Nelson County Rocks

This year I tried out two distinctively Southern crops I’d never grown before: cowpeas and peanuts.  Cowpeas, also known as southern peas, were brought to the American south by enslaved Africans.  They come in many varieties, the most well-known being black-eyed peas.  They have a high protein content and are easy to grow.  Being a legume, an added benefit is that they fix nitrogen in the soil.  I chose to grow a variety from Baker Creek called Six Week Purple-Hull Cowpea.  A package of seeds produced about five cups of dry beans.  A great thing about cowpeas is that if you just leave them on the plant until the pods are dry, they’re pretty much instantly ready for storage.  This one has a particularly nice buttery and nutty taste.

 

Peanuts originated in South America; the Spanish encountered them first in what is today Mexico.  It’s been surprising to me how many people don’t know that peanuts grow mainly underground–I learned this early living in Tanzania, where peanuts are known as groundnuts.  The nuts grow mostly underground on string-like tethers from the many branches of the plant.  They take at least four months to mature, but they are heat and drought tolerant.  To harvest, one loosens the plant with a pitchfork and then pulls it out.  A single plant can have 50-70 peanuts, although some may have considerably less.  You leave the nuts on the plant to begin drying for a few days, then remove them and dry them on a screen for about three weeks.   After all the nuts have been cured, roasted peanuts and homemade peanut butter are on the agenda!

Of course, the classic crop of Southern planters, from colonial days well into the twentieth century, was tobacco, which devastates the soil, quite apart from its other pernicious effects.  Decaying tobacco barns still dot the countryside here, but Nelson County is happily making an agricultural transition to healthier and more varied harvests.  Just today we bought a quart of sorghum molasses at the annual Sorghum-making festival down the road, and a bushel of Fuji apples at a nearby orchard!

Sorghum stalks being fed into press;
the resulting juice  is then boiled down

After four solid weeks without a drop of rain (the wind storm described in my last post was completely dry), we had a good downpour yesterday afternoon, with our rain gauge registering 1.3 inches.  Our gardens look much relieved, and summer’s bounty is beginning to flow.  Lots of squash, tomatoes, and cucumbers, with red and yellow peppers not far behind.  Potatoes, scallions and onions ready to be harvested whenever I get to them.  My various pole beans have been stunted by the dry weather, but today they look quite perky.  As always, the trick is to keep up with the flow!  Monika’s just (almost) gotten through over a bushel of peaches we bought a week or so ago–canned as halves and processed and  frozen as cobbler, ice cream and sorbet, and cakes.  (All really good!)

“Blessed” is very much part of Southern vocabulary–sometimes with an explicit religious connotation but otherwise simply constituting a recognition of the many things we cannot take personal credit for but that enrich our lives deeply: the extraordinary beauty of our surroundings in Nelson County, the expanding web of friendship we’ve become part of, the  local knowledge and resourcefulness we’ve benefited from, and much more.  And at Thanksgiving this year, we felt blessed not only to have Nic and Alison, Tim and Megan, and my sister Eleanor with us, but be able to share in their impressively interesting and productive lives.

More of a surprise was the bonding that went on between Eleanor and our chickens, whom she was “meeting” for the first time.  Eleanor became the main egg collector, snack provider, and even poopy cleaner-upper for the time she was here, and she shared in the pleasure we take from simply sitting in the chairs alongside the outer pen and watching the antics and machinations of our flock of fourteen hens.

Our Thanksgiving turkey was an organically-raised and free range Midget White from Tall Cotton Farm (not that midget at twenty pounds), a breed we were surprised to learn has not only been rated as the best-tasting turkey by Mother Earth Magazine but was developed by a plant geneticist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, from which Tim and Megan just received their Ph.D.’s in Computer Science.  We were joined at dinner by two local friends, Mikel and Linda, and it was a lovely time.  Later on, we introduced the kids to Recipe, a card game we’d learned down here from our (93 year-old!) friend and neighbor, Virginia Page, whom we also feel blessed to know.

click here for more Thanksgiving pictures

Yesterday we put in our chick order at Meyer Hatchery in Ohio.  Clockwise from the upper left, we ordered six Rhode Island Reds, three Barred Rocks, three Silver Laced Wyandottes, and three Black Australorps.  All are female chicks  reputed to grow up to be good egg layers with placid personalities; Monika and I also chose these particular breeds to get an interesting range of colors and patterns.  They are due to be shipped on April 25th and (amazing as it seems to us) we will pick them up at the local post office when they arrive.

This is all very new to us and we have lots to learn.  If my mother is looking down from above, I’m sure she’s saying in our family lexicon: “Whodathunk!”

Our chicken coop, that is (with help from Ruritan friend David Hight)

click here for more pictures

my current favorites: Seed Savers Exchange, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Baker Creeek Heirloom Seeds, and The Maine Potato Lady

It’s that time of year for gardeners: dreamily thumbing through seed catalogs in anticipation of a new (and always better!) gr0wing season.  After a promising start, last summer’s heat and dryness (and attendant pests) were disastrous for our cucumbers,  squash, and lima beans, and very stressful for mid-summer tomatoes, although we had lots of early tomatoes and late-planted tomatoes did well in later summer.  In fact we were eating fresh tomatoes (ripened after threat of frost inside, wrapped in newspaper in a dark closet), well into December.  Most everything else did pretty well, and we still have quantities of frozen string beans, peppers, turnip greens, zucchini bread, and squash pancakes, along with garlic harvested in mid-summer.  Plus of course lots of canning jars of homemade jams, sauces,  and tomato salsa.

Potatos were our major new crop in 2010, and we got a little over four months of good eating of the four varieties we planted: Satina, Romanze, Carola, and German Butterball.   Our goal this year is to double the size of our potato patch and hopefully triple our potato production (Monika is German, you know).  This year’s varieties will be Satina, Sangre, Keuka Gold, Yellow Finn, and Kennebec.  Garlic was also a new crop (planted in fall 2009) and was quite successful too; we still have a reasonably good supply, despite the fact that we use and gave away a lot!  I planted this past fall several new garlic varieties, including Appalachian Red and Romanian Red, while continuing with Music and Brown Tempest, as well as Inchellium Red and S&H Silverstein, from bulbs harvested in early summer.  All but the last two are hardneck garlics, which we prefer since they produce fewer, but larger, cloves that are easier to peel (those supermarket bulbs with a zillion tiny cloves are softnecks).  Hardneck garlics also produce the edible garlic scapes which we enjoyed and wrote about this past spring.  Edamame (soybeans) also proved to be a welcome new crop.

This past year we also increased the variety of vegetable plantings for spring and fall; we especially enjoyed the mix of shell, snow, and snap peas in the spring, and collards, turnips and kohlrabi in the fall.  Since most fall vegetables will also do well in the spring, we’re planning to increase our spring plantings significantly.  Along with some heirlooms with curiously interesting names like Drunken Woman Lettuce, I’m also trying for the first time fennel, parsnips, and lemon grass.  Well, at least the seeds are ordered…..

In the fall we also planted 350 bulbs for daffodils, lillies, iris, and bluebells, which hopefully will add even more color to spring.

Monika’s and my other big project (for which she is the main initiator) starts with eggs, not seeds….but more about that later!

Click here for garden pictures from 2010

Winter hasn’t yet officially begun, but we had our second snowstorm on December 16th: about five inches and COLD.  But we were cozy in our house, amidst holiday decorations and our wonderful wood stove.  A more complete set of views, inside and out,  may be accessed here.

In late fall we  visited various friends to learn about raising chickens (for eggs), a project Monika and I intend to undertake in the spring.  We continued to harvest turnips and chard  (see basket above) as well as collards, kale and lettuce until the second week of December, when a cold spell did most of the remaining garden in.  In mid-November Nic and Alison came over and made us  delicious roasted stuffed pumpkins!

For our Thanksgiving turkey, which we took up to family in Maryland, Monika found Open Gate Farm in neighboring Albermarle County, which raises heritage turkeys and sells them fresh (our turkey from Polyface Farm last year was frozen).  We went out to the farm on the Monday before Thanksgiving amd got a delightful guided tour from Tom Ward.  We also got a surprise: our Bronze Standard turkey had turned out to be much larger (38 pounds!!!) than expected.  This posed a series of challenges: locating a large enough roasing pan;  locating a container large enough to to brine it in;  fitting it into an oven just barely larger than the turkey; and figuring out how long to cook it.  Regarding the latter, we were many hours off in our estimation, but fortunately got the turkey out in time and it was the best turkey ever.  Pictures of our Maryland Thanksgiving may be accessed here.

Early morning view from our front deck

Life in retirement is great!

It’s hard to believe that summer is officially over  (despite 90 degree temperatures).  We were pretty focused on Tim’s and Megan’s wedding for the first half of the summer, and the rest seems to have just gone poof.  But actually the second half of summer has been interesting and varied, and below is a kind of late summer photo potpourri.

We’ve stayed pretty close to home, but we’ve begun to explore the Shenandoah Valley, on the other side of the mountains, somewhat more.  One particularly interesting visit, with our friends Anke and Axel, was to the Frontier Culture Museum, a living history museum in the mode of Sturbridge, Shelburne, and others.  But rather than strictly focusing on recreating pioneer life in the 19th century here, it also attempts to showcase the rural culture that immigrants (including those enslaved) both left and brought with them: German, English, Scot-Irish, and West African (Igbo).  It’s very nicely done and we had a gorgeous day to walk and explore the different parts.  Click here for more pictures of the Frontier Culture Museum.

In early September, we celebrated Nic’s thirty-first birthday with his wife Alison, and local friends Virginia Page,  Axel and Anke.  Earlier, we hiked to the St. Mary’s Falls (see previous post), where Nic scared the bejeebies out of me by leaping off the cliff into the deep but narrow pool below.  A few less birthdays for me, I’m sure…  Alison took the picture below with their cell phone.

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With almost no rain all summer, our vegetable garden has been less productive than last year, but surprisingly good overall, with the exception of cucumbers and squash, which were done in by insects that seemed to thrive and multiply in the dry weather.  In addition we bought lots of fruit from local orchards, and Monika made all sorts of wonderful jams, sauces, and deserts for canning or freezing.  Currently we’re getting lots of string beans and peppers, some tomatoes, lettuce, chard, herbs (there’s been tons of basil for making pesto), with fall vegetables–collards, spinach, kale, and kohlrabi coming along.  And we still have lots of garlic and potatoes that we harvested in mid-summer.

One summer project has been to complete a little trail system in the woods that surround three sides of our property.  That and enjoying nature and the beauty of our immediate surroundings.  For a late summer photo potpourri of these things, click here.

Well, it was more like “homestead-sitting,” but recently we kept an eye on the chickens, goats and sheep of friends for three days while they were away.  Our duties were pretty minimal, but it was a first time for us in dealing with an electric fence and reaching under hens to remove the eggs.  Our life here continues to teach us new things! [BTW, we get our eggs from these friends, and those eggs are the best!  Totally different from store-bought.]

I guess most non-gardeners would think I spent a ridiculous amount of time this period of each year poring over seed catalogs.  But what gorgeous displays many of them have become, and with the growth of interest in heirloom plants, they are goldmines of historical as well as horticultural information.  Who can resist names like Cherokee Trail of Tears Bean, Pennsylvania Dutch Crookneck Squash, Paul Robeson Tomato, Bloody Butcher Corn, or Fife Creek Cowhorn Okra?  When combined with all the luscious catalog photos, it’s easy to understand Barbara Kingsolver’s husband’s reported quip in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that it might be more efficient for her to circle the items that didn’t tempt her, rather the ones that did!

The four catalogs pictured above: Seed Savers Exchange, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange are my current favorites for varying reasons–vision, diversity, horticultural information, and regional focus, among others.  I’ve ordered seeds from all of them and the arrival of their catalogs around the new year feels like a visit from old friends.  Recently I’ve also discovered three online catalogs that have nice special features: Cherry Gal not only offers an impressive variety of heirloom seeds but also packets with half the usual number of seeds (generally more than enough for most gardeners) at half the price.  Renee’s Garden Seeds, while somewhat more limited in its offering, combines color-coded seeds of different varieties of a given vegetable in the same packet, allowing one to get what one wants in one packet instead of several (I also like the detailed growing information right on the seed packet, rather than having to refer back to the catalog).  And Amishland Heirloom Seeds provides unusually-detailed information on many hard-to-find heirloom tomatoes and other vegetables and flowers.

Beyond seed catalogs, retirement has produced a fairly eclectic range of reading, but increasingly I’ve recognized a pattern involving the material bases of culture and history, with a parallel effort to broaden my woefully-limited scientific background.  This started with Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, a book that had been sitting on my bookshelf for twenty years, while it influenced others like Jared Diamond, who popularized many of its ideas.  Other good reads in this vein were Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, and Henry Hobhouse’s Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Changed the World. (A re-reading of Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire also provided food for thought.) Recently my son Tim came by with The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, which I appropriated for the duration of his stay and found to be a fascinating account of British scientist and radical theologian Joseph Priestley, his long-term intellectual relations with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and his eventual flight as a political refugee to the backwoods of Pennsylvania.  While I’d known about his role in the discovery of oxygen, I was unaware of his being the first to grasp the fact that plants gave off oxygen through what we now understand as photosynthesis.  He was in a sense, then, the founder of ecological studies.  Currently I’m reading and enjoying Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I’d listened to while driving to and from Virginia, but am getting much more out of by actually reading it.  How Bryson manages to serve up such a broad smorgasbord of basic science while being consistently funny and entertaining constantly amazes me.  But I’m learning a lot!

Among other books read: Monika came across Virginia Bell Dabnay’s Once There Was a Farm: A Country Childhood Remembered in our local library, and her enthusiasm led me to read it too.  What a great read!  Without nostalgia or sentimentality, Virginia Bell Dabnay (1919-1997) provides a beautiful elegy for a life few would want to live today but which nonetheless hauntingly reminds us of what we have lost in our mostly paved-over industrial consumerist society.  Dabney describes her growing up on a farm in central Virginia with her strong-willed mother and two sisters (her strange bird of a father lived in Chicago during most of her upbringing, until he moved uncomfortably to the farm when he retired).  Coincidentally, in later life, she bought a place not far from our new home  in Roseland, which she abandoned in disgust when the Wintergreen development came in the 1970s, moving later on to  the Allehgeny Mountains in western Virginia.   With its intimate portrait of the hardships and rewards of rural life in the 1920’s and 1930’s, filled with amazingly-vivid stories and with unobtrusive but powerful insights into family, race relations, friendship, and community, it’s a deeply moving, and for me, unforgettable,  book.