Fall Figs

Crickets. Half moon light.
Ripe, soft figs-- harvest by feel.
Rain is coming soon.

First Rain

   

            We knew that the seasonal shift was coming. Rain on Sunday. All across the state, people have been hoping for the change; the wildfire season has been bad this year. Fires. Smoke. Blocked roads. We need some dampness.

                On Friday, we dug the potatoes from both beds. I’ve been letting them dry down for several weeks so that they would store better, but it was time. We pulled 94 pounds in about an hour, then cleaned up the Three Sisters bed as well. I harvested a big vase of sunflowers that had volunteered on the potato plot. After dinner, I picked a basket of figs from the tree and set up the drier. The air was dry and clear, a perfect golden afternoon.

  

              Saturday was partly cloudy, a soft grey gold morning. Mark cleaned up the space under the stairs where we store our potatoes while I cleaned the kitchen, harvested a basket of tomatoes, and cooked them down to sauce. I watched the bees work the goldenrod and apple mint, bringing in flashes of deep orange and bright white pollen to the hive.   In the afternoon, we shifted fences and brought the coop onto the Three Sisters bed, where the chickens rustled joyously in the corn stalks until bedtime.  We brought the lamp in from the outside dining table before we went to sleep.

                This morning, the world had changed. The sky was soft grey with layers of clouds. We went hiking at the wildlife refuge and stopped half way around to pull on rain coats. The light in the woods was dim, filtered both by clouds and by leaves. Back at home, we hauled in the things we do not want to get wet—the hammock, some plants for my classroom that I had just repotted, the tablecloth and pillows—and settled into the dining room. Do you want a fire? Mark asked. Yes, I did. And here we sit, with fire, tea, cats, and books, watching the rain come down and hoping that it is moving inland, to the forest fires still burning in the Cascades. Maybe we will have baked potatoes for dinner.

Chicken Info

There are facts that no one tells you when you are thinking about raising chickens in the back yard. None are deal-breakers, but still, it would be nice to know.

1. Chickens are really dinosaurs.
2. Chickens are wily creatures who can walk fences if they want to lay an egg somewhere else.
3. Chickens eat small rodents alive.
4. Chickens lay small eggs for the first few weeks. They are cute-- but you feel wrong, somehow, eating them. Like you are eating a baby.
5. Chickens practice Labor Coaching, loudly.
6. If you have chickens and someone finds a loose chicken near-by, they will knock on your door at 7:45 AM to find out if it is yours.
7. You are the Big Chicken.

Also, blue jays will eat honey bees. How, I do not know.

Canning Season

       

   

  It is canning season. The garden is full of tomatoes, fruit is ripe everywhere, and school is about to start. Because we were gone for six weeks of the summer, I am not preserving as much as I usually do. This winter will be the Eat Down Winter, when we finally clear out that jar of salsa from 2014 which has slipped to the back of the shelf every fall despite my best efforts. There are way too many half pint jars of jam downstairs  for any small homestead as well.  “Eat More Jam” is posted on the fridge as a reminder.  Still, there is canning to be done.

                Small batch canning works well for our household—there are two full time eaters and we focus on eating locally. My goal is about 95% local produce, which is not impossible or even unreasonable with a little planning. Right now, I am saving tomatoes for the winter. Thirty pounds from Sunbow were roasted and put up in half pint jars early this week, perfect for pizza, soup, and pasta this winter. I cooked down two soup pots full for sauce—10 pints. There are already dried tomatoes on the shelf and tomato chutney in a far corner. A pile of black tomatoes balances on the table, ready for lunch sandwiches.

                I can work this processing into my daily routine because of the steam canner I bought years ago from Territorial Seed. Rather than hauling out the big canning pot and rack, filling it with water, and waiting for it to heat-- which takes about an hour!—I can heat up  a batch of sauce, pour it into jars, and seal it in half an hour. The steam canner heats up in less than five minutes, uses about a pint of water to seal the jars (you pour a quart in, but most of it remains), and saves an immense amount of time and energy. I can prep a batch of apple butter, set it in the crockpot to cook down overnight, put it in jars in the morning, and have a box full of food ready for the basement shelf before I leave to prep for school in the morning.

                The jars are filling up, slowly and steadily. Every time I take a batch of something down stairs, I re-adjust the food already on the shelves to make room and spend a few moments admiring  my efforts.