Pete & Teri’s Next Big Adventure

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:

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…

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

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:

Ok, really it was chop wood, carry wood…

Our new year’s eve day was chilly but bright and sunny, allowing us to spend much of the afternoon outside (a welcome change from the bitterly cold winters we’re used to).

I finally harvested what was left of our rose hips (if you don’t know already: rose hips are the fruit of the rose plant, and are very high in vitamin C – a good food to preserve for the winter). I’d been itching to get at them for quite awhile, but they weren’t ripe and weren’t ripe and weren’t ripe…

Then I went away for a week, and by the time I returned, most of them were overripe and mushy (above). But I still managed to get a decent harvest, which I’ll next need to clean, slice each of them in half and scoop out the seeds, and then place in the dehydrator for drying. (If we’d ended up with a larger batch, I would’ve been tempted to make rose hip syrup or rose hip marmalade. But that’ll have to wait for next year.)

The next and best part of the afternoon consisted of Peter teaching me how to split wood rounds into pieces small enough to fit into our wood stove. I’d been quite nervous about swinging around a heavy sharp object (I’ve been known to bonk), and I’m sure that my first several swings were pretty girlish.

But as I got the feel of the tool and began to feel more confident, my swings improved (as well as my success in actually splitting the wood).

As you can see, we can easily tell which logs are the ones that I split – for some of the more stubborn ones, it took many, many, many tries!

But what a satisfying feeling, at the end of the day, to see the new pile of wood that I helped create (and which will keep us warm for several days). And to continue closing the circle, inch by inch. And as we enter the new year, to be, quite literally, chopping wood and carrying water.