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The other day we were watching an interview with the singer Jewel about her life growing up in Alaska, and she said that basically up there you spend all summer getting ready for winter.
We don't live in Alaska anymore, but Idaho is close enough (actually, according to the USDA Zone Map, many places in Alaska, including where Jewel lived and where we used to live, do not get as cold as it gets here, and considering they actually have humidity up there, the weather in general up there is less harsh than it is here), and we know exactly what she means.
Today my husband and stepdad went out to cut wood and spent all day (well, 7 hours) doing it. We now have a giant pile (about a cord and a half) of wood scattered about our backyard; my son has already built a fort out of some of it. That wood needs to be split and stacked, and we still need to get about 4 more cords. It's work--muscle-straining, backache-inducing work.
And today I spent about 4 hours working on cherries. I had bought about 10 or 12 pounds yesterday at the farmer's market. These are locally grown (more or less) Bing cherries, picked absolutely ripe and indescribably delicious, the kind of cherry that turns you off supermarket fruit. I washed them all and pitted them. The slightly overripe ones will go into jam (make that tomorrow) as cherry jam is one of my all-time favorite yogurt toppings, and we need a lot of it. The perfectly ripe ones are being individually frozen. I put them on cookie sheets to freeze, so that once they are bagged I can just pull out however many cherries I want at a time instead of having to defrost the whole bag.
All the peas are harvested and stored now. We have about 10 quarts of snow and snap peas in the freezer, along with 2 gallons of shelled peas. We also dried enough peas to total about a pound of dry peas for soup. We dried all the peas on a homemade screen rack outside in the sun. We will plant peas again soon, for a second harvest in the fall.
Chamomile and other herbs for medicine and tea have to be harvested almost daily in this weather, because they're growing so fast. We dry them on the same screen rack outside, using nothing but solar energy. We're going to have a bounteous supply of chamomile tea, although I'm also mixing it with pineapple weed flowers. Pineapple weed is, yes, a weed, but it's closely related to chamomile (the Matricaria chamomile, anyway), and it tastes really good as tea and offers some of the same benefits (being soothing, etc.). We also have calendula flowers to dry and yarrow. Indeed, I am utterly in love with yarrow. I have never tested its supposed fever-curing properties, but if it's good enough for Achilles, it's damn sure good enough for us. We also picked about a pound of wild mint leaves, and we are drying them and intend to mix them with our garden-grown mint (we have three varieties, currently) to make a mint tea for winter. I'm letting the cilantro do as it wants to do and make coriander for me. The poppies are also doing what they want and making seeds, later to make lemon poppyseed muffins with. Lillies, sunflowers, nasturtiums, and cornflowers (aka bachelor's buttons) are all blooming to great effect and pleasing me mightily.
Oh, right, y'all wanted pictures. After work finishes up, OK?
Also at the farmer's market yesterday, I bought 20 pounds of local apricots. Yum. I hope to get another box next week. Of course, we are eating them, letting the bright-orange juice get all over our faces and forearms, but we will also make jam (we eat a fair quantity of jam, mostly because we only buy plain yogurt, and we put jam on top of the plain yogurt--we also use it on biscuits and pancakes and so forth, of course, but the yogurt habit is what really affects our jam consumption), and then--THEN!--I ordered a new food dehydrator, a 9-rack commercial type unit, and we will make dried apricots. Oh, super yum. I bought the big dehydrator because we intend to do a lot of drying this year, especially once my husband gets a deer (jerky!--fingers crossed, as getting a deer is by no means a foregone conclusion), and things like apricots and cherries take a long time to sun-dry here. I think we're going to do the tomatoes out in the sun, though. Oh, right, I also intend to make zucchini chips this year. I read about it this winter, and I'm always looking for new ways to sock zucchini away for the winter since it produces so abundantly, and apparently dehydrated zucchini slices make a delicious chip, that you can just eat straight out of the bag like a potato chip. You could also rehydrate them, of course, and use them in soup or whatever. Whatever. It's chips I want. I figure once the zucchini gets going it shouldn't be too hard to fill that 9-rack dehydrator. Fortunately, I have a mandoline for easy uniform slicing.
Oh, we also found a big patch of wild raspberries the other day while we were fishing/harvesting mint. They're in flower now. Can't wait...can't wait.
I only have one week of work left for the summer, and it's good, because August is too full of getting ready for winter to hold down an actual job. Once the tomatoes and zucchini start in earnest (all our tomatoes are still green right now--we should start having cherry tomatoes soon), dealing with them is a full-time job.
People ask me all the time if I don't get tired of it. The truth is that we get very tired of it about the end of August or middle of September, but the rest of the year makes up for it. Well, not only that, but to be honest, I think for us there is great satisfaction in doing this kind of work. There is satisfaction in using your hands and your back to do real hard work, in getting sweaty and dirty from mixing about with earth. All three of us (because my son helps, sort of--as best as a 3-year-old can) sit back in October and look at our carefully split-and-stacked wood, our pantry full of dried and canned foods, our freezer stocked with both vegetables by themselves and some ready-to-eat convenience foods that I make (stuffed zucchini, soup concentrates, zucchini fritters, etc.), and we take pride and comfort from it. It will mean lower grocery bills for us, of course, and it will mean fewer trips to the grocery store, more selection when decent produce is hard to get in winter, and higher quality food. It also means that a significant portion of the work we do in our lives is not work where we trade our time for money, but where we work directly for whatever it is that we need, cutting out the money part of the deal. It means that that work that we did was work we did as a family; it was time spent together, working towards a common goal, laughing, bickering, cooperating, trying not to cut each other's fingers off with the axe.
I don't mean to get too sentimental about it--it is hard work, and as I said, we do get tired of it. And I don't want to sound preachy, but sometimes I wonder if more people tried it out, if they wouldn't also find it more rewarding than they imagined. I wonder, too, if people would appreciate the energy (in the form of electricity, oil, or food) they consume more when they knew what that consumption meant in real physical terms. Maybe we wouldn't be so wasteful as a society, and maybe we wouldn't abuse food the way we do. Maybe being outdoors and working and finding yourself reaching for apricots and peas for snacks would give us better health. Maybe the time spent working with their families would be good for kids and adults alike. Oh, I don't know...but maybe.
I know, I know--I'm a dreamer and an idealist, but when you spend 4 hours pitting cherries, you have a lot of time to daydream. Trust me.
The Mystery Vine latched onto the tomato cage.........
The Mystery Tomatoes are blooming!
So far, the squirrels have kept out of the table planter.
Top Downloads
Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed. ~Lewis Gannit
In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death. ~Sam Llewelyn
By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course. ~Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman, 1981
The Chicago Botanic Garden has a large collection of bonsai. One hundred eighty specimens are rotated at their peak, with fifty on display in two large courtyards. It is simply stunning to see. I was surprised by how large the specimens were, expecting them to be much smaller. But after seeing them I can understand the scale required to develop the plant, and really appreciate the beauty of the tree.
You can read more about the collection here.
Okay.
In regard to the 1000-seed extravaganza; I've needed to haul out the tomato cages:
Two or three kinds of tomatoes. Dunno. It'll be a surprise. I have no clue what kind.
Then there's this:
A tendril! A tendril! Could be a bean of some sort. Third tomato cage up.
Then there's THIS...............
About 18" tall, purpley stem at the bottom....????? Anyone have a clue?
And they are breeding! I think I need one of those beetle traps, but I am afraid if I use one, I'll just attract more from other places instead of just grabbing the ones setting up camp in my garden. I wonder what you do with the bag of beetles after its full?
The first watermelon of the year. Just last week it was only the size of a walnut.
Flower pot shots.
