July 17, 2009

Water woes and Beary season

For weeks, Joe and I have been stretching every last drop of our precious spring rain water as far as it will possibly go in an attempt to keep the garden from becoming a crispy, brown desert, while the flowers look on in helpless envy. In the spring, when water and enthusiasm are both abundant, I plant scads of flowers in anticipation of a brilliantly hued summer full of butterflies and hummingbirds. In reality, summer is hot and dry and water is scarce. The flowers feed my soul, but the tomatoes feed my belly, and you can see which ultimately takes precedence. Meanwhile, nature has been cruelly taunting us with that ever elusive chance of a summer thunderstorm. After a while, it's hard to take nature seriously. Like the boy who cried wolf, when the thunder rolls and a couple of raindrops appear on the windows, all you can say is "I'll believe it when I see it." Well, now I believe it. At long last we are enjoying a REAL shower, and I can just hear the plants singing songs of joy.

Well, in about the time it took me to compose the first paragraph, the storm has moved on, but it did manage to dump a ton (just shy of two inches, over 200 gallons in the rain barrels) of water before moving on. I guess we'll settle for quantity over quality this time. All of this water uncertainty has led to a recent overhaul of our water system. Joe has re-plumbed and re-routed such that the rain barrels can now be filled via the pump down at the spring. It is a bit labor intensive, but at least we have the option of water when we need it.

Okay, enough water talk; let's talk berries instead. We've been doing a work exchange at a nearby you-pick blueberry farm in exchange for berries. The farmer was pretty thrilled to find out we'd be willing to work for food, so he's put us at the top of his list to call when he needs help. We've already canned quite a few pints of blueberries and are planning to try drying the gallon we picked yesterday. Joe is making us some wooden/cheesecloth drying racks to put in the earth oven so we can avoid a repeat of our first drying attempt, the results of which are documented in the following photo.


We learned two very important lessons from this experience - 1) Don't use meltable drying racks and 2) Let the earth oven cool for many hours, overnight if possible.

In addition to blueberries, we're starting to hit peak wild wineberry/blackberry season. The wild black raspberries were sadly lacking this year, but we've already picked a gallon of wineberries with more to come soon. Compared to the ease of farmed blueberry picking, wild berry picking seems like a deep jungle adventure. Wild berries may be free, but they come at a cost of blood and sweat if not tears. Good thing they taste so good. :)

After the rainstorm, I took a walk out back to get some berry pictures for this post. I found this as well. Looks like I'm not the only one interested in blackberries! For those of you whose tracking skills are a little rusty, this is a bear track, and a big one!



Last but not least, our first potatoes and little Tigerella tomatoes (hence the stripes).

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