Thursday, August 27, 2009

Mowing; Vegetable Report

For the past couple of weeks I've been spending a few hours every afternoon that weather and time have permitted in the fields with the sickle bar mower attached to the BCS walk-behind tractor, a jarring experience. Ordinarily I like to mow two of the fields in mid-June and again at this time of year, but they were too wet to mow in June, and so I skipped it. Except for mowing the orchard and scything on a steep bank behind the house I'm done as of today.

The chief reason to mow is to keep the fields as fields and prevent them from growing into spruce forest. Spruce seedlings dot the fields every year, it seems. There is also the occasional white pine seedling. The hay, such as it is, may be used for mulch, either right there or moved to surround apple trees as a fertilizer, or be composted, depending on how much time I have to spend on moving hay.

Blackberries are coming in, not nearly so much as last year, but still very good. Nearly finished eating one of the two rows of potatoes. Greens have all gone by and the later plantings were washed away, so it's back to store-bought. Cabbages are ready; beets and onions will be ready soon. Tomatoes plentiful on the vines but way behind on account of the cool, damp June and July; will they ripen? It's getting cool again, now, with temps going down tonight to the 40s, days in the 60s and 70s.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Time for Old-Time Music

The last couple of weeks have been filled with visits and music. A couple of days after playing music with friends at Isle au Haut, our friend Art came to the island and stayed for a couple of days, and we played music much of the time. Art is a multi-instrumentalist, on stringed instruments; but with us he usually plays guitar--unless there is another fine guitarist with us, and then he'll play mandolin or something else. But as there were just the three of us, the same lineup when we recorded music here for our Bound to Have a Little Fun CD which Marta still sells on the internet, he played guitar, Marta played banjo, and I fiddled. He'd just come out of a week at the Maine Fiddle Camp, where he was an instructor; we had plenty of time to visit and talk and share tunes. He had his recorder out and seemed especially to like some of the newer ones such as "Newt Payne's Tune" and "Granny Went to Meeting with Her Old Shoes On." After listening to Bruce Greene and then his source, John Salyer, play a tune Salyer called "Shady Grove," I fashioned a somewhat different setting that I've been enjoying playing a great deal. (It bears no resemblance at all to the folksong revival tune "Shady Grove"; it's close in one of its parts to "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss.") Then a day or two later Nathan came over and he and Marta and I played music for an hour or two. And then again last Sunday Nathan came over, with Fred, and the four of us played, getting ready for our public appearance at the Common Ground Fair at the end of September. So, much music and visiting. Meanwhile I'm getting ready for the start of school in September, and trying to get the fields mowed.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Visit to another island

A few days ago we visited some friends whose extended family has a cottage on Isle au Haut, an island off the Maine coast accessible only by boat. We took the mail boat and spent a lovely time with the family, eating and talking and playing music, with a walk through the woods to the shore to look for whale bones the following morning.

In some ways it seemed like a trip back in time, for life on this island is close to the ideal of plain living and high thinking that attracted the wealthy "rusticators" from Boston and New York to this part of the Maine coast late in the 19th century, where at first they boarded with natives, later rented cottages, and eventually bought shorefront property and built cottages, some plain and others quite elaborate. Mothers, aunts, grandparents and children would come spend a month or two of the summer in this place far healthier than the city, while fathers and uncles would come by boat and spend a week or two.
Today half of Isle au Haut is part of Acadia National Park, and people come to hike, bicycle, and camp there; the other half is mostly summer colony, and partly year-rounders, though only 40 of those, with a one-room schoolhouse and two children attending school. Thus very little in the way of industry there, except for the tourist industry. Today it is the summer cottages that dominate the island outside the park, inhabited for a month or two out of the year by families who prefer to live close to nature and far from fast food restaurants, supermarkets, and shopping malls--the nearest ones would be about 90 minutes away. Spend a week there, and it's a vacation; spend a month and it concentrates the mind.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Bottling day

Today I bottled two cases (24 bottles) of cider wine that we pressed from our apples on the island last October. That was the contents of one carboy put into one 5 gallon oak barrel for two months and a little better. As I'd hoped, the wine had just a tiny bit of fermentation left in it, which will help make it more champagne-like when we drink it. The taste was dry rather than sweet, but not unpleasant. Last year's vintage was sweeter. Next I siphoned the fermented wine from last year's second carboy into the emptied oak barrel, and added 1/2 lb. of sugar. Last, I washed out the siphon hose and the carboy. The 24 bottles are sitting down cellar where they will rest for a while and I'll see which corks are coming up more than a little, and then take these out and replace them. Then I'll label them and we'll store them down cellar, perhaps trying a bottle in the fall when bottling the second batch that's in the oak barrel resting down cellar now. The wine usually needs six months or so in the bottle to develop its full flavor; before then it doesn't taste as flavorful and is said to be "bottle-sick." Altogether it took me nearly two hours of pleasant work. Luckily the wasps were not out in large numbers to sample the cider wine, as they sometimes have been in past years.

The weather gradually turned shortly after my last post, the foggy mornings giving way to sunshine earlier and earlier in the day, with only a couple of days of rain in the past week. I've been eating greens out of the garden for salads every day, but with the warm and sunny weather they will bolt soon. The second plantings of greens must have gotten washed away, and a third planting will follow shortly although these don't usually work at this time. The potatoes have never been larger or nicer; I'm digging new potatoes the size of my fist and eating them every other day or so. The eggplant, pepper, and tomato plants are growing well but behind the calendar and it'll be interesting to see if they're able to ripen. By now I'd normally be eating Sungold cherry tomatoes but this year they haven't even set yet. The deer have been circling around the gardens, browsing the fields. My fence work seems to have paid off so far.