HAH!!!!!

The Week In Review: planted nada. I was mostly in Florida visiting my mom and dad; I suppose I could have planted an orange tree, but I've missed that chance yet again.

Harvested grapes, sweet corn, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, kale, yellow zucchini, beets, green zucchini, chard, bell peppers, chicken eggs, duck eggs.

Canned tomato puree.

Converting garden waste into chicken, duck, and goose smiles.

Sold chicken eggs and gave away yet more veggies.

100 foot diet: from frozen: chicken broth and blackberries and nuts. From home canned: blackberry jam. From the land: apples, duck and chicken eggs, turnip greens, zucchini, elephant garlic, onions, basil, chives, cucumbers, eggplant. 100 mile diet: wheat, oats, rye, spelt. 1000+ mile diet: you should just try eating sustainably by flying 6000 miles round trip and hanging out in in my folk's sausage-and-bacon-and-canned-biscuits kitchen! HAH!!!!!

Successful purists we're not

Photo by Daughter (see her reflected in the pot?)

A little rain today; the clouds have sat upon the hills across the river and their ghostly feet are stumbling through the damp firs.

I'm canning some tomatoes that are still straggling in. We're predicted to have two days in the nineties this week; but for now I'm relying on the canning kettle to warm the house, and worrying about the tomatoes in the dehydrator, which doesn't do them a lot of good in the rain.

The Week In Review: planted peas. Late, but that's how it is. Hope to add beets today or tomorrow.

Harvested grapes, sweet corn, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, kale, blackberries (yay, Daughter!), cabbage, yellow zucchini, beets, green zucchini, turnips, turnip greens, kohlrabi, chard, bok choi, radishes, beans, bell peppers, potatoes, onions, garlic, chicken eggs, duck eggs.

Dried apples, tomatoes and beans, canned tomatoes and applesauce, strung leather britches (beans), and wrapped and stored apples. Started fifteen gallons of grape wine (including pulp, so make that eight to ten gallons we hope to bottle -- still, that's ambitious for us!). Our method with tomatoes is to cut the outer slices off all the way round, and these, with the skins on and salted and spiced, go into the solar dryer. The rest of the now-naked tomato goes into the canning pot.

Converting garden waste into compost now -- corn stalks for example are going into the shredder. One corn patch got past us while we were eating out of the other one, and all those ears are going over the fence, where they keep the poultry almighty busy!

Sold chicken eggs and gave away lots of veggies.

100 foot diet: from frozen: rhubarb, chicken. From home canned: blackberry jam. From the land: apples, duck and chicken eggs, bok choi, turnip greens, potatoes, zucchini, elephant garlic, blackberries, cabbage, onions, green beans, basil, chives, onions, cucumbers, eggplant. 100 mile diet: wheat, oats, rye, spelt. 1000+ mile diet: Some corn chips. Successful purists we're not!

A heart knows

We took advantage of a long weekend to get caught up a bit, picking, packing, stacking, pickling and canning, and the bees frantically did, I'm sure, much the same amid the basil blooms.

I have been meaning to make some wine; year before last there was a huge crop of grapes but we had other commitments, and most of what was picked went straight to the chickens. Nothing about that crop was due to any judicious viticulture on our part; we've done about all we could to abuse these vines.

When we moved here, the arbor was on the remotest part of the property where it would never be watered, and although the vines were already fairly massive, we undertook to dig them out and shift them nearer to the house. The largest one, which we call the scuppernong because that's what the grapes taste like to us, barely fit in the wheelbarrow. The other two are a white seedless and a red seedless, not as vigorous, then or now, as the more bitter, seedy "scup." But all moved successfully and pretty much took over the middle of the garden.

The white seedless, for many years, made almost no grapes at all. The red held its own, but the seeded scups are pretty sure to make a crop unless interfered with in some major way. The arbor got out of hand over the last couple of decades, and its supports were collapsing, so last year we gave everything a severe haircut and rebuilt the post-and-wire apparatus. When you cut back grapes that far, they skip a year, so neither we nor the chickens got any last fall.

Now they're back --but with a difference. The red seedless vines look good -- but no grapes. The white seedless are suddenly productive and just heavenly, and we're eating them like there's no tomorrow. Ya never know.

My dad is all about winemaking, and when my parents lived here for a year, a decade ago, he made us a lovely batch of red table wine (now long gone) from the scups and red seedless combined.

I have only made wine once, a one bottle effort -- dandelion wine that turned out well, so I'm feeling lucky. After picking three bushels of the scups, I puzzled a bit over how to crush them, and went with the well-washed electric compost grinder. This thing is not much for shredding, let alone chipping, but it makes an industrial-grade blender, and converted the grapes into a juicy pulp in about three blinks. To boost flavor and kick in the direction I want to go, I also pulped some apples and added a couple of cups of sugar and some wine yeast. Straight table wine doesn't require this, of course -- the grapes have their own yeast.

So now I have three five-gallon buckets of must started, which I'll strain and drain presently into two clean five-gallon carboys with fermentation locks, and then bottle. In a year or so we should know how all this went.

After this rather haphazard experiment, I went after the rest of this year's apples, and Daughter, who is here on a working vacation, went after the tomatoes.

For lunch, I drank a handmade smoothie of applesauce followed by a glass of local Gewürztraminer and Daughter and I sat in the shade of the lilacs, listening to the Adagio from Mozart's Serenade 'Gran Partita' Adagio on the old turntable.

I spent the afternoon making applesauce, and she filled the dehydrator with sliced tomatoes. For a grand finale, we cleaned up the kitchen and dining room to the sound of the Shirelles' greatest hits. A soup of sweet onions, peeled tomatoes, zucchini and fresh parsley and chives simmered in the background.

There are days that are more blessing than a heart knows how to receive.
.

If not, then lots of vinegar

The Week In Review: Planted? No. Harvested? Mostly corn, potatoes, tomatoes, apples, grapes, eggs, filberts. Some chives, parsley, basil. Firewood. Stored? Firewood, applesauce, tomato puree, dehydrated tomatoes. We took down and stored the summer burlap awnings. Seeds saved this week: tomatoes. All the bean varieties went into a second bearing, so we're respectfully waiting for those to all mature and we will, with any luck, dry and shell them. Curing onions, winter squash, pumpkins. Set up fifteen gallons of --we hope-- grape wine -- if not, then lots of vinegar! We have three volunteers at the community gardens this week, but, again, not me, I'm canning for the home front ... but we are definitely the Women's Land Army! Ate? Whatever was not nailed down, with special emphasis on applesauce and tomato soup left over from canning, and lots and lots of corn on the cob. The variety that turned out well was Silver Queen, which was a gamble for us but it has turned out to be a long season here.

Suitable tools

[an edited re-post]

My father's "tiller" was a big machine like the front end of an Allis-Chalmers tractor; it had water-filled tractor-tread wheels that were as tall as I was, and with it he pulled a small but quite real single-moldboard plow. It lasted for two decades.

Our first tiller, bought from a hardware store in 1977, lasted just two years shy of two decades. We practically farmed with this machine, as we never seemed to know when we had "enough" ground in cultivation.

A more recent tiller, however, we used for about twenty hours a few years ago, and then it died of a heart attack.

Clunk!!

I know the sound of a piston rod giving up the ghost, but I'm old enough to remember that I should be hearing that sound after three or four hundred hours or more, not twenty.

Our old chain saw, a 1979 Husky, will still cut wood if we get around to putting a new sprocket on it; it fought the Memorial Day fire in Sweet Home, in '82, I think.

A more recent saw, one of those black-and-green things you can buy in a box at discount stores, lasted two weeks.

We think we see a pattern here, and it's one that encourages us to rethink our original reaction to Wendell Berry's advocacy of horse-drawn equipment and scythes. I thought then that he was a bit of a romantic, too much of a purist, a professor playing at farming with a professor's income to fall back on, but I think now that his views will eventually make the most economic sense.

Not to a salesman, to be sure, but to someone who wants to live in the country, not go there every night to sleep and back into town every morning, mind you, but to live in the country. There comes a time when plunking down good money for gadgets that look like labor-savers but ain't -- because they are going to refuse to do the labor -- begins to look like money spent foolishly.

Pick up a garden magazine and the bright ads rave at you about the labor you will save with this machine or that machine, but in the end, Thoreau was right.

He said: "...I start now on foot, and get there before night....You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime tomorrow...if you are lucky enough to get a job in season."

If you have to work for two days, or, ten, or twenty, to earn a tool and it lasts you two, ten, or twenty days under normal conditions, well, you really ought to have investigated the corresponding hand tool and saved half your time!

Yes, Farm Girl's new tiller broke and she took to philosophizing as she turned over the garden with a hay fork and blistered her soft hands: sour grapes we used to call it, per Aesop and his fox.

But blisters heal, hands toughen, the body begins to slim down a bit, and if there's any sunshine to be had, some vitamin D into the bargain. One begins to move like one who one understands work. And anyone who might smirk at the ineptitude with which she yanks, over and over again, at the starter cord of an intractable machine may admire instead, if she reaches into the toolshed for a good fork or spade.

Meanwhile we see articles hither and yon about the disproportionate share that tillers, lawnmowers, chainsaws, edgers, and the like have in the despoiling of the air we breathe. Perhaps -- just perhaps -- we're onto something.

We live where hand-inverted sods resprout at the first hint of rain, which comes almost daily in our spring. So for years we spread black plastic to kill sods. It's very effective, if kept on for five weeks or more.

Technology shouldn't be regarded as either our savior or our nemesis; the key is to use as much of it as necessary to get done what needs to be done, and no more. Now would be the time to rant about ski-mobiles and power boating, but I'm going to presume that the gentle reader would regard this as preaching to the converted -- take it as a compliment to your good sense.

As our power tools fail us one by one, we become more appreciative of hand tools, and abuse them less and less. We have several hammers, a straight 22 oz., a curved 16 oz., a tack hammer, a ball peen, a masonry hammer, and a couple of sledge/maul monsters. And we've become aware that these are not all interchangeable, and discovering why a tool is shaped a particular way pleases us greatly.

We have a brace-and-bit, plane, bench vise and bench grinder all over fifty years old and going strong. The grinder is electric, but it's an old electric, sealed, never needs oiling, perfectly balanced. It can heat up an edged tool very quickly, and we've learned to keep a can full of water handy to sizzle things in, so they won't turn into butter.

As time passes, we're using the grinder less frequently, instead locking tools into the vise and leaning over them with a sharp bastard file, knocking the file against the bench from time to time to shed filings. A file takes a little longer, but it won't destroy temper and you can keep a clean eye on the angle of the cut.

We have five shovels. There's a round-pointed long-handled shovel for digging and ditching, a square-point for scooping up loose material from a flat hard surface, a d-ring-handled tree planting shovel with plates welded to the step for booted work, a more delicate d-ring shovel with an eighteen inch blade, suitable for bulb work, and a British-spade type thing -- a cheap imitation -- but useful for light sod cutting and for mixing things in the wheelbarrow.

One finds, after time, the point of balance with which a shovel can be wielded all day without undue fatigue. After more time, one becomes aware of the subtleties, such as when it's time to file the blade, or how one can put more pressure on a handle that has been linseed-oiled in the last year than can be put on one that hasn't. One begins to take the trouble to carry a shovel to the shade when not in use, to protect the wooden shank from the sun.

Different people have different tool preferences for different techniques.

Beloved carries around a feed sack with a pillow in it, upon which she kneels to work in the garden with her ever-present trowel. I use a kneeling bench and a right-angled trowel.

I get a lot of use out of a pair of pruning shears, thirty years old -- a cheap brand, too -- and a heavy duty pair of limb loppers that have outlasted their wooden handles. I drove the tangs into two three-foot-long three-quarter-inch galvanized pipes, and on these iron legs they have walked with me over the land many times.

To draw out the rolls of stock fencing that have languished for fifty years in the blackberry patch,we use a pair of double block pulleys a hundred years old, with a two-hundred foot length of rope looped back and forth from block to block, giving us our own strength four times over across a distance of fifty feet. This thing beats a modern "come-along" for speed and distance, if power is not all that's wanted. The rope is new, but that other rope lasted us decades; a mysterious thing of true hemp, soaked in creosote by hands long vanished from the earth. We hated to give it up.

There is a footbridge on the place, as a seasonal creek divides it right down the middle, end to end. Across this we go, summer and winter, with the wheelbarrows. A wheelbarrow is an amazing device that can hardly be improved upon. It will negotiate tiny gaps while carrying hundreds of pounds with ease. We bring straw to the barn a bale at a time from the driveway, feeling our way with our feet, unable to see round the bulky loads.

A wheelbarrow imposes a stately gait that adds dignity to any laborer's demeanor.

We bought a five-cubic-foot model at the same time as our old tiller, in 1977, for forty dollars. It has done far more hours of work than the tiller did, and looks fair to outlast us.

Another one, a more recent purchase, shows signs of inferior manufacture, so it does lighter duty. But it's not as apt to give up the ghost, suddenly, as a power tool.

Put the load over the wheel, near the front, to relieve strain on your arms. I have seen student workers at the university, including young men who looked as if they knew these things, simply pretzel themselves round hand trucks and wheelbarrows, which they found as alien as the controls on a spaceship. Maybe more alien. I was reminded of the old Southern joke, "Liza Jane, you get 'way from that wheel barrer, you know you don't know nothin' 'bout machinery."

Every family should have at least two wheelbarrows. We pass, sometimes, Beloved and Farm Girl, like ships in the night, laden with our separate but equal treasures.

Mysterious things go on

We have two filbert trees; one of them bears no nuts at all and though we haven't tried to identify it, suspect it is male. The other bears nuts copiously; but whenever I have picked up a batch, more than four fifths of them have already been ruined by filbert worms, for which we have never been inclined to spray, especially with insecticides.

Either resistant to, or far away enough from orchards not to get eastern filbert blight, this tree has been healthy, to say the least. It was grown as a standard with the suckers cut away, and I took over and continued the practice for seventeen years, and it became a giant among filberts. Unfortunately it stands right by the garden, and both its shade and its roots have become an issue.

This year we let the suckers grow out and they are about eight feet tall; so we went after the main stem, about a foot in diameter at the base, and firewooded it -- coppiced it, in other words -- to see how the suckers, now more properly called rods, would do. The crop had always been out of reach unless fallen, and perhaps getting to them sooner, on the shorter branches, would make a difference. We might lose a year, or never see a crop again, but hazel rods are a crop in their own right, so the tree would not be a total loss.

There was a fine-looking crop on the fruit-bearing branches of the main stem as it lay on the ground, and I absent-mindedly cracked a few while taking a break. There was a good nut in each one. Eureka! Earlier picking is the key.

After piling the slash and putting away the firewood, I beat the slash pile with a baseball bat, forked it over, and picked up the nuts with a basket at hand. This operation took four evenings, and each night after the quickening September dusk came on, I cracked filberts with my mom's heirloom nutcracker and bagged and tagged them for the freezer. It was quite a haul.

I did find filbert worms from time to time, just getting started on their long meal, and let them fall among the shells that would be nightly carried out to mulch the grape vines.

A few days after, Beloved and I took a weekend lunch break in the garden between the compost barrel and the arbor, commenting on the quality of the grapes and the numerous signs of Autumn. One of those signs was right next to us -- an orb-weaver amid the grape leaves. Most years we mostly see the large greenish-yellow-and-black argiope aurantia; this year I've seen only one of those, but many of the pale yellow ones (eriophora transmarina?) with the reddish leg joints (does a spider have knees?). This was one of those. She was busy with something -- we assumed a fly -- at the center of her web. As we rose from our chairs to return to our chores, I looked closer at the victim being wound round and round with the silken threads.

"Oh, hey!"

"What?"

"Y'know what she's got here? A filbert worm!"

"How would she come up with that? They grow inside the nuts, don't they?"

"Mm-hmm. Very odd."

Then I remembered my late-night mulching, and pulled back the leaves to show the heap of broken filbert shells. It was four feet from the orb.

"The worm couldn't have made it that far overnight, could it? To get caught in the web?"

"I think she must have gone hunting and found it. Treasure!"

Mysterious things go on in the garden while we sleep.

''09'

The fall rainstorm has arrived. We had been reading about it on the weather sites for a week, and knew from the way they posted a weather alert and warned travelers to dress warm and consider the possibility of snow above six thousand feet, that this one would arrive more or less on time. It poses a hazard to our tomatoes, blackberries, drying-on-the-vine beanpods, to our dehydrating schedule, and to anything left lying about outside which we'd be happier to have brought in.

So we got busy after work on Friday and harvested every red (or orange) tomato in sight, along with French beans, filberts, zucchini, eggplant, apples, and all the blackberries we could see in the gathering dusk.

The weather came in about 4:30 in the morning, and Beloved awoke to listen the big raindrops hammering on the roof and pouring onto the parched earth. I, the deaf one, slept through it all, as usual.

Today, Saturday, Beloved has to work all day and so I am the housewife du jour, baking bread, roasting a duck, canning applesauce, cracking filberts and freezing them in batches, and putting up dried apples in jars. Everything is labeled with what it is and the year -- '09. The first jars we ever labeled had the year '77. Thirty-two years of 'putting food by'!

Oh, my. And I still sometimes find a canning lid dated from the 70s and 80s; it's like archaeology.

We did a lot more of this sort of thing then, as we were real homesteaders and worked as either migrant labor or seasonally in the valley where we lived. We were proud of our shelf upon shelf and rows upon rows of canning jars, our five-gallon buckets of grains and beans, and the venison in our freezer. Having food ahead made a lot of sense to us, with our irregular income.

In the 90s, we grew and stored quite a bit less and shopped more, as we had 'careers' and were soccer moms as well. But as that part of our lives fades away, we're getting serious again. The garden has doubled and re-doubled in the last couple of years, and I'm trying to remember how to do things with the resulting harvest.

We have been blanching and freezing a lot of vegetables right along, because that seems simplest, though it isn't, necessarily, and there are reasons, good ones, to get away from using a freezer. Ours is an efficient chest freezer, medium sized, but it does constantly draw current and is vulnerable to a long power outage. Since there's seldom much meat in it any more, loss would not be much of a financial blow as it would to a steak-and-pork-chops family, but it would still hurt. So we think about diversifying our assets.

We do still have the five-gallon buckets, and have added galvanized trash cans mounted on casters for storing various flours and grains. These we don't grow ourselves, and we're aware how hard they might be to obtain during a long emergency -- but at least we have a two years' supply at any one time.

In our kitchen quite a bit of the space is taken up with gallon jars (we think we need even more of these) filled with beans and grains, which we top up from time to time from the 5-gallon lots; also there are jars of dried vegetables and herbs, apples, zukes, pears, and tomatoes, from the farm, as well as a zealously guarded jar of fair-trade Colombian coffee.

The dehydrating has gone well this summer, and I'm hoping for one more week of good sun after this storm, to put out some more apples and tomatoes before taking in the dry-box for the winter. I hope to spend the remainder of the long weekend firewooding and making a start on getting down the awnings in preparation for the winterizing.

Turning the radio to my favorite station, which will play blues, sixties classics, gospel, and old-time country (as in Jimmy Rogers old-time) throughout the day, I start the morning slicing apples, then cook them down while preparing seven Mason jars for the water-bath. We get away with leaving the peelings in the applesauce by dicing the slices up fairly small. I add some cinnamon and nutmeg to my batches, as the whim takes me.

While the applesauce cooks, I make up a batch of dough with 32 ounces of water, which comes out to four small loaves of bread to bake on a cookie sheet. Setting the dough aside to rise, I run back and forth between stirring the applesauce and cracking filberts. When the applesauce is turned off and the water bath is coming to a boil, I shape the loaves and put them in the oven to rise, then pour the applesauce into the funnel over the mason jars, wipe their lips for luck, lid and ring them, and pop them into the water bath. Then I work up the thawing duck with some sliced onions and leeks and a bay leaf in salt water and sherry in the roasting pan, and set it aside to bake after the bread.

The water bath is done, so I retrieve the jars and cool them, check the bread, turn on the oven, note the time, and go crack filberts. When I have a 12 oz. jar full, I write 'filberts' and '09' on a sandwich baggie, dump the jar into the baggie, seal it, and set it in the bulging freezer. If we hadn't taken out the duck I don't know where I would have put the filberts. And there are more of them out there in the rain, calling to me.

The bread comes out and is shoveled onto the drying rack, the duck goes into the oven, I un-ring the applesauce jars and pencil 'applesauce' and '09' onto the lids, then stack the jars in a row on the cold-room pantry shelves.

I pause, trying to visualize future labels. ''10'. ''11'. ''12'. With any luck, what will be my last one? ''22'? ''31'? In September of ''31' I would be eighty-two years old, my mother's present age. She's had two strokes, a myocardial infarction, dozens of cardiac arrests, throat cancer, has debilitating arthritis and rheumatism, and is legally blind. She doesn't can anymore and hasn't for many years.

Time to cut up some green beans, zucchini and tomatoes to go with the duck dinner tonight.

I'm well aware that my farming and preserving and cooking is not of the best quality, and not all that cost effective, and doesn't do as much as I might wish toward self-sufficiency and all that. If civilization collapsed, where would I get canning lids in two years?

But I enjoy it. Beats watching commercials.

Yesterday morning, a friend took me out for coffee.

"So, you're retiring in three weeks."

"Mm-hmm."

"That's said to be a big transition, dangerous to a lot of people."

"How so?"

"Well, they find they don't have anything to do."

My coffee almost went up my nose.