Radishes are easy to grow and very fast. I really must remember to do succession planting on such things – a few plants every week, so there are always fresh ones. But for now, we have a surfeit of hot little red roots, so before the worms get in (which happens if they’re left in the garden after becoming ripe) something must be done. That something is a “quick” (non-fermented) pickling: QUICK-PICKLED RADISHES Makes about one pint 1 1/2 cups sliced radishes 10 fl oz vinegar 10 peppercorns 1 bay leaf 2 teaspoons salt 2 teaspoons sugar (optional, or use honey, stevia, etc.) 1 small onion First, obviously, we need to pick some fresh, organic radishes, fertilized with last year’s kitchen compost and a bit of composted horse manure: The greens can go into a salad (they’re a little bitter to be the whole salad, but a nice addition), or into the goats, if you’re so equipped. Then we slice up the radishes along with an onion: Bring vinegar (we used a mix of brown rice and apple cider vinegars), peppercorns, salt, and sugar to a simmer to get everything nicely dissolved, then cool it off so you don’t blow up your canning jar: Put the radishes and onions into the jar, and pour the cooled vinegar mixture over them: Refrigerate overnight, and the next day you will have delicious pickled radishes floating in a red juice. The smell when you open it is pungent, but the radishes themselves are crunchy and delicious, their sharp flavor mellowed. These will last at least a week in the refrigerator. With a stronger solution, they might last longer, but really what we need to do is some proper fermentation pickling…soon!

I haven’t posted in a while, partly because it was Teri’s turn to debut a goat and I didn’t want to post about other stuff till that happened – and she’s been crazy busy finishing up school. Myself, I’ve been busy with work – dayjob got hectic just when I have a couple of side projects going on. Despite all this, we’ve somehow managed to plant bush beans, chard, kale, peppers (sweet & jalapeño), potatoes, cucumbers, corn, tons of sunflowers, various types of tomato, chives, 30 domestic raspberry plants, 4 wild black raspberry plants, dill, catnip, basil, oregano, and a few hundred square feet of perennial ryegrass (where the goat pen was bare after blackberry cane removal). The salad greens are part of our dinner about every other night, peas are doing well, and once again we’re faced with the “how to eat all these @#$ radishes” problem (but they’re yummy). Lettuce and spinach seem to be unhappy about being planted so late; we had a few really hot days already, and they’re both very slow and spotty. The onions seem to be slowly growing, the apple trees are setting fruit, and the pear tree (which did very little last year) looks like it will be bountiful. And of course there will be a zillion blackberries. Not much in the way of photos today, but here’s the goat house viewed from about halfway up one of the 100′+ trees that flank our house: As for how to eat all those @#$ radishes, I’ll save that for the next post…

…for taking so long to introduce her! Aberdeen is the latest addition to our little goat herd. Another yearling doe from the same herd as Drama, Aberdeen came to live with us just over 2 weeks ago. She’s bigger than either Koko (yes, we just found out we’d been spelling it incorrectly) or Drama Queen, but much more shy and skittish. (And did you notice her wattles in the above photo? Are they cute or what?! We call them her “caterpillars”.) It took her a few days to get used to us, though now that she has identified Peter and me as the bringers of treats, she seems to have gotten over some of her shyness. I don’t think it helped that both Drama and Koko began beating her up incessantly as soon as she first walked through the gate to her new home. (Apparently goats find it very important to establish their pecking order – and poor Koko, the lowest of the low in her old herd, finally had someone that she could pick on! Drama, on the other hand, just likes to be top dog no matter what.) Now that she’s been here for a while, she’s settled in nicely. The other two goats still like to put her in her place, but they seem to have accepted her as one of them. The plans are to breed both Drama and Aberdeen sometime this fall, so by spring we’ll have kids bouncing around and fresh yummy goat milk.

Apple tree blossoming: Pear tree in flower: Peas: Red lettuce sprouting: Salad mix coming in nicely: Violets: Pretty yellow dangly flower: More purple: I do what I call “hippie mowing” – I bring the grass down pretty short to set it back and let the wild strawberries take over, and completely mow around anything that seems to be competing with the grass, hoping that much of it will eventually be replaced: There’s always another mushroom: We used to call these “basketball bugs” when I was a kid: Big snails love it down by the river: Cocoa!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltane