Pasta from scratch

Speaking about the pasta that we made, here's the process of making pasta.

Julia and I made this pasta about a month ago. It was a lot of work but it was worth it.

All you need to make pasta is flour, eggs, salt and patience!

Our eggs came from the garden chickens, patience was a little harder to find.

We made our pasta the old traditional way, mixing it by hand.

Started out by shaping the flour into a volcano and slowly pouring the mixed eggs in the middle

 being careful of not to destroy any walls of the volcano, or else you have a big mess of eggs. Trust me on this.

This is where patience comes in

Once the eggs and flower are integrated is time for kneading. Julia was a pro at this - I still need practice, and patience...

The secret of kneading dough is to use a well floured surface, press and stretch the dough with the heel of the hand, fold over, and rotate 90º repeatedly until your hands are about to collapse

Kneading is important because it mixes together the ingredients and adds strength to the final dough

Once the dough is ready, the rolling begins.
We borrowed this pasta machine from our friend Maria. She got it in Argentina, she claims everybody in Argentina makes their own pasta.

The dough has to be divided into small balls that pass through the machine 7 times, each time at a thiner setting, turning the dough into longer strips.

After that, the strips go through the machine one more time to be sliced.

et voilà we got fettuccines

The dough was still kind of sticky so we carefully hung the fettuccines to dry on a cloths rack

The problem was convincing the cats this was not a toy for them

They look so beautiful no?

After some time drying we were able so safely arrange them for their final drying

Is this beautiful or what?

The next day they were cooked al dente and tossed with sautéd New Zealand spinach, oyster mushrooms and the Moroccan lemons and herbs that I had preserved a few months ago (recipe coming soon) 

It was outstanding!

Thanks to our wonderful photographer Steve Pon

Spreading Seeds in Mexico

A few months ago my good childhood friends Lizy & Leslie came to visit me from Mexico. I was very excited to see them and show them my life in the Bay Area and take them to some of my favorite places. But I was mostly excited to show them the garden and have them over for the lunch.

Leslie, who is originally from Irapuato, a city know for its strawberries, actually harvested them for the first time and learned how the flowers look before they turn into strawberries. I was so proud of my strawberry patch for being so instructional to a native of the land of strawberries.

Lizy loved the home made pasta even though she does not eat wheat. 

To my surprise Leslie went home and made pasta from scratch herself - with cage free eggs. Vamos nena!

It was really nice to have both of them at the garden. But beyond that, I'm continued to be amazed with the impact that it had on their lives. A Buddhist monk once told me to spread seeds everywhere, you never know where and when they will sprout, some times in the most unexpected places and he was right.

Lizy went back home and got her husband and kids to help her tear up a patch of lawn to start their own "huerto familiar"  I'm so proud of her.  Following is a set of pictures of the work that she did. I hope it inspires you to start your own "huerto familiar"

One week later she sent me this pictures. The seeds have germinated!

If you are interested in reading more on small & urban farming in Mexico, La Jornada (a national journal) has this interesting supplement: Harta Milpa 

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2010/07/17/delcampo.html

Sun flower invasion

A few weeks ago some unexpected sunflower seedlings germinated on the zome green house. I thought about  transplanting them but as usual I got distracted with some other chore in the garden and left it for later. Later soon became too late. The sun flower seedlings turned into sunflower trees and pooped out of the zome through the opened windows.

I found it pretty amusing at first and cute to have sunflowers coming out of the zome, but they continued to grow and grow and they have now surpassed the zome height (10')

This sunflowers are now about 12' to 14' high with trunks up to 10" diameter

They are spilling over the side

They have completely taken over the zome. I want my green house back!

however the bees and the squirrels are loving the sunflowers pollen and seeds 

Look at that guy taking the entire head of the sun flower. I wonder how it lost it's tail.

No dejes para mañana los girasoles que puedas sacar hoy....

Bee ceremony at Hayes Valley Farm

The SF Examiner wrote a nice piece on the bee ceremony that we did for the lost bees at Hayes Valley Farm.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Farm-honors-slain-honeybees-99215089.html

And youtube video featuring Karina and I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClbUxgrbV6M&feature=player_embedded

Bees - post swarming check

I had a terrible night of anxiety the other night. I could not sleep thinking that my hive, which swarmed, was not OK and was lacking a queen. Although I had see queen cells, queens some times are eaten on their mating flight. This is the only time queens leave the hive, precisely for their safety. Lately I've seen a lot of birds hanging out by the hive catching the bees in flight and eating them. There are also spiders under the hive that jump on the bees before they can fly. My poor bees, the chances of survival for the queen are slim.

 On their mating flight, queens fly really high, up to 100 feet or more, and mate in air with up to 8 to 20 drones that can keep up the flight with her; she keep that sperm through her entire life and lays eggs with different DNA to maintain the genetic diversity in the hive.

Later that day, I found out that it was not my bees who were in danger but the bees at Hayes Valley Farm. Two of their hives were completely killed and a third hive was heavily damage by someone who sprayed insecticide in them. It was truly devastating to see so many dead bees, and I can not understand why would anyone do such a thing. Bees are essential to our survival. One third of all of our food is pollinated by bees, they are an incredible species that feed us, and we have so much to learn from them and their social structure.

We will be having a ceremony for the lost bees today at 4:30 at Hayes Valley Farm.

http://www.hayesvalleyfarm.com/blog/324-two-killed-and-one-attempt-at-the-farm.html

Back to my bees, I still had to do an examination on the hive to see if there was a queen. When a hive swarms it means that half the population of the hive leave with the queen in search of a new spot. So the old hive is left queen-less. The bees left behind make a new queen by feeding one of the fertile eggs with royal jelly, they also build a special longer cell for the queen to grow. I looks like this image below.  

It takes about 4 to 5 weeks for the queen to develop, emerge from her cell, go out into her mating flight and start  to lay eggs. It had been about 6 weeks since the swarm happened so it was time to look for the queen.

Since I had not opened the hive in those 6 weeks there was a lot of wax build up between boxes

I had to do some maintenance clean up which the bees never like. I had to smoke them so they would go hide and I could remove the wax without hurting any of them.

As usual I was not able to find the queen, but on the first brood frame that I pulled out I saw eggs and larva, this is a clear sign that there is a fertile laying queen, so it's all good.

Look at those beautiful cells full of eggs

and larva

OK, I realize this might be hard to see for the untrained eye, so here's a close up so you can see what I'm looking at, see the white dot in the center of the cell, that's a bee egg.

This close up is of a hatched egg turning into a larva. The egg hatches three days after it is laid and the larva feeds for around nine days before the cell is capped and the larva pupates. 

Total development time is 16 days for a queen, 21 days for a worker, and 24 days for a drone

A very successful hive exploration and queen presence makes a happy bee tender.

Amazing fact: a queen bee lays about 1500 eggs every day over a 3 to 5 year life after her one mating flight.

Here's the latest addition for our bees, a small drinking basin with circulating water, they seem to be enjoying it.

Big thanks to my beautiful, amazing and wonderful friend and photographer of this bee session Karina Borgoño