“Oooh, where are we going?”
“Oh. I’ll get you for this.”
Category Archives: Sights
Fifteen minutes of flowers
It’s difficult to capture or describe the lushness around here this time of year, so I decided that I’d spend 15 minutes walking around and see how many different flowers I could spot. Here’s the result…
Brandywine tomato:
Strawberry:
Foxglove:
Cool frost-colored plant (this isn’t Photoshop, this is what it actually looks like in June):
Last year’s kale finally allowed to go to seed:
Ahh, yes, the Meadow Multi-Dangle:
Peas:
Purple clusters:
Purple cones:
Red clover:
One rosebush:
The other rosebush:
Rosemary:
The Dreaded but briefly lovely scotch broom:
Small daisies:
Umm…purple:
Trailing blackberry:
Something lavender colored:
A magenta one:
A pink one:
More pink:
Purple again:
Fantastic red flower:
Unknown yellow flower:
Another yellow one:
White clover:
Yarrow, or Queen Anne’s Lace, or similar:
And finally, today’s garden haul – the Chinese Pink garlic, which mostly crapped out but gave a few small clusters, more turnips, and the first good pint of domesticated strawberries:
Chick hatching in improvised incubator
(first three images are scaled-down; click pic to see full size)
Peck peck…
Crack!
Peep…peep…umph…
Hello!
Signs of spring everywhere
(images below are scaled-down; click each one to see full size
or click here to expand them all)
The Asian Pear tree has leaves as lovely as any other’s flowers.
Cover crops of clover and cereal ryegrain are so pretty it’s almost a shame to till them in when planting the next crop. In some places, I’m experimenting with just opening a hole in the clover cover and planting into that, cropping the clover surrounding the transplant to let in light. Might mean less weeding, which is always a good thing.
Radishes…fast and reliable, they really lift your spirits when you’re looking at everything else you planted and wondering where the heck it is. These were planted from last year’s seeds. Several radishes were allowed to complete their whole cycle undisturbed, and when they died in the fall it was an easy matter to strip the seedpods off into paper bags. I crushed the pods in the bag with a beer bottle and sprinkled some of the resulting mixture here about a week ago. The greens, being early and abundant, are almost worth more to us than the spicy little radishes themselves.
Turnips and Kale are having a riot in the cold frame. We’ve been taking several large helpings of kale every week, along with some turnip thinnings – the greens are a little sandpapery when raw, but wonderful steamed.
Purple flowers by the house…this is our third spring, and I’m not sure I ever saw these in that place before. There are always surprises waiting here!
This is a close-up of pollen settled onto the Letsgo…for a few days, everything had a yellow haze around here.
Random decoration from a previous tenant.
Garlic plants are looking great!
We have about 26 hops vines going, thanks to a friend who let me dig some rootstock from his patch. An essential beer ingredient, we are currently paying about $4/ounce for the dried flowers, so this may be one of our more practical plantings.
There was recently a 2,200% tax increase on the tobacco I like…these TN86 tobacco seedlings are my response to that. It’s a shame; of all taxes I pay, a sin tax that is largely spent on medical care is one of the most palatable, but with close to half my salary going to taxes, tolls, and other government fees, I don’t feel the urge to pay more.
Ahh, spring!
Tired, promise to post full story of the birthing soon, but for now: cuteness
Drama queen with her little boy:
…and here’s the little girl:
Also I stopped in the middle of fixing the HTML/CSS, so it’s more broken than before, but I’ll finish that soon and IE users will stop seeing a mess =)
Oregon Winter
Goat friendship and eggs: both pretty miraculous
Here I am with Drama Queen…that’s Koko’s ear and nose behind Drama’s head, and Aberdeen behind me.
It might sound silly to someone who always got eggs from a supermarket, or who always had chickens, but today we ate “homegrown” (home laid?) eggs for the first time, and it was a thrill. It’s amazing that these pigeon-sized bantam hens lay such big eggs.
The shells were very firm and thick, so they cracked neatly with no shrapnel. Yolks were the deep orange, high-domed ones we’ve gotten used to from real free-range eggs, and unsurprisingly the omelet was delicious.
Gimpy
Here’s Gimpy the turkey looking a bit happier…she’s clearly much perkier than when she came here, perhaps because I spent the day making a little rainproof yard for her where she can get sun and air but be safe from dogs.
You can see here why the breed is called “bronze”:
Thanksgiving
Photo by Teri
Next year we expect to produce all of our own milk, cheese, and eggs here on the property, in addition to a much larger portion of our fruits and veggies.
It’s also likely that we’ll raise chickens or turkeys for eating, so a while back I volunteered to help with the chicken “processing” (killing and cleaning) at a friend’s ranch, as much to take measure of my own determination as to learn the skills involved. The skills have already come in handy!
The Saturday before Thanksgiving, I was perusing the local Craigslist, and found someone offering two free Bronze turkeys. They were aging (the larger domestic turkeys don’t age well), and she didn’t want to kill them herself.
The turkeys lived with chickens in a nice place just outside of Eugene. I liked the woman and felt that she cared about their welfare and was a fellow aficionado of “clean food”. These were turkeys I’d feel OK eating…well, one of them. The bigger one was a tom (male), and blind in one eye because chickens can be really mean. He was enormous and healthy, and ended up being our Thanksgiving bird. His name? Thanksgiving. That’s him at the top of the post.
The other bird…she’s a sad case. “Improved” (intensively selectively bred) turkeys become so heavy so fast that they are often crippled just by their own weight. “Gimpy” isn’t as big as Thanksgiving (who must’ve been 30 lbs), but she has a deformed right leg and can only get around with a lot of lurching and flapping. The chickens saw this weakness, and began to peck her to death. They removed maybe a quarter of her feathers and left her with a multitude of raw wounds by the time she came to live with us.
Our accidental pet turkey looks pretty unhappy in this picture taken the day she came home, but she’s perked up now.
Photo by Teri
“Gimpy” originally escaped the butcher block because she just didn’t look healthy enough to eat. But something happened; as our neighbor put it, she “seems to want to live now”, so she’s a resident here for as long as she is satisfied with her life, though determining a turkey’s quality of life is guesswork for us. Away from the hectoring hens, she’s become more bright-eyed and energetic, and every morning we transport her by wheelbarrow from the predator-proofed henhouse to a grassy pasture where she can lurch about, eating bugs and grass and frustrating the hell out of our dog by her inaccessibility.
The rest of the post will be about butchering the big male turkey, and you have to click “more” to see it. But here’s how it turned out – home-processed turkey, homemade cranberry sauce and squash from Teri, fresh baked bread, and (of course!) a pumpkin pie brought over by a dear neighbor who we shared the holiday with. Note the “store boughten” beer – something we’re working to phase out, but if you have to buy them, the Deschutes Brewery ones are all really good.
Photo by Peter
If you’re a vegetarian, you might find the rest upsetting. If you’re not…well, this is the reality of meat, and it’s far more humane and hygienic than what happened to that “free-range organic” supermarket bird you probably just ate.
Miss Kitty Fantastico
Ok, that’s only partially her name. She came to live with us about two weeks ago now, and is an absolute sweetie. Doesn’t like the dog much (probably because he keeps wanting to chase her…), but the humans she loooooves. She’s all full of purrs for the littlest bit of attention.
She’s a stray, but obviously had been accustomed to being around people – the nice lady that took her in and found her a new home (ours) said she’d been begging all the neighbors for food. They tried to find her people, and finally decided that she must have belonged with the people down the street who had recently moved out – apparently they just left her. So now she lives with us.
For the first couple of days, we just called her Kitty, as that’s what the lady she had been staying with called her, and she seemed to answer to it. And being a fanatic for all things Buffy (yes, the tv show), I decided that she should be called Miss Kitty Fantastico (though she looks nothing like her Buffy-verse namesake), since having a cat named Kitty is just lame.
Then, after she’d been here for a few days (and after spending those days trying out every single name that I thought might fit her, and rejecting them all), I woke up one morning with a picture of her face in my mind, along with the name Anu.
So, Anu is now her “real” name – it seems to fit her and she seems to respond to it. But most of the time I still call her Miss Kitty Fantastico, ’cause she is.
