Well, this month has come and gone so quickly, it’s hard to believe it’s almost November. Halloween decorations have popped up on schedule, with some displays modest and others extravagant. The ginormous plastic skeletons aren’t so much in evidence this year as it’s probably a pain to put them up and get them down again. They’ve been replaced by huge spider webs with equally huge spiders.
Ghosts are showing up more with a few having LED lights inside them for night time display.
Trick or Treating doesn’t seem quite a popular nowadays as it used to be. I received only a handful of children last year leaving me to eat up or toss what was left over. This year I’ve bought only one small bag to cut down on my snacking.
With not much to report this month, I’ll leave you with some pictures from previous years.
With the arrival of fall and its chilly temperatures, now is the time for cooking. Soup tops the list, of course.
I save up chicken skin and left over bones in a freezer bag until I have enough collected. Then with chopped celery and onions, I simmer it all in a stock pot or the crock pot for smaller batches. After filtering out the solids, I then use the stock produced for creating chicken soup. The same for beef bones when I can get them. The local farmers market had a meat vendor selling pork products this past summer. Among their offerings were ham hocks which I will experiment with at some point but for now they are in the freezer.
Another dish, which my mother called ‘spaghetti’ and my father called ‘goulash’, is a very simple recipe which actually goes under the name American goulash. My mother used spaghetti rather than elbow macaroni, a can of tomato paste (Campbell’s Tomato Soup) with some ketchup (about two or three tablespoons worth) added to hamburg cooked up. No oil or seasonings were used except for salt. About as basic as they come, yet both my brothers and myself consider this comfort food. I still make this as it consitutes a meal in itself along with some cukes or kim chi and is a great budget stretcher.
I bake my own bread now as it’s cheaper than store-bought and tastes way better. And there’s something else I noticed once I started doing this. As I was walking down the aisle in the Shaw’s supermarket which had loaf after loaf of commercial bread, I found myself sniffing. The odor of the bread was detectable but there was also another odor combined with it, that didn’t smell right and put me off. It was quite subtle and difficult to describe. The only thing I can think of is that I was smelling the additives put into commercially prepared bread. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. All the more reason to stick with homemade bread.
Then of course there’s dessert.
Brownies have always been favored but up until recently I had only made them from one of the brownie mixes at the grocery store. I finally decided to try baking them from scratch and used the following recipe.
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup granulated sugar
½ cup melted unsalted butter (1 stick)
2 large eggs
½ cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 8 X 8 pan with parchment paper
In bowl, mix melted butter and cocoa powder until smooth
Add sugar, mix well until combined, then add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each. Stir in vanilla extract.
Add flour and salt, then fold gently until combined. Don’t overmix.
Pour batter in pan and spread evenly. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs. Then let cool in the pan before cutting.
The results? Well, let’s just say they disappeared very quickly and it was only me eating them. Needless to say, I won’t be buying brownie mix any more. Without all the additives the commercial mix has, the taste of home-made brownies is out of this world. Very rich flavor and they seem to hit a spot I didn’t know I had. If you like brownies then try the above recipe. Makes me want to experiment with other recipes.
Invasive plants, fungi and animals are a perennial bugbear of environmentalists in America. In their efforts to preserve and enhance the biota of North America, they find that these invaders threaten to push out unique species unable to compete with them, often taking advantage of an ecosystem already disrupted by humans.
The sad fact is that much of the damage done so far is irreversible. Vigorous weeds such as plantain, dandelions, mullein, chicory, Queen Anne’s Lace, kudzu, purple loosestrife as well as a host of others are now too widespread to eliminate.
The chestnut blight, accidentally introduced when Asian chestnuts were brought into the country, killed billions of native chestnuts, forever altering the East Coast ecosystem. Dutch Elm disease wiped out 80 percent of the trees here. As a child, I can remember all elms in my home town, one by one, having the sticker attached, warning the tree was infected. One by one they were all cut down, nearly all gone by the time I graduated high school.
Insects such as the Emerald Ash borer and Hemlock Woolley Adelgid are making inroads on these trees as well, though it’s still up in the air as whether ash trees and hemlocks will go the way of the chestnut and elms.
Birds like the starling were deliberately brought here by individuals apparently homesick for birds from their native lands. The result is 150 million starlings, who hog nesting sites favored by bluebirds and other native species. English or house sparrows, brought over to control a linden tree pest, also compete with native birds, their aggressive behavior often giving them an edge.
Plant invasives were deliberately brought in by bumbling well-meaning humans. Kudzu was introduced as an ornamental as well a high protein plants for cattle to forage on. Instead, without any natural enemies to control it, the kudzu vine went berserk, transforming into the ‘vine that ate the South’.
Interestingly enough, not all invasives come from other countries, so they don’t need any human help getting a foothold. Virginia Creepers, a vining plant with foliage which turns a garnet red in the fall as well as dusty blue berries favored by birds was for a long time confined to the south.
But over the past 30 years, it has begun appearing here in New Hampshire, its seeds spread by birds, particularly turkeys, by passing through their digestive tracts along with a nice little package of fertilizer. This is a vigorous plant which spreads tendrils up trees and along the ground, quickly dominating the area. I’m constantly pulling the darn stuff up. I like to refer to it as the kudzu of the north.
A bird which has begun spreading throughout the south from Central and South America is the black-bellied whistling duck.
I’m not sure if they quality as invasives, but they’ve not only been expanding into southern states, but there have been confirmed breeding in states such as Illinois and Arkansas, with fringe sighting as far north as Canada. Wikipedia reports their current population as between 1 and 2 million, with indications it is increasing. They often use nest boxes and tree cavities for nesting so there is the potential for them to displace wood ducks though I haven’t found any reports of that yet.
Other animals have been deliberately brought into the US as well, though whether they will ever become invasive is really debatable.
One surprise is the zebra. A feral herd of zebras live in southern California. These animals are the descendents of a herd once kept by William Randolph Hearst at Hearst Castle as part of a private zoo he had. After financial hard times came during the Great Depression, most of the animals in his zoo were donated to other zoos, but the zebras were turned loose to fend for themselves. There are estimated to be about 120 animals who seem to survive just fine in the southern California climate. Because the population is so small, it’s not likely their numbers will explode to troublesome levels. But you never know.
Another import from Africa is the oryx. In the early to mid 1970’s New Mexico Fish and Game brought in 95 captive-bred animals for release on the White Sands Missile Range for big-game hunters. Since the area is very similar to the Kalahari Desert they came from, they did well and their population has expanded to between 3000 and 6000 animals, possibly more (the exact number is unclear).
The concern now is to keep them from expanding beyond the area Fish and Game intended. They eat the same browse as native deer and pronghorn. Their size, between 300 and 500 pounds, along with simitar like horns, makes them a formidible animal, easily outcompeting the much small pronghorn who is a much more delicate 75 to 100 pounds. Limited hunting of about 1500 animals a year is permitted.
Their size keeps some native predators at bay. They’re too big for coyotes. Wolves, existing in small populations in New Mexico, would have a hard time tackling an adult, unless it was ill or aging. Calves might be a better bet. But cougars, weighing at 100 to 200 pounds can take an adult. Reports indicate some of the big cats are in fact willing to tackle oryx. One enterprising cougar is reported to have taken 29 oryx with the animals making up to half of his (or her) diet.
What will the future bring? Given the small size of the zebra herd in California, they are not likely to really expand very much. But the oryx is more likely to succeed and become a permanent part of North America. Kudzu, dandelions and other imports are also here to stay. The environment will eventually reshape around them. And life goes on.
Where did the month of July go? Not much happened this month, but that hardly justifies the month taking a hike so quickly with August now on the doorstep. The beginning of July was pretty steamy though wildfire smoke coming down from Canada kept the air temperature from soaring into the mid-nineties and roasting us to a turn.
So here’s a few pics taken during the month. A nice little collection of forest fungi and lichens decorating fallen branches.
A geranium I bought last year has decided to put on another display for this year.
I’m still doing crochet, a craft I began teaching myself last fall. One of my practice pieces was a funky looking throw blanket made from tail ends of yarn balls from other projects. With over a dozen different yarns in it, I’m not about to pull it all apart to reuse the yarn. I’ll leave it as is. I kinda like it.
In crochet, there is what is known at the ‘magic circle’, a way of starting a project which is being done in the round, such as amigurumi yarn toys. I have finally, FINALLY, managed to gain some mastery of it. One of the benefits of this technique is it makes it possible to close the hole at the starting center so your amigurumi won’t have a gap in the top of its head. I’m not adept enough to make cute yarn critters yet, but I did manage to create these disks, which also allowed me to master increasing the size of a project. These are also keepers. I’ll stack on each other to make a small table-top display.
The month of June here in northern New Hampshire has seen its fair share of rain, a little more than three inches for the month compared with four and half inches last month. Fortunately it’s been spread out rather than coming in mass quantities all at once. There’s only been occasional minor localized flooding, nothing disasterous.
This month’s project has been tree removal. For years the white pines around my home have been growing taller and taller. Given that winds seem to being blowing more strongly than they used to, I figured it was time to take down some of them. I started with three pines all well over fifty feet tall as well as a large oak tree located beside my house. Two of the pines were just over the edge of the bank and the remaining pine and oak were at the end of an old defunct garden.
The space between my home and the steep narrow bank next to my property was kind of a tight squeeze but with a bit of jockeying the tree service guys worked in their bucket truck and commenced the felling. They started with trimming branches off each tree, feeding them into a woodchipper which noisily gnawed through them, spitting out the chips into a truck also driven up on the lawn.
To make room for felling the trunks, undergrowth had to be cleared out to one side, so the cutters had a place to drop the trees.
Then came the main event, the felling of the trees.
First the tops.
Pine top being cut down
Then the bottom halves.
Base of the garden pine being felled.
Then the bottom half of the last pine.
Last pine tree on bank being felled.
This last one fell so hard, it snapped in half.
Last pine trunk snapped in half when falling
Then all that remained was to haul off the trunks, probably to be cut into boards or firewood.
Pine tree trunks being loaded on flatbed
All in all, a job well done by the tree service. Admittedly it was a bit expensive to remove four trees, but it was worth it for the peace of mind. Now, of course, there are two huge pines on the other side of the house that need removing but that’s for a later date. In the meantime, I will be mulling over what kind of landscaping needs to be done in order to spruce things up.
