How's Your View?

This afternoon, I plan to spend a couple of hours bent over in the willow bed looking at the bases of plants as I harvest them. Tomorrow, I'll spend a few more hours in the studio looking at the individual willows I cut today and sorting them by quality and size and utility. In these two tasks, I see the material from completely different points of view. Ah, I love the smell of metaphors in the springtime.

Even though I don't use much willow in my fiber art or teaching any more, the willow harvest is still an important ritual for me. The repetitive tasks of cutting and sorting give me time to reflect on pieces I've put on hold, classes I'm developing, and ideas that are incubating. An idea that's been bubbling up to the surface a lot lately is point of view.

One element that's been factoring into this stew of ideas about point of view comes from a Tumblr microblog called Science Is Beauty. One day it's a post of a micrographic image, another it's something like this animation of an iceberg collision seen from space, which originally appeared at Wired Science.

Out in the willow bed where my hands are full, I don't stop to make lists. I just reflect and let my mind wander. And it seems to work for me. Perhaps it's because all the blood rushes to my brain when I'm bent over? Maybe not. I'll think about that, too, while I cut today.

What tasks help you reflect and get perspective?

December Harvest

On Sunday morning, we ate the last of our fresh cherry tomatoes for the year. Some of them were a little wrinkled, so I threw them in a scromblet – potato, onion, tomato, basil butter from the freezer, eggs from a local producer, and a bit of local Asiago cheese grated on top.

Just before the hard freeze that mostly ended our garden season, I brought in all the green tomatoes. What wouldn’t fit on the windowsill I wrapped in newspaper and put in the basement. About the time I finished all that wrapping, I talked to my mom in Florida. She had just heard about a different way of ripening green tomatoes. I found the same method described at a University of Nebraska Extension site.

I still had one cherry tomato plant that was loaded with green tomatoes, so we tried it. And it worked.

What you do is pull the entire plant, shake the dirt off the roots, and hang it upside down in a cool, dark location. We hung ours from the exposed floor joists in the ceiling of the basement. Make sure the leaves don’t touch the walls or floor or anything damp. The green tomatoes ripened slowly on the vine. They don’t have as much flavor as sun-ripened tomatoes, but they tasted just fine to us.

The leaves on the vine are dry and crispy now, and the whole thing is ready to go out to the compost pile. I’m looking at those exposed joists now wondering how many tomato plants I can hang there next fall.

Hopped Up On Soda

Bill has another soda experiment going. After several years of brewing beer, he branched out to soda last year. He started out using soda extracts that he buys where he gets most of his homebrew stuff. But recently he’s been brewing up his own ideas.

Last summer he scored a big win with his rose petal soda. It’s not something you chug a big bottle of, but it’s very floral and refreshing. He has a stash of magic rose elixer in the freezer to make a batch of rose soda this winter when cabin fever gets bad.

Right now he’s infusing hops he grew and harvested himself. They're more of a bittering hop rather than an aroma hop. He’s shooting for a flavor that’s not too bitter. For this experiment, he used a half-ounce of leaf hops, a gallon of water, 1 Tbsp. each lemon juice and lime juice, and 2 cups of sugar. He may add more citrus and sugar before he bottles. I’ll keep you posted when we can sample the soda.

Doesn't take much to entertain us.

Never Too Late

This year we had a bumper crop of rose hips. I got some photos I liked, one of which I’m almost ready to start stitching on. What I didn’t get was a harvest – until this week. I meant to make jam (we had HUGE hips on one of the roses), but that was back in October. Now those are too squishy, so we left them for the birds. Still, there were plenty of smaller ones, and they’re drying on a cookie sheet.

Because these are so small, they’re drying whole. I didn’t split them to remove the tiny hairs and seeds, which can be (ahem) irritating to the digestive system. When I brew them into tea, I’ll just strain it well.

Rose hip tea is a great source of vitamin C. I read on the University of Vermont Extension site that during World War II, many volunteers gathered rose hips, which were made into syrup and distributed by the Ministry of Health as an alternative to orange juice, since it was so difficult to get citrus products.

When imports are abundant, it’s easy to fall out of the habit of using the resources in our own back yards (the free stuff, I might add). The hardest thing about reviving a harvest tradition, I think, is getting it onto a flexible calendar in your head. Gathering isn’t like Just In Time inventory, where you declare a need and then get it filled. Making ourselves available when a resource is available requires a slight shift in thinking. We’ll get better at it with practice.

In the meantime, here’s another perspective you might enjoy. Seattle poet Rachel Dilworth read from her book The Wild Rose Asylum in a program recorded at KUOW. The piece is called “On Harvesting Rosehips.” You can listen to it here.