Stray socks

Fir branch done up to look like a tree.

Oldest granddaughter was here for a week.

I set up my tent, a pop-up model that has been with me to the wilderness many times, in my bedroom and we camped out on a mattress that stuck out of the tent door like a gian't tongue. Camping is what she likes to do when here, but with the torrential rains on most days of the visit, and the clod clammy conditions generally, indoor camping was indicated and it was a roaring success.

Most of the time we did pretty well together, though I think she's being raised in a culture of -- well, not as much respect for adults as we're comfortable with.

I think the purpose of respect, when it hierarchizes age, is safety. You want to be able to tell a small child to stop -- and they stop -- and the truck, or whatever is coming down the street, doesn't run over them. That kind of command-driven safety is lacking sometimes, with the result that we are very tired grandparents after these visits. The kid does try, but she's got years of helter-skelter behind her already. It's not easy for her, or us.

That said, the old lady (me) and the young lady (she) went up to the park by the boat basin and had a pretty good day. At her suggestion, we went fishing, and she hauled in an undersized kokanee, which we carefully released after a bit of a petting session. Then we moved up to the playground, where she practiced on the monkey bars for a while, and then discovered some sprouted acorns.

The acorns were a big hit. She dug holes all over the park, and basically planted a forest. We also collected mistletoe, lichens, and moss, which had come down in the big storm, and brought these home to add to the greenery on the mantel. A few extra critters appear to have been added to the menagerie -- mostly small tree spiders -- but the effect is quite cheering.

A particulary rewarding aspect to this visit is that Granddaughter has become a very good audience since the last time she was here. We went through the Sendak-illustrated Nutcracker that has Hoffman's entire, weird, but worthwhile story, with all the chapters that are missing from the ballet and the board books. Beloved would read a chapter, then later in the day I would, and when Granddaughter knew we had had come to the chapter called "Conclusion," she placed a bookmark in it and saved it for the morning of her departure. As Beloved rounded up Granddaughter's things to drive her back to the Big City to the North, we came at last to Marie's wedding to the Prince, and were all three quite emotionally affected.

After they left, I cleaned house, and kept finding stray socks and toy people, and such. I didn't realize I so much missed having children in the house.

The howling wind

We heard there was a storm coming -- with winds of fifty miles an hour. Lots of storms here gust to fifty, but when fifty is sustained, that can mean trees down and power lines lying on pavement, crackling, and the like.

One of the venerable pseudo-cypresses framing the front of the Library was shoved over, and had to be cut up ignominiously and hauled away in a dump truck. Houses and parked cards in various areas were serving as resting places for trees both large and small. One man died when his pickup hit a patch of black ice; three experienced climbers have disappeared on Mt. Hood, and sixty people can't find them. A catamaran has washed ashore upside down, and bodies are appearing on the beaches. So it's been kind of a rough week here.

As I was driving home from work during some of the worst of all this, I saw three explosions of blue light against the black sky, and the neighborhoods around me went dark. I drove the twelve miles to our place through rain and an unaccustomed lack of illuminated windows. Even the country mall and its usually brilliantly lit gas station were out cold. Nothing glittered except for the headlamps of other cars.

As I reached our place, I found, at last, some light -- for Beloved had got out the candles and lit the kerosene lamps.

These lamps were passed down from my grandmother's mother. They're no-nonsense nineteenth century lamps, with a fluted glass base sweeping up to a champagne-glass shaped reservoir, a brass fitting for the wick and chimney, and the tall chimney itself. Regal in bearing, these lamps can keep a room fairly well lit. Thanks to the wood stove and the lamps, we had dinner, hot cocoa, and a good book. It was almost a let-down to have the power come back on just as we were going to bed. What had been a romantic interlude ended in a clock frantically flashing "12:00 -- 12:00 -- 12:00 -- ."

Snow did not come down to the valley floor, as they say, but it has dusted all through the hills amid the upper elevations look like a winter scene from a New Hampshire calendar.

This morning I had a kitchen frenzy, making creamed sweet potatoes, whole wheat onion-garlic bread, steamed beets with honey and vinegar, mixed vegetables with Jerusalem artichokes, and veggie soup with garlic blossoms (from the freezer).

There was a hard freeze, and the roofs in the neighborhood were all white. This meant that the chard, bitter in warmer weather, would be edible, so I hopped out to the garden, you see, and one thing led to another.

After all that cooking, the weather moderated, and I felt a yen to go fishing. I pulled out the kayak and drove over to the reservoir. No one there, as is usual this winter. This place had been popular over the last decade or so, winter as well as summer, or even more so in winter, as it's known the trout will bite here in the cold, when they seem sulky elsewhere. But not as many have been stocked in the lake as in the past, and the regular season was so poor that all the men have either gone elsewhere or hung up their rods, leaving it to one old madwoman in her little cockleshell and about fifteen cormorants.

We're not complaining.

The bite was on, and the trout, as has been usual for the last few weeks, have been heavy holdovers, fish that have survived the motorboats and sonar over the last couple of years. They have lots of fight in them, too, as they no longer remember the hatchery, and the cold water holds more oxygen in it than in warmer seasons.

The surrounding hills were all white with snow, and the sky was quilted over with that thick, dirty cotton that says "snow coming." There was a biting northeast wind, against which I was well muffled, and a heavy swell running from the other end of the water. Sunward, the swells glittered wanly; elsewhere there seemed little difference between light and shadow. Cormorants dove, then popped up elsewhere, fixing me with their unblinking stares.

I had to divide my attention between the trout, who were certainly active, and the wind, which drove me toward the dam at a spanking pace. I might hook a trout and start reeling, only to find myself too close to shore, and then switch to paddles and make for open water over the grey peaks and troughs, almost shipping water, towing the fish behind me.

When I had had enough, or about an hour and a half, of this fun, I put in to the boat ramp, packed everything away, used the jiffy johnny, which was actually invitingly warm out of the wind, and went down to the boat basin for a glance around. The rich people's boats live here, lonesomely gathered together, clanking against their moorings, the wind howling through the stays, unvisited by their owners for months at a stretch. No one was home but a handful of gulls and some fifteen cormorants, sulking in a row along the breakwater.

One of them turned his head to run an appraising eye over me, then dismissed me with a bird's equivalent of a shrug. The others didn't bother to look.

It was a place where one has no name.

Up and down

Up and down weather and such. I made it over to the reservoir again in a grey hole and brought back three largish trout, one of which was one of those landlocked jack salmon that are stocked in the upper lake. You only find them in the lower lake if they got through the turbines intact and then grew up. This one had to be at least four years old; towed the boat in a circle before I got the landing net out.

:::

I made a soup on the same day, using leftover water from steamed broccoli, some red chard, beet greens, a garlic clove, a green onion, a leaf of red cabbage, black beans, and tomato sauce, We didn’t grow the black beans. I’m happy about the extent to which we are using our own garden through the winter. Beloved also thawed out some of our diced apples to use with oatmeal and such. I’ll probably put the last of that into a loaf of bread.

In two days the Library will have its holiday potluck and I’m so apathetic; haven’t made anything or even thought of making anything. Sigh ... Should maybe pick up a couple of sweet potatoes and some walnuts ....

:::

Local Granddaughter is coming to stay next week, so I need to find the tree trimmings for her to use; I should also have repaired the creek bridge so that she can safely get to the playhouse but I have put that off due to the cold and my diminished strength and resistance. So instead I have wrapped everyone’s gifts; Beloved will add her contribution to the various heaps and pack and mail them next week.

:::

Spare time, such as has been available, has been divided between napping and revising old poems. The poems were written by a former self. I kept about two thirds of them and have changed the pronouns in more than half; otherwise they are fairly recognizable, I think. So I’ve taken down links to the original books and replaced them with a set of Collected Poems.

Here's one of the earliest of them:

she sells books

She sells books from nine to six. They are
good books, well bound, well written, colorful
to the eye, and children love them, but

the town is poor. She sits waiting for hours
for one grandmother to come in and buy one book
for a favored grandchild. The owner of the store

is her friend; she cannot leave her just now, but the store,
she knows, is not her place in life. All
she has ever wanted is to farm: at evening,

when the dinner things are cleared, and the hot sun
drops behind the cottonwood, she farms.
Food for the ducks, and soapy water for broccoli;

old lettuce gone to seed comes out; the hay
is rearranged, and fall peas go in. She stops
only to hear the geese pass overhead,

then bends among her plants until the stars,
first one and then another, leap and are caught
in the hair of approaching night, so like her hair.

She comes in, soiled to the elbows, leans against
the table, extending an open palm. "Look,"
she says, her eyes afire. "Marigold seeds!"

A Blue Hole

I was able today to take advantage of what we in this part of the world call a "blue hole" -- a gap in the weather -- loaded up Little Eva, my seven-foot kayak, and sprinted for the reservoir. I haven't been here in months, and, sure enough, there have been changes. Most of the ducks have moved on, to be replaced by about two thousand coots. The cormorants, whom I haven't seen for awhile, have returned and established themselves on the breakwater booms. 

The booms, meanwhile, have lost their moorings in the storms. Wakes and waves are crashing right in among the moored yachts. The owners don't come around much at this time of the year, and may not be aware this is happening; the marina isn't staffed. Mr. and Mrs. Park Keeper are missing, as well -- and so is their trailer, which has been here for four years. They are frail people, and I hope nothing has happened to them. There are no cars in the parking lot, and no boats on the water. There is snow on some of the surrounding mountains. 

But the lake is reasonably calm, so I decide to have a go before the next storm can get at me. The kayak, as I've said before, is a Micro Poke Boat, a bit stubby and wide for a kayak. In it, on the water, I mostly look like a turtle. But it's very stable and sturdy and offers some protection from wind. It fits in the back of a Saturn wagon. I can carry it down to the water in one hand, with all my gear already in it. I snap together my paddle and shove off. 

From old habit, I assemble a rod and tie on a nymph. It's the wrong time of year for nymphs; might do better towing a spinner. But I cruise around the water in dual purpose mode. If a trout bites, we may eat trout. If it doesn't, I've anyway had a good workout, with spectacular scenery. 

Someone puts a runabout into the lake from the landing on the opposite shore, and drives off in a cloud of blue smoke. Too much blue smoke. Way too much blue smoke. The boat coughs, and loses way, and the blue smoke turns brown. They're on fire. This is a quandary. Since they are a mile away, and I'm in a tiny cockleshell that couldn't tow anything that size or take on passengers, I want to resist the impulse to go over. The most I could do is add to their embarrassment. They had better have an extinguisher; it's the law. On the other hand, if they do lose control of the fire and have to go over the side, they'll need me. This water is extremely cold, and they are at least five hundred feet from shore. They could latch on to my stern loop and hopefully I could get them to the landing before they go numb. I start paddling toward them. 

They do have an extiguisher. The fire is put out, and after awhile the runabout begins limping home with awkward, but determined, paddle strokes. And I get a good solid strike! I'd forgotten I have a line in the water, and it takes me a moment to re-focus. The line has been run out into the backing, so it takes a while to strip in in. The fish is heavy, and not a jumper, but gives enough head-shakes in the deep that I know it's not a pikeminnow. Carefully maintaining line tension, I work the fish in to Little Eva's starboard, and, yes, it's a big holdover rainbow, almost two pounds. 

  

The wind picks up and little whitecaps appear all around me. I check the western horizon. There's another storm coming in, almost on me. But it's been a perfect blue hole for me. Everyone's Thanksgiving wishes for me have paid off. Thank you.

Thanksgiving Prep

Our stove has died, just in time for Thanksgiving. We have one on order, but delivery ran into a snag and we won't see it until December.

This is a holiday that means a lot to the kids, though.

Daughter can't be here next weekend (ask her about her nice new fella), so, this Monday, she and Last Son and Beloved and I will have a symbolic feast, featuring pumpkin pie, at the university's student union, where I'll be tabling for an event. More about that in a couple of days.

The Tribe will come down from the Big City sometime during the holiday weekend; we're not sure yet when.

Because some Tribe members can't do without turkey, Beloved plans to go to Last Son's apartment and bake the big bird there. Then she'll give him a ride here.

Meanwhile, I'll be running back and forth between the crock pot, the electric frying pan, and the zapper, as well as arranging fresh veggie slices on trays and the like.

Today is my bake day. I've just created a loaf of acorn/apple bread, and am now setting about to bake Jerusalem artichoke/garlic bread.

For these loaves, I chose to grind some of the ingredients in a hand grinder. Ours, a Universal that we inherited from somewhere back in the Seventies, is simplicity itself. Clamp to table, put bowl in front, grind, unclamp, take down into three parts, wash, reassemble, and dry on top of the wood stove.

The acorns I steamed a couple of weeks ago, then froze. A couple of handfuls of these, straight from the freezer, put through the grinder, make an acceptable flour, but they're a bit strong for our taste, so I use this with chopped apples and the usual bread ingredients, including some oats and a couple of cups each of white and whole wheat flour. By cutting the sugar with a little bit of molasses, you can get a dark loaf that rises well and doesn't overpower you.

The Jerusalem artichokes, I noticed, don't store well, so I tossed the bad one, and re-washed the good ones and put them through the grinder. Some I have frozen, some went into a soup, and the rest is going into the next loaf. I put a clove of garlic through with the artichokes, and after throwing the ingredients into the bread machine, added the same flour, oil, salt, yeast, sugar and molasses ingredients as went into the other loaf.

Oldest Son sent me this bread machine as a gift a decade ago, and it has been going strong ever since. One of the switches on the bread machine finally gave out this morning. I have to unplug it to change settings. Hmm. But I hate to give it up, because it's from him.

His tribe will be the one that dosn't make it here for Thanksgiving, not that I've asked. I think they're a bit nervous about me, still, and it's a long way -- over three thousand miles. Would be too much to attempt with the two young girls. But I'm thinking about them.

I had hoped to work in the gardens, but there's an icy fog out. Instead I'm running to the woodpile pretty much all day, between other chores, trying to keep the house warm. These fogs do more to chill the house than just about any other weather, including snow, which we rarely see any more. Even Julia, the irrepressible Banty hen, has given up scratching for bugs for the day and is hunkered on her roost by our front door, depressed.

It's hot cocoa weather. With lap robe.

Ripening

I have apples on the brain. It was a good fruit year for us all round, except for the plums, which were apparently having a rest.

I blanched and froze as many bags of apples as I dared (ours being a shared freezer with negotiated project space). Beloved has been making applesauce (hers includes a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg). I cut up apples and make apple wraps, apple pies, apple bread and even apple soup. And I carry at least three with me every day to work.

They don't always get eaten right away, as there are a couple of freebie trees between the area where I park and the library where I work, so I pick from these as I go by. They provide outstanding flavor, so my own apples, with which I'm understandably a bit jaded, wind up in the "offering plate" -- intended to funnel chips and candies and such to my data entry student workers -- and usually the apple-orphans find a good home, like the summer zucchinis.

I have been noticing, in the last half year or maybe a little longer, that on the right side of my nose there is a discolored area that wasn't there before, and it sometimes cropped up like it was going to scab over, and then maybe bled a little, then more or less went away, then returned. This was unnerving behavior, unlike anything my body had done before, so I asked my doctor about it, and she sent me to a dermatologist.

By the time I got in to see him, of course, the spot was the least alarming it has been in months -- like the car that runs perfectly when threatened with an actual mechanic -- but he took it seriously.

"What you have there is not a melanoma -- yet -- but I'd characterize it as a precancerous growth. We could biopsy now, and find out that it either is or isn't, and if it is, we can freeze it. Or we we could just freeze it now, and if it ever returns, we could biopsy it then."

"Umm, I'd say, we could freeze it now. How long does that take? I have another appointment."

"About ten seconds." He grinned.

So we did that, and my nose has swollen up a bit, and where the blotch lived there is now a red circle, as if someone had placed a red-hot dime there for a few seconds. Having had a lot of practice working on that side of my nose with foundation, concealer, and powder, I was able to minimize, but not quite eliminate, the change in my appearance.

"What's with your nose?" asked one of the students.

"Cancer! Well, pre-cancer anyway."

"Ahhhhhhh!" she screamed.

"But we froze it off. That's why it shows up more today."

"Aaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

"Not to worry, It just means I'm getting ripe."

"Ripe?" she wheezed, catching her breath.

"You know, like an apple. First it ripens, then it falls from the tree."

Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Poor thing, I thought, as she ran back to her station. What do they teach them in these schools nowadays?

And I notice she didn't take any apples home with her this afternoon.

Rehearsing for Thanksgiving

Today was the first time in two weeks I was able to get at the garden. First there were some complications after surgery; then there was the frenetic pace of work from the beginning of the school year (which at this university begins in the last week of September). And the dreadful round of Meetings To Save The World From Fascism has begun again. But today, for half a day, I lay about me with knife and spade, putting the year's growth on the irises and mints down as mulch, and setting out the annuals from the "pots garden" to await their inevitable demise.

There has been no hint of frost -- so I got in a basketful of tomatoes along with the inevitable bushels of apples. The Black tomatoes have outlasted the Oregon Springs, Willamettes, Early Girls, Beefsteaks, and Brandywines, and I'm quite impressed with them. The Yellow Stuffers, which look just like bell peppers, have done well, too, and don't look at all troubled by the fact that it is October.

Beloved's cousin, whom we love dearly, has retired from her job as a counselor at a retreat center and came to see us for a few days. She had stored many boxes in our garage/attic that had been shipped, ten years ago, to us for safekeeping and never opened. The two of them went through the boxes and it was a sad occassion -- quite a bit of treasured crockery had been shattered en route. But many beautiful things survived, and have been washed, and are stacked on the sideboard awaiting a better re-packing.

Mutual frinds were invited to Sunday dinner, and I made it my business to provide for all.

Saturday I baked.

Apple juice, 8 oz.; warm water, 8 oz.Add yeast. Set aside. Put a few cups of whole wheat flour and white high-gluten flour, equal proportions, in bread machine on DOUGH cycle. A spoonful of olive oil. A handful of rolled oats. You may add sugar or honey to taste, and a small handful of salt.

Cut up two small apples or one medium, taking quarters off the core and dicing them small, peelings included (these are organic apples, as is everything on the premises). Add to the flour mix. Check the yeast, which should be well fizzed up by now. Dump in all the liquid and start the machine. Add dough until lump "cleans off the sides" -- forms one ball rolling around on the paddle. Shut off machine.

Sprinkle flour on cutting board. Dump lump on board, knead into a high ball shape. Lightly grease an ironstone platter that has high sides -- say, about an inch. A pumpkin pie platter, 10" diameter, will do. set loaf in middle. Slice across top three or four times diagonally, sprinkle sesame seeds on loaf, cover with lightly oiled plastic sheet and set aside to rise. Check a few hours later. When platter is well filled, turn oven up to 325 or 350 degrees F. and put loaf in for 55 minutes (in our oven, anyway). Our bread tends to burn on the bottom and not bake through, even in the ironstone, so I use a pizza sheet as a deflector by setting it on the other shelf, just underneath the "breadpan."

After almost an hour, I test the loaf by flipping it part way out of the dish and thumping it on the belly. It either "sounds done" or it doesn't. This takes a little practice. If done, set on a cooling rack until ready to serve or bag up and refrigerate.

Oh, and remember to turn off the oven!

On Sunday, for an entree, I built a 16-inch platterful of giant thin slices of Brandywine tomato and sticks of celery, two colors of bell pepper sliced lengthwise, the third color being Yellow Stuffer tomatoes ditto, and pepper-jack cheese, all radiating from the center of the platter, where a small bowl of tofu dip formed the center. A dash of basil flakes added sophistication to the lot.

I also made a sauce, rather like an eggplantless ratatui, with steamed zucchini, mushrooms, bell peppers, tofu, and bok choi folded into a conventional tomato spaghetti sauce, served over rice, and steamed zucchini, steamed beets, and steamed corn as side dishes.

Aside from baking the bread, none of this was done over at the stove. With a little planning and rotation, you can do it all with a small rice steamer and a microwave.

Last Son, who is twenty-two, was also invited, and brought a bottle of beer made by Belgian Trappist monks, on which he expounded as a true connoisseur of Belgian beverages.

After this meal, which we all agreed turned out pretty well, we retired to the "playhouse," which has reverted to a kind of writer's cottage, and all sat comfortably talking "of cabbages and kings" until the sun went down and the moon rose.

Quail sat on the roof, above our heads, and cooed to one another engagingly. We had not seen them for six years, so it was lovely to have them visit on this particular occasion, adding their magic to an enchanted evening.

:::

Beloved and Cousin have gone off to California to pester my in-laws, So I am rattling around the place alone -- when home, which is taking some doing to acheive. It's dark when I leave and dark when I arrive, so it's nice to have that Sunday dinner to look back on. I've retreated into my own room, which I can keep warm with body heat and a little space heater, without building the big fires in the dining room stove that keep the place habitable through the winter.

There I doze, or read, doing my medical bits at the same time, until it's time to go to bed properly.

Readings at present: I have several books of May Sarton's from the library. A novel: Kinds of Love. A diary, Journal of a Solitude. And some early poems. Also on the bed with me: Anna Karenina, which I'm finding slow going, and The Wind in the Willows, of which I seem to like best the scene in Badger's kitchen.

Also, interestingly, I find I'm able to pick up where I left off writing an experimental novel of my own, several years ago, when all this transitioning began in earnest. Experimental, because it's sustained book-length third-person present tense, mostly through one character's eyes.

The problem for me was that this writing began as autobiography. But I was becoming another person than the one one I was writing. So it was necessary to lay the effort aside for three years.

Recently I took another look, and realized I could pick up where I'd left off, because the main character could now be safely treated as, by me as I now am, fictional. I'm free to be me. And the chararacter is free as well. We're out of each other's hair for once. A good thing.

Build it yourself

 

I have been kayaking on the reservoir again. It has been a good bird year; I’ve watched eagles steal fish from ospreys, and vice versa. The cormorants are back, along with grebes and herons. Plenty of geese and ducks around , and thousands of coots wintered over on the reservoir. There’s a bald eagle sitting, day after day, on a nest about two miles from the house. We're eating trout fairly regularly, something that can’t be done everywhere these days, either due to depleted stocks or too much mercury in the water. This fish goes well with a salad and a glass of water with a sprig of mint. Since I've walked two or four miles with a boat on my back to get to the fish, the calorie count seems to come out about right.

I’ve become rather obsessed, lately, with the notion that obesity is not a disease, as everyone seems to be calling it, but, in most cases, a symptom of a disease --- one that has no name that I can discover. Call it proto-diabetes, perhaps, since diabetes can be one of the full- blown consequences of our poor eating habits.

"Poor eating habits" may down to simply this: insulin shock. It's not whether we eat carbs and fats, it's how and when as much as how much. If we eat more slowly, more raw and uncooked, less processed, avoiding not only sugar but sugar substitutes (which often produce extra hunger as does sugar itself) we can slow and/or lessen the impact of our food choices on the pancreas, which is really what "improved digestion" means.

Take spaghetti, for example. Diet fads have often targeted spaghetti or any pasta. But you might consider making only enough that there can be no "second helping." And cooking it less, which results in what Europeans call al dente. This is a little harder to chew and digests more slowly.

Now add your own home-made sauce, made in a small enough quantity that there will be no leftovers. Make fresh, eat fresh.

Dice very small some zucchini, green onions, pok choi, and, if you like it, tofu. Blenderize a tomato with a chili pepper. Mix all these. No need to cook the sauce. You could put it all in the blender, but I like texture.

Drain the al dente noodles, put them on a heated plate, pour the sauce over them, and add two more ingredients: a sprinkling of basil flakes and chopped allium blossoms (in season).

Serve with a simple three-lettuce salad (Romaine, Simpson, iceberg). Skip the Ranch and use a vinegar- olive oil dressing made with your own hands. Doesn't need to be too fancy; just add your favorite spices, along with a garlic clove, to a bottle of your choice of vinegar, and when you're ready for the dressing (don't try to make ahead) combine one oz. of the vinegar to one oz. oil in a four-ounce bottle and shake.

If you're dining alone, the above should work, or multiply quantities as needed for two or for guests.

For drink, try serving water or a very small glass of red wine, or both. You can do all this in a half hour. Spend another half hour lingering over dinner and chatting. For dessert, go take in a nice sunset.

This can all be part of a daylong plan: cup of oatmeal with diced apple, or one egg on one piece of toast for breakfast, snack on carrots, salad for lunch, celery for snack, and now the one-helping pasta dinner. I know that sounds like starvation to some people, but, really, that lunch salad can be sustaining if you build it yourself in the morning.

Example:

Take a pair of scissors and go to the garden for a handful of leaf lettuce, some pok choi, spinach, leaf of red cabbage, snow peas, red bell pepper, and those ubiquitous elephant garlic blossoms. Dice up a firm small ripe tomato or halve some cherry tomatoes. Toss. Heat up some diced pok choi and red chard stems in a small nonstick frying pan, lightly oiled (virgin olive, which is good for you). Add cubed tofu and mushrooms. Now add sesame seeds or sunflower seeds, and some basil. When it looks ready (pok choi beginning to soften, but mushrooms not yet shriveled) take off the heat to cool, then add to the salad. Toss again. Seal in a container and take to work in one of those nylon cooler bags.

If you like eggs, try dicing up a hard-boiled egg instead of the tofu and mushrooms.

This works! And it takes only about as long as standing in line at the canteen while the three people in front of you get their espresso mocha thingies made.

Trust me, you'll make it through the day. Drink lots of water between times, though. Not "diet" pop, that will set off the insulin rush, same as sugar, and then you'll be hungry. Same for most anything else they will sell you at the canteen. It's all either salt or sugar (usually corn syrup), or it's a sugar wannabe. Don't go there. Leave your spare change at home if you have to.

Or, drink unsweetened mint tea. Consider growing the mint. If you can grow nothing else, you can grow mint. It takes over, like bamboo, kudzu, vinca, or ivy. You can wash a bouquet of mint and simmer it in a pan till the water darkens, or put it in a gallon jar of water and leave it in the sunshine. I'm kind of hard core, I like to take a multi vitamin and grind it up in a mortar and pestle and add that to the tea. I pretend it's that stuff the marathon runners drink.

To convince yourself it's exactly that, join a walking group. Take your tea with you. If you like to chat with your friends and sip tea, there's no reason not to get in some of your 10,000 steps a day at the same time!

Beets & etc.

The Detroit Dark Red beets this year are huge without being woody at the core. I have taken to bringing in one for breakfast, washing it, cutting off the greens and thin-slicing the root into a bowl with about 1/2 cup of water. Cover with a matching bowl. Zap for 99 seconds. Uncover, add onion blossoms, garlic blossoms, or celery blossoms to taste, cover, zap 44 seconds, uncover, drain, and serve.

The drained fluid, a rich magenta in color, I may let cool for a drink later in the day or use in bread or soup.

The greens I use for lunch. Separate the stems on late-season beets as they are a bit too fibrous. Roll up the leaves in two directions and shred with your Chinese cleaver. Place in bowl. sprinkle with blossoms, as above, and spritz with water, or vinegar, or both. Zap for 99 seconds. Serve, with or without your homemade vinaigrette.

Today I did make beet-water bread, using 14 oz. of the red water, yeast, salt, oil, green apples diced small, oats, white and whole wheat flour, baked 1 hour at 300F. A bit crusty on the outside, mushy inside, but good.

We're invited out to eat tonight, or I would make green and yellow squash, with bell pepper rings and the usual garlic blossoms, as I did for a potluck yesterday, to serve with a looseleaf lettuce, bok choi, young chard, and onion greens salad. The squash dish took five minutes to make. The secret of all this quick cookery is to stay away from pots and pans and avoid overcooking anything.

Think about the density of each item, and add it to the dish in the microwave accordingly.

Example: small potatoes or celery, with tofu, two minutes. ADD bell peppers and snow peas. 1 minute. ADD fresh chopped spinach or beet leaves with garlic blossoms, one minute. Serve!

:::

The potluck was to celebrate a friend's fiftieth birthday. I met old friends there from over twenty years ago, many of whom had not seen me in all that time and had to be re-introduced due to my life change. No one seemed compelled to ask if I'm happy; I guess it just shows.

The setting was the farm where my friend lives and works, a large strictly organic operation that does community market baskets as well as specialty crops such as burdock. The view across the valley is spectacular, and as we all held hands in a great circle around the well-stocked tables, our host taught all of us to sing Pachelbel's Canon in D as an Alleluia in three parts, which went better than I would have thought -- Beloved said afterwards, "he must have done this before." The stunning music was the perfect counterpart to the lengthening shadows on the fields, gardens, and paddocks.

And people clearly liked my squash dish! A perfect day ...

Early apples

I got home at a reasonable hour, for once, but was too tired, even so, to take a run at yard work. So I went to bed, read myself to sleep with a book about making soba noodles, and woke up half an hour later ready to look about me.

We have been mowing the grassy parts of the acre with a gasoline-powered push mower, which is kind of against our principles, but we both work, we're between batches of farm animals, so what can you do?

But it does have a bagger.

This grass has been mowed without a bagger for many years, and for my twelve of those, the mowers have been kept at the highest setting, so the grass stays green late in the summer, as its soil is both shady and mulched. We have never used weed-and-feed and such. This has encouraged the worms and a great many other critters, and so things are a bit lush -- suitable for taking off some of the nutrition and concentrating it elsewhere.

I have been spreading the clippings in the garden and around the shrubbery and the trunks of many of our trees. They form a nice, earth-colored mat of interlocking fibers; lets water in but keeps weeds down.

Unfortunately, Julia, Beloved's pet banty, loves to scratch up the mat to inspect its undersides.

I have issues with that, but I know better than to chase her around -- most of the time.

I've hit upon the notion of surrounding the tree trunks with much coarser material -- as in grape prunings, fruit tree prunings, bolted lettuces, and even Douglas fir prunings. These I cut short enough to go round the base of the tree, using a pair of limb loppers, then I go mow until the bag is full, bring the heavy thing over and empty it on top of the other stuff. The mulch looks just as it should, but the branches and such, just beneath, prevent the scratch artist from doing her thing.

You couldn't get away with this in the Northeast; the whole arrangement would make perfect mouse houses and then the mice would chew away the bark all winter. But here, this practice seems fine.

It was while I was putzing about at this job that I began to despair of one of my apple trees.

I don't know the variety; something Granny Smith I suppose, but this tree has a habit of dropping all its fruit well before it ripens, so that you never get to pick the tree. And the other trees won't be ripening their fruit until over a month from now.

Suddenly I had an idea.

I have been playing with the microwave oven -- another gizmo that's supposed to be against our principles -- softening and resurrecting dried-out bread, or moisturizing underhydrated vegetables.

Would it cook young apples in such a way as to, in effect, "ripen" them?

I gathered a double handful of the lightly bruised groundlings and brought them into the kitchen. With a paring knife, I made enough thin slices to fill a small bowl, then spritzed them with a bit of water and posted them to the zapper, setting it on 99 seconds. A couple of minutes later, I collected the bowl and a fork, and made my way out onto the patio.

Under Julia's critical gaze, I conducted the taste test.

Success. Early apples!


Yours,
risa b

Full summer

Summer has thoroughly arrived here, and I'm amazed at the height of the tomatoes, corn, squash, and sunflowers -- a record-setting year.

I have been making meals on yellow squash; slice thin, cover with garlic blossoms or onion blossoms or both, put into a suitable bowl and zap on the popcorn setting. Serve.

Or beets: pull one beet about two to three inches in diameter, wash, slice the root thinly, spritz with water, place in bowl with onion blossoms, zap on popcorn setting. While microwave is running, separate the stems from the leaves, give the stems to the guinea pig, cut up the leaves, wait for the bell, add the leaves to the bowl, zap another minute. Serve.

Or salad: Carry scissors and colander to the garden. Cut into colander: romaine lettuce, Grand Rapids lettuce, Bibb lettuce, Bok Choi leaves and stems (if young), ditto red chard, onion greens, garlic blossoms, beet greens, nasturtium blossoms, snow peas. Bring into house, wash, drain, add diced hard-boiled eggs, serve.

The nasturtiums have come up everywhere. I let the excess ones grow to about a foot high, pull them, and use them as mulch around the apples and plums.

The bush peas I've planted appear to be looking more like climbimg peas, so I have "bushed" them with some sapling-like shoots from the flowering "willow" tree. Don't know what else to call it. It's a water-loving spcies that grows to about thirty feet, very rapidly, like a Lombardy polar, and dies out, making strong shoots all the while like those of an unpruned filbert. It makes flower heads in early spring that resemble lilac. The shoots, I have discovered, root easily when used as garden props, so I am propagating them to plant round the place as a supply of garden stakes, withes, and even firewood.

Time to move the water. Love to all,

risa b

We've never sold one yet

 

You may be interested knowing in what to do with a hundred goose eggs.

Last year, Beloved kept them in the refrigerator for, oh, all the way to this year. I asked about that.

"Well, we are going to blow them out and make holiday decorations out of them and things like that...and sell them."

We?

"Sure, it's easy; you'll just punch a little bitty hole in each end with a little bitty nail and blow it out into a little bitty cup or something."

Me.

I tried the technique as described, and after about five minutes of blowing, had one egg in the cup and a severe headache.

A hundred and thirty-nine more eggs waited quietly on the table. I sat and thought for a bit, then went to get the high-speed mini-drill, and stopped by the sixteen- year-old's room.

"Got a pump and a basketball needle?"

"Uh, yeah, but what do you want 'em for?"

"Trust me, you don't want to know."

I selected an egg, and, using a cone-shaped grinder bit, opened one end and soften the other (the skinny end). I punched the needle in ever so gently, then pushed down the plunger, slowly, so as to avert an explosion, while holding the needle-inserted egg in the other hand above the cup.

The egg emptied itself in about three seconds.

Visions of a cottage industry danced in my head. I made quick work of the pile of eggs, emptying the cup after each one into a mixing bowl (this is in case you find a bad egg), in which the eggs would be later blended and moved into freezer bags -- when thawed, the batches are good in baking recipes that call for eggs. But as far as cottage industry goes, well, we've never sold one yet. But after two years of this our Christmas tree looks splendid, and so do those of just about all of our friends....

The perfect aunt

 

AS I rose this morning and carried a cup of English Breakfast to the east porch, I found Beloved already there, with her big mug of coffee, admiring her surroundings wistfully.

"Fall has started," she said.

This was a shock. The really hot weather has only just begun, and we've become full-time waterers.

But I knew immediately what she meant.

The air smelled differently, somehow, than the previous morning, and a golden glow on the wall behind us, the telltale September glow, which I associate with Canada geese going up the river, suffused the whole porch area with sadness.

Where did the summer go, so soon, that we had waited so long to begin? And we have so little to show for our work, so far this year...

The brassicas went in too late to avoid the flea beetles, which are the current plague. We only did one small bed of peas, rather than the usual four in succession. The tomatoes have barely set fruit. We've just picked the first zucchini, and there's no crookneck squash yet.

Granted, we did get a crop off the early sweet corn, but the late variety should have tasseled by now and hasn't even reached waist high yet.

The second-year red onions were our only real show crop, making juicy bulbs six inches across. We took most of these to the Friends Meeting House, where there is a tradition of leaving surpluses for all comers on the back porch, but that looks like it will be our only contribution for the year.

There were no plums, and few apples; the Asian pears are too young to count, so there's just the one crop on the lone Bartlett to represent the orchard.

One thing we have a lot of, this year -- from our point of view, anyway -- is geese.

There are in the core flock two White Chinas, Abner and Amanda, and two beautiful gray Africans, Auntie One and Auntie Two.

Last year there were about 140 goose eggs, with Amanda producing about as many as the other two together, albeit smaller ones. Of these we left two to be hatched, which produced a couple of fine looking White China goslings, both of whom, however, died not long after fledging, from causes unknown.

This year, there were about 100 eggs, of which we left enough in the nest that seven hatched. These came in waves, so to speak.

Auntie One took over the brooding early on, hissing if Amanda got anywhere near the nesting box, and hatched three goslings which she took to be her very own. She was willing for Auntie Two to babysit them, or proud papa Abner, but Amanda was not to come near. If she even tried to share in bathing and drinking at the common pools, Auntie One drove her off with hisses, snake-like threatening movements of her long neck, and beating of wings.

It got so that poor Amanda was getting dehydrated, and we had to spread the various pools and "white buckets" over a large enough area that Auntie One couldn't cover the entire territory, making it possible for poor Amanda to jump off the nest, run for a drink, and run back. For Amanda had chosen to take on the remaining eggs, and stayed with them day and night.

Eventually four new goslings appeared, which seemed to us smaller at birth than those Auntie One was rearing. Three of these were larger than the last, whom we called Junior. It was now Amanda's turn to go on the offensive. Keeping the new babies close to her, she interposed herself between them and Auntie One at every possible moment, occasionally rushing over to give Auntie One a smashing peck in the back, between the shoulder blades, whenever she seemed to threaten to come too close.

We were impressed with Amanda's motherly courage, Auntie One having considerably more reach and strength, and about double Amanda's weight.

The children grew apace, but came a morning last week when I counted six at feeding time. Had Junior fallen down a missed post-hole somewhere, or had there been perhaps a fox raid? I searched, and before long came across his stiffening corpse -- neck broken -- he'd been severely pecked between the shoulder blades.

Amanda?? Oh, surely, not.

I elected to weed the upper garden, which is close to the fowl pens, and keep an eye on goose society for a bit. Amanda and her remaining three were cropping weeds and sipping water in one pool cluster, Auntie One and everyone else, including Abner, were doing the same in the other area.

Then Amanda, going for some stray bits of cob, was momentarily distracted. Instantly Auntie One, who had apparently been single-mindedly on the lookout, dashed across the invisible line of motherly enmity, and gave a slamming peck to the smallest remaining gosling, right at the base of his neck!

I must intervene.

Leaping over the fence of the duck pen (to the mild astonishment of the ducks), then over the goose fence, I chased Auntie One through the pool areas, overturning buckets, slipping in mud, rounding Auntie One in ever- tightening circles. We bowled over non-Auntie-One geese and goslings in all directions in our epic chase, which seemed to go on for a long, long time, though it was undoubtedly over in a couple of minutes. I held Auntie One's sleek, almost expressionless face close to mine, my fingers wrapped round her downy neck, and pronounced sentence: "Okay, you – in with the ducks." And dropped her over the fence.

The ducks scattered, goggle-eyed and squawking, then went about their business, which was mostly chasing flies.

At that moment I got the feeling one gets when one is being watched from behind. I turned. Abner, Auntie Two, Amanda, and the six goslings stood together in an amicable group, regarding me with mild curiosity. And just beyond them, our neighbors Mr. and Mrs. T. leaned on the fence. They had thoroughly enjoyed the chase.

Auntie One began treading up and down along the fence across from her three darlings and the rest of the flock, calling to them, and trying the wire at every possible point. The others, after getting over the discovery that the madwoman was not planning to kill them all, simply went back to grazing.

Auntie Two was the perfect aunt, spelling Amanda as needed in raising the six goslings, who from that moment looked to Amanda for all orders.

Beloved was away at a family reunion during all this. On her return from the Midwest, she got my report on goose events of the preceding week, then went out to survey the crime scene. I made tea, and brought it out to the shady side of the "veranda." Beloved returned, took two quiet sips, and said, "You know what? Every one of those babies is a White China!"

The three that Auntie One had fought so hard for, and been willing to kill for, were all Amanda's.

One size almost fits all

 

For years, we were bamboozled by the term "fall planting." It conjured up an image of late September afternoons, dew on orb-weaver spiders' webs, and pumpkins taking on that golden sheen. The problem with putting in seeds for winter harvests in the fall is, of course, that the days are already too short for proper growth.

Eventually, perhaps in our reading, or just stumbling around in the garden, we caught on. Fall planting is done in high summer. Everything should put on height and weight before the short days. The trick is not to let the heat "bolt" things -- cause them to run to flower and try to set seed.

We've hung a shade over a bed, made from repurposed burlap bags, and we'll hope that helps some. I cut through the newspaper/straw mulch in one of

the beds with a right-angled trowel. I'll make an opening in the mulch about seven inches in diameter. She spreads a handful of compost/potting soil mix on the spot, shake out a mix of seeds from my shaker -- beets, spinach, kale, chard, lettuce, kohlrabi, radishes, turnips, bok choi -- and spread a bit more potting soil over them, lightly, before moving on to the next spot. Later, I'll bring the watering can and soak each hill gently, with the rose of the can at ground level. With luck, in a month or so I'll get to thin the hills.

This isn't a perfect procedure. Lettuce, for example, really likes a bit more sunlight than this for sprouting. But we find that splitting the difference works okay, and gives us fewer things to have to think about. One size almost fits all, so to speak.

The resulting bed, as a rule, after thinning, has enough variety of plant life to confuse plant predators and to share space with different root systems going after different nutrients. The word for this is polyculture and we are trying it more and more.

92 in the shade ... head for the house.

Every good habit helps

 

AS THE winter rains subside slowly across the coastal and inland valley landscape, and days are sunny but nights still cool, my neighbors pile up accumulated garden and yard debris, leaving it for a few weeks, perhaps under a plastic tarp. As soon as it's dry enough out, but not dry enough to get them in trouble with the fire warden, they torch off the lot. From a mountain top nearby, one can see this activity as a kind of Civil War reenactment, with the smoke of the guns drifting from various parts of the field. Filbert farmers are prone to set off a lot of piles at once, so that their places look like some corner of Shiloh.

When we first began to accumulate such material here, we started to build such a pile, but then remembered reading a book by a maverick Japanese organic farmer. He said that he had no way to fertilize a hillside orchard until he hit upon the idea of gathering wood and spreading it around on the slopes to rot. His trees thrived. We've begun to emulate that basic idea. Since we still use wood heat, we do try to saw up larger branches for the woodpile. The natives are ash and oak, so their smaller branches are useful for the small barbecue pit we inherited with the place. Finger- sized trimmings of oak, ash, bigleaf maple, blackcherry, and cottonwood go into low places on the land, to help build soil. When there is a lamb, much of this goes to stock feed -- cottonwood is a favorite -- as does the abundant Japanese knotweed festooned with morning glories.

Himalaya blackberry, our region's equivalent of kudzu, we leave where it drops when cut. The lawnmower will eventually chip up the drying stems. Some of them we may use for bushing peas.

We have let too much mint grow in too many of the beds, and what we can't use we pull -- and pile around the feet of the fruit trees for mulch. Old squash vines, sunflower stems, hollyhocks, zinnias, cornstalks, "mother" strawberries, and old-growth chard or broccoli plants we chop up with a machete and leave in place to be mowed and perhaps eventually forked in. Of course all the kitchen waste goes straight to the garden.

We save our dishwater, add it to some other choice "household wastewater," and feed this to fruit trees, grape vines, and flower beds. After we've done the woodcutting for the year, the driveway accumulates a layer of sawdust and chips too small for gathering up for the woodstove. This material is gathered up with a square point shovel and wheelbarrow, and added to the blueberry row.

With all this activity, we find there's nothing left over that belongs in a bonfire, so we've never had to have one. In fact, we import whatever we can find. We buy tremendous bales of straw at a few dollars apiece, each weighing about the same as the Titanic, and huff them up to the barn to spread around under the bottoms of the ducks and rabbits. The resulting fertilizer is highly prized for projects all over the farm.

In November of every year, I scout around for bags of leaves left curbside. Last year I brought home some twenty-five of these.

Some of the bags were big-leaf maple, which is said to be a no-no in the vegetable garden, but they're fine for the "low spots" and around rhododendrons and the like. Some were oak, which can be sweetened with rock lime and used wherever you like. Some were more of a beechy-sweetgum kind of thing, and these were sheet- composted on the garden.

This seems to work so well that we question the usefulness of a compost heap. By the time the pile, of whatever humongous size at first, cooks down, there's so little of it that it has to be rationed to the neediest (usually tomatoes), and the rest go hungry.

At a Hutterite commune where I was a baker, I set up a bin behind the bakery, made of three sheets of metal roofing, and while waiting for the seventy-five pound lump of bread to rise indoors, shoveled whatever I could find into a big chipper. Sawdust, mule (yes, mule) manure, kitchen wastes, grass clippings, and whole piles of cleared vegetation, including a half-acre of high- nitrogen kudzu, went into the machine, in alternating batches, so that there'd be an even mix in the bin. As soon as the bin was full, I added another one, and when that one was full, I added another. The half-acre garden, which had been in ryegrass over the winter, we tilled in, and after the crops got high enough to mulch, we sheeted the whole area with the contents of the bins. The chippings served as compost, mulch, and pathway alike.

We would show visitors the garden, and on learning that it was organic, they would invariably ask where the compost heap was. "You're looking at it." We never bought fertilizer, except for some organic mixes for the nursery, where a more controlled acidity was called for.

I remember the nurseryman, now a famous organic truck farmer who lives in this area, did sometimes have to fight white flies, the bane of greenhouse operations whether organic or not. He set off pungent smoke bombs that were very effective. I asked what was in them. He grinned. "Nicotine. The stuff's an organic insecticide, invented by tobacco plants to kill any bugs that try to eat the leaves."

This gave me an idea. I bought a pouch of chewing tobacco (which raised a few eyebrows in the store), and make a pomade of chewing tobacco, chips left over from old soap bars, and rabbit manure, all tied up in a cheesecloth, and left the "teabag" in the watering can overnight. The resulting tea could be used in the greenhouse, on flower beds, and throughout the young garden, and fed plants yet insulted bugs effectively.

You can put a similar mix into a hose-end sprayer, but it doesn't seem to me that the resulting dilution, even at the highest ratio, has enough kick. Just keep the solution making daily in the watering can, and use it wherever it's needed most. I leave the can in the greenhouse, where the heat from the sun during the day and radiating back from the brick floor at night can "solarize" the tea. The warmth seems to be preferred by the plants over cold water, and I would do this routine of leaving the water in the can overnight even if didn't have the teabag in it. 

Once you've made yourself responsible to a lot of plants, every good habit helps.

The cherries are gone

The birds have finally stripped the pie-cherry. I got to eat a lot of them this year, though. The tree is out by the mailbox, and passersby were treated to the sight of me, late for work, stuffing my cheeks with cherries by the cedar-board fence.

Where there is a will

 

I used to despair of ever getting the garden tilled. Here in western Oregon it generally rains, rains, and rains until about the fifth of July. Throughout this time, if you pick up a handful of "dirt" and drop it, like the tilling manuals say, it will hit the surface with a wet splapp!! -- just like a Better Boy tomato -- thus failing the ready-to-till test.

So, what's a gardener to do?

We have weeds like nobody has weeds. We can hear them growing at night. Neighbors like to lean on the fence, shake their heads, and say, "Oh, my. Need some herbicide in there!" Well, thanks but no thanks; we had a serious run of birth defects among tree planters' families back in the seventies, including ours, and it turned out to have something to do with the 2,4,D that was used to keep the forest clear-cuts free of brush. I figure the big chemical companies owe our family about forty thousand dollars so far, but for now let's just say, no herbicides on this place, thank you.

So, ok, what to do? We learned, some years ago by trial and error that with a long-handled garden fork we could "spade" wet ground: the tines don't seem to compress the soil the way an actual spade does. We turned the clumps upside down, and the roots of sod and weeds, ripped by the fork rather than cut off cleanly by a spade, stood upside down naked in the sunlight, rapidly drying up, a satisfying scene of mayhem. But the earth itself remained stubbornly cold and damp, even for peas.

Something more was needed.

During one hot, dry summer not too long ago, I tried to water my plants from little irrigation ditches, as I had seen done in a garden book somewhere, but the plants were drying up anyway, because the rows were too far apart for the ditches to have any effect.

A little exploration with a spade taught me what most of you old-time gardeners already knew: most of the water goes straight down.

You have to water the roots of a plant to do any good. If the water is hitting the ground just a little outside the reach of the plant, it may miss the roots entirely on its way to the aquifer.

Hmm.

If I can water only straight down, said I to myself, then I can also dry straight down. As with sun and shade, you can manipulate water levels by opening up or blocking paths for water -- or rain!

The next winter we bought some stuff we had been avoiding: sheet plastic. 4-mil black and clear. We experimented with both, spreading them over various areas of the garden, and found that the clear plastic seemed to actually encourage weed growth, though it did dry out the soil enough to till.

The black plastic seemed superior. Every green thing underneath it died, though worms did not seem to be at all discouraged. I've since heard that the clear does work, but it has to be tucked under the earth around all the edges -- absolutely all -- in order to deny air to the weeds and get enough temperature to kill them and their seeds. The black plastic seems much less effort.

When we don't have enough to do the whole surface of the garden (which is always), we spread out what we've got, and three weeks later, go back, pull all the plastic away, till the dry spot, and spread the plastic over the next space for the next three weeks. Thus there is always some earth dry enough to work, even in constant rain.

Meanwhile the clear plastic does come in handy. In prepared ground, we can plant whatever rows or hills of seeds interest us at the time, let it rain on them one night, then cover the rows with a sheet of clear plastic for three to six days so the seeds won't drown, then remove. And voilá! A garden up and running, even as the cold rainwater keeps up its endless drumming. Where there is a will, I suppose, there is almost always a way.