Too Many Melons - Sunday of the Month

This summer has been one of the warmest in my memory, and unlike the rest of the Midwest, in this part of Minnesota we’ve had enough rain. Our garden has grown enthusiastically as a result. We’ve harvested one or two succulent ears off of every corn plant. The cabbage and broccoli have grown faster than the cabbage worms. The carrots are fat and orange.

The warmth this summer has given our melons a boost and they win first prize for productivity and taste. Dave planted two varieties of watermelon and three of cantaloupe and when we are patient enough to wait until they are completely ripe, the melons are magnificent. Most summers, about the time we figure out what a ripe cantaloupe looks like, we’ve eaten them all – green.

This year we have enough melons for our learning curve to flatten out. The cantaloupe are ripe when the background color behind the netting is a warm beige, not a light green. The watermelon are ripe when there is a small yellow spot on the bottom of the fruit and when the little twisty vines at the stem end of the fruit are dry.

We serve the watermelon plain, with mint and feta cheese, and with tomatoes.
When Dave cuts into a ripe melon, the scent fills the room and my mouth begins to water. Today we had one cantaloupe for breakfast and two different cantaloupe and a watermelon for lunch. Tonight we had cantaloupe shakes for dessert. On the off chance that we can’t eat or give away the melons fast enough, I freeze cantaloupe for shakes later in the year. There is no such thing as too much melon.

Cantaloupe Shakes

1 medium ripe cantaloupe, diced – about 5 cups
2 T lemon juice
2 T sugar
¾ c milk
1 pint vanilla ice cream

Blend cantaloupe, lemon juice, sugar and milk until smooth. Add ice cream. Blend again. Serve with a long handled spoon. Serves 4.

Selling wool

Sales are not my forté. I sell lambs with reluctance. I have a web page that is slowly bringing in new wool customers, but I sell most of my wool to people who come to my house for two fiber days a year. I’m not very good at pricing or advertising.


Last year I joined the Mercantile on Main, a limited liability partnership, because it sounded like a good way to sell my yarn, my roving, and my books. Each of the members has different strengths – some keep the records, others work on advertising. A few are great at display, while others work on legal documents. Somehow it all works and it has been so much fun!


A year after we first opened our shop in an old gas station, eighteen women and one man signed their names to a deed of sale and bought the old municipal liquor store in Pelican Rapids, Minnesota. We renovated the building – ripped down interior walls and floors, replaced ceiling and plumbing, added a window, and then filled the space to bursting with interesting things.


The Mercantile on Main sells all kinds of items just like an old-fashioned mercantile. We have Asian groceries, antiques, fabric and sewing supplies, collectibles, hand made jewelry, silver jewelry, hand made clothing and toys, art and art supplies, crafts, farm raised beef and poultry, Tervis Tumblers™, soaps, candles, cookbooks, wool roving, yarn, and knitting supplies, as well as my books.


The hard part about being a partner at the Mercantile on Main is that I have to work at the store two to three days a month, just like every other partner. The great part is that I sell my books, yarn, and roving year round. The best part is that I have gotten to know an incredible group of people who encourage each other. With their help, I’m getting better at pricing and beginning to enjoy selling.

Guest post

My parents are two of the strongest people I know. When most people say this they are speaking about strength of character. When I say this I am talking about physical strength (they are pretty good at the character part too).

Anyone who has ever baled hay by hand knows that there is just no way you could ever replicate such a physical experience in the gym. 8-12 hours of lifting 50 pound bales all the while balancing on hay wagon! They don't make a workout machine to reproduce this experience. And even if they did no one would have the time to use it.

I think about these things because I'm a personal trainer, and the daughter of a shepherdess. I work with city types; lawyers, financiers, actuaries, and bankers. My clients are amazing people and, with a little help, they have become pretty fit folks. But as a rule, they really aren't in same fitness class as my mom and dad. This is not a character judgement. It is just a fact.

How could they possibly be when their careers demand 6 to 10 hours a day of sitting. I work with some of the most motivated, most focused, and toughest people you're likely to find. They work really hard to keep their bodies in good shape. But they are at a disadvantage. No amount of willpower, no amount of dieting, and no amount of fitness schemes can make up for a sedentary career.
You can't sit for 8 hours and then in one giant burst make up for all that time in 1 hour at the gym.

It is no mystery to me why we face an obesity epidemic. Our bodies are not made for this amount of sitting around. Our bodies are made to move.

In recent years I've done my best to help my clients, my friends, and my family to adjust their lifestyles to be more like farmers, or gatherers, or hunters. I encourage them to do a 10-minute workout here and 30-minute walk there:
Walk to the grocery store and carry home a bag or two. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Stand up and stretch, maybe do some pushups every 30 minutes or so when you are at your desk. Rough house (safely) with your kids for ten minutes instead of watching T.V. Go for a walk after dinner... You get the idea.
This sort of up and down rhythm is what our bodies enjoy. Too much stillness can cause damage. Likewise too much physical activity in a short span of time can cause damage. When you arrive at the gym compelled to get all your physical activity in, in one fell swoop, you expose yourself to injury. When you sit at a desk all week and then hurl yourself into a day-long mountain biking adventure you expose yourself to injury.

What we need is to find the middle ground. Plenty of moving and plenty of rest throughout the day. On, off, on, off, on, off (as my 1-year-old son Jasper is so fond of saying).

So if you don't have the good fortune of being a sheep farmer I'd encourage you to figure out how to sprinkle micro-workouts throughout your day. If you need some suggestion on what to do why not visit your local sheep farm. I'll bet they have plenty of wood for you chop, hay for you to collect, trees to trim, sheep to herd, thistles that need to be policed, and manure to be shoveled. They probably won't even charge you for the workout!

Will all this make you as strong as my parents?
I doubt it. But you may lose a pound or two, and more importantly it will make you feel a whole lot better.

Amber Ellison Walker lives and works in Minneapolis as an in-home personal trainer. She splits her time training clients and taking care her 1-year-old son Jasper. One of her favorite things in life is returning home to the sheep farm. She is even up for an occasional 3:00am lambing session or a ride in the hay wagon. She is the owner and head trainer at I Think I Can Fitness.

Written with the help of Jesse C. Walker, a small business online marketing consultant, who also happens to be Amber's husband.

Raspberries - Sunday of the Month

Raspberries, that mid summer fruit that epitomizes vacation time - soft, sweet and fleeting - are a pleasure at which you really have to work. Raspberries are so ethereal that they were seldom sold in grocery stores until modern modifications created a tougher berry. Although they are much larger and do survive packaging, shipping and reselling, store bought raspberries are pale reproductions of the original.

Traditional raspberries ripen in a thicket; every inch of bush covered in thorns to catch at your clothing and scratch your skin. Yet each berry is so fragile that they stain your fingers as you pick and your lips and tongue as you eat. Your fingers must work gently to pick the berries from their stems, and you have to spread them in wide containers, berries less than an inch deep, to keep them from crushing each other.


Picking berries forces you to slow down, just a little - a small taste of vacation in your berry patch. There is nothing small about the fragrance or flavor of home grown raspberries. The scent of berries hanging thick on their branches in the warm sun entices and the bright, intense flavor as you slip one into your mouth grabs at your taste buds and shouts “Yes! This is summer!”


Wild Raspberry Sunday


The absolutely best way to eat raspberries is sprinkled liberally on a dish of vanilla ice cream. But if all my Sunday of the Month blog entries are plain fruit on ice cream, they will get boring fairly rapidly. The following “Sunday” came from a friend who ate something similar in a restaurant and figured out her own version of the raspberry treat. I altered her recipe for our family’s taste buds.

1 cup fresh raspberries divided into 3 small bowls
2 Tablespoons powdered sugar
1 Tablespoon sour cream or yogurt


Mix the sour cream (or yogurt) and powdered sugar until well blended. Spoon mixture over the raspberries. Serve with small spoons to make the treat last longer.

Dave and I are both 64 years old. Most of the time we don’t feel that old. We know lots of people our age with bad backs, bad knees, or big bellies that limit what they can do with their bodies. We know farmers who have to use a four wheeler instead of walking their pastures, who raise beef cattle instead of dairy cattle because it’s physically easier, who shifted from small square hay bales to big round hay bales so they wouldn’t have to lift by hand. Only skidsteers or tractors can lift the big rounds.

Haying and lambing are the two most physically exhausting times of our year. During haying, if we don’t have extra help, we lift 70,000 pounds of dried alfalfa in 50 pound bales from the baler to the wagon, from the wagon to the elevator, and from the elevator to the stack in the mow. During lambing, we spend hours of every day out in the cold. We walk, kneel, lie down, climb, lift, wrestle, chase, and tackle much more than we do the other eleven months of the year.

One of the reasons we can still immobilize a 150 pound ewe or lift a 50 pound bale, or catch a 10 pound lamb that squirts around the barnyard much faster than we can, is that we keep in good shape the rest of the year by working and exercising. Dave rows, I run or snowshoe almost daily, and we both work out by Skype with Amber, our daughter and personal trainer. That one hour workout each week, by a trained person who sees us better than we see ourselves, stretches tight muscles, strengthens weak muscles, improves our balance and keeps us limber. I hadn’t realized how the range of motion of my head had decreased until Amber helped me enhance it. When I wrenched my back lifting Dave’s backpack before a camping trip, Amber helped me focus on the muscles that hurt and then strengthen them. She worked with me for over a year until the pain was completely gone in almost every situation. Dave hadn’t seen the changes in his posture until they began to improve with his weekly workouts.

The work necessary to farming helps keep us active, but having our very own personal trainer keeps us fit enough to continue farming.

For as long as I can remember, our family celebrated summer with hand cranked ice cream. My folks had an old freezer with a faded green bucket held together with twine. It didn’t matter that the bucket had cracks between the wooden slats – the important part was the metal canister that held the ice cream and the dasher that churned it.


When the family gathered, Mom made up the custard and Dad bought a big block of ice and chopped it into shards with an ice pick. The he layered salt and ice around the canister and the rest of the family turned the crank until the ice cream was hard and only the strongest of us could move the handle. Everyone helped because the family rule was that if you didn’t help, you couldn’t have any ice cream.


When Dave and I were married, my folks gave us a hand crank ice cream freezer and we continued the tradition with our family and friends. Home made ice cream is best when eaten the first day, and it takes about a half an hour of cranking, so we try to have a crowd around when we bring the freezer up from the basement.


Last year, we presented our daughter’s families with hand crank ice cream freezers for their anniversaries. Their sons, Kieran and Jasper, are a little young to turn the crank, but they’re a perfect age to pick strawberries. For strawberry sundays, slice the strawberries and sprinkle with sugar. Make your ice cream and ladle on the strawberries – a perfect treat for an early summer evening.


Grandma’s Homemade Ice Cream


2 cups white sugar

3 eggs

2 ½ cups milk

1 ½ teaspoons flour

2 tablespoons vanilla

pinch of salt


1) Cook the above ingredients slowly, stirring constantly, until thick.

2) Cool.

3) Add fruit if desired (1 box of mashed strawberries, 7 mashed peaches, or several mashed bananas).

4) Add 1 pint whipping cream.

5) Place in canister of freezer. Place dasher into canister and cover. Add 3 pounds of ice and 3 ounces of rock salt around the canister in repeating layers until you reach the bottom of the cover.

6) Work on a tile floor with towels available or outside as the tub will leak as the ice melts.

7) Churn (turn the crank) until frozen, thick and creamy. Stop when the handle becomes hard to turn or when the motor complains. May take up to 30 minutes.

8) Carefully wipe the salt and ices off the cover of the canister before opening.
9) Remove dasher and lick it clean.

10) Recover canister. Let ice cream ripen half an hour to an hour in the ice cream freezer covered by a heavy towel or in the refrigerator freezer for up to six hours before serving.

A week ago Tuesday we gathered with friends to watch the transit of Venus across the sun. It doesn’t happen very often that Venus passes between the sun and the earth – Tuesday was only the second time in just over 100 years. In 1639, it was such an important event scientifically that scientists and observers went all over the world to record the time that Venus began crossing the sun and the time that it finished the crossing. Scientists hoped to determine the distance from the earth to the sun using those measurements. In 2012, although many people did, we did not take measurements. We ate a picnic dinner beside our oat field, watched the sun through filtered binoculars, and talked - an important opportunity to enjoy the evening and to decrease the distance between friends.