Twenty years from now, after peak oil, after climate change, after the self-destruction of our country, will I be able to look my sons in the eye and tell them I did everything I could…
You have to watch this:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10092009/watch.html
Any Republicans or neocons who are not among the rich and powerful need to realize that the banks are bending you over along with the rest of us.
Today G and D and I separated pumpkin seeds from the guts of the two pumpkins (one home-grown, one grocery-store pumpkin) we carved for jack o lanterns. They’d been in the refrigerator since last weekend. The boys were into it and quite helpful.
I had saved about 25 seeds from D’s pumpkin that he grew from seed, and G wanted to do the same for the bought pumpkin, so I saved an additional 20 or so seeds from that. (Wash them, put them on top of the refrigerator for a week to dry them, then bring them down into the cool and dark of the basement.) So we’ll have lots of pumpkins in the garden next year, which is fine. I don’t have that much experience with eating them, but I know I like them.
I washed the rest of the seeds, put them on a large flat pan with some salt and coconut oil, and put them in the oven for 40 minutes at 300F. Stirred them every ten minutes. They came out good, above average for pumpkin seeds.
At the same time, also baked the acorn meats we collected last weekend for 30 minutes at 300F. Those had been in water in a quart jar in the refrigerator for the last week. I changed the water every day in an effort to remove some of the tannins. I tasted them this morning, and they were still too bitter to eat. So I thought I would bake them and see if that improved them — it was either that or the compost pile.
And baking did improve them — they were within shouting distance of edibility. I figured they would be okay in something, maybe especially something sweet, so G and I made some molasses-banana bread with some on-the-edge bananas. It’s in the oven now — I’ll update later with results.
The banana bread came out great. G gave it two thumbs-up, which is high praise. The only trace of the acorns is a distant bitter aftertaste that doesn’t detract from the bread at all. So although it involved a lot of steps, I’m happy that we identified another wild food source and learned how to prepare it.
It was 24°F this morning, marking the official end to the 2009 growing season.
So sometime in August we pulled up all the tomato plants because they were dead or dieing from the blight. I should have planted a green manure crop there. If you have an unoccupied spot in the garden during the growing season, plant some buckwheat!
Harvested a few last green peppers and dug the plants in. Dug up the one sweet potato plant — got one large and one medium sweet potato.
Dug in another 10 gallons of coffee grounds.
Last year, I put a 3-gallon pail of water a couple inches from the side of the woodstove to act as thermal mass and to humidify the air. It didn’t work that well. It’s a galvanized steel pail, so the outside is very shiny and it reflected most of the heat radiating from the side of the stove, not to mention the cooling effect of the water evaporating from the surface. The water in the pail wasn’t stone cold, but it wasn’t as warm as tepid either.
So last Spring, after heating season, I painted the outside of the pail flat black (with high-temp paint). And this year, the water in there is quite warm when the stove is running. It should work much better for both of the above-stated purposes, as well as backup warm water for washing if ever needed. It’s amazing to me that a coat of paint can make that much difference.
Ending and Beginning 