Monster Squash 2021 (Count on Cucurbits)

My mother used to say there were only two things for certain in this world - death and taxes. But I know there is another - that every year volunteer squash will grow out of the compost pile. 

It’s so funny, I don’t usually have much luck trying to grow winter squash on purpose. The plants get powdery mildew, or they are poorly pollinated, or they get blossom end rot. But lo and behold the vigorous vines that sprouted this year from our discarded supermarket squash seeds:

There are actually three separate volunteer plants in that picture, and together they cover a good 500 square feet. All of them bore copious fruit, but unfortunately since supermarket squash are mostly hybrids, none of the three distinct varieties of fruit they bore was good to eat. 

As varied as squash fruits are - that is to say, infinitely - squash blossoms are uniform. All squash plants, be they winter or summer or of unknown provenance, produce lovely yellow trumpet shaped flowers that are delicious. 

We like to tuck the fresh raw flowers into quesadillas, but they can be prepared in any number of different ways - one Italian preparation is stuffed with goat cheese, battered and fried. They can be added to soups or just sautéed in butter. 

Since we didn’t care about the inedible fruit of these particular plants, we picked both the male and female flowers, but if you are growing squash to eat just pick the male flowers. They are easy to tell apart because the male flowers grow in tall stems and the female flowers stay stuck close to the vine. Remove the pistils; they can be bitter. And always check for bugs! Our vines were still producing flowers last week, in chilly late October. 

Although inedible, this year’s gourds do make a fine halloween porch display. There are many more that are not pictured here. One gargantuan vine produced more than a dozen of the huge warty gourds - probably well over 100 pounds of squash. 

I am not certain if the seeds of all these squashes are edible or not. I believe they are - I never heard of a poison pumpkin seed - but I should probably look it up to be safe before I decide to roast all the seeds after Halloween. 

Mercy is in the window. 

Farmer’s Swap Meet (Fall Harvest)

A neighbor of ours, a friend who started out as one of Homero’s clients, started a farm a few years ago. She raises medicinal plants of all sorts and makes them into tinctures, salves, ointments, and decoctions. She started just two or three years ago with a weedy patch of ground and now has a lovely three acre medicinal plant garden. 

Last month, she decided to throw a swap meet for all her local friends - mostly farmers but also bakers, artists, musicians, and people with skills of various sorts. I was super excited to be invited - a decade ago I did the same thing, hoping to make it an annual event, but alas there was only one September Swap Meet and Jamboree on our farm. 

Deciding what to bring was half the fun. I didn’t know what might be available to trade for, so I didn’t worry about that and just brought a little of everything, hoping to hold my own and put on a pretty spread on front of my farming peers. 

We had lots of fruit from our trees - Italian plums, pears, and apples - both fresh and dehydrated. And just the day before Gleaner’s pantry hosted a farm glean for organic cherry tomatoes, so I had a ridiculous number of gorgeous cherry tomatoes in various colors. I also brought a selection of ferments - some caraway kraut, some kohlrabi kimchi, and some sourdough starter. 

I rounded out my section with a bunch of canned goods from the pantry. Admittedly, some of it was weird stuff from years last that didn’t get eaten, like my “spicy mixed stone fruit chutney” and some apple-plum butter. But I also brought a whole bunch of freshly made blackberry jam and pickled asparagus and dilly beans. Oh, and a two pound wheel of cheese. 

There was also a potluck, which was delicious. I brought lentil soup with bacon from our pig, and a big sourdough bread made with the same starter I had brought to swap with. 

We came home with a lot of stuff. Two or three different salves and some lip balms; tomatillos; raspberries; eggs; a carved wooden kitchen spoon, a fancy bottle shaped like a skull (which I think started out filled with tequila); a load of firewood; and a dehydrator. 

It was a great day. I got to meet lots of my neighbors and fellow farmers. Most of them were considerably younger than me, but it’s nice to be slowly morphing into a kind of elder in the community. I got to show off a little bit - my table was definitely one of the more diverse and well-frequented. And Homero and I got to wander through the beautiful garden eating raspberries and holding hands. 

Meet the Greengage (Bears and Plums)

                                  

When we first moved here, in 2007, I knew the first thing I wanted to do was plant some fruit trees. The property had been a dairy farm before it was chopped into five acre parcels and sold off, and our parcel was the one with the original farmhouse on it, and where the dairy barn had stood before it was razed. There were few trees and a lot of bare earth. In my mind, an orchard is an indispensable part of any homestead, so I started doing some research.

Fruit trees are not as easy as people think - they are really rather finicky and delicate, for the most part, and need to be carefully chosen for the site. One needs to take into account not just the zone you are in 

(We are 8a - you can look up yours here) but also your microclimate and factors like drainage and soil composition. I have a very cold, windy microclimate and sandy, gravelly soil. Not really ideal. However I also have full sun all day long and  more than adequate rainfall.  While I was looking for information about varieties that might do well on my farm I found this amazing web site: Trees of Antiquity

Trees of Antiquity is devoted to propagating and preserving heirloom varieties of fruit and nut trees, and their experts will happily chat with you on the phone about your specific needs. They also have a terrific catalogue which arrives in the dead of winter and provides hours of entertainment in January, when I am likely to have exhausted all the interesting options on Netflix. 

After extensive consultation, I chose several trees - three varieties of apple including one cider apple (a golden russet); three cherries (Bing, Rainier, and one named Sam), three pears (really too many pears, nobody needs three pear trees but I'm glad I got the Comice, they are the best pears EVER. I forget what the other two varieties are) and two plums. One is an Italian plum, which are purple on the outside and golden on the inside and delicious. That tree bears an alternating light/heavy harvest, but always as many plums as we can eat or possibly use. 

The second plum tree I chose is a greengage plum. Greengage plums are a very old variety, believed to have originated in Iran, and first introduced to Europe by the royal gardeners of 16th century France, who named it the Reine Claude. You MAY have seen greengage plums once or twice in a particularly well-sticked grocery store, but they are not generally available because the trees are not well suited to profit driven agriculture. They take a decade or so to begin bearing, and then they only bear good crops every two or three years, with very scant or absent crops on the off years. 

My tree has a perverse tendency to bear only in years when we are spending the summer in Mexico. I have only had three good harvests off this tree (which I planted in 2008. The first was in 2016, when we first discovered the unearthly deliciousness of these plums. Their reputation as the queen of plums is well deserved. We gorged ourselves and eagerly anticipated the next harvest. In 2017 there were no plums. In 2018 we could se it would be a goof year, but alas, we were spending the entire summer in Oaxaca. 

I told a friend of mine to please harvest the plums, and she did. She texted me to thank me and said "oh by the way, there has been a bear in your orchard. I saw bear scat." Normally, I would probably pooh-pooh a pronouncement by a friend of mine that they saw bear scat, but this particular friend grew up in the Yukon, and I trust she k owe bear scat when she sees it. "don't worry about it," she said, "your goats are safe. He was here for the plums." A year or so later, while we were beating about the bushes looking for a lost turkey, we found the place where the bear must have come in. A heavy-duty galvanized cattle panel was crumpled up from the ground, bent and twisted and lifted a good three and a half feet from the ground. We hadn't noticed because it was in an area of very thick brush. As far as we know, the bear hasn't been back. 

Maybe the bear hasn't been back because the tree hasn't fruited again until this year. In late spring, I could see the tree was absolutely loaded with small fruit, and that this would be the best year yet. And once again, we were planning to be in Mexico from mid July through mid August. I lamented the fact that we would probably one again miss out, and told my friend to come on back, and watch for bears. But luckily, when we returned a few days ago, the plums were just beginning to ripen and fall. 

They are just as good as I remember. So sweet - the sweetest fruit I can think of, sweeter than peaches. They are beautiful, too, green with glowing yellow and pink blushes. There is probably no better way to use them than to just eat them out of hand until you can eat no more. But because there are so many, I need to find some other things to so with them. 

Things to do with greengage plums, after eating yourself sick:

- dehydrate them (greengages are a freestone plum, so very easy to prep and dehydrate)

- make a shrub (cover a quart or so of chopped fruit with sugar and let macerate two days in the fridge. Add apple cider vinegar to make a concentrated, sweet-and-sour fruit flavored syrup. Pour over some ice cubes and add sparkling water, with or without a jigger of spirits)

- Clafouti

- jam, as a last resort. Perusing some recipes suggests vanilla as a flavoring. However, we also got home in time for peak blackberry season, so my jam needs will be well-met. 

Small rant to end this post: The world has lost some vast and depressing percentage (I've heard everything from 30-75%) of its heirloom varieties of food plants. The wonderful diversity of food plants not only provides us with a spectrum of tastes and nutrition, but is also essential for food security. Different varieties of the same species have differing resistance to pests and diseases and different abilities to thrive in varied climates. This isn't academic - with climate change we need ALL the varieties of ALL the food plants in order to feed our hot, crowded planet. 

There are many seed houses and orchardists devoted to preserving these wonderful old heirloom varieties. 

It's worth seeking some of them out and supporting their mission. You'll eat better and sleep better :)

 

Scrumptious Scraps

I don't have any work appointments today, so it's "get stuff done" day. Although it's a gorgeous day outside, the inside of the house is what needs attention. I've already washed the dishes, done the laundry, cleaned the kitchen (okay, half-cleaned), and gone grocery shopping. Grocery shopping means I have to clean out the fridge and make use of the older produce to make room for the new. 

After throwing all the really old produce into the piggy bucket - we will have happy piggies later today - here's what I was left with:

A whole lot of cilantro

 a head of organic purple cabbage and a fair number of carrots. Not pictured, several Serrano chiles and a half a head of garlic. 

Looks like a good day to make a few ferments. I will make cilantro chutney by blending the cilantro with the chiles, a white onion, a knob of ginger, and a heaping teaspoon of salt. That will go in the fridge and be available as a fresh dressing for anything vaguely Indian. I have leftover mashed potatoes so maybe I'll make samosas tonight. 

The carrots and cabbage will, of course, become sauerkraut. It's a little unusual to have such a high ratio of carrot to cabbage, but I'm sure it will taste fine. I will just grate the carrots on the largest holes of a box grater, shred the cabbage as thinly as possible, and toss with 2% salt by weight (which I estimate). pack into large glass or ceramic jar, pound down firmly until the natural liquid covers the vegetables. Put something on top to keep all veggies submerged - I use a plastic bag and a glass weight. 

At room temperature - about 67 these days - the kraut will take several days to get nice and tangy on the countertop. After that it keeps indefinitely in the fridge. 

Animals Behaving Badly (Escapes and Attacks)

We had an exciting morning around here. It started off nicely enough; I was sitting at the kitchen table around nine am having coffee with my husband, and we were enjoying the fact that our children are now in high school and get themselves off to school without even waking us up. The sun was out and it looked like it was going to be a nice day. 

Then our neighbor called. 

"Your cow and the pigs, they are over here on my side of the fence," he said. So we jumped up from the table, ran around looking for ropes (to lead the cow) and stale bread (to entice the pigs) and headed outside. The animals were indeed just on the other side of the fence, on the east side, near the orchard. Luckily, there is a cattle panel on that side that is just attached with carabiners, which we had done in order to let our neighbor come through on his tractor and pick up compost for his garden. So it was fairly easy to open the fence and chase the animals back in through the gap. Except for the Kune Kune pig, who had apparently decided he wanted to run away and join the circus. 

I assumed we had a breach in the fenceline somewhere along the eastern side of the property. Pigs will test fences and push cattle panels up off the ground and go under,  or detach them from the t-posts if, as is there case at our house, they are but loosely affixed with baling twine. So once the animals were all back in the main pasture, Homero grabbed some zip ties and got on the ATV to inspect the fences, and I went back inside to finish my coffee and peruse Facebook. 

Where I saw this:

Shame!! Shame and embarrassment! Animal escapes are always entertaining unless they are your animals. It's bad enough that people know my animals were out, but the fact that they were actually wandering along the state highway was worse. Tanker trucks blast by at 60 MPH and we live on top of a hill with a very short sight distance. Only blind luck prevented a terrifying accident. Oh well - all's well that ends well, and at least somebody driving along got a giggle out of it. As it turns out, there was no breach in the fenceline (although we do need to do some maintenance). The chain holding the main gate shut had broken. Probably secondary to a couple of big pigs pushing on it. 

Then, when I went back out to feed everyone, the black rooster attacked me noiselessly from behind and gouged two good sized holes into my thigh, right through my skirt. I never saw him coming. It was like being hit by a very small meteor. He's always been a vicious bird. I think I'll have Homero wring his neck and make a fan out of his very beautiful, glossy black evil feathers. 

First Fire (Carne Asada)

Built a fire this afternoon and had a carne asada, just for us. It’s still cold, but the sun was bright and tempting. I just took the oven rack out to the fire pit and laid it over the coals. Nopales and spring onions, tasajo, and a bit of fresh chorizo. I whizzed up a quick raw tomatillo salsa in the blender, heated up tortillas, and brought out the quesillo I made last week. 

 

Yard work (Before and After)

This past week, the first week in April, has had typically schizophrenic weather. Bright sunny days alternate with gloomy, freezing days - and the occasional hailstorm thrown  in for fun. 

Last night there was a windstorm that blew frigid air into the house under the doors and -seemingly- right through the windows. But this morning dawned bright and clear, and warm enough that I felt like working outside.  It was cold, but not so cold that a few minutes with a hoe wouldn’t warm me up. 

The farm is a mess. I mean, it’s always a mess, kind of, but in early spring the accumulated detritus of winter really stands out. There’s work to do anywhere I rest my eyes. Today I decided to spend the day doing something about it. 

Turns out, “a day” for me means about four hours, and that right leisurely. Nonetheless, I did manage to make a noticeable difference. 

I cleaned up two small garden beds, each about two by ten feet. I dug out the buttercup and the grass roots, raked, and brought over fresh compost from the pile. I had a few plants in pots I wanted to get into the ground, so in one bed I planted a sage plant and some lemon thyme, and in the other I sowed scarlet runner beans. 

The trampoline has been overrun with blackberries over the last few years. It took me a solid hour with a pair of pruning shears and a pair of gardening gloves (not thick enough - need leather) to get it cleaned up. 

The cut blackberry vines went over the fence into the hot yard, where the goats were very happy to see them. There are still blackberries growing underneath, but I can’t get at those without loving the entire trampoline, which is staked down against the wind. That will have to wait. 

I did a good enough job for Paloma, anyway. 

Notes from the Year of the Pandemic (Spring Equinox, 2021)

 

So far, spring this year is cold. There was a week of warm sun sometime in early March - there usually is - that tempted me to start shoveling some dirt into a wheelbarrow and laying down cardboard in the garden, but it was only a tease, and the frost returned as expected. I knew it would, of course, even as I stood on top of the compost pile in my shirtsleeves, shovel in hand. I'm slow but I do learn. 

The awareness that the warmth on my shoulders was the product of a small, false spring didn't matter. When the sun shines in March in the far Pacific Northwest, and you live on a farm, you get outside and you pick up a shovel with as much thought as worms have as they come to the surface when the ground thaws, as much as chickens who start to lay when the days lengthen, even though the eggs may freeze in the nest boxes overnight. After a Northwest winter, especially this last one which threatened to draw a final dark curtain across so many lives, you take your lumens while you may. Get out in that thin wind and squint, and take off your coat, and shiver, and give thanks.

It was a bad winter. In so many ways. Last spring, when the pandemic was just ramping up and we didn't know how long it would last, we made jokes about lockdown lasting a whole month, and we distracted ourselves with the rites and tasks of spring on the farm. I took up an old habit and carried a sketchbook around the property, drawing leaves and bugs and chickens. Like everyone else, I put in a big garden. I bought mountains of craft supplies for the girls and we all planned the ways we would enjoy ourselves and better ourselves and learn things and have fun together during this time of enforced togetherness. We were optimistic, if not about the course of the pandemic then about the possibility of our own growth and development during it. Like healthy people everywhere, undamaged people, people who know not what lies ahead, we embraced the imagined challenge of joy in adversity.

And I'm not saying none of it happened. We did stuff. The craft supplies were used to make crafts. I taught the kids to play cribbage and rummy. We took to going hiking on Sundays as a family and discovered beautiful places we'd never gone before. The garden did pretty well and many vegetables were fermented, and many loaves of sourdough were baked (yeast being in short supply). The farm produced, as it does every summer, a crop of beauty and fun in the form of baby goats and baby chicks and, this year, baby guinea hens. For months, the work of the day was sufficient thereunto, and we were more or less content. 

Then fall came, and school did not start. Life refused to return to anything approaching normal. Milestones passed uncelebrated. The new systems that were hastily constructed to replace the old, now-impossible ways of doing things were confusing and inadequate. We were all sick of the sight of each other. The stress of waiting to get sick was making us sick. The uncertainty -the total, global uncertainty - was wearing us all down. Would Hope be able to apply to colleges? Would school sports ever happen? Would we ever be able to have a birthday party? Would ANYTHING ever be NORMAL again? Time seemed more meaningless by the week, and I stopped updating the altar or looking forward to seasonal celebrations. 

It was especially hard to keep our spirits up after the string of disasters among the animals. The problem of multiple drug-resistant parasites with my goats has gotten worse and worse, and my veterinarian has basically thrown up his hands. First baby Stormy died, then Flopsy. Trying to medicate Lilac - out of desperation, as all the medications we have tried have utterly failed - the plunger slipped in my hand and I accidentally gave her a fatal overdose. This was especially awful, as Lilac was young and healthy and I expected her to be the star of the next generation of milkers. Polly and Christmas are looking thin and unthrifty and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. All I can do is keep them all contained in the sacrifice area, where there is nothing to eat, and feed them (presumably parasite free) hay. I am terrified I will simply have to watch them all die slowly, one after another. I can't sell any babies, should there be any, because I can't ethically export these awful worms to other farms. Paloma is not even looking forward to baby goats this year, after she fell in love with Stormy last year and lost him so soon.

An entire clutch of newly hatched chicks drowned in a waterer. 

Thirteen out of fourteen baby guinea hens failed to survive. They just disappeared one by one over a few days, and by the time we could catch the mother and remaining babies there was only one left. 

Gucci, Hope's beloved ferret, got tumors in the belly and had to be put down.

Turning our attention away from the farm to the outside world was little solace; the news was full of death, disaster, riot, war, idiocy, and fear. Fall was scary and long and dark and cold, and it often felt like the whole damn world was going straight down the shitter. The election was a bright spot of blessed relief, but the period between November 3 and January 20 was nerve-wracking.  Every day threatened rampage and disruption on a scale unimagined in my lifetime.

Now I've just been sitting here staring at the screen for five minutes. Then what? Then it was winter. We lived through it. It was not so awful for us, really, not compared to so many others. We had work. We didn't get Covid until January, and when we did it wasn't so bad, thank God. Homero's oxygen dipped down to 89 a few times and that was scary, but they put him on prednisone and gave him an inhaler and he was fine. I had awful chills and couldn't stay warm. I would shiver and my teeth would chatter while submerged in a hot bath. But it only lasted about ten days and we have almost totally recovered. I get winded quickly, that's all. Everyone should be so lucky.

There was a pretty good snowfall in February - 18 inches or so, enough to entirely transform the landscape and bring a welcome intermission from the tedium of rain and mud. My kids no longer play in the snow much, being in their high teenage years, but the dogs do. 

I don't know what I'm going to do next. Im staring down the barrel of empty-nest-hood. Hope did apply to colleges, and she will go away next fall, to one or another of them. Paloma is only two years behind her. Sports did start, and both girls have evening practice most nights. They have jobs on the weekends. They  drive. They kiss me and say "goodbye, mom!" and go see their friends.  I cook too much food, and nobody eats it. Well, the pigs do. 

Will nothing be normal ever again? No, it will not. Not for me. Normal is little girls blowing dandelion clocks on the lawn; normal is shiny baby goats bouncing across the field. Normal is reading bedtime stories. Normal is being able to make it all better with a kiss, and having answers to all their questions, or at least them believing I do. Normal is a memory now.

It is the equinox today. Winter is passing away and Spring is on the verge of emerging. The year of the pandemic - godwilling - is over, but I cannot see what is coming next. Like the planet, I am balanced on the knife edge of a new season. Be gentle with me, spring. I'm getting old and I'm slow, but I learn if you give me enough time. 

Goodbye to a Great Goat (The End of an Era)

 

    Iris gives the girls an early sex ed lesson, farm style

My first goat was Iris, a beautiful Nubian about a year and a half old, a first freshener. I bought a pregnant goat because I absolutely couldn’t wait another year for babies. 

Iris (short for Arcoíris, which means rainbow in Spanish) was a very fancy registered purebred from a farm with lots of grand champions to their credit. I really didn’t care about that, I just loved spotted Nubians. But breeding will out, and Iris turned out to be a truly outstanding goat in almost every way. 

The kids she threw were gorgeous, year after year. She almost never needed any assistance, and was a very good mom. She had a beautiful udder, easy to milk, and gave about a gallon of delicious sweet milk a day. She stood for milking, too, and jumped on the stand without fuss. Her hooves were good. She was seldom sick. But most of all, she was smart. 

Iris was one of the few goats that obviously knew her name. She could unlatch gates, be they barred or closed with a hook and eye. We had to use carabiners to keep her out of the feed shed. The undisputed herd queen, she led the herd for a good ten years, remembering which trees on the property fruited in which season and where to find the best new shoots and flowering twigs. She was affectionate and loving. Iris was a wonderful animal and a friend. 

Iris was fifteen this year, which is very very old for a dairy goat. As she got old, the worms which plague every dairy goat started getting the best of her, and she became very thin and frail. No matter how much grain and alfalfa we fed her, she kept losing weight. The other goats began to bully her, and knock her down. 

When we found her out in the field, knocked over and unable to stand up, we knew it was time. In fact if the truth be known I probably waited too long. She was suffering; I just didn’t want to say goodbye. After I brought out the girls to say goodbye, and after I stroked her and fed her some grain out of my palm, and after I shed a few tears, Homero went and got the gun and that was that. 

Iris, beautiful spirit, thank you for all the happiness you brought into my life. Thank you for for sharing your grace and your beauty with us. Thank you for the adorable kids you birthed. Thank you for your milk, which nourished our bodies and nourished my mind too, as I learned to make cheese and grew in my craft. Thank you for being a good goat. I loved you. 

        

                                   Herd Queen 

A girl and her goat in happier times. 

Still Here (Midwinter)

Soon, I promise - promise myself - I will sit down and write a long update. Two months have passed since my last post, and so much has happened I hardly know where to start. Great changes both on our farm and in the outside world. A few of them good (adios, worst president in history! Hello, personal recovery!) but many of them terrible and dispiriting. 

Meanwhile, here is the new, post-Christmas midwinter altar. Usually this is a dark, rather frightening altar, with my Hecate icon or the storm tree paintings. But this year I don’t want anything gloomy. I swept the altar bare of all the Christmas gewgaws and glitter and place only three items. A silvery money plant, a garland of dried orange slices that Hope made, and my sleepy beast-man. 

The sleepy man is a ceramic figure I found in a thrift store many years ago. I love his gentle face, his whiskers, his strange paws, between which he holds a flower, and the generous mantle he is wrapped in. When I put him on the altar I think of peaceful hibernation, rest and restoration, and sweet dreams.