Tag: homelife

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Home Life Kitchen Garden

Making Soup and Applesauce

Potato Digger
Potato Digger

LAKE MACBRIDE— At the end of the season, before the last gleanings from the garden have turned to compost, home cooks prep and cook and preserve to make use of summer’s bounty.

Foraging in the refrigerator as if it were foreign turf, forgetful of how the mix of cut onions, diverse greens and leftovers arrived, the best is culled for a hearty fall soup. Kale and onions, Brussels sprouts and broccoli stalks, celery and carrot, a turnip, some potatoes, frozen sweet corn, and everything else suitable goes into a large, stainless steel stock pot.

Tomatoes are selected from the counter, their numbers diminishing without replenishment from the garden patch. Cutting away the soft and dark spots, they were cored and pulsed on low speed in the blender, skins and all. The red puree was poured all at once into the simmering ingredients. A handful of leftover farfalle, bay leaves, some dried red and black beans, and chervil were added. The pot simmered more than an hour on low heat. It was soup for dinner.

At 3:15 a.m. I brought the graniteware water bath canner from downstairs to the kitchen. Using the wire rack, four quarts and a pint of applesauce, plus the pepper puree made this weekend, were lowered into the pot which was then filled with warm tap water. Moving the heavy pot to the stove, I turned the heat on high to process the jars of summer goodness. Now breakfast.

While working in the local food system, one never knows when or where the next paying job will come along. I finished the season at the orchard yesterday, at one CSA the work is clearing the field, which won’t take too long, then there is the planting in the high tunnel and fall share help, which will end soon as well. There is the prospect of cutting firewood at another farm, but weather seems likely to intervene before long. It begs the question, what’s next?

While invited to return to the warehouse after the season, it doesn’t pay enough given the investment in health and well being required. It is a fallback position to pay some of our bills should no other opportunities present themselves. There are a lot of low wage jobs around town, but they present the same problem of occupying space without providing enough income. I’m confident something will materialize.

While there is fresh food, I’ll continue to eat well and stock the pantry for winter. Mostly, we eat to live, and there is still time to make deposits in the food pantry. Hopefully there will be enough reserves to see us through until spring.

Categories
Home Life Kitchen Garden

Stuffed Peppers

RURAL SOLON— While finishing a shift of deconstructing tomato cages, I walked along the row of frosted bell pepper plants toward the gate. It snowed yesterday and hard froze last night. I picked six pepper survivors for the flat side upon which to sit on the baking sheet. There was a lot of food that survived the snow and frost, but we enjoy stuffed peppers a time or two during each year, and that was my choice.

When it was time to begin preparing the meal, I cored, parboiled and stuffed the peppers with a mixture of rice, eggs, a blend of Italian cheeses, cooked onion and garlic, and dried rosemary and sage. They were topped with leftover pasta sauce and went into a 350 degree oven for 22 minutes. We had a working family supper, served with sweet corn and fresh tomato slices.

On a cold day food fresh from the oven, made with local ingredients raised by people we know is as good as it gets. It is a simple pleasure, one that bears repeating if that is possible.

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Environment Home Life

Storm Cleanup is Finished

Ashes from the Brush Pile
Ashes from the Brush Pile

LAKE MACBRIDE— Embers of the brush pile marked the final cleanup after the Sept. 19 storm. Uneven spots remain where the tree fell, but the lilac bushes retained a nice shape and appearance after trimming the damaged branches. Next order of business is to mow the lawn, which is still partly brown after the drought, and collect the grass clippings to use as mulch where the burn pile is now. It’s been two months since the lawn was mowed.

The season’s canning is mostly done, and I posted this to Facebook yesterday,

All the canning jars in the house have something in them, more than 30 dozen. Tomatoes, applesauce, hot peppers, soup stock, sauerkraut, dill pickles and hot pepper sauce. There is apple butter, pear butter, peach, raspberry and black raspberry preserves, and grape jelly. The freezer’s full too. Plenty of potatoes and onions. We will have the beginnings of plenty of winter meals. All was grown locally and organically. Think I’m done for this canning season.

Herbs are drying in trays in the dining room, and a lot of produce remains in the garden. The counters and bins in the house are full of tomatoes, winter squash, apples, onions and potatoes. By Monday we should have a hard frost which will end most of the growing season. The historical first hard frost is around Oct. 7, so the growing season extended by about two weeks this year. It’s not clear what weather history means any more, except to point out how different things are getting.

A farmer was talking about the weather last night, commenting that it has recently been extreme, with nothing in between. He was referring to the early snowstorm that killed an estimated 100,000 cattle in South Dakota earlier this week. What we want is a steady, soaking rain for about 48 hours to bring up the moisture level in the ground. It hasn’t happened, and we are left with heavy downpours, flooding and fires in the great plains and upper Midwest.

For some farmers, the soybeans are in. While they had the potential for a big crop, the average yield was about 40 bushels per acre. The pods formed but didn’t fill for want of rain. The corn crop is still coming in, so if it rains, nature could wait until the rest is in. The variation in yield is between 40 and 200 bushels per acre. There aren’t many places producing the high end of the range and average is coming in around 140. There is some hesitancy to say until it is all in, but yield will be better than last year during the record drought.

Everywhere in the farming community, people are concerned about the extreme weather. Weather is always a concern for farmers, but this is different. People seem worried like they haven’t been before. There has been no mention of climate change in these conversations, and I don’t bring it up. No need to assert my views when the connection between extreme weather and climate change will become obvious with the persistence of trouble, and the expansion of knowledge.

While our cleanup is finished, the extreme weather seems like it is only just beginning. We use the same language, developed over generations, to discuss farming. But there is a sense, a resonance of worry, unlike what has been present before. It will nag at people and hopefully result in action to mitigate the causes of climate change before it is too late.

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Environment Home Life

Storm Cleanup Continues

Work Station
Work Station

LAKE MACBRIDE— After completion of the Sept. 19 storm cleanup, the monetary cost will be $230.50, including hiring an arborist to tend to two trees and a construction company to repair the fascia on the southwest corner of the house. It was not much, and a lot less expense than others in the neighborhood experienced.

I avoided the cost of disposing of the fallen branches by cutting them into two types: firewood to be sold, and brush to be burned. The cost is in time, with one or two more four hour sessions of cutting ahead, and at least two more burns when the wind dies down. We’ll evaluate the condition of the damaged trees and lilac bushes and make adjustments after the burning is finished. With pruning, the lilacs can be saved.

Burn Pile Site
Burn Pile Site

Beside our checking account and labor, and a share of the bill for the damage in our subdivision, another toll from the storm lingers— the idea that this worst in 20 years weather event, coupled with recent severe drought and terrible flooding, is just the beginning of the effects of climate change on our lives. Whatever severe weather we might have had was intensified by the effects of global warming. That a monetary value can be assigned is a sign of things to come.

Farm and newspaper work continues over the weekend, so the cleanup will wait until next week. Cleanup displacing other things to be done to advance our socioeconomic status in Big Grove. The storm cleanup reinforces the idea that climate change is real and happening now. We need to do something to protect what we hold dear, we can’t be effective alone, and the time to act is now.

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Home Life

Autumn Days

Turnip Green Soup Stock and Tomato Juice
Turnip Greens Soup Stock and Tomato Juice

LAKE MACBRIDE— As cleanup from the Sept. 19 storm continues, the weather has been almost perfect for outdoors work. The plants in the yard have come alive, and the garden generated a burst of food (collards, Swiss chard, turnip greens, arugula, herbs, tomatoes and peppers) as the first frost approaches. Days like these are as good as it gets.

Roof Damage
Roof Damage

Slowly… systematically, evidence of the storm diminishes. Yesterday I cut up the locust tree and spread the branches in the back yard for easier final cutting. Today a construction worker comes to repair the corner of the house. All that’s left is to finish with the locust tree and replace one of the downspouts damaged during the storm. Then to glean the garden, mow the lawn, and collect the clippings for mulching the garden over winter.

What then?

Much as we relish our moments of sunshine in brilliant autumn days, there is work to do before the final curtain falls and we join the choir invisible.

Writing About Apples
Writing About Apples

My writing will continue. It has become subsistence, a part of me, like blood production in the marrow, a way to breathe life sustaining oxygen in an unsettling and turbulent world. It is not expected to contribute much financially.

Farm work and gardening, participation in our local food system will continue at a subsistence level. There is inadequate income to be generated in working for someone else, and farm work will always be lowly paid.

There is family life, but little role for that in the blogosphere. We depend on our families, and little more need be said here.

Mostly, life will be living as best we can during moments of brilliance and trouble. Like these days in early October, when worry seems far away, and life so abundant.

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Home Life

Caesura

Silhouette on Parched Ground
Silhouette on Parched Ground

LAKE MACBRIDE— It’s 50 degrees at 4:30 a.m. with a slight chance of precipitation around lunchtime. There is a break in the narrative— caesura.

Intense activity with local food producers during recent months engaged me fully. Suddenly, expected, it is over. The pause is welcome. It’s time to reflect, catch up on neglected work and renew efforts to sustain our lives on the Iowa prairie.

Today will be a day of building a to-do list. When the sun rises, it’s outside to cut up the locust tree and fallen limbs from the Sept. 19 storm. The garden gleaning needs completion. The house needs repair. The list builds already. During this pause, there is much to do to prepare for winter, and before long, life will reengage my energy and attention. Already it leaks in. I’ll resist for another hour, and then embrace it again… until the next caesura.

Categories
Home Life Kitchen Garden

Talk about Frost

Backyard Apples
Backyard Apples

LAKE MACBRIDE— We are from a week to ten days from the first hard frost. Suddenly it’s time to clear the garden, make a brush pile, and cover the ground with what mulch there is. We’ll make a gleaning pass over the plots, and bring in everything that is ripe or can ripen to use this fall and winter. Cookery gradually turns from fresh and local to working out of the pantry and stores. There is a happy and sad part of the change in seasons.

The happy part is found in being born a city person. Working indoors part of the year comes naturally. As a child of the 1950s, reading, media consumption, writing, email, and social media fit in with a general outlook of being on an island in a complex sea of society. More than 60 years later, after a career in a competitive business, my core values are unshakable. They are a platform from which I can view society and plunge in when the time is right to engage in fights worth our blood and treasure.

The sad part is over the years, in our compound on the lake, I have become an outdoors person, and spring through fall is the best part of the year. That was particularly true this year when farm and yard work kept me outside much of the time. The outdoors part of the year is not finished, yet winter’s approach is unmistakable. Its time to roll up the garden hose in the garage and make sure the automobiles are winterized.

The season’s home canning is almost finished with 18 pints of “fallen apple butter.” After the recent storm, I picked up the fallen fruit (three types of apples and some pears missed during the harvest) and made them into a commemorative apple and pear butter. The only thing remaining to can will be some hot sauce with fall peppers (on the stove now), applesauce and perhaps some more canned tomatoes or a garden ends relish after the gleaning. Come November, it will be another plunge into the vortex of the holiday season, then starting anew in 2014.

The seasonal farm work is also winding down. I am finished at one farm, wrapping up at another on Thursday, and the work at the orchard ends after two more weekends. The time is right to consider what’s next in the cycle of life on earth.

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Environment Home Life

Storm Damage Update

LAKE MACBRIDE— The sound of chain saws echoed through the neighborhood yesterday, including in our yard where a tree service climbed the Autumn Blaze maple tree and removed the broken branch high in the canopy. They also removed a large branch from the maple tree on the north side of the house. The branch was growing toward the structure, and could have fallen on it should another intense storm come through. It seems increasingly likely another intense storm will hit, sooner rather than later.

The storm peeled back the southwest corner of the metal facing on the roof. From the ground, it appears there is water damage to the underlying wood, it will have to be inspected and repaired. One can accept the reality of intense weather, caused by climate change, but it is much more than words on a web page. The work of recovery absorbs our resources and time, and portends more of the same. Dealing with disasters, even small ones like ours, is not how we intended to spend our life when we were in grade school.

On the plus side, there is a buyer for the firewood the disaster will produce, and finding an inexpensive tree service will be an asset going forward. I bartered some of the cut maple wood with a neighbor who will use it to smoke meat. In return, he will press some apples into cider. The storm’s wake left more neighboring than I can recall in a long time.

According to the U.S. Census, our household is above the median net worth for people our age. Not by much, but enough so that to say we are working poor is inaccurate. Poor people don’t have a net worth. At the same time, trying to make ends meet is challenging.

The reality of working seventy hours per week for less than a living wage, is there is less time, energy and resources for everything else. At the center of this life is the notion that we can maintain priorities and get the most important things done. Add disaster recovery, and the equilibrium is upset.

It’s approaching 5 a.m. in Big Grove, when I’ll depart for the newspaper, hoping to finish the week’s proof reading and catch the grand opening of a new restaurant in town before heading to the orchard for work. In the hour or two of daylight after my shift, I’ll glean a garden plot to make room for the disaster brush pile. Once that is done, organize for our presentation at the library on Sept. 30. We make plans, work the plan, and hope for the best— sustaining our lives in a turbulent world.

Categories
Home Life

Survey of the Storm Damage

The storm prematurely knocked acorns from the Bur Oak
The storm prematurely knocked acorns from the Bur Oak

... and apples from the tree...
… and apples from the tree…

The worst damage was knocking over a locust tree...
The worst damage was knocking over a locust tree…

... which somehow missed most everything,
… which somehow missed most everything,

...except the lilac bushes.
…except the lilac bushes.

The Golden Delicious apple tree lost another branch...
The Golden Delicious apple tree lost another branch…

... the maple tree lost two. One fell to the ground...
… the maple tree lost two. One fell to the ground…

... and one didn't.
… and one didn’t.

Categories
Home Life

Dealing with the Storm

LAKE MACBRIDE— A neighbor posted this message to our community email list last night,

Dear Neighbors,
Our garden has produced tons of great tomatoes this year, more then we can or can. Tomorrow I will pull my trailer up to the road with some of the surplus tomatoes on it.  If you would like some home grown organic heirloom tomatoes help yourself.

It was a generous gesture, the kind of which we need more in this dog-eat-dog world, where the Darwinian struggle for existence is taken literally and has also taken a turn toward the coarser side of human nature. He posted before the storm rolled in.

One neighbor called the brief storm, “(the) worst in 20 years.” He and his family built about the same time we did, during the early 1990s. The rain was intense and the wind sharp. With the climate crisis, one expects this sort of storm, and seeing how it plays out is never a pleasant experience.

We lost a tree, some lilac bushes and a big branch from our favorite tree, the autumn blaze maple in front. The apple crop was mostly knocked from the trees. When the sun rises we’ll see what is left to finish ripening, and whether there was any structural damage. I won’t be going to the farm today while spending time with post-storm cleanup. It could have been a lot worse.

Next steps are to finish coffee and breakfast, make a list and start doing things on it when the sun rises. There’s a song about that.