The most intense of vegetables

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Tom Robbin’s novel, Jitterbug Perfume, begins with these immortal words. ” The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.” Then he wanders in his marvelous bohemian prose for awhile and lands at my favorite lines about our dear beet: “The beet is what happens when the cherry finished with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.”  Tell it, Tom.

Resisting the Commodification of Culture- Celebrations of the Harvest

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One of our early inspirations for this business was the book “Wild Fermentation” written by the very inspiring Sandor Ellix Katz. In an early section of the book he says, ” We can merge our appetite with activism and choose to involve ourselves in food as cocreators. Food has historically been one of our most direct links to the life forces of the Earth. Bountiful harvests have always been occasions for celebrations and appreciation of the divine.” Katz suggests that through creating and enjoying cultured foods you “build your body’s cultural ecology as you engage and honor the life forces all around you. ”

We could not agree more!These are some wild plums that we harvested and then experimented with preserving  in salt to make something resembling the Japenese umeboshi. The result was a fascinating, lively, bubbling plum pickle which Mara reports eating for breakfast leaves her feeling great all day long.