Spring and summer garden, 2023, in pictures

March:

 July 

August

Farm vignettes

A smattering of vignettes from life on the farm in 2022

Homemade tofu, a report.

I decided to try making tofu, because it's fun to make things from scratch, and I was tired of dealing with plastic tubs. After reading that you can coagulate it with lemon juice, I found a recipe online, procured soybeans, and commenced with the experimenting.

It is fantastic! We're spoiled for storebought, now. It took a little tweaking with the recipe a few times, but it has steadily gotten easier. We learned that I need to leave it on very low heat while it's coagulating, and add a bit more lemon juice for best results, but it's the best tofu we've ever had. Much happiness. I press the bejesus out of it, so it's super extra firm.

We soak the soybeans -- six hours, up to a week, depending on how the week goes -- they keep well, in the fridge, although they take up a lot of room. We have a little magic pitcher for making the soymilk, although it is possible to use a blender, and might be faster, since we have to make four batches in the little pitcher. That part is time-consuming.

Making the tofu itself is a little like making ricotta; very similar process, except you don't press ricotta. I'm still working out uses for the okara (lefotover soy pulp. I make sausage that we really like added to spaghetti sauce, and have also made failed garden burgers that we ate with mayonnaise. The first time, DH said they were just like imitation crab cakes; the second time, he didn't like them quite as well. They were really good though; might have to work on that one some more.

Fruit tree woes

I planted a fair-sized orchard last winter -- frantically, right before a massive ice storm hit, and froze everything solid for a week. The little trees gamely survived, and off we went into a brutally hot, dry summer I spent lugging hoses around the field. The little trees gamely survived, although they did not grow very much. And then we headed into winter again ... a cold winter, followed by a very long, cold spring filled with unexpected late freezes ... and it all proved too much for some of the poor things. I lost an apple, a peach, a sweet cherry, a fig, two apricots and an elderberry. Sob.

So, not to be thwarted, I ordered more trees: A peach, a sweet cherry, two figs, an elderberry and a plum, plus a couple of comfrey starts. It was late for ordering trees, but I had high hopes, which might have been the first mistake. They went Into the box, it was later clear, looking beautiful.

The trip, however, was not kind. The box arrived looking like this:

Things did not look better on the inside. The cherry and both figs were snapped in half. The leader on the peach was broken. There were assorted broken branches and wilted leaves. I wanted to sob. All has not been lost, however. UPS has made no response at all to my claim for shipping damages, probably because I refused to let them throw my trees away, except for the cherry rootstock. I should have kept it, if they were going to be like that. The nursery did reimburse me for the broken trees, at least. The cherry was now out of stock, so I'll have to wait for fall to re-order. But the figs are putting out new leaves! And the peach will be Ok, I think. They urgently need to get into the ground, though, and I have been busy in the garden, instead.

Moments in the garden and greenhouse

The garden is running well behind schedule, thanks to the extremely soggy spring, and the snows of April, and I am frantically trying to get things planted that should have been in the ground a month and more ago. I am also digging up at least some of my already-coming-up potatoes, to replant in chicken-wire lined trenches, as the gophers have proven remorseless and disinclined to share this year.

I walked into the greenhouse, and a startled mouse must have dived off something — my potted potato, I think — because the first I saw of it was its landing at my feet, furry white belly up and tiny pink paws waving as it squirmed and flailed until it rolled over and ran off.

I blinked and walked further into the greenhouse. A juvenile banana slug was on one of my hardware-cloth protected seedling-boxes, just starting to curl itself under a protruding flap to squeeze inside and start munching. I removed it to the extensive and lush grass outside.

No chipmunks squeaked and ran today, but there were the remains of green strawberries scattered all over, as usual.

The yellowjackets I evicted a few weeks ago are back, busily constructing a new nest, just above the door, on the inside. We keep forgetting to go out early enough to remove it, and them, to a more suitable location again.

I don't know why I persist in thinking this is MY greenhouse. Everyone else on the farm is clearly of the opinion that their claims are at least equal to mine.

Speaking of which, it turns out that the wool I thought was such a bright idea for mulching the vegetable garden with, makes a lovely, luxurious mouse nest liner.

Well. They say enhancing ecosystems is a good thing ... I certainly seem to be doing my part.

 I have a very large garden, but it's almost never all in cultivation at once, and there are pretty much always a few sections covered in tall grass, because I don't till, and don't have enough landscape fabric to cover the whole thing over the winter. Drives me nuts, and I keep trying to eliminate the grass and at least most of the thistles, but I'm finally realizing I just need to accept wild edges and a grassy swath here and there, after yet another reminder that the rest of the denizens here prefer it so. (This year, I'm using it to mulch potatoes, so it is coming in handy.)

After work yesterday evening, I was out cutting blackberry vines trying to infiltrate the grassy northwest corner, next to a gallica rose and a row of verbena. I reached for the last one, brushing the grass aside to get to the base — and looked down at a tiny, perfectly-woven cup filled with gaping beaks. They were absolutely silent! But there are pretty much always birds perched around the garden fence, enjoying the day or watching me work, and sure enough, a male junco, midway down, making its "chip, chip, chip," call. Leaving the blackberry to wreak its wretched will, I decamped hastily to the other end of the garden to plant a rhubarb instead, and fashion chicken-wire guards for the rhubarb and peonies, since something -- I suspect rabbits -- snipped off their branches last year, for no apparent reason. This place is filled with quiet, unobtrusive wonders.

A tale of two cherries

 

A porcupine, having a nap in the cherry tree

Note: I wrote this blog entry a year ago, but never got it posted. And here we are, nearly to cherry season again, but after an unexpected freeze while they were blooming, we don't yet know if there will be much of a crop this year. 

Sakes alive, I fear we’ve been cursed to live in interesting times, as the saying has it … but this is the tale of the smallholding of Foggy Mountain Farm, and not the tale of the Coming of the Great Plague, or all the disasters it presaged, and so, to our story.

Which is about cherries. We are blessed with a number of feral cherry trees on the property, great, venerable things 50 and 60 feet tall, and, we discovered this year, at least two kinds of them. This year they bore a bumper crop, to the great joy of the robins, squirrels, porcupines, and doubtless many other beings.

Including me. I am either a squirrel or a dragon at heart – a harvest dragon, to be specific – and the sight of all that gorgeous, glistening fruit awoke every instinct I possess to … gather it all into my lair and hover over it, hissing in admiration. Or something like that.

In any event, we picked cherries. Pounds of them.

I kept promising I was done now, but then a week later I’d see those branches still hung with fruit glowing like lanterns in the sun, and announce that, actually, I was not done, because it was just Wrong, to squander a chance to preserve all that goodness. What if there are no cherries next year?!

One of the problems brought about by the Great Plague to plague dragons hoarders preservers, has been disruptions in the supply chain, including the supply of canning jar lids, which have been nigh unto impossible to get hold of for the past year. Not to be thwarted, however, I besought me a supply of the things late last winter, from an E-bay merchant who marked them up to an appalling degree.

I handed over my gold nonetheless, lest the long-promised arrival in the stores never materialize, and was glad that I had done so, when indeed it did not.

As mentioned, we have two kinds of cherries: Bright red pie cherries and tiny, dark sweet cherries that are about half pit. Both are stunningly beautiful. We could not reach them all, given the height of the trees, and so there were plenty left for the birds and for the squirrels, who leave little mounds of cracked cherry pits all over the woods. This may have something to do with the surprising number of cherry trees occupying our mixed oak and Doug fir wood.

Having taken note, I’ve decided that what we need is more cherry trees, and so I took to tossing handfuls of the pits along the hedgerows. With luck, we’ll end with an entire forest row of cherries — some of which I’ll prune, so we can stay off ladders in our rapidly-encroaching old age. At least, for harvesting purposes.

We have no orchard ladder, so like any self-respecting pair of lunatics foragers, we carried a regular ladder through the woods into the far field where the cherries dwell, balanced it as best we could among the blackberry vines covering the uneven earth, and clambered up with our baskets, hoping the adventure wouldn’t end with broken bones, and picked bowls full of glowing red pie cherries.

On the way back home with our loot one day, we saw a baby western tanager sitting motionless on the forest floor under a bush, while its father chirped and fluttered in the branches above, doing his best to distract us. Another day, we watched a Steller’s Jay tuck an acorn into a hollow in a fir branch, to hold the nut securely while the bird hammered at it with its bill. Sadly, we had no camera with us either time. We did, however, get a picture of the porcupine we saw one morning, sleeping the top of the biggest cherry tree. 

We gave pie cherries away, we froze them, canned them, dried them, baked a pie, made a small batch of jam. We admired the porcupine we found occupying a high branch of the biggest cherry tree, and we left the seeds out for the mice and squirrels (they thanked me by storing them in — already occupied — pots all over my greenhouse. It is possible I’m going to have a bumper crop of baby cherry trees at some point).

We then began turning more and more of our attention to the little black cherries, which glow, on the tree, and in bowls, like marbles or cranberries or jewels. They also taste divine — and for the first few pickings, we could reach them from the ground.

The pie cherries were relatively easy to pit; we possess a device that pits six at a time, although you have to double check its work. But the little black cherries are too small for it; they must be tediously and repetitively pitted by hand, which gets hard on the wrists after a while. But it’s worth it.

Oh, so worth it.

They were astonishingly delicious when dried, so we picked and dried some more. And then I made a batch of fruit cheese, little dark squares of exquisite, tangy sweet fruit candy.

And then, with the very last picking, a batch of jam.

And then I gathered all those glowing jars of goodness into the center of my lair, and coiled around them, and if you need me, I’ll be here, counting them.

Although, the blackberries are ripe and our dear friend up the road tells me she has yellow plums begging to be picked …

The raptor pole

 Nearly a year now, since I have written on this blog. My apologies for that. The Year the Plague Struck was challenging, in many strange ways. And it was a year of so many things, both personal and societal ... the Year of the Great Black Lives Matter Protests; the year we moved into our house, the Year of the Great Wildfires (four Oregon towns destroyed, 11 people killed); The Year of the Insurrection, the year, I am saddened to report, that our beloved, elderly little terrier died, last fall. We remain in mourning. 

The fires spread smoke across the entire state for a week last September. Here's what it looked like on the hill: 

Strange times. We were supposed to stay indoors not breathing the smoke, but we were frantically working on the house, so our lungs had some unfortunate exposure. We finally bought a couple of furnace filters and taped them to a box fan to try to at least get some clean air in the house. Everyone else had the same idea, and furnace filters joined the list of shortages.

Now it's May and the entire West is in drought, ranging from severe to exceptional, and so there are fears for another severe wildfire season. Possibly in perpetuity.

The February ice storms did not help with that issue.

The fires were so severe, in part, because of rare hot, dry east winds; the same winds that drove the great Tillamook Burn back in the day. One exceptional weather event being insufficient for the Interesting Times in which we live, in February, we had a rare series of severe ice storms that knocked out power to most of the Willamette Valley for a week. 

Here's what it looked like on the hill: 

They also knocked over trees and broke branches and generally left the state littered with debris that will be ripe for burning in the coming months. Our little forest is no exception; we lost some big cherry and oak trees, and suddenly there's a lot more light coming through. But it's hard to walk because the ground is quite a mess. 

Just before the storms hit, my orders of bare root trees started coming in, and I spent a frantic few days planting my new little orchard. 

I'm gradually working on putting in a hedgerow around it, to, I hope, keep out the deer. A work in progress.

We also put up a little greenhouse, and it is filled with starts. The garden, alas, is filled with weeds, grass, cover crops, and gophers.

Which brings me to the titular raptor pole.

As you know, rodent populations live in a perpetual boom and bust cycle. Lots of predators, few rodents. No food, predators die off, rodents boom, predators increase with all the food, etc.

We're in a rodent boom, and the gophers have decided they are entitled to the whole garden, not a mere tithe. (The mice also got into my greenhouse and helped themselves to my tender young starts, the furry little bastards. Hardware cloth boxtops made by R have helped with that problem). 

We don't like killing creatures, but I'm fine with encouraging the natural order of things, so we hauled a dead tree up to the garden and installed it. (In point of fact, the same tree featured in the ice storm photo, above.) It was hair-raising and back-breaking — dead trees are heavy, who knew! — but now the hawks have a place to sit and watch for gophers in the garden. At least I hope they focus on the gophers, and not on snakes. I need the snakes to eat the slugs. And gophers.

R chainsawed a couple of large chunks from the end of the trunk, to lighten the weight, and shaved the sides down a bit. I used a post hole digger to excavate a hole to put it in. For some reason, I decided to post-hole dig a few tomato holes in the garden on the same day. My muscles are sore now. 

Yesterday, we hauled the tree the 300 feet or so up to the garden by balancing the trunk on a barrel, which I sort of pushed along, holding the trunk up to take some of the weight off, while R walked ahead, carrying the narrow end. It took quite a long time and did not feel like quite as smooth a process as the description implies. But eventually, we got it up there. And left it overnight while R "cogitated" about how the dickens we were going to get it installed in its hole without killing ourselves in the process. As usual, he came up with a clever solution. 

Here's how it went: 

 

Two by fours nailed to the tree helped hold it up, and we "walked" them forward, a few inches at a time, while desperately keeping the tree from rolling to either side.

Taking an idea from a television show on theories about the building of Stonehenge, R dug a trench at the side of the hole, to guide the log in.

More walking it up. This part went on for a long time. R also nailed a cross piece onto the tree, to give large birds a place to perch. 

Eventually, we had to add more two-by-fours.

Almost there!

Is that cool or what?

So. There you are, all caught up. Let's chat again soon.

Mid-August garden

 

Mid-June

I keep thinking words are going to manifest but they haven't, so enjoy these photos of mid-June, instead.

Kitchen desk now installed.

Rainbow out the kitchen window

Rainbow of irises

Tomatoes and potatoes in the garden

More vegetables

Counterwaffling

So much has happened in the month since I last wrote that it feels as if it's been a year. The pandemic, the brutal killings of more black Americans, the massive protests. It's a little hard to breathe, and it's hard to find words.

This accounting of our humble smallholding in the hills has felt trivial. And it is. But our lives here continue, and friends have been asking, and so herewith is the next installment.

DH has built and installed this lovely set of kitchen cabinets and a countertop to top them with. We like wooden countertops, and I am thrilled with his work, and with the overall look of the house. Later, there will also be a wooden backsplash.

We've put in the sink, a wonderful enameled porcelain one we found secondhand at one of the local Habitat for Humanity Restores last year.
And, thanks to the awesome Amanda Whatley, we've enjoyed waffles in this beautiful kitchen.
Here they are:

No, we're not moved in yet. But after Amanda thoughtfully provided information about her antique waffle iron, we too were able to locate and purchase one, for use on an induction stove. And having procured it, we couldn't wait to use it. So one morning over the weekend I made a batch of our favorite sourdough waffle batter and we carried it down to the house, along with plates, forks, a ladle, and other important breakfast paraphernalia, and we made a divine batch of waffles, for the inaugural use of the induction stove.

They were delicious.

DH did the honors; he is the official waffle chef of the household, because only he has the iron nerve required to wait until they are actually done before opening the iron. When I get involved, we have undercooked waffles. He is also in charge of cooking fish. And oatmeal. I handle the

rest.

Here is a sample of my contributions:

And a green quiche, just because I happen to have a picture of it:

So, meanwhile in house news, there are more kitchen counters to build, and they need doors, and DH is presently installing a built-in desk, and working on the stairs, and when he finishes with all of that, there's … still more to do.

Here is another view of the kitchen, which I cannot wait to inhabit:

And here is a trailer cat, just chillin':

Until next time. Be well, be safe, be fierce.