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before . . .

OK, so we’ve begun to harvest a lot from the farm.  This ought to be an exciting time for me: seeing the fruits of my labor and all that.  Naturally, I choose to be irritated about it all instead.

. . . after!

So far, I’ve gotten a ton of rhubarb, prompting me to try out rhubarb salsa, rhubarb sauce, rhubarb cookies, and rhubarb snack cake (thank you, Martha Stewart, for that one!), along with my normal rhubarb pie and strawberry-rhubarb preserves.  We also picked our first batch of strawberries, and we’re supposed to have another batch in about a month.  I found these harvests thrilling.

What I have had trouble with is all the rest of the crap.  What am I supposed to do with a handful of onion scapes?  How does one use a tiny head of bok choy?  And there is only so much arugula, kale and mustard greens I can consume without getting sick (and – in the case of the arugula – that amount is very, very small).  Not to mention radishes and turnips: items I have never liked and now hate even more (OK, not true: I was told to pickle them in some rice vinegar and a little ginger, and they actually tasted pretty good).   (But who needs 5 pounds of them in one week?)

Here’s my real problem with working a garden: I now know exactly what goes into the growing of items I usually just buy, so I feel really guilty all the time.  I think of the hours that went into the tilling and fertilizing and sowing and weeding and harvesting of the two-pound bag of carrots I bought, of which I only used a pound (mmmm . . . applesauce-carrot cake!) before the rest slimed and I threw them in our compost.  I feel the pressure to eat everything I harvest, and to harvest everything, because now I see how that food item truly was a living organism, and letting it die without consuming it is like murder!

What really pisses me off is that I can’t even enjoy harvesting the things I’m excited to eat, because all I can think about whilst harvesting is the thousands of migrant workers on commercial farms who spend hours bent over in the hot sun so they can take home $20.  And, all these years, I was griping about having to spend $4 on that little carton of strawberries I bought at the store.

And this whole organic-eating thing just doesn’t time out.  I mean, I got a head of cabbage last week, which I was excited to use in my stew; but I still needed to go to the store to buy commercially-produced carrots, string beans, peppers, and green onions to make it.  By the time the onions are ready for harvest, the peppers will be long gone, and the carrots won’t even be close to full-grown. I just don’t know how Laura Ingalls Wilder ate.

I’m trying to get into the whole canning/freezing/preserving thing.  Someone told me I could steam the kale and then freeze it for later use in a white bean/sausage stew, which sounds good.  So I’m doing that.  But I can’t take up a lot of room in our freezer, since we’re hoping to get another half a cow soon.  And, while I have jams and jellies mastered, I’m waaaay too intimidated to safely can vegetables and soups.  Not to mention that it kind of freaks me out to have all these things soaking in a water / sugar water / vinegar solution.  If I’m just going to remove half the nutrition by preserving it this way, I might as well buy the non-nutritional, chemical-laden carrots from the store in February!

Oh, yeah: I have the proper mindset for all this.

I’m trying, though.  At least gardening intimidates me a little less, now, though I’m still much too lazy to do it properly at my own home.  But this experience is at least giving our family a good idea of what we’ll eat a lot of and what would serve our purposes better if bought from the store – I mean, local farmer’s market.  If I get a garden going at our house next year (one that actually survives, I mean), I’ll plant tons of berries, lettuces, tomatoes, and even kale . . . but that swiss chard can go to hell.

peas