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[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

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