Cooking Frittatas with Salt Water Farm: DownEast Magazine Video

By Rebecca Sornson

Oh, it’s a beautiful sunny day here at Saltwater Farm. I’ve been meaning to write a blog entry for weeks now, but instead find myself watering, weeding, planting, picking, cooking, teaching, swimming, hiking, etc. etc.

I had been contemplating as I watered, weeded, planted, and picked a philosophical blog on peas.

I would begin with a story about how I knew it was summer when the peas were ripe on the fence line of my dad’s vegetable garden. Then, I would pontificate on the various trellising systems of peas and how some peas grew and straight tall and some refused to twine at all and instead flopped on the ground or grew into the neighboring row. I was considering comparing peas to people and the various paths we tread.

But then, I decided this was way too heady for summer. Instead, I would take you on a little tour of life in the garden and save deep contemplation for the depth of winter.

Here we are. The gardens are in full bloom.

I always have a moment of panic in June when it’s been four or five weeks since we have put most seeds in the ground and yet, there is no substantial food. Then, all of a sudden, overnight it seems, the gardens are full and we can’t keep up with the harvest.

Here is a bed of lettuce, raddichio, chard, onions, and nasturtiums. Did you know that nasturtium leaves make a delicious pesto?

Our asparagus is done for the year. Our bed of about 40 plants fed us well this spring. We were still harvesting asparagus into the middle of June. Now, it has grown tall into wavy ferns and will blow in the breeze until winter comes.

The monarda, also known as bee balm, bloomed last week. The flowers are magnificent and edible!  We garnished a beautiful cherry-studded farro salad with the monarda blooms at our last moon supper.

Oh look! Here are potatoes that went into the compost pile and decided instead of breaking down that they were going to grow into big beautiful potato plants.

Here are a few of our last garlic scapes. Garlic, like most plants, sends up a flower stalk and that is the garlic scape. The farmer or gardener quickly snaps it off so that the plant will send its energy down into making big garlic cloves rather than up into making flowers that will soon turn into seed pods. Garlic scapes are delicious and can be used in any way that you might use a green onion.

Here is dill flower and if you look closely, you will see a pollinator hard at work.

Sometimes farming is hard, but then the raspberries get ripe, and you walk around the garden humming a little tune about how glorious life is.

The first slim, soft green beans.

Our fava beans. I had never grown fava beans before and when I opened my first, I was struck by the thick, fuzzy white layer that protects the beans. Plants are incredible!

This beautiful lacy flower is growing all over the state of Maine right now. It is valerian and a really gentle, calming medicinal plant. I get so excited when medicine grows of its own accord.

Here is another beautiful white flowered medicinal plant. It is called an elder, and the flowers will be turned into magnificent fritters at Sunday’s Supper.

And here is me and an elderflower.

And there’s the ocean. Rocky and calm at low tide. This is midsummer at Saltwater Farm. We are mighty grateful.

By Rebecca Sornson

It’s been just over a month since I arrived at Salt Water Farm. I came on April Fool’s Day, driving up from Connecticut in my little green Oldsmobile Achieva, which I bought for $500 when I returned to the States after farming for a time in the Virgin Islands.  My almost-sixteen-year-old sister, Molly, refuses to ride in it, claiming it to be far too hideous. I offered to give it to her for Christmas. She said she’d rather walk.

Several days before I drove to Maine, I flew to Connecticut from Hawaii where I had been taking an ethnobotany class. Ethnobotany is the study of how plants affect people and how people affect plants.  Since we all eat plants, wear plants, build stuff from plants, and make medicine out of plants, ethnobotany is relevant and wildly interesting if you ask a plant geek like me.

In Hawaii, many of the important plants used for food, fiber, medicine, and fuel were brought by Polynesian explorers. These plants included banana, coconut, yam, and cassava. They were called canoe plants because they were brought on the beautiful double hulled canoes that the Polynesians sailed to Hawaii. These Polynesian explorers were not unique in toting along their survival plants. For most of human history, whenever we have traveled somewhere new, we have brought along the seeds of plants which will hopefully help us survive in our new environment. Africans, in the process of being captured and forced into ships bound for the Americas, would braid seeds into their hair and thus these braids became called corn rows.

I brought a bag full of seeds in my Oldsmobile but mostly just because I couldn’t resist the charm of the Comstock Ferre Seed Company in Wethersfield, CT. I knew that I didn’t need to bring seeds to Maine to survive. My survival plants were already there, brought along by my European ancestors in the 1600s and 1700s. Sure enough, when I arrived, the first plant that I met was a pretty spring ephemeral called coltsfoot. A classic lung medicine, the coltsfoot leaf was etched on the door of European apothecaries to let people know that there was medicine inside.

Many people mistake coltsfoot for it’s more familiar cousin, taraxacum officinale or my friend, dandelion. In mid-coast Maine, dandelions shoot up their flowery yellow heads in mid-April. Like coltsfoot, dandelion was brought to America by Europeans for its vast culinary and medicinal uses. Dandelions quite liked their new environment and shot across America like wildfire. Apparently, Native Americans knew when European colonists were getting close because dandelions would begin growing in their fields and along the edges of their forests.

Dandelion root

Dandelions are tastiest in the early spring when their toothy leaves are still tender. Here at Salt Water Farm, we’ve been eating dandelions like crazy. First before they flowered, we ate dandelion greens in pesto. Then, we started eating dandelion salads. Their bitter leaves are rendered quite delicious with the addition of a honeyed vinaigrette. We’ve eaten them lightly sauteed with bacon. Also tasty. We’ve fried them, turning the blossoms into delicate fritters. (Check out Tuesday’s recipe post). We’ve put dandelion greens on pizza, and yesterday, I put three gallons of dandelion wine into a carboy to ferment for a few months. Apparently, in the depths of winter, when it’s ready to drink, it will taste like liquid sunshine. I haven’t spent a winter in Maine yet, but I grew up in Michigan so if the winters are anything alike, I think a glass of liquid sunshine in February will be mighty wonderful.

Dandelion wine fermenting

Medicinally, dandelions target the liver and the kidneys. Due to their bitter qualities, they help the liver kick into gear, clearing the body from any winter stagnation. The roots are sometimes ground up and used as a coffee substitute. I dried some last week after weeding the garden. Ladleah wanted to eat them like dandelion chips.

Today, it’s rainy and gray as I look out the window at the ocean. The dandelions are all closed up, protecting their golden blossoms from the rain. Even though I can’t see their smiling faces, I’m glad that they are there, easing my transition into a new life at Salt Water Farm. Hooray for the adventurous human spirit and the plants that help us along the way.

Dandelion Green Pesto

4 cups dandelion greens
2 lemons, juiced
1 cup almonds
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup grated, hard cheese such as pecorino romano

Place almonds, lemon juice, olive oil, optional cheese, and salt in a food processor and process until blended. Then add greens through the top while the food processor is still running and process until the greens are completely incorporated. Enjoy with crusty bread.