This Year's Pole Bean Contraptions

Ramp Recipes--Told Super Fast

My four-year-old is begging for the laptop. My almost one-year-old is pulling down the curtains. And this is my life. So, if I am going to blog I must be quick. So hear it is, three ramp recipes told super quick.

1st-- Ramps are wild leeks. They grow mostly in neutral damp woods, best spot under maples.

Recipe 1-- Ramp bread.

Dough

3 cups flour.
2 teaspoons yeast.
2 teaspoons salt.

Mix in food processor, add water until dough is a wet ball, drop in oiled bowl, shape into a ball (it should be really sticky), wrap with plastic, let rise about 3 hours.

Ramps

Quickly saute greens and bulbs in a little oil to soften up and take some of the bit out of. Set aside and let cool.

Ramp Bread


After first rising, lay dough ball flat on floured surface, rub ramps over the top (as if it's a pesto pizza), kneed.

I kneed in a circle, working around the dough ball and pressing it down with the heel of my hand.

Kneed one full circle or so. Shape dough ball into the bread you want. Place on floured baking sheet. Lightly flour and cover with a small towel. Let rise for another hour.

Take out after one hour, Slice top three or four times with knife. Make an egg wash with egg whites. Brush wash over the bread; this will give it a brown color.

Preheat oven at 450. Place in bread. Spray or flick some water on the walls to create a humid chamber. Cook for about 10 minutes.

Lower heat to 350. Cook for another 20 min. or so, until when you knock the back of the bread, it sounds hollow.

All done!

Next- Ramp Pesto (I have to move faster; my kids have blankets over their heads and they are walking into walls.)

Place ramp bulbs and greens in food processor. Pulse until finely chopped.

Add what you like: Olive oil. A little honey or sugar. A pinch of salt. A little pepper. Pine nuts if you want (I don't). A sprinkle of Parmesan cheese.

Enjoy!

Last (and my favorite)-- Pickled Ramps

Pickle Solution

2 cups of water.
1 cup of vinegar.
1 cup of sugar.
2 table spoons of salt.

Boil until everything dissolves.

Meanwhile, cut off ramp bulbs at about one inch, make sure to include the red spot at the stem. Blanch and then place in pickle jar.

Pour hot pickling solution over ramps. Let cool. Seal. Refrigerate. Love.

That's it! Forgive the typos. My kids just walked (and crawled) out the front door. I'm off!

Finding wild ramps (I think) on a strange and beautiful hike

We stood at the top of a steep hill, just off an abandoned railroad track. This was the spot. I had noticed it from the road and had a feeling we'd find ramps here. I looked around: no pines (ramps dislike the acidic soil pines grow in). A corroded pipe jutted out from the embankment near the street, allowing a stream to pass underneath and into the tiny valley. Ramps grow in such moist soil.

Paddy and I climbed down, digging our heels in with each step. Once down, we had to cross a bridge made by a fallen tree to get to the other side of the stream. It was about six feet up and Paddy carefully balanced his way across, while I followed behind.

On the other side, we began to roam.

Paddy found an uprooted oak tree and I told him that some people believe such roots are the best place to look for rare rocks and long-ago buried treasures. He went to work poking his hand into the roots, searching for his treasure.

We soon continued on and I noticed some light green leaves, in a small patch, poking from the ground. I immediately knew they were ramps. I snapped one at the root and smelled. Ramps are a wild leek and they smell like onions. I smelled onion.

I looked around and saw a few other patches. I dug up a few plants in each, careful to leave enough to go to seed, so they could produce more later on. I stuffed the ramps in my backpack next to some garlic mustard I had already picked and we moved on towards the culvert that Paddy wanted to check out.

The ramps were the climax of a strange hike, marked by beautiful and weird sights, like a miniature forest of tiny white flowers ...

and a root that looked like a giant snake ...

and the abandoned house crushed by a tree, set right in the middle of the woods ...

and a sea of mesmerizing plants growing from the leaf litter ...

Finding ramps would have been a perfect finish and I had big plans. I wanted to pickle them with some fiddleheads I plan to pick in a couple of days. We quickly headed home, with Paddy in the lead.

My plans lasted the whole way, until we reached home. This was when I called out to Lisa.

"I found ramps!"

She was on the couch with Gabo sleeping on her chest. I brought her in one to smell.

"Smells like onion, right?"

"I don't smell onion," she said.

What did she mean? How could she not smell onion?

I smelled it again. The scent was not as pronounced as when I picked it in the woods, but I smelled onion.

But now, I needed to be sure. Lily of the Valley looks like ramps and is poisonous. I read online that sometimes when you pick ramps with garlic mustard, the onion scent is from the garlic mustard, not the ramps. "So be careful" was the message.

I wasn't so sure anymore.

I grabbed one of my books. It said that ramps have a red or purple color at the base. Mine were pure white; it was not looking good. I decided to bag the "ramps" for the day. Tomorrow, I would bring them to my father-in-law, Thom Smith, a nature writer who lives in Pittsfield. He'd know.

To be continued ...

But How? Waiting for the Seedlings

A pea breaks through.

When I drop the tiny dry seed into the grooved earth, no deeper than a finger nail, and cover it with soil and pat dirt down, I sit and doubt. I doubt a plant will ever come from this. I do not articulate these doubts. I feel them. A skepticism directed at the seed and the earth. I just do not see how something that lay packed away in a drawer or stacked on top of the living room bookcase, sometimes for more than a year, how from this anything could grow, let alone in dirt often strewn with rocks and sticks. And yet, I water the rows and the hills and I wait. I get down on my knees and scrape away the top layer of shredded leaves and little sticks and I check. And then, there it is, the light green shoot, just beyond the dirt's crust, sometimes wearing its seed casing like a crown, and I sit there and still I doubt. I feel the impossibility of how something so fragile, something that could be plucked free with no effort, could survive spring's downpours, could go unnoticed by the eastern cottontail, could by-pass the tree-root and rock below, could grow strong and bear leaves and fruit; how? And yet, each year they come and they grow and my doubt is replaced by joy.

The Alchemy of Making Black Gold

Each spring my thoughts turn towards dirt. I get down on my knees and run my hands through it, searching for worms. I squeeze it to see if it crumbles or keeps.

I go to the compost piles: the quick-turning one that takes in kitchen scraps and the slow-churning one that eats yard waste.

I shovel out spades-full, using it to fill in trenches for beets and parsnips. I mix it into the lazy bed for the potatoes. I make new gardens.

Dirt is the foundation.

And, for me, it starts in the sky, far out of reach ...




… with the trees.

My suburban home is surrounded by them. Which, come fall, can be overwhelming. Each tree sheds at a different time, laying down layer after layer of leaves, and I barely keep up with raking.




Just the thought of bagging them is exhausting. So, out of laziness a few years ago, I dragged them with a tarp and dumped them in a corner of my backyard, hoping they would go away.

Maybe, they'd turn into soil which I could use in my gardens.

A friend soon shot this down. They're oak leaves, he explained, which contain tannin. The acid in tannin would poison my plants.

To protect my laziness, I needed to debunk this. And, luckily, I soon did. I discovered that tannin dilutes out over time, especially when mixed with other yard waste.

Not only that but oak leaves can improve soil, as Kentucky State University research and extension horticulturist, Ward Upham, said: “Oak leaves can become a good source of soil nutrition.”

Yet, Upham warned that the leaves can take a while to breakdown. Thankfully, a lawnmower solves this problem.

Here’s what I do: I rake the leaves into piles and then run the mower over them a few times, shredding them into a fluffy mix of tiny pieces, which I layer into the compost pile with other yard waste.

I make sure to wet and flip the pile throughout the year, helping the material breakdown.

Then, before winter, I cap it by tossing some dirt from the sides over the top. The swollen hill--filled with leaves and grass and forsythia branches and sod--cooks for a couple of years and then pours out black gold, perfect for plants.

The late poet Seamus Heaney captured the joy of cutting into such fine earth (for him it was peat in the bogs of Ireland) in his poem “Digging”:

            The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
            Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Yes, more than the need for compost for the plants and more than the need for dirt for the new garden--there is just that sound, the slide of the spade slipping into soft earth.

Digging Out The Beds and Making Fluffy Soil

The first veggie-garden is complete. My four-year-old son, Paddy, and I shoveled two trenches about one foot down and 20 feet long, sifted the sticks and rocks out of the dug-out dirt (we used some chicken wire draped over two workhorses; the wire caught the rocks and wood but let the fluffy dark soil sift through), filled the trenches back in and now they're ready for turnips and beets.

We worked compost into rows for kale, broccoli and brussels sprouts ...

... and set aside room for three tepees for beans, which we'll make from some massive branches that a white pine next to my house shed this winter. We made three big hills for spaghetti squash and cleared spots for flowers, including a small patch of giant sunflowers. We transported some wild raspberry vines we found in the woods to a corner near wild low-bush blueberries that we found on a hike and dug up and planted at the end of last year, and we are anxiously waiting to see if they took. ... These are days when I do not have to read in bed at night because I just lie there thinking about the garden.

Spring's First Forage

The fiddle heads have almost popped up from last year's stems. My four-year-old son, Paddy, and I found them last year in a gully down by the Connecticut River. The gully is made by a culvert that runs under East Street in Easthampton, and last year we found the massive ostrich ferns, fully unfurled and filling in the tiny valley. Soon the furled fiddles will be ready to be picked. I haven't cooked them before so I'm looking forward to see how they taste.

Along the way we also found garlic mustard, good for a bitter pesto that I tame by adding a little sugar, and what I believe is immature watercress growing in a tiny intermittent stream running alongside the Manhan Bike Trail. We couldn't be sure about the watercress so in the end we didn't' eat them; if you can help me identify them, they're the last picture.

Broken Nest

A couple of weeks ago, Lisa walked me to the sliding glass door. "Look" she said, pointing at our vegetable garden: A squirrel, its mouth stuffed with leaves, scurried over the roof of the garden shed and slipped through a tiny hole at the top of the doors. "Shit," I said. "It's making a nest." Two days later, I shoveled some snow from in front of the doors, pulled them open, and stood looking at a globe of tightly wound leaves, string, a pair of stockings and dried grass, and poking out of the center like a tiny ball, a squirrel's head, darting left to right. "Back up, Patrick," I said, having a cartoonish vision of the squirrel jumping out and latching onto my son's face like a starfish. "It's just a squirrel," he said, not listening. I knew I had to get the squirrel out of the shed because spring was coming and I had all my garden tools in there, so I poked the nest with a shovel, but the head just dove inside. I could have walked away. Keeping the door open. The squirrel would have scattered, but I was curious. I wanted to see the squirrel again. I hooked the nest with the shovel and pulled and the squirrel shot into the air like a water-rocket. "Run," I screamed at Patrick. He walked back a few steps, watching the squirrel dart up a tree. And then, the cries. Tiny high pitched whimpers. Coming from the broken nest. "Patrick," I said. "Go inside." "Why?" he asked. "Just go inside." He listened this time and walked away. I stepped closer and looked down, pink and bare, the baby squirrel on the white snow. In the shed, there were three more. I looked at the sliding glass door, where Lisa stood with Patrick. I raised my arms. "What?" Lisa said. I couldn't speak. I just raised my hands again. The mother made noises from a branch on the white pine above me. What had I done? I mouthed the words "babies" to Lisa and then I looked back at the shed. I bent down and scooped the baby on the snow onto a piece of cardboard. I tried to place it back onto the shelf where the tangled globe once was, but its leg snagged a piece of string and it hung there above its siblings, swaying frantically. I juggled its leg loose and it fell with the others, all crying now; the mother making noises above. I did not know what to do. I covered them with the leaves that had fallen onto the snow, closed the door and walked away. Inside, I did a Google search and read that the mother may return to take the babies away if you leave the nest alone. I did, for two days, and then returned. I opened the door, feeling uneasy about what I might find. I flipped through the leaves, and the string. Nothing. The babies were gone. Thankfully taken away.