2008 September Archive at Beside the Stream

Archive for September, 2008

Covering a seat cushion

Published on September 30, 2008 in Do it yourself. 3 Comments

My mother recently passed on a painting that used to be my grandmother’s. I have a dressing table that belonged to my other grandmother, so I put them together to make a Grandmother’s Corner.

The only problem is the seat cushion, which I recovered about 12 years ago.

I thought this jungle-theme tapestry was supercool at the time, but now it clashes.

Like most seatcovers, it’s just stapled onto the wooden form. I pull off the bottom panel first, and then rip off the seat fabric.

There’s another layer of fabric underneath. I try to pull out these staples, but they’re in there too tightly

so I cut the fabric and pull it off.

This is the underside of the seat cushion: I think it’s cotton batting with a horsehair pad. It’s not dirty, it doesn’t smell, and it’s still springy, so I’m reusing it.

I’m recovering this seat with a nice piece of Scalamandre velvet (from Ebay), so I put the fabric face down, and then lay down the old horsehair and cotton cushion and flip the plywood form to get a side that’s not needled with staple holes. I staple the fabric down along the easiest side first: the straight back.

Next I staple the curved front. The fabric has to be pulled taut–the tighter the fabric, the better the results.

The sides are the hard part. First I cut the corners so there is less fabric to fold.

I fold the corner like you wrap a present, fiddle with it, and pull it tight to set the first corner staple.

This is after I get the second corner staple in place,

and then you do the staples in between (alright, this is the other side, but I have to use the photos I have).

Now all of the sides are stapled, and I’ve trimmed the excess fabric. I know it looks like a mess, but be patient.

I plop the backing that I saved from the old cover right on top of what looks like an amateurish job, and staple around the edges. And I’m done.

Here’s the cushion when I flip it over. This striated Scalamandre velvet is really special–the character is woven right into it–

and here it is back in place. I got visual assonance for $20 of Ebay velvet and a few staples. Bob thinks I’m out of my mind to bother, and I think it’s cheap thrills. I suspect that’s a male-female divide, and I understand that some people would never recover their cushions to match. But if you should happen to want to, it’s much easier than you’d think.

A cold summer for tomatoes

Published on September 29, 2008 in gardening. 0 Comments

It has been a cold summer for tomatoes. Bob usually grows basketfuls, but this summer they’re still green. These are Zebra tomatoes, beautifully marked but very… green.

Here are some (green) Cherokee Purples.

We have a dozen heirloom varieties grown from seed, but almost all of the tomatoes are green. With the cold nights we’ve been having, they’re unlikely to ripen before frost. Tomatoes are tough to grow at 7,000 feet: some summers there’s a bumper crop, and other years you’re stuck making mincemeat and wishing you liked fried green tomatoes.

At the Farmer’s Market, one of the vendors has tomatoes from 5,000 feet (the lucky dog). It looks like heaven to Bob, and he goes back near noon for a bushel. In mid-September, he finally got that surfeit-of-ripe-tomatoes summer thrill.

The two dozen small tomatoes in the foreground are ours, while the rest are grown elsewhere. It’s a terrible thing for a Jersey boy to buy someone else’s tomatoes, but that’s life.

Gone travelling

Published on September 26, 2008 in Travel. 3 Comments

I’m leaving today to go to Russia for two weeks. I don’t think I’ll have much computer access, so I’ve spiked a dozen entries for Bob to post. And (although I love comments more than almost anything) I won’t be able to see your comments until later.

I am going by barge from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and am taking along my camera and both lenses. I’m leaving Jessie under my bed.

Bob said, Two weeks? It’ll kill the dog.

But the truth is that Bob and Sam and Jessie will get along just fine, and I’ll show you what I saw when I get back.

Roasting coffee

Published on September 25, 2008 in Do it yourself. 1 Comment

Bob has been roasting our coffee beans for nearly ten years. It’s sort of a money-saving venture because green beans cost less than half of roasted beans, and they stay fresh at room temperature for years.

This is Bob’s coffee drawer. He has a few ten lb bags of green beans, and two jars of freshly roast coffee. He says that after the beans are roasted, they need to stay in a jar for three days for optimal flavor development.

This is our current home roaster, the i-Roast 2. This roaster costs $180, and they don’t last that long. We’re on our third roaster in ten years, and we just drink one or two cups a day. Roasting your own coffee saves a little money but not a lot. The real draw is choosing your green beans.

When I pull up the list of beans from sweetmarias.com, sure enough the first thing I see is a coffee grown by Guyami indians in Central America that is pulped in a creek and paddled downriver by canoe. Our last batch of beans came from a small farmer in Rwanda, and I practically knew the name of his cow. This part of the global economy, that allows me to support a Rwandan farmer directly from Durango–I like it.

Grubbing Potatoes 2

Published on September 24, 2008 in gardening. 3 Comments

Our total potato harvest was 50 pounds of Rose Finn Apple (productive plant and waxy potato, good for salad), La Ratte (exceptionally flavorful and waxy firm) and German butterballs (good all-round but a little boring next to the others).

This doesn’t look like much of a supply to me, so I did some research.

According to the USDA, we each eat over 140 pounds of potatoes a year. That includes about 50 pounds of fresh potatoes, over 60 pounds of frozen potatoes that are eaten as french fries, and another 30 pounds total of chips and dehydrated potatoes.

From this data I can see that

our harvest is a year’s supply of fresh potatoes for one person (or, we need three times that much), and
somebody else is getting all my fries.

Sometimes it’s better not to know. I’ll be wondering for weeks: Who’s eating my fries?

Grubbing potatoes

Published on September 24, 2008 in Do it yourself and gardening. 1 Comment

It is really fun to harvest potatoes. It is ideally a two-person job: one person digs, while another person grubs the spuds. I prefer to grub.

We’re not far from a hard frost, and the vines are beginning to die back. Bob starts with a shovel and quickly shifts to a pitchfork. There are lots of potatoes.

Potatoes are a strange crop, with their poisonous leaves and fleshy lumps below the earth. This is a Rose Finn Apple plant with all its little rose finn apple potatoes attached to the roots.

Here is a German butterball plant, with lots of butterballs. Somehow it feels like you’re digging for diamonds, even though it’s only potatoes.

As it turns out, grub is a term for unearthing root crops that dates from the Middle Ages… so when potatoes arrived from the Americas, the word for digging them up was already in use.

grub noun, verb, grubbed, grub·bing.

–verb (used with object)

6.	to dig; clear of roots, stumps, etc.

7.	to dig up by the roots; uproot (often fol. by up or out).

8.	Slang. to supply with food; feed.

9.	Slang. to scrounge: to grub a cigarette.

[Origin: 1250–1300; ME grubbe (n.), grubben (v.); akin to OHG grubilōn to dig, G grübeln to rack (the brain), ON gryfia hole, pit; see grave¹, groove]

Too cute, or Maximal cuteness

Published on September 22, 2008 in deer herd. 2 Comments

The deer, elk and bear stayed up in the high country this summer. There were piles of food up there, berries and acorns galore, so the animals are just starting to move down to the valley as cold weather sets in.

I’ve seen this late fawn a few times the past week. It’s sticking close to its Mom, who is skittish.

Here he’s shaking his little tail at me. I think I’m seeing his Mom’s tongue marks on his little speckled coat. On a cuteness scale of 1-10, where does this late fawn fit in? 14?

Steve’s tomatoes

Published on September 21, 2008 in Do it yourself and gardening. 4 Comments

Steve’s tomatoes (at 8,200 feet) are much riper than ours. With two layers of plastic, his hoop house is like a jungle… during the day.

Most of the crop is tucked under the leaves, but you can see a cluster of ripening tomatoes in the lower right hand corner.

They are much rosier than ours, but production is just beginning.

Here is a Cherokee Purple that has the possibility of darkening up (unlike ours)

and these are nearly ready to harvest. But it’s starting to get very cold at night.

It seems as though every time I see him, Steve is puzzling out improvements to the system. Here he’s adding another length of pipe filled with water that heats up during the day; the water is pumped into the greenhouse where it releases its heat at night.

Thomas Jefferson said,

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Time: 3 1/2 months

Published on September 19, 2008 in gardening. 0 Comments

I planted this begonia on June 1–that’s our official frost date–and on June 3 there was supposed to be a hard frost. We covered a lot of things, but this one was a pest to protect so I took a picture instead.

This is the same pot 3 1/2 months later. The begonia had a nice summer in a shady spot next to the door (but round about now it’s dreaming of Central America).

And then there was one.

Published on September 18, 2008 in birds. 3 Comments

Two geese spent last winter at Clearwater Farm, Berna in the rear and Lillo in front,

and four ducks arrived early May.

Two weeks later, the ducklings needed more room

and a bobcat appeared on the scene. Everyone knew when it came because it ripped off Berna’s head and buried both parts in a pile of leaves. Lillo, the other goose, was lonely and needed protection, so the ducks and geese were penned together by day and locked in a henhouse at night.

Rosie the dog guarded them at night. People explained that it was a privilege, not a punishment, but Rosie thought it was a lousy deal. So when the ducks’ feathers came in, the goose and the four ducks moved down to the pond.

This photo was taken mid-June when the cottonwoods bloom, and all was well for a while. But then the bobcat returned, and started doing what bobcats do.

First it took Lillo. Then it took one of the ducks… and another. By mid-August

there were two ducks left on the pond, and by the end of the month there was one.

The poor little duck must be lonely, and I’m afraid she’ll be killed by the bobcat too.

If only I could, I’d tell that old cat: people would like you a whole lot more if you didn’t eat their pets.

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