Happy Zombie Jesus and Marijuana Appreciation Day to all who celebrate! I am sitting on my front stoop with a big 7-Eleven coffee, enjoying the spring sunshine and admiring all the green growing things in the yard. I'm so happy our landlords planted a bunch of tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, and narcissus in the garden. It's been such a nice surprise watching them all come up.
The dogs, cats, and chickens are all hanging around too. I just watched our hen Beatrice scavenge up the bedraggled, disembodied wing of a little birdie, probably killed by Freya our cat, and eat it with clucks and chuckles of pleasure. A few days ago she ate a mouse, whole!
Pictured above is Pearl, who was just acting very interested in going inside, and also in the contents of my coffee mug. I don't think that's a good idea, girl! Anyway, the garden is coming along. I have planted several perennials, including this artichoke:
It looks so alone and puny! Artichoke plants can get really big, though, so I planted it in the corner of the yard so it can just grow and sprawl out as needed.
This really exciting picture is of a bit of the polycultural vegetable bed, which is a fancy name for strewing a bunch of different types of seeds in the same bed together and just letting them all grow, thinning out and adding more as needed. I've got a few types of greens, beets, carrots, turnips, and such in here. I'm excited to see how this goes because it's way easier than planting in rows.
Here's a picture of the elusive Minerva Louise, from about as close as one can get to her. As I was taking this photo, Pearl snuck up and nipped my thumb, coincidentally the one I sliced open with a bread knife a couple weeks ago.
I've been continuing with my dairy preservation efforts. After making ricotta and finding it so easy, I made it again, this time with goat milk, and have also tried making butter, yogurt, and creme fraiche, with mixed results. Butter is as easy to make as ricotta, so I've made that twice now as well. I made yogurt successfully once with cow milk, then tried with goat milk and was left with a weird, half-lumpy yogurt-type liquid. My most recent experiment was the creme fraiche, which didn't work at all! It ended up as a quart of warm cream. I made it using some creme fraiche starter culture RC got from his work, but maybe the fact that it's expired means the cultures are dead. Who knows! It's been a lot of fun trying all these methods for preserving dairy. I could honestly see myself making butter, ricotta, and yogurt regularly, and I like the idea of rescuing a bunch of expired milk and cream and putting it to use instead of throwing it away.
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