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Posts tagged as 'random thoughts'
Even though Billy sometimes doesn't know what's growing in our vegetable beds at all times, he's very likely to correct you if you call this place Novella's Farm or Novella's Garden. "That's *Bill* and Novella's Farm," he'll say. And he's right. I couldn't do half the things I do without him. It was with a big heart and much joy that we celebrated our 11th anniversary by riding our bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge. Yup, two Oakland hicks tackling the Big City. Of course, like everything we do, there were some disasters. Like when we tried to ride our bikes on the highway. Enough cars honked and yelled that we figured out we were total dumb-asses. Bicyclists should really ride through the Presidio, or snake along Chrissy Field and get to the entrance of the bridge that way.
The bridge is a dream of red and blue. How can it be so perfect? 
We took a ferry back to SF from Sausalito then another ferry to Oakland. It was nice to get a break from the farm, my farm hand partner at my side.
Tagged as random thoughts | 4 Comments » | Continue 
Let's get this out of the way first:The cutest goats ever. I started milking Bebe, too, just to get her used to my human hands. Those babies are getting some yummy, creamy, sweet-tasting milk! Lucky little devils. 
Now then, onto pot pies. Bill has a joke from some dumb movie where he says, "woman, make me a pot pie." For Easter, instead of clobbering him like I usually do, I actually made one. First I followed the dough recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall's opus: Meat. His was for a kidney pie, but the crust--made with my piggies' lard and a touch of butter--was thick enough to pour in liquid without fear. 
Then I chopped onions, picked celery (!) and herbs from the garden, and threw them together with the turkey stock and meaty bits. Hugh told me to add a decoration on the crust, so I crafted a very jankity nest with two eggs--see them in the corner there? Then I sealed her up, baked for an hour, and there you have it: turkey pot pie.
Tagged as random thoughts | 4 Comments » | Continue
Hi, just a quick note that I'm giving a talk at the Ecology Center in Berkeley tomorrow (Saturday) at 7pm. It's a fundraiser for City Slicker Farms. Despite fear of vegetarian backlash, I'm bringing slides of my meat projects at the farm. Any locals out there, I'd love to meet you in person!! Here's the blurb (I'm not mentioned, but I'll be speaking after Nathan): Ferment Change! A Benefit for West Oakland's City Slicker FarmsCome join us for a fermented food feast and celebration of Urban Agriculture to Benefit West Oakland's City Slicker Farms "growing fresh and affordable produce for West Oakland". There will be a presentation on the work of City Slicker Farms by founder Willow Roesenthal, a slide show of international urban agricultural by UCB lecturer Nathan McClintock, live music by Zoyres Eastern European Wild Ferment, and a live ferment workshop. Bring a fermented food and get entered in a drawing to win Homebrew, Sauerkraut, Plant Starts, and Gift Certificates to the Berkeley Farmer's Market.Time: 7pm - 10pm.Location: Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way, Berkeley.Cost: A donation of $10-30 sliding scale is requested, no one turned away due to lack of funds..Info: 510-548-2220 x233, max@ecologycenter.org.
Tagged as random thoughts | 3 Comments » | Continue
To Archie we had to bid a farewell. Last night I ate his organs, today I'll probably make turkey pot pies, and Friday I'm bringing marinated turkey breasts to my friend's house for dinner. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As you may recall, Archie the male turkey, a beautiful Royal Palm, gobbled enthusiastically. Maybe too enthusiastically. In the past week he made some kind of noise every five minutes. He would stand on our back porch and gobble at the top of his throat to the entire neighborhood. He would preen next to the fence and yell at every passer-by on our street. On Sundays this was very loud, as there's usually a soccer match down the street. And the mornings, he would gobble in the morning until I came out to feed him. Finally, two days ago, as I was in goaty bliss, our next door neighbors told me the turkey was driving them crazy. On an urban farm, neighbor relations are critical. If they complain, I could be cited, and who knows, they might take my animals away. 
So I boiled a big pot of water. Then I got out the tobacco, burned a chunk of it, and grabbed Archie for a death hug. Novella in the garden with a pair of pruners. He made a hissing noise, pecked me, and then his head was off. I dipped him in the hot water, and pulled off his gorgeously and soft feathers. Underneath he had softer white feathers. Then alabaster skin, puffy with fat. In his crop were chunks of corn and greens. He was the most healthy turkey I've ever plucked. Underneath his ...
Tagged as random thoughts | 11 Comments » | Continue
The birth of two beautiful baby girl (pretty sure) goats, today around 4pm. They don't have names yet, but since they were born on St. Patty's day, I think they need Irish names. Please send suggestions. More info about the birth--and photos--to come.
Tagged as random thoughts | 8 Comments » | Continue
Dudes. I bought a used pressure canner! In case you don't know, a pressure canner is different from a pressure cooker, which is a smaller pot used to quickly cook beans and stews. Pressure canners are usually much larger--my behemoth comfortably holds eight quart jars. Betty MacDonald, author of the sometimes funny homesteading opus, The Egg and I, famously hated them. In one of the chapters from Egg, she writes: "Canning is a mental quirk just like any form of hoarding. First you plant too much of everything in the garden; then you waste hours and hours in the boiling sun cultivating then you buy a pressure cooker and can too much of everything so that it won't be wasted. Frankly I don't like home-canned anything, and I spent all of my spare time reading up on botulism..."To her I say, girl, you've never tried my dry-farmed canned tomatoes. But like Betty, I do worry about botulism, and that's where the pressure canner comes into play. 
The beauty of a pressure canner lies within this formula: PV=nRT where R is a constant and n has something to do with quantities, pressure (P) is conversely related to temperature (T). When pressure goes up, temperature goes up too. Canning jars in a pressure canner increases the pressure and thus increases the boiling temperature. Harold McGee in his bible, On Food and Cooking, says it can reach 250 degrees F in a pressure canner. This higher temperature effectively kills all the spores which cause botulism in the jar. It also means canning my tomatoes this summer will use much less energy, the water bath method that I've used in ...
Tagged as random thoughts | 10 Comments » | Continue
Lovely article in the NYTimes today about people growing fruit trees in their backyards. The only thing they forgot to mention is how, in addition to being edible and local, the blooms and fruit of backyard trees are terribly beautiful, too. Here's my apple tree in all her glory. See also a graft (King David apple) that may have taken!! 
Tagged as random thoughts | No Comments » | Continue
I got it. The dreaded flu: fever, cough, muscle aches. Here it is spring and I have hay to move, mulch to spread, crops to plant, hooves to trim, stalls to muck out, a milking stanchion to build (goat kids are due March 30!) and all I can manage is to watch my farm from out my window. So frustrating. I also missed the bee symposium and the California rare fruit growers meeting this past weekend. Lucky for me, my rare fruit growing angel sent me a link to a video of the meeting!! Thank you Spidra! The other thing I’ve been able to do is order goat supplies. I found a great website, Hoegger's, where I ordered, from the comfort of my sickbed, all manner of goat-related items. Goats are prone to various kinds of worms, so I bought a natural de-wormer, made with Worm Wood, Gentian, Fennel, Psyllium, & Quassia. They also had buckets of goat minerals—calcium, phosphorus, salt and magnesium, selenium, and vitamin E. I picked up a kid bottle and some colostrum in case Bebe has a million babies. Finally, I got a bag of kelp in bulk—I’ve noticed the goats love wakame, but at $5 a bag, it was breaking me, so this should do the trick. In other goat care madness, I made them their first batch of sauerkraut. My goater friend Jim tells me goats love the stuff—it’s full of B vitamins—we’ll see how Bilbo and Bebe feel about it, they don’t seem like terribly adventurous eaters. P.S. Here’s an article I wrote for SFGate about a foodie who doesn’t have much money, yet manages to eat well by growing her own, dumpster diving, and buying wisely.
Tagged as random thoughts | 9 Comments » | Continue
I have these genius friends who can sew and knit. They get together every Monday to craft. One lady, D, makes all her own clothes! And they look really great, not all falling apart like a certain pair of paisley shorts I made in HomeEc 28 years ago. I work Mondays, so I miss craft night, but recently there was so much craft in the air, they held a special night on Friday. I accepted the invite to join them with a little trepidation. W said if I wasn't crafty, I could just bring my taxes, or balance my checkbook. Little does she know I do that less often than knit a scarf. But I knew exactly what I would do. 
There have been these hanging bags of olives in our mud room for months now. They were starting to get oppressive, these salty bags of procrastination. My head would crash into them on occasion, and then I'd have salt hair for the rest of the day. I had potted some up in olive oil--but honestly, how many olives can one couple eat? Also, I noticed that some of the olives tended to be a little too soft so I didn't want to give them to people as gifts. But then I remembered: olive tapenade. It doesn't matter if the olives are soft if you just blend them up into a paste! So an hour before craft night, I untied the olive bags, washed them of their salt, and set off to be, for just one night, an olive pitter from heaven. 
While M and D worked a sewing stations, I sat at the kitchen table and peeled ...
Tagged as random thoughts | 1 Comment » | Continue
As promised, here's a blow-by-blow of Archie and Edith's adventures in procreation. First off, Archie is constantly preening and puffed up. He seems to be in a permanent state of arousal. When he sees Edith, when a chicken walks by, when I go outside to feed them, when the goats pass by him, and yes, even when he sees the rabbit. Hell, a sparrow could fly by and he'd puff up. It's really Edith who decides when to do the nasty. She will squat down, sort of like a chicken, but laying with her breast on the ground. Then Archie does some puffing and huffing (literally, he makes this airy gulping noise) and circles around her. Then he stands on her wings. 
It looks kind of painful, this big puffed up bird trying to balance on her delicate wings. You know how they say factory farmed turkeys can't 'do it'? It totally makes sense to me now. Because it's a balancing act really. And it requires space and time. Ok, then Archie pecks Edith's head for awhile. Love pecks, I guess. Then he manuevers around and gets her tail up. He looks pretty funny doing this part. Like a nasty humper. He drapes his wings along her side, and Edith makes some cute chirping noises. Interesting fact that turkeys and chickens don't have proper penii, they just rub their duct onto the female's oviduct. 
Edith's eggs look similar to a chicken egg, but larger and with a more rounded bottom--can you tell which one is hers? 
Tagged as random thoughts | 3 Comments » | Continue
Even though Billy sometimes doesn't know what's growing in our vegetable beds at all times, he's very likely to correct you if you call this place Novella's Farm or Novella's Garden. "That's *Bill* and Novella's Farm," he'll say. And he's right. I couldn't do half the things I do without him. It was with a big heart and much joy that we celebrated our 11th anniversary by riding our bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge. Yup, two Oakland hicks tackling the Big City. Of course, like everything we do, there were some disasters. Like when we tried to ride our bikes on the highway. Enough cars honked and yelled that we figured out we were total dumb-asses. Bicyclists should really ride through the Presidio, or snake along Chrissy Field and get to the entrance of the bridge that way.
The bridge is a dream of red and blue. How can it be so perfect? 
We took a ferry back to SF from Sausalito then another ferry to Oakland. It was nice to get a break from the farm, my farm hand partner at my side.
Tagged as random thoughts | 4 Comments » | Continue 
Let's get this out of the way first:The cutest goats ever. I started milking Bebe, too, just to get her used to my human hands. Those babies are getting some yummy, creamy, sweet-tasting milk! Lucky little devils. 
Now then, onto pot pies. Bill has a joke from some dumb movie where he says, "woman, make me a pot pie." For Easter, instead of clobbering him like I usually do, I actually made one. First I followed the dough recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall's opus: Meat. His was for a kidney pie, but the crust--made with my piggies' lard and a touch of butter--was thick enough to pour in liquid without fear. 
Then I chopped onions, picked celery (!) and herbs from the garden, and threw them together with the turkey stock and meaty bits. Hugh told me to add a decoration on the crust, so I crafted a very jankity nest with two eggs--see them in the corner there? Then I sealed her up, baked for an hour, and there you have it: turkey pot pie.
Tagged as random thoughts | 4 Comments » | Continue 
To Archie we had to bid a farewell. Last night I ate his organs, today I'll probably make turkey pot pies, and Friday I'm bringing marinated turkey breasts to my friend's house for dinner. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As you may recall, Archie the male turkey, a beautiful Royal Palm, gobbled enthusiastically. Maybe too enthusiastically. In the past week he made some kind of noise every five minutes. He would stand on our back porch and gobble at the top of his throat to the entire neighborhood. He would preen next to the fence and yell at every passer-by on our street. On Sundays this was very loud, as there's usually a soccer match down the street. And the mornings, he would gobble in the morning until I came out to feed him. Finally, two days ago, as I was in goaty bliss, our next door neighbors told me the turkey was driving them crazy. On an urban farm, neighbor relations are critical. If they complain, I could be cited, and who knows, they might take my animals away. 
So I boiled a big pot of water. Then I got out the tobacco, burned a chunk of it, and grabbed Archie for a death hug. Novella in the garden with a pair of pruners. He made a hissing noise, pecked me, and then his head was off. I dipped him in the hot water, and pulled off his gorgeously and soft feathers. Underneath he had softer white feathers. Then alabaster skin, puffy with fat. In his crop were chunks of corn and greens. He was the most healthy turkey I've ever plucked. Underneath his ...
Tagged as random thoughts | 11 Comments » | Continue 
The birth of two beautiful baby girl (pretty sure) goats, today around 4pm. They don't have names yet, but since they were born on St. Patty's day, I think they need Irish names. Please send suggestions. More info about the birth--and photos--to come.
Tagged as random thoughts | 8 Comments » | Continue 
Dudes. I bought a used pressure canner! In case you don't know, a pressure canner is different from a pressure cooker, which is a smaller pot used to quickly cook beans and stews. Pressure canners are usually much larger--my behemoth comfortably holds eight quart jars. Betty MacDonald, author of the sometimes funny homesteading opus, The Egg and I, famously hated them. In one of the chapters from Egg, she writes: "Canning is a mental quirk just like any form of hoarding. First you plant too much of everything in the garden; then you waste hours and hours in the boiling sun cultivating then you buy a pressure cooker and can too much of everything so that it won't be wasted. Frankly I don't like home-canned anything, and I spent all of my spare time reading up on botulism..."To her I say, girl, you've never tried my dry-farmed canned tomatoes. But like Betty, I do worry about botulism, and that's where the pressure canner comes into play. 
The beauty of a pressure canner lies within this formula: PV=nRT where R is a constant and n has something to do with quantities, pressure (P) is conversely related to temperature (T). When pressure goes up, temperature goes up too. Canning jars in a pressure canner increases the pressure and thus increases the boiling temperature. Harold McGee in his bible, On Food and Cooking, says it can reach 250 degrees F in a pressure canner. This higher temperature effectively kills all the spores which cause botulism in the jar. It also means canning my tomatoes this summer will use much less energy, the water bath method that I've used in ...
Tagged as random thoughts | 10 Comments » | Continue 
Lovely article in the NYTimes today about people growing fruit trees in their backyards. The only thing they forgot to mention is how, in addition to being edible and local, the blooms and fruit of backyard trees are terribly beautiful, too. Here's my apple tree in all her glory. See also a graft (King David apple) that may have taken!! 
Tagged as random thoughts | No Comments » | Continue 
There have been these hanging bags of olives in our mud room for months now. They were starting to get oppressive, these salty bags of procrastination. My head would crash into them on occasion, and then I'd have salt hair for the rest of the day. I had potted some up in olive oil--but honestly, how many olives can one couple eat? Also, I noticed that some of the olives tended to be a little too soft so I didn't want to give them to people as gifts. But then I remembered: olive tapenade. It doesn't matter if the olives are soft if you just blend them up into a paste! So an hour before craft night, I untied the olive bags, washed them of their salt, and set off to be, for just one night, an olive pitter from heaven. 
While M and D worked a sewing stations, I sat at the kitchen table and peeled ...
Tagged as random thoughts | 1 Comment » | Continue 
As promised, here's a blow-by-blow of Archie and Edith's adventures in procreation. First off, Archie is constantly preening and puffed up. He seems to be in a permanent state of arousal. When he sees Edith, when a chicken walks by, when I go outside to feed them, when the goats pass by him, and yes, even when he sees the rabbit. Hell, a sparrow could fly by and he'd puff up. It's really Edith who decides when to do the nasty. She will squat down, sort of like a chicken, but laying with her breast on the ground. Then Archie does some puffing and huffing (literally, he makes this airy gulping noise) and circles around her. Then he stands on her wings. 
It looks kind of painful, this big puffed up bird trying to balance on her delicate wings. You know how they say factory farmed turkeys can't 'do it'? It totally makes sense to me now. Because it's a balancing act really. And it requires space and time. Ok, then Archie pecks Edith's head for awhile. Love pecks, I guess. Then he manuevers around and gets her tail up. He looks pretty funny doing this part. Like a nasty humper. He drapes his wings along her side, and Edith makes some cute chirping noises. Interesting fact that turkeys and chickens don't have proper penii, they just rub their duct onto the female's oviduct. 
Edith's eggs look similar to a chicken egg, but larger and with a more rounded bottom--can you tell which one is hers? 
Tagged as random thoughts | 3 Comments » | Continue