Creekside Ranch

Right now, I am can­ning tomatoes.

This process began in July, when we planted the left­over plants from mar­ket, includ­ing sev­eral dozen San Martino's Romas. Now we're pick­ing them in big colan­ders full, and today was our first can. My first-ever time peel­ing toma­toes, seed­ing toma­toes, puree­ing toma­toes, then cook­ing them down and then can­ning toma­toes. Because this is tir­ing, I'm writ­ing a post.

We live in tomato coun­try. Yolo County pro­duces a goodly share of the Cal­i­for­nia can­ning tomato crop, which in turn com­prises nearly all of the canned toma­toes we eat in the U.S. Start­ing in the spring, the fields begin to fill with mil­lions of the lit­tle spi­dery plants, and by this time, early fall, the last of the har­vest machines is scoop­ing them up. The machines take a whole plant, and using some kind of eye, pick out the red from the green toma­toes. Then peo­ple sort the good red toma­toes from the bad ones (so says this guy), and the good ones go onto a belt into a wagon about 15' high. It's all gonna be ketchup any­way, so it's OK if it gets a bit squished.

We have seen the tomato trucks every­where, and breathed the toma­toey fumes from the Wood­land tomato plant.  We have sold dozens of starter plants and planted dozens more.  And now at last, our first batch of home­made tomato sauce is in the can.

And you know what?  The work has been a plea­sure, up til now.  I have enjoyed the lit­tle seedlings, and the till­ing of the ground, and the run­ning of the irri­ga­tion lines, and com­ing home with bas­kets full of bright red fruit.

And now, there are clear jars of bright red pre­serves on my counter, and friends, I am so done with this process. Come and take my toma­toes away. There are green ones and red ones and Chero­kee pur­ple, and var­i­ous cherry toma­toes as well, and if I peel and seed one more joy­ous bowl­ful, that might just be one bowl too many.

Well, hello, and wel­come back to the blog! It's been awfully quiet around here for…2 months…but now autumn's arrived. Time to turn over a new leaf, and then step on it, get­ting that crunchy sound.

Today is Indige­nous People's Day, which we cel­e­brated by har­vest­ing the Tarahu­mara sun­flow­ers, and leav­ing some out for the birds. I can't tell you much about the Tarahumara/Rarámuri, except that they are famous for run­ning, and they man­aged to escape the Span­ish col­o­niz­ers who showed up at what is now Chi­huahua, Mex­ico. I think these facts are linked. Also, they wear flat shoes made out of old tires, which have inspired Evan's cur­rent choice of footwear.

We brought in the sun­flow­ers, we brought in some beans, and we brought in our first batch of chiles! Oh, crops of the Amer­i­cas, you never dis­ap­point. Tonight we are mak­ing chili in cel­e­bra­tion. Here is my approx­i­mate recipe for chili (dif­fer­ent every time): 1 – 2 onions 2 – 6 sweet pep­pers [now saute the above with 2 – 4 cloves gar­lic in plenty of veg­etable oil] 1 – 3 pounds toma­toes as many hot pep­pers, and as many dif­fer­ent kinds, as you like dry beans, or fresh shelling beans, cooked to near-doneness. The more kinds of beans the fuller the fla­vor.
salt, oregano, pep­per, and cumin to taste

That's it, just com­bine all of the above and let it sim­mer as long as you can stand it.

We are lucky to have a big space for our gar­den. I think of myself as a begin­ning gar­dener, but an expe­ri­enced eater. This means I know what to plant and how to cook it, but har­vest time still feels like a mir­a­cle. Wow, food came out of the ground! Again!

I must share with you one more thing about the gar­den, which is that we almost never weed, and it works out fine. We just weed at the begin­ning to give the crops a fight­ing chance, and then we let the many plants come as they will. This is the kind of thing you can do with a big gar­den, because who cares if you lose a few beans in the grand scheme of things? This is also the lux­ury of grow­ing food for our­selves, rather than as a busi­ness. Our busi­ness is plants and lamb, pos­si­bly duck next year and the almonds, but the veg­eta­bles are all ours.

Ours and the sheep's. There's a case of the snif­fles going around the flock, and they say that sheep ben­e­fit from C the same way we do, so we're cut­ting the oranges up and feed­ing them to the sheep. More green­ery would help, too…beet greens are up next on the menu. Then beets, if we can devise a cut­ter. Peo­ple used to feed beets to their stock, and they'd have a beet cut­ter, which I gather is just a large hand-crank food proces­sor. Tell me if this sounds like some­thing that you could invent, read­ers. We need it.

What I meant to tell you, is it's beau­ti­ful right now. The sec­ond rain of fall is here, and tiny shafts of grass are pok­ing up out of the dirt and thatch. They seem so pre­car­i­ous now…I don't know if we'll get enough rain to sus­tain them or if they'll just die. But all around us, if the rain should allow it, are acres and acres of sheep feed, just wait­ing to grow.

So, sum­mer­time cook­ing is easy.  Pretty much any­thing ripe that you buy at the mar­ket can be eaten raw and salted, or cooked in a lit­tle but­ter, and it's awesome.

Here are a few of the things we've been eat­ing this summer…from eas­i­est to hard­est (but best):

Cucum­ber Salad:

Revised, due to Katy's fuzzy mem­ory!  Shred cukes, sprin­kle with salt, let them sit awhile while you dis­solve some sugar in vine­gar.  Mix every­thing together, add pep­per, chill it a lit­tle while, and enjoy.  Tastes good with every­thing, and the juice is the best part.  Credit Krystof's mom for this recipe.

Yet Another Way to Eat Pasta:

While you're boil­ing the water, brown some zuc­chini slices in but­ter.  Once they're brown, add thin slices of gar­lic and 1 – 2 chopped toma­toes. Throw some good olive oil in at the end.  By the time your pasta is out you will have a fine sauce for it.

Chiles Rel­lenos:

Fol­low this great recipe, but make a com­pletely dif­fer­ent stuff­ing, as devised by Evan: brown 1/2 pound pork and an onion, set aside, saute a cou­ple pounds of sum­mer squash and 1 of the poblanos from the recipe because you broke it acci­den­tally, and then mix in the pork and about a third cup of farmer's cheese or goat cheese or prob­a­bly cream cheese would be good.

We also made mous­saka, fill­ing in zuc­chini for some of the egg­plant, which was lovely but much too com­pli­cated to con­vey in 1 sen­tence.  The les­son learned there was: bread­crumbs on the bot­tom and top make your mous­saka extra good, and left­over pork from the rel­leno project just makes every­thing good.

In my last job, we worked on a soft­ware tool that peo­ple used to track project expenses and time, to help bosses make "busi­ness deci­sions."  Now, as a small busi­ness owner, I make oodles of busi­ness deci­sions, every day.  And when you farm, those busi­ness deci­sions are going to hap­pen wher­ever they please.

So this morn­ing I got up at 6, packed the van up for Evan's trip down to the mar­ket, fed the cats and ducks, and went back to bed.  It was Sun­day, and I was deter­mined to stay in bed as late as pos­si­ble, sleep­ing and read­ing and avoid­ing busi­ness deci­sions for a few hours — or even all day, if I could.  Think­ing maybe I'd go into town for a paper and cof­fee and eggs, maybe raid the remains of the Bor­ders book­store in Vacaville.

Late morn­ing came, and it was time to water plants and feed the sheep, so I man­aged to hoist my book off of my chest and get dressed.  I put the hay in the truck, I drove down to the pen, I stepped out, and there was a sheep in the tree.  Forefeet up, leaf in mouth, black eyes open, not mov­ing.  Look­ing for all the world like a taxi­der­mied sheep.

So I put some hay out and some flaxseed meal in the feed­ers, and refreshed the sheep's water, and went up to look.  Ewe lamb num­ber 1010 had man­aged to stran­gle her­self in a tree.  There are so many things they don't put in the sheep books, like oh, trees are deadly, watch out for that, folks.  Poor thing must have stretched up too high, stuck her head in a notch for a leaf, and then got stuck.  And no hands around to pull her out.  I keep notic­ing the tragedy of not hav­ing hands.

I came inside, read an arti­cle on how to com­post your dead ani­mals, and called Evan, who hero­ically offered to haul the sheep out of there for me, and assured me that it wasn't going to be too gross if we waited until evening.  Decided I'd bet­ter start build­ing the com­post pile, so we'd be ready to go when he got home.

And then I thought about that cof­fee and the paper and the eggs, thought about the hot sun out­side and another day of expo­sure and work.  And I thought, well, she's not going any­where.  And it's still Sunday.

So I had my paper and (it being too late for eggs) my BLT, and built a bin out of some ran­dom stuff we had around, and home came the heroic Evan.  We untan­gled the sheep from the tree and had her turn­ing into plant food in no time.

There is a say­ing among ranch­ers, some­thing along the lines of "as soon as that lamb hits the ground, it starts try­ing to die."  I think it helps peo­ple feel bet­ter about the myr­iad ways you can lose a lamb in its first few weeks of life.  But I can't really see what this 5-month-old sheep could've done dif­fer­ently — she wanted leaves, she went for them, her feet went out from under her.  I applaud her ambi­tion and we buried her with starthis­tle, a favorite food.

I like to move the sprin­klers every day, to help the almond trees along their almond way.  They're microsprin­klers, so they give off a fine mist which sinks down into the roots over sev­eral hours, which saves water and pre­serves the struc­ture of the soil.  This does pretty much noth­ing for the grass — there is just a thin layer of green here and there, where the sprin­klers have been.

So I'm mov­ing the sprin­klers this evening, and it's a hot one.  I am walk­ing kind of zom­bielike at this point, hav­ing well and truly cooked my brain dur­ing a mid­day fence move.  I lurch to my right and say "OH god."

For there, where my hand was reach­ing for the sprin­kler, a long snake lay twined in the grass.  Frozen.  Hop­ing I didn't see it.

"Well, you scared me too!" I said — and then crouched down to get a closer look.  No rat­tle and no diamond-head, whew.  Rat­tlesnakes are so com­mon here that (1) the hay guy warned us not to put our hands between the bales — the snakes hide there — and then we did it any­way and found a skin, and (2) the ceme­tery has a promi­nent "Rat­tlesnake XING" sign right as you walk in.  Really puts one in the mood for some peace­ful reflec­tion on one's own mortality.

So it took me awhile, but even­tu­ally I found its pic­ture online — this is the com­mon Pacific gopher snake, which is friendly and sweet, and may even eat rat­tlesnakes.  A friend indeed — a snake, a snake.

If you would like to see a gopher snake befriend­ing a baby, you will have to click here.

Like this, but bigger.

So guess what we found next!  A mushroom-mushroom.  Evan found this puff­ball about the size of a baby head.  (Baby heads are big­ger than soft­balls, right?)  And to make mat­ters stranger, it was damp (from the sprin­klers) and very firm, and warm, so I half won­dered if it wasn't something's head as I wig­gled it out of the ground.

I think it was Scle­ro­derma polyrhizum, which accord­ing to this expert, is at war with his sub­urb, cre­at­ing "plump pus­tules on patiently preened promenades."

Because you haven't seen it in a cou­ple years, and because we are 2 for 3 on wildlife sight­ings today, I bring you:

Evan always enjoys the music at the farmer's mar­ket.  Last week­end, I got this very spe­cial text:

Evan: Desparado.  Never has a song about an out­law been less trangressive.

And today, live from Inderkum High.…

Evan:  Noooooooo!  Not Landslide.….….losing will to live…

Katy: Did the land­slide bring you down?

Evan: Have been killed by awful gui­tar music

Katy: At least they did it softly, with their song.

Evan: Also by soph­moric wordplay

In con­clu­sion, our mys­tery squash: