The garden is at the heart of our homestead. We use permaculture techniques to grow nearly all of the vegetables we eat and are building up our fruit production. Our goal is to eventually grow nearly everything we eat in a method that is beyond organic...healing the old farm we live on.
So you've made some
charcoal. How do you get it into the soil in such a way that it
helps your plants grow? The embedded video in this post walks you
through using biochar
in your farm or garden.
While hanging
out with other farmer geeks last week, I discovered that
there is a cool new cover crop making the rounds --- radishes.
Everyone's glowing about the way tillage radishes, oilseed radishes,
groundhog radishes, fodder radishes, forage radishes, and daikon
radishes mellow clay soil, adding copious amounts of organic matter and
tilling through hardpan. If you play your cards right, you can
even graze your livestock on the radishes a time or two during the fall
since most of the cover crop biomass comes from the roots. What
really caught my interest, though, is news that these cover crop
radishes winter-kill
here in zone 6, meaning that they work perfectly with no-till systems.
I clearly had to give a
radish cover crop a try, but which one to choose? A little
research made the choice simpler since all of the names I listed in the
last paragraph refer to the same species (Raphanus
sativus.)
Now, to be fair, cabbage, broccoli, and collards are all members of Brassica
oleracea, so it's
clearly possible to come up with multiple subspecies that act quite
differently. But in the world of cover crop radishes, there is
really only one huge distinction --- the daikon radish has been bred to
be eaten while all of the others have been bred primarily for biomass
and are types of oilseed radishes. Groundhog radish and tillage
radish, specifically, are terms that plant breeders have trademarked
for their line of oilseed radishes.
The
differences between the varieties seem to come down to the roots.
Many people want a long, thin taproot like that found in the tillage
radish, but we don't have hardpan, just heavy clay, so I chose to go
for a more branched root instead. That said, cover crop radishes
are so trendy that the ones I wanted the most were sold out and I had
to settle for a generic oilseed radish from Johnny's Select Seeds.
Before you go out and
seed your front lawn with radishes, though, I should warn you of one
factoid I noticed on every website. When oilseed radishes freeze
and rot over the winter, the resulting smell is quite foul. Maybe
it's best not to plant them beside your front door.
Too busy to garden? Microbusiness Independence shows you how to find time
for the things that really matter.
The internet is chock
full of articles glowing about biochar's potential, but I seldom find
any useful, hands on information. The Abingdon
Biochar presentation
we attended delved into the nitty gritty.
Today's video highlights
methods you can use to make biochar on any scale. I was
especially intrigued by the idea of modifying a rocket stove to produce biochar while
cooking your dinner.
Our homemade chicken
waterer is a simple
DIY project that requires an hour or less to produce clean water for
your flock.
Part 2 of our biochar
video series covers
the benefits of biochar. One backyard enthusiast calls the
charcoal "condos for microbes," and biochar also has a host of other
beneficial properties in the soil. Julie Major from the International Biochar
Initiative and Rory
Maguire from Virginia Tech point out biochar's most impressive features
in this short video.
Take a weekend vacation
without worrying about your flock once you install our homemade chicken
waterer.
You see, an absolutely
adorable, striped insect showed up around the swiss chard this summer,
and I left the critter alone because it was so cute. Only weeks
later did I catch the chomper in action and figure out why it was so
plump.
The disillusionment made
me so mad at my buddies that I smashed every single one, so I don't
have a photo to show you (nor can I figure out what the bad bug was.)
Even though it set me
way behind my frozen greens allotment for the summer, my swiss chard
insect taught me a good lesson --- identify, identify, identify!
Now, whenever a new insect shows up in my life, I pull out the books
and figure out what it is right away.
During my weekly bug
picking and smashing expedition Monday, I came across these fascinating
grey scales shingling a dead asparagus twig. Ten minutes later, I
knew that they were mostly harmless --- just katydid eggs to serenade
me to sleep next year. Thank goodness!
Although we clearly got
a lot out of visiting Abingdon
Organics, our real
purpose was to listen to several biochar experts talk about charcoal's
potential as a soil amendment. The seminar turned out to be the
most exciting presentation I'd attended in several years, so I was glad
that Mark filmed the whole thing. Once we got home, I edited the
video down into bite-size segments for your lunchtime enjoyment this
week.
Today's video is an
introduction to biochar. What is it? Does it occur in
nature? Is biochar the same as terra preta? Watch the video
and find out.
The last video in this
week's lunchtime series may be too scientific for some of you, but I
highly recommend it to folks who are serious about giving biochar a
try. Ken Revell, graduate student at Virginia Tech, is
experimenting with turning overabundant
poultry litter at commercial chicken farms into biochar.
He'll tell you precisely how much biochar is beneficial in soil and why
it shouldn't be applied beyond a certain rate.
Want your chickens to have a
higher standard of living than the average bird? Our homemade chicken
waterer provides
unlimited clean water.
In
my opinion the biggest benefit you can gain from growing
your own food is the ultra freshness, which removes all the middle
men involved in conventional food production.
I think it may be one of the
most efficient ways to reconnect more with the rhythm of nature.
For me the change was gradual
and I didn't notice the full impact of the reward until about the 2
year point of my WaldenEffect journey.
Roland sent me a link to an
intriguing article in the New York Times called "Math
Lessons for Locavores."
The author argues that locavores need to take a harder look at the
facts and realize that the distance food travels before it reaches
their plates accounts for only 14% of the total energy costs of their
eating habits. While I like Stephen Budiansky's focus on numbers,
the author's conclusion doesn't make as much sense to me. He ends
his article by saying, in essence, that our current agricultural system
is just peachy. I couldn't agree less.
Here's
a quick example to help you see one small reason why I think that even
mainstream organic farming is fatally flawed. While touring Abingdon
Organics, I was
shocked to hear that Anthony tosses 200 pounds of culled tomatoes and
peppers in his compost pile every week. Mark and I once attended
a few meetings as potential growers for Anthony's organic gardening
marketing association, and I can personally attest that those culls
aren't nearly as bad as the tomato I
chewed Mark out for throwing to the chickens a few weeks ago.
Chances are, the culled vegetables had a slightly odd shape, were too
big or too small, or had a minute blemish. A hundred years ago,
those culls would have been known as "food", or, at the worst, would
have fed pigs or chickens that would quickly become human food.
In
my opinion, the problem with mainstream agriculture is not the miles
food travels to get to our plates; the problem is sheer size.
Over the last hundred years, farmers
have been forced to grow food on larger and larger acreages or go out
of business, with
the result that they simply cannot keep the farm ecosystem
balanced. Pollution from concentrated animal feeding operations
is yet another example. Just as today's culls used to turn into
yesteryear's soups, today's problem manure used to be yesteryear's
black gold.
Although
the average eater can't shut down factory farms or change the policies
that make the typical American farm a 400 acre monoculture, we can take
simple actions that will start to change the system. Forget the
greenwashing labels on the food from the grocery store and start
thinking about your own growing, cooking, and refrigerating
habits. In "Math Lessons for Locavores", Stephen Budiansky wrote
that 32% of food energy costs come from refrigerating and cooking that
food at home. If you grow your own vegetables, you won't need to
run one of those huge refrigerators that grace the modern home --- you
just take the food out of the garden, cook gently, and throw it on your
plate, putting the leftovers in a smaller, energy-efficient
model. A rocket stove is on our winter project list to further
lower our energy footprint.
Truthfully,
though, I think that even those steps are a bit cosmetic. The
real way to make your eating habits an asset to the planet rather than
an oozing sore is to grow your own food on a small enough scale that
you can put all of the "waste" back into the farm to feed the
soil. Although you don't hear it bandied about much, I see no
reason why adding compost to your soil and growing cover crops wouldn't
count as carbon sequestration --- after all, humus can take up to a
thousand years to decompose. Add in some livestock to make the
ecosystem more complete, and you've got a simple permaculture farm that
feeds butterflies and birds as well as humans.
If
growing your own food is so great, why don't we see more people jumping
on the bandwagon? Well, there's very little profit in it, for one
thing, so marketers feel no need to spread the word. Growing your
own food also takes time and effort, and we're all inherently lazy
people who would far rather think we were changing the world by paying
double for a zucchini marked "organic" than putting down a kill mulch
in the backyard and getting to work. To top our reasons off,
everyone knows that the average American is far too busy to commit 15
hours a week to growing crops, even though we easily spend that much
time in front of a TV. And, heck, what can one person's actions
do? How quickly we forget that during World War II, little
backyard victory gardens
produced 40% of Americans' food.
I'll step down off my
soapbox now. Thanks for reading a post that got way too
long! Feel free to tear my reasoning apart in the comments.
One
of the first aspects to catch your eye at Abingdon
Organics is half a
dozen high tunnels. Anthony Flaccavento uses these 150 foot long
hoop houses to give his plants a head start in the spring --- his
secret to having May tomatoes without heating a greenhouse.
The first high tunnels
at Abingdon Organics were purchased for thousands of dollars apiece,
but the newest hoop houses are DIY versions. Imagine 4,500 square
feet of protected growing area for just $900.
Anthony and his farm
manager built the DIY high tunnels from locust posts, a steel purline,
PVC pipes, brackets, and a huge sheet of plastic. Clearly, the
hoop houses are still being perfected, and Anthony noted that he lost
two during heavy storms this summer. Still, at a cost of only
about 20 cents per square foot, his high tunnel design is definitely
worth continued experimentation.
Mark's
ears perked right up when Anthony started discussing homemade hoop
houses, but I had to point out the negatives. Like any greenhouse
or other protected area, Anthony's high tunnels become breeding grounds
for molds and spider mites. Mark's rebuttal is that we could
easily build a small, movable unit that was just used to give the
tomatoes a couple of months' head start. Clearly, cheap, DIY high
tunnels are making their way onto the drawing board.
Looking for an easy DIY
project to make homesteading life simpler? Our homemade chicken
waterer kits can be completed in less than an hour.
Wednesday,
Mark and I attended a riveting presentation about biochar at Abingdon
Organics, the home
and farm of Anthony and Laurel Flaccavento. The first time I
toured Anthony's farm, I was blown away by his experiments, and by the
colors and sheer beauty of his crops. I figured there was no way
I could ever achieve such perfection.
Even though he's still
head and shoulders above us, I actually felt a little better about my
own garden after this visit. Anthony's tomatoes were keeling over
even faster than ours (although he had been eating them since May) and he told us that this
was the worst year he'd ever seen for Mexican bean beetles. I
guess misery loves company....
On
the other hand, Anthony never throws in the towel, even when faced with
total bean defoliation. He discovered that you can buy a
parasitic wasp (Pediobius
foveolatus) that
will lay its eggs inside the bean beetle larvae and wipe out your
infestation...at least for a season. The brown larva shown here
is a parasitized bean beetle that won't do any more eating on Anthony's
beans. (In the background, you can see a yellowish, unparasitized
larva of the same age.)
Unfortunately, Pediobius wasps are tropical imports
and won't overwinter in our climate, so you have to keep buying them
each year, making the proposition less sustainable than I would
like. Still, if you're dying to grow beans and the Mexican bean
beetle is your archnemesis, you should give Tom Dorsey a call at
609-530-4192. He doesn't appear to have a website, but is
Anthony's wasp source.
Stay tuned for more
tidbits from our exciting day in the big city (and, hopefully, a
lunchtime series on biochar!) Meanwhile, I have to end with
another highlight of our trip --- meeting two loyal blog readers who
came over to compliment us on the Walden Effect. Thanks for your kind
words, Rocky (and sister, whose name I didn't quite catch.)
This is Spike, it was nice of
him to help me smooth out our 4th load of chicken manure compost.
It took the previous 3 loads
for me to wise up to the idea of covering the entire truck bed with a
large tarp, which most likely helped to save several 5 gallon buckets
worth from blowing away during the trip back.
"Did
you know that we're forecast to have a warmer than average fall this
year?" I called to Mark as he set out to work on the shed's roof.
Mark came in and looked over my shoulder at this
prediction by Weather Services International that forecasts
abnormally warm temperatures through November everywhere in the U.S.
except on the Pacific coast.
"What would you do
differently if you knew the growing season was going to extend for an
extra month?" Mark probed. Well, that was easy --- I would start
a lot more of the fall
crops that didn't
come up in the dog days' heat, tricking them into germinating indoors
in flats then transplanting them to the garden.
Our
traditional first frost date is October 10 --- 46 days away --- and I
need about 55 to 70 growing days to make it worthwhile to replant all
of the roots and cabbages that failed me in the garden. Even that
is an optimistic estimate, since you should usually add two weeks to
the "days to harvest" on your seed packet when planning fall crops to
take into account shorter days as the year fades. I figured there
was no way fall crops would have time to mature if I planted them this
late, so I assumed we'd just make do without them.
But what if the killing
frost really did hold off for an extra few weeks? Isn't it worth
wasting a dollar's worth of seed on a gamble if you could instead win a
bushel of carrots, beets, cabbage, broccoli, and turnips? I
wonder what it says about me that I would never buy a lottery ticket
but have no problem gambling on the garden?
Although
I thoroughly enjoyed last week's
deluge, the tomatoes
didn't. I had been keeping a pretty good handle on the early
blight, but several
days of damp spread other fungi and I can tell our tomatoes
are now on the decline.
The pictures at the top
of the post show our new septoria leaf spot
infection. At a quick glance, these spots look a lot like early
blight, but notice that the septoria spots are smaller, more numerous,
have a
pale center, and aren't ringed by a halo of yellow. (There is
some yellowing on the leaf, but it doesn't encircle the spots.)
Meanwhile, late blight
has struck as well. About a third of the leaves on a
couple of plants have curled up and turned brown, and I'm beginning to
see rotten tomatoes on the vine.
Perhaps if the septoria
and late blight had hit the tomato patch during dry weather, I would
have been able to use extreme pruning to keep them at bay. But
somewhere in the course of last week's dozen inches of rain, the
septoria managed to colonize every tomato plant in our garden,
infecting even the upper leaves. My only option is to harvest as
fast as possible and accept that our tomatoes won't be much longer in
this world.
Despite all of this
death and destruction, I can't complain. We're close to our goal
of frozen tomato products --- enough to make pizza, spaghetti, and
vegetable soup twice a month apiece for an entire year. I was
hoping to experiment with ketchup and add some dried tomatoes to the
larder, but at this point I'm happy to take what I can get.
Several
people have asked me, "Do I have to pull up my Egyptian onions and replant them every
year?" I'm not surprised that they ask --- even though Egyptian
onions are perennials, the tops die back for about a month at the peak
of summer and the plants look a bit dead. But as August draws to
a close, new green shoots poke up from the bulbs, proving that the
onions are still very much alive.
In the past, I've yanked
out the bottom bulbs during the dormant month and replanted top bulbs
in new beds. But the bottom bulbs don't rot in the compost pile,
so I ended up with a lot of onions. This year,
I'm letting the Egyptian onion beds alone to see if I can treat them
like true perennials. The only problem I foresee is overcrowding
--- each bottom bulb has now split into several new bulbs. Since
I yank whole plants now and then to make Butternut Squash and
Egyptian Onion Soup,
hopefully this overcrowding won't be an issue.
As a final note, we sold
all but about a hundred of our onions, and I saved the last ones for a
quick giveaway. Just leave a comment on this post before August
29 and I'll choose one lucky winner at random to receive the last of
our onion top bulbs.
Yes,
the pictures don't lie --- I've been planting grass in our
garden. Perhaps an eighth of our garden beds are currently
fallow, partly because I didn't water carefully enough and had a hard
time getting my fall
crops to
germinate. As August winds to a close, it's too late to replant
the turnips, cabbage, beets, and carrots that had spotty (or no)
germination. Instead, I can double up on greens and lettuce, plan
ahead for the fall garlic, and then fill all of the remaining beds with
cover crops to improve the soil.
As you'll recall, buckwheat has
been relegated to my list of cover crops that can't handle heavy clay
and high groundwater
--- the precise type of trouble spot I want to remedy with cover crop
planting. The next cover crop on my experimental list is oats,
and already this grain seems to be growing much more hardily than
buckwheat. Hopefully, the oats will be winter-killed in a couple
of months and will leave the beds happily mulched with straw of their
own making.
I had some hull-less
oat seeds leftover,
but not nearly enough to sow all of the beds I was hoping to turn
fallow for the rest of the summer. After looking at shipping
rates on the internet, I realized that cover crop seeds are best bought
locally. Our feed store had a 50 pound bag for about twelve
bucks, allowing me to plant as heavily as I pleased with plenty of the moderately
high protein grain
left to feed to the chickens.
Our chickens love whole
grains, but they love clean water even more. Mark invented a homemade chicken
waterer that keeps
our water poop-free at all times.
Last
week, I wrote that I
was concerned shelling tiny Urd Beans might be difficult. I needn't have
worried. A few days later, when hot sunlight was streaming in the
front window and across my pan of drying beans, I was startled by a
loud pop. "Huckleberry!" I exclaimed, sure that our spoiled cat
had gotten into something he shouldn't have, but Huckleberry was asleep
on the couch and the popping continued.
I eventually figured out
what every Urd Bean grower out there already knows --- warm, dry
weather will shell your Urd Beans for you. When the pods reach a
certain level of dryness, the two halves curl apart and the seeds
explode out in every direction. Picking another batch of pods this
week, I had to carefully enclose entire fruits in my hand since even
the gentle pressure of my fingers was enough to pop some pods open,
just like pressing on a touch-me-not pod.
Green or damp pods don't
pop on their own, but if you catch them during a dry day, you can
gently roll a handful between your palms and remove the hulls from
several pods at once. Or just wait until the sun comes out and
your kitchen turns into a rice krispies commercial --- snap, crackle,
pop.
Our homemade chicken
waterer is the
perfect fit for a suburban chicken tractor --- clean and easy to use.
The
good news is that closer inspection of our tomatoes shows they are
infected with early blight, not late blight. Notice the yellowing
of the leaves and (not pictured) the absence of problems on the stems
and fruits. Although both are fungal diseases, early blight tends
to be less devastating, and I'm having very good luck keeping the
fungus in check with my
blight control measures.
The bad news is that
early blight tends to stick around after it shows up. Unlike late
blight, which needs living tissue to survive, early blight can
overwinter in plant debris or even in saved seeds. Although it
pains me to remove biomass from the farm, we'll continue to take our
blighted leaves to the dump.
This week, I ripped out
another three tomato plants that showed too much damage to save.
But I can't complain, since the tomatoes have been pouring in.
Here's our August 6 harvest:
Then skip ahead a few
days to August 10, and you'll notice I had to upgrade to the bigger
basket:
No photos of the next
few harvests, but suffice it to say that I'm now harvesting large
masses of tomatoes three times a week. We've already frozen a
gallon of pizza sauce and three quarts each of spaghetti sauce and
tomato-based vegetable soup. When the peach
leather comes out of
the automotive dehydrator today, I plan to replace the fruit with a
batch of sun-dried tomatoes.
Our peach tree had another surprise
in store for me. I chomped down on one of its luscious
fruits...and spit that bite right back out, along with the maggot
happily consuming the peach's center. Yes, nearly every one of
our peaches has a little blob of gum on the outside marking the
entrance path of these little, white larvae.
The first step in
combatting any insect infestation is figuring out
what you've got, but I had quite a time identifying my maggot. My
handy Garden Insects of North
America narrowed
down the playing
field
to a mere score of "fruit chewers": plum curculio, plum gouger, cherry
curculio, speckled green fruit worm, peach twig borer, eyespotted bud
moth, oriental fruit moth, navel orangeworm, lesser appleworm, cherry
fruit-worm, mineola moth, cherry fruit sawfly, apple maggot, walnut
husk fly, cherry fruit fly, western cherry fruit fly, black cherry
fruit fly, chokecherry gall midge, European earwig, or green fruit
beetles.
An expert at Bug Guide took a look and gave me a
tentative ID of
coddling moth or oriental fruit moth, the latter of which is more
likely as a pest of peaches. Although most of the mainstream
websites tell me to spray chemicals on my tree, an Australian
site
recommends running chickens in the orchard. I wonder if putting
up a temporary fence around our peach trees and running chickens inside
during critical periods in the spring and fall would be sufficient to
cut down on our peach damage?
That Australian site
(which I am thoroughly impressed by) also suggested some other
permaculture style control measures for the oriental fruit moth. My
favorite involves taking advantage of the fact that the moth goes
through several generations in a year. Before the fruit are
large, the larvae instead grow inside twigs, which are highly visible
because they wilt and produce gum. By cutting off and destroying
these infested twigs in the spring, you can
cut back the population, which means there won't be adults present to
lay eggs on your precious peaches.
A final method of
control involves putting out artificial pheremones around the
tree. These pheremones mimic the scent emitted by the female moth
when she's trying to attract a mate, so they disrupt the moths' mating
behavior. At four pheremone ties per tree, replaced twice a year,
though, this method could add up.
Despite the problematic
centers, our white peaches are growing on
me. I cut them in half and scoop out the bad spots, then gulp
down half a dozen a day. Now that they're at their peak of
ripeness, I've discovered I prefer homegrown white peaches to
storebought yellow peaches!
After
carefully
snipping butternuts off the vine and felling
towering sunflowers with a single blow, it was time to harvest our experimental
beans. First
came the garbanzos --- aren't they lovely? The only problem is
that what you see in this photo is nearly the entire harvest. I'm
not giving up on the variety, though, since a reader commented a few
months ago to let me know that the extremely confusing instructions on
the seed packet were really trying to tell me to plant
the garbanzos at the same time as peas. I planted them at the
frost free date instead, so I'll have to give the crop a more fair shot
next year.
Next
stop "shelly beans", as folks around here like to call beans that you
grow for drying. The harvest in this bed was much better, despite
the fact that bean bugs ate the plants down to nubbins...then moved on
to my delightful Masai beans. I'm tempted to blame
the arrival of this new garden pest on the shelly beans, but I suspect
that it just took the beetles a few years to find us. Next year,
I'll add the Mexican Bean Beetle to my list of bad bugs to squash
weekly, and maybe all of our beans will do better.
Although
the quantity of pods from the shelly bean bed was good, I discovered
that I should have picked the drying beans much sooner. Many
people leave beans for drying to harden on the plant, but our climate
is just too damp for that sort of harvest. By the time I picked
them, many of the older pods had begun to mold, and over half of the
beans were discolored. Next year, I'll harvest the beans when the
pods are still slightly green, then allow them to dry inside, out of the
weather.
Finally,
I came to our Urd Beans (a variety of sprouting bean.) I thought
this bed was a goner after the deer nibbled it nearly down to the
ground...then repeated the maneuver a week later. But the Urd
Beans have a saving grace --- bean bugs don't like them. Despite
the name "Bean", Urd Beans are in an entirely different genus than Phaseolus
vulgaris (which
includes green beans and the green-bean-like shelling beans I
planted.) Instead, Urd Beans (Vigna
mungo) are in the
same genus as black-eyed peas, a group that seems to be of little
interest to our current crop pest.
I
was also pleased to see that Urd Bean pods are hairy, a feature that
seems to repel moisture, keeping the seeds inside dry even after the
pods turn black. I harvested half of the pods, leaving the green
fruits on the vine to be picked at a later date. The only problem
I foresee with Urd Beans so far is their size --- shelling these little
guys by hand would take all day. (For a sense of scale, that's my
thumbnail on the left side of the first picture of urd beans.)
I'm hopeful, though, that after I let the pods dry for a week or two,
they'll be brittle enough that I can thresh them and then blow the
empty pods off the seeds.
So, to sum up what
became far too long of a post --- garbanzos need to be planted in early
spring, shelly beans need to be harvested before the pods turn brown,
and Urd Beans are my new favorite experimental bean.
Last
year, oilseed
sunflowers were an
experimental crop for us, so of course the deer ate them and we didn't
have any seeds to harvest. Deer aren't so interested in the
sunflowers this year, preferring to nibble our experimental
beans, so I've been
thrilled to watch these low-work vegetables do their thing. The
plants quickly shot up above my head, opened huge yellow flowers, and
then dropped the petals as the seeds swelled up and the heads drooped
under their own weight.
Some people advocate
leaving sunflowers to dry in the field, but I know for a fact that our
local wildlife would consider that a "free lunch" sign. So as
soon as the backs of the flower heads began to yellow and the tiny
yellow disc flowers in the center of the "flower" easily rubbed off the
black seeds, I snipped the tops off the sunflower stalks and hung them
to dry under the porch eaves.
The
harvest came not a moment too soon. As I worked, a brilliant
yellow goldfinch flew to one of the headless stalks and chittered at
me. "Hey, no fair! I was counting on that to feed my
family!" A couple of hours later, he'd gathered his wife and
brothers to peck seeds out of the drying heads, so I had to cover the
whole mass with row cover fabric. I hope he isn't bright enough
to slip up underneath the fabric, but even so I'm considering rubbing
the seeds out of the heads ASAP and putting them in a sealed container.
If I get my act together
and buy or make an oil press, I'll let you all know how much oil you
get out of two beds of sunflowers. Or maybe I'll just save them
and feed
the high protein sunflower seeds to the chickens.
The BFR
Mulch guy called this
morning saying he could only deliver us 6 scoops of
compost instead of the 9
that was mentioned last week due to the dump mechanism not being able
to handle the extra weight.
I was thinking it was still a
good deal that would save me from making 3 round trips to Norton. Add
the travel time with the time to unload each load and it equals up to
somewhere over a day's worth of labor. The delivery charge was going to
be 75 dollars.
I was very clear on the phone
that I needed them to cross a creek and requested the 4 wheel drive
Mitsubishi Fuso dump truck by name.
They made it as far as our
ford when they had to
stop and give up. It seems like someone decided to add a snow plow
attachment that shrinks the clearance down to a paltry 8 or 10 inchs!
I can see how they would want
to take advantage of this 4 wheel drive beast in the winter by pushing
snow, but why not install it so that you could unbolt it for the
summer? It was welded on and the only obstacle to getting the load back
to our garden.
I almost had them dump the
load out by our parking area, but decided that would be even more work
loading back on the truck and then unloading it at the garden.
The driver was a nice guy and
apologetic about the handicapped truck.
"I guess most people don't
live this far back in the woods anymore these days?" I asked the guy
while we puzzled over the problem at the creek.
I felt bad about sending him
back with the full load, but even felt worse over the wasted morning
with nothing to show for it. This still seems to be a good option for
mulch and compost delivery, just don't expect them to go up any sort of
hill or over a big bump.
"Look
at all the butternuts I harvested,
honey!" I said proudly. "And we've got four more left in the
garden."
Mark glanced over at my
22 pounds of butternuts and replied --- "Four
more baskets?" Shame-faced, I had to shake my head no. I
only had four more squash in the garden.
The truth is that when I
planned our three butternut beds this year, I
should have realized that Mark had turned a general preference for
these winter squash into an outright craving. Already, he's
talking about buying some butternuts from a friend, and he has the
right idea. Now's the perfect time of year to stock up on any
vegetables of which you have an unexpected shortfall (or ones that your
husband suddenly decides he adores and wants three times as
many of.)
If
you planted your butternuts a bit late (which would have been
smart), they might not be ready to harvest yet. Wait until your
vines are dying back, your fruits are fully tan, and the stems have
begun to brown (but be absolutely certain to harvest before the first
frost.) Then carefully cut each butternut off the vine, leaving
an inch of stem on the fruit. Never toss the butternuts around
--- even though they look hardy, they actually bruise quite quickly if
treated harshly.
Some people wash their
butternuts gently in a solution of bleach water
after harvesting to kill off any fungi living on the skin, but I've had
good luck storing our butternuts as is. For best flavor, allow
the squash to cure at 80 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of
weeks, then store in a cool (50 to 60 F), dry place. We keep our
butternuts in a kitchen cabinet and eat them until the middle of the
winter...or until we run out.
Our homemade chicken water ensures that your flock
doesn't run out of what they need most --- water.
Perhaps
in other parts of the world, it's not considered abnormally dry when
you've had a steady one inch of rain per week for most of the
summer? Around here it sure feels dry, though, after a month with
abnormal highs in the nineties nearly every day. The floodplain has dried up, meaning that
even though there are puddles of water in the driveway, the ground
between is hard rather than mud. Perfect weather for hauling.
Last winter, when we
were trying to ferry in building supplies through endless muck, Titus
gently noted that she tries to do all of her hauling during the dry
season. So when we realized the driveway was firm enough to allow
Joey's truck to pass through, we dropped everything from the list and
instead focused on ferrying supplies into the farm. That's why
Mark went to town nearly every day last week, hauling in compost and mulch. It wasn't photogenic
enough to post about, but he also hauled out a year's
supply of household garbage --- a truckload and a half
full. We hope to finish
bringing in the year's supply of biomass this week, and also cut up and
haul in firewood from deadfall trees along the driveway. Round it
all out with some lumber for the solar dehydrator and picnic table
projects, and we should be done hauling for a long, long time. I
just thought you all deserved an explanation so that you didn't think
we were on a crazy spending spree.
"Lucy,
where did you find a brand new tennis
ball?" I asked our frugivorous dog, catching sight of a yellowish
sphere in her mouth. She dropped...the first peach from our kitchen
window peach tree.
Then promptly gulped it down, pit and all.
I had smelled the scent
of ripe fruit wafting from the tree as I walked
past earlier that morning, but I was so sure the peaches weren't
ripe. You see, I had planted a Loring peach in that spot three
years ago --- a
yellow-fruited variety with a nice red blush on the skin. And the
fruits on my tree were steadfastly pale yellow with white flesh. But Lucy likes her fruit
ripe, so I went back to check again. Sure
enough, the peaches were just barely starting to ripen, even though the
flesh was pale as can be. What's the statute of limitations on
complaining about being given the wrong tree variety?
The trouble is, I adore
yellow peaches, while white peaches are
considerably lower on the totem pole --- like the difference between
strawberries and blackberries. Luckily, I have another peach tree
out back that's one year younger but already gave me four little
peaches with great flavor and bright orange flesh. By next year,
I should be glutted with yellow peaches. But what to do in the
meantime? Perhaps I need to check out some recipes for peach
leather? Now's your chance to shower us with your favorite peach
recipes.
Our homemade chicken
waterer is perfect
for chicken tractors --- it never spills on uneven terrain.
My last trip to BFR
Mulch in Norton gave me a chance to ask the guy about delivery
options.
It seems they have a small
Mitsubishi 4 wheel drive dump truck that can haul 5 times what we can
do in the truck. The delivery fee is 30 dollars from Norton to Coeburn, which
is about the half way mark for us and why the guy guessed the charge to
be around 60 bucks for our zipcode.
The
final element of our tomato campaign is "never waste a tomato."
Mark and I completed our vine-ripened
versus indoor-ripened tomato taste test
last week, concluding that the former had just a hint of extra
flavor. Still, the kitchen-ripened tomatoes were ten times better
than storebought. So when I had to pull out three blighted tomato
plants last week, I first picked every tomato that had at least begun
to whiten and am now ripening them under the kitchen counter.
Meanwhile,
fruits with a bit of blossom end rot or a cosmetic crack are fine additions to sauce
--- just slice off the troubled spot. On the other hand, our volunteer tomato
plant turned out not to be worth saving even under these drastic
conditions. I suspect the volunteer came from a storebought
tomato seed, because fully two thirds of the fruits that I left on the
vine to ripen rotted before turning red. I guess those hard, pink
tomatoes in the grocery store don't
ripen all the way, no matter what you do. That vine came out to
give more space to its neighbor.
Our
back garden is a trouble spot. As I've mentioned before, previous
owners had a pasture there and I suspect allowed all of the topsoil to
erode away. What's left is dense clay over a high water table ---
a recipe for crop failure.
And then there are the
problems that are my own fault. When I built the back garden's raised
beds,
I believed it was best to merely scoop up the topsoil from the aisles
to create the beds. But there was so little topsoil present that
the beds turned out to be barely higher than the surrounding
aisles. A couple of years later, the beds have collapsed a bit
more,
which means that the grass and clover in the pathways encroach
constantly on the "beds", and grass seeds also drift up into the
growing area
as a matter of course. Yet more problems.
Again my fault --- I was
new to pathway planning when I laid out the
back garden, so for some reason I can no longer fathom, I created a
checkerboard of tiny beds. Mowing takes twice as long since you
have to go across the garden horizontally, then again vertically.
Yuck! Can you tell this is my least favorite gardening spot?
I took advantage of Mark's
load of topsoil (aka "compost")
to start fixing all of the back garden's problems. First step ---
merge all of the beds on a contour line into a single long bed by
dumping topsoil in the dividing aisles. Suddenly, I wanted two
more truckloads of soil so that I could also build up the empty beds
(which had been planted in buckwheat and are waiting to be planted in
oats next week.) My goal is to create a replica of my current
favorite garden --- the mule garden --- with long raised beds at least
six inches high. Then I could start to consider the high
groundwater a boon --- subirrigation!
I
like to call step four in our campaign against the tomato blight
"tomato islands." While it's quite true that blight spores can
travel up to a mile in damp weather, planting patches of tomatoes in
different parts of the garden can be relatively effective in keeping
the blight from spreading if the summer stays hot and dry. So
while our romas (and a few slicers) are all clumped together along the
sunniest
edge of the mule garden, I've got slicing tomatoes and tommy-toes in
three other areas. The ones in the far-off front garden still
seem to be blight-free.
I'm also taking a page
out of our neighbor's book. Last year, while touring a friend's
garden at the end of the summer, I saw that he had a healthy tomato
plant still spitting out fruits. "How did you do that?!"
I exclaimed, and he told me that he'd thrown some seeds in the ground
in early June. This year I followed suit and seeded three more
tomato plants a couple of weeks after our frost-free date. These
late plants are starting to set fruits, and so far look pristine.
Perhaps they will give us a fall harvest?
While
weeding the mule garden this week, I discovered an unintentional
polyculture. I had pulled out all the seed potatoes from my fall
potato experiment because they weren't sprouting --- or so I
thought. It turns out that one potato was overlooked, and it
popped up between the leaves of a watermelon I'd planted at the end of
the bed.
Meanwhile, my primary
purpose for the bed was to plant fall carrots. I seeded three
different beds with carrots this summer, but very few seedlings
came up in two of the beds. However, in my polyculture bed, the
watermelon took off and ran across the carrot area, shading the soil
and retaining enough moisture for the seeds to sprout.
All three
vegetables seem to be growing quite happily together so far, though I
recently
moved the watermelon tendrils aside to give the baby carrots room to
grow.
In the interest of full
disclosure, I have to admit that the carrot seeds in the other beds may
have had shoddy germination rates because they were a different variety
than those sown in the polyculture bed. I usually have very good
luck with Jung's Sweetness hybrid carrots, but the pack this year seems
to have been a dud --- germination was low in our spring carrot bed
too. Next year, I might change my loyalties to one of the seed
companies recommended by Steve Solomon.
Take the guesswork out of
DIY. Our homemade chicken
waterer kit comes
with an instruction manual that helps you make the very best waterer
for your specific flock.
The
agricultural extension websites are quick to tell you that no tomato
variety is immune to the blight, but I've discovered that several are
resistant. In general, tommy-toes
seem to fare quite well, losing the battle much later than the
larger-fruited varieties. On the other hand, the Green Zebra we
were testing for the first time this year turned out to be the most
blight-prone of any of our tomatoes --- we won't grow Green Zebra
again. So far, all of our other slicing tomatoes are faring
pretty well. The heart of our tomato
patch is our romas, and I'm starting to get a feel for which
roma varieties last longer when blight is in the air.
Large-fruited romas do the worst, and I don't think I'll even save
seeds from Italian San Rodorta this year since the plants blight so
quickly. In contrast, the even more hefty-fruited Russian Roma
plants are only barely blighted. Yellow Roma and Martino's Roma
are currently my roma winners --- the fruits are small, but they ripen
quickly and copiously, and the plants are blight-free so far.
I suspect that if I
tweaked my plantings to focus solely on the most blight-resistant
varieties, the fungus might not enter our patch until weeks
later. Or not at all?
During World War II, 40%
of American vegetables came from 20 million victory gardens. With
American men fighting abroad, women were raising their kids alone,
working outside the home (to fill those men's jobs), and still finding
time to till up their backyard and grow food for their families.
(Doesn't that make you
feel a bit silly for saying you don't have time to plant a
garden? There's still time to put in lettuce and greens for the fall, by the way.)
Posters like these from
both World Wars admonished women to plant a garden, can and dry the
excess, and never waste a crumb. The propaganda definitely worked
--- Americans ate potatoes instead of wheat so that the less perishable
grain could be sent abroad, and they generally managed to subsist on
what those remaining at home could grow.
But
after the war ended, the propaganda took an abrupt about-face.
Suddenly, posters were telling us to buy, buy, buy! And, once
again, we followed along like sheep, dropped our shovels, and went out
to spend some money.
While I'm tempted to
talk here about our current government's admonitions to spend money to
prop up our ailing economy rather than striving to become more
self-sufficient, frugal, and debt-free on a personal level, I
won't. Instead, I think the takeaway message from the victory
garden campaign is clear --- think globally, act locally. If you
believe that the environment would benefit from food grown in an
ecologically conscious way, then look into permaculture and plant a
diversified garden. Anyone living anywhere can plant something,
preserve something, and cut back on food waste.
To see the source of
these posters (and peruse many more --- huge time sink, I warn you),
visit Beans
are Bullets, a
website/exhibition put together by the National Agricultural
Library.
If you're thinking of adding
a laying flock to your homestead, consider providing a homemade chicken
waterer for
healthier hens and more eggs.
We
tried a new mulch source that has more down to Earth prices than The Mulch
Company... including a
sale on compost for just 10 bucks a scoop.
Don't get too excited. Their
"compost" was just aged wood chips mixed in with average looking dirt.
I still took 2 scoops because
I wanted to believe the lady at the desk when she said it was just
"pure aged wood chips", and I was a bit fatigued from following a map
that was not quite accurate on what may have been one of the hottest
days of the year.
I knew right away something
was amiss when Anna didn't get that same giddy laughter of joy I've
become so accustomed to when I bring truckloads of compost home.
"We can still use it for
areas in the forest garden where the clay doesn't drain well," she
said trying to make me feel better.
BFR Mulch in Norton has a
distorted definition of compost, but I guess it's a subjective term that
will vary from person to person. The stuff will make okay raised bed
material, but was barely worth hauling home when you gauge it on the
Anna meter.
They have aged oak mulch for
21 dollars a scoop, which is what we'll try next.
But
what do you do if, despite preventative pruning, your tomatoes begin to
show signs of late blight?
Rather than sticking your head in the sand the way we did last year,
your best bet is to take decisive action immediately. Single out
any tomatoes on which the blight has progressed beyond the very lowest
leaves and delete the entire plant. Then clip off any blighted
lower leaves on nearby plants.
During this extensive
pruning expedition, you should wipe your clippers with a rag soaked in
alcohol every time you move from one plant to another, or from a more
blighted area to a less blighted area. In addition, you shouldn't
even think about going into a blighted tomato patch when dew or rain
are heavy on the plants --- blight spores move around and germinate on
wet surfaces.
This
is also the one time I advocate removing biomass from the farm.
You should definitely not incorporate the blighted tomato residue into
your compost pile, but I feel that it's dicey to even toss it off into
the bushes at the edge of the woods. Instead, I actually let Mark
haul our blighted tomato parts away to the dump.
Finally, I take the
first sign of blight as a signal to get realistic. All of your
hard work pruning off diseased foliage is not going to cure your tomato
patch of the blight --- it will merely slowly the disease's
spread. You might be able to stay ahead of the blight for a while
by removing any yellow or brown leaves, but you'll have to stay
vigilant. So harvest while you can!
Stink
bugs are usually bad news in the garden. They suck the juices out
of your plants and the chickens won't even eat them because of the
noxious fluid they squirt out when disturbed. But if I'm honest,
my antipathy toward the insects dates from childhood. You see,
stink bugs love blackberries, and so do I. Pop a blackberry in
your mouth without looking and there's a good chance a stink bug might
come along for the ride, leaving the most awful taste in your mouth
imaginable.
Despite my scarred
childhood, stink bugs have now been redeemed in my eyes. I was
out on my weekly bug-picking expedition Monday, squashing asparagus
beetle larvae and
tossing all of the other bad bugs into a cup of water to give to the
chickens. Guess who was already helping with the asparagus beetle
control? This predatory stink bug uses its long proboscis to spear
insects and drain them dry rather than sucking a plant for lunch.
I'm glad I decided to
use manual control this year on our insects, even though it is a bit of
a pain to pick bugs for an hour a week during the growing season.
I've noticed spiders, ladybugs, and now this stink bug moving into the
asparagus, keeping the beetle populations in check. Maybe in a
few years, our beneficial insect populations will be so healthy that I
won't have to hand-squash larvae?
Last
year, the blight took me by surprise and sent me reeling. Since
then, I've done a lot of plotting and researching, and I feel like I
have the possibility of harvesting a crop after the fungus hits.
I've talked about our
extreme tomato pruning
before, but I want to add a few notes since I can already tell that I'll be pruning slightly
differently next year. Most importantly, I plan to snip off the
bottom leaves repeatedly rather than spending my weekly pruning
sessions solely cutting back suckers and tying up the main stems.
I've noticed that even leaves attached a foot above the ground bend
downward with age until they are dipping into the splash zone.
Unsurprisingly, the first symptoms of the blight show up as yellowing
and browning of these leaves --- a sign that fungal spores are being
exposed to the air. In the future, I'll clip off low leaves as
soon as they droop.
And if --- just
hypothetically --- I happen to run out of rebar
and don't tie up a few exuberant tomatoes one week, I'll be positive to
get back to them pronto rather than letting the vines bend and crack
under the heavy weight of ripening tomatoes.
Luckily, rebar is a long term investment, so we shouldn't have that
problem next year.
Congratulations to
Bladerunner, the winner of our most recent
giveaway!
Bladerunner, drop me an email with your t-shirt size and
we'll get your prizes out to you as soon as possible.
Thanks to everyone who helped spread the word! Don't despair if
you didn't win --- we'll start up another giveaway before long.
Since this is a light
post, I thought I'd throw in a photo I've been saving for a couple of
weeks. There's not really much to say about it, except that
succession planting corn is the best way to sweeten dinners all summer
long. Sweet corn patch part two is about to hit the plate....
Everett and Missy (from Living a Simple Life) were kind enough to invite
us over to
their new homestead for lunch on Saturday and I leapt at the
offer. There are few things I like better than a farm tour --- a
great chance to walk around someone else's operation and get ideas.
The farm was beautifully
manicured (way out of my weed-overgrown league), and I'm sure lots
of you would love to see pastoral photos. However, being who I
am, I took a few pictures of the chickens and then a whole bunch of
pictures of the garden. Everett and Missy made
the wise choice to spend their first year on the farm focusing on
infrastructure, but they didn't ignore the garden entirely.
Instead, they planted a few cucurbits down by the creek, hired a nearby
farmer to plow up a field to plant a clover cover crop in a second
area, and then spread thick straw mulch over a third area.
This third area, of
course, was the one that caught my eye --- a patch of lawn being
transformed into a budding Ruth
Stout garden.
Mushrooms were already hard at work improving the soil, and worms had
clearly been attracted to the moist, bare soil beneath the mulch.
The couple's free range Buckeye chickens loved scratching up
the mulch to find critters...and depositing their own organic
fertilizer in exchange. I wouldn't be surprised if this plot
turns into a bountiful and trouble-free garden next year.
Of course, we didn't
escape the farm tour entirely unscathed. Like they say, August is
the only time you have to lock your car in Appalachia --- otherwise,
you'll come back to discover it full of zucchinis. Thanks for the
produce, the delicious lunch, and the tour!
Everett and Missy's chickens
are the only ones I've met who honestly don't need our homemade chicken
waterer --- they
prefer the fresh, flowing water in their personal creek.
The
tobacco hornworm is easily confused with the closely related tomato
hornworm. Both caterpillars are the larval form of hawk moths,
and both like to nibble on your tomato plants, but the tobacco hornworm
has seven white lines running down each side of its body while the
tomato hornworm instead has eight Vs.
Some gardeners resort to
hand-picking their hornworms, while others
believe that planting marigolds or basil between their tomato plants
keeps the pests at bay. I just ignore the hornworms of both
types. In our diversified environment, parasitic wasps quickly
lay their eggs in each plump hornworm, and the wasp larvae eat the
caterpillar alive from the inside out. By the time these white
cocoons show up on the back of the hornworm, he has long ago stopped
nibbling on my tomatoes, so I am careful to leave hornworms like
this in place to hatch out the next generation of parasitic wasps.
(I know I left you
hanging about the tomato
blight. It turned out I had too much to say to fit in one
post (surprise, surprise), so you'll hear all about it in a lunchtime
series next week.)
Your chickens will be annoyed
to miss their tasty hornworm treats, but they'll cheer up when you
introduce a homemade chicken
waterer.
It's
never a good idea to hide things from
your spouse, but I'd been keeping something from Mark. When he
tossed a
half-rotten tomato to the chickens, the truth came spewing out.
"You can't give tomatoes
like that to the chickens," I admonished him.
"There was barely
anything left," my sweet husband
explained. "Just a bite for each
of us."
"No,
you don't understand," I said. "I'll cut off bad
spots. Any tomato is precious. You see, the blight has
struck."
I knew that our tomatoes
had a high likelihood of contracting the
blight this year even though I planted them on the far opposite side of
the garden from last year's tomato patch and pruned them
heavily to
promote air movement. Once the blight is in the air, you tend to
see symptoms the next year no matter what you do. The trick is to
be proactive and stay ahead of the disease.
I
could have dusted my tomatoes with copper and prevented
the blight, but this "organic" treatment seems too harsh for my
garden. Instead, I plan to yank out the worst plants and cut off
diseased leaves as soon as we have a day dry enough to make it safe to
work in the tomato patch. Meanwhile, I picked a bowlful of ripe
fruits to save
tomato seeds for next year.
What do you do with a
bowlful of gutless tomatoes? Make pizza
sauce of
course! That pizza I've been craving for the last few
months really hit the spot.
Our homemade chicken
waterer prevents
heartbreak in the coop --- no more heat exhaustion during blazing
summer days.
We picked up our 2nd
truckload of mulch for the year today.
This time the guy managed to
fit 3 scoops in the truck, which was a little priceier than the first load, but well worth it when I saw the
look on Anna's face.
Our
buckwheat
experiment is not
what I would call a success. The best thing
I can say is that our bees did really enjoy the flowers. And the
plants do bloom, as promised, a scant month after planting. But
all of the biomass that was supposed to be ready when the
plants bloomed? Nope, not so much.
Buckwheat doesn't like
heavy clay soil, which is the precise
kind of soil I was asking it to rejuvenate, so I shouldn't blame the
failure entirely on the crop. And, to be fair, a deer came
through for a midnight snack a few weeks ago and clipped the tops off
plants in a couple of beds. Those buckwheat plants never
recovered, and weeds quickly sprouted up to fill in the bare soil.
Still,
I would have expected a bit more growth out of the cover crop.
When I mowed down the buckwheat, it seemed like the
succulent stems disintegrated into a mere handful of plant
matter --- and that was in the beds that escaped deer damage. I
may give buckwheat another shot in the loam of the upper garden, but
our troublesome back garden is going to need another cure. Next
try --- hullless
oats.
One of the casualties of last
year's big
winter storm was our high fence to keep deer out of the mule garden
in case one of the deer
deterrents fail.
I finally got around to
repairing the damage last week and decided one of the upper gaps was
big enough for a deer to jump through. An experimental solution was to
use some of this orange marking tape to deter any possible breach.
I know a deer could rip right
through this thin plastic ribbon material, but if he or she does the
evidence should be obvious, and then I'd know if this was a failure.
If it does prevent deer from
thinking of jumping, then maybe someone else could use this as an ultra
cheap fencing material that could be installed within a few hours
depending on what type of posts or trees get incorporated.
Space in
our freezer is suddenly starting to get tight, something that never
happened last year. Pretty soon, I'm going to have to make a
decision --- stop freezing and start giving produce away, turn on one
of our inefficient freezers, or buy another energy
star model.
Such bounty!
I also harvested about
half of our potatoes Monday because I needed the space for fall
peas. The average yield per bed was about 6.5 pounds (from about
1 pound of seed potatoes per bed.) Yukon Golds aren't the most
productive potatoes, but I'm still a bit blown away at the sheer mass
of tubers I grubbed out of the soil. If we had only a tiny bit of
ground and were desperate to feed a family, potatoes would be the way
to go. At the moment, our
potatoes are cooling it in our refrigerator's crisper drawer.
Even though we downgraded to a much smaller and more efficient
fridge last year, I still run the fridge about half empty most of
the time. I'm a strong believer in keeping close tabs on
leftovers and eating them within two days, so there's plenty of space
for a few dozen pounds of potatoes. Still, we're going to have to
excavate the refrigerator
root cellar soon and
put it back to work --- I've got three more beds of potatoes to
harvest, and the fall carrots are finally starting to germinate in the
garden.
Remember how I told you that
the deer ate our experimental
beans? It turns out I spoke too soon.
I finally took a close
look at our garbanzos and saw that they were liberally sprinkled with
tiny pink flowers that are swelling into balloon-like fruits.
Meanwhile, our urd beans
bounced right back and are now decked out in the fascinating pods to
the left. I assume I should leave both beans on the plant until
they dry out, so I'm just watching them grow at the moment.
Another experimental
crop also seems to be doing well --- our sesame. Several of the
plants have oddly twisted leaves that I suspect is the result of some
sort of pathogen, but they're blooming and setting pods anyway.
It looks like at least three of this year's experimental crops will be
successful.
Try something new in your
chicken coop this summer --- a homemade chicken
waterer that
provides clean water for your chickens.
When
I first got strawberries, I thought that since they were perennials, I
could just eat fruits every year and mostly ignore the plants. So
I just picked off runners now and then, mulched, and weeded.
Along came the plants' second year of bearing, and the berries were not
as tasty as I remembered. What happened?
The problem turned out
to be multifaceted. I suspect that heavy rains last spring washed
away some of the soluble minerals, resulting in a micronutrient
deficiency.
But it didn't help that I'd let the beds become matted masses of plants
and hadn't given the berries a good top-dressing of compost to make up
for their hard work the year before.
I've
now tentatively settled on a three year cycle for strawberries.
At this time of year, I pull out any beds that are three years old or
older, then renovate the one and two year old beds. Renovation
consists of ripping up any runners I've let set between the parent
plants and breaking off new runners starting to form. Add a
little manure and some grass clippings, and the plants are ready to
soak up the rays in preparation for next spring's harvest.
While
I'm renovating the middle-aged beds, I take a little care to dig up the
best-looking runners and transplant them into new beds.
Transplanting strawberries in the heat of summer is a bit dicey, but
the payoff is large --- you gain enough growth that you can eat plenty
of berries from the beds next spring rather than picking off all the
blooms and waiting until the second spring to taste the crop.
I've found that if I dig the roots up carefully enough, my transplants
will wilt in the hot sun but will be putting up new leaves within a
week.
My hope is that this
three year cycle will keep me sated with my favorite fruit for years to
come. Only time will tell if this method needs more work, but
strawberry yields this spring were heavy and delicious. The proof
is in the pudding* --- strawberry shortcake.
*The British use the
word "pudding" to mean "dessert", in case this isn't clear.
While
researching tomato blemishes, I stumbled across a piece of data that
seems unbelievable to me --- vine ripened tomatoes taste no better than
those picked at the first hint of red and ripened indoors. Chuck
Marr, the horticulture program leader at Kansas
State University Research and Extension, says:
“By the time the tomato has its first
blush of red color, the layer of
cells – called an abcision zone – is complete, and you can pick the
tomato with no loss of flavor or quality. If left on the
vine after that, all the tomato will do is hang there, disconnected,
going through the rest of the ripening process.”
Marr says that you can
avoid most of the cosmetic problems I discussed in this lunchtime
series by picking your tomatoes early and ripening them in your kitchen
out of direct sunlight. The
blogger who tipped me off to this process
notes that storebought tomatoes taste awful not because they were
picked too soon, but because they are a variety bred to be tough and
easily transportable.
I think it's time for a
taste test! I've picked a couple of
blushing tomatoes to ripen in the kitchen, and will report on our taste
test in a week or so. I hope some of our loyal readers will try
it at home and report back too.
Green
shoulders are the most purely cosmetic problem I'll discuss. I
have certain tomato varieties --- notably this yellow roma and our
pear-shaped "black" tomato --- that ripen the bottom two
thirds of the fruit quickly, but leave the top third green. My
solution, as usual, is to cut off the tops
and give them to the chickens, but I was interested to discover there's
a reason for the green shoulders.
Green shoulders form
when tomatoes deal with high temperatures and
strong sunlight during ripening. The light and heat prompt the
fruits to retain
chlorophyll around the stem area, and the "shoulders" often become hard
and leathery.
Unless you've pruned
excessively and removed leaves that would normally
shade your fruits, you haven't done anything to cause green
shoulders. And there's not much you can do to fix the "problem"
either, short of ripening your tomatoes indoors or choosing a different
variety. This is definitely one of those times I'm glad not to be
a market gardener whose customers demand blemish-free fruit.
Our
garlic has had a good month plus of drying
time hanging under the eaves, so I decided it was time to clean it
up and move it inside for storage. I took down our strands of
garlic, rubbed the dirt out of the roots, and trimmed both roots and
leaves back. Next step was sorting --- I like to pull out the
very biggest heads for planting, and at the same time I set aside the
tiny or damaged heads for immediate eating. We've saved lots of
mesh bags from buying oranges and onions, so I popped each variety into
its own bag and put the whole mess on our scales.
"How
many pounds of garlic do you think we grew this year?" I asked Mark
minutes later, wanting to brag.
"Six pounds?" was his
less than ambitious reply.
"No!" I hooted.
"25.5, plus whatever we've eaten in the last month." Then, as the
wheels turned in my head, I added "That's half a pound of garlic per
week. Do you think we grew too much?"
Mark got a puzzled look
on his face --- clearly, the idea of too much garlic had never occurred
to him. "Of course not," he answered. "You'd better get
cooking!" Garlic green beans for supper it was.
Cracking
is probably the most common tomato blemish out there. Like
blossom end rot, split tomatoes are often
the result of improper
watering, but the symptoms usually show up when the fruit is closer to
maturity.
At a certain point in
the tomato ripening process, your fruit has
achieved its full size and it toughens up its formerly stretchable
skin. If a heavy
rain soaks the soil after the tomato epidermis hardens, the tomato can
swell
up further and crack its skin. Alternatively, cracks sometimes
occur when hot days are followed by cold nights, causing the skin to
expand and then contract quickly.
My advice is about the
same as it was for blossom end rot --- mulch if you're worried --- but
I tend
to think that cracking is just an inevitable fact of life. I cut
out hardened cracks and just eat soft cracks. Life's too
short to throw out a delicious tomato just because it has cosmetic
damage!
I'm
not sure why no one talks about planting sunflowers for their honeybees
--- our bees adore them. We put in two beds of oilseed sunflowers
so that we could experiment with pressing
our own oil this
fall, but the flowers have already paid for themselves by feeding local
pollinators.
During the day, it's not
at all unusual to catch several honeybees on
the same flower head, along with lots of smaller pollinators. The
action doesn't even stop when night falls --- yesterday, I snuck out at
dusk and found a moth on every flower, each dipping its proboscis deep
into the tiny florets opening around the circumference of the sunflower
head.
On a semi-related note,
if you're interested in native
pollinators and have
a bit of time on your hands, you might want to check out the Great
Sunflower Project.
Just plant a Lemon Queen Sunflower seed, watch the pollinators flock to
your flower for 15 minutes, and input your data to help scientists
figure out how pollinator populations are doing in your area. I
suspect this project would be especially good for science-oriented kids.
If some of your tomatoes
have a black spot on the bottom, chances are
they've come down with blossom end rot. This condition isn't
something to be overly concerned about since it's not caused by a
virus, bacterium, or fungus and won't travel beyond the fruit in
question.
Technically, blossom end
rot is caused by lack of calcium, but that
doesn't necessarily mean your soil is low on the essential
micronutrient. A variety of other
factors can reduce your plants'
ability to take up calcium, including drought, damage to the plant's
root system, excessive heat, or even rapid plant growth.
I'm not as careful as I
could be about making sure my tomatoes always
have an even supply of water, so I often find a fruit here and there
that has succumbed to blossom end rot. The affected plants are
most common at the beginning of the season, and are more prevalent in
certain varieties than in others. If blossom end rot seemed to be
excessively widespread in your garden, you should mulch your tomatoes
to maintain an even supply of
water in the soil and should take care not to overfertilize.
Otherwise, just cut out the spot and enjoy your homegrown tomatoes.
Don't have time to tend your
garden? Start a microbusiness that will pay all the bills
in just a few hours a week.
This post is part of our Minor Tomato Ailments lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
With
tomato season officially underway, we're
going to have to make some hard
decisions. Like --- now that our happy plants reach over my head,
do I keep tying them up and harvest with a
stepladder or do I let the plants hang
down?
Or, how about this ---
do we plan ahead for a future blight year and can some tomatoes
as well as freezing them?
And --- what do I do
with that first roma when it doesn't have enough sisters to make into
sauce?
This week's lunchtime
series doesn't actually answer any of those
questions, but it does explore some of the cosmetic problems you might
run into while wandering through your tomato patch. I mentioned
in an earlier comment that orange
tomatoes are caused by high heat, and the truth is that
tomatoes will complain about lots of environmental variations in
several different ways.
I subscribe to the "eat
it or give it to the chickens" school of
thought, so discussing vegetable cosmetics is out of the
ordinary. But I recently realized that beginning gardeners might
not know the difference between pissy tomato plants upset by two days
without adequate water and blighted tomatoes that are going to wipe out
your entire tomato garden. If that describes you, stay tuned for
a look at all of the tomato problems that aren't contagious and can simply be
cut out of the ripe fruit.
This
spring, I decided that broccoli
is our most productive cool season crop per unit space, so I decreased our planned
pea plantings and increased our broccoli plantings for the fall.
The broccoli came up quite well, although I did have to transplant a
few seedlings that were too close together, filling in gaps where dry
soil had prevented any broccoli from germinating.
Since we gorged on
broccoli this spring and still managed to put away two gallons of
the florets, it feels a bit decadent to have planted half again as many
broccoli beds for the fall. However, the later in the year we can
eat fresh produce, the healthier and happier we'll be. I also
like to keep the garden full and productive, and I know that my usual
recipients of excess garden produce all love broccoli.
As a side note --- the
freezer is nearly half full, and we're also halfway to our winter
goal. We've put away 9 gallons of vegetables as well as a good
deal of pesto and homegrown chicken. I can tell we won't be
reduced to buying produce from the grocery store in March of 2011.
I like to pretend that
our garden looks like the image above --- well-weeded beds separated by
carefully mown aisles. But at this time
of year, a lot of it actually looks like this picture:
Yes, our garden is full
of weeds. We're slowly developing a mulching technique, but this year is
a bit of an experimental year, so we haven't mulched nearly as much as
I would have liked. Instead, I weed the garden constantly,
rotating through so that each area is weeded at least once a month.
Or at least that's the
plan, which I manage to achieve in the spring. By the height of
summer, though, my rotation extends out to nearly two months, which is
how long it's been since the portion of the garden in the second photo
was weeded. Luckily, our vegetables have grown tall in that span
of time, so they don't seem to have been stunted by their weedy
neighbors. I've been reading Corn
Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri (which may become a
lunchtime series if I ever get my act together), and at first I was
stunned by the traditional cultivation method the Native Americans
employed --- plant and weed like mad until the entire garden has been
weeded twice. Then go off to hunt buffalo for the rest of the
summer, returning just in time to harvest your corn, beans, squash, and
sunflowers. But the truth is that if you weed carefully when your
vegetables are in the seedling stage, most veggies can quickly outstrip
the weeds and form a leaf canopy that excludes competitors. Sure,
we might get a slightly higher yield if I weeded more obsessively, but
there are only so many hours in the day.
The primary point of
this post is --- don't feel bad if your garden is weedy! We've
passed the point of no return (July 4), so the worst that weeds can do
to your garden now is seed a new crop of weeds for next year. If
you do your best to pull the weeds out before they fruit, I think it's
quite all right to focus on the harvest.
Install a homemade chicken
waterer and leave
your chickens alone without a worry while you go hunt buffalo...or go
on vacation.
I've had my eye on our
oldest tomato plant for weeks. (This is
the one that volunteered in our lemon tree's pot this winter and which
I set out in the garden on April 21, babying
through cold spells.)
The plant swelled up huge fruits, then
kept swelling more and more fruits, none of which changed color.
Last week, I saw the tiniest hint of red on the oldest fruit, and
crossed my fingers. But I was looking in entirely the wrong spot
for our first tomato.
Wednesday
morning, I caught a glimpse of
orange from the tomato bed on the opposite side of the naughty
butternuts. I
peered closer and saw a fruit nearly ripe!
A few years ago when we
splurged on seeds for several heirloom
tomatoes, I picked out Stupice as a very cold-tolerant and early
variety. Sure enough, it looks like the Stupice tomato will
probably be the first one on our plate, perhaps by the end of the week.
To be fair, though, this
mini-experiment doesn't prove that tomatoes started in a cold frame and
set out at the frost free date ripen just as quickly as those started
indoors and transplanted out three weeks earlier. I have
absolutely no clue what variety my volunteer belongs to, and I suspect
it might have been the seed of a storebought tomato that made it into
our neighbor's compost and thus to us. At this point, though, I'm
at the who-cares stage --- as long as I get a sun-ripened tomato
shortly, experiments will fly out of my head.
This year, I
decided I was going to wean us off Bt even if it meant a
squashless season. Maybe it's a fluke, but we've actually had a
much better cucurbit year than ever before. My new secret is
succession planting.
Notice how the cucumber
vine on the left is starting to wither up? This time last year I
would have been pulling out my hair, but now I simply shrug my
shoulders and look at the bed of three week old cucumber plants nearly
ready to bloom. I plan to seed a third bed of cucumbers this week
so that we'll have a final glut of cucumbers around the end of August.
I did even better with
the summer squash. Our four spring plants gave us nearly two
gallons of fruits to go in the freezer (with who knows how many eaten
and uncounted), but now the squash have collapsed into a mass of vine
borers, squash bugs, and disease. No worries --- check out our
month-old youngsters who just gave us their first fruits. Again,
I've got more squash on my succession-planting list for this week to
take over when our second planting bites the dust.
To be fair, succession
planting isn't my only innovation this year. I'm growing a different variety
of cucumber (Diamant)
and of summer squash (Butterstick Hybrid.) I also gave our
cucurbits quite a bit of extra compost so that they'd grow quickly and
give us produce before disease and pests struck. And the weather
has been perfect --- droughty weather with us irrigating
regularly. Still, I think succession planting has been key in
this year's success, and I suggest giving it a try before spraying Bt.
When
I was a kid, we never cultivated brambles (blackberries and
raspberries.) Instead, we knew spots where big patches grew wild,
and we'd go on a pilgrimage to pick by the side of a country
road. With such good wild berry patches, why grow your own?
Lately, I've decided
that cultivated brambles do have definite
advantages. The large cultivated berries are quick and easy to
pick, and in many cases taste as good or better than the wild
berries. You can grow thornless varieties (particularly of
blackberries) to cut down on the scratch factor and everbearing
varieties (particularly of red raspberries) that extend the bramble
season from early summer through the killing frost. If you find
varieties well suited to your soil and climate, you can also expect
much higher production out of cultivated brambles than out of wild
canes.
Although cultivated blackberries
and raspberries can be pricey, the frugal homesteader quickly learns
that she only needs to buy one plant of each variety. If the
brambles like your garden, they'll grow so fast that you'll be overrun
with offshoots to give away by the end of the second year. (But
do be prepared to
run through a few varieties before you find one well
suited to your garden.)
The only real
disadvantage I've found with cultivated brambles is that they take up a
good deal of space. On the other hand, they tend to grow well in
awful soil that wouldn't support anything else, and if you prune them
ruthlessly (and mow up any shoots that wander out of their row), you
can definitely keep brambles under control. Our patch of
blackberries and raspberries is the easiest and most productive part of
our fruit garden so far.
We
went a little overboard with experimental beans this year, and now
we're starting to get an idea of which ones like our garden.
First of all, I should note that our old standby Masai Beans are still
plugging right along. We already have a
gallon of delicious green beans in the freezer, with many more to
come as my later-planted beds start to bear. Masai Beans
are really the best green beans I've ever tasted, and they're
stringless, so preparation is a breeze. Plus, you can save the
seeds --- we haven't bought green bean seeds in three years.
On the experimental
side, a friend of mine mailed me a few of her favorite dried
beans to play with --- Yellow Indian (pictured above), Allubia Criolla,
and Cayamento
Cranberry. My goal here is to find a dried bean that will capture
even Mark's interest, and I'm willing to try as many varieties as it
takes to reach that point. Currently, the pole beans are happily
running up their trellis, blooming like crazy, and setting big
pods. I won't really have information for you, though, until we
run a taste test.
Our
garbanzo beans are less happy. I planted Black Karbouli Bush
Garbanzo at the end of April, but later learned that garbanzos like
cool weather and should be planted at the same time as the peas.
No wonder a
third of my plants dried up and the rest have luxuriant foliage but no
signs of blooms. Even if we get nothing out of this experimental
bed, I'll try the garbanzos again next spring, planting in a more
proper time frame to see what develops.
We
also planted Urd Beans (for sprouting) and some Endamame Soybeans
(for endamame). The two types of beans seemed
happy as little clams...until the deer came in and ate them. We
had a few minor deer incursions this summer when deterrents went
down, and our four-legged f(r)iends seem
quite partial to my experimental crops. So, just like with our
garbanzos, if we fail to get a crop this year, I won't despair.
Now that we've done
everything wrong that we possibly can with beans, I'm hoping next year
will be a stunning success. For the sake of comparison, oilseed
sunflowers were one
of our big experiments last year, so the deer ate them down to the
ground. This year, the sunflowers were no longer experimental, so
the deer left them alone and the plants are now towering over my
head. Clearly, there is a moral here, if I can only figure it
out. Maybe the deer are bored by my experiments posts?
Our homemade chicken
waterer is a
great way to keep your chickens cool and hydrated during a heat wave.
I've always thought the
traditional pop up style campers had room for improvement.
The Yurtle will put an end to
your square lodge blues with a nice circular structure to rest within.
This portable model will run you about 6800 bucks, which seems
comparable to other new pop up campers. The Yurtle will take at least
an hour to set up compared to seconds on the pop up.
Seems like this might be a
great alternative to the FEMA trailers we heard so much about after
hurricane Katrina?
Go
to Laurelnestyurts.com for more round options and
details on their small community of 14 yurts. They've got a few
sections to their blog where they discuss permaculture and gardening,
topics that drove me to their site in the first place.
Last
week, I noticed that the bottom leaves of our tomato plants were curled
up. The leaves weren't yellowing, browning, or developing spots;
they were just bent in an odd curve that made the pale undersides
visible.
Even though I usually
try to be very proactive and look up problems as soon as I see
symptoms, this time I procrastinated. I've been living in fear of
the blight all growing season, and,
honestly, if my tomatoes were blighted, I didn't really want to know.
It turns out that I
could have set my mind at rest days ago. There is a leaf curl
disease caused by the Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus, but the virus'
symptoms include yellowing leaf margins and crumpled leaves, neither of
which my plants show. Instead, chances are my curled leaves are
the result of letting the plants get a bit drought-stressed, then
saturating the soil a bit too much, all combined with my new, drastic
pruning regime.
The leaves may stay curled, but it sounds like I won't see any damage
to the plants' growth or fruiting.
I'm very relieved that
my tomatoes aren't going to die, but I would still like them to hurry
up and feed me! The plants are dripping with huge green fruits,
but none has even shown a tinge of color. As I read on more and
more blogs about homegrown tomatoes, my patience is wearing thin.
Fresh sliced tomatoes, vegetable soups, sweet pizza sauce --- I'm
aching to taste them again....
I
seem to have slightly over-planted our Egyptian onions this
year. I only put in three small beds...and then three more
patches sprang up from compost piles where I'd tossed the excess
bulbs. The result was so many
onions that I didn't even put a dent in the population by pulling whole
plants to eat over the winter, and now that it's time to harvest the
top bulbs,
I'm officially overwhelmed. This basket is less than a third of
the harvest!
Rather than composting
the top bulbs (a method that clearly failed last year),
I'm going to sell them in big bunches to anyone willing to start a
good-sized Egytian onion patch. I don't really want to get into
the retail side of mailing off a few bulbs here and there, but if
you're a regular commenter and just want a tiny start, email
me and
I'll likely oblige you. You definitely want these plants in your
garden if you grow in
zones 3 through 9. Sorry, I can't mail them outside the U.S.
To order, click on the
paypal button above to buy 100 top
bulbs for $25 (with free shipping.) 100 bulbs will weigh
approximately 5 ounces and will be enough to start one good-sized bed
that will feed one or two average people. Your package will
contain small, medium, and large bulbs.
If you really want to
feed an army (and help me get rid of these top
bulbs as quickly as possible), you can buy 500 top bulbs for $75 (with
free shipping.) If so, click this button instead.
Once
you receive your bulbs, plant the Egyptian onions as soon as
possible in good garden soil in full sun. The very top of the
bulb should be poking out of the ground, but the rest should be
submerged. Some people recommend planting them a foot apart, but
I've found that my plants do well in raised beds spaced only about
three inches between centers. Leave the plants alone for a few
months, then you should be able to start
harvesting green onions in the middle of the fall through the winter.
To maintain a perennial
patch, cut only every second or third leaf,
making sure that the plant has enough green leaves to continue
growing. You can also dig up entire bulbs in the winter to use in
recipes that call for leeks, but you'll want to let all your plants
grow
the first year. By this time next year, your plants should be
putting up top bulbs, each of which can be planted to expand your
patch. As long as you don't get too greedy and overharvest,
Egyptian onions will soon become your most dependable --- and easiest
--- vegetable.
If Egyptian onions aren't up
your alley, but you still want to support the work of the Walden
Effect, check out our homemade chicken
waterer.
is reliably winter-killed in zone 6 (meaning that I don't have to
till it in or pull it out)
is non-leguminous (so that I'll get lots of organic matter rather
than lots of nitrogen)
will survive in our problem spots --- dense, clayey soil with a
high water table
So far, buckwheat and oats seem to be my top
contenders. I've been slipping buckwheat into gaps in my rotation
this month, beds where spring crops have been pulled out with nothing
to take their place for at least six weeks. Next month, I'll
plant oats in empty beds.
If all goes as planned,
our cover crops will turn into a heavy mulch that will partially or
entirely decompose in time for spring planting. It's even
possible that the buckwheat will die in five or six weeks when I mow it
down at bloom time, allowing me to plant garlic under the green manure
a few weeks later.
Do you have a favorite
no-till cover crop? I'm open to any and all suggestions since
this year is our first trial.
This
weekend, I tricked Mark and his mom into taking me to Sunwatch Indian
Village in Dayton. My companions win the patience award for not
even looking bored while I took notes for three hours on how Native
Americans fed themselves 800 years ago. Okay, maybe they do look
a little bored....
I was intrigued by this
particular window into the past because corn had just become the
mainstay of the Native American diet, making up over half of the
villagers' diets. Meat (76% of which was venison) made up another
40% of their diets, so I wasn't surprised that the Sunwatch villagers
were actually less healthy than their recent ancestors, with over half
of their children dying before the age of six. We all know that a
diet of corn and meat with very few fruits and vegetables isn't going
to promote good health.
The villagers stored
their corn for the winter in large, grass-lined storage pits.
Each family of six to eight people had their own pit, which would hold
500 or more pounds of corn. I loved the museum's reconstruction
of a typical storage pit while in use:
...and then, once
emptied of corn, how it might have looked when filled with the family's
garbage...
...and, finally, what
the pit looked like when archaeologists carefully picked through it 800
years later:
The
reconstructed village also included a typical three
sisters garden,
which I've pictured here. Unfortunately, there was much less
interpretation about the garden than about the buildings, so I came
away with more questions than answers. Most importantly, I ended
up curious about how the Native Americans combatted the squash vine
borers, which my
trained eye noticed were already hard at work wiping out the pumpkins
in Sunwatch's garden. Does anyone know?
I
posted some images of the lodges in my review
of Sunwatch Village
over on our Clinch Trails website (which I've decided
to reenvision as our travel website), but what caught my eye in the
architectural arena was the way the Native Americans burned the bases
of their posts to protect the wood from insects and rot. I would
have thought that charring the base of a post would make it less
structurally sound, but presumably they knew what they were doing.
On the other hand, the
buildings weren't meant to last forever. Like my method of intentionally
underbuilding, the
Sunwatch villagers were used to moving on after a couple of decades
when firewood and game in the immediate vicinity had been
exhausted. As with slash
and burn agriculture,
the sustainability of using up all of an area's resources and then
travelling to a new region is questionable, but the method might make
sense if populations are low enough that the land is given a century to
recover after each episode.
Finally, doesn't this
watch platform look perfect? I've long wanted to have one of
these in the middle of the garden with a ramp up to the platform so
Lucy could nap there and watch over our entire domain. Who knows
--- the Sunwatch villagers might have even let their dogs stand watch
there too!
My
beekeeping mentor told me that he waits until June to plant most of his
potatoes, which means he doesn't have to store the mature tubers during
the heat of the summer. Since potatoes are primarily a storage
crop and have a
limited shelf life, planting them as late as possible makes sense.
However, when I went
shopping for seed potatoes at the beginning of June, all of the feed
stores looked at me like I was crazy. Instead, I decided to see
whether I could just plant some of my halfway matured spring potatoes
in new beds for a fall crop.
I was so happy with the Ruth
Stout method of potato planting last time around that I
decided to take it a step further this time. I simply spread
manure on a freshly weeded bed, plopped down the seed potatoes, and
covered everything up with a thick layer of grass clippings.
Since then, I've been
waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Nothing has happened.
When I poked around under the mulch, I discovered that very few of the
seed potatoes had sprouted. In fact, all of the small new
potatoes that I had put in the ground whole were sitting there, while
only the few potatoes that were large enough to be cut in half had
begun to grow. I've read that some companies sell new potatoes as
seed potatoes, but I clearly haven't discovered the trick yet.
Since the beds are well
mulched and growing no weeds, I'm going to let them sit for another
month or two even though I now have small hope of a fall potato
harvest. I'll let you know if anything exciting happens, or
whether I end up just digging the seed potatoes to eat.
Sick of spending forty plus
hours per week working for someone else? Create your own job that pays the bills in a
fraction of the time.
Even
though I'm the primary cook around here, Mark does nearly all the
grocery shopping. I just hate shopping, so every two weeks, I
hand Mark a list and send him to the big city. He always comes
home with everything on the list...plus this and that. When I
first started converting him to Walden Effect eating, the "this and
that" were things like biscuits-in-a-can and lemon cookies.
Nowadays, I roll my eyes when he brings home...an out of season
butternut.
Yes, we've become such
fans of butternuts (especially butternut pie) that Mark's hard pressed
to live without them over the summer. I didn't know they would be
such a hit, so I only put in two small beds last year, and we ran out
of the delicious fruits in the middle of the winter. This year, I
expanded the planting to encompass three beds, and I fed the soil
well. Cucurbits love a good meal of manure, and before I knew it,
the butternuts had zipped off their own beds, across the aisle, and
were partying with the tomatoes. Bad butternuts!
As every parent knows, proper limits are essential in raising a healthy
child...I mean, butternut. And parents definitely have to work
together to set those boundaries. So Mark and I went out as a
team to train our recalcitrant butternuts to toe the line. Mark
hammered in fence posts and I strung up pea trellis material to cage our butternuts
in. Now they can play as hard as they want and we won't have to
worry about them skipping curfew.
The next error was to use a
drinking container spigot as a drain valve. It needs to be bigger with
the ability to be turned on and left on as opposed to the push button
mechansim of the spigot.
The good news is that the
worms did great! Which goes to show you how easy it is to grow your own
worms. Once the kinks are worked out I think this garden cart will make
a fine over sized worm bin. One that will provide buckets and buckets
of compost tea in the future.
As
long as you choose a non-hybrid variety, peas are
one of the easiest garden vegetables for seed-saving. To that end, I let
the snow peas stay in the ground for a couple of weeks after the pods
began to turn woody, giving them time to mature their seeds.
Last year, I left the
pods on the vine until they were completely brown, but this year I'm
experimenting with harvesting them a bit earlier when they're in the
pale yellow stage. My goal is to counteract the mildew that
struck about a third of last year's seeds. Rather than expecting
the pods to dry on the plant like last year, this year I carefully
shelled out the peas and put them on a rack to dry.
Davia
asked me if I'd ever heard of Hugelkultur. I thought the
answer was no, until I googled the term and discovered that hugelkultur
is very
similar to the mounds
I built last fall using dirt tossed over decomposing branches. Putting a name to the
method really expedited my research and turned up a lot more
information than I thought was out there. Thanks, Davia!
The idea is pretty
simple --- adding wood to a raised bed acts as a sponge, evening out
soil moisture so that the ground doesn't become waterlogged and also
doesn't dry up. As the wood rots, it turns into wonderful organic
matter a lot like the stump
dirt I rave about.
However, I think I made
a few mistakes with my hugelkultur beds. If you research the
technique, you'll discover that the correct way to make the beds is to
bury the woody material at least a foot or two under the earth. I
just built up piles of partly rotten branches and shoveled dirt in the
gaps, a method that worked okay for the hazels and wildflower mixes I
grew there, but that wouldn't have worked for vegetables. I'm
sure the branches are locking up nitrogen out of the soil as I type,
but everything I put in the beds is extremely resilient and seems to be
surviving.
The real problem is that
my beds are too dry. The wood hasn't rotted down enough yet to
act as a sponge, and the loosely shoveled clay has a lot of air pockets
that let water drain right through. Granted, I located the mounds
in an area where the groundwater is so high nothing will grow there, so
this "problem" isn't so bad --- it made a nice spot to put in rosemary
without ending up with root rot the way my rosemary plants usually do.
Problem number two is also
related to my haphazard construction. I left bits of branches
sticking out around the edges, which made Mark very leery of mowing up
to the sides of the mounds. Add to that the fact that my mulch
mostly blew away over the winter and I forgot to refresh it or weed the
mounds, and the result is a weed thicket. Surprisingly, the
thickly seeded wildflowers seem to be holding their ground against the
weeds, and the honeybees consider this area their second home, so all
is not lost.
Now that I know more
about the technique, though, I want to try hugelkultur again as another
winter project. This time, I'll bury the wood deeper and plant a
cover crop to add fertility for the first year or so before planting
anything important. I'll be curious to see how quickly the
rotting wood starts benefiting my plants.
If
2009 was the year without a summer then 2010's heat has made up for
every drippy, rainy day. Luckily, with our irrigation
system humming along
happily, garden plants are thrilled by the heat and sunlight.
Look at this --- baby
butternut squashes! Little watermelons hiding under the
leaves! Plump tomatoes just waiting to turn color! And
could that really be a canteloupe, the first one we've ever
successfully grown on our farm?
Although
it seems hard to believe at the end of two weeks with highs in the 90s,
now is the time to start your fall garden. Luckily, your spring
garden should be pretty much kaput --- all we have left is a stray
broccoli plant or two, and some bedraggled potatoes fading back into
the soil. You can fill the gaps your spring garden left behind
with most of the same crops, just switching around locations to ensure
each plant family is in a new spot.
This coming week, we'll
be direct seeding broccoli, beets, parsnips, and carrots (along with
some late beans and corn). In a few more weeks, we'll throw in
peas, turnips, lettuce, and spinach. Then come greens (and more
lettuce) in August and garlic (and yet more lettuce) in September.
If you want to put in a
fall garden, but this teaser just leaves you confused, check out last
year's lunchtime series about the fall
garden. On the
other hand, if you have garden areas that need some help and don't have
time to tend fall vegetables, why not plant some buckwheat as a cover
crop?
Our homemade chicken
waterer gives your
chickens something to do other than picking on each other.
Our hardy
kiwi plants sulked
for the first two years, but as we begin their third summer, they're
suddenly acting like vines. Each plant has put up multiple stems,
the longest of which has twined for five feet along its trellis
wire. At this stage, I want the kiwis to focus their energy on
one main trunk, so I clipped off the extra shoots springing up from
each rootstock. Time to propagate!
Hardy kiwis are best
grown from softwood cuttings, which means cuttings taken from new
growth during the summer. (In contrast, grapes
are best grown from hardwood cuttings, which are the dormant,
woody stems pruned out in the winter.) I clipped the excess kiwi
stems into six inch lengths, cut off the growing tips, and then clipped
each leaf in half. Although people who want 100% success often
root softwood cuttings under misters using rooting hormone and applying
bottom heat, I prefer a simpler method with a lower success rate ---
put an inch of water in a jar, drop in the cuttings, and ignore for
three weeks.
And
now, look --- little roots all over the ends of the cuttings!
Once the roots expand enough to feed the cuttings, I'll put my new
kiwis in the ground in a permanent location. My original kiwis
arrived in late July two years ago, so I assume the nursery used the
exact same tricks I did, and that these new cuttings will really take
off in the summer of 2012.
Getting started with
perennials is always pricey --- our three hardy kiwis came to nearly
fifty bucks. But if you're in it for the long haul, you can turn
that initial investment into a large orchard. I'll bet at this
time next year, I'll be giving baby kiwi plants away to everyone who
can fit one in their garden.
After much trial and error
I've concluded that the water we
pump from the creek is
too rich in particles for these little screen filters to handle.
Anna started experimenting
with deleting the filters back in the spring. So far the results
suggest we don't need them for this application. I suspect the high
pressure is enough to push any stray particles out through the
sprinkler nozzle.
After
the internet, what I missed most during our power outage was the
ability to pack food away for the winter. With the freezer closed
and halfway full, 30 hours without power wasn't a big deal, but there
was no way I could introduce warm food without negatively impacting the
old. So I watched the summer
squash achieve, then surpass, their optimal size, and as soon as the
power came back on I was ready to freeze.
Roasted
squash, cabbage for winter potstickers, and a few meals worth of
green beans left the garden for cold storage. I also dug into our
fresh
garlic to make nine
cups of pesto for quick winter
lunches. While I was at it, I picked the second to last meal of broccoli --- these plants are buggy
and ugly since they took so long to grow, but they still tasted great
in cheese sauce for supper.
While poking around, I
discovered that we are overflowing with cucumbers for the first time
ever. Our farm is hard on cucurbits, and cucumbers are the worst,
coming down with some kind of wilt disease every year just as they
start to bear. This year, I sprang for a wilt-resistant hybrid
--- Diamant --- that is vigorous enough to (mostly) withstand our
annual bane. Since we don't like pickles, I'm suddenly serving
fresh cucumbers with every lunch and dinner (and am seriously
considering making the prolific vegetables part of a complete
breakfast.)
Last year, the weather
was against us and we only managed to pack away 13 gallons of food for
the winter. As a result, we bought grocery store produce for a
couple of months this spring, and I vowed to do better. With 6
gallons of vegetables, 7 cups of pesto, and 7 whole chickens already in
the freezer before the end of June, we're starting to ponder what we'll
do with the excess.
Potato onions were
one of our experimental vegetables this year, and I'd be
hard-pressed to call them a success. The total production from
one garden bed was 60 bulbs, but most were too small to bother skinning
for
supper. I figure that all together they'd add up to enough onion
flesh to feed us for about two weeks.
On the other hand,
potato onions do have a
lot of potential. These storage onions can be grown from
multiplied bulbs, a bit like Egyptian
onions, with no need
to buy seed or sets
every year. If we tweak our growing technique a bit, I
think we could turn potato onions into a dependable part of our annual
harvest.
We began our experiment
with an eight ounce starter package of Loretta
Yellow Multiplier
Onions from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. The company told us
that we could choose to plant bulbs in the fall for a larger yield, but
also a higher likelihood of losing onions to freezing, or could wait
and plant in the
spring. We opted to toss them all in the ground at the beginning
of November.
I'd
like to say that we lost a third of the bulbs to winter cold, but
instead I have to admit to mismanagement. After planting, I
mulched the bed heavily with autumn leaves since I knew from experience
that garlic will push up through a heavy mulch with
no problem. Potato onions are made of weaker stuff, though,
and the bulbs under the thickest mulch languished and died.
Spring
came, and our remaining onions were doing well. As
the original bulb divided into multiple bulbs, the plant pushed the
dirt aside and I was able to watch the onions grow. I was pleased
to see each individual plant turn into six to ten smaller plants, and
then the bulbs began to swell.
I thought we were in for
a bumper crop, but then over half of the
potato onions threw up flower stalks. An exhaustive search of the
internet turns up little data about potato onion flowers, except that
they're rare and channel energy away from the bulbs. A few
anecdotes suggest
that potato onions are more likely to bloom when fall planted, so next
year I'll stick to spring planting. I was disappointed but not
surprised to find that the
blooming plants produced only small bulbs.
The
few non-blooming onions, though, sparked my interest. Each plant
produced one to two big bulbs about two thirds the size of a
storebought onion, along with several small bulbs for replanting.
I plan to eat the big bulbs and put all of the small ones in the ground
early next spring. If we can tweak our planting
method to prevent blooming, I foresee doing away with fiddly seed
onions and expensive and ephemeral onion sets and instead planting
potato onions every year from our own offset bulbs.
I'm
sure you've all been perched on the edge of your seats for the last
couple of weeks wondering: Will cardboard
mulch retard water
penetration and harm our plants? A couple of days after I posted
about our cardboard mulch, Mark had the great idea of poking a bunch of
holes in the cardboard with a pitchfork. Even so, I was a bit
concerned that the perforated cardboard would keep the soil too dry.
Rather than waiting to see if
our vegetables started
struggling, we
bought a $10 moisture meter from Lowes and took some
measurements. As you can see, the perforated cardboard actually
kept the soil wetter than either whole cardboard or bare soil,
especially in the top inch of the soil. Whole cardboard, on the
other hand, was a loser --- I headed out with the pitchfork to
perforate the overlooked bed right after taking these measurements.
Some days, I wish I had
about ten acres of research farm and three or
four interns to turn my little play experiments into real
experiments. I'm well aware that three data points for each
treatment isn't enough information to draw any
scientific conclusions. But the numbers were remarkably uniform,
suggesting that perforated cardboard mulch is definitely a plus when it
comes to water retention.
Mark
dug the rest of the garlic on Monday and hung it under the eaves to
dry. I can honestly tell you that there's more garlic beside our
front door than I've ever seen in one spot in my life!
Learning from last
year's drying fiasco, we hung up the garlic in
small clumps immediately after digging. This photo shows some of last
week's garlic ---
notice how it's already drying up nicely due to the air movement around
the exposed bulbs and leaves. If we had room indoors, we could
also have spread the plants out in a single layer on screens to dry.
Either way, the bulbs
will be thoroughly cured and ready to move to storage two weeks after
harvest. At that point, the garlic will have sucked all of the
nutrients out of the leaves and roots, so it's safe to cut off the
excess plant material. We store our garlic in mesh bags we save
from buying winter oranges.
Last
year's garlic is still lingering on our kitchen shelf, proving that it
is quite possible to eat your own garlic for an entire year without any
special storage area. The trick for preventing your garlic from
sprouting is counter-intuitive --- keep it warm. Once garlic has
been cooled and then re-warmed, the plant thinks it has survived a
winter and starts to grow. Keep the heads warm (but not hot) and
they'll linger in an eternal summer.
One last note on garlic
curing and storing --- be sure to pull out the biggest heads for next
year's planting. I'm pretty sure that the few small heads mixed
in with our many large heads were due to me not being vigilant enough
about planting only the biggest cloves from the biggest heads last
fall. Even though you might want to brag by giving away those
beautiful big heads to your friends and family, just think how much
more you'll get to brag next year when every one of your garlic heads
is that size!
Two
weeks ago, I pinched off the tops of the
black raspberry canes. Left to their own devices, black raspberry
primocanes will grow so long they bend down and root a new plant at
their tip. This trait is useful if you're looking to expand your
berry patch, but is less useful if you actually want to be able to get
into the patch to pick berries.
If you choose to keep
your plants contained, you can pinch off the tips
when the brambles reach waist high. In most plants, apical
dominance tells the plant to put all of its energy into growing the
main shoot, but if that main shoot is gone, the side buds are allowed
to grow. The bottom photo shows what one plant looks like two
weeks after pinching. Notice how the side shoots have grown out
--- these will all be coated with fruits next year when the primocane
becomes a floricane.
I've
similarly pruned our cultivated
blackberries.
Blackberries usually aren't tip-rooters, but
mine are, and I've also found that they will grow primocanes a dozen
feet long if left to their own devices. I prefer the plants to
stay contained in my obsessive rows, so I take a few minutes to summer
prune.
This
week's lunchtime series has barely scratched the surface of learning to
start a small garden and eat the fruits of your labor. If you
catch the bug, you're sure to want to learn more. Of course,
you'll keep reading our blog, but where else should you turn?
Barbara Kingsolver's Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle
may help to get you inspired, and also includes some in-season
recipes. For more solid information about
growing your food, many beginners report getting a lot out of Square Foot
Gardening,
despite its flaws. The basic spacing, planting, and harvesting
information about all vegetables can be found on extension service
websites using a quick google search. (I've found keyword
combinations like "tomato cultivation" get good results.)
Year one is a good time
to start learning about the soil food web, and Teaming
With Microbes
is a quick, fun way to open your eyes to what's going on beneath the
surface. I don't have specific books to recommend, but other
important topics to consider include composting and
beneficial insects.
Finally, why not take a
master gardener class? Most state
extension services now offer these semester-long classes for a small
fee. You'll meet other gardeners in your area and will come away
with a great grounding in basic concepts.
Whatever you do, don't
put the process off until next year. If all you have the time and
energy for is throwing one tomato plant in the ground, do it!
Right this instant! Turn off your computer, pick up your trowel,
and plant!
The squash vine
borer will be
hitting our farm shortly --- I know because the first brilliant flowers
have come out on the summer squash. With the impending collapse
of our plants looming, I've resolved to find a better solution than
Bt. Bacillus
thuringiensis is
rated organic but is still a relatively broad spectrum insecticide,
which means it may be doing more harm than good by killing beneficials
that would otherwise wipe out the borer. In addition, try as we
might to spray once a week and after rains, Bt doesn't seem to be
preventing the total destruction of our summer squash crop each
year. We're both willing to do without summer squash for a year
or two, if need be, while we figure out a better option.
This year, we're keeping
our experiments simple. I'm planting a new bed of summer squash
every two weeks to give me an idea of the timing of the
infestation. In the north, you can just plant your summer
squashes late, after the fourth of July, and the vine borer will
have finished its flying stage. In the south, though, the vine
borer has multiple generations, so I'm not sure how early I can plant
squash and still miss the insect's depradations. A planting at
the beginning of August 2009 netted us a bounty of summer squash...for
about two weeks before the frost hit. I'm hoping to be able to
plant a bit earlier than that and still miss the borer.
Other options to try in
later years if the easy route fails include:
Planting a more resistant summer squash variety such as Summer
Crookneck
Using a floating row cover over the plants to physically exclude
attack
Wrapping something around the stem (panty hose and aluminum foil
have both been used) to keep the larvae out
Mounding up dirt over the stem at intervals to promote rooting
(which would require a different squash variety since we've been
planting bush squash)
If
you ask ten gardeners the best way to manage tomatoes, you'll get
twenty answers. We've tried out a different method every year,
and still haven't found one we're truly happy with. This year
we're using out the old standby --- one stake per plant, then prune to
three main stems.
The Master Gardeners of
Santa Clara County have a very comprehensive page about the advantages
and disadvantages of different tomato support methods. They note that the
one stake method results in less productive plants, which is the reason
I've steered clear of pruning in the past.
On the other hand, the
tomato blight is still in the air this year across the eastern U.S.,
and I'm willing to accept a lower yield if I actually get something. Pruning does have the
advantage of keeping the plant drier, which means that fungi don't have
the humid environment they need to thrive. Here's hoping that
drastic pruning and other blight
prevention will give
us a crop.
The
easiest way to lose the gardening bug permanently is to start a huge
garden with a bunch of vegetable varieties suited only to an expert,
then see everything disappear down insect gullets in a few
months. I recommend that beginning gardeners instead start small,
with just a few vegetables that are nearly impossible to kill.
Here are my top contenders:
Leaf
lettuce - The
time has
already passed for this cool season crop, but fall will be here before
you know it. Lettuce is great for beginners because you can't do
anything wrong and you get to harvest a month after planting. One
of the easiest to grow in our area is Black-seeded Simpson, but I like
to mix in a red variety for eye candy. Read all of my tips
on growing lettuce here.
Swiss chard - Most greens are
extremely easy, but Swiss chard takes the cake. Unlike other
greens, swiss chard doesn't get bitter, nor does it bolt the first
year. The greens are mild in flavor and can be substituted in
recipes which call for spinach (a vegetable that does bolt quite
quickly.) Although they taste the same as the white-stalked
variety, urban gardeners will love Swiss chard varieties with leaf
stalks ranging in color from white to yellow to red since they're
pretty enough to mix into your flower border. This warm season
crop should be planted after your frost-free date ---
for nearly all of you, that means you can go ahead and plant now.
Once
the leaves are four inches tall, I start cutting them just like leaf
lettuce once or twice a week, making sure I don't cut the growing bud,
but taking most other leaves.
Tomatoes - In my opinion,
tomatoes are really a year two crop, but the flavor difference between
a homegrown tomato and a storebought one is so great that few people
can resist planting them. For the raw beginner, you should go
ahead and buy a transplant or two from the feed store and put them out
after the frost-free date. Choose a slicer or a tommy-toe (or
both). Be sure to cage or stake your tomato, and if you're
starting this year, I
highly recommend pruning since the blight is still in the air. In
later
years, I think you'll be happier starting your own tomatoes from seed
and growing primarily romas for ease of storage, but in year one you
should stick to simple vegetables that go straight on your plate.
Basil - I see people buy basil
transplants, and I can't figure out why. Basil is the easiest
herb you can grow --- throw the seeds on the ground around your
frost-free date and you'll be picking off leaves a couple of weeks
later. The trick to a summer-long harvest is to cut your basil
back regularly (at least once a week) and never let it bloom.
With lettuce and swiss chard, I told you to be careful not to harvest
the central growing bud, but with basil I advocate the reverse.
Cut the whole top off the plant, leaving one or two pairs of older
leaves at the base, and it will branch out into a bush. Keep
cutting the youngest, tastiest leaves, and your plant will just get
bigger and bushier. When the basil does start trying to bloom,
pick off the flower buds. I recommend a simple Sweet Italian or
Genovese basil for your first year, but later you can branch out into
the varieties that taste great in other ethnic foods.
Sweet Corn - The only major
thing that can go wrong with corn is lack of pollination if you plant
too small of an area. I try to plant at least two short rows
together, and three or four are better. Your corn will mature
nearly all at once, so for a full summer harvest, I plant a bed on our
frost-free date, and continue planting another bed every two weeks
until the end of June. Like tomatoes, there's no comparison
between homegrown and storebought sweet corn. But this is the one
vegetable where I like to stick with fancy hybrids --- heirloom
varieties are starchy instead of sweet.
Okra - Okra may seem like an
odd choice for the beginner, but in the South few crops beat its ease
of growth. In fact, the plant has such huge, beautiful flowers
that okra can easily pass for an ornamental. Plant the seeds at
the frost-free date, and in a couple of months you'll see blooms and
little, furry fruits. Cut the whole fruit off at the stem when it
is less than three inches long and steam it --- the trick to defeating
okra slime is to never let water touch the interior of the fruit.
We eat our steamed okra with our fingers, holding it by the stem and
eating the fruit portion off, but you could cut the tops off after
steaming them if you like. The traditional method of eating okra
is to slice, batter, and fry it, but I can't really recommend that
approach. Our favorite variety is Clemson Spineless.
The beginner should pick
two to four of these varieties to try out their first year,
steering clear of okra if you live in the north and of tomatoes if you
live in a very hot area like Texas. Plant a very small garden, no
more than perhaps 100 feet square, and mulch the whole thing if
possible to cut down on weeding. If you have anther choice, steer
clear of pots, which are harder than they look, and keep good records
of when and where you planted and what happened. Most of you
still have time to start something this year, so go do it!
Several
friends of mine have neither the inclination, time, nor space to grow
their own vegetables, so they join a CSA
to be part of the local food
system. Inevitably, a few weeks in, they regret the
decision. "What do I do with a huge basket of mixed greens?" they
moan. Or, "Five butternut squash? I
don't know how to cook squash!"
The truth is that the
beginning gardener often feels the same
way. We're used to buying whatever vegetables suit our fancy or
are mandated by our favorite recipes, and we don't know how to make a
salad when we realize that lettuce and tomatoes are never in season at
the same time. On a similar note, we might want to start a
garden, but we don't know which vegetables are within our reach and
which ones are the domain of experienced green thumbs. How can we
even start when the whole endeavor looks so daunting? It's much
easier to pick up some organic produce at the grocery store and figure
we're doing our part to save the world.
Although I know that
many of our readers are long time gardeners and
cooks who use in-season produce without thinking about it, I also
suspect that others of
you are afraid to put the first plants in the ground because you just
don't know how to go from seed to gourmet feast. This week's
lunchtime series launches a new facet of this blog geared toward giving
beginners the information they need to start a quick and easy garden
and then to enjoy the bounty. I hope that you experienced
gardeners and
foodies will read along and add your own advice on which plants are
easy to grow in your neck of the woods, and on simple recipes you use
to produce delicious, in-season meals.
Don't have time to put in
even the smallest garden? Our microbusiness ebook will show you how to make a
living in just a few hours a week so you can spend time doing what
really matters.
This post is part of our Beginner's Guide to Gardening and Eating in
Season lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
Yes...the Trake is one of
those garden instruments that when backed up with a twin can become
twice the tool if you've got the extra hands to wield them.
Let's
look at a contest between the six beds of shelling peas I planted in
early March and the six beds of broccoli I transplanted in early
April. This week, I've harvested about a quarter of the shelling
peas, and about two thirds of the broccoli, freezing all of the peas
and most of the broccoli. Elapsed harvest and freezing
time? Half an hour for the peas, an hour and a half for the
broccoli.
So far the two crops
seem to be about even, right? Now let's look at how much food
we've gotten out of those beds --- one cup for the peas, two gallons for the broccoli. When
you look at the food produced per hour harvest time, that's like the
difference between being paid $2.50 per hour and $50 per hour* --- I
know which one I'd choose.
Granted, peas do have a
lot going for them in other ways. They provide protein for our
bodies, and also fix nitrogen to feed the soil. They freeze well
(but so does the broccoli) and are finished in time for me to plant a
summer crop (though broccoli wins here, coming out a precious week or
two earlier.) We find them tasty and easy to cook with, too, but
no more so than broccoli.
This is the fourth year
we've grown shelling peas, and each year I was certain the problem was
the pea variety. Having run through four different varieties now,
I'm ready to accept that maybe shelling peas aren't the best crop for
our farm. Our snow and sugar snap peas seem to produce about four
times as much plant matter per bed, but we can't really grow more of
them since we only like them fresh. Maybe we'll skip the shelling
peas next year and double up on broccoli instead?
In fact, we could have
tripled our broccoli planting since I still have five empty beds that
are waiting to be filled with the other half of our sweet potato slips,
slowly budding in the sun room. Why maintain empty beds all
spring when they could be feeding us broccoli?
*I'm not suggesting we
actually get $50 worth of food per hour with the broccoli. I
didn't count in the planting, transplanting, weeding, and watering
time, and I actually have no clue how much frozen broccoli costs in the
store.
Hopefully
you're sold by now and can think of at least one use for comfrey on your homestead. So
how do you grow it?
Choose
a good location.
Comfrey isn't picky about soil quality, but it requires deep soil with
no hardpan, rock layer, or high water table to prevent the roots from
reaching
deep. Heavy clay is no problem, and is in fact preferred.
Although comfrey is moderately shade tolerant, it will be less
productive when planted out of the sun.
Propagate
your plants.
Comfrey is only grown from cuttings, so unless your pockets are deep
you will want to buy a few plants and then divide them up. The
good news is that one good-sized comfrey plant can be divided into
dozens of small plants, many of which can be harvested starting the
first
year. First dig up the large plant and cut off sections near the
top containing leaves --- each leaf crown area can become its own
plant. Then take all of the small roots that are left, cut them
into one inch sections, and plant them in a nursery bed one inch deep
and two inches apart. These youngsters can be transplanted into
permanent locations the next spring.
Prepare your ground.
Comfrey will outcompete almost anything once it gets a foothold, but
you could lose your crop to weeds while it's getting established.
So take a bit of time to root out any perennial weeds.
Plant
your comfrey.
Comfrey needs a permanent location, much like an orchard, since it's
very difficult to eradicate once comfrey has gained a foothold on a
plot of
ground. Space plants three feet apart in good soil, or half that
in poor soil. Plant in the fall (September to November) or spring
(March to May.)
Weed and
fertilize.
One tantilizing system consists of planting comfrey in the chicken
run. Since chickens don't like unwilted comfrey leaves, the birds
will weed
between the comfrey and fertilize it in the process, only requiring you
to add wood ashes or another form of potassium every few years to
balance the fertility. You can cut a plant or two every day while
feeding your chickens, and the poultry will eat up the cuttings the
next day once they're wilted. If you're not using chickens, dig
out any perennial weeds by hand and fertilize annually.
Harvest. You can begin
cutting leaves as early as the first year, but the plants produce the
maximum yield
starting in the third year. After several more years,
productivity will
begin to decline as the centers of the huge comfrey plants die
out. This is the point at which you'll want to dig up the plants
and divide them, or just turn in pigs to root out the comfrey and start
a new comfrey patch elsewhere.
Weeding
may be a boring job, but it has its perks. While ripping up big
weeds in the upper raspberry patch, Mark came across this tiny box
turtle. Ten minutes later, he found another! I guess our
berry patch has the box turtle seal of approval.
I have to admit that I'm
a bad, bad farmer. A good farmer would move the box turtles out
of the area since they like to eat strawberries and tomatoes.
Instead, I carefully relocated the pair to the shade under the worm bin and gave them a strawberry
apiece. What can I say --- finding a hatchling box turtle has
been my life-long dream.
Hills
boldly states that no other
plant will produce as much biomass for composting when grow in an out
of the way corner as comfrey. In addition, comfrey is a
much-lauded dynamic
accumulator, able to
stretch its roots deep into the
subsoil and draw up calcium, potassium, phosphorus, and trace minerals
that are out of reach of most other plants. Finally, comfrey's
C:N ratio is so low that it nearly
melts into the soil, creating
compost in next to no time. What's not to like?
When growing comfrey as
the raw material for compost, Hills recommends
taking six to eight cuttings between April and November. If
you're using a highly productive Russian Comfrey variety, you can
produce 100 or more tons of leaves per acre in this manner, and you
could
potentially double or triple that yield in heavily fertilized patches
on a small scale. The plants are cut two inches above the ground
when they are between one and three feet tall, allowed to dry for 48
hours to lower their moisture content, then gathered and
added to the compost pile.
An alternative use of comfrey as a fertility
plant is found in forest
gardening literature, which suggests planting
comfrey below fruit
trees as a sort of
living mulch. Last year, I tried this out, planting comfrey
around the
base of our nectarine, and now I'm cutting the comfrey every week or
two, allowing the leaves to drop down and produce a heavy mulch and
then compost around the tree's trunk.
On the positive side, I've
noticed that the under-tree area requires nearly no weeding, but I feel
like the comfrey may be competing with the tree more than it's giving
back with my frequent cuttings --- the nectarine's leaves aren't as
vibrantly green as the leaves of our two peach trees.
Unfortunately, I have no other nectarines to compare mine to, so the
data is very inconclusive. However, Hills agrees with my gut
reaction, noting that comfrey will steal potassium from fruit trees and
requires more nitrogen than the tree can handle well. I'm going
to keep searching for some other literature to the contrary, but for
now I'm thinking I would probably be better off planting comfrey beyond
the tree's spread and cutting the leaves to drop around my tree's base.
When we first started this irrigation
project the budget was a bit limited.
I'm sure it breaks every law
of proper electric wiring, but sometimes you've got to do what you've
got to do.
It's basically four 100 foot extension cords cobbled together and wired
so each pole is carrying 110 volts. I'm pretty sure this is close to
the maximum distance you should think about stretching these cords.
Electrical tape works well for sealing up the junctions where each cord
is plugged into.
We're going on the third year
of this setup. There was a problem in the
beginning with the pump connections, but I solved that by figuring out
how to make the contact points waterproof.
If you feel like you're
testing the limits of safety try picking up the
cord in question to see if it's giving off much heat while you have
your pump working. It's this heat
that can be dangerous and must be dealt with by making the distance
shorter or the electrical cord thicker.
Internet
sources tell me to harvest new potatoes when:
The potatoes begin to bloom.
The calendar changes to June.
The peas are ripe.
I noticed the first
flowers on our potato plants this weekend, so I decided to dig around
and see what's there. The result? The potatoes are past the
tiny new potato stage I love, and are already swelling into the
half-fist-size zone. I guess option 3 is the best indicator for
my garden since the peas have been ripe for a week or two, which is
just about when I should have harvested new potatoes.
Most
people harvest new potatoes by grubbing them out from around the bases
of plants, leaving some tubers in place to finish growing. I
opted to just yank out two plants since they were encroaching on my
biggest tomato's growing zone. This gave me a great opportunity
to explore the benefits of my modified
Ruth Stout method,
and I'm totally sold on the heavy mulch. The potatoes required
just a little digging with the trake, but they came out clean and
beautiful, with nary a spot of green. The area is also nearly
weed-free despite never being weeded (though I did toss a few more
handfuls of grass clippings on insipient weeds a few weeks ago.)
I picked a bowlful of
our stunning sugar snap and snow peas, cut up the first basil leaves of
the year, and added the rest of the ingredients for a modified Green Bean and
Potato Salad.
The taste of summer!
I am new to your blog thing (I can't even tell you how I stumbled across it!) and I have to tell you that it's wonderful! I haven't gotten far enough to find out where you are for sure, but someday I'll get there. It's so interesting to hear about all those things that I sometimes see and sometimes miss. I do have a one year old son, you know! Anyhow, thanks and I hope that I can get signed up for getting this sent to my email.
Sarah Stieren
aryyana@hotmail.com
Comment by
Sarah
— late Sunday evening, May 3rd, 2009
I'm glad to meet you, Sarah! You'll need to click on the RSS button at the top of our main page to subscribe to our blog. I'm not sure if there's a way to get it through email, but you will be able to see it in your RSS reader.
Comment by
anna
— late Sunday evening, May 3rd, 2009
I am just starting to garden in a new area and the soil is drying out way to fast, 12 hours. I have killed more than 1/2 of what I have planted. Some things are doing good in this but others just die, some in less than a day. I do have a compost pile and it is cooking down but is'nt ready yet, is there something else cheep (we live on a fixed income) I can do to help hold the moistor in the soil? I am in zone 8b in southern alabama, it is in the high 80s low 90s daily now.
I hope I can find my way back to get your responce,
Comment by
Lynne
— Tuesday afternoon, June 2nd, 2009
I am new to your blog thing (I can't even tell you how I stumbled across it!) and I have to tell you that it's wonderful! I haven't gotten far enough to find out where you are for sure, but someday I'll get there. It's so interesting to hear about all those things that I sometimes see and sometimes miss. I do have a one year old son, you know! Anyhow, thanks and I hope that I can get signed up for getting this sent to my email.
Sarah Stieren aryyana@hotmail.com
I am just starting to garden in a new area and the soil is drying out way to fast, 12 hours. I have killed more than 1/2 of what I have planted. Some things are doing good in this but others just die, some in less than a day. I do have a compost pile and it is cooking down but is'nt ready yet, is there something else cheep (we live on a fixed income) I can do to help hold the moistor in the soil? I am in zone 8b in southern alabama, it is in the high 80s low 90s daily now.
I hope I can find my way back to get your responce,