What’s Cooking in the Garden?

I would be a terrible teacher. In my mind, the best teachers present information in a neutral, non-judgmental way. For older kids, good teachers provide both sides of a controversial subject and let the kids arrive at their own conclusions.

Not me……Every Fall for the last 10 years I’ve been teaching a class to 2nd and 3rd graders at my kids’ elementary school called “What’s Cooking in the Garden.” There is no objectivity when I teach. I am basically a propaganda machine promoting the importance of growing and cooking your food. Fast food and junk food get a bad rap in my class. The other day I had all of the kids pull out the wrappers from their lunches and read the ingredients. I told them if they couldn’t pronounce the ingredients they shouldn’t be eating the snack. Every snack but one ended up in the garbage. Then we made fruit salad with fresh fruit from the school's garden and they were thrilled.

I keep things pretty simple in the class so the kids can make the same things at home. This week I grabbed some Refosco grapes from our property and made grape juice. Every kid in the class claimed they knew someone who has a vineyard. That’s Napa for you!

There's always several kids who hesitate when we start squishing the grapes because they don’t want to get their hands dirty.  By the end the kids who hesitated the most are the hardest ones to get to stop.

getting their hands dirty

juice was flying everywhere

everyone finally gave in

pressing the grapes to extract the juice

the press cake - everyone loves cake, right?

Cheers!

Our Unsung Heroes

We are very excited to be harvesting our home vineyard today. This is the vineyard that we look at everyday; the vineyard that the kids walk out to to snack on grapes; and the vineyard we hope to pass on to them one day. The folks who come to visit us always get a tour of this vineyard.

But when I say “we” are harvesting the vineyard, it means that we got the harvest bins over to the property and we removed the shade cloth covering the western side of the vineyard (a family affair till dusk of last night), but the real “we” is really not the Matthiasson clan, but the work crew that we hire to literally do all of the heavy lifting. These guys are our heroes. They are out there right now, in our backyard, working faster and harder than we could ever even imagine working. This is the time of year when they have to make enough money to get them through the period of time after harvest when they get laid off for a few months. They typically start back in January when it’s time to prune. These are not our regular employees, but a crew that we hire a few times a year for the big pushes in the vineyard.

And without these hardworking guys, we would never be able to grow and harvest the grapes. So a big THANK YOU goes out to all of them, especially today, for being a key part of us being able to do what we do.

harvesting Ribolla gialla

the bins they are carrying weigh about 60 pounds when full

Jack, who works for us year round, has been
another invaluable part of our harvest this year