Wet Weather is For the Birds!

Hi!

It’s been a really cold and wet spring here in NW PA. In a way, that has been great, because I have not had to do much mowing and yard work. But my gardens are kind of hung up, too. All the leaves are on the trees about halfway out, and they’re just kind of hanging there, waiting for it to get warmer. My early plants like spinach and radishes are about the same. I read all these things about spinach being a cool weather crop and how you can’t grow it later in the spring, but I’m going to have to make a note in my garden book about this one, because I thinking I’d be having spinach salad and spinach quiche and all good things like that if we’d had a few days where the temperature got over fifty degrees.

I have my main vegetable garden turned over, but the lower one is at a standstill because it is too wet. Even if you have a tiller or a plow, you should not work muddy soil and you should not even think about working a garden patch with standing water. It destroys the soil structure and causes all sorts of problems. You can’t put seed in standing water anyway, it might as well just rest some more. Around here, direct seeding doesn’t happen until after Memorial Day. Tilling and plowing is a different matter, though, and tilling time, according to my grandmother, is when the dogwoods are blooming. Luckily, this year, the dogwood flowers are in refrigeration mode, the same as everything else. All blooming trees keep blooming and blooming, which is a good thing, because the cold, wet weather is keeping the pollinators from getting out and about. The bumblebees are plugging away, but the little sweat bees and other things like that are nowhere to be seen. A couple years ago, we lost a lot of songbirds because a late frost killed off all the bugs.

The birds don’t seem to be having a hard time this year, though. I keep reading stories about the different problems birds are having with pesticides and cats and disruptions in migratory routes, but I’m not seeing the results of that here. I would guess that bird populations really started to go up a lot about fifteen years ago. I’ve always spent time outside and one of my prized possessions is an old Roger Tory Peterson bird book I got at a yardsale when I was about ten. Roger Tory Peterson is a local person who actually got his artistic start painting pretty things on furniture in the factories in Jamestown, NY, and I’m partial to that book.

Anyway, when we had our previous couple dogs, we were lucky enough to live right on the edge of town and had miles of farm fields and logging roads to walk with them. When they were a couple years old, I really started to lose them a lot walking in the field, and it was because the volume of bird noise had gone up so much just in the space of a few years that I couldn’t hear them moving through the long grass anymore. After that, I started to notice birds of prey in increasing numbers and I would say that I have not noticed a significant overall drop in bird numbers since then.

Right now, I’m playing around with submitting bird species counts and observations to ebird.org, which I am too lazy to make a link to. It’s called ebird.org. Cut and paste. Which is a project to track numbers of birds. It’s kind of fun, because you can have your data sent to you through email and keep and eye on everything you’ve seen. Scientific bird people use the counts submitted from all over to find trends in population and migratory patterns. It also just takes a little bit even on my slow, slow phone lines. I’m incredibly biased towards stuff that doesn’t require you to have broadband or even normal dial up. And I actively hate You Tube, because on all the news sites and entertainment sites that I usually browse for headlines, they used to have transcripts or descriptions of what went on in an interview on some cable TV show or other and now they just say: “Look at this Video!” So, like everything else, instead of an advance or innovation making people more creative or more informed, it has just made people lazier. Just what we needed.

Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed sitting by the window and making lists of the different kinds of birds I see. I’m still feeding birds, which I know I shouldn’t be, but I do like to watch. And I’m extra lucky because of the pond, so I get water birds as visitors really often. I saw a female common merganser last week. A pair of solitary sandpipers hung around for a week or so, though I figure they’re long gone now, as they generally breed up in Canada. A Great Blue Heron has made several pitstops in the shallow end of the pond over the last week or so. There are actually a pair of them which I see flying over every few days. They are big birds. When they fly in pairs, they go so close together that the legs of the one in front are overlapping the body of the one in back. When they take off they seem a little clumsy, but on the ground, they are really impressive. I know they are taller than I am when they have their heads up. When nothing spooks them, and they get a chance to fish, they are better than TV. They take a step about every five minutes or so and go down into the water very slowly. Then they hold their heads down, and after a while, they go so quick and grab out a fish. It’s amazing to have something like that going on right out the back window.

The cold weather has not stopped ay of the birds from breeding. There are egg shells everywhere, and every tree is full of peeping little chicks. I’ve already seen fledgeling mourning doves and robins and the cattails in the pond are full of redwing blackbird nests. The redwing blackbirds, I never thought of as watery kind of birds, but they also dive against the pond for bugs like sparrows and bats do. My favorite birds are bobolinks. They nest in the hayfields and have the best song. It sounds like a computer printout on a low budget TV show from the ‘60’s. It is definitely not tree cutting time or even time to limb the trees we cut in the smaller stand of pines over the winter. Last year around this time, I accidentally went over a nest of sparrows on the ground clearing a sunflower patch in the long grass, so it is actually too late to break any ground or clear any of the overgrown places too.

I did feel the other day like I was going to be the victim of a reenactment of “The Birds” when I got too close to what must be about ten robins’ nests in a patch of cedars and spruces at the edge of the yard. Lots and lots of very large very ornery birds came out of the trees and flew around in a not nice way. Birds get really strange and aggressive during the breeding and nesting seasons.

There is actually a theory that the true story of bird attacks which inspired the creepy Hitchcock movie was caused by birds eating toxic algae that washed up on the beaches of California. That story has given me lots of motivation to keep the goat water trough clean. I got a new stock tank for them last year, and it seems like to grows algae a lot faster than the washtub I watered them out of before. I keep emptying it and scrubbing it, though. I can just imagine “The Goats.”




On the goat front, things are finally moving along to replace their very pathetic shed. I went to the sawmill, very impressively reconstructed from the pile of boards and the field of mud which it was in January! and put in an order which was finished a day or two later. So, I have to borrow my uncle’s truck and it is time for another adventure in hauling very soon. This weekend, the weather is supposed to be nice, so I went shopping and bought some chicken legs which I will use to lure my family over on Saturday or Sunday to help with the “goat shed raising.”

Of all the pets we have right now, the goats are a combination of the easiest and the hardest. For a farm pet, I totally recommend goats, even over chickens. You can buy a goat for next to nothing. You can feed them for next to nothing. They can’t bite. (Only have teeth on the bottom.) They are cute, and if you handle them a lot while young they are very friendly. I’ve been thumped by them before when they barged through somewhere I was standing, but they have never actually tried to butt me. I’ve heard a lot of things about how goats are stinky. I have neutered male goats, and they smell really sweet.

Drawbacks of goats are they are escape artists. They will get out of any fence. Ours just climb right over the top of the wire fence. the really naughty one will hang there for going on minutes until he can just make one more rung. A friend of ours hates goats for just that reason. She suggests as an escape-proof goat solution, use razor wire like at a prison and then a shotgun if any make it over. She is a funny lady.

When goats get out, they will go for your favorite flowers and trees. Lots of people get goats to keep down weeds and help clear fields. You would have to have dozens of goats for that, even in a small yard. They are not focused, and they will eat where you want for a few minutes before wandering away and destroying the asparagus patch or stripping the bark off that tree you got as a wedding present or just deciding they aren’t hungry anymore. My goats love to loiter on the porch, pull down windchimes and kick over flowerpots. They’re like bad kids! They are also fools for tomatoes. A white angora goat with a tomato smile is kind of funny/kind of scary.

They are pretty stupid. No matter how many times I’ve handled the goats, they still think you are going to kill them when it is time to trim hooves or shear. Wrestling them to the ground and doing any work on them has never gotten any easier. This year, I tricked my sister’s husband, who is in law enforcement, into helping with their hooves and with shearing, and we had a relatively easy time of it because he is trained in positional asphyxiation techniques. It is less mean than it sounds. He wasn’t choking the goats. They were choking themselves!

Other than hoof and hair time, though the goats need very little care, and they are funny, personable little creatures. And hopefully they will not butt their new shed into tiny pieces like they are with the old one!

Getting Started in Bread

Hi!

I’ve not included a recipe for a while, so I’m thinking I should make a couple available.

I went on a grocery store run yesterday and was flabbergasted when I saw the price for five pounds of my favorite King Arthur Flour is now around four dollars. I’m glad a stocked up a few weeks ago when it was about fifty cents less! right now, I’m going to sit tight and try not to use up what I have too much and hope things go on sale in a month or so. If not, I always have the prairie gold bread flour that they sell down at the Amish store I can fall back on, and I actually use very little wheat flour for bread baking.

I got into bread about ten years ago. After I got out of college, I kind of went through a phase that I really haven’t kicked yet. (Maybe not a phase, then?) I learned how to knit and spin and took up a lot of hand crafts. At the time, I was working in the deli of a grocery store . That’s where I learned to decorate cakes which is really cool, because I got paid to go to work and learn from the touring cake expert lady and learned how to do all the Wilton-style decorations. It’s come in really handy, since I only worked in the grocery store a year, but I’ve done everything from big cakes for my sister’s wedding and every birthday cake for my family for a long, long time. I even made my own cake a couple years ago, because I wanted orange chocolate cheesecake for my birthday cake, and no one else was going to make the candied orange peel or bake the orange shortbread cookies for the crust or anything like that. I give little “cake decorating clinics” for one of my cousins when she comes to visit since she is actually going to be a real artist but she likes to play with cake frosting. One of my sister’s friends from high school went to school for graphic design and actually makes decent money on the side with cakes.

I’m the worst business person in the world, and I haven’t yet made a cent from cake. I just don’t see how to do it. Just last night, I saw a report on the news about a stay-at-home mom who has a cake making business right in her kitchen. Then, I saw another one about this woman who has a commercial monkey bread business, supposedly right in her kitchen. Now, I’ve worked in commercial kitchens before, and I don’t understand why these ladies don’t get the health department knocking on their door after they go on TV. They have kids just running through the kitchen. No one has their hair up. There’s no thermometers or separate storage. All I can conclude is that they live in states that aren’t Pennsylvania and/or these cheery little pieces of propaganda really aren’t telling the (whole) truth. For goodness sakes. I’ve seen people writing up the Amish kids who do their family’s bake sale by the side of the road every week.

Anyway, to make a long story even longer, I was slightly horrified to find out the way bakery bread is made in the store. Those nice loaves that you pay extra for are just about the same thing that comes in the bags. The loaves are just frozen and shipped to the store and baked in the bakery. There isn’t anything about them that is any more “handmade” than Wonder bread.

I made bread a few times when I was a kid, of course. And those frozen loaves you can get in the freezer section of the grocery store are a good shortcut for making pizza. I seem to remember one very cash strapped weekend away from home where the sum total of my food was some carrots and a couple loaves of frozen dough that I baked up, but there may have been some chocolate involved, too. I also remember being horrified when I was working as a camp counselor at Camp Evil in the the Adirondacks. We had all this special camping cookware to make PIZZA IN THE WILDERNESS, but no one knew how to knead the dough. That’s what I hate about rich people. I grew up literally on the Allegheny River. I’ve been on the water my whole life, and I can canoe for miles, catch a fish (with my bare hands if I want to), hike through woods with nothing and not get lost. I’ve been stranded on an island in high water, helped a friend with a severely broken arm hike miles back to the house in zero degree weather, and at Camp Evil, I looked stupid and incompetent, because I didn’t know any of the secret handshake stuff from the Official Canoeing Manual the Official First Aid Manual the Official Directions for the really expensive junk I can afford that they advertise in Outside Magazine. Needless to say, that’s just one of many work experiences which was way more awful than what I signed up for. And the Adirondacks are not prettier than the Upper Allegheny area.

Back to bread!

While I was working at the grocery store, I decided to start baking bread, and I have done ever since (except for one miserable stretch of time when I baked nothing because my filthy neighbors had our apartment infested with bugs!)

What you need to start baking bread, in terms of stuff:

2 bowls
a good spoon
bread pans (at least two, three is better)
an oven

The bowls should be the size of a large mixing bowl at the smallest. A high sided bowl like a mixing bowl is great for letting bread rise. You can get them at thrift stores and junk shops. Bowls can be metal, plastic, glass, wood. Doesn’t matter. You can even just have one bowl and wash it in between or let the bread rise in a basket lined with a clean floured tea towel (no terry cloth, though! It makes a mess.) The oven has to be able to get up to 350 degrees. Bread loaf pans come in many sizes, and I recommend medium because the loaves fit in the 11.5x 12.5 inch bags that they sell at the store for bread bags. You don’t need anything fancy. Grey painted metal loaf pans like they have at the dollar store or K Mart. Don’t get anything heavy, fancy or anything that costs double digits. Junk stores are great! I use a hand carved cherry wooden spoon for my bread spoon. I destroy wooden spoons, but I’ve had this one for years. Spoons are not a splurge. You can’t make bread in a mixer unless you have a commercial dough machine. Your wooden spoon replaces a very expensive piece of equipment. You can afford to get a heavy one.

When I first started baking bread, I made the mistake of rushing out and buying a bunch of whole wheat flour and all these ingredients. I made a few bricks before I started looking for the basic beginner recipes and learning on those. Start with white bread. It’s nice, it’s fun, it’s still better for you than store bought.

If I had five seconds to get out of my house and could take only one cook book, I would bring my 1969 Betty Crocker. I have other cookbooks, but Betty is the go to book for everything basic and good. I get more people who ask me for my recipes when I use Betty than any other thing. Everything is covered and it’s the best book ever. I don’t know about these contemporary and revised cook books. Try libraries and used book sales and estate sales and things like that, but the older books are better.

Basic steps of making bread:

1. Mixing: Getting all ingredients together.
2. Kneading: working the dough to finish combining ingredients and to break up the gluten in the flour so the bread will rise and be airy.
3. First rising: in a big lump in a bowl (usually about an hour)
4. Shaping: Cutting the big lump into loaves or rolls
5. Second rising: bread rises again in final shape
6. Baking

Betty Crocker White bread is as easy a loaf as you could want to make, and tastes good too. The original recipe calls for the bread to be panned in two large loaf pans, but I pefer to cut it into three medium sized loaves instead.

White Bread

2 packages Active dry Yeast
3/4 cups warm water
2 2/3 cups warm water
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon salt
3 tablespoons shortening
9 to 10 cups All Purpose Flour
Soft butter or margarine

Dissolve yeast in 3/4 C H2O, add 2 2/3 c. water plus the salt, sugar, shortening, and five cups of the flour. Beat until smooth. Add flour gradually to make dough easy to handle.

Turn dough onto lightly floured board. Knead until smooth and elastic, 10 minutes. pull it into a ball shape, and place in greased bowl in a warm place until doubled. (about an hour)

Punch down the dough. Use your fist to smash down the middle, and pull outsides of dough down through the hollow -- try and get rid of all air bubbles.

Put dough back on lightly floured counter, cut into loaves - two large or three medium. Roll dough out into a flat oval about half again as long as the pan. Fold in sides and pinch a seam in the middle. Tuck in ends and pinch closed. Put in greased loaf pans, seam side down.

Brush tops with butter and let rise until doubled.

Near end of rising, heat over in 425 degrees. Get racks as low as you can. Bake 30 to 35 minutes (I usually turn the loaves at 10 minutes for even heating) until golden brown. Loaves that are done sound hollow when you tap the bottom crust.

Turn the loaves out of the pans immediately. Paint the tops with more melted butter. Let cool before eating.


A couple notes: Active dry yeast in packages is ridiculously expensive. If you plan to make more than five batches of bread in a six month period, you should buy bulk yeast and keep it in a jar in the vegetable crisper in the fridge instead. Don’t freeze it. One package of ADY is 2 and 1/4 teaspoons. If it’s in bulk, you might have to do a little math.

The step at the beginning of the recipe where you dissolve the yeast (also called proofing) is kind of an old fashioned thing. You let a the yeast foam up a little in the warm water to make sure it is viable before you go through all the trouble of baking bread. Also, the water temperatures in old recipes are a little more strict than they need to be. Very hot water will kill yeast, but they are a little more durable and reliable now.

I also hardly ever make any recipes that call for two packages of yeast. If you have that much yeast, the bread rises a lot faster, but the cost of the bread goes up. You can get by with just one in almost every recipe.

This recipe calls for just all purpose flour. I wouldn’t do that with cheap or store brand flour, though. Really, even with costs going up, you need less of better flour to get the same results, so better flour is more economical.
Kneading is actually a matter of personal preference. You can twist or hit or slam the bread. I got my nephew to knead for me once by just letting him wrestle and punch the dough for a while. The accepted method is “push-turn-fold”. You take the ball, and push down and away with the heel of your hand, it makes kind of a flattened oblong. then, you pick up the dough and bring it back close with the long way pointing at you. Fold it back into a ball shape. Repeat.

For white yeast bread with fat, I usually knead about eight minutes, even though this recipe says ten. There is some scientific thing about chemically what happens inside the bread that is based on time, though, so no skimping on the kneading! For sourdough and French type bread that don’t have any fat and which use high gluten flours, kneading times can be as long as fifteen minutes, which is another reason why it is better to start with boring old white bread and not try and bite off more than you can chew.

A friend of mine who pays attention to all those things that “they” say, says that eating hot bread is bad for you. She also says that “they” will buy burdock roots. I thought that meant that she was going to dig them up and sell them, so I left them in the ground and got an extra large bunch of sticktites on my dogs and in my clothes a couple years ago. So, there is a cooking process that still is taking place inside the crusts when you bring the bread out of the oven, and slicing pieces of warm bread kind of squishes the loaf, but hot bread out of the oven is really nice.

Obviously, I haven’t just been baking Betty Crocker white bread for the last fifteen years, so there will be more on other kinds of bread later. To be continued....

One Month and Counting to Planting Time

Hello!

Right now is the middle point of one of the busier times of year. I’m turning over the gardens and getting things ready to go in the ground. The greenhouse is set up, and all of the plants are out in it. I’m also trying a new experiment with some “cold frames” which are actually just three sections of glass fronted book shelves laid out in the yard. I put broccoli and cabbage plants in them because I don’t think it would be too big a loss if it didn’t work! I’m not just picking on two of my less well liked vegetables. Both broccoli and cabbage can be started again from seed in July and planted out in the cooler weather. So, if this batch doesn’t quite work out, it’s okay. There will be more later.

Seed Starting update: As I said, everything is in the greenhouse and started, even the melons which is exciting, because they are started three and four weeks before the last frost. I ran out of peat pots a couple weeks back and could only find one of those “mini greenhouses” which is basically a covered salad pan like you get from the grocery store or when a restaurant caters something. Hint, hint: If you have a family member in the medical field and you want a good planting container, wait until the drug reps bring lunch and save the plastic containers they brought the meal in.

I bought the mini greenhouse thing, because I needed the cups out of it. I suppose I deserved to get fleeced because I went to Tractor Supply, which is almost as bad as the Devil’s Playground (AKA Walmart) to get planting stuff. I usually don’t get hung up on having to get the exact right thing, especially if it’s overpriced and encased in a completely unnecessary piece of plastic. BUT I have been very unhappy with the plants that I started in flats. It was fun and all to just dump seed starting soil into whatever and chuck in the seeds, but I really had trouble after that. Because:

1. The seeds planted in flats too up too much room. It just seemed inefficient. I either had to plant rows of different seeds in the flats or hog up one whole pan for just one kind of seeds.

2. When I gave in and mixed seeds, different things were ready to transplant and different times. You generally start pulling things apart when the real leaves sprout. The first little leaves that come out of the seeds are are really generic. It’s so exciting to see the real leaves. They are different colors and jaggedy or feathery or hairy or spiky. The plant starts to look like a real plant. Then, you pop it into a cup by itself. When I mixed plants in flats, I’d be ready to transplant some while others were still immature. Then, I had even less room, see complaint about flats No. 1.

3. It’s hard to water flats. Sure, at the beginning, I’d just mist away enough to get the seeds going, but young sprouts generally need to be watered from the bottom. There was no good way to do this without just dumping water in and exposing some of the roots. Meanwhile, every time you move the plants, the surface shifts and cracks open, and more roots get exposed. In cups and pots, you just water through the bottom, and the water just kind of osmoses gently up to the plant.

4. The seeds just didn’t start good in flats. I didn’t skimp on seed starter. I made the flats nice and deep, and still, compared with things started in peat pots, my plants started in flats were spindly and slow to develop. Eventually they stalled, and I just started transplanting things too early for their own good. Which led to :

5. TRANSPLANT CARNAGE!!! There is no neat way (at least for me) to get the plants out of the flats. In cups, I rip off a cup, wiggle out the things I’d like to transplant, and pop them into the new pots and cups. In the flats, things were getting ripped and tangled and mauled and buried under the soil thrown up by other plants, and it was awful. And because the plants were spindly and under-developed, the stems snapped very easily. A lot of plants that looked like they had made it through okay were just withered away by the next day.

So, peat cups. Even though a lot of the books and things say flats. I like peat cups. Are they cost effective? I’d say yes, since, I have three living broccoli plants out of about two dozen I tried to transplant and another couple dozen I tossed out when picking which plants to transplant, and I’ve also lost quite a few flowers and herbs that were started in flats, too.

Other than the fiasco with the flats that consumed about a third to a half of my cosmos, calendulas, and gallardias plus most of the first crop of broccoli and cabbage, seed starting has gone fine. I have some tomatoes which could have been started earlier but weren’t due to the peat pot shortage. The strawflowers are late, too. Some hot pepper seeds I did not plant last year that I saved and tried to use this year didn’t come, and I wasn’t able to find a good replacement for them, but nothing horrible. I started more seeds and more kinds this year than ever before, and I even needed to add a new shelf to the greenhouse. I haven’t let anything freeze yet, and things are going well.



Everything is just sprouting its head off. I put in three new currant plants a couple weeks ago, and they won’t bear for a year or two, but the other currants are loaded with blossoms which are like little green flowers. Currant jelly is the jelly to have in my family. In the fall, I’ll sell strawberry, I’ll sell elderberry, I’ll sell grape, but I would get killed if I didn’t dole out the currant to my mom, aunts, and grandmother. At the house where I grew up, we had an old fashioned berry patch with gooseberries, rhubarb, and currants, and I remember learning how to make jelly by picking the berries with my grandfather and then moving into the kitchen and helping my mother and grandmother with the cooking and canning. My mom doesn’t care to make jelly, and my grandmother doesn’t like to get bothered with it anymore, but I usually combine my currants with the ones from her bushes and get about two batches a year.



I “inherited” an asparagus patch from the lady who had my house before I lived here. Asparagus are some of the longest-lived plants there are. You can grow them from seed, but most places will sell roots. Asparagus are one of those weird plants that has a funky chemical in it that some people can taste and other people can’t. Kind of like rolling your tongue. Elderberries are the same way. About ten to twenty per cent of people are deathly allergic to a chemical in raw elderberries. When you cook elderberries to make wine or jelly, that chemical is broken down, and they are perfectly safe, but I have read about some people getting poisoned from drinking maple sap from elderberry spiles. For the record, when I was a kid, we did maple syrup one year and used elderberry sticks which hollow out really well to make the spouts. No one got sick, but I don’t remember drinking the sap before it got boiled.

Back to asparagus. I don’t care for it, because I can taste whatever funky chemical that is, and I don’t like it! However, just about everyone else love asparagus. You can munch them raw or steam them. They are kind of an ongoing difficulty for me, however. Like I was saying, you get the roots, you put them in the ground, and they take a few years to get going. After that, asparagus can grow for decades.

These asparagus are planted in a raised bed that I have to mow around all summer. I understand the appeal of a raised bed, but I don’t like them. They are like special little weed factories that grow big, healthy weeds. I got rid of the strawberry pyramid last year, because it grew weeds and grass better than it grew strawberries. And every year, I vow that I’ll keep the asparagus patch weed free, and every year, I lose.

At first, I didn’t weed it that well, though, because I wasn’t sure what was growing there. When weeds came up, I thought they might be the asparagus, and I didn’t pull them out. Now, I know better, and I know that asparagus looks exactly like it does in the store, just sticking out of the ground.

In any planted bed like strawberries or asparagus, weeds are a problem. Because the plants stay in the ground and grow in the same place year after year, you just can’t cultivate and weeds the same way you can in a garden with annuals or vegetables. Strawberries don’t stay in place as long as asparagus, so after a few years, you just start a new patch and start out with a clean slate. Not with those darn asparagus!

So, I caught a reference in my favorite book “Garden Magic” that said something about dressing the asparagus beds with salt in March or April. Now, I’ve heard a lot of different things about weird stuff to put on your garden. And my grandmother says you should sprinkle epsom salt on the tomatoes when you put them out in the garden (along with a cup of manure tea) but that asparagus reference was a little too brief and too vague for me to just go pitching salt around.

I checked all my other books and found nothing about salt and asparagus. So, it was off to the internet, which is less fun than you’d think. We have a running joke that in the post that marks the underground phone lines, there is actually just one of those pre-historic woodpecker birds that like carve out the grocery receipts on the Flintstones. Every few minutes, it stops to say “I gotta get a new job!” And that’s our internet access. It’s just heck, I tell you!

Basically, since there have been asparagus patches, people have been dealing with how to keep the darn weeds out. Asparagus are native to the salty coastlines of the Asian Pacific (or something) and they tolerate salt well, even though the weeds in the garden do not. So, to keep a weed free asparagus patch, sprinkle a little rock salt around to burn up the unwanted plants, and it should not hurt the asparagus.

I tried that with a few plants, and I haven’t noticed a dramatic reduction in weeds or anything. But, I wasn’t too keen on just salting the earth out there in the raised bed. Last year, I used the raised bed as a kind of overflow area for tomato plants, and they did really well, and the asparagus was doing better than it had the year before, at least until the goats ate it. Two years ago, the plants were really buggy, but they seemed fine last year.

By chance, I read a book called “Carrots Love Tomatoes” over the winter which gave some scientific reason for the things I kind of noticed anecdotally. Apparently, there are chemicals in the roots of tomatoes which chase away the bugs that eat asparagus most, and there are chemicals in asparagus that tomato-living bugs just can’t stand!

There are some other kinds of hints in that book, too. Like: other plants just hate fennel. That one, I’m not sure about, because we had a lot of fennel growing here when we first go here, and the lower level plants did just fine all mixed in. I’ve tried to migrate the fennel other places, but it takes a while, because you need to just wait for the old fennel to go to seed and rip it up and start seeds elsewhere because fennel does not transplant well.

Another one I thought was funny was the advice to scatter a little lovage in amongst the garden beds because it has some kind of insect repelling qualities. Now, I have lovage I also inherited, and it is not a “scattery” kind of plant. Lovage looks like what would happen if flat leaf Italian parsley mated with bamboo. It smells very strongly of celery and grows about seven feet tall. It has a mighty root and will spread and grow back every year too. So, I’m not going to take that advice, but I will mix tomatoes with my non-salted asparagus this year.

All the Spring Things Are Happening

I know everyone always says it seems like spring will never get here, but, really, this year winter seemed especially long. After the January thaw, we really didn’t have any of those nice warm days that pop up in February. There were a couple of half days that were freakishly warm, but I spend most of those days down in the basement wading around and running the sump pump. How on earth you can get a flood in a basement on the top of a hill is beyond me, but this late winter and early spring, our happy home featured a spring fed pond plus a spring fed basement as the French drains reversed themselves and started sucking water out of the swamp and into the basement.

March was wet and rainy, too. In fact, it was one of the top ten rainiest Marches ever according to NOAA. I’m a big fan of the National Weather Service. They have great statistics and tolerably good forecasts and their storm warnings are better than what they have on the local weather, that’s for sure. I’m waiting with baited breath the final diagram of season snowfall total amounts. Last year we were in the 180 inch zone. It seems like we have had more snow this year, though. 180 inches sounds like a lot, but, in one of the big snow storms, you can get 30 inches just in a day or two. If that happens a few times, viola!

We got quite a bit just in March alone. It was like Mama Nature misread leap year and not long did we have an extra day in February, we had two Februarys March was so bad! And now, April is dry! Can we ever win? The almanac says heavy rain that last weekend of the month. We’ll see. I actually plunked down at the computer and started typing because it was clouding up out there, and one of the main items on my to do list is watering, and I’m hoping to get a little sprinkle instead, but now it’s looking sunny.

Seed starting has gone very, very well with just about everything making a good go of it, including a lot of seeds I gathered from plants in the fall. I see in “Organic Gardening” magazine there is a little blurb about ground cherries. I grew a few last year, and I thought they were kind of good. They look like Japanese Lantern plants but they have this juicy little berry in them that is kind of citrusy-caramelly tasting. I never got enough to make anything with them, but I did get enough to save the seeds, and they are coming along nicely. My tomatoes are in, and the earliest variety has already been transplanted. Alpine strawberry seeds that I saved and cold treated are growing, too, along with a few herbs and flowers.

There are a lot of good books on starting seeds, but actually, the seed packets themselves are good enough a resource. I use a combination of things for starting seeds. I prefer the peat cups just because it makes things easier to water from the bottom. I have a quart container I just dump water in plus a squirt bottle. When I plant seeds in peat cups watering is quick. If I’ve just thrown the seed starting medium into an old cake pan and added seeds, I generally mist them, and that takes longer and needs to be done more often. Peat cups are cheap, and I use quite a few of them. I tend to get the larger ones and plant four or five seeds in each one. And I keep everything in a combination of tin cake pans and cookie sheets and also a few “real” cookie sheets that are cheap at the dollar store.

My original cookie sheet plant tray was one of the “air” cookie sheets that were popular in the ‘80’s that were supposedly made to keep cookies soft and squishy and never let them burn. The sheet never let them brown, either, and you also couldn’t submerge it in water or the steam could build up inside next time you baked and make the cookie sheet EXPLODE! I’m not sure they have those sheets anymore, but it they ever try and bring that one back, remember the ‘80’s and just say no to air cookie sheets. Needless to say, the sheet has had a better career as a plant tray!

When the seeds start coming up, I start to thin them a little. I’ll pull out the slower ones or the smaller looking ones. It sounds mean, but you’re not a gardener unless you kill plants! After second and third leaves appear, then I start transplanting. I’ll transplant into anything. I reuse old plastic flats and cells from plants bought at the nursery, yogurt cups, more peat cups, clay pots -- they’re cheap and reusable, but it’s hard to control the amount of water plants get. With the yogurt cups, you need to take a hammer and nail and punch a hole or two in the bottom so water can drain. Last year, I transplanted a ton of tomatoes into styrofoam cups with the top inch or so peeled off. All I needed to pop holes in that was a sharpened pencil, and the tomatoes grow better than in anything else. Also, the nice white styrofoam made marking the plants really easy. If I have one complaint about the peat cups it is that there is no way to reliably mark the variety of plant in it. I’m planting about twelve different kinds of tomatoes this year, and last year I have fewer kinds and lots of trouble keeping them straight.


Okay. My embarrassing little secret is that I do not have a bed. I’ve been sleeping on a succession of second and third hand couches that I’ve gotten from different aunts and uncles for about ten or fifteen years now. But I do have a miniature greenhouse in my “bedroom”. In a week or two, when more of the plants have been transplanted, I’ll migrate the whole operation outside to the pop-up greenhouse. I use the same shelves and everything, only when I put them outside I take a couple of short t-posts and drive them in the ground and tie up the shelves to keep them from falling over. That happened to me the first year, and I’ve also had trays of plants flip off the shelves in high winds, too. But the greenhouse has been remarkable even with the amount of wind we get up here.

I’ve also lost plants to frost even in the greenhouse, so once my babies are outside getting used to being on their own, I’ll get up and monitor the temperature a couple times a night if I think it might frost. Last year, I hooked up two heat lamps in the greenhouse and ran an extension cord out there and that was enough to keep things warm. I don’t have anything fancy for lights. I got a couple clip on shop lights and put grow lights in them and have all of about twenty dollars invested in lighting for both indoor and outdoor planting.

My other big and kind of crazy project has been turning over ground for my planned Three Sister’s garden. I’m really excited about this, but I decided about a week ago that instead of just marking off a bunch of spots where I would be planting individual hills of corn, I was just going to plow under all the goldenrod and make the plot into a proper garden patch that I might be able to use next year or the year after. My big problem with that wording is that I have no plow. I have no tiller. I have a shovel and a motika. So I started shoveling. I squared up the plot and just started loosening the sod in strips. Then, I went back through and flipped the sod and gave it a chop or two and went back up the strip.

I’ve done this before. I’ve cleared a good sized garden patch out of thicker sod and more weeds and junk down the hill from the house. In that case, I removed the sod entirely and made a sod pile down by the compost pile and have been using up the sod little by little to patch holes in the yard where my uncle got his truck stuck in the fall bringing a load of wood. It was wet. We were pushing it bring the truck down and not just unloading onto the driveway. We should have listened to my aunt. I’m pretty sure we might have learned our lesson.

Anyway, down below, when I expanded my second garden, I added clover seed to the newly turned dirt and turned it again when the clover sprouted and got big. It was so incredibly easy compared with all the other garden digging I’ve done around here, and the quality of the soil was fantastic. So, even though I’ve left the sod in place up above here, I have still added red clover seed to the new dirt, and hopefully, it will rain or dew enough to get a good sprout going by early June which is when you put corn in up here.

The guy at the farm co-op said ten pounds of clover seed was enough to seed an acre. I got five pounds, which raised some eyebrows. Which also leads me to my second problem. Once I got committed to digging out the whole patch, I figured it is somewhere in the neighborhood of a tenth of an acre. I’m done with it. The cover crop is in. My arms are a little tired.


So, this is picture of the fence we put up the first year we were here. Behind the fence is my new patch. To the right is border of wormwood I planted around a flower patch of annuals last year, and I hope to put ground cherries in that spot this year.

Just a note: I was reading in the Independent yesterday -- which is a British lefty newspaper -- how there has been a three year study done scientifically on the productivity of Monsanto’s genetically modified soy bean seeds. According to the study, the GM seed produced on average under the same growing conditions ten per cent less than the non GM seed. With extra added nutrients, the farmer was able to bring the GM seed up even with the regular seed, but was never able to surpass traditional seed.

Scientists were able to explain the results of this study, and the US Dept. of Agriculture agreed, by the simple fact that it is easier and faster to improve plant productivity by traditional plant breeding methods, i.e. crossing the healthiest, most productive plants and planting those seeds, than by mechanically modifying the genetic makeup of the seed. Also, plant productivity is at the frontier of its possibility. The only improvements that can be made by any means will be very slight.

Please, keep this in mind and quote the results of this study to people who will claim that genetic engineering of plants is the way out of the coming food crisis. GM seed is simply a tool by which very rich companies are trying to gain control over the food supply by patenting varieties of seed which they claim to have improved. Speculation in the food markets and the interference of large corporations are some of the root causes of the growing food crisis, not some deficiency in the seed. These companies have tried and failed to do things like patent rice to force all rice farmers to buy seed from Monsanto instead of using saved seed. As ridiculous as it sounds, Monsanto has successfully sued farmers in Canada who replanted seed after Monsanto patented pollen blew onto their fields. These are bad, ruthless people who think nothing of starving whole countries, and I’m getting off my soapbox now to do some real work!

Some "Real" Digital TV Answers

Hi!

Okay, when they were talking about doing this two or three years ago, I wrote to Senator Arlen Spector and said, basically: Don’t get rid of analog TV. And if you do, don’t spend millions or billions of dollars to buy people converter boxes.

I really think the whole switch was just to trick people who didn’t know better into having to buy new televisions or paying for TV. At its least sinister, there were still a few big electronic companies who stood to make a lot of money selling converter boxes or new TV’s to people who knew about what to do. And the coupons were just handing money to big electronic companies who make cheap electronic crap in Chinese factories and turn around and sell it at high profit to the American people, thereby taking advantage of everyone: the Chinese people, the American people, the federal government, anyone who pays taxes to the US, and anyone who just wants to be able to find out if that tornado is going to smack into their house and has just found out that their TV is no good, their TV band on their emergency radio is no good, and no one really cares about them anyway!

I still think all those things. I am really spoiled right now, because for the first time in my life, I get free TV. When I wrote my original letter about saving analog over the air signals, I had never actually lived anywhere that really had free over the air TV. No kidding. When my sister moved to Erie, she and her husband were sitting around and twiddling their thumbs waiting to scrape together enough cash for cable or dish, and I was like: “Go get an Antenna.” My sister has basically lived everywhere that I have lived, but her husband is a veteran and lived all over the country and overseas for a while, and neither one of them realized, that in a lot of places, TV is like radio, and you can just watch it with an antenna without paying for it. A lot of places in the country get a fuzzy channel or two with a big, ugly ariel, but we never lived close enough to a TV station to make it worth doing.

So, this year, when all those commercials started yapping about how TV was going away unless you did the thing, I was all mad. I finally had free TV, blah, blah,blah. There’s no way a digital signal is going to reach us out in oogah-boogah land. I get all my stations but one boosted through a translator that I have no idea of the origins or locations. And I checked every digital TV answer site and message board I could think of just to see if the analog signal death date has anything to do with translators serving rural areas without finding any real answers to my questions.

I am always very pessimistic about technological advances. Because I am a gadget person, and I really like electronic toys and computers and things like that, you’d think I’d be like: Oh digital TV! Now the world is perfect. But I’m typing this on a really nice imac that is connected to a 26k telephone line. I kid you not. That is the top speed. Most of the time it is 24, and sometimes 18. There is one phone company. They do not offer high speed. There’s no cable. There’s no wireless. That’s what you get. And all those nice calling packages that are advertised all the time: pay this little amount and get unlimited calling. We get the ads for that in our phone bills, too, but they don’t really offer those prices out here. You can’t even get them on the phone to complain.

In Pennsylvania, there is a law that says everyone has to be wired for DSL by 2010. I’m pretty sure there is a loophole that’s going to let the phone company get out of doing it up here, since it also takes about five days to get anyone to fix the lines when the phone goes out. I don’t even have a phone hooked up to the landline because even talking on it is so crackly and noisy.

And I did write to complain, but the answer I received was even more frustrating than the original situation. Apparently, there is another law in PA that says there has to be a line deployment plan, and the way the phone company decides who to rewire next is if enough people in the area sign a request for service. So, once there is X number of people or a percentage of the population, the phone company has to wire them. It sounds cool, but really, all it says is that they get put on a list to get wired. And by signing the request for service, you are also agreeing to subscribe to a year of their service, whenever it is that they install the lines. There is no time line, no prices, no real explanation. If you signed it and then moved or died or became Amish, what would happen then? Would whoever lives next in your house be forced to pay for a year of high speed internet service. And also, we pay more for phone service and for electrical service because of line maintenance fees. Probably that would be the case for internet, too. Call me a little whiney party pooper, but I’m guessing the phone company show up to put in those lines right about the time we get effective wireless or broadband by powerlines or something.

Meanwhile, I did write my local PA congress guy and told him that the whole requirement to purchase service aspect of the law was a little ridiculous considering the phone company has no commitment to do a thing for the consumer, and he wrote me back a nice letter assuring me it was a really good law and much to my advantage as a consumer that it got passed. Oh.

Meanwhile, back to digital TV. I decided the only way that I was going to be able to find out the answer to my questions was to just go and find out the answer to my questions. In February, right about the time they started advertising, I went to www.dtv.gov and signed up for the coupons. Okay. I signed up for two, even though I only have one TV. My sister has four thousand television sets, and she can use my spare coupon.

Even though, they started saying in early March coupons were being sent out, I didn’t get any until last week. They look like little debit cards , and they come with a nice list of places you can go in your area to get a converter. Most of those places are Walmart, but I went to a really little Radio Shack and got one. At a bigger store, there might have been more choice, and they might have been cheaper, but I ended up having to chip in about $20 dollars for the box even with the coupon. And there are also some converter boxes you can pick up all your digital and all of the remaining analog stations, but the one I bought does not. So, to watch digital, I need to hook up the box, and to watch analog, I need to pull the plug on the digital and rehook my antenna back into the TV.

Hooking it up was very easy. It came with a little Coax cable, and there is a plug in for AV cable, but it didn't come with one. I don't have any spaces left on my TV anyway, so that was just fine. You just plug the antenna in the back where it says "In from antenna" and plug the other cable in where it says "Out to TV" and put that one in the back of the TV.

Of course, this made remote control #5 for me, and all of these remotes are supposed to be universal, but none of them do everything that needs to be done just to change the channel or watch a DVD and turn up the volume.

Watch digital, you say? YES! I hooked the thing up and scanned through the available channels and found myself pleasantly surprised. Other than public TV, only one other station in Erie is using a full powered digital signal. That came in fine, and I was able to actually see the CW channel, which I’ve never looked at before. My cousins will be thrilled the next time they come to stay with me, because they always want to watch Smallville. Two other Erie channels showed up but didn’t actually come in, and I was able to get another CBS TV station from somewhere in Ohio that came in pretty well. Then, I unplugged the converter box and switched back to regular TV because I still get more channels that way.

I live on top of a hill, with very little interferance of any kind about 30-40 miles away from the TV towers. I still was just using my rabbit ears, and I suspect if I wanted to put some ugly big antenna on the top of my house, I’d get more TV, but I don’t want to! My cute little house doesn’t want a big ugly TV antenna on it!

So, the verdict is, I should be able to get local news and weather on one channel, and my cousins will be able to watch Smallville, but unless the signal strength gets a lot better, I’m going to lose all but CBS and PBS next year. Which is fine. I’m not one of those TV snobs. I really like Law and Order, so I’ll miss NBC. I hate PBS, and, ironically, it comes in perfectly. (You should just hear me cuss when I do a Marxist/feminist deconstruction of "Antiques Roadshow".) But I mostly like TV for local news and football but the radio is just fine for football, too. But if there’s a TV show I like, I’ll just watch it later on DVD. That’s what the library and Netflix are for.

Springtime Update and More Food Issues

Spring is here, even though it doesn’t look like it! We still have piles of snow, and the weather is still chilly. But there are a few hopeful signs. Tulips and daffodils are starting to peek up through the mud. The robins have been back for a couple weeks. The killdeer came back last week, and I expect to hear peep frogs down in the frog pond any moment. I have started my earliest seeds, and some of them are actually growing, and we had our first party of the year: a combined birthday party for my brother and my niece. So, my picture is of my nieces and my sister feeding stale crackers we liberated post-holidays from my grandmother’s cupboard to the goats Matt and Don who very badly need sheared at our first party of the year!

The weather for the party was sunny but very chilly, and the yard is wet, wet wet! We refer to the “back 40” which is more like the back eight by a few different names. We have the Little Pine Forest and the Big Pine Forest which are both overgrown stands of Christmas trees, and then there is a little field at the bottom of the hill and an old fenced field that I would like to be able the call “the Pasture” someday, but right now, we can’t be romantic, and it is “the Swamp”. Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice back there with tall grass and elderberries and man places to explore, but it is just swampy. Right now, the whole yard could be included in the Swamp, however.

Speaking of elderberries and outdoor things in general, I have a few new pieces of information that I was just pleased as punch to know about! Elderberries first: I read recently how you could read the vegetation of an area to discover the state of the water table. I need to find the book again and take better notes, but what I can remember off the top of my head is that elderberries indicate that there is water within ten feet of the surface. I bet that’s true, since we have a spring fed pond and a really clean, productive well and also a lot of elderberries.

As spring was rolling around, I also was looking for when I should “unmulch” my strawberries and my lavender and other plants that I had covered up last fall. I really go by a nice book I’ve had for a few years called The Complete Book of Garden Magic by Roy E. Biles. It originally came out in the 1930’s which is enough to win me over right there, because I am a fiend for all things Depression Era from clothes to cookbooks to history to art and architecture and music. Judging by the state of the economy and all, I may not have a bad “hobby” of learning how they did things in the Depression.

Anyway, Mr. Biles give much good advice about every sort of thing from houseplants to flowers to greenhouses and vegetable gardens. Except for the pesticides, I think this is my very favorite book for gardening. There is a great month by month guide in the back. According to this guide, in March, mulch should be loosened to allow it to begin to dry out and to start to allow air to circulate among new leaves and shoots but should be left in place as there can still be rapid temperature changes that might damage the plants.

Ideally, I should have done my grape vines in February, but there was a lot of snow in February, and there was a lot of snow in March. Luckily, there were a few warm days, and still had to do a lot of tromping around in the snow, but at least I didn’t have to be all the way bundled up! I needed to repair a fallen wire on my grape vine trellis, and to lift the wire back up, I needed to be a lot more aggressive with my grape vines than I have been in the past. I wish I had taken a before and after picture of what the vines looked like, because I took a pile of vines about four feet high by five of six feet across off the vines this year.

Trimming grape vines: This should be done in late winter. It also is something that you just figure out after you do it a few times. You are supposed to take off about eighty per cent of the new fruiting wood, and I have seen all kinds of diagrams with pictures of nodes and vines and what is what. Basically, the new fruiting wood is the wavy stuff and the very end of the vines. If your vines have been neglected, you need to be meaner than that, however. This year, because I had to also lift the wire, I needed to unwind the vines, and I chopped a lot of the things that were too unwieldy. Also, last summer, lot of the fruit was located on the insides of the vines. Those bunches didn’t ripen well, and I made a decision to cut out a lot of the insides of the vines. We live very near a huge grape growing area along Lake Erie, and I have had the opportunity to see how the commercial vines are shaped. I still haven’t pared mine down that far, but they are getting there.

The thing to remember is that there is very little you can do to kill grape vines just by trimming them back. It’s possible you might get a thin year, but the following year after a really aggressive trimming, the whole harvest will be better. If trimming and pinching and everything seems like a waste, like throwing away potential grapes, it’s really not. Grapes that are not cared for will overproduce, and the plant will get stressed. Last year, I pruned and trimmed and pinched like a madwoman, and I still had more grapes than I knew what to do with! And nothing is more wasteful than seeing the grapes just shower down off the bunches still unripe because they plant can’t support them.

Speaking of not knowing what to do with excess produce, boy do I wish I had put away more tomatoes last year! I ran out of my sauce about a month ago, and while the storebought wasn’t expensive, it took me only one year of using home grown canned sauce to get spoiled. Luckily, I saved seed from my paste tomatoes and plan to try many more varieties this year. My grandmother whose father was a baker during the Depression and basically always had money (so that is the sum total of her Depression-era advice -- get work as a baker) wanted brandywine tomatoes, and I was able to find some seeds for her. If they come up good, she’ll send some plants my way, I’m sure. I shared seeds with her a few weeks ago, and that was fun.

I was reading in an article just today about how much food inflation there has been over the past few years. Things have basically gone up by a third, and people are cooking at home instead of eating out. It’s a shame that it took making food more expensive to do that, but I also could have been able to tell anyone who asked that was what was going to happen. I don’t like to brag, especially not about misfortune, but I really think that my food trends are a little ahead of the average, and I have been cutting back on everything for a couple of years now. I have basically gotten rid of ice cream, most frozen foods including those fancy baby veggie mixes and those pre-cheesed broccolies and cauliflowers that I used to just live off of. I buy bulk ingredients and also troll the expired food section at the local market for usable produce and also for bread for French toast and things like that.

Luckily, I make all my own bread, and only get it from the store if it's something REALLY cheap. My grandmother has another funny story about when she was a little girl, and a big family sized loaf of bread cost ten cents and it came with a lollipop. She always says: "Now, you can't even get the lollipop for ten cents!" According to the Associated Press, a loaf of bread costs on average $1.37. I usually make this giant batch of multi grain bread, but if I was going to generalize, I could say that out of a regular bag of good flour, costing around $2.50-3.00 a bag -- which is expensive, but bread takes good flour -- at twenty cups of flour to a bag, my favorite white bread recipe uses a hair over five cups of flour to make two loaves. If yeast is bought in bulk, the cost is neglegable same for salt, sugar, and fat. I put buttermlik in which is the most expensive thing, so count about sixty cents per batch, or thirty cents a loaf for non flour stuff, and you can make a good loaf of bread yourself for about seventy cents a loaf with less than ten dollars spent for bowls, pans, etc. that you then used again and again. And this is proper bread, too. When I eat store bread, I feel like I need four or five pieces to get full when two of mine do the trick and last longer in the tummy, as well.

I also buy as many things as I can directly from the producer. I get eggs for a dollar fifty a dozen, up from a dollar and a quarter in the past few months at an egg farm down the road. They sell the same eggs from the same farm in the grocery store for over two dollars a dozen. I get milk from a local dairy. I’m pretty sure that it is more expensive than store milk, but the store milk is gaining fast, and this is good milk from a small herd and no junk and chemicals. If I’m on the ball and put a call in to the farm store, I can also get raw milk which is legal in PA as long as the cows are tested for the right things and licensed. It used to be that you could get raw milk as long as it was in your own jug. Some states are really strict about this. There is a website called www.realmilk.com that goes into the whole raw milk debate and also how to get milk from small dairies. But be warned, it gets a little zany out there! I just get raw milk because I grew up shaking the bottle and can’t stop and don’t want to let my efforts go for naught. Actually, I figure, if they’re going to offer it, I might as well go for it. That and the bottle shaking thing.

The small dairy thing might be a good idea considering that one of the constantly cited reasons that milk goes up is the cost of feed and the cost of transport. The small dairies around here all grow their own corn and make their own hay. I know that you need to get actual grain feed with vitamins and trace minerals and everything from a feed mill, but almost everything else is “in house.” And I’m not sure what the average person knows about the way modern dairy farms work, but the milk truck comes to the farm twice a day to get the milk, it goes to a processing plant and gets mixed with milk from a lot of other farms and they do what they do to it, pasteurizing and homogenizing and adding vitamins and all that, they package it and send it off to warehouses and the warehouses send it off to stores, and by the time the milk gets to you, it’s actually up to three weeks old. The milk I get goes from the barn to the farm store, about twentyfive feet. They put it in glass bottles you pay a deposit on. Then people come and get it. They take some out to local stores, too, but not grocery stores which have their own suppliers which I why I sometimes end up in hardware stores buying milk.

Speaking of milk, and then I’ll be done! It just became legal in PA to label milk as not containing recombinant bovine growth hormone. This is some nasty stuff, despite what you may have heard. Cows given rGBH give more milk, but they also suffer from chronic udder infections (painful for cows, yucky for consumers) and it is possible that the growth hormone in milk is freaking out kids’ endocrine systems and that is why so many really, really young girls are physically mature so early. That is just a theory, but because of labeling laws pushed through by Monsanto (a company spat from the bowels of hell if there ever was) farmers were not allowed to put on their milk if they were using hormones or not. But just last week, I saw non rBGH labeled milk at my sister’s house, which is cool, because her kids drink milk by the gallon, and she won’t pay for expensive organic milk from the store (which I won’t either, because storebought organic milk is a scam) and yet, she still doesn’t deserve to have her children’s glands poisoned by Monsanto so they can make money!

A recipe so you can use up everything and still have a good time!

We’ve been “dipping” loaves of bread in olive oil and spices at family meals lately, and I’ve been breaking out my favorite French toast to use up day old bread. This is also great if you find outdated loaves at the grocery store for cheap. Our local egg farm also offers cracked eggs at half price a dozen. If you are feeding an army and you’re going to use up the eggs very soon, there is no reason not to use cracked eggs.

The French Toast:

For about 3/4 loaf of bread.
Take three eggs and crack them in a bowl. Add about a half cup of milk, two teaspoons of cinnamon, and a teaspoon of vanilla. These are the secret ingredients: Put in a pinch of cardamom and about a quarter cup of orange juice, bascially that last swig in the carton that no one ever drinks anyway.

Beat up. Make a hot butter pan. Give the old bread a quick dip on each side. Don’t soak! Fry each side very quickly. The butter should almost burn. The pan should be that hot. Add more butter and keep frying.

If you don’t have pancake syrup, make some!

The fake Maple Syrup:

2 cups Brown Sugar
1 Cup Water
1 tsp. maple extract

Boil together Sugar and water until the sugar dissolves. Simmer and stir another five minutes or so. Let cool. Add the maple flavor. Put it on when it’s warm. Store in the fridge.

A New Craft: Ukrainian Easter Eggs

Hello!

As has been the usual case the past month or two, the weather is quite awful. We had sixty degree temperatures Monday and I had to work, of course. Luckily, the basement did not flood because of rapid melting. You know it’s wet when you live at the very top of a hill and your basement floods. This time the garage flooded. Twice. And there was another ice storm. Now, we’re having high winds and snow with ice all over everything. The township truck actually came through really dumping cinder. Usually, they don't put a lot down, but today they're not fooling around.

We did manage to get one tree cut on Sunday and spent a couple of days moving wood into the basement to dry. We haven’t been able to switch over from the propane furnace, however, but looking at the weather for the next week or so, it looks like we’ll have plenty of opportunity to get one going. Unfortunately, my almanac/calendar does not have any fair weather posted until the last week of the month. March did come in like a lamb, though, white and fluffy with the worst snow and deepest drifts so far this year!

When things are horrible outside, though, there’s nothing like starting a new craft. I wanted originally to try and sew some cute clothes for my nieces for spring, but my good sewing scissors are currently misplaced. So I’m also not able to work on the quilt I promised my sister ages ago, as well. I suppose I could do more of the actual quilting on my own quilt that has been held up for a while. You don’t need sharp scissors to cut thread, but I was looking for something fun to do, and that quilt has been really boring for me!.

Luckily, I was at my grandmother’s house the other day, and I got to looking at her collection of pysanky. Yes, I am Ukrainian. And Irish. It’s why I’m always right. My grandmother doesn’t really do eggs anymore, but she always made nice ones the whole time I was growing up, and one of my aunts does them, and she’s a real artist. Everyone in the family has at least played around with making them, but I decided that I would try a new craft this week and actually work on getting good at making Ukrainian Easter eggs.

Luckily, I dont’ have to start from scratch, and I was able to borrow everything from the stylus to the dyes from my grandmother. She has a plug-in stylus which is really nice because you don’t have to stop and fire it. She also has a great book called “Eggs Beautiful” by three Ukrainian ladies and published by the Ukrainian gift shop in Minneapolis. It has step-by step instructions for making eggs which are done kind of like batik with melted beeswax that comes out of a little “pen”. There are wonderful diagrams of each step and what order to put them in the dye.

Just because these little mysteries are clarified does not solve every problem. The eggs are curved, and you have to work hard to make even lines and keep things neat. A lit of it is feel and guessing. You need to kind of brush your finger over the surface of the egg to make sure you have the dye in the right place, and once you mess up, you can’t really “erase” or go over it.

So, I followed the directions for the first egg, and the picture is of my egg, on the right and one of my aunt’s eggs on the left. Someday, I hope to have that steady a hand. I have been practicing, and trying a few different styles of the easier step-by-step eggs, but I haven’t bothered finishing any of them since they were just practice.

A few things it is nice to know about making Ukrainian Easter Eggs:

1. Dyes: Obviously dark black is not a typical egg dye color. I made up a few dye colors with special powdered dyes I got from my grandmother who must have mailed away for them or gotten them at a Ukrainian store. I guess she went to one last year when she was in Chicago. With the internet, finding all of these things is a lot easier than it used to be! Some of my dyes are regular old liquid food coloring, though. I followed the instructions to make concentrated egg dyes right on the box, and they work quite well, even if the really dark colors are not available. Put dyes in old pint jars and put the lids on. You can save the dyes and use them for many many dozen eggs before you need to replace them.

2. Stylus: this is the little pen that puts the wax on the eggs. Again, the best place t find one would be a Ukrainian store. Though I have seen the ones you heat with a candle just at regular craft stores before.

3. The wax: the wax has to be beeswax. I get beeswax usually directly from “bee people.” I suppose they have beeswax in craft stores, too. Before quilting thread was polyester coated, you used to have to run it through beeswax to get it slippery enough to pull through layers of batting and cloth, so they still sell small lumps of it in the sewing stores, too. I use it for waxing up the drive cord on my spinning wheel to keep it from sliding on the whorls. Apparently, the high melting temperature of beeswax is just right for making eggs (or anything else with resist dying) because the warmth of your hand won’t melt the wax once it’s on the eggs and make smudges!

4. Eggs: You do not need to drill a hole in the egg and “blow it out.” I’m not sure where the idea came from, but it’s not a good idea. You need to have something in the egg while you’re working on it or the shell will crack. A long time ago, I remember my grandfather getting it into his bean that he would drill a hole in the end of a finished egg and blow it out like people say to do. To get the insides out of the egg, you need to drill to holes in your beautiful finished egg, and “blowing it out” is hard. Don’t do it! All you have to do is wait, and the insides of the egg will go away on their own. If you’re afraid of cracking the egg and having it smell rotten, that is good motivation to not handle the eggs in the first place.

5. Finishing the eggs. “Eggs Beautiful” recommends dipping the eggs in varnish. I’m not sure that we have had good results with that. It doesn’t stop the eggs from drying out, but it does add to the steps you need to do it and also gives you the risk of having discoloration because of the finish. Maybe some of the newer water based polyurethanes are okay for this, but we have never put coating or finish on the eggs.

Now, I wanted to try more eggs, but I already used up all the eggs in the carton! Some of them I dyed and other I just drew on with pencil and others I just drew on with the wax to practice. To get rid of the eggs (and some milk I’ve had since Sunday without opening) I decided to make pumpkin pie. It was kind of fun to crack the squiggled and dyed expirimental eggs into the bowl!

In northwest PA and western New York State, we get Lakeshore Pumpkin which is really great, really deep orange fresh smelling pumpkin that is packaged in Buffalo with no preservatives or anything like that in it. Every fall, giant displays of Lakeshore Pumpkin are set out in the grocery stores. I usually buy about five or six cans of it, and one can makes two pies. It gets harder to find as the winter goes on and almost impossible in summer.

Now, on the cans of the pumpkin is this recipe, so even if you can’t get that kind of pumpkin, it’s still the best recipe:

Lakeshore Pumpkin Pie Recipe

for two 9 inch pies

Make a hot oven: 400 degrees.

Put the crust in the pies -- don’t bake before filling!

Mix together:

4 eggs
1 can pumpkin (29 oz/822 gram)
1 1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. allspice
2 cups milk

Bake for 45-50 minutes. It’s done when you can stick a knife in halfway between the center and the crust and the knife comes out clean.

Okay. It usually takes me closer to an hour to get them all the way baked, but that’s just me! Also, I’ve been substituting raw sugar for white sugar, and it’s been delicious. But I don’t recommend doing it unless you can buy raw sugar in bulk or it will be too expensive. And to make it really good, it has to be whole milk. Never bake with skim or two per cent. Your baking needs fat to stand up and stick together. Needless to say, you don't use premade pie crust in my family. My sister did it once, and was badly teased by about three generations worth of pie makers. She is now an expert pie crust baker and her pies are hits in both her workplace and her husband's. I know a lot of people like the really creamy, custardy pies with condensed milk and all that, but this is just the best pumpkin pie ever. Really.