How's Robb?

I could a tale unfold...

2012-01-21T20:17:00.000-08:00

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On Friday I had the great fortune to participate in a workshop with artist Chris Palmer.

If you've ever seen the origami documentary Between the Folds (and you really should), he's the one who makes the incredible rotating "flower tower" and who has the wild squirrel wandering into his Chicago apartment.

A terrible photo,
Anya's head is about to explode with joy.

Chris makes mind-bending works of art, at the dazzling intersection of origami and fabric pleating. The workshop was hosted by the costume shop of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The costumiers, props artisans and my little team of scenic artists attended, and I think everyone who participated felt they had stuck their finger directly into high-voltage creativity. It was hot stuff, let me tell you!

A roomful of artists says "whoa..." in unison.

Shadowfolds

Chris spoke of his influences, which include classical Islamic tile. In his works, he establishes a structured pattern through pleating. In some cases he maintains a strict structure to the direction of his pleats.

And in other cases, he twists and rotates the direction of the pleats to create an astonishing array of variations. (See how the star shapes have the same structure, but vary wildly from one another? Brilliant!)

The backs of his work are as mesmerizing as the fronts sides.

The workshop wasn't a mere show-and-tell. We got hands-on. Chris presented a large sheet of elaborately folded silk. And then he asked us to gently stretch it out from the corners.

Unfolded, it was a mysterious rumpled ocean of silk. The pattern was no longer evident.

At this point, he invited us to poke, prod and coax the fabric. The material had memory. Although we had no understanding of the structure, the fabric knew what it was doing.

Slowly at first, but with growing confidence, we manipulated the folds back into place.

This was mind-blowing. I don't know if this one of those you-just-had-to-be-there-to-understand experiences, or not.

After that, Chris shared some of his templates. We laid out our patterns, drawn with pencil on cotton. And we started sewing.

This photo shows one hexagon of my project sewn. Without ironing, the fabric is already twisting into place.

Here's one completed motif of a central hexagon, surrounded by alternating squares and triangles. My project will be an all-over pattern, when I finish it.

I have an unreasonable love of repeating pattern, and this workshop had my brain jumping with glee. As I said in the previous blog post, the interns gave me a really hard teasing because every time I stitched another section and turned my project over to see what was revealed, I said -- in an awestruck tone -- "This is sooooooooo cool."

It's such an honor to work at a place that values artistic learning and exploration, and I was so fortunate to have been a part of this fascinating workshop.

If you want to learn more about this technique, Chris Palmer has a beautiful book, with remarkably simple tutorials. Click here for more information.

Makes Re-Folding a Map Look Easy by Comparison

2012-01-20T21:01:00.000-08:00

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Flower Tower Origami Fold from Yulia Pinkusevich on Vimeo.

Flower Tower 8-Fold (Uncut Silk Square) from Chris K. Palmer on Vimeo.

Today I had the great pleasure of participating in a workshop with Chris Palmer, the artist featured in these videos. He brought along some of his famous flower towers, and let us play with them. My intern Anya teased me mercilessly because I simply could not stop announcing "THIS IS SO COOL" as we were working on our projects.

But really. THIS. WAS. SO. COOL.

I'm a bit too tired to slog through all of the photos I took today, so you'll have to enjoy these videos, and just look forward to seeing what we worked on.

Still Waters Run Deep

2012-01-14T22:13:00.000-08:00

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Play this video, all the way through. It's quite amazing what the artist, Riusuke Fukahori, is doing to create the illusion of dimension.

It's almost like he's a three-dimensional printer.

And honestly, I can't see how he's managing the edges of his paintings.

For the record, he's not the first person to paint with a broom. (A mop holds more paint.)

Flash Photo, with Squirrel

2012-01-07T15:53:00.001-08:00

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I know this is a lousy photograph, but I don't care.

It makes me laugh, and sometimes laughter trumps everything else.

Oh, The Horror.

2012-01-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, we are all over the news. Well ... our bees are anyway.

The San Francisco State entomology study we participated in has been published and, since it was based in San Francisco, it made the local news. Since it was another chance to talk about the importance of honeybees and provide tantalizing clues to the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder, it made the regional and green press. The story also gave everybody the opportunity to talk about creatures being turned into zombies, so, naturally, it's gone global.

Yes, Folks: we have brain-dead zombies roaming around our backyard. But only a few. And much fewer than last summer.

The study itself showed that a particular, very small fly which was known to parasitize bumble bees also infects and kills honey bees. It also showed that infected bees will leave the hive at night (something healthy bees would almost never do) and eventually die outside the hive. Somehow the parasite causes the bee to alter its normal behavior, robs it of motor control, eats its brain, and causes gleeful journalists to write things like, "flight of the living dead."

The researcher who periodically came by the house to collect bees for the study was fairly certain some of our bees were parasitized judging from the behavior of our backyard zombies. It turned out that more than three quarters of the hives surveyed from all over the region have some signs of infection.

The good news is, many hives just cope with this additional stressor. All kinds of diseases and pests can assault individual bees, but the colony survives and thrives. (Even without baseball bats and shotguns).

2012 -- Off to a Delicious Start

2012-01-01T19:02:00.000-08:00

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Unlike many folks, Robb and I made no plans for New Year's Eve. Large crowded spaces just aren't good for him, and neither is staying up late. We had a lovely night at home. Robb cooked a delicious dinner, and then we both baked this incredible sourdough bittersweet chocolate cake. Clare over at Curbstone Valley Farm mentioned that she had been experimenting with this recipe, and her online friends sat drooling until she posted instructions.

Back before Xmas, I was given some 80-year-old sourdough starter. Amazing stuff, that. To think that families have been continuously cooking with this living bacterial culture is kind of thrilling, if you're a big old dork like me. Robb has been making beautiful breads and pancakes with this stuff. All these things are delightful uses for sourdough.

But cake? Sourdough cake? Pure genius!

Today, after we got home from our Chicken Tourism, I decided to make a batch of persimmon-ginger preserves. Our persimmons are starting to get soft, which means they need to be used up. This jam actually calls for persimmon pulp, the mooshy flesh of an exceptionally ripe fruit. And we're starting to have a lot of that.

This jam was so delicious, that I immediately made a second batch.

The time has come for me to admit that while I understand how to make jams that taste great (at (least to me) and I feel confident in the kitchen safety and hygiene aspects of jam-making, I really don't have a clue about how to work with pectin.

Sometimes my jams gel beautifully, and sometimes they're extremely runny. I'm baffled by my rate of failure. I had thought that I was over-cooking (and thus killing) my pectin, but this batch had pectin added at the very end. Who know? Maybe I under-cooked this pectin. Oh well, this jam is so delicious, I don't care of it runs off of my toast. I'll happily lick it off of my jam-sticky knuckles.

I think I'm going to sign up for a class on jam making, if I can find such a thing. Does anyone have any suggestions, either about where to find a class (I'm thinking about the Institute of Urban Homesteading), or about why I suck at getting a decent texture to my jam?

update: The jam is gelling nicely, after all, although I really can't take any credit for understanding why it is working.

New Year's Cluck

2012-01-01T13:31:00.000-08:00

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I'm not a particularly superstitious person, but I do (kind of) believe that what one does on New Year's Day sets the tone for the rest of the year.

Today, we met some new neighbors (thanks to an online introduction by way of our neighborhood discussion group), and went to visit their chickens. Paul and Jamie (and their delightful children) keep seven hens in their back yard in East Oakland.

We've been trying to look at as many henhouses as we possibly can. We also want to ask chicken-keepers what they think they got right, and what they wish they had done differently. Robb's pretty certain of his design, but it helps to see coops in action.

Paul and Jamie are doing the "deep litter" method, and their hens were very clean. Robb and I had participated in chicken coop tours, but we figured that everyone tidied up like crazy for those events. It was good to see a normal set-up.

It's also nice to cuddle chickens. This is the super-relaxed Tiger Lily. She's a Barred Rock, a very chickeny chicken. Although I've done my share of carrying wild waterfowl, chickens are different. Part of it is body-configuration, and part is temperament. Tiger Lily just loved being petted. She settled into a sort of coma of bliss, and was a good sport about some wing-clipping.

Robb and I brought over a jar of our honey, and some fruit from our trees, and returned home with beautiful locally laid eggs.

You'd hardly think that we live in the middle of a huge city, would you?

Year End Garden Projects

2011-12-27T18:04:00.001-08:00

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Although we've accomplished a lot since buying our little house, the garden is far from perfect. In fact, it's a real mess. We've got an apparently infinite supply of invasive onion and arum plants, which I dig up by the trug-full, but never seem to reduce in number.

This is supposed to be a vegetable garden, but despite the fact that I've dug through this soil on numerous occasions, the soil keeps producing more bulbs. Plant-wise, there are two chard plants in this bed, a couple of miserably unhappy native penstemons, and the rest is weedy bulbs.

In addition to having weed-filled soil, we're surrounded by horrible fencing. What you're seeing in this photograph is Robb's cover-up of a falling-down garage. If I said that the walls of the garage were made of soggy graham crackers, I wouldn't be too far from the truth. The crumbly-looking grey stuff is apparently some kind of decades-old interior-grade particle-board. The white stuff behind that is sheetrock, which is also not a building material meant to be exposed to weather. The garage could probably be ripped apart with a butterknife. It is also riddled with rat-holes. Lovely.

Robb is covering all this mess up with some of the 80 year old old-growth redwood siding boards that we bought off of craigslist. We bought more than we needed for our house-siding project, and Robb has been stockpiling the less-than-perfect boards, with this project in mind.

We have decided to get chickens in the spring, and this is the spot in which we plan to locate their home. For the chickens' safety, we can't have a permeable coop. So, Robb has been shoring up the wall, to keep chickens in and varmints out.

Oh, that's so much better! I genuinely like the color variation of the old redwood planks.

We had beautiful weather over the last few days, so we spent a good part of our holiday working on garden projects.

I dug up and sifted through several of our vegetable beds. I added a huge amount of compost into the soil, and relocated some unhappily-situated plants. Our compost was dreamy, assuming you like that sort of thing. Our heavy silty soil needs all the fluffing-up that it can get. It's lovely in the damp winters, but come summertime, it turns rock-hard.

The photo above shows much-improved garden beds, with Robb in the background.

Smog was very involved, leaping in and out of the trenches that I created. (I know it looks like he's doing something else, but trust me: he's mid-pounce.)

I moved a clump of Douglas Iris, which I had bought early in our time here, and put in a bad location. The plants never really prospered.

Having this garden has been a learning experience. Some things I did were huge successes, others were Dumb Ideas. I'm so delighted to have had the time and cooperative weather to allow me to make improvements in our little garden. I don't know that most people would be able to see the difference, but I figure that we'll keep chipping away at our projects and eventually all that work will pay off.

What's Cookin' ?

2011-12-27T10:56:00.000-08:00

There's plenty to eat at our house. A mockingbird has been guarding our persimmon tree, but that doesn't stop the cheeky squirrels. Our little cat Smog races up the tree after the squirrel, but she ignores him. Who's to say where "brave" ends and "foolish" begins. Those persimmons sure are tasty.

Our lemon tree is just starting to ripen. Unlike most fruits, citrus "keeps" on the tree really well. We'll have fruit for months.

When we first moved here, Robb built the Little House for the feral cats. He wanted to give them a dry shelter during the winter rains. It is a favorite napping spot, rain or shine.

We're harvesting fennel. I've learned my lesson, and am cutting it when it is young and tender. If I wait for my plants to get as big as grocery-store fennel, they are invariably tough and inedible. Robb made an oven-braised fennel and then finished it under the broiler with a bit of deliciously stinky cheese. I'm still thinking about that dish...

A friend from my handspinning guild hosted a holiday party on her houseboat, and handed out all sorts of amazing goodies. I'm now the proud owner of eighty year old sourdough, and a whole variety of dye plants. We've been having a bit of a pancake orgy this past week.

Robb has also been baking pies. This is an unbaked persimmon tart, made with (home made) almond paste. Insanely delicious.

And these are some slices of home made veggie pot pies. Yesterday was beautiful and clear, and Robb and I worked out in the garden for something like six hours. I re-worked a lot of our vegetable garden, and moved poorly-placed plants to better locations. Robb worked on what's going to be our chicken coop.

I suspect that when people at work ask me what I did over the Christmas break, they won't understand why I was so happy to spend most of our time at home, cooking and gardening. Oh well...it sure made us happy.

Springerle Success!

2011-12-26T18:13:00.000-08:00

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Other than one faintly muttered "damn," no swearing occurred while making springerle cookies this year. I used a new recipe, because I located one of the more obscure leavening agents (baker's ammonia, once made from the horns of deer, and found at a local European deli).

I'm not sure why things worked out as well as they did, but the cookies unmolded, and baked beautifully. I only dragged my oven mitt through a couple of them, and that was fine, because it meant that Robb and I got to eat 'em.

This first photograph is the finished product -- pillowy and white, just like they should be.

Over the years, I've managed to find antique wooden cookie molds. They are little works of art, and if you think about it, they're pretty mind-boggling. The image is hand-carved, which is complicated enough, but here's what amazes me: the carver had to essentially carve the image inside-out. They had to carve deepest, where the image would be the tallest. And of course, since they were carving in wood, they really couldn't see what they were doing.

Printmakers and rubber-stamp carvers should be suitably impressed. Everyone else can shrug and wonder why I think this is such a big deal.

I think these are lovely, and keep a few on display in our dining room. Yeah, I've got a thing for hand-made wooden objects.

It is possible to buy resin reproductions of springerle molds, but I don't find them to have the same charm. Also, I've been super-lucky in the past, and found my wooden molds at remarkably good prices.

(If you ever see these little wooden molds at antique stores, send me a photo from your phone, and I might just ask you to buy them for me.)

In one way, I'm non-traditional with these cookies. I flavor them with almond instead of anise. I adore licorice, but I know that many people loathe it. There's no point going to the trouble of making a cookie that nobody wants to eat.

I spent part of my childhood in Austria, and have always thought that Northern Europeans really know how to do Christmas. That's probably why I get so misty-eyed about these cookies. It's not like they're actually part of my childhood memories, but something about really touches a nerve.

Charming, aren't they? This one is a bit more modern (or so I think).

Sadly, the carving of the grapes seems to have been damaged. I wonder if I could smooth it out, or if I would just wreck the mold in my misguided attempts at repair.

Bunny? Cat? Lamb? Darned if I know.

This series of molds seem to have been carved with a dremel-type tool. You can see the work of a rounded carving bit.

A charming castle. One of my fondest memories of living in Austria was spending weekends, doing what our family called "castle climbing." There were an apparently endless number of castles and fortifications open to the public, and we seemed to have explored most of them.

Compare the carving on the veins of the leaves with those on the rose, above. You can see how the carver of this mold dug their knife into the wood, creating a protruding vein. The carver of the rose was far more sophisticated, creating a leaf that curls in space and has more realistic (and far more difficult to carve) veins. Still, this is one of my favorite images.

In years past, the dough has gotten stuck in the molds, causing all sorts of heart-ache. This time, things could not have worked better. I suspect brushing flour into the molds and onto the dough really helped.

I'm almost tempted to try the (vegan) gingerbread recipe. Almost.

'Twas the Night Before Christmas

2011-12-24T19:56:00.000-08:00

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And All Through the House

Not a Creature Was Stirring

Not Even a Mouse

Best wishes to all of our friends, both our old ones and the ones we haven't met in person yet.

May all your holiday dreams come true.

Springerle Cookies for Christmas

2011-12-22T12:46:00.000-08:00

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Every few years, Robb and I get the crazy idea to make springerle cookies.

This is always an insane and over-ambitious undertaking.

If we don't share photos of our cookies in a few days, you'll know that we weren't very successful.

My father grew up in a wealthy household in Hungary, with a staff of domestic servants. There's a story about their cook, that when she was making streudel, everyone stayed out of the way. The process was so difficult, and her swearing was so blistering that nobody wanted to cross her path until the streudel was done. Making springlerle is a lot like that.

As for my family fortunes ... all that was lost when the Russians rolled their tanks across Eastern Europe, at the end of World War II. My family was declared "enemies of the state." My father fled across a heavily fortified border. His brother spent years in a Russian prison. My grandparents lived under house arrest. It was a difficult time, to say the least. As you can imagine, I have great compassion for immigrants, and am appalled by the current xenophobic rhetoric among some American politicians.

Happy Holidays, y'all!

(Robb says, "Xeonophobic politicians should just eat a cookie, and chill the @&#$ out.")

Winter Foraging -- Pineapple Guava

2011-12-22T10:58:00.001-08:00

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photo from Bay View Elementary School's nutrition program

At this time last year, everyone at Berkeley Repertory Theater was in the middle of a huge upheaval. We'd bought a complex of buildings, had given up our leased spaces, and were racing to get moved in during a rare period of "down time." My scene shop didn't just move the contents of the eighteen thousand square foot warehouse. We also moved all of the systems. So, when the air-handling system was moved, and we had no heat, I knit hats for all of my staff. It was a hard and hectic time, but we got through it, and are now settled into our new workplace.

At the time of the move, I noticed some unusual fruit-looking objects laying on the sidewalk, outside of our new place. My brain was occupied with the thousand details of the move, and I told myself to stay focused and to keep moving.

The following spring, I noticed that the hedge that surrounded our complex was blooming. The flowers were like nothing I'd ever seen before. Fleshy and velvety and very exotic. Oddly, a few days after the flowers caught my eye, I saw them on a website about tropical fruits. Turns out, they were the flowers of the feijoa, otherwise known as the pineapple guava or guavasteen.

The flowers themselves are edible. Posh folks around here use them as a garnish in champagne. The local squirrels certainly loved to eat the flowers. I never failed to smile when I saw an urban squirrel munching on one of these crazy-looking blooms.

Now, the hedge has ripened, and I'm collecting these odd fruit before and after work. The fruit fall off the plant once they're ripened, and I have no shame about picking them up off the ground. (I wash them very carefully.)

The fruit has a texture like pear, and tastes like a cross between kiwi fruit, jolly rancher candies, and just a smidge of turpentine (actually, I meant kerosene -- whoops). They have an intoxicating perfumed fragrance that Robb finds disconcerting, but which I just love. They're smaller than a chicken's egg.

We eat them by cutting off the skins (which carry most of the solvent-y flavor) and eating the entire fruit. You can cut them in half and scoop out the pulp with a spoon. Delicious.

These fruits are native to South America, but grow very well in the San Francisco Bay area. I tasted several varieties at the most recent meeting of the California Rare Fruit Growers. They're not true guavas, but rather belong to the myrtle family. The shrubs are evergreen, and very attractive.

What about you? Have you ever tried these? What did you think?

Volley'd and thunder'd

2011-12-21T19:34:00.000-08:00

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Lord Cardigan declares:

"The War on String will be fought on all fronts."

"The Brigade will advance."

Well, okay.

Perhaps the historical Lord Cardigan never said that first part, and maybe our back garden isn't exactly like the Valley of Death, but we are nothing if not silly and literary around here.

Our two feral cats Sleeves and Cardigan, while originally named for their markings, eventually ended up being referred to as two of the pivotal figures in the battle memorialized in the famous poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade.

That's Lord Cardigan, and Field Marshal Sleeves, the Right Honorable Lord Raglan, to you.

And no. I don't know anything definitive about the connection between Cardigan, Raglan and the names of sweaters. Knitting lore is notorious for being more romantic than historical. Lord Raglan lost an arm in the Crimean war, and apparently his tailors created clothes that were cut for easy dressing. Lord Cardigan was said to have been more interested in the sartorial trappings of military life than with competent fighting. You can draw your own conclusions about how the eponymous sweaters were named.

Barking up the Wrong Tree

2011-12-18T18:36:00.000-08:00

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Robb and I bought a lovely Christmas tree this weekend.

For some reason I'm worried about the
safety of our vintage glass ornaments.

Comfort and Joy

2011-12-17T17:49:00.000-08:00

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I continue to try to earn the trust of she shy feral cat we call Sleeves. He really is starved for affection, but if we touch him the wrong way, he panics. He is particularly terrified by being picked up. I've been spending a lot of time, petting him, and then reaching under his body but not actually picking him up. I've got this idea that he'll come to realize that this isn't a threatening gesture, if I do it enough times.

Today, somehow, I managed to pick him up, and we enjoyed a nice long snuggle. He sat on my lap and purred and purred, which was utterly delightful. At that moment, there was no wariness or fear, just pure feline bliss.

Dramatic Paws

2011-12-15T18:35:00.000-08:00

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Our little cat Smog is full of energy.

He's so very full of energy that all the other cats find him rather annoying.

Smog would be happiest playing Chase Me all day long, and everyone else wishes he'd learn to play Leave Me the Hell Alone.

Smog is exuberant, but the other cats have Street Smarts. Twice now, Robb has seen Smog go charging up to Linguine, in the hopes that she'll play with him.

Linguine lifts her paw in the air.

Smog runs full-force into her paw, effectively punching himself in the face.

She's no fool, our Linguine.

The Wild Bride

2011-12-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

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Here's a delicious taste of the show that's next up at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where I work. The show comes to us from Kneehigh Theatre in Cornwall England, but due to the difficulty of shipping theatrical scenery across the Atlantic, our studios built and painted some -- but not all -- of the larger scenic elements.

The show looks haunting, creepy and sexy. In other words, I expect to love it.

A Love of Books

2011-12-02T07:06:00.000-08:00

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Click here for the delightful story of a mysterious artist, who has been leaving beautiful paper sculptures as gifts in the libraries of Edinburgh Scotland.

I know that many of this blog's readers will appreciate the idea of hiding tiny works of art, for others to find.

All of these works are made of books. Tiny paper feathers! Such artisanry!

Who can fail to be charmed by a diminutive paper T Rex?

Dyeing to Know

2011-11-26T20:27:00.001-08:00

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Lately, I've been thinking a lot about dyeing yarn. Specifically, I've been thinking and reading about dyeing wool with natural dyes. As it turns out, there are all sorts of plants growing in my area -- most of them unwanted weeds -- that produce vibrant dyes.

The problem is that I'm not sure how to collect them. Collecting plant material -- even unwanted weedy plant material -- is strictly forbidden in all East Bay Regional Parks. Oakland City parks are a bit more lenient, as far as I can tell. But I'm not sure I want to have the conversation with the nice ranger or police officer, explaining why I have a couple of grocery bags full of eucalyptus leaves.

So, I'm asking blog readers if they can suggest any places where I might be able to collect large quantities of the following. (Most plant-based dyes need to be at least double the weight of the wool that's being dyed.)

black walnut hulls (the outer green husks)
blackberry leaves
broom
dodder
eucalyptus (the red iron-bark variety)
fennel
horsetail
ivy
mullein
pomegranate (I want the skins, but I won't say no to entire fruits!)
prickly pear cactus fruits

I'm envisioning overgrown areas, near industrial parks. Places that nobody really tends, but where I won't feel like I'm going to get mugged. Do you know of such a place? I've been considering the Albany Bulb, because it's kind of lawless. I've also been thinking about the various warehouse districts, but most of them are in pretty skanky neighborhoods.

If you're about to weed out your back garden, and you're over-run with any of these, do let me know. I'd be happy to help you weed, and would put your unwanted plants to good use.

While I'm asking, I may as well check to see if there are any blog readers in any of there areas where woad is a problem. This European dye plant is listed as a Class A noxious weed (whatever that means) in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, California and Oregon. Anyone want to mail me some? I'll pay for the shipping, and send you something fun in return?

Likewise, if you happen to have access to pounds of onion skins, I'd love to take them off of your hands.

Any thoughts or suggestions, blog friends?

Black Friday This-n-That

2011-11-25T19:03:00.000-08:00

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I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. I was still feeling sick with my head cold, so we stayed home. Please don't feel sorry for us. We had a beautiful dinner, including a delicious persimmon-frangiapani tart, made with persimmons from our tree.

Now as for Black Friday? Long-time blog readers know that Robb and I would rather poke hot needles in our eyes than venture into any shop on the day after Thanksgiving. Neither of us possess the Recreational Shopping Gene, and we both have a deep suspicion of religiously-mandated consumerism. We stayed home, and worked on small but gratifying projects.

I'll spare you my annual rant on this subject, and only note that the shooting in the Walmart parking lot was one town over from us. I'll also spare you my thoughts about the woman who pepper-sprayed her fellow shoppers at a Wal-Mart in Los Angeles.

Is this how good Christians observe the birth of Christ? What's wrong with people?

As I said, we stayed home.

Our little 1925 cottage has many of its original lighting fixtures. Not surprisingly, they're all in delicate condition. The glass shade for our dining room lamp, for example, is held together with glue and string. Glue and string that probably qualify as antiques, in their own right. We've been looking for an unbroken antique shade, but these things cost Real Money. Both Robb and I have been terrified by the thought that the string might finally give way, so today we wrapped some brass wire around the lamp, to augment the vintage string.

It's not a complete fix, but it will do for the time being. Now, at least, I won't spend dinner staring at the lamp and fretting.

Because we are tender hearted idiots, and because we plan to eventually replace the door to the laundry room, Robb cut a doorway for the outside kitties. They've spent the last two winters hunkered down under our house, and that's just too pathetic. We've made a little bed for them in the laundry room. (I'd invite them inside, but they're not housebroken, and anyway being closed inside with the humans is terrifying.)

We thought they'd be totally suspicious of the whole arrangement, but they took turns jumping in and out of their door, and generally checking out the view. When last we looked, they were snuggled up together, next to the washing machine. Adorable.

Robb and I also unclogged our clawfoot tub, using a cut-up bicycle inner tube, a bike pump, and an empty bottle of tylenol. I'll leave this to your imaginations.

I'm -- finally -- feeling well enough to knit. The cold still has hold of much of my brain, but I've been able to do some simple work. You can judge where I am on the path to recovery by the this fact: I'm still making plenty of mistakes, but the mistakes don't make me want to cry. It is a good thing that I like knitting, though. By the time I finish finding my errors and ripping them out, I'll have knit this project four times.

Thankful

2011-11-24T12:55:00.001-08:00

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Here's wishing everyone a happy day. I do hope we all take a moment -- between gorging on pie -- to consider all that we're thankful for.

Waxing Poetic (or something like that)

2011-11-23T17:36:00.000-08:00

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There hasn't been much blog activity of late, because

1. I suck and,
I've been indulging in my new favorite hobby of having tenacious head-colds.

Seriously, this is the third bad cold since the beginning of October. The physical sickness is bad enough, but the abject stupidity is driving me insane.

Let's not dwell on that, okay?

Instead, I wanted to talk about harvesting our beehives.

So, look again at that top photograph. On the left side of the frame of comb, you'll see closed-over cells, containing developing female worker bees. During the colder months of the year, we understand that the queen lays almost no male drone eggs. We can tell the difference in the developing bees' gender by the size of the wax cells. We do not use factory produced wax foundation in our hives, but allow the bees to build whatever types of structures suit their needs. On the left of the frame, you'll see smaller comb, and on the right you'll see that the wax cells are notably larger. At one point these cells would have contained developing drones (the big boys). Now, they're used for nectar storage. Cool, huh? You can see a few cells that are capped with lovely white wax. These contain ripened honey, that the bees have sealed up for later use. You'll also see a rainbow of cells, surrounding the tan-colored brood cells. These contain pollen from the flowers near our house. Amazing, that. The pollen is a high value food for developing bees.

Robb and I leave most of the honey for the bees, but we were able to harvest a bit for ourselves.

Please pay no attention to the stray crumbs on our kitchen counters.

If the comb is especially beautiful, we'll carefully cut it out, and float it in a jar of honey. This batch was rather funky-looking, so we opted not to preserve any of the wax comb.

(We give away a fair amount of the honey that we harvest, and it seems that people are sometimes baffled and slightly horrified by the idea that the wax comb is edible. It's sort of like how people are grossed out by imagining their vegetables growing in the dirt. Don't get me started on this...)

While large-sale honey producers harvest with centrifugal extractors, we're entirely low-tech. We remove our honey from the combs using the crush-and-strain method. We cut the comb out of the frames, and place it in a double-layered sieve that's set over a bucket. Then we smoosh the comb, and wait for it to drain. The bucket has a clever honey dispenser, which allows us to fill jars easily.

All that's left in the sieve is some slightly sticky wax. Sometimes we'll wash this, and use the honey-wash-water to make mead.

And sometimes we'll skip that step, and just harvest the wax. This brown stuff doesn't look very promising, does it?

We wrap the wax in two layers of fine cheesecloth, and tie the cloth into a bag. The bag is then placed on a wire cookie-cooling rack, which is in turn placed over a bowl of water. This goes into a barely warm oven. The wax melts, and is filtered by the cloth. The liquid wax floats on top of the warm water. Once all the wax is melted, we take the bowl out of the oven, and wait for it to cool. The leftover gunk goes on the compost pile.

And we're left with beautiful clean honey-scented beeswax. It's like some kind of kitchen alchemy.

(Also, how about that faux-bois tablecloth? Allie gave it to us. It's super-awesome, and is decorated with cowboys, guns, and oil wells, as well as buildings that just might be slaughterhouses. You just can't make this stuff up. Allie, you're the best!)

The Feral Boys

2011-11-13T19:01:00.001-08:00

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When we bought our little house, we did not realize that it came with a backyard filled with rusty nails, shards of glass, small animal skulls, and a couple of feral kitties.

The cats are funny. Despite all the kindness and food we give them, they are still suspicious of us.

Sleeves is a real mystery. I'm convinced that he has some kind of problem with partial vision. I'll be standing right next to him, petting him, he'll be purring his head off, and then SUDDENLY (EGADS!) he'll notice me, and run away in terror.

But the big news is that if I approach him just right, he will allow me to pet him. He's incredibly affectionate, but his fear over-rides everything else.

I can't imagine what happened to this cat to make him so afraid. If we move too quickly, he panics and runs off, as if his life were at stake. He also cries piteously when he can't find his brother Cardigan. Sometimes Cardigan is off tom-catting, but more often than not, Sleeves will be howling with loneliness while Cardigan is just a few feet away. It's baffling and heart-wrenching.

Life is not all sadness and fear, thankfully. I have enjoyed a few exquisite moments of on-lap Sleeves-petting. This requires great cunning and stealth on my part.

Cardigan is bolder, but less overtly friendly. When we pet Sleeves, he thrusts his head into our hands for more. Cardigan, on the other hand, often tenses every muscle in his body, which seems to help him endure the humiliation of human contact. Robb and I are Food Dispensers, but we're only sometimes Cardigan's friends.

Occasionally, he'll curl up on one of our laps and have a nice snooze. Today all the kitties were squinting and soaking up the autumnal sunshine. Cardigan was trying to perfect the use of the persimmon pillow.

And, of course, he was being a perfect feline and lens-sniffing.

Linguine was, as ever, not amused.

Julia

2011-11-12T20:01:00.000-08:00

Lately we've been enjoying watching the first season of "The French Chef", Julia Child's seminal cooking show from 1963. It's fascinating to watch the birth of a TV genre and, as always, delightful to watch Julia.

If you're curious, Amazon's Instant Video service is streaming about 12 years worth of "The French Chef."

Fresh Fruit, Over a Hundred Years Old!

2011-11-12T19:39:00.000-08:00

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how often does one get to taste hundred-year-old apples?

Today I went to a meeting of the local chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers, where the topic of conversation was Felix Gillet, one of the very first nurserymen in the state of California.

Monsieur Gillet established Barren Hills nursery in California's Gold Country in 1871, where he sold hundreds of varieties of fruit and nut trees, imported from all over the world. Current research suggests that Monsieur Gillet may have introduced many, many of the fruits that we still eat today in the United States.

The speaker, Amigo Cantisano, stumbled across Monsier Gillet about thirty years ago. Since that time has been exploring the counties around the site of the original Nevada City nursery, locating old fruit trees that would have been purchased and planted over a hundred years ago. He's working with the original catalogs from the Barren Hills nursery, and from Gillet's writings, and has made it a mission to protect these unique old trees.

historic texts provide information about heritage crops

While some of the fruits that Gillet brought to America are still being grown, others are unknown to the nursery trade. Many of the heritage trees that have been located are resistant to diseases and pests, and thus have great value to contemporary growers.Some of the trees that Cantisano has found are so obscure that their names have been lost. He and his colleagues are fruit sleuths, pouring over antique agricultural publications, seeking clues to the identity of mystery fruit trees.

At the meeting today, we sampled fruits and nuts from trees dating back over a hundred years. It was thrilling and delicious.

Cantisano has founded the Felix Gillet Institute (no web site yet, alas, but here's a great article) and is slowly propagating young cuttings of these ancient trees. In the next few years, he hopes to be able to return these "lost" fruits to market.

The meeting was held at the horticultural department of Diablo Valley College. We had a quick tour of their public facilities, which were very impressive.

And, of course, we shared the fruit that we've been growing. These are Australian Finger Limes.

Break them in half, and twist them, and they release their vesicles. Robb and I are trying to figure how to use them on a cornmeal dessert.

Many people brought in Pineapple Guavas. I can't even begin to describe their flavor.

I have access to some of these fruits, and will have to check their ripeness. If you see me out-and-about, grubbing around under the bushes, please avert your eyes.

My camera failed to capture the freaky day-glow pink color of this rose-petal jelly. Had I not been in the room with the rare fruit growers, there's No Way in Hell I would have eaten anything this color.

It was a wonderful day for food experiences, and learning about things both old and new.

Windfall

2011-11-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

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Cold weather seems to have settled into the Bay Area.

Last week, we had a huge windstorm that ripped several branches off of our persimmon tree.

We now have a huge amount of not-quite-ripe persimmons, that I have no idea how to use.

I'm thinking of treating them like apples, and trying to make a cake.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd hate for all this fruit to go to waste. These are "Fuyu" persimmons (I think). They are the non-astringent type that can be eaten while still firm.

Friends, Imaginary and Otherwise.

2011-11-05T19:55:00.000-07:00

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knitter meets sea anemone

Today I had a day off from classes at the Interweave Labs conference. I convinced one of my Imaginary Friends* knitting goddess Mary Jane Mucklestone to leave the business-park environs of the conference center while the sun was shining and go to the beach. (How's that for a run-on sentence?)

I know I use this word too much but, Mary Jane is amazing. Click any of these words to see her work.

Also: knitted eyeballs.

The federally protected harbor seals were hanging out near the entrance to the beach, so we weren't able to roam very far. (All marine mammals have protected status in the United States, and humans are not supposed to approach closer than 100 yards.)

We met up with Mary Jane's in-laws and had a lovely time clambering over the rocks, and peering at the creatures who inhabit the tidepools. Robb talked brewing and distilling with Mary Jane's (lady distiller, how cool is that?) sister in-law, and I demonstrated my scintillating conversational skills.

I'm sure that everyone was thrilled beyond measure to be told that sea-slugs breath through their butts.

gull with sea star

I won't share any of the unflattering photos taken of us humans today.

eyes bigger than stomach

I'll stick with embarrassing the wildlife.

* Imaginary Friend: Robb's name for the people I "know" only on the internet.

Meanwhile ... Back at the Lab

2011-11-04T07:22:00.000-07:00

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As a treat to myself, I signed up to participate in the yarnapalooza known as Interweave Labs. This is a four-day textile symposium, with classes taught by a pantheon of designers and historians.

I spent the last day on the southwestern coast of Sweden, some time before the 21st Century. I studied Bohus knitting techniques (beautiful garments, great teacher, infuriating process), as well as the knitting culture of the Halland region of Sweden. As part of the class, we knit mittens on teeny-tiny kitting needles. Toothpicks, really.

Halfway through morning session of the class, we were joined by Eunny Jang, editor of Interweave Knits, and Undisputed Knitting Goddess. She stayed for the morning, and part of the afternoon session. The class was fascinating. Carol Rhoades who taught was well-informed, engaging, and really fun.

We all chugged away on our little knitting swatches. About halfway into the afternoon session, Eunny excused herself. She had a conference to attend to. On her way out the door, she waved her perfectly finished mitten at us.

WHAT ? ! ? !

The rest of us had accomplished a few inches of knitting, and this rockstar had left us to eat her dust.

Now, With More Hellishness

2011-10-31T19:19:00.001-07:00

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I just had to share one more photo of what the neighbor kids are calling "The Devil House."

Trick or treating did not disappoint. The kids were all adorable, shockingly polite, and a bit awed by the whole experience. I do think that some of the littlest ones were as excited about ringing our doorbell as they were about getting free candy. It was really fun, listening to them chatting as they came up our stairs.

I was charmed by the kids who earnestly told us "we're inside of a MOUTH."

This really is my favorite holiday.

Happy Birthday to Lisa!

2011-10-27T09:37:00.000-07:00

It's Lisa Appreciation Day around here.

She's the beautiful, talented girl with the many-tentacled curiosity and an irrepressible joy for life...and I'm lucky to have her in mine.

Step on a Crack, Break Your Lover's Back.

2011-10-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

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Like the sculpture? It's by artist Maskull Lasserre.

Just about a year ago, Robb -- who was already injured from a spinal cord injury -- slipped and fell and broke his back for the second time.

At the time, we just "toughed our way through it."

But I'll say it now. I never want to have this happen again. Robb is an incredibly resilient person, but he doesn't need anything else to deal with.

Best Petting Zoo, Ever!

2011-10-25T21:40:00.001-07:00

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Although they went away for the afternoon on Monday, the goats were back on Tuesday. I borrowed a pair of scissors from work, and spent part of my lunch hour, cutting down fennel and feeding it to my inquisitive goat friends. I cannot tell you how many people stopped their cars, and got out to smile at the goats. This brought me a great deal of joy.

The found dog is apparently reunited with its people. As soon as my coworkers walked through the door of the animal shelter, they were told that that a distraught owner had been calling all day, hoping that someone had found their dog. This is the best possible outcome.

As for the sweater, I ripped out the sleeve and started again. I'll be knitting both sleeves at once, so that I can hopefully keep them matching.

Robb bought a red light for the porch, and an outdoor spotlight to illuminate our hellmouth. We're still trying to focus the spotlight, so that it shows off the painting without blinding people as they walk down our stairs. I'd like to find a way to light the red stairs, so that they look like a sprawling tongue. If I do say so myself, the house looks really bad-ass!

Lonely Goatherd

2011-10-24T21:28:00.001-07:00

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Anyone who works for me knows that I'll call a temporary break from work for a Really Good Nature Sighting. When I worked at Glimmerglass Opera in rural central New York, my poor co-workers were forced to stop work to consider the lives of bald eagles, egg-laying snapping turtles, yellow-bellied sap suckers, and gigantic salamanders.

Today the "stop the car! stop the car" moment was a herd of over a hundred goats, two blocks from our studio. I've written before about the local fire-suppression goats and weed-eating sheep, but I'd never seen them in action among the warehouses of North Berkeley.

There's a weed and trash filled lot near where I work. It takes up an entire city block and has been for sale the entire time that I've lived in the Bay Area. Today the formerly waist-high weeds were gone, and the lot was filled with over a hundred goats.

The goats were frolicking and head-butting each other, while a Border Collie ran around, looking industrious. Very strange, for such an industrial part of town.

Later that day, one of my coworkers found this beautiful Australian Shepherd, in the middle of our street. We brought him inside, and gave him some water. He ran around like crazy in my gigantic studio. We played energetic indoor frisbee, and had a lot of visitors from other departments. There was much slobbering and snuggling. I was smitten.

I called the goat company to see if they might be missing one of their dogs (they weren't) and later the coworker who found the dog took it to Berkeley Animal Care Services to see if he had been micro-chipped. I hope this sweet animal is reunited with his people very soon.

In other news, I totally screwed up the sleeves of the sweater I'm knitting. I'm not sure how I goofed up my gauge swatch, but the cuffs were insanely huge. Like, a third again too large. Damn.

Random Garden Chatter

2011-10-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

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Robb and I had hoped to go to an event with our letterboxing friends today, but unfortunately today was one of the days where Robb's legs just weren't cooperating. Some days are harder than others, and today was a day where his legs were particularly weak.

Thankfully, we love our little house and garden, so staying home is never a bad thing.

Robb noticed this clump of mushrooms, near the Gloriana beehive. How odd. We've never seen this variety of mushrooms in our yard, and it really hasn't rained much this fall.

For those blog readers outside of California, it helps to know that around here we pretty much have two seasons: the warm months, when there's no rain AT ALL, and the cooler rainy season. We've had rain twice this fall. Prior to that, there has been no rain since the spring.

The mushrooms were huge. Having consulted my super-huge mushroom book, I think that these mushrooms are in the agaricus genus. Of course, I know next-to-nothing about mushrooms, so I could be spewing pure nonsense.

They have pink gills, and their veil forms a complex ring around the stalk. There are no warty structures on the cap.

Please ignore my dirty gardener's fingers.

When scratched, the mushroom bruises bright yellow. I have not taken a spore print.

How about that rat skull? I dug that up in the garden last week. The whiskers are still attached, which is extra-grisly.

I've been trying to be a more active part of the neighborhood, so last weekend I helped prune and pull weeds with two of our neighbors. I had a nice gossip, did a bit of work, and managed to fall flat on my face while we were walking home. I was looking at the work another neighbor was doing on his fence, stepped on a loose pebble, and tripped in a truly spectacular manner. I also asked about the fruit trees planted on the median strip on our block, and was told that we all had permission to pick the fruit.

Once I outed myself as a fruit geek, the guys offered me their sad neglected fig tree, Jesús. They named the tree this, because it looks like someone crucified the poor thing.

I'm hoping for a resurrection.

This fig tree has been languishing since they moved in, six years ago. We hauled it into the back yard, and I wrassled it out of the pot, cut out grass-roots that were strangling the fig, and parked it between the lemon verbena and the pluot tree. Once Robb and I finish the work on the front of the house, I'll plant fruit trees out front.

For the record, this poor tree has a total of twelve leaves. I'm a sucker for a hopeless cause, and am determined to nurse it back to health.

Also last weekend, I planted fava beans, radishes, purple mustard greens, and a bunch of California wildflowers. (Need to go check the seed packages, to remind myself what I planted.)

I pre-sprouted the beans, and then planted them nine inches apart. I've never grown fava beans, so I don't really know what to expect. I had extra seeds, some of which grew fuzzy mold, and some of which I managed to pot up. I'll probably give them to Allie. (Hi Allie!)

Other than that, I planted two each of California shield fern (Polystichum californicum), "leather leaf" coffeeberry (Rhamnus californica), and western bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa) near the QEII beehive, in front of the World's Ugliest Fence. I also planted a western pennyroyal (Monardella odoratissima) under the persimmon. I actually thought this was coyote mint, (Monardella villosa). Whoops. I bought all of these at the opening of the new East Bay Wilds Nursery in Fruitvale. This is going to be a by-appointment-only business, but I managed to line my schedule up with one of the few days they were open to the public.

Speaking of the persimmon tree, we harvested our first two fruits, and broiled them for breakfast. They tasted like autumn.

Living in the Jaws of Hell

2011-10-21T17:46:00.001-07:00

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Halloween is kind of a big deal on our block. We have one of those neighborhoods which attracts carloads of parents and kids from other parts of town for trick-or-treating. Usually, everyone on the street does some kind of decorating. Not everyone goes as crazy as the house up the street which has a tableau of silhouettes enacting a slasher movie scene in the windows (complete with crime scene tape), a skull-faced ghost mannequin over the front door and enough fake cobwebs to trap all the fake flies in Oakland.

This year, we wanted to do more than just plunking the obligatory pumpkin on the front stoop. I was thinking of the above image which shows the entrance to the Hell Cafe -- a bar in Paris about a hundred years ago.

After a little slap-dash photoshopping, I had a plan for using the hell-mouth image on our front porch.

Fortunately, I happen to live with a brilliant scenic artist with a macabre sense of humor and a love for the spooky.

Lisa painted this over a couple of lunch hours at work this week. It's not the monster green of the original since she was using leftover paint, but that's a good thing since I was concerned it would look too much like the Incredible Hulk.

I installed it today and immediately my across-the-way neighbor was standing in the street saying, "Ooh yeah. I like that." I don't think I've ever heard anybody say, "Now that's different" with such admiration and awe before.

This is what it looked like before installation:

I can't wait to see it night with a red porch light.

As I write this, the sun is setting and I can hear some neighbors outside ooh-ing and ahh-ing.

A Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On!

2011-10-20T21:54:00.000-07:00

...

Oh my! We had not one, but two earthquakes today. Oddly enough, the Bay Area was scheduled to have an earthquake preparedness drill, this very morning. Both were centered in Berkeley, and both had a magnitude of about 4, which in the scheme of things, are very mild indeed.

This first quake was about 2:30 in the afternoon.

I was at the shop, and while everyone felt and heard the tremor, nothing seemed to have been knocked over. We have good shelving for a seismic area, but I really would not not want to be standing next to a huge rack filled with steel or lumber when the "Big One" happens. The girls in the prop shop were upstairs, where our "hand prop" storage is, and apparently the contents of the shelves were really swaying and rattling. Everyone in our building checked in with each other, and once we regained our composure, we all went back to work. I spent some time wondering how (or if) birds in flight experienced earthquakes.

Robb was at home, and heard the quake before he felt it. He said that his immediate thought was that our stacks of siding boards must be falling over.

Later in the evening, Robb and I (and the indoor cats) were sitting in the living room when the house started to shake.

This was the longest quake we had ever experienced. Smog flew out of the room, and I lunged into a crouch in the middle of the room. I'm sure I looked like a complete idiot. Some dishes shifted in our kitchen sink (good thing there were plenty of dirty dishes to cushion the blow), and our sump pump went a little crazy, because of all of the sloshing around under our house. Once the shaking stopped, it took us a moment to figure out what was causing the sound of gushing water. The "museum wax" that we use to hold our antique break-ables in place did a great job. Nothing was broken.

I'm not sure why this series of quakes agitated me as much as it did.

Linguine was not impressed. She never budged from her spot on the couch. When we found Smog, he was planted in a doorway. Clearly, he had not heard that we're now supposed to dive under tables when the shaking starts.

The Cats Love it When I'm Sick

2011-10-19T07:13:00.000-07:00

...

Linguine is in Nap Heaven

Can I just say that I'm tired of having the World's Most Hyperactive Immune System? I'm sick of my chronic sinus illnesses.

I had opera tickets last night, but stayed home with a cold and blinding sinus-headache. What a depressing waste of money.

While I'm grumping away, I need to express my bafflement at the whole neti pot phenomenon. I have sort of managed to get the thing to work. It still feels like water-boarding. I don't see what's so amazing about it. Unlike what many people report, I'm not liberating tons of disgusting material. If anything, my sinuses are too dry. I suspect that there's not a lot to dislodge. According to my ear-nose-and-throat doctor, I'm supposed to use this peculiar torture device three times a day.

Other than the freaky gross-out factor of getting water to squirt into one nostril and out the other, I really don't see what the objective is. Why would any adult person want to do this?

Hop Question

2011-10-17T09:19:00.000-07:00

Bubbaloo M. asks: Are hops good for anything else besides beer?...

Some people will eat the tender, young leaves either cooked or in a salad. I have tried this and, coming from someone who has eaten and enjoyed stinging nettle salad, I can tell you it's about as flavorful as any random green leaf you chewed on when you were 6.

I know that hops are used as an herbal medicinal. Hop tea is supposed to have a relaxing effect. The stuff is so bitter, though, that the amount of sugar I had to add to make it drinkable just left me wired.

Traditionally, sleeping on a pillow filled with hops was supposed to ensure sweet dreams. (Not sure about this one. Depending on your frame of mind, hops can smell like good beer or cat urine.)

Many people grow it decoratively. It grows so fast (a couple of inches a day in early summer) that it can provide significant shade by August. In the fall it dies back to the ground. You just cut it down and it starts all over again in the spring.

One of the major reasons hops caught on as an additive for beer, hundreds of years ago (before that most ale was flavored with a variety of herbs or tree resins) is that hops acts as a preservative. Not sure if anybody still uses it for this purpose.

I'm sure there's an internet article out there spelling out the "101 Household Uses for Hops."

Hop To It!

2011-10-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

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For the past two years, we've been growing hops. Our intention is to use our own hops for flavoring home-brewed beer.

We started with twiggy rhizomes, ordered from The Thyme Garden. It really is hard to imagine how huge these unassuming things proto-plants become.

We had read that we would not see much in the way of growth on our first year, but this was a filthy lie.

Last year, the hops almost engulfed our garage. It was comical to see the rate of growth. Robb kept having to add on more structures for the continued growth.

This time around, Robb built an improved system on which to grow the hops, involving good support, and rather shaggy ropes.

The plants grew at markedly different rate, and back in September, we harvested our first hops, from the Sterling plant.

The hop cones were still green, but had dried enough to harvest.

If you read much about hop-growing, or if you lurk around living history museums, you'll come across the much reported "fact" that traditional hop harvesting involved jumping up and down on the dried cones. This, we are told, is the origin of the word describing an informal dance or "hop." I can tell you from experience that there's some merit to this idea. Late season hop plants are just crawling with spiders. And if there's any activity that would inspire jumping up and down, it's the act of repeatedly and blindly shoving one's hand into a spider-riddled thicket. If I hadn't been balancing on a ladder, I would certainly have been doing my version of the spider dance.

Quite typically, I started the hop harvest late in the day, without any real plan for what to do with the cones once I'd gotten them. So I parked them in our laundry room overnight.

The next morning, the bowls containing the hop cones were swarming with aphids. Apparently these aphids had been deep inside the crevices of the cones, but once the cones were disconnected from their juicy stems, the aphids went on the prowl. It was really disgusting. Quite by accident, I discovered that the aphids were attracted to the broken ends of hop leaves. So we covered the bowls with hop leaves, which we used as aphid traps. We kept swapping out leaves until there weren't any more aphids on them.

Turns out that hop aphids overwinter on plum trees. Great. We've got both hops and plums, which means we're creating quite a nursery for these creatures. Since we garden organically, we're not really sure how to deal with the aphids.

Extra protein in the beer, right?

(How many of our blog readers remember the urban legend about the percentage of insect parts permitted in Fig Newton cookies? I can't stop thinking about that...)

A month later, we harvested the rest of the hops. By this time, the cones had dried out, and while there were still zillions of spiders, but the aphids had moved on.

Around here, October is Spider Season, which makes me think about the connection between spider imagery and Hallowe'en. I assume that anyone with a genuine connection to the growing seasons would immediately associate spiders with the harvest-time. The rest of us have lost this thread, and just think about spiders as being generically "spooky."

Unfortunately, the aphids had been replaced with snails.

I'm really, really sick of fighting snails in my garden. From everything I've read, I believe that these creatures were imported from France as a luxury food, during the Gold Rush. They're a nightmare, reducing much of my garden to tatters on a regular basis.

I think that waiting for the cones to dry might be the way to go, in our garden. We literally don't see rain all summer long, so allowing the cones to dry on the plants isn't too much of a risk.

Sure beats fishing aphids out of the brew-pot!

Milestone

2011-10-14T19:44:00.000-07:00

I was struck by a line I came across today. It's an unattributed quote which seems to be an self-help aphorism about life in general.

It goes, "Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."

I was chewing this one over and it finally came to me that this is really the response I was always looking for when people asked about my condition. {This is Robb writing, by the way}

In a medical setting, I got used to being asked about my pain level and was trained to give an answer on a one to ten scale. I remember deliberately never allowing myself a "ten" or even a "nine," thinking, "It could be worse."

Here's the thing, though: once you get to seven or eight, is it really fair to call one or two or three "pain?"

Instead I just started calling my usual day-to-day flare ups, "discomfort." The overall message I wanted to convey was, "I'm fine."

Now, I feel like I can articulate this point so much better by saying:

Yes, I have all these things going on, but ... I'm not suffering.

To suffer is to let your situation overwhelm you. Whatever it is. I really do believe that we each have a choice about how we look at the world, ourselves, and the million details that make up our surroundings.

Even if we can't control all those details, at least we can find enough joy in some of them to hold back the darkness.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Incidentally, this blog post is a milestone. It is the 1,500th posting on How's Robb. That works out to about 20 posts per month for the last five and a half years! Lisa, who has produced about 99% of this, is amazingly prolific (and brilliant) and repeatedly astounds with her broad interests, astute observations and startling good photographic eye.

She is the reason this blog seems to be worth reading and the reason that, while I may hurt, I don't suffer.

There's an "ear wax" joke in here, somewhere...

2011-10-10T19:34:00.000-07:00

...

On Saturday, Robb was raking up some leaves in the back yard and got stung on the ear by a bee.

The swelling was truly impressive.

He took an antihistamine, which totally knocked him out. Oddly, it was the lethargy from the drugs that did the most harm. When Robb doesn't keep moving, he suffers.

Also, he get confused, and starts wearing deviled eggs as jewelry.

(Do any of you recognize this image?)

Bleh...

2011-10-05T07:29:00.000-07:00

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I've been sick since the day of the BORP ride. A nagging head cold won't release its grip on me.

I finally got an appointment with the Ear, Nose and Throat doctor, who refused to wave his magic wand over my poor aching body. As we both already knew, my chronic allergies make me particularly susceptible to respiratory ailments.

Of course, I've still been going into work at the theater. The show must go on, after all.

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This photo has nothing to do with anything. I thought it was interesting to see how the wasps and ants (look closely) clean up the dead (and, I suspect, dying) bees. I think that this young fuzzy bee was affected by varroa mites. Her wings look messed-up, which is a sure sign of varroa infestation.

Monarch on Milkweed!

2011-10-03T10:19:00.000-07:00

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Although we've had some fly-overs, this is the first time in the two years that we've been here that a monarch butterfly actually noticed the milkweed that I planted. Much of our garden plants were selected to feed someone, either me and Robb, or the native wildlife. The milkweeds have gone largely un-noticed by anyone except aphids until this past weekend.

I never noticed that monarch butterflies have polka-dotted bodies, until now. How wonderfully odd!

Another Revolution!

2011-09-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

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We did it! Another successful BORP Revolution fundraising ride!

This year, there were more adaptive cyclists participating in the 25-mile ride than in the past. This is just a small part of the pre-ride crowd. Paraplegics, quadriplegics (riding that wild-looking super-reclined hand-cycle), folks with no legs, folks with debilitating medical conditions, blind cyclists -- they all rode! It was a blast to share the road with the BORP riders.

The weather was just about perfect. Not too hot, and with a bit of a breeze. We rode the route we've done on the last two years. The year before last, I got heat exhaustion, and it's always interesting to me to revisit the spots where I hand my melt-down. Even though we weren't super-prepared for this ride, it was vastly easier than the year of the dreadful heat.

As always, the landscape was glorious. Many of the vineyards had not yet harvested their grapes. I imagine that they were taking advantage of the late-summer heat. It rained for the first time last night. I hope that the grapes are all right.

I'll write a more thoughtful summary of the ride when we get home.

And of course, I'll say this one more time: If you had intended to help us support the great work that BORP does, improving the lives of people with disabilities, it's not too late. Click on the link on the right side of our blog, and make a donation!

Today we Ride!

2011-09-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

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It's the day of the big BORP ride! Hundreds of people will be riding to raise money to provide fun, challenging recreational opportunities for people with disabilities.

And speaking of "challenging" somehow I managed to catch a wicked cold since yesterday afternoon. I'm hoping that decongestants and coffee prop me up enough, so that I'm able to ride. This ride is going to be hard. But "hard" is, in some ways, what this is all about. Every person participating in this event has dealt with their share of challenges. In some way, directly or indirectly, they're living with a disability.

They're moving forward, staying active, and getting out in the world.

Do I need to say that it's not too late to support the great work of BORP?

One Day Remains Before the Ride

2011-09-23T07:09:00.000-07:00

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One final day remains before our fundraising bike ride. While we've made our modest goal, fundraising overall is down this year. I know that the economy is bad, but could any of you spare ten bucks to help a disabled child? Click on the photo to the right of this essay to donate to the Bay Area Outreach Recreation Program (BORP).

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About five and a half years ago, Robb was working in the theater department of the University of California. He was working with a student, taking down some fluorescent fixtures. Apparently, the light they were moving was hung in a non-conventional manner, and as they were de-installing it, the entire unit broke loose from their control, and swung directly at the face of the student worker.

Robb did what anyone would have done: he pounced on the light, and in doing so, disrupted the balance of his ladder, and fell to the ground. He landed on a concrete floor, shattered one of his vertebrae and suffered a paralyzing spinal cord injury.

His career as an actor and scenic artist ended abruptly that morning.

Luckily, we live in a part of the country that understands that a disabled person should have the chance to live a full, fun, adventure-filled life. And that's what Robb and I have been trying to do, since the time of his accident. Shortly after Robb got out of the hospital, we discovered the Bay Area Outreach Recreation Program (BORP), whose mission is to offer sports and recreational opportunities for people with disabilities. It was through BORP that we realized that Robb could continue many of the outdoorsy activities that he and I had enjoyed prior to his accident. Among its many other programs, BORP maintains a "lending library" of cycles adapted for use by people with disabilities. We started out riding BORP's adaptive trikes, and eventually got one our own.

Since this time, Robb has cycled over thirteen hundred miles, which is amazingly great for a guy who can't walk particularly well. Not only is this a total blast, it is also highly therapeutic. Rhythmic repetitive movement seems to help regenerate damaged neurological connections, both for sensory and motor neurons.

As our way of expressing our gratitude for everyone who has helped us since the accident, we participate in BORP's annual fundraising ride, the Revolution. You should see this event! Blind cyclists ride tandem bikes with their friends. Paralyzed kids zoom around on pint-sized hand cycles. Legless athletes blast through the hundred-mile course, leaving slugs like me to eat their dust.

It's awesome!

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Let us tell you a little more about BORP, particularly its work with disabled kids.

BORP’s website states that it “uses sports, recreation & outdoor adventures to build educated, productive citizens, one life at a time.”

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Okay, that sounds good, but what does that mean?

Well, the statistics for young people with disabilities are grim, and BORP aims to do something about that.

Disabled kids are twice as likely to be depressed, commit suicide, and use alcohol or drugs than their able bodied peers. 28% of disabled Americans drop out of high school, and of those who graduate only 20% manage to get a college degree. A staggering 73% of disabled Americans are unemployed.

By contrast, 100% of BORP participants have graduated from high school in the past eleven years, and 80% either have university degrees, or are in college now. Over 80% of these college grads are employed.

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So, how does it work? Why do BORP participants succeed?

While studies have shown conclusively that kids who participate in sports and outdoor adventures have better grades and better habits, there’s more to the picture than a bunch of kids in wheelchairs, playing basketball, or riding bikes.

BORP works closely with participants, their families, schools, and service providers, providing strong, weekly support from disabled role models. Where possible, kids start with BORP at the age of 5, and stay with their programs until they are 18. BORP asks a lot of their participants, and – given support and mentoring-- the kids are able to meet those expectations.

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We’re asking our blog readers to help us support this great organization. In a tangible sense, the money goes to run recreational programs for kids (and adults) with disabilities. But in a deeper way, it helps give disabled people the skills and confidence to face life’s challenges, and to have fun while doing so.

And it works. Instead of being the stereotypical "burden to society," BORP graduates overcome tremendous hurdles and lead full productive lives.

Thank you for considering a gift to BORP, and please, please, please be careful on ladders!

Thanks.

Urban Nature

2011-09-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

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Robb and I went cycling near the Oakland Airport today. We're trying to prepare for our fundraising ride next weekend. We had stopped for a drink of water, when I noticed a family hanging over the edge of a bridge, watching a school of rays.

This is a pretty lousy cell-phone movie, but I don't care! I possess an almost insane love of rays and skates. I don't actually know much about them, but when I see them swimming, my heart just about bursts with joy. We saw about half a dozen (what I think are) bat rays, swimming in the channel. It was hard to tell, but Robb and I think that these animals were two or two-and-half feet across. I kept wondering what the ducks swimming in the channel thought of the rays.

As far as I'm concerned, it was magical to see such dream-like creatures.

The ride was pretty humbling. Somehow I haven't done much cycling in the last year. Robb broke his back (again). We had to move out 18,000 square foot warehouse-studio, while producing a full season of plays. And I'd been busy with the house and garden.

That big ride next weekend is going to hurt.

A Long Road

2011-09-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

I broke my back, for the second time, last October. And while I am doing so much better now, it only just dawned on how much of a set back this has been physically.

Being laid up for several weeks led to a weight gain I can ill-afford. Because of the previous damage to my spine, my legs are only strong enough to enable me to walk very slowly for very short distances. Every pound added means greater difficulty.

Lately I've been preparing for our annual ride to raise money for BORP 's program for kids with disabilities. It's a challenging 25 mile ride and I've had some success lately in trimming down and cycling more. So, am I ready? My answer, as always, is "I will be."

Every once in a while I need reminding, that despite the setbacks, I've come a long, long way.

Today, I found this blog post from a previous year which we might have written today.

Here We Go Again!

When I was still in the hospital recovering from my fall-- barely able to sit up, walking a distant hope-- I heard about BORP. They could keep me active. They sponsored field trips and sporting events. They had adaptive bikes and could get almost anybody cycling.

Without BORP, I would never have tried that first trike. Or the second. Or the third one, either. Without that program I would never have figured out that cycling was something I can do.

And now, with about 4,000 miles of pedaling behind me, I think I can say that I would never have the energy and good health I enjoy today if i hadn't tried out that first trike.

So, it's that time of the year again. Time to say thank you.

We've been putting off making the decision but last night we finally committed and ...

OH, CRAP! WE'RE DOING THE BORP FUNDRAISING RIDE AGAIN THIS YEAR!! IT'S 25 MILES!!!

AND WE HAVE ONLY NINE DAYS TO GET READY!!!

and so-- without much by way of preparation, training or time-- here we go!

Please, please please. Help us raise $1,000 in the next NINE DAYS. Every little bit helps.
Just click on the banner at the top and then select "Robb Bauer" or "Lisa Lazar" from the pull-down list. After that you can contribute via credit card or Paypal.

Thanks.

The Magnolia Queen

2011-09-05T20:24:00.001-07:00

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Today I did an in-depth inspection of the Gloriana hive, and pulled a frame full of capped honey to give to the new colony that I cut out of the magnolia tree in San Lorenzo.

That colony is small, but mighty. They've been in the their new hive box just eight days, and already they're building beautiful white wax comb.

One nice thing about a small colony: there's a chance that we'll spot the queen. I swear, I never see the queens in my two big hives. There are just too many bees, and it takes so long to go through all the frames that the queen has plenty of time to vamoose.

Can you see her? She's the largest, reddest bee. She's dead-center in my photograph, with a bit of space on all sides.

In pouring over my photographs, I realized that the Magnolia queen is already laying eggs, and some of those eggs have hatched into larvae. She must have gotten to work the instant her retinue had built the first comb.

Robb and I had assumed that this queen was a virgin queen, and that we'd have to wait for her to make her mating flight before she started laying. We're delighted to be proved wrong in our assumptions. If this queen is already laying eggs, the colony stands a better chance of building up a large enough population to make it through the winter.

Of course, winters around here aren't particularly rough, but the hive does need a critical mass for survival.

Good for you, Magnolia Queen!

A Week of Bees, Told in Three Chapters

2011-09-05T09:12:00.000-07:00

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Here's a little glimpse into my life as an urban beekeeper. All this happened over the course of a week.

I had been contacted by Rick (a semi-neighbor, who "knew" me through a gardening discussion forum) who wanted a bit of advice about his back yard hive. I met him at his house, and we opened up his hive. The colony was small, but thriving. The bees had plenty of food stores, and were raising the next generation of bees. Everything looked exactly as it should, and the bees were very relaxed. We spent a fair amount of time, exploring the hive, and were pleased with everything we saw.

Just after we closed up the hive-box, I noticed a cluster of bees on the ground. I figured that Rick and I had dropped a bit of honey, and the bees were lapping it up. The strange thing is that the bees were nowhere near where we had been working. Odd.

I had taken off my bee suit, and stooped to take a closer look.

Well, crap.

There, in the middle of the clump of bees was Rick's queen. This is what no beekeeper ever hopes to see. The queen is not a good flyer, once she's been mated, and I couldn't imagine how she had gotten so far from the hive. We quickly "suited up" again, and picked up the garden hose cover that the bees were on. I had a good look at the queen, and she seemed to be fine. I was terrified that she might have been injured. Rick's colony was small, and the last thing he needed was to lose his queen. The bees could surely raise a new one, but doing so would be a real set-back.

We carried the lid over to the hive, and I intended to tip her back inside. And just as I was saying "...and now, I'm going to coax her into the hive," I lost track of her. She just vanished. Great, some bee-advisor I was turning out to be. I had lost Rick's queen. I fervently hoped that she had scampered into the hive, licketty-split, but because I have a fertile imagination for disaster I was certain that she'd met with a dreadful accident.

As it turned out, Rick checked in on his hive at the end of the week, and all indications were that the queen was alive and well. (I still feel like a jerk.)

Later that week, I was house- and pet-sitting for Allie, which gave me an opportunity to check on the bees that some jackass had sprayed with insecticide. (Combining pet-sitting and beekeeping makes a lot of sense, as it turns out. Beekeepers' gloves are a great tool when caring for feisty pet parrots.)

Despite the devastation that we'd seen at the time of the attack, Allie's bees were doing just fine. They had tons of nectar stored up, and baby bees were emerging from their brood cells. Allie lives on the other side of the hills from us. As is typical with California micro-climates, her place is usually ten to twenty degrees hotter than Oakland, where Robb and I live. I've learned that the best time to inspect her hives is at dusk, because otherwise I just overheat. People who tell you to check the bees at high noon either live in a very cool climate, or are just plum crazy. Sweating inside a bee suit, and dealing with bees at the busiest part of their day is not my idea of a good time.

The one problem with evening bee inspections is that it is often just a smidge too dark for photography. I'll spare you my blurry photos of emerging baby bees.

I let the bees build their own comb. I've read that the wax used on commercial "foundation" is harvested from the largest industrial beekeepers, and that it is often contaminated with all manner of agro-chemicals. As a mostly-organic beekeeper, I have no interest in introducing unknown chemicals into my hives. Anyway, the bees have been building their own comb for millions of years.

I had given the bees a bit of wax "starter strip" when I first set up Allie's hive, but it all melted in the heat. I think there weren't enough bees on that particular wax. Bees regulate the temperature inside their hives, heating in the winter, and cooling in the summer. I guess Allies bees weren't able to keep up with hive cooling when they first set up housekeeping.

Most of the comb the bees had built was straight and fit nicely into the hive.

But there was a bit of eccentric architecture. This style of hive is a sort of filing cabinet, filled with bees. If the frames are too wonky, they'll get damaged during hive inspections. As long as things are pretty much straight, I'm content.

I did remove these particular frames, because the bees had built comb that bridged all three frames. If I had left them in place, the bees would have filled all the comb in, and when we went to inspect, I would have ripped apart either brood comb or honey comb. Damaging brood comb kills developing bees, and ripping up honey comb spills honey, which drowns bees. Either way, it isn't good.

The bees know what they're doing. It's the beekeepers who are tearing things apart, in the course of our inspections.

While I was at Allie's I got a frantic call from a gentleman who had a swarm of bees in his front yard. By the time I got home, it was too dark to do anything, so I stopped by his house the next morning.

He was totally freaked out. He also didn't speak English perfectly. His English was way better than my non-existent Chinese could ever be. Still, I had to explain everything in very simplistic terms.

This late-summer swarm was quite small, very calm, and almost at head height. I borrowed a stepladder from the homeowner, and with his permission, cut off the branch on which the bees were resting.

He stood on the sidewalk, across the street from his house as I worked. He wanted nothing to do with these bees. Despite his fears, he did call a beekeeper instead of spraying the bees with poison. Not everyone would have done this.

Without a doubt, this was the easiest swarm I had ever collected. I think I had finally broken my streak of bad luck, and didn't get stung in the ass. (You think I'm kidding? Click here, or here to read about my misadventures.)

Robb and I set these bees up in our back yard, and gave them a frame of capped honey and a frame of brood. Hopefully, they'll be strong enough to make it through the winter. If they survive, I'm going to offer them to one of our neighbors. I'm really interested in "hosting" hives at friends' houses.

If you live nearby and are interested in keeping bees, but don't want to do all the work, let me know. I'll set you up with bees, and take care of them. And if there's any honey to harvest, we can share it.

A Postage Stamp Sized Panorama

2011-09-03T21:08:00.000-07:00

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As much as a reminder to myself as anything else, I though I'd post this picture of one corner of our back garden, taken at the end of July.

The World's Ugliest Fence is just as ugly as ever. I figure that until we get the siding finished on our house, we have no right to complain about any neighborhood eyesores. We had the arborist out recently, to prune the plum tree. The plum looks great, but now we've got an even clearer view of the fence.

With regards to the fence, there's also a language problem.Our neighbor speaks about as much English as we speak Spanish. So, for the moment, we're stuck with what we've got.

The hops are ripening in this photo. They're the three columns of green on the short side of our little garage. We harvested the Sterling hops today, which is the plant on the left. The hops were a huge success. We placed them in one of the few spots in our little yard that gets consistent sunlight. I really need to think about the whole sun situation.

If only that danged fence weren't ten feet high... Robb looked into it, and Oakland building code says that backyard fences can only be six feet tall. We had harbored the illusion that perhaps the fence had been put in by the previous owner of our house, and that our neighbors hated it as much at we do, but -- alas -- the neighbors recently added even more orange netting.

The pink flowers are our Naked Ladies, which came with the house. We had to put a wire cage around one of the plants, because Smog became a bit obsessed with beating up one particular bulb. He's a strange little cat, our Smoggy. Like much of the back garden, these plants are in a state of flux. I need to find a better home for them. When the fall rains come, I suspect I'll be moving most of the back garden. Good thing I enjoy digging.

The vegetable garden is seen in the front of the photo. What a mess. We're pretty much done with summer plants, and I've put in some of the cool-weather stuff. The snails and slugs are having a plant-eating jamboree. It's demoralizing. Between the snails and the lack of sun, it's a wonder anything can grow back here. As soon as we get the front of the house finished, I'm staring work on the front garden. At the rate I'm going, that will be in about ten years.

The plant stand against the garage holds about half of my orchids. The terra cotta pot at the intersection of the path is the lemon tree my sister gave me. It's destined for a spot in the front yard. It's doing fine, but I suspect it will be much happier with its roots in the earth.

Behind the potted lemon is the false indigo that I bought as a food source for dogface butterflies. I haven't actually seen any of these butterflies in the yard, but no matter. I haven't seen most of the butterflies I've planted food for. You never know. We saw some kind of orange fritillary butterfly today, for only the second or third time. I've had great success attracting green bees.

And behind the false indigo is our persimmon tree. Unless something drastic happens, we're going to have a bumper crop of fruit. They're just now starting to get the tiniest bit of color. We should be harvesting them in November, or maybe late October.

By way of comparison, here's what the garden looked like back in December.

And here's another look at how things looked in late July.

I've been sick most of the week. I've been dragging myself into work to deal with the Daily Crisis, and then coming home and conking out. Between naps, I've been reading garden blogs, and feeling bad about all the work I need to do. Comparing these two pictures actually does show me that we've accomplished a lot this spring and summer.

Love Among the Green Bees

2011-09-03T14:25:00.000-07:00

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I finally got around to planting some cosmos, and almost instantly (like magic!) we had green bees in our garden.

I had spotted a single green bee two years ago, back when we were "stealth gardening" before we officially owned our little house. Even though we didn't have the keys, we'd come over and work on the vine-covered mess that was the back garden. There was just so much to do, and I was so excited about it all.

I kept hoping that we'd see more of these beautiful creatures, but they never came for another visit, until this past week. They probably don't come around until late August, and I must have missed them last year.

These bees are quite small, and very fast-moving. They don't hang around posing for my camera, that's for sure.

If I sit very still, and focus on just one flower, the bees come to me.

There's quite a bit of backyard drama going on. The bee that I assume is the female is going about her business, foraging, while the putative male bombards her.

Forget all that cutesy business about "the birds and the bees." Bee nookie is more like a fly-by mugging. The male tackles the female, and in the blink of an eye he's gone. After the ruckus, she's flat on her back, sprawled across a petal. The "romance" hardly deters her, and she's back at work in no time at all.

Ah, summertime romance...

Rolling

2011-08-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

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It's time once again for us to start preparing for our annual fundraising ride for BORP. That's the Bay Area Outreach Recreation Program–– an organization providing recreation activities for children with disabilities. Next month we'll be joining a multitude of riders, of all abilities, to tackle 25 very hilly miles.

This is such an inspiring event. We get to ride alongside elite cyclists on two wheels and paraplegic handcyclists on three (riding their 100-mile course); blind cyclists on tandems; Paralympic Medalists; children and adults with a range of abilities who may or may not be able to finish the 10-mile course they're on (but, by gum, they're gonna try). And then there are the scores of people like us who are pushing the edges of their abilities every time.

Each year, arriving at the finish line, we have such a strong feeling of accomplishment–– not only from having met the challenge, but also from the knowledge that by supporting these warm, wonderful people, we are doing something meaningful and important.

We hope that you will join us this year as we try to raise $1,000 to keep BORP rolling.

Pickles! (Our First Attempt.)

2011-08-21T12:29:00.000-07:00

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When I was over at Allie's house helping with her bee situation, she gave me a few gigantic homegrown cucumbers. There's no sense of scale in this picture, so you'll have to take my word: these cukes were huge!

Last year, we got cornichon seeds from Christine, but some creature ate the baby plants all the way to the ground. My gardening is all about the battles with the snails. Sigh.

I had grown French tarragon with the goal of pickling cornichons, and so even though these particular cucumbers were humorously large, I decided to follow the recipe for cornichons.

Following a single recipe was easier said than done. There were all sorts of contradictory instructions online and in our cookbooks. In the end, we improvised, using what sounded tasty, and using what we had on-hand.

We cut the cucumbers into spears, and salted them with kosher salt (regular table salt has additives that do not work well in pickling). We left these overnight, and in the morning the cucumbers has exuded about an inch of water. This is a very typical Hungarian preparation for cucumbers. I can't imagine how many salad cucumber I salted in my childhood.

Do you notice our vintage enamel cookware? We've been finding these at estate sales. This white-and-blue stockpot is from Poland. The couple who owned it had a neat trick: they stuck a wine cork under the enamel handle. While these handles typically get dangerously hot during cooking, a cork stays cool, so it is easy to lift the lid. Very clever!

I harvested the tarragon, washed it, and cut it into sprigs that were about an inch long. I suppose I could have left them long, but I liked the shorter size.

Gardeners who do not apply pesticides have to be extra vigilant about removing varmints from their crops. And, of course, at our house all interesting creepy-crawlies get photographed before being chucked into the compost pile. I wonder what this guy is? Perhaps a cabbage white caterpillar?

We used our home grown garlic. I somehow managed to knock the wicked-looking sheep shears off of the wall while I was cutting the garlic off the braid. I caught it before it hit the floor, and didn't get hurt. But clearly we need to secure this more safely.

Also, I have to realize that trying to catch falling rusty blades is a really foolish instinct. Let it fall, and get your hands and feet out of the way. I was lucky, but really, reaching for a plummeting blade is stupid.

Robb boiled some large sauerkraut jars, to sterilize them. And then we divided the seasonings between three jars. We really had no idea how many jars the cucumbers would fill.

For my own record, we used 1.25 ounces of tarragon, 1 ounce of garlic cloves (which was two heads of our pathetic little crop), 15 whole black peppercorns, an unmeasured amount of kosher salt, and about 2.5 pounds of cucumbers. The spears were too tall for the jars, and trying to stand them up was a pain-in-the-patoot, so we made a positive out of a negative, and spiraled them around the inside of the jar. We ended up needing only two jars, and will probably buy more cucumbers today to use the spices in the third jar. We topped off our jars with white vinegar, and will store these in the fridge for about a week.

It's always nice when one's kitchen clutter is so color-coordinated.

A Bee Massacre

2011-08-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

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To update the story of Allie's poisoned beehive: this is what I found, when I got to Allie's house. Thousands and thousands of dead bees, littering the area in front of the hive. There were tons of bees, dead in the grass, but my grass photos weren't particularly clear. Dead bees in the grass look remarkably like dirt. Trust me when I tell you that there was a six-foot-square patch of dead bees, right in front of the hive.

Allie and I suspect that someone came into her yard and started spraying the entrance of her hive with insecticide. The bees released their "alarm pheromones" and more and more bees poured out of the hive in response. The spraying probably continued until the bees overpowered the sprayer, and stung this person so much that they ran away.

Here's what it looked like inside the hive. A carpet of death. Horrible and senseless.

Honeybees are not aggressive toward humans. Robb and I keep two vigorous hives in a small urban back yard, and none of our neighbors have ever complained about trouble with bees. In fact, when we gave everyone honey for Christmas, most everyone was surprised that we even had bees (our immediate next-door neighbors already knew, of course).

I had a heavy heart, and low expectations for Allie's hive. Robb and I had packed up a frame of freshly laid eggs, from one of our hives. The idea was that if any bees survived, they might be able to raise a new generation of young from those eggs. Furthermore, if Allie's queen had been poisoned, the bees could potentially raise new queens from the donated eggs. Robb and I placed the frame of eggs, and the "nurse bees" that were tending the eggs inside of our swarm-catching box, and I drove out to Martinez, to see what could be done.

The bees hummed in the back of my car, and I thought dire thoughts about bees and humans.

Considering the carnage evident at the entrance to the hive, I had no expectations of finding any live bees, so you can imagine my surprise when I opened the hive up and saw large numbers of bees, going about their business. I had anticipated finding only a few survivors, mostly going through their death-throes.

Allie had identified a particularly secluded part of her yard, that would be unseen by any neighbors, and Robb had provided a new "landing board" for the bees. We figured that we ought to replace any of the wooden parts of the hive that might have been sprayed with insecticide.

Once we determined that there were live bees, I did a cursory inspection of the hive.

Astonishingly, I spotted Allie's queen.

I was shocked. I never see my own queens, and yet somehow, Allie's queens always walk right up to me. Queen bees are larger than their daughters, and move with a purpose. Combine that with the fact that the sun was setting, and you get this blurry photograph. (The queen is centered on the bottom of the frame. She's larger and redder than any of the other bees.)

In the end, I added the frame of eggs to the hive, along with the nurse bees. I'm unsure if Allie's bees will accept my bees in their hive. There may be a bit of fighting, but at least there are some uncontaminated eggs. We agreed to leave the existing honey for the bees, hoping that it was far enough away from the spray to be safe for bees.

Allie spoke to the captain of her neighborhood watch, an imposing hulk of a man, who turns out to be a huge friend to bees. She plans to file a police report. She'll be improving the locks on her gate. And she plans to speak to all her neighbors. She's figured out a way of phrasing things so that the innocent ones will be alert to trespassers, and the guilty ones will be paranoid about the police. We had a good laugh about her alternate plan to go door-to-door, pretending to be fundraising for some good cause, and look to see which neighbors have bee-stings all over their faces.

So, we're cautiously optimistic. I'll go back next weekend, to check on the bees. Hopefully, I'll find a colony of bees, rebounding from this attack. What we're not clear about is how long-lasting the poison that was used on this hive might be.

Trespassing and Killing

2011-08-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

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Last spring, Robb and I set up a beehive at our friend Allie's house. She provided space in her beautiful garden, and we gave her bees and a hive. We'd stop by from time to time to hang out and tend the bees.

This seemed like a perfect arrangement.

Until yesterday, when someone came into Allie's yard, and sprayed insecticide all over her hive, killing thousands of bees. Given that Allie has a six-foot-tall fence, it's clear that the culprit was not some random by-passer. The person who killed Allie's bees must have been an immediate neighbor, who could see the hive from a second-floor window.

If this neighbor had an issue with Allie keeping bees, they could have spoken to her. They could have called someone from Animal Control. Instead they chose a "solution" that was both sneaky and cowardly. This makes me crazy. I feel terrible for Allie, because this will surely sour her relations with her neighbors.

Imagine if Allie had a dog that the neighbor was afraid of. Would the neighbor be justified in sneaking into Allie's yard, and shooting her dog?

I'll be going over to Allie's house after work to see if anything can be done to save the remaining bees.

Sometime I really hate humans.

Perfect Birthday

2011-08-15T08:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all you well-wishers. We went up to wine country for the weekend and had a fantastic time.

On Saturday morning, we went up to the Russian River, took out a couple of kayaks and spent the day paddling, swimming and picnicking along the banks.

It took us long enough to discover this (after eight years living here) but this is the Northern California version of spending the day at the beach. (Usually the coastal fog, wind, rough surf and cold water make the complete day-at-the-beach experience more challenging here). Large groups of people will rent canoes, load them up with: ice chests, beer, pool toys, children, beer, wine, beer and dogs and then set off downstream stopping at every swimming hole and sandy bank. It's a floating party for miles.

After a day on the river we checked into a Bed and Breakfast in the little hamlet of Geyserville. We're getting to know the town well since we go there every year for the annual BORP fundraising ride. The B&B (the Hope-Bosworth Inn) is a gorgeous Victorian house which was decorated with Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper in every room. They have a small vineyard in the back, a swimming pool and, for a modern touch, enough solar panels on their carport to power half the town.

The following day we drove down to the West County Trail, a beautiful, secluded, paved, off-road bike and walking path which runs for miles over rolling hills, through little towns, ranches and vineyards.

Huge stretches of the trail are lined with blackberry bushes and we were there at exactly the right time. The canes were heavy with ripe berries and all the neighbors were out with their gloves and buckets and ladders.

At midday we stopped at a little café, ate lunch on their garden patio and asked for empty carry-out containers. On the way back we spent a couple of hours peddling and picking, peddling and picking until about six pounds of berries loaded down Lisa's bike basket.

I'm glad we had a chance to ride this trail because it's the route that the kids take on the BORP ride. Every year at the event, we find ourselves wondering what their ten-mile ride was like. Now we know it is some of the most beautiful cycling in the region.

We can't wait to go back and we won't have long to wait. In six weeks, we will return to Geyserville for our fourth annual Revolution ride.

If you'd like to add your support to BORP and their sports and recreation programs for children with disabilities, please join us by clicking here and then choosing "Lisa Lazar" or "Robb Bauer" from the "Select a participant" pull down menu. Thanks.

Home Sweet Home

2011-08-14T14:39:00.001-07:00

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Slowly, slowly Robb and I are working on our house. We've been going to estate sales, from time to time, and this weekend we brought home a few gems.

This oak display table was a happy find. I suspect that it was sold as a flat-pack kit some time in the early 20th Century. You thought Ikea invented this? Apparently not. Here's a link to photos from a catalog of Mission/Arts and Crafts furniture company, selling flat-packed furniture as far back as 1907.

Whoever originally put the kit together didn't do a very good job, so Robb ever-so-carefully took the table apart and re-assembled it. It's odd to be repairing decades old slap-dashery.

We also found another vintage jug, to add to our modest collection. The solid green jug sits well with its companions.

I re-arranged our jugs, and need to glue them back in place with Museum Wax. In earthquake country, fragile antiques need to be secured.

It only took two years to find a lampshade for our bathroom. At least I didn't have to conk myself on the head to get this one.

And yeah, the walls are still not painted. What can I say? I paint all day long, and am not terribly motivated to scrape paint off my ceilings when I get home from work.

Also, I suck.

Speaking of sucking, we've made damn sure that we'll have a vampire-free kitchen. If the home-grown garlic doesn't deter vampires, we'll fight 'em off with antique sheep-sheers and the world's most vicious cheese-grater.

We were delighted by these cans that once held local honey. The Desert Bloom is from Fresno, and the Floradale was packaged right here in Oakland.

After a day at the estate sales, Robb concluded that he and I have the aesthetic sensibilities of eighty-year-old rich people. What can I say? I'm a very young Little Old Lady.

Happy Birthday Robb

2011-08-09T12:53:00.001-07:00

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A Bit of Birthday Fun

2011-08-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

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In celebration of his birthday, Robb and I are headed out of town for a little getaway.

We learned our lesson years ago, and won't be bringing cameras kayaking. You'll just have to imagine us, paddling down-river in wine country.

You are also invited to imagine our tough-guy neighbors, our burglar alarm, and our fearsome pussycats all guarding our house.

Two Weeks in the Life of the Hive

2011-07-31T21:51:00.001-07:00

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The weekend before last, we opened up both of our beehives. It had been far too long, since we had inspected, and the Gloriana hive was terribly overcrowded.

The bees had run out of room in the hive proper, and were shoving honey anywhere they could. They had built extra honey comb on the tops of their frames, because there was no other storage space.

The developing bees in the capped brood cells were surrounded by uncapped nectar and capped honey. The food stores were encroaching on the nursery.

Robb and I had read that a hive will swarm when it runs out of places for the queen to lay her eggs. The bees had been busier than we expected, and things were getting dangerously crowded.

We added another box of open frames on to the beehive, and harvested four frames of honey.

The honey seemed darker than what we had taken out of the hive, previously. However, when we actually strained the honey, it was light and clear. Perhaps the older, darker wax made the honey appear darker?

We extract our honey using the crush-and-strain method. Our local bee club owns a couple of mechanical extractors, but actually borrowing them is a real pain in the patoot (or so it seems to me, judging from the heated discussion at the bee meetings). We cut out the nicest comb, and carefully place that in jars. Then we mush up the other comb, and let it drain through fine metal sieves. We collect the honey in a special bucket, which is fitted with a "honey gate" that's allows for (reasonably) easy filling of our jars. It's a messy process, and we end up with sticky drawer-pulls and doorknobs before we're all done. Thankfully honey is completely water-soluble, so cleanup isn't too arduous.

Robb figures that we got something like seventeen pounds of honey, as well as a pound of beautiful golden beeswax.

Here's what we found, when we opened the hive today. Lots of newly-constructed wax comb. Remember, we cut all of the comb out of the frames, when we harvested.

The bees built all of this in fewer than fifteen days. In fact, they must have built all of this in about three days, because if I've got the "bee math" right, the capped brood in the center of the frame can be no younger than twelve days old.

You can see that the bees have not built the comb wall-to-wall, quite yet. You can also see that when we cut out the honeycomb, we always leave a bit of the comb behind, as a building guide for the bees. Do you notice the comb on the outer edges of the frame? That was probably in place from after our harvest. The bees will eventually fill in the entire frame, leaving just a few open spaces, as travel corridors.

We've found it fascinating that the bees will construct neat little holes in their wax comb. We often observe bees passing through these passageways.

This is two week's worth of nectar collection. The bees have built comb, brought in nectar, processed it with enzymes, evaporated the excess water, and capped the finished honey.

It is said that bees travel an average of 1600 round trips -- of up to 6 miles per trip -- to collect enough nectar to make a single ounce of honey. Put another way, bees travel a distance equal to 4 times around the earth in order to produce just 2 pounds of honey. One reads a lot of bee statistics, and I'm always a bit skeptical of their accuracy.

Regardless, one has to admire the amount of work the bees accomplished in such a short period of time. They re-filled a hive that we had harvested just two before.

There were a few unpleasant discoveries, during the course of this inspection. I spotted a parasitic varroa mite attached to one of the colony's drones.

Here's a blow-up of the previous photo. Even with the lack of clarity, the parasite is evident. It looks like a brick-red crab, sucking the life out of this bee. Varroa are a huge problem for beekeepers, both because of the damage they inflict on the colony, and because there don't seem to be many safe products for combating these revolting pests. The mites continue to develop resistances to the miticides.

This year, our apparent varroa load is lower than last. We interrupted the brood cycle of our bees when we split the colony back in the spring. By interrupting the bee's reproductive cycle, we also smashed the life-cycle of their parasites.

This is a non-chemical approach to varroa management that has, it seems, worked for us this season.

Overall, we were delighted by what we found in this hive. We completed our inspection by adding a sixth hive box, and interspersing existing comb with empty frames. This seems to help the bees build straight comb, that doesn't get ripped when we open up their house.

The new honey comb really is beautiful, isn't it? Also, our sky really is that blue.

Backyard Research

2011-07-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

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Another piece in the honeybee puzzle... Researchers have recently discovered viruses in bees which may be contributing to Colony Collapse Disorder. Coincidentally, a researcher from one of the labs shown in this PBS NewsHour segment, which aired yesterday, will be in our backyard this afternoon to sample our hives as part of an ongoing study.

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Thanks, Feral Cats!

2011-07-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

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It was very thoughtful of you to leave the lower half of this gigantic rat (and the accompanying pile of viscera) in the backyard.

Handy

2011-07-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

If it can be said that there are any "advantages" to having a disability, handicapped parking is one. I've come to rely on those "handy spaces" whenever they get me closer to a building entrance. My walking is still extremely slow and very tiring.

I used to intentionally leave the most convenient spaces open for those who might need it more than me, until I gradually realized that I rarely see anybody who apparently fits that description.

I say "apparently" because one thing we have noticed is that you often can't tell by looking who has a physical disability. A person with chronic fatigue, for instance, could go bounding into a post office but end up dragging themselves out ten minutes later. An average walker might be seen entering a shop but might have difficulty carrying their purchase when they leave.

Or ... they might be a selfish, able-bodied jerk using someone's handicap placard to park for free. Here in California the DMV admits that their recordkeeping is a couple of years behind and as a result they have sent out 56,000 hang tags to dead people. Many of their family members have kept them. By DMV estimates, on any given street, on any given day, more than one third of handicapped parking spaces are being used improperly. One-third! They apparently deduced this from recent sting operations they conducted around the state.

I started thinking about this yesterday because, as I was unloading my trike at a local park, a parks district police officer asked to see my permit. Wow! This is the first time this has ever happened to me. It made me wonder if this was a random check or if the local municipalities have discovered a new revenue stream. At about 250 bucks a pop, fines for placard violations can keep a lot of libraries operating, schools staffed, and police officers and firefighters in their jobs.

It's a delicate operation because law enforcement is not permitted to ask you anything about your physical/medical condition. Still, it's important to stop the opportunists because, as our population ages and more and more disabled people remain active, those "handy spaces" are going to become scarcer and scarcer.

Slatternly

2011-07-24T18:51:00.000-07:00

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Things have been a bit slow at work, so I took two days off last week. I managed to get some more of the siding-boards for our house scraped, but it didn't feel like I made a dent in the pile. Our neighbors must hate us, because our house is so trashy-looking. Robb and I are determined to get this project finished before the neighborhood block party. Goodness knows, I'm sick of the piles of boards, clogging up our driveway, and the sloppy tar-paper "siding" on our house.

I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but this past week, I had my first professional haircut since Robb broke his back. That's over FIVE YEARS, people. I'm not sure what happened to me, but somewhere along the line, a switch was flipped in my brain, and I stopped taking proper care of myself. It was really weird at first. I'd drive Robb to all sorts of doctors' appointments, but I wouldn't take myself to the dentist. I think that this was some kind of crazy survivor's guilt, stemming from Robb's paralysis. I suspect that another part of this was my sinus infection that went undiagnosed for three years.

Anyway, this was crazy, and had to stop. I had long since resumed seeing my delightful dentist, but I really needed a haircut, and I wanted to cover up all the grey hairs that sprouted when Robb was in the hospital. I got exactly the hairstyle that I wanted, from a lovely stylist.

While the haircut was perfect, the dye-job looked cheap and fake. I looked like Severus Snape's curly-haired sister. And after half a day of scowling at myself in the mirror, I called the salon and scheduled an emergency re-visit. They graciously fixed my hair for free. Much better!

This weekend, I dug up a lot of the calla lilies in our back yard. As much as I like these flowers in February, they are a terrible space-hogging snail breeding ground. They take up a huge amount of room in our tiny garden. Because they're right up front, they look like hell when the leaves die back. I'm going to give this batch to my across-the-street neighbor, who actually wants them. If anyone else wants some calla lily bulbs, leave me a message on the blog Don't be shy.

I also dug up on of my two "hot lips" sage plants, which I had foolishly planted in the vegetable garden. I like the idea of including ornamental flowering plants in the garden, but I totally underestimated how huge the sage would become. For the moment, I've stuck this plant into a large pot, and will trundle it around the garden, until I figure out where it wants to live.

After digging up the garlic, shallot, sage, and lilies, the garden looks pretty sad and sparse. At this time of year, most local gardens would be crammed with tomatoes and peppers. Alas, since my violent allergy to hot peppers progressed into an allergy to all members of the nightshade family, we no longer grow these staples of the summer garden.

Robb and I drove around to several garden centers this weekend, and I bought a plants to fill a few voids, notably scarlet runner beans, and parsley. I also got some cosmos and alysum, for the bees.

We've got our "six-pack" seed starters soaking in a sanitizing solution (something from Robb's beer-brewing stash, I think) and I'll be starting my autumn seeds soon. I would have started them today, but I was hit with a head-cold, and have next to no energy or focus. (I know that this blog post reflects my lack of mental focus. Oh well...)

I'm feeling rotten and have been mooching around the house in my jammies. Robb is being a total sweetie-pie. He's making lemon verbena ice cream from the gigantic bush in our back yard. And at my request he's making a turnip gratin. I'm desperately missing potatoes, and thought this might be a decent substitution.

I'd better be feeling better tomorrow, because we have a huge project at work that needs to be finished in two days.

Sorry about the discombobulated blog post. I'm a mess, right about now.

Garlic Harvest

2011-07-22T18:31:00.001-07:00

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After the fiasco that was our leek harvest, I wasn't sure what to expect of our garlic.

The time had come to dig up our bulbs. The leaves were dying back, and in fact the plants were putting up flowers, which didn't bode well.

The garlic bulbs were neither huge nor puny. They were solidly medium-sized, with a few small bulbs scattered throughout. Considering how poor our soil was when I started this garden, I'm pleased by what we got.

I hosed everything off, and stuck the garlic into a wire bookshelf that I had picked up along the side of the road. Everything I read about garlic says that it needs to "cure" but I have no idea what that really means. Perhaps they need to dry out a bit, to keep from getting moldy. I dunno.

Today, I peeled off loose outer layer of garlic skin, and removed the roots. I was about halfway through this project, when I realized that I could grasp the roots with my scissors and rip them off the bulbs. I hope I remember this neat trick next year.

I dug the roots and cut-up skins directly into the garden. I'll often incorporate small amounts of un-composted organic material into our soil. I figure it can't hurt. Our dirt is like concrete, and needs some loosening up.

I found a couple of videos online, and braided the garlics. I think that my braids would have worked out better with larger bulbs. I found that I couldn't keep the braid and the bulbs in synch. The bulbs were small, but the stems were quite stout, and so the braiding got ahead of the actual garlic bulbs. Furthermore, the few garlic plants that hard started to produce flowers were too hard-stemmed to braid.

I also harvested shallots today, if you could call digging up bulbs that were the exact same size as when I put them in the ground back in November a "harvest." It is a good thing that the plants were so beautiful, and the bees and bee-mimics and butterflies liked them so much, because they were a culinary failure. Those shallots were a waste of money and garden space.

I've got to figure out where we went wrong, and try again.

Ready to Emerge

2011-07-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

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As of yesterday, we've successfully raised and released four Anise Swallowtail Butterflies.

I cannot express the pleasure that this gives me. There's something so metaphorical about the life-cycle of these creatures. To be a tiny part of it is just thrilling.

I've realized that I can predict which butterflies are going to emerge. The green chrysalises are easy. They become more transparent, and the wing markings can be observed . The other clue that a butterfly is about to hatch has to do with the tail-end of the chrysalis. It expands a bit, in an accordion-like manner.

I can admit now that I thought all of the butterflies were dead. I read "butterflies emerge in ten days to three months" and I start to freak out after eleven days. What's strange is that it seems that the butterflies that had been in their chrysalises the shortest amount of time were among the first to emerge. Baffling.

Keep Smiling

2011-07-18T09:29:00.001-07:00

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Sure, life is hard and unfair. Bad things happen to really good people.

But look at Smog. He was was injured so badly in his early life that he'll never walk (or poop) without difficulty. This is just his daily norm. It's not like he's "overcoming" his problems. He's stuck with them forever. What Smog does is, and what we can all learn a lesson from, is have as much fun as possible. He may not walk normally, but that doesn't stop him from racing around the back yard with a crazed grin on his face. And when he's not tearing up and down our fruit trees, he's basking on his back, with all paws in the air.

Linguine, however, is unconvinced that anything about this little urchin has merit.

Tag-Along Beekeeping

2011-07-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

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On Saturday, Robb and I visited Stefani's impressive and inspiring garden. I wanted to assist her in doing a bit of beekeeping, and I dragged Robb along so that he could see Stefani's chicken coop. We're pretty certain that we want to get chickens next spring, and the coop that Stefani's husband built is very similar to what Robb has been designing. I thought it would be helpful to see this set-up in action.

Stefani had been given some bee equipment by a friend who wanted to get out of beekeeping. And at some point, a colony of bees had moved into the empty hive boxes. Because there were no frames on which to build honeycomb, the bees started constructing comb on the inside cover of the hive. Stefani had placed this (lavender) hive box on top of another (unpainted) box, in the hopes that the bees might be convinced to move down onto the existing comb inside of the (unpainted) box.

The plan was to carefully detach this comb from the cover of the lavender box, and then rubber-band it into frames. In California, it isn't legal to keep bees in hives that cannot be opened up for inspection. And anyway, it's not good for the bees to have their comb hanging from the ceiling of the hive-box. The comb would be damaged any time the box was opened.

When Stefani opened the hive box, she found the worst possible situation.

The new, soft wax comb had heated up enough to melt, and all of it had fallen away from where it had been previous attached.

Not good.

Stefani set to work, separating the mass of comb as gently as she could. And I wrapped frames in rubber bands.

Trying to maintain the original orientation with the broken edge facing up, we slipped the comb between the rubber bands. We hoped the bees would be able to salvage some of their brood.

Despite the destruction of the upper comb, the bees had happily accepted the comb that Stefani had provided them in the other hive box. The queen was laying eggs, and larvae was developing. This colony was in good shape.

Here's a close-up detail, showing eggs (third cell from the left, bottom row), developing larvae, as well as bees sharing nectar.

These bees are lucky to have Stefani, helping them out. If they were a truly feral colony, with no beekeeper to offer them better housing, the bees might not have been able to recover from the destruction of their comb.

Sadly, some of the brood comb was too badly damaged to salvage. In the spirit of letting nothing go to waste, this was fed to the chickens.

I cannot imagine how anyone takes a non-blurry photograph of feeding chickens. These girls were going crazy for some overgrown lettuce.

Stefani has an amazing vegetable garden. I was particularly taken with her Russian Kale. We've only grown Lacinato (or "dinosaur") Kale. Perhaps I'll try some of this, next go-around.

Stefani does not seem to have the same snail-and-slug problems that we do. Her strawberries are spectacular, and amazingly delicious. The only predator of the berries seem to be her dogs.

I'm really thankful that Stefani let me tag along with this beekeeping endeavor. I had never done a "cut out" before, and was glad to learn this technique.

Another Butterfly in the World

2011-07-15T18:31:00.000-07:00

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I was having one of those bad days at work. Nothing really horrible was going on, but for some reason I was failing to rise above the day's petty annoyances.

However, all of my grumpiness faded away when I received a photograph on my phone from Robb. Another butterfly had hatched out. (These are not the photographs in question.)

Today is cold and overcast, and the butterfly seems disinclined to fly. We tried setting her loose, but she just hunkered down on our fennel. We read that butterflies become quiescent at night and on cloudy days. Because she was so big and showy and not moving at all, I was worried that she'd end up as a Scrub Jay's dinner. So for tonight, we've moved her back into the safety of the enclosed tank. We'll set her free in the morning.

Nothing like a newly emerged butterfly to put everything into perspective.

Outside the Kitchen Window

2011-07-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

This morning ...

Poor Sleeves.

Scalping Rastafarians in the Back Yard

2011-07-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

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A few weeks ago, I bought the fleece of a sheep named Ziggy. I thought it would be interesting to process the wool myself, and then spin it into a sweater.

I was prepared to wash out a lot of lanolin, but I had no idea how sweaty sheep are. There's even a special word for funky hardened sheep's sweat: suint (pronounced swint). Washing took quite a while, and I still haven't managed to brush out even half of this fleece. I've got the fleece hanging on a drying rack in the back yard, and it really looks bizarre and ghoulish.

Cleaning and brushing out this fleece has given me so much respect for our ancestors, and what they had to do in order to clothe themselves.

The prep takes a lot of time, but it's quite enjoyable. The wool is incredibly lovely, and I'm enjoying the tonal variation of this sheep's coat. I've been sorting the wool into three piles, greyer grey, browner grey, and palest silver. (I suspect that nobody is going to be able to tell the two darker colors apart.)

The length of the fiber, or staple is quite impressive. This sheep was a cross between a Lincoln sheep, and a Corriedale. If I understand correctly, Lincolns are an ancient breed of sheep that have existed in England since the Roman occupation. Renowned for glossy long fleece, Lincolns do not have a great reputation among spinners. In fact, some people have turned up their noses at this wool, and helpfully advise me that the yarn I'm making will be unwearable, and only suitable for rug-making.

I'm not so sure that I agree. First of all, I'm hardly a delicate flower. I rather like a good scratchy sweater. And secondly, this sheep's other parent was a Corriedale sheep, which are known for their soft, crimpy fleece.

I have the idea that I'll make a nice wooly sweater out of this wool, but at the rate I'm going, I'll be lucky if I spin enough yarn to make a pair of scratchy knickers.

I did knit up a sample of the first yarn I spun from this fleece. This is just a little swatch, knit up as a test. It fills my heart with glee, when I think that I created the wool that I could actually knit.

Thank you Ziggy. You sure have lovely locks.

The Tour de Fleece

2011-07-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

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For the past few years, the online community of handspinners have participated in something called the Tour de Fleece. It's a fun event, where spinners challenge themselves to spin every day of the the Tour de France bicycle race. There are wheels, spinning round and round all over the planet.

I'm not usually not big on joining these sorts of online shenanigans, but I decided that this would be a good opportunity for me to do a lot of spinning, and work toward improving my skills.

I had my share of technical difficulties, right from the start. I'm spinning on a rather rickety antique spinning wheel, which presents quite a few challenges. First, the driveband that spins the wheel kept falling off. Like, every four seconds. Then, my bobbin split into pieces.

Robb learned quite a bit about tuning up my spinning wheels, while I practiced my swearing.

I got this lovely undyed wool through my handspinning group. It was astonishingly cheap, which was very liberating. I wasn't worried about ruining expensive raw materials. I could "mess around" without fear. If I screwed up, it was no big deal.

This is freshly spun wool, wound as a little cake. There's only one strand of fiber at this point.

Here's the same fiber, plied into yarn. Do you see how it has a rope-like quality? This gives more structure and strength to the final product.

Now that I'm (almost) finished with this project, I have to decide what to work on next. I tried spinning the alpaca fiber that both Edwin and Annalisa sent me, but it's painfully clear that I need a lesson in working with this unique animal fiber.

I think the next thing I'm going to work on is either some wool that Mel sent me, or the gigantic fleece I bought recently. It's from a sheep named Ziggy, and everyone who has been over to the house in the past week has seen this fleece hanging around the back yard. It looks like I have been murdering and scalping rastafarians.

A Butterfly Emerges

2011-07-06T19:33:00.000-07:00

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I'm not a morning person, but if Robb tells me that there's an Interesting Nature Event in progress, I'll catapult out of bed. This morning, I was rubbing my eyes, when he shouted that we had at butterfly.

We had been collecting the Anise Swallowtail caterpillars that we found on our garden fennel, and one by one they transformed into mysteriously dead-looking chrysalises. We've had quite a few people over lately, and we've all peered into the tank, and wondered when or if anything might emerge.

In truth, I had pretty much given up hoping. I might tell myself that the markings on the chrysalises were changing, but I was secretly convinced that nothing was going to happen. Reading that it takes from ten days to three months for a butterfly to emerge results in a lot of staring and worrying, two things I'm very good at doing.

Robb and I cleared a space on an outside table, and carried the butterfly tank outside. The butterfly was busily bashing into the glass, so we gave her a stalk of fennel to rest on. Her wings had already "inflated" with fluids, but she still needed to rest and gain strength.

We had a wonderful opportunity to observe her, up close. Robb noticed right way that the undersides of her wings were significantly more colorful than the top sides. When I was going through the photos, I also noticed that the patterns on the top and bottom sides did not line up. Look above the blue markings, and you'll see the sun shining through her wings. You'll notice that you can see through her wings, and see the "shadow" of her top markings.

We enjoyed looking at her licorice-whip proboscis. She kept her tongue out the whole time that she was resting. Butterflies have long hollow structures, with which they sip nectar from flowers. Apparently, butterflies don't suck up liquid (like a drinking straw) because the pressure required to pull viscous liquids through the tiny tube would be impossibly strong. Rather, they use capillary action to, much in the way that a paper towel draws in liquids.

We were enchanted by the fur on the butterfly's body, and interested to learn that these hairs, called tactile setae, connect to nerve cells, and provide the butterflies with sensory information. Caterpillars have similar structures, as well. We've probably all seen a hairy caterpillar at one time or another. Who knew that those hairs were functional sensory structures, providing the animal with information about touch, smell and sound?

Whoever gets the opportunity to look at a live butterfly this closely? And when does one get to see such fresh, undamaged wings. The scales that form the markings are like pixels, creating an image.

(Here's a link to an article on micro-photography of butterfly wings.)

The ends of the wings are slightly curved. I imagine that this offers aerodynamic advantages.

Christine was teasing me for assigning genders to the flies and bees in a previous post. But in this case, I'm confident this this butterfly is female. There are no claspers at the end of this butterfly's abdomen. A male butterfly uses his claspers to hold onto a female, during mating.

Because this is just the way the universe works, the butterfly actually flew when neither Robb nor I were present. Robb was laying down, resting his back, and I had gone inside to get another camera battery.

She was flitting around the lilac bush when I came back outside.

A few seconds of overwhelming emotion on my part, and then she flew off into the big wide world.

Exploding Stars

2011-07-03T16:33:00.001-07:00

...

About a month ago, I accidentally kicked over this mushroom, back by the QE2 beehive.

I cut it open, to see what it might look like. The inside was dense, and reminded me of ground poppy-seed filling. I rifled around in my gigantic mushroom book, Mushrooms Demystified, and made a tentative identification as being something in Scleroderma genus. I figured this was some kind of Smooth Earthball.

And then yesterday, I was clearing out the weedy non-fruitful, thorny blackberry patch, and uncovered these wonderfully odd things.

The mushrooms had split open in the form of a star. How magical is that?

(This is about as close to a fireworks post as I could manage this year.)

Reflections on Urban Farming

2011-06-30T11:26:00.000-07:00

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Yesterday, Oakland animal control officials confiscated twenty one malnourished rabbits from an apartment building near Lake Merritt. The rabbits were apparently living in filthy overcrowded conditions. The rabbits had been fed nothing but white rice, and were covered with urine burns. These rabbits were apparently on their way to the dinner table.

I have very conflicted feelings about all of this.

I have to say that I've become rather uncomfortable with the orthodoxy of the urban farming movement. I've long had an interest in raising my own food, and have done so whenever I had access to some land. So you would think that I would be delighted by my fellow urban gardeners.

In truth, I've become uncomfortable with what I read about the urban farming movement. Those folks seem so damn sanctimonious, as if they singlehandedly invented agriculture. I tire of articles about urban hipsters, giving their vegetable gardens ironic farm-names, and patting themselves on the back because they are killing animals in their own back yards.

So, in an effort to better understand my feeling on all of this, I recently joined the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance. I figured I needed to meet the people I'd been reading about, and draw my conclusions from actual experience, not hearsay.

I really want to like my fellow gardeners, but somehow some of these folks (or the articles written about some of these folks) just rub me the wrong way. There's a subset of urban gardening blogs where the writers are so intent on proving their own hipness that I just have to laugh. "Look at me," the blogs shout. "I'm a total badass. I have an Ivy League education, but I'm authentic, because I live in the ghe-tto. I'm planting motherfarkin' potatoes in the motherfarkin' dirt. I'm going to kill and eat a small animal. I'm so farking rad."

Uh huh.

Tell that to an actual farmer.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to clear my head. I'll be out back, weeding my little vegetable garden.

Plum Jam!

2011-06-29T11:18:00.001-07:00

...

Our plum tree drops a few fruits every day. Instead of letting these go to waste, we pick them up, rinse them off, cut off any smashed bit, and stick them in the freezer for jam making. When we got three gallon-sized bags filled, I decided it was time to make jam.

I added eight ounces of water, to keep the defrosting plums from sticking to the pot, and slowly cooked them. When the plums were suitably pulpy, I started digging out the pits. I chucked them in the vintage "chinoise" that I bought at the White Elephant Sale at the Oakland Museum a few years back, and smooshed out as much pulp as I could. The skins pretty much de-materialized, in the cooking process.

I added sugar to taste, in my case about four and a half cups. (That seems like a lot, but this is tart jam.) And then I added half a pouch of pectin. Once again, I didn't get great set. Either I let the pectin cook too long, or I mis-read the "set test" of sticking some jam on a frozen plate. In any case, this jam is a wee bit sloppy.

But who cares if the jam is a tad runny? It's insanely delicious.

A year ago
The pleasures of beekeeping

Two years ago
Our bid on our house is accepted!
We're so excited that we can barely see straight

Three years ago
An impromptu trip to Seattle

Four years ago
Our baffling lawn-covering neighbors,
or "using blankets to deter raccoons"

Five years ago
It could be worse

Bees and Bee Mimics

2011-06-28T11:35:00.001-07:00

...

Our crop of shallots are blooming, and the bees seem very pleased. I thought I'd harvest a bunch of these, but the flowers were providing food for so many creatures, that I didn't have the heart to remove them from the garden just yet. I'll wait until the flowers die back a bit.

It's interesting to see how many insects share a bee-like form. Also fascinating to observe the variations in size and coloration. This tiny wasp could be mistaken for a honeybee, if an actual honeybee weren't working the same flower-ball. The shallot flowers are no more than an inch and a half in diameter.

Look how tiny this little fellow is, compared to the individual flowers of the shallot. I'm going to be lazy, and not look up the scientific names of all of these insects. I'm just going to enjoy their appearances, and not worry about taxonomy. This dude is, I believe, some kind of fly. I tend to look at insects eyes, and decide if they are flies or bees. I could be dead wrong about this, of course. I think that the antennae also offer some clues to the fly-ness or bee-ness of these creatures. Bees, I think, have longer antennae.

This is a wee native bee. You can see her two larger eyes on the sides of her head, and her three smaller eyes, just behind her antennae. She and the honeybee are the only fuzzy looking insects. You can see the flower pollen on her furry little legs.

Here's another fly. We see a lot of these, in our little garden. They are the largest of the bee mimics that visit our yard.

I'm not sure that most people slow down enough to notice these creatures. I say this a lot, but take a moment and look around. You might be delighted by what you see.

Confessions of an Incompetent Leek Farmer

2011-06-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

...

I read a lot of gardening blogs. (To be totally honest, I read a lot of gardening blogs when I ought to be doing something constructive, like sweeping the kitchen floor, or putting away the laundry.)

These blogs can be divided into two categories. There are blogs that offer helpful tips, and present a vision of idyllic bounty, whose gardens don't have a twig out of place, and the only insects present are well behaved beneficial ladybugs, who probably wipe their little feet before climbing onto the aphid-free rosebushes.

And then there are the blogs that I find genuinely interesting.

These are the blogs that honestly chronicle the garden failures, along with the successes. These are the blogs where I actually learn about gardening.

One of my greatest challenges, since starting to garden in Northern California, is trying to understand the growing season. I've lived most of my life on the East Coast, and have gardened in both urban Maryland and rural New York. I had amassed a body of knowledge, based on reading, observing, and screwing up. I had a reasonably good idea of what I was doing, when I put a seed or plant into the ground.

When I first got my hands on a patch of California dirt, I had to throw out all of my assumptions about when to plant. Around here, summer is a dormant period, when no rain falls. Winter, on the other hand is our greenest time of year, with steady rain, and almost no temperatures below freezing.

So, when I decided to plant leeks, I put them in at exactly the wrong time of year. They skipped the getting-big-and fat stage, and went right into the producing-woody-stalks-and-flowers stage of their lives. They never bothered getting succulent. They just headed straight for reproduction. I left them in the ground, and glared balefully at them, willing them to fatten up.

I had about as much luck with this as the Gingerbread Witch had with fattening up Hansel and Gretel. I just couldn't see what I was doing wrong.

Then, a few weeks back, I went to a class taught by Pam Peirce, the author of Golden Gate Gardening. She's the local expert on the questions of what, where and when. She confirmed my fears that I had been fooling myself, and that my leeks were only getting tougher and that I had better yank them out, as soon as possible.

As you can see, my leeks were skinny little things, with lovely flowers on top. Those flowers were in the process of producing seeds for the next generation of leeks. And those flowers were atop thick, woody inedible stalks.

If you look closely, you can see that the center of the leek bulbs have a sort of pinkish color. That's the base of the flower stalk, and is about as food-like as a wooden pencil. Oh well, we worked around the tough bits, and have been enjoying our leeks, in spite of my own amateur mistakes.

I think I've missed my chance for leeks this year, although in the spirit of Misguided Optimism, I stuck in a few baby leeks, just in case. I've been pouring over the planting schedules for our region, and hopefully I'll have better harvests in the future.

I also suck at mushroom gardening, in case you had any doubts about that.

One year ago
Caterpillars and Butterflies

Two years ago
Tidepooling with Friends

Three years ago
Wildfires and Blue-Necked Birds

Four years ago
I'm painting Victorian kennels for a doggy day-care facility

Five years ago
Five hours spent waiting for a scheduled doctor's appointment

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

2011-06-26T22:31:00.000-07:00

...

Exhausted from kayaking, Robb and I spent a day in the pre-industrial age.

Robb cooked up another human heart.

Oh, wait, no. That's a photo of him making plum-honey wine.

Seriously, we never feast on the hearts of our enemies. Our enemies run far too quickly for us to catch, and anyway, both Robb and I have been vegetarians for decades. (This wine will be ready by Xmas 2012. Talk about Slow Food!)

I scalped another Trustafarian.

Oh wait, no. That's a photo of the freshly-washed baby alpaca fleece, which Annalisa mailed me. I also worked on the alpaca fiber that Edwin sent. Thanks to the generosity of my friends, I'm overwhelmed with luxury fiber.

I finally rediscovered my knitting mojo, and finished the back of my cable-knit sweater. I'm going to make some big changes to the front of this garment. I think that rope-cables are needlessly fussy, and that the sweater needs better thought out shaping.

Messing About in Boats

2011-06-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

...

Yesterday, Robb and I took a four hour kayaking class on the Oakland Estuary. A new boating center has opened up near our house, and Robb was pretty thrilled to read that they offer classes. There's a public launch, there, too. Hmmmmm......

It's funny. Robb cannot sit in a normal chair for more than about twenty minutes, but the geometry of a kayak suits him just fine. (As you might imagine, I was concerned about the length of the class, and Robb's comfort.) We never know what kind of seating is going to work, and what is going to cause Instant Discomfort.

This was huge fun, and we're hoping to go again, soon. Anyone want to join us?

In other news, Linguine managed to get locked in our coat closet all day, yesterday. We were boating, and she was crying in an empty house. Today, she is being incredibly needy.

An Observation on the Garden

2011-06-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

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What's the best part about having a garden full of fruit and herbs?

Sharing.

A Cat's Life

2011-06-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

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Our kitty Smog, who we once thought so injured that he would never be able to jump, has been amusing himself by racing up and down the plum tree.

Unlike Cardigan, he's not hunting. He's just got more energy than any of us know what to do with. The backyard boys and Linguine seem to find Smog pretty annoying, because all he wants to do is play Chase Me. Smog's internal monologue goes along these lines:

"CHASEME CHASEME CHASEME CHASEME !!! Okay, now I chase you. I'm ... sneaking ... up ... on ...you ... Sneeeeeeeeeeaking... Sneeeeeeeeeeaking... Sneeeeeeeeeeaking... I'm gonn-nn-nn-nna pounce. OH BOY! Now you chase me! Hey, is that a string? OH BOY! I'd better chase that! The Mean Lady is growling at me again. I think she needs me to chase her. OH BOY! CHASEME CHASEME CHASEME CHASEME !!!"

Being chased around the garden by a crazed teenager interrupts important napping obligations.

We find him hilarious, although I wish he hadn't developed the habit of biting my toes.

Linguine is disgusted by all of this.

Barbie's Dream Kitchen

2011-06-20T20:58:00.001-07:00

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I'm still gloating about this weekend's antique shopping. This was only part of what I brought home.

Bitter Harvest

2011-06-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

...

I know that everybody has to eat to survive, but it breaks my heart every time a jay is killed in our yard.

It was a big night for predators in our yard last night. In addition to finding this jay, we found the head and tail of a baby possum, as well as a huge pile of barfed-up possum remains. Gross.

Caterpillars Continued

2011-06-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

....

I thought blog readers might like to see the caterpillars in action. They've doubled in size in the last two days. The butterflies continue to lay eggs, and I think we'll probably bring some more caterpillars inside.

I believe that most of the caterpillars are in their final stage, prior to forming their chrysalis. I've started to notice them, just after they shed their skins, and emerge in a new form. The skins shrivel and dry almost immediately, reducing down to a tiny remnant.

I don't believe that either Robb or I ever raised caterpillars before this year. Somehow we missed out on this, in grade school. (Tadpoles are another story.)

It's fascinating, and not a lot of work. I put multiple layers of paper towels under the fennel filled vases. Every morning, I roll up the top layer, which catches most of the frass (the polite scientific term for caterpillar crap). As the caterpillars get larger, they eat more, but even now, it's easy to keep them fed. I add more fennel every couple of days.

Still no action on the two chrysalises. They've been in this stage for about two weeks. I understand that the butterflies can emerge in as few as ten days, but that this can also take months. I've added a few more dried sticks for the current crop of caterpillars to latch onto when they are ready to form their chrysalises.

Wish us luck, everyone!

The Acrobats' Breakfast

2011-06-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

...

The Anise Swallowtail butterflies keep laying eggs in our fennel. So, I keep collecting the caterpillars, and bringing them inside where the birds won't eat them.

At the moment, we have eight caterpillars chomping on fennel fronds in our office. We have beautiful light in our house, and I waste an awful lot of time in the morning, taking moody out-of-focus photos of caterpillars.

It is incredible to see how quickly they grow, and how frequently they change form.

I particularly love it when the caterpillars grab onto a fennel strand with their hind legs, and then pull the far end of the strand toward their mouth with their front legs. They create a looping swag of fennel, and gradually eat their way back to where their hind legs have been holding on. This fellow is letting his middle legs hang lax as he gorges on fennel.

The caterpillars are also prodigious poopers, but we're far too delicate to discuss that sort of thing, here at How's Robb. Let's just say that it will be a quite some time before I order a poppy seed bagel again.

In No Particular Order

2011-06-14T18:29:00.000-07:00

...

I have a bad habit on this blog. I start a story, and don't always finish it. So, in no particular order, here are second and third chapters to some of the things we've written about previously.

Recently, we had electricians certify the safety of our 1920s knob-and-tube wiring. They inspected, did a bit of work, and gave us the legal go-ahead to insulate our attic. I'm delighted by this, and more delighted that both the electrical work and the insulation installation were No Big Deal. We paid someone to pump in recycled (and flame-treated) paper pulp, and I didn't have to crawl on my belly in a roasting-hot attic, dumping out bales of pulp. I didn't have to haul bales of pulp up a ladder and through a tiny hatchway. I wrote a check, and some nice men came with their pulp-spewing pumper truck. It was over in a matter of hours, and there was no residual mess. Our spring has been protracted and freakishly cold, but now that summer has finally arrived, we're observing a notable difference in the temperature of our little house.

There's still one surviving fledgling jay. I hear it, skrawking to its parents from a number of different locations. It seems to have mastered flying, which will hopefully protect it from the cats. I won't lie. I spent several mornings, camped out in the back yard with the garden hose. Yeah, that was me, at 5:30am, shooting water at the cats if they got too close to the birds. I'll ever be a Morning Person, but I am a lunatic.

Our caterpillar plantation is humming right along. No butterflies have emerged, yet. The bees are also doing well.

My worries about my emotional state were pretty much resolved when I got a long-lingering sinus infection diagnosed and treated. In addition to having no energy, coming home from work and going straight to bed, I had been experiencing a freaky smell issue. I was constantly smelling a sort of ammonia/urea odor, that nobody else could detect. I really thought I had the world's most polite friends, and that I somehow smelled like a homeless person. But sniff as I might, I could never identify the source of this unpleasant smell. I mentioned this to my doctors, who tried to not act like I was insane, and sent me off for brain scans. The good news is that once we treated this chronic sinus infection, the weird smells went away. I must have been smelling the insides of my infected sinuses. The bad news is that I had been experiencing the smell for over three years. It took a freaking brain scan to find something that was cured by a week of antibiotics. My sinuses are still a mess, but then, I'm allergic to everything.

Our lemon tree is finally winding down. I never did manage to make a properly textured batch of marmalade. Turns out, you can't scale up marmalade production. Or at least, I can't. What I made tastes fantastic, but runs right off the toast. I have delicious knuckles, most every morning.

The plum tree is just starting to ripen. We've had about a half a dozen plums, and we're about to be drowning in fruit. Our arborist seems to have been overbooked this spring, and we never did our scheduled pruning. At this point, I think we should just let all the fruit ripen and then figure out where to go next.

We're also going to have an insane persimmon harvest, based on the amount of fruit on the tree. We're in the middle of what's known as "June drop" where the tree aborts the fruit it cannot support. Little bitty persimmons are falling on the back yard, but even if we lose half the crop, we're going to have more than we know what to do with.

We've resumed scraping boards. This project came to a halt when I was dragging around with the sinus infection. I scrape, Robb primes, and slowly we're chipping away at the heap in the driveway. We still haven't figured out who is going to mix up the paint. We've found the perfect color, but it isn't available as an exterior paint. (And no, I'm not going to custom mix our house paint.)

What am I forgetting? What did I talk about earlier, that you may have thought, "I wonder how that turned out?"

From Caterpillar to Chrysalis

2011-06-05T20:43:00.001-07:00

...

Last summer, we noticed interesting caterpillars in our garden. We looked them up in our butterfly book, and concluded that they were Anise Swallowtails. We took a lot of photos of them, and observed their growth.

And then something came along and ate them.

So this year, I fashioned a protected habitat for the caterpillars. It was fascinating to watch them grow and change. Notice the spikes on this hungry fellow?

This was the final form that the caterpillars took. No more spikes.

Over the past few days, the caterpillars spun silken "climbing harnesses" and attached themselves to branches that we'd provided. They hung like this for a couple of days, and I naturally concluded that they were dead.

I was also sure that I had killed one, when I accidentally touched it. I just knew that I had crushed all of its internal organs. (There's a good reason that I never had kids.)

When we weren't looking (of course!) they shed their skins. The chrysalis sure doesn't look like much does it? Just a dead dry leaf. Nothing to eat here, Mister Predator. Please move along.

We understand that the butterflies might hatch out in as few as ten days. I hope that it happens when we're at home, so that we can see it.

If you want to read much more about raising these beautiful animals, click here.

Let's Give the Man Some Applause!!!

2011-06-04T20:08:00.001-07:00

...

What did Robb do last weekend?

Oh not, much...

He just clocked
FOUR THOUSAND MILES
of cycling.

That's the distance from Miami Florida to Anchorage Alaska, y'all.

(Not bad for a guy with paralyzed legs.)

Can I get a shout out to Robb, who is the most incredible guy I know?

I get no pleasure from saying, "I told you so."

2011-06-02T19:10:00.000-07:00

...

This morning, as I was leaving for work, I heard a terrible commotion of squawking jays. And sure enough, what I had been dreading had come to pass.

The feral cats had killed one of the fledgling scrub jays. The parents were freaking out, and swooping at the cat, who had the limp bird in his jaws. I was on the verge of tears.

Damn it.

I knew that this was going to happen.

I am a pathologically tender hearted person. I deplore any form of killing, haven't eaten meat in twenty five years, and am staunchly opposed to war. But I am not such an idealist to think that I can change nature. Even if I stuff the feral cats with kibble until they waddle, they'll still be ambush predators. And young birds will be inexperienced and naiive.

I feel like a murderer.

(Robb did manage to catch Cardigan and put a particularly jangly bell around his neck. Maybe that will slow his hunting down just a little bit. Maybe.)

Update: The very next morning, the cats killed another of the fledglings.

Further Update: Cardigan managed to get the collar wrapped around his shoulder and torso, and ripped off the bell. Sleeves won't let us get close enough to touch his neck. I've taken to hanging out in the back yard with a garden hose. I squirt the cats when they get too close to the jays.

There is still one baby left.

Hunters and Prey

2011-05-29T21:23:00.001-07:00

...

There's a pair of Western Scrub Jays, hunting in our yard. Earlier this spring, they had started construction on a nest in one of our trees, but we think they ended up nesting in the neighbors' yard. The two birds are currently hard at work, feeding a little family.

The jays are particularly keen on the bees in our backyard apiary. They grab up as many bees as they can hold in their crop, sometimes stopping to rub the stingers off on a branch or fence-top.

We can hear their babies shrieking with excitement when the parents approach the nest. (Interestingly, Robb has noticed that the resident mockingbird has learned this cry, and now starts his cycle of vocalizations with the sound of hungry baby jays.) Jays are very attentive parents, usually raising only one brood a season. The parents form long-term bonds, and the young may associate with their family for an entire year. Also, jays are smart, damn smart.

Western Scrub Jays are opportunistic omnivores. On pleasant weekends, Robb and I eat breakfast outside. The backyard cats come around asking their perpetual question, "Where is ... Egg and Cheese?"

The jays are interested as well. More than once, I've stepped away from my meal and heard the distinctive sounds of a hard beak tapping on a ceramic plate.

Much as I love seeing these birds in our yard, I also despair because I fear that they -- or their babies -- will fall prey to the feral cats. I can't move the cats indoors because they're not housebroken and also because Sleeves is terrified of being trapped indoors with the Scary Humans.

This is not an idle fear. Last spring, Cardigan caught a baby jay, which I managed to wrench out of his jaws.

Later that summer, the cats killed another jay, the bird whose trust I had earned, and who would eat from my hand. I still feel like a killer and still feel physically ill when I think that I had a part in this animal's death. If it hadn't been so comfortable in our yard, if it had been more wary, it might not have been killed by the cats.

While it's enchanting to see these birds up close, I really wish they would stay further away from our backyard cats.

I won't lie. I spend a lot of energy chasing the cats away from the birds.

The jays act totally unafraid. They yell at the cats and swoop at them like dive-bombers.

But bravery is one thing, and foolishness is another.

We no longer stock the bird feeders in our back yard after we saw Cardigan leap higher than we thought possible and catch a feeding bird. The cats are survivors and, despite the fact that we feed them quite well (Sleeves has a majestic belly), they regularly feast on birds and small mammals.

I'd like to be wrong about it, but I just don't think this story is going to end well.

A Hop, Skip and a Jump

2011-05-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

...

Back in the spring of 2010, we planted three twiggy rooty sticks that we ordered from a company called The Thyme Garden in Oregon.

This is how they looked in July of 2010. We were (and are) growing Sterling on the left, Kent Golding to the right of the garage door, and Nugget on the far right.

Unfortunately, we did not dry last year's harvest correctly, and weren't able to use them for beer-making. (We also screwed up drying our black beans, which just goes to show how humbling the act of gardening can be. While there are many miracles, there's also always more to learn.)

The hop vines (or more accurately "bines") are cut back to the ground every year, and re-grow in the spring. Here's how things looked two weeks ago.

As of this week, the Sterling has crested the roof, and Robb has installed horizontal support lines. The Nugget already has flowers on it. And the Kent Golding, which is always our slowest growing variety, is about six feet tall.

We are hopeful about our future beer crops.

Saving Water

2011-05-21T20:13:00.000-07:00

...

greywater system, complete with monorail cat
(we can't afford mag-lev, just yet)

The source of our water here in the Bay Area is the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

It can rain all it likes here, but if it doesn't snow in Lake Tahoe we're all in trouble. This past week's snowfall up there was likely the last of the season and brings the total depth of snow to 55 feet (!) This is about twice the average.

Water conservation has been a pretty big deal around here for a while now. In fact, we in the East Bay did such a good job of using less water, that the local water district needs to raise our rates because we failed to reach expected demand.

So, now with the rates rising, we are ironically thinking about water conservation even in the face of an almost unprecedented surplus.

When we moved in, we had ideas about greywater systems to divert waste water from the sinks and shower for use on the lawn and garden. These systems can be expensive and are difficult to engineer. We opted instead for an easy first step.

This simple system allows us to water our garden using water from our washing machine. We use a laundry soap formulated for this purpose.

We got this used oak wine barrel from somebody advertising on Craigslist. I built a base for it using ancient redwood found in the backyard. There's a submersible pump in there which gives us enough pressure to shoot water about 20 feet. If you wanted a machine for terrorizing cats, this would be a good start.

There are just a couple of problems with this set up. One is: our high efficiency washing machine is just too efficient. One load of wash is barely enough to water a couple of trees. The other issue is that the water, when it's coming out of the hose, smells an awful lot like French wine and dirty laundry. C'est la vie.

Got Unwanted Saplings?

2011-05-21T13:18:00.000-07:00

...

The only advantage that I can find in having a tenacious energy-sapping sinus infection is the vast amount of internet-trawling I've been doing.

My latest obsession, thanks to the fascinating blog about a gamekeeping family and their life on an estate in Dorset, England, is the building of hurdles.

These are traditional fences, woven out of hazel or willow. They were used to enclose animals on farms, and were often used in a modular fashion, meaning that they could be moved around as needed.

It's times like this that I wish I lived deep in the country (or in England) and had access to slender trees. I pride myself on being a creative thinker, but living as I do, in the middle of urban Oakland, I can't figure out where I'd get slim young saplings.

I've contacted the arborist who worked for us last spring, but I'm not particularly optimistic. He never returns my messages these days. I know that there's a willow farm in Pescadero, about an hour from us, but it is unclear if they sell raw materials, or just finished goods. (The $2,000 minimum order is a bit daunting, as well.)

So, I'm asking my blog readers if they might have a supply of pliable saplings that they might be willing to part with. Got some scrubby trees that need thinning? I'm your girl!