Birdseed Bag Sit-Upon

My crocus and earliest daffodils are up and blooming. Fall-planted garlic and shallots are up and growing in the garden, and just received a top-dressing sprinkle of bonemeal and a light mulch of shredded leaves from last year. The soil in the rest of the Early garden bed has been composted and raked smooth, now being watered to bring up the weed seeds for a final cultivating before planting later this month. It's starting to look like Spring is on its way!

But there's still a lot of snow in the higher elevations, just 10 minutes drive away. And that means there's still a lot of snow fun - snowshoeing and cross-country skiing - to be enjoyed. When on an outing in the snow, it's important to have some kind of waterproof seating for lunch and break times; preferably lightweight, easy to fit in or strapped onto your daypack, and with a bit of insulating thickness to it. Harking back to my Girl Scout days, I decided to make a sit-upon.

For those of you who weren't Girl Scouts, making a sit-upon is a traditional camping project. They're made by weaving strips of newspaper into a padded square, then enclosing in an envelope of vinyl tablecloth or other waterproof fabric, to sit upon round the campfire. I decided to skip the waterproofing layer, and just make my woven pad out of waterproof material.

I have a few wintertime bird feeders hanging in a pine tree outside my picture window. I love watching the variety of birds in our area, so even though it's quite expensive these days I find buying birdseed a worthwhile expenditure. It now comes in woven plasticized bags, that I couldn't see just throwing away, so I've saved them in the bottom of the birdseed cans until now. They'd be perfect recycled into a woven sit-upon.

Working outside on the deck, to keep the little fluff bits of seed hulls out of the house, I cut the bags to open them out flat. With careful measuring, I could get three 12" x 25" sections from each 40-pound bag, or one plus a scant second one from the 20-pounders. By creasing each section lengthwise, opening it up and folding each long edge to the center crease, and then folding the center crease to enclose the cut ends (like bi-fold seam binding), I made 3" x 25" strips, each four layers thick with all cut edges enclosed, and clipped each one with a clothespin to keep them from blowing off my table.

Traditional GS sit-upons are 4 strips by 4 strips, making a 12" square that can be folded down to a 6" square. But my sit-upon-er is a bit bigger than a 10-year old girl's (besides, I'm also wearing multiple layers out in the cold) , so I made my sit-upon 5 strips by 5 strips - using 10 pieces total. Weave the strips together, trying to keep them pretty much centered in regards to the crosswise strips. They're a bit slippery, so I used the clothespins to keep them from sliding too far out of alignment while weaving them together.

Once all the strips are in place, more or less, start with the center and middle strips. Measuring to make sure they're centered, fold an end up over the edge of the cross-wise strip and tuck it snugly back underneath the strip you just folded it over. Spin the square around, push the strips together tight, and repeat on the other edge. When all of the bottom strips are folded up and tucked in, flip the pad over and do the same on the other side, all the while making sure all the strips are tucked up tight against each other.

 

 For the corner strips, I folded them over but instead of tucking them back under the strip they'd just been folded over I tucked them under the edge of the next, adjacent, strip as I folded it up and tucked it in.

When all the strips are tucked in tight, you have a woven pad that holds itself together, and weighs practically nothing. I fold mine down into a 9"square and slide it down into my daypack between my water bladder sleeve and the rest of the pack contents.

It works great! Here I am on a lunch break during a snowshoe outing in the Sierras; Donner Lake (named for the tragic Donner Party pioneers that spent the winter of 1846 marooned nearby) in the distance below. Spinning around to talk to others would catch a bit of snow beneath the weave, but it slid right out when shaken and was easy to wipe dry. I'm thinking this also will make a good garden kneeling pad, and probably make it into my summertime camping gear as well.

Crocheted Vintage Diamond Potholders

I like to have something to keep my hands busy in the evenings, especially in the winter. We heat with a woodstove in the living room, which leaves the rest of the house a bit cool. So we're just like in the days of yesteryear, when families had to gather 'round the fire. My husband watches tv while the pets stretch out on the rug with their bellies to the warmth. Sometimes, I'm totally uninterested in what Aries is watching, and then I'll read. But other times, I'll want to catch a bit of the show but then get bored during the commercials. So I like having some kind of handwork - crochet, embroidery, mending - I can work on sporadically without too much concentration involved.

I just finished up with a new pair of crocheted potholders. I inherited a lot of old crochet pattern booklets - the oldest published in 1921. This particular pattern is in a 1941 booklet entitled The Magic of Crochet, that has lots of placemat sets, glass cozies, and other little household and fashion goodies.

This pattern is so easy! It's worked all in one piece, in rounds of double-crochet instead of turning. So once you get the first round onto the hanging loop, there's no counting or placekeeping needed. When you're satisfied with the size you just match up the sides, work a row joining them together, and then make one last turn to finish with a decorative scalloped edge. The double layer of crochet is thick enough without the need for added padding that so many of the potholders from that era need.

You can see that I've scribbled up the pattern a bit. The first time I made this pattern, maybe 25 years ago (the golden ones), I was almost finished with the first one (top left) when I realized a typo in the pattern made the diamond shape lopsided. I corrected it for the second one. That set still lives in my camping gear.

It's a really sturdy pattern, too - just make sure to use cotton or wool (acrylic blends can melt). The middle set I made about 20 years ago. After daily use in my kitchen, they've just now worn through enough to burn my fingers if I'm not careful. I tossed those when I completed the new set, on the right. Since they're all cotton, they will shrink and the crochet tighten up a bit, the first time I run those through the washer and dryer. Even though a set of six was suggested for the housewives of the 1940's, two are sufficient for me.

I hope you are able to read the pattern, with my correction and adaptation for a crocheted hanger loop instead of covered bone or plastic ring (once those break, or melt, there's no way of fixing them). Let me know if I need to make a link to a pdf file of that page. Or as a last resort (and I'd really rather not bother), I can type out the pattern as I've adapted it. My potholders are a hanging loop of 30 dc worked over a chain of 15 joined into a ring, 16 rows of green dc, 2 of white, 2 more of green, then the joining single crochet and the edging - about 6 inches square. I know crocheting string can be really tedious for some folks, so I'm thinking about adapting this pattern for cotton yarn too.

Ordering Onions

Even though it's been snowing (lightly, I admit, and really welcome - pretty much all of our natural annual precipitation is from snow) the first yellow crocus are blooming. That's my signal that it's time to start thinking about getting the earliest garden bed ready to plant. Garlic and shallots, planted last fall, are now up about an inch. I didn't get around to sowing any spinach or arugula seeds back then, but I did leave a few plants that set seed to winter over, so I might get some volunteers anyway. I've gotten lots of questions from local gardeners regarding my success, so I'm going to try to write for northern Nevada gardeners to follow along. So, kids, do try this at home!

The weather is supposed to start warming up again tomorrow, so it looks like I get one more lazy day before it's time to get my hands back in the dirt! I ordered my onion plants yesterday. Now, you could get onion plants from your local garden center, but most of them won't get their plants in for a few more weeks yet. I suppose I could grow my onions from seeds, but I've never had much luck starting, then growing them to a decent size inside. Besides, seed-grown plants should have been started in early January, at least. The little bags of onion bulbs, called sets, are ok if you want scallions or a few small onions for fresh use, but for big onions you want a variety specific to your growing environment. To get my onion plants when I want them, the varieties I want, for the way I want to use them, I've found it best to order them online. I've been very happy with the service and quality at Dixondale Farms.

Each leaf on an onion plant makes a layer inside the bulb. The earlier and quicker your onion starts growing, the more leaves on the plant and that means a bigger, juicier onion bulb. So they need a rich soil that will hold water, but with enough drainage to keep it from getting soggy. Drainage is no problem in my garden's DG (decomposed granite) sand, so I concentrate on supplying enough nutrients and water-holding capacity. Aries was out a couple of days ago running last fall's compost pile through the shredder, rebuilding the pile, and wetting it down. A check with the thermometer this morning showed almost no heating up though, so it's pretty much ready to use. I also have a bin of leaf mold, made more than a year ago, that's slowly broken down to a third of what it was. Leaf mold doesn't contain much nutrients, but it's great for water retention.

My onion plants should be shipped next week - they base shipping dates by your zip code to get your onions to you at the optimum planting time for your specific area. I know from experience that they will stay dormant for a few weeks if kept cool and dry, if the weather isn't cooperative. But looking at the advance forecast, it's time to get busy! The entire early bed gets a light dusting of my all-purpose fertilizer mix (equal parts bone meal, blood meal, and greensand), a layer of finished compost, plus some of the leaf mold. I'll just lightly dig that into the top six inches (I just leave it as a top dressing where the shallots and garlic are already up), and rake smooth. Onions, especially, don't do well in competition with weeds, so I then will wet that down well (or maybe Mother Nature will do it for me) to get any weed seeds in the top inch of the soil to germinate. Over the next week or so, a very light going over with the stirrup hoe a couple of times will take out quite a few baby weedlings before the onions go in.


Onions switch from growing leaves to swelling into bulbs depending on the amount of daylight during the height of summer. I live right where Nevada makes that obtuse angle next to California. Looking at the Dixondale map, that's intermediate day onion territory. But I want the storage capabilities of the northern, long day, onions. So I compromise by ordering long day, long keeping onion varieties and then get them into the ground as early as I can with as much soil fertility as I can so they can grow as many leaves as possible before mid-summer. I ordered one bunch of Copra, the biggest and best-keeping onion I've found. And then I ordered a mixed variety sampler bunch (since you get a price break ordering more than one bunch, but two bunches is all I have room for) of long day onions. The Walla Walla grow great here - they get really big really fast, but then don't store at all. We start pulling and using them by early July, for fresh use as we need them, so they're usually all gone by early September. If you're not interesting storing your onions, grow the Walla Walla. By fall, we're using the Ringmasters, for fresh eating and then that's what I use in my fall tomato sauce and salsa canning recipes. We pick a few Redwings incrementally throughout the summer, whenever I want a red onion, and then those also store well into mid-winter.

Converting Frames for Seasonal Display

This past fall, we took a road trip to see my mom - crossing Nevada, Utah, and half of Colorado. On the way there, we toured Arches National Park and Colorado National Monument; on the way back the Colorado River Byway into Moab and the northern part of Canyonlands National Park. I like buying postcards as souvenirs, and found some that were replicas of old posters. I liked the look of them so much, I wanted to display them somehow after we got home. The refrigerator display is already pretty much full, and besides, these particular postcards were the perfect colors to go with my then-autumnal living room decor.

I inherited a couple of long, narrow, cream-colored wooden frames from Aries' mom, that held sets of Aries' baby pictures. Even though the photo sets were the same, the frames were similar but not identical. One is a bit wider, one a bit longer; they're both painted a creamy color, but not quite the same shade; the wooden framing is pretty much the same width, but different patterns. I figure they must have been given to each set of his grandparents, so the minor differences wouldn't matter. Anyway, I always liked both frames, in a shabby-chic sort of way, but they were so long and narrow I never had anything that would fit in them.

Until now, anyway. Hung vertically, off-set side-by-side, they were the perfect size to display three portrait-oriented postcards each. I even had the perfect spot to hang them, too. So I set to work. One had brown paper glued to the back - I ripped that off. The backing was just corrugated cardboard, held in place with lots of rusty little brads. I used pliers to pull enough of them to slide out the cardboard, a thin piece of matting paper, and the baby photos mounted on a matboard. I just flipped the matboard over, lightly glued my new postcards plus a couple more I found that fit the color and display theme, and hung them up.

Just a little note regarding hanging pictures on wallpaper. My husband has fits about me putting holes in the walls, so I keep my frame-hanging to a minimum and always try to make sure things are hung in the place I'm sure I want them to stay. But, to placate him, I also use a nifty little technique when I want to put a hole in the wall.

Once I know where the nail will go, I use an X-acto knife to cut a little upside-down "V" just barely into the wallpaper. Then, using the tip of the knife, I peel that little "V" down, leaving it still attached at the bottom, and put my hanging nail or screw in the little opening. This is all hidden behind the picture, but should the time come that I want to change the arrangement, it's easy to just remove the nail, dab a bit of glue over the hole, bend and paste the cut bit right back in place - a practically invisible repair I know will match the pattern exactly.

Anyway, I was thrilled all autumn long, looking at my beautiful display. Until December, when I changed my decor from golds and browns to reds and greens. The orange-themed display now clashed with the rest of the room.

Years ago, Mom had given me a bunch of vintage postcards. Luckily, in that collection I found six vertically oriented Christmas-y ones. I could make a new display, specific to winter-time, then maybe Valentines, Spring-y flowers. Oh, this was going to fun, once I got it all set up to be easily done!

But, I now wanted to do this right. Pulling and replacing those little brads was going to mark up the wood, besides being a real pain to deal with. I needed to find those little turning things that are on the back of changeable display frames and convert my old wooden frames to accommodate an easily changed seasonal display. So, I asked in my local framing shops, craft stores, even the hardware and frame sections of chain big box stores - picking up empty frames there to show them what I was looking for on the backside. Everyone just gave me blank looks - "duh, I never heard of anyone buying anything like that."

Eventually, at the very bottom of a rack of picture-hanging gadget packets at Michael's Crafts I found what I was looking for. They're called turnbuttons - four to a package, one-inch long, screws included, $1. Alrighty, then! A wet rag was enough to soak the backing paper enough to scrape it away. I pulled all the little brads, and then found out the frames had been painted without removing the glass. Well, getting those out was a bit tricky, but I carefully managed. And then I broke one glass trying to scrape the paint off when I hit a jagged little bit where it had been poorly cut. Since I had to replace that glass anyway, I paid a local frame shop to cut a couple pieces of non-glare acid-free acrylic - it's lighter, better in earthquake country, would offer a bit of protection to those vintage postcards, and would just look so much better. It's more expensive than plain glass, but I'd received some Christmas cash from Mom, so that seemed the perfect present to myself.

Installing the turnbuttons, I had to make sure I put them far enough out to the edge of the frame where the wood was thick enough that the tips of the screws wouldn't come through the other side while still making sure they reached the display backing and didn't show in front when turned. They had to be tight enough to stay put, but loose enough to turn. Since the frames are so long and narrow, I used one pack per frame so I could have a pair near the top and another pair near the bottom.

The old corrugated cardboard backing was warped and bent, so I cut new backings from a piece of foamboard. I used the old cardboard, though, to make a folding storage portfolio for the baby photos and autumnal postcard display, by taping the long edges together. A 12" x 12" sheet of scrapbook paper is the perfect size to make six little mats, and then a bigger sheet of colored paper can be cut to make matching backgrounds. I use a scrapbooking glue dot dispenser to hold my display in place. I figure that way I can dismantle it if necessary without damaging those vintage postcards.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Picnic Cake

With one of our biggest summer holidays coming up, I thought I'd post a recipe for a great picnic cake. It's one of my mom's recipes I've been making since I was a kid. With the topping baked into the cake, once cooled and covered it holds up well even tipped on its side in my picnic suitcase. It's been a hit at every potluck I've taken it to and often shows up at family camping trips, brought by one sister or another.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Picnic Cake (9" x 13" flat cake)
1 ¾ cup boiling water
1 cup uncooked oatmeal (I use rolled oats)
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
 ½ cup butter or other shortning
2 eggs
1 ¾ cup flour (I use whole wheat)
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
12 oz package chocolate chips
¾ cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven 350º. Grease and lightly flour a 9" x 13" cake pan. Put oats in mixing bowl and add the boiling water. Let stand 10 minutes. Add butter, brown and white sugars and stir until the butter melts. Add eggs and mix well. Stir together the flour, baking soda, salt and cocoa and add to the oats mixture, mix well. Stir in half the chocolate chips. Pour batter into prepared pan. Sprinkle walnuts and remaining chocolate chips over the top. Bake 40 minutes, and test with toothpick (until the toothpick comes out clean).

I won my picnic suitcase in a raffle years ago. It wasn't really my style - I was more the lunch cooler and canvas bag type So, at first I planned on perhaps re-gifting it, then thought maybe I could use it as decorative storage for linens or such. But then one day, I was getting ready for a Sierra Club potluck. Now, with a tree-hugging group like that, one simply does not take paper plates and disposable flatware. I was getting ready to dig out my camping gear when it hit me. I already had the perfect picnic/potluck set-up, up there on top of the coat armoire. My vintage cake pan fits perfectly, with even room for a bottle of wine. I'm still tweaking the contents. I've added dessert plates, and use my cloth napkins to wrap the wine glasses and serving utensils. It's now a very useful part of both my living room decor and many summer outings.

The cake pan I inherited from my mother-in-law. I figure she got it at a yard sale. Scratched onto the top it says, "Happy Birthday to Winnie from Laura, March 7, 1959" and neither of those are family names. It's obviously seen its share of past potlucks or church dinners too. Winnie Vincent scratched her name onto both sides of the pan itself. The slide-on metal top holds up so much better than today's plastic pan covers. The pan is deeper than most cake pans too, making it my go-to pan for batches of wintertme lasagna. So Ms Vincent, if you're still out there - thank you! I love it!

The Last Zucchini

I was doing some cellar maintenance earlier today. I noticed some mold on the stem end of the last zucchini - left to grow huge last summer, picked just before frost, and then stored. Usually they'll only hold until early January, so I'd been watching this last one - wondering how long it would keep. It looked like now its time was about up, so I brought it inside.

The rind had turned orange, and was almost as hard to cut as that of a winter squash. Inside, the flesh too had turned orange, and had gotten quite fibrous close to the seed cavity. I saved some of the seeds but since I also grow Delicata squash, another C. pepo variety, the two most-likely cross-pollinated. I might plant a few just to see what I get, depending on how much space I have out in the garden this summer.

Stored zucchini aren't cooked the same as summer-fresh ones, but they are good in baked goods. After scraping out the seed cavity and trimming off the hard peel, I had a nice bit of usable flesh (and a bucketful of scraps, which made for a very happy bunch of chickens). Shredded on the large holes of a box grater, I ended up with three tightly-packed cupfuls. One cup, and raisins, made a batch of oat bran muffins (there were twelve, before Aries wandered through). And the other two cups made a big panful of cake-like zucchini brownies (that piece is mine). Also in the photo above, a few more things up from the cellar today: the last of the fresh bell peppers, a bit shriveled with a bit of mold starting on the stems (still plenty more chopped pieces in the freezer though), some stored paste tomatoes (paste, or roma-type, tomatoes store much better than round ones - nowhere near the taste of summer ones, but still better than most supermarket ones), and apples (plenty of those yet, and still in fine shape). The Delicata squash I store inside the house.

It's A Snow Day

It should be time to start thinking about getting outside, getting my hands in the dirt once again. The first daffodils are blooming, as is the apricot tree. But after a mild and dry winter, March has decided to show its lion side and has dumped an inch of wet, sloppy snow on us this morning. I really can't complain. We need the precipitation - plus it saves me having to get the hoses out to water the trees. It should all be gone by tomorrow, anyway. So for today, I'll sit inside by the fire and watch the birds outside my windows.

A flicker eating snow on the deck railing.

 

Goldfinches waiting their turn on the sock feeder.

A black-capped chickadee, feathers puffed up against the cold.

And the first robin of Spring, wondering how much longer he'll have to wait.
Me too.

T-Shirt Scarf and Flowers

I wrote about our Green (for St. Patrick's Day) Green (for Spring) Green (for sustainable) Fashion Show for my latest post on the Simple Green Frugal Co-op blog. Instead of outfits from a chain department store the models, and many of the guests, wore second-hand finds from local thrift and consignment shops.

I didn't have the time nor the inclination these past few weeks to browse thrift shops for something "new" (to me) to wear. But, in the spirit of things, I decided to take an afternoon to re-purpose one of my husband's old t-shirts. An advertising freebie from the casino where he worked, it had a big beer logo on the chest. I don't think he ever wore it - it was a bit too gaudy for his tastes. But the shirt itself was a lovely green tie-dye - perfect for a St. Patrick's Day refashioning project.

I cut the shirt bottom off below the logo, trimmed off the bottom hem, and stretched that loop to make the edges curl under - voilá: an infinity scarf. Then I found a fabric flower tutorial I liked, on Emily's Little World blog. I cut enough circles from the sleeves and top part of the back to make three fabric flowers, and snipped little triangles from the edges to make flower-petal shapes. I'd first planned to make one big flower and two little ones, but decided I didn't like the big flower - it would be too big and floppy. So after the photo, but before making the flowers, I trimmed the big circles down so all three sets of nine were the same size.

I wanted to later be able to use the scarf or the flowers separately so I glued a bar pin, covered over with another felt circle, onto the back of each flower. And here I am, in my St. Patrick's Day wearing o' the green. I got loads of compliments at the Fashion Show. Most of the women were amazed when I told them I'd crafted the scarf and flower pins myself, in less than two hours.

Salvaging a Tattered Tablecloth

As long as I had my sewing table and machine all set up, I took care of another little refashioning project today. After its last go-round in the washing machine, I had to admit that an old cotton tablecloth was finally too worn and tattered to continue using as such. The center was too fragile to even bother trying to patch; the holes unraveling more and more after each washing - not even strategic placement of doilies and placemats could disguise it any longer.

But the edges, that had hung off the edge of the table, were still in pretty good condition. And it was such a nice, soft cotton fabric. With a bit of judicious cutting, I was able to salvage some nicely-sized rectangles. So, after a little time spent folding over and pressing the raw edges, and a quick hemming on the machine, I now have three lovely gingham dish towels for my kitchen, and a new liner for my bread basket.

Aprons into Pillows

My home decor is still in my cozy red and white winter theme. The past few days, I made a couple of decorative refashioned items I've had on my to-do list for a while.

When I wander through thrift shops, I'm always drawn to the home and kitchen textile sections. I have a special weakness for hand-embroidery, patterned tablecloths, and cloth napkins, but try to limit myself to things that will actually go with my decor. Anyway, I couldn't resist a couple of red souvenir half aprons, the type they used to print up in the 1950's and '60's. One had snazzy gold gilt and black printing, featuring Reno, Nevada. It shows 50's era cars, the 1935 version Virginia Street's Reno Arch (replaced in 1963, it now straddles Lake Street near the Truckee River), the Washoe County Courthouse (early 20th century divorce mecca) plus two hotel/casinos, the Mapes (imploded in 2000) and the Riverside (saved at the last minute, same year). Since I live in northern Nevada, not far from Reno, I just had to have that one.

The second red apron was maybe a little bit newer, featuring the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado. It wasn't quite as flashy as the Reno one - no golden gilt, but black print with white - the lettering looks snow-topped, befitting for my memories of Colorado. I was born and raised in Colorado, and I've walked across that bridge. Built in the late 1920's, it's a wooden plank, narrow one-lane suspension bridge hanging more than 1,000 feet above the Arkansas River near Cañon City (I had my Afghan hound, Omar, at the time, and he was walking with me. For the first half of the trip across, he was a happy dog, bouncing along on his leash, back and forth, here and there. And then a car passed us, rumbling and bouncing the bridge quite a bit. Omar looked down into the cracks between the planks and realized just where he was. His tail sank between his legs. For the rest of the trip across and back, you could have used that morose dog to align a center line on that bridge. As for me, I love heights. I was leaning over the railing, spitting).

I never wear half-aprons, so I'd always envisioned these transformed into pillows. Since aprons, by their nature, are wider than they are tall, I had to do a bit of piecing to turn them into square pillow covers - especially the Royal Gorge one, since it originally had the print and the picture side-by-side. Fusible interfacing reinforced the piecing seams and gave the fronts a nice smooth look.

I bought a red and black cotton print for the back sides, pre-shrunk everything, added zipper closings, and stuffed my two Christmas pillows inside (I'm planning to make a couple of summertime covers the same size, and then I'll tuck these covers inside the back when I change decor. In a small house, storage in plain sight works really well. That plaid pillow, above is really a bed pillow, in a flannel bed pillowcase. By shaking the pillow down into the bottom of the case, then compacting it by tucking the pillowcase ends inside-out smoothly into the back side of the pillow I make my guest bed pillows into square decorative pillows. And using different pillowcases, they're just as easy to change to fit my seasonal decor).

The pillow covers needed a bit of edging trim to really finish them off. I thought, at first, about gold braid or fringe, but decided that would make them look too bordello. So I went, instead, with a narrow black rope trim - showcasing the print, setting the pillows off nicely, and giving them a finished professional look. They turned out just like I'd envisioned!

Short-Term Stored Foods at Year-End

Barely a week past the solstice, but the chickens can tell the days are already getting longer - two eggs yesterday, another one today. We last got eggs in mid-November. I had to buy eggs to make pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving, and another couple dozen since. But the girls are looking all new and fluffy-feathered once again, and coming back into production. Hooray!

I used the last of my stored eggplants when I made lasagne a couple of days ago. The stored zucchini are still holding very nicely. I cut, peeled and de-seeded, then shredded two-thirds of one - half going into the lasagne, and made zucchini brownies today with the other half. The shredded storage zuke was a bit drier than summertime ones, so I added a splash of milk to the recipe.

I still have a few Asian pears left in storage - probably enough for 2-3 more batches of muffins. Fresh tomatoes are still looking ok in the cellar, but the temps down there have now dropped to where they've pretty-much lost their flavor. They're still better than buying supermarket tomatoes, though. The last of the fresh bell peppers stored down there are getting rather wrinkly - but roasting them out on the grill and peeling them solves that problem.

The Walla Walla onions just barely made it through last fall's canning season, but they were so big it made processing easy. I still have some white Ringmasters left in storage. But maybe every third one of those has started to get soft in the center, so I'm watching those closely and using them up quickly now. The Red Zeppelins didn't get very big, but they're still storing nicely. And I haven't even started on the Copras. Last Spring's onion combination order has worked out very well.

I cut the last of the chard, kales, and broccoli a few weeks ago, before our nighttime temps dropped into single digits. Washed, dried, wrapped in dish towels, then bagged, they're stored in the refrigerator and still look as fresh as when I picked them. It's nice having some fresh greens to add to winter recipes. I left the plants out in the garden but everything, other than the leeks, is looking pretty shriveled out there now.

So, going into the new year, we'll finally be eating the traditional storage foods - apples, carrots, winter squashes, and cabbages (didn't get a potato or beet crop this year), fermented stuff (sauerkraut and pickles), and our dehydrated, frozen, and home-canned fruits and veggies. Life is good.

Sunshine Hot Sauce

I plant one Habanero chile plant each summer. The peppers are so hot that I don't need very many - enough for a batch of hot sauce, a few more to freeze, and then a few to hang in a little ristra to dry, to grind into powder. I've learned that even those I have to harvest green, if full-size, can be left out on the counter in a bowl and will ripen to orange.

This past summer my one plant did really well, for my climate, anyway. My hot sauce recipe makes 1 quart but this year I had enough Habaneros for all my own uses plus a second quart of sauce. I just reuse the same bottles for my own hot sauce, but needed to find some way to package that second quart to give away as Christmas gifts. I found a bottle company on-line here, and ordered a case of 12 5-ounce sauce bottles plus the drip shaker inserts, tax and delivery, for $20.

I sterilized and filled 6 bottles, storing the other half-case for the next time I get a bumper crop. Since the sauce is such a pretty yellow-orange color, I decided to call it Sunshine Hot Sauce (not quite as hot as the sun, but close), and created a label to fit on 2" x 4" shipping labels. The labels were a little taller than the flat side of the bottles, so they're pleated a bit on the curves top and bottom, but I like the way they look. In fact, a couple of the people I've given them to are amazed when they realize that it's something I made myself, instead of a professional company product.

Crafty Hostess Gift

 I've been learning a bit about beading and some simple jewelry-making techniques, and acquired a couple starter tools. I've also been invited to quite a few holiday functions this month at people's houses, and don't like going empty-handed. Now I'm the type of party-goer that wanders about, working the room, talking to lots of folks. I often set my wine glass down, forget about it for a while, and then wander about trying to remember where I last had it. So I love the idea of wine charms - little decorative rings that hook around the stem of the the glass, each one different, so people like me know when I've found my own glass again. But the charms are not an item that every party host has.

So recently, when I saw some mini ornaments on sale in my local crafts store, it gave me an idea for a crafty little hostess gift. Using a few glass beads, mini ornaments (in this case, colored jingle bells), and small earring hoops, I've been making wine charms to give my party hosts. I can put together a set of 8 charms in less than an hour. I enjoy a bit of quiet contemplative creative time. Everyone just loves getting them, and sets them out to use right then and there. And I haven't lost my glass at a party once this holiday season. Pretty crafty, wouldn't you say?

Leaf Mold

I was out riding my bicycle around a quiet neighborhood of one-acre lots. As I rode past one house, with lots of lawn surrounded by big trees, an elderly couple was tossing puffy-full trash bags over their fence onto a huge pile on the side of the road. That looked like something I could use. I turned around and pedaled back to them.

"Are those leaves by any chance?" I asked. "May I have them?"

"Either you or the trash pickup, whichever gets here first," they replied.

"I'll be back with the truck. Oh, did you spray your trees with anything this year?"

Assured that the bags held only leaves, and that I'd be bringing no noxious chemicals back to my garden, I rode home smiling. Returning with the truck, I managed to get the entire pile, at least 25 big black trash bags, into the truck bed, piling them up, mashing and wedging bags in against the sides so as not to lose any as I drove home. What a treasure!

leaf mold bin in foreground, Aries & compost bin beyond

We're already making compost with our garden cleanup, the leaves from our trees, and the manure from cleaning out the chicken coop. I had something else in mind for these leaves - a batch of leaf mold.

Leaf mold is just leaves - piled up and left to decompose. To help them break down faster, we ran them through the shredder first. I made a round bin, about 3' tall and 3' across (it's best to have a pile at least 3' x 3'), with a length of wire fencing, lining it with some of the trash bags to keep the bits of leaves from falling through. First raking, then closing up the circle and shoveling, we filled the bin to the top. Using a small step ladder, I got into the bin, stomping round and round, packing the leaves down as Aries kept shoveling. With a bit of work, we got an entire piled-high truckload of leaves packed into the bin.
I got the hose, and soaked it all down, until water just started to run out the bottom. I live in the high desert, so to keep the leaves from drying out I covered them with more of the trash bags weighed down with bit of carpet and a slab of wood (winter storms can come through here with 60 mph winds). Last item was then to use a pitchfork to poke small holes in the plastic lining the bin. Some oxygen is necessary for the decomposition process.

Unlike the pathogen and weed seed killing heat of a properly made compost pile, making leaf mold is a cold process. Even so, a week later, the contents of my bin, six inches below the surface, pegged out a 125F thermometer. Left alone, leaf mold bins can take up to three years to break down to a dark, crumbly texture - a much slower process than composting. But by shredding the leaves and wetting them down well this bin might be ready by next summer.. And leaf mold, being made of only leaves, doesn't have the multitude of minerals and plant nutrients of compost either. But dug into a garden bed or used as mulch, it's great at retaining water. That's a necessity for my sandy soil and hot, dry growing season, but it can also soak up and hold the water in too-wet soils as well. It's also a great additive to a container potting mix. If you have or can get the leaves, have the room for a bin or two, and the time to let it break down, leaf mold can be a valuable addition to any garden.

Pink Banana Squash Pie

Pink banana squash is the best large winter storage squash I've found for growing in my high desert climate. I have the room to let the vining variety ramble, but both the bush and the vining varieties set 10 - 20 pound fruit that has time to mature in my 110-ish day frost free season. And the pink banana will keep in storage, in a crate in a corner of my bedroom, for at least 6 - 8 months - long after all the delicatas and butternuts have been used.

Of course, once cooked, a big squash can provide more than a week's worth of meals - muffins, soups, and just mashed with a bit of butter on top. But one of my favorite ways, and especially for Thanksgiving, to eat pink banana squash is as pie. Pies made with pumpkin can have a bit of a greenish cast to them. But a pink banana pie turns out even tastier, with a beautiful brown color through and through.

  

 This year, for the first time in at least 15 years, I get to be a guest at a Thanksgiving dinner instead of the cook. I'd only need to prepare an appetizer (jalapeno pepper jelly poured over a block of cream cheese, served with whole wheat crackers) and a dessert. Of course, my dessert offering had to be pink banana squash pie. I wanted to make two pies, but I won't be in my own kitchen the next few days, to be able to deal with the extra squash pulp. So I picked one my smaller pink banana squash, small enough to fit in the dish drainer, to prepare.

 

First step in making pink banana pie is to cook the squash (don't have a pink banana? this recipe also works well with a butternut or pie pumpkin). Cut the squash in half and remove the seeds. Place, cut side up, in a large roasting pan and add an inch of water. Bake at 375F for 1 -2 hours, until squash is soft and browned (this banana squash took two hours). Scrape the flesh out of the peel for use, as is, in any recipe calling for pumpkin puree.

Pink Banana Squash Pie (one 9" pie)
Line a 9" pin tin with 1 prepared pie crust (your favorite recipe, or you can use a half-recipe of mine - flute the edge of the crust up above the edge of the pie tin. This recipe overfills a 9" pan by a bit, and it will puff up while cooking, then sink down as it cools)

2 cups cooked mashed squash
1 12 oz. can evaporated skim milk (or can use heavy cream, for a more decadent version)

2 eggs 

¼ cup firmly packed brown sugar

½ cup sugar

1 tablespoon molasses or real maple syrup

⅛ teaspoon allspice

⅛ teaspoon ground cloves

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

¼ teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

(or can just substitute 2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice for all the spices)

Blend all ingredients in a blender (in batches if necessary) or with a hand-held mixer. Pour into prepared raw crust and very carefully (it will be very full) transfer to 425F preheated oven. Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350F and continue baking for another 45 minutes, or until a knife stuck in the middle comes out clean.

Baked Cinnamon French Toast, Cinnamon Apples

I recently spent a Soroptimist "girls weekend getaway" in a vacation rental house up at South Lake Tahoe. Arranged by our District Director as a planning retreat for Club Presidents and Presidents-Elect, each club was responsible for one meal or snack. We were assigned Sunday breakfast, for eight.

the weekend was BYOB, and wine was pretty much the drink of choice

I figured our Saturday breakfast would probably be some kind of egg dish (and I was right). So I wanted to do something a bit different for Sunday. Looking through my recipes, I found one in an old Taste of Home magazine Collector's Edition that sounded good: Baked Cinnamon French Toast.

We got the coffee going, and set to work. My co-cook fried up some bacon, set the table, and opened the juice. I pretty much followed the recipe as written, my only change to use non-fat milk. It was easily enough for eight. It is a bit decadent for my usual cooking style, though. To make it a bit healthier, in the future, I'm thinking of tweaking the recipe a bit - trying non-fat creamer instead of the whipping cream, maybe eggbeaters or part egg whites for the eggs, and maybe Splenda instead of the sugar. If it still turns out ok, I'll repost with my adaptations.

Instead of the optional blackberry preserves and whipped cream however, I made cinnamon apples: Cut cored and peeled apples into bite-sized chunks - quarters or eighths depending on size. Pile them in a saucepan, add some brown sugar and a generous sprinkling of cinnamon. Cover and cook on very low for about an hour, stirring maybe a time or two, until apples are tender but not mushy. Notice that there is no liquid added at all.

I'm happy to say that our breakfast was a hit with everyone - and planned just right: no leftovers.

The Splint Mitten

Aries' injured finger is doing much better. He got the cast removed, and the stitches out. He now has a molded rigid plastic splint wrapping around his palm, held on with Velcro straps. He can remove the splint periodically to exercise the fingers, and is slowly regaining the ability to bend the joints. He can even tie his own shoes once again.

He's still off work, for at least another 3-4 weeks, maybe more. He finally got a short-term disability check (it's a really good idea when they suggest having at least 3 months liquid emergency savings - despite having medical insurance, we've had no income since the accident 6 weeks ago). He's now able to get out and do more around the house - bringing in firewood, running more garden gleanings through the chipper/shredder (get right back on that horse, so to speak), washing the vehicles, repairing the tire on the garden cart, etc. etc.

But it's cold outside, his damaged circulation and nerves just starting to repair themselves. And that plastic splint gets cold and then stays cold. He'd have to come back in, saying that hand was painfully cold. I could feel and see the difference between the damaged hand and the other - it didn't look good. Aries asked if I could make some kind of cover for the splint, to wear when he was outside. Ideally, it would be a bit stretchy, but still somewhat loose, so he could get it over the hurt finger without incurring more pain. He wanted something thick enough to be really warm, and tightly woven enough to stop the wind. It needed to stay on without him having to tug at it or keep readjusting it, but he wanted his index finger and thumb uncovered. And then his last request was that he didn't want anything "flashy."

I don't knit very well, but I do crochet. I looked through my yarn stash, and found some light gray and dark gray - crocheting the two strands together would give me a heathered gray look, almost like a sweatshirt - nothing flashy about that. A mitten shape would be warmest. I drew around the splint plus two smaller fingers for a rough pattern. Using a single crochet would make it tight enough to block the wind. I suppose I could have just crocheted around and around, increasing the rounds as needed until it was long enough (not sure why I didn't just do that). But instead I turned at the end of each row, making a flat shaped piece to size, and then folded it and crocheted a seam up one side and decreased around the top to fit over the splint. I added a few more rows on half, to cover his knuckles, and then chained a length from palm around his wrist to the top to hold it on. He secures the loop under the splint's Velcro strap on top of his hand, and pronounced it an unqualified success.

An Interesting Discovery

We very rarely buy furniture new. Other than the electronics, just about all of our furnishings are second-hand or thrift shop finds, worn classics/antiques that Aries cleans up and refinishes, or pieces I sketch out and he makes for me.

We have an old floor lamp that I honestly can't even remember when or where I got it. I think it made the move from Colorado with me, 25 years ago, but I really don't remember. It's nothing special - probably from the 50's/early 60's, heavy round pedestal base, round wood-look pressboard table midway up the post - actually quite ugly, to tell the truth, but functional and a useful size.

Anyway, lately, the switch has been a bit temperamental, needing a bit of wiggling sometimes to get it to come on. Today, Aries took it out to the garage to see if it could be repaired. The connections inside the socket had worn out - easily fixed with a $4 replacement piece from the local home hardware supply store.

After we got the piece, he brought the lamp back in, and asked me where I'd gotten the lamp. I had to admit, "I honestly can't remember," I told him, "probably a freebie from helping somebody move - I really don't think I paid money for it," and asked why. "Look what I found," he said, and held out a capped, but obviously used, hypodermic needle with a piece of masking tape across it. Ewww!

He had been checking over the rest of the lamp's wiring for wear and tear. There was a piece of felt backing glued to the bottom of the base, but he noticed it had come loose near where the wire went into the brass base. Looking through the opening to check the wiring, he saw a bit of masking tape hanging down. When he pulled on the tape, out came the needle! He'd discovered someone's forgotten drug paraphernalia hiding spot. It's a bit creepy to think I've been moving that lamp around with me for years!

Figs in Northern Nevada

I got out today, and gathered up the rest of my hoses. It was windy, but not too cold, so the hoses were still somewhat pliable. I don't have room to store them inside anywhere, so I coil them up into piles on a couple of pallets on the north side of the shed, and then cover them with a tarp for the winter.

The storm moving in tonight was expected to bring rain, turning to snow before morning. I took a gamble, that it won't get too cold, and left the fig trees out. Please note: figs are not a normal plant for this area. I inherited my two potted trees about 10 years ago, and have been babying them ever since.

They can take temps down to about 25F before it kills the top growth. I know that because I lost the trunks once, but the roots survived. This time of year, I put the pots in the wagon and move them into the garage on the really cold nights. But all the nights are getting too cold now, and I need them to finally go dormant. I don't want to just pull the leaves off. I want to make sure the tree gets the signals that it's time to drop its leaves and shut down for the winter. Then I can move them down into the cellar until spring.

I'm also chancing losing my chard and kale, as I left them uncovered tonight too. They can take it down to about 25F as well, so I'll be checking the min/max thermometer first thing tomorrow morning. I'm hoping the cloud cover from the storm moderates the cold tonight.

Garden Update

We've shut down and drained the yard water system. I got some clean-up work done out in the garden this afternoon - rolling up hoses, stacking wire cages, and storing the metal stakes. I still have to figure out where to put the chicken wire I use to protect newly seeded areas, and still have hoses out around the fruit trees that need to be stored. Low temperature last night was 15F so I now have a few more dead plants to pull, but it's looking pretty good.

Aries has been filling up the compost bins - raking and shredding leaves as they fall, mixing them in with chicken manure. He has some finished compost for me too. I got half of next year's Early Bed composted and raked smooth last week. Today, I planted next year's garlic and shallots, and broadcast some arugula and spinach seeds to winter over.

In the Late Bed, I'm trying to stretch my fresh eating out of the garden a little bit longer. I leaned a couple of pieces of wire together above the Swiss chard, put tomato cages over the Tuscan kale, and a wire frame over the radicchio, and have been covering them when the temps drop into the teens. Rain, turning to snow, is forecast tomorrow evening into Friday. I think I'll pull the covers tomorrow, so everything can get watered and the draperies stay dry, and then put them back on Friday when it's supposed to get really cold for a couple more days. I thought about digging a few plants and putting them down in the cellar, but I don't want to take the chance of introducing an aphid infestation, so I'm not going to bother. I might get a few straw bales and rig up a cold frame out of some old windows though.

I harvested the last of the cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflower, but left the plants. The cabbage stumps froze, but the others still look ok. I've made a note for next year that the leeks should be in the Late Bed instead of with the other alliums. They looked pathetic late this summer, after I broke off the seed stalks, but now they're gorgeous and just keep getting bigger. And they'll still be fresh eating, no problem, in February.