2008 August Archive at Beside the Stream

Archive for August, 2008

Pesto for the freezer

Published on August 20, 2008 in recipe. 2 Comments

After making an effort this spring to empty out the deep freeze , I’m in the process of filling it up again. 18 chickens, lots of apricots, and now it’s time to get some basil ready for winter. We have a big patch this year, and I don’t want to waste it.

Besides basil, pesto only requires four ingredients: Parmesan cheese, olive oil, garlic and nuts. I think pinon nuts are traditional, but Bob hates them and walnuts are cheaper.

The Silver Palate recipe calls for 2 cups packed basil leaves to 1 1/4 cups grated cheese, 1 cup nuts and 4 cloves of garlic in the food processor, using olive oil to thin it out. Start with the garlic, drizzle in olive oil, and then stuff in all the basil. Turn on the processor again, adding olive oil until the mixture is a reasonable consistency, and then add the walnuts. Add oil again, slowly, and then add in the cheese. Add salt and pepper, make sure you’ve added enough oil, and it’s done.

I used an ice cream scoop to put the pesto on a cookie sheet, and stuck the tray in the freezer. Three hours later, I put the hardened pesto cookies into ziplock bags, and stashed them all in the deep freeze for winter. I made nearly 10 pounds of pesto this round, and when I eyeballed the basil patch again I realized that I was less than half done. So I could easily end up with 25 pounds of pesto downstairs… and then I thought, so what. Be bold. Save money. There’s nothing wrong with frozen pesto that can’t be cured by a little pasta.

Time: Horses, 7 months

Published on August 19, 2008 in horses. 2 Comments

Here is a photo of a little palomino filly starving on January 17, 2008

and here is a shot of the same horse on August 11, nearly seven months later.

“We are advertis’d by our loving friends.”

William Shakespeare

Miss Roberta’s raspberry patch

Published on August 17, 2008 in Colorado women, gardening and old-timers. 5 Comments

At 95, Miss Roberta has been working on her raspberry patch for over 60 years. It is enormous. Raspberries were her only cash crop back when she was a school principal and her husband raised bees. She is still proud of keeping her raspberry customers happy, but for the last few years she has done very little picking and this year she stopped entirely. At 95, she’s not very steady. So the way she keeps her raspberry customers happy is that two other ladies and I pick the berries for her.

Roberta has, without a doubt, the best raspberry patch in the valley. She doesn’t let anyone near this patch except the three of us, and it’s an honor to be able to help. (Roberta’s raspberry patch is like Tom Sawyer’s fence. A neighbor asked me, How come you get to pick them? I’ve been trying to get in there for years.) Ruth picks with a lard bucket belted to her waist, which leaves both hands free. I use a belt from Roberta’s dead husband to strap on my bucket (gone these past sixteen years but still helping out) and we start picking around 8AM every Tuesday and Friday morning. It takes a few hours for us to clear the patch, and we take home half of what we pick.

At peak production the patch was producing over 30 pints a picking, but today we picked 15. Since we get half and Roberta sells berries at $5/pint, we earned about $10/hour in berries for two hours work. We pretend that we do this because Miss Roberta’s raspberries are beyond compare… and they are. But the real reason we pick her berries is because she’s too old to do it herself. It’s a mitzvah. She was once the fastest picker around, and it’d make her crazy to let them rot.

When we finish up, Roberta is down the road irrigating her vegetable garden. (She won’t take her cane and everyone clucks, but so be it.) I stop by to report how many pints we picked and where I left her share, and we discuss the state of the walnut crop, the virtues of sheepnose apples vs. strawberry apples, and her raspberry customers.

They’re not like you and me, she said. They don’t eat bowls of berries with cream. They just sprinkle a few on their cereal for breakfast. Can you imagine? Mixing berries with cereal? And she laughs as I shake my head in dismay.

At 95, she knows that life is much too short to mix berries with anything but cream.

A Cross-Cultural Teepee

Published on August 16, 2008 in uncategorized. 4 Comments

You might think this teepee was cross-cultural because it has a Bernese Mountain dog lying in front of it, and Berners are from a specific canton in Switzerland.

But that’s just the beginning.

Instead of buffalo robes on the floor, there’s a queen sized bed with two bedside tables and a stack of books, five pillows, heavy old sheets and a carpet. It’s like heaven. Do you remember Voltaire’s Candide (1759) where Pangloss kept saying ”This is the best of all possible worlds, and couldn’t possibly be any better”? He might have been dreaming about this teepee.

Thankful with a herd

Published on August 14, 2008 in Colorado women and horses. 4 Comments

A herd of horses was finally dropped off on the Ute Mountain Ute land for the summer, so Thankful is no longer alone.

The horses were lounging around in a stand of cottonwood trees about a mile and a half upriver from Suzy.

Some of the horses will let you get pretty close, but not Thankful. She’s the one with the arrow, on the left back end of the herd.

These mares are all managed by a single stallion who has kept them in order for ages. He’s a gentle old guy with pale lashes and one blue eye. Stallions make me skittish, so my dog and I keep our distance. But Suzy has known him for over ten years, and she and Rosie give him a fond greeting.

There are two new foals and a heavily pregnant mare who looks like she’s ready to pop. This little blue-eyed foal was born outside, and has been living wild its whole life… but it’s not afraid of me.

It’s the youngest member of this old-style band of Indian horses, the same size that Thankful was last year. I think it’s the prettiest little horse I’ve ever seen.

Suzy says that the nice old stallion, over the years, has sired a lot of blue-eyed foals.

Meanwhile, Thankful likes to be far away in the back of the herd, hidden. It takes a while to sidle around to get a picture of her, and she scoots away. And again. It’s easy to see how she got left behind,

but eventually I caught her in a sunbeam, all grown up.

Stickering wood

Published on August 14, 2008 in Do It Yourself and teenagers. 0 Comments

To people who store wood, sticker is both a noun and a verb. I’ve heard people discuss sticker stain, and how far apart the stickers should be placed. Stickering is slightly too heavy work for me (sometimes I can do it but not today, which is sort of like “free beer tomorrow”) so when Bob said to Sam, I need some help stickering this pile, I thought I’d take some stickering photos while Bob and Sam did the work.

We store lumber, timber and boulders on a back corner of our property near the neighbor’s elk fence. The last time this wood appeared in a photo, it was the backdrop for a couple of deer who were up to frisky business.

The cedar trunks are from clearing we did on the upper lot–two winters outside, and the bark is supposed to strip right off–while the white tarp is covering beams from Vancouver Island. (We used a half load of these for the porch so Bob got a full load to reduce transportation costs, figuring to sell them over time.)

There has been a lot of work done here since last fall. Sam peeled all the cedar posts before he left for Peru and those are ready to sell, but today Bob and Sam are moving beams–a man in Telluride bought a load that Bob will deliver tomorrow.

First they pull apart the pile and measure which beams they need.

They pile the load for the trailer

and end up having to pull apart a second pile to find beams of the right length.

They load the trailer, and then sticker the piles.

There is a pile of stickers in the foreground of this picture–they’re the short lengths of wood that are used as spacers between the layers of beams. Bob and Sam have placed three stickers perpendicular to the beams, and are putting the pile back together.

Each beam has an inch of air in all directions: the beams are placed an inch apart, and the stickers are 1 x 2s cut from the same wood. Once the pile is stickered and reassembled, they cover it with a tarp and tuck everything in. I don’t know how many tons of wood they moved, but I bet it was more than one.

Dogs and the homemade bridge

Published on August 12, 2008 in dogs. 1 Comment

I don’t use this bridge much. I went across it twice to prove I could, but I didn’t exactly scamper. My dog doesn’t use this bridge. But Miss Rosie does.

Rosebud thinks it’s a reasonable way to cross the river.

She thinks any sensible dog or person would take the bridge rather than fording the river.

Jessie is an old dog, and she’s impervious to peer pressure.

She had no interest in crossing this bridge back in May. It’s August now, and she’s seen nothing to change her mind. The sight of Rosie crossing the bridge does not impress her. She said, That’s fine for Rose, but I prefer to wade.

And I, for one, agree with her completely.

EM•1, the latest form of pixie dust

Published on August 11, 2008 in gardening. 3 Comments

I routinely buy dried blood, bat guano, kelp, volcanic dust, and worm castings for the garden… and I’m not the only one. Many gardeners believe in the possibility of a perfect supplement. The latest and greatest supplement, though, is so far-fetched that people are keeping quiet about it around here. It’s the commercial growers who bought it first, at $250 for five gallons. Home growers could get the $23 size–still a lot for a supplement–and I see that they now have a $15 size for the house. The garden club split a bottle 8 ways, so I’ve been using it for a month.

EM•1 includes ”enzymes, bio-available trace minerals, vitamins, and live naturally occurring beneficial microorganisms” (it’s EM for Effective Microorganisms). It is classic pixie dust: you don’t know quite what it is; it doesn’t look like anything interesting; and it takes care of everything. (The pixie dust graphic is from here.)

You use a few drops at a time. EM•1 keeps the water in vases sweet, so cut flowers last much longer. A drop in the water for houseplants makes them much happier. Plants don’t shock during transplant if you dip their roots in a bucket of treated water. The vegetable garden looks more bodacious. The garden pond is more vibrant. I think I’m using it everywhere, and then Suzy asked, have you tried it in the toilet? It cleans the toilet bowl.

So I tried it, and it’s absolutely true: when you let a few drops sit in the toilet bowl for a few hours, it ends up clean. It’s a probiotic cleaner that, according to their literature, also works on the septic tank and the stove.

But the best cleaning trick is that EM•1 removes all odor from a wet dog. My dog keeps cool in the summer by dipping into the ditch, so by August she can get pretty ripe. I rubbed a few drops in water into the dog’s coat, and she became–and stayed–odor free.

Now that’s pixie dust.

A hairy little fly

Published on August 10, 2008 in insects. 1 Comment

I thought this fly was really cute.

See its strange little antennae?

Its handsome bristles?

See how his proboscis is deep in the aster’s nectar?

It’s hard for me to tell what kind of fly this is (”little hairy” isn’t a type). If you want to know more about fly anatomy, this website was recommended by a Norwegian dipterist (an entomologist specializing in flies).

[Dipterist is from the Order Diptera (Greek di = two, and pteron = wing), possessing a single pair of wings on the mesothorax and a pair of halteres, derived from the hind wings, on the metathorax.]

I don’t think dipterist is a very useful word, but for some reason I thought those little fly bristles were particularly endearing.

A Party, before and after

Published on August 9, 2008 in celebration. 2 Comments

Here is Bob before the party.

There are 20 3-pound lobsters, and Bob has them in an ice chest on a layer of seaweed, and in the frig. The guy who sends the lobsters each year is a friend, and Bob feels very personally about this party… it’s a summer seashore ritual played out on the Continental Divide.

This was the first round of crustaceans and the last picture I took that evening.

Here you have 2 pm the next day, when reasonable people would have already cleaned up the kitchen. There’s a big pot of lobster shells and heads simmering on the back burner, and you might notice that I still have to process 6 zucchini and 10 pounds of apricots. Or you might stop entirely and admire this flower arrangement–that’s what I’ve been doing. These flowers are otherworldly, as if they came from a place where people are nine feet tall. It’s an arrangement so enormous that it came with its own 3 gallon vase. The kitchen can be cleaned any time, but an arrangement like this its own schedule: it says, admire me now, for I will die sooner than you think.

Beside the Stream