The autumn studio is home to still life set-ups featuring pumpkins,poppies and pink, angled October light – fodder for big paintings during the long, cold winter ahead.
Posts Tagged ‘autumn’
Battened down
Friday, October 1st, 2010I’ve tied the hoop house doors together using thin hemp twine that will swell and tighten as it soaks up the rain, moved the house plants that summer out of doors inside, gathered up all the Tyvek so that floating row covers don’t whip around the neighborhood and put big rocks on the plastic Adirondack chairs. Tonight we’re under an areal flood and high wind watch for 4 to 5 inches of rain and 40 mph sustained winds with 68 mph gusts. There’s a storm warning for the Gulf of Maine with 5′ seas and the locals have been beaching boats all day. We’re fully stocked with flashlights and toilet paper because the big storms are never the hurricanes – the worst weather is always associated with the unnamed storms that come with warnings but don’t make history.
I toured the garden with the camera one last time before the storm wipes everything straight to winter. This year the sweet peas bloomed all summer long but I don’t expect they will survive the wind and rain tonight.
Thanks to the bees, the melon vines are starting fruit they won’t finish – cute though, and maybe destined to be a still life composition.
The vines look thin, but the pumpkins and hubbard squash are still maturing and will stay out till November, growing thick hides and increasing their sugar content.
Sugaring the bees
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010Sunday was a nice fall day by Maine standards; 65 degrees and calm, the sun hidden behind thin clouds and a few flowers still blooming. Now is the time to feed the hives up – while the temperature is still warm enough for the bees to freely move around and store the sugar in the hive body.
I use BeeMax Polystyrene hive top feeders. They’re about $20, weigh 8 lbs and are practically indestructible. Betterbee suggests painting the exterior with the same latex paint you’re using on wooden ware. The bees are protected from the bulk of the syrup by a plexiglass sheet at one end of the box and I find this also protects the hive from cold drafts on the late fall days when I’m opening the top to add more syrup.
Use a two-to-one mix of water to sugar for the fall feeding. Try to keep the box from running low – evidently a wax and wane of food can encourage the queen to produce new brood just at the time the hive should be tapering off for the long winter ahead. Here is a close up of the box with the plexi shield in place and about a gallon (one batch in my stew pot) of sugar syrup.
The asters are the last full crop of flowers we’ll have for 2010 – a beautiful conclusion.
That owl really gets around.
Sunday, September 26th, 2010
The Common Ground Fair was held this weekend in Unity and someone dressed the owl in a brand new t-shirt. Thanks, guys! And we hope it was a great time for all.
At the altar of the Harvest Moon
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010Time to inventory the Summer:
2 Gal grape juice (4 quart jars and assorted pints – most of this is in pints)
2 Gal tomato sauce (plain)
3 pints catsup (tomatoes, honey,peaches, onions, tamari, sea salt)
6 pints peach jam
10 pints brandied peaches (Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!)
6 pints grape jelly/jam, assorted
4 pints raspberry jam
4 pints elderberry tonic
Plus green beans, sliced peaches in syrup, blueberries and pumpkin puree in the freezer. The seckel pears will be in soon with pear butter. Oh, and some quart bags of frozen tomato sauce from when it was 98 degrees and I couldn’t bear to use the steam canner. I’m still a lousy farmer, because we couldn’t make it through the winter on this amount of food, but it will feel good when the potatoes come in, and there will be a big box of carrots and canvas bags of onions stored carefully at the other end of the cellar.There are canning jars of seeds, too: pumpkin, beans, sweet peas and hubbard squash.
This year was easy. Pretty soon (in gardening time) we’ll see what 2011 will bring.
After Apple Picking
Monday, September 20th, 2010
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human dream.
Robert Frost
Our Hardy Ancestors, continued
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009Generally these OHA posts are all about food and the way people cooked the dickens out of it around the turn of the last century, or possibly the one before that. But in the olden days they did more than overcook seafood. When the sun went down and chores were done, my maternal grandfather researched genealogy at his rolltop desk. My mother remembers him calling long lost relatives in New York state, noting marriage lines and cross referencing maiden names. His four children could recite the Barnard line back seven generations: Raymond, Louis, Judah Harrison, Judah Pinney, Ebenezer, Francis and Joseph.
All his work on the family line is gone now, lost with the rolltop desk. A few years ago I inherited a family bible (or three) and tried to begin again. After a few weeks the piece of vellum I had taped to the wall had grown to 5′ x 6′, with extra pieces flapping all over with the names of children I’d forgotten and second marriages. I had to take it down when winter really set in and we started up the wood stove so as not to end the family line in a house fire.
Two years later I tried my first software genealogy program. It sucked – I think that’s actually the technical term. Family Tree Maker 1.0 was deeply flawed, structurally unsound and compulsively tidy. No one ever remarried, had step children or came into the line undocumented. In my family it’s not unusual to have one set of siblings marry another set, and then the remaining two marry after their spouses have passed on. This kind of behaviour is hard on probate courts and software, and don’t even get me started on gender issues. FTM 1.0 hated my family so much it eventually stopped working altogether.
Two weeks ago I bought a copy of Family Tree Maker 2010, because winter is setting in and I knew what would happen if I started taping big sheets of vellum to the wall behind the wood stove. I never thought I’d be plugging software on this blog, but this product is more fun than a video game. Well, any video game that’s not GTA IV.
My favorite of the Barnards has always been Francis. Referred to as “Deacon” Francis in the lore, he married Lucretia Pinney in 1740 when she was 19 and he was 21. Starting in 1743 they had 13 children: Lucretia, Lydia, Irana, Aaron, Moses, David, Sara, Elizabeth, Elijah, Ebenezer, Samuel, Elihu, Caroline and Francis, Jr. They lived in the same town I grew up in, and my mother often told me of the sign on the side of the house that proclaimed:
The house stood on Duncaster Rd. until 1989. I have a vivid memory of the sign, but now I can’t remember if I saw it myself or simply heard the story often enough to make it real. In ’89 they took the house down and the Wintonbury Historical Society put up a plaque in honor of the sons. Tonight I’m going to fire up the program and record the daughters, too.
Plum Duff
Friday, November 27th, 2009
Normally I wouldn’t start a post off with a picture, but “Plum Duff” isn’t really going to tell you much all by itself. And the Wikipedia article will re-direct to “Spotted Dick” and then you’re REALLY going to need a picture. It’s a dessert, people. A lovely, delicious, traditional dessert created by people for whom the term “Spotted Dick” was a fond endearment.
For this recipe you’ll need a few specialty items. I always hate running across that in a recipe I perhaps haven’t read closely before starting out; “You’ll need a flugelhorn!”, announces the author, brightly. “These days you can find one easily on Amazon!”. So, advance warning, for this recipe you will need a pudding mold or basin with a lid or cover, a metal trivet to rest the mold on the bottom of a pot, either tall enough to enclose it, or close enough that a collar of aluminum foil will do the trick.
My Great Aunt Margaret’s Plum Duff
* This used to be a very messy process – cutting the prunes with a sharp pair of sewing scissors, cooking and then mashing the results. Now we can throw the cooked, drained fruit in the cuisinart and have done with it.
Now mix in the prunes, add the flour. . .
And spoon the whole mess into the greased pudding mold. Now would be a good time to mention that the pudding is going to be a solid mass in the bottom of this mold after you’ve cooked it and allowed it to cool. It will look like it is solidly glued in there, but no – set the pan in very hot water for a few minutes and then invert over a plate. It should fall right out – if not feel free to repeat the process. It’s not like this stuff is fragile.
To the left in this photo is my aluminum trivet, useful for keeping the mold off the bottom of the pot. It is stamped “1820 Cincinnati” on the bottom, so hey – an antique! I expect modern trivets would work just as well. Also, please ignore the Goya Black Bean Soup can. I’m not making anything from this product placement – the can was there for our supper of huevos rancheros later on that night.
I didn’t think I had a photo of the pot with its aluminum collar, but here it is. Evidently I’d thought I’d blog my recipe for huevos rancheros, because there’s all the fixin’s, but thought the better of it. Everybody already has a favorite recipe for those. But waaayyy in the back there you can see how to make your stew pot a steamer for your pudding mold.
Steam the pudding at a low to moderate temperature for about an hour. You shouldn’t be able to hear it boiling madly, and check about half way through to see that the water level still comes close to 3/4 of the way up the mold.Add more hot (from the tap) water if you’re getting low. The temperature may drop below simmer for a minute but it’s not going to bother your Duff.
Cool the pudding in the mold overnight in a cool place, then unmold it and decorate for the season. I used horehound, lavender and geranium because this is Thanksgiving and you can never tell when someone is going to eat the garnish – better to make it all edible.
Now go check out all the interesting steamed dishes out there, like The Bitten Word’s Persimmon Cake (which they did w/o a pudding mold).
- 2 large eggs
- 1/2 cup melted vegetable shortening
- 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
- 2 cups cooked prunes
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 2 tablespoons cold milk
- Beat eggs well.
- Dissolve brown sugar in hot, melted shortening and add to eggs.
- Add cooked prunes that have been drained and mashed with fork.
- Sift flour and add. Dissolve soda in milk and add last.
- Fill greased pudding molds 2/3 full, cover lightly and steam one hour over rack in large cooking pot.
- Serve hot with Rum Sauce or whipped crea
2 large eggs
1/2 cup melted vegetable shortening
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 cups cooked prunes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons cold milk
1. Beat eggs well.
2. Dissolve brown sugar in hot, melted shortening and add to eggs.
3. Add cooked prunes that have been drained and mashed with fork.
4. Sift flour and add. Dissolve soda in milk and add last.
5. Fill greased pudding molds 2/3 full, cover lightly and steam one hour over rack in large cooking pot.
6. Serve hot with Rum Sauce or whipped cream.
- m.
Winter’s green – Parsley Butter
Sunday, November 15th, 2009If pesto is August – Genovese basil ground with green olive oil and pine nuts – then November is parsley butter. We have had an unusually warm fall here in the Northeast as tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico push warm air and tepid ocean water up the coast, changing our Maine November to a balmy May – complete with heavy fog and mosquitoes. It won’t last. When the 20 degree nights return, the Gigante d’Italia Parsley will still be growing glossy and dark green in the raised bed near the front door.
I don’t really have a recipe for parsley butter – it’s more of a kitchen staple. Try this on a bowl of hot pasta, in an omelet, or as we did yesterday, on tea sandwiches.
Put a cup (2 sticks) of salted butter, cut into 1″ slices, in your food processor. One stick will work too, but it isn’t enough mass for a regular (8 cup?) bowl and you’ll spend a lot of time stopping the machine and using a spatula to force the lump of butter back into circulation. Trust me, I know.
Add a huge amount of parsley. (See, I told you this wasn’t really a recipe.) A close gripped handful of leaves or about a cup chopped loosely, should do it. Use the small leaves close to the center of the plant for this, if you have a plant. I have been known to use two cups on occasion – like right before the final freeze in January, when I know it will be July before I do this again.
Add some oregano (2 tsp dry, 1/4 C fresh), 1 tsp garlic powder, 1/2 tsp sea salt. Pulse until the mixture is bright green and looks like you could spread it without chunks of plant material getting in the way.
Now dry some cucumber slices in a clean dish towel, get out your Pepperidge Farm thin white slices, and make some tea sandwiches. It’s a good thing.
Irrevocable
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009Etymology: From the Latin revocare (present 1st-person singular revoco), meaning “to call back”. Adjective 1. Unable to be retracted or reversed. Final.
Irrevocable is not generally a word for the garden, especially in a temperate zone. Silver Queen sweet corn grows to 8′ over the course of the summer, and then subsides to stubble in the field. Perrenials are planted, grown, divided and moved, and the mint and chives go everywhere. Yesterday Rat came by and cut down a dozen 40′ spruce and pine at the front of the yard and yes, actually, it makes a tremendous difference in the local landscape and no, they don’t grow back.
This is “before”, looking west toward the road.
And this is “after”. There’s a lot more light in the garden now, and possibly a need for curtains up at the house. . .
