Fun & Food for Every Season
(Page 2 of 3)
April/May 2007
By Amy Grisak
What we eat for dinner depends on what plants look best that day. I’m always delighted when the first basil is ready to pick, which in my eyes, is the official start of summer. There’s nothing tastier than homemade pasta topped with pesto and just-picked vegetables, particularly baby squash, which I pick as soon as they’re a couple inches long. Harvesting squash early is one way to keep ahead of the plants, before they start producing more than we can possibly eat.
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Every day, Blaine inspects the strawberry bed to pick the sweet, ripe fruit before the birds find it. More than once we’ve been out-picked, so we make an effort to be faster than the feathered foragers. Next, it’s a contest to find the first ripe raspberries. Our raspberry patch produces in fits and spurts, but we enjoy wandering through it, picking and eating — so does Melvin, our blue heeler/Australian shepherd mix, who cleans the lower branches of any ripe berries.
When the snow melts in the mountains, it’s time to explore nearby streams and find cutthroat and rainbow trout waiting in the cold waters. We also go hiking, and keep an eye out for patches of huckleberries, a tart cousin of the blueberry. By August, they are usually ripe in the lower elevations, and we’ll go back and spend a few hours picking. The crop varies each year depending on the weather conditions, so we take advantage of the bountiful seasons. It takes a lot of picking to get a substantial amount of huckleberries, and in poor years it’s almost better to leave them for the bears.
Harvesting honey is another big summer event. Grant’s 10 hives produce more than 800 pounds a year, and it takes him several weeks to remove the supers and spin out the sweet treat. It’s sweltering, sticky work, but he loves sharing the process with others. We’ve even had a home-schooling group visit to study the social aspects of bees and how honey is harvested. We sell some of the honey by putting a sign out near the road.
Our summer finale is the county fair. Grant meticulously prepares his entries in the apiary division. He puts together the best colony representation for his observation hive, and carefully melts and strains beeswax until it looks like a brick of gold. I make lists of which herbs, vegetables and flowers might be ready to enter, and do any last minute canning. Then I spend all morning harvesting and preparing entries before we haul them to the fairgrounds. The next day is like Christmas morning. We rush over to see if our entries won, and begin planning our strategy for next year.
Fall Hunting & Harvesting
During the summer, the heat can make the landscape appear hazy and flat. But when the weather turns colder, everything is revived. Colors pop — the blue sky is crisper and the yellow and orange leaves are almost blinding. This is definitely the best time to be in the woods. I have two horses, Tiger and Kelo, but Kelo is my main mountain horse. He’s more like a mountain goat, and will go just about anywhere!
