Humble Garden

This flash slideshow shows you some of the ways I have used our [[beet]]s lately.We have eaten about half of our first batch of red beets (some of the other beets we have planted include: Shiraz Tall Top Beet, Chioggia Beet, Lutz Salad Leaf Beet, Yellow Mangel Beet). Their greens are starting to look mighty ragged so we will be accelerating our beet-feasts to catch them before they simply go bad in the ground.Various recipes have been or will be blogged at my food blog Nika’s Culinaria.The one dish that has the yellow disk like item (its polenta) was blogged at this post “The unbearable intensity of homegrown food” and it is called “Homegrown organic beets and greens served over beet juice infused [[polenta]], dribbled with a beet, garlic, apricot gastrique“.I think I like the following detail photo especially because it shows the dark voluptuous nature of the beet along with some of it’s delicate inner leaves. These leaves are revealed sometimes when you pull away the much larger ones.

Slightly steamed with a sprinkle of sea salt, beets are such a lovely part of summer.

If you have been reading here a bit, you will remember that we are in the process of building a new chicken house. I have not mentioned this in a while because construction on the house has been delayed. Why? We live not too far from Old Lyme, Connecticut and live in the Lyme Disease Hot Zone and as a result, like everyone else around here, we are awash in deer ticks and the constant lingering menace of Lyme Disease.

My husband, while building the decking between the wood shed and the chicken house, was bitten and came down with lyme disease. Let me assure you, this is not a minor annoyance. Lyme disease, the way he got it put him in the ER several times, bought him a spinal tap and dubious concerns by ER docs of Eastern Equine Encephalitis, West Nile, even Malaria (which his symptoms were mimicking tho they said since he didn’t just come from some stinking steamy malarial swamp – they haven’t seen parts of our land! – that malaria was not likely). It finally took our family doc, who is just awesome, to know as soon as he heard the details that this was lyme disease.

Whew.

Back to the chickens.

Some of the chickens we are thinking of raising include the white silkies which the Chinese love for it’s black meat and traditional medicinal value, MAYBE we can get a hold of some blue feet chickens, some hearty brown and other color layers, and perhaps some cubalayas.

In my previous chicken experience we had meat chickens and I am still traumatized by the experience of killing and butchering them. As a scientist, I have taken down numerous rodents but I never butchered them nor ate them (yikes). I always did it because I had to and I always detached mentally from it. That doesn’t mean I don’t still think about those animals and I certainly appreciate their contribution to my thesis and published works.

To get more experience from people who have done this a lot and who raise organic pasture chickens, I attended the “Chickens for meat and eggs” workshop at the Many Hands Organic Farm.

I have put together a slideshow of some of the photos from the part of the workshop that demonstrated how to kill and then butcher the chickens below.

I share this with the intent of helping to educate. I do not share this to traumatize anyone so if this sort of thing bothers you please do not click through the show.

I also do not share this so that it can be used to traumatize others! I believe in mindful eating and mindful animal husbandry. Its important to know from where and how your meat comes to you.

 

(Organic flowers)

 

(More organic flowers)

I just wanted to share some photos I took recently at the Many Hands Organic Farm in Barre, MA. I will talk more later about their fantastic workshop on raising and butchering organic pasture raised chickens.

These are a few shots from around the farm.

 

(Garlic drying in a chicken house)

 

(A fantastic day)

 

(Barn and workshop participants)

 

(Tomato cages stacked on the roof of a barn)

 

(Contemplative barn window)

 

(Windrowing attachment for the tractor)

 

(Organic tamworth pig)

 

(Organic tamworth pigs)

 

(Organic tamworth pigs)

 

(Organic tamworth pigs)

 

(Organic tamworth pigs)

 

(Pastured chickens)

 

(Moving the pastured chickens to fresh grass)

 

(Pastured layers)

 

(wood fired cook stove with organic chicken soup on top)

Will be sharing more in another post.

Below is my second try at this video podcast business. I hope it loads for you and that you can hear my voice!

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-eb5a79734dd79125645e1e5327d2a732}

If this is not working for you, try the YouTube link.

We, ok, I have spent quite a few hours filming (on my laptop so sorry if its sketchy), editing, configuring and posting our first video podcast!

Commence applause now. (Just kidding!)

Let me know what you think and if you have any problems viewing this.

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If the above video is not loading, try the YouTube video below. If you just see a camera-clock icon, this means that YouTube is still processing it. It should go live very soon.

This is the YouTube version:

(Green and lemon cucumbers rising to the occasion)

Because we grow in raised beds and also because we are trying to grow a bit of pasture and run space for the kids, I am growing our vine crops skyward to keep them off the ground. I have read that this encourages higher production and better fruits/veggies because they do not mold on the ground.

(infant cuke)

What it means in a practical sense is that I am doing bonsai veggies.

(rising spaghetti squash)

I am not doing any pruning but a lot of tying and coddling and massaging, etc. Rather intensive and good more me because its a small garden but this would be tedious if you had a larger thing going on.

(Massive squash)

This enormous squash is growing TONS of base leaves and amassing quite a few proto-runners but has yet to send out a vine I can attach to the trellis. This plant seems poised to simply explode with vines. I feel like I need to almost check it several times a day in case it gets ahead of me!

Who knew there could be so much excitement in a garden. Makes me feel a bit silly, but what are you gonna do.

The young kohlrabis are coming along and I do not find the beetles most times when I go out. I got this notion that these plants must smell irresistible to the beetles because they seem to find them so easily. Because of this crazy idea, I decided to sprinkle the leaves with some cinnamon. I hope this will change the “flavor profile” to one the beetles find either confusing or revolting and I hope not delicious.

Finally, here is a shot of some of the beds, just to give a sense for how some of the garden grows.

We have been very lucky to have few aphid problems. I have found aphid mommas surrounded by many aphid babies on the undersides of my tomatillo plants but I kill them right away (by hand, right on the leaf so their little juices, in my theory of things, might be attractive to predators). I check the tomatillos every day and kill these colonies every few days (as in, I don’t find them every day).

Yesterday I found a woolly aphid on the poor tomatillo and shot it with the 100mm macro lens.

These bugs leave a woolly residue on stems.

Woolly aphids (subfamily: Eriosomatinae) SOURCE

Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hemiptera
Suborder: Sternorrhyncha
Superfamily: Aphidoidea
Family: Aphididae
Subfamily: Eriosomatinae

This aphid was not happy when I brushed past the woolly area and she went on to wollify some place else on the plant. :-/. From what I have read, you want to encourage ladybugs and lacewings, spray with water, etc. I squish them.

I am not too worried about aphids because we, like everyone else around here, are besieged by massive swarms of ladybugs every year. This year they will have extra meaning to me because they will be helpful. Already we have lady bugs in the garden busy laying their eggs every where.

We have not seen any honey bees, at all. Thankfully we have several industrious bumblebees who are quite busy.

Before the bumblebees were on the scene, we have had a lot of other pollinators, especially around the tomatillos!

Like anyone else into gardening, I know about colony collapse disorder (CCD) in the bees here in the US. We have several local hobby beekeepers (one sells honey the other has them because he adores them and he has a nice big garden) and I know that at least one of them is having a hard time with his queens.

If I were to get into the bee thing (I do worry about my kids being near hives because I would never forgive myself if they were stung and died, we have severe allergies to nuts so we need to determine if the kids have a proclivities to allergies to bee venom) I think I would not do it for the honey (only for home use tho we are not big into honey – hurts my teeth) but to breed queens and to pollinate my own garden.

I would prefer to help with the restoration of the annihilated wild bee population but I am not sure yet how or if I could.

First, a thought that I felt was noble, something to aspire to:

“So stop perching on your shoulders peering out from behind your eyes and sit down. And when you stand, stand forth from the haunted and dead thoughts of the past and idle and wasteful speculation about the future and take a step.” * see bottom of this post.

I usually load up my iPod with various zen teishos (podcasts) and walk about the garden in the cool of the morning listening to the zen masters without having to sit on my legs (an impossibility, I would throw a clot in no time). This is suboptimal because teisho is best after sitting at least some 45 minutes but its still a good thing to do. Sometimes I do wonder about the discordant dichotomy between my pondering the universal dharma and the preciousness of all beings while pulling weeds, killing flights of aphid babies and beetles, and pruning various plants. My sole justification is that I am growing this garden for my family, not for the ravenous bugs. Its the right justification but it still gives me pause as I consider the tenet of doing no harm.

As with the realities that most women have to live with, I come to terms with the needed death decisions in my garden but I do it first hand, by hand, and not in the disconnected way with pesticides.

Today I was admiring the way the kohlrabi plants had burst into growth but then when I looked more closely I noticed this little beetle you see below. He sure is pretty but he is also an eating machine. He has eaten several plants to nothing and has hit almost all the rest.

This photo? It was his last.

When I planned out my garden, I bought seeds that were not the usual thing you might see in a traditional New England garden (I am sure not a traditional New Englander, considering I was born at the Equator, in a far away land). One plant is doing MUCH better than I thought it would. Do you know what this plant is? There are several photos below.

and this..

and this..

If you know, drop me a comment!

The entire garden is surging into a green frenzy. Its abundance is hard to capture by camera but here is an attempt.

The tomatoes are blooming. I know that many other people have plants laden with fruits but we started late so we are happy with anything we get.

The cucumber plants have little infant cucumbers with tiny nascent blossoms.

This photos was taken yesterday.

This photo was taken today, the difference is amazing.

Our entire patch of spinach had been planted at the same time and it was also all starting to bolt at the same time so yesterday I pulled it all.

We steamed it, chopped it up and added hot heavy cream, salt, some pepper. Was delicious. We had many green spinach salads from the same patch over the past weeks. This spinach was just so productive!

* Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, concluding teisho 5: “Actualizing the Samadhi of Dharmata” in the series “Essentially Real, commentaries on Eihei Dogen zenji’s Hossho: Dharmata”. Presented on Tuesday, December 7, 2004 at the White Wind Zen Community Zendo in Ottowa, Ontario, Canada. See their site to learn more about zen and their sangha.

I learned recently that our neighboring town has a farmer’s market starting up (on Saturdays) and I have looked into what it takes to sell there. I am a bit worried that some of the crops we planted may overwhelm our capacity to eat them and this Saturday market would be a good way to profit from the overproduction. Its entirely possible that I am being overly optimistic but better to be prepared than caught off guard. Come to think of it, I do not know how best to price produce so that I am not undercutting or pricing myself out. Anyone have any good guidelines?

I put together the logo you see above as a brand for any veggies we may sell at the market. We will print it out onto stickers which I will then apply to bags at the time of sale. I used the euphemism “Grown Pure” because I didn’t want to have to remove “Organic” at a later date. I understand that if you make less than $5000 a year, you can call yourself organic (if you ARE organic) without the certification. We are going to go through that process. Am going to be joining Northeast Organic Farming Association/ Massachusetts (NOFA) and also attend their conference this summer. Should be a lot of fun and a great way to meet fellow growers.

There are many things going on in the garden since last I wrote. Trellising is going up for climbing beans, snow peas, squashes, watermelons, mini-pumpkins, and zucchinis. We had a pretty windy storm yesterday so some plants had to do be tied up for support. I am not exactly sure why but my cruciferous veggies, like the broccoli and the collards are really leggy but do not want to quit so they just have this really weak elbow bend where they came out of the soil. I staked the broccoli so that they get some support and I hope that they produce. Did I water them too much? These were seeded right into the bed on and around May 24th.

We have been cutting mesclun to eat and it grows right back. The spinach is the same but it is REALLY abundant! We cut and cut but they just grow back even more vigorously. Some of them didn’t like the 96 F weather last week so I think they are on the verge of bolting. Good thing is that it has cooled off a lot. Now its humid, mid 70s and abundant rain (tho a bit rough at times).

The first batch of radishes that were planted are getting to the final pickings. Here are a few photos for your food porn purposes.

 

Bundle of red globes.

The radishes slice up nicely, are crispy and sweet at first with a medium and not harsh hot after-taste.

My bell peppers are starting to bloom (there are other pepper plants that are sequenced later so we have a couple sets of those) and the tomatillos are budding too. The cayenne are taking their sweet time! I dont think they like our mild weather.

The wood shed – to – chicken house connecting deck is almost done and then we will start on the chicken house. We are still debating how many to get :-/.

I am working on what MIGHT be an exciting project that will bring in organic fertilizer to help us maintain and boost our soil fertility.

 

(Tomatoes: Bonnies and Seeds of Change heirlooms)

Its been a busy week or so. As you may or may not know, I am a food photographer (as well as many other things) and activities are picking up a bit in that department. In the last week, I have been out to shoot a local BBQ joint called B.T.’s Smokehouse, a lavish fund raiser for Les Dames d’Escoffier at the Allandale Farm in Boston, and a low key wedding in an idyllic landscape.

We have been working away on the garden too.

Yesterday and the day before, we had temperatures in the mid 90s so things have been drying out but growing like gangbusters.

 

(mesclun, radishes, carrots, collards, tomatoes)

We are proceeding with the chicken house and also the trellising for the now-desperate peas and beans, waiting for something to climb! We will be growing the beans and squash, that are planted with the corn, up strings to get it away from the corn. Will use slings to hold the squash up. High-rise gardening!

Will update with a shot of these when made.

 

 

(The three sisters: beans, corn, squash)

I have planted two 16 foot raised beds with many legumes, such as: black beluga lentils, flageolet beans, cranberry beans, turnips, chard, and other species.

 

(sprouting black beluga lentils)

Our potatoes are planted in their hay dirt-free systems.

 

(potato patch in the distance)

Our asparagus has popped up through 10 inches of soil and are now ferning out in their first year’s growth.

 

(tiny asparagus spears, a foot tall and

 

just before ferning out)

We are getting various patches of grass growing around the house (including the septic field) and are considering the purchase (or planning what we need to support) a dairy animal (jersey or a goat). We love the eggs from chicken but it would be great to close the loop on the milk/butter/yogurt/cheese because we eat so much of it.

From the jersey, we would get milk and manure, something we really need an organic source of. I just have to determine if we can establish enough pasture to feed it and a calf during the summers and afford to overwinter them with outside bought (unfortunately not organic) feeds.