Sometimes, the garden is about simply living!
In this post, I share a glimpse into what we did in the garden today.
Think pink and the 5th birthday of my middle child. Much sugar and fun was had.
Hope your day was as amazing as ours!
Archive for the ‘growing’ Category
Gardening as refuge
On July - 12 - 2008
Sometimes, the price of oil and the collapse of the housing market and the fall of the freddies and maes and indimacs of the world, that can all weigh on you a bit. On the other side, the feeling that there are things that need to get done at home and at work can become overwhelming as well.
There is this cognitive dissonance between working on self-sufficiency at home and then having to commute 80 miles a day that can cause a low-temperature sort of boil or ferment that can add to the stress.
I am also rather frustrated with the way a recent meeting I set up for re-localizing the food production in our region went. One person came (she was awesome! Hope to get to know her better and I am sure she will be doing neat things) and then we were rather negatively harassed by a very drunk and increasingly belligerent homeless woman.
Really threw us both off kilter.
Made me think a lot about how complex community building and crafting has to be. I came to overt terms with something that has been with me all my life (due to growing up with an alcoholic grandfather): I do not suffer drunks at all. I throw up an instant zero-tolerance mindset. I know I should be tolerant on some compassionate level but it is hard for me. Part of it stems from this expectation that I have that adults are expected to be functional on a substantial basis otherwise they are wasting the time of the community. This made my thoughts go toward how I would cope with dealing with this sort of problem if society went into a collapse mode and we all had to fend for ourselves much more.
Needless to say, this is all heavy stuff!
I am extremely grateful to be able to walk out my back door and into our garden and tend it, pick a few weeds, nip the suckers on the tomatoes, look for incipient disease or infestations. I get to go look at the chickens in the chicken tractor or in the chicken run. I can go and watch the sweetheart goats, romping and nibbling bushes, head butting each other. I can watch the llama, the shy thing she is. I can wander to the edge of the garden and pick wild blueberries.
I am going to share some of the scenes around the garden in the past week. Hope you enjoy and perhaps relax a bit yourself.
Peas, such beautiful peas.
We had our first batch of fresh shelled peas yesterday, super sweet!
Cabbages grow with such rigor, I am LOVING them just as plants right now. I planted loads of them along with some hot peppers.. am going to make some sauerkraut and also kimchi with lactofermentation (using whey from raw goats milk). This will be a fantastic source of vitamin C and other things for the rest of the year.
Broccoli is a luxury but I love growing this vigorous enormous plants! Its my conceit 
Cherry Peppers will be used in the kimchi and perhaps other sorts of pickles.
Chickens in the tractor, hanging out.
Tomatoes growing like gang busters.
Bad baby goats that are trying to and having success getting into the chicken pen. Why? I have no idea other than – its there, lets go there.
Misty who has one black eye and one blue eye.
Blueberries
Acorn squash
Thanks for visiting!
Making chevre cheese from our home-milked goat milk
On June - 22 - 2008
(This was cross-posted to Nika’s Culinaria and Peaknix)
We are enjoying our independence from the food chain. We get our eggs and our milk (and now cheese) from our backyard. We eat our salads from our backyard.
If you don’t now, what are you waiting for?!
If you think food prices are high now, you will be pale with shock soon enough. Think oil-based fertilizers, oil-based pesticides, oil-run tractors and trucks, think floods, think drought, think 2008.
The seed companies are reporting a 40% rise in seed sales this year (they were shocked, didn’t see it coming, these people need to get on the web more often).
Now that the baby goats are not such babies and are fully weaned, we have more goat milk to work with. We go through less than 1 gallon of fluid goat milk a day for Baby O (who adores goat milk and is sensitive to lactose in pasteurized cow milk).
Our milking doe, Torte, gives us about one and 1/2 gallons of milk a day. Over two days, we then have one extra gallon of milk, works out nicely.
You may or may not know that it is hard to make cream or butter from goat milk because the fat doesn’t separate out (because the fat globules are smaller and stay spread out, like its been homogenized). We could make it if we bought a $400.00 cream separator but thats not going to happen! I love goat cheese just fine.
We will be getting a jersey cow/calf to have super high quality milk, cream, and butter. I can wait for that.
Back to the topic for today.
It is VERY easy to make chevre but it takes a few days, you simply have to be patient.
We are using milk we pasteurized for this batch, we may go raw with he next batch.
We used a chevre starter from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, I can not recommend them highly enough.
This little packet is enough for one gallon of milk. This could not be easier, you just bring your milk up to (or down to as the case may be) to 86 F and sprinkle the starter in. Mix well and let culture at room temperature for 12-20 hours.
The curd sets up and excludes the whey.
You then slice it up a bit so that the mass of curd is broken up and more whey is excluded.
Remember that all of the equipment being used must be sterilized.
We bought the plastic chevre molds from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company which I cleaned very well.
These are well worth the cost and will last a long time.
Using a sterilized slotted spoon, you scoop out the curds and begin to fill the molds.
One gallon of milk yielded three molds worth of cheese.
Once they are filled they go on a wire rack over a pan or bucket to catch the dripping whey, cover the tops and let sit at room temperature or in the fridge for 2 days. They will shrink a lot.
After the two days, the cups were no longer dripping and the cheese was quite firm and much dryer.
This cheese tastes unbelievably fresh and, I think, uniquely ours. Its a fantastic feeling to sit down to a salad that we grew topped with chevre we made from our own goat. I watched Torte munching on tree bark in our backyard as I nibbled on the cheese.
Resources:
Make your (garden) bed
On May - 30 - 2008
I mentioned previously that I was going to use landscaping fabric to keep down weeds and manage water loss. I am ALMOST done with the planting and transplanting.
I thought I would share what the beds look like now. I am putting in a weeping hose system that I have cut to length. Its not done yet as I need to get some regular 1/2 inch tubing to span the gap between the beds.
My going back to work full time resulted in our indoor started plants being VERY meek. The other day, when we were shopping at the farm supply store in Spencer, MA called Klems, I bought some of their conventionally grown plants for transplant. Such is life.
The process is: I lay out the soaker hose, I cut holes where I want the plants, I dig out the soil, plant the little guys deep (in the case of the tomatoes), cover, and then water in.
Some weeds grow under the brown paper fabric but not many and they are not hard to pull.
Our carrots are growing as are our beets. I will be finishing the main beds this weekend and then the squash (to be allowed to vine throughout the blueberry patch behind the main bed area).
I will write soon about the latest additions to our animal menagerie. I can say that we are closer to my personal dream of getting the jersey cow .. cant wait to make butter and cream! Pigs will come after that.
Breaking out the seeds
On May - 18 - 2008
This year, owning to the fact that I am back at work full time, I am pre-empting weeds and hopefully watering issues by laying down landscaping fabric before planting the beds.
Once the fabric is down I then go back and use an eXacto knife to cut open little windows through which I plant the seeds.
Perhaps there is a better way to do this but one advantage to doing this (at least it seems that way right now) is that I can write on the fabric with a sharpie what was planted where.
As with any idea, I may be cursing the day I put this stuff down in the fall. For now, it seems like a good idea.
The sweet onions are already peeking out.
Our spearmint, marjoram, and parsley came back really vigorously early this spring. I dug up the marjoram and parsley and transplanted them all to one end of a bed and they didnt seem to mind it one bit!
I am going to be doing the same with the tomatoes. In the case of the tomatoes though I will also be putting down some red plastic and then hang some strips of mylar (to flutter vertically amongst the tomato vines) to discourage aphids. I read on the web (can’t remember where now) that foil upsets the aphids. I am going to guess that it seems like the sun has come out UNDER the leaves and so they move away from the sunny under-leaves to find that the other side of the leaf is also sunny and then they are encouraged to move on. Last year the only plants that I had aphid issues with was corn (and HOW).
This year, any aphid-phylic plant will get mylar streamers. (I will leave one or two plants mylar-free to be my scientific null control)
I have only just begun to plant the beds.. it’s a long process and when I get home at night, I can never seem to summon the strength to get a whole lot done :-/.
Must butch it up!
Another thing I need to get done ASAP is build the netting “pup tents” for the vining crops (which have yet to be planted as well).
Once I can get a few minutes (hours) free, I will do up my planting diagrams for this year and then post them here.
I will also be doing some more video of the 2008 Humble Garden over time to show how things progress. Looking back at last year’s I realize how much a gift to myself it was to record that beauteous riot!
I apologize for my cheesy voice over
Sproutastic
On March - 30 - 2008
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I hope that your indoor garden is sprouting up a storm!
We have been starting things like tomatoes and eggplants and onions and today we will seed out herbs.
A while back I found a link that showed people starting corn indoors so we have been giving it a try.
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These are not your normal corn. No, these are Giant Corn which will, supposedly, reach over 12 feet high. They are seed corn and not meant to be eaten by humans. The chickens will LOVE it.
I planted a tray of mesclun lettuces so that we can start having some salad even before mid May which is when we can start planting in the garden outside.
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We have some other news but I will share that a bit later in the week.
Share how your indoor starts are doing!
Recent fall plantings yielding goodness
On October - 3 - 2007
As I mentioned obliquely before, perhaps in the comments only, my vine crops were hit with a double whammy of powdery mildew and then 6 weeks of drought. No amount of spraying milk helped so I pulled out the spaghetti squash, the watermelons, the zucchinis, the scallopini squash, and then my poor little moon and stars which also got the mildew.
I just had to pull out the turnips because they started to mildew as well and they were also heavily fed on earlier by bugs.
This is what I got, tiny stunted things.
But you can see we are still getting tomatoes and now some of the cranberry beans are drying up very nicely! I am very much looking forward to those bean crops.
I have planted spinach, beets, and green onions where the squash and zucchini once were.
I also planted some bibb lettuce some weeks ago.
Some delicious braising chards and such were planted some time ago but the baby bok choy have been eaten to bits.
I will grow the bok choy again but under row covers for certain!
A small harvest of straw potatoes
On October - 1 - 2007
Here is a patch of straw potatoes that I wanted to dig up and see what was what.
I pulled back the straw on some 4 or 5 plants and the yield is very low. This is because we didnt put enough straw on these to make a deep thatch.
KD points out some of the potatoes.
A close up.
We have quite a few more patches that we will be letting go for some time to allow all the tiny potatoes to grow to adulthood.
I think I like this method but next year I will also be planting them in the ground.
Can’t have too many homegrown organic potatoes!
Fighting powdery mildew with milk
On August - 30 - 2007
This is one fast growing crop that I didn’t intend to grow. I think I “bought” this problem of powdery mildew when I did a foliar spray with some fish emulsion that was then followed by multiple damp dark gloomy depressing sunless days.
Within a week, it has really done a number on my vine crops.
It doesn’t really upset me because this represents a teachable moment. My family will not starve due to a reduced number of spaghetti squash and mini-pumpkins and I will, hopefully, learn something about how to cope with powdery mildew.
Lesson #1: Once it starts, its not going away so you have to “deal” with it if you do not want it to spread everywhere.
Lesson #2: It might start in the shade but it will be happy spreading to sunny locations.
While searching for an organic way of dealing with this problem I came across this paper by Crisp, Wicks, Troup, and Scott called “Mode of action of milk and whey of in the control of grapevine powdery mildew” (PDF format) in the journal called Australasian Plant Pathology, published in 2006 (Australasian Plant Pathology, 2006, 35, 487–493).
Powdery mildew takes out all sorts of crops and can be especially vicious to wine grapes. Control of powdery mildew in wine grapes has been done by spraying with sulfur containing fungicides. This is why wines are contaminated with sulfites (and why I can not drink wine, I am violently allergic to these sulfites).
Its been known for some years that spraying a 10% skim milk or whey solution on affected plants is very effective in the treatment of powdery mildew.
This paper reports that sunlight interacts with the milk to form oxygen free radicals that collapse the hyphae of the organism grapevine Erysiphe (Uncinula) necator which we call powdery mildew (zucchini is effected by Sphaerotheca fuliginea). It also damages the conidia (asexual, non-motile spores of a fungus) within 24 hours of treatment.
Some people use hydrogen peroxide, a rich source of oxygen free radicals, but this paper reports that H2O2 doesn’t do anything to the conidia and that it encourages germination of this fungus.
Interesting huh?
Must be that the free radicals produced by photo-oxidation of something in the milk acts by a different mechanism than the free radicals in hydrogen peroxide. Or does it?!
The answer lies in complexity. Read on.
When they looked at a specific component of milk called lactoferrin (a globular multifunctional protein with antimicrobial activity (bacteriocide, fungicide – WIKI, an 80 kDa iron-binding glycoprotein, binds to the membranes of various bacteria and fungi, causing damage to membranes and loss of cytoplasmic fluids – paper), a part of the innate defense, conidia were ruptured but hyphae were not effected until 48 hours out.
This indicates, as per these authors and seems intuitive, that milk has a bipartite action against powdery mildew:
- photo-induced free radical activity
- lactoferrin mediated rupture of conidia
The authors close by saying that the mechanism by which lactoferrin is effecting the conidia is not clear. They also think that there many be other parts of milk which could be having an anti-mildew effect.
I will be spraying my unfortunate mildew-infested plants with a 10% skim milk solution (shown below) and I will let you know how it goes!
Drop me a comment if you have had success with this method.
Measure a 1:10 milk:water solution into a sprayer. I am using skim now but I might try a whole fat to see if there might be some fat-soluble or fatty acid aspects. I might even use raw if all else fails!
If I were being scientific about this, I would leave a section unssprayed, spray one section each of – skim, whole commercial, whole raw. This is not scientific, its going to be anecdotal and descriptive and with no controls because I started out just desperate to attack the problem so I do not have any untreated plants right now.
As I am not a mycological physiologist and I am not working of a government grant, I think its going to be ok.
Pour in the milk.
Pour in the water, mix it all up in a bucket.
Spray on a SUNNY DAY, not cloudy.
Watch.
Spray twice a week.
Watch.
Blog.
Lets hope I can see SOME result otherwise there will be no follow up to this post and you will be left hanging!
A healthy ecosystem in an unappealing wrapper
On August - 16 - 2007
In one of my many-a-day strolls through the garden, I was looking at one of the tomato patches, lamenting the loss of most of the leaves on my calabash tomato to some sort of wilt (I hesitate to says its one thing, I am guessing various things are going on here) and I found, hanging from a tomato branch, this caterpillar beset by eggs and what looked like flying ants.
My first reaction was revulsion (OK, that remains my reaction) but I left it there because:
- I could not help myself with wanting to take a shot,
- I knew that someone over at the flickr group “ID Please” would be able to help me identify these two creatures (flies and [[caterpillar]]) and
- I had a sneaking suspicion that something so revolting must be good some how (just like when I see an antique .. if I find it hideous it is bound to be expensive and in demand … like a reversed fashion compass of sorts)
My friends Mean and Pinchy and aw c’mon at flickr helped my identify this as a [[tomato]] hornworm (Five-Spotted Hawkmoth – Manduca quinquemaculata) being consumed by braconid [[wasp]]s, a VERY good thing. Once these wasps hatch they can go on and [[parasitize]] more hornworms.
From the wiki entry on braconids, relating to their parasitism:
“Most braconids are primary parasitoids (both external and internal) on other insects, especially upon the larval stages of Coleoptera, Diptera, and Lepidoptera, but also some hemimetabolous insects like aphids, Heteroptera or Embiidina. Most species kill their hosts, though some cause the hosts to become sterile and less active. In the case of endoparasitoids, species often display elaborate physiological adaptations to enhance larval survival within host, for example the co-option of [[endosymbiotic]] viruses for compromising host immune defenses. These polydnaviruses are often used by the wasps instead of a venom cocktail. These viruses suppress the immune system and allow the [[parasitoid]] to grow inside the host undetected. The exact function and evolutionary history of these viruses are unknown. It is a little surprising to consider that sequences of polydnavirus genes show the possibility that venom-like proteins are expressed inside the host caterpillar. It appears that through evolutionary history the wasps have so highly modified these viruses that they appear unlike any other known viruses today. Because of this highly modified system of host [[immunosuppression]] it is not surprising that there is a high level of parasitoid-host specificity. It is this specificity that makes Braconids a very powerful and important biological control agent.
Parasitism on adult insects (particularly on Hemiptera and Coleoptera) is also observed. Members of two subfamilies (Mesostoinae and Doryctinae) are known to form galls on plants.”
So these hymenoptera order members are in good in my book. I will just have to look the other way cause they make me nauseous!
Here are a couple shots of a couple of my tomato plants are seem to have a wilt. This first one is a calabash tomato plant with MANY fruits.
The fruits look fine and so many and so heavy that they need to be braced or the branch gets very stressed (see photo)
This is a different tomato (small salad tomatoes)
This also has abundant numbers of small cherry like tomatoes.
I took some new shots of the whole garden today and it seems to become this sort of embarrassing overgrowing crazy green entity! Makes one think of a green version of tribbles.
If you have any ideas of how best to minimize this wilt business next year, I would love to hear it. I plan on planting each tomato far from it’s neighbors and give them abundant space.
I am also definitely going to plant [[tomatillo]]s again (and more, disbursed everywhere) because they bring in the bees like crazy, very good for [[pollination]].
