Monthly Archives: September 2008

On fruit

Posted on September 30, 2008 | 9 Comments

Because we live in the bounteous Fruit Belt I suppose I am a bit jaded about what the average person pays for fruit.  (One of the final straws of our moving from Minnesota was the $48 pricetag on a peck (half bushel) of Macintosh apples.)  I’m even more jaded now that I get much of my fruit for free.

Did you know that Michigan, after California, has the most diverse acreage for growing things in the U.S.? It’s true.  Agricultural commodities, from elk to ginseng to cranberries to wheat to apples and our famous cherries, we do grow a lot of stuff here. Considering most folks associate Michigan with our top-of-the-bottom lists (unemployment, home mortgage failures, etc.), I think folks should also know what we do right.

Child labor: a good thing

So Saturday we actually “went retail” and visited a local U-Pick apple orchard.  (U-Pick:  isn’t that the oddest term ever.)  Of course, most places can’t *just* let you pick apples.  Nope.  You can fish, run through a corn maze, get your face painted, listen to live music or tumble in one of those moonwalk things (that is, you can if you are small), and of course go on a hayride.  Eat cinnamon donuts, or a caramel apple, or a hotdog, and of course drink lots of fresh cider.  It was all a bit much for me, including the price for picking three pecks of apples ($24).  Then I realized that was a sixth of what the Minnesota farm wanted for the same apples, so I bucked up and paid them.  The girls sure had fun picking them though.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Onward, construction

Posted on September 29, 2008 | 10 Comments

Construction has a way of making me happy.  Can’t say as I have been my usual happy self lately, but…when I observe, or participate in, something being built I am joyful.  Not to say that all construction is happy construction, but most of what I personally do is positive, and future-directed.  I don’t build jails, say, or army barracks.  Or Wal*Wart stores.

Finding a corner:  A squared plus B squared equals C squared

Busy weekend;  we began construction on the new greenhouse.  Yay.  Too bad Tom was sick or it would be up now!  Poor thing.  Pounding head while pounding stakes. 

This doesn’t look like much but…it is.  Eight stakes one side.

This part is actually the hardest part:  getting the ground stakes level and aligned.  All that rain though left our tough clay soil slightly easier to work, thankfully.  Next come the bows and purlins, then a wood base, then the end walls, and then the plastic.  Hopefully before first frost it’ll be enclosed.

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Posted in greenhouses

On note-taking

Posted on September 26, 2008 | 11 Comments

In the category of “You know it is fall when…”, I started this year’s garden notes.

Are any of you ardent note-takers?  If so, I take my sunhat off to you.  Me, well…I started with the best intentions when I moved here in late fall of 2004.  My first season’s notes were copious, with each variety of vegetable and each bed elaborately detailed.  (How I ever pulled this off with a one-year-old I still don’t know.) Now, I have settled in to creating three sets of notes per annum:  a seed inventory/seed order, seed-starting notes, and then the garden bed inventory.  The latter is what I began last night.

The bed inventory is a bit of a trick, considering I am a manic succession-planter.  My main objective is to label each bed to show what I grew in it that year, thus avoiding putting the same stuff, or same family of stuff, into it again.  Mostly, I simply remember what went where.  Having the notes is kind of a nice crutch though.

But golly:  I had 47 beds of stuff this year to take notes on.  Yipes.

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Posted in books, sweat

On the upside to a lot of rain

Posted on September 25, 2008 | 7 Comments

So:  two weekends ago we got a record rain.  Has this rain done the garden any good?

You know, I think it is rather amazing that most things really just up and grow at all.  Unlike, say, a roomful of persnickety toddlers, most veggies and flowers have a wide range of what is considered acceptable to them.  Nobody really whines much about their conditions.  In fact, the only whiner is the gardener. And this gardener sure is whining, ruing the loss of her Brussels sprouts for the second year in a row.  And the rotten root crops in the ground.  Ah, the splitting cabbages!!

Well, the celery loved it.  I have always grown celery but it was mostly for taste and not so much out-of-hand fresh eating.  Celery is a water hog.  Park it under a drippy faucet and it would be happy (or so it would appear).  Otherwise, and usually for me, I get skinny stalks that are very tasty but you’d need to be a four-stomached bovid to be able to appreciate the fiber.  Cooked, though, they’re fine.  But now, with all this extra water?  I have nice crunchy celery!  One-stomach-friendly celery!

The autumn olive berries love it.  Granted, these are invasive shrubby trees that I shouldn’t encourage, but they got the rain at the right time of ripening that the berries are lovely and plump.  (I will post later about what I do with the things:  my mom is coming up again to do a half-day harvest soon.)  As far as the rest of the fruits, the grapes are kind of sad, and are taking longer to ripen than is usual.  Same with the apples.  I suppose this should fall under the category of “the rest of the things that hate the rain” but now is the time when I am normally buried in grape and apple harvests.  So I am…appreciative.  But that hammer will soon fall.

The Amanita muscaria (toadstool) mushrooms love it.  Too bad we can’t eat them.  We do have cepes (porcini) but those won’t pop up until it gets cooler…about Oct. 15th or later.  The grass looks lovely now, too, and all the birds just love it, especially the geese.

Otherwise, extremes plainly stink.  Luckily, most of the stuff in the gardens was winding down:  the rain was simply the push toward the compost pile. Could’ve been snow, you know…

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Posted in death, weather

On the death of summer

Posted on September 23, 2008 | 12 Comments

I spent the autumnal equinox in my car, driving home from Wisconsin.  I thought mostly about changing seasons and death.

Funny:  most of the weekend was spent wildly reveling in the strength of my body and embracing life.  And food.  Glorious food, the fuel of life itself.  But death has a way of sticking its nose in.  Fortunately, I was able to spend some time at the bedside of a dying friend.  I was able to at least say goodbye.  The rest of the weekend was living the life of the living, and living it with those who remain alive, without him now.  He died Friday morning, at home.

Ostensibly, the reason for my journey was to configure a large screened enclosure to house this thing.  This wood-fired oven has been a labor of love for my friend C on her farm.  It’s been wonderful, helping shape this dream with her:  lots of sweat, edible payoff.  The oven needs to be stuccoed yet, and the concrete legs on the side are to hold up plank tables for easy pizza assembly.  But as you can see it is functional.  I spent much of the weekend playing with its functions.

Here are the tomatoes I brought for her (with some gnocchi I made): we threw these in for an overnight roast in the cooling oven (300* down to 125*).

I adored the quick hot pizzas we would wolf down for lunch, but the oven’s greater wonders for me were in its long-term cooking abilities.  Seeing what it could do with the tomatoes, I threw in unshucked corn cobs, some glut sauce hastily made from what I could find in C’s garden, and sliced apples and pears from two neighbors’ trees.  In different pans, we let them cook all day while we labored…except the corn was just on the oven floor. The glut sauce is now frozen and the apples/pears are now butter with ginger, allspice and sugar.

Sweaty dirty working girly arms, and one should always drink out of canning jars, don’t you think?

And then after digging and hammering, wine would come out, and a walk through the cornfield, then hot outdoor showers in the cool dark in this lovely space.  Then dinner.  Repeat the next day.

Ah.  Life.

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Posted in death, food, masonry oven, sweat

On vacation

Posted on September 18, 2008 | 7 Comments

Well, I am off for points northwest, car packed with chopsaw, hammer drill, tool belt and tools.  I’m going to help my friend C build some stuff on her farm in Wisconsin.  (I’m also sneaking a bushel of tomatoes to hand off, too.)  This is my first vacation away from my family since the kid was born, and although it will be strange to be without them, I know I will have lots of fun too.

There will be lots of photos and things to share, but C’s internet connection plainly stinks so please stay tuned to this spot next Tuesday.  Onward!

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Posted in sweat

On fear of food

Posted on September 17, 2008 | 17 Comments

No Fear:  I might tire of seeing them daily now, but come January, this will be a sight for sore eyes

One of the more interesting conversations I have had recently was (no surprise here) about food.  Specifically, the fear of food.

When in Boston, I spoke with a woman who runs her own CSA.  She and her husband had retired from teaching and went into “the hog business,” raising up to 300 heritage-breed hogs annually.  Her husband’s untimely death led her to shift her farming focus to vegetables, and the subscription service of a community supported farm was something she could handle, though it still meant a lot of work for her.  Her grandparents on both sides were farmers, as were her husband’s; but her mother was “modern,” she said, and did not have a garden or can her own vegetables.  “We had four children, though,” she said, “so having a garden was an inexpensive way to put a lot of food on the table.”

We talked a lot about her customers.  Because she comes to vegetable gardening from a point of her own personal thrift, she was quite surprised by her customers’ reasons for subscribing to her CSA.  “It’s fear, not money.  They’re afraid of food, the mothers especially.  I just don’t understand it.”  Were they afraid of your food, I asked?  No, but she sure gets a lot of questions about growing methods.  “A lot more than I used to get, anyway,” she said.

We talked a bit about our farm.  “So you moved to produce your own food,” she said.  Yes, but not entirely, I admitted:  I liked the idea of having a country kid, and mostly, we moved here to be closer to family.  “But the quality of your food means something to you,” she pressed.  I had to admit that it does, but, more importantly, it wasn’t really fear of what I was eating that motivated me to DIY so much as I wanted to shorten the supply chain to, well, no chain at all.  “No middlemen, or women,” I said, smiling to her, and admitting I had relied on a CSA for our city vegetables for years, and thus, on someone just like her.

I had to admit later that I was kind of envious of her.  Though she was nearing the end of her farming career (at 70+ she wasn’t going to be able to run a CSA forever) she had completely missed out on fearing what she ate.  Hers was not the path of food choices based upon anxiety.  She always knew her food, her vegetables, were good.

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Posted in food

On exceptional weather

Posted on September 16, 2008 | 7 Comments

Slow and steady makes the web

This morning on the drive to school we saw the moon for the first time in what feels like weeks.  The kid has always been a bit moon fixated, and the surprise this morning was a nearly full one, peeking over the woods at us.

Thomas Friedman said global warming won’t come necessarily as something we’ll see in our daily lives but instead will be something the post office delivers:  higher energy and insurance bills.  It’s not so much global warming, he says, but global weirding.  And “weird” is one word a person could ascribe to this year’s weather in much of the U.S.

I tried not to think about the record rain we have had when I put my boots on this morning.  Records:  what do they really mean to me, I thought:  I have only been here four years and every year we appear to have a period of record rainfall.  Who cares if it’s a record.  Its effects are the same.  Lots of rain (or its opposite, or heat, or cold) are not exactly welcome.  If one is a gardener, one tends to lobby for moderation.  I do not appreciate this weekend’s exceptionalism.

So, boots on feet, I step lightly through the gardens, wondering what all that rain really means to us.  My coffee is warm but the air is damp and chilly, and the week’s sunny forecast can only be good news for what I see in the gardens.  I have to stop myself from going into crisis mode, the mode which one jumps to to bail out one’s basement, say; or grabs the pellet gun at the first shrill cry of the chickens.  Slow and steady, things will dry.  Time to sit back and wait.

I’m not very good at sitting and waiting, though.  With the financial crisis, climate change, this election…I am more jumpy than ever.

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Posted in weather

On looking for silver linings

Posted on September 15, 2008 | 6 Comments

Chickens love their worms

My rain gauge says we have had 8.25″ of rain since Friday night.  My neighbor’s rain gauge says it’s more like 9.25″.  Either way, that’s a lot of rain.

“Could be worse,” neighbor said.  “If it were snow, we’d have about 90″ of the stuff.”

It’s good for worm hunting though.  And anytime is a good time to have a bagpiping session, no?

Friend Rob plays pipes:  moist weather is good for woodwinds, apparently

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Posted in weather

On tomatocide

Posted on September 13, 2008 | 9 Comments

Okay, to prove to the few doubters of you that yes indeed I am human and have actual limits in this food preservation thing:  I hit a huge wall on Wednesday night.  BANG.

I was making another batch of corn/black bean salsa and took time out to play with the family and geese/turkeys and then put the kid to bed and as I was reading her the 4th story, wow, all I wanted to do was stay right there in the bed with her and not get up again.  Ah.  Couldn’t do it though:  had the salsa to make, then can.

So I mentioned it to Tom.  Then I took a tour early Thursday a.m. of the gardens and came back in and asked him:  can you help me kill my tomato plants?  Because, as the good earth mother that I am, I am unable to uproot these green children of mine and I need help.

Last night, in the rain, we uprooted the remaining 25 or so paste tomato plants outdoors, harvested the ripe ones, put the greenies in the greenhouse to redden, and composted the remainder.  Relief!!!

Now, I have a whole weekend to freak out about what to do with two full bushels of tomatoes.

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Posted in death, sweat

Boy? Girl?

Posted on September 11, 2008 | 9 Comments

Politics is an entirely depressing topic for me now.  How about turkey sex instead?

When one is pregnant, one spends a fair amount of time wondering what the child’s sex might be.  It’s a giddy time.  I wouldn’t say this time is AS giddy, but…I am still somewhat in the dark as to the sex of my geese and turkeys.

This is the goose…or at least I think it is

These six birds, mere babies really at nine weeks, are our start at a new phase of bird ranchery:  breeding.  If we have a boy and a girl, that is.  Statistically, I figured having three birds of one sex would not be so great.  (The hatchery does not sex the ducks, geese and turkeys they sell.)  And so far, I think I have one goose and two ganders.  The turkeys, though?  Not a clue!  The turkey poults do look a lot alike.  When we had the other turkeys come to visit, I did notice that two of the baby turkeys imitated the toms’ braggadocious fluffing-out.  And two of the birds also have bigger wattles below their beaks.  Hmm.  Only time will tell, I suppose.

These birds are on the American Livestock Breed Conservancy’s list of endangered barnyard animals, and both are listed as “watch,” meaning their numbers aren’t dire, but are endangered.  The geese are Production Toulouse (bred for meat, generally) and the turkeys are Bourbon Reds.  Both breeds are active foragers, and the geese, especially, are known as quiet, calm birds.  (Having hissy mean geese was a deal killer for me because the kid is active in their care.)  I LOVE them all.  They are all so curious and sweet, the turkeys especially.

I really do not know what I will do if I have three toms, though.  I still intend to breed, so I am wondering how adult toms do with little poults around, does anyone know?  Am I heading toward disaster if I go get more babies next spring to (hopefully) mate with the toms?

Oh:  the odd girl or boy out of each set, should I be so lucky to have sets?  Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.  Yes, it will be hard.  But here’s hoping next year we’ll have our own home-hatched little poults and goslings running around…

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Posted in chickens, etc.

On education

Posted on September 10, 2008 | 29 Comments

That lovely library, and looking down the street to Copley Square

Our Boston hotel room overlooked the finish line for the Boston Marathon, and faced the north side of the Boston Public Library.  On the north side of the old McKim, Mead and White section of the Library was the following, carved into the limestone of the frieze:

THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE AS THE SAFEGUARD OF ORDER AND LIBERTY

I thought about this statement a lot as we watched the Republican convention coverage in the evenings.  If I have a bias toward anything, I would say I am avowedly pro-education.  Whether in the hands of the state or in private hands, it is my belief that access to a solid, well-rounded education for all citizens will cure most of what ails us as a country.  A lifelong love and quest for knowledge, likewise, is what we as parents and as people should expect for our children and ourselves.

So it was with some dismay that I watched the governor of Alaska’s speech on Wednesday:  her finger-wagging prettiness will go far in a country where style trumps substance.  She, of the six colleges in five years, she, mother of the teen daughter whom she’s goading into early motherhood and shotgun matrimony.  Do you think she had education as a topmost concern in her own life, in her daughter’s life?  Good God the woman doesn’t even believe in sexual education.

Perhaps this is petty of me.  John McCain’s choice of running mate should be seen as what it is: a purely craven choice, a hard-right pander to an ever-shrinking base of religious white folks.  And my bias plainly shows, as not everyone has the educational opportunities I have had, or is as knee-jerk a card-carrying liberal as I am.  But in this country, and it is one of the things that makes it so great, education is available to anyone who wants it.  Education, more than class or gender or race, is any American’s ticket to a better life for themselves and their families.  We have the best post-secondary education system in the world, even if we don’t value educating our elementary and high school-aged children as much as we should.  And we (still) have LIBRARIES, even if Sarah Palin actually tried to get her own town’s librarian to ban books.

I worry for this country, I do.

Addendum: I love this woman.

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Posted in politics, soapbox

On fall-planted winter gardens

Posted on September 9, 2008 | 7 Comments

Plant me!  (And ignore the weedy paths!)

You know, going on vacation kinda sucks in one and only one way:  the work that you’d otherwise be doing if you stayed  home still needs doing.  I woke up at 4 this morning in a minor panic about all that hasn’t been done.

So, on to the greenhouses.  The one concept one needs to get one’s head around about the winter garden is it’s a harvesting garden, not a growing garden.  I should underline, bold-face, italicize that:  one harvests most of the fall, winter, and early spring.  This means the plants that are in there once it starts getting cold have to be, well, not small!  Thus, my early-morning panic.

Penny, showing off some of the new greenhouse frame:  more work ahead.

You see, I am still growing some tomatoes in the new greenhouse beds, but they’ve gotta go.  These are mostly the paste tomatoes, and yes, they’re still fruiting…though admittedly the plants look mighty sad compared to the beauties growing indoors in the “old” greenhouse.  The lower leaves on these outdoor ones are brown and crumpled, and, in general, just look spent.  Indoors?  I swear they just get taller, and bushier.  Currently it’s a spider web of jury-rigged support twine hanging from the framework in there.  But those tomatoes have gotta go, too, as do the peppers and eggplants; I will give them to the end of September, then they’re compost.  It’s still mighty hot in the greenhouse (100/day, 60/night), so I am a bit scared to plant the usual winter garden suspects (lettuces, mainly, and some kales).

This whole succession-planting thing is a bit of a juggle, I admit that.  I don’t usually drop the ball because I really try to nibble off my tasks daily.  Monday, the first day of school, was such a day.  After dropping the kid off but before I start in on my job, I went to the new greenhouse beds and planted broccoli, kale, oak leaf lettuce and some escarole in one bed.  If I do one bed a day, then hey, in 8 days the remaining beds will be filled!  But, oh yeah, I have to evict another six beds of tomatoes first.  Sigh.  I need to pick up the pace.

I will be kinda glad when tomato season is over.  Tomatoes can be tyrants. And all I will *have* to do daily in a couple of months is harvest some goodies out of the greenhouse for dinner.  Sound good to you?  Me too.

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Posted in greenhouses

On Beantown

Posted on September 8, 2008 | 11 Comments

I want no long-faced saints too: Little Italy (North End)

Driving the Duck on the Charles River

Of course I would love a town with a food nickname, especially of the family Fabaceae.  And food:  I swear we ate our way through the town.  I think I got my annual fix for seafood.  But Boston was lovely, including the weather.  It’s an eminently walkable city, even for a 4.5-year-old.  We wish we had more time to spend there.  But…we’ll be back.

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Posted in food

September = officially buried

Posted on September 2, 2008 | 6 Comments

Decidedly not tomato red

Labor Day, pshaw!  I put away 22 quarts (quarts!) of tomatoes yesterday.

Gawd, I don’t even want to even SEE another tomato for a while.  And I won’t:  we’re leaving tomorrow for Tom’s show in Boston.  (Come see us if you can:  it’s at the Bernard Toale/Carroll and Sons space, with the public opening on Friday.)  I usually have a hard time leaving the farm, usually fearing for the animals, but…everyone is in good hands so it should be fine.

And yes, I will appreciate the vacation from food preservation.  I’ll be back soon enough and those pesky tomatoes will be leaping off their vines, I am sure.  Let’s not talk about the grapes, as I noticed the Niagaras are ready…oh gosh get me out of here!!

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Posted in food, sweat