Rainy May

These last few days have been THE sweet spot of spring for me. Last chance to drive around and see my favorite trees naked; tiny leaves coming in all chartreuse and reddish; lawns and fields fully greened up and loaded with dandelions. The Bobolinks have arrived to complete the perfect RWB/Tree swallow/Bobolink sonic trio. A couple of male RTH's spotted in the last few days; no Orioles yet.

Of course it rains quite a bit and that presents a problem for people who neglected to do much soil prep last fall. This is the time of year where timing is so, so important. Seed potatoes are chitting in the kitchen. Onion sets, shallots, fava and pea seeds are ready to go. However, I am stymied by garden soil that is the consistency of uncooked brownie batter.

On May 3rd I dared to loosen up a potato area and the two new raised beds with the broadfork. This past weekend, I stared at the muddy clay and decided that my best bet was to mulch the heck out of it, to avoid ceding it to weeds. The plan is to transplant my tomatoes and chiles into the mulched area later, and make hills of compost for squash and cukes. Though I haven't yet gotten the chance to dig at all, I had a grand time yesterday dismantling a couple of round bales and hauling rotten hay around.

The garlic looks great. I hit it with seaweed/fish and mulched it too. My strategy for the potatoes and favas and everything else I should be doing right now is to wait and hope that things dry out enough in time.

Woodchucks live under my house. They cavort openly in the yard, even up on the terrace. I am fortunate to know people who are qualified and eager to help me with this problem. This spring, three separate hunting parties have convened in my kitchen during brunch hours, without getting even a glimpse of a woodchuck. Brunch is fun, yet somehow woodchucks sense the danger. Does this mean when I finally borrow Madre's .22 that they will just stay away?

Started tomatoes, eggplant and chiles very late this year. The coop is clean; egg production is WAY down from last year; Handsome Dan continues to behave like a gentleman.

Perrin and Sharon and Dmitri arrive today, hooray!

Six months ago, or six months from now

It's March. It's snowy. I'm getting tired of Facebook.

Just found this picture on my desktop from haying time, six months ago now. It is really past time to order seeds.

Handsome Dan speaks

Dan the Barred Rock cockerel at 8 weeks, back in October:


Today at 16 weeks, having grown some nice hackle and saddle feathers. Still working on the tail, though:



This morning I heard him crow for the first time.

'09 Garlic is in

I am trying a configuration of 20' long, 2 1/2' wide beds in the newly tilled area. Prepped the easternmost one for garlic last weekend with compost and amendments per Steve Solomon's COF recipe. The following varieties went in yesterday, all home-grown:


Species Allium sativuum; Subspecies ophioscorodon (hardneck)

Brown Rose
Chesnok Red
Lavigna

Species Allium sativuum; Subspecies sativuum (softneck)

Kettle River Giant
Inchelium Red

Species Allium ampeloprasum (technically a leek)

Elephant

Alberta

Alberta the cat of Richmond, ME died Saturday, October 11th at Androscoggin Animal Hospital in Topsham.

Born in 1990 in Bronx, NY, Alberta was adopted from the 96th Street Animal Shelter in Manhattan in 1991. She began her hunting career in a small apartment on Mott Street, where she innovated a technique of trapping the American Cockroach in human footwear. Traveling widely by car, train, boat and plane, Alberta fiercely defended territories in Vashon Island, WA, Berkeley, CA, and Richmond, ME.

Her hunting prowess, proven in urban, suburban, and rural environments, brought her many rodent trophies, including the House Mouse, Deer Mouse, and Field Mouse or Meadow Vole. She also enjoyed bird-watching.

Alberta was a great lap cat, and a true party-animal who loved being the center of human attention. She is survived by her companion-human, Sandra York, and the other cat, Edith.

CABIN FOUR!!!!

The BOW weekend was a blast. Very fun, educational, and I met a bunch of amazing women. The best things I learned at "Finishing School" were the trucker's hitch, and that I actually can sweat a pipe. Couldn't start the chain saw by myself, though.

Picture above is from my first time ever firing a .22 rifle. We tried skeet shooting later. I will need a lot more practice at that.

Let's hope that the BOW weekend doesn't conflict with the Common Ground Fair next year.

http://www.mainebow.com/id61.html

Agricultural Processing

Finally got a chance to do some harvesting and processing this weekend. First I made sauce from the Banana, Speckled Roman, Amish, and Hog Heart paste tomatoes. A bunch of Principe Borgheses got in there as well. I think Hog Heart is my favorite variety, but I would grow them all again. Four quarts in the freezer.

I brought two Hubbard squash up. They are nice specimens, but not enormous. There are some great big leeks and kale and parsley still. Weeds are completely out of control, to the point where I think I will have to call Tony to till up a different garden spot for garlic planting this fall.

The chile bed did very well despite the encroaching pasture. I harvested a bunch of Hot Paper Lantern, Limon, Red Rocket, Matchbox, Fish and Czech Black peppers, pictured. As of mid-September there are plenty of green fruits still out there. As an experiment I yanked a few of the pepper plants, roots and all, and hung them upside down under the ell porch roof. Maybe I will get more ripe chiles before frost this way. If not, at least I maintain my weirdo reputation in the neighborhood.

In addition to drying chiles I thought I'd try to make a batch of hot sauce. Lacto-fermented, of course! I chopped up a mixture and packed them in a jar with sea salt and a drizzle of kimchi juice to get things started. Since I don't expect that the types of chiles I grew, with the intent of making ristras, to have enough moisture content on their own to make a brine, I topped the jar off with water, then crammed a ziploc bag full of water in the mouth of the jar to weigh them down.

Terry Johnson cut the fields late this year, understandably due to the rains. I was surprised at how eager I was, beyond any practical reason, to see the pasture mowed.

Garlic over goats

Much as I predicted when I began it as an experiment, this blog is becoming repetitive. There will be a Garlic Harvest entry every July. That is how it should be. This year, the garlic was ready about a week before I expected it. That is not all the excitement I have to share today, however!

Harvest on Lila's birthday, plant on Max's birthday...even though the party's not until Thursday, I found the garlic ready to go yesterday. So, instead of touring goat farms on Open Farm Day I dug the garlic in a soft, cool rain. Heavier rain fell last night and we are in for a wet week, so I guess I was just in time.

Last year I hosed the garlic off and dried it in the sun for a few hours. Since then I have read that I should not do that. This year I strung up the bulbs in the tractor shed with the dirt still clinging to them. After they cure for a bit, I will strip off the outer leaves and hang them in attractive bunches from the banister in the upstairs hall, like normal people do. Like I will do every year as long as I am still breathing.

The main exciting news is about the Lavignas. Though I have yet to conduct taste tests this year, Lavigna is again the outstanding variety in terms of size, beauty and vigor. I have left several in the bed to ripen bulbils; I plan to propagate Lavigna as my main hardneck variety.

But the news! ONE of the Lavignas is a freak!! Since it did not send up a scape, I thought it was damaged, and considered harvesting it early. Really what it was doing was forming topsets like a walking onion! One of the topsets is sprouting already. I have left the plant in the ground for now, and look forward to propagating both ends of it! Was this just a fluke, or is there such thing as topsetting garlic?

This year was my first year trying softneck varieties, and they all seemed to do great. My first taste was Kettle River Giant, which I was pleased to find nice and hot, both raw and cooked in some scrambled eggs.

June things

Late May in Richmond smelled wonderful. Short pasture, no obvious flowers, maybe some trees blooming that would torture allergy sufferers, but whatever was going on, it more than made up for the skunks of February and April.

To walk into late June pasture is like inhaling atomized clover honey. The vetch is waist-high, mixed with red clover, Dutch white clover, and daisies. These fantastic daisies seem to favor the ground that I have disturbed since moving here. Thunderstorms roll through at almost perfect watering intervals. I finally cleaned the chicken coop last weekend.

I have already harvested some garlic scapes. The tomatoes are all jungley, and Glacier is setting fruit. My one Purple Tomatillo plant is magnificent, and is attracting all the Three-Lined Potato Beetles in the vicinity. The Negreta favas are already beset with aphids and chocolate spot, but somehow seem to be doing better than the Broad Windsor favas did at this point. Enough cucumber and squash seedlings survived the slug pressure in th North bed, along with one sunflower plant.

My one concern is that I may have planted my hot peppers out too early. I set them out about a month ago, and still the plants look stunted. There were a few nights that dipped into the 40s in late May and early June. Fortunately I gave a couple of the seedlings from this batch to my friend Anne, who is raising them in her sunroom. If they do well there and not here, I will know that the cold spring nights were the problem.

Turkey, doors, seedlings, frost, chickens, deer, woodchuck.

It was a cold, rainy weekend and I did not get a thing done outside. I did put up some recent pictures, though. http://www.pleasantpondfarm.com/08lateApril.html

Mary E. York

Friday, April 18, 2008

FARMINGTON - Mary Elizabeth York, 95, of Wilton, died Tuesday, April 15, at the Sandy River Center for Health Care and Rehabilitation.

She was born Nov. 2, 1912, in Wilton, in the house on Main Street which she called home for all of her 95 years of life. Her father, Albert Isaiah York, M.D., delivered her. Her mother, Maude Feader York, was in the second class of nurses to graduate from the Central Maine General Hospital School of Nursing. There were two in the class.

She grew up in a time of many changes, from the horse and buggy era to the present with all its marvels. She graduated from Wilton Academy as valedictorian of her class in 1930. She graduated from Bates College in 1934, with a degree in English and languages and subsequently taught at the high school level for all of her working life.

She held positions at Flagstaff High School, Weld High School, Wilton Academy and Jay High School, teaching English, Latin, French and then guidance. She coached girls field hockey at Wilton Academy with consistently winning teams despite playing against larger and private schools.

To aid her teaching career, she took advanced courses at the University of Southern California, Auburn University in Alabama, Indiana University and the University of Maine, where she received her master's degree. Some of these courses required traveling, including a trip to pre-Castro Cuba. She visited every state with the exception of Alaska, most of the National Parks and made trips to Western Europe, the British Isles (England, Scotland and Wales), and Hawaii. She attended the Passion Play at Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps and kissed the Blarney Stone in Ireland.

She was elected delegate to national teachers' conventions in St. Louis and Miami, and was a member of the Maine Teachers' Association, the National Teachers' Association and the American Association of University Women. She joined Eastern Star in 1937, and was secretary for its local chapter for 47 years. She was a charter member of the Weld Historical Society and has been a long-time member of the Wilton Historical Society and the Wilton Congregational Church, where she taught Sunday school for high school students and served on the church committee.

She is survived by her devoted sister, Ruth E. York of Wilton; Bruce's wife, Nancy York of Mattapoisett, Mass.; grandnieces, Sandra York of Richmond and Megan York and her husband, Brad Adams, of Montclair, N.J.; great-grandnephews, Lincoln and Gibson Adams; her niece, Priscilla York Dowd and her husband, Joseph, of Mattapoisett, Mass.; grandniece, Amy Dowd of Massachusetts; and grandnephew, Dr. Peter Dowd of Wisconsin.

She was predeceased by her brother, Albert Isaiah York Jr., M.D.; and her nephew, Bruce York.

favas and tomatoes

Raised beds raised beds raised beds raised beds!

After a rainy Saturday, it was nice enough to get busy down in the clay today. Working up last year's potato patch yielded a nice hod-full of previously-missed, holdover potatoes. I mixed a slurry of fava beans and Rhizobium inoculant, and planted the whole bed to favas.

This year I am trying a medium-sized, purple variety from Territorial Seed Company called Negreta. After planting the whole bed thickly, I had some beans left over so I rinsed off the inoculant and cooked up a nice ful medames. Ah the single life! Standing over the stove, eating mashed beans, and loving it.

You may or may not know that I have been struggling with favas since I moved here. So far, it has seemed that the spring season that favas like is just too short. When the proper, summer, tomato-growing weather hits, bugs and blights move in and make the favas miserable. This is the first time I am using Rhizobium in this garden, though, so maybe they will have leg up this year.

Seeded the tomatoes to soil blocks on the heat mat and moved the peppers up to 4" pots this past week.

MRD Port Authorities beat the Rhode Island Riveters in the first bout of the '08 season last night.

Wild weekend

I am almost done with the '07 garlic. Some of it has started to sprout, but overall I would say that it has kept very well. I have not had a cold all winter.

Megan caught a ride up from NJ last weekend for a brief, but great visit. We hit Gritty's, the A1 Diner, and an art show in downtown Richmond. Then things got really wild - we visited a plant store, a nursing home, and watched a knitting video, in which Elizabeth Zimmerman expresses very strong opinions about yarn. Crazy.

There was also this soup.

Golden Delicious

Skunks have been active under and around the house since early February, a development that I choose to think of as auspicious even though I can smell skunk on my parka even after I get to work. This past weekend was beautiful, with plenty of snow left upon which to snowshoe around. Critter tracks are everywhere. I should be able to report on the specifics but by the time I go out, things are melted and vague.

Garlic and dried chiles have really kept me going this winter. For 2008 I have two beds of hard- and soft- neck garlic waiting under the snow. Eager to get farmy and convinced that certain chiles need a long time to germinate, I planted a few Limon and Hot Paper Lantern seeds in soil blocks on a heat mat in the cellar last week. I think these two are C. chinese. The other peppers I am going for are Fish, Czech Black, Matchbox, Red Rocket, and an Ancho hybrid called 211 -- waiting for early March. I assume that they are all C. annuum, but the catalogs don't say for sure. It will be educational to try to ID them. I am finding all kinds of info on the Gardenweb Hot Pepper Forum. I am also finding that the online Chile Freak world is not unlike or unrelated to BBQ culture.

Just so you don't think that I am distracted from tomatoes, these are the packets I am sitting on for April: Speckled Roman, Orange Banana, Amish Paste, Hog Heart (yes, I like the paste tomatoes.) Also Garden Peach for a novelty, Principe Borghese just in case I get it together to try drying them, and Glacier in hopes of ripening something a little earlier. I also want to squeeze in some purple tomatillos and ground cherries. All this under four fluorescent tubes?

Mike Doughty has a new album out and that makes me very happy. It is Golden Delicious.

Bruce A. York

Bruce A. York
BOSTON — Bruce A. York, 69, of Mattapoisett died November 10, 2007 at Beth Israel Hospital. Mr. York lived a healthy life before being diagnosed with lymphoma two years ago. He was the husband of Nancy (Bower) York. Born in Farmington, ME, the son of the late Dr. Albert I. York, Jr. and Margaret (Anthony) York, he lived in Mattapoisett all of his life. Mr. York was a member of the Mattapoisett Congregational Church. He sailed as chief engineer for 30 years in the shipping industry and ended his career with American Overseas Marine in Quincy in 2000. Mr. York was a graduate of Center School, Fairhaven High School and Mass Maritime Academy. He was a beloved husband, father and grandfather who enjoyed gardening and technical challenges. Survivors include his wife; two daughters, Sandra York, and her husband Kavi Montanaro, of Richmond, ME and Megan York, and her husband Bradley Adams, of Montclair, NJ; a sister, Priscilla Dowd, and her husband Joseph, of Mattapoisett; and two grandchildren, Lincoln and Gibson. Visiting hours Monday 4-7 PM in the Saunders-Dwyer Mattapoisett Home For Funerals, 50 County Rd. (Rt. 6) Mattapoisett. Burial will be private. For directions and guestbook, please visit www.saundersdwyer.com. Published in the Standard-Times on 11/11/2007.

First frost

We had our first real frost just this morning. I harvested ripe chiles and winter squash last weekend, and I swear there was no sign of any frost damage in the garden yet - even the lone eggplant plant was still looking good.

I did not blog about the Common Ground Fair last month but I took a bunch of pictures: http://www.pleasantpondfarm.com/07CGF.html

Major progress on the ell - pictures to come. Have started prepping two beds for garlic.

grilled summer squash recipe

I didn't succession-plant salad this summer, so for green veggies we have been relying on Swiss chard, handfuls of green beans here and there, and summer squash.

My priorities for summer squash are: 1. Freshness. 2. Ratio of Skin to Meat. 3. Low Effort. 4. No Guilt.

Freshness: why gardening would STILL be better than shopping, even if it wasn't more fun.

Ratio: I say "Ratio of Skin to Meat" rather than"Size" because zucchini, crooknecks, pattypans etc. all get away from all of us at all times. Small and Fresh is best. If not small, Medium-sized and Fresh is also very good. My suggestion is to cut up the medium-to-large ones in such a way that a high Skin-to-Meat ratio is obtained.

Low Effort: Given full sun and a nice hill of compost, one summer squash bush goes and goes and goes long after you do anything for it.

No Guilt: The really big ones go to the chickens.

Now that you are absolved of all Effort and Guilt, I will tell you how to enjoy summer squash for dinner every other day from mid-July to late-Powdery-Mildew:

Step one: Remove all conventional cooking facilities from your dwelling, as well as doors, ceiling, floors, plumbing and electricity.

Step two: Install a convenient gas grill (or hardwood charcoal grill) in a convenient spot somewhere between your dwelling and where the squash are at.

Step three: Dice a bunch of garlic, whatever herbs you have, and judicious amounts of the hot-hot-hot peppers your Mom grew by mistake when all she wanted was sweet green peppers.

Step four: Harvest summer squash, and cut up in shapes that maintain a high Skin-to-Meat-Ratio, yet are too large to fall through the grates of your grill.

Step five: Toss squash pieces with olive oil, the garlic, herbs, peppers and spices if you like.

Step Six: Wait & Marinate briefly. Or for a couple of hours. Or not at all.

Step Seven: Grill until stripes are formed on the squash pieces, and the insides of each piece have given up some moisture. This will require turning once or twice, but the timing of the operation is not nearly as critical as when animal meat is being grilled.

Step eight: Enjoy hot off the grill, or cold later.

Step nine: Compost any leftovers, then resume at Step Three, until frost or powdery-mildew ends production.

"There's more to life than plants!!"

But is there, really? Maybe not, according to enthusiasts for the Macrobiotic food-way, one of whom blogged about a visit to my dear, separated-at-birth-twin-brother Mark's awesome central Maine woodland garden recently.

http://www.becomingwhole.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/08/marks-enchanted.html

http://www.becomingwhole.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/08/where-the-wild-.html

Mark stopped by recently for the early August 2007, decadent mid-summer PPF tour. All I can say is that Mark needs to get more documentation of HIS garden up on the internets, and I need to keep up on my in-person connection with him.

Picture by Kavi.

What is Kavi up to?

Garlic harvest

Harvested hardneck garlic, elephant garlic and shallots today. I've got them all rinsed and curing on the picnic table, but have not had any taste tests yet. By looks alone, Lavigna seems to be the most successful, with the largest cloves.

The tomato plants look great, all with green fruits. I have one little egglplant on the egg plant plant. Mysteriously, all potato bugs have vacated - for the remainder of the season, I hope. The corn looked a little peckish, so I gave it a hit of seaweed/fish foliar feed.

My more liberal open-coop-door policy of late has led to more chickens voluntarily free-ranging. I am glad for them because this is the time of year when grasshoppers are abundant. I know I am gambling with the foxes, though. There will come a time this late summer or fall when chicken appeals to them again, and hopefully I will have shut the door that day. We have had an outbreak of feather-picking recently, and I think that the last remaining Speckled Sussex is the perpetrator. In a perfect world we would still have Olivia, and the feather-picker would have gone to this year's litter of foxes.

The last Sussex is my main free-ranging buddy.