Welcome June

June is bringing in the hottest weather of the year so far; no June Gloom fog and clouds here this year, sadly -- although the month is young, right? But things around the garden are loving this spate of heat, which will likely go away within a week or so. (hear oh Lord our prayer)

Milk Carton Tomato Kids.

The tomatoes are snug in their milk cartons to protect them from the wind and are quite happy.

As are the zucchini squash I said I wasn't going to plant again this year....Why do I plant zucchini. Why? Why? Because I need something to leave on my coworkers' desks when they are not looking. That's why.

I even planted a bed for cutting flowers this year with a couple of Bell Peppers thrown in for good measure. We'll see how that goes.

20 more just like this one!

And I've had the best berry harvest since moving here. More than enough for pies and sauces and galettes galore. While I sold some of these beauties in the past, this year everything is being preserved, because last year I got only a handful of berries. The moral of that story is that you just never know what the weather is going to to for, or to, your crop. The Great Berry Deficit of 2015 was a crisis of epic proportions, so this year I'm not taking any chances. Sorry, friends and neighbors. It's every man for him/herself where berries are concerned. Get your own.

My garden at work is producing zucchini already, along with tomatoes and lots of herbs. And my corn and pumpkins are popping up, too! (Pics later this week)

But still, when it's this hot, the order of the day is to finish work early, say by 10 a.m., and shelter in place somewhere cool, like inside with a good book. I'm currently reading "The Geography of Bliss" by Eric Weiner...a look at the places on earth where people are the most happy. Fascinating.

Berry good.

I'll tell you what...as long as I have plenty of berries and a cool place to retreat to in the heat of the afternoon, I'm convinced I'm actually in one of the happier places on earth, even when it's triple digits outside.

Hope your spring is springing up lots of greenery and food!

Fall around the homestead

Fall color in the vines of Big Ag's vineyard and our own olallieberries. Our table grape vines are still kinda green (upper right of second pic).

Fall has meant that chores are much more comfortable to do outside now, and so in addition to continuing our back yard project, we're also pruning, trimming and making the first early preparations for spring. 

By far our biggest success on the property has been our olallieberry, blackberry and raspberry vines down in the pasture. While last year was short on berries, the summer proved very hospitable for growth, so next year's harvest should be a good one.

The year before this, I had such a bumper crop I ended up selling quite a bit to a local restaurant, which was a nice little bit of extra income I was happy to have. I'm hoping 2016 is the same, but since I don't know what the weather is going to do, I don't want to count my berries before they hatch, so to speak.

Yesterday was such a nice sunny day I decided to finish up trussing the vines and clipping the ends off the really long ones, since I'd rather have some nice lateral branches with berries on them than one looooong strand.

Stepford Wife vine/root...can be whatever you want it to be. Spooky

I discovered while down there that there are blackberry shoots with roots on the ends of their vines trying to dig down into the ground, which must be how brambles get established.

I just find it amazing that anything can be so versatile that it was be a root or a shoot, depending on its environment. We should all be so flexible.

Around the rest of the property, we finally have chairs and a fire pit for the back yard. Perhaps we'll actually get around to lighting a fire in it this weekend. 

And Valentina is still happily fostering with us, she has laid an egg nearly every day and since I'm currently getting none from my other girls, she was literally the hen who saved Thanksgiving. She can stick around as long as she likes.

Valentina frolicking among the rose bushes.....

Big Ag and I frolicking among the vines.

Dawn

Granny Smith Apples

The days may be warm here, but the mornings are always cool and inviting. Today I woke up before six a.m., and decided to do a little walk around the property and check on things before the sun came up. I checked vines, fruit, and growth.  It's amazing how much plants can change just within a few years; the fig tree we planted in 2013 that was just up to my knees is now as tall as I am, and the cherry trees which were sticks now have sizable trunks and stand well over 7 feet tall.

Baby pumpkin.

On the more short-term end of things, the pumpkins are growing in anticipation of fall, and summer squash is in its usual state of over-abundance.

Ollalieberry vine.

For some folks, Sunday is a church day, and I have total respect for that, but I have always found God more present in the land than in the cathedral.  And so this morning left me especially grateful for the fruit, for the clouds, and for the good land we live on.

Seckel pears.

Happy Sunday, everyone.

Ollalieberries and apple pie

Every once in awhile we catch a huge break here at the Hot Flash Homestead, and in summer that means that for just a few days it's not so hot after all. I hate heat.  This is because, in general I do walk through life creating my own "personal summer," just by virtue of being a middle aged female. That notwithstanding, this morning we experienced the marine layer coming back in and cooling our outside weather, creeping in like summer fog does and cooling everything off nicely. And so the work began on the ollalieberries.  

The berry crop itself was a bust this year due to a number of factors -- heat being the biggest -- but thanks to some perfectly timed fertilization, next year's canes are growing like gangbusters.  Yet extremely long, wraparound canes is not what you want, because while some of the fruit develops on them, most grows on the side branches that emerge from the canes, with proper pruning.  And the side branches only sprout if you prune the canes before they become too stringy.  So that's what this foggy, cool morning was about. We've got a long ways to go, we'll continue fertilizing through the summer and get everything to where it's on the first wire -- the top trellis wire -- so that next spring there won't be much bending over to gather in the berries.

And speaking of fruits of the season, this last weekend I made an apple pie from my picked apples, which I preserved last November.  There were a few city types at the July 4th party I went to, and they were amazed that I preserved my own apples and made my own pie crust. It reminded me that although the homesteading lifestyle has become more popular in recent years, its by no means common.

Here's to being uncommon.  Hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend.

A land -- and time -- of extremes

Vineyard Wedding!

The last 10 days or so have been a time of extremes, hence my sparse posting. There have been no horrible events, (in case that first sentence sounded dire) just a lot of difficulty working the land due to the incredible heat and at the same time, a bunch of wine country related events, which gave us a great excuse to shrug off some chores at the end of the day in favor of dancing in the vineyards and eating fine food.

This is about all we got.

My olallieberry crop was a total bust this season; I think the heat withered the berries on the vine quicker than they were able to ripen properly. At the other end of that extreme however, the canes for next year look extremely promising, so hopefully summer '16 can make up for the berries we didn't get this summer. I still have plenty of berries frozen from summer '14, so we will have pies. (this is our homestead's unofficial motto/anthem, by the way: We will have pies. So very important.) My cucumbers also seem to be a bust, never quite taking hold, while my zucchini squash crop is, as usual, leaving us buried in excess zucchini. So it looks like I'll be buying cukes to make relish this year and leaving squash on the passenger seats of coworkers' unlocked vehicles -- a typical thing.

An afternoon Industry party getting wild, and then wilder (see below).

The events and parties we've been to have been just wonderful. We had a coworker's wedding to attend last weekend, along with a birthday party plus an Industry Night that turned out more like a combination of Pride celebration and/or giant rave in the vineyards, and we danced until we dropped. The great thing about dancing is that you can pretty much eat all the food you want, drink what you like, and are guaranteed to burn it off on the dance floor. Sometimes it seems strange to be doing that at my age, but as long as there are people older than I am doing the same thing, I feel safe in participating.  Who knows, someday (probably sooner rather than later) I may not be able to, so I'd better enjoy it while I can.

So while we bake in the daytime triple-digits and hide from the sun after about 11 a.m., at night everything is warm and magical and people come out to have some wine, see their friends, and dance until the cows come home, or in our area, until the grapes ripen. Which, at the rate this heat is going, should start in a couple of weeks.

Annual tradition

First big zucchini of the season got picked last night, and so of course today is the first zucchini chocolate cake of the season, cooked in the solar oven.  Today there are at least five more zucchini, the first eggplant, a bunch of ollalieberries and raspberries, onions and peppers, all ready to eat. All around things are ripening and sprouting.  It's a time for abundance. Summer's just a breath away.

Trees of Antiquity

We have a great resource here on the Central Coast for heirloom fruit trees.  It's a company called Trees of Antiquity here in Paso Robles, which specializes in organically grown heirloom fruit trees.  When I first heard about them, I initially balked at the idea of buying an organic tree.  After all, it's the fruit that matters on a tree, and whether or not you've produced organic fruit depends on how YOU treat the tree -- what you do with your soil, as well as how you manage your weeds and pests.  

But in thinking a little more, I realized that an organic tree farm is better for the water table, the air quality, and the ultimate sustainability of the land it sits on.  So by giving them my business, I'm making a little investment in the environment of this beautiful region I live in, and helping keep it healthy for generations to come.

I picked up a Golden Grimes apple tree today, parent of today's Golden Delicious apple.  And I have three ollalieberry bushes and two blueberry bushes on order.  Planting season is indeed in full swing, and I hope to someday, years from now, be able to take a blanket and a book and sit among my trees, berry bushes and vines and remember this first planting season on our new land.

For more information on Trees of Antiquity, check out their website.  I think you can even have trees shipped to you, if you live out of the area!

http://www.treesofantiquity.com/