To The Surbiton Manor Born

Bread. I am challenged in the kitchen. Mostly because of my impatience. My eyes glaze over, my chest gets tight, my breathing quickens if  recipe has more than a handful of ingredients and steps. Even so, I decided to give the whole bread thing a solid effort because of three things. Great British Bake Show- it just looked kind of cool and it was presented as science not chore.  Culinary Reactions book by Simon Field- again, Science equals Fun. I was given this for the holidays Covid. - Stay Safe at Home rules and yes, I got caught up in the whole homemade bread fad.  I began by making tortillas, I couldn't get to Trader Joe's to get my favorite ones so I tried to make them. I have my mother's old lefse grill and I had some success and gained and lost competency. I'm giving them a rest for the time being. I'll try again soon. The biggest challenge to joining the trend was sourcing some yeast. I can't believe how hard it was to find. When I finally

It's been a busy weekend of planning and preparing for the future while some fruits come to...well, fruition. Looking ahead to next year, the long-weekend started with another purchase of 2x6 & 4x4 lumber to finish off last weekend's project of building three 4x4 raised beds in the Lower Garden. Once again, I was surprised by the slope here at Steepmeadow. Even the beds that appear flat are at least two 2x6's at the base. So lumber costs are going to be higher than expected, and we need to take into account the limited transport capacity of the Sonata. The limit is about six 2x6's. So we need to do this step-wise. On the positive side, it helps to keep things inside the limited budget. This work is, of course, focused on preparing for next year. As much of the garden has had it for this year, or is looking beaten-down and sickly, there is a strong urge to rip it up and look to the future. Part of that process is planning what to plant next year and putting

Spending just a few minutes on the deck in the early evening watching the sunflowers has become a favorite thing to do. For just a few minutes, it's nice to forget the imploding outside world. From a food growing perspective, filling 1.5 of our raised beds with giant sunflowers was perhaps not the most efficient use of space (especially after the cucumbers that were supposed to use them as a trellis failed), they've been a fairly abject failure. But from a wildlife perspective, they are awesome. They've attracted a little flock of goldfinches - my favorite bird. The neat little creatures are perched all over them in the early evening. The bees love them. The camera on my phone is full of pictures where the bee has just left the flower and the frame. Also, there is something very cool about a flower that towers over you. While they are probably not raised-bed material for next year, we will definitely have to find room for them somewhere in the yard.

It has recently become necessary to eat tomatoes at pretty much every meal in order to keep up with production. Tonight, I attempted a new culinary delight: Hot Lime Gazpacho. And you can, too! (Though I don't wholeheartedly recommend it.) "It was dinner," Kiki raved. Yes, onions, fresh tomatoes, cilantro, aurora peppers and jalapenos along with a usually tasty plant-based chicken substitute heated to perfection in a pan. It was not wholly unlike a delicious salsa. On the surface, it should have been good. Or at least so I convinced myself. I think the kindest words were those that Kiki used when she suggested that perhaps we should save room in the home recipe book for other dishes.

It has been a glorious and productive three day weekend. It's been steaming hot (about 90 degrees and humid) and sunny. I'm just back from a short bike ride. The suburban homes are quiet outside as most people seem to be huddled in their air conditioning. (They're missing out, in my humble opinion.) There is not a cloud in the sky. The breeze is barely moving. When you ride you whiz through shadows that provide a minute of cool, and all sorts of different summer smells waft through the air. Heat waves rise from the road. Yellow flowers wave in the ditches. Friday started with a drive to collect lumber, followed  by a short run, followed by assembly of two 4x4 raised beds made with 2x6 boards and 4x4 posts rising 24" from the bed.  We envisioned the Lower Garden as all raised beds - three on a North/South axis and a fourth & fifth on an East/West line because of the tree and its roots.  Money was thin in the spring, what with the expenses of moving in

The corn needed to be dealt with. It had resorted to trickery to try and keep itself in the garden but I'd had more than enough empty sacks of corn husks and horrifying mutant cobs. I mercilessly yanked it all out, maniacally laughing as I did. Not really, but it was pleasant to remove what had become such an persistent eyesore. In so doing,  I came across a little bean plant. This is significant because a bean plant had been planted with each cornstalk and yet we'd seen no beans all summer. I counted, "un, deux, trois..." (they were French green beans...) and found the wee plant had produced a stunning onze haricort vert!  I also discovered my bean pocket (haricort vert poche) in my overalls. So that was also a pleasant surprise.  You never know when you might find yourself in need of an emergency bean. Wait! This isn't what I found...how did this get in here? This is what I found. poche de haricort vert

We planted Aurora Pepper seeds from Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, IA in March, under grow-lights. They took so long to germinate (over two weeks) that we were ready to declare them DOA. Then tiny leaves appeared, and they started to grow.  By May, they were about two inches tall, and, impatient, we planted them out - two in containers, one in a bed in the Lower Garden. They've been in full sun, as the directions for growing suggest, all summer long. We watered them to get them through the steamy 90 degree + days without withering.  Finally, toward the end of July, little purple bulbs started to emerge. They've taken nearly a month to reach almost maturity. They go from purple to yellow to orange to a deeper orange/red when they are ready to harvest. The leaves are mostly a dark green.  They would make a lovely edible landscape. I can see planting these out in front of the house at some point. They're decorative.  While the seed packet said that they a

"Perfect Lawns" Stink Traditional Turf Grass Lawn in April I had a nemesis called the Grand Prix. It was a coppery gold and had a black Briggs & Stratton motor mounted on it. This was controlled by a series of wires and ropes. It had a grass catcher that would only catch a very small amount of grass dangling precariously from one side. It was a lawnmower. I hated that thing. I distinctly remember being left with that thing during the summer between 6th and 7th grade. I'd be under orders from my parents to mow the lawn before they came home. And I did my level best. But even if I managed to get it started the first time, if I ever shut it down to empty the tiny grass catcher, the job was over. I'd struggle with adjustments to the choke. I'd pull the starter cord until my arm was sore. It would simply refuse to turn over. And then I'd be in trouble. "It's not my fault!" I'd protest, to no avail, and my dad would go outside, pull

' Tis a silly place .

I'm not much of a cook. In fact, my foibles are legendary. I have such culinary catastrophes in my past as, Pop-in-Fresh-Cinnamon-Roll-Soup and Tator Tots with French Fries on the side, a dish my two daughters remember...I'd add fondly but that would be a bit too far. I've left a trail of burnt heat and eat foods in my wake. Lately though, I've been trying to figure out some stuff and I think I've managed to redeem in some small way, my tarnished reputation. I have found success in baking bread. Yes, I fell victim to the lockdown rage of bread baking. I came late to the party and it took a long time to acquire the yeast and flour. While I waited, I read a book that explains the science of baking, thus making the whole endeavor more fun than drudge work. But I digress, back to the story teased by the title. It has to do with those 3 small Turk's turban squash that we grew. We only harvested them because we'd had an overnight near total wipe out of the squ

Living Greener A Few of our Plastic Reducing Tips One of the most important reasons Kiki and I have chosen to attempt self-sufficiency is that we care fervently about the environment, and think that we need to do what we can to keep the planet from burning down. One day a couple of years ago we paused to consider how much plastic we were using, and we were shocked by it. Plastic never degrades, and we don't think that people (if any survive the current extinction) thousands of years from now should have to deal with, for instance, our discarded shampoo bottles. I won't beleaguer the point, but we all know that generating tons of garbage from toxic fossil fuels for single-use rubbish that then enters the food chain and fills the oceans cannot be helping the environment. So, without sanctimony or further ado, some things that we are doing at our homestead to reduce our environmental footprint:  Starting in the bathroom, toiletries contain a massive amount o

Friday Morning's Harvest (August 14, 2020) Not every crop has been a failure this year. The tomatoes, for instance, are producing heavily. So far we have been able to keep up with eating them, so not quite the source of food to take us through the winter that we'd hoped, but definitely enough to keep us in veg and out of the weird, surrealistic COVID grocery stores.This morning's take is pictured above. We took our first pumpkin as well as our first cantaloupe today. Hopefully they are suitably ripe. They look promising. There are three more of each, close behind, in case we were too rash. Our kitten, Zipper, has a habit of running amok in the morning. We usually harvest when we get back from our morning runs, and he has developed the habit of charging and climbing the screens and stepping over, or more frequently on, any dishes that happen to be in the sink as he wildly look for us. We developed a solution: Zip him in his backpack carrier and take him with

A New, Prototype Raised Bed Yesterday we finished building a raised bed prototype.  It is our goal to enclose all of our beds at some point, but the cost, to date, has been prohibitive. We threw down more beds this spring than we had planned, because we worried about a food shortage when COVID-19 hit in March. Building eight beds at that point, when combined with some immediate needs around the house, was just not in the budget. It is not for nothing that we call this garden "Steepmeadow." We want our beds to be level. And so, as you can see above, we need to build them into the hill.  We wanted the corner posts to extend above the bed so that we have options to enclose the bed in bird netting, or cover it against frost, or attach fencing of some kind if that proves necessary down the road.  We want it to look good, so that it doesn't offend suburban sensibilities. We want it to last.  It is possible that the bed we built is a little overkill. We

Ten Early Lessons from our First Year of Gardening The first year of gardening for self-sufficiency is often, or so we understand, marked with, shall we say, "noble failures." It is a time for learning valuable lessons for the next season. If we were planning to be wholly self-sufficient, and if society were to break down today leaving us with only the food that our humble homestead in the suburbs could produce, we'd be starving by November.  The lessons we've learned thus far include, but are not limited to, the following: Squash sometimes gets a fungus, and a crop that started out promisingly can be reduced to three iffy, tiny Turk's turbans, three zucchini, and a couple of pumpkins that might actually make it, if we are lucky. Sweet corn is a big waste of space. The amount of space required, in our case two and a half of our eight 8x4 beds, compared to the amount of food that it produces is far too much to justify. We have reaped a few, paltry,

Well, not quite. This year anyway. We moved into our new home on February 7th and I dare say, not a moment too soon.  Of course, being that we found the house in the middle of a snowy Minnesota winter, we may have neglected to take careful note of the slope of the backyard. We did find the existence of a shed in the back to be rather fortunate as we could now refer to ourselves as Tom and Barbara "Two Sheds" Good. No plans as yet to acquire a second shed. We just have the one. So this particular February 7th occurred in the year of our lord of the manor, 2020 and if you know your history, a pandemic was about to lock us all firmly in place. We were happy to be out of our cramped rental with its teen parties coming through balsa wood walls anyway.There will be a tale of the townhome back forty that Tom will share later- a warm hearted story of the wrong kind of gardening. Which isn't really a thing- any gardening is good gardening. Even if it is only practice for the nex