Rhubarb

When I was little, I found rhubarb terrifying. There was something about those big, crinkly leaves, the way it grew so quickly in the spring, the deep red stalks that gave me the creeps. I would hide behind the barn and peer around the corner, just to shiver at the sight. I did not like large vegetables, overgrown or otherwise. Even today, a huge zucchini emerging from the undergrowth will make me scream. There’s something wrong about it.

That being said, I have two rhubarb plants in my back garden and there are six more thriving in the school garden, where I have been working to restore order. So, it is the season. I made a rhubarb cake, which we love and ate quickly. Then I made some rhubarb pickles because I have been pickling everything lately. They were…ok. Maybe they are getting better over time, as the flavors meld. I’ll check again in couple of days. That left quite a bit of the plant, so I tried the rhubarb marmalade in the newspaper. Yum. I simplified the recipe a little bit and it feels more like a jam to me, but the flavors are amazing.  Who knew a scary plant could become so tasty.

Rhubarb Marmalade

Makes about 7 half pints

•About 2¼ pounds rhubarb, cut into ½-inch pieces to measure 8 cups

•4½ cups granulated sugar

•2 oranges, zested and chopped

•1 lemon, zested and chopped

•¼ cup finely chopped candied ginger

In non aluminum bowl, combine the rhubarb with the sugar. Cover and let stand overnight at room temperature.

Place the prepared oranges and lemon in a heavy pot, along with the rhubarb and sugar mixture, and the butter. Bring the mixture to a full rolling boil over medium high heat, stirring frequently. Reduce the heat to a slow boil and continue simmering, stirring frequently, until the mixture has reached the jelly stage (220 degrees from sea level up to 1,000 feet; 216 degrees at 2,000 feet; 214 degrees at 3,000 feet; 212 degrees at 4,000 feet; 211 degrees at 5,000 feet; 209 degrees at 6,000 feet; 207 degrees at 7,000 feet; 205 degrees at 8,000 feet), stirring constantly, about 8 minutes to 10 minutes.

Remove from heat, add ginger and rind. Let sit for about 2 minutes, then skim off any foam that has accumulated. Ladle the marmalade into individual containers for storage in the refrigerator or freezer.

For long-term storage at room temperature: Have 7 half-pint canning jars washed and ready for filling when the marmalade is through cooking. Prepare canning lids as manufacturer directs. While it is still hot, ladle into 1 clean and hot canning jar at a time, leaving ¼-inch head space. Wipe jar rim with a clean damp cloth. Attach lid. Fill and close remaining jars. Process in a boiling-water canner for 10 minutes 

Green Dream

Green dreams….

These days, I wake at dawn, grey light filtering through clouds, through my eyes. It is not time to rise, drink tea, get moving on the day, but to dream, halfway between waking and sleeping. I have green dreams. I think what is growing in the front yard, the hop vine adding several inches a day, waving above the trellis. I remember the bean seeds I planted in the warm moist ground the day before. I plan where  and what I need to do next, at home and at the school garden, which we are slowly bringing back to order.  Weeds and irrigation systems tangle in my brain with potato starts and mints to be replanted on the herb mound. These days, there is no sound of traffic, or early morning workers on the move. It is silent, except for the haunting whoo  of pigeons, calling for the friends. And the quiet rustle of plants, growing towards the light.

Green dreams.

When I pulled the tarot card for My Day, it was the Knight of Cups: what kindles your dreaming soul?

Snapshots from Stay at Home, Save Lives

  

              The greenhouse is packed. It’s always pretty full this time of year, when tomatoes have been bumped up, some summer greens are waiting to go out, and the vines have just been planted in the four inch pots. But, this year, it is also holding all of my classroom plants, with some hanging from the ceiling because there was no room on the shelves, as well as a napping cat, and my work computer on sunny mornings. Add in a sweater or other piece of clothing needing some sun, a used mug or two, and a folding chair so that we can both eat lunch in the steaming warmth of plant growth, and it is packed.

                The shed has been cleaned out. Much like the cozy room closet, I was looking for some wood stored in the open loft and discovered a mess.   

This time, it was hazelnut shells that the squirrels had feasted on as well as rodent droppings and some leaves that had blown in. I was handing down boards to Mark when I spotted the nests so he climbed up the ladder and sighed. “I guess we’d better haul everything out from below,” he observed. “It’ll only be worse if we don’t.” We exploded the shed, pulling everything, including the shelves, out. While Mark swept inside, I cleaned up the piles—corralling the bird netting back into its tub, putting remay into a tin so that it could not become a nest, sorting out stuff we no longer needed. After we were done, we tucked everything back in. And there was more space.

          

      I have succumbed to the sourdough trend. After the Yeast Panic early this week, I began a starter. I’ve always wondered about the wild yeasties floating around my kitchen and now they are cheerfully bubbling away on the top of my fridge. We had our first batch of sourdough pancakes for breakfast on Sunday morning.  I miss the library—figuring this out would be much easier if I could sit on the floor, surrounded by various cookbooks, because there are so many variations on this theme. MY book was written by a homesteading woman who spends her entire day in the kitchen and garden, raising five kids. Her system is pretty labor intensive and productive. I don’t need that much starter! So I will be experimenting, sorting out systems that work for us when life becomes more scheduled once again.

               

Sweater Compost

   

        

     While putting away the Easter decorations, I discovered that two of my oldest sweaters had been destroyed by moths. They had eaten their way through the middle of one sweater completely and were on their way through the second. To be fair—these sweaters were on their way out; I had been patching and repairing them for several years. But, it was still a shock. I quickly cleared out the entire closet, flinging the contents all over the living room. No more sweaters were damaged! My great-grandmother’s shawl was fine. I moved onto the chest of drawers that holds our hats and scarves. Two of Mark’s ancient wool hats were munched. I dug through the yarn stash (probably the source of the moth problem) and cleared out a ball and a half of yarn. Then I checked the bedroom—there was sweater dust, but the sweaters were fine. I washed down the closet and the chest, then carried the remaining sweaters out to the greenhouse, where they are airing in the sun.

                This morning, Mark was in charge of disposal. My plan was to lay them in the bottom of the compost, but he was worried that they would not break down quickly enough. They are both all wool and rather sheepy, but thick. One was natural, untreated wool, still a little oily after twenty five years. Because he was reluctant to compost them in the hoops, he dug down into one of the garden beds until he hit the base layer of clay. As he dug, he considered the power of double dug bio-char to deepen the soil, but was just a theoretical consideration. When he was down to clay, we spread the sweaters out and buried them. They were good sweaters—the black one I knit my last winter in New England, while in graduate school. The brown one was my first Portland sweater, a lovely rug on a damp and rainy day, which I wore canvassing for OSPIRG in the early spring. They had served me well—and now, they will take care of us one more time, as compost.

Strong Towns

            Mark and I have been reading Strong Towns by Charles L Marohn, a chapter at a time. It becomes the focus of our walking conversations—a vast improvement over the latest corona virus details or fuss over local politics. Right now, Mark is ahead, so he keeps dropping tantalizing hints as to what is to come. Last Sunday, we walked out to the edge of the city to deliver some quick breads. On the way back, right at the edge of town, we passed a patch of untrimmed blackberries about to take over the sidewalk. “That’s exactly what he’s talking about!” I realized. Here, in Corvallis, we have infrastructure that we cannot maintain over the long haul. 

            The basic premise of Strong Towns is that we have broken our old development patterns of incremental growth and slow upgrading of “infill” in favor of building out entire neighborhoods far from the economic centers of towns and cities. Even if developers pay for the original infrastructure (roads, pipes, storm water run-off, parks), the city will be paying for the upkeep and maintenance for hundreds of years. And, because we have sprawled over the landscape, we do not have the money to do so. He is also worried that these neighborhoods will all “fail” at the same time; every house on the block will need major repairs within five years of the first house.  Just think of 25 year roofs; even if a few last longer, they will all need to be replaced at about the same time. If the repairs are not done, the housing stock will degrade very quickly, as will the tax base. It’s a grim future he sees for many cities and suburbs in the United States. I am a little over half way through, so I am hoping that he has a glimmer of hope for us all.

            The blackberry vine taking over the sidewalk encapsulates the problem. First, it is on the public side of a backyard fence of a house that was built on a cul-de-sac, a recent development pattern.  Cul de sacs are “good” for families because they provide a “safe” place for kids to play, but they are bad urban design because they reduce connectivity, which supports walking and biking, thus discouraging community interaction. They also create some nasty sidewalks, because people want privacy, so they build fences along the back yard, which is often along the sidewalk of the larger collector street. It is not comfortable to walk long blocks of fences in various states of repair, dodging overgrown shrubbery that belongs to everyone, thus no one maintains it.  That aggressive, thorny Himalayan Blackberry, grown from a casual seed dropped by a bird, becomes a menace.  And, because we have so many collector streets in the newer parts of town, it is impossible for the city to trim them all back in a timely fashion.

            The blackberry is only one example of this problem. Keeping all of our streets maintained to a decent level to reduce even more costly repaving projects, fixing leaky pipes so that we waste less water and the energy needed to clean it at both ends, planting and pruning street trees, keeping the park bathrooms open….the further from the town centers we go, the more expensive it becomes to do all of this. Marohn argues that we have to acknowledge this problem and make some hard decisions. What areas of our cities do we need to hold onto? What areas will be let go? His primary audience, I believe, is me, as a city councilor wrestling with budgets and policy decisions, but it’s a clearly written, if not frisky, piece of work. And it will change the way you view that blackberry that just snagged your sweater as you walk by.

             

the Peace of Knitting

Stress knitting… it’s a thing. I have been avoiding the action for the past three weeks, but on Friday, I broke down. It was a combination of trying to focus on online meetings—in person meetings are hard enough!—wrestling with technology, constantly changing and vague answers, lack of daily human contact, a rapidly diminishing supply of reading material, and rain. Cold, downpouring rain for days. My mind was jumping from one thing to another, unable to settle, much like the weather.

I knew it would come to this. I had purchased a complex sweater pattern and yarn several years ago, but I had not yet begun the sweater. I did not need another sweater, especially not a heavy one made with grey, sheepy yarn. I have enough sweaters. I do not wear the ones I have…all sorts of reasons to not begin.  The yarn was sitting in the closet and the bottom of the yarn bag, mocking me every time I sorted through the stash, vowing to knit it all down. Six skeins of yarn…. Waiting.

On Friday, I realized that I may not need a sweater to wear, but I did need a sweater to knit.  Socks, hats, earmuffs for bike helmets are all quick projects, to be begun and done over the weekend or on a long car drive. Sweaters, especially complex ones, are a commitment. They engage the mind in a different way; they grow slowly in the evenings, an inch at a time. I am fast enough to see growth after about 45 minutes, but a complex sweater will take weeks, not days, to finish. Knitting a sweater, you are in it for the long haul. And knitting is a calming process, engaging just enough of the mind to settle it to wander into calming paths, not jumping from action to action, thought to thought.

So I hauled out the pattern, rearranged it to be knit on circular needles all at once, not in pieces to be sewn together (why would anyone sew a sweater together?!), and cast on 173 stitches. Before long, the rhythm settled my mind. By dinnertime, I was done with the ribbing, counting stitches to set the pattern, and settled in. Peace.

If this goes on for months, Mark and the cat will be sporting Irish Knit sweaters next winter.

Time

               Maybe it is because I am shut off from the world of teaching, or because I have been re-reading The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart, but I have been thinking about my sophomore year of high school this week.  My English teacher, Mrs. Sarner, assigned us The Once and Future King by T.H. White, a tome of a novel, written in Britain during World War Two. I loved the book, even the dark, dark sections when the Round Table was collapsing because men value Might over Right.  As a tenth grader, I picked up on some of the underlying fears and ideas for world peace and the removal of boundaries, and the hints of the United Nations, a future historian in the making.  When I was done, I began an hunt for all of the other versions of the King Arthur legend, which led me to the Hallow Hills, and John Steinbeck’s and Mark Twain’s  takes on the story,  and then back to some of the original work by Malory.  Then I moved outward to the Elder Edda, and Welsh mythology, and Conan the Barbarian.  

                What I had, even in my very excellent high school, was the gift of time. Sure, I had chores at home—I was in charge of cleaning the apartment and doing the laundry in our wringer washing machine every Saturday while my mother worked—and homework, which I did with various degrees of enthusiasm, but I still had time to read, and think, and dream of worlds far beyond Hampstead, New Hampshire. I had no scheduled lessons, or teams, or activities. Many of my friends lived half an hour away, because of the nature of consolidated high schools in semi-rural New England.  When we visited, we took our pillows, our books, our notebooks, and spent the night. Time.

                With time comes self-directed learning. When I wanted to know more about King Arthur, I had time to read as many books as I wanted, as long as the dishes were done when my mother came home. After I graduated from college, I realized I had not read many nineteenth century novels, so I spent a long, hot  summer with weird afternoon dreams of Dickens. I had time. Long hikes and road trips lead to self-discovery and education; we read Walden while walking around Mt. Rainier. My partner had the same experiences—he grew up roaming the woods, examining things under a microscope, and learning calculus in the back of his classroom. Different subjects, maybe, but the same concept.  Time.

                And so, many of us have time right now. My students certainly do, as school is still closed and I hope they have caught up on their sleep. Maybe some self-directed learning is in order. Mark has set up his microscope on the living room bench. During the downpours, I am taking another whack at learning perspective in drawing. I am looking for books on urban design for the 21^st century, rethinking the way we design communities. And, if I can get access to sources on-line, I want to answer the question: did people in 1930 know how bad it was going to get? because I think it will help me understand this time right now. Time. What do you want to learn?