Fruit Fly Jelly Recipe

This recipe makes a single jar and may be doubled to make three jars, tripled to make twenty.  ( Fruit flies reproduce every twelve hours)

This jelly is an excellent protein supplement for small children, invalids and those with no sense of humour.

It’s easy, quick and economical

Place a single layer of strips of banana peel carefully on the bottom of a large heavy-bottomed cooking pot. Cover*.  Leave 24 hours... 36 hours for a thicker product.  (One procrastinating jam-maker waited 48 hours and had an extraordinary yield of jam from breeding fruit flies.  He did, however, have to evacuate the house for two weeks after a single over-flowing batch.) 

Meanwhile, sterilise a jar.  Care must be taken in the process to ensure that the jar isn’t contaminated from those ubiquitous, unauthorized, domestic, terrorist-type plum-loving fruit flies.  Have your vacuum cleaner handy.

In a smaller pot, boil a solution of four parts sugar to one part water.  Bring to the soft rubber ball stage on your candy thermometer.

Quickly and carefully lift the large pot’s lid and pour the sugar syrup over the flies, dispatching them quickly and humanely.  When cool, strain the fly syrup through cheese cloth to remove the banana peel and the cheese (Note: It doesn't remove the flies... nothing does,)   Pour directly into the hot, sterilized jar, sealing quickly.  Let cool completely.

 Helpful tips:

---If, as you’re pouring the jelly into the hot jar, more fruit flies jump in too, then simply re-label the jelly as jam.

--- Don't store this product in the house, it attracts fruit flies.

--- If you have extra flies, try them in your home-made scented candles and bath oils.

*Covering the pot keeps wasps out. But don’t be concerned that the lid will prevent fruit flies from entering the pot.  They can do it.

 PS ... I discovered the genius of this recipe while I was actually supposed to be transcribing the minutes of the previous Director’s meeting.

Plum Wasp Crumble ....Nick Jackson ... Sept 26 09

Not being one for one-upmanship  I hesitate to share my plum wasp crumble recipe with you, but what the heck here goes ( after all Thanksgiving is just around the corner and I know that you will really want to pull out  all the stops for your fellow villagers:

Acquire 24 large over ripe windfall plums which will already be festooned with yellow jackets - professionals harvest the product using tongs, the ignorant and/or foolhardy use their bare hands.

Pit the plums, taking great care not to disturb the wasp feeding frenzy, thus creating a greater surface area for ever more wasps to gorge on (pitting is optional but beware of being sued for the dental costs that go with cracked teeth)

Place the fruit/insect melange in a suitable buttered oven proof container, add a sprinkle of cinnamon and drizzle with Aunt Jemima pancake syrup.

Select well ventilated hot sunny window ledge and allow the insect mass to double in size (23~26 minutes before noon, 4 minutes less after 2pm).

While the dish is naturally leavening pre-heat the oven to 475 degrees and mix 1/2 cup sifted flour, 1/2 cup naturally stone rolled oats, 1/2 cup low trans fat omega rich shortening until it forms coarse clumps. (no added salt is required as the wasps are naturally tangy).

This next step requires a deft hand and lightning fast reflexes and should not be attempted by persons with known heart or vision issues.

Carry the now seething wasp/fruit dish carefully to the kitchen, open the oven door in a manner as not to alarm the bio mass, then in a single uninterrupted move dump the topping over the mix, whip the dish into the oven and slam the door shut. If you fail to complete this step successfully you should exit the premises by the fastest method possible and call a paramedic and an exterminator.

On the assumption that the last step was entirely successful the heat should be turned down to 375 degrees. Now all you have to do is wait 36~42 minutes until the topping is golden and the wasps smell cooked, before removing the dish and setting it aside to cool and rest uncovered for 32 minutes to allow a light dusting garnish of fresh wasps to alight before serving.

Due to the extreme risk of multiple facial, lip and tongue stings from the garnish a trip to Costco for a bulk buy of epi-pens is strongly recommended.

Give thanks and enjoy this protein enriched crumble with friends and those whom you wish to leave a lasting impression with.

Fruit Fly Village

I suppose by now, if you’ve been reading my recent string of tales, you know that every morning, I take the black dog on an unvarying route down the lane, past the farms and towards the pastures and mountains at the back of our property.

By taking this very same walk each day, I’m tuning myself into the tiny, incremental daily changes that happen, as the seasons roll, from one into the next. Every day, there is a shift.

It’s cooler this morning as I meander. The sun is still lingering behind the mountain and mists lie low over the fields. Each leaf and petal has drip hanging on its tip. The air is cool and moist; the birds are squeaking in loosely-flying flocks and the grass makes juicy squishes underfoot. Dandelions ... their fluff heads looking wet and clumpy ... have had their morning dew-shower and are not yet blown dry. Cheeky Stellar’s Jays are stealing nuts and shrieking their nut-news to their accomplices in the other hazelnuts trees. ( Jays are always ‘cheeky’ regardless of what they’re doing)

... It’s Fall! .... I’m thinking.

And then, all of a sudden, the sun heaves itself over the mountain top and flings its strength widely down, and through, the valley. The mists gather up their skirts in haste and run for the hills. Instant warmth promises later heat. It’s summer, back again.

Yesterday had turned into a hot day, too. I noticed a hot-day buzzing noise as I was tiling in my new house. I’m working on laying out a pattern of river pebbles and stone tiles on the expanse of kitchen floor, ready to transfer onto the walls around my bathtub. An inordinate number of houseflies had made it into my living room ... and why wouldn’t they want to come into my beautiful space when I leave all the doors and windows wide open? They’re making a big racket against the glass. I open the window and they evaporate.

(Speaking of flies evaporating ... Have you noticed how fruit flies do the opposite? They expand into huge realms by spontaneous generation. Half a dozen flew out of my fridge this morning. I have fruit flies in my cutlery drawer.)

As I’m letting the flies out the window, I can see one of our farmers, from my lofty height. He’s in his field down below, gently tossing rye seed in a wide-sided basket and letting the wind blow the chaff off. I’m imagining that the sound is taking a little longer to reach me.

The whole farm is spread out around me and the folks are busy ant-people ... each, oblivious to the others. A gardener has her summer sun hat on and is bending over tending her vegetables in her community garden patch.

One of the workmen is barrowing construction supplies past the silo building and the dirt mountain the children play on.

Now, the farmer is doing something else ... pulling out some squash plants?

We have people here now, getting on and doing the things people do.

Living.

I take a tour through the farm to see who’s here. Our elder is heading over to the office with a sheaf of papers and books tucked under her arm and the key dangling from her fingers.

She doesn’t see me.

There’s some hammering.

One of our hands-on people is putting an extra window into the shed where he’s setting up his cabinet-making business.

Around the other side, a mum is tucking her kids into their van to take one of them to soccer practice.

A couple of the men are splitting wood at the front where we’d had some trees taken down, to make way for power lines. I can see their sweat from here ... I can almost smell how hard they’re chopping.

And just as I can’t be sure whether it’s fall or summer, I can’t tell you whether our Ecovillage is still in its forming, pioneering stage, or it’s made it over the mountain ridge and is shining as a settling, consolidating village. Are we there yet, I wonder?

The seasons are a certainty in how they come. Always fall after winter. Fruit flies come with bananas and stay with plums. Wasps hover around the edge of the roof where their nests are, and cruise in through open windows. The sunshine turns golden and softer.

Humans in villages aren’t so certain.

The Chinese have a special season they insert at this time of the year, that is about ripening fruit, consolidating plenty and sharing abundance. I would call it “Fruit Fly” season, if I didn’t think they’d mind ... the Chinese, I mean. Fruit flies are about all those things, but are too busy being fruit flies, to care what I call their season. And maybe our villagers are too busy too, to be pondering what our village will be in the future.

They just are. And the village just is.

And that’s perfect.

YES featured in the Vancouver Sun

We are featured in the Vancouver Sun this weekend. The mosaic that makes up our community is well represented as a large number of our members are quoted or pictured in the article. Congrats to all involved!

Swallows’ Flight

Does anyone know if the swallows have left on their migration yet? I saw several only the other day ... and I noted their presence. I recall from my big city days, that the swallows were always gone before the end of August. And so I remarked particularly to myself, that they stay longer out here, in the Fraser Valley. But they’re here one day, and gone the next, apparently. I miss them already.

And while I’m asking, when do the turkey vultures leave? Is it soon? And how will I know that my last sighting, is indeed my last? I’ve missed any number of ‘last’ occasions in my life. The last time I wiped drool from my babies’ faces, the last occasion I walked them to school, or stayed up waiting and wondering when they’d be safely home after an evening of partying. I didn’t know at the time. The ‘lasts’ passed without comment.

If I had known that those were the last, I would have wiped more tenderly, walked more slowly, and waited and wondered with more concern and patience. Would that I could go back, to see my children as babies, just one more time! I miss them.

And as I consider which will be the last apple to fall and which the last hazelnut ( I’m still obsessed with picking them) I come to wondering when will be my last time to climb a ladder onto the roof, when I won’t consider it would be fun to try snow-boarding, or when I won’t drive at night any more. Will I note the passing?

But I’m distracted by looking at the mountainside near here ... the maple trees are standing out from the firs now, as they go more orange and brown, and the firs stay green. The vine maples along the road towards town too, are showing off their first red leaves. (I do like vine maples, and hope to have some near my house ... or where I can see them from my windows.) As the deciduous trees head towards winter they flare up briefly with colour before fading back into the forest to remain unnoticed ‘til the first flush of spring.

I can let go of the maple leaves, I know they will be back. I have let my children go too, there are always children in my life and my daughters are always my daughters.

But what about the salmon? The cod stocks on the east coast? And humpback whales. Can you begin to imagine what it would be like, if they were never to come again?

Can you even begin?

.

Hoarding, Hoarding Nuts

This has been a terrific fruiting, producing summer, and the hazelnuts are no exception.

The trees in the front lawn are raining the little plonkers constantly.  I’m not alone in relishing the harvest.  I can often look out of my upper floor window and simultaneously see two kinds of gleaners down below ...the fuzzy, fat-tailed collectors racing along on the power lines with treasures stuffed in their mouths,  and a hand-and-knees, bum-in-the-air  human scavenger dragging a basket along the ground and  throwing in nut after nut ... plink, plink, plink.

I find myself out there too, picking up nuts, when actually I had thought I was meant to be hanging up the wash, or making lunch.  The allure of fallen nuts is powerful.  I fill my pockets until they prevent me bending over and then I waddle into the house to dump my load.   I wish my cheeks were more capacious, to save me trips. 

A basket full of nuts is like a cupboard full of gleaming, full jelly jars.  And a freezer loaded to the gills with bags of the summer’s beans and blueberries.  Like a shelf full of books, a box full of tools.   Like my collection of sewing thread ... every colour is represented there ... every notion of sewing project is  possible, every eventuality predicted.    Bags of nuts in the larder bring peace of mind.  They are abundance and plenty and having reserves.  

And here I am again ... out on the lawn, under the trees, my rapier gaze glancing this way and that through the grass,  for yet one more, one last, nut.  It’s become an obsession.  And how can I not be fascinated by them?   Each nut has come from a perfectly-fitting swaddling blanket that’s frilled to perfection.  They are either ready to be popped out with a gentle finger-thumb squeeze, or, instead, have launched themselves from the tree for an Olympian dive, splashless into the turf.  Either way, I spot them and collect them into my bucket. 

This has been going on for several days now.  Plentiful nuts.  And I can feel I haven’t finished, though I’ve got my own sufficient supply, spread out on newspapers on my spare bed.  Have I picked too many?  More than my share? I’ve filled several buckets and given them away. 

The trees are still loaded and other people have been filling buckets, too. If I tell you I’m hoarding nuts, do you then think I have gone too far?  Hoarding...is that bad?

I look in the Oxford dictionary to check.  Hoard ... it’s an old noun from 1663 meaning a treasury, a repository, a cache.  Or it’s a verb meaning to put away and preserve for future use (squirrels are mentioned).  

Gerry says that it’s built into us ...we’re a northern folk and need to store food for the winter.

I’m feeling somewhat reassured.  What will complete my peace of mind is for me to invite you to come and share and pick nuts too.  But hurry!  Winter is coming!

Water, Unconscious

Michael Greenstein is making a newsletter for Intentional Communities that I want to support and luckily, he’s asked me to write an article from the Yarrow Ecovillage point-of-view.

Michael tells me the theme for this month is ‘water’.

Water! We, here in our ecovillage, are in the midst of the confustication of moving houses, of finishing up construction, planning landscaping, restructuring governance, buying a new tractor, and hiring a ecovillage planner. Water! ... Water is last thing I’m thinking of! I’m still hanging onto summer. Water means rain at this point, and I’m in denial.

And besides, I’m not confident in writing on command about a single topic... I still feel new at this writing business and haven’t tried an exercise like this before.

I have a small friend visiting, who wants to walk my black dog as a diversionary tactic to stall her bedtime. Venturing out with her, allows me to procrastinate with the writing, too. The sunset is drawing in closer and earlier, this end-of-summer evening, as we head down our lane, hand in hand, and hand on leash, towards our far pasture, to pick some late blackberries. She’s an observant child and she spots some sheep on the distant hillside.

“Listen!” I say to her, “Can you hear them bleating?” We stop, and hold our attention. Nope! ... too far ...and wind in the wrong direction. We hear dripping instead. The rows of blueberries on the farm next door, run close and parallel with our lane. They are bushes confined by wires stretched between posts and there’s a black plastic pipe running along the top that has regular holes and a regular drip, drip, drip.

The rows are constrained, straight, uniform and tidy. Our neighbour keeps weeds in control, the birds out, and uses a mechanical picker to harvest what, presumably, is a profitable crop. I’m not tempted at all to taste a sample of his berries, even as they are close to hand and a beautiful blue. When the weeds are standing dead, the berries don’t look alive, either.

There are noises, too, on our side of the lane that aren’t sheep baaaing. Soban, our own ecovillage farmer, is irrigating his cucumbers with the nozzle on his hose gushing into a long trough between the rows, making a long, blue stripe of reflected sky and a lively sound. His cucumber plants are carefully tied to strings that hang from long wire rows. When they sway in the wind, they remind me of passengers on a bus hanging onto the upper hand rail, jostling cheerfully along ... not going anywhere at all.

I’m enjoying myself, but still, I have more thinking to do before I write about water. I’m glad there’s some staining to do on the boards for the new cordwood-masonry house.

Staining is a good activity for the kind of musing meditation that precedes my writing. I’d like to use the big brush with the soft bristles, but it’s lost. I didn’t lose it ... Can’t have been me ... I haven’t been staining for awhile. Someone else lost it. There are so other people to choose from to blame ... many of us are taking a turn at this job, as it’s rather a pleasant one ... satisfying, not too difficult, and helpful.

We’re standing in a circle, wondering ... Is each one of us looking to the others as a person who could have lost a brush, even though we’d rather not go that blaming way? Nevertheless, it’s an easy direction for humans.

Shawn plunges his hand into the cleaning bucket that’s been standing at our feet ... and brings out the brush. It’s been submerged and hidden all along, right there in front of us... in the water.

Ah! I think. Water. There all along. Dripping, gushing, standing still. Now I know what I’ll write for Michael’s theme ... About water, unconscious.

I hold in my long ago memory and imagination, a particular way of water, that still inspires me, as I live in this intentional community.

Have you heard of chesil? ... and/or Chesil Beach in the south of England?

Chesil is a kind of gravel and Chesil Beach, the place, is remarkable in that it has a stream that flows completely through the gravel ... through, not on top. You can sense as you stand there, rather than see or feel, the water moving beneath your feet. Water that seeks the cracks and spaces. Flows around.

Patient.

Soft.

Persistent.

And at its end, reunited with the sea.

Chesil would be in the Permaculture principles, wouldn’t it? ( Permaculture being about finding better ways for humans to live in nature.)

I can see it in ... Creatively use and respond to change. Use small and slow solutions.

Where can you see it?

Holmgren's 12 design principles from Wikipedia.

These restatements of the principles of permaculture appear in David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability ^[5]; also see permacultureprinciples.com ^[6];

1. Observe and interact - By taking the time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.
2. Catch and store energy - By developing systems that collect resources when they are abundant, we can use them in times of need.
3. Obtain a yield - Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback - We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well.
5. Use and value renewable resources and services - Make the best use of nature's abundance to reduce our consumptive behaviour and dependence on non-renewable resources.
6. Produce no waste - By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.
7. Design from patterns to details - By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go.
8. Integrate rather than segregate - By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other.
9. Use small and slow solutions - Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources and producing more sustainable outcomes.
10. Use and value diversity - Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides.
11. Use edges and value the marginal - The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.
12. Creatively use and respond to change - We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right time.