splash bing bang boom

zing zang twing twoong

little noises run around

come out of instruments into town

and strut about and ride on bikes

and go for walks and go for hikes

Today she made cookies and added So Many Ingredients! Like, everything in the house! I cringed as I watched her toss it all into the bowl, unmeasured and completely random, of course. But, to my surprise, as usual, they turned out delicously! We devoured the whole batch in about ten minutes.

Ingredients in Amanda’s Everything Cookies

• almond extract
• grated carrots
• ground coffee beans
• carob powder
• oats
• poppee seeds
• icing sugar
• ginger
• banana
• apple
• whole grapes
• puffed wheat
• almonds

After cookie eating, we made music together, singing loudly. Here’s some photos from the evening:

Alex has moved back into the farmhouse, and Sara is taking a four month trip over the winter, and we are happy to have Mapris in her bedroom for the next several months.

The garden is partly covered for the winter with a heavy multch, but part of it is still growing kale and winter greens. We also harvested tons of jerusleum artichoke and potatoes about a month ago, and are still eating some of the garlic we grew over the summer.

In no particular order, here are some photo from the past several months:

We started the pizza. Whole wheat dough. Flour, yeast, water, oil, and salt. We let it rise for one hour, then rolled it into the pans.

Before it went into the oven. A thick layer of pesto, a thick layer of pizza sauce, and a thick layer of vegetables. I splurged on vegan cheese, which I’ve never bought before. It was our first time eating “Daiya”, which came highly recommended by friends.

MEANWHILE.. Amanda unwraps a candle.

Dan looks closely at our new candles. Besides the wick, there are also garden herbs in them.

The rosemary in the wax catches on fire, creating a beautiful flame.

Burn, baby!

Pizza after cooking. The cheese .. sorta.. melted. It was melty and stringy once you move it, but it did look a lot like it did when it first went in. It was delicious. though!

We set the table with our new candles, and chowed down on the pizza. How did it taste? Lets just say, there was no crumbs left at the end of the meal, and Patrick, one of our resident meat eaters and a regular pizza purchaser said: “It was one of the best slices of pizza…I’ve had in a while”.

Soil
Most of the time we sprout our seeds in good soil taken from the garden. It’s working well for us and we don’t need to buy or make potting mix. A side effect of using garden soil is that there is lots of seeds already in it. Mostly this is a good thing: kale, borage, chickweed, tomatoes and sometimes even carrots sprout up among our “planned” seedlings and we couldn’t be happier about it. If a plant we don’t want sprouts up, we just pluck it out once it’s been identified. We do keep a bag of sea soil around for those times we want to be 100% certain about whats sprouting.

Watering
When a seed is first planted, we water the top of the soil with a spray bottle (we buy high-quality ones through Sara’s work because 1-2 dollar ones break quickly – save money, and plastic, and don’t buy them!). Once the seedling has grown a bit, we keep the roots wet by “bottom watering” – pouring a thin layer of water into the bottom of the tray the seedlings are sitting in. This way, they are not damaged by streams of water, you get to water the roots directly, and it even saves us time, too.

(tacky design warning! I have used this post as an excuse to download and play with as many funky/tacky fonts as possible.)

Now on to the photos ..

As the sun shined yesterday, I got inspired to take about a million photos of the garden. Under the cut is most of them! Continuing in the theme of going over the top, I also added fancy font captions to every picture. So, please relax, hit your F11 key, and leave us a friendly comment when you’re finished.

and that’s not all. stay tuned for the next post: photos from inside the greenhouse. wow!

fact: i hated mushrooms as a kid.

like most strongly flavoured ingredients (olives, garlic, truffles, seafood, wines, spices, “game” meats etc…), my premature tastebuds would become overwhelmed and repulsed, but as i have grown in my years, diets and experiences, i have learned to savour what i once shunned. many of us experience this…

my love and curiosity for mushrooms did not come from eating them (from table mushrooms to mushroom-tea) but stemming more from their uniqueness, beauty, symmetry and diversity

fact: the mushroom is the largest organism on earth!

“..they have a relative out west that occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf.

“The discovery of this giant Armillaria ostoyae in 1998 heralded a new record holder for the title of the world’s largest known organism, believed by most to be the 110-foot- (33.5-meter-) long, 200-ton blue whale. Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years”

i have been grateful to observe six species in our own yarden, so far; and a few others around precise parts of town, at precise times.

unfortunately i am not well trained in the art of identifying mushrooms….if it wasn’t for my prudent, caring roommates, i might have ingested  all these species without living to gloat about their taste and properties!

(remember: eating unidentified mushrooms COULD equal: death.)

In the garden, we have been tidying up while sprouts are growing fast in the greenhouse. We are pleased to be still eating last summer’s kale, the onions and garlic have sprouted, and our berry bushes are budding to life. We have a strong feeling it will be a very good summer.

About these photos, to save money, I scanned my photos on a free scanner, instead of getting them scanned from negatives at the photo lab. As you can see, the quality suffered dramatically, but luckily I think the graininess is endearing.