Dark of the year

At my age, I'm finding I don't get out for chores much when the thermometer drops below fifty Fahrenheit, or it's dark and I'd have to wear a headlamp, or rain gear would be called for, or rime coats the fence posts. One or other of these conditions obtains pretty much all the time now, what with its being an el Nino year and all.

It's teatime all the time, and sit-by-the-fire time, and visit time and such. Visitors create dishes, and I like doing dishes; it's a kind of meditation and an excuse not to camp out on Facebook.

There was one decent freeze, lasting about three days, and I went so far as to cover the kale, chard and beets, which went well. I find I am cutting the beets and chard more than the Red Russian kale, which seems a bit coarse even after the freeze. Some broadbeans are also up and I have been taking some greens from those as well.

Along with the beets, I am finding onions that were missed in the fall -- they are sending up shoots and giving themselves away. Add to these some corn from the freezer, and homegrown meals are turning out all right.

The Granny Smith apples hung on through the freeze and I'm finally getting around to them -- enough for pie.

All that is left is the Granny Smiths; she
Loves that they cling to their shivered tree,
Leaves long gone. Even the hens have left off

Trusting the sky to toss them sugar, and
Have retired to their tractor, pecking
At store-bought feed in its styrene bin.
The winds whistle through, rasping

Ink-black twigs together; the apples nod and
Stub their green bellies. She

Lifts ten or so down, as if they were
Each one of her own breasts, tenderly
Filling her small basket. In the kitchen
They will sit shyly waiting their turn:

It is the season for other foods; in
Stoneware bowls, nuts and citrus

Talk among themselves in distant tongues.
Here her hands make outland meals,
Even finding work for lemon skins.

Granny Smiths are not much favored,
Really, by her guests; in festive mood, if an
Apple is desired, they'll reach for waxed,
Not thinking of that one tree, struggling
Night and day to keep for them fresh joy.
Yet she knows she cannot blame them;

Shy apples do their best in pie.
Moonlight limns the fruit she did not pick;
If some green globes remain at large tonight,
The morning light will prove, tomorrow,
Holiday for those that cannot buy.
Squirrels and towhees will know what to do.

Work for one another

I'm a bit of a Murray Bookchin bunny, as may be divined by perusing the link at the bottom of this rant. Please bear with me.

In the 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a forestry services cooperative, The Hoedads, Inc., as recounted in my book, Iron Buddhas. While our initial contract bid bonding was put up by the founders by attaching liens on their real estate, we capitalized our bonds and other costs after the first year by docking ourselves fifteen percent on our individual earnings, meaning that those who earned more were subsidizing those who earned less; but we did not mind that as everyone's fifteen percent pooled together made bidding for work possible for all, including those who earned most.

At first much of the work was done by piece. Say replanting a clear cut grossed us ten thousand dollars and required fifty thousand trees. Each seedling was worth twenty cents, so a planter who put in one thousand trees made two hundred dollars that day, less fifteen percent, while a planter who put in two hundred grossed forty dollars. Fifteen percent out of that did not leave them much to live on, even in those days, especially for such bone-bruising work. Yet these were the very people who, for various reasons having to do with human nature, often found themselves planting in the most unplantable and dangerous ground.

Some of what we called the "low-rollers" accordingly gave up and went away; but many contracts stipulated a minimum crew size in an effort to guarantee that the clear cuts would be reforested in a timely manner (before the end of the rainy season). In an effort to retain them and not lose work due to an underpopulated roster, the crews (each of which was autonomous in its internal governance) entertained solutions.

It was to be expected that the low-rollers proposed switching to an hourly wage. That would certainly be to their advantage, though they could argue both their presence and their patience with unproductive ground (which could not be skipped over or the work would pay zero) as having value, as well as pointing out that they would now be paying a full share of the capitalization.

This, some other crew members (generally the high-rollers) saw as unacceptable. The one to two hundred dollars per day that they were bringing in to their families and farms (as migrant labor who had successfully cut out the "middleman") was vital them and the principal reason for their presence. Making, say, seventy dollars for a day's work in which they had planted a hundred and forty dollar's worth of the trees galled them.

The company operated on the basis of Robert's Rules of Order, and while majority vote had brought everyone a long way, there was the very real danger that in this matter of the distribution of earnings, a vote for either position could result in the disaffected parties departing, leading to a defaulted contract and considerable loss of earnings all round.

A compromise was proposed, in which the treasurer would calculate each crew member's earnings by tree total and again by the hour, then average the two methods to calculate the paycheck. This was called half by the share and half by the tree, or Half & Half. One crew even named itself for this innovation.

A low-roller might make sixty-six dollars in a day instead of fifty, and a high-roller might make eighty-one instead of a hundred, depending on individual totals, gross tree totals for the unit (clear cut or shelterwood), and unit price.

This practice, on my own crew, was voted on, with the amendment that the crew as constituted upon arrival at the landing could decide to amend the ratio after seeing the unit together -- say, 1/4 by the share, 3/4 by the tree. This was a lot of work for the treasurer but deemed an acceptable sacrifice.

The motion passed.

The crew, and several other crews, had survived a crisis by identifying a policy where two apparently irreconcilable parties could, while agreeing to disagree, attain part of what they wanted and move forward, rather than voting on their own initial positions and then imposing policy from the majority upon the minority and risking a permanent and disabling rift.

All this was an exercise in workplace democracy, and it was carried out by socialists and libertarians choosing to work together toward a common goal. The shared commitment that pulled everyone through was a strong distaste for, and distrust of, authority.

Oh, wait! Some readers might say; aren't socialists authoritarian? The low-rollers wanted to confiscate some of the earnings of the high-rollers and give it to themselves! Isn't that authoritarian?

Well, any action by a living being or group of beings must proceed from some autonomous entity, whether its locus is in the individual or in some or all; you cannot effectively get fifteen workers to lay out seedlings on a grid on a slick and uneven sixty-percent slope in a driving rain without communicating (and, with permission, imposing) a vision of how it is to be done.

The usual method in our industry was for a sole proprietor, partnership, or limited liability corporation to hire workers and tell them what to do, paying them to do it out of the gross the workers earned while retaining some portion for themselves. Direction and control thus comes from "above" and resides in property rights (this is my company); the hierarchy thus established reaps the earnings of all and for all, but (usually) disproportionally to itself (profit) despite who really knows how to do what, or does it, on the ground.

They had the consent of their workers, in exchange for relatively low but stable wages, for what they were doing, but there was generally an element of theft.

Nothing is the actual equivalent of something of a different kind. By this I mean that wheat is not corn, and leather is not steel. Interest accrual is not labor. Money is none of the above. All transactions have a component in which someone subsidizes someone. This is what is meant when some say there is socialism for the rich as well as socialism for the poor. Under authoritarian structures such as corporations or oligarchies, socialism for the rich is more common than socialism for the poor, as anyone might expect from a study of human nature. Yet the low-rollers do perform a service to the high-rollers in labor, as we have seen above; add capitalism and you will see that the low-rollers also subsidize the children and the grandchildren of long-dead high-rollers, as well as those of thieves and pirates who can afford good lawyers.

Returning some proportion of that subsidy to those who have helped generate it makes good business sense. They will now have something to spend, helping the economy, instead of going off to die under debt or a bridge somewhere, or adding to the burden of a strained and much maligned welfare system. Even then, as the poor become the homeless, investing in the well-being of all benefits all.

The rich sometimes become the homeless, though they seldom see it coming, just as the able become the disabled, and who are we to decide which among them is worthy to receive assistance in the hope that they may regain some measure of productivity? Meanwhile, they will spend that assistance.

There are always those who forget the ancient story of the goose and its magnificent eggs.

I mentioned capitalism, but I'm inclined to think it's only one way of fleecing the low-rollers, and I think a stable society with a high level of well-being (goose not killed) follows upon our maintaining vigilance against all fleecers.

The private-property libertarians in the Hoedads were faced with a different structure than the authoritarianism most often associated with capitalism. They had more power over themselves in context than they would have had working for a contractor, but so did everyone else. Managers (the "foreperson" as we called them) were elected on the spot for the day and earned a share only, more than the low-rollers and less than the high-rollers. The workers were otherwise equal in voice to them and to each other, regardless of productivity, religion, sex, race, sexual preference, or hygiene. Nothing was ever perfect, as there is no such place as Utopia; yet we all had self-respect and mutual respect and generally a very high level of morale. It was the best years of most of our lives.

This was social democracy in the raw, and I think quite applicable to the ills of modern society.

It can't, perhaps, achieve everything but it can do much.

All the time now, especially in the United States, there is increased polarization of right versus left on issue after issue that seemingly cannot be resolved, even by the vote, even by edict of the Supreme Court. Without an understanding of the ills brought about by authoritarianism (particularly externalization), to which both the right and the left have fallen prey, we will continue our slide toward the abyss.

By choosing workplace democracy -- quitting jobs in businesses or entities which refuse to adopt a democratic structure and banding together to create businesses or entities that embody a democratic structure -- we can take a step toward regeneration of ethical treatment of ourselves, those around us, everyone in the world (many of whom the USA is currently bombing for oil), and the biosphere itself (resulting in clean water, air, soil, oceans and food for all sentient beings).

Externalities are a major consequence of authoritarianism. Worn out bodies of contractor treeplanters tended to be made the responsibility of the workers and not their bosses. Externalities ultimately create extinction. Externalities are a byproduct of industrialism. Modern industrialism is authoritarian and represents socialism for the rich, both in capitalist and so-called socialist regimes. Government tends to enslave itself, via the taking of bribes, to this authoritarianism. Government thus winds up protecting the “right” of industrialism to externalize costs and subsidize itself at the expense of labor and everyone and everything else.

Regime change is called for -- one of the best, because most peaceable, ways to begin to achieve this, is by choosing to work for one another, both in trades and in nonprofits, cooperatively rather than for "The Man."

Lefties, clear your heads; the Right is aggravating and even dangerous yet is not your enemy but only your enemy's troll. If you are authoritarian the Right could say the same of you. Here is your homework (don't worry, it's short): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava

There is much to do, but it can be done incrementally and many of us live where we might not even be taken out and shot for it. Lucky us.

Planning? What planning?

When it's raining out or otherwise makes it difficult for us to appreciate the joys of getting out of our robes and into gum boots, there are other homestead-y things we can do, such as pottering about in the kitchen or sewing.

Planning? What's that?

Oh, actually we do have a plan. It has kind of settled in, though, and does not need much updating. Two posts ago, we talked about how the satellite view of the home place lent itself to zone analysis. That's a step in planning, for sure. We used to have a drawing of the place on a white board, and after satellite photos became available, we took to transferring the more accurate dimensions to the white board, by printing out a cropped printscreen on graph paper, numbering the squares, and drawing on the board in squares we'd lined off to scale.

Beneath the white board is another white board, and it's an inventory-at-a-glance of stored dry goods and stored seeds.

We have no garden journal, but these lists, combined with such memories as we have of last summer's garden and with the zoned map above them, seem to jog us enough to prepare more or less adequately for the coming year.

In October I pulled the seeds from the refrigerator, in their packets in the seed box or in their mason jars (saved beans and such), and listed them in alpha order. We saw right away that there were no lettuce, pumpkins, yellow zukes, snap peas, and some other things. So we placed an order with our most local seed supplier, Territorial (no, they are not owned by Monsanto). We like other reputable seed houses, such as Baker or Fedco, but aside from our economic localism, we like to support and use local landraces.

We also have on hand way more of some seeds, especially cucumber, than we need. It's like this: A hardware store or somebody donated a lot of year-old seed packets to a food bank, which could only use so many in their gardens, so they sent whole crates of the packets to their collection points, who handed them out until no one could be prevailed upon to take more. So my roshi, who was volunteering at the local collection point (a Grange hall), was prevailed upon to bring home the remainder in a grocery sack, and she dumped them out on the dining room table at a meeting of the sangha.

So this is how I came to have a lot of hybrid and probably Seminis-sourced seeds this year. Especially cucumbers.

I'm probably the end point for these seeds as seeds, as they were having trouble finding a home in the first place and I hate to waste anything, even hybrids. But we have relatively little room for them this year, as I'm not this year's farmer. Beloved, who has been away from it for the last half decade, is ready to get back into it.

What I may do, and I encourage others who find themselves in like case to do, is go ahead and sow them in flats, pot up what comes up, and give away plants to gardeners and would-be gardeners who have a little room.

No, I don't farm for money. I believe in, to the extent possible when living among others who have disparate goals, subsistence.

Every plant freely homed, if cared for and harvested from and then composted, helps in its tiny way to build community and unbuild the enclosure of the commons as represented by the supermarket system.

That might be a plan.

Zones

We haven't talked much about zones at Stony Run Farm. Basically, the farther you have to go to get up from your rock in the cave or easy chair in your house and do something to water, feed, clothe, shelter, or remunerate yourself and yours, the higher the zone number. If you are well organized your lower-numbered zones are those closer to where you get up, and are those more frequently visited. If you are having to commute ten hours a week to work forty or more hours a week thirty miles away from your bed, you're, to that extent, not doing permaculture, because you're mostly in Zone 5, the least efficient and least ecological place to be spending the bulk of your time. Getting there and back literally costs the earth. 

So your livelihood is most permacultural when it is most on the premises, and within reach -- say you're a knifemaker and the knifemaking workshop is on your premises (or in your village), in or near Zone 0 or 1. Walking to work is both efficient (expends little energy or capitalization) and resilient (needs little energy expenditure or capitalization). 

We two worked for the last thirty years in libraries and now live on our pensions, so we are in our inner permaculture zones much more of the time than we used to be. This is privilege, and it's been expensive to the earth for us to do it this way -- most of those sixty combined years of commuting were via automobile -- but we're here now, and our apologies will not do much for either you or us. Given the way society's infrastructures and opportunities are laid out, it was kinda what we could do.

Wikipedia

Zone 0 is usually the house, then Zone 1 is the kitchen garden, Zone 2 is the crop garden, Zone 3 is the orchard and henyard, Zone 4 is pasture,  and Zone 5, in an ideal world, is just the wilderness beyond your village, but in the world I live in, it's the city twelve miles away, with its libraries that needed managing.

Here's a satellite view of our acre. The house is in the middle and, clockwise from top, the driveway, orchard, garden, sheds, creek, pasture, and woodlot. Those white dots in the orchard/poultry moat at the far right are Ancona ducks and a goose.

Here's the same satellite view with zones imposed on it. Because I forgot about Zone 0, let's think of my easy chair, where I'm sitting with a Macbook, as Zone 0. The house with its nearest garden beds is Zone 1, the gardens and sheds are Zone 2, the orchard/henyard is Zone 3, the pasture and wood lot are Zone 4, and the wide world not included in the photo is Zone 5.

I think the arrangement came out much as a permaculture designer would have come up with for us, which is to say that more or less concentric zones based on number of steps facilitating frequency of visits is just common sense. Most of the farms around here are in fact zoned correctly already.

What's bad is that they all have that driveway with multiple fossil-fuel powered vehicles in it, just as ours does.

The real take home lesson from the zone exercise is that most people in most of the "developed" world spend most of their work life in Zone 5 somewhere, requiring some kind of commute and often extra travel as well, which is a lot of where the excess carbon that is now killing us is coming from.

Also, instead of making, borrowing, repurposing, etc., the things we use in zones 0-4, we buy them, which also requires a lot of zooming about in trains, planes, trucks, automobiles and ships.

As well, in Zones 0-4, we like to import energy in the form of electrons (Macbook here) from various sources, including coal in most places, or in the form of gasoline or diesel for our tractors and such -- replacement slaves.

When you're pouring gasoline into the fuel tank of a lawnmower, there are a lot of zoomings embodied in the creation and acquisition of that lawnmower and the liquid slaves acquired to spin its rotary blade.

So it's nice to draw up a Permaculture plan and put zones on it and go onto Facebook and show lovely photos of one's lovely garden, orchard/henyard, pasture and woodlot.

But for the sake of any possible future, please give some thought to how you will avoid doing as we at Stony Run have done -- trading excessively with Zone 5 to get currency and the liquid or electrical slaves it buys. The more you can spend time in Zones 0-4 doing by hand not just the "look I have a garden" trope, but your actual livelihood, the more like Permaculture what you're doing will actually be.

That's of course, a plea to energy descend toward subsistence, and I'm aware that a) it's hard and b) opposed -- sometimes violently -- by the Powers That Be, who want to keep you in Zone 5 for reasons, the main one being that somebody somewhere sometime declared themselves owners of the coal, oil, and gas in the ground and have organized a game where you must use it and must pay them for it.

This is an old strategy, and is related to the Enclosure of the Commons.

Fight back. Please: http://permaculturenews.org/2014/09/26/un-small-farmers-agroecology-can-feed-world/

You will notice the zone chart up at the top of this post regards Zone 0 as "house or settlement." This is key. Village life is the key to post-urban post-carbon intensive life, if there is to be one. Your livelihood may not be found in or near the house but if it is within walking or bicycling distance (and you actually walk or bike) it will certainly count for something.

For eight years (when we lived closer in) I biked to the library where I worked, and often stopped in an abandoned orchard on the way home to forage. I like to think those years redeemed me in some small way. Not sure what, but there it is.

Here are some of the things we tried to do over the years to walk our talk (when not commuting or working off-site).

 https://plus.google.com/photos/107442207705940975209/albums/6172943247457469089

They were small efforts compared to what doing without the cars, refrigerator, water heater, freezer and dryer would have been (as we did for part of the Seventies), but ... something.

For an exercise, if you like, look around your own site, with these zones and principles in mind, and see if you can a) do at least what we did with our site, b) improve on what we did, c) do without the immense carbon footprint embodied in how we did what we did, and d) find a way to make a livelihood within the inner zones, either on the premises or within something approximating a village (community).

This is what it will take, I think, to truly honor Earth Share, People Care, Fair Share. 

One another

Here, November is doing what it does, dark and wet and broody, though a little warmer than we are used to -- still no frost, tomatoes trying to ripen under a leaden sky streaked with silver.

Bedraggled as the garden is, it is still supplying a lot of greens for the humans and the hens. Ducks have been let in early and are high-grading the chard, but also cleaning up wheat seeds in the straw that we have been slowing drawing over the beds, like a blanket for a winter night.

Much of my intent has moved indoors, where the wood stove finally has something to do and is slowly taking over the house. There's dishwater, tea water, and a loaf of Dutch oven spelt/cornbread happening.

I'm sitting by the west window more and in the living room less. I'm learning to sew a rakusu, which is a demanding task for these old eyes and fingers. I've found and dyed appropriate fabric and am practicing rows of stitches on a swatch, to get the hang of it before beginning on the real thing. Such daylight as we are getting is a help.

A friend came through who has been pedaling an electric-assist recumbent bike from Ramona, California toward the general direction of Seattle. I fed him rice and veg with a dessert of apple-pumpkin pudding, both of which went well for a change.

I'm still walking, though fewer miles perhaps.

Trail walking with a dog is excellent meditation practice and, it seems to me, deepens one's bond with all the good things. I think the dog thinks so to, in his way.

We sit by the river together and share a meal. It's best that he not drink the river, which still has rafts of suspect algae in it, so I shorten his leash and provide him with a steel cup (his own) of the water I brought.

He listens to the surrounding sounds and sifts them for possible dangers.

It's thus we are responsible to one another.

Pumping on the treadle

Time to make some holiday cards. A bit of green ink on the ink disk and some pumping on the treadle to distribute it on the rollers.

Lock up the chase.

Run the job.

Come back when the ink is dry on the paper and bag up the products. I did four designs.

Outside, a few sprinkles. Not nearly enough, but appreciated.

Waiting for rain

All of us are waiting for rain. A friend's well has gone dry and we are being careful of our water from ours. Here is a tiny fall garden consisting of a few marigolds and beet greens.

On the night of the full moon, I stepped out and looked for the eclipse. The moon was rising already almost at totality, so it took me time to locate it. I dutifully snapped at it with the little cheap camera, and got no result (such as it was) until late in the show:

But it was certainly a show worth watching. I felt thousands of years old, or even millions, witnessing this. 

There was a similar eclipse in May of 1975. I watched that one with many people of my own age, on a farm that had no electricity, not long after my first arrival alone in Oregon. We drank Oly and Rainier and stood around a fire and chatted and howled and danced, and I spent the night in a tipi. None of my four children is as young as I was then.

I'm getting off the farm more, now that the orchard is done and the garden, or most of it, is in fallow. Much of the time is spent hiking nearby trails, of which there are plenty, with the little dog. He can only go so far at his age.

But that's true for me too.

In-between times

The Cowboy kindly escorted me on a fourth journey to the place of my parents' ashes, which is near this stone. I placed an offering of leaves from nearby shrubbery on the stone and bowed three times, then cried a little.

It was much more difficult to get up there than previous years. The hikes I had done to prepare me for this were insufficient. On the other hand, we had all day, and my kind companion had made five good sandwiches.

I am pulling tomato vines and hanging them up to see about ripening stragglers. At the base of one of them, in a large pot by the door, I had planted a basil, to wrap cherry tomatoes in basil leaves for snacks as I stepped out. This I brought in and hung in the mudroom, something that always cheers me. When the leaves are dry I will crumble them and add them to the seasoning jar.

I'm done with apple rings for family and friends for the year, but there are still apples so I'm making a batch of apple wedges for my own use. These are for hiking. Also there were some Stupice tomatoes left over and there is a tray of those as well, cut in quarters, for soups and such in the winter.

I am gathering sticks left over from the summer's firewooding and cutting them with long-handled pruners into firewood lengths. These can be used to extend the fall sunshine, so to speak, warming the house a little without dipping into the real winter wood.

It feels like vacation, almost, after such a strenuous summer. It is like that with in-between times.

Another batch of apple butter

Things are not as they should be, and if we are honest with ourselves we know this. 2015 will clearly be the hottest year in the record (meaning since 1880) for Stony Run, for Oregon, for the Northwest, and for the world.

More about that here, here, and, in a way, here.

Stony Run runs on a well in a shallow water table above a substrate of impermeable basalt. The well is driven in hard clay and round stones, of basalt and andesite. We are absolutely dependent on rain, and so far this year we've had twelve and a half of our forty inches. The well cannot support the farm with a few more years like this.

Also, I'm sixty-six and Beloved is right behind me. We had hoped to avoid more decrepitude than we actually have, and walk like the fragile old eggs that we are. Even with a return of the rains and delay of the anticipated chaos, we cannot maintain Stony Run as the kind of project it has been for the last twenty-two years. We were never really able to provide for all our needs, and were dependent upon first work (we both found jobs that met our criteria for Right Livelihood) and then pensions to pull off our partial dream. "Helen and Helen" Nearing we were not! :)

The idea was to be able to supply a provisioned haven in case of disaster, but the young people have been able to make other and preferred arrangements. So what we have been doing here, while perhaps exemplary to some, is rapidly becoming (other things being equal) superfluous.

We realize it would be unfair to the children for us to try to keep on forever here. They've committed to our care (wow!) but indicated we should live near them, rather than any of them here. This move may be a ways off yet -- we hope so -- but we should begin our preparations soon, if not sooner. We're not city girls by breeding or inclination but we will know how to behave ...

So, enjoy the video. In it you can see that a garden can subsist on less than half the water it's used to, at least for the first year (the drought actually reached us in 2014). We broadforked, mulched, composted, mulched, and mulched again. We germinated all the seeds in the potting shed/greenhouse and hardened them off before transplanting. We utilized shade. We soaker-hosed and spot watered.

We, and the plants, endured a record number of days above 90F, some above 100F, and the lowest humidity we had ever seen. We packed the truck, with its shell on, with everything we might need in order to evacuate quickly -- a fire would have spread rapidly, as we saw throughout the region.

Harvests were reduced, but they were lovely. All the more so, as we detect the signs that we will plant fewer things next year, and fewer the year after that. After all, what one does when one's vitality begins to fade is not so very different day to day -- where one did a hundred things in a week, now one does ninety-five.

Ninety five things is all good. A blessing. __()__

I'm boiling down another batch of apple butter as I write.

A job which it does very well

Our hops vines grow along the west side of the house, with the intent that they add shade during the hot summer. The west side is the creek side, so the foundation is at its tallest here, adding sufficient height to lean fourteen foot poles and train the vines on them.

When it's time to harvest the blossoms, I cut off the vines about thigh high, pull the poles away from the house, harvest the flowers from the poles, unwind the cleaned vines from the poles, cut them up, and return them to the ground along the foundation to assist in feeding the hungry hops roots in future.

I tie the poles up in a bundle and stack them where the other poles are stacked, then carry the blossoms to the dehydrator. The dried flowers can be packed in jars as they are or dry blended so they will pack tighter.

We have been known to make decent beer but other people are better at it and we don't drink a lot of it, so mostly this will be for making a bedtime tea, a job which it does very well.

September in the kitchen

This is about apple rings.   

I use a Victorio corer-peeler. Left to myself I would leave the peels on, but others have expressed interest in doing without them. These are fairly large Honeycrisp apples, from our next to last tree. Any of them will do for rings. Ours progress through the season thus: Gravenstein, Egremont Russet, MacIntosh, Honeycrisp, Jonagold, Granny Smith. The Gravensteins make the best apple butter and we like the Honeycrisp for rings. We usually run out of steam by the time the Grannies roll around, and end up calling friends to come pick them.

I inspect each spiraled apple for browned wormholes and such (they are unsprayed, so we expect casualties) and cut these out. One slice down through the apple on one side separates the rings.

I dip the spiraled apple in water with salt, cinnamon, veggie leaf powder, and ginger. It takes about 36 to 40 Honeycrisps to fill a nine-tray dehydrator.

Each tray goes straight to the Excaliber Economy, which is turned on as soon as the first tray is in, to forestall exposure browning.

They say to cut out all bruises, but I've yet to spot a problem with our apples, which are a bit sweeter if allowed to drop. YMMV. Next year I hope to rig up a tarp to catch them and roll them into a basket, for more even results.

The dryer is in the potting shed. No need to be heating up the kitchen with it as we approach 90F outside today. (!!) The house is buttoned up with night air in it and the curtains are drawn. In cooler weather I will bring the dryer in and let it help warm the house.

We often store our rings in oven canned half gallon mason jars. We serve them from a repurposed Adams peanut butter jar. These are some Granny Smiths from last year. I think. You can see that they shrivel a bit and are brown and chewy compared to sulfured dried apples, but they work just fine as snacks or in baked goods. You can quite easily make far more dried apples than you are likely to use. We do it anyway, as they are decent prepper rations. Any holdovers that are over two years old may be a bit of a Spartan exercise to enjoy, so we give them to the compost.

The leftover peels and cores may be regarded as a kind of pomace. They make pretty good vinegar, but we have lots of that. So these are headed out to the chicken moat, where they will attract bugs that will be snapped up by the hens, who will then eat the cores and peels later for dessert.

After this job, I'll head out to round up the winter squash, which need to season a bit before being stashed near the wood stove. A couple of them have been chewed by gophers, so I'll steam those this week and stuff them with some rice, tofu, beet greens and tomatoes.

And a weather eye

We are somewhat underwhelmed by the predicted and overdue "storm" so far. There have been only traces of rain.

What we are getting is plenty of wind, as we can see from various upturned leaves and trees leaning eastward.

Still hoping. It now smells like full-blown Fall.

Today, I chopped the last of the cornstalks, and selected an ear to keep for seed, but it is backup. We'll be looking for another variety of sweet corn.

Canning some pickled beets and apples and some tomato sauce while dehydrating kale, beet greens, squash blossoms, dandelion and false dandelion greens, and baking a deep dish frittata.

For those interested: take one green and one yellow zuke, grated; one large mangel beet leaf including its stem, chopped; one Stupice tomato, chopped; half a dozen duck and hen eggs, a small handful of dehydrated greens, powdered; a bit of olive oil. Salt to taste.

Stir/fold all together and pour into a baking dish. Cover with grated parmesan and local cheddar cheese. Bake at about 350 until it looks done -- I think this, which is rather a smallish dish, went around forty minutes.

Serve. Beloved likes it, which is a good sign, as I'm an on-again, off-again cook.

The runner beans are shelled and the pods went to the compost heap. Ordinarily I just throw them right on the garden but the heap looked hungry. Both the Jenny green beans and the runners were hard hit by drought but they made enough to save about a third for seed and the rest can go into baked beans.

I have taken down the burlap shades on the outside of south, east and west windows. The house looks odd with so much light. Buildings are shifting around a bit and I need to trim the bottom off one of the doors.

Birds are in the grapes in large numbers; competition is up because everything is dried out. Leaves are curling on the kale, heralding the arrival, later than usual, of aphids. Heavily infested leaves are particularly popular with the hens. Lightly infested leaves do no harm in your meals, but perhaps you should not tell anyone. If, like some, you're not into any aphids at all, switch to the beet or chard greens -- the kale serves as a catch crop for them.

Hopefully we'll be back to juicing tomorrow, which is heavier work and needs more of a block of open time. When one lives by the seasons, one lives a bit like a sailor. Hammock time, deck time, and a weather eye.

Apples enow

In the improved air I am back at work and beginning apple cidering a few weeks early as the apples are ready.

Using multiple varieties creates a more complex flavor and your constituency will prefer the results.

I grind ours with a dedicated electric shredder (it's not good for much else) into a bucket and then pour the pulp (about five buckets full) in a clean cloth sack (a large pillowcase will do) and suspend the sack (I use a four block rope pulley and a tree branch) over a suitable container. It's cleaner than it looks, but wash everything before and after and be vigilant.

The tub in the kiddie wagon collects the gravity-pressed juice. The sieve over the tub helps keep yellow jackets (valuable allies!) from drowning. They gather around what I'm doing but I move deliberately and calmly, knowing they're not after me.

The juice that runs from the sack may be dipped and strained into quart jars and canned. This setup works for pears, blackberries, grapes and other fruits as well. I add anything that takes my fancy to the cider -- this one has a few pears and also quince. I think I'll throw some mint into the hopper as well.

We make cider two quarts at a time all winter, boosting with a little bit of honey and wine yeast.

Or if we prefer the juice flat, that's good too.

This method is not efficient, but it is resilient. Leftover pomace can be used to make vinegar and then dumped at the foot of various orchard trees for mulch and soil amendment; poultry love to pick through the pomace as well.

Be sure to wassail the trees with your cider at the solstice:

Old apple tree, old apple tree; 

We've come to wassail thee; 

To bear and to bow apples enow; 

Hats full, caps full, three bushel bags full; 

Barn floors full and a little heap under the stairs!