Rhubarb: A trip down memory lane

For those of you that don't know, I will be writing the "What's in Season" column in the Times Recorder this summer.  It is supposed to come out on Thursdays so the first one should be in today's paper (which I haven't seen yet.)  I'm a little worried about what the TR may do when they "edit" what I send them--you never know with the paper.  So, for those of you who don't get the paper, here is my article.  I plan to post them for you every week.

Rhubarb:  A trip down Memory Lane

                This Saturday, April 30^th, is opening day of the 2011 Farmers’ Market season at the Muskingum County Fairgrounds.  The hours are 9:00am-12:00pm and it will run every Saturday until the end of October.  This year I’m excited to be able to write each week about “What’s in Season,” fresh and available for you to purchase from our local vendors. 

Now is the time to think of your gardens and what you want to plant.  There will be many vendors offering a wide variety of flowers, both annuals and perennials.  They will be glad to offer advice on what will work best for your flower beds or planters.  There will also be a large selection of vegetable plants available for purchase.  I think it’s great that a lot of the shoppers at our market do plant some vegetables of their own, be it in pots or gardens, then come to market to supplement what they are growing themselves.  If you don’t have space or time for vegetable plants, I would encourage you to at least get your feet wet with some pots of herbs.   As the season progresses I hope to feature plenty of recipes that highlight fresh herbs in addition to fruits and vegetables.

If some of the farmers were able to get in their fields before all this rain hit there may be a selection of early vegetables this first week such as radishes and greens.  The asparagus is just starting to pop, so there may be a little bit of it for sale if we are lucky.  One old-fashioned standard that we can find in these first few weeks is rhubarb. 

Rhubarb seems to be one of those vegetables that creates conversations starting with “I remember when Grandma used to make. . .” or “I haven’t had a rhubarb pie in years. . .”  My mom’s good friend, Carol, has been talking for quite a while about her childhood memory of the “rhubarb-currant-custard pie” that her grandmother made.  Currants are one of those old-fashioned fruits that most people don’t grow anymore and are nearly impossible to buy, so she ordered a couple of bushes and planted them a month or so ago.  In a couple of years they will produce berries so that we can try to re-create her grandmother’s pie.  Let’s hope this pie is as good as her memory seems to think it is!  I have an early childhood memory of my aunt Theresa, who has always loved rhubarb, cutting a stalk from her dad’s garden and letting me taste it raw.  The sour pucker it produced makes me understand why pretty much every rhubarb recipe you can find contains some amount of sugar. 

Last year I bought a cookbook called “The Joy of Rhubarb” by Theresa Millang, which is filled with every rhubarb recipe you can think of—most of them desserts—cobblers, crisps, cakes, cookies, pies, jams, and so on.  I wanted to find a non-dessert rhubarb recipe (and trust me, that’s hard), but my book did have few.  This one was perfect since I had a little spinach out in the garden that was ready to harvest.  We really enjoyed this simple, healthy salad. 

Rhubarb Spinach Salad

4 stalks fresh rhubarb, cut into thin slices

¼ c. sugar

2 Tablespoons red-wine vinegar

Salt and Pepper to taste

6 Tablespoons olive oil

4 c. fresh spinach leaves

Put the rhubarb in a saucepan, sprinkle with sugar, and cover with 1 inch of water.  Bring to a boil and boil uncovered 2 min.  Remove from heat, drain rhubarb and reserve liquid.  Place liquid back in saucepan.  Stir in vinegar, salt, and pepper.  Cook uncovered over high heat until reduced to ½ cup.  Remove from heat; whisk in olive oil.  Place spinach on 4 salad plates; top with rhubarb and top with the warm salad dressing.

            If you have recipes to share or questions, feel free to contact me at curlygirlfarm@gmail.com or come talk to me in person on Saturdays at the fairgrounds.

Here are pictures of the salad.  We ate them with pork chops and mashed potatoes.  Yummy!

You say potato. . .

    Friday was a marathon day of planting, trying to get some things in before the rain hit on Saturday.  My seed potatoes had arrived on Tuesday and I was waiting for the ground to dry out to get them planted.  So, when I got home from work on Thursday evening I was able to hitch up the tiller and get the ground worked up.  The seed potatoes arrive whole and you have to cut them into pieces before planting.  Each piece should have a couple of "eyes," from which the new potato plant will grow.  Dad usually helps me cut up the potatoes, but he was in Tennessee on a fishing trip, so I figured I'd be up most of the night cutting them.  I got an unexpected surprise though, as a crew assembled to help with the cutting.  Dale Clapper, who is one of the guys I make maple syrup with, showed up, and mom pitched in and called her best friend, Carol Butler, to come over.  With their help the job was finished in no time.   Here's the crew.

This red potato is red all the way through!  I'm bummed though because the seed company ran out of my purple potatoes that are purple all the way through and didn't send them.  Too late now to order them from somewhere else.  :-( 

Carol Butler really knows how to get her hands dirty!

Here's the finished product.  180lbs of potatoes ready to plant Friday morning!

This is Friday morning.  I have a "potato plow" that my dad bought me at an auction a few years ago.  I think it was originally built to be pulled behind a horse, but I use the tractor.  I roped Greg Zink into driving the tractor for me so I could use the plow to make the furrows to plant the potatoes. 

Three furrows made.  Surely that's enough for all my seed, right? 

Carol Butler came back to help me plant the potatoes.  She was my savior!  Turns out three rows was no where near enough to plant all my seed.  We ended up planting three more rows and still had seed left over!

This is Carol driving the tractor so we can add three more rows of potatoes.

A farm girl from way back, Carol really knows how to wield a hoe!  I really can't express how thankful I am for her help getting in the potatoes before the rain came.

I always joke with my friends that some girls are just built for "hoe-ing" and I am one of them--I can hoe for hours and not wake up sore the next day!  :-)  I didn't inherit these broad shoulders and strong back from my Slovak grandmothers for nothing!

Turns out the rain didn't set in until after dark on Friday, so I had some time to get some greens planted as well.  Kelley and Capria came to help.  This is Capria helping me plant Swiss Chard.  Capria is my right hand farm girl; she is my neighbor and the hardest working eighth grade girl I know!   You will see her with me every Saturday at Farmer's Market as well.  I don't know what I'd do without that girl!

It was bugging me that I had over thirty pounds of potato seed leftover even after planting six rows instead of three. (Now you see why my garden plan flies out the window soon after I start planting.)  So, just before it got dark Kelley and Capria helped me get one last row of potatoes planted.  This is Kelley steering the potato plow.

The plow was proving a little too much for her handle though (I didn't want crooked rows!) so we switched places and Kelley drove the tractor instead.  She was pretty excited to drive the tractor--she did great! 

More Spring Planting

Last year I salvaged some old windows from my Grandma's neighbor who was having his replaced.  I wanted to use them to make a "cold frame/hot bed" to start my seeds.  Here's how I did it.  A cold frame just uses sunlight to create heat to make a warm environment for starting seeds.  If you add an additional heat source it becomes a "hot bed."  In a cold frame the temperature will fall at night or if the sun is not out which is not ideal for starting some seeds that require higher germination temperatures (such as a lot of flowers).  Manure is often used as a heat source in a hot bed because as it decomposes it generates heat.  So, I thought I would give it a try.  Here is the pit I dug about 18 inches deep.  Laying next to the pit is the window frame I am using.

Then I filled the trench with chicken manure and covered it with some straw.  The chickens are checking it out!  Dad and Greg helped me add sides to the window frame to make it into an angled box.  The front is 12 inches high and the back is 24 inches high.  It slopes to the South to take the most advantage of the sunlight.

This is the whole frame after completion.  The windows are open for ventilation since this was a warm sunny day.  I have 15 flats of Kale in it right now.  I'm not sure that my chicken manure is really working to produce any heat in my frame because once the sun goes down the temperature is falling.  Horse manure probably would have done a better job.  Since I'm using this to start Kale plants right now it's not a big deal though because kale doesn't require a high temperature to germinate.  I have already seen a few sprouts after just a couple of days.  If I want to start flowers I may have stick a heat lamp in here on really cold nights.

Here's what it looks like when it's closed up.  I have a couple more window frames that I can use as well, but I don't know if that is going to happen this season.

My Granny always said to plant peas on St. Patrick's Day.  That never happens for me; I'm never ready that soon.  Quite frankly, though, I think the soil is usually still a little too cold and wet on that date anyway.  Mine were planted on April 3rd.  Kelley came down to help and we were finished pretty quickly.  This is me pushing my Earthway Seeder which drops the seeds in the ground and covers them for you.  It is super handy because it really speeds things up but can be very frustrating as well.  It has "plates" for different seeds, but if the seeds aren't exactly the right size it will put down too much or not enough seeds.  I used it to plant my row of shell peas.  The snap pea seeds were too small and the snow pea seeds were too large so Kelley and I planted those by hand.

This is Kelley planting peas (the cat came to help as well.)

The Friday before we planted peas I was able to get some ground tilled up and lay down the plastic for my onions.  A couple of years ago I stopped using onion sets and switched to using onion plants and putting them in black plastic.  This works so much better for me--I won't go back!  So, after we finished planting peas Kelley went home and brought back her six year old, Jud.  He is hardest working little boy I know!  At age two, he could help us pick green beans in a hot August field for two hours and not complain one bit.  The two of them helped me plant half a row of onions in about an hour that day (each row is 320 feet long.)

I planted the rest of the onions over the next couple of days.  I planted five varieties:  Yellow Spanish (large yellow), Superstar (large white), Ailsa Craig (large yellow), Red Zepplin (large red), and Cippollini (medium flat yellow).  I planted about 7,000 onions.  Please don't be impressed with this number; my best farmer friend Becky just planted like 22,000!!  I have about 2,000 plants leftover--they were all the scrawny little plants--I'm going to plant them closely spaced straight in the dirt to pull out as green onions. 

So, I had about 1/4 of a row left to plant and I called Kelley to tell her she had better bring Jud back down to help finish it if he wanted to help me plant any more onions (he had been begging to come back and help.)  She showed up with a whole crew of kids!  Aren't they cute?!

I have to admit, I was a little afraid when I saw them all--I could see things being trampled, etc.  But they were sooo great.  They all listened to my directions and did exactly as they were told and worked quickly and carefully.  We had that little section done so fast!  I joke about "child labor," but really, what a great experience for these kids.

Kelley is handing out yellow onions to Jud and J.D.

Kelley's sister Sarah is handing out red onions to Nate, Evie, and Maura.  Don't worry, I wasn't just taking pictures while they worked; I was making the holes in front of them.

And don't worry, I let the kids have some fun when they were finished working!  The slide was a huge hit as always.

Wax paper makes you fly!

Also, this past week, I got my tomatoes started in the greenhouse.  Twenty five flats in all.  The peppers and eggplant were up and doing well.  Here's Eli McDonald helping me fill my flats with dirt. (The pictures turned out foggy because it was so humid in the greenhouse.)

Fill the dump truck, back it up, then unload it!  So cute!

My seed potatoes finally arrived today from Maine!  I'm going to have to wait for the ground to dry out now though after all this rain.  They are predicting sunshine for the next couple of days so let's hope I can get them in before the next round of rain hits.