Category Archives: random thoughts

Lovely article in the NYTimes today about people growing fruit trees in their backyards. The only thing they forgot to mention is how, in addition to being edible and local, the blooms and fruit of backyard trees are terribly beautiful, too. Here’s my apple tree in all her glory. See also a graft (King David apple) that may have taken!!

I got it. The dreaded flu: fever, cough, muscle aches. Here it is spring and I have hay to move, mulch to spread, crops to plant, hooves to trim, stalls to muck out, a milking stanchion to build (goat kids are due March 30!) and all I can manage is to watch my farm from out my window. So frustrating.
I also missed the bee symposium and the California rare fruit growers meeting this past weekend. Lucky for me, my rare fruit growing angel sent me a link to a video of the meeting!! Thank you Spidra!

The other thing I’ve been able to do is order goat supplies. I found a great website, Hoegger’s, where I ordered, from the comfort of my sickbed, all manner of goat-related items. Goats are prone to various kinds of worms, so I bought a natural de-wormer, made with Worm Wood, Gentian, Fennel, Psyllium, & Quassia. They also had buckets of goat minerals—calcium, phosphorus, salt and magnesium, selenium, and vitamin E. I picked up a kid bottle and some colostrum in case Bebe has a million babies. Finally, I got a bag of kelp in bulk—I’ve noticed the goats love wakame, but at $5 a bag, it was breaking me, so this should do the trick. In other goat care madness, I made them their first batch of sauerkraut. My goater friend Jim tells me goats love the stuff—it’s full of B vitamins—we’ll see how Bilbo and Bebe feel about it, they don’t seem like terribly adventurous eaters.

P.S. Here’s an article I wrote for SFGate about a foodie who doesn’t have much money, yet manages to eat well by growing her own, dumpster diving, and buying wisely.

I have these genius friends who can sew and knit. They get together every Monday to craft. One lady, D, makes all her own clothes! And they look really great, not all falling apart like a certain pair of paisley shorts I made in HomeEc 28 years ago. I work Mondays, so I miss craft night, but recently there was so much craft in the air, they held a special night on Friday. I accepted the invite to join them with a little trepidation. W said if I wasn’t crafty, I could just bring my taxes, or balance my checkbook. Little does she know I do that less often than knit a scarf. But I knew exactly what I would do.

There have been these hanging bags of olives in our mud room for months now. They were starting to get oppressive, these salty bags of procrastination. My head would crash into them on occasion, and then I’d have salt hair for the rest of the day. I had potted some up in olive oil–but honestly, how many olives can one couple eat? Also, I noticed that some of the olives tended to be a little too soft so I didn’t want to give them to people as gifts.
But then I remembered: olive tapenade. It doesn’t matter if the olives are soft if you just blend them up into a paste! So an hour before craft night, I untied the olive bags, washed them of their salt, and set off to be, for just one night, an olive pitter from heaven.

While M and D worked a sewing stations, I sat at the kitchen table and peeled off the fleshy of about one thousand olives. My fingernails turned black, salt stung my hangnails (no i didn’t wear gloves), and we talked about such high-minded topics as Thai rap pants and their cultural ramifications. What a lovely evening. Once home, I whirled the pitless olives with some olive oil, then placed the olive spread in jars. True tapenade would include capers and anchovies, but I don’t have bags of those just hanging around…The olive tapendade is tasty with crackers, on bread, with deviled eggs, and probably, shoe leather.

As promised, here’s a blow-by-blow of Archie and Edith’s adventures in procreation.
First off, Archie is constantly preening and puffed up. He seems to be in a permanent state of arousal. When he sees Edith, when a chicken walks by, when I go outside to feed them, when the goats pass by him, and yes, even when he sees the rabbit. Hell, a sparrow could fly by and he’d puff up.
It’s really Edith who decides when to do the nasty. She will squat down, sort of like a chicken, but laying with her breast on the ground. Then Archie does some puffing and huffing (literally, he makes this airy gulping noise) and circles around her. Then he stands on her wings.
It looks kind of painful, this big puffed up bird trying to balance on her delicate wings. You know how they say factory farmed turkeys can’t ‘do it’? It totally makes sense to me now. Because it’s a balancing act really. And it requires space and time.

Ok, then Archie pecks Edith’s head for awhile. Love pecks, I guess. Then he manuevers around and gets her tail up. He looks pretty funny doing this part. Like a nasty humper. He drapes his wings along her side, and Edith makes some cute chirping noises. Interesting fact that turkeys and chickens don’t have proper penii, they just rub their duct onto the female’s oviduct.

Edith’s eggs look similar to a chicken egg, but larger and with a more rounded bottom–can you tell which one is hers?

While I was in New York Bill reported that she had started to set on a clutch of eggs. But then she got bored and hopped off. I’m hoping spring will make her broody and soon we’ll have little poults marching around. I think Edith is going to be a good mama.

Mulch.

I returned home from a quick trip to New York to a boggy soggy Oakland garden. So when the Ponderosa Tree Company called last night and asked if I wanted a free 5 cubic yard load of mulch, I agreed, though I have a million other things to do. This morning the truck showed up, backed in between the gates, and dropped the load.

Mulch is defined as any organic substance that keeps weeds down and eventually breaks down into soil. It can be straw, wood chips, nut shells, coffee grounds. This stuff is California bay laurel and pine. It smells amazing, kind of what I hope a native American sweat lodge smells like. Note that the pile is steaming because it’s decomposing!

The only hitch is, the guy couldn’t back the truck all the way into the lot so about half of the load is um, on the sidewalk and the street. Sorry neighbors!! So really what you are looking at is my personal mulch trainer–I’m going to get buff moving this wonderous substance. Why I am telling you about this? I really needed a break. Ok, ok, back to the mulch pile….

My trees look like trauma victims. They’re hacked up, taped together. They’re part of my dastardly grafting scheme. A few weeks—maybe even a month ago—I went to the scion exchange held by the California Rare Fruit Growers Association . Fruit geeks. My people! I knew I was in heaven when I overheard two fruit lovers comparing sapote tasting notes. I know a little about fruit, but nothing what these people know. Which kind of pear tastes the best (Buerre Blanc), which mulberry scions–pieces of branch that can be grafted onto a tree–to get (“Alba”), how to cleft graft a Green Gage plum.

I took about 25 scions home, stuck them in the fridge and promptly forgot about them. But now I’m going on a quick trip to the East Coast, I have a million things to do and so I spent today grafting. Onto the Persian Mulberry, onto the persimmon, onto the plum, onto the Granny Smith apple tree which hasn’t burst yet.

The idea is to match up the cambium layers of the little twiggies with some judicious cuts. Then you wrap them tightly together with parafin. The idea is the tree, in a burst of springtime good will, will think the little scion is an injured part of itself. It’ll send forth energy and heal the wound, thus bringing the two branches together. The graft looks like a pucker on the branch once it has healed. I’ve successfully grafted an Orange Pippin onto my apple tree before, but no word on the fruit yet, it can take up to three years before you get fruit. Still, there’s something satisfying about fooling the tree.

Here’s what I did:
Moro persimmon onto a rootstock
Alba or white mulberry onto a Persian
Black Arkansas onto a Granny Smith
King David onto a Granny Smith
Buerre Blanc onto a Comice pear
Johanna onto a Comice pear
Green gage onto a Santa Rosa (probably won’t work)

I’m just hoping ONE of these takes.

P.S. View from my desk.