This year’s cold summer didn’t deter the columnar apples.  We’re having our best harvest ever from these funny little trees, and Claire has fun going out to pick the fruit for her lunch each morning:

Remember the Bicycle Pea Trellis?  It is now surrounded by broccoli, and a few sugar pie pumpkins.  I should pick the pumpkins and cook them up, but they are so pretty and look so autumnal out there, I just can’t quite bring myself to do it yet.

In another trellising experiment, this one feeding our souls rather than our stomachs, the passion vines we planted from seed took over the corkscrew willow branches (see link above), just as I hoped they would.

A late-but-plentiful blackberry season brought plenty of foraging, jam-making, and pie:
Among our new batch of young “spring chickens,” Ethel the barred rock was the first to start laying.  They start with little tiny “beginner eggs,” very cute:

All the sunflower seeds are intended for sharing with the wild co-inhabitants of our neighborhood.  Goldfinches come through in intermittent flocks, and lots of chickadees and squirrels:

We continue our habit of sleeping outside through the summer and as far as we can into the fall before getting cold and miserable.  The last couple of stormy nights have been a bit eventful, and we’ve had to put the rainfly on (so can’t see the trees and stars), but we love it out there:

There seems to have been a bread-baking hiatus over the summer, but we’re back to our good old Deep PB&J with walnut cider bread for school lunch:

And in the “merry olde England” spirit of a smallholding, we’ve been busy making our own fun.  This summer Claire crafted a rather fancy hoop of PVC pipe decorated with colored tape, and all of us have been working on our hoopster moves:

I am writing with a light heart, but am feeling keenly that it’s no coincidence–is it?–that the call in our lives and communities to simple living coincides with a crisis in the industrial-economic-corporate complex.  We join so many who are seeking to create and re-create ways of living that make common sense, and draw out our innate enthusiasm, vitality, and delight.

Anyway–that’s a bit of what’s going on around our place.  We’d love to hear what’s happening at yours.  What are your autumn pleasures?

I was leaning way off the top of the ladder, swaying with the cherry tree in a light breeze as I reached for a cluster of ripe fruits just beyond my grasp, when the UB40 song popped into my head.

“Cherry oh, Cherry oh, baby.
Don’t you know I’m in love with you
If you don’t believe it’s true,
What else is there for me to do?”

As the cherries fell into my basket, UB40 was soon joined by a list of other cherry touchstones. Neneh Cherry. And the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. And a vague memory of a Don Cherry from Canadian hockey broadcasting, and maybe one from jazz? Oh and Cherry Coke, and Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, and didn’t Cherry Lane Music publish Elvis?

Cherry oh, cherry oh, baby.

The cherry tree in the corner of our back yard is exploding with fruit this year. It is by far the best crop we’ve had in the five years we’ve been in this house (apparently it’s a bumper crop all over the state). I love cherries, look forward to them every summer, and am happy to graze on them from a bowl within arm’s reach, pretty much continuously, throughout the few wonderful weeks when Washington’s cherries pop onto the market.

Life these days at the Tangled Nest is a bowl of cherries.

Claire and I have been having so many pit-spitting contests that the yard and garden paths are littered with pits and Lyanda finally put her foot down and insisted we use a pit bowl. We grumblingly comply when she is looking, though I feel pretty strongly that the restriction-free spitting of cherry pits and watermelon seeds is one of the great joys of summer.

Cherry Garcia. Erma Bombeck’s “If life is a bowl of cherries…” book. The cherry symbols on slot machines. Cherry bombs. As we enjoy lunch on the patio, we pit our pop-culture cherry knowledge against each other. Lyanda remembers Agent Cooper’s fondness for cherry pie, but my own Twin Peaks cherry memory stems more from Audrey Horne. Wow.

Say, wasn’t there a glam rock anthem, “Cherry Pie?” I can almost sing it, it’s there on the edge of my too-full pop culture memory bank, I picture red bikinis and big haired rockers in spandex, but it takes coming off the patio to the internet to remind me that it was a Warrant song, and to push “Cherry oh, baby” out of my head, replaced by even more inane lyrics (“Taste so good, make a grown man cry, sweet cherry pie”) and cheesy guitar riffs.

And then in that way that only the internet can, Warrant videos on YouTube lead to discovering that a band called Wild Cherry recorded the classic song “Play That Funky Music,” and it’s just a hop, skip, and Google jump from there to discovering that cherry tattoos are very, very popular. Lots and lots of cherry tattoos.

Mmmm, cherries. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what these nice folks are trying to express with their ink, but just like the slot machine cherries, I’m going to posit that it has something to do with getting lucky.

We’re not sure what variety our cherries are. They are a textured light red color even when fully ripe, and plenty tasty but not overwhelmingly sweet (which makes them all the better for eating one after another after another all day long without stopping). If you have any thought on the variety, let us know. If you need a sample, stop on by, we have plenty.

(And we’d love your help in brainstorming more PG-rated cherry cultural references).

Originally Posted June 29, 2009.

But when I got home, I realized I would need to dry many of the riper figs pretty quickly or they’d ripen beyond edibility. So I began searching the internet for simple drying methods. I found designs for all kinds of cool-looking solar dryers that seemed simple enough to build-and I may build one yet. But meanwhile, what about these ripe figs? With a little more searching I found a simple idea that made immediate, intuitive sense: why not use the fine German-engineered solar collector we already had sitting in our driveway?

By then I had already sliced the figs thin enough to dry fairly rapidly (I hoped). They were sitting in the sun in an old box with its side cut off, with a screen on top to keep out bugs. They seemed to be making very slow progress towards dehydrating. I moved them to the dashboard of our car.

Along with them, I moved our kitchen thermometer. For dehydrating, you want the food to dry fast enough that mold does not grow, but you don’t want to cook it, and you want some enzymes to survive. So for vegetables and fruit you aim for temperatures in the 100-150 degree range. (There are schools of thought on the perfect temperature, of course. You can spend a whole evening reading the internet arcana about dehydrating – perfect dehydrating temperatures, enzyme survival, et cetera, if that interests you).

On a warm Seattle afternoon (high 70s), the temperature in the car was just about perfect. (The surface temperature of the drying fruit will theoretically be slightly lower due to the cooling effect of evaporation). On hotter days or in hotter places I suppose the temperature could be managed through careful window-opening.

I confess this experiment was not entirely carbon-neutral: when our driveway shaded over at about 3 PM, I backed the car onto the street to get four more hours of direct sun!

The figs spent a couple of sunny days in the car (intermittently – we took them out when we ran errands, and during the night), and we ended up with a nice dehydrated snack.  We will be consuming these in the next few weeks so I did not let them get overly dry, but to prevent mold you want to be sure foods are very well dried before storing them away in a bag in the cupboard.

(If you have a tree exploding with fruit, there are some wonderful Seattle programs like City Fruit and Community Harvest that will harvest your excess fruit and donate it to food banks – call them, or volunteer with them to go help pick this year’s bounty!)

February above, June below:

Here’s today’s view through the chicken coop door:

We grow only what we truly love to eat, and save our experimental forays for the farmer’s market.  Several times I’ve tried growing something that sounded exciting, but if we don’t LOVE what we grow, it just won’t get eaten up.  So this year we have a garden-full of peas,  lettuces, beans, shallots, lots of tomatoes, small sugar pumpkins, ONE zuchinni plant (Cocozelle–an Amish heirloom), some sweet peppers, cucumbers, delicata winter squash, chard, oft-used herbs, flowers for the soul, and a few other favorites.

I planted two kinds of pole beans:  Kentucky Blue and Violet-Podded Stringless, which make those gorgeous purple pods.  I love how even the stems of the Violets grow purple, so I can tell them from the others even though they’re planted together.

We planted Oregon snow peas and Cascadia bush snaps at the end of March, and are now overrun with their sweet pods:

This morning I picked the first bouquet from our sweet pea teepee, planted on the spring equinox:

Even Claire will eat broccoli from the garden.  It looks so pretty in the morning, all dewy.

The columnar apple trees are producing little applets.  Columnar apples are branchless, with fruit growing compactly along the trunk–perfect for backyard gardens.  If you are interested in these trees, autumn is a great time to plant them–just get two varieties so they will cross-pollinate.  Ours are Northern and Golden Sentinel.

The chicks, meanwhile,  are all getting along nicely.  The older girls still peck at the younger ones, but it seems to be mainly symbolic.

Looking back at the coop:

I hope all of your gardens (real and metaphorical) are flourishing.

Happy Solstice.

Because of my unshakable aesthetic tendencies (a blessing and a curse), I'll be switching out these plastic labels for copper tags, but for now I'm enjoying how all the different colored flags make this pear look like a little Christmas tree.

Early spring is a great time to plant fruit trees.  They are starting to bud, but not yet leafing out, and the transition is eased by mild spring days that are not too hot or dry.  In the moist Pacific Northwest, though, we should resist the temptation to lop any wayward branchlets off of our new Asian pears until the weather is dryer–late spring or early summer–as open cuts in wet weather make them susceptible to a bacterial disease that can kill the tree.

As you may have noticed from the photo, there’s something mathematically interesting thing about my tree.  The label says “four-way Asian pear,” and so did the nice hand-written sign at  West Seattle Nursery.  But when I got it home, I counted the labels and did some simple addition:   Shinko+Kosui+Shinseiki+Nijisseiki+Kojuro= 5 varieties!  I’m very much looking forward to the eventual taste test. I think Asian pears taste like they fell from heaven, and feel grateful that they thrive in our maritime climate (and in much of the rest of the country as well).

If your local nursery doesn’t have 3 or 4-way Asian pears, the amazing Raintree Nursery in Morton, Washington, carries beautiful, bare root trees, plenty of recommendations unique to your garden zone, and their delivery fees are entirely reasonable.

For a refresher on Spring tree planting, find Raintree’s comprehensive guide here.