The cold frame is full of tomato, zucchini, and leek seedlings — I checked this afternoon and although it was only 42 outside, it was 65 inside the cold frame. It’s still snow/raining, although everything is that bright saturated green that comes with spring in the mountains. The apple trees are just starting to leaf out, and we’re on the look for morels, although no one I’ve talked to has found any of them yet. The chickens are just waiting for the finishing touches to move outside — they need a fence, and a door to the coop, and a…
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They’re not really hairy, but I couldn’t resist the title. Sorry about the dearth of blogging — I’ve been off falling in love this spring, and well, as much as I adore you all my blog readers, the other guy is kind of distracting, in the best way possible. However, in the meantime, my cheeses have been growing the right sort of furry white mold that you want to see on a camembert. The directions said to ripen them in the fridge, but the fridge was a little too cold for mold — so I put the cheese “cave” container…
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FaceBook is a funny thing — I have deeply mixed feelings about it although I do like being in a sort of everyday casual contact with lots of old friends. On Saturday, when I was in between garden chores, I checked in to see what was happening and my old friend Sean O’Grady had posted Jim Houston’s obituary in the New York Times. I had no idea he’d been ill, and was just shocked that he’s gone. Jim was a tall, gentle man who you could count on to give you a true reading of your work. The very first…
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I took Easter Monday off from work, which was lovely for many reasons, among them that I got the early crops planted. I put in peas (Garden Knight and Telephone from Seeds of Italy), fava beans, arugula, broccoli rabe, a Japanese mustard green that I don’t have the packet in front of me and can’t remember the name, beets (chiogga and early wonder) and chard. And then it snowed all week. Nice wet spring snow, which was good for all those little seeds, but which did leave one wondering if winter is ever going to end. Despite the snow, the…
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Here are the chickens — they’re so goofy looking right now, they seem to be in whatever passes for eighth grade in chicken-dom. Their feet are enormous, and while their feathers are coming in, they’re still not really feathered out (look at their funny tails). But they’re getting little chicken-y personalities, and they like to torment the dogs by flapping their wings. I took the chooks outside for a little air last week, and here’s Raymond watching them. He spent the entire afternoon out there, occasionally running inside to whine at me that there were birds! birds! out there. In…
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Here are my first two baby camemberts. I made them last Thursday — and while the recipe was not difficult at all — it’s the same basic cheesemaking skills — heating milk, adding cultures, waiting for a clean break, cutting and separating curds from whey, and molding the cheeses. It’s not difficult. Where the magic seems to come in is in the waiting. The cheeses are in the fridge, in their mini-cave made from a plastic storage box, and I’m waiting for the mold to form on their surfaces.I’m a little concerned that they are not entirely smooth — there…
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The weather has turned glorious, sunny and warm with intermittent rains — the lawn has greened up overnight and there are daffodils and crocus blooming in the foundation beds. I’ve been up to all sorts of fun. I made a couple of camembert cheeses that are ripening in the fridge, the chickens are getting big and we’re planning to build them a coop out of a packing crate in which a friend had some family things shipped over from England, and I planted lots of cold weather crops in the garden over the long weekend. And perhaps the happiest of…
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Blogging is sort of on hiatus for a week or so. “My” kids are back in town from LA for Easter break, there’s so much going on in the garden that I can’t keep up, and there are some other happy developments here at LivingSmall. So we’ll be back next week with lots of fun news.