Kill the Wabbit…

A while back I wrote here about my excitement at seeing the return of rabbits to our little space of nature. I’d been surprised to find, when we moved out here, that both rabbits and squirrels seemed to be absent from our island of grass and trees in the agricultural sea of former prairie.

Back when I wrote that, I didn’t have a garden...

We’ve planted vegetable gardens here occasionally over our decade or so at the Homestead, the grandest effort being the straw bale garden that MLW designed and implemented a few years ago.

...In fact, looking back, the first sightings of rabbits on the periphery of the yard was later in the same summer as we put in that garden. Coincidence...?

At any rate, we hadn’t done a vegetable garden since then, but we decided to do one this spring. In our uncertain times we didn’t want to incur the expense of the straw bales, so we modified the garden plot to just use the soil underneath. This mostly involved pulling up some partially buried landscaping fabric (a hateful activity which has definitely affected the likelihood that I’ll ever use it again) and renting a rototiller. We are in prime farm country, so one can anticipate that the soil is going to be pretty good for vegetables, and this same area, more or less, also held my grandmother’s garden years ago.

We sprouted seeds indoors and then planted them - a variety of items including pole beans, peas, lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, rutabagas, zuchinni and yellow sauash, and a variety of types of tomatoes. I enjoy much about this process - the planting, the weeding, and watching the garden grow are as much fun as the actual anticipation of the harvest for me.

When it started I did not make the connection to what was going on. Specifically, I noted that one of the pole beans seemed to have broken off. It had not been in great shape when it went into the garden, so I figured it just hadn’t made it, and set it aside in my head.

Then the one next to it was gone.

This proceeded, each trip to the garden finding less and less of what was planted still remaining - no lettuce, no spinach, and now one single, sad green onion...

I think MLW actually first suggested that it might be the rabbits. I don’t think I’d made the connection, in part because I hadn’t seen them anywhere near the garden. And, after all, the garden is right there in dog territory, so they wouldn’t dare, would they?

I say I hadn’t made the connection "in part", because the other part might just be that I’m kinda dumb. I already know they will venture into dog territory, even without a garden in there. And, after all, what else did I think was happening? I clearly wasn’t shaving with Occam’s Razor that week.

So where does that leave us? Like this:

Of course, it’s a little hard to see what isn’t there, without context, so let me offer some:

The zuchinni and yellow squash are doing great - I suspect the hairy composition of their stalks is somehow unpalatable to the leporid louts invading our space. And somehow, some of the rutabagas have made it through. There are a handful of tomatoes that have survived, but most of them are later transplants offered up by some friends, and I suspect that their larger size at the time of planting may have reduced the risk of predation.

But spinach? Slaughtered. Carrots? Killed. Peas? Pulverized. Beans? Butchered. Lettuce? Left this mortal coil. Beets? Uh... well, you get the point.

I did have this section of the garden blocked off to keep the dogs out, worried they would walk on the sprouts. In retrospect, that was almost certainly a mistake. The space between the climbing wires is too small for our dogs to walk through, but for rabbits...? What I appeared to have offered, instead, was a rabbit smorgasbord in a canine-free safe zone.

I am quite honestly now wondering if the absence of rabbits from our property was more than just happenstance. My grandparents were children of the depression, and their gardening was more than just a hobby. Grandma Marie even picked dandelions for salad (the yard offers an abundant supply), and I’m certain that was even more true for prior generations at the homestead. Our ancestors did not have the same perspective towards maintaining a natural balance of critters - I can easily picture ancestors engaging in an active rabbit extermination program to protect their gardens.

...I do love roasted rabbit, and they’ve become pretty comfortable around here... But I am not going to do that - mass scale lepooridicide is off the table. However, it’s clear that if we are going to continue to grow vegetables going forward I will probably need to put a rabbit-proof fence around our garden. This is the sort of chore that I don’t love because, while I understand how to do it intellectually, my technical skills are... lacking. No matter how hard I try the fence will almost certainly look like crap when I’m done. But our garden looks like crap now, so...

First Spears of Spring

You know that spring really has sprung when the fruit trees start to bud, when the Cherry Tree flowers, and you can bring the first harvest of asparaguys.

The asparagus sprouted late this year, probably due to the chillier than typical weather for our region. The first batch is usually ready to go by the last week or so of April, but this year we are bringing them in towards the end of the first week of May. To be fair, a few of the stalks were past their prime, but this is pretty much always the case for us - it just grows too fast for us to catch every single one.

The patch we have is a legacy of our homestead - it was here when we moved in, left behind by my grandmother. This is a bonus and a benefit in and of itself, but when you research asparagus online, there are many words spent on just how hard it is to get a patch started, the care needed - it makes it clear just how lucky we are to have an existing, productive patch. The other benefit to Grandma’s hard work is the size - many of the spears we pull out are a half inch or larger in diameter at the base - these are not the little shoots you see in the grocery store.

We went with an "old" recipe for this first batch. We roasted them in the oven in olive oil, with garlic, diced tomatoes, Italian bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. I say "old" here because it’s a recipe we learned - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say borrowed - from a favorite restaurant. There used to be a little Italian restaurant called Cannova’s in Rockford, set in a converted house on Riverside Blvd just to the east side of the Rock River. It was gone long before we moved away from Rockford, but while it was there it was a place we very much enjoyed. They had a delightful fettuccini alfredo, and it was there I first discovered spaghetti aglio e olio - a dish I initially ordered simply because it was fun to say (ala Moons Over My Hammy ), but found that I very much enjoyed.

They also had the asparagus dish that I’m describing here, served as an appetizer, and we ordered it virtually every time we ate or ordered out from there. Ultimately, MLW reverse-engineered the recipe (a rare and delightful talent she has), and we continue to make it to this day. And we make it just as I described above: we roast them in the oven in olive oil, with garlic, diced tomatoes, Italian bread crumbs, and Parmesan cheese.

You see there are no proportions or measurements, nor cooking times. I can say that we set the oven at 400°, but sometimes we turn it up a bit. Otherwise, you put the asparaguys in the baking dish and you put the other ingredients over them in a volume that looks like enough of each item. Then you cook it until it is, you know, done. In essence, that means that the cheese has begun to brown a bit, and the asparagus is tender.

So that first batch is gone now, asparagus being the ephemeral spring treat that it is. Given its nature, though, we should have another batch in a day or two. Those will find a different fate, almost certainly. In fact, the emergence of the asparaguys makes me remember that it’s also time to clean up the grill...

Spring!

Asparaguys!

They say that it's the little things in life that really matter. Living out in the country offers a lot of those little things, and one of them shows up for a brief period of time each Spring.

I remember my Grandma Marie walking through the ditches picking her asparagus. It was never shared with me, I suspect because it grew in small batches, too valuable to waste on a child who might not care for it (it's one of the few vegetables that LB doesn't care for). But as an adult I truly understand the attraction.

With so many fruits and vegetables nowadays, we've largely lost the understanding of eating things that are "in season". If you go down to the local outlet for any major supermarket chain and search through the produce section you will, now, almost always find asparagus. This is of course because, like so much produce in the grocery store, it is grown in warmer climates and then shipped to the U.S.

As with so many of those other fruits and vegetables, it is different when it is grown at home. One of the most notable differences is size - when you pick up a bunch at the supermarket the spears are typically about a pencil size in both diameter and length. The home grown variety is typically as thick - or thicker - than my thumb, and they can get to nearly a foot in length (or longer, if you don't pick them quickly enough).

At this point we've had two batches out of that patch, with a third to come in the next day or two (they grow so quickly you have to check on them daily to see when they are ready to go). The first batch we roasted in olive oil, as a side to hamburgers. The second batch we did in garlic marinara over pasta. They were delicious both ways.

There is, of course, a somewhat unusual side effect to consuming asparagus. The NPR program How to Do Everything did an episode on this phenomenon. It turns out that it doesn't happen to everyone, and that not everyone can smell it. Kind of fascinating and well worth the listen.