Summer Solstice

Early summer has settled on the Willamette Valley. On Solstice morning, I rode out to Sunbow to spend the morning mulching tomatoes and pulling oversized weeds away from purple cabbages just starting to head up in the fields. The light was glorious—clear blue sky, bright sunshine dancing on leaves. The fava beans were shoulder high. Some parsnips were going to seed in one corner, mustardy yellow flowers in umbel spray formation. On the ride home, the air smelled of ocean, and forest, and earth mingled together in the light breeze, with a little cow poop thrown in. Wild daisy, dandelion, and vetch bloomed by the side of the road. Wheat straw mulch had sprouted and the seedheads were formed and turning golden.
Back home, the potato beds were waist high and blooming, the young jays arguing over whose yard this is, and I harvested a quart and a half of honey from the hive on Sunday. We had peas and cauliflower for dinner last night—so nice to eat a vegetable with substance, after months of greens—and I’ve been picking raspberries along the berry alley for about a week.
We had company for dinner on Solstice evening. We ate outside for the first time this season. Goat cheese and crackers, olives and pickles to start, followed by salmon, fresh salad and broccoli, rhubarb and berry pie with ice cream. Fresh mint tea. It was light until after ten. We did not have to get up in the morning…Summer has begun.

End of the School Year Checklist

End of the School Year Checklist:

Graduation and dinner with Leslie—check
Art Ride around town—check
Romeo and Juliet projects—check
Deep sighs—check
Big note on the board “No Yearbooks out during class or they are mine!”—check
Scent of Junior Campout—check
Weird clothes to school—perhaps the pants with a bit of paint on them—check
Green checkout sheet in my box—check
Staring out the classroom window—check
Cardboard and art supplies creeping forward into my room—check

Why are we still here?

This I Believe-- For Ana Lind

I believe in the art and science, the system, of housekeeping, of home making.

I believe that you must know how to feed yourself: how to take beans and pasta, sauté homegrown onions, celery, and garlic, add tomatoes roasted and canned in a summer hot kitchen, a roasted red pepper, some zucchini, basil and parsley, and mix them all together into a soup that will carry you through a long week of work and meetings and grading papers. You should know how to bake bread—or at least muffins—to go with that soup, and maybe some oatmeal raisin cookies as well. You could even learn the more arcane arts of fresh cheese making, of gnocchi and pasta, of beer brewing and food preservation and fancy meal planning. But you must know how to cook. I believe all good things start around kitchen tables, around meals shared amongst strangers.
I believe in the weekly rituals of house cleaning, of bringing order back from the brink of entropy, of establishing the patterns of the week. While the bread rises and the soup simmers, clean the bathroom, scrub the kitchen counter, hang up the still clean clothes. The blankets need airing, the sheets and towels should be changed. Put away the books and projects left over from the busy week. Find all of the mugs tucked under chairs and beside the bed and wash them. Plan out the food for the week and grocery shop, so you know, in advance, what you’ll eat on Wednesday night. I believe we need to establish order in the physical world to establish order in the mental one.
I believe that you should grow some of your own food, so that you know, in your soul, what fresh food means. I believe in small herb patches: the scent of just picked marjoram cooking with garlic and onions at the beginning of the soup, chives and parsley chopped into cottage cheese, mint tucked into the pitcher of sun tea brewing on the doorstep. I believe in lettuce and broccoli jumbled together in a raised garden bed, in a community allotment full of potatoes in July, in working on a local farm, listening to the rustle of wheat in the summer air. Then, after you have raised the food, save some of it for winter. Make jam and pickles. Dry some fruit and herbs. Stash a couple of winter squashes under the bed, if you must. I believe that eating your own food at every meal—even if it is just the parsley—connects you to the cycle of the earth.
I believe in hand washing dishes while meditating on the nature of reality, in sorting laundry and hanging it out to dry in the cool morning air, in mending shirts and knitting socks and hats. I believe in eating off of the Good Dishes by candlelight some nights when you are dining alone, in inviting people over for dinner and setting a beautiful table, in carrying a mug of tea into the vegetable garden on the Summer Solstice.
I believe that, in establishing the rituals of housekeeping, you are connecting yourself to the core of the world, to the cycle of the earth, to all who have come before and those who will follow. If we all care well for our small personal homes, I believe we will make better choices for our larger home, the planet.

Summer is....

Memorial Day weekend is the tease of summer…and summer is:

· Having tea without discussing the most recent book in American Lit.
· Wearing the same pair of pants for three days
· No weird papers or requests from counselors
· Hiking, wildflowers, feet in cold streams, backpack creaking…
· Fresh veggies from the back yard
· A pile of books from the book sort
· Eating both of my lunch cookies, rather than giving one to Jesse when he comes in to tell me about his attempts at getting a girl
· Being outside, rather than inside, as the default location
· Staring into space
· House projects
· Day hikes every Monday
· Dirty feet
· Garden hoses exploding in the yard
· Watching the bees bring in pollen with Lucy
· Listening to Harry’s stories while weeding at Sunbow
· Making jam, drying fruit, reading cookbooks
· Fresh berries
· Democracy Now all the way through
· ……

Homemade Yogurt

I’ve been making yogurt for about a couple of months now…when I first saw the process, back in the old Laurel’s Kitchen cookbook, I thought—why bother? Only women with huge hairbuns make yogurt! It is cheap to buy. And the idea of fixing up a heating pad, and using a blender for dried milk powder…seriously. Too much effort for something that would not be tasty. Then, Sunset magazine had a recipe involving a small cooler and some canning jars of hot water and I thought, What the heck? I have some extra milk. If Sunset readers can do this, I, as an Urban Homesteader, can. It was amazing. Homemade yogurt is significantly better than store bought (and cheaper). It is light and delicate. No need for sugar; it has not had time to sour. Pair it with some homemade cinnamon walnut blueberry granola and you are styling.

So here’s the process:
Heat 4 cups of milk to 180 degrees.
Cool said milk to around 116—I put it in a sink with some ice water and stir frantically.
Add a couple of tablespoons of yogurt from the last batch.

Pour into a quart canning jar (because I stir so vigorously, I end up with a half pint overflow jar of froth).

Put into small cooler with two jars of hot water for 8-10 hours. In the winter, when the cooler was chilly, I pre-heated it beforehand with some of the boiling water.
Put in the fridge to stop the fermenting process.
Eat.
Repeat.

The trickiest part is not having the kettle boil right when the yogurt is ready to be poured into jars.

Give it a try. It is worth the effort—and you do not need the hairbun.

Garden shimmering

Mark and I left town for the weekend—packed up The Ark with warm blankets, a fresh loaf of bread, and the flower guides and headed south to Table Rock, a mesa in southern Oregon with an excellent rep for wildflowers. We left behind email, TKAM character sketches, photo survey of neighborhood organization…It was a good trip—Mariposa Lily all the way up the hill, madrone trees in bloom, warm breezes…and we found an old school Italian restaurant in Medford that served garlic bread and piles of spaghetti drowning in sauce. The owner was the host and knew everyone in the place except for us. We stayed in a state park with hot showers and lots of little kids circling the roads on small bikes, scooters and one electric motorcycle (Mark as jealous). At seven AM this morning, Mark woke up and rustled around loudly enough to stir me. “It’s a great morning for driving,” he announced and it was, cool and bright. We headed out so that we could climb the hills on I-5 before all of the traffic. We were home by noon.

The garden was shimmering when I walked out back….you know that afternoon, in mid-May, when all of your work planting and trimming and coaxing seeds out of the ground suddenly bursts out and every plant in the yard is glorious? That’s what we had. All of the spring veggies were huge in the sunlight; the potatoes were filling their beds; the onions were proud; the breeze was gently swaying the wind chimes; the bees were humming in the back corner; the chickens rushed out of the coop and plunged into the compost pile. White alliums crowded the front garden beds and the fig tree is finally leafing out. Everything was glorious and there were no pressing tasks. Life was good.

At dinnertime, I wandered out with the basket….mustard and kale greens that need to be eaten before we plant beans, asparagus shoots, micro-greens (aka lettuce thinnings), and hunky radishes….and we ate outside, balanced on the planting bench.

Summer will come.

Community Supported Lifestyles

I’ve been thinking about how the community that surrounds us, the structures that has been put in place over the years, enable us to live as well as we do, and as low on the carbon foodchain as possible. We do what we can, the community supports these choices, and there is the beginnings of a model for how we all need to live in the future, if the planet is going to survive. We are far from perfect, but we are better off than most of the country.

1. We have Blue Sky power, which supports local alternative energy projects; my fee pays for Marge’s solar panels, which is good because she has better solar access than I do. There is similar program for natural gas.
2. The Bean and Grain project’s Fill Your Pantry event lets me purchase wheat, oatmeal, beans, onions—all of the winter staples—directly from farmers in bulk. How cool is that?
3. There is also an all winter farmer’s market, a CSA that allows me to jump in for the last nine weeks of the season, Sunbow farm…we can eat totally local fresh veg all year. I can even bike out to pick it up directly off the farm. Really—I could HARVEST it.
4. Allied Waste will pick up our trash twice a year and our recycling whenever we put it out. Recycling is free. They are also composting kitchen waste. We can even dispose of weird, dirty plastics at the co-op.
5. People rake leaves and pile them in the street for leaf pick-up in the fall and no one cares if I gather them all up to pile on my garden beds. Free organic matter.
6. There are sidewalks and bike paths all over town and enough people bike to work that the cars know we exist. We are a Bike-Friendly town. Corvallis does not sprawl, either, thanks to urban growth boundaries.
7. There is an ethic of repair here. We can take our old reel lawnmower down to the local hardware store, on a bike cart, and someone will sharpen the blades, replace some bolts, and tighten the whole thing up, without suggesting that we buy a new one. When we converted our garage into the dining room, Mark Meyer bought old lumber and worked as much of what was already there into the final construction as possible—and took pride in the list of recycled materials we generated later.
8. There are several excellent bookstores—new and used—and an award –winning library. There is always something to read.
9. There is green space surrounding the town. We can take an eleven mile hike through second and old growth trees, following the ridgeline. On one trail, we will see thirty species of wildflowers next weekend.
10. We are not considered weird because of the way we live. It is normal for a large segment of the population.