Spring flowers

Nettle Tea

Up until last week, I have always tried to stay away from this spiny dragon of a plant. It triggers unpleasant memories, like when I squatted down to pee in the woods at Hogsback and basically sat on one. 

But this week I sought it out, armed with bright pink rubber gloves and a big bowl. It's hard not to jump on the fresh nettle train when the shady part of the pasture just steps from my back door is full of them, just three or four inches tall--so many that my friend and I, after picking for an hour, processing, and then coming back for more, couldn't even tell where we'd harvested. We were inspired by a local homesteader, Corina, whose blog I love to read. She just recently wrote about nettle pesto, and we had to try her recipe. Eight batches of it. 

It is delicious enough to snatch a cube of it from the freezer and pop it into your mouth plain, as Tim can testify. 

I also tried dehydrating lots of it for nettle tea. Stacked full, the dehydrator only takes a few hours to turn the leaves shriveled and crackly. I use the very scientific recipe of about one teaspoon dried leaves per mugful of water.

The flavor reminds me of green tea, earthy and somewhat spicy and spinachy. Spinachy tea doesn't sound super delicious, I know, but I have found it quite addicting. Apparently it also has superpower health benefits. I feel much more friendly toward nettles now, at least until summer, when they'll be thigh-high and I'll want to walk around in sandals.

The Message of Peas

I'm a fairly impatient person. When an idea bursts into my mind, I hate to wait to carry it out. I may regret it later--why did I fiddle with that rum-and-coconut-cake recipe last night instead of catching up on that deadline?!--but sometimes I just can't help it. The idea is there, and it won't go away, and the only way to be rid of it is to do it.

So I find gardening an agonizing process. Vegetables grow so slow. Recently I've taken up my garden-season habit of walking the greenhouse and our planted beds every lunchtime, partly to water (the greenhouse, not our direct seeded plants, which are spring-showered on enough right now) and partly to stare. Have the onion seedlings grown any since yesterday? Where are all the Copras, and why are the Wallas growing so much better? Are there any more cabbage sprouts? Are the fall shallots taller? Have any direct-seeded peas sprouted?

Most days, the answer is no. To all those questions. And I bite my lip and squat down in the dirt and squint, wishing for laser vision to see what's happening beneath the soil. I want to stick my finger a few inches deep and see--and maybe in the case of one tulip bulb, I do. Just to make sure. Still growing?

Some days, the answer is yes. Like the other day, in the morning I saw four snap pea shoots in the greenhouse. In the afternoon, I saw one new slender green thing shrugging potting soil off its back, head still curled under. Now, today, it's standing straight and tall.

Today I think I saw the first snap peas poking out from along the fence line, where we direct seeded them. It's hard to tell. They could be weeds. But they looked different than anything else around, and they were all in a row, about two inches apart.

So I congratulated them and went back inside. There is nothing else I can do. Garden peas are not like the cheese mat that can arrive on my doorstep in two days via Amazon Prime. In May or June, we will be drowning in peas, maybe hundreds of pods of them, thousands if you count the shell peas, but for now they are all in my head. 

Meanwhile, I'll be out there again tomorrow, imagining them--and soaking up their lesson of patience. 

a season for walking slowly

Indian plum. I've never noticed it until this spring! Now I see it everywhere and I'm obsessed. Something about the glow of the leaves backlit by sun, and the up-reaching shape of the clusters, like raised hands greeting the change of seasons. I couldn't stop taking pictures of them the other day when we walked the trail. 

It's funny what living in the country does to perception of season. Every tiny snowberry leaf is a reason to stop and watch, and rejoice—the wildscape alive again after months of sleeping. The change is so startling and drastic and everywhere. 

I'm trying to put a finger on why spring is so much noisier to me here, and I don't mean actual noise but it is a roar. I guess the answer is obvious: without the confines of pavement and the crowding of buildings, spring is literally everywhere I look, pulsing through everything. Roaring, if I listen close. 

baby life

I For a long time in January, we kept saying "it just feels like spring is almost here!" The weather was mellow and warm, and even though the trees and shrubs were still spindly and naked, winter seemed to have lost its bite. I think half of it was that we were on the flip side of the winter solstice.

Now, in mid-February, there's no wondering or hoping. Spring is here, and everywhere new life is bursting out of what seems like nowhere. The cover crop in our garden, after huddling close to the ground for months, is leaping and leggy and brilliant green. The snowberry and salmonberry are leafing out along the trail; our side yard is full of unfolding bleeding heart. We even seeded things in our greenhouse the other day--enough onions for the world, or at least the town of Concrete, and spinach and peas. I'm ready to get the picnic table back out on the patio!

No, there's still a lot of rain yet to come. It's not picnic table season.

But my very favorite sign of spring this year is baby lambs! We found them in the barn Monday morning, wrinkly and awkward and almost alien-like in their long-leggedness. And just darn cute. These two are ahead of the curve; there are still four mamas yet to give birth. I have now become obsessed with baby lamb watching and eyeing those mamas for signs of labor, at least, the signs that Storey's Guide to Raising Sheep has told me about. Monday afternoon, I did a close read on the labor and delivery chapter, and took a bunch of notes. Luckily, most of the time labor goes fine and the mamas don't need any help. But I do have the page about labor assist, with all sorts of handy diagrams, flagged. Can you just imagine us with our Storey Guide and sanitized cooking-oiled hands, ready to reach in?

This morning, triplets appeared in the barnyard. All of them healthy, mama included, which is not necessarily expected when lambs come in threes. Monday's, 1601 and 1602, have already graduated to a bigger pen with access to outside, and you'd never know just a few days ago they were wobbling and weaving instead of leaping and prancing. 

Sunday, we expect chicks. Needless to say, it's super distracting. Who wants to be consulting Chicago Manual of Style when there is so much new life outside?

touching four seasons

We've fallen into a season-driven existence here. And I don't mean simply seasonal eating. The seasons drive the cycles of our days, too. In the height of last summer, we were spending tons of time outside--my work days were bookended by garden watering and tending; we ate out on the patio, then worked in the garden or walked the trail, not coming inside until dark at 9 or 10. It was projects galore. In the depths of this winter, our garden soil is so frozen that we can't even hack out our last few carrots and beets. We tuck the animals in for the night at 3:30 or 4--although yesterday we noticed we were coming back from the sheep barn at 4:30 and it wasn't yet dark, a milestone!--and then we hunker down inside by the wood stove for evenings of cooking, playing board games, and playing music. The rain shushes on the roof and wind roars in the trees. The windows are vast and dark and show nothing at all except the reflections of the cheeriness inside.

Yet, as I am cooking dinner tonight, with the wood stove flaring orangey-red across the room, fall and summer and spring feel close. I'm cooking potatoes and carrots from our fall garden, and  roasted tomatoes (the last, sob!) from summer. They're so sweet I think they might conjure summer right here, like a potion, if I purée and drink them. And spring is on the mind; our seed order is on its way this very minute and we'll start seeding in the greenhouse in just about a month. I can feel it—the lighter evenings, the salad greens, the radishes. 

We may appear deep in hibernation, but the ground is thrumming. For a moment, the dark windows are full of promise. 

csa obsession

I have always loved the idea of CSAs since I first read about them back in my intern days at Mountaineers Books (in The Urban Farm Handbook). But I've never been a part of a CSA until last fall. And the shipment that arrives on our doorstep once a month isn't full of vegetables but of flour!

I first read about Bluebird Grain Farms and their grain CSA in the same book I mentioned above (it's a great book). I've dreamed about doing this CSA since two falls ago, when I realized how much flour we were using for our weekly loaf of no-knead bread--and how little I knew about it. We were using mostly white bread flour because it bakes into soft open crumb bread, but white flour is basically wheat with its most nutritious parts, the bran and the germ, removed. Bread was a big part of our weekly diet. We weren't (and still aren't!) going to change that. Were we actually eating anything worthwhile?

Fast forward a year, and we finally signed up for the CSA. Bluebird Grain Farms is just across the pass from our home; they grow, harvest, and mill organic hard red spring and hard white spring wheat, as well as rye and some ancient grain varieties. They are the sort of small, family-owned business that I feel very strongly about supporting with my cash whenever possible.

This flour is milled to order. That means a number of things: the flour is young and nutritious. If you're going to eat whole grain flour because of its nutritious value, then this is the way to do it.

However, the flour is immature. Aged flour (perhaps one month or older) tends to have stronger gluten-forming properties and bakes better. Plus the bran and germ, when left in during milling, interfere with the gluten-forming properties of flour. The result? Bricks for bread, apparently, and bricks that don't even really hold together on top of that. So when we got our first CSA delivery, I did all sorts of research on baking with fresh purely whole wheat flour. Usually, you have to make compensations, a main one being adding something like vital wheat gluten, which gives those gluten networks a big kick skyward and helps the bread rise, be less dense, and not crumble apart. Also, all–whole wheat recipes often call for adding sweetener, like maple syrup or honey, to smooth whole wheat's earthy and sometimes bitter flavor. Flour from hard red wheat berries is not ideal for cakes, cookies, and pie crusts due to its high protein content. Low protein flours lead to softer baked goods. So you usually want soft red or soft white wheat flour, or not even whole wheat flour at all. (And this is really just scratching the surface of the science; I could go into waaaay more detail thanks to a bread-related project I've been deep in for work. Way more detail than most people, but luckily not Tim, or so he says! want to know). 

I decided to not make any compensations at first, for experiment's sake. And thus I discovered the mystery of Bluebird Grains flour: it needs no babying or assistance when you have the right recipes. (I did bake a few crumbly and less-than-ideal loaves before I found the right recipe). I really don't know how to explain it, because frankly you could spend decades reading forums bursting with stories about all kinds of complex workarounds for achieving the holy grail whole wheat loaf. But this flour just works. 

I make no-knead sandwich bread (http://www.veganbaking.net/recipes/breads/enriched-breads/yeasted-enriched-breads/no-knead-whole-wheat-sandwich-bread) with the hard red flour. It isn't a craggy artisan loaf with holes as big as your thumbnail. It has a tighter crumb, although not anywhere as tight as  store-bought sandwich bread. It rises. It's soft. It doesn't crumble. (Again, other sandwich recipes I tried struggled with these issues, but I've never had problems with this recipe.) And the flavor is nutty, earthy, rich, and totally worth obsessing over. 

I use hard red for pie crusts too. The end result has more heft and flavor than AP flour crusts, but it flakes and melts in your mouth just like pie crust should. For biscuits, I use hard white or einkorn. These biscuits are not the pillowy puffballs you get from a box (I do like boxed biscuits, so that's not an insult). These biscuits somehow manage to be light and hefty all at once, with a fresh deep flavor that does not actually need any honey or jam at all. In fact, honey and jam just get in the way. All you need is butter. 

I sat down to do some research tonight about baking with fresh flour, just to refresh my memory. And really, I discovered that I can't explain why I haven't had issues with it. I should. But I don't. So go buy Bluebird flour.