Carrot love

As my grandmother said when I came out to her, love is a gift wherever you find it. Even in the carrot patch.

Tomato accounting

I canned my second batch of tomato sauce today, and I have to say there were a few moments during the three hours of chopping, mashing, boiling, sieving, filling and processing (not to mention the washing, drying and wiping every tomato-spattered surface in sight that followed) that I wondered if it was all worth it.

Don't get me wrong. I love home grown tomatoes right off the vine, still warm from the sun, sliced and piled on a toasted gluten-free bagel slathered with tzatziki - yum, yum and more yum. But canning tomato sauce is pretty labour intensive, as these things go. Roughly chop the tomatoes, mash them to release the juices, bring to a quick boil, add the onions, garlic and seasonings, reduce to a slower boil for about two hours, stirring regularly to make sure it doesn't scorch. Then when the sauce has reduced to half its volume(or, as happened today, you just get tired of stirring and stirring), run it all through a food mill to remove all the skins and seeds. Then back into the pot for a return to the boil. Meanwhile, wash the jars and bring to a boil in a canner. Remove jars from the canner. Fill jars. Wipe rims. Put on lids and rings. Back into the canner for 35 minutes of a rolling boil. Remove and listen for the magical music of lids pinging as they seal. Look down and remember that white t-shirts and tomato canning don't mix.

Organic tomato sauce costs $5-6 a jar at our local store. Today's efforts started with ten pounds of tomatoes and resulted in six 500 ml jars. If I factor in the time spent growing the tomatoes in the first place, and the cost of the seeds, the fish fertilizer, the canning supplies, and the electricity to keep those pots bubbling for three hours (but not the cost of a new t-shirt) is that minimum wage? Barely. But I think that's the wrong kind of accounting to do. I think you have to factor in the sense of security that comes from knowing how to do this, and the satisfaction of providing for your family, and the peace and contentment that rises from an apron (okay, today I forgot the apron), a wooden spoon and a bubbling pot on the stove, and the feeling of a cycle come to completion I get when I look at the finished jars on the shelf and think of the tiny tomato seeds I planted in April, and the soil I patted around the stems as I transplanted the seedlings into the greenhouse beds, and the hours and hours of sunny warmth they basked in. I'm okay with minimum wage, if it comes with all of that.

On another tomato related topic, I have finally organized myself to save tomato seeds for next year. Not for every kind I grew - some were busts, but four were standouts. Granadero, an indeterminate (climbing) plum tomato that produced an enormous quantity of gorgeous, flavourful fruit. Black Krim, an heirloom variety with a quirky shape and a beautiful dark colour. New Girl, which beat out my previous favourite Early Girl for a reliable early producer. And Orange Blossom, a mild, colourful orange mid-sized tomato.

Here's how you save tomato seeds: squeeze out the seeds into a small dish. Mix in a bit of water. Put them in a warm spot, like a verandah railing. Watch them ferment over the next few days and wonder if you've done something wrong. (You haven't. The fermenting is getting rid of the coating on the seeds that would make it impossible for them to germinate). Stir occasionally. When they have done their thing rinse them and leave them to dry out on a paper towel, then put away until spring.

Our first summer at Mucky Boots I tried saving seeds, but forgot them on the railing and by the time I remembered they were past saving. The second summer I forgot completely. This year I am determined that come next April, the tomato seeds I'll be starting will be my own.

Rain and sorrow

According to our local weather station, the last time we had any appreciable rain was June 2, when 6.3 mm fell from the sky. That's about a quarter of an inch for those of you who still think that way. Bottom line: it has been dry, dry, dry. That sums up Southern Vancouver Island weather right there: first it is wet, wet, wet and then it is dry, dry, dry.

Finally, today it is raining. The forecast has been predicting it for a few days - at first it said rain Monday and Tuesday but now it's saying rain today only. Even a little is a welcome relief. When I was at the grocery store yesterday the chatter in the line-up was about the impending precipitation, spoken in a way that reminded me of children on Christmas Eve - all happy anticipation. I don't think anyone will be feeling that way come November when we're back to the wet, wet, wet, but for now a lot of people in my neighbourhood are looking happily out their rain-streaked windows.

On a completely different and uncharacteristically political note, we are so sad to hear that Jack Layton died today. For those of you reading from other parts of the world, he was the leader of the federal New Democratic Party who led his party to their best showing ever in the election in the spring, forming the official opposition for the first time. In the best tradition of the New Democrats, he was a person of integrity, honour, vision and action, with deeply held views on social justice. I remember him from my days living in Toronto, when he was the city councillor who came out to Gay Pride Marches in the days before they became a tourist attraction, when such an appearance usually meant political suicide. He wasn't gay himself - he was just deeply, deeply committed to creating a fairer and more just world. I am sad for his family and for the loss of the difference he would have continued to make to our country.

Just call me Laura

When I was a girl I loved - I mean really loved - the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I don't have a lot of memories of my childhood, but one that stands out clearly is the day my parents brought home a Little House boxed set for me. I had been a fervent fan for at least a year before that, and had read every one of those books. But to own them all - I can't articulate how rich that made me feel.

I still have those books - me, the one who ruthlessly pares down my belongings every time I move, and who has moved twenty-two times since then, between four different provinces. The box is long gone, and the books are more than a little worse for wear, but I know exactly where they are on the shelf. Those books will be with me forever.

My nine-year old imagination was dominated by those books. I played Little House on the Prairie and made pioneer dresses for my dolls. I had a rag rug in my bedroom, and a washstand, and I dreamed of the day I would have a basin and pitcher to go with them.

I was captivated by the self-sufficiency of Laura's family. Her ma made soap and cheese and bread and sewed clothes. Her pa grew wheat and chopped firewood and built houses from logs and sod. That wasn't all of the attraction for me - I knew all about the magic of homemade music at night by the fire - after all, I learned all fifty-seven verses of "The Fox Went Out One Chilly Night" at my own father's knee as he strummed a guitar in front of a campfire. I knew about the sense of safety and security that came from being with all my family under one roof - in my case it was the canvas roof of a tent when we went camping. But the resourcefulness, the ability to make things instead of buying them - those were awe-inspiring to a nine-year-old and still are forty years later.

So maybe I've been channeling my inner Laura these last couple of weeks. When I look on the porch there are onions and garlic I grew and harvested drying in the summer heat. In the cold cellar are the first of the potatoes, still dusted with dirt and wrapped up in paper bags. On the shelves in the storage room are jars of pickled beets, Victorian barbeque sauce made with rhubarb, blueberry and rhubarb chutneys, gooseberry and lavender jellies, bumbleberry, blueberry and rhubarb jams. Curing on the table in the dining room are my first two batches of handmade soap, and the third, made this morning, is cooling in the milk cartons I used as molds. The first round of tomato sauce is processing in the canner as I write, and in the crock on the counter is my inaugural attempt at sauerkraut, tasting wonderful but still needing a bit more mellowing.

There are good, practical reasons to do all of this. But somehow food security issues and reducing footprints and food budgets don't explain all the deep pleasure I get from growing and canning and making.

I think, when it comes down to it, I have Laura to thank.

Treasures in the garden

On the radio this morning I was listening to a gardening expert trying to deal with the collective angst of southern Vancouver Island gardeners over the dry, lackluster states of their gardens.

Count me in. I'm missing the dewy, lush freshness of the late spring and early summer. The heat is nice, but we haven't had any rain in a month, and I refuse to water the perennial beds any more than is necessary to keep plants alive. Which means the garden is a place of tough, stringy, crisp-around-the-edges survivors these days.

But August is also the month a few flowers finally come into their own. The pots and pots of echinacea I started from seed last year are flowering with slightly goofy purple abundance, and the lilies that are scattered in ones and twos throughout the perennial beds are finally unfolding.

The double bee balm is earning its name, with two tiers of petals. . .

. . . and the sadly neglected roses that I do nothing to except hack back every year are looking beautiful enough to make me reconsider my gardening priorities.

In the vegetable garden some stray onions I swear I didn't plant are flowering, along with the hollyhocks I started last year.

The globe thistles are turning from silvery green to purple, and then erupting in tiny petals which the bees just love. Me, too. There's something about these prickly, quirky plants I find really endearing. Maybe it's because they make me think of a plant Dr. Seuss would think up. Maybe it's because as someone who has spent my life perfecting niceness, I am fascinated by something that is so defiantly prickly. Or maybe it's sheer gratitude: the thriving communities of globe thistles growing in even the driest, scrubbiest looking perennial beds go a long way to help me preserve a few shreds of self-respect as a gardener this time of year.

But the best treasure in the garden? That's easy. My mom and dad, come from Calgary for lunch.

Chicken management

Remember the saying about the cat being away and the mice getting into trouble? Well, Kim's away and the chickens are running wild.

The chickens were always going to be Kim's thing - I had my hands full with the vegetable and perennial gardens. And a good thing, too, because those birds could not want for a better mama than Kim.

But even the best chicken mamas need a break from time to time, so Kim is spending the week at a blues guitar camp in Port Townsend, Washington. Which is lovely, and I am so happy for her. But it's about those chickens. . .

The current count is 51. Many of those are young cockerels destined for someone's freezer in a few weeks. But for now, I am responsible for all 51 of those birds. In Coop #1 there are eight Old Girls (aka the year-old Buff Orpington hens), Hector and Alice, plus five Red Rock Cross pullets and eight BO and Australorp teenage pullets. In Coop #2 there are 15 BO and A teenage cockerels, plus 13 BO and A babies, the last batch hatched in May.

Needless to say, this takes some management. So first thing every morning I refresh all five feeders and waterers, usher the teenage boys out of the coop and into the wild (they roam free every day, which we think is why we haven't had any rooster-type squabbles so far), usher the babies into the medium-sized chicken yard, usher the teenage girls into the small chicken yard, and usher all the big girls and Hector into the biggest chicken yard. Then I usher myself back into the kitchen for a very large cup of coffee.

Early in the afternoon I collect all the eggs and let the grown-ups and the Red Rocks out to free range. At that point I feel sorry for the teenage pullets and the babies, who are chirping and squawking at their gates wanting to roam, so I go into the garden to pick them some nice greens which they gobble up in no time flat. Today I cut up a mango for them, which the babies devoured but the teenagers turned their beaks up at.

When Kim is home she lets everyone run wild, including the babies. This is easy: you just open all the doors and stand back. What's not so easy is getting everyone back in the right enclosure at the end of the day. Kim is a Master Chicken Wrangler. I am not. So while she's away everyone has to play by my rules, which means no freedom for the pullets (who are impossible to separate from the cockerels when it's time to go to bed) and the babies (who are impossible to get anywhere near bed).

The chickens who do get to free range are running wild - they are roaming all over the property, scratching in my perennial beds, making a mess of my careful mulching. Today I found a bunch underneath the hydrangea, pecking at my hostas. I don't remember them being so rambunctious when Kim was here. I think this is the chicken version of the Substitute Teacher Syndrome.

Then about 5:00 or so I do my best to get everyone in the right enclosure of the chicken yard. If you're having a bad day and need a good laugh, just show up and watch. Kim thoughtfully provided me with two tools: a big bin of scratch (the babies are clueless about scratch, but everyone else will come running on the double when I shake the container and yell "Here chickie chickie chickie), and a long, skinny twig known as the Boop Boop Stick. Please don't ask me how it got its name, because I don't know. All I know is I'm supposed to use the thing to poke little chickies in the butt to usher them along in the right direction. Oh, and I'm supposed to say "Boop, boop" as I do that. Apparently that's part of Kim's Master Chicken Wrangler magic.

Then about 7:30 it's bedtime, so I go out again, use the Boop Boop Stick to get everyone in the right rooms of the two chicken coops, refresh all five feeders and waterers again, close the doors and turn out the lights.

Kim comes home on Sunday. I can't wait.

Lavender jelly in the window

When I was young, one of the reasons I loved visiting my grandmother in Canmore was that I got to see once again the beautiful bottles that lined the windows of her house. They'd originally been filled with things like wine, or vinegar, or oil, but once they were empty my grandmother had filled them with coloured water of almost every imaginable hue. They looked like jewels to me, with the sun shining through.

This morning I made lavender jelly. Not much to it: cover lavender blossoms with boiling water and let steep for 20 minutes, then strain and use the liquid to make jelly. Ingredients: lavender-infused water, lemon juice, pectin and an incredible amount of sugar. No nutritional value in this one, just jewel-like beauty and a memory of my grannie. That's enough for me.

Summer garden

This is my third summer at Mucky Boots, and even though each year has brought different weather, I am starting to recognize patterns in the ebbs and flows of each season. Early spring, with wave after wave of different spring bulbs, is full of excitement and relief that winter is over. Then come the poppies and the peonies, and the garden is lush and green. And right about now, when the warm weather hits, there's a shift change: the rain stops, the soil dries, and the dewy moistness of a few weeks ago settles into hot, baking summer.

It feels like a bit of a trying time. It's harder to work outside, in the heat of the day, and there are fewer emotional benefits: all my friends in the garden seem hunkered down, closed up, doing what they can to make it through the hot, dry weeks ahead. The perennial beds have gone from a riot of purple, pink and red to more uniform green, with a side of baked-earth brown.

But there are still plants to admire, even if I have to go hunting for them now. Many are ones I grew from seed last year, that are flowering for the first time now. Here's a bit of what's braving the heat these days at Mucky Boots.

This is double-decker bee balm (otherwise known as bergamot). The flowers are just starting to emerge - I think the small green pod coming out of the top of the flower will open as well, forming the second layer of petals.

This echinacea looks more than a bit strange to me - are these petals going to unfold, or is this just an anorexic blossom?

This mallow and the nasturtiums below, grown from seed this year, are flowering in the herb garden. I picked up a few different varieties of nasturtium, but neglected to label them properly, so now I don't know what's what.

There is lavender growing everywhere on the property, including about a dozen bushes in the vegetable garden. They're really earning their keep these days, attracting masses of bees that I'm hoping will then go on to fertilize some of my bean and squash blossoms.

The summer bulbs are starting to flower: lilies, crocosmia, gladiolas. The crocosmia are old friends - we had many of them at our old house and loved them, so we planted a bunch of bulbs last spring. This is the first year they're flowering, and the colour is so welcome in the parched garden.

What's flowering in your garden these days?

Herbal intensive

A nice, big dose of serendipity landed on my doorstep - or rather, in my vegetable garden - about two weeks ago. Some folks were visiting our neighbours, and as often happens, one stopped to talk to me over the fence as I watered the garden.

"Are you growing lambs' quarters?" she asked, pointing to the quinoa. It turns out that lambs' quarters and quinoa are both members of the buckwheat family, and look amazingly alike (which explains why I was, to my puzzlement, seeing quinoa sprouting all over my garden - it turns out it was lambs' quarters!). It also turns out that the woman asking the question (Lorene is her name) is a master herbalist who lives on the next road over.

I was thrilled. There are many herbs growing here at Mucky Boots, a couple of which I have identified and used, and many of which I have no clue about. When I confessed to wanting to learn more, Lorene told me she would be giving a four day intensive on herbs the following weekend.

Serendipity indeed!

So of course I went, and it was amazing. We spent the Friday afternoon learning about the medicine wheel, which categorizes medicinal plants according to their natures and functions, using Lorene's own specially planted garden to help us. We tasted everything, learning what mucilaginous and astringent herbs feel like in our mouths, and how bitter some herbs can be. We studied diagrams of different leaf shapes and margins, and different flowering and branching patterns, and then we each chose a particular herb to study that night for homework.

Saturday, Sunday and Monday were spent learning how to make different herbal preparations: infusions and decoctions, a salve (much like the one I made last year), a tincture, a glycerite and a tinc tract. We discussed the difference between using fresh herbs and dried ones. We made an herbal vinegar. Some of us snuffed an herbal snuff, others got poultices for sore muscles or wounds, and I got to try a steam treatment with essential oils for my sinuses.

It was a wonderful way to get started with learning about herbs - I have a framework now and some preliminary knowledge, plus a whole bunch of enthusiasm to learn more.

One of the best parts was finally identifying some of the mystery plants here at Mucky Boots. Some of them are residents of the perennial gardens, like malva (a demulcent, soothing to the digestive and respiratory systems and the skin) and motherwort (stimulates and tones stomach action, and is good for respiratory congestion and symptoms of menopause). . .

. . .and others are weeds I have spent the last two years trying to eradicate, like broad leaf plantain (great to chew up and use as a poultice on bee stings or poison ivy), sheep sorrel (an excellent source of Vitamin C and delicious in salads) and purslane (an excellent source of omega 3 fatty acids, also good in salads).

And there were others, like wood sorrel (which looks like clover but isn't), and prunella vulgaris, (also called heal all) whose flower looks a little like French lavender.

That's in addition to the plants here that I already knew about, like borage, chickweed, cleavers, comfrey, dandelion, horsetail, lady's mantle, lavender, lemon balm, nettle, oregon grape, peppermint, raspberry, red clover, sage, spearmint, thyme, woodruff, yarrow and yellow dock.

Mucky Boots is a veritable medicine chest, just waiting for me to clue in!

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!

Horsetail patrol

This is horsetail. We have a lot of it here at Mucky Boots, in all the damp areas around the pond and the aquifer at the back of the property. It's a prehistoric, primitive plant, and there's a reason it has survived so well: it's indestructible. It is impossible to get rid of horsetail - it even grows through cement.

But we have a secret weapon: our chickens. They have decided that the tender horsetail fronds are a delicacy, and have been decimating the horsetail forest around the pond like there's no tomorrow.

We think the chickens started hanging out in the horsetail forest as a way of sheltering from the heat and the eagles overhead, but in no time the forest began to look like this.

I'm sure this will just put a momentary dent in the forest, and the horsetail will regrow quickly. But in the meantime the chickens are happy!