Category: Eric

No, I didn’t get hair plugs…

Just before it started to rain on Monday afternoon, I climbed into my unproductive MacIntosh apple tree (which regularly blooms with scab — a fungus infection — in late July, whereupon all the young apples fall off the tree) and started grafting scions of other apple varieties onto some of the limbs. Last year an orchardist suggested top-working the tree instead of cutting it down because it rarely produced edible fruit.

We inherited this particular tree along with five other semi-dwarf varieties (two Rome Beauty, Northern Spy, Macoun, and Cortland) with the property, all about twenty years old at the time we moved in. Besides the MacIntosh the other trees, despite our utter inexperience and ineptitude tending an orchard, regularly bear prolific quantities of beautiful fruit. We managed to press fifty gallons of cider last year, and we still left bushels of apples on the trees because we just couldn’t fit all of them onto the truck to take them to our local press (our sheep, cows, and the wild deer were very happy to help with the rest).
Continue reading “Top Work” →

Last Sunday the the weather (overcast and cool, but not raining) and my schedule (no planned activity) allowed me to dig my main garden in preparation for spring planting. This is a critical beginning to the gardening year because digging fluffs the soil, gets those microbes converting the generous amounts of organic matter (read: cow poop) into available nitrogen, and removes the weeds that got established in the long autumn demise into winter last year.
Continue reading “Stick A Fork In It, It’s Done” →

Now that it’s after Candlemas, things in our hoophouse are really taking off.

Candlemas is celebrated as “Groundhog Day” in the U.S, and is thought to be the ancient marking of the point between Winter solstice and the Vernal equinox; according to Wikipedia, in France, “Candlemas (French: La Chandeleur) is celebrated with crêpes, which must be eaten only after eight p.m. If the cook can flip a crêpe while holding a coin in the other hand, the family is assured of prosperity throughout the coming year…” Did you and Valerie flip your crêpes, Bro?

One of the hardiest of the greens we grow through the winter are these cute little tufts of buttery soft green called “mâche” or “corn salad” which are starting to bolt in the early spring heat. (Our unheated hoophouse will often get 40 to 50 °F above the outside temp, which now can be a blazing 40 or 50 °F at mid-day — you do the math…)
Continue reading “Mâche Pit” →

OK, so I DID start this process by making butter out of fresh cream, but that’s not absolutely necessary.

[In case you are interested how that would work, I’ll quickly describe what I did. Pick up a bunch of fresh cream, innoculate with a little mesophilic culture (the “Flora Danica” mix seems to deliver the best flavor, in my tests, but you could even use a little organic cultured sour cream or creme fraiche because they use the same cultures), and let sit at around 80 °F for 24 hours, afterwhich it should have thickened slightly, but not solidified, and start to smell like sour cream. Shake/whip the cream *at room temperature* until it peaks, then breaks (this could take 15 to 30 minutes) forming bits of butter that start clumping together. Pour off and save separate liquid — this is your buttermilk. Wash the butter grains in cool water until the water stays clear, then knead into a large mass, set aside in the refrigerator.]
Continue reading “Better Butter Biscuits” →

A friend’s recent birthday dinner featured Boudin of Chicken Livers, a lovely poached sausage based on chicken livers with toasted walnuts and shallots (from American Charcuterie by Victoria Wise which is a terrific book for anyone interested in making their own sausages, terrines, patés, and other meat products). In addition to these complementary ingredients, a hunk of “pork fatback” was called for — half a pound to be exact. To obtain this fat back, I extracted a hunk of badly butchered pork loin from the freezer, a refugee from a “Pork Processing Workshop” that I organized last October.

(“Badly butchered” because there were newbies wielding the knives breaking down two whole pigs that were meant to end up mostly as sausage, so the loin was not as plump and round as it could have been. Otherwise the meat was very good — young, tender, and sweet, having been raised organically and fed largely on beets for the last month of its life.)
Continue reading “Pork5Ways” →