E-I-E-I-O

Readers may wonder why I haven’t been blogging for over a month. You can blame it on climate change. Portland has had a hot summer, and everything in our backyard farm has been ripening at once, so all my time has been taken up harvesting, cooking, and putting up for winter.

One of the main reasons we bought this place was the back yard. The house sits on one end of a double lot, and when we moved in (ten years ago, in 2005), the rest of the lot was thick with weeds. It took Sylvia two years to kill the aggressive perennial ones—Himalayan blackberries, English ivy, and traveler’s joy hanging from the fences on the perimeter. There was an enormous patch of bindweed, which also took years to kill, and an assortment of soft weeds growing waist high throughout. Of course those keep coming back. Weeding is forever.

Next we built some 4′ x 8′ boxes for vegetables. Over the years we acquired more boxes and now have 23 of them. We planted fruit trees, had handypersons build a greenhouse and a chicken coop, bought two sheds for tools and supplies, rescued unwanted bird baths from neighbors, agreed to host a beekeeper’s hive, planted grapevines and hardy kiwi vines, set up areas for blueberries and raspberries, established a cornfield, and installed miles of drip irrigation.

As you might imagine, the farm work is pretty constant. First thing in the morning I fill the birdbaths (one for the wild birds, one for the bees in the hive down by the coop, and one that both the chickens and bees like to use) and the chicken’s watering bowl under the tree where they like to hang out. Every couple of days I clean all the bowls. Every week I refill the bird feeder. Then I let the chickens out, give them their treats (such as watermelon rinds, or kale chopped up with eggshells for calcium, or freeze dried soldier fly larvae—yum!), and make sure their feeder is full. (FYI–we eat the eggs but not the chickens. When they stop laying, they have a happy retirement. And when they die, we bury them under a plant and say kaddish.)

After breakfast, and before it gets too hot, I harvest whatever Sylvia planted in spring. This summer it’s been spinach, collard greens, mustard greens, beet greens and beets—and pears from the pear tree. Kale, tomatoes, basil, plums, and carrots are happening now. The apples and the hardy kiwi aren’t ripe yet.

We have plenty to share, plenty to give to our neighbors–who also share what they can. This will matter more and more as the current administration seems bent on sinking the economy.

And it’s not just hard work. Besides the pleasures of good food, there are many joys–predictable ones, like watching Arcturus appear when we lock up the chickens after sunset, and some unexpected, like finding a beautiful katydid in the basil.

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Next–check out Part II, happy reunions in the SF Bay Area.