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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Notes From The Farm (November 2005)
  • Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2005 15:42:14 -0000

I just can't go on enough about my new shed. It has a few flaws, but that hasn't stopped me from falling in love. I'm forever doing laps and widdershins in the only hard dry spot that exists, here in mudville. I have to remind myself that it's probably not good to hug treated wood too much.

The shed has a huge L-shaped concave eave on the south side, under a cherry tree. We figure it's best not to waste such a fine structure by leaving it to cover mud, so it calls for an equally large L-shaped concrete porch. Part of the ell will just be used as a walkway to come and go from the shed, but I couldn't think of anywhere I wanted to _go_, towards the other arm of the ell. So I decided to make a huge fern box (it won't house any ferns, except as far as ferns are weeds here) out of three old panes of glass that we have, and place it at the dead end of the porch. It will be situated right under the window of the barn. If I grow Sarracenia, the tall Eastern pitcher plant, in the fern box, flies will pass right over them as they come and go from the barn. The lighting is perfect there for terraria, since there's a southern exposure, an eave, _and_ a deciduous tree. So I'll probably place my old aquarium against the wall just before the big fern box, and fill it with all the usual miniature goodies: sundews (Drosera ssp.), Australian pitcher plants (Cephalotus), butterworts (Pinguicula ssp.), the diminutive parrot pitcher (S. psittacina) and purple pitcher (S. purpaea), and of course, the Venus' fly-trap (Dionaea muscipula). Except for the latter, they're all pretty easy. In the big fern box I also really want a ginger and a galangal, and I wouldn't turn down aromatic ginger; these are the three Zingiber species used in Asian cooking. They're better off in pots above the anaerobic medium of sand and peat that insect-eaters thrive in. I also have a tropical Salvia that really thrives on humidity. I can see the most difficult of insect eaters, the California pitcher plant (Darlingonia californica), any time I want to, not far from here. I have such a perfect spot, maybe I can really fulfill a dream and grow the finicky Drosera filiformis, the very dramatic sundew with tall, slender raspberry-frosted fronds, in front of the tall Sarracenia species. That makes for an incredible display. And it's all pretty useful, requiring only rainwater, and ridding the air of fruit flies and mosquitos too.

On the west side, I'm thinking of plantings that shade the wall on summer afternoons. Boysenberries are sprouting near their old spot, so I think we'll go with a covered cement walk up next to the building, one that passes through a tunnel of boysenberry vines. This walkway will lead past the back door to the back steps. Behind the shed it's logical to put a chicken coop, since we'll hardly hear the rooster at all then. Speaking of roosters, a raccoon got the young rooster that was refusing to join the flock. It had gotten lax and had started sleeping on low branches. They always seem to come right before dawn. The odd thing is, I heard it cry out (I'm up early). I think it was discovered yesterday, because I remember hearing a cry then, but he lived. I thought it was a pathetic attempt at crowing, so I didn't look out the window either time, and the construction guys pointed out the heavily-gnawed carcass to me later this morning. Actually, it saves me from having to do the same job (without the gnawing, of course). Extra, omega roosters that stay outside the coop will inevitably attract hens outside to join them, and it eventually becomes quite a disaster, with both hens and roosters being killed (and eggs going to waste somewhere), but usually not before they spend many mornings crowing outside your window. So they normally have to be dealt with. This also tends to make me believe that the mother perhaps did not rejoin the flock, but was taken instead, which is sad (I can't tell the hens apart).

I did indeed end up finding a nursery that sells the native "springbank clover" (Trifolium wormskioldii). There's only one, since the other two didn't pan out, and it's in Tomales. Lee's going to pick up six plants on his way here in December. Freshwater Farms in Eureka has the traditional companion, the native cinquefoil called "Pacific silverweed" (Potentilla anserina), or so their website says. I think the plan I outlined last time was a little artificial. The one unknown is how long it will take for the wood chips to break down enough that non-nitrogen fixers can grow. The logical thing to do is to plant a single silverweed at the middle of the bed, surrounded by the clover plants, during the first spring. It's invasive, so its progress will become an indicator of how much nitrogen is available to plants. As soon as it starts to thrive, the bed can be turned over to regular crops. Northern rice root and chocolate lily and such are interesting, but I can't believe that they're much better than tulip bulbs, which are also perfectly edible and take only half a year to produce a similar (small) crop. So it's not likely to take longer than two years for a bed to be finished with its initial treatment, during which time pole beans and peas can be grown at the back, and the edible clover front and center.

Lee came for Thanksgiving weekend and it was a great success. I made stuffing from a loaf of brown-and-serve "French" bread from the store. Virtually no bread in a modern store is real enough to make into stuffing these days, so I saved the piece of bread that I previously bought. We had lots of great celery from the garden. I marvel at how my hands perform the ancient ritual effortlessly. I also made an English parsnip pie. It's quite interesting how the flavor changes when you add enough lemon peel and spice. There was plenty of room for experiment, since the olde recipe didn't specify details, so I concentrated carefully on adjusting the seasoning. I think I used everything but cardamom and mace. It was an old-fashioned sort of presentation, with cross-hatching of the sort that you'd only see on a berry pie today, and a ring of lemon-flavored meringue around the edge. We also had a few perishable vegetables from the garden, like the last of the cucumbers and fall cauliflower. I can't get over how long fresh cucumbers keep in the refrigerator with no special treatment; in a bag they would keep longer. We had cucumbers in yogurt with parsley and the last of the chives. I was really impressed at the "mock cranberry" sauce, a mixture of the most unpopular fruits of early summer (black currant, Canadian elderberry, and 'Yellow Transparent' apple) with the pulp from evergreen huckleberry jelly produced in the fall. I'm going to put in some pectin so that it jells, and can the rest.

I haven't gone a day without a real tomato for quite some time. These ripeners are still much better than store-bought.

Today I harvested about 25 pounds of potatoes from a round bed. Tomorrow I'm doing the beets and the kohlrabi. So far I have an ice chest full of parsnips and carrots too, and another set of potatoes in a bag. I planted six beds of garlic in some of the cleared beds. I still have to do yacon, mashua, and oca. It's just not freezing hard enough to knock them down.

Our disappointment with the Microshaft "BASIC Compiler" reaches new heights with each passing week. Now we've discovered that the Enter key, the Delete key, and the arrow keys cannot be detected by a "KeyPressEventHandler". This is not the first time that goons like Barney have created impossibly ridiculous I/O straitjackets. When I was in college, I used something called the "IBM RT". I wanted to make the machine detect a keypress without stopping and waiting for one, like the old BASIC function Inkey$(). On the Apple II or Commodore 64, you just checked a particular memory location to detect a keypress, and it's clearly explained in the manual. Well, all the king's horses, the "consultants" from IBM, couldn't figure out how to make their machine do what every teenager could do on a VIC-20. So it's no surprise that now They've done away with "Get" altogether, and one incredibly complex "Event Handler" apparently has to handle all the keyboard input in every context (unless there's a way to activate and deactivate separate "event handlers"). That is, if you're willing to use maybe the backslash instead of Enter to terminate an input string. Isn't it the next logical step? On the IBM "C" compiler you couldn't detect a keypress without pausing, and now you can't even "Get" a character in the usual standard BASIC way. Did I also mention that after my system crash, I was not able to reinstall the damned thing on my computer? When it gets to the window where you have to type in the 25-digit "product code," there's no longer a field to type it into. So we've been playing batch processor over a phone line. It's typical of the crap to come out of Belview; they create garbage designed by incompetents, and then we're told it's an innovation. I should also mention that the system crashed again during another failed attempt at installation, when we merely tried to remove the non-functional compiler files from the disk, and Lee spent most of the weekend trying to get it all back. It seems that they produce software that destroys your system, once their computer program has found you guilty of attempted software piracy. I wonder how many people know that for years the windoze op system just translated your hand/mouse movements into DOS commands, until after a decade they finally made one like Apple's. That's the beautiful future for you: people whose only possessions are glitz, living hand-to-mouse (I just put this last line in to take credit for this beautiful pun).

But despite this Fizbin, I've finished a text version of the tree editor. You can use the "<" and ">" keys to move down to the left or right in a binary tree (but not the arrow keys, of course), creating new nodes where they don't already exist. It works pretty well, and I've finished the inorder tree traversal routine too. So making a graphic version that displays binary trees won't be that hard, with the tree traversal ready to go. It turns out I need to write all three types of tree traversal algorithm; only postorder traversal can be used to delete a subtree, since you can't delete a parent before its children, and only preorder traversal can be used to copy a subtree, because the parent of a node must already be present in order to have somewhere to hang it from. We'll need both subtree deletion and copying for doing algebra with trees later. Our schedule for this winter vacation is fairly light. After I finish the graphics version of the tree editor, I want to perfect the system I made last winter for drawing solids bounded by 3-D surfaces. After mid-January, I can begin the long process of incorporating all the rules of algebra into the tree processor.

Since I've sworn off aspirin, my nasal polyp has abated to the point where I can smell and taste again, not to mention exhale through my right nostril, so cooking is a newfound joy. I just made the best turkey noodle soup ever, from the old breast (that's all that I cooked for T-Day, a breast). We had turkey enchiladas too, on Saturday. It's amazing how my homemade soup puts that canned stuff to shame. I guess that, just as in preparing any sort of food, whether Chinese or Mexican or American, when you leave out the main seasoning (the onions), it will never be the same. It's just another tiny reason why you can never count on anyone to make it right _for_ you; you can only get it right by doing it yourself.

For years I've speculated that there must be some non-sour, stable culture of yeast and bacteria that can be used to brew alcohol. It would be like a sourdough starter, only suitable for brewing wine. Well, leave it to the olde English cookbook to provide the answer. It mentions something called "bees' wine" (or ginger beer), a symbiotic combination of a unique yeast and a dependent species of Brevibacterium. Together they make a colony rather like a kombucha mushroom, only with a tastier result. There are two sources in Europe for the culture, one in England and one in Germany, but it can't be sold legally in the U. S. Country people used to share the culture with everyone in the neighborhood, and soon everyone was brewing their own ginger beer. I found some interesting stuff online about how to start a culture from raisins. I read some old legends about putting a bee into the starter culture, hence the name (or some people say that it's because of the humming sound that the jar makes as it bubbles). The secret of its preparation has been lost, and even the DSMZ culture from Germany is just being perpetuated from someone's ancient batch of Ingverbierpflanze (ginger beer plant) that they found in a German village. When I get some time, I'm going to experiment with it. Let's reason for a moment. If these two organisms really evolved in symbiosis, and form solid colonies, we should expect to find them living as such in nature now, quite independently of man, in the same environment where they evolved. Where might that be, where we could find yeast that have evolved to form solid colonies in dry air? Inside a beehive? Where's the harm in experimenting? All the recipes I've seen involve quantities of ginger that are inhibitory to some organisms, so this enhancement might be part of the secret (along with real bee inoculant). It could be that the ginger is the key to suppressing lactic acid bacteria (the organisms that typically grow with yeast in a wild culture). There's no doubt that ginger has often been used, like hops, to prevent the growth of gram-negative bacteria like those that produce lactic acid. This species of Brevibacterium must be less sensitive to ginger than most gram-negative bacteria. If I end up with a lumpy, gelatinous culture that produces a pleasant-smelling, non-sour, fizzy alcohol, then it's likely that I've found the key, and I'll perpetuate it to see if it stabilizes. If so, and it still smells pleasant, I'll test out some small quantities on the dog. If not, I'll just toss it. Getting a starter culture from Europe is such a hassle, but not impossible if you have friends or relatives there. This is really a beautiful concept. The ginger alllows non-sour bacteria to dominate over lactic acid bacteria, but the combination of yeast and these specialized bacteria still manages to repel infection by gram-positive bacteria (inhibited somewhat by alcohol, but not in the least by ginger), much like sourdough or kefir. The secret of using this fermentation to produce something other than ginger beer would be much like the secret to producing non-bitter bread from hop yeast. For a few generations (multiplications), the culture should remain pure when liberated from the bonds of hops or ginger, allowing one to create ferments (dough or booze) that are neither hoppy nor gingery (as we do with bread dough all the time). But after that, it would eventually become unsafe to use, in the absence of perfect sterility, because of the introduction of foreign bacteria, much like the "friendship bread" dough starter that you may have heard of. It makes me wonder whether the DSMZ culture is really what it should be, since if they're not continuing to raise it with ginger, the foreign bacteria naturally present in the original culture would probably come to dominate over the desired Brevibacterium in short order, and the latter might even disappear altogether after a few generations. But the English culture available online was never used to make anything but ginger beer (if it's even really for real). Who knew that herbs could be so interesting?

I'm experimenting with winter crops of maca, salsify, and parsnips. There's no doubt they'll succeed if they sprout. I put plastic covers on them during the cold, sunny spells. Some maca seedlings are already visible. I put a PVC frame on the bed to support their cover, because I'm leaving it on permanently. They don't like freezes too well, and now the rain may flatten them (the only thing that stops winter poppy seedlings). I've also decided to try planting some old potatoes where the yacon is. If I cover them, they're sure to sprout during the sunny weather of mid-winter, and they'll grow during the rainy season. I'll put the cover on when frost threatens. It ought to work just fine, if there are no huge freezes after a certain point (late autumn tends to be the frostiest season here, I think), since potatoes love the cold to no end; they just can't actually take a freeze. Inland, winter potatoes would not work at all. The freezes are too hard, and practically every non-rainy day in the inland valleys of Oregon is a densely foggy one, in winter. Miracles are possible here, if only freezes can be averted. Right now, Vietnamese coriander has never looked happier, on the table in the pouring cold rain out front. The light frosts we've had have not yet affected the tender potted plants in the front yard. I suppose I really should plant a patch of flax, to perpetuate the golden-seeded 'Mega' variety, since cold never stops flax from growing. I really have to order some Austrian field peas; they're just like any soup pea, and they grow here like chervil, as if there were no winter. I still fondly remember harvesting fall-bearing 'Amity' raspberry, with their sweet mellow flavor, in December; I can't wait to have enough beds to devote one just to them.

I'm trying to find an alternative to the rather rusty, fragile round beds that I've been making (not to mention their great waste of space), and my mind always keeps coming back to the same model. Place 4 corner posts and dig out the topsoil from the rectangle. Pack stones into the area. Lash a stack of cured small saplings or straightened branches between the corner posts on all 4 sides (conifer wood in this size range usually just goes to waste). Line the sides with greenhouse plastic inside and out; just one continuous piece that snakes around the top edge and drapes down should do. It should take many years for the wood to rot, kept dry like this. I think maybe a third pair of posts, at the midpoints on the outside, would be good to prevent bulging. I like this because it uses a bare minimum of high-tech stuff. Right now, I could never store all the bags of cement and all the rolls of re-bar that it would take for me to complete my goal of making 200 eighteen square foot round beds (or the equivalent area). With this other method, we could easily afford and store all the necessary ingredients to continue making protected, raised beds, in the absence of transfusions of materiel from the hardware store. The rock can just be dumped in the drive, where it's badly needed anyway.

Today we had sleet!! It's official. I thought there was something especially clear looking about those ice pellets that fell.

Well, I'm within days of getting everything buttoned up for the Holidays. The guinea pigs will be set up in the new shed. All of their bedding will be layered with berry vines on the compost piles. The last of the beds will be planted, including the twig chip experiment. Tomorrow is the last of the showers for a while, so I need to write Christmas cards, do dishes, and write a subroutine to display a binary tree graphically (Lee needs something fun to do, during these last days of autumn). The larger calf will be going away soon, and the runt calf will be able to sleep in the barn in a few weeks. Next week I'll have a chance during the sunny weather to get a PVC hoop house over the goose pen and clean that out too. I guess I need to order a few things online, and then it's time to start cleaning and decorating for Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

Bill







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