Quintessentially Autumn

With the new house and Kate's new job and Mark's deer fence odyssey, meals have gone a little downhill recently. There's even a nasty rumor that investigators found evidence of frozen fishsticks on the premises, although all suspects are innocent until proven guilty.

Tonight was our rendition of a religious revival: two kinds of sweet Genesis squash brushed with butter and thyme, then roasted with rich cherry-wine venison sausages from the farm around the corner. We just threw it in the oven, and an hour later this deliciousness emerged. Nightcaps will be buttery molasses bran muffins now cooling in the pan.

Goodbye, vegetarianism!

Cloves of Raven Dark

By the light of an infernal moon, we plunged cloves into the black earth, one by one, with needles of sleet piercing our weary backs... oh wait, that's another blog. What I meant to say is that we finally scraped the grass off a few meager square feet of earth tonight in order to plant some garlic. There was a sense of haste brought on by the prospect of sleet and snow tomorrow night. (Seriously, WTF, October?) Since everything seems to take longer at the new homestead, we didn't even get out to the garden until after sunset. But considering the agonizingly slow progress of the deer fence and the lack of funds to buy the fruit trees we're coveting, this garlic is an accomplishment. We actually planted something on our new plot of land!

Mark has been spending all of his meager spare time digging trenches and post holes for the deer fence. Naturally, it's taking much longer than expected. The next step is to pour the concrete and get those posts in before the ground freezes. Considering the brutal frost on our cars this morning, that might be sooner than expected. Cue roar of the frosty undead...

Second Life

We know our adoring fans have been itching to know what we've been up to at the new homestead. Well, mostly we've been painting, unpacking, and adjusting to our colossal lawn, which needs to be mowed every 10 days or so. This lesson was learned the hard way, since we waited almost a month to mow it the first time. It was so long that only half the grass was cut by the mower blade, the end effect being one of a haircut by a blind or sadistic person.

Our ambitious plans for the fall have been scaled back for for reasons of cost and sanity, but we won't be sitting on our hands, that's for sure. We were going for a fall crop of root vegetables and greens, but we took the prudent option to spend more time planning. But seed garlic will be shipped shortly, and the big project looming is to mark out the new garden and put in a hardcore deer fence before the ground freezes. This will be a lot of work, of course, but just as difficult has been determining the dimensions of the main garden. It needs to be big enough so that we'll never feel hemmed in, but small enough to be manageable. The existing vegetable garden is 50 x 25', and we're looking to enlarge that to 75 x 50'. Now that's a lot of space, but it includes 10 annual beds, 2 of which will have cover crops each year to let them rest, interspersed with 4 perennial beds containing strawberries, rhubarb, asparagus, and a wild card--chives, hardy kiwi, something like that. There will also be a considerable 4-foot buffer of wildflowers on two sides of the beds, which will deter pests and attract birds and bees for now as well as give us room for expansion later.

There's also been plenty of salivating over fruit and nut trees over at Trees of Antiquity and Gurney's, finally settling on some cherries, almonds, apricot, hazelnut, persimmon, blueberries, and our favorite golden raspberries. (Actually, after looking at that list, we may have to pare down a bit more.) Mark's grandparents also have an orphan fig tree we'll be adopting. Fruit trees will help cut down on some of our huge freakin' lawn as well as yielding the obvious deliciousness after a few agonizing years of waiting.

We're still struggling with how much of the property will be lawn come next year. It's a challenge to find portions to allow to go to meadow while keeping some nicely trimmed spaces for socializing and running around, all the while keeping the holistic approach to our place in mind. Our mantra: This is a process, not a goal. Rinse. Repeat. Repeat.

In the Weeds

This evening I ignored the piles of boxes still scattered all over our new house and took a bath in our new cast-iron tub that overlooks the meadow. For real, people. Although we're totally excited about the new home, it still doesn't quite seem real, although the work to keep it in shape is all too much so. We're just starting to tackle big-picture plan for an annual garden interspersed with perennials, as well as plenty of fruit around the property. Since the big plan is daunting, the short-term objective for this week is to clear some space in the existing "vegetable garden" for some fall plantings of greens and root vegetables that can be coaxed with a cold frame or overwintered. Take a gander at the photo below and you'll see why I put that term in quotation marks. It's basically a thistle farm with a few sad tomatoes fighting for light. You can't even walk in there without gloves and boots on.

Since we don't have any harvests of our own right now (*sniff*), I'm making do by picking as much extra produce as possible at our CSA. The cucumbers are out of control, so last week I picked some little gherkins along with the big, beefy picklers and made cornichons (with mixed results). But what I did glean from the experience is a terrific way to make new pickles, which are my favorite kind. New pickles are the ones that are still bright green and haven't been cooked. My cornichon recipe told me to soak the cukes in salted water overnight, and when I tasted one the next day it was salty all the way through. I won't get all salacious about said delicious, salty cucumber, but I will tell you that I sliced some, sprinkled them with wine vinegar, and ended up with my ideal fresh, crunchy pickle. Today I picked several more pounds of cucumbers and attempted to fine-tune the recipe. In a day or two I'll know if I was successful or not. But either way, don't they look pretty?

In Which I Am Given a Soapbox

Behold!

Heinz Owns You: Epilogue

Marion Nestle from Food Politics illustrates why we should be wary of big business calling the shots with our organic food. Goodbye ethics, hello profits!

Heinz Owns You

I wasn't being paranoid after all! (Not on this topic, anyway.) Turns out most of the organic products we buy at the supermarket are actually made by huge international conglomerates. Read it and weep.

Courtesy of Phil Howard at Michigan State University

This doesn't mean that the products are necessarily any less healthy than we thought, although we don't know anything about how or where these foods are processed. But it does mean that buying Odwalla drinks feeds the same corporate machine that has plagued our schools with Coke machines, and I'm not fond of that idea.

What should we do about this? The first answer that comes to mind is to buy as much local food as possible, and to buy as many whole foods (like produce) as possible, so the big guys get as little of our money as possible. But that doesn't mean we're going to stop buying Muir Glen canned tomatoes or Morningstar hot dogs altogether. We are human (and Americans), after all.