By Andrew Haupt
While the eternal struggle against squirrels and rabbits continues, the harvest has begun to trickle in. Somehow we’ve ended up with far too many squash plants again, and the wave is beginning to grow larger than we can handle. We’re down to the last Homestead Sweetmeat winter squash outside the garden. The last couple in cages outgrew their cages and were subsequently demolished. Something (deer?) came along and ate all the leaves off a few of the cherry trees in the meadow as well.
I cut a handful of coast live oak logs in a dense thicket to inoculate with shitaake and reishi spawn. They need to sit for awhile so waiting until next week to do it.
I started a new project creating a couple wattle raised beds on the front border of the meadow garden, with the idea that it will be harder for animals to get into. I started off trying to do a traditional wattle using woven willow branches, but quickly realized it wasn’t the best use of materials considering all the other brush laying around (oak branches, manzanita, black locust). So it won’t be quite as pretty or easy to weave but at least it’ll clean up some. It’s taking forever to build up...
Gathered gooseberries up at Volcan Mountain on Friday and started a Julian Summer Mead, trying to capture the flavors of the place and time, like I did in the spring. I tried a different method of extracting the goodness out of gooseberries this time, simply covering them with cold water and crushing, then straining, which I think preserved the flavor better. The ingredients for this mead include gooseberries (the primary flavor), cedar cones, elderflowers, and yarrow. I’ve also been playing with manzanita berries, making some manzanita gatorade (just crushed manzanita steeped in water a couple days) and a manzanita cider with honey as a sugar source. I added a bit of prickly pear juice, lemon, and tulsi from the garden to it, and letting the wild yeast do its thing. I finished off the weekend by brewing a hazy pale ale.
We also got a bit of rain this weekend. On both Saturday and Sunday we had 5 minute spells where the water actually fell out of the sky for a few minutes. I felt incredibly grateful, although it doesn’t add up to much. It made me wish I could have lived here 40 years ago, when summer storms happened on a weekly basis. The solastalgia hit hard.
