Imperfectly Organic

“Even the yucky ones taste great!” my youngest child called to me as we stooped in the strawberry garden, me picking and him feasting. When he says “yucky” he means not perfectly red and strawberry shaped like the ones you buy in the grocery store. That’s the thing about organic fruit, and home-grown organic fruit in particular, sometimes it doesn’t look pretty.

It’s very tempting to go for the perfect fruit over the funny looking fruit with a few bad spots. But nine times out of ten, perfect fruit has been grown with pesticide, harvested before it’s time, gassed to make it finish ripening, and then sprayed with preservative. And you can taste the difference.

My children have gotten spoiled. They don’t even want to eat the strawberries from the market that are conventionally grown somewhere far, far away. They know they don’t taste like strawberries, just the idea of strawberries. But they sure look pretty.

Same is true for other fruit. We shopped at Trader Joes today and I told my 9 year old he could “spend” $20 on the stuff he wanted. When we met up at the check-out, I was impressed with his choices of organic fruit and yogurt, and not at all surprised to see the rest of his loot come from the snack aisle.

“The organic raspberries were 60 cents more than the other kind!” he remarked. “Why would you buy the other kind?” He knows of what he speaks. The “other kind” taste like the memory of raspberries. On the drive home, we feasted, savoring the fresh sweet-tart taste of real raspberries and wishing that ours would ripen faster.

So, the next time you find yourself standing in the fruit aisle of the grocery store wondering if it’s really worth the extra 50 cents or more a pound – take it from my youngest child – why would anyone buy the “other kind”? If not for your health, than for your tastebuds. This is the only body you’ll be getting in this lifetime so take care what you put in it. Life is too short to eat chemically created strawberries!

Your Very Own Raspberry Patch

I thought since I started to write about raspberries in my last post and ended up rambling on about my own issues with managing my life, I really should post about growing raspberries. If you only grow one fruit, let it be raspberries. They are the best plant for those of us who just don’t have time to care for our plants. If you put them in well to begin with, raspberries will bear fruit for years and years without you doing anything other than cutting them down each winter. All you need is a sunny spot. Raspberries do wonderfully along the edge of a yard or against your house or barn, but you can plop them down anywhere.

Perhaps the best reason to grow your own raspberries is they are so expensive, even when they’re in season. Kids are drawn to raspberries. Despite the fact that we grow them at home, my kids beg for them at the store. They can’t resist the plastic carton filled with plump, juicy raspberries. And half the time you buy those beautiful tempting berries in the store you come home to discover they are moldy in the middle. Raspberries don’t keep well. So when they are in season you just have to eat and eat and eat them, which is also a good thing, because they are really good for you. Organic raspberries are even better for you. Commercial raspberries that have to travel a great distance to reach you must certainly be laden with preservatives and heaven knows what else, or they wouldn’t survive the journey. Another great reason to grow your own!

Raspberries are very simple to grow. I would counsel you to spend some time preparing a proper garden bed for them, but truthfully raspberries are a bit like weeds and they can generally take over a garden all on their own. I hope you’ve taken advantage of the thousands of wild raspberries that grow all over the country side. They have a sweet-sour taste while the domesticated ones are just plain sweet. I can’t get enough of the wild raspberries and regularly get up at the crack of dawn to beat the neighborhood kids to the best patch.

Plant your raspberries in a single or double row, but no more than that. Otherwise you can’t get in to the middle to pick them. Raspberries are prickly, so you don’t want to be reaching too far in to your raspberry patch to harvest your berries. I would advise that you sink a border around them at least 4 inches deep – wood, plastic, metal, something that doesn’t leach awful things in to the soil. Raspberries will send out roots and spread to kingdom come, so you need to keep them contained. You also want to keep the grass surrounding them from moving in and strangling the raspberries’ root system. I would say that raspberries can handle anything and they’re much tougher than any wimpy lawn grass out there, but I know different now, so a border is advised. If you don’t put in a border, keep an eye on the immigrants crossing over and yank them out before they become entrenched.

Your raspberries will bear fruit the first year. (I told you they’re easy!) I looked up the details on pruning in a couple of texts before I wrote this and was confused by the directions about cutting down certain canes right after harvest and the tops of others. I’m sure that if you are a master gardener or own a raspberry farm you’re up to speed on those rules, but for the rest of us, I’ll share what we do. After a good hard freeze (usually early February), we pull out the dead canes and cut the others down to about tummy level. That’s it. We have a huge harvest every year with that simple effort. I’m always about simple and easy. But if you’re more of a detail person, you can check The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch. She’s got a nice section on raspberries with details on the complicated way to prune them.

Our raspberries bear a light June crop and then a heavy September crop. It’s good to have that break in the middle because you can only eat so many raspberries. The thrill of the first raspberries is not lost on my kids and they generally eat them all up as soon as they ripen. In September the kids are pretty distracted, so I am able to pick lots and use them to bake and freeze. I don’t make jam because the fussy people I live with don’t like seeds in their jam and removing seeds from raspberry jam is just way too tedious. Every now and then someone gives me a jar of homemade raspberry jam with no seeds and I am in awe. We eat lots of fresh raspberries and freeze many bags. You freeze raspberries just like all the other berries – clean them, dry them (salad spinner works well for this – but be gentle), and spread them out on a cookie sheet. Freeze them overnight and then transfer them to plastic bags to store.

Last week I wanted to do something with the raspberries, but I wasn’t getting enough in one picking for anything fancy, so I washed the raspberries and added sugar to preserve them and kept adding more berries to the mix all week. As I said before, raspberries don’t keep well, so if you aren’t going to eat them or bake them or freeze them right after you pick them, you need to add a preservative of some kind, sugar works well for this. By the end of the week I had a big bowl of raspberry mush that tasted divine. I added a little essential lime extract (incredibly potent lime flavoring I got from a fancy gourmet store). Then I pondered what to do with it. It sat for several days while I pondered. I tasted it daily and made everyone who came by taste it and we all just sighed and said “that’s incredible”. Finally my husband couldn’t stand my dithering any longer so he threw some in a blender with ice and another potent liquid and made a rather delicious drink. I’m thinking you could also mix it up with ice cream to make a more family-friendly smoothie that would divine. Eventually I did make a decision and used the amazing raspberry concoction to make a cobbler. I mixed up some shortbread and topped the raspberries with it and baked it in the oven for 20 minutes. Oh wow – a taste of heaven with whipped cream.

Here’s my favorite raspberry recipe. It also uses sweet corn, conveniently in season at the same time. Now don’t get wiggy on me and say you can’t eat corn and raspberries together because you will totally miss out. This is way yummy.

Fresh Corn Cake with Raspberries
(Cooking Light)

1 Cup fresh corn kernels (about 2 ears)
6 T butter, melted and cooled
1/3 C water
2 t fresh lemon juice
2 t vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 C flour
1 ¼ C sugar
2 t baking powder
1 t salt
½ t baking soda
2 C fresh raspberries
2 T flour
1 T powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 325.

1. Coat 9” cake pan with spray, line bottom with wax paper. Coat was paper with spray.
2. Combine corn and next 5 ingredients in blender or processor; process until smooth.
3. Combine flour, sugar, powder, salt and soda in large bowl; stir well with whisk. Add corn mixture to flour mixture, stirring until just combined.
4. Toss raspberries with 2 T flour; fold into batter.
5. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake at 325 for 1 hour or until toothpick comes out clean.
Cool in pan 10 minutes on a wire rack.Remove from pan and carefully peel off wax paper. Cool completely.

6. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Do It Right the First Time

I once had a job that required I do ten things at once and rarely ever finish anything. It was a challenging, if frustrating, situation. Too many days ended with my office strewn with project after project and my desk swimming in papers. I’d turn off the light and sneak out, stressed beyond belief and anxious to get some sleep so that I could get back at it the next day. I kept a quote taped to my desk in those days, after staring at it for six years, you’d think I’d have it committed to memory. It went something like this, “Do it right the first time, because there isn’t time to do it over.”

This mantra is one that has gone the way of high heels and sleeping in. It’s no longer realistic since having children. In the early years, it was just do whatever the hell it takes to get it taken care of, covered up, cleaned up, or hidden, and move on. This was true not only of my house, my diet, my wardrobe, but my garden too. I’ve gotten really good at getting a lot of things done, but please don’t look in my office, or my basement for that matter. Chaos rules. There are piles of books to be read, projects to be finished, papers to be filed, and they don’t hold a candle to the mounds of things to be put away, sorted out, given away, or mended. But generally I just close the door and sneak away and manage to neaten the piles when guests come to stay (the spare bedroom is my office).

This weekend as I began the huge project of tearing out our raspberry patch, I meditated on my long forgotten belief that you should do it right the first time. If we had taken the time to build a proper bed for the raspberries when they were first bequeathed to us six years ago, we wouldn’t be fighting the entrenched grass, mile-a-minute vine, and quite literally a small poplar tree as we struggled to save the raspberries that were being slowly suffocated by the interlopers. Back then I dragged some plastic over the ground, poked holes in it and plunked the raspberries in the holes. I mean, raspberries are really weeds, they can beat anything, right? Wrong. It was a long morning.

When I was just over half-way through the patch, my darling husband joined me in the battle. We talked about other options for the space (more tomatoes? How about moving the blueberries up here?). But in the end we recommitted to raspberries. Only this time we tilled the ground thoroughly, yanking out stubborn grasses and unidentifiable roots. We sunk a wooden border around it which would keep the grass out and the raspberries in, and debated the mulch options. As I re-planted the salvaged plants this morning, it felt really good. Good to be giving these beauties a new start instead of scrapping the whole mess and giving up. And hopefully this time we’ve done it right and it won’t be necessary to plant the raspberries a third time.

Satisfied with my efforts, I leaned on the pasture fence and surveyed the new garden. It looked so neat and tidy. I just wish the rest of my life were neat and tidy. I can’t help but think if I could apply my do-it-right-the-first-time strategy to the rest of my life it would be neat and tidy. If we just put away things as soon as we finished them – laundry, dishes, the newspaper, puzzles, games, clothing, SHOES, homework, and all the crap that fills my car, think how neat it would be! But we don’t. Life is just too busy. And I don’t want to spend my days nagging. All I can do is try to create places for everything and bribe children to put things where they belong. Besides, I do love to see the masterpieces that my youngest son creates, even all seventeen of them as they are displayed throughout two rooms in the latest version of his “art sale”. Of course the clutter from the masterpieces and the accompanying sale signs taped to the walls contribute to the “broken windows theory”. The theory that says if the neighborhood has broken windows and graffiti, people will treat it badly. They’ll assume that no one cares and add to the trash, crime, and general apathy that erode the area. I think that’s what’s going on in my car. Not that there are any broken windows, but there is graffiti in the form of yellow crayon on my window and some kind of black goo splattered on my ceiling. I think we need to embrace the broken windows theory and get things in order before we can begin to live the Do-it-right-the-first-time belief.

I just wish for once I could get my house and car, and perhaps my life, in order. Make it all beautiful and neat and organized, kind of like the new raspberry patch. It’s a fantasy. This I know. Because for this season in my life, the mess is my life. Hubby, kids, animals, gardens, and friends are much more important than a clean house (or a clean car although that doesn’t seem as far out of reach). Still, I think I will attempt to resurrect my mantra of “do it right the first time.” This may make my kids a little nuts and I’m sure it will make my husband smile knowingly. But just maybe it will be the push I need to re-claim some of my house. And maybe it will help me to stop trying to do everything. Instead of starting ten new projects, maybe I can do one (or two) right the first time.