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.

A month and a half now since we last posted.

We talk about writing more, writing our stories, about documenting our farming more.  We have eager readers telling us they love our blog and keep checking for the next post!  We have great intentions.  And then there’s life.

Recently I checked in with some farming blogs I like, and was comforted to find that many of them at times seem not to keep up with regular posting too, like us.  Or they take the summer off.  And then there are the familiar apologetic posts, mentioning how long it’s been, how busy it’s been, vowing to be better at posting…. And I slowly came to the lightbulb moment of realizing that if you’re really farming….you’re often simply too busy to compose an essay about it!

We took a few days off and went away for a break last week.  This has been a difficult year, and I badly needed to see something else…something like mossy boulders, water, sand, silent boreal forest.

We weren’t gone long, actually only had 4 days of not laying eyes on the gardens.  But when we returned at the end of the last day…..the place had turned to a jungle in 6 days.

It taught me how much I do in a day, and how much there is TO do in a day.  Day to day work, chores & activities make it hard to spot the differences we make, and it’s easy to focus on (and feel bad about) the things that don’t get done.

But stop doing any of it for even 6 days, and you really see it.  The weeds are miles high, the popcorn and squashes grew 2 feet.  The tomatoes I didn’t get to staking are horizontal on the ground, and nothing to do about that now.  The green beans were going past, and the chickens got to eat a lot of overgrown zucchini.  But it helps to remember that they were all just packets of tiny dry seeds just very recently. And, but for the invisible daily efforts, they would be still.

In this world, there are so many things and people telling us we aren’t doing enough.  We aren’t giving enough, we aren’t working hard enough.  We aren’t chipping in, going the extra mile, shouldering the pack, showing volunteer spirit, making the deadline.  I almost always feel like one of me isn’t enough.  I often feel guilty even for doing something for myself as simple as writing on this blog - when there are so many people wanting so many things out there.  I treasure these moments of perspective, before diving back in again.

Home from the offices at 6:30pm, been there all day.  Quick snack, no time for more, gotta use the daylight, when it’s not 90 degrees, or pouring down lightning and rain.  Hurry and gather eggs.  Out to the new garden plot.  Arms are sore from yesterday’s hoeing of heavy wet clayey soil up over the 160-odd feet of potatoes planted.  Carried out 21 more hot pepper plants, and 20 more eggplants.  Hacked holes in the same wet heavy clayey soil, planted the plants.  Mulched, weeded, checked other newly planted plants for bugs, moles, disasters, took stock of what we can sell at market on Thursday.  One branch of a newly planted apple tree is broken in the storms - the tree’s so little, the one branch makes up about 1/3 of it’s mass.  Branch is hanging by a strip of bark, and the leaves not wilted - position it carefully, and wrap it with grafting tape and splint it -it may survive and heal.  On one of the trips to and fro from the house, picked the asparagus and took it in, started pots of lentils and rice on the stove, returned a couple client phone calls.  Pulled up the wires from beds that don’t need row covers anymore, moved them to the other garden to cover the eggplants.  Quickly cut and placed TP tube cardboard collars around each new plant, to protect the little stem from cutworms and rabbit teeth.  Getting dark now, working faster.  P helps place new support wire hoops and cut and stretch and tuck and fasten the rowcover, to keep out the deer and the fleabeetles.  Carry the tools and supplies back to garage.  Run back to house to check on the rice and lentils on the stove.  Grab the salad spinner, hike back out with the scissors to pick lettuce for supper and tomorrow’s lunch.  Notice the slugs returning after the rains, grab the slug-picking container, go from row to row brushing slugs into it.  Now the hips and legs and back are really starting to hurt, end of a long day, kneel, squat, bend, stand, over and over.  Drown the container of slugs in a bucket of water.  Have I mentioned how I hate slugs?  Not as much as I hate chemicals.  P is shutting up the chickens for the night.  Give the lettuce a first washing out in the garden. Grab a fresh young garlic and handful of herbs for the lentils, handful of radishes for the salad.  Pull off the lettuce rowcovers for the night, and the rain.  Run in, check stove, start chopping herbs and radishes.  Was soaking some bean seeds for quick germination that didn’t make it into the ground before dark fell tonight - drain them and pack them to last the night until tomorrow.  Throw together the lentils and herbs and seasoning, a quick salad, pass the asparagus coated in olive oil under the broiler - done, supper by 10pm?

Learning to overwinter greens was one of those lifechanging events for me, when I first started about 6 or 7 years ago.  This year we’ve been eating out of the garden since February, when the hoop tunnels started to yield the first spinach and mache.  A lot of the first salads are as much foraged as cultivated.  In March, our greens featured the spinach & mache, a little overwintered lettuce, violet leaves, a little overwintered kale & chard putting out tiny new leaves, overwintered radiccio, early-emerging sorrel, chervil, parsley, and dandelion greens. A couple planters sown with spindly lettuce and mache, grown on the porch, filled it out.

Dandelions allowed to grow and covered with mulch give blanched tender leaf sprouts with a flavor very similar to Belgian endive, their close relative.  Rather than weed them out, I leave many of them be in the fall, cover them with leaves, and harvest in March and April.

Our banner above, for this season, shows our overwintered “wild baby greens” salad mix.  Lettuce is being planted now, to come in for May and start off at the Westside Farmers Market in June.  :)

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.

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.