Spring Fruit Clafoutis

Happy April, Happy Easter, Happy Fruit Desserts! 'Tis time, now, for regular bakings of crumbles, crisps, cobblers, and clafoutis - not to mention buckles, slumps, grunts, and pandowdy. Oh, don't let all those terms stop you from making something with spring fruit. Crisps and crumbles are cooked fruit topped with some sort of streusel, cobblers are baked fruit topped with biscuits, buckles and slumps are fruit-and-batter cakes that sink after cooking and on the plate; Clafoutis can be considered in that same category. 

Clafoutis is a French term which, strictly speaking, should only be used when the fruit is cherry. The French say that if you use any other fruit, this dessert should be called a flaugnarde. But again, why let terms stop you? Just make a mess of batter and spring fruit and call it Buster, for all I care. I just say Clafoutis (Claw-foo-TEE) because it's fun.

Our rhubarb is coming up nicely, so I trimmed off all the largest stalks to make this cake today. It only gave me a scant two cups, however, and you need six cups of fruit for this recipe. No matter; I added in a cup of blueberries and three cups of strawberries. Delicious!

One rhubarb plant after trimming - more stalks will come up soon

You know not to eat rhubarb leaves, right? The leaves are very high in oxalic acid, which can cause kidney problems in humans. However you'd have to eat something like 11 pounds of rhubarb leaves to put your life in jeopardy. Still, it seems wise to stay away. Just enjoy the tart stalks.

I use the recipe that we got from the Apple Farm - which is below - but there are a million different recipes out there. It's a very custardy cake batter, with lots of liquid. I am enjoying making them in my cast iron pan, but you can use a pie plate if you prefer. 

I don't make the sauce, just serve it with whipped cream, whipped creme fraiche, or ice cream.

We've been super busy here at Poppy Corners. First, livestock news. One of our chickens died of natural causes this past week. Ginny, the Rhode Island Red who had been not-quite-right for a long time, was found dead in a nesting box. She was a sweet chicken, but had been sick on and off for the past year and had not laid in all that time. I just couldn't bear to cull her because, at one time, she had followed me around the garden and sat in my lap, while she was recuperating. She died as quietly as she lived. She was a very unassuming chicken.

And, we opened the hive (after the swarm) to a box still overly-full of bees - so many bees - I think they may swarm yet again. Plus, one comb had been built improperly and slid right off its bar onto the floor of the hive, in a pleated mess. So, we got some honey. That's the good news. The bad news is that the bees were seriously pissed at us being in there and one gave me a jab on the leg (she flew up my jeans to my knee). I immediately took Benadryl, grabbed my epi-pen, and stayed horizontal for a solid hour, hoping the Benadryl would kick in before the throat-closing would. And it did. I made it through without the epi-pen. Hooray! However I realized that I have, because of this allergy, become a timid beekeeper, and that is no help to Tom whatsoever. So, we are going to trade some time with my dad - he'll come help Tom when the hive needs seeing to, and Tom will go help him when his hives need work. That will make me feel much better about the whole situation. Neither Tom nor I am ready to get rid of the hive - we just can't imagine it here without bees.

And, Tom spent his entire spring break helping me (well, I was helping him, truth be told; he did the lion's share of the work) build some set pieces for Kate's theater company. It was an interesting project. We made three 4x8 Hollywood panels to be used as walls, and one other 4x8 panel with a working door. We purchased the door pre-hung at Urban Ore, it is hollow, but this one panel is still very heavy. Dad helped us with some Sketch-Up plans, and allowed the use of his tools and shop for the cutting of the wood. After everything was cut, it was just a matter of assembling, which took us a few days. In the coming week, I'll be painting these pieces. We enjoyed learning how to do this and feel even more confident now of our building skills.

And can I just say? A husband who says 'yes' to your every project and finds it a learning process and actually enjoys it even though he has very little experience in said project??? Priceless. Tom's a Prince, for reals.

Lastly, I've potted up all the tomatoes and peppers into gallon cans. They are growing like gangbusters in the 'greenhouse,' after all the mid-80-degree days we've had here. This week, I need to transplant basil into the beds, and sow some collard seeds. 

Mites in the Hive

Sorry for the radio silence over the weekend, I just couldn't seem to get everything done. Adam had the regional Odyssey of the Mind competition (they won first place in their division!), then a dress rehearsal at the Conservatory; I had a massive take-home test to work through, plus some memorization for a lab practical (I think it went ok yesterday). Plus the dreaded late-winter colds are making their way through our house, and on top of that, it was raining. So that's why we didn't get a Weekly Walkthrough video up. This coming weekend is looking pretty busy too, as Adam has his first solo recital Saturday night, but we'll do our best to get something up on the YouTube. We need to go pick up compost, which might be a fun ride-along for you guys.

I'm starting to get more into the rhythm of my new schedule. Monday and Wednesday are just for school - I'm there all day both days, basically. Tuesdays and Thursdays are for homework (and often Friday too), though on Tuesday I also try to get caught up on cleaning and cooking. The garden projects get done in between all this stuff. I'm usually out like a light every night at 9:30 pm; there's not much time for reading or TV (though we have been keeping up with the new Planet Earth, it's awesome!), and I haven't been on a real hike in a week.

This morning I decided to spend some time outside before I got the grunt work done; we're supposed to have a stretch of seven days without rain, and temps into the low 70's tomorrow, so a good time to pot up tomatoes. I got everything ready to go, and went to get some water from the rain barrel, which took me past the beehive, where I stopped abruptly in my tracks when I saw a smattering of dead bees on the landing board.

Damn it. I expected to have some dead brood, because we broke up some herky winter comb when we inspected the hive last week, but did not expect any dead adults. So I took a closer look, and that's when I saw the varroa mite (picture above, the mite is the red circle on the bee's leg). Double damn it. I've never seen evidence of mites this early in the hive. But we did see an awful lot of drone brood last week during our check, and mites especially like to procreate in drone brood. 

So, deep breath, on to treatment, a necessity if the hive is to grow and get strong over the summer. It's just not warm enough for formic acid, which does better at summer temperatures (this is what I use in the early fall). Too late for oxalic acid, because that doesn't work on the mites in the brood, and there's already so much brood and that's where this problem began.That left Apiguard, which is made of thyme. Apiguard needs temps over 60 to work, and the warm temps on tap for this week are perfect timing. The downside is that it makes the honey taste like thyme, but we already harvested the honey we are planning to take this year, and the bees will manage. Some of them will die due to the fumes of the thymol, but that's better than all of them dying due to mites.

All these treatments are made for Langstroth hives, so I have to jerry-rig them for our top bar hive. I waited until the sun hit the hive and then I opened her up. Right away the bees were pissed. I had to make several journeys around the yard to lose some aggressive bees, but I got the little dish of thymol into the back half of the hive, hoping both worker bees and nurse bees would walk through it. I took a popsicle stick and smeared some gel on the bottom board in a couple of different places. No one was happy, least of all me, but hopefully this will mitigate any mite problems we have. I'll have to reapply in two weeks.

Fuming but resigned (fuming because LORD I HATE MITES, and resigned because I did all I could do), I set myself to transplanting tomatoes. Every thirty minutes I had to go in a knead the bread, and the combination of methodically removing the tiny seedlings and firmly patting them into their new homes, and rhythmically stretching and pulling the warm dough, got me back into my happy place, mostly.

The peppers aren't ready to transplant, and I want to start a second batch of those anyway, so they'll stay in trays for a while yet, but at least the tomatoes are potted up and happy. I found myself saying things aloud like 'good girl!' whenever I pulled out a particularly strongly-rooted tomato. Are all gardeners this way? I imagine so. We do get awfully attached.

I love these compostable plastic cups for the in-between potting stage. They're the same size, basically, as plastic four-inchers. In another couple of weeks these little guys will go into larger pots. I'll keep them under lights at night for now, but when they get larger, they'll go into the greenhouse. Meanwhile outside during the day as long as it's above 50 and sunny. That way they'll be hardened off when it's time to plant them.

I've pretty much decided to plant the entire summer garden in tomatoes and peppers. I'll do cucumbers in the new fire-rings; I'll do bush beans and basil in pots. That's really all we need. I'll skip melons this year, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to plant corn anyway (it takes up so much space for so little yield), so this will work. Then over next winter, I am not going to plant crops in the raised beds. Instead I'm going cover crop everywhere, in order to build up nutrients in the soil and provide organic matter. Probably clover for nitrogen fixing, mixed with winter wheat to provide both grain and weed-free straw (I'm having a terrible time finding good straw). As for winter greens, I can plant those in pots and move them around to catch the best sun. We can do without peas for one year and buy frozen at the store. This is my current plan, but of course it could all change - stay tuned!

Now I must face the music and go clean the house, then knuckle down to my studies. How are your tomatoes coming along? If you have bees, have you had to treat in the spring? Let me know about your garden in the comments!

Weekly Walkthrough: The first hive check of the year

This week's walkthrough is up; we decided to take advantage of a dry, sunny day and open the hive for the first time this year. We're always anxious to see how the bees fared over the previous winter. 

Super Bee Sunday

Ha ha. The game is on here, but we're not really watching it. It's been an interesting week in San Francisco with pre-game events and concerts, all of which we've largely ignored. There's been controversy about the homeless of SF, of which there are way too many, and 'where to put them' so the tourists wouldn't be affected in any way. To be frank, I'm tired of going to the morning paper and seeing Super Bowl news. Today at least, the hoopla is down closer to San Jose, about an hour/hour and a half south of us. 

Anyway, our list of chores didn't change any. We still had all kinds of stuff to accomplish in the garden and kitchen, and it all got done. Since it's a beautiful day, we decided to open the hive and see how the bees were faring. Over the past week (sunny and warm) I had noticed some limited activity, and I wanted to make sure the bees were ok. 

I tried this trick Dad said he uses, which is to set a timer for a minute and count how many bees come back to the hive (after foraging). He has two hives; one is very strong, and he had 30 bees come back within a minute. His other hive, which he thought he lost this winter, had 10 bees come back within a minute. Me? I had 5 bees come back. So I was a little nervous about the state of the colony.

But what we found was very encouraging. We really have very few bees, I mean it seemed like maybe a hundred (though I'm sure that's wrong). However we found the queen, we found a small bit of brood, we found plenty of honey still in the hive (and several bees were eating it) and new pollen being packed in to cells. So while they are extremely diminished in number, they are also beginning to recover.  

House bees working near the brood

Sorry so fuzzy, but that's the Queen up top. She moves fast and it's hard to focus before she's gone!

We rearranged some bars, moving those full of honey up close to the cluster. We saw an opportunity to take out some old bars on which the bees had built comb sideways (it's been a pain to work around these bars since last spring), as they were at the back of the hive and being completely ignored. As I've said before, bees won't travel to the back of the hive in cold weather, as long as they have enough honey nearby - they need to stay warm in the cluster. Now was the time to take these bars out of rotation.

And that meant we could have the honey from those bars!

We cut the comb off of five bars, dropping it in to bowls lined with colanders. We soon realized that this wouldn't be a large enough solution, so Tom ran to the hardware store and picked up two buckets, then drilled holes in the bottom of one bucket, making an impromptu drainage system that I think we will probably now use forever. 

Tom drilled the holes, then I washed the buckets with soap and water.

Stacked one on top of the other, there's a good half foot between them inside.

Crushed comb goes in the top layer...

... draining in to the bottom. Simple!

This was a totally unexpected benefit of opening the hive today. How lovely that the colony made so much honey last summer that they still have plenty to eat, and extra to give to us! 

The Weird Bugs Continue

Ok, Entomologists: Tell me what this thing is.

I found him on a window screen. He's been hanging out all day. Beetle? Cricket?
*edit 9/14/15 It is NOT a beetle, it is a true bug, by the name of Leptoglossus zonatus, or Leaf-Footed Bug. This guy has probably been eating all my fruiting vegetables. Next time I see one, it's toast.

The Western Spotted Cucumber Beetles are all over my garden, I find them in every crop, on every flower. So far they haven't done enough damage to any one thing that we can't harvest some of it. But honestly, they are everywhere, and I've never had them before. Hopefully my deep mulch plan (with chicken coop litter) will help to deter them next year. They apparently overwinter in the soil. Argh.

But I continue to see good bugs on everything too -native bees, most notably the huge Carpenter Bees on all the flowers each morning. We checked our honeybee hive today and they look great - a little bit of brood, a lot of honey - plenty for winter, I think. This is really good news. Now if they can just fight off (or avoid entirely) varroa mites, we may have a strong overwintering hive. I've decided not to use chemicals to treat any varroa seen or unseen. I'm convinced now that I have to let the strong survive without help, and evolutionarily, the weak ones shouldn't survive. The bees just have to figure it out themselves. It's heartbreaking but that's the way I think it should go down. I know plenty of people would disagree with this assessment. However I'm confident in my decision, and I'll let you know how it plays out here in the next few months.

I continue to see lots of spiders, and lots of monarch butterflies. Today I found a scrap of monarch Gulf Fritillary wing on the garden paths. It's really beautiful, and nice to have a chance to study it close up.

front

back - hard to see in this light, but those white patches are silvery and glittery

The first section of buckwheat cover crop has flowered and it sure is pretty - in a couple of days I'll need to chop it down so it doesn't set seed. I'll let it compost in place. I've been reading an awful lot about cover crops and growing all your own compost materials rather than importing outside materials. For instance, I don't know exactly the history of any compost I order in bulk, nor do I know the exact history of even the horse manure I pick up each year. Who's to say the horses didn't eat herbicide-treated hay? In that case, you'd have herbicide-treated manure, which can do a bad number on your crops. I've had a lot of trouble with crops this year, most notably tomatoes and pumpkins, both of whom are planted in (forgive me) a shitload of horse manure-amended soil. In fact the cucumbers haven't done that well, and I've had problems with other crops too. So who knows? If I grow all my own carbon materials here in the garden, I'll have everything I need to make plenty of compost. I already have quite a bit, the compost just takes so long to break down. I guess I need to be better about turning and watering it. Or build a compost pile directly on a raised bed that is fallow, then start a new one when that is high enough... Gosh it just takes so much planning. Even getting a cover crop in takes a lot of planning, because I can grow veg in the beds year-round. If we had a cold winter here, I could plant a cover crop in the fall and let it winterkill, then the beds would be all ready come spring. Oh well. There's drawbacks and benefits to gardening any place, I guess. But the benefits to using cover crops are very clear in numerous ways - they definitely provide stacking functions (a permaculture premise) as they do more than one job. Feed pollinators, improve soil tilth, provide compost material, prevent soil erosion, feed microorganisms in the soil - lots of good stuff.

I do have to say, my honeybees pretty much leave the buckwheat alone, just as they did last year. I'm not sure if I'm planting the wrong kind to attract honeybees or what. There are lots of native pollinators on it, which is great - I was just hoping to provide some forage for my bees, as well. I may try something different next summer. The only thing is, buckwheat is good for hot dry weather and fast growing, and there aren't too many other cover crops that fit that bill.

I did see some honeybees up in the open space last week, which is only a mile from our house, so it's very likely that they are our bees (although I do know one other beekeeper in my area). The tarweed (Hemizonia congesta) is prolific right now, up in the hills.

As you can see, that's about the only living thing up there at the moment, other than native trees.

Here's another interesting thing I found this week walking with Joe:

Sorry the light is wrong on this picture, but the turkeys are everywhere, as usual. I wish I could try to catch one for Thanksgiving dinner. I wonder if we'd be allowed to? And then of course how would you do that without a weapon? I haven't the foggiest. Joe the dog just looks at them and yawns, so he's no help.

I harvested beans, tomatoes, peppers (both hot and sweet), cantaloupe, cucumbers, and herbs today from the garden. Three beds are full of ripening pumpkins (mostly the mini variety at this point, though I planted three different sizes), one bed is holding basil and buckwheat, one has cucumbers and buckwheat, one has cantaloupe, another one has just buckwheat, three have tomatoes, one has all the peppers, one has winter squashes, one has beans, and one has the sweet potatoes, which are going nuts. I'm looking forward to winter crops, even though we're nowhere near ready to plant them yet. We've got at least a month of hot weather in front of us. Early November will be our time to get the floating row covers ready and plant overwintering crops.