Decem-bare

We're still waiting for snow here. We've had a few dustings, and one overnight snowfall a month ago that brought out the snowplow for a single pass (it went by in one direction while the leaf-pickup truck traveled along the opposite way, in a perfect example of two seasons colliding). But mostly it's still bare out there. Novem-bare. It's nice, in a stark November sort of way. But this is December, and I'm ready for splendor.

Last week marked three years in my house, a short enough span of time to recall that each of those previous Decembers we've had plenty of snow by now. Here's the proof, from last year and the year before and the year before that.

Meanwhile, I'm spotting the same scenes as in previous late-fall, early-winter stretches, just without the sparkle I've come to expect. On our morning walking loop, the beavers have been busy again.

The milkweed pods are exploding with their fluffy white seed-parachutes.

The Queen Anne's Lace has curled into its nest-like winter shape.

These orange-red berries are stunning against the bare branches and a (rare) blue sky.

Today, as rain pours down, the backyard cedars are glittering with water drops.

I suppose the lesson is that there's splendor in every season. If this is more subtle than the beauty of a fresh snowfall, then it makes me look harder and deeper. But the temperature's dropping and there's snow in the forecast. Those raindrops should be turning to feathery flakes any moment now. And I must admit, that makes me happy!

Fall Countdown

Judging from a faint layer of white on the ground and the word "December" headlining my calendar, winter is just around the corner. Must be time to finish the fall news roundup, then! Here are ten items to summarize the remainder of Fall 2011.

1. Nick's yurt out on O'Brien Road in Lake Leelanau is nearly done. It just needs a cover at this point (a work in progress). But I quite like the lines of the bare skeleton.

2. Also on O'Brien Road, we picked some pretty little peaches in the old orchard (and made some delicious peach butter).

3. Later in the season, we picked apples and made cider again, using Nick's handmade press. It turned into an impromptu party when Sarah, Michael, Maggie, Sarah's brother Tim, and Tim's friend Kristin stopped by.

 Miss Maggie was all about apple-picking - and eating!

 

4. Back at the homestead, the window boxes I built from some old trim salvaged from the house on O'Brien filled in nicely by the end of the season. I really love how these turned out.

5. The mushroom logs under the yew bush in the front yard sprouted again. We got two more good harvests of shiitakes, followed by the first flush of oysters.

 6. In preparation for winter, Nick brought in a nice stockpile of wood. (One of the benefits of running a tree service.)

7. We also loaded up on a stockpile of produce for the winter at the final downtown farmer's market. The bike trailer makes such a great vehicle for fetching and carrying. It's so satisfying to haul heavy loads around town (dog food, chicken food, bird seed, apples and squash and cabbage, etc.) without getting in the car.

8. The least photogenic but most time-consuming project of my fall was reglazing the 48 window panes in the front entry.

They needed it badly - the old glaze was cracking and falling out, and the paint from a previous paint job had never been cleaned off the glass. They looked pretty terrible. Chipping out the old glaze (and then replacing the four or five panes of glass that I broke in the process) was about half the project. Then I had to pack the play-dough-like new glaze around each pane and cut it with a putty knife to create a smooth angle. I certainly got better - and faster - at it by the last section.

9. Then I had to prime and paint them, after letting the glaze cure for several weeks.

I had doubts about whether winter would hold off long enough to finish all these steps, but got lucky with some relatively warm weather all the way through Thanksgiving. They're back to black now - finally!

10. Perhaps most exciting of all, Nick's creamery dream is getting closer and closer to reality. He's been fine-tuning his business plan, gathering investors and securing financing, and riding the roller coaster of location-selection. O'Brien Road, the original pastoral vision, is out for now. The new plan is a more urban location here in TC, with a combination production/retail facility. The perfect place is out there somewhere. Meanwhile, he has been collecting equipment: a giant 200-gallon vat that he traveled all the way to upstate New York to retrieve, a bulk tank that came from Virginia, a sophisticated printer/scale that will weigh wedges of cheese and print labels for them. He's making plans to spend a month in Germany this winter perfecting his cheese-making skills. If all that didn't make it real enough, the business now has a (official, legal) name!

California Wedding and Wandering

At the end of October, the Michigan branch of the Hofmann family tree flew off to California to celebrate my cousin Tom's wedding. The weather in Carmel Valley was ideal for the occasion: sunny and warm by day, brisk and starry by night, altogether perfect for an outdoor wedding. The Holly Farm was a beautiful setting, full of greenery and flowers and distinct outdoor spaces that felt like separate rooms. Tom and Deanne crafted a lovely ceremony and kept all the guests busy with a full weekend of events, from Friday's taco truck dinner through Sunday brunch, with cornhole and bocce on the lawn and plenty of mingling with family and friends from all the eras of their lives. Paper cranes hung from the trees, Duke the dog carried their rings, and the couple zoomed in on a Vespa, to everyone's great delight.

I had lots of fun helping with the flower-arranging project, beginning with a trip to the Monterey farmer's market. Between Mom and Aunt Fran and me and several of Deanne's friends, we got all the gorgeous blooms cut and sorted into many glass jars.

We couldn't resist a few other colorful additions to the decor, also from the farmer's market.

Deanne brought tree rounds gleaned from her job as an arborist in Palo Alto, and the results were lovely!

Despite my lack of photos to document it, the wedding was wonderful all around.

Tom is one of those cousins I feel lucky to count as a friend. I'm grateful to family ties for bringing us together when we'd never have had reason to cross paths otherwise. We've spent at least a week or two together nearly every summer since we were babies (he's just a few months older than me). There are stacks of photos of us cousins through the years and, somewhere, a pile of letters we exchanged starting in elementary school, long before the advent of email. We've shared some excellent wilderness adventures in Michigan and Colorado and California, two memorable Thanksgivings (one during each of my two stints living on the west coast), and a crazy 24 hours on a team running the Hood to Coast relay in Oregon, among other notable experiences. But, as the best weddings always are, this was a great opportunity to fill in the rest of the picture as family and friends shared stories and impressions from his childhood in Denver to his college years at Stanford to his product-inventing, marathon-running, and world-traveling days of the past decade. It was also terrific to meet Deanne's family and friends, and to hear more about her past and how she and Tom found each other. Deanne, it's so great to have you as part of the family! Thanks to you both for including all of us in your celebration, and I look forward to many more gatherings and adventures and tales to tell in the years to come.

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After the wedding, Nick and I had several more days to explore around Carmel Valley with various arrangements of the family constellation and on our own. Here's the stunning view from 17-Mile Drive, which we explored with Sarah and Michael and then, after the fog rolled in, followed up with a hike at Point Lobos to see more of the spectacular Pacific coastline.

With my parents, we made a trip to the Monterey Bay aquarium. The jellies and sea stars and sardines and all manner of other sea life were mesmerizing, and the sea otter feeding was good entertainment.

I think I enjoyed seeing marine mammals in the wild, from a distance, perhaps even more than the aquarium's close-up views. At various times out in Monterey Bay, we spotted sea otters floating on their backs and carrying babies; sea lions sunbathing and swimming; and even some leaping dolphins at sunset. Most awe-inspiring of all, we made a stop at the wharf in Santa Cruz on our first day and were lucky enough to see whales passing by.

Later in the week, Nick and I borrowed the PT Cruiser and cruised on down to Big Sur.

We ran around on the beach, admired the crashing waves, played with giant kelp, and went for a hike up through the redwoods at Pfeiffer State Park.

The next day, we hiked up a significant hill not far from where we were staying in Carmel Valley. It was a trail that Mom and Uncle Steve and I attempted back in March, but we ran out of time and had to backtrack instead of completing the loop. With that bit of unfinished business as motivation, I lobbied for us to give it another try. This time Nick and I made it all the way to the top, admired the view, and headed back down the other side.

 

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The second leg of the trip was a visit to Nevada City to see my good friends Chris and Carlyle, Nell (almost 5 now), and Maggie (age 1 and a new addition to the family since my last visit).

The Yuba River is as lovely as ever, and though the sculpted granite and green water may not be quite as warm and inviting in November as in the peak of summer, Carlyle and I had to jump in anyway for old times' sake.

It was fun to show Nick another of the places I once called home.

Meanwhile, Maggie is a delight. Hooray for peek-a-boo at the coffee shop (and spotting Kate-knit hats in their natural habitat)!

Nell is a firecracker and such fun. Here she is in the squeeze machine.

We were only there for two days, but I think we won full approval!

Thanks to Carlyle and Chris for taking the last Yuba photo and the final two photos in this post. Full album from the California trip here.

More Egg-cellent News

We now have two laying hens! Pippi has joined Penny in providing for her people, which makes checking the nest box each day doubly fun. It's egg-specially egg-citing because, as an Easter Egger, Pippi lays greenish eggs. They complement Penny's brown ones nicely.

We had nearly a full carton to bring up to Petoskey for Thanksgiving, along with a few loaves of bread from our favorite local bakery. Nick cooked up a breakfast batch of "eggs in a nest" to kick off a day of enjoying the harvest bounty.

In other news, it seems that Penny may be done laying cute little pullet eggs. Check out the mammoth egg in the upper right slot of the carton below. I egg-spected a gradual size increase over time, but yesterday's was as small as ever and today's prize is nearly twice the size. It may be just a fluke, but now we know she's capable of more!

By the way, Nick just cracked open that giant egg. Two yolks!

Interesting

The other day, I snapped two photos as I passed through the garage. Both are excellent evidence of how my life has grown more interesting (and more complex) since Nick came into the picture.

Exhibit A. Two big buckets of sunflower seeds. Harvested from the acre of sunflowers Nick and Marty planted this year, to be pressed into edible sunflower oil if they can come up with the right combination of hardware to make a borrowed oil press work. (That particular piece of heavy equipment is installed in Marty and Erica's garage, not mine.)

Exhibit B. Yes, that would be a hive of honeybees. They're alive, although the cold weather keeps them fairly quiet. They were living in a hollow tree that Nick recently took down on the job. (He runs a tree service). Their section of trunk is now tucked into a 50-gallon trash can beside our bikes. I believe they'll be staying for the winter.

Tomato Tornado

In summing up the garden season, I had to give the tomatoes their very own post. Bold and bright and beautiful in their various shapes and sizes, they demanded it.

We started the season with an unprecedented number of different tomato varieties, thanks to the pooling of my seed collection and Nick's. Sure enough, that led to some great variety in the harvest basket, too! These are Green Zebras, one Orange Banana, one Chocolate Stripe, a Brandywine peeking in from the top, and various grapes and cherries.

There was a single Pruden's Purple plant, and it produced a single - but giant - fruit. (Maisie for scale.)

Nick happened to have a fish scale handy, so we weighed it. It came in somewhere between 1.5 and 2 pounds!

Here it is with its more modestly sized companions: Peacevine (red cherries), Sungold (orange cherries), Yellow Pear (yellow and pear-shaped, of course), and Juliet (red oblongs).

I saved seeds for next year, too, so we can do it all over again.

The seeds ferment in water for a few days, then get spread out to dry.

Meanwhile, lots of this year's harvest ended up like this:

Cut in half, sprinkled with a little salt, and then slow-roasted in the oven for a few hours. Delicious blended up with roasted garlic and basil for a fresh, simple sauce. Or marinated in olive oil, garlic, and basil for a few days and then used to top zucchini pancakes, along with a dollop of goat cheese (inspiration found here). As anyone who's been invited to dinner at my house in the peak of harvest season probably knows already, I make this a lot!

Yay for tomatoes - it'll be a long wait before they come around again!

Garden Wrapup

The growing season is finished for another year, but I have lots of photos I've not yet posted. Come join me in the garden for a tour of some highlights from 2011.

Here's the view back in June. At this point, most everything was just seeds in the ground or tender new sprouts (except for the wild tangle of asparagus on the far right).

Here's the same view in August. Even this was still not quite the peak of productivity, but it gives a sense of the jungle-like growth.

I love harvest season, when the planning and planting and tending bears fruit all at once. Many days in late August and September, my lunch break included a gathering trip to the garden. Within minutes, I'd have a bowl full of something beautiful.

Potato harvest day was fun. Nick grew these same fingerlings last year. We saved some over the winter to use as seed potatoes.

I found a message in the tuber-shapes. What could it mean?

I also unearthed a pair of cute tater-mice.

It was not such a great year for squash, but several intrepid spaghettis climbed the fence. Hardly Squash Mountain, however.

The lettuce was pretty.

I grew one decent-size leek and a few scrawny ones. It was a first attempt.

It was a first attempt for parsnips, too. Yield: one single specimen. Sparsnips, quipped a clever farmer friend.

The fence-row sunflower tradition continued.

Scarlet runner beans engulfed this cool old cherry-picking ladder with impressive speed.

These beans grow big, by the way.

I let the largest pods dry and harvested the beautiful, speckled purple beans. I'm hoping these will become next year's giant beanstalk!

Maisie still loves her beans. (Note the tongue?) Bella declines.

As usual, the season's color show concluded with a purple performance by the New England asters.

The six-legged garden visitors enjoyed the show as much as I did.

Things are pretty much done out there now - just a few herbs and greens still available for gathering. With the early darkness, I find myself running out to the garden with a flashlight for last-minute additions to dinner. But beets and carrots and potatoes fill bins in the basement, the cucumbers are pickled, the basil is frozen in icy cubes, packets of greens and jars of tomato sauce also await their fate in the freezer, and overall, I'd call it another good year in the garden.