2008 October Archive at Beside the Stream

Archive for October, 2008

Making cider

Published on October 20, 2008 in Do It Yourself. 2 Comments

We picked apples on Wednesday, and filled the truck with boxes and 5-gallon buckets of apples from the old orchard at the Apple Orchard Inn and a house next door.

Here’s Milo shaking the apples down, and Sam collecting them. Bob and I are working on different trees. I shake the tree, and ~~kick the apples~~ nudge the apples with my feet to make a pile. Sam said, You can’t do that. You’re bruising the apples. I explained that since they’re for cider, it doesn’t matter. And my 17-year-old said: If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. (Out of the mouth of babes.)

We stored the apples in the garage and made cider Sunday. It’s a four-step process.

Here Kristy is washing apples in a big cooler. Since the orchard wasn’t sprayed, we’re not very careful.

Bob made this grinder set-up while I was gone: the grinder is mounted on a table that he built from scraps. It was hand-cranked before he attached a motor and geared it down.

It works like a charm.

The buckets of apple pomace–the ground-up apples–are loaded into the press, and the cider comes out at the bottom. We use the lobster pot to collect the cider. At first it’s easy to push the bar around the press, but as the screw goes down and the cider streams out, it gets harder and harder. Here I’m being Twinkletoes the Donkey, but at the end of the pressing you have to pretend to be an ox.

When the pomace has been completely pressed, you take apart the cage and load the spent pomace into the wheelbarrow. The deer and bear get the pomace.

The cider is strained and funneled into bottles, and that’s it. One truckload of apples made 22 gallons of cider.

make a pillow with gathered cord

Published on October 18, 2008 in Do It Yourself. 1 Comment

This is the finished product–you have to admit that the cord is really cute–and this is the process:

I got this appliqued San Blas Island fabric on Ebay, and I’ve been carrying around this Thai silk for 25 years–it has a color-change between raspberry and royal blue, and it’ll make perfect trim. I noticed that I have a pillow that is just the right size for this fabric, so I took the plunge. I cut the silk on the bias into strips about 3 inches wide. To make a plump gather, I cut enough strips to go around the pillow three times. About.

After ironing the silk strips I notice that this fabric shows pinker on one side and bluer on the other. Making sure the pieces are all going in the same direction, I sew the strips together and iron the seams flat. I sew the end of the cord to the end of the silk strip.

Here I’m sewing the cord. I have already gathered it once, and I’m sewing the second length here. When this length is gathered, I’ll sew the third section and gather that, and the cord’ll be done.

Then I sew the gathered cord around the pillow top, ruffle side out.

Trim it, turn it under and adjust the cord length, and now we’re ready to get the back on.

I have a zipper that matches the fabric I have for the pillow back, so I sew one side on the zipper onto the back, and sew the other side of the zipper on the pillow front.

Zip up the zipper, lay the front fabric facing the back fabric, and sew the two layers together.

Unzip it and turn it inside out, stuff in the pillow and

it is a pretty thing.

A doe eating apples

Published on October 17, 2008 in deer. 1 Comment

While I was gone, two boxes of apples sat around and got so wrinkled that Bob dumped them out back for the deer.

This little doe liked them. She’s a messy eater,

and she’s nervous about someone telling her to go away.

But she gobbles down as many as she can,

and then she scratches.

And when you do a double take on the photo above, you can see that that doe could have been channelling Sharon Stone. (Ahem.)

Russian Gingerbread

Published on October 16, 2008 in small town life and travel. 2 Comments

These gingerbread-y wooden houses, sometimes well-kept and sometimes falling down, were in every city we saw from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

The proportion and detailing were unfamiliar to me, and seemed to be characteristic.

Each of these houses have green fences!

This house has the most ornate porch railing I’ve ever seen,

and this is such a whimsical confection

that you could almost have it for dessert.

Ordering eyeglasses online

Published on October 15, 2008 in Do It Yourself. 3 Comments

I ordered glasses online–I think they’re made in China–and they came while I was away. They’re excellent. I’ve worn glasses since I was 8 years old, and I have a few friends who wear glasses as well. Four or five years ago when we all switched to bifocals and trifocals, we all started paying close to $800 for everyday glasses. Big bucks.

I read about a website where you order your glasses direct, and decided to give it a try. I used www.zennioptical.com. I printed up their order form and took it to the Optometrist to make sure that I didn’t make a mistake filling it out. The Optometrist wasn’t impressed with the concept, but helped nonetheless.

Meanwhile, it was the first time I had my eyes checked in four years, and during my eye test I could’t read the top line. The lovely young woman who took baseline measurements holds up three fingers and walks away from me backwards, asking when I can’t see individual fingers. This is a new low for me. The Optometrist said, Between 44 and 48 you lost 10%. That’s not bad. (I’m thinking, not bad for whom?)

The glasses technician helped me fill out the part of the form that specified frame size, using my current glasses. Later, I entered this information to the computer along with $88 on Visa, and received my perfectly nice (high-end frames, thin lens, anti-glare, graduated) glasses in three weeks. I can see again. They are perfectly acceptable glasses made to my new prescription.

They’re just like regular glasses, but they cost $700 less. As my Mom would say, It’s a miracle.

Kizhi Island

Published on October 14, 2008 in travel. 4 Comments

Kizhi Island is an outdoor museum of architecture.

It is very far north, nearly the same latitude as Rekjavik, Iceland, and has been inhabited for many centuries.

This was the most elaborate church (1714), with a simple graveyard next to it. The shingles are all aspen, and the entire structure is built without a nail.

This is a second church (1764), right next to the first church,

and a big belltower (1874) completes the complex (Russian churches don’t have belfries because that would mess up the onion dome).

Up close it seems like too many buildings too close together, but from farther away it knits into a seamless, nailless portrait of architectural perfection.

This is Russia’s oldest wooden church, the Saint Lazarus church from the 1300s (it was moved to the island). People have been coming distances to kiss this church for centuries. Russians seem to be big on kissing religious items. I saw lots of people kissing icons in church.

This is a traditional farmhouse, with a little sauna to the right. The animals live on the bottom floor during the winter, and enter through the door on the left.

This is the other side of the same house, with a cow ramp going up to the second floor, also for winter. They took the cows by boat to little islands to graze during the summer.

The houses had a lot of intricate gingerbread for decoration, and although the house looks spacious there were two interior rooms for the extended family. The rest of the space was for animals and winter workspace.

One of the rooms was for everyone to live in, and the other room was for guests.

I preferred the guest room.

Back from Russia

Published on October 13, 2008 in small town life and travel. 2 Comments

I got back Friday night and spent Saturday harvesting the onions, corn and tomatoes. I made chicken soup, three peach cobblers, and we did our first run of cider on Sunday, from picking to clean-up. I was supposed to edit photos last night, but I ended up going to bed instead. So I’m up early this Monday to try and show you what it was like for a breakfast at a nice lady’s house in Uglich.

We went by boat from Saint Petersberg to Moscow, and Uglich is an old city near Moscow. The city is industrialized, and the air is acrid with some nasty pollutant… from a tire factory? oil processing? It’s pungent.

She lived in a compound of perhaps six apartment blocks with a playground in the middle.

A couple of things in this photo are standard: absolutely no litter. No graffiti. No flowers. And no kids.

We were 12 around a table, and she served hot cereal first, and then a stack of blinis with homemade jam and condensed milk. And vodka. Our hostess is a nurse, earning $125 a month. Her rent is $20 a month, and her husband is a pensioner. We arrived at 8AM, so she must have started cooking around 6. I ate a lot of blinis and jam.

When we were through eating, she turned on the radio and picked up her tambourine.

Can you see how nice she is? She’s paid to have tourists to breakfast.

She cooked, we ate and drank, so it must be a party.

And it was.

The man on the left is her husband, who went walking when we were there.

We were told on the boat that the current life expectancy for Russian men is 58 years, and 40% of the government income is from the sale of vodka. This wide-angle lens makes everything look good, but it’s grim here.

Two days later we were at Kruschev’s grave, and two men made photos of themselves pounding a sneaker on the gravestone.

Kruschev’s children and grandchildren are Americans, the USSR is no more, and American men still tap the soles of their (Chinese-made) shoes on his grave. You can’t make this stuff up.

Prickly Caterpillar plant

Published on October 10, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

I am sorry to report that the Prickly Caterpillar plant (Scorpiurus muricatus) is better in the seed catalogue than it is in real life.

It’s just a few inches high, and it has a tap root so once it gets established it doesn’t require much water. I grew almost a dozen. Some were over a foot in diameter and others were just a few inches across, depending on how much water they got. The prickly caterpillar blooms continuously through the summer, but it doesn’t have very many blooms at one time and each blossom is the size of a corn kernel.

The prickly caterpillar plant is named for its seed pods, which are tightly curled and kind of cute… except that they’re too small to be very impressive. They’re technically edible, but I spit out the one I ate–bad taste and very chewy. If it self-sows I’ll let it grow again, but otherwise there won’t be prickly caterpillars around next year. (Unless they’re actual prickly caterpillars, of course.)

Making a native garden pond, Step 2

Published on October 8, 2008 in water. 3 Comments

I did some research on making a native garden pond, and came up with a list of directions.

Remove goldfish
Line pond with rocks
Transplant five species of native waterplants from local waterways
Add minnows from local waterways
Add waterfall
Wait.

Now that the goldfish are gone, I’m ready to start reconfiguring the pond.

I don’t like these rocks: the pond would be nicer with plants growing over the edge. Bob pointed out that there won’t be anything growing this fall, and I might as well leave the pond intact until spring. But I’d like to line the pond with rocks as well. This would increase the underwater surface area in the pond quite a lot, creating more living space and more hiding places. So much for leaving it until spring–Bob was gone for two days and it happened.

This is the first iteration, and I can see from this photo that I should use smaller stones on the shelf.

Here is the second iteration. The pond will look a lot better as soon as it’s surrounded by groundcover… but that’s cosmetic. The next step for a healthy native water pond is: transplant a total of five different species of local water plants into the pond.

The three sisters

Published on October 7, 2008 in gardening. 3 Comments

Around here corn, beans and squash–the triad of plants grown by the Native Americans–are known as the three sisters. Bob always plants a few rows of corn because it’s fun to watch grow. This year he grew beans and pumpkins amongst the corn.

It’s a mess. There’s a row of beans between the corn rows, and a few interspersed pumpkins.

The beans climb the corn, but the plot is so dense you can barely walk through it.

I looked it up, and learned that this Indian trio doesn’t grow in rows. It grows in hills.

Here’s an old Ansel Adams photo of Indian cornfields, where the corn is planted a few stalks to a hill, with beans climbing up them.

Here’s the same trio in full growth, and instead of being a mess (like ours) it makes sense.

For the three sisters to work together, you don’t line them up in rows; you make mounds. Their synergy depends on their spatial relationship. There’s probably a moral to this story, but I don’t know what it is.

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