December in the Farmhouse

Here, Willow, Ander and I have dressed up in preparation to get some food:  in style!  With warpaint!

We did a fair bit of dumpster diving in December.  A grocery store we know on the west side of the city has a great set-up for it.  Since Vancouver has a composting collection, the grocery store has three large trash bins labeled for organics that are used only by the produce department--no plastics in there, and no meat, dairy, or other things that you'd worry about spoilage.  The majority of the things in the bin are discarded lettuce leaves, I believe because they strip the outer leaves off the lettuce before displaying it so that it looks nice.  More importantly, it cushions everything so that the slightly brown bananas, bruised eggplants and who-knows-why-they-threw-it-away everything else is just hanging out waiting for you to dig down to it.

I don't have a picture of "soup time", but the Farmhouse has a soup clock with the names of each resident taped to it.  When it gets to your name, it's your job to fill the crockpot with water and vegetables until it's soup.  It's quick, healthy, easy, and a great way to use up vegetables that need using.

I mentioned our wine-making before.  Our apple-pear-grape-mango wine is fermenting away in its carboy.  These pictures are from the day that Sara and I moved it from the primary fermentation chamber (a foodsafe 5-gallon bucket) to the glass carboy (a giant 5-gallon glass jug).

Here, Sara dresses up science-tastically to pour our first taste of the wine.  The wine isn't done, so our tastes were extra-sweet and low in alcohol.  The yeast has to eat the rest of the sugar to make the rest of the alcohol.

I'm using a hydrometer here.  The hydrometer measures the specific gravity (the thickness or viscosity) of a liquid by showing how high it floats.  Think about it; something would float much higher in a bowl of syrup than a bowl of water.  So it measures the sugar content.  By subtracting the current sugar content from the original sugar content before fermentation, you can figure out how much sugar the yeast has consumed and therefore how much alcohol is in the wine.  During our test, I guessed the alcohol content to be about 8%.  Our goal is around 15% at the end of another few weeks of fermentation.

So the wine wasn't ready for Christmas, but...

Turkey!  Delicious turkey for the omnivores!  You can also see our roommates Patrick (his prescription sunglasses are the only glasses he has right now) and Willow.  Willow, who I last mentioned as someone that no-one had met yet, is fabulous and, due to her obsessive dish-washing, makes a perfect roommate.

We had Christmas dinner "Quebec-style," according to Sara, which meant that we had dinner and presents on the evening of December 24th, which was also my 25th birthday.  Ander was visiting family for Christmas, but Sara's girlfriend Razan spent her holiday break with us, so we still had a full house, but...

At the end of December, Willow, Tomko and I moved out of the Farmhouse.  Willow moved back with her family to Winnipeg, and Tomko and I are staying in Olympia, Washington, making plans of where to go next.

Good luck, Farmhouse!  I hope you find new and amazing roommates!  I hope spring finds your garden better than ever, and the city stays out of your gardening-business.  Happy 2011.

First snows at the Farmhouse

Ander and I went on a day-trip to Olympia on Friday, and when we returned the next day we were driving past Seattle and on towards the Canadian border when we saw that the trees on the side of the curvy road looked weirdly lit. Then we realized that they were covered in snow.

When we got back to the Farmhouse, the entire garden was covered over with snow. It's still covered with snow. Actually, it is currently dumping even more snow on it from the sky.

Garden status update: The kale, chinese greens, and other leafy greens everywhere are sadly frozen solid. The broccoli and brussel sprouts we have a little more hope for unthawing, and if not we'll just eat them. The grains that we hadn't finished harvesting yet (amaranth and flax) are ruined, I assume. Two beds had already gotten sheet-mulched, but the rest were still going so well that we didn't want to pull everything up. I don't know a lot about sheet-mulching yet, but I bet we're just going to mulch over everything once the snow melts.

I sure hope the snow melts. It can't snow straight from now until March, can it?

Our newest roommate Willow moved in on Monday, and we now have a full house.

The greenhouse generally stays above freezing. There's some kale babies in there right now, I know, and a basil plant that we rescued before the snow. We'll be trying to sprout some winter peas, cabbage, and other hardy plants soon enough. Ander and I have already filled the trays with some good dirt, and now we just have to find a warmer place for the trays to sit for germination. (The greenhouse is warmer than the outside, but not that warm.) Maybe we will do this soon, because it'll get the seedling project out of the processing kitchen.

The Farmhouse has two kitchens. They're both pretty standard (fridge, oven, stove, countertops, sink), but the upstairs one is more frequently used. The downstairs kitchen was covered in junk because the basement flooded and Sara's furniture was still in the kitchen until her room was re-carpeted. Well, happy day, that was yesterday, and now I think I will spend today getting that kitchen into better shape.

Whyyy, you may ask! Well, the downstairs kitchen is where we can process our harvests and other big projects. Our next big project, which we have just finished gathering equipment for, is wine-making from fruit. (Grapes, pears, apples... you could make Apple-Jalapeño Wine, if you were so inclined.)

Tonight we will obtain enough fruit to get started on the wine. It was supposed to be today, but yesterday was a bust. That's not true: I did get a wine corker from a very nice pair of Swiss men who gave me recommendations about how to distill wine without a still and told me stories about their many landlords. And I drove two composters over to Ander's cafe. But still, we need more fruit.

Also planned for tomorrow, the pickling of green beans and perhaps beets. Mmmm, pickled beets.

Helsing Junction

When we arrived at Olympia, Davi explained that she was planning to spend the weekend at a farm nearby called Helsing Junction, which was having an organic music festival fundraiser something something, and that we could get free admission if we spent at least 4 hours volunteering.

She had a meeting on Friday that went a little long, and by the time she got home I had pretty much packed everything we needed into the car, and off we went! We got only a little lost and had to call her brother Brian for re-direction. (The street signs were turned, we discovered.) We parked Byzantium in a field and went up to where all the people were.

We went straight to the kitchen and were put to work. I was shanghaied into making stir-fry. Initially, I was told to fry tempeh, which I do not know how to do. (Tempeh, for those of you who don't hang out with vegans, is some sort of fermented soybean product.) I was recommended by various other people in the kitchen that "it's like cooking bacon except it doesn't make its own grease" and "you can't screw it up" and "don't burn it." Then someone responsible came by and said, "How about you just make the stir-fry and it'll cook in there."

The stir-fry involved two coolers full of pre-prepped vegetables and stuff, including: minced garlic, chopped onions, yellow squash rounds, green squash quarters, marinated tempeh, yellow and orange sliced carrots, broccoli, bok choy, chard, shiitake mushrooms, olive oil, soy sauce, and a collection of spices. There was a frying pan and a large wok, a metal spatula, a pink plastic spatula, and two propane ranges. There was usually one other person with me, which is good because I spent about two hours making the same thing over and over, often times forgetting about the mushrooms or the tempeh or other ingredients. I left the plastic spatula leaning against the frying pan, then picked it up and burnt the hell out of my finger by getting pink plastic stuck all over it.

I spent most of the weekend in the kitchen. I liked the people and the endless supply of delicious tiny yellow tomatoes. The kitchen was very close to the stage, and so you could always hear the music that was going on.

If I left the kitchen and went to the music, the best part of the music was the giant stack of straw bales from which one could watch the stage. It was a roughly pyramid-like structure, with nooks and crannies that became less and less defined as the weekend went on and people kept jumping around on it.

At one point, I slept on the straw pile inside a sleeping bag. I got two people to make nuclear paper cranes and met a boy who made an amazing orgami eagle in like fifteen minutes. There was a backrub circle around the campfire on Saturday night. I got to wear my blue and yellow hair all weekend, and I got a Helsing Junction Farm t-shirt for helpfulness. Davi picked the same shirt color, so we matched.

We were some of the last people out of the farm on Sunday. We did a lot of dishes and packed things up and then realized that we hadn't packed up our tent and camp stuff yet, so by the time we got back to the Nuthouse it was already six o'clock on Sunday night. Davi ran off for dance class with seemingly infinite energy; I decided to laze around the house. I hung out with Brian, who I don't really know--I met him once during Davi's 21st birthday party--but who is a thoroughly enjoyable human person.

Salt Lake City to Olympia

The drive seems like a blur that includes about 16 hours and 900 miles.


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Shortly after getting out of the SLC metropolitan area, we passed into the state of Idaho.

Neither Tomko nor I had a very good idea of what the upper, leafy part of the potato plant looks like. At the beginning of Idaho, we saw a lot of corn and occasional hay, but nothing else: Particularly, we expected to see fields and fields of unidentified crops, which we could quickly assume to be potatoes.

By observation, Tomko and I determined that potatoes have above-ground parts that are kind of like soybeans in height and greenitude. We have not yet checked with the internet to verify this one way or another.

We were ahead of schedule--we were going to Portland and then leaving for Olympia at 2am--so we were somewhat leisurely about our drive. We decided to stop in Boise, since who doesn't want to be able to say that they went to Boise? Also, it was about 4pm and I figured that if we wanted to hang out at a public library, then we better do it sooner than later (before all libraries close).

There are many reasons that you will find homeless punk kids hanging out around a library. We ran into several when be pulled into the library, asking Tomko for cigarettes. Libraries are great places because they have: climate-control, electrical outlets, computers and internet access, potable water and sanitary facilities, and because you don't need to justify being at a library. You can hang out and that's just what you're supposed to be doing. If you have no money but want to hang around a nice place for a while, libraries are where it is at.

After we chatted with the punk kids for a while, we went inside. The first thing I remembered to do was to call VW parts places to see if they had headlights that would fit my car. The first place said yes. $62 each, including bulbs and orange plastic bits and so on. Great. Fine.

I am shocked that I managed to get from Baltimore to Boise without front turn signals, without being pulled over a single time.

We went to the place and got the new turn signals. I got someone to come outside with me to see if I was attaching them correctly, and as I was putting in the driver's-side one (the one that simply disappeared and I never got to see the inside workings of), I realized exactly where the hook on the spring was supposed to go. I made sure everything else was lined up and the light was plugged in, then yanked the spring into place. Horray!

The passenger's side one (the one that fell out because I had not placed the spring correctly) was a lot harder and took a lot more time, because unlike the driver's side, this had pieces of the engine blocking most access to the place where you wanted to put the spring. After I repeatedly bruised the top of my hand and knuckles shoving against gravity and springs, and then using miscellaneous silverware from the car as levers, Tomko managed to place the spring onto a piece of metal. It was not the correct piece of metal, but this isn't relevant. I yanked on it and couldn't get it loose, proclaimed Byzantium healed, and we got on our way.

Boise has adoooorable rush-hour traffic wherein we were stationary for about thirty seconds.

Oh, also we got a sleeping bag in Boise. Apparently, my mother reports to me, there were like three sleeping bags in the garage that I could have taken from Maryland but no one checked the garage to find this out.

On and on we drove. We hit Portland around 1am, and then hung out at a gay bar waiting for our friend Davi to get off work an hour later. Then he jumped into our car and directed us to his house in Olympia, Washington, where we quickly fell asleep.