by Julia Boles
When I feel uncertain about the world I have always turned to food for grounding–cooking, eating, and sharing stories through food-centric media. When I left city life and moved to Vermont four years ago, I followed food to its beginnings by joining a community garden. The identity of food grower fits me so well that when I name it aloud something deep within me melts into relaxation. Food grower. I am a food grower, and through living this identity I steward the creation of food to nourish myself and my loved ones. If you come to my home, I will offer you something to eat or an ingredient from my fridge or freezer to use in your home cooking.
Before I knew I was a food grower I spent my days behind a computer, looking out the window, longing to be on the other side of the glass. The lights on my screen were not nourishment, they did not feed my soul or stomach. For years the community garden satiated this craving, but I found myself hungry for more. Hungry to be outside, hands in the dirt, sweat on my brow, out from behind the glass full time. I stepped away from my comfortable office job life and joined a farm crew.
Food grower for work and play. I am in sync with the seasons.
I love the hurried feeling of long summer days where the opportunity to nurture and harvest exceeds my energy. A time when my counters and floors are overflowing with produce. With each harvest season I’ve gained a better idea of how to efficiently turn bins of kale, baskets of tomatoes, and mountains of green beans into well-labeled gallon bags and neatly packed quart containers.
My freezer tetris skills are improving, stacking containers in tall towers around bags of round tomatoes and balls of kale in the chest freezer. It is a game I am good at by necessity, though I also take pleasure in the opportunity to pull everything out and marvel at my bounty under the guise of reorganizing.
As fall turns to winter my counters and floors start to look more like a home kitchen than the farm stand they were pretending to be during the sunnier months. Each year at this time I mourn the shift of my identity away from harvester and look again for who I will be in this next season.
How do I settle into indoor activities while I wait for the ponds to freeze and trails to get a deep snowpack? How do I remain a food grower after the frost sets in? Others hunker down with a giant jigsaw puzzle and work on it for hours, but that has never been me. Jigsaw puzzles demand that you sit still and use your mental energy to sift through a spread of pieces to find the one that goes in the next empty space. Or, you have a piece and you spend hours looking for its neighbors. Maybe part of my problem is that it takes me hours to match two pieces.
My other qualm with puzzles is knowing that when it’s finally done I have to take it apart and put it back into the same box. When a puzzle is done, it has not undergone a permanent transformation. You can’t tell whether a puzzle on the shelf has been done 1 time or 10, except for subtle wear and tear on the pieces and the disappointment of a missing piece when you are 999 pieces into a 1,000 piece puzzle. After years of trying, I have finally conceded that jigsaw puzzles are not my thing. I’d rather work with things that grow or change.
Last fall I discovered my puzzle–sorting dry beans. In my obsession with food preservation I have expanded beyond the freezer to seek out pantry staples I can grow and process myself. The bean project began without much planning, when garden green beans started drying on the vine and I realized I could save them in a shelf-stable form. This year the project grew with my newfound access to green beans at the farm. My squirrel self couldn’t help it, and it turns out beans require a lot of indoor sorting, at least if you are doing them at a small scale.
Beans require tending throughout the summer and a hurried dash in the late summer or fall to bring the mostly-dry beans inside before rains turn the harvest to mold. Once under cover the beans need to keep drying, a good time to ignore them for weeks or months while tending to other end-of-season tasks. The messy part is breaking up the dried beans in their sharp, crackly shells and sifting them out of the chaff to a mixture that is cleaned up enough to bring inside. Enter, my puzzle.
The dried beans begin in a crate on my living room floor–good beans, rotting beans, slightly shriveled ‘going to rot in the future’ beans, and remaining flecks of chaff. When I’m done they are neatly sorted into compost, eat soon, and storage jars – a puzzle that transforms permanently.
Like any puzzle, beans require good light, a large flat surface, and a lot of patience. With beans, I am able to enter the trance that I imagine many feel with jigsaw puzzles. I am locked in, scanning the table for rotting beans and chaff to sort out. This step reminds me of gathering all of the edge pieces. I am looking across the whole set and picking out the easiest to identify pieces first. I run my hands through the beans, feeling them slide through my fingers, jingling as they fall, revealing hidden pieces that match my search.
The small beans are especially fun to find this way, like finding a puzzle piece that is mostly background with a small clue telling you just where it fits. The small beans slip through my sifting, stationary and exposed in their cute but often shriveled and grey ways. This searching is tactile and auditory as much as visual. I go around the sheet pan sifting and plucking with one hand and collecting in the other. When my holding hand is full I carefully pour it into my compost jar. The tricky part is not mixing up the compost jar from the keep jar! I repeat this step a few times with laser focus until the majority of the sheet pan is storage-worthy beans. Beans are ready for storage when they are firm and smooth, so firm that when you try to dent them with your fingernail they pop out of your grip and fly across the room.
At this stage my technique changes. With the chaff and tiny, shriveled beans now mostly sorted out, I am left with a spread of uniform beans. I grab a handful and pour it up and back between my hands, this time looking for any beans with holes or smaller rotting spots. I offload the part of the handful that is ready for storage into my ‘keep’ vessel to free up a hand to pick out or catch rotten beans. I repeat this about a dozen or two times until I have filled a pint jar, ready to go in the round cake pan in the toaster oven to kill off any microscopic pests that might decompose the storage beans.
While a round of beans spends 30 minutes in the oven I prepare the next batch and end up with time to spare to bounce around my home. When the oven timer goes off, I pour the baked beans into a colander to cool and dump the next batch into the pan which goes right back into the oven. As beans begin to cool, the 30 minute intervals gain another step: moving the beans to their final destination. The beans rattle as I pour them into the mason jar.
As I twist each metal lid shut, I breathe a sigh of satisfaction, the last piece in place. This puzzle will carry me well into the winter months, along with pots of beans simmering on the stove and jars ready to send home with loved ones.
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photo credit: Julia Boles
Julia Boles (she/they) is a storyteller, food grower, and all around outdoor creature. Their personal essays and poems weave together themes of interdependence, connection to place, and food, asking us to consider our role in and reliance on the living breathing world around us.