An Ode to the Enchanted Days of August

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, August 21, 2013 by Sara Mattinson.

At ten o’clock in the morning, the chairs on the front deck are shaded. In July, you couldn’t sit out during the day, it was so hot, but now the cat is curled up in one of those chairs on a yellow towel laid down earlier to soak up a heavy dew. She will catnap in cool comfort until the sun passes between the maple tree and the birch.

The sun is lower in the sky now and it doesn’t take The Farmer’s Almanac to know that summer is slipping away. Blue herons gather along the shoreline in the outer basin of Pugwash harbour and this year’s osprey hatchlings are gone from the nest near our home, building strength for nex t month’s migration south by fishing the River Philip. The sunflowers and rudbeckia are in glorious blossom while lilies die out and the wild asters growing around the chicken coop raise their fuzzy purple faces towards a sun drooping in the sky.

When I walk into my husband’s garage, I say, “Your pet cricket is chirping,” and so it is apt that naturalist and writer Harry Thurston of Tidnish Bridge writes about “the cricket-enchanted days of August”. If that is the way August sounds, then this is the way it smells: golden and spicy. This year, a quiet hurricane season, August is reminding me of the month of my Ontario childhood: hot and dry yet swollen with the culmination of all that is summer, when we try to cram every last moment into the loosening days and the star-blazing nights. August reflects our urge to gather and enjoy to the fullest. It is the month of harvest, the month when the labour and hope of June, and the watering and anticipation of July produce a cornucopia of eye-dazzling flowers and homegrown vegetables. 

Growing up, vegetable gardens existed on the periphery of my existence. My clearest childhood memories are these three: skipping under the long arbour of raspberries canes in Grandma and Grandpa George’s yard; standing on the bottom slat of the white fence surrounding my grandparents huge and tidy garden; and watching great-uncle Everett in his straw hat stooped over in his garden at the cottage. It is possible, apparently, to develop a late-onset joy and appreciation for a vegetable garden. Better late than never.  

I was 37 years old when I dug up a potato for the first time. Six years ago, during my first summer as a resident of Nova Scotia, the vegetable garden was entirely my husband’s domain because my early attempts at picking carrots or beets yielded nothing but greens and the teeniest roots. I stopped helping myself for fear of decimating his hard work. 

But potatoes I figured I could handle; we’d been eating them for weeks so how hard could it be to find them? The first plant came out of the ground with a potato nub the size of my pinkie hanging off it. I pulled up another plant. Nothing. Not even a nubbin.

I called my country boy at work. 

“I want to get potatoes out of the garden before it rains,” I said to him, the forecast calling for 20 mm of post-tropical storm precipitation, “but when I pull the plants up, there’s nothing there.”

A sigh wafted through the phone line. 

“They aren’t like carrots and beets, dear. You take your little garden rake, that hand-held one you use, and dig around in the dirt. They should just come rolling out.”

So little rake in hand, back to the garden I went. I knelt down by the spot where I’d yanked out the first plant and stuck my rake into the dry dirt. One stroke. No potato. Another stroke and out popped this lovely round yellow potato. Excitement bubbled up inside and splurted out my mouth in a loud, giggling shriek.

Like I was a five year old kid. 

I raked some more and two more potatoes popped out of the soil. I was digging up potatoes! There I was, kneeling in a garden near a river in rural Nova Scotia, digging potatoes out of the ground in order to take them into the house, wash them off and boil them for supper. 

In 1959, John Updike wrote a poem entitled, “Hoeing” in which he expresses his fear that the younger generation will not know the pleasure, and importance, of the task. The poem closes with these lines: “Ignorant the wise boy who/has never performed this simple, stupid, and useful wonder.”

Ignorant the wise girl who has never dug potatoes out of the dirt. 

Every time I walk across the yard to the garden to pick a vegetable, or three, for supper, with the late afternoon sun warming my skin, I want to stop, hold onto this month with both hands, slow it down, capture the lazy ripeness of August and make it last a little longer than 31 golden days. 

For now are the last days to harvest the little jewels we long for all winter: the joy of discovery, the irreplaceable lushness of rural life, the appreciation of producing our own food. 

The enchanted days of August. 

"Buy Local" Licence Plates

Announced today, a new licence plate is available in Nova Scotia (regular fees + $50 donation) that shows your support for your local food producers.

It appears the $50 donation goes to the Select Nova Scotia fund and money will be used for awareness campaigns and event sponsorships.  Select Nova Scotia is the province's buy local marketing initiative.

http://novascotia.ca/news/release/?id=20130827001

Another Pictorial Food Adventure

Good Thyme Farm in Shinimicas has a great idea: Sell pre-packaged condiment kits. So easy to make "Salsa Verde" when everything you need, plus the recipe, is at their stand at the Pugwash Farmers' Market for five bucks!

www.goodthymefarm.ca

 

Nothing like fresh salsa! Easy to make and tastes really good. Now we're going to have to have a Mexican night.

In Conversation With...Carla Green Benjamin

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, August 14, 2013 by Sara Jewell.

If Carla Green hadn’t failed a test during her first year of university, she would not have become a pharmacist. 

And she would have missed out on a career that she truly enjoys. 

“I originally went to university to study math and physics and I might have been an engineer,” Carla says. “I ended up having mono my first year and I missed a lot of time. When I came back to school having been out a month, I was behind, I was frustrated, I failed my first ever test. I just said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’. It’s a bit of perfectionism: if you can’t do it perfectly, you don’t want to do it at all. I had a good friend who was studying pharmacy and I thought that looked kind of interesting.”

But that wasn’t the only life-changing decision she’d make as a result of her illness. 

Carla was in her second year of her four-year pharmacy degree when she heard about the military program. 

“When I got into pharmacy school, there were classmates who were doing that program and they were telling me how they were guaranteed a job, their tuition was paid for, their books were paid for. They had a salary while they were in school, they had to attend two meetings during the school year, and guaranteed summer employment. Then they had to give five years of service when they were done their studies. I thought that was a great idea.”

So at the age of 21, she applied to the Canadian Armed Forces.

“It was pretty exciting and pretty scary,” Carla remembers. “I was a young woman but I wasn’t superfit. I was never in cadets. I wasn’t a runner. I was a fairly rugged individual but I didn’t really know what I was getting into.”

Heading off to boot camp the summer after her second year, Carla faced challenges before even arriving at Borden, Ontario. 

“I was getting on a military flight at Shearwater and I’d never flown anywhere so I was getting on my very first flight in a uniform I didn’t know how to wear properly because I hadn’t done any training yet, surrounded by all these other military personnel. As an officer cadet, you are the lowest rank in officers. You have to salute everyone of higher rank and I didn’t know how to do that. I was afraid I’d get in trouble. I was absolutely terrified.”

Carla lucked into three roommates who were nurses but also had been in cadets.  She says they knew about drill and polishing boots and making beds with tight corners. 

“All the sorts of things I wasn’t good at,” she laughs. “My strength was in academics. I had no experience with anything to do with the military. Drill was kind of fun. It took me three years to master shining boots and I still can’t iron worth crap!”

For Carla, who is afraid of heights and deep water, it was the obstacle course she dreaded most. 

“Obstacle course was my biggest fear because I’m afraid of heights and deep water. The swimming test was a big, frightening thing because we had to jump off a high board into a pool, fully clothed in our combat gear,” she says, speaking as if it happened last week. “But by the time I was done, I realized I could do those things so I wasn’t as afraid of them as much.”

Even though it has been more than twenty years since boot camp, Carla talks about her experience vividly.  

“It made a huge impression on me,” she readily admits. “Going in, I didn’t know anything about the military but by the time I was done my training and had graduated, it was really a big part of me.”

She says she enjoyed both her career as a pharmacist and as a military captain (the main working rank for pharmacists). 

“I enjoyed what I was doing. I was learning, I had a variety of different pharmacy jobs from the mid-sized hospital in Halifax to a tiny base in Manitoba to Ottawa. I was there in a larger hospital. I really enjoyed clinical pharmacy there. I enjoyed being pharmacist but I enjoyed the military aspect of it as well.”

In 1996, after ten years of service and believing she’d achieved all she could in the military, Carla decided to apply for release. Wanting to be close to home, which is the Truro area, she responded to an ad for a position at Henley’s Pharmacy in Oxford in 1997.

“I came down on the Easter long weekend to meet them and interview and they offered me the job on the spot. Before I went back to Ontario, I’d bought a house.”

The same house she now shares with husband of 11 years, Mark Benjamin, seven cats and two dogs. 

Carla may not have been the stereotypical straight-backed, barking-orders army broad the staff may have envisioned but she admits there is a little bit of that in her still. 

“There’s always going to be a sense of pride,” she says. 

Eventually, she opened her own pharmacy then a few years later, bought out Henley’s and moved into the Main Street location. But the years behind the counter took their toll. She developed circulation problems in her legs and was told to stay off her feet. 

“I’m a retail pharmacist, I’m on my feet all day,” she told the specialist. 

Forced to sell her business seven years ago in order to heal her legs,  she wasn’t prepared to give up what she enjoys doing and has now returned to her first love, hospital pharmacy.

Carla does have one regret about her military career: She never served overseas. 

“I would have gone overseas in a heartbeat,” says Carla but the timing was never right. 

During the first Gulf War, she was the only pharmacist and only officer in a small hospital in Manitoba.  

“I had this deep sense of loyalty already. They needed good medical people and I was a good pharmacist and I wanted to go.”

“Had I stayed in longer than I did, I would have gone to Bosnia.”

But to quote the great English poet John Milton, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’

Carla's got muscle: Her Camaro and her dogs, Mack and Oliver.

Nova Scotia Hodge Podge

Covering for Jane while she was on vacation left me little time for spontaneous and creative expression so last Friday, in the search for inspiration for this week's  Field Notes column, I spent some time going through the PDF of an old blog of mine that I started when I first moved here in 2007. In the midst of the August scribblings, I found a post that mentioned "Nova Scotia Hodge Podge". I wanted to know what it was and my friend Lisa from Lower Sackville wrote to tell me that it's all about the new potatoes, and the rest of the vegetables that are finally ready to harvest.
Thinking that it would be a neat topic for my column, I decided I would make, for the first time, Nova Scotia Hodge Podge.
One piece of advice American author Richard Ford gives writers to "marry someone love and who thinks you being a writer is a good idea." I got that right, at least, because out to the garden went my husband to fetch in the ingredients. He would have done all the cleaning and chopping if I hadn't insisted it's my column therefore my experience.
Piling the vegetables up in the sink was pretty much the most interesting part of this exercise. Otherwise, it was just like making soup. 

 
Basically, if you didn't grow up eating it as part of along family tradition of eating it, it's not that exciting. Made with cream and butter, it's just a vegetable chowder! Delicious, mind you, but for an Ontario-raised transplant to the east coast, if I'm going to eat that much cream and butter, I want seafood swimming in it. My new, freshly-picked vegetables should taste as pure as possible (they don't even need butter when they go from garden to table in under an hour, do they?).

I used summer turnip, green beans, carrots, onion and potatoes, blend cream, butter (too much, as it turned out) and S&P to taste. All this based on the recipe sent to me by Lisa, and it's the one her mother and her grandmother used.
"No measurements," Lisa wrote, "just make as much or as little as you want, and taste along the way. My Nanny always said if you're going to make Hodge Podge, use real butter and use Farmers Blend. Make it like you're making chowder and make it a day early so the flavours distribute."

My measurements came out like this:
1 onion, chopped
1 cup snapped green beans + 1 cup of snapped yellow beans (which we didn't plant this year)
(peas can be added if you have those)
1 cup chopped carrots
1 cup diced turnip
2 cups new potatoes, diced
6 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup cream
salt and pepper

Here's Lisa's recipe:
Melt butter and add chopped onion. Cook on medium-low heat until onions are soft. Add some water. Add carrots and cook for 5 minutes. Add rest of veggies. Add enough water to just cover the veggies (not too much because you won't be draining it). Once veggies are cooked (not too soft), add butter ("My Nanny used lots!"), Blend and salt/pepper to taste. Simmer on low.

Too much butter! Sorry, Nanny.

This Nova Scotia country boy is not complaining!

Even though my mother-in-law said she'd never made Hodge Podge, both she and my father-in-law knew what it was and he was quite excited about getting a container of what was leftover. 
So...is there a typical Nova Scotia dish that would be challenging for a "come from away" to attempt to make? Something that would prove I'm worthy of being married to a Maritimer?
How about some version of haggis? C'mon, has no one invented Nova Scotia Haggis yet? I wonder what that would be...

It's Beckwith Bash Time Again!

Now you know what you're doing with your Saturday night...Heading out to Beckwith, Cumberland County, for an afternoon and evening of great food, great music and great people...all gathered in the "back yard" of Eric Fresia and Catherine Bussiere.
This bash -- becoming a festival -- has grown so much in the last few years. It's a really great night! Don't miss it.
(No hurricane-like weather for this weekend, either! Good times.)

City Girl Goes For A Country Drive

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, August 7, 2013, by Sara Mattinson.

Given that Nova Scotia is as much a vacation  mecca as a land of fishers, loggers and snow plow drivers, it’s an easy assumption that a lot of firsts happen right here: First taste of lobster, first clam dig, first kayak, first whale sighting. Definitely first kiss. (What? You missed out on that?)

Summer vacation has a way of encouraging an adventurous spirit and in the Maritimes, the call is irresistible. Especially if you are a city girl from Ontario spending the first two weeks of August on a farm along the Northumberland Strait. 

The one and only daring thing I’ve ever done took place here in Cumberland County in 1985. It was slightly illegal but since it happened 28 years ago, it must be safe by now to tell this story. 

This tale of adventure starts with a friend, whom I’ll call “Sue”, who put up with me tagging along behind her like some farm girl wannabe. It also involves Sue’s brother, let’s call him “Paul”, because he left his brand new sports car sitting in the driveway on that particular sunny August afternoon. 

“Let’s go to the racetrack,” Sue said to me. “You can drive.”

I don’t know if this was yet another test for me to fail (a few years earlier, I wore pajamas to the  sleepover in the hayloft while Sue slept in her jeans and T-shirt) but really, given my general lack of knowledge about life on the farm, there was no reason for Sue to think I could drive a bicycle, let alone this car. 

Did I mention it was brand new? 

Of course, as a farm kid, she’d been driving a tractor since she was eight. It must have seemed inconceivable to her, already 16, that a 15-year-old wouldn’t know how to drive a car.

The amazing thing is that I hopped into the driver’s seat fully prepared to drive that vehicle. Fully prepared in terms of nerve (and an uncharacteristic boldness)  but fully unprepared in terms of actually knowing what to do once I’d snapped on the seatbelt. 

I could turn on the ignition, I could  put the car into gear (it was an automatic), and I knew to put both hands on the steering wheel.

After that, it was a crap shoot.

In Paul’s brand new sports car. 

How we got out of the farm yard with no one seeing us is beyond me but off we cruised down the driveway and onto the quiet road in front of the farm. But this wasn’t the road to the racetrack. By  no means. Let’s just say that our route to the racetrack meant driving several kilometres and through a place I’ll call “the village”. 

You know how in every chase scene in the movies, the “bad guys” car careens through a major intersection on a red light, dodging dozens of cars? Well, this wasn’t that scene. Fortunately, the main intersection of “Church” and “Durham” rarely saw a dozen cars (back then) and certainly doesn’t need a stop light. 

I couldn’t have stopped if it had.

Nearly 30 years later, I can still feel the sensation of cruising around that corner without even slowing down because I didn’t know how to take my right foot off the gas and apply it to the brake pedal. 

My eyes may or may not have been open.

In this big brand-new sports car, I swung left around that corner without stopping, without looking, drove through the east end of “the village”, down and around a sharp corner, then swung left onto the road to the raceway and pulled up alongside the barn with a jolt, a laugh and the adrenaline rush of “Holy crap, we made it. And I drove a car!”

Every kid should get the chance to spend the summer in rural Nova Scotia. It’s the kind of place where you can be free and daring (even stupidly so: if “Paul” had seen us even touch a door handle...) and create memories that stay with you forever. Along with the kind of people who will not only let you do something daring and out-of-character but will suggest it in the first place. 

Every one of us needs to have that feeling of exhilaration and disbelief, that “Holy crap, I did it!” moment to tuck away in the heart for the rest of life. 

Summer vacation in Nova Scotia is the place to make that happen. As long as no one catches you.

(If they do, tell them “Sue” made you do it.)