Celebrating the Season (Before It's Gone)

Last post (Turn the Page) I was whining about the change in the weather, and lamenting the fact that Autumn was upon me while I still wasn't done with Summer. I had been lazy and remiss (or, to be gentler on myself, busy and out of town) and my pantry was still bare. The altar had been neglected for an entire season.

Well, the powers that be gifted me with a few days of beautiful sunshine, and I did not let them pass by without taking advantage. I have been playing catchup on the preserving front, and actually got quite a bit done.

I canned a gallon of pear/blackberry sauce from the pears off our tree. This is in fact the second batch - the first batch got eaten up in the three days that I was out of town. This batch is safely stored away in the pantry. Hopefully it will last longer than three days.

We stopped off at the blueberry farm on our way home and picked five pounds of blueberries in about twenty minutes. Must get back there right away - the blueberries are out of control! It's so easy to pick a vast amount, and they are only $1/pound. Organic, too!

And I cleaned and decorated the altar. It's pretty simple - I just picked a few pears off the tree, found a cob of Indian corn, and clipped some wildflowers and weeds that are blooming or fruiting now. Thistles, tansy, bachelor's button, and blackberries. There is a sun medallion to plead for more sunshine, and all of it is under a drawing of Ceres (or Demeter).

I don't have a figurine or a painting of Demeter (or Ceres), so I made a quick, one-minute drawing and decorated it with star-stickers (which could also represent back-to-school, now that I think of it.) I hope the Goddess doesn't mind my crude representation - I rather like it.

Pasture Patrol

In preparation for the alpacas, who are coming sometime this week, we had the pasture field-mowed. Jordan, the local boy I hired off Craig's list and his mid-sized kubata could only do about half the feild, because of debris and large rocks in the other half. This photo does a fair job of showing the difference between the mowed and the non-mowed halves.

The goats love the mowed field. They can see each other. They were literally over their heads before, and the littlest one kept getting lost and crying for his mama. I'm hoping that they will do a decent job of getting blackberries and other weeds as they grow back.
But we still have a problem with the Poison Hemlock. My friend Sarah, garden authority, warned me that topping them was unlikely to do any good; that most likely it would simply spur them to produce more heads. She was right. But I thought, well, maybe REPEATED cutting will fix 'em! I bought a gas powered weed-eater and we cut them all down again, pulling as many out by the root as we could reach and our backs could stand. And of course, many were mowed to the ground again yesterday. I think it might be late enough in the growing season now that they won't be able to stage a comeback.

But.

Our neighbor to the east (there's no neighbor there yet, it's just raw land) has a large stand of them, tall and flowery and waving in the breeze. I don't have their number to call and ask if I can cut them down, but I'm thinking of doing it anyway. I might talk to the next neighbor over, the one on the other side. He has cows, and Hemlock will poison them easier than it will poison goats, so maybe he will agree that it's okay to go cut. Or maybe he has their number.

Philosopher's Bane

Today I visited the noxious weed board of our county with a sample of a particularly annoying weed that is rapidly proliferating on my land. It starts out very small and feathery, innocent-looking, with a sharp, half-familiar, not unpleasant smell. But pretty soon it is seven feet tall, growing in thick hedges, stinking to high heaven with a rank, foul odor, and giving me hives whenever I brush against it. The goats, naturally enough, won't touch the stuff, with the result that it is spreading. 

I walked into the office of the noxious weed board with a wand of it in my hand, and the lady who met me visibly blanched. "Ooh, put that in the trash. Here, wash your hands." Turns out I have poison hemlock flourishing all over my pasture. Yes, the same plant that killed Socrates. It's a potent nuerotoxin, and it looks just like wild carrot (though it doesn't smell like it. I can't imagine anyone taking a whiff and deciding to eat it for lunch.). Madame weed board said "you just go to sleep, and never wake up."

It probably poses no risks to my goats, since they don't eat it, and it probably poses little risk to my kids, since it's stinky and sticky, but it is crowding out grass and other good forage that my goats need. The only good thing I heard about it is that it only spreads by seed dispersal, not by rhizomes or cuttings falling on the ground or anything else, so if I hurry, I can lop all the flowering tops off before they go to seed and maybe put a dent in it this year.

I went directly from the weed board to the farm store and bought a machete.