No wonder I'm tired...

I just downloaded pictures from the last two or so weeks, not thinking there would be all that much to report on. I was wrong! I'll start with what is freshest and that is the fun we just had going out for a sweet potato greens extravaganza! Will it become an annual event (or something we do multiple times before digging the sweet potatoes?). We set a timer for 30 minutes and each had a 5 gallon bucket and a clippers. We blitzed through the patch getting whatever leaves looked tasty and came in with 3 full 5-gallon buckets. I've reduced that now to just over 8 stuffed quart containers of blanched greens. That should be enough for us to decide if we like using them over the winter. I must say that if we do, trying to grow enough spinach to freeze will soon start to seem a little pointless.

 

But backing up considerably, I realized that I never included at least mention of having enough grapes from our vines to do a load of grape juice again this year. Just one juicer full, so we'll savor it. We kept out enough for Mom to treat us to grape pie.

This update will more or less be focused on food, but I'll just put a quick plug in for what I've been taking in while making cheese, chopping veggies, washing load after load of dishes, etc... After having multiple people recommend it to me, I began listening to the Seeing White podcast. I just finished it up yesterday and am now eager to recommend it, particularly to any white person that has yet to listen to it!

We continue to be drowning in fresh raw milk for making a whole range of dairy products. Some are made as needed or as requested, and also I pretty much get a cheddar going any time I see a day where it can fit in. So the counter often has cheddar rind drying to make our "Tangly Woods parmesan" and the shelves in the root cellar are near capacity with aging cheeses.

In order to get back to the cheese shelf, I walk past the rest of the canning shelves. The shelves are probably as full as they will get until they have a fresh round of lard on them in December. Other than a few more rounds of hot sauce, I don't think there will be any more big canning days any time soon (fingers crossed!). 

Now most of the things we are harvesting are the crops that won't have to be frozen or canned. Terah (and briefly Alida, not pictured) got in on the hazelnut harvest recently. Jason got 3 bushels of hazel cobs off of the tree he's picking in the photo and cumulatively about 5. 

They are now drying down in our back kitchen, along with black and other beans, buckwheat, and popcorns, in the new drying trays Jason recently constructed for said purpose. The tower is even taller now than when it was photographed here. 

With plenty of rain lately and 2.5 inches in the most recent wet patch, the grass is growing FAST! And that means that the butter we are making is once again bright yellow and we have egg yolks that are changing from yellow to pale orange to a deep reddish orange. A whole bunch of those eggs went into a humongous patch of green noodles that Alida and I made recently. Our pantry is stocked with homemade pasta for a bit. There is beautiful amaranth coming up in the pig paddocks so Jason picked us a generous bowl full and I used it all, making for a whole lot of noodle cranking. I was glad for good help!

Some fall harvests are happening more on a daily basis and we just accumulate them over time. Most recently that included black walnuts (about 15 5-gallon bucketfuls total, still in husks; two bushels after husking), daily chestnut picking up to try to beat the squirrels and now adding in persimmon perusing also daily to beat the chickens to them. 

I must pause here to celebrate a new found method for roasting chestnuts! Discovered today and I'll never go back. I'm not sure if I had never looked this up before or what, but this season I realized that I really needed some tips. I love eating chestnuts but do not enjoy prepping them for roasting OR peeling them. So my feelings, as the quart containers of chestnuts build up in the fridge, is mixed. Then my internet poking around let me to this site with step by step instructions. I found it the other day when I was putting some in the oven so I did the "wrap in a towel" part at the end but that was it. It might have helped a little? But then today I did it "by the book" and it was MAGICAL! I did just one slot across the top, put them in cold water and brought them to a boil, fished them out right away and popped them into a hot oven (425 or so degrees) for about 15-20 minutes. Then I wrapped them in a towel for 15 minutes and then popped them out whole from the shells. I was honestly a bit flabbergasted by how well it worked! So glad to keep learning new things...

So tomorrow is sweet potato digging and we'll see what the yield is like. After a kind of sad white potato harvest, we had another superb delicata squash harvest. That one is going up each year - with a total of 5 bushels this year. And they are so colorful! We've only eating seconds so far and the fact that even those were good is exciting.  We were able to harvest the delicata squashes before the rains came. This was fortuitous for a number of reasons. The rain laid over a good portion of the amaranth that had been standing up all perky and tall adjacent to the delicata patch. It was nice we didn't have to wade over fallen amaranth to harvest the squash.

We ate the last of our summer carrots recently and were sad to see them go. But so thrilled that growing summer carrots with shallots/onions is working. Now if only we could figure out what nibbled our new seeding of fall carrots as they emerged from the soil here recently, we'd be glad. We resorted to starting some inside in flats and are having better success inside but still not great germination. We love carrots so much, so we'll keep working at it! This is probably a good time to shift from food updates to a few people updates (not that food and people updates aren't mostly intertwined anyway). 

A few nights ago, Terah was sitting on the futon eating a popsicle when she burst out crying. She couldn't get words out right away but finally holding her mouth she said, "My tooth hurts. I think I bended it." Alida was nervous about whether she was ok and ran from the room as I checked things out and sure enough felt one of her front teeth "knocked loose." In that moment, I felt a little rise of panic and stayed calm externally telling her we'd just watch it and check it tomorrow. As the words came out, something felt odd and then it dawned on me. "Wait, how old will be you be soon?!," I blurted out. Then it all made sense - our almost 6-year old has her first loose tooth! Kali was wondering why I was seeming at all concerned because, of course, she knew immediately what was going on. The tears turned to giggles because this gal has been very eager to lose her first tooth. And I wondered at myself for completely losing track this third go round on what happens when!

A few other happenings worth noting:

Mom and I enjoyed a beautiful morning walk up to Hensley's Pond today. What a gift to both be in good enough health to do it together. 

Recently, Kali and Jason went together to donate blood and both came back with the arm bands and smiles denoting success!

And on that same day, we enjoyed the only full family swim of the year in our friend's pool. AND Alida learned to swim! It never ceases to amaze me how all of a sudden it seemed like everything was in order in her brain and body and it clicked! I won't leave her alone in the deep end quite yet, but I imagine she will soon be a very competent swimmer. Terah's got a little ways to go yet but our friend had these new little weights that are used for some kind of pool exercise thing and they made perfect floaties for Terah. That was a very fun way to spend a few late afternoon hours together.

We topped off our spontaneous family night (planned only a day or two ahead constitutes "spontaneous" for us these days!) with a trip to Smiley's Ice Cream. 

Ok, if I wrap this up now, there is time to squeeze in a short Sunday afternoon rest before the evening fun ahead of us. After I meet with the couple I'll be accompanying as a birth doula any day now, I'm cashing in a coupon for homemade coffee ice cream, made by Kali. I've made some chocolate squash brownies to go with and I imagine they'll be some games alongside the food - maybe I can convince all 5 to go with a word game tonight?! We are heading into Jason and my birthday week and I'm happy to have been able to take off work for the week. I hope to have more mornings like today, when I took my time a bit more while doing chores and even stopped to take in the beauty of the goldenrod!!

September Days

I've probably mentioned it before, but I do love turning the calendar from August to September. September has brought cooler mornings and evenings which I savor after the heat of July and August. And the semester is underway so my work days are less grueling. And the tomatoes are waning, the cucumber beds are now seeded with carrots, and there are less things to can and freeze. There starts to be a tiny bit more wiggle room for the zillion things that have moved from to do list to to do list for many weeks now. A recent example was me giving most of yesterday to that onerous task of getting all the clothes/shoes down from the attic and sorting through them with Alida and Terah to get them the next size up for their dresser drawers and then going through all their existing clothing/shoes to pull out too small things or things that just aren't their "style" (as Terah was apt to say). Jason exerted a lot more physical energy working at clearing the fence row at the bottom of our land, but I think I might have been able to compete with him on who was most exhausted by the end of the day! 

Jason has also been squeezing into the cracks a few projects between harvests and starting in on the fall cover cropping. He finished up the sweet potato curing room in our crawl space and I haven't even been down to see it and photograph it. He also finished up making a large set of various sized corn/bean/grain/seed drying trays that we'll use in our back kitchen this fall for drying things before putting in storage. When I can focus on the progress on those items, there are moments of satisfaction that we are continuing to refine various systems around here. But mostly right now I am often consumed with what we are not managing to get done in any given day or week. Sigh!

In one of Jason's workshop times, Terah joined him. She had been wanting some "shop time with Daddy" and that seemed a good opportunity. So in addition to the seed trays, she finished up with Jason a little table that Kali had started ages ago. To say she was proud of it upon completion would be an understatement!

We have also managed to squeeze in some fun which most recently included sneaking out after dark and decorating my parents' car on the even of their 56th wedding anniversary. My children, and I also learned husband, had never decorated a car after a wedding. So it was high time they learned. Once my parents had left for a day of hiking and time with friends, the younger gals and I also had fun remaking their bed in an alternate way that did not promote ease in climbing in at day's end. It's fun to have their house so handy for such pranks! Though I do fear that I might have some things coming back at me, as it is kind of dangerous to teach one's children these things!

When September rolled around, it was emotionally challenging to take our first family photo without Tala. So instead we all picked something to hold or wear that reminded us of Tala's presence in our home. My dad chose a broom, since Tala so graciously and at her own initiative spent many hours helping to keep our homes clean. Do not ask how it's going downstairs since she left! My mom chose a puzzle to represent the fun of puzzling together. Jason grabbed the orchid Tala had given us when she moved in and which never stopped blooming during her entire time with us. When I looked at it this morning I realized that the many blooms are shriveling and falling. I'm holding a mug of iced coffee, which represents so many things. Kali is holding Rook cards, which she doesn't need any more to play with Tala, though they still play online most nights. Alida is wearing the beautifully handwoven dress made for Tala for her graduation which she gifted to Alida before she left. And Terah is holding Jusr, Tala's bunny entrusted to her that she snuggles with most nights now. We miss her!

After a long dry summer, we've had rain. Inches of it. We have been fortunate to get plenty of rain but mostly not too much. And in doses that have mostly soaked in. We realize that many places have not been nearly so fortunate...We haven't needed to irrigate now for some time. And the rain brings the kind of mist and clouds on the mountain that I love. Thankfully there has also been sufficient sunshine for drying things back out and enabling us to keep up with most of the harvests. Here's just a small sampling of what's growing out there and what's coming in the door!

I do love the look of amaranth heads forming!

We are having a good pepper year!! After a good number of awful pepper years in a row, we are bringing in many sweet red peppers - enough for lots of fresh eating, cooking in recipes and for salsa/sauce and we are even freezing some for winter. Yay! Jason is pretty sure what has been ailing them in recent years was broad mites. 

As things come in the door for processing, I'm so glad the number of helpers who can work with sharp knives keeps increasing. One day Alida and Terah chopped more or less all the tomatoes for canning diced tomatoes. 

While we have more or less decided that we need to give up on growing peaches, we were gifted a large crate full from one of my colleagues. I was able to can 14 pints, we've been eating them fresh for days, I froze a few and tonight we will enjoy peach kuchen that Alida made this morning with the last of them. 

It's the time of year where we are shifting from the summer gardens to fall. Here the cucumbers (which did ok) and watermelon (which did horrible this year) are now out and we have seeded carrots. As soon as I finish this post, I'll head down to give them their daily sprinkling until the seeds germinate.

And then there was the potato harvest! Now with 4 potato forks in the garden shed, we can use lots of help. And the digging was delightful as the soil has changed so much in recent years. Now only if there were a lot of potatoes. It was funny as we got started because I was just so taken with how easy the digging was that I hardly noticed that I wasn't finding many potatoes. 

So the yield was pretty bad. We looked back over recent years and 3 years ago we dug 4.5 bushels, 2 years ago it was 4 bushels, last year it was 3.5 and this year 3. We are clearly going in the wrong direction. We'll savor every potato we eat this year!

To ease the disappointment in the potato harvest, I stopped to take a picture of the cardinal climber vine that is abundant in one of the strips in the root patch. The hummingbirds love it too!

And then we celebrated finishing up potato digging by harvesting the first of two pineapples. We get a pineapple every few years and this year had TWO! As of this morning, they have both been savored and the tops are now in new pots to grow a pineapple each that we'll enjoy a few years hence. They were so delicious!

Alright, I now have an antsy 5 year old (ALMOST 6) on my lap who is going to come with me to water the carrot beds. And I think it's time to turn my attention to other things. I'll end with a fun experiment my mom did recently that was a hit. She made a round of tomato cocktail with all yellow slicer tomatoes. I loved it! And think it was lower in acid such that my taste buds could enjoy it and my mouth not feel raw afterwards. Yum! She also made a mega-batch of relish using trombone squash. We need to make some burgers now to try it out on. The root cellar is looking very colorful!

Tala, the "dash" in Myers-Benner!

While I have not exactly had a surplus of available moments where I could have written this post sooner, I also recognize some common patterns of procrastination in myself today as I gear us to finish catching up on our scrapbook. I think it is just that my thoughts and feelings don't want to be confined to some words or select pictures on a page. I also have this desire to not cheapen what is such a sacred shared experience, so I want to choose with care things that honor this intense time of transition in our home and what came before it.

As I sit down to write, the remnants of Ida are soaking the earth outside, just as our tears soaked many a cloth in the weeks leading up to our goodbyes last Tuesday. And we have turned the calendar to a new month today, which means it is the day to take our monthly family photo. But there is an ache that rises in me as it will be the first family photo without our "dash" present. When Tala joined us at Tangly Woods last July, we were looking forward to enjoying a short month's visit from her before she took off for her next adventures. We are so glad that plans changed such that our month together turned into almost 14. It also means that the saying goodbye was at least 14x as hard as it would have been after one month. In a very deep way, Tala became family!

As Tala reflected on Facebook recently, our year plus together was a big mix of both quality time and "garbage time." We shared lots of quality time focused on our relationships, but also just shared the joys and pains and laughter and tears and hard work and sleepovers and games and weeding and all the other aspects of daily living (oh, I must mention dishes - Tala washed SO MANY DISHES in her time with us - I know because of how many dishes I have done in the last week since her departure!!). Early in our time together I had a sense that the personal healing journeys that both Tala and I were engaged in were linked in a beautiful and profound (and as time went on I would add messy) ways. And I also began to see more clearly how our individual healing journeys were intricately woven into collective healing that is so badly needed in our world as well. And how the individual harms we have experienced in our lives are nested within collective and systemic harms. In other words, my world because even more complex, more beautiful, more connected... And I'm being invited again to embrace mystery and messiness, brokenness and wholeness, and so much more.

As the time of Tala's return home to the Philippines approached, we packed a lot of quality time into our final days together. As many Rook, Upwords, Farming Game, and Dutch Blitz rounds as possible were squeezed in, up to Kali and Tala playing Rook in the car on the way to Dulles. Tala and I savored a last hike up to Hensley's Pond together, sharing the gifts we received from each other, the lessons learned, as well as reflecting on the times of joy and of pain. We shared meals (and lots of ice cream!). We celebrated what we love and appreciate about each other. We enjoyed an evening partially around the fire (before being stormed in), as well as rituals of naming messages and things we have carried for too long that were never ours to hold or carry. We did a lot of hugging and some of us did a lot of crying. Here's a few photos of those last days together.

As a parting gift for Terah, Tala had decided to leave her treasured bunny Jusr for Terah to have. Terah doesn't understand now all that this bunny has been through with Tala, but she certainly is being well loved and cherished. She has already provided comfort to Terah too, when she needed to have a good cry the night we took Tala to the airport. And she has joined a meal, when on one occasion Kali mistakenly set the table for 6. Jusr has been introduced to many of the other stuffed bunnies in the house, so has acquired a lot of stuffed friends. And Jusr joins in on various other family activities and often comes to the screen to say hi to Tala when we video chat. Terah is quickly learning what Jusr does and doesn't like. We hope she finds Tangly Woods to her liking for the long haul!

Last Tuesday, we stretched the time together as long as we could but eventually had to take off for DC. 

We were grateful for safe travels to the airport AND the unexpected gift of being able to go in with Tala until she checked in successfully. This enabled me and Kali to help her repack and lower the weight in her bags so she didn't have to pay extra for her luggage. So we have a little stash of things here that hopefully Kali can take when her long anticipated visit becomes a reality! We could not help but chuckle when Tala pulled out some ketchup packets from one of her suitcases. We aren't sure how those made the cut, but removing them also didn't help much on weight. It was all the beloved books (that were truly also friends) that were weighing things down!

It was really hard to drive away. I realized that I hadn't felt that kind of ache or experienced the unstoppable flow of tears since Nora died. While not a death, we also knew we were saying goodbye to a very precious way of being together that would not likely happen in the same way again. It also struck me then and many times since that moment: even goodbyes are not fair or equitable. While all of our hearts ached with this separation, I still had 6 other people to hug at home. And my daily routine was not about to be upended. Tala had to say goodbye to all 7 of us at one time, along with many other dear friends. And she had to cross time zones and navigate airports and paperwork, only to end up in a small hotel room under Covid quarantine regulations for 10 days. Sigh! But we've never been so grateful for technology! How wonderful it was to have that first video chat and to see her safely in her home country! And following along with her photos and reflections on Facebook, I'm also grateful that her memories did not weigh anything and that she could take all of those with her, along with our love. And I also see how many people have been eagerly anticipating her return. We are just so very thankful for the gift of Tala becoming part of our family. No matter who else comes in and out of our lives, she will never be replaced (she'll always be "our dash!"). 

In honor of one of the ways Tala rubbed off on me, I've got coffee brewing for an afternoon iced coffee. Maybe I'll have my mug of that join me for our September family photo. That will help her feel closer!!