Life With The Crew

The End of January

The last week of January has been a good one.  The coat of slick ice in the backyard is slowly melting.  Chip, our old dog with sensitive feet, gets carried to the small patches of grass every time he goes out.  He shivers and whimpers miserably, but wouldn't tolerate us putting boots on his feet.  The babe and I went to the arboretum yesterday, on a sunny winter day, and were surprised to see that all of the perennial "pollinator gardens" have been torn out, leveled into a construction site in the process of making a better pollinator area which will attract "all of the region's native pollinators".  A lofty goal and a worthy cause, but still, it is hard to see gardens reduced to nothing.  I wonder what they did with the perennials - goldenrod, bee balm, and wild sunflower-like plants that rose 8 feet tall.  It was a fantastic place in the height of Summer - I always imagined how many insects were moving around me when I stood there. 

The gardens were pretty barren, cut down and cleaned up, waiting for Spring.  Compared with my gardens, where I let most of the stalks and leaves remain until Spring (critter habitat), this was almost eerily bare.  We did find a lot of Praying Mantis egg cases (about a dozen) and the glass house was open, where they have wonderful displays about nature and small activities for kids.  It is a really nice (warm!) place to visit on a sunny Winter weekday - we had the place to ourselves.

I will leave you with two pictures from the homestead - homemade soft pretzels and January's harvest of parsnips.  I made the pretzels the right way this time, boiling them first in water and baking soda, and they got really good.  However, the thing about soft pretzels is that they are really only good first out of the oven, so partaking in a carb overload is required.

No Vampires Here

Along with it being strawberry season, it is scape season too!  I always laugh when I remember back 14 years ago, when my husband and I were in our first apartment and we received a bag of garlic scapes in our CSA box.  (The scapes are the top part of the garlic plant that will form a flower.  You don't want this to happen, because then the energy will go into forming those seeds and not into the garlic bulb.)  We both said, "What the heck are those?!" and then set them aside, to linger in the box until we threw them out.  So awful.  Flash forward to now, and on Wednesday night we had a wonderful dinner of linguini topped with homemade garlic scape pesto along with crisp salad from my garden.  For the pesto, I combined a lot of scapes with a handful of kale leaves, then walnuts, pecorino, and olive oil.  It was pungent and very garlicky - perfect for scaring away vampires!  I have three containers in the freezer, so in the depths of winter, this green garden goodness will be a nice change from root veggie soups.

What have you been picking in your garden lately?

 

Early February

Baking, baking, always baking something.  When my husband leaves his lunchtime banana in his truck overnight and it freezes, making chocolate chip banana muffins is making the best of a bad situation.

A trip to the marsh with friends on an insanely warm day.  Blue Heron sighting, Mallard ducks soaking in the sun, and lots of ice breaking, mud stomping, and children running free.

Lovely light creating shining ornaments from simple seeds (Box Elder).

January went out with an Arctic blast and February is coming in warm and wet.  Warm weather is supposed to make people happy, but a 40 degree temp swing in Winter just puts me in a funk.  I think it has to do with my need for control - I don't like things not being the way that they shouldn't be and almost 50 degrees and my child in a sundress (her choice, not mine) is not the way things should be at this time of year in the Northeast, especially when we were just huddled by the woodstove three days ago.  I know this won't last, so I am proceeding with my wooly warm alpaca/wool knitting; sticking my head in the sand knitting project and hoping for a couple more snow flurries.

 

Thankful Tuesday - 3.13.18

I am not ashamed to admit that I am happily still in Winter mode.  Everyone wants it to be done and is ready to don shorts and sandals at the first day over 50 degrees.  The bulbs are bravely shooting up, green tips appearing amidst the brown debris of last year's garden life.  The strength of the sun is amazing and also deceiving.  It makes you think that it is warm outside, but unless you are feeling the greenhouse-like heat while sitting in a car, it is still darn cold.  13 degrees at Sunday sunup, chicken water still frozen in the mornings, and snow flurries falling today.  So for me, I am still happy to run to the cold barn early in the morning, then come home and hibernate the rest of the day.  Baking carrot cake, bagel chips (the simplest snack in the world to make*), carrying in wood for the stove, experimenting with food based dyes for pysanky eggs and tie-dyed handkerchiefs (turmeric, blueberries, and beets), knitting my grass-green St. Patty's Day sweater, coloring side-by-side with the little babe, and still bundling up in plenty of wool.  Not quite Spring yet.  At bedtime each night, I ask the little babe to tell me something good about the day.  Lately she has been saying, "Everything about the day was good!"  I am thankful for that.

What are you thankful for today?

*I had a batch of fresh hummus and needed something to go with it, but didn't feel like baking pita chips.  My husband had just bought a dozen bagels, so I grabbed 3 of them from the freezer, sliced them into thin pieces, coated them with olive oil and salt and popped them into the oven.  The "everything" bagels made great bagel chips!  I have to admit that I've been cheating on the hummus recipe - instead of boiling the raw chickpeas, I've been using organic canned cooked chickpeas.  Still the same healthiness, but a whole lot quicker.

Fresh from Peaks Island

Bright blue skies, crashing surf, hedgerows of beach roses, stacking cairns, salty sea smells, and windblown apples free for the picking.  The two large Golden Delicious and one dark red apple are Pennsylvania grown, the rest are from Peaks Island, Maine.  This is my first attempt at jelly making and while it was a success, it is not something that I am going to do very often.  There is too much white sugar and too much waste involved.  If I didn't have chickens to eat the appetizing apple and rose hip cake pictured above, I would have had to throw out the leftover apple mash.  The little babe wanted to eat it and while it did smell like applesauce, it contained the cores and seeds, so it wasn't very palatable.  The chickens loved it though!  I don't think the rose hips imparted any flavor to the jelly, but they gave it a nice rosy color.  I did not use any pectin in this recipe - the apples alone were enough to set it, which I thought was pretty cool.  Our Peaks Island Apple and Rose Hip Jelly is a sweet reminder of a lovely vacation.

 

Thankful Tuesday - 9.19.17

Today I am thankful for...

~family time - pressing cider with homegrown and foraged apples.  The press is a beast to drag out of the shed, but once we have it all cleaned up and ready to go and the sweet cider is running, we're glad to have it.  After 7 years it still hasn't paid for itself, but hopefully we're implanting some good memories in the little babe's brain and we know that we have totally fresh, chemical free cider.  The big red apple on the right is from the tree in my parent's backyard - Mom, that is "Grampy's Cider".  The other two are foraged apples.  We did two batches last week with our own apples.

~a Sunday morning explore with the little babe to new territory.  A woodlot near us is being managed for animal habitat - it looks ugly right now after the logging trucks have gone through, but there are paths through the woods and we saw a lot of animal tracks near the mud puddles.

~late season garden goodness - I'm still bringing in yellow cherry tomatoes, green peppers, and the Fall batch of kale and spinach is ready.  The squash are taking over the garden - frost keep away for another month!  

What are you thankful for today? 

Thankful Tuesday - 8.29.17

Today I am thankful for...

~plenty of food.  Garden soup - heirloom tomatoes, a couple of sweet peppers, and garlic.  Roast and blend with some herbs, salt, and pepper.  Easy peasy.

~a husband willing to forage for elderberries with me.  Not a good year around here - we somehow missed the bulk of them already to the birds, though some berries are still green.  I'll check again later this week.

~the long awaited blooming of the garlic chives!  Last year I commented that I really wanted some because they are so great for pollinators and a super awesome blog reader, Regina in Maryland, sent me some seeds and actual plants in the mail!  The plants took, are blooming beautifully, and are buzzing with winged insects!

~a healthy babe with room to roam.

What are you thankful for today?

 

Three B's

Butter:  Today was a bad butter day.  We bought cream yesterday at market and left it out over night like we normally do.  In Winter, our house is so cold that we have to keep it near the woodstove to warm up.  Apparently in Summer, our house is too hot to leave it on the counter that long.  So it was a bad butter day, which is always a big bummer.  The little babe refuses to eat store-bought butter and she hasn't had homemade for about two months.  After I collapsed onto the kitchen table with burning arm muscles, I did some on-line research to figure out the problem and discovered that this is a common problem.  So I learned something new and next week we'll leave it in the cooler entryway.  50 degrees sounds like the ideal.

Birds:  As the little babe and I went into our room for quiet time, a large moving shape out the window caught my eye and I actually heard a loud movement of air.  Realizing that a hawk had just been sitting on the chicken yard fence, I ran outside.  I followed the bird to the large pine in the back of the yard and it was bold enough to allow me to walk right up under it.  It was gray, with a distinct barred tail with a squared-off bottom.  It was a Sharp-Shinned Hawk, which is similar to the Cooper's Hawk, but the latter is larger with a rounded tail.  Luckily the tiny bantam chicks are protected by wire and the other seven ladies were hiding under the brush.

Beautiful:  Every year I wish that I had more cut flowers and this year is the same.  However, I managed to find several new hydrangea blooms on the back of the bush - the rest are fading to blueish-gray - and the spiky penstemon is just starting to bloom.  Add that to some echinacea and my white mystery bush, perhaps a hydrangea variety judging by popular opinion from you blog readers, and it makes a decent bouquet.  

Learning, adventure, and beauty.  It was a full day.

I'll Keep Trying

My mystery shrub.  I don't know what it is, but it is beautiful.  I had it for a couple of years in the shade and it struggled, but since the cherry tree came down last year, it has received a lot more light and it really took off.  

This is a third of our garlic harvest.  Growing garlic is so satisfying - super easy, the critters don't bother it, and it makes me feel like a farmer.  Plus I love the smell.

Barefoot child in the dirt.  She doesn't seem to care that we share our yard with five dogs.  

I realized that our garden is behind schedule from last year.  It might be due to the cooler temps, but the main reason is the garden pests.  I think I actually started planting earlier, but I don't have any potatoes yet and last year at this time we were pulling up purple ones.  This year a mystery animal has been pulling up the seed potatoes.  Our trellis is bare and I don't have any beans yet.  The chipmunks and baby rabbits have been such a nuisance and I just added a second layer of fencing along the ground.  We'll see if that keeps them out.  At least I have a ton of tomatoes forming, enough basil for a batch of pesto once a week, and my living room is full of drying herbs.  And the garlic makes me feel like I'm not a total failure.  Deep breaths.  I am fortunate to have access to not only multiple grocery stores, but several farmers markets, to supply our main food needs.  But growing our own is so much more fun and satisfying, so I'll keep trying.

Happy Things

Things making me happy...

~Elderflower blossoms, foraged from the side of the road by my husband.  We left enough flowers to harvest berries later, but I wanted some flowers for tea.  Thank you Hon.

~Returning home to a freezer and fridge full of good food and a lovely bouquet of flowers on the table.  Thank you neighbors.

~A morning of berry picking with my daughter and free zinnia seedlings and squash.  Thank you farmers.

~Good things from my garden that evaded the groundhogs, rabbits, catbirds, chipmunks, and even gray squirrels - I saw one leaving my raspberry patch - while I was away at my parents.  Basil, scapes, lots of herbs, a few raspberries, a dinner's worth of stolen new potatoes.  Thank you animals for leaving me something.  I'm now doing damage control.

What is making you happy?