Hope in Ordinary Time

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the coming year. I don’t make resolutions, but I do frequently make goals. And I always try to have an overarching theme that guides our year, both in and out of the garden. Last year, our theme was ‘resilience.’

The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, Tom is home from work, and we have been able to go on long walks together (often in the rain, which we stoically bear without complaint since it is so needed - and as a bonus, it makes us walk faster). Our conversations during these walks have been interesting; as often happens, our goals and ideas for the approaching year complement each other and converge nicely.

As the world and its circumstances seem determined to break our spirits, I like the idea going in the complete opposite direction and cultivating a robust attitude of hope. It’s a tall order. How do we hope - and I mean actively hope - in the face of all that’s wrong around us? What does this kind of active hope look like? What form does it take? How does it express itself?

Similarly, as the world and its circumstances seem determined to whirl ever faster, threatening to throw us into a tailspin, Tom has decided to concentrate on slowing time down. He’s wondering how to count each day, and each moment. How to be truly aware and truly living, dwelling, not just somehow glossing over time, quickly on the way to the next thing.

These ideas reminded us both of the liturgical season called ‘Ordinary Time.’ In the church, part of the year is made up of the major seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. During these times, life is full of flashy events and excitement! But then there is the time of year when none of this taking place. It’s ordered time, ordinal time, ‘ordinary’ time. Some say that Ordinary Time is the perfect season for conversation, growth, and maturation. It can also be a time where we allow the mystery of life to deeply penetrate our consciousness.

Ordinary Time does not have to mean tedious, or repetitive, or dull. Certainly it can be these things too, but the idea is to make all time matter in some higher way, even if it’s not exciting. What is the gift in an ordinary life? What can simplicity teach us? When the theatrics are over (and let’s face it, we’ve all been living in a heightened state for quite some time now), what are we left with?

Could it be… hope?

So that’s our goal for 2022. Cultivating hope while learning to live consciously in the present, in ordinary time.

We look forward to more of these kinds of conversations in the coming year, whether they concern the garden or just our lives. Thanks for spending time with us. We wish you all a very peaceful and happy New Year!

All the Trails

We’ve always been a family of hikers and walkers, but since the pandemic began, our daily excursions have become quite sacred to us, whether in our neighborhood (blessed by many regional open spaces with great hilly walks) or in the greater Bay Area. We have been using an app called Gaia in the last year, which records our walks, and also shows us the many trails we have yet to travel (the free version is great). This has allowed us to find trails that we didn’t even know existed, and especially on weekends, we tend to go further afield to find new favorites.

One thing that has become so clear to us is that the Bay Area is littered with extensive trail systems, some maintained by local park systems, and some by state parks or even national parks. These are all non-profit groups, often dependent on volunteers to establish or maintain trails. We are so thankful for all of these organizations, and all the people, who make this kind of recreation possible.

We have long been supporters of East Bay Regional Parks. Many of these parks are free to enter, but supporting them by purchasing an annual pass is great. Individual memberships run $60 for a year (the price of three movies, or 10 fancy coffees). A family membership is $105. The wonderful thing about EBRP is that they have an extensive system which includes urban trails and parks, as well as more suburban parks. This promotes equity in the outdoors and makes these open spaces accessible to everyone, which is something that is really necessary.

EBRP also oversees two of the longer, linked trail systems we often find ourselves using. The California Riding and Hiking Trail is mainly a Contra Costa County trail system that links Mt. Diablo with Martinez, and will encompass 16 miles of trail. The Martinez-Concord section is already completed and will link to Mt. Diablo State Park in the future. The East Bay Skyline National Trail is part of the 1968 National Trail Systems Act. It begins at the Alvarado staging area in Richmond, and ends at the Proctor Gate station in Anthony Chabot regional park. We’ve hiked most of both of these trails and have found them quite interesting.

Other local trail systems include the scenic San Francisco Bay Trail, which is a planned 500 mile walking and cycling path around the entire bay, going through all nine counties, 47 cities, and seven major bridges. 350 miles are already in place. This project is also restoring wetlands around the Bay. They have a really cool navigational map that shows existing trails (whether paved or dirt) and planned trails. We’ve walked much of this trail system, too, including two bridges, and always enjoy these walks on days when it’s prohibitively hot in our neighborhood and we need the cooling influence of the Bay. The Bay trails are often flat, as well, offering an easier but longer walk, and there is always good wildlife viewing with shorebirds.

The Bay Area Ridge Trail, however, offers a completely different kind of hiking experience, taking walkers over the peaks that ring the Bay. This trail was the vision of William Penn Mott, Jr, who was Director of our National Park Service as well as EBRP and California State Parks. He wanted a 550 mile trail encircling the ridges of the Bay Area. 393 miles of trail have been established and they are all great, challenging miles! They have some neat trail maps and tools which include ‘curated’ trail adventures such as wheelchair accessible loops, or training ridge to bridge trails for those who want a challenge.

There is an interesting state trail system that we are just recently learning more about. This is the Mokelumne Coast-to-Crest Trail, which is planned to go all the way from the Bay to Yosemite. Currently three sections are complete: the East Bay/Contra Costa County section, the Camanche-Pardee Reservoir section, and the Upper Mokelumne River Canyon section. We have been on the Contra Costa section many times, as it winds through and over Mt. Diablo, Black Diamond, and Contra Loma parks. We are hoping to eventually get to the sections east of here and explore those, as well.

There are two interesting interstate trails here, one being (of course!) the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, through California, Oregon, and Washington. We have been on a very short section of this trail when hiking in Yosemite, but other than that, this trail has been beyond our reach, as it runs through the interior mountain ranges and is primarily in wilderness. It has long been a dream of mine to hike this trail, and maybe we’ll have more time in the future to section hike portions of it, at least.

Another interstate trail which I have just recently discovered is the Juan Bautista de Anza trail, which is part of the National Park System and is a National Historic Trail. It runs through Arizona and California, following Juan Bautista de Anza’s route in 1775 as he established (colonized?) a settlement in San Francisco bay. I don’t know how much we should be celebrating the takeover of land from California Native Americans, but while we don’t need to honor questionable historic activity, we should certainly learn about it and face the truth of it, and what better way to do that then to walk those same paths?

The final trail that I want to bring to your attention is the American Discovery Trail, which runs from the West Coast to the East Coast, 6800+ miles of continuous multi-use track. It does run on some roads, but the organization is working to make the trail completely off-road in the future. It is not a wilderness trail, like the Pacific Crest Trail. It passes through cities, towns, farmland, and wild areas. It is meant to be a voyage of discovery of our country as a whole. On the website, you can find the trails in your state (if it passes through your state); the California portion starts in Pt. Reyes National Seashore, and goes right over Mt. Diablo, over to Lake Tahoe, so we’ve found ourselves on this trail many times.

We are lucky to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place that celebrates outdoor living year-round. That doesn’t mean the conditions are always idyllic (see my previous post), but it does mean that we are provided with a lot of opportunity to get out into nature, and explore. We have come to realize that this is extremely important to us, and it will dictate how we move forward into retirement (which isn’t happening anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean we don’t think about it). We don’t necessarily see ourselves living in California forever, but we do want to live in a place that offers a lot of outdoor recreation, no matter the season. That might mean that we need to get good at snowshoeing! But that’s years in the future, anyway. Right now, we are just happy to have plenty of adventures located right outside our front door.

PS: If you like to hike and get outdoors, and you’re looking for a new adventure, let me know - Tom and I have plenty of suggestions for great walks all over the Bay Area!

Happy New Year!

All the holiday decorations have been put back in the garage, and the house is clean and bright for a fresh start in 2019. Outside there is quite a gale - I like to think the wind is blowing away 2018 and bringing in the new year. Tom and I will fall asleep long before midnight, but perhaps the kids will manage to stay awake.

One thing we like to do around now is set a theme for the garden for the coming year. 2018 was the year to ‘Improve the Soil,’ and I definitely think we accomplished that, even without the proof of any nutrient or soil-life lab test. The testimony is in our delicious produce and thriving, healthy ornamental plants and trees.

Of course, soil improvement is not something you can accomplish in one year; it’s taken us 15 years on this property and six dedicated years of best practice to get where we are today. However, as a ‘last gasp’ in our soil improvement year, we had 20 cubic yards of free wood chips delivered from a local tree company. We’ve spent the last two weeks moving it, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, to every bit of un-planted soil.

It also makes the garden look nice and smell good, on top of feeding the microbiology in the soil. And, of course, it also improves our own cardiovascular health. :)

I think 2019 is going to focus on making the garden really lovely. I so appreciated that one pollinator garden full of tall, blow-in-the-breeze, pollinator-attractant blooms that invited the whole neighborhood to stop and gaze every time they walked by - and kept me totally entertained with creatures of all kinds. Not to mention providing lots of cut-flower bouquets to give as gifts or to decorate our home. My garden-design skills are really rudimentary, but I do feel like I’m hitting my stride with annual flowers, and I want to do even more to keep the garden beautiful. So, more on that as I learn and try new ways of planning and designing.

Another thing I wanted to do in 2019 was continue a ‘monthly’ thread that runs through the entire year, like I did in 2018 with the seasonal wreaths. I polled my family and they agreed that it would be fun to do a series of seasonal meals, using what you can find typically in season in the store or garden. So you can begin to look for that in January. However, in that spirit, I want to share how to make a fresh fermented cheese that is totally delicious.

I found this recipe on the One-Cow Revolution website. I watched a series this couple did for Living Web Farms, about how just having one cow (or other in-milk ruminant) on your farm can provide food for a family immediately, even as you wait for the garden to mature and the hens to lay eggs. Of course there is no way to have a cow (and her calf) on our 1/6 acre, but someday in the future I hope to make this a reality, so I’m always interested in learning about it. The series was terrific, and I’ve been enjoying reading their short-but-sweet blog posts about every farming subject under the sun. Lately they posted one about homemade cottage cheese, and that inspired me to give it a go in my own kitchen, with store-bought milk.

Tom and I have made all kinds of cheeses before, but all have used lemon juice or vinegar or rennet, none have just fermented naturally. So this was a little different - it’s incredibly simple, but it takes some time. You start out with the freshest milk you can find. Pour it into a nonreactive pan or bowl and cover with cheesecloth. Then, just let it sit on the counter for two days (in summer, this would take less time, as warm temperatures speed up fermentation). The milk will ‘clabber’ - that is, sour - and begin to look a bit like yogurt.

Then, you stir it gently with a whisk, and put it in a warm place. I turned my oven on to the lowest available temp (175) and placed the bowl on top of the stove where the warm air from the oven blows out. I left it there for several hours, pivoting it regularly and stirring it, so that it heated evenly. I suppose you could also put it in a proofing drawer if you have one, or in your dehydrator set on low. As the soured milk heated, it started to form curds. After several hours, I drained it, tied it up in a cheesecloth, and let it drain some more.

I started with a quart of milk and ended up with about a cup of cheese. I wouldn’t call it cottage cheese, like One-Cow Revolution did - I’d call it more like a farmer’s cheese, or ricotta. Once salted, it was delicious, and I ate it on my lunch-time frittata. The chickens enjoyed the whey.

Tom and I wish all of you a very happy new year. We are hopeful and excited to see what people like us, and you, can do in our small ways to improve everything around us and make the world a healthier, more productive, and better place to live. Cheers!

Gardening goals for 2018

It's crunch time at school. The last two weeks of the semester (I've just finished with one of them) contain three finals, one lab practical, two large projects, two presentations, and one book discussion for credit. It's been a bit of a whirlwind. Not a whole lot of time to spend in the garden.

Spinach, with melting frost

However I always try to stop doing homework several times a day and get out to do some sort of yardwork, which I find clears my mind, warms my body, and cheers my spirit. Sometimes I sweep up leaves from the sidewalks and add them to the paths between the beds. Sometimes I turn the compost pile. Sometimes I haul water from the rain barrel to the container plants. I find these breaks very necessary.

8 am, 32 degrees, and the bees are already working - astounding. So much for that old adage about them staying at home unless it's 50 degrees or above.

We've had lovely frosty mornings, but zero rainfall. We've had to run the drip system but I don't like to. The more I learn about what's in our municipal water (which has been added for good reasons), the more I learn it's bad for the garden. More on that in another post. I have to be in the right frame of mind to tackle that one. I must say, the news from my Soil class has been more depressing than hopeful of late.

This cabbage is so beautiful, with it's deckle edge of purple.

I've been removing the summer annual flowers as they get burned up by frost - it's hard to say goodbye to the bright colors of the zinnias, the lacy foliage of the cosmos, and the cheerful orange-red of the tithonia. I'm sure the bees and hummingbirds will miss them too. I retrieved the hummingbird feeder from its summer storage, cleaned it and filled it with sugar syrup. It's hung in its usual place in the Chinese pistache tree right outside the kitchen window for optimal viewing. My tiny friends haven't discovered it just yet, but I know it will soon be a hub of activity. The hummingbirds are often the first birds awake in the morning, getting their bodies moving in the cold. Did you know hummingbirds lower their body temperatures at night so they can survive the low temperatures? We can thank my friend Barbara, birder extraordinaire, for that tidbit of information. It's good to know things, don't you agree?

Shallots in the foreground, wheat in the background.

It's rather freeing to be gardening without the row covers this year, but it also produces a bit of anxiety about how the crops are doing. As you can see from these pictures, everything growing at the moment is placed here because it can withstand cool temperatures. All these crops actually need or improve with a little bit of cold. The only thing that's on the edge is the wheat. 

Artichoke

It's winter wheat, so it's meant to be grown now, so I think it'll be ok. It's just a new crop for me. And, as I've said previously, if it does die, at least it will be a green manure for the beds. But I sure would like a small yield for my sourdough baking. 

This is how the chickens look in the morning before the sun hits their yard: Hunkered down and fluffed up to stay warm.

I'm a little disappointed in my clover germination rate, and have ordered more to spread around  all of the bedded plants, but it probably won't do much at this point, until it warms up a bit. I really need that nitrogen source for the beds. Next winter I might just plant all the beds to clover or vetch over the winter, in order to further improve the soil.

Narcissus blooming already!

Speaking of improving the soil, I've ordered a quarter pound of lupine to scatter in the pollinator beds, along with the usual poppies and other California natives. I realize I haven't done much to enrich the soil in those beds, other than random handfuls of compost over the years. The lupine, being a legume, should help introduce some nitrogen into those areas. As I clear out the summer annuals, I'll add the spring wildflower seeds to compost and scatter them in place, so that as soon as the weather warms up in January, they can get started growing.

Arbequina olives, getting closer to harvest. These two trees are in very large pots, but I'm planning on transplanting them into a space where a privet has been. The privet is now a 15-ft tall tree, and is terribly good at reseeding itself, blech. The only reason I've left it so long is for the bees - they love the flowers. But it's time to remove it. And the olives will be happier in the ground, though they will need excellent drainage.

I'm actually rather unhappy with the lack of bed space for greens, though I planned it to be this way. All the greens are in containers, and they are doing fine, but I'm not getting the harvests that I usually do. I'd have to plant a zillion containers to equal the size of one 4x8 bed. I miss having overflowing baskets of chard, spinach, and kale. I have to be conservative with my use, which bothers me. This is greens season. We should be profligate with their use, eating them at every meal, getting all those good winter nutrients. Instead I am rationing them. 

shelling peas

So I'm not sure how to handle this. This is the problem with a small farm. You need time for the cover crops because the soil needs the rejuvenation. But that means there is less space for actual crops. If I had an acre, I could trade off half each season and have room for both. Somehow I am going to have to figure out how to incorporate both covers and crops into the same beds at the same time. Actually this would be good for many reasons. I just have to change my mind about how the beds are supposed to look and work. I have to be creative in my planting schemes. 

Some flowers are not minding the cold - the yellow is Rudbeckia hirta and the purple is Felicia echinata.

I think it's important to have an overarching goal for each gardening year. 2017 was our year of tomatoes: Our goal was to simply have more of those, both for fresh eating and for canning. And it worked! Usually we are out of canned tomatoes by about this time of the year. But I still have many jars of both tomatoes and tomato products on the canning shelf and in the freezer. This really feels good. We set a goal, and we accomplished it. 

Brussels sprouts, recovering after something ate them

So I think the goal for 2018 is to focus on the soil. Make more and better compost. If I must purchase it, buy the best stuff I can find (more on that later). Don't skimp. Find ways to incorporate living green manures in with my annual crop systems. Continue to utilize chicken manure from our own hens, but also continue to find other sources of clean manure (without any chemicals from antibiotics or other). Know sources. Try to provide as much from my own property as possible. Resource what I have here for best use. Make connections with my neighbors for more resources that might be going to the landfill.

Garlic. This is one of the beds where the clover just didn't germinate. Some rain would be helpful in this regard. I'll try again. This is an ideal crop to have intercropped with another species, as garlic doesn't take up much lateral space.

'Better Soil' is actually a pretty large goal, and is one that can't be accomplished in just a year. And in fact it's been part of all we do here, and have done, for many years now; you've come along with me as I've learned best practices and tried to improve our soil all over the garden, whether it's for vegetables, fruit trees, or perennial ornamentals. But if I make it the primary goal, I think much more will be accomplished much more quickly, because everything I do will be to accomplish that goal first. 

These trays of beets, romaine, and carrot starts have been on a table outside under the shelter of a tree. They are doing fine with the frosts. 

Some of my practices will have to change. I think I will do less direct sowing in the garden, and instead make use of our little homemade greenhouse for lots of seed starting this winter, so I can put starts in the beds. This means that it will be easier to keep things growing all the time in each bed. There will always be cover; there will never be a time when the beds are bare. For instance, I have a bed where I left Thai basil growing and flowering in half of it, but it is now dead from frost. So I'll take some of these starts I have and replace the basil with them. The other half of the bed has fully grown cauliflower plants, which succeeded pepper plants. I certainly couldn't direct-seed into that basil half of the bed now - well, maybe turnips or radishes - but it would be hard to germinate anything else in there at the moment. However I can transplant these starts in, and they should do just fine.

Ajania pacifica, or Pacific Chrysanthemum, a welcome winter bloomer in a protected space

I'm excited to take you along with me as I work on this goal, and to see how much I can accomplish in one year. I'd also love to hear what YOUR goals are. Plus, has anyone started buying tomato seeds yet? I'm getting all the catalogs, and starting to make a list of all the new ones I want to try. Chime in on your favorites, please, and together maybe we can figure out the ultimate tomato list. 

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.