Saying Goodbye to our Friends

Well, this is it. We finally got a thorough frost last night, killing anything we didn't bring inside or cover with blankets. Tomorrow morning we leave on our 2-week journey to Southern California. As a last post, I thought I'd say goodbye to some of our favorite garden friends we've made during the last four months:

The neighbor's dog Tess

Our Worker Bees

The Garden Orb Spider

Harvey

Chicken

The Woodchuck (he was too tricky to take a picture of OR shoot)

The Bears at the Rockland Lobster Festival

Kitchen Catch-up

Don't worry, we haven't been too busy in the garden--we've still had plenty of time to prepare good meals. In fact, a lot of the garden work we've been doing for the past couple weeks has been preserving what we harvest through canning, freezing, drying, storing, and eating. (Alright, eating isn't really preserving, but we do an awful lot of it anyway.)

A summertime berry-coconut smoothie:

Handmade pizza with a sourdough crust, prosciutto, homemade sauce, fresh tomatoes, olives, and swiss chard:

A pot pie with a handmade crust, locally produced beef, and lots of veggies from the garden:

This kale was washed and sold to Darby's, a restaurant in Belfast:

And we're still making plenty of bread:

A Night at the Blue Goose

Last night Jon and I were invited to our friends Dan and Heather's house for a potluck with a few of their friends. After a delicious dinner comprised of various produce from five different gardens we headed down Route One to the Blue Goose, a roadhouse dance hall in Northport. We went to see Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish, an amazing blues band that plays here annually to the biggest crowd of the year. (I've heard that the band is just as excited about this performance as the local audience is.)

Before the band got two notes out, the entire hall was dancing. Jon says it looked like the first few songs played at a wedding reception, when the adults are still drinking and all the kids run onto the dance floor, jumping and waving their arms. Except at the Blue Goose, there were about 150 people, aged 20-80, jumping and waving their arms. There was no drinking, no smoking, just dancing.

We danced from 9:30 t0 1:00 in the morning, when the band finally called it quits. It was an exhausting night but I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I felt like I got a taste of true Maine culture: a hall on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere filled with people of all different ages, styles of dress, and styles of dance. The only uniting factor was a love for the music that was being performed (that, and our uniformly white skin!).

What We've Been Doing Instead of Blogging

As the weather finally warmed up and dried out in late July, the garden actually began to grow things! That we could eat! It's been very exciting, watching all of our food grow and flower and fruit. We even have an artichoke budding!

The tomatoes that barely peeked out of their well-dug holes (the holes direct water towards the roots, allowing for less watering and better use of rainwater) at the beginning of June were finally beginning to fruit in late July and are up to my shoulders now!

The basil that we interplanted with the tomatoes (to ward off pests) are also looking and tasting quite good.

The strawberries are also experiencing a second wind, as the runners produced in early spring have developed into plants of their own. And because the weather is more agreeable now, the strawberries we're getting this time are bigger and juicier.

The fava beans, which like cooler, wetter weather

(just like kale) were ready to harvest as green beans in mid-July (we left about half of the beans on the stalks to get big and dry so that we can shell them later on for dry beans to store for the winter).

Meanwhile, Jon and I have also been working on a few side-jobs: we've been walking our neighbor's adorable Saint Bernard, Tess, while they're away at their cabin.

We also planned and planted out 2 acres or so for a fall garden for our friend Darcy.

While most of Bonita's garden has been planted in intensive plots, this 2 acre area was planted in long rows with a seeder for quick, easy weeding. It was interesting to work with a different (but still organic) style of

farming.

In between all of this, we've still managed to fit in lots of swimming, kayaking, canoeing, hiking, and a week-long visit with my family. And of course, lots of cooking!

Bees!

Today was a wonderfully hot, sunny day. We appreciated not only because it provided a welcome break from all the rain, but because it was a perfect opportunity to finally check up on our bees.

Jon volunteered to don the bee suit, meaning he was the one to do all the close up work. Bonita yelled instructions to him from a safe distance, and I took pictures.

Jon started by smoking the bees. By gently blowing a bit of smoke around the entrance and

over the top of the hive, we trick the bees into thinking that the forest is on fire: they quickly get to work eating honey, so that they can move their food to a new, fire-less area. This means that they are too busy to notice a beekeeper poking around the hive. By reapplying smoke every few minutes, we can keep the already gentle bees occupied and make the whole process as easy as pie!

Since we got them in late May, our Italian breed, extra-gentle bees have been busily working at filling up their new home with honey and brood. Now that it is well into summer our hive needs room to expand! It was time to add the "super" to our hive, a box of honeycomb trays that sits on top of the hive and stores honey for human consumption. Because of a nifty "queen excluder" screen that fits between the super and the rest of the hive, the worker bees can fill the super with honey, but the queen (who is larger than worker bees) can't lay her eggs there.

The expedition into hive territory went off without a hitch. Soon (I hope) we'll be able to taste the fruits of our labors!

With warm weather comes wonderful Wows

So far the rain has been significantly less in July compared to June. We are still getting rain often but not continuos day after day. With just the right amount of rain and the warm sunny July days things in our garden are really stating to pop! A few days ago Bonita came back into the house, from her morning check-up walk, with a small collection of our first non-leafy veggies and the announcement that I had better go collect our newly ripe strawberries before the birds or some little bug gets them. She came in with a radish and cucumber, the tiniest broccoli I have ever seen a pepper and a fava bean. Catie cooked up a quick and delicious medley of our new veggies with noodles and lemon thyme so that we could then make our way to Waterville where the Maine international film festival was occurring.

With the warm weather a few new fauna have arrived. The most surprising of which was discovered one night as Catie and I were cooking dinner. We heard the frantic thumping of cat feet then followed by some squeaking. Our assassin cat, Chicken, the one in the earlier picture, had managed to injure a little brown bat so that it could not fly away and was tossing it around the barn as squeaked. The bat was able to avoid chicken enough that we could step in with a pair of gloves and intervene. There are a lot of biting bugs around that we need that bat to eat! We carried the bat up to the cupola in the barn so that he might have a cat free place to rest and heal.

A Maine Birthday

Jon's birthday was 7 July. Coincidentally, his friend Eric planned a going-away dinner for the same day (he joined the Europa a few days later for the long trip to Antarctica). We decided to make it Jon's birthday dinner as well! The one hour drive to his house took us twice as long, but the dinner was well worth it. The captain and several other crew members of the Harvey Gamage were there, along with other friends.

We brought an appetizer of crostini made with Jon's homemade sourdough bread, thinly sliced and toasted with a thin spread of garlic/basil/olive oil emulsion (the genovese basil was from the garden), and a goat cheese spread to top it.

For dinner, we ate a curry of vegetables, Maine mussel, and hake (a very Maine-y fish), rice, and spring rolls filled with fresh veggies from Beth's Farm topped with a homemade peanut sauce, all made by Eric and Christine.

Our first dessert of the night was made by Captain Flansburg and his friends: strawberry shortcake. The strawberries were fresh from the garden, and the cream was whipped about 3 minutes before we sat down to eat it. The whole event was delicious!

When we finally got home around midnight, I pulled our second dessert out of the fridge: a New York Cheesecake I had made the day before for Jon's birthday and hidden in our neighbor's kitchen. Although it was late, and we were stuffed, we each had a small slice while Jon opened his presents and birthday cards.

If I do say so myself, it was a fun and delicious birthday!

Wet Weather

We've had a very rainy month here in Maine, which hasn't helped our garden at all (you can hear and read all about the problems rain causes here, and then learn about the late blight that

has appeared recently--a result of all the wet weather).

The weather has allowed Jon and I to explore our new home a bit more. Recently, we made our way down to Rockland to visit the Farnsworth Art Museum, which features a variety of Maine-centric 2- and 3-D art. Afterwards, we stopped in at Atlantic Baking Company for some sweet treats and coffee from Selva Negra, a coffee plantation I visited a few years ago!

We've also spent a few sunny-ish days outdoors. On another trip into Rockland, we spent the afternoon sailing with Jon's friends Christine and Eric. We saw a Bald Eagle, a porpoise, and many seals!

A few weeks ago we hiked through a good chunk

of Camden Hills State Park. The view from the top of Mount Battie was amazing.

More recently, we hiked through a section of the Georges River Land Trust, a large area of protected land that runs very close to our house. Part of the Georges River, in fact, runs through our backyard. We canoed down a section of the river recently. The river was wide and high, making it easy to pass through the rapids--the one good result of all this rain!

Working in the Kitchen

Jon and I have been exploring all aspects of food production here in Maine--we've been learning about the journey of food not just from seed to produce, but from soil to table as well. This is (in my opinion) one of the most fun, relaxing, and rewarding aspects of gardening that we've experienced so far.

Any bread in the house is homemade. And since I eat lots of bread, I've done lots of bread baking. I've explored poolish baguettes, vienna torpedo rolls (left), english muffin bread, and anadama bread (a New England specialty made with molasses and cornmeal) and enjoyed all of them. Since Jon's arrival, he's treated us to several sourdough bread experiments. Each one has been better than the last--and they've all been great!

We've also been cooking with the early garden produce: kale, swiss chard, dandelion, and several other random greens are picked from the garden and incorporated into our lunches and dinners almost daily, as are a variety of herbs (the lemon thyme is my favorite at the moment). We made blueberry-lemon scones with blueberries frozen since last year's harvest, and Bonita

has made us two fish dinners with the frozen salmon she caught in Alaska last fall.

While Bonita's rhubarb hasn't been around long enough to produce much (rhubarb, like asparagus, is a perennial that needs several years to establish itself before it grows enough to harvest), Jon and I were able to harvest several pounds from a neighbor's backyard. We've made a rhubarb-apple crisp, a rhubarb-blueberry crisp, and a delicious rhubarb-strawberry pie (and we've still got 4 quarts in the freezer).

Some other meals have just been

for fun--like molasses ginger cookies, celeriac risotto, and the french onion soup Jon made with my Anadama bread and his mom's recipe. He made his own mushroom stock for a vegetarian-friendly soup, and mixed the remnants of this stock with barley for a delicious side dish.

French Onion Soup

Ingredients:

salt

pepper

sherry (optional)

Multiply the following ingredients by the number of servings required:

1 cup water and 1 cube beef bullion OR 1 cup mushroom stock

1 large onion

1 teaspoon butter

1 slice of bread

a few slices gruyere cheese

In a large pan over medium-low heat, saute the onions in the butter until dark brown and sweet. Warm the water in a pot and dissolve the bullion into it. Pour the mixture into the cooked onions. Let simmer. Add salt, pepper, and a small amount of sherry to taste. Let simmer for at least an hour, until the soup is reduced.

Meanwhile, slice a baguette and the cheese, covering each slice of bread with enough cheese. When soup is done, ladle into individual serving dishes, place a slice of bread with cheese on top, and broil until the cheese is lightly browned and bubbly. Alternatively, broil the bread and cheese on a cookie sheet, then place on top of each bowl of soup (this works well if you don't have oven-safe bowls).

The Beginnings of Spring

I arrived in Searsmont, ME on a Tuesday night in mid-May to a wealth of seedlings covering Bonita's front porch: tomatoes, leeks, eggplants, onions, shallots, celery, artichoke, chives, bell peppers, hot peppers, celeriac,

and many more.

The growing season is relatively short in Maine,

so in order to maximize the amount and variety of fruits and vegetables we produce, seeds are started indoors (like these squash seedlings in

the front window).

The seedlings can be moved to a more

outdoors-y area as they grow, but they still need protection: cold frames to cover them at night; a greenhouse with windows that can be closed when needed; or the front porch, where they can

be easily moved inside on frosty nights.

These seedlings will be hardened off eventually and planted in the back garden (newly tilled and relatively bare upon my arrival) or sold to neighbors, friends, and fellow gardeners at our "Clueless Gardener" farmstand.

I spent the next week and a half getting acquainted with Bonita, the garden, and the cats, Harvey and Chicken. I began learning about the process of springtime planting by starting seeds in new flats, planting rows of leeks and celeriac in our kitchen garden, and weeding witchgrass from the fava beans (an early, hardy crop that was already well on its way in the garden upon my arrival).

On the last day of May I drove down to Boothbay Harbor, a little more than an hour south of Searsmont, to greet Jon as his ship, the Harvey Gamage, sailed into port (which you can read and hear a story about here).