Long Island Cheese Pumpkin {Favorite Flavors}

Have you ever had finger-licking good pumpkin?

You might think that such a thing doesn't exist. Truthfully, I didn't either. I am disappointed by watery, slightly bitter squash every time I roast a pie pumpkin. I honestly usually enjoy the roasted seeds more than the pumpkin.

That is, until my farm friend Al from Stonefield Naturals gave me four heirloom winter squash to compare. Four deeply autumnal colored skins, four textures of flesh, four sizes of seed.

roasted pie pumpkin

I took the variety to a potluck dinner. We scooped the oven-roasted squash plain to taste all the nuances of the flavors.

Long Island Cheese, the biggest squash, won every person's vote. The dusky sunset-colored skin yields fully cooked, deep orange flesh after a fourty-five minute roast in a medium oven. Buttery in texture and mildly sweet, the Long Island Cheese flavor embodies everything great about fall - warmth, richness, settling earthiness.

I shared cold puree with friends who couldn't believe I'd added no sugar, no fat, or seasoning. The Long Island Cheese is scrumptious all on its own. I couldn't help myself but lick my fingers as I pressed the roasted squash into jars for storage and I keep coming back to the fridge for spoonfuls.

wp-1447451390111

You can bet I'll buy some more of these beauties from Al at the Worthington Indoor Farmers' Market before the season ends. They're going in my garden plan for next year too - Baker Creek caries the variety if you can't get your hands on seeds to save.

What's your favorite flavor these days?

Phyllis's Gingerbread Cake {Recipe}

It's young ginger season again at Swainway Urban Farm! We love growing this beautiful tropical plant and enjoying the mild, clean flavor of the young ginger.

Last year some time, my mom mentioned my Grandma Phyllis's ginger bread recipe. We didn't eat it much growing up so I adapted it with our fresh young ginger and whole ingredients to try. Here's a cake I can love!

I've made this dark, molasses-sweetened cake several times since, including at a recent Seasoned Farmhouse class. Everyone enjoyed the simple, rich flavors.

This gingerbread easy to make, requiring no stand mixer and few dishes. Freshly whipped cream lightens and smooths the rich flavors. Try this recipe for the holidays or any time you want a special autumnal treat.

Grandma Phyllis's Gingerbread Cake

Makes: 8x8" cake, approximately 9 servings Time: 45 minutes

1/4 cup unsalted butter + extra for greasing pan 1/4 cup white sugar 1/2 cup molasses 1 egg 1 small thumb young ginger, grated 1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour 3/4 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon cloves 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup hot water Whipped cream, sweetened and flavored to your liking, optional but highly recommended.

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. 2. Butter an 8x8 glass baking pan and set aside. 3. Melt butter in small sauce pan, allow to cool slightly. 4. Transfer butter to a medium bowl. Add sugar, molasses, egg, and ginger and whisk together until smooth. 5. In a separate bowl, stir together flour, soda, cinnamon, cloves, and salt. Meanwhile, heat water. 6. Alternately add flour mixture and hot water to butter mixture, stirring until smooth after each addition. 7. Bake for 35-45 minutes or until cake tester inserted in middle comes clean. Allow to cool before serving with freshly whipped cream.

Growing Edges

Have you ever noticed where weeds are most intrusive in the garden?Where the forest erupts in plant diversity? Where shellfish thrive?

On the edges.

The boundaries of the raised bed, the forest floor, and the ocean shore are teaming with life.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over.

Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Growing Edges

A former supervisor used to visit the concept of growing edges in my employee review. She wanted to know where I was expanding and challenging myself and also what support she could offer.

I was uncomfortable with this concept. Visiting your boundaries requires admitting that you have room to grow, that you are full of imperfection.

Standing on the edge comes with a risk of falling and failing. Sometimes the waves splash and the weeds scratch. Sometimes breaking through boundaries feels exhausting and overwhelming.

Growing edges in nature are so intensive because resources are bountiful at boundaries. Newly turned soil at garden bed edges expose weed seeds. Ocean water splashing and pooling on the shore allow fish fry, algae, and shellfish to thrive. The sunlight at the edge of a forest gives plants an opportunity to flourish.

The idea of 'growing edges' was introduced to me over a decade ago. For most of the intervening time, my pride and discomfort have largely kept me far from the shore. I've busied myself with providing for others instead of bettering myself.

Eventually I realized that residing in my personal growing edges brings more resources to me. More courage comes when I take a step into the fray. More peace materializes when I change my fear of the edge to love. I experience layer upon layer of growth by becoming comfortable with the unknown abundance awaiting me.

I took a little break from this writing space to explore some edges recently. I'm ready to return and grateful for those of you still here.

What are your growing edges?

Sharing Strawberries

This spring has been a good for strawberries. Great, even. Our patches produced enough for multiple quarts daily that we've eaten fresh, frozen, and made into jam. Enough that the afternoon "pick me" call feels more like a chore as days go by. Enough that I revisit this memory often:

I am nine or ten years old, maybe a little younger. (I judge these things by how many sisters exist in the memory and I think my youngest sister was a baby then.) My family and grandparents are gathered at the Columbus Zoo for a picnic and performance in the old amphitheater along the river. I remember blankets on the grass, a few folding chairs, and a lot of people crowded into a large lawn.

Potluck picnic dishes come out of the coolers. I recall only one, a large translucent yellow Tupperware canister. Great Grandma was a Tupperware lady so Grandma was appropriately outfitted, each woman distinguishing her collection by marking their last name on the lid in wax pencil. Some of these Tupperware still exist in our family and we now wash carefully around the handwritten 'Davis' or 'Ward' because the women who wrote those letters are dear to us.

Inside the Tupperware is an abundance of tiny, ruby red homegrown strawberries. They're freshly picked and topped but kept whole for easy eating by hand.

I'm wowed by these fruit, helping myself to one after another. All are sweet and juicy, undoubtedly my fingers stain red. Some are transcendent, as is the way of homegrown berries. I think Grandma is a super woman for growing and sharing these delicious jewels.

I vaguely recall an admonition for eating so many, or perhaps for not sharing with my sisters. But in my memory, the Tupperware never empties.

I now understand, after a spring of bending over the berry patch, that Grandma might have a different recollection of those strawberry days. By this time of year, I've had my fill of fresh berries and preserved plenty, yet the ripe fruits still beckon. Grandma wouldn't ever let them go to waste and neither do I. So I continue picking, sharing with friends and family, and just maybe creating memories for the future.

Five Things I Know About Keeping Bees

1. Bees die. Sometimes they die as part of the natural life cycle and are carried out of the hive by coroner bees. Sometimes whole hives die from cold or starvation, the fate of the bees kept on our property the last two winters respectively. Dead hives are fascinating and beautiful in their own morbid way.

2. Bees can come in a box. Thousands of them hum around a queen trapped in a smaller cage inside the box. The community vibrates, singularly focused on surrounding their leader. Some people find the boxes unnerving, but I feel like they're a fascinating example of the possibility of community.

3. Bees thrive in community. Our friend Eve is the main caretaker of the bees on our property. Alex, Lil, and I assist Eve when we can, including building a new hive and helping install new bees this spring. Family, friends, and visitors watch, learn from, and share the sweetness of bees together.

4. Keeping bees requires a brave, gentle spirit. Eve embodies this calming attitude every time I see her work with the bees. Hives often send out a scout to check out visitors and I've watched them send additional bees to check out a nervous visitor. I take deep slow breaths to calm the scout and they generally let me sit very close to the hive to watch. If the bees don't seem to want me there, I leave respectfully.

5. We need bees and bees need us. Many produce plants need pollinators to produce abundant crops, which is one of many reasons we keep them. We like to eat their honey too, of course.  On the flip side, bees, particularly honey bees, need protection from pesticides and food and water sources. We choose to encourage pollinators by not using chemicals that might affect bees and provide as many sources of pollen and nectar as we can.

What do you know about keeping bees?

Frog In The Swond - Attracting Wildlife With Water

We're coming upon our third growing season at the Harmonious Homestead property. As I think about the year ahead, it occurs to be that I've never shared the most exciting goal we achieved last year. The frog in the swond. When we moved here, our property was like a park. We enjoyed big, beautiful trees and bemoaned the excessive lawn. We watched a few species of birds and wild animals, large and small.

Something was clearly missing. Amphibians. The presence of amphibians in any environment indicates clean water, active insect life, and lots of other good things. Despite our area being often wet, no neighbors could recall seeing any toads or frogs.

I made it my goal to attract a toad or frog to our place.

Needing a Pond

In July 2013, we experienced heavy rain and thorough flooding of the Swainway garden in the front of our property. The crops weren't totally lost but they weren't healthy either.

During the winter of 2013-2014, several delivery trucks and cars got stuck in the same area. The cause? 3 parts bad driving and 1 part totally saturated ground.

We talked with Joseph, manager of the Swainway gardens at our place, and decided we needed a seasonal catchment basin for the excess water.

Building A Swond

Under Joseph's direction, we rented a machine. He dug for several days until we had a five foot deep meandering hole in the front yard. He invented the the term 'swond' to describe the depression that would hopefully hold and move water seasonally like a cross between a swale and a pond.

It filled with rain and emptied with evaporation for the rest of the summer. We planted wildflowers, cattails, and ornamental willows around the edges. Lil thought a troll might decide to live in the swond, so we wrote a warning sign.

Water skimmers showed up. Bees sipped at the shoreline. Lil discovered a praying mantis on cattails.

One day, Alex came in and said there was a frog. "It jumped," he said. I headed out and I saw....no frog.

Two more times Alex spied the frog before I finally caught a glimpse. A green frog in my swond!

When moving compost to the garlic beds in October, we found a brown toad. Two amphibians near the swond!

I imagine toad and frog are buried underground now. I hope they survived the winter and will call friends to the swond soon so Harmonious Homestead will never be without amphibians again.

Alex has other goals. He says he'll know we're successful in restoring the area's wildlife when a great blue heron stops by to snack on a frog. A pair of mallard ducks checked out the pond recently, so maybe we're close to that goal too.

Printing & the Hand-Made Ethic #MoveOurIgloo

I have a new tradition. On Sunday mornings instead of giving to a church plate, I give to a Kickstarter project. Not every Sunday, and not always Kickstarter, but over the last few years I've shifted from charitable giving to funding small businesses. Why this is would be an interesting post in itself, but I don't have time for those mental gymnastics today. I want to tell you about who I'm backing this Sunday.

Igloo Letterpress is a small print shop in downtown Worthington. I first met the owner Allison when she taught a workshop at Wild Goose Creative about book making. I have made hundreds of her simple folded paper books for Lil over the years. When I need a special card or want to feel connected to a different time, I head to Igloo.

The presses in Allison's shop are historical pieces that allow her and a small staff to continue the letterpress tradition of setting type by hand. Their products, cards, posters, and books, all elevate the act of letter writing, record-keeping, and promotion.

In this digital world, I find myself drawn to giving and receiving hand-written notes. All the better if the paper used has already passed through hands that carefully cut, fold, and imprint.

Igloo Letterpress has always been an open and welcoming place to learn and experiment with letterpress. Lil and I have attended walk-in printing activities and on Thursday Allison, Beth, and other staff allowed a group of bloggers including myself to print a set of notecards and make hand-bound books. They're great teachers and clearly passionate about the hand-made ethic of printing, even in tight quarters as it was with so many people and machines at the event I attended this week.

Today I pledged to Igloo's Kickstarter campaign to outfit a teaching space in their new location. This will be where groups can comfortably learn to carry on the tradition of letterpress. It's where Beth can say yes to Scout troops and friend groups who want to gather and share in a hand-made experience. The new studio will include a new (to Igloo) press dedicated to educational and community work. If you can, contribute to the #MoveOurIgloo - there are great rewards!

"Science Lesson" {Homestead Haiku}

Unschool girls in woods. What better teacher exists than Mother Nature?