Humble Garden

Sharon Astyk over at Casaubon’s Book wrote a really cute post about being potentially perceived as a “Sustainable Martha Stewart”

I hope that she NEVER has the nightmare interview that she parodies.

She refers to being called a “Sustainable Martha” – that is too darn funny. Martha actually does a lot to grow food on her property and she seems to love to blog about her efforts (tho she has an army of people who help do it and administer it so she too isn’t the perfect “Sustainable Martha”)

I have 3 kids and woe is the person who gives me a look askance about their numeracy. We figure we are just a tiny drop in the karmic balance bucket against the Duggars of Arkansas (who have bred up to 19 as of last count, are not done breeding, and who are teaching their kids to go “full quiver”)

My oldest complains at times about her goat milking, chicken tending, and egg collecting duties. I smile and try to be sympathetic while encouraging her to hop to it. Things will be more difficult when its -20 F this winter, then we will be going out to give her moral support.

We will also be arranging for a mechanical milking machine and warmer surrounds.

Besides, she doesn’t get ALL the tough jobs, she will not be the primary midwife this next early spring tho I intend to train her along with myself when the 8 goats go into labor. I try not to be terrified, most days it works.

I never assumed that Sharon would have a perfect house! Anyone with 4 kids and all the rest (including writing a book) would have to be twisted to be perfect in the cleaning department too.

My house – well – it does make me weep on occasion. I admit to dreaming about becoming a monkess at a zen monastery where NOTHING but cushions hit the floor. And the quiet. I can dream. Then I awake to watch my sleeping kids as I get ready for my commute and work.

My real dream is to be able to stay at home and get a more complete situational mastery of the homestead but its been more difficult than it seemed in past times when I worked full time out of the home.

Only way THIS is happening is if I win the lottery.

If you do a bit of reading on permaculture you will see that integrating animals into the garden is very beneficial. You do have to be careful about allowing them access to tender delicious plants.

The nitrogen from the chickens, goats, and llama, all goes into the compost. The chickens convert weeds, bugs, MICE, other unknown things, into eggs. We have seen our chickens attack live running mice and eat them almost whole. Before this batch of chickens, I had no idea they were such hunters.

They do a great job of scratching up bugs in the underbrush and doing a bit of airing out of the compost heap.

KD inspects one of the broiler chickens who is obviously getting rather large!

Barred rocks scratching between raised beds.

In the photo above, look at the upper right hand corner. You will see a blurred image of our cat Fuzzy. She is running for her life because aggressive little roosters are chasing her. Our cats (we have 5) mostly just watch the chicken antics.

I had something like 12 cabbages growing and have been letting them grow and grow. Lately, two have simply burst (from the extensive rains?) so I have picked them. My oldest child who we thought was allergic to cabbage tried some (stir-fried with tumeric, nutmeg, sauted mustard seeds) and loved it!

So, this is a great metric for garden success – child now BEGS for cabbage!

Share how you use animals in your garden!

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!

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!

(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:

• New England Cheesemaking Supply Company
• Chevre Starter
• Plastic cheese molds
• Books on making cheese
• Classes on making cheese

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.

Two weekends ago we got a few things done that I will share here. It was a sunny day on saturday so KD, Q, and I sat in the sun (tho a bit chilly) and started making hay-based baskets. Above you can see KD playing with one in progress, great place for an egg.

These wont last long but it was nice to sit in the sun and play with it. Above you can see KD holding the egg basket with the unfinished rope hanging off to the side.

I grabbed some garden stakes and such and cobbled together the nest box frame above. Darn chickens love to roost on it and lay eggs UNDER it.

Ed and Q took some other left over used garden lumber stuff and made a chicken tractor. Didnt take them very long. This is just one for our backyard. If you want to do this for the field then it needs to also have a covered section for when it rains, chickens dont like rain much. (neither do goats!)

Chickens, eating clover and grass, in the tractor. Hawks flew overhead but never tested the tractor. Nice to be able to control the grass and then get even more beautiful eggs!

Our goats now have a much more substantial fence and area to roam in. I estimate that they have about 20,000 square feet for their pen. Their area is filled with wild blueberry bushes (which we are awash in).

We have also adopted 5 more kids bringing the total goat herd size up to 8. This is sort of scary to me but its something the family seemed to want. Deep Breaths. Why scary? We have to feed these girls and then I will have to be the midwife sometime next spring. I have midwifed cats and dogs in the past but goats kidding out twins, yikes.

Gonna have to read up.

Torte is our only milking doe at the moment but she has a really good output right now (over a gallon a day).

Sometimes Torte will headbutt twerpy kids who get in her way but she is very calm and patient. Sometimes, they will all break into a leapy gallop and fly from one far flung end of the pen to another.

The kids and doe will walk about, nibble leaves, branches, bushes.

This kid is called Millet.

All the kids have grain names, including:

• Wheat
• Millet
• Amaranth
• Maize
• Oat
• Spelt
• Rye

Some of them are Torte’s babies, some come from a goat called “America”, some from another goat called “Midnight”.

Feeding 7 kids is chaos incarnate. Ed, Q and KD have to corral and manage the various kids and Torte (who wants to get in on whatever is happening) so that each kid is fed for certain.

They are noisy kids but every single one of them is as sweet as they can be!

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

So, as you likely know, we live in the North East USA (MA) where oil is usually used to heat in the winter. We have always heated with our wood stove but used the oil heat-on-demand heater to make hot water (showers, dishwasher, etc). Because we are careful with our oil use we go through a 250 gal oil tank in a year.

That oil ran out this morning.

Traditionally, oil companies deliver oil on a subscription service here. They automatically deliver oil and then bill you.

We called our oil guy today and learned the following:

• He is about to declare bankruptcy
• He owes over $600,000 USD due to inventory and customers bailing out on their back debt
• Other oil companies in our area are in the same condition
• They too are on the verge of bankruptcy
• No company in our region will take any credit
• All deliveries must be paid in full upfront before delivery or COD
• Our tank will cost $1050 to fill

Yep, our tank will cost $1050 USD to fill.

Lets see.

Can we afford even this one tank of diesel?

• I am driving our gas guzzling mini-van because my car is dead
• my commute is over 400 miles a week
• We do not have the money to buy even a cheap junker car
• With the cost of gas and the cost of basic food stuffs we honestly do not make it from one paycheck to another
• The garden can not feed us yet, we are not even out of frost season yet so its all potential and not even sprouting yet

To dig out of this hole will require money we do not have. We are not likely to be alone in this one.

News Flash – Oil is pegging over $122/barrel today.

Right now? I can’t see the end of this path.

I will be going home from work tonight to cobble together a solar shower – my hide can not take ice cold well water showers!

Is the price of oil still academic to you?

How are you feeling the pain these days?