Monday, April 13, 2020

My sourdough starter overflowed pushing up the lid of its tiny crock and bumbling and spilling down the sides.  I'd overfilled it. It's nice and healthy now, and strong enough to put in the refrigerator, so I only need to feed it once per week.  Sourdough is not as hard as most people make it out to be.  In fact, its really easy.  I figure if the California gold miners made it in the dirty conditions they lived in, basically camping in pop-up cities of 10's of 1000's of people, I can handle it too.

Mosquito likes weeding with Sara.  She pulls the plants and Sara searches the roots for goodies, like grubs and bugs.  They work together every day.

There is no hay for the rabbit litter or the hen house, but luckily my neighbor, Farmer Hummingbird just rebuild his fence.  He has given me 2 huge garbage bags of redwood flakes. They are fine and dark reddish brown.  Wood is not my preferred bedding because it contains so much lignin and cellulose, woven together in a tough carbon matrix that make tree trunks, houses and fences so strong.  It doesn't break down quickly enough in the garden to be used by plants and can even smother and kill them.  It is indigestible to most animals (termites can handle it) and plants and needs strong helpers like fungi to decompose it.  That means the rabbit's dirty litter has to sit for much longer before its usable by the plants.  Still, I am grateful for these beautiful flakes.  They make for a pretty hen coop.

We now have 3 bees hives in the yard.  Mosquito and Cob-weaver are not happy.  They say the bumblebees are gone now.  As I was taking out the compost, I saw the strangest interaction: a honeybee and a bumblebee face off.  They were flying face to face, little legs outstretched offensively circling.  They were so absorbed in their battle, they didn't seem to notice me. Finally they came together, grappling and tumbling to the ground, rolling and disappearing into the grass.  I tried to part the grass to find them, but ended up disturbing the battle.  They both flew off in different directions.  I wonder who has a more powerful sting?  I know that both kinds of stings can kill their insect predators, like preying mantids.  I also know that honeybees only have 1 sting in their ammunition, then they die.  They use this sacrifice judiciously  I like to believe honeybees only use their sting if they feel they have to for the protection of their hive.  Still, honeybees are European, non-native interlopers.  The gentle bumblebees were here first.

I've been putting cleaned, crushed egg shells out for the chickens and seem to have solved the alligator egg problem.  We finally decided they were coming from Isabella because of their color. Isabella pecks me gently on the back of my legs every morning.  She is a sweet chicken.  This is her story, as best as I know it.

Isabella's Story

I know very little about Isabella.  I do not know when she was born. I cannot tell what breed she is. She came to the school midway through the fall last year, just after our school chicken Speckles died.  A girl in 5th grade came in carrying her and said, "Please take my hen, Speckles. She is the last one left of our flock.  The raccoons have eaten all of them.  They come into our yard night and day.  We cannot keep her safe."   And, so, we adopted her and she moved in with Popcorn and Diamond (Penny).  I have never heard of raccoons coming out in the daytime to eat chickens.  I often think how terrible it must have been for Isabella to live through that, and how wily and smart she must be to have escaped.

What breed do you think Isabella is?  Find her picture on the Cast of Characters page.

Farmer Ladybug🐞

Friday, April 3, 2020

Coco is so loud!  Every morning she comes out and bock bock bock bock bock bock bock.  What is she talking about?

Cob-weaver and I made berry muffins again this morning. This time we used baking powder and baking soda.  They were much yummier.

Mosquito and Cob-weaver raked the chicken yard.

For lunch we made spring greens soup.  I love soup.  It's on my menu for Thursday nights, but last night Mosquito and Cob-weaver groaned so much, I gave in and Ant made them hamburgers.  They don't appreciate soup night.  That's OK.  They used to groan a lot about hiking, biking, gardening, and journaling too.  But now they love these things as much as I do.

It helps if they make the soup.  This one is especially fun because we gather all the spring "weeds" from the yard to eat and our spring garden leafy vegetables.  Mosquito and Cob-weaver love to forage from the wild, so were eager to help. This soup is different each time because it depends on what is growing.  Our early spring greens are mostly too old- I can tell because flower buds are forming, but there was plenty to cook with.  We collected for our soup: nettles, chickweed, sourgrass, crane's bill, New Zealand spinach, fava bean shoots, asparagus, kale, parsley, arugula, and wild lettuce. It was delicious! Everyone said so. Miner's lettuce would also be a good addition to this soup, but we don't have it growing in our yard.  If you decide to wild forage, make sure you know your plants well.  As one of my teachers, Paul Stamets*, says, "Mushrooms can heal you and they can also kill you."  This goes for plants too.

While cleaning the arugula, I found a caterpillar.  It's our first caterpillar of the year.  It looked like a cabbage white butterfly caterpillar to me, but Cob-weaver (who is a caterpillar and butterfly expert) says that it had an extra stripe down its side.  We are going to raise and find out what it turns into.  We do this with all of the caterpillars we find and have figured out how to identify everything in our yard that way.  There are no good field guides to caterpillars that I've found, and even when we do find the caterpillar in a guide, its hard to compare a caterpillar picture with real life.  So we raise them.  We put the caterpillar in a glass mason jar with the plant we found it on and poke holes in the metal lid. We have found that all our caterpillars eat comfrey, so we always put comfrey in it too. It's best if you can find a fat caterpillar because they quickly will make their chrysalis or cocoon and you don't have to feed or clean up their poop daily anymore.  We find underwing moth crysalis' in the soil, so we put them in a jar and bury them in soil.  We've raised cabbage-whites, painted ladies, underwing moths, and looper moths.  The chrysalis of a painted lady is so beautiful, trimmed with gold.  Did you know that moths make a cocoon and butterflies make a chrysalis?

Cob-weaver found aphids on the fava beans today.  Then I spotted them on the kale.  I wonder if they are at the school garden too?

Spring Greens Soup

1 medium onion, halved and sliced
1 tablespoon cooking oil
3 cups bone or vegetable broth
Salt
3 medium potatoes, quartered  ( I used 1 a huge sweet potato because I didn't have potatoes)
3 cups sliced fresh mushrooms (optional) (I didn't have any)
2 tablespoons butter
10 cups fresh spring greens (spinach, parsley, arugula, kale, chard and anything wild you can find), cleaned with stems removed.

Garnish:
Fresh arugula
Yogurt
Lemon
Green onions or wild onions

1. Cook onion in oil over medium heat for 5 minutes.
2. Add potatoes and saute 2 more minutes turning them to brown
3.  Add broth, pepper, and salt to taste. Bring to boiling, then reduce to simmer, covered, for 10 minutes.
4. If using mushrooms, saute in a separate skillet with butter for 6 to 8 minutes or until tender and liquid has evaporated; then set aside.
5. Remove soup from heat. Use an immersion blender to blend onion-potato mixture until almost smooth. 
6. Add greens. Return to heat. Bring to boiling; remove from heat. 
7. Using blender (I have to do this step with my Vitamix blender because my immersion blender can't handle it), puree soup again until nearly smooth and flecks of green remain. 
8. Season to taste with salt. Serve immediately topped with sautéed mushrooms, fresh arugula, lemon, green onions and yogurt.

Farmer Ladybug 🐞

*My mentor and teacher, Paul Stamets (his work is the reason I studied mycology in graduate school) is featured in the newly released documentary, Fantastic Fungi.  This one didn't make it to my recommendations list because it contains content about hallucinogenic mushrooms.  I do recommend it highly for adults and for kids whose parents have pre-screened it and are comfortable with this topic, or are prepared to fast forward the part not appropriate for kids.  I have watched it with Cob-weaver and Mosquito.

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Today, I called our garden animals, the rats, flies and their friends to come help me to clean the house.  Mosquito caught it on this 3 minute video.

Rats and flies are such great helpers! April Fool's!

What are great helpers, though, is yeast.  Isn't it amazing that yeast in the air all around us can be farmed to help to rise dough?  Tonight I used my new sourdough starter, now 8 days old, to make the pizza dough.  I also baked arabic (pita) bread.  I made 3 pizzas.  Two are cheese and one is parsley pesto.

Garden math: I made 3 pizzas.  Each pizza had 8 slices.  How many total slices of pizza were there?  There are 4 people in the family.  How many do each of us get?  Do you think we ate it all?

Cob-weaver loves math problems like this.  Her favorite operation is division.  Equal division.  Fairness.  She says that is why she needs to make so many cookies, so she can practice division.  My favorite operation is multiplication.  Multiplication is magical to me.  It makes me think of fairies with magic wands, or plants and seeds.  Mosquito loves addition.  What is your favorite operation? I learned today that our favorite operation relates to our temperament (a fancy word for personality).*  That's neat.

Pizza Dough

1. Use about 1/2 cup of sourdough starter. Add flour and water to make a sponge.   A sponge is the consistency of really wet batter. Cover the bowl with a clean towel.  Make this in the morning and let rise, all day if possible (or set out the night before to work overnight for cooking in the morning).  This is the no-knead method where you let the yeast do all the work. Do not let go more than 12 hours.  I did mine at the last minute (of course), so it only sat for an hour before I made the dough.
2. Add enough flour to make a dough that can be handled.  Add a pinch of salt and other herbs you like rolled into your dough, like oregano, basil, or powdered garlic.  You can also put in cornmeal for a heartier crust. Roll out into a pizza dough.
3. Bake at 425°F for 8 minutes.  
4. Add toppings.
5. Bake at 425°F for another 8 minutes.
6. Slice and Enjoy.

Arabic Bread

1. Using the same dough. At step 2 above, after making the dough, form it into balls, bigger than a golf ball, but smaller than a tennis ball.  What kind of ball is that?  Place on a well floured board and cover.
2. Roll out each ball. First pressing down from the center with your hands.  Then roll out from the center making sure your rolling pin does not go over the edge of the dough and pinch it.  Keep it thick than a quarter inch.  Roll out to a small plate size.
3. Cover the unbaked pita with a clean towel.
4. After cooking your pizzas, heat the over to 500°F with a baking pan on the bottom rack (the pan must be hot).  Remove any upper racks, or put them at the top setting to get them out of the way.
5. When the oven is hot, quickly and gently toss your bread onto the hot baking sheet. I can fit 2-3 at a time.  They should not touch one another and hopefully will land flat (this gets easier with practice).
6. Close oven quickly and bake for 4 minutes.
7. Quickly remove your puffed arabic bread with tongs and cool.  
8. Add more dough until you've finished cooking all of them.  Make sure to keep the oven hot by closing it quickly each time.

Parsley pesto

This is made just like basil pesto.  You can use basil or substitute parsley or arugula.  We have lots of parsley, so I usually make pesto like this.  As always, my quantities are relative to taste.  Sometimes I use bone broth with the oil to help blend the pesto.  This cuts down on the amount of oil used.  I often omit the parmesan if I don't have any.

1. Use a big bunch of parsley, removing thicker stems.
2. Add olive oil, pine nuts or walnuts, garlic clove to taste, salt to taste, and small chunk parmesan cheese to taste.  Use just enough olive oil to make it blend.  If you want to cut down on the oil, used bone or vegetable broth.
3. Blend until smooth.
4. Freeze leftovers in ice cube trays.

🐞Farmer Ladybug

*The Four Temperaments by Rudolf Steiner

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

This morning we made hot cross buns, hot times buns, hot division buns, hot minus buns, and hot equal buns with the sourdough starter.  They were good.

My husband, Beekeeper Ant, then filled the kitchen with a large tub of honey from a wild hive.  Processing honey is relatively easy from box hives.  The frames from the super (a fancy word for beehive) fit into the hand spinner and centrifugal force extracts the honey.  Wild hives are different because the combs are disorganized, fitting to whatever space the bees found.  They are removed in large chunks.  These big chunks of comb have to be squeezed by hand and extracted by gravity.  That means a lot of strainers and bowls all over the kitchen.  This honey is from eucalyptus. Eucalyptus honey is thick, heavy and bitter.  Ant says it is not his favorite kind of honey.  Did you know that the flavor, quality, thickness, and medicinal properties of honey depend on the flowers the bees forage on?

We have honeybees from outside coming to visit all our honey bowls in the kitchen because they smell the honey.  I wonder where this bee came from?  Honeybees can travel up to 3 miles from their hives in search of nectar. Mosquito and Cob-weaver's fingers are often visiting the honey bowls too.

We mostly get honey from wild hives that people don't want to live with anymore.  Ant moves these unwanted honeybees into supers and takes them to a better life on a farm. We don't keep bees at our house because our neighbors don't like them and Mosquito and Cob-weaver can't walk barefoot when we have a hive in the yard.

After Ant finishes in the kitchen (minus all the bowls everywhere that will take several days to process), he puts the dirty honey and old comb outside to attract a wild swarm to the empty supers.  It's a good time of year to catch a swarm, the swarm season is just starting.

In the afternoon, myself, Beekeeper Ant, Mosquito, and Cob-weaver went to the school garden to check the rain gauge, water, weed the lazy bed and the greenhouse and keep on building the sundial beds for planting the fall harvest.  The rain gauge read 6.2 inches of rain! We finished planting the blackberry bushes and took the rest home to better tend to them.  Its funny because until now, I have always brought things from my home garden to put at school, now I am bringing it all home.  We plan to work there every Tuesday afternoon.  The fava beans, cabbages, kale, and garlic look great, but it will be a few weeks still until harvest.  The artichokes are ready but who will eat them?  The compost looks perfect and full of worms.  It's ready for spreading.  Now I must do it myself.  I really miss all the farmers.

Garden Math: Check the Rainfall Page.  What is the largest rain measurement?  What is the smallest rain measurement? What is the total rainfall so far this school year?  What is the average rainfall (=total rainfall/# of records)?

Cob-weaver and Ant make cookies again tonight.  Cob-weaver divides them equally.  We each get 3.

Garden Math: If there are 4 people and we each get 3, how many total oatmeal cookies do Cob-weaver and Ant make?

Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Makes 4 dozen
From the Quaker Oatmeal box top

1/2 pound butter, softened
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt (optional)
3 cups oats
1 cup raisins
1/2 cup chocolate chips (optional)
1/2 cup walnuts (optional)

1. Heat oven to 350°F
2. Beat butter and sugars
3. Add eggs and vanilla
4. Add combined flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt and mix well.
5. Stir in oats, raisins, chocolate chips and nuts. Mix well
6. Drop tablespoon fulls onto ungreased cookie sheet.
7. Bake 10-12 minutes

Farmer Ladybug 🐞

Monday, March 30, 2020

I may be too lazy for sourdough starter.  I am supposed to feed it every day, but have only managed to do it two times in 5 days.  Another problems is that I don't like throwing away the spent dough, but am too lazy to make bread every day.  But this morning, I fed the sourdough and made biscuits with the old dough.  It looks fine, even though, as usual, I haven't followed directions perfectly.  The dough is bubbly and the biscuits tasted sour and chewy.  I don't think its strong enough to rise a loaf of bread yet, but making biscuits was easy. I can manage that every day..... I think.

Farmer Hummingbird brought over lots more romaine lettuce heads today.  I'll need to clear some space and cut back the hedge that is shading my garden to plant them.

It's been 6 days since I planted the marigold seeds.  Still no sign of green....

Sara needed help again roosting. Maybe I'll stop writing about it, and just tell you the days she does roost properly.

There was a ladybug on my pillow tonight when I went to bed.  I thanked her and helped her go outside.

Everyday Biscuits

From Lean, Luscious and Meatleass by Bobbie Hinman and Millie Snyder
I put in the starter and added flour to it to get the right quantity.

1-1/2 cups of flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3 tbsp oil or butter
1/2 cup milk

1. Preheat oven to 450F
2. Combine flour, baking powder, salt and if desired, other herbs you might like (eg. dill, marjaram, thyme, garlic)
3. Add oil with fork until crumbly
4. Add milk so that you have a dough you can handle, not too sticky
5. Press out on a floured board to desired thickness and cut with round cutters, or make drop biscuits by placing handfuls and pressing directly onto your ungreased cookie sheet.
6. Bake 10 minutes or until lightly browned

🐞Farmer Ladybug

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

We made the second video today. We worked more clearing the sundial/ medicine wheel for the video.

Since I am out of yeast and not going to the store, I finally make sourdough starter. I usually make bread for pizza once a week.  Years ago before I let my sourdough starter die, I would make all the bread- loaf bread, arabic bread, english muffins, biscuits, pizzas, etc.  I made bread for 5 years running at least! I even had the kids grind the grain when Mosquito was in 3rd grade.  My new starter will take 10 days to be mature enough to stop daily feeding.  Since I am lazy, I don't measure anything. I simply mix flour (rye and white) with water to a pancake batter consistency, put in a small crock and place on the back of my stove.  I am not lazy about the water for my starter.  Chlorine will kill the wild yeast, so I take the time to let the tap water sit out overnight to off gas chlorine before mixing it to make the starter.  Cob-weaver is amazed that yeast are floating all around us to be captured just by stirring flour and water.

Sara tried to roost on the floor of the coop. I moved her onto a stick.  I don't want her to get pooped on.

At night there is a hailstorm.  I'm worried about the bunnies but glad the school chickens are here instead of the drafty school coop.

Sourdough Starter

Mix flour and water into a thick pancake batter consistency with chlorine-free water to make about 1 cup.  Cover and set in a warm place.  To feed, make 1/2 cup fresh batter daily and add to it 1/2 cup of starter.  Discard spent starter or use for making breads.  Continue daily for 10 days.  After 10 days, and if your starter seems healthy, you may keep it in the fridge and feed only once per week.


Farmer Ladybug 🐞