gardening

We moved in to our new house (5 acres!!!) in the middle of May. This meant that we didn’t have time to get any gardens ready, but we still did manage to get some things in the ground. PE is working on some lovely permaculture gardens for next spring that we will post pictures of soon! There are already 2 apple trees, 2 pear trees, lots of black walnut trees, and some wild blackberries on our property. Other than that we have a fairly clean slate to work with! As our friends say, we have less work because there isn’t anything to undo :)

After the last post about taking care of our friend’s chickens, the same friend decided that she had the itch to incubate some eggs! She decided that she was going to get Araucanas (they lay light blue eggs) and asked us if we wanted some. We decided that with our new knowledge of how easy chickens can be that we would go for it. We should be getting them sometime in November and are really excited about it! PE junior is also quite excited, he really liked going over and taking care of the chickens (including throwing food down on the ground for them to scratch).

Plant something: 7 tomato plants (from a friend who had extra) using a cool method (direct planting into sod) that some of our favorite CSA farmers taught us! 2 chocolate bell pepper plants and 2 yellow bell pepper plants using the same method. In our fall garden that I made using 3 boards and lots of organic soil (that I bought because I was itching to get things planted!) we have beans, peas, lettuce (several varieties), carrots, radishes, marigolds, and a really small variety of corn. We have 3 whiskey barrels that I planted grape tomatoes (a huge hit with my 2 year old and his friends!), basil (purple and regular), sage, parsley, and spearmint.

Harvest something: Tons of tomatoes, lots of bell peppers, beans, peas, lettuce, radishes, basil, sage, parsley, and spearmint. PE has been experimenting with some hay cutting and putting it up in our small barn.

Preserve something: I did several types of tomato preservation (before we got late season blight ARGH!). A couple of times I made a big pot of tomato sauce for dinner with carrots, zucchini, etc. (from the great farmers market that we have in town) and froze the rest in ball jars for later. I also made salsa and canned it, cold pack whole tomatoes (which I did not like the results of, but I will wait to make a decision if I will do it again until I eat them!) green tomato salsa, and green tomato chili sauce. We went to a friend’s house the day she was working on canning a deliciously wonderful smelling tomato sauce (the kind that baked in the oven for 4 hours!) and helped her so in exchange we got a jar of the sauce. We also made tomato paste using her cool hand powered food mill which she later brought all 3 jars over for us! She calls it PE junior sauce because he was such a good helper making it :) I also went to a friend’s farm with PE and his parents and PE junior and we picked 32 pints of raspberries! So lots and lots of jam in July. It is so good on fresh baked bread. I also made basil olive oil and froze it. The next thing for me is canning all of the pears from our trees! I’m excited to try out some different recipes and figure out what we like. I also need to get the rest of our herbs in and dry them/make something from all of the basil (mmm pesto!).

Waste not: Our usual compost and recycling. We took all of the CFL’s (that we bought we aren’t stealing from the landlord!) from the house we were renting and brought them to our new house. We took the light bulbs from the house here and put them back in the rental house. We are looking forward to having chickens to help with the cleanup of the apples and pears under the trees. For now the bees are in them and the deer come along and snack. The dog also does a great job cleaning up after PE jr. Also using all yard clippings, leaves, etc. on our new garden beds.

Want not: We got a Vermont Castings wood burning stove put in a few weeks ago and are hoping that we can have that be our only source of heat this winter (instead of turning on the propane heater). We also have a great exchange going on with a friend. I babysit for her one day a week when her childcare provider does not work and in exchange she gives us food from her farm, maple syrup that they make, and the latest is firewood. PE goes and uses their splitter and gets wood from their huge pile of wood that they were feeling like they would not be able to get through before it rotted. I also did an order from Raintree, raspberries, blueberries, cranberries, loganberries, gooseberries, and some other things I can’t seem to remember at the moment. We have some decent planting coming up in the next week or two! I have also been working on winter type projects; knitting slippers and scarves, making draft dodgers, and my next project is making corn heating bags.

Eat the food: We made the tomato sauce, and I have grand plans for some stuffed bell peppers. We also have lots of salad and beans. I hardly get the peas inside the house before PE junior is chowing down on them, and the grape tomatoes were his favorite snack this summer. I have been considering a special snack garden for him next year.

Build community food systems: I have already mentioned a couple here (friend with chickens, making sauce with a friend, and the friend who has an established farm that we exchange with). PE is working with people at our church to create an indoor winter farmers market either at our church or another church in town. I have also been going with a friend on some farm tours around the area. I get to see what different people are doing and get some ideas for what we should do around our farm, and also meet some more people who are doing lots of the same things that we are doing. I love that we are not the crazy ones anymore!

That is what we have been up to this summer! How about you?

We dug up a fairly reasonable 10 lbs. of potatoes, still intact after several hard freezes. While not a spectacular harvest, it was decent enough considering our clay soil, high moisture levels, and planting just a handful of potatoes (~3 lbs. worth?), it’s still heartening to know that potatoes truly can survive unharvested through a bit of winter. We cooked some up last weekend and even fed them to my office, but no ill effects or flavors reported (phew! ).

The next round of potatoes (and indeed the whole garden) will be grown in planters, as we’re expecting to move to our permanent homestead sometime during the growing season. One more new adventure in gardening...

In addition to all the veggies in our garden, we are growing a fabulous crop of poison ivy at our rental house. I knew we had a significant infestation after I had to abandon my first compost pile that was overtaken by a field of aggressive poison ivy sprouts. I had also noticed quite a few isolated patches spread throughout the yard. But I didn’t realize just how bad it was until I noticed that what I had thought were two tall, healthy, green trees were actually very dead trees with woody poison ivy monsters climbing their skeletons as high as 30 feet (above).

My plan is to smother the ground patches with mulch and slice into the base of the woody vines. I need to do the smothering without the landlord noticing, as he was concerned about it being “unsightly” (right...where nobody but us would see it?) and preferred we apply poison. While eradicating this plant may be one of the rare exceptions where I could justify pesticides, I prefer to try less destructive -- and probably more effective -- organic options.

As yesterday’s harvest (above) can attest, it’s amazing what you can get out of a garden even if you completely abandon it for more than a month. As I noted in the previous post, we were out-of-state for all of July, with the only garden support being a neighbor watering our hanging baskets. Even after we returned, however, it took us the better part of two weeks before we recuperated enough to spend much time on the garden. I finally found a weekend to get out there and tackle the weeds, spending a total of about four hours yanking them up, which in truth definitely didn’t qualify as “no work”. Actually, I prefer to let the weeds grow as thick as my thumb -- it's so much more sporting that way…

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...