Maybe the Best Thing I Learned This Summer

One June day, craving fruit, I stopped at a farm stand. It was a hot afternoon and the strawberries looked a little squishy, but the farmer seemed nice, so I wanted to buy something. I settled on a quart of chanterelle mushrooms.  I'm not sure I had ever had a wild mushroom. Upon closer examination of the fungi, though, I had the feeling I had seen them before, like recently, maybe while walking the dog in the woods behind our house.

As luck would have it, our friends Brian and Kasia were visiting that weekend. Kasia is from Poland, where apparently mushroom hunting is a national avocation. She is a mushroom queen. When we all went walking in the woods, I pounced on a little golden growth in the field at the top of the hill. "Not so fast," she cautioned, showing me how the ribs on the bottom of the cap stopped suddenly where the cap joined with  skinny stem. Not a chanterelle at all. Oh well.

Not yet, that is. For just a little way down the path, more apricot-colored fungi poked out of the forest undergrowth. These had thick stems with ribs partway down them. They smelled kind of sweet. And they were everywhere in this section of the woods. I took the bandanna off my head to collect them and soon ran out of room, so Fin took off his long-sleeved shirt and we loaded them into his shirt too. At various spots on the trail, Kasia the mushroom queen would pointedly detour. We'd follow her to whatever random mushroom den she had miraculously located with her eagle eye and collect them. When we got home, we had a huge pile of chanterelles! I did a spore print to make sure. We ate them the next day and didn't die. In fact, they were delicious.

2 1/2 pounds - we weighed them
There's a bolet in there too.

Harvest Moon Harvest

The harvest moon has been shining bright the past few nights, but I harvested these eggplants during the day. Over half a bushel!

Vardaman the cat endorses these eggplants

There's more out there too. This is the first successful eggplant crop for me. We started them in late May with fabric row covers that gave us a head start and also protected the plants from flea beetles, which usually devour my baby eggplant seedlings within a week. In late June or early July, when the plants were ready to flower, we took off the row covers. Nothing really happened until August, when suddenly there were eggplants everywhere!

Some of them, I grilled and pressure-canned. The USDA does not recommend canning eggplant at all, so hopefully we will not get botulism when we make baba ghanoush all winter. I made a batch of baba ghanoush to eat right away too, of course. Here's how:

BABA GHANOUSH

4-5 small-medium eggplants

1 cup tahini

juice of 1 lemon

1/4 cup olive oil

1-3 cloves of garlic (you can probably guess where I stand on the garlic spectrum)

salt & pepper

parsley (chopped)

Roast or grill the eggplants until they are mushy. Let them cool and scrape the mushy insides into the bowl of your food processor. Add the tahini, garlic, and olive oil and puree. Add salt and pepper to taste, and stir in parsley last so the whole thing doesn't turn green. Eat it on pita, with crudite, or on sandwiches.

Building an Ark on the Hilltop

It’s Wednesday, September 7th, and it’s raining torrentially again. I’m feeling antsy, wondering what’s going on in the valley. A week and a half ago, Hurricane Irene swept through here, devastating Schoharie County and many other places in upstate New York. More rain is the last thing we need right now.

This is the view from Vroman's Nose in Middleburgh on Monday, August 29. The Schoharie Creek normally winds around those submerged trees at the bottom of the hill in the back of the photo.

Photo from the Albany Times Union

Irene was forecast to be a pretty big storm. Fin, my friend Clara - up from Brooklyn for a visit - and I spent Saturday morning preparing. We cleaned up the yard, filled a couple of water buckets, brought all the houseplants and hanging baskets inside, got some movies at the library, and hauled out the generator, just in case.

We awoke to rain on Sunday. Shortly after that, the power went out. It did not come back on until Friday night, almost a week later. We spent the day reading, napping, knitting, snacking, and comparing notes with friends downstate. Outside, the wind blew the rain horizontal. The tiny stream that runs next to our house overwhelmed the culvert and there were several inches of water on the road. The rain slowed down in the evening, and we milked the goats and made grilled veggies and couscous in the twilight. Before we went to bed we watched a strong wind blow the remaining clouds away, revealing a sky full of stars, brighter for the lack of electric light anywhere in the vicinity.

The Emperor's New Barn

We broke ground on our barn yesterday. Hooray!

There's nothing like coming home from your day job to find that your lawn is now a giant hole.

There it is! The new barn! Can't you see it?

Stay tuned for progress reports, when I'm not busy jumping up and down and clapping my hands with glee.

Moon Flower!

I am a killer of houseplants. It's not that I forget to water them. Rather, there is some perverse impulse in me that will look at a thirsty houseplant and deliberately not water it. Between these neglectful urges and a history of herbicidal cats, even plants that are widely touted as indestructible have died on my watch.

I need the help of Mother Nature. The garden, with the help of unlimited sun and occasional rain, is generally fine, and now that I live in a house and not a city apartment, I can bring my houseplants outside in the summer. As a result, I have managed to keep a few of them alive for years. Years! Maybe I'm turning over a new leaf. Haha.

The latest and greatest addition to my houseplant collection has been absolutely enthralling. It was a gift from my good friends Frank and Scarlet, the proprietors of a lovely cottage business in plants and flowers. You definitely want one of these, so here's their website:

https://sites.google.com/site/paradiseperennials/

And here it is, the enchanting, entertaining, and extremely fragrant MOONFLOWER!

Above, Moonie on Sunday, just starting to unfurl

Early Encounters

Anyone who grew up in upstate New York probably remembers the Catskill Game Farm. You could get up close and personal with baby animals and even feed them from little bottles.

Here's a little gem my mom uncovered of my first encounter with the caprine kind.

I think maybe that goat was a little TOO close and personal. Either that or I'm gazing into its eyes and seeing a future of getting up very early, trudging up a hill in the snow with a five-gallon bucket of water, and spending countless summer afternoons inside making pounds and pounds of cheese.

Of course, there's really nothing I'd rather be doing. I mean, just look at me now.

I guess I haven't changed that much.

Midsummer

There is a lot going on in the garden right now, and out of the garden too. Definitely time for a Cotton Hill collage.

Outside edges, clockwise from top left: Raspberries about to bust; my favorite garden bed right now: yellow marigolds and yellow melon blossoms; being patient with tomatoes; sungolds aplenty; nascent eggplants and onions; pretty flowers; moonflower waiting for full moon; Bird with some of the potato harvest: look at the giant one on the right; baby baby watermelons; superlate beans and romaine; the garlic harvest curing in the woodshed; giant green pepper, please turn red.

Inside: cool cauliflower, crazy cukes, and cute chicks!

Life is good. Recipes coming soon.