Winter greens

We grow food in our small greenhouse. Most years we just start seeds in the spring, but this fall I brought in parsley and rosemary, friends gave us a celery plant and a pot of New Zealand spinach, and Dave started a row of lettuce. Our greenhouse is just a wide spot in the stairs to the basement with only a tiny space for plants, so we can’t produce all our winter veggies or even many of the greens we need, but after a month, our lettuce is 2” high and filling out. It’s time to plant the next crop of greens and we’ll include arugula and perhaps kale. Next fall I’ll transplant some peppermint to a pot so we’ll have fresh mint for chimichurri sauce and for peppermint liquor during the winter.

After the amazing desserts of the holiday season, Dave and I have vowed to eat fewer cookies, cakes and pies, but still enjoy a bit of sweetness in the evening. Peppermint liquor on a small scoop of vanilla ice cream makes a delicious, delicately flavored light green sundae, especially in the depths of winter.

Peppermint Liquor
2 cups fresh mint leaves
2 cups vodka
2 cups water
1 cup sugar
5 drops green food coloring
Wash and dry mint leaves. Crush leaves and combine with vodka in a quart jar. Mix well and store covered in a cool, dark place for one month. Stir weekly.
To make a syrup, bring water to a boil. Stir in sugar and stir until sugar has dissolved. Cool.
Strain the mint leaves from the vodka and then stir in the sugar syrup. Add green food coloring. Store in decorative bottles. Serve on vanilla or chocolate ice cream for a delicious sundae.

Cranberry Orange Sundaes

Photo by James Barker

There are cranberry bogs in west central Minnesota. For several years, a friend brought us cranberry sauce made from berries he had picked himself in the swamps near his house. I don’t have the time in October and November to pull on my knee high boots and slog through the freezing swamps near our house, but I do love cranberries.

Two years ago, we planted four high bush cranberry bushes. They haven’t thrived, but they are still alive, finally outgrowing the weeds that threatened to engulf them. This year, we had ten berries on our bushes – a beginning.

I am eagerly awaiting next fall’s crop because I love cranberries. My favorite cranberry sauce requires a food processor or a meat grinder. I haven’t made it in a long time because and we lost our meat grinder in one of our moves years ago. Every Thanksgiving, I bemoan the loss, but I don’t think of it early enough to order a meat grinder on line and you just can’t find them in stores anymore. This fall, a friend brought a meat grinder converted to a table lamp into the shop where I am a partner. I thought aloud about buying the lamp and reconverting it to a meat grinder. My friend laughed and the next day she brought me a meat grinder.

So this year we had cranberry-orange sauce for Thanksgiving. It tastes bright and fresh with turkey. It’s tart and sweet flavors combine wondrously with plain or vanilla yogurt. But the really magical combination is cranberry-orange sundaes where the sauce complements the cold sweet of vanilla ice cream. Frozen cranberries in the freezer and a meat grinder in my cupboard mean that we can cranberry sundaes (either with yogurt or vanilla ice cream) any month of the year. Perhaps we should plant a few more high bush cranberries next year.

Cranberry – Orange Sundae
1 package fresh cranberries
1 – 2 oranges
¾ cup sugar

Grind the cranberries and oranges (peel included) in a meat grinder or food processor. Mix in the sugar. Refrigerate. This sauce tastes better the next day.
Serve on yogurt or vanilla ice cream.

The soul of my computer

When we got back from our last trip, my computer was dead. It wasn’t a catastrophe because I had backed up everything on my external hard drive so that I’d have access to all of my writing and photos in St Louis.

Dave took the tower down to our computer repair shop and when it was done, I brought it home and connected all the wires. The screen came up with all the appropriate icons and programs, but the soul of my computer was gone. My daughter’s laughing faces didn’t greet me from the desktop. Gmail didn’t know who I was. Ten years of manuscripts were missing. Two and a half years of photos of my grandsons were gone. All the files were empty.

Dave’s laptop and my computer use the same operating system and are pretty much the same in many ways. But my computer always opened photos with Microsoft Picture Manager and we worked well together. Dave’s computer favored Serif and I couldn’t use it at all. The book I’m writing was only three clicks away in my old computer. I need ten double clicks to find it on my external hard drive. This computer tower hunkered beneath my desk is not my computer!

I know that I can reload everything from my external hard drive back onto my desktop, but I won’t. The external drive will become old storage like the 3 ½” floppies I have in a fire proof safe under my desk – archived, but not easily accessible. Ten double clicks is too cumbersome for files I use daily or weekly. Gradually, I’ll even forget what files are on my external hard drive.

Gradually, my computer will develop a soul again, but it won’t be the same computer and it won’t have the same soul. I won’t accidentally run across the letter from the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer accepting my article on natural dyes. I won’t glimpse Newton and the cat BC playing when Newton was a puppy or a single thistle blossom glowing in the late afternoon sun.

I am a different person than I was last year or five years ago, and so, my computer will have a new soul, and by extension, become a new computer. Today, I will begin by finding a new photo of my daughters to smile out at me from my desk top.

Late harvest

Mullein in late summer






















The leaves are gone from the trees, only the brussel sprouts remain in the garden, cold nights freeze the ponds. Fall is well settled and winter is creeping closer. This morning I picked fresh green mullein in our pastures. The sheep don’t particularly like the fuzzy oval leaves, but I love them – for dyeing.

Common Mullein, Verbascum thapsus, is my favorite dye plant. With copper sulfate as a mordant, I can produce a beautiful mossy green fiber from a handful of leaves and a skein of my favorite yarn. To dye with mullein, the wool must first be mordanted. A mordant is a metal salt that helps the dye color attach to the wool fiber. Without a mordant, most natural dyes yield beige.

I simmer two pounds of fresh leaves in a big dye pot for thirty minutes (you can also use dried leaves). Then I strain out the leaves and add copper sulfate to the dye pot. I stir until the blue crystals are completely dissolved and then submerge 2 pounds of freshly washed wool. I then simmer the wool for thirty minutes, turning the mass occasionally to expose all the wool fibers to the mordant and to the dye liquor. For more information on dyeing with natural dyes, see From Sheep to Shawl: Stories and Patterns for Fiber Lovers.

There is something deeply pleasing about dyeing wool our sheep have produced with a plant that grows naturally on our land. This morning as I walked the fields in search of mullein, I appreciated the scent of the manure Dave spread on the fields yesterday, the cool autumnal breeze on my face, and the sight of our sheep lying in the sunshine, the colors of their patched coats blending into the brown grasses.

I haven’t stepped back in time – I’m wearing a polar fleece jacket and carrying the mullein in a plastic bag, but I did leave my cell phone in the house and I’m not rushing off in the car. Today I am fully at home on the farm, appreciating and using one of the last green plants we harvest in the fall.

The taste of honey

We extracted honey this weekend. As the little hexagonal cells that the bees had filled over the summer emptied, we filled jars with the beautiful golden sweetener to use over the winter. The house was fragrant with the aroma of honey, the floor was sticky with drips and we sated our palates with the incredible taste.

This year we extracted honey from hives in three different locations. Steve and Kanita brought boxes from their hives in the Twin Cities, Paul and Jenny’s came from East Silent Lake and ours from the farm. Each honey had a unique taste. Steve’s was made in a forest, the bees visiting the trees, wild flowers and local farm market gardens to create a honey with a floral taste. Paul and Jenny’s bees also lived at the edge of a woods with some grain fields in the distance. Their honey was similar to Steve and Kanita’s, obviously from a combination of wildflowers. Our hives sit at the edge of the home woods, overlooking a big wetland, beside an alfalfa field. Every year, our honey has a wonderful minty flavor. Our guess is that the bees spend a lot of time at the Motherwort blossoms. Motherwort is a part of the mint family and blooms early and long in the woods, so it could give a minty flavor. But who knows what the bees find for nectar the rest of the time. Alfalfa is supposed to give a light, subtle, spicey flavor with a mild floral aroma. Basswood blossoms yield a light honey with a strong biting flavor and a woody scent. I know our bees find both blossoms, but I don’t recognize the flavor notes in our honey.

Whatever the cause, our local honeys have spoiled our families for store bought honey. That pasteurized spread which is a blend of honeys from many different beekeepers, is sweet, but has no special flavor. Varietal honeys on the other hand, can range from sweet to sour, citrusy to minty, soft to bold. No matter the source, whether we spread it on toast, stir it into chai, or drizzle it over vanilla ice cream, our honey is a treat.

Honey sundaes can be simple, just a light coating of honey thickening on vanilla ice cream, or complex, a light coating of honey thickening on bananas sliced over vanilla ice cream. Either is an incredible way to experience the taste of honey.

Stealing honey from the bees

photo by Lehigh Valley Parenting


















Dave and I stole the last of the honey from our bees yesterday. It went well. Some years it’s a more harrowing experience. Like the year Dave had a tiny hole in his pants…

It’s hard to think rationally when you have a bee in your pants. Is it better to remove the bee immediately or to wait until you’re away from the rest of the bees before you drop your pants? Dave compromised by running half way up the path from the hives to the house before he dropped his pants. Bad decision. You can’t run fast with your pants around your knees. The bees have quite a range.

I made an even worse decision while looking for the queen in my dad’s hive. The bees were angry at my intrusion and flew around me, crawling across my bee suit, running into my bee veil. Each collision produced a miniscule thud. I tensed a little more at each thud. On one of those collisions, a bee flew through a small opening at the bottom of my veil. When it flew past my face – on the inside of my veil – I panicked and ripped the veil off to let the bee out. Net result? Instead of one bee inside my veil, I had dozens tangled in my hair. I ran screaming for the lake and stuck my head under water. My mother patiently squished every entangled bee with her bare fingers and then combed them out of my hair. Neither of us was stung.

Unlike wasps, bees don’t sting for fun or as a hobby. Bees die after stinging, so only sting in defense of their hive. Now, when we work on the hives, I try to appear relaxed and non-threatening so that the bees don’t feel the need to sting.

Yesterday, everything worked well. Dave took the lid off the hive and laid it aside. Using a crowbar like hive tool, he separated the frames from each other and lifted them out of the hive individually. He brushed the bees off each frame and handed them to me. I admired the regular array of hexagonal cells capped in golden bees wax, set them into a traveling box and covered it to keep the bees from returning to their honey. The entire process took only a short time and no bees threatened us. Obviously we had been able to persuade both ourselves and the bees that all was well and we weren’t a threat to their hives.

Then we stole their honey.

We were just curling up for a nice read on a rainy evening last summer when the tornado siren cut through the rush of the wind in the trees. We grabbed Oolong the cat, Newton the dog, Hillis’ pet mice Stormageddon Dark Lord of All and Jareth, our knitting, our computers and our books and tramped down the basement stairs. Shortly after we’d settled, made sure that the mice were out of reach of the cat and the cat was out of reach of the dog, the lights flicked off and the howl of the wind generator was silenced.

Our basement has improved since the years it was a pit with random rubble walls (one including a mysterious thigh bone) and a dirt floor, but it is still windowless. Our senses registered only the floor under our seats, the wall at our backs, and the roar of wind and rain. It was eerie. Dave and Hillis booted up their computers, but without electricity, our wireless router was down. We used the light of the computers to see our knitting.

Hillis found the weather report on her Iphone, a confirmation of what we already knew, but reassuring all the same - some contact with the outside world. No all clear siren sounded, but after about an hour, Dave ran out of patience and went outside to adjust the downspouts and redirect water from the basement floor. We ventured upstairs, lit a dozen candles and continued reading on a rainy evening.

When the electricity came back on at 6 A.M., we discovered the narrow path of the wind through our woods. Tree after tree fallen, like a trail of dominoes, before the chicken coop, after the chicken coop and through the orchard. This years apples were the only real casualties on our farm. Some trees lost many apples; some trees held their apples, but broke under the force of the wind.

We harvested the last surviving apple from a tree that didn’t survive the wind this afternoon and stored enough for many caramel apple sundays.


Caramel Apple Sundays
1 tart apple per person
Caramel sauce (either store bought or from scratch. I've included my favorite recipe below)

Chop one apple into each bowl. Drizzle caramel sauce over it and enjoy.
If you need ice cream for the "sunday" part of this dish, slip a scoop under the chopped apples.

Caramel Sauce
1/4 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup cream
1 t vanilla

Bring butter, sugar and cream to a boil. Add vanilla, remove from heat and beat until smooth. Serve warm or cold. This sauce is thicker when cooled. Refrigerate left overs.