Greenjeans Farm

We’re busting out of the greenhouses this year!   I’ve run out of trays, thanks to my dear friend across the valley Barbara who keeps giving me her saved seeds!  We have more heirloom vegetables than ever and I’m busy trying to figure out how to mark them in the big garden so we really know who they are.  The ornamentals are coming on strong.  Gotta get stuff in the ground! 

We are kind of in experimental mode this year!  And it is WAY fun!  That’s the way I like it!  Jeff is still trying to deal with the rain and the cold and the soil but I am looking forward to that first fresh pea and potato salad with chives and sour cream dressing!   I am also looking forward to the unusual that you can’t find in the grocery that have the taste that you could have had 100 years ago!  Some of the great gourds from last year are turning into fairy houses with a little carving and paint!  We are doing a fairy garden at the bottom of the bottle tree!  Stay tuned for that one, I’m going to let the Morning Glory run its course there!  

I think it’s going to be a great year, and we are really ready for it!    We are going to take it as it comes, and if you wish, please give us your email address and we will let you know when things are ripe and ready!     

I promised to go with the ebb and flow this year and not feel pressured and not feel like it had to be done, but the weather is really testing my patience.

I don’t think I’ve seen a more cold or rainy May in my life! Even growing up in Tacoma Washington!  But this is Potter Valley CA, Farmer frustration! It’s time to plant tomatoes and cucumbers and melons.  They are saying LET ME OUT OF THIS GREEN HOUSE!!!  It’s in the low 40’s at night and I am not about to kill these beautiful babies. But I certainly do not want to drag around five gallon pots to plant in the ground and that is the way it seems to be going!

It’s 5 am and the sprinklers are grinding away in the vineyard across the way to protect the emerging fruit from frost.  I can see the headlights of our neighbor’s truck diligently driving along the rows.

September is almost gone, I am staring at a bushel basket of basil, a bushel basket of tomatoes, a bushel basket of beans, a bushel basket of crooked neck squash and thinking I would rather write tonight.  The wee hours of the morning are better spent on putting things up when it’s 100 degrees at 2pm.  It’s cool and quiet then, with nobody running in and out of the kitchen.  I have a reverence for food, and if I can’t give it my whole attention I would just as soon give it away or leave it out in the garden. 

My mother’s family was a German/ Irish bunch.  And my fathers family French / Norwegian!  At the Hellwig’s and Weller’s there was always cabbage, root vegetables, potatoes and roasts, good substantial meals.  At the Sorensen’s and DeSelle’s, you could bet on fresh fruit and cream and wonderful roasted things with delicate herbs.   I loved it all.  From the Raspberries and cream my Pa DeSelle used to feed me for breakfast, to the wilted cabbage and wonderful spice cookies Aunt Memo used to make us.  All my relatives were either directly from or one generation away from Europe.  AND I had an Italian Uncle Frank who was my best uncle!   They all came to the United States to make a life and they all ended up on the west coast! 

There was always someone cooking up a mess of beans.  There was always someone putting up a batch of jam or jelly.  There was ALWAYS someone trying to make me try yams in a way that would not make me throw up!

Then there were the neighbors, Hispanic, Eastern European, Texans!  As kids we used to run around to each others houses eating our way through the day, until the street lights came on and our mothers started calling us home.   Summer was always the best time for food.  In my book it beat out Thanksgiving!  Everybody had the same stuff on Thanksgiving! 

I finally got the rest of the garden in and we’re getting baby peas and new potatoes!  Pot roast for dinner, damn the hot!  I need some fatty meat and veggies!  Jeff put in a new screen door in the kitchen that slams and Squeaks! We have both decided that there can never be anything that really fits in this house and if it doesn’t squeak it isn’t worth it.   I absolutely love summer.  Flip flops, the river, the sun, eating, planting, eating, harvesting, eating, canning and freezing, eating! 

I have a bouquet of hot red sun flowers on the kitchen table with a bright yellow table runner,  and the freakin’ robins are eating my Rainer Cherries which are almost ready to pick!  A flock of geese flew like two feet over my head this morning!  They just went swoop, swoop, swoop.  No honking. Really spooky, it was like one giant bird!  They are getting better at flying in formation, Potter Valley geese are kind of retarded.   And I saw a bald eagle fishing the pond.   

There are times I just don’t care how funky this house is, you can’t keep a floor clean here and you have to dust and vacumm every day, and bugs crawl in and out – we found a potato bug in the bedroom today,, ugh, they look like little aliens! But otherwise it’s beautiful.  When it gets too hot we sit on the porch with the misters and the fountain going.  The lavender will start to bloom next week so it’s good the garden is done!   There is a climbing rose that grows up the crabapple that is in full bloom and honeysuckle and roses just make the air perfume!      

 When I think of my happiest times I think of my mom and dad drinking a beer on the porch after a hard day of yard work in Tacoma, dad in shorts with  his sandals with socks, brown ones with stripes at the top and his horned rimmed glasses (such the geek)!  Looking at Mount Rainier while it turned all pink and purple in the sunset.   And then I think of Memo’s  five foot back porch and the screen door and her yelling at me don’t slam the screen door, and stop jumping off the porch!  And then I would jump off the porch and cabbage wilting on the porch and running through laundry on the line because it smelled so good!   And that crazy folding stool thing in her kitchen!   

There is a framed postcard in our bathroom that greets me each morning on the shelf where I keep my make up brushes.  It portrays a 1950ish beautiful blonde woman ala Lana Turner in full make up and the caption on the bottom is “Frugal is such an ugly word.”  There is also a framed postcard on another shelf in our bathroom that portrays a 1950ish beautiful red headed housewife type and the caption on the bottom is “My Garden Kicks Ass”.  

These two postcards totally explain my relationship with frugality.  On one hand thinking frugal is a pain, on the other hand it can be greatly rewarding and a heck of a lot of fun.  The fact that I chose to place these two in our bathroom is beyond me.  I guess I think of the bathroom as a place of reflection!  And I am definitely a split personality.

There is the me who wants to be able to live in the Pottery Barn Catalogue.  And there is the other me who looks at the pictures in the  Pottery Barn Catalogue and can figure out how to get the same look and feel at a fraction of the price!  That spurs me on to other frugal adventures.  It would be wonderful to be able to hire people to decorate your home, or landscape your property, or if dogs and cats and mud and dust and fly’s didn’t exist!  And yet it is rewarding to be able to plant with abandon and make things grow and have a beautiful multi colored frog visit you in the bathroom while you are brushing your teeth.  And to not have to pay $300 for a slip cover that your dog is going to destroy in a matter of months. 

I long for an all white living room, I always have.  If I ever lived by myself I would have one, it would also have a view of city lights and ever changing floral themes in the room.  But I live  on a working farm with the people I love, so I won’t attempt an all white living room any time soon and if I ever get there I think it would be initially satisfying, but really lonely. You are never going to get alot of people that want to live in an all white house.    And hey, I can always go to my all white living room in my head and the people I love know not to bother me when I’m there! 

Visiting second hand and consignment stores rather than “antique” shops.  Making new friends, finding friends who have saved what they tore out of their homes and are willing to give you that wood that is just laying around, or the clawfoot tub that didn’t fit in the new bathroom. Or trading a tent for a mattress!   Buying that fabulous three door refrigerator that is marked down by 50% because there is a scratch on the side that no one will see.  These are the things that make frugal fun.  Trading plants and recipes with a neighbor.  Buying a side of organic beef that two families can share!  Now that is fun!  That is participating in your life, being conscious of what you are doing!

There are a lot of people who think they are entitled, either because of education or their “place” in society, what ever they think that is.  But none of us should think that it’s not work, getting up everyday, hitting the ground running.  Here and there you slam your head against a wall or fall down and brush yourself off and hit the ground running the next day!  The only rule should be it is never at the expense of another. 

I am not sure what this whole ramble means, except that I am leading up to taking a sledge hammer to my 7 foot living room ceiling.  Honey get the tarps out and catch on to the vision!