Coffee is just one of those things for me.  I can (do) drink it pretty much all day, and even a bit in the evening, and not feel too much effect.  I like a good cup, but am not much a snob about it.  Well, not true… I don’t like bad convenience store coffee and dislike styrofoam-like cups (some are truly evil, especially some of the newer fine-grained foam ones).

But this isn’t about dislikes, its about what I like right now.  What I am liking right now.  Here is a photo of this morning’s Joe… Mandyrose’s cup is on the right, mine on the left, presspot by Bodum above, maple syrup from 2008 above left.  Our blend du jour is 2/3 ground beans of French Roast by Coffee Express here in Michigan, and 1/3 Irish Creme Decaf from By The Pound in A2.

Grind it medium-fine, add near boiling water halfway up the presspot and stir well, then add the rest of the water and set the top on.  Wait a couple minutes for just the right combination of caffeine and other goodies to move out of the beans and into the water (and perhaps even some of the ions in our well water to adsorb onto the coffee grounds) and then give it a slow, 30-second press to the bottom of the pot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the hot water has been warming our coffee cups.  Pour those off into the dishwater, and pour Mandyrose’s coffee first (she likes it hot).  Add maple syrup to sweeten a bit, pour in a dose of good (really good, fresh, non-homogenated) whole milk (shake a bit first so it’s not all cream), stir once and serve.  Then pour mine and sweeten, sans milk (ok, sometimes I add the milk too).

Creamy, a little bit Irish, mmmmm.

Now about presspots… there’s just something wonderful and clean about this coffee’s taste that I don’t get anywhere else.  I think it’s because no matter how fancy the machine, you just can’t get access to fully clean every part and hose and pipe that the water touches… or if you can, you don’t often do so.  Hot water with ions leaves residues when it evaporates away… period.  You can’t avoid it.  Distilled water? Maybe.  But not once it gets coffee in it.

But a presspot is glass and steel, with perhaps a bit of plastic near the top for a final strain (but my next one won’t have that plastic), but basically you’ve got hot water and coffee in an easily cleaned vessel, pure and simple.  And the taste of the coffee is all coffee, no residue.

My mother and I have discussed coffee over the years.  I had bought her some better beans a few times, and made my best for her, but she didn’t really like any of them.  Each time I visited I would try some different things to see what she liked, and finally one day she said, regarding a cup of joe I had not made, “Now this is what I’m talking about!”  The common denominator, after all these years, was the taste of the residue from coffee makers.  The particular coffee in question was from one of those enormous church percolator pots, with the big coffee basket on top.  The crew in charge had (fortunately) not over percolated this brew, so it was as good as such coffee gets, but was full of the unmistakable taste of years of hard water + ordinary coffee grounds with a simple rinse instead of cleaning.  Those big church-hall coffee makers are something else in that regard, building a patina of taste that lingers with me from my earliest coffee tasting attempts at church functions when I was 7 or 8 (lots of cream and sugar).  But that’s what Mom likes!  It’s that residue taste that is missing from all my other attempts to introduce her to coffee bliss.  So I just use her coffee in her coffee maker when I visit her, and all is well.

Ordinary coffee makers (of the Mr. Coffee variety) do the same thing, more or less.  Mostly less, of course, but unless you clean the heck out of them, with hot vinegar washes and the works, they gradually build up the same types of residue and produce the same types of extra tastes for you to get accustomed to.  I spent a week recently with a friend who makes espresso in a beautiful machine, a machine fastidiously cleaned… except of course it isn’t.  There are innards that get residue built up, and I could detect something like a residue buildup taste, or at least I believed I could.

But my presspot, it’s just coffee and the glass.  Pure and simple, and repeatable.  Our coffee always tastes the same.  Mom doesn’t like it much, but she doesn’t have to.  She knows what she likes.  We do too.  And with my third little cup finished, so is this post.  Have a good day.  Oh, and Hi Mom! :-)

So, I just had to post our lunch today, or is it dinner.  Our tomatoes have been SO incredibly good.  They’ve also been bursting at the seams, the rains have been so frequent and the humidity high.  Our horizontal tomato bushes (hardly ‘plants’) are going nuts, and it’s way hard to keep up.

BLT w/ S4L in the making

With tomatoes, we’ve had so many split fruit this year that we have only been able to take a small fraction to the Westside Farmers Market.  The best go to market, and the rest stay here for canning and eating.  But today, we made BLT’s from two of the nicest tomatoes we took to market… and nobody bought.  The crazy thing is, these are just incredibly good eating tomatoes, the kind everyone says “Oh, I wish I could find tomatoes like I remember from the garden when I was a kid.  Now THOSE were tomatoes!”  Well that’s what these are.

But the thing is, they don’t look like we remember them.  And I think it’s a problem of implanted memories, like the ones they worry about in criminal trials where witnesses try to remember details of something that happened years ago, but they include details and ideas that they may believe are actual memories, but are really just implanted ideas that have insinuated themselves over the years.

In the case of tomatoes, we’ve become conditioned to believe that these mystical tomatoes are red.  Perfectly red.  Uniformly and gorgeously consistently red.  Because that’s what line we are being fed by the grocery stores.  We can’t help it… Agribusiness has bred red tomatoes with long shelf life for decades now, and that’s what we see in the store shelves.  These tomatoes get red before they’re really ripe, so that they can be picked early when they’re hard and can be transported easily.  They’ve got tough skins so that they hold up to transport from big farm to distributor warehouse and warehouse to big box grocery produce section.  They treat them with ethylene gas to help ripen them up.  And the message is not just in front of us everytime we go to the produce section… and who (besides us) doesn’t go to the produce section?

These damn perfect red hard skinned tasteless bastards of agribusiness are sold to us with every TV commercial touting “Fresh!”.  Pizza commercials, restaurant commercials, pasta commercials, and in countless magazine articles.  Red.  All red, consistently red, inside and out red.

But it’s not where the really good tomatoes are.  It’s not what we grow to eat at Dragonwood, and it’s not what we sell (at least not very much).  We grow the tomatoes we want most to eat, and they’re not very red typically, they’re not very consistent, they’re just not usually “beautiful” to the modern consumer’s eye.  I’m not going to list off all the varieties we grow… and I certainly can’t pick every tomato out of the garden basket and tell you which it is (Mandy can, mostly).  They’re yellow and orange, purple and green, and usually inconsistent.  Some have green shoulders even when they’re perfectly ripe, and some have such deep purple insides that they look a bit rotten from the outside!  But I’ve learned the difference between conventional (red!) beauty and tomatoes prized for their taste.  I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this tomato season.  In fact, I want to thank all those customers at the market this week who didn’t pick the best tomatoes so that they could go into my lunch sandwich today.  But I do hope they (some of them) might read this, and at their next market go to the vendors who prize their tomatoes for flavor, who have mostly tomatoes that look funny (less than perfect red), and talk tomato with the growers, and take home a variety of funny looking tomatoes to relish.  Vive la différence!

Oh, I got off topic didn’t I?  We have no (capital L) lettuce these days, so our sandwiches had green bean slaw, which you can see in the photo.  It’s fantastic stuff… beans + non-iodized salt + time, and bingo, what a delish relish.  With a side of tomato wedges, all colors.  Mmmm.

Zucchini Chocolate Chip Yum

How much can I say about this healthy breakfast treat?  A cup of coffee and a nice piece of Zucchini Chocolate Chip Yum.  Ahhh.  Oh, and that’s my favorite coffee cup, a DaRo design original… Mandy has a handle free DaRo cup with a similar glaze pattern, our morning coffee ritual cups.  Too bad we don’t have zucchini all year round to start the day like this during all our Dragonwood seasons.

So, mowing our yard is not so much for keeping the neighbors happy at our tidiness (hah!) as it is a harvest.  Our gardening style is, as much as possible, to mulch the place like mad to keep the grasses and other bystanders somewhat at bay.  We just don’t have time for massive and continuous weeding operations, so we try to keep overgrowth at bay by burying it.  It works reasonably well, but takes massive amounts of mulch to do so.

Mulch raking in progress

We have two main sources of mulch.  The first, as seen in the photos above, is yard clippings.  This is my harvest.  I mow the yard in patterns amenable to raking, since I have no mechanized way of picking up the clippings…  I rake by hand.  So it takes several hours to mow the whole place, and several more hours to rake down the rows of clippings (after they sit for a couple days).  In a good mowing I get about 10 full garden carts of clippings (about the amount I can comfortably pull up the grassy hill).  Then I spread it out wherever it’s needed, or make a big pile for use later.

Pumpkins like mulch

In this photo we used it to extend the new pumpkin patch farther out into the yard.  The pumpkins are looking happy to have the extra space, here in this foggy dusky summer evening shot.

Our other main source of mulch is wet hay.  When, over at the family farm, the weather doesn’t cooperate and a pile of hay comes in that’s too wet to store and isn’t immediately needed for the horses or sheep, then a trailer full appears at Dragonwood.  We used that in the new pumpkin/corn/potato/squash patch as we sowed seedlings to make a good base for all the pathways between the plantings.  That particular patch (about 16×100 feet) was well mulched to start and has fewer weeds by far than those garden patches we didn’t manage to mulch so thoroughly.  As in the pumpkin photo above, our use of mulch around the edges has expanded that patch to about 20 some feet wide and 120 feet long now, an easy way to grow the field by mulching down the grass on each side :-)

And if you’ll excuse me now, I have a lot of raking to do.

So, to follow up my last fishin’ post, here’s a quick photo I took of the bluegill and bass heaven where I caught ‘em.

Bass and bluegill heaven (at least as far as my fly casting is concerned)

Just a perfect spot for fly fishing around the edges without getting your feet wet and (almost) never snagging in anything behind you (thanks sheep and horseys).   Next time I just might wade in to get out a little farther from shore.

I went fishing tonight, at a family farm pond.  I haven’t had my fly rods out in about 20 years or more, and haven’t seriously fished for much longer.  But Brian said he threw three worms in last week and caught three nice bluegills, and the weather was just so cooperative today, and I finished all my mowing, so about 7pm I was over there with my two 30-some year old rods and my 40-some year old vest and ready to fish.

My goals for the evening were modest:

1. Find out if my equipment still works.

2. Find out if my muscle memory for fly casting still works.

3. Drop at least a few flies into the water right where I intended to drop them.

4. Catch a fish.

… and if those work, then the list expands to:

5. Catch a keeper.

It was a beautiful evening.  When I first arrived at the lake a heron flew away, the goose flock was at the far end of the lake, a kingfisher rattled away across the lake to a dead tree, and a doe and fawn were getting a drink down near the geese.  The day’s wind had died, making the pond flat as can be, and the sky was gorgeously colorful, with little yellow rims on the little puffy clouds.

Unfortunately there was not a fish rise to be seen on the pond surface.  Nada.  But I paid out some line and started flexing my arms and working the line and dropped my little red dry fly out near some lily pads.  More nada.  I fished ten minutes without a bite, but I met my first three goals pretty easily.  It’s hard to kill decent fly fishing gear, and I’m just not that out of shape, so I focused more on #4.  I changed rods and put on a white streamer fly.  About then a fish rose in the lily pads, and then rose again a little closer to the edge of the pad cluster.  I dropped my fly right next to the pads, but had a bit of excess line paid out by my feet.  So the fly rested there a moment longer than I intended while I gathered in the excess and when I finally took up the slack (it’s only been a few seconds, really) Bingo, Fish On.  Forgetting for the moment that I was fishing for little bluegills and not lunker bass or Bahamian snappers, I reared back with the rod to set the hook and a 6″ largemouth bass flew out of the water across 10 feet or so and landed in the weeds near my feet.  Oops!  He was fine and swam off a moment later.

Brian came over the hill and beckoned to go to the other side of the pond.  It was a good choice… my side faced west into the sun.  I followed, and caught and returned another small bass, and then Brian said Hey What Do You Think The Bucket Is For?  Turns out we were keeping our catch to stock the little swamp drainage pond that sources most of their mosquitoes.  Natural pest control.  Brian just made my Goal #5 a lot easier.  I caught that same bass, or his brother, about three casts later, and then suffered a little drought.  The fish just weren’t rising, and weren’t biting.  Brian had tried a worm, a popper, a frog and back to the worms and had only caught one bluegill.  But as the sun got lower, all of a sudden they started hitting my flies just about every cast.  Only once did I get a hit at the surface… all the rest were on a fairly fast retrieve, pulling in the line to make the fly act like a minnow trying to escape.  I caught three in three casts at one point.

It was a great evening, and I even got home before it was completely dark, in time to shut up the chickens for the night.  We filled up a stringer plus a couple more in the bucket… I think we took 11 or so fish (half bass, half bluegills and sunnies) to the mosquito pond.  I caught twice or thrice what Brian caught, which is a first for me.  I never catch more on flies than the bait fishing folks I’m with.  But he did have 1 year old Sophie in his arms most of the time, and he did switch bait and tackle a fair bit.  Maybe next time I’ll try taking Sophie for some of the time.  Maybe.

The new banner above is Gina, one of our yearling mother cats, acting like a kitten again.  She had a nice litter of 5 kittens a couple months back, and is now enjoying a second kittenhood.  We were eating at the picnic table when suddenly she leapfrogged over the other kittens and raced up into the redbud tree beside us, and I snapped this picture with my camera phone, moving as I tried to follow her.  She has wonderfully bright round eyes, open wide almost all the time, and this picture captures some of that.  But mostly it’s just another day with the cats in The Garden at Dragonwood.  She came down from the tree within thirty seconds and went back to being aloof mother cat.

Oh, and I promise to work on a page about the Cats of Dragonwood, and a page of Dragonwood Banners too.  Really.  I do.

As I walked back from the east coop this morning, I could hear the gentle rain falling on the tree leaves more than I could feel it dropping on my naked arms.  It was one of those quiet summer rains so subtle that it doesn’t show up on radar (I checked) and won’t really get you wet unless it lasts 10 minutes or so.

This rain did just that, and dampened these phlox sweetly (which I caught on my new iPhone 4 camera, which I already love.  Took the new website banner photo of a sweet kitten face with this camera too).  Several more times this morning I’ve heard the rainsong, a longtime summer favorite.  More a lullaby than the familiar Sousa March of a summer thunderstorm, Ferret our indoor cat sleeps soundly through it all.

This is my job today.  Finish it up.  Last week I rototilled the overgrown 15×20′ patch, after strategically removing a few straggling irises.  This week I’ve managed to rake and get down to the deep roots of most of the grasses over half the patch.

Paul with three-prong rake, sheep-based compost and the new potato patch.

Here I am with a barrow of composted sheep-manure plus straw fertilizer/mulch covering the first half of the plot.  Today… the remaining 150 square feet gets derooted and covered.

It truly is lovely filth though.  Very little smell at all, compared to the manure spread on local fields, whether sprayed as a liquid (what liquid is that, exactly?) or thrown from a manure spreader.  I don’t think most farmers really let their manure get composted like this stuff has.  We’re spreading it on thick enough to (hopefully) keep the light out and inhibit the grasses growing back very much until we get potatoes in.

We need new potato patches to help keep the pest population down (those that like to overwinter and be ready to chow down when potatoes come up again).  Anything that helps in this regard is good for me… I take responsibility for much of the potato patch hand pest picking during the growing season.

But that takes me away from this filth.  Lovely filth, from lovely sheep in their lovely barn with their lovely bouncing lambs, who will in turn later this year taste oh so lovely too.  Lovely sheep, lovely compost, lovely vegetables, oh lovely all around.

And now it’s afternoon, and time to end this lovely post and go back to my 150 square feet.  Fortunately, Mandy found me a nicer tool (pictured above, but you can’t really tell) to use, a three-pronged garden weeder with long prongs.  I was using a stiff-pronged garden rake, but it has about a dozen short prongs and is almost impossible to apply with enough force to get deep roots out.  But this three-pronged beauty goes right down and saves me work.  I have high hopes of finishing this bed off by 5pm.

It was inevitable, following my reprehensible actions. Late last week I expressed dismay (? well, at least disbelief) that I had not once this winter shoveled our driveway. It was very shortly thereafter that the first inklings of the latest (last night’s) snowstorm started to hit the weather predictions. Then over the weekend I found opportunity again, and repeated my proclamation, thus sealing today’s “snow day” for schools all over the midwest, and adding another X inches of in the east and northeast today. To all who feel inconvenienced by my actions, I apologize. To those who get out and enjoy this snow, You’re Welcome!

I was up last night around 2am, helping Mandy get out the door and on the road, in the middle of the snowfall. Actually, near the end. We already had 8-10″ on the ground and only a couple more inches fell after that. It was beautiful outside, and the snow was perfect powder, light and fluffy… a joy to shovel, or even to sweep.

my winter friend Tippy

This morning though, it was worktime. After coffee and some early emails, I headed outside with water and feed for the chickens. First I shoveled out to the west flock (not so far) and shoveled out a circular path for them in their yard. Then I invited them out and sprinkled scratch grains all along the circular drive… half of them joined me. Changed water, collected eggs, added feed, chatted up the peeps (6 little ones, three months old, have their own little corral in the coop) and headed back to restock.

Tippy joined me then, stretching as he came out of the garage… the other cats (Caprica 6, Georgina and Sassy - our three polydactyls) had been across at the east flock last night, so I hadn’t expected to see anyone this morning here. Tippy rides my shoulder all winter long whenever he’s around, and he mewed to jump up.

As we trudged across to the east flock through the drifts (not quite knee high), I found I was following Tippy’s footpath. Obviously it was the footpath we use every day, but the 6″ of snow that had fallen since yesterday’s trip to close up the east flock and the blowing powder should have obliterated the path… but here it was, freshly marked by Tippyprints only partially reclaimed by the drifts.

Tippy's trackway, 10" powder

O Intrepid Cat! O Noisome Traveler! (I could say noisy, but sometimes this field cat is more noisome than noisy). After following his path, I could see that he went from the east coop barn overnight, over to the nearby garage, then back to the usual path and over to find me. He had leapt through the deepest snow in several places, but mostly trudged through the powder dragging his belly. I was proud of him then. He is a fine companion cat for the out of doors.

The chickens are all fine this morning. I used my boots to scuffle out a smaller circlepath for the east flock and scattered their scratch grains outside too. The roosters deigned to join the hens this morning, as seems their fair-weather prerogative. But everyone seemed happy. And I was too.