r ransom

K Kaba wrote:What about making it a series of paintings or drawings?

Wouldn't that be great!

At this stage, one would be a victory.

Walking around the farm this morning, the native species losing their leaves are cottonwood, alder, big leaf maple.  Imported species like hazelnuts and chestnuts are also leaf dropping.  The younger the tree, the more dramatic.  We're about a week behind on this trend from a normal year due to rain in july.

In a way, I'm sort of asking for help.  But I also don't know what kind of help i need.

So perhaps, I'm asking for help to figure out where to focus my learning or experiment next.  The first stepping stone because this problem looks so big to me.

What i have so far.
1. A real rat skull (most of one) i dug up in the garden.
2. Fake rat skeleton, bigger than life size
3. An budding interest in making miniature things
4. Painting skills that allow me to copy, but not create
5. Lack of confidence

In our climate, it's pretty normal for big leaf maples and a few other water loving trees, to drop their leaves in early August.   It's a survival mechanism for not having any rain since april.

I can imagine if a tree isn't acustom to drought or doesn't have strong reserves, it would drop leaves much sooner to stop moisture loss.

This year we had a bit of rain in the summer, so the trees might hold out until fall.  When that happens, it's glorious as instead of turning brown, the leaves make bright colours before dropping.   This is maybe once every 7 years.  The last time i can remember is 14 years ago when a family member died so I couldn't enjoy it.  So I hope this year might give us pretty colours again.

First cold morning this summer.  I know it will be hot in an hour when the sun gets above the wildfire smoke, but for now, I am wearing my cardigan.  This always reminds me of Halloween and it's time to get my costume ready.

I've been very down on myself and my painting this week.  The better I am at copying masterworks, the worse I feel about composition skills.  I need to spend a few months focusing on this skill.

So, with the understanding that i will probably fail, maybe that freedom could help me try and paint the death of rats?

I love these touches of whimsy.   Marbles in the wall!?  Brilliant!

Barbara Kochan wrote:

r ransom wrote:So loving chickpeas right now.

Soaked overnight, soon to be in the pressure cooker for 15 or 20 min.  Yum..

Are you growing these yourself in our coastal PNW??  I would love to grow some but see, at lease commercially, they are grown east of the cascades.

Thank you

They geow well here.  Carol deppe talks about it in one of her books and she's  not far south of me on the coast.  

I'm told they can overwinter for a bigger crop in a Mediterranean climate like ours, but I plant about the same time as garden peas.

I really need to dedicate more space to them in the garden.

So delicious

Next time, see about replacing more of the water with vinegar...maybe.   it needs to age a few weeks to be sure.

The most difficult part was making sure the food had enough head space.  I don't like it touching the lid as it seems to degrade faster.  And the instructions say not too as well.  In the reflection, it's easier to see how much headspace is there.

I feel if i used bigger jars, things would be better as less headspce needed per amount of chutney.

It doesn't look very impressive at first.

But the smell!  So good!

I don't do enough canning to know how accurate this is.  

The advise i was given
1. Always allow ample head space inside the jar.
2. When jar cooled from canning, remove ring, clean ring and outside of jar.  Let dry overnight before returning ring
3. Avoid tilting the food so it touches the lid.
4. For this person, most of the risk was in using the jars and keeping in fridge, so choosing jars for one session worth of food (meal, week, whatever) was preferred.

I think there must be more to it than that.  The storage was a former spare bedroom in the basement that was surprisingly cold and dry for that climate.  She was very aware of temperature change when moving jars in and out.