Not Constantinople...

Close to 20 years ago, when I was tracing the origins of religion in college, I wanted to go to Anatolia to visit archeological sites.  But I never went.  Then, when I was a member of Raqs Halim Middle Eastern dance troupe, performing with a live band to predominately Turkish music, I mingled with many people from Turkey and talked about saving for a trip to the region.  But I didn't.  Now, as a mosaic artist, I have even more reason to visit Turkey. The place is full of ancient mosaics, intricate tiles and incredible architecture.  Istanbul is enjoying great success, with a thriving arts community, and there are many prominent mosaic artists living and working there.

In March, at the Society of American Mosaic Artists conference in Chicago, I happened to sit at a table with one other person.  He introduced himself as Suha Semerci from Istanbul, and we muddled through polite conversation in very simple words because he was just learning English.  During the rest of the conference, we touched bases occasionally, and we have kept in touch by email and facebook over the past 6 months.

Mike and I have planned a trip to Istanbul, in detail, in the past, but we never saved enough money to go.  We finally scraped together a small chunk, along with two no-interest credit card offers, and we are going for it.  I was very excited to have a personal contact in Istanbul, and Suha has been very generous about offering suggestions and looking for information to help us plan.  But more connections keep developing, and it looks like I will have a busy social calendar while I'm there.  At every turn, something else falls into place, and it promises to be a very rich experience.

Here's Suha at work.

When I get back, I'll definitely post some of the highlights of the trip.  We will visit beautiful mosques, take a ferry down the Bosphorus, see the mosaic museum, have tea with colleagues, meet many new friends, and ride camels in Goreme.

We'll stay in a cave hotel in Cappadocia, among the "fairy chimneys."

We leave on the 15th of October, and will be there for two weeks.  As you can imagine, we are getting very excited!  I feel like this trip is a culmination of many interests, and it is sure to be very inspirational.

Stealth Raccoon.

As you may know, your standard Thanksgiving turkey is a genetic mutation, developed to produce the most food for the least money and effort.  The resulting creature cannot carry its own weight after a year and is unable to reproduce naturally, in addition to being flavorless and shot full of hormones and antibiotics. Heritage breed turkeys are making a little bit of a comeback, and we have jumped on that bandwagon for the past few years. 

Each year, we order turkey chicks from several states away, and they are shipped to us in a box through the U.S. postal system (which seems none too happy with the arrangement.)  There are always a couple of dead or dying chicks in the box, and we usually lose a few more before they stabilize in a warm spot in our bathroom.

My goal has been to get them to breed, and eventually eliminate the need to order and ship live baby animals, because it just seems so ridiculous.  They are expensive, too, at about $15 per chick.  However, they no longer possess their natural instincts.  Males often can't figure out what to do with their hormones, females think I am their mate, and eggs get dropped randomly in the yard, left to quickly grow cold.

This year, I managed to get one still-warm egg under a broody hen, who successfully hatched and raised it.  It was a female, and I had high hopes that she might have some inherent maternal instincts, and my plan would finally begin to work.  But, just now, when I opened the coop to let the flock out for the day, I found a bloody, headless body on the floor.  At first, there was no sign of a break-in, but I finally found a spot near the roof where the chicken-wire had been pried apart.  I am grateful that only one of our 6 turkeys was killed, but it appears to be my baby.  My one hope.

Butchering will take place sometime this week, by my good, efficient friends at Barnyard Gardens.  I'm taking the whole bunch in, and will start again in the spring.  I can't imagine the amount of work and investment involved in a real business raising and selling free-range, organic, heritage turkeys, but I am certain that those doing it deserve every penny of the steep price.

Harvest time again!

Last year by this time, I was harvesting and storing as fast as I could go, listening to "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" on cd to keep motivated, and delivering bags of fresh produce to the local food bank every week.  But, if you read my spring posts, you know we had delays and frustration, and the weather was very cold during early summer.  So, we are definitely eating lots of yummy fresh food these days, but not giving much away. 

Here's part of the veggie garden, looking toward the pumpkin patch.  You can see that we harvested and tilled two of the raised beds, and the last one was just planted with winter broccoli.

The bees have been working all over our garden, but the honey super is empty.  We removed the queen excluder, hoping they would start building some comb on those frames, but it seems like we might not get honey this year.

If you look carefully at this shot, you can see that our tomato plants are laden with beautful GREEN tomatoes.  If they do finally turn red, it will likely happen all at once, so I'll be trying to find ways to use and store all of them.  My fear is that they will just begin to go bad, without ever ripening.  Everyone I know has had the same tomato trouble this year, blaming it on the cool early summer temps.

One new thing we did this year was to hand-pollinate our cucumbers and squashes.  Anouk learned to do it very well, so she helps to keep on top of it.  I feel like I have a much more intimate relationship with my vegetables.  It's interesting to see the female flowers open, waiting eagerly for some action, then to look for the male flowers, with their very male anatomy, and to intervene on their behalf.  Sometimes a plant will have a ton of females, with no males in sight, and other times it's the opposite.  And it is always sad to see the withered fruit of a female that was never pollinated; a loss of potential food.  Since we started hand-pollinating, we have so many more cucumbers, it's amazing!  And they are absolutely delicious.

I thought I would end with a photo of one of our Romanesco Cauliflowers, because this has to be my favorite thing growing in the garden right now.  Isn't it fantastic?

Concrete garden mushroom project

Here is a fun project that would be fairly simple for anyone to do at home, and kids can help.  This came from Creative Concrete Ornaments for the Garden by Sherri Warner Hunter, though the mushrooms in the book are far more finished looking than our first attempt.  They are still cute.

First, we filled some plastic storage bins with sand.  Any large containers will work for this.  Then we made indentations in the general shape of mushroom tops, inverted.  Anouk placed glass gems and bottle tops in the sand for decoration.

Next, we mixed up the concrete (one part cement, three parts sand, about one part water) and let Anouk put the concrete into the forms.  *We mixed it too thick.  It should have been pour-able.  Now we know.

We pressed small pieces of rebar into the centers and allowed them to begin setting up while we made the stem forms out of tar paper.  I'm sure there are other materials, but the book called for tar paper, and we had plenty of scrap from building projects.  We made them into tubes, held together with duct tape, and placed them around the rebar.  We then poured concrete into the tubes.

We were supposed to wait 12 hours, but they were ready to unwrap in about 6 (probably because the mix was too thick.)  I had to fill in some gaps with grout, but they are pretty cute, and now they have a happy home in our shade garden.

Carving Concrete

A couple of weekends ago, I headed to Seattle to attend a workshop taught by Elder G. Jones , an artist who carves wet concrete into beautiful garden art.  His work is featured throughout my three books on making concrete forms, so it was an exciting opportunity for me.  I have big ideas for making sculpture, incorporating trash, inlaying mosaic, and generally expanding my skills.

The workshop was great, and I was very happy with the pot that I carved.

So, for my first project at home, I decided to go with the most technically challenging possibility.  Mike has been building a wood-fired pizza oven, and the exterior is unfinished.  For my first trick, I wanted to enclose the hideous chimney assembly in carved concrete, which meant building a form around an existing structure on an uneven surface.

Above: the chimney before, and then right after I removed the form, made of aluminum sheeting.  The towel hanging down in front was used to hold the concrete in at the base, but I had to carve it out of the partially cured block.

The form is removed when the concrete is firm enough to hold its shape, but soft enough to carve into.  At this point, it feels like carving into a very stiff sand sculpture.  You have to be very gentle, or it will come away in chunks.  But, it quickly begins to harden, so from here, you just work steadily until it sets up completely, which is about 5-6 hours.  (No breaks!)

I've been enamored by the phoenix image lately, and it seemed like a fitting symbol for the top of a wood-fired oven.  The front is the body and head, and the wings wrap around, meeting in the back.

I know concrete doesn't really fit the "sustainable art" description, but really, on this level, it is pretty harmless compared to entire city blocks, overpasses, and campuses.  My next step is to find local sandblasters who want to unload used sand, which comprises 3/4 of the mix.  And, as I become more skilled, my plan is to create sculptures that have a core of plastic garbage; the bottle caps, adhesive tubes, and random packaging that I can't seem to keep out of my trash.  This way, they will become part of a permanent, solid object that is functional and beautiful, instead of floating around in the ocean, slowly breaking down, being ingested by sea animals over and over and over for all of eternity. 
Yes, I obsess about these things.

Harvesting

I haven't been keeping up with this blog thing at all this summer because we are so very busy, it feels like a major indulgence.  Right now, I can hear the goats bleating for breakfast, and the chickens and turkeys are still cooped.  Mike is off to a training and Anouk is still fast asleep.


Because of our garden delays early in the summer, we are not getting nearly the harvest we had last year. 
Thanks to my friend Shari, we have a few broccoli plants that are finally growing edible parts, and a ton of cabbage is going to be ready soon.  Our daily meals now include chard, zucchini, cucumbers and salads.  We have many freezer bags full of raspberries, and I'm starting to freeze veggies for winter.  We are anxiously waiting for the green tomatoes to turn color, and it seems very late in the season.  We will have many carrots this year, an inordinate amount of parsnips, and it even looks like we'll have some corn after all.  The goats had munched the tops off in the spring, but they actually grew back and have cobs developing now.  And we always grow many heirloom pumpkins.

Meanwhile, I am working in the studio as often as possible to finish a set of glass cabinet doors for a client.  My work has involved submitting for calls for art and exhibits, trying to keep track of which pieces have been submitted to which shows, meaning I just have to hold onto them until I am accepted or rejected.  Upcoming events include a show at Childhoods End in Olympia called 15 Ways with Light, an exhibit at the Washington Center for Performing Arts called 25 Feet of Art, the Sequim Glass Art Festival, and the Red Hot Party & Auction at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma.  All of that takes place in September.  I can't even think about October yet.

Well, Anouk is up and I really need to feed her and the rest of the critters under my care.

Garden blues

Our vegetable garden is just not off to a very successful start this year.  When we first started planting from seed, the chickens were accessing the garden, munching to their hearts' content.  We brought home starts for the greenhouse, but the door wasn't latching properly, so they got in and ate all of the cucumbers, eggplant, and broccoli.  We replaced the starts, fixed the door, reseeded the outside beds, and kept going.

The peas tried to come up, but something has been eating them.  For some reason, the beets just won't grow.  Our weather has been unseasonably cold and rainy (payback for the mild winter and early spring, resulting in a major slug invasion), which might explain why so many of my seeded veggies are still little stumpy sprouts.

We have planted the greenhouse, and we should at least have lots of tomatoes and basil.  They are doing well.  But our broccoli hopes have dwindled each week as one after another animal has busted into the garden and eaten every last one of them.  We thought we were safe when we constructed a chicken fortress, entirely enclosed by chicken wire (which will also allow us to stay out past dusk on occasion without fear of raccoon massacre.)  But, the goats have pried fencing apart 3 times now, devastating anything remotely yummy.

We love our goats, but milking was abandoned years ago out of frustration.  Now, they are pets that live in the barn.  During the winter, I feed them in the morning and at night, but that is all.  I can't keep up with vaccinations or hoof trimming, so I just feel guilty for being a bad goat mom.  They are so sweet and affectionate, and, for the most part, they have a great life here, but I think they could do better than us.  So, I'm considering finding them some greener pastures.  It really is about time we did something to make our lives easier instead of harder.  But, the yard will be so lonely without goats...

I plan to replant today for the 3rd time, but we'll have only a few broccoli plants, no corn at all, and the sunflowers and nasturtiums that usually line the edge of the garden will be missing.


The good news is that our broody chicken hatched a baby turkey, and it seems to be doing well. I have hopes that a few more of the eggs she is sitting on will hatch so that we take one small step toward breeding our own turkeys.