When Mom Gets Bored...

Been There, Read That

2011-09-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years, several people have asked me why I don't write a book about my adventures in urban homesteading. There are two answers to that question. The first is "I tried, but it wasn't long enough to be a book." The second one is "Because someone else already did." Novella Carpenters "Farm City," written about her efforts at urban farming and livestock production in Oakland, CA, was published more than two years ago. I found it hilarious and informative, but far too profane for most of my friends to truly enjoy. Any treatise on Permaculture would tell you everything I have learned and more, but they are usually just that- long, sometimes tediously academic treatises, expecting the reader to slog through pages of plant guilds and the advantages of biodynamic farming, when all they want to know is how to set up a backyard chicken coop.

Then last week I checked out "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Urban Homesteading." Mildly insulting title notwithstanding, it is a comprehensive beginner's guide to increasing one's independence (in the practical sense) without migrating to the countryside. I don't do everything they discuss, and certainly don't do it in the exact manner they describe. But if you want to move beyond growing summer tomatoes and try something a little more radical (the root word of which is the latin "radix", meaning "root", amusingly enough), then this is a quick read and a fine place to start your study.

Come Mista Tally Man

2011-08-19T13:25:00.000-07:00

It's banana blooming time again.

I have learned from past experience that this variety (I don't know the name- the tag was long ago lost in the mulch by the rummaging of kids and chickens) produces far more bananas than I can use for cooking. The kids don't find their slippery ripe texture to their liking for fresh eating, so lunchboxing doesn't help much.

Besides, when the 'nanas start filling out, they get so heavy they threaten to tip the tree. So as soon as the plant has produced a few more hands (the "bunches" that you buy in a grocery store are properly termed hands; a bunch is the entire enormous pseudostem full of as many as a hundred bananas) imma gonna cut off what is left of the flower and see if I can cook it. Anybody have a recipe suggestion?

Live and In Person

2011-07-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

I saw a bakfiets yesterday. A real, Dutch bakfiets, on the streets of Long Beach by Whaley park.

"But what on God's green earth is a bakfiets?" I hear you cry. Only the coolest euro-hip kid-carrying cargo bike ever! It looks like this.

The one I saw yesterday was carrying a toddler and a baby, and was ridden by a guy named Michael Wolfgang Bauch. I know this because, after stopping him to ask where he got the awesome wheels, he told me that he was a filmmaker. He recently finished a film called "Riding Bikes with the Dutch", which will soon be screening at LACMA. Here's his website:
http://everydaybike.com/

I told him about my Madsen bucketbike (http://www.madsencycles.com/), and he was kind enough to not scoff at my American wheels, and share my enthusiasm for going car-free for short trips. I think it was the high point of my week.

I didn't Know Birds Could Do That

2011-07-26T19:59:00.000-07:00

I've never seen anything like it. A pair of goldfinches (Michaelson assures me that is what they are) wove a nest on the underside of one of our banana tree leaves. I think it incorporates fibers from the leaf itself in order to support the weight.

It gets bounced around by the breezes an awful lot, but hey, maybe birds like that.

I haven't seen the chicks yet, but I can hear them peeping from across the yard when their parents show up with lunch.

Goldfinches aren't supposed to breed in this area, but nobody told this pair. I hope we get to see the chicks when they fledge, and before they fly away. The father has been a real bright spot in the yard. I don't have a photo, but he looks like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Goldfinch

Spread 'em

2011-07-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

I know, it looks like I was trying to make a Transformers birthday theme tree. In reality it is my most recent effort to turn a tree with a relentlessly upright growth habit into a spreading shade tree.

When a tree resists my efforts to prune it into the shape I want, I resort to bending the twig, as it were. Sometimes I tie limbs together, sometimes I bungee cord them to stationary objects. And sometimes I hang things from the branches to weight them down until they conform. K'nex were well suited this time because I needed so many weights, but relatively light ones. Besides, it was easier to pillage the kids' old K'nex bin than drag out a ladder and get down the box of Christmas ornaments.

Although that would arguably have been prettier.

Calling Our Food by Name

2011-06-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

~~This didn't get published on Our Mother's Keeper, so I think I'll just throw it up here.~~
Ohp, they did post it! But how did this whole post end up in boldface. Sigh. Really must work on my technical skills.

My mother’s parents were both school teachers. But they had 6 children (five boys plus my mother) and wanted to teach them the value of good honest manual labor. So they also ran a small dairy farm- the sort of thing where you keep few dozen milk cows on pasture just off the highway that runs from your town to the next town over. That was where the high school was, anyway, so it was fairly convenient to do the milking and feeding morning and afternoon. They sold the milk to the neighbors. They kept a quarter-acre vegetable garden beside their adobe home, and when they wanted chicken for dinner, Grandma caught and killed one from her own coop (while my mother hid in a tree to avoid being asked to help).

By the time I came along, the flock had disappeared, chicken came on a Styrofoam tray from the grocery store, and there were only a few cows left. I got to visit the milking barn as a small child, and I still remember grandpa grabbing a handful of oats from the hopper to snack on while he prepared a cow for milking. (He gave some to the cow, too, of course.) Raised on supermarket 2% milk, I couldn’t stomach the creamy stuff- certainly not when it was still warm from the cow, no matter how enthusiastically my older relatives raved about it! The beef, however, I was more than happy to eat. Old dairy cow isn’t much good for steaks, but pressure canned cuts make for excellent gravy over potatoes or brown bread. We sometimes came home from visits to Grandma and Grandpa with cans of beef, labeled with the year and a name identifying the cow from which the meat had come.

Fast-forward 35 years. I keep half a dozen free-range chickens in my backyard for the eggs, fertilizer, pest control, and general amusement. My children are involved in their care and feeding, making sure they have water during the day and locking them safely in their coop at night. It’s nothing compared to getting up a 5 a.m. to milk a dozen cows, but it’s still a responsibility for the well-being of another living creature, and a connection to their food. Between “the ladies”, our fruit trees, and our vegetable garden, my kids understand better than most of their classmates just how their bellies come to be filled every night.

We also keep chickens for the psychological salve of knowing that at least we are doing some small thing to avoid complicity in the various horrors of factory farming without giving up animal products. That’s not to say this is a chicken sanctuary: when a hen gets too old to lay reliably, we kill and eat her (mostly in soup or stew; the meat on a three-year-old chicken is remarkably tough.) Yes, I know, vegetarianism is an option for avoiding the blood and sins of industrial farming. But my daughter is decidedly allergic to peanuts, mildly allergic to soy, and politely but firmly declines to consume nearly any other nut. We’re working on expanding our non-animal protein sources (I’ve got sapling almond and macadamia nut trees planted in the hopes of changing her mind), but we’re going to have to keep going with the moderate animal protein consumption for now.

If I could keep a milk cow, I totally would. Ditto for a dairy goat. But I’m in urban/suburban coastal southern California. One of my neighbors got in trouble with the city just for having a pet potbelly pig that got too big for his “pet” designation. Milk is just going to have to come from the store. Urban meat production, on the other hand, we are still trying. If you’re vegetarian or vegan, I totally respect that, and strongly suggest that you not read any further. To the rest of you I say: rabbit tastes just like chicken. Well, dark meat free-range turkey, anyway.

Honestly, my rabbit raising efforts have been a failure so far. My first buck (that’s a male rabbit, we called him Roger) died of heat stroke, before I learned to put soaking wet towels on top of the hutch on hot days for some evaporative cooling. Jane, my first doe, refused to breed despite being given her pick of two different bucks. (The kids got an eyeful watching the bucks try to woo her. I’ll have to get back to you all on whether or not having one’s first glimpse of sexuality be of a doe kicking the butt of the buck attempting to mount her is useful in preventing teenage sexual activity, but I’m thinking it might be.)

This spring I rallied my determination and acquired a new doe. This meant that it was time to cull Jane. I only have so many hutches. She was over two years old, but I’m opposed to wasting flesh as much as I am opposed to cruelty. So my husband gave her one last cuddle- or tried to, she was always crotchety- then quickly dispatched her and skinned the carcass. (I skinned and cleaned Roger’s carcass when he died, but I’m still too lily-livered to personally kill a mammal I knew. I’m working on it.)

Then I got cooking. We got a significant part of four dinners from Jane: rabbit stew, chopped rabbit meat in orange-ginger sauce over rice, rabbit adobo (Filipino marinade), and then finally the broth from boiling the bones went into a tomato-corn soup. Yes, she was a big rabbit, and we eat meat in small portions. During the second dinner, my 13-year-old was having trouble getting the somewhat fibrous meat out of the ladle and onto his plate. He muttered “Jane, stop fighting me and get out!” And then the meat did. And then, he ate it.

We don’t just know where our food came from; we know it by first name. Eat your heart out, Michael Pollan.

Little Girls

2011-05-23T21:17:00.000-07:00

My sister's little girl

My little girl

I can't stop mentally comparing those two pictures. Not sure why.

Hey, Look!

2011-05-18T09:26:00.000-07:00

They like me over here:

http://ourmotherskeeper.com/2011/05/17/laundry-and-the-low-water-landscape-greywater-harvesting-and-reuse-part-ii/

Only problem is, my posts don't generate much discussion. So head on over there and start a comment war for me, wouldja? Thanks.

Solar Season

2011-05-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

Some days our "May Gray" overcast really puts a damper on my solar cooking. But other days, it's golden. Even if the weather isn't really warm, bright sun can get the solar cooker to 300 degrees, from as early as 10 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon during the summer months (but 10 to 2, and only about 275 degrees, in the winter.)

We recently inherited about a half ton (and I mean that literally) of wheat from a friend who was cleaning out her mother's food storage. It's a bit stale for making bread, but it makes good chicken feed. At least, it does if it is cooked. What better way than putting it in the solar oven (with equal parts water) for a few hours? Let it cool, then toss it on the lawn for the yard birds.

Next up was granola. My teen has recently decided that this is his favorite after-school snack. The ingredients are cheap, but granola sucks a lot of electricity for the hour it has to toast in the oven. As a low-temperature recipe, however, it's perfect for the solar cooker. It does require hands-on time; the solar cooker has a small internal cavity, so I have to break the granola into two batches, and it has to be stirred every 20 minutes. Two hours tending the cooker means Solar granola is only for the seriously stay-at-home.

Last item of the day was a pan of caramel cinnamon rolls. I like giving them to the kids for breakfast once in awhile (they're 50% whole wheat and light on the caramel, so they're not too awful for breakfast food). That requires that I make them the day before- I'm not the kind of mom who thinks getting up at 5 to allow fresh pastries to rise in time for breakfast is the best way to show love. Nope. Not doin' it that way.

Although the recipe calls for a 375 degree oven, cooking them at 300 worked fine. Well, it would have, if I had left them in long enough. Jon wanted to go run some errands that required my presence, so I took them out at 45 minutes. Next time, gotta go for the full hour. The outer ones were fine, but the inner ones were doughy. Tasted good, though.

Shame I had to go to the bank that day. I think I could have done a quiche with the daylight that was still left. Oh, well, the sun will rise tomorrow.

The Big 4-No

2011-05-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

For the sake of clarification, let me state that I will not be celebrating my 40^th birthday this year.

The 40^th anniversary of my arrival on this planet will arrive soon, but I will not be marking it with a celebration. I’m not in denial about it. I’ve been referring to myself as being 40 years old for several months already. I just don’t see it as any sort of celebrational event.

I may have reached the midpoint in life, but I may have passed it a year ago, or it may not be for another decade. I won’t know until I’m done.

Certainly I have long since passed the days of gleefully marking my height on the bedroom door frame- I am in the days of marking my weight on the bathroom scale. I am no longer “such a lovely young woman,” looking for any excuse to wear a fancy new dress- I am growing a dowagers hump that makes fitting any dress an increasing problem.

But I am also not yet to the point where waking up alive is an achievement in itself, and doing it for a whole year is party-worthy.

I am in the vast middle lands. Some of my skills and abilities are getting stronger, but others are fading at the same time. I am accumulating experience, but I am losing both physical and mental vigor- slowly, yes, but measurably. My children are growing up, but my parents are growing- well, not in that direction anymore.

So in summary, it’s my birthday, and I can chose not to celebrate it if I want to. If that bugs you, go have your own party. Celebrate the random event of your choice. Nuthin’ to see here.

The Beheadings Will Continue Until Egg Production Improves

2011-05-10T08:18:00.000-07:00

The chickens laid goose eggs yesterday. By which I mean they did squat. Hmm, still too elliptical.

There were no eggs yesterday. From 6 adult hens. Not a one.

And so, at 4:40 yesterday afternoon, when I should have been on my bike taking Jillian to piano lessons, I decided to kill a hen. Jon did the actual cutting off of the head, though. He knows he is faster (and therefore more humane) than I am.

Oddly, this chicken seemed almost glad to go. I wonder if she knew she was unproductive, or if she had been in some distress that was preventing laying (yes, we've been watching them, and this hen hasn't laid an egg in many months). As I was pressed for time, I just buried this one. She was old enough to be too tough for anything but broth, anyway.

So it's down to 5 (ostensibly) laying hens, and 4 young pullets. We'll see if shaking up the pecking order improves the egg production. At the very least, it will decrease the feed consumption, and it did make me feel like I had accomplished something for the day.

Mother's Day

2011-05-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

I solemnly resolve to run away next Mother's Day.

I said the same thing last year, but decided the kids were still too young for me to just drive them to church, kick them out the door, then take myself to the movies. But next year, I'm pretty sure they can handle it. They were delightfully reverent through the whole sacrament meeting. I did more coloring in Jillian's books than she did, to distract myself from the ludicrousness of the affair. If we really wanted to enjoy Mother's Day as a sort of holiday for mothers, we'd cancel church and spend the day in our pj's, ignoring the housework and feeding the children out of cans and cereal boxes. (I would say "letting our husbands do the housework and feed the children," but, well, sigh.) If, on the other hand, we need a special mark on the calendar to remind us of the importance of mothers, then we are remarkably stupid. Either way, the manner in which we "celebrate" is not well suited to the purpose of the celebration, and I've had enough of it. The boycott is declared.

As soon as the obligatory candy was passed out (and handed to my kids, who need the calories rather more than I do), I went home. I cooked a really nice lunch, prepped a good dinner, listened to some comedy on the radio, and got back to church in time to pick up kids. If I hadn't been so ticked at my husband for not doing anything to acknowledge the holiday, it would have been fairly pleasant. Next year, I will remove the responsibility from him entirely, and take myself out. He has been informed of this plan, and I think he is secretly relieved. I don't blame him. I am aware that I am difficult to please- I have to live in this brain all the time, y'know.

Jillian did give me a cute flower pin she had made in Activity Days that I wore to church, and Ben wrote me a nice note that afternoon. My favorite "gift" was from Michaelson, however. I hope you can see what it says.

I haven't asked him how he is going to kick his own butt, but I truly look forward to cashing this in.

Baby Come Back

2011-05-03T20:32:00.000-07:00

Technically Roselyn, my sister's newborn, has never been at my house for daycare before, so she can't really come back. But she's here, nonetheless, from 8-ish until 4-ish every school day until the end of my sister's school year (late June). At not quite 8 weeks, she's a very mellow baby, but not used to being away from mama.

Having an infant around is reminding me of so many things I was beginning to forget. How being even a little sleep deprived makes me nuts. How much I can get done in a half hour of quiet. How little I can get done in three hours if I have to hold a child at the same time. Why I chose to be a stay-at-home mom rather than try to juggle kids and work (since I had that choice open to me). Why I won't be having any more children. How human beings of all sizes tend to resist doing the little things they really really really need to do to be happy (seriously, kid, the bottle is full of breastmilk- I know it doesn't feel like mom, but just suck the nipple already! You're hungry!)

Next time I forget how I got to this point in life, y'all remind me to spend a few days taking care of a new human. I may not be any more reconciled to my life's limitations, but they will make logical sense.

P.S. Speaking of logic, did I mention that Rosie can raise one eyebrow and look at me like a tiny Mr. Spock? Hilarious.

A Little Less Alone

2011-04-30T18:24:00.000-07:00

There's a new blog out there, started by mormon environmentalists. It's much too new to know what I think of it yet, but already I feel a little less alone.

http://ourmotherskeeper.com

Feeling Chipper

2011-04-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

On Friday afternoon, the UPS guy brought this

Which I used to turn this

into this.

I foresee much improved levels of hummus in my garden soil.

I can practically hear the worms salivating.

My new toy is a Greenworks 15 amp electric chipper, and it does a fine job converting fruit tree prunings (of which I have large volumes over the course of a year) into respectable mulch without hurting my eardrums or triggering my asthma. Anything too big for this little baby is just about the right size for the pizza oven.

Transforming waste into resources and cleaning up the back yard at the same time. Possibly the best fun I had all week.

At least it doesn't smell like Teen Spirit

2011-03-24T19:12:00.000-07:00

Tonight at dinner we had baby cauliflower and broccoli (from the garden-brag brag), sauteed in some leftover bacon drippings- not enough to make them actually taste like bacon, but enough to make them plenty yummy. At least, that's what I thought. Jon doesn't comment on my cooking very often, beyond eating a reasonable amount of it and insisting that the kids eat it, too. Ben and Jillian both are having allergies, so they had a hard time tasting much of anything tonight.

And then there was Michaelson. He tasted a piece, pondered for a minute and asked "Mom, did you get this recipe from Dad's mom?"

"Uhh, no...why?"

"Because this tastes like Arizona."

Brassicas in bacon grease = Arizona. Did not know that.

Balls Out

2011-03-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

Not THOSE balls. These balls.

We live along a flood control channel. And when it rains, all manner of dreck is washed off the streets and into that channel. I dunno what the wierdest thing we have seen is- maybe a shopping cart? But aside from the appallingly predictable styrofoam flotsam, one of the things we see most often is play balls. Apparently it is common for kids to kick a ball over a fence and into a ditch. This year someone (no idea who) decided to start rounding up balls that get stranded on the rocks behind our house- then throw them over the fence into our yard.

30+ balls so far this year.

They just show up. One day there is nothing under the play structure but digging toys, the next day, I find this. (The chicken is ours, of course. Not sure what she was planning to do with that mini soccer ball.)

Same with the trampoline. One day nothing but lanky grass underneath. Next day, half a dozen spherical plastic toys.

I've taken the best of the lot over to the school to be put back in service a few times now, but honestly, a lot of these balls have had it and should just be thrown away. So to whomever is out there bombing our yard with trashy balls- Please, stop.

In Case You Were Wondering

2011-03-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

Pineapples grown in a greenhouse in a back yard in southern California taste just as good as the ones fresh off the plantation in Oahu.

I have witnesses to prove it.

Apple Attack? Lumber Lockdown

2011-03-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

I planted a Gordon Apple sapling next to the trampoline last year. We've had this variety of apple before, so we know it grows well in Long Beach. (The fact that the old Gordon Apple tree was finally killed off by the combined effects of no less than two diseases and two simultaneous insect infestations is just evidence that a lot of things grow well in Long Beach.) The sapling I planted was a semi-dwarf, so I figured that by the time it was big enough to be a space concern, we wouldn't have little kids wanting a trampoline any more.

But I forgot about the fact that kids like to sit on the edge of the trampoline and mess with stuff.

In this particular case, they messed with the branches.

All of them.

Stripped off.

Not a single sideways twig left on this poor little whip of a sapling.

So I caged it.

Try and get your mangy paws through THAT, my dear destructive little children!

Promising Panicles

2011-03-05T10:57:00.000-08:00

There were a few panicles of flowers on the Macadamia tree when I planted it last year, but they didn't survive the transplantation.

Perhaps the possibility of nuts is improved this year?

Happy Face

2011-03-04T15:27:00.000-08:00

Jillian's dinner Wednesday. She said is was a "REALLY smiley face!" Apparently someone has been showing her photos of Groucho Marx?

Meanwhile, He's Back at the Ranch

2011-02-19T14:51:00.000-08:00

Jon works from home now. At least, that is what IBM is telling him this week. He will be part of a team of experienced implementers who help other IBM business services people troubleshoot projects that are not meeting their deadlines, etc. He will be here pretty much all the time, on the phone and computer, except when he suddenly has to fly somewhere for a few days/weeks to help a project onsite.

There is tremendous upside potential to this arrangement for Jon and the kids. Travelling every week isn't easy, even for a person who can sleep standing up the way Jon can. And the children should benefit from his more consistent involvement in their daily lives. I think they may get a little tired of his involvement, to be brutally honest, but it will be good for them to have it whether they want it or not.

I'm having more difficulty finding the upside for myself. I still can't commit to a regular job, as I can't count on Jon for childcare with any regularity. Just because he is at home doesn't mean he is available, and experience indicates there will be little prior notice before he is called away. I will lose the use of the office/sewing room often, due to his frequent business calls (every sewing machine I've ever met was too noisy to be used in the same room as a cellphone.) If I have a rush sewing job, I can always set up in another room, but it will be an annoyance not to be able to use my functional setup. Jon will take on various daily household duties, which will be good for him, but will also increase my already growing dispensability. If the only reason to get out of bed in the morning is that there are kids to be fed and taken to school, but Daddy can handle that, well then why bother getting out of bed?

I'm almost to the point where I should cut my thyroid medication dose in half and spend most of my day meditating by a sunny window. I often said I should be reincarnated as a cat. Apparently, I won't have to wait that long.

Proof

2011-02-16T09:03:00.000-08:00

Just had to provide evidence that I can in fact move these muthers.

Does this rock make me look fat?

I'm pretty sure that I sometimes make messes just to experience the satisfaction of cleaning them up again.

Taking the Good with the Bad

2011-02-15T13:12:00.000-08:00

The last guava finally ripened and fell from the tree last week. The very next day, our apricot tree started flowering.

In a good year, this tree would be covered in blooms. But there's no way we got anywhere near the 400 hours of chill (temperatures below 45 degrees) that this tree needs to set fruit. Now that the tree has broken dormancy it is too late for any late winter chilling to do any good (and it might even kill off whatever fruits do manage to set). So odds are that this will be the second year in a row of no apricots, or very few. Several of my other stone fruits most likely won't be bearing either, but at least the tropicals are happy. I'll just have to save up the money we didn't spend on heating to buy fruit this summer.

And When I'm Thoroughly Pooped Out

2011-02-07T15:58:00.000-08:00

I watch lectures on uctv.tv. My favorite series is the Mini Medical School for the Public out of UCSF. I have a little tiny crush on this lecturer.
http://uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=20218&subject=health

As a mother, this lecture on pediatric issues was quite useful.
http://uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=20221&subject=health

I like many of the lectures in the Science category as well. Wanna see some Science Cheerleaders? (They're at about 3:02, if you don't want to hear the rest of the lecture.)
http://uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=19862&subject=sci

Other subject areas include Arts & Music, Public Affairs, Humanities, Business, Education Issues, and Gardening and Agriculture. (I think I've watched every video available in that last category.) The site is searchable and new talks and lectures are posted regularly. I am occasionally disappointed in the sound quality, but not usually. There is often an extended introduction of the lecturer, but it is easy to skip past it.

Anybody know of other sites like this?

Puzzled

2011-02-01T20:07:00.000-08:00

So I've found that if I get a solid hour or two of exercise per day, I don't need any antidepressants. I could just do a good workout in the morning and another at night. But I'd really rather just have physical activity be a natural part of my day. If I had a job, having one about 4 miles away that I could cycle to and from would be ideal. Or having a job that naturally involved a fair amount of activity. But for the last two weeks (and the next few, I'd guess) this is how I have been getting my exercise.

The chickens "help out" by eating all the juicy worms I dig up when I remove an inch or two of dead grass/dirt to set the stones in. They've never eaten so well in their fluffy little lives.

I can set 20-50 stones per day, depending on how large the stones are (they vary from about 15 to 50 pounds- I have Jon move the occasional 75 pound monster) and how easily they fit together. It's like the world's heaviest jigsaw puzzle, with no picture on the box to guide you.

Putting in the stones will help a little bit in reducing the water bill, a bit more in reducing the amount of mowing we need to do, and rather more in making the back yard look like I meant it to be like that, rather than just "Eh, I didn't know what to do back here, so I left it to the bermuda grass." I suppose I could try to make a job of it, but can you imagine the business card?

World's Wimpiest Stonelayer!

Two hours per day, maximum.

'Nuff Said

2011-01-31T19:27:00.000-08:00

Something I Will Never Need to Make

2010-12-16T09:20:00.000-08:00

At least not as long as I live in Long Beach.

This photo comes courtesy of one of my old favorite blogs,
http://www.cityfarmer.info/2010/12/16/ideas-for-christmas/

Steal This Trashy Idea

2010-12-05T22:14:00.000-08:00

We usually give homemade jelly to neighbors and teachers for Christmas, packaged nicely with a box of crackers. It's personal, and the recipient doesn't have to eat it right away, so they can spread the holiday caloric orgy out a bit. I don't know exactly how much this jelly-giving costs. Pectin runs about $3 per batch (of around 2-3 quarts of finished product); sugar may cost me about a dollar per batch; the fruit is homegrown, the cost is minor; the lids and rings are another $4 or $5. We only just barely finished using up the jelly jars that came with the house, so that will add a bit to the cost next year. So maybe a dollar or two of cash cost per jar? (The time involved is much more significant, but that's not what I'm accounting for today.)

I do, however, know how much it costs to make the jelly jars presentable as gifts. Gift bags are absurdly expensive. From $1.99 to 4.99 for an 8" x 6" x 3" bag (plus tissue), for a container that may very well be thrown out after one use, and almost certainly can't be recycled. My little green heart just can't quite fathom it.

I used to look for once-used bags at yard sales, but I haven't done much of that this year (my kids are too big for most of the wares one finds at yard sales around here). White paper craft bags are one way to go, but they were sold out when I last needed them. I've tried just tying the jelly jar and box of crackers together with pretty ribbon. No joy. Maybe it's just me, but it looks like a 6-year-old did it. So I've been looking for other options.

Coincidentally, I've also been looking for ways to recycle my kids' juice pouches. Yes, I know, I should be sending them to school with reuseable beverage containers. You do that with an ADHD kid for a year and see how many reuseable beverage containers you go through. We're sticking with the juice pouches.

Last year I realized that mylar juice pouches could be sewn together when I saw bags like this one from online "green" retailers. They really aren't my style, so I never bought one. But I did collect a few of my kids' empty juice pouches, run them through the washing machine and play around with sewing them together. Nothing came of it until this week, however, when it finally occurred to me that I didn't have to use the printed side as the outside.

This is a week's worth of juice pouches. the flat sections are zigzagged together, then joined at the corners with a straight stitch. No sewing with the right sides together and turning them right-side out, however. Mylar juice pouches are too stiff for that. (Now that I think about it, though, maybe I could try a leathercrafting technique and hammer the seams flat...)

The finished product is still a little rough. But don't be surprised if next year's holiday goodies go out in handcrafted recycled mylar bags. Shall we start a trend?

The Bucket Bike

2010-11-06T18:35:00.000-07:00

I wish I looked this good when I haul kids in my Madsen Bike.

I don't, of course, but we do have just as much fun as it looks like they are having. My nephew Josh particularly loves it when I need to make a run to the library or the grocery store and really don't want to pull the gas-guzzling minivan out of the garage. And of course, as we are temporarily a one-car-family, the bucket bike serves as our "other family vehicle". I delivered a half-dozen pizzas on it for our scout fundraiser this week. Jonathan regularly uses it to pick up the kids (four of them, over 200 pounds worth of kid-flesh and backpacks combined) from school when he is in town. I'm too much of a wimp to handle more than 100 lbs. in the bucket myself, but the bike sure can!

I don't know if we are making the world a better, less polluted place with our Madsen, but we are definitely making people smile.

Sweet Potato Surprise

2010-10-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

All the rain this week reminded me that I wanted to grow more winter wheat this year. The point of the crop is to utilize the free water and spare growing space- there's only so much cabbage and beets I can convince my kids to eat- to at least produce some kind of crop, even if all I use it for is to amuse the chickens. (While I could thresh and winnow the grain and use it for breadmaking, it is much easier to just give the matured stalks to the chickens and let them do their thing with it. It's funny to watch, and it's that much less feed I need to give them.)

One of the sections of garden I wanted to plant was used over the summer to grow a sweet potato vine. I had planted it meaning to grow sweet potatoes, of course. I was told that the vine would put down roots along the length of the vine, and form new tubers at these locations. Well, mine never did. It produced plenty of foliage, which the rabbits really enjoyed eating when I finally got tired of it spreading everywhere, but it never rooted anywhere but where I had planted the original chunk of rooted tuber. So when the weather turned, I ripped up the vine, turned it over to the rabbits, and made a mental note that sweet potatoes had not been a success, at least not in a mild-summered year.

I didn't think about it again until Wednesday. That was when I started pulling the accumulated weeds out of the plot to get it ready for seeds. Pulling out a large patch of spotted spurge, I spotted a flash of orange in the dirt.

Hmm. I'd never seen a weed with an orange root, at least, not a BIG one. I got a hand trowel, dug in, and turned up a sweet potato, paler and pinker than the ones I buy in the store, but definitely a sweet potato. I kept digging, moving a little farther out to try not to damage. More sweets! I finally got my pitchfork and probed the several square feet where the vine had been.

By the time I was done, I had edited my mental note. Sweet potatoes may not do as well here as they do down south, but they do just fine. When you take into account the fact that both their roots and their foliage are useful (roots for us, vines for the rabbits), they are downright wonderfully productive.

Erector Sets for Big Girls

2010-10-16T11:05:00.000-07:00

This is the new trampoline we put together last week, after the old one started shedding springs like a trees sheds leaves in autumn. The kids even did a fair bit of helping, much more so than 6 (?) years ago when we last had to replace this particular piece of backyard recreational equipment.

And this is what I did with most of the frame from the old trampoline.

Have I mentioned that I love my Makita cordless power drill? (Not to mention the joys of brand new drill bits and self-tapping metal screws.)

I'm pretty sure this will become a trellis for a kiwi vine next spring. It may also do some time as a hammock stand, although the structure is only 4 feet deep, so it wouldn't be for big swingers. Sorry, kids!

I also have a hankering to build a platform under it and set a few benches there so people could sit and observe the occasional wonders of the wildlife in the brackish channel on the other side of that wall. It's pretty scruffy out there, but being only a mile from a wetlands, we do see a nice variety of sea birds and jumping fish. Anybody have a dumpster full of broken concrete?

You've heard of Christmas in July?

2010-09-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

How about Easter in September?

While harvesting sugarcane the other day, I found this.

You can just make out a white chicken behind the canes, next to the old soda bottle. Fluffy didn't want to move, so I left her alone for an hour. When I came back later, found this.

THAT's where the chicks have been laying! I was getting rather annoyed at them for being fully 5 months old and not pulling their weight in the egg department.

A Buff Orpington hen

There was a second surprise in the discovery, though. All of those eggs are blue-green, even though fluffy is supposed to be a cream-colored egg-layer, a Buff Orpington. Well, she never did look like the Buff Orp pictures, or like her Buff Orp year-mate (whose eggs I have yet to find).

An Ameraucana hen

I checked the charts on what other breeds lay blue egs. Only Araucanas, their cross-bred cousin the ameraucana (we have two of these this year, which look just like the picture at right), and some other rare breed that basically looks like an ameraucana have blue eggs. But there is such a thing as a white araucana, and fluffy is a dead ringer for the photos I found of those.

A White Araucana hen

Fluffy must have gotten mixed in with the Buff orps as a chick because she was pale yellow, rather than brown-and-tan striped like all of the other araucana chicks the feed store had. It's our own little family ugly duckling story.

But When Life Hands You Sugarcane...

2010-09-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

SOL, buddy. If you search the internet for "sugarcane recipe," Google will just keep trying to give you recipes for candy cane sugar cookies. Oh, and sugarcane shrimp, which I expect I will eventually try to make.

Yes, I know, I actually planted these things on purpose. I guess I didn't realize I would have to cut them with branch loppers. Or at least that once I got the outer foliage off I would need loppers to chop them into pieces small enough to peel.

Or that even once they were peeled, I would STILL need loppers to cut the stalks into pieces small enough to boil.

I'm pretty sure I have never had my loppers in the kitchen before.

By the way, granulated white sugar is waaaay under-priced.

The chunks of sugarcane are boiling in water now, the house smells like brown sugar, and I think we will be having some unusual lemonade this weekend. That's the only pragmatic way to use this stuff that I can think of. Got any other ideas?

When Life Hands you Quinces

2010-09-14T09:56:00.000-07:00

You turn to Google. Because somebody out there must know what to do with a fruit that looks like this.

This isn't actually one of mine. I cut mine up before realizing I really should get a picture. This is the first year I have gotten a crop (we'll use that term very loosely) of quinces from my young quince tree. But these are mine, stewing in a pot with water and lemon peel.

I used an organic spray on the tree early in the season (Surround tm, a kaolin clay that is supposed to repulse hungry insects), but I guess I should have repeated it around the beginning of August. I lost a lot of fruit flesh to what looked like apple maggots (quinces are cousins to apples and pears, as well as roses). But hey, using up blemished fruit is what making preserves is all about.

So this is what my preserves looked like after I pureed the above mixture, added an equal volume of sugar, simmered it for an hour and a half, and then let is set up in a warm oven (however warm it is when I leave the light on) overnight.

I give you- membrillo! Well, my pathetic version of it anyway. It's apparently the national snack of Spain, and I must say, it is tasty. I don't happen to have any manchego cheese, which is traditionally eaten with it, but cream cheese and toast seem to go well with it.

I would describe the flavor as "floral honey"- very much like the wild honey I got from my bees before the neighbors made me get rid of them. The texture was a bit gritty, but that may be because I picked the fruit while it was still green. Hey, I had to pick it before the maggots got it all!

Tonight's adventure: convincing my children to eat it.

When Life Hands You Prickly Pears

2010-09-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

You make prickly pear puree. I have no idea why various websites give elaborate directions for removing prickly pear spines (which are called glochids, and are not to be sneezed at- and heaven help you if you do sneeze at then, you'll never get the pokey little buggers out of your nose) before slicing the fruit and steaming it to get out the juice. All I do is pick the fruit with a pair of tongs, then cut them in chunks (holding them on the cutting board with tongs) and run them through my KitchenAid juicer. It takes care of the skin, seeds, and spines all at once, and gives a nice thick puree with a scent reminiscent of melon.

From the puree you make prickly pear punch (made with puree, sugar, lemon juice and carbonated water, it tastes a bit like a citrus soda punch), and prickly pear syrup (strained puree boiled with sugar).

Also prickly pear muffins, and prickly pear gelatin. The muffins are quite good, but I should have strained the puree before making it into gelatin. The texture of the puree doesn't bother me, the kids find it a bit off-putting.

I still have puree left, and more pears on the cactus that aren't ripe yet. What shall I try next?

Polygyny is sooooo last century!

2010-09-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

In the past, Jillian has told me that she wants to grow up and have children "and just be a Mom." So of course I've had the discussion with her that she should get an education first, and then prepare for a career, because things may not work out that way. She may decide she wants to work (I keep telling her she should be a doctor, as she is bright and completely unfazed by chicken blood/innards), or she may not find a spouse whose income would allow her to stay at home with their kids. It takes quite a bit of money to support a family, I have explained. (And yes, she knows that staying at home with your kids still means you work.)

Jillian told me this morning that I wanted her and her brothers to grow up and have children so that I could have grandchildren when I was old. I told her that I hoped she would have a few children, because I enjoyed having children and I thought she would, too. "But it's not like I expect you to have a dozen." Her reply was "Yeah, you'd have to marry a LOT of husbands to have that many kids!"

Polyandry. It's the new dual income family.

I Ain't Greened Nuthin' Yet!

2010-08-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

I am in awe of the people who built this.

Here is a video describing their successful experiment turning a crappy, disused swimming pool into an urban permaculture site.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMkmgolAj6o&feature=player_embedded

I'm not about to do what they did with their pool. My pool is in good shape and used often. Beside, I'm a little too gentrified to live with a yard that looks like that, and I think Jon might leave me if I tried. But still, I am amazed by their ability to think outside the box. Or perhaps, inside the pool.

My Thinking Place?

2010-08-04T14:43:00.000-07:00

On the advice of a few friends, I read The Happiness Project, a best-selling book about one woman's efforts to make her life more fulfilling. Although the author goes out of her way to say that the book is not meant to be prescriptive, and is not an exact road map for others to follow, it's hard not to consider how some of her methods would apply to me. For example, a friend of hers, taking the "follow your bliss" concept to an unusual place, asked her "What do you think about when you're on the toilet?" the point was that if your thoughts drift in one particular direction whenever you have a quiet private moment, you should probably spend more than your toilet time on that subject.

I wasn't aware that I thought of much of anything while on the toilet. So I checked. In the week since I have finished the book, I have consistently had only two classes of thoughts while using the facilities.

1. Geez, I really need to sweep this floor.
2. Aaaah, that's better.

I don't really see a life path there. Maybe I am doing it wrong?

R.I.P. D.B.

2010-07-31T16:46:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, our diving board bit the dust. Well, actually, it broke off it's rusted footing bolts (the switch to saltwater had been just too much for the ageing hardware) and followed its final diver into the deep end of our pool like some silly skit version of the sinking of the titanic. Luckily for all, no one was hurt, and the aforementioned diver was a fully-grown but not overweight adult. No, it wasn't me. Or Jon. No, I'm not going to tell you who it was, you'll just have to live with that.

We got all the rusted particles out of the water quickly, and the board and hardware have gone to the dump and recycling. But the bolts are still standing up out of the pool deck, corroded and unsturdy like a miniature ruined pier, menacing enough to demand that we all stay clear. Usually we just put a chair over them. I have been toying with the idea of not replacing the diving board. New ones made for saltwater pools would need different bolts and a different configuration, anyway, so we'd have to do some concrete work. I really should and just grind the old bolts down. "Maybe the kids would forget we ever had a board," I find myself thinking.

Today we hosted a birthday party for a friend's 7-year-old and had a dozen or so kids in the pool. There were plenty of balls and water toys to play with, but eventually some of the kids started competing for the best canonball and belly flop. It was during this activity that I learned something. If you don't give kids a path on which to run and from which to jump, they will make their own. And it may not be in a good place. It may be in a very bad place, or at least, a place that has high potential for harm, not only to themselves, but to those with whom they are sharing the pool.

Somewhere in there is a general lesson for parenting.

And I am going to buy a good quality, smallish, non-skid diving board as soon as we come home from Family Reunion.

No Picture- 'Cause We Ate It All

2010-07-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

I am learning to appreciate the capacity of the solar oven to make something good out of partial failures. A tray of freezer-burned round steak, some out-of-date mushrooms that were on sale at the grocery store, a bunch of nearly-gone-to-seed onions from the garden, and a can of generic cream-of-chicken soup, sliced up and stewed together in the solar cooker for most of the day, made some darn good stroganoff today. It was even good over the food-storage noodles I used, which really were getting a bit stale. If I were the sort of person to have a few ounces of red wine lying around to have added to it, I think it would have been nearly fantastic.

Pomegranate Espalier. Gesundheit.

2010-07-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

When we remodelled back in 2005, we had to cut down a lovely if somewhat overgrown old pomegranate tree. I missed the fruit, so when a neighbor up the street offered us a cutting from his abundantly fruitful pomegranate tree, I happily looked forward to the return of homemade pomegranate jelly.

Five years later, I am still looking forward to it. The cutting grew quite nicely into a small (so far) tree. I planted it against a south-facing wall where it stays nice and warm, and gives some sun protection to the house in return. It even flowered this spring. But that was as far as it got. The flowers all dropped and there is narry a fruit to be found.

Maybe it doesn't like being irrigated with laundry graywater. I don't think this is really the issue, though - pomegranate trees are adapted to desert and saline soils. Maybe it doesn't like all the trimming I do to keep it fairly flat against the wall. The main family entrance to the house is just to the left of this photo, after all, and Jon usually parks here at night, so the tree has to be well-behaved. Or maybe I just haven't given it enough time. Having invested this much effort into its well-being I am not likely to give up in the next few years. But Jillian, who by virtue of her gap-toothed smile and big blue eyes gets a few pomegranates from the neighbor up the street every year, is getting impatient.

Pretty Sure Everyone is Gone By Now

2010-07-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

I don't actually expect anyone to read this. I'm pretty sure everyone has stopped following this blog by now. Even if you are reading, this is a cheater re-post so I don't blame you if you skip it. But if you do read it, and can get through the massive list of comments at the end, I'd like to hear your take. This is as close as I have seen anyone come to expressing my own sense of my place within the Mormon church.

http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/?p=3221

Still Here

2010-07-13T12:06:00.000-07:00

I have not dropped off the face of the earth, I just don't have a camera right now. I loaned mine to Ben so he could take a kid's digital photography class. Technically he only needs it during the a.m., but he fills up the memory card, and I don't want to get in the way of whatever he is working on. So to keep y'all interested, here are some of the things I have every intention of blogging about once I get my picture-maker back:

Wall planter update
Solar oven update
Madsen Bucketbike: don't hate me just because I'm green.
Plums, Nectarines, and enough Jam to bathe in
Pomegranate Espalier: Fail? Succeed? Meh.

I hope to avoid posting anything like "How Green was my Swimming Pool," but we'll see about that. It occurred to me this morning that the Cub Scout Pack Meeting/Swim party here on Thursday will be for not just the cubs, but their whole durn families. Not sure how that escaped me before. I think I need to go tidy up the back yard. And padlock the greenhouse.

Salad Days

2010-06-28T20:29:00.000-07:00

Now that the kids are out of school, I really don't have enough to do with myself. So I did this.

I was going for a sculptural look.

One week later, the lettuce transplants are growing quite well. I am hoping that the sunbrella fabric I used to make my wall planters will hold the moisture away from the stucco. So far it seems to be working. The planters get morning sun, and light to deep shade the rest of the day. Being up a stucco wall should make the planters essentially impervious to slugs.

More Than Just a Book Stand

2010-06-27T18:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I figured out I could do this with my recumbent exercise bike's book stand and my laptop computer.

Between that little trick and the videotaped lectures available on http://www.uctv.tv/ (which I heartily recommend to anyone, not just those trying to entertain themselves while they pedal in place for half an hour), I think I may have figured out how to get all that exercise the Doctor ordered.

Craziest Cluckin' Thing I've Ever Seen

2010-06-22T14:34:00.000-07:00

I found this in the nest box the other day.

For reference, this is what a normal egg looks like. We haven't been getting any eggs from the two barred rocks (Mac and PC) for weeks now, maybe months, so it could have been from either of them. I'm pretty sure PC laid an ordinary egg today, however, so I guess she has saved herself from the soup pot for now.

Doctor's Orders

2010-06-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

My physician has strongly recommended that I get more endorphin-producing aerobic exercise. Like, as much as an hour per day. That's way more than my knees can handle on my elliptical, so it is time for me to get a bike. Not a stationary bike, a real live get-out-in-the-sunshine-with-the-wind-in-your-hair bike.

I know what I want, something I can use to haul kids or goods, something that might substitute for a car during my routine weekly errands. In other words, I want this.

Yes, I know, I bought the rickshaw/pedicab more than a year ago thinking I could use it for all those things. Turns out I am a wimp, and my knees are bad, so the pedicab is too heavy to work for me, either for transportation or simply for exercise. Live and learn, and keep trying until something works. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

Anybody wanna buy a used pedicab?

Gonna Be a Bright, Sunshiny Day

2010-06-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

I put off buying a solar oven for two years. Yes, I know, you can build them. I tried that. But either my concept or my skills were deficient. The cardboard box cookers that boy scouts make for camp do work, but if you accidentally leave them outside over night and a heavy mist falls on them, they are toast (no pun intended). I wanted a really sturdy solar oven that would stand up to occasional negligence, and that was gonna cost upwards of $200. No way I was going to save enough money on cooking to make up for that kind of cash outlay. So I waited until the opportune moment.

That moment was my most recent birthday. I refuse to celebrate my birthdays anymore (because really, what's good about getting older once you are past your prime?) But I will use them as an excuse to purchase myself something I reeeeeally want but can't justify in any other way. So this year I bought myself a Global Sun Oven. The price was over $250, but I comfort myself in knowing that this company uses some of its profits to send solar ovens to refugee camps. Google it if you want to know more.

So far I have made zucchini bread (twice), minestrone soup, a small loaf of wheat bread, and cannellini beans. Yes, I am loving my new toy. On a really sunny day it can do 300 degrees for as many hours as the sun is bright, but with patchy clouds it does about 250. Due to our "June Gloom" morning cloud cover, I can't start cooking until about 11:00 a.m., as thick cloud cover reduces temperatures to 100-150 degrees, but even then I can still get a main dish cooked by dinner time. Near as I can tell, if something can be cooked in a crock pot, it can be cooked in a solar oven. The main disadvantage to the solar oven is that I have to keep repositioning it throughout the day to follow the sun, so I can't just "plug it in and forget it" the way I can with an electric slow-cooker. And I am having trouble remembering that 200 degrees is quite hot enough to burn my fingers. I've done it twice now, maybe that will be enough to learn my lesson.

A Bad Case of Five-Finger Blight

2010-06-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

I have four Boysenberry/blackberry vines. Two are new this year and I knew I wouldn't get any fruit from them. But the two I planted last year showed great promise this Spring, with plenty of blossoms. I was sooo excited to get fresh, homegrown berries. I guess I gloated a bit too much to the kids about how good they were, though, as they started picking the berries before they were even fully ripe. Must be the current mania for sour candies that made them palatable.

This here vine should have been covered with fruit, but the only fruit I found was waaay up at the top of the vine, out of reach of the kids. Guess if I want to get any fruit for myself or for jam I will need to train next year's vines up on the top of the wall.

The Worst Way to Use a Dozen Eggs

2010-06-05T20:09:00.000-07:00

So we got Egged sometime early Saturday morning.

It wasn't just us. The neighbors two doors down, who have kids the same age as mine, also got a few eggs thrown at their house, but only in their driveway. They got one rolls' worth of toilet paper scattered on their lawn, but there was almost no toilet paper at our house.

I did manage to get most of the egg off the house, and Jon got it off his car. No real damage there, considering the already dilapidated state of the paint job on his ancient Honda.

The oddest thing was that whoever did it apparently also brought along a bottle of dish soap and squirted it around some of the impact sites. That made for quite the foamy mess when I was cleaning up with my beloved pressure washer. It also left apparently permanent marks on my front porch. Maybe they felt bad after the fact and were trying to help with cleanup? If they were, it didn't really work. I tried to keep the soapy wash water on the concrete and get it out to the street, but a lot of that detergent made it onto my plants. I expect one of them to die of the exposure, but I think most of them will be fine.

Ben and Michael both say they have no idea who might have done it, and I am inclined to believe them. Thanks to the lack of serious damage, I am mostly thinking that this is just a horrible way to use eggs.

More evidence my religion might be green

2010-05-26T14:03:00.000-07:00

Ohmigosh, ohmigolly! Yet another sign my religion might be green. A group of Elders (Mormon missionaries) were featured in a photo for Treehugger.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/san-jose-viavelo-2010-ciclovia-video.php

Once again I am inclined to think this merely demonstrates that we are cheap, not green (and apparently lack a little taste in ties). But of course, I'll take what I can get.

For my next trick, I will transform myself from a misanthrope to an humanitarian!

2010-05-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

So whenever I am desperate enough to post on Facebook about my despair of ever having a fulfilling life, my friends inevitably suggest that I get involved in volunteer work. They are correct, of course, in thinking that getting outside of oneself will natural lead to greater happiness. It has been proven to do just that. And I have, in fact, been trying to volunteer my time and effort. Here's what I have tried in the recent past.

PTA
Bleagh. Just, bleagh. Who knew parents were so political? Besides, all they want is people to do fundraising. You can't even pay me to do that job. I have done some informal volunteering at the school taking care of neglected trees and clearing weeds. I also volunteered (twice, once in writing and once in a direct conversation with the principal) to install a food garden next to the cafeteria. The project was not approved. The idea was floated at least once more by another individual (as a potential Eagle Scout project) and it was not approved that time either. Ben finds me too embarrassing to have me help out at his school. Helping in Michael's class makes me want to throttle him, an impulse I already spend a great deal of effort suppressing. And I am thinking maybe it would be best if I remained blissfully ignorant of Jillian's actual classroom behavior.

C.E.R.T. Team
I did Community Emergency Response Team training last year, thanks to my siblings being willing to watch my children during class time. The idea of CERT is that, in a large-scale event such as an earthquake or terrorist attack, emergency personnel will be overwhelmed by people needing aid. Trained members of the community can assist them by taking care of more basic functions like preliminary triage and basic first aid, small-scale fire suppression, and light-duty search and rescue. I enjoyed the training, but the mock-disaster event at the end of the course rather freaked me out. Some of the actors were pretty darn good at faking trauma. I would like to do more training eventually, but the training usually occurs at times when my children still need supervision. I am hoping for next year.

Atherton South Neighborhood Association
This is my local neighborhood association (not a homeowners association-we don't narc on the neighbors for leaving their recycling bin out overnight!) My neighborhood is a bit scruffy and most folks just want to be left alone. That's OK by me. My function on the association board is to be the CERT representative. To the best of my knowledge, I and the association president are the only folks in the neighborhood who are CERT trained, although I do have a HAM radio operator in the area as well. The association sponsored a tree planting last month. The five Brimleys all showed up, met our local city councilman, and helped plant a half dozen 8-foot saplings. Yipee!

Los Cerritos Wetlands Stewards
Many people don't realize that Long Beach used to have a sizable wetlands. All that is left of it, after years of both legal and illegal development, is a degraded, scruffy, weedy patch of land pockmarked with antique (but often still operating) oil wells. Despite its unappealing appearance, it still functions as a breeding ground for various species of native birds, fish, and other wildlife. Given what is happening to wetlands worldwide, I support preserving this one as best we can. I help with their mailings and store their tabling supplies (the information that volunteers hand out when they have a booth set up at fairs and farmer's markets) in my food storage closet. I would do tabling as well, but it usually happens on Sunday mornings, when I am teaching Sunday school lessons to 7-year-olds. But that is another category.

Church Calling
I teach a Primary class (that's basically Sunday school, for those non-LDS readers out there) of 6- and 7-year-olds. I am certain I could never be an elementary school teacher. I prefer being in Primary to being just about anywhere else at church. And I think I need to volunteer for nursery duty soon, so I get one more crack at it before my knees give out.

LDS humanitarian efforts
The LDS church has a long history of humanitarian activities. In recent years, they have made a more concerted effort to lend a helping hand to people not of their faith. I have participated in these efforts by making quilts and putting together school supplies and hygiene kits. I have done these things both on my own and as part of organized "service days", like last weekends' tree planting project at El Dorado Park. 350 people showed up to do about 150 people's worth of work. (Uh, yay? Maybe I shoulda gone rogue and headed over to the LA River cleanup instead.) In any case, I always participate in service projects sponsored by my local congregation/s unless I have a children's schedule conflict. More info on LDS humanitarian efforts can be found at http://www.lds.org/humanitarianservices/, if you are inclined to see what kinds of things are being done in your area or how you can help. At present we are being asked to volunteer with charities in our own communities.

Which brings me to my next point. As the above haven't brought me much satisfaction yet, but well-meaning people (whom I generally consider to be intelligent enough to have some idea what they are talking about) keep telling me I should be doing service to feel better, I am going to try different service opportunities. It is possible I just haven't found the right one yet. The ground rules are that I must be able to do it weekday mornings (with my availability starting in the fall, after the kid's summer vacation), and I must be able to ride a bike to the location. I am determined to both incorporate physical activity into my daily life and reduce my dependence on pollution-generating modes of transportation. I'm an asthmatic trying to stay healthy and strong. So that means locations within about 5 miles from my house are best. These are the candidates I have found so far.

Local Library
This would only work the one weekday that my library branch is open in the morning. But one day is better than nothing.

Meals on Wheels
This would only work if they allowed me to help in the kitchen or in some other back-end function. I am not prepared to be a driver. My father volunteered in that capacity for some time and did an excellent job at it, but his experience is enough for me to judge myself not suited to cheer up the elderly and home-bound.

Arts and Services for the Disabled
Gardening with disabled individuals, various ages. I have very little information about this option, but as gardening is involved, it is on my list.

These ideas came from a search of volunteermatch.org. Have any others?

On Becoming Legal

2010-05-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna post a link to another blog today. It is from Feminist Mormon Housewives, but the post has nothing to do with feminism, and everything to do with becoming a citizen of the US legally. I knew it wasn't easy to do, but it's rather more difficult than I realized.

http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/?p=3101

Did you know?

Farewell my Grapefruit Tree

2010-05-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

I have spent scores of hours each of the last seven summers trying to prune a 20-year-old pink grapefruit tree into a shade tree. I wanted a shade tree because it is next to the pool, where a shady spot to supervise swimming children is highly desirable. It was a pink grapefruit tree because that was what my parents planted there, many years ago. Unfortunately, our climate is only marginally suited to growing pink grapefruit. The tree produced prolifically, more grapefruits than we could use (and I tried many a recipe to try to raise our consumption). I did give some fruits away, but the tree was infested with so many sucking insects that the skins of the grapefruits were, shall we say, unappealing. The fruit itself was good if you left it on the tree long enough, but more often than not we would pick it too soon and it would be bitter. Sugaring helped, but never completely masked the bitter flavor. My efforts at insect control only got me covered in angry ants, which nurse along the scale and aphids for the "honeydew" they exhude. (The ants eat it. Ew.)

So it was with regret that I began to cut down the tree some weeks ago.

(This is actually our lemon tree, which is alive and well, but I neglected to get a photo of the grapefruit tree before I started taking it down, and I wanted to give a sense of scale.)

Cutting down a mature fruit tree is not a small undertaking. There is a remarkable amount of foliage to be dealt with, and I don't throw away good greenery, even if it is buggy. But I no longer have a chipper, so composting woody material is a slower process than it used to be. And until a few days ago I was afraid of our electric chainsaw, so I was trying to cut down a 12-foot, branched tree with a handsaw. Yep, that was just as ridiculous a sight as you are now imagining it to have been.

This is the tree after I cut it in half. There had been two major branches/trunks. I hacked away at the left one until it gave way, leaving this funny popsicle shape.

I separated the small, leafy branches from the trunk and placed them in various places around the yard where the chickens have been making messes. It keeps the hens away for a little while, giving the grass a chance to grow. Then I just mow over the piles of dying leaves and twigs whenever I do the lawn, which makes a small, slow compost heap. These tend to get bugs, but then, the chickens tend to enjoy that aspect of the process. I only have so many places around the yard that can handle these piles, though, so it was just as well that the tree take-down was a gradual process.

I cut the trunk into sections and placed them around the bases of young trees (of species unrelated to citrus.) I haven't noticed old citrus wood getting termites in the wood pile. I have noticed that citrus wood makes noxiously smoky firewoood. I'm not going to throw away good captured carbon, however. I intend to bury it in the garden, chunk by chunk, to become worm food. My clay dirt can always use more organic amendment, even if it takes a decade to get it. For now, the sticks and logs keep the chickens from doing too much digging around some of my younger trees.

And Saturday I finished the project. Well, this phase of it. I finally overcame my fear of the chainsaw, took the main trunk down, and distributed the debris around the yard. Grrlpower, and all that.

Next week I expect to buy a large patio umbrella. Then this summer I will spend my idle poolside moments drilling into the stump and roots, hastening their decomposition. I already have two candidates to replace the old grapefruit, but they're just seedlings and will need a few years to grow up before one of them can fill the spot. By that time, I should have a ratty old patio umbrella I want to be rid of. (Cue "The Circle of Life" playing in the background...)

Does This Make Me a Home Schooler?

2010-04-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

I really did mean to take some pictures of today's adventure, but I was too busy. I had 22 homeschoolers (children and moms) in my backyard to see some of my projects. I've had more than that many people in my yard before. Heck, we have more than 50 here for parties every summer. But I've never tried to lecture them all. And I learned a few things from the experience.

1. Other people find my backyard agriculture projects much more interesting than I do. This I assume is because I have been doing it for some time now and it is old hat to me now. Or maybe I just need to get my mojo back.

2. I really need to write up an outline to follow when showing people around. I did a reasonable job explaining what various projects were and what had or had not worked, but I realized after folks had gone that there were several bits of info I did not communicate, or not clearly.

3. Lecturing is a skill, and I need to practice it if I intend to do much of it. My voice is just not that strong these days. It would be if I were to exercise it more, but I don't do that much talking, and talking for an hour over the sound of kids and chickens and the occasional airplane was much more than I was used to. Next time I plan to give a tour, I should do a singing warm-up first (and in private- a concert is not going to be part of the tour!)

More Than a Day Late

2010-04-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

But it's a step in the right direction. LDS church buildings are going green, or at least, some of them are.

http://www.sltrib.com/Utah/ci_14968222

We're not exactly on the leading edge here. LEED standards have been around for more than a decade, and have been near-mainstream for several years. But at least my church knows enough to jump on a good bandwagon when one comes along. The new website on LDS conservation practices would have you know that the church has made energy efficiency an issue for decades.

http://newsroom.lds.org/ConservationPractices/#panel-1

I'd be more convinced of the notion that the LDS church is green if I had ever heard it preached at a general church meeting that we should conserve our resources and protect our environment. (Perhaps others have been more fortunate?) Looks to me like the church simply saw that sometimes saving energy meant saving money, which is a good thing for most people and organizations. But I'm still going to celebrate. Green is officially part of my religion- Woohoo!!

Food, Inc.

2010-04-26T08:20:00.000-07:00

It's online in it's entirety. If this doesn't convince you to go veggie at least part-time, I don't know what will.

http://video.pbs.org/video/1472879887

Decline and Fall of the Roman Vegetable

2010-04-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

The artichoke plants, while impressive during their season, are also impressive in their demise. This is the front yard after I took out two of the 6 artichokes(I think that is how many plants there are now, they multiply unpredictably.)

Cutting off individual leaves as they get buggy and ragged keeps the plants looking reasonably tidy. I can manage that with a kitchen knife, or my garden machete, a lightweight tool with a slim 8" blade that I absolutely adore. But by the time bud production winds down, the central stalks have grown to 4 inches in diameter. The only way to handle removing that is with a saw.

I don't dig out the rootball because next year's plant(s) will grow from that rootball. I don't know how many years I can get out of each plant, but some of them are on their 4th year now and show no sign of slowing down yet.

Once I saw down the central stalk like a small fibrous tree, I chop the vegetation into pieces with my garden machete and leave it around other parts of the garden. It looks a bit silly today, but give it a few days. The leaves will break down rapidly. The stalks will take a few months or even a year to decompose. In the meantime, they make good mulch for the coming Summer.

Hooray for My Hometown!

2010-04-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of one for boosterism, but sometimes I am just proud of the things my hometown is doing.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/04/long-beach-california-most-bike-friendly-city-us-video.php

The video is rather carefully shot to make LBC look particularly clean and pretty. Many parts of it truly are. My neighborhood itself ain't too bad. In theory, if more people rode bikes for a significant part of their transporation, there would be more impetus to make the whole darn city attractive, clean, and safe. A girl can dream, right?

Our Giving Tree

2010-04-18T15:57:00.000-07:00

It was Spring cleaning time in my yard this week. So I dragged disused toys, garden gear, and miscellaneous other stuff out to parkway, to the shade of our usual "giving tree".
I am a member of a freecycle group, an online group of people who list useable items they no longer need, and any other members who want them come get them. It works, but most of the time it is just simpler to take useable items I no longer need out to the tree. Most things that area easily identifiable from a passing car are gone within a few days. If something doesn't get picked up by recycing/trash day, I usually just recycle/dump it. Simple as that. Less trash for me, free stuff for someone else. Probably only works because I live on a major street and have tolerant neighbors, though.

Women's Work

2010-04-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

If my life as a member of human society needed explanation, I would have found it here, in a book recommended by a former college roommate of mine that I read over Spring Break.

I would have liked the book to be even longer than the nearly 300 pages it was. The author has impressive material on the ancient european and middle eastern world, but precious little on the far east, and virtually nothing on the new world.
The premise on which the book is built is that a society will tend to rely upon women for a particular kind of labor if it is compatible with the care of young children. Exactly what kind of work that is has varied over the millennia, as cultures and economies have changed. Contrary to the perspective we have inherited from the classical (Greek and Roman) roots of western culture, the daily circumstances of women haven't always been worse than they are today. Who knew ancient Sumerian women were frequently in business for themselves as textile producers, and employed their male relatives as salesmen? The social status of women has historically waxed and waned along with their ability to add economic value to the household. At least, that is this author's assertion, and I am inclined to agree.

Must be Spring

2010-04-10T14:05:00.000-07:00

Now that we are back from Spring Break, it is time for the Spring chicks.

Shown here are Fluffy (back to the camera, but that's about what she looks like all around), Arrowhead (the striped hindquarters just barely showing in front of Fluffy), Rosie (hiding in the corner), and Truffles (the only one facing the camera). The first and last listed are Buff Orpingtons, the middle two are ameraucanas. They are only a few days old, so here's hoping they all make it to full egg-laying adulthood.

Squirrel!!!

2010-04-02T12:18:00.001-07:00

We caught and dispatched our first squirrel of the season. I will not be posting a picture, but he was a big-ol' male. Now Jon wants to skin it and try making stew. I'll just let that sink in for a minute.

I have created a monster. I should have known no good would come of it when he started perusing emergency supplies catalogs in the evenings as his new hobby. I didn't mind when he ordered TVP (that stands for "textured vegetable protein," or soybean curd rendered to look like ground beef, chicken chunks, or what have you). It's not bad in tacos and chili. And the spreadsheet for keeping up with rotating stored food is actually useful. But when he noted, with some enthusiasm, that one could buy real canned squirrel meat - boneless or bone-in, no less! - the alarm bells should have gone off.
On the one hand, it is earth-friendly meat. Squirrels are rodents, and reproduce abundantly. This particular one has, I am fairly certain, been stealing our chicken feed and garden seedlings for some time, so I have some claim to his pound of flesh. But its a mature male (read: extra gamey) whose diet has most likely included a lot of urban trash. Jon is just going to have to consume this one himself and try to convince me to share some other time.

Kumquat. Come again?

2010-03-30T19:36:00.000-07:00

These are kumquats.

I don't remember why I bought a kumquat tree. I'd almost rather be rid of it at this point, as I don't actually care that much for the fruit. But my little girl loooves to eat them every spring. Only a few dozen of them, but still, she would sob and wail if I cut it down. And I am a sucker for my little girl when plants are involved. So it stays. And produces lots of kumquats.

In my neverending effort to do something productive with what I have (time on my hands and, in this case, kumquats), I tried to make marmalade today.

I actually started yesterday. The recipes I found online all called for mincing and seeding the fruit, then letting the minced fruit stand in a bowl, barely covered in water overnight. I have no idea why one is supposed to do this, but I did it just to be compliant. The next day, you measure the fruit and water, add an equal volume of sugar, and boil the bejezus out of it. The pectin in the pith of citrus fruits is supposed to be sufficient to gel the mixture into a pleasantly spreadable confection.

I gathered enough kumquats to make a solid 2 quarts of mince-and-water mix. With sugar that came three quarts, which boiled down to 10 cups before it started gelling. Total boiling time was several hours. I suspect I should have boiled it a bit before adding the sugar. But, as is soooo often the case around here, there will be a next time.

Aroma- fantastic. Color- darker than I expected. Need less water next time so it doesn't take so long to boil it down. Flavor- sweet/sour with a bitter aftertaste. Is that how it is supposed to be? I added some to some frozen yogurt, and the kids enjoyed it. What other test matters?

A Line on Laundry

2010-03-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

I finally got off my duff and finished hanging up a laundry line for Philip and Jenny.

No Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree

2010-03-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

For those of you who did not grow up Mormon, "Popcorn Popping on the Apricot tree" is a peppy little children's song about spring and blossoms on fruit trees. Last year my aprium (interspecific hybrid between an apricot and a plum, but basically it looks and tastes like an apricot) was so thickly covered in faintly blushing white blossoms that it was easy to see where a child might make a mistake about it being popcorn. This year, the tree looks like this.

Just one lone blossom in the middle of the tree. I kinda guessed from my relatively low gas bills that we were having a warm winter. Well, the winter tomatoes were a big hint, too. And those bananas that keep getting closer to ripe. But I had hoped it would not be so warm that my fruit trees wouldn't get enough dormant time to produce fruit. Unfortunately that appears to be the case. But maybe only for the aprium.

The nectarine and plum are blooming nicely, and the pear and apples look promising as well. I didn't hold out any hope for the cherries until this week. There are only a few varieties of cherry that will fruit with less than 500-1200 hours of chill time (air temperatures below 40 or 45 degrees, depending upon whom you ask). I have a pair that are supposed to need 250-400 hours. Did they get it?

Those look like baby cherry blossoms to me.

Aside from the lack of apricots, we don't seem to have had any major garden losses over the winter. Well, except for the incredible disappearing brassica seedlings. Time and again I planted them- cabbage, broccoli, etc. Tme and again some pest or another ate them- chickens, snails, crickets, maybe even mice/rats. Don't they know I need to eat my veggies, too?

Sure Signs of Spring

2010-03-18T12:43:00.000-07:00

"Panamint" nectarine in bloom

"Gordon" apple sapling pushing out its first leaves

Children jumping into a 67-degree swimming pool on an 80-degree day

Laundry drying on the line in the bathroom, rather than in the dryer. I learned by musty experience last fall that I should never try to line dry inside the house when the temperature inside was below 70. And yes, I am fairly certain that it takes more natural gas to heat the whole house up a few degrees than it does to dry a few loads in the dryer. I don't dry on an outside line because of our various allergies. But now that the house is warming up, I can go back to my eco-ways!

By Popular Request

2010-03-17T12:21:00.000-07:00

Several folks requested the Lemon Curd recipe, so here it is.

6 large eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 scant cup FRESH lemon juice, strained

Beat together in a nonreactive mixing bowl (I use my Kitchenaid), then place over a pan of simmering water and cook for about 10 minutes. Don't wander away or it may overcook and curdle on you!

When the curd is thickened to about the consistency of pudding, remove from the heat and whisk in:

1-2 Tablespoons of lemon zest, depending on your taste for lemon (a microplane grater is the only way to go on this)

8 Tablespoons unsalted butter, one Tablespoon at a time

When the butter is all melted in and the curd is a bit cooled, pour into clean dry containers for storage. Makes about 4 cups of lemon curd.

THIS WILL NOT KEEP IN THE PANTRY! It will keep in the fridge for a few weeks, in the freezer for a few months (it won't freeze solid, and thaws quickly, so the freezer is an ideal place for it).
I can't imagine a batch of lemon curd going bad in storage. It is all I can do to keep from sucking it down straight. We'll be trying it in homemade ice cream later this week- I can't wait!

How green is their valley

2010-03-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

I've had trouble finding other greenfreak mormons. Not that any of the Mormons I know think we should trash the earth. They don't. It's just that there just isn't much of a Creation Care movement (also called Environmental Evangelicalism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_care) in the LDS community.

There's no reason why I can't have good "green" friends of other religions. I do. But it's nice to have someone in your corner at weekly worship, as well. A friend of mine (not LDS) found a few environmentally-minded-LDS websites for me, but they are not well-tended. One seems to be downright deserted. Where is everybody?

Apparently, they are in Salt Lake. I found this link on City Farmer News, an urban agriculture blog out of Canada that I have been following for- well, it seems like years, but is probably only one.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=10024101

Warms the cockles of my verdant little heart, that does. I hope it works out well for SLC and becomes a model to follow, or build on, for other cities.

What's the Hook?

2010-03-15T17:39:00.000-07:00

I've been crocheting since I was 5 years old. Back then it was just little chains that I used as belts or hair ribbons, but my skills progressed with time. Over the years I have made umpteen blankets, hats, scarves, the occasional dress, and even "tropical sore bandages" (as part of a church service project). In recent years, I have become disaffected with the craft. Does the world really need another frilly synthetic-fiber crocheted candy dish? Sure blankets and scarves are useful, but I recently discovered where to buy recycled-content polarfleece (http://www.milldirecttextiles.com/dept2.asp), which makes up into a blanket or scarf faster, warmer, and with no greater expense than if I had bought the yarn needed to crochet one.

Last year I came up with a useful, if unusual, outlet for my old skill. The city in which I live is very proactive about recycling. Virtually all plastics marked for recycling (with a number from 1-7, which indicates the specific type of plastic used) can be placed in the recycling bin (although I have no idea what becomes of the plastic once it is collected). Plastics that are not marked, however, are still frowned upon. And a surprising range of plastic bags, usually food packaging, are not actually marked. Sometimes, if the bag is essentially clean (like those ridiculous double-bagged loaves of bread), I put it in the recycling anyway and hope for the best. If it is filthy or was used for meat, I consider it to be trash. If it is not filthy, but not clean, I hate to waste the water to wash it when there is a good chance it will only go to the landfill. So I crochet it.

Why on earth would anyone want to crochet a ginormous plastic doily? Because it is not a ginormous plastic doily. It is a tarp. A pervious plastic tarp, perfect for covering compost heaps. It allows moisture and air in, but keeps chickens out (as well as other critters, if I weight it down). I have at least one compost heap going at any given time, so a tarp like this is surprisingly utilitarian, recycled, and free.

To make tarps like this, I cut plastic bags open into long strips, knot the strips together, and stitch the resulting "homespun" yarn into a circle using the largest crochet hook I could buy. I could do other shapes, but round is simple and works for my needs. This one is about 30" inches across, the result of unmarked bags I have been collecting since about October. I usually sit down and work on it whenever I have 10-20 bags to use up. The ones shown at the top of the tarp are 25 lb pinto bean bags- it was time to top up the food storage. By the end of the summer, I should have amassed enough bread, frozen veggie, marshmallow, and various other bags to make it large enough to cover my typical 3-foot compost pile.

Now where is my rake so I can clean up the mess the ladies made while I was crocheting?

Bye Bye, Bees.

2010-03-13T19:46:00.000-08:00

Somebody narc'd on me.

I don't know which neighbor it was (although I have strong suspicions) but one of my neighbors complained about my beehive. So a couple of city Vector Control workers came by the house Friday morning and said it would have to go. I brought them into the backyard to see the hive, stood a foot away from the entrance, and let a bee land on my hand to show them it wasn't a so-called "africanized" hive, the bees were not aggressive, and any fears about them constituting a danger to the public were groundless. No dice. They said once the complaint was made, the hive had to go.

I could have fought it. The Long Beach city ordinance is a little vague (see it at http://library.municode.com/index.aspx?clientId=16115&stateId=5&stateName=California and search on "bees"). But the neighbors I suspect are involved are moving soon. I intend to wait 'till the new ones move in, and see if I can get more cooperation, and less paranoia, from them.

Fortunately, a lot of amateur beekeepers are looking for bees right now. Within a few hours of posting my plight on the Backwards Beekeepers Hotline (call them at (213) 373-1104 if you need a swarm removed in the LA area), I had two offers to come get my bees. Saturday evening, a man named John came by, loaded my hive into the back of his gardening business truck, and left with my ladies. He left me some fresh eggs from his hens (the dark brown are from a Maran hen) and a jar of the best lemon curd I have ever tasted. I MUST learn to make that stuff properly!

It was a sad thing to see the little ladies go, but I am optimistic that I will get to try again.

Femivore? What, am I eating Feminists?

2010-03-13T08:53:00.000-08:00

I know it's a bit of a copout to post someone else's article on my blog, but this one is definitely apropos. While it doesn't explain everything about why I do what I do, it elucidates a lot of it, and shows that I have sisters in the cause. And thanks to Jean for bringing it to my attention!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/magazine/14fob-wwln-t.html?ref=magazine

Round One

2010-03-09T09:15:00.000-08:00

The Artichoke season has begun.

These are only about two inches across, but as last year's artichoke season went on long enough for the kids to be quite sick of them, I figured we might as well start this year when the first buds were young and chokeless.

I used to just pull off the outer leaves and boil them 'til they were soft. Nowadays I prefer to boil them in acidulated water (add a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar) until just tender, then slice in half and dig out whatever choke there is with a narrow spoon. (The smaller ones in the strainer above had no choke at all - I almost could have eaten them whole). Then I place the halves in a baking dish, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with coarse salt, and place under the broiler for a minute or two.

Today I got a little carried away with the lemon juice. Our lemon tree has the perverse habit of producing bushels of lemons in the winter, and only a few in the summer, so I like to use them up when I have them. I used the juice from one whole lemon in the boiling water, then another one along with the olive oil in the baking dish. "Lip-puckeringly sour" would be a fair description of the result. I thought the artichokes were fantastic that way, with tart being the first flavor sensed, followed by artichoke accented with oil and occasional bursts of salt. Ben enjoyed them, too, but my other two said "next time, Mom, only one lemon! Oh, well.

There will be a next time.

Defeating the Purpose

2010-03-07T16:29:00.000-08:00

Of mosquito netting. But at least the rain barrel is full again.

One side of the mushroom will make you...dead?

2010-03-05T16:23:00.000-08:00

I wish I knew if these were edible.

I have been trying to improve the microclimates for my various woodland-origin plants by plunking old logs around their bases, or even burying a chunk of wood and planting right over it. The idea is to replicate the kind of leaf mold/fallen tree/dappled shade neighborhood for which these plants have evolved. This log is next to one of my blueberry bushes, on top of the remains of last year's Christmas tree. Yes, you can grow blueberries in So. California, but only a few "low chill" varieties.

These lovely little mushrooms showed up this week, probably due to the rain and increasingly warm weather. I am not quite curious enough about their edibility to just taste one and find out. Anybody know how to test it without risking one's liver?

Droning On

2010-03-02T10:12:00.000-08:00

I hadn't checked on my bees in awhile, so when I found myself with about 5 unclaimed hours on my hands, I wandered out in my beekeeping regalia and cracked open the hive.

On the positive side, there were plenty of bees. On the negative side, they were building cattywampus comb, crossing two or three frames at a time, and every frame I pried out was peppered with drone cells.
I know hives build up their drone population (drones are the boys, fyi) in the spring, as the season for producing new queens (who will need to mate) approaches. But seriously, One hive doesn't need a thousand males. So I cut some of the drone comb out and dumped it on the ground.

I am hoping the chickens will eat the dead larvae.

Not surprisingly, the bees were torqued by my apparent apiacide. I probably would have escaped unscathed if I had remembered to tuck my pants into my socks. As it was I got two stings on my calf. No biggie. As long as I was infuriating them, I figured I might as well get really reckless and see if I could split the hive. I obviously didn't have enough room in my Langstroth hive (the grey box in the first picture), and my top-bar hive was empty. So I yanked a few frames of brood, workers, and honey and put them in the top-bar box. Chances are pretty darn good that you will never hear of that experiment again because it failed. (It will only succeed if there was some very young brood or eggs in the combs that the worker bees can raise to be a new queen, and the ladies were way too aggressive for me to be inspecting cells for newly laid eggs.) Then I will have to drive up to LA and buy more boxes to expand my hive. But stay tuned.

Cloudy with a chance of Artichokes

2010-02-28T09:35:00.000-08:00

Steady rain. Cloudy. Driving rain. Sunshine and a rainbow. Overcast. Windy. Microburst and rain pouring off the roof in landscape-lacerating arcs. Silent night. Songbirds in the morning.

Weird weather over the last 30 hours or so, but hey, my water tanks are topped off again, so I am happy. And Jillian discovered a few of these as we were inspecting the front yard for storm damage. She is anticipating the first artichokes of the season with twinkle-toed delight. Seriously, she was dancing around the yard, but then she does that whenever a new plant in the garden starts to produce edibles for us.

Yes, We Have Two Bananas!

2010-02-23T15:28:00.000-08:00

If you need some indication of how warm our winter has been, check out these.

We've had two fat little bananas from the larger of my two big banana trees. OK, actually bananas are the world's largest herbaceous flowering plant, but who's keeping track? Although the tags identifying their cultivars (short for "cultivated varieties") have long since been stolen by small children, I am fairly sure that this one is a close relative of commercial, "Cavendish" variety, bananas (which, by the by, are nearly all genetically identical to one another and hence particularly susceptible to diseases). The flavor was very similar, although the skin was much thicker and the texture was firmer. In fairness, I may not have waited long enough for it to be fully ripe.

I think for the next one we will try frying it like a plantain. But not in my leftover squid-flavored cooking oil.

Experimental Cuisine

2010-02-20T14:45:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to get my kids more involved in feeding themselves, and not just in the "open a box of cereal" sense. Growing veggies is a great way to get kids to actually EAT veggies, as they get to see the food progress from seed to plant to fruit, and tasting the resulting produce is as much fun to them as showing off a picture would be after they had worked on for hours and hours. Teaching my kids to cook is also a part of the plan, partly to make sure they know how to make healthy food, and partly because someday I really would like to be able to delegate some of the family cooking duties.

Seeing as how it is also Science Fair season at school, we did a three-fer Saturday activity. We set up Michael's science experiment, an aquaponics (that's aquaculture combined with hydroponics) fishtank & growbed, and a traditional seedling flat for comparison.

Of course, if you are going to do aquaponics, you need fish for the aquaculture half of the business. We had a few dozen mosquito fish in the tank, which had been filled up with nice clean(ish) rainwater, for most of the winter. But they're the size of guppies, and they don't poop all that much. You need fishpoop to fertilize the hydroponics half. So the kids and I trucked on down to little Saigon, to an Asian market with a nice big tank full of live tilapia. the Hispanic man (I couldn't help wondering, in how many different languages could he say "do you want this cleaned and fried?") behind the meat counter looked at me funny when I plunked a bucket full of fishtank water on the counter and told him I needed four LIVE tilapia, but he got out his net and did what I asked. It was a longish wait, so the kids poked around the seafood section. We came home with four large live fish, a fresh but dead squid, and a half-dozen shrimp, also recently deceased. My children were delighted.

The four fish were quite confused (if I am any judge of fish expressions), but happy to be poured into the tank when we got home. 200 gallons of water is much more comfortable than 4. They promptly parked themselves on the bottom of the tank, so we couldn't get a picture right away.

Meanwhile back in the kitchen, Jon boiled water for the shrimp. the kids got a kick out of how the shells changed from grey to pink when they cooked, and Jillian (7) asked me if that was an "irreversible change". I didn't teach her that phrase, so I guess the public schools are doing something right. Michaelson went after the squid with a knife to show us all how he had dissected one in summer camp last year. He didn't care much for gutting it, but the chickens were delighted that we fed the offal to them, rather than throwing it away. If you've never seen chickens chasing each other around with squid innards dangling from their beaks, you haven't lived. I'm just saying.

We looked up an episode of "Good Eats" (which takes the "Bill Nye the Science Guy" approach to cooking - my children love it) on Youtube to see how to fry squid properly. This ended up being my job. Call me crazy, but I am more confortable with my children using sharp knives than I am with them plopping food into 375 degree frying oil. I didn't get a photo of the resulting calamari because is was so darn good and was eaten so quickly. The tentacles were a little chewy for my taste, but the rest was fantastic! If the results of the rest of our day's efforts turn out half so well, Michael will have a very good science fair project this year.

No use crying over spilled pool water.

2010-02-18T07:44:00.000-08:00

Having gotten 7 inches of rain in January, the pool was in serious need of a good pumping out. So I put the spare pump on the top step of the pool, ran the outflow hose into the patio sump (which pumps water out to the flood control chanel), plugged it in, and walked away. A few hours later I unplugged it and went to bed.

The next morning, this was the water level. Notice where the leaf is floating. That's six inches below where it had been the prior afternoon. And this is the lower end of the pool (the deep end of our pool is higher out of the ground than the shallow end, but that tilt hasn't changed in decades so no worries). The deep end, where the filter pump inflow is located, was high and sadly dry, and not able to maintain suction for filtration.

Jon pointed out to me that when the pump is in the pool and the end of the hose is all the way down into the patio sump, it forms a siphon. I know how a siphon works, of course; it just hadn't occurred to me that, in our ridiculously unlevel back yard, the hose was farther down on the sump end than the pool end. Even unplugged, the pump was allowing water to flow out of the pool and (pump out into the ditch) all night.

So I ran the hose the other way and put about 1000 gallons of water from my overflowing rainwater tanks back into the pool. Sigh. Well, it is early in the year, perhaps we will stilll get enough rain to fill them back up again.

In Her Own Little Corner, In Her Own Little Chair

2010-02-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

Or even in the playhouse. A good book and a good imagination can take a girl anywhere

The warm, 70+ degree sunshine on her back just makes it all the more pleasant.

Stretch

2010-02-11T19:37:00.000-08:00

There's really no reason I would have known that my kids were outgrowing their winter raincoats. It's not like we had any rain, or even cold weather, before January (nya-nay!) I was keeping up with the growth spurts in the pants department. I had let out all of the hems in November and December. But when my kids were gearing up for the wet walk to school last week, I noticed this:

When I was Ben's age, going through growth spurts, I could tell that my arms were ridiculously long. Chimpanzee long. Knuckles dragging on...OK, so that's a bit hyperbolic. But my father was also self-conscious about his arms in his teenage years. So now that I am seeing limb-focused growth-spurts in my own children, I am particularly sensitive to the fact that long sleeves really are supposed to go ALL the way to the end of your arms. I deal with it for myself by buying women's tall sizes, which are about an inch longer in the arms. But what do you do for kids? They don't make tall sizes for children. Regular, slim, and husky, yes, but nobody makes a "boys 12 tall." I buy Ben's pants from Lands End, which offers a few styles of pants unfinished/unhemmed, allowing me to make them as long as he needs them. But for shirts and jackets, I'm still hosed. Despite my sewing skills, I can't buy fabric of high enough quality (locally, at least, I have had some luck with online fabric shopping) to make it worth the effort to make daily wear. He's waaaay to thin for men's sizes, so no go for men's tall departments. But what about women's?

Aha! Women's tall sizes for Mom and Ben for the forseable future. More expensive, but self-confidence is worth something.

Do You Igloo?

2010-02-07T17:19:00.000-08:00

My children want to build an igloo. In Long Beach. That's SOUTH of Los Angeles. An igloo is not gonna happen.

But I am pondering the notion of allowing them to build a cob dome, rather like our cob oven, and make it look like an igloo. Cob is a dirt-cheap construction material, made of nothing but clay, sand, and straw. I have plenty of straw, which I get for free from pumpkin patches in early November. It is a habit for me now to scan craigslist for "straw" the week after Halloween. Clay is available for the digging - our subsoil (only about one foot down, two at the most) is almost nothing BUT clay. So all I would have to buy is sand, and that's pretty cheap. Might even be able to get it free once the rain stops and people want to be rid of their sandbags.

This is what I looked like the summer that I made the cob oven. I dug a shallow hole and lined it with a sturdy tarp. Into that I put a few buckets full of clay, one bucket full of sand, and added water enough to make a mudpie out of it. Then I trodded it (what is the right verb conjugation???) with my feet, mixing in straw until I couldn't get any more in. I did it barefoot, which is actually quite pleasant in the summer, but some folks do it in old boots. Construction itself is very like making mudpies, plopping one on top of the other. But as you stack them, you squish your fingers vertically down into the pies (more accurately, cobs) to poke the straws from the mudpie on top into the mudpie on the bottom. Once dried, the structure has impressive compressive and tensile strength.

Something tells me, however, that if I let the kids do their own cob project, what they come up with will not end up looking like an igloo, no matter how much Michael proclaims that is what he wants (with a hole in the roof, no less, "so we can make a fire and have the smoke go right up!") No, I'm thinking a building project of theirs, besides being remarkably messy, wouldl end up more like this.

What backyard would be complete without its own little hobbit abode?

Perhaps the tactile nature of the building process, not to mention the necessary planning involved, would be good for an ADD kid. Or perhaps they would abandon it in the middle and leave me to finish it (not likely) or attack it with a pressure hose to reduce it back to a heap of dirt.

I continue to ponder the possibility.

Just a typical day

2010-02-02T09:06:00.000-08:00

I have a head cold. It is my first of the season, so I actually feel pretty lucky that I got this far before coming down with something. My day (and yesterday, and possibly most of the week) will therefore be on the dull side. Instead of posting any of my nyquil-addled dreams or wobbly ramblings 'round the yard, I am posting what may someday become the first chapter of my memoirs of urban homesteading.

On the morning of November 2 I woke up at 5:00 a.m., not because I needed to, but because my husband had to get on a plane at 6:30. He works as a business consultant for IBM, so he goes wherever the work is, stays the week (if that place is more than a few hours’ drive from our house), then comes back home on the weekend. He tries to be quiet in these early hours, but sometimes my brain just starts up, regardless of my body’s complaints, and I can’t settle back down. He brought my 7-year-old daughter to our bed before he kissed us both and drove to the airport. My girl just can’t function without her morning cuddle time, and I love it, too. I stayed in bed reading until 6:00, then rolled my daughter onto her daddy’s pillow and got up. It was light, and I wanted to get in a hive inspection before making whole wheat waffles for breakfast.

I let out the chickens and fed the rabbit on my way to the hive. My yard is about 100 feet deep, so animal husbandry is a fairly efficient process; walk 50 feet from the back door to the greenhouse, scoop up rabbit feed, walk around greenhouse, feed and water rabbit, turn around, unlatch chicken coop, walk 12 feet, feed chickens, walk 10 feet, open beehive. The little ladies were still cranky when I opened the hive. They had been cranky for some time. They were trying to raise a new queen, and apparently had not yet succeeded. If there were a viable queen in the hive, they would have settled down by now. I messed around just enough to see that there were still sealed queen cells. Maybe my math was off and they weren’t dead, just not done yet. No need to get stung over it. I closed back up and went into the kitchen.

I mixed batter and put away clean dishes from the dishwasher while the waffle iron heated. As the first batch cooked, I put my hair back in a barrette and woke the kids. My nephews weren’t coming for babysitting until after school that day, so the morning would be relatively unhurried. I let the kids watch PBS television while they ate breakfast and made their lunches. I refilled the dishwasher (the kids had been practicing baking the day before and left a huge mess), and took the full compost bucket and stack of broken eggshells out to the compost bin. I put out the mail – a ballot voting in new bylaws for the Los Cerritos Wetlands Stewards – then washed up and stopped at my laptop to check email and my Facebook friends’ Halloween pictures of their children. When the kids were finished eating, I scarfed down all the leftovers.

After riding the kids to school (I hauled the younger two in my pedicab, a.k.a. “the exercise machine,” while my oldest rode his own bike to another school), I sat down to rest in a soft chair and, lulled by the dull sloshing sound of the dishwasher, fell asleep. Cardio really takes it out of me. When I awoke half an hour later, I changed into grubby clothes and mixed up a 5-pound batch of color coat stucco in my KitchenAid stand mixer. When they say “heavy duty,” they mean it. I smeared it onto hose-dampened patched spots on the rear exterior walls of my house with a sponge trowel. We had had insulation blown into the back half of the house last year and I hadn’t gotten around to tidying up the stucco yet. The chickens watched, with little interest, then ran to the composter hoping I would give them something disgusting to eat. I tossed them a few hot dogs left over from a church Halloween party, which they decimated while I washed out my dirty bowl and trowel on the back lawn. Although the fruit trees were losing their leaves and most of the county was well into autumn, we were expecting an 80-degree day, and some of the grass was in need of some second-hand moisture.

Heading back toward the kitchen through the side door, I saw that my sister-in-law had done her usual Monday morning laundry, so I started running the barrel full of greywater onto the front garden. I squashed a few bugs and grasshoppers (if only I could let the chickens forage out here!) and grabbed a broken leaf from an artichoke (for the rabbit) before heading back in. The dishwasher was finished again. I cleaned up while listening to NPR. I started a small load of laundry (bleached whites), then wandered out to the swimming pool and nudged the “automatic” sweeper to get it started. I threw a few pieces of squashy fruit from the kids’ leftover lunches to the chickens and watered the vegetable garden, now mostly peas and a few stubborn cherry tomato vines that were producing scores of little green tomatoes. Maybe the heat would ripen a few. I pulled some weeds, gave the tastier ones to the rabbit, and checked for eggs. There were three, still warm and in varying shades of brown. Back inside I put them in the fridge, and then took down the last of the laundry from Saturday – jeans and other thick things that needed extra time to dry- from the line over my bathtub. We have too many allergies in our family to line dry outside.

I temporarily had nothing to do, so I sat down to read blogs. That reminded me I needed to make some phone calls. Two appointments and several web pages later, the washer beeped that it was finished. I hung the laundry to dry and brought in the mail. I made a mental note that after I ate some lunch I needed to clean out under the chicken coop and, if it wasn’t too hot this afternoon, work on digging out a fruitless spiny natal plum shrub out front so I could put it in the next day’s trash pick-up. I checked the clock.

It was five minutes to Noon.

Ahh, the life of a Greenmommy in the suburbs.

So I underestimated the hawks

2010-01-31T09:23:00.000-08:00

You know how I said in my last post that the red-tailed hawks often hang around our back yard, but never actually catch anything? Apparently, they heard me.

If I had to guess, I would say this was the remains of a young phoebe, a fairly common bird that nests under the bridge just down the channel from out house. In any case, it wasn't any of my lifestock, so Bon Appetit, my red-tailed neighbor.

The Los Cerritos Wetlands are Wet- which is not as common as you might think.

2010-01-30T13:42:00.000-08:00

I finally got off my kiester on a Saturday morning and took the whole famdamily to do a Los Cerritos Wetlands cleanup. These wetlands, which were almost entirely filled in by misguided individuals a century ago, are now seriously degraded, full of invasive species of plants and dotted with those mutant-grasshopper-looking oilwells you can just see in the background of this photo (which is not mine, but is representative of the area). I was pround of how well my kids did. Jillian spent a full hour towing garden wagonloads of debris and trash back and forth to the dumpster. Adults loaded and unloaded it, but she was a trooper. Ben towed even heavier loads. Michael worked for about half an hour before his attention wandered to the search for interesting bits of trash to attempt to smuggle home. I let him get away with one hair barrette that looked like it had been lost on the last cleanup day. (If anything else made it home, I will find out when I do the wash!) We were part of the biggest turnout that the Los Cerritos Wetlands Stewards (http://lcwstewards.org/lcws/index.html) had ever had. If they post the picture they took of us, I will repost it here.

The boys were really hoping to see some snakes while we were working, but no luck. They did get a kick out of the wild rabbit that bolted out of a pile of brush they were clearing. I wasn't all that impressed by the two circling red-tailed hawks, because the both of them have made several attempts (usually failed ones) to catch small birds in our back yard. And of course, living along the flood control chanel we see all sorts of herons, egrets, and pelicans. They've even left the occasional offering of a dropped fish head in the neighborhood (yes, it is as gross as it sounds to find one of those lying on the lawn). But I did get to see a kestrel in the wild for the first time. None of these photos are mine, BTW. My cargo pants were so full of gloves and water bottles that I was already in danger of losing my modesty without having a camera along, as well.

We treated the kids to lunch at Pick Up Stix afterward, which seems to have impressed upon them the notion that taking care of our local environment- what little there is left of it, anyhow- is a reasonably fun thing to do. Now to figure out how to get the Young Men & Women to make it a service project...There's no way I am treating them all to Chinese food afterward, but maybe ice cream sundaes at my house?

Oh, and I almost forgot to explain what I meant by the title. The los Cerritos Wetlands are an ephemeral, or seasonal, wetlands. Since the landfilling cut off direct access to the ocean, it is only really "wet" when we have had rain- and lately we've had more than we know what to do with. Someday the Los Cerritos Wetlands Stewards wants to cut an access to the San Gabriel River, which runs right past the wetlands. This would idealy return the area to nearly its original circumstances. So which do you think will happen first - the nature freaks will defeat the corporate oil interests in court, or sea level will rise enough to make the wetlands truly wet, regardless?

Origins

2010-01-27T11:39:00.000-08:00

It all started with a $20 donation to Heifer Project. Heifer Project is a wonderful international charity organization that takes the “Teach a Man to Fish” paradigm one step farther. First they teach a man to raise fish. Or a woman to tend dairy goats. Or a teenager to raise meat rabbits. You get the idea. Then they give said persons the fish, goats, or rabbits, on the condition that, when the animals are bred, the caregiver will “pass on the gift” by giving some of the progeny to another deserving, trained person in need. Heifer has existed for about 70 years, and has operations around the world. After you make a donation, you get a free subscription to their “World Ark” magazine, among the most readable of such publications I have seen.

So one morning I found myself reading an article about a farmer in Southeast Asia who had implemented an impressively integrated farm model on his family’s relatively small property. Food scraps from their garden were fed to their chickens, ducks, rabbits, and goats. Anything they all didn’t want went into their worm bin. Escaped or surplus worms were happily eaten by the chickens. The ducks roamed flooded fields, foraging for snails and fertilizing the flora. Chickens helped keep insect pests under control. The goats were kept in a pen above the pond: fed weeds and fibrous crop waste (goats think cornstalks are as tasty as Snickers bars), their “nannyberries” became fish food. The fish in turn became people food, and the scraps became chicken food. Rabbit droppings fertilized the vegetable gardens, the produce from which fed the humans and the scraps from which fed the rabbits. And of course the rabbits also fed the people, from time to time. You see where this is going. The waste from one animal or plant was food for another. There was no “trash,” just resources to be moved from producer to consumer. A nearly closed system. Harmless. Wise. Absolutely beautiful. Now how could I get in on that?

I was looking for a worthwhile project. I was a stay-at-home mom and part-time daycare provider, college educated but with little daily stimulation. I wasn’t a PTA sort of gal, or a play-date-in-the-park sort of gal. Have you seen that T-shirt that reads “Does not play well with others”? I am absolutely amazed that none of my siblings has given it to me for Christmas yet. Here was what I needed to do - what that farmer half a world away was doing, in whatever way I could, on my own little 1/3 of an acre on the periphery of urban Long Beach, California. Take care of myself and my own, with as little waste and bother to others as possible. That would keep me occupied for awhile. In the process, I just might figure out why exactly I wanted it to.