Hot Cross Buns -- Maybe

I am currently making a large batch of hot cross buns for a function we have to attend tomorrow.  Got all the way through the kneading and rise process before figuring out I'd forgotten to add the grated orange peel, raising and cinnamon.

Why is it these accidents only happen when I'm cooking for others...never when it's just family?  

Stay tuned to find out if I end up with light, airy buns, or dense, un-risen hockey pucks.  I added the forgotten ingredients as I pounded the loaf down, before dividing it into rolls. It's a gamble. We'll see what happens.

A Generational Issue

So this morning Groceries, our 19 year-old son, gets up and announced that he's going back to the Valley for the weekend to see his friends and hang out.  This was after he repeatedly asked these same friends what they were doing this weekend, and if they wanted him to drive the two hours it takes to see them.  They were non-responsive, all week long.  

It's so easy when the kids are this big.

But sometime last night, they apparently figured there was nothing better to do than invite our son out for the weekend, and so this morning he announced he would be leaving presently.

(Perhaps I will discuss the issue of why kids are so willing to jump through hoops for friends who don't appreciate them on another day, but all three of my kids exhibit this tendency when in the presence of the pretty, popular peers of their group, so it's a universal teen malady, I know.)

Anyway, this presented a problem.  Groceries had already agreed to help my husband Big Ag put in some fencing at the bottom of the property today, a project we desperately need to finish if we hope to keep the deer from consuming several hundred dollars' worth of orchard and vineyard plantings.  I pointed this out to him and said that, under similar circumstances, his Dad would never, ever leave him in the lurch like that.  Nothing like dose of good, old-fashioned Jewish guilt, dealt out by a good, old-fashioned Jewish Mother.  

And so both men are now at the bottom of the property installing fencing.  One happy, the other not so much.  And the not-so-happy one will leave this evening to see his friends instead of jumping in his truck this morning and leaving his Dad one man short for a two-man job.

Gosh, were we adults ever so flighty, so inconsistent, so self-centered when we were that age?

The answer doesn't even require any thought, does it? Of course we were.  

Wet and wild afternoon

Dark skies at noon

It's been a dry year so far, but today the rain poured down for about an hour or so.  It probably won't do much to improve our precipitation stats, but it was a welcome change from our un-seasonably sunny and warm winter so far.  

I was happy to see it, because we water our vegetable garden with well water. And our well water is extremely high in mineral content, as you can see by residue on the Mason jar I use to heat the water for our coffee every morning.  It's delicious water, but needless to say, we won't be needing any calcium supplements anytime soon.

Mineral Build-up

The cure

So this afternoon, even though it was a cool 46 degrees when it started raining, I ran outside to catch some roof runoff so I could water our raised vegetable beds.  Mineral-rich water is not harmful to drink or even to water your plants with, but if you water with it often enough (as we do through the dry seasons and in winter if there's no rain) those minerals will build-up in the soil and can affect plant growth and production.  Out in the fields, there's not much you can do about this but pray for heavy rains, but with raised garden or vegetable beds you can give them a good wash-out by collecting rainwater and soaking your beds with it.

While I was out there, though, the sky grew extremely dark and the temperature dropped at least 10 degrees...and the rain went from pelting to slushy.  Nonetheless, I stayed at my post, doing bucket duty until all the beds (and I) were thoroughly soaked and my fingers were numb and aching from the cold.  It may seem silly to cry cold when much of the nation is experiencing a blizzard as I write this, but standing outside in the wind and rain, soaking wet, when it's only in the high '30's is cold, believe me. 

But then I had the privilege of coming indoors for my farmer's reward....some hot spiced tea, a good read, and the pellet stove warming me from head to toe and drying my wet clothes. 

All for some rain water.  Precious rain water. Totally worth it.

Take Your Time

Old homesteads...

Today the landscape company will drop off nine yards of bark, and this weekend we will run drip lines and lay down bark on most of the front yard, thereby completing our water-saving landscape project.  We still have a pathway to put in through the yard, so even after this weekend's labor, we'll still have a ways to go before that project is completely done.

Sigh.  I'd like to be finished with this project, as well as our fencing project around our acreage, but it's not going to happen immediately. My life is like this a lot, especially considering the fact that we now have acreage, and how long we've had it (8 scant months, for those who are counting).  

When we were living in our little suburban homestead, we hit our expansion maximum after just a couple of years. We put in a clothesline, a grey water system, and planting beds, but couldn't progress to the next logical step of adding livestock, because keeping even hens was illegal within our particular city's limits.  And we knew we wanted more than just hens, anyway.  So we left that area and faced the onorous task of starting over again, from scratch (although we did bring our old clothesline).

But if I've learned anything from starting again, it's to pace yourself.  You finally get enough ground to farm, where you can plant as much as you have water for and where all kinds of livestock are not only legal but a pretty common sight, and you want to rush in and do everything.  Now.  It's the pent-up frustration of the urban homesteader going rural -- and going hog wild on all the opportunities -- but despite your excitement, you have to pace yourself.  Real acreage isn't developed in a couple of years, unless you have very deep pockets and can hire a crew to plant and build for you.

...were not built in a day.

Even the original homesteaders had five years to establish their claim.  That alone says something about the nature of this work. It takes time to locate where the good soil is on your property, choose the right kind of fencing, and determine exactly what animals will suit your property's and family's needs best.

And you can't do everything anyway, not if you want to do it well.  So slow and deliberate is the order of the day.  We'll do get more livestock this time next year, and since we sorely need a kitchen remodel I suppose we'll have to take care of that too, but until we're done with fencing and landscaping, all other expansion/renovation projects will have to wait.  

Because while you can do it all, you probably won't do it well, and when you're talking about anything which will involve the health and well being of plants, trees and animals, the stakes are high.  

So slow and steady wins the race, and keeps the homestead healthy.

Why You Have To Go Home

I've been thinking a lot recently about going home.  An old saying states that you can't go home, but I think everyone needs to, in one way or another, at some point in their lives (which for me, happened to be at age 50). 

My old home, circa 1960

My birthplace and home is in a city nestled up against the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California.  Although I lived in the San Joaquin Valley for about 20 of my adult years, while I felt "at home" there, it never felt like "home."  Does that make sense? The reason is that it was just too different geographically from where I grew up.  I grew up surrounded by hills, in an area where June Gloom, Santa Ana winds and coastal haze were all on the menu, and nothing in the valley spoke to any of those things.  

Eventually I found myself longing for home, once again.  But not the Southern California of today.  Those 20 years I was gone have morphed it into something unrecognizable to me.  No, I'm talking about the Southern California of my childhood, from the 1960's.

When I was a child people who lived in the hills above Los Angeles still owned horses and had fruit trees and vegetable gardens. We didn't, but I always envied family friends who did. There was plenty of un-constructed no-man's lands to hike and roam on.  The beach was 35 minutes away, because the freeways flowed and traffic was not really an issue.  And if you wanted to own a small farm, there were plenty of one or two acre lots up in the La Canada or Sunland areas to be had, for not too much money.

I've ended up in a geographic region that's very similar to my childhood home, and there's a deep, abiding comfort in that. In most ways it's an improvement on the specific house and city I grew up in, but in the important ways, it's the same.  The sunlight through the eucalyptus, the warm winds that start up at sundown, all bring me back to a good time in my life. I think that for every man or woman, there is something they long to re-capture in either their childhood or young adulthood, and as a person heads into the second half of their life, those things crop up in thoughts and in dreams, demanding to be brought back into your life, once again, in one way or another.  

You can't go home, yet in some ways you have to, or you will cease to thrive inside.  The need to come full circle is in us all, in differing ways. And only we know how to honor that need best.

To Weed Block Or Not To Weed Block...Hmmm

A Weedy Dilemma

So this morning I installed weed block in our front yard, before laying down some bark and finishing the lawn removal project we started last fall.  And just to be sure I was doing it right, I checked a few internet sites, only to find out there is a massive backlash against the use of landscape weed block, from gardeners everywhere...which leads to the dilemma:  Do I weed block or not?  Basically the arguments against it go as follows:

Weed block is ultimately unnecessary, because the mulch or bark you spread over your yard will 1) deter weeds all by themselves, and 2) break down and enrich the soil as it decomposes. But if you put weed block in place before laying your mulch or bark down, when the bark breaks down it will not become part of the soil -- it will just sit on top of it, uselessly. There's also the little issue of landscape fabric being non-recyclable, with some being made of plastic compounds.

Those are convincing arguments.

Nonetheless, I still weed blocked the front yard anyway, using non-plastic weed block.  Why?  First of all, because enriching the soil around the yard is not something I am interested in.  If I had spreading groundcovers, or planned on a more busy garden, adding plants as the years went on, I would leave the weed block out of the mix and just bark over the yard, since good soil would be something I needed in the future.  

The mostly-native plants that are growing out there will be receiving natural compost and of course water, but most of the yard is being left fallow, intentionally, because we want to use very little irrigation on anything not producing anything edible.  All these plants we put in do well on very little water and poor soil, so they are well-adapted to what's there now.  

The other thing is that while weeds ARE deterred by a thick layer of mulch, many of the native weeds we have here put down deep tap roots and, once in, are almost impossible to yank out.  A layer of weed block assures that, if those weeds do start to grow, they will not be able to get under the fabric layer and will therefore be easier to remove.

I also wonder how many people don't use the weed block and then end up using copious amounts of Round-Up instead of old-fashioned weeding.  I am a realist, and know I will be concentrating more on our food crops than our front yard, so I want to make sure I have to do as little weeding as possible, because I absolutely hate using Round-Up and avoid it at all times....even though it has low mammalian toxicity, it is still extremely hazardous to creatures like toads and frogs, both of which reside on our property in abundance. So thanks, but no thanks.  

So often things seem to come down to using what we consider to be the lesser of two evils.  I'm not in love with weed-block, but if it prevents Star Thistle from settling in as permanent yard-scape plants, as well as allows me to pull weeds easily instead of resorting to chemical warfare, then I'm willing to bite the bullet and use it.  

That being said, I am getting extremely excited as we approach the end of this lawn-killing endeavor.  The front yard has looked so bad for so long, to see bark and green, growing shrubs will be much easier on the eyes than how it's looked recently.  I'm sure our neighbors will agree.

Thoughts on "So God Made A Farmer"

Of course the "So God Made A Farmer," ad from the SuperBowl yesterday is making the rounds on not only Facebook, but also homesteading websites today.  It's a beautiful piece, delivered by Paul Harvey in 1978 at an FFA conference, long on heart and short on spin.

But if you listen to the words closely, you will find he's NOT talking about modern factory farmers, who produce thousands of acres monocrop/genetically modified foods and work for faceless corporate behemoths.  He's talking about farmers from the days of yore, who worked and lived on their own lands, grew food but also raised livestock, and were part of a close-knit community of like-minded souls. Like your and my great-grandfathers, more than likely.

In this country we love to glorify our farmers, to a point where we sometimes fail to see the difference between a real, small, local farmer and a corporate gun in a flannel shirt who drives a truck through the fields but works for a company that just happens to produce food instead of making widgets.  But when Paul Harvey talks about the farmer who milks his cows before heading out into his fields to tend to his crops, who comes back in to his own house for lunch, and who tends to chickens, pigs, horses and seedlings, he's talking about a vanishing species:  The homestead farmer.

There should be as much protection for this man and woman as there is for the bald eagle and the white rhino, because he is a vanishing species, friends.

It's my dream that someday, the man Paul Harvey is talking about will rise again in our country and become a common sight; that everyone will know a farmer who might be their friend, their neighbor, their spouse or maybe just the person they serve with on the school board.  

Until that happens, we can at least help support those practicing this dying art by buying from them, and choosing their locally-produced goods over what's in the supermarkets, whenever its possible and whenever we can afford it.  It's worth it, because it preserves not only a valuable profession, but also a way of life.