Foraging: It's Wineberry Season

Wineberries

This is the first week here of wineberry season -- often referred to locally as wild raspberries. They are indeed a species of raspberry and they grow wild here, even rampant, but they are not native to North America. These berries litter the woods around our property and, if you can tolerate the thorns, reward the picker with a nice tart fresh flavor. In parts of the country they are considered invasive, though I'm not sure if that is true here in Maryland. Originally they were cultivated to use as a hybrid for raspberries, but they got loose. The great thing about them is that they grow in reasonably heavy shade, an attribute not found in many berries. We follow the edge of our yard or trails through the woods to grab whatever we can. Of course, the "best" berries taunt you from canes that are just out of reach. Despite better wisdom, my son and I are always drawn further and further into the brambles reaching for that cluster of perfect berries, inevitably caught by the many thorns and left scratched and battered.

This morning we took a friend out picking and, determined to overcome the thorny branches, we set an early morning meeting time and dressed in long sleeves and long pants. Naturally, we've hit a very humid spell and so we set off around 8am in already oppressive weather. The berries are close to their height now, and the picking is easy. The extra clothes were worth the heat, as we got caught many times, but our arms and legs returned unscathed.

Pick only dark red and plump berries - like the one far right bottom

The best berries are always just out of reach

and between you and the berries are these thorns!

wild blackeberries

Where there are wineberries, there are wild blackberries. Their season is just starting and so you'll only find a few dark black juicy berries on each cane this week. And they'll undoubtedly be very sour. I'm not a big fan of these berries, and I'm particularly not fond of their thorns, which, though fewer in number than those on a wineberry cane, are longer and far more vicious.  But they look tasty.  So when they are there, we pick a few of them too. These are not wild black raspberries, which are, well, raspberries and quite delicious. They are also much rarer to find in my woods; I tend to find them each year more by random than planning.

Nasty blackberry thorns !!

So, how do you use wineberries? Quickly! Wineberries do not last very long at all, and you'll want to do something with them within 24 hours. You'll notice they have a stickiness to them and the flavor is more tart than the cultivated red raspberry. They are great fresh, on cereal for example. I made jam with an early batch this week, which came out ok, but not great. Mixed with the sugar necessary for jam, the wineberry seems to lose its distinct fresh flavor. Today's pick will be macerated (sprinkle with sugar and let sit until the juices are drawn out). Then we'll turn lady finger type cookies (quickly!) in the resulting juice and layer the cookies, crushed berries, and cream cheese into a fast tiramisu-like dessert. Yum, Yum!

Today's harvest - random blackberries included

Traditional tiramisu uses marscapone cheese, which is rather expensive, and requires significantly more work to whip egg whites and fold in the rest of the ingredients. It's fabulous and we make it for special occasions, but for a quick "just us" dessert, we go with the faster, cheaper recipe. Well, it's not so much a recipe because it's modified heavily depending on what we have around. But it is faster and cheaper. The Germans, at least in the South, use whipped cream and something like cream cheese to create these big thick lighter versions of tiramisu. They are just absolutely fabulous. Ours is something in between. If we have whipping cream, we whip that and fold it into cream cheese with a bit of sugar. If we don't, we hand whip the cream cheese to make it a bit lighter, but still dense like the traditional dessert. The main lesson we learned from the Italians was to quickly toss the cookies in the coffee or juice that you are using. The cookie will seem dry, but as it sits in the fridge, it will absorb that liquid and have a lovely cake texture when it is eaten. That soggy gooky tiramisu you often find in restaurants is due to soaking the cookies in liquid, rather than tossing them quickly.  Making the dessert with fruit allows you to eat the great berries that are available all Summer, and you can make this with just about any fruit that will macerate well. 

Toss your berries in sugar and let them sit to extract the juice

These are the cookies we use

 

 

Macerated berries

 

 

Toss quickly in juice and layer with cheese....

then more cheese and fruit

Layer until you're out of ingredients - rest in fridge 30-60 min

This entry is part of "Feed me tweet me follow me home" blog hop at A Moderate Life !

Furnace Hills Coffee Storefront and the Great Garlic Pull

That sounds like a great title for a tweener novel. Well, maybe swap out the word "storefront" for something more compelling. And I'd love for it to portend riveting character development and plot twists in what follows, punctuated with juvenile humor, but really, I just have multiple small things to write about and figured I'd slam them all together. But maybe my epic battle with the garlic will hold your attention.

Remember around Christmas time I wrote about two of my favorite local businesses for hot drinks - Sweet Simplici-tea for tea in Sykesville and Furnace Hills Coffee roasters in Westminster for, well, coffee. At the time, Dave Baldwin of Furnace Hills had acquired a storefront to roast and sell coffee from on Westminster's Main Street. For those familiar with the area, you can throw a rock from their place at 71 West Main Street and the Carroll Center for the Arts. It took a bit longer than they hoped, but they have opened for retail sale. Yesterday I had a chance to run by and pick up some freshly roasted Ethiopian Coffee. Dave was out, but I chatted a bit with Erin and took a few photos. The store hours are a bit irregular still, but you can always send them a note via Facebook. They also post there when the store is open later. As I understand, they are generally there on Monday and Wednesday 8-3:30, at a minimum, and they are still at the downtown Westminster Farmer's Market on Saturdays. Furnace Hills is still providing great locally roasted coffee, focused on providing a long-term income for Erin, who lives with Downs Syndrome, at very affordable prices. Here's a few pictures I snapped of the store.

Erin at the store

The new large roaster they have at the storefront

Furnace Hills Coffee at 71 West Main Street, Westminster, MD

After hemming and hawing a bit, or a lot, I finally pulled my garlic this past week. From everything I've read, which is not insignificant, deciding when to harvest garlic is quite an art. You are trying to balance leaving them in the ground to increase the size of the bulbs with pulling them before they've lost the protective outer coatings. There is lots of lore surrounding the perfect time to pull them, mostly having to do with how many leaves are brown, but in the end, nothing is really hard core science. If you yank them early, you get small cloves with too much outer coatings and it reduces the storage capacity of the bulb. If you yank to late, the coatings are gone, the cloves will start pulling away from the bulb, and, no surprise, it reduces the storage capacity of the bulb. So, what to do??! this is my first year with garlic, so what I did was read a lot. The Maryland Cooperative Extension says that most garlic in Maryland should be pulled around July 1st. Garlic is grown generally in more nothern climates, so as you read on the Internet, you'll see that most websites recommend pulling from early July through late August.  The key is the browning foliage.  Because I live in the woods, I'm usually about two weeks behind the neighborhood at the bottom of my hill. Of course, one might reasonably ask why you are growing garlic in the woods in the first place. Well, you certainly can't grow it if you don't try. So, I tried.

I made this!

I tried hardneck garlic, Red Chesnuk variety.  Hardneck garlic produces scapes that you can harvest and use in salads and stir frys while the garlic is maturing. But, it doesn't have anywhere near the storage life of the much smaller-cloved softneck varieties. In my case, the reason I tried this variety was because I ordered so late nothing else was available. Lesson learned. If you want to grow garlic, order early, like now. If you have sun and semi-decent soil, and you like garlic, I highly recommend it. It must have the largest payoff for effort reward of any annual I've grown, and it is quite cost effective.

Here's how it breaks down. A friend and I split a 1 lb order from Big John's Garden - an organic garlic and shallot farm - in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Why him? Well, I had just vacationed last year in that area and it's beautiful and he's organic. That's all. He's got a cool website, lots of variety (now, not in September), and was very responsive. He has these sampler packages, which naturally I missed out, ordering as late as I did. In any case, with shipping our 1 lb of Red Chesnuk was $27. I can't recall exactly if we split this evenly, but in any case, I ended up planting around 40 cloves myself. All you do is split the bulbs into individuals cloves, and put them in the ground a few inches under. Then mulch around them with straw or something. Garlic can not compete with other weeds, so if you don't want to be tied to weeding, you must mulch. One bale of straw will be plenty for Fall and then re-mulching in Spring. Then, no weeding. With the hardnecks, you remove the scapes as they come up in early June. Then you watch your foliage, and when it is 1/3 brown, or 1/2 brown, or when there are 5 brown left, or some other magical formula, you use a garden fork to go underneath the cloves and loosen them from their death grip on the earth. Having done that, you just pull gently, shake off the dirt, and let them dry in the house for about 3 weeks to cure the skins. If you try to pull them directly out of the ground, you'll be very sad. I am quite certain that my sneaky little garlic cloves tried to dig themselves in deeper during the winter... some of them were desperately difficult to get out of the ground.

Straight out of the ground - you can see the brown foliage

Ok, so I shelled out about $13-15.  If you buy organic garlic from the farmer's market, you are going to pay $1-3 per bulb based on size. based on the unrelenting reality that I have little sun exposure, most of my bulbs were pretty small. Still, when I added it up, I harvested about $50 worth of garlic this week. Not bad.  We also harvested my friend's garlic... the same original bulbs... but with a lot more sun...hers were big and plump... and I'd say easily $80-100 worth of garlic. Not bad at all. So, I already have plans to make a raised bed on the property where I have a bit more sun. This year, I want to try a softneck variety and we'll see what happens.

Mine are curing in the basement on paper

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday at Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

It's Berry Pickin' Time Again

With our stores from last year nearly depleted, we headed to Larriland Farm in Woodbine this morning to do a little berry picking. Well, ideally, we would have done a lot of berry picking. The blueberry, raspberry, and sour cherries were all picking "good", according to the farm's website. The weather here for nearly two weeks has been a daily dose of grey punctuated by a little rain and a little thunder. This morning was no different, but we decided to head out anyway. Midweek mornings are certainly the best time to pick at a large pick-your-own place like Larriland.... last Summer we met a friend a few times around noon on a Saturday for picking. Wowza. The only thing you get is a little perspective of the life of an immigrant farm worker. My goal this year is to stick to mornings and whenever I can, midweek.

blueberries look great

The blueberry bushes looked absolutely fabulous, spikes of grey-blue berries filled each bush. Unfortunately, it was deceiving. Many, if not most, of the berries were still a bit underripe. I'd guess in two or three days - like Saturday ! - they'll be fabulous and easy picking. There were lots of ripe berries but separating them from underripe ones by eye or feel is something I find difficult. Luckily, we don't mind a little tang. Still, I picked only 7lbs of blueberries, where I would have gone 15-20lbs if the picking were "excellent". Frustrated, we moved on after time to the black raspberries.

They were, on the other hand, picking "excellent". Black berries hung in huge bunches from every vine in row after row of berries. This leads to an almost impulsive picking frenzy, I think.... you say, I've got plenty, but then, making to leave, you see another beautiful bunch and, naturally, have to take that one too. So, we ended up with nearly 3.5lbs of raspberries, which have a much shorter lifespan than blueberries.

Black raspberries were plentiful and easy to pick

We like picking at Larriland. They have a mob of very courteous high school students working at each station and it's clear that it's a family business. They use Integrated Pest Management (IPM), which for the fruit means, there is definitely spraying going on, but hopefully through the expensive consultants they use, the chemical usage is minimized. We'll head back in the next few weeks to get more blueberries and stock up on tart cherries, then we'll go back again at the end of July or early August for peaches. Now that I've kept track of how much we stored and what we consumed (everything), I have a pretty good sense of what we should buy.

Folks picking at Larriland Farms

Larriland Farms

Given the pile of berries I had, I decided to try making some freezer jam this afternoon. Ok, in all honesty, I saw these cool looking freezer jam containers at the store and now I needed to use them. Besides, I was curious how we would like the taste of fresh jam, when we are so used to the cooked fruit jams. Hands down, the freezer jam wins on time. From start to finish, it took me 15 minutes (!!) to make and jar two half-pints of blueberry jam. Another 15 minutes for the black raspberry. And included in that time was running the fruit through the food mill to remove the seeds and skins. So, I actually made black raspberry jelly.  I never make jelly; way too much work. 

In this case, all you do is crush your fruit. I ran through mine a food mill... the blueberry with a large opening to remove the skins and the raspberries with a fine opening to remove seeds. A few minutes later I had the requisite 1-2/3 cups crushed fruit. In a bowl, mix 2/3 cups sugar with 2 Tbsp of instant pectin. Add the fruit and mix by hand for three minutes. Pour into containers. Let set. Ta-da! Jam. It took about 30 minutes for a light set of the jam, and a few hours later, they have a nice thick consistency, better than I tend to get with canning.  You can probably do 4-6 jars at once, but I wanted to check this all out first, so I just did a few. Absolutely fabulous.

blueberries in the food mill

The food mill separates the pulp from the skins

Add the pulp to the sugar and pectin, mix, and you are done !

This post is part of Simple Lives Thursday !

A Trip to the Olney Farmers Market and the Season's First Canning

Music at the Olney Farmers Market

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine invited me to accompany her to the Olney Farmers Market. This Sunday morning market boasts live music and cooking demonstrations, with a location not too far outside of Washington, D.C.  I am hoping to visit a variety of markets in the area this Summer to see what is out there. The Olney market is larger than the Westminster market I'm used to, for sure. In addition to produce, there are vendors for a variety of ethnic foods, olive oil, bread, super-fancy baklava, and a handful of other handmade items. It has a nice vibe to it. The location is larger than Westminster, and on a nice green area. The music was good, and the Indian curry I had was outstanding. My friend's mother watched a bit of the cooking demonstration, and was impressed by the chef. All of those extras really provide a lot of life to the market and entice people to stay a bit longer. I even ran into friends I hadn't seen in a long time, who encouraged me to buy some of the bread. Zeke's Coffee vends there, as well, which was a yummy surprise.

I was less impressed by the produce vendors.There were only two local organic farms at the market that day and two or three large farms from Virginia, which were conventional. I was surprised to find this and disappointed, given the proximity to D.C. Doing more web investigating, it looks like the Olney market does indeed have a larger set of local farms, including Kayam, a Jewish organic farm near Finksburg. I think it was just too early in the season, and so they were not there. I'll have to check the market again at the height of the season and see what it is like.

The cooking demo at the Olney market - you can see the market in background

I did buy spinach from the organic Sligo Creek Farm and I really wanted to buy garlic from another small vendor, AvianMead Produce, but they were sold out. Both farms are in Brookeville, Md. Sligo Creek looks like a great place to try and visit -- 12 acres is farmed on the 140-acre property. I was very impressed with their salad greens. According to their information sheet, they also sell at the Crossroads Farmers Market in Takoma Park on Wednesdays (3-7pm) and Silver Spring Market on Saturday mornings.

There was also nice cheese from Palmyra Farm near Hagerstown. Like Bowling Green Farm nearby in Howard County, Palmyra Farm is a dairy farm that had decided to reinvent itself as a cheese company in order to sustain its business. Most cheese from Maryland is made in Pennsylvania, but Palmyra has hooked up with a cheesemaker in Hagerstown to produce their cheeses.  Palmyra is also selling at several local restaurants and markets, including the Common Market in Frederick.

Prepping the strawberry haul for freezing - sugar helps preserve taste and texture

On the way home from that outing, we decided to stop by TLV Tree Farm, in Glenelg, Md. on the chance that they still had some strawberries to be picked. I had picked there on Memorial Day weekend this year and found the picking slim, so our hopes weren't too high. Lucky for us, the picking was great and the strawberries sweet and juicy. TLV uses Integrated Pest Management (IPM) on their farm. We ended up picking probably six quarts or so, enough to make a strawberry tiramisu-like dessert - our standy favourite - and freeze some. This week, I converted about six cups of the frozen strawberry slices and some fresh rhubarb into jam. In a total of 45 minutes, I had 8 jars of strawberry-rhubarb jam. Every two weeks, in about 30 minutes, I make two quarts of whole milk plain yogurt for the family. Throughout the year, we mix in various jams and jellies, either made or acquired, to create our fruit flavored yogurts. This is actually the first year making strawberry jam for us, but it turned out most excellent.

This post is part of the Real Food Wednesday and Simple Lives Thursday blogrolls. Please check them out and their host sites for what's going on across the country and internationally in the Real Food world.

Love Dove Farms

Love Dove Farms, Woodbine, Md.

John Dove's family is living the story you read about in books. Not the fairy tale kind of story, but the kind highlighted by Michael Pollan and so many others about the plight of the American farmer. A fourth generation farmer in northwestern Howard County, the family's dairy business fell by the wayside a few decades ago, and John's father turned to conventional grain and soy crops to make money. When he could no longer feed a family with four kids by toiling in the fields, he didn't sell their land to a big developer, he got a job. When he's not working the fields, John's dad is delivering fuel. But John's got big dreams for this beautiful farmland and they don't involve Monsanto. John hopes to figure out how to scale an organic sustainable farm to the point he can earn a decent living and be part of changing consumers' choices to a healthier way of life.

Love Dove Farms lies off Old Frederick Road nestled in an expanse of rolling hills of grain fields. Here, John, his father, and grandmother live on about 200 acres that the family has farmed since the early 20th century. That's a significant difference from the majority of organic farmers I know. While most are farming and living in 5-10 acre plots, Love Dove Farms really does have the capacity to scale, if he can work out a healthy ecosystem. So even though this is John's first year selling organically grown produce, he hasn't started small. We toured his three large plots together, and I was impressed by the quantity and variety of plants he's got in the ground. Several long rows of garlic, their scapes and browning foliage indicating he'll soon be pulling hundreds of bulbs from the ground. There are, of course, all of the usual suspects: heirloom tomatoes, radishes, various greens, potatoes, peas, peppers, and herbs. But there are also blueberry bushes, as well as several rows of asparagus, and he's trying his hand at organically grown chick peas. The magnitude is huge when you consider he's doing it almost entirely alone.

 

 

Looky at all that organic asparagus!

This is what 40lbs of garlic plants look like -wow

Besides coming from a family of farmers, John earned a degree in environmental science, and he's interned as part of the Young Farmer's program. While still in college, he interned with Serpent Ridge winery, a fabulous Maryland winery out of Westminster. Last year, he worked for Calvert's Gift Farm, a 5-acre organic farm in Sparks, Md. that has proven they can provide for a lot of families without a lot of land.  Since 2009, they have sponsored a New Farmer's Training Program with the University of Maryland with the goal of increasing the number of young farmers, particularly in Baltimore County. There he learned a lot of tricks of the trade, including hand methods for working the soil and maintaining an organic farm.

One of the huge challenges he and other small organic farmers face is how to manage the heavy physical demands of many organic practices while producing and selling enough to keep afloat. The hourly wage of farmers using all manual practices is extremely low. John talked about an organic farm in Salsbury he visited recently, where they have incorporated some technologies that help reduce the manual labor. At that farm, they have also integrated produce and livestock into a holistic system. John finds that very appealing. We walk down one of the many long rows of tomatoes , and I ask whether he rips the buds of arterial shoots - side shoots that grow at the join with the main vine. Ideally you want to cut all these off so that your tomato plant puts its energy into producing fruit. The trouble with this is as summer begins, tomatoes grow like crazy, and if you don't grab these shoots quickly, they'll be thick stems in a few days. In other words, it's very man intensive. As we walk along pinching plants, we both agree it'll be nearly impossible for him to do this for his plot through the season. That's the difference, or a difference, in garden scale and farm scale.

Love Dove Farms - a look over the main field

In this first year of business, John is selling at a few farmers' markets and restaurants. On Friday, he is at the Howard County Hospital market in Columbia from 2-6 pm. This small market offers a nice variety of produce and baked goods, as well as local cheese and coffee. On Saturday, he is trekking south toward D.C. to sell at the Mt. Rainier market. He's also made deals to sell to Aida Bistro, a yummy Italian wine bar in Columbia, and to Drovers Wine and Grill in Mount Airy. I've always found Aida excellent and love their dedication to locally sourcing their foods. Drovers is not a place I'm familiar with, but they sell only Maryland wine. I look forward to checking it out. Another dream of his is to sell at Centennial Lake in Columbia on the weekend. What a great idea! If you've ever been there, you know the throngs of health conscious folks who descend on the park to circumnavigate the lake on its paved 2 mile trail or to take a spin on a canoe or paddle boat. I imagine this would be a great setting for farm fresh local produce.

One of my particular soap boxes is that in Central Maryland there is this geographic separation between the bulk of organic consumers and producers. In Carroll County, the number of organic farmers is really quite remarkable. There is a strong enough community of farmers and like-minded individuals in the County to put on the Sustainable Living Maryland (or Go Local) Fair for several years now. This year, the fair had over 1500 visitors, indicating that there is a lot of interest from our residents. But, there is no doubt that Howard County has a much larger consumer base. There are several large organic markets in or adjacent to Howard County, where Carroll County has none. On the other hand, while western Howard County is every bit as agricultural as Carroll County, there really aren't many organic farmers in the area. Several farms are using IPM (integrated pest management), but not many are fully incorporating organic practices. That is why I was so glad to meet John at the market. His story is really quite different from all the other farmers I have interviewed, and I think he's in a great position to realize his dreams of keeping the family farm going organically. Give him a visit and wish him well.