Seeds and Fruits
Originally published September 30, 2022
We are talking about fruits and seeds these days, and it seems like the world is bowing down its seed heads before us everywhere we look here in southern Vermont. We have been squeezing exploding jewel weed seeds, popping juicy Concord grapes from the arbor above the mud kitchen, chewing up the last of the ground cherries in the garden, letting burdocks hitch a ride on our clothes, and sending milkweeds and maple samaras off into the wind.
On Monday we read The Reason for a Flower, (the answer is seeds!), and looked for seeds in the forest. We also played with spiraling maple samaras.
On Tuesday we read The Dandelion Seed, then made ourselves some dandelion flyers with paper and scissors and sent them up into the wind together.
On Wednesday we celebrated Scarlett's birthday at circle, and then visited the community garden to look for fruits and seeds. We read Fruit is a Suitcase for Seeds, dug potatoes and found so many interesting things! We also played a game with a basket of objects, some of which were seeds and some not. We introduced the sight words "Yes" and "No" and tried to decide which things were seeds and which were not by sorting them.
Throughout this week we also worked on threshing and winnowing some rye that Laura Burch at SVTfarm in Wells grew and donated last summer. First we smashed the seed heads in a pillow case by hitting it against the ground, or a tree, or jumping up and down and stomping on it. Then we winnowed off the broken chaff in front of the fan until we got a nice pile of clean seeds in the bottom of the bowl. On Thursday we finished our winnowing, then took those seeds and ground them up into flour. Then we mixed in yeast and water, kneaded it up, and turned that flour into bread. It’s so cool to hold a dry grass with a seed head in your hand in the morning, and then hold it again as warm bread with butter and honey on it by the afternoon. Satisfaction embodied! It took a long time to rise, and didn't rise much. Our cooking projects are usually process based and the product is sometimes unusual and probably wouldn't be considered conventionally successful by any chef, but it's the experience that we are going for. Rye has a strong taste that not everyone likes, but fresh out of the oven with butter and honey it was a pretty good treat to most of them.