The Farm Guide

If you’re not familiar with chutney, it’s a preserve of fruits and vegetables, with vinegar, sugar, and spices. Chutneys can range from mild to quite hot, and they can do wonders in jazzing up a meal or snack. You can use them as a condiment with all kinds of meats, poultry, and fish; likewise, they go very well with some cheeses and vegetables. You can find chutney in many supermarkets or ethnic food stores, but it won’t be like Marcia’s Chutneys.

That’s because Marcia takes pride in using fresh, local, and seasonal produce. She buys from farmers at her local Farmers’ Market as much as she can, and she has good business relationships with many of these growers. She uses absolutely no corn syrup in her products (look at the ingredients in a large scale manufacturer’s commercial chutney and you’ll surely find corn syrup among them), and organic produce is used as often as possible. By the way, if you don’t care for chutney, Marcia also makes preserves.

Growing up in New England with its abundance of Cortlands and Macintoshes every fall, I spent some time, as did my Yankee forebears, experimenting with ways to make hard cider. But it was not until I went to Iowa that I learned the country method of home winemaking.

Rural southeastern Iowa, which surrounds the University of Iowa where I went to graduate school, is a land of small farms, corn fields, vegetable gardens, root cellars, fruit trees and, yes, rhubarb patches. Rhubarb, or “pie plant” as my grandmother used to call it, is usually thought of as good for pie filling and not much else. But for the farmers in this rural area, many of whom are of German descent, the best use of rhubarb is for making piestengel (“stengel” is the German word for “stalk”), a somewhat tart white wine with a slightly pinkish tint. Probably brought over from the Old Country, their recipe for making rhubarb wine relies on natural fermentation and is simplicity itself.

The End of Steam and the Rise of the Modern Tractor

Steam traction engines revolutionized agriculture during the late 19th century, but the notoriously dangerous and inefficient steam power was soon to become history. Even as steam traction engines were beginning to prove their worth on the farm, inventors were investigating new technologies to replace them. As innovations produced ever better machines, tractors quickly took over the farm and evolved to become the engines of mechanized agriculture so recognizable today.

Red worms (commonly called red wigglers) and brown-nose worms can be used to compost food scraps and paper. Worm compost bins have been called organic garbage disposals. The worms live in paper bedding into which kitchen scraps are placed. They eat both the paper and the kitchen scraps and excrete worm castings. Castings are far more potent than compost made from a backyard pile. There are more nutrients in castings, and they are in a form that makes them even more readily available to vegetation.

People often question why this process doesn't smell. It is actually the rotting portions of decaying food that stink. In worm composting, the worms eat the rotting portion. The fresh portion is then exposed to the air and begins to rot. The worms eat it as it rots. As long as you don't put in too much food for the worms, they will eat the food as it rots. Therefore, there is no rotting food left to create an odor. (If your bin smells, you are providing the wrong kinds of food or too much food.)