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.

Starting Seeds

Last week I officially kicked of the 2011 farm season by starting my eggplant and pepper seeds.  I do not have my own greenhouse so my friends, James and Susan McDonald, kindly let me use space in theirs to start some of my plants.  I can't thank them enough for the use of this space since I do not have a place to put up a greenhouse of my own.  They have a retail shop next to the BP Station just off I -70 at the Adamsville.  It will open later in April with lots of hanging baskets and bedding plants.  In the fall they have a really cool corn maze out at the farm plus a pumpkin patch, hay rides, petting zoo, and lots of other family friendly activities.  If you are looking for a fun place to take your kids in the fall I highly encourage going to "Old McDonald's Farm!"  Here is their website if you want more information.  http://www.mcdonaldsgreenhouse.com/

I will plant seventy-two pepper seeds in this flat--on for each hole.

A view of the plants that the McDonalds have already started in their greenhouse.  This is just a small sample of the plants they grow.  They have several other greenhouses.

My first flats of the season (each flat is seventy-two plants.)  This is four flats of eggplant and twenty flats of peppers.  This is just the start.  Tomatoes will be next.  Watch for updates.

For those of you who will be buying garden plants and flowers this season I encourage you to buy locally.  There are a lot of family owned places in Zanesville to get them--in addition to my friends the McDonalds, there are all my friends who will be selling at Farmer's Market on Saturdays starting April 30th at the Fairgrounds, plus my neighbors the Paul's, just to name a few.  My friend Christie Gormley is growing a large selection of perennials this year.  My friend Jayne Barnes has a lot of different herbs and Becky Swingle has a cool variety of heirloom tomatoes and peppers that you might not find other places.  If you are looking for a good selection of seeds try Dollar Saver at the corner of Linden and Adair or at Fred's on Putnam.  So, wherever you live, I encourage you to skip the big box stores and support your local growers!

I'm Back!!

Well, it's been over a month since I last posted on this blog.  Sorry to keep you in such suspense!  Actually, this past month a lot of my activities didn't seem too "farm" related so that's why I didn't write.  Maple syrup season is over--we made over thirty gallons total! Today I was sitting on the tractor tilling up some ground for onions and peas--that is, until it started snowing so hard that I had to stop.  In spite of this unseasonably cold weather, planting season really is already upon us.  So, after this one, most of my posts will be more gardening related. 

Here's a little update on some of the things I've been up to over the last month (at least these are some of the times when I had my camera and remembered to take pictures.) 

BAKING!  I feel like I've made a lot of pies in the last month for various functions.  Here's a sample:

Lemon Meringue - I use the recipe from Grandma Jean's friend "Scotty" Nessline.  It is grandma's favorite pie and my favorite to make.  It's really fun to make those little peaks!

Lemon and Strawberry pies - I use the Strawberry recipe from my pie-making hero, Ruth McLaughlin, who recently passed away.  Maybe some of you remember reading her column every Monday in the Times Recorder.  She was quite a farm woman--I can only hope to be half the worker and cook that she was!

Cherry Pie - I made this one for the guys at the Sugar Shak.  I made it with a lard crust per their request.  I normally use Crisco.  They gave it high praise, so I may have to do that again.  Ruth always used lard for her crusts.  It was a little more challenging to work with since I'm not used to it, but I think it turned out rather pretty.  I'm actually not a huge fan of cherry pie, but I think that's because I don't like that canned pie filling stuff.  This is made with frozen cherries--much better, in my opinion, and I can actually eat a slice.

Quiche - Made with spinach from my own garden that held out over the winter!

Grandma Jean got the cutest new puppy "Babe."  Isn't she sweet!

Me with my cousin-in-law Kelley (right) and her sister Sarah (middle).  This is our "Rosie the Riveter" look; our hair was in pin-curls.  Turns out pin-curls don't work on already curly hair--imagine that!  You just end up with a tangled, frizzy mess.  Oh well, we had fun hanging out and watching movies on a Saturday night.

Of course, as my friend Shannon will quickly tell you, hanging out with me always involves some kind of work.  Lately I've been roping everyone into helping me shell beans.  I totally missed my goal of having them all shelled by the end of February. (Kelley's going to have a fit when she sees I posted these pics of us with our hair up--hehe!)

And, as you can see, I'm certainly not opposed to employing child labor!  This is Kelley's daughter, Cecilia, who is my goddaughter.  She sat with me for probably an hour doing this and kept saying in her sweet two-year-old voice, "Look--a little tiny bean!"  It never got old!

This is when I was helping my friend Becky work on a sewing project.  "Craft Night" with the girls was a big thing this winter.  However, I think more eating and chatting took place than crafting.  Did I mention that my friends are all amazing cooks?

Maggie, Amy, and I on a craft night.  Notice we're not doing crafts. :-)  You can't really tell from this picture, but Maggie was just a couple of weeks away from having a baby when this was taken.  Her first baby, a boy, August James, was born last week!  Congratulations Maggie!

Here's Becky diligently working on her first knitting project.

Nora is painting a picture of the rest of us doing our crafts.  She's a pro--for real!

I wasn't kidding, Nora, really is a professional artist.  This is a huge painting she did that hangs in Maggie's dining room.  I like it because the woman is holding a chicken like she just killed it for supper!  I'm going to have to take another picture because I didn't realize Nora was standing in front of the chicken.

Another craft night--myself, Janelle, and Neala at Neala's house.

This time instead of crafts I made everyone shell beans!  Amy, Becky, and Greg are hard at work.

More child labor!  Here's Neala and her two-year-old daughter, Kendyl shelling beans.  Such a sweetie!

Here are some pictures from Grandma Jean's 88th birthday dinner.  This is her newest great-grandchild, Sophie.

Cousins Rachel (left) and Leah (right) and Aunt Denise (middle).

Aunt Martha and my mom.

Uncle Jim and Aunt Tammy

My sister and baby Sophie

The amazing cake my sister made for Grandma.  Lemon with blueberry filling!  Yummy!!!

My hero.

Uncle Dennis and John Mattingly

Aunt Martha and Sophie

Grandma with eight of her ten kids

Just a few of the grandkids.

Visiting my friend Travis makes me glad to see that other people end up with chickens roosting in funny places!  Can you find the hen in this picture?

Two of my favorite little girls--Anna and Lily Parks!  Lily is in her "princess dress."

The girls took several pictures with my camera and this one was too cute!

Baking a birthday cake for their Uncle Travis.

Anna stirring the icing.  Caramel, of course!!!