It's Spring

Spring sprung! And I've already fallen behind on my plans for this year! By now, I was supposed to have

1. 1 chicken coop
2. 5 chickens
3. 6 raised garden beds teeming with peas and tomatoes and lettuce

What I actually have as of this weekend:

1. 1,320 square feet of sanded and stained wood for raised beds (includes front and back for those of you counting).  
2. 8 dying pea plants ready to go into said raised beds
3. 4 wilting tomato plants waiting to go into raised beds
4. 30 seed pots of basil, dill, and tomatoes that never sprouted or got eaten by birds/bugs/squirrels/feral cats/opossums (opossi?)
5. 10 beautiful Italian cypress trees for privacy along the back wall

My coop was, I thought, being built but it turns out I hired a scam artist who flew the proverbial coop, and while I am unbelievably disappointed, I have found another person to do the building and I am supposed to be meeting with him tomorrow.

My schedule for this week is:
Tuesday: meet with new contractor, lay down the weed barrier and hopefully move the soil into the beds
Wednesday: it's supposed to rain :)
Thursday: Finish moving soil and move still living seedlings into the new beds
Friday: Move compost piles into their new home

Hopefully I'll have a new post next week to update y'all on how this went and some before and after photos!

Oh, P.S., the loquats are just beginning to get ripe so next week is going to be the beginning of canning season!

Word Wednesday - Heirloom Skills

Sustainability is defined as the capacity to endure. It sounds like such drudgery when you put it like that!

Graphic by NotMadeinChina

I am loving the concept of "heirloom skills" though.  It sounds like something valuable, something precious and useful. These skills used to be passed down, usually from father to son or mother to daughter. Crocheting, woodworking, how often to water plants, cleaning, baking bread, building barns. Today it's primarily passed vertically from those of our own generation to others.  Previous generations, on our moves out to the big cities put down many of these skills, thrilled to be able to buy conveniently pre-made goods.  I'm not against pre-made.  Sometimes, it's pretty damn handy to have someone else make what you need! But sometimes, what's made is not exactly what you need or it's made by people in horrible working conditions or it's shipped 10,000 miles across the planet using up an enormous amount of resources for us to have a $3 knitted hat.

I was pretty lucky in that I learned crochet from my grandmother starting at about 7 years old and cooking and baking were essential skills to learn in my house growing up. I was taught sewing but I didn't like it at the time and so I stopped until I was about 25. I must say, I regret that.

I wish I had learned other skills like canning, woodworking and planting, but I am slowly teaching myself, mostly through trial and error, though I have to admit that the intertubes are really helpful for learning.  For instance, I picked up about 6 pounds of figs from a friend yesterday who has a fig tree but has no idea what to do with them. I'm not particularly skilled in the fig department either so I went online to discover the type of fig (Desert King) and what one can do with them.  I'm going to try my hand at it this afternoon and we'll see what we get.

I'd never really built anything prior to building my raised beds. That was also mostly trial and error and the next beds I build which will be going in the back 40 are going to be a lot more stable than the first set, though I will give myself some credit; the first set is holding up its fourth planting season in a row!

I love to trade skills with people. You show me how to use a miter saw and I'll show you how to crochet or knit or can figs.

OK, so here's my heirloom skills wish list for right now, if you have a skill to trade or you have a list of your own, add it to the comments and we'll see what we can work out!

• Woodworking skills - Primarily using a miter saw or learning to turn wood
• Oxy-acetylene welding
• Photoshop/graphic design (ok, maybe this isn't heirloom but it's definitely going to be!)
• Weaving

 What's on your list?

Pump up the jam, pump it up!!!!

So, when I realized that julienning orange peel for four hours was a relaxing way to spend an afternoon, I discovered that jam making and canning might just be for me.

In the last 6 months, I have canned over 150 jars of jam, marmalade and jellies.  I have had some spectacular successes (see Apricot Jam [OMG] and Loquat Jelly) and some miserable failures (actually just one this year, the Rainier Cherry Vanilla Bean Jam). But now a lovely woman named Piper Goldstein, proprietress of the new Atwater Village Farm, is giving me my first start in the real world, selling jam at the Pickle Pop Up this Thursday night in Atwater Village!!!!

What is Atwater Village Farm, you ask?

It is a brilliant idea!  Piper is a chef with a dream of opening a market that provides both a community environment and an opportunity to purchase fresh, organic local produce at an affordable price.  Piper is collaborating with local farmers and food artisans (that's me!) to provide affordable and sustainable food and knowledge.  She is going to be offering classes on having your own little urban farm and how to use what you produce (or buy from her!).

Atwater Village Farm isn't open yet, but I'm anticipating their opening in the Fall, my favorite season.

How can you be involved? Well, you can go to Kickstarter and donate anything from $1 to $5,000 to help Piper meet her goal. Or....you can come out to the Atwater Village Summer Nights on the Boulevard where AVF is hosting the Pickle Pop Up this Thursday night and buy some jam. Preferably from the table of BluestockingFarm!!!! 10% of the proceeds will go directly to the Kickstarter campaign!  

Ch Ch Ch Cherry Bomb!!!

This past weekend I got in my car and went driving up Bouquet Canyon, a super fun twisty road headed for Leona Valley where the cherries grow.  I went to a U-Pick farm up there.

Here's something I'd like to figure out before spending my money. When the crazy orchard owner is listening to the radio after you've given him your money, after you've picked and weighed 9 pounds of cherries and you hear the announcer say, and I quote,

"The liberals never learn, even when you teach them something over and over again! It's like McCarthy. We've taught them that he wasn't the evil person that they say he was and yet they still keep referring to McCarthyism as a bad thing...." 

I wish I had known that beforehand. I really hate giving my money to these people. Anyway, I'll try a new farm next time...

Clearly I'm a bad, bad blogger. I always forget to take pictures! 

The farm encourages you to taste as you go, so by the time I was finished picking my bucket, I was stuffed to the gills with cherries.  I also learned a new trick of putting up old CDs in the trees to scare away the birds. Gotta do this with my peaches and pomegranates.

Pretty cherries!

Anyway, I picked 9 pounds of cherries and headed back toward the San Fernando valley for canning and other enjoyment.  Yum!

I like to pick and use fruit within 24 hours.  I feel like it tastes better that way and I know myself. I get busy. If I make the time to harvest, then I also like to make the time to process within 24 hours. When I harvested my loquats, I would get off the ladder and take them straight to the stove. Same with the apricots and the zucchini.  Otherwise, I tend to have rotting fruits and veggies in the fridge which is kind of a pet peeve of the Mr.

So I arrived home and started sorting cherries!

First I pulled out almost all of the Rainiers and made them into a jam with vanilla beans.  Unfortunately, this is where the bomb comes in because while they taste superb, they are totally ruined visually as I didn't follow the directions for powdered pectin to the letter. They are also SUPER JELLED which is not my preferred way to have jam. I like it a bit runny.  Now I know better, but damn it!!!  I'll be giving out some tasty but bubbly-looking and jello-consistency jam. 

Then I picked out all of the bing cherries and tried again.  This time I made the Bing cherry jam with some kirsch and it just looks like a precious ruby.  Absolutely lovely and tasty.  Yay!  Other than caramelizing my entire stovetop, it was a total success!!!

Utah Giants?

Finally, I had some Utah Giants, which were not giant at all.  Actually, they were quite tiny so perhaps the tree was marked wrong but they were absolutely tasty and quite ripe so I picked a bunch.  I had already canned 2 batches of jam so next on my list was some maraschino cherries.



I went out and bought some Luxardo cherry liqueur which was, if nothing else, in a very lovely bottle.  I don't drink.  I just have absolutely no taste for alcohol whatsoever, but the recipe called for liqueur and who am I to argue? It also calls for cinnamon sticks, nutmeg and because I'm crazy like that, I also added some vanilla bean.

First I used the last of the Rainiers.  I know maraschino cherries are supposed to be super red, but I wanted to try this, and so try I did. From some forums I looked at, the cherries are supposed to be much more tasty after a couple of weeks in the juices, so I'm not going to taste them for a couple of days. They have just a hint of redness to them. I like the color. We'll see if I like the taste.

Rainiers in syrup

Next, I started the "Utah Giant" dwarf cherries. Again, the forums suggested that if you want really red maraschino cherries, you either have to use a certain kind of cherry or use some red food coloring.  I wasn't about to do that, so I just hoped for the best.  Well, not quite a bomb, but not really a success either. The simmering in sugar part sucked a bunch of the color from the cherries, so they're not nearly as red as they appear in these photos before the simmering, but I put them up anyway and in a couple of days I'll taste a few to see how they come out.  I'll update you as to whether at least the taste was a success or it was a total failure.

I've had such resounding success with all of my marmalades, jams and jellies so far this year. These cherries certainly taught me a little lesson in patience...and using pectin, which I haven't used this year at all...Oh well. What's next in the harvest?  Tune in to find out!

When we last spoke...

Well, actually, I skipped a bunch of stuff in that first post. I skipped how I rented a sod cutter, cut up all of my grass in preparation for a gorgeous new yard and our sewer line broke to the tune of all of the money we had saved up for the yard and then some.

Then I decided I would put in a new sprinkler system myself and dug trenches through the back yard. It took me a day of really sweaty work to dig one trench. But I kept going for another couple of days only to realize that I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about sprinkler systems. (we looked on Google Earth yesterday and you can see the trenches from space...it looks like freaking half-finished alien crop grids. Awesome.)

At some point in all of this, I realized that the tree in the front yard wasn't a chestnut tree, which seemed sentimental in a Currier and Ives way but is totally useless to me as I don't eat nuts. It was a loquat tree. Lemme tell you, that shit is good.  Loquats are lovely, apricot-like fruit, but they don't really last more than a day off the tree, which is why you never see loquats at the market. So, if I was going to pick the loquats, I was going to have to do something with them.  I bought a ladder. I bought a fruit picker. I flung loquats jai alai-style into every neighbors yard within a block of me.  I eventually PUT. DOWN. THE. FRUIT PICKER.  I started canning.

Throughout it all, the Mr. was, for the most part, exceptionally supportive of my efforts. If he minded the sugar-encrusted walls in the kitchen and the awe-inspiring chasms in the yard, he didn't say so (much). He was also very supportive when I started picking up drills and saws and shovels and hoes (he he), as long as he didn't need to take me to the hospital. Toward which, I might add, I have a propensity. 

Now I have a beautifully planted side yard with 4 gorgeous raised beds producing snap peas, tomatoes, zucchini, strawberries and Kentucky beans. The fifth bed is in the main section of the yard where the entertaining patio will eventually live. It accommodates a sizable herb garden with oregano, sage, dill, rosemary, thyme, and basil. Separately, I have 4 pots of mint, each one a different kind, I think it's grapefruit mint, chocolate mint, peppermint and pineapple mint.  I'm going to experi-mint...ha ha.  Finally, there are pomegranate, peach, lemon and lime trees.The lemon and lime are doing poorly.  I can't quite figure out what I'm doing wrong with these, but that's another post.

Sounds good so far; but the farm is FAR from complete. I have that 60' x 24' patch of weed that was once the lawn, which I am turning into the core of the farm. The plans are drawn up, now I just need to start. It all begins with water. I can't really have a farm without it. So we're back to the sprinklers; which, I believe I might actually have to pay someone to install. It just seems like it's too important a job for me to screw up (I'm sorry, use as a learning experience).

I read. I love to read. When I find something I love to do, I read about it. I go to the library and check out books, I find magazines, I spend hours perusing Amazon for the best reviewed books. I started reading and doing, more reading, more doing.  Pros and cons. Horror stories and success stories. I read them all. It started with just a few books and a few raised beds. Then a composter. And another bed. Then a worm bin. Then another composter.  Eventually, I found my way to The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. It's a good book. Funny. Clever. Well-written. They encourage getting backyard chickens.......

More tomorrow. :)