The Toad and I

This is a guest post from Jim.

A couple weeks ago, I hauled home a quantity of paving blocks with which to build a walkway in our garden and stacked them nearby. Today, I finally got around to it, hot and dirty though it was.

At the start, I noticed a fat toad peering out from under one of the bottom-most blocks in a particular stack. It must have been his semi-permanent shelter because he had hollowed out just enough space for him to squat in the shade beneath.
Not wanting to harm him while moving blocks around, I pulled him out and sat him aside. He immediately toadied back inside his nook.

So, I left him be while digging the bed, laying plastic for a weed barrier and doing all the things necessary for the job at hand.

The toad kept his place throughout and seemed to be watching my progress, offering no comment.
At the end, I had 4 blocks left over, so at Karren's suggestion, I made a right turn with 2 of them. 

Problem was, the toad was still under one of the pink blocks, which I needed to maintain the pattern.
I carefully moved that block and just as carefully substituted the one leftover gray block.
The toad is as before and seemingly content.

Glad it worked out that way.

Harvest Monday

I haven't gotten out into the garden much in the past few days, so wandered out there this morning and found bounty out there needing to be harvested.  
Each garlic plant had thrown up a scape that needed to be removed.  That's the flowering part of the garlic plant.   If you leave it grow, it'll make little bulblets that you can plant, but they take much longer to become the wonderful garlic plants we love than if you plant a clove, so it's best to clip them off.  I've always heard about how delicious fresh garlic scapes were, and so I carefully snipped that alien looking growth out of each of the many garlic plants that are growing so well this year and brought them inside.   Now I just have to figure out how I want to consume them.   I can pickle em, blend them into pesto, add them to greens for a mild garlic flavor, or chop and make a pasta topping.   Yummmm, maybe some each way.
 There were a lot of peapods to harvest too, about a cup and a half of strawberries, and a lot of basil.    Turnips, beets, kale and lots of various kinds of lettuce are all ready now too, but will probably wait until tomorrow for harvesting. 

I love this time of year.  Talk about eating locally!  

Whew! What a Week!

Happy Mother's Day to you all, and even to the Fathers who provide love and support so that Mothers can mother.   It is a cooperative venture, and nice to see when it's jointly done.
This has been a good homey week here at the old farm.   Jim's bees are settling in well, and buzzing all over doing their thing on the many flowers cropping up all over, the blueberries, strawberries, rasp-and blackberries, even the wiegelia bush out front and the many little blooms of creeping charlie in the grass.   It's a great sign of life to hear their happy buzzing.
We picked up our chicks this week, just 3 aracanas and 3 rhode island red pullets for enough eggs for our own use and to share.   It's great to listen to their flurries and peeping in the corner of the living room as they grow into their feathers so we can take them outside into their permanent home.

We watched both grandchildren this weekend, and the chicks provided as much entertainment as the tv.   The 2 1/2 year old, spent lots of time with his face pressed to the mesh of the cage pointing and telling us, BABYCHICKIES!    His 7 1/2 year old sister wanted to hold and snuggle them, so she got to, one at a time, each time the much more energetic little brother went down for a nap or outside to play.    She was grossed out because they walked in their own poop, and had a hard time understanding that was just the way it goes for baby chicks.

She's getting to be such a good reader, that she spent lots of time reading to us this weekend, and everyone's favorite was Shel Silverstein's "Where The Sidewalk Ends" with the funny word twists and great drawings.    She even needed to demonstrate what a superior reader she is, finally, by hanging upside down on the trapese while reading out loud to us.    Fun stuff!



The garden is coming along very well.   We have enough lettuce to feed an army now, with the looseleaf kinds I planted outside by seed, and the heading ones that Jim started in the greenhouse.   We also have cabbages, peas, radishes, broccoli, carrots, turnip and corn up and growing.   Plants put in are doing well for tomatoes, peppers, 4 kinds of squash, cucumbers and melons.  There are still a few more tiny plants coming along to transplant, and the irrigation system and mulch needs to be put down, but it's all growing very well.   The herbs and flowers are tucked in between and around everything, so it's got beauty as well as bounty, and delicious flavorings as well.  It won't be long until we're scrambling to keep up with harvesting all the good stuff, and preserving it for future use.   This sure does feel like a productive time of year.   Just thinking about it all makes me want a long, slow nap.

Bee’ing a Little More Self Sufficient

We enjoy our lives here in the country, and the special place we’ve created on our little three acres of sand.    As far as we can, we like to be self-sufficient, providing as much as possible for our own needs.  The garden has a lot to do with that, and each time we open a quart of our delicious tomato juice, or use some of our frozen blueberries in a pie, we smile and feel grateful for what we’ve been able to grow on this old place in Northern Indiana.

We’ve had bees here three different times in the past, and they always got too fragile and died off, or absconded, as they did last year.   The old place just isn’t the same without bees to pollinate the garden, so Jim did a lot of research, and built a whole new type of hive, from plans he found on the net.  It’s called a top bar hive, and has a whole different way of functioning from most standard hives.  This one is made with bars across the top of a space that the bees use to create their own hive base and hang brood and comb from, making it more like the bees make for themselves in nature.  This one is really intended not to harvest honey and comb from, but to establish a more natural base for the bees to build their home base and forage out to pollinate a big area. Since pollination is our main goal, this kind of hive made more sense to us.

So we ordered bees and Jim went to pick them up two days ago, installing them into the hive and hoping they make it a home they’ll love for years.    It’s a fascinating process, picking up bees you’ve ordered.






They come in a wooden screened box, 10,000 active, buzzing bees, clustered in the center of the box, around the queen, who is stoppered in with a sugar plug.   You take them home, open the box, pull out the can of sugar that the bees have been feeding on, and hang the queen carefully in the center of the hive.

Her Highness is in a little wooden cage, fenced in with solid sugar and a cork.   Once you put her in the middle of the hive, you unceremoniously dump the 3 pounds or so of live bees in with her and they set to work, eating the sugar to free her to get to work, raising future generations of bees.   The bees are quite placid at this point, all concerned about taking care of the queen, the future of the hive, and they’ll seldom sting, but set to work building comb for her to lay her eggs in, as soon as they set her loose. 

These pictures show the scene as Jim went out this morning to check how everything was going.   The little white strip holds the queen cage, and you can see the bees, clustered around as he pulled the cage out to make sure she’d been freed.   You can see the cluster of bees inside the hive, and the guards on the bars above. 

The hive is right at the side of the garden, and hopefully the whole area will benefit from these hard workers.   The pictures show what’s up and going at this time.

So far we have Buttercrunch Lettuce, starting to curl into heads, interplanted with onions that we’re already starting to harvest for green onions.    We also have cabbages, doing very well, and loose leaf green and red lettuce, spinach, collards, kale, peas reaching for the fences, and strawberries, just bursting with blooms.   It’s going to be a very good garden year, and it should do much better with our little beneficial guardians pollinating it.

And last but also very important, Jim found morels this week, right in our own yard!   Just 5, but they were so very delicious!    Oh, boy, nothing else quite like those wonderful morels.   

Just two weeks until we pick up our chicks, then we’ll bee really complete—Hooray!

It's Always Something!

It figures. Just when we let our guard down and relax, we got invaded tonight!

We'd had a full work day here on the old homestead. Jim pulled out all the tomato plants from the greenhouse and carefully planted them in the garden. Yeah, we know it's early, but they were growing too tall for their little pots and needed to be outside to stretch. So he planted them and we have buckets nearby to protect them from the mean cruel world that might freeze their little rootlets yet.

I planted lots of beans and weeded most of the beds, and wore myself to a frazzle. After a hot bath to soak the knots out of the old muscles and restore myself to a mostly erect posture, we settled into a delicious potroast supper cooked by our resident chef, Jim. It was so delicious, that we then retired to our comfy chairs, wine glasses in hand, for a long slow discussion of what we still need to plant. The wine was so good tonight, and went so well with the cheese and black walnut banana bread, that we just had to open a second bottle. After all, we were already home, and not driving anywhere so.....

We had just agreed on replanting moon and stars watermelon and cucumber seeds by planting in the greenhouse, and okra by direct seeding in the garden, (important decisions, you know) when Jim saw the invader! There, just outside the window, was an adolescent raccoon, black robber's mask in place, shimmying down the river birch tree right outside the window!

Jim jumped up and ran outside to chase off that pesky raccoon, while I ran for the camera, and came out just in time to see him standing under the pine by the end of the clothesline, looking up into the tree and yelling at the raccoon. I should say, at this point, that we have had so much damage caused around here by raccoons, that we are justifiably reluctant to have them hanging around, but the sight of him, mostly tipsy on good wine, yelling at a raccoon, was just so funny, I had to get a picture of it. Here it is, blurry, but pretty good, nevertheless. I'm not really sure if Jim was blurry, or it was the dark and the action, but it's not bad for the conditions.
The raccoon was huddled in a tangle of branches, way up in the tree, and it was a test of the telephoto lens on the camera to get anything.
But isn't it cute? Pesky, but cute. Spooky eyes! Life sure is exciting out here in the boonies, and pretty funny some days too.

Playing in the Dirt. Oh Boy!

Finally! We have a nice warm day today and it's time to go out to the garden and play in the dirt. The snow's all melted off, and the ground is soft enough to be worked in the raised beds. I lifted the black plastic off of one of the beds, and checked it with the soil thermometer. To my surprise, it registered 65 degrees. It's good black dirt, lots of compost piled in there last year and it should have lots of soil nutrition for this year's crops too.
I peeled back the black plastic to find wonderfully warm, moist soil, just waiting for early season things. I planted Sugar Snap peas along the fence, so they could climb, then added a close-by row of half Purple Plum radishes, and half a row of Claytonia, Miner's lettuce. On the other side of that bed I added Spinach and onion sets. They should all do well, even through the cold spells to come.
It was 63 degrees and blowing out there, so I just couldn't quit and go back inside so I washed the sheets from the bed and hung them out on the line along with the blankets and pillows, to blow the musty winter smell out of all of them. By the clothesline, I saw the snowdrops, coming up through last year's leaves.
Then I turned the dirt up in four more raised beds and planted turnips, beets, more peas and lettuces and onions. It felt great to get out there and work in that beautiful black soil. In the greenhouse we've got a couple more lettuces growing for salads before the garden ones come along, and Jim has seedlings coming up for transplanting. This time of year, we've just got to get out there and get something growing, and we treasure each little bit of greenery we find.Happy Leap Day everyone, it's good to see winter loosening it's cold grip.

What a change!

As usual, we spent our holiday week between Christmas and New Year, on the beach in South Carolina, visiting my daughter and her husband. The weather isn’t summery then, but the crowds are less, and the rates low enough to make it affordable. We’ve been going to Myrtle Beach for about 20 years, and this year made the change to the little town of Folly Beach.

What a great place! It’s small, non-commercial and friendly, and kept that way by the residents who carefully restrict development and keep the character of the island. The business strip is just a few blocks long, and only one small, open 24 hours grocery store as the only off strip business. There are no chains and all businesses must be owned by locals. No fast food, no banks, but great seafood and you can buy a hot dog from Bert’s Market 24 hours a day for 82 cents! This is me, watching the sunrise from our own deck.

We rented a little house right on the beach, very close to the downtown. Jim was in heaven because he could walk to the Crab Shack for a half dozen raw oysters on the half shell and a beer almost every night. The people watching was just the best, and everyone asked where you were from, and are you having a good time, and they really cared!

Captain Anton shucking out an oyster for Jim.

We also took a pluffmud tour, (that’s the swampy part of the tidal backwaters) and ate an oyster right out of the shell, walked on boggy ground and picked up shells and a starfish, toured Fort Sumter, and the Hunley, as well as a local winery and distillery, and hoisted a pint at Tommy Condon’s, the best Irish Pub in Charleston. What a great week. We painted the boat with our own message and took about a million pictures of sunsets, sunrises and lots of palm trees, dolphins and lighthouses.

We spent New Year’s Eve walking from bar to bar in the little town area, then walked home when things got crowded, got the sleeping bags out and sat outside wrapped up warm, drinking champagne and watching the fireworks down the beach. It wasn’t really cold, about 50 degrees, but what a marvelous way to break in the new year.

The next morning we went in our pj’s to the local breakfast place, The Lost Dog Café, for free coffee to go with our delicious breakfast, then later in the day, when it warmed up to about 73 degrees, Jim took part in the Polar Bear Plunge! About 100 crazy people, many of them in costume, gathered on the beach, ran screaming into the water, splashed about a bit, then waded out, silly and happy. We will definitely be back to Folly Beach. It’s a great place.

Now that we’re home, the cold weather set in, and this morning we woke up to snow-lots of snow, from 8 to 10 inches of dry, powdery snow, heavy on the bottom and icy. Jim was prepared though, and went into action.

He bought a snow blade for our lawn tractor this summer, and mounted it, put the chains on, and parked it in the garage with the blade pointing out. This morning, he’s been out plowing for about an hour and a half, and is almost done clearing a wide swatch of driveway. Such a change from trying to shovel the whole thing out by hand, and safer too.

I’ve been doing the usual housework, shoveling a bit on the patio, and taking pictures. The new blade seems to be working well, and it’s amazing how much he’s getting done in a short time.

What a change, from that warm vacation on the beach. Soon as I get my chores done, I’m starting on this summer’s garden plan. I have a stack of garden catalogs I’ve been saving for just…this...moment.

This is OUR Kind of Christmas Season

It occured to me today, that there are all kinds of ways to celebrate any holiday, and while ours may not be what most would consider great, we love it.

This epiphony hit me as we were driving home from town with our two grandkids in the car, to watch them for the day while both parents worked. The 7 year old granddaughter was singing in the back seat, her own version of Jingle Bells, with goofy words. Something about "Batman smells, Robin lays an egg!", while next to her, her little brother, with all his 2 year old lightheartedness, joined in with "Dingle Dah, Dingle Dah," my husband, with his own warped memories of Christmases past, warbled the old Pogo song that my Father used to sing, to the tune of Deck the Halls. The chorus goes, "Swaller Dollar Cauliflower, Alla-Go-Roo!" Not to be left out, I chimed in with the only song that seemed appropriate and belted out, "Grandma Got Run Over By A Raindeer!"

We all finished with a happy flourish at roughly the same time and looked around at each other, proud of our joint cacophony and spirit and I thought, "I gotta remember this. It's one of those Golden Moments."

It seems as though, if we're lucky, and we are very lucky these days, our lives have a lot of those happy loving moments that just crop up when we are living right and paying attention to what's important. We just have to watch for them, and celebrate them when they happen.

Once we got home, we took the kids out in the yard to play, spent time climbing a tree, brought in and stacked some firewood, planted some little trees, (can you believe we can still do that on December 22nd?), played a few thousand games of go fish, and ended up building a fire in the wood stove and toasting some marshmallows. Now that's a happy holiday time.

I feel so grateful for the family I'm a part of, and my wonderful husband, Jim, who compliments my life in so many ways, and even abets and furthers the nutty madness that is our life.

We hope for everyone, a comfortable, loving family, and a bit of nuttiness to make it all sparkle and glow. I did get a good picture of the tree planting, and one of the little guy at the tree.

In closing, just in case you were curious, here are the full lyrics to the song:

The lyrics to "Deck The Halls" as done by Pogo Possum

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker 'n' too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloupe, 'lope with you!

Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo!

Dunk us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an' polly voo!
Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, woof, woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, goof, goof!

I did it! I did it! I made a souffle’!

Way back in the 60’s, I used to love to watch Julia Child cook up those yummy looking masterpieces of hers. Her warbly voice and confident manner was just fun to watch, and entertaining too. What a sense of humor and obvious love of good food. I loved the way she explained things so clearly. The cheese soufflé always delicate, tall and fluffy, seemed to be the epitome of French cooking, and way beyond my meager talents.

That movie that came out last year renewed my interest and I vowed to make one someday. We went out and bought her cookbook and I’ve been enjoying dipping into it for ideas ever since. Last weekend we got a dozen big beautiful brown eggs from a local Farmer’s Market and I thought that this was the time-and the perfect eggs for the task.

So last night I did it! Made a classic cheese soufflé, from Julia Child’s cookbook. I don’t have the perfect pan, so used two smaller ones, so it didn’t raise properly, way above the edges of the dish like it’s supposed to. And I think I dirtied 20 dishes or cooking utensils on the way, but the result was delicious—if I do say so myself. And Jim agreed! In the end, it wasn't that hard, just sort of complicated. Light and delicate, with a soft cheesy, eggy taste, it was just yummy.
We still have a few cold tolerant things growing slowly in the garden, so the soufflé was teamed up with a dish of stewed turnips and potatoes from our garden, simmered in chicken broth. We had a salad of freshly harvested red lettuce and wild garlic tops, dressed with a dressing made from the walnut balsamic vinegar we recently got in a South Haven Michigan store, and sparked with mushrooms and onions sautéed in just a tiny amount of butter. Chardonnay completed the meal.

Dessert was locally picked SunCrisp apples, simmered in just a tiny amount of butter and cider, and topped with a little Captain Morgan’s spiced rum. Wow! The best meal we’ve had in a while, bar none.

Next, we’re going to try a dark chocolate soufflé for dessert some night soon. I can hardly wait.