A week ago, it was around 50 degrees…..in southern Michigan, in January.

Starting a soup: Cubed celeriac stand in for both celery and potatoes at once. Browning lightly in a little chicken fat or olive oil starts laying the foundation for flavor depth in a good soup.

I got all riled up about it.  Granted, it was hard to complain….getting around without snow is so easy, less fuel use for heating, chickens laying in record numbers for this time of year, and digging in the garden as though it was October.  I generally try to avoid complaining about the weather, and I find wonder and joy in weather changes, season changes, and day-to-day differences.  However, I found myself longing for snow and worrying that it wasn’t cold enough.  After a super-hot summer, and ground that still hasn’t really appreciably frozen, in January, (I easily dug carrots and leeks today), it can be a little scary to contemplate the climate changes I believe I’ve seen in my own back yard.  What if every year increases in temperatures the way this past year increased over the year before?

Next ingredient - some of our lovely leeks, dug from the garden earlier today.

But now, with the temperature in the teens this morning, and the longed-for snow covering the ground,  I feel a little better.   Waking to the brilliance of sunlight reflecting off snow, and filling the house with light is a welcome change from the two months+ of warm but sullen grey skies and ground.  Even though I could still dig vegetables out of the garden, we came in with bright-pink faces from the cold.   Settling down with seed catalogues and a cup of tea feels much more in-tune with my expectations for this time of year.  And soup is a frequent quick meal.

One thought that has struck me this winter was to contemplate how much more food I might have grown if I had known the late autumn and early winter would be so mild.  I’m missing lettuce and spinach.  In our hectic fall, I passed the usual dates for re-sowing these greens, and figured I might as well not try.   Turns out, they would have

Some of our piddly carrots - small, yet brilliantly-colored and amazingly sweet. Sliced carrots, a chopped onion, and minced garlic all get added to the pot.

done well.  We’re not suffering for salad, we do fine substituting cabbage, endive, baby chard, tatsoi, and baby kale for other raw greens.  But lettuce and spinach would be a welcome touch of luxury.

My next thought was that if we are indeed experiencing warming of climate, there is even less reason for us northerners not to grow our own food.  There is even less reason to ship in food from milder climes, when well into December, (and now even January) it is possible to harvest greens and roots - even without a hoophouse.  If you cannot grow your own, you can buy it locally.  Support and pay for local farm goods, and more farms will come into being, increasing availability even more.  And at the same time, we will be working to reduce what food transportation contributes to global warming.

Growing our own food or purchasing it from someone close by, and learning how to cook it solves so many problems at once.  Last month, a study determined that eating commercial canned soup for just five days raised urine BPA levels 1221%. The lining of the cans contains this chemical, leaching it into food. “Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor , which can mimic the body’s own hormones and may lead to negative health effects. Early development appears

When the veggie mixture is lightly browned and softening, I deglaze the pan with a little white wine. This really rounds out the flavor and makes a soup delicious, but it can be omitted. All the veggies added to this point are only the ones that need time cooking - the roots, mostly. Save the delicate things for later.

to be the period of greatest sensitivity to its effects, and some studies have linked prenatal exposure to later neurological difficulties.” (Wikipedia)  As a midwife, you can guess how that makes me react.  Why do humans tend to take a nourishing food and ruin it?  (Unfortunately, it’s not just soup.  BPA is also found in many other food containers, cans, lids, and the lining the metal canning lids that many of us use to preserve our food at home.  The price of lovely Weck jars still makes them prohibitive to me - but they would be a safer solution for home canning.)

Every day, I am upset with what our species is doing to the world we live in, the food we ingest, the chemicals we instill in the bloodstreams of our unborn fetuses.  I am trying to do my small part by refusing to participate with at least some of it.  I wish more people would join those of us who are making these choices.  Maybe it sounds silly to talk about changing the world by growing and cooking your own soup, but maybe it doesn’t.  Because every time each of us purchases something like canned soup, we consent to waste, pollution, and chemicals in our food.  If you buy it, if you eat it, you have agreed to it, you have helped put off demanding that manufacturers must change.  I am not suggesting I am perfect - there are many ways in which I am still too complacent.  There are many days I am exhausted from late work hours and feel forced to resort to food I haven’t grown or cooked.   But I’ve got the soup down, at least!   Here’s a recipe that starts with pre-made chicken stock, and

Adding more flavor: For this soup I added a pinch of tumeric, a very light sprinkle of cayenne, and generous amounts of dried summer savory and parsley. We dried the peppers, savory, and parsley in the food dehydrator. Savory has proven easier to grow in quantity than thyme, for me, with a similar flavoring.

pre-cooked beans. (Many blogs cover how to make broth or stock, so I won’t - here is a good one, for example.)  Except for salt and tumeric and sweet corn, every ingredient in this soup was grown or harvested by us, on our land.  Most of them are doable for a backyard gardener.  Most of them can probably be obtained locally in most northern areas, unless you are in a food desert.  No cans were opened, all garbage from the making of this soup could go onto the compost pile.  This is not my once-a-week local challenge meal - this sort of eating is daily fare for us whenever possible.  If nothing else - learn to make soup.  A pot can provide meals for days, and keep chemicals out of your food.

What is this?? This is what good homemade broth looks like! It has gelled nicely. A couple of our excess roosters went into the making of this stock a couple days earlier.

Adding the cold broth to the soup pot. Add some water too, and bring the whole thing to a simmer.

The stock is steaming - now is the time to add some precooked beans. These “Snowcap” beans grew in the backyard garden, and they’re better than any beans I’ve ever bought from a store. Add precooked beans near the end of cooking so they don’t fall apart.

Add the delicate vegetables closer to the end of cooking, after the stock has been bubbling for awhile and the root veggies are cooked through. Here, I added kale picked frozen from the garden today, and some frozen sweet corn. Other things to add now would be green beans, peas, or broccoli.

Finished soup! Chopped chicken was also added near the end of cooking. This soup can be stretched over several days, by adding some more water and seasonings and another vegetable here and there.

I’m not counting chickens before they hatch, I’m counting eggs as they’re laid.  It’s less than a fortnight past solstice, and already the egg count is starting to rise.  No, we’re not getting dozens a day yet, and it’s not enough to put out the newsflash bulletins for everyone to start putting orders in for eggs.  But it’s definitely an uptick and numbers, and the color mix of our daily eggs has changed.

Maybe it’s just the excessively warm spell we’ve had this December, and not the passing of solstice at all.  It’s definitely clear though that some of our layers are back after their molt… we haven’t see a blue or green Auracauna egg for a month now, and in the last three days two of the Auracaunas have started laying again, nice big eggs.

We love how big the eggs are from the older birds.  We love having older birds around, actually, and not just because their eggs are among our largest.  Our two flocks have great leadership, both from the roosters and the hens.  A couple months ago now we took the thirty or so new pullet hens and their roos from their chick-to-pullet-coop and split them up and introduced them to their permanent flocks… the new Welsummers went west to the bigger flock, and the Cuckoo Marans to the east flock.

Having older birds and a stable flock/coop situation allows newcomers to settle in quickly.  There’s some initial confusion and a bit of put-you-in-your-place pecking, but that’s why it’s called a pecking order.  New birds come in near the bottom of the order, and work their way into a comfort zone.  Everybody finds a place, and within a short time, everybody knows everyone else and things are fairly settled socially.

Brunch with friends in the snow.

I read once that 50-60 birds in a chicken flock is about the most that they can handle well, because more than that and their little chicken brains can’t keep track of the social structure and civilization breaks down.  We haven’t pushed the upper limits of that range too much;  our west flock is around 70 right now.  But it’s very clear that everyone knows everyone else, and they all understand the pecking order.  So I think the maximum reasonable Facebook friendslist for chickens could actually be much higher, given a comfortable coop and roosts at night and plenty of room for free-ranging during the day.  Not such teeny chicken brains after all.

Back in November, there were three Barred Rocks from the east side flock that refused to stay in their fenced pasture, and kept escaping to greener pastures.  The west flock has better fences, so after a week or so of this, we simply took the lead escape artist and carried her back to the west flock, setting her on a perch after dark so that in the morning, she’d find the new water, food and “friends” before setting out for the day’s foraging in new territory.  We’ve found this a pretty reliable way to introduce birds to different flocks, that they always seem to find their way back to the coop after waking up there.

Two more escape artists headed for the West Flock.

In the morning at roll call, the escape artist found she’d fallen a few notches (plummeted, more like) and needed to find her new place.  Everyone in the West Flock knew this was someone different and yet someone who could belong here.  There were no death struggles, just don’t-stand-so-close-to-me messages and minor display-fight skirmishes.

Our wild/tame Tom turkey (who lives outside the flock in the trees, but spends all day with the west flock chickens) knows instantly who any newcomers are and quietly chases them around the hen yard, walking along with his long strides causing them to hop and run a little and behave themselves.  After an initial chase, Tom leaves the newcomers alone most of the day unless they get into skirmishes (which they do).  He’s our cop, breaking up all the fights, or trying to by sticking his head in and getting between skirmishers and *peenting loudly at them.  I don’t think the peenting does much, it’s not a very threatening sound, but he’s getting to be so massive that he’s definitely imposing.  He takes this job seriously, always picking out who he thinks is the troublemaker and targeting him/her specifically for little snakelike jabs with that big head of his.  So the newcomers learn fast to work their way up the ranks gradually, and not set off The Big Guy too much by being too much the social climber.

And it works.  We have happy flocks.  Whenever there’s a singleton newcomer introduced to a flock on either side, the process seems about the same.  Brief universal shunning, a few short spats, begrudging acceptance into the lowest tier, and gradual tolerance of the newcomer and a place on the roosts at night with opportunities for social advancement, given time.

Are you my neighbor?

It’s not a bad system.  Better than some human ones I’ve participated in.  Similar to several of them, more humane than a couple.  I think it’s closer to being a newcomer in high school than to being a new professor in a mid-tier academic department… the latter situation can range from uplifting to downright horrifying, depending on the roosters in that flock.  I’ve seen it both ways, occasionally at the same time in the same department.  Being now a bit removed from the daily academic environment affords me the luxury of looking back and seeing it with new eyes.

Roosting neighbors

Overall, I loved being a professor.  And now I love being with my chickens even better.  Happy New Year.

*note to birders: I know that only woodcocks are said to “peent”, yet this unique and seldom used vocalization of the turkey reminds me of peenting (search “peenting” and you can hear woodcocks on YouTube), although it’s far from being the same call.  Someday I’ll record this insistent, nasal warning the turkey makes and post it.  Meanwhile, I’ll call it a peent.

It’s not really Dragonwood’s first ground-coating snow of the season… but we missed the first one, being away on visits.  So it’s OUR first snow, and it didn’t arrive until after Christmas!

So, to celebrate my morning walk with birds and cats, here are the first snow footprints that I found this morning:

1. Unknown polydactyl cat print, front foot, five toes across the front.  Non-polydactyl cats normally have five toes on the front paw, but arranged as four across the pad and one behind, as a dew claw.  Gina and a couple other kitties here have five toes on the front, but arranged straight across the top like this one.

2. Sassy (aka Sasquatch), who came running through the snow to see me.  On the bottom is her front paw print, with seven toes, and on the top is her back paw, which has five toes (non-polys have four in the back).  It’s harder to see the fifth claw and matching pad, but they’re on the left of the main print and other toes.

Sassy has 24 toes altogether, tied for our local record holder.  You can only see six toes/claws on her front paw print here, arranged with four across the front and two out on a “thumb” (to the left, since this is her right paw)… the seventh claw has no pad, and grows neatly between the thumb-pair and the four-pad above, and curls under (rarely leaving a mark).

Also… Sassy seldom retracts her claws, and we’ve never known her to do so while she walks.  Normally cats retract their claws, leaving a distinctly different pawprint (like #1 above) from their friends like dogs and raccoons (always show claws in their prints).  But Sassy walks on her claws, whether in the snow or on our hardwood floors… you can always hear her click clacking along in the night.

3. The turkey.  Our Tom greets me every morning, and on a morning like this it’s easy to see where he’s been exploring before I get out to greet him in return.  Tom is now 2-1/2 years old.

I shoulda shot the chicken prints too, I suppose.  And the juncos flitting around the kitchen garden’s remains.  But this isn’t a documentary, it’s a celebration.  It snowed!  Yay!

Crazy weather.  It was 14 degrees, and then it was 50.  After freezing solidly, it rained for two days, and my boots sank ankle-deep in mud, trying to salvage a few more things from the garden, and to pick a salad.  Pick a salad??  After market exhaustion, other work, and some travel, I did a spectacularly poor job this fall with arranging low tunnels or cold frames to ensure our winter salads.  There is no lettuce.  The kale is damaged but hasn’t given up.  Unbelievably, I did not do my fall planting of spinach, or mache.

salad picked in December mud needs several washings.....

And yet, we continue to eat great salads.  This is the time of year when salad comes into one of its fullest degrees of appreciation, for me.  This is the season of mashed potatoes, soups, soft cooked vegetables, grains, and meat-eating.  I quickly begin to crave crisp cool crunchiness.

So what’s for salad if I failed to plant some of the staples and house them under cover for the winter?

I am a big scavenger when it comes to greens.  I guess I don’t know if I just find tasty things that most other people won’t eat, or if there is a huge untapped potential here, and you just have to know how to prepare and season it.   I like to think it’s the second one.  But there are so many people who are convinced they don’t like flavorful greens, or anything with any bitter undertones.

....a good salad spinner is essential.

cold brings out the reds in the greens

So tonight’s salad - collected at dusk, in the cold breeze, and with that mud bogging me into the ground:  There is some gorgeous tatsoi under a light covering - I gathered the outer leaves from some of the rosettes, leaving the rest.  It tolerates cold and freezing amazingly well, and its thick succulent dark green leaves stand in perfectly for spinach.  Then, I moved on to the remains of the kale plants - the young small leaves in their centers are tender and easy to eat raw.  The hearts of a few spent celery plants continue to send up pale soft leaves - these and a bit of the baby celery under them go into the salad.  A stray radicchio brings color and flavor. (I leave the base of the plant to grow more.) A few small center leaves from the fading chard plants (they overwinter and send up useable baby leaves if mulched heavily or covered.)  And baby curly endive that didn’t get far this fall, but may survive under the mulch, rounds out the bitter greens part of the salad.  If it was early spring, I’d be adding the first dandelion greens.  The mache has self-seeded for random rosettes popping up here and there throughout the garden.

A salad like this can be helped, or a bitter edge to it can be softened, by some of the veggies no longer in the garden, but in cool storage.  Thin slices of red cabbage, chunks of savoy cabbage, matchsticks of carrot, kholrabi, or jerusalem artichoke, or finely shaved fennel, all add more crunch, or a neutral element, or a subtle sweetness.  Sometimes I grate raw beets into salad.  We grow it all in the backyard - no petroleum miles on this salad, noone’s E.coli contamination. The brighter, stronger the colors, the more nutrition.  A pale grocery-store romaine with bland tomato wedges is not on our menu.

I would much rather have seeded beautiful beds of winter greens in a greenhouse, at just the right time, and be picking new plants under cover, and have lettuce and spinach in our mix.  Sadly, we’re not quite there yet, and we seemed to have missed the boat this fall in particular.  Maybe next year…maybe next year.   But it’s still remarkable what can be had for greens now, even without that greenhouse.

For those who are still skeptical about eating anything stronger than lettuce:  It can totally change your mind to try some of these greens, when the mix is good, you put some toppings on it, and a dressing is well-chosen.  I make a lot of my own salad dressings.  One favorite is a sweet-ish dressing made with our maple syrup, olive oil, sesame oil, balsamic vinegar, frozen raspberries, a dash of mustard, and a finely minced shallot.  This, over a bitter salad, with some raisins or dried cherries, chopped dates, or grapefruit wedges, or pumpkin seeds, can be fantastic.  A little grated asiago or parmesan cheese, or crumbled feta, or maybe a softly cooked egg, or a chopped hard-boiled one… there are so many ways to use a base of greens like this. Another great dressing for a salad on the bitter side is a classic Italian dressing traditionally served over puntarelle:  Tons of mashed raw garlic, mashed anchovies, salt, olive oil, lemon juice, mustard, red wine vinegar.   Something about this combination with a bitter green brings out a sweet aftertaste, and it can be totally addictive.

I think maybe it’s a good thing we don’t grow lettuce year-round, even being salad-lovers.  It makes me experiment…it helps us learn how to make other things taste good…and you can feel how nutritious these alternative greens are for your body, when you give them a chance!

Although today was nice and warmish, I am not fooled.  Frosty time has come again to Dragonwood.  I love frosty weather, and cannot, cannot, cannot help taking photos every time the frost appears, especially in the mornings when I go out to open up the chickens.

These last few weeks, the frosts have all been light, and in the early morning it’s common to have frost gone in the very early sunlight but still present in all the shadows.

brittle star

Also we’ve only had one or two hard frosts where the frost extended right up to the garage and under the big trees… usually the frosts have just been out in the open.

Colder weather is coming.  Snow picture season will be next.  I love snow picture season. :-)

This blog is not abandoned.  :)

It didn’t even go off my radar, get forgotten, nor did I take a deliberate break from it. I am a diarist at heart, and most days this fall when I’ve been in the garden, bringing in the harvest, or walking in nature, I have composed a blog post in my head.  The trouble is with the time it takes to transfer from thought to paper or computer.

I thought of a blog post as we wrapped up the final market day, and switched our focus from feeding other people, to preparing our own winter food supply.

Our table last day at the Westside Farmers Market - incredible celery, leeks, and celeriac this fall.

I thought of a blog post as the first frosts hit and we started to say goodbye to the garden, and began to light a fire in the woodstove daily.

I thought of a blog post as we dug potatoes, and more potatoes ….and more potatoes.

Tiredly, I thought often about posting about the sanctuary I felt in the garden, even if for only half an hour of twilight at the end of a frantically busy work day.

Last big harvest before frost.

I thought of a blog post as I walked through a wooded patch, hearing the birds, noticing how green the moss looks after a rain, when everything else has turned into winter browns.

I thought of a reactionary blog post every time I listened to news about Occupy Wall Street, “consumer confidence”, anti-consumerism, and the Plastic Ocean.

I composed words in my head about our harvest as it filled every bin, bucket, and tray we had, as we worked in the rain and by flashlight to bring the last of the perishables in by the first hard frost.

But with all this doing, our hands have been a bit busy for blog posting.  I am continually thankful and amazed by the enormous amount of food two people working two other jobs can produce from a tiny little plot of land.  We grow so much of what we eat now.  Eggs, chicken, greens of all sorts, beans, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, celery, celeriac, rutabega, squash, popcorn, apples, berries, herbs, onions, garlic, leeks, radishes, carrots.  Our own pickles, krauts, jams, sauces, cider.  So much to write about, and so little time to write!

Remains of the market garden

Some people call us a farm.  Some are amused that we call ourselves a farm.  Some get grand ideas in their head of how we must live and what the garden looks like, imagining an orderly organic utopia.  Sometimes their silence when they come to visit seems to tell of their disappointment.  We are small.  The “market field” is just a big messy garden.   The shutters are falling off the house because most days, we’re too darn busy or exhausted to fix them.  Our furniture is mismatched, and our kitchen needs remodeling.  This is what it looks like to live as much as we can right now from a patch of land, trying to reduce the need to buy, to turn less garbage loose into the world than we might. This is what it looks like to make do, purchase less, grow more, work hard.

Digging potatoes, and immediately replanting the bed with endive seedlings - just barely visible at the top of the photo.

And yet, somehow, we manage to grow enough beautiful produce to sell to others while feeding ourselves.    Somehow, we had an enormous Thanksgiving supper where the only store-bought ingredients I used in the cooking were milk, butter, cream cheese, salt, pepper, flour, arrowroot powder, olive oil, vinegar, anchovies, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, sugar, and wine.  There was so much joy and pride in roasting the 10 lb 3 oz “turkey” chicken who grew running around in our back yard, and so much peace and fulfillment in carrying baskets of greens and roots in from the garden, rather than braving the crowd at the grocery store.

The promoters of monoculture farming retaliate against the rise of interest in local food.  They try to win support by saying we can’t feed the world with small farmers, local produce, and organic techniques.  Yet I don’t see how 7 billion+ people will eat sustainably without digging up our lawns to grow chemical-free food.  I’m thankful for those who grow their own, or support others who do.   I’m thankful for the shoppers I know who are trying to buy less, buy locally, and use less plastic (in all senses of the word).  For me, Thanksgiving is about celebrating what bounty we can produce, rather than what bounty we can buy.  It’s about celebrating the wonder of being able to grow our food.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sorry, it’s just been so long since I posted anything at all, that I thought I’d just post this photo I took this morning with my new phone.  The morning sun on the sage caught my eye, and since the best camera is the one you have with you, you get to see what I saw.  The chickens had to wait a couple minutes more to get out to pasture, but them’s the breaks.  You don’t get much from this tiny view… click through to see it bigger (along with the spotty beetle adding color).

It’s not consolation, but taking the photo and posting it helps a little with something else I had to do this morning.  Boy George died last night, and I buried him this morning.  He was a wonderful friend, and I miss him.  I’ll repost this photo of him, as a little memorial to the way he loved to curl up with you. Sniff.

Goodbye, Boy.

The garden’s a mess.  Torrential rains, followed by extreme heat, kept us back from some of the work we might have done to keep it tidy at crucial times.  Plants are sprawling all over each other, “rows” have run together, and some of the weeds are sky-high.

It doesn’t seem to be interfering with our harvests, for the most part.  Okay, I lost half a row of leeks under some overgrown arugula that fell over on them in a windstorm, because I hadn’t taken the time to pull it out when it was essentially past its prime.  And then I didn’t find the time to pull it off the leeks until it was too late and they were collapsed and rotting beneath it.

But there is an up-side to the disorder - we are seeing record numbers of beneficial creatures and insects.  For several weeks now, it’s been rare to harvest something without finding a praying mantis patrolling the veggies, or frogs jumping out of my path.  And recently, while examining for tomato hornworm damage, we found this:

Interrupted right in the middle of breakfast! A hornworm, covered with pupating wasps, right above the bite-marks it left in the tomato leaf...

Under the cottony white packages, there is a green caterpillar with a red spike on its butt - a tomato hornworm, a fantastically destructive creature.  They blend in perfectly with tomato stems, and are difficult to see until you notice the damage.  By the time you notice the damage, there’s a lot of damage to notice. One worm will have defoliated half a tomato plant, bitten into the developing fruit, and lopped off the replacement buds.  But - they have a predator that stops them in their tracks.  This hornworm is hosting a nice clutch of parasitic braconid wasp cocoons.

The wasps are small, and their cocoons are the tiny white wooly packages dotting the top of the hornworm.  Those aren’t part of the hornworm.  The description of what the wasps do to the hornworm reads like poetry to the organic farmer who has picked her share of hornworms off by hand, and endured their rampages.  In short, the wasps lay eggs in the caterpillar, the larvae feed off the caterpillar’s innards, and hatch out through to its surface to form their cocoons and finish pupating.  Here’s a more descriptive page about it.

Nearby, there was a second parasitized hornworm. The hornworms were literally stopped in their tracks, beside the chewed up leaf they’d been feasting upon.  I watched them for a few days - they were always in the same location, not dead yet, but obviously sick and not moving, and most importantly - not eating!

Last summer, we had record numbers of hornworms, but I found only one of these parasitized hornworms, with just a few cocoons.  I carefully watched that one, and left it in its place.  If you find one of these, don’t remove it!!  The hornworm  is a goner, even while still alive, and you can leave it alone without fearing it will continue to do damage.  It’s important to leave it so the wasp larvae can complete their hatching and become more wasps  that can kill more tomato hornworms.  This year we have had radically less hornworm problems, and at least double the sighted evidence of braconid wasps.

The wasps are tiny, cute even, and harmless to humans.  They are part of why I won’t put anything harmful on my garden.  Not anything.  Not even the organically-sanctioned treatments.  I may have garden chaos, I may lose some things to pests, and I may have holes in some produce.  But we also have an environment.  We have a mini-ecosystem keeping its own checks and balances.  What I use in the garden to kill the caterpillars will also kill or affect the wasps.   And the bees, and the mantises, and the other pollinators and predators.  Not cool, not what we want, not why we are doing this.    The frogs, the mantises, the parasitic wasps, the spiders, and the assassin bugs that find a home in our jungle garden have taken several years to make their way there, and they are integral to the way our garden works.

So the besieged caterpillars stayed on the tomato plants for a few days, until one day they were gone, probably dropped to the ground dead.  I noticed only when I could zoom into the photo while editing, that the little wasps had already hatched from one of the clutches when I photographed it:

Their cocoons have their hatch doors popped up, and the cocoons are empty.  Another tiny army of protectors is out there already, patrolling for us, finding the hornworms we won’t see.

Old Mr. Welsummer stands guard over the flock of hens, head up and sternly on the alert.

We were right there this morning when the hawks attacked.  A beautiful morning, my favorite kind of summer morning - cool, a slight mist, dew hanging on every stem and flower and spiderweb, rays from a low sun cutting through at a sharp angle.  P had just let the chickens out of the coop for the morning, then ducked inside for watering and egg gathering.  I had just thrown last night’s corncobs and tomato remnants to the flock of young birds and was enjoying the first leisurely Saturday morning in the garden I’ve had in more than a month.  Then there was the unmistakable sound of the attack - a sudden rushing Whoooooosh!, feet running, shrubbery rustling, and a split second later, chicken alarm call cacophony.

We both just missed seeing the actual attack, though we were right there - P in the coop, me head down in the swiss chard.  By the time we popped out and came running, chickens were in the shrubbery hiding, but loudly chorusing their distress call, and there was nothing to see in the bare area a distance from the coop.  We walked out a bit and looked around at the sky and trees.  At first we saw nothing, then, there it was.  About fifty feet from us, and only maybe 20 feet up on a dead tree branch, a young hawk or a falcon sat still, looking at us.  And at the chickens.  Waiting.

We made a move to see it more clearly, and it flew off.  But then, right after it, a second one hopped out of the deeper greenery, perched for a moment in the same place, and then followed the other one away.  By then we recovered from surprise enough to speed it on its way with some loud clapping and yelling.

We don’t know what they were for sure.  Perhaps young redtails.  They moved too fast, and I didn’t have my glasses on to see clearly.  Two young juveniles learning to hunt?  We will need to ramp up chicken security.  The raptors were smaller than the chickens, but still entirely capable of killing, if not carrying off, a full-grown chicken.  Our pack of roosters came through for us again, giving the alarm call and shepherding the hens to safety.  It seemed that the attack missed this time - no feathers on the ground, and actually siting the raptors to know they weren’t carrying a chicken - but they will likely be back.   (from The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America, regarding red-tails, “Hunts mainly from perch, choosing same sentinel perch day after day….”)  Sigh….

Almost there tomatoes!

We don’t buy much at grocery stores.  In fact, I always feel a bit embarrassed by our cart, or actually, by our basket, since we rarely buy enough to need to roll the cart through the store.  It looks like a terrible diet - often some combination of baking supply, flour, sugar, chocolate, pasta, coffee, butter, raisins, rice and grain products, olive oil, corn chips, cheese.  Maybe, more rarely, some kind of packaged treat or cracker.  And condiments, like vinegars, anchovies, capers, soy sauce, etc.

But most of the rest of what we eat, we grow, or get from someone else who grows it locally. If it’s not in season, we don’t eat it in its fresh form.  So for a big chunk of time now, we’ve dreamed of tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, okra…the things that we just don’t eat fresh for the parts of the year they aren’t in production or lasting in storage.  All spring, new fresh foods trickled in slowly here.  We’ve had lots of greens since March, but adding to that was a challenge - asparagus, green onions, and herbs were mainstays through May and June, but didn’t feel like much variety after a couple weeks.  We’d had no potatoes since last year’s ran out  about the beginning of March.  Radishes and peas and new celery stems in June brought in more variation, and the wild black raspberries were our first fresh fruit.  But even though it is so much anticipated, the suddenness of the classic summer produce is always a surprise.  When it starts to come in, it just really is suddenly….in.

Impossibly skinny haricots verts

The garlic gets harvested in July, and suddenly after months without fresh garlic, we have garlic in everything.  Zucchini, other summer squashes, cucumbers, green beans, the first cherry tomatoes followed by the first magnificent slicing tomatoes, and then, just last night, the first okra.  The first few days of a newly ripening vegetable are treasured and savored as they only can be when, by eating seasonally, your palate knows how special they are.  We had the first tiny potatoes for the 4th of July, then tried to leave them alone, only harvesting enough to have a taste a couple times a week.  I thought nothing could be as delicious as a plate of herbed new potatoes and sugar snap peas. But then after watching eagerly for the first green beans, nothing compared to the first lightly steamed tiny green beans with butter and a fine grating of parmesan. And the first handfuls of cherry tomatoes never made it out of the garden, of course, savored right on the spot. First eggplant arrived last week, and the rain came just in time to plump up a great harvest of wild blackberries this week.

Produce that was only two weeks ago longed for, for months, is suddenly in such full force that it is our daily staple. Last month’s fried eggs over a bed of greens, radicchio, or side of peas, has given way to a huge frittata full of new potatoes, summer squash, corn, shallots and onions, green peppers, basil, and topped with sliced rounds of tomato.

We’ve been eating this salad daily for about a week now:

Dragonwood variation on Caprese salad, with Asian Cucumber and Cherry tomatoes:

Dice up a “Suhyo Long” cucumber.  Halve some cherry tomatoes.  Dice desired amount of mozzarella into half-inch squares.  Finely slice a small onion or a shallot.   Finely slice or tear basil leaves, according to your preference (I don’t like large chunks of rough basil leaf in a mouthful, but rather prefer it delicately through the whole dish, so I finely slice it.  I’ve been adequately informed that this is improper, and basil must always be torn, thanks.)  Toss all vegetables together.   Combine olive oil and a little red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, and shake dressing in a jar until emulsified.  Pour over the salad, toss again.

This is what summer tastes like.  And we are celebrating it at every meal.  Soon, tomatoes will become commonplace, and then they will even perhaps become burdensome, something to be laboriously canned and dried for the winter months.  The green beans are already commonplace, eliciting a “well, we have to eat the green beans twice a day to get rid of them” reaction now, compared to the eagerness a couple weeks ago.  Soon, they will go into pickles and krauts as we truly tire of them.  Such is the life of a seasonal eater.