Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] Notes From the Farm (Summer 2006)

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Notes From the Farm (Summer 2006)
  • Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 12:40:19 -0700

SISU! wrote:

Bill Jones wrote:


Finally a few pimentos are ripening, so I made machaca from them.


What's that?

It's a mixture of shredded beef, fried peppers and onions, and scrambled egg, seasoned with black pepper.

There's no choice but to deal with squash,

so I made a giant pot of Italian-style zucchini in tomato sauce and canned 14 pints of it.


Recipe, please...
I make lots of zucchini bread and squash casseroles and freeze them.

I didn't measure. I peeled and skinned and seeded about 2 gallons of tomatoes, and added them to a mixture of one bulb of sauteed garlic, 2 onions, and a pimento. I simmered this until the tomatoes fell apart, then added just one large can of tomato paste, to thicken it up. Then I seasoned it liberally with salt, pepper, and oregano. You can do this days ahead. When I added the squash, I sauteed it first in very little olive oil in a wide cast-iron pan, to sweat out the water, then added it to the tomato sauce. Usually it works according to the Pickle Principle: one volume of sauce or brine is required for 2 volumes of solid chunks. But this time there's more sauce than squash, which is fine, since I always have it with noodles. I sealed the jars in boiling water, although I'm not sure if its pH quite matches the 4.2 value recommended for water bath canning. In Mexico squash is often cooked in tomatillo sauce flavored with cilantro. That makes a nice change of pace, and tomatillos are more acidic than tomatoes.



The filberts bore a quantity of nuts for the first time, and for some
reason the squirrels are incompetent this year, so I cured several
dozen of them.


How old are your filberts?

I planted 3 Hazelnuts this year.

I think they're almost 10 years old now. They were tiny whips. They didn't really get enough fertilizer during their early years, and almost no water. Lately the lambs' manure seems to have energized the entire orchard.


We put lots of them into the rumpot, along

with many other early berries. And the grape harvest is more
enormous than ever, with 3 kinds of table grapes (Canadice,
Interlaken Seedless, and Himrod)


How do you like the Interlaken?



I'm starting to wonder whether that's really it, after I went online to look at picture of grape varieties. How do I tell Interlaken from Himrod? The red one is definitely Canadice, but there's another that doesn't look like any of the table grapes I mentioned. It ripens to a much lighter red than Canadice. In any case, the Interlaken/Himrod vine than I have has wonderful grapes. All fruit is better if it just is allowed to ripen, something that never happens commercially.

Speaking of dry weather, it rained about a half-inch over about one week's time. That brings our total for the rain year to 71.42",
which will probably be the final total, since no more is expected
until after October 1.



Wow. We only get about 54" here..

It's a shame it was all in November and March.

I'm happy to have finished Step 0 (deciding what it is you need/want)
on several building projects. In the front yard we're converting the
old lamp tower to an obelisk, and building a trapezoidal arch to walk
under, for an Incan theme. To discourage people from going around
the archway, there'll be a low trapezoidal sundial to the side. It's
design will be truly unique. The gnomon will be a smaller replica of
the obelisk, standing apart from the trapezoidal face. An ordinary
sundial makes a great calendar in winter and fall, but in spring and
summer the shadow is so short that you can't easily resolve what date
it is. So I had a great idea to position things so that the shadow
falls in the normal way onto the flat face only in fall and winter.
In spring and summer the shadow will fall onto the side of the
trapezoidal block. Conveniently, the side pattern will resemble a
plant stem, to go with the flower motif that will appear on the top
(actually the mathematical curves for each hour of the day that
resemble flower petals).


I'd love to see pictures of this. I've been batting around the idea of
a inground sundial and a labyrinth for the garden. I have several pages
bookmarked, but can't decide on exactly what I want.


One thing I've learned is to allow your mind to run free when I comes to sundial design. Literally anything that casts a definite point shadow can be both a sundial and a calendar. An entire garden can become a sundial. There are sundials where the entire face is vertical. So I'd recommend starting with your own vision that reflects your personality.

I don't know if attachments are allowed, but I'll try to send the pattern for my latitude and longitude. Each infinity shape (they're called analemmas) represents one particular hour of the day, tracked over the course of a year. The long part of the analemma describes the position of the shadow in winter and fall, the place where the curve crosses itself shows the shadow at the equinoxes, and the stubby part near the center is for spring and summer. Can you believe I was actually able to find the formulas for making these curves online? But I'll be using the actual shadow position, not the predicted one, to ensure accuracy.

Bill
S. Oregon coast



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page