around the house

busy day

Today i cleared brush along our property line. it's amazing how much scruffy stuff crops up in one year. i took out the evergreens and left a few well-placed paper birch and sugar maples. There was even a beech hiding in there! Ideally, there will be a row of deciduous trees to shade the house in summer and let in the sun during the winter.

Miss Critterpants painted her very own garden box.

My Guy went to Town today to pick up the last load of top soil and soil amendments. I hope that putting effort and a little bit of money into the dirt gives the garden a good start. happy fertile soil means happier plants with fewer problems, right? Here's to hoping!

so far we have put down 2.5 cubic yards of top soil plus green sand, bone meal, peat moss, lots and lots of manure and this crazy Maine compost made of lobster shells and aspen bark.

it looks like we will need about another yard of top soil and i would like to add some more peat to the mix.

Pears for my heir

We have been planting fruit trees from the second spring we lived here. I feel that they are the first things to go into a garden, because it takes so long for trees to bear fruit. Right now, we have one apple tree, two plums and two cherry trees (one sweet, one sour). This spring we are adding two more apple trees, an almond tree and a grape vine. That covers a great deal, but we are missing pears. Miss Critterpants would eat nothing but pears if given the chance.

Pears are pickier about their climate and soil than apples and non-grafted trees can take years and years to bear. However, the trees live for generations, grow to enormous proportions and can yield tons of fruit. literally tons of fruit.

Grafted pears reduces the time before bearing and controls the size of the tree. It makes growing pears more accessible to the backyard fruit grower.

I have narrowed down to three types of pear I would like to plant on our property.

Seckel: it is an American heirloom and delicious. discovered in Pennsylvania in the early 1800's, it grows reliably in western Maine and bears annually some of the most delicious pears I have ever eaten.

Yellow Huffcap: an heirloom European perry pear. not for fresh eating but for fermenting into perry, which is hard cider made with pears as opposed to apples. Yellow Huffcap is supposed to be an excellent unblended perry pear, and it makes such a strong drink that it "lifts your cap" when you drink it.

Pound Pear: it is an old old pear dating back to the 1600's in France. One fruit can weigh anywhere from two to four pounds. They aren't for eating fresh, but baking. Traditionally, an entire pear was wrapped in pastry, baked for hours until the pear softened and the flesh turned pink. They keep all winter in cold storage. the image of enormous pear-shaped pastries all winter is so romantic to me that I have to find this tree to have our very own supply of giant baking pears. however, there is some debate over the pear. "Pound Pear" may have been the generic name for any large baking pear so it can be any number of old cooking pears and all are difficult to find. "Belle Angevine", "Uvedale St. Germaine", "Catillac",or "Black Worcester". I guess I don't mind which it is, as long as it is big and delicious when baked in pastry.

There is hope! The National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvalis, Oregon is a USDA facility that "that preserves invaluable plant genetic resources of temperate fruit, nut, and agronomic crops. This gene bank maintains collections representing global diversity of hazelnuts, strawberries, hops, pears, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and cranberries." They probably have more information about pears and fruit than I could ever use in a lifetime. If any of you know about pears and pound pears i would love to hear it!


Update: I have found a large culinary pear that is not only available, but apparently more delicious that any of the ones I listed above! It's Bellissime D'Hiver. A vigorous grower and excellent bearer and does well grafted on to either pear or quince stock (important for size and cold-hardiness) The description from the National Repository is; "One of the very best culinary pears with which I am acquainted, and quite free from that disagreeable grittiness which is peculiar to baking pears generally. It is both in size and every other aspect superior to the Catillac" I had been searching for an American source for the Catillac pear, but had only found one in the UK and one in Canada. Hooray for the Bellissime D'Hiver pear!

Come on!

Please take note that this is happening TODAY. it is April 17th.

Whoopie!

Martha's recipe for chocolate whoopie pies with peanut butter filling.

i will make this recipe again.

'Tis the Season!

There was going to be a lovely post about baking the traditional New England dessert of Whoopie Pies with peanut butter filling, but Big Spider Season has begun!

Here we have a small specimen of a wolf spider. In my kitchen. The largest one i have seen here was 3" diameter. Every spring, huge beautiful Luna moths hatch and flutter around like small green nocturnal birds. You may ask, what eats big moths? The Circle of Life answers "really freakin' big spiders!"

Wolf spiders don't spin webs, and females carry their babies on their backs. so if you ever step on one, all the tiny babies scatter into all the crevices nearby. Did i mention that they run really fast and jump too? just for fun, really.

Big Spider Season is celebrated by shrieking and lots of hollering "HOLY CROW THAT'S A BIG SPIDER!" Other traditions are; shaking out every item of clothing, and flipping over the bed covers before sleeping. Shoes are knocked on the bottom like recalcitrant bottles of ketchup. Towels and shower curtains are also gaily flapped about in sheer dread of being caught nekkid and having to run screaming from the bathroom.

sweet smell of gardening

One of the women in my knitting group generously offered another woman in the group manure for her garden. i pounced on their private conversation "MANURE?!?!?! REALLY? Can i have some? pleasepleasepleaseplease..."

these are very kind and gracious women who are getting used to my flatlander manners and they let in on the manure loop! the soil we are putting in the garden boxes is purchased and beautifully clean, but devoid of organic matter. a generous helping of animal poo would go a long way to make happier plants.

today i spent four hours in the gathering and delivery of cow/goat/llama poop. i drove a truckload to the original recipient of the offer and then a truckload back to the house. then about two hours shoveling it out of the truck and into the boxes.

it was kind of a gross day, but totally worth it. there were interesting conversations, beautiful homes and gardens and i came home with not only fertilizer but a bag of hothouse tomatoes and a jar of homemade maple syrup. absolutely worth a little hard labor and a little smell.

Boxes! Yay!

Let me explain about why these boxes are amazing. They are far and away better than any boxes ever seen! They are made from the white cedars that were once growing on the site.

White cedar is one of those indestructible woods that will resist rotting and insects and last at least five years in box form with wet dirt packed against them. and that's without any sort of stain or weather proofing on them. i figure they will last 10 years.

so, My Guy cut down the trees, milled the trees into lumber, chipped the parts of the tree that weren't mill-able, built the boxes, and then helped me move the boxes on top of the mulch. then, above all of that, he left me alone to move them around until they were just right by my own plans.

Our Neighbor, upon hearing that i was under the weather and unable to spread the mulch around under my own devices, brought his tractor over and pushed it around so all i had to do was rake it into an even 3" cover.

Behold! a raised bed garden built entirely from the ground that it is standing on! There are another eight or nine boxes in the works once he has finished dispatching with The Big Tree. It is lying on top of the other half of the garden plot. My Guy is great.

Snow in April

It isn't sticking, but it is falling in tiny, hard balls of cold. Since Miss CP and i are still under the weather, our out-of-doors time is limited today.

Allow me to introduce one of our trees that shrugs off cold weather all the way down to -40 degrees! This is a Garfield Plantation sour cherry tree. It was traditionally grown on farmsteads in Aroostook County, Maine, the part of the state that abuts Quebec. If left to its own devices, the Garfield Plantation Cherry will sucker into a large shrub but it can be kept as a tree with determined pruning.

I have visions of sour cherry preserves and sour cherry pies and cherry pit necklaces for the Miss.

Creepy

I have planted seeds of creeping thyme between the flagstones of our front walk. supposedly it can handle being stomped on, and it will gently fragrance your approach to our front door! the trick is, it grows in alkaline soil and our is so acid it almost burns. Pine trees prefer to grow in acidic soil and their needles decompose into a lovely low ph compost. so it takes acid soil for them to grow and they like to keep it that way.

i sweetened the dirt with ash from our wood stove. not only does it raise the ph but it also adds yummy things like potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, calcium and delicious delicious sulpher. add a generous dollop of compost and it's great soil for creeping thyme! i hope. cross your fingers for a creepy walkway!