To The Surbiton Manor Born

(Kiki's Christmas Drawing) Some might say that it is a little chilly outside. This is actually a heatwave compared to Friday and Saturday. We had minus 13 overnight last night. I can confirm that cars with electricity and bitter cold don't mix very well.  We've burned through the last of last year's wood. Four bags a day this weekend (usually three are sufficient.) Got to keep the home fire burning.  Kiki made chili and curried pumpkin from the summer's vegetables and froze it away for easy good weekday meals. It was a good year. Satisfying to still be eating from the garden. Fingers cold. Brain frozen.   

Princess Poppyseed Watson enjoys reclining on the mantlepiece on cold winter days. She will probably be sitting up there regularly until June. We received about six inches of snow over this Thanksgiving weekend.  I was waiting for the strawberry plants to die back to brown. They were still green when the flakes began falling, so I did not get a chance to cut them back this year. I did bury them in straw before the snow came too hard. Hopefully they will be alright in the spring. I had forgotten what a pain in the neck the electric snowblower is to handle. Perhaps in windless conditions it would be easy. There are almost never windless conditions in Minnesota. There's always snow flying into your glasses, drifting over to the neighbors' clean driveway or blowing onto parts of it that you already cleaned. With a large driveway, the blower is really a necessity. It could be done with a shovel, but we are not spring chickens. Everything just gets harder in the winter. I discovered ...

This is the sky that I was shaking my fist at last weekend. While they don't show up in the phot, little snowflakes were falling (no accumulation).  All of the leaves are now gathered. At least those that I gathered. There's a school of thought that says "leave the leaves." I pick up the leaves for the most part, because I don't think that letting them get matted on the lawn will be helpful. But the last bits I mulch so there's a light leaf cover.  Today marked the day when I was planning to bring the leaves to the leaf dump. Showed up 10 minutes after they opened. On a Sunday. Bad move.  There was a line a mile long, and Kiki & I abandoned it. The van is sitting in the garage, stuffed to the gills, and ready to go tomorrow when it will hopefully be possible to approach the leaf dump. Not Plan A.  Another little piece of learning: It turns out that you want to clean your solar panels periodically. There's a miracle solution that is specifically designe...

  There's a time for writing in your web log, and there's a time when things badly need to get done. We've pretty much arrived at the latter.  The wood arrived. Four cords. It is a good feeling having a winter's worth of warmth stacked in the back yard. Sadly...Actually, I should say "happily" most of it will need to be split again. Our little wood stove is clearly not what the folks at the wood yard have in mind when they say "split." Still, the price was right. Moving it was a little difficult. Four cords is a lot. Just Kiki and me and two wheelbarrows this year. But things are shutting down. The second marathon in the year is finally run. (Not too bad. 4th best when age-graded. A 4:24.) The leaves are picked up in the front yard. Though most of them have yet to fall from the trees in the back. Well, maybe half.  The patio furniture needs to be covered up for the year. The table umbrella is safely stashed in the garage.  We did get a couple of edib...

This, above, is the kind of harvest we are getting every other day here at Steepmeadow. It is challenging to keep up with processing it, eating it, freeing it, giving away. I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but we've had to invest in a freezer. We've discovered techniques of blanching, using the vacuum sealer, trying to extend the remarkably short life of this veg. Today was also the last really long run training for the Mill City Marathon in scenic Dundas, MN. 22 miles of running doesn't exactly prep you for more work. While processing vegetables and preparing for a marathon, I've been using the all-important month of September to rip out weeds and plant the "poor man's bee lawn mix" in the front yard, for all to see.  The thing is that we have something to prove. I want to show, by example, that you don't need to use a bunch of poison on your lawn in order to have a nice one that is insect friendly. It is sort of intended as a demonstrati...

It is an exceptional year for garden productivity. I'm currently reading William Alexander's Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World , and learned that some in Renaissance Europe would refer to the reviled tomato as "Galen's wolf peach," a poisonous fruit described by Galen of Pergemon [the second century AD doctor who expounded on Hippocrates' theory of "humors" and human disease] as a lost, poisonous fruit...possessing strong smelling yellow juice. Tomatoes are a much loved food here. But we now have so many of them, that we were forced to buy a deep freezer to process them. As soon as you get one batch processed, another one comes in. In spite of eating tomato sandwiches, tomatoes as snacks, tomatoes with mozzarella cheese, more just keep on coming, like hordes of orcs at the siege of Helm's Deep, only much more delicious. Same thing with zucchini. And beans. And banana peppers... No more time to write. Time to harvest.