Category Archives: sweat

Ripe for the picking

It requires a pair of scissors…

…and an excited and toothless child to harvest and then eat it

Get out the sunscreen, beach chair and the trashy novels!  I will be taking a break from blogging for the summer.  Expect maybe one post a week from me, hopefully every Monday.  (Psst:  put this blog in a reader if you don’t wanna miss anything.)

Of course I realize this is a bad time to quit the blah-blah if you might be in the beginning stages of making your own masonry oven, making your own cheese or making your own booze, as these are all things that are happening in real time at this little farm.  Having one’s own backyard greenhouse, chicken coop, and vegetable garden:  continue to consider me your biggest cheerleader!  Really, shortening the food supply chain to “you” and “yard” means lightening your carbon footprint considerably…and it’s fun.  Trust me on this.

I will leave you with a few favorites from the (yipes! 900-odd post deep) catalog.  As ever, if there’s something you wish to learn about I have probably covered it in some form or another so make good use of the “Search” box up above.  Make free use of my email as well as I do love hearing from you and am more than happy to answer any burning questions you might have.  But otherwise, have a fun summer!

On fear of food

On life without the had-boughtens

I am the bridge

Call me a peasant

This I believe

About 90% of vegetable gardening is merely keeping your eyes open.  I’d say another 5% is actual “work” and 5% is harvesting and storing but really, all that “puttering around in the garden”?  It’s entirely necessary.  It’s field work!  It’s direct observation!  Even with a glass of wine in my hand, I am WORKING, people.

And it is through direct observation that I realize my darned greenhouse seedlings are never ever gonna grow past the stubby 2″ phase unless I do something to stop the munching damage caused by the sowbugs.  I can’t do anything about the sowbugs barring absolute war so…I employ a simpler strategy.  In this instance, entrapment.

The caramel-colored blob is this year’s barrier method.  And “OB” = “Orange Banana,” a delectable paste tomato.

Last year I mounted an office-supplies war with indifferent results (the greenhouse was open-ended thus wind-riven; these collars up and flew away if not simply apart).  This year, I applied the stuff normally applied to tree whips (sapling fruit trees) to prevent girdling by other, equally hungry insects.  [It's called Tanglefoot; it's a gooey waterproof paste of wax/oil; used to be made in Grand Rapids but like so many Michigan companies it's up and gone away.]  Can’t say it won’t stop the bugs from decapitating the seedlings below the point of the goo, but it’s something.  Now, I stand back and watch.  And sip.  And watch some more.

I have said it before:  in matters of taste, there is no argument (De gustibus non est disputandum).

Now having said that, let me tell you about something I like!

All tools are personal things.  What works for you won’t work for me, and vice-versa.  And after early experiences, I have long maintained a Do Not Buy policy for my own garden toolshed.  I learned that I was wasting my money AND precious tool-storage space by succumbing to every short-handled tool whim.  I always used what I liked, and what I liked was never the new-fangled thingy I thought I needed to have.

Well!  After years of coveting, I broke my rule and bought this tool.

It does look positively murderous:  like the game of Clue, Mr. Green did it in the garden with the Korean Ho-mi!

It is the BOMB.  Seriously.  I have never planted potatoes faster, or planted peas with such ease.  Like all new things, you need to learn how to use it.  My only criticism is that the handle is overly large.  I purchased it from the stalwart folks at A.M. Leonard:  I can only guess (if it was they who made it that is) that those swarthy Germanic Ohio boys have bigger hands than my dainty blistered Irish ones…and certainly my hands aren’t much smaller than those gardeners of peninsular eastern Asia, from whence the design comes.  No matter.  There still is no ONE garden tool I turn to, and this one isn’t it either, so the diameter of the handle doesn’t bother me enough to have it changed.

I am glad to have added it to the collection.  And, goodness knows, it does look intimidating.  I think we can all agree about that.

I am not one to take myself overly seriously.  I also gave up a life of stress an eternity ago, it seems, when I left my city job behind.  However, every once in a while I will have a bout of “get it done” farm-related insomnia!  Like, ohgosh wouldn’t it be great if I could take two days off of work to at least get caught up on my to-do list?

And then I have weekends like last weekend.  It was a weekend in which I get so many things crossed off that I realize…my list is probably not long enough!

But, two non-weekend days off does sound nice.

Hard to tell, but the grape vines are pruned:  I always seem to leave more on the ground than on the trellises.  Number One at the top; Number Two at the bottom.

The kids really don’t help much with the trimming pickup, but they think the tractor is cool.  Number Two in the driver’s seat, Number Three (bottle baby) riding sidecar.

Kids are great as dance partners with your own kid, though.  That’s little Number Three.

And there are bunnies to pet.  It’s amazing how quickly they are growing; they’re a month old.  And:  we have six of the things!

Here’s the girl holding a baby and Daddy Dum-Dum to show you how big the babies will eventually get; not big in other words, as they’re Mini-Rex rabbits…and terribly soft.

And Ruby is officially on lock-down under the Chicken Tractor, complete with doghouse and 9 eggs.  Earl is verklempt!

Like I don’t have enough to do, I have decided that 2010 is the year I will make wine too.

In my aim to make this a full-service farm, wine has intimidated me.  I have said for years that indeed I will do something more readily enjoyable (for grownups anyway) with those 50 grapevines.  And wine as we all know certainly doesn’t start and stop with grapes:  dandelion wine, anyone?  Strawberry, blueberry?  Plum?  Well.  The process intimidated me, that is, until another D.I.Y. someone I’m getting to know kind of stopped, looked me up and down and said, well, why AREN’T  you making wine, considering everything else you can do?  It’s easy, he said.

Easy!  Well, we’ll see about that.  In the meantime, Craigslist is again my friend, this time with finding glass carboys.

(Now I am wondering if anyone’s ever made wine out of winter squash….)

Pine (Remembering Andrew Sie), by Thomas Allen, 2009

Not much happening on the garden front, so I thought I would share art stuff.  Tom’s got a portfolio in the January issue of Harper’s.

You can see more of his work here.

Sunday found me dodging the raindrops of a late autumn thunderstorm.  What’s with the fireworks, I ask that cloudy sky, don’t you know there’s outdoor work to be done? I got doused for my impertinence.

Plan B had me harvesting the last of the calendula blossoms for another batch of balm.  “Make balm while the rain falls,” then, became the activity of the afternoon.  I upped the quantity of beeswax considerably in this batch:  I enjoyed the easy spreading of the first recipe but this batch is solely for gifts, and I don’t like complaints about greasiness.  (Unbelievably, yes, people tell me to my face that they didn’t like to use that last batch, as it didn’t melt into their hands with the rapidity that alcohol-based commercial products will do.  This either means that I am the type of person who won’t take offense, or this means I have some loose-lipped, patently unworthy friends:  you be the judge.)

Really, there’s nothing easier than growing calendula:  once you have it, you always will.  And if you can melt oil in a pan and grate a bar of beeswax, this, too, can be yours.

And the consistency:  it’s up to you, so…no complaints!

Little Edie for scale:  bean bed with monster weeds

November!  It’s time for stews, simmering stock and lots of roasts. It’s also my last chance to put the garden to bed.

We have about a month before we can expect snow in earnest, which is good:  that garden is still a weedy mess, I confess.  Despite my usual routine of grass mulch and close plantings, the perennial weeds like dandelion and thin-leaved plantain will take hold between plants, and it is only now that the plants are gone that I notice.  So I am on a rigid routine of hand-weeding beds and paths, about 6 a day, before I cover them deeply in compost and grass clippings and leaf mulch.  All 26 outdoor beds will be covered about 5-6″ thick with this stuff, and some beds, like the cardoon/artichoke beds, will be covered by a foot or more.

Deep cover on the beds serves two purposes.  One, for the beds with winter crops on them (leeks, root veggies), the mulch prevents frost from settling in deeply…at least for a while.  The second reason for deep mulch is for the benefit of the soil itself.  The worms and other creatures will consume the mulch, tunneling through it, tilling it into the soil.  My thick soil has vastly improved these five years by doing this one thing:  mulching in fall, slightly tilling in the remaining mulch in the spring.

The best possible scenario is we get a few light frosts between now and mid-December and THEN blammo we get a foot and a half of snow, which most likely will remain (and get deeper) for the rest of the winter.  The mulch will stay in place that way.  Wait:  did I just say I want it to snow?

Epilogue, by Thomas Allen (c-print, 2009)

We’re off again on another art junket!  This time we’re bound for the old stomping grounds of Minneapolis.

We’d love to see you at Tom’s opening on Sat., October 24th, from 6-8 p.m. at Thomas Barry Fine Arts, 530 N. Third St., Minneapolis.

au revoir!

Thomas Allen:  Unreachable, 2009

We’ll be stepping away from the gardens, pets and poultry for a few days.  Tom’s latest show, all new work, opens in New York on Thursday night.

He’s had a review in The Daily Beast!  Check it out.

“What, you’re going away during Tomato Season?” came the incredulous query from a friend.  YES!  Not that I can spiff up enough to get all the dirt out from under my nails, but indeed, it’s time for a trip to the city.  And our daughter, ever the budding naturalist, is itchy to see rats in the subway tunnels again.  “There are no rats in the country,” she said.  (Only because she hasn’t seen them, surely.)

So:  if you are in town, come to the opening, 6-8, at Foley Gallery in Chelsea!

Boothby’s Blonde cukes in the all-volunteer garden

For the last three years, my daughter has had her own garden bed.

Never one to force the issue, I figured she’d either like the idea of having a space to grow her own stuff, or she wouldn’t.  Either way, whatever is growing in that bed is “hers.”  And, for the third year in a row, she hasn’t shown much interest beyond the initial seed-starting frenzy begun last winter.

That is okay.  The compost yields its gifts quite readily, and this year, in that garden bed of hers, there are: two prolific Costata Romanesco zucchini, four pie pumpkin plants, three butternut squash plants, four tomatoes, and one (at least one, can’t tell) Hubbard squash.  Oh:  and the above cucumber.

She has been delighted with these “finds.”  She considers herself quite the successful gardener.

Who am I to tell her that the garden planted itself?

The school’s Verde Puebla tomatillos and Riesentraube tomatoes

I have so many irons in the fire now I can’t think straight!  But that is okay.  I feel like things are getting accomplished.

But you should see how weedy the garden is…

I will be back to post later in the week.  Until then!

There was a time when I had beautifully manicured nails.  That time has passed, as has the time of business attire and an obsession with shoes.  I don’t necessarily miss my dry cleaning bills or shoe habit, but my hands could use some help.

Our little Christmas gift experiment was fun:  we made lots of lip balm, bath salts and hand cream for friends.  The kitchen got messy, but canning season sees a lot more general untidiness and stickiness, so I knew I would eventually get back to making more salves and balms.  And vegetable preservation season (also known as Tomato Madness) has not begun in earnest, but the flowers and herbs are truly exploding out there.  Time to mess up the kitchen!

Calendula (pot marigold, Calendula officinalis) is one of those self-seeding wonders that I allow into the vegetable garden.  Their seedlings are readily identifiable in the early spring, and they’re easily removed and/or transplanted to where you might need more color.  They’re not quite the pollinator-attracting darlings that, say, borage is, but selfishly, I love gold and orange, so these guys are allowed to stay.  They have many wonderful properties, too:  the petals are edible, and they contain antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and rash-healing magic within them.  In fact, I had used a calendula-based diaper rash cream on our kid when she was a bulky cloth diaper-clad babe.  Huh!  Well, now, I D.I.Y., with an olive oil, shea butter and beeswax salve.

Pretty, huh?  Will it bring me back to those lacquered nails and perfect cuticles of my city days?  Doubtful, but…it’s a step.

Meadow-encroached long bed now grass-free!

On Saturday, three of Tom’s students came to work in the gardens with me.  Considering my recent revelation of (duh!) how much more work gets done with help, I gladly, readily accepted!  And I am so thankful.

It took me a long time to come to this realization:  sometimes, I cannot do it all.  Sometimes, it’s quite nice to have help.

I would say my hesitancy to either ask for or accept help comes from that nagging sense of obligation that attends the help itself.   Would I be willing to return the favor, or would I always feel indebted?  I expect help, for example, with the school garden:  its objective is not so small (feeding the school) whereas my personal garden feeds my personal family.  And maybe that is it: my garden is selfishly mine, whose output feeds me and mine, plus a few other souls as serves my need for dispensing largesse.

We got a lot accomplished Saturday, whatever my feelings are toward accepting the help.  I will say I was rather surprised when a student made the offer, and even more surprised when two other students offered to join.  We shared a happy garden-supplied meal, ate a yard-supplied chicken, drank elderflower cordial and grape juice of the property, and finished with an egg-based dessert from the girls with our strawberries on top.  It was fun, we were dirty and sore.

2 of 8 garden zones, plus greenhouse, at my friend’s house

Having gardening friends is wonderful.  It is quite true, I do love all of you virtual friends, but having a flesh-and-blood person walk around your gardens with you “is so very much more better,” as my daughter might say.  I am quite envious of those of you who garden with partners, or have relatives or good friends with whom to weed and share tall gardening tales.  Gardening should be shared!

I have gardening buddy who has the idea that, between the two of us, we can figure out every single crop that can grow in southwest Michigan.  He’s got a few years up on me trying to figure this out.  He’s a weekender, coming in from Chicago; they bought their property in the dunes in the late 1980s and have been battling the deer, woodchucks, raccoons, and sandy soil ever since.  His gardens, frankly, are Fort Knox compared to my wide-open plain:  because he’s in the woods, he has 7’ high electrified chain link fencing running around each set of gardens.  I would guess he has twice my square footage under direct cultivation, all in raised beds.

He also has a greenhouse.  His is a “true” greenhouse, not a hoophouse but a proper building with supplemental heat.  Indoors he grows 16’ tall fig trees, as well as bushes of capers, bay, various citrus, curry, allspice, epazote, guavas. Outdoors, it’s much the same as I grow, plus a whole lot more fruit trees.

But before this year, he didn’t seed-save, and he didn’t use his greenhouse to grow salad stuff and vegetables in the winter!!  I will say I have shamed him into doing both these things now.  And soon, he’ll be putting in a hoophouse of his very own.

Because our gardening interests are different, they complement each other:  I am learning so much from him in terms of fruiting things, he from me in terms of…I don’t know, me being a stick in his side about using less energy and seed-saving.  But it is so fun to walk around and say, “has your zucchini ever done this?  What do you think it could be?” and getting a good answer.

I encourage you all to find someone with whom to garden, or at least from whom to learn.

Friends are also good for buckets full of poison:  rhubarb leaf tea, a general insecticide (oxalic acid kills sucking insects)

Goldie tomato with two suckers:  do you see them?

It is the time of year when I think I would save myself a lot of time if I simply used tomato stem-colored towels in my house.  As it is, all human towels (as opposed to dog or car or beach towels) in the house are white, thus, my personal one has the distinction of having a rather unpleasant sage-green cast to it.

Tomato tasks (trimming, staking, tying) are one of the least enjoyed of my garden repertoire.  I’ve opined on this issue probably every year I have been blogging, but it remains the same:  I do not like the work of tomatoes.  Perhaps it’s only because of the green sap that covers my arms and person; you’d think I was fastidious in my habits but let me assure you I am not.  And I don’t need to trim, stake or tie my tomatoes to get a harvest out of them but I do, because doing so encourages a better (bigger, less sickly) harvest.  And I do like a bit of tidiness in the gardens.

Ah well.  I can solve my problem easily by using those sage-colored dog towels in the basement.  But what would I complain about then?

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.