Pete & Teri’s Next Big Adventure

I know you come here for the pretty photos, so rest assured there is a big backlog of beautiful plants, animals, recipes, and adventures waiting to be resized and color-corrected, and they will be posted soon.

Apart from working 40+ hours/week at the day job, I’ve just been really busy. Lots of that “busy” is stuff that would be perfect for the blog, but I just haven’t had time to document it in detail.

We’ve been harvesting/canning/fermenting/drying: Oregon Grape, apples, pears, blackberries, zucchini, cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, sunflower seeds, asian pear, dill, kale, and a bunch of other stuff. Planted arugula and carrots for us, and a whole bunch of perennial rye grass for goats. Started blackberry, Oregon Grape, and blueberry wine, and the new batch of chocolate stout is ready. Got a great deal on oak parquet flooring for the kitchen, and the loft area is just a few days of labor from becoming our winter bedroom. A few cords of wood are waiting in a pile for me to find a deal on a used chainsaw, which needs to happen soon if we’re to be warm this winter.

I learned to “process” chickens from live bird to frozen grocery item. I wondered if it would bother me, taking a life with my own hands, but although my reverence for life has grown throughout the years – all life; we escort even the hideous-looking earwigs and vicious wasps outside to continue their lives – it felt nothing but right. I feel like I have much more of a right to eat chicken than I did when it came from a supermarket all prepared and shrink-wrapped.

Next month I’ll be going on my first wild turkey hunt, which I’m very much looking forward to, and somehow that doesn’t clash with the fact that our property is a no-gunfire-except-in-case-of-emergency refuge where a momma turkey and her five babies visit several times a day to eat seed fallen from our bird feeders and the deer who ravage our raspberry plants and chives will be fenced out rather than shot. As I write this sitting at our outside table, the turkeys are pecking and cooing not more than five feet away from me.

Coyote have been howling their eerie chorus in the hills at night, and the days, which were fifteen-plus hours long just a short time ago, are noticeably shorter. Part of me reflexively tenses at the thought of winter’s approach, until I look back at how green things are in the rainy season and remember that December and January are often perfect for BBQs in Western Oregon.

The man who considered CBGBs a holy place of pilgrimage and mourned the “cleanup” of Times Square is now reluctant to visit “the city” (Eugene, a small but vibrant town of 138,000 about half an hour away) more than once a week. If I’d known how much country life would agree with me, I would probably have left years ago – but then I might not have met Teri, who is my glowing inspiration and the anchor of my life.

What a long strange trip it continues to be!

And I promise you lots of pretty photos very very soon.

Zucchini starts sat around in their little pots till they started flowering, poor things, but now they’re in double-dug, well-manured soil:

Potatoes are growing like crazy…it’s very comforting to see, because this can be a staple item most of the year:

Kale is finally coming up (we had a strange, extended Winter and Spring):

Last year, our peas succumbed to a lawnmower accident…this year I marked them clearly, and they’re thriving, starting to flower now:

We started a whole bunch of tomatoes from seed in the early spring, and then the seedlings languished for months without really growing, and a few died. Finally, the plants are starting to take off:

This patch doesn’t look like much in the photo, but it holds red lettuce, onions, chives, broccoli, tomatoes, jalapeños, sweet peppers, and a whole bunch of sunflowers:

We have a lot of happy raspberry plants now. I bought 30 rhizomes from a neighbor (conventional red raspberries), and dug up a few of the luscious black raspberries from the woods, which are flowering now:

I know I posted the lingonberries before, but now they’ve got wood chip mulch, which makes them much more visible:

I prepared a little bed next to the house and planted dill, oregano, basil, and an especially nice catnip plant here:

The pear tree looks like it’s going to give us a huge crop this year:

There will be lots of apples too. These are about 1/2″ wide now:

Indian Plums grow wild here and there…edible, but not considered very tasty. We’ve yet to try them, but we will:

Swarm!
Yesterday, I was watering in a layer of mulch and soil around the potato plants when I heard a strange buzzing sound. I ignored it, and it got louder. Could the neighbor be home from work already, running some sort of machine? I turned off the water and the sound was much clearer. It was the sound of tens of thousands of bees bearing down on me, a huge black cloud the edge of which was only about 20 feet away.

I reminded myself that honeybees aren’t aggressive, particularly when they’re swarming (seeking a new hive), and stood my ground. For about five seconds. They were headed straight for me, and I ran like hell toward the house.

I dashed inside, got some local organic raw honey, and smeared a little bit into our recently purchased bee box. Ran back out the the garden with the box, but I could hear that the bees had already moved on, across the road. Oh well, that’s a project for next year anyway – we’ll probably buy a queen and workers from a local business called GloryBee. It would have been great if they’d decided to settle in with us, though.

Vacant:

Projects:
Bees can wait, but with organic eggs at $5/dozen, chickens can’t…so a new coop is rising from the rotted ruins of the one that was here when we arrived. It’s made of scrap lumber from a local sawmill and the better pieces of the old coop:

The most labor-intensive part of making your own beer is the bottling. Using bigger bottles helps, and replacing a rubber gasket now and then seems more sustainable than using new crimp-on caps every time, so we got a bunch of used Grolsch bottles…bottling is so much easier with pint bottles that don’t require use of the capper device.

Hillbillies from Brooklyn
Some might say we’re getting a little redneck-y out here in the mountains. I guess so, considering that a holiday decoration from last December is still hanging around:

Radishes are easy to grow and very fast. I really must remember to do succession planting on such things – a few plants every week, so there are always fresh ones. But for now, we have a surfeit of hot little red roots, so before the worms get in (which happens if they’re left in the garden after becoming ripe) something must be done. That something is a “quick” (non-fermented) pickling:

QUICK-PICKLED RADISHES
Makes about one pint

1 1/2 cups sliced radishes
10 fl oz vinegar
10 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons sugar (optional, or use honey, stevia, etc.)
1 small onion

First, obviously, we need to pick some fresh, organic radishes, fertilized with last year’s kitchen compost and a bit of composted horse manure:

The greens can go into a salad (they’re a little bitter to be the whole salad, but a nice addition), or into the goats, if you’re so equipped.

Then we slice up the radishes along with an onion:

Bring vinegar (we used a mix of brown rice and apple cider vinegars), peppercorns, salt, and sugar to a simmer to get everything nicely dissolved, then cool it off so you don’t blow up your canning jar:

Put the radishes and onions into the jar, and pour the cooled vinegar mixture over them:

Refrigerate overnight, and the next day you will have delicious pickled radishes floating in a red juice. The smell when you open it is pungent, but the radishes themselves are crunchy and delicious, their sharp flavor mellowed.

These will last at least a week in the refrigerator. With a stronger solution, they might last longer, but really what we need to do is some proper fermentation pickling…soon!

I haven’t posted in a while, partly because it was Teri’s turn to debut a goat and I didn’t want to post about other stuff till that happened – and she’s been crazy busy finishing up school. Myself, I’ve been busy with work – dayjob got hectic just when I have a couple of side projects going on.

Despite all this, we’ve somehow managed to plant bush beans, chard, kale, peppers (sweet & jalapeño), potatoes, cucumbers, corn, tons of sunflowers, various types of tomato, chives, 30 domestic raspberry plants, 4 wild black raspberry plants, dill, catnip, basil, oregano, and a few hundred square feet of perennial ryegrass (where the goat pen was bare after blackberry cane removal).

The salad greens are part of our dinner about every other night, peas are doing well, and once again we’re faced with the “how to eat all these @#$ radishes” problem (but they’re yummy). Lettuce and spinach seem to be unhappy about being planted so late; we had a few really hot days already, and they’re both very slow and spotty. The onions seem to be slowly growing, the apple trees are setting fruit, and the pear tree (which did very little last year) looks like it will be bountiful. And of course there will be a zillion blackberries.

Not much in the way of photos today, but here’s the goat house viewed from about halfway up one of the 100′+ trees that flank our house:

As for how to eat all those @#$ radishes, I’ll save that for the next post…

…for taking so long to introduce her!

Aberdeen is the latest addition to our little goat herd. Another yearling doe from the same herd as Drama, Aberdeen came to live with us just over 2 weeks ago. She’s bigger than either Koko (yes, we just found out we’d been spelling it incorrectly) or Drama Queen, but much more shy and skittish. (And did you notice her wattles in the above photo? Are they cute or what?! We call them her “caterpillars”.)

It took her a few days to get used to us, though now that she has identified Peter and me as the bringers of treats, she seems to have gotten over some of her shyness. I don’t think it helped that both Drama and Koko began beating her up incessantly as soon as she first walked through the gate to her new home. (Apparently goats find it very important to establish their pecking order – and poor Koko, the lowest of the low in her old herd, finally had someone that she could pick on! Drama, on the other hand, just likes to be top dog no matter what.)

Now that she’s been here for a while, she’s settled in nicely. The other two goats still like to put her in her place, but they seem to have accepted her as one of them. The plans are to breed both Drama and Aberdeen sometime this fall, so by spring we’ll have kids bouncing around and fresh yummy goat milk.