Hiatus

I'm off to the Pacific Northwest with six of the loveliest ladies, and then to the South Shore of Lake Superior with Jake.
Pictures and phenological observations upon my return!

Presto Pesto

I first liked pesto at my aunt Kathy's house when I was in high school. For 15 years or so I had her recipe written down on the back of a page of her 1995 day calendar and would use it each time I'd make pesto. This summer I haven't been using recipes when making pestos, to good results. You can make pesto with any herbs, and experiment with other oils and nuts and hard cheeses. I'm wondering about a walnut and sage pesto... next time.
Tonight, I used about a cup of basil leaves, 3 garlic cloves, small handfuls of grated parmesan and pine nuts, and enough olive oil to make the food processor do its job with it all.
I'm going add it to my collection in the freezer- it is truly special to taste that bright green flavor as a pasta or pizza sauce, marinade, spread for bread or crackers, or stirred into soups in the middle of darkest winter!

Backyard Meal

A happy accomplishment: Everything on this plate came from the backyard! Herbs snipped, potatoes dug, tomatoes picked. The chicken was actually actually slaughtered on Saturday, along with its comrades, so tonight it made the trip from the freezer. Yum City, USA!

We learned how to process chickens by reading books and this blog. We don't have any of this guy's fancy "whizbang" equipment, we just do it by hand, but his pictures and words are a good tutorial if you ever find yourself needing to slaughter a chicken.

... in which my beekeeping dreams come true!

Jake bought me a beekeeping book for Christmas in 2006, and I'd been dreaming and scheming about them for a long time before that. I finally got started when my incredibly wonderful lady friends gifted me a starter hive for my 30th birthday. Below are pictures of me setting up our first hive last spring and (so proudly!) holding our small honey harvest from last fall.

The bees did better than we thought they would last year, and luckily made it through the long winter. We should have tried to split the colony in the spring, but didn't have the right kinds of boxes to add at the right times, and were afraid they'd swarm. After a phone consultation with a woman in my beekeeping club on Thursday night, we suited up and ventured out yesterday afternoon, a little nervously, with a multi-step plan that involved taking apart and reassembling the entire hive, and sweeping bees around with a paintbrush in a time-sensitive search for the queen before adding a queen excluder and another deep. We pulled it off without a hitch! Except for one sting to Jake's cheek and one to his foot.

We devised a homemade honey extractor with a paint mixer attachment for a cordless drill, some fencing wire, and a 50 gallon barrel.

We scraped out the honey and strained it.

It was messy, everything is sticky, but we have honey! Oh, do we have honey.

While I was sitting in my day-long trigonometry class yesterday, I entertained myself by making this label for our honey jars. I'm calling this harvest "garden variety" because the bees have been busy all spring and the first half of summer by buzzing over to pollinate their next door neighbor, our vegetable garden.

The bees are doing great... we're expecting another 2 gallons or so of wildflower honey at summer's end. Sweet! Literally.

Countdown Update

10 meat chickens to be slaughtered on Saturday.
9 ducks here, 10 more on the way
8 squash vines taking over the garden
7 fruit trees wilting in the heat
6 kinds of wildflowers blooming in the woods
5 hens about to start laying
4 new bee hoxes for adding to the hive
3 blueberry bushes finally fruiting
2 fully feathered geese who knock their light down nightly
1 less raccoon in these woods- two down

Black Cap Season!

I picked a few pounds of these wild black rasperries yesterday, and my arms are full of the mosquito bites and bramble scratches to prove it. I made some berry scones for Jake and his fellow Class of '96ers to enjoy this morning before they went out on the river for the weekend.

Black Cap Scones
2 1/4 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
5 tbsp honey
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 pinch nutmeg
9 tbsp chilled unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
2/3 cup plus 1 tbsp half-and-half
3/4 cup blackcaps or other berries

Preheat oven to 425. In a bowl, whisk together dry ingredients. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in 2/3 cup half-and-half until just moistened. Gently fold in berries.
Pat into a 1-inch-thick round. Cut into 8 wedges; place on a baking sheet. Brush tops with remaining half-and-half; sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon if desired. Bake until golden brown, 12-15 minutes. Let cool on a wire rack.

"Spread by Birds from Garden to Hedgerows"

The garden's asparagus harvest is well over, but the patch now features these feathery ferns with green and red seeds hanging like ornaments.

In the past few weeks I have spotted asparagus ferns growing on the edge of a bike trail near Trempealeau and on a lakeside path near Owatonna. I am re-reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle right now, a lovely book. She writes, "Dad always made it a point to notice tall stands of wild asparagus later in the summer whenever they waved in the breeze. He would stop the car, get out, and mark the location of the patch with orange flagging tape he carried for this purpose. If the highway department or winter weather didn't take down his flags, we'd have well-marked asparagus checkpoints all over the county next spring."
Keep your eyes peeled!

Hen of the Woods

Also known as Chicken of the Forest, Chicken Mushroom, and Laetiporous sulphureus, so says my Field Guide to Mushrooms.

Jake found a cluster today growing near a large oak stump west of the house a ways today. Morels, giant puffballs, and these chicken mushrooms are the only wild mushrooms I feel comfortable harvesting and eating, because each of them are so distinctive. Also, they're delicious!

It isn't just a clever name; these (fun) guys really do taste like chicken. Jake grew up eating them from time to time in northern MN when his dad brought them home. They're great breaded and fried (what isn't?), but my plan for them is to saute in butter with garden garlic scapes and chives and enjoy on sourdough toasts.
Spritz yourself with OFF, grab a La Crosse Lager Light, head out to the adirondack chairs by the fire pit, and you've got yourself a supreme S4311-style summer supper!

Wish you were here.

Here's Hoping

It was a raccoon.

We found her in the trap on Thursday night at 11:45 or so, and by morning the entire chicken was gone. Jake released her in a beautiful chicken-free setting several miles from here yesterday. However, my heart rests uneasy about how this has turned out. The raccoon was almost certainly a nursing female. The trap has been kept baited so that we can maybe capture some of her kits and, based on their size, either release them in the same place or deliver them to our local wildlife rehabilitation professionals. Here's hoping.

Blerg. Sad face.

One happy outcome: I received this email from my aunt after she read the last post. "What does the scat look like? I have a scat id book."

Um, scat identification book? SOLD!

CSI:S4311

That's the biggest live trap the hardware store in town had. It cost $87. Inside is one of the ten decapitated chickens we came home to last night. The same fate struck a duck a few days ago.
What kind of vicious creature is responsible for this massacre? After careful examiniation of the crime scene late last night and this morning, here's what we know.
1. Only the heads, necks, and inexplicably, TOES were eaten.
2. It got into the chicken coop by BREAKING the 3/4 inch thick wooden latch in half.
3. Its (huge) scat reveals an omnivorous diet.

I read today that weasels, raccoons, foxes, martins, opossums, coyotes, skunks, fishers, owls, and badgers go after backyard birds in various ways, but none of these profiles fits the evidence.

Could there be a gang of local predators working together? A weasel to burrow under the fences and roll out the eggs, a fox to serve as a footstool for a tall dextrous raccoon, an owl to serve as lookout?

I plan to run outside in my jammies at the break of dawn to find out who the culprit is and read it (or them) its rights.