Book Review, Transatlantic Gift Economy, and Cherry Tomato Art Installation

One day sometime in the past year, I issued a plaintive call to friends across the intertubes for someone to lend me a book I had built up a powerful urge to peruse: Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante. My Internet Friend Annie Levy* (who is always referred to like so by her full title) promptly responded by GIVING me a copy! A woman who I have never met, who lives far across the ocean in Wales sent me a present in the mail! A really good present.

As soon as the book arrived I promptly read it from cover to cover and then commenced to re-reading, savoring, and luxuriating in each of its 197 pages. With prefaces by no less luminaries than Eliot Coleman and Deborah Madison, this dense little treasure of a book is a new favorite kitchen reference in our house.

The recipes and descriptions of techniques are simple, practical, and clearly held dear by the gardeners and farmers who offer them. Each entry includes the contributor's name and place of residence, and sometimes also information about growing, harvesting, or wildcrafting the ingredients and/or using the finished product. Over 100 people contributed to the book, and the brief personal notes that accompany their contributions make reading the book feel like sitting around a table sharing stories and techniques with other gardeners and cooks.

Some of my favorite entries are the simplest:

Plums, Variation 2.

Plums
Small crate

A pane of glass

Place whole plums in a small, well-ventilated crate, covered with a pane of glass. Keep the crate in the sun (ideally against a wall facing south).

~Annie Dijoud, St Joseph-de-Rivi

ère

The book begins with a section on root cellaring and other methods of in-ground preservation, including pits, trenches, and packing apples in elderflowers to impart a pineapple flavor. That is the sort of tidbit that I love. It continues on with chapters on drying; lactic fermentation; and preserving in oil, vinegar, salt, sugar, and alcohol. All of these methods are ancient, pre-electric food traditions that retain flavor and nutrients far better than modern methods. The flavors, textures, and look of these preserved foods remind me of shopping in open air markets in little towns in the South of France: encountering simple, delicious, and beautiful foods handcrafted with old-world grace.

I pulled this lovely little book down today when I was considering the abundance of cherry tomatoes coming out of the garden, and envisioning how nice they would look packed in a jar. But how to preserve their beauty and sweetness without compromising their vitamin-packed nutritional punch?

I looked up "cherry tomatoes" in the index of PFWFC and discovered this recipe:

Cherry Tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes

Small onions or shallots

Cider vinegar or lemon juice ( 1-2 Tbs per 16-oz jar)

Fresh basil, tarragon, oregano, etc. (to taste)

Coarse salt

Olive oil

Canning jars and lids

"You must start with cherry tomatoes that are very firm and ripe. ...Wash and dry the tomatoes. Peel...the onions or shallots.

Prepare scalded or serilized 16-ounce jars. Fill them with tomatoes, alternating with a few onions and herbs. When the jars are filled to about one and half inches from the rim, sprinkel with a pinch of coarse salt. Add one or two tablespoons of cider vinegar or lemon juice, and cover with olive oil.

Close the jars with a very clean lid, and store them in a rather cool place (10 to 15 C/50-59 F). The tomatoes will be ready to eat in two to three months and will keep for up to a year."

~Anne Duran, St. Front

Jars ready for capping and storing: Pearly Pinks packed in oil with basil and mixed cherry tomatoes packed in oil with pearl onions and basil.

One of the great things about simple, heat-free preservation methods such as this one is that you can quickly process small batches without lots of effort -- I packed two 16 ounce jars and an 8 ounce jar this evening and I'll continue packing more as the tomato season continues.

The jars of little jewel-tone tomatoes are as lovely as I had hoped. They feel like a little art installation on the top shelf of my fridge.

Thank you, Annie Levy, for your generosity. And thank you to the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante.

*I met My Internet Friend Annie Levy via the Wild Fermentation facebook group. A wonderful resource for fermentation lovers, and it turns out, a place to encounter lovely, facinating, and generous people.

Homesteading Summer Camp

Extracting honey

With our three interns and various visitors coming and going all through the summer, things have been very lively at the Red Wing for the past few months. "The 'terns," as they are affectionately known, are incredibly hard workers, smart as whips, and excited about all things garden- and homestead- related.

Because we don't want to exploit the 'terns and their youthful energy, we have tried to break up the hard work with fun and educational activities such as the Farm Tour, field trips, and kitchen projects.

Also, we've been hosting long- and short- term visitors, various friends and family who come to stay for days or weeks and sometimes help out with farm work or participate in Big Projects while they're here. Andriana is here from Manhattan, experiencing composting and chicken butchering for the first time, among other things. Fer was a "day camper" for two weeks while she was visiting from Mexico City, pulling weeds, spreading mulch, and generally jumping right into the fray.

Sometimes it feels like we are running a summer camp --the kind of summer camp I'd like to attend: one where the activities are shoveling manure, chopping vegetables, squishing bugs, extracting honey, discussing heirloom tomato varieties, saving seeds, identifying insects, and fermenting things.

Along those lines, we spent a day extracting honey and making mead with the 'terns and various visitors a few weeks ago. It was one of the stickiest and most delicious ways to spend a day you can possibly imagine. Here are a few shots of the process; you can view more photographs here: honey extraction and here: meadmaking.

Yesterday the campers (aka interns) convened in the kitchen and we made a big crock of sauerkraut and jarred up some brine-pickled (fermented) garlic scapes after a brief lesson on fermentation.

We followed up the festival of fermentation with a garlic tasting, sampling the ten heirloom varieties that we grew this year, cleansing our palates between rounds of baked garlic with a variety of homemade jams, baked brie, and sliced tomatoes from the garden.

Friends and family joined us to gorge on garlic and offer comments on the varieties to help us decide what to grow next year.

I was struck by how our collective work produced this incredibly delicious, nutritious, and beautiful food. Gathered around the table were people who had helped with all of the different pieces of the work of growing food: Shannon and Sharon helped dig and prepare beds, Ali and Nicole and Dau harvested and processed hundreds of heads of garlic this summer, Christopher and I chose varieties, saved seed garlic, and planted and mulched and cared for the plants. And we all savored the fruits of our labor together. It was lovely.

Best summer camp ever.

Harvests

Summer squash, beets, fingerlings, and new potatoes at our farmers market booth in West Asheville.

Garlic

Ali, Nicole, and the last of the shell peas

Onions

June in the Garden

Elecampane in bloom

Summer Squash gets its groove on

Cucumbers and Globe Amaranth

Bee Balm and Wild Mint with Honeybee!

Echinacea tennesseensis and pennyroyal

Balloon flower - a Chinese medicinal flower with edible roots.

Tomatoes ripening

Cardoon about to bloom

Edamame.

Black Futsu squash with pole beans

Medicine garden.

Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans.

2 Days. 7 Farms. Lots of Inspiration.

Old barn at Imladris Farm ... goats and chickens inside.

For the past two days, the annual Family Farm Tour has been afoot. The tour is sponsored by our beloved ASAP, and features farms of all sorts. So, Ali and Nicole and Christopher and I packed up our farm family and headed out down the highways and byways of Western North Carolina to explore some small farms.

It was exhausting and amazing. We visited Gladheart Farms, Imladris Farm, Flying Cloud Farm, Firefly Farm, Mountain Farm, Arthur Morgan School, and Mountain Gardens. We returned home inspired.

To top off the weekend, Christopher cooked up an incredible meal of the last of the fava beans and the first of the summer squash sauteed in butter with garlic and walnuts and served with a goat's milk white sauce over gnocchi. It was perhaps the best meal he has ever prepared in all the time we've known each other. I cracked open a bottle of sparkling Lavender-Rosemary mead I made last fall and drank it ice-cold with the aforementioned feast, and we gave thanks for the rich community that we live in, and the gifts of our own garden.

Here are some highlights of the tour:

Michael Porterfield at Gladheart Farms. Gladheart grows vegetables which they sell wholesale and through a CSA, and also has a small number of dairy goats and laying hens. All of their diesel equipment is run on biodiesel made on-site from recycled waste oil, and their hoophouse is heated using biodiesel too.

Christopher and goat friend at Gladheart.

Gardens, barn, biodiesel production facility, and chicken tractor at Gladheart.

View across fallow fields at Flying Cloud, a Fairview farm that runs a very popular CSA and always generates a long line at the farmers markets.

Tops of sweet corn visible through the packing shed window, Flying Cloud.

Fall starts in the hoophouse, Flying Cloud.

Christopher tries out a homemade planting contraption at Firefly Farm.

Border collie pup, Firefly Farm

Poultry at Arthur Morgan School, a Quaker-oriented school for grades 7-9 with a work requirement for students.

Grape arbor shading south-facing windows at Arthur Morgan School.

Shitake logs at Arthur Morgan School

View into the vegetable garden, Arthur Morgan. Jerusalem artichokes in the foreground; passive solar greenhouse in the background.

We ended the day today at Mountain Gardens, the woodland "paradise garden" of the amazing Joe Hollis. Joe and his apprentices cultivate 500 species of edible, medicinal, and otherwise useful plants on about two acres.

Wineberry trellis, Mountain Gardens.

Cob house built for under $100, Mountain Gardens.

Loveliest outhouse around, Mountain Gardens.

Cob cactus cultivation wall, Mountain Gardens.

Dried herbs, Mountain Gardens.

A small portion of the vast array of blend-your-own tinctures available at Mountain Gardens.

So long, Spring, we hardly knew you

An unusually cold winter followed by an unseasonably hot spring has made for a strange start to the warm-weather gardening season.

Temperatures have been holding steady in the high-80s to low-90s for a couple of weeks now, and there is no end in sight--very unusual for western North Carolina. We're all a bit peaked and many plants that usually bloom all summer (foxglove, valerian) are fried.

Summer Solstice was on Monday, and yesterday I took most of the spring peas off of their trellises (one of many wheelbarrow-fulls pictured above) to allow the cucumbers to bust a move. It felt like a fitting garden transition for Solstice time.

It's summer for sure now. Squash. Cucumbers. Green tomatoes and peppers on the vine. Wilting, bitter lettuce. Browning peas. Blown-out arugula and mustard all gone to seed.

I'm learning how not to hang on too tightly to the things in the garden that have slowed their production or passed their peak. It's such a straightforward lesson from the garden, one that lends itself so easily to allegory: the things we can't let go of start to taste bitter and feel tough in our mouths. Time to sweep out the old and allow room for what's next. In this case: cucumbers.

Creature Comforts

File under: Things we wouldn't get to do if we had a Big Farm. Rescuing woolly worms. A photo from late winter/early spring that I meant to post back then but lost track of.

They were everywhere! We tried to relocate them to alternate warm spots whenever our gardening activities exposed them.

Given the onslaught of insects we've been encountering lately that DON'T bring a smile to our faces, it seemed appropriate to remember the sweetness of discovering sleeping woolly worms in the garden.