Springing into February

Check out this before & after picture of Hidatsa Shield Figure beans! They really plump when you cook them, and taste great. Hidatsa is the name of the tribe that originally grew these beans, and the dark part of the bean is supposed to resemble they way they painted their shields. I haven't seen any Hidatsa shields, so I can't verify that ;)

These beans were recently boarded on Slow Food USA's Ark of Taste. (Be sure to check their site out for all kinds of amazing foods in danger of disappearing.) We've grown Hidatsa beans for 2 years, and will keep them in rotation as a house favorite. Dry beans take up a fair bit of garden space, and take a long time to mature, but it's worth the trouble to find out for yourself just how tasty heirloom beans can be. You can buy your own Hidatsa bean seed here, or check out Local Harvest to see who's growing them near you.

Finally! Paychecks, days off, and end of road restrictions all aligned so we could have a load of gravel delivered. It was a fun day of being local. The gravel came from the pit nearly next door, then we drove 3.5 miles to our local Breckenridge Dairy for milk (check out this picture of the dairy drive-thru during our recent floods), ran into a neighbor who had just seen a friend/coworker/neighbor coming down the Pole Rd. on his tractor to spread the gravel for us. He brought his cute little dog, Roxie, with him, and took some of our homemade goodies back with him. We had to leave for grocery shopping and traded our hard earned cash for more local delights - fresh oysters from Taylor Shellfish farms. We grilled the oysters on the BBQ and ate them with lime wedges, hot sauce & melted butter.

Stewart, doing his lapdog impression. He's going on 3, but still a puppy at heart.

And as usual, Magnus, demonstrating how stressful his life is.

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We also attended a day of classes in assorted farm & livestock management called the Cattlemen's Winterschool. Here's this year's class schedule, so you can get an idea of what is offered. It is a program of the Washington State University extension, and they have an incredible amount of useful information on their website alone, not to mention all the classes and publications available through them. More about our day of agricultural fun later this week!

Fall's falling...

Harvest continues. Here's J shelling Hidatsa Shield Figure beans. Grand total for apple sauce canned is 20 quarts, 37 pints and 19 half pints. Good thing we like apple sauce. We also dehydrated some broccoli for the first time, and it was so delish we'll be saving a lot more that way for sure next year. Last thing left to harvest in the garden are the peppers... and we'll need to do them soon. It was 39 degrees last night and it could freeze at any time.

Return of the prince. This is an Agaricus Augustus Fries mushroom, also called the prince, which grew near where the same variety showed up last year under our old growth trees. This is a more coastal California mushroom, but apparently it likes it here. J harvested, sliced and dehydrated it to share with some friends. The mushroom is a delicacy and quite tasty.
I was clearing garden plants from the side of the house for winter prep and look who was hanging out catching bugs! J actually watched her catch and eat a small spider.
Here's Fergus's Marty Feldman impression.
Stew tried as well, but looks more like he's attending some sort of first aid class. Nice try Stewart.
The cats like to lurk just outside the cat door tormenting one another. As long as one of them is sitting right outside, then it is too dangerous to exit. This can go on for hours.
After such cat door torture Magnus needed some Z's, and what better place than on some warm sheets from the dryer? At least his feet weren't muddy this time.


Here we are approaching a 4-way stop on Gemini. No matter how little or much we drive him, he's always the consumate proffesional.

Pick a peck of Peppers

The garden hasn't been a complete loss. The meal on the plates here came almost all from our own little piece of earth. Squash, stuffed pasillo peppers, all the salad and a chunk of the second of our two watermelons grown in the greenhouse. The beer as well is a pale ale that we brewed right here at Seven Trees. Now that's eating local!

Here's the pepper dish up close. The pasillo and the pimento peppers seen here were stuffed with sauteed hamburger, onion, garlic, corn and taco seasonings, then covered with diced canned tomatoes and baked 30-40 minutes. J then uncovered them, placed a slice of local made pepper jack cheese on each one, and baked them another 15 minutes uncovered. It was so tasty a meal we almost wept!

Strange harvet this year though. While we lost the tomatoes to blight... the pasillos and the red pimento peppers all grew like gangbusters as well as our two little watermelons. I'd say things are warming up in the northwest, when southern crops grow better than the cooler weather varieties. Although we had some nice cabbages, spinach, kholrabi, kale, carrots and the like, they did come on early. Next year we'll plant cabbages and other crops a bit later, so we can enjoy a later harvest. Plus some crops like kale taste better after a frost. It sweetens the flavor considerably. Our kale plants were so early that they may be too spent to winter over for this.

We still have a bunch of carrots, some lettuce, and spinach ready to eat now plus more successsion planted through the summer that weather permitting we might also see make it. The drying bean harvest continues, specifically Hidatsa Shield Figure Bean ... not only beautiful, but also prolific. The other dry bean we planted was Good Mother Stallard's, but they are not quite as happy where we placed them, so we'll have to keep that in mind for next season.

And of course when either of us have a moment to spare, we've been painting our small run-in barn. The weather hasn't always been cooperative, but we should get it done this week... fingers crossed... including adding the last of the 1"x6" cedar trim, and painting it as well. The colors were matched from a 1920's craftsman/bungalow house book that showed color palettes from that era, and we intend to paint and trim the house with the same colors... even the chicken house. We'd like everything to match when all is said and done. The idea of craftsman/bungalow's was that they blend in to the natural environment rather than protruding starkly from it, and while the picture doesn't convey this; the new colors have seriously made this structure "blend" much better into the nature that surrounds us here. Exactly what we wanted to happen. Once we get the chicken house painted, then we might try to do the house one wall at a time... see how much we can do in between rain, freeze and snow. Worse case is... we'll start that project next spring, once we build up our sorely depleted nest-egg again! Living and buying locally isn't always inexpensive, but it IS the right thing to do.