Apricots…with recipe

February 17, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

As I wandered through the pond garden yesterday evening, watching the fish and the damselflies, I noticed that the apricots had blushed. I tested one. It was soft and ripe—so ripe, the juice dripped down my arm when I bit into it.

This was the first year the apricot tree has given us anything, and the wind stripped many of the fruits a month ago, but there were still about two dozen on the tree, and they were all ready to pick.

So this afternoon, I made apricot upside down cake—for the second time in a month. This time, I’ll give you the recipe…

This is adapted from a recipe in the 1997 edition of Joy of Cooking.

Melt 3 Tbsp butter in a 9-inch (20cm) cast iron skillet or round cake pan. Tilt the pan to coat all sides with butter.

When the butter is melted, sprinkle ½ cup brown sugar evenly over the bottom.

Arrange apricot halves, cut side down in the bottom of the skillet, completely covering the bottom.

Whisk together in a medium bowl:

2 large eggs

2 Tbsp buttermilk

½ tsp vanilla

Combine in a large bowl:

½ cup all-purpose flour

½ cup whole wheat flour

½ cup brown sugar

¾ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

Add to the flour mixture:

6 Tbsp softened butter

6 Tbsp buttermilk

Beat on low speed just until the flour is moistened, then increase the speed to high and beat for 1 ½ minutes. Add one-third of the egg mixture at a time and beat 20 seconds after each addition. Pour batter over fruit.

Bake at 180C (350F) for 35-40 minutes. Cool in the pan for 2-3 minutes before unmolding. To turn the cake out, run a knife around the edge to ensure the cake has separated from the pan. Place a plate on top of the pan and quickly flip pan and plate together. Carefully lift off the pan.

Fire!

February 17, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

Preying mantises were leaping out of the flames, scaling the fence and jumping on my face in panic.

And rightfully so. The neighbour (the one who harvested yesterday) burned off the stubble today to prepare the field for replanting.

I have to say, that though I hate the practice of burning off stubble—it mostly ends up sending nutrients into the air as pollution, rather than back into the soil—I still love to watch a good burn-off. Something about fire…

I had extra incentive to watch this one, as the fire was lit five metres from our fence line, and the wind was blowing towards our property.

It was while I watched that the preying mantises began landing on me. I’m sure there were other insects (and probably a whole lot of mice) fleeing the fire, but I only noticed the mantids.

It won’t be long, though, before they’re back in the neighbour’s field. By this afternoon, it will be planted in grass, to provide winter grazing for his sheep. In a week, you’ll hardly be able to tell it was burnt.

Harvest

February 16, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

It’s time to harvest barley.

For us that means the rumble of combine harvesters all day and long into the night.

And it means realising how tiny our property is. Never does our property feel so small as when the neighbour harvests next door.

He’s been harvesting for weeks—distant fields—but today he cut the barley behind our house. The harvester dwarfs every building on our property. If I planted every inch of our land in barley, he’d be able to harvest it in just a few passes.

When he drives down the road between fields, the machine fills the road entirely—good thing there’s little traffic out here.

It’s a reminder of the massive scale modern agriculture works on. And these Canterbury farms are nothing compared to the ones in the Midwestern US.

It’s also a reminder that my view of agricultural life, as a “subsistence” farmer is entirely different from my neighbours’ views.

I count my plantings by the square metre or by the plant, they measure theirs in the tens of hectares.

I measure the harvest by the colander, they by the truckload.

My tools are a hoe, a spade and a knife—at a garage sale, you might buy them all for under $20. His tools include multiple machines clocking in at over $100,000 each.

I can produce $50,000 worth of food over the course of a year. He can lose twice that amount in a bad storm.

My soil and water conservation strategies—mulching with grass clippings, using drip irrigation, composting everything—don’t scale up to two hundred hectares. Nor do my planting, harvest and storage techniques.

There is very little resemblance, in fact, between what I do and what my neighbours do, though we both produce food.

And so, I stand and watch in awe as the harvester roars by and the trucks fill up with grain.

And he marvels at the variety and quality of my summer squash and beans.

And we find our common ground in the sun, wind and rain that rules us both.

Water gardens

February 15, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

My husband always wanted a water garden. In our pre-children days when we rented, he put a tiny fountain in a half-barrel, but it didn’t really satisfy him.

Within minutes of moving in here, he was scheming a “real” water garden.

It took about eight years for him to get to it. It was necessarily lower on the to-do list than re-piling the house, replacing weatherboards, remodelling the kitchen and bathroom, creating a third bedroom, and a host of other tasks.

And then when he started it, it took a lot of planning, digging, refilling, and digging again to get the basic structure right.

Then there were countless trips to the beach to collect the rocks to line it and complete the landscaping around it.

Then two years to kill off the twitch around it so he could even think about planting perennials there.

Add dozens of broken wine bottles in his attempts to create the little waterfalls coming down the hill toward the pond.

A solar pump to keep the water flowing, nine goldfish (now blossomed to a standing population somewhere around 40), two bridges, and a whole lot of plants, and it’s looking quite settled into place.

We all enjoy the garden. I could sit for hours watching the fish and the invertebrates in the water. The birds love to bathe in it, and the cat loves to prey on the birds bathing in it (he likes to drink from it too—must taste fishy). Herons come and snare fish, and the plovers hang out around it in springtime.

The pond garden has become something of a potager, too, with fruit trees, herbs, vegetables, and annual flowers nestled together with an eclectic mix of native and non-native perennials. A lovely change from the rank grass that filled the space for the first eight years we lived here!

Sounds of Summer

February 14, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

As we drove to the beach this afternoon, we passed out of the agriculturally blasted plains to the slightly less blasted Banks Peninsula. As we drew closer to the remnants of bush on the Peninsula, the decibel level outside the car rose dramatically. The culprit was the chorus cicada/kihikihi wawā (Amphipsalta zealandica). Wawā means roaring like heavy rain, and it’s an excellent description of the noise the males make en masse from every bush and tree. In some places, they are so loud, that conversation is completely impossible.

But their chorus is summer here. The season hasn’t really arrived until the cicadas start calling in January. As my husband noted today as we drove, “It just feels warmer when the cicadas are calling.”

And for as long as they call, we will believe it is summer. For as long as they call, we will feel we are on vacation, and the work week is simply a temporary interruption between trips to the beach.

Outside In

February 13, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Window screens are uncommon in New Zealand.

It’s not that there is no need for them. This time of year I struggle to keep the outside out of the house.

Flies, bees, wasps, mosquitoes, and moths all find their way in, to buzz, bite, and generally be a nuisance. Leaves and seeds blow in on the ever-present wind. And the occasional escaped chicken or feral cat wanders in, too.

So why no screens?

It makes sense if we look at why window screens are found elsewhere in the world.

In the United States, window screens were uncommon until the early 1900s, when they were suddenly mandated by local governments all over the country. An important advance of science was the reason for the new laws.

Today, with think of malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and a host of mosquito-borne diseases as tropical. But these “tropical” diseases, especially malaria, used to range all through Europe and North America. The ancient Romans invading Scotland, lost half their soldiers to Scotland’s local strain of malaria. Yellow fever and malaria were common in Boston and London. Philadelphia was decimated in 1793 by a yellow fever epidemic.

The connection between mosquitoes and malaria was discovered by entomologist Ronald Ross in 1897, and by 1900, mosquito control efforts were underway all over the world. Within a few years, window screens were being mandated by law in disease-hit areas. Most of those laws are still in place, as there is nothing preventing those mosquito-borne diseases from returning.

Here in New Zealand, we are remarkably free of mosquito borne diseases. Malaria, and yellow fever have never gained a foothold, though they almost certainly have shown up now and again in the form of sick travellers.

With no mosquito borne disease, the biters that slip in through my windows every night are just a nuisance, so screens haven’t been written into the building code.

But they would be nice to have…

Thrips

February 12, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

I can’t help but think about thrips at this time of year. They seem to love my office. They crawl everywhere. I’m constantly swiping them off my face and arms, and they end up in drifts on my desk when they die.

Thrips are tiny cigar-shaped insects with hairy wings (the order name, Thysanoptera, means fringe-winged). Most suck plant juices, and they leave characteristic little puncture wounds in leaves. Some transmit plant diseases.

Thrips are fascinating insects for a number of reasons.

Their development from egg to adult is not quite incomplete metamorphosis (in which the young look like the adults, but lack wings), and is not quite complete metamorphosis (in which the young look very different, and go through a pupal stage before adulthood). It’s a mix of both, and differs among species within the order.

Thrips are also left handed. As a south paw myself, I appreciate this. Instead of having a symmetrical mouth, like most other insects, with mandibles on both sides, thrips only have a left mandible. No one knows why this is the case. I like to think it’s because left handedness is just better.

Another thing I find intriguing about thrips is that some species will bite people, though they feed on plant juices. Our thrips, which I believe are Limothrips cerealum, the grain thrips, have this annoying tendency. They don’t bite often, but now and again you’ll feel a little stab and wonder what the insect is playing at.

Even linguistically, thrips are interesting. “Thrips” is both singular and plural—one thrips, many thrips. Thus, in the following poem, I couldn’t rhyme thrip with trip, it had to be thrips with sips…;)

Thysanopteran

Little thrips,

What does it think

As it delicately sips

The juices of plants?

Does it prefer

My prizewinning rose?

Or does the pollen

Tickle its nose?

Does it find

The broccoli sweeter?

And how can it be

Such a big eater?

Attack of the Killer Squash

February 11, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

One of the new varieties in my garden this year is the Jumbo Pink Banana Squash.

It is neither pink, nor banana-like, but it IS jumbo—both plant and fruit.

Really jumbo.

Like, scary jumbo.

Like, “how are we going to eat even one of those?” sort of jumbo.

And earlier this week, they grew to, “OMG they’re going to take over” jumbo.

45 cm (18 inches) long and still growing…

I walked down the centre path in the garden, past the sweet corn, and something grabbed my face.

It was a pink banana squash tendril, a good five metres from the closest plant and hovering at eye level. As I recoiled and realised what it was, I couldn’t help exclaiming out loud, “It’s a pink banana squash!”

I was sure I heard a deep, “Mwahahaha!” in response.

The Homework Table

February 10, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

My daughter started high school last week.

I don’t know who was more terrified about that—her or me.

She had been attending a special character school in which she had a great deal of freedom about where she did her work, she could climb trees at lunchtime, and which didn’t assign any homework.

She still attends a special character school, but one with a different philosophy.

Her classes are almost entirely indoors, tree climbing on campus is forbidden, and she has homework.

For a girl who NEEDS to be outdoors and moving, I’m sure the transition is going to be rocky.

But she recognises her needs, and she’s getting better at asking for what she needs.

So when she came home with her first homework yesterday, instead of bemoaning the fact she couldn’t go run around outdoors after school, she came to me with a suggestion.

“Mum. We need a table outdoors in the shade somewhere so I can do my homework outside.”

As it turned out, we had a table that fit the bill perfectly—an old picnic table that I’d recently banished from the shed because it was in the way. She scrubbed it up, dubbed it the homework table, and brought her desk chair outside to complete her homework.

No grumping, no tears, no stress.

If the whole school year goes like that (yeah, right), it’ll be a fantastic year!

Sunflowers

February 9, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

I am of the opinion that you can never have too many sunflowers.

I have Golden Toasted sunflowers in the vegetable garden, with big fat seeds for eating, and I have half a dozen other varieties of sunflower in other places around the property.

Sunflowers don’t like the wind here, and they tend to grow short and stocky or to fall over unless they’re staked or well protected from the wind. Still, I plant them wherever I can.

Sunflowers serve many purposes in my garden, beyond the seeds for eating. The blooms look great in the garden—pale yellow through orange to deep russet—and make stunning cut flowers, too. They also attract lots of insects. Though there are many pollenless varieties, I steer toward the varieties that produce copious pollen, because they are more attractive to insects. Pollen provides important protein for—bees flies, parasitic wasps, beetles, ants, and many other insects.
The pollen attracts some insects, and they, in turn attract others. Preying mantises regularly visit my sunflowers.

When autumn comes and the blooms are spent, the sunflowers (the entire plant), make a nutritious snack for the goats.

Beauty, food for me, food for my livestock, and food for the wildlife—what more can you ask of a plant?

Robinne Weiss

Fantasy / Sci-fi / Non-fiction

Author: Robinne Weiss