From the Garden

 

This is just part of our morning harvest:

• Japanese pickling eggplant
• Rhubarb
• Dragon Tongue beans
• New Russet potatoes

We also got some strawberries, one tomato, green beans and some cilantro.

What have you eaten from your garden?

Pesto

It's pesto time.

Pesto tastes like early misty sunrises and hot humid walks in the fields.    It makes me happy just thinking about it.

I make pesto with these basic ingredients.  

• basil  [4 cups or so]
• pistachios [1 cup or so, shelled]
• olive oil  [1/4 cup or so]
• garlic [3 cloves or so]
• parmesan cheese [1/2 cup or so]
• parsley [just a touch]

Put it all in a food processor and process until smooth.   

I never make it the same way twice because I never measure.   It's always good.  

Note:  I do not use pine nuts.   I don't really like them very much.   I love pistachios and they have enough salt to help cut the bitter.

Salt cuts bitter.   Did you know that? 

It's true.   Some people put salt in their coffee to cut the bitter.   I don't drink coffee, so I put salt in my pesto to cut the bitter. 

Rumor has it that the best, smoothest pesto happens when you use a mortar and pestle to grind it up.    I will never know because I have no intention of using a mortar and pestle to grind up as much pesto as we eat in a year.

We make pesto all summer and put the extra in jars to freeze.  We eat it on pasta, on green beans, on squash, on tomatoes, on mozzarella cheese and just plain with a spoon. 

Just plain with a spoon is my favorite.

Blackberry Barbeque Sauce

Remember what I said the other day about desperation?

Desperation makes me creative.

I had a lot of blackberries I needed to use.    I was desperate to use them.   Desperate I tell you.

But not in jelly.   And not in syrup.  And not in bags of mixed berries in the freezer for pies later.

Even though I love blackberry jelly and syrup and bags of mixed berries in the freezer for pies later, I have enough.  

Enough is enough. 

So I really, really needed to find something else to do with more blackberries. I was desperate.  Before they took over the house.  And desperation resulted in creativity.

And creativity resulted in Blackberry Barbeque Sauce.     It's delicious.   As a bonus, it used up some cans of diced tomatoes I had in the pantry.   Here's the recipe:

Blackberry Barbeque Sauce

• 2 cans diced tomatoes 
• 2 large cloves garlic
• 1 small-medium onion, diced
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 4 cups blackberry juice
• 1 cup  white sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 tsp molasses
• 1/4 tsp cayenne
• 1/2 tsp mustard powder
• 1/2 tsp ground allspice
• 1 TB salt

Heat the tomatoes, onion and garlic until soft.   Puree in blender.   Put back into wide bottom pot.  Combine the rest of the ingredients in the pot and simmer until reduced by half.    Adjust spices to taste.  Makes 6 1/2 cups. 

Notes:

• Blackberry juice:   Cook the blackberries with a bit of water [so they don't stick to the pot].   Mash.  Strain seeds and skins out.    I line my chinois [colander, sieve, strainer] with cheesecloth, put the mash in, and squeeze the juice out. 
• Consistency:  We like it on the thin side.  If you want it thicker, cook it longer. 
• You can halve the recipe if you need to.

Commenting on a post

K2's hibiscus.  The flowers are huge.

Bloggers love comments.  

Comments show us that we're not just walking around talking to ourselves.

Not that we don't walk around talking to ourselves.

We do.  Sometimes. 

Comments let us know who's out there.  Knowing our audience is an important way of gauging our material.  

We like to gauge our material.   It's nice to talk to someone and not just send words out there to land wherever.   We like being revelant.   I mean relevant.  

We like being revelant, too, but we can only do that when our crystal ball is working and that hasn't happened in a while.  

ahem. 

Comments let us know what questions you have and what interests you have.    This is very helpful when we are stumped for topics.   I know it's hard to believe but occasionally the creative well runs a bit slow and we run out of ideas. 

Also, we don't always write as well, or clearly or completely as we think we do.  

So we like the help. 

OK.   I like the help.   [Really, what's with the royal 'we' business.]

Mostly, I just love hearing from you all. 

In case you want to comment on a post, and I hope you do, this is how you do it:

• Look down at the bottom of the post.  If you're on the Home page you'll see the phrase:  ' ___ comments so far...'.   Click on that to take you to the post's comment page.   
• If you're already on a post page, at the bottom of the post [and below the other comments, if there are any], you'll see a white rectangle below the words 'Post a Comment'.   Type your words of advice, wisdom and reaction there. 
• Just below your text, you'll see 'Comment as'.    That lets you choose which ID you want to comment as.   If you don't want to use any of those IDs, you have two other options.   You can comment using your Name/URL, if you have a website or blog.   OR you can comment as Anonymous.    
• Remember:  If you are commenting on a giveaway post,  you need to leave me your name - so if you post as Anonymous, make sure your name is in your comment.  

I hope I hear from you soon.   

Creativity Exercise: Finding Beauty

Creativity is born of desperation.

It's true.  If we weren't desperate, we would have no need at all to do anything new.  

Remember that saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention'?   Necessity and desperation are the same thing.  

We need to fix something.   We need to save someone who is hurt.   We need to feed our families.   We need to find work.   We need to put this big pile of stuff into that not-big-enough space.   We need to get a long list of stuff for school with a short list of resources.    We need to entertain our kids or ourselves.   We need to do something harder than we have done before.   We need to finish what we've started.   We need to see if we can build/make/write/compose something from nothing.    We need to know if we can take an idea and make it real.    We need to satisfy our curiosity. 

Creativity is born out of all that need.  

It's easy to let creativity take a back seat to other stuff:  Other stuff takes our money, our energy, our space our time, our focus.    We give priority to our families, our jobs, our pets, our house, our lawn, our friends.    That's normal.    That's appropriate.

This exercise is for those of us whose creativity needs to be unshackled for a little while and let out for a walk.  This is for those of you who are desperate to feel creatively alive again.

Task:     Find 10 beautiful things inside your house.  Take a picture of them or draw them or write them or compose them. 

That's it.   Think outside the box.   Look at the cobweb in the corner with new eyes.   Spray it with water and take a picture of it.    Look at how the books on your bookshelf have beautiful lines when you tip your head over and look at them sideways.  Look at the texture of that old drawer pull.  Listen to the music of the dryer.

There are 100 beautiful things in the same room you're in right now.   Find 10 of them and tell me about them. 

Good luck.  Keep in touch.

Designer Beans

We love fresh green beans.

And we love fresh green beans that aren't green but are sort of a pasty pale greenish white with purple stripes. 

It makes for a nice change.

I grow our beans from seed.  It's one of the few veggies that I plant from seed that I never stress out over.

That's rare.

It's hard for me to grow things from seed.   You have to baby seeds.   I hate babying seeds.    You have to make sure they're at just the right temperature and watered just so.    I don't even make sure that I'M the right temperature and watered just so.  Seeds and me have a rocky relationship.  

But beans I shove into the ground, salute and walk away from and in a few weeks I have food.

It's awesome.

This year we grew two kinds of bush beans:  Blue Lake Bush and  Dragon Tongue Bush.    I'll let you guess which ones are which in the photo above.

I love bush beans because they stay short.   I don't have to build structures to support them and then take those structures down at the end of the season.     All I have to do is pick the beans.    I love that.

The Blue Lake beans are great beans.    They're reasonably bug and disease resistant.   They're great producers.    They have a beautiful white flower and smooth green flesh. 

No need to string them, just snap the stem end off and they're delicious.

These beans are my favorite beans to use for Dilly Beans.   They stay quite firm and have a bit of crunch and I like that in a dill pickle.

The dragon tongue beans are a whole different experience.




They have pink flowers.

This, of course, makes them far superior to every other bean on the planet.   Just ask K2. 

Dragon tongues are flat and have a rougher texture than regular green beans, but they are delicious!  We like them sauteed with garlic and olive oil.   It's too bad that those exotic purple stripes disappear during cooking.

I tried these beans in Dilly Beans last year, and they were fine at first,  but after a few months they turned soft.  They'd be great to pickle now to use for a Halloween treat [Yes!  Serve your kids Dragon Tongues for dinner!], but I wouldn't want to keep them much longer than that. 

I also planted some Chinese Red Long Beans this year, but they're not ready yet.  More on them later.

What kinds of beans do you grow?

Lavender Sachets

Remember when we made lavender wands?  

The thing about lavender wands is that you have to make them pretty soon after you pick the lavender and it's still soft and pliable.

Pliable is good. 

We like pliable.

After pliable comes dry.   Dry is not pliable.   Dry is stiff and brittle. 

Dry is what happens when you pick the lavender to make the lavender wands and then get distracted by real life stuff like changing diapers, going to work, cleaning the house, taking care of Grandma, writing letters to your representatives,  making pickles, going to the vet, sleeping for a few hours every night, etc.

Yeah, that sleeping business really gets in the way, I tell ya.    While you're sleeping, the lavender is leaving the land of pliable and heading at warp speed into the land of dry.  

It's pretty near impossible to make lavender wands with dry lavender. 

Never fear!  All is not lost!    You can use that lavender to make lavender sachets!

This is what you need:

• Paper.  Pretty paper!
• Double-sided tape
• Lavender
• Paper cutter or scissors

We used old scrapbooking papers that I knew I wouldn't use for scrapping, but would look fabu full of lavender in my drawer.

Cut the 12x12 ones in half.   Leave the 8.5 x 11 as is.   Fold them all lengthwise.

See where the fold is?   On one side of the fold, put tape across the top, one edge and bottom.   You don't have to use much.  

See?

Now, put a small bunch of lavender in the sachet - a dozen stems or so.

See how mine in the photo are too long?   I just cut the ends off.   They were dry and brittle and I could just bend and twist to get them off.  

Now, fold the other side of the paper over the lavender and stick it together. 

Voila!    A lavender sachet.   With rescued lavender!  Aren't you clever!

I made mine with bits of tape so there are open spaces along the edges.  That means that bits of lavender might fall out.    Mine are in the bottom of my drawers so I don't have a problem with that.    If you want secure edges, make sure you tape all along the top, edge and bottom so there won't be any openings for lavender bits to fall out of. 

They smell good immediately.  My scarf collection loves these.

So do my sheets.  

So do my holiday towels.  

And my t-shirts.    

And my kids' drawers.

You can also punch a hole in the top, thread a ribbon through it and hang it on a hangar in your nice clothes.   It would make you happy every time you opened your closet. 

Lemon Squash

Pattypan type squash are my favorite.  Patisson Golden Marbre Scallop is my favorite pattypan variety.  They're the beautiful scallop shaped squashes.   I love them.   They have a denser texture than crookneck or regular zucchini.   I slice and steam them and eat all my favorite pasta sauces on them instead of pasta.    They're also good sauteed with garlic and butter.   [But then, so is everything.]

This year I added a new pattypan type squash to our garden lineup -Lemon Squash.    I grew them with seed that I got from Baker Creek. They're big, tough plants that survive squash bugs and vine borers.  Baker Creek says they have "huge yields and the best resistance to insects I have seen in a summer squash."  I was hoping that meant that the bugs wouldn't bother them, but both the vine borers and the squash bugs did go after them.   However, the plants are doing fine and producing well.  So I guess that 'best resistance' means that even if they are attacked by both [as mine are this year], the plants will live on and produce.   I heart that!

Here's a pic of both male [right] and female [left] flowers.   If you click on it, it will blow up so you can get a closer look at the difference between them.

Another way to tell the difference is just to look at the base of the flower.    The female flowers have baby squash at their bases.  

See the bigger baby squash at the top left of the pic?  The blossom is still on it.   It'll be ready to eat in a few days.  Now look at all the tiny ones, lower down on the vine.   Their blossoms haven't opened yet.

But they will!   And I'll be waiting with butter, garlic, skillet and fork in hand.

Our Veg Garden

Our veg garden was a lot of years in the making.    I was first a flower and herb gardener.  Vegetables were not as interesting to me as herbs and flowers.   Plus, the gardens were in the bottom of our hollow.   Frost collects there.   This was bad for vegetables.  I killed a lot of vegetables in those lower gardens.

From the end of the veg garden looking on to the studio

Once the studio was built, we had a nice flat place on the west side of it that was perfect for more gardens.   It had full sun, except for the first couple of hours after sunrise.  Plus, it was up and out of the frost-collecting bottom of our hollow.  

One problem.  

Clay.

Clay, clay, clay.    Winter and Spring:  slimy mud.   Summer and Fall:  brick.

I built raised beds.   We have six of them now, plus smaller borders around the south and west sides of the studio.  

After we built the beds and the borders, I ordered a dump truck load of sand.  I'm not kidding.   We filled the beds and borders with sand.

From the corner of the studio looking on the garden.

Sand, sand, sand.

And then manure.   Chicken manure and horse manure. 

Then we dug and mixed and dug and mixed and dug and mixed.    It was hard work.    I stink just thinking about it.

Then I planted vegetables.   And by golly, they grew!   And they produced fruit!  And we ate it and all was well with the world.   Finally, a place where our vegetables can be happy.

I put the herbs in the studio borders.   They're happy there.   So is the okra.

The paths were still an issue.  Muddy and boggy in the spring.   And weedy.   I hate weeds.  

From the strawberry rhubarb bed toward the house.

I got my shovel out [again] and dug shallow ditches to direct the wet away from the beds.   I laid landscape cloth in the ditches to discourage weeds and put tons, literally, of gravel on top.    Works like a charm.   We have fabulous drainage now. 

Since the ducks adore squash and melon leaves, and bean bugs and pretty much anything they can reach, we wrapped every bed with plastic deer fence [which so would not keep out deer, by the way!].   That keeps the ducks out.  We also put some of the deer fence on top of the strawberries to keep the birds out.  As long as we keep it high enough to let the rhubarb get tall, it works great. 

The saw horse in the middle of the garden is where I put the sprinkler.  It likes being high.  

And the trellis in the middle is where we train the cukes and Chinese long beans.   They like to hang.

All in all, it's a very happy garden.    I love it.

Right now I'm learning how to combat squash bugs and vine borers.   I hate them.    More on that later.

Blackberry Marinade

We have so many good blackberries this year that we've been reading up a bit on cool stuff to do with berries.   We love The Berry Bible by Janie Hibler.    It's chock full of information about berries of all kinds and what to do with them.  

She has a great section on sauces and after reading some of hers, we started playing around with a recipe of our own for a blackberry marinade.   It was great on pork shoulder chops!

Blackberry Marinade

• 2 cups blackberries
• Zest and juice of 1 small lime
• 1/4 tsp chipotle powder.   [More if you really like chipotle]
• 2 green onions chopped.
• 1/2 tsp garlic salt
• 1 T red wine vinegar
• 1/4 tsp oregano
• 1/8 tsp paprika.  
• OPTIONAL:   5 T sugar [if you want a sweet marinade]

Put berries in saucepan.  Mash while heating.   Add other ingredients and heat until everything is well mixed and dissolved.   Refrigerate until chilled.    Spoon over meat and let marinate for several hours or overnight.  

Mozzarella Curd Cheese

This weekend we scored some more fresh milk from The Swiss Connection, so I made lots of cheese!

The first one was Mozzarella Curd Cheese, which is a new cheese from Suzanne McMinn at Chickens in the Road.  It's a nice change from regular pulled mozzarella, very easy to make, and quite delicious.    Make this one with raw milk.   Raw milk moz acts very different from moz made with store milk.  It's much better. 


Don't worry if you don't have lipase; it works just fine without it. 

This cheese is great with a good olive oil and dipping herbs, and rumor has it that it's great sliced on a sandwich and melted.    Ours never lasts long enough to do that.    If you try it, let me know how it turns out.

Digging holes

Because I like to garden, (O.K.; because I am compelled to garden by some mysterious power) I am often in intimate contact with dirt, or as real gardeners call it, soil.  Also because I am compelled to garden, my husband is compelled to garden.  The only mysterious power that compels him is me.  His projects involving dirt are sometimes different from my gardening projects that involve dirt.  I dig holes and put in perennials.  He digs holes and puts in septic systems.   Same process, different sized holes.

Shortly after we moved out here, we discovered that our septic system emptied right into our creek across the road.  When we mentioned this to the former owners, they didn't understand why that could possibly be a problem.  After all, didn't everyone's empty into the creek?

We immediately began to dig a septic system.  Eric got a license from our county and discovered that it was only within the past year or so that our county had any waste water disposal regulations at all, and that was because the state had refused to give the county money if they didn't adopt existing state waste water regulations.  Ah, the power of the mighty dollar.  So, our county instituted waste water regulations and specific guidelines for septic systems.  That is not to say that anyone actually enforces them.

One of the things we had to do was have someone come out and test the soil in the area where we wanted to put the system.  Now, we had done enough digging to know that we already had clay.   Eric, who has a degree in Environmental Sciences, was not allowed legally to do this.  We actually had to PAY someone a lot of money to come out and take a soil sample and say, yep, you got a lot of clay and silt. 

They came and took a soil sample to the depth of five feet, I think.  As they removed the sample, they laid it in a half piece of PVC cut lengthwise.  It was very interesting to see the layers of different types of soils.  Actually, we really had only three layers:  Topsoil, clay/silt, and damp clay/silt.  Since there was enough slope to the area, but not too much and since we were digging a septic system big enough for a hotel, we had no problem getting approval and installing the new system.

The dirt in this part of Indiana varies.  Rumor has it that this is because the glaciers melted right about here.  The hills on our property are large rocks with leaf mould based soil.  The hills on my parents property, which is just a few miles away, are all sand.  Wonderful orange sand.  We have sand in a narrow strip right around the creek that comes down from the northwest corner of our property.  The rest of our dirt is what many people around here call clay, but what is in fact mostly very fine silt, which when dry and chiseled out in clumps, might as well be rock. 

Clay is wonderful dirt if one wants to dig it up to make water storage vessels.  Clay is horrifying dirt if one wants to dig it up to plant flowers.  Silt is wonderful dirt if one wants to dust (i.e. MAKE dust) with it.  Silt is horrifying dirt if one wants to do anything else with it.  You see our problem.

A decade or so ago, we expanded our main flower/vegetable garden area yet again, only, this time we decided to do it right, the way the books tell you to.   

The books tell you that when one is beginning a planting bed, one should amend the soil with whatever it is lacking:  humus, sand, peat, etc.  One first digs out all the dirt in the bed to a depth of eighteen inches or so and sets that aside.  Then one tills up or digs up the next layer to loosen the soil and amend it.   Then, one puts back the first stuff that had been set aside, tills it up and amends it.  Then one has a beautifully prepared, well drained, amended and slightly raised garden bed all ready to plant.  Voila!  The whole process is called double digging.

When we decided to add six more planting areas, Eric told me that we should double dig the new beds and tailor each bed to the needs of what we wanted to plant in it.  For example, we could have a really sandy bed for things like larkspur and root vegetables.  We could also raise all of the beds since flash flooding had saturated the west half of that garden area.

Eric started out with a song in his heart and a shovel in his hand.  In no time at all, he had dug out and set aside the first layer of dirt in the first bed.  Then it rained.  Instead of a garden bed, we now had a lovely swimming pool.  The birds thought so; the frogs thought so; my dad thought so.  My dad didn't actually swim in it, he just teased us mercilessly about it.

As the water in our pool would dry up, it would rain again and fill right up.  The dirt around that thing was practically impenetrable and the water stayed there until it evaporated.  A few weeks later we were able to finish the job.  We amended with lots of sand to improve the drainage.   Then we realized that what we might have done was to create a delightful little container that would collect and fill up easily and then be impossible to empty.  This was a problem.   We wanted to plant carrots, not cattails.  We're still perfecting a drainage system.

When we built the studio, we decided to put the electric underground.    Sigh.  This meant completely reworking how the electric came off the power line to the house.    We had to dig huge trenches from the power line around where the veg garden was going to be, to the back of the studio, then from there down the side of the studio to the back of the house.

At the same time, we had to lay in the water lines to the studio from the house and the waste water pipes from the studio to the septic field.   More big deep trenches.  

It was August.    Clay + August = brick.  After a couple of hours of trying to dig by hand, we gave up and  I hired a local guy with a backhoe to come out and dig for us.   In just a couple of hours, he had all the trenches dug.   It was fabulous.    Except that our backyard looked like the Grand Canyon.   Deep trenches with big piles of dirt next to them everywhere.  

We hustled and got the electric, water and sewer laid in, covered it all with whatever gravel was needed, if any and then covered the trenches back in by hand.    And foot.   When I was too tired to keep shoveling,  I just sat down next to the hole and pushed the dirt in with my feet.   It worked and the kids thought it was a game.   They helped. 

When we put the veg garden in, we put drainage in, too.   By then it was spring and wet.   I literally carved shallow trenches just deep enough in the clay to direct the water where we wanted it.   Then I laid landscape fabric in the trenches and filled them full of gravel.   It works like a charm. 

We didn't even try double digging the veg beds.   I built raised beds [8'x10'; 12" or so high] and set them right on top of the clay, then filled them full of sand and manure.   More on them later.

These days I'm kind of over the whole digging holes thing.   The only holes I dig now are just big enough for a plant.    There may be more construction events in our future, but I'm saving my pennies so that someone else can move all that dirt. 

In the studio: Iris

These are my favorite colors.   I love working with them.   I love wearing them.   I love them on my walls.

Lots of other folks like them, too.   This is only a third of what I've dyed in this colorway to take to the Michigan Fiber Festival.
  

What are your favorite colors?

Winner - Charmed Knits

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the giveaway with weekend.   We hope you loved the new HP movie as much as we did!

According to random.org, the winner is #1, Kristy! 

"We heart Harry Potter too. To gear up for the upcoming movie, the kids have been practicing their magic spells and we even played quittage with our cousins over the 4th of July weekend. Ærowyn keeps asking if Harry Potter and all the magic stuff is real. It hurts to say no because Brandon and I want it to be real too (except for all the bad magic of course). We love everything about the wizarding world. In fact, when we moved I made sure all the books got their own box and I labeled it really big so I would be sure to find them quickly. They have their own private space on my dresser :-) "

Kristy, email me [robin at morenna dot com] with your address and I'll get the book right out to you!

Swamp Rose

We live in the southwest Indiana highlands.   That means that there are actual hills where we live, unlike in northern Indiana, where I grew up, and where it is so flat that you can see from South Bend to Chicago unless it's planting or harvest time and the tractors and combines are in the way.  

Though we do have hills down here, we don't have lakes.   Naturally occurring lakes do not exist in Indiana, I was told in a limnology class, though we have lots of man made ones.   Thank heaven for the man made ones.   Even though we don't have lakes, we have plenty of wet land.   And we have plenty of wetland plants. 

My favorite is rosa palustris, the swamp rose.    

Here's one that showed up by the small creek.   It's a small one. 

These babies love wet places and in our Squishy Meadow, one has grown to more than 20' x 30'.  Pic below.

That is a single giant rose.   Or maybe a colony.  I don't know what the correct term is.

There's one down the road in the middle of a beaver pond that is even bigger.     Really. 

They have single pink flowers that smell delicious - lighter and more citrus-y than damask roses.   I much prefer their fragrance over the bottled 'rose' fragrance.


So,  there you have it.   A rose to know.

Butterbeer

Oh, yes.   We went to the movie on Friday.  

We did not do the midnight show and though my kids would have LOVED it, we were glad we waited until the 9:45 a.m. show when we heard that 1800 people showed up at our theater on Friday night for the midnight show and party.     That's about 1/3 of the entire population of town.   Apparently all the parking places were full, so people parked 'wherever'.   'Wherever' turned out not to be conducive to adequate traffic management and it was a nightmare.   I'm glad we missed that.

To celebrate all things Harry Potter [and my birthday this weekend], we made a new [to us] Butterbeer recipe by Darla over at Bakingdom.  Darla is a huge HP fan, too.  And we love her even more because she's from Indiana [!] and loves Dr. Who [!!].    Darla is awesome!  

This butterbeer is the Best. Butterbeer. Recipe.  Ever.    Here's the link to the butterbeer recipe.

photo: www.bakingdom.com

You'll need to find some butter flavoring [much less caloric than butter!], so start looking around.   We found ours at Kroger, but rumor has it that you can get it at Walmart and of course you can get it online.   Darla's got a link. 

Drink up, everyone!   Happy Harry Potter 7.2!  

Giveaway - Charmed Knits

I heart the Harry Potter books.  

I discovered them late.   The 4th one had been published and the 5th just about to be when I was convinced that they were worth reading by a trusted friend.    I got them from the public library and started at the beginning.  I was able to read the first 4 quickly.   It almost killed me to wait for the 5th.    And the 6th.    And the 7th.  And by then it was a family affair.   We all loved them.  

There were so many rumors around who would die in the 7th, that the day the book came out, we went to the store and I opened it right there and read the epilog.  

[Yes,  I read the end first.  The Harry Potter police did not catch me.   Neither did the You're Not Allowed to Read the End First police.    I live quite happily and sleep very well in spite of the fact that I do, on occasion, read the end of a book first.]  

Once we agreed that we were satisfied with the end of the 7th book, I opened to Chapter 1 and started reading the book aloud right there in the store while Eric finished the shopping.   We read it in the car all the way home,  we read it through dinner and baths until a late bed time.   We got up in the morning and read it all day long, through breakfast, lunch, dinner and baths until we finished it about 2 in the morning.    Not only was a it a great book, it was a great family experience.   We smile whenever we talk about it. 

We love Harry Potter.   We love the crazy food, the robes, the wands, the whole nine yards.   So, we're really excited about Part 2 of the 7th movie being released today.    We're probably there right now.

photo:  amazon.com

To share our love of all things Harry Potter, this weekend I'm giving away a copy of Charmed Knits: Projects for fans of Harry Potter,  by Alison Hansel.    It's a wonderful collection of knitted projects that will transport you right into the world of Harry Potter.

The rules:

1.  Residents of the US and Canada only, please.
2.  Leave a comment on this post and please consider following the blog if you haven't already.  [No, you don't have to follow the blog to be in the drawing.   You do have to comment, though.]
3.  If you need something to talk about in your comment, tell us about your favorite Harry Potter book or character. 
4.  The comments close on Sunday night July 17, 2011 at midnight.   I'll post the winner some time on Monday. 

Good luck!

Blackberries

It's blackberry season.  

It's hot and sticky and buggy.   The cicadas come up and start buzzing at precisely the moment the first blackberries are ripe.

Canes are loaded but thorny.   Picking blackberries requires military courage and precision.   You have to have a strategy.   You have to wear boots and body armor.   You have to tolerate significant discomfort.  You will return with chiggers and ticks.   You will return scarred and stained.

Blackberries taste like sunshine and bird song and stormy weather.   I love them.    And it's a good thing because we have about 10 acres of wild ones. 

I confess that for years and years I admired them from afar, but could never figure out how to make them edible.   I'd taste one every year and be disappointed at how sour and bitter they were and I'd leave them alone.  Again.  

They kept spreading.  Soon there were so many that  they created their own gravity source, drawing me to them.    I hated the thought of not using all that free food so I did some research.   And I experimented.

The key is to make jelly so you can discard all those bitter seeds and skins.    I made some good jelly and some bad jelly.    In the end, I learned how to make jelly with and without pectin.   And I discovered how good blackberry syrup is on pancakes. 

This year our berries are plentiful and sweet, for a change.   I made blackberry syrup with the first berries.

K1 and I picked almost 2 gallons our first day.  [K2 prefers not to brave the bugs.]  I washed them and put them in a big pot with about 3 cups of water and cooked them down. 

I squish them with a potato masher to break them up and release the juices, then I cook it until it boils. 

I put a single layer of cheesecloth in my chinois, which I set in a big bowl to catch the juice, and dump the cooked juice and goo into the cheesecloth a few cups at a time to strain.   I gather the corners of the cheesecloth and twist it up tight to get all the juice out.    Then I dump the seeds out of the cloth and do a few more cups until I've got all the seeds out.    I give the seeds to the chickens.   They love the seeds.

Then I measure the juice.    I had 10+ cups of juice.  

For pectin free jelly, you use equal amounts of sugar and juice.  

For syrup, you can add just enough sugar to make it tasty.   Since our berries are quite sweet this year, I used only 75% sugar and I probably could have used less.    For 10 cups of juice, I used 7 1/2 cups of sugar. 

I put the juice and sugar back in the pot and boiled it, then put it in jars and processed them for canning.   [10 minutes for pints and jelly jars].   

If I decide to make jelly with it later, I'll dissolve the pectin [Ball] in a cup of water, and after the first hard boil, I'll put in 4 cups of  syrup, boil it again and voila!  Blackberry jelly!

Blackberry syrup is beautiful.   And delicious.   We had some on crepes yesterday.  


Mmmmmm.

Dragonflies

We have water here.   There are two creeks that run all year, one that runs most of the time and a couple of run off creeks.   It's lovely.  We have a lot of frogs and turtles and a lot of bugs.    Dragonflies are our favorites.

Here's a dragonfly gallery for you.    We don't know much about these guys and have been too lazy to look them up, so if you can identify them, let us know.


These dark ones with the single white spot on every wing are beautiful.

Then we get the gigantic ones with clear wings and fat gray bodies.

And we get the iridescent ones.   Green...

 and blue.

From the bottom, they look purple, but it's hard to get a pic of that.  They change color as they fly.

All photos K1, who has the patience of a saint.

Asclepias Tuberosa

This is one of my favorite wildflowers in this part of the country.   

The bees and butterflies love it.      In fact, its common name is Butterfly Weed.

I love that you can see buds and blooms at several stages on a plant at the same time. 

It comes in all shades of orange:   from orange juice...

... to dark tangerine.  

Some are striped, some aren't. 


All photos K1.   She's a marvel with the camera.



What's your favorite July wildflower?