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.

The grapes of wrath

No, we still don’t have any eggs.

Friday, September 26, when I returned from my weekly shopping trip, Terry announced that he had “a little project” for us to do after supper. We had to harvest the grapes. A raccoon had gotten into them the night before, and he didn’t want to lose any more of them. Really, we should write things down. Hilda and I thought Terry was watching the grapes and would alert us when they were ripe. He thought we were doing it.

It was immediately apparent that we had waited too long. Many of the grapes were heavily infested with picnic bugs. The bugs chewed one tiny hole in the grape and took up residence inside. Hundreds of them. Per grape. Some of the grapes were just empty skins.

“I just thought they’d go all raisiny on us,” Terry said. “I didn’t think this would happen.”

We also had labored under the false impression that they would all be ripe at once and should, therefore, all be picked at once. We did pick them all, but some were riper than others. We discovered that some that were not completely dark were still sweet. Some were too green and ultimately were thrown out.

There were plenty of good grapes among the infested ones. It was a messy job, though. I felt like I had things crawling on me for the rest of the evening. We started by filling every stainless steel bowl we had with the thought that we could just add water to wash them off later. After that, we reverted to the pink trays that we use for harvesting everything.

Then what? We couldn’t leave them outside because the raccoon would eat them. The greenhouse was too hot. I wasn’t going to leave all those bugs loose in the root cellar. I would have to find room in the spare refrigerator. I moved all the beverages off the shelf either to the door or to the root cellar. I had to take all the grapes out of one of the smaller bowls and stack them on top of the grapes already in a pink tray. Knowing that I would have to clean bug carcasses out of the refrigerator at a later time, I shut the door. At least they would be contained.

Grapes in the refrigerator overnight

Saturday morning, Hilda and I started sorting through the grapes after breakfast. We set up operations outside, once again to try to avoid bugs in the house.

Our grape-cleaning stations: grapes and water in the pink tray, clean grapes in the steel bowl, discards in the green buckets

We filled the first bowl with water using the garden hose. After giving the grapes a good dunk, we pulled the good grapes off the vine and put them in a big cooking pot. The bad grapes, vines, and leaves got tossed in a plastic pail destined for the mulch bin. We soon discovered that most of the bugs had dropped to the bottom of the bowl. For subsequent batches, we lifted the grapes out and put them in a clean vessel for washing.  Here is a picture of the bugs at the bottom of a pink tray after the grapes had been removed.

Hundreds of picnic bugs among the grape skins

We worked on the grapes for an hour and a half before lunch and two hour and 15 minutes after lunch, for a total of 7.5 person-hours cleaning grapes. We filled both of our big kettles and two stainless steel bowls besides. Halfway through our afternoon session, Hilda remarked that she wasn’t really that mad at the raccoon for eating some of the grapes. We put the bowls back in the refrigerator and carried the pots upstairs. Hilda started heating the grapes to make juice while I cleaned up the patio. By the end of the day, she had the grape juice cooked, strained, and in the refrigerator to settle. It needs to sit for a while for crystals of some sort to precipitate out. The crystals are not good to eat.

She did the canning today while I was at work. We ended up with 12 pint and 2 pint-and-a-half jars, one pint short of two gallons.  And next year, if we start earlier, we could have even more! Oh, wait…

The final product

 

Sauerkraut Day

No eggs yet. I went back in the archives to check when our first hens started laying, and we calculated that, if these hens are like the others (and we have no basis for that assumption), the earliest we can expect an egg would be Tuesday, September 23.
Even though the first official day of autumn is not until that very Tuesday (late this year—what’s up with that?), the weather is autumn-like today. Low, gray clouds are skittering across the sky, blown by a chilly wind. Bah. When I’m done with the post, I’m going to bake some bread and then head out to the garden to continue the end-of-season clean up.

Last Sunday, Pat and Nancy came out for the annual putting up of sauerkraut. We grew some enormous heads of cabbage. We harvested about a dozen or so. We took one or two of the Danish Ballhead and all of the Stonehead, which were sunburned and beginning to split. We left most of the Danish Ballhead and all of the Kaitlin because they have no visible signs of damage and will keep better in the garden. We will eat those fresh or freeze them later in the season.

Part of the harvest. Note exceptionally tight leaves in the cut cabbage in the bowl.

The cabbages were exceptionally solid this year. A single cabbage weighed over four pounds. When we got to calculating, we figured we must be making in excess of 40 pounds of sauerkraut. This will be WAY too much sauerkraut. Yet once we get started, well….

The evidence: a 4.75-pound cabbage

Hilda and Nancy cleaned the cabbages and cut them into halves or quarters, depending on the size. Nancy cut open a cabbage that looked exactly like the brain, right down to having a core at the proper angle of the brain stem.

Hilda (in back) and Nancy prepping cabbage

Nancy and the brain cabbage 

I did the slicing, as Pat can’t even look at the slicer without getting the willies. The wire mesh slicing glove I got a few years ago ranks among the top 10 best purchases of my life. It is so much easier to use than the lame and boxy finger protection device that came with the kraut slicer.

Pat weighed the cabbage, mixed in the salt, and packed the cabbage into the crocks. 

Pat mixing in the salt

We used our new crock and crock weights for the first time this year. The latter is another top 10 purchase (at least among items that get used once a year), much superior to the plastic bag filled with water that we have used previously. Also, the crock has a heavy ceramic lid which seems to be preventing spillover as the volume inside the crock expands with the accumulating carbon dioxide. We filled the crock way too full. I forgot all about the expansion problem while we were packing the cabbage. I remembered in time to put a tray under the crock when we set it in the root cellar. I learned that trick last year after cleaning up a puddle of sauerkraut brine from the cement floor. One would think that one could remove the gas by pressing down on the weights and get the level down to where it was, but one would be wrong.

The crock beginning to bubble on the day it was made

The crock this morning on the brink of overflowing

Terry has had a spectacular squash harvest this year. The Delicata are really, really good. So creamy and delicious! Last year some of them were unpleasantly fibrous. So far, we are two for two at having the perfect custard-like texture. Who would have thought I would ever be one to go on and on about squash? I used to hate squash as a child. It is a good thing I have learned to like it. We have literally ahundreds. As I contemplate my winter menus and take into consideration what we have in the larder, I realize we need to eat Delicata four times a week and sauerkraut at least twice. I wonder what sauerkraut-stuffed Delicata would be like.

Part of the squash and pumpkin harvest. The round orange squash in the foreground are Golden Nugget, a new variety for us this year. The Delicata are the white squash with green strips in the bushel baskets and the two boxes in the back.