A Trip Through Time

We spent the first half of this week in Williamsburg, playing at Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park, and exploring Jamestown Settlement and Colonial Williamsburg. A rare getaway as a family, we really enjoyed our time down there and felt lucky to get such a great rate through a local homeschooling group. Usually, one of us needs to stay home to take care of the farm, but we're lucky enough to have a really reliable farmsitter (who didn't organize this particular group trip!) that lets us get away for short periods of time every once in a while.

The highlights of the trip for me were the time spent poking around in the colonial garden in Williamsburg and talking with a food historian in one of the colonial kitchens. Unfortunately, my favorite place of all, Great Hopes Plantation, was closed for the season, but I still found ways to nourish my own love for all things homesteading. Knowing that I won't likely get back down there this season has made me more determined to seek out some of the historical homesteads closer to my neck o' the woods, and I'll definitely be heading down to Monticello at some point during this growing season.

Here you can see all the cloches out to protect the plants at night; during the day they are set aside:


They had row covers made from saplings and cuttings and canvas tarps. You can see the tarps thrown aside in the above photo on the potting benches behind me. They also had some permanent row cover frames built that could be lifted on and off the rows of plants. These were constructed of solid framing wood and tar paper, though Jim didn't get a photo of them for me.


Here are some of the standard cold frames for starting plants:


And here, you can see the very clever straw insulation design:


The food historians were cooking over an open fire and had just finished spit roasting a piece of beef and making mashed potatoes, which Emily sorely wished she could taste. One was making some lemon custard tarts in a dutch oven near the fire, and he said it only took a ship about 6 days to bring citrus up from the Caribbean, which made sense once he said it. Nutmeg was also a plentiful spice.

I asked if he thought the food tasted better cooked with wood fire, to which he responded that the meat definitely did, but mostly the food tasted better simply because it was fresh. He continued to say that people now don't know what fresh ingredients taste like, and the girls had to say, "Well we do!" The historian protested, beginning a spiel about how grocery food isn't really fresh in the same way. My girls indignantly said, "we don't go to the grocery store!" *laughing* I told him that we raised our own food, that I went out and milked our cow, etc. and we talked a little bit about the different breeds we raised and those that were raised at Colonial Williamsburg. The piece of beef was from one of their Devons.

Overall, we had a lovely time, but it is good to be back home. I'll leave you with a few more garden images, while I go get to work on mine!