Apple Pressing Partnership

 

One benefit of Long Term partnerships—getting the work done efficiently.

                Last week, I roamed the neighborhood with my fruit picker, finding early apples to press for cider. I filled the larger laundry basket, then the heat wave settled in and I ignored them for several days.  By Saturday, there was a line of ants heading across the dining room floor and something had to be done. “Let’s get it over with before it gets hotter,” Mark sighed. I agreed. We divided jobs without discussion.

                Mark: prep the press. He hauled it out of the greenhouse and turned on the hose to rinse it off, then took it apart and gave a couple of pieces a good cleaning. He found the bowl to catch the juice.

                Charlyn: prep the chopping. I found the cuisinart, the fruit cutting board, and the bowl for the choppings. I hauled the apples out of the dining room and hunted down the bucket for the compost. After plugging everything in, I began chopping.

                Mark: is in charge of pressing. It is more fun, but it also requires more leverage to press all of the juice out. He can stand on the mounting board and crank down much better than I can. More weight.

                Charlyn: is in charge of apple prep. I am much faster at chopping and slicing without cutting my fingers, even when there is apple juice everywhere. I have better knife skills and can eliminate more worms, too.

                Mark: does compost delivery and outdoor clean up after the pressing. As compost in general is his area, he knows which ring will like a nice boost of apple moisture to move things along. He also feeds the chickens some of the mash. He hoses off the table and rakes up any big piles of residue.

                Charlyn: does the canning. As soon as the pressing is done, I heave the big pot of juice onto the stove to boil, then pour it into quart jars and can it. Later, I tuck it onto the shelves in the basement.

                We are pretty good at this. And, somewhere in the process, when everything is set up and cranking along, Mark will observe: This wasn’t as bad as I remembered. And the final product is always better.  Partnership.

A week in Zucchini

 

It is that time of year, when the number of zucchini in the dining room exceeds the number of dinners in the week.  To help us all out of the dilemma, we are eating at least one a day—and I will post the recipe for each. If you find yourself needing a zucchini to try one of the recipes, I think we can help you out. Just ask. Or guard your doorstep….

Thursday… Zucchini, Indian style:

This is tasty, but  improved with flatbread and raita, along with a peach chutney.  It also uses up the tiny potatoes that I harvested, which is preferable than letting them shrivel and die in the bottom of the storage crate.

1 onion, chopped

1 zucchini, chopped

2-3 medium potatoes (or a lot of very small ones), chopped

A handful of raisins

Any other veg on hand

1-2 half pints of roasted tomatoes from the basement—or 2-4 large tomatoes from the garden

 

Drop into the big soup pot or cast iron pan and cook, slowly, in a bit of olive oil.

 

Meanwhile, in a small pan, pour oil, two cloves of chopped garlic, 2T ginger, 1t cinnamon, 1t cumin seed, and 1t of coriander seed, and cook for a few moments. Add to the stew.

 

Friday….Seedy Zucchini Cake, because we are having a meeting this evening. This is from Snacking Cakes.

 

2T of poppy, millet, and flax seed (can change!)

Zest of a lemon

¾ cup of sugar

2 eggs

¾ cup of oil

1t cinnamon, 3/4 t salt, 1t BP, ½ t BS

1 cup of white flour

½ cup of whole wheat flour

2 ¼ cups of shredded zucchini

 

Mix, use a square brownie pan or 8 inch round springform pan. 350 oven.

 

Saturday: Mark likes zucchini bread with peanut butter for breakfast and we just picked blueberries.

1.5 c white flour

1.5 c whole wheat flour

1/2 BS

1.5 t salt

2 t cinnamon

1 t nutmeg

1/2 t cloves

Mix dry ingredients

1/2 c milk

2 eggs

1/2 c oil

1/2 c sugar

2 c shredded zucchini

1.5 c blueberries

mix wet and add to dry. 2 loaves, 350 degree oven.

Sunday:  The classic summer dinner-- zucchini, tomatoes, onion, and basil tossed over pasta. Never fails.

 

 

 

 

 

Lammas and the potatoes

 

Lammastide is the time of early harvest, traditionally grains, but, here, potatoes. I don’t have enough land to grow enough wheat and oats to feed us, or the technology to harvest and separate out the grain, but I can produce potatoes. And, if I put them in the ground early enough, they need less water and are ready to give up their beds to other crops in early August.  The pandemic, plus a seed potato shortage, has made this a bit more challenging this year, but I pulled them on Monday, August Second, Lammastide.

This year, I put in a half bed of kennebucks, a large white potato that is a solid producer. They grew alongside leeks and carrots to create a “soup bed”; the potato leaves, despite my best efforts,  overwhelmed the celery before I could really get going. Next year. They came out—22 pounds—last week and were quickly replaced by the direct seeded fall crops. Arugula. Watermelon radish. Tat Soi. Lettuce.  If last year is ever an indication, these greens will keep producing until Winter Solstice.  They are already up.

This morning, I tackled the full bed, planted a couple of weeks later. Even with the water turned off for two weeks, a few vines were still lush. I tried working around them, but gave up. Two rows of Yukon Gold (17 pounds, medium sized tubers) and two rows of Blue (16 pounds, not as lovely as some other years) appeared as I expected, in terms of size and production. But, then, I had run a small row of huckleberries down the middle of the bed and they were….amazing. Huge! They beat out the Kennebecks, which are traditionally the largest potato. Clear and clean. Beautiful tubers. Deep purple outside, golden inside, and, I remember from last fall, yummy all the way through. 22 pounds from less than four. The bed emptied pretty quickly. I use my hands first, finding about 70 percent of the tubers while the compost I dumped on the straw mulch last week works its way into the bed. Then I take the pitchfork, with bare feet, and gently dig up the rest. This allows me to prep the bed for the next fall crop while harvesting the spring planting. Any big chunks of straw are set to the side, to be laid back on the bed later.

Once everything was out, I planted two rows of potatoes for a late fall harvest. It’s not as big, but it works! Then the hoses went back down, followed by the straw mulch. The other side of the bed will be filled with fall starts next week—kale and mustard, first, then the broccoli and fennel and cabbage. Depending on the fall, we will have a late harvest of potatoes and greens. Meanwhile, harvest begins.

Apple collection on Tuesday….

               

Downtown

 

                Why do some downtowns thrive, while others die? What can we do to improve our own downtown, so that it remains vibrant and healthy? Mark and I tossed these questions back and forth as we drove across the country in July, wandering through desolate and deserted places, followed by booming towns with the latest building codes.  We formulated and tested theories and this is what we saw.

A functional downtown has:

1.       A solid economic base. This is the most important aspect of a thriving downtown. Towns that had at least two of the following were thriving: a county seat, a college or university, a hospital, or manufacturing with middle class wages. If there is no solid economic base, there is nothing.

2.       A small block grid makes it easy to negotiate downtown on foot or in a car.

3.       Fifty percent old buildings help by lending charm and variety.

4.       Slow moving traffic.

5.       Not a tourist economy—practical businesses.

6.       A mixture of uses—food, clothing, drugstore, offices. There has to be a reason to go downtown on a Tuesday afternoon, not just to buy a tomato on Saturday.

7.       Far enough away from a big city that it cannot pull economic development out of town.

 

So, towns can build bioswales on streets were every business is empty (Tucumcari) and nothing will change. We can make our downtown pretty, and people will come down for a summer afternoon, but that won’t help keep businesses alive. Or we can have a vibrant economic base, not based on the interstate, and naturally support our downtown.

 

 

Butte, Montana

 

Butte, Montana.

Although Butte was on our list of places to stop—Mark has always wanted to see the Berkley Pit—I did not expect to drive into down the historic district with my mouth hanging open in shock, awe, and a disconcerting sense of déjà vu. Butte is the quintessential city of my northeastern childhood, shifted 2000 miles west and on the edge of an open pit mine, rather than blocks of closed factories. It looks like Manchester, and Haverhill, and Worcester, and all of the other post-industrial towns of the 1970s, before some of them were rediscovered and remodeled and others fell apart. Butte hovers on that edge; I was at home.

It’s not a huge town, although it is surrounded by the commercial sprawl of the interstate, abetted by a large “shop-shed” and the proximity to some amazing natural scenery.  Coming in at ten at night, looking for a motel room, we were watched by a 90 foot tall Virgin Mary perched on a hill and lit from below, glowing in the darkness. We crashed into bed on the fourth floor of an over-priced hotel, after glancing out the window at the city lights, and headed into town the next morning, searching for breakfast and the open pit mine, still foggy from a 450 mile drive the day before.

The edge of the old part of town is working class housing, surrounded by empty weedy lots. There are fourplexes built before that was a term—squared off shoulders, porches on the first and second floors, all of the doors lined up off of the first floor porch, a few chairs to sit and have a smoke, and a couple of old cars in the driveway or on the street. It looks like Haverhill, I thought. I have seen those houses—and those empty lots—before. Right next door were small single family houses, old windows, peeling paint, funky design with something added on as the family grew. A few of the houses were well maintained, with flower gardens an cheerful paint jobs, an some looked like grandparent’s houses, where the occupants cared, but were limited in what they could still do. Not all of the housing was working class; there is a lovely street lined with solid middle class houses built for the mine managers and the businessmen who ran the downtown, as well as a few amazing houses built for and by the very wealthy. Several spires from Catholic churches dominate the skyline. Familiar patterns.

As we climbed the hill into downtown, which was, according to a roadside sign 50 miles out, the largest historic district in the country, the buildings changed. Three and four story brick buildings, still surrounded by the empty lots, rose up. On their sides were old advertisements for hotels and diners, targeting a population that was in town to make a deal or do a job, not settle down forever. On the sides of other buildings, you could see where something once was, but has now come down. There were not so many gaps in the built environment in Butte’s heyday.   Some had windows for second and third story apartments, and curtains blew out from them and tough houseplants balanced on the sills. I know those windows, I thought, they have not changed in 50 years.

Downtown still held signs of the glory days of the mines, when Butte was the wealthiest city between Chicago and San Francisco. Elaborate facades from the late 19^th century, when turrets and carving were popular, lined the streets. Banks, hotels, businesses, dance halls, social organizations—as well as labor unions—all built and inhabited these glorious buildings. There were stairs dropping down to basement establishments. Apartments and rooms for rent on the upper floors.  Amazing. But, the upper stories were, for the most part, boarded up and empty. There were occupants for most of the first floors—which is a positive sign, unlike some other downtowns we have seen on this trip—and there were going concerns…a couple of new coffee shops, banks, stores. But the streets and town were built for a much larger population than we saw on a Friday morning in July. This was a town that once had  money—a lot of money—that has left the area.

And it was that feeling, more than anything else, that haunted me as we drove the streets, looking for breakfast (which we did find) and then wandered around, staring at the beautiful old  buildings that were all empty upstairs. We walked by a mission and a collection of people waiting for it to open, the first group of clearly down and out, if not homeless, we had seen since Oakland, two weeks and 2,500 miles before.  There was once money, jobs, union activists, families, and now, there is not. Butte in a northeastern city, 2000 miles west.

The Mother Road

 

If Highway 66 is our Mother Road, the United Sates is in deep economic trouble.

The little towns all follow the same pattern: economic activity right off the interstate, with at least one hotel and a gas station/convenience store where everyone buys cheap snacks and iced drinks when they stop for gas, then Business 40, route 66, which swings through the old empty downtown. Along the road, small houses are rotting into the ground, cracks in the stucco, dead cars in the driveway, overgrown weeds in the yards. The vintage motel signs are still there with glimpses of their neon glory, but they are no longer lit at night and the motels are closed. In Winslow, every motel door had a red sign posted on it—four closed motels in one small town. In other places, the buildings were just…gone, leaving behind a concrete slab. The downtown buildings remain, on neatly gridded streets, but they are all closed, boarded up, businesses long closed. Gallup took the problem one step further and had bars on all of the doors and windows, like an urban ghetto. There may be a Dollar General near the interstate, but there are no diners, no banks, no grocery or hardware stores, no dentists or doctors, no local economic activity. As you loop closer to the interstate again, there is another gas station, another hotel, another truck stop.  And the pattern repeats.

Tucumcari was one of the starkest contrasts between what was and what is. The town  was once a glory spot along the Mother Road, where motels and bars lined the street and flashed neon lights into the desert darkness. When I came through 25 years ago, the businesses were not all open, but the buildings were still standing strong. Now…they are gone. We spent the night in the Blue Swallow, an historic landmark and a glory of unchanged motel, complete with neon sign and chenille bedspreads, tiled tiny shower and windows that open (unto the neighbor smoking a cigarette in the early morning). There was a small cluster of three old restored motels left in town. But we walked down the street to the grocery store and then through the old downtown and the rest of the town was, literally, falling apart. The sidewalks were crumbling, the roads were breaking into asphalt chunks, and there were no businesses open for the three blocks along Main Street.  There were some amazing old buildings, but nothing in them. And no one. The town, off of the main highway, was silent—half the population of the late 1950s, when it peaked.

 In contrast to the small dying towns, a few places are booming. Flagstaff’s population has more than tripled in size in the same time. The downtown is packed with people, with shops and places to eat, with well-maintained sidewalks and streets, lined with expensive new cars. They even have a vegan Indian restaurant. It is clean and orderly, with a nicely updated land development code that encourages mixed-use development and ADUs, signs of wealthy communities everywhere. There is no dead zone driving into Flagstaff; the sprawl is lively with businesses of all types and new housing. All of the economic development along Route 66, for Needles to Amarillo, is focused in Flagstaff.

John Steinbeck saw it coming in 1937, when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, sending the Joad family, tractored off their land by big agricultural corporations, onto the narrow highway west to California. Remember, the Joads—and many other sharecropping families—were not done in by the Dust Bowl but by the industrialization of agriculture, the ability of a tractor to do the work of twenty men and not require food or wages when it was not in use. He also describes the small independent gas station owner, trying to stay in business against the fancy new stations nearer the towns, with their snazzy new pumps and freshly painted signs. Even then, no one wanted to shop at the small, dusty local dealer. The proprietor and his wife were thinking about moving west themselves. Results, not causes, he observes. The restlessness, the desire to move on, is the result of some deeper cause, which he is struggling to understand. He never does, quite. Maybe history would have been different if we had not had a World War that pulled us out of the economic depression propelled us into a long period of prosperity for many, although not all of us. Maybe we would have confronted the causes of this inequality sooner, rather than later. Maybe we would have been a better country if we had.

But here we are. Mark and I are driving across our country, remembering its vast beauties and even vaster inequalities as we loop through small towns, visit museums curated by Native Americans and African Americans, considering how history changes depending upon who is telling it. And we are asking a few big questions: What has happened it our country, to our Mother Road? And is this road symbolic of our country as a whole, where we are going as a nation? Can the American Dream, founded on the ideal that everyone can have enough, still be reached? And, if so, how?

 

Reducing Weed Loads

     

Weed loads—I have been pondering weeds lately as I face the daunting task of bringing the school garden into some sort of order. It’s hard—a focused group of three to five people, working for a couple of hours every week would whip it into shape in no time, but…we all have lives- -and gardens-- outside of school and commitment is difficult. Especially when it comes to blackberry brambles.  It’s not like the garden is a weed patch; the actual beds are in pretty good order, weeded, mulched, and irrigated only around the crops. It’s the edges and paths, and the unique challenges of nut sedge, a lush green grassy looking weed which has a nasty little nodule that needs to be removed to kill it, that are a challenge.  I find myself making little lists in my mind before I fall asleep.

Weed Suppression techniques:

1.       Weed and mulch with cardboard and chips: Very effective in the short term and looks really nice when done. However, I have a deep and abiding suspicion that, long term, I am creating a really nice bed for some deep rooted weeds.

2.       Mowable paths: Looks nice and is pretty easy to maintain. Do the weeds creep into the beds more easily? Probably.

3.       Dry and trampled paths: This happens naturally over time with heavy foot traffic, especially during mud season. It is cheap and easy to maintain, once the irrigation is set up, but does it look very good?

4.    

   Preferred invasives: I used this one a great deal—plant things I like to push out what I don’t. Or don’t weed out what is spreading. Calendula flowers. Mints. Mustard and amaranth. Lady’s Mantle. Sunflowers. Fennel. Pollinators love it but it can get out of control – but is it worse than the nut sedge?

5.       Densely planted perennial beds: Similar to method four, this method depends upon crowding out the plants we do not want in favor of ones that we do. With drought tolerant herbs, this can be very effective, but takes a few years to establish.

6.       Constant weeding: Deep sigh….needed, but takes a great deal of time and effort. Should be saved for focused areas.

7.       Weed-whacking: Improves the area in the short term, but does not eliminate the problem. And that string is a pain!

8.       This is a food farm, not a flower garden: Rethinking expectations to match the area. I do this at home. Everything does not have to be perfect to be beautiful and productive.