This is a guest post by Irina Just.

Readers of Jim’s blog are fully aware that we’ve been planning to build an outdoor brick bread and pizza oven because we simply couldn’t get any home-made bread to come out the way we like it: chewy, stretchy on the inside and very crusty on the outside.

And of course, it wasn’t available in any store here, in our area. The closest we ever came was the La Brea sourdough baguette which we used to buy by the dozen, frozen, from our Lebanon Roth’s grocery store and bake as needed. When Roth’s closed its Lebanon store, there went that source.

I experimented with any and all recipes I could find, collected from friends, the Internet and my old recipe files. I sprayed the oven to create steam, I worked quickly, I kneaded diligently – and it seemed that I worked with a new recipe every week, either with or without my sourdough starter. Not a single one was satisfactory. The breads were good, but they didn’t have the texture I wanted to achieve.

My last resort was an outdoor brick bread oven, fired with wood, to be used once a week for pizza, bread, and chicken (in that order = the order of available heat).

Then one evening we were at our friends Linda and Robert’s house in Scio for dinner. Linda fixed coq au vin. We brought bread and our own wine to contribute, Robert shared his wine. The conversation centered around food and focused on bread. When I was done lamenting my unsatisfactory loaves, Linda asked, “Why not try no-knead bread? It’s easy, and results in a bread that sounds just what you’re looking for.” Now why I hadn’t heard about no-knead bread before? The very next day I dove in – and ended up baking myself right out of a bread oven.

It is an amazing, and amazingly simple recipe. It doesn’t require any fancy equipment, elaborate preparations or muscle power. All you do is mix in a bowl3 cups flour with ¼ tsp instant yeast, 2 tsp salt and 1 5/8 cup lukewarm water, using a wooden spoon or rubber spatula.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit in a warm place (warm room temperature, out of any draft) somewhere between 14-20 hours. I place mine on a shelf above our woodstove.

The dough then looks pretty spongy and wet.

Coat your fingers with flour, lift the dough on a floured surface and fold over twice. Cover with plastic, let sit for 15 minutes, and then shape the dough into a ball, using enough flour on your hands to handle the still very sticky dough. Put the ball on the kitchen counter or a cutting board, seam down; sprinkle with more flour, cover loosely with plastic and then with a towel, and let sit on the kitchen counter for up to 2 hours.

During the last 30 minutes start the oven by preheating it to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and put a Dutch oven or any baking dish with a lid inside the oven, so the dish can get hot also. When the oven and the dish are heated, take your dough and place it inside the dish.

Put the lid on and bake for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove the lid.and bake your bread for another 20-30 minutes. Take the bread out of the oven and take or turn it out of the pan to cool a bit (if you can wait!).

THAT’S IT!

Try not to eat the whole loaf all at once (I put on a whole pound after the first 2 loaves). It is very crusty outside, perfectly chewy inside and has those big holes that we all identify with “hearth, artisan” bread.

If you can get bread like this out of an ordinary kitchen oven that can be fired up every day with the turn of a knob, why go through the expense and effort of building a specialized bread oven that, because of the cost and effort of heating with a wood fire, you’d probably only use a couple times a week at most?

If your dish is round, your loaf will be (somewhat) roundish (free style); using an oblong dish will obviously change the shape. I’ve been searching for more shapes with lids, since the lid is the secret to the dish creating its own steam oven.  I have found one great website – www.breadtopia.com, headquartered in Iowa. They carry a round and an oblong clay baker, called La Cloche, a version of the German popular Römertopf. I ordered the oblong clay baker as the round one is on back order right now.

In my e-mail I had asked about the lead-time for that and Eric, the owner of Breadtopia, called me on the phone within minutes of my query and answered my questions personally.  And I got email confirmation that my order had shipped, the very same day. I’m so impressed with this outstanding customer service that I want to spread the word.

Meanwhile, I’ve been experimenting with different types and various ratios of flour:

1. All 3 cups bread flour (King Arthur is the best, I think).
2. 1 ½ cups bread flour – 1 ½ cup hard white winter wheat ground myself with my flour mill, from a friends’ farm just outside Albany.
3. 2 cups of my own milled flour and 1 cup bread flour.
4. And even all 3 cups of my own milled flour.

The results were all good, but the No. 2 version of equal amounts of bread flour and my own milled flour were the best – chewy inside, hard crusty outside, a bit heavier (because of the whole wheat) but not too dense. Next I will experiment with using my sourdough starter as a portion of the dough. Lessen the amount of water to achieve the same texture should theoretically work. Stay tuned!

A few days of blue skies and warm sunshine is all it takes to turn one’s thoughts to spring.

Over the last week of clear weather, temperatures have been cool at night – like in the low twenties – but have been getting up to the low or even mid-sixties during the day. In the greenhouse, minimums are in the low forties, with maximums reaching the low seventies. Time to plant seeds!

Two weeks ago I planted seeds left over from last year: the first batch of lettuces, and herbs – parsley, chervil, cilantro. Those seeds have already sprouted. As soon as the plants are big enough, they’ll be set out in cold frames, where we’re still harvesting lettuces planted last fall.

This weekend, after a seed-buying expedition to Nichols in Albany, it was an orgy of planting. Six types of lettuces: Australian Yellow, Black-Seeded Simpson, Flashy Butter Oak, New Red Fire, Red Velvet, and our old favorite Merlot. Artichokes, to replace any that may not have survived the brutal cold of early December (at least some old plants show signs of new growth, too soon to know how many). Two new varieties of cabbages – Megaton and Stonehead – to expand on last year’s very successful experiment with sauerkraut. Cauliflower: Snow Crown and Cheddar. Lemon cucumbers. Tomatoes: Oregon Spring, Siletz (would have planted Legend, but I proved to have saved an empty seed packet). Peas, snap and sugar pod. Winter squash – Cornell’s Bush Delicata, our favorite (I know, it seems awfully early, but you catch the planting bug . . . ). And flowers! Sunflowers, pansies, violas, nasturtiums, all in several varieties and mixes. All to be set out at the appropriate time.

Even with all this planting, the greenhouse isn’t even near full. No more seed trays in the windowsills in the house!

We got a whole selection of commercial-grade seed trays in various plug sizes from Yarnell’s Red Barn nursery in Stayton – for a mere dollar each. The planting mix we made ourselves, from compost run through our Steinmax chipper-shredder.

Garlic, onions, and shallots have been in the ground since last fall. Oops, forgot the leeks! Put that on the list for the next visit to Nichols, along with Legend tomato seeds and doubtless a few others we’ve overlooked.

Over the weekend we raised the borders of the herb garden and added several inches of compost. Got the raspberries pruned, and dug up a couple of dozen plants to give away to friends.

Now comes the true test of the greenhouse, to see if we can sprout all these seeds with no heat other than from passive solar gain, and no protection from cold other than thermal mass and insulation.

Sergio Gabrielli, CEO of Petrobras (a Brazilian multinational energy company headquartered in Rio de Janeiro), says global oil production (including biofuels) will peak in 2010 due to oil capacity additions from new projects being unable to offset world oil decline rates.

Gabrielli points out in his presentation that the world will need to produce oil from new sources equivalent to one Saudi Arabia every two years to offset future world oil decline rates – which he sees at about 5% per year.

Finding and bringing to production the needed magnitudes of new oil is simply not going to happen. Even managing to maintain historically observed decline rates may prove to be a challenge. Take Nigeria, for example. As the world teeters at the edge of economic and political collapse, Nigeria seems to be going over the edge. Nigeria, which in 2008 produced over two million barrels of sweet crude a day and today provides 9% of U.S. oil imports, could vanish as an oil exporter, virtually overnight. Despite its enormous reserves, Venezuela is looking none too stable as a producer and exporter, either.

Chris Nelder takes a close look at Mexico, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia and warns the oil export crisis has arrived – we just haven’t felt it yet:

[W]hen oil prices rise again, the pain will be far greater for the U.S. than it is for our top suppliers. Next time, the spear of declining oil exports will puncture a lung.

If the gap between demand and supply shown in the chart above cannot be filled with new supply, the only alternative is for prices to increase to reduce demand to equal supply: “demand destruction.”  That means economic shrinkage rather than growth, and a consequent financial crisis of epic proportions. Consequently we are going to find it harder to extract other energy and mineral resources. As George Mobus points out in a post at The Oil Drum, our net energy is already in decline and that is at the root of the global economic problems we are seeing. You cannot have a growing economy when the basis of all economic wealth production is in decline.

The economic tremblings we’ve seen over the last couple of years may prove to be mere foreshocks. No matter how many trillions we throw at the problem, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Rather than trying to save the irretrievably lost, we’ll have to accommodate ourselves to the new reality:

We can only start simplifying our societies and giving up the many discretionary expenditures of energy that we currently enjoy without much thought. We can learn to once again live on real-time solar influx via our food raising systems. And even then we are talking about an ability to support only a small fraction of the current population. Ironically the simplification of society involves the increasing complexity of individual lives. What this means in practice is that each individual must start to become more of a generalist in terms of the functions that support life. Everyone will have to become a food grower! Believe it or not that isn’t simple! Knowing how to grow your own nutrients is actually quite complicated and will demand a whole new set of cognitive skills.

For the environment, peak oil and economic collapse offers a glimmer of hope. For example, oil accounts for 43% of our CO2 emissions from energy use. Consequent economic collapse will mean that a lot of coal plants in the works will never get built, and maybe we’ll even see existing plants begin to wither away.

Chris Martenson used to be a corporate honcho with a big expensive house in the suburbs on the Connecticut coast. Now he’s downsized, is living in a rural community, has traded in his twin-engine fishing boat for a kayak – and travels the country giving lectures on why we’ll never see a “recovery” from our economic throes. What happened, and why?

In a speech before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Martenson lays out the hard facts:

• There are 70 million more people on the surface of the planet this year than last year.
• Each of these new humans consumes some amount of resources such as food, oil, air, soil, water, copper, coal, or timber.
• Someday, perhaps already, maybe a little later, the global flow rate of oil coming out of the ground will peak and then decline inexorably thereafter.
• From 2000 to 2008, eight short years, the total amount of debt in this country doubled while no net jobs were created and median incomes actually went backwards.
• During the industrial revolution, humans have consumed vastly more energy each decade. During the lifetime of a 22-year-old, humans will have burned more than half of all the oil ever consumed throughout history.
• Oceanic fish stocks, ancient aquifers, and topsoil are all being depleted at unsustainable rates.

Martenson goes on to explore the implications of these realities. To summarize:

All these facts share a single common feature: they are tied to exponential growth in some way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with exponential growth, as long as you have unlimited room and unlimited resources. We live on a finite planet. Time runs out in a hurry towards the end of any exponential growth system, forcing hurried decisions and severely limiting options. And there are clear signs that several key resources on our planet are in their final minutes.

Just as higher prices for fish will not cause more cod to come from the depleted fisheries, oil fields will yield their treasures in accordance to geological limits and not because our economics textbooks say they should.

Adapting to a future of less and less oil will take decades of preparation – but we’ve not yet even begun. TIME is a critical factor. SCALE is an issue. And then there’s COST.

COST – now there’s the economic rub. Every dollar in circulation was loaned into existence, with interest. The effect of loaning all of our money into existence, with interest, is this: there is always more debt than money floating around in the system. Always. And the amount of debt will compound over time – that is, it will grow exponentially. To service the debts that are growing exponentially, the economy must also grow exponentially.

See the problem?

An energy crisis rooted in resource limits will quickly translate into an economic crisis unlike any other. Consequently,  the era of growth is ending and what Martenson calls “an exciting new chapter” is about to begin.

Why the optimism? Martenson sees our challenge as not to find vast new resources to exploit, but to undertake the far more sophisticated and worthwhile task of using what we’ve got more wisely. A life with less pollution, more free time, meaningful jobs, more happiness, less stress and greater connection to each other as well as to nature are all within the realm of the possible.

As Martenson says, the longer we fiddle around the more our options shrink. Let’s hope it’s not already too late.

A new study concludes that wind, solar photovoltaic, concentrating solar thermal, geothermal, wave and tidal have the best net-energy performance and offer the best prospects for supplying society’s energy needs – but cautions all of these have challenges, including intermittency, remoteness of good resources, materials needed for large-scale deployment, and scale potential. The bottom line is this:

Contrary to the hopes of many, there is no clear practical scenario by which we can replace the energy from today’s conventional sources with sufficient energy from alternative sources to sustain industrial society at its present scale of operations.

The study warns that conventional energy sources such as oil, gas, coal and nuclear, “are either at or nearing the limits of their ability to grow in annual supply, and will dwindle as the decades proceed but, in any case, they are unacceptably hazardous to the environment.”

The report, Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society, was published by the International Forum on Globalization with content provided by the Post Carbon Institute. The report is said to be “the first major analysis to use the new research tools of full lifecycle assessment and net energy ratios to compare future scenarios for how industrial society can face its long term future.”

The report asked the basic question: Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100?

And the answer:

It is reasonable to conclude . . . that a full replacement of energy currently derived from fossil fuels with energy from alternative sources is probably impossible over the short term; it may be unrealistic to expect it even over longer time frames.

The easiest way to replace our current energy sources – while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions – is to use less energy. Maxine Savitz, a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, says the energy efficiency gained through new technologies in buildings, cars, and industry could reduce energy use as much as 30% by 2030.

That wouldn’t get us very far. A 30% gain in energy efficiency would only be enough to offset projected growth in energy consumption through 2030.

Political leaders have yet to come to grips with the question, what will follow “industrial society at its present scale of operations”?

David Korten, speaking at the recent Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, California, says our economic system has not only failed – it’s evil, and deserves to die:

So what is real wealth? We might say it is anything that has a real intrinsic value: land, labor, knowledge, food, education.

Most valuable of all are those forms of wealth that are beyond price: Love, a healthy, happy child, a job that provides a sense of self-worth and contribution, membership in a strong caring community, a healthy vibrant natural environment, peace—none of which find any place on Wall Street balance sheets or in our calculations of GDP.

Pull back the curtain, as the financial crash has done, and the truth is revealed that Wall Street acquires its power by destroying real living wealth to create phantom financial wealth. Wall Street is more than immoral, it is an institutional manifestation of evil.

The full text of Korten’s speech was published in Yes Magazine. A one-page version is not available, so you have to click through five pages (most annoying!). The excerpt quoted about is found on the second page.

Korten argues that our economic and political systems no longer work for or protect the public interest:

From the late 70s onward, Wall Street market fundamentalists mobilized to roll back the rules to unleash a consolidation of corporate power and de-link it from public accountability. Their right-wing social-engineering experiment allowed Wall Street to colonize the Main Street economy, decimated the middle class, undermined democracy and sense of community, reduced our national happiness index, and brought financial, social, and environmental devastation wherever it has reached.

Korten pleads for an economic system based on three foundational principles: ecological balance, shared prosperity, and living democracy; and for a shift from a “production-oriented” measurement system to one focused on the well-being of current and future generations.

Bring down Wall Street? Fat chance. But then again, who could have imagined that the Soviet Union would collapse and disappear, virtually overnight?

With the greenhouse project done, it’s time to put it to use. We’re going to try growing tender herbs (chervil, parsley, cilantro, even basil) over winter, and experiment with tomatoes.

In the past, I’ve been using our own compost for planting seeds. Everything goes into the compost pile: food scraps, garden waste, grape stems and pomace. Turn it over once, and a year later it’s transformed itself into beautiful rich, black, and crumbly soil. Our compost bin is to the right in this photo.

That’s composted bedding straw from the sheep barn on the left, under cover to keep it from getting saturated over winter.  It will go into the garden and vineyard next spring.

I got some used seedling trays, cheap, from the Red Barn Nursery in Stayton. Perfect for starting seedlings for transplant into larger containers as they grow. But the compost as it comes out of the bin is a little too coarse than it ought to be for starting seeds. I tried putting it in a blender, but that didn’t work. The solution: a big blender, in the form of a Steinmax 1800 electric chipper/shredder.

The Steinmax 1800 sold in 1986 for $230. I found one on Craigslist for $75. It needed a bit of refurbishing – welding, hammering, patching, rewiring, lubricating, painting. The results?

Beautiful stuff, the texture and color of coffee grounds.

We used to have a big, gas-powered chipper/shredder, thinking that we’d shred plant material before it went into the compost bin. But that didn’t work well, it was too much work, and the machine was hard to start and noisy to run. We soon sold it. But after a year of composting, the course compost (fine for amending soil in the garden as is) slides readily into the maws of the shredder. Letting all the heavy lifting happen by itself in the compost bin is definitely the way to go. Do seeds like it? See for yourself.

We’re still getting fresh peas out of the garden, despite repeated frosts and rains. Here’s how.

A similar cold frame will enable us to harvest lettuces all winter – as long as the gophers don’t move in.

We experimented with Brassica for the first time in our garden this year – cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbages – with mixed success.

The cauliflower – yellow, purple, and white – ripened first, and all at once. What do you do with all that cauliflower?  But the orange-yellow and beta carotene rich  Cheddar was particularly flavorful and delicious.

We discovered deer love broccoli and brussels sprouts. We were lucky to eke out enough for a couple of meals. For next year, we have an idea for a portable deer fence, made with steel T-posts and 6″ welded wire mesh (normally used to reinforce concrete). The fence would be cheap, light, and easy to move around as needed and to get out of the way when not needed. Portable fencing could keep the deer away from the peas and beans, as well.

The cabbage was a total triumph, yielding a dozen or so huge heads. We made a little slaw. But I’m not crazy about coleslaw, and how much can you eat anyway while the cabbage is still fresh? So with the last half dozen heads, we determined to try preserving the cabbage as sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut is finely shredded cabbage that has been fermented by various lactic acid bacteria, including Leuconostoc, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus. No special culture of lactic acid bacteria is needed because these bacteria already are present on raw cabbage.  Traditionally fermented sauerkraut has lots nutritional value, as it contains beneficial digestive enzymes and lactic acid bacteria and is high in vitamin C. (There may be an added bonus, as well. A study by nutritionist Lejla Kazinic Kreho at King’s College found that sauerkraut is as effective as Viagra at increasing sexual function.)

Sauerkraut has a long shelf life and a distinctive sour flavor, both of which result from the lactic acid that forms when the bacteria ferment the sugars in the cabbage. The name comes directly from the German, which literally translates to sour cabbage. Sauerkraut is traditional throughout northern and central Europe, where it provided a vital source of important nutrients during the winter before the days of refrigeration and global food transport.

We borrowed an 8-gallon ceramic crock from friends Jan and Pete, scanned the net for a look at kraut recipes (like here, here, and here), and got to work. Sterilize the crock. Shred the cabbage. Toss with kosher salt. Throw the shredded cabbage in the crock. Tamp firmly – the punch down we use for wine worked perfectly – and as the cabbage was really fresh out of the garden, it was almost instantly submerged in its own juices, safe from oxygen. Cover with a food-grade plastic lid that luckily fit snugly in the crock. Weigh down with a plastic bag filled with water that also served to seal out air. And put in the root cellar, to wait for six weeks or so.

Six weeks later it’s October, and the kraut should be about ready. Serendipitously, Irina’s cousin Doris and her Mann Bernd arrived from Germany. Who better to consult about actually cooking the stuff?

Berndt said his favorite recipe was with Polish sausage. Slice and brown the sausages. Add julienned onions. Cook with the kraut for about a half hour.

Doris told a story of Irina’s mother’s favorite, a dish that Doris would often cook for her when visiting her in Darmstadt. Cut some big – like 2″ – cubes of nice fatty speck (bacon that’s cured but not smoked). Brown a bit, then add onions and cook until soft. Add the kraut, then simmer gently for a couple of hours. Mother was in heaven.

So we tried a fusion – sauerkraut with sausages and speck. We had some speck from Michael at the Pepper Tree Sausage House, and we used his bratwurst, as we didn’t have any of his Polish sausages lying around. Bernd first did the pork belly bit, then add the browned sausages for the last half hour of simmering.

The result was a revelation. The sauerkraut was tangy, tasty, and crisp, and the meats were tender and rich. Accompanying the main dish were mashed Yukon Gold potatoes with sweet butter from the Noris dairy in Crabtree and a fresh green salad from our garden with fresh herb dressing. The potatoes, lettuces and herbs were all from our garden.  A bottle of own Pinot Noir, of course, from the fresh and fruity 2008 vintage. A simple meal with delicious, nutritious food and good friends – life doesn’t get any better than this.

Voilà – a smashingly successful demonstration. Winter doesn’t have to mean deprivation, even in the absence of refrigeration.

By Irina Just

A few years ago, downtown Lebanon received its final deathblow when the city council approved the new Super Wal-Mart at the south end of town.

But some Lebanonistas still refuse to surrender. This spring, a group of enthusiastic folk (labeling themselves with the unfortunate moniker “partners for progress”) under the motto “working together for a brighter future” started a Thursday afternoon farmers market – right in the heart of downtown Lebanon.

I was a skeptic, doubting that any effort to bring something new to downtown or to revitalize this misbegotten town would succeed. But from the first Thursday on, I was hooked.

I soon began to plan my entire week around Thursday afternoons. I compiled my shopping list all week long with Thursday afternoons in mind – but I would revise it on the spot should any fresh, new produce surprise me, to take advantage of the bounty of quality, home grown food and home made products. I no longer had to pine for big city markets such as the Pike Place Market I frequented when we lived in Seattle. I no longer had to drive to other farmers markets in Corvallis, Albany, or Sweet Home to get fresh, home grown food.

And what a draw! Vendors came from Jefferson, Harrisburg, Sweet Home, Lebanon and many places in between. There were no junk or antique dealers – just real, fresh, local foods and quality hand-made products.

I was intrigued by the idea that I could buy everything for my entire dinner right here, on a half-block stretch . . . and so I did. I bought pizza dough; bread; dessert cookies; all the veggies imaginable to prepare a week’s-worth of suppers and then more for canning or freezing; fruits for desserts, cakes and pies. I found salad stuff; herbs of all sorts; mushrooms locally grown or picked by hand, varieties I had never before heard of: lobster, pink & Phoenix oyster, chicken, ashy coral, fried chicken, hedgehog. There was organic goat cheese, made right here but usually available only in Portland or Eugene. There were flowers, cut and potted, soaps, lotions and potpourris; hand spun and knitted bags, hats and caps, handcrafted gifts and homemade preserves. And when the egg lady discovered there were only 11 eggs in her carton, she stuck a lemon cucumber in the 12th spot. “There, now it’s full”. I laughed and of course bought the mélange. And from the Worm Lady, I gleaned new insights into composting my kitchen scraps.

But Thursday afternoons in Lebanon were about more than buying great food and other things. It was a chance to chat with the vendors, to learn about their business, to share their experiences, successes, and failures. It was a chance to visit with other customers, to share recipes and ideas. It made for a perfect opportunity to meet your friends for a joint shopping spree. It was personal, direct, communal – and very lively.

The market ran from May 28 to September 24. For 18 weeks, once a week, a dozen dedicated farmers and producers spent four hours sitting in pouring rain, freezing cold, scorching heat, and all kinds of weather in between. They brought what they had grown, harvested, made or produced. I learned about crop failures, about the virtues of greenhouse tomatoes (available much earlier than mine!), about the rarity of some mushrooms, and the reason cheese wasn’t always available (you can’t milk a nursing goat!). I began to understand more about natural processes, about farmers’ problems as well as their successes – and I enjoyed what I discovered.

There was life in the street of downtown Lebanon, a real sense of community and camaraderie. I’ll miss those Thursday afternoons, and fervently hope the organizers will continue their efforts next year.

I will be there, shopping list in hand, ready to abandon it should a great find or a new variety appear to whet my proverbial appetite for fresh, local food, goods and services, with a dose of friendship thrown in gratis.

Almost a month ago I wrote about building a passive solar greenhouse at the farm. It’s now complete and in use.

Here’s the view of the south side. From a heating and cooling efficiency standpoint, it may have been better to limit the glass solely to the south side – but aesthetically, I couldn’t resist a window on the east side and a glass door.

Here’s a shot showing the back interior wall, painted black to absorb heat, with a work bench/plant shelf over the water-filled barrels that serve as a heat sink.

And this photo shows the plant shelves along the south-facing windows. More water-filled containers support the lower shelf and provide additional heat storage.

So far, the greenhouse has not dropped below 60 degrees at night and has maintained a comfy mid- 60s during the day, with a plant-friendly humidity. We’ll see how it performs in the depths of winter – and later next year, during the long hot days of summer.

We’ve moved the herbs – basil, parsley, chives – into the greenhouse, hoping to grow them all winter. The seedling tray has been planted with more basil, cilantro, and chervil.

Outside, the tomatoes have been draped with plastic to husband the last vestiges of summer heat (and protect them from hungry deer). The lettuces will get their cold frame at the first hint of frost. The fall sugar and snow peas are coming on, as is the second raspberry crop. Winter squash is just waiting on the vine. The sauerkraut should be ready to sample in another week. The sheep are taking care of themselves. Hopefully our new ram has done his work freshening the ewes and we’ll see new lambs come late December, early January.

The grapes are approaching 20° brix – another week or so of sun and they’ll be ready. Harvest is tentatively set for Saturday October 10.