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.

Bathtime for Boris; Monitor Pass Colors

It's that time of year. Boris, our German Shorthair pound hound, has been shedding quite a bit (and smelling rather doggy too). This morning, I decided it was bath day for Boris. I made a fire in the woodstove so it would be warm when we got out of the bathroom. Lots of treats, lots of towels to kneel on, and some tail-down shivering on his part (he's not a water dog), and I soon had a damp but sweet-smelling dog bouncing around the living room.

I wasn't done with those kneeling towels just yet. Of course, the bathtub then needed a good scrubbing. I soon had it shining once again. Since I was pretty much wet all down the front anyway, and had worked up a sweat scrubbing, I figured I needed a shower next (best way to make sure the tub was all rinsed down too).

Well, you can't have a clean dog sleeping in a grungy bed, can you? I bundled up all the mopping, sopping, and drying towels, along with his bed, and headed for the Laundromat. Some nice me-time for reading, and Boris soon had a fluffy clean bed.

Pictures of a wet dog or of a commercial washing machine tumbling round really aren't very interesting. So instead, I'm posting some photos from our day trip last week up Monitor Pass for some leaf-peeping. Boris loves when he gets to go places with us. He's such a great car dog, too. The truck has a little bench seat behind our seats. Boris sits behind Aries, so quietly (no panting, no pacing, just sits), and looks over Aries' shoulder or out his own little side window. With Aries off work until his hand heals, we're getting to do lots of the fall excursions we like but some years can't find the time. But with plenty of time this year, we timed it perfectly for the very peak of the show. It was a gorgeous day!

Aries' hand is doing pretty good. He got the stitches out a few days ago, and his splint reduced down to just his hand so he can now bend his wrist. He won't be released back to work until at least December. He got all his paperwork in for a Family Medical Leave of Absence (FMLA), and now we're in the 2-week waiting period before he starts getting temp-disability pay.

There's been a bit of adjustment to be made by both of us. Our grocery bill has gone up, since he's now eating breakfast and lunch at home instead of comp meals at work. But it's more than balanced out by the drop in the gas money, since he's not doing his 50-mile/day commute either. A happy re-discovery, a nice reminder, is just how much I really enjoy his company (after all, that is why I married him, 22 years ago this month). We each do have our own friends and things to do, but we're having fun spending lots of time together too.

For those of you reading this and thinking about a leaf-peeping outing this weekend: you may be a bit late for the high country this year. The past two nights, temperatures got down to 20F here at our house at 5,000'. A lot of our trees are now brown and the leaves are dropping. It's been dry, though, so you still could catch some good views. It would be perfect for the canyons and the California foothills though. Just don't wait much longer.

The Green Beast Bit Aries

Our first hard freeze was looming last week, so it was time to bring in all the tender crops. Two days prior, I'd cut all the squash and cucumbers; the day before all the chiles, peppers, and eggplants. As I snipped apart tomato plants and hauled tubful after tubful of green tomatoes up to the house, Aries was busy clear-cutting the stripped-clean plants and hauling loads up to the chipper/shredder.

After a break for lunch, he started processing everything for the compost pile. I was down by the garden shed - organizing the cages and trellises for storage, coiling up soaker hoses. Faintly, I heard Aries calling me from up near the house. I poked my head around the shed to see what he wanted. "Get up here! You have to drive me to the emergency room," he yelled down.

I thought he was kidding, and replied, "Yeah, right."

"No!" he said, "I really mean it! I caught my hand in the shredder! Get up here!!"

I ran. He was holding the fingers of his left hand with his right. At least, there was no spurting blood. I grabbed a clean washcloth for his hand, closed up the house (it was threatening rain), and grabbed my purse and keys. The hospital is about five miles away, on the other edge of town. It took me maybe 10 minutes to drive, and they got him into an emergency room right away. I settled in and waited, for hours, as they x-rayed and stitched him up, updated his tetanus immunization plus gave him two massive doses of antibiotics (those two shots, one in each arm, were the only things that brought tears to his eyes) and finally sent us home with prescriptions for pain-killers and more antibiotics.

He's reasonable lucky, albeit in quite a bit of pain. He was sweeping the shredded pile away from beneath the bottom screen, using a piece of board. There's a rounded guard piece there, with nickle-sized holes for the material to fall through. The holes are also just big enough, that when his grip on the board slipped, to let the tip of his middle finger on his left hand slip through. In an instant, it shredded his fingertip, shattering the bone into pieces. Fortunately, it didn't penetrate deep enough to damage the joint. Right now, he has 20 stitches and his hand in a cast, but it looks like the bones will knit back together.

We're ok financially. He has pretty good insurance coverage through work, and we have enough liquid savings to pay the deductibles and emergency room co-pays. His bosses are looking to see if they have any modified light-duty position he could do, but it's not likely. So we're now in the waiting period before his medical leave of absence gets approved. It's looking like he'll be out of work for 6 - 8 weeks.

I have to tie his shoes for him each morning, but since it was his non-dominant hand he's managing ok for the most part. I've had to take over the firewood hauling, and putting the garden to bed. Aries just finished up with the antibiotics, and is cutting back on the pain-killers. He's not the type to just sit around though, so being so restricted in his actions is really getting to him. Plus, I know he's berating himself for getting into such a fix in the first place.

So, could this accident have been prevented? He's always so careful around machinery - wears safety glasses, heavy boots, tucks in his shirt, but hates wearing gloves. In this case, gloves might have been enough to have been stopped by the size of the holes. As I said, it was threatening to rain that afternoon, so he wanted to get everything finished up before it started - maybe he was rushing the job a bit. He'd sprained a couple of fingers on his right hand at work the week before, so he's been using his non-dominant hand more instead. The lack of coordination in his left might have been a factor. We'll make it through this. It's a shock, but not a disaster.

Bed Linens Laundry Day

Today was bed linens fall laundry day. Here in the high desert, summers are hot and winters cold. In order to sleep comfortably, spring and fall I change the bedding. Right now, it's still warm enough that we're sleeping with the windows open, closing everything up by nine in the morning to keep the house cooler through the day. But come September, I'm ready to get my fall decor out - replacing the whites, blues, and yellows of summer with tans, golds and burgundy of autumn.

It's still warm enough for cotton percale sheets, but I just replaced our light cotton quilted bedspread with a fall-colored heavier one. As nights get cooler, blankets washed last spring are added, then the flannel sheets, and by January, the down comforter too.

Then, there's Albert to figure into this too. Albert is our big tuxedo cat. Besides being covered with black hair, he'll immediately roll in the dirt whenever he gets outside. And then comes back in to nap in the middle of the bed (as well as ending up between us most nights too). My summer bedspread is peach-colored floral pieces on a cream-colored background. Between the cat and nightly opened windows downwind of a canyon with a dirt road, that quilt (and the one on the guest bed - also a favorite Albert napping spot) definitely need to be washed.

This is a small house. Our washer and dryer is a Thin Twin stacked unit - about a third the size of a standard washing machine. It's fine for our usual laundry use (a Cal-King flannel sheet set really pushes it - I wash the pillowcases in a different load). Spring and fall, when I change the bedding, I bundle everything up (in the bag I made from legs of old blue jeans - usually, it's storage for my sleeping bag) and make a trip to a laundromat at the other end of town - one that has a big, 50-pound front-loading washer.

It only takes about an hour - especially if I go in early enough in the morning that I don't have to wait for the big machine. And you know, I actually enjoy it - it's just one of my rituals to accompany the change in the seasons (plus, there's a McDonald's in the same shopping center - it's an excuse to treat myself to a Sausage McGriddle, something I never do, for breakfast and a San Francisco newspaper to read while I wait for the machine to finish). I do have to check the weather report first, though. My quilts are cotton, and I love the smell of cotton bedding dried in the sun and fresh air. So I need a warm day with only light winds. I bring everything back, damp right out of the washer, and hang it out to dry at home.

More Autumnal Chores

The cupboards and pantry are filling up with jars containing this year's harvest. One of the pints of yesterday's tomatillo salsa didn't seal, so it went into the refrigerator, joining the jar that wasn't quite full. There was room in a top corner cupboard for the rest.

That top cupboard shelf also holds my apple cider vinegar jar. It had been almost 2 months since I'd fed it, and as long as I had the step-stool right there, I figured I might as well take care of that too. The five gallons of this year's cider are still burbling away, in the fermentation bucket on the counter. It could be a couple more weeks before it's finished. So I went down to the cellar (skimmed the scum off the pickle crock while I was down there) to fetch a bottle of last year's hard cider.

There was a thin fresh layer of mother on top of the vinegar in the jar, plus quite a few layers of dead mother piling up in the bottom. So with well-washed hands, I pulled out the fresh mother plus one more thin one, putting them into a clean bowl, then reached in and pulled out the rest of the dead layers to throw out. I diluted the bottle of hard cider with half again as much water, poured that into the jar, and dropped in the thin pieces of fresh mother. Topped with its cheesecloth lid, the jar went back into the dark cupboard to continue its magical process of turning alcohol into tasty vinegar.

Aries went with me for the drive this morning, up to Tahoe to get the mole-removal stitches out of my arm. Doc said everything looks good and the lab reports say benign, so I'm good.

This afternoon, Aries was once again busy over at the compost bin. He'd cleaned out the chicken coop earlier this fall, and most afternoons has been out there raking leaves as they fall. He still had one last wheelbarrow load of finished compost for me, so this afternoon I dug that into part of next year's "early" bed, and raked it out smooth and level. I set out garlic and shallot cloves, from this summer's harvest, and winnowed, then sowed, spinach and arugula seeds from the dry plants I had hanging in the shed. Everything tamped down and laid over with wire to deter hungry birds, they now wait for winter's snows to water them in.

It's Cider Time Again

The weather is finally feeling more like November. Last night's lows were in the low 20's, and today, all day, was cold, gray, and breezy - not really a good day to be outside much. So I spent the morning on the computer, creating certificates to give to our Soroptimist Girls of the Month and scholarship recipients tomorrow.

We've had the potted fig trees in the big wagon for the last six weeks, so we could move them into the garage when it was really cold, and then back outside when the nights have been more moderate. The trees can take temps down to the mid-20's, but not an entire winter outside. Today, with most of their leaves finally gone, we pulled the last few off and moved the now dormant trees down into the cellar to spend the winter.

Then, this afternoon, it was cider time. We got no fruit at all from our trees this year - what little bit survived the late Spring freezes, Bambi ate. But a month ago, before the first freeze, we gleaned four bushels of apples from a big old heirloom tree on the west side of Carson City. The ones without bird pecks or worm holes I tucked away in the cellar for fresh eating through the winter. I canned enough applesauce for the year, have been baking a batch of apple muffins every week, and we're eating fresh apples every day. Time to get the rest of the apples out of my living room, where they've been ripening, sweetening, and softening so they'll make more juice.

While I set up the grinder and other equipment in the kitchen, Aries got our cider press cleaned up and ready to go outside on the deck (more about our setup and the entire process here). It took us about 3 hours to quarter, grind, and press almost three bushels of apples into six gallons of cider. Five gallons are now in the fermentation bucket on the kitchen counter, the sixth in a gallon jug in the refrigerator to drink fresh.

A couple of years ago, we tried an online hard cider recipe, calling for added tannic and other acids. We ended up with something that tasted more like hard lemonade. It was ok, but not what we were going for. Last year, we tried brown sugar and champagne yeast. That batch tastes like a dry champagne - not bad, but the added sugar increased the alcohol content quite a bit. It's too strong for my taste, so when we split a 12-ounce bottle, I have to mix my half with club soda. This year, we're trying a cider yeast, with the juice alone. And we have a new toy to play with - a hydrometer. We floated it in the fresh juice, and came up with an 8% reading (sugar content, I think - the little measurements are labeled "potential alcohol content"). We're supposed to take another reading after fermentation has finished, subtract the first reading (or is it the other way around?), and that should tell us the alcohol content. Should be interesting.

When I was washing out the gallon jug, prior to filling it with apple juice, I used a neat little trick I learned when I used to work construction. One of my tasks on one job site was filling up the big water coolers strapped to the work trucks using five-gallon water bottles. To quickly and easily get liquid out of a narrow-mouthed bottle without any glugging or splashing, put your hand over the mouth and give the upside down bottle a quick horizontal swirl, to get the water swirling around inside. Take your hand away, and the liquid quickly and smoothly spews out in a circular motion as the air enters through the middle of the spiral. Try it with any round bottle, and see for yourself.

Drying and Storing Herbs

I can't believe how time slips away between posts here. I've been doing a lot of seasonal chores, and some kitchen experimenting, and I know a lot of it would be interesting to my readers. I find myself composing blog posts in my head, and then never seem to find the time to sit down and type. I have taken some photos too, so will try to use them to rebuild a bit of my activity of the past few weeks.

Between the rigors of late Spring freezes meaning a slow start to the garden season, a summer on the cool side, and Bambi's predation, my harvest is going to be somewhat meager. I haven't been doing very much canning this year. The nights are still hanging in there above freezing, with the lowest of the lows in the high 30's, so I'm still hoping for a bit more from the tomatoes, squashes, and peppers. Right now, I'm harvesting herbs.

Perennial herbs are great. I love that they're, for the most part, low maintenance and drought tolerant. Once I find the just the right spot for each one, they pretty much take care of themselves. Throughout the summer, I snip bits here and there for fresh use. But now it's time to clean things up for the winter, cutting the plants back and hanging labeled bunches to dry.

I use rubber bands on the bunches (tying with string not so good - the stems shrink as they dry and will slip out of string) and then use old drapery hooks for hangers. The pointy part slips beneath the rubber band, the hook part fits over the edge of a high shelf. Once dry, I crumble the leaves from the big stems into a large colander set atop a piece of newspaper. Then a combination of shaking and more crumbling separates out the smaller stems and leaves me with reasonably uniformly shaped bits of dried herbs to last me through the winter and spring. My tea herbs are stored in clear glass jars I've lined with paper to protect them from the light; brown glass bouillon powder jars are reused to hold the cooking herbs.