The Love Salad

I have to admit, I wasn't much of a salad eater before I started farming. Then, one day I discovered that 1) fresh greens grown with care and attention taste significantly better than store bought; 2) that I can add just about anything I can dream up to make them more interesting(see Spring Salad Post); and 3) I love to make my own dressings.

Lately, David and I have been mixing our lettuces from the garden with all kinds of ingredients from the farmers market or grocery store. I've started calling them the Love Salads, because *&#%, I love them! We'll be providing some of the ingredients found below in our future CSA boxes. In the not too distant future, in fact.

What's in The Love Salad
Giving you exact proportions of the following ingredients would take some of the fun out of it, unless you hate experimenting. When it comes to the dressings, I'll give you some guidelines, the ingredient list and then encourage you to do the dip test(dipping your finger in to see if it works for you). If you're not into experimenting with this, I'm sure someone's written a recipe online somewhere you can try.

• mixed greens, cabbage, snow peas, carrots, red onion or shallot tops, fennel, avocado, fat free feta, pine nuts or cashews, flax seed meal and orange vinegarette or honey-mustard-thyme dressing. And my new favorite addition, a friend egg, yolk still runny, over the top! This was an adventure for me last week after my friend, Heather recommended it. I never would have thought of it myself!
  

Orange Vinegarette Dressing
In a jam jar or cup, mix:
Zest of one orange...I'm careful not to grate the white, bitter part found underneath
Juice of the same orange...I like to use tangelos, blood oranges or valencia when available
Virgin Olive Oil
Vinegar...rice wine, pear-ginger infused or cider, although I imagine that balsamic could be good, too.
Salt, pepper
Tumeric if I'm feeling saucey

Toss it with the salad.

David's Honey Mustard and Thyme Dressing
Yellow or Brown Mustard
Honey
Virgin Olive Oil
Salt & Pepper
Sprig of Thyme...my suggestion is go easy on the thyme

June's Back!

What a May we've had! I am not your usual sun-loving gardener, even though I have great appreciation for it. Twelve to thirteen hours a day of working in the sun, however, sort of changes your perspective on attire. I'm not going for the beach tan of my youth. Give me a long, breezy shirt and a larger than real sun hat and I'm happy. When the days are hot like these, breaks require laying around under the hickories or dips in the local swimming hole.

You may have caught my reference above to the 12-13 hour days we've been working lately. We've been in full gear and that leaves me very little time or energy for sitting down at the computer, hence my blogging negligence. Heck, I'm lucky if I can get my shoes off before climbing into bed. We've found our rhythm though and the bulk of our late spring planting and winter bed prep/planting should wrap up in the next two weeks.

I've put together a few pictures to show you what's happening around here:

mounded Yukon Gold potato bed;
cicada exoskeleton found on a pepper plant in the greenhouse;
at least once a week, one of our chickens lays a monstrous egg with a double yolk. As you can see, we can't even close the box it's so big!;
our leaf lettuce bed, aka the divas of the garden since they like to be shaded and misted in the hot weather(ah, what we do for sweet sweet salad greens);
David mulching around the pimento peppers in the greenhouse;
David with big smile(caught on camera! boy, I'm good!) planting tomatoes.

Keeping things moving...

It's been a beautiful, busy spring and we've each been following our own rhythms as we move resources from place to place. We move crushed local clam shells and hay from our field to the chickens, then chicken hay to future beds, grass clippings nestle around the plants, mole mound soil to our greenhouse pots while more greenhouse pots come from friends, family and local nurseries. Resources just keep moving and we're trying to keep them as close to home as possible. We've reduced our imported compost and mulch by half this year and by next year we should be able to stop importing it all together. On a related note, I know we're coming close to the end of our rainy season, but I've been thinking about all the new surfaces we have available to collect rainwater. This is a system that I hope we'll be able to work on this summer or early fall. I look forward to watering our strawberries from the shower house rooftop and keeping the chickens watered from their house run-off. I love water...in fact, I'm sure it's possible to grow up in Michigan or the Northwest without loving water, but I suspect these people may be of reptilian lineage;)

Praise for Spring Showers

We've appreciated the sunny, warm days that have come and gone so far this spring. The plants and our spirits perked up a little more as we soaked them in. The rain is back for awhile however, and has brought us a few gifts. Besides the beautiful rainbows over the Columbia and morels popping up in the front yard(which we included in our miso soup the other night), it seems to be keeping the pollens down. My allergy symptoms have been greatly reduced since Saturday. It also saves me the time I would usually take watering the beds, freeing me up to do other needed work that often gets neglected by higher priority, dry-day activities. So, welcome back showers! Thanks for visiting!

Spring Shots

Time to pick(and weed) the asparagus.



























Nice view of Mt. Hood this week.


















Bed of Oregon Sugar Pod II peas.

Welcome Back!

"...winter's come and gone
a little bird told me so."-Gillian Welch

It's been a little over a month now since the vultures started coming home to Fawnwood from their winter stay down south. For the last couple years we've had 11 residents who travel the air currents through the ravines, over the neighbor's clear cut, and often over the garden. Even if my nose is buried in a garden bed, I know when they pass overhead. Their massive bodies cast huge shadows on the ground. I can't help but look up.

Like many of the migrants, I miss them when they're gone and hail their return. Shouts and cheers erupt in the Spring as one of us announces the first birds that return after the long winter. This year, we were able to give the 3 returning vultures a real welcome home gift. Only a few days after their return, David, Terry and Tom shot an elk on Terry's family ranch. After processing everything we could, we placed the elk carcass below the barn in the ravine. It became a raven and vulture hang out for many days. I have to admit that I've never seen ravens act the way they did that week. They made so many different sounds, sometimes like eagles, while doing spiral dives and what looked like dancing or air acrobatics.

Sandhill cranes have also passed by in droves over the last couple weeks. They have the sweetest, oldest sound. I consider myself pretty lucky to hear them nearly every day between April and November here. This area of the Columbia River is a staging ground for them on their way to breeding spots in the north and south.

Finally, Violet Green Swallows or Tree Swallows(not sure which ones because they look almost identical when flying around) have returned this week. I've been faked out twice as little flocks have passed through on their way somewhere else. They are a huge presence here in the summer until the fields are hayed in July. They cruise by us at head or shoulder level, snatching bugs out of the air while we walk around the garden. They're stunning and I'm happy they're finally back! Plus they probably help keep the mosquito population down. Thank you!

I patiently await the return of the Goldfinches. They are good company in the garden and we like to grow the seedy flowers for them so they stay late into the fall.

Ah, the birds here are so many to mention. They do bring me happy moments every day.

Spring Salad

Today, while preparing a winter bed, I dug up several overwintered daikon radish roots. They were huge, juicy and crisp, and inspired me to throw a little spring salad together. I grabbed a basket and headed into the closest ravine for wood violet leaves, flowers and miners lettuce. Next, it was back to the farm for dandelion greens, baby kale leaves and florettes, chives, and carrots(also found hiding under the soil in a winter bed). I added last year's spring pickled beets, a bit of feta, pine nuts and made an orange vinegarette. I have to say, not only did it taste like spring but looked like spring too! Yum!