Diana’s Think Space

I have got to tell you about this little discovery I made yesterday: honeyed mozzarella.

I was making regular mozzarella for the grilled pizza we were going to have later in the week, and on impulse I separated a trial bit and kneaded honey into it. And oh. my. god. was it ever good. Deliriously good. Like, biting into a melting cheese danish good – and even without all the extra calories. (But man, come to think of it I sure could see this wrapped in pastry. And maybe deep-fried, to boot. Extra calories, here we come again.)

You all know what a firm believer I am in the necessity of mixing different tastes together to bring out the best in any given food, right? Like how adding brown sugar to tomato sauce, a little flaked salt to a chocolate chip cookie, or a little acid to barbecue sauce suddenly makes those basic foods so much better, even if you can’t actually taste the addition itself? Well this cheese started out as a thought experiment like that – what would happen if I put sweet honey into a salty cheese? – and ended up cementing my belief forever.

Someone has to have done this before, right? I cannot possibly have been the first person ever in the history of cheesemaking to mix honey into my curds. I probably just haven’t seen it before because I’m such a cheapskate that I stay very far away from the expensive-cheese-counter (while eyeing it wistfully from over in the dried beans aisle). But if not… then why isn’t this more popular? Because I have to say, honeyed cheese is probably going to become something of a staple at my house from now on. I can’t wait to try doing this with something even more pungent, like a sharp cheddar – and next year, with raw honey of my very own.

Yesterday I noticed that several big chunks of the clay I’d dug out of the pond were bone dry, so I chucked ‘em in the wheelbarrow and began the long, laborious process of making bricks. Emphasis on labor.

First I built a brick mold out of some 2×4s I had lying around. I know most bricks are 2×4x8, but I didn’t think it would be worth trying to build a mold to achieve a specific desired final dimension since I have no idea what the shrinkage rate is going to be on these suckers. I just went ahead and used the lumber as-is and ended up with some big honking mothas.

This wooden form is based on the wooden brick mold I saw in use at Colonial Williamsburg’s brickmaking site. You fill the mold with clay and then level off the tops with a flat piece of wood (I just used my hand).

To make up the clay, first I had to beat all those huge bone-dry clay chunks with a hammer into very fine bits and powder – otherwise it wouldn’t dissolve. (I found maybe three pebbles in the whole wheelbarrowload- this is very pure clay.) If I had a mechanical pug mill I would feel confident enough to use it straight out of the ground, but it’s much too stiff and dense for me to even try to work all by myself. So instead I just waited for the shovelfuls I had pried out of the ground to dry on a tarp, banged them into powder, dumped that in a bucket of water for a few minutes, and transferred the resultant drippy goop (trying to leave all the water behind) into a huge rubbermaid tub where I mixed it with straw.

I came really, really close to just getting in and mixing it with my feet colonial-style, but decided I’d rather not have wet feet and ended up doing all the tedious mixing by hand. For like half an hour. Bent over, lifting 10lb wads of clay. Dignity 1, back muscles 0 – mixing clay, even soft sloppy clay, is hard work. The next time I have a whole wheelbarrow-load to do (and oh boy there are so many more wheelbarrow-loads of clay in my future – to give you an idea, this whole batch made only 22 bricks, big bricks but still), I’m setting up the laptop in the sunporch so I can watch some TV or a movie or something and I’m stomping mindlessly away in that muck for as long as it takes. Josh can even take pictures if he wants.

Sadly, once mixed all the beautiful yellow, orange, and deep red perfectly delineated striations in my otherwise lovely white clay turned into baby-poop brown. I can only hope the oxides and iron in the bricks will change color again when they’re fired.

So the process goes: You set the mold on a ware board (which will hold the bricks later). You wet and sand the mold, you roll up a big wad of clay and sand that, smooth and press it in, lift off the mold, and presto! A brick!

At least that’s the theory. My clay was so soft and sloppy – it had to be, or else how could I mix it? – that it became not only the color but also the texture of runny baby poop. So while my first bricks did hold their shape admirably, I kind of held my breath as I moved them around. And then of course there are the little side mohawks they got as I pulled the mold upwards and they slid along it. Those will all have to be trimmed off with a knife when the bricks are firmer. Sigh.

Still, 22 bricks are on their way towards this Fall’s big firing. Or 17, if you deduct the average 20% loss rate I’m told to expect from the clamp-style firing I’m planning on doing. Or 44, if you count that they’re about twice as thick as regular bricks. Either way, while it doesn’t sound like much payback for a couple hours’ work and an aching back, it is very nice to have a tangible, concrete result for all that labor. It makes me smile every time I go into the garage and see them all neatly lined up in tidy rows. And besides, if you consider that it only takes 16 bricks to build a rocket stove, I’ve already completed one of my brickmaking goals.

I love how the chickens all follow me around the yard whenever I go out to the garden. Do they see me as their rooster, or are they trained to expect treats?

They frighten poor Sofía because they’ll peck you if you squat down, thinking you’re feeding them – and they peck hard – but today she had a victory and remembered what I had told her about being big, waving her arms, and shouting NO, CHICKENS! And she laughed, and laughed, and laughed when the frightened would-be-Sofía-snacker flapped away in dismay.

Today I also got them into a feeding frenzy by gathering handfuls of disgusting little scratchy swarming Japanese beetles and holding them down at their reach. They must have eaten dozens of the nasty little bugs. Happy chickens, happy mommy, and less Japanese beetles next year, hooray.

I’m really becoming kind of absurdly fond of them. And far from thinking them ugly, I’m beginning to think the black Australorps, at least, are quite beautiful. Their black feathers shine a deep iridescent bottle-green in the sun.

I went mining for clay the other night after a rainstorm. Yes, the pond was full of water. Yes, I got soggy and muddy. But hey, I’m a potter, how can I not be excited about that much clay just lying right there for the taking?

The line of clay seems to run deeper than the 3-4 inches I had thought likely – I couldn’t find the bottom of it with the shovel. It also seems broad – or well, it’s bigger than the 3′ across that I dug before getting tired of squelching in the dark, grinding mud into my blisters, blindly prying out shovels full of water and roots, and splashing mud in my eyes.

Did I mention that not only was the pond full of water, but it was like ten at night? Cuz that’s the way I roll.

I got a good amount of clay; enough for one evening, anyway. I plan to calm down a little bit and maybe go back and dig when the pond isn’t quite so wet and I can actually see what I’m doing. Concept.

In the mean time it’s set out on a tarp to dry in preparation for slaking, mixing, and forming into bricks.

This image below is dried clay chunks that I collected earlier this year from Backfill Hill, slaking down to mud. Soon it will be mushy enough to mix with straw and pack into brick molds. I don’t know if I will bother sieving it after all, for such a rough use as brickmaking.

So I don’t know how much clay is under the pond, but clearly it’s a lot. As impatient as I always am, I want to dig it out all at once, get it mixed and formed and dried into all the bricks I will ever need, and all that right now – but as I figure I have only about a month or two before the Fall rains set in, plus I’m as busy as ever with all my other projects, that seems increasingly unlikely.

Patience, grasspotter. That clay has lain at the bottom of the pond for a few centuries already, it’s not like it’s going anywhere soon!

Look who I found nestled in a flower box this morning:

This poor little guy is the same, I’m pretty sure, as the toad intermittently terrorized by Sofía that I see every so often close to the back door. I’m even moderately sure that it might be him I’ve rescued a couple times from the pool – if so, he sure is a survivor.

Stick around, little guy. I’ll try to keep my girl off your back.

I felt like a real pioneer woman today, because this is what I did while Sofía napped:

Armed with a long-handled sledgehammer, three wedges, and – just at the very end, just a tiny bit – a little garden saw, I split a 30-foot log. All by myself. It took me two hours, but I did it.

I also managed to clock myself in the jaw – hard – with the butt end of a catapulting sledgehammer, take a bit of skin off one knee, get seven new mosquito bites, and come close to crushing some fingers, but I survived. And boy, do I feel like I did something worth doing tonight.

See, all these logs have lain here since the ground was cleared back in February. Originally I was going to use them as bed borders, but first I couldn’t even lift them – these logs are BIG! They were full-sized trees! – and then I went and decided to make my beds all curvy, so long straight-ish things won’t work any more. I had got so I was kind of wishing I had let the guys chop them in lengths for firewood to begin with.

But they have to be useful somehow, right? Beyond burning?

Well for one thing, our goats will need a pen, so how about some split-rail fencing? All I would have to do is split each of those halves in half again (the right one I’d split in thirds I think, it’s pretty damn heavy), and I’d have lots and lots of fence railage at my disposal (too bad I can’t make the wire mesh liner, too). Or alternately, I want to build a little tool shed in the center of the garden, backed into Backfill Hill. It doesn’t have to be watertight, so I had thought I might use halves of logs just like these ones, lined up vertically on top of a stud frame, for the walls. Rustic-looking and self-sufficient. Additionally, every time it rains my little chopped-out staircase turns into a mini waterfall and washes away a little bit more: the steps could really use some wooden risers to hold back all that dirt. I could buy a few 6×6s, but I bet a small, halved log would work just perfectly.

The point is, now that I know I can do it I’m sure I can find uses for these logs. As long as all my echoing clanging and banging with the sledgehammer doesn’t piss off all the neighbors.

Got this via my father-in-law … way to go, government!

The extreme overgrowth and underbrush on the hillside behind the Richard H. Chambers U.S. Courthouse in Pasadena, California, prompted GSA’s Pacific Rim Region property management to take quick action to avoid summer fires.

Ultimately, the choice was easy: Use a herd of goats. The decision meant a cost-saving to taxpayers over hiring manual labor and proved to be better for the environment than bulldozers.

The unusually wet winter and spring caused the overgrowth, which, in California, always means the risk of summer wildfires and grass fires because of tinder underbrush.

The goats are an efficient vegetation management tool, costing thousands less and taking three days vs. a week for manual labor, with few side effects. Unlike bulldozers, used historically for the annual project, goats control brush and weeds without disturbing the grass and soil. They also do not pollute or leave synthetic chemicals that could run off into lakes and streams or be ingested by other animals.

Download the full report of goats vs. the costs of manual labor at http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/149785 .

Someone asked me what exactly I meant by “top bar” beekeeping, so here are some images.

Normally beekeepers slip a commercially-made sheet of plastic or wax, imprinted with a honeycomb pattern, into each wooden frame. It is tied in with wire. The bees build up the comb wax following those guides. The whole frame is one solid sheet, like so:

Whereas in top-bar beekeeping, the only guide provided the bees is a little strip of beeswax applied along the top center of each frame. The bees build up the entire honeycomb on their own, from the top down. This lets them make the cells the size and shape that they want (evidence has shown that the smaller natural size may help reduce mite infestation) and makes honey harvesting much easier as you simply slice off the whole comb, but also takes twice as much work for the bees and has to be watched to make sure they’re not drawing it out in crazy shapes and sticking all the frames together.

Eventually they will fill out the whole frame with comb and it will look identical to the first, though it will still be more delicate. Top bar frames can’t be tipped around as cavalierly as foundation frames, because the soft, honey-heavy wax will simply fall out. That nearly happened to me the last time I opened the hive – it partly detached as I tipped the frame carelessly, but I think the bees will be able to repair it.

Because of the extra work required by the bees to make comb from scratch, I am planning to never ever harvest the brood boxes. Only the shallow supers will get touched, and only once per year. It’s kind of a balance; were I to use commercial foundation I could harvest honey twice a year because the bees wouldn’t have to work so hard to build comb; but the only wax I would get would be from slicing off the capped honey, and that little bit wouldn’t go far in making candles. So harvesting a top bar super will be a nice tradeoff, I think – less honey, but more wax. And with the eventual four colonies that I hope to have, harvesting once a year should be more than enough for our needs. In fact, if I weren’t baking for people outside our small household, I could give up buying commercial sugar entirely… at least, that’s the hope for far in the future.

Josh said we could get a goat in the spring! I guess he (and me, too) is tired of owning so much land and not being able to see it because of the mighty, impenetrable, spiny and poison-ivy-ridden jungle that covers it. While we could make a practice of bushwhacking it every summer, the big fallen trees, rough ground, hundreds of saplings, and the cost of the machinery make it a daunting prospect. What better option, then, than goats? Low-maintenance and delighted to browse on any forage presented them, they are nature’s deforesters and are already used by several companies – such as Google – to keep vegetation at bay. They will destroy young saplings, find poison ivy and brambles delicious, and will prevent perennial weeds from coming back.

I’m definitely buying a doe of a dairy breed, because why have an animal just as a land-clearer when that animal could also be providing us with milk at the same time? Though I’ll contradict what I just said there to note that we will probably also buy a wether – castrated male – at the same time, because a) goats are social animals and goats with friends spend less time plotting to get out of their fences, b) wethers cost 25% of what does cost and there’s no way we could afford two does, and c) I don’t think we could find a use for all the milk that would come from two does anyway.

Though it will take 7 months for the new doe kid to hit goat puberty, plus another several months afterwards for her to give birth, I am excited about the possibility of goat milk for at least a couple different reasons.

1: Most obvious, saving money over commercial stuff. I’ve been making a few of our soft cheeses and all our buttermilk and yogurt for some time now; having free milk on hand would encourage me to also make things like cream cheese and maybe some hard cheeses again too.

2: Health reasons. Goat milk is supposed to be much easier on the digestive system; lactose-intolerant people can drink it, and it also (unlike cow’s milk) has a basic reaction in the stomach which can soothe people like me with overactive acidity problems.

But as for the question of what breed of dairy goat…. Who knows?

I got up on the roof today and took several pictures with the wide-angle lens. And then I spent altogether too long futzing around with them in the Gimp, trying to compose them into a passable panorama just for YOU.

Click on it to see a 3X larger version.

This view from the roof fits much better with the image of the farm that I have in my head. I might get up there once a year now, or with the seasons’ change.

It’s kind of funny to me how it goes from kind of idyllic farmland – flowers, even! – petering out to scruffy, unkempt weedland at the other end.