Grape jelly in the cool winter light of the hoop house. Pastel on board, 16 x 20.
Archive for November, 2010
New work
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010(First) Snow Becoming Light by Morning
Saturday, November 27th, 2010
In case you sit across from the meteorologist tonight,
and in case the dim light over the booth in the bar still shines
almost planetary on your large, smooth, winter-softened
forehead, in case all of the day—its woods and play, its fire—
has stayed on your beard, and will stay through the slight
drift of mouth, the slackening of even your heart’s muscle—
. . . well. I am filled with snow. There’s nothing to do now
but wait.
Jill Osier
Pre-game
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010The menu for Thanksgiving Dinner 2010 stands as follows:
Martha Stewart’s Gruyere Thyme refrigerator crackers, made with Seal Cove mixed milk aged cheese “Olga” instead of Gruyere. Thank you for the delicious sample, Betsy! The crackers are incredibly simple to make but do need to chill overnight, so I’m making them in between blog posts. They will be our appetizer, with. . .
Fruit: Forelle pears (here on Peanut Butter Etoufee – welcome, pull up a fork!), Red Globe grapes and Courtland apple slices.
We will have turkey. R received a beautiful-but-deadly Wusthof 4″ boning knife for his birthday, so we’ll have a rolled, boneless turkey a la Julia Child – pan roasted in butter, and then finished in the oven in a remarkably short period of time. It will share oven space with sweet potatoes in maple syrup and turnips, par-boiled and then roasted with sea salt. Oh, and stuffing! This year the Morning Glory Bakery in the village provided 15 cup bags of their assorted breads cubed and baked – both savory and efficient. I added butter (duh), chopped onions, shallots and celery, vegetable stock, Black Mission figs and Northern Spy apples. R. will roll some up with the turkey and we’ll serve the rest on the side for the vegetarians in the audience.
We’ll have Savoy cabbage, carrot and apple slaw in the big wooden bowl with Susan’s favorite dressing for which I promise I will find and record the recipe (sorry, Susan!). There may be rolls.There will be cranberry sauce with local berries, sweetened with pomegranate molasses, which makes the sauce explosively tart and gives it a wonderful dark color.
Then there will be pie! Just two this year: Fannie Farmer pumpkin made with the New England pie pumpkins we grew over the incredibly balmy summer of 2010, and Martha Stewart’s (again) Maple Bourbon Pecan Pie, because it is just so good.
Recipes for what makes the grade to follow over the weekend. Keep warm, everybody.
Wild life
Saturday, November 20th, 2010Today I took a walk along the carriage trails in Acadia National Park toward Witch’s Hole and the Breakneck Ponds. The park is a good place to observe nature in action, and I saw two peregrine falcons, a predaceous diving beetle (late in the season, but the swamp is still warm), a white-tail buck (very common in the park, where there is no hunting), countless red squirrels and six beavers. The first lodge pond is very close to the Eagle Lake Rd. – the dam is only 15′ from the highway. I saw a beaver couple here, the “v” of their swim across the pond is to the right of the lodge.
I walked farther down the carriage road to the first of the Breakneck Ponds, and found a recent “chew”. Here the beaver has felled a poplar and a carried the tree off for construction purposes.
And this is why beavers can be hazardous to your health – I’m glad it wasn’t windy.
Further down the carriage road the park has been forced to intervene. Beavers have dropped a fairly large birch tree across the road and the park crew has chainsawed it into manageable pieces.
At the last lodge I visited there were two beavers cruising the deep water in front of this impressive dam. Evidently they don’t take weekends off.
Prospect, ME
Thursday, November 18th, 2010Tonight I drove across the Verona Island Bridge, past Fort Knox and out to the Prospect Community Hall for the Tri-County Beekeepers Association Annual Meeting and Pot Luck. First order of business was to honor Genevieve for her 20 years work as our treasurer with a carrot cake from Frank’s. You’re a Honey!
Speaker for the evening was Tony Jadczak, the Maine State Apiarist. Tony’s talk was centered around 2010 weather: the warm, early spring followed by a terrific summer honey crop, then a drought setting in for July and August and a dearth of honey this fall. A long dry summer means no goldenrod, and that means the bees eat their winter stores early. In 2009 we had one of the coldest, rainiest summers on record but the rain stopped in early September and the vegetation was lush. Hives put on a lot of honey and the bounty carried many weaker hives, and even some wild colonies, through a very mild winter. Tony took us through the consequences of “reinfestation pressure” and predictions for 2011, touched on new virus research and the ever increasing threat of mites, and talked about the people all over Maine who make their living (and their kids tuition) by the bees.
While I was there I noticed that renovations to the Prospect Community Hall continue. Sometimes I think every building in Maine is a product of retrofitting: the Hall has three layers of ceiling, two front doors (leading directly to the shoulder of Rt 1A) and a new bathroom.
I miss the old bathroom with its irregular toilet and the sheet of polished steel as a mirror, but the flowers are a nice touch.
Like the beekeepers, the Hall is ever-changing in an effort to keep up with the times; to be useful and purposeful and bug free as much as possible.
Hasty
Sunday, November 14th, 2010Thursday was a beautiful day and I had it off from work (thank you, Uncle Dwight, who was a Chosin Marine). I checked on the bees and “Stripey” was doing very well – lots of full comb and traffic, some bees were even landing with dark orange pollen. I’ve given up trying to figure out where the flowers are at odd times of the year; I’m sure some wealthy summer person’s gardens are full of alpine poppies down in Northeast Harbor, blooming orange and purple in mid-November. It wouldn’t be the first time I wished I could travel with the bees.
I realized I was in trouble when I took the top cover off to check the level of sugar in the feeder box. The syrup was shot through with green mold that looked like seaweed and smelled like vinegar. The bees hadn’t touched it and all the previous week while I was hoping they were happily stocking up while trapped in their hives by wind and rain. The week of damp, 65 degree weather might have encouraged mold, and this year I bought cheap, store brand sugar for 1/3 the price of Domino’s in 15 lb bags so perhaps that was a factor, too. In any case, I pulled the feeder box off the hive (heavy!), cleaned and bleached it, dried it in the sun and then refilled it and went to check on Hive Two (Two Bee).
Two Bee, sadly, was empty. The top box had comb on only three frames, so I took it off and poked around a bit. The remaining boxes smelled good – honey and beeswax – so I put the top cover on, blocked the entrances and walked away, figuring I would use the set-up for the new package bees on order from R. Weaver Apiaries in the spring. My only excuse here is that this is normally the time of year I lose a hive and I was rushed.
Yesterday was another beautiful day – 60 degrees and perfectly still – and the bees in Stripey were out and about in force. I went out to check the sugar level (about two days depleted, perfect) and then realized I heard buzzing – from both hives. I knocked the wooden door cover off the “dead” hive and bees immediately boiled out. And kept coming. Pissed at having been cooped up all day Friday, they formed a cloud in front of the hive and began making foraging sorties, and boy, did I feel stupid. I ran in the house and made them a batch of fall syrup, grabbed the clean feeder box out of the hoop house and promptly made my second mistake in two days.
Lore and practice suggest wearing white, smooth clothing while tending bees. Popular reasoning goes that most bee predators are dark and fuzzy: bears, skunks, raccoons, etc. I’ve never had a problem wearing work clothes around my hives, but I do “dress up” in a white beekeeping outfit with a full hood when doing anything invasive. Yesterday morning I was wearing a dark red long-sleeved shirt and a black skirt with black tights and shoes. When I popped the cover off the second hive to put a shim and feeder on top four guard bees immediately settled on my right forearm and stung me as a group. I had the feeder box in my hands and couldn’t brush them off for a few seconds – it felt like my arm was on fire.
Now, Sunday evening, my arm is red and swollen hard from elbow to about 2″ above my wrist. I don’t typically react very much to bee stings, but perhaps four at once was a shock to the system. I’ll try not to do that again right away.
Erased
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010Earlier this week R. came home from the village and reported it gone. Whole blocks, down by the waterfront; the confused jumble of decrepit housing wiped clean with some alt-Photoshop tool. A large hotel is planned, very clean and bright until a few decades of the local weather sets its teeth in it, and then the cedar siding and glass will peel back and fade like the little houses before. It will take a while, but I’m looking forward to it.
This is the back yard of the houses that faced West St. and the harbor, taken from the municipal parking lot. Not a very typical description of pricey real estate, but these little shacks were much too dear to stand.
Raspberries Redux
Sunday, November 7th, 2010Seventeen years ago raspberries were the first permanent planting in our garden. Our land has been harvested for spruce and pine, cleared for pigs and burned over, but it has never been farmed. When I planted those first berry bushes I moved rocks and dug through deep deposits of yellow clay, lined the holes with seaweed and horse bedding from the stable up the street, mulched the new stalks with salt hay and waited. Turns out that raspberries will put up with a lot of abuse. There were late springs, early winters, droughty summers, deer, birds and weeds but most summers I picked raspberries by the gallon. The yield increased in 2006 when I began keeping bees, disguising the decline of bushes that had been producing well in poor soil and without weed control. 2009 was a terrible year in the garden, nothing did well, and while I thought about replacing the now 15 year old plants, I didn’t have a plan.
Now, I have a plan. Last week I dug over the beds, removing the old plants and uprooting the alpine strawberries and miner’s spinach that had become a thick ground cover. Today I dug out rough squares to use as planting areas for the new canes come spring, and covered the plot with landscape fabric.
I removed most of the decent soil and will use it next spring, after subzero temperatures have killed most of the weeds. I’m using my new favorite building material – firewood from the bottom of last year’s stack – to station the landscape fabric and mold it to the holes.
I bought two bushes last year, variety “Killarney”, and transplanted them to the new bed this afternoon. This fall I plan to purchase “Anne”, an ever-bearing yellow, “Royalty Purple” and “Prelude”, and early fruiting red. Raspberry plants are sold bare-root in bundles of 10 or 5 canes, depending on the variety. I plant them in hills, so will divide the shipment up by the size of the holes I’ve dug.
And finally, where is my matched team of Morgans when I need them?
Gran Manan geology – the rock collection
Thursday, November 4th, 2010I have an entire folder on our file server named “rocks”. While we were on Gran Manan this summer we explored Red Point. The guide book says;
RED POINT – A left turn just as you enter Seal Cove will lead you along Red Point Road to Red Point beach. This is an area of great interest to geologists. From the parking area climb down onto the beach at the Point; you will find two geological eras clearly visible in the cliff face. To the left of the dividing line, or geologic contact, you see dark grey lava rock; to the right of the line you see red rock – much older in origin. With the use of a magnet, you can collect magnetic sand (magnetite) on the beach. Part of the point was acquired by the Anchorage Park in 1996, and picnic and parking facilities were added. The boardwalk to the Anchorage Park is also accessible from here.
The boardwalk mentioned above is very impressive. About half way to Anchorage we jumped off and made our way down a steep embankment to the beach. We walked back the way we came for about half an hour, looking for a place to climb back up and not finding one, taking turns saying; “Maybe around that next point!”. Fortunately, we’re experienced islanders and started at low tide. High tide here at Bar Harbor today was 12′, on Gran Manan it was 5.8 meters, or about 19′. We finally made it off the beach at the geologic contact at Red Point. I tried to document examples of all the different rocks along the beach and gave up at 200 photos; here are three – more later.
RED POINT - A left turn just as you enter Seal Cove will lead you along Red Point Road to Red Point beach. This is an area of great interest to geologists. From the parking area climb down onto the beach at the Point; you will find two geological eras clearly visible in the cliff face. To the left of the dividing line, or geologic contact, you see dark grey lava rock; to the right of the line you see red rock – much older in origin. With the use of a magnet, you can collect magnetic sand (magnetite) on the beach. Part of the point was acquired by the Anchorage Park in 1996, and picnic and parking facilities were added. The boardwalk to the Anchorage Park is also accessible from here. A facility for Whale Camp, a summer camp for kids, is located on Red Point Road.