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.