on watermelon babies and other round things

I've dabbled with gardening here and there in various ways over the years. It's the kind of thing that I love the idea of but often not so much the actual work. I loved envisioning a garden and choosing and planting the plants. But after that my interest waned. (I believe this is typical ENFP behaviour.) Rather, my interest remained, in a passing kind of abstract way; I loved watching the plants grow and bloom and make seeds. I just didn't much care for the work of maintaining a garden: mostly, weeding. Such tedium!

I have a friend who is a brilliant flower gardener. I am a little in awe at how he never seems to mind the weeding. And he spends so much time just standing there, watching and looking. I liked looking at the garden while I walked by on the way somewhere else. But I was never a fan of watching a garden, like, just watching. I mean, there were no people!

In the vegetable garden this year, I was hoping that the promise of food would keep me motivated to get through the tedious work. Now, I have to say I don't spend a lot of time just watching, like while standing still. But I am loving the practice of observation it is instilling me. I manage to take an awful lot of information in about the weeds and the bugs and the plants and the soil. And whatever I miss is pointed out with great excitement by Eldest. His voice goes up several octaves when he exclaims about something new that I hadn't noticed. I don't weed as much as it needs it, but I am surprised by how much I actually enjoy weeding. It's very satisfying. I wish I could get more time there by myself but there are creatures I need to attend to at home as well. (Well, one creature, mainly, who would crash through everyone's garden plots and wreak havoc if a grown-up weren't policing his every move.)

I didn't spend much time planning, and I had no real context for envisioning what my vegetable garden might look like. I based all my decisions on what I enjoyed eating through the winter. I figured local organic produce is easy to get in the summer and was probably better purchased from people more knowledgeable than me. But winter vegetables were harder to find from local sources. I planted some Swiss chard, beets, lots of potatoes and a decent amount of carrots. I plan to grow cabbage and more beets in the fall to store. If I could find Brussels sprouts seeds I would try some of those, but I'll have to wait for next year. I stuck in some cilantro, basil, rosemary, cayenne peppers and sweet peppers because why not? And some peas because people said they were just too good not to. (Having eaten my weight in bought fresh peas recently, I must concur, but it looks like we won't be harvesting any from our own garden. Barely any seeds germinated and several of those that did died. Two plants were left and just as the pods were fattening up, they suddenly turned yellow and flaccid. I think it was just too hot for the poor peas. Next year, we'll plant them much sooner.) Eventually I want to grow my own beans for drying but I figured I'd start with bush beans to eat green this year. And some lettuce, because salads are good. Most I've planted from seeds, except for the herbs and peppers, which I bought as seedlings.

Just before I bought the seedlings, when I was still trying to figure out what to grow, Eldest mentioned that his favourite vegetable is cucumber and his very favourite fruit is watermelon. So when I saw cucumber and watermelon seedlings at the market, I made an impulse purchase. The cucumber shrivelled within days of transplanting (I've since learned that cucumbers do not like transplanting. And I think I added insult to injury with I fiddled with its roots in the process. Next year I'll direct seed.) The watermelon definitely suffered, and I thought it was going to go the way of the cucumber, but it made a comeback. Today it is healthy and happy and spreading like mad, so we put it up on a support so it doesn't crowd out my entire plot. Last week, or maybe it was the week before, it got the most beautiful small yellow blossoms on it, and we watched ants pollinate them. So far we've counted four tiny baby melons on it and there are more blossoms too.

When I was pregnant with Youngest, we told Eldest quite early on. Earlier than I really felt comfortable with, but my parents were coming for Thanksgiving and I was so horrendously nauseous I knew there was no way I could hide it from them. And it seemed so very wrong to tell anyone else in the family before telling Eldest. So we told him and hoped for the best. I remember each week telling him about how the baby was growing, and more than once the three of laughed about how the updates described the baby's size. It was always food related: "Your baby is the size of a kidney bean," a grape, a stuffed green olive... later, it was a cantaloupe and, eventually (it seemed to me anyways), a watermelon. Maybe I'm imagining the watermelon. Today, Eldest and I were shocked and delighted to discover that the biggest baby melon has already grown from pea-sized (and a small pea at that) to grape-sized. Actually, plump cherry-sized. In just a day or two! It's amazing!

In the early pages of The Resilient Gardener is the "Plant Gardener Covenant: 33 Gardening Golden Rules." Now, I'm going from sieve-like memory here, so I may not get it exactly right and anyways you should read it yourself because it's so eloquently written, but the covenant's premise is that domesticated plants are not so good at surviving the perils of life so they need our protection and care. They can't compete with weeds because their resources are spent making bigger fruits or roots or leaves for us to eat instead of competing. Even though I can't recite the details of the golden rules, I do feel deep affection for my plants. I mourned when I discovered my Norland potatoes have early blight (they're still producing potatoes but perhaps not as much as they would otherwise, and I believe they won't store for long, so we'll be eating them all up sooner than I might otherwise and eating them faster). I got angry with the unknown rabbit who ate our lettuce (although thankfully they all came back just fine from the trimming and we enjoyed them) and again with the unknown animal who messed with my cabbage seeds the other day. I felt genuine remorse when my poor peas succumbed, and not only because we probably wouldn't get to eat them. I felt I failed them.

Tonight, as Eldest and I crowed over the baby melons and how very cute they are and imagined enjoying them when they get big and ripe (even though I cautioned myself and him that I'd heard watermelons are very hard to grow so we mustn't get our hopes up too high. But surely getting pollinated and forming baby melons is a very important milestone?!?), it struck me as a bit odd to feel such tenderness for something I'm later going to around and EAT. But I guess livestock farmers do that all the time. And now that I think about it, maybe it isn't so odd. Maybe what's really odd is that I think it's odd.

Here are the very adorable babies:

the smallest one

the biggest one

(And now that I'm looking at the biggest one I'm fretting that the wire will cut off circulation to the melon. I hope it will be ok until morning when I can change it. Soon we will need to support the melons with slings made from old t-shirts.)

magic

So get this. If you stick some seeds, or potatoes, in some dirt, and water them and keep away the weeds that want to steal their water and sunshine, eventually you will get some food.

The other night we ate our first beets from the garden and tonight it was potatoes. It's really quite magic. Most of the pea plants have died so I dug up the poor struggling things and put some cabbage seeds down for a fall harvest. This could get addictive.

Here is our first, very large beet.

I can can

In my twenties, I suffered a lot of anxiety and panic. It went undiagnosed for a couple of years, during which time I thought I had some mysterious gastrointestinal illness. I was seriously phobic about vomiting, especially in public. I became paranoid about certain (most) foods, germs and pretty much stopped eating out for dinner. During this time, some poor man, a youngish father I think, got botulism from a baked potato of all things. I had to read all the media reports for my job at the time, and it was terrifying. Food contaminated with botulism doesn't look or taste any different, and if memory serves, refrigeration and heating don't kill it.

Around this time, my friend gave me a jar of her homemade pickled beets, which I love normally, but I was so paranoid about botulism I never had the courage to eat them. Years later another friend gave us a housewarming basket of all kinds of homecanned goodies and again, I never ate them. I am ashamed.

(During that job way back when, I remember alsoreading many articles about how most food poisoning happens at home, and they blamed the home cook's unsafe food handling practices rather than the industrially produced foods that have way more pathogens in them than they have had historically. But I digress.)

Anyways, this year I wanted to try canning. My epiphany this winter started me thinking about how fucked up it is to believe that industrially made food is safer than homemade food. In a factory, people do different steps separately. The workers have no connection with the person who may eat the food. They themselves may or may not eat the food. With homemade food, one person controls the whole process from start to finish, and they themselves eat the food. There's just a lot more accountability in homemade food, isn't there?

When I made the rhubarb relish, I wasn't planning to can it. I was just going to stick it in jars and let them seal and keep them in the fridge. But they didn't seal overnight, so I had to put them in a waterbath the next day. I wrung my hands and angsted on twitter and eventually sucked up my courage and did a super crazy long waterbath and the jars all sealed within half an hour afterwards. It wasn't that bad! In fact, it really wasn't that big a deal in the end. I'm still keeping them in the fridge but I'm not even sure that's necessary.

So I got a whole bunch of books about canning from the library and had a look through them all. In most of the books, I'd find one, maybe two recipes that I was interested in making. There were a whole lotta recipes I just had no interest in. But in Liana Krissoff's Canning for a New Generation, I want to make pretty much every recipe. Last weekend we had enough rhubarb and strawberries to make her Rhubarb Strawberry Jam. It did take a while but oh my goodness that jam is good. We went through a half-pint jar in about five days. It's bright red and beautiful, and full of flavour. For most of her jams, she takes the fruit out of the pot for a period of time and just cooks the juice so it gels without cooking the fruit beyond all recognition. And she also adds lemon juice, which I suspect keeps the colour and flavour so bright. Having grown up loving freezer strawberry jam (but having decided to eschew commercial pectin from my canning), these are all good things.

I also like her philosophy in general. She says, "Folks nowadays can for many reasons. [...] For me, putting up the very best produce I can find in season -- especially if it's homegrown or from a nearby farm -- is quite simply a way to spend some marginally productive time in the kitchen, preferably with my family and friends. [...] I understand that canning isn't really economical in most cases. If I didn't put up a dozen jars of strawberry jam each spring, I don't think I'd end up buying a dozen jars throughout the year to fill the void; I'd just eat something else. The point is, preserving food -- and thinking of delicious ways to use those preserves -- is fun."

Next I want to pickle the radishes we grew, then Chamomile-Scented Strawberry Syrup for pancakes, and Spiced Strawberry Butter for oatmeal, and of course some old-fashioned strawberry jam. Then Sour Cherry Preserves, Peaches in Vanilla Syrup, Peach and Cilantro Salsa, Cardamom Plum Jam, Roasted Red Peppers in Lemon Juice and Good Ketchup.

And of course, the best part is that she explains how these foods get preserved, and she covers botulism in particular. Botulism spores cannot survive in an acid environment, so as long as the food is acidic (as pretty much all fruit is and pickles and salsas), you're good. And all the recipes in the book are acidic. All this time, and botulism wasn't even a real concern with the pickled beets and salsas people gave me.

Grandma Ruth's Rhubarb Relish

Ever since I started this elimination diet, my milk supply has been a bit hit and miss. It was confusing because I was eating all kinds of oats and flax and other galactogogues. I was drinking many cups of nursing tea and that helped a bit. But every time I stopped, my supply would drop again. A few weeks ago I saw a tweet that said that if you're struggling with milk supply you should increase your protein.

I have never in my life been concerned with protein intake even though I've been mostly vegetarian for 12 years or so. I ate enough dairy, wheat, corn, soy, eggs, nuts and seeds that it was never a problem. But apparently when you're breastfeeding you need 65 grams of protein a day and a cup of oatmeal only has 6 grams in it. Ever since I've been struggling to eat more protein. We've already given up vegetarianism for chicken and fish, and we started cooking chicken ourselves. But there's only so much chicken and fish one can have in a week.

At the same time I've been reading a lot about how grass-fed meat is so much better for you than grain-fed meat. I've never had moral concerns with eating meat; my pseudo-vegetarianism was more about health and sustainability. So now I'm realizing that well-raised meat can be a part of a healthy diet and a healthy planet. 

I've discovered a local farmer who raises all kinds of pastured meat. She no longer sells at our usual market so yesterday we finally made the trek to the more distant market she sells at. We bought some nitrate-free bacon, turkey sausages, stewing goat (!) (I don't think I've ever eaten goat in my life!) and a chicken. Sadly she was out of the maple and cranberry pork sausage, cause I would totally try that.

It's so weird because I'd gotten really squeamish about eating red meat in my years away, but now I feel totally ok with it. (It helps that I'm REALLY HUNGRY for protein.) I've even been thinking about eating things like rabbit. There actually is a local rabbit farmer at the same market but my husband isn't quite there yet.

Anyways, we decided to have the turkey sausages today since rhubarb is plentiful and I've been wanting to make my Grandma Ruth's Rhubarb Relish for the first time. I have to say, it was super easy and pretty great. My mom was pretty vague with the canning instructions, so all I did was sterilize the jars and I'll keep them in the fridge. If you know about canning and things, please share what I should do.

Here's the recipe:

4 cups chopped rhubarb
4 cups chopped onions
3 cups white sugar
375 ml malt vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar to avoid the gluten and it tasted just as good)
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground cinnamon

You throw them in a pot, mix it, bring it to a boil then let it boil gently for about 45 minutes. I think I let it boil a little too gently because it took over an hour before the rhubarb really broke down and it matched the consistency I have in my memory.

My family eats it with sausage and chicken. It would probably be great on a turkey sandwich or dipping pakoras into, but I haven't tried that.

Edited to add: If you like rhubarb, you should definitely try this recipe for rhubarb custard crisp. Yum!

Beltaine and first times

So apparently it's Beltaine today. I'd forgotten, although I'd like to make more of an effort to celebrate these seasonal days. I keep getting swept up in life and not realizing the day is coming until it's here. Oh well.

Yesterday, Eldest and I planted our first vegetable seeds in our new community garden plot. A row each of radishes, beets and Swiss chard. I was kind of freaking out about it before we went, to be honest. I don't know anything about anything and I felt like I needed to have it all planned out in advance. When I told my husband about my panic, he said, "That seems like a funny thing to panic about. I mean, the worst that can happen is nothing grows, and then you're out - what? - 20 bucks for the seeds? How can you go wrong?"

Well, when you put it like that...

I did develop a bit of a plan for the seeds we were going to plant first, but when we got there I changed it anyways and looking at the actual dirt, suddenly it wasn't so complicated. It wasn't exactly easy, because I don't think it's ever easy to feel that awful discomfort of not having an f-ing clue about what you're doing and doing it anyways. But simple. You drop little dried bits of pure potential life into dirt. And then you try to keep the dirt moist and without weeds.

We loosened the soil a bit with a couple of rakes, drew a line in it with my finger, dropped seeds in according to the instructions for each plant, then swept a bit of dirt over top and patted ever it ever so gently. After we planted the three rows, we watered it with a gentle mist from the hose. The most complicated tasks were unlocking the tool shed and untangling the hose.

It was a revelation to hang out with just me and Eldest. A treat. The garden was completely empty, so I would have felt lonely if I was there by myself, doing this thing I'd never done before (I've only grown from transplants before). He was great company and seriously helpful too. It was great to have another set of hands. We didn't get as much planted as I'd wanted to - we still need to plant the peas. I think we'll try that tomorrow, although we'll have the baby with us, so I'm not sure exactly how that will work.

recant

I think I may have done a disservice to Harriet Fasenfest when I said I didn't think I wanted A Householder's Guide to the Universe as a reference book. Now that I'm staring down the barrel of 150 square feet of garden space in a nearby community garden, I'm wishing I could refer to her planning charts: one for planting, which if I remember correctly, had sowing times and harvesting times for each variety so you could make sure you didn't overwhelm yourself, and one for preserving, so you could make sure you grow what you need and ditto on the overwhelming thing. I thought the charts were way too Type A for me, but now I'm realizing the real value. Ah well, I can always buy it, right?

homeschooling update

We've been homeschooling for six weeks now, so it's probably about time I gave some kind of an update. I've been pretty silent on the whole thing, because it's such new territory for us. If you'd told me last November that we'd be homeschooling in March, I would have thought you were crazy. It wasn't even on my radar of distant dreams.

But then my mind started working, and since I'm on mat leave, it seemed like the kind of thing we should just plunge into and see what happens. So we did.

It's been pretty good. We're taking a pretty unschooling approach, although we're careful never to use that word around family. Instead we describe it: we believe that children are learning machines so we use the things that we do anyways, the things that Eldest is interested in and the things that I'm interested to learn from. The first few weeks were heaven. The weather was mighty fine (26C in March!) and my parents were on a cruise in Asia. So every time we got an email from them, we'd look up where they were in an old 1984 world atlas I picked up at a thrift shop. Sometimes we had to google the old names of cities to find them on the map. Did you know Beijing used to be called Peking? You probably did but I didn't. And if my parents mentioned a specific site, we'd google that too and try to find pictures and videos. Eldest said he felt like he was right there with them. We'd go to the library and he'd type his search into the catalogue and I'd find the titles. Then we'd read them over the next week or so.

He also wrote emails to my parents himself. Given that he can't read (yet -- although he's making marked progress over the last several weeks), this was a time-consuming process for both of us, but very valuable. Sometimes he did all the typing and composing (I helped with spelling when he asked) and sometimes he narrated and I typed. And we spent lots of time outside -- at parks and in our yard. He's such an observer.

Then the baby started teething and waking up at all hours of the night and I felt awfully exhausted. We didn't do much in the way of deliberate, focused learning. Mostly it was about keeping our heads above water. He asked to learn how to operate the washer and dryer and has now taken to doing the laundry at every opportunity (Yay!) -- and there are many, trust me. He also asked to learn how to fry an egg and how to make a grilled cheese sandwich. He doesn't do all the steps but he did flip his egg successfully on the first try.

One day he announced he wanted to buy a toy hay baler he'd seen in one of those sneaky toy catalogues that sneaky toy companies put into their toy boxes. So he had to count up all his money before we went to the store. Then he had to figure out what he could afford (sadly not the hay baler) and whether he wanted to keep saving or buy something else. Since then he notes the prices of stuff at the stores we go to (which, because I'm still adjusting to the not-so-new restricted diet, is pretty much every other day).

But other than that, the learning has been a bit harder to track more recently. I did start to have some doubts. We haven't connected much with the local homeschooling group yet, so it's also a bit isolating. I still feel it's way too soon to tell one way or the other. But I'm feeling more confident again today. I read some blogs and a bit of a homeschooling book, and there are so many reasons we want to do this.

Today when we walked to a friend's house, we noticed the different trees, and we talked about when my grandparents were born and when his was born. We noted the native plants coming out in the small woodlot (trout lily leaves, mayapples beginning to unfurl and bloodroot already finished blooming). We talked about other stuff too, but of course I can't remember exactly what now.

I really don't think I need to worry about Eldest. He's such a curious scientist all on his own. He's picking up reading now that we have more time to read the books that really interest him, and also, I believe, because we've had time to talk about how being wrong or making mistakes is how we learn. And he also gets to see me making mistakes and feeling frustrated and disappointed about it, but also learning for the next time.

But I think my family thinks I'm crazy. Or at least my parents do. On Easter we visited with them and the homeschooling only came up if I mentioned it. And then I swore I saw a pinched expression on their faces that I haven't seen since I was much, much younger. And probably drunk. So that part is hard.

Anyways, this whole homeschooling thing still feels like a fragile little flower I'm cupping in my hands. One strong gust could blow it away, so that's a lot of why I've been silent.