fall

Yesterday I planted three 2'x4' beds of garlic (about 84 cloves) and one bed the same size of shallots.  I mulched them thickly with some straw after planting.  I will remove the straw in the spring when it's time for them to grow above ground. 

We haven't had any frosts yet around here but they are forecasting there might be one in a couple days.  So I spent some time yesterday covering all the outdoor faucets and pipes (bubblewrap, newspaper, garbage bags and duct tape - nothing fancy but it works every year), and putting the insulation blocks inside the foundation vent covers.  I also picked all the green tomatoes.  I've got a late crop of snow peas which hasn't bloomed yet.  If there is too hard of a frost I will just cover them with some more straw and they will become mulch, but I'm hopeful I might still get something out of them yet.  I also wanted to work on some new insulated shelters for "my" feral cats, but after all that I was too worn out to start them.

I've been eating mostly grain-free the last month or two.  Ever since I had the lung damage I have found I feel better the less grain I eat.  I used to eat A LOT of grain, and have drastically reduced that (and what I did eat was almost always prepared according to the Weston A Price guidelines) but decided it was time to cut it out all together.  I've eaten a sandwich or two when out during that time, but not eating any grain in an average day or week.  At first it was challenging (what do I take for lunch if I can't make a sandwich?  what do I have for a snack?) but after a little time went by it became much simpler and I very quickly quit wishing I could have some.  I've found that not only do I feel healthier but I feel way less hungry and almost never need a snack and I absolutely never crave sugar anymore.  If I have to wait a little too long between meals due to work or etc. I don't start feeling bad like I used to sometimes.  Also I didn't used to eat a lot of sugar since I was ill, but I would still crave it and now I never do.  My body is happier.  I'm still eating potatoes frequently and other starchy vegetables so it isn't really low-carb nutrition (like GAPS or Paleo or some of the other interesting nutritional systems I have leaned about and borrowed recipes and ideas from in just the last couple months), just no grain.
I've mostly been focusing on eating simply and naturally (basically how I did before since becoming familiar with WAPF-type diet: grass-fed meat, farm eggs, raw milk, and veggies, with small amounts of fruit and nuts, just taking the grain out and finding I really didn't need to replace it with anything).  I didn't want to just replace baked grain items with a bunch of other baked items so I made a point of not doing that at all for awhile, but this weekend I decided to make some grain-free muffins to take in my lunches this week.  I have found some great websites with recipes, some of them are in my blog list and more that I will add later. Today I made pumpkin spice muffins and they are really good.  I used this recipe, although I substituted coconut oil for the grapeseed oil and I cut the sweetener in half and substituted honey in place of the agave because I don't use things that are high in fructose.  Here they are (minus the two I had for supper to make sure they were good):

Sprouted Sesame Seed and Peach snack bars

A couple weeks ago I posted about making sprouted pumpkin seed and date snack bars, and how I wanted to try this with various seeds and fruits in the interest of making grain-free snacks.
This time I decided to sprout some raw sesame seeds.  They sprouted for 2 days.

Yep, they really did sprout.  They look kind of funny but they actually smelled good.

I took a plate full of peaches from a farm down the road, skinned them and then mashed with a potato masher.

After this I stirred in the sprouted sesame seeds.  I decided at that point I should have had about twice as many peaches, but I couldn't do anything about it right then since it was late and the farm stand was closed.

 

The mixture filled two trays for the dehydrator.  Since the peaches were so juicy I used the two free samples of tray liner I got back when I bought my food dryer, but wax paper would work as well I think.

I spread the mixture pretty thin because it was so juicy I was afraid it would take a long time to dry.

But today when the dryer was done, I found that I could have left them thicker and I definitely should have had more peaches.   They are still cooling so I haven't cut them into bars yet, but I snuck a taste and they are pretty good.

In other news, my sister helped me rewire my stove.  Well more like I helped her as she did most of the work, in exchange for my taking care of her cat while she was gone on vacation.  Help with a project is so much better than any other kind of payment!

The problem -- icky old wiring inside my old stove, and a couple burners that no longer worked.
Neither of us had worked on a stove before, but the wiring was pretty straightforward once you got the back of the stove open, and there is a good used appliance/appliance repair and parts store in the next town over, so we had no problems in figuring out how to do the rewiring.  It just took a long time.
The wiring from the burner switches to the burners was all replaced and new burner receptacles were installed.  The wiring from the oven switch to the elements in the big oven on the right were also replaced, as they looked pretty nasty also once we got inside the stove.  And what did we find works better for shrinking the heat sleeves on the new burner receptacle wires, better than a match or lighter?  An embossing gun that's what.  Talk about girl power! :)
I wanted to replace the oven thermostats also, as neither of them works very reliably.  Unfortunately though I found out they quit making replacement thermostats for this stove model in 2003, so I am out of luck in that regard.  The store suggested I try scrubbing the thermostat tube with steel wool to see if that helps it, so I will try that one of these days.  I have also tried sending an email directly to Sears just to double-check, so I will see if they say anything back.  Personally I don't shop at Sears and prefer to spend my appliance dollars elsewhere that I get better customer service and things that are easier to repair.  But, I can't change the fact that a past homeowner long before my time was a Sears shopper.  The appliance repair store people sort of groan when you tell them it's an old Kenmore you need parts for.

Here is the rewired stove, all nice and cleaned up with new burner pans also.  I'm waiting for the store to get one more large burner in stock.  Older appliances are generally built so much sturdier than newer ones, so I am happy to give this old stove new life and keep it running for many more years.

peanut butter and pillows

It was so cool this morning I actually turned on the heat for awhile.  Not that much different from most of the summer here, but the last few weeks we had a heat wave so it was kind of a shock for it to cool down so quickly.

The raspberry harvest has begun in earnest.  The everbearing raspberries seem to love cool weather after a heatwave and will be producing for at least the rest of the month I think.

I finally found the right pillow, so I splurged on them.  Feather pillows are the only kind I really find comfortable but my old feather pillows had started to smell musty and I know they say almost any kind of pillow is full of dust mites and other allergens after only a few months of use.  I've heard said you should buy new pillows every 6 months, but who can afford that?  But I know this musty smell and the dust mites and such are so bad for my lungs so I've been searching for a solution.
This pillow is filled with shredded latex, so it feels a lot like a feather pillow.  You can fluff it up and shape it how you want like a feather pillow.  It is a little "bouncier" though if you can understand what I mean by that and (a plus) it holds whatever shape you make of it all through the night and your head sinks in just enough but doesn't keep sinking in during the night like my old feather pillows did.  The covers are made of organic cotton and have a zipper, so if the cover needs washed you can dump the shredded latex into a bag, wash the cover and then reassemble.  The latex is naturally processed and has no odor at all, and since it can't host dust mites or mildew or any other allergens these pillows should last me for many many years.   I've used the pillows for several nights now and I am totally sold.  Plus I am waking up breathing easier too.  It's amazing what a difference the right pillow makes.

I bought this grinder awhile back but hadn't used it yet.  It's not a grinder that can make wheat flour (at least not without multiple grindings) but it is inexpensive and I got it to make my own nixtmatalized corn meal, which I haven't tried yet although I did buy the non-GMO dried corn and the lime I need to do it.  I also had the idea to grind my coffee with it.  I set it up today and tried that, and it worked great for that.  The only place I have to attach it right now is on my pull-out breadboard.  That worked for today but it was wobbly as the board shifted and it made gouges in the board, so I need to figure something else out.  I'd like to be able to set it up permanently, though that is going to be a challenge in my smallish kitchen.

While I had the grinder set up I decided to use it to make some nut butter according to the Nourishing Traditions recipe.  (I left out the honey because I didn't want it to be sweetened.)

First I ground a jar (a little over 1 quart) of crispy peanuts.  These are raw peanuts that have been soaked for 12ish hours in salt water and then dried for 24ish hours at 145*F in the food dryer.  The recipe said to use a food processor, which I don't own, but that it would make a dry meal which this did too.  It was really easy to use the grinder for the peanuts and didn't take very long.
I added 2 tsp of sea salt to this meal and stirred it in.

Next I added 1.5 cups of coconut oil.  Since I only have unrefined oil, it tastes like coconut. Since I wasn't using a food processor to mix, I had to do the next part by hand.  I started using a spatula and ended up just mixing it with my hand.  It was easy to incorporate the oil using my fingers to sort of knead it in.  It would have been a little easier yet if I had thought to get the oil out of the cool pantry ahead of time so that it would have softened first.  

Want a taste? :)

This nut butter has a different consistency.  Not really crunchy and not really creamy, as far as traditional storebought peanut butter comes.  (I buy Adams, which is just peanuts and salt so this is what I am comparing it to.  Not to crisco-added icky stuff like Jiff or something.  My apologies if you like that kind of peanut butter.  But really how could you?)   I could have set the grinder to a finer grind and this might have made it creamier.  Since I like crunchy peanut butter, I think it might be best to make a fine grind and then at the end add in some chopped peanuts.  It tastes good, although slightly like coconut.  

Some things I learned from making the recipe this first time:

1) I want to get some refined coconut oil (although I already knew that).

2) I think I will take up my mom's offer of borrowing her old Vitamix next time I am ready to make nut butter, in order to make a finer grind for a more traditional peanut butter texture.  (Although a Vitamix and/or a food processor would be handy I tend to really avoid owning a lot of small electrical appliances.  Several recipes I've tried lately have almost made me decide to buy a food processor though.)

3) This grinder is going to work great for making almond and filbert flour.  Grinding the peanuts basically into a peanut flour was easy and fast.  I will probably use it more often for that than I will for cornmeal.

4) The grinder grinds coffee just like I remember them doing it when I was in the mountains of Mexico during college.  Maybe I can figure some way to mount mine to a board attached to the wall under the window...

Ok, talking about Mexico made me nostalgic so I dug out some pictures and scanned them so I could share them here.  (They will get bigger if you click on them.)

Roasting coffee beans over a fire.

Grinding the coffee.  See, it looks just like my grinder, except theirs is red.

Isn't this absolutely the most fabulous outdoor kitchen you have ever seen?  I love my little indoor kitchen of course and I have more modern amenities, like a hot water heater, for which I am grateful.  But ever since I saw this place I have wished for an outdoor kitchen like this one too.  It was a great place to hang out and chat with the women-folk also.

Ah... people I will never see again, a place I will surely never be again.  Good memories...

Have a great week.  It's almost fall!

first week of September

Time for another weekly blog post - which hasn't happened in a couple months...

One of the upsides of living in an area rich with agriculture is that a wide variety of local foods are readily available within a short driving distance.  One of the downsides is that for a couple months every summer the air in the valley is thick with dust which covers my car, seeps through my windows, and worst of all gets in my lungs and really irritates them.  It's always dusty here in the summer, but this seems to be the worst ever.  I'm not sure if that's really true or if it's just because I notice it now that I have bad lungs.  The last few weeks especially have been really hard on me and I have to stay inside as much as possible and even then I get sick often.  I will be glad when it starts raining again and clears the air.

This week I cleared out all the remaining raw nuts I had stored in the freezer and made them into crispy nuts (soaked for 8 hours in salt water and then dried in the food dryer at 135*F for around 24 hours).  I use the Nourishing Traditions directions for each type of nut - this process neutralizes the stuff in the nuts that makes them inhibit vitamin absorption and also makes them easier to digest.  I did try to follow the directions for taking the skins off the filberts but it didn't seem to work, so I just went ahead and soaked and dried them with the skins on.  I had 2 trays each of walnuts, peanuts, and filberts.  The walnuts must be stored in the fridge but the others just go in the pantry. Soon I should be able to buy some of the new local harvest of walnuts and filberts so it was time to use these up.  The walnuts are my favorite of these three.

I found this tea infuser at the local thrift shop last week. It looks brand new and I don't have one of this style so I picked it up.  You can never have too many tea infusers, especially for 50c.

I ordered a couple, unrelated, things this week and they both arrived in the mail today.  On the left you see a bag of sprouted flour.  I found a mill in Alabama that sells sprouted flour (of many kinds, not just wheat) milled to order.  Of course I could sprout wheat myself at home and grind it and probably save a little money.  Money, like it is everywhere, is at a premium here.  But since I work 2 jobs time is also at a real premium and I only have so much time and energy to go around, so I was excited to find fresh sprouted flour that I can buy ready made.  With shipping added it came to around $4 per pound for the 10 lb bag.  But you can't put a price on good health and I have not seen sprouted flour done exactly according to the Nourishing Traditions principles available from anywhere else.  I don't eat at lot of grain and I will only use this in recipes where the batter isn't going to be fermented so it will last me for quite awhile, stored in the freezer.

On the right you see a milk can.  I always put the milk in a gallon glass jar when I pick up my milk share.  But the jars have to sit in the car all day while I am at work (I pick up the milk on the way home) and go through various temperature extremes and the other day I found one jar had cracked.  I also use the jars to ferment vegetables and kombucha so I am constantly running out of clean gallon jars and decided to buy some more.  However, on my way to buy some more online I started looking at stainless steel milk cans and decided to get one of those instead.  The can cost as much as 3 glass jars, but it is unbreakable and has a carrying handle as well.  I am looking forward to using it to pick up milk next week.

I ordered a few plants and they arrived earlier this week.  Until the hot spell is over they are hanging out in the laundry tub.  Clockwise from top right: ostrich fern, salal, wintergreen, blue elderberry.

These are all plants native to Oregon.  

The ostrich fern will have edible fiddleheads in the spring.  

The salal will replace a pineapple guava that was killed by repeated cold spells the last couple winters.  There were two pineapple guavas planted on either side of the front door.  Although pineapple guava is supposed to be hardy in my zone, they really seem to struggle here.  They never produce fruit, even when I pollinate the flowers with a paintbrush.  The other guava tree has a dead section but is mostly doing ok and had 3 or 4 blooms this summer.  I don't feel motivated to spend money on another pineapple guava just to have the matching pair back, so I decided to go with a plant I know is hardy here because it is native.  It also is one of the few bushes listed to do well in the shade and the north side of my house gets very little direct light.  The valley Indians used salal berries as one of their major food sources.  I've never eaten a salal berry, so in a few years I should get to try them out.

The wintergreen is a relative of salal, though itself technically not native to Oregon I think.  This is a different kind of wintergreen than the 2 chilean wintergreen bushes I already have.  Those have small pink berries with a sweetness to them but very little flavor.  I ate a couple berries off this little wintergreen bush and these white with pink berries have a strong mint flavor.  This is a low growing bush that does ok in shade.

The blue elderberry is a type of elderberry native to Oregon and I bought it to replace a different kind of elderberry that I planted about 4 years ago.  That one failed to thrive due to the cottontails (bless their little hearts).  I will rig some chicken wire around this one when I plant it so it won't suffer the same fate.  The cotton tails are in my yard a lot less now though since all the feral cats moved in.

 This is a cookbook I bought secondhand a number of years back but have never really explore.  It was printed in 1939.  Today I got it out and started looking through it a little and I definitely need to sit down and read it more.  It has little stories in it in addition to the recipes.

Now I definitely am not a New England Yankee.  When I went to college in Texas I found out that people in the south consider everyone not-from-the-South to be Yankees.  Whereas I had grown up in the pacific northwest considering only people from "back East" to be Yankees, so I was kindof offended to be called a Yankee.  (Now on the other hand if we are talking baseball, then I am a Yankee through and through, but that is most definitely NOT what they meant.)  So there are stories in this book of an entirely different culture than I've ever experienced.

I used some of my sprouted flour to make this biscuit recipe.  Since I used whole wheat flour (and cream of tartar that is a little out of date) I don't know if I would call them "marvels of lightness" but they were some of the lightest whole wheat biscuits I have ever made.  This recipe is a keeper.

Those of you who also buy a lot of used books will know that you find the oddest things tucked inside secondhand books.  Things that people used as bookmarks or just tucked away and forgot they were there.  While looking up the biscuit recipe I found this old note tucked in this book.  I thought it was a sweet snapshot of someone's long ago day, so I took a picture of it before I stuck it in the recycle bin.

That's it for this week.  Below I will put a few random pictures from the last 2 months when I didn't blog...

I bought a couch that came UPS in two boxes of this size.

After I put it together it looked like this.  (Cat not included)

I fermented a gallon of sliced cucumbers.  My first "real" (not vinegar) pickles.  I use whey drained off homemade yogurt or curdled raw milk for inoculating all my fermented vegetables.

And a quart of corn salsa (corn relish recipe in NT)

And a quart of ginger carrots...

I tried my hand at making grain-free sprouted snack bars, similar to the good but expensive "go raw" brand they sell at the store.  These are ground date with sprouted pumpkin seeds and a little bit of applesauce to help it hold together.  Then formed into bars and dried in the food dryer at 135*F for I forget how long.  They turned out great, especially for a first experiment, and are almost gone.  I want to try more, with sprouted sesame seeds and sunflower seeds and other kinds of fruit instead of dates.  This is a great alternative to a granola bar.

Picked up my lamb from the butcher.

The "others" - part of my resident feral cat colony.  Who could refuse to help out someone so cute?

yukon gold and red pontiac potatoes - size 10 US womens flipflop provided for scale

The red potatoes were mostly a failed crop, which has to do with my neighbors weedeating that row of my garden before the potatoes had even bloomed, but since they are really good neighbors and really nice people (aside from the weedeating without asking bit) I did not yell at them about it, but just enjoyed my few delicious red potatoes.

russet potatoes - 16 lb cat included for scale

And to end... of course tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of 9/11.  I don't have anything profound to say that has not already been said.  But I will never forget that day - the loss, the heroism, the fear, the uncertainty.  In ways little and big, life has never been the same again.  And so, although we never forget on any day of the year, we pause to remember in a special way tomorrow.

vanilla extract update and other "currant" events

It has been 4 months since I started the vanilla extract.  It has been hiding away in a kitchen drawer and I shake the jars every now and then.  I decided it was time to strain the extract off of the beans and seeds.  From the 2 quart jars I got 3 pints of strained extract.  (I used muslin inside of a funnel to strain it.) 

I found this brand of kombucha that comes in amber glass bottles.  I bought 3 bottles awhile ago and saved them specifically for bottling the vanilla when it was ready.  (I will be giving some of the vanilla as gifts, and I still have about half the package of beans left, so I will be making more extract for Christmas gifts as soon as I buy more alcohol.  I made this first batch with Everclear, and I think I will try white rum for the second batch and see which is better.)

I read online about making vanilla sugar with the used beans and seeds, so that is what I did.  I mixed a 2 lb bag of "washed raw" sugar with the beans and seeds left after I strained off the extract.

My new washer was delivered and I've used it a couple times by now.  It really spins the clothes dry!  So that is going to be really nice as I hang dry all my clothes and this is going to make that process go faster.  I doubt I will ever use all the fancy cycle options on this machine, so I wished I could have something simpler, but I am won over by it's cleaning and spinning capabilities.

Not too much happening on the gardening side, since I have not been able to devote too much energy or time to it this year again.  But I did harvest the red currants from the bush I planted a couple years ago.  I am not sure what people do with red currants other than make jelly, and as you can see I only had a small harvest.  So I decided to make them into a batch of scones.  I used a little of the vanilla sugar to sweeten the biscuit dough, and they turned out really good.

I also harvested the shallots.  I'd never planted them before, or ever cooked with them, but the Joy of Cooking book said to harvest them when the stalks started to lay down but before they turned all yellow and so I did.  It said I should harvest 4-5 times as much as I planted and I did, so it was a success.  The Territorial catalog said to plant them in fall and then harvest in the summer, so when my coworker gave the starts to me in early spring and said to plant them then I was a little worried they wouldn't grow right.  But now that I see the cooking book says to plant in early spring and harvest in late June so according to that I did it just about right.  They are laying in the laundry room to cure for a few days (I can't leave them on the ground like the book said due to my resident feral cat colony) and then I will either braid them or I will attempt to braid them and give up in frustration and then put them in a mesh bag and hang it in the pantry.
Those are a few of the things that went on here for me this week.  There is also a dumped-off cat who has been hanging around with my feral cats for a number of months now (and had his trip to the vet to be neutered several months back).  I assume he is dumped off and not feral because he does not act as terrified of people as the ferals do, but still he hisses and growls very meanly and runs away from me all the time.  I had to live trap him to get to the vet just like I did the others.  Lately he caught a respiratory infection and I guess that made him decide to trust in me.  So all the sudden he has started befriending me and begging for my attention every time I go out.  I have been giving him colloidal silver on his food and rubbing medicine in his eyes every day and hoping for the best and that it won't spread to the other cats outside.  After several days on medicine, he seems to be making a turn for the better, so I am relieved, for now anyway.  Now he has decided he is my good friend and he keeps trying to get let into the house (which my inside kitty absolutely would not allow!).  The feral cats sit behind the bushes and stare at him in amazement as he gets petted.  They probably think he is crazy.  Doesn't he know that people exist to give you food every morning and night but that you must never ever get near enough for a person to touch you?

laundry room is done

The ginger plant is getting tall.

 The dog wanted his picture taken too.  Never hurts to look cute and try to finagle a treat.

My big project this week was getting the laundry room painted.  The walls are a light orange, called "perfect peach", but what the color reminds me of is the orange sherbet swirled with vanilla ice cream we used to eat a lot when I was a kid.

(Unfortunately these pictures I took with my phone are a little blurry, which I couldn't tell till I saw them on a bigger screen.)  Storage shelves on the left and ivory soap girl sign on the wall.  I need to find a more permanent way to close in the dryer vent; right now it has a yogurt container stuck on it.

All ready for the new washing machine I will hopefully buy next week...  I'm not sure what year the addition on my house was built, just that it was some time after the original part of the house in 1946, but by the linoleum I'm guessing it was during the 60s. 

Notice the lovely avocado green toilet (with paint brushes still drying on it).  It hardly ever gets used and it has a tendency for the water not to shut off inside if someone does flush it, but it's not in my budget to pay to have it taken out now and it has come in handy a few times to have more than one toilet in the house.
You can't really see the curtains in this shot because of the sun glare, but they are some I got second hand - sheer panel with orange and yellow flowers on the ruffle at top and bottom.  The orange is a different color than the wall, but I think they go ok and help tie in the yellowish floor too.  They are just the right size and let in the sun and air like I wanted.

I got this chest of drawers free on the side of the road a few years back and it has been just sitting in my shop building because I was sure I could find something to do with it.  The paint is a little scuffed, but not so much that I was motivated to repaint it.  I cut a piece of plywood to fit where the drawer was missing so that I can set little bins in there.  It will be great storage for cleaning rags, etc.
I am so happy to finally get my laundry room all fixed up!  And though doing some loads of laundry by hand has not been all that bad, it will be nice to get a machine next week!

I transplanted these calla lilies next to my side door several years ago, and this is the first year they have bloomed.

Now, as the cat reminds me, it's time for a nap.  :)  Here he is sleeping on top of one of my next projects - another old chest of drawers which I am going to fix up as a sideboard.  Maybe I will have that done to show next week.

almost sort of like summer

These first 2 pictures are from over a month ago when I planted some ginger.  I use quite a bit of ginger, and I had some roots that had begun to sprout on the kitchen counter, so I had the thought that perhaps I could grow some myself.  I read several pages about growing ginger in pots - I already knew my climate is too cold for it to survive outside.  As usual when looking things up online, there was disagreement among people as to whether the ginger would just make a nice plant or would grow enough to harvest roots.  So we'll see.  This is not a good picture, but you can see one green shoot at the top of the picture and one at the bottom. 

Below the green shoots just barely show above the soil after I finished planting.  One of these shoots is now about a foot tall and growing leaves while the other has not grown at all.  I will take a new picture soon.

My little leek harvest, overwintered in the garden from last year.  This was the first time I grew leeks from seed (or any other way) and since I basically ignored them ever since planting them I was really happy to have this harvest though they didn't get very big.  I turned these into a pot of vichyssoise, one of my favorite winter soups.  And yes, I know it isn't winter any more, but it was still pretty much feeling like it when I made the soup a couple weeks ago.

First strawberry harvest earlier this week.  Late this year because of the weather, of course, but finally!  I've had 2 harvests of about this same size now.  And got a very small first raspberry picking today too.

The evening sun highlighting roses (and weeds :)) against the bedroom window shade.

Tomato plants at left and at right a bean teepee made of an old Christmas tree trunk and twine all ready for the pole beans to sprout after planting yesterday.

 I also planted a row of cucumber plants yesterday.  Mostly pickling cukes but also a few plants of slicing ones. 

I am without a washing machine right now.  I want to get the laundry room painted before I get a new one, so that is taking me awhile to get done since I can't work at it for very long at a time.  I could do wash at my sister's house, but didn't really feel like loading it in the car and driving there.  Then I remembered I had a wringer and some other hand laundry stuff in the attic that I bought a couple years ago before I was sick but I had never used yet.  So I set it up and washed a load of towels last night/today.  The main problem is that doing something like the plunger washer is about the hardest thing on my lungs so I knew I couldn't do it very many times at all, so I let the towels soak in the wash water overnight and then only used the agitator a few times now and then during the soak.  Then I did 2 rinses similarly, though not overnight of course.  They may not be the cleanest laundry in the world, but they looked pretty good to me.  Fortunately the wringer was easy to use.

Here are the towels ready to go on the line.  The wringer really gets a lot of water out!  More than a washing machine, I think.  And the nicest part is that it was actually nice enough here to have the clothesline outside today. There have been very few days like that this year, very few...

Those are a few things going on around here the last couple weeks.  And now we are even having a whole week of days that will be in the low 70s, so it is practically like a miracle to have so much sunshine without rain! :)