Plums

 

This has been a bit of an odd summer here at Mucky Boots, at least for me. A taking stock kind of summer. I've been taking a close look, in as gentle a way as I can, at what I can realistically commit to on the garden front, given that my arthritis seems to be a more constant presence in my life. It's not only a question of  what I think I can do, but what I want to do. What am I good at growing? How much can we reasonably expect to eat? How can I cut back or adapt what I do to make it a joy instead of a constant game of catch-up?

Part of what's needed is a change in expectations, and I am happy to announce that I think, finally, I have graduated from the Remedial School for Perfectionist Gardeners. My garden hasn't been perfect for most of the year (so what else is new...) and I've been fine with that. Really.

After four growing seasons here, Kim and I are also taking a hard look at what's working and what's not, what we're good at and what we probably need to give up on. And first on that list, for both of us, is fruit.

We're pretty good at berries: strawberries, raspberries and especially blueberries. But we suck at growing tree fruit. We had big plans for our orchard, and added a number of trees when we first got here, but we have learned that growing fruit organically is tough: there's a disease and a pest for every season and every kind of fruit tree, and I think we've encountered them all. Throw in the demise of the grand dame of the orchard, our Pink Lady apple tree, and we're ready to throw in the towel. So we decided this summer that we would take out a few of the trees that are either dead or on their last legs and transition into more blueberries.

And then Mother Nature gave us this gift: plums.



We planted the Italian plum tree in the vegetable garden a couple of years ago. Last year it had one blossom. This year it had more, many of which transformed into fruit. And this afternoon, while seeing to the chickens, a lovely purplish-blue hue caught my eye and I realized the plums were ripe and ready to be picked. Not too many - about three pounds, I would guess. But they're everything a plum should be, the essence of plummy goodness.

All of which adds to my conviction that to be a Happy Gardener you should hope for the best, accept that this year's garden will be different from last year's, marvel in the miracles that present themselves every day, forgive yourself for the things that don't work, and be grateful for the gifts Mother Nature bestows.

Like a handful of plums.

Peach

I want to say we grew these, but the reality is the tree grew these. We really had little to do with it. The tree just did its thing, minding its own business, hanging out in the vegetable garden with the cabbages: it blossomed beautifully in the spring, grew fruit bountifully though the summer, and now, in early fall,  has presented us with fifteen gorgeous, juicy pounds.

We've already eaten a pound or two, more have gone into a crumble for dessert after tonight's supper, and some will be made into jam. A handful were earwiggy and were given to the chickens, but that doesn't feel like a loss. After all, the peach tree shades the entrance to the coop, so the chickens have been eyeing the ripening fruit hanging above their heads all summer, waiting for some to fall. It seems mean to whisk it all away without giving them a taste. And for them, the odd earwig is a bonus. 

(Want to know how fast can six chickens devour a peach? Fast.) 

Quinoa harvest

Quinoa providing a lovely backdrop for a stray poppy, in July.

I finally got around to dealing with the quinoa that has been patiently hanging around since I harvested it about 6 weeks ago. The reason for the delay has been puzzlement over exactly how I was supposed to separate the edible parts - the seeds - from the fluffy material surrounding them, not to mention all the dried leaves and stems.

I know how to Google as well as the next person, but I didn't find much to help me. There is general consensus that you need to bash the heck out of the seed heads to break apart the clusters of seeds and fluff, but past that all I could find were very brief references to "winnowing", which were contradicted in the next source by a statement that the seeds are too light for traditional grain winnowing to be of any use: the seeds would be blown away along with everything else. In the end I decided to just make it up as I went along...

The quinoa had been hanging in splendid colour outside under cover of the verandah, but once the rains started the ambient humidity was so great there was no chance they would dry. So a couple of weeks ago it got moved inside to a cozy corner of the wood-stove-heated family room. My first step was to strip the seed heads from the stalks into a big bucket. Because each stalk had numerous seed heads nestled in among all the dried leaves, this meant quite a lot of dried leaf and stem matter made it into the bucket along with the seed heads.

After a bit of experimenting, I settled on a two-step process: I would dump a big handful into a colander and gently mash it to separate out the smaller seed and fluff clusters from the bigger stems and leaves. Then I put the result into a finer sieve and rubbed and rubbed to separate out the fluff (which was fine and fell through into the bowl) from the seeds.

All of that took about an hour, and resulted in about two pounds of this: mostly seeds, but also small pieces of leaves and stems.

I figured I was most of the way there, but how the heck was I going to get the seed clean enough to eat? And then I realized that when I washed the quinoa (which has to be done before cooking because it is coated in a protective soap-tasting substance) the seed should sink but the chaff should float. So I tried it with a small amount and it worked perfectly.

I feel like this deserves a trumpet fanfare: I grew quinoa that I can actually eat in my garden!

Now for some math: 2 pounds from about 32 square feet is exactly the same yield per square foot as the Vermont Cranberry beans. How do they compare nutrient wise? After all, the purpose of growing both was to see how much protein I could produce from the garden. Since 100 g of (uncooked) dried beans provide about 23 grams of protein and the same amount of (uncooked) quinoa provides only 14 g, the beans win hands down. But since one is a legume and one is a seed, they would actually be very nice nutritive complements to each other.

Will I grow quinoa again next year? Yes, and in fact I'll grow more. It was a great crop for this part of the world: sturdy, drought tolerant and nutritious. I didn't have to fuss over it, it germinated well, it looked gorgeous in the garden all season long and, best of all, it's already part of my regular diet so I don't have to learn to like something I really can't stand (can you spell K-A-L-E?). What's not to like about that?

Beans

The first year I had a vegetable garden, I grew three kinds of beans: yellow beans, green beans, and some fancy speckled beans that were meant to be harvested as dried beans. When the growing season had finished and all the work was done, I ended up with a double handful of dried beans I then spent hours and hours turning into a single, modestly sized batch of baked beans. It seemed like an awful lot of work for a small quantity of beans, so the next year I didn't bother.

But what goes around, comes around. This year, my third as a vegetable gardener, I was interested to see how much protein I could get from the garden. As Carol Deppe says, all those salad greens are pretty, but they don't provide many calories or much protein for seeing a family through the winter. So I planted quinoa (more on that in another post) and three kinds of beans for drying: Kenearly Yellow-Eye, Vermont Cranberry, and (to my amazement even today) garbanzo beans. I didn't devote a lot of space to them - I really just wanted to see if I could grow them successfully. So each variety got about 16 square feet of space.

Germination was great for all three. The Vermont Cranberry beans were the most vigorous, with much fuller and more robust bushes than the wimpy Kenearly Yellow-Eye beans growing right next door, and the beautiful but spindly looking garbanzo plants. And the yield was much better. There were more pods per plant, and more beans per pod. I ended up with about a pound of Vermont Cranberry beans, and about half that for each of the other two varieties. Not much, but not bad for an experiment. According to John Jeavons, the average yield per 100 square feet for dried beans is about 6 pounds, which means when it comes to Vermont Cranberry beans, I am perfectly average. [Apparently my perfectionist tendencies are leaking through: I can't just be average, I have to be perfectly average. Oh boy...]

I spent yesterday afternoon - a lovely warm, sunny fall afternoon - sitting on the porch swing shelling the beans that had been drying on the verandah for a few weeks, deriving productivity and yield formulas for my bean crop. And I discovered I had neglected one important equation...

Dried up bean leaves + stocking feet = mess.

Quinoa

One of my goals for the vegetable garden this year was to see how much protein I could grow - protein in the form of three kinds of shelling beans, and quinoa.

Here's the quinoa, hung under cover on the verandah to finish drying. It rained this weekend, and I was worried about the seed heads getting wet. So, even though the stalks and leaves were only half dry, I decided to go ahead and harvest on Friday. Now there are six big, gorgeous hanging bunches of quinoa, ranging in colour from pale yellow through dark golden to pink and red, adorning my view from the French doors out to the garden.

This was just an experiment, and all the way along 75% of my brain has been convinced it couldn't succeed. After all, quinoa is a grain native to the Andes. What business did I have trying to grow it? But germination was great and the plants stayed healthy and formed heavy, loaded seed heads. I still have to see how the whole threshing/winnowing process goes, but unless it's a disaster, I think quinoa will be a regular feature in my garden from now on.

Potatoes and cabbage

I must have been feeling an affinity with my Irish roots, because today's harvest consisted solely of potatoes and cabbage: 2.5 kg of beautiful, tender new Yukon Gold potatoes, and 4 hefty cabbages.

There was a bit of urgency to this harvest. The cabbages, after going unscathed for most of their development, have been besieged by cabbage worms, and need to be eaten before they're not fit for human consumption (although I bet the chickens would think worms in cabbage a bonus). So I picked the four biggest and spent some time tonight shredding, salting and packing them into my new (old) stoneware pickling crock. In a few weeks we should be eating Mucky Boots Farm's first fermented food: sauerkraut.

The potato plants are also in trouble, but in their case I have no idea what the problem is. The leaves are turning mottled yellow and in a few cases the plants have died. Potato plants are supposed to die, but this seems much too early. So today I went digging beneath the worst-off plants to see what was happening beneath the surface, and was pleasantly surprised to find plump, soft-skinned, blemish-free potatoes - 2.5 kg of them, from just three plants. The potatoes we have growing in two other locations - in buckets along the driveway and in the dregs of the former pile o' dirt near the house - are doing much better, so we'll leave those for winter storage, which means we can indulge in regular feasts of boiled new potatoes slathered in butter without thinking twice.

And just in case you're looking at that second photo and thinking "Miriam should be holding a couple of those cabbages a few inches higher," Kim got there before you. Who says farmers have no fun?

Eating

All of a sudden there is food to eat in the garden. As Toni at Backyard Feast wrote recently, we wait and we wait and then all of a sudden there's a glut and we're wondering what to do with it all. In our case, yesterday, it was the shelling peas.

After last year's pea debacle (mice eating the newly sown peas, mice moving around the re-sown peas, peas collapsing in a chaotic tangle, Miriam unable to tell snow/snap/shelling peas apart because the mice mixed them all up) I was determined to get it right this year. I was never a drill-sergeant kind of teacher, but man, did I keep those peas in order this year.

The snap peas (Sugar Ann) have been delicious, as usual. The snow peas (Dwarf Sugar Grey) were a mysterious no-show: they just didn't germinate, even after resowing. And the two or three that did manage to sprout were spindly, feeble, non-producers. But what I was really waiting for were the shelling peas (Strike). Last year, in all the pea confusion, I picked them too soon, got them mixed up with the other types, and then gave up. This year I have been watching them like a hawk, gently squeezing the fat pods, trying to gauge the size of the peas inside. I was determined to get it right. And then, all of a sudden, when I checked them yesterday they were ready. All of them.

So I picked and picked. Three and a half pounds worth. And then I did something I've always wanted to do: I sat in the swing on the verandah with a bowl of peas in my lap and shucked. I looked out at the garden and shucked. I listened to the birds and shucked. I thought about my life and shucked. It was marvellous. Tonight they're going to have a starring role in some risotto. Yum.

That's not the only food-first this year. We also managed to beat the birds to our cherries. We have three cherry trees in the orchard, two of which are old enough to produce more than a token smattering of fruit. The first spring we were here the cherries all fell off because we weren't careful enough about watering. Last spring we tended the trees faithfully but lost all the fruit to birds, waiting for the darn things to get ripe. This year we finally clued into the fact they are not the same cherries we both grew up eating - deep, ruby red in colour. They're Rainier cherries, which are a rosy blush colour when ripe. So now I look back on last year and imagine the cherries being ripe, but us too stupid to know it, and the birds all sitting around waiting politely for us to harvest our crop, then finally giving up and saying "Well, if they're not going to eat them . . ."

Not this year. This year we have a ladder permanently stationed by the cherry trees so we can nab those babies as soon as they're ripe. The other day Kim picked a whole lovely bowl full, and I would show them to you, but this is all that's left.

And remember that purple broccoli that had me confused? Well, I checked my records and it turns out I actually did order purple broccoli seeds (Santee is the variety). And it's sprouting broccoli, so it doesn't form big heads - it's more like broccoli rabe. And it is purple - definitely purple. And tasty, did I mention that? And best of all, it stays purple when it's cooked, unlike purple beans which turn the most unappetizing grey-green.

Maybe I just haven't been at this gardening business long enough, but it still amazes me that I can plant some little seeds and then a few months later have a garden that is full of food. Tasty, fresh, nutritious food. It fills me with glee.

Anyone have any good recipes to use what's ripe in the garden, that don't also call for a lot of other ingredients that aren't seasonal at all? Share, please!

Garlic harvest

Our hard-necked garlic harvest has happened just in time - we're down to a few small heads from last year's crop. To me this counts as a modest but proud success: we are self-sufficient when it comes to garlic. It was the first crop we planted at Mucky Boots, and it's one of our favourites. Even to someone with almost no sense of smell, there's a huge difference between fresh home-grown garlic and the shriveled, mummified stuff from China we used to buy at the grocery store.

Who needs a bouquet of flowers? This'll do for me.

First harvest

I am one happy camper today. Today I harvested the first food of the Mucky Boots 2011 growing season: 3.5 kg of rhubarb, which translated into 1.5 kg of stalks.

There is rhubarb growing all over the property, and this year I'm going to do it justice. I'm going to make vanilla rhubarb jam, and rhubarb chutney, and rhubarb-strawberry-raspberry crisp with last year's berries still in the freezer. Maybe not today - we're still working on Chicken Coop #2. But I'll keep harvesting, and will stick it all in the freezer until I have a spare afternoon for some canning.

Yum!

Eating the fall

Even in the second year of our Mucky Boots adventure, it's amazing to me that mid-October we can still be pulling food from the earth to eat, like the golden beets, leeks and carrots that were part of our Thanksgiving meal on the weekend. Maybe that speaks to the fact I was born and raised on the prairies, where by the time mid-October came round (in the pre-global-warming world of my youth) we'd already be trudging through snow drifts bundled in parkas and hats.

Of course not all food is being pulled up from the ground. Some of it is falling down on our heads, from the big chestnut tree near the pond. Or would be, if we were in the right place at the right time (or maybe, given the prickly nature of chestnuts, the wrong place at the right time). The tree gave us a lovely harvest of nuts last fall. It was like looking for treasure: every time I walked past it on the way back to the greenhouse or the vegetable garden I would load up my pockets with the fallen nuts scattered on the path. This year, all I am seeing is this.

Someone (a small furry someone) is beating me to the harvest. Now it's like a contest: who will get the nuts first? So far I've managed to nab three. Three. I'm clearly losing this game...

Changes at the chicken corral

Meet Red Toe. He is one of what has turned out to be five roosters. (Yep, that's right. After all that hemming and hawing about how many roosters and how many hens our gender-mysterious chicks would turn into, we ended up with five and five. As a former math teacher I find this hilarious.)

Red Toe is so named because of the lovely red nail polish he sports on one toenail - Flartus's suggestion for how to tell our chickies apart. We wanted to distinguish this particular rooster from the rest because he's so darn friendly. He's a keeper. He's the one who comes a-running as soon as he sees one of us near the chicken yard, and who used to climb onto Kim's lap for a snuggle when she settled in for a session of Chicken TV. (She can't do this anymore since the chickies started using her chair as a roost in her absence. Poop. Enough said.) Since our plan is to keep only one rooster and send the rest to the stew pot, we don't want any cases of mistaken identity - hence the toenail polish.

There were big changes at the chicken corral today. Shortly after this nap time photo was taken, the roosters were separated from the hens and will remain that way until the fateful trip to the slaughterhouse for four of them. They have their own enclosure in the coop, and their own fenced-in and disco-dance-themed outdoor area. We knew this was going to have to be done eventually, but we decided to do it now because the roosters are repeatedly chasing two of the smaller hens away from the food.

We have been busy painting and otherwise sprucing up our guest room in preparation for a visit from my dear, dear sister next week. I can't wait. Sister Kim (it gets a little confusing when the two Kims are in the same room...) is keen to have a repeat of our canning and preserving sessions last summer, so I've got my eye on what's ready to harvest from the garden. There are lots of beets we can pickle, but I think that's about it. Definitely none of the tomatoes or apples we canned last year - it will be a couple of weeks before there are sufficient quantities of those ready.

Onions, though. We've got lots of onions. Yellow onions, red onions, shallots and leeks. Mucky Boots is a fragrant place these days...

It's hot - really hot

Was it last week I was complaining about the fact that summer had yet to appear, after a spring that was unbelievably cool and wet? Someone must have been listening, because the sun came out this week and now we're sweltering. It's 35 degrees in the shade on the verandah today.

Such hot weather has forced some changes in work routines around here. We have been painting our outbuildings this week (workshop, chicken coop and tool shed), something that is not generally advised in such sunny, hot weather because the paint dries too quickly. So we've been up-and-at-'em much earlier than usual, trying to get a coat of paint on while the air is still cool. Then I move to garden tasks dictated not by what's most urgent, but by which tasks can be done in the shade. One nice thing is that the spring flush of weed growth has slowed right down, and for the first time since March I feel almost on top the maintenance of the perennial beds - almost.

I pulled up our garlic today, and it was a moment to celebrate: our first Mucky Boots crop grown from Mucky Boots seed - or, in this case, bulb. I'm not sure how much seed saving I'm going to do in the next year or two - I feel like my hands are quite full already. But it's awfully nice to think that this garlic is ours, from top to bottom.

Vegetable update (and some poppies)

You have kindly given me free rein to post as many blog entries about poppies as I want. To celebrate, here's another one. This gorgeous variety has looked just like this for a few days - I initially thought it was just on the verge of opening, but if that's the case, it's either stuck or has had second thoughts.

Some of the poppies I have shown you (like this one) are practically as big as dinner plates.

But Mother Nature is never dull or boring, because here's the poppy I discovered today in the middle of the herb bed.

And just in case the chamomile and lemon balm leaves don't give you enough of an idea of scale, here's a close-up.

Is that not the cutest thing?

I spotted that poppy while I was in the vegetable garden harvesting a few things for supper. Carrots, for one. At the risk of sounding insufferable (or jinxing next-year's carrots), my carrots are a masterpiece. Long, straight, blemish-free, tasty as anything. This has been a good year for carrots.

And a good year for lettuce, too. Day after day of cool and rainy weather may depress me, but the lettuce couldn't be happier.

This time last year I was having trouble keeping the lettuce from bolting, but this year it's still crisp and juicy and fresh.

Unfortunately it's not me who is finding my cabbages crisp and juicy and fresh. I haven't had a chance to, yet, because something else is getting there before me.

The heads are just starting to be formed, as you can see, but if you looked closer you'd see pretty gross larval kinds of blobs tucked in among the leaves. Now that I've noticed I've started flushing them out every day with water, but I'm not entirely confident I'm getting them all. There could well be little surprises waiting for us when we eat these cabbages...

Convert

I haven't exactly been enamoured of our gooseberry bushes. We have six or seven of them and last year I was completely confused about when to pick them - they tasted awful when they were green and they tasted just as awful when they were red. Plus, as I wrote here, weeding around them was an occupational hazard. I wasn't sure these bushes had a future at Mucky Boots.

Well, I never did get around to taking them out, and last week I noticed the beautiful (if awful tasting) green berries hiding beneath the leaves and decided to give them one more chance. I went looking on the Internet and found Tigress in a Jam, who had a recipe just for me: Golden Jelly. It called for a couple of pounds of green gooseberries (which I learned are full of pectin) and some lavender sprigs, which are in plentiful supply around here these days. Perfect.

Except that when I went out yesterday to pick the berries, I found the birds had been there before me, and the most I could scrounge was about 3/4 of a pound. The end result didn't even fill a jar (which is why you can see the foam on top - normally this would be skimmed off while it cooked, but I didn't want to lose a single drop). But oh, it is lovely! Soft and fragrant and not too sweet. I am now a convert. I may even plant more gooseberry bushes, just for this jelly.

On the way back to the house after taking the jelly photo I saw this: William and Petunia. Bookends.

Anti-ouch ointment

I've been cruising around the Internet looking for things to do with some of the herbs and flowers growing here at Mucky Boots - in particular, ideas for using calendula, which I grew from seed this year and which has just started to flower.

Calendula is good for helping skin irritations, abrasions and burns heal, so some kind of salve or ointment seemed a good bet. Comfrey is good for the same thing, and it's growing everywhere here. The recipe I eventually found used both, plus lavender.

The first step is to put an ounce each of calendula blossoms, lavender flowers and comfrey leaves in a jar and cover them with about two cups of sweet almond oil. That's what I did today. It's going to sit in the sun for about two weeks to infuse, after which I will strain out the vegetable matter. The infused oil will be gently heated with some beeswax and the result, when cool, should be a nice salve to use on all of the bites, scrapes and burns I seem to accumulate.

Herbs

You may remember that one of my gardening resolutions for 2010 was to be more diligent in harvesting and drying herbs. Never one to procrastinate, I launched the first harvest yesterday.

It was prompted when I offered our visiting neighbour Nick a choice of teas, and he expressed a preference for something we had grown. Fortunately I had the one measly baggie of dried mint that was the sum total of all the herbs I harvested last year - and very nice tea it was, too. And it got me thinking that I better get going, or I'd be forced to serve Nick tea from a box the next time he was over.

So out to the garden I went. I had my eye on a beautiful, rounded mound of lemon balm, and an incredibly vigorous patch of oregano, both growing in the herb bed in the vegetable garden. These two herbs are everywhere at Mucky Boots - I think one of the two previous gardeners of the property divided them repeatedly and used them to fill in empty spots in the perennial beds. There are probably half a dozen mounds of lemon balm and about four times that many patches of oregano here and there. There's even a bunch of oregano growing out of the rock wall near the workshop.

Three minutes was the scissors was all it took to cut enough to fill a really big colander to overflowing. The stripping of the stems and tying of the bundles took longer, but it was a nicely meditative thing to do while sitting on the verandah. I ended up with a dozen bundles which I washed and then tucked into paper bags to protect them from dust and bugs. Kim is going to fasten an old garden trellis horizontally to the ceiling of the verandah so I can hang the bundles for drying.

Mint is already making itself seen in the perennial beds, so some bunches of that will soon join the happy herbal hangout. Once it's dry, I'm thinking lemon balm and mint might make a nice combination for tea, maybe with a few of the lavender flowers I saved from last summer thrown in. The Mucky Boots Blend is born.

First and last

Our friend Donna came for an overnight visit yesterday. She brought her viola, and all afternoon the house was filled with viola and guitar duets - mostly gypsy jazz - and lots of laughter as she and Kim made fabulous music together.

While they played by the fire I played in the kitchen, putting together a supper equal to the special occasion. As well as crispy roast chicken and potatoes, the meal had a last and two firsts. The last of the rutabagas, pulled up the day before to make room for new plantings, mashed with butter and a bit of cream. The first of this year's salad greens. And the first of what we hope will be many asparagus spears - carefully cut it into thirds so we each could have a taste.

Wonderful company, wonderful food, wonderful music. It can't get any better than that.

Eating the harvest

Harvest? In February? Actually, most of the harvest took place months ago, but I seem to be having trouble eating it.

I recognized I had a problem in June, when the fennel was ready to eat. There were 24 beautiful bulbs, just waiting to be julienned into salads, or steamed under fish in parchment, or braised in broth in a saute pan. But did I eat them? No - I just admired them, regularly. Every day I would stand by the raised bed and admire the fern-like fronds, and imagine how good they would taste when I finally decided to eat them. That went on so long that by the time I brought myself to pull one out of the soil it was past its prime. So there I was, having saved my fennel only to end up with two dozen woody bulbs.

I had the same problem with my canned harvest. I made great pickled beets, but I only opened the first jar recently. And I worked hard to can as many tomatoes as the greenhouse could produce. They're all still there except the one I finally used last week. And when the vast quantities of strawberries kept rolling in I chastised Kim for eating them fresh, insisting we needed to save them in the freezer. And they're still there, for the most part - in the freezer.

What gives? you may be asking. I'm asking myself the same question, and I think there are a few reasons I'm hesitating to enjoy the food we grew.

Reason #1 is that I am saving the harvest for a special occasion. I'm not entirely sure what that occasion might be. Maybe the thought of fresh-from-the-garden produce is so wonderful I figure it shouldn't be for everyday. Which pretty much defeats the purpose of giving up our jobs and moving to a farm. I think I need to get over this.

Reason #2 is pride. Those 24 bulbs of fennel looked gorgeous, and I felt a real sense of achievement that I, the city girl who had never had a vegetable garden before, grew them. Surely they deserved to be admired a while more before being eaten.

Reason #3 is a bit weirder. The third reason I feel a need to save the harvest instead of eating it is a fear of - um - armageddon.

You may have noticed that, what with concerns over meteorites hitting the house and middle-of-the-night flood evacuations, I have a bit of a problem with disaster scenarios. But really, it's not that big a deal, and beyond making sure we have a reasonable earthquake kit (which all Vancouver Islanders should have) I don't think fear of disaster affects my day-to-day life.

But when we moved here to try to grow our own food, we also moved into the sphere of people around the world striving for self-sufficiency. And some of those are people preparing for one kind of armageddon or another: peak oil, climate crises, a day of judgement. When I'm googling "homesteading" or "self-sufficiency" I try to bypass sites with numerous biblical quotes, or instructions about handling small arms. But I think somehow I have been infected, a little, by the fears behind them.

I can see how this might happen. There's a lot of overlap between self-sufficiency and survivalism. What do people who want cheaper organic vegetables and people who fear the collapse of the rule of law have in common? They grow their own food. What links frugal folks trying to be thrifty with certain religious groups preparing for crises? Food stockpiles - you know, buying things in quantity when they go on sale, or preserving as much of the harvest as you can. And whether you're trying to reduce your carbon footprint or you're afraid of having no electricity because society as we know it has collapsed, you might choose to have solar power. Different motivations with the same outcome.

So, I think part of my reluctance to break into the freezer or the pantry for the harvest I preserved last summer and fall might be a semi-subconscious sense that I should be saving the food for harder times.

This year I am determined that this not affect my decisions about eating the harvest - at least not unconsciously. I am determined that every bulb of fennel I plant get eaten and enjoyed, preferably at its prime. We will eat warm, juicy raspberries for breakfast, and if last year's harvest was any indication, there will still be lots leftover for the the freezer. When the greenhouse is full to bursting with tomatoes we'll slice some into salads, dry some for the pantry and make the rest into tomato sauce which we'll enjoy during the months until the next harvest.

The next harvest: what lovely words.

Monster veggies and a special visit

Before I started blogging about our adventures here at Mucky Boots, I was sending "Farm Updates" to family and friends via email. Here is one of them, from the end of August 2009.

Hello everyone!

Harvest time has arrived. We are wallowing in a bounty of tomatoes, potatoes, beets, carrots, kale, chard and apples, and we grow 'em big and we grow 'em strange out here at Mucky Boots. Here are pictures of a really big potato we grew, and the oddest 4-legged carrot we have ever seen. And a picture of my bowl of apple cereal illustrating why the apple variety we are currently harvesting is called "Pink Lady."

The best part of the last few weeks, unquestionably, was Kimystree's visit. What a special thing, to have my beloved sister here for almost a week - thanks, Dave, for getting the ball rolling and for holding down the fort at home so she could come. Sister Kim came determined to help with the harvest, so we bought the Rolls Royce of apple pickers and picked the first bushel basket of Pink Ladies. Then we got to work - we made and canned apple butter and applesauce and filled the dehydrator twice to make dried apples, and were we ever grateful for whoever invented the peeling-coring-slicing machine we used and grateful to Dad who gave it to us! With the addition of 15 jars of crabapple jelly made after Kim went home, our cold storage shelves are filling up!

Kimystree is Frankie's new favourite person, and he is moping now that she is gone. He followed her everywhere, and, most tellingly, stopped barking at her every time she moved (which is his normal procedure for house guests).

The other news of note is that Sweetie Kim has added to her stringed family with the purchase of her first (and undoubtedly not last) banjo, on-line from a dealer in North Carolina. When it arrived she looked inside and found "J. Romero Banjos, Cobble Hill, BC." Imagine that! She had been on the maker's website, but didn't realize he was in Cobble Hill, just down the road. Needless to say, she has already been in touch with him, to tell him his banjo (a special one featured on his website) came home to BC to roost. Also needless to say, she learned 3 songs within a day...

Lots of love to you all!

Mir

XOXO

Wildlife adventures

Before I started blogging about our adventures here at Mucky Boots, I was sending "Farm Updates" to family and friends via email. Here is one of them, from August 2009.

Hello everyone!

We have had lots of excitement here at Mucky Boots this week: a cougar was killed on either our property or our neighbour's on Monday night. Both our properties back onto Vaux Road, which was where the conservation officers killed the cougar - but our fences don't go that far, so we don't know which property it was on. Regardless, it was CLOSE! I got a call from Nick around suppertime - he had heard a bunch of dogs barking and went out to investigate, and it turned out he was hearing the five specially trained beagles (yes, beagles) that are used to track cougars. The conservation officers told him to go back home and put his chickens in the barn, which is when he called me to let me know. So I called in the cats and shortly after there was a shot and the cougar had been killed. I don't know why it was killed rather than tranquilized and relocated.

Much less dramatic was the wasps nest I accidentally discovered the day before - it turns out it was a specific species of wasp that build nests under things: decks, floors, and in my case, one of the wooden covers to the septic tank. There I was, cleaning up the dead bamboo leaves in the little flagstone patio, and all of a sudden I got bit, twice. Ouch!

We have just come through a wicked hot spell - 37-39 degrees in the shade every day for a week. Frankie, the smart dog that he is, has fully made the transition to farm dog, and now sleeps under the truck on hot days. The weather has been great for our tomatoes, which are ripening faster than we can eat them. We're using the dehydrator to make sun-dried tomatoes, and are accumulating enough ripe tomatoes to make a big batch of tomato sauce for canning.

It's fun learning how to can - so far I have made pickled beets and pickled beans. The beets were fun: some were golden and some were Chioggia beets, which are striped red and white when raw, but cook to red or pink or even white. So when they were all mixed up, they looked like jewels!

Our perennial garden is a mess - things have been so dry, and we've been unsure how much we can water before we run our well dry. The only things blooming right now are the echinacea and my absolute favourite the globe thistle. Everything else looks brown and ragged. I am remembering the moist, dewy, flower-filled days of May with longing!

Kim and I were out shopping today. New binders: $3.99. Package of pencils: $0.99. New lunch kit: $8.99. Not having to buy any of it: priceless!

Lots of love to you all-

Mir

XOXO

P.S. (Next day) I should have waited until today to send yesterday's farm update! Here is a photo of this morning's encounter with wildlife. Note that the tape measure is in INCHES, not CENTIMETRES!