Renee Wilkinson's Blog, page 31

Friends in the Right Places

In addition to friends in low places, I am also fortunate to have friends in all the right places when it comes to growing food. I recently spent an afternoon at the Courthouse Garden here in Eugene, which is a re-entry program for ex-cons and also a class on urban farming through the University of Oregon. They were blessed with a huge donation of tomato and pepper plants, with extras to share.

Their garden is gorgeous and the visit was worth it just for that. They have such tidy rows and these fancy veggie signs. So cool! Of course, never being one to turn down a free veggie plant, I happily took advantage of their offer for veggie starts and brought some home to our garden. Do I need more peppers and tomatoes? Well, define "need". I certainly need them more than the compost pile there needed them.

The tomatoes were in really great shape. They have been carefully managed, so they were not root bound and were nice and tall. I snipped off the flowers when I planted them though so they could focus on getting established quickly. A couple weeks later, the flowers are back and I'm hoping for a decent crop. The varieties are Brandywine (classic heirloom), Japanese Black (should be interesting), Cherokee Purple (another classic) and a striped something or other.

The pepper plants were smaller, still not root bound, and some already had fruit. I snipped off the flowers when I planted them, but just couldn't bring myself to snip off the fruit. I'm letting it ripen and am pretty excited about the new additions. Most are Italian sweet peppers – long and brightly colored. I snagged a couple hot ones and also this interesting Russian variety that supposedly does well in the cool Pacific Northwest. We'll see soon enough.

I'm really hoping for a nice, long, warm September and October to get these babies ripe!

Cool Summer Eggs

With three chickens and four ducks, we have no shortage of eggs at our house. We have friends watch over our flocks when we vacation and usually give them some eggs as a thank you. Aside from those few occasions, we have given hardly any away this season because we have integrated them as a staple into our meals.

There are a few recipes in particular I have been enjoying this summer. The weather has been heating up, so I have been craving cooler things. My two favorites have been the classics: deviled eggs and egg salad.

For deviled eggs, I wing it when I make them. Since you need to hard boil them, I store a carton at a time in the fridge for over a week. Sometimes it takes two weeks for them to be best separated from the shell. When they are too fresh, they stick and you end up peeling away the egg whites – so frustrating.

I boil them all up, peel and carefully slice in half. The cooked yolks go in a boil and I mash them with a dollop of mayo, spoonful of dijon, paprika and whatever else I'm craving. Recently I tried pickle juice, which was okay. But some followers on Twitter gave me great suggestions:

bungalowranch Cora Potter @hipchickdigs I like using creme fraiche and mustard instead of mayo.


jknakayama Jason K Nakayama @hipchickdigs Curry powder instead of mustard rocks!


From my friend Claudia: Rice vinegar to give them a fabulous tang

If you have suggestions, send them my way! I'm still perfecting how I make them, but they are my new favorite summer snack.

I found a fantastic egg salad recipe that I made recently, originally from AllRecipes. I know I reference that site a lot and it's mostly because you can scan recipes until you see over 300 people gave it five out of a five stars. So here is my slightly-altered version to make enough for eight sandwiches:

12 eggs
1/2 cup mayonnaise
3 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon prepared yellow mustard
1 lemon, juiced
1/2 cup chopped green onions
salt and pepper to taste



Place eggs in saucepan and bring to a boil for ten minutes. Run under cool water immediately to stop them from cooking. Peel and chop.
Mix eggs with mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, yellow mustard, lemon juice and green onions. Season with sea salt and fresh cracked pepper.

I made these into tea sandwiches on a hot day for a baby shower and they turned out great. They were really bright, bright yellow from the rich homegrown yolks and they were a big hit. I'm planning another batch later this week to enjoy when we're vacationing in the high desert this month. It's a cool, lightly filling lunch for those hot-hot-hot days.

Good Haul

Oh my goodness, I am almost getting buried in the harvest this summer! The garden in our little rental house is productive, which is surprising considering how little work it has been. The broccoli has all come on at the same time and I'm barely eating it before it completely flowers.

Often I get asked to help people plan their vegetable gardens and I always start by asking them what they buy most often from the grocery store. This is a great reminder to grow what you eat frequently already. If I didn't like broccoli and beets, I would be in real trouble right now.

I am watching the green tomatoes, pepper plants and eggplants like a hawk right now. We have had a really cool summer – which I am not complaining about – but that means a lot of things are late to ripen. I have four different tomatoes that I am eager to sink my teeth into. But a little patience and some hot summer days will get me there soon.

The late summer crops are not quite ready yet. The early summer crops are being harvested left and right. That probably means it's time to pull out the spent plants and put in fall and winter crops. Is it that time already? Bak! Time is flying by…

Portland Book Event This Saturday

In Other Words is a great shop in Portland specializing in feminist literature and I am proud to have an event there this weekend! They are the feminist bookstore featured in Portlandia, which is a hilarious show in case you haven't seen it yet. I will be there at 4:00pm this Saturday July 30th. I will have a few copies of the book to giveaway!

It would be great to see some friendly gardening faces there and I would love to give the book away to my blog readers. I am hoping for some good conversation all about juggling homesteading with modern values. Hope to see you there!

Goodbye Milt

We found Milt a farm! Our drake, or male duck, is now spreading his love among a large flock of ladies living on a farm just south of Eugene. Whew! We were not looking forward to having him for dinner.

I think Bess, Pepper, Gladys and Ramona are enjoying the peace and quiet. We are getting a steady supply of eggs already from both Gladys (green eggs) and her daughter Ramona (brown eggs). We are in the process of trying to teach these girls where to lay, as they seem prone to laying just anyway – like right in the middle of the lawn. Some days they lay in the duck house and other days it's an Easter Egg hunt.

In a new homestead mystery, our Rhode Island Red chicken Florence stopped laying. We gave it a few weeks, thinking she just needed a break, but it has now been a month of no eggs from her. I checked her over carefully for signs of pests, like mites. I carefully felt her body to make sure there was no egg binding, which is when an egg essentially gets trapped inside her.

She seems completely healthy. The only thing that has changed has been their feed. Since the ducks and chickens were eating from each other's feeders, we switched to a feed blend safe for both ducks and chickens. We talked to our local feed store this weekend and picked up a new blend, slightly higher in protein, so we'll give it a shot and see how it goes. We definitely have no shortage of eggs right now, but we want the animals to be getting all the nutrients they need.

With the departure of Milt, it feels like things are back to "normal" and we can work on these other little homestead mysteries. The egg bowl is overflowing and the garden is producing more than we can eat. All feels right again around here.

Strawberry Waffles and Funny Eggs

Like a crazy woman, I went back to the local farm to u-pick more strawberries. Our cupboards are stocked with jam and I am getting tired of standing over the stock pot stirring. So this round I decided to just freeze them all – easy and versatile.

I lightly rinsed the berries, since they can be little sponges and soak up excess water. I then hulled the tops off and set them out in a single layer on a cookie sheet. They went into the freezer for a few hours until totally frozen. Then I rolled them off the sheet and into a plastic freezer bag. This freezes them as individual berries, instead of one giant block. That makes it really, really easy to measure out what you need as you need it.

Pearl, our 7+ year old Americana, laid a really funny looking egg the other day. It was under-sized and crooked. She seems otherwise healthy and has been laying eggs since then that have looked normal. We also got our first duck egg from Gladys!

For breakfast, I decided to whip up something using our funny shaped eggs and the frozen berries. I have been craving a huge pile of waffles using this great recipe from AllRecipes.com. I made up a strawberry compote/sauce for the topping.

Strawberry Sauce

2 cups frozen berries
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup sugar (or less)
2 tsp. cornstarch
1/2 tsp. vanilla


Mix berries, juice, sugar and cornstarch in a small saucepan and bring to a boil.
The berries will fall apart as they cook, but you can mash them to desired consistency. Boil hard for a couple minutes to thicken.
Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Serve warm over waffles, pancakes, biscuits or ice cream.

The great thing about frozen, local berries is that they taste so close to fresh when they get cooked up. I ate about two waffles before I couldn't fit anymore. With blueberry season just around the corner and raspberries coming on just now, it's going to be a morning-berry-bonanza around here!

Milt Needs to Go

Our chocolate runner duck, Milt, needs to go. He is four months old and humping everything in sight! How do you wrestle being a modern feminist with the animal world? He will corner one of the ducks, bite the back of her head to keep her in place, then mount her. It doesn't look fun, enjoyable or kind. It's kind of a frustrating spectacle to observe on an insanely frequent basis.

We were down to just two hens, which is what you call female ducks, after our raccoon incident and they were getting bombarded by Milt. After a few weeks of searching, we found two sweet runner hens to add to our flock. They are a mother and daughter, whom we named Gladys and Ramona. Ramona is the daughter who is very slender and small, but fully grown and healthy.

Ducks have a pecking order, just like chickens. But they also seem more flock-oriented than chickens. So we decided to just introduce them all in the enclosed run and see what happens. Well, it didn't take long for Milt to make his presence known.

He is just relentless! Every time the ladies seem to be enjoying the sunshine or settling in for a nap, Milt has to run over and ruin it. We want our ducks to be peaceful and calm. And we want eggs, not babies. So after a week of "seeing how it goes", we're over it. Milt needs to go! (Pictured above left to right: Gladys, Ramona, Bess, Milt, Pepper)

Roosters can be really hard to re-home, but we are hopeful that a local farm might need a nice purebred drake. We'll give it a few days, but if it doesn't happen quick we may be eating duck for dinner.

Found the Off Button

Typically I go a million miles an hour trying to balance roughly 10 things at once while standing on my head blindfolded. I am happy to report, however, that my summer break from school and work has led me to discover the off button.

I am still doing little projects – writing, some book events, lots of volunteering – but I am for the most part abandoning a set schedule. The last time I had a summer like this was probably when I was fifteen years old. It's taken a couple weeks to adjust, but I am there now. Here is a little compilation of a typical week for me.

Mornings include a fresh berry shake, soft boiled eggs and crusty bread.

Howard, our almost twelve year old greyhound, gets a walk and a rest.

I am eating bouquet after bouquet of artichokes, my favorite vegetable.

Weekend trips are sprinkled here and there, reconnecting with friends near and far. This particular friend came from very far. Currently from Pakistan, but before that Afghanistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Poland. I'm probably missing some in there.

And then volunteering at a local dog rescue called Luv-a-Bull cleaning kennels, feeding sweet dogs, and petting puppies. They have both big dogs (mostly pitbulls) and little dogs (many from death row in LA).

It's summertime and the living is real easy around here.

Strawberry Lemon Marmalade

Marmalade is similar to jam in texture, but typically they include some amount of fruit peel. In this case, I made a delicious batch of strawberry-lemon marmalade or, as my friend Behak described it, strawberry-lemonade in a jar. It tastes like I canned summer and I can't wait to pop these suckers open in January when I've forgotten what the sun feels like.

The original recipe is based on the one in the Ball Blue Book of Preserving – a very inexpensive and useful recipe guide to canning. I made some modifications based on my taste preference and what I had on hand. Here is my version:

lemon peel from 4 large lemons
8 cups mashed strawberries
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
4 cups sugar


Cover lemon peel with water and boil for five minutes. Drain and return to stove.
Combine all ingredients and bring to a boil.
Continue stirring constantly until the mixture is a jam-like consistency or the boiling point is reached. If you don't have a thermometer, mound a bit of marmalade on a spoon, remove from heat and cool. If it's not thick enough, keep cooking.
Put hot marmalade into warm, sterilized jars. Process in a hot-water bath for 10 minutes. Makes about five pint jars.

I don't use pectin generally, so I increased the lemon juice in my version above. It made a nice, sweet-tart marmalade. I also decreased the sugar because my berries were really-really-really sweet. I've never done u-pick Shustan berries, but they have won me over. Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did!

Holy Strawberries

Most years I completely miss strawberry season. It comes so early for us here in the Pacific Northwest that it is barely, sort-of-consistently-sunny when they are ripe. And after about three weeks, they are all but gone for the year. This year, however, I stayed organized enough to stay on top of the harvest season.

I called around to several local farms offering u-pick berries to find the best deal and decided on Thistle Down Farms in Junction City. Their prices were on par with most everyone else and they don't spray their strawberries, which I think is important. Holy moley – I'm now up to my ears in strawberries!

My lovely friend Bekah took a spin out there with me and we each picked a bucket full. I think mine ended up being around eight pounds of juicy, sweet, Shuksan strawberries. They are a new variety for me, but it sounds like the Hoods this year just aren't getting real sweet. The Shuksan strawberries are just great though.

I popped the bucket in the fridge for a night and Bekah met me the next morning for a day of canning. Here are some tips to keep in mind as you start canning the harvest this year:

wear closed shoes, no flip-flops
wear long-sleeves to prevent burns when things bubble up
have snacks on hand
have a nice long playlist queued up

We spent about four or so hours canning and ended up with about six pints of strawberry jam and six pints of strawberry-lemonade marmalade. I'll give you a follow-up post with a recipe for the latter – it was amazing and surely needs it's own spot on the blog.

It was great having company and Bekah was such a trooper, especially for her first time canning. We just chatted the day away listening to Adele, hulling berry tops and taking turns stirring. After all that though, I still want more! I'm planning to u-pick next week so I can freeze some and can up some fancy gifts. Enjoy the holiday weekend and more next week!