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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
grubnoun, 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]
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 (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.
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).
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.
There’s a saying about Bernese Mountain dogs that goes
Three years a young dog,
three years a good dog, and
three years an old dog.
As David Sedaris put it, there are cheeses that last longer than these dogs. (He was referring to Great Danes, but he could have been talking about Berners.)
I recently read that the current lifespan for Bernese Mountain dogs in the US is 6 to 8 years, which sparked a few conversations about how long much longer we think our Jessie will last. At 8, her hips and elbows are often sore and she has started bowing out of hikes she knows are excessive. She’ll be gone before too long because that’s her nature, and she’s such a fine dog that Bob thought we should build a big pyre and light her up for a bonfire party–really celebrate her passing. Which sounds reasonable to me because I had a female Bernese before and can have one much like her again. Their gene pool is about a quarter inch deep.
Here’s a Berner from the 1800s,
and here are three from the other day (a woman visiting a neighbor brought two, so we went up to a meadow to get some pictures). Jessie is the good-looking one lying down.
Mutts are one of a kind. If you get a great Heinz 47 dog, you’ll never see its like again. But a female Bernese is like the Dalai Lama, always the same good egg.
Here is the 13th Dalai Lama,
and here is the 14th:
Berners and the Dalai Lama: Cheerful, loyal and brave, every time.
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