Beach Day!

Last week was my roommate's birthday, so she and I and Nic and Ivy went to the little town of Rockport on the coast of Massachusetts where she was born and lived the first few years of her life. It was a lovely New England beach town that almost too idyllic.

We stopped by The Coffee Shop and got coffee, hot chocolate, and Norwegian coffee bread, which was delicious.

Then we went and ate it on the beach.

Here is the view.

We looked for cool shells.

And we found some!

This cemetery was across the street from the beach. Nic, Ivy, and Elizabeth look appropriately freaked out, if you can tell. Also, note the crypt on the right.

We went to a bookstore that used to be a bank.

And then had a picnic out on a jetty.

Here is the view of the town and the land across the way.

There were also cool seaweed covered rocks. All in all, New England beaches were much rockier than Florida beaches.

And then we went to a store called Rocking Cupcakes and got Elizabeth a birthday cupcake. It was absurd. We got two, actually, and almost couldn't finish them because they were so sugary.

We took walks around and looked at the shops and the houses and it was lovely. And here is one last picture of me.

And tomorrow is Thanksgiving! Get ready for a great big update! Right now, through, I need to run to the grocery store!

I lied.

So, okay, do y'all remember that time when I declared garlic officially over? As in, my last entry? Well, I shouldn't have been so quick in my call because, let me tell you. The garlic is not over. Sure, sure the seed cloves are all nice and cozy in the ground, but there were more than just seed bulbs, which I had all but forgotten.

Back when we first started cleaning and trimming it all up, when it first came down from being hung, part of the cleaning process was sorting it. There were three categories: The best of the best became seed garlic, the good stuff became storage garlic (bulbs that can sit in our root cellar for a few months with no ill effect), and the not-so-good stuff was termed "Use Now" garlic. These were the bulbs in which the paper wasn't fully formed around the cloves (or bulbs that had cloves busting out of the paper) or bulbs with soft spots that might start to rot. These are bulbs that won't be good anymore by the time we need them if we try to store them. We have been slowly trying to use them as garlic in food, but there is just so much of it. (Plus, all the cloves we took off seed bulbs that were, for whatever reason, unfit to be seeds themselves had to become Use Now, too, being already de-papered.)

So what to do, what to do? Well ladies and gentlemen, we have been making garlic powder. We have been making garlic powder like there is no tomorrow. Yesterday I had a group of kids, and part of their program was a service project. So guess what we did. Yeppers, we took about a crate's worth of Use Now garlic and peeled every bit of paper off every clove. It took ten of us about an hour. Meanwhile, their four chaperones took what was being peeled and sliced those cloves in half. It was great fun. But then today I had to take the two giant ziploc bags crammed jammed full of cloves (plus another half full one) and had to get them prepped for dehydration. All I needed to do was trim them up a little, cut off any really brown spots, slice them thinner if need be, and put them on the screen. Seemed like an easy job to spread these things out over five screens about two feet square, but I quickly learned the best way to do it was individual clove slice by individual clove slice, therefore ensuring that a lot of garlic fit onto each screen and that none of them were overlapping. It took the better part of my morning and early afternoon, but by 2:00 I had five neatly arranged screens that looked like this.

And they all went into the dehydrator like this.

And I only got through one and a half of the bags. There's another still to go (when the screens are empty again) plus two more crates' worth that haven't even been peeled yet. But don't worry. I sorted those still waiting yet again. One crate is now labeled "Use Now But Take Your Time" and the other is "Use Now, Seriously." Hopefully it'll all get done pretty quick.

And then, because I'd been inside all day and the weather was bizarrely yet gloriously WARM and beautiful, my camera and I went on a short stroll. Here is what happened:

This is the view from out the kitchen door, essentially.

The sheep were grazing on a hillside with a great view and didn't even know it.

And then I got to the garden. Oh, the garden. There is a ridiculous amount of food that we are still getting now, in mid-November. In fact, a couple days ago I helped Liz Jo harvest some stuff. This is us looking amazed at what we got.

We still have lettuce mix growing. (Covered, to keep it warm.) (Also, who knew lettuce naturally grew kind of mixed like that? I always thought different colored leaves got mixed together right before it got put into a bag.)

Most everything else is either a root vegetable or a brassica. Like these giant turnips that are totally busting out of the ground.

Or this beet.

Or these carrots.

Brassicas are things like broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. Here is a broccoli plant. (By the way, I need to make a whole nother entry about my quest to find and relationship with broccoli plants.)

Here is a cauliflower.

And here is a cabbage. I think this one looks like a star.

AND, wonder of wonders, here is the thing that amazed me most recently. Are you ready for this? This is a PURPLE cauliflower! Have you ever heard of such a thing??? And it is seriously bright purple. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw it. But it's real folks. Vegetables are so much more diverse than we have come think they are.

And tonight I watched the sunset. Scratch that. At 4:30 this afternoon I watched the sunset. So pretty.

GARLIC!!!!!

Well folks, the garlic is all officially done! What garlic? you may ask. Well, when I first got here, it had all been harvested and was hanging all over the place to dry.

Then, maybe a month or so ago, we started processing it, which meant cutting off the tall top, trimming the roots, peeling off the outermost layer of paper, and scrubbing off the dirt. Any bulbs with cloves sticking out got designated "Use ASAP," but most of them got stored in the root cellar to use until next summer when it gets harvested again. The best of the best bulbs, though, were taken out to use as seed garlic. Because garlic doesn't grow from a seed-seed. It grows from a clove. You plant one good clove that came from a good bulb and it replicates itself to make a new bulb.

So we had all these bulbs, but in order to plant it we had to separate the cloves. Easy, right? Well, sure, except that we needed 4,000 of them. And not every clove we pulled out was seed-worthy. Some were too small, or had spots on them and looked diseased, or two (or three) had grown together. So we sat and peeled off paper and sorted and re-sorted until we had enough. (This all happened in our living room, by the way, and I spent somewhere close to 14 hours over the course of three days doing it.)

We ended up with a lot of buckets or cloves and a lot of bushels of paper.

And then came the planting! The beds were prepped.

We "dibbled" the rows. (This thing is called a dibbler and is a really cool tool. It looks like a medieval torture device, but you put it over the row and then stand on it, as Nic is demonstrating, and it makes holes for the seeds, perfectly spaced out and all the right depth.)

Jason distributed the seeds.

And we planted them.

See the little garlic in its new home?

It was a fun group effort.

And then we found a bug that grossed out Liz Jo.

And the next day we spread hay over the beds. Since the cloves will be in the ground all winter (which is when they grow best) we have to protect them from freezing. A six inch layer of straw over all of it will keep the newly growing plants warm in the ground. And in the spring that straw will have turned into compost, so nourishing and helping the seedlings even more. We spread it out.

Occasionally stopping to hula dance.

Here are the four garlic rows in the big main garden, covered in hay and "put to bed" for the winter.

And then we all spontaneously fell in a circular pattern in the oats growing next door to the garlic. (Don't worry, we're not actually growing oats. Well, we are, but they're just a cover crop, so it's okay to collapse in them occasionally.)

Cover crops, by the way, are things that get planted so the ground doesn't just sit empty; they protect the soil from erosion, add nutrients (like nitrogen) back into the soil that whatever was growing there took out, will die when it freezes and, like straw, turn into compost in the spring, and, finally, cover crops are great for falling into and possibly hiding it. See? Can you see me?

No choruses of "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead," please.

And so ends the garlic! Until next year! The end!