The Most Fun Wedding

In May, we had the privilege of hosting the most fun wedding ever.  (And I'm not biased.)

The groomsmen and David's family came from Georgia and Connecticut, and didn't have much farm background to bring with them.  So we held a "Farm Day" before wedding day.  It was a chance to introduce people to an unfamiliar way of life, and to each other, and it was a lot of fun..

We started with a little agricultural education, provided by John.  First he explained how his planter splits the soil 16 rows at a time, drops in seeds and then covers them up at the rate of 384,000 seeds per hour.

Then he demonstrated his antique, horse-drawn planter that sows one row at a time.

After Farming 101, we went to Farm Play 101.  Everybody got a chance to ride horses

and drive tractors.  Audrey persuaded the groomsmen to take a spin in a 170-horsepower tractor,

while the father-off-the-bride taught the father-of-the-groom to drive a 35-hp tractor built the same year they were.

Curly-headed cousins got to see each other and catch up

and siblings-of-the-groom posed with big horses.

I was the hostess of Farm Day.  I couldn't very well be hostess AND official photographer, so I left the latter to my competent brother.  Thanks, Marshall, for the photos.

Here's Marshall on the horse. We let him hang around because he takes nice pictures, not because he knows what kind of shirts to wear in Nebraska.   The Longhorns?  Really?   Tsk, tsk, Marshall.  ;)

Sometimes the Sister Club meets upstairs.

That's What I Like About the South

And I'm really not talking about the food.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

life is but a dream.

A new text from Audrey: "Would you please spritz my duck egg?"

I wonder if anyone else in the world got a text like that yesterday.  Sometimes I can't figure out why I'm so blessed.

I slid my feet into flip flops, nabbed the spray bottle and went out to the chicken coop, where we have strategically placed one duck egg under a hen who thinks she's hatching baby chicks.  Developing ducklings apparently need more humidity than a foster mother hen provides, so we're spritzing the egg with warm water several times a day.

Audrey hit the duck's nest last week while cutting hay.  Mama Duck thought that hiding herself and her clutch in the tall alfalfa was a good idea, but she was wrong.  She didn't enjoy her contact with the windrower, a big machine that cuts hay and crimps the thick stems and isn't good for ducks.  She is broken beyond repair, as are all but one of her eggs.  It's the greenish one, laying low and hoping Mama Hen won't notice the stowaway.

Duck eggs take between 19 and 29 days to hatch.  Chicken eggs only take 21.  We're going to be out of town from Day 7 to Day 15 after disaster struck.  We won't be here to spritz a duck egg or make sure the broody hen hasn't given up on it.

So we borrowed an incubator today, which is not only supposed to hold the eggs at the proper temperature, but also rotates them (five to seven times a day, just like Mama Duck would do) and provides the correct humidity.  So far, in our test run on the kitchen counter, the enclosure has been way too hot and way too cold; the reservoir providing the water doesn't flow into the hut, and the mechanism that rotates the eggs  is being wayward and difficult, sproinging its arm skyward and threatening to whap the motor upside down on the table.

This not a 1940s hairdryer or a brain-sucking machine in some cheap sci-fi flick.  It is THE INCUBATOR!

Isn't it amazing that hens and ducks and other birds can so easily take care of all these details, even though their brains are smaller than walnuts?  God's ways are best.

If we ever actually see this duck walking across the yard, I'm sure we'll laugh and remember why we believe in miracles.

Nuthin' but a Hound Dog

Peace

Sounds and Colors

I love walking outside and picking my breakfast off the vine.

Rachel and I have been emailing a bit about the differences between her new home in Atlanta and her old home in Nebraska.  They are both full of colors and sights and sounds, but in very different ways.  She wrote:

This morning I paid the train fare for a homeless man who was dragging on a cigarette and asked me "could you buy me 3 or 4 trips?"  (I paid for 2 - $5).  He seemed very thankful and kept saying "God bless you, sweetie, God bless you, you have a wonderful day" until I was out of sight.  Then as I walked to my office building I went by another homeless man, perched on the side of a garden planter, singing gospel music at full volume.  A big black lady walked by and shouted, "Hallelujah!" and he shouted right back, "Amen!"  Guess I'm back in Atlanta.

I thought about Rachel's day and my day.  Sometimes it is amazing that big city Georgia and our farm in Nebraska are on the same planet, much less a part of the same sovereign nation.  Last night, I was gardening with Audrey toward dusk.  I heard an owl, and then, while I waited to hear it again with my head cocked, a wild turkey gobbled from the trees by the river.   Then we heard a mourning dove, and then a calf bawled from the nearest neighbor's, a half-mile away.  The sound carried across the still air as loudly as if the baby had been calling from our own barn.  We started counting the sounds....owl, turkey, dove, calf... frogs drumming out their croaking tones; insects and numerous unnamed birds cheeping, chirping, flapping and calling...a horse banging the feed bunk with its heavy hoof, the wind tickling the trees  Audrey mentioned that she had heard quail earlier in the day, and then there was a meadowlark and then the wren who is nesting in my little bird box and who warbles and dances around the yard at all hours of the day.   

I was thinking about the sounds and began to notice colors --- three deer grazing the tender corn plants across the road, their coats shining golden in the setting sunlight.  Red strawberries peeking from under dark green leaves.  Green pasture grass, green soybeans, green elms and mulberry trees --- all green but none of them the same color. And many different browns--soil, bark, mulch, rust. Bright and muted colors in flowers and sky.  Dots of white in the pasture where the bindweed blooms, dots of white on the window where a bit of rain had yet to evaporate.

This little bubble of space in Nowhere, Nebraska, is vibrant, but these hues and tones are not wrapped around dense humanity as they are in Atlanta.  Not at all like the colors and sounds on the mass transit, or in the foreign tongues and mysterious bright clothing that weaves and bobs outside a busy Atlanta BBQ joint. The difference between Rachel's immediate surroundings and mine is a pretty wide swath.

From my vantage point, the Georgia city and the Nebraska plain are both ripe with lovely and intriguing aspects that, in a Venn diagram, have very little overlap.   But I suppose that if you compared them with a place like المملكة العربية السعودية, located in Saudi Arabia or some other hinder part of the world, her home and mine might begin to look quite similar.  Attitude is everything.

Did you note that today was National Donut Day?

Audrey did.

Shopping with the Girls

Last year, for the first time ever, Erica talked us into Black Friday shopping. 

You can tell that this year's shopping was not on Black Friday, because we look pleasant.

Sharing the Prairie

Six Thousand Layers

I was recently asked to bring dessert to a gourmet dinner party.  I paged through a few cookbooks before deciding that Puff Pastry Apple Tarts would be perfect.  After all, crisp apples with a blush of red are the very essence of autumn's glory, and puff pastry is delicate enough to balance a hearty meal of several courses.

One of my dearest friends, upon seeing my handiwork, declared that the only reason I had made the pastry from scratch was that I am "an overachiever."   But the real reason is that the local grocer doesn't carry frozen puff pastry, and I had neither time nor inclination to drive the thirty miles to one who did.  However, I just smiled and nodded when she tossed out her allegation.  This particular friend doesn't lack for confidence in her own reasoning, and is not easily distracted from it.


Homemade puff pastry is no harder than making a loaf of bread.  You use your rolling pin and the power of exponents to create thousands of layers of butter and dough.  Then you pop them into a hot oven where melting butter and rising steam lock in a delicate crispiness.

So if you are also "an overachiever," I highly recommend this little endeavor the next time you need puff pastry dough.   I have posted the full recipe here.  Or, if you are still holding the line against holiday weight, just scroll down and enjoy vicariously.

There are basically three parts to making these tarts:

1.  Whip up a dough that's a lot like a pie crust.  Wrap it around a pound of butter, sort of like gift wrapping a birthday present.  Don't think about the pound of butter, just do it!  This recipe makes enough dough for lots of tarts, and you're going to eat just one.

2.  Roll it out.  Fold it in thirds.  Chill.  Roll it out.  Fold it in thirds.  Chill.   Roll it out.  Fold it in thirds.  Chill.

Once you have repeated this process six times, you've made 2187 layers of dough and butter.  One more roll and you have 6561 layers.  If you are a math head or a homeschooling mom,  figure out an algebraic equation to express the relationship between number of layers and how many times you repeat the folding/rolling process.  Mental exercise keeps your brain in shape, and you have to chill the dough between rolls anyway, so you've got time.

3.  Cut your dough into squares, put some crispy thin apple slices on top, dot with (a little more!) butter, bake and eat!

Now, if you're really an overachiever (and if you made this, you definitely are :) , go run a few miles to work off that butter.  You will feel great the whole way, smiling and rejoicing at how good life is.

Equine Sunshine

Erica's Michigan house, dressed in autumn.

It will be great to see Erica today in her Nebraska house, also dressed in autumn.

Canning Colors

Does this look promising?

I don't think so.  It looks like kind of a mess to me:   a strainer full of mushy apples and seeds and tough cores.  But the book said---the book said---to boil the apples without peeling or cutting out their middles, because most of the pectin is in the skin and core.  Pectin is what makes fruit juice set up into jelly, and jelly was the best end I could devise for these apples.  So I boiled them all into an ugly muck.

I didn't have much to lose.  Someone gifted me the soft, mealy fruits.  It was an act of kindness, I'm sure, but my first bite vehemently declared that these apples were chicken food, not people food.

John remembers his grandmother making apple jelly---lining up her jars on the counter, filling them with the hot syrup and then floating a clear stream of melted paraffin on top for a seal.  I like to think that when the babies weren't crying and the hogs weren't out, his grandmother paused for a moment before she whisked the jars down to her closet under the basement stairs.

I like to think she took time to notice the sunlight flaming through the colors she had just sealed in glass.

I hope she smiled at the contrast when she set her autumn hues alongside chunks of summer green that she had canned with the pickles a few weeks earlier.  Colors tucked away for future reference, holed up in the closet beneath the steps, waiting for release into January's shroud of grey and tan and white.

When I tossed the pale mash to the chickens, they pounced, fighting and flapping and clucking loudly over the tastiest bits.  They didn't even miss the autumn brilliance that is sleeping in my basement.

Winter Garden

I weeded my garden today, plucking out all the lettuce and cilantro that had seeded itself in amongst my intentionally planted spinach.

Fresh baby greens for the salads tonight!

There are two key elements for weeding fresh baby greens out of your garden in the middle of Nebraska in the middle of November:

1.  A hoop house.  I've had mine up for several years.  You can read about it here and here.

2.  A bit of laziness.  That means you don't harvest all of your lettuce in the spring, because you just didn't get around to it.  So some of it heads out, dropping the seeds of fresh November baby greens in the bed next door.

It also helps if you plant non-hybrid lettuce in the first place, so your fall seedlings grow up to be just like their mama and daddy.

Setting up a hoop house, weeding in November, and eating fresh spinach in March are good ways for a Texas girl to fight back against the rage that Nebraska calls winter.

HeArtwork

You didn't forget my creative friend Derri, did you?

I think Derri is creative in part because she surrounds herself with other imaginative folk.  They spontaneously see joy, invention, and newness in places where my eyes are bouncing along half asleep in the same-mobile.

Like Derri's friend Ellen, who has embarked on a project to create one heart every day, for a year.  Turns out Ellen's world is full of funky, colorful, wispy, bold and crazy hearts, lurking everywhere and just waiting to be born. Like this one:

and this one:

and this, made from a rubber band and two staples:

Ellen posts photos of her hearts here (ellensdailyheart.blogspot.com) - a new one every day.  Be sure and visit often for a fun journey through Ellen's heARTsy world.

I've never met Ellen, but I credit her for turning my flour-laced counter into a blank canvas the other day when I was baking.  I wasn't really planning to copy Ellen, but before I knew it I had reached up and swiped my index finger through, creating a little heArtwork of my own.

A whiff of creativity can put sparkle into the most tedious tasks.  And it's delightfully infectious.

How can  we catch a bit today?

(Thank you, Ellen.  I hope you have a happy Sunday!)

Harvest Progress

We had a little rain.  That's good.

We really needed a little rain a couple of weeks ago, when soybean harvest was in full swing around the county.   Soybean harvest is always dusty.  These pods reaching skyward are crispy crackling dry.

See the dust kicking up behind the grain cart and combine as they mow through the field?

Soybean harvest was especially dusty this year, because our fall was so dry.

More than once, within a few miles of where I live, something wasn't quite right in somebody's combine. Something like a bearing going out, something that makes a lot of friction and enough heat in the combine to ignite a dry soybean stem or pod.

One day as I was headed home, I saw a plume of smoke billowing skyward from the direction of my house.  The fire was a few miles east of us.

The wind came to whip the flames into a fury.

The volunteer firefighters came.

The old farmers came, lining the road with their old pickups, with their old bodies leaning on them, and talking about how dry it was.

The guy who drives the road grader came.  The road grader is normally a slow-moving machine, crawling down the gravel with a wide blade sunk into the top bit of road, smoothing out the potholes.  I glanced in my rearview and saw the road grader flying toward me, kicking up dust.  You know something is wrong when the road grader is going faster than you are.  The driver had been called to bring his machine and plow up some of the unharvested soybeans, creating a wide, bare patch of dirt across the middle of the field for a firebreak..

They got the fire out before it spread to neighboring fields and houses.  Then it rained, and then all the soybeans were harvested,

and now corn is king.