Homer the Puppy

I'd always known that Russ wanted a dog. I like dogs and years ago it seemed like a good idea. More recently I had decided I wasn't interested in the additional mess and responsibility of a dog, not with two toddlers to care for. I came up with the perfect compromise - we'll get a cat! In my imagination, getting a cat was going to be great. We would feed it and it would take care of itself, occasionally letting us pet it. 

I was still under the impression that the cat was the right option when I arrived at my sister-in-law's for Thanksgiving. She has two cats and we have spent lots of time there before, but I had previously failed to see exactly how much her cats hate my children. I realised that we would have to find an exceptionally patient cat to live in our house and that would be tricky. It might end up hating my children anyway. Toddlers are not cat people. A dog would be a better fit for our family.

I hadn't yet told Russ of my change of mind. A week ago, he mentioned that he'd been on PetFinder and had seen an adorable pug-poodle cross.  I  surprised him when I suggested that we go and see it. We made some tentative plans to see the dog, but Russ found out that it was being spayed and not ready for visitors. 

On Saturday morning, we wanted to look at puppies and ended up at the local pet shelter. We were only there to look. The shelter didn't have any dogs there that were right for us, but the guy mentioned that they had a cocker spaniel at an adoption event in town that might meet our needs. We had a free morning, so we headed over to the adoption event. There were lots of adorable black lab puppies, some older dogs and then we found Homer. He was just the right size - a medium-sized cocker spaniel with a beautiful cream/golden coat. I could tell that Russ was immediately taken with him. We took Homer for a little walk with the girls, who both had to hold the leash. We were having a hard time  deciding if we should wait to see if the pug-poodle would eventually be available to us or possibly get Homer, when I did something unusual for me and made the bold decision to take the dog home. We filled out some forms and Homer was ours.

The first 24 hours were a little overwhelming. Homer was very excited and also had some diarrhoea. Our second day with him has been much better. Russ and I have been on a number of walks with him and he is calm now. He's doing really well with the girls, though I think he was somewhat confused when Alex and Rosie tried to feed him imaginary food this morning. He'll get used to it. We're glad to have him.

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Show Me the Honey

Last night we harvested our honey for the first time - 17.5 pounds of the stuff. We haven't yet bought a fancy motorized extractor, so we had to use the crush-and-strain method. First, we had to remove the frames from the super. This was tricky, as the bees glued the frames firmly into place, leaving brown goo  (propolis) everywhere. Then, we had to cut the honey out of the frames and mash it with a potato masher. Russ purchased a special food-grade bucket and appropriate strainers. Once the honey and comb were sufficiently mashed, the mixture went into the strainer. One day later, we were ready to complete the process and filled 17.5 one-pound jars. It was very exciting to actually fill the jars and see how much honey we produced. The kitchen was covered in sticky honey and propolis, but it was worth it.

New Bread-making Efforts

Russ bought me this book for my birthday. I used to make a lot of bread, but haven't in a long while. I often start thinking about dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon and by then its too late to make bread that will be ready for dinner at 5:30. This book offers a whole new method for making bread. Instead of taking three hours  start to finish, this book gives instructions for making a large batch of high-moisture dough, no kneading required, and keeping it in the fridge for up to two weeks. When you want to eat bread, you cut off a lump of dough, shape it, let it rise for 40 minutes and bake it. I've been impressed with the results, though I've only made the first recipe.

 

The great thing about this approach is that the longer you leave the dough in the fridge, the more flavor it acquires, akin to sourdough bread. Russ and I have tried keeping a sourdough starter a few times and they are a lot of work. This method really is an easier, tastier bread. Alas, my loaf doesn't look quite as perfect as the loaf on the cover, but I'm determined to get there.  

Transformational Peaches

Nothing improves my day more than a fresh ripe peach from my own tree. I've been potty training Rosie for the last month, which comes with many frustrations.  Potty training accidents eat up all of my patience. I finished cleaning up another terrible accident  just before lunch and was starting to feel grouchy.  Then I sliced up one of these and shared it with the kids and the whole incident was forgotten. It was full of real peachy flavor that I hadn't tasted in  years. A truly transformational peach.

Sunflowers

Russ planted sunflowers in front of our house a few months ago. I've never been much of a flower person, so I was a little sceptical.  They grow quickly - the tallest of these is probably eight feet high - and in the last week they have started to bloom. I've spent the last hour sitting in the front room admiring the flowers while the rest of my family is in bed sick. They are beautiful.

Not My Favorite Job

A few weeks ago I tried canning some peaches (pictured above) and some apricots (pictured below). The apricots were fairly straightforward. Slice them in half, remove the pit, put them in hot jars, add syrup and place the jars in the canner. To can peaches, you follow the same process, except you need to blanch and peel the  peaches before you put them in hot jars. I blanched the peaches (put them into boiling water for a minute, then into ice water) but they would not peel. I tried blanching them again, this time for two minutes and they still wouldn't peel. I ended up removing the peels with a paring knife, which was not a fun or quick job. After discussing the problem with my mother-in-law, an experienced canner, I realised that the super cheap peaches I used were probably not ripe enough. Grrr. Hopefully I'll forget this experience and be willing to try again next year.

Sweet Loving Nature

Russ pulled this piece of comb from one of our hives and stuck his finger in to taste it. The amber-colored liquid looks like honey, but it isn't, as it hasn't been aged. It tastes like honey-flavored corn syrup. Alex and I have been enjoying it for the last few days. I can't wait for the real thing.

The garden might be dead, but at least we have apricots

As I was writing the last post, the apricots were starting to ripen, but  I was worried we would lose most of them to birds and bugs. The Chinese apricots did much better than expected and we dried them. I used to think of dried fruit as being somewhat tasteless and unexciting, but home-dried apricots are the opposite. I never had a dried apricot before I met Russ' parents. They used to have several large apricot trees and would dry the fruit every year. I tasted some when I first met them and was hooked. We eat them plain and add them to soups. The trick is to let them ripen as much as possible and then dip them in sugar syrup before placing them in the dehydrator.

The Learning Process

When I was a child, my family had a vegetable garden one summer, but other than that I have no prior gardening experience. Its a learning process. Gardening, and especially gardening in the desert at a high altitude, poses some unique problems. Its the middle of summer and almost everything in the garden is dead or dying, even with daily watering. The temperature regularly hits 100 degrees Fahrenheit and its never cloudy. The pumpkin starts I planted two days ago didn't have a chance and I planted my tomatoes, borlotti beans, summer squash, zucchini, strawberries and butternut squash  too late in the season for them to be established by the time high summer arrived. I'm trying to start some basil and pumpkins indoors (pictured above), but I don't know if they'll have a chance. Next year, I'll know better.

On a brighter note, the trees in the orchard are doing very well. Russ and I picked 20-25 pounds of beautiful orange apricots from one tree last night and they will be going into the dehydrator later today.

Nancy gets a little too excited at the prospect of cheap strawberries

After canning 20 jars of cherries, I was feeling like the Food Preservation Queen. I borrowed my mother-in-law's 30 year old fruit dehydrator and dried a bunch of cherries. The dried cherries resemble large raisins, with a hole in the middle where the pit/stone was punched out. 

Yesterday, Russ went shopping and came back with a few pounds of strawberries that he had purchased for 75 cents per pound, a fabulous price. Later, I drove back to the store and bought 24 pounds of overly-ripe strawberries. I prepared them for drying as soon as I got home and today, a day later, they're nearly done.

Lots and Lots of Cherries

This morning, Russ and I woke up early to pick cherries. Our neighbors have a mature cherry tree but aren't interested in the fruit. We received permission to pick the fruit and ended up with about 25 pounds of cherries.

I've been meaning learn to preserve food by canning for a while. I have several books in the subject, but I've been too chicken to start. I figured that cherries would be an easy way to begin, as you don't have to pit or peel them, which many other fruits and vegetables require. It wasn't too bad, though I was  busy canning for about five hours. At least I have a lot to show for it.

The Lone Strawberry

A few months ago, I was excited to dedicate one of our eight garden beds to the growing of strawberries. We planted 18 small strawberry starts and then watched a late season cold snap destroy all but a handful of them.  We bought a bunch more to replace the dead ones. Everything was looking healthy until the temperature rose a week and a half ago, killing many more. in the days that followed. I've become much more protective of the strawberries now that I can see how delicate they are. Finally, one of the plants is producing an actual strawberry. Unfortunately, Rosie and Alex have seen it and whenever I take them out to the garden, I have to guard that strawberry. Whenever I turn around, Alex will lift the net that protects the plants from animal predators and reach for the strawberry. I'm glad that she's not that fast. The prized strawberry may yet live and ripen.

Bountiful Baskets

Last week I joined Bountiful Baskets. Its a food co-op where you pay $15 for about 15 pounds of produce plus 15 pounds of vegetables and then go and pick it up from a designated site on Saturday mornings. Its much cheaper than buying produce at the supermarket. Where possible, they buy from local producers and the rest is purchased from regional wholesalers. They deliver to various sites in Utah, Arizona, Texas, Wyoming, Washington, Nevada and Idaho. Twice a month they deliver at my local park.

I arrived at 7am to pick up my produce and was surprised to see the volunteer operation running so smoothly. A friendly neighbor greeted me, had me sign for my goods and pointed me to my basket, where all of my fruit and veg was ready to be loaded into my car. I received lettuce, bok choy, tomatoes, potatoes, red peppers, honeydew melon, apples, red grapes, peaches, blackberries, cucumbers and bananas. I was pleased with the variety of food, convenience of paying online and the ease of local pick up. I also liked being presented with some fruit and veg that generally aren't on my shopping list, forcing me to try new things and search for new recipes. If you're stuck in a food rut or just want to try something new and cheap, check them out.

Peas Please

The sugar snap peas were a big winner this year. I also planted little marvel and green arrow varieties, but some of those seeds were dug up and eaten by chickens. For some reason, the chickens left this bed alone and I've enjoyed watching the peas grow. Most of our acre of land is bare dirt and these peas have added a significant amount of green to our backyard landscape.

I planted these peas on a warm day in late February/early March. I've cared for them for about three months and now they're ready to harvest. We've eaten them straight off the vine (or in Alex's case on the vine), cooked with dinner and we will eat some of them this winter, as I've blanched and frozen some of them. For all of the work I've put it, there really aren't that many peas, perhaps three or four meals worth, but it doesn't seem to matter.

It sounds corny to say, but there is a great deal of drama in gardening. Its like a reality tv show is taking place in my backyard. My very own soap opera. Will it work? Won't it work? Will that late-season frost kill my plants? Will they germinate? Will pollinators, like our bees, find their way to the flowers at the right time? Will the chickens eat my seeds? Will deer eat my plants and trees? Will the neighbor's goats get loose and eat everything? Will nature, which I only partly understand, work its magic? I love the eating part of having a garden, but watching the garden drama unfold over the season is one of the great pleasures of gardening.

Getting to Grips with the Bees

Yesterday, Russ was putting on his bees suit and asked me if I wanted to join him. I've been enthusiastic about keeping bees, but haven't ventured too close to the hives. The bees are fascinating to watch. They wake up and rest with the sun and are active throughout the day, travelling all over our little community collecting nectar and pollen. On particularly busy bee days, you can hear the hives literally buzzing with activity from about 100 feet away. I like to watch the bees, but from a distance of about 20 feet. 

Since my most recent bee adventure though, I've been feeling a little braver. I put on the spare bee jacket and veil and went out with Russ to check on their progress. I also brought the camera, but the battery died just as things were getting interesting. 

This first photo is of our three hives in their bee enclosure, which protects them from the wind. Our oldest hive, now 2 months old, is on the left. We bought a second hive, on the right, and the recently-captured swarm is in the middle.

The second photo is of Russ smoking the bees. The smoke from the smoker confuses the bees and encourages them to eat, which in turn sedates them and makes them easier to work with. Even though we used smoke, the bees were flying all around us and buzzing very loudly. Normally, this would cause me to run away screaming, but my late-night-angry-bee-garage experience taught me to be calm in the face of this intimidating behavior. It was all for show, as the bees weren't landing on us and  so we didn't get stung. 

The third photo is of Russ removing the inner cover of one of the hives. This was his first time checking on the bees without thick leather gloves for protection. 

The last photo shows the interior of the hive and the tops of the ten hanging frames inside. The bees build their comb in the frames, which they use for laying brood and for storing honey.  As we pulled the frames out, there were hundreds of bees clinging to the comb. We saw lots of cells with little white worms (brood) and lots of cells with golden honey, which makes the frames heavy.

 

                                                      

Nature's Freebies/Free Bees

A few nights ago we arrived home from a family barbecue to find a series of post-its stuck to our front door. One of our neighbors had a swarm of bees in the eaves of his roof and wanted to know if they were ours and could we please remove them. They weren't our bees but were wild bees that had swarmed, or left their home in search of a new one. Swarming bees aren't aggressive, as they don't have a hive to protect. Russ thought we should try and catch them, doing ourselves and our neighbors a favor. We've spent a lot of money on bees and bee equipment over the past few months and so we were excited at the prospect of free bees.

We had a friend staying with us and he and Russ collected the necessary swarm-catching equipment, namely a box, ladder and flashlights, and headed over to the neighbors to catch our very first swarm of wild bees. We had some confidence that this would work, as we had seen it all on the tv show River Cottage.

As it happened, catching the swarm was straightforward. Russ and Alex climbed ladders and Alex held the box as Russ brushed the basketball-sized and shaped swarm into the box. Things got a little more difficult once we got the box home, where the goal was to get the new bees into a hive as smoothly as possible. We set up operations in the garage and did everything just as we had seen on tv, only the bees weren't interested in forming an orderly queue and marching into the hive in an efficient fashion.

We should have just left the bees in their box until morning, as they would have been just fine and much more prone to cooperation in the daylight. But by this time, it was nearly midnight and we were eager to get the bees into the hive and go to bed. So Russ opened the box, containing perhaps ten thousand or so bees, and tried to dump them in the hive. This plan probably would have worked if we'd used a smaller box or just cut open one small corner. But the box we used was much wider than the hive and when we opened the lid wide and tried to dump them in, many of them missed the mark. It was very late at night and it seemed like a good idea at the time. It only took a few seconds for our garage to be filled with thousands of angry bees. At that point, I decided that the whole thing was a little too intense and went to bed.

Eventually Russ and Alex were able to get the bees to calm down, mainly by turning of the lights for a while. They collected the majority of the bees into the hive and set the new hive next to the other two at the far end of our yard. Miraculously, Russ was only stung twice and Alex and I managed to get away without being stung at all. The bees that remained in our garage were dead by the next morning, as they needed the whole colony to provide necessary heat. Still, we were very pleased to get a new colony for free, if you don't count the stress of standing in a mostly-enclosed area with thousands of angry bees.

We're now a one-coop family

Russ built our first chicken coop during spring break of 2008, when our first batch of chicks were still tiny and Rosie was less than a year old. He didn't have clear plans for it and made trips to Home Depot every few hours to buy more tools, nails and wood. It took a full week to build and has had a number of renovations and re-paintings since then. It is dog and wild cat-proof, weather-proof and has two levels and a variety of exits, entrances, ramps, doors and egg boxes. It is the biggest backyard chicken coop I've seen. Its many re-modellings reflected our developing understanding of raising chickens and their needs. Ultimately, we realized that it wasn't right for our climate. Russ built a second smaller coop last year that was more suited to the windy conditions of our environment and this year he constructed a chicken run (small fence) around it. We had been wondering what to do with the old one. Yesterday, we sold it.

The First Harvest of the Season: Accidental Radishes

I was watering the garden this morning and discovered radishes in the lettuce box. I thought they were a variety of lettuce until this morning when I noticed large red bulges at the base of the plants. I was particularly surprised as I hadn't planted radishes in this spot. I was out with my toddler girls planting seeds in April and May. Rosie was very good at sprinkling handfuls of seed in the little furrows I had made, but Alex was more interested in grabbing fistfuls of seed, tasting them, spitting them out and throwing them into random garden beds. As it happened, the radish seeds I planted were dug up and eaten by the chickens, who were subsequently moved into a fenced-in chicken run. Alex's radishes were the only ones to survive. Perhaps I should let her do more of the planting.

Our Story

While living in a tiny flat in Cambridge, England, Russ and I started watching River Cottage.  Its hard not to be taken in by a tv show with scenes of the lush English countryside, the raising of sheep and vegetables and the drama of the county fair. More than that, the program introduced us to food politics, particularly to the harsh realities of the meat and poultry industry and we began to read more about these issues. At that time, Russ started to talk about someday getting some chickens. I thought he was seriously crazy. We were Ph.D students heading for academia and high tech industry, not bumpkins heading for the farm. He read about the Eglu, a combination chicken coop and run, and told me how easy it would be to keep chickens in our own backyard someday. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

I don't remember when I changed my mind. Perhaps it was after my disastrous first try at growing tomatoes in the window sill of our flat. The plant grew to be six feet tall, with about five leaves and eventually one tomato. I realized that if I was going to grow anything real, I needed more than a window box. At that time, our friends were starting to get pregnant and we began to talk about the future of our own family. We had both been fortunate to grow up with open outdoor spaces and we wanted that for our children. We wanted them to know where food comes from and of course Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall had convinced us of the pleasures of living and growing in the countryside. We planned on moving back to America, but we figured that someday we would be able to make it work. We wanted to make it work.


In a whirlwind weekend in January 2007, we finished our theses, said goodbye to student life and England, and moved 6,000 miles to southern Utah. I was six months pregnant with our first child and the transition was a difficult one. Apart from leaving behind beloved friends and family, we left behind lots of good food. The local supermarket had a tiny selection of ridiculously-priced produce and the most promising, yet deceptive, meat label read "All Natural!" This was very different from what we had encountered in England, where fears about genetically-modified food had sent the major supermarkets into an organic frenzy several years before. As poor students, we purchased organic milk for a tolerable premium of about 30 cents. Here in America, our cheapest organic milk option was at Costco, where we could buy it for about three times the price of conventionally-produced milk. We did that for a while, but had to give up when our kids started drinking cows milk and suddenly we were going through multiple gallons per a week. The purchase of organic fruits and vegetables and organic or free-range meat was often within our household budget when we lived in England. In this country, I can sometimes find organic food in the local supermarket, but it is rarely within our budget.


The food culture that we encountered and continue to encounter here in America has only made us more determined to be involved in the production of our own food. We rented a small house during our first year in southern Utah and then bought a house on an acre lot in a small community outside of town. We've been in this house for two and a half years and have started to build a different kind of life. Russ and I teach at the local college for nine months of the year and during the summer we become farmers. We're planting trees, raising chickens, growing a garden and just recently started keeping bees. This blog will chronicle our domestic agricultural adventures and give us space to discuss the variety of issues we encounter.