Lammas - First Harvest

    Lammas, also called Lughnasadh, is the first of the three harvest celebrations of the year, the other two being Autumn Equinox and Halloween.  In Middle English, the celebration was called Lammasse, meaning "loaf mass", and was a Church holiday on which the first loaves of bread from that year's grain were consecrated.  Another name for Lammas is Lughnasadh, a harvest celebration particular to Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man.  In the story of this holiday, the god Lugh fights to steal the grain for humanity and avoid the blight that would ruin the harvest and starve the people.

    At our house, this holiday has gained in importance as our gardens have grown in size.  We have a small altar in the back of our property on which we have placed offerings of this year's first produce  You can see a summer squash, green garlic, and a small sheaf of wheat I harvested at the Low Technology Institute https://lowtechinstitute.org.  

    It's considered bad luck to start the harvest season with last year's grain, so I managed to grab a few wheat stalks at the Low Technology Institute when I was co-teaching a class on flax processing and spinning with Scott Johnson, the head of the Low Technology Institute.  Scott grows and mills his own wheat on a small homestead in Cooksville, Wisconsin, and he showed me a couple of his beautiful wheat sheaves.         

 The garden gate at the  Low Technology Institute     

                                     

   

 Lammas is a time for assessing the progress of planting and for celebrating the abundance still to come.  In the spirit of the celebration, here is a tour of the progress of our gardens and other projects we started this spring.  But before we begin, I must tell you a bit about the harvest loaf.  

    Each year, we bake a harvest loaf for Lammas.  Sometimes it's a rounded braid, sometimes it's a perfect sourdough loaf; sometimes it's in the shape of a sheaf of wheat, sometimes like a corn dolly or an abundant goddess figure.  This year Harvest did the honors by making beautiful focaccia bread decorated with tomatoes, squash blossoms, basil, and garlic scapes, all from our own garden.

                                  Share the harvest loaf with us as you take a tour.
                                                      

Thanks to well-composted chicken straw (thank you, ladies!) and Harvest's loving care, we are on the verge of a vegetable explosion.  Harvest doubled the size of the garden this spring and put tomatoes on "her" side with a few pepper plants that I was allowed to put into an unused corner. I put in quite a few non-tomato veggies on "my" side, but the squash is climbing every available surface, including fencing.   Although I have a lovely diagram telling me where everything should be, the squash has had other ideas this year, and I can't tell what's where anymore.  I brought in what I thought was a not quite ripe squash to cut up for dinner.  It was unbelievably bitter.  I couldn't figure out why until I realized  later that it must have been an unripe melon instead.  Even the best laid plans, or in this case, the best drawn diagrams, are of no use when the squash goes berserk. And yes, I know that squash has a tendency to do this, but this is becoming squashmageddon.  Somewhere underneath the squash vines, the broccoli and broccolini are hiding. I've seen glimpses of the blue-green leaves, but I can't get to them for the squash vines, and there's something in me that just can't cut back a vine that has blossoms and potential fruit on it.  Good thing the broccoli and broccolini are cool weather crops.  The squash leaves are keeping them cool, and they should be visible when the squash vines start to die back.  I hope.  

         

    This happy chappie is a Candy Roaster squash.  It's a great keeper, but does get large.  It's the size of a miniature poodle now, but this one promises to be the side of a toddler when it's all grown up.  I have no idea how I'm going to carry it inside much less where I'll put it.

    The peppers and sunflowers are coming along.   I had hoped to plant a Hungarian pepper variety so that I could make my own paprika, but the plants didn't make it though the indoor planting stage, and it was too late to start over, so I've settled for some Louisiana peppers that are supposed to be both hot and sweet.  I'm going to let them ripen to deep red, which should mellow them somewhat, then dry them, hoping they will give a little kick to dishes without overwhelming heat.

    Because we had cedar apple  rust on our apple threes, we decided to cut two of the three down to about  four feet in height.  When apples trees are planted too close to cedar trees, there's nothing that can be done about it except to remove the cedar trees, which, unfortunately, are on the neighbor's property.  We didn't know about it when we planted the apple trees and didn't figure it out for years.  The apple trees had to go.

    We left one tree up for shade, knowing that any apples it did manage to grow would be inedible, and we took down the other two leaving tall stumps as handy places to put tools.  We planted a charming little flower bed around the stump in Harvest's side of the garden.  As you can see, the apple trees, like the squash, have had other plans.  The trimming, vicious at it was, seems to have encouraged them.  I think this one makes a charming little topiary, and perhaps we'll get a good crop of apples from it next year.

    Meanwhile in the raised beds in the front of the house, the beans have been harvested.  

    These are purple-podded bush beans.  They're easier to harvest because they're more visible, but they're not as crunchy as we would like, and their window of harvest time is very narrow - just a few days - so we've frozen them, and Harvest has planted a second crop of the faithful Blue Lake beans.  They're coming up like troopers, and it looks like we'll have beans by late September or so.  

Next to the house in the front yard, the dark red hibiscus are blooming profusely.  If you look at the photo, you'll see the railing of the front porch, and you can see how huge the flowers are.  The smallest ones are the size of a luncheon plate.  The dark red flowers are perfect for dyeing wool, which is why I bought a plant.   It gets bigger every year, but who could complain with a show like this.  Because they only last a day or so, they have to be harvested and dried the moment they start to wilt.  On the other hand, they give us an ever-changing view as the flowers come and go on various parts of the plant.

Enormous hibiscus next to the porch.

    And in the chicken coop, all is well at last.  Those cute little fluffballs that turned into ungainly teenagers have finally turned into hens, and they should start laying eggs around mid-September.  We've been hoarding the eggs we do get at the moment because we only get two from the Prairie Blue Eggers, Isis and Judy, and a small one from Elizabeth who, after months of not laying a single egg, decided to come back into lay, thereby saving herself from a trip to another home.

                                            The "little" girls.  Left to right: Hattie, Shirley, Barbara, and Goldie

    Everyone sleeps in the coop now, and though each group tends to stick together, there are no more scraps, and they all spend time peaceably in the yard together.        

                Little girls to the left, big girls to the right.

Having been raised by hand, the "little girls", as I call the former chicks, entertain themselves by following me around.  This sounds like a brilliant idea until you realize that they are following you down the driveway toward the street.  And, of course, each group has their own way of getting into mischief in two separate areas of the yard, naturally, which involves shooing one group away from where they shouldn't be, then going to find the other group and what trouble they've got into.  Meanwhile the first group... you get the idea.  I had a notion at one point to sit in the yard and read with the chickens pecking around nearby.  It didn't happen.  On the other hand, Barbie and Hattie like to be petted and held, so that makes up for it a little.

    As the harvest time continues, there will doubtless be more tales to tell.  Meanwhile, I will leave you with the sound of cicadas.  The sound starts almost like a cricket and then rises to what I can only describe as a "shiver" before subsiding again.  For those of you who have never heard the sound before, it is surreal, and it means that summer is beginning to wane and autumn will be arriving before we know it. https://soundbible.com/920-Cicada.html