Last year, a little too late in the season, I discovered that we have miner's lettuce growing in our front yard. Becky knew about miner's lettuce from Girl Scout camp in California. She taught Greta and me about it when we saw it at a farmer's market. Miner's lettuce is so named because it was the first edible plant to pop up in the spring. It has important vitamins and helped miners stave off scurvy, or so the myth goes.
It took me a while to put it all together and realize we have a nice patch of our own and it's actually pretty tasty, nothing like eating other common weeds like eating bitter dandelion.
My theory is that it arrived here long ago transplanted along with a Douglas Fir tree that my friend Tom McRoberts brought with him when he visited us. About 12 years ago Tom did a brief stint working in a tree nursery for the Washington State Forest service. I asked Tom if he could score us some Doug Fir seedlings. He brought us three. One was planted in our front yard and is quickly growing to be way too large for the space. (What was I thinking planting it here?!)
I suspect that this patch hitched a ride as a seed in the small bit of soil that came with the tree. Alternatively, the shade and soil conditions created by this tree helped a latent patch take root.
I need to poke around the neighborhood and see if I can find it elsewhere. I haven't seen any elsewhere though. It made for a great addition to last night's dinner salad.
Over the past year, I’ve been planting fruit trees in the back lot of a neighboring apartment complex across the street from our house. The ownership of this group of apartments and commercial buildings has changed hands a few times over the years, moving from one non-profit to another. Custodianship of the property has been virtually non-existent and the landscaping is currently maintained be a property management company whose sole orientation is “mow and go.” Therefore I’ve taken it upon myself to liberate the land and plant some fruit-bearing trees for the family and the neighbors.
About three years ago a long-time neighborhood resident and friend helped me plant the first tree in a barren island between the parking lot and sidewalk in the rear parking lot. It wasn't a fruit tree but this effort did lead to my current project. I had expressed to my friend how naked and uncared-for this area was. I told her that I wanted to plant some trees in this area to create a visual break between the residents and the commercial buildings and to provide some shade and greenery for the neighborhood. My friend took the lead here and said she had a tree we could plant. It was a Zelkova Serrata, a tree that is often used as a replacement to the American Elm. The Asian Zelkova is related and, though smaller, shares the elm's characteristic of having a gracious and large canopy.
The first tree took a lot of work because the soil was mostly rocky gravel. We spent an afternoon clipping up tree branches by hand that had been left over from a neighborhood clean-up. The clippings worked as a soil cover/mulch. We dug in further compost material and later planted a tree. It took some effort to protect the tree from the landscapers since they had a proven track record of bumping lawn mowers into the trunks on the trees, effectively scalping the bark off the base of the trunk and killing the trees.
After some reckless haphazard watering on my part, the tree seems to have established itself and we are beginning to see inklings of a gracious shapely tree.
The property was redeveloped about ten years ago. With the exception of a great old barber shop and a wholesale record distributor, pretty much everything else in the entire block was boarded up. In the redevelopment, ginkgo trees and other small shrubs were planted along the property’s parameter. Within a year pretty much everything was dead. Those trees that didn’t die from lack of water (I did make an effort to help here but was too late) eventually died from having the bark scalped at the base of the trunk by careless lawn mowers scraping them. It looked awful. Over the years. I did my share of pulling out the dead trees to remove the eye sores.
My friend was my tree planting teacher with this project. She led me through putting up a wire fence around the base of the tree to help protect it from urban deprivations: lawn mowers, cats, kids and bicycles.
Here's a photo of the fence we built to protect the tree:
I want local accessible fruit for eating and preserving. We’ve done a fair bit of canning over the years. I’ve pressed apples and pears for juice, cider and peary (aka pear-based hard cider). Recently I’ve experimented with food drying. The apartment complex across the street has a long length of planting strip that runs along the entire block-long section of the south lot. It's about three feet wide. The ginkgo trees planted here ten years ago have long since died so this is where I’ve been working on sneaking in fruit trees.
So far I’ve planted four fruit trees. Last year I planted a French plum. (Some sort of free-stone plum that I don’t know much about.) This winter I added an Italian plum, a russet-type apple and a Rainier cherry. The last three trees all came from Earth’s Rising Nursery. I ordered them on faith from a catalog that I found at our local coop grocery. The catalog had no email or website listed. I sent a check in on faith and the trees arrived without incident. The trees were bare root, packed in saw dust. This is not something I’m used to. I’m only familiar with planting trees with a soil root ball. Apparently this is not too uncommon and the trees, so far, seem healthy enough. They are even budding a little.
Digging and planting for the last two trees, Greta and I noticed some interesting things. We dug up old (broken) soaker hoses that had been grown over by grass and weeds. The hoses were intended for watering the failed trees and other landscaping that went into the area when the property was redeveloped. Also we were able to take advantage of some of the pre-amended soil from when the ginkgoes were planted. The last two trees that we planted ended up being in more or less the same areas as the ginkgoes so we had some good top soil instead of gravelly soil to work with.
Since it is the first day of spring, there really isn’t too much to show for the planted trees. The photos didn’t turn out that well because there isn’t much to look at. In a few years, with luck, I’ll have some better photos!
Going down the row, starting from the tree in the foreground on the right, there is a russet apple, Italian plum, French plum and a Rainer cherry.
Here's a photo of my own kid/lawn mower defense:
I used rotting log ends that didn't make it into the sauna in time. The posts are steel pipe that I picked up in another neighborhood that were left on the street for scrap. (I was good and left the good copper and aluminum for someone who probably needed the scrap metal money more that I did.)
My beloved teardrop trailer has found a new home. In 2005 I discovered this trailer on eBay. The listing was only about two hours old. It took about five minutes of decision to grab it at the "Buy It Now" price of $850. Luckily, the trailer was just outside Portland, Oregon.
I bought the trailer from an older guy living in Estacada who was selling his house along with most of his possessions. The story of the trailer was that it sat for years abandoned in a field in the area at the base of Mt. Hood, having previously been used as a hunting trailer.
The seller was an older baby-boomer hot rod enthusiast. He had spent most of his adult life working as a machinist at Precision Cast Parts. He had some of this hot rods up on eBay at the same time, including a 30s Ford Coupe convertible and a 40s Ford truck. Both each sold for over $30,000!
The trailer was partly customized and partly restored to be towed as a matching accessory to his Ford Coupe convertible. I appreciated his restoration. He kept it true to the character of the original trailer. Probably because it was built during the war, it didn't have aluminum siding. Instead the plywood was painted and it had wax-cloth heavy canvas for a roof. I'm sure that out of respect for the trailer's original state, it was redone, keeping the original painted plywood. Instead of wax-cloth the roof was redone in a very fancy black fabric, historically correct to 1930s Fords.
There were many added details that only a true hot rod enthusiast would care about. The rims were old 1950s rims that had been cut in half and rewelded so that the fill valve was hidden facing the inside of the trailer. The intent here was to widen the tire profile and to give the tires a clean uncluttered look. The door handle was polished and the art deco lines had been carefully filled in with black paint.
The interior didn't leak a drop and all of the basic mechanical issues were addressed. The cool low-profile torsion bar suspension had been rebuilt with repacked axle bearings. The trailer frame had been completely repainted. All of the hardware was replaced with stainless steal. In short, I lucked out. I kept thinking to myself, "I'm not worthy."
It came to pass that I certainly wasn't. I didn't have a place to properly store it. In a couple short years the plywood began to rot and the beautiful paint job began flaking and fading. Another issue was that our family had outgrown the trailer. Originally we could sleep two and stuff Greta on a shelf in the back of the cabin part of the trailer. As she grew older the three of us ended up sleeping together. With only one door to get in and out, it just got claustrophobic.
In another life, if I lived by myself, I would be a nomad out of this trailer. It wasn't perfect but I loved it for its imperfections and character. There was nothing like waking up in a camp ground or in a rest stop, daydreaming with my eyes following the wood grain of the vintage and patina-ed plywood. I loved looking at the simple but very well-put-together structure. A few well-crafted carefully-cut boards were all that were needed to give the trailer a robust structure. Sometimes, if I was desperate for a nap away from the family, I'd sneak out to the trailer. I would go hide here whenever a new issue of the Veteran Vespa Club of Great Britain newsletter arrived from some blissful undisturbed reading time.
The trailer was great for spur-of-the-moment camping trips since we could just attach it to the tongue of the truck and go. The vintage romance was certainly a huge part of the appeal but these trailers are also damn practical and economical. They remind us how far carried away Americans have gotten with over-built gas-guzzling RVs.
This trailer pre-dated the stereotypical teardrop format where a kitchen galley was built into the rear door. Instead we had a rear storage compartment. We loaded a table, and other stuff that comprised our camping kit into this area. It was really just as simple to unload this stuff and set up the cooking area at the rear of the trailer. Admittedly there is also something appealing and gadgety to having a rear kitchen galley where, all you need to do to cook, is to lift up a door.
Someday I may dabble in teardropping again. Maybe Greta would go for a pup tent and Becky and I could sleep in peace? Maybe it would work if the trailer was five feet wide instead of four?
Here's a link to the Becky's Flickr page with a collection of the photos from rallies and the Northwest Spring Fling teardrop trailer gathering.
About a year ago a subscription issue of Homepower Magazine arrived at our home. One of the stories was about a solar food dryer. (Issue #199, page 58) I pine for an opportunity to do proper solar in our home but for various reasons--mostly siting and financial--it hasn't been practical. The solar food dryer was a solar project I could afford and accomplish and it fit well with my interests. I share it here because I haven't seen many web photos or discussion of this particular dryer and maybe I can offer some of my own experiences with its use later during the harvest season.
Our inner Northeast Portland (Oregon) neighborhood is filled with old turn-of-the-century fruit trees. We have none in our yard but we (my daughter, Greta, and I) forage off of neglected trees in vacant and commercial lots and overhanging branches. Over the years I've put up a fair amount of fruit but canning gets to be a hassle after a while. It's time consuming and labor intensive. Canning fruit, from start to finish, can take up a weekend and sometimes it only happens if a free weekend falls when the fruit is ripe. With plums in particular you need to put them up shortly after picking them. You can't put them in a box and forget about them like you can with apples.
For the past few years we've been drying a lot of plums in a garage-sale-found electric food dehydrator. The electric dryer works well but it is noisy and it does add noticeably to our monthly electric bill, maybe $10 extra for a month.
Dried plums, aka PRUNES, are the bomb. Say "prune" and all sorts of unpleasant associations are conjured up. As a youngster, I drank the better part of a full jar of prune juice in one sitting. I can attest to the unbelievably effectiveness of prune juice as a bowel mover. It gave me hours of gut wrenching pain on the toilet.
Prunes or dried plums however are pretty much like any other dried fruit and don't deserve the same rep as prune juice. They're sweet and flavorful. They keep well and make a fantastic snack or additive to things like oatmeal and baked apple crisps. Portlanders used to understand the incredible urban agricultural value of of the free-stone Italian plum. They are all over the place here and mostly the fruit goes to waste.
When life gives you plums make pluminade!
The solar food dryer seemed like a big enough project that I would get a better return on my investment in time if I made two instead of one. The idea made sense since I only had to dig my table saw out from the garage a few times for the extra effort and I would have less waste if I bought material for two dryers instead on one. After purchasing the full book (the HP article doesn't have the complete plans), The Solar Food Dryer by Eben Fodor, I finished one dryer last year mid-summer, as a gift for a friend. I figured she needed it sooner than I did. (She has a huge garden.)
I've finally gotten around to getting number two done.
Here it is looking down on the dryer, like the camera is the sun:
Below is the rear of the dryer with the doors open and the screen drying trays partially pulled out. A bit of construction detail I deviated from the plans a bit by adding extra bubble foil insulation on the very bottom piece of plywood (under the spray-painted black sheet metal "collector plate." I also added standard kitchen aluminum foil on bottom front and back plywood pieces. With the aluminum foil, I glued it onto the plywood with spray adhesive, a trick I learned in a kid's workshop for making cardboard solar cookers. (We'll see how it holds up.)
You can also see that I stapled the bubble foil insulation onto the lower sides of the dryer. Below is the kitchen aluminum foil (on the left of the photo) glued to the front plywood section of the dryer. Just to the right of this is visible a thin section of the bubble insulation that is glued and stapled to the bottom. Mr. Fodor recommends the foil insulation on the larger back door of the dryer as a performance upgrade to get more drying time later into the season. He suggested using foil tape. I've taken this idea a lot further. The question is will the dryer be too hot now in the summer? I'm starting to get a little nervous about this.
I built the dryer with his suggested electrical back-up of two standard 200 watt incandescent light bulbs. These are to help get drying done on cloudy days or later in the fall when there is less sun. The bulbs I found were 130 volt commercial-service bulbs. The box states that at 120V (more like regular house current) the energy used is 176 watts. Nevertheless when the dryer is plugged in and the vent doors are closed, the internal temperature pretty quickly reached 160 degrees! I suppose with the extra insulation I could use a lower wattage bulb. Is there such a thing as a 150 watt bulb? A few general comments about the design:
One thing that made me nervous in the plans was the placement of the light bulbs in the bottom of the dryer. The 200 watt bulbs seemed too close to a piece of wood that supports the dryer's bottom section of plywood. Mr. Fodor's suggestion to limit the fire risk was to apply aluminum tape to the wood below the bulbs. My method was to wrap the support wood a few times in foil. (I didn't have any foil tape.) I stapled the foil onto the wood. I like having a few extra layers of foil to provide some air insulation between the foil and the wood.
To help move the the bulbous part of the bulbs away from this wood, I mounted the porcelain sockets on an additional section of plywood. This help give a bulbs another 1/4 inch of clearance from the wood. I mounted the sockets as close as possible to the metal collector plate so that the bulbs are almost touching. This might help dissapate some heat. Now that I see how well the extra insulation works, maybe I can get away with lower wattage bulbs? This would save electricity and add a margin of safety to the design.
The book suggests that the exterior of the dryer can either be painted or coated with linseed oil to provide some protection from getting wet in the rain. I coated the plywood ends and the exterior in shellac. I'm a fan of shellac because it is natural and easy to work with. The solvent/liquid medium for shellac is denatured alcohol, pretty benign stuff compared to other chemicals and solvents. I'm not sure how well the shellac will hold up outside in direct sunlight. I've read that one method of sealing shellac from UV degradation is to coat it with old-school (floor?) wax. I may wait to see how well the shellac holds up for a season before trying this. Alternatively, shellac is so easy to work with, maybe if is begins to fail I will just slop on another coat?
Now all I need is something to dry! Another challenge will be figuring out where to store the dryer. It's a bit big and our yard space is limited. If I can talk Becky into sewing a rain cover, it might work well on our flat garage roof. If that doesn't happen I'll hoist it into the attic.
score us some Doug Fir seedlings. He brought us three. One was planted in our front yard and is quickly growing to be way too large for the space. (What was I thinking planting it here?!) 
score us some Doug Fir seedlings. He brought us three. One was planted in our front yard and is quickly growing to be way too large for the space. (What was I thinking planting it here?!) 
