I AM a Chicken Tender

I have been unable to post until today about my new chickens because of a plight unique to the modern homesteader: my broadband has been down. Quite a handicap, and I was much more inconvenienced than I care to admit.

My chicks were four weeks old on Monday. They are amazing, growing machines. From fuzzy little handfuls 30 short days ago, they are now nearly fully-feathered and look like real chickens. The cockerel has his comb and wattle, and thankfully there is only one (I don't know how those hatchery people sex day-old chicks, but they are GOOD. They hatched on Monday and on Tuesday, the 25 chicks were packed into a 12x18-inch box and shipped by the Postal Service. They arrived at my house about 6 p.m. on Wednesday. I am especially grateful to the postmistress, who delivered them to our house after hours--I had checked every day and that very morning, not realizing they received afternoon shipments. (Photo above: Chicken in a box, and not the kind we're used to)

I started them out in a cardboard box in the bathroom, the only place with a door that closes to protect them from our mostly lazy, but still predatory cat. The 18x36-inch box was outfitted with a quart chick waterer, a brooder lamp with a red heat bulb (to prevent toe picking), and a simple paper plate for feed. Initially, I lined the box with paper towels over the pine shavings, since apparently they will pick at and eat anything until they find the feed. After a day or so, I switched to a trough feeder with little holes for them to stick their heads into. The chicks settled into their new home, and it was nice to pop in every 15 minutes or so to just look at them and listen to their constant peeping.


After about a week, several of the more adventurous chicks began flying up at us when we came into visit. Once or twice, they made it to the top edge of the box. It was time to move them our into the coop. It was still cool outside, mid-50s during the day and we had some pretty cold nights, so I created an enclosure inside the 4x6-foot coop with some cardboard and hooked the light to one of the rafters. Not long after, I had to abandon the trough feeder because the chicks all perched on top of it and proceeded to poop in their feed. I switched to a tube feeder and removed the cardboard circle. The chicks wanted to roam and a few more square feet was all I could give them inside.

The power of animal instinct always amazes me. The chicks were not even two weeks old, but they so wanted to perch on things. I knew I needed to replace the single piece of wood that was the only roost provided, so my son and I set about building a simple ladder-style roost that I could remove when I needed to add or remove bedding. Within 10 minutes of putting it into the coop, the chickens had learned to hop from the low perch to the highest one. A few days later, they began pecking at the window as if to say, "Hey, let us out there!"

Now, I was really under the gun since I had not expected to let them outside for a couple of weeks and didn't have any materials. I made a hasty trip to Lowe's and came back with some 2" wire fencing, metal posts, and plastic netting. Initially, my thought was to create a rotating chicken run, in order to let the chickens eat down the grass and give the old area time to recover. After an afternoon of driving stakes, clipping on fencing and wire tying netting to the top to keep out predatory birds, I realized that this run was semi-permanent. The laying hens will have to enjoy vegetable scraps and other treats; the meat birds will be pastured--but that's the next blog... In the end, I was proud of my little 8 x 14 foot run. I built it pretty much by myself, and that includes a little utility door which allows me to reach in to put feed and water outside. I later realized my fence prohibited me from opening the chicken door without going inside, but my husband kindly rigged me a pulley system which works beautifully.

The day had arrived for the chicks to make their first venture into the great outdoors. I asked my son to pull the rope, while I waited with my camera. First one chick appeared at the door, cocking its head curiously as it peered outside. Several more appeared, looking over the backs of the first ones. Soon, most of them had crowded in behind and began jostling the others about, peeping with annoyance at each other until inevitably one was pushed out nearly falling onto its beak. Two more tumbled out until those in the middle of the pack were able to step out of their own accord. It was a funny scene. Ever since, each day when I open the door, they all come streaming out at once, then take a flying run across the yard to stretch and flap their wings. I can see that now that I am a chicken tender, every day will be an adventure. (*Many thanks to my sister-in-law Sue, a chicken "hawker," for the chicken tender pun)

Chapter One: My Chicks are Born

To begin my story with the beginning of my chick's life, I record that my chicks were born on April 27th, 2009 on a Monday, in Polk, Ohio. Then came the great time of waiting, during which I telephoned the post office twice, came begging upon their doorstep once, was most unfortunately absent when called to announce the chick's arrival and still not at home when the postal service ultimately came to my doorstep, last evening at about 6 p.m. Fortunately for me--not to mention the chicks--my son and husband were home and greeted their arrival with all due manner of excitement, calling me upon my cellular phone in order that I might hear all manner of peeping. And now the comparison of my chick's story with that of David Copperfield ends, except perhaps for the story of one poor, crippled chick, whose fate remains to be determined.

Until now, I have only hinted at my plans and dreams to start keeping chickens. I intended to get them last year, but didn't feel up to building a coop myself and with my father's illness and my husband's increasingly busy schedule, I hesitated to ask for help. Earlier this year, I discovered that Good's a local Amish business that sells sheds and swingsets, also had a small 4x6-foot chicken coop. I'd seen similar coops advertised for twice the price and so it seemed like a good deal. I ordered it in February and it took well over a month to get it delivered. I'll post about the coop at a later time.

Since last year, I had pretty much decided to get Plymouth Barred Rocks. After all, these are the breed which started the Delmarva chicken industry. Then, I admired the flocks of Rhode Island Reds I saw at Rumbleway Farm and the Colchester Farm CSA, and decided to get a few of those as well. My friend Jeff, who has Dominiques, suggested I consider a heritage breed. So I went to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy website, and found a great chart on heritage poultry breeds, their relative rarity, the types of eggs they lay, their meat qualities and their disposition.



I remembered my brother's silky bantams--beautiful fluffy white birds--and the fact that I could not play in my own backyard because of one, evil rooster. Yes, I know they don't look very tough, but this rooster would fly at me whenever I ventured past the swimming pool toward the rest of the yard. The day our new neighbors moved in sometime in the early 1980s, he attacked their 4-year old son. They were from the city, somewhere in Massachusetts; some welcome to the country and the south! When the rooster was in the coop and I had to collect eggs, I would stick a pole in and knock him around a little bit so he would be too woozy to attack. Finally--perhaps after the neighbor incident--we decided to get rid of the evil rooster. My grandmother did the deed and cooked him up for dinner. His flesh was purple like turtle meat, stringy, and basically inedible. His last revenge.

So I was intrigued when I read that the Delaware breed was gentle. Originally called "Indian Rivers" for a prime broiler area in Sussex County, Delaware, the breed was developed by George Ellis in 1940 for the burgeoning poultry industry. They were bred from the old stand-by Barred Plymouth rocks and New Hampshires. In the 1950s, they were replaced by the Cornish Cross breed that dominates today, but they sounded like a good dual purpose bird and they are considered critically low in numbers. In addition, they have a very good rate of lay for extra large to jumbo brown eggs, they grow fast and can be eaten at any age. My most recent issue of Backyard Poultry says they used to be the standard for "Sunday dinner chicken."

I looked up New Hampshires, since they are the hens from which Delaware's were bred, and they are a pretty reddish buff, satisfying my desire for a colorful backyard bird. They also have a pedigree as an outstanding meat bird, having been the standard in the Chicken of Tomorrow contests. That sealed the deal for me. One of my favorite items in our archive when I was curator at the Delaware Agricultural Museum was the copy of the 1948 film, "Chicken of Tomorrow," which was filmed in Delaware. It is the typical newsreel-type film like the ones shown in theaters during World War II, dramatic music and all. I was pleased to discover you can watch "Chicken of Tomorrow" online.
New Hampshires are also "calm" birds, lay extra large brown eggs and are fast growing up to 7 and a half pounds.

So I ordered 12 Delawares, 12 New Hampshires and one Delaware male. The Delaware rooster, bred to any of those females, should produce chicks of the Delaware pattern. If I manage to raise broody hens, I want to do my part to keep the breed going. There is much more to come about my chicken adventure. You're going to have to wait for the baby pictures!

The Long Winter

Laura Ingalls Wilder has been my hero since childhood: mother, teacher, writer, pioneer. I always considered Laura and I to be "kindred spirits," like Jo from Little Women,(or rather Anne from Anne of Green Gables). After this Maryland winter--Minnesota and Maine folks are now laughing, "Do you call that winter?"--I realize that I'm not cut from the same stock. A March blizzard (by Maryland standards) caused the collapse of my hoop house, even though I went out in boots and ear-flap hat to sweep it off at 11 p.m. After that, I gave up and have been holding my breath for spring ever since.

Will spring ever come? Oh, it's here. The signs are everywhere. The crocuses have already come and gone; the daffodils are in full bloom. The grapes, blackberries and blueberries are budding, but I have yet to prune them. You see, I can't seem to handle 45-50 degree breezy days anymore. I hung clothes on the line for the first time in three months last week, and then had to come inside and turn up the propane stove. Our new woodstove is wonderful, however, we have run out of wood trimmed to the smaller 16-inch size and so we haven't burned it for two weeks. Turning on the heat is out of the question, of course, so it is 59 degrees in my house most days. I find myself fantasizing about just driving around my Subaru station wagon with the heated seats on.


The spring chores are piling up. We had one beautiful 60-degree day last week, but I had to spend most of it traveling up to the northern part of the county to pick up a quarter of organic beef that was ready. By the time I got home, I only had time to plant about half of my onion sets (about 100 plants) before leaving for a school function. Potatoes are waiting to be planted, blueberries and strawberries are to arrive any day, and I haven't even finished building my last raised bed. Pansies I purchased two weeks ago are still sitting in their grower packs on my front step. The weeds are doing great, though!

I am pleased to report that last fall's spinach and surprisingly some romaine lettuce survived the hoop house collapse and are growing like crazy. We had a nice spinach salad on Sunday. Unfortunately, these are growing where I planned to put the strawberries. What to do?

Even now, I am avoiding going outside. Yesterday was in the fifties, but felt bitter to me because of the 25 mph wind. Today is sunny, with highs forecasted for about 60. Yet, here I am writing instead of changing into my gardening clothes, content to watch the garden from the window. I can see things are happening but--well--it's just warmer inside. Something about winter lulls me into an attitude of watching and waiting. Watching the birds, waiting for a warmer day, watching the flowers and trees bud, waiting for the seeds and plants to arrive. I feel like I'm stuck out of gear and can't shift into drive.

I know I'll get moving eventually. Winter planning has set events into motion that I will have to deal with, regardless of the weather. Soon, perhaps even today, the blueberries and strawberries will arrive at my doorstep. The still unplanted onions are starting to shrivel. I guess I'll pull on my flannel-lined plants and find a place to put them. Spring is here, whether I'm ready or not.

A Much-Needed Taste of Spring

This past week, we enjoyed six glorious days of spring-like weather--yes, in February. Temperatures reached almost the mid-60s one day. I celebrated by pruning my blueberries and preparing their new home by tilling in the grass clippings and newspapers I put down in a long row in October. While the rest of my yard remained frozen from a late January cold snap, the covered bed cultivated beautifully. Not a shred of newspaper remained, and the tough sod beneath had broken down as well. This soil is some of the poorest in my yard, but it already looks pretty good. I sprinkled in some iron sulfate to lower the pH for acid-loving blueberries. I'll apply some mushroom soil either when I transplant the old bushes and plant the new ones, or as a top dressing after they're in the ground.

It felt good to get outside and breathe in the smell of freshly-turned earth. It felt good just to breathe deeply after another bout with illness, this time pneumonia which put me out of commission for most of January. I was winded and tired after my short gardening session, but my mood improved tremendously. Earlier in the week, I made my first foray outside into the newly warm weather out of necessity. Snow and ice just a week earlier had caused my PVC hoophouse to collapse. It was my own fault. If I'd only brushed the inch or so of snow off, the icy precipitation probably would have rolled right off. But I've gotten too used to keeping myself warm and rested inside the house.



The hoophouse is yet another experiment, one that has taken nearly two years to perfect--if in fact I've perfected it. In the fall of 2007, I purchased greenhouse film and created a framework out of 3/4-inch PVC pipe, using cross and T connectors. I placed a series of hoops over rebar driven into the ground, and connected them with sections of pipe at the top and sides. Last year's structure was high and wide, and did well during the mild winter until an early February snowstorm, which picked it up off the rebar and pulled it apart.

This year, I changed my design to make the hoophouse lower and wider, using my raised beds as the base. I purchased metal channels into which the greenhouse film is drawn tight, snapped in with a sturdy piece of wire. But a late November cold snap this year did in my lettuce and cilantro. I did manage to keep my basil alive for four weeks past the first frost, but it was already gone by the time temperature dipped into the twenties.

Part of the problem was the door. Last year, I covered both ends and then slit one in the middle, applying "industrial strength" sticky velcro to close it. It was a bit of a pain to get the velcro to line up, but it sealed well...at least until the first damp night. A little cold and a little moisture and that velcro never stuck again. For the rest of the hoophouse's short season, I used spring clamps to keep the sides together. It worked o.k., but what a pain it was to get in. This year, I covered the entire end and just left one side partially unattached, weighing it down with some old boards and a couple of bricks. What I didn't consider was that the film got incredibly muddy in the wet garden, so that every time I bent down to crawl through the two and a half foot opening I'd allowed myself, my entire back would get covered with mud. Once I tripped going in and ended up with mud all over my knees as well.


So with the hoophouse once more in need of reassembly, I decided to try something I'd seen driving by one of the local nurseries. I cut two two-by-fours to the height and angle of the end and attached them to the PVC using plastic ties. I screwed the bottom ends into the raised beds for stability. Then, I attached another two by four across to be the top of my doorway. The door is only about 3 1/2 feet high, only because the plywood I wanted to use as a door was behind about 30 other pieces of wood. I stapled the greenhouse film around the doorway securely, then placed the plywood over the opening and held it in place with a 1x2 which I slid into some U-brackets. When I want to get in, all I have to do is remove the 1x2 and lift the plywood aside. Wow, and it only took me two years to figure it out!

My son helped me patch the holes in the film with packing tape and then we went inside to check it out. He enjoyed tapping the top of the greenhouse to make it "rain" on me. I checked the thermometer. It was 90 degrees inside! I think I know where I'll be spending the rest of my winter. Inside, the carrots are small but doing fine. The spinach and lettuce is not growing, but it's alive. I'm already anticipating some very early greens this year. I'm also hopeful that the greenhouse will help me get an early start with my warm-weather vegetables like tomatoes and peppers.




It has been a particularly dark and dreary winter, but things are looking up. A few fifty-plus degree days got my blood pumping and warmed my heart. I pulled back some straw on Tuesday and dug up a beautiful bunch of carrots which I cut up and put into a pan with a roast beef. Any day now, I will place my spring order and get those first seedlings started under lights in the basement. And when those new blueberry bushes arrive, I'm ready for them.

Sweet Potatoes and Sickness

It was October 1970, just about two months before I was born. My grandfather had been bringing in his sweet potato crop, which required careful digging by hand so as not to pierce or bruise the tubers before they could be cured for storage; he would never think of using a tractor. Pop Pop Brannock was known for his sweet potatoes, and he even grew the tiny slips for planting and sold them to other farmers and growers. Mom recalls how gently, almost lovingly Pop Pop would brush the dirt off each sweet potato as he prepared them for curing.

The rest of the story I have pieced together over the years from brief comments made by my aunt and my mother. My grandfather is alternatively described as stubborn and domineering or soft-hearted and playful, a volatile drunk or a silly sipper of beer. My mother was 14 years younger than her sister. Personalities sometimes mellow over the years, so perhaps both descriptions are true. In any case, Pop Pop had been feeling poorly, but kept quiet about it because he had potatoes to dig. One day, the family came home from church and found dark drops of blood all over the kitchen. He'd had a stroke, but in typical fashion, he refused to go to the hospital and the ambulance driver couldn't take him by force. Pop Pop paced anxiously around the kitchen, unable to speak, blood dripping from his nose. Finally, his leg gave out and my aunt was able to force him to get in the car and she took him to the hospital in Cambridge. He never regained consciousness.

I never met my grandfather. On the day he went into the hospital, my mother was called, and she left in the middle of something. The kitchen timer had not yet gone off, and must have buzzed for hours before it finally just gave up. As a young

child, the broken timer was a reminder of the grandfather I never met. Pop Pop has remained a shadowy figure to me. Since he didn't like having his picture taken, there was only one photo of him in our family album--standing over his cold frame in the spring of 1967 with my older brother, Jim. Recently, my cousin unearthed a picture of my mother with both of her parents: tall, thin figures flanking her in the family graveyard next to their house. Mom cried when I gave her a framed enlargement of the image as a surprise two Christmases ago.

I can't imagine the fear and pain my grandfather must have felt as old age and his body betrayed him. Why did he resist getting treatment and instead chose to buzz dazedly--a bit like my mother's kitchen timer--until finally he had to give up too? The answer I imagine is that he was clinging to what he knew, what was predictable. The sweet potatoes had to be dug and if he could just get through this physical setback, he could get back to what needed to be done.



My last blog post was in October. Soon after I brought in my first-ever sweet potato crop, sickness hit my family again and again. Debilitated from severe back pain, my father had two spinal surgeries and has spent the last two months in recovery. My immediate family has suffered, in rapid succession, an anti-biotic resistant ear infection, gout, bronchitis, asthma and a nasty stomach virus. Just after Thanksgiving, I awoke in the middle of night with an upset stomach that somehow spiraled into anaphalaxis. I lay in bed--intensely itching, throat tightening, shaking because of my lowered blood pressure--and tried to control the panic, hoping the antihistamine would stop the reaction. I didn't want to shoot myself with epinephrine and go to the hospital. I'll have to wake everyone, there's so much to do before Christmas, I haven't pulled up the tomato plants, what about Joe's test...

I'm not kidding, this is what I was thinking--in between prayers. A long hour and a half later, the symptoms finally subsided and I fell asleep. My body betrayed me, but didn't give up. Perhaps now I have some insight into what my grandfather was thinking the day he died, as he lost control over his body. The work of harvesting, like all gardening, is a constant. Something to focus upon, a rhythm, a purpose when so much of life is really out of our control. Of course, it's folly to think we have control over our gardens either, with the vagaries of weather, rainfall and pestilence, but we gardeners like to control what we can.


Right now, I am choosing to delight in what I can't control in my garden. Somehow, despite losing one batch of sweet potato slips which succumbed to the cold and turned slimy before ever growing, I grew a half or dozen or more ENORMOUS sweet potatoes this year. The largest measured 13 inches long, 19 inches and diameter and weighed in at 6 pounds. The day I dug the last of the sweet potatoes (right after the first frost), I quickly uncovered several 4-pound potatoes. These are about 3 times the size of those you usually see in the grocery store. I found the prizewinner on my very last dig. I hollered to my family inside and they came out to gush and marvel and overall were suitably impressed. I called my mother to ask, "Is this normal?" I waylaid my Amish neighbor as she walked by in their adjacent field. "Ours were big this year," she noted, "but not that big." I bragged about my sweet potato to anyone who would listen. I researched giant sweet potatoes on the internet and learned the largest was 81 pounds!

On Christmas Eve, I brought my giant sweet potato up from the basement to show the whole family and to weigh it on my new digital scale. The result: 5 pounds, 15 ounces. No record there. Oh well, I'm going to eat mine not keep it to show off for 10 years anyway. On Thanksgiving, I made a double recipe of my sweet potato casserole from a single potato, and that wasn't even the biggest one. So there. No matter what, sweet potatoes are definitely on the list for this year's garden. Will I grow another whopper? I have no idea. It's out of my control.

"We Didn't Know There Was a Depression"

Ten years ago, I curated an exhibition exploring the impact of the Great Depression on Delaware farmers. Despite an overall downturn in crop prices that had impacted growers since the 1920s--long before the stock market crash--many rural people did not experience the bread lines of the cities, the despair of the Dust Bowl. As one woman who lived through the Depression as a child put it, "We didn't know there was a Depression." I thought this was surprising and thought-provoking, a great title for an exhibition. We announced in our newsletter that we'd received grant funding for the exhibit and the proposed title.

Soon after, I received an angry phone call from a woman I admired very much, a Quaker, a farmer, and the woman who had written THE book on Delaware Agricultural history. "How could you possibly say there was no Depression?" she chastised me. "Some poultry farmers may not have felt the Depression, but we certainly did." I brooded over her words for days, even though I had given considerable thought to the title and my director had approved it. I had no intention of trying to minimize the everyday struggles of farmers; on the contrary, I was trying to highlight their resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.

But I also understood her point. Even as prices for crops fell by almost half, in 1923 a new business opportunity began to boom in lower Delaware: broilers. In 1923, a farm wife named Cecile Steele accidentally received 500 chicks instead of the usual 50 for her home flock. She raised the chicks until they were "broiler" size and then sold them as meat to a local buyer for 62 cents a pound. By the early 1930s, the Steeles were raising over 200,000 birds a year and Delaware growers sold chickens year-round to Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Hatcheries, feed mills and by 1938 a processing plant sprung up to support the new industry. For those growing broilers, the Depression hit very softly. On the other hand, average farmers marketing field crops, fruits and vegetables were often cash-strapped, land poor and unable to invest in the technology or new crops that might have brought them more success.

The lady who said "We didn't know there was a Depression," however, was NOT the daughter of a poultry farmer. Her father was a truck farmer who sold fruits and vegetables at market and to the local cannery, and kept a herd of dairy cows for some "milk money." What she meant is that her family was insulated from the privations of economic strife such as not having enough to eat or having a place to live, because they owned their own modest farm and they had the ability to grow and preserve their own food. It is a story I've heard time and time again as I've continued to interview children of the Depression. Mildred Strong of Trumpington recalled that her mother gardened and canned, and bartered eggs for staple items at the store in Rock Hall. The milk money provided cash for taxes and some hired labor. They pinched pennies: "If I had a nickel, I thought I was rich," Mrs. Strong remembers.

I never heard much pain or regret in the voices of those I interviewed who struggled through the Depression. On the contrary, I heard pride. My parents were both born late in the Depression, my father to a poor family of 10 in coal-mining country and my mother to a family who lived on tenant farms until she was a small child. Nonetheless, they felt the legacy of the Depression and growing up poor and that was passed on to my brother and me. We scrimped and saved, gardened and canned, but generally had a much more comfortable existence than my grandparents'and parents' generation. My father rose from teller to bank vice president to elected County Treasurer. Dad schooled me in balancing my checkbook every month to the penny, how to make good money decisions and eventually how to land a good mortgage. Both my parents gave me lessons on thrift.

The spending excesses I've seen since I was a teenager have remained a mystery to me. The first time I asked for a pair of Jordache jeans, my mother sat me down and explained the family budget and why there was no money left for $60 designer jeans after the bills and food were paid for. I didn't like the answer, but I understood. (I also recall receiving designer jeans as my ONLY birthday present a year or so later.) But I must admit, when I say no to my own children's requests for video game systems and cell phones, I feel a pang of guilt. Every other child their age really does seem to have all those things. I've continued to resist, and now with the current economic crisis, I'm feeling pretty wise.

Commentators on TV say that good citizens like me who don't have credit card debt and pay their modest mortgages every month should be annoyed with those who have gotten in over their heads and lived beyond their means. I supposed I started to wonder myself, so I asked my Dad if he was annoyed. After years of dealing with bank customers who had plenty of money and wealthy homeowners who didn't think they should have to pay their property taxes, I must admit I thought he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about "rich people." I was wrong. "No, it doesn't annoy me," he responded so quickly I was a bit taken aback. "I wouldn't have lived any other way."

There it was. The same pride in self-sufficiency and living simply that I had seen in Depression-era farm kids. The difference is not so much in what people like my parents expect out of their lives as what they value in their lives. Our family was close, we loved each other and we worked together. We had food on the table, clothes on our backs and a place to live. There was even enough left over for a few family trips and to help my brother and I go to college. Today, my parents delight in giving things to us. Sometimes it makes me a little uncomfortable, even as I am grateful.

That's because I don't want my children to miss out on the lessons of the Depression, and to learn what they truly should value. Part of me hopes that our whole country is at a point where it will finally learn this lesson.

Image: "Harvest: Spring and Summer," mural by William D. White at the former Dover, DE post office, painted as part of the Treasury Relief Art Project in 1938.

© 2008 Jenifer Dolde

And When She Looked There, The Cupboard Was NOT Bare...

Is there anything more beautiful than rows of canning jars, filled with the bright goodness of the growing season? Bright red tomatoes, deep purple grape juice, brilliant green pickles, all lined up and waiting to be enjoyed. Canning is far from over for me this year. It has been nearly a month since I've blogged, and I blame canning and the start of school. Things are supposed to be returning to a "normal" school and work routine for me, yet the work of preserving the harvest still awaits me.

Two weeks ago, my parents brought me a cooler full of grapes from their prolific vines. I managed to squeeze--literally--six quarts of my own grape juice "concentrate" from my struggling vineyard this year. For this I am grateful, since I had given them up as lost for yet another year mid-summer. Gray mold or some other fungal disease has begun to infect the clusters, and each grape after promising green Concord grape turned dark, not a sweet purple but a rotten brown. But as the bad grapes dropped to the ground, I diligently picked them up and pruned off infected clusters in an attempt to forestall a total crop loss. And I had some success. The first flush of grapes were large-ish and juicy, and I just had to pick out the infected ones. As the summer and the drought wore on, the grapes became smaller and much less juicy, but I used what I could.

Mom's grapes were fat and fragrant and I was able to get eight quarts of juice from those she brought me. In fact, I revisited my childhood (as characterized in my last blog) this Labor Day, as Mom and Dad and I sat on my deck with trays full of washed grapes, picking out the good ones and tossing them into a large stockpot. My brother came out, took one look at us, and pulled up an obligatory seat to the party. The tedious job took about a half an hour; it would have taken me at least 4 times that alone. The juice tasted that much sweeter.

This year, in an attempt to keep the heat from boiling water for hours on end out of the kitchen, I invested in a "patio stove." Basically, it's a 16 x 16 inch steel frame with a burner, attached to a medium-sized propane tank. Apparently, people use it to cook enormous batches of gumbo and to fry turkeys--well, we've all heard how turkey-frying usually goes. The number of precautions and warning went on for two pages. Nonetheless, my husband helped me hook it up in the shade of a tree and I was able to boil water to scald the skins off the tomatoes and then set the 5 gallon pot to process the jars on to boil while I peeled. The water boiled in record time and I was cool (well cool-er) in my kitchen.

I'm canning more quarts than pints of tomatoes this year, and opened up two boxes of hand-me-down quart jars from a friend who owns a gift shops. She frequents yard sales and discount stores and going out of business sales in search of amazing bargains. I had a good time pulling out the jars she'd given me, all of varying ages. I know none of them are old to the point of being valuable, but they recall a time when you could find more than one style of canning jar at the local store: Kerr Self-Sealing Mason, Atlas Mason, Ball Mason and one simple "Mason" with an anchor design embossed on it. My mother still has some old blue canning jars around the house, including some with the glass lid that clamps down, which she displays but no longer uses. As a historian but not a collector, I appreciate objects like canning jars for their simplicity and their functionality, particularly when they change very little after over 100 years. I found a nice summary of the history of the canning jar at pickyourown.org.

The Delmarva Peninsula was once populated by canneries from one end to the other. The cannery provided seasonal work for farmers and laborers alike. Sixty years ago, my grandfather was manager of the cannery in Church Creek for several months out of the year, his one source of steady, guaranteed income. My mother recalls that in those early years, they canned in tin cans at home as well, and she sometimes helped to crimp on the lids. As a child, I vaguely remember visiting the cannery during its last years in operation. They were canning pork and beans for Campbell's; my only memory is that I thought it was funny that they dropped only one small piece of pork or bacon into the can before sealing it up. I don't remember hearing anything about how critical the canneries had been to the local economy, and how their decline spelled the end of an era when produce was both grown and processed on the Eastern Shore. That was thirty years ago. Perhaps the stories I've heard about the cannery, along with our family tradition of growing and canning food at home, are what lead me to continue home canning year after year.
(Workers at the Kent Packing Co. in Rock Hall)

© 2008 Jenifer Dolde