Potato Growing: Top 5 Tips!

Anyone who's compared the taste difference between vegetables you buy at the grocery story and the ones you grow yourself knows there's just no comparison: hands-down, home grown tastes best! And of all the veggies we grow at Berryridge Farm, I've found that it's potatoes that offer the biggest "yumminess" factor between store-bought and home-grown--and that includes the organic potatoes at the local food co-op.
So potatoes (that's "Irish" potatoes as opposed to sweet potatoes) are one of my must-grow crops. To my dismay, however, it's the crop I've had the least success with: voles have eaten us out of potato house and home, my timing with planting has often been way off, and in our rainy climate, late blight has ruined more crops than I care to remember. (And did I mention the voles love 'em?) So the last couple of years I've been trying some new strategies.
First off, since voles were our greatest challenge, we started growing potatoes in a boxed raised bed, with a bottom lined with hardware cloth. It's a lot of trouble and expense but totally worth it: with no vole predation, our harvests have quadrupled. Quintupled! At least!
Planting timing: I've often heard it said that you plant your potato hills on St. Patrick's Day. I concluded years ago that in the Foothills, we're still getting way to much rain to plant anything in March. So when is the optimal time to plant? I just read in Mother Earth News that you go with soil temperature. Well, who knew: you want 50 degrees minimum. Otherwise, your seed taters may just rot. (Been there, done that.) I don't have a soil thermometer, so I will improvise: in a couple of weeks I'll take a meat thermometer out to my beds and check things out! 
Blight: I finally figured out why I was getting such blighty potatoes. I was mulching them with home-grown compost. And what was wrong with my compost, you might ask? Well, I was throwing all our blighted tomatoes into the pile. All my lovely, fluffy compost was probably rife with fungus! So last summer, I didn't use the previous year's compost on the potatoes. No blight! And you can be sure that at harvest time, all our spoiled tomatoes went into a separate weed pile far from my compost.
As far as the dreaded potato "sunburn," those green spots that make your taters bitter, there's an easy solution. Mulch, mulch and more mulch. I've learned you want  to cover your hills with an ample layer of soil plus several inches of leaves, compost or any other friendly material.
One last thing: I always limed all our veggie beds since we have very acidic soil here. But here's another one of those "who knew" facts: potatoes like slightly acidic soil! So lime with caution.
If you have any favorite potato growing tips, I would love to hear from you!

Fun Irish Recipe...Spotted Dog is not a Dalmatian!

Writing Irish stories means I like to do something special for fans of Irish tales right around St. Patrick's Day and the month of March. So this month, I'm celebrating the print format release of Mother Love, my second Village of Ballydara novel, with a Goodreads Giveaway! The giveaway lasts through March 31... so if you're interested in a free autographed copy of the book, here's the Goodreads link. 
Fun stuff this month also included my recent St. Patrick's Day party and Mother Love book launch at Village Books in Bellingham, Washington. There's a lovely story, "Writing Irish," about the book and event in the March 11-18 issue of The Cascadia Weekly (click on Archives). I hope you'll check it out. And you'll find a review of Mother Love in "The Bookmonger" column in The Bellingham Herald!


For the St. Patrick's Day bookstore festivities, I brought shortbread, as well as "Spotted Dog," which isn't a Dalmatian breed, but a traditional soda bread! I used Irish chef Darina Allen's recipe. In addition to the usual flour, soda, salt and buttermilk, for "Spotted Dog," she uses a touch of sugar, raisins, and an organic egg, making a more cake-like soda bread. The raisins create the "spots."


I substituted dried cranberries for the raisins, and it turned out great! They add enough sweetness to offset the soda, I think. The trick to soda bread, according to Darina, is to mix things the traditional way, with your hands, not a spoon: first the dry ingredients, lifting the flour mixture and letting it sift through your fingers. Then make a "well" in the dry stuff, and pour in your the wet ingredients, mixing with your hands as well. The first time I made soda bread, I made the mistake of soaking the raisins in a little boiling water before combining. The wet raisins made the dough soggy and the bread heavy, so  just put your dried fruit in with the flour mixture. Then get your hands right into the flour and swirl it around!
I also found that if you use a bit less salt than the recipe calls for, the bread doesn't have that trace of bitterness that baking soda can impart. I never liked soda bread much before, but John and I are going to make it a regular thing here at Berryridge Farm!

Big Cat Confusion

A recent cover story in TIME magazine implies that wildlife are a dime a dozen--people finding deer in a motel room, bears in a kitchen, alligators on the front porch. Here at Berryridge Farm, wildlife encounters have pretty much been confined to the outdoors, thank goodness. And there are lots of them, depending on the critter. Deer? See 'em everyday. Rabbits? Our garden beds are fenced tighter than a high-security prison, thanks to the gazillions of them that call our place home. And we have birds of every feather: songbirds, ravens, and hawks, and even bald eagles aren't uncommon.

Then there are rodents. This is the country, so they're everywhere. Voles have eaten more of our crops than we have. And despite trapping, mice have their run of the place. In our shop/barn, crawlspace, and once even in the house, we see more evidence that they've been around, rather than see them for real. Mostly those telltale black specks, but there was that time I lifted the hood of my car to check the oil, and found a mouse nest on the engine. And I once put my foot into my muckboot and found the boot toe full of something. Yanking my foot out, I turned my boot upside down and found that mice had stored a cup or so of squash seeds in it!

Face-to-face encounters with those little pests have been rare, but one memorable day, I was cleaning straw out of the garden shed and suddenly felt a lump inside my boot. I looked down, and eeeeek! A mouse had jumped into my boot! I tore the boot off and dumped out the mouse pronto. But it took days to get rid of that lumpy sensation on my foot.

We haven't seen many bears, and I'd like to keep it that way. But when it comes to big cats, they're the rarest of them all. In our neck of the woods we've had only 3 or 4 sightings in the 7 years we've been here. Years ago, John saw a mountain lion in the woods, but all this time I'd seen a bobcat maybe once every other year, slinking around our fence line, half-hidden by the brush.

The day our hens were attacked, I saw the big cat that had done it on the other side of the chicken coop. I was too upset to see anything but the cat's head, and the expression on its face--fierce and insolent. I assumed it was a bobcat, though I'd heard they were shy. But then, I'd never seen any other kind of cat on our place.

Then a few days ago, I got a close look at a bobcat. It was staring longingly through the fence, like it would have liked to nab a rabbit, but had no intention of exerting itself too much. What was more important, though, was that I got a good long look its face, which was narrow and streaked with black markings. It didn't look threatening at all...and if Tweety Bird had been around, he would have said, "I think I see a puddy-tat."

I realized then the cat I'd seen just after the attack was a mountain lion. It had a wide, tawny-colored face, almost golden, and piercing eyes that stared right back at you. After all I'd heard about dealing with mountain lion encounters, how you're supposed to quietly and slowly retreat, I get cold shivers. Because I didn't do anything of the kind. I yelled at it, "Get away!" then turned my back (another no-no) and raced to the house.

I should have known. Because this big cat had the nerve, the guts to climb our fence, and squeeze through the hens' tiny door. Not a bobcatty thing to do at all.

Anyway, I'll know better next time, if there is one. We still miss the hens. We didn't have the heart to replace them after they were killed. But we plan scout around for some pullets in the spring, after we overhaul the coop fencing...with the hopes that any future mountain lions around here return to their former habits of  laying low.

And I also hope that your wildlife encounters are good ones.

Christmas Gift Idea from the Oprah magazine: Chickens in the Road

Here's a gift idea for that homesteader, backyard farmer, or farm animal lover on your list: Chickens in the Road: An Adventure in Ordinary Splendor by Suzanne McMinn, which I recently discovered in the Oprah magazine (November 2013 issue). It's a delightful memoir about a romance author and single mom of three who embarks on a new life by starting a country farm. Living among her extended family, she shares her rural adventures, taking on not only chickens, goats, cows and sheep, but learning lots of old-time country skills like making lard, cheese, and milking her animals by hand.

The book also includes 46 pages of recipes--I made her cornbread recipe (page 237) the other day, and it was delicious. (I substituted whole what pastry flour for the white flour, and since I used stone-ground cornmeal, I soaked it first in the milk. Worked great.) Next on my list is trying her sweet potato pie recipe (page 263), which looks amazing. Suzanne has a generous hand with the butter and sugar, but hey...the holidays are a great time to splurge! 

For DIY fans, the author also includes loads of crafts too: she provides detailed instructions for making practical items like soap, candles, and household cleaners. Her recipe for beeswax moisturizing cream (page 285) is similar to my own, but I use a mix of almond and olive oil, and I use strong green tea instead of the water. Chickens in the Road is so entertaining and useful, you might want to buy a copy for yourself!

If' you're looking for a Christmas story to give as a gift, I highly recommend The Wee Christmas Cabin of Carn-na-ween by Ruth Sawyer, a picture book for readers of all ages. Despite its rather mournful theme, the Christmas Cabin is a tender, mystical tale that will stay with you long after you close the cover. You'll find this book and more on my list of Irish books and movies at my website at susancolleenbrowne.com. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful holiday!

Fun with Goodreads

I joined Goodreads a few weeks ago, and I had the same thought I did about waiting till I was 18 to taste rhubarb: what took me so long? Although I'm just now learning how it works...with a little help from my Goodreads pals. What's been great is not only discovering what your friends are reading, but  pulling together your book list, and revisiting all your faves from days of yore.

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, was a book I discovered when I was nine. Unable to put it down, I would try to sneak read at my desk in the fourth grade. It never worked, but then, Mrs. Wolff, the teacher, didn't punish me for reading! Turns out, Alcott took a lot of the story from her own life, like Jo March's parents in the novel: both Mr. March and Mr. Alcott never really were gainfully employed; also Marmee March and Mrs. Alcott were extraordinarily strong women who kept the family going.

Gone with the Wind...my favorite read when I was fourteen. My heart still goes pitter-pat, remembering all the romantic chemistry between Irish-American heroine and hero Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. Author Margaret Mitchell was also of Irish ancestry...and knew a thing or two about forbidden love: she divorced her first husband, and remarried the man who'd been her first husband's best man at the wedding! Sounds like plenty of romantic tension going on in her life before she married Mr. Right.

What's really fabulous about Goodreads is the chance to give away copies of your books! I've scheduled a giveaway of my first novel, It Only Takes Once, which goes until December 8. If you'd like to take a look at the giveaway, here's the Goodreads link.

As you've probably guessed from my Village of Ballydara series, I love Irish stories...both writing them and reading them. If you enjoy books set in Ireland too, I've assembled a list on my website...

Until next time, happy reading!

Halloween Disguises and an eBook Freebie!

The October issues of Real Simple magazine has a piece about a mom who has Halloween anxiety: she wasn’t afraid of witches or goblins or other evil spirits, but she was apparently very concerned that she wasn’t creating enough fun for her kids!

Aw, c’mon. The ancient Celts, now, had reason to be scared...they believed that on the eve of Samhain, our modern Halloween, spirits walked the earth, so they dressed in disguise to make sure any evil ones wouldn't recognize them.

Besides, dressing up, slathering oodles of your mom’s make-up on your face, and getting free bagfuls of candy is most children’s favorite fantasy! Of course, costumes have changed since I was a kid—then, you mostly scavenged around in your mom or dad’s closet for ratty stuff to borrow. When I was in 6^th grade, I found an old scarf and skirt of my mom’s, and put on tons of her blue eye shadow and red lipstick, and voila, I was a gypsy! If you were really lucky, they’d get you a super-cheapo store-bought rig:
In 2^nd grade, I was one of the fairies in Sleeping Beauty, wearing a silky blue garment that was so flimsy the seams ripped while you were taking it out of the package.

These days, costumes are a serious business. I just got a look at the Museum Replicas Limited catalog, and there you can order all kinds of wild outfits, from Renaissance-era to Hobbit-themed to steampunk! You'll need to spend about $300 just for the basics. My 6-year-old grandson is going to be the Incredible Hulk, with the must-have accessory, a giant pair of padded green hands. It’ll be a challenge for him to hang on to his candy sack, is all I can say.

In my Halloween story for kids, Morgan Carey and The Curse of the Corpse Bride, my 10-year-old heroine gets more than she bargained for when she dons her disguise for Halloween. To celebrate this coming Halloween and Day of the Dead, Morgan Carey is coming out in print…and the ebook will be free on Amazon.com October 31, November 1 and November 2!

I'd love to hear about your Halloween costume...in the meantime, Happy Halloween!

Irish Chef Darina Allen Jam recipe a winner!

John and I had raised oodles of berries for years, but I’d never made jam. For one thing, I didn’t really eat jam—I put so much sugar in my morning tea I figured jam on my toast would be overkill. Second, faced with a huge bowl of our favorite cane berry varieties—raspberries, loganberries, boysenberries, and marionberries—I’d always made a gigantic berry crisp, and that would take care of any berries we hadn’t eaten fresh. But this berry season, I had more berries than I knew what to do with. Maybe it was time I took the big leap into “putting up” all the lovely fruit I was picking.

I pulled out my favorite cookbook, “Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time-Honored Ways are the Best,” and dove into Darina's “Preserving” section. In her Raspberry, Boysenberry or Loganberry Jam recipe, Darina writes, “If you’ve never made jam before, this is a good place to start.” Okay, I’d come to the right place. She goes on, “Raspberry jam is the easiest and quickest of all jams to make, and one of the most delicious.” I was sold.

I wasn’t ready to do any actual canning—in Ireland, they call it “bottling,” but I figured I could freeze half the recipe. 

Raspberry, Boysenberry or Loganberry Jam recipe:

2lbs fresh or frozen berries

4 cups sugar, warmed (I use organic)

Being a bit of a rebel when it comes to cooking, I’m always up for modifying a recipe. And 4 cups of sugar just seemed like so much sugar! So I used 2 ½ pounds of fruit: for a quick measure, that’s 2 quart yogurt containers filled to the brim.

I followed the directions to put the berries into a large saucepan, mash them a little, then cook for 3-4 minutes over medium heat until the juice begins to run. Then add the warmed sugar and stir over low heat until the sugar is fully dissolved. Increase the heat, bring to a boil, and cook steadily for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently.

Within moments, the berry mix started to splatter. I turned down the heat, but I was still getting dark red juice all over the stove. Plus risking burning my stirring hand. OK, time to swap out the saucepan for my big soup kettle. I got the berries back to a boil, and gave them six minutes—on account of the interrupted cooking process—then with more than a little trepidation, pulled the kettle off the heat.

I couldn’t help thinking of one of my favorite passages in the book “Little Women,” when Meg tries to make jelly as a new bride and the stuff just won’t jell! What if I cooked all these beautiful fresh berries and expensive sugar and all I got was runny berry sauce? 

But Darina was spot-on! The berries did indeed set—I had actually made jam! And if I may say so, it was sublime. I put half the jam into two small jars, and the other half into a glass freezer container.

And I do eat jam now—I still have peanut butter sandwiches as just PB, not PBJ, but a couple of spoonfuls of homemade jam on cooked cereal is delicious. And I like to think the vitamins in the ground flaxseeds in my cereal will sort of cancel out all the sweetening!