What you see here are the remains of an orchard.

An orchard I drive by often, on the grounds of an empty house. Last year, on my drives, I watched as the trees blossomed in billows of white that sent apple-blossom fragrance through the car, watches as the apples ripened, fell unused to the ground, or clung to the branches after the leaves were gone, shrivelling as they froze. I thought a couple times of trying to track down someone who might be able to give me permission to gather and use the apples, as they were likely unsprayed, in their abandoned state.

Now, as winter draws to a close, the grounds of the house are filled with bulldozers. Other large trees on the property have been felled and bulldozed into piles, likely for burning at some point. I looked at the orchard with a sinking feeling in my stomach - surely they wouldn’t bulldoze it? Surely, someone would value a pretty, productive, beautifully laid out little orchard right in their backyard? Surely, a community would not bulldoze an asset that takes years to establish?

But no, the day came when on my drive by, the beautiful little apple trees had been hacked down to these trunk stumps. The stumps have sat like this for weeks now. They must be awaiting the bulldozer. The bulldozer sits quietly beside them. I wonder, why not just bulldoze them, then, and be done with it? Why leave it like a mockery to spring? Was it important to chop the tops off the trees before the buds begin to swell and look alive? Important to start the destruction before the blossoms break and create a reminder of what is being destroyed?

Someday, I am convinced, (some of) our decendants will look back on this time as we do upon historical times of misled thinking, and wonder at how it could have been so. How could a society condone bulldozing trees into piles to burn, rather than at least providing firewood to the community? How could they destroy a productive source of local fruit, then pay in so many ways to ship what they eat thousands of miles? How does this make sense? I am filled with sadness when I drive past this spot.

I wonder what they will name the subdivision. “Apple Acres”, perhaps.

Must have done something right with the eggplant seeds this year. I was feeling behind, off to a late start on the seeds I usually start in February. So I soaked the eggplant seeds for a day before planting them. Eggplants need warmth to grow quickly, so their seed trays are also parked on a seed heating mat, and located near the woodstove. It all seemed to make a difference: eggplant seeds that often take 2+weeks to germinate were up in a record 5-7 days!

We’re growing 4 varieties of eggplant: Japanese Long Pickling, Pingtung Long, Rosa Bianca, and Snowy. The Asian varieties are more reliable, earlier fruiting, and perhaps grow a little faster. Snowy is a white eggplant that was one of the few productive survivors of last year’s eggplant debacle. Rosa Bianca is a beautiful eggplant dream I chase…. supposedly requiring too long a season in this area to produce, but the fruit are so delicious and so beautiful that I will try until I have reason to give it up. Last year I ended up with only 3 specimens of Rosa Bianca fruit - but the circumstances were extreme! Hoping for better this year….

I keep thinking of joining the Dark Days Challenge, but don’t quite. We make locally produced food (much of it our own) a feature of most meals already, rather than a feature once a week. I think our general approach is to eat mostly local food, and most of that is grown by ourselves, or someone closeby we know. But our effort seems to be put into having a significant part of almost every meal be local… rather than having limited times of being completely local.

Brunch today: (A sub-average one for us actually - it’s rare not to have some kind of homegrown vegetable, either in an omolette, or a side of cabbage or brussels sprouts…)

Sourdough bread using the recipe from Jeff Hertzberg, published in Mother Earth News, and using local flour. Eggs produced here at home; quince jelly we made from quinces that grew here. Butter, salt&pepper, and coffee were not local. Milk in coffee from a local source.

It fascinates me to see how many people are photographing their food, and their cooking processes in the kitchen. I feel drawn to do the same thing. When you grow and cook your own food, there is such wholeness to it, such wonder in it. I think it shows what a rediscovery it is, to want to document it.

Someone commented to me last night, “Well, so the garden is finished now, right? You’re not getting anything much out of it anymore?”

There is so much. We are so fortunate to still be pulling so much fresh food out of the garden for most meals. I guess, sometimes it’s hard to see beyond tomatoes, basil, potatoes, and zucchini, and recognize what’s still there when they’re gone.

So here’s what we’re still harvesting:

Brussels Sprouts… my favorite at this time of year. They are so good after a couple frosts, and just very lightly cooked until they are bright green. Dress with butter, some chopped chervil, parsley or dill, or balsamic vinegar.

Oh, the chervil, parsley and dill come from the garden still. And green onions. And thyme and sage.

Broccoli (little tiny florets “pre-cut”).

Celery. Beets.   Leeks…tons of leeks.  Radiccio.  Cabbage.  Carrots. Still have some potatoes to dig, just a few.

Parsnips and Rutabega. There are some Turnips there, but have been harvesting greens from them more than liking the roots.

Greens: (Our house salad mix is currently lettuce-free, as the voles ate ALL of several plantings of lettuce)…Mizuna, Chard, Kale of several types, Mustard greens, Arugula, Spinach, Beet greens

Corn salad is coming along, not ready quite yet.    Found a couple self-seeded Radishes.

There is still so much in the garden.

Friday the 13th:  We know now that we’ve been losing chickens this week.  About 10.  About one a day, since about when the leaves fell.  We’ve seen the hawk several times.  This morning I got up early and when it was light walked out in the morning mist.  The weeds and branches were softer in the fine rain, and didn’t cling to me so much as yesterday.  I found three spots, as though visiting shrines on a pilgrimage, where a sad soft cloud of feathers on the ground marked a chicken loss.  The cobwebs dripped teardrops when I brushed them.  And the complicated interwoven circle of life goes on.

Discovering membrillo has been a revelation.

Quince Paste - Membrillo

We found out about it when we were researching what to do with our quince harvest a couple years ago. Quinces are hard, tart, and astringent raw, but cooked they soften and sweeten, and when cooked down, they magically turn from dun yellow stuff to clear, rosy red.

Membrillo is quince paste. Think of some meeting of fruit leather, jelly beans, and apple butter. The flavor is mild and flowery, but in appearance, it looks like a slab of organ meat. The traditional way of serving it in Spain is sliced with manchego cheese as a snack. We do the same with it, but also love it tucked into a hot popover with butter, sliced on toast, or just by itself.

quince pieces and cores ready for cooking

see the pectin-rich goo around the seeds?

We made membrillo by starting with the quinces, washed, and cut up. Most recipes say get rid of the cores, but I noticed that the cores seem to have a huge amount of pectin in them, which I wanted. (Pectin makes things gel!) So I boiled the best cores in a little pan and added that water to the big pot.

The cut-up quinces go into a pan with a little water, and brought to a boil. They cook until the fruit is soft and can be mashed easily.

processed, ready for second cooking

Drain off excess water, add the little bit of water the cores cooked in, and run the fruit through a food processor until it is a smooth yellow applesauce-y consistency.

Now, according to most recipes, the sauce is measured, and an equal or nearly equal amount of sugar (by volume) is added. I sweeten it by taste instead, and usually end up using 1/2 to 2/3 the sugar recommended.

This all goes into a heavy-bottomed saucepan (pick one that reduces jams and jellies easily, without burning!). Now comes the part that requires a fair bit of patience. The sauce is cooked over medium-low heat, stirring often to nearly constantly, until it thickens, loses moisture, and turns into a lovely shade of merlot red. If you leave it to cook on its own, it will burn to the pan!! It will begin to move and bubble slowly like lava, with steam-holes bursting through, and throwing red bits around your stove, or up to your ceiling, if the heat is too high!

When it’s thickened about until you can swipe the spoon through it and see the bottom of the pan for a moment, or it’s starting to hold shapes you stir into it, it’s ready. Have ready some lightly buttered pans (or line with parchment paper and butter over it). Pour the sauce into the pans, to about an inch thick or less, and smooth the top. Leave this to cool undisturbed at room temperature, and surprise! It magically solidifies into a gel that slides easily out of the buttered pan, and can be cut into squares or wedges. (This year…we’re going to try cutting into small squares and chocolate-covering it…) Another bonus - a big batch can be made and stored in the fridge, well-wrapped, for literally months.

Cooked down and ready to pour

membrillo setting up

We are blessed with a quince tree in the back yard.

It blooms with beautiful white flowers in the spring, and by fall, if it’s a good year, the branches are weighed heavily by fuzzy yellow fruit.  This year was a great year for the quince tree!

We picked quinces a week or two ago on a rainy day when our raincoats exactly matched the color of the fruit.

Quinces are an intriguing fruit that looks like a combination between a yellow apple and a pear.  But if you bite into one raw, the high level of tannins make you feel like the insides of your cheeks are trying to adhere to your tongue!  They need to be cooked……next post!

The garlic is finally all planted, as of today. We planted nearly 600 cloves this year - alot for two people fitting in planting around jobs, weather, and early darkness, but little in the sense of selling market garlic. I also started a nursery bed to experiment with some small-but-potentially nice garlic found growing wild on a roadside, and some bulbils we let mature on the two varieties I’ve grown for about 7 years now. It might take several years of planting, culling, and replanting to see what those can do, but it’s a fun experiment.

Last year I didn’t plant as much as I’d planned on, because the ground froze sometime in October or November when I was counting on planting more, and didn’t really thaw again. (Garlic goes in the ground in the fall, overwinters, then sprouts early in the spring and grows a new bulb ready to harvest in July or August.) But we had a nice amount to sell steadily at the Westside Farmer’s Market from July through the end of September. We saved the best, largest for replanting for next year’s crop. Before planting, we spent a couple hours breaking up bulbs & sorting and counting the best for planting.

The yearly garlic planting ritual here usually involves at least one session of planting in cold blowing wind and rainy drizzle - feeling rushed in case the temperature suddenly drops; this year it’s been much warmer than some past. But the amount of rain we’ve had in the past few weeks ensured coming in from each planting session with gloves, jeans, and boots caked in mud and grime!

Caprica 6, our polydactyl (”Hemingway”) cat, had two kittens about 3 1/2 weeks ago. She moved them five times. They were born outdoors somewhere, then moved into the garage at 5 days, then moved outdoors outside the garage, then far away in another outdoor location, then back into the garage again last night.

Caprica shows off her extra digits

Caprica is an enigma. We don’t know where she came from. She appeared early this spring as a pregnant seemingly-teenage mother, completely feral but apparently starved enough to approach humans. We fed her well, but she lost her litter, probably not able to make milk or care for them in the condition she was in. Slowly, over the summer, she gained weight, warmed to us, and finally allowed us to begin to pet her a little bit. She never loses her nervousness entirely. On the day that we were first able to really pet her while she was lying down, we noticed that on each front paw, one of her extra toes had grown a terrifically long and horrible claw that curved around and pierced the skin between her toes, because it doesn’t wear normally. Her own claws were growing into her foot. We wrapped her up in a towel and trimmed them. We noticed the next day, and ever since, that she meowed differently - she used to yowl with each meow, and now she doesn’t so much.

Wild creature of the forest

Polydactyl cats have extra toes! Ernest Hemingway’s house grounds was, and continues to be, home to polydactyl cats, thus the nickname Hemingway Cats. It’s a genetic propensity that Caprica has passed to her two kittens. In fact, one of them has more toes than she does!

“I have HOW many extra toes on my feet??!”

You can find out more about polydactyls here. And at this informative site, too.