herbs. With the new baby and wanting to paint the house I think taking out the awful rose bushes may happen, but not planting perennial herbs and kiwis til next year.

KITCHEN:
This year I finally started making yogurt- so easy, so cheap, so yummy I can't believe I haven't been doing it for years. Thank you Jennifer for encouraging me to tr it. Can you believe I make a gallon of whole milk organic yogurt every week, and when I strain it we end up with 3 quarts of Greek yogurt for $5, when Fred Meyer sells one pint for $6?! It's amazing.
This year I want to learn cheese making- ricotta and chevre are easy I think, but it'd be nice to learn to make mozzarella and some other cheeses that are hard to squeeze into the budget regularly. The kids also like kefir, as do I, and I'd like to get started making that, too. $4.69 for a quart is too steep for us to buy except for a treat. We plan to buy a bigger freezer, and stick it in the garage, thus clearing up space for bookshelves in the office and making sure we have enough room for lots of blueberries, asparagus, fruit, a side of beef, plus the other animals I want to get- a lamb, pig, lots of fish, chickens, and some venison. Having the freezer full of food is wonderful, and knowing we have healthy pasture fed organic protein without having to carve it out of the weekly budget is great, but it would be nice to have something other than beef in there!
I'd also like to find someone to sell us fresh eggs and raw milk on a regular basis, but I doubt that we'll save any money, just get more nutrition for the dollars we do spend.

HOUSEHOLD:
I also learned how to make laundry detergent. Again, a huge savings, and easy to do. This spring we're putting up laundry lines outside- I envision two T-posts with a hammock between and a shade cloth, and either a multi-line retractable clothesline from one post to the house/garage or a couple of clotheslines attached to the post with clips, so they can easily come down for the raucous playing that sometimes happens in the yard, maybe with cleats on the house to wind the line out of the way.
Getting Mymy out of diapers will be a savings, since he's been in 7th generation disposables for the last year+. The new baby will start in cloth, and hopefully not have the same skin and uncontrollable rash issues Mymy's had. I hope drying diapers in the hot desert sun will help that problem, as well as take care of the $10 a week for diapers we now spend.

Autumn Nature Table

We finally have our nature table up again. We've been collecting things on walks this week- its the first week of falling leaves and buckeyes and walnuts and other little treasures. Tonight will be the first below freezing night and all of the sudden it feels like fall. So Mymy and I finally dug through and found some cloths, sorted acorns and buckeyes into baskets, and made a little nature table in the living room. It will, I'm sure, change as the season does, and as Mymy's interest does! Right now he loves filling his dump truck with buckeyes, and pulling the caps off of the acorns. What fun! The boys and I have been talking about the pumpkin patch, and going back to the one we discovered last year with pumpkin cannons and fresh-made pumpkin doughnuts, hayrides and a corn maze small enough for kids to go in by themselves. The house is bursting with all of the garden produce we pulled in to keep from freezing- a huge box full of tomatoes to take care of tomorrow, there's delicata and acorn squash, pumpkins, bell peppers, zucchini and yellow summer squash, cucumbers and broccoli. My Mom brought over quarts and quarts full of home canned pears and the prettiest pinky applesauce. We turned on the heat for the first time this morning, but I love the feeling of waking up with the air cold and the bed and layers of covers warm and heavy all around. I love crisp air outside and crinkly leaved walks and crystal clear blue skies and the faint smell of woodsmoke. I love the house stocked full of food for winter and I love autumn.

Reasons to Love This Place

Because I sometimes need a reminder to love the town where we live:
#1 My brother from Southeast Alaska called the other day and said he was happy- it was the first day all summer it hadn't rained. Well, it rained that morning but it had burned off and the sun was out. It was 55 and everyone was out enjoying the sunshine. Then he made the mistake of asking me how the weather was here, and I made the mistake of answering. 85 degrees and sunny, it hadn't rained in weeks at least, I don't remember the last rain, but there was a little breeze and the kids were bummed it was too cold to go to the outdoor pool. It hadn't been warm enough to go to the pool in days! For some reason he didn't feel all that sorry for us!
#2 Local Produce. Yesterday I bought 63 pounds of produce for $19.27! One 15 lb watermelon, a 6 lb cantaloupe, 5 lbs cucumbers, 5 lbs donut peaches, 4 lbs each Yukon gold potatoes, peaches (one of which was 1 lb all by itself!), nectarines, summer apples, 2 lbs each carrots, yellow plums, and green beans.
#3 My garden. Despite some weird troubles this year (someone ate all of the Yukon gold potatoes I planted but not the red or blue ones, I'm overflowing in green bean vines but not a single flower or bean!) I have a pretty fabulous, easy garden. Not everywhere in the world can you grow bushels of tomatoes just by sticking plants in the ground and occasionally watering. We've got tons of lettuce, basil, onions, millions of cucumbers coming on, summer squash and winter squash and if it stays warm enough melons. We've eaten peas, carrots and spinach. The broccoli I thought was doing nothing but growing leaves finally has little baby heads sprouting up through the middle, there's a whole block of hot peppers turning ripe and a big patch of sweet peppers we haven't given up hope for. But its the tomatoes that save the day, turn pasta into a meal and provide lots of snacks for even the toddler, who loves to go find hidden red jewels and gobble them up before his older brother!
They may seem like small reasons, but weather and food are pretty big parts of our lives, so having those be amazing makes it always bearable, often nice, and sometimes even wonderful to live here. I just need to remind myself sometimes!

Summer Garden Supper

Yesterday I finished a weekend long garden weeding frenzy too late, too hot, and too tired to think about cooking anything complicated for supper. I had thinned a whole bunch of broccoli plants, and didn't know exactly what to do with them. It seemed a waste just to dump them all in the compost, so I tore the leaves off, chopped them up, then sauteed them with an onion, olive oil, chopped tomatoes, salt and pepper. The broccoli leaves were so tender and sweet, I might just plant extra on purpose next year. That was served over brown rice, with poached eggs on top. I also had the first decent sized zucchini and yellow summer squash, which I sliced and placed on a baking sheet with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, minced onion, garlic, and Parmesan cheese, and broiled til the cheese was brown and crispy looking.
Yum. I love eating from the garden!

First Tomatoes!

Hooray! Today I picked the first ripe tomatoes!
We had such a cold spring I couldn't even put the tomato plants in the ground until late May, and then they just kind of sat there for a few weeks, but now its over 100 and they're going gangbusters! Mmm.
I planted 26 tomato plants in the garden, and had two Brandywines I couldn't fit and couldn't kill, so they're in pots on the deck steps. I'll get around to killing them, I'm sure, but so far they get watered enough....
I also have lots of lettuce, a spinach patch about to be converted to lettuce, broccoli coming along, lots of sweet peppers and 12 hot peppers, green onions, garlic, onions, radishes everywhere, 3 kinds of potatoes, sugar snap peas, oddly struggling basil, green and yellow zucchini, lemon cucumbers, striped Armenian cucumbers, 4 kinds of winter squash (maybe 5?) and 3 kinds of melons. This is the best part, by far, of living in this dry hot land!
My baby rhubarb keeps on trying. The asparagus apparently didn't like their home, so I'll try again next spring in a different place and turn their patch into something fun. Maybe currants, with a big strawberry bed in front?
The raspberries are coming on strong. The 2 blueberry bushes I planted last spring haven't made any fruit, but the 6 I planted this spring are making a few berries. Mymy had the first ripe one this morning.
The baby pie cherry tree looked like some science fiction plant a couple of weeks ago- its only a few feet high and it was covered! in cherry stems, each with the cutest little cherry on the end. They're pretty tart, but the boys ate them anyway, before the birds could! It was a bowlful, at least.
And 4 of the billions of sunflowers surrounding the deck have flowers now, so its cheery every time I look outside from air conditioned comfort. Summer is here!