Eighth of an Acre Bounty

So I have been seriously remiss in posting lately. And I don’t really have a valid excuse short of life gets away from you sometimes. That and I have found myself not wanting to be in front of a computer for the remaining free time I have while the sun is still shining. I have been reading quite a bit lately courtesy of our local library. I checked out two cookbooks, David Lebovits’ Perfect Scoop and Edna Lewis’ The Taste of Country Cooking. The Lebovits book was good, I made peach ice cream and noted several others that I will try eventually. We are only two people here so I couldn’t run the course of recipes without filling the freezer and throwing us both into adult onset diabetes.

The Edna Lewis book was an absolute gem! It follows the seasons and is part cookbook part memoir of her youth growing up in a small farming community. Even if you are not into cooking that much I highly recommend this. It includes recipes for Blackberry wine and is a beautiful piece of writing, what more could you want?

Aside from food books, I have been reading several homesteading books. I checked out the River Cottage Cookbook and am convinced that I will actually need to purchase this. Far from just a cookbook this is a reference manual for almost anything having to do with producing, preserving and/or raising your own food. I also read Extreme Simplicity: Homesteading in the City. While I had high hopes for this book, I don’t really feel like I walked away with anything I didn’t know already. It has some good tips for someone just starting to consider the idea of small scale self sufficiency in urban settings, but it is a little too new-agey for my tastes. I read John Seymour’s The Fat of the Land: Family Farming on Five Acres, which is a classic at this point. I would recommend this, and have Gary reading it now before it is due back.

I do have a gripe about these homesteading/self-suffiency books though. Each one advertises how you too can make the move to a (at least partial) self sufficient lifestyle and support yourself with next to nothing. The extreme simplicity book originally intrigued me because in our current location I am constantly preoccupied with seeing exactly how much we can get/how much we can do with our teeny tiny eighth of an acre (including the footprint of the house). The reality of the Extreme Simplicity book is that although the authors do indeed live in Los Angeles, they have the luck of bordering their backyard on an abandoned orchard in the middle of the city. An orchard who’s owner is open to them keeping their bees and several wild chickens on his property as well as gathering wild foodstuffs for the market and burying their pet dogs there, collecting firewood, etc. The subtitle should be Extreme Simplicity: Provided you have a beneficent neighbor who will let you use his property for free. The Seymour book actually acknowledges his good fortune, and is a bit more dated but is a similar situation. He and his wife had the luck to sign a lease for a 5 acre parcel of land with two homes and outbuildings on a 25 year lease for $25 dollars a month. Show me anywhere in the States now that that is even remotely possible (that isn’t arid desert) and I will live on 5k a year with no problems.

I read another book as well, but that is saved for the next post – I have a bit of venting to do on that one. And the tomatoes are slowly coming in! (see, I had to come around to the leading picture eventually). The beaver lodge have been steadily dribbling out, I harvested the first two San Marzanos yesterday, several Russian Blacks in our bellies and today brought our first ripe Aunt Ruby’s German Green. We constructed a hoop house over the tomato bed the other weekend as a last ditch attempt to lenghten the season. But the snap clamps I ordered have still not arrived. I ordered them on the 7th and they didn’t see fit to tell me they were out of stock until I called in a week later wondering where my order was. SO as soon as those arrive we will put up the plastic and hopefully jack up the temp inside by 5-10 degrees. I have not canned a single batch of tomato anything yet and am beginning to get concerned that we will need to purchase our winter supply from the farmers market instead of the back yard. But maybe the hoop house will perform miracles.

I tried to include links to all the books mentioned above, but Amazon was not cooperating. So it goes…