First Flatbread

Here is the first flat bread produced in the oven. The oven is still drying out so it is hard to get the heat up to where we would like it, about 700 degrees Fahrenheit or more. Tasty, but took over five minutes to cook, which is too slow, we are looking for two minute pizzas. We hope to take it on the road soon.

Nice Lupines this year, they made it past a bad aphid infestation and lots of powdery mildew to produce these showy blooms.

Lots of figs in the tree outside our kitchen back door.

First Fire

The Cob is drying and we have lit a couple of small fires. Once it dries, we will lay on a final skim coat of plaster.

Orcas Island Pizza Oven

A good day, final wood fired oven build happened. First, build up a sand mold with many other space occupying objects. Next, layer of straight clay, sand, and a bit of Portland Cement. Finally, a cob layer and a skim of the same mix with added straw. The shape is great, we look forward to removing the sand mold as soon as it sets. Pizza is coming soon and many other roastable items, including our local Mangalitsa Pork.

Next Phase of Wood Fired Oven Build

Garden Jungle. Greenhouse is over full. Trying to harvest the last lettuces before we turn over to all tomatoes. Everything is looking good, sugar snaps are 7 feet tall.

Garden Basil, I could not resist. Tomatoes and warm weather plants are very happy.

Here is the frame for the door of the oven. We have the rebar support to help out the clay when moving down the road. Made by the amazing Pete Welty, who also made the custom trailer. Tomorrow we lay the hearth and Monday is oven build day, barring any major issues.

Wood Fired Pizza Oven Build

Here is the Trailer with poured slab and insulating layer for our latest project, A fully mobile wood fired pizza oven. We will be setting the oven floor, building the door frame & chimney and will make the actual oven this coming weekend. More pictures to come.

Our focus will be on quick fired, hi heat pizzas.

New Growth

The gardens are really taking off and most of the grafting work we have done is starting to grow. Five types of plums, six types of pear. It will be interesting to completly work over all of the vigorous trees that produce inferior fruit.

The tomatoes have been repotted and now we are waiting for all of our greenhouse lettuces and snap peas to finish so we can transition into our warm weather crops. This year we have, Tigerella, Green Zebra, Cherokees, Black Cherry, Sungolds, Yellow Pear Cherries, Orcas Orange, German Greens and some Brandy Wine Tomatoes. The utdoor greens are enjoying the warmer weather.

Spring

Not to rave too much about any one topic, we just had to show everyone the incredible marbling of the Mangalitsa pork. This is a piece from the leg, which was brined and seared. Truely awesome.

We had the good fortune to be taught some basic grafting technique from a local expert orchardist named Ed, he grew up in Holland and was kind enough to come over and show us how to top work some old pear trees. The tree was vigorous, but the pears were not good at all. We grafted an old heirloom, asian type that we had here, and several old varieties of keeper pears that Ed had in his orchard, including one named after his father, Suij, from Holland. The tree looks kind of rough, but as the grafts take, we will continue to remove the old growth. We also grafted several plum varieties into our healthy Italian Prune Plum trees, of which we have plenty. We will look forward to reworking these trees and it will give us greater diversity and let us ripen over longer periods of time. Some of the cooking pears that Ed brought us were from last year, and are really good. As it is now, most of our pears ripen at the same time, during our busiest period, late August.

Here is a terrine being lined with some of the nice cured Mangalitsa Lardo. It is very clean and white, great for lining duck or chicken liver mousse.

The sun has been shining, lulling us into a false sense of security. We all know that many weeks of rain could be in store. But spring is unstoppable at this point, the tomatoes are started and the fruit trees are begging to bloom.