The day started off so nicely. It was not warm but the calm was nice. The animals woke up slowly. 
But soon after breakfast Mistress Wind arrived – her black cape flapping – unpacked her bag of demon daughters and they let loose with a terrible wind that blew like hell itself for the whole day. I had already put the goats and calves out into the fields but with all that wind I did a Mary Poppins (but in fast forward) my feet barely touching the ground and brought them all back in again. It is not even warm. Every night for the next week we go down around freezing. Sigh.
The wind makes me anxious. I think it kind of deafens a person as it buffets you so you don’t feel quite in touch with your surroundings. And no-one likes to feel unsteady on their feet. I never feel quite sure of my body or its place in the surroundings in the big winds. The dogs and I hunker down, tucking our chins into our chests and move as fast as possible from one sheltered spot to the next. And I wanted to work on the Fellowship Forest yesterday. 
Where we live out here in the Midwest, Illinois, the county sells bunch lots of trees cheaply to the farmers in an effort to reforest the land. They have a great prairie land program too that I am looking into. The day before yesterday I collected my trees (the black walnuts, the wild plum and the red stemmed dogwood) but I cannot plant them in this wind, so they are still waiting damply in their bags. This kind of wind makes it hard to stand up let alone dig in a slight stick of a tree.
So the wind gave me the opportunity to work on our second fellowship Book – Letters for my Baby Girl. The letters are in and being collated and now I am calling for recipes, handy tips, anecdotes, etc. Short and succinct. These will be on every other page (I hope) weaving in and out of our stories and will make this book even more memorable and useful. So if you have a recipe of your own, that you would like to hand down. Or a method. Or even a non recipe for making an old family treat. Or how to get red wine stains out of the carpet. How to pick up dropped stitches. How to plant out cabbages. How to make one pound of ground beef feed Twelve. The perfect pasta recipe. How to make Hokey Pokey. How to potty train a toddler. How to grow sunflowers. Things like that. Stuff that ordinary women and men will find useful. Please send them to me at celima.g.7@gmail.com. Set them out IN AN EMAIL the way you want them printed and don’t forget to put your name or your pseudonym and the date and the country you are writing from. This is so exciting. This will be a great book for our daughters and their daughters.
Good morning. The Old Codger is pleased to hear we are planting Black Walnuts. He said they were a very popular tree in his day and everyone had huge Walnut trees on their properties. Evidently they are great in brownies. I said he can do the nut cracking.
I hope you have a lovely day,
Your friend on the farm,
celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
86 responses to “Screaming Mistress Wind”
Frost here in southern Minnesota this morning. And the wind here yesterday was ferocious, too.
I find that wind blows my thoughts right out my ears. It’s unsettling–like being underwater.
What on earth are the kittens and the rooster so entranced by?
oh those kittys in the hen house! darling photo! I’ll conjure up a recipe for you! Cheers!
I certainly prefer the flavour of a black walnut (not my favourite nut though) to english walnuts. However, you definitely need slave labour to hull, crack and shell the nuts. The nuts are very hard and the meat is not easy to extra. Wear gloves when hulling or your fingers will be black for weeks.
We have a bread we make for a particular customer who likes raisin bread with black walnuts in it, he supplies the nuts from his own trees. It’s loaded with equal weight of raisins and walnuts. He calls it squirrel bread since he is in a constant battle to harvest and keep the nuts safe from the squirrels; they go mad for them.
That sounds like a stunning bread.. Once again i wish we lived closer, but I fear I would not like your winters.. c
Send my your address and I’ll mail you some bread 🙂 You’re welcome to come visit; we have a spare bedroom.
Oh I would love to come and visit, it would be in the winter though. when i am not milking.. my email is celima.g.7@gmail.com but oursnail mail service here is just rubbish it takes weeks for some of our mail to reach us. Al the country PO’s are on such short hours and the sorting buildings are being closed and combined… a mess.
oh and your big brick cooker in the house is amazing.. such a lot of work too… c
What is your favourite nut? c
Boring old roasted peanuts, probably has something to do with my addiction to peanut butter.
Our nasty stuff made it to you…it’s a doozy of a storm, not one I want to go through again in the spring time. I found to crack black walnut, lay them in a line on some cement/pavement/extremely hard surface and drive over them. Otherwise, pound with a hammer. They are good in ice cream, also. (You can sell them shelled for a fair price)
Linda
http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com
https://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com/sherlock-boomer
I tried the drive over them option and man did they leave a mess, they smash well enough though once dry.. pigs love them.. LOVE them.. c
Oops , I forgot about mailing you a recipe ? What kind of recipe would you like for the book ? Schnitzel? Potato pancakes? My apple cake or something else.
Schnitzel! YES! My baby girl loves schnitzel – so do I.. c
Ok schnitzel it is
I sent you an email
Celi ~ it’sbeen fun reading all the comments about walnut trees. When I lived in Chatsworth we had a few very old walnut trees at our place. One was destroyed when the tornado came over Chatsworth, so Dale took the huge old tree and put it in the old building to dry it so we could use it toward a fireplace when we built a new house someday. Well, life brings changes and he died in an accident in ’92. A man who knew we had this walnut tree took it and made 2 big memory boxes ~ one for me and one for his parents. all of my cards and other memories in there ~ walnut wood is so beautiful. I absolutely love these incredible shots of Mr Rooster with the Kitties!! Have never seen anything like it!!! Now those are magazine cover shots and one should go on the calendar!! Selling any prints??? have a good day planting some trees!!
I read online that peanuts in the shell aren’t as good for squirrels as hazelnuts are, so I buy hazelnuts by the pound and put them on my back porch then watch with delight the squirrels come and eat them.
I have a black walnut story for you–
When my kids where little and growing up we lived in a trailer home–with a metal roof– and the trailer was set right beside a black walnut tree–
which during the summer gave us great shade and helped keep the trailer cool–but come fall when the nuts matured and fell from the tree–
well–they were not ‘quite’ when the hit the top of the trailer–they were large and hard and loud–very loud!!!!
We, also, had a couple other black walnut trees near the road and every year an elderly couple came and picked them all up and took them home to shell and eat!!
those where the simple days!!
Aha!! Simply lovely..
Well, I missed the first deadline… so if I send something within a week is that too late? I was too overwhelmed to think I could send anything, but I might be able to now.
You certainly have time Jeanne.. looking forward to it! .. c
The look on the Kune Kune faces seem to be saying: “Do you think she knows what we were up to?
I have my thinking cap on…. for the tips, sayings and recipes!
Hmm. Tips and recipes. You’d think that after all these years I’d know something, but sadly I do not.
There was a black walnut at one of the homes I lived in years ago. It dripped sap all over the car which was parked under it. The sap proved to be a fairly decent sealant, where the sap was left there was no rust (it was an older car to begin with and the paint in bad shape). There was a lot of noise in the autumn with the falling nuts. I would love to contribute a recipe, will look through my heirloom ones.
Thank you.. Looking forward to the heirlooms!
I’ve already replied, but I failed earlier to note my one and only reason for loving black walnuts—the horrible stain they leave on skin and clothes and fingers. When I was a little girl, all the neighborhood children would wait, wait, wait until the black walnuts would begin falling from the tree down the street. For days, we would have the equivalent of snowball fights with the walnuts. We all knew better than to come to fights in our best clothes, lest we receive a spanking in reward for our fun. Welts and brown stains were the marks of friendship as school would begin in the fall.
That is SO brilliant.. did you ever see that movie War of the Buttons.. this story reminds me of that! wonderful..c
I did not. I’ll look it up the movie now.
Every Fall I would give Black Walnuts another try. Every year I thought they tasted like I imagined turpentine; even in banana bread or chocolate chip cookies. To this day, their stain is all that holds a place in my heart.
My grandparents had a Black Walnut tree, too. We weren’t allowed to touch them (kids, you know) for fear of ruining our clothes.
Clothes!! Probably wearing your Good Visiting clothes.. c
Probably so. 🙂