Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
This bread is so good. We had it with homemade pesto (last harvest of homegrown basil) and the last Brandywine tomatoes.
Tomorrow if I am feeling better I’ll pull all the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants from the hoop house, chop them up, and mix them with the orphan punkins, of which we received three more today. The neighbors are really into this!
Found the next batch of orphan punkins under our mailbox, and a bag of rotten apples too. What must the neighbors be thinking?! Oh, wait, it’s the neighbors who brought them here!
Along with out Jack-O-Lanterns it makes for a big haul of soon-to-be-compost.
So I’m not going to be able to bake a bread every day, but it’s cool. Taking advantage of the hot oven, I also baked a punkin pie, using this wonderful recipe (but with canned pumpkin puree). I can’t show you pictures because it’s mostly gone already. I may become a (modest) baker after all. Still looking for that no-knead whole wheat, though…
The tomato vines in my hoop house have started dying, so I pulled the last tomatoes, 2 pounds of them, mostly green.
I also harvested 5 little eggplants, 3 more peppers, and the basil that was not blackened by the frost – which, judging by that frost-sensitive basil, made it into the hoop house on the last (fourth) night of the frost, after a gray day failed to warm it up enough.
I wrote some time ago about needing to do something beyond my own backyard. It didn’t take long before I figured out what that should be. Transition!
(Almost exactly a year ago I attended Transition training in Boston. You can read about it here and here.)
Taking advantage of a rare intrepid, or should I say now-or-never moment, I called my library to reserve the Meeting Room for
I know that’s a lot of events, and it’s all just to find fellow initiators, that is, to get to the first stage of starting a Transition Initiative. Though I hope that, simply by speaking to people to get them to come to these events and advertise in their communities and newsletters, I will find some before April.
I let the date depend entirely on the availability of the Meeting Room, and so April it is (I’m lucky, some town’s Meeting Rooms are booked for over a year). And so…
April 2011 will be Wayland Transition month!
~
Meanwhile I also reconnected with the trainers and the fellow transitioners on my state’s Transition ning site, where we explore our values, share our practical efforts and look for news and support. One of my first discussions was about localization, and I shared some thoughts on “being local”:
As I am calling around my town, trying to get places to hold the Transition Wayland events in April 2011, I am confronted (in a good way) with “the locals” and especially with the question: “Am I a local?”
The I in question – that’s me – knows the answer: yes! It took me a while to get to it, but that’s a different story.
I speak with an accent. I’m from Belgium (Dutch-speaking), I moved here 13 years ago (and moved into this town, 2 years ago), and I speak English well enough, but people think I’m from Ireland (go figure).
On the phone with the library’s administrative assistant, organizing the book club for Rob’s *Handbook*, I was (kindly) asked: “Are you from here?”
Are you a local?
I said, “Now I am!”
It brought home to me the welcome principle – which Sharon in Casaubon’s Book and several other have been espousing (cf. Adapting in Place) – that our home, our place, our locus is, simply, where we live.
So not, per se, “where we come from”. Though it is great, I hasten to add, to also have come from here (wherever you are), to have stuck around until now, to have already gotten to know your place and the people, and to be known. But we should not let the lack of such a past deter us from being “a local”. If circumstances or one’s own choice (poor or not) have only just brought us here, so be it. It’s about now, and the future.
I have let the lack of such a past (not an American, not a New Englander, not a Waylander) deter me. It made me shy, made me feel undeserving, in a sense, like I should be an observer for a while and wait for an invitation, to deserve a voice. But now I am beginning to think that it might give me an edge, this ignorance about how things are done in this town, the fact that no one knows me. This was an important realization for me, and one of the factors in getting me going again.
So you could say I’m inviting myself, or rather, have already invited myself, and so, true, I am new, but hey, I am here!
And a plump little thing it is.
There’s Amie, counting on her fingers
This is what our living room looks like now. DH said it looks a bit weird, those big peppers. I said, well count yourself lucky I’m not overwintering the eggplants! (Poor eggplants.)
At least I’m making that big picture window pay for all the heat loss in cold weather.
Speaking of heat loss, I need to calculate the Riot, it’s been two months now, but the site and so the calculator are down, hopefully not for too long.
It is recommended to plant garlic a week after the first frost, and we finally had our frost two nights ago, and i couldn’t wait any longer. That first frost was almost a month past our average first frost date (10/5).
I had about 30 cloves, saved from last year, and 10 volunteers from bulbs I must have failed to dig out when I harvested the garlic in July (I transplanted these to the new bed). They’re all hardnecks – with wonderful scapes in Spring – but I don’t know what variety, or mixture of varieties they are.
I didn’t prepare my cloves last year and wasn’t happy with the result: a lot of cloves didn’t grow at all, or the bulbs were rotten and soggy at harvesting time. So this year I decided to prep. I soaked them overnight in a solution of baking soda (1 heaping tablespoon in 1 gallon of water), then soaked them for 2 minutes in rubbing alcohol, right before planting.
I chose a bed that hasn’t had garlic planted in it in the last three years (in my young garden that means never). Until recently it had tomatoes and peppers in it. It’s a fine bed, I found the soil light and fluffy, just the way garlic loves it. It gets as much sun as any bed in my garden gets. It’s also situated to the East of where the Winter hoop House will be, so it won’t be in its shade and will even get some of its reflected sunshine and protection from winds.
I didn’t fertilize, but did mulch with 4″ of straw. It’ll protect the soil from the pounding rain, keeping it fluffy, and it will protect the garlic from temperature swings.
~
While I was covered with straw anyway, I spread it over all the bed that will be unused over the Winter. This is what the garden looks like now. From the North:
From the East:
The asparagus bed still needs mulching, but I’ll wait until after I’ve cut down the ferns, after they’re spent.
Today, the day after Halloween, we found our first punkin orphan, dropped off at our mailbox. Amie ran to welcome it. We reminded people of the composting program when we were out trick-or-treating, and many were enthusiastic. And I met one elderly gentleman who was the first to live on this street, and he and I resolved to meet soon so I can take down the history of the neighborhood.
~
I am back on track with the baking. Because these are busy days I went back to the old recipe which is such a favorite in our house. Daily Bread No.7 was finished in a jiffy and Bread No.8 will be finished at breakfast. I love it too, but am hoping fr a good no-knead whole wheat recipe.
~
We had our first frost last night. It went down to 21. There’s more frost predicted tonight and tomorrow night, so I decided to bring in all my potted pepper plants. I’ll post a picture of my interesting living room tomorrow. The hoop house is performing well, though unfortunately I don’t have any precise data. But all the plants inside it survived the frost, so far. The eggplants are still going strong. The tomatoes aren’t looking so good, but the tomatoes on the vine are still ripening.
~
Today I went into Amie’s class (K) to talk about compost. While putting her snack together in the morning I had an idea. I walked in, sat down in front of the kids, and asked them if it was okay for me to eat my snack, I was so hungry. I rummaged around in my bag, complaining that my snack had been in there for a long time and muttering that I hoped it was still good. Then I pulled out a big clear plastic box with wet, gooey, wormy compost! Eek! What happened!
We talked about rot and decay, composing and decomposing, falling apart and being taken apart, it no longer being food for us but still perfectly edible for other organisms, etc. I must say, I used to teach college kids metaphysics, epistemology, logic and ethics, and that was tough. But teaching these five-year-olds is a different thing altogether! Afterwards the class went out to plant bulbs and make a scarecrow in their little school garden.
(Note to self: mustn’t forget to take that “snack” out of my bag. I’ll do it tomorrow…)
Back to the boule, which is really very yummy. I baked just one after all. Amie will be happy, she loves it with butter and homemade blueberry jam.
My I-have-to-do-something realization (re-realization!) of Friday blotted out any thought of Bread No. 6, which was good because it was really no good. Even at the right oven temperature it failed to rise. It was worse than Bread No.5 because I baked it in a pan – which is what the recipe suggests – and so the bottom is entirely too wet and yeasty. Can I make a bread pudding out of that thing?
Yesterday was my first no-daily-bread day. I just wanted to give my family a break – nah, I just couldn’t fit it into my super-busy day – or, rather, I thought about making the new dough too late (it does have to rise, just once). Silly, it takes five minutes to put that dough together! But today’s bread is rising, and I will bake one loaf for us and one loaf for a friend.
~
Today I put the bushes and berries and perennials to bed with straw, made a humongous leaf pile (couldn’t get the shredder started) and I emptied out the rain barrels, as we’re going to have freezes over the next couple of nights. I potted up and brought in the scented geraniums – I wonder if they’ll survive the winter in the Annex. I haven’t put in the garlic yet because I found half my garlic, which was curing in the attic, rotten! I have a measly 18 cloves to plant. The garden center has no more seed garlic. Tomorrow I might buy some organic garlic from the grocery store and plant that. First thing tomorrow, though, is planting bulbs and talking compost with the kids in Amie’s class.
~
Soon Amie will come home and we’ll dress her up for trick or treating. This year’s costume will be something very special and appropriate! Can you guess?