First Day of Winter

Please enjoy this four minute video taken in the garden today on a foggy, drippy morning.

Clearing Out the Pollinator Gardens

My finals are DONE! My semester is FINISHED! I am now free as a bird until the middle of January. It feels so so so good to not sit and study. I was actually getting a particular hip pain because I was sitting so much. That’s never happened before. I would sit at the kitchen table, hip aching, table full of charts and papers and books, and then I’d look outside and see everything that needed doing, and sigh. Well, no more table! Outside time only! Bit by bit, I’m tidying up the garden and planting for spring. Now, when my body hurts, it’s because it’s getting some work done!

The pollinator gardens in our garden are the spaces people comment on the most. Oh, they like the vegetables and the fruit trees, the bees and the chickens, but it’s the flowers that really make people excited. I’ve written extensively about them before, because in order to get this abundance of flowers, it takes a little doing (it’s not hard, though). Three times a year I go out there and scatter wildflower seeds, the kind of seed depending on the season. That’s the easy part. The hard part, or not hard exactly but time consuming and a pretty big chore, is removing all the dead biomass before scattering the seed. If you don’t remove all the dead stuff, the seeds can’t get the light and moisture they need to germinate. And then, for about a month after removing everything, the garden is bare, bare, bare. Which isn’t all that attractive.

Today

I do have some perennials in there to hold down the space, but a lot of those, like dahlias or hollyhocks, are dormant in the winter, or else, like salvias and sages, need to be pruned hard in the winter. So it tends to look rather forlorn, with only borage (a workhorse all year round) and early narcissus blooming. The very first forget-me-nots are starting to bloom too, so that’s good. But on the whole, it’s very sad looking. You’ve got to hang in there, though, because within a few weeks, there will be a haze of green over this entire space, and then not long after that, the poppies will be up. By February things should be in good bloom. This time of year, I sow both California and opium poppies, Chinese Houses, Clarkias of all kinds, Nemophila, Gilia, Phacelia, Tidy tips - mostly natives. They’ll bloom until May when I will go through this whole process again and seed in the late summer flowers. Sometime between February and May, I’ll get a sowing in of early summer flowers, wherever I can find space.

The amount of biomass that accumulates from just one of the pollinator gardens is tremendous. I put as much as I can in the compost, but once the pile reaches above my head, I start to put the rest in the green bin for pickup. This year I made more space for the compost pile to go long, along the fence behind the chicken coop. I want to keep as much material as I can, especially with 10 chickens now to work it over. I’m making compost faster than ever before.

Taking out all the dead plants takes many days for all my pollinator gardens, two days for the south pollinator garden alone (pictured above). I’m actually still not done; I need to prune the passionflower vine hard and build it a new trellis. This will be a two person job and probably won’t get done until Tom’s holiday break. I’ve still got many gardens to go, though. Lots of wildflower seeds yet to get in! What a joy, though, to get out and use my muscles, instead of sitting!

It’s also time, if you live in California, to cut down the asparagus stalks/ferns and dress the bed with compost and mulch. This chore makes me anticipate late winter/early spring, when the spears will be appearing. Yum!

The new chickens (well, not so new anymore I guess) are figuring out the lay of the land. What makes me happy is that they do not run from me quite so quickly anymore - they are starting to realize I come bearing good things, like leftover yogurt or fresh greens. So now they just eye me warily and stay poised to dash. It’s an improvement. One not-so-happy development is that I think one of them might be a rooster. No crowing, just a very suspicious tail.

More than Double

The last time we added hens to our existing flock, we only added two. Two big girls, ready to start laying any day. That was traumatic enough and a real eye-opener for me; I had to learn to dampen my feelings about competition and pecking order. (Can’t we all just get ALONG???)

But this time, with six new chicks joining our current four old gals, it’s been positively a whirlwind. Everything has more than doubled: the noise, the poop, the amount of beat-downs, how fast the food vanishes, the intense jostling for a position on the roosts at night. We desperately need these six young chickens to provide eggs (in a month or two), but it sure has been a chaotic couple of weeks trying to get them settled. I’m scrambling for more carbon (anyone have any dry bags of leaves I can have or old hay or sawdust?) and ordering layer feed at an astonishing rate.

Add this to the start of our rainy season (which means closer quarters), and you can imagine the impact. Tom rigged up a tarp so that there is some outdoor space for the chickens to go without getting soaked, and this has helped tremendously (chickens can handle cold, but cold and wet is difficult). I had to assist the little guys getting in and out of the hen house each night for about two nights; after that I put a stool in the coop (yes, really) and now they climb up that and fly up from there. I still go out to watch bedtime (anytime between 4:30 and 5) because we’ve had a few bad falls as the chickens all jostle for space. One of our older hens, Scrappy, fell three times through the hole with the ladder in it, because the other old hens didn’t like how aggressive she was being and they knocked her off. The little chicks just gambol around like drunks and they tend to make it ok, but they sure get knocked around a lot. They have to find the proper times to approach the food and water, the proper times to have a dust bath, the proper times to root through the compost pile, because the older chickens are keeping them firmly in line. However, they are growing fast, so I think they are getting enough to eat. They were raised in a dark shed with 500 other chicks, so all they have known before this is a dirt floor and the scramble for food of any kind. I imagine this new life is pretty great for them, despite the ‘lessons’ they are learning from the big girls. Bugs, sprouted grains, regular greens, leaf piles to get lost in - all of this must seem like wonderland.

Still, it’s a lot of chickens in a smallish space. Once spring comes and we see who’s really laying, there might be a reckoning.

Speaking of reckoning, I’m about to enter into finals. Chemistry is kind of like my own personal big chicken - knocking me around and teaching me a few life lessons. I’m the little guy, scrambling to keep up. I feel safe and well-fed, and then suddenly a big beak comes at me from behind and bites me in the ass.

Whoops, I know it's December, but here's our November recipe

Actually, I have two: this apple galette recipe was the best one I’ve ever had, so I’ll share it. And also a baked spinach a la Julia Child. I’m sorry I didn’t get these up sooner, November (and honestly, the last two months) just got away from me. And here it is December already and I’m so not ready for it. We’ve been dying for rain - and now we’ve finally got it and I find myself scrambling to get systems in place to deal with it, rather than been on top of my game. I’ve felt slightly behind all semester. I’m looking forward to getting my finals over with and then having a month to put everything to rights before the whole cycle begins again. You would not believe the state of my garden - such a mess - so much to do out there. I did manage to get our new mulberry tree planted, to replace our very sad peach tree.

“Country Apple Galette, adapted slightly from Jacques Pepin in Food + Wine

Pastry:
1-1/2 C all-purpose flour
1-1/2 t sugar
1/4 t salt
1 stick plus 2 T cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/3 cup ice water

Filling:

4 large apples (I used six small Granny Smith from my friend Lawrence’s tree)
2 T sugar
1/2 t cinnamon
1 T honey
1 T unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

In a food processor, combine the flour with the sugar, salt and butter and process for about five seconds. Sprinkle the ice water over the flour and process until the pasty just begins to come together, about 10 seconds. Transfer the pastry to a work surface, gather it together and pat into a disk. Wrap in plastic wrap or wax paper and refrigerate until ready to make galette (or just go ahead and use it right away).

Peel, halve, and core the apples. Chop half of the apples into small pieces. The other half, make nice slices. In a small bowl, combine sugar and cinnamon.

Preheat oven to 400. Roll out the pastry to a 12”x14” rectangle and transfer to a cookie sheet lined with parchment. Spread the chopped apples over the pastry to within one inch of the edge. Drizzle honey over the chopped apple. Arrange the apple slices on top in a pretty way. Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar evenly over the apples and dot with pieces of butter. Fold the pastry edge up and over the apples.

Bake for about an hour, until the pastry is nicely browned and crisp and all of the apples are tender. Transfer the pan to a rack and let cool. Serve warm or at room temp.”

“Baked Spinach a la Julia Child by way of Smitten Kitchen

3 pounds fresh spinach
3-1/2 to 4-1/2 T unsalted butter
salt and pepper
1-1/2 T flour
I C stock
3/4 C grated Gruyere (or swiss)
2 T fine breadcrumbs

Stem and wash your spinach but no need to dry. Put spinach in large pot over high heat. Cook, covered until wilted. Drain. Fill pot with cold water, plunge spinach into it, then drain again. Squeeze spinach to extract as much water as possible. You should have three cups (approx) of cooked spinach. Chop coarsely.

Melt 2 T butter over moderately high heat and stir in spinach. Cook for a couple of minutes until all of the water has steamed off. Lower heat and sprinkle in flour. Stir and cook for 2 minutes. Add stock very slowly and stir as added. You might or might not need all of the stock. Stir in another T of butter if you like. Season with salt and pepper.

Preheat oven to 375. Lightly butter a shallow 1-quart baking dish. Stir 1/2 C cheese into the spinach and then pour into baking dish. Mix remaining cheese with breadcrumbs and sprinkle over spinach. Melt 1-1/2 T butter and pour it over the top. Bake about 30 minutes, until heated through and brown on top.”

Hope you all had a lovely thanksgiving. We were able to travel to Tomales Bay for fresh oysters. It was fun to have them there for lunch, and fun to bring some home and shuck them for dinner too. It reminds us of our Maryland days!

New Chickens!

Please meet (from left): Amber, Gertrude, Joan, Dorothy, Lois, and Florence. They are too shy to show you their faces just yet.

Amber is our very first Buff Orpington. Joan and Gertrude are Rhode Island Reds. Dorothy and Lois are Easter Eggers. And Florence is a Plymouth Barred Rock. Florence has been the early leader, adventuring to the water first, onto the roost first, into the food first. Which is why we named her after Tom’s adventuring Aunt Florence who loved to visit new places. All these chickens are named after women in our family that we admire.

We were down to four chickens, two of whom aren’t laying at all anymore (from our very first batch of chickens all those years ago). I’m tired of not having fresh eggs, so I’ve been waiting for the right moment to add some new hens. The other day I saw a post in CropMobster - a farmer in Petaluma had pullets for sale. So today I drove up north and picked these six up. Let me know if you want some too and I’ll get you the farmer’s email and phone #. He has a lot more to sell. They are really a bit younger than pullets - coop-ready chicks, I’d call them. I had to run out and buy crumble because the pelleted food was too big for them.

I have the six little hens in a large dog crate in the main coop. They have food and water and a branch for roosting. At night I’ll cover the cage with a blanket to keep the wind and chill off of them. In a few days, I’ll put them in with our big hens, and they can fight it out, but meanwhile they are protected while they all get to know each other.

Our four big hens are completely nonplussed - very unsure of this new situation. So maybe they will all be on equal footing when I finally let everyone mingle. I can only hope.