Category Archives: Garden

Cooking, Garden

Homemade Chicken Pot Pie

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Lugnasa                                                             Hiroshima Moon

Not only did it not make it to 80 today, the temps didn’t make 70 either.  Ah.

Spent the morning making four chicken, leek and vegetable pies.  Used our leeks and carrots, our thyme and tarragon and dried garlic.  Something very satisfying about cooking with vegetables grown at home.

This is a lengthy process since it involves sauteing vegetables, cooking a whole chicken with celery, carrots, garlic and green onions.  12 cups of water plus corn.  That takes about an hour, cleaning the leeks takes a while, then boiling them in salted water.  Dug a few new potatoes yesterday and added them to the leeks, just for something different.

After the chicken cooks, it comes out of the pot for cooling while the leeks and the potatoes go into the liquid for a gentle warming.  Shredded chicken gets placed in pie shells with crusts, then vegetables ladled over the chicken, mounded in the center.

Butter and flour for a (roue-unintentional humor here.  I meant) roux to thicken the broth a cup and a half at a time.  The thickened broth goes in the pies, four of them.  A frozen pie dough gets flattened with the rolling pin, then draped over the pies.  Vents are cut.

The oven, preheated to 425, receives all four pies.  15 minutes, then down to 350, cook for another 20 minutes.  Done.

Wrapped in aluminum foil three of these pies go in the freezer for mid-winter meals.  The fourth will get reheated for supper tonight.

We have enough leeks to do this several times over.  Next time a bigger chicken, free range, more leeks and some additional vegetables.  Not sure what quite yet.  That awaits the next time.

Each cooking session differs from the last in some way or another.

Garden, Weather +Climate

The Harvest Season Underway

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Lugnasa                                                                  Hiroshima Moon

Cool.  Rainy.  Clouds.  Ahhh.

My whole Minnesota self sighed today as the clouds rolled in, a bit of chill rain hit the windshield and the temperature hovered around 70 and below.  This is curl up with a book or hit the computer or nap or just enjoy the evidence of the sun slowly giving up to night.  Me.  I plan to do them all.

Each aspect of the gardening season has its pleasures, but this one, preparing food for the long fallow time has many.

Kate came downstairs this morning and showed me a container full of dried garlic slices.  They look like tiny potato chips, but pack a heavy garlic punch.  I ate one, so I know.  We also pulled all the pears off the tree (well, ok, there were 5.), brought them inside and put them in the fridge. Turns out, according to our drying book, that pears ripen better off the tree.  Keeping them in the fridge holds back the ripening and we’re doing that so we can dry them with the apples which don’t come to maturity until September or so.

 

Family, Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Intiba, Radix, Lactis Coacti, Ova

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Lugnasa                                                               Hiroshima Moon

Spent yesterday with my nose in the Metamorphoses.  I’ve not been doing Latin every day, rather only when I can devote sufficient time to it, like 3-4 hours.  Yesterday I put in 6.  It’s not the best way.  Each time I have to crank up my Latin engine, which often acts like one of those old cars with the hand starter.  Better to keep the engine  running by daily exercise.

Still, I made progress.  Even had Latin nouns circling in my mind before I went to sleep:  intiba, radix, lactis coacti, ova.  That’s endive, radish, cheese (coagulated milk) and eggs.

Today Mark and I will make one attempt for his driver’s license.  By we I mean I’ll drive him over there and then sit as he waits in line.  For hours.  I hope he gets it though since it would allow him to rent cars in Saudi Arabia, be generally more free.

I sliced garlic and gathered rosemary last night, both for drying.  We bought a dryer several years back and each fall we process things.  First time for garlic, though Kate has done a number of herbs in the past.  I hope to dry apple this year.

Mark has a bank account, new passport and the material he needs for his visa.  The driver’s license is the main thing he wants now.  He leaves Friday for Lansing, Michigan to visit our cousin Kristen, then on to Detroit to visit Leisa and her husband, Bob.  She’s in a nursing home recovering from a devastating stroke.

 

Garden, Weather +Climate

A Window Defenestrated

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Lugnasa                                                     Hiroshima Moon

Harvested the last of the first planting of chard, the first of the first planting of collard greens and continue to harvest from the kale Kate planted by the herb spiral.  Staked up (further) tomatoes and peppers, all getting tall and droopy with fruit.  A good thing.

Weatherman Paul Douglas reports he found a dining room window blown out after returning from the cabin this weekend.  A stained glass window in our bespoke garden shed, secure in its mount for over 12 years, blew out, too.  It lies on the garage floor, awaiting a large enough piece of cardboard to slip under it, then off to the stained glass place.  Don’t know where one is, but Mark Odegard does and I’ll see him tonight.

Used lath to nail thick mil sheet plastic over the window; that’ll have to do until the repair folks finish.

Now, back to work on revising the novel.

Feelings, Garden

More Doing

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Summer                                                      Hiroshima Moon

More doing.  A couple of weeks ago our dogs, imagining we were bored, I think, decided to dig under the orchard fence rather than vault over it where I had put the electric fence.  Thing is, they succeeded.

(a 2010 effort, getting ready for the Olympic digging)

The first route underneath resulted in a shallow cave under the second of two blueberry mounds that we have, leaving them in danger of collapse.  That was when it was too hot to move, so indolence carried the task through until today.  Got out the shovel and reversed the dog’s action carried out with their two front feet.  If it was Vega and Rigel, and I’m sure it was, then they probably took turns, as I have seen them do numerous times.  One gets tired, the other steps in to continue the task.  Two big dogs can move a lotta sand fast that way.

Digging underneath the fence requires a different strategy than electric fence since I don’t want to run a low wire-rope.  Too much trouble with plants, snagging, that sort of thing.  My method in this instance is to bury chicken wire after having wired it to the larger mesh we have between the wooden rails. This works.

The California fence that we had put in for the vegetable garden, five foot tall chain link in
black with red cedar posts, top rails and bottom boards, would have worked better here, too, but we didn’t choose it.

(California fence)

Also collected the onions whose tops had fallen over, the sign for harvesting, put up the old screen door on supports in the near garden shed and laid out this year’s yellow onion crop for drying.  After about a week they’ll go downstairs into our small root cellar simulacrum.  The yellows keep best.  Reds don’t keep at all; whites in between.

Finished weeding the mounds around our fruit trees and the blueberry patches, helped Kate start the mower and came in.  Kate came in a few minutes later to say she had disturbed the ornery bees.  Two stings.  We have one hyper-vigilant colony and one almost somnolent.  Odd.

 

Dogs, Garden, Health

A Bike, The Orchard, Gertie Wounded

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Summer                                                       Hiroshima Moon

Got a bike and a helmet today.  Ready to ride.  This bike’s a fixie which means it won’t coast, though it has a hub that can switch out so it rides like an old timey Schwinn.  Not expensive, my helmet cost almost as much as the bike.  Wanted another aerobic alternative, something to get me outside for exercise.  This’ll do it.  Bought the bike on line and had a local bike shop assemble it.

Kate and I worked in the orchard today.  One day a week she says where and what she’d like to have me do outside.  Think it’ll be two days this week.  I like to work outside for an hour to an hour and a half, then I’m done.  She likes to work until she’s finished.  Commendable, but not my style.  I parse tasks over time.  Needless to say Kate gets more outdoor work done than I do.

Gertie has wounds again.  This is the third time since she got here and the second time in a month.  We’ve not seen it happen so we can only speculate, though they look like canine bites and tears.  Fortunately pediatrics has a lot in common with veterinary medicine–that is, the patients often can’t talk–so handling doggy trauma at a certain level is well within Kate’s capacity.

I held Gertie while Kate put hydrogen peroxide on and into the punctures.  The punctures went all the way through the dermis to the muscle fascia.  She debreeded, then put an antibiotic ointment under the skin around the wounds.  Then, some bandages that lasted for a bit.

We started her on antibiotics we have here from other doggy misadventures, gave her some rimadyl for the pain and let her sleep in our room.  Where she is right now.

 

Cooking, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Health

A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream

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Summer                                                Hiroshima Moon

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.” – Anais Nin

Horticulture.  When we moved in here now 18 years ago, we decided to spend money upfront on landscaping, figuring we could enjoy it over the life of our tenancy rather than putting in as an amenity at the time of a sale.  We hired a landscape architect from Otten Brothers and he put in a basic plan.  Two wild prairie patches on either side of a manicured lawn.  Norway pines, a spruce or two, some amur maples, a genus maple, an oak, some river birch.  Near the house he put on narrow beds planted with shrubs like euonymus, a dwarf lilac, shrub roses, viburnum among others.

A boulder retaining wall in the front shored up a long bed like a peninsula into the green ocean of our yard.  In the back we had them cut a three tiered garden, each tier marked off with boulder retaining walls and divided near the house by steps made of rail-road tie size square lumber.

The rest of our property, all now that is our “backyard”, was part woods and part scrubland covered with black locust trees, thorny and not visually appealing though very good for fence posts.  The first two years after our move I spent cutting down trees, using a commercial wood-chipper to  grind them up and hiring a stump-grinder to come in and rid us of the stumps.  The scrubland became, gradually, a place where we could build a shed, plant a vegetable garden and I dreamed of making it an expanse of prairie, as I had wanted to do with the entire property when we moved. Continue reading A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream →

Garden

Ninja Weeder

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Summer                                                                  Hiroshima Moon

Kate and I spent time working in the garden this am.  I plucked out extra beets, collard greens and chard.  Getting a second round of all these underway.  The tomatoes have grown fat, tall and filled with fruit so I got out the plastic tomato handcuffs and cuffed separate stalks to the red metal supports.  Barring a drop in temps (unlikely, eh?) we’ll have a big tomato harvest.  The leeks and potatoes continue strong, dark green.  Both of these develop out of sight, as do the carrots, but the above ground leaves and stems give good evidence of their overall health.

Kate put out water for the bees while I was gone.  A neighbor called and said she had a lot of dead bees in her bird bath.  Not sure it was due to lack of water but it never hurts to add water for them.  I forgot that when I moved them into the orchard.  It’s looking like  this will be a non-honey harvest year which means I’ll have to do the work to  overwinter these colonies, something I did not want to do anymore.   Ah, well.  So much for that management idea.

Kate does a wonderful job of keeping our garden beautiful by fighting the good fight against weeds and other invaders.  She is, as she names herself, “a ninja weeder.”

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden

Good News! Still Not Allergic to Bee Stings!

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Summer                                                      Under the Lily Moon

 

Bees working hard.  One slightly behind the other, though the more advanced (more brood in the second box) also has an inexplicably large number of drone cells.  Not sure what to make of it.

Picked cherries today.  Got about a dozen.  Not a big cherry year and many of the ones on the tree had some sort of fungus.

Moved our new, all steel firepit ring back to the firepit Mark dug out last year.  Need to bolt it up and we’re read for a fire.  Just as the temps head back to the 90’s.  Maybe not the best time to try it out.

To move the firepit Kate and I had to maneuver a fixed tire back on the wagon.  We have a heavy duty lawn tractor, a Simplicity called the Landlord.  Sort of an icky name for this renter organizer, but, hey.  It does the job.  Probably should paint over the damned thing.  Put an image of Artemis over it.

Moved to Book VIII of the Metamorphosis; this time the story of Philemon and Baucis.  Once again inspired to choose this passage by art.  The first history painting of Rembrandt’s bought by a US art collector is an illustration of this story.  Has made me begin to think about a book/research project digging up all the paintings and sculpture telling Ovid’s stories.  If it hasn’t been done, it would be fun.

 

Garden
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Summer                                       Under the Lily Moon

A morning with the garden.  Odds and ends.  Transplanting hosta and pachysandra.  Removing the tire from the wagon so it could be filled with air.  Loading the mower into the truck for degunking.  Weeding in the beet and kale bed.  Cutting an old carpet up for weed control in the vegetable garden.  Mulch will go on top of it.