Summer Olympics at Excalibur Farms
Another excerpt from my upcoming book, Letters from a Family Farm.
The Paris Olympics reminded me of an August 2008 letter that I wrote (pre-SubStack days) just as the Beijing Olympics wrapped up. Here it is. I hope those who have joined our group recently will enjoy it as much as my long-time friends did in 2008.
Hello Friends,
The Summer Olympics may be over in Beijing, but we are still going strong here at Excalibur.
Except possibly for orienteering and equestrian events, and a few creative jumps into the swimming hole, our sporting events don’t resemble those Olympics events much.
One big sport here is the Zucchini Toss. This event requires a number of qualifying stages. You get started with the cookbook and graduate to internet recipe searches shortly after these prolific plants start producing. These garden goodies do not “can” or freeze well, but they make you wonder how there could be hunger in any space-time continuum containing even a few zucchini plants. You steam, fry, sauté, stuff, pickle, and casserole—yes, if you are a rural Methodist, casserole is a verb—all the zucchini you can stand to eat in a recognizable form. When you discover that all of your friends are avoiding you because they are also out of recipes, you start baking zucchini bread and chocolate chip zucchini brownies. This baking marathon has diminishing returns, as you can lose only one modest-sized zucchini in a typical brownie recipe. You run off the extra calories from those brownies by racing away from your neighbors’ houses after leaving your extra zucchini on their porches. You don’t want to stick around long enough for them to find their shotgun and ratshot. Fortunately, everyone has forgotten that my mother introduced this prolific plant to our community over 40 years ago.
Finally, you give up on miracles occurring in the kitchen and start throwing zukes over the garden fence. If you miss a day, you have zukes that rival baseball bats in size. You have to keep picking the green buggers to “keep the plant producing.” For some strange reason, you must want this plant to keep producing, because you keep picking. Funny that those who protest against farming livestock to eat haven't wised up to how cruel we are to plants in our garden: we keep these plants feeling like they are under siege, stealing their offspring as fast as they can generate them before they go to seed.
Fortunately for me, the sheep never get tired of zucchini and stop by daily to help out. Thus, I don’t feel as guilty about the waste as my gardening colleagues do who have no small ruminants nearby. The sheep prefer the zukes lobbed far enough and fast enough to split open on impact, making them easier to munch down, so my throwing technique is important. I have to get some height. Or, I can make each zucchini’s arc just clip the top wire on the fence, which will slice the zukes open rather nicely on their way into the pasture. This takes practice, but even with only a few zucchini plants, I have plenty of that!
Here’s the garden in early August, with the sheep working their way over to check for a zucchini hand out:
It's not quite as tidy now that the butternut squash has run amok, attempting to strangle its neighbors and beating what passes for lawn here into submission.
I warm up for the Zucchini Toss with the Cucumber Lob. Being smaller than the zukes, the cukes don't challenge the throwing arm as much, but you still have to get the excess off of the plant every day to keep it producing new ones of a size you actually want to eat. It generally takes me well into August and far more jars of pickles than we can eat in years, let alone one winter, to ask myself why we want this plant to keep producing. The cucumber has fewer uses beyond putting on the table fresh than the zucchini does. I have found exactly one (1) cucumber recipe other than pickling and salads: cucumber soup. It’s delicious cold or hot, but this soup requires nowhere near enough cucumbers to keep even one plant fully occupied. No surprise that all those old pickling recipes start with bushels of cucumbers, and yes that's bushels, plural. Consequently, I have pickles left over from two years ago. I planted only a single cucumber plant this year, not enough to motivate me to start pickling, but still enough to amaze me. Lettuce weather is looming in the fall, so I keep on pitching the excess cukes to the sheep in hopes that I'll have some fresh cucumbers for salad when the fall lettuce sprouts.
I never look at a cucumber plant or a pickle jar without recalling that Grandad (Mom’s father) made pickle barrels at his sawmill in Louisiana between the world wars. They would put those huge barrels on flat railroad cars and half-fill them with pickling brine. Those railroad cars would roll slowly through cucumber fields, where the field hands would pick the cucumbers and throw them into those barrels unwashed. Those cukes were well on their way to being crispy pickles by the time those trains got to Chicago. I wonder if those workers made a sport out of filling those barrels, or perhaps placed bets on their cucumber throwing skills.
“Putting up” the garden is an endurance event: canning, freezing, pickling, and drying whatever you can't eat or give away. “Canning” is a bit of a misnomer since nearly everyone now uses glass jars instead of tin cans. Mom remembers her father using tin cans in a fire pit in the backyard for their winter stash. It seems her mother refused to have “that mess” in the house. And it is a bit messy—peelings and cobs and such everywhere. You don't realize how much sugar vegetables contain until you have to scrape peelings off the counters after a food preservation marathon.
I really hate vegetables that have been in a metal container for any length of time—yes, I can taste the difference blindfolded—so I use jars for canning. They have a clever two-part lid. The sealing part of the lid can't be reused but the rim and jar are carefully saved from year to year. I bet some of our jars are 40 years old. In between uses to preserve food, some of the jars find their way onto the table for use as drinking glasses. You engineers might find it interesting that Ball Aerospace got its start making canning jars. At their peak production in 1931, Ball produced 190 million jars a year, more than one and a half for every person in the US. They got into aerospace to save the company from the decline in home canning that came as refrigerators became common in homes. I think they recently sold the canning division to Kerr, but you can still get canning jars embossed with that classic “Ball” signature.
Picking tomatoes is replacing green beans and squash as the main event as the season progresses. Romas, anyone?
This is most fun with young companions who enjoy a tomato fight, because there's always a soft tomato or two or six that give a rather satisfying smack, soon punctuated by cries of indignation, when thrown correctly.
A somewhat less popular farm Olympics event is peeling tomatoes for canning. This is done by dumping the tomatoes in boiling water until the skins split, then fishing them out of the pot and pulling the skins off under cold running water while trying not to burn one's hands. My surgeon canceled my participation in this event when she took out all those lymph nodes last year. My left hand can no longer tolerate burns and cuts. Oh, darn. Lymphedema sucks in general, but you can imagine I'm so disappointed to be on the sidelines of this particular event. Fortunately, my mother remembered that she had a Squeezo packed away. This little machine is really wonderful: throw tomatoes in the top, turn the crank, and it separates the part you want to eat from the part you would rather not. Best of all, Mom is still able to use it:
This year, I am experimenting with drying produce. Note the bags of dried veggies up on the shelf behind Mom. I got a dehydrator for Christmas. I am making zucchini chips and squash chips along with drying vegetables for winter soups and herbs for tea. I am also letting some things dry on the plant naturally, like sweet corn, to save energy. This year's drought has made this easier—the corn crop has been abysmal. Even though I have way too much else to do, it feels a little strange to not be freezing corn. When I was a kid, we grew acres of sweet corn. Dad would plant several rows of the “sweet corn” along the edge of the “field corn” crop that was our main income crop besides beef in those days. Mom would put an ad in the Washington Post: “Sweet Corn, pick your own, $1/dozen ears.” Adventurous people would drive all the way down from Washington and fill their cars to the roof. This pick-your-own sideline was eventually overcome by concerns about liability and difficulties in educating a new generation of city people about the difference between sweet corn and field corn (“but the ears on those stalks are so much bigger!”), not to mention which snakes are not poisonous, plus improvements in grocery store produce offerings and people getting away from preserving their own food.
City slickers buying corn or not, there was always a week or two of the summer in which we did the freezing-the-corn marathon for our own winter supply. My mother supervised a long processing line starting in the cornfield and winding its way up to the back stoop where shucking took place with a large audience of dogs and cats who eagerly devoured the “nubbins”— the tips of the ears we whacked off to make shucking easier. From there, the corn went onto the kitchen stove for blanching in large pots of boiling water, then to cutting boards on the kitchen table where we sliced the kernels off the cob. We bagged the kernels in quart-sized baggies, tied them up (no zip-lock then!), and stacked them into our thousand-pound freezer. My brothers would turn anything into a competition, so we had quite a few races shucking corn and cutting corn off the cob, with the biggest pile of cobs winning the latter. Technique was important, too—somehow you got extra points if you could go the entire length of the cob with a single stroke of the knife. I don't really remember who won most of these races, but I definitely remember my younger brother Jeff needing a trip to the emergency room and a bunch of stitches in his thumb, courtesy of competitive instincts mixing poorly with a very sharp corn knife.
Eggplant grows very well around here. Fortunately, it has more uses than zucchini and summer squash and cucumbers, especially for someone who likes Indian and Chinese food. I have created a bit of an uproar, however, with eggplant-and-cardamon ice cream. Fortunately, just the idea of eggplant ice cream freaks out enough people for me to have plenty for myself, because it's actually very good. Our sheep-shearer now demands some of this ice cream as part of his fee; after he got past the idea of eggplant in ice cream, he loved it. He recommends rebranding it as “Grandma’s Christmas Cookie Ice Cream” because it reminds him of his grandmother’s old-world cookie recipe and that would get more people tasting it than “Eggplant Ice Cream.” I’d rather eat it all myself.
Ice-cream making is my very favorite summer farm Olympics event, although I have to confess that I haven't cranked an ice cream freezer for decades. The hand-cranked version had a very short residency here in the 1960s. I'll never forget my Dad telling the Sears Roebuck salesman, “No, I'm definitely NOT buying the motor option. I have three motors already,” as he pointed at us three kids. “I cranked an ice cream freezer when I was their age, and they can do it now. It will be better ice cream and they’ll appreciate it more.” Funny how 40 years later you remember the ice cream more than the cranking. Well, we got that new freezer home and everyone got to work immediately on the first batch of ice cream. The ice cream was really good when we finally got it done—close to midnight—but the very next day my dad went back to Sears and bought that motor. We all quickly agreed that we couldn't tell the difference between hand-cranked and motor-cranked ice cream. So much for nostalgia.
This year we have a new water sport:
This hay bale has spent several sulking (er, soaking) weeks refusing to learn to swim. The real story is not its inability to match Michael Phelps once in the water, but how it got there. Perhaps it was trying out for the diving team. I didn't see its dive—I was probably running the bean-canning marathon then—and no one else is ‘fessing up to seeing the performance. My brother Jeff has been coordinating the “make hay while the sun shines” venue, his version of OCD “stocking up” for the winter. Racing a summer storm to get the hay under cover is one of the more exciting farm sports. Knowing how many bales Jeff was stacking onto wagons when wrapping up that hay-making marathon, I have my suspicions that there was one too many in one of those laps through the field. Round bales have some advantages over square ones, but staying where they fall off the wagon is not one of them. The sheep are hoping that hay-bale diving is not going to become a regular event on the Excalibur, as this is their winter dinner, and they prefer it dry. Or at least they prefer not having to swim to dinner. Sheep hate getting wet more than cats do. If you’ve ever handled a wet ewe, you understand why they hate swimming.
All this is a long-winded way of giving you a little insight into what “eating local” really means. Truthfully, every year about this time I wonder if it's worth it. Forty years ago, when it was fifty miles from our farm on bad roads to the grocery store, the investment in the garden was a no-brainer. Now, you can buy produce in two places within 15 miles on much better roads. Produce is cheap enough nowadays that you can never make an economic argument for growing your own unless you have no skills other than migrant farmworker. On the other hand, much of that so-called “fresh” produce is weeks old by the time it gets to your local grocery store. According to the USDA, frozen vegetables have greater food value than the “fresh” vegetables that have been separated from the plants for the time it takes to ship them all over the world.
What keeps me gardening is the delight of nurturing a growing thing into food and the flavor of truly fresh vegetables. Mom and I have a little ritual of asking the garden what's for dinner every day around five or six o'clock. You put the water on the stove to heat before you pick the corn for dinner. After the novelty wears off, what keeps me preserving my own produce is some challenging dietary issues, mostly post-cancer, such as sodium restrictions. I have learned that you really don't need salt to preserve food. It's also a self-reliance thing. But I don't have any qualms at all about buying chocolate, the most important food group, which I have not (yet) learned to grow.
It's time to pull a batch of chili out of the canner, so I will explore this “eating local” thing more later.
Take care and think about what you eat!
Love from Excalibur,
Kristin
I can identify with some of this (on a much much smaller scale) from my youth where every summer involved wheel barrows of corn for shucking then freezing on and off the cob, my mother canning tomatoes and green beans, making cucumber pickles, pickling beets, we picked up enough potatoes after my dad plowed the rows open to fill the three levels of the large potato bin in the basement. It was enough to last the winter for a family of 4. I still have a small garden which gives me enough tomatoes to eat, occasionally can, plus enough cucumbers for canning pickles again this year and a few varieties of squash. Even this amount is some work - don't think I could grow enough to feed myself now. I admire all that you do on your farm. Linda Godwin
As a kid in a suburban city in Western Nevada, our zucchini proliferated like there was no tomorrow! So I identified with your valiant attempts to get rid of the pesky gourds back on your farm when you were a kid. We tried most of the recipes that you mention, but the one I liked the best was zucchini relish "canned" in Ball Aerospace mason jars, with vinegar, salt and spices. It was quite good on sandwiches!