Hello, hello again

My my, here’s the old blog, still lying around, gathering dust, or whatever the internet equivalent of dust is. Webcobwebs? Of course there’s no point writing anything just now, as tomorrow is SOPA Strike Day and this blog will have a big black bar across it. Because censorship sucks. So I’ll just censor myself until the day after. Tot ziens!

Snow business

Shot this from our back window this morning. Lots of traffic out there…

Tracks & sparkles

Out with the old…

…in with the new! I am not one for making New Year’s resolutions (I know myself too well), but I do feel inspired by the change of the calendar to hit the refresh button, if you will, on my life, or at least the stuff that fills my life. Sometimes it just feels good to use up the last of something. Like the Long Pie pumpkin puree I had in the freezer. The last cup went into these muffins yesterday morning.

The last of the Long Pie muffins

No more delicious pumpkin until we grow some more. I am going to try to grow them from the seed I saved. Wish me luck!

In the meantime, a minor miracle. I have had any number of kalanchoes over the years, often acquired while in bloom, and never has a single one of them bloomed ever again in my possession. Until now.

Bloomin' kalanchoe

This was one of the last plants given to my mother during her final illness; I can’t remember by whom—it might have been me. The peachy color reminds me of her. And now it’s the first kalanchoe ever to bloom for me.

So that’s new. And we have acquired a new member of the family this new year. Well, DH has, anyway. I joked that he has found a replacement for me—a younger, fitter model. Not too far from the truth…

Isn't she lovely?

I have to admit, it is a really beautiful bike. Oh well. Let him see if carbon fiber is any fun to snuggle with! Seriously, though, any possibility I may ever have had of keeping up with him on my flat-pedal hybrid has now evaporated for good. Not that I had any real hope. He has always been, and always will be, faster and stronger than me. I don’t have a problem with that. I’m not a competitive person (except maybe at Scrabble…).

One side effect of this new addition is that we now have what may be accurately called a bike collection. To my mind, the definition of a bike collection assumes more than one bike that goes unridden for most of the time. We already had my dear old 1970′s Columbia 3-speed that DH picked up at a yard sale and refurbished for me before we were married. It’s still one of the nicest things he ever gave me (even if the real motivation was a DIY project for himself). I used to ride it around the Big City when we lived there, and boy was it a bugger on the hills. It’s wickedly heavy, and apparently the frame is bent (DH only just pointed that out to me; I never noticed it). But it has a nice basket on the front and big wide tires and it’s a beautiful shade of green and I can’t bear to part with it, even though it’s been sitting in the basement since we moved into our house, its tires long flat and cobwebs all over it. I have a vague plan to fancy it up and ride it on First Friday with the Slow Riders (see below). That would be cool. Anyway, now we also have DH’s two old road bikes. One of them may have taken up permanent residence on the trainer in the basement. That’s legitimate, I think. The other one, I’m afraid, is part of the collection. We will have to build a two-car garage just for the bikes.

Bittersweet Christmas

This is our Christmas card this year, in memory of Lily the Wondercat, the best cat who ever lived. She departed this plane of existence on Friday, December 10, 2010 at the age of 13 and 1/2. Despite the busy-ness of the holidays, our home seems strangely empty.

Good tidings to you

A pie story

This is the story—in pictures!—of a humble gourd who grew up to be a delicious Thanksgiving pie.

It all started with a little packet of organic seeds.

The seeds were planted in a beautiful raised bed in a beautiful garden in Maine.

Soon the seeds grew into a long green vine; then a long green pumpkin grew on the vine.

Much love and affection helped the pumpkin grow to maturity despite the threat of downy mildew.

After it was picked, the pumpkin rested in the house until it turned a glorious shade of orange.

At last, the pumpkin was ready! It was cut in half and its seeds were scooped out. Some of the seeds were saved to be planted next spring. Some of the seeds were toasted and eaten.

The pumpkin went into a nice warm oven and roasted until it was soft.

Freed from its shell, the lovely golden pumpkin pulp went for a whirl in the food processor, then into the freezer to sleep until November.

Then, on the day before Thanksgiving, the defrosted pumpkin puree was mixed with eggs, evaporated milk, sugar and spices and poured into a pie crust. Into the oven it went, and came out a slightly overbaked, not-quite-set-in-the-middle, absolutely delicious pie.

The pie took its place proudly on the Thanksgiving table, alongside an equally delicious apple pie and lots of other nice things. And for that we are truly thankful.

I’m also thankful for my mother’s pumpkin pie recipe, which I followed with a tweak or two. It’s still hard to celebrate holidays without her. Her handwriting on these recipe cards fills me with memories. Miss you, Mummie.

Illustration Friday: Burning

It’s been a while since I posted to Illustration Friday. I often get caught up in the belief that I have to come up with a finished, polished piece for IF, but really I don’t. I just hate showing things that aren’t up to my perfectionist standards, you know? The catch is that if I set the bar too high, I won’t jump at all. Here’s to lower standards!

Burning

And here is an example of how bad I am at drawing things in Photoshop. I would consider this sort of a color sketch, I guess. Maybe we could pretend it’s “primitive.” Didn’t Picasso say it took him a lifetime to learn to draw like a child? It would have taken him 5 minutes with Photoshop!

I do find it easy to go bold (sometimes too bold) with color in Photoshop, way more than with “real” media. Bold colors tend to look better on the screen, though, to me. It’s uncomfortable to draw with the Wacom tablet; I find myself gripping the pen with all my strength, trying to force it to act like a pencil or a paintbrush, but it just won’t quite. I know it’s a matter of practice, and finding the place where the tool and I can meet and agree on what’s going to happen.

The inspiration here is William Blake’s poem:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forest of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Read the rest here.

Beautiful roots

It was the garden that just wouldn’t quit. Even after several pretty good frosts, things are still alive and kicking. I picked two basketsful (basketfuls?) of root veggies today: turnips, parsnips, carrots and beets. Met up with a lively population of worms, including several red wrigglers and a big handsome nightcrawler; evicted a few slugs; and even came across two bloody-minded cabbage worms hiding in the beet leaves. How could they have survived? Darn things.

Lovely dirty rooty toot roots

And still there are more in the garden! I guess I will leave them alone and keep picking as long as I can, until the ground freezes, then see how they fare over the winter. Maybe some will still be edible in the spring. In the past my overwintered root veggies have been edible only to slugs or some other mysterious critters that hide in the dirt all winter and nibble on things from below so that when unsuspecting gardeners go to pick them in the spring they pull up a hideous half-carrot or whittled turnip. Either that or they freeze and turn to mush. Gardening experts say mulch to prevent freezing, but don’t mulch because that encourages pests. As usual the experts disagree. My vote is to let the chips fall where they may. There are plenty of maple leaves in the garden right now that can pretend to be mulch if they like.

Well I couldn’t just pick these proud beauties and put them away, so I cleaned up the biggest turnip, three carrots, and two parsnips, chopped ‘em up, and sauteed ‘em up with an onion and some garlic in butter. I threw in a quarter cup of barley, then I dumped in some leftover chicken stock, a can of beef stock (yeah, I combined two different kinds of stock; I’m crazy like that), salt, pepper, and thyme, brought it all to a boil, and now it’s simmering away. This is a riff on my sister’s Beautiful Root Soup recipe (thanks, J). I’ll let you know how it is. Probably won’t kill us.

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup.

We all know root vegetables are good eatin’, but they also make great craft projects. For instance, what do you do if you find yourself on All Hallows’ Eve without a pumpkin to carve? (I had pumpkins, but they’re Long Pie pumpkins, and carving them would just be a waste of good food!) You do what the Irish and other Northern European types did before pumpkins were invented. You carve turnips.

Turnip-o'lanterns.

Luckily, I happened to have two gigantic, man-eating turnips just waiting in the garden. I managed to get a picture of them before the wind blew the candles out for the last time. I guess they did the job anyway; we only got two trick-or-treaters, and they were the cute little girls from next door, so the real goblins must have been scared off. Or it could have been the frigid temperatures and biting wind that night.

There is a good explanation of the history of the jack-o’lantern, as well as a photo of a super creepy turnip-o’lantern, on Wikipedia. Supposedly the practice arose from an Irish legend about a fellow named Jack (of course). I am inclined to think the story arose by way of explanation for a much older pagan custom. I am also inclined to think poor Jack’s fate was unfair. He had to be an awfully clever guy to trick the Devil; didn’t he deserve some kind of reward? On second thought, he probably wouldn’t have had any fun in heaven (especially Irish Catholic heaven). So maybe he’s better off wandering the world forever. Maybe we all would be…

Trouble in paradise

All is not well in the garden. Perhaps it’s the continuing unseasonably hot weather and lack of rainfall. Perhaps it’s just the way of nature to try to defeat any illusion I have of control. Whatever it is, Things are Happening that are Not Good. On the bright side, gardening always presents me with the opportunity to learn something new. Like, what the heck are these things?

Unwelcome tenants

I searched my gardening books, insect books, and all the insect ID and garden pest websites I could stand, and couldn’t find anything that looked like these things. They are some kind of weevil larvae, I bet. The most interesting thing is that the ones on the purple beans are purplish and the ones on the green beans are green. The purplish one in the photo has just pooped, so clearly they have no manners to speak of.

The mildew on the cucurbits continues apace. I might try a baking soda solution that I just read about in my Rodale Garden Problem Solver (while I was looking for the bean critters). The pumpkins themselves look fine. Here’s the big daddy:

He's a biggun

Note the mildewy leaf in the lower left corner. Bleah. Big Daddy has four smaller brothers last I looked, not counting the one slowly ripening in the kitchen.

Here’s one of the big tomatoes. This one looks reasonably healthy, but another one that I picked is overripe on one side, green on the other, misshapen and splitty. I found one small tomato hiding in the foliage that was brown and netted all over. Weird.

She's a sad tomato

I yanked a whole tomato plant out of the Jungle because I didn’t like the look of it. I hope it’s not late blight. I had that last year and it really sucked. (Actually, the tomatoes had it, not me.) There’s another one that looks suspicious. The broccoli, on the other hand, is looking great. I harvested one head and here’s another one growing. I am still seeing cabbage moths flitting about but haven’t apprehended any caterpillars lately.

A lovely green bouquet

In other news, my back felt so much better today that I decided to get on my bike. Yup, I rode my bike for the first time since my tragic knee-ripping accident in July. I finally brought the bike in to the shop and got it repaired and tuned up, and it’s running like a dream. I just did a short lap around the neighborhood and that was it. I don’t want to push it. But it felt pretty good! I dislike feeling out of shape and sedentary now. I want to get back to feeling as fit and energetic as I was back at the beginning of summer. Patience, I know, I know…

Baby got back (pain)

If you are suffering from “back trouble,” absolutely everyone you talk to will have advice for you. Each person has their favorite liniment, a miracle-working chiropractor, a particular stretch that is guaranteed to cure you. Indeed, everyone you talk to will have his or her own tale of pain. Because everyone, it seems, at some time or another, will have “back trouble.” Apparently this is one of the things that make us human. It is probably the evolutionary price we paid for deciding to walk upright. Stupid monkeys.

So, at more or less precisely 6:35 a.m. on Friday the 13th, my back went out. What I mean by that, in case you are one of the unbelievably fortunate people to whom this has not yet happened, is that I made one small unremarkable movement that caused my lower back muscles to suddenly contract in an excruciating spasm. I was getting into the car when I felt something like an electric shock pass through my lumbar region, and suddenly I couldn’t move. I wonder if that sensation is anything like being tasered, because if so, I have great sympathy for anyone who’s ever been tased, bro. Anyway I sat there helplessly, unable either to close the car door or get out of the car. At last DH became aware of my plight and came to my rescue. I wonder if the neighbors heard me wailing in agony as he dragged my sorry carcass back into the house. I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, and this pain was pretty much at my limit. In addition, I felt a great deal of frustration at my body’s sheer refusal to function, and my inability to do anything about it. I couldn’t make the spasms stop, and I couldn’t make my body work. It was infuriating. And the icing on the cake? It was my birthday. Feeling sorry for me yet?

I managed to live through the weekend, assisted in no small part by some dear, kind friends and relations who came over and gave me presents and fed me medicinal margaritas and chocolate chip cake. Thanks! And now,  a week or so later, I am still hobbling around like an octogenarian, but the severe pain and spasms have subsided and I am showing small signs of improvement daily. I even got myself into the garden. Well, I had to, didn’t I? It’s harvest time!

You can ring my bell (pepper)

You have no idea how thrilled I am to finally get bell peppers from my garden! No doubt it’s due to the unusually hot summer, plus the better garden location, plus healthy seedlings that were already in flower when I planted them. Most of these, along with the baby scallions and a zucchini, went into a pasta salad for a bike club cookout.

In the meantime, the pumpkin vines have taken over, sprawling over every square inch, insinuating themselves among the pole beans, tearing down the Vietnamese fence. I am literally tripping over pumpkins now. The vines and leaves are painfully prickly, which makes it quite an adventure to get around in the garden. The tomato plants have imploded under the weight of tomatoes as big as your head; unfortunately, they are ripening unevenly and splitting, so I don’t know if I’ll get any prizes for them. On Monday I harvested a blessedly caterpillar-free head of broccoli, with more to come. I also debrided the garden. The zuke and pumpkin leaves are beset with mildew, which makes no sense to me as it’s been so dry, but there it is, and I pruned all the dead and dying leaves I could find. I also pulled up all the snow pea plants which were doing the zombie thing where they are clearly dead from the bottom up, but still producing flowers and pods at the top. For some reason that creeps me out.  And anyway they certainly weren’t producing much, unlike the pole beans, which need the space. I picked a purple bean that was probably seven inches long (photo pending).

I’m picking cherry tomatoes daily and running out of uses for them. They are delicious for snacking, of course, but there’s just too much of a good thing here. I decided to oven-dry some last week.

Tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes.

They came out pretty good. Now what do I do with all these dried tomatoes?

Welcome to the jungle

Just picked another plateful of deliciousness from the garden!

Nom nom nom!

As I mentioned, the vegetable garden is in a new, better location this year. Better in what way, you ask? I shall tell you. It’s sunnier, drier, less weedy, roomier to walk around, and more convenient to the house and hose.

Four new raised beds

In May, DH built two new raised beds and we moved the existing pair from the old garden. Following the advice of a friend who is an experienced professional landscaper, we spread newspaper (one whole Forecaster at a time) over the area to be gardenized, wet it down with the hose, and covered it with mulch (on the paths) and soil (inside the beds). We were assured that this is the very best way to kill the sod without digging or rototilling; this way, the worms do the work for you! And why not? They should earn their keep. In the background of the above photo you can just see the old garden, already bursting with weeds.

Vietnamese fence and tepee

For the snow peas, I constructed what I call a Vietnamese fence. It’s just vertical bamboo stakes with horizontal bamboo stakes woven through them. It holds itself together with no string, glue, duct tape or nothin’. I invented it. You may use it if you like, free of charge. For the pole beans I tied together three bamboo stakes in a tepee. I admit that I did not invent the tepee.

Tomatoes and peppers

Our neighbor across the street saw us working and offered us some extra tomato and pepper seedlings that she didn’t have room for. We gratefully accepted, and suddenly we had a garden! In fact, we now had so many tomato seedlings we had to find more space to plant them. I had been pondering a theory of DH’s which goes something like, “If the grass grows well there, other stuff will too.” (The corollary is “If the grass grows well there, do something so I don’t have to mow it.”) One place where the grass grows very well is along the east foundation of the house. I don’t know why this is; it only gets sun for half the day, but it’s pretty bright sun, so who knows? Anyway I decided to test the theory and build a tomato bed there. I picked a spot, did the newspaper thing, and crammed all the leftover tomato seedlings in.

The Jungle begins

So that was on May 30. Did the theory prove true? You be the judge. This is August 1:

Welcome to the Jungle

The seedlings weren’t well marked, and I lost track of which were which, but there are some Beefsteak, Early Girl, Sweet 100′s and I think Sungolds. We’ve been picking the cherry tomatoes for a few weeks now; the rest are still green. Picking cherry tomatoes in the Jungle is a bit like an Easter egg hunt.

Cherry tomatoes in the Jungle

Meanwhile, in the main garden, we planted all last year’s seeds ordered from Fedco:

• Atomic Red Carrot OG
• Space Spinach
• Multicolored Pole Bean Mix
• Harris Model Parsnip
• Lettuce Mix OG
• Wonder Tall Top Beet OG
• Evergreen Hardy White Scallion
• Gold Ball Turnip
• Broccoli Blend
• Long Pie Pumpkin OG
• Raven Zucchini
• Blizzard Snow Pea OG

The vegetable garden, August 1, 2010

I did a second planting of beans, parsnips, lettuce, beets, and scallions on July 4. Everything has done beautifully except the spinach, which didn’t perform well last year and barely even sprouted this year. The broccoli was beset with cabbage moth caterpillars as usual, but that’s the only pest I have had to battle so far. I did find one snail this afternoon and sent him on an all-expenses-paid flight to anywhere in the back forty. That’s nothing compared to the slugfest that was the old garden. The sunnier location and better drainage make it less attractive to slugs and snails. The down side is that I have to water occasionally. I have the soaker hose set up to take care of that.

We’ve been harvesting a good crop of snow peas; they’re finishing up as the first tepee of pole beans has started to produce. The zukes have been coming along one or two at a time; the first one was a bit of a monster but it was perfect for stuffing. The Raven zukes are so buttery and delicious, I never get tired of  them. We had a few salads with the lettuce and baby beet greens. The bell peppers are doing very well, which is exciting because I’ve never successfully grown them before. There are one or two peppers on each plant. But of course, the thing I’m most excited about is the Long Pie pumpkins. There are two good ones already and a few more on the way!

Ohhhh... the precioussssss...