These are analogies for the first 50 or so years of my life.

The problem of being raised “secular” (i.e., without any sort of religious principles) is that you have no tools to measure by. Every decision you make is plagued by a lack of ability to weigh options accurately. Lacking any other solid principles, you get left with a sort of hedonistic utilitarianism whereby you can easily believe that what you desire is moral in a sort of watery, liberal way.

Even a false religion helps this somewhat. Having fixed principles can help you to perform better in life the way that having measuring cups that are improperly labeled might help you eventually make a cake. With a fixed value system, there is more order and you can be better disciplined. With a disdain of religion, you’re left with nothing but your sense of false superiority.

How can you possibly decide how to, for example, choose a spouse?

Now imagine you possessed not just the proper tools, but that they were solid, well-made, time-tested, and perfectly accurate. Immutable truth.

What would today be like if I had been raised to consider virginity a state of the highest value, if I had understood that a wife was made to submit to and support her husband, and that her place was in the home, raising children?

It has been a slow process, not because of the level of difficulty, but because of my own recalcitrance. Last week I made bagels for the first time, and they were so easy and the results so glorious that I felt ashamed that it has taken me so long to try them. When I think of all the sleeves of preservative-filled bready things I’ve bought over the years, I am aghast. How have I managed to keep my family alive by serving them such rubbish?

Over the last two years, I have really changed in how I view food and cooking. All my adult life I’ve been a decent cook, and I never hated cooking, but at some point in my life a struggle over priorities coupled with a negative reaction from young children to the food I cooked leaned me into solutions that involved less effort, care, and wholesomeness. Now, however, I have come to find the baking of yeast bread a fairly simple process that does not fill me with dread or seem to take all day, as with puff pastry, pie crust, pizza dough, and noodles. I’ve made pita and tortillas. These things are generally straightforward, and for a person with good initiative and time management, simple basics for delightful and satisfying family meals.

Not that I’ve had as much luck learning the initiative and time management skills as I have the bread making skills, but now I know that even the intimidating problems have answers.

I know what you’re thinking, and no, I don’t need kudos for doing what I ought to be doing anyhow. Facebook never gave me kudos and I am sure Substack is even less likely to. Perhaps I just want to normalize the activity. Perhaps the solitary activities make me lonely to express myself verbally to an imaginary audience. Increasingly, I am of the opinion that, as I Catholic woman, I should not be debating dogma or virtue signalling faith issues.

Whether a garden is to slake an urge for prepping (because everyone is talking about food shortages) or simply to make good use of one’s time and resources, it can hardly be debated that gardening is not a net good. It could be argued that it is expensive or cumbersome, but particularly if one is interested in high-quality organic produce, it seems well worth the costs and effort. Even in my secular suburbanite days, I found gardening to be a series of incredible everyday miracles. That was when I was buying my live plants from a garden center! I can barely over-extol the glory of planting one’s own seeds and watching edible tasties be the result!

Anyhow, I got in all my brassicas, and I had quite a mess of them. They were getting leggy under the grow lights and while I’m concerned they’re not quite well hardened, I hope they’ll be happy to have more space. There are about a dozen each of two varieties of broccoli, about eight romanesco cauliflower, a dozen brussels sprouts, about a dozen cabbages, four cheery collards. I also had a dozen cayenne pepper plants which were beginning to make blooms. Hopefully the cold weather stays away from them.

I’ve got three more beds to clear, and one of those will be for potato starts. I’ll need to decide if I’m going to hold the remaining space for the tomato and cucumber starts I’m working on under the lights or direct sow something. I struggle with patience, and empty dirt needs plants. Inevitably the tomatoes are ready and I have no dirt left to plant them in, resulting in emergency planting locations. (Perhaps a good excuse to put in more raised beds this year?)

I’m so ready. Ready for garden vegetables, ready for farmer’s markets. Ready for salads and canning and berries and, oh yes, melons. Pickles and peppers and flowers.

That led me to articles about depression era workhorse vegetables, largely root crops, that packed vitamins and minerals and either stored well or lasted in the garden all winter, to be dug up from the soil as needed. I couldn’t help but wonder why, and especially in the “superfoods” era, some of these items were not on the hot recommended new trend lists. Eventually I started with a thing I’ve had a lot of curiosity about: rhubarb. What do we know about it, and why is it not more popular?

I first experimented with rhubarb about eight years ago. I was trying to find a way to make chili without any nightshades or other IBS-triggering foods. I exchanged cubed hard squash or sweet potato for the beans, used chopped radish in place of onion, but I struggled to replace the tomato, which is a nightshade and a fairly important thing to eliminate in various diets. After trying stewed strawberry (too bland) and then cranberry (too fruity), I stumbled onto chopped frozen rhubarb in the frozen section of my grocery store. It was genius! All the tartness of tomato, less sweetness, and a history of use in stews made it perfect for the task.

A little internet surfing for information on rhubarb led me to this study which said some very interesting things indeed.

“Rhubarb can be used to treat multiple diseases… The major constituents of rhubarb are a variety of phenolic compounds, such as anthraquinone derivatives, dianthrones, stilbenes, polyphenols, flavonoids and chromones. Among them, rhein, emodin, aloe-emodin, physcion and chrysophanol are well recognized as biologically active components.”

What are these mysterious compounds? Chrysophanol may be useful to prevent or treat cancer, liver disorders, metabolic disorders, and gut issues like Crohn’s and colon cancer. Stilbenes are antifungal and antimicrobial (think resveratrol), Physcion is an antioxidant with anti-cancer properties. Chromones have cardiac and blood pressure benefits. Rhubarb is an important substance in Chinese medicine.

The rhizomes I have planted in my garden are popping up some leaves and I am eager to begin experimenting with culinary uses. Aside from the typical pie and jam uses, I’ve considered trying making a soda syrup with it, trying it in a sauerkraut-type ferment, and adding it to soups for tang, as well as fresh in cold salads.

I will share my experiences, should they yield anything interesting.

Meanwhile, I’m increasingly suspicious about why the garden plants that have fallen out of favor have done so. Certainly many of them are easy to grow, requiring no special soils. Most of them are easy to transport and store well. Low cost may be a factor in the modern grocery store model, yielding little profit for unit of shelf space, but the system has a way of making things profitable when they want them to be.

Perhaps I am paranoid these days, seeing malevolence where it is not, but I think the last few years have provided sufficient evidence for us to withhold our trust in modern systems. So with limited garden space, I think I will begin a slow process of trying forgotten garden plants, learning how to grow, store, and prepare them.

I have such great ideas for this stack, dear reader, but I’m plagued with doubts. As if my own lack of skill isn’t enough, I worry about my tendency to acerbic tone, know-it-all-ness, and even more primarily, saying anything that isn’t flawlessy founded in a Catholic worldview. This means, among other things, keeping to a woman’s proper domain. The vast world is full of information, some of which flares up some of my most volatile moods, and I have come to realize that my watchful eye not only does not help prevent any potential oncoming global disasters, but in fact, threatens to derail me from my own intention to be cheerful, productive, and virtuous.

I’ve been out working in the garden, and after a series of setbacks, I’ve come inside to cool off both mind and body (even while warming up the oven to bake the rolls that have quietly performed their second rise), and I thought I might type away some of my energy in a little update while my zeal still holds.

Let me tell you about my endeavors this spring. First, on the chicken front:

My hens have begun laying full-tilt and I’m selling eggs at the farm stand again. Or, rather, I have offered them for sale. It takes a minute to get the buyers to bite, as I learned last year. I have a dozen new pullets I’m raising in the seed shed to help round out my egg colors (as rainbow eggs have been my dream since my first adventures in fowl). Additionally, we have 30 eggs in the incubator that are almost a third of the way gestated. This is my first year tackling meat birds, and after a weather related loss of two thirds of my chicks, the remaining birds are over halfway to butcher size and are happily surviving in a new tractor that Mr. Weeds beautifully built.

I’m still on the lookout for guineas or guinea eggs.

All my nanny goats are are due to deliver within the next 30 days or so, and I’ve taken on a bottle buckling from a friend’s farm, so caprine adventures are high and mounting ever higher for the season. Once that begins I’ll be milking full time, so I’m enjoying the wait. We’ve got a new cow, “Oopie”, due soon (dates uncertain), so that will add to barn chores and our original Bitsy is believed to be expectant as well for a summer delivery. They keep our bottle-raised steer (“Homer”) company.

I started seeds in February, mostly brassicas, and they’re due for transplant. My beds are a mess from last season, so that is what I was working on earlier. They should be in dirt within a week. For home-germinated plants, they look great (this is a skill I’ve long struggled with), so I’m pleased. I’ve got cabbage, brussels sprouts, romanesco, napa, collards, and loads of broccoli, along with some flowers and some assorted herbs. I’ve planted more rhizomes in the perennial beds, and I’m hoping to have my first rhubarb harvest this year. I have a few peas that survived the hard recent frost (direct sown) and today I started some tomatoes,cucumbers, and peppers. I’ve got some potato starts to put in as well. Oddly, I’m finding myself unseasonably revved up about canning and freezing, so my crop selections are focused on these goals. (Honestly, I think current events have me worried about putting away food.)

I just finished reading another book, and it is on my task list to make a set of stacks focused to my thoughts and the other books I read over the winter. Realizing the limited options for fiction with a Catholic worldview, I went on a bit of a bender and consumed close to a dozen books. I doubtless have strong opinions about these, and I’d like to share some of my thoughts with a focus works aimed at satisfying the preferences of the traditional Catholic woman.

Something to look forward to.

Here is where the rubber meets the road, as they say. I’ve been procrastinating about writing, in part because I don’t feel adequately prepared. My assessment is that in this social media heavy world of ours, people are insufficiently mindful of making sure they have rationally formed their ideas with a sufficient amount of research and have considered what the overall affect of their comments might be. There’s responsibility in writing and even with an audience of zero, I feel the weight of it.

Not only must you avoid contributing to the net negativity of the blogosphere, there’s the sense that you need to have something to say that can have some benefit to the reader. This can be tricky, particularly for a person like me who lives with a continual sense of having be repeatedly disregarded by key people in my life, particularly within my family of origin. Fifth wheel syndrome, if you will.

Additionally, there needs to be a focus. Boundaries. Themes.

Bear with me, gentle reader. I’m barging into this space unprepared because the only way for me to figure out what to do is to begin doing it and fail if I must. I can live with being an embarrassing spectacle, but I want to stay virtuous at all costs.

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