Yips and Howls

A Writer's Reflections on Nature and Culture

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Race for the Pears

By Elizabeth Enslin on August 29, 2010

It’s that time of year again, when my taste buds give up on peaches and berries and begin longing for crunchy pears and apples.

Blushing pear

Blushing pear

We have a lovely old pear tree above the old homestead on our land. Every year, I wait for the pears to ripen…

Pear and pine

Pear and pine

…and every year, the competition beats me to them.

Black bear scat

Black bear scat

I saw this morning that the black bear has already been snooping around.

It’s amazing how well this tree has survived decades of bears climbing to the tippy top and breaking branches.  The scars are evident up and down the tree.

Mangled branches

Mangled branches

Oh well, I suppose bears have to eat too. We’re planting our young pear and other fruit trees inside eight foot high deer fencing.  When they start bearing (pun not intended) fruit, we’ll electrify some wires around the outside.  That may be our only chance of ever eating a pear around here.

Young pear tree

Young pear tree through the garden fence.

Cross-posted to Amaranta Farm.

Posted in Homesteading, Sustainable Food, Wildlife Encounters | Tagged bears, fruit, photography, trees, wild | Leave a response

Orion on the Horizon

By Elizabeth Enslin on August 23, 2010

Good news on the professional front…

Orion Magazine

Orion Magazine has selected my short essay, “Canyon Dreams,” to appear in the “Where You Live” series in their Nov/Dec issue.

And Press 53 chose two previously published essays, “Ama” and “A Nature Lover’s Phobia” as finalists in their Non-Fiction Open Awards.

Posted in Kudos, Publication, Recent | Tagged awards, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, Orion Magazine, publication | Leave a response

Temptation in the Apple Trees

By Elizabeth Enslin on July 6, 2010

Last week, I spent an afternoon in the old apple orchard to check out the bird nesting scene. The cows found this fascinating.

Watching me watch birds.

Watching me watch birds.

The chickadees mostly ignored the cows under their tree and carried on with the hard work of feeding hungry hatchlings.

Chickadee nest

Chickadee nest

After a while, I followed the flight path of a red-naped sapsucker to another tree on the edge of the canyon.

Red naped sapsucker on apple tree

Red naped sapsucker on apple tree

Heading out

Heading out for more bugs

About three feet above the sapsucker nest, nuthatches tended their young.

Pygmy nuthatch

Nuthatch

Then I glanced into the branches above and saw this:

Bull snake

Bull snake

My initial thoughts went something like: “oh cool, what a gorgeous snake. And in a tree! What snake around here climbs trees? I feel like I’m in some tropical jungle.” Then, I realized why the snake was in the tree.

Uh oh. From an avian perspective, there never has been a Garden of Eden.

But from an ecological perspective, it’s a pretty cool example of how the system works — and it’s not about cuteness.  I feel bad for the baby birds (though I never saw whether the snake succeeded in eating one), but I suppose I should feel equally sorry for those still-live bugs being stuffed down baby bird gullets.  Or for the calves destined for human dinner plates.

That reminds me: while watching birds, I should look around now and then to see if a cougar is stalking me.

(Note on the cows: although I don’t object to raising animals humanely and sustainably for meat, the cows don’t belong to me.  They belong to our neighbor and visit our pastures for a couple weeks every summer).

Posted in Recent, Wildlife Encounters | Tagged birds, cows, photography, predators, reptiles, wild | 17 Responses

Wren Independence Day

By Elizabeth Enslin on July 4, 2010

The house wrens nesting on our yurt porch chose this morning, the 4th of July, to shoo their young ones out of the nest.

Edging forward

Edging forward

To leap or not?

To leap or not to leap?

Resting

Resting for a moment under table before another short flight into bushes and pines. How do the parents keep track of them going every which way?

Posted in Recent, Seasons and Rituals, Wildlife Encounters | Tagged birds, holidays, Humor, nature, photography, wild | 3 Responses

Elderberry Bloom

By Elizabeth Enslin on June 28, 2010

Part of the 49th Festival of the Trees, hosted at Yvonne’s The Organic Page.  Be sure to check out the other wonderful posts there on artistic interpretations of “Favorite Trees.”

Elderberries (Sambucus cerulea) are blooming in northeastern Oregon.

Elderberry flower cluster

Elderberry flower cluster

I’ve heard the flowers can be battered and deep fried but have never tried it.  It’s hard to give up what the flowers become by August and September.

Ripe elderberries

Ripe elderberries

I rake the berries off the stems, steam-juice them, then brew syrups and juices.  The juice is especially tasty in apple pies and crisps.

Fragile branches break easily but make lovely designs

Broken elderberry branches

Broken elderberry branches

Most of the elderberry trees on our land perch on steep slopes where ladders don’t work.  We leave those for the cedar waxwings and tanagers.

Elderberry and view

One of a few elderberries on fairly level ground.

Some elderberries have sprouted in my garden.  I’ve been transplanting them into a new “elderberry orchard” near our yurt.  I’m counting on these young trees to grow up and supply me and my friends with lots of elderberry wine in our advanced years. Let me know if you have a good recipe.

Young elderberry

Young elderberry

Posted in Biodiversions, Homesteading, Recent, Sustainable Food, Sustainable Gardening | Tagged food, photography, trees, wild, wildflowers | 7 Responses

When Life Gives You Weeds…Eat ‘Em

By Elizabeth Enslin on June 11, 2010

With all the rain out over the last few weeks and the challenges of getting the summer garden in, I’ve been grateful for food that sprouts with no effort on my part.

I might not want stinging nettles in my cultivated garden, but I like having a patch on a distant corner of our property. It’s a pleasant quarter mile walk from the yurt to the old hog pens where they grow.

Nettles

Nettles in the hog sheds

I have vivid childhood memories of nettles, both bad and good. On one of our many family forest outings, I waded through a tall patch of pants and felt the sting of a thousand bees.  I looked all around and didn’t understand.  I screamed and cried at the mystery of it as much as the pain.  I was under siege from something I couldn’t see. My mom waded through the nettles to pluck me out.

My mother was a passionate mushroom hunter and taught me most of what I know about that.  But she also experimented with wild greens at various times.  Several years after the nettle trauma, I accompanied Mom on a nettle picking expedition on Orcas Island.  We wore gloves.  But Mom also showed me that, even with bare hands, you can avoid the toxic hairs on the underside of the leaves and the stem by only touching the leaf tops.  I marveled at how a quick steam or saute in butter removed all the sting.  The nettles tasted delicious too and spoke to some part of me that has always wanted to live a life closer to the land.

I am positively giddy at having my own private nettle patch now. If anyone ever threatens it with herbicide or a tractor, I might teach myself how to load and shoot a gun.

While living and working in Nepal, I learned from my mother-in-law, Ama, that one shouldn’t be too hasty to clear out the weeds among the desired vegetables. She pointed out amaranth, lamb’s quarters, and sprouts of mustard oil seed.  She urged me to wait until they grew to eating size and then pick them for a meal.

I now follow Ama’s wisdom in my own garden. I admit the amaranth seedlings I protect are not the local amaranth weed species (puny and not as appetizing as the Nepali amaranth), but are volunteers from the Love Lies Bleeding I planted last year.  But they are weeds in the sense of interfering with this year’s bed of winter squash.  I’ll let the amaranth grow larger and then thin some out, transplant others, and let a few grow where they are.

Amaranth seedlings

Amaranth seedlings

Lamb’s quarters is everywhere.  It would be easy to see it as a pernicious and frustrating weed, but I see it as free food. It’s a wonderful green that fills in beautifully for spinach in stir-fries or sag paneer and may actually be more nutritious.

Lamb's Quarters

Lamb's Quarters in the garlic bed.

I was thrilled this year to find that miner’s lettuce had begun colonizing shady areas in the garden.  It grows wild in the surrounding forest and makes a great groundcover beneath berries and fruit trees.  It fits in well with my permaculture plans to make my fruit orchard into a food forest (more on that later).  Miner’s lettuce is a charming plant and easy to thin out when it goes a bit too wild. It tastes delicious raw in salads or sauteed like spinach.

Miner's lettuce

Miner's lettuce under the raspberries.

Posted in Recent, Sustainable Food, Sustainable Gardening, Wild Plants | Tagged food, Homesteading, nature, Sustainable Gardening, wild | 5 Responses

Gundruk Saves the Day

By Elizabeth Enslin on June 4, 2010

Rain.  Day before last, it was relentless.  We had a reprieve yesterday, and I got some planting done, but most of my garden is flooded and impossible to work.  I’m already a week or two behind.  In this short season, that could mean a lean year for vegetables.

Gundruk

Steaming bowl of gundruk soup.

So when I woke at five this morning to another storm pounding the yurt, I wanted to cry.  After dumping for several hours, the squall moved on.  We’ve since had a few sun breaks between brief showers, but the garden is still too wet to work.

I gave up and decided to make gundruk for lunch.

Gundruk is a Nepali soup made with fermented and dried mustard greens.  It’s not an ingredient you’ll find in any grocery store, not even in the “Asian” section.  I received mine during my last visit to Nepal three years ago from Amalesh’s great aunt, Chandrakala.  She’s well-known for her meticulous preparation and for achieving the perfect degree of sourness.

The gundruk has kept remarkably well. It’s sour, musty, and pungent.  For me, it is one of the quintessential smells of Nepal.  It reminds me of the warmth of family and the hearth on cold days.

Along with a handful of gundruk, I chopped up an ancho chili and the last of my sun-dried tomatoes from last summer.  I grated some ginger and chopped garlic (also from last year’s garden).  In a bit of oil, I sizzled some fenugreek seeds and a few dried red chilies.  Then I added the chopped gundruk, tomatoes and ancho, and fried the mixture a bit more.  Next, I poured in four cups of vegetable broth and a bit of water, three chopped potatoes and simmered it all for about twenty minutes.

The result was not only delicious, it also gave me the satisfaction of bridging the seasons in my garden and reminiscing about the gardens and friends I’ve cultivated in various parts of the world.  And it reminds me of one of the most important lessons I learned in Nepal: Farming is precarious. Don’t count on any one crop. Plant variety. And plant some of what always grows well so you’ll have something to preserve and eat no matter what.

Posted in Recent, Sustainable Food, Sustainable Gardening, World Travel | Tagged food, Nepal, patience, Sustainable Gardening | 2 Responses

Shower Under the Apple Tree

By Elizabeth Enslin on May 28, 2010

People often ask me what it’s like to live in a yurt. As I wrote in an essay published in The Smoking Poet last Fall, much of the living goes on around the yurt rather than in it. And that’s as it should be with a shelter traditionally used by nomads.

Take the shower. There’s no room in our twenty foot diameter yurt for a shower unless we want to cut out some of our precious living space. And we don’t. We’ve been meaning to put a shower on the porch, but we can’t bear to enclose it and displace the house wrens that nest in the rafters each spring. So we mostly rely on outdoor showers naturally heated by the sun through hundreds of feet of black pipe. The problem is, the water in those pipes is too hot on hot days (when a cold shower would be fine) and not hot at all on cold days when we really need a hot shower.   And now that we’re burying the pipe under the frost line, there will be no more hot water gained the lazy way. We’ll have to build a proper solar hot water collector.

So to make it easy on ourselves during this cold, rainy spring when there is too much work to do and not much sun, Jerry put together a propane shower under an apple tree near the yurt.

Shower

Note the lovely platform to keep our feet out of the mud.

We’ll add a shower curtain when guests come. That will help block the wind too. But for now, we enjoy a spectacular view.

Shower view

View to the west.

Today, I discovered another benefit, though it will only last another week or so.  We’re working up heavy sweats and mucking around in some strong smelling stuff, like rotting organic matter around the spring and water ditches, compost, and a ton (literally) of rabbit manure we trailered in for the garden.  When we peel of our clothes at the shower and wait for the water and soap to take effect, the fragrant blossoms cut through some of the not-so-pleasant odors that waft out.

Apple blossom

Apple blossoms

Posted in Homesteading, Recent, Yurt Living | Tagged beauty, Homesteading, photography, yurts | Leave a response

Domestic Challenges, Wild Beauty

By Elizabeth Enslin on May 23, 2010

I’m ecstatic to be back on our property in Northeastern Oregon.  There’s lots to do: organizing inside the yurt to make cooking and storage more convenient, building a spring box and laying pipe to get potable water into the yurt, putting in the garden.  And there are many challenges: a muddy road, cars that get stuck in the mud, a broken water pump, mice nibbling seedlings in the cold frame, late frosts.

But the wild beauty of this place makes it all worthwhile.

Yurt View

View from the yurt

On Saturday, we took a break to look for morels.  We found nine and sauteed them with our first asparagus harvest from the garden.

Morel

Morel

First Asparagus

First Asparagus

They were delicious, but so were the views on our short walk.

Arrowleaf Balsamroot

Arrowleaf Balsamroot

Looking towards the Blue Mountains

Looking towards the Blue Mountains

Posted in Images, Recent, Sustainable Food, Wild Plants, Yurt Living | Tagged beauty, Homesteading, photography, Sustainable Gardening, wild | Leave a response

Save the Frogs Day 2010

By Elizabeth Enslin on April 30, 2010

Today is Save the Frogs Day. Over 2000 species are threatened with extinction. Save The Frogs icon

The organizers have lots of ideas for how to spread the word through art, poetry, political action.  Visit the website to learn more.

At the very least, consider signing the petition to ban Atrazine, a pesticide implicated in frog declines.

Posted in Biodiversity, Politics and History, Recent | Tagged amphibians, political action, wild | Leave a response

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About Elizabeth Enslin

A writer based in Oregon, I look for inspiration and distractions in nature. An anthropologist, I ponder the places where nature and culture meet. A kitchen gardener, I promote biodiversity and learn from farming traditions around the world. A recovering academic, I try to do all with compassion and humor.

Find out more about me here, or at elizabethenslin.com.

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Recent Comments

  • Elderberry Bloom 
    • suzi smith: our flowers are fading in the uk… i love the elder, especially the older trees. An elder orchard...
    • Mike B.: You’ve got a great site! Unfortunately, we have tons of RED elderberry which are poisonous- but the...
    • Patricia J. O'Brien: I feel like I took a stroll through your woods and learned something new and wondrous. Thank...
  • When Life Gives You Weeds…Eat ‘Em 
    • Jennifer (ponderosa): You have clover among your miner’s lettuce. Can people eat clover? My guinea pigs love...
    • arati: ver y cool :)
  • Photos 
    • Nicole Raisin Stern: Hello Elizabeth and greetings from Kyoto, Japan. I found your website via a Pacific Yurts...

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