Spring, Spring, Spring

So my dear readers have you sensed it yet, the leaves are coming back, My work garden if you look close you can seethings making an appearance.and the birds are reappearing, those are sure signs of one thing, SPRING!!!!!! Alright so I am excited but hey I have right to be I live in New England, we had record snow fall. Even my truck was covered. (If you live south of the Equator, I am sorry.) What is the best part of spring… well other then everything, I think it is planting. Yea that is right I get to plant my garden again. I haven’t quiet decided how my home garden will work out but my work garden that is another story. On the first day I got to plant, I planted spinach, red tongue deer lettuce, radish, onions, leeks, cabbages, peas, and parsley.

My work garden if you look close you can seethings making an appearance

Now it will be a few weeks until I see anything growing, and then maybe a few more weeks after that until I can pick anything but hey it feels good to work in the soil again. When I was a kid loved to help my mom in the garden. I am not sure how much of a help I actually was but it is the thought that counts. We would plant peas, and beans, pumpkins, now and then carrots, and once we even did sweet corn. Of course there were also tomatoes and my mom still continues to make the best spaghetti sauce in the world. We would go to my Grandpa K’s house and he and my Grandma would have planted tomatoes, beans, butternut squash and summer squash. I was always impressed at the size of their garden. At my Grandpa G’s there was the largest blueberry bush and there garden always had lettuce and beans. They grew so many beans that we even call them GG Beans. It helped to keep straight him from his father who was also Grandpa G.

So why do we garden, well one is because freshness. I think the secret to my mom’s spaghetti sauce is that she grows the tomatoes. The moment she harvest them they go straight in to the pot. Even her Oregano is from her garden. The second thing is they are sweeter. I am not sure if it is the fact that you grew the goods yourself but there is something about the difference in produce between store bought, farmers market bought and home grown. It is your sweat, your caring, sometimes your tears, and on occasion your blood that goes into your garden. I have even found strength in it. Now sometimes because I am gardening so much at work my home garden misses out on some of my love and attention but I still enjoy seeing what comes out.

Gardening is nothing new. It like everything in history goes back in forth to how often it is seen. They are very common in the country side where you have a lot of room but in the city they are still not all that common. You might find homes with potted plants and some cities today are finding way to put them on roofs and other locations like that. Yet in cities throughout time it hasn’t changed, food is still trucked in from the country. There were places in some cities though were market gardens were kept, usually in abandoned lots were the building had fallen down but the idea of seeing them would depend on what city you were in, what part of the city you were in and what era you are in.

Dutch Painter Beuckelear's Earth dipicts the fresh vegetation you might find at the local market.

So here is to the things we grow now that spring is making an appearance. Here is to spring’s arrival, and summer’s coming. Here’s to the aces in our backs and legs, the sweat on our brows and the love in our hearts. What will you be growing this year? 

Wraping thread

When we sew we need thread. Today thread comes on a bobbin, or a spool. Even non-sewers know what these look like. Yet spools of thread haven’t been around all that long in the grand scheme of sewing. Spools as we think of them today have only been around for 100 years coinciding with the beginning of the industrial age and the invention of the sewing machine. Spools of thread were common long before that but the shape of them now is a modern concept. Before that they were bigger and balkier and more for selling the thread then for being purchased themselves. Thread could of course be purchased in small spools or you could purchase just the amount of thread you needed. It could be wrapped around a scrap of cloth to be kept or a thread winder.

My Victorian thread wrapper you can hang from your belt

Thread winders are also used for prettiness factor. They can be extremely interesting and pretty. Most samples I have seen date from the late 18^th centuries and seem to fall out of use by the turn of the 20^th century. They can be animal shaped wrapping your thread around the body of your animal. Some are crosses with eye catching patterns and details. They were as much something to look at pretty in your basket as they were about being a useful part of your basket. What’s more  perfect interesting and useful. 

Swiftly winding....

A few years ago I went home to visit my mother. She gave me a whole bunch of my grandmother's knitting, sewing, and tatting supplies. Among the magic that were in the piles of stuff was a ball winder. Now at the time I was living with my aunt. That same weekend she went to a yarn and wool festival and bought herself a yarn winder but also a swift. Now more and more yarn companies are selling their yarn the old fashion way, in hanks. A hank is when you take the yarn off the bobbin and wrap it around a kniddy knoddy (this will bring up a whole different blog post.) The result when you take it off a kniddy knoddy  is a hank that you then curl in on itself before you wind it into a ball to use it. With the creation of massive yarn companies this has fallen by the way side but dyers and artisan spinners still sell it in this form.

the swifter I asked for at Christmas

What happens is you take your yarn hank and place it on your swift, and it holds it for you while you go through the pain of winding it. If you have a ball winder you may get it done even faster. Now I have wound yarn with out a swift, to put it simply, it was like trying to eat ice cream on a very hot day. You think when you start it is a good idea, but by the end you are still sweaty, but now sticky and wishing you had asked for a cup and not a cone. First you start in the spread knee position, holding the yarn on your knees as you wind but then you are stuck in the position. As your ball becomes bigger the yarn around your knees has slid off with you noticing. Now instead of a some what organized hank you have the biggest knot you have ever seen in your life. You put down the ball to fix the hank and the ball not only rolls off your lap but under the table and across the room where the dog discovers it. You get up to retrieve the ball after putting the even more knotted hank down. What should have been a 10 minute winding process turns into a three hour epic project. If the yarn was under $15 dollars you might go get scissors to get yourself out of the mess. If the yarn is over $25 you will continue to muffle curses under your breath as you try to straighten out the mess. If you are single you might start thinking it is time to date again, so you have someone who can hold the hank for you. If you are married, you decide you might sit though his grumbling of he has better things to do for 30 minutes then to ever debate doing this by yourself again. If your really smart you ask for a swift for Christmas (after debating the maybe I should find a human one).... which is what I did.

Mid 19th century swift at Lowell Mills National Historical Park

So I received my swift, I have already in 3 months wound 6 balls of yarn, I love my new toy. Now here is the thing the idea of swifts goes back centuries. They are often seen in varying shapes and styles in the back of paintings, and prints through time. Spinners use them to stretch the yarn to make sure the spin holds. Also they have been used to measure yarn. They will count how many times the yarn goes around the swift to know if they have enough for what ever they will be using it for. Weavers use swifts to measure their warping threads, if they don't have a warping board, to make sure they are all even.

Some come on stands, often called Yarn weasels. These ones would often make a popping sound as you spun them so you would know how many yards you had completed. Others were umbrella style and could be easily folded up. Mine is two bars that come apart and you put pegs in it to hold your yarn at various sizes. It can also be screwed to the wall.

19th century metal yarn swift.

So here is to the tool that makes my spinning, knitting and (if I ever learn how to weave) weaving life easier, the swiftly swift. (I know bad pun.)

Grind his bones to make my bread...

So everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. One of the most famous lines from Jack’s story is “Fe Fi Foe Fum, I smell the blood of an English Man.” Then everyone gets fuzzy on the next line until he says “Grind his bones, to make my bread.” Alright now that is just gross but it brings up the point, anything if you really want it to can be ground down to make flour. In fact some friends and I recently read the ingredients on a Gluten free and apparently flour free cake. It was not in fact flour free, just wheat flour. Gluten is a protein found in the seed that when mixed with yeast, baking soda or baking powder that lets the dough rise. What the cake was made out of was rice flour.

van Gogh 1885, wheat field

In the 16^th and 17^th century English documents the word grain is used but not as often as the word corn. Corn during this time period referred to any good that could be ground down to a powder. In a number of sources the word corn is found following anything that might be ground down to make flour, wheat corn, rye corn (though this is falling out of favor by the late 17^th century being referred to as just rye), barley corn, Native Corn (Flint corn, or the very colorful corn we use to decorate our table at Thanksgiving time), Pea Corn (also falling out of favor like rye, becoming just peas), Gun Corn (referring to the ingredients that get ground down to make gun powder) and so on. Now based on archaeological evidence the first bread seems to be made in the Fertile Crescent, what is today Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Syria, Israel, and Palestine.  Bead was the staple food of the people in this area and they were harvesting vast fields of wild barley and wheat 22,500 years ago.

Now with the creation of fire, people have been cooking with fire for almost as far backs as Homo sapiens which is around 4,800 years old. (That is us by the way,) The earliest evidence of human cooking heaths dates to 250,000 B.C. That dates to Homo heidelberenis (350,00 years old,) but a few years ago, charred bones and primitive stone tools were found in a cave in South Africa, moving cooking on a fire to 1 Million years ago (That dates to Homo erectus).

Small Morter and Pestle

Ignoring when fire was created it, using it to cook caused not only our bodies to get used to cooked food but also our bodies to adapt to cooked food, hence body parts like the appendix that we don’t need anymore. This means that when 22,500 years ago when we start eating wheat and barley our bodies couldn't digest it in its raw state nor could our teeth handle it. So we “grind grains to make our bread” to paraphrase the giant.

Grinding Stone

Now a statue out of Old Kingdom Fifth Dynasty Egypt (2,465-2,323 B.C.) shows a woman grinding flour on with a flat rock and almost round pin. Evidence of this method for grinding are found the world over. Examples are found all over Mesas in the Western Americas. Mesa Verde in Colorado has some beautiful examples that date to over 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. Mortar’s and Pestles are found all over showing the pounding method everywhere. Eventually these gave way to mills. The first mill was run by slaves or mules around 300 BC and by 89 BC the first water wheel was created. Archaeologists are still determining if it is in Greece, Norway or one of the other few locations that gets to claim who had it first. The grinding mill allowed flour to be readily produced for the masses, strengthening breads grasp on cultures around the world.

5th Dynasty Egypt

So grind on, enjoy bread, and I prefer stone ground over steal ground (today's method) when I can get it.   

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