How to Make Potato-Squash Pancakes with Lox

Wondering how to use that excess of summer squash? Here is a great idea. Put grated squash into potato pancakes. Here’s how I do it.

Finished potato squash pancakes

RECIPE

2 eggs

1/4 C all purpose flour

!/2 to 1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp paprika

1 1/2 to 2 C grated summer squash such as zucchini or yellow squash

1 1/2 to 2 C grated potatoes such as Russet

butter and /or bacon fat for the skillet

sour cream

2-3 T capers

4 oz lox or smoked salmon

Mix eggs, flour, salt, and paprika together in a mixing bowl/ Grate the squash and potatoes using a box grater, and mix grated vegetables into the egg-flour mixture. Heat butter and/or bacon fat in a skillet over medium heat. Fry until first side is crispy and brown. Flip pancakes and cook until second side is crispy and brown. Put onto serving plates and garnish with sour cream, capers, and lox. Serves 2-3

Gather the ingredients

‘/

Mix all together

Fry them up. serve, and garnish

I used about half of that Cocozelle squash in the photo. You can use just summer squash without potato to make these pancakes, but they come out too soft with no structural integrity. Use 50:50 squash and potato for best results. You can vary the spices or add herbs. For example, add chives. Or use smoked paprika. or Louisiana hot sauce, or Herbs de Provence. Use your imagination and make this recipe your own.

Growing a Garden is Fun!

Every year, I swear that this year’s garden will be my best. Usually that fails to materialize. Rats, squirrels, possums, birds, or the weather usually conspire to thwart my plans. This year, the stars seem to have aligned in my favor. It is really shaping up to be a great year in the garden for us.

View of our backyard with one of the veggie beds, the herb garden, and chicken coop.

My little “farm” sits on a normal-sized (6500 sq ft) southern California urban yard, which is small. In 2007, after reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” I was inspired to change our landscape to accommodate growing more food at home Like Kingsolver, I am a locavore, ie, someone who tries to eat locally grown food as much as possible. It takes fossil fuel to bring food from far away, so every pound of food that you can grow at home helps to combat global warming. Sadly, we are now seeing the effects of all that excess CO2 in the air Many gardeners from Washington to Texas had to contend with unseasonable triple digit temps this whole summer, and their gardens fried. We have lucked out here in coastal southern California with temperature so far this year.

Food doesn’t get more local than from your own yard. Hubby and I altered our landscape by cutting down some trees that needed removing anyway. I planted fruit trees around the perimeter, and added raised beds wherever I could. We added a chicken coop in 2009, and our transition from urban yard to mini farm was complete. I tweak my growing space from time to time, adding containers in the driveway or adding a micro bed here and there. This year, I had the most growing space that I have had in this yard, with 110 sq ft of raised beds and a lot of containers.

You can join the movement to grow your own. One of the easiest ways to start growing your own food is to plant an herb garden. Mine changes from year to year. Right now we are growing rosemary, two varieties of sage, sorrel, mint, watercress, chives, oregano, marjoram, parsley, and basil. The squirrels ate my cilantro and dill. Not everything succeeds. But it is wonderful to have herbs fresh from the garden. Below is a view of my herb garden with raised beds for veggies behind it.

View of the herb garden wth veggie beds in back

I built two new tiny raised beds this year out of scrap lumber. One is 12 sq ft and the other is 9 sq ft. I am growing pole beans and corn in them. One is shown below I am a 79-yr-old great-grandmother. If I can do it, you can do it. And if you don’t want to build your own beds, hire someone to do it.

My newest bed, a mere 3′ x 4′, with corn and pole beans

View from our deck looking west onto 3 raised beds

Tending a garden is fun. My garden gives me exercise, time in the outdoors, and something to look forward to. I love the anticipation of seeing seeds sprout, and seeing what a new vegetable variety will taste like. By growing your own, you can enjoy varieties of food not available at your local farmer’s markets. For example, this year I am trying Dragon Tongue bush beans, Gete Okosomin winter squash and Georgia Candy Roaster squash.

We usually get between 280-300 lbs of produce a year, plus anywhere from 400-750 eggs, depending on how many hens we have, and their ages. Right now, we have 2 lovely Lavender Orpingtons, a Buff Orpington crossbred, and a French Black Maran. Our son Scott has a family of six, and they take all the excess eggs we can produce. It has been a joy to share the ins and outs of raising hens with the grandkids, and to give them the experience of feeding chickens and gathering eggs.

Buffy Blacktail on the left, Marie the French Black Maran, and Lady Violet, one of our Lavender Orpingtons

In addition to chickens, we raise Monarch butterflies. All you need to do it plant milkweed, keep an organic yard, plant other flowers for pollinators, and the butterflies will raise themselves. We usually have 2-4 Monarchs flitting about, plus other species of butterflies and loads of honeybees.

Tell me about your garden. How big is it? How much food do you produce? Why do you love it? And how can we encourage others to grow their own?

Making Scottish Bannock Bread

August 11. 2022

Good grief, has it really been three years since my last blog post? Yep. Pandemic, knee injury, recovery. While I was laid up, I watched a lot of a British TV series about archaeology called Time Team. And that got me interested in medieval life, and foods eaten during that time period. As a result, I learned how to make bannock bread like they had in Scotland back in the day. It is surprisingly easy and very delicious! (Easier than figuring out how to use this changed WordPress format.)

Picture yourself back in Scotland in medieval times Viking raiders are on the horizon and you need to flee to the hills with your sheep. You don’t have time to make a yeast bread for the journey, so you make a quick bannock bread.

The only difficulty I had was finding oat flour. I didn’t see any in the local grocery stores, so I made my own by grinding rolled oats in a blender. Easy, peasy. In an attempt to emulate wheat flour from medieval times. I used a blend of white whole wheat flour and all purpose flour. The former is made from white wheat. It is a bit more delicate than regular whole wheat flour. Most wheat flours are made from red wheat. I use Bob’s Red Mill and/or King Arthur flours.

Other recipes call for buttermilk, but I don’t keep that in my kitchen. I make my own from half and half, 2% butterfat milk, and lime juice. We grow our own limes and always have frozen lime juice in the freezer. I squeeze and freeze the juice in ice cube trays when the limes are ripe, and we always have some around.

You will need something to score the bread before it cooks. I used this nifty bread dough cutter. Just be careful not to cut the bread all the way through.

I used a ceramic bowl and wooden spoon to mix the dough, and that felt very authentic.

The baking soda is going to need an acid to make the dough rise. Originally, people used buttermilk. I never have any of that, so I make my own. I used 1/4 C half and half, 1/2 C 2% butterfat milk, and 4 tsp of lime juice. We have a lime tree and there is always frozen lime juice here. I squeeze the lime and freeze the juice in ice cube trays, then store the cubes in a ZipLoc bag. You can also use lemon juice if you have that. Or you can milk the cow and make your own buttermilk, however that is done, if you think you have time. Remember, the Vikings are coming!

SCOTTISH BANNOCK BREAD

1.5 C oat flour made from rolled oats

1/2 C white whole wheat flour

1/2 C all purpose wheat flour

1 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

1/4 C half and half

1/2 C 2% butterfat milk

4 tsp lime or lemon juicce

2 T honey

Mix the half and half, milk, and lime juice together and let sit for 15 minutes, then mix in the honey. Mix the dry ingredients together, Add the milk mixture with honey to the dry ingredients and stir until mixed. Turn out onto a floured board and pat into a circle that is about 7 inches across. Score with whatever tool you have available. Preheat a 12″ cast iron skillet on the stovetop. Add the bannock and cook for about 20 minutes on one side over medium heat. Flip carefully and cook for about 15 minutes on the other side. Invert onto a cutting board. Cut into four pieces. Cut each wedge in half and slather with butter and orange marmalade to serve.

First photo is the flipped bannock, showing the cooked bottom.

I had a dickens of a time trying to figure out this changed WordPress format. I didn’t get the photos put where I wanted them, but I think the text is at last coherent. This really is an easy recipe, even easier than making scones. Let me know how your bannock came out. It is tasty and quite filling.

How to cook with pumpkins

1 Nov 2019

Even though it is now November 1, it is still pumpkin season. And by pumpkin, I mean any winter squash. It breaks my heart to see all of those heirloom pumpkins at the grocery store used merely for decoration. They make great eating, you know. But I don’t bother with the Connecticut field pumpkins for eating. They were bred as Jack O’lantern pumpkins and are pretty darned fibrous. But don’t let those other beautiful heirloom pumpkins go to waste.

This is a fall display at our local Sprouts store. On top from left to right: Rouge vif D’temps, Jarrahdale, and Connecticut field pumpkins.

A friend bought this beautiful Galeux D’Eyesines, a French heirloom pumpkin, for me. I saved the seeds and may try growing some next summer.

I cut it in half, scooped out the seeds, and baked it on a tray at 350 F for an hour. Look how meaty it is! This pumpkins yielded a lot of mashed pumpkin.

I scooped out the cooked flesh from the shell, and mashed the flesh in my late mother’s colander with wooden pestle. This device is nearly a hundred years old and works great. My Mom used it to make applesauce in the fall. You can still buy something similar, now called a chinois. Or you can use a potato ricer. Both take out the long fibers. Mashing it in an electric mixer will leave the big fibers in, which I do not consider desirable. I don’t have a food processor, but that should work too..

From this one pumpkin, I made two loaves of Cranberry-pecan pumpkin bread, and froze about 9 cups of mashed pumpkin for future use. Recipe for the bread is at the end of this post.

In my garden this year, I grew Guatemalan Blue, Mayo Blusher, Red Kuri, Butternut and Teot Bat Put winter squash. The one above is a Guatemalan Blue. I was absolutely fascinated by them. It is a banana type squash, a type I have never grown before. I got only two squash from four seeds planted, so in my garden, it wasn’t very productive.
My Navajo Cushaws resulted in crop failure They kept setting small fruit, but none of them grew. Probably not fertilized. I tried hand fertilizing many of them, but even that didn’t work.

These are my two Mayo Blushers plus the store bought Galeux D’Eyesines pumpkin. Mayo Blushers are highly variable in shape and color. I was hoping for a white one because they blush pink when ripe. Nope, I got an oblong striped green one and a round blue one

The Mayo Blushers are serving decorative duty at present, along with my Glass Gem corn. I will write about the corn at a later date.

I made pumpkin soup out of the first Guatemalan Blue squash. It was delightfully free of fiber and had a great flavor. I froze the extra mashed squash for use later. I will definitely be growing this squash again.

Darned if I can remember what recipe used. My husband is always telling me to write things down. I usually don’t though. (Maybe I should listen to him.) I used canned chicken broth and then cooked onions, potatoes and carrots in it. I blended that and added the mashed pumpkin to it. I suspect that I seasoned it with salt and Herbes de Provence. It looked blah, so I topped the soup with smoked paprika. Voila!

• 

I loved this Guatemalan Blue so much that I almost didn’t want to cook it Almost.

But bake it I did. First I scooped out the seeds with a grapefruit spoon, and put the seeds into a bowl of water for washing. This is a shot taken before baking.

I washed the seeds and dried them on a tray to save for planting next summer.

I got two loaves of delicious cranberry-pecan pumpkin bread, plus a cup of mashed pumpkin to freeze for later use.

To make the pumpkin bread, I started with a recipe for “Easy Pumpkin Bread” from King Arthur flour. But of course I modified it. It used canned pumpkin, which is really a mix of butternut squash and several other varieties of winter squash, and is thicker than freshly baked and mashed pumpkin. So much more fun to use fresh. Here is my recipe.

Cranberry Pecan Pumpkin Bread

1 C melted butter

2 1/2 C granulated sugar (I will reduce this to 2 C next batch)

4 large eggs

2 C mashed pumpkin

1/2 C water (use 2/3 C if using the thicker canned pumpkin)

1 tsp pure vanilla extract (not artificial)

3 1/3 C King Arthur organic all-purpose unbleached flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp mace (I will increase this to 1/2 tsp next time)

1 to 1 1/2 C pecans, halves and pieces, not ground

1 to 1 1/2 C dried cranberries

2 T turbinado sugar for shrinking on top (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease two 9″ x 5″ loaf baking pans.

Beat together the butter, sugar, pumpkin, water and vanilla. I hand mix.

Add the dry ingredients, stirring to combine.

Mix in pecans and cranberries. Batter will be thick.

Pour or spoon into the two baking pans. Top each loaf with a tablespoon of turbinado sugar, if using it. Bake at 350 F for about 80 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Remove pans from oven and cool on a rack. Tip bread out of pans when cool. I usually freeze one loaf in a freezer bag.

You can substitute golden raisins for the cranberries, or use chopped fresh cranberries.

I hope you like the recipe. BTW, I am using nothing but organic flour these days because most wheat (and corn) in America is grown with glyphosate (Round-up). The plants were genetically modified to withstand spraying with the herbicide Round-up. I don’t mind GMO crops in general, but I do not want Round-up in my food. Farmers even spray it on the crops right before harvest to desiccate the crop. I don’t want to eat Round-up, thank you, so I am trying as much as I can to get organic wheat and ground corn products.

Are you growing your own winter squash? What varieties? Has anyone else tried growing the Guatemalan Blues from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds, or Mayo Blushers from Native Seed SEARCH?

Harvest Monday August 12, 2019

I have been harvesting all year, at least a little bit, but I have not been playing Harvest Monday. That is where blogging gardeners post photos of their harvests, and usually list the poundage as well. I have found that I don’t like photographing my harvests nearly as much as my growing plants. My second favorite things to photograph after plants in the garden are the meals I made with my harvests. Photographing harvests comes last, but I managed to snap a few pics.

Tomatoes

I turned about two dozen tomatoes into spaghetti sauce last night. There was enough for dinner for the two of us last night and tonight, plus two freezer bags of sauce for later.

We are getting pounds and pounds of green beans. These are Blue Lake pole beans. The Contender bush beans are just now beginning to produce. The basil leaves at the bottom of the dish went into pesto. Then I made a dish of baby gold potatoes, green beans, tortellini and pesto. One dish dinner. The recipe was from “Molto Italiano” by Mario Batali.

Harvests this past week included:

Apple (Fuji) 4 oz

Basil 1 oz

Garlic 2 oz

Green beans 1 lb 3 oz

Green onion 2 oz

Lettuce 4 oz

Nectarines 1 lb

Summer squash (Lebanese) 1 lb 1 oz

Tomatoes 6 lbs 14 oz

and 5 eggs

I think I finally remembered how to use widgets in WordPress, and have added in my total harvests for 2019 as of July 31. It isn’t overwhelming, just 81 lbs of fruit and 37 lbs of vegetables. August and September bring harvests of my “heavy” vegetables such as tomatoes, summer squash, winter squash, and cucumbers, so those harvest numbers should go up. My goal is 200 lbs of produce. We shall see if I get there.

I am expecting a nice harvest of winter squash one of these days.

I was about to give up on my Navajo Cushaw squash, but one of them finally set fruit. This one is about 4 inches long.

The first Guatemalan Blue squash is already about 6.5 inches long.

Two butternuts have set fruit on two different vines. Both vines sprouted from compost.

This is the second butternut. They both have a lot of growing to do before they are ready to pick.

And because eating the produce is really the whole idea of growing it, here are some recent meals.

Summer squash fritters with green onion, parsley and sour cream, buttered green beans, and sockeye salmon dipped in lemon zest and olive oil with a dry rub of sugar, cocoa and smoked paprika.

Cottage cheese with a sliced Snow Queen nectarine fresh from the yard.

Salad of homegrown tomatoes, homegrown lettuce and little balls of mozzarella cheese with garlic, basalmic vinegar and olive oil, and an entree of tuna, tortellini, green beans, caper, garlic, and cream.

Hope you enjoyed this brief review of my week’s harvest and meals at Harvest Monday.

Summer of 2019 and what a great garden

Every year I hope for a great garden. I tell myself each January that THIS year I’m going to grow my best garden ever. Well, this year’s garden is certainly a contender. I have three 3′ x 6′ raised beds in the backyard, a variety of containers in the driveway (yes, I garden in my driveway; it’s sunny there.), and the Garden of Perpetual Responsibility, which always needs weeding. I’ll get to them later. First, check out the Garden of Infinite Neglect shown below, a 3′ x 12′ raised bed in the front yard next to the sidewalk.

This bed is a riot of winter squash, Crimson Sweet watermelon, Japanese cucumbers, Soleil wax beans, and Arikara Yellow Indian Woman beans. There are some zinnias and marigolds buried somewhere under those huge squash leaves.

I am most excited about the two varieties of winter squash in this bed because, well, I am just plain silly about squash. I am growing Mayo Blushers and Guatemalan Blues in this bed. I have grown the Mayo Blushers before. The seeds are from Native Seed Search, a non-profit that collects native-grown seeds from throughout the American Southwest and Mexico. Mayo Blushers make small to medium-sized winter squash that turn a pinkish color when they are ripe. The first TINY female flower bud showed up on those plants today.

But what really has me intrigued are the Guatemalan Blues. I got my seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, but a number of vendors carry them, including Fedco. I have four plants growing in the foreground in the above photo. I have never grown them before, so I am most curious what they will look and taste like. I am expecting something that looks like a long banana squash, only blue. They are supposed to grow to 15-20 inches long and get up to 10 lbs, with moist yellow-orange sweet flesh.

A female Guatemalan Blue flower bud about three to four days from opening.

This is the flower bud yesterday evening about to open. The ovary is almost two inches long.

Ta Da! The flower opened this morning and it is a humdinger.

My garden provides me with so much entertainment. But I am easily amused.

I am going to bring this post to an end because I am still getting used to my beautiful new iMac, and WordPress has changed since I last created a blog post. I am basically stumbling around here.

BTW, about my long absence from my blog… I finished radiation for cancer in May, 2018, and the treatment utterly wiped me out for a year. In May this year, my energy bounced back and I began planting my summer garden. I was late getting it into the ground, but by golly, I did it. My priority was to garden first, blog later. I will post about the back veggie beds and my hens some other time. Hope your garden is growing well this year.

Changes in America’s Food System

Just in the time that I have been alive, there have been major changes in how I obtain my food. Add in the experiences of my parents and grandparents’ generations, and we see profound changes.

My mother was born in 1911 in the tiny town of Spencer, Indiana. Her father ran the livery stable in town, later selling those new-fangled automobiles. They lived a couple of blocks from the town square, and a few houses from the country. My grandfather kept a milk cow in a nearby pasture and milked it twice a day for the family milk supply. For the rest of their food, my maternal grandmother simply phoned in her grocery order, and a delivery boy brought it on his bicycle.

My mother told me that fishermen sold their daily catch from the White River. Market fishermen are pretty much a thing of the past. And market hunters–popular in the 1800s and into the early 1900s–are definitely a thing of the past. I’m sure my grandparents in southern Indiana had access to fresh passenger pigeons in their day, as well as ducks, geese, and venison. Many folks kept backyard chickens and rabbits for food. My Dad hunted rabbits his whole life, and fished as well. If he found a snapping turtle, we ate that. We did not get all of our food from the store.

The offerings of market hunters.

My paternal grandparents lived in the city of Indianapolis, but they always had a garden. They also got a lot of their food from my grandfather’s sister’s farm in Tipton, Indiana. We did too. As a teen in the 1950s, I remember freshly killed stewing hens and big bags of lettuce, green beans, tomatoes and corn on the cob that came from the farm. But most of our food came from the grocery store.

This isn’t Harry Grasshof’s store, but this is what it looked like. I don’t remember his store ever being this well stocked though.

When I was 7 years old, my mother would send me to the store for the odd item that she had forgotten, like an extra carton of milk or loaf of bread. The tiny store was a couple of blocks from our house. Harry Grasshof, an immigrant from Germany, ran the market. I gave Harry my list, and he got whatever I needed and bagged it for me to carry home. The store had only two aisles, with a very limited selection of goods. Potatoes, onions, apples, oranges, grapes, bananas, lettuce, green beans, carrots and such were available, but not all things were there in all seasons. The produce was local and in season. In the winter, we relied on canned vegetables and long keepers such as potatoes and cabbages.

The meat case had cuts that Harry had butchered himself, and the edges of the meat were dried. There were flies in the case in the summer. There were a few boxes of Tide, All, Oxydol, Duz, Ajax and other cleaning products on the shelves, plus canned fruits and vegetables. We ate canned green beans, corn, asparagus and beets. The only baked goods I remember were loaves of Wonderbread.

This isn’t our local A&P, but it looked like this. Such a selection!

Then the first supermarket, an A&P, opened up across the street from Harry Grasshof. That was probably about 1953. I was dazzled by the big, bright aisles with all of their selection. Meat was packaged. No more flies. Produce aisles were packed with beautiful, fresh fruits and vegetables. They had treasures like Twinkies, Hostess Cupcakes, and Little Debbies. One got a cart and helped one’s self to whatever one needed — or was induced to buy on impluse. No more personalized service from a grocer who helped customers one at a time.

People grew Victory Gardens during World War II, but when the soldiers came home, home gardening seemed to die out. Grocery stores carried more and more items and they came from farther and farther away. Then came the hippie movement, a back-to-basics mindset that included growing one’s own food. Jim Crockett started Crockett’s Victory Garden on PBS out of Boston. I lived on a 7-acre farm in Higganum, CT in 1976, following advice from Jim Crockett. My husband and I raised lambs and grew our first garden together. I hadn’t had a garden since I was an ag major at Purdue University in 1963, but I have been gardening pretty much ever since.

Today we have big modern grocery stores all over the place with an unbelievable selection of goods from near and far. Fresh produce of all types is available year round. If the US isn’t harvesting strawberries and blueberries, the stores carry them from farms in Australia or Chile. People forget that produce has seasons. You just go to the store and it is there. But that incredible availability comes at a cost. Not just to your pocketbook, but to the environment. Food travels an average 1500 miles to get to your table, and that adds a LOT of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from the trucks, planes and ships that bring your food to you from the four corners of the world. Even local food travels. We live in Orange County, CA. Our carrots are grown in the Imperial Valley in San Diego County. But before they get to us, trucks haul those carrots up to Bakersfield for washing and packaging. The they come back to Los Angeles, and then Orange County.

People concerned about such things as saving civilization from the ravages of global climate change are paying more attention to where their food comes from. Many are growing their own. Others are patronizing farmers markets. Every little bit helps.

I recommend reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable and Miracle,” as well as Michael Rhulman’s book, “Grocery,” which is a brief history of America’s grocery stores in the 1900s. See if you don’t think differently about food after that.

Back to blogging? Let’s hope!

I have been neglecting my blog. I finished radiation for breast cancer in early May and have been recovering ever since. My mammogram in August showed that I am still clear of cancer, so all should be smooth sailing from here on out.

I was able to plant and maintain my garden this summer, but blogging was still beyond my energy level. I have now cleared the mess around my computer, taken some photos of the yard, and processed the photos. Am I back to blogging about my tiny farmlet in the city? Time will tell.

We have had some changes in the chicken yard. Someone dumped three chickens in a neighboring park a few weeks ago. All three had health issues, so they appear to be culls. Someone adopted the hen and rooster with bumble foot, a staph infection. I got the hen with a prolapsed vent. The lady who rescued her fixed the problem with the protruding cloaca, and our new girl, Cherry, even laid a few eggs for us before going into autumn molt. She is a sweet girl, probably about a year old, and she lets us pet her. We think she is a Rhode Island Red, but her personality is shy and retiring, not the super active typical Rhodie. The granddaughter of the lady who rescued her named her Cherry Jam. We shortened it to Cherry. Here she is. Whoever had her before us clipped her beak, a horrible practice on factory farms.

We had an issue with our hens this past weekend. Our oldest hen (who I think we named Little Red Hen, even though she isn’t red) is about 11 years old now and enjoying her retirement on my no-kill pseudo-farm. She got into an argument with Dino-peep, our bad-tempered Barred Rock, and Dino-peep pecked her eye pretty badly. Here is her good eye. See how long her beak has gotten? She got it stuck in the hardware cloth and that is when Dino-peep attacked.

Her left eye was a bloody mess. Looked like hamburger. I had my husband hold her while I applied antibiotic ointment with a Q-tip. This is what the other side looks like three days later. The swelling has gone down and there is no sign of infection, but I’m not even sure that she has an eye left in the socket, much less if she can see with it.

We still have two out of five hens laying, but it is molting season and we expect egg production to stop soon. That is why I freeze the abundance of eggs in the spring. I break open the eggs, beat them slightly with a pinch of salt and put four eggs per baggie into the freezer. They are good for baking, scrambled eggs and omelets in the winter.

The nasty Dino-peep is on the left, and the nice Princess Aurora on the right. Based on how red their combs are, I suspect that they are the ones still laying.

The other “animals” on our farm are Monarch butterfly caterpillars and garden spiders. I don’t have any photos of our caterpillar crop from this summer, but I did snap some pics of one of our huge garden spiders. This gal builds her web on our deck.

I did manage to grow a garden this summer, but the rats and squirrels got a lot of it. I have never had bigger or more lush Blue Lake pole bean vines. They were loaded with flowers. Then the rats ate every one of the baby beans plus the flowers! I got exactly zero green beans from my row of beautiful pole beans. I found three beans that escaped the rats, and am saving them for seeds for next summer’s garden.

I have a similar tale of woe from my tomatoes. Eight tomato plants, zero tomatoes to harvest. Fruit set was paltry and the rats got the few that did set.  My one summer garden success is this lovely butternut squash. I think it may weigh several pounds.

I got a nice harvest of summer squash from my fabric Gro-pots in the driveway, but have no photos. Those are now kaput for the year.

So what about my orchard? The rats and/or squirrels got every single apple. I got ZERO.  Same with my Katy apricot, except it was birds that ate the crop. Not sure who ate the two Snow Queen nectarines, but it wasn’t us.

I have other fruits coming along. There are about two dozen avocados on the tree. I may start picking them soon. They don’t ripen until picked. Then it takes about five-eight days, and then, uh oh, they are overripe.

We have been harvesting limes off and on. Here is an unripe one. The Bearrs limes turn yellow and fall from the tree when they are ripe.

The lime tree is also flowering, so I am expecting an extended harvest from it.

My Meyer lemon was looking pretty bad last winter, but it has bounced back with some fertilizer and more regular watering. I have two dozen nice lemons already nearly full sized.

Our citrus crops are pretty immune to the critters, except for the oranges. Once they turn orange, it is a race to see who gets them, me or the critters. Our semi-dwarf Navel orange is loaded with fruit this year. I am expecting a nice harvest this winter, starting about January, God willing and the rats don’t get them. There are five oranges in this one pic.

Right now, my biggest joy is my Fuyu Persimmon tree. It was finally big enough to set fruit this spring. We have five lovely persimmons that should be ready in about 3 weeks. I picked one today Just to make sure I get one of them.

For some reason, my crazy blackberry vine set fruit late. We may or may not get any of these berries. Birds like them too.

Part of my joy in gardening is anticipating what might produce food next. Here are my artichokes. They won’t produce flower buds (i.e., the artichokes) until spring, but I enjoy watching the plants grow.

The artichokes and persimmon tree are in my Garden of Perpetual Responsibility. That is also my pollinator garden that I plant for bees and butterflies. I still have a few straggling flowers left over from my summer garden in this bed. Here is a marigold and a zinnia.

One of these days, I might get around to adding up my year’s harvests to date to see how many pounds of produce we got. I log the harvests from my calendar into an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of what I actually harvested. No way to tell how much the rats got, but it was a LOT this year.

But it is also time to clean up the garden beds and plant my fall/winter garden. No rest for a gardener in coastal southern California. Something is always growing. And that is a good thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

First day of the New Year, and happy gardening to us all in 2018

Sorry for the long absence. No, I’m not quite dead yet. My last post was in March, 2017, when I was trying to get over a number of physical challenges, including constant tiredness. Well, no wonder I was tired and constantly sick. In June, I found a lump in my breast that turned out to be cancer. YIKES!

The biopsy showed that it was triple negative breast cancer, the hardest type to cure. My oncologist ordered what is called neo-adjuvant chemo, which is chemo before surgery. I don’t want to go into the gruesome details, but the past six months have been the worst of my life. Chemo SUCKS! I still have surgery and radiation ahead of me. But my last MRI shows that the cancer is GONE. And my body concurs. I am only three weeks out from my last chemo session, but my energy bounced back before I was hardly finished. I am once again bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, having beat cancer’s ass. Surgery to remove the tumor markers is scheduled for Jan 19, just before my 75th birthday. I will be getting radiation from late February into early April, and then it will be “just” years of monitoring for recurrence.

During this ordeal, my loving hubby took over composting and chicken chores, plus doing most of the cooking and some of the grocery shopping. That was in addition to his teaching job AND his duties as an environmental activist with our local and state Audubon organizations. My poor garden went fallow.

Nevertheless, I did manage to plant and maintain my little garden box, The Garden of Joyous Anticipation. I built it in 2016, six weeks after recovering from surgery for endometrial cancer, which was unrelated to the breast cancer. How lucky can one person get, huh? But weighing and recording my meager harvests fell by the wayside, as did recording the number of eggs our four hens laid. I estimate that we got 600-700 eggs in 2017. I have absolutely no clue about produce, except we had decent apple, apricot, and peach crops. The persimmon and pomegranate trees flowered, but they are still too young to produce.

Let’s take a look at where my yard garden stood yesterday, on New Year’s Eve, and hope for a better 2018.

Our two Liquid Amber trees in front turn a gorgeous color in December, with leaves remaining on the trees into January.

This was all the garden I could manage to plant and maintain for the past six months. Watching these plants sprout and grow gave me hope and courage. As well as some tasty organic produce! Can you identify the crops? Green bunching onions, Redhead radishes, garlic, a red lettuce of some kind, chard, beets (Detroit Red and Chioggia), baby bok choy, and two overwintering bell pepper plants (a Giant Red Marconi, and I forget). We have been harvesting green onions, lettuce and radishes.

Crazy weather. We have an iris in bloom in January. Southern California plus global warming equals unpredictability. I call it global weirding.

My artichoke patch survived. Somehow I managed to keep it watered, and we have four artichoke plants promising a nice spring crop.

My three raised beds in the back yard are utterly neglected. Our watering system is me with a hose. And yet somehow a few dwarf blue curly kale and a couple of collard green plants have managed to hang on. Rejuvenating these poor neglected beds is high on my priority list for 2018. Right after finally sending out our Christmas cards. Hahaha. Yeah, I am WAY behind on a lot of stuff.

Our semi-dwarf navel orange tree has a very nice crop of huge oranges on it. I think there are about 4 dozen oranges, and they are the biggest ever, weighing nearly a pound apiece. Joy, joy.

Our Bearss lime tree has a decent crop on it. We squeeze and freeze the juice in ice cube trays, and store the cubes in ziplock freezer baggies for year-round use. Vic does most of that squeezing and freezing. I have been using the juice lately to make a powdered sugar glaze for homemade cranberry-pecan scones.

Our dwarf Meyer lemon isn’t looking too good, and neither are the dozen lemons on it. I hope I can rejuvenate that poor little tree.

Our Littlecado avocado tree is infested with invasive non-native shot hole borers. It produced only three avocados this season. I hope that it can successfully fight off the infestation as several of our other trees have done. At least it didn’t die like our plum tree and one of the nectarine trees did.

Our three Asian pear trees produced a number of small pears this year, but the rats got them all. At least the trees make pretty fall foliage.

This is a winter view of our chicken coop and run, as seen from our recently pruned apple tree orchard. I have a dwarf Granny Smith, a semi-dwarf Fuji, a full-sized Gala that I mistakenly thought was a semi-dwarf when I bought it, and a semi-dwarf Florida Prince peach tree, all growing in this tiny space. Vic and I cut the trees back to a decent height a couple of days ago. I have hopes of reaching the fruit from 2018 more easily now. This is assuming that I get to it before the rats, squirrels and possums do. Urban gardening is a real challenge.

This is Princess Aurora, a nice Black Sex-linked hen, and a prolific layer. See how pale her comb is? She is in her winter rest period and not laying right now.

Contrast the size and color of Princess Aurora’s comb and wattles with Princess Ariel, our Light Sussex hen. She is laying again after her fall molt. Sadly, Dino-peep (the nasty-tempered Barred Rock shown in the header photo) picks on her and has pecked off her neck feathers.

Poor old Chicken Little is about 10 years old now. She is doing good to lay 10-20 eggs a year these days, in contrast to the 300/yr that she produced in her prime. My husband keeps threatening to review her vacation and retirement benefits package, but I think she is pretty secure. She has become a nice pet in her old age. She is too feeble to get away from being petted now.

Look, somebody laid an egg! We are getting an egg every second or third day. Meanwhile, we have eggs frozen down to make scrambled eggs during the winter egg dearth.

And that concludes yesterday’s photo tour of my tiny urban farmlet. Here is hoping for a healthy 2018, and a MUCH better year than 2017 was. Please leave a comment.

My chicken surprised me

First, let me apologize for my absence. I got sick on December 28, a mere cold supposedly, but it laid me low for two months. And being old, I also had visits to my GP, urgent care, the ER, and the dentist for one thing or another in the last two and a half months. The result was that my energy has been sapped and my garden neglected. It has been all I can do to just maintain our four hens, and keep up with composting chores.

Princess Ariel is the white hen in front, with Dino-peep (a barred rock) right behind her. The two black ones in back are Princess Aurora and old Chicken Little, both Black Sex-linked hens. We are getting three eggs a day, almost every day. Can’t keep up with them!

It is spring, and three out of four of our chickens are now laying. We are awash in eggs. I devil some of them, make 5-egg frittatas and 6-egg German pancakes, and even freeze some of them for use during the winter when my hens stop laying. (To freeze eggs, break them into a bowl, then break the yokes and mix them slightly with a dash of salt. Pour the eggs into a small Ziploc bag, squeeze out the air, and freeze them flat. I freeze them four to a baggie for our winter scrambled eggs. Or two to a baggie for use in baking.)

This is Huevos Rancheros season as well. I melt grated Mexican cheese onto a corn tortilla, and top with a fried egg and salsa. That orange is from our tree. I LOVE springtime here on our little urban farmlet.

But how did my new hen surprise me? Well, I thought Princess Aurora, my white hen with black tail and wing feathers, was an Americauna (or however that is spelled), and I was expecting her to lay blue- or green-colored eggs. Nope. They are light brown.

Back to the internet I went, where I figured out that Princess Ariel is a Light Sussex breed of hen. They are a nice meat and egg breed, although we don’t eat our chickens. Our spoiled girls get laying pellets, and a daily feeding of scratch to give them something to do, plus mealworms and an assortment of seasonal organic greens. They have a nice enclosed cage that keeps them safe at night, plus an open run for daytime use. They have a good life, I think, plus a very generous vacation and retirement package.

The nest box of our chicken coop is decorated with art on the outside, and the cage is lit with a solar light. They can roost inside or outside the nest box at night. Chicken Little is old and prefers the shelter of the nest box these days. The area to the left of the cage is fenced, but open on the top for daytime use. If the girls ran free in the yard, there would one NO greenery left. And there would be chicken poop on my pathways. So they have their part of the yard, and I have mine.

The Light Sussex is a friendly breed, and Princess Ariel seems very people oriented. She tries to follow me as best she can inside her cage and run, always interested in where I am more than where her fellow hens are. I suspect that she associates me with getting fed, and that she is more food focused than the others, but who knows.

Despite my neglect of the vegetable garden, the fruit orchard is providing. The number of lines this year is astounding. These are Bearrs limes, which turn yellow and fall from the tree when ripe. This is about a third of what is on the counter now, awaiting squeezing and freezing.

This is about five pounds of limes.

I squeeze the limes and pour the juice into ice cube trays for freezing. When the juice is frozen, I pop the cubes into a Ziploc freezer bag. When we want some limeade, we just put a couple of cubes into a glass of water and add a teaspoon of sugar, plus regular ice cubes when the lime cubes have melted.

 

It is also navel orange season. But we have rats in the yard, and they like oranges too.

I would go out to get an orange for breakfast only to find that the rats had beaten me to it.

Sadly, the rats got more than half of my orange crop, and it wasn’t a particularly large crop with year. I did manage to trap one in a snap trap, but I haven’t been diligent about my trapping.

The rats also ate ALL of my snow pea crop as soon as the seeds sprouted, all of the bok choy and komatsuna, and all of my Lacinato kale. It seems that they don’t like leeks, so I do have a dozen leeks that are nearly ready to harvest. I have given up on my winter garden and am about to plant my summer garden of tomatoes and bell peppers. Unless I give up on that too before planting. Between being constantly sick, and the ongoing rat problem, I am pretty depressed about gardening. Encouragement would be appreciated.

Hope springs eternal in the garden, and this August Price peach flower bud holds out hope of a peach crop down the road. There are about 80 blossoms on this semi-dwarf tree, the most ever. The abundant rain this fall has been a boon to my mini-orchard.

The tiny Garden Gold dwarf peach tree in a pot is blooming nicely this spring. I never get any peaches from it, but I am hopeful this year.

The Florida Prince peach tree is loaded with fruit, despite having been attacked by shot hole borer beetles. It seems to have fought off the infestation and is bearing a bumper crop. Maybe all the water helped.

Our Katy apricot was LOADED with blossoms last week. I am hoping to get some apricots, unless the birds get them all.

With rats, birds, possums, and pests, it is hard to get a crop these days. A changing climate isn’t helping either, what with weather that is too warm, too dry, or just unpredictable. But I keep trying.

A volunteer tomato plant is growing nicely in my Garden Box of Joyous Anticipation. So far the nights have been too cool for it to set fruit, but look–tomato flowers in March!

Deer Tongue and Black-seeded Simpson lettuces have self-seeded themselves in some of my little garden boxes. I see a salad in our future.

And so my garden and I struggle on. Best wishes for your spring garden!