Applemania
It’s as Kazakhstani as apple pie.
Which is not as they say, whoever THEY are . . . but as they should say, if they knew.
I learned of the origin of this nationalized icon some years ago back in a fabulous article from Orion Magazine, which you can read for yourself as long as the internets allow.
Meet Yggdrasil.
When I met Yggdrasil in January 2019, I was not sure it was still alive. The only indications of the possibility of life were a couple of thoroughly withered post-rotten unto mummified small apples still clinging to the tree that could not have been there for much more than a year.
My new neighbors-to-be assured me several weeks later that it was quite well. They had collected good apples off of it while the property was abandoned. 10-12 years ago it fell down in a wind storm, they estimated. Which is 15-17 years ago now. How time flies. Despite (or perhaps on account of) being completely sideways for roughly 1/4 of its existence and neglected for at least that long, Yggdrasil is, as another neighbor put it, “just living its best life.”
The first autumn of our acquaintance, I made the journey to Mossyrock in time to pick the apples before the first really hard frost. (Apples suffer frost damage at around 26 degrees.) I found the quantity boggling. About 140 lbs! Many had scab or bug damage, but most were salvageable, and they were delicious. And they kept in the garage of my Seattle rental for over 3 months. I ordered a cider press, a simple but well-crafted manual one along with a grinder with a hopper and hand crank that fit over a 5-gallon bucket. “Nectar of the GODDESS!!” my roommate declared when I shared a glass with her. And she was right.
Spring of 2020, pictured above, I set about trying to free it from the blackberry thicket that had infested its northwest quadrant with canes up to 20 feet long. I cut all of them at ground level and got most of what was within 8 feet of the ground before it started to break bud and I was afraid of harming it yanking on canes and trying to tease them out of the snarl.
Fall of 2020 – upwards of 200 lbs of good apples! A notably higher percentage were intact and unblemished compared to the year before, probably because the fruit had not been left to rot on the ground and on the tree. Pest and disease affected bits went off to perish in the Seattle municipal compost instead of lingering to re-infest in spring.
At least a third of that generous haul I sold, gave away, or used in trade. For elk and venison, among other things. At the time the root cellar still had a bit of service in it. I made 3 batches of cider (one 5-gallon bucket yields 8-11 cups) and froze a bunch of applesauce. Maybe a dozen quarts. It was a cold winter. The apples kept in the cellar into March, nearly 6 months. The few most perfect ones sorted out in January went in the fridge. I ate the last of them June 1.
Spring of 2021, I got the rest of the blackberries out and started very gently to prune, mostly what was clearly dead wood, to see what was still there. The tree had good branch structure at one time, one can tell. It had been pruned well in its early years. For probably 15 years it had not been pruned at all. If you prune too aggressively or at the wrong time, you send it into sucker/water sprout mode and you can never take it back. Prune slow.
I could see into the center of the tree now, get a ladder in. For two years (’21 and ’22) I got a yield in the low-to-mid 100-lb range again. Enough for fresh eating, a batch or two of cider, and a bit of trade. More apples spoiled winter of 21-22 even though I had fewer because it was not as cold and because the roof and the facade on the root cellar are starting to fail.
Last year, 2022, I thought I would barely get 50 lbs of apples. May rained and rained and rained. Too cold and wet for the pollinators to fly. Too wet perhaps even for the pollen to stay viable and on the blossoms. The Spring of Eternal Sogginess followed by the Summer that Wouldn’t End–brutal heat and drought and hot dry wind and wildfire smoke. Summer lasted 3 weeks into October. 4 months without meaningful rain brought visible stress to even a heavily self shading 50-60 year old tree. Midsummer the crop was looking very thin and I was not sure it would put on size.
Apples grow on trees. They do not just show up on trees. They grow . . . from a nub. From pea sized, to grape sized (which is when one is likely to first notice them), to golf ball sized, until one has full sized apples.
Green apples are easier to see at night by headlamp, lit from below, than they are to see during the day when shaded from above by a dense canopy of green leaves. Partway through September of ’22, a bunch of tennis ball sized green apples appeared on the tree that were not there before. I had been walking past it with a headlamp on every night since probably mid-July. Those apples were not there. I would have seen them. They just appeared. The apple population of the tree roughly tripled in a week’s time.
Yggdrasil is magic.
In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the World Tree, connecting the over and under worlds via Middle Earth, the realm of living mortals and the namesake of Tolkien’s epic setting. My Yggdrasil is decidedly a portal to another realm, as one can see when approaching from the Northeast, especially when it is lit from behind. One can also feel it. It exudes a stillness, a sort of slowing down of time, of Memory in a small way reminiscent of Tane Mahuta, the mammoth kauri tree in the Northland region of New Zealand that has presided over a myth-worthy forest for more than 1,000 years.
Sometimes I duck inside and sit on its lower limbs when I am stressed or sad. It feels like being held.
The first two pictures below are from early spring 2021 just before I started to prune.
Fast forward to late spring 2022. The quadrant that was nearly bare from blackberry choking had more than half filled in with leaves and blooms.
And on to September 30, 2023. Harvest eve. It’s just loaded. There look to be nearly as many apples as leaves.
I used to wonder why there were so many twigs growing straight down in the middle of the tree. Now I know.
Halfway done. Just before picking on October 14, it looks like a somewhat normal highly productive tree. You would have no idea I had already brought in more than the total harvest of the year before.
At roughly 30′ long x 20′ wide x 15′ high, the apple tree is more than double the volume of my house.
How do you like THEM apples?!!?!
I started making cider before I finished harvesting to free up buckets.
October 26, a few dry hours before the first really hard frost. Last call!
Mischief well underway.
What had seemed to be barely a feature of the property when I encountered it turned out to be a treasure. Yggdrasil continues with effusive generosity to give. Hummingbirds drink straight from frost-softened apples in its upper branches, their needle noses a perfect straw for the perhaps slightly hardened juice. Deer sleep in its embrace and eat the windfall that is too bruised or buggy for me to bring inside. This fall, a family of Northern Flicker (first spotted hanging around in January, absent for the summer) pecked at the lingering bounty that was not worth my effort to reach. Bees feast on its blossoms in the spring, putting away provisions against leaner months for sisters they will not live to see.
I put the apples in my mouth and in canning jars. Some dried, some heat canned and shelf stable, some in the freezer. And I bake. And I sell. And I trade. And freeze apple mash from the cider making process and cubed fresh apples for making fruit leather and muffins and pie and crisp later on. Fresh apples, apple pie, apple blackberry crisp, apple muffins, spiced chunky apple sauce, apple butter, apple rings, apple blackberry leather, sweet cider, cider vinegar, hard cider, apple wine, apple syrup. I might need to learn how to make apple fritters this year. One of those gallons of wine might have a future as brandy. That’d be fun.
Applemania 2023: 1st quality apples straight off the tree = 541 lbs. 2nds, either visibly damaged but still salvageable off tree or intact-appearing off the ground = 139 lbs. Over 100 lbs left on the ground (too damaged to bother) and roughly 50 lbs left on the tree (not worth heroics reaching) for the critters to enjoy, which they have done. 830 pounds of apples. 830 pounds!
I hope you’ve enjoyed meeting Yggdrasil, Orchard of One.
Camp Ratatouille
Are you suggesting bell peppers migrate?
I may be the first person in history to have eaten ratatouille several ingredients of which spent part of their life growing under a giant sequoia. This is a source of considerable amusement for me.
Less amusing is the reason. For a total of several weeks this summer it was too hot for bell peppers and eggplant. That takes some doing. In the ground they probably would have been OK but we do not have a long enough growing season here for bell peppers and eggplant to mature in the ground. In pots, even in 2-3 gallon pots with good soil and sufficient water the dry days in the mid-upper 90’s were bleaching out the leaves and burning the fruit.
In direct sunlight, the soil in the pots reaches air temperature or warmer and the plant’s physiology becomes strained to its limits. In shade the fruits will not ripen. Under the new terms of summer in a valley in the foothills of western WA, if you want your potted bell peppers and eggplant to bear well, start ripening late summer and keep going into November back in the greenhouse, migrate they must.
The potted tomatoes and the grape vines and all of the potted perennials other than herbs eventually relocated to Camp Sequoia. Some of them stayed until it started to rain.
The three best moments in the gardening year are the first strawberry, the first cherry tomato, and when you put the hoses away. I did not put the hoses away until early November this year.
It was long summer. The season overstayed its welcome by at least 6 weeks. There are some advantages to a long summer in the Northwest, such as harvesting 3 ½ pounds of cherry tomatoes fully ripe outdoors third week of October and winter squash and watermelon having time to ripen after a month delay on the front end of the growing year.
Nearly 4 months without meaningful rain though . . . not cool.
The water table dropped out of reach of all the trees and shrubs that I have planted in the past several years and even some of the mature ones were showing significant signs of stress. I spent more time watering in October than I did in July.
On October 18, 48 hours before it started sprinkling, 3 days before the first good soaking rain of the fall, there was a brush fire 2 miles from my house. I was out running errands when I heard and for about half an hour was not sure I would be able to ever go home. I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing to evacuate.
Massive gratitude for the volunteer fire departments around here for being on top of their game. They had it contained in under 4 hours. Had it been windy, it could have gone a very different way.
Foreboding that we are all just pending climate refugees has been lurking in my mind for some years. Then my high school best friend lost her home in the Boulder fire in January. Then this summer Alisha’s homestead in Oregon—scorched earth. All gone. Unlike me, she is a single mom. Like me she had waited years to find her place, just a couple years ahead of me in landing. Starting over, again. Then on October 18 I was loading my car with the important things (?) in case it was my turn. The thought of being driven out by the inhospitality humans have wrought on the planet creeps closer to the front of my mind and more often all the time.
Other than myself of course, the important things don’t fit in the car. Not really. The sequoia, for one. My sweet cozy house the interior of which I finished by myself. All my nearly 4 years of work. My south meadow which will remain wild as long as I live here. The green hills. The 50+ year old apple tree that still bears heavily despite years of neglect and having fallen down in a windstorm 15 years ago. The hopeful feathery asparagus planted this spring. The baby fruit and nut trees that would never get to bear a yield or hold nesting birds or have children climb them or shade me for a nap in my old age.
If you don’t put down roots, you wither more easily. If you do put down roots and the storm comes and you leave too much of yourself behind in the escaping, how do you start over? How do you regrow?
It’s a dangerous business, making a home.
Rain. Blessed rain. The sky is blue again. I can see to the horizon, where the Winston Creek valley disappears around a bend. I’m done coughing up particles of Gifford Pinchot National Forest, at least for 2022.
The ratatouille turned out admirably. In September I made three pots of it for a total of nine meals. Only imported ingredients were the olive oil and salt. Ratatouille is the perfect September food because it’s warm but not too heavy, and so, so colorful as many of the flowers and other growing things are starting to fade into fall. French peasants knew how to live, that is for sure.
When I posted this photo on my team’s social chat at work, a coworker dubbed them Elfplant. That indeed they are.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it, the life I have chosen and the tradeoffs involved. The excess of solitude and the endless to-do’s. But then I watch the birds over the meadow—hunting, foraging, mating, dancing, playing. I wander out to the garden and collect the ingredients for dinner. I fill my eyes and my belly with beautiful food from living soil. I raised those eggplant and red bell peppers from seed. I carried them back and forth to Camp Ratatouille at least four times, over 100 ft one way. I watered them every day for several months, sometimes twice. They rewarded me with hearty, scrumptious Rainbow Stew.
Feeding yourself with the work of your own hands, and sometimes feeding others, and knowing that mostly care and not harm went into the procuring of your sustenance—this is the most deeply gratifying endeavor I know.
Living is a dangerous business. We are in this together, the peppers and eggplant and sequoia and I.
Keepers
Growing food is enough of a learning curve. Storing it takes the game to another level, especially when built environment is low tech and low square footage and natural environment is getting increasingly warm and erratic.
Last year the apples kept in the root cellar through April. 6 whole months. Some were softening but they were still pretty good through March. I put the last 10 in the refrigerator and had one that still tasted alright raw on June 1.
This year way more of them spoiled in the first month and the majority had started getting soft and mealy by mid-December, 2 months in. Fall of ’21 was not cold enough to keep the root cellar below 40 degrees most of the time. I had fewer apples this year by half but also had to compost a much higher percentage of them. 3 weeks into January (when I started writing this) I am down to my last 3 apples.
I still have several quarts of last year’s apple sauce in the freezer. I will use that up this year because I am not sick of apples. Last year I had plenty of apples to hold me over for fresh fruit from the end of orange season until the strawberries started coming in. I was a little relieved when the apples were gone. (At the rate we’re going with the temperatures I might be growing oranges and avocados here 10 years from now.)
For natural keepers, squash are where it’s at. Filling and nutritious. Prime comfort food. Can be served sweet or savory. If ripened on the vine and handled carefully so as not to bruise them, most winter squash will keep 6 months if stored at medium humidity and 40-60 degrees. I’ve had homegrown butternut last a year in a basement apartment.
Even zucchini (picked baking size) can keep on the shelf for up to 3 months. I have one patty pan squash that I saved as an experiment from July 25. Late January it was a little soft but still not moldy. March 1 I cut out the one small mold spot and cut it up to use in soup for my Homegrown lunch. 7 months on that guy. Not bad. My pump house is perfect storage for squash. I’ll just have to rearrange and install some shelving over the work bench for lighter things to make room under the bench for heavy bins. I hope to have enough squash next year that I’m not rationing them primarily for Foodshed Challenge days.
As is, I’m not struggling for calories on Homegrown days, which is really important when it’s cold. This year I have enough dried tomatoes and frozen red bell pepper that I’m enjoying them for other meals too. I have fruit leather made of apple mash (byproduct of the cider making process) mixed with various other fruits. Mostly though it is thanks to the squash and their seeds.
Besides augmenting squash yields by increasing plant population and improving soil, I’m working on production of nuts, seeds, and grains, all 12-month+ keepers. Last year’s bare root pecan trees didn’t make it. The three potted pecan saplings I planted last fall still look alive. I put three baby hazelnut trees in the ground this week, twigs 12”-24” tall. With any luck I’m looking at 3 years until my first harvest of hazelnuts and 5 years to pecans.
I direct-seeded two 8-foot rows of amaranth in June of ‘21. Total yield: ¼ tsp. Eight plants survived triple-digit days as tiny seedlings. (For proper spacing, I would have kept sixteen.) Two of those survived an early hard frost mid-September. Before the rains started in earnest I dug them up moved those into 1-gallon pots in the greenhouse for the seeds to mature. The drooping pink seed heads were gorgeous and an impressive percentage of the plant’s runty size.
A quarter teaspoon of amaranth wouldn’t make a meal for a parakeet. However—this is the miraculous thing about seed.
I planted half the packet, 100 seeds or so. Amaranth seed is so tiny that the quarter teaspoon contains about 400 seeds. Input quadrupled in just five months. The parent plants showed extraordinary resilience through heat, drought, and frost. What amounted to crop failure from a sustenance standpoint last season is the beginnings of a ‘land race’ of amaranth, selected for optimal production in local conditions. I am going to start this year’s amaranth in the greenhouse in late April. Half the plants will be from the seed packet purchased in 2021, and half will be from that precious quarter-teaspoon.
If I can get sixteen plants to the 6’ potential of amaranth, with 4 oz of seed apiece (above average yield but not extraordinary), that would be four pounds. Over half a gallon of grain. Even at 1 oz per plant, the low end of the theoretical yield range, I would have 2 ¼ c of amaranth. That is 9 servings of delicious hot cereal for a medium-sized human. Topped with berries and someday with honey? Breakfast on Homegrown food days would get a major upgrade.
Sunflower seed is easy to grow. It is not easy to clean or to shell. I still have a paper grocery bag half-full of sunflower heads. I will probably end up feeding them to the birds. I would have to be very hungry or very bored to spend more time on them than I already have, and I processed the ones with the biggest seed first.
Squash seeds that you can eat whole, right out of the fruit, while you are waiting for the fleshy part to roast or boil—winning. You can also rinse and dry them and keep them in glass jars for over a year. Keepers.
Foodshed Challenge Rundown: All food grown/raised/foraged/hunted in stated geographical area excepting imports allowed on Homegrown days (coffee, olive oil, salt, and yeast) + County and State days (chocolate, butter, maple syrup, and spices that do not grow in WA).
Homegrown Foodshed Day – October 1
Breakfast: Roasted Delicata and Apple, Delicata Seeds, Coffee
Snack #1: Apple Plum Leather, Sunflower Seeds
Lunch: Veggie Salad
Behold the Winter Giant spinach. Or Giant Winter, depending on who is selling the seed packet. Either way, it is impressive. Those are gallon pots. I have large hands for a person my size. This is when it was just staring to get going. The leaves got even larger for a few weeks before the weather turned really dark and cold. For most of October it was replacing itself quickly enough to provide two or three portions a week. The ones in the ground stopped producing sooner (I was able to bring these into the greenhouse on bitterly cold nights) but after enduring a week with lows in the teens and a recent night down to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit, they are still alive.
Behold the Salad Bowl. After several rounds of futility planting in the ground (it doesn’t like my soil, the critters get it all) I tried in my long-time favorite potting soil, Edna’s Best by EB Stone. Big struggle. Slow to start, really runty, bolted before it put on leaves of any size. I have never had trouble growing arugula before. It was the same seed I had saved from a bumper crop in 2017, that had thrived in two different Seattle gardens with succession plantings nearly year-round.
Then came MJR. A local farmer friend had tried a new potting mix and ordered a pallet of it based on the results. I did a test planting with one planter bowl of Edna’s and one of MJR. In less than two weeks (arugula is quick when it is happy) there was a clear winner. I tossed the ailing Edna’s arugula in the compost and planted a new bowl of lettuce in the MJR. Lettuce had done alright in the Edna’s, but MJR turned out to be the sauce for that too.
Spinach and arugula topped with tomatoes, olive oil, and salt.
Snack #2: Watermelon
Dinner: Tromboncino with Pesto, Tomatoes, and Sauteed Kale with Red Pepper and Shallot
That is a belly full as well as an eye full. Tromboncino steamed, as there was enough oil in the pesto. Pesto made with homegrown basil and garlic, along with olive oil and salt. Frozen in glass and thawed the day I was using it, it tasted as fresh as the hour it was made in July. It tasted, in fact, like July. Tomatoes lightly salted. Kale sauteed in olive oil with red bell peppers and shallots, runty enough to look like pearl onions but no less delicious for that.
County Foodshed Day – October 9
Breakfast: Scrambled Egg, Coffee
Yup, just one egg. Oops. Forgot to check supply level the day before. My primary source of eggs is my neighbors to the north. So easy that I don’t have to stock up the way I do with 45-minute-one-way-drive errand things.
Snack #1: Hot Cocoa, Mozzarella Cheese, Apple
Milk from Glenoma, cocoa, maple syrup, pinch of salt. Homemade mozzarella from Glenoma milk as well. Homegrown apple! Windfall, a few days before the official big harvest. Ideal harvest time for flavor and shelf life is when apples have full color and let go easily but before a night goes below 26 degrees.
Lunch: Carrot Sticks, Baba Ghanouj, Tabbouleh
I had not eaten or even heard of baba ghanouj and tabbouleh until my mid-20’s. While in grad school in Chicago, I worked for a canoe & kayak outfitters that had a Saturday evening outing entitled Moonlight Dinner Paddle. These were catered by a family Lebanese restaurant a few blocks from our riverside park destination. The paper-topped foil trays contained feast enough to overfill someone who had been schlepping boats all day and paddling for the past hour and a half. I’d had dolma and hummus before, and of course pita. Baba ganouj and tabbouleh I had to ask what they were. Not until several years later did I attempt making my own, inspired by the contents of a CSA box from Local Roots farm out of Duvall, WA.
Carrots from Root Cellar Farm in Onalaska. Eggplant from Jesse and Terry’s garden in Centralia. Probably a lot of homegrown garlic in there too. Parsley, mint, and tomatoes homegrown. If I wrote down the other ingredients and their origins I have long since lost track of the note. I am 5 months behind on my blog.
I intend to continue practicing Homegrown, County, and State Foodshed days indefinitely. After I get through the first year documenting them, I will only write about meals if there is a new ingredient or food preservation technique or exciting recipe on the table. That will make way for doing and blogging about other things.
It’s a rather summery meal for October. Like many spring and fall days in Mossyrock, it was wintery overnight and mild, low 60’s, in the afternoon. Those must have been Cherokee Purple tomatoes from the greenhouse, because I brought in the last of the Chocolate Cherry September 15th-ish in advance of a very early hard frost. Chocolate Cherry are good keepers as cherry tomatoes go but I don’t think they were that good.
Snack #2: Warm Fruit Salad, Theo Chocolate, Aronia Tea
I put fresh apple, frozen rhubarb (homegrown), and frozen blueberries (Aldrich Farm, Mossyrock) in a steamer basket and then drizzled a little maple syrup on top. The tea is made with Aronia syrup (mashed berries boiled with water and honey) and the juice from the sauce pan under the steamer basket.
Dinner: Elk Steak Fajitas
I’m not sure it’s really fajitas if there is no tortilla involved, but there’s a plate full of fixings. Tomatillo sauce made with tomatillos from Jesse and Terry’s garden in Centralia (take-home pay from home improvement gig) and homegrown shallots and garlic.
Elk steak from my mechanic. Traded apples for that. Steak previously pan fried and warmed with some lightly sauteed red peppers and shallots, both homegrown. Topped with mozzarella cheese (homemade with milk from Glenoma and potions from Italy) and homegrown cilantro.
State Foodshed Day – October 21
The light here sometimes! The light and the textures and colors. The road to my house was looking especially splendid decked out for fall one late October day.
Breakfast: Apple Muffin, Chocolate, Coffee
I used apple mash (byproduct of cider making process) instead of banana in a banana muffin recipe.
Snack #1: Hazelnuts, Apple, Herbal Tea
Apple homegrown, hazelnuts from Waldron Island (see Cornucopia = September). The tea is home-foraged rose hips and cleavers with honey from Four Cedars in Glenoma.
Lunch: Carrot Ginger Soup, Raw Kale Salad
I don’t remember now where I got last fall’s carrots. Either Root Cellar in Onalaska or the Chehalis farmer’s market. Probably some WA potatoes and homegrown shallots in there too. The kale is homegrown, as is the plum apple fruit leather. The ‘naked’ pumpkin seeds (you don’t have to shell them! they grow that way!) are from Anore’s garden on Waldron. This reminds me to try to order seeds for a variety like that. (Squash cross-pollinate readily and are notoriously varied in form so you won’t get the same thing as the parent by planting a seed unless breeding is carefully controlled, which is more work than most home gardeners are up for, especially when you want to grow only 1-3 vines of lots of kinds.)
Snack #2: Limpa with Butter, Apple Juice
Dinner: Chicago Deep Dish Pizza
Dough made with Bluebird flour using the recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook. Pork sausage previously browned and frozen in recipe-sized jars, raised by Gary the Pigman and butchered by Zack, the guy who sells me my firewood. Both neighbors. Dry mozzarella homemade with milk from Glenoma. Sauce homemade with veggies from my neighbor Val, Jesse and Terry’s garden in Centralia, and homegrown. Spinach homegrown.
Kraut from Waldron Island on the side, also featured in Cornucopia. From-scratch Chicago pizza on a wood stove ranks up there for both proudest and most delicious deep DIY meals.
Cornucopia
Life Goal: Collect beautiful baskets made out of natural fibers like the ones my friend Anore has. Anore is 80 years old, widowed 5 years ago, homesteading alone off-grid on 5 acres on Waldron in the San Juan Islands. She goes barefoot outdoors even in September when it’s cold enough to need heavy wool sweaters, even when she is driving her pickup truck. I hope to be as cool as Anore when I grow up.
These shallow, lightweight baskets are for drying herbs, nuts, and seeds, suspended on the ceiling around her wood cooking stove for the even dry heat and to protect their contents from direct sunlight and most of the dust. She has a number of more heavy-duty ones, some with handles, for collecting fruit, veggies, and nuts.
Next Level Life Goal: Learn how to make baskets, and grow the fiber myself. (I may need a subsequent life for this goal. My present life is filling up rather fast. I have my work cut out for me just growing the edible things to put in the baskets right now.)
Life Goal in Progress: Grow my own food.
Several day’s worth of harvest from September. Photo taken afternoon of the 11th. From upper left in a somewhat wiggly order: Butternut squash, ‘Chocolate Cherry’ tomatoes, ‘Cherokee Trail’ black beans, shallots, blackberries, ‘Sungold’ tomatoes, cucumber, ‘Patty Pan’ squash, ‘Cherokee Purple’ tomatoes, ‘California Wonder’ bell pepper, ‘Tequila Sunrise’ pepper. Not pictured: Whatever I was eating right away.
Harvest displayed with a minimum of ceremony in the hodgepodge of thrift store and repurposed containers I happen to have around, for the most part the containers the produce was already in. I could have spent another half hour or more gussying it up but I had no end of other things to do and I wanted to get that photo taken before I either put the food in storage or ate it.
An important part of an abundance mindset is using what you’ve got instead of waiting until things are ideal to do anything. Remember the scene in The Princess Bride where they’re on the bridge and Westley, who has been mostly dead all day, gets put on the spot to plan an invasion? He asks, “What are our assets?” Homesteading is like that a lot of the time.
Just re-watched the scene. Let me sum up: Westley asks, “What are our liabilities?” (other characters answer), followed by, “And our assets?” Eventually, a wheelbarrow gets mentioned, not originally included in the list of assets, and becomes a key element in an unlikely victory. The Permaculture imagination calls for assessing liabilities regularly but not dwelling on them, seeing how many problems you can solve with one asset or how many different problems one asset can solve, seeing to how many different and sometimes unconventional purposes one humble object or material or creature or force can be turned.
A food-grade 4-gallon bucket with a lid is a winery, a cabinet, an end table, and a plant stand. A machete is a grill spatula. A mesh utility trailer is a planter pot drain rack, a chicken wire dispenser, and a field-mouse-proof nursery for seeding flats of cool season crops that need to live in the shade until they go in the ground in September. 200′ of black garden hose left in the sun for a couple hours is a hot shower on a pleasant autumn afternoon.
It’s December 21st now as I’m writing this. The three spaghetti squash are in my pump house (insulated with an electric heater, 40-60 degrees most of the time), still in perfect condition. The cabin with its wood stove would be too warm and dry for them to hold til spring. I plan to eat the first of them on January 1 for Homegrown Food Day.
As I write this, it’s snowing. I got my garlic mulched this afternoon. Last chance before the grass gets buried and temps drop in to the teens. Strawy grass, as tall as I am on average, thick enough that it takes a hedge trimmers or a scythe to cut it, makes for great mulch, especially once the birds have picked the seed heads clean. I collected and hauled the grass in the wheelbarrow. Earlier today, the wheelbarrow carried bricks from my salvage material collection along my north fence to the big vegetable garden where I was putting down some 1.2 oz floating row cover to protect my winter vegetables from the coming sustained freeze.
This year’s harvest was quite comfortable for fresh eating with occasional surplus for barter. I went at least 6 weeks and possibly closer to 8 without buying produce except for mushrooms and avocados. The squash did pretty well but I could eat more in a winter than what I grew. I froze some jars of tomato sauce and a few other odds and ends. Storage crops (things that keep without heroics) and preserving perishable foods without freezing are things I need to work on.
Crops harvested in September in order of first appearance on my harvest record for the month: spinach, arugula, watermelon, bush beans, cucumber, tomato (‘Opalka’), strawberry, aronia berry, ground cherry, tomato (‘Cherokee Purple’, ‘San Marzano’, ‘Sungold’, ‘Chocolate Cherry’), black beans, blueberry, blackberry, squash (‘Spaghetti’, ‘Patty Pan’), parsley, sweet pepper (‘Tequila Sunrise’, ‘California Wonder’) from greenhouse, cantaloupe, squash (‘Delicata’), sunflower (for seed), leek, squash (‘Tromboncino’, ‘Butternut’). Most of those on a repeat basis somewhere between alternate days and once a week. Abundance indeed!
Foodshed Challenge Rundown: All food grown/raised/foraged/hunted in stated geographical area excepting imports allowed on Homegrown days (coffee, olive oil, salt, and yeast) + County and State days (chocolate, butter, maple syrup, and spices that do not grow in WA).
Homegrown Foodshed Day – September 1
Breakfast: Cantaloupe, Coffee
‘Minnesota Midget’ cantaloupe are true to their name. At 4-6 oz apiece, they are perfect personal size. Vine-ripened cantaloupe is a whole different food from the kind you buy at the store.
Snack #1: Apple Blackberry Leather, Cleavers and Rose Hip Tea
Lunch: Salad!
Arugula, cucumber, red bell pepper (‘California Wonder’), ‘Chocolate Cherry’ and ‘Sungold’ tomatoes, basil, a drizzle of olive oil, and a sprinkle of salt. That is a full dinner plate. No rationing necessary this time of year!
Snack #2: Watermelon
This is the dream watermelon I raved about in the previous post. 4 lbs 9 oz of vine-ripened perfection, harvested minutes before eating. Half of it I ate over several snacks. The other half I brought to a picnic to share.
Dinner: Sauteed Veggies with Dried Herbs
Yellow summer squash, ‘San Marzano’ tomatoes, red bell pepper, and shallot sauteed in olive oil with a sprinkle of winter savory and oregano on top. Also a full dinner plate. Winter savory is new to me as of last year. It tastes like a mixture of rosemary, thyme, mint, and spruce.
County Foodshed Day – September 15
Breakfast: Sweet Pepper and Cheese Omelet, Salad
Eggs from Cryptid Creek (100 yds), homemade fresh cheese curds (Thelma the Cow, Glenoma). Arugula, ‘Sungold’ tomatoes, and ‘Tequila Sunrise’ pointy orange sweet pepper, all homegrown.
Snack #1: Blackberries+, Milk
Fresh homegrown blackberries with a drizzle of maple syrup and some Theo Sea Salt Dark Chocolate on the side. Glass of cold fresh Thelma milk (Glenoma).
Lunch: Salad with Sweet Corn
Homegrown spinach and tomato–looks like a ‘Cherokee Purple’–I didn’t write it down. Hardboiled eggs from Cryptid Creek (Mossyrock), corn from Jesse and Teresa in Centralia. A buddy of mine is a property manager there. He hired me for the day to help paint their house. I was treated to a generous box full of take-home pay from their garden as well as the promised wage.
Snack #2: Vanilla Ice Cream with Aronia Berry Syrup
Ice cream homemade from the raw milk from Glenoma. For the story on that, see the county food post from July.
Aronia berries are a new thing for me this year. I had heard the name but not thought much about them until my cousin ended up with a few bushes (well, rooted twigs) as an accidental inclusion in a nursery mail order last summer and gave three to me. They bore a token handful of fruit this year, just enough for a few tablespoons of syrup. The bushes can reach 3-4′ tall, in clumps that gradually spread. Once they need thinning, cuttings can be used to propagate more.
Eaten fresh, the berries are tart and astringent, not to most people’s palate (including mine–one was enough) and can cause an adverse reaction if one eats too many. The common name ‘chokeberry’ has fallen out of favor in promotion of this rediscovered gem of winter nutrition known to the Native Americans, but it is not unwarranted. Aronia are best boiled and sweetened, or dried and used in baking or in trail mix or tea, blended with other things. I boiled mine with some water and honey (Four Cedars, Glenoma). The flavor was excellent that way. The berries are powerful enough to stand up to the honey. I don’t have a good analogy for what they taste like. They are distinctive. Quite their own selves.
Dinner: Ratatouille
My first ratatouille! Vegetable stew featuring eggplant. Eggplant, tomato, and pepper from Jesse and Teresa’s garden in Centralia. Leeks, garlic, yellow summer squash, and winter savory homegrown. Sautee in butter and olive oil, simmer a long time. Topped with homemade fresh cheese curds. Yum! A perfect, rich but not-too-heavy comfort food for fall.
State Foodshed Day – September 29
Breakfast: Limpa, Cheese, Apple, and Coffee
‘Limpa’ is Swedish for loaf. Our family uses the word to mean ‘sweet rye bread’, a recipe that my mom got from her mother’s side of the family and used to make sometimes when I was a kid. It’s heavenly fresh, or toasted with a bit of butter. It doesn’t need help to be yummy, but since living in Sweden I often eat mine as open-faced sandwiches with a thin slice of cheese and then cucumber or raspberry jam on top like I learned to do over there.
Made with Bluebird Grain Farms flour (Winthrop), half rye and half wheat. It turned out a little dense for my liking. Next time I will use the Einkorn for the non-rye half instead of whichever coarser flour I did use. I cheated a little and used a quarter cup of molasses (out of state!), which is more of an ingredient quantity that a seasoning, but I wanted the limpa to taste like limpa and I was afraid that honey just would not be the same. Honey and maple syrup in place of the sugar in the recipe. Butter of course (it’s Swedish!) and yeast and water and flour.
Apple from Jesse and Teresa’s in Centralia. In September I had just a few windfall from my tree, none really ripe. Homemade dry mozzarella cheese (Glenoma, WA). What a cozy farm breakfast it is! Jade Council presiding. I’ve decided that ‘council’ is the appropriate collective noun for jade.
Snack #1: Plums, Hazelnuts, Chocolate, and Chai
Hazelnuts! Above is Anore’s haul from her one 30-year-old hazelnut cluster with 20-30% of the harvest yet to go. (Left unpruned, hazelnuts form lots of trunks out of one stump.) I had never had fresh hazelnuts before. Dry roasted in cast iron when they’ve been drying just a couple weeks and were shelled a few minutes ago, eaten still warm . . . !!! She was kind enough to send me home with a couple pounds.
I don’t have a sturdy enough mortar and pestle to crack them the way that she showed me (bap-bap-bap-bap-bap), with just the right amount of oomph that the shell shatters and the nut stays whole. It’s a subtle kind of joy to watch someone work when her motions, so specialized to the task, are practiced to the point of nonchalance in affect but done swiftly and with such precise results. It wasn’t pretty, but for me the flat side of a meat tenderizer on one side of the hazelnut and a piece of cardboard to protect my porch on the other side did the trick.
I ordered my hazelnut trees this fall and will pick them up at the nursery in February, three different varieties that are mutually pollinating. Can’t wait til I have even a cookie sheet full of my own hazelnuts to dry. Could be as soon as 2025! I will have a mortar and pestle by then. By the time they are collectively producing as much as Anore’s does, I will need a bigger house.
Lunch: Toasted Bread and Cheese, Salad
Limpa with butter and homemade mozzarella in the toaster oven. Homegrown spinach, arugula, and tomatoes with some olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Snack #2: Zucchini Cake
Kept in the freezer from August State Food Day.
Dinner: Kraut, Meatballs, and Potatoes
Homemade kraut from cabbage from Anore’s neighbor Winnie on Waldron Island. Winnie is a retired professor with a huge garden and an adventuresome past like the two other women whose company I spent the weekend in. We made several gallons of kraut between us, chopping and measuring and getting the salt solution that encourages natural fermentation just so. It was not practical to travel with more than a quart of it. Apple and fennel (well in this case, wild anise) from Anore’s garden for seasoning. So much better than any I’ve had from the store. Kraut parties appear to be a regular thing on Waldron in the fall.
Meatballs left from spring (April?) state food day. Boiled potatoes from Root Cellar in Onalaska. The end.
Ashes to Watermelon
A maple tree that had grown on the ridge south of the creek heated my cabin for the first half of the winter last year. It showed up in pieces in the back of a white pickup several days after I messaged a local seller on OfferUp. It had stood for perhaps 30 years rooted somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 ft of elevation, looking out over the valley I call home, gradually being relegated to the understory by towering conifers.
When the unit it occupied got clear cut, the timber of commercial value rattled down the hill on the backs of U-shaped cradle trucks and barreled around the bend in the narrow winding backroad past the gravel easement that leads to my land, clearly in a hurry to be transformed into lumber and what we still out of habit call telephone poles. The maple lay where it fell until an enterprising and burly young man, son and grandson of loggers, armed with chainsaw, axe and a permit for gleaning firewood from the carnage left on BLM land, spent his morning cutting it into rounds and splitting it for me.
My second load of firewood for the winter—a full cord this time—was also maple. It arrived just in time, a few days before a storm that brought 14” of snow and a windy night with a low of 19°F. The previous seller had dropped off the map and the next internet person I booked stood me up a week after I called him. Plenty of downed wood here but all of it wet and half green. My mechanic referred his wife’s cousin for the job.
Great-grandson of one of the founding fathers of Mossyrock, he now resides on 40 acres which has been in the family for a century or more. His lot is a subdivision of a much larger parcel purchased for an impossibly small sum of money by today’s reckoning. Firewood is a side gig. He does some permit-harvesting up in the hills but most he collects by selectively logging his land. This maple stood taller than a man before young Mr. Woods was a twinkle in his mother’s eye. Perhaps as a child he climbed it or dug for earthworms in its shade. There are all kinds of roots around here.
About once a week, afternoon when the embers have fully died from the morning’s fire, I empty the ashes into a bucket. Tree dust. All of the non-combustible content left behind. Cellulose and other hydrocarbons (C?H?) + oxygen (O2) –> carbon dioxide (CO2) + water (H2O). Exothermic reaction, meaning the energy stored in chemical bonds gets released as heat. Combustion. Poof! Out the chimney. Encapsulated sunlight that landed on maple leaves over the course of most of my lifetime radiates into the room.
What remains amounts to a natural mineral supplement for the garden, concentrated micronutrients in readily bioavailable form, procured without artificial chemical processing or mining. Calcium carbonate, potash (potassium), phosphate (phosphorus), iron, manganese, boron, magnesium, sodium, copper, and zinc are the more prevalent or important ones. Wood ash can be used like lime to increase the pH (=reduce the acidity) of soil, but with all the aforementioned advantages over lime.
Wood ash is more bioavailable, more minerally complex, and moreover is a byproduct of something you are already importing and would otherwise have to dispose of so is energetically and financially free. Because of its pH implications it must be used sparingly and only in areas where the acidity of the soil is too much for one’s desired crops to thrive. Easy to overcorrect if you pile it on.
Internet experts specialize in being vague and disagreeing. After some research in various quarters I settled on an application rate of 1 gallon: 100 sq ft (= 1 c / 6 sq ft). If an area needs more correction, better to apply more times a year than more at once so that it can gradually work its way in. Dust the soil using a plastic measuring cup for a scoop. Let rain, earth worms, pill bugs, and mycorrhizae do their thing.
Watermelons originated in Africa. Who knew? Not I until the watermelon I harvested August 1 turned out albino in what should be a red-fleshed variety and I started googling to find out why. Turns out, watermelons are not only drought-tolerant but drought-preferring once established. Rather counterintuitive for a fruit whose name is half ‘water’ and which is more than half water on the inside. Makes sense that it evolved in a region that has two seasons: rainy and dry.
Its wild ancestors survive untended in the desert. It was domesticated several thousand years ago and spread across the continent enough that archaeologists cannot agree whether the plant as we know it emerged in South Africa, Sudan, or around Egypt and Libya. A picture of one appears in an Egyptian tomb from 4,000 years ago. Trade introduced the watermelon to the Mediterranean around 2,000 years ago. All we know is that this summer picnic staple was brought to you by generations of inspired human attention before the institution of the alphabet and that they get around.
A watermelon is an oasis in a ball. Few things are more refreshing than a watermelon on a hot summer afternoon even when one has an endless supply of cool well water on tap. Imagine if you lived somewhere that the creeks dried up seasonally, the rains did not fall for months, where you might have to walk an hour to a well or half a day to a lake and carry back all your drinking, cooking, and bathing water on your head. Only once every 10 days would you have to share with the vine, while for weeks in the hottest, driest part of the summer the vine held the water and sweetened it, wrapped up in a sturdy green rind, packaged in a way that did not readily invite insects and did not spill. What a treasure a watermelon would be for you!
I ordered my ‘Blacktail Mountain’ watermelon seeds from Uprising, a small PNW seed company specializing in heirloom varieties suited to a temperate maritime climate. This variety of watermelon is ideal because they are small enough to fully ripen in our [historically] short warm season and because at 2.5-4 lbs they are manageable for eating without waste when one lives alone and only had a mini-fridge to keep leftovers in. This year I got four fruits off of three vines between August 1 and September 15, all softball-to-volleyball sized.
The first one, though white-fleshed (indicating overwatered and/or slightly underripe) was still quite crisp and sweet and flavorful. That vine bloomed again shortly after and managed to size up a second melon that matured before our first very early hard freeze September 16. The second one on the same vine was red and not as sweet as the first.
I planted this year’s watermelon seeds in the greenhouse April 27. The starts went outside and into the ground June 15, later than necessary based on frost but I was behind schedule clearing the turf off the new garden beds due to soggy weather and life. The third watermelon to ripen, the 4-pounder—definitely the best watermelon I ever had. It shimmered in your mouth. Sweet without being syrupy, and just so much flavor. I had cut back on the watering a few weeks before. Nature had not been watering for several months. Now I know.
Next year I’ll plant the watermelon seeds closer to April 15 and get them in the ground June 1 unless we are scheduled for even crazier late spring cold. (Last frost May 29 this year!) Maybe with the extra head start the vines will get strong enough that they can support more than one fruit at a time (they had plenty of blooms, and 3-6 bitty melons apiece that sized up enough to show they were pollinated before yellowing and dropping off), or at least all have time for a second fruit.
Last year I bought watermelon starts from a nursery. They were already pot-bound and stressed. Mice got one of the four before I figured out about the milk carton collars. Planted in the ground around the same time, the vines did not do anything but stay green until sometime in August. They then grew 2-3 feet long and put on one fruit apiece. Two reached baseball-sized and one almost attained softball but they stopped enlarging before our first hard frost in October, at which point I brought them in. Sugar Baby is supposed to be a dwarf variety but not *that* dwarf. The Internet says they can reach 8 lbs. The October watermelons were edible but not impressive for any reason other than being an October watermelon. Rough start in life (never really overcame the stunting from pot stress), less compost applied later in the season (I had just started my compost pile in April of 2020), and no ash.
Less compost later and no ash means fewer nutrients in the soil. No ash means more acidic soil means harder for most plants to take up the nutrients that are there. Too many variables to pin the relative success of this year’s watermelon to any one factor but I daresay the application of a little tree dust served them well.
All of the melons, squash, and cucumber did much better this year than last. Most of last year’s in absence of a proper greenhouse I had planted from seed in early June directly in the ground.
Bits of calcium and iron that were the maple that warmed my house last winter before feeding the watermelon are in my blood and bones. Perhaps a few molecules of that tree line the retinas on which the late afternoon October light imprints the raw beauty of the southern ridge where the maple used to stand. (Potassium? Copper? What are eyes made of, anyway?) These mysterious and highly specialized arrays of cells, not caring where their components were scavenged from, cooperate with the mysterious and highly improbable terms of biochemistry and physics by conjuring up an image in my brain.
Other particles from the tree dust are scurrying around as pill bugs or resting in the frost-withered vines until I get around to cleaning up that garden bed and composting them.
The carbon dioxide that flew up the chimney makes the atmosphere ever-more-dangerously insulating, though some of it will be breathed in by the leaves or needles on the ridges above me to become future timber and firewood, fresh oxygen breathed out in return. The water vapor in the wood smoke joins the mist floating up from the creek and the clouds that blow in from the ocean before falling as precipitation further east. The hydrogen atoms that held the maple aloft and the oxygen from the wooded hills that settled on the valley on a cold winter night joined to become crystals that graced the landscape up at White Pass, smoothing the rocky terrain to make way for a flurry of skis.
August and drought feel like much longer than two months ago on a late fall afternoon after an inch of rain in less than 48 hours. The damp chill is setting into my fingers as I write this. I think I’ll go split another bucket of logs and build a fire.
Foodshed Challenge Rundown: All food grown/raised/foraged/hunted in stated geographical area excepting imports allowed on Homegrown days (coffee, olive oil, salt, and yeast) + County and State days (chocolate, butter, maple syrup, and spices that do not grow in WA).
Homegrown Foodshed Day – August 1
Breakfast: Apple Mash and Blackberries, Coffee
Apple mash thawed from last year’s cider making process, blackberries fresh.
Snack #1: Apple Rings, Fruit Salad, Rose Hip and Cleavers Tea
Apple rings made in dehydrator last spring and kept in glass. They still taste great. Fresh strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries . . . nomnomnom. Little piece of heaven there. My big tea mug that fits both tea balls was dirty and doing dishes is a bit of a process here so I had two small cups of tea instead.
Lunch: Tabbouleh and Boiled Potatoes
Homegrown food in August gets exciting. I started the parsley early from seed and moved it up into several gallon pots. Cucumbers and tomatoes reaching critical mass where I can harvest a portion every few days. The potatoes volunteered in the garlic bed, ones I missed from my meager harvest last year. They came out with the garlic mid-July. Small potatoes are better than none!
Tabbouleh made with olive oil and salt. Potatoes, too.
Snack #2: Watermelon
Just watermelon! Less than 10 minutes from vine to plate. So exciting to go out to the garden with pruning shears and cut it up and enjoy on the front steps on a hot summer afternoon.
Dinner: Tromboncino with Pesto, Snap Peas
Homegrown pesto made back in July right after the garlic harvest, when the basil was at its prime. Convenient of them to coincide that way. I managed to keep it in pretty good shape through the heat wave by moving it to my porch where it gets afternoon shade. The basil lives in pots because last year when I planted a few seedlings in the ground as an experiment, they did not last the night.
Tromboncino! An entertaining vegetable in the zucchini family with an equally entertaining name. It’s especially fun if you throw in some Italian emphasis. Tromboncino tastes like a cross between zucchini and spaghetti squash. I’ve roasted it whole before but this time I just boiled it in bite-sized chunks. Freshly thawed pesto on top, fresh snap peas on the side.
County Foodshed Day – August 14
Breakfast: Scrambled Eggs, Coffee
Eggs from Cryptid Creek, 100 yds away, cooked in butter.
Snack #1: Smoothie
Apple mash (homegrown, thawed byproduct from last year’s cider-making process), blueberries (Aldrich, Mossyrock), blackberries (homegrown).
Lunch: Potato Salad, Watermelon
The second watermelon is red! I backed off on the watering and waited a little longer after it stopped getting bigger. Tasted about the same.
Boiled potatoes (Root Cellar, Onalaska), chanterelle mushrooms (foraged last October several miles northeast) sauteed in butter, ‘Sungold’ tomatoes (homegrown), pesto from homegrown basil and garlic plus olive oil and salt.
Snack #2: Chocolate Milkshake
Homemade ice cream = milk (Glenoma), eggs (Mossyrock), honey (Glenoma), vanilla, and salt. Add cocoa and buzz in the food processor for a few seconds. Yum.
Dinner: Caprese Salad
Homegrown ‘Cherokee Purple’ tomatoes and cucumber on a bed of homegrown arugula with homemade cheese curds (milk from Glenoma, potions from Italy via Homesteader’s supply) and a drizzle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar on top.
State Foodshed Day – August 28
Breakfast: Zucchini Pancake with Blackberries and Cantaloupe, Coffee
Pancake = egg (Cryptid Creek, Mossyrock), kefir (Grace Harbor Farms, Custer), zucchini (neighbor in Mossyrock), einkorn flour (Bluebird Grain Farms, Winthrop), honey (Beeworks, Bellingham), cinnamon, salt. Cantaloupe and blackberries homegrown.
Snack #1: Zucchini Cake, Milk
Cake baked the night before. Double chocolate zucchini cake is the best reason I can think of for zucchini to exist, though I enjoy it a number of ways. Pictured is the second giant zucchini my neighbor gave me. The cake was made with a portion of the first one, which was not quite as photogenic anymore after being used in a prior cake and several pancakes. This one weighed probably four pounds. The third one he gave me, which I have used to bake the 3rd and 4th zucchini cakes of season, weighed in at 5.4! Never have I encountered zucchini that were still this sweet at baking size.
Flour (Bluebird Grain Farms, Winthrop), honey (Beeworks, Bellingham), zucchini (neighbor in Mossyrock), kefir (Grace Harbor Farms, Custer), eggs (Cryptid Creek, Mossyrock). Olive oil, cocoa (Sierra Leone), maple syrup (Vermont), chocolate chips (Peru), salt, baking powder and soda, cinnamon, and cloves imported from outside WA.
Lunch: Carrot Salad, Hardboiled Eggs on Greens, Bread and Butter, Hard Cider
I loved my mom’s carrot raisin salad as a kid. I’ve forgotten about it for years until recently. I now use plain yogurt or kefir instead of the mayo or Miracle Whip. No WA State grown raisins (yet–I plan to grow some) so I minced some homegrown-homemade blackberry apple leather and that worked rather well. Grated Carrots (Piece by Piece Farm, Olympia), kefir (Grace Harbor Farms, Custer).
Hardboiled eggs (Cryptid Creek) and spinach (homegrown) with a drizzle of olive oil and salt, Italian sourdough (homemade, left from WA State Foodshed day in July), butter. Cider from Tieton. The Hazy Strawberry is a little too sweet for my liking. I prefer their plain Organic which is the Goldilocks sweet spot between sweet and dry.
Snack #2: Ice Cream
Homemade ice cream using Lewis County ingredients. Milk (Glenoma), eggs (Mossyrock), honey (Glenoma), vanilla, and salt.
Dinner: Hodgepodge
Not quite a stir-fry. More of a warm salad. ‘Tromboncino’ summer squash (homegrown), elk steak (previously pan-fried and frozen), Cherokee Purple tomatoes (homegrown), and red bell pepper (homegrown) sauteed in olive oil and butter. Homemade fresh cheese curds (milk from Glenoma, potions from Italy) and homegrown basil on top.
Say Cheese
I spent my birthday money on a cheese making kit. A step or two up from the single-batch gift boxes, it was an entry-level hobbyist setup with all the basic hardware and enough enzyme and rennet for a dozen or so batches, recipes included for six different types of cheese.
Cheese making is great fun. It is also time consuming (at least it requires several minutes of doing at intervals over a 24-hour period, frequently in the first 3 hours) and very much makes one appreciate the per-pound price of quality cheese. I have yet to try an aged cheese. I decided to stick to mozzarella for a whole year to hone my skills at that before branching out. Five batches in now.
The wheel pictured below was my third batch. Second batch was fresh mozzarella, enjoyed on County Foodshed Day.
It takes a gallon of milk to make a pound of cheese. Afterwards one is left with three quarts of whey, which is a bit of an acquired taste, not because it’s unpleasant but because if one is expecting milk it tastes off. It’s not quite juice either. Somewhere in the kombucha and kefir realm but entirely its own self. I’ve come to enjoy it and find it best cold.
At $10 a gallon for farm-fresh raw milk, I am not saving money on the $5-$10 a pound that I usually spend on cheese at Grocery Outlet and Trader Joe’s. Unlike some things homemade or homegrown, the taste while pleasant and decidedly ‘fresh’ is thus far not superior to a respectable grocery store cheese, and this is certainly not the fault of the milk. I’m hoping with practice that’ll change. The fresh curds are the exception. The curds, once they have drained for the requisite 4-8 hours but before they have been submerged in a hot water bath for the ‘stretching’ that either a fresh or dry mozzarella requires, are amazing.
Once I left the whole batch as curds out of overwhelm and timing issues. They are less work and less waiting than the finished balls of fresh mozzarella or wheel of dry (shredding) kind. Even refrigerated they don’t keep as long, and are not as good after 3 days as they are on day 1. The dry cheese is the other way around.
I have no problem eating a pound of cheese in 3 days (in fact I have a problem NOT eating a pound of cheese in three days) but if you want your cheese to keep in the fridge for a week or two without sophisticated storage preparation, better to go through the process all the way. I have taken to eating an ounce or two of the fresh curds before finishing the rest of the batch in its intended form.
Were one in possession of a dairy animal and harvesting more milk on the daily than one could drink, converting to cheese for storage becomes a practical endeavor, and experimenting with something that would otherwise go to waste would be pure fun. I do someday hope to have a pair of dairy goats.
For now it’s the principle of the thing–support a neighbor whose care of his animals is top-notch, and have affordable accessible cheese for the Foodshed Challenge, which was not previously the case. Small-batch artisan cheese–made by farmers in Washington state, not a factory–costs upwards of 3x per pound what I am paying for mine not including the value of my time. It has every right to do so. It’s also not available anywhere I regularly shop and to drive miles out of my way just for that errand would defeat much of the purpose. The nutritional and digestive advantages of raw dairy over pasteurized are also part of the appeal.
Foodshed Challenge Rundown: All food grown/raised/foraged/hunted in stated geographical area excepting imports allowed on Homegrown days (coffee, olive oil, salt, and yeast) + County and State days (chocolate, butter, maple syrup, and spices that do not grow in WA).
County Foodshed Day – July 13
Breakfast: Omelet, Coffee, Apple Juice
County breakfast just got a whole lot more exciting! April, May, and June were scrambled eggs. One could go a long while on farm-fresh scrambled eggs for breakfast but it’s fun to be able to jazz it up. The recipe made 4 balls of cheese. I had eaten one the previous day. I put half of one into the omelet. Displaying all three because it looks more impressive that way.
Eggs (Cryptid Creek, 100 yards), homemade fresh mozzarella cheese (milk from Glenoma, potions from Italy via Homesteader’s Supply). Arugula, basil, chives, and tomatoes all homegrown. Second-run apple juice (homegrown). I drank most of the coffee while prepping everything else.
Snack #1: Cherries and Chocolate
Cherries from the Chehalis farmer’s market. I forget the farm and variety name but they were grown in Lewis County on the west side (of the Cascades–most cherries grown on the east side of the state in the Yakima valley). I ate half the basket of cherries and several squares of chocolate on my way back from errands in town.
Snack #2: Pepino
Cucumber (Chehalis), lime juice, salt. Hold the cayenne, which is the typical 4th ingredient in this dish. We have a Scandinavian palate to accommodate here.
I was introduced to this refreshing Latin American snack when working at Chicago River Canoe & Kayak. The park was in a predominantly Latino neighborhood and was home to a number of community sporting events as well as family picnics. The bicycle-pulled or human-pushed snack carts would come around and we would spend our tip money on soggy paper plates full of ‘pepino’ or on ‘paletas’, the yummy Mexican popsicles that tasted more like decent frozen yogurt than they did the food-colored-test-tube-flavored American kind. Cold corn-on-the-cob, shaved off the cob into a cup and loaded with mayo and cayenne was the third typical offering. I only tried that once.
Snack #3: Milkshake
Raw ice cream (see A Cow Named Lu), homegrown strawberries and blueberries. Nomnomnom. The cheese might not clobber the competition but that is a contender for the best milkshake I’ve ever had.
Dinner: Elk Steak, Beets with Greens
Elk steak (Lewis county, shot and butchered by my mechanic and his sons) marinated with olive oil, caramelized shallot (homegrown), homegrown hard cider (=somewhat fermented second-run apple juice), and maple syrup.
Beets from Chehalis Farmer’s Market, root part roasted in toaster oven, greens sauteed.
State Foodshed Day – July 28
Prepping the ‘biga’ (Italian for sourdough starter) for the Italian sourdough the afternoon before. I bought a sampler pack (2 lbs each of 5 types) of flour from Bluebird Grain Farms back in April. I’ve had this recipe for ages, back from an Italian-themed party (New Year’s?) in my mid-twenties. I hadn’t tried it in years but it was right there in my recipe folder where I left it.
With standard issue grocery store ‘all-purpose’ flour it’s pretty good. With Bluebird flour it both looks worlds fancier and tastes like it belongs at a vineyard in Tuscany. I have been baking more than half of my own bread for more than half my life now. Just add water, salt, and yeast. Top-notch fresh ingredients + long experience = magic.
Breakfast: Swedish Pancakes, Coffee
Welcome to Valhalla. Breakfast is served.
I definitely identify as a Viking. The traditional Nordic vision of the afterlife involved fighting all day, dying gloriously in battle (the prerequisite for entry to heaven), being resurrected in the evening, and then indulging in a feast involving pork and mead every night. The pork came from a pig (a wild boar?) that regenerates every day to be slaughtered for the feast.
Nowhere in the mythology does it mention breakfast, at least not that I can remember. That leaves room for poetic license. I am free to imagine that they serve pancakes for breakfast in Valhalla every day. What kind of heaven would it be if it were otherwise? Kom igen nu. (Come on, now . . .)
A single batch of my family’s Swedish pancake recipe typically serves three, even if those three are my nieces and nephew at ages 2, 2, and 4. Those children can put some pancakes away. Miniature Vikings. Rarely do I make Swedish pancakes for anything other than a family gathering but this particular morning I let myself move slow, reveling in the production and the results.
As eating well is much of my purpose in undertaking Edgewild Farm, it would be foolish not to take the time to savor my meals and my place now and then. The Foodshed Challenge has been good for helping me take the time to do so. My family on road trips likes to say, “This would be really cool if it were in Europe!” The view from my front porch–meals that I prepared and partially grew, that originated in my state of residence grown by people who love the land and care about food . . . so grateful.
So grateful to be able to live this way, to have these moments, that I’m tearing up as a write this. It has been such a hard year. I’m lonely. I’m tired. Lots of things are not going according to plan. Everything is getting more expensive so fast that the cost of materials will set me back months or years on projects instrumental to my vision here. But I wake up every morning to this place that is beautiful for anywhere. I have enough to eat and almost every day I eat something delicious even if I don’t spend this much time to make it beautiful. As long as I live I will never run out of good work to do. Yes things are incomplete but my plate is so very full.
That is definitely going to be the calendar photo for July.
Pancakes: eggs (Cryptid Creek, Mossyrock), milk (Thelma the Cow, Glenoma), einkorn flour (Bluebird Grain Farms, Winthrop), maple syrup, salt. Strawberries and blueberries homegrown. Cooked in butter with maple syrup on top.
Snack #1: Bread and Cheese
Dough rising. Bread fresh out of oven. Just add butter and and a wedge of homemade dry mozzarella (milk from Thelma of Glenoma, potions from Italy via Homesteader’s Supply).
Lunch: Bruschetta, Cucumber, Tomato
Homemade Italian sourdough drizzled with olive oil and toasted with Cherokee Purple tomato (homegrown), homemade mozzarella. Basil (homegrown) on top after toasting, with another Cherokee Purple tomato and a homegrown cucumber on the side. This would be really cool if it were in Europe.
Snack #2 – Raw Ice Cream with Blackberries
I thought the blackberries might do poorly this year on account of heat and drought like the ones in the Seattle area did after the un-winter of 2015 and subsequent hot dry summer. Not at all. If anything they were better than last year. I think their roots go down to the underworld and that they are as immortal as Valhalla’s boar.
Raw ice cream: milk (Glenoma), honey (Beeworks, Bellingham), egg (Cryptid Creek, Mossyrock), vanilla, salt.
Dinner: Meatballs, Potatoes, Cabbage
Swedish meatballs left from State Food Day in April. Potatoes (boiled with a little butter and salt on top) and cabbage (just sliced raw) from Piece by Piece farm in Olympia. In-house cuisine flight Sweden to Italy and back to Sweden again. Good day.
Heat Storm
The heat storm burned the new leaves on the blueberry bushes. Rhododendron, too.
Day before the heat storm when temps were only in the mid-90’s, I cut 9” off my ponytail with a kid scissors. It was 18 months since I had gotten a hair cut due more to chemical sensitivities than COVID (I can’t breathe in normal salons) and the longest my hair has ever been. Afterward I looked like a horror-flick creepy doll with my hair down but it was much more comfortable that way.
I since have found a stylist who is self-employed in her own little shop who could take me for the first slot of the day so there were not yet too many ambient product fumes. My hair is respectable-looking and level now. It’s never fancy. Down when it’s clean. In a ponytail or bandana when it isn’t.
For four days I watered all the annuals every day instead of the usual 2-4 day rotation and twice as long as I usually do for the size of plant or time of year. Twice a day for potted plants and seedlings instead of the usual once. Every day for the blueberries as well, which otherwise get watered once a week or maybe twice if it is really hot and dry. Shrubs and saplings planted in the last two years, alternate days instead of at one-to-two week intervals.
Even so, most seedlings didn’t make it.
The tomatoes, both in ground and evacuated from greenhouse, stopped setting fruit and dropped their blossoms. What fruit they already had stopped sizing up. Several ripened the size that they were. Most waited a week or more to resume taking on color and did not resume bigger-ing. It was two weeks after the heat storm ended before new fruit started to appear.
Aside from the scorched new tender leaves, the blueberries themselves hung on fine. My neighbors who did not water every day lost most of theirs off plants much more established than mine.
If squash and cucumbers get drought stressed, the powdery mildew sets in and the leaves die off faster than new ones grow. Existing fruit will mature decently but they largely stop producing once half of their leaves are gone. Season’s over. Besides the crop loss you have to burn the plants (out of the question with the fire ban) or throw them in the garbage to keep the mildew spores from persisting in the compost and being worse the next year, wasting valuable biomass. I have been able to stave this off so far.
(If you are really truly hot-composting, this should kill the mildew, and mildewy and otherwise diseased or seedy plants are fine for urban compost bins because industrial-scale composting heats everything up pretty high. It’s chemical contamination you want to avoid passing on for soil-building in any form.)
Basil: Out of greenhouse (were nighttime temps just around 40?), onto porch for afternoon shade.
Peppers: Out of greenhouse, onto white plastic picnic table that serves as my kitchen counter & dish-washing station in the shade of the 10’x10’ pop-up shelter that serves as my outdoor kitchen. Peppers in 3-quart pots have to be off the ground or the bunnies and mice will get them.
Greenhouse tomatoes: Out of greenhouse and onto the ground under the pop-up shelter. These are in 5- or 8-gallon pots so safe from small critters unless they flop and some tender new growth or a tomato gets too close to the ground. Deer and elk, however, would love to prune them to a nub. Scrounge segments of fencing to cobble together a perimeter for the 10’x10’. Not much room to move under the shelter between the table, the cinderblock anchor, and 6 tomato plants sprawling over the edges of their large pots. It’s a good thing I don’t need to get in except to water anyway. I can cook what little I’m eating out in the oven hut and the dishes can wait.
Food: Out of cabin and in to root cellar. ‘Non-perishable’ things containing oil can turn rancid if held at high temperatures. 90 is enough. Proteins slowly denature above 104 and enzymes are killed instantly at 117. Chocolate and cooking oils first . . . priorities! Then nuts and nut butters, seeds, grains, flour, coffee and tea. Last, preserves in glass and boxed soups. Secure everything against mice in coolers or heavy duty plastic totes before stowing it away.
Water 4-6 hours a day, getting up at 5 am because it’ll be in the 80’s mid-morning and 90+ by noon. High of 100 Saturday 6/26. 105 on Sunday. 108 on Monday.
My little outdoor thermometer has a 24-hour memory programmed to reset at noon. I keep it on my furthest front step at night (no shelter from full range of cold due to building or trees) and on top of a plastic tote under the picnic table in the pop-up shelter during the day so that it is in 100% shade (even a minute of direct sun can skew the high temp severely) and so that it is not in any trapped air or being buffered by the relative cool of the ground. Besides optimizing accuracy, shuttling it between the two spots helps me to remember to write it down.
Saturday I sprayed myself with the hose several times but it was too humid for evaporative cooling to be effective. Sunday I walked a quarter mile on my 30 minute meal break (remote work for wage-paying gig) to sit in the creek for 5 minutes. Bringing down the core body temperature works wonders for presence of mind and restoring locomotion to at least half speed.
Guzzling water all day, sometimes with some Himalayan sea salt mixed in for electrolytes, but lost my appetite almost altogether for several days. Monday with no climate control and the sun beating on the steel roof, I had sweat running down my forearms and onto the keyboard and I started feeling woozy just standing still. On my break I filled two 5-gallon buckets about 2/3 full with 60-degree well water and stood in them for the duration of my shift. Just cooling the blood as it flowed through my calves and feet reduced the sweat level to a mere glisten and kept the fog in my skull from turning to steam and floating away. Clock off at 5 pm. Go straight to the lake (a 2-mile drive) and jump in.
For several days temps were still around 90 outside at twilight, hotter in the cabin, and worse yet in the loft where my bed is. Four nights in a row I slept on the porch. If one must be up with the sun a week after summer solstice in order not to lose one’s past three months of work and next three months of food, it helps if this is the view when you open your eyes. Turn your head sideways for the full effect.
Withered slightly, less productive for a week or two if not for the season from the strain, but most of us made it through.
Foodshed Challenge Rundown: All food grown/raised/foraged/hunted in stated geographical area excepting imports allowed on Homegrown days (coffee, olive oil, salt, and yeast) + County and State days (chocolate, butter, maple syrup, and spices that do not grow in WA).
Homegrown Foodshed Day – July 1
The official local industry of Mossyrock is blueberries. This is for real. I have twelve blueberry bushes that I bought gallon-size last spring from Aldrich, a local multi-generation family farm. July is the month for blueberries, with a token few coming ripe in late June and early August. At my request, Glenn Aldrich himself assembled a sampler of different flavors and sizes with a range of early, mid, and late varieties. It’s working out well.
Year two marked a perceptible increase on year one, roughly guesstimating double from 2 lbs total to 4. Maybe this winter I will find where I wrote down last year’s harvest and add it up and compare it to the list from this year.
One is supposed to harvest blueberries every 4th day because they are their final shade of dark blue for an average of 4 days before they are fully ripe and sweet. Beyond that they start to shrivel and fall off the bush. Picking on this schedule lets you get them at optimum average flavor without losing many to being too far gone. Harvest from the previous evening, clockwise from upper left: Bluetta, Northland, Rencocas, and Bluecrop. (Edit: Not Rencocas. Toro. I checked my harvest records the evening after publishing. Rencocas should be the earlier variety but the Toro got a few in first. Most Toro are between dime and nickel size. I’ve had a few the diameter of a quarter. These were apparently too much in a hurry to finish growing. Perhaps the heat affected them.)
A few ounces every 4th day for a month is perfect for decorating pancakes, yogurt with granola, or oatmeal. Someday there will be pie and jam and smoothies and muffins featuring homegrown blueberries. Someday I will be measuring a day’s harvest in pounds and freezing them by the gallon. Someday!
Breakfast: Boiled Apple Mash and Rhubarb with Blueberries, Coffee
Morning Snack: Apple Rings, Chamomile Tea
Last year I got just enough chamomile blossoms for one cup of tea. The chamomile plant started out as a wispy thing in a 3″ nursery pot purchased probably in June. I moved it into a gallon pot. By late summer it filled a 3 gallon pot, then died back completely over the winter. This spring I moved it up into a 10 gallon half-barrel. It is working on filling up that. Round one of flowers from this year is 6-8 cups of tea. I cut the stems back after flowering and the plant is starting in with fresh greens.
I anticipate the flowers filling one 8 oz glass jar, not packed in. This is about as as much chamomile tea as I drink in a year. The flavor is so much richer than storebought (even good-quality bulk), which is no surprise. What’s astonishing is that tea is only $20 a lb instead of $200. Chamomile will not be a cash crop for me.
Lunch: Snap Peas and Tomatoes
Half a pound of snap peas total, harvested alternate days over the course of a week. Snap peas are a cool season crop and don’t usually tolerate sustained temperatures much above 80. These not only survived the heat storm but started growing new sections of vine and put on a bunch of blossoms about a week after the heat subsided. They didn’t slow down and turn yellow enough for me to pull them out until late July. I will definitely be planting that variety again.
The tomatoes though. The first Sungold tomato ripened in the greenhouse on June 18. There were a good number sizing up right behind it. I thought I’d be able to collect at least a quarter pound on July 1 or several days before. Nevermind. Only ¼ oz due to the heat storm. A shriveled and runty piddling three. At least the garnish makes it look like a salad. Not that there is anything wrong with just a plate full of snap peas.
Afternoon Snack: Fruit Salad
Strawberries and blueberries fresh from the garden. Some of the last blackberries from the freezer. It will be an eternal learning process optimizing how much of the harvest to put away and then rationing it to make it last but use it up before that type of produce starts coming in the next year.
I need another chest freezer already. What a delightful problem to have! A much bigger problem is where to put the chest freezer and be able to plug it in.
I also need to learn how to can, which will alleviate freezer overcrowding in the long run. Right now, however, I am not harvesting enough of anything all at once to make a big enough batch of anything to be worth canning. I would have to freeze several weeks’ or months’ yield and then thaw and can it to make room in the freezer for the next thing.
Dinner: Sauteed Squash Blossoms and Shallot, Salad, Cherries
I don’t recall having eaten squash blossoms before. They were beautiful and delicious. There are any number of recipes online for how to do this in fancy ways. I just sauteed thinly sliced shallot in olive oil and added the squash blossoms right at the end, stirring gently over low heat until they wilted. Ta da!
Fresh arugula, lamb’s quarters, and sorrel for the salad.
Wild black cherries from the massive and photogenic tree framed by my kitchen window. I can only reach about the bottom 10% even with the help of the 6′ orchard ladder (I’m not carrying the 10′ ladder around down there), which is just as well because as is I froze two gallon bags (one for making wine) and the fruit is so small relative to the pit that they would be nonsense to process for making pie. Rather yummy for munching fresh for a week and a half in late June through early July.
Over a month later as I write this, I am bracing myself for Heat Storm #2 to start two days from now. (Tomorrow from date of publication.) Here in the valley temps average 7 degrees warmer and colder than the forecast for town. 97, 104, 103, 92 were listed for Wednesday through Saturday at last glance. Could be four triple-digit days for me. With an hour less of daylight on either end than in June, at least perhaps the cabin will cool off a little more at night.
I will be really sad if there is a two-week gap in the tomato harvest again. Things were just starting to get real.
A Cow Named Lu
As I was driving back from an errand an hour or so southwest of home, a highway sign alerted me to a total closure of I-5 a few exits north due to an accident. I chose my own detour and found myself in a little town that I had never passed through before. The main drag took me right past their farmer’s market which happened to be going on that afternoon.
None of the several markets I had been to in my new home region had a dairy vendor, which was disappointing and baffling for a county that has a fair number of cattle. It was a lucky detour that day. I came home with a half gallon of what turned out to be the sweetest, richest milk I’ve ever tasted. The vendor was very proud of his product and evidently loved his animals. He even labels the jar by their names.
This week’s dairy perfection brought to you by a cow named Lu. Naturally, there is also a Thelma.
I normally don’t drink half a gallon of milk a week, and I wasn’t sure how long the raw milk would keep. When I buy pretty-good pasture-raised-but-pasteurized milk from PCC I do so a quart at a time and more often than not the last cup turns before I get to it. It would be a crime to let that happen to milk from Lu.
Ice cream, of course! I’ve been wanting for ages to make homemade ice cream. Half an hour of Google research turned up any number of ice cream recipes insisting on their superiority and one fabulous article about different methods for making ice cream without an official ice cream machine. The food processor method seemed like it would work best for me.
A homesteading blog post theorized, sensibly I thought, that one is defeating some of the purpose of raw milk by cooking it to make custard for ice cream the way some of the more sophisticated recipes call for. The same blogger also theorized that considering the gobs of raw cookie dough she had eaten in her life without negative consequence, some raw egg in raw ice cream that goes straight from farm-fresh to frozen should be just fine. I am in that camp all the way!
Raw ice cream:
3 cups fresh raw milk, including most of the cream off the top. I let it settle and layer out again after having gently mixed it to enjoy the first cup of cold milk full-cream for the complete experience.
1 duck egg. Several recipes insisted on 3-6 eggs or yolks per quart recipe of ice cream. I can’t imagine. Duck eggs are extra-rich and the yolks are large and really dark orange, even more so than a healthy farm-fresh chicken egg. Just one gave the ice cream a deep ‘French vanilla’ yellow. Perhaps the presence of the egg is what makes it French-style ice cream? I have since made this recipe again with a chicken egg. Much as I prefer the richness of duck eggs hard-boiled, I think I prefer the chicken for ice cream.
2 T honey, from Four Cedars in Glenoma.
1 tsp vanilla
a pinch of salt
Whisk the egg with the honey until the honey is at least somewhat dissolved. Add vanilla and well-chilled milk, whisk again briefly, and pour into a 9×9 casserole dish. Freeze.
Thaw just until you can get the ice cream scoop in. Blend in food processor until it is milkshake consistency. Put in individual serving containers (I did 8 oz wide mouth canning jars but snack-size Tupperware or even paper cups would work for kids) and immediately refreeze.
The trick for creamy ice cream, besides lots of cream, is having it freeze fast. The crystals are smaller that way. By churning the near-solid-state batter you break up the crystals and evenly distribute the coldness. Back into the freezer, nestled between other frozen things, ASAP, and leave them there with the freezer closed.
Thaw for a few minutes in the fridge so you can get a spoon in but it doesn’t turn to soup around the sides. It doesn’t need any help to be delicious but if you have fresh berries you might as well decorate it with those!
I also froze a cup of the milk unmodified to see how it fared. I’d love to be able to buy it farm-direct in the winter once or twice a month and keep some on hand for baking and hot cocoa. It thaws out just fine.
Foodshed Challenge Rundown: All food grown/raised/foraged/hunted in stated geographical area excepting imports allowed on Homegrown days (coffee, olive oil, salt, and yeast) + County and State days (chocolate, butter, maple syrup, and spices that do not grow in WA).
County Foodshed Day – June 11
Breakfast: Scrambled Eggs, Apple Juice, Coffee
Chicken eggs from Cryptid Creek across my north fence, butter. Apple juice from boiled apple mash left over from cider process (homegrown). I thaw a gallon bag of the mash and simmer it with half a gallon of water and then strain in a colander. (A mesh strainer clogs hopelessly with the pulp.) It yields 4-6 cups of juice that is better than grocery store apple juice though not as good as the first run cider.
Tea: Cleavers with Honey
Cleavers are the spindly grassland and woodland plant with whorls of sticky leaves and tiny burrs. I harvested a couple grocery bags full last year and dried for a pleasant-tasting medicinal tea. Honey from Four Cedars (Glenoma). The tea ball is a climber rappelling, though it looks more like an astronaut with its big head. I couldn’t resist.
Morning Snack: Blackberries with Maple Syrup, Double Mint Tea
Blackberries and mint homegrown. Theo chocolate on the side.
Lunch: Sauteed Radishes and Garlic, Roasted Beets
Radishes (Chehalis farmer’s market), garlic (Root Cellar Farm, Onalaska), butter. Beets (Root Cellar Farm, Onalaska, fall 2020!), olive oil.
Radish greens are edible cooked and best a day or two after the radishes are picked. The radishes themselves keep several times longer if their greens are cut off just about the radish tops right away. I rinse them well as grit likes to stick to their fuzzes and then sautee in butter. If you are also cooking the radishes you can slice them thin so they can go in the pan all at the same time. Beet roasted on a tray in the toaster oven.
Afternoon Snack: Raw Ice Cream, Strawberries, Coffee
Ice Cream – Milk (Glenoma), duck egg (Mossyrock), honey (Four Cedars, Glenoma), vanilla.
Strawberries homegrown.
Dinner: Rainbow Chard with Shallot, Pork, and Chanterelle, Hard Cider
Rainbow chard (Chehalis farmer’s market), shallot (homegrown), browned pork sausage (Mossyrock), chanterelle steamed and frozen last October (foraged Lewis County), olive oil, salt.
The hard cider is from the same round of juicing the apple mash. I added a quarter teaspoon of champagne yeast to a quart jar of it and left it at room temperature for several days with the lid not-quite-sealed and stirred it once a day. It’s gently sparkling and just slightly boozy. PG-13 hooch.
Bedtime: Steamed Milk with Honey
Milk (Glenoma), honey (Four Cedars, Glenoma).
Oh so lovely. One can understand why “the land of milk and honey” was the dream destination. Just the pair are splendid, but make some yogurt, add some nuts and berries . . . or get enzymes and yeast involved and make cheese and mead.
State Foodshed Day – June 26
Breakfast: Pancake with Apricots and Cherries, Coffee
I hope that I can be forgiven for making the pancake my usual way, with just egg, kefir, and 1/3 c Bob’s Red Mill pancake mix. I was flipping it over in the pan before I realized, and did not wish to waste time or food correcting my error. Waking up at dawn on the porch and bracing myself for a 100-degree day is my excuse. I had the WA-grown Bluebird flour on hand. Yakima apricots and cherries found at the Toledo market. Butter for cooking, maple syrup for eating. Nomnomnomnomnom.
Morning Snack: Bluebarb Smoothie
Blueberries (Aldrich Farm, Mossyrock), rhubarb (homegrown), kefir (Grace Harbor, Custer), honey (Beeworks, Bellingham).
Lunch: Raw Kale Salad, Hard-boiled Egg
Kale (Root Cellar Farm, Onalaska), sweet turnip (Piece by Piece farm, Olympia), blueberries (homegrown), snap peas (homegrown), olive oil, maple syrup, white balsamic vinegar (Trader Joe’s), salt.
Hardboiled duck egg (Mossyrock).
Afternoon Snack: Ice Cream and Strawberries
Same as County Day.
Dinner: Meatballs, Potato Salad, Coleslaw
Cold meatballs thawed from State Food Day batch made in April. So lovely to have a refreshing, filling dinner that requires no cooking when one has spent about 6 hours that day watering and it is just now cooling down to 90 at dark and you are about to spend the second night in a row on your porch.
Coleslaw – Cabbage (Piece by Piece Farm, Onalaska), carrot (Piece by Piece), olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper. Potato Salad – Potatoes boiled and cooled (WA via PCC), green onion (Vienna Gardens, Silver Creek), kefir (Grace Harbor), salt, pepper.
Arrival II: The Pie Garden
June 7, 2019 marks the first Edgewild strawberry and indeed the first Edgewild harvest of any kind. The total strawberry yield that season was about half a pound. My basis for that estimate is memory of quantity and size of berries compared to what half a pound of strawberries looks like when I harvest that many all at once this year. Summer of 2019 they all went straight in my mouth. I was not yet living here so I probably missed a few, though I did camp out for a week mid-June for my birthday which coincides with the height of the Albion strawberry season. What fine luck!
In the first 7 days of June 2021 I harvested a pound and a half of strawberries. I think they like it here.
The vegetative ancestors of these strawberries came from Swanson’s nursery in north Seattle, spring of 2017. I bought 3 little pots each of Tristar and Albion. The Albion had two tiny crowns per pot. Judy allowed me to take over two of the 4’x4’ raised beds along her driveway for the strawberry effort. I added a generous layer of Cedar Grove compost. The Albion went nuts with runners and by fall of 2018 required division. I counted 54 total plants. The healthiest 24 first-year plants I potted up and kept alive through the winter in a wheelbarrow that I moved in and out of the garage depending on the weather. March of ’19 I moved them down here.
Judy story: July 2016 I moved in with Judy. I met her through mutual friends and had started doing yard work for her a month or so before. The entire double-size city lot was a garden, mostly ornamental but with 16 raised beds full of vegetables down one side of the long sloping driveway. Few yards in Seattle have as much character as Judy’s did, but then few humans of my acquaintance have as much character as Judy.
But about the strawberries . . . Several times that fall and several more over the winter when we were ordering seeds and cleaning up for next year, Judy asked me if there was anything we weren’t growing that I wanted. Every time, I said “Strawberries!” and every time, Judy said “No.” I love Judy dearly. This is just the way she is.
Finally in the spring I convinced her that there were more vegetables growing than she would take the time to harvest for her own consumption or food bank donations, and she gave in. I did not get to eat the first half a dozen strawberries because I was waiting until they were perfectly ripe and when I got home from work on a day I expected one ready, they were gone. Judy eventually confessed. “So YOU’RE the critter!” Ha. This was the source of some good-natured razzing as long as the strawberries were there. Judy was 76 years old at the time.
When life gives you perk test holes, plant something!
Arrival.
For my 25th birthday I made myself a mix CD called “Arrival: Quarter Past Never” loaded with themes of wanderlust and shapeshifting. I made a dozen copies and gave them to friends for Christmas later that year. Somewhere around 30 I started feeling ready to trade in my wheels for roots. My personal definition of ‘arrival’ became having my own asparagus, rhubarb, and strawberries in the ground somewhere. Strawberries like to move every 5 years. They bear the most heavily years 3 & 4. Asparagus and rhubarb take 5 years to really get going and like to stay put for 15. It’s a sign of commitment putting those in, and of hope.
It took another decade for things to work out. Once I had the title to a good patch of soil of course I had to start gardening right away, and of course the first ceremonial garden had to be asparagus, rhubarb, and strawberries. It’s a good thing they get along. Asparagus likes to be planted early, just as the soil is thawing out, and garden centers stock it accordingly. I went to Swanson’s Nursery and picked out 7 bare-root plants of Jersey Knight, then packed them in soil and kept them in Judy’s garage until it was time.
The ancient and venerable rhubarb clump behind Judy’s garage, probably 15-20 years old, took some serious digging up. It was so large I had to slice it into mini-clumps by jumping on a shovel before I could lift it out of the ground. The most robust of the root clusters came straight here. The medium-sized ones I gave to friends and put one back in the ground for the future owner of Judy’s house. Several small ones I kept in pots for a year. Four survived and went into the corners of my big garden last spring.
It took four hours of actual digging time spread out over most of a day to fill in the 6’ deep perk test hole before I could start planting. Later that spring my neighbors asked if they could graze their sheep and horses over here for a few weeks to rest their pasture. They filled in the other 5 holes with their tractor in half an hour.
This year the rhubarb started growing like it meant it in early May. This fistful is from the 6th.
Today (June 11 when I started writing this) I harvested 14 oz of rhubarb stalk from the Pie Garden. (One leaf measured 27” wide and 27” from top of stalk to tip!) I froze the whole batch. I should be able to save up enough strawberries by the end of the month to make some strawberry rhubarb jam. I’m not dealing in pie quantities of strawberries just yet.
Last fall, between the apples in my root cellar, the rhubarb, blackberries, and Aldrich Farm blueberries in my freezer, and the baking supplies I always keep around, I could have subsisted for a month entirely on pie.
Really the whole place is a pie farm. Especially if you expand your definition of pie to include quiche and deep dish pizza. They’re round with filling and a crust. Even just talking classic pie, the orchard and berry game is a lot more promising than the vegetable one. Veggies have been more work with heavier losses so far and would require higher input costs, both money and materials, to adequately defend.
Actually I nearly always make crisp instead of pie. Taking the time to master pastry crust is on the long-term self-improvement list for sure but the oatmeal crumble topping is so easy to prepare and turns out just right every time. Anyhow, someday I hope to be growing all of the ingredients for the expanded-definition pie category except for the butter and flour. It makes way more sense indefinitely to import grains and for the most part cooking fats as well. Growing, harvesting, and processing flour, butter, and oils does not really work on this scale, much as I would like on principle to learn how.
When I have grown the entire filling for an asparagus mushroom quiche, I will really have arrived.
It’ll be a while on the asparagus. 3rd time’s the charm, I hope. The 2019 asparagus were quite healthy and even put up one or two spindly green shoots per plant several inches high.
When I came down again a couple weeks later, they were gone. My neighbor said it was the mice. All that work fencing, in vain. 5’ tall dear/elk layer and a 2’ high bunny-proof chicken wire layer. There’s no fencing out the field mice, aka voles. They’re the size of gerbils though rounder than a hamster and they can tunnel right in. Fortunately they can’t climb. Things are safe from voles if you can keep them more than 6” off the ground.
2020 I was too busy getting my home site ready. No time to garden until asparagus season had gone by.
The 2021 asparagus I mail ordered. Never doing that again. It arrived a ball of rotten mush due partly to overzealous rubberbanding and partly to being sealed in a plastic bag at goodness knows what temperature extremes while being in the clutches of FedEx for a week. Also, five plants (what was left of them) was about the total mass of one of the Swanson’s asparagus plants in 2019.
I had meticulously cleared a 4’x8’ bed for it with good help detail weeding from my friends Wendy and Jennifer. After wincing in sticker shock (lumber prices were already somewhat ridiculous in March) I bought and had cut the cedar 2×6’s for an 18” high (well really 16.5”) raised bed.
I had planned to build 6 raised beds this spring, as that is the only way that greens, brassicas, and root vegetables will survive here. Nevermind. The asparagus is worth it on principle as well as for convenience and quality of fresh homegrown asparagus and may pay for itself in the 15 years that both asparagus plant and cedar boards should last. Salad greens I can grow in planter bowls on my porch. Brassicas, potatoes, and carrots—farmer’s market it shall be!
I planted 3 lbs of potatoes last year and got 2. It should’ve been upwards of 15. Damn the voles!
Half the cedar got repurposed for the foundation for the greenhouse. I’m lucky I had it here already when that project was underway. Hoping prices will relax late fall so I can build the asparagus bed and be ready for spring of ’22.
Don’t take on farming unless you have the stomach for disappointment and for waiting. You are in for lots of both. At this rate I will be nearly 50 before I have a plate full of homegrown asparagus.
As a wise man once sang in a monster ballad, “Two out of three ain’t bad.” Two out of three is in fact a grand success if you are starting a diversified farm.
If the two out of three remaining occupants of the Pie Garden continue thriving and increasing productivity at their current rate, next year for my birthday there will be strawberry rhubarb pie.
Homegrown Food Day – June 1
Strawberries and rhubarb feature prominently.
Breakfast: Steamed Rhubarb and Apple, Coffee
Breakfast included the last fresh apple from last year. Nearly six months in a bucket in the root cellar, then two months in a bag in my fridge. That’s a pretty good run.
Morning Snack: Apple Rings and Rhubarb Apple Horsetail Tea
The apple rings are nearly 3 months old now, I think. Stored sealed in glass at room temperature they are only slightly chewier than when I first made them. They are better than any store-bought ones I’ve had. I will make more next year.
The tea is the juice from the sauce pan under the steamer basket left from breakfast mixed with refrigerated horsetail tea. It’s really refreshing and great for hydration with the minerals from the horsetail.
Lunch: Arugula and Lettuce Salad with Strawberries
Arugula at last! Never before have I struggled to grow arugula. It thrived even in the crummy hardpack soil of the Chicago community garden that I started in what had recently been a sorry excuse for a lawn. I suspect it doesn’t tolerate the soil acidity here. What little did manage to make it past germination got eradicated by critters after doing nothing at all for several weeks. Happy arugula goes from seed to harvestworthy leaves in 2-3 weeks. It germinates in just 4 days. I tried a couple batches of it in containers similar to this one in “Edna’s Best” by E. B. Stone, the high-quality potting soil that I have been using for years for my houseplants and some container vegetables. It fared poorly though not as bad as in the ground. I was not sure what I was doing wrong.
Then my friend Lucas of Root Cellar Farm introduced me to MJR. I’ve been doing experiments. Jury’s out on several but with the arugula it’s no contest. I started two containers on the same day. The MJR group was so much healthier than the Edna’s group that a couple weeks after germination I tossed the latter in the compost. Sadly, this batch bolted a few days later because of the unseasonably early heat. Should’ve been able to harvest off it for several weeks. I moved it off my porch during a rain and left it there a little too long. Arugula will tolerate a light frost once it has its first true leaves and survive temps down to the mid-20’s if it is in the ground. Like lettuce, too hot and/or dry for even a day and it’s over.
Just a little olive oil for dressing. So much good flavor and juiciness that I could’ve enjoyed the salad without dressing. Really fresh vegetables grown in good conditions don’t need much help with taste. In fact often it is a shame to mask their natural yumminess with additives. Today the olive oil was for the calories.
Afternoon Snack: Rhubarb Apple Leather, Doublemint Tea
Apple leather from just over a month ago is pretty good. Slightly stale. Stored sealed in glass but not space efficient. Way more air than food in there.
Dinner: Braised Field Greens with Shallots
Slim pickings for dinner food this evening. Would’ve been awfully nice to have some black beans. I planted twice as many black beans this year, several weeks earlier and in better soil thanks to last year’s amendments and a sprinkle of wood ash this spring to help neutralize the pH. I’m hoping this will result in 4x or better yield. Their little viny stems have started to stretch up between the first true leaves. Trellising required before the first of July.
The shallots continue to hold up beautifully. I have four left after tonight which I will save for Homegrown days to get me to October when they should be ready for harvest. I planted about as many shallots this year but in improved soil and on the other side of the lot from the Giant Slug Zone near the drainage ditch so they are doing better. Sizing up steadily, starting to evolve out of ‘any tiny allium’ mode, becoming recognizable as shallots with the signature red papery sheath around the top of what will be the bulb. Thus far 90-95% remain unscathed and none are gone.
I foraged dandelion, sheep sorrel, lamb’s quarters, and clover and rinsed them, then added to the shallot sauteing in olive oil. I had already soaked the dandelion greens in salt water which helps them be more tender and less bitter. It amounted to a decent helping even with all the shrinking that cooked greens do.
At least it would have been a decent helping of greens as a side with some other main dish involving protein and carbs. The upside of having a 90 degree day on June 1 is that guzzling water and moving slow left me with less of an appetite than usual. It was fairly tasty. The flavors blended well. If I had it do over I’d cook the dandelion and clover a little longer and throw the sorrel and lamb’s quarters in at the very end.
Themes and Variations
May went fast.
This is going to be more of a gallery than a blog post. All three Foodshed Challenge days for last month. It’s also a work in progress. I am getting the pictures up here. I will add captions and descriptions as they come to me. I’m too busy finishing getting my big vegetable garden in and keeping the grass from swallowing everything to do much focused thinking about anything else.
Foodshed Challenge Rundown: All food grown/raised/foraged/hunted in stated geographical area excepting imports allowed on Homegrown days (coffee, olive oil, salt, and yeast) + County and State days (chocolate, butter, maple syrup, and spices that do not grow in WA).
Homegrown – May 1
Not much changed in the very local food scene since April. The biggest difference is that I’m doing most of my cooking outdoors on propane instead of indoors on the wood stove. I do not need any heat indoors on sunny days.
Breakfast: Steamed Apple & Rhubarb, Coffee.
Same as April. The rhubarb is fresh instead of frozen.
Morning Snack: Apple Rings, Rhubarb Juice & Horsetail Tea
The apple rings made in the dehydrator a couple months ago are holding up admirably. I am rationing them to last me until there are fresh apples again. I will make more next year. I got the juice out of the bag from the last of the frozen rhubarb, which I thawed to mix in with the apple leather and then strained. It’s rather refreshing that way.
Packed to go for my morning errand driving to a town an hour and a half a way to adopt my first beehive!
Lunch: Micro Greens Salad with Kale Blossoms, Apple
And a little olive oil and salt for dressing.
Afternoon Snack: Apple Leather 3.1 (now available with Rhubarb!), Blackberries, Coffee
The apple leather is different from April. Much improved. Third time’s the charm in this case. Parchment paper instead of plastic (round 2) or nothing (round 1) on the dehydrator trays. I made some plain apple and some with the last of the frozen rhubarb, thawed and blended with the apple mash, 2:1 apple : rhubarb. Most fruits I would do 1:1 but the rhubarb has plenty of flavor and needs all the apple sweetness it can get.
Dinner: Black Beans, Sauteed Brassica with Horsetail, Apple Juice
The fruiting stalks of field horsetail precede the more recognizable leafy parts and look a fair bit like zombie asparagus. It is hailed as a survival food by foraging experts which means it is a lot of work relative to the calories or not all that appetizing or both. True. Even with a fairly dense stand of horsetail around my blueberry patch which is easy to walk through it took a while to find this many stalks that were full size but not too far gone. Most I left the tops outside as they had already started to brown and were shedding a mess of pollen or spores or whatever it is that horsetail do.
Then you have to pop the segments apart and cut off the conveniently color-coded fibery bits, leaving the crunchy white edible part. They were not unpleasant. They tasted a lot like the ribs of romaine lettuce. I must say I prefer them to celery. Apparently the stalk itself and the tiny sip of water that each hollow segment contains are loaded with minerals. Emergency rehydration, sure. I really hope I am never hungry or bored enough to make a whole meal out of these.
Black bean preparation identical to April, with shallots sauteed in olive oil, a pinch of salt, and sun-dried tomatoes and cilantro for garnish. The greens this time are nonsense brassica (see State Fare dinner) sauteed in olive oil instead of April’s boiled nettles.
The apple juice is rendered from the apply mash. I add half a gallon of water to a gallon bag of apple mash thawed and simmer it for 10-15 minutes and then strain it. The twice-extracted apple mash goes in the compost. The second run juice taste better than kid juice box apple juice though not nearly as good as the first run cider. This year’s apple wine is made from the juice yielded from 3 bags of mash. Last year’s cider-based wine was excellent but it feels like a waste to dilute and filter the fresh cider for winemaking when this option is available and there is *so much* apple mash because it takes so many apples to make cider.
Lewis County Day – May 15
Breakfast: Scrambled Eggs, Coffee
Same breakfast as April county food day. This time the eggs came from Cryptid Creek, my neighbors to the north. I traded a pound of rhubarb for a dozen. I would not be nearly as wealthy if rhubarb were fiat currency as I would be if apples were the reigning legal tender. But just one clump divided two years ago spring is already yielding more rhubarb than I have ever before eaten in a year with a pound or two surplus to trade. Rather exciting.
On that splendid mid-60’s-and-sunny Saturday morning I drove uphill for 20 minutes to check out the Morton farmer’s market for the first time. Mostly plants for sale. I bought sweet white turnips and bok choy from Vienna Gardens (Silver Creek) and honey from Four Cedars (Glenoma). I hadn’t planned to buy honey again, as I got enough last month from Beeworks in Bellingham, WA to last me until my own bees produce a surplus. But now I have some for Lewis County days.
Lunch: Cold Beet Salad on Greens
Beets (Root Cellar Farm, Onalaska) boiled and cooled. Homegrown lettuce, arugula, and lambs quarters. The latter grows itself and tastes like spinach. Compared to spinach it is drought tolerant and less vulnerable to mice and slugs. Olive oil and a pinch of salt for dressing.
All that salad really need is some fresh chevre and pecans to top it off. If all goes well I should be making homegrown chevre a year from now and my brand new pecan trees should start bearing in 5 or so.
Snack: Bluebarb Smoothie with Apple Mash and Honey
The day before county food day I went to Aldrich, the 3rd-generation blueberry farm in town, and bought a 5 lb bag of frozen blueberries out of a chest freezer in their barn. This will keep me in smoothies and pancake toppings until my own start ripening in late June or early July. My twelve blueberry bushes are all from Aldrich, purchased last April in gallon-sized pots. They appear happy, with several inches of new twig growth and dense clusters of green berries that as of May 15 were about halfway to full size. Now they are almost there and a slight blush of purple is starting to show on the earliest-ripening variety.
It’s fun to think that apples, rhubarb, strawberries, blueberries, and honey are things I will never need to buy again. Also blackberries of course, but that has been true since I moved to WA.
Yet another use for apple mash. I prefer the bluebarb smoothie with yogurt or kefir but this works. Here’s to goat’s milk yogurt next year!
Dinner: Roasted Turnip with Pork and Chanterelles, Braised Turnip Greens
The sweet turnips came from Vienna Gardens in Silver Creek via the Morton farmer’s market. I had never experienced these before I started subscribing to a CSA. There they were in the box! Figure out how to use them! The greens are edible fresh if they are tender enough. I have sometimes made salad out of them. Otherwise they are great lightly cooked. The ribs have just a little crunch to them, reminiscent of chard but less fibery and sweeter. The root part is usually excellent fresh but gets downright buttery when cooked. I roasted these in the toaster oven with a little olive oil, then topped them with shallots sauteed in butter, chanterelles (foraged last fall, steamed and frozen), and browned pork sausage left from the packet I acquired for the making of meatballs on April WA State Food Day.
Turnip greens rinsed and sauteed still damp along with some butter and garlic. Braising (sort of a cross between steaming and sauteeing) helps greens cook down faster while using less fat and reducing the chances of scorching. Stir until the butter is melted and the water starts steaming, cover for a few seconds, repeat. Remove from heat as soon as the greens are wilted and bright green. Ta da!
State Food Day – May 29
Breakfast: Pancake with Steamed Rhubarb and Strawberry, Coffee
Same pancake, different topping. Steamed rhubarb (homegrown, picked fresh) and a strawberry!
Snack #1: Roll with Butter and Blackberry, Apple, Chocolate, and Mint Tea
Pretty much the same snack as April state day. Different tea. Honey wheat roll (saved a few in the freezer from WA State Day in April) topped with blackberries (homegrown) mixed with WA state honey and butter (TJ’s NZ – see below). Mint tea (homegrown), apple (homegrown – 2nd to last fresh one!), Theo Chocolate Sea Salt Dark.
Lunch: Duck Eggs on Salad Mix, Wheat Roll
The duck eggs are from Rylee, a friend on the other side of town. Salad mix from Onalaska via the Centralia farmer’s market. A little olive oil and salt for dressing. Homemade honey wheat roll, butter.
Snack #2: Bluebarb Smoothie
Homegrown fresh rhubarb, frozen blueberries from Aldrich (Mossyrock), Grace Harbor Farms kefir (WA), and honey (WA).
Dinner: Meatballs, Purple Potatoes, Snap Peas
Same meatballs from WA day in April. Pulled from the freezer and warmed in the boiling water with the potatoes (WA via PCC. Fresh snap peas on the side, first of the season for me, from a vendor at the Centralia Market.
