Lou Murray's Green World

August 11. 2022

Good grief, has it really been three years since my last blog post? Yep. Pandemic, knee injury, recovery. While I was laid up, I watched a lot of a British TV series about archaeology called Time Team. And that got me interested in medieval life, and foods eaten during that time period. As a result, I learned how to make bannock bread like they had in Scotland back in the day. It is surprisingly easy and very delicious! (Easier than figuring out how to use this changed WordPress format.)

Picture yourself back in Scotland in medieval times Viking raiders are on the horizon and you need to flee to the hills with your sheep. You don’t have time to make a yeast bread for the journey, so you make a quick bannock bread.

The only difficulty I had was finding oat flour. I didn’t see any in the local grocery stores, so I made my own by grinding rolled oats in a blender. Easy, peasy. In an attempt to emulate wheat flour from medieval times. I used a blend of white whole wheat flour and all purpose flour. The former is made from white wheat. It is a bit more delicate than regular whole wheat flour. Most wheat flours are made from red wheat. I use Bob’s Red Mill and/or King Arthur flours.

Other recipes call for buttermilk, but I don’t keep that in my kitchen. I make my own from half and half, 2% butterfat milk, and lime juice. We grow our own limes and always have frozen lime juice in the freezer. I squeeze and freeze the juice in ice cube trays when the limes are ripe, and we always have some around.

You will need something to score the bread before it cooks. I used this nifty bread dough cutter. Just be careful not to cut the bread all the way through.

I used a ceramic bowl and wooden spoon to mix the dough, and that felt very authentic.

The baking soda is going to need an acid to make the dough rise. Originally, people used buttermilk. I never have any of that, so I make my own. I used 1/4 C half and half, 1/2 C 2% butterfat milk, and 4 tsp of lime juice. We have a lime tree and there is always frozen lime juice here. I squeeze the lime and freeze the juice in ice cube trays, then store the cubes in a ZipLoc bag. You can also use lemon juice if you have that. Or you can milk the cow and make your own buttermilk, however that is done, if you think you have time. Remember, the Vikings are coming!

SCOTTISH BANNOCK BREAD

1.5 C oat flour made from rolled oats

1/2 C white whole wheat flour

1/2 C all purpose wheat flour

1 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

1/4 C half and half

1/2 C 2% butterfat milk

4 tsp lime or lemon juicce

2 T honey

Mix the half and half, milk, and lime juice together and let sit for 15 minutes, then mix in the honey. Mix the dry ingredients together, Add the milk mixture with honey to the dry ingredients and stir until mixed. Turn out onto a floured board and pat into a circle that is about 7 inches across. Score with whatever tool you have available. Preheat a 12″ cast iron skillet on the stovetop. Add the bannock and cook for about 20 minutes on one side over medium heat. Flip carefully and cook for about 15 minutes on the other side. Invert onto a cutting board. Cut into four pieces. Cut each wedge in half and slather with butter and orange marmalade to serve.

First photo is the flipped bannock, showing the cooked bottom.

I had a dickens of a time trying to figure out this changed WordPress format. I didn’t get the photos put where I wanted them, but I think the text is at last coherent. This really is an easy recipe, even easier than making scones. Let me know how your bannock came out. It is tasty and quite filling.

I have been harvesting all year, at least a little bit, but I have not been playing Harvest Monday. That is where blogging gardeners post photos of their harvests, and usually list the poundage as well. I have found that I don’t like photographing my harvests nearly as much as my growing plants. My second favorite things to photograph after plants in the garden are the meals I made with my harvests. Photographing harvests comes last, but I managed to snap a few pics.

I turned about two dozen tomatoes into spaghetti sauce last night. There was enough for dinner for the two of us last night and tonight, plus two freezer bags of sauce for later.

Harvests this past week included:

Apple (Fuji) 4 oz

Basil 1 oz

Garlic 2 oz

Green beans 1 lb 3 oz

Green onion 2 oz

Lettuce 4 oz

Nectarines 1 lb

Summer squash (Lebanese) 1 lb 1 oz

Tomatoes 6 lbs 14 oz

and 5 eggs

I think I finally remembered how to use widgets in WordPress, and have added in my total harvests for 2019 as of July 31. It isn’t overwhelming, just 81 lbs of fruit and 37 lbs of vegetables. August and September bring harvests of my “heavy” vegetables such as tomatoes, summer squash, winter squash, and cucumbers, so those harvest numbers should go up. My goal is 200 lbs of produce. We shall see if I get there.

I am expecting a nice harvest of winter squash one of these days.

And because eating the produce is really the whole idea of growing it, here are some recent meals.

Hope you enjoyed this brief review of my week’s harvest and meals at Harvest Monday.

Every year I hope for a great garden. I tell myself each January that THIS year I’m going to grow my best garden ever. Well, this year’s garden is certainly a contender. I have three 3′ x 6′ raised beds in the backyard, a variety of containers in the driveway (yes, I garden in my driveway; it’s sunny there.), and the Garden of Perpetual Responsibility, which always needs weeding. I’ll get to them later. First, check out the Garden of Infinite Neglect shown below, a 3′ x 12′ raised bed in the front yard next to the sidewalk.

This bed is a riot of winter squash, Crimson Sweet watermelon, Japanese cucumbers, Soleil wax beans, and Arikara Yellow Indian Woman beans. There are some zinnias and marigolds buried somewhere under those huge squash leaves.

I am most excited about the two varieties of winter squash in this bed because, well, I am just plain silly about squash. I am growing Mayo Blushers and Guatemalan Blues in this bed. I have grown the Mayo Blushers before. The seeds are from Native Seed Search, a non-profit that collects native-grown seeds from throughout the American Southwest and Mexico. Mayo Blushers make small to medium-sized winter squash that turn a pinkish color when they are ripe. The first TINY female flower bud showed up on those plants today.

But what really has me intrigued are the Guatemalan Blues. I got my seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, but a number of vendors carry them, including Fedco. I have four plants growing in the foreground in the above photo. I have never grown them before, so I am most curious what they will look and taste like. I am expecting something that looks like a long banana squash, only blue. They are supposed to grow to 15-20 inches long and get up to 10 lbs, with moist yellow-orange sweet flesh.

My garden provides me with so much entertainment. But I am easily amused.

I am going to bring this post to an end because I am still getting used to my beautiful new iMac, and WordPress has changed since I last created a blog post. I am basically stumbling around here.

BTW, about my long absence from my blog… I finished radiation for cancer in May, 2018, and the treatment utterly wiped me out for a year. In May this year, my energy bounced back and I began planting my summer garden. I was late getting it into the ground, but by golly, I did it. My priority was to garden first, blog later. I will post about the back veggie beds and my hens some other time. Hope your garden is growing well this year.

Just in the time that I have been alive, there have been major changes in how I obtain my food. Add in the experiences of my parents and grandparents’ generations, and we see profound changes.

My mother was born in 1911 in the tiny town of Spencer, Indiana. Her father ran the livery stable in town, later selling those new-fangled automobiles. They lived a couple of blocks from the town square, and a few houses from the country. My grandfather kept a milk cow in a nearby pasture and milked it twice a day for the family milk supply. For the rest of their food, my maternal grandmother simply phoned in her grocery order, and a delivery boy brought it on his bicycle.

My mother told me that fishermen sold their daily catch from the White River. Market fishermen are pretty much a thing of the past. And market hunters–popular in the 1800s and into the early 1900s–are definitely a thing of the past. I’m sure my grandparents in southern Indiana had access to fresh passenger pigeons in their day, as well as ducks, geese, and venison. Many folks kept backyard chickens and rabbits for food. My Dad hunted rabbits his whole life, and fished as well. If he found a snapping turtle, we ate that. We did not get all of our food from the store.

The offerings of market hunters.

My paternal grandparents lived in the city of Indianapolis, but they always had a garden. They also got a lot of their food from my grandfather’s sister’s farm in Tipton, Indiana. We did too. As a teen in the 1950s, I remember freshly killed stewing hens and big bags of lettuce, green beans, tomatoes and corn on the cob that came from the farm. But most of our food came from the grocery store.

This isn’t Harry Grasshof’s store, but this is what it looked like. I don’t remember his store ever being this well stocked though.

When I was 7 years old, my mother would send me to the store for the odd item that she had forgotten, like an extra carton of milk or loaf of bread. The tiny store was a couple of blocks from our house. Harry Grasshof, an immigrant from Germany, ran the market. I gave Harry my list, and he got whatever I needed and bagged it for me to carry home. The store had only two aisles, with a very limited selection of goods. Potatoes, onions, apples, oranges, grapes, bananas, lettuce, green beans, carrots and such were available, but not all things were there in all seasons. The produce was local and in season. In the winter, we relied on canned vegetables and long keepers such as potatoes and cabbages.

The meat case had cuts that Harry had butchered himself, and the edges of the meat were dried. There were flies in the case in the summer. There were a few boxes of Tide, All, Oxydol, Duz, Ajax and other cleaning products on the shelves, plus canned fruits and vegetables. We ate canned green beans, corn, asparagus and beets. The only baked goods I remember were loaves of Wonderbread.

This isn’t our local A&P, but it looked like this. Such a selection!

Then the first supermarket, an A&P, opened up across the street from Harry Grasshof. That was probably about 1953. I was dazzled by the big, bright aisles with all of their selection. Meat was packaged. No more flies. Produce aisles were packed with beautiful, fresh fruits and vegetables. They had treasures like Twinkies, Hostess Cupcakes, and Little Debbies. One got a cart and helped one’s self to whatever one needed — or was induced to buy on impluse. No more personalized service from a grocer who helped customers one at a time.

People grew Victory Gardens during World War II, but when the soldiers came home, home gardening seemed to die out. Grocery stores carried more and more items and they came from farther and farther away. Then came the hippie movement, a back-to-basics mindset that included growing one’s own food. Jim Crockett started Crockett’s Victory Garden on PBS out of Boston. I lived on a 7-acre farm in Higganum, CT in 1976, following advice from Jim Crockett. My husband and I raised lambs and grew our first garden together. I hadn’t had a garden since I was an ag major at Purdue University in 1963, but I have been gardening pretty much ever since.

Today we have big modern grocery stores all over the place with an unbelievable selection of goods from near and far. Fresh produce of all types is available year round. If the US isn’t harvesting strawberries and blueberries, the stores carry them from farms in Australia or Chile. People forget that produce has seasons. You just go to the store and it is there. But that incredible availability comes at a cost. Not just to your pocketbook, but to the environment. Food travels an average 1500 miles to get to your table, and that adds a LOT of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from the trucks, planes and ships that bring your food to you from the four corners of the world. Even local food travels. We live in Orange County, CA. Our carrots are grown in the Imperial Valley in San Diego County. But before they get to us, trucks haul those carrots up to Bakersfield for washing and packaging. The they come back to Los Angeles, and then Orange County.

People concerned about such things as saving civilization from the ravages of global climate change are paying more attention to where their food comes from. Many are growing their own. Others are patronizing farmers markets. Every little bit helps.

I recommend reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable and Miracle,” as well as Michael Rhulman’s book, “Grocery,” which is a brief history of America’s grocery stores in the 1900s. See if you don’t think differently about food after that.

I have been neglecting my blog. I finished radiation for breast cancer in early May and have been recovering ever since. My mammogram in August showed that I am still clear of cancer, so all should be smooth sailing from here on out.

I was able to plant and maintain my garden this summer, but blogging was still beyond my energy level. I have now cleared the mess around my computer, taken some photos of the yard, and processed the photos. Am I back to blogging about my tiny farmlet in the city? Time will tell.

We have had some changes in the chicken yard. Someone dumped three chickens in a neighboring park a few weeks ago. All three had health issues, so they appear to be culls. Someone adopted the hen and rooster with bumble foot, a staph infection. I got the hen with a prolapsed vent. The lady who rescued her fixed the problem with the protruding cloaca, and our new girl, Cherry, even laid a few eggs for us before going into autumn molt. She is a sweet girl, probably about a year old, and she lets us pet her. We think she is a Rhode Island Red, but her personality is shy and retiring, not the super active typical Rhodie. The granddaughter of the lady who rescued her named her Cherry Jam. We shortened it to Cherry. Here she is. Whoever had her before us clipped her beak, a horrible practice on factory farms.

We had an issue with our hens this past weekend. Our oldest hen (who I think we named Little Red Hen, even though she isn’t red) is about 11 years old now and enjoying her retirement on my no-kill pseudo-farm. She got into an argument with Dino-peep, our bad-tempered Barred Rock, and Dino-peep pecked her eye pretty badly. Here is her good eye. See how long her beak has gotten? She got it stuck in the hardware cloth and that is when Dino-peep attacked.

Her left eye was a bloody mess. Looked like hamburger. I had my husband hold her while I applied antibiotic ointment with a Q-tip. This is what the other side looks like three days later. The swelling has gone down and there is no sign of infection, but I’m not even sure that she has an eye left in the socket, much less if she can see with it.

We still have two out of five hens laying, but it is molting season and we expect egg production to stop soon. That is why I freeze the abundance of eggs in the spring. I break open the eggs, beat them slightly with a pinch of salt and put four eggs per baggie into the freezer. They are good for baking, scrambled eggs and omelets in the winter.

The nasty Dino-peep is on the left, and the nice Princess Aurora on the right. Based on how red their combs are, I suspect that they are the ones still laying.

The other “animals” on our farm are Monarch butterfly caterpillars and garden spiders. I don’t have any photos of our caterpillar crop from this summer, but I did snap some pics of one of our huge garden spiders. This gal builds her web on our deck.

I did manage to grow a garden this summer, but the rats and squirrels got a lot of it. I have never had bigger or more lush Blue Lake pole bean vines. They were loaded with flowers. Then the rats ate every one of the baby beans plus the flowers! I got exactly zero green beans from my row of beautiful pole beans. I found three beans that escaped the rats, and am saving them for seeds for next summer’s garden.

I have a similar tale of woe from my tomatoes. Eight tomato plants, zero tomatoes to harvest. Fruit set was paltry and the rats got the few that did set.  My one summer garden success is this lovely butternut squash. I think it may weigh several pounds.

I got a nice harvest of summer squash from my fabric Gro-pots in the driveway, but have no photos. Those are now kaput for the year.

So what about my orchard? The rats and/or squirrels got every single apple. I got ZERO.  Same with my Katy apricot, except it was birds that ate the crop. Not sure who ate the two Snow Queen nectarines, but it wasn’t us.

I have other fruits coming along. There are about two dozen avocados on the tree. I may start picking them soon. They don’t ripen until picked. Then it takes about five-eight days, and then, uh oh, they are overripe.

We have been harvesting limes off and on. Here is an unripe one. The Bearrs limes turn yellow and fall from the tree when they are ripe.

The lime tree is also flowering, so I am expecting an extended harvest from it.

My Meyer lemon was looking pretty bad last winter, but it has bounced back with some fertilizer and more regular watering. I have two dozen nice lemons already nearly full sized.

Our citrus crops are pretty immune to the critters, except for the oranges. Once they turn orange, it is a race to see who gets them, me or the critters. Our semi-dwarf Navel orange is loaded with fruit this year. I am expecting a nice harvest this winter, starting about January, God willing and the rats don’t get them. There are five oranges in this one pic.

Right now, my biggest joy is my Fuyu Persimmon tree. It was finally big enough to set fruit this spring. We have five lovely persimmons that should be ready in about 3 weeks. I picked one today Just to make sure I get one of them.

For some reason, my crazy blackberry vine set fruit late. We may or may not get any of these berries. Birds like them too.

Part of my joy in gardening is anticipating what might produce food next. Here are my artichokes. They won’t produce flower buds (i.e., the artichokes) until spring, but I enjoy watching the plants grow.

The artichokes and persimmon tree are in my Garden of Perpetual Responsibility. That is also my pollinator garden that I plant for bees and butterflies. I still have a few straggling flowers left over from my summer garden in this bed. Here is a marigold and a zinnia.

One of these days, I might get around to adding up my year’s harvests to date to see how many pounds of produce we got. I log the harvests from my calendar into an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of what I actually harvested. No way to tell how much the rats got, but it was a LOT this year.

But it is also time to clean up the garden beds and plant my fall/winter garden. No rest for a gardener in coastal southern California. Something is always growing. And that is a good thing.

Sorry for the long absence. No, I’m not quite dead yet. My last post was in March, 2017, when I was trying to get over a number of physical challenges, including constant tiredness. Well, no wonder I was tired and constantly sick. In June, I found a lump in my breast that turned out to be cancer. YIKES!

The biopsy showed that it was triple negative breast cancer, the hardest type to cure. My oncologist ordered what is called neo-adjuvant chemo, which is chemo before surgery. I don’t want to go into the gruesome details, but the past six months have been the worst of my life. Chemo SUCKS! I still have surgery and radiation ahead of me. But my last MRI shows that the cancer is GONE. And my body concurs. I am only three weeks out from my last chemo session, but my energy bounced back before I was hardly finished. I am once again bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, having beat cancer’s ass. Surgery to remove the tumor markers is scheduled for Jan 19, just before my 75th birthday. I will be getting radiation from late February into early April, and then it will be “just” years of monitoring for recurrence.

During this ordeal, my loving hubby took over composting and chicken chores, plus doing most of the cooking and some of the grocery shopping. That was in addition to his teaching job AND his duties as an environmental activist with our local and state Audubon organizations. My poor garden went fallow.

Nevertheless, I did manage to plant and maintain my little garden box, The Garden of Joyous Anticipation. I built it in 2016, six weeks after recovering from surgery for endometrial cancer, which was unrelated to the breast cancer. How lucky can one person get, huh? But weighing and recording my meager harvests fell by the wayside, as did recording the number of eggs our four hens laid. I estimate that we got 600-700 eggs in 2017. I have absolutely no clue about produce, except we had decent apple, apricot, and peach crops. The persimmon and pomegranate trees flowered, but they are still too young to produce.

Let’s take a look at where my yard garden stood yesterday, on New Year’s Eve, and hope for a better 2018.

Our two Liquid Amber trees in front turn a gorgeous color in December, with leaves remaining on the trees into January.

This was all the garden I could manage to plant and maintain for the past six months. Watching these plants sprout and grow gave me hope and courage. As well as some tasty organic produce! Can you identify the crops? Green bunching onions, Redhead radishes, garlic, a red lettuce of some kind, chard, beets (Detroit Red and Chioggia), baby bok choy, and two overwintering bell pepper plants (a Giant Red Marconi, and I forget). We have been harvesting green onions, lettuce and radishes.

Crazy weather. We have an iris in bloom in January. Southern California plus global warming equals unpredictability. I call it global weirding.

My artichoke patch survived. Somehow I managed to keep it watered, and we have four artichoke plants promising a nice spring crop.

My three raised beds in the back yard are utterly neglected. Our watering system is me with a hose. And yet somehow a few dwarf blue curly kale and a couple of collard green plants have managed to hang on. Rejuvenating these poor neglected beds is high on my priority list for 2018. Right after finally sending out our Christmas cards. Hahaha. Yeah, I am WAY behind on a lot of stuff.

Our semi-dwarf navel orange tree has a very nice crop of huge oranges on it. I think there are about 4 dozen oranges, and they are the biggest ever, weighing nearly a pound apiece. Joy, joy.

Our Bearss lime tree has a decent crop on it. We squeeze and freeze the juice in ice cube trays, and store the cubes in ziplock freezer baggies for year-round use. Vic does most of that squeezing and freezing. I have been using the juice lately to make a powdered sugar glaze for homemade cranberry-pecan scones.

Our dwarf Meyer lemon isn’t looking too good, and neither are the dozen lemons on it. I hope I can rejuvenate that poor little tree.

Our Littlecado avocado tree is infested with invasive non-native shot hole borers. It produced only three avocados this season. I hope that it can successfully fight off the infestation as several of our other trees have done. At least it didn’t die like our plum tree and one of the nectarine trees did.

Our three Asian pear trees produced a number of small pears this year, but the rats got them all. At least the trees make pretty fall foliage.

This is a winter view of our chicken coop and run, as seen from our recently pruned apple tree orchard. I have a dwarf Granny Smith, a semi-dwarf Fuji, a full-sized Gala that I mistakenly thought was a semi-dwarf when I bought it, and a semi-dwarf Florida Prince peach tree, all growing in this tiny space. Vic and I cut the trees back to a decent height a couple of days ago. I have hopes of reaching the fruit from 2018 more easily now. This is assuming that I get to it before the rats, squirrels and possums do. Urban gardening is a real challenge.

This is Princess Aurora, a nice Black Sex-linked hen, and a prolific layer. See how pale her comb is? She is in her winter rest period and not laying right now.

Contrast the size and color of Princess Aurora’s comb and wattles with Princess Ariel, our Light Sussex hen. She is laying again after her fall molt. Sadly, Dino-peep (the nasty-tempered Barred Rock shown in the header photo) picks on her and has pecked off her neck feathers.

Poor old Chicken Little is about 10 years old now. She is doing good to lay 10-20 eggs a year these days, in contrast to the 300/yr that she produced in her prime. My husband keeps threatening to review her vacation and retirement benefits package, but I think she is pretty secure. She has become a nice pet in her old age. She is too feeble to get away from being petted now.

Look, somebody laid an egg! We are getting an egg every second or third day. Meanwhile, we have eggs frozen down to make scrambled eggs during the winter egg dearth.

And that concludes yesterday’s photo tour of my tiny urban farmlet. Here is hoping for a healthy 2018, and a MUCH better year than 2017 was. Please leave a comment.