Edible Ivory

GERMANS are a little obsessed with asparagus. White asparagus, that is. As soon as the season begins in April, little farm stands pop up at the side of the road and all restaurants from the smallest eatery to the classiest establishment offer at least one special dish featuring local harvest. Far away in the US, we thought wistfully of the tender shoots, until we received a lovely surprise package full of the yummy veggie! We quickly cooked it up and served it traditionally with a hollandaise sauce and boiled potatoes.

Once in Germany at the appointed time, I was looked at in astonishment when I asked if there was any kind of 'pick your own' we could go to. I've since discovered there is great skill involved in harvesting asparagus, which is all done by hand. The shoots are kept from turning green by keeping earth piled up around them, preventing the production of chlorophyll by exposure to sunlight. Workers scour the mounds of earth looking for cracks, which would indicate a spear is about to burst through. Then they dig around in the earth and cut off the shoot at its base. To give the shoots maximum growing time yet prevent them ever seeing a sun ray, a field is harvested two or three times daily. Asparagus season always ends on June 24, the birth date of Saint John the Baptist. After this time, no asparagus may be bought or sold by law.

Wild Jam

WE missed the picking seasons for strawberries and blueberries to make jam, but a cycle ride to pick blackberries was something worth waiting for. Emma found the brambles too prickly so was happy to be in charge of the basket. Back at Oma's house, we set to work washing, picking over, heating and juicing, simmering with sugar and gelatine and finally pouring the delicious hot syrup into jars. We had all kinds of fun ideas for decorating the jars once we got home to Atlanta, however sadly the jam had a different destiny and didn't make it onto the plane.

We came home to find muscadine grapes ripe in the garden. Four. Since four grapes do not a jam jar make, we were happy to find an abundance of muscadines and scuppernongs at the farmers market. Once again the house was filled with the sweet scent of cooked fruit and we had fun pressing the pulp through the sieve and watching the pink liquid drip down. These little grapes have a unique taste and make a wonderfully refreshing sorbet! Here's where I found the recipe (called Scuppernong Grape Ice).

New Creatures

CYCLING along a wheat field I happened to spot a chubby bird leading her chicks on a trek. They were extremely well camouflaged in the golden-brown stubble - it was only their movement that made them visible. It started me on a quest to try and snag a photo, involving scrambling down a bank of brambles, but they were long gone before I finally landed on the field, panting and scratched. (Course, it wasn't the stealthiest approach I've ever made...). I knew the name of this bird, but only in German. Imagine my surprise when I looked it up and discovered it was a partridge! So, evidently partridges don't live in pear trees; the edges of cereal fields are in fact their natural habitat, and they nest right there in the ground.

We stumbled across another animal's natural habitat while playing cards in a field late at night on a camping trip. A shadow moved across the grass... a hedgehog! We followed it for a while, until we realised our sculking behaviour might appear odd to other campers, and let the little creature go about its search for worms, insects and other such delicacies. My brother did manage to get a photo, but this was a poor substitute for Emma. She was so mad we didn't wake her up, when we told her about the hedgehog the next morning.

We Plough The Fields

AH, life in the country! We're in Germany visiting Oma and Opa, and just a few streets away is the edge of town and field upon field of crops. Whether you consciously observe it or not, you can't help but notice a change in the season when the landscape literally changes colour. We were fortunate that our trip coincided with the wheat harvest. We saw combine harvesters at work, watched tractors pulling trailers of straw bales into their barns, and noticed how some bales were round and others rectangular. Emma wondered why she could see 'lying-down stalks' in some harvested fields and 'little tiny stalks all still standing up' in others. I didn't know the answer to this one so had to research how the whole harvest works.
So here's a suburbanite's understanding of the harvest:
First the weather has to be warm and dry (ever mown the grass in the rain?)
The combine harvester both cuts and threshes the wheat. During threshing, the grain is separated from the stalk and chaff and collected in a tank, which is periodically emptied into a grain truck. The leftover bits are dropped back onto the field among the 'little standing up stalks'.
Then a baling machine comes along and gathers the stalks into straw bales, which are used mostly for animal bedding. (Hay is grown in its own right, rather than a by-product, and is more nutritious than wheat stalks, which become straw.)
Finally the last bits of stalk are tilled back into the ground.... and the 'short standing-up stalks' (stubble) are now 'lying down'.

The wheat crop was the most obvious, as it was being currently worked on, but we have also been driving, walking and riding bikes through fields of corn, rye and oats. Today we picked a sample of each of the cereal crops and then went home and looked in our cupboards for things that were made from these plants.