On track to beat the 3.25 pound monster I grew two years ago? Perhaps!
I am going to be completely boring and unimaginative and give you guys a reread of one of my favorite posts.
I’m a bit tired today: we put away 26 quarts of strawberry, strawberry/rhubarb, and blueberry jam last night for the school’s snack pantry. So much more to do! But exciting nonetheless.
Posted in soapbox
Today’s berry, bubbling in the saucepan: gooseberries
Gooseberries. Finally, we have enough to “do” something with them, after three years of off/on harvests, so I grabbed a bowl yesterday and headed outside. “Do you want to pick the gooseberries with me?” I asked my daughter. “Nah, too prickly. Can I pick the strawberries instead?” Smart child.
I get all misty when I think about gooseberries. A green variety adorned our wedding cake, they and some golden raspberries and some very red currants. The cake probably had no flour in it but was made instead with almond flour, honey, and lots of egg whites. It was a perfect summer cake, perfect for me that is, an avowed cake-hater, especially of the wedding variety.
But today I made four pints of jam. Because I am usually terribly time-crunched and have no patience to tip and tail these things, what I do with little fruits like these is cook them down and run them through the fine sieve on my food mill. The skins and those nasty pointy stems are left behind, and I measure out the resulting juice and pulp and figure out how much sugar and pectin is required to make a small batch of jam. I cook down other seedy fruits the same way: damson plums, cherries and those aronia berries have seeds too small to reach but (in some instances) too vulnerable to the food mill’s crushing turns so they instead go into a chinois that has a pestle to wring the juice from the pulp. It sounds like I might have a crowded kitchen and it is true, I do, but the chinois does come in handy.
I just adore fruit, and fruit jam is one way to preserve all this bounty. I will mention a few other ways in some following posts.
Posted in food
Another day, another berry to blog about
I picked up some aronia berries at a friend’s house on Friday. This species of native berry is very high in antioxidants, especially the black and purple varieties; it has been labeled a “superfood” for that reason. The variety we picked, Aronia albutifolia, isn’t so very high in this magical property. No matter. The red, sweet, jujube-shaped fruits were plentiful, and I got a gallon with which to experiment.
Traditionally one of the fruit sources found in pemmican, these bushes or shrubby trees normally yield clusters of pea-sized fruit in the fall. Well, MY calendar told me it was late June, so I kind of scratched my head about this a bit: can these really be red aronia berries (also called chokeberries)? It would appear that they are. Some time ago, these eastern American trees got exported to Poland and Russia and it was there that they became cultivated enough to be used widely as a juice berry, and its progeny got tweaked enough to ripen in June. Normal aronia berries, the shrub-borne black variety (A. melanocarpa) ripen much later and are entirely too tart to be eaten out of hand.
Personally, I am highly suspicious of anything that is labeled a superfood, a culinary “magic bullet” to cure all that ails a person. I also think that many people who look to a food as medicine aren’t doing the hard work necessary to maintain basic good health. Diet and exercise certainly go a long way to keep the doctor away. Eating a decent diet and getting up off the couch is just plain too hard for most Westerners: thus, let’s look for some tonic, hopefully found on my grocer’s shelf, that will offset all my couch-sitting, all those extra pounds around my middle.
I’m also suspicious of the purported health claims tagged on things like aronia berries. If it were true that eating these things magically cured you from ever getting cancer, do you really think this would be the first time you have heard about them?
With my skeptical eye, then, I turned these into jelly early this morning (with some of our grape juice and fresh cherries to help flesh out the taste). A little slice of medicine on my morning toast? Doubtful, but tasty.
Posted in food
As I was making strawberry jam this morning, the estimation process I was going through reminded me that this was where I began, fourteen years ago. I’ve made it fairly clear that I think the world would be a much happier place if nearly everyone had chickens and greenhouses in their back yards, and normally walked around with dirty knees, muddy boots and juice-stained hands. Alas, not everyone shares my dream, but more than a few of you keep coming back here to read this blog, so…I’m going to keep blathering on about the things I hold dear, like making lots of strawberry jam.
I started small. Granted, I started as a city girl: each spring found me at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market trolling the aisles for the best price on the tiniest, tastiest strawberries for my year’s-worth of strawberry jam. For myself, as a single person, four pints was sufficient to keep myself in jam. Repeat the routine for raspberries, green beans, tomatoes and one trip per summer down to this neck of the woods for a bushel of peaches and I had (for me) a full larder, a full freezer. My backyard garden helped with tomato and bean preservation, but my yard was far too shady and small to really have sufficiency in mind.
Fast-forward to five years ago: we’re on a farm now, I am married and have a toddler. The garden is in, the local fruit farms beckon with their wares, and I have started to go a little crazier in the stocking-the-larder department. My initial aim was to have enough “usual” stuff to can and freeze, but I had no ambitions to be self-sufficient in certain things like onions, carrots, celery or even garlic. I had dreams of a greenhouse, dreams of chickens, but this first spring I was happy just to have 1500 square feet of raised-bed gardens. And this first spring, I put away two flats of strawberries in jam. Whew! Thirty-two pints of jam!
Today I still harbor no ambition to be self-sufficient in fruit: I can still forage or glean or even outright buy fruit at much less cost (labor) than it would take me to grow all of my own. But vegetables? Certainly, vegetables are do-able, and the amazing varieties of vegetables one can grow from seed should be reason enough to turn over some dirt to grow them. Even onions and garlic became less daunting, and geez, I have even mastered leeks! And I don’t think I will ever be satisfied with a store-bought carrot again.
Anyway, the point of all this is to just start small. Go ahead and try to put away enough strawberry jam to last your household until next year. Figure out how many row feet you will need to freeze enough dinner-side sized bags of green beans for a year. Plant enough garlic to take you through from July to April, when the first heads of green garlic can greedily be pulled up and eaten. It’s a fun game, and it will make you feel proud of yourself, seeing all those gleaming rows of jars, frozen bags, and braided ropes of garlic heads just waiting to be eaten.
Posted in sweat
The turkey family loves the new driveway ornament too
I would like to thank the tree gods for:
but: did that huge branch need to be so close to the house, AND did it have to happen when I was home alone in the kitchen a mere 15′ from where it fell? Not that I am truly ungrateful, I’m just saying.
Posted in nature
Daikon radish pickles: RECIPE NOW IN COMMENTS
Yes, it is that time of year again: big pots of boiling water on the stove, zero counterspace available due to all the green and fruity produce coming in the door.
Interestingly, however, the preservation being done today (Saturday) is not being done for this family. No: the school garden is just as busy as our home gardens, and many of those lovely Asian vegetables planted in April are ripe and ready. Likewise, it’s strawberry and rhubarb season around here, and we are on the cusp of the sweet cherry season.
The one thing I have discovered (and you will all probably laugh at this) is that WOW having lots of hands doing the work makes any task go so much more quickly. I say this admitting that for today I am elbow-deep in making the second batch of kimchi and the first batch of radish pickles all by myself, but it is quite amazing how much fun, and how productive, those Thursday Weed and Feed evenings in the garden truly are. So much gets done! Makes me think I should have a team of my own here on the farm…
Other than working in the garden, another volunteer opportunity for the school community is what we’re calling “fruit tithing.” One of the fun things to do with your kids in the summer is go to one of the myriad pick-your-own fruit places in the area: there are many, verging on hundreds, of these farms. We are asking parents to set aside some portion of that fruit for the school. We are having organized picking sessions with the school community too, but if folks want to go ahead and pick on their own, we’re giving them instructions on how to process and freeze these fruits to give back to the school. It is all part of our Slow Snack initiative wherein we source local, organic, nonprocessed foods for the school-wide snack.
But what to do with all that fruit, of course, is yet another volunteer opportunity, and through the summer we are having canning parties at a local cafe/shop owned by a parent at our school. So every two weeks, we will be jamming, jellying, pickling and sauce- and salsa-ing the contents of both our garden and these fruit-y gifts from the parents.
All of this is so exciting, I must say. What started as a simple “let’s make the school snack a little bit more nutritious” a couple of years back has now blossomed into a greater notion that Food Does Matter, especially the food consumed by our youngsters. Having them participate in the complete foodway that is seed-to-table eating is a knowledge base that we hope will serve them their entire life. Will it discourage them from grabbing a Twinkie and picking up a spotty heirloom organic apple instead? Well we shall just see. We do know, though, that all habits (good AND bad) start early.
Posted in school garden, soapbox
Part of last year’s squash haul
I guess I AM a bit obsessed: on top of all the planting, weeding, and harvesting on the garden task list this week, harvesting the biennials’ seeds is also a top priority. Spinach, beets, and three types of onions are ready to harvest, and then there are all those crazy lettuces that are likewise on the brink. (And winter squash: I saved a few for seed of the ones that made it through the winter…it’s nearly past time to cut them open and haul out their seeds to dry.)
Seed-saving seems to have taken over as the subject of my blog posts, anyway…
Verily, I admit I save more than I use; it’s one of the reasons I have started seed-trading with local gardeners and even some online gardening friends. The local angle is pretty great as seeds from the plants grown in this particular patch of earth will more than likely do well in other Michigan gardens. But somehow the idea of seed-sowing over a wider patch of the world also appeals to me. In point of fact, I believe I will start a limited seed trade with anyone who’s interested. So, over the next…well, month or more, I hope to have a bit of a list on the sidebar of this blog for you to peruse. All seeds will be open-pollinated, organically grown, and under two years old.
If you are interested, simply look at the list and email me and we’ll figure out a suitable arrangement for getting the seeds to you. I might require some seeds from you in return, or maybe your first-born child. You know. Something equitable and fair.
Posted in seed trades
Lettuces, gone to seed
Ostensibly, I understand how big things get in the garden. Through years of trial and error, I *get it* that a blooming lettuce plant can reach 3′ tall and wide, and, should I wish to save seeds from this plant, I will need to allow that much space for the plant to do its thing. Indeed, producing a plant for its seeds can be a lot more of a hassle than producing it for its food, mainly because of this land grab. It becomes tough, say, to make the decision between saving the seed from one’s surprisingly frost-hardy oakleaf lettuce or yielding that same space to that tiny pepper plant growing in its shade in the new greenhouse. Considering I didn’t expect that lettuce to survive our particularly freezing winter, that pepper must suffer! (Is this a Sophie’s Choice kind of decision? I am not sure. There’s still plenty of time for peppers.)
Seed-saving can become an obsession in itself, of course. Honestly, saving *all* the seeds from this one lettuce means I will be self-sufficient in oakleaf lettuce for 10 years and I still would never be able to use up all the seed! YAY. That makes me happy, frankly, in a hole-up-in-a-bunker kind of way, in a full-root-cellar kind of way. And I like being happy,even if it means my pepper plant temporarily lacks proper real estate.
Posted in seeds
You know, I would say I trend more toward prude than its opposite, but, as a seed-saver and new poultry husbanding person, I have become more aware of sex in the flora and fauna around me. There are two reasons for this, prudishness be damned: one, I *need* to pay attention and two, birth/sex/death is really…not closeted in farm life.
So in the interest of the didyouknow, I will heretofore tell you that spinach is the only commonly cultivated annual vegetable that throws either male or female flowers. I can just see your eyes glaze over as I reveal this tasty tidbit! Wha? you say. Well! Most plants propagate by being a lot more AC/DC (that is, bisexual): they circle back and forth between throwing male and female flowers, either to self-pollinate or to time the blossoming of the male flowers to correctly match up with the female flowers, with the pollen either being wind-blown or availing itself of a willing intermediary pollinator (birds, bees, etc.) between the male and female flowers. Of course, it’s our human world that absolutely categorizes everything as “male” or “female,” and I think that’s where a lot of problems start, and not just for plants.
Male spinach with its tendrils, with female plants beyond
But back to spinach. Either a seed produces a female plant, or it produces a male one. If you let them go to seed, you hope for both to ensure yourself a nice set of happily fertilized ova. And luckily nature does lend you a hand: like most other species in the natural world, the chances of having either a male or female seed of two is roughly even.
Female spinach, with seeds
Posted in seeds
Hedgerows: doesn’t that sound so very…English? I confess to a certain admiration for the long gardening tradition of the British isles, and I readily admit having a huge crush on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. But hedgerows. I can’t claim to have hedgerows here in Michigan. For one, our property lines only go back about 100 years (not nearly long enough for a proper hedge) and two, ours are poison ivy- and bramble-filled ditches, not something as tempting a foraging target as some misty Cotswold or Yorkshire hedgerow.
But it is the season for elderflowers, the pretty creamy-white blossoms of the black elderberry. And–wonder of wonders–I have elderberry bushes in the hedges ditches around my property. So! Time to get out the scissors and the wading boots (all the better to fend off the poison ivy tendrils) and get snipping.
In honor of another Dorset bloke who’s a champion hedgerow forager, I made some of Hedgewizard’s elderflower champagne this week, as well as elderflower crepes. It will be a while before the fizzy, nonalcoholic champagne can be sipped and enjoyed, but boy did those crepes get eaten quickly! Our gooseberries are near ripening, too, so it’s time to try Hugh’s Elderflower/Gooseberry fool.
It is quite fun harvesting food from the farm I had no hand in growing, you know? Just watch the poison ivy, which, alas, is not edible.
The girl models edible jewelry in the form of garlic scape bracelets. That’s part of the first round of garlic drying on a rack behind her, a harvest of about 10 pounds of softnecks from my tiny first-year bulbil sets. They didn’t get as large as I thought but this was still a successful experiment.
Many, many things bloom and ripen at the same time and it is quite a boon for both we food gardeners and the people our gardens feed. Strawberries and rhubarb, tomatoes and basil, peas and spring onions are a few at the top of my head/tip of my tongue. And there are items we seasonal eaters absolutely look forward to all year: for me, it’s that one big pot of asparagus risotto, that first gluttonous binge of shell peas, that first ripe tomato, warm in your hand.
Somehow, however, my convergence gets off track, and it’s (mostly) my own damned fault. I mentioned that my potatoes went in late this year. I also mentioned that garlic is ONLY getting the greenhouse treatment from now on because the heads so produced are exceedlingly large and (thanks to the time warp that’s greenhouse living) early. This means, therefore, that my garlic scapes are going to miss the first grabbled potatoes by as much as a month. SIGH. This, this is a shame. Tiny potatoes and minced garlic scapes! Divine!
Scapes are little twisty miracles all on their own, of course. The flower stem of rocambole or hardneck garlic, there is raging debate if they should be left on or chopped off to ensure bigger heads below ground. Frankly, I have never noticed a difference in the head size of scapes that escaped. But I do what I can to harvest them all. They can freeze successfully, and even have a fairly long life in the refrigerator if you keep them in a damp towel. I won’t go that far. All my potatoes are gone (and this is no hardship; they’re staples 10 months of the year) so I actually (gasp!) purchased three local Russets from the farm stand down the road.
I couldn’t let those scapes go without a little spud love….
Posted in food
Okay I swear this will be the last poultry post for a while on this (ahem) gardening blog, but it was a big weekend around here last weekend.
Six appears to be the magic number.
She’s not exactly doing the Hovercraft thing, but her tail is quite fluffed out. She was giving me the warning crackle the whole time I visited.
Here’s Chicken Patty with her six foster chicks. She’s doing very well with them, though admittedly she was getting kind of bored in the dog kennel I had set up for her in my gardening shed. So, I moved her and the babies out to the Chicken Tractor, which is (conveniently) set over the goose/turkey nesting box. Considering the geese and turkeys have other sleeping arrangements, this works quite well for Patty and her little brood. The babies are five slow-growing Cornish like their adopted mama and one little red broiler.
And Yoli, our goose, hatched six goslings this weekend, of the 9 eggs she was sitting. Isn’t she just the prettiest bird? Look at that refined, beautiful head of hers.
Here’s the back end. Can you count three little legs? Must be warm in there…
Posted in chickens, etc.
Recently I was discussing my greenhouses with some non-gardening folk and it was brought to my attention that hoophouses (polytunnels, etc., i.e., what my greenhouses are) are…not pretty. “I don’t think we could have them in our neighborhood,” came the supposed-to-be-softening following statement.
I will here admit I was thrown by this comment. Word to the wise: do not EVER tell a mother that her baby is UGLY. She might just pop you one.
So, here I am, about to tell you more things that *I* can do out here in the country, where aesthetics obviously do not matter (!!). Most gardens aren’t as blessed as my (UGLY) country garden is with all its sun. Sun, sun I have, in spades. It’s not the best thing for tender things like lettuces and certain brassicas because sun (mostly just heat) causes them to toughen and bolt into seed. I do what I can to extend the lettuce season as far as I can, knowing I’m chasing a fleeting thing. I interplant, usually growing lettuce seedlings in between quicker, taller-growing things like fava beans and broccoli. And I seek the shade of the few tall perennial things located in the garden, like the lovage pictured above. This tall, now blooming plant is south of this lettuce bed. Aesthetically pleasing, no?
And note the ugly baby at the top right
And then I do hee-haw things that no self-respecting HOA would ever allow, like putting weed block over old political sign frames, and fastening it down with clothespins. Effective, I will tell you!
Nixie Knox says, what’s all that racket?
As of Wednesday, 3 June, our household has 74 feathered creatures. The tally: 50 day-old chicks (40 meat/10 egg), 5 teenaged bantams, 3 teenaged egg-laying chickens, 7 egg-laying chickens of various ages, 3 guineas, 3 turkeys, and 3 geese, with Mother Goose sitting on 10 eggs which are probably duds.
That is a LOT of poultry, people!
Chicken Patty, doing time in solitary confinement
The grand experiment for the day? Chicken Patty has gone broody again (!!) so I put her on a nest in a dog kennel and then stuck a chick under her last night. Shhh. It appears to be working! Another chick tonight…
hisshissHISSS!
Baby Goose is called Jeffrey (from Charlotte’s Web of course), though it’ll be a long time before we figure out if he’s really a he. This gosling was hatched out by our ever-patient turkey hen Ruby on Mother’s Day. She ignored him as she had her own little baby to tend to, so he went right in with his parents the same day. Considering Yoli (Yolanda, the goose) was sitting, I figured Mel the gander would either attack him or would care for him: let’s just say that hanging out with Dad all day has been great for Jeffrey. He’s HUGE. Mel’s done a great job.
Ruby and baby, quite happy in the meadow
Baby Turkey has no name other than Thanksgiving Dinner. S/he is doing so well with Ruby. Ruby flew into the pen with the geese and our tom turkey Earl a couple of days back so they’re all happy together in there. In general, parent-raised poultry is the best thing ever. They may be shy of people but I swear their brains and their bodies grow much better this way.
The bantams. Ah, the bantams! I have three roosters of the 5 birds, and I have no idea: they could ALL be male. Sigh. They moved in with The Big Girls about a week ago. The guineas hate them, but they’re too fast for even the guineas to peck. The three are trying to crow but it sounds like a bunch of chicks with headcolds.
The three egg-laying chicks used to be four, but we lost one, one of the two Buff Orpingtons. I have had the remaining three spend their days in the garden and greenhouses, nights in the temporary coop. Living in a little temporary coop all day makes them stupid, I think: letting them out and dealing with what little damage they do out there is fine as a half-step (kind of like finishing school) before life with the Big Girls. They’ve learned to forage, scratch, and get dust-baths, all without fearing for their lives. They move from the temporary coop to life in Gen Pop on Friday.
And the fifty peeping babies. Sigh, babies! With luck this will be the absolute last year I have to order chicks. (With luck, crossing fingers, burning sage, doing a voodoo dance, etc.)
Verloe says, come join my flock!
Posted in chickens, etc.
It is true that some architects have…skyscraper complexes. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I have one, but I do appreciate structures of all kinds. And garden trellises are one functional structure that I love, skyscraper complex be damned.
I suppose I crowd my plants more than wide-row gardeners do. Admittedly, crowded plants can reduce yields because the poor plants are stressed, thus game for predation from all manner of bugs or fungi (crowding leads to less air movement, thus creating a happier growing medium for certain wilts, etc.) But I am a succession planter, and my soil is pretty darned good…I say this fully admitting it’s more the fact that clay is a fertile medium, and that my judicious compost, manure and mulch applications only replace what the plants suck out. So I don’t worry much about crowding.
Pathetic first-pick of strawberries on Tuesday. You have to know I find this picture hilarious because she never looks like this and has only just put two berries in her mouth while I was adjusting the camera, thinking I wouldn’t notice. But the photo other than providing humor for her mother shows a couple of the trellises behind her.
But back to trellises. I have seven permanent trellised bed areas in the garden. There are also a few teepees of sticks, etc. that are scattered around for effect. Lots of verticality, in other words, mostly to support the wonderment that is the Pole Bean. Pole beans, cucumbers, certain members of the winter squash family, peas…all these lovelies appreciate something vertical to clamber up. And I am here to accommodate them.
I succession plant them, too: on beds that are staked east-west, I plant peas on the north half, and once bean season starts, I plant pole beans on the south half. Same trellis, different plants; the peas dying back gracefully when the beans go into full-production mode. I do the same thing on the north-south staked beds, though I plant first in the east, as the west sun works better at that second planting of beans or cucumbers. And I do succession-plant the cucumbers. I start two batches about a month apart, one in the end of May and one late June: two weeks after each of these plantings, I get the dill going for pickles.
Good golly that sounds like a lot of work. It’s more work to type it up, I swear, than it is to plant these things! All I am saying is that if you have a small garden and want more stuff, then go vertical, and share that trellis. Happy building.
Posted in sweat
Cilantro seedlings (they can stay, for now)
Weeds in the paths: my own version of broken windows.
The broken-windows theory in urban issues means that minor things that are otherwise easily remedied (broken windows, graffiti, trash) tend to snowball, and then the neighborhood slides into urban decay. Its gardening parallel for me is weedy paths = quite quick chaos in the garden beds. Does anyone else subscribe to this theory?
My solution, such as it is, is to cover the paths with woodchips. About 20 tractor loads (10 pickup truck loads) should do the trick for a solid year, with a few poke-throughs during Year Two. I am now on Year Three of the woodchips in the paths, so they don’t work terribly well any longer. Sigh.
So, I am trying to figure out which is less work: getting 20 loads of woodchips from a neighbor>>schlepping them around the paths, or weed>>paths>>with>>hoe>>every>>single>>weekend until the snow falls.
I think I know my answer.
Posted in sweat
Glad you came to visit!
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