Sunday, October 18, 2015

Progress (?)

This week a crew came by and resurfaced the lane to the house.


During the last election period, the some of the candidates for Mayor went door to door campaigning and the one who ultimately won observed to the neighbors he was shocked at the lamentable state of the road.


Frankly, I thought it was more picturesque before.  But, I´m confident that it will now be left to quietly decay in place, so in a few years it´ll develop that patina of rusticity that appealed to me.  At least it´s basically sturdy gravel, with a light spray of asphalt to hold it all together, and not a petro-chemical engineering project.  There was a rumor that they were going to repave all along the logging road up to some hamlet or other.  V and I were appalled.  There´s quite enough traffic in tractors, trucks and cars (!) as it is.  We suspect there won´t be enough in the budget for those sorts of projects ever again.


In other news, lately the sunrise is getting later and later, but the results are spectacular.


Monday, October 12, 2015

Veg patch

The season is definitely changing - the spiders and field mice are heading indoors.  But I´ve been outside working on something resembling a veg patch.  It´s still very much in the development stage, but practical before pretty.

Raised beds.  The one on the left is planted with garlic, the one on the right is waiting for something else, perhaps onions.  My MIL told me to plant onions.  Another, smaller hugel will go behind the second retaining wall.

These are transplanted starts of lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage.  I killed the brussels sprouts before I got them in the ground.  The woman at the farmer´s market assured me these would grow without plastic or row covers.  I have my doubts, but this is all an experiment anyway.

Spinach sprouting

Garlic up!  It may be too early here.  October is the target month in the Pacific northwest, which I´m using as my guide.  I may plant out some more in November to compare.


Hugelbed in front (could it have something to do with the mice?).  The next section is lasagna-style with cardboard over the grass.  Now, I´ve realized more than pasture grass, it´s really mostly weeds like nettle, mint, blackberry, and rushes.  Probably going to have to redo later. And it needs more soil.

In next section, I took off the weedy ground cover.  There is a thick layer of thatch with most of the weed runners that can be rolled back on itself like a carpet with a lot of work and leverage.  Then lasagna layers.  I suspect I´ll have to redo this one as well because of what I discovered digging the following section.

The last 2 raised beds had the weedy layer removed and then I dug down 18 inches.  About 10 inches down there is a layer of stone ranging from the size of my head to gravel.  It´s like there´s a Roman road under there.  Underneath that it turns to heavy clay.  So even if the lasagna works as advertised on the other sections, I´m not sure roots will ever penetrate that stony layer.  Anyway, it got the remains of the stinky anaerobic compost I had left in a plastic bin, and a bunch of dry grass the neighbors let me have, then cardboard and dirt.  It will be interesting to see how each section performs.

And V took pity on the poor, struggling Mencia grape vine that looked so, so pitiful in its container and built this fab planter for it.  Eventually we´ll put up supports and drape it along the house for shade in the traditional Galician fashion.


So for now I´ll be doing battle with weeds and the invading arachnid and rodent hordes.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Fresh Fig Tart


I had never eaten figs.  When they appeared by the bushel full at the farmer´s market, it seemed time to remedy that.

While sweet and enticingly soft and juicy, I have to say they were relatively flavorless eaten fresh.  So, with most of a kilo to get through, I happened upon Rick Stein´s recipe.  I´ve seen some of Mr. Stein´s cooking and travel shows and he seems like such a delightfully jolly fellow, curious and enthusiastic about all things edible. I adapted his recipe for a lack of marscapone by substituting cream cheese with a couple of tablespoons of grated lemon zest and some homemade yogurt to fill it out.

I used Smitten Kitchen´s non-shrinking crust recipe, and I did it without so much as a food processor.  As you can see, the crust is quite overdone, but in my defense, the oven shut off at some point early in the blind- baking stage and from then on I was improvising.  Covering the crust with protective foil during final baking didn´t give results and it turns out the back of the oven is hotter than the front.  Live and learn.

V liked it well enough.  The lemon cream saved the dessert - again, even after baking, the figs themselves didn´t speak to me.  I tried some of the black variety the next week, but still wasn´t bowled over by their flavor.  So, now I have two jars of fig compote in the fridge and figs have dropped to the bottom of the fruit tree list.