Spring on the Homestead

I never posted this magical photo. But before it disappears off of my phone, I want other people to see it.

This is what June looks like at our house.

We just watered it for the first time yesterday. In AUGUST.

Solar Oven

Ok. This was just for fun, but what a blast it is!

I got up in the morning and thought, 'I want to make a solar oven today.' So I wandered around the house, found a couple of boxes, some packing peanuts, some aluminum foil. A more extensive search turned up the Elmer's glue.

Two hours later, I had an oven built.

An hour after that, I had cookies. Cooked by the sun.

I felt so ridiculously empowered that I posted to Facebook. And made the teachers in my energy class make 'em too. And my honors students are going to do it. So are my environmental physics students. Apparently, you can do this even with just a pizza box, although mine's a little more complicated than that. Get thee to the basement, and find thyself some boxes, o readers of my blog!

Applesauce!

We missed most of our big apple tree, out of simple ignorance about when the apples are ready! ; ) But an afternoon of picking and 2 hours of processing yielded 18 pints of applesauce. Which we thought would be plenty, given that we almost never eat applesauce. But it's SO GOOD. We are going through it like nobody's business. Good thing we have two more trees of apples coming on!

This reminds me of a conversation we were having with J's dad the other day, when we were wondering why we don't know these things about apple trees, etc., that are coming to seem really, pretty important to us. And he said, rightly, 'It's because we didn't teach it to you.' Shortly after that, I came across a quote from Nora Ephron: 'What my mother taught me about cooking was that if you work hard and make money, you can make other people do it for you.'

So much knowledge, just evaporated in one generation. Oops.

A garden update

We did not plant enough rattlesnake beans. I'm beginning to think there's no such thing as enough rattlesnake beans. We ate them ALL in the pod, and there were none left to dry and shell! We'll plant again for fall production, and see if we do better!

Tomatoes and zucchini are finally coming on, and my lemon tree is looking like it might turn one of 'em yellow soon!

More than 200 lbs of produce so far, and we haven't even gotten to real tomato time, zucchini time, or grape time yet!

One apple tree is done. Two more to go.

Corn was late going in---hopefully not TOO late. And the winter squash is starting to take over the yard.

Potatoes are bearing. The fingerlings are amazing. Creamy and sweet. We are waiting anxiously for the Yukon golds.

IMHO, we pretty much didn't plant enough of anything. ; ) I have fresh-veggie greed. I just can't get enough of 'em.

A new kind of home brew

We bottled our first wine two nights ago. We made it from a kit---a cabernet/merlot blend. We got 28.5 bottles for our trouble, and drank the half bottle with dinner (homemade chinese food, with homegrown veggies!). It was quite drinkable, if a little 'raw' still. It has a grape juice tang to it still that will probably go away as it ages in the bottles. It took surprisingly little time, and was disappointingly easy. We pretty much just opened packets and stirred them together, waited a few days, stirred in more packets, waited a little longer, and bottled it up. Easy-peasy. It will be 'ready' in early November. Just in time to test it out before T-day.

This is the cheapest (not poisonously bad!) wine we've ever had. The kit was about $40, and we invested in a corker/capper at about $50. We already had all the other stuff from brewing beer. So that's... er... my poor sabbatical head... about $3/bottle.

We've inquired about the next step in wine-making, having moved from beer kits to malt kits to all-grain. Our guru tells us that the next step is to start with your own grapes. J asked if we could use concord grapes, and the guru tells us that those make the classic Italian table wine. We have a bumper crop of those on the way! I guess we need more bottles to re-use...

How is this 'enviro'? Well, mostly we save on the shipping water all over the place. Instead of shipping 28 bottles and their contents from wherever to here, and then throwing the empties away, the company shipped us about 40 pounds of grape juice. We re-used a lot of bottles (thanks A&K!), and so on. Of course, growing our own will be an even bigger enviro-benefit. We're on it!

Considering dinner...

Tonight, for dinner, we had:

Appetizer: our first sliced tomatoes, still warm from the sun, with salt and pepper

First course: Corn-on-the-cob from the CSA, boiled, with butter and salt.

Second course: a stir-fry, made from our own zucchini, squash from CSA, scallions from CSA, and these absolutely, positively amazing beans from our garden (var: rattlesnake), which can be eaten as nice, fat green beans, or dried like pinto beans. We ate them in a chinese-style stir-fry, which was overpoweringly delicious. Seriously. It was so delicious that we started spooning our sauce over the corn and J was mad that we didn't have any rice to go with it. (I have a thing about 'too many starches'!) But there were leftovers, so we can make rice tomorrow. ; )

Dessert: I had homemade chocolate-chip cookies made last week. J ate those 'Grandma's' brand of choc. chip cookies. I don't know how he stands 'em.

It's so satisfying to walk out the door and pick the food that will be dinner. What a loss that most people don't know what this feels like. It feels like 'diversifying your portfolio' or 'insuring against a loss' or 'I love it when a plan comes together' or, more simply, it feels like magic. Because when you carefully tuck the little seeds in under their soil blankets, you just have to believe that sooner or later, they are going to feed you. And then they do. And I think, 'Wow. What have I done to deserve this?'

Home again.

We've had family in town for almost a month---first my mom and her partner for 8 days, then a few days later, my 17-year-old sister arrived for a two week stay. It turns out...

we're weird. ; )

From the food we eat to how warm we let the house get in the afternoon, to the chickens and the garden, we are just slightly off-center.

And so our house has not felt like our own. We lived altered lives during the month---roasting a chicken, having bacon, being 'off the farm' most of the day, driving all over Utah, missing visits to ponies.

Guests take up room in your space and in your head, no matter how much you love them. And when they go, there is a feeling of ease, with a heavy, contented sigh, as you do the last of the laundry, munch up the last of the cereal you never buy, and shut the door of the guest room. And go back to the garden to see what's new.