I just want to start this post off by getting something off my chest:

I AM REALLY, REALLY SICK OF HAVING CONTRACTORS AROUND!!!

 

Phew. I kind of feel better now. Sorry about that, but it’s been three months since we moved up here, and it seems as if a day hasn’t gone by when there isn’t someone – either a plumber, an electrician, a general contractor, a chimney sweep, a spring/well/water guy, a landscaper, an arborist or, with our luck, a combination of them all – trudging around the property, asking for glasses of water and signed checks.  We’re so used to being walked in on, it’s gotten to the point where we consider it a good day if the guy strolling into our dining room unannounced is even wearing a shirt.

Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was all the animals around here. I had forgotten, having been in Long Beach for several years, what it was like to live in an area so heavily populated by non-human critters. Sure, we had the typical suburban scourges like racoons, skunks, and the occasional opossum waddling through our lives (and sometimes our kitchen), but nothing like we have out here. I’m not just talking rabbits and mice (which of course are everywhere), but larger things, with pointier teeth. Red Tailed hawks circle the air constantly. Bobcats, which we were surprised to learn have a habit of wandering around, sometimes only feet from the house, have been a regular sight. There are coyotes, as well – but more on them later.

Not all the animals are predators, of course. Like most people who live away from major cities we have an abundance of deer:

These adorable little things started showing up each evening just before dark, apparently to take advantage of our surplus of apples. Oftentimes we see them in the middle of the day, looking at us like we’re trespassing on their lawn.

As alluded to above, coyotes have been heard, too – packs of them howling eerily in the middle of the night, celebrating after some moonlit kill. Mostly they remained unseen – that is, until one recent morning, when we caught the tail-end of one slinking across the hill behind our house as we were getting Sarah off to school. The experience was both scary and comical: scary because our cats were out and about (they would be choice snacks for any predator), and comical because of the general demeanor of this normally nocturnal creature. In truth the poor coyote was far from threatening; it had the look of a teenager trying desperately to sneak past his parents on his way to his room upon returning home waaay late for curfew. The whole thing was actually kind of awkward. I felt so bad for the little guy that I almost gave it a cat.

Speaking of cats, ours have been bringing in all sorts of prey themselves: lizards, mostly, but also a bird or two, some moles, a mouse, and even a chipmunk. Usually we’re able to rescue the critters, but not always, as the following picture illustrates…

Poor chippy. Sarah made me take this one out and give a proper burial, complete with a stone grave marker. Fortunately she hasn’t seen some of the other things our cats have tormented.

Which is not to say that the girl doesn’t have a healthy awareness of death, at least in the “circle of life” kind of way. One of our more exciting experiences, in fact, came last week when we went for a little after-dinner walk around what we call the “upper pasture” –  several acres of additional, undeveloped land next to our property that came as a package deal.

We were happily hiking around, dodging poison oak, when we discovered, in the dry, dusty dirt and fallen leaves, what appeared to be a large section of jawbone. Excited, we went on to unearth almost an entire deer skeleton, including the antlers. The bones were quite clean, so we surmised that the creature had met its end some time ago, most likely at the hand – er, paws – of one of the aforementioned coyotes.

Being the irresponsible parents we are, we of course let Sarah handle everything  – without even a single drop of Purell. Someone call DSS!

We spent a good hour out there, digging around and generally behaving, in Sarah’s words, like “archaeologists.” When we were done we hauled everything back to the house (Lizzy had run off and grabbed some plastic grocery bags to facilitate the return trip) and dropped the loot in a utility sink to soak in bleach. Once cleaned and dried, the take was pretty impressive, if a little gruesome:

Everything went into a sturdy cardboard box, into which we placed a hand-written note that read: “These have been washed and bleached. They CAN be handled.” The very next day at school we signed Sarah up for the following week’s “Sharing” (what we old-timers used to call “Show And Tell”). That day actually came and went just two days ago, and by all accounts Sarah killed. Apparently the kid who shared after her had brought a rock. Poor kid.

Best of all, we found out that her classmates did handle the bones – and with gusto. There’s hope for the future yet!

– Jason

It is now high season for apples around here, and it’s become obvious that we will never get to them all.  We have now pressed 25 gallons of cider and canned 10 quarts of apple sauce, and we have barely scratched the surface.  The apple trees remain stubbornly full.  But we sure have fun picking!

We are giving away cider as fast as we can, plan on making a lot more apple sauce, and are even making 3 gallons of hard apple cider (more on that below) with plans for 3 more gallons soon, but we are going to call it quits sometime.  We have the phone number of a nice guy who wants to pick apples for making hard cider, and we know of at least one apple juice company down the street who will pay us (a pittance) if we bring them our apples.  But it’s even worse with the three pear trees.  All three pear trees are hopelessly entangled in poison oak vines and are too tall to boot.  We ordered an orchard ladder but it hasn’t come in.  We tried canning some not-yet-ripe pears in cider, but they didn’t turn out that well.

But when we let the pears ripen, they become mealy.  Of the few we have managed to collect, that is.  Maybe we’ll tackle the pears next year, when the poison oak has been dealt with and the trees have been pruned to a more reasonable height.

The three plum trees produced barely a handful of fruit this year and, frankly, I’m counting my blessings on that one.  We’ve got our hands full.

Regarding the hard apple cider, it will have to be a serial tale.  Apparently it takes something like two months to ferment, although some resources say two weeks, confusingly.  We bought a book, read about it online, bought lots of things at the brewery store and asked questions, and still have no clue what we’re doing.  Jason and I setting up the 3 gallons to ferment was like something out of “I Love Lucy.”  You can’t tell from the photo, but there’s an extra cork floating around inside the bottle.  I’m not going to say who did it – let’s just say “mistakes were made.”

This photo was taken the day after it was set up, and it’s bubbling away nicely.  It is now three days later and the cider is an unsettling bright yellow color and is bubbling out a nasty sulfur smell.  Maybe we shouldn’t have set it up by the dining room…  Anyway, we’ll keep you posted as it progresses.

We all had a wonderful time at the Santa Cruz County Fair two weekends ago, which should be re-named the Santa Cruz COUNTRY Fair.  The rows upon rows of farm animals took up nearly half the fair, and highlights included a parade of old tractors

and Sarah getting to pet a 3-day-old calf

I was thrilled to see the spinning demonstration – no, not the stationary bicycle exercise class.  It was neat to see several women adeptly spinning wool into yarn with old-fashioned-looking spinning wheels that, it turns out, were fairly new and are still being made.  Who knew?  We also learned that our area was the biggest exporter of apples in the USA around 1910-1920.  The most popular varieties at the time were Newton Pippin, Bellflower and Red Delicious.  Guess which kinds we have?  Yup.  And several of our trees are 100 years old.  Now it all makes sense.

Well, that’s about it for today’s update.  I’ll end with a couple of photos from a hike on our own land.  We went to the “upper pasture” where, for some reason, I was pointing to the left

and we even ventured into the woods at the back of the property to the top of the ridge.  We followed a deer trail and found a beautiful stand of mature oak trees at the top – sorry no photo of that.  But the most fun was had by Sarah who found a delightful patch of mud.  Our spring-fed water tank has a crack in the top and there’s so much water that the excess escapes out the crack, cascades down the tank like a waterfall and pools in one muddy spot in the upper pasture.  Sarah had a blast!

We’ve got to fix that leak.  But meanwhile we’re working like dogs trying to clear brush/trees in the chicken yard area (which is huge) before the fence is put up around it, which would make dragging dozens of small trees out of there much more difficult.  We are in a race against the contractor whom we hired to put up the fence, and we’ll let you know who wins.  It’s going to be a squeaker: one side of the rectangle-shaped yard was fenced in today, and we have about three quarters of the yard cleared.  Wish us luck!

– Lizzy

Sorry that I haven’t posted sooner, but there’s been a lot going on. Admittedly, most of it is just your typical around-the-property chores like clearing brush, driving around in the pickup, chainsawing dead trees, and chasing bobcats off the property with a hoe (I know, booooring), but it’s still pretty daunting. Sure, most farmer-types probably bang these things off their to-do lists before breakfast, but for us – this stuff takes time!

We did tackle one task, however, that was pretty exciting…

As you know we had a large chicken coop built on the property. We plan on having about 40 birds, and with the number of predators we have around here, we knew that not only would we need plenty of room for the birds to free-range, but that we’d have to invest in some serious fencing as well. So we marked off a quarter-acre (or so) rectangle between the barn and the house (land that rises steadily at about a thirty degree angle), then got ourselves a contractor who would do most of the work installing 4×4 posts and polypropylene deer fencing around the perimeter.

The contractor, who happens to be a neighbor, told us we could save some money if we could dig the holes ourselves, and since we do have this nice, new tractor…well, long story short, we went and got ourselves a large auger with a PTO attachment for the Kubota. If you’ve never seen this kind of thing let me tell you – it’s huge. Twelve inches in diameter and about four and a half feet from top to bottom.

It’s actually quite fun and simple to use, once you get a tutorial and assuming you’re digging on flat, healthy land. For this job, though, we’d have to navigate the tractor across some really steep patches of arid and loose earth, pock-marked with gopher holes. So not quite so fun and simple to use after all, it turns out.

Our neighbor had already marked the spots where we were to drill, so Lizzy directed me while I drove the tractor and operated the auger. We had to drill nine or ten holes along a path that traversed the property horizontally, then about fifteen running down the hill to the coop, then several more along the bottom (the final vertical length, which runs dangerously close to our gas line, will be dug by hand). It was the first bit – the row near the top of the hill – that carried the most risk.

The experience was harrowing. I had to back the tractor across the hill sideways, and even though the spot we had chosen was on somewhat of a plateau, the angle there was still around 15 degrees – steep enough for me to feel like I could tumble port over starboard at any second.  In fact, I experienced several moments of sheer terror and near-slips before I even backed up to the first hole.

Unfortunately I was unable to take any pictures, as the mechanics of the act – that is to say, boring massive holes with heavy machinery on a brittle and steep bluff while narrowly avoiding rolling to my death amid a couple of tons of metal and diesel – left very little room for holding a camera. Somehow, miraculously, we managed to finish the task unscathed:

This picture was actually taken a couple of days later, after the several posts had been set, but you get the idea. It’s a little hard to see here, but look at the posts in the foreground. See the drop? Now picture me, strapped to a tractor, rolling all the way down the hill, stopping only after crashing through the paper-thin walls of the old barn. Now picture Lizzy, suddenly wishing she had looked into that offer for a life insurance policy we got in the mail the other day…

Anyway, as I said we pulled it off, if only just barely, so that’s that. More to come on some of the moderately less-dangerous things, like canning pears, that have occupied our time these last few days…

Jason

We have awesome neighbors.  They are not only friendly, kind, generous and are practically like grandparents to Sarah, but they know our property inside and out.  Which is wonderful, since we’re still bumbling around regarding all things farm.  Diane’s parents used to own our property (they passed away a few years ago) and they farmed it: mostly apples, corn and cattle.  So, when we started to pick apples for more cider on Saturday, they came out to help and showed us how to shake the apples down off the trees, which is much more efficient.  And, wow, did we get apples!

This truckload was from mostly emptying four trees, and a few apples from various other trees.  So, maybe five trees worth, added together.  We have 35 trees.  Just sayin’.

On Sunday, we pressed 8 gallons of cider and we still have two FULL trash barrels worth of apples.  Jason did all the hard work of hand-cranking the press, and Sarah and I ladled the cider into gallon containers while fighting off the yellow jackets.  We have no more cider containers, so we’ll have to buy cheap gallons of water and empty them.  The two barrels of apples might make around 15 more gallons of cider.  Time to plug in the chest freezer!

The leftover smashed apples from pressing those 8 gallons filled up our compost bin (layered with leaves, of course).  We have one more empty bin, but after that we’ll have to start a big compost pile down the hill.  I envision a farm-sized compost pile that we’ll turn using the bucket on the tractor – and this apple smash stuff will be perfect to start it up.

Anyway, Jason couldn’t just rest on his laurels after hand-cranking 8 gallons of cider, oh no.  That same day he also hand churned butter:

Okay, there’s really not much butter in this picture, but you can see Sarah likes to help Daddy clean the bowl.  And, also on that same day, Jason made Pork and Apple Sausage:

The recipe uses sauteed tart apple and leek, as well as reduced apple cider.  The results were amazingly delicious.  This photo of the raw final product does not do it justice, but I had to include it anyway:

We ate some for dinner on Monday and decided they’re so sweet we’ll use them as breakfast sausage from now on.  Yum!

And now, I must admit my big concession regarding organic farming.  On Monday I sprayed poison on the poison oak.  After my pitiful attempt at pulling it out by hand landed me at the doctor’s TWICE, with less than 1% of it pulled out, I came to the conclusion that there is a limit to my organic orthodoxy.  Poison oak is where I draw the line.  I am supremely sensitive to the stuff, needing a long course of prednisone every time I get near it, and boy oh boy do we have our fair share around here.  Since the property wasn’t taken care of for many years, the poison oak has really taken over.  I geared up and sprayed for 2 1/2 hours on Monday morning, and got a good amount done, but not all by a long shot.  Here I am in my getup:

I was protecting myself from the poison oak as much as from the poison that I was spraying.  I think it worked well in that regard, but I probably started to get heat stroke by the end.  I stopped when I started to feel nauseated, and after I took off the jumpsuit I found I’d sweated through all my clothes – totally soaked.  And I weighed two pounds less.  Needless to say, I drank a lot of water afterwards!

Luckily, that was all the important poison oak spraying, and the rest can wait until cooler weather.  What is also lucky is that the poison oak is growing where we don’t plan on growing any crops – it’s mostly under redwoods and live oak trees.  Our future vegetable garden area is completely free of the stuff.  And certain areas, like the back forest and the upper pasture, are infrequently visited so I think we’ll wait until we have goats that can eat the poison oak up there.

Ah, my theoretical future goats…  For now, I’ll be happy when we can finally order our chicks.  The coop is done, but the HUGE chicken fence is still in process – but that’s a subject for another blog.

Meanwhile, I owe our wonderful neighbors a gallon or two of cider for all their help with the apple tree shaking.  And next time they offer to help, I’d better be ready for a whole truckload of apples!

– Lizzy

If you’re like me you remember a day, way back in your youth, when you were able to purchase and enjoy real, unpasteurized apple cider. You remember how good it tasted, and you lament that you can’t seem to get it anymore (the government now requires all producers to pasteurize their cider in order to prevent consumers from getting sick). This has bothered me for years now, especially each autumn, and now that we live with a small orchard – well, let’s just say we have to do something with all these apples. Well now it’s finally happened – we got ourselves a cider press! Take a look at this beauty:

As I posted earlier in the weekend, Lizzy found it for sale on Craig’s List. It certainly qualifies as “Like New,” in that it is clean, intact and works flawlessly (though not effortlessly). And it cost us half of what a new one would (God I love Craig’s List). The only downside to the deal was that we had to drive over two hours to pick it up; a quickly arranged dinner with some Berkeley-based friends on the way home, however, took some of the sting out of that. We got back to the house after dark and had a friend over the next day (Sunday), so it wasn’t until Monday that we were able to experiment with our first batch.  We hiked down to the orchard with a five-gallon bucket and came up with this:

I’m not nerdy enough (yet) to have an opinion on what ratio of apple varieties produces the best cider, so we just trudged around and grabbed whatever seemed ripe enough to consume. Ultimately we were able to come up with about 20-25 lbs. That is, at least I think that’s how much we got – by the time I finished lugging the bucket up to the house I could have sworn the damned thing weighed then times that. Yes, I’m that weak.

Of course many of the apples were pretty spotty, but for the most part they looked pretty darned good – a miracle, it seems, considering none of the trees have been sprayed or pruned for at least a couple of years. Still, I thought it best to wash them, and sure enough, as soon as we hit them with the spray – out pops a pretty hefty, annoyed-looking spider.  So…I washed them with a little extra vigor. Then I washed them again. Then I wept.

There are two steps, it turns out, to this process, and we dove into them with aplomb. First we fed the whole apples into a grinder attached to the front of the press. I hand-cranked the wheel on the side, pulverizing the fruit. The apples (now all mashed-up bits) dropped into the muslin-lined bucket underneath.

Pictured below: me cranking the grinder like a boss. Not pictured below: me sweating like Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News” and breathing through my mouth like an over-excited gorilla. Trust me, it’s there – it’s just not pictured…

Once that grunt work was done we moved on to the second step. We tied the muslin bag up loosely and placed the flat, wooden, circular lid on top of the mound of apple chunks. Then we cranked the large, threaded metal rod down, down, down until it hit the lid, forcing it onto the bag of apples – and then we kept on cranking. The apple mash was squished, and voila! Cider issued forth from a small hole in the bottom like ambrosia.

*Note that we placed a large pot underneath the hole to catch the liquor. I know, I know – it seems obvious, but as anyone who has ever changed his/her own oil knows – remembering that part isn’t a given.

I admit – Sarah had her hands in the pot the whole time, but I figured it was no big deal. I’m sure there are worse things in your average bushel of home-grown apples than a few kid-germs (I mean, the government didn’t force producers to pasteurize their cider for nothing). Anyway, the whole thing was done in about ten minutes. Here’s what we got:

Which we carefully portioned out…

And the result: from about 25 lbs of apples we pressed just over a gallon and a quart of totally awesome cider. And when I say awesome I mean it – this stuff tastes just the way I remember real cider tasting. So sweet, but with depth and a just the right amount of tang – nothing at all like what you find in stores.

Now for the next, obvious step: learning how to make hard cider! I’m thinking with a little sweat and patience we won’t have to buy beer ever again!

Lizzy took a short video, as well:

Wish us luck – there’s going to be a lot more apples to press before the end of the year!

Jason

Heading up north of San Fran to buy a cider press Lizzy found on Craig’s List. Pictures later!

J.

In the last two days we’ve had a blast staining the new chicken coop

and Sarah made sure to put her signature hand prints on the East side.

The wonderful thing about this project is that it doesn’t matter how sloppily we slapped on the stain – it’s just a coop!  We let Sarah do her own thing with almost no intervention, and didn’t worry about our own technique either.  We just did our best to keep from painting any windows or doors shut.  It was happy, busy chaos – perfect for a future fond memory.

Then Jason said: “Next up: Sarah’s room!”  Ooooh no, thought I, not like this!  We’d have pink and purple splatted across the floor, on the ceiling, hand prints, drips, globs…  No no no.

But one thing we did agree on, after putting in a good afternoon of chicken coop staining, was that Sarah should drive us home.  Yes, she is only 5 1/2 but the girl’s gotta learn sometime:

Note that we kept saying she should keep her eyes on the “road”.  Actually, that was just our driveway.  Most of our driveway, not the whole thing.  Because of this enormously long driveway, Sarah gets to sit on our laps fairly regularly and practice steering (with help, of course).  Once, when I had the car down on the flat part, in a field near the driveway, I really let her steer by herself – what a riot!  We laughed ourselves silly!  We eventually made it to the driveway, and then I started helping so we wouldn’t go careening into the apple orchard below.

Here’s a photo of the start of the driveway, by the street, showing how far away the house is:

It starts out flat, as you can see, but then it really goes uphill pretty steeply – Sarah should be an expert by the time she’s old enough for a license.  Speaking of which, did you know there’s no license required to drive a tractor? Dun dun DUN!!!

– Lizzy

Let’s start with a few pictures.  Most of these were taken on the four-ish acres of apple and pear trees that make up the front of the property. There are several older trees (upwards of 100 years, we think) – gnarly, half-dead, hollowed-out relics that are still, somehow, producing bushels of apples with nifty names like Bellflower and Pippen. There are also a dozen or so newer trees (Red Delicious, it turns out. Blah) which look far more healthy. A couple of pear trees, which our neighbor (whose parents owned the land from around the early 1900’s) ominously referred to as great “canning” pears, keep the apple monopoly at bay. About thirty-five trees in all. None of these have been pruned or sprayed for at least two years, and the fruit is blotched, discolored, misshapen and tasteless. Kind of like me, back in High School…

The land was pretty much unattended to for a few years; consequently we’ve been doing a lot of brush-clearing and chainsawing. Fortunately we’ve got a new toy – a Kubota B series tractor with bucket, mower and tiller attachments. We’re both crazy about the thing, but I’m afraid that Lizzy’s affection for the orange miracle-machine may be pushing the limits of what most would consider normal. I swear the other day I overheard her whispering to it something about “always being together” and “never letting them come between us.”

Sarah’s been getting in on the act, as well. Is is appropriate to let a five and a half year-old clear brush with a hand-saw? Probably not. Does it make her happy? You bet. Will I be spending an inordinate amount of money on first aid? Probably…

One of the best things we did when we got out here was buy a pickup truck (we sold one of our Honda Civics when we were still in Long Beach). I know, I know – pretty cliché. Still, you gotta admit it looks cool. Sarah’s going to love wrecking it in ten years!And that’s about it for now! More updates later!

Jason

Hello there! On this page you’ll find all you’ll ever need to know about our recent giant leap from living on a 2,400 square-foot lot in Long Beach to a house on 9-ish acres of farmland, apple trees, redwoods and a whole bunch of vindictive thistle outside of Monterey Bay. Both I (Jason) and Lizzy will be posting – hopefully with some regularity, but we’ll see. Lately I’ve been so busy I haven’t even had time to water the poison hemlock that little Sarah has been nurturing under her pillow.

Anyway, there’s a lot to catch up on, so check back in and we’ll do our best to keep you updated!

Jason