By Andrew Haupt
Cory and Jess moved onto the property last week and got their van all set up to live out of. It’s been nice having them around to help out. We had the craziest lightning storm I’ve ever witnessed in Southern California on Monday night -- the sky lit up in a strobe pattern every few seconds, but there wasn’t much thunder. We ended up getting half an inch of rain overnight, which was incredible.
We spent quite a bit of time inoculating oak logs with shiitake plug spawn. It’s quite a tedious process -- drilling a bunch of holes, knocking in the pegs, and sealing each with wax. We ended up with 11 logs total, and still have a bag of reishi spawn to use as well.
The rain got a bunch of seeds wet that I’d left out, so I did a ton of planting this week, planting carrots, cabbage, parsnips, broccoli, leeks, turnips, and throwing beets everywhere there was space. I ended up pulling the summer squash and cucumbers as they were getting mildew and not really producing anymore. I harvested two rows of the Wapsie Valley flour corn as well, and hung them to dry. A lot of it got eaten by the crows unfortunately.
Experimented with the rest of the black walnuts I foraged by making a fermented black walnut ketchup based on Alan Bergo’s recipe. Ideally the walnuts would have been younger, before the hull formed, but we’ll see how it goes. Straining didn’t work that well, so there’s still some chunks.
Prickly pear season is officially here! Gathered a 5 gallon bucket in 20 minutes this weekend. Also planted out the couple cuttings that actually took, a merlot grape and a mulberry. And the duckling are now free to roam in the garden.
