Summer Jam
The plum tree arches heavy over the fence, ripening in my yard.
5 months ago
Ball Blue Book
"You want to what?"
"I want to can."
"I heard that, but WHY do you want to can."
"Look," I said, "it's weirder to me than it probably is to you, but I just want to."
"I hate canning," my aunt said before hanging up and after promising to send Auntie Alice's, Ball Blue Book - Easy Guide to Tasty, Thrifty Canning and Freezing.
The book arrived yesterday. It's bound with three staples and a display of plastic fruits and vegetables doused in water to convey freshness. The book was published in 1974 and it's like new.
My great aunt, Alice, made notations by the pickled beets and mint jelly. The jelly for the lamb Uncle Henry raised I'm sure.
There are tips on destroying molds, yeast, bacteria and enzymes with cartoon illustrations that do nothing to reassure me.
There are recipes for marashino cherries, pear mincemeat, dixie relish and a victoria sauce made with rhubarb that call for alarming amounts of sugar but set my imagination whirling none-the-less.
I will not be making carrot jam or rummage relish. But I do like the sound of a kumqut marmalade. It's poetry if nothing else.
The cute guy likes the recipe on the back cover - How to Preserve a Husband .... sweetened with love and seasoned with kisses.
There are conversion tables, troubleshooting spreadsheets. There are tips to can without sugar or salt, instructions for freezing which I've already negated (they call for scalding). There's a chart for altitude, a list of vocabulary words, canning time references.
There is everything except Grandma or Auntie Alice in the kitchen stirring and explaining. Yet they'll inform the canning more than the Blue Book. An invisible circle is being drawn and while I move forward I'm also stepping back for inspiration and instruction.
I've even convinced my aunt who hates to can to do it with me for a day. "It'll be fun," I keep telling her. Grandma and Auntie Alice would get a kick out of it. That's for sure.
Iceland Poppies
The Muse brought me a bouquet of iceland poppies on Sunday morning from the farmers' market. Each blossom was crimped in it's egg shaped hairy shell. The first orange blossom hatched by noon.
Three days later they are continuing in shades and combinations of pink, yellow, cream and more orange. The prickly skins drop to the table, the flowers opening like cups and bowls and maturing into flat saucers, the inner pod an Alice in Wonderful cup with sugary stamens surrounding it.
Tonight I carried them through the house, from the kitchen to the living room, to the table and back again. Wherever I was, they were too. I set them in the late light, approached them from every side. But the cute guy captured them best - all fuzzy stems and papery petals.
Iceland poppies have always been one of my favorites in the garden but I've never had an entire bunch in the house. They're such decadence I nearly need to pinch myself to be sure I'm real.
Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds
If I were to change one thing about the book above, which I read as part of the be a bookworm invitation from Green Bean Dreams, it would be the title.
Last night a friend audibly groaned when I told it to her in response to what I'd read recently. The conversation paused and turned to the weather but inside I was scrambling for a way to turn it around, to make genetic engineering and yes, the future of seeds, a breezy conversation. In the end I let it go.
But I'm excited about this book and I've never before considered the seed. I mean, a seed. What's the big deal? The author, Claire Hope Cummings, however infuses the book with a passion and knowledge of the seed and all things around it. It's impossible to not be ignited.
While Michael Pollan lifted one veil to the realities of industrial food, Claire Hope Cummings, lifts another to the realities of the industrial seed market. Take this line from the first chapter:
... the GMOs that are on grocery store shelves today have never been tested for human health hazards.
It's scary you know what but not without pockets of great hope. That is after all her middle name.
The tale of seeds and the immediacy of their impact on the future of our food moves steadily forward and is grounded in places that provide a recognizable map.
It begins with the seed heritage of Iraq and the controls on seed saving that were ordered upon America's occupation. It moves to Hawaii and the experimental open-air field testing of GMO crops grown there. The extent of all this is new news.
My favorite chapter, set at the University of California, Berkeley, reads like a crime mystery -
In an old laboratory that looks like a museum exhibit on the science of the past, there is an old wooden bench strewn with beakers and rubber hoses. Under the bench, in a wooden drawer, is a plain manila folder, which I was shown. In that folder was a photograph no one's supposed to see. It depicts something that no one is even supposed to know exists. It's a picture of .....
From the revelations in Berkeley the book takes off to America's Heartland to see who owns the seed being farmed today and the affects that corporate ownership has. Then in Vietnam it looks at who owns the rice and the politics of feeding the world, which is surprising in it's starkness -
Famine is a function of how food is distributed, and that is always a political issue.
Next it's Norway and the Doomsday Vault or Noah's Ark for agriculture, the newest and most innovative seed bank in the world, she says, before providing a view inside seed banks everywhere. She likens one seed bank to a church and for a moment I am standing there too.
Then she travels through local food systems starting in Fort Collins, Colorado at the Fort Knox of seed banks and ends with this quote I like by the philosopher Eric Hoffer,
"in times of profound changes, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
The last third of the book set in Iowa, Mexico and back to Hawaii focuses on the work being done to preserve and generate heirloom seeds and along with them the stories and food of all our cultures. It's the good news and the hope.
Uncertain Peril finally ends in the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, exploring the link between the narrative of creation and agriculture.
And while it's usually cheating to give away the final sentences of a book, in this case it's not. The last lines are an invitation to enter the world of seeds, to encourage native crops, support local farmers. They're an invitation to share the map of what grows in our own gardens and to know what is on our plate.
The story of seeds is also our story. We can be guided by the way of the seed and by knowing that what we do to seeds, we do to ourselves. One thing is certain: the future of seeds in our hands.
Herbal Hair Rinse
Did you ever make mixtures when you were a kid? You know, perfumes or lotions, magic remedies? I started with mud pies but moved on to mixing perfumes and lotions from powders and water to make myself pretty for make believe tea parties.
Not a lot has changed except the tea parties are less make believe. These days I mix herbal rinses for my hair which I learned from the Herbwifes Kitchen blog. She said, use anything you want. Really. Use anything you want. I know how to do that, I thought, except I didn't believe it would work on my hair.
She mentioned rosemary. I used rosemary. My hair was smooth, snarl free. Then I sprinkled in dried lavender from the pantry. Next time lemon thyme from the backyard went in with the rosemary snipped from the neighbors hedge. And the time after that it was only thyme and lavender.
I tried scented geranium leaves with the lavender. It smelled nice. I put them with rosemary, with sage, with mint but I never noticed the color of the rinse. Could that be possible?
Tonight I poured it from the tea pot and it was red; jewel, berry, ruby red. Rosemary and rose scented geranium leaves steeped in hot water did this? I took the lid off the pot to investigate. Leaves. The answer was yes.
The rinse made my hair pink. Not really. But it did tickle me pretty.
The Wild Edge
A while back I heard a panel of women talking about gardening. The head gardener at Green Gulch, Sara Tashkar, talked about the wild edges of the garden. She'd picked the nettles there that day that had been made into a nettle pesto and was being served with fresh baked bread. The wild edge, stayed with me. I wanted one. It was the challenge, the suprise and the mysteries of a garden all wrapped into one.
I was reminded of all this Sunday as I was crouched down at the flower bed that is both the edge and the garden in my backyard. I was half covered by arching branches of spirea. Two four foot lillies were reaching for the sun between it and the fence. A leggy pot of mint was quietly getting bigger to my right. Chartruese volunteer fever fue that had escaped the bed was thick beside me and a rose scented geranium had morphed into a snake. It coiled from beneath the spirea. I bent my head under the branches and that's when it struck me.
I'd found my wild edge.
It smelled like roses and there was a stillness, a cricket in the bamboo above me, a spider hanging on the fence, a stillness that I suspect is still there even though I'm not.
I'd introduced all the plants at one time but it was clear as I rested in the tangle of scent and leaves that they were now co-existing in their own way. They were claiming this once almost manicured spot as their own.
In this tiny yard hidden from a busy street they were going wild. And I'll be the last person to put a stop to them. In fact, I may add some nettles.
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