Tomatoes in June, and Reflections on Meat

I have never been happier for cloudy weather than I am this week. It's not just my Pacific Northwestern blood talking, begging for a break from summer in May. It's sympathy for the topsy-turvy garden. 

Tomato flowers on May 15? 

At the same time as pea flowers? 

We've had radishes, pak choi, several types of mustard greens, spinach, and arugula already bolt and flower after pretty lame harvests or, in the case of the radishes, no harvest at all. We're nursing the onions along only by watering like it's August. But this stretch of cooler weather has every plant unhunching its shoulders and raising its arms to the cloudy sky, heat stress mostly forgotten. 

The upside is that our actual summer crops as well as fall crops, like dry and green beans, summer and winter squash, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes, are already ginormous. Actually, the squash are bigger than the peas. 

And these beauties, which got mostly shade in the afternoons, made it all the way to our plates. 

I guess even if we have to pull even more bolting confused spring crops in the weeks to come, at least our pigs will be happy to eat them. 

We took these three piglets home about a week ago. Believe it or not, they'll be 250 pounds in a few short months (right now they're about the size of our cat). Until then, we plan to pamper them with an expanse of woods to root around in and a lot of organic feed. They'll live kingly and queenly lives, as far as pigs go. And then they'll pair perfectly with those winter squash and potatoes in early November. 

It's funny, a few years ago I'm not sure I would have approved of a statement like that about baby pigs. I would have squirmed to think of them as future food. But raising our own animals for meat has changed my perspective. Now meat is not just vacuum-sealed protein to buy in a store. Meat is mornings spent striding through dewy pastures carrying buckets of grain and salt, and the baaing hellos of ewes and lambs that nose up to my legs and nibble my work jeans. Meat is the chickens who wander free around our yard and the pastures, forming subgroups and cliques that we nickname and gossip about at dinner. (Have you seen the Deputy recently? He's always hanging around the Three Stooges now.) Meat is planning—electric fence line or hog panels? Can three piglets fit in the back of the Jetta? Meat is poring over YouTube videos on butchering techniques and researching charcuterie recipes and planning what cuts we want to eat, sharpening knives and buying butcher paper. Meat is the fascination and art of transforming a whole side of pig or lamb into cuts that we wrap and mark with sharpie and store up in the freezer and carefully cook through, one at a time. Meat is knowing our animals lived well, ate well, were healthy and honored, and in turn give us nourishment we feel right about.

So it has its messy parts. There's no way to romanticize plucking a chicken or scalding a pig. But my life is infinitely richer for the animals we raise, in their lives outside and in their lives in our freezer. The dots connect. 

Not everyone can or wants to raise animals for themselves. But it's driven home, for me, more than any book or article, how deeply important it is to care about the meat you eat and the animals it comes from—at the most basic, were they given the space they need, fed food they naturally want to eat?—and to use your purchase power to communicate that care. 

Soapbox over. 

Sprouts

Apparently the last few months my blogging energy has hovered around zero...or a little higher if you count posting pictures and no words as blogging. 

I struggle with sitting down at the computer to write or read after work. After a solid day of editing, it's just not appealing. Although we do watch Netflix sometimes on my computer. So perhaps my excuse is not valid. 

Things are a little crazy on the homestead. There's just so much to do. Planting, weeding, watering, tending in the garden; chickens, sheep, soon pigs; a lot of work on the truck (not my realm, but still); and a number of unfinished yard projects. We are frazzled. In a good way though. I find nothing more satisfying than discovering the hunched shoulders of a bright-green bean shoot in the morning and finding it shooting for the sky in the afternoon. 

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?