Monthly Archives: May 2009

On seasonal eating

Posted on May 30, 2009 | 17 Comments

IMG_1389Pea season

“Guess what’s NOT for dinner tonight, folks?”  I have just walked in from the garden, colander brimming, and I am addressing my husband and daughter.  “SALAD!”

“Woo-hoo!” was the response.

Don’t get me wrong:  we adore salads in this house.  We easily eat between six to nine cups of salad an evening for dinner:  that’s the equivalent of about one of those huge bags of premixed salads you buy at the store…though ours is much better, of course ;)   Our daughter eats a good two cups by herself.  And it’s not like salads aren’t still on the menu, because they are.  It’s just that other things are ripening and moving the salad over.  Last night’s big harvest was broccoli, and it was really quite tasty.  Tonight will be greens of some variety, perhaps turnip or spinach or rapini, to pair with the pot of cranberry beans bubbling away on the stove at the moment.

Eating seasonally means you do need to take what’s available:  it’s completely different from “well, what do YOU feel like eating for dinner tonight?”  The garden dictates our diet!  One more day and that broccoli would’ve opened too much, another 5 days my spinach will be bolting.  While many people would find this incredibly limiting, I instead pity their narrow-mindedness and lack of opportunity.  Everything we eat is at its nutritional peak, still warm from the sun.

The downside, if it could be considered one, is when something’s in season, that’s what you eat.  It’s license to be a glutton, I think.  Asparagus!  Green garlic, multitudinous greens, spring onions, broccoli, Asian cabbages.  It’s not a bad way to eat, frankly.

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Posted in soapbox

On plant genetics

Posted on May 28, 2009 | 10 Comments

It took me a few years, but I think I have finally come to understand the onion family.  I now get their germination, growth patterns, nutritional needs, and their preferred storage temperature.  I also “get” their propagation.  Behold:  the best of the best of last year’s yellow storage onions (Copra, in case you’re curious).  Instead of gracing some savory dish, I want their seeds!

IMG_1412Behold the power!

I’ve done quite a treatise on onions before. We take a many-pronged approach to this wonderful vegetable, and don’t “just” eat storage onions all year; I reserve their exclusive use for the depths of winter.  But storage onions are important.  So I select the heaviest, non-sprouting, biggest ones to save for seed-making.  These three are actually from seed saved here, so they’re obviously well-adapted to the rigors of the clay soil and the relative neglect that is storage in my root cellar.  And here they are, shining on a day in May.

Simply placing them up to their shoulders in the dirt, I wait for them to sprout.  They’re in the back of a bed:  their seedheads can get quite tall (one in the greenhouse from a red storage onion is now over 5′) and let them do their thing.  I will harvest the seedheads when they look kind of dry.  When fully dry, they’ll get shaken over a white pillowcase and then the little black seeds will go into an envelope, waiting for next year’s seedling season to sprout anew.

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Posted in seeds

On garden anxiety

Posted on May 26, 2009 | 10 Comments

IMG_1392

Fava (broad) bean blossoms:  the good thing with gardening is once things are in the ground they mostly take care of themselves

So here it is, 6:00 a.m. on a holiday morning, and I am awake and caffeinated.  Why in the world am I up and around, considering I normally need a crowbar to get me out of bed an hour later on a workday?  Well, garden anxiety of course!

I would say that we have tried to structure our lives out here in the country to be relatively stress-free.  Our city lives weren’t terribly fraught, but they were busy.  Things are certainly busy here, but it’s different in that we are (mostly) in control of our time.  And now, during the spring-busy season, my projects are beginning to outnumber my regularly scheduled tasks.  While this is a normal, even expected occurrence, I woke up in a panic!  Ah!  I gotta get up and PLANT THE CORN!

Granted, gardening for me (and for most of us who do it) is an immensely enjoyable task with a tasty payoff.  I hope it never becomes a drudgery, a point of worry, a burden.  I doubt it will:  my ambitions are manageable ones, or, well, mostly manageable ones!  I suppose I just need to have a few more 5 a.m. awakenings, and days spent getting dirty, before things are back on track.  Then comes Preservation Season, of course…

Having a garden:  what an odd way to have job security!

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Posted in sweat

On pretty things

Posted on May 22, 2009 | 14 Comments

We’ve lived in our house for five springs now, and only twice have we had a full bloom on the tree wisteria in the side yard.  Usually frost gets the young blossoms, whose flowering coincides with that of the apricots and plums; when the wisteria blossoms die, so too does the hope for a big harvest (or any harvest at all) from these lovely stone fruits.  This year, we have blooms.IMG_1278

This picture doesn’t do it justice.  The smell is delicately sweet.pretty_2

And of course the blossoms are gorgeous.

Here’s hoping this turns out to be a fruitful year!  I *adore* apricot jam, don’t you?  Or plum jam, or dried apricots AND plums, and clafoutis, and dicing them up in salads, and and and…

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Posted in weather

On pecking order

Posted on May 21, 2009 | 9 Comments

IMG_1288

Little, but big enough for trouble

“Man, I cannot believe the slugs in the greenhouse,” I said to Tom.  “They completely deleaved my Arkansas Traveler tomatoes.  And I had the bantam chicks in there too for the day….Wait.  Uh oh.”

Yep.  Not slugs, chicks!  Buggers.  The thing to know about chickens is that their existence is very monkey-see, monkey-do.  So I am quite sure one little chick got a taste and the others joined in.  Tiny as they are, they can do some damage.  I am not worried about the tomatoes, though; they’ll be fine.

“Well, I do need to get them out of the temporary coop, and move them in with the Big Girls.  And the baby chicks need to move to the temporary coop, and then THEY need to move into the coop, probably earlier than they’re comfortable, when the rest of the chicks show up in early June.”

“You mean you’re moving them all to Gen Pop?  Is that safe?  Poor birds.”

The one thing that I know about chickens is that they need Their People (i.e., at least two others the same age).  What makes Chicken Patty and Queen (Bloody) Beatrice so sad is that they’re “only birds,” as Chicken Patty’s “people” are all in the freezer and Bea’s “people” are likewise very dead.  Bea we don’t worry about so much because she’s Queen and everyone defers to her.  Chicken Patty, the largest bird, is the most picked-upon.  And so it goes:  move the bantams in, they’ll get picked on; move the babies in, the bantams will pick on THEM, then the new egg birds will move in during July and the babies will pick on THEM.  (Let me be clear:  the picking (pecking) only occurs at group events like trips to the feed bowl or while waiting for the dirt bath.)  There’s safety in numbers though.  Everyone will work it out, eventually.

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Posted in chickens, etc.

On gardening adjustments

Posted on May 19, 2009 | 12 Comments

IMG_1260

Chive blossoms

On Saturday I pulled  a monster (4.5″ diameter) leek out of the greenhouse for dinner, and a friend says, my gosh, what did you do to that thing?  Nothing much, just the coddled life in the greenhouse.  So, she said, they’re like the Kobe beef of the vegetable world.  Oh yeah, I say:  I massage my leeks with sake daily.

She was on to something, though.  In point of fact, those greenhouses of ours are taking some getting used to, like all good tools.  My garden and food-preservation life has also needed to adjust.  With effort (mostly in the form of forethought), I will need to do a LOT less canning and freezing this year.  This, incidentally, is not the best news if I consider how much time was spent and how much food was preserved last year.  Well, it’s still good news; it’s just quite a bit of an adjustment.

So, I have had these greenhouses (hoophouses, polytunnels) for a year and a half now.  This is therefore my second spring with them and I now have my first full year of harvesting under my belt.  Like any beginning gardener, I am completely learning, completely figuring out how to manage (in reality, I’m flying by the seat of my pants).  But here it is, early May, and we definitely have had a salad for nearly every dinner for the last year.  We cleaned out the rest of last autumn’s veggies from the greenhouses within the last month.  And recently, we’ve been able to pull new (planted since Feb.) vegetables out of the greenhouses and gardens:  Asian veggies and brassicas mostly, like pak choy and broccoli and napa cabbage, as well as asparagus from outdoors.

This is great!  Preferring fresh produce whenever possible, I can really plan on doing a lot less canning and freezing over the summer.  Yes indeed I will still be chained to the stove for fruit and tomato season, and I’ll still freeze some green beans; for the most part, though, the garden and greenhouse contents need to adjust.  Less cabbage in the root cellar, less sauerkraut, time the fall and winter plantings to add more root crops, stage the production of staples like parsley, carrots, onions, and celery.

It also means I don’t need 70 tomato plants  again.  But the leeks?  Oh yeah:  about 100!

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Posted in greenhouses

On green views

Posted on May 18, 2009 | 8 Comments

_DSC3724Blueberry blossom cluster

These spring days are long, but short as far as crossing off items on the daily task list.  I wonder, quite frankly, if this is the reason that spring isn’t my favorite time of year.  It used to be, when I lived in Minnesota.  I loved–and lived for–the first loud blooms of the season: I’d take a pair of garden clippers with me when walking the dog at night to “liberate” some neighbor’s blossoms of the alley-overhanging shrubs and trees.  So many unappreciated blossoms!  And every morning, that pilfered  bouquet would shed onto the top of the polished dining room table, clouding the finish with that pollen, those petals.  Cleaning up after them was one of the only things I had to do.

And maybe that’s it:  the hurry-blurry life of spring on a farm:  so much happening, so much needing immediate attention, so much yet to be done.  It’s an effort to slow down and appreciate how quickly the world is changing around us.  Looking north from the kitchen window just this morning, I marveled at the sheer number of shades of green I could see.  This view looks toward the wooded end of the property.  I was slightly envious of the insects and other animals who can see more of the color spectrum than we can:  all I saw was lots of lime greens and chartreuses of new deciduous leaves, new coniferous growth, new meadow.  New.  And very variegatedly green.

It helps to slow down and look.  Soon enough, that view will melt into the dark green of summer.

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Posted in nature

To plant out or not to plant out

Posted on May 14, 2009 | 15 Comments

That is the question!

IMG_1254But I’m ready!  Tomatillo blossom

My non-scientific answer to that question is to ask myself, well, will the plant sulk?  Our normal temperature range at this time of year is highs in the low 70s and lows in the low 50s, but there is still the rare potential for frost and an even rarer instance where it could get to be 80.  This range, then, is not ideal for the heat-loving solanaceae family (peppers, tomatoes, eggplants).  It’s even worse for cucumbers and beans.

SO, I wait.  It’s hard! Especially when I didn’t have the greenhouses to distract me, this time of year is one spent waiting and watching the 10-day forecast.  Hard work, this waiting, this watching your lovingly tended seedlings grow more and more leggy and spindly.  But it is best for the plants.  Get them in the ground and they either become victims of those munching creepy crawlies or are simply done in, fainting like corseted Victorian maidens.  Or they survive.

But Thursday is Plant It Out day in our school gardens, so I will be “risking it” with okra, tomatillos, tomatoes, peppers, and those really fainting- and sulking-prone eggplants.  So, cross your fingers for us.  Unlike here at home, we’ve got the school calendar tick-tocking away on us.  Some plants might just have to sulk.

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Posted in weather

On missed opportunities

Posted on May 12, 2009 | 11 Comments

IMG_1167Celery seedlings by the hundreds

It is at this time of the year I start considering shortcuts.  There are too few hours in the day for all that we need much less want to do, right?  Why NOT just hop a fence here and there.

Well, even shortcuts require forethought.  Forethought, or at least opportunity.  Note, for example, the positively crazy self-germination of the open-pollinated Golden Self-Blanching celery above.  One plant (one!) out of 15 went to seed last year, its first year: these polite biennials generally wait until their second spring to do so.  Like all the umbelliferae, they’re prolific in the extreme…they believe in lots of seeds.  But anyone who’s tried to grow parsley or celery from seed will tell you it’s a trying endeavor.  They require soaking, they require up to 21 days to actually poke their heads above the soil.  They require effort, in other words.

And guess what I have in the greenhouse:  about 60 plants, three inches taller than these, that I have painstakingly sown indoors, coddled for weeks, and transplanted.

Humbug.  Where’s a fence to jump?

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Posted in seeds

On Mother’s Day

Posted on May 11, 2009 | 10 Comments

On Mother’s Day, our turkey hen Ruby hatched:

IMG_1218One fuzzy baby goose

and

IMG_1222one adorable turkey poult.

My mother’s comment:  “Does this make you a grandmother?”

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Posted in chickens, etc.

More chicken madness

Posted on May 8, 2009 | 9 Comments

Wow!  Commit to a fence, commit to more poultry, or at least that’s what it seems like this year.

IMG_1187-1Could YOU resist?

In one bold move on Wednesday, we doubled our egg-laying population.  Yep.  We should Just Say No to the feed store but as you know it’s hard.  We came home with four more chicks, seen left to right: one Silver-laced Wyandotte, two Buff Orpingtons, and one Black Sex-link (which is a Barred Rock/Rhode Island Red cross).

img_1184Note  how big their eyes are in their heads, and how their tails point up and their wings down.  This, as well as their tiny size, are bantam traits.

The bantam chicks are (thankfully) getting kind of big, or, well, bigger.  They’re due to join up with the Big Girls soon (our 7 laying hens and 3 guinea hens) as, well, our meat and egg bird order shows up on the first week of June.  It would appear that the three black-ish ones are not Ameraucana bantams but instead are Golden Sebrights.  The white one, my daughter’s personal favorite, is still a mystery as to what variety s/he is; and the little buff colored one in the center is a feather-footed creature who is quite fast, so I have been calling him/her Mercury.  This one is probably a Cochin.

Tom’s rationale for getting four more birds went as follows: “Well, the bantams are only half-sized.”

My rationale for the bantams was that they’re good setters.  However we have no idea what sex they are:  we certainly don’t need five banny roosters.

But, yeah:  crazy.  If all goes according to The Grand Chicken Plan, we’ll go into the fall with 7 old egglayers, 3 relatively worthless guineas, 12 new egg-laying pullets, 5 bantams, and 2 egg-bird roosters.  Thirty-eight meat birds are destined for the freezer.  And Chicken Patty will finally get her man:  we’ll keep one of the meat roosters as well as one red broiler pullet.  Thirty-one chickens!

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Posted in chickens, etc.

On pest prevention

Posted on May 7, 2009 | 15 Comments

img_1171

Office supplies in the garden:  sowbug-proofing the tomatillo seedlings

So many of the tricks employed to outwit garden-munching critters have seemed somewhat familiar to me, in different contexts.  I was thinking about it last night when I was rigging up these little collars.  “Ah,” I thought.  “This is a barrier method,” as in…contraception!  Yes, it’s true:  one can indeed draw parallels between pest prevention and, uh, well.  You know.  And yes:  the ultimate prevention of all would be not to garden:  abstinence works, right?

In all seriousness (not that birth control isn’t a serious issue), the sowbugs were having a field day with some of my greenhouse seedlings, and I needed to pay attention.  Sure, I do plant more than I need as both insurance and because I like to share my plants, so I can spare a few to the sowbugs (roly-polies, pillbugs); they tend to favor the weaker plants so are actually doing me a favor.  But it is a bummer to come into the greenhouse and see leaves sitting on the ground, stems munched straight through.  The plants are only vulnerable for a short time:  the greenhouse gets too hot and dry for the bugs’ preference, and the plants also toughen up and become unpalatable.  But in the short interim, these index cards work just fine.

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Posted in greenhouses, nature

On potatoes

Posted on May 5, 2009 | 17 Comments

img_1162Rejects, soon to be populating the compost heap

We planted potatoes this weekend.  This is about 3 weeks later than normal:  I kind of hate to think our harvest will likewise be 3 weeks later, but, so be it.  Planting them “on time” would’ve been futile.  Our very wet and very cold spring, coupled with the clay soil here, would’ve meant rotting potatoes.

There are seriously fewer things that stink as much as a rotten potato.  I have stuck my hands in all manner of awful things, but a sodden, rotting potato is a small water balloon of horror.

Likewise, the late planting meant most of the spuds were spookily sprouting little forests of white-armed sprouts climbing from wrinkled tubers.  Every year, we consume a lot but not all the potatoes.  Every year, I plant more.  Every year, I tell myself I need to find someplace colder than my basement to store them.  Every year, this mantra is repeated.

But this year, I am glad they’re in the ground.  This year the land grab continued as I to devoted even more space to these “apples of the earth” as the French so lovingly call them.  This year kind blogging friends have contributed to the variety by generously giving me five crazy ones:  All Blues, Swedish Peanut Fingerling, Purple Majesty, Huckleberry and Purple Peruvian Fingerling:  I am really looking forward to those beauties! What a little rainbow of colors. (My typical potatoes are much more pedestrian; most are now in their 5th season of seed potatoes grown here so I at least know they grow well.  They’re russets, Kennebecs, Pontiacs, Katahdins and Yukons.)  Including the new additions, there are a lot of potatoes in the ground now.

I wonder what’ll happen next year.

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Posted in seeds, sweat

For want of a nail…

Posted on May 4, 2009 | 14 Comments

A little neglect may breed mischief …
 for want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
 for want of a shoe the horse was lost;

and for want of a horse the rider was lost. -Benjamin Franklin, from Poor Richard’s Almanac

I have been thinking of this proverb for all the years that I’ve been a country bumpkin.  Substitute “nail” with “fence” and you’ll see what I am getting at:  many country problems are solved (magically) by fences.

However, I have…commitment issues with fences!  I just hate them.  I hate erecting  them, I hate maintaining them, I hate negotiating them, and I hate looking at them.  Would that I could let my poultry truly free-range.  They’d be happier, surely.  Happier, and probably dead.  My garden would be decimated, though, by digging chicken feet.  I would never harvest a ripe tomato without a peck mark in it.

Fences, however, aren’t all bad!  Containment helps; one of the reasons we didn’t get our dairy goats this year is we hadn’t a fenced-in area  in which to pen them.  I would be able to find *all* eggs should the girls be enclosed in a chicken-proof run.  And our turkey could sit on her eggs unmolested had her pen’s fence been tighter.  And the geese:  well.  The secret with them is to simply build something so high they can’t fly out of it.

But back to the proverb.  It’s not a fence I have been missing for all these years, it’s a post-hole auger! (smacks forehead.)

img_1154Beast, in repose

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Posted in sweat