Morels

Early this month, my brother and I (OK mostly my brother- hah!) were digging out a drainage ditch here at the house. It is an old concrete ditch about 4 foot deep, but over the years it has filled up with leaves almost to the top. Frank (my brother) wanted to take some of this old leaf mould back to his garden, and we wanted the ditch emptied out, so it seemed like a pretty good arrangement.

While he was digging however he came across this mushroom which I thought I recognized immediately.

Well, I looked at a guide to identification for them, and it seems that it really is a morel; Probably a yellow morel. From what I've read, only the 'false morel' is close in appearance, and it is easy to differentiate because it isn't hollow. This mushroom was hollow through both the stem and the cap. In fact, the cap even had a hole in the top- though I think it may have been broken a little.

We didn't eat it however, because of the difference between sure and pretty sure- and because you never know with the internet. As one website advised, "You can actually eat ANY mushroom, it's just that some can only be eaten once." (paraphrased and can't remember where I read it- sorry to not credit..)

Anyway, this has really been on my mind this morning. Wouldn't that just be amazing if I could encourage my own little wild mushroom patch here? And MORELS no less. I could only be happier with truffles!

I have some emails out to experts on morels, hopefully I can get some more info on this.

If you know something about wild mushrooms please chime in or drop me a line. In the meantime I'm going to tag this post with Wildlife, and optimistically with Garden- let's see if we can make that a reality.

More wildlife

Just some photos of more animals in the garden.

A bee I chased with the camera trying to get a flying shot..

And here it is, ok not great but anyway. He's pollinating the tomatillo here..

For the next one you have to see a raspberry flower first- 

So here's a raspberry flower.

And here's a white spider with no web. He is always there, he holds his legs out like petals on a raspberry flower, and the bugs just come to him for that hug. He's hugging two flies here, so it looks like a pretty successful strategy..

Where did he live before we planted a raspberry I wonder? Maybe on the lemons next door?

Flies love compost, lizards love flies. Here's the king of the compost pile. 

And finally, one that's a first sighting for me. 

Jen actually spotted it in the grass while we were leaving for Lowes. In all my years in this county, I've never seen this species. Anybody care to guess? Pretty sure I knew the genus right away, but I had to dig up some info to get specific. Looks like we caught him enjoying a meal. I'm guessing he ate a fence swift (lizard) by where we found him. He was right near a wood pile where they are plentiful. 

Here's a hint!

Marmalade

It's a pretty great thing to have mature fruit trees around, though with the hustle of the seasonal garden we often forget about them.

This is especially true of the oranges. There are 6-7 orange trees here on the property we rent. Why 6-7? Well that discrepancy depends on what you call a tree. There is one here that was just full of dead branches when we moved in. I trimmed it pretty hard, because I figured it was a lost cause and was preparing to cut it out entirely, but the battery on the chain saw died out before I could get to the main trunk. Before I got back to the job, it suddenly sprouted a whole bunch of pretty vigorous suckers- so we've decided to give it a chance. I know that might sound foolish to some people, but one of the best producing trees here is nothing but a HUGE stump (biggest around I've seen on an orange) that has a big, round, tangled mass of suckers coming out of the top of it. The oranges it produces are quite small and stay pretty sour, but in my opinion they make for perfect juice and the quantity is best of all the trees. This tree is the very one that got me fired up to make marmalade today.

Since it grows pretty close to the hedge that blocks us from the street, I couldn't help but notice it when I was walking around the hedge chasing a lizard. And what I noticed was this: All the (30 or so) 'oranges' on it were empty shells hanging like so many dried out old Christmas ornaments. There were no oranges on this tree at all anymore, just some old hard peels still attached to their twigs.

So I got to googlin'. It sounds like this is the work of 'roof rats', aka- black rats. I don't find this hard to believe at all, because we sure do have them. We have been in a sort of truce for most of the past year, with the exception of the compost bin incident, and the crawl space incident (the only time I have resorted to poison). This certainly means war.

First thing is to pick all the oranges, from all the trees. Well, all but one anyway- I'm leaving the tall one in the driveway to let them get REALLY sweet. But what shall I do with all these oranges?


We turned to Fine Preserving, a book which I bought long ago simply because I thought it was written by MFK Fisher. It wasn't, it was written by Catherine Plagemann- but the copy I bought was a reprint and annotated by MFK Fisher. Anyway, it was a happy accident, cause that book is full of recipes for strange and forgotten preservations that I'd never heard of before. I've been hoping to get to this book eventually (making something from it that is) but I haven't done anything but read from it till now.


So, here we were staring at all these oranges and wondering whether to juice them or eat them, donate them, try and barter them or what- when we thought of marmalade. Not only does this book have a great recipe for orange marmalade (it actually has two), but it also contains one for every other citrus fruit you can think of (OK, not starfruit). The one we chose uses both lemons and oranges.

A few hours of peeling, chopping, cooking and jarring later- and we've got some oranges tucked away where the rats can't get to them, in the form of about a gallon of marmalade. It's pretty good too, though I'm really supposed to wait a week for best taste.

Here come the pictures..

Snake day

Must be a big snake day.  Just found this guy while out picking up the mail.  Much smaller gopher snake than "Stumpy", and with its tail point intact. 

Big Worm

Uh-oh! Looks like trouble.. Stumpy (missing the tip of his tail) is a gopher snake who has lived here longer than we have. We see him quite a bit through spring and summer. He was poking around and smelling into the gopher holes when he wandered across the DMZ. 

"What is it? Big worm?"

Summer goes for a taste, snake strikes back, and the birds ALL (whether near him or far) jump simultaneously in the air for a second. So funny, wish I had gotten a picture of that. Our buddy Stumpy uses their surprise to make a 'run' for it.

But Summer is hot on his 'heels'. She is not quite sure that he isn't delicious. For some reason I'm thinking of the Mexican national flag here..

Crow Jane can't resist the wiggling tail, but I'm not letting anyone hurt this guy. DUH, he eats gophers!

"What'd I ever do to them?"

"Those chicks are too big to swallow, I've checked"

Owley looking crazy. Still worked up and squawking away.

Big Worm aka Stumpy, hiding safe under the artichoke. The garden is fenced off from the chickens. Isn't he (or she) pretty? Skin looks practically beaded. 

Angry mob knows just where he is.

"... And don't come back either!" These birds are mean..

Confetti Stir Fry

That's what Jen calls it. I call it delicious. It has been different every time I've had it, depends on what's coming out of the garden.

This one has swiss chard, bull's blood beet greens, blue solaise leeks, yellow squash, garlic, daikon radish, and some rice cooked in our own chicken stock. Yum.

Everything but the rice is from the yard.

Progression photos, main garden

No bla bla blahs this time. Just some pictures that speak for themselves. Look at everything grow!


               Three Sisters planting- Silverqueen Corn, Butternut Squash, and Pinto Beans

 Artichokes are blowing up! Been eating about 4 a day for the past week, and look at all those new ones coming in.. I'm not complaining.

                                       Crook-Neck squash

A few shots of the whole garden

              I can't wait for the Olallieberries!

Pullets and cockerals are growing fast. It looks like I will have some rumpless birds here, like their dad.  You can see how some have tail feathers coming in, others don't appear to.

These are our two favorites- Hope they are hens!

              Tomatoes

          And a pea flower..

Finally, a couple pictures of a newly started batch of compost. We put it together yesterday and look how it's cooking. Mostly coffee grounds on top here..

Composting Controversy

So, I guess it's because I'm so fascinated with composting that I talk about it so much. And I guess it's because I talk about it so much that people assume I'm an expert at it. Really I'm new at it, as with everything else I'm blogging about.

If you read what I do, and then you look around the web and at most books, you'll find that I'm actually doing everything wrong. Try telling that to my corn.

Here is the controversy. I compost everything from the kitchen, and that includes the meat scraps that nearly everyone advises against. I do it because it's food waste, and because I don't want the food waste going into the landfill. I do it because it's biodegradable, and I KNOW it composts well. Bodies have been composting since they invented death. It's not simply possible, it's inevitable.

Now don't get me wrong. I know why some people like to advise against it. 1. Putting a great deal of meat into a hot compost can get smelly fast. 2. Protein is also a very precious thing to wild animals (and domestic), and when they smell it in that box outside they will do whatever they can to get at it. 3. You could wind up with maggots and flies and all kinds of creepy crawlies. 4. And finally, it seems to be recommended that compost that includes meat get a longer 'finishing' time, because of the possibility of contamination of bad bacteria. These are (as far as I know) very real worries, but there are much simpler solutions than throwing valuable nutrients into landfills.

Here is how I deal with these problems instead.

1. Nobody that I can imagine (maybe a slaughter house?) would be filling a compost bin with anything but a very negligible amount of meat products. Even if I put a whole roast into my bin, that would account for a very tiny amount of the available space it has. I won't pretend that decomposing meat won't smell (unless you have a very active population of soldier fly grubs) but if your compost is like mine, that smell is mostly covered- both physically by burying it under some lawn trimmings, or by other smells. My compost typically smells like coffee grounds or orange peels, both of which go into it in very large quantities.

2. Animals DO want to get into your compost bin. My first bin was a haven for rats before I figured out where they were getting in. I had to scrap it altogether and rebuild it so it would be more secure. My bins are made from wooden pallets. They aren't the usual slatted pallets (though you could use those too), they are 'paper pallets', and have no space between each slat. They are also very securely attached together and then have a fifth pallet upside down on top for a lid. The only animals that get inside these days, are the ones I want inside, because they are some of my composters. I think that most people advising against using meat are folks who either are using (or selling) thin plastic made compost bins that probably wouldn't stand up to a hungry animal. I'm confident that mine would.

3. It's actually really easy to control flies in the compost bin. If it weren't, vegetable waste would have the same problem that meat does anyway. I simply do the same for all food waste, cover it up with compost. I scoop out a bit of compost, pour in the food waste into that depression, and then cover it up with the compost around it. In a couple of days to a week, it will look quite a bit more like the compost around it.

4. I'm in no big hurry with it. I make pretty large amounts of it in a year, so while I do wait the whole year for it to finish- I have a lot for my trouble at the end. I also use two bins, so I don't have to hurry it up to make way for more, any more than I need to hurry it up so I can use it in the garden.

However you decide you want to do it, get to composting. It's a great way to be mindful of the fact that there really isn't much organic matter that is 'trash' if we look at things the right way. And it's fun to put your trash bin out every other week with only one little bag in the bottom. You'll get to wishing they would charge you by the pound to haul it away (and I still say they should!)

Here are some hens scratching for worms!

Deleted

Because Amazon is working so hard to block honest CA revenues from getting to the state, I can no longer recommend the purchase of any product from them.

Breakfast

So we had some of our artichokes last night, with some homemade aioli (delicious).. Funny thing was I was making the aioli from memory, and forgot that I need to whip up the yolks FIRST, before adding oil. I had just whipped up olive oil, yolks, garlic, salt, and pepper- all together. Of course it wouldn't come together, and I had to stop and think about it. Not a disaster right? I just started a new batch of yolks (with a tiny bit of lemon, cause I like it), then poured the whole earlier broken batch over it while I whipped. Bottom line was I made an EXTRA rich aioli, since it had about double yolks necessary. And I was left with a whole mess of eggs whites.

So we looked in the garden this morning, found a young yellow squash, and a couple green onions, sauteed those in some butter (with some store bought baby spinach) and then scrambled the egg whites on top.

Don't know about you, but I think egg whites are kind of boring. There was nothing to do now, but feed the scramble back it's own yolks. In the form of a generous serving of aioli of course! Funny how it all works out..

Very tasty. Onion rye toast with butter and raspberry jam on the side.

Strawberry trials, place your bets folks.

So we planted strawberries last year, and they've performed very well for us. Not surprising, strawberries doing well in Ventura county right? Thing is, we've never been able to eat a single one. The snails and woodlice (yeah 'rolly polies'!) are munching on them so much, that by the time they are ripe, they look like swiss cheese. When I do find the odd one untouched by bugs, it's been mushed up by some yeast or fungus from sitting on the bare ground.

These partially bug eaten berries have made for almost a years worth of great snacks for the chickens, but I STILL want some berries.

Here's what we've done. First we ordered 50 bare root mara de bois strawberries and we decided to plant them several different ways to find out what works best.

Planting 1- In a large raised bed with lots of composted wood shavings from the chicken coop (poop included) and everything I clean out of the rabbit cages (poop, shavings, urine, and lots of wasted timothy hay). It may sound gross, but I've read that rabbit manure is one of the few that's not too nitrogenous to use fresh. I have planted some melons in the same bed, since I figure it should take the berries awhile to really take off. I'll trim vines though, or just guide them away from the strawberries since I want them to take it over after the melons are gone.

Planting 2- As a control for the composted chicken/rabbit manure & shavings experiment, I've plopped a couple of them into another raised bed with my Armenian cucumbers. They are all growing on store bought container soil. Nothing fancy, just want to see if they like the manure better or if it's really all the same. Both raised beds are very close together, so sun should be the same.

Planting 3- Individual pots, hung with twine over an old 2x4. These should definitely keep the bugs off, don't know if there will be enough room for their roots. I used the bagged soil here as well, and I add compost to the top occasionally.

Planting 4- I took an old chicken feed bag- made of a plastic woven mesh- and filled it with compost and bagged soil. I laid it on the ground and cut 6 x's into the top, to plant the bare root plants into. I figure this will probably be much like the plastic mulch that the commercial growers use locally on their rows, with the added bonus that I'm recycling. I had refused from the outset to buy that plastic mulch, even though I can see it's ideal for keeping the berries off the soil where they rot.

Planting 5- same as 4 except the feed bag has been additionally lined on both sides with cardboard and then hung up on one of our swings. Because this one is hung, I get to plant both sides. I planted one side with a commercial variety I found at the gardening store (can't remember the name), and mara de bois in the other.

Planting 6- This was not planned, but I received a gift card for a local gardening store, and when I went to spend it, I found a great big old strawberry pot for $17. This one has 12 slots for berries and we filled them, (french thyme on the top) though it looks like about half of the little plants are already not doing well. I suspect the drainage is a little slower through all that bagged soil than strawberries want. Maybe if I had mixed it with sand first I'd have been better off. The ones dying are mostly on the bottom row. Isn't it always the most expensive method that works the least?

Pictures in the order I wrote about them, except the last picture should actually be first..