Garden Girl

We are finally here...well, at least I am; Smoky's transfer doesn't go through for another month.  And although I have many photos to share I can't even find the camera to download them.  As I type, I am surrounded by boxes.  They can stay there a while.  The number one priority this first week full time at the homestead is to get the garden in.

Today ends Day #3 of waking at the crack of dawn to beat the heat and get seeds in the ground.  I work till around 1:00, stumble in for lunch, and then try to unpack during the afternoon.  (Not terribly productive today:  I fell asleep in a camp chair on the porch.)  This is what's planted so far:  tomato plants, basil, butternut squash, lettuce, spinach, collard greens, swiss chard, two varieties of sweet corn, two varieties of pole beans, lima beans, and four varieties of shell beans.  What's left?  Carrots, zucchini, crookneck squash,two varieties of pumpkins, two varieties of both watermelon and cantaloupe, turban squash. 

We netted the sour cherry tree against birds before Smoky left, and they should be ripe next week.  I'll try to get a photo.  Daughter is coming for a visit, and I believe I will wrangle her to help me can them up.

And pears....we have a half dozen or so trees LOADED with pears.  It's actually a bit frightening.

But that's another story, and it will have to wait for another day.  It's 9:00 p.m..  I'm so tired I can't even type straight.  G'night.

Bessie's Gifts

Bessie was the previous owner of our homestead.  Now 94 and living in an assisted living center in town, she and her husband spent many happy years here raising their family.  I have never met Bessie in the flesh, but I feel I've come to know her from the gifts she left behind in the form of the trees, bulbs, and flowers of every description and variety that populate the property.  Every weekend we make a new discovery or two.

 Lilacs, on the bush and in a porcelain enamel pitcher on my kitchen table.  Their heady perfume filled the house.

Pear tree in bloom.  There are several, as well as apples, cherries, and plums, all bursting forth with blossoms.

Onions coming up in field beside the house.  They came up on their own, most likely from seed from a mature plant.  Who knows how long they had been waiting for an errant bit of moisture?

This caught my attention when I was clearing trash out of the garden.  It's a very old grape vine.   The dead and brittle vines I cleared out of the fence above it spread all along the fence, so it was a prolific plant at one time.  In the year the homestead had been vacant it had received no water, yet managed to hang on through the blazingly hot summer.  A well-established root system and decent winter snowfall were its salvation.  We planted four concord vines just last week.  I wonder what type of fruit this old-timer will yield?

Bessie would know.  I wish I could ask her.

 

My Attempt at Refining Beeswax

Since beekeeping is high on the list of priorities for the homestead, I was excited when Smoky brought this home:

It's a bit hard to visualize against the orange of the Home Depot bucket.  This is better:

Beeswax!  Smoky found it inside an electrical panel.  It was an abandoned hive.

Amid visions of handcrafted candles and little pots of sweet-smelling unguents, I searched the internet for information on how to best extract and refine the wax.  I found an excellent blog post
at The Lone Star Homestead.  The trick is to slowly melt the wax with water, allowing the impurities and wax to separate.  The theory is that the dirt and bee parts will sink to the bottom and the pure wax will rise to the top.  It's necessary to repeat the melting and cooling process with water a couple of  times before carefully melting the pure wax and straining it through a piece of nylon stocking or cheesecloth.  A pan dedicated to the melting process was in order (you won't want to use it for anything else), so I hopped down to Goodwill to find one.  $8 was more than I wanted to pay, but what I found was heavy gauge stainless steel vessel with a cover and a pouring lip - perfect!

I filled the pan halfway with water and added the wax.  You don't want to overload the pan.

As I was adding the wax, I noticed that it was webby and what looked like dead mites or larvae.

With a sinking heart but hopeful still, I began to heat the pan on a medium-low setting.  Maybe all the webs and whatever-they-were would sink to the bottom.

But no sinking was apparent.   Beeswax was obviously in there, but so were pieces and parts of I don't know what.  Perhaps they were dead bees?

It was a mess.  Still hoping, I put the pan out in the garage where it was cold.  After the top layer hardened, I removed it in pieces.  This is what it looked like:

Obviously, there was beeswax in there (notice it on my fingers), but extracting it was going to be tough.  I decided to try the melting process another time and gauge the results.  Maybe the chunks would fall to the bottom.

They didn't.

With not much prospect of successfully extracting (much less refining) any beeswax, I sadly threw the clumpy stuff away.

No candles.  No creams.  No lip balms.  (Sniff!)

I read up a bit, and have come to the conclusion that this wild hive suffered a wax moth infestation that led to its demise.  Too bad for the bees and too bad for me!  I will have to wait till we have our own hives before I can try this again.

Thoughts on Hurricane Sandy

I have a question in to our realtor about the large wash running through the corner at the back of the property.  With the recent drought we've been having in the southwest, the wash hasn't run in years but the owners confirmed that it has run in the past.  The very fact of its existence confirms that large volumes of water - either from excessive rain or snow melt - have run through it at some point or another.  As the house and outbuildings show no evidence of water damage we're not overly concerned about future flooding but we do need to know how the county designates the land:  flood plain, flood fringe, or flood way.

In Arizona, we tend to extremes in many things.  Flooding is one of them.  I remember watching in disbelief in 1997 as my parents' cars bobbed gently down the street in the overflow of the swollen Verde River. (Their house was designated flood fringe.)  You never cross a wash that's running and you certainly don't build a house in a flood way.

Which is why I am having a problem generating much sympathy for the victims of Hurricane Sandy who lost their homes due to flooding.  (Actually, "recipients" is a better term than "victims," which implies suffering due to no fault of their own.)

Don't get me wrong; I do sympathize with their plight.  I can only imagine the horror of being forced out of your home, having all your dearest possessions destroyed, and then having either no home to which to return or one that was irreparably damaged.

But I have to ask:  why did they purchase homes either right on the water or in imminent danger from the water?  Surely it was no secret to them that they lived in an area prone to hurricanes.

Certainly it was their right to purchase homes wherever they pleased.  We all have that right.  But if that is your choice then you must accept the accompanying liabilities and make responsible provisions for them.

Translation:  if you live in a home at risk of flooding you buy flood insurance.

The indignant response heard from advocates of hurricane victims has been, "Well, these are working people!   They just could not afford flood insurance!"

If they could not afford flood insurance then they should be living somewhere else.  Depending on how our property is designated we have, as we see it, just two choices:  buy the property and accept that it might flood and we lose everything, or, 2) buy flood insurance.

Notice that expecting the government to bail us out of having made a bad decision is not one of our options.  Neither should it be for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.  All notions of accepting responsiblity aside, we simply can't afford it.  Our government can't even fund itself.  From where is the $60 billion dollars for a proposed aid package supposed to be found?

I tell my middle school students to own what they do.  Do not blame others for the consequences of your actions.  It's advice grown-ups should heed as well.

Canning Dog Food

When I was 12 years old, my mother and I struck an agreement:  I could get out of weeding the garden if I learned how to can up the bounty it produced.  After dragging out the dog-eared copy of the Ball canning book and reading up on hot water bath canning, I processed what would be the first of many quarts of tomatoes during that long-ago Wisconsin summer. 

I was hooked.  I've been canning ever since.

Not only do I save money, but home-canned goods are the ultimate in convenience food.  Pop open a quart of chicken and I can quickly put a tasty meal on the table:  soup, chicken and dumplings, chicken and biscuits, pot pie, curry, sweet and sour, barbecue...the list goes on and on.  Plus, foods I can myself are free of preservatives, and most of the time, organic.  Since I canned it, I know what went into it.  I also receive an enormous amount of satisfaction from my well-filled larder, a small bastion of security against an uncertain future.

As food prices rise nearly weekly, I've been doing a good deal more canning lately.  OK, I've been doing a lot more canning.  It's starting to get a bit out of hand, not because there's too much food but because I am running out of storage space.  When I ran out of room in the kitchen cupboards and bedroom closets, I had Smoky build me some shelves at the end of the hallway.

When the hallway shelves were filled, I migrated to a table in my office. 

 

 

As you can see, the table is now at maximum capacity.  I have no idea where I will put the overflow.  As it is, the six quarts of dog food I processed yesterday are on my office desk. 

 

 

 

 It seems hard to believe, but the desk was once a tidy place where could one do actual work instead of a craft and project staging area.  (And let's get it straight, here:  what you see under the table of canned goods is not laundry. They are old sheets to tear into strips for rag balls.  Just so you know.)

 

 

 

Yikes.  At any rate, I am more excited than you can imagine when we can finally transfer the canned goods larder to the farm and into the cold room and its abundance of lovely, study shelves.

 

But back to dog food.  We currently have two dogs, a three-pound maltipoo and a bruiser of a pit bull.  While the maltipoo's dietary needs are quite dainty, the pit bull is a bottomless...well, pit.  When we move to the farm we will be getting another dog, so being able to feed our canine crowd if going to the store were not an option is important.

 

Whenever I process meat or poultry for canning, I invariably wind up with a small mountain of scraps:  meat bits, gristle, fat and skin.  I save them until I have a batch big enough to can. 

 

 

I chop it all into small pieces, discarding large pieces of fat.

 

 

I figured I would need five quart jars.  Here they are, washed and waiting on the counter.  I can almost all my meat using a raw pack, as it is so much easier than managing hot vats of liquids and greasy jar funnels.  Sterilizing is not necessary, as the time spent in the pressure cooker kills any harmful bacteria.

 

 



I fill the jars up to the first ring line and wipe the rims with a cloth dampened with vinegar to remove any grease.  I didn't add any water, but if you want more yummy dog gravy, then go ahead and a cup or so of water to each jar.  Don't fill beyond the first ring line or you may have greasy liquid boil up and get between the lid and the jar rim, spoiling your seal.

 

 

 

I processed for 90 minutes at 13 pounds of pressure (the right amount for our elevation).  After the pressure returned to zero I removed the jars, still bubbling, from the canner.

 

 

 

 

 

When the dog food cools, it will have a layer of fat at the top; just mix it in.  We do not feed this food straight to our dogs (it's very rich), but spoon a little over their dry food and stir it up.  It could just as easily go over rice to feed them, if rice was all you had.  A little goes a long way, the dogs love it, and I made it for free out of scraps that are usually thrown away.  Wahoo, what a bargain!

 

 





 

 

 









Walnuts!

I forgot to mention some treasure we discovered at the property.  This is what we found in the backyard on a picnic table:

Who knows how long this tin box had been there, exposed to the elements.  We opened it up to find...

 

 

Walnuts!  Somewhere on our property is a walnut tree.  The nuts were in perfect condition, protected by the box.  We love walnuts, and include them in our diet over cereal, in salads. and for out of hand snacking.  I recently purchased a 3-pound bag of walnuts at Costco for $17.89 (it truly pained me to do so), so this discovery is a delightful one, to say the least.  I tried whacking the nuts with a hammer and was surprised to find them stubbornly resistant to crack.  A vise grip worked much better, with dental tools to pick out the small but very tasty nutmeats.  Yum!