Category Archives: nature

The title of this post is a knockoff of a chapter title of a wonderful book I read last year.  2011 was, if nothing else, a great year for books.

I appear to be blocked!  My last whine about 2011 pertains to the kitchen sink plumbing.  Ask any architect and she’ll tell you that in her house 5% goes un-built, unfinished; in my case, it’s the sorry state of the kitchen (and its illegal drainage system).  So yes, left to right, draining dishes, nasty sink, draining sprouts and overflowing compost bucket…a normal day here.  2012 means the sink is now draining.

Ah, a new year, a blank slate; a new year, new plans.  The last year stunk on so many levels that I cringe on remembering.  Too much death, too much illness, too cold in the gardens for much bounty.  We even bookended the year with another week-long trip in the hospital with our daughter (she’s okay now; I thanked her, though, for getting ill before the new year’s high health deductible kicked in).

Flowering rosemary in the snow-covered greenhouse makes me happy

I am not one for resolutions and never have been.  Too much road-to-wellville; too much revisionism:  I suppose I am either entirely too pleased with myself as a package to change anything, or else I am too aware of the futility of such an effort…I leave you to judge which is closer to the truth.  However.  There appears to be one lingua franca, one currency, habitually common to women of my age, social status and education, and that is bitching about things, especially one’s life.  I understand the reason behind it:  sharing one’s gripes forms a (bizarre) kind of community.  How tiresome this is.  It’s wearying on so many levels I cannot begin to list them all.  Even if I am reluctant to make personal resolutions, I will resolve to not join in the whinge daisy chain.  How bad do we really have it?  Not bad at all, not bad at all.

Can’t we flip it and share what we’re happy about?

Fuzzy goats likewise make me happy

I am happy, frankly, that we’ll be putting in a new greenhouse this year.  I am on the fence about upping the CSA membership from six members to eight; we’ll see how it goes (membership typically starts in May, with all the new garden goodies), but I am so pleased to be sharing my food with people I care deeply about.  I am so glad to have my job and to have chosen a profession that I love and that is so very rarely boring.

And, of course, I am so happy to share our garden virtually with so many of you.  Happy 2012, all.

I am of course a “if you want it so badly, you get to do the work yourself” kind of parent:  2 lb lobster dives into the boiling pot

My husband was away last week (he had a teaching gig) and my daughter and I reveled in the culinary freedom that his absence gave us.  He’s a picky eater, see; fortunately for my garden, he likes vegetables, but all fish and all cheese are just plain not eaten by the guy.  While the seafood thing isn’t such a hardship for us, we do have a home dairy and…I do make a lot of cheese.  His loss.

So, we had a fish and cheese vacation ourselves.  The kid loves lobster so I figured it was time to teach her how to cook, pull apart and eat one…and those red shells make a fine stock for some of the week’s fishy dishes.  We did the usual biology quiz too (crusacea, exoskeleton, decapods, 10 legs, etc.) and I reminded her again about our yard crayfish, the land lobster.

Timing it, watching its color change

You see, crayfish (crawdads, etc.) don’t just live in streams.  Some species find the clay soil of our land quite hospitable, land that is hundreds of feet from any standing or running body of water.  These are the digging crayfish.  They reside in burrows, never actually needing a stream or a pond.

  Child’s size 12 boot for scale

This of course got her wheels turning.  “Can we bait a hook and catch them?  Can we dig them up?  Can I put some food out and catch them with my butterfly net?”  I said they didn’t come out during the day, but she was welcome to feed them, so we found the two known burrows and left some fish skin at the mouths of the holes.  It was gone the next day.  She now has visions of feeding them so they’ll breed  more and we can then harvest them.

I suppose this isn’t so far-fetched.  It’s her daily experience that our land feeds us, with our help (fruit, veg, eggs, poultry, milk…and foraged items like bolete and morel mushrooms, rose hips, elderflowers and berries, sassafras, sumac and maple syrup) so why not add mudbugs to the list?

Years ago my chef/farmer friend Catharine taught me to crack each egg individually into a bowl before sending it off to its final culinary destination.  “You never know,” she said, “and egg surprises really suck.”  So I have a small metal bowl handy for just this purpose.  When you eat maybe 18-24 eggs a week as a household like we do it’s best to be safe.

Phyllis, you sneak!  Darned bird:  lying amongst the angelica, these eggs just rot.

Not that my egg-managing skillz aren’t superlative (they are).  But chickens, especially bantams, can be really sneaky in their ovarian habits.  I swear there are a few birds who purposefully cycle themselves so that they can lay their eggs far, far away during their daily release from confinement (AKA Happy Hour).  And I will find their caches, eventually, squirreled away under the shrubbery, well beyond the Eat By date.  (I have learned to gingerly retrieve these eggs, placing them into a bucket half-filled with water…explosions do happen, especially with the weather this hot.  Best it happen under water and thus contain the pain.)

And it has been hot, hasn’t it?  I have been going to great lengths to keep the house cool and avoiding the stove (it’s electric: lots of ill-managed, escaping BTUs).  Yesterday was just such a day.  I cooked a 3-lb. chuck roast in a crock pot on the back porch all afternoon (larded with persillade and poached in tomato chutney, with the day’s volunteer All-Blue potatoes , red onions, and some carrots for color).  Crock pots, how 70s, how…redolent of my childhood; I had avoided them myself until my mom got me one (of course) a year or so ago.  Useful things, I suppose, and they can’t on their own heat up the house like the oven or stove…plus they do a mean turn on tough cuts of meat like this chuck steak.

So I sat in my garden habit, sipping a cold glass of post-garden-rewarding Traminette, flipping through a stack of cookbooks for some inspiration.  Slow-cooked meats yield lots of good juice and good juice needs something to sop it all up, doesn’t that follow?  And no heavy bread, thanks.  SO I picked up a handy Richard Olney tome and beheld Batter Noodles (Nouilles a la Poche).  (Re:  the late Mr Olney:  Iowa has never, before or since, produced such a snippy pretentious bit of bombast in human form.  *Love* that guy.)  “Treated as a gratin, these rich, round, tender eggy noodles are quite astonishing–simply drowned in cream and sprinkled with grated cheese (or liberally sprinkled with meat or poultry roasting juices and cheese…).” (Simple French Food, NY:  Wiley, 1974)

Four eggs, salt, a tablespoon of olive oil, and 1-1/3 cups of flour?  Sold!  You pipe it into gently simmering, salted water from a cone of parchment paper.  I may have to turn on the stove to boil a pot of water for this, but…it’ll be worth it, I thought.

And then the second egg exploded as I cracked it, sending its contents onto me, the counter edge, and the floor.  Yeesh.  But the noodles were quite good!  I had, you see, cracked that befouled egg into that handy little metal bowl.  Better safe than sorry.  Such an annoying truism.

Yesterday was a conference day at our daughter’s school so she got to spend the day at home with her dad.  It was a self-described Nature Day.

Armed with a magnifying glass, they went to watch the ant colony at the Old Sitting Stump.

Tom kicked over part of the stump to better see more of the carpenter ants, and disturbed a nest of voles*.They’re very tiny as you can see.  And our daughter told me they were especially fun to see under a magnifying glass.So they put them in a jar to better watch them.  And, while they were at it, they found some wild asparagus.And later in the day, Little Edie the fearless feline flushed out a baby wild bunny.  We tried to find its burrow but failed.  Poor little thing.  The little dot on its head says it’s still a nursling.

*Voles are my greenhouse nemesis as they loves themselves some seedings.  They also are incredibly prolific.  Sure, these little ones probably won’t make it but their mother will go on to have as many as 7 more litters in 2010.

Last year, Mama Ruby the Turkey surprised us by hatching out one turkey poult and one gosling on Mother’s Day.

This year,  we were surprised by how many: seventeen!

They all hatched on Thursday.  This poult is still wet from the egg.

Happy Mother’s Day to all…it’s hard work!

We had an internet- and television-free weekend this weekend, intentionally.  This was the first warm weekend so there was plenty of spring cleaning to tackle, including cleaning out the bunny hutch.

You remember the bunnies, right?  Two BOY bunnies?  So yeah, rabbits to me are either salad-poaching varmints or, well, dinner.  So it was with some shock that Tom pounded on the back door with a “geddout here you HAVE to see this,” cupping a squirming little black thing in his hand.  “I thought it was a mouse!”  Five squirmy bundles later, and here we are.  Six little kits.  (Unfortunately, Tom had completely pulled out their nest in his rush to clean.  He had wondered why the rabbits hadn’t been peeing in their nest box.)

I am glad our daughter was with her Grandma and thus missed me cursing a blue streak.

One breeder, one vet  (and three vet techs), one middleman seller, and one “Oh I know rabbits, and yeah, these are both boys” friend later, but…DumDum knew all along that Wrinkles was a she.

(Incidentally, these bunnies won’t be dinner.)

Bug-eyed deer mouse (top) and sneaky little house mouse (bottom)

One of the seasonal routines that gets fired up here in the fall is the Rodent Harvest.

Yes, admittedly, this is a gross topic, but…one we’re all probably familiar with:  mice do outnumber us, greatly, and once it becomes cold, they like to come inside, too.  The greenhouses are especially plagued, and overnight I will notice that one of the 6 precious Delicata squash, while curing, has been entirely EATEN, blossom to stem, by obviously more than one gnawing creature.  GRR.  War!

We (my daughter and I) bait regular old mousetraps with a solitary sunflower seed (in the shell).  It’s highly effective because the mice really like sunflower seeds, and try very hard to get the seed out of the trap with a satisfyingly predictable result.

Now, mice like squash but usually leave my lettuces alone.  They like to chew the exposed tops of my carrots, and will climb a tomato plant for the fruit.  The voles, my lettuce-eating nemeses, are fairly resistant to sunflower seed bait.  They are, however, fairly stupid, so if I put mousetraps, unbaited, around the inside of the lettuce beds, they’ll run across them and inadvertently get trapped.

All this, incidentally, makes working around the greenhouses a fairly fraught affair…SNAP!

Land mine

In the category of Things I Will Not Repeat, I will give you a lesson in compost humility.

Before I left on our little vacation, I threw down some compost, about 3″ thick, on top of the two greenhouse beds where I had pulled up the resident tomato plants.  I didn’t dig it in; I was in a bit of a rush (as ever).  Well, a sick and sleeping child gave me the opportunity to get some gardening done when we returned from our trip so…I went after that compost, digging it in with my trusty wobbly three-tined cultivator.

I uncovered an egg in the compost.

“This must be old,” I told myself, as whole eggs next to never come out of the compost process whole, or if they do, they’re dried out, their contents a flaky memory on the insides of their shells.

I hit it with that trusty three-tined fork, and it exploded, KAPOW!  Quite a huge pop!  Kind of cool in a way.  And I didn’t realize it at the time but a blob of sulfurous rotten egg came flying and landed on my head.  The top of my head.

I thought rotten potatoes were gross.  And boy, am I glad I always have a large jug of thinned vinegar in the bathroom!  Half a gallon later, I was fresh as a daisy.

But yes:  I learned my lesson.  All eggs are potential stinkbombs.  Do not poke!

The turkey family loves the new driveway ornament too

I would like to thank the tree gods for:

1. one-stop shopping for this year’s tomato supports for me
2. a neat and convenient place to practice one’s tree-climbing skills for my daughter
3. a ready source of firewood for my husband

but:  did that huge branch need to be so close to the house, AND did it have to happen when I was home alone in the kitchen a mere 15′ from where it fell?  Not that I am truly ungrateful, I’m just saying.

Blueberry blossom cluster

These spring days are long, but short as far as crossing off items on the daily task list.  I wonder, quite frankly, if this is the reason that spring isn’t my favorite time of year.  It used to be, when I lived in Minnesota.  I loved–and lived for–the first loud blooms of the season: I’d take a pair of garden clippers with me when walking the dog at night to “liberate” some neighbor’s blossoms of the alley-overhanging shrubs and trees.  So many unappreciated blossoms!  And every morning, that pilfered  bouquet would shed onto the top of the polished dining room table, clouding the finish with that pollen, those petals.  Cleaning up after them was one of the only things I had to do.

And maybe that’s it:  the hurry-blurry life of spring on a farm:  so much happening, so much needing immediate attention, so much yet to be done.  It’s an effort to slow down and appreciate how quickly the world is changing around us.  Looking north from the kitchen window just this morning, I marveled at the sheer number of shades of green I could see.  This view looks toward the wooded end of the property.  I was slightly envious of the insects and other animals who can see more of the color spectrum than we can:  all I saw was lots of lime greens and chartreuses of new deciduous leaves, new coniferous growth, new meadow.  New.  And very variegatedly green.

It helps to slow down and look.  Soon enough, that view will melt into the dark green of summer.

From the archives:  our daughter at 2

Yesterday was a downright chilly day with a high of 40*F., and rainy too.  Our lone resident frog in our pond still sang his lovely tune, albeit much more slowly.  I took our daughter outside to hear it and to see if she had noticed the difference.

“It’s cold out here, so the frog is slowing down.  It means he’s not putting so much energy into his calls,” I told her.  “He’s got to save his energy because he’s cold-blooded, baby.”

“No, Mama, he’s not cold-blooded.  He’s ectothermic.”

Dang, but you gotta love Montessori!  She’s five, and I had to go and look up the word to see if she was correct.  (She was.)

Happy Earth Day.