Local Foods: Rhubarb

Rhubarb, or Rheum rhaponticum, is a perennial plant native to the mountainous regions of China and Tibet. Althought rhubarb will grow in many temperate areas of the world, a fondness for rhubarb seems to be focused in a few small localized regions including England, Sweden, New England and the Great Lakes area. I'd never heard of strawberry-rhubarb pie until I moved to Vermont. Now I can't comprehend missing out on this fabulous vegetable.

Localized food choices are an integral part of our web of food culture, and are an important counterpoint to the increasingly uniform and lowest-common-denominator fast-food-chain and agribiz-supermarket-produce phenomenon. Enjoying locally-favored food species and varieties entertains your taste buds, expands your life experiences, and helps you to bond on a deep yet subtle cultural level with the surrounding community. Sharing rhubarb plant divisions, bringing rhubarb to elder friends who no longer garden, and savoring that rhubarb pie every year on father's day weekend, is part of what defines our local culture here as Vermonters. Where ever you live, your own local food culture, including locally grown or developed plant species and varieties, is just as important.

It may be that one of the attractions of rhubarb is its early-season appearance. It's huge, burdock-like leaves emerge about the same time as asparagus, and in fertile soil it quickly grows to elephantine proportions. Rhubarb is a heavy feeder, so dig a deep hole and fill it with manure and compost before starting a new plant. If your rhubarb likes its surroundings, it will need to be divided every 3 or 4 years, which gives you an opportunity to renew soil fertility with a fresh batch of compost.

Gardeners in some less stalwart communities may have an aversion to growing rhubarb because it's actually poisonous. Well, the leaves are considered poisonous, in that they have a high oxalic acid content. It's the crisp, red celery-like stalks that are eaten raw, stewed, baked into pies and muffins, canned in jam and jelly, and just about anywhere else you can throw it if you happen to be a rhubarb fan. Cut each stalk near its base, being careful not to cut into other adjacent stalks. Cut away the leaf at the end of the stalk, and either let it lie to help mulch in your rhubarb plant, or throw it in the compost pile. When the white fluffy flowers appear in early June, on stalks that will soon reach 6 feet high, I cut off the first few flowers to try to delay the end of the season. The common wisdom is that once those flowers escape you, usually by mid- to late- July, the stalks go bitter and should not be cut.

I'm rather crazy about rhubarb. I love its appearance, and grow it in the front flower bed as an edible ornamental. My favorite way to eat it is raw, with a light sprinkle of sea salt. On larger stalks, I peel off the stringy skin, but on smaller stalks I just eat that too. The sharp tang of the rhubarb stalk with the bite of salt is like a real-life version of those horrific sour gummy candy things that kids adore, except without the artificial neon color and chemical ingredients. Granted, this is not for the faint of heart or those with an aversion to aggressively-flavored foods.

For the gentler spirits, Victoria sauce is rhubarb, chopped and stewed with brown sugar, with optional raisins and honey, cooked until it is just the right texture to pour over ice cream, pudding or angel food cake. Rhubarb also subs in well for tart apples in pie and crisp recipes.

A local favorite in my neck of the woods is Rhubarb Punch. Rhubarb Punch has been something to look forward to every year at our January pot luck supper at my local spinning guild, courtesy of fellow guild member Christine Rising Turner. I've finally asked her for her recipe, which she's generously shared:

Rhubarb Punch

When rhubarb is in season, cut 1.5 pounds of stalks--about 6 to 8 1" wide stalks, 18" long. Cut these into 4-6" pieces and stick them straight in the freezer.

To make rhubarb juice, remove a bag of the stalks from the freezer, empty the contents of the bag into a saucepan and add 1 quart of water. 2/3 cup sugar, and a pinch of salt. Heat on medium until the rhubarb has stewed down to mush. Strain the juice through a fine sieve or cheesecloth to remove the stringy bits.

To turn one batch of juice into punch, add a 1/2 cup orange juice, 2T lemon juice, another pinch of salt, and 1 1-liter bottle of seltzer or ginger ale.

Fresh lemon slices make it even more festive, or during strawberry season, mash some strawberries with a sprinkle of sugar and pack it into ice cube trays and freeze it, then remove the cubes and store them in the freezer in a Zip-lock bag. Throw a handful of these into your rhubarb punch around New Year's as a reminder that you're half way back to rhubarb season once again.

Product Review: The Pointed Stick

The Pointed Stick

I supposed I should urge you all to go buy shiny newfangled garden tools in order to jump start the economy and encourage new advertisers to flock to my blog.  But that would be progress, and I'm agin' it.  Kind of ironic for someone who ran for Attorney General as a Progressive, eh?

But before I get distracted by discussion of Vermont politics, I would like to introduce you to the garden tool I rely on about 75% of the time. I refer to it as a Pointed Stick. Actually it's a double-pointed stick, with a pointy broken-off wooden handle at one end and an arrow-shaped pointy metal bit at the other.

The implement is also known as a Warren hoe, and would be a long-handled Warren hoe but for the fact that the handle broke at least 20 years ago, back when the handle also used to sport barn-red paint. To my way of thinking, the broken handle was actually an improvement. The thing broke right at the perfect length for me to grasp as comfortably as a baseball player might grab the end of a wooden bat in one hand to swing it while stretching out his or her arms, or the way a fishing-person might grab a rod, or a tennis player their racket. In other words, it fits.

In addition to hanging on to that short wooden handle, I flip the thing over and use it as a dibble--the pointy thing to poke holes in the ground to plant bulbs, or transplant plugs. Handy.

The more conventional business end rakes a nice furrow through the ground, from a tiny drill for lettuce if I press lightly, to a wide trough for transplanting big stuff if I bury it up to the hilt.

Held tilted to the side, the long flat blade edge makes a perfectly good imitation of a flat-bladed hoe for weeding or pulling dirt back over the just-planted trough. 

The other 25% of the time that I'm not using the Pointed Stick, I'm using a shovel 10% of the time, a bar rake 10% of the time, a spading fork 2.5% of the time... and an actual pointed stick the remaining 2.5% of the time, when I can't lay my hands on THE Pointed Stick. That's when I'm using a tool at all other than my hands, of course.

I guess that does not help you with your tool shopping much... but sometimes less is more. Personally, I'm wicked impressed that I've managed to not lose the Pointed Stick for over 20 years of gardening. I guess I'll just have to think up other ways to jumpstart the economy besides buying new gardening tools... 

E. Coli Outbreak New Update

After the media dashed to slam organic growing practices, particularly the use of manure, as a dangerous potential source of bacterial hazards like E.Coli, today the German government announced that the organic veggie sprouts they fingered as the culprit yesterday are off the hook. In fact, they are back to square one -- baffled. And never mind that they have devastated the European fresh produce market, in the midst of an already tough economic downturn.

Media hype and the rush to a feeding frenzy seems to be the sort of info-news-ment the American public enjoys, and it is a key factor in the present big-agribiz mindset that gets consumers thinking that only factory farmed food is safe. (For a beautifully written, thoughtful reflection on how that media hype plays out in our television weather reporting, grab Tim Brookes' Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment as your next summer hammock read.)

We still don't know the source of the outbreak of the deadly E.coli strain which has killed about two dozen people and hospitalized hundreds more. The sad thing is that by now, we may well never know, and the potential for a take-away lesson will have been lost. The source of the economically deadly smear on European produce growers and organic farmers--and bean sprouts--is easy to pinpoint, however.

If you grow your own food, or purchase from local farmers, if heaven forbid there should be a  health issue resulting from the food, you will know exactly where it came from. That's not to say I don't eat out or buy rice that's been grown elsewhere (though my Co-op food shelves label the rice farm origins, so at least I know where that came from), nor do I mean to imply we should build high walls and live in isolated feudal castles. But the closer you are to the source of at least most of your food products -- meat, dairy, produce -- the more genuine information you will have about it. You will be able to rely on the facts you gain about your food from your own eyes, ears, nose and tongue -- and not from the infotainment rants of what passes for commercial news sources.

Lettuce Entertain You

I don't know why I find lettuce so amusing. Maybe it's the gorgeous palette, from neon chartreuse to deep burgundy. Maybe it's the array of shapes from tight iceberg globes to enormous frizzy heads.Or the fact that it tolerates shade and can grow in my getting-shaded-out side beds without a hint of concern.

Lettuce is one of the best ways for new gardeners to learn succession planting. Many gardening books suggest planting a short row of lettuce, then another length of row a few weeks later. That works, but I hate to see two-thirds of a row sitting empty when it could have something in it. I plant whole rows as soon as the soil is no longer soupy in the spring, then start trays of replacement plants inside. When I pop out a lettuce plant--and I just harvest the whole plant rather than picking leaves most of the time--I can just pop a new seedling in its place.

In the spring, I plant cool-season lettuce varieties outside but start heat-tolerant types indoors. Once we hit mid-summer I start trays of cool-weather lettuces indoors to sub into the garden bed in early autumn, then switch over to spinach and Oriental salad greens to close out the outdoor gardening season. Once you get in this habit of thinking about lettuce in terms of continual starting, planting and harvesting through the growing season, it's easy to transfer that mindset to other crops and corners of the garden.

Lettuce is also fun to tuck in just about anywhere: hanging baskets, flower pots, between young tomato plants where they will be harvested before the tomatoes take over the bed. Miniature varieties like Tom Thumb are particularly well suited to inter-planting between bigger veggie crops. Plant some between rows of tall vegetables like brussels sprouts or under the ferny asparagus once it has passed the spring spear stage.

Unlike many garden vegetables these days, lettuce seed remains an inexpensive pleasure, and the dozens of varieties offered in garden seed companies like those at High Mowing Seeds, a Vermont grower that sells all organic seed mostly raised at their own seed farm in Wolcott, provide hours of catalog reading pleasure. Just remember that lettuce seed needs light to germinate -- sprinkle it lightly over the surface of damp seed starting mix then rub the surface with your hand just enough to ensure the seeds won't blow away. It's never too late to start lettuce, so peruse the garden-store racks now and get started on your late summer lettuce entertainment.

E.Coli Outbreak Update

Tonight's news regarding the deadly E.Coli outbreak in Europe was exactly what I was dreading--and I don't mean to be drab, the whole thing is tragic, so it's not like any of us wanted the problem to exist at all. But the announcement was made that bean sprouts grown on an organic farm were the source of the present highly dangerous bacterial infection.

As I explained in a previous post, American farms, to qualify for the USDA organic label, must demonstrate food processing hygiene and manure handling practices far in excess of those deemed acceptable on non-organic-certified American farms, thus minimizing the risk of E.coli from organic farms.

The bean sprouts growers which were the source of the contaminated sprouts apparently used no manure in their sprout growing, according to news reports. The sprouts were no grown with manure tea, and are not grown in any form of soil, so there is no reason to think manure came in contact with them. The source of the bacteria growing in the sprouts is therefore likely either in the water, or was in the seed stock.  German investigators have not yet determined the ultimate source of the bacteria.

That said, the press has been quick to quote consumers in Germany as stating that they would not eat organic produce anymore. Press has also been quoting the German agricultural minister as saying that manure is frequently used on organic farms and has been a source of E.coli outbreaks in the past.

Small farmers, seed savers, and organic growers are under attack in the U.S. by the massive agribusiness lobby that uses the term 'food security' as a weapon to bludgeon out non-chemical agriculture competition. Unfortunately, no matter what the ultimate source of contamination may be at this one veggie sprout farm in Germany--water contaminated from another farm, poor handling practices, deliberate sabotage, whatever--organic farmers the world over better brace their feet and prepare for the wave of negative energy that will follow this tragedy.

It is a horrible irony that something so healthful as bean sprouts should be a source of death and widespread illness. My heart goes out to he families of those who died from this baffling incident--and to the organic sprout growers. I have been trying to imagine what any of my Vermont organic farmer friends would be going through were something of this ilk to have been found to have originated on their farms -- they'd be utterly devastated.

It's too early yet to be certain of the take-away lesson from this E.coli outbreak, but it's not to early to be certain that it will become yet another battleground point between corporate agribiz and small growers over the question of where better food security can truly be found. For me, no matter the outcome, that security will still be found in my garden and in the produce of my local market farmers.

Thinnings: It's What's For Dinner

One of the fabulous things about growing your own food is how efficient you can be at using every last drop of the product at every stage. A commercial farm would discard, or maybe possibly compost, the millions of seedlings of lettuce, spinach, carrots, herbs and other produce that get thinned out when transplanting or in thickly direct-seeded rows. Me, I get to eat them, along with my weeds, volunteers, and just about anything else edible growing on the premises.

I've been eating thinned lettuce and spinach salad for weeks now, and tonight's bounty features a bowl full of mixed thinned basil--Genovese, sweet, lemon, lime, cinnamon.  The basil is in the oven right now, atop a bechamel sauce atop a quick pizza crust, all of it smothered under some local mozzarella.

Last night, I had pulled out some barley soup from the very bottom of the freezer--that time of year, when I'm in a rush to finish off what's left in there before this year's stuff goes in--and decided that some greens and cornbread would put together a good meal with it. Out to the garden, and scrounging around the beds I found three plants of golden chard, a couple small heads of radicchio, and a young red kale that had all reappeared from last year's plantings. I pulled them up, cut off the roots and chucked them to the chickens, and headed in to saute these 'weeds' in a little canola and sesame oil. A little splash of vinegar and sprinkle of sesame seeds, and they were just the right side-dish.

Of course there's the real 'weeds,' too -- uninvited specimens that are welcome into my kitchen nonetheless. My earliest seasonal salads are thick with garden sorrel. I'm not sure why this grows rampant in my yard, with it's tangy lemon or oxalic acid taste and arrow-shaped leaves. I suspect it came in on a load of topsoil bought to fill my original raised beds. I also use it to make 'weed soup' as my family calls it--an early summer treat of a creamed base, pureed potatoes, a bit of onion and black pepper, and copious handfuls of garden sorrel that turn it brilliant green.

More than 263 million pounds of food are thrown away in the United States every single day, according to the End Hunger program of the Society of St. Andrew. But that's not even counting the weeds and thinnings that never make it to the 'food' category--though they do make it to my dinner plate. Growing your own food enhances your own, and the nation's, food security because garden-grown food is used more efficiently, so we need less of it.

Next Year's Garden Starts Today

When someone asks me for my pesto recipe, I always say, well, on September 1 you plant garlic... and so it goes.

Next year's garden is always in progress this year. This morning I double dug a long, 4 foot wide raised bed and turned in two wheelbarrows-full of compost. The pile of weeds I pulled out of that same bed before digging it over went right into the wheelbarrow and back to the compost pile (with a few choice tidbits thrown to the chickens and bunny along the way). Next year's garden will grow on this spring's decomposted weeds. The compost I was spreading still had some 'clinkers' in it -- chunks of coal from the woodstove that hadn't completely burnt to ash -- and I threw those back into the compost pile for next year too. Winter's wood ash joins spring weeds in the compost pile, along with all those eggshells, veggie scraps, hay and manure from the rabbit and chickens, brush, and whatever else we've got.

I love compost. And I'll admit -- I am not very good at making it. I'm not methodical, I don't save up things in neat piles in order to layer them in carefully measured layers. I just throw stuff on there and turn it from time to time. It all works out.

A bunch of my veggie scraps get saved in the freezer for soup stock, and cooked down until they are nothing but an unidentifyable brown mass before I add them to the compost pile. Other bits get fed to the chickies or rabbit first and then get to the compost pile as manure. When time is short or I have a big pile of compost spilling over whatever container happens to be catching it on the kitchen counter, it will just go straight to the compost pile.

Shoveling up the compost pile I see remaining little bits of corncob or eggshell here and there, and every shovelful disturbs a bevy of earthworms and earwigs as well as the evidence of millions of other agents of decomposition too small for the eye to see. A toad has taken up residence in a broken piece of sunflower stalk and hops away in panic as I shovel the compost out around him.

Few things illustrate the spiral journey of growing food more than composting, and saving seeds. Sometimes the compost even saves seeds for you--and up pop the volunteer squash and tomato plants, all on their own.  Sheesh, sometimes you might even think the natural world could go on without us...