Backbreaking Toil In The Orchard

We have, over the last couple of years, planted twelve fruit trees in our front yard “orchard”. This year we decided to add two more peach trees, after last summer yielded a hefty crop of fruits from Peachy, the lone peach tree. (Of course, we decided, like idiots, to let the peaches ripen on the branch, so every last one of them was eaten by squirrels. But we’ve learned. Oh yes, we’ve learned.)

We’ve gotten our trees from Trees of Antiquity, with the exception of a Granny Smith and an Enterprise apple and Peachy himself, which we impulse-bought at a nearby nursery co-op. Our two newest additions, a Peregrine (or “Perry”) and a Rio Oso Gem (or “Rio”), are both from Trees of Antiquity and were delivered to us about three weeks ago. They came in a bundle with the six blueberry bushes we’re putting along the base of the deck out back (we got Blue Crop and O’Neal varieties) and the Alexander apple we needed to fill the spot of death with at the front of the orchard (the deer keep getting to the tree at the center of the yard along the street and eating it down to nothing. We’ve put a new tree in that hole every Spring), with the roots of all the plants smushed together and tied up into a plastic bag. It was gold and gray and gloomy and miserable this past Monday after work, but the trees couldn’t really stand being in that bag much longer. With no hockey on during the interminable break between regular season and playoffs, we figured we didn’t have anything better to do, so we got out the sod cutter and shovels, and got digging.

Even though it was dreadful outside, there was a spot of joy — in his little cage of deer netting, Peachy is starting to bud!

Before long, he is going to be a riot of glorious, fluffy pink blossoms!

After cutting a big circle of sod to make room for the eventual mulching we’ve promised the trees (but have yet to deliver), we pulled Perry out of the bag and were delighted to discover we wouldn’t need to dig much of a hole for him.

That’s not the world’s most inspiring rootball, but someday, as the peach juices are running down our chins as we loll in the shade of his mighty canopy (in as much as a semidwarf tree can have a mighty canopy), we’ll look back at this picture and laugh and laugh. Or something.

After cutting through roots and chipping out rocks and laboring to create a sufficient pit in the clay that passes for soil in our yard, we nestled Perry in and filled around him with some nice garden soil. Look at what a towering giant he is!

Sufficiently exhausted, it was time to repeat the process with Rio, who had a much bigger rootball. Of course. With tempers starting to run short, we finally got him settled into his own spot, ready to start producing a hefty bumper crop.

Okay, yeah, neither one of these trees is even waist high. So, no, we don’t expect any fruits for at least three years. But in our experience with the apples, these buggers grow like weeds. By this time next year, both these trees will be taller than we are.

The last step of the planting on Monday was to cage Perry and Rio in their own deer netting safety enclaves, and by the time we finished we were all too drained to even bother taking a picture. The lesson we’ve all learned from this venture is that tree-planting is way more work than we want to do on a worknight.

A Little Splash Of Pretty

I have very few regrets about the plantings of Maple Hoo, but one of them, this time of year, is the lack of forsythia. Of course, forsythias look like ass most of the year, but for a few weeks in Spring, they’re the very best. We have one scraggly little stick in the backyard that’s currently trying its hardest to be a festive, bright yellow spray, but really, it’s not that great. Fortunately, I get my forsythia fix at work, along the path outside my building. They were slow in coming, but today I stepped outside into a brisk, sunny afternoon and was greeted by an eruption of loveliness.

In the immortal words of Farmer Hoggett, that’ll do, pig.

Senor Patata

Last year we had pretty much just one success in our garden: potatoes. Not only were they easy to grow, but they were insanely scrumptious, so we eagerly turned over a huge percentage of our garden space this year to a massive potato crop. Of course, being complete spazzes, we freaked out that Seeds of Change would run out of potato supply and not fill our order, and in our obsessive checking up with them to see what the status of our seed potatoes was, we got it into our heads that they had to be planted two to four weeks before the last frost. EEK! But the last frost is, like, next week! When the order finally arrived in the mail, we sent Boomer out for more bags of soil and leaf compost, and raced to ready the beds on a blustery, gray evening after work. Normally we’d save the yardwork for the weekend, but this was urgent! It had to be done right now!

So we discarded the protective straw coverings from two of the beds, and pulled up the volunteer garlic and onions coming up in the old soil. Then we lugged bags and bags of new soil into the garden and filled the beds up with the stuff. Then it was time for the fun part:

Our delicious crops this year are going to be Yellow Finn (the single most delicious potato we’ve ever eaten, and a bumper crop last summer), Desiree, Banana Fingerling, and All Blue. We’ve never grown the latter three varieties, and if they suck, we’re going to be very disappointed by the space we gave over to them that could have been Yellow Finns. (Just kidding. I think we get Banana Fingerlings from our farm, and they’re fantastic.)

Potatoes are very fun to plant, because you dig a four-inch hole and drop a whole potato in.

That’s it.

Of course, they’re moderately high maintenance once they grow, since you have to continue to mound soil around the plants to keep them happy, but in the meantime, we’re feeling super-productive. I mean, look at how much of our garden is now working hard at growing magnificent crops!

The best part of doing all this work today was when we read the growing instructions that came with the seed potatoes, and discovered they can be planted starting two to four weeks before the last frost, and all the way up to twelve weeks before the first frost. So now we’re thrilled at the prospect of doing a second planting later this summer. That would at least justify how many seed potatoes we’ve got left over after this first planting.

How I Spent My Annual Bonus

Last month was that happiest time of the year for the people who work for my employer — annual bonus time. Normally I don’t pay much heed to my bonus, just enjoying the bit of breathing space it gives me if it’s my month to pay the mortgage, although I did once upgrade us from a futon to a cheap couch with it. This year I decided to treat myself to something cool, and splurged on an heirloom prosciutto from La Quercia. I’d gotten a sampler of some of their amazing cured pork products for Christmas, and figured this would be a scrumptious addition to my pantry for the next few months. Of course, I couldn’t have a prosciutto without a meat slicer, could I? So, yeah, I splurged on that, too.

The prosciutto itself is out of this world. It is so buttery and rich, with a depth to the flavor of the meat itself that puts the pre-packaged deli “prosciutto” that my bobo grocery store sells to shame. (I suspect that stuff is just thin-sliced regular ham, actually.) It’s exquisite. I am so excited about all the things I’m going to be able to make with this; it’s the kind of foodstuff that makes a meal extraordinary.

Meanwhile, the slicer is the bomb. I was more than a little terrified of it, but it turns out that it’s amazingly simple to use, and remarkably good at its job.

In trying to decide what meal to kick my new meat-slicer-and-prosciutto era off with, I decided I was desperately in the mood for asparagus risotto. Of course, Pookie hates asparagus, and while she likes the flavor of prosciutto, she’s not a fan of the texture. So I decided to make a creamy leek risotto with chicken (so I wasn’t just feeding my sister rice and leeks for dinner), and then added the asparagus and prosciutto to my bowl and Boomer’s when Pookie wasn’t looking.

It was all pretty simple and on-the-fly — I sauteed some chicken (one whole boneless, skinless breast, cut into small pieces) in olive oil in a dutch oven, then removed it from the pot. In the same pot I melted a tablespoon of butter with a tablespoon of olive oil and then sweated the leeks (two of them, white and light green parts only, chopped relatively fine and carefully rinsed) in that. Then I stirred in two cups of arborio rice and let them get a nice coating of the oil before stirring in about a half cup of white wine. Once the liquid was all absorbed, I added about a cup of hot chicken stock, and did the risotto thing: stir pretty regularly, simmer on low heat, let the liquid absorb, then add more stock. I used something in the neighborhood of seven cups of stock. When the rice was all tender and everything was creamy, I seasoned with salt and black pepper, and stirred the chicken back into the pot along with about a half a cup of fresh grated parmesan cheese. Overall, pretty basic, but still, pretty tasty. And with the addition of some steamed asparagus and that mind-blowing prosciutto? This became a masterpiece. Okay, maybe not a masterpiece, but it was pretty damn delicious.

Garlic, Unchained

Today was insane. It was gorgeous. It was like the entire world was as excited that March is over as we were. Look! The daffodils along the side of our house just busted out today:

Even though we know that it’s technically not garden season quite yet (you’re supposed to go by the last frost, which is conventionally thought of as April 15 in these parts), we couldn’t resist. It was time to have something going for reals in Maple Hoo’s vegetable beds. We turned our attention to the garlic.

Since it’s a bulb, garlic should be planted in the fall, and we made it cozy and warm under a thick blanket of straw for the winter. Because we have a rampant squirrel problem, we decided to discourage all vermin from digging up the garlic by covering the whole thing up with chicken wire. As the weather’s been warming up, and the aforementioned daffodils and their bulby brethren have been sprouting, so too is the garlic. And our tiny babies are starting to chafe in their little wire prison.

Our task today, on a warm, humid evening, was to take off the caging and remove the straw, which was all delightfully soaked after a couple of rainy days. We were gobsmacked to see what lay beneath:

It looks like every single bulb of garlic that we planted has sprouted. This is an astonishing success rate for us; for all that we talk a big game, we are really amateurish gardeners. Our approach is pretty much to toss shit in the ground and see what grows. So we’re stunned that underneath all that straw… everything was growing.

There’s plenty of time for all kinds of things to go wrong, and plenty of time for squirrels to ruin our lives, but for right now, we feel Springishly flush with success. And now we have something to watch every day when we walk past the garden, which is, ultimately, what the fun of this whole venture is.

Gardening… OUTSIDE!

Today was a big day in the lives of the tomatoes of Maple Hoo, as we could no longer deny that they have grown too big for the little trays we started them in. Knowing what a mess the three of us are capable of making with a few peat pots and a bag of potting soil, I suggested we use repotting plants as an excuse to bring the outdoor furniture out of storage. I know it’s a tad bit early for, say, grilling, and theoretically we could get that “last big snowstorm” Boomer keeps ominously saying could happen, but honestly our empty deck was starting to get depressing.

The furniture was put in storage early last summer because of the kitchen remodel so it’s been a long since the deck has been usable. I’d never thought of myself as a deck person but after having our picnic table and benches sitting like this for a year:

I can’t help but being antsy to be out sitting out on the deck in the evening, nursing a beer while Schnookie grills up some pork and bacon kebabs. Mmmmm pork and bacon kebabs… So it is with much glee and anticipation for warmer weather that I present the Maple Hoo Deck Furniture — restored to it’s former glory!

I can practically taste those kebabs looking at that!

For today though, the table was less about Summer food and more about Spring gardening. The tomatoes have grown up a lot since before dinner — here they are ready to bid fond adieu to their old seedling trays:

They look (and smell) like happy, robust and strong paste tomato plants, but beneath the soil, so to speak (no, wait, literally beneath the soil) they look like a cry for help:

They’re bursting at the seams in those tiny trays!

All 32 plants (of which we’ll probably only plant 8 in the big garden and maybe 4-6 more in the back) got re-potted in bigger peat pots, or as Schnookie dubbed them, “big boy beds”. We took great pains to label them with tags tied to their mini-skewer steaks (those skewers could be holding pork and bacon kebabs… O! When will it be grilling weather?!) and carrying them down to the yard to water them.

Looking at the paper tags and thinking about a steady steam of water being poured over the plants, Schnookie sighed, “If only we had those little plastic garden label things.” That’s when I remembered moving some garbage off the picnic table before moving it to the deck. That garbage, I was fairly certain, contained little plastic garden label things that came free with the peat starter trays. Heh. We may not solve the problems we face in the most efficient manner, but in the end we usually get it right! The tags were removed, and little plastic garden labels added.

For Christmas, Schnookie and I gave Boomer new watering cans, fancy ones, to replace the crappy ones we’d all hated using the last two years. Turns out spending a little extra on a watering can is worth it, as these work like a dream. (At the same time we gave Boomer the watering cans, we gave her ForzaMotorsport2, an Xbox 360 driving game. She and I had played it a bit, driving the starter car, a Volkswagen Golf. On a whim we fired it up last night and fumbled our way into getting enough points that we we awarded a 1961 Jaguar. The thing about these new-fangled computer games is that they’re considerably more sophisticated than the MarioKart of my youth. I stupidly thought the difference between driving the Golf and driving the Jaguar would be the Jaguar would be cooler to look at. I was wrong. Damn, but that Jaguar handles differently than a Golf! And that’s what I felt like using this new watering can. It’s a 1961 Jaguar compared to the Golf watering cans we’ve been struggling with. Watering the garden this summer is going to be like joy-riding in an Aston-Martin!) Schnookie commented, and I agree, that there is something just so very zen about watering plants with a nice steady rainish stream. And when you’re watering in the sun, and there are little beads of sunlit water collecting on fresh green leaves? Well, there’s not much better than that.

One thing that is better than that, though, is seeing the plants you water grow big and strong. The tomatoes weren’t the only seedlings getting a new home today. The onions got to take the new wood-and-glass cold frame (as opposed to the tent-y thing we wrote about earlier; that threatened to blow away in a recent wind-storm and has been relegated back to the garage) out for a spin. We plunked them down outside at around 2:00 or so.

The cold-frame supposedly will be about 20 degrees warmer than the outside temperature, meaning cold weather crops (like onions and lettuce) can be put in it starting, well, now. It’s supposed to get wicked cold tonight, so we’ll bring the onions back in for the night, but we figured they might enjoy some fresh air for a few hours today. We were right! Two hours later, we’re all convinced they look considerably perkier.

Look at them! They’re ready to be harvested and served alongside some pork and bacon kebabs! Seriously, we’ll be putting them out permanently starting tomorrow, along with the lettuce and the second set of onion seedlings. That’s right. We’ll have plants outside. Spring has certainly sprung. And the Bounteous Bounty is well on its way!

A Regionally Appropriate Sip

Well, it might still be a bit brisk outside, but it’s all sunny and summery and chockablock with playoffy hockey inside, so we needed a summery drink today. Flipping through one of my Food & Wine “Best of [Whatever Year]” cocktail booklets, I found something called a Schuykill Punch, from a restaurant in Philadelphia. Hey! We’re not far from the Schuykill! That’s, like, a cocktail meant for us! The recipe calls for 1 1/2 oz of spiced rum (it specifies Sailor Jerry’s, our new favorite alcoholstuff), 1/2 oz of Cointreau, 2 1/2 oz of orange juice, 2 1/2 oz of pineapple juice, and 1/4 oz of grenadine. Everything gets shaken together over ice, then is served over ice.

I, um, didn’t have all that stuff. Namely: I was lacking the orange juice. But I did have a few tangerines, which I juiced, and then evened out the amount with some lemon juice. The end result?

It’s a lovely color, is super-fruity, and the juices really punch up the vanilla of the spiced rum. As we each sampled a sip of the first one I made, Pookie just snatched the glass and trotted off, saying something about how it tastes how Hawaiian Punch was supposed to taste. We were never really juice drinkers as kids, and what I’m discovering later here in life is that those juices were all just missing alcohol.

Seedlings ’08: An Update

This morning saw tragedy befall our onion crop. Pookie reported shortly after the event, “The onions will someday be able to tell their descendants about the time they survived the Great Earthquake.” It seems she was rotating the flat of seedlings and, well, dropped it. Many were lost in the cataclysm. Of course, a fair number of them made it, so we should still be okay when it comes time for the big outdoor planting.

Meanwhile, the tomatoes are growing at a ridiculous rate. We were thinking they’d stay small enough that we’d transplant them in three weeks just directly from the seedling trays (like the peppers), but these are not well-behaved tomatoes. They are willful and perhaps even mutants. They’re huge. We’re going to have to graduate them up to little peat seedling pots soon, because their roots are starting to bust out the bottoms of their trays. Also, they’re tall enough now that they’re starting to fall over like they think they’re creeping, free-range tomatoes or something. So Boomer got out some twine and bamboo skewers and staked them today.

Meanwhile, we started a few more trays of seedlings — some more onions (we were planning to do so even before the Great Disaster) and some lettuces.

Now, lettuce is a total bobo plant. You can direct sow it into even the crappiest of soil, and with a bare minimum of care, really at any time of year, you’re likely to get a nice crop. But we want to start them early this year because we have ambitious plans for decorative planting patterns. I have no doubt this will yield highly comical results, but who are we to let that stop us?

This Is Not A Lemonade

I made Boomer drive to the store yesterday for a grapefruit, without realizing that it was the day before Easter. She came back several hours later, haggard and beaten down, and I felt terrible for having sent her on that errand just because I kind of vaguely wanted to make a cocktail with grapefruit juice in it. Now I had to make one, and it had to be good. I turned in my time of need to a St. Augustine Cocktail.

The recipe I used called for 1 1/2 oz. white rum, 1 oz. grapefruit juice, and 1/4 oz. of Cointreau. Everything was to be shaken with ice, then strained into a cocktail glass and served with a twist of lemon. I discovered at the last minute that I didn’t have white rum, so I used sugarcane rum instead. I also decided I wanted to sip this over the course of several hours, so I served it over ice. The end result? Looks like lemonade.

It also tastes like what I expect those fancy bottled European lemonades you see in gourmet stores to be like. It’s got the bitterness of the grapefruit, but the Cointreau, instead of being sweet, just smooths the grapefruit out. It’s light and fresh, with the sweetness of a rum drink, but has the sophisticated edge and crispness of a really nice lemonade.

The Greening Of Maple Hoo

This morning we woke up to the excited news from Boomer that there was a daffodil blooming in our yard. Abuzz with excitement, we put on our shoes, grabbed the camera, and ran outside, ready to soak up the glorious Springness.

Ummm… okay. Well, it is, undeniably, a daffodil. It is also minuscule. In case you can’t tell from that picture, here it is next to one of those sugargum ball things:

Maple Hoo’s first daffodil of the year is the size of a quarter. At best. We’re not even sure how Boomer noticed it in the first place.

A bit disappointed, we went in search of other signs of the burgeoning season around the grounds. As we turned the corner of the deck and made our way along the side yard, we came across the famed gooseberry bush of Maple Hoo. This is a plant that Boomer brought home from a Master Gardeners sale last summer; it had been free for the taking because it was so extravagantly pathetic that the Master Gardeners felt bad charging anything for it. It makes Charlie Brown Christmas trees look resplendent. When it arrived home it was no more than a stick in a pot, and now that it’s “thriving” in its new home, it’s really no more than a stick in the ground. But it’s allegedly a cutting from a massive heirloom gooseberry stock from some nearby estate, so while it might not look like much, it’s said to be from great bloodlines.

And it’s also getting leaves.