Silly birds

From Boys Own Book of Outdoor Sports

A wild turkey trap is made by first digging a ditch; then over one end is built a rude structure of logs, covered at the top. The structure should not be tight, but, of course, sufficiently close not to let the birds through. Indian corn is scattered about and in the ditch, and inside of the pen. The turkeys follow up corn in the ditch, and emerge from it on the inside. Once there, the silly birds never think of descending into the ditch, but walk round and round the pen, looking through the chinks of the logs for escape that way. To make all sure, the ditch should end about the center of the pen, and a bridge of sticks, grass and earth should be built over the ditch, just inside of the pen, and close to the logs; otherwise, in going around the bird might step inside the ditch, and once there it would follow the light and thereby reach the outside of the pen.

Farmy Decimal (Work in Progress)

I’ve been put in charge of getting our growing library at work organized. I used librarything.com to catalog the books, one ISBN at a time. Originally I was going to use the Dewey Decimal system for sorting, but I soon realized it’s not great for small libraries — especially collections that have many books on only a couple topics.

I have this slight personality problem, where I reinvent the wheel whenever possible.

So now I have a new library system, loosely based on Melvil Dewey’s. It’s the Farmy Decimal system.

000 Spirituality etc.
	00 General Spirituality
	10 Philosophy
	20 Religion
	30 Energy
	40 Plants

100	Agriculture
	00 theory & science
		0 schools of thought
			.0 biodynamics
			.1 permaculture
			.2 agroecology
		3 botany & plant science
			.0 diseases & pests
		4 soil science
			.0 minerals
			.1 compost
				.10 compost tea
				.11 vermiculture
	10 agricultural settings
		1 landscaping
		2 greenhouses
		3 urban/small home gardens
	20 crops
		1 vegetables
		2 trees, vines, and shrubs
			.0 fruit trees
				.00 olives
				.01 apples
			.1 nut trees
			.2 vines
				.20 viticulture & wine
			.3 silviculture & forestry
		3 herbs
			.0 medicinal
			.1 culinary
		4 flowers
		5 mushrooms
			.0 medicinal
			.1 culinary
		6 animals
			.0 bees
			.1 chickens
		7 grass & pasture
	30 techniques
		1 pruning
		2 propagation
			.0 seeds
			.1 asexual
		3 grafting
		4 irrigation

200 Sustainable Living
	10 Health
		1 Alternative Medicine
			.0 herbs
		2 Food
	20 Food Preparation
	30 Crafts
		1 Building
			.0 Carpentry
			.1 adobe, cobb, and earth
			.2 strawbail
		2 Tool-making

300 Issues
	10 food and farm
	20 environmental

400 Business & Economics
	10 farm

500 History
	10 Biographies

600 Literature
	10 Essays
	20 Poetry
	30 Children's Books

700 Language
	10 Spanish

English Muffins

This morning we had the most incredible brunch at the farm for a crowd of 17. Jeff made two massive piles of pancakes, someone brought fancy sausage, and Julia, Jessica, and I made eggs florentine with crazy fresh eggs, garlicy sautéed Swiss chard, velvety hollandaise, and made-from-scratch English muffins.

I’d never made English muffins before, and I was pretty sure they were going to come out more like hockey pucks than anything, but they were absolutely amazing!

I used the Artisan Bread Baking directions, but modified them so I could, you know, go to sleep. I set up the poolish after lunch, did the initial knead after dinner, and left the dough in the fridge overnight to ferment. I skipped the next couple rises and went straight to dividing the dough into 3½ ounce balls in the morning, shaped them, pressed them into the cornmeal, and cooked them on a baking sheet set over two burners.

If you have any sort of experience making bread, this recipe is absolutely worth the effort. The only tricky thing about it, really, is that you need to cook the muffins on very low heat, and flip them almost constantly — that way the inside will cook evenly before the outsides burn.

English Muffins

Ingredients for Poolish

• 5 oz AP flour
• 5 oz whole wheat flour
• ½ t dry active yeast, dissolved in 10 oz warm water

Ingredients to add to Poolish

• 19 oz AP flour
• 3½ oz milk
• 1½ t dry active yeast, dissolved in ⅓ C warm water
• 1 egg
• 1 T vinegar
• 2 T sugar
• 2½ T oil
• 2 t salt

1. Combine the ingredients for the poolish in a large mixing bowl. Let it sit on the counter or a draft-free, warm place, for 6+ hours.
2. The poolish should be nice and bubbly. Add all the remaining ingredients except the salt. Mix it with your hands — it’ll look like all there’s too much flour and not enough liquid, but just keep folding it in until everything is incorporated.
3. Knead, in the bowl, for a few minutes. Don’t worry too much about kneading it thoroughly — you’ll do that later.
4. Let the dough rest for 20 minutes.
5. Sprinkle the salt onto the bowl, and knead until you can stretch a bit of dough thin enough to almost see through without tearing.
6. Cover with a towel and place in the fridge to ferment overnight.
7. When you remove the dough, it should have increased in bulk tremendously. Fold each side of the dough into the center and press down, so that you end up with a ball about the same size as before it rose. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes in a warm place — a gas oven with the pilot light on is good.
8. Divide into 3 1/2 ounce / 110 gram pieces. The trick to making English muffins is to avoid overworking the dough. The less you work the dough, the flatter the finished English muffins will be. If you take the dough as it’s cut from the main dough and just pull it into shape, you’ll have a flatter English muffin. However, if you like higher English muffins, with loft between a regular English muffin and a round loaf, then round the dough and flatten it with your hand.
9. Round the doughs into balls and let them rest for 5 minutes.
10. Take each dough ball and gently pull it around the edge and in the center as if you were pulling the dough to start a pizza. They should wind up about 4 inches / 10 cm in diameter for this weight. Place cornmeal in a bowl and press the doughs flatter in the corn meal, turning once or twice to assure that you have cornmeal on both sides. The flatter you can get the doughs the better, within reason. They will puff up when you cook them, but if you start too round, they will be thick and may not cook on the inside.
11. Place as many muffins as will fit (you’ll cook them in several batches) on your griddle, if you’ve got one, or sheet pan, and turn on the heat to something between low and medium. Cook, shifting the muffins and turning them over every minute or so, until the muffins are done to your liking. The longer you can cook them without burning, the better they will be.
12. Allow the muffins to cool before splitting and heating. These freeze very well; put two or three in each plastic bag and freeze.

Thanksgiving contributions

Rounding out the holiday carb team:

• Corn-free Blasphemy pecan pie
• Apple-sage stuffing
• Rosemary focaccia
• Some other bread — maybe sage or garlic?

Review of Hervé Kempf’s How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth

I started typing this for the Facebook iRead application, but it ended up exceeding the 1000-character limit. So here it is!

How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth

The preface and introduction promised so much, but by the end of the book I was disappointed. Kempf says his intent with this book is to convince environmentalists to care about social justice, and convince the Left to care about the environment. If his book accomplishes this, it is because he expounds on the environmental and poverty crises separately, rather than by showing the connection between the two.

That’s not to say this book is without its merits, though. To say it’s “fact-filled” doesn’t begin to convey the boggling amount of statistics and research tidbits crammed into each page. And there are delightfully snarky quips scattered throughout, for instance, “Like a junkie who can stay standing only by shooting more heroin, the United States, doped up on hyperconsumption, staggers before it drops.”

I’d recommend this book to environmentalists who haven’t quite grasped the horrors of global poverty, or to leftists who echo Marxism’s old line that maximizing exploitation of Mother Nature can help solve social injustices. For those of us who have already realized, as Kempf says, “that the ecological crisis and the social crisis are two faces of the same disaster,” this book has little to offer aside from oodles of statistics and occasional dark humor. But if you, like me, find the title irresistible, reading it isn’t a bad way to spend a few hours–just be sure to pass it on to an oblivious friend or relative when you’re done.

If reading the book leaves you feeling unfulfilled, I recommend Wendell Berry’s essay “In Distrust of Movements.” To me, it feels like the missing last chapter to Kempf’s book.

Boy Meets World continuity issues

And I thought I was just getting confused. Thanks, Wikipedia!

The series features many continuity errors, including:

• In season one, Cory, Shawn and Topanga are in sixth grade and Eric is in tenth grade. Cory, Shawn and Topanga are able to graduate by season five (when they should be in tenth grade). Eric, however, graduates during season three, when he should graduate.

Season	Cory, Shawn, Topanga	Eric
1	Grade 6	Grade 10
2	Grade 7	Grade 11
3	Grades 8-10	Grade 12
4	Grade 11	Year Off
5	Grade 12	1st Year of College
6	1st Year of College	2nd Year of College
7	2nd-3rd Years of College	3rd-4th Year of College

• Shawn has a sister in the first season, Staci, and a half-brother, Eddie, in the third season, but later it is stated that Jack is his only sibling.
• Topanga has a sister, Nebula, during the first season, but later refers to herself as an only child.
• Topanga’s mother’s name is Chloe at the beginning of the series, but Rhiannon at the end of the series.
• The age that Cory and Topanga were when they first met (everywhere from birth to age six) and how they met (parents were friends to meeting at a playground when Cory couldn’t get off of the monkey bars) changes each time the issue is discussed.

Reflection on Farm #1

Chris and I recently spent two and a half weeks on Harmony Hill, a WWOOF (World-Wide Opportunities On Organic Farms) host that was less of a farm than we expected. The place is the home of an attorney and his wife. They have two dressage horses (dressage has got to be the bougiest sport in the world), four Nubian goats for milking, and an incredible amount of chickens that only manage to produce one or two eggs a day. The husband, Allen, has very, very little to do with the farming activities — in fact, he whole-heartedly refuses to consume any home-made dairy product — so it’s really just the wife, Elena, running the show.

Like I said, we expected something more than one woman who produces some of her own animal products — we thought we were going to be farmers! Fortunately, my disappointment faded after the first couple days, when I realized that we were somewhere much cushier than a farm. I kept a log of what I did every day, and most of it was relaxing: napping in the hammock, reading, swimming, cooking, re-watching episodes of Good Eats and Home Movies on my laptop, and more napping. We only had to work for six hours a day, and when you start at 6:30, that means you’re done awfully early.

A lot of the work we did was chores: sweeping miles of pavement, cleaning the common areas, weeding, weeding, weeding, cleaning up cobwebs, and lots of poop-scooping. We milked the goats once a day in the beginning, and upped it to twice a day later on when there were six WWOOFers there and we were going through milk like *that*.

The goat-milking was fun, (goats are pretty fun in general) and I got pretty quick at it, but the best part was the gardening. When we first got into town, we spent part of an afternoon working on a garden they have in Visalia, in the backyard of the house that serves as Allen’s office. We harvested pear tomatoes, chives, parsley, and did a heck of a lot of weeding on the unkempt garden. After that, though, there wasn’t much more to do — there weren’t any gardens on their property. In a walk around one day, Bridget (another WWOOFer who was there for two weeks before we arrived, and is staying through the middle of October) suggested that we turn a large, currently empty goat pen into a nice big vegetable garden, and a few days later, we had begun digging. (And digging. And digging.) We also turned a cracked koi pond in front of the house into a winter garden. The hardest part of that work was building a fence out of odds and ends (every tried to make a door using scrap chicken wire and staples? Ugh) and digging up cement-like dirt from the other side of the house to fill the two-tiered pond. Before Chris and I left, we had started a bunch of broccoli and lettuce seedlings indoors, and sown rows and rows of radish, Swiss chard, bush bean, turnip, spinach, scallion, and lettuce seeds. I’m not sure all of them will survive the last few hot days, and I’m even less sure it was a good idea to start everything at once (man, I hope they feel like eating a million heads of lettuce in a few weeks), but it was fun to research and try to figure out everything with Bridget and Chris.

We’ve spent the last few days doing even more vegging at Chris’s parent’s swanky house in La Qunita, watching their sweet but timid dog. The time off is just making me excited about the next farm we go to. We’re looking for a real farmy farm this time, preferably one that has a CSA program or sells at farmer’s markets. I’m so pumped to learn more!

As far as traveling goes, we’ll be here through the weekend, then out in Riverside till the 20th, and up to Santa Barbara for a few days, maybe a week, maybe more. Then we’ll be off to the Northwest till Christmas, but Chris wants to stop in the Bay Area for a couple days to see some folks, and I suppose I’d like to see some folks too. =D

More photos, if you’re interested, on Facebook. (Erm, for those who aren’t reading this on Facebook.)

Not that I’m sayin’ you have to or nothin’

Soooooo, my birthday’s on Sunday.

Incidentally, my favorite webcomic artist has just begun selling her second book, and, um…

As usual I am offering custom drawings on personalized editions. But as a bonus, if you order a personalized edition for the first week – that is, until next Wednesday – I will personally give Hanna a SPARKLE BUTT in your book. If you know what this means, you will probably want it.

I know what it means. I want it.

Just, uh, just in case you didn’t know what to get me.

Doooooooonuts

Things I need to buy before I can make some donuts:

• potato ricer
• frying themometer
• kitchen scale or a potato that weighs exactly 6 ounces
• biscuit cutters

And then — delicious vegan donuts for everyone!

Dark Legacy

Dark Legacy by Arad Kedar

This one’s easy: if you didn’t fall off your chair laughing at that panel, then Dark Legacy is going to be completely lost on you.

As I’m fairly certain none of you play World of Warcraft, I feel perfectly comfortable ending the review here.