The Actual Recipe for the Best Cucumber Salad Known to Mankind

Apparently Lorell has been telling people that this recipe is on the blog. So here it is:

• 2 large cucumbers, sliced very thin (not quite paper thin, but as thin as you can get them with a food processor or a knife).
• 1/2 sweet onion, sliced thin (optional, this gets pretty oniony-reduce the amount if you don't like onions)
• 1 teaspoon salt

Spread the cucumber and onion slices on some paper towels and sprinkle them with the salt (You can also do this in a bowl, and then dump the moisture). The salt will draw moisture from the cucumbers. Let them sit for 30 minutes, then squeeze the moisture out of them.

While the cucumbers sit, mix the dressing:

• 1/2 cup 0% fat greek yoghurt
• 1 Tablespoon mayonaise
• 2 Tablespoons sugar
• 2 Tablespoons white vinegar.
• 1 Teaspoon dried dill
• 1 Teaspoon dried parsley

Mix this all up, then mix in the squeezed cucumbers and onions. Refrigerate for an hour or so.

The Garden Groweth

And has gotten pretty big. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans are the primary source of greenery right now. The cucumbers and beans are venturing past our carefully constructed bird netting shield into the wide blue sky beyond. This has been a crazy year for vegetative growth; hopefully, it will be matched by a crazy harvest.

The Best Cucumber Recipe Know to Mankind

Given our abundance of cucumbers, I was reminded of the cucumber salad I had in Germany. So a quick Google search yielded a smashing recipe for Gurkensalat; this stuff is the best possible way for a cucumber to pass on to the next world. If you ask nicely, we might be prevailed upon to share the recipe...

Exponential growth

We didn't check the garden yesterday because we irrigated early in the morning so it was too soggy to go out, and then we were busy for the rest of the day. So this morning, we had a crop of fairly large cucumbers, plus three zucchini. As you can see from the full sized pen dwarfed by the vegetation, these things are getting out of hand.

The First Tomato of the Season...

... was this cute little cherry tomato, photographed in a bed of chives. We cut it into thirds and had it with dinner several nights ago. It was quite sweet and tasty.

In Which the Apple Tree Becomes Less

We went out this evening to put the chickens away and discovered the apple tree had dropped a branch. I assume it produced too many apples and couldn't hold them up anymore.

Don't Turn Your Back on the Zucchini

Or they get really big. Overnight.

(The coin is a quarter. We use it here to impart a sense of scale to the squash.)

The Schnozzcumber

Technically, it is an Armenian cucumber. This is the only variety of cucumber we have found that continues to produce fruit throughout the Arizona summer. It seems to thrive on heat and abuse. The cucumbers are pretty tasty, especially given that they don't look very appetizing. And, they can be turned into fabulous light sabers.

And So It Begins...

Zucchini. First one.

Then two more.

In several weeks, we will hopefully be filling the cars of unsuspecting neighbors with the excess crop. For now, we are happy.

The Apple Tree is Still Not Dead

It actually has hundreds of little green apples on it. We need to thin them soon before the tree has hundreds of little ripe apples (instead of fewer large ripe apples).

Spring Has Sprung

The lack of recent posts has not been, as you might expect, because everything is dead and there is nothing to post about. Quite the contrary! The garden is growing marvelously; I attribute this to two things.

1. Chicken poop has magical powers. (Pay no attention to the funny looking chicken coop behind the curtain-actually a tarp that was making it waterproof that started blowing around and makes things look so unprofessional-it houses the producers of pooh, and is an integral part of the hobby farm ecosystem.)
2. I installed a cheap automated watering system before we left for Utah a few weeks ago.

Chickens are Ingrates

We have a chicken coop with world class laying boxes.

So where do some of the chickens decide to lay their eggs? Next to a tarp-covered bale of hay.

Fort Knox

We have finally finished sealing the garden away from bad influences. Yesterday, we put up the last of the netting designed to keep cute little songbirds and other nasty vermin out of the garden. Here is the netting on the ground being cut to length and sewed together.

And here is the final result.

As we were creating this cozy little fortress in the wilderness, we decided that it would be a great place for grand kids to sleep out in. I can hear the following dialog already:

• Grandchild: Mom, I don't want to sleep in the garden.
• Mother: I know, but can't you do it for just one night? It makes your grandparents so happy.
• GC: But Mom, it's creepy. There is bugs and stuff.
• M: Just humor them, OK? Put the sleeping bag outside, and they will forget all about it in twenty minutes.

Bring out your dead...

Monday evening (the 11th), after finally hermetically sealing the garden against chickens and other nasty foul (down to the size of a 1"x1" square), we planted the plants that were living the the laundry room. Here is the plan according to which they were planted:

Here they are, all happy to go into the rich, fertile soil:

Here is the proto-vet, putting them into the rich fertile soil:

And here is what they look like after less than a week in the rich, fertile soil:

You will notice a lack of green stuff in much of the garden boxes. That is because many of the plants have turned white and died. This is quite disappointing. One possible explanation for their failure to thrive (failure to live?) is the excessive heat we have experienced this week. It has been above 90 on several days.

This reminds us of a story told to us by a good friend. He was planting grapes one spring; planting grapes apparently looks like burying sticks in the ground. His neighbor, seeing this, remarked "I see you are saving time by planting things that are already dead."

Move the duck?

Call it busy minds otherwise occupied with more important matters or just a lazy habit, we are Post-it users in the worst way. Even with technology at our fingertips nothing speaks with the authority or clarity as a reminder (almost always on the microwave) of a post-it note.

That seems normal enough until I looked at this note with objective eyes. "Move the duck". How weird can one family get? I laughed out loud.

Then I remembered with fondness, the story of a morning of one of my mentor-moms, when she was overheard yelling, "Don't let that bunny go downstairs!" Carolei was famous for being uber-normal and in control of her larger brood. If she can have a rabbit loose in the house I am in good company with ducks that need moving. At least they weren't inside the house......yet.

Protecting Our Stuff From Our Animals

We have noticed a disturbing pattern in our farming activities. We acquire some animals (40 chickens, for example). Then we discover that these animals have a deleterious effect on something (our tomatoes, for example). So we end up spending a Saturday or two or three and somewhere between $50 and $250 to animal proof whatever needs protecting.

Exhibit number one. Some of the chickens figured out that they could fly over the fence to eat bugs (good) and produce (bad) and bathe in the soil (bad) in the garden; cute little song birds have also eaten many of our finest tomatoes. So we have sealed off the garden to anything that can't fit through a 1" hole by draping the whole thing in bird netting. (The filmy green mist you see in the picture below is not the steel tubing sending forth the first shoots of spring; it is the bird netting that is turning the garden into a fortress.)

Exhibit number two. The cats that live on the back porch were using the flower garden as a litter box. But no more! The flower boxes are now protected by chicken wire, with holes for the flowers carefully cut out with a Dremel tool. So now they have started using the gravel between the flower beds.

It's Spring and Those Chicks are Just Popping Out of Their Eggs

Last Tuesday (the 26th), all of Red's hard work came to fruition as a baby chick pecked its way out of its egg. It was joined on Wednesday by another. So now we have two baby chicks (plus an egg that we are 90% sure is not going to hatch, but we don't dare throw it away yet even though Red stopped sitting on it yesterday but we don't want to accidentally commit chickencide). Baby chicks are about the cutest things on the planet (cuter even than baby bunnies; bunnies just sit there looking cute, while chicks look and act cute).

Of course, this happy news comes with a future dark side. Assuming that each chick has a 50-50 chance of growing up to be a rooster, and that this probability is independent from chick to chick, there is a 75% chance that at least one of these adorable little balls of fluff with turn out to be a testosterone driven pain in the butt. We already have seven roosters, which is four or five more than we should have; sadly, we have not yet figured out how to decide who gets voted off the farm. So the chance of one or more of these adorable little chicks will go bad casts a dark shadow on this otherwise joyful event. (Kind of like in the poster for Star Wars Episode I where Anakin Skywalker's shadow is shaped like Darth Vader.)

The Apple Tree is Not Dead (Yet)

The apple tree is awash in blossoms. The pruning does not seem to have hurt it at all. Yeah for miracles!

How to Make a Really Big Pencil Eraser with Materials You Probably Have Sitting Around the Farm

Lorell tried to make cheese the other day, because that is what you do if you are a farmer. Unfortunately, the instructions were not as clear as they could have been about not heating the milk above 88 degrees. The end result was a chunk of cheese that had the structural properties of vulcanized rubber. We fed it to the chickens*, with no obvious bad effects. Here is a picture of said cheese floating in the whey.

*Interesting side note (actually, this is disgusting enough that you really don't want to know this; I write it only in the interest of scientifically documenting life on the farm. So stop reading now. I can't be responsible if you continue reading.) Chickens seem to be able and willing to eat many surprisingly disgusting things with no obvious bad effects. Cockroaches, for example; they snap them up like popcorn. The one that surprised me, however, was that a few weeks ago we were trimming the goats' hooves, which had become way overgrown and thus smelled like Feta cheese. The chickens ate the hoof trimmings with apparent relish. (Don't you wish you had stopped reading? You were warned.)

The Incredible Shrinking Apple Tree

Yesterday was apple tree pruning time. (This was actually the event that led us to start the blog in the first place. Every year, I go out and stare at the apple tree, desperately trying to remember what it is that should be accomplished by this exercise in woodsmanship. So this year, we are documenting the process so that next year I will just read the blog and be ready to hack and slash.)

The before picture:

The goal was to curb the horizontal spread of the tree, because some of the main limbs were getting dangerously long, and to bring the top of the tree down within reach of a fruit picking pole. I sketched it thusly:

The results:

There are still some places that are too tall, but I couldn't really cut them without being able to levitate. (We keep telling the Proto-vet to learn to fly, but she has not been obliging so far.)

Social Climbing Chickens

We got a call from the next-door neighbor that their bug man (not a man who is part bug-he is actually their exterminator) had found a nest of chicken eggs. As they do not own any chickens and we do, our chickens were deemed to be the culprits. The house next door is rather largish with a Tuscan Vila architecture, and the chickens were laying their eggs in the entry courtyard. Their desire to move up in the pecking order is understandable.

Here is the basket of exterminated eggs. That is a lot of social climbing.

It's Alive!

The little seeds are sprouting like crazy. It feels like spring in the laundry room. The little paper cups seem to be working well so far.

(It also feels like spring outside the laundry room, since the highs are in the mid seventies and the trees are all sprouting leaves.)

I Don't Like Spiders and Snakes

We found this spider hanging on the screen outside our kitchen window. It was, according to the proto-vet (those of you who know the family know who this is), trying to get through the window and eat her, because she is small and succulent. It was big enough to do just that.

And snakes are actually not that bad. Unless they touch you. Especially with their forked tongue.

Age-Activated ADD

The reason we need this blog is Age-Activated ADD.  Because we really are busy all day, but we can't figure out why things don't get finished. And farming requires consistency-remember the law of the harvest.

This video explains why things don't get done.

Scotch Tape is the Answer

But we don't know what the question is. Actually, it is good for holding paper planting cups closed. Although future archeologists will sift through our garden dirt and find the little strips of undecomposable tape and surmise, wrongly (hopefully), that we choked to death on the plastic. And that we deserved it for having done such damage to the environment.

But that's not really the subject of this post. We are planting seeds in little paper planting pots so that later this spring we can transplant them into the garden.

Hello World

So, we have decided to start blogging, mostly so that next year we won't be asking the same questions that we did this year and trying to reinvent the wheel year after year.

Besides, farming badly can be highly entertaining...