On Gleaning and Fresh From the Farm This Week

The week before summer school started up, I received an email about volunteer opportunities with Hopelink, a non-profit on the Eastside that does all sorts of good things, including, in this case, gleaning fresh vegetables from small farms for the food bank that it operates.

 Gleaning is one of those words that seems completely out of place in our modern day society.  For me, it harkens to Biblical times, in particular, the story of Ruth, a widow, who in order to support herself and her mother-in-law, gleans for grain in the fields of a rich farmer.  The happy ending is that Ruth ends up marrying the rich farmer, Boaz, who also happens to have a heart of gold, and they become ancestors of King David, and ultimately part of Jesus' genealogy.  Not bad for someone who had become marginalized in society as a widow and a stranger in a strange land.  I suppose our modern day equivalent might be dumpster diving or something of the sort, but saying I'm going dumpster diving doesn't quite evoke the same sense as gleaning does.

Hopelink had partnered up with Sno-Valley Harvest, whose motto is "Everyone deserves access to healthy food.  And you can help" and  the volunteer coordinator was a lovely young woman named Jody, an AmeriCorps volunteer, who has been spending her time finding small farms that have extra or non-saleable produce and bringing in gleaning parties to harvest, transport, and bundle the food for Hopelink's food bank.

On Friday morning, I drove out to Monroe, WA, to Present Tense Farm for a two-hour shift to glean braising kale.  I had no idea what to expect and no idea who did this sort of thing, but I guess now I know: people like me. :)  When I arrived, Jody and one of the other volunteers, Bonnie, were already there with Rick coming in right behind me.  The farmers, Jayme and Neil, were a young couple who were leasing an acre or so of land to grow their produce, which they sell at the Queen Anne farmer's market.

Jody gave the three of us some mini-machetes, which worked like a charm, and we got to work harvesting some beautiful curly purple kale.  With four people, the work went quickly, and we filled up about 15 containers of kale in about an hour and a half.  It totaled up to 156 pounds of kale, which is amazing to me.  It really didn't seem like that much at the time, and we didn't even harvest it all.  We had to stop because we ran out of containers but Jody said that the following week she'd come back and harvest the rest with another crew.

After we were done, I spent some time chatting with Jayme and Neil about their farm.  Even though it was only an acre or so, it was astonishing how much food they could grow there.  And their produce was beautiful, healthy and flourishing.  They were leasing the land for a year and began working on their farm in January.  They tilled the fields and put up the large greenhouse on the property where they grew their starts before transplanting them in the ground and now where they grew their warm weather crops like tomatoes and eggplant. (Note to self: I need a greenhouse!!)  They did have issues with deer (I had to ask!), but with the amount they grew, it wasn't too big a deal if a deer ate a bit of it.  Call it a tithe to Nature, which makes sense, though it's still a bit hard for me to embrace that attitude because of the much smaller scale on which I farm. All in all, I had a great time meeting the other volunteers and really loved seeing these small farms out in our larger community.  I especially loved meeting these young farmers who have such a passion for what they do.  It's inspiring and I definitely would love to become a regular in a "gleaning crew" when my other day job finishes up in about 7 weeks.

Present Tense Farm is a nice name for a farm, but there's no farm like THE farm for me.  This week's harvest was abundant after the warm rains and the hot weather from the last few weeks.  My 8-ball zucchinis were forming nicely and most of the favas and peas were ready for harvest. 

 Speaking of deer, I was pretty sure they were the ones who went in and nibbled at the ropes of my bean trellis as well as the tender shoots of some of the plants, (Repeat to self: "Nature deserves her due.  Nature deserves her due") but after doing a little research, it may be that I am too quick to blame everything and anything that goes wrong there on the deer.  In fact, it might actually be slugs or some other type of bug or even birds!  The bean tips get neatly trimmed off about an inch above the ground but not eaten.  Rather, it's left there wilting right next to the sad little stem that's left. Now that just seems like plain spite.  It wouldn't be as annoying if whatever it was actually was eating the shoot, not just killing it, but I have yet to truly sleuth out the culprit.

 All in all, it was an abundant haul.  I decided to do some close-ups of these vegetables to show how beautiful their forms and colors are:

I put all this lovely produce to use in an Ad-Hoc inspired salad that was comprised of fresh red lettuce and arugula, blanched favas and peas, chunks of avocado, and a lemon-honey vinaigrette.  (Ad-Hoc is a wonderful restaurant in Yountville, CA, and the first time I went there, the waiter took probably 15 minutes or so to describe the menu, explaining how the lettuce and much of the other vegetables were grown from The French Laundry gardens down the block, how the beef was from a cow that they bought from a butcher around the corner and that they were eating it from tail to snout, and how the vineyard for the wines were neighbors in the next town over, you get the picture.  And I enjoyed every minute of it!)

Since I still had quite a bit of produce and some orecchiette pasta, I pretty much made another version of the same thing using pasta instead of salad greens.  After decades of making pasta that was too dry or not quite flavorful enough, I finally learned a couple of tricks from watching all those cooking shows that seemed to work well this time:

1. Salt the water so that it's like the ocean.  I usually just added a teaspoon or so thinking it's more for raising the boiling point but now realize that it's also used for flavoring the pasta.  So I used 2 tablespoons or so this time for the water and that made the pasta more flavorful.

2. Keep the pasta water to help make the sauce for the pasta.  Since I wasn't using a tomato sauce or a pesto, the pasta water kept the pasta from sticking together or feeling too dry, which was something I often had a problem with in the past.  And since it was already so salty, it also added more dimension to the sauce and vegetables.

One last note is that wilted, slightly cooked arugula works really well with pasta.  Sometimes arugula can be a bit strong for me, especially since the ones I am growing are going to seed, but cooked with the pasta, it took on a slightly bitter, minerally flavor (in a good way!), which I really liked.

The following is part of the Jewish Encyclopedia's explaination of "leket" or the "gleaning of the fields":

The remains of a crop after harvesting, which must be left for the poor. The Mosaic law enjoins: "And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and the stranger: I am the Lord your God" (Lev. xix. 9, 10). 

"When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shallbe for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow" (Deut. xxiv. 20, 21). These provisions belong to the agricultural poor-laws of the Bible, the transgression of which was punishable with stripes.

In the Book of Ruth there is a description of the manner in which the fields were gleaned. The poor followed the reapers at their work, and gathered all the remains of the crop, both those that fell out of the hands of the reaper and those that escaped the sickle (Ruth ii. 2).--From the Jewish Encyclopedia

I also wanted to share a quote from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, who has this to say about the poor:

"The poor and marginalized see the devil first and most clearly. They have the power to reveal a culture’s actual gods and their blindness!  This is why spiritual seekers must pay very careful attention to the voices of the poor and the marginalized. Not because it's our job to "serve" them from our own limited "truth," but because they see, live, and breathe a truth that our culture and privilege have made invisible to us."

In the midst of such bounty in my own life, I offer up this Prayer of Thanksgiving that I found on beliefnet:

Prayer of Thanksgiving

God of all blessings,
source of all life,
giver of all grace:

We thank you for the gift of life:
for the breath
that sustains life,
for the food of this earth
that nurtures life,
for the love of family and friends
without which there would be no life.

We thank you for the mystery of creation:
for the beauty
that the eye can see,
for the joy
that the ear may hear,
for the unknown
that we cannot behold filling the universe with wonder,
for the expanse of space
that draws us beyond the definitions of our selves.

We thank you for setting us in communities:
for families
who nurture our becoming,
for friends
who love us by choice,
for companions at work,
who share our burdens and daily tasks,
for strangers
who welcome us into their midst,
for people from other lands
who call us to grow in understanding,
for children
who lighten our moments with delight,
for the unborn,
who offer us hope for the future.

We thank you for this day:
for life
and one more day to love,
for opportunity
and one more day to work for justice and peace,
for neighbors
and one more person to love
and by whom be loved,
for your grace
and one more experience of your presence,
for your promise:
to be with us,
to be our God,
and to give salvation.

For these, and all blessings,
we give you thanks, eternal, loving God,
through Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.

--Adapted from "Prayers of Our Hearts" © 1991 Vienna Cobb Anderson

 

Flower Power

I think I've shared in the past about my childhood desire to be a florist when everyone else wanted to be a nurse or a astronaut or a circus clown.  I've been making up little nosegays and bouquets from flowers from my and my dad's yard non-stop recently.  Perhaps I'm simply returning to my roots (pun intended), as I've just previously shared here, in yet another way.

There's something inherently satisfying in being able to put together a bouquet for someone and proudly say, "I grew that!"  I know it's not good to brag, but yes, I do want a gold star because I'm kind of a big deal! (I've been reading over some old blog posts and was reminded of my goal to embrace youthful hubris when I read this. :))

I don't naturally migrate to the soft pinks, whites, purples, and blues if I were to pick a ready made bouquet but since I used a seed packet called "Grandmother's Cutting Garden" by Botanical Interest, this is the sweet mixture that comes out of the ground year after year.  Bachelor's Buttons, Sweet Williams, Love-in-the-mist, and campanulas dominated the garden this year.  I also tucked in some sage flowers for contrast and their heavenly smell and added some borage for texture.  I also have been putting together big bouquets of borage because the blossoms are so abundant that some of the stems are ripping off the stalk due to the weight.  The bees couldn't bee (pun intended) happier!

This last bouquet is made up of roses from Dad's garden.  I'm not necessarily a fan of roses given how fussy they are but I may be a convert.  This sweet little bouquet perfumed the whole house for days and I loved how the the gorgeous shades of pink, red, orange, and mauve complimented each other.  I stuck a few branches of barberry bush in there for height and contrast.  This is one scary plant with a sharp thorn hidden behind each rosy leaf.

In the end, I can't really say that I "arranged" these flowers.  When the flowers you have are all so beautiful and fresh, it takes very little skill to put them together in a pleasing way.  But I'll still take that gold star.

This last photo is just a bonus picture of a flower called "kalmia."  I'd never seen this sort of flower before but found it on campus one day while walking to my office.  The kalmia is a plant related to the rhododendron, and its flowers and leaves can be deadly.  It's sweet clusters spiral upward and remind me of something else that's sweet:

But you've already been warned; the flowers are dangerous so no eating.  (They're also know as "sheepkiller flowers" (!!).

Is there such a thing as flower fever?  Because I think I've got it bad.

Staycation All I Ever Wanted

Last week's staycation at the farm was just what I needed after a hectic quarter (the week before I had no less than 3 students crying in my office!).  Rather than commute back and forth from my condo to there,  I decided to stay overnight for a few days in order to be able to work on the garden in a more leisurely manner.  I also wanted to take a break from the usual routines and to be able to wake up and sleep surrounded by nature.  And I got just what I asked for.

One of the first things I usually do when I get to the farm is to make the rounds and to see what is blooming, pickable, or in dire need of weeding.  This time around, I saw that all the garlic had grown scapes that were  getting ready to bloom so off they came so that the garlic would expend its energy into growing its bulb rather than flowering.  Garlic scapes have a mild garlicky flavor (surprise!) and are great sauteed or stir fried with some other veg.

I also had a few projects in mind besides the usual non-stop weeding.  Linda, the queen of DIY, had given me a few milk jugs when I had told her my theory that the reason why my tomatoes had been doing so dismally year after year was the lack of consistent watering.  She suggested I use the jugs to create self-watering reservoirs for the tomatoes, which I thought was a great idea.  "How hard can it be?" is my inherited motto but sometimes it doesn't quite prove true.  These containers were a bit trickier than anticipated as I was apparently overzealous with my poking on the first two jugs.  When I went to check on them the day after I filled the jugs, they were already completely empty.  So round two had me poking only two tiny holes on the side facing the tomato. This time around, the jugs seemed about a third full when I checked the next day but it was a little hard to judge the depth of the water, so I'm going to leave them be and see how the tomatoes fare this summer.

My other project of which I'm rather proud is this bean trellis that I constructed out of twine and the bamboo poles from my dad's back yard.  When I initially told him my plan, my dad wanted to give me 5' poles, saying that they'd be hard to fit in the car otherwise, but I was pretty sure that bean trellises were usually around 8 feet tall as I had seen them towering over other people's backyard fences.  We compromised at 6' and he trimmed up the poles he had harvested from his bamboo trees.  Once they were in the ground, they were a little under 6' with the horizontal pole just high enough to not be eye-poking height (at least for me).  I wound the twine around the top and bottom, then immediately put my scarlet runner beans, which I had started at home and were ready to climb, in the ground.  I had put some squash in the space between the poles but on second thought, after seeing some photos of how full the vines get, I moved them to more open space.

Dad came to visit me out at the farm and did a whole lot of weedwacking, which spiffed the place up quite a bit.  We picked the first of the favas and shelling peas, though he kept protesting that the favas were still too small but I was glad we could enjoy the young tender beans which didn't have to be shucked twice because the inner membrane was still tender enough to eat.  For my next harvest, I want to try grilled fava beans, which I'd also heard praises about from Ms. Foodie herself, Vicky, when she went to Kyoto in the spring.

Finally, I was able to make several bouquets of flowers for friends and family from flowers that I had grown from seed (which is its own small thrill) and which have been blooming so wildly these last few weeks.  The Sweet William along with cuttings of sage flowers just smelled fantastic and I also learned the name of the bell-shaped mystery flowers, campanula or bellflower, as well as these delicate blue flowers with the fern-like leaves: love-in-the-mist.  Isn't that just an absolutely fantastic name?

I could've stayed there longer but duty called and it also started raining and raining, so with reluctance, I packed up and returned to reality.  But I'll be out there again.  That's the lovely thing about staycations--you don't have to travel anywhere to go on one.  You're already there; you just need to make that mental switch to begin one.

I'll finish with two quotes from Simone Weil about what it means to pay attention.  It seems that often the victim of busyness is our attention and most of the time, we need to get away from it all to open up the space to pay attention again.  However, once we return to "reality," that attention diminishes or disappears again.  Staycations can be little portals to paying attention again, to each other, to the beauty around us, and to the things that matter, and I can't wait until I can go on another one.

"[Attention is] a suspension of one's own self as a center of the world and making oneself available to the reality of another being."--Simone Weil

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."--Simone Weil

Returning

A few weeks ago, I went out onto my back balcony, which had finally been liberated from the builders who had been redoing the siding, roof, railings, etc., of my condo for the last 4 months.  I have a storage unit out back and I wanted to get a couple of things out of it.  Right when I stepped outdoors, a robin started chattering furiously at me from the tree, and hovered around on the branches of the pine tree in front of my balcony, all the while scolding me.  It took me awhile but I finally remembered that the year before, the same thing had happened and it was because a pair of robins had built a nest on the waterspout by the balcony.  I looked over behind me and lo and behold, there was a robin's nest on the water spout full of little baby birds.  They had returned to nest in the same place as last year.  This really surprised me since the building had been undergoing massive renovation for months and in particular, recently the builders had been repainting and making all sorts of racket outside.  But there they all were and I saw that the painters had only painted halfway up the spout in deference to the birds' nest, which was sweet of them.

This got me thinking about the whole instinct that all animals seem to have to return to the familiar, especially as I had recently applied to renew my Taiwanese passport after over 30 years of not having one.  My father and I are returning to Asia this fall.  I say return because we are heading to Taiwan, my birthplace, and then China, his birthplace, to visit the old, probably not-so-familiar-anymore sights and to see former friends and even family who are still there.  In the process, my father had decided to re-apply for a Taiwanese passport although we'd been US citizens for over 30 years.  Partly this was because Taiwanese citizens can obtain a special visa to enter China and by so doing, we would be able to bypass having to get one as American citizens.  When I had lived and worked in Taiwan about ten years ago, I had considered re-applying for my passport then but got stymied by all the bureaucracy in a language that I didn't speak or read very well, so I had forgone doing so. However, this time around, since my dad was already doing one for himself, I asked him to help me get one, too.

The process of applying for a Taiwan passport is much like any other: there are forms to fill out, passport size photos to be taken, and verifications of identity and residence.  In order to show previous residence, my father pulled out what seemed like an ancient manuscript to me: a yellowing typed document with red ribbons dated from 1975.  It was a notarized copy of our household registry, or hukou, from that time.  

In Taiwan as well as China, Japan, Vietnam, and even several European countries like Germany, the household registry is an important document that tracks important family events like births, marriages, deaths, and immigration status.  This process of recording dates back to the Xia Dynasty (2100-1600 BCE) when a system was needed in order to tax (what else), conscript, and keep track of the citizenry.  In recent history, the method of hukou in China has been somewhat controversial as it has been used as a means to control the movement of rural citizens to urban areas where oftentimes more job opportunities are available.  If a person doesn't have a legal hukou in the city, he or she can be denied employer-provided housing, health care, and access to other services, effectively becoming an undocumented worker in his or her own country.  Before my parents had immigrated from Taiwan, they had the forethought to get their houkou translated and notarized and now, all these years later, it was needed again.

I had never seen or even known of this document's existence.  Looking at it was truly like stepping into a time capsule.  Seeing my grandparents' names in English [aren't all grandparents just called  "kung kung" (grandpa) or "po po" (grandma)??] as well as my mom and dad and all my mom's various siblings' names really brought home the fact that despite not being very close to my relatives, that here was a document that inextricably tied us all together.

Ever the pragmatist, my father was not nearly so impressed by these papers.  He filled out the paperwork for me (he reads Chinese whereas I barely do) and then one Thursday in May, he took the bus downtown to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) to get the forms processed.  I wasn't able to accompany him as I had to work but from what he told me, usually the person who was filing the paperwork needed to be present to get the form processed.  However, as a long-standing member of the Chinese community, he knew several of the people who worked at the TECO office and one of the administrative assistants, upon recognizing him, vouched for my existence and he was able to get the deed done.  These are certainly times when having guanxi, or connections, is beneficial.

 Probably not more than two weeks later, my father handed me my Taiwanese passport.  Despite not really knowing the purpose of having one, it was still a thrill to get this newly minted passport that showed my birthright as someone born in Taiwan.  My original Taiwanese passport had been issued when we immigrated from there when I was six years old.  At that time, I didn't even have my own passport but instead, shared one with my mother.  I still remember the black and white photo of me sitting with her from the passport although the passport itself had been long lost.  On the back page of this new passport, there was a note that indicated just that exact situation: that I had originally had a passport with my mother, its issue date, number, and the fact that it had been lost.  It seemed somewhat surreal that after all these decades, and what had seemed overwhelmingly difficult when I lived in Taiwan, was now accomplished so easily and quickly.

I read somewhere that robins will continue to go back and nest in the same spot year after year even if you try to discourage them by tearing down their nest before it's finished and that they also have an innate ability to know how to build the nest.  I don't think that the desire by my father and I to return to the place of our birth is quite so evolutionarily instilled but who knows?  Perhaps we're not as wise or complex as we think.

I thought I'd end with Li-Young Lee's poem "The Gift," which certainly is about legacy, planted in the narrator as a child, a gift that he only realized years later.

The Gift
by Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he’d removed the iron sliver I thought I’d die from. I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head. Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame. Had you followed that boy you would have arrived here, where I bend over my wife’s right hand. Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, Metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.

Li-Young Lee, "The Gift" from Rose. Copyright © 1986