Future House Farm

The Growings On

2008-10-04T21:38:00.003-04:00

Since we only work during the school year now, it's nice to see how well our careers will work with our need to garden. As I had mentioned a few posts ago, things in the ground are slowing down. I just started to pull some carrots we planted in the late spring. I still can't get over the difference in taste between our garden carrots and those bought in a supermarket.

Our fall greens are steadily creeping along. A mix of heavy rain and sudden high temperatures slowed things down a bit, but we are back on track to having salads until the December snows roll in.

Even as most of the garden is turning brown, there are still plenty spots of color in some of our surviving flower beds. I forget the name of these things, but they have quickly become one of my late season favorites.

The End of Tomatoes

2008-09-29T20:09:00.007-04:00

This quite possibly will be the last tomato from our garden this year. The rest are looking kind of sickly from the damp chilly weather. If we have learned anything about tomatoes this year, it's that with our new squasher, we can handle a great deal more than what we planted. Next year we are looking at possibly tripling the number of saucing tomatoes. Space may be an issue, but I'm sure that we'll figure something out.

Pots

2008-09-28T09:18:00.003-04:00

As promised, here are a few of the pots from the wood firing two weeks ago. This summer I desperately tried to learn some semblance of concinstency on the wheel, but it came to no avail. Granted, some potters will spend years crafting their form on the wheel, so I wasn't expecting miracles, but my relationship with the clay was far from what I was looking for. I think what it was is that the process of pot building on the wheel is a little too fast for me. It's not the spinning that's too fast, but the actual beginning to end stages that seem, well, without kinship.

I shared this concern with my ceramics instructor and she recommended that I look into a treadle wheel. While looking for it on the internet I discovered that the treadle wheel was actually designed by Bernard Leach, and his grandson Simon has some fantastic Youtube videos on pots, pots building, and the Leach wheel.

In the near future I will begin to pester my brother to help me build one of these things. He's pretty handy with a torch and hot metal. In the mean time I'm going to stick with hand building.

Octoberfest

2008-09-27T20:55:00.004-04:00

We celebrated Fall today, spending the most of the afternoon and early evening eating and drinking at various Octoberfest gatherings. There were plenty of good beers to be had and I have consumed enough meat products to last me a good while. A food coma has been building.

Unfortunately one member of this household was unable to hold her own.

In Between Stages

2008-09-25T20:12:00.002-04:00

With our professional lives gorging itself on our time, its kinda good to know that our garden is experiencing a bit of a nonproductive period. There is a a ton of work to do removing our spent summer labors, but with a few Octoberfest hoedowns to attend this weekend, the fall clean up will certainly have to wait.

Little Brothers

2008-09-23T18:11:00.007-04:00

I commute 170 miles a day. The students I teach and the experience I'm gaining are well worth it. If this turns into a steady gig, Meg and I will certainly move, but for now, I am one with the turnpike. (I go through a lot of audio books. Right now I'm listening to In Cold Blood.)

Meg and I own a Jeep. She needs it to get to the train station and I couldn't realistically drive it everyday and expect to make any money. I needed cheep, reliable, and temporary transportation.

Mid August my little brother Derrek reminded me once again (like I forgot) why I love him so damn much. He is the proud owner of a 94 honda civic that gets close to 45 miles to the gallon. He lives close enough to his job that he can walk and on the shitty days our Ma can give him a lift. The convenience of his location, plus the fact that he also owns a truck, meant that his little frankencar was available. I never really had to ask if I could borrow it before he selflessly offered it up. I'm very lucky.

I imagine that if Superman were going through a rough spell, he would drive this car.

Side note:
Meg also has a younger brother, John, who although I've only known a few years, is pretty kick-ass as well. He has a problem with stealing his sister's legos, but that's their quarrel.

Fall Chores

2008-09-20T13:45:00.003-04:00

It was pretty chilly this morning. I think it dipped below 50 last night. When we go out to feed the chickens we walk past the end of the garden where the corn is. Lately it's been browning and just looking a little sad and dead. The mixture of dew, chill, and rot, cemented the fact that we need to do some Fall prep work. Hell before we know it, it'll be time to plant garlic.

Arrrr

2008-09-19T23:03:00.000-04:00

Wood Firing

2008-09-15T19:48:00.004-04:00

I spent this past weekend at a local art studio for a wood firing. I just got back into ceramics last year after an especially long hiatus. Back when I made pots and such kind of regular, I never had the opportunity to participate in this kind of firing. It is tremendously labor intensive, but the results are fantastic.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the loading (forgot my camera) but I was able to get in some clicks on the second day before things got real busy. On day two I got there around seven in the morning and by noon we had a crew of about ten or twelve.

The fires were started around 6:30 in the morning and they reached cone ten around 5:00. The gentleman in charge of the firing said that when we reached cone ten, the flame from the fire would be around 60 feet in length and it would snake all through the pots before it sparked out of the chimney.

The pots will be cool enough to unload in about three days. If all went well I'll be sure to share some shots.

Shelling dried beans? Here's a time saving tip:

2008-09-14T20:32:00.003-04:00

Lock the kitten in another room.

A Beat Down

2008-09-09T19:51:00.003-04:00

The rains from all the hurricanes and tropical storms have been sweeping through these past few days. We certainly have needed the water. Meg and I were afraid that we were going to have a dry brown Fall this year. We usually try to hit the Appalachians for a solid day hike to see the leaves and migrating birds. So it was good to see the rain, but the garden has a few beds of small greens that are begging for a break.

Any day now

2008-09-04T20:26:00.003-04:00

I love hot sauce. We planted about seven varieties of peppers and they are all beginning to turn. The plan is to roast them over the fire pit or on the grill and then process them with some vinegar and salt. It's simple and delicious.

Share Time

2008-09-02T19:13:00.003-04:00

Not to long ago I told you all about a new site I've been reading called Cold Splinters. Well shortly after, I started reading/experiencing a site listed on his blogroll called Born To Be Nervous. Between the two sites, my musical world has expanded exponentially.

Born To Nervous isn't just about music. Today he linked to this home I know many of you can appreciate. He also has an eclectic taste in art that I find just absolutely fascinating. The world seems fuller.

On Patrol

2008-09-01T21:10:00.002-04:00

We got lucky and had a mess of mantises (mantii?) hatch under our row covers in the Spring. We've always had a few of these guys on the property, but this year they were everywhere. They stationed themselves all throughout the garden and have been dutifully chowing down on other bugs all year long. Mantises actually eat pretty much everything they come across—good bugs included—but I think we have enough pests running around to serve as the primary food.

Frozen Veggies

2008-08-31T21:16:00.004-04:00

We don't have a pressure cooker for low Ph canning and we have a sweet ass freezer begging to get filled. We have begun to blanch and freeze some of our veggies to keep us going during the Winter months. The last two batches have been five pounds of green beans and about five pounds of corn.

There's nothing fancy about our prep process. We blanch the veggies in boiling water (with a little bit of salt) for a few minutes, drain them, and then put them in an ice bath to stop them from cooking.

After they've cooled, we drain them again ( we actually let them sit in the strainer for a few minutes to let any excess water drip off) and spread them out evenly on cookie trays.

This is where the genius happens.

We put the trays in our freezer above the refrigerator to stiffen a bit before we store them in a bag or plastic container. To keep the trays separated, we used wine corks as stilts between each layer. I'm telling you it works like a charm. If you want to try it, but don't have enough corks, throw a party.

Fall Greens

2008-08-26T18:32:00.005-04:00

The nights have been getting cooler. This evening's low is expected to dip down to about 57 or so. It's been good sleepin' weather. The day's heat is also losing its intensity. The low 80's seems to be the norm. I just read El's post, which confirms it. Fall is coming.

Capucijners

2008-08-23T22:29:00.002-04:00

The seeds came from a local-to-us company, Amishland Heirloom Seeds. Even though I planted these late (mid-June—what was I thinking?) they all germinated and thrived. We've got dozens of fat, mature pods drying now and I presume that they're all as full of perfect peas as the guy in the photo. I still don't know if we'll have enough to actually eat any this year, but we definitely have our seed stock for the spring.

Have you thanked a parasitic braconid wasp today?

2008-08-22T20:28:00.002-04:00

Pick a Peck of Pickles

2008-08-21T19:27:00.001-04:00

Lots of folks have landed on this blog recently through Google searches for a quick dill pickle recipe. That's the recipe we used, from Putting Food By, to make pickles a few weeks ago and I promised in the comments that I'd post the recipe here.

Quick Dill Pickles (7 [questionable] pints)

Ingredients:

30 to 40 medium pickling-type cucumbers, 5 inches long
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup pickling salt
1 quart vinegar
1 quart water
7 fresh dill heads
(optional) 7 garlic cloves
(optional) 3 tablespoons mixed whole pickling spices

Mix together the sugar, salt, vinegar, and water and bring to a boil. Tie optional pickling spices loosely in a thin white cloth and boil in the vinegar mixture for about 10 minutes; remove and discard. Scrub cucumbers, remove stems and blossom ends; cut lengthwise in haves or quarters, not longer than the shoulder-height of the jar. Put 1 whole head of fresh dill in each clean hot jar. Pack the jars with cut cucumber upright, then tuck in a clove of garlic if you like it. Pour in the boiling vinegar mixture, leaving 1/2 inch of headroom. Adjust lids. Process in a 185 F/85 C water bath for 10 minutes. Remove jars, complete seals if necessary.

Greene, Janet, Ruth Hertzberg, and Beatrice Vaughan. Putting Food By. 4th ed. Plume: New York, 1991.

This recipe is great and it worked really well for us, but here are some things we wish we'd have known beforehand:

Anyone who can make this fit into the seven pint jars that the recipe asks for has some kind of special hold over the laws of physics. We used half as many cukes and filled eight pints.

We also ran out of the vinegar/water stuff and had to make a new batch to fill the last jar and a half. Basically, the quantities seem kinda off. Have extra jars and extra vinegar stuff on hand.

We used extra dill and it still didn't look like quite enough. If you like your dill pickles to be very dill-y, then keep lots dill on hand as well.

And of course, we put in tons of garlic.

Nasty Little Bastards

2008-08-20T19:05:00.004-04:00

Squash vine borers demolished our very tasty Striata d'Italia summer squash this year. We knew it was doomed a few weeks ago, but I was harboring false hopes of recovery. After a week of increasingly wilted leaves and droopy flowers, we yanked it.

The stem was completely eaten and rotted out and inside it held—surprise!—a couple of big, fat vine borers. These squirmy things eat the plant from the inside out and steal water and nutrients that would otherwise keep the leaves perky and allow new fruit to set. Our extremely prolific Lemon squash is naturally bug-resistant, so it's still doing fine. The cucumbers, melons, and winter squash are also hanging in there, so they are still chugging along in the garden. The vine borers, meanwhile, gave us a nice occasion to have a campfire.

Catch of the Day

2008-08-19T20:00:00.003-04:00

Meg and I did all of our gardening before breakfast this morning. It was nice. The long grass was heavy with dew and in the shade it was still chilly. The sun was warm and the coffee was hot. We watered the seeded beds, pulled a few weeds, and talked about how kick ass our garden will be at Future House. I just submitted my materials for a tenure-track position. I hope I get it. If so, Future House may happen by next summer. Our fingers are crossed.

The garden is finally starting to flex its muscles. It sounds like there are other folks out there who have also had slow gardens this year. Today we hauled in a pretty little fifteen pound produce section. Hopefully it becomes a trend.

Tomato Sauce

2008-08-18T15:17:00.005-04:00

The tomatoes we juiced on Saturday became canned sauce on Sunday. The recipe we used, again came from Putting Food By. It really couldn't be easier.

What we did is took the five quarts of juice (from fifteen pounds of mixed tomatoes),

put it in a pot,

and gave it a gentle boil...

for an hour.

The reason for the cooking time is to cook off the excess water from the fruit. When using paste tomatoes there isn't much loss in volume, but since we were using slicing and paste tomatoes the loss was much more. Actually, after a hour our five quarts cooked down to five and a half pints. However, cooking it down is important, so we just kind of hung out...

and had some beers.

One quick note: Since we are doing a boil-water method (as opposed to pressure cooking), we left the sauce straight as not to muck with the ph levels. Adding any kind of vegetable will lower the ph and run the risk of bacteria having a field day in your food. To be on the safe side we added a tablespoon of lemon juice to each pint, which guarantees it will be okay.

When the juice becomes sauce, the rest is pretty simple. Hot pack the sauce into scalded jars, wipe the rims, set the lids...

and put the jars back into the boiling water for half an hour. Oh yeah, we took Robin's advice about adding a little vinegar in the water to eliminate mineral dust. It works kick ass. Thanks Robin.

After half an hour we pulled the jars, let them cool...

and dated them.

Four quarts down, lots more to go.

2008-08-17T22:18:00.004-04:00

We did not have any sausage-making music, but yesterday's tomato squishing went pretty well anyway.

Tomatoes ready for squashing.

Kelly chopped up the tomatoes and I cranked 'em through—we got done with 15 pounds in about 15 minutes. Our new tomato grinder-upper worked great. I ran the waste stuff through a couple of times to make sure it was all properly squeezed out, and by the time we were done the runoff glop was pretty much completely dry.

And in the end there was a whole lotta lovely tomato sauce in our mixing bowl rather than on the counter, which surprised me.

Three little drips. And that was my fault, I think, for cranking too exuberantly.

Movin' Shit Around

2008-08-16T19:20:00.003-04:00

The brassica beds were spent and man they looked like hell. A major drag about floating row covers is that they make a swell place for weeds to grow unnoticed. Actually, that's a lie. We did notice the weeds, bud it's a bit of a pain to take down and repitch the cover on a regular basis. On top of some desperately needed weeding we also wanted to reposition the beds to make the space a little friendlier for walking and running hoses. It was a shit load of work and well worth it.

After the pulling and digging, we planted some Fall seeds. The bed next to Meg is spinach and the one next to that is bush beans. There were a number of other beds that were put into rotation, and in those we planted lettuce, carrots, and chard.

The nights have been pretty cool so hopefully the greens will germinate. The rain harvester is at maximum capacity, so keeping these buggers wet for a week will be a cinch.

Renewable Resources

2008-08-15T19:15:00.003-04:00

We build a great deal of our garden structures with bamboo. A few folks have wanted to know where we get it all from. I know I have mentioned that we collect it from the backyard, but I don't believe we have ever put a photo to it.

The photo below is just part of the 2,500 square foot area of bamboo forest that we have on this property. The great thing about this stuff is that it aggressively regenerates, which means that you can collect poles until your heart's content and it will never go away. The bad part about it is that it aggressively regenerates, and if you don't keep a choppin', then your yard will be good for nothing more than a panda retreat or the set for a Rambo sequel.

This next photo is what a typical harvest will look like. This pile turned into a batch of more than 50 eleven-foot poles. My mom and Dan hauled it all across the state for their own backyard happenings. I think on their last visit they took well over a hundred poles of the same length. I'm serious, once you plant this stuff, it will never go away. If you're a gardener and can use it, it's great; but if not, well...