gardening

I spent some of the last few weeks breaking ground on a garden here in Yellow Spring. Since we’re in a rental, I can’t make the garden quite as big as we would like, but I’m grateful that the owner is flexible enough to let us dig one at all. It should be a great learning experience for gardening in Ohio and prepare us for larger-scale operations when we find a permanent farmstead.

It will also be an experience in growing in soggy soil, the exact opposite issue from what I faced in Florida. It turns out that our yard is not a swamp merely due to the recent heavy rains, but our neighbors informed us that there is a natural spring under our area. It is one of the many springs that gives our village its name, and is already proving to be a bit of a gardening headache.

There is a lull in the moving craziness on the Florida end at the moment, so I was able to discipline myself enough to post. We still need to figure out where we're going to live in Ohio, and we'll likely be renting for a year or so up there, which could present some challenges in trying to continue our development of a sustainable homestead. For instance, we need to figure out a way to keep gardening if our landlord doesn't want us to alter the landscaping. We also need to sort out what sustainable solutions we could carry with us to a permanent homestead.

In Florida, we're enjoying the winter gardening season. I pickled 8 jars of hot peppers out of the garden for Christmas presents (and for our own use) and I'm waiting for tomatoes to fruit.

Hot peppers are one of the few crops in my garden doing very well against the Florida heat and bugs. I have four hot varieties planted (although I think they might have cross-pollinated to yield some interesting fruits) and also some sweet bell peppers.
The first batch (pictured here) mostly went into our food processor with some cider vinegar to make a hot sauce, with the remainder going into work so my co-workers and could prove our manhood with a pepper eating contest. I plan on sun-drying the next batch and making them into a chili paste or powder (depending on how well I dry them).

Earlier in the season, several of my garden plants were wiped out by fusarium wilt including the six potatoes I planted in February. I had thought the plants had died too early to have produced any crop underground. Well, when I was cleaning out the bed last week I discovered 8-10 lbs. of ripe, unspoiled potatoes just hanging out waiting for me to harvest them! It was a pleasant surprise in an otherwise disappointing gardening season.

An essential requirement for sustainable lifestyles is locally composting as much waste as possible. This can be as sophisticated as a complex methane digester or as simple as burying the scraps underground. Most solutions, as is often the case, fall somewhere in between. In this post I will describe how I made the below composter in just a couple of hours last weekend.

I always enjoy it when my mother-in-law visits, especially when she saves me from making terrible gardening mistakes. For a few weeks I was watching an unknown "weed" grow in my garden, but had left just in case it was something interesting. When I showed my MIL, she said "that looks like a kind of tomato with a husk that I've seen before." Aha! Suddenly I realized that it was actually one of my ground cherries that apparently waited two months to sprout!

I was about a day away from pulling it, which would have been really unfortunate. Now I can't wait for ground cherry jam in a few weeks...

Who, me? I didn’t eat those strawberries out of your garden!

We will have no trouble feeding our dog after Peak Oil…

I tracked down some hay bales last week and I was finally able to fully mulch my garden. I also replanted many of peppers that never showed up -- I seeded them directly several weeks and the soil was apparently still too cool for the hot varieties. The potatoes, beans, squash, melons, and new tomatoes are all doing well. We've also harvested several radishes from the radish/carrot/lettuce corner already.

Peak Oil and global warming are enormous problems, but are still only part of a network of impending disasters -- all of which appear ready to juxtapose at the exact same instant. Between the riveting news debates over Donald Trump’s hair and the wardrobe malfunctions of Britney Spears, there recently appeared one of the most frightening (and shockingly underreported) news stories in recent memory: populations of the North American Honeybee -- the workhorse pollinator of American agriculture -- are plummeting rapidly.

As sources like CNN noted casually, pollinator species (including honeybees) have been in persistent decline for decades due to factors such as an invasive parasitic mite. But the mite is now ruled out as the cause for the current collapse -- the main suspects include commercial pesticides, genetically modified crops, or an unknown pathogen. Given the past evidence of pesticides’ effects on bees, my money lies on careless commercial operations indiscriminately spraying killer chemicals.

An interesting report on LiveScience today on growing crops such as tomatoes using diluted seawater. Apparently, tomatoes grown using the method produce higher levels of antioxidants. From the article:

The researchers found that growing tomatoes in 10 percent seawater improved antioxidant levels significantly, findings they detailed in the April 4 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.