Heinous choices

Would you rather grade the last four lab reports or clean the mold from behind the dressers?

I don’t remember exactly when I discovered the mold behind the dressers. I think it was when we were bringing the onions in. We had to mobilize every table we owned, including the craft table that was stowed next the row of four dressers that are lined up against an outside wall in the basement. I know, I know, what normal person needs four dressers? In my defense, only two of the dressers are truly mine, and two of the dressers are really fairly small lingerie chests. Two are historical items from the big house in Michigan. One dresser used to be my brother’s; one lingerie chest I don’t even remember. The latter is still full of my parents’ things including but not limited to basket making supplies and safety goggles. You never know when you might need them. Of the remaining three, I use about half the space for everyday items and the other half for long-term storage.

Back to our story. When I pulled out the table for the onions, I saw black irregular splotches on the white plastic. I swore, cleaned the table, and put the larger cleaning on my To Do list. Every week since I copied “Clean behind dressers” from the last weekend’s list to the next one. Until yesterday. Not only was my other choice grading lab papers, which I loathe, but also I woke up with a wicked sinus headache for the bazillionth time. Enough. Terry helped me move the dressers away from the wall. I put on an industrial dust mask that made me look and sound like Darth Vader.  

Luke, I am you father

The floor tiles were completely black. The cement wall had spots of mildew to a height of two to three feet. Okay, I thought, this won’t take long. It’s not a large area.

The project went according to Kay’s Law: Nothing is ever easy. (Kay was one of my office mates when I worked for the Girl Scouts.) Because that corner of the basement has no electrical outlets. I got the cordless hand vac to suck up all the dead bugs. I couldn’t figure out how to take it apart to dump it. After struggling with it for a few minutes, I left that part for Terry. Next, I contemplated my choices for what to use in the mop water. Since we’ve had a cleaning lady for the last two and a half years, our stash of cleaning supplies has dwindled. All I could find was an ancient small tub of OxyClean under the laundry sink. The plastic shattered on one side when I tried to lift it. It was a Big Mess. The only reason it wasn’t a Huge Big Mess was that most of the OxyClean had petrified into a lump on the bottom. Only the loose granules on the top spilled into the cabinet. I carefully tipped the container so the sound side was down and carried the remains to the kitchen. Then I got the hand vac and cleaned the cabinet and the trail of OxyClean that went from the cabinet to the kitchen.

Mop? Where is the mop? Don’t we still have a mop? Ah, behind the door in the store room. I knew where the mop bucket was. I broke off a hunk of OxyClean and put it in the bucket, once again scattering granules from here to Kingdom Come. With the OxyClean dissolved in hot water, I mopped for the first time. I replaced the OxyClean water with bleach water. I scrubbed the walls and floor where the mop didn’t reach. Oh, wait. Shouldn’t I be wearing rubber gloves? Those are under the kitchen sink. I wiped off the backs of the dressers. I mopped up the excess. I changed the bleach water about halfway through.

I was making good progress. I decided the best way to clean underneath the largest dresser was to take out the drawers and tip it forward. The top four drawers went well. The bottom drawer had mold in it. Nothing is ever easy. I unloaded the clothes. The drawer contained my good jeans (defined as not having garden stains on the knees), my jungle pants, and sentimental items such as a pair of scrubs from my respiratory therapy days, a stethoscope from that same era (you never know when you might need it), and my Hawaiian shirts. I put the scrubs and my pink flamingo shirt in the laundry. I don’t even know if the scrubs would still fit me. With a heavy heart, I threw away my original Wa-Ha Hawaiian shirt that has been with me since the early 80’s. It looked like it wouldn’t survive a trip through the washer. Sigh.

I bleached the drawer. I bleached inside the dresser. I bleached underneath the dresser, and under all the other dressers. I was relieved to find that only one dresser had internal mildew.

Two hours after I started on a project that I thought would take 30 minutes, I finished by stringing an extension cord for a fan to get everything in that corner nice and dry. Then I tackled the cobwebs and dust behind the headboard in the bedroom, as long as I had the respirator on.

By this time, I'd forgotten all about the OxyClean sitting on the kitchen counter. It was not a pleasant surprise. I broke up the lumps on a piece of newspaper. I inferred from my experience that long-term storage in plastic was not a good idea. I poured it all into a Mason jar. Then I swept up all the granules that had flown all over the kitchen.

Terry helped move the dressers back into a new and airier configuration. As he shoved a dresser back toward the wall, I said, “Stop! Leave it there!” where “there” was about 4 inches from the wall.

“Forever?” he asked.

“Forever.” I answered. At best, the increased circulation will prevent the mold from growing back. At least I will be able to easily look behind the dressers to see what’s going on.

I had a cup of tea and my lunch. After all that, the lab papers didn’t seem so bad. At least I got to sit down.

I pleased to report that I did not have a headache when I woke up this morning.

Welsummer eggs at last!

We got the first Welsummer egg on Thursday. While it was not as dark as I remembered from the photo in Hobby Farms that prompted me to order the breed, it is still beautiful. I would not, however, describe it as chocolate colored.

Welsummer egg, left; Buff Orpington egg, right

We had a nice trick or treat on Halloween. We got five eggs! Three were from Buff Orpingtons, one was from an Araucana (as far as we can tell, only Lizette is laying), and one from a Welsummer. Here is the group shot:

All of these eggs were laid on Halloween

We had five eggs yesterday as well. Only two today, though. I wonder where we'll be by next weekend. Soon I'll be hard boiling the excess to have for breakfast during the week! Can't wait!

Happy Halloween!

Among the many pleasures of the garden is carving one's very own pumpkins for Halloween. Jane, Terry, and I carved our pumpkins last Sunday.


Don't they look happy?

Last weekend in October

Egg update: We have had two brown and one blue egg for three days in a row! It seems likely that more than three chickens are laying. No Welsummer eggs yet.

It was a beautiful warm weekend. While it wasn’t the sort of weather to put you in the mood to get ready for winter, doing the ready-for-winter activities was a whole lot more pleasant. On Saturday, I dug the leeks and clipped most of the leaves off the kale. I left the small leaves at the top as an experiment. They are supposed to keep growing. We’ll see.



Leeks, left; kale, right

As I cleaned the leeks in preparation for braising them in chicken stock (which I made from one of the laying hens Friday night), I saw something I had never seen before—worms. What is the point of having all those oniony sulfur compounds if not to protect against herbivory? There weren’t a lot of them, and we are certainly not short of leeks. Still, I was amazed. It looked like some kind of insect larva. One worm seemed to eat quite a lot.

Worm on the right, damage from that one worm on the left. The little stinker eats a lot!

I also harvested one of the Kaitlin cabbages (Kaitlin is the variety name). It’s supposed to be a good keeper, which is certainly true. There’s not a one of them that has split. The downside is that they too continue to grow, and the one I harvested, with a  great deal of effort to cut through the massive stem, weighed NINE POUNDS. What am I going to do with a 9-pound cabbage? More to the point, what am I going to do with five of them? We’ve already got more than enough sauerkraut for the year.

This cabbage, about 8" in diameter, weighed 9 pounds

I made potage Parmetier (leek and potato soup) for supper. I took a picture of it, but it didn’t look like much. When I looked up the recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I saw that Julia had a recipe for cabbage soup. Maybe I’ll try it.

Hilda got started on the Brussels sprouts. We still have a whole row of them left. They can stay in the garden until Thanksgiving, although we’ll keep working on getting them blanched and in the freezer. Also, Brussels sprouts on the stem make great gifts.

Saturday afternoon, Terry and I planned to clean up around the chicken fence. After lunch, Terry said, “Wanna go scare some chickens?” I pulled the posts up while he wielded the weed-whacker. The chickens were conflicted. They were curious about the gaps that came and went under the fence, but the weed-whacker noise sent them scurrying to the furthest corner. It looked so nice when we were done, with the grass nice and short and the fence tight and straight. It won’t last.

The straight clean fence after weed whacking. The girls liked the grass clippings.

The chickens quickly settled down to a quiet afternoon after all the excitement.

Lounging in the shade on a lazy Saturday afternooon

Sunday, I decided to do something with all of those onions. I thinly sliced six of them and caramelized them half at a time. My goal was to make a lovely caramelized onion and blue cheese focaccia. I cooked the first half all the way down, making about a cup of caramelized onion from a couple of quarts of raw. It took over an hour.

Before

After

As I cooked the second batch, I got to fretting about having the onions burn as they baked on top of the focaccia dough. I didn’t cook them down quite as far. I made the dough while the onions cooked. After the dough had risen in the pan, I spread the onions on top and baked it for the first 30 minutes. I crumbled the blue cheese on top and baked it an additional 10 minutes. The onions did not burn. I probably could have caramelized them longer. Maybe next time. We have a lot of onions.

Caramelized onion and blue cheese focaccia

 

Slowly but surely

My office phone rang on Thursday as I was wolfing down my lunch in the time between the end of my morning class at 1:00 and the beginning of my afternoon meeting. It was Hilda. “Lizette gave us the first blue egg today!” she announced. She was sure it was Lizette because she saw her in the nest box and retrieved an egg from underneath her that was so fresh it was still sticky.

Kirsty (presumably) has been reliably producing an egg every day except Thursday. It is possible that Anna Vic is starting to lay as well. She did the squat as soon as she ran out of the coop on Wednesday. The first day we got two eggs was yesterday, one brown and one blue. We find it strange that every hen seems to be maturing in her own sweet time. I suspect it is because these are heritage breeds that have not been aggressively selected for consistent maturing times. In any case, by the end of the week, my share of the eggs had accumulated to four.

My half of this week's egg production

I have mentioned that a hallmark of approaching maturity is “the squat,” a sign of sexual receptivity. I got two brief videos of Anna Vic (the Buff Orpington) and Lizette (the white Araucana) today. Lizette’s video is better.

We had quite a hard freeze last night. It got down to 30°F for a little while one morning last week, but Terry told me this morning that the temperature had dropped below freezing by 11:00 p.m., and it remained below freezing until after 8:00 this morning. The ginkgos dropped all their leaves in one fell swoop. Winter’s coming.

An egg at last!

Yesterday, October 11 about 10:00, I heard some squawking in the chicken coop. I went in to investigate. Once in the coop, I heard someone thrashing around in the nest boxes. I carefully raised the panel to peek inside. The first nest box had been swept nearly clean of wood chips. Kirsty (one of the Buff Orpingtons) was in the middle box. She was sitting quietly at the time, blinking at me. I put a hand underneath her to check for an egg. I didn’t see anything and quickly retreated, not wanting to upset her. As soon as I shut the panel, the kicking and scratching started up again. I guess it’s hard to get comfortable for that first egg.

Hilda and I had planned to change the wood chips in the coop for the last time before winter. We decided we’d best wait until Kirsty left the nest box on her own accord. We went to the garden to continue with the clean up. My goal for the day was to get all the landscape cloth up. I soon remembered that I’d have to roll up the drip irrigation as well. Bah. It is easier to take it up than it is to put it down, but either way, it’s putzy and annoying.

Just before lunch, we saw that all four of the Buff Orpingtons were in the chicken run. Sure enough, there was one brown egg in the middle nesting box. Hooray! 

Kirsty's first egg, left, and a standard large egg from the grocery, right.

Hilda had the egg for lunch. It was delicious. It was big for a pullet egg. I put it next to a grocery store large egg for comparison. I suspect that the Buff Orpington eggs, when the hens get the hang of laying, will be extra large or jumbo.

Hilda says she has seen Lizette and one of the Welsummer do the squat of sexual receptivity. Hopefully more hens will start laying soon. It’s been more than a week since Kirsty started squatting.

We did get all the drip irrigation and landscape cloth off of the garden. Predictably, my bending-over muscles are quite sore today. Still, it was nice to cross that off the list after at least 6 weeks. 

Harvest Party

There’s just a few things left in the garden including some truly mongo carrots. There are still some small ones among the giants, which is good because only the small ones make good carrot sticks. As for the oversized ones, you might as well gnaw on a tree branch. They will be good roasted.

Giant carrots

We had our annual harvest party yesterday. Hilda and I cooked for three days. I asked Dad to make a shrine for the Holy Family Potato. It was beautiful. Still, I got no offers.

The shrine of the Holy Family Potato

Terry arranged his squash and pumpkins on the trailer for guests to pick from. We roasted a Delicata squash in chunks so people could experience its awesome deliciousness for themselves in the hope that they would be inspired to take home two dozen or so. That didn’t happen, but one guest went back for two more after trying it.

The trailer o'curcubits: Pumpkins in the back, squash in the front. The striped ones are the Delicata, the best squash on the planet.

We had the hot food on the counter. Chicken-squash tortilla soup is on the front right. I made it with tomatoes, beans, peppers, jalapenos, squash, and corn from the garden as well as chicken and chicken stock from one of the old hens. I put together skewers of little potato runts, Gruyere cheese, and olives (front left) and heated them in an electric skillet until the cheese got all melty.  Behind the skewers is a hot dip of cheese and homemade salsa. (The cheese was, in fact, Velveeta. I’m conflicted about eating a dairy product that is shelf-stable at room temperature until March of next year, but really nothing melts like Velveeta.) In the middle is a very popular roasted vegetable lasagna that I made with baked tomato pasta sauce, fresh pasta, and ratatouille. I had hoped to have leftovers for lunches this week, but only one piece remained. Hilda made Brussels sprouts with mustard butter ( which were eaten in their entirety), a chicken pot pie, and a sauerkraut casserole with kielbasa that was to die for. Unfortunately, the sauerkraut casserole used only 1.5 cups of sauerkraut, which still leaves a huge amount in the crock that will have to be canned when we get a moment.

Hot food buffet

The cold food was on the dining table. Guests brought various dips, chips, and crackers. I made Asian Cole slaw from a Danish ballhead cabbage and a giant carrot.

Guests gather around the cold food

The dessert were in the living room on the coffee table, which was the last flat surface available for food service. I made the usual three: cherry-oatmeal-pecan-pumpkin cookies, pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting, and the Legendary Pumpkin _shaped Cookies _{that contain no actual pumpkin}. Really, they are just sugar cookies with buttercream frosting (only I never have cream, so I guess it is butter-milk frosting, but that conveys an entirely different idea), but people go on and on about them. I don’t even like them. I like cookies with either chocolate, or inclusions (nuts, oatmeal, etc), or chocolate inclusions. But when it comes time to think about the party, here come the questions: “Are you going to make those pumpkin cookies that contain no actual pumpkin again?” I can only infer that people are so used to packaged cookies that have a lot of funny-tasting chemical additives to keep them soft that when they taste something that is just butter, sugar, flour, and vanilla, they think they have died and gone to heaven. These are sad times.

Guests in the living room with pumpkin bars barely visible on the coffee table

Legendary Pumpkin shaped Cookies that contain no actual pumpkin

It was a chilly day. After awhile, it got hot in the house. Guests wandered in and out the regulate their temperature. We got out the bubble toys for the kids.

Left to right around the table: Dad, Aaron, Joe, Paige, and Sarah

Sarah making bubbles

We still have lots of squash left. We’ll have to find another outlet. We did get a fair amount of food out of the freezer, though.