Spring? Already?

Getting out in the (finally) sunshiny weather to do some homestead chores had me covering three full seasons today, and seeing some rather disquieting signs of a fourth. Bring in a 2-day (and night) supply of wood for the wood stove, because it’s still in the 30s at night and mornings are decidedly chilly. But days are in the high 50s to mid-60s, and absolutely glorious with the whiff of spring. Even as I finished (finally) harvesting beets and digging potatoes from last fall’s crops. Which didn’t manage to get harvested before the holidays descended upon me but weren’t in any real danger of destruction during what has been one of the mildest winters in all my 20 years here.

Basket and garden fork in hand, I wended my way to the bottom tiers from the bricked herb and rose garden below the grapes. Noticing how green the mints are, when they’re usually nothing but scraggly sticks in January. When they’re not under an accumulated couple of feet of snow. The thyme is brown, but the oregano has fresh green leaves low on the plants. The rosemary is still thick and green, thicker even than when I cut it down to nubs in November. Every single one of the sages is putting out leaves, including the potted sage I forgot to bring indoors to keep me company. The chives are still standing, and here’s new leaves on the parsley too. I’ve never seen that anywhere north of Florida.

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Best Thanksgiving Perk: Cranberries

Thanksgiving is just over a week away, which means one of my absolute favorite fruits are now being sold fresh in bags – often on half price sale – at grocery stores everywhere. For Thanksgiving I use just one of those 12-ounce bags to make my famous Crackberry Sauce (regular whole cranberry sauce with a bag of frozen blackberries added). But I buy as many as I can afford when they go on sale so I can dry them as “craisins.”

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Things to Do with Fallen Leaves

As we quickly approach November and the portion of the year when things are mostly bare and brown instead of lush and green, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about things we homesteaders can do with all those fallen leaves that will help our general productivity over time.

We were gifted with one of those noisy, gasoline powered leaf blowers a few months ago when a friend moved from the countryside back into town and had no further use for it. Made me chuckle considering the fact that we live in the middle of the southern Appalachian forest – “thick” by anyone’s standards – and have enough fallen leaves to drive most towns crazy. Worse, living where we do we also get fairly regular fires that love nothing better than a good thickness of dead leaves to burn. I’ve learned through the years that the low-level “brush fires” that don’t burn much other than the leaf fall and a few scraggly saplings are actually good for the forest. So long as they don’t manage to get hot enough to engulf trees. Heck, most of the mature trees can (and have) survive the ground fires just fine, a bit blacker around the trunks than they used to be. And kudzu, of course, loves fire. Always comes roaring back twice as thick as before, and does way more than its share of eating forest trees, engulfing dead cars and stray cattle herds overnight.

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Another Autumn Goodie: Rosehip Syrup

My daughter went a little wild this year “trimming” back the grape vines that wandered over the fence that badly needs repair (rather than simply repairing the fence), so diminishing the ripening fruit that we got basically nothing from them this season. Ah, well. Happens every so often. They should be back in bulk next year, and I’m fixing the fence over the winter so she won’t be tempted to prune out of season. What she didn’t manage to trim into oblivion this year are the wild roses (sweet briar) bushes on the up-ridge side of the driveway. They can get out of control pretty easy, and always want to drape down into the driveway to cause scratches (and sometimes blood) to people who park too close.

So I’m the one who did the pruning this year, and I was very careful to hardily discourage growth on the driveway side, while encouraging growth on the ridge side. That allowed for a pretty good haul of rose hips this past weekend by my grandson. In previous years I’ve simply put the little hips – sweet briar hips are about half the size of dogwood berries, not the fat wild persimmon sized hips of garden roses – into a jar in the freezer to add to teas made over the winter. Especially the colds/flu tea we drink a lot of to keep the viruses away. But this year we made rose hip syrup, and I’m definitely a convert as I drink my morning coffee sweetened with it.

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Woodstove Maintenance

As the hardwoods peak and shower our homestead with a bright blanket of multi-colored leaves, the resulting re-emergence of the surrounding mountains reminds me that cold weather’s coming fast and things here on the ‘stead have to be squared away for that inevitability. First on the list of things to do, of course, is woodstove maintenance.

Our woodstove is a custom job, came with the cabin when we bought the place. It needs to be blackened, as the surface does tend to become a bit pitted and rusty over a period of years. We could use a coat of gun blue, but we usually just get a can of good ol’ stove blacking from the hardware store and apply that. Once it’s on, it needs to be fired up to set, however. And that of course requires cleaning the stovepipe and making sure all the joints are sound (or get replaced, also something that has to happen every few years). And while we’re at that, cleaning out all the packed ashes leftover from springs last cold nights has to be removed, the lining bricks re-set, and all the grates through which the stovepipe passes have to be meticulously cleaned of accumulated cobwebs and possible flammables. A well-maintained woodstove provides reliable and welcome heat for decades whether it’s free-standing or a fireplace insert variety. Without said maintenance it’s a fire hazard for which you may find your insurance lacking.

So now that at least the start on the winter’s wood supply has been cut, split and stacked in a convenient location, here’s the basic overview of “How-To” do whatever else needs doing…

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Comfort Food from the Fall Garden

If you’re like me, having to wait until November 1st before the kids (or, in my case, the grandkids) will allow me to process the pumpkins, making simple but delicious meals out of what’s still coming in from the garden at this late date can be a challenge. There’s not much out there right now, mostly the last of the peppers, some scraggly red kale still struggling along as the fall kale is just now coming up, the herbs still being cut and slowly dried for winter, the potatoes still safely stashed underground to be dug as needed. Oh, and those pesky but delicious cherry tomato volunteers that become tolerated weeds depending on where they grow (and I’ll allow).

Nights are decidedly chilly now, though there hasn’t yet been a freeze. Days are gorgeously mid-October, the reds finally kicking in to add their richness to the yellows of the fall leaf color scheme, all but the oak leaves will be gone before Thanksgiving. The grandsons have been spending their school weeks in town since the semester started at the Community College due to a shortage of motorized gad-about(s) since the pickup died last spring. That leaves hubby and I with four actual days a week just to ourselves, something we’ve never enjoyed at any time in the 40+ years of our lives together. It can be quite a challenge to suddenly go from a lifetime of cooking for a fluctuating hoard to making dinner for just two light eaters.

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Upsetting the Apple Cart

I don’t know about you, but here at my homestead we’ve been watching the goings-on in New York City, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and elsewhere across the country (including our own small city 20 miles up the road) that comprise the burgeoning and growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement. As the authoritarian servants of the richest 1% of the nation’s population have moved to isolate and abuse the professional activists, the unemployed, the homeless who have gravitated to the encampments, the juxtaposition with astroturfed, billionaire-funded “Tea Party” demonstrations where denizens were allowed to openly carry guns and assault members of Congress is dramatic. I admit I feel a little guilty to be so enjoying the gorgeous fall colors while people are putting their lives on the line to demand equality and an end to taxpayer bailouts of the criminal 1%.

It is glaringly obvious that the well-funded astroturf ‘movement’ enjoys a far greater share of our supposed First Amendment freedoms than the downtrodden 99% of people who just want to make the rich share in the suffering they order our political class to impose on the rest of us as ‘austerity’. So far the demonstrations have remained entirely peaceful even when police officers start pepper-spraying demonstrators (and their fellow police officers), or when the riot squad barrels into the crowd to choke and fling demonstrators to the ground. Reminds me of 1968. I know ‘they’ say that if you can remember the 1960s you probably weren’t really there, but that was one action-packed year full of billy-clubs and fire hoses and cracked skulls… and that was just the Democratic National Convention. It was still a bit less than 3 years before the Powers that Be started killing college kids wholesale for rudely NOT volunteering for that generation’s dirty big war, but let’s not fool ourselves. The very same thing is possible in 2011, and I’m pretty sure those doing the demonstrating across the country are aware of that possibility.

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Some Sun-Dried Tomato Recipes

The rush of big heirlooms and romas were processed in August, most dried in the solar unit out on the front (southside) deck. Weather’s back up into the ’70s during the day after a couple of nights of high-30s and frost warnings, looks like the peppers and grape tomatoes survived to finish up before Halloween – more sun-dried tomaisins! I keep making them, they keep disappearing faster than they’re coming in. I’ve found they’re not just great on crackers (with fresh basil, red bell peppers and feta cheese) and pizza, but add lots of zing to pasta and rice dishes as well. Mostly, though, the kids eat them as late-night snacks by the handful, right out of the jar.

As soon as it’s too cold to garden any longer, I’ll be using some of the dry-dried tomato that I’ve turned into powder to make tomato, basil and rosemary fettucini. Fresh pasta is fun to make and freezes very well, great to pull out and cook up quick when unexpected guests drop by. For the leathery half-dried tomatoes I had to go looking for recipes beyond “the usual” diced and tossed into/onto stuff. Discovered Valley Sun, a California company that specializes in sun-dried tomatoes. The linked page offers some general ideas about adding dried tomatoes to just about any recipe for meat, poultry, seafood and vegetables.

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Another New CSA and a Change of Herbal Heart

Autumn has come to the mountain just as spring did – one ay it was perfectly clear, close to 80º and comfortably into the mid-60s at night, the next it was barely up to 60º at mid-day and into the high 30s at night. Not only are we seriously behind in the necessary wood supply for heat, I’ve been having to scramble to bring in the remaining peppers and last of the tomatoes. Poplar leaves are already yellow and dogwoods are getting a ret tint on their leave to complement their quickly ripening bright red berries, and the crisp air fills with leaves whenever the breeze blows.

Luckily autumn is my favorite of all seasons. In three weeks from now the lush greens of summer will have turned into impossible corals and day-glo oranges and deep reds and yellows bright enough to light up the night. The smell of leaf-fall is heavenly even though it means endless raking in November, a necessary task to ensure resistance to spring fires. And of course the usual foot-deep winter covering once I’ve cleaned out the garden terraces and tossed the remains of their summer bounty on the compost pile. But it’s raining right now, so I’m shivering inside not daring to use any of the scant locust we have left from last year’s wood supply before nightfall, when it’ll really be needed.

In my last post I talked about a new centralized organizational outfit for connecting CSAs [Community Supported Agriculture farms] and ass orated organic suppliers with customer bases in their area via the internet, for promoting healthy, local food and food products and changing the way we eat. In my wanderings about the web, I discovered another kind of CSA that sounds like something right up my alley.

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Disrupting the Way We Buy Produce

Straight from the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, a new internet-based project to greatly expand the CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] movement into places where it hasn’t been before. It’s a project designed to connect community organizers – volunteers with a group of friends and neighbors who want to get in on farm fresh produce and other fresh foods – to buy in to local suppliers in the usual CSA manner and set up a drop-off point in their area for deliveries and for members to pick up their weekly food items. The company, farmigo, acts as the middleman to negotiate directly with growers, coordinate deliveries and scheduling, and handle the nitty gritty of the business end. It also maintains the web-based platform for people to manage their accounts, order food, and pay the fees. To support this effort, farmigo receives a 2% fee on food sold and collects this from the producers rather than from the customers.

The idea isn’t entirely new, as CSAs in some regions have already set up their local businesses through websites, and even pooled with other suppliers to make for convenient ordering of variety items and coordinate deliveries. Farmigo is pretty much the same type of thing, but on a much larger scale and including big city dwellers. The farmers, fishermen, butchers and bakers who offer products through the service still get to set their own terms and commitment periods. When you check into the website you can click on a map to receive a list of suppliers in your area with links and information on already established drop-off sites.

Farmigo also facilitates one-time ala carte purchases of things like eggs, flowers, meats, seafood, baked goods and other things that will be delivered to the drop-off point on your usual days, so the customer isn’t limited to whatever crops are being harvested at any given time on their CSA’s farm, but isn’t corralled into long-term purchase contracts with those other suppliers. This also saves the member/customer the trouble of driving around to several different drop-off points to get their food allotments. Some suppliers will even deliver to your home, depending on where you live and the nature of your orders.

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