Mystery Mint Becomes Hanshaw Road Backyard Mint Tea!

We stopped mowing the backyard for a variety of reasons. One reason was to see what would come up! What native or interesting plants had been suppressed by decades of mowing wetlands and old pasture into a “grassy lawn”?
The re-grown backyard now boasts native sedges and grasses, wetland shrubs and seedling trees that are gone from surrounding cultivated or paved areas. Also, to my surprise, there is a plentiful and spreading bed of mint, which revealed itself via its beautiful scent when stepped on. Mowed into the lawn for many years, the plants had managed to spread across a sizable area of the backyard, and grew up into sizeable plants over the spring and summer months.
The photos show the mints emerging from the surrounding grass; and the rolls of mint-leaf filled paper towels that I use to dry the harvested leaves for tea.
Twice this past summer, I cut the plants off about a third of the way down each one, to harvest the leaves and to allow the small plants to become sturdier and bushier for future growth (I dunno if I am doing this right!).
I rolled single layers of leaves into paper towel bundles, fastened with rubber bands, and left for a month to dry fully. I have found this method works better than air drying, which in this moist climate can lead to mold and bug infestation, not to mention spider webs!
The dried mint leaves yield a pure, honest mint tea when a few are crumbled into a tea-ball and steeped in hot water. The aroma alone will carry you to a better inner place for long enough to truly refresh.

Apples and Pears from Roadside Trees

My mid-20th century house is on an old road, co-existing with the remnants of older landscapes. Apple trees dot the roadside woodline. Although today they are ignored and overgrown, they indicate that earlier residents planted and used these excellent fruits. A hearty old apple tree peeks out of the woods along the road just east of my house, and this year it was loaded with small pretty green apples, ripening with a tinge of red. There is also a small pear tree growing at the end of my driveway. It was “always there” while I grew up; today it is in bad shape, half-dead: but every summer it produces a healthy crop of small hard pears.
This August I finally “got” or “took” or “seized” the time to pick a small bucket each of the pears and apples, and prepared a combination sauce. The photos show the apple tree; the half-prepared pears; and the resulting thick creamy apple-pear sauce.
These wild or feral fruits take a little longer than their fully tame cousins to prepare. They are small and hard. They require cutting with a small sharp knife, and cleaning out of seeds and bug-holes. I did not peel them.
I put the resulting mixed fruit (three-four cups total) in a pan on the stove with a small amount of water, and let it come to a rolling simmer. I stirred the pan and left it – for only about four minutes – and when I looked again the apples had sort of exploded into a creamy mass. The pears were firmer and retained their shape and intense pear flavor. I stirred, tasted, and added 2-3 tablespoons of sugar, as the sauce was too tart for me (and I like tart).
This wild apple-pear sauce was creamy, dense, mousse-like. Wonderful, powerful. I’ll do it again. Gets easier once you have done it the first time!

My own personal cookout

August 2011:

What a heavenly backyard meal. Although this summertime feast is usually consumed in the company of others, it tasted just as good when savored alone. I don't eat meat very often; the local sweet corn this summer was superb. Local red potatoes & butter from down the road!

The soft evening and a good read made for a wonderful, private celebration of living well. Cats for company.

My well is back but frackers want my water - and my air, my land, and my quiet enjoyment of my property

My well ran dry for about a month this just-past summer. That uncomfortable period was followed by a second month of begging the plumber to come and figure out what was wrong with the PUMP.

After Tropical Storm Lee deluged my area and caused historic downstream flooding and suffering, the plumber finally got here, with an escort of two guys who were gonna pull the pump and replace it at astronomical cost.

Turned out that there was just grit in the pump from the dry weeks. That was flushed out, and I now have hot showers and all the joys of plentiful (but carefully conserved) water from a shallow well drilled into a jumble of glacial debris, where the water fills the crevices between the boulders and pebbles not too far beneath the house.

That was last week. This week, angry Anschutz Inc. of Denver Colorado has announced that they are suing the Town of Dryden NY, that's where my house is, to try and overturn the recently-passed zoning ordinance amendment that says that gas drilling and related activities are not in accord with the town's zoning ordinance or its general plan.

I would speculate (because that's the wording one uses when desirous of avoiding a lawsuit for libel, slander and generally having one's mouth shut by the power of the almighty dollar) that this lawsuit is closely tied to the Dryden NY GOP's plan to get a pro-fracking town supervisor elected in November in order to liberate Dryden from the shackles of environmental protection and burdensome regulation.

Why would these (alleged) doofuses aid and abet a company and industry that want to take away MY precious and very limited clean water supply, clean air, and the quiet enjoyment of my property? How do these (possibly) naive fools think they have the right to hold the door open to let in the gasaholics to destroy my land's value and uses?

One of these (apparent) idiots has written that we in Dryden will be constrained to a life of "genteel poverty" if we do not jump for the golden ring of gas development. And yet he said to me, with witnesses, that he himself does not have a lease on his land in Ellis Hollow and does not plan to obtain one. This publicly-revealed hypocrite is working on behalf of a candidate and a lawless industry, while hoping to keep the shit off his own shoes?

I am already living in genteel poverty. If this man's reckless, irresponsible actions lead to the destruction of my water, air, land and the quiet enjoyment of my property, what will I have left? Genteel poverty is all I've got, and he wants to let Aschutz take even that away from me.

Wild grapes & their leaves

This summer has been ferociously busy, but I have managed to find time for some wild foods harvesting and preparation. Last week I crossed the road and fields to the woodline, in search of tender wild grape leaves and the small tart purple wild grapes.

With them I planned to make dolmas and grape juice. Euell Gibbons and other wild food writers say you should collect grape leaves in June while they are new and tender, but even in August I found several dozen that were not too bug-eaten or leathery; and I also gathered numerous ripe, miniature grape clusters, found hiding beneath the blankets of vines and leaves.

Back at the house, I cooked the leaves in a few inches of boiling water (with olive oil, garlic, red wine vinegar) for about five minutes to soften and partially cook them. While they drained and cooled I prepared rice with olives, garlic, nuts, raisins and other tasty ingredients. I dabbed a bit of the rice mix into each leaf; folded top and bottom and sides of each leaf around the mix, and placed each dolma bundle seam-side down in a glass casserole pan.

When the pan was full (one layer, tightly packed), I poured over it a flavorful mix of oil, vinegars, salt and pepper (also some liquid from a jar of olives) - enough to come up the sides of the dolmas but not to cover.

A tin foil cover was applied to the casserole, and I let it simmer in the oven for about 45 minutes at 350F. Then it went into the fridge to cool. These dolmas were wildly flavorful and tender - success!!!

As for preparing the grapes for juice, I sorted the ripe purple grapes into a pan with a little bit of water, brought it to a boil and let it simmer for about 10-12 minutes. I placed a metal mesh kitchen strainer over a bowl and poured grapes and juice into the strainer.

With a wooden spoon, I rubbed the grapes gently so that their pulp went through the strainer into the bowl with the juice, leaving the grape pips behind in the strainer (I discarded the pips, yes of course into the compost bin).

Tasting the resulting juice, I found it exceedingly tart, so I cut it with about a cup and a half of water and 2-3 T of sugar, stirred, and let it cool in the fridge. Even a week later it was AMAZINGLY pure and refreshing in its purple grapey flavor - I mixed it with seltzer - POW!

When it fails to rain

Beautiful fresh rainwater can fill a bucket quickly - but none fell this weekend.

The rainclouds swept heavily and darkly across my backyard all day Sunday, but released only a few sprinkles in all that time, not enough to even wet the bottom of my buckets set at the bottoms of downspouts on the house. Not enough to flush one toilet one time!

I went to the Slottjes' house for a tasty (home made! Go Helen!) supper on Saturday, had a long hot shower, and filled twelve jugs of water from their kitchen and bathroom taps. As he lugged the jugs out to my car David said, "It would do some people a lot of good to have to live like this for a while."

Of course, most of the world's people do live like this -- in fact much worse -- drinking, washing and cooking with polluted water -- when they can get it.

David was referring to New Yorkers and other pro-gasaholics who are convinced that using our precious clean fresh water for gas fracking is a great energy bargain for the country and planet. If they had to live on water in jugs and showers at friends' houses, they might begin to understand the true (overwhelming) value of water in the gas-water equation.

I got back to the house with my twelve jugs of water wealth, and ran around setting up the downspout buckets for all the rain that was supposed to show up on Sunday. I went to bed Saturday night thinking that I was going to be rich - water to drink, wash dishes with, water for the tomatoes in the garden, and flush the toilet twice a day!

I used up almost three gallons of the jug water wealth on Sunday to wash two sinkfulls of dishes that had built up -- and there was an almighty stink of putrefaction in the drain due to no soapy water having rinsed its gullet for five days.

And then, no rain all day Sunday. A month into having no running water, I kept thinking about what the Atlanta sewer and water authority guy said at that conference: "Try to do without it for an afternoon!"

Sadly, the new advice is to call in a well driller expert to help diagnose the problem. Uh oh.

The sound of flowing water

Some days I am cast down by the complications of having a dry well, but this afternoon as it rained gently and quietly, I began to hear the most lovely sound: it was water trickling through the downspouts off the roof and into the buckets I have set around the house. Such a sweet pure small calming set of notes.

I washed chard from the garden today by setting the leaves out on the picnic table, turning them over when they were brimming with rainwater, and then shaking them. I know there's bad stuff in the rainwater, but surely the romance of rain-washed produce is stronger than acid rain?

Sitting out in the back yard yesterday, I gazed at the tops of the trees around my house as they swayed far above me in the restless breeze of the approaching rainstorms. White pines, maples, willow -- and the big oak in the front yard, about 60 years old (I remember when my mom planted it, young and skinny.) I thought about the shallow roots of the white pines, and the deep taproot of the oak -- and stopped to think again. Maybe the oak tree's root has grown deep enough to tap into my well water? If that is true, the oak is more than welcome to it.