Tarragon Radish Quick Pickles

These days, peas are just around the corner. I ate one yesterday, on the last day of May. While the plants have struggled in the hot spring weather and are still short, some just a foot and a half tall, and even though the snap peas didn't germinate fantastically and look scraggly along the fence, with big gaps between them, it was a delicious and satisfying moment. So we might not have as many peas as we hoped--I am happy for what we have! Last year, we didn't plant any.

We planted thirty-two tomato plants outside last night, and the greenhouse--now home to eight tomato plants--feels so spacious sans seeding tables and the mini forest of potted tomatoes that lived on top of them for two months. Don't tell me forty tomato plants is overboard. I still don't trust that they all will make it, not after last year's rotting-tomato-disease fiasco, and this way I am pretty sure, barring wholesale disaster, we will at least have some. And if they all end up producing, I will achieve tomato nirvana.

Meanwhile, we're eating lots of cherry belle radishes, hailstone radishes, and purple-top turnips. When you catch the turnips young, maybe golf-ball size, they are shockingly sweet and sugary, with just a hint of a snap in the aftertaste.

But I wanted to write about cherry belle radishes. These beauties mature after just twenty-five days, which goes by so fast that it's easy to miss them in their prime--as I almost did with the full-grown cache I discovered yesterday. Besides being quick to grow, they are low maintenance and so satisfyingly red and round and juicy. It seems almost a shame to do anything to them besides slice them into a salad--as much as we like sautéing them quickly in butter and eating them just barely translucent and still a little crunchy, any cooking turns that firehouse red color a sort of lame pink. Pickling does the same; the pigments stain their pure-white insides pinkish, too, after about twenty-four hours.

But I can't resist quick pickles--a first milestone in the garden season, when you have some extra to "put up" rather than just enough for a lunch salad or dinner side. I have to put "put up" in quotation marks because, let's face it, the jar will be empty in less than a week!

Tarragon Radish Quick Pickles 
The fresh tarragon adds a hint of licorice, and the longer you let the pickles sit in the fridge, the more licorice-y they will taste. 

I like these pickles as a condiment for stir-fried noodles, especially if you add a little hoisin sauce--the sweetness of the hoisin plus the tangy tartness of the radishes is addictive. Or fold them into a salad with avocado, Gorgonzola cheese, and almonds—the pickles brighten all that richness to make a perfect dinner on a hot June evening. 

About 20 cherry belle radishes, cleaned and sliced thin
A few sprigs fresh tarragon
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup honey
A pinch of red pepper flakes

Wash and dry a pint jar, then fill it with radishes. Stuff the tarragon down the sides. In a small saucepan, combine the water, red wine vinegar, honey, and red pepper flakes, and bring just to a boil. Pour the vinegar mixture over the radishes, fit a lid on the jar, and let cool to room temperature. Refrigerate for twenty-four hours before eating.

The quick pickles will keep for a week or two in the fridge.

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.