Matzah in the Sandbox

Nobody wanted to leave the sandbox at lunch time today. With the perfect spring breeze shaking the new Bradford Pear leaves over our heads and the soft afternoon sun warming our cheeks, we were all content to keep playing. Plus, there was a new bucket of plastic sand toys for digging and building. But I was hungry too, so I ran into the house and grabbed a box of matzah.

I have noted the irony of the impressive onslaught of matzah crumbs beginning the moment the house has been cleaned for Passover. The near constant shower of matzah crumbs around my kitchen table has been relentless for the past few days. With two young children, I even found myself sweeping in “real time” with crumbs falling around me and a few directly into the dustpan. Maybe this is another opportunity to remember the bitterness of slavery, I am sure building the pyramids and sweeping up after Egyptians was far more thankless. But for me, I would rather be eating horseradish (which I guess isn’t fair because I do sort of like it).

So, matzah in the sandbox was a welcome change. The crumbs fell and instantly camouflaged into the sand just as the original matzah crumbs must have disappeared on the ground of the Sinai.  And as we were eating, it seemed a perfect time to talk about Passover with my son who spent most of the Seder playing with legos in the next room with his cousins.

He started the conversation. “I love matzah with jam and matzah without jam” he declared.

“Do you know why we eat matzah”, I asked.

“To remember that we are free and that we ran away from the Egyptians.” He said.  Ok, I thought, he absorbed more than I realized during his brief stints at the Seder table.

Then he thought for a minute, raking some sand and asked, “Who was good, Pharaoh or the other one?”

“Moses,” I volunteered, “he and his sister Miriam lead us from Egypt and God helped too.”

He thought about it and asked, “Is Pharaoh still around or did he turn into a skeleton.”  This has become his turn of phrase for describing his new concept of death since we visited the dinosaur museum.

“No, Pharaoh turned into a skeleton long ago.”  I said thinking this is not the time to introduce the mummy concept.

“Then we could stop eating matzah, and go back to Egypt.” he suggested still raking.

“Yes, I guess we could visit Egypt someday,”  I told him.

Then he ate some more matzah and said, “Mom, the matzah is working. It does make me remember.”  And he had a far off look in his eyes, like the matzah was literally giving him memories from someplace far away. What was he thinking about? Were there four year olds who played in the sand in Sinai after crossing the Red Sea.  Or maybe he was remembering something from earlier that day, like when we ate matzah with jam on actual plates at breakfast. Either way, I highly recommend matzah in the sandbox.

Bringing in the Heavy Hitters

When I wrote, Eulogy to a Greenhouse in February I promised to add updates as we built our new greenhouse.    In the past few weeks, we have made some progress and the new structure is taking shape.

We now have all of the side bars in place and more than half of the top bars.   The side pieces actually went in very easily thanks to the awesome High and Heavy Hitter made by (I love the company name)Wheatheart that we were able to rent from our local extension office. If you like machines you can click on this link to see a video of it in action.  We were able to pull it behind our tractor and basically knock all of the side pieces into the ground with a giant hammer almost as easily as sinking birthday candles into a cake.  That part went so much faster and was way more fun than the rubber mallet method we used last time.

The center pieces still need to be lifted up and held in place by exhausted arms while being attached.  We had a former CSA member come out to help last weekend, and along with my husband they managed to get more than half of the top bars in place. This weekend we are relying on some neighborhood high school students to come help with the last bars.

We are hoping we will finish the top bars and possibly be able to pull on the plastic this weekend.  Pulling on the plastic is a lot like raising a very big sail on a boat.  It takes several people pulling ropes attached to one side of the plastic while someone else runs around with a pole to release any bits that are stuck.  Unlike a sail boat, we need to wait for a windless day to pull on the cover,  so hopefully the weather will cooperate. It can be a dramatic moment when the cover is suddenly pulled into place,  giving the hoophouse walls, a roof and an instant sense of place.

Jewish Farming Piece

 I am happy to have a short piece called Back to the Land about farming and Jewish life running on the Jewish Parenting Blog Kveller today.  Feel free to check it out and the rest of the site which has several good Passover posts and  lots of other interesting things to read.  If you are landing here from Kveller,  you might want to click here for another Jewish parenting post on this blog.   Happy Passover!

Potato Planting

antique potato planter in action

It is always an event when my husband teams up with a neighboring farmer to break out this restored antique potato planter that actually works amazingly well.  They are pulling it with a small tractor. The machine digs a trench, drops the potatoes in and covers them up all in one pass.  They are planting fingerlings and purple potatoes today.

It is great fun to watch this machine in action, and the children found it especially fascinating. Since we used to plant potatoes by hand and know what a slow process that can be, it is a bit miraculous to watch it happen so easily.  It might be equivalent to the magic of using  a sewing machine for the first time after hand stitching.

Here is one more shot of the machine being loaded up with yet another batch of potatoes.

May they grow as easily as they were planted!

First Green

If you look closely at this picture you can see thin, green lines of sugar snap peas coming up in the beds.  Even though the germination looks pretty good, we are a long way from harvest.  These tiny shoots are very attractive to deer and groundhogs and now that they have emerged from the soil, we need to scramble to protect them.

It’s hard to imagine that if all goes well, in just a couple of months these plants will be tall enough to require six feet of trellis which we will piece together from old tomato stakes and flower netting.  Once the trellis is in place, the whole area looks far too inhabited and maze like to attract deer and groundhogs.  But in the mean time, these little plants are vulnerable. Our best defense is this thin

deer fence

strand of deer fence which we will power up with a little solar panel.  Hopefully, that will be enough to give these little plants the head start the need.

Beyond the pea bed, you can see a nice stand of winter rye which we use as a cover crop to add nutrients to the soil and protect against erosion.  And beyond the rye, the camera caught a few trees in their “nature’s first green is gold” phase.  If you are so inspired, you can refresh your memory and read the rest of Robert Frost’s poem here.

Passover Countdown

We are only 10 days from the first night of Passover and once again I am realizing that my house will not be cleaned to my images of Passover perfection.

I love the idea of a very deep, full house spring cleaning where any trace of chametz – both literal like cracker crumbs under car seats and figurative like the clutter that rises and puffs on surfaces and in closets—is removed.  While it is a wonderful idea that your entire home could be perfectly clean in time for Passover, I never seem to pull it off.

In part it is because it is a very busy time of year when we are in the midst of spring planting on our farm and preparing for Israeli Harvest’s holiday orders.  We have a small family business that aims to support Israeli farms by selling Israeli farm products in the US, including Passover treats.

My last couple of challah makings before Passover, I am much more apt to notice the dusty bits of flour that settle by the mixing bowl and slip into nearby drawers especially when little hands help mix. It makes me think it would be easier to ease into the holiday and stop baking a couple of weeks out.  But that is not the tradition. When we left Egypt we had to move fast, the Pharaoh was known to change his mind. There was no easing into the journey, we just picked up and left.

So in that spirit, we do the best we can in our house which usually means a smaller cleaning and putting all breads and flour products in cartons on the screened porch, away from our daily flow.   Maybe someday I will achieve something closer to the super clean perfection in my mind and find every last stray cheerio in time for the first Seder.  But in the meantime, we will do the best we can and then overlook what is left unfinished,  so we can move on to the important work of celebrating our freedom.

Toto, we are not in Connecticut Anymore

fuchsia camellia

As  a displaced New Englander, this fuchsia Camellia that is flowering outside my kitchen window seems unreal with its abundant display of bright pink flowers.  Once a local master gardener stopped by and remarked that this is as far north as this species could possibly survive and the tree would be much happier south of Richmond.  He pointed out that it was carefully planted many years ago in the warmest and most protected corner of the yard.

When I look these blossoms, I feel like I am far away in the tropics or at least the deep south.  It is my “Toto, we are not in Connecticut anymore, ” tree.   It seems impossible that something this tropical looking could flower in Maryland, even with snow on the ground.

A few years ago, we cut small branches  from this tree and used them to decorate a friend’s chuppah or Jewish wedding canopy.  The flowers were perfect for the occasion and our very artistic bride was thrilled.   This past weekend, the couple came to visit with their nearly 2 year old daughter. They were so happy to visit their very own chuppah tree and take a few pictures under the flowering branches.

We have the former owners of our house to thank for choosing the perfect location for this tree and probably keeping a close eye on it for its first few winters.  Maybe they even wrapped it in burlap to keep out the chill.  These are the same folks who  carefully built our house and farmed in the same fields for so many years.  I think we can safely bet they never envisioned the camellia  blossoms gracing a chuppah, but I am quite sure they must have enjoyed the flowers too.