life lessons of sorts.

First off ---Daisy found a home! They are happy together and I'm glad. She's an amazing dog.

Secondly, the CSA season is winding down and I'm getting that nostalgic-season feeling where I'm reflecting on everything I did and did not do and wishing I did more and thinking about next year and what to do differently and what not to grow and what to switch up. I think for right now, I should try to just focus on the question - what did I learn this year?

Hmm, with the hard task of clearing out my brain from the frenzy of harvest time and putting food back for the winter, amazingly enough, it's hard to concentrate. But anyways, here goes.

What I learned in 2009.

by Janee Houston

Pigs love to hang out in the road.

Sheep can't swim.

Radishes love to reseed themselves, especially if you don't like radishes.

If you want rain, it won't rain but if you don't want rain on a Tuesday... it pours.

Cats can't stop traffic like pigs can.

Not all apple trees are created equal.

Yes, there can be "too much of a good thing." Example, a very succesful zucchini season.

You can never plant enough garlic.

...or potatoes.

....... or asparagus.

............. or sweet corn.

Carrots hate me.

Onions hate me too. note to self, try a new technique - winter seed sowing in greenhouse?

For every one pint or black raspberries picked, expect 25 briar scratches.

Kale in partial shade is no match for kale in full sun.

All kale is still delicious, except after no rain for 3 weeks.

More dogs equals more fun.

Alpacas make crazy noises like cats fighting.

"Free" cow means something you feed, but you can't eat. (still trying to figure that one out too)

Real fencing works far better than electric and is totally worth the money to not have to chase sheep and goats and pigs all around, though I do miss the daily jog and anger management just isn't the same.

Do not count your melons before they grow as they will grow slower and less prolific than math equations and seed packets may want you to believe.

Forcing grapes to be seedless cuts down on their diversity.
Goats love to destroy anything you spent time on - especially if it's time spent planting.

Hmm... I'm sure there's more life lessons to be had, but after a long CSA day of fighting rain again, I'm ready for bed. Members - one more pickup before we close up shop for the season. It's time to stock up. See you Tuesday night!

scattered showers

It rained a little bit yesterday. Not much at all. By "scattered showers" I think the weather prediction meant -one spitting little shower- because it was just enough to get your windshield wet. I guess this is the odd end to a weird season, a little 3 week drought ought to confuse the plants even more. I have a apple tree in bloom now. The dirt is just powder. Even the established trees are looking a little stressed.

The grape harvest is coming up fast and the last week of the CSA is impending. I'm feeling the end of the season blues pretty bad. Even football can't cheer me up this year as my team is more disappointing than ever this season. (I think you know which one I'm talking about...) I'm placing an order for blue berries and cranberries to plant along the creek bed. The pigs are all but one gone, and she is the most lonely looking pig ever.

I guess I'll just keep my eye on the winter plantings of garlic, kale, and turnips that we'll hopefully be pulling up all the way through the dark winter days. I guess no matter what the weather is, things are still growing.

Indian Summer

It is August now. Welcome to the Indian Summer... er wait. Welcome to summer part 1. Hm... well it's going to warm up some time now.

In the grande scheme of things, August was going to be my month to really step back and work on battening the hatches for winter. We were going to start on plans for a wind turbine to start cutting down on the electric. We were also planning on hooking up an old wood burner in my basement to start cutting down on heating bills. And then I was thinking about figuring a compost heating system to try to heat up the greenhouse for a bit to keep me occupied with green things in the winter as well.
That is my wish list.

Instead, August has begun with sore muscles, an -o crap I have to find a job for winter- search, and for some odd reason a rescue dog trying to find a home project came to fruition.

First off, manual labor sucks. It is fun for a bit, but then there are just some days where I wish I had an office to crawl into and hide behind a computer. I spent most of the drizzley day yesterday cleaning up my loft and trying to get my head straight amidst a whirlwind of activity. Between the park and the vineyard, my mind is constantly racing and my body is constantly in motion. As the sun dapples and the wind blows... and the turkeys cry loudly for their breakfast which is a Sunday morning kind of late, I am really trying to sink my roots in and let things happen as they may. Maybe a good yoga stretch in the back field would really start this day out right.

Second - oh crap. I have to find a winter job.
This is really starting to hit me. I think it was the football cue that really knocked me on my feet. Our fantasy draft is coming up. Usually by the time football rolls around, I am done with gardening and the heat and am ready for the snow to fly on a lazy Sunday and fall asleep to the browns getting beat mercilessly.
But the heat never came this summer. And I am not ready to give it up yet. Where was all the swimming!? Where was the water volleyball? The summer nights with friends? Camping? Fishing?! Where have I been all summer? What the hell have I been doing!!!???
Which of course brings me to a new crisis...
The vineyard is great. I could list like twenty million things that I like about it, but I will spare you all. The one bad thing about the vineyard is this winter I will be SOL for employment. It is just this year and it shouldn't be too bad, but uncertainty is something that I am uncomfortable with and this is as uncertain as it gets.
The harvest is going to happen in late September. I am traveling down with the grapes to get pressed then and watching the master vitner start to work his magic. By the time I get back, frost will be upon us and I will have nowhere to go, no CSA to divert attention, only the cooing of turkeys that need sold for Thanksgiving (but of course, their deliciousness sells itself) and the deep longing for warmer weather.
We'll see, I am looking at some ridiculous options, and some of them involve plane tickets to warmer climates...

And lastly, the dog project.
I have no idea what got into my head. Perhaps I always wanted a pound puppy. Perhaps I just wanted to add a bit more chaos to my life. Perhaps I just really love all dogs, but I have a new project and she is happily sleeping on my rug in my newly cleaned room.
She doesn't have a name yet. It annoys me that I don't know it. I found her while searching for a pound puppy for my friend Bethani. And she is ridiculously sweet. I saw her first about a month ago, happily wagging her tail and rubbing up against the chain link trying to get pet. I took home another dog who looked like a young purebred border collie with the intention of training him as a herd dog, but he turned out to be really sick and after a tearful vet visit, I returned him. This girl was still in her cage, doe-eyed and almost crying with her big ears and wagging tail.
Thinking - of course that sweet dog is going to find someone - I left her there. I went back one week later, two weeks later... still there. But the pound and the barking was getting to her. She was more reserved, scared, and getting sores from being on concrete too long. So I took her home.
She was on a leash attached to me for 3 days. She went to the vineyard with me. She slept outside. She howled to come in.
After a few days, we started calling her Daisy. She still doesn't know it. I wish I knew her former name. She was somebody's dog. Her coat is soft, the vet said she was already fixed. This is someone's dog, but they threw her away.
I cannot have another dog. Pepper is all that I need. Daisy is a sweetheart though and I still think that there is a home out there that is perfect for her. We are re-teaching her manners and she knows how to sit and answers more to "Come here" than to "Daisy." She is most certainly from herd dog blood though and once she was inside the sheep fence, she split the flock then brought them back together, drove them to one end then circled and brought them back. It was amazing to watch her, totally untrained before but just enjoying what she was meant to do.
Since then though, she's slowed down a lot and would much prefer to be an inside dog. She will still run around and put the ducks away at night, but not with the ferver that Pepper keeps the pigs in line. Seems like she is most at home in front of the TV watching movies.

Anyway, if anyone is looking for a dog, just let me know. This one is 100% sweetheart and waiting for someone to give all her love to.


Until then, we'll be wandering around on this lazy summer sunday, bathed in sun and waiting for that 90 degrees they are talking about so we can go swimming!!!

fourth of july

The dew soaked my feet before I even got to the turkey feed this morning. The sun was bright but it was cool enough for a jacket. The ducks filled their bills with all the mash they could fit before running to the creek to wash it all down and take their morning bath. The meat goats were happily laying under the shade of a bark stripped locust tree, lounging around eating their morning grain. I picked the summer squash while the sheep impatiently yelled at me for their morning meal and the pigs weren't even up when I threw their feed in.

It has been a tough week with the loss of the best cat who thought he was a dog and the best sheep who loved people. The pigs were running crazy and getting my grandma yelled at (what kind of jerk yells at a sweet old woman) and the goats were mischevious as ever. The next day, we lost our first fainting goat kid before we even realized it was born. So heartbreaking. In the middle of the week I was completely frustrated and tired and about ready to just move to a giant city and eat food shipped thousands of miles and not think about it.

... but I guess that's when you really just put your head down, one foot in front of the other and tackle each problem one at a time until everything is back in balance.

I moved the pigs behind the chicken house and gave them an electric fence of their own. I tied the alpacas to a tree so that they could graze, put the meat goat in a nice fence Travis built behind my house, checked online to see what could cause a miscarriage in a goat and what we can do about it next time, weed eated the trees that are growing in the cabbage... and slowly before long everything seemed to hit equilibrium again.

This morning was a sigh of relief, a sun bathed scene of beautiful fields with ducks preening themselves, geese flapping their wings for a morning stretch, sheep bounding and jumping at the sight of their breakfast, pigs sleepily waking up and plowing nose first into a giant bucket of slop, and pepper the heeler sitting back to survey her flock and make sure everyone is in line.

After blue berry pancakes and a big pile of eggs, I feel much better. And now, with one eye open to the problems at hand, today I am going to try to sit back and enjoy this independance day, eating straight out of the garden and grilling up some home grown hamburgers.

It's CSA season!

There is nothing like the sit down at the end of the day, especially after running around all day. The first pickup day is always very exciting, with all of us running around through the berry patch, pulling root veggies out of the ground, deciding what lettuce heads to cut and which to keep for next week... all the while thinking - do we have enough? or do we have too much? how will i remember everyone's names?
So when 8 o'clock starts drawing near and the chickens are just starting to roost, it's amazing how your feet feel when you finally give them a break. With an extremely pleasant new signup rounding out the end of the pickup day, we were all happy to crack open a beer, giggle at the ducks and geese chasing bugs, and sit down to assess the first pickup day.

My sister looked a bit incredulous at me when it was all said and done and said "you do that every week?!" Eh, it gets easier as the season goes on though. It is so odd to think -- yes, I am planting this today but it won't be ready to eat until.... three months from now or four months from now or five weeks from now. After last year, I threw out the calculations going by the back of the seed packs (seed companies are terrible liars with high promises of huge yields in little or no time at all) and we have gone for the gung ho - plant as much as you can whenever you get the chance - approach. With the extra help this year, the gardens filled up quickly and we started looking for more land that we could use. Travis is the best for that. He can prepare a bed where there was nothing before (or where the pigs used to live, hehe) and things just start growing from there. I am trying not to worry, but I can tell it is going to be a wild ride as we battle the bugs, grow through a rather rainy summer so far, and try to stop the deer from eating our tomatoes in the back garden. They think we planted just for them. Wouldn't you know that as soon as I got the groundhogs under control, something else would think the garden looks delicious.

Anyway, as I promised this year to Jason, we cut back on signups so that our family can eat out of the gardens, a luxury we didn't have this year. I looove the radish recipe from the baskets this week and we are going to have grilled asparagus, lamb chops, and steamed on the grill radishes with a light short cake with a couple tiny strawberries on top.

I forgot over the winter how nice it is to cook straight out of the gardens.

summer salads and the first lightning bug

I feel so lucky today. Perhaps it was sleeping in on a warm summer Sunday or maybe it was the hours playing in the garden and then jumping in freezing cold water to wash off the sweat and dirt. I am very happy with the pace of how the gardens are planted this year and I am incredibly happy that we didn't start the CSA as early as we did last year. I just keep thinking, geez, we'd be on week two already last year!
I am happy this way because it is allowing the lettuce to head instead of all be loose leaf. Sure, we will only catch the waning end of the asparagus and strawberry season but I think that the best is yet to come. The war on the weeds is on and Scout, my dad's white german shepherd suddenly figured out that his call in life was to hunt groundhogs... which is good news for us. There has only been one squash bug sighting so far and I haven't seen a cabbage moth all year yet. The peas are in full flower, the squash is putting on new green leaves, and the trees have settled into their new leaves quite nicely, turning the chartreuse into a rich, chlorophyll green of summertime.

I saw my first lightning bug today! It was at dusk and I was walking out to the sheep as the tree frogs were warming up for their nightly song when the ground started blinking at me. It is so funny how the early lightning bugs are supercharged, blinking so fast it seems like they are confused with their power to illuminate. Once settled in within the next few weeks, I'm looking forward to their nightly show as the bats fly overhead eating hundreds of mosquitoes.

I feel lucky today. Not that I am going to play the lotto or win money or narrowly escape catastrophe, more just glad to be in this moment at this time. Everything is growing, blooming, fruiting, and baa-ing. It's summer salad time!

carrots, kohlrabi, cabbage, and peas

The peas are up, the garlic is almost knee high, the onions are poking out of the ground as we throw mulch to cover their bare shoulders. In the ground, waiting for germination to catapult them into happily growing are colored carrots, purple kohlrabi, cylindrical cabbage, white radishes, golden beets, swiss chard, arugula, two types of kale, and all types of heading and loose leaf lettuces.
The broccoli, cauliflower and celery are happily soaking up today's rain and I'm cursing the plum tree who foolishly burst into bloom the first warm spring day, leaving it vulnerable as always to those last inevitable spring frosts.

This is the time of so much anticipation. This is the first flush of chartreuse in the grass and a bit under the trees. The apple trees have a little green on their tips and the lilac has what looks like baby grape clusters coming on. There is a sweet smell in the air, combined with the rain turning everything into mud means that spring is certainly here.