August - Peaches, Tomatoes, and Flax - Oh, my!
August this year seemed like a month suspended in time followed by an insane rush. After months of waiting for a real harvest from the garden, the beans and tomatoes exploded in their bounty, and there was no time to put everything up.
Harvest froze the green beans, then planted another crop, and I put up 18 pints of tomatoes (since there are just the two of us, we prefer pints to quarts). Time got the better of me, though, and several bags of tomatoes are in the freezer awaiting their turn to be canned, and they still keep coming. It's tomato-mageddon out there.
The tomatoes join the peaches already in the freezer which were purchased at the local Amish school auction, held annually just a few miles down the road. Every year boxes of peaches and quarts of Amish-made Wisconsin maple syrup come up on the auction block between hand-woven rugs, handcrafted wood items, and spectacular hand-made quilts including a truly magnificent one which sold for just over $2,000 this year to thundering applause from everyone in attendance. It's been a couple of years since we last bought a box of peaches there, and I wanted to make peach jam this year, so I bought a nice-sized box thinking I would be able to make jam the following weekend. Jam was not in the cards.
I am inordinately fond of peach jam. When I was young, my mother, being a thrifty woman, bought strawberry jam in 4 lb. tins. I can still remember the brand name - Empress - and the design: a light blue on white lattice affair, very mid-1960's. I have no idea how many tins she purchased at a time, but knowing my mother, she probably bought them by the case. It was the only jam we ate, day in and day out, and I came to loathe strawberry jam. The tins of jam lasted forever. You would finish one tin and another one would appear out of nowhere. It was jam purgatory. My mother, however, failed to appreciate this. I prayed for grape, apricot, anything to relive the unremitting boredom of strawberry jam, and the only time I got anything else was when we were at my aunt's house, which we visited perhaps twice a year. There my sister and I could indulge ourselves in peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, or peanut butter with honey, a true luxury. To this day I am reluctant to eat strawberry jam when there is anything else on offer, and peach or apricot jam are my favorites. I had intended to jam the peaches we had purchased at the auction and indulge my craving right away, but time slipped away, and into the freezer they went, snuggling up to the tomatoes, to wait for another day.
In addition to the standard Martino Roma tomatoes we plant every year for canning, Harvest planted a few really interesting tomatoes for fresh eating that are worth sharing with you.
The Black Strawberry tomato on the left side of the bowl is truly almost black with a blush of red on it. The flavor has an unusual, floral overtone. The tomatoes are about the size of an apricot. The harvest period didn't last long, but while they were on the vine, they were wonderful.
The Micro Tom, shown in the top and lower right of the bowl, is a tidy, miniature bush tomato that fits perfectly into a hanging planter and grows a surprising number of cherry-type tomatoes. Harvest hung three baskets off the arbor next to the barn at an appealing eye level, ready for snacking. It's September now, and they're still going strong.
The most unusual tomato she planted is the Spoon Tomato shown at the left side of the bowl and the bottom of the bowl. These little darlings virtually explode on huge and exuberant plants and grow streamers of tomatoes. The strings of tomatoes look like snap-together plastic beads for kids and go from red to green on the same chain. If left on the vine, the green ones on the bottom continue to ripen even after the red ones at the top have been eaten. The tomatoes are about the size of a large blueberry, and it's irresistible to simply graze away on them while wandering around in the garden or doing outdoor chores. Bear, who is ever patient when it comes to treats and won't eat anything without permission, snacked his way through dinner with me - one for me, one for you, one for me, one for you. After discovering that there were still some tomatoes within corgi reach, he happily continued munching away on his own while I stacked wood, his little corgi butt sticking out of the bush while his nose was buried within sniffing out more goodies. He does love his veggies, and they seem to have had no deleterious effect on his system. I have determined, however, that next year we're going to espalier them along the garden fence since they are so abundant that it's nearly impossible to reach the ones in the middle of the vines. They will make a very colorful wall. They, too, show no signs of slowing down.
Mid-August found me doing a reprise of the flax growing, processing, and spinning workshop with Scott Johnson of the Low Technology Institute. (For more information on the history of growing and processing flax into linen, see last year's September post - "Flax to Linen the Low Technology Way.") We had gotten good reviews from last year's workshop, so we decided to do it again. There were four students this time, one coming from as far away as Appleton for the weekend, indulgent husband and two tween children in tow. I always feel so honored to teach when someone is willing to drive so far to learn. The family stayed at a local B & B, and dad and the kids found all kinds of interesting things to do while mom was learning all about flax.
Sadly, the flax crop hadn't done well this year at LTI, but there was plenty left over from last year, so we went at it with gusto, first breaking the flax between the jaws of a wooden contraption called, not surprisingly, a break. Chaff dropped all over the ground like tiny bits of hay. Good thing it wasn't windy.
Breaking the flax
We then took a scutching sword to it. This looks exactly like a toy wooden sword, and you whack away at the flax to get more chaff off it. Every time I see a scutching sword, I think of little kids playing pirates ("Avast there, matey!"). All the while you are breaking and scutching, the amount of flax in your hand gets smaller and smaller as the chaff falls away. It's rather disheartening. And it's not finished yet.
Hackling the flax - combing out the flax on a board with three sizes of nails - made each bundle smaller yet as the shorter fibers were left behind. Scott scooped up these short fibers, called tow, and tucked them away like a magpie. He uses the tow for spinning twine. We tease each other about this, since I want the tow for fire starters, which is absolutely horrifying to him. He does make a nice twine with it, though.
By the time all the breaking and scutching and hackling is done, only 10% of the bundle you started with is left: a soft, shiny handful of fine, two-foot long fibers no larger in diameter than a broom handle. In other words, not a lot. This is the stuff you spin into linen thread, and this is the reason linen is so darned expensive. It takes a lot of flax to make just a little bit of spinnable fiber. Our ancestors must have really valued the end result to take such time and effort for such little return. Sheep produce far more for the money, but wool can be decimated by moths, leaving nothing but fine dust where your favorite sweater used to be. Truly, there's nothing like flax, and the darn stuff lasts forever. Seriously.
The 5,000 year-old Tarkhan woven linen dress. Now that's durability!
And those threads were all spun with a drop spindle (not a spinning wheel), and they're as fine as any linen today.
There are even pleats!
"Dressing" the distaffs - putting that hackled hank of fiber onto poles that hold the flax so it's ready to spin - took hours on Saturday. I told the students it would, but nobody ever really believes me until they do it. Rush this part of the process, and the rest is just plain misery as many, including me, have discovered. Alas, there was some rushing. There always is.
A strick of flax after hackling, ready to go on the distaff
A "dressed" distaff
On Sunday we arrived at the final stage of all the prior effort: spinning the flax fiber into linen thread. Before the fiber is spun, it's flax; after it's spun, it's linen. The line of transformation is the space between the spinner's two hands, which is pretty magical if you think about it. The two experienced spinners went to it with a will. They quickly discovered that flax can be fiddly and persnickety, and they had to dump pretty much everything they knew about spinning wool in order to learn to spin flax.
Flax can be a joy to spin once you have the rhythm, but finding that rhythm can take some doing. Imagine being Ginger Rogers (For those of you too young to know about such things, she was Fred Astaire's dance partner. Who was Fred Astaire, you ask? Oh, never mind.). Imagine dancing backwards in heels. Now add five balls to juggle at the same time. Smile while you're dancing and juggling. That's spinning flax. Once you've got it, you've got it; it's getting it that takes practice. By the end of the afternoon, the two experienced spinners were getting the rhythm of it. By the way, I've heard tales that children as young as five were able to spin flax. I don't believe a word of it. The manual dexterity required just doesn't exist in five-year-old hands. Wool? Maybe. Flax? Nope.
Linen thread
But wait, I hear you cry. Weren't there four students? What happened to the other two? Did I mention that two of the students had never spun before? I didn't, did I? Not a lick of experience. Nada. Zip. Zilch. I had some qualms about this, but ever the optimist and brave explorer, Scott figured they wouldn't have to unlearn anything if they didn't know anything at all, so we gave it a go, and I tried to teach brand new spinners to spin. With flax. On a spinning wheel. What could possibly go wrong?
Since we hadn't anticipated four spinners, we had to improvise on providing them with spinning wheels. One of them was assigned Scott's "frankenwheel" - a re-fitted spinning wheel with very rustic parts Scott had fashioned himself - and the other worked away with a temperamental vintage Ashford wheel from the 1960's. Not ideal conditions, even for teaching spinning wool, let alone flax. Bless them, they gave it their all and even managed to spin a bit of flax. For some reason known only to the goddesses of spinning - and there are many - they actually enjoyed themselves, especially after I had them set the flax aside and started to teach them how to spin wool. Their shoulders came down from around their ears once the flax was put down, They took their dressed distaffs home with them. I assured them that the distaffs and flax could sit quietly in a corner adding ambience to their room, and they could come back to it when they had a bit more experience under their belts. As I said, it lasts practically forever.
And there we were, the six of us, sitting in a circle in Scott's garage/workshop with the door open to the yard: Scott spinning twine from his flax tow; the two experienced spinners alternately learning how to spin flax and helping the new spinners with their wool; and me flying back and forth trying to demonstrate how to spin flax, coach the experienced spinners, and teach new spinners how to use a wheel and spin both flax and wool while not colliding with any of the five spinning wheels. To (badly) paraphrase Winston Churchill: it was multitasking's finest hour. There was hot tea and cold water and three varieties of Scott's homemade pickles to sample and enjoy, and rain that bucketed down late in the afternoon leaving mud puddles everywhere, and stories, as there always are at LTI, and a lot of laughter. The new spinners weren't in the least daunted, and they both want to learn to spin in earnest - but wool first, thank you very much.
Scott is still determined to weave a shirt for himself, and after this workshop, I think we may now have enough flax for me to begin to work on spinning the thread for it. There's going to be a lot of time on my hands this winter, but there's a lot to do between now and November when the snow starts to fly. I'd better crack on with it. Scott, meanwhile, needs to learn to weave which, I am sure, is going to be a story of its own.
In closing this month's post, I must bid farewell to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. I'm not a royal watcher, but my father came to the US from England when he was a boy, and I was raised as an English child in Southern California, which is weird. My mother taught me how to drink tea properly "just in case you ever have tea with the Queen." Well, mum, I never did, but I'll miss Her Majesty all the same.
Queen Elizabeth II
1926 - 2022
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