Boy, it sure has felt like fall these last couple of days.
Low clouds hanging in the sky, cold wind blowing from the west. It is supposed
to warm up again next week. I just hope it doesn’t get too cold for the
tomatoes in the interim. One hates to see green tomatoes left on the vine.
When I first started gardening, having as many tomatoes as I
wanted made me feel unbelievably wealthy. I’ve gotten used to lots of tomatoes
over the years. Now it’s raspberries that do it for me. And the raspberries are
starting to come in. Raspberries! If we run out today, we just have to wait two
days for more. It’s so awesome! I’ve already frozen the first quart. Last year,
Terry got over 50 quarts. If you have ever tried freezing fresh raspberries and
ended up with a Big Old Block O’Fruit, here’s a hint: pick off the bugs, give
the berries a dunk in water, spread them on a towel to dry, and freeze them
individually on a tray. When the berries are frozen, slide a spatula under them
and put them in a container in the freezer, where they will happily retain
their individuality for at least the entire winter.
How to freeze raspberries
The beets did well this year. I’ve been taking them to work
and have found a surprising number of beet lovers among my colleagues. I made a
batch of pickled beets and eggs for my lunches. The addition of crumbled blue
cheese and homemade sourdough bread puts it over the top. I do live well in the
summer.
Pickled eggs and beets with blue cheese and sourdough
The oaks have produced a good crop of acorns this year. We’ve
had two tom turkeys prowling the grounds as well as a group of (I think) two
hens and 7 juveniles. Turkeys love acorns!
Two tom turkeys
Tom turkey close up
Hens and juveniles
We’ve had a feral cat around lately. Terry named him/her
Toby. Toby has gotten the ground squirrel population under control, for which
we are grateful. We are hoping he/she will take on the rabbits in Nursery 1
next. One day last week, Toby was stalking the tom turkeys. I have to take
Terry’s word for it because Toby and the turkeys had gone separate ways by the
time I got out with my camera. Toby is a nice looking cat and seems healthy.
He/she is not friendly, however. We are in no danger of becoming cat owners on
Toby’s account.
Toby, a gray and white stray cat
The pullets are getting big. The Ameracauna are getting
their cheek feathers. When I close the coop each night, I get a “what are YOU
looking at?” glare from them. They are so cute.
What are you looking at?
Yeah, I mean you!
The other night, Chloe hopped up on the edge of the feeder
and took several spins around. I should have taped it, but it didn’t occur to
me.
Chloe's make-shift merry-go-round
Sunday afternoon, I got out the
Big Key with the Hard Words (Swink and Wilhelm, 1994) and drove myself crazy
trying to identify the prairie flowers. Actually, the purple one was pretty
easy. It is winged loosestrife (Lythrum
alatum). I was much relieved that it was not purple loosestrife, an
incredibly invasive alien. Purple loosestrife usually has 10 or more stamen.
Winged loosestrife has less than 10. The one I looked at had 5.
Winged loosestrife
Then there’s that damned aster. I had to learn
words like “phyllaries” and “coriaceous.” Don’t ask. The most annoying thing is
that I could not retain the meanings. I bet I looked up “involucres” six times.
Plus Swink and Wilhelm say that the asters hybridize all over the place, which made
me completely despair. The closest I could come was panicled aster (Aster simplex). My picture book says it
grows 3 to 8 feet tall, which is right, anyway. Given the hybridization problem,
it may very well be a panicled half-aster. Ha! Botany humor! And guess what! Neither of these
plants is on the seed list of what we planted. Could it be that these plants
are coming from an ancient seed bank after all?
Panicled aster?
The sweet corn is done. The dry beans are winding down. Soon
it will be time to bring in the onions, then the potatoes (what’s left of them,
if anything), then the winter squash. As the growing season wanes, I mentally
check off the milestones that get us ready for winter. There’s still a lot to
do!
It seems to me that my father has planted petunias just
about every year that I have known him. Now 89, he does his gardening in raised
planters that are waist high. And he still plants petunias. This year is the
first year I can remember seeing volunteer petunias. I am amazed. I had assumed
that commercial petunias were sterile because of hybridization or whatever. My
dad says that he got volunteer petunias coming up in his planters, and that
they are a different color than last year’s petunias, suggesting cross
pollination among colors. We have volunteer white petunias under the deck. We
also have volunteer petunias in truly marginal habitats, namely the cracks in
the patio and the driveway. Because these plants occur at some distance from
the planters, I wonder if the seeds are ant-dispersed. They do seem to be in
cracks at non-random frequency, and God knows we’ve got ants everywhere the
petunias are coming up.
Petunia growing in a crack between the patio bricks
There are many cardinal flowers in bloom out in the
restoration area. I am so pleased!
Red spikes of cardinal flowers
Guess what! That thing with the obedient plant really works!
You don’t even have to use much force. Just nudge the flower to one side, and
there it stays. It makes me wonder what’s going on with the cells at the
junction with the stem. What could be adaptive about a flower that stays where
it gets bumped?
Obedient plant before I moved the flower on the left
And after
I have not yet been able to identify two new flowers. I’m going
to have to bite the bullet, bring in some samples, and work my way through the
Big Key with all the Hard Words. I just haven’t had time this week, what with classes
starting and all. Maybe this weekend. After I mow and harvest and put up
tomatoes and mulch around Oak 5 and, and, and….
There's this little blue flower:
First not-yet-identified flower
And this spectacularly tall (well over my head) composite with leaves that go past the petiole and down the stem. You'd think that would make it easy to identify, wouldn't you? It might be smooth aster, except the guide says it only grows to 3 feet. This thing is huge!
Tomatoes are so impatient. Dry beans will wait forever to
get shelled and put in bags. But when a tomato is ready, you’d better get on
it. One of my favorite ways to put up tomatoes is Baked Tomato Pasta Sauce. I
have a precise recipe, but it only calls for a ridiculously low number of
tomatoes (6). I use the method rather than the measurements.
Step 1: blanch room temperature tomatoes in boiling water
for 10 seconds. Peel, core, cut in half, and deseed. My set up shows the
blanched tomatoes in the pink tray, the skins and seeds in the blue bowl, and
the finished tomatoes in the white bowl. I use the spoon handle to get the
seeds out of tiny locules (the space where the seeds are, if you couldn’t infer
that from context).
Prepping the tomatoes
Step 2: I put a lot of garlic, a fair amount of parsley and
enough olive oil in the food processor to make a nice paste. This I smear on
top of the tomatoes, which were previously arranged on two jellyroll pans and
sprinkled with salt and pepper.
Tomatoes smeared with garlic, parsley, and olive oil
Step 3: Into the oven at 425° for an hour, after which they
look like this:
After an hour in the oven
Step 4: I scrape the baked tomatoes into a bowl and pop in
some tomato paste, butter and chopped basil. {Prepping the basil on the same
day as everything else is WAY too much work. I throw basil and butter in the
food processor and aliquot the resulting pesto-like substance into ½ cup
containers and freeze them.] I squish everything together with the potato
masher until the butter and basil melts and all the big chunks are broken up.
Finished sauce
Step 5: I put the sauce into four freezer containers and
mentally check off four winter suppers, with perhaps a little left for lunch
the next day or pizza night.
The beets and carrots are officially getting away from us. I
harvested both today. I am working on pickled beets and eggs as I write this. I
gave the very small and very large carrots to Hilda and made carrot sticks for
my lunches.
Left to right: NutriRed, Mokum, Purple Haze, Danvers Half Long carrots, Detroit Red beets
We grew four varieties of carrots this year: Purple Haze,
NutriRed, Mokum, and Danvers Half Long. Danvers Full Size must be very long
indeed, if there is such a variety. Mokum seems to not be tolerating the heavy
soil. Some of them are rotten at the tip. Purple Haze only expresses the purple
pigment on the outside of the cortex. Hilda said the center turned white when
she roasted it. Interesting. NutriRed is a different color all the way through,
suggesting a mutation in how it makes carotene. Whether or not it is actually
more nutritious as the name implies is an open question not likely to be
resolved by me.
Longitudinal sections of (left to right) Purple Haze, NutriRed, and Danvers Half Long
The pullets are getting bigger. They haven’t learned to come
a-running when we show up with watermelon rinds or carrot peelings. In fact,
they seem afraid of us. Probably traumatized by the broiler round up.
An as-yet-unnamed Rhode Island Red and Antonia
Remember how Terry and I put nylon bags on some of the
apples at the beginning of the season? The experiment was not a success. In
this photo, the upper apple was covered (I opened the bag and left the apple
partially covered for the picture) and the one on the bottom was not covered.
Which one looks better to you?
I have been enjoying two of my other favorite breakfasts,
peaches with Cheerios and red raspberries with Frosted Mini-Wheats. We didn’t
get any peaches this year, but the red raspberries are starting to ripen. I
love picking raspberries, but I have to go back to work. Boo.
We had our first sweet corn last Saturday. I cooked extra
thinking that I would use it in something, such as fried corn and potatoes.
After two days, with more corn coming in, I fed it to the chickens. Best thing
ever!
Gracie was not cured of her broodiness. I did more research
and found The Chicken Chick who spoke authoritatively against any cure
involving ice or cold water. Keep them out of the nest boxes and in as much
light as possible until they are cured. The longer a hen has been broody, the
longer it takes to cure her. She recommended a rabbit hutch. Needless to say,
we did not have one on hand. Gracie had been broody quite some time. We worried
about keeping Gracie in the cat kennel for an extended period of time because
the wires on the bottom were so far apart. We were afraid it would hurt her little
feet. A rabbit hutch would be better because the wires were closer together. Or
we could cover the bottom of the kennel with hardware cloth, but somehow we
would have to cover any wires that stuck up out of the ends. It seemed hard. On
the other hand, a complete rabbit hutch kit was available at Tractor Supply in
Harvard for only $50. Easy peasy. I ran to town Sunday morning to pick it up.
Gracie in the rabbit hutch
Anna Vic had gone broody again too. The Chicken Chick said that broodiness was contagious. You may recall that in previous posts, I said it was Nelly Elly who was broody. I apologize for this mistake, which I’m sure you noticed. The rabbit hutch was too small for Gracie and Anna Vic, so we put Anna Vic in the kennel. She has bigger feet, in any case. She immediately started tossing food to her companions on the outside.
After two days, both were cured.
It is so dry! We have not had significant rainfall since the
Big Storm on July 18. We watched the radar so hopefully, and front after front dissipates
or splits, going north and/or south of us. Last Sunday it was oh, so close. We
watched the lightning from clouds tinted pink by the sunset. And not one drop
of rain.
When it got a little darker that evening, Hilda and I
clipped the wings on the pullets. They had been getting a bit too enthusiastic
about flying. The broiler round up was coming on Thursday. We didn’t want to
have to worry about the pullets flying over the fence in the fracas. I had read
that chickens don’t see well in the dark and figured that it would be easiest
to grab them then. This turned out to work very well indeed. I climbed up into
the coop, grabbed the pullets one at a time, and held them. Hilda pulled out
their wings and wielded the scissors. As I mentioned last year, wing clipping
involves cutting off the tops of the flight feathers on one wing. It does not
hurt the chicken, being analogous to us clipping a fingernail or getting a
haircut. The shortened feathers on one side put the chicken off balance so she
can’t fly anymore. The next morning, the pullets rather sheepishly walked down
the ramp instead of bursting forth in a flutter as they had previously. And
thus we have the figure of speech.
Antonia with her wing clipped
Monday morning, I cut the garlic bulbs from their leaves and
put them in bags. There were a total of 270 bulbs from the four varieties we
grow (Purple Glow, 50; Smarakand, 67; Chet’s Early Italian, 79; Inchigium Red,
74). Will that be enough?
I had plans for Monday afternoon that were thwarted by the
realization that it was time to harvest the sweet corn. Terry plants varieties
that mature at different times, the earliest being 66 days and the latest 75
days. Last year I waited too long to pick the corn, and it got starchy and
tough. Freezing did not improve it. I wanted to be sure to catch it while it
was still sweet and tender. I picked all the ears that seemed ready, and mostly
I was right. Terry, Hilda, and I shucked one tray full. Hilda went to the
kitchen to start the water boiling and started the blanching. Terry and I
finished shucking. Hilda, bless her heart, did the rest—boiling six minutes,
cooling in an ice bath, cutting the kernels from the cobs, and packing them
into zip-top bags for the freezer. From the cobs, Terry estimated that we’d
processed 10 dozen ears.
Terry shucks corn
One tray of shucked corn. Is it not beautiful?
I did the second picking yesterday. Dad, Hilda, and I
shucked. This time, I kept track of how many ears we had, which was 12 dozen
plus 7 ears. Some of them were runty, though. Hilda and I boiled, cut and
packed. When we did the final count, we had 11 2-cup bags and 30 1-cup bags of
corn. Will that be enough?
12.5 dozen ears in the second picking
Out in my restoration area, a new flower is blooming. This
is biennial gaura. It nearly as tall as I am. The Peterson guide says, “Note
the cross-shaped stigma typical of the Evening-primrose Family.” And sure enough,
when I looked at the close-up picture, there it was.
Biennial Gaura
Biennial gaura, close up. Note cross-shaped stigma at the top just right of center
As scheduled on Thursday, Terry and I caught the broilers
and loaded them into two cages. Hilda opened and shut the gate, later saying
that she felt like she hadn’t done anything. I reassured her that her role was pivotal
because we could not have managed to go in and out with both hands on a
chicken. The leg hook that worked so well for the dual purpose chickens last
year was not very useful. Sometimes we could catch their toes, but the hook was
too small to fit around their huge ankle joint. (A chicken knee is between the
thigh and the drumstick. What we think of as a chicken foot is just their
toes.) Hilda reminded me that at the butcher, they carry the chickens by
grasping the upper part of the wing next to their body. The chickens calmed
down immediately when grasped thusly. I wish we’d thought of that when we had
to move Gimpy in and out of the coop. Even without the hook, we had the
chickens loaded in 15 minutes. We’re getting better at this.
Glory bound in the back of Terry's truck
Hilda and Dad picked up the chickens this morning. The
largest weigh 7.5 pounds (presumably the roosters). The smallest were 4.5
pounds. This photo compares this year’s chickens with the last remaining dual
purpose chicken from last year. Any questions about why we went back to
broilers?
Left to right: 2.5 lb dual purpose, 4.5 lb hen, 6.5 lb rooster, 7.5 lb rooster
Terry and I went to the McHenry County Fair last night. I
had my annual corndog. I fell victim to consumerism, however. A regular corndog
was $5.00. A jumbo corndog was $6.00 and 2.5 X the size. I got the jumbo. It
was too much. I ate it anyway. Will I remember next year? I was not able to
photodocument my enormous corndog. I hadn’t gotten my camera out before
receiving said corndog, and by that time Terry was in possession of a gyro that
required both of his hands. He was, therefore, not able to do anything helpful,
such as hold my corndog while I got the camera out of my purse.
McHenry County Fair
We headed for the beer tent after our main course. Much to
our annoyance the beer tent was behind a fence with the motorcross racing, and
everyone entering the area had to pay $5 admission. Terry refused, and I didn’t
argue with him. “We’re not paying $10 a piece for a beer,” he grumbled. It
seems to me that if they are going to charge admission, your first beer should
be free. What the heck!
We did our usual things, looking at the antique tractors,
going through the 4-H displays, photo contests, vegetable contests, buildings
of commercial exhibits, and some of the livestock barns.
The cow wash by the cattle building
We got ice cream cones
at the food booth sponsored by 4-H and the County Extension. I love the butter
pecan. Terry has finally come around to not buying an elephant ear. The
elephant ear is fried dough that has gotten to be the size of a real elephant’s
ear. It is too much. I have converted him to mini-donuts. I would have gotten
the smallest size they sold. A half dozen would have been perfect, but
(consumerism again) the smallest size was a dozen. Terry got the largest instead,
the Big Bucket O’Mini-donuts for $8.50. (Actually, the bucket wasn’t that
large.) I didn’t count, but I think it must have been at least three dozen. And
then, because he is full, he didn’t eat ANY, even though they are best when
they are hot from the fryer. I was full too, so I only ate six….
Terry orders our mini-donuts
Bucket of mini-donuts, which can be held easily with one hand
This morning, I had one of my favorite summer breakfasts:
vine-ripe tomatoes with cream cheese on toast, lightly sprinkled with sea salt
and black pepper. Basil is good too. Sometimes I use blue cheese instead of
cream cheese.Oh, the ephemeral pleasure of really good tomatoes!
Blue moon: the second full moon in the same month. Doesn't happen often, hence the expression. Last night the blue moon was actually orange as it rose behind Oak #4.
