FuoriBorgo

gardener's hand scrub

Yesterday I came back from the garden with the first full basket of the season: radishes, peas, strawberries, lettuce, borage, and herbs.  I also came back with a big smile: the tomatoes and zucchini are beginning to blossom.  This means more produce soon, and also, more time spent working in the garden - summer is such a busy and hard time for a gardener's hands!

A gardener's hands are tools, and need to be taken care of as much as the garden and its plants.  Dirt (and horse poo manure and compost!) must be scrubbed away after gardening, of course.  But also, little scrapes and minor cuts must be helped to heal, and skin and nails need conditioning, as well as being cleansed of all the the stains that come from working with plants and dirt.

If you garden, making a gardener's hands scrub paste is an easy and natural, not to mention inexpensive and quick, way to take care of your working hands day in and day out.  Here's how I make mine:

Gardener's Hand Scrub

• 2 cups sea salt (in addition to its antibacterial and exfoliating properties, sea salt sooths skin)
• ½ cup fresh rosemary, finely chopped (a good antiseptic and an excellent wound treatment)
• zest from 1 organic lemon (for its antiseptic and bleaching effects, especially when combined with sea salt)
• ⅔ cup extra virgin olive oil (olive oil's polyphenols and antioxidants make it an effective and economical emollient and moisturizer with anti-ageing properties)
• ½ cup vegetable soap, grated (I use an olive oil based soap, like Castile soap)

Mix all of the above, and store in a light-proof and air-tight container (otherwise the olive oil will go rancid, making your scrub smell bad and removing many of its positive skin properties).

A dab on your gardener's hands, then rub and scrub (a nail brush will help), wash and rinse off the excess with warm water, and finally massage the remaining oil into your hands.  

It's a beauty treatment, a cleansing massage, and an aromatic, natural way to keep your gardener's hands in good shape.  Try it!

flowers to drink

    

Their scent, sweet with a fresh citrus tinge, fills the air these days where they grow by the creeks in our valley: they're the creamy-white, delicate flowers of the elder tree (Sambucus Nigra), one of the greatest gifts from the woods.  Its roots, leaves, flowers, inner bark and berries can be used in a variety of ways from medicinal to culinary, to gardening and dyeing - as all my fellow foragers in the area well know.
(Note: my favorite reference herbal book in English, which contains information on the elder tree, is Commmon Herbs for Natural Health by Juliette de Bairacli Levy)

This time of year, basket in hand, I walk the woods picking elder flowers, which I steep in water to make a fragrant syrup that's delicious in the summer, drunk with chilled sparkling water or frozen into cooling popsicles for those hot summer days (hello, heat?  We're ready and waiting for you!).  I've used different recipes over the years, and this latest discovery made one of the best elder flower syrups.

Here it is, the first batch of elder flower & lemon zest syrup of spring 2013.

add bay leaves to spring cleaning

In the course of the last month I've been spring cleaning at a somewhat irregular pace - mostly in brief, frenzied spells, whenever the weather turned hot and dry and the windows could be opened wide, and the spring cleaning rapture took me.   It's a funny thing, this spring cleaning in a rural home: I store winter clothes and bedding away, wash the windows, roll up the rugs, and do all the things as one would do when spring cleaning  ... but I also vacuum ceilings and walls for cobwebs, sweep up the saw dust and wood chips from beneath the firewood storage, and pick bay leaves (Laurus Nobilis).  Yes, laurel for spring cleaning.

One of the things that the hot weather brings us in our rural home, in fact, is critters of all sorts.  Bees and wasps, lizards and geckos, flies, beetles and ants - we (more or less) know how to deal with them.  But the tiny flour moths have been a big problem.  They colonize my kitchen, and spoil flours, grains, pasta and nuts.  One of the best ways to prevent them, would be to keep all dry food supplies in sealed jars that moths can't access to.  I don't do that, mainly because in terms of space, in my small cupboards, it's more efficient to store food in its original packaging, closing them with a clip.  But pantry moths are voracious, and gnaw through the packaging.  I've had to find a natural way to repel them.

 

This is when I discovered that bay leaves have repellent properties that keep away insects and pantry moths.  Victory!  (If the Romans didn't think of moths when they wore laurel wreaths as a symbol of victory, they sure should have!)  The first year, we just scattered leaves inside our cupboards and wardrobes, but when these dried and crumbled, they made a mess.  Nowadays, at spring cleaning time, we pick laurel boughs, and tape them upside down on the inside of the doors and on the bottom side of the shelves of our kitchen cupboards and wardrobes, where they repel moths without creating more stuff to clean.  (Note: if you don't have a laurel tree nearby, store-bought dried bay leaves work fine - just make sure you replace them when the fragrance fades).

And this year, we made watercoloring part of our rural spring cleaning ritual: we first made a bay leaf botanical card to add to our growing collection, and then taped the bough to the cupboards to repel moths. 

676 hours in the kitchen

Have you ever calculated how much time you spend on average in your kitchen, cooking meals?  I did the other day, when I heard on the radio that because of the economic crisis, Italians are spending more time in the kitchen: 56 minutes a day during the week, 69 minutes during the weekend.  The research quoted was also gender specific: 11 days a year (264 hours) in the kitchen for Italian women, and 8 days (192 hours) for Italian men.  The first question that came to mind was: where are those Italian men?  I want to meet them!  No, forget it, that isn't the first question that came to mind at all.

The first question that came to mind, actually, was: how long do I spend cooking every day?  Now, the answer is a bit muddled, because "cooking" for me is the time I spend working in the kitchen, and includes not only the food prep but also cleaning up and dish-washing after meals, which quite often take almost as long as the cooking itself (don't get me going on the fact that our kitchen doesn't include that wonderfully useful appliance, the dishwasher!).  Because I'm quite sure that the study in question assumed dishwashers and not the cooks washed the dishes, I've only considered the time I spend preparing meals as "cooking".

On average, I spend at least 1 hour and 40 minutes a day cooking meals for my family on weekdays (about 10 minutes for breakfast, 30 minutes for lunch and 1 hour for dinner), and considerably more during the weekend, when my main baking, food preserving, and fancier cooking take place: let's say 6 hours each weekend.  That works out to be 13 hours a week, or 676 hours - 28.16 days - a year:  over twice as many days as the average Italian woman.  In other words, I spend just under a month a year in the kitchen cooking for my family!

If a month a year spent cooking seems a lot, I reckon that until just a short time ago, I, like many mothers of small children, used to spend even longer, cooking multiple meals: one for the carnivore, one for the vegetarian, one for the child in their picky eating stage (our kids are all reformed picky eaters), a mushy meal for the baby, one for the parents who just liked to eat grown-up hot-spicy foods once in awhile.  And let's not forget those long, interminable winter days spent puttering around the kitchen with bored little ones!  When my children were smaller, I probably spent two months a year cooking.

So I guess I feel lucky: now that my children are older, I've moved up in the culinary world, make one meal for the whole family, and spend only 28.16 days a year cooking!

I cook from scratch, and I could no doubt cut back the kitchen time a lot if I didn't.  However, a part of my role as a parent is teaching my children the value of food, by which I don't mean abstract notions about nutrition (or not only that, anyway), as if meals were collections of chemicals like fuel for a car.  We aren't cars that need to be tanked up with nutrients to keep going.  Instead, I want my kids to see food as nourishment and pleasure for a healthy body and soul: the taste, the variety, the color, the texture, the freshness, the look and the fragrance of the ingredients that we bring in from the garden or choose at the store, and that we make into meals which we enjoy together.  They needn't be gourmet meals, but must be made with quality ingredients.  By showing my children how a meal is an affair for all the senses, to be enjoyed with family and friends, I hope to teach them not to be satisfied in future with the plastic look, the obscure origin and the flat, fake taste of unhealthy ready-made foods that cost a few euros, and take a few minutes to heat up.  Some of the best things in life, including our nourishment, take time and require work. In my case, 676 hours' worth in the kitchen each year.

knit-mending

As someone who contributed to a book by the title Mend it Better, I should really be ashamed of the state of my poor husband's favorite sweater (I am, I promise!).  I did try to mend it awhile back, but since then, the fiber frayed all around my careful darning, and the precious ol' sweater had gotten to a stage where only serious patching had a chance of fixing it.  This weekend, I took the sweater in hand, and sat down with my basket of odd bits and leftover yarns.  The question was which tool to use: crochet hook or knitting needles?

I chose knitting needles, because they have an advantage: you can work multiple projects at once. 

I improvised a roundish pattern, and to give the patches more structure I crochet slip-stitched a little border. 

I like the way my simple knitted patches turned out.  They remind me of something quaint, something my grandmother might have come up with, using just what she had on hand.  They remind me of a time when nothing went to waste, and when many crafts were works of art, not perhaps for their sheer beauty but because of the skills and ingenuity expressed in reusing and repurposing materials.  Like stitching together scraps of fabrics to make quilts and patchwork.  And like using leftover yarns to make patches to salvage worn garments.

I think these patches gave Tom's sweater a new life.  Certainly they've given it a new look.  After all, how many men do you see walking around with pot holders on their elbows?

a curtain

It was early in December, during the first cold weather spell of the season, when I realized that I wasn't looking forward to taking down our sheer summer curtain and putting up the winter one, a repurposed blanket I'd felted and dyed deep purple (here).  In fact, this winter curtain, though undoubtedly effective, created a large, dark, gloomy patch in the house that in the low light months didn't lift my winter blues one bit.  Yet, a curtain on this glass door to the terrace (we don't have other curtains as we have no neighbors, and the view is too beautiful to shut out) is crucial for improving insulation - and a cold house would deepen my winter blues even more.

So I decided on a whole new take on winter curtains, making one that was mood-enhancing as well as functional.  I happened to have just the material:  a large fabric remainder I'd originally intended to use in refurbishing our sofa (maybe in this funky patchwork style).  That project will have to wait, because the new winter curtain took first priority.

I love this curtain.  The fabric is thick enough to insulate well, and the gold damask pattern is bright enough to cheer my winter blues when, at 3.30 pm, it's time to draw the curtain, and shut out the cold night air. 

raining leaves

It's been raining steadily for the last couple of days: a persistent drizzle that sometimes grows to a downpour, which has brought down most of the yellowing leaves from the trees, and left them bare.  But just a day before the rain started, we went for a walk in the woods to collect pine cones (which we use as fire-starters), and found ourselves in a different kind of rain.  As a breeze made the treetops dance far above, yellow leaves rained down on us, making a gentle fluttering music.  We stopped and listened in amazement at this autumnal shower - this autumnal show.

from drupe to olive

We went olive foraging in the abandoned olive groves around here, which we've been doing each autumn for the last several years (here and here).  This year, though, I have a new way of preparing the olives we picked.  

Last summer, in fact, while traveling with Tom on a part business, part family trip, we met a chemist and food scientist with a specialization in olives, and I got to chatting with him about my fondness for foraging and putting olives in brine.  He politely told me that the method I was using was totally wrong.  

What?!  

I was using the traditional, ancient rules that my neighbors (and a trusted regional cookbook) had taught me.

Have you ever tasted a ripe olive from a tree?  They're totally inedible: so sharply bitter that you have to spit them right out.  It's a wonder that anyone even considered these small, bad-tasting fruits could be fit for human consumption!  The traditional method for curing olives, turning the fresh drupes into edible food, is to soak them in water for twenty days & twenty nights, rinsing them out at least two or three times each day, and then to put them in brine to preserve them.  

The scientist told me that water alone doesn't do anything to the olives - only the brine itself cures them.  Yet the traditional method in my region calls for it, and until fairly recently, there wasn't any running water around here:  to get the water necessary to soak and rinse out the olives, trips had to be made to the river, and water had to be hauled, multiple times a day!  Can you imagine?  All that carrying of water, for centuries, was utterly pointless.  Those peasants might as well have used it to make a tea, and spent their time sitting by the fireside, sipping tea and saving their energy.

The anthropologist in me was dumbstruck; it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that science had proved this traditional method not just wrong, but useless.  Didn't anyone ever taste an olive after all that rinsing process to verify whether it was edible?  Of course, why should they, if that's the way olives had always been cured?  I hadn't tasted them, either.

Anyway, this year I'm sipping tea by the fire while the olives sit in their briny bath, waiting for twenty days & twenty nights (you can't dismiss traditions entirely), making a new batch of brine now and then, while waiting for our bitter drupes to turn into tasty olives. 

perfectly imperfect?

this over-stuffed doll-stroller basket is in fact a lacy crochet hat that never stayed on my toddler girl's head for longer than 1 minute

Yesterday, I wrote about the imperfections inherent in handmaking.  Today I'm going to confess that some of my projects which turned out perfect esthetically, also turned out perfectly unfunctional, and didn't work.  Or, rather, they did work, but not in the way I'd conceived them.

Take the hanging laundry bag I made for my traveling boys some years back.  A brilliant (I thought) solution to my boys' laundry while away, created from a heirloom pattern, with an embroidered sashiko-style design inspired by some of my boys drawings: perfect, basically, in every possible way.  Except that, it turned out, my boys didn't have any use for a laundry bag while traveling for tennis tournaments: laundry facilities were not available, so their coach gave them a bar of soap, and instructed them to hand-wash their clothes daily (and every year, I'm surprised happy to report, their clothes come back amazingly clean: this goes to show how kids can make virtue of necessity ...).  

So our hanging laundry bag stopped traveling after that first year, and instead got hung in the bathroom, where it serves as a collector of unpaired socks: because, for some inexplicable reason, socks worn in pairs often come out of our washing machine as a single sock.  It's one of those maddening mysteries, to which I found a temporary solution by turning the laundry bag into a limbo bag for lonely socks.  This bag has been hanging from our bathroom door every since, and because occasionally one of the missing socks does turn up and is happily reunited with its lone companion, the bag is indeed very functional ... as a single-sock limbo bag.

PS if you need a travel hanging laundry bag, or a single-sock limbo bag, or an everywhere handwork bag, see my tutorial here!

March work in my garden

Garden work this month has been all about closing one phase of the yearly cycle, and opening another: harvesting the last winter crops, and preparing the soil for the coming warm season.  It's great to be out there digging in the dirt again!  Here's some of what I got up to:

-    During the waning moon (I chose the right time more by accident than design!), I pruned the grapevines, olive trees, peach tree, perennials and herbs.  It was a drastic pruning, as many of the trees and bushes had really suffered from the hard frosts.  We only lost one plant over this harsh winter, our broom bush, which was a little sad, since it was the first plant I planted when we moved here, and had grown huge with beautiful bright-yellow flowers that signalled the arrival of Spring . . . but I would have been sad if any other plant had died too, because each tree and plant we've seen grow and gotten to know has become like an old friend, woven into our family history.

-    I hoed, hoed, and hoed some more (once again trying not to feel too envious of fellow gardeners with rototillers, by telling myself that they're "spewing carcinogenic diesel fuel over their crops and soil," and not saving their backs - though I'm not entirely sure I convinced myself).

-    I dug up, divided and replanted the unruly strawberry plants that had exploded and expanded in the last year couple of years and taken over the best spot in the garden, where I plan to grow zucchini this spring.

While I was preparing my garden for the new season, someone was working hard alongside me, giving her dolly a bath and a new fresh look for spring.