Here’s a slew of pretty pictures, taken during a one-hour morning walk around the yard -

The “lawn” is largely composed of flowers. Some are just pretty:

…but many are wild strawberries (the real thing is far cheerier than

A baby fir-tree cone:

Apple trees are budding:

Not sure what this tree is, but it’s got pretty flowers:

Never got around to moving this extra horse poo to the compost bin, and now it’s lush with greenery and fungi:

The woods by the river have a number of Trillium, a somewhat uncommon and delicate plant; it’s illegal to pick any part of it – even taking a leaf may kill the plant, and they can take fifteen years to flower for the first time:

Also down by the river is the beautiful and malodorous skunk cabbage. The roots are actually edible (after cooking to destroy harmful compounds), and while this still doesn’t sound very appetizing, with all the food craziness going on in the world, the discovery of yet another edible plant on our property is a comforting thing.

Oregon grape – fruit is edible, but very sour…used more in jam than fresh:

There are a couple of these, which I believe are Salmonberry. They’re isolated, with just a few flowers each, which is too bad because I’ve been wanting to try it. If there are only a few berries, maybe I’ll save them for the seed.

I really want to grow some raspberries here…especially black raspberries, the sweetest, most amazing ones I know of. There’s one small patch at the edge of a clearcut near here from which I picked very lightly last year…I think I’ll try to find out how to propagate it before the $#% timber companies spray defoliant or bulldoze it.

I don’t know what this is, but Teri quite likes it, which has rendered a whole patch of our garden area off-limits to tilling and planting:

Catnip is pretty common in un-tilled bits of our garden, and here and there all over the property, but for some reason it LOVES the spot where I grew tobacco last year…maybe I’m creating the ultimate feline drug – Tobacnip!

Speaking of the garden, here’s the beginnings of this season’s planting, which will be much more extensive than last years, and which should benefit from the soil tests and classes we’ve been taking.

Walla Walla onions:

Shelling peas:

Salad mix:

If you’ve got Swede in the family tree (or shop at Ikea), you probably know what Lingonberries are. Delicious and tart, they are made into jams and sauces, and are full of anti-oxidants. Best of all, they grow well in acid soil (ie, all of Western Oregon) and propagate by rhizome as well as seed (they’ll slowly spread out without help from us, and won’t become out-of-control invasives like the Himilayan Blackberries that plague/feed us):

Chives and heirloom tomatoes (Purple Calabash and Brandywine) are under lights in the kitchen waiting for this extended frost season to finally end:

…and finally, no post these days would be complete without cute goat photos

Drama queen nosing through the nasty old chicken wire someone applied over the field fencing:

And Cocoa, with the evidence of a messy bottle feeding still on her face:

That’s it for today, but I’m sure tomorrow will bring a whole bunch of new flowers and cute animal shots

Yes, it’s true, we had an Oregon blizzard last night (half an inch of snow that melts by noon.) This was the scene around 8:30am today:

The daffodills sagged, but I’ve seen them do that before; they’ll pop right back up tomorrow:

This apple is probably getting a bit overripe now:

…but the fir trees don’t mind the weather, they just keep on photosynthesizing all year long -

This evening I stopped in at a nearby farm to pick up an order of drug-free, hormone-free, etc. goat meat. Deck Family Farm is a beautiful place about ten minutes* from us, with lots of happy looking cows, chickens, sheep, ducks…I’m pretty sure I saw a bison there too, though it may have been a big muddy brown cow from a distance. I didn’t see the goats…I was tempted to ask, but didn’t want to impose and delay what must be a zillion chores on such a large (for one family) farm.

I ended up leaving with a half-gallon of fresh, raw cow milk, a dozen eggs, a pound of stew goat, a pound of goatburger, and a 3-pound goat roast. This is the kind of thing that excites me these days. Yes, I am almost 40.

If we ever buy “supermarket” eggs again, I will have to do side-by-side photos; pastured, free-range eggs from our neighbors have bright orangy-yellow yolks and make the store-bought kind look and taste pretty much like cardboard.

The goats we’re preparing to get will be a dairy breed, but I’m an inveterate carnivore and would like to eventually produce my own meat, so buying the goat meat is sort of an experiment to see how I like having goat as a primary meat source (though we’re planning on keeping chickens, too). If it works out, we may at some point consider getting some meat goats (different breeds from dairy goats).

[edit] The more I think about it, the less likely it seems that we will want meat goats, for practical and sentimental (ie, they’re too darn smart and cute) reasons. Looks like we’re gonna be eating a lot of chicken! Rabbits are another very good smallholder meat animal, but suffer from the same “how do you eat a pet” problem as goats. I don’t think I’d have any problem eating chickens, though they do have a lot more charm and personality than I knew before [/edit]

I feel that if I can’t bear to put the bullet into the back of its head and cut up the carcass, I really don’t deserve to eat meat. We’ll see. But for now, we have a local source for clean, humanely raised meats =)

Of course, the moment I got home I had to try the milk side-by-side with some “whole” milk from the supermarket. A sip of one. A sip of the other. Remaining supermarket milk goes back into the bottle for emergencies, and I pour another glass of the rich, delicious raw milk. It’s on the left in the photo below

* Ten minutes on normal roads. On the way back, I decided to try a “shortcut” involving steep, twisty logging roads. It was a nice 45 minute drive; fortunately the van has a refrigerator to keep our food from spoiling.

Gods I love the weather out here.

Found this little beauty behind the house today:

Spent a little time brainstorming about the goat stable…the primary construction material will be shipping pallets, plus a few stout, rough-split poles I originally collected for firewood. Here’s about half of what I figure I’ll need (more scrounging to do!):

The fencing is mostly in good shape, but about 100′ of it droops beneath a thick mat of blackberry. I’ve already spent hours clearing it, but there’s a full day of work just getting the rest of it off the fence:

Finally, to cap off this random little post, a backlit photo of one of last year’s hot peppers:

Tobacco is over 3′ tall now:

Spearmint discovered for us by our friend Christina:

I can’t wait for these…I mean really can’t wait; I chopped up a couple of half-grown ones to throw into pasta sauce the other night:

Apples apples apples…making apple-blackberry sauce as fast as I can:

The hot peppers just keep on coming:

The corn is actually turning into….corn!

I’ve been picking all the broccoli flowers about once a week, and they just keep cranking out more:

I was not the first to discover this pumpkin flower:

Yes, it’s another post of organically grown eye candy =)

I’ll work from the North end of the property, where the Orchard is, toward the garden in the South.

Some would say I do it this way because I’m a Capricorn, but I’m way too much of a typical Capricorn to give credence to astrology.

There are about half a dozen apple trees around the property, and they’re getting heavier every day:

Multicolored tassels on the multicolored corn should lead to multicolored kernals:

The flowers have calmed down a bit in anticipation of the end of summer, but there’s hardly a shortage:

We’ve probably got 2/3 of the wood we’ll need to get through the winter now…about half of that waiting to be split. It’s a good feeling; our fuel for the winter is tangible, visible. We’ll be warm regardless of how everyone’s business is going.

We’ve been working on new habits, to reduce the rate at which we gobble up the earth’s resources. Here are plastic bags washed and drying, to be used again at the market, for leftovers, etc.

I really need to learn all I can about preserving apples in the coming weeks!

This pear tree has only a few pears, but they look and smell so goooooood:

Teri’s friend theorized that this might be buckwheat or a relative…it just popped up in a container of lettuce and corn I had planted:

We let whole row of radishes go to seed, and eventually they produce these pods with a few seeds in each. We are now set on radish seeds for next year…err…possibly for several years.

Pumpkin plant – started them a bit late, hope the gentle climate out here lets them live long enough.

The older flowers are heavy with seeds, and it’s still producing more. I think I’ll be saving these seeds for planting next year.

The tobacco plants are finally taking off

Sweet corn is tasseling…

…and silking (tassels are the male flower on top, silk is the female flower where the cob will grow.)

There are about to be a zillion cherry tomatoes. We’ve eaten a few already; all store-bought tomatoes, even from organic-fancy-expensive health food stores, pale in comparison.

Another “lifetime supply” thing…We’ve got about half a dozen hot pepper plants of different kinds, all putting out fruit now and all very potent.

Cherries and strawberries and blackberries, oh my! ‘Course, the critters seem to get first dibs, and by the time they’re done, there’s just a handful left for us. We’ve learned to started picking them when they’re nearly ripe, and allow them to finish ripening indoors (though it took an entire cherry tree full of pits for us to learn this lesson – glad someone’s getting fat and happy off of our fruit!)

But despite having to share our bounty, it’s incredibly gratifying to have a snack plucked fresh from our trees, or a salad made from greens grown in our garden. Who knew this would be so much fun?

Yes, that’s Peter, shoveling horsesh*t. (I particularly like the cigarette dangling from his mouth – adds an authentic redneck touch…)

Yesterday, we had 2 firsts for our life here in Oregon. We joined our first CSA – for those who don’t know, that stands for Community Supported Agriculture – individuals buy shares of a farm’s seasonal harvest, receiving a weekly goody-box of fresh-as-can-be produce, while in turn supporting the farm and sharing the risk that goes along with growing crops. We went to the farm for our first pick-up, met the owners of the farm and this season’s apprentices – all of whom were lovely and warm – and picked up our first box, including: spinach, cilantro, 2 varieties of lettuce, a big bag of mixed salad greens, radishes, scallions, broccoli, and something called garlic whistles:

I don’t know, my garlic greens have never looked like that! The flavor, however, was fantastic. And, we both agreed that we’re quite happy to know that these are the people who will be raising our food for the next few months.

In the evening, we made a visit to a lady with a horse. Or rather, a horse with some sh*t. The soil in our garden seems to be rather hit or miss, and we just weren’t making compost fast enough. So yes, we shoveled a truckload-full into the big red monster (I mean truck), and drove it home – where our landlord was properly horrified at our unloading of a pile (and I mean a BIG pile) into the yard. (Well, 1/2 of it went into the compost pile – the other half went to an undisclosed location in the “back 40,” to mature.)