Weather journal: racing winter

We had our first ripe tomato on September 1st. Our first hard frost came September 7th. We covered the tomatoes, but the squash are done for the year.

The reduction in foliage allowed a census: 58 squash.

Autumn brings morning fog.

Once we gather the squash from the field, I will be able to reach the last of the potatoes.

We are thinking of making potato sausage this year.

We began harvesting old ducks this week, despite their being in the middle of a molt. We have been skinning and boning them for sausage fodder. We processed 4 ducks before the rain started. We have 5 more old ducks to go. A predator got the one chicken that was on the sausage list. Then we have 7 new ducks that need to go before winter sets in. Our Duck Mansion is big, but does not have unlimited capacity.

One of our new duck hens started laying yesterday.

We had two days with highs in the 40s: time for a fire!

Before I could light that fire I had to clean out the chimney. This was a bluebird, but I doubt it was happy.

Michael and I pressed 4.5 gallons of cider in one day. Last year we pressed 8.5 gallons. The apples ripened three weeks earlier this year. My trees keep telling me “winter is coming.”

We took advantage of our one cold rainy day to walk the mushroom woods. No edibles, but always a lovely hike.

We encountered neither cows nor people on our walk.

The rhubarb survived the frost, but it is time to put some away for Christmas pies before it succumbs to cold.

The advantage of cooler weather is that it allows me to cook inside again, but with fresh tomatoes and herbs at my disposal. This was the first time I ever grated a fresh tomato. Simmered down with garlic and chile flakes, it made a wonderful base in which to finish cooking the pasta. Roasted eggplant and peppers were added afterwards, adding a nice texture to the dish.

Construction has taken a back seat for a while as we batten down the hatches for that first real snow. We need more wood in our woodpile. We need fewer birds in our flocks. We need to plant garlic. We need to walk in the woods and down the lane and breathe in the ripeness of autumn.

Harvest, Construction, Fishing and Farm journals: a walk through August into September

I last updated this continuing saga almost a month ago. So much happens this time of year: this post is a bit of everything.

At the beginning of August Mama was still guarding her chicks.

The Favored Five still hang together, but they left Mama one day about the third week of August.

At the beginning of August I soldiered on with sanding wallboard mud.

I completed my mudding job on August 21.

Michael completed the primer coat today. The temptation is to paint the walls and ceiling white. I’m still engineering the trap door into the attic.

We began August making elderberry jelly.

Mid-month the plums ripened and also became jelly fodder.

They were so beautiful this year. Sneaking bites between picking and pitting whirled me back to the plum tree I plundered as a child.

Our first pear harvest began at about the time the plums ripened, but they spread their bounty over a couple of weeks. I finished making pear butter yesterday.

The sunflowers and winter squash: battle of the Titans!

I had to commission Michael to reach these for me.

We discovered the first ripe tomatoes on September 1. We’ve had tomatoes at every meal ever since.

End of August and time to dig potatoes.

The Red Pontiacs are not too scabby. The Russets turned out well too. We will have about 200 pounds of potatoes by the time we are done. We will give many away and the rest will last us until next spring.

The monarchs have been traveling through. This one insisted on sampling our duck harvest. We found five that were pin feather free. The sixth made us realize why we wait for the feathers to emerge. The remaining 20 ducks we need to process earned a brief reprieve.

The sun sets earlier every day. We have so much we need to do before winter arrives. We had some 90° weather, but all of our rain has been cold. By the end of August we started having highs in the low 70s and upper 60s. The soy beans are ripening, Sandhills are gathering in fields, the deer are losing their red summer coats, the maples are turning: fall comes early this year.

Okay, that last photo was too dour. We did get to take the Young People out fishing a couple of weeks ago. They caught more fish than we did. Hope to take them out again this weekend.

Weather journal: the last warm rain

Sunday, August 9th, Michael took me fishing for catfish on the St. Croix.

The raindrops made little splashes that caught the light: sparkles!

The heron caught more fish than we did.

Trees are beginning to turn, even without a frost. The weather man says it will be a late autumn. The leaves say different.

We had a magnificent time in the warm rain, even though we caught no fish.

We did get to inspect the flora of the small islands in the stream.

We have been making time for fishing lately. Perhaps we, also, are feeling like this past Sunday was the last warm rain of summer. Today’s rain is cold.

The farmers are gathering a last crop of hay.

The popcorn has tasseled and the cobs are forming.

The winter squash climb and produce prolifically.

The tomatoes grow taller than me. We have yet to see a ripe tomato, but we direct seeded due to lack of space for starts. We could have bought starts, but we like the varieties we grow. They are highly acidic. We are always disappointed in the tame tasting tomatoes grown by others.

We have plenty of other vegetables with which to invent dinner.

The cabbages need to be harvested. We have 16 this size.

Think of it as a cabbage calzone, but with sour cream instead of cheese.

We race the birds for the elderberries. This year we use the apple pectin we canned last fall: a byproduct of making apple butter.

Just to reassure his adoring public, Michael does tend to catch fish whenever we go out.

Just to reassure my adoring public, I can fillet anything Michael catches. I hate bones in my fish.

We fed the sunfish I caught to Irene. Mung bean noodle and sautéed kale completed the meal.

I am hoping high summer continues long enough for me to build the cabinets for the addition. I am closing in on being ready to paint. In the meantime we hoard all the warmth and sunshine we can.

Harvest journal: garlic

Last October I planted 300 garlic cloves. By early August, we harvested about the same number of bulbs.

The garlic is ready to harvest when the tops start to brown.

We have been planting garlic for at least 15 years now. The beginner mistake is to plant in the springtime. Garlic needs to establish its root system in the fall so it can take off in early spring. We found that any time we had a number of freeze/thaw events in a season, our garlic would be stunted. Covering the cloves with a layer of straw not only keeps the weeds at bay, it also helps even out the ground temperature, preserving those precious little roots.

Look at those great roots!

The Rocambole clean and ready to dry in the sun.

As we pull each bulb, we use the straw mulch to wipe the dirt off the bulbs. Doing this while the dirt is still damp is much easier than waiting until it’s dry. For some reason, once the dirt dries on it becomes like cement. At that point you either have to wet the bulb to get the dirt off or take off a layer of outer covering. Both of these cleaning techniques is bad for your garlic, or it is if you want to store it for any length of time. The more paper you can preserve, the less your garlic will dehydrate over time.

We put the garlic out in the sun for several days to take moisture out of the stems, so it doesn’t get moldy once braided or bundled.

I rarely get a photo of the braiding/bundling process. My hands are usually busy and really dirty. I rub the roots (still full of dirt) off before braiding/bundling. Why do I keep using these two terms? We grow 2 types of garlic: hardneck and soft neck. The “neck” refers to the stem. Those with soft stems I can braid. Those with hard stems don’t bend, so instead I tie them together with cotton string.

We grow two kinds of hard neck: Siberian White and Rocambole. Our two kinds of soft neck are River Giant and French Germinador. The hard neck ( up there in the top of this photo) have lovely big cloves that peel easily. Flavor-wise, my favorite is the River Giant., a soft neck. The soft neck tend to have smaller cloves that are more difficult to peel. Why go through the trouble of growing them? They save WONDERFULLY! We had French Germinador that was still good when we started to harvest the new garlic. All other kinds had shriveled.

We eat a lot of garlic. Diced with fresh ginger, it adds zing to sautéed green beans or other vegetables. Sliced with fresh rosemary or thyme, with a dash of olive oil and kosher salt, it makes a wonderful marinade for grilling or roasting chicken or vegetables. You can dip a whole bulb in olive oil and bake until soft, then peel off the cloves and squeeze them onto slices of baguette for a taste treat. And pasta. Oh, garlic goes into so many pasta sauces. Red. White. Aglio e olio (garlic and oil and lemon juice and Parmesan). Sliced and fried in a bit of olive oil until golden crisp to top a salad. Toasted. Sautéed. Baked. Roasted. Eat more garlic!

Harvest journal: onions

Last year we planted 800 onion sets. This year we used more space and planted 500. Whether due to increased space or hot weather, the onions are much larger this year.

We braid the onions together, allowing us to finish drying them indoors and to hang them in the kitchen as we use them.

Three fifths of the onion harvest and one half of the garlic harvest (which we also braid or bunch and hang to dry).

The last of last year’s harvest. We started eating the imperfect new onions as they will not save.

Ten cups of onions sautéing in a bit of oil and butter.

An hour later the onions have reduced by half and now are a wonderful golden hue.

Viola! Onion quiche.

Paired with sautéed beet greens, it’s what’s for supper.

Having a bit of cooler weather (highs in the 80s) fortuitously let us bake and use those lovely onions before they dissolved. I never considered the impact of freshness on the flavor of an onion. Michael declared these “superlative.” Here’s hoping the huge onions save well.

Season journal: red

So many things that bring me joy. Here are ten of my favorite July reds (in no particular order).

One: onion harvest has begun! Onions. I love onions. I love Michael too.

Two: Beets. I love beets. The beets love hot weather, which we have this year.

Three: Jelly time inspires cake making….and eating.

Four: Currants. I love currants. I love how currants smell. Rich.

Five: E.B. Cresap, my great granddad, gave this geranium to Percy Meek Cresap, his wife. It may have been an anniversary gift. I love geraniums, but I particularly love this geranium.

Mama Hen with her five chicks make six! The feeders and waterers are red. So I’m cheating a bit, but I’m loving having a Mother Hen.

Seven: Agates. They shine red due to their iron content, derived from algae that lived in seas millennia past. Or maybe I’m just making that up and the iron comes from the basalt in which they formed. Agates. I love agates.

Eight: I find agates while walking Zeke on his red leash. Walkies. I love walkies.

Nine: The currant jelly shines as bright as an agate and will bring me the scent of summer in mid-January.

Ten: Tiny tomatoes, fresh washed, are the best.

Commemoration journal: Bastille Day

Holidays. I love holidays. I love them so much I’ll celebrate every holiday that holds a place in my personal pantheon. As a criminal defense lawyer, there is something in the idea of freeing those wrongfully imprisoned that appeals. The French could not shake the bonds of history and ended up with Bonaparte and imperialism, but change takes time. Michael advocated including photos of severed heads. I demurred. I’ll celebrate the traditions quietly and champion the change we have managed in spite of ourselves.

Holiday breakfast: home baked rye bread, butter, asparagus omelette. Black coffee. The NYT crossword. Rocks recovered on our dog walk to contemplate.

Breakfast fodder from the gardens. Okay, the peas wait for tonight’s dinner.

Green. Today is green.

Garlic harvest: River Giant. Garlic and onions form part of dinner.

Rhubarb pie. Is rhubarb French? I doubt it. But pastry has to count.

Rain. Sun. Red wine. Good food (rhubarb stew…perhaps I can glean a theme yet). Good company. Good work. Always more work to do. We have much to celebrate.

Happiness journal: Girls Girls Girls!!!

As ever, doing things got in the way of telling about them. Here is a bit of catch-up.

We have been being well entertained since July 3.

Despite weather that even melted the cat, we have celebrated.

“Visit Summa”…a girl knows where to find treats and how to spread joy.

Running through sprinklers: Who needs air conditioning?

Canoeing on the St. Croix in 90° weather nearly melted the girl, but walking on a sand bar where fish nibbled her toes revived her.

Helping Boopa put ducks and chickens away at night is exhausting! But the berries are good.

Ice cream sandwiches: heavenly.

Happy to see a girl being happy with her guy.

Interactive art installations: our favorite.

Our broody hen hatched 5 chicks on July 8.

Chicks galore!

Perhaps this entry should have been logged as a gratitude journal. The Grand Girl and her parents are headed back to their lives, the other girl has taken her sweetheart on a voyage of exploring the west, and we are settling back into gardening and construction projects. We ache at parting and anticipate reunion. We feed and water all these living things and are, in turn, nourished. It’s a pretty good gig.

Summertime journal: fish and chickens and gardens

In the six days since my last post I spent only one working on the addition. No wonder this project is taking so long! Yesterday I sanded the stairwell and fixed the goofs. The day before that we went fishing.

Bass and scapes hot off the grill.

We were treating ourselves to a day off, as we spent the prior three days processing 19 chickens.

It looks mean to carry them by their legs, but hanging them makes the blood go to their heads. This quiets them.

We used the cool weather to good advantage. That is our modified pillow case to the right. It keeps the birds hugged tightly, again keeping them calm, with only their heads exposed. After Michael separates head from body I stroke their breasts until they hug me with their wings and stop shuddering. We give thanks and comfort to each of our birds.

Whether this counts as ethical harvest can be debated. It’s what we do, if only to help us get through the killing part. We find we can only stand so much death in one day.

We take the feathers off and the insides out in the open air. Our local dinosaur herd is there to clean up any stray offal that hits the ground.

Michael does a final clean up and I part them out: wings, legs thighs and breasts, soup bones.

Packaged and ready for freezer camp.

This is our version of “processed food.” These birds grew to about 3 lbs each In 12 weeks. They are tiny compared to broilers, which weighed in at 10 lbs after 9 weeks. They taste…more complex: they have eaten more grass and insects and worms and basked in more sunshine, and it makes a difference.

The popcorn noticeably grows every day. This is the corn 4 days ago.

This is the corn today. The wooden things are anti-lodging racks (or “corn crates”). Even if we’ve never had a tornado, we get powerful straight line winds every summer. Field corn withstands the wind better than our heritage popcorn.

From right: bok choi, cabbage, carrots hiding in the back next to the rhubarb, onions, potatoes.

The straw bale garden is burgeoning. Cucumbers, peas, beans, eggplant, tomatoes, onions, and dill.

Most exciting of all: one of our hens has gone broody. She’s sitting on 10 eggs, mostly laid by other hens. She doesn’t move off that nest except to eat (very little) and to let the eggs breathe if the weather gets too hot. She is amazing. It has taken 5 years and any number of hens to get one who needs to sit on a nest and hatch eggs. Most chickens have had that instinct bred out of them. The eggs should start hatching around July 9. Keep tuned!

My father died two years ago today. He never made it out to see our farm, but he was very proud that we have one. He once told me that of all the amazing things his father’s children and grandchildren have done (and believe me, even having argued before the Supreme Court, I am a piker compared to many of my siblings and extended family), he thought that the one thing my grandfather would have been the most impressed by is my owning and working a 40 acre farm. Every morning I sing a Salve Regina with my father. Then I go and work with Michael to build a beautiful life. Every. Day.

Construction journal: I’m still working on that drywall

For those not keeping track, I last posted about drywall on January 25. Pictures posted confirm that the last of the drywall was almost up and I had commenced taping. I’m not taping anymore, but I’m still mudding. Six. Months. Later.

The only good thing about sanding drywall is it means I’m almost done.

If you look closely, you can see where I’ve sanded (the edges look blurry) and where I need to sand (crisp looking edges).

These seams only have tape applied. If left this way, it would look terrible and the tape eventually would just fall off. These are areas I still need to mud. The space in which we are living has wallboard that was never taped, or if taped, never mudded. I’m not complaining, as it will make renovating that area easier.

This is a first layer of mud. The bumps are from where the paper on the wallboard lumped up. Michael used many screws hanging the wallboard and didn’t use a screw set, which is supposed to minimize this problem.

This seam has a second layer of mud. Still can see lumps, but they are less noticeable.

I keep adding wider layers of mud to hide the dips of tapered joints and lumps of butt joints (and the really big jags where a butt joint meets a tapered joint) until it looks pretty smooth. Then I shine a shop light on it, and it looks terrible again.

This is when I sand. If the light doesn’t cast shadows, my work is done (except for clean up).

Sometimes there are shadows from bubbles, nicks, or uneven places. I don’t want to live with these shadows. I mark these places with a pencil and go back over them with mud mixed with food coloring. I can see the area, sand only there, and THEN my job is done…as long as nothing gouges or nicks the mud before we paint and stabilize it. Living in the same space in which you doing construction makes for interesting problems.

I would feel more badly about not having the mudding done, but for realizing how many other things we’ve been doing in the past 6 months. This particular part of our construction project doesn’t have a true deadline. I’d like to get it to the painting stage so I can move on to making cabinets, helping Michael cut a hole in the wall to join the addition to the original house, and then help him get the flooring in. At that point Irene can get a door on her bathroom! We are hoping to have her bathroom finished before she turns 99.

Happy to be sharing projects with this guy, father of my children, Boopa to the Grand Girl (who just turned 3!), and gardener extraordinaire.

Season journal: getting from May to mid-June

Our days grow ever longer, with sun up around 5 and sun down by 9:30. Soon the curve will start the downhill slide. In the meantime all creation strives to grow and reproduce.

The Eastern Phoebes have fledged and new eggs occupy this space.

Wildflowers everywhere! Even on my picnic table.

Morels and lilacs bloom at the same time. Our lilacs were hurt by the frost/warming roller coaster we had this year. So were the morels. We unwittingly lucked into some.

It’s worth having Creeping Charlie if we can host a Tri-colored Bumblebee. I’m thinking of adding some (Charlie, not Bee) to my next batch of pasta.

Wild strawberries: one of the Grand Girls favorites. Mine too.

The flags have come and gone. Day lilies will bloom next.

The Great Blue Herons still fly past our house all day long. I can hear them chattering on their nests in the tall pines when I take Zeke for a walk by the river.

This Giant Stonefly graced us with her beauty.

Luckily, no Wood Frogs nearby. They eat insects bigger than they are.

We don’t often get to see Luna Moths. They like deciduous forests, one of which grows on our hillside.

Turtles of all types seek places to lay eggs this time of year. Michael saved this Western Painted Turtle from being stuck in with a drying pond. It is the first year in five we’ve had to water gardens.

Wild Four-O’Clocks put me in mind of my granddad.

Peonies. Summer would be incomplete without them.

There have been riots in The Cities. COVID-19 is still a concern. I work in a system (currently part time) that often is more criminal than it is just. Eggs fall out of nests. Turtles get run down by cars. Bees and bugs contend with pesticides. Yet life is still sweet in mid-June, compelling in its insistence.

The joy of small creatures is our saving grace.

Fishing journal: first fish of the season

The fishing opener comes early in May. We were busy getting our gardens in, finishing the last on May 30th. The next day we went fishing.

Every time we use the Suburban I can feel my Papi smiling. It was his baby.

The breeze kept us cool without blowing us around too much.

My job is to find the fish. Michael is my trolling motor.

I found the fish. This is a bluegill sunfish.

35 fish gave us a huge meal of fresh fish and 7 packages of fish in the freezer. Michael removes heads, fins, scales and guts. I filet. We make a good team.

We hope to be able to take these girls fishing this year!

Garden journal: keep planting!

We are garden rich this year. Eight. Count them: eight! gardens.

These three hold the record for longetivity: a lettuce garden, an herb garden and the asparagus garden. Michael says the railroad ties went in before the original cabin was completed. There used to be four gardens, but one came out when Clyde and Irene added the first addition in 2007.

The “big garden” went in soon after the cabin was completed. Michael thinks maybe 1998. We had to fence the area so the deer didn’t eat everything down to the ground. We hauled untold loads of compost. Then we moved to Maine in 2006 and the garden reverted to sod. We reclaimed it when we moved in with Irene after Clyde died.

We’ve had an on and off relationship with garden #5. We hauled loads of compost and improved the soil when we planted the currants ages ago. In wet years it becomes a quagmire and then returns to sod. It’s been a garden and then sod again several times since we moved here in 2014. Currently it’s our popcorn garden.

The tomato/pepper/eggplant garden grew out of an experiment. Last year we cleared this area of our first straw compost pile (it went into the big garden), so we stuck some winter squash seeds in the area to see what they would do. They grew wonderfully; we cooked the last squash a week ago. We widened the area, evicting the Creeping Charlie and quack grass, erected the fence to keep chickens from bathing here, and hope our nightshades prosper.

We cleared the last of the composted straw from Garden #7 yesterday. Michael installed temporary fencing to keep the chickens from scratching up the area and I planted winter squash (and sunflowers) today. We will remove the fencing when the squash are large enough to beat the chickens into submission.

This winter we will start to pile used straw atop garden #6 and last winter’s straw pile will mulch next year’s gardens…replacing Garden #6. Two winters worth of composting seems to be about right for repurposing straw. Why so much straw? Winter bedding for the birds.

Garden #8 is the “flag garden.” It’s the only flower garden we have. Some day I will have a dye garden as an excuse to grow flowers by the bucketloads. At the moment, I can barely keep this low-maintenance batch of blooms watered and weeded.

Today would have been my dad’s 89th birthday, an anniversary he shared with my friend Katherine, who turned 60 and is a Master Gardener. My father loved watering and weeding the flowers at his house. Katherine has been known to wear a headlamp and garden well into the night to get bulbs in before the first snow. Posting about our gardens during these troubled and troubling times is a fine way to celebrate their birthdays.

Harvest journal: unsustainable farming

Michael and I spent the past two days harvesting 12 of our broilers. They are about 6 weeks old now and rendered about 5.5 pounds of various chicken parts, which means 66 pounds of meat and bone went into the freezer.

These two chickens are the same age. The one on the left is a broiler; the other a barred rock. This was two weeks ago.

I’ve been trying to figure out our cost to raise these birds. It’s not easy as we haven’t separated feed for our various chicks and ducklings. Even though we have (had) 16 broilers, and 80 other baby birds, the broilers probably eat a third of the feed we buy. In round numbers, I think it cost us $2 to buy the chick and $2 to feed it. So far, about $0.75/lb to raise. We also have increased electricity bills to keep them warm, the building to house them, not to mention our labor to turn them into meat. Unprocessed chicken would be a strangely frantic meal.

Michael and I spent a total of 16 collective hours to move them from coop to freezer. It is the amount of time we spend, without the economies of scale, that makes our farm commercially unsustainable. Over time, and without more mechanical inputs or young recruits, our farm will become physically unsustainable as well.

Broilers have the best feet for making broth.

It will take our other chicks closer to 14 weeks to grow to about 3 pounds. We are trying barred rocks to compare flavor. The other chicks are mutts, mostly Giant White and Light Brahma crosses. Broilers grow quickly, are one of the most efficient animals at turning feed into meat, and are what you buy when you get chicken at the grocery. They are bland (Julia Child complained that American chicken tastes like cardboard) and soft. We may have waited too long to harvest our non-broilers in the past, as they require slow cooking. Or the tastiness factor may be inherent in birds that get more exercise. We will see what 14 weeks does for the size/tenderness balance.

In between harvest, we are enjoying watching our trees bloom. We should have a good plum harvest this year.

The Northwest Greening is taking the year off, but the crab blossoms like clockwork.

Clyde and Irene made a sign to hang at the entry of the driveway that says “NORESTHERE.” There will always be work to be done on a farm. What we find in that work is, perhaps, not restful, but nourishing on so many levels.

Sharing at a distance is what we can do for now.

Season journal: flowers, gardens and greens

Our babies are blooming!

So much happens so quickly in springtime. The broilers, after only 5 weeks, are ready for harvest. We just finished hatching out the ducklings and have 34 happy little creatures. They will soon graduate to outdoor foraging.

Stinging nettle is up and flourishing.

Delicious, if also dangerous. It earns its “stinging” name!

Cooking destroys the sting. And yes, we still eat home grown onions with nearly every meal. Here they are paired with venison liver. Some day we may make our own cottage cheese…but not this day.

Speaking of onions, they have grown tall enough for me to mulch them with composted straw. Those are the garlic looking exuberant there in the upper right hand corner.

The remains of a fish. We bury dead things in the used straw piles. The chicken and duck manure helps compost the straw. More concentrated forms of nitrogen make it break down even faster. Any remaining bones add calcium, slowly.

Weeding is more pleasant with company. This is where we had our first used straw pile. Last year we grew squash here. This year may see tomatoes on this spot. It went from hard clay to lovely garden soil. Who knew raising birds would be so good for the gardens?

The asparagus appreciate the nutrients and protection from quack grass the straw mulch provides.

Quack grass roots create a dense mat and can burrow down 8”. I use a mattock, as these roots laugh at my attempts with a shovel.

Michael and I took a break from gardening to walk the woods. It’s my first time to spot Dutchman’s Breeches. So many wildflowers bloom after frost but before the trees leaf out. You have to time it right to see them.

Marsh Marigolds line low lying areas and lend brightness to dark hollows.

The trillium. Oh, the trillium!

Trout lilies carpet entire hillsides.

Violets were Baba’s favorite.

But she would have loved her great-great-grand girl more.

Foraging journal: dandelion time

Michael and I spent part of this sunny afternoon picking dandelion flowers. I have mad respect for anyone who earns a living by stoop labor.

Three gallons of flower blossoms. They smell so sweet, like springtime in a bucket. We now have them steeping in boiling water, the first step in making wine.

Michael finished processing the last of the dandelion greens we gathered several days ago. We had less than a week between when the greens showed and when they started to blossom.

Soaking in water to rinse off dirt and keep them fresh. They last several days after picking if you keep them wet and cool.

We sliced them off below ground when gathering them. Digging the entire root would have left too many potholes in our yard! You can see where the root meets the stems. That is where we trim.

If you trim too much, the leaves fall apart and you lose the crown. Here, the brown of the root is gone but the crown remains.

Trimmed crowns sizzling in butter. Olive oil works well too. They leave a wonderful fresh taste in the mouth, like artichoke hearts.

The leaves can be eaten as a salad or cooked and used any way you would spinach.

Dandelion pizza!

Dandelion imposters exist; most are edible. My mother wondered why she couldn’t find crowns on hers.

On close inspection the prickles show: prickly lettuce it is! Edible. May be more astringent than dandelions. And no crowns!

Pink anenomies. Not edible, but they just began blooming.

White anenomies out as well.

Farmers are beginning to plant. This is a no till field.

The local lore says you plant corn when the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear. Michael is still clearing a garden area for our popcorn.

Slow and steady gets rid of quack grass.

Speaking of quacks, our ducklings started hatching last week. We have 25 as of today with more on the way. We don’t keep our different breeds separate, so we have mutt ducks.

I finished weeding the asparagus garden today. We planted asparagus 20 years ago. Every spring and summer we weeded it, as Clyde and Irene didn’t. Then we left the area for 8 years and we came back to sod. I cured the problem without having to start over by piling on mulch. The grass sends its roots into the mulch, where I can pull them up in long streamers. The asparagus remains in the dirt, mostly undisturbed. We shall feast on asparagus now that dandelion season is over.

Season journal: wild flowers

Three days ago I spied the first bloodroot blooms. They are thick in the ditches now.

A surprise to see flowers without their greens.

Two days ago the pussytoes popped up.

Pussytoes carpet lawns with their tiny soft white blooms.

All the trees burst forth in flowers yesterday.

Both leaves and turtles made their appearance today. Spring tumbles over itself, rushing to profit from the first week without below freezing temperatures.

This curious beetle caught my attention. My references tell me it is a carrion beetle. Given the number of road sacrifices that come with springtime, it’s surprising I haven’t seen one before.

We dug up dandelions finally and Michael made a fine pilaf with their centers. They remind me of artichoke hearts. Leaves will make a salad tomorrow. They are best before they blossom out, when they turn bitter. We will gather the flowers for dandelion wine.

We are eagerly awaiting our next chance to see this wee wild one.

Garden journal: potatoes in, chicks growing

Michael says we are not so much farmers as we are really serious gardeners. Our birds are as much a part of our gardening ethic as our apple trees or the potato patch.

Look at those feathers! Ox (the big guy with sun in his eyes) is about 2 weeks older than the big yellow feller in the background. The two little ones in front of Yeller Feller are the same age as that yellow giant. The size difference is due to breeding. The Yeller Feller is a broiler, and will grow to be about 5 pounds in 5 weeks. The others will grow to be about 3.5 pounds in 14 weeks. Broilers give more meat, but the slower growers are tastier.

We have a bunch (about 40) duck eggs in the incubator. They should begin hatching in about 10 days. In order to have space for the new ducklings, we moved the current flock down onto pasture.

We moved them into their huts right before bedtime so they hopefully would remember their summer routines the next day. And….they all trooped right into their huts on their own last night. Yay! Ducks are smart. Notice how green their grass is. Wherever we keep ducks seems to have the lushest grass. They like grass; the grass likes them.

Michael finished turning over the garden (except for the sodded-in part next to the fence…more on that another day), leveled it and tilled it. Then he planted 44 potatoes.

We will either have too many potatoes or we will have too few, depending on the vagaries of temperature and rainfall. We hope to control pests by letting our birds into the garden for short bursts. We have to take care because the ducks will devour certain crops, like cabbage, given the opportunity.

We find that we seem to have enough onions if we plant 800 sets. Most years the yellow onions save the best. This past year the red and white saved better. We eat onions, in one form or another, almost every day. We hope to get the onions in this week.

As I was walking past our vegetable and bird gardens, this vulture sprang up from the road and circled overhead. Both a deer and a raccoon met their ends the night before. It’s all a circle of life (although I refrained from including the carcasses) and a warning that we need to set out the raccoon traps.

The trees keep trying to bud out, but so far have resisted the urge. Something about below-freezing temps at night have kept their flowers inside their calixes.

My favorite springtime flower is my youngest daughter, who turned 30 this year. We celebrated, if distantly, on our new deck. Thanks go out once again to my eldest brother and his wife for coming out last summer and helping take the deck from concept to party central! (And yes, that is some of our rhubarb wine on that table.)

Season journal: the rites of spring

Signs of spring come slowly but surely to Western Wisconsin. The Sandhill Cranes arrived about 2 weeks ago, creaking their love songs in recently harvested corn fields. The Great Blue Herons make the trek from river to feeding grounds. Our house sits under their flight path.

The first flowers of spring: chickweed from the garden.

The garlic pokes out of its straw comforter. The rhubarb rumbles it’s way toward the light.

We finished our dog walk just as today’s flurries commenced.

Michael has almost 3/4 of the garden turned over. My contribution is the pittance behind the shovel on the left. He’s been racing wet weather to get the weeds out and all ready for spring planting. We save the dandelions as our first harvest. Welcome to the season of fresh salads and cooked greens!

The bag Michael is carrying is for picking trash out of the ditches. We have added trash picking to our rites of spring. Our local township provides garbage bags and will pick them up from the roadside. I walk the road with the bag and Michael scrambles into steep places with the small bag, emptying it into my big one. The ditches are clear of snow (mostly), but the poison ivy has yet to awaken, so the time to “ditch dive” is now. My neighbor has joined in our efforts to keep our neck of the woods free of the detritus of modern life. Once the ditches awaken, we will restrict our efforts to non-toxic portions of the road. As for fear of contamination of the trash, most of it is pre-pandemic. All has been exposed to hard UV. The items that may retain viral content, such as cardboard, will melt with time. We let it lie.

We added 26 chicks from the feed store to the 30 we hatched so far. Michael always dreamed of being a chick magnate.

Ox (he is exhibiting rooster behavior) and his cohort are feathering nicely. Michael partitioned the coop and made a cozy place for the babies. The hens emit a low rattling sound, as close to a purr as a hen can get, since sharing quarters with the peepers.

We have more chickens than we can eat and plan to plant extra potatoes, root vegetables and cabbages. The pandemic may end with the warm weather or it may not. Either way we will have enough to share with anyone who may be in need once harvest starts. Here’s to the hope for the future that comes with springtime.

Livestock journal: chick update

It has been eight days since chicks started hatching. So far we have 18 chicks and more on the way.

Still wet, fresh out of the shell.

Chicks start pipping (getting a hole pecked in the shell) and then work work work to break all the way out. They come out wet, floppy and uncoordinated. In hours they fluff up and start exploring, looking for company. They are flock centric and need company more than even food and water once hatched. Their yolk remnants keeps them hydrated and fed for a while after hatching.

This is Ox at Day 7. Look at those wing feathers!

We moved a batch of the chicks out to the outside coop as their inside bucket was getting cramped. That, and with those awesome wing feathers, they would begin to be able to hop out of the inside bucket soon.

Zeke and Dusty know there is competition downstairs and are very jealous.

We had snow yesterday but not enough cold to refreeze the ground. Garden prep here we come! This also means we can move the ducks onto pasture soon.

We opened up the duck yard to Zeke’s yard so the ducks could mow the tall grass. They’ve done an excellent job and have such a good time in new territory.

Before we move the ducks to their summer digs two things need to happen. We need above-freezing temps overnight so we can water our livestock with hoses. We also need to gather sufficient duck eggs to hatch our next generation of ducks. We will start gathering duck eggs once we have room in the incubator, which will be in a couple of days.

In addition to the eggs we are hatching from our own flock, we have also ordered chicks from the feed store. In this era of insecurity we figure we may need to feed more than ourselves. If everything returns to normal, we can still feed more than ourselves!

Our favorite little chick.