Congee and critters

Look at this lovely use of an old laying hen! The soup above is called congee. Also known as jook and chao ga, it's an Asian version of comforting chicken soup. My personal recipe is this:

One soup chicken

One 'stalk' of lemongrass

Three 2" pieces of fresh ginger

1.5 cups Jasmine rice

Cilantro

Lime

Salt & pepper

Put an old laying hen (previously butchered) into a soup kettle and cover with water.

Chop the lemongrass into 1.5" pieces.

Scrape most of the peel off the ginger and add.

Add salt to taste, maybe 1 tablespoon.

Simmer 24 hours on the back burner, not letting it come to a boil.

Take out the chicken and remove meat from bones.

Strain out lemon grass and ginger.

Put chicken meat back in pot and add rice.

Bring to a quick boil, then simmer until rice is porridgey.

Salt & pepper to taste.

Garnish bowls of congee with chopped cilantro and squeeze a wedge of lime into it. Heavenly!

This kind of soup can't be canned, so I freeze it with a squeeze of lime and a sprinkle of cilantro in each container.

Magnus is taking advantage of chilly nights by the woodstove. The squash are in curing before being stored in the pantry for the winter. They like a week or so of warm temps, then they will last for months in the cool dry pantry on a wire rack. The Uncle David Dakota dessert squash are all they're cracked up to be. Highly recommended!

Gemini is obviously starving to death, and needed to come up on the back porch to beg for dried apple slices through the kitchen window.
After a hard day's work at Seven Trees, humans and critters need to relax.....Gemini doesn't really like beer, but he can't help being nosey.

Busy bountiful summer!

The new pullets have just started laying. We had to hurry up and add some nest boxes to their coop, since the older hens don't share their house too well.

Coop with a view! This Welsummer was a little perturbed by the sudden appearance of 'air conditioning'.
Much better! The young gals are getting the hang of laying now, but we did find a few eggs in the barnyard this morning. Practice make perfect!

Here's a bit of the squash patch. You can just make out the yellow yardstick in the middle of this jungle. The vines literally grow more every day, and we have to chop them back from the melons, cukes, beans, maters & peppers that are trying to hold out against the onslaught.

The warm summer is good for the few melons we're growing this year. Not quite ripe yet, but close. This is a Blacktail Mountain watermelon, developed in Idaho and good for cooler summers.

We totalled up our harvests so far this year, just to see how we're doing....

1lb asparagus
27lbs assorted lettuce
3lbs mint/lemon balm/catnip
3lbs nettles
15lbs chard
27lbs kohlrabi
14lbs carrots
6lbs onions
15lbs tomatoes
32lbs cukes
17lbs broccoli
116lbs taters
25lbs blackberries
20lbs green beans
50lbs beets

1340 eggs
59 heads garlic
4 heads cabbage
28 pints pickled beets
21 quarts green beans
5 pints relish
5 pints sweet pickles

Still to come:
-onions
-carrots
-squash
-beets
-maters
-peppers
-melons
-chard
-berries
-apples
-cabbage
-broccoli
-kohlrabi

-lettuce

We're frantically watering, harvesting, processing, and even starting some veggies for a late fall harvest. Maybe we should follow Newt's example and find a hidden nook to relax in. Here she is, tucked behind a stump in the barnyard. When the cows noticed me taking pictures, they came over to ham it up. Newt high-tailed it for some other hidey-hole.....

Weekend Harvest

This weekend as well as more house painting, we did some garden harvesting. The vegetables are very happy this year, especially our Uncle David's Dakota Dessert Squash. It's muscling out everything near it as you can see!

Squash blossoms closer up. The plants seem picture perfect this year.

Got beets? We sure do! This week we'll be processing and pickling many beets. Estimate is about 40 pounds worth this particular harvest.

First storage potato crop brought in as well, and curing before going in the back pantry. One of these days we hope to add an old fashioned cold cupboard to better preserve things and for longer storage life.

Pickling onions, cukes and dill as well as some carrots not shown all went into a batch of fridge pickles.

We used this Refridgerator Dill Pickle recipe and in as little as 2 -4 days this jar of goodness will be ready to eat... Mm-mm!

The tomatoes appear to have a new resident... can you spot her/him in the picture?

Here Fergus is trying to figure out if he should be jealous of "Tame Chicken". She's one of our new hens and seems to love people, running over whenever we are in the area. Naturally she gets special privileges, such as hanging out with us in the yard.

Or even better, lap time with hugs.

All kinds of busy!

Ruby chard is one of our go-to veggies here at Seven Trees. It makes a nice salad green when young, and cooks up tasty once it matures. It grows well in cold weather and is slower to bolt than spinach in warm weather. Usually we freeze the surplus for winter after a quick chop & blanch. But those crunchy, juicy red stems are also excellent made into relish. Here's a recipe we found online that is well worth trying if you have a lot of chard in your garden....

Swiss Chard Relish

2 lbs (4 cups) swiss chard stalks only
1 lb (2 cups) onions
1 lb (2 cups) celery
1/2 lb (1 cup) red peppers
2 cups vinegar
2 cups sugar
1 tsp dry mustard
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp curry powder
1/4 cup corn starch
1/4 cup salt

Finely chop vegetables, mix together and set aside. Bring to a boil vinegar, sugar, mustard, turmeric and curry powder. Remove ¾ cup of liquid and mix with cornstarch. Set aside. Add salt & vegetables to remaining liquid and simmer until tender stirring often. Add corn starch mixture and stir continually until thick. Place in prepared jars and seal. (We do 10 minutes in a water bath canner.)

And now for the 'busy' part.....

We've gotten a first coat of paint on most of the house now. Funny how painting always takes much longer than you plan for. But it looks great and will do wonders protecting this 89 year-old tiny farmhouse.
The prep work is half the battle...brushing off webs & yellow jacket nests, a soapy scrub down, caulking any gaps or holes... Lots of people pressure wash their houses, but with one this old, and cedar sided, pressure washing can drive water up into the siding and cause rot inside the walls. It's also important to leave the bottom run of siding uncaulked so the walls can breathe. Old houses have their own needs, but when you do it right, they far outlast new construction. The last time this house was inspected, it was said to have an effective age of only 15 years!

Here's rooster, known as #1. We're hoping he outgrows his teenage rowdiness and has some manners with the ladies. Right now he's still a bit uncouth, but so handsome we'd like to use him to breed our next batch of chicks from. If he doesn't turn out to be a gentleman, he'll go in the stockpot and we'll keep trying. He's fairly friendly though, and likes cuddling. You can tell Stew would much rather have him as broth....

Our painting vacation got rained out a couple of days. Almost every house critter is in this photo. Cats, dogs & parrot make for a lively household when they're all in the same room, not to mention the humans!

New visitors to Seven Trees are a pair of cedar waxwings. They aren't rare to the area, but we've never seen them here before. I think they're trying to nest in the apple tree behind this maple, but our painting activity is making them nervous. Hopefully they will stick it out til we're done. It's always nice to know we're making good habitat for native birds. We also have a pair of swallows which are most likely violet-green swallows nesting in a birdhouse on one of the front fir trees. They eat flying insects, so they should help keep the pest population down this summer.

The garden is coming along great. So far we're harvesting carrots, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, chard, onions, garlic, kohlrabi, a cuke and one tasty Stupice tomato. The squash are going gangbusters, with the Uncle David Dakota Dessert squash doing its best to take over the garden. We are also growing our old favorite, Sweet Dumpling Delicata. So tasty, a great keeper, and one squash makes 2 nice serivings. We snuck a few Sugar Pie pumpkins in, and they are starting to ramble all over the garden as well. Looks like a good summer for warm weather crops.

Garden planning - 2008

We've finally completed the annual agony of poring over seed catalogs, last year's garden map, and climate change predictions. Here is one new squash variety we'll try this year. Last summer was very unkind to the Cucurbita family, and the Potimarron & Long Island Cheese squashes didn't produce or ripen well. So this season's strategy is to plant cold-tolerant varieties and hope they can adapt if summer turns hot, or at least mature before the heat hits. (If you want to read more about what may be headed our way climate-wise in the PNW, the Climate Impacts Group is a great resource.)

So let me introduce Uncle David's Dakota Dessert squash from Fedco Seeds:

(95 days) Cucurbita maxima Buttercup squash at its best. This outstanding strain which David Podoll calls “the original buttercup” has been in his family for 70 years. They’ve been selecting it for 40 years, crossing it with hubbards and other maximas, primarily for color, taste, sweetness, and vigor and hardiness in cold weather, but also for thick flesh, small seed cavities and higher productivity, while maintaining the buttercup look. The results show. Our five hills produced 18 ripe squash averaging 4.5 lb. The Podoll family bake it into pies without using any other sweetener. But this is also a versatile main dish squash, with all the character that makes buttercup a New England favorite. And it is one rugged buttercup, withstanding several cold summers and all those temperature extremes in each of the past four years without skipping a beat, and persevering to produce a lot of squash.

Should be easy to spot under all the squash vines with such dramatic coloring. And the 95-day growth period is a lot better than the 110 days of the Long Island Cheese squash we tried. With a little soil preheating via black plastic, and being planted on a manure/straw pile, I have high hopes for this one. Our other winter squash choice is a repeat from last year, the Sweet Dumpling bush delicata. Mainly because we like delicatas, and have seed left over.

Otherwise, Seven Trees is still in project-planning mode, as well as a shift change at work. There are starting to be rumbles and whisperings of another summer shindig to celebrate Lughnasadh, a Celtic first-fruits festival.