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.
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Hop on over and check out my recent piece on Culinate: “Rethinking our food priorities: No more cheating on my egg lady“
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Here are the chickens, after a big week in the shed. This week they kind of sprouted up a little — they’re not so round and fluffy — they’re getting kind of tall and chicken-y looking. You can’t see it from this photo, but they’re starting to stand up and crane their little necks. They survived a couple of really cold nights out there in the cardboard box in the dog crate, so that was a triumph. On Saturday, I built them a bigger box — taped two boxes together so now they have the whole 3’x2′ dog crate —…
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This was my other weekend project — cleaning out the garden beds and turning over the soil. I used straw mulch last year, which was a great success, but it was a seedy batch, and I wound up with a sturdy winter cover crop of wheat. I experimented a couple of months ago with just turning it over. But like the grass that I also have troubles with, it kept coming back. So this weekend I went through each bed, digging out the wheat, and the carcasses of dead vegetables, and turned over the soil, breaking up lumps along the…
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This is Raymond, staring at the shed door, because on the far side of that door are four baby chicks in a cardboard box tucked into a dog crate all kept warm by an infrared light. There were six chicks, but I erred and thought they were too hot under the light, and so two of them caught a chill and gave up their tiny little ghosts. They’re resting peacefully in the compost pile. Here’s the little peepers. Saturday morning I called Murdochs, our local ranch store to see if the chicks had come in (they’ve had a shortage this…