Double.Dutch.Voodoo

Old School Okra

Posted in Uncategorized on September 2, 2011 by mjandree

Like many Northern gardeners, the temptation to grow crops not meant to be grown in the North is almost universal. The challenges are that the long growing season and hot temperature needed for many of these crops are a rara avis up here. In a perfect season I could have 150 frost free days. Most years I can reliably plan on 125 frost free days. As for heat, all I can say is “that depends.” Our weather is drastically affected by what happens in and around the Great Lakes. It’s not uncommon to run the furnace and the air-conditioner, both at full blast during the course of the same day. I’m pretty sure those long pants that you can zip into shorts were invented here.

Okra, a traditional Southern crop is easily grown here in most years. Some of the newer varieties, like “Millionaire” from www.johnnyseeds.com, only requires 50 days to mature. For others you can plan on at least 80-90 days. I always start my okra inside in March, planting outside well after frost danger as the tender transplants are very sensitive to frost, so wait until you’re sure. Okra is an all around great addition to the garden, it has verdant tropical foliage, stunning flowers (they are a member of the hibiscus family) and delicious pods. It looks slightly exotic and out of place enough to always draw comments from my Double Dutch Farm visitors. Usually the deeply probing question, “What IS that?”

When conditions are right, okra can be frustratingly vigorous. We like to pick our pods at 3 to 4 inches in length. If you don’t stay on top of your harvest, they go wild and the pods will grow like Pinocchios’s nose when he’s yammering on about the date he picked the first red tomato of the season. When I returned from a week long business trip, I had found my okra had used my absence as an excuse to go wild. I heard from the cabbages that the debauchery was legendary. I had to snip off all of the oversized pods and start over. With the weather as hot as it’s been, I had another perfect, tender crop of pods in a week.

There are some who might say that anyone north of the Mason-Dixon Line has no business cooking okra, but I disagree. With fresh pods, a hot skillet and a skilled cook the results can be fabulous. I would not say the same about hush puppies, however. I don’t think they can be grown here, no matter how long the growing season. Something about the limited availability of the seed stock and secretive habits of Long John Silver’s head gardener.

There seems to be considerable consternation and debate about okra slime. Many cooks attempt to render it harmless by adding acid ingredients like tomatoes or limes. I agree with my friend Travis, Head of Food Development at Williams-Sonoma, when he told me, “I like a little slime in my okra, you just don’t find that quality in any other vegetables, well, at least not with fresh ones anyway.” Travis’s mother, a Georgia girl, cooks her okra in the same old school way we do. It’s simple, straight forward, traditional and…has a just the perfect touch of slime.

Shannon slices up the pods, tosses them in corn meal, salt , pepper and a touch of cayenne and fries them until they are golden brown and nice and crispy. Best when eaten with your fingers right out of the frying pan, when they’re so hot you run around the kitchen with your mouth open, like a choir boy, while uttering unintelligible words that sound something like, “hothothothothot” and “goodgoodgoodgood.” This ritual always reminds me of Hemingway’s Nick Adam’s excellent telling of eating fried bananas in the short story, “The Big Two-Hearted River”. Come to think of it, they’re a bit slimy too.

14 Comments »

The First Sweet Corn of Summer

Posted in Crops, Sweet Corn on August 1, 2011 by mjandree

There are few days on the farm that are looked forward to with as much anticipation as the first sweet corn of summer. Other close contenders are: the delivery of a new tractor from the dealership, a load of day old calves and that defining moment in the spring, “When the oak leaves are as big a squirrels ears.” This has always been my traditional signal to plant sweet corn here in Michigan.

If the soil has dried sufficiently, I will have fit the field, readied the planter and spent countless distracted moments looking first at squirrel’s ears and then secondly at oak leaves. This year we had an exceptionally wet spring and I was not able to plant until May 21^st. By this late date, the oak leaves were actually the size of full-grown hog ears. I thought about changing my mantra to honor hogs, but I didn’t want to offend the squirrels. I have enough trouble with that tribe of bandits as it is. Better to leave them their glory.

It’s been seventy-two days of waiting to be exact. Considering the cold slow start this spring, that just about squares with the estimated maturity date given for this outstanding, earlier bi-color named “Vitality.” (Available from ruppseeds.com #04204). For a member of the homozygous sugar enhanced hybrids (none GMO), It has excellent standability in the cold, wet soils of early spring. The kernels are small and tender, with exactly 14 rows of them on each diminutive 7-inch ear. When I see the first silk, for the first time, my harvest anxiety heightens. The general rule is that the corn will reach maturity anywhere between 14 and 21 days after the appearance of silk. If there is adequate moisture combined with warm days and nights, the harvest date creeps closer to 14 days, thus my Sweet Corn Harvest Anxiety (SCHA) begins.

Dead ripe sweet corn is fleeting and in 80-90 degree weather might last only 24 hours. The goal is to harvest at the very top of sugar production, which is called the milk stage and you’d better have your picking done by 8 in the morning, as the sugar content drops throughout the day. To hit this mark, I check everyday, starting at a mere 10 days after silk. I wander down the rows, squeezing ears, inspecting silk color and perhaps one of the most sinister manifestations of SCHA, I peel back a few husks for a peak. It gets worse as the ripening approaches and I start to exhibit the classic, full-blown symptomology of SCHA. At about day 12 from silk, I start snapping a few ears, husking them in the field and taking bites. Corn will ripen unevenly across a field, but when I happen upon a chance ripe, early ear, I’ll devour it raw, right then and there in the field; no boiling water, no butter, no salt. Corn all over my mustache, sticky corn juice running off my elbows, leaving a trail of naked cobs in the dirt behind me, I couldn’t be happier.

The flavor is beyond fabulous and it reminds me of why I go to all of the trouble to grow sweet corn, you really cannot buy corn like this at the store. In fact, you can’t buy it this good, even from my corn stand. It’s all about anticipation and maximum sugar content, two things you can’t buy.

As soon as corn is picked, the rapid change from sugar to starch is off and running. About 30 years ago, my brother and I started an annual sweet corn harvest tradition to answer this sugar to starch race. After the SCHA had run it’s course and the best varieties of our corn were perfectly ready, we’d make preparations. We’d load up a hay wagon with the old Coleman camp stove, an enamel pot, water, salt, butter and plenty of napkins, grab our farm hand Jason (aka Mumar), hook the wagon to the old Allis and head to the sweet corn field. Once there, we’d haul all of the cooking apparatus to the middle of the field in a wheelbarrow, clear a spot, set the water on the flame and begin the hunt for the perfect ears while we waited for the water to boil.

The idea was to find two perfect ears, but not to pick them, just stand by ready to pick them. As chance would have it, they were often the ones farthest from the pot. The player closest to the pot would keep an eye on the water, once it boiled he would let the signal go out, traditionally, the call of the peacock.

When you heard the peacock call, you ripped your two ears from the stalk and made a mad dash to the pot. Leaping and weaving through rows of corn and husking your two ears on the fly, throwing them in the pot as you raced by at full tilt, all the while whooping at the top of your lungs like a peacock (I’m really not sure how the peacock’s call got into this tradition. It’s been lost in the sands of time, but every time I hear a real peacock go off, I still get this urge to find the nearest sweet corn field and run wildly about).

It was mayhem; three grown men racing around the corn field towards a boiling pot of water, corn flying through the air, some hitting the pot, others the dirt, then the pot, most of them still covered in silk, others still in the husk, all for a chance to sample the freshest, sweetest sweet corn on the planet….and it was.

The Sweet Corn Eaters. Taken about 1982. Martin and Mumar.

14 Comments »

Black Cap Raspberries and the Wild Side

Posted in Crops on July 15, 2011 by mjandree

Double Dutch Farm is rich in natural bounty. Our fields, wood lots and fence rows abound with black walnuts, morel mushrooms, wild chives, venison, turkey, fiddle heads, elderberries and rose hips.

The undisputed royalty of all this fat of the land however is the wild, black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis). Locally, we refer to the fruits of this member of the rose family as “black caps.” Their season is fleet and their ripening; always ill timed, is maddening.

I watch them with anticipation from the moment the bees have finished and the petals have fallen from the bloom. They grow in fits and starts along the fence rows that line our pasture and I check them every day. There are places where their brambles are thick and hang heavy on the fence and others where a lone bramble seems as out of place as a June Bug in January.

They always ripen when I am either out of town for work, (usually the summer Fancy Food Show on the East Coast) or when I have hay down, a card that trumps all. The window to harvest premium berries is always closing and, as with all crops, weather dependent. A wet early summer means a bountiful crop with large glossy fruits. Once they are ripe, two days of weather in the 90’s will shrivel and ruin the crop like the Wicked Witch of the West.

This challenge is usually answered by heading out at odd hours, in fading light, surrounded by clouds of mosquitos and working up a furious lather in the process. We limp back to the barn, scratched up from the thorns, bitten up by the mosquitoes and with our hands and pants decorated with dark purple berry stains. We are always strangely giddy and have always eaten more than we’ve picked.

Our goal is to harvest enough to make two fresh black berry pies, one for the freezer and one to eat now. And to have enough to make a dozen or so jars of black berry freezer jam for the winter. Now I know this doesn’t sound like too lofty of a goal, but wild black caps are very small and very tempting. It takes a long time to fill up several quarts of berries, especially when I’m popping every other one in my mouth.

Their flavor is unparalleled. I grow a lot of crops, including several varieties of domesticated brambles, even black ones, but the taste of wild black caps has yet to be cultivated. They have a lot of seeds, but that’s fine with us. It’s like the fine bones you have to contend with while feasting on wild caught trout, the trouble is well worth the taste.

It’s always a sad day when the last pie has been devoured and the last dollop of jam has been metered out. It will be a long wait until the next ephemeral crop of sybaritic delights, and I’ll wish I had put more in the berry bucket and less in my mouth. No, not really, the wait is an essential element of what makes black caps such a fabulous treat.

2 Comments »

Fourth of July Ham Hocks and Beans

Posted in The Meals on July 8, 2011 by mjandree

Ham Hocks & Beans

The ham hocks came from the Hampshire, Yorkshire, Duroc cross I mentioned in my previous post, ” Salad Genealogy.”

We have our meat smoked at Van Ball’s Meats a few miles from the farm, where Mike, the owner, still smokes over fragrant hickory.

Both the Dark Red Kidney and the Pinto are from Rupp Seeds in Ohio. Bunny and I harvested them on a hot day in late September. We gathered about four bushels of dry beans in the pods. After letting them dry for another month, we spent many evenings by the winter fire shelling beans. Now that sounds like a romantic event, but after several weeks of shelling, the romantic charm is long gone. Alone and cold, I finally finished with all of the shelling sometime in late February.

You really have to love beans to go through all of that work, especially when you can buy them in the store so cheaply. I just like everything about them, from the way that the seeds feel in my hands as I plant them, to the verdant glow of the dark green leaves.

A few words of advice for growing great beans:

1. Wait until your soil has warmed to at least 65 degrees before planting. If you don’t, your germination will be spotty and nobody likes bald spots in their bean rows.

2. You’ll also want to make sure you use an inoculant, one that is specifically for beans. Not only will your beans perform better, but the inoculant will also allow the bean plant to affix nitrogen, resulting in a boost for next year’s garden.

3. Never cultivate your beans when it’s wet, as soil that comes in contact with the leaves can introduce disease.

4. Seeds are cheap, so plant a lot of them. I religiously ignore any spacing recommendations on the seed packet and sow them thickly. I thin them after they emerge with a hoe.

5. Varmints, especially the dastardly and cunning wood chuck, love beans. To help spread risk, I plant beans in several different areas of the garden. In my mind, when he eats an entire row, he thinks that he’s eaten them all and would never consider I’ve hidden another row behind the parsnips. In stead, he will just move on to your neighbor’s garden for the next bean feast.

6. I always order at least a pound of seed of each variety. This makes me feel rich, and I like the big bags they come in. Even if I don’t plant them all, I like the look of the dirty bags with their tops all rolled down, sitting on my shelf. They look like progress has been made and work has been done. All that for about eight bucks.

Washing Beans

This year I have planted eight varieties of dry beans. I’ll be shelling until the Fourth of July.

4 Comments »

Salad Genealogy

Posted in The Meals on June 29, 2011 by mjandree

THE PERFECT SUMMER SALAD

This beautiful salad, the perfect summer supper, was crafted by Bunny on Saturday afternoon. Like all of our meals in the garden season, they begin with her question, “What do you have?”

I generally respond with an exacting answer consisting of unconnected components. I tick off the list, “Smooth leaf spinach, sugar snap peas, strawberries, French gray shallots and I’ll have sweet corn in about nine weeks if you are so inclined to wait it out.”

She begins by culling my nonsense from the real options, and pulls together a menu from both what I claim and what she knows we have “put by” in the past year.

To the fresh laundry list I offer: spinach( Johnny’s Select Seeds # 121, slow bolting, dark green and smooth leaved. Planted April 17) and French shallots (these are from Territorial Seed Company and were planted last November, in the dark with snow cutting past the beams of the tractor headlights), she adds eggs, honey and bacon. All raised here on our Double Dutch Farm.

The eggs are from our small flock of hens, mostly my favorite standard breeds, Barred Rocks, Buff Orpingtons and Araucanas. The bacon, from one of the half dozen hogs we raised last year, Yorkshire/Hampshire/Duroc crosses. Lastly there is the honey, extracted with friends from our hives last September. It’s light gold, gathered mainly from Red Mammoth and Dutch White clovers, with a trace of wild flower, kissed with just a blush of apple blossoms.

The only component that has not been wrangled from the farm is that damned splash of lemon juice, essential for the dressing. Not to be out foxed by the reality of living in one of the coldest states of the union, with some of the heaviest snowfalls, I have ventured into citrus farming in Michigan. I have both a lemon and a lime tree potted and growing happily in my herb garden. They have both blossomed and set fruits. They fill the door yard with their exotic fragrances that are as welcome as they are out-of-place. I will take them in the house in September. According to the accompanying and typical propaganda, optimistically titled, ” Success with your new citrus tree,” I will be harvesting a bounty of lemons and limes sometime around the Winter Solstice. Well, that may be, and I’ll keep my mittened fingers crossed, but snipping fresh spinach from the garden at that time of year will be another matter altogether.

2 Comments »

A Field Guide to Rain

Posted in Rain on June 24, 2011 by mjandree

I place rain into three categories. Below you will find field notes for the behavior and habitat of the most common rain types.

“Ten Drops to the Acre” Common in the hot dry months of August. Elusive and often mistaken for real rain if not studied carefully. This type of rain most notably arrives when you are desperate for precipitation. At the point where the corn leaves are starting to look gray and “knifed-up” due to lack of moisture. This is the rain that everyone who knows you is hoping for, so you’ll stop bitching about how it never rains. Then it happens, the poplar leaves turn up their silver bellies, the cattle flies bite, the dark clouds boil up from the horizon and it rains. It rains for about twenty minutes or maybe even a half an hour. The non-growers in my life are elated and happy for me and don’t understand why I glower and kick the earth with the heel of my boot, just to get down on my hands and knees for a closer inspection to prove to myself that this rain did no good. It didn’t penetrate a quarter of an inch. This kind of rain is never helpful for plants or people who have to be near me.
“The Toad Floater” This rain is often seen in movies. It tends to inhabit areas that are already soaked. Can be easily identified by it’s annoying habit of once started, it goes on for days. It’s name, like the evening call of the Whip-Poor-Will makes for positive identification. Just look for toads leisurely floating around in your garden, just there between the turnips and the tomatoes. Although to the casual rain watcher, this rain might seem like a fabulous boon to the grower. It isn’t. It’s too much too fast and most of the benefit runs off from where it is needed most and ends up created amphibian water parks where you need it least.
“The Million Dollar Rain.” This is a rare one indeed and consider yourself fortunate if you see one. It’s secretive habits make it hard to predict. You only need to look at any gardener or farmer to know you’ve made the correct identification on this one. They’ll be found in back yards and off tractors, standing in the rain, with their heads back and hats off and sporting delirious grins. This rain usually has a slow, building start with gentle, low blue-gray clouds and a drop size just above a gentle mist. It doesn’t fall from the sky as much as it floats. Most importantly, does it’s job, while not sticking around long enough to ware out it’s welcome. A gentle soaker that gets to the roots and doesn’t run-off or pool. You couldn’t buy one like this, not even for a million dollars.

3 Comments »

Rain Day

Posted in Rain on June 24, 2011 by mjandree

Baling the hay behind the barn in perfect weather.

Today is a rain day and it looks like a perfect one.

For over 30 years, my fortunes have depended on rain drops. Even though my lively hood has changed and I’m now in an office everyday, I still automatically scan the sky at every opportunity, a habit I can’t kick and probably never will.

My posture is always the same, one hand in my right pocket, the other shading my eyes like a visor, twisting my head in all directions looking for signs of weather. It’s a fickle affair with me, sometimes I want it and sometimes I don’t and even when I do, I only want it when it’s perfect.

My wife will often ask, “What are you looking for anyway?” I can never answer that question in a way that makes any sense. It’s a combination of what I feel and what I see, born mostly out of years of being wrong about my predictions. I’ve gotten better, but I’m still wrong and still hopeful a good part of the time, a necessary mindset for a farmer.

Some rain indicators are easy and fool proof: if I see the silver undersides of the poplar trees in the south fence row and the wind is from the east it will rain. If the flies in the cattle barn are biting, it will rain. If my sweet corn is a week from the milk stage or I just seeded a field over to alfalfa, it will never rain. Then there is the iron clad rule that if I rake a newly mown field of hay, the threat of rain is guaranteed.

On a more scientific bent, I watch the barometer and monitor several weather sites. As good as these all are, I never let myself forget the old timey philosophy of on my now departed neighbor and friend John Deyoung (aka OTG, ” Original Tough Guy). He always told me I could never trust a weather forecast because the Great Lakes had a habit of “Knocking the hell right out of those storms before they get here.” And he’s right about that.