Sculpin

I do occasionally wonder what the neighbors think. As when, for instance, I open the back door and rush out shouting, “Grawrr!! I kill you with my mind!”

Stupid squirrels, digging where they ought not be digging. Grawrr.

Josh just went outside to work on the bikes. His ensemble includes a wool hat, wool socks, and a thick wool overshirt. This is not my idea of June. We didn’t move into the southern hemisphere while I wasn’t looking, right?

It’s a lucky Seattle gardener who’s doing well this spring, and I’m not one of them. I’ve yet to catch much of a break in the seed-planting department. Planted cilantro and it snowed; planted basil and we got unusually cold, wet June weather. I’m rethinking this whole business of direct seeding. At least the chard seedlings have come through like champs. My new favorite plant, right there.

The chickens are almost three weeks old now. In theory, they should be ready to go investigate their new home very soon, and I’m becoming very ready to see them leave their corner of my office. Chicks do create a lot of dust and sometimes a lot of racket. But unless this weather straightens out, they’re going to be in the brooder a good long while.

This year I ordered tomato plants from Territorial Seed. Uh-oh! They arrive tomorrow. And is that bed ready for them? Will I be home much of tomorrow? Will I have enough time and energy to get that area prepared? Are they going to go in promptly? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Gahhhh.

I’ve been gardening like a fiend, though. I’m putting in a path to and around the chicken coop and basically regrading a significant part of the backyard, which involves moving a big hill of dirt that’s full of vile buttercups. (The buttercup is my nemesis. Or maybe I should reserve that title for the morning glory.) Can’t just drop ‘em on the compost heap, because they’re acting like noxious weeds. Can’t just drop ‘em in the yard waste, because the yard waste is close to its weight limit already. It’s a pain. I’m hoping the hot weather lightens the yard-waste load.

Alternate names for Ranunculus repens: devil’s guts, granny threads, ram’s claws, meg-many-feet, setsicker, sitfast, tether-toad. And then there are other buttercup names, some of which R. repens is likely to share: crazy, guilty-cup, blister-flower, blister-weed, hell-weed, pissabed, cursed crowfoot. (Thank you, Albert Brown Lyons!) Apparently I’m not the only person who’s ever disliked this stuff.

Week by week, more and more of the basic garden structure becomes a reality. And there’s actual soil! When I come inside from shovelling, I’m actually filthy! This is great news, because the dirt out there used to be a mixture of fine clay dust and sand with hardly any humus. It couldn’t even really get you dirty, just very dusty. I’ve been dumping organic matter into this place for years. At first you could hardly tell; I’d dump a load of compost and dig it in, and what I’d get is slightly darker, heavier dust. Now things are starting to hum along at last. The soil’s physical structure is finally getting to the point at which I’d consider it worth testing the nutrient balance and monkeying with it.

Sometimes when I garden, it strikes me that I’ve been making something that may well live on after me. Not the rocks or the vegetable beds, but the soil itself. It’s like I’m constructing and feeding an enormous quiet creature. Sometimes I take a moment and try to imagine/sense it as something like a living tissue.

Speaking of the P-Patch, last year we planted two artichokes there; then we dug them up in fall and brought them home in a tub, intending to transplant them. Instead, we forgot about them, and the tub sat on the patio for six months, cold and dry and completely ignored. I was shocked a few days ago to discover that the artichokes were still alive and putting up leaves. So I transplanted one today. What do you want to bet I kill it now? [ETA: Yeah, that thing’s looking like death warmed over, if not worse. Weird.]

Late last fall I put the worm bin in the shed, gave it a fair amount of food scraps, and more or less forgot about it. Josh put a stack of very heavy chipboard sheets in front of it so we couldn’t really get to it. (Those sheets were supposed to be moved and used in October. That’s another story.) It wasn’t until the other day that I got a look at what was inside.

A whole lot of very fat and healthy-looking worms, that’s what was inside. That worm colony came through with flying colors.

So, if any of you Seattle folks want to start your own worm bin this spring, I have a few handfuls of worms to give away.

So! It’s taking a while to get everything together, probably because we’ve ordered some fairly obscure chicken breeds, but our chicks will be shipped to us on May 19. Hooray! Much as I wish they were coming in April, having them show up a little later may make it a bit easier. When they’re ready to move outside, it should be nice and warm for them.

I ordered seeds without looking at what seeds I had left over from last year and the year before. Uh, I guess I’ll be planting a lot of carrots this year. Fortunately, they’ve got a pretty good seed life, though I haven’t been storing them in anything like an ideal situation — just a box in the south bedroom.

Besides carrots, veggie plans for the year include tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, Tom Thumb lettuce, chard, lacinato kale, cilantro, green beans, and a couple different varieties of basil — one for pesto, the other a giant-leaf variety that I hope to use for mieng kham wrappers at least once. We’ll also be harvesting the garlic and shallots I planted last year. And then there should be grapes, strawberries, blackcurrants, plums, and perhaps some blackberries.

This turns out to be the year I start to get the seed storage thing together. I’m using old glass half-gallon jars, each with a cloth bag containing about a cup of silica desiccant. It’s not clear to me that the jars are as airtight as I’d like, so in a couple of weeks I’ll try to remember to check the desiccant color. I might have to rework things a bit there. But meanwhile, I’m commandeering the vegetable crisper for the seed storage jars. No loss, that — vegetables go into those brown crisper drawers and usually come out as compost. Nearly opaque crisper drawers are not a great idea for this household. Really not. Not for vegetables, anyway.

Another promising thing in the fridge right now: shiitake spawn. I’ve got some decent garden spots for mycoculture. (Also known as “not good for anything else”: dark and damp and out of the way.) Unfortunately, the logs I originally had in mind are a little older than is ideal, but I can trade for some freshly-cut elm that should do just fine. Mushroom growing turns out to be fairly intriguing to me. Did you know that you can grow oyster mushrooms on coffee grounds?

Speaking of mushrooms, I don’t see any morels yet. Maybe they’re all out of go. Aww. I still have a bunch of dried ones in the freezer, though, so there’s something. It turns out I like them best when used almost as a sort of spice, dried and crumbled into a tomato-based soup or sauce, much as I’d use porcini.

Right now we’ve got 232 square feet of raised bed, not counting the herb garden, various berry beds, or paths. I’ve got plans for another 132 square feet for a total of nine beds. (After that we’ll have to tear up the driveway and/or do some terracing to get much more in the way of garden space.) Keeping records of all that could be pretty confusing, so I thought I might buy some dog tags or other bits of engravable metal and physically label each bed. My first thought was that I’d just call them plain old “A”, “B”, “C”, but on second thought, I’m tempted to name them, much as Cissa has named her beehives. (A is for Aldo… H is for Hayduke…) Just like a server farm, only more farm than server.

The coop is finished, and it’s adorable. Looking at it critically, there are a few little alterations we may make:

1. Hinge the window so we can get at the coop more easily from the outside.
2. Augment the chicken wire with hardware cloth.
3. Install some latches that are more raccoon-resistant.
4. Landscape around it for better drainage.

The bones of it, though, look really good. I’ll be ordering chickens soon and requesting an arrival date in mid-late April, which should mean that the chickens will be grown up enough to move out there in early June or so.

Paul Beard came by with some spare raspberry suckers for us and complimented us on our urban farm. It is looking rather farmish these days. (Right down to the random stuff left out in the yard.) The place is coming together. Every year we get a little closer to Granola Paradise.

Speaking of random stuff, we’ve been making out like bandits with free stuff lately, and every find was serendipitous. Stuff we’ve picked up off the street in the last month: a two-foot-tall steel milk can, a bike trainer, a fondue pot, a green cone composter, and half a dozen tiki torches.

ETA: I have ordered chickens! They’ll be here in a little over a month, if all goes as planned. Yay!!

It’s tempting, so tempting, but I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to go out back and ask Josh and Brad if they’re going to put in a henweigh.

I don’t think I could pull it off.

(”What’s a henweigh?” “Oh, about six pounds.”)

Josh has been working with Brad from the Seattle Urban Farm Company to build a chicken coop! They were out there leveling the ground today and will start the actual building tomorrow, if all goes well. It’s going to be a long few days of coop-building in the rain, looks like; too bad our spell of nice weather didn’t last.

I’d originally thought we’d start with pullets because raising chickens from chicks looked intimidating. But after a lot of reading, I changed my mind. Going to the City Chicks class at Seattle Tilth confirmed it: we can totally do this. When the weather warms up a little bit, we’ll be ordering day-old chicks in the mail.

Chicken catalogs are a lot like seed catalogs. I want 75% of what’s in them and have to talk myself down to something reasonable. (Or, in this case, something legal. Seattleites are generally limited to three hens.) If I were to decide today, I’d probably get a Delaware, a Buff Orpington, and a Welsummer. But I might yet change my mind. Those huge Jersey Giants are tempting, and so are the Wyandottes, and the Dominiques, and the Barred Rock, and gosh aren’t those Golden Campines pretty, and Ameraucana eggs are neat, and… Or maybe what I really want is an Australorp. And there’s always the possibility that we won’t order in time and will wind up getting random chickens from the feed store, which would probably be fine.

Whatever we get, we’ll probably order from My Pet Chicken, because those guys will send you as few as three chicks with a little heating element to keep them happy. Day-old chicks ship very well as long as they keep warm. Most hatcheries have a minimum order of 25 chicks, and they all cram together to keep cozy. Ideal Poultry will ship a small order too, but they pad out the box with male chicks for warmth. Baby chicks as packing material, jeez. I’m glad nothing else comes packed in chickens.

Here I am with a wee bit of the flu and a cobwebby blog, so I’ll do a little catching up. In a nutshell: I’ve been domestic.

Most recent things first: rosettes. I’m a real vulture for going-out-of-business sales, and when Martha By Mail went under, I snapped up some fantastic Halloween rosette irons on the cheap. Finally we got around to trying them out. These are implements for making crispy little deep-fried Scandinavian cookies. You make a thin, simple batter, dip the iron in most of the way, then deep-fry. I think they’re best sprinkled with cinnamon sugar — imagine an airy, crispy essence of cinnamon toast. It took a little while to get the hang of it; you want to have everything at exactly the right temperature, or you wind up with rather abstract rosettes as the batter drips off the iron. Soon, though, we had it down. I hope to make crispy deep-fried pumpkins, spiders, and bats for my friends soon!

In body news, my hip still hasn’t quite healed, though I’m not gimping around too badly. Apparently I’ve got some kind of a problem with my right obturators, deep inside the hip; my rotation’s pathetic. This does not please me, though I’m a little amused by the horrible sounds that joint keeps making. I suppose I should go back to PT and/or find an LMT to work on them. (I love Mark the LMT, but crotch massage is past my boundaries for a male massage therapist. Maybe any massage therapist.) Ugh. In the meantime, I’m just rolling them out with some small Yamuna balls, which helps a good deal, and hoping the problem will magically go away.

I’d planned to replace much of our front lawn with a big vegetable garden this summer, but with one of my hip joints still in limited service, I decided that Combat Gardening was probably not in the cards for me. So I called the Seattle Urban Farm Company, who came out and installed a beautiful new raised-bed vegetable garden in two days flat. They even included automatic drip tape irrigation, with the line cleverly snaked under our walkway and the remaining grass. It’s marvelous. I can hardly believe how fast everything’s grown; I’ll be harvesting the first bok choy this week. (Pot stickers!) I’m definitely calling these guys again. For a few days after the garden went in, I felt slightly unmoored– there’s this great garden in front, and yet I am not sore. How can this be? Eh?

I’ll definitely be calling them again anyway, because once the fall planting season cools down a bit, we have plans to put a chicken coop in the back yard. (We’re getting ever closer to hippie paradise here at House of Cranks.) SUFC has a chicken expert on staff. Brad loves chickens. To hear him talk, you’d imagine that they are the sweetest, most wonderful animals in the world. I don’t know about that. Josh is still more pro-chicken than I am, but I’ve come around on the subject. I’m interested in the eggs, mostly, and I’m also a little curious about what I might be able to train a chicken to do. (Apparently, dog trainers often work with chickens to hone their skills. There are even “chicken camps” for trainers.) Plus, some of them can be very pretty.

Speaking of front yard changes, we finally had our alder tree taken down. It was in pretty weird-looking shape after the developers next door sheared off all the branches on the west side of the tree. Plus, I have a strong suspicion that I’m allergic to the thing; it’s either that or the birch, or both. In any case, we called up Seattle Tree Service and they came out and took the thing down. The process was fascinating. And I got to see it a little more clearly than usual because one fellow was being trained. Ours was his very first tree ever. At first I could hardly watch; he’d put on his climbing gear upside down, and I thought, “Oh no, catastrophe ahead.” But Mike, the certified arborist who’s the boss, corrected him without freaking him out (would that all teachers were that good) and got him ready to climb up and limb the tree. He was all ready to go when he looked up and said, rather tremulously, “Do you think there are squirrels in that tree?” The tree came down safely with no squirrel attacks or other catastrophes. Hard to believe that thing was just sixteen years old; some years it grew more than an inch in diameter. Alders are amazing.

We kept the wood for firewood. I was sure we were going to get a splitter. No way could we get that tree split ourselves. And by “ourselves” I mean “Josh”. You know, we all have our oddball gifts in this world — I’m a bizarrely fast and accurate collator, and Josh can pack boxes like a pro. And then there are our anti-gifts. Do not, on any account, give me an axe and a load of wood to split. Many years ago, at the peak of my physical condition, I spent ten weeks in the backcountry of Yellowstone doing trail work. Every day, I’d try to split some wood for the fire. And pretty much every day I was grateful for my steel-toed boots. I am world-class lousy at splitting wood. So, while I could help stack the wood, all the splitting was up to Josh. And Josh did it. The man is a machine. We’ve now got a woodpile that must be about 8′ by 6′ with some more left over.

He really has been pouring it on. (Josh, you rock.) The new shelves he built in the shed are fabulous. I’m amazed at how much more space we have in there (using the opportunity to get rid of some junk didn’t hurt) and I’m excited to see that we can probably fit a workbench in there. Maybe I’ll even get that glass kiln I’ve been wanting for years but had no place to put. (Yes, because what I really need is more things to do.)

Josh went gonzo on those shelves the day after I made macaroni and cheese for us, his dad, and my mom. If that’s what a really good macaroni and cheese dinner does, well, heck, I will make some more. I used the Beecher’s recipe that was in the P-I recently. It felt like some pretty high-stakes entertaining: this was my first butter-and-flour roux (as opposed to an oil-based roux), my first white sauce, and my first cheese sauce. The next day, I read about a cheese sauce that had curdled. Boy, am I glad I didn’t know anything could go so wrong. Served it up with some salsa and some steamed local broccoli; for dessert we had some homegrown plums, roasted with a little Zulka sugar and topped with a dab of whipped cream.

In other food news, Josh and I learned to can last month. We’ve put up some rhubarb and strawberry-rhubarb jam, and still have lots left to can. I hope that someday soon we can have another canning day.

Whew.

Something out there likes cole crops as much as I do. I go out and find that they’ve all been gnawed to the stem, if not to the ground. Broccoli? Kaput. Kale? Gone. Collards? Well, the ones that were protected by wall-o-waters are doing just fine. The ones that were protected just by 8″ open-topped wire cages, though, haven’t fared so well; they get chomped as soon as they stick a leaf over the top of the cage. Damn you, varmints! So much for my plans for homegrown gumbo. I’m considering some plans for Varmint Stew, though, I can tell you. Grr.

The garden at home has pretty much gone to hell lately. It’s all overgrown with weeds. And I seem to have sprained my hip somewhat in yoga, so it’s going to stay overgrown for a while. Maybe I’ll get it together in time for fall planting. That’s coming up fast.