Yay for the Urban Farm Tour!

This morning I was up at 6 after a restless night. Tom had had dreams that deer crashed through our fence and ate everything in sight, leaving nothing for our guests to view. I combated nervousness by walking the garden several times while sipping glass after glass of cold brewed coffee.

Good morning, North Garden!

I noticed a few new things. Figs! Yahoo!

a good omen

potato flowers

pole beans working their way up the trellis

I was feeling good about the garden, but then I noticed spotted cucumber beetles on the potato leaves. I collected what I could and fed them to the chickens. Dang it. These guys can decimate all my melons, cucumbers, potatoes... Double dang it. I vowed to research this later, and added that to the running list of things to be done in my head: "...the peas need to be pulled out and replaced with pumpkins, the shallots need to be harvested and replaced with cantaloupes, the sweet potato slips are ready to be planted in with the corn..." All of this monotony calmed me, and I was happy to see our first group of guests arrive.

And the tour was terrific fun. We hosted close to 100 folks on this sunny, windy, beautiful day. I was overwhelmed with the awesomeness of gardeners - interested, seeking, searching, learning, laughing. I got some great questions, made some interesting connections, and was generally excited all over again by what we're all doing here, in our yards. Gardeners are making the world a better place! Many of the people that visited toady are already themselves accomplished farmers, beekeepers, and chicken keepers. I learned as much as I taught. Tom and I are tired but happy. The kids came home from their first Bar Mitzvah tired and happy. It's was a red-letter day, for sure.

The folks at the Institute of Urban Homesteading do good work, and did a great job planning the event. They have tours in Oakland and Hayward later this year, if you'd still like to participate.

admiring the chickens

passing the bee hive

discussing hoop houses and row covers

No cooking tonight, I promise, and the garden list can wait till tomorrow. We feel recharged in soul but pooped in body. Totally worth it.

Grass-fed/Pastured meat delivery

I just received my first shipment of meat from Tara Firma Farms! I'm going to be getting shipments three weeks out of four each month, and I'm so happy to be supporting a local farm that raises pastured beef, pork, and chicken - healthier for us and for the environment, and happy animals! Win-win all around.

The shipment arrived via On-Trac this morning at 10. It was packed in a plain cardboard box, but within was a black cooler bag and ice packs surrounded the meat. In this shipment, we received:

-beef stew meat
-ground beef
-beef short ribs
-pork shoulder roast
-pork picnic roast
-hot italian sausage, pork

and two things I added on, bacon and breakfast sausage

I can't tell you how happy it makes me to know that I've seen the pigs that provided this meat with my own eyes when we visited the farm - pastured and happy, eating day-old veg from the farm next door, rooting around in the dirt. I'm happy to know that these steer wander the Petaluma hills at will, eating whatever local grass is available. I've already got meals planned - cuban pork sandwiches! pulled pork! short ribs with creamy parmesan polenta! Italian wedding soup! sausage ragu! and it'll be fun to cook with cuts of meat that are new to me (though I got lucky with this shipment, as I've cooked each of these cuts before).

Now, back to garden clean up for the tour tomorrow. With visions of meatballs dancing in my head...

Yum!

Interesting finds

Just a quick post to show you some cool things I've found in the garden and woods lately.

Our watermelon plants are coming up. The variety I planted is called 'Moon and Stars.' I expected to see this pattern on the fruit, but isn't it neat that it's also on the leaves?

I noticed this 'bouquet' of Lysurus mokusin (or Lantern stinkhorns) coming up by the train shed. Click the link for other fun pictures of stinkhorns. The more I learn about these fungi, the more I'm intrigued. This particular kind comes up quite frequently in my garden, on the wood chips.

I found this beautiful caterpillar this morning, not ON the carrots, but near them in another plant (apparently it likes carrots and carrot-like food and blossoms). It's a papilio polyxenes, or Black Swallowtail. I'll be curious to see if it sticks around and pupates.

And finally, while walking with the dog this morning, I found several kinds of ripe plums on wild plum trees. I usually bring home some to eat, but I was feeling generous and gave them to the chickens, who adore any fruit (I've been giving them all the fallen peaches and apples from my trees, and they eat it all up, including the pits). Since I'm a little short on greens in the garden at the moment (although it's nearly time to rip up the peas), I'm feeding the chickens whatever I can find. They do get regular chicken food (grains), but I really prefer to heavily supplement their diet with plant forage. This way, the eggs will have superior nutrition. And, it can only help keep the chickens healthy. Besides, in the wild, they would eat all this stuff.

Tom and I are gearing up for the Urban Farm Tour, which is coming up in two days. I have an insider tip about discount tickets - so if you're on the fence, and need an incentive, leave a comment here and I'll give you the scoop. Meanwhile, regular readers can look for a post about it Saturday night, with pictures! We're extremely excited about having a lot of folks over to look at the garden!

Beer! and various other things

First things first: Today, we finally made beer!

Tom and I bought our supplies a month ago, and between one thing and another, we just haven't had time to get the process going. It takes about five hours to get a batch started. Finding five hours at home is not easy, but today we had lots of little chores, so we were able to do those and brew beer at the same time.

The best part of brewing beer (in my opinion, I'm sure Tom feels differently) is the words you get to throw around. "Time to sparge the mash!" might be my favorite phrase. And, of course, it was fun to do a project together.

The first part of the process is mashing the grain. Basically you take the dry, cracked grains and combine them with warm water, and make the liquid that will be the base for your beer. It has to remain at a certain temperature for an hour, it's a bit fiddly, but it's basically like making a big batch of oatmeal.

Sparging the mash!

I then took the spent mash out to the chickens, and that pile o' grain was gone in about five minutes. They LOVED it.

Then we added hops and boiled for quite a while. We added two kinds of hops, bittering and flavoring, and boiled after each addition.

When the foam 'breaks,' you cool the brew down quite a bit. After it reaches 70 degrees, you check the sugar content using a hydrometer.

cooling

science!

Meanwhile Tom had prepared everything with a sterilizer and it reminded us of cancer, funnily enough, where you have to have a sterile field before drawing blood (which we did at home every week for years). This was a sterile field for beer. Much nicer, and not life or death. :)

Then the yeast was added to the beer, whisked vigorously, and decanted into our carboy.

The only thing left to do now is wait!

In between beer processes, we got all our chores done. We even had time for some extra fun. I had a nice hike with Joe this morning in a spot I haven't been for a while in Shell Ridge. While walking I came across a camera, for monitoring wildlife. I've never seen one of these in the wild before.

Chamomile is blooming profusely in this part of the hills.

Adam and his friends went mountain biking in the same section of Shell Ridge this afternoon and came across a big rattler. They avoided him and had a great time. Unfortunately Adam took a sail over his handlebars at one point, and has road rash from his upper lip to his knee. He's now on the couch with a bag of ice.

Speaking of creepy crawly things, I found a paper wasp nest blown down from the eaves of our train shed. I have it in pride of place on our outdoor dining table. I appreciate paper wasps and never kill them - they pollinate as well as bees do, and lay eggs on soft-bodied insects, controlling that population.

I managed to get some art made for the chicken coop.

Let heaven and nature SING!

And I did some tidying up to ready us for next weekend and the Urban Farm Tour. Have you got your tickets yet? I'm really excited for the day. I think I'll make honey cake using honey from our hive, to share with our visitors.

It's definitely fruit time in the garden. These are all ripening and will be ready soon, but not soon enough!

peach

tiny apples

raspberry

blackberry

Meanwhile I'm harvesting and eating strawberries, blueberries, and huckleberries every day. The only veg we're harvesting and eating at the moment is peas, but collards and Bibb lettuce are not far away.

I did something this weekend that I'm particularly proud of. I signed us up for a meat CSA! Tara Firma Farms provides pastured beef, pork, and chicken to their members, delivered right to your door! We've visited this farm twice - Mother's Day in 2014, and to get a freshly-killed pastured turkey at Thanksgiving time. The property is idyllic and the animals all living out their lives the way they were meant to. We do eat meat, and I want to make sure that the animals have had good lives, not spending them in dark barns or in small cages with slatted floors, but rather running free in the grass, eating and rooting and mating and being animals. The meat costs more, and it should. Our weekly deliveries will start Friday, and I can't wait to see what we get, and share the cooking results with you!

And speaking of cooking, it's time to get to dinner prep. I've got focaccia risen and ready for the oven, and am making a seared scallop and bacon soup to go with it. Happy June to all of you!

Gates and a Bat Box

Another guest post from Tom about construction...

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One of our plans for this year was to raise the height of the fence that surrounds the yard, so that we could grow more food for us and less for our local deer population. This past weekend we finished the last part of that work, installing new and higher gates.

The work to make new gates gave me an opportunity to work with Elizabeth's dad Tim Killen,  who comes from a line of woodworkers and who blogs for Fine Woodworking. Tim's focus for a number of years has been in using SketchUp, 3-D modeling software, to plan his woodworking pieces. I'd dabbled a little bit with SketchUp, but I've always found that having a specific project is always a good way to learn software. This gate project would be a perfect opportunity.

After a few fits and starts and YouTube tutorials, I was able to work up a model for the gates:

Front View

Rear view

We had some lumber left over from the chicken coop construction project, and used that to form the main frames of the gates. Working with Tim gave me a chance to try making some mortise and tenon joints, and at one point we used nearly every clamp that he had:

The final gate design looks a little different than the model I'd created, as we simplified the work needed to make the pickets that attached to the frames.

The gates wound up being pretty heavy, so I was glad that I'd followed Tim's advice and ordered some pintle hinges online to hang the gates. Pintle hinges come in two parts -- there's a metal strap that attaches to the gate using carriage bolts, and a pin (the pintle) that gets screwed into the post. The gate is then lowered into position so that a loop on the end of the straps goes over the pintle. Here's a closeup:

Pintle hinge

 We used two straps per gate, and each one is rated to 100 lbs, so that should hold up. Here's one of the finished gates in place:

It was a lot of fun working with Tim on the gates, and I learned a lot (like, when you subtract off the width of the stiles when measuring your rails, be sure to add back in the length of the tenons, or your gate frames will be a lot more narrow than you had planned. D'oh!).

Our other construction project of last weekend was for an Eco-project for Adam's 7th grade science class. For this project, he needed to make something that would contribute to an environment. We've been working on making our home environment a better place for animals, both wild (birds, insects, lizards) and domestic (chickens, bees), and so we decided to follow that same path and work on a bat box.

There are a lot of plans for bat boxes online, and the construction is pretty straightforward. We settled on a design from This Old House that has a fun bat motif. The box itself has an opening on the bottom, and is fairly shallow – only about 3/4" between front and back.

Adam has to bring it in to school next week, then we'll put it up high on our shed.