Oliview and the Carr Fire: Update

The Carr Fire is in the headlines of every newspaper, radio station, and TV news broadcast right now. We've been watching it for nearly a week. It was initially a little 3,000-acre fire that we could see from the second floor of the house at night - that weird, super-bright, almost-neon-red color that fire turns in the dark. And then it blew up. Hearing about it taking out a town, no problem, overnight, was pretty scary, but watching it double over the last two nights and begin to encroach on the City of Redding has been horrifying.

Seeing the south flank of the Carr Fire slowly advance, toward Happy Valley, we decided to evacuate ourselves and our furry animals yesterday. Our wonderful friends at Red Gate Ranch generously took in Hansel and Gretel, our lovely little soay sheep. Our wonderful friend in Red Bluff took in us and our SIX cats and dog. Where would we be without friends?!

Pedro has soaked the orchard over the last several days with sprinklers, turning them off yesterday evening after the water district requested conservation to support fighting the coming fire. We opened our curtains so that law enforcement could see that we were gone, and are now simply hoping for the best. The chickens are still at Oliview, which breaks my heart, but it's incredibly difficult to evacuate chickens... especially as many as we have. 

We know that the fire has already taken at least 500 structures, many of them homes of our friends, colleagues, and neighbors. These disastrous events are such a challenge to empathize with from afar, but your texts, e-mails, and phone calls have heartened us for what is doubtless more challenges ahead.

This fire is making us think, yet again, that climate change is already being embodied in this "age of consequences". The legacy of all of our past actions, and continued profligate lifestyles, will continue to revise our expectations of how natural disasters behave, demolish our millennia of experience in seasonal impacts on food production, and wreck havoc on our mal-adapted civilization. We must change the way in which we're relating to the environment around us. Some of that adaptation must be uncomfortable: shorter showers, bringing your own bags, buying glass or metal in place of plastic, driving less. Not all of it has to be, but without using fewer resources, we simply cannot hope to be a positive force on the future of our world.

Thank you for your expressions of love. We will let you know the outcome as soon as we can.

- Elizabeth

Midsummer Upate

Here at Oliview Farm, we see the Summer Solstice as midsummer, rather than the beginning of summer. This is more accurate per the weather and the solar year, but also just feels right with what is growing at the different times of year. Likewise, we see the Equinoxes as the height of spring and fall, respectively. I will see about getting Pedro to write more about that, as it's very interesting and not something I'm not as knowledgeable about. 

In any case, it's midsummer here at Oliview Farm, and beautiful. We have dozens and dozens of zinnias in the garden this year, and were good at getting cosmos and Mexican torch sunflowers into the ground on time. Cucumbers and summer squash are already producing bushels of produce (just ask our CSA members), and the tomatoes have formed and should be getting red in the next week or two. 

The zucchini, cucumbers, and zinnias are superstars this year!

The garden is getting to the point where it's very, very large... and Pedro is having a hard time getting to all of the beds in time for turning and planting, before it's too hot and dry. We've had some awesome help this year in the form of some new neighbors, and really need to start thinking about formalizing help on a seasonal basis, on an annual cycle. 

We did have a new farmhand show up this year: Arthur just appeared on the farm a few weeks back, trotting out of the bramble behind Lux, our little boy (the other four cats are girls!). He's taken quite well to the farm: the chickens don't scare him, he's not afraid of sprinklers, he and Bucky are negotiating the porch, and he seems to be interested in ground squirrel patrol... that latter being an excellent quality in a cat out here at Oliview! We got him neutered right away, and I'm hoping that a lower testosterone level will help him in getting along with the ladies. HOWEVER, out existing cat herd is really not accepting him; if you have space for a loving, human-oriented cat partner in your life, please let us know!

Handsome Arthur! Dressed for a black-tie affair, and ready to snuggle whoever shows up next!

In other updates, we had a serious fire scare on June 24th, which has spurred us to move some lumber and trimmings piles away from the house. Sigh: opportunity out of crisis, like usual.

We hope that your summer is full of joyful discoveries and sights, and includes experiences that make you grow. Also, of course, we hope your summer is full of lots of veggies!

- Elizabeth 

A little peak at our bed of zinnias: their gorgeous colours pop like balls of bubble gum, and it is a pleasure to cut bouquets for our CSA - my favourite job! In the background, the covered bed hosts basil, and there are tomato beds further back. to the top right are a few compost bins.

Herbal Teas

It's the season of beautiful herbs! While many of the herbs we grow at Oliview are rated as "drought tolerant", that really just means that we won't kill those plants if we forget to water them for a few 110-degree days... not that they thrive in hot, dry conditions. In fact, the conditions they love are happening right now: cool nights, evenly moist soil from the rain, and warm - not hot - days. The thyme is big, bushy, and with beautifully green, moist leaves. The culinary sage even bloomed this spring (it generally blooms once every couple of years)! Lemon balm looks shiny and just so luscious. Roses are prolific this time of year, and the calendulas have been popping up as if we have the perfect conditions... because, for now, we do!

An herbal vignette: feverfew, roses, sage, comfrey, scented geranium, and lemon balm... all 30 feet from my front door!

A bunch of herbal tea ingredients - so pretty!

Some of these herbs I do end up drying for use throughout the year, but some of them are only good fresh. Soooo...

With nights that are still cool, I love herbal teas as I wind down and get ready for a good night's rest. And I'm not the only one: Sunset featured this article in the latest issue, and I found a great BHG article on planting a garden to supply herbal tea. It's a popular sport! My favourite is a mix of lemon balm with calendula flowers and some rose petals: it's beautiful, light, and sets the perfect tone for sweet dreams. A sage leaf or sprig of rosemary two adds some throat-clearing power, without overpowering the brew.

I know some people chop or crush the leaves and petals, but I don't do that. I do use just-off-boiling water, though, and let it steep for about 10 minutes. It's so beautiful in the pot!

A little cup of tea is the perfect accompaniment to a biscotti and a good book before bed. Sweet dreams!

- Elizabeth

Berry Blast... or, in other words: The Great Negotiation

There's a lot to negotiate on a farm. You think you have something figured out, and then a chicken, or an insect, or the weather... or a spouse... comes in a messes with your vision! This is the story of the berry patch.

I grew up with boysenberries in my back yard. When dinner wasn't ready quite soon enough, Mom would send us out back to play, where we'd usually end up at the boysenberry fence finding berries that we'd missed the evening before. In fact, there are STILL boysenberries in this SAME spot in my childhood backyard.

If you have never had a boysenberry, you can't know what you're missing, but know that you're missing something major. They have the je ne sais quoi of a raspberry, and the luciousness of a just-ripe blueberry, as well as the deep sweetness of a blackberry - without the subtle, slightly off-putting rancidity that blackberries seem to carry. In any case, they're stellar. AND they're super-easy to propagate. They do so themselves, quite naturally, but you can easily plant a cane one fall, and the following spring have a boysenberry plant! 

Boysenberry plants, in their current/old location. They're just leafing out - which they do before blossoming! It's not an ideal time to move them, development-wise... however, it is a GREAT time to move them, human-relationship-wise! Note the slightly weedy-unkempt look of the bed... ahem.

SO: my dear mother supplied us with boysenberry plants when we moved up here. They're delicious, part of my childhood, and don't take up a ton of space. An easy "go", in my garden (notice the ownership, there... this becomes part of the challenge). So we - husband and I - agreed to plant them along the garden's north fence line. I promised to care for them: cut the year-old canes, pin up the new ones, weed, feed, etcetera. They're an exuberant plant, and did end up somewhat taking over that fence line. Not offensively so, but exuberantly. I was still caring for them, though, and Pedro - and CSA customers! - was reaping the spring/summer berry rewards... Great, right? 

No so great for Pedro. 

The plants were coming under the fence and showing up in the nearest garden bed... as well as growing wildly - exuberantly! - and creating nasty scratches on those brave enough to walk the pathway on the opposite side of the fence. Sigh. I still say: "small price to pay". However, it is not only my garden. Sigh. So they had to be moved.

The deal was that Pedro build a structure and I'd move the berries. It being Easter-time, this seems like a good opportunity to show the structure:

Boysenberry trellis in the making... looking oddly like three crosses in the middle of our property! 

Pedro put the trellis structures in last weekend, and then over the last few days I scraped the ground of weeds with our Valley Oak Tools wheeled hoe, a most amazing tool (the piles of weeds and topsoil will be composted). I then forked loose an 18-inch-wide strip on either side of the trellis for the actual berry plants. In the photo above, the chickens are helping to cultivate. This is very hard work, so I welcome any help I can get!

This morning I planted the west side of the trellis (the right side, in this photo). (Sorry: no photos. I was too hot and annoyed to get my camera.) This afternoon we'll be wiring it up with two long wires connecting across the length of the main posts, and then another few wires creating a kind of umbrella structure across the cross-posts, at the top. And then I'll dig more berry plants (sigh) and have a brand-new boysenberry trellis to enjoy! Yay! Hopefully we'll get a few berries this year, but I've composted the soil really well so that they'll settle in this year and we'll have a bumper crop next year! AND now I'll get to pick both sides, and not be hemmed in by the garden!

Here's to hard work, negotiations, and a better solution out of all of it!

- Elizabeth

Our First Cabbages!

It has taken all of my childhood and some of my adult years, but I have been enjoying the complex fresh/bitter flavors of some of the more... challenging vegetables for the last several years. One of those happens to be cabbage. It's a beautiful vegetable in the ground, and if you're about my age, you probably will think of Cabbage Patch Dolls with the following photo, as well:

Mature cabbages, ready for eating!

It's my pleasure to be doing some fun things with cabbage this year, now that we've finally figured out how to grow it (starting it WAY earlier than we thought, and being very, very patient). I made some great kraut last month, but I also made a cabbage soup. French onion is one of my favorite foods, and I couldn't get a similar version with cabbage out of my head. It turns out that I was right - cabbage soup has a lovely flavor, and is quite similar, though quicker and not as pretty, to French onion. 

Our first Oliview cabbage! It's not as dense as store cabbages, but is infinately fresher and more satisfying!

I had a medium-small head of cabbage that I chopped up similar to how you might for kraut. I chopped up some onions, too, and LOTS of garlic, sautéed those, and added in the cabbage.

After seeing it soften (though not brown), I added in about 3 cups of chicken broth (from our own chickens, of course!), some thyme, oregano, and tarragon, to play up the French flavors. After boiling for about 15 minutes, I went at it with the immersion blender... which promptly failed me. I did a few rounds in the conventional blender, but it ended up chunkier than I'd planned. This was still pretty good, and a great way to eat a lot of cabbage! I topped it with Gruyere cheese and some of our amazing garlic scape pesto and had myself a fabulous veggie-heavy dinner.

Yay for a mature palate!

- Elizabeth