Samhain, the Irish Halloween, Scary Reads, and other Halloweeny stuff!

Not a banshee, but a cool ghost! Thanks to Pixabay

With Halloween 2022 just hours away, the newly-released Irish film, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” got me thinking about the famed banshee spirits of Irish mythology. Although I love Irish movies, I won’t be viewing this one.

Spoiler alert for Wikipedia fans: the entire plot is online! But I’m glad I read the article. “Banshees” looks far too grisly for a lightweight like me (I pretty much can’t watch horror, gore, or violence of any kind). I’d rather consider the dark side of Halloween and All Hallow’s Eve from a safe distance.

Starting with the “Irish Halloween,” Samhain: it’s the ancient Celtic festival signaling the beginning of winter. Pronounced “shahv-nah,” Samhain begins not with the winter solstice, but with the first of November—the turning point into the dark time.

A note on pronunciation. I like to get this stuff right, and many of those in the know contend that Samhain is pronounced “sow-win.” But one Irish Gaelic expert I discovered, whose native language is Irish, swears by “shahv-nah.” So that’s what I’m going with. However, everyone seems to agree that Samhain is most definitely NOT pronounced the way it looks, i.e., “Sam-hayne”!

Anyway, Samhain sounds way more grim than the modern Halloween we know and love.

The night before Samhain, Hallow’s Eve, it was thought spirits walked the earth. Apparently the ancient Celts would dress in disguises, so any evil entities couldn’t recognize them. Communal bonfires were also part of the holiday, thought to ward off evil spirits too. On the way home from the bonfire, people would put a candle in a hollowed-out turnip to keep ghosts away.

Interestingly, the Scots used not turnips but pumpkins, and brought that tradition to the U.S.

Hallow’s Eve is more fully explained in the book Irish Cures, Mystic Charms and Superstitions, by Lady Wilde, mother of nineteenth-century author Oscar Wilde, forever famous for his creepy novella, The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

Terrific Irish Reading!

Lady Wilde describes Samhain in a far more ominous way. The night before, on Hallow’s Eve, it’s not safe for people to go near cemeteries, or even leave home after dark, or ghosts will pursue them.

(There goes trick-or-treating!)

Also that night, the dead will rise from their graves and go forth among those living. The dead can even have some kind of weird power over the living, and if they wanted, can do harm to those who are alive. And worse, “take revenge for any wrong done to them while they lived.”

At midnight, the dead will drink wine from fairy cups, and in their mad joy to be “alive” again, “dance in their white shrouds to fairy music” until daybreak.

Not my kind of Halloween at all.

Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, sounds pretty foreboding, and somewhat similar to the Celtic Hallow’s Eve. Yet it’s actually far more cheerful than scary. As I understand this Mexican tradition, families visit the graves of those who have passed, share treats together, and revisit joyful memories. Now this is a tradition I can happily embrace.

As for more Halloween-themed reads, I highly recommend a chilling vampire novella, Carmilla, by another nineteenth-century Irish author, Sheridan La Fanu—a story that predates Bram Stroker’s Dracula by many years. You can find it, along with The Portrait of Dorian Gray, in The Oxford Book of Irish Literature. 

And famed Irish poet W.B. Yeats compiled a quite extraordinary volume or prose, Irish Folk and Fairy Tales. Anything you want to know about banshees (the fairy spirits of death and doom), pookas (a phantom fairy/goblin that can be a changeling and a trickster), and the fairy race, you’ll find it here!

However you celebrate, Happy Halloween! 

National Pumpkin Day--October 26!

Now that pumpkin pie spice-flavored food and drink items are everywhere, it makes sense to celebrate this amazing vegetable!

I like pumpkin pie spice as well as the next person--but I think it belongs best where is was intended: in pumpkin pie. Preferably homemade. And with Thanksgiving just around the corner, it's time to get serious about the pie that makes the holiday!

This post is from Thanksgiving 2021, but I hope you--if you like your sweets as much as I do--think it's worth a rerun. So here we go:

When it comes to my Thanksgiving pies, I'm a traditionalist. 

Sure, pumpkin cheesecake, or pumpkin pie with a cookie crust or chocolate somewhere in there sounds yummy. But give me the basic pumpkin pie recipe on the Libby's canned pumpkin label and I'm your girl. 

Still, I don’t follow the recipe to the letter. A few years ago, I figured out two things simultaneously: 1) evaporated milk didn't really agree with me, and 2) local whipping cream (not the ultra-pasteurized cream grocery stores generally carry) makes the most amazing pumpkin pie you'll ever eat. 

I also concluded that any given dish can only be as good as the ingredients. So for every step of the process, I try to work in one or more high-quality ingredient. 

For two pumpkin pies, I prepare two large or deep-dish pie crusts, using butter, not shortening, and organic, locally-milled flour, in glass pie pans.

Once I've made my crust, I follow Libby's recipe (with a few tweaks), with the best ingredients I have on hand.

4 farm-fresh large eggs from our own hens, lightly beaten by hand

1 1/2 cups organic granulated sugar (A few times, I reduced the sugar by 1/4 cup and substituted a little organic maple syrup and a big spoonful of local honey. But now I just go 100% sugar, as local honey has become eyebrow-raisingly expensive!)

1 teaspoon sea salt

1 29 oz can Libby's 100% pure pumpkin (I once used an organic brand of canned pumpkin, but it wasn't as well strained as Libby's, and the filling was a bit watery.)

2 heaping teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 heaping teaspoon organic ground ginger

The Libby's recipe calls for ground cloves, which I don't care for. So I use 1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

I mix the above by hand in the order given, and when it's thoroughly blended, I add:

About 12 oz locally produced heavy whipping cream, more if you prefer.

The cream we buy is produced on the other side of the county, about 20 miles away. It comes in a glass bottle and is non-homogenized, so you'll find a layer of butterfat in the neck of the bottle. To use, all you have to do is make sure the cap is secure and shake it thoroughly. The cream also comes from Jersey cows, so the color of the cream isn't white, but slightly golden, which is lovely.

I gently fold in the whipping cream until everything is well-blended, then I fill the prepared, unbaked crusts. Using the reduced amount of cream instead of the larger amount evaporated milk that the Libby's recipe calls for, this recipe does make considerably smaller pies. 

I bake the pies at 350 until the middle is just about set. If you wait until the top begins the brown, the filling won't be as tender. Anyway, you can start checking the pies at 45 minutes--my pies in 9-inch glass pans are done in about an hour.

Some years back, I noticed almost all pie recipes called for pre-baking the crust, which I don't get--and never do. It seems like the crust would be so browned, all the flavor would be gone. But that's just me.

Thanks to Libby's large can, you can always double the deliciousness!

Anyway, after you take out the pies, let them cool on racks at least 1 hour. The filling may seem a bit too soft for some folks--evaporated milk makes a firmer filling. Still, the pie is so rich and flavorful you don't even need whipped cream on top!

 

Orchard Management, Part 2

Lots of bushy growth from late pruning

As I mentioned last week, John and I have slacked off on proper orchard care the last few years.

I’m not sure how it happened—sure, the weather didn’t always cooperate, and there were the usual family commitments, chicken care, or a million other chores that took precedence. But the fact remains, our apple trees were neglected.

We’d gotten behindhand in two basic ways: pruning and thinning.

Pruning is essential. Apple trees in our climate grow an insane amount each year; lots of our trees grow five or six feet each, with lots of bushy interior growth. Yearly pruning helps open up the middle of the tree—much easier when it comes to picking, for sure!

Pruning ideally should take place during the dormant season, when the tree hasn’t yet started its spring growth—in our area, February is recommended.

The problem is, we’ve gotten a fair number of northeasters in February, making it a challenge for even the hardiest of gardeners to get into the orchard!

But we can’t use wintry weather as an excuse. John and I have often not gotten around to pruning until as late as April. Or even May. And one spring, I think it was three years ago, we didn’t prune at all. The trees turned into monsters! And were that much harder to manage the following year.

Anyway, when you prune a tree in mid- to late spring, it only encourages the tree to grow even more. And you wind up with a bushy tree that is putting its energy into producing leaves, not high-quality fruit.

Pruning, as it happens, works in concert with thinning.  A bigger tree produces more blossoms, which in turn means more potential fruit. A smaller, neatly trimmed tree will naturally have less fruit set.

But you’ll still need to thin. Without it, you’ll generally wind up with a tree that will overbear one year, and the next, produce little or no fruit at all.

Thinning also will help you have larger, healthier fruit, instead of the smaller, even stunted fruit that you’ll often find on an overbearing tree. John and I have also erred in thinning way too late, in mid-summer instead of early June, when the tree has already put oodles of energy into hundreds of apples, instead of dozens.

The rule of thumb: thin your apples to keep about 5 inches between fruits. Apple trees will often set fruit in multiple clusters of three, four, five or even more apples per fruit spur. So make sure to select the most vigorous little fruit in the cluster, and remove the others.

Given this neglect, John and I have often wound up with overgrown, overbearing trees. Which has led me to suspect it may have something to do with our apple maggot problem. It seems to me that with less fruit to attract the maggot flies, Berryridge Farm won’t be such a target-rich environment.

As an aside, the same goes for the neighborhood bears! Without so much fruit at our place, maybe they’ll be less tempted to break down the fences and go on an eating binge.

Back to apple maggot: the photo below was taken the first year we found the damage. At the time, I thought it was terrible! Come to find out, these bits of brown were minor--many of our apples will now have brown tracks and some mushiness all the way through the interior. 

One chore you can do to help this fall: go through your orchard and pick up all the little fruits any tree dropped over the summer. That means less food for the maggot larvae that are living on the ground below the tree.

Years ago, I read about protecting your apples from this pest by diligently enclosing each and every apple in a Ziploc bag. At the time, I sorta cringed. All that plastic! All that time!

But as much as I don’t want to go the plastic route, I’m ready. It’ll certainly save money on buying nematodes. And maybe we’ll be able to reuse the bags.

To sum up, for our nine apple trees, here’s our plan for 2023:

1^st: We’ll prune in February, as orchardists recommend, to maintain smaller, less bushy trees.

2^nd : We’re going to take a pass on nematodes this fall. It’s been too dry to apply them, and soon it’ll be too cold. We’ll apply them only in spring and see how it goes.

3^rd : We’ll thin the fruit early—when the fruits are the diameter of a quarter—to give the tree a chance to put its energy into producing larger fruits, in smaller numbers.

Then we’ll bite the bullet and get out the Ziplocs!

Under New Management

William’s Pride apples, an early season variety

Orchard management, that is.

To be truthful, John and I haven’t been on top of our fruit tree care the last few years. 

But given this fall’s disappointing harvest, we’re resolved to step up our orchard game: getting back to basics and trying some new methods. The goal is to save time and even more importantly, money!

Our orchard story: For about six or seven years, John and I were happily raising loads of apples organically. We didn’t use sprays, fungicides or pesticides of any kind, not even any compounds that are approved for organic growing. 

It was wonderful to share beautiful, organic apples with everyone we knew. Including my sister's three horses!

Then the apple maggot pestilence found Berryridge Farm. If you haven’t heard of apple maggot, it’s a pest that ruins apples. The flies lay eggs on the outside of the developing fruit in the spring. The eggs then hatch into larvae, which bores into the apples and leaves nasty brown tracks inside.

And at our place, despite our healthy-looking trees, the last five years or so it’s been one crummy harvest after another. The apples don’t look all that bad, dimpled with innocuous-looking little dots. Yet inside the apple, leading from each dot, lies yucky brown disaster. 

John and I tend to be glass half-full kind of food gardeners. No matter how poorly a crop turns out, we’ve always figured, “there’s always next year.”

But I’m losing hope with our mid-season apple trees.

What’s kept us in the apple game at all is that we have a couple of early apple varieties that are not affected by the maggot. I imagine the young apples are already developed enough—perhaps past a certain vulnerability—by the time the apple maggot flies start laying eggs. 

But our later-season apples, especially the yummiest variety at our place, the Honeycrisp…well, Blech!

For sure, hard-won wisdom has taught us not to pick an apple and just bite into it! We’ve learned to cut into every apple first and inspect it for damage. But for us, it's getting really old, producing only a couple of edible apples out of a tree full of them.

After two years of increasingly gross fruit, John and I heard about treating apple maggot with nematodes: ground-living microscopic organisms that, as we understand it, bore into the apple maggot larvae and devour them from the inside out.  

Given the cost, I wish you could just find these “insect-pathogenic” nematodes in nature, but you order them from gardening supply outfits. And although they come in a small packet of powdery-looking material, the powder contains “live” critters that you need to keep refrigerated. 

You mix the powder with water, and apply to the ground under the apple tree, in spring and fall. For our nine apple trees, a supply of nematodes runs about $45 with shipping. Doing the math for a twice-yearly application, that’s 90 bucks.

John and I were really optimistic—and we’ve been dedicated to the spring and fall nematode program ever since. And yet…

We’ve been using nematodes for three or four years, hundreds of dollars spent on nematodes, without a huge improvement in these infestations. And quite frankly, the financial outlay is starting to get to me!

Now, as I’ve talked about before, John and I long ago gave up on trying to get our food gardening efforts to pay for themselves. Meaning, investing so many dollars into producing certain fruits and vegetables, to save a commensurate amount at the grocery store.

Case in point: giving our hens insanely expensive organic feed, to produce eggs that will never pay for themselves…even when you factor in the fun of keeping hens at your place, and the pleasure of eating healthy, homegrown eggs.

Or buying seven organic tomato plants at $5.99 per pot—I think they went up to $6.99 this year—when in a chilly summer, your $42 investment has given you a couple dozen tomatoes. But there comes a point when you get the feeling that doing this year after year isn’t just impractical. It’s sorta…dumb.

Here’s the deal: I’m quite sure we have NOT gotten $90 worth of halfway decent apples each year since we started using nematodes. So I am ready, as the old saying goes, to stop throwing good money after bad. 

John and I are determined to soldier on growing apples…but we’ve decided to get back to basics, as I mentioned above. And pursue strategies that are cheaper than imported nematodes to manage our orchard. I’ll share next week, for my regular Thursday post!

New Irish Novel, Book 7 of the Ballydara Series!

Warmhearted Irish story

My latest Irish novel, The Fairy Cottage of Ballydara, is now available!

This nanny-boss love story is actually the third installment of a trilogy within my Village of Ballydara series. Emma’s journey to find home and family takes her from Dublin to Seattle Washington, and back to Ireland…and finally brings her to the O’Donoghue “fairy cottage,” nestled in the quaint little village of Ballydara, in County Galway, Ireland.

If you’re familiar with my Ballydara short stories, The Secret Well and The Christmas Visitor, you've already met the hero of this novel, Declan O’Donoghue. You’ve also gotten acquainted with his family and their old cottage, dubbed “the fairy cottage” by Declan’s young daughter Ava.  

The story of The Fairy Cottage of Ballydara has been with me for many years. I began writing about Emma, her younger sister Hazel, and Declan what seems like eons ago, under a different title. But I sensed there was a bigger and better story hiding in there somewhere…a novel that turned into Becoming Emma—Book 6 in the Ballydara series.

Yet Emma’s search for happiness and home—which turned into rather an epic one—was far from over. The Fairy Cottage of Ballydara, Book 7 of the Ballydara series, is more than a sequel—it’s actually the second half of her story. And along with The Little Irish Gift Shop prequel, Book 5 of the series, the three novels bring Emma to the climax of her journey, in Ballydara…

Here’s more about the story…

An uplifting romantic tale, a nanny-boss love story, a ramshackle cottage in a quaint Irish village…

With her career going down the tubes, Dublin girl Emma Carey vows to fulfill her one, simple New Year's resolution: make a quick journey to rural County Galway, to do a small favor for her former colleague, Declan O'Donoghue—who had almost been a friend. And who, for a lovely little while, had been more than a friend. And then suddenly…hadn't.

Yet when a week-long nanny gig falls into her lap, Emma figures a friendly, picturesque little spot like Ballydara would be a great place to quickly lick her career wounds before she makes a fresh start. Problem: it's not just any nanny gig—it's working for Declan. In his house.

Luckily, one of Declan's kids is absolutely darling. But the others are a real handful--and the narky cottage next door makes Emma's job even more complicated. She has to wonder, exactly what has she gotten herself into?

Single dad Declan has been going it alone far too long…and he's completely gobsmacked to find Emma in Ballydara—the woman he’s yearned for and never forgotten. When she accepts his very temporary offer to mind his daughters, his life, and Emma's, takes a new and completely unexpected turn…

Caring for Declan's kids in a lovable, close-knit community, will Emma finally find the life and love she's dreamed of at the Fairy Cottage of Ballydara?

If you’d like to get a look, you’ll find The Fairy Cottage of Ballydara at Amazon, Kobo, AppleBooks, Barnes and Noble, and all other ebook retailers. And now that the book is out, it’s back to my glamorous life as an author…pulling on my work duds to clean the chicken coop!

You can find lots more about all my books at www.susancolleenbrowne.com!