One of Our Favorite Options for an Abundance of Cabbage

We've either eaten or processed most of the cabbage crop.  We still have 3 heads in the fridge and 3 heads still growing in the garden that I need to harvest this afternoon.  As the weather warms, we find that snails get into the cabbage and eat them.  Coleslaw has been standard fare for over a month now.  We also made four quarts of kimchi (Korean sauerkraut).  We also have been eating a cabbage & sausage jambalaya, which is really deconstructed cabbage rolls.  We also made a batch or two of eggrolls, but thought we'd make a bunch of eggrolls and then individually freeze them, so that we can pull out a few at a time to eat over the coming months.  Who doesn't like a delicious, quick meal?

I didn't capture step by step instructions as I remembered that we had done that several years ago.  However, when I searched the blog, I found this: Post from 13 Years Ago  Unfortunately, the photos are gone!  The recipe and steps are still there, though.  Making eggrolls seemed, initially, to be something outside of our expertise and comfort level, but making them/rolling them is a process that you pick up fast.  

So here is a photo of our egg roll filling all made up.  It contains shredded cabbage and carrots and seasoned ground meat, but the filling is up to you.  We've made them with mushrooms or chicken.

We set up a little assembly line in the kitchen, laying out the egg roll wrappers, putting two heaping scoops of filling into the center and rolling them up.  We line them up like little soldiers until the oil is hot and ready for frying.

We use coconut oil or beef tallow for frying.  The eggrolls are dunked in the oil and a spoon is used to roll them around until all sides are golden brown.

When done, we pull them out and arrange on paper towels to absorb the excess oil.

When you get in the groove, you can really get things going in a smooth, efficient process.

In this instance, I was rolling them and Tricia was frying.  As soon as she had some coming out of the oil, I had some waiting in line to be fried.

We allowed the eggrolls to completely cool and then arranged them on baking trays.  Our objective was to put them in the deep freeze and freeze them individually, so that they don't stick together and we could take out one eggroll for a snack or 10 or 20 at a time for a meal.  We learned that if you don't individually freeze them, the oil makes them stick together and when you try to remove them, they'll tear.  This process fixes the sticking together/tearing.  Into the freezer all of the trays of eggrolls went...

Once completely frozen, we removed each one and stacked into several Rubbermaid containers, sealed them and placed them back in the freezer.  Here is one of the containers:

We ended up making just about 60 eggrolls!  We'll likely make more as we do have 6 more heads of cabbage to do something with.  This will work out nicely.  With a little preparation and planning on the front end, we now will have quick, delicious meals at our convenience.  All we need to do is take out however many we want and warm them up.  Pass the soy sauce, please!

The Old Ways

 

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As I drive down farm roads this spring, I notice acres and acres of recently planted rice fields.  The rice is sprouted and is coming up in perfect, symmetrical rows, shimmering kelly green in the moist soil as the sun rises in the east.  Most of the fields are drill planted these days.  What a difference!  This time of year in the past, you would be awakened by crop dusters (arial applicators) flying over your house en route to plant this year's crop of rice.  I scarcely heard a single one this year.

Growing up on a rice farm as a kid, I remembered the old process well.  All rice was planted in the water.  Levees were pulled and fields were worked to loosen the soil and then flooded.  Then the fields were water leveled.  Tractors would drag water levels across the field.  The soil would become a muddy slurry, and you would pull the high places down to the low.  Gravity would level the area to somewhat allow for a pinpoint flood.  Laser leveling has GREATLY increased the accuracy of this process these days.

Planting in the water and water-leveling served another purpose - to try to keep red rice in check.  Red rice is an insidious thing.  It grows taller than the other rice, with a red or black seed that makes your sample of rice ugly and you would be docked in price for having rice with red rice in it.  Since it is taller, as the rice ripens and winds blow, the red rice would fall down (lodging), and it would knock down all the good rice with it, making harvest a slow, arduous task.  Planting in the water in a water leveled field attempted to bury the red rice seed so that it wouldn't germinate.  Red rice reminds me a lot of the wheat and the tares parable in the Bible.

We would purchase seed rice that would come in 100 pound burlap sacks to plant in the fields.  We would flood an irrigation canal and unload each sack into the flooded canal to soak.  After a few days, the rice would 'pip out,' meaning a small sprout would emerge.  Once this occurred, we would use a conveyor belt tilted into the flooded canal.  We would lift each sack onto the conveyor belt and others would remove the water-soaked sack of rice and stack it on the back of the truck.  It was so cold to be in the canal lifting those HEAVY sacks of rice.

The truck would be driven to the landing strip where a crop duster pilot would meet us in his plane.  He'd go over the maps to ensure the correct field would be planted.  The burlap sacks were cut open and all of the rice would be dumped into a loader on a truck that would be lifted up and loaded onto the crop duster.  The pilot would fly over the field, releasing the rice that would scatter into the water-leveled field.  

After a few days, the water would be drained from the field and the newly planted rice would grow.  Today, the land isn't worked as intentionally because weeds are "burned down" by using Round Up and seed rice is directly drilled into the unworked soil.  Red rice is controlled by chemicals and the  The 'old way' was a lot more labor intensive and manual in nature.  

As we try to examine the cost-benefit analysis of then versus now, it's a complicated calculation.  Yes, the old ways involved many people doing hard work.  Compared to today, the process wasn't as accurate nor efficient as it is done today.  On the other hand, we've largely replaced people with machines.  Expensive machines.  Expensive machines that you can't work on anymore.  Expensive machines that only a few can afford.  Farming increasingly implements the use an array of chemicals and the small family farm has largely been replaced by corporate farms.

The amount of capital outlay, amount of risk, and number of mostly foreign workers that must be employed in order to farm today makes farming look nothing like it did in the past.  I guess I'm nostalgic for the old ways.  I wish I'd hear more crop dusters flying overhead and see a farmer walking his levees with a shovel slung over his shoulder.

Trying a New Variety

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that for the last 20 years we have sweet potatoes that come up volunteer each and every year.  We never have to plant them and yet receive a nice harvest every fall.  It all started from composting one Beauregard Sweet Potato.  That one sweet potato expanded and multiplied.  To that, we added an heirloom variety called Golden Wonder, that we picked up from a guy called "The Barefoot Gardener" in Tennessee.  The Golden Wonders were prolific, producing a nice tasting sweet potato, but not as rich of a color and flavor as the Beauregard.  To add insult to injury, the Golden Wonder's crowded out the Beauregards.

Just to the east and north of us in a community between Evangeline and Iota is a farming family named Garber.  Everyone else around here grows rice.  They grow sweet potatoes.  I picked up a box of a variety they grow called Evangeline from our local feed store.  Admittedly, I purchased them to eat.  We made sweet potato fries, and I'll vouch for the flavor.  Yum!  But the other reason I bought the box was to attempt to get a local variety growing in our garden again.

No matter how thorough you are when digging sweet potatoes, you always miss a root.  From that root comes new sweet potato plants.  Here is a Golden Wonder growing up this spring.  My idea this year is to pull up 2/3's of these to allow room for the Evangeline's to get a foothold.

I picked out eight sweet potatoes from the box that were on the smaller side - we want to eat the big ones!  I also picked the ones that had "slips" or sprouts growing out from one end.

This sprout will grow out a vine.  Now you can put the sweet potato in water and the slips will grow out.  You can then clip them and they'll develop roots and grow.  I think I'm just going to plant the potato whole.  That's what we did with the Beauregard a long time ago and it grew without planting individual slips.  We'll see if this works.

I dug a shallow hole in the north part of the garden and planted the potatoes with the sprouts sticking up.

I watered them in and marked where I planted them with blue flags.

I'll keep a close eye on them.  We will hopefully experience a good growth of the Evangeline variety of sweet potato in our garden, allowing them to establish themselves so we can enjoy them year after year.

A Manicured Lawn

Someone showed me a funny meme the other day that showed a manicured lawn as compared to a beekeeper's lawn.  The manicured lawn was immaculate - not a blade of grass out of place, cut short.  Then the beekeeper's yard showed tall weeds and wildflowers.  So true!  We put off mowing our yard for a plethora of reasons.  First, the white dutch clover is flowering along with many other wildflowers, and the bees love them.  Second, our bees don't like the sound and vibration of the lawnmower.  They chase me and sting me.  Third, my lawnmower is broken and I need to try and figure out the electrical issue that won't let the mower blades engage.  Finally, we always like to wait and rotate the cows through the yard and eat the spring grass.  I think the record-setting year was one year when we didn't mow the grass until May!

For some of our long-time readers, I apologize.  This is a redundant post as we seem to make this post each and every year.  We have a Gallagher solar fence charger with some temporary step-in posts.  I break up the yard into different paddocks and unroll the poly wire using a ratchet reel.  Over the years, the cows have learned the sound of the reel clicking and, like Pavlov's dogs, they begin mooing LOUDLY when they hear the clicking of the ratchet reel unrolling the poly wire.

 And so it begins...  I moved Rosie and LuLu into the first paddock.  They excitedly run around, scoping out the various types of grasses, like you and I might scope out a buffet table.  They settle for the white Dutch clover first.  It's a favorite of theirs.

The cows have learned to have a healthy respect of the one strand of wire.  The solar powered charger pulses electricity through the line.  You only have to be stung by it once and you learn to avoid it.  I trust the charger, but I'd never leave the house with the cows in the yard.  I've learned to keep checking on the cows every few minutes.  One time after church, we were having pot roast and rice & gravy when someone came knocking on our front door to warn us that the cows were out!  Not good.  

We generally leave the cows in the paddock in the yard for a full day.  At the end of the day, they have the yard clipped down pretty good.  They we'll put them back in the permanent pasture, roll up the fencing, pick up the posts and set up another paddock right next to it.  Over the course of a week, the grass will be all eaten throughout the entire yard.  It won't look like the putting green on a golf course, but much better than before the cows grazed all day on it.

Preserving an Excess of Cabbage and Carrots

We have an overabundance of cabbage and carrots in the outdoor fridge due to bumper crops from the garden.  We've been cooking Cabbage and Sausage jambalaya, Egg rolls, steamed cabbage, roasted cabbage, coleslaw, Cream of Carrot soup, raw carrots, roasted carrots and on and on.  There's still a lot left, but we have a plan.

We've got a couple of recipes for lacto-fermenting cabbage and carrots that we always do, so we got busy.  First we are going to make a Korean sauerkraut (Kimchi).  It involves shredding cabbage, carrots, radishes, garlic, green onions and grated jalapenos.  We doubled the recipe to make four quarts.

We like to use a big wooden masher tool to bruise the cabbage and carrots and get the juices flowing.  You would think that an enormous stainless steel bowl would keep the contents inside, but we made quite a mess in the kitchen with bits of vegetables flying all over the place.

We tightly pack the kimchi into wide mouth quart-sized Mason jars.  The juices from the crushed cabbage and carrots coat the kimchi.  We also add salt.

Finally, we add 2 tablespoons of whey to each jar.  The whey is a by-product of making yogurt or cheese, and it is a preservative.  

Kimchi is put together.  Now we'll do Ginger Carrots.  We began to shred carrots and a bunch of ginger.

We've got loads of carrots to shred.  Our food processor got a work-out today.

All the carrots and ginger was dumped in the big bowl, and I once again got busy with the potato masher, working and working to crush the carrots and release the flavorful juices.

We spooned the gingered carrots in 2 quart sized Mason jars and added 2 tablespoons of whey in each jar.  For both the kimchi and the gingered carrots, it's real important that your vegetables stay beneath the liquid.  We purchased some glass weights that work perfectly for keeping the kimchi and the carrots below the level of the liquid.

We'll leave these on the kitchen counter at room temperature for about 3 days and then we'll transfer to the fridge.  It'll keep there for months and months and, believe it or not, gets better with age.

Very tangy, fizzy, and flavorful.  Very healthy for you, too!  We still have more cabbage and carrots.  I told Tricia that she should make a carrot cake!

What Happens When You Rush Things

Gardening is an inexact science.  You win some and you lose some, and you definitely learn along the way.  For planting the spring garden, I use the average last frost date for our zip code.  Our average last frost date is March 22nd.  If you plant on March 22nd, you have only a 10% chance of getting a frost and injuring or killing your plants.  You can also use the Early last frost date.  That date is March 3rd.  If you plant on that date, you have a 30% chance of injuring/killing your plants.

Sometimes, I subscribe to the "you gotta risk it to get the biscuit" mentality.  I could gamble and plant early, right?  What could happen, really?  So, I pushed things this year, planting the snap beans, cucumbers, squash and cucumbers around March 10th.  Well...  Just so happens, it got down to 34 degrees.  I thought, incorrectly, that things would be okay.  We have lots of trees, the plants were mulched, they would make it.  I was busy doing other things and I didn't even go out and cover them.

All the plants were damaged!  Let's take a look.  Here are the snap beans.  The leaves are burned from the frost.  Fortunately, fresh new growth is being put on.  They'll be stunted, but most of the beans are going to make it.

But look at the cucumbers!  I have 3 varieties planted on a cattle panel trellis.  The cucumbers are hit a lot harder than the snap beans.  Honestly, I think I'll have to replant ALL of these except one on the very end.  I don't know how it avoided the damage.  I will wait for 3 more days to see if any new growth appears.  Then if nothing happens, I'll pull the trigger and replant.

This third photo shows the severely damaged squash, including hills of zucchini, straightneck yellow squash and crookneck yellow squash.  This right here was my main reason for rushing things.  I figured if I got a really early start, I could avoid the squash vine borers.  This pest usually kills all of my squash.  I theorized that by getting a jump on things, I could make a big harvest of squash before the onslaught of the SVBs.  The squash was absolutely beautiful, with big, healthy green leaves.  They would have been blooming in a week.  Then the temperatures dropped and all of the big leaves turned brown and died.

But I'm hopeful.  I see fresh new green growth.  There's an old adage that says, "That which does not kill you, makes you stronger."  If there's any truth to that, perhaps we'll have a strong squash crop.  We'll wait and see.

Finally, in the garden in the side yard, here are my butternut squash and spaghetti squash.  Burned by the frost? Sure.  But these plants will live to fight another day!

There are significant benefits to getting things planted early.  You get plants that produce prior to fighting the high heat and bug and pest pressure.  But there is significant downside risk that may cause you to have to replant everything.  Fortunately, I don't think that is possible.  However, I'm pretty sure I'll be replanting all the cucumbers.  I will try to rush things and plant early again, I'm quite sure, but next time, I'll cover all of the plants.

The Last Hurrah for the Broccoli

The big broccoli heads have long been harvested.  About every other day, I walk down the broccoli row and snip off the florets.  We've had broccoli in our fridge non-stop for at least a couple of months because of this.  All good things must come to an end.  But it's not really the end, is it?  When the florets aren't harvested, they flower.  Beautiful yellow flowers fill the garden.  Broccoli seed pods are forming and when these ripen and turn brown, I'll save a multitude of seeds since these are non-hybrid.  It'll soon be time to remove the broccoli plants and plant another crop, I'm thinking peppers, to fill that spot.  The broccoli flowers, apart from being pretty, attract our honeybees which are located just west of the garden.  During the day, bees dart this way and that around the broccoli flowers.

I like to watch the bees hard at work pollinating, flying greedily from one flower to the next.  You can hear the buzz as they work.  What an industrious creature is the bee!

Busy as a bee!  You can see why that phrase is repeated.

Stay tuned for more reports on the bees.  We've got lots to tell you.  Bees moved back into our hollow column on the side porch.  We also have a couple of swarm traps set in the yard.  Finally, we'll be attempting on our second try to make splits.  More to come on all this later.