A Few Loose Ends

Happy New Year, everyone!  My conscience has been nagging at me to follow up with results from several things I've written about over the last year or so.  I'm not good about getting around to posting about things I say that I will.  So I figure I'll clear my backlog with the first post of the year and then I can get back to semi-regular posting.

Leek seedlings
Last spring I tried a somewhat fiddly method of starting leek seedlings, with the aim of encouraging them to grow long and tall before they were transplanted out.  The idea was that a long seedling, transplanted deeply, wouldn't need hilling to make the plant develop a nice long white section, which is the best part of the leek.  Well, it worked and it didn't.  The seedlings indeed grew long and tall.  I duly transplanted them with just a couple inches of their full length showing above the ground, and then ignored them for the whole growing season.  Disappointingly, when I dug up a few this fall, they had very minimal white parts.  It seemed to me as though the plant turned anything planted below the soil line into root.  So this was a bust.  Hilling seems to be required to grow beautifully long white leeks.  I'm still looking for the best way to do this in my long narrow garden rows. 

Tomato trellising
Remember my enthusiasm to try a new tomato growing technique that I learned about at last year's PASA conference?  I've got results.  The trellising system worked fairly well as the plants grew tall.  It took some diligence to keep up with pruning extra branches and clipping the remaining ones to the wires.  The problem came when the plants started setting fruit and bulking them up.  I had all my trellises in short rows, which meant that only two 7' stakes were holding up three tomato plants each.   Gradually the weight of the plants pulled the stakes in towards each other, making all the wires sag.  This could be only minimally remedied by adjusting the wires at the stakes.  Next year I plan to grow my tomatoes in longer rows, with stakes every ten feet or so.  Since all but the end stakes will be supporting plants to either side, the growing weight of the plants should exert equal pulling in both directions, so that the stakes remain upright.  I may try angling the stakes outward at either end of the rows to give them more resistance.  The sagging wasn't a disaster, but it looked kinda shabby and cut down on airflow around the plants, which might have been a very bad thing in a blight year.

Burdock
I've become a fan of burdock, aka gobo, for its delicious flavor and its soil amending properties.  When I wrote about them more than a year ago, there was some question in the comment section as to whether or not the parts of the taproot left in the ground would regrow in the spring and form a new plant.  The results this spring were negative - in the sense that I saw no plants emerge above ground where we'd dug out the roots.  This is a positive as far as I'm concerned though, because it means we can have our soil amendment and eat it too.  Those portions of root that are too deep to dig out rot in place, adding organic content to the subsoil and greatly improving our clay soil in the process. So burdock is not forever once you plant it, provided you harvest the root.  Those roots we didn't harvest definitely came roaring back this spring, ready to set seed.  And this is not a plant whose seed I want to save for myself, thank you very much.  It took more than one severe cutting down to the ground to encourage the plants to call it quits.  Burdock produces a fair bit of biomass in the second year, and the greens are marginally of interest to the chickens.

Acorns sprouting and different oak species
This one is owing for quite a while.  In fall of 2010, I aggressively gleaned acorns from oaks in parks and off my own property to use as feed supplement for my laying hens.  I went for a certain oak species that produced beautiful, large, meaty acorns, and I managed to gather some 60 pounds of them.  Unfortunately, it was mostly wasted effort.  The acorns that looked so big and worthy to me did not pass muster with the hens. They pecked rather half-heartedly at them after I crushed them by hand.  It was my mistake.  Since they obviously enjoyed the taste of the small, poorly looking acorns produced by the oak tree at our property line, I assumed that the acorns that look so much better to my eye would please them just the same.  Not so.  There are more than five hundred species of oak in the world.  And there's enormous variation in the tannin content of the seed of different sorts of oak tree, and even between individual trees of the same species.   Tannins give a bitter flavor to foods.  These compounds can be leached out of acorns well enough to make them palatable to humans, but that's not a process I'm willing to go through for the chickens' sake.  Some acorns are naturally "sweeter" than others, and obviously the oak on the edge of our property produces tasty ones.  So I've gone back to only collecting these rather sad looking acorns, which the hens do appreciate.  My advice is to definitely run a test on any acorn available to you before you go to the trouble of collecting more than a handful.  See if your livestock will eat the acorns from any given tree, and don't rely on appearance as an indicator of feed quality.

A note too about storing the acorns you do collect.  Do not keep them in plastic bags or buckets, even if left open and uncovered.  The acorns give off enough moisture so that the ones on the bottom will start to sprout in just a week or two.  A canvas or burlap bag will breathe enough to prevent this, as will baskets made of wire or natural fibers.


If there's something else I promised to report back on and have forgotten about, please remind me.  I'll do my best to follow up!

Update on the Comfrey Experiments

I posted earlier this year about two related projects to do with the comfrey plants.  The first goal was to get rid of the comfrey in the garden proper, because since it was planted the garden has expanded and the comfrey is no longer holding down the corners, but mucking up what I'd like to have as a pathway.  The second goal was to create a comfrey hedge along the northern edge of the garden with some of the rootstock I was trying to get rid of.

I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the hedge is a success.  The tiny pieces of comfrey root that were transplanted in late February got very little help, and yet they've grown into a row of thriving plants.  I did use a hand scythe a few times to cut back weeds and grass that grew up alongside the comfrey in spring and early summer.  By mid-summer the comfrey clearly had the edge and was able to hold its own.  I don't anticipate that it will require any further care.  From now on, and for years to come, the comfrey hedge should hold the line on any grass or weeds that would otherwise encroach on that garden border.  I've run the lawn mower right up to that edge of the garden several times, shredding large comfrey leaves that hang down.  As expected, the comfrey shrugs off such incidental abuse.  I'm definitely thinking about where else a comfrey hedge would be of use.

The possible downside that I worried about - that rodents would make themselves at home under the protection of the comfrey foliage - has come to pass.  A few times I've seen rodents darting between the comfrey hedge and the raspberry canes.  But I haven't noticed any significant crop damage that I can attribute to them, and we have a prodigiously talented hunter-cat.  I know he's keeping all sorts of rodent populations in check (when he's not stoned, of course).  So I'm content to let that ride.

As for the eradication part of the project, that's going about as I expected it would.  I have cut back lush growth in the original locations at least five or six times this year.   It keeps sending up leaves, just a bit slower and less abundant each time.  I didn't expect to get rid of the comfrey in a single year, and clearly I haven't.  I'm perfectly fine with that.  I'll keep on with the reaping next year.  If it manages to hang on to sprout after that, it surely won't have much oomph in the third year of the eradication project.  I'll keep you posted.

If you need more information about why I'm growing comfrey in the first place, read about its wonders.

Fig Tree Update

So we've had our three fig trees in large containers for a year and change now.  I wanted to wait this long to post an update on them so that I could have some results to share.  The figs are in 17-gallon containers with a sizeable water reservoir at the bottom that takes away some of the growing space.  These containers were constructed along the same lines as the self-watering potato buckets I experimented with last year.

The figs are doing well.  It's likely I jumped the gun just slightly in pulling them out of the garage this spring.  I was overeager, and the garage was really crowded.  I knew fig trees could withstand light frosts.  The garage where they spent the winter is large enough that the temperature inside had never dipped below 30 F (-1 C), even though it's unheated.  I pulled the trees outside in late April, though our last frost comes typically in early May.  I covered them with a drop cloth when frosts were predicted, and even put bottles of warm water under the cloths with them when temperatures in the 20's were forecast.  These precautions proved insufficient to fully counter my overeagerness.  The trees took some damage on the higher branch tips which held up the drop cloth.  I was afraid that I'd done serious harm to the trees.  But true to form, the figs proved they could withstand light frosts.  I waited a few months to see how much of each branch had died, and ended up needing to trim only a few inches here and there.

The soil in the containers had settled quite a bit after planting last year. In late spring I laid each container on its side, hauled the tree out, trimmed the roots that had grown down into the water reservoir, and added more soil to the bottom of the growing space.  The figs already had their leaves on, but they took this disturbance in stride. It's clear that the third year root trimming is going to be necessary next spring.  This is considered standard maintenance for fig trees in containers.  All the plants were working on becoming root bound.  The extra soil should do for this year though.

All three varieties now have unripe figs on them.  I've got them positioned on the edge of the driveway, and they seem to relish the extra baking that the blacktop provides.  Making sure they're well watered through the heat wave has been a priority.  They are thirsty plants indeed.  I think keeping them in sufficient water would be very difficult without the water reservoir.  It needs filling at least every other day.  I'm especially anxious to keep up with their water needs because I suspect the first few figs that one tree put on were lost last year due to lack of water.

I'm looking forward to our first fig harvest, perhaps in a month or so.  I don't expect it to be huge by any means, but I think we'll see a good handful or two from each of our three different varieties.  An older friend of mine who grew up in Italy told me once about a breakfast he ate every day for a few weeks in late summer.  Ripe figs smeared over crusty bread, drizzled with good olive oil and a pinch of salt.  His mouth watered when he described it to me, almost 50 years later.  Sign me up for that.  Or figs skewered on rosemary twigs and roasted over a real charcoal fire.  Or fig clafouti.  Or figs with soft goat cheese on a green salad.  Or, or, or...

Got any favorite ways to eat figs?

Potatoes in Buckets, Round III

I may not be the most diligent blogger, but I'm dogged when it comes to gardening.  I'm not a quick study, and certainly no expert.  But I'm willing to experiment, and to persevere with empirical tinkering.  For the last two years I've experimented with growing some of my potatoes in buckets.  The first year, wet and cold 2009, saw all my potatoes eventually succumb to late blight, but the potatoes in simple perforated buckets held out longest and produced very respectable yields.  Last year was hot and incredibly dry, and to compound matters I situated my fancy self-watering buckets on the driveway, which only baked the poor plants all the more.  The yields were abysmal.

This year I'm trying a new potato-in-bucket method.  I realize that those of you in the northern hemisphere who grow potatoes will already have planted yours by now.  So this is just for documentation purposes.  I'll do a follow up post around harvest time, and maybe some of you will choose to use a bucket method next time you're ready to grow a few spuds.  I came across this technique about two years ago, somewhere on the internets.  It's a very easy one to implement and may just combine the best aspects of in-ground cultivation and container growing.  All you do is cut the bottom off a bucket, turn it upside down, and plant your seed potato in a prepared garden bed.

Potatoes cultivated in the ground have plenty of space and access to the huge reserves of nutrients in that soil.  The drawbacks include higher susceptibility to damage from rodents and other pests, some difficulty in digging for harvest, the risk of damage from harvesting tools, and the likelihood of missing some tubers entirely.  Potatoes in containers can be easily hilled, which is thought to encourage better yield.  They can also be pampered with a rich mixture of garden soil and compost.  My experience suggests that in a year of blight both their elevation and the ability to spread the plants out protect them from the fungus by increasing air circulation around the leaves and stems.  Harvest is also remarkably easy, with little chance of missing any tubers, and no chance of spearing them with a digging tool.  Simply dump the buckets in a wheelbarrow, and gather up the spuds.  The downside is the need for additional diligence in watering, finite growing space inside the container and thus limited nutrients, which may limit yields.

This third potato bucket method promises to deliver most of the advantages of both in-ground and container cultivation, and few of the drawbacks.  While hilling will be easy, the plants' roots will still be able to draw on the garden soil for both nutrients and moisture.  To harvest, the buckets can simply be kicked over one at a time, and the tubers easily gathered without the need to dig, and therefore without risk of damaging them with shovels or pitchforks. That, anyway, is the theory.  We'll see how it works out in practice.

I know of two potential drawbacks of in-ground cultivation that will remain with this method. Once planted, the spacing of the plants is fixed.  If late blight shows up, the plants can't be separated to increase airflow around them, as would be possible with other bucket methods.  Also, damage from rodents is still possible.  With loosened soil around and below the buckets, gnawing critters might have little difficulty making inroads.  This risk may be mitigated by the fact that I used the buckets directly over the cardboard layer of sheet mulching in the beds.  So the rim of the bucket rests against a flat surface, at least until the cardboard rots in place.  I cut through the cardboard inside each bucket in several places to prevent water from pooling in there and rotting the tubers.  This also gives the potato roots access to the underlying soil moisture.  I suspect that just the elevation of the potato leaf canopy creates a much less favorable environment for late blight through better air circulation.  It's also a less sheltering and inviting space for rodents as compared to in-ground plants which drape their leaves to the soil.  It might also help to tamp down the soil around the bucket, making it more difficult for the rodents to get in, but I'm very reluctant to deliberately compact the soil after working so hard to loosen our clay.

I had hoped to be organized enough to run side-by-side trials of the all the bucket methods I've tried.  That didn't happen this year, but I did at least record the weight of the seed potatoes I planted in each bucket.  I can compare those to the results I got with my first bucket potatoes in 2009.  If I'm more organized and less frazzled next spring, perhaps the three methods of bucket potato cultivation will go head to head.

The potatoes are all growing well, with the bucket grown plants showing a big more growth so far than the in-ground plants.  I've already hilled them once, and they're due for another.  So far the year promises fair for a good potato harvest.  I'm also allowing all the volunteer plants coming up from spuds we missed at last year's harvest to go ahead and grow.  We had no problems with disease last year, so there's no real reason to remove them.  They came up in what I intend for a melon patch this year, so they should be able to share the space nicely.

This year we're growing Red Pontiacs, Kennebecs, All Blues, German Butterballs, and possibly a few Sangres, depending on which varieties are represented among the volunteers.  Are you growing potatoes this year?  If so, what varieties and what methods are you using?

Early Snow Peas

Just a quick report on a successful experiment started early this year with snow peas (mangetout), one of my favorite vegetables.  Peas in general are quite hardy plants.  They even tolerate freezing temperatures, so they can be sown before the last frost of spring.  However, there's one little catch to this.  The pea seeds must have favorable conditions (meaning above freezing) to germinate.  If seeds are placed in the ground and never have suitable moisture and temperature for germination, they'll simply rot.  Once they've germinated, the seeds are as resilient to harsh conditions as the plants they will eventually grow into.

The neat trick is that germination can take place indoors.  All one needs to do is soak the pea seeds for about six hours in water to cover, and then drain them and wrap them loosely in a damp paper towel.  Keep the moist towel with the seeds in a plastic bag with plenty of air in it for 2 to 5 days, checking the seeds daily and rinsing them gently with fresh water.  You will see a pale little spur begin to swell under the seed coat.  Eventually this spur will break through the surface of the seed as a root, but you don't need or want to wait that long.  If the root emerges by more than a millimeter or so, you must handle the germinated seeds very carefully so as not to damage that root.  Far better to get them in the ground as soon as you can clearly discern the root forming up under the seed coat.

I planted pre-germinated snow pea seeds in my cold frame on the last day of January this year.  This was an audaciously early date.  But it worked.  The timing was chosen based on when we get ten hours of daylight back at our latitude.  (Ten hours of daylight being a critical minimum requirement for plant growth.)  I knew that all the growth from seed to emergent seedling would be fueled by the energy stored in the seed itself, not by photosynthesis.  Available sunlight during that time wouldn't matter, but our winter temperatures would slow down that phase of growth.  By the time the seedlings poked their heads up above the soil sometime in mid-February they'd have sufficient daylight to continue their growth so much as temperatures would allow.  Though the cold frame only has about 8 inches of headroom, I figured by the time the snow peas were of a height to make that an issue, it wouldn't be necessary to keep the cover on the cold frame any more.  That's exactly how it worked out.  The variety I grow, Snow Sweet, doesn't even require trellising, so it's perfectly suited to being started in such a small space.

The picture above is what our snow peas look like today.  I got our first small harvest off of them last night, half way through May, roughly 3-4 weeks early for this area.  Typically snow peas peter out once the temperatures get too warm.  I suspect these plants will continue to produce through June and possibly even into early July, depending on the weather.  We're planning to build a small hoop house this year, which will provide more sheltered growing space than our cold frames, and greater temperature gain as well.  These advantages should afford us snow peas even earlier in the season.  My plan is to sow germinated snow pea seeds progressively through late winter wherever carrots or other crops are removed from the hoop house beds.  I think I could eat snow peas every day of the year and not get sick of them.  Maybe by this time next year we'll be testing that theory.

If you want to nudge the boundaries of the possible with plants on your own property, you can figure out the daylight calculations for your own latitude here. You'll need a fair degree of precision in your latitude values.  You can get that by looking up your address on either google maps, or google earth, by the way.

Warfare in the Garden - Moving Comfrey

In which our heroine attempts to eradicate well established comfrey plants which are tragically misplaced in the garden.

Everyone makes mistakes when they start gardening.  Putting comfrey plants at what I thought were going to be the corners of the garden was one of mine.  The garden has expanded twice since those plantings, and two comfrey plants are now positioned where I've decided there should be pathways.  Comfrey is legendarily difficult of removal, and these plants seem to find their current locations quite agreeable. 

I have a method to my madness, or so it pleases me to think.  I've had a few years to observe the way comfrey grows, and how other plants behave around it.  I've noticed that:

• comfrey leafs out early in the spring
• comfrey dies back late in the fall
• one comfrey plant generally gets to about 3.5' (~1.1m) in diameter
• nothing - I mean no plant - grows under the full shade of an established comfrey plant

As a homesteader, and a frugal person, I've gotten into the habit of asking myself, about most anything, "What's it good for?  What can I do with it?  How could it be repurposed to serve my needs?"  Naturally I ask, what's comfrey good for - in a structural, functional sense within the garden?  (Because I'm already up to speed on all the other fabulous stuff it's good for.)  It seems to me that comfrey could well form a low hedge plant, to hold back the crab grass from the borders of the garden.  Since comfrey is around both early and late, the grass shouldn't be able to get a leg up.  Another tool in comfrey's campaign for supremacy is its habit of plastering the ground with all the foliage of the year when it dies back in the fall.  Nothing comes up through those layers of leaves before the new comfrey shoots of spring are well on their way.

So the first step in eradicating the comfrey was to take divisions of the roots and transplant them to the northern end of the garden.  This area was heavily lasagna mulched in fall of 2009.  The mulch did a decent job of holding the weeds in check all through last year.  But as you can see, it would need renewal this year to keep the weeds back.  I'd much rather create a self-maintaining border composed of a plant so profoundly useful, and not ever have to give that area another lick of work. With the help of our first WWOOF volunteers of the year, I took some dormant root pieces and stuck them in small holes in the unimproved soil at the garden's edge back in late February, spaced roughly 3.5' apart.  I did absolutely nothing to help these roots along, and after watching for about a month I only needed to put in second root divisions at two of the transplant locations.  I now have obviously viable comfrey plants at each of the ten orange flags in the picture above.  I may expand the comfrey hedge along the western edge of the garden at some point.

Aside from getting rid of comfrey plants where I no longer want them, relocating comfrey seems to make good sense from a fertility perspective.  I think of comfrey as a miner plant.  It grows a formidable taproot and pulls up nutrients from deep underground, making them available to more shallowly rooted plants.  But every mine plays out eventually.  These comfrey plants have been in place for four years.  Putting new plants in a new area should grant access to untapped resources.  Comfrey is also a plant with an extraordinarily large surface area for its size.  The leaves are very broad and long, while the stems are minimal.  I don't know this for a certainty, but that would seem to suggest that comfrey transpires a lot of water vapor, well supplied by its tap root even when the soil surface is relatively dry.  In times of drought that moisture would be helpful to other plants nearby.  At the same time, by covering so much soil, comfrey regulates temperature and slows water loss from the soil through evaporation.  Even if I'm wrong about comfrey's utility to nearby plants, establishing an entire row of these plants where nothing but grass was growing before seems like a good idea.  It will store carbon in the soil, provide more food for bumblebees, and serve as convenient a trap crop for Japanese beetles, making them easy to handpick for the hens.

So much for all the benefits of moving the plants.  But how do I imagine I'll eradicate the comfrey from its current location?  Well, I plan to take a multi-pronged and long term approach.  And to be philosophical about it, rather than allowing my personal feelings to come into it.  Now that I know the root divisions have taken, I'll basically just keep cutting back the growth of the parent plants.  I expect to take at least six cuttings this year, and I don't expect to win the war in one year.  The first spring cuttings from the comfrey will, as usual, be used to provide some extra fertility to the potatoes when I plant them.  This year I may also use comfrey cuttings to give the corn a boost as well.  After that, I'll take several cuttings to dry for the chickens' winter feed, and also feed it to them fresh.  I will even let them have direct access to the comfrey occasionally so that they can do some damage on their own; although I know they'll be far more interested in eating all the critters living below the mulch that the comfrey creates from its own leaves.  The damage to the comfrey itself will be purely collateral.  Other than that, I'll just keep cutting back the top growth of the plants, so that the roots gradually deplete themselves.  Without leaves to photosynthesize, the roots will eventually starve and die.

Depending on how it goes, I may experiment with solarizing the root mass at some point.  This would entail covering it with clear plastic and weighting down the edges so that the roots are both deprived of water and baked by the sun.  It sounds torturous, I know.  The only thing that salves my conscience is knowing that I've already provided for the continuation of the plant's genetic line.

Tune in later this year to see how fares the war.  And wish me luck.

Mint, Tamed

Last year I decided to put in a spearmint plant.  Of course I'd heard all the tales about how invasive mints are and what drastic measures are needed to contain them.  Serious gardening friend said he planted his mint in the middle of his lawn so that he could use the lawn mower to tame any offshoots or new growths.  But still, I was determined.  Perennial herbs are so tempting, and there was no way I was going to resist adding a nice mint to the collection.

So I did a little strategizing.  The first thought was physical containment.  I decided to sink a 5-gallon bucket into the ground, and plant inside that.  So I cut off the bottom of the bucket, while my husband dug a fairly deep hole where I indicated.  I had him put the dirt into a wheelbarrow, and to this I added a good amount of compost.  The bucket was placed in the hole with a couple inches remaining above grade.  Then I put in the soil and compost mixture until it completely filled the bucket, and backfilled the rest of the hole around the bucket.  I knew the soil inside the bucket would settle down gradually over the season.  I put my spearmint seedling in the bucket and watered.

My second thought was also physical containment.  I'd been looking at this fragment of large plastic pipe that we'd fished out of a dumpster on a construction site for quite some time.  Its diameter was several inches larger than that of the bucket, and laid on the ground it's about 10 inches high.  Now mint is known to spread just by expanding its root system, which the sunk bucket should take care of.  But it has a second, stealthy means of propagating itself.  The plant can just grow a long stem which then casually, oh-so-innocently and when you're not looking because you're distracted by everything else going on in the garden, falls over under its own weight until it touches the ground.  That's when this double agent piece of plant tissue grows roots and establishes a beach head.  The plastic pipe was installed as a collar around the bucket to prevent exactly that habit.  If the mint wanted to try spreading by such methods, the stem would have to grow very tall indeed, lean itself against the collar, and then droop a considerable way before reaching the earth.  It never happened in all of last summer.

Interesting thing too about the bucket and collar system.  I think it creates a microclimate that is beneficial in both summer and winter.  Last summer was a scorcher - very hot and unusually dry for our area.  I watered the mint seedling from planting through late spring, but it was mostly ignored after that.  It held up fine through that sort of neglect, and I think the shade provided by the collar reduced the soil temperature at the surface inside the bucket, and therefore checked evaporation.  The bushy habit of the mint also helped to cool its feet, I'm sure.  In winter, the tall collar kept some wind off the plant, and the black color helped snow melt a bit faster and provided a little extra warmth in early spring.

This spring the level of soil in the bucket is at least a couple inches below the mulch I put between the outside of the bucket and the collar to keep weeds down.  I see no signs of any offshoots from the spearmint.  This is good, since I plan to add peppermint and catnip (another member of the mint family) this year too, though I fear we can count on the cats to help control the latter.  I expect that the bucket and collar method will keep the spearmint from taking over the world in this second year which should bring even more exuberant growth.  I'll be keeping my eye out for anything that can serve as collars for my additional mints when we go dumpster diving this year.  If nothing turns up, we could cut out the sidewalls of some old tires and use just the tire rims.

How about you?  Do you have any tricks for keeping the mint family within reasonable bounds?  Or have they gotten the better of your garden?

Sneaky Leeks

I've mentioned before how I love leeks.  That's me brandishing a few prized specimens in the top left of the banner collage.  Leeks take up real estate in the garden for a long time, but they are very unfussy plants, and they have the virtue of harvest-ability at that part of the year when it's very slim pickin's in the garden.  I've also just recently figured out how to store leeks for a short time by freezing them.  But the bottom line is they just taste wonderful.

So I'm starting an awful lot of them from seed this year, and I thought I'd share a little technique I've come up with.  It starts with the knowledge of how leeks behave.  That part of the leek which is below the surface of the soil will grow straight and white, and be the tenderest part of the leek.  Perhaps the sweetest part too.  In other words, you want to bury the seedling as deeply as feasible without completely covering it.  Leeks and potatoes are the only plants I know of that respond well to hilling.  But it's not really practical for me to plant leeks in a trench and then gradually fill it in over the season.  That technique works beautifully, if you want to pursue it.  I'd just rather not plant leeks in a single line and then tend to them that much.

Instead, I'm working on forcing my tiny seedlings to grow tall before I set them out.  At this stage, they are fairly easy to "hill."  Besides, leek seedlings are so floppy as they grow that they can use the support of repeated partial burials.  Some sources advise clipping the tops of the leek seedlings to avoid this flopping over, but that seems counterproductive to me.  I'd rather support the seedling than trim it.

My idea was to save several half-gallon milk cartons for seed starting.  Leek sprouts are so tiny that they can easily be crowded into a very small space.  So I use the carton in its upright position, with the top cut off and several drainage holes poked in the bottom.  I also cut most of the way down the corners of the carton, so that only a small portion of the carton will hold potting soil at first, and fold the sides down to allow plenty of light to reach the seedlings.  The waxy surface of the carton interior can be labeled in crayon or with a wax lumber pencil.

As the seedlings grow I progressively tape up a bit more of the sides of the carton, add more potting soil, and make another crease to keep the unfilled portion folded over to give the seedlings light.  Adding more soil to densely planted and flimsy plants is somewhat delicate work, so I use a spoon and dry potting soil that scatters easily.  If the potting soil bends any of the little seedlings as I fill, I just very gently pull them upright and the loose soil repositions itself around the stalks.  Only then do I water with a mister.  In this way I'm both supporting the seedlings, and encouraging them to grow long and tall well before it's time to put them in the ground.  When the sides of the carton are completely taped up and filled with potting soil, the seedlings will be more than 4" (10 cm)  tall. I'm betting that by the time it's warm enough to transplant them they'll be long enough to just plant quite deeply and leave it at that with no further hilling. I think the technique is sneaky.  It's a way of shifting most of the work needed to raise superior leeks into the relatively calm period before spring has properly arrived.

The picture above shows leek seedlings and their milk carton containers in several stages of development. Just planted seeds are on the right; those on the far left are the oldest.

P.S.  The homesteading books from the giveaway were mailed on Monday.  Winners, you should have them in your hot little hands very shortly if they haven't reached you already.  Thanks to all who entered.

Update: this technique didn't work out as hoped.

On the Horizon - A Broody Hen

I can't tell you what a great thing it is to know a few local farmers on first-name basis.  I get all kinds of benefits from my acquaintance with them, and being a paying customer for the foods they produce is just the tip of the iceberg.  Last year my farming friend offered up a disabled turkey poult, and we had the experience of raising it for our table.  She also sends pork jowls my way for free because her customers don't want them.  So I get to turn them into guanciale.

This time we'll get a broody hen with some heritage breed fertile eggs under her.  The idea is that we'll foster her and give her a place to rear her chicks.  After that we might split the chicks with the farmer providing the hen.  I've toyed with the idea of raising chicks before, but could never motivate myself to place an order and then buy necessary equipment to set up a brooder for them.  Being a surrogate chicken mother has just never appealed.  The alternative - a broody hen with good mothering instincts sounded fantastic.  Such a hen is all the equipment needed to rear chicks.  But my laying hens are production model Red Stars with no mothering instinct, and besides, I have no interest in keeping a rooster.  I'm pretty sure my neighbors have their limits in my residential setting.  So the out-of-the-blue offer of a broody hen was another fantastic opportunity just dropped into my lap through the magic of personal acquaintance with farmers.

After last year's turkey+honey bees infraction, I'm trying to stick to my one new species per year rule this year.  The Black Soldier Fly is going to be this year's unglamorous species of choice.  But a broody hen with chicks is all sorts of excitement without rule breaking. Chickens we know.  Chickens we've done.  The brooding-hatching-rearing process is entirely new to us, but it still falls within my self-imposed and sanity-preserving limitation.  So I'm psyched!  Our homestead will be host to a new phase of animal husbandry.  At least I hope.  I'm bearing in mind that old adage about counting chickens. I'm especially eager to see this process through because in the back of my mind I've thought about using a bantam hen to brood quail eggs and rear the young, should I ever decide to try my hand at quail.  (Domesticated quail aren't known for their mothering skills.)  Working with a broody hen ahead of time seems like the smart move.

Details are still a bit unclear as to the timing and other issues.  Sometime around the middle of the month we should take delivery of a broody girl and "her" eggs.   They may not all be hers biologically, but I'm pretty sure she'll feel rather proprietary about them. I don't know whether the farmer will want the hen back with the chicks, or whether he'll want us to keep her.  Details should be forthcoming eventually; farmers are busy people.  In the meantime, a small DIY project is on the agenda.  I'm guessing she and her chicks will do best with a separate space from our layers.  At the very least she'll need her own nesting box for her fertile eggs.  I figure she and her chicks can use the poultry schooner while the other hens are kept in the mobile pen and coop.

I find myself wild with the hope that the brooding experiment works out.  I am uncharacteristically excited about all the potential cuteness of tiny chicks.  It's a good thing that they go through an ugly phase as they grow and molt for the first time.  I'm not sure yet whether we'll keep any of the female hatchlings.  We definitely won't keep any males, though if the farmer doesn't want them either we could always turn them into meat and chicken stock.

As for our current layers, if you were waiting for details on their conversion to canned meat and chicken stock due to the egg-eating habit, they've been given a stay of execution.  Securing a small number of layers this time of year isn't proving easy, and I don't want to get rid of the ones we've got before I know we can replace them.  The egg-eating has also eased up a bit lately, though I'm not at all convinced the problem is solved.  I'm keeping them for at least a couple more weeks as I try to figure out where the next layers will come from.

Overwintering Rosemary in Zone 6

Time to report on my experiment in keeping a rosemary plant alive through a zone 6 winter.  Last fall I assembled one of Tamar and Kevin's instant mini-greenhouses, made from two window well covers, for my rosemary plant.  I had previously done a little homework to find a variety of rosemary noted for its hardiness, relative to other rosemary varieties.  I settled on the un-euphoniously named Arp rosemary, said to be hardy in zone 7, or only half a zone off our bit of earth.

I drilled a few small holes for ventilation at the top of my greenhouse and began covering the rosemary in November.  It came through the hard frosts of late fall just fine, retaining its green leaves fresh and ready for the picking.  I was pretty sure the truly cold temperatures of winter would send it into dormancy, and they did.  I could see no new growth, and the leaves took on a somewhat dull tone.

The question was, would protection from the wind and direct contact with snow be enough to let it survive?  With such a small space protected, there wouldn't be much advantage, if any, in terms of temperature.  A greenhouse large enough for a person to walk around in would certainly do the trick.  But this greenhouse was essentially a flimsy cloche; not thick enough or big enough to hold heat overnight.  All I could do was wait out winter's harshness and see how the rosemary fared.

Our big dump of snow came towards the end of January, and we've had snow on the ground ever since.  The snow covered the mini-greenhouse completely for several days.   I went out and scraped off some of the snow, to allow a little light in to warm up the space inside.  I suspect the snow that had built up around the sides then acted as insulation.

We're nearly to the end of February now.  Historically the coldest month of the year here is January, though we often see more snow in other months.  We're still seeing overnight temperatures substantially below freezing.  But we should only be headed into temperatures that trend warmer.  Today I checked the plant under there and found it looking fine.  It still has a wonderful scent, and the thicker stems are supple under my testing fingers.  They bend without breaking.  The color of the leaves is still dull green.  But green they are.  I'm pretty confident saying that the rosemary has survived with the help of this protection.  The plant will probably need the shelter of the mini-greenhouse for at least another six weeks though. 

Now that I know I can keep rosemary alive through a zone 6b winter, I wonder how much farther north this would work.  Any northern type gardeners out there tempted to try?

To keep this particular plant over the long term I'll have to keep it pruned such that it fits under the cover.  Or else start new plants each year.  There's enough room under there right now to accommodate another plant.  I may add some early peas in the next couple weeks.  But after the peas are done I might try planting some flat-leaf parsley alongside the rosemary, and see if parsley can also make it through next winter with a bit of shelter.  Home grown, nutritionally dense fresh parsley would be mighty welcome through the winter months.

Of course, a little success gets me scheming about other things I could plant, other non-hardy stuff I could drag into my hardiness zone by adding a few more shelters.  While it was ridiculously easy to make this mini-greenhouse from two window well covers, it wasn't exactly cheap. Not by my standards anyway.  I bought the heavy-duty ten-year covers, and I think it ended up costing about $30.  I expect they'll last even longer than ten years, since I'll store them in the shade for most of the year.  But I'm still going to keep an eye out for any other materials that might be repurposed for the cause.  I'm thinking an old skylight or the globe of a street lamp might do the trick, if I ever came across something like that in a dumpster.  I could also experiment with straw bales again.  I have plenty of salvaged storm windows to work with as lids for straw bale frames, and overwintered straw bales make such nice mulch in the spring.

Winter-Dug Burdock

We still have several gobo (domesticated burdock) roots in the ground.  I dug two of them up during a brief thaw about a week ago to see what roots left to overwinter in the ground would be like.  They were no more difficult to dig in cold earth than in warm earth, which is to say I still broke a sweat on a cold day.

Turns out I could have simply consulted the Johnny's Seed catalog to answer my questions about whether or not gobo holds in the earth through the winter.  Just last night, while surrounded by six open seed catalogs, I came across this: "...roots make a great season extension offering.  For fall, winter and spring harvest and storage.  Burdock can be overwintered in soil much the same as parsnips."  Still, it was an opportune moment to do the digging.  Temperatures are barely peaking above freezing once or twice a week.

In the course of answering my question by empirical means I found that the roots have developed a single growth ring, just as any tree does each year.  I've seen such rings before in carrots left too long in the ground.  I've heard that biennial parsnips do the same, and that the flesh of the parsnip outside the growth ring remains edible in the second year, even though the part within the ring becomes tough and unappetizing.  In gobo, the flesh is always somewhat tough, which lends it a meaty texture but also requires more cooking than for other types of root vegetable. 

The roots I dug this month were extremely large; more than two inches in diameter.  As ever, I was not able to dig deep enough to harvest the entire root.  So there's a root fragment of unknown length left in the ground for each plant that I harvested.  In wild burdock that I've dug up, the roots had hollowed out to form very large fibrous cavities.  I saw just the beginnings of this trait in the Takinagawa gobo I left for winter, though not in the least in those harvested earlier.  Where the cavity begins to form, the flesh discolors slightly and becomes sort of spongy.  I just trimmed around these sections and composted those parts.  I also found some traces of a pink coloration near the top of the root as I trimmed it.  I don't know what to make of this as I've never seen any such pigmentation in roots dug earlier in the year.  But we ate that root and are none the worse for wear, so it seems there's nothing to worry about.

I've read that burdock root stores only for one week in the refrigerator, but this has not been my experience.  I harvest the roots, leaving the very base layers of the leaf stalks intact, only very gently cleaning off the dirt that clings to them.  To do so I soak the roots in a big pot of water out on the porch to remove the soil clumps, and then shake off both water and dirt, leaving all the little feeder roots intact.  Rinsing the roots is said to hasten spoilage, but with this method all seems well. Then I wrap each individual root as tightly as can be managed in plastic wrap and store it in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.  So far I've kept them for two weeks in there and they seem fine. (My next experiment will be to store one in the root cellar and see how that does.)  I can't say this with absolute certainty, but it seems to me that winter-dug gobo roots are slower to discolor when the flesh is exposed to air than are summer- or fall-dug roots.  The discoloration occurs quickly when preparing the roots by scraping them with the back of the knife.  (There are more details about preparing gobo on my kinpira gobo recipe page.)  Whereas the parts of the root exposed by breaking them off during winter harvest seem very slow to discolor.  In any case, the discoloration is purely aesthetic and not in any way dangerous.  I now put a generous splash of vinegar in the soaking water during preparation and this prevents most discoloration.

So there's my empirically derived answer as to whether or not gobo will hold in the ground over the winter.  They will, though the tendency of the plant to form root cavities may become more and more evident the later the root is harvested.  Now the question remains as to whether or not the root fragments left in the ground will rot in place, or manage to grow enough to produce top growth in a second year.  The fragments are all at least 10 inches below the surface and usually more than that.  If they rot in place, that's fantastic treatment for our clay soil.  If they regrow next year, there's a good chance I'll get another harvest from a single planting.  In the latter case it would be interesting to see how many years of harvest could derive from the initial planting.  It's also possible though that the second year's root growth might be less edible in some way.  We shall see...

Catching My Breath

It's been one busy blur from late summer to Thanksgiving around here.  A lot has been going on that I haven't had time to write about; projects big and small, major working weekends with WWOOF volunteers, and hosting Thanksgiving for relatives coming in from out of state.  In mid-November it finally felt as though the garden was winding down, though what was ripe/mature and needed eating still pretty much set our diet right up to Thanksgiving.  I pushed myself a bit to keep up with the outdoor work well into fall, and have been rewarded with a mostly clear conscience and lack of niggling thoughts about things left undone.  So as I catch my breath, I'll catch up on some topics I wanted to post about.

I painted the front room, a combination living and dining room, late this summer.  It was an attempt to make the room a little less stark and more welcoming.  We close off that room each winter because it's one of the coldest in the house.  But even in summer time, when that coolness is welcome, we hadn't been using it much.  It was a fair bit of work to get the painting job done, but the room feels very different with the change from stark white to some color.  We also got some decent blinds.  That part of the house dates from the 1870s, when houses were built with a lot of windows, probably because they valued the light in un-electrified times.  The ugly curtains the house came with were so prominent in the room that it was hard to see much else.  The unobtrusive new blinds take the ugly down several notches, insulate a very significant part of the total area of the walls, and also block out a lot of the street noise.  Again, homes built in this area during that time period were built right along the road, so the street noise also kept us away from this room.  Soon we'll close it off again for the winter, but I feel good about having made that room a part of the house we like to spend time in.

This year I made a big effort to be a more responsible gardener and put the garden to bed in a somewhat decent fashion.  Not in a nightcap or anything, but I'm not sending it into winter covered in weeds.  So garden work continued right through this month, and I'm hoping that this will lead to a less stressful spring workload.  It looks pretty decent out there.  Not perfect, but better than it ever has before in November.

I borrowed Tamar and Kevin's ingenious mini-greenhouse idea for my in-ground rosemary plant.  It's made with two plastic window well covers, available at hardware stores.  Mine is a taller version of what Tamar and Kevin built, with a smaller, rectangular footprint compared to their lower and wider version with a circular footprint, 'cause rosemary plants need the headroom.  Here in zone 6 our winters are just a smidgen too cold for rosemary to overwinter.  This is an experiment to see whether a little windchill protection, and perhaps less completely frozen soil, will allow the rosemary to survive.  So far the rosemary has come through some pretty respectable frosts (26F/-3C) just fine.  If it doesn't survive this year in the garden, I'm trying again next year in a more sheltered position.  Rosemary is an herb I most want for cooking winter dishes and for baking breads.  In fact, I practically ignore it during summer.  So I'm determined to find a way to provide myself with a source during bread baking season.

We pressed our apples earlier this month, blessed with an unseasonably warm Sunday and the help of an awesome WWOOF volunteer crew.  Having so many pairs of hands made the job go very fast, and it was delightful to not be freezing our buns off during cider pressing.  The yield was, as usual, depressingly small given the apple tally.  I pitched in earlier this fall to help a small scale local orchardist press her apples into cider at a commercial press.  Her yield in cider was amazing compared to ours, and it's pretty obvious that the advantage comes from the combination of very fine grinding of the apples, and the sheer force of a hydraulic press.  We can't replicate the strength of the press, but with some DIY tinkering we could improve a great deal on the extremely coarse grind we get from a hand-cranked vintage apple grinder.  I've been meaning for a few years now to find the time to convert an in-sink garbage disposal unit to a superior apple grinder.  The finer the grind we produce from our apples, the higher our cider yields should be.  So reluctantly I'm going to add this project to my list of formal goals for next year.

Because our chest freezer was very nearly full before we even pressed our cider, I encouraged my husband to use a good portion of it for hard cider.  He's got four different batches going at the moment in the cellar.  We'll see how they turn out.  Gonna have to work on eating through that chest freezer this winter...

While the WWOOF volunteers were here we made further progress on the lawn eradication front, and set ourselves up well for digging big holes to transplant our hazelbert bushes in about 18 months.  We lasagna mulched a fairly large area in our side yard for the bushes.  This is a narrow and significantly shaded part of the property, situated close to the neighbor's house, and fully visible from the street.  None of the doors of the house open on to that side, so we don't go over there very often, except for my most hated task: mowing the grass.  The lawn eradication was satisfying, as it means that much less time spent on the dreaded chore.  Planting two hazels which will eventually grow into a substantial screen for that area will be equally satisfying.  The lasagna mulching will kill the sod there and, we hope, make the digging of deep holes much easier, while also improving the soil for the plants. So it's nice to look out the window and see the spot prepared so far in advance.

We just hosted Thanksgiving for my extended family, and several family members declared it the best Thanksgiving meal they'd ever had.  My family are mostly quite serious eaters, and none of us blow sunshine up each other's skirts.  Ever.  So this was a serious claim.  Not that I take credit for the success of the meal, because everyone contributed.  But I will say this - the pastured turkey we bought from my farming friend was grilled to absolute perfection by my husband, as the first snowfall of the season came down.  We've been grilling our Thanksgiving birds for quite a few years now.  It's a once a year endeavor, so it's not like he gets a lot of practice.  I had brined the bird for just 24 hours, then aired it out in the fridge for 36, pulled it out of the fridge two hours before cooking began, and iced the breast for the second of those hours.  The ice trick slows down the cooking of the breast so that it doesn't get dried out while the legs finish cooking.  Fresh rosemary sprigs and our apple wood chips were repeatedly laid on the mesquite coals while the bird cooked.  It's easy to overdo this flavoring technique and end up with a resinous, over-smoked bird.  But my husband dialed it in this year.  The bird was moist and beautifully flavored.  The leftovers are like the smoked turkey deli meat of your dreams.  I can only hope our New Year's turkey turns out so well.  The stock I made from the carcass also has a gorgeous hint of apple wood smoke.  It's probably the most delicious stock I've ever made.  And not incidentally, the side dishes were pretty awesome this year too.  I picked leeks and savoy cabbage from the garden on Thanksgiving morning, and cooked them very simply.  Family members brought other vegetable dishes and desserts that were equally good.  A few pints of our elderflower cordial made over the summer graced the table too.  It was a righteous feast.  Then followed the making of turkey pot pies and other attempts at letting nothing go to waste.  Pie of several sorts has featured at breakfast recently.

Image taken from the Remington website

We took advantage of my uncle's presence during the holiday weekend to do some gun shopping with him.  We had only intended to browse and avail ourselves of his vast experience with guns of all types.  He is a competition marksman, certified gun safety instructor, and his part-time retirement job is in a gun store in another state.  He hunted for many years to put food on the table as well.  So he knows his way around firearms.  As often happens, we stumbled into a good sale on the shotgun we were fairly sure we wanted before we even got to the shop.  The family-owned and -operated nature of this local business and its service guarantee impressed us too, so we walked out with a 12 gauge Remington 870, a shotgun my uncle praised for its reliability and versatility of purpose.  Our Christmas shopping for each other is done.  Now we need to find a place and time to practice shooting on a regular basis.  Who knows?  Maybe this time next year we'll go hunting.

There are a whole bunch of crafts and projects and recipes I've been putting off, and putting off while the garden was in session.  Felting a pair of mittens from an old wool sweater.  Duck confit.  A classic English pork pie.  A mosaic decoration on a stepping stone or two for the garden.  Making a variety of filled dumplings.  Hosting a cookie baking get-together.  And a handful of minor DIY projects, which the garage workspace is now usually chilly enough to deter me from even beginning.  I'm hoping that December and January will be slow enough, and my industriousness steady enough to get at least some of the indoorsy things done.

An Aha! Moment

Homesteading is equal parts experimentation, failure, and learning to actually see what's right in front of you.  At least, that's the definition I give you today.  Over this past year I've been eying the wooden fence that almost entirely encloses our small property.  It's old, and not in good shape.  I'd been thinking that next year we might have to scrape up some serious money to have it fixed or replaced.  In other words, I was thinking conventionally, and not at all like a homesteader.  It still happens.

The strong wind storm that visited much of the northeast this week toppled one of the panels of our fence.  It might well have toppled a few others at the same time, but the wind contented itself with making just one ten-foot gap in the fence line.  I sighed, and wondered whether I should call some fence guys right away, or just wait for spring.  Clearly, the wooden support posts on the entire fence are reaching the ends of their useful lives.  I expect to see them fail one by one in the coming years if nothing is done to remedy the situation.

Then my husband went out to take a look at it and came back inside with the obvious and fully brilliant idea of scrapping the fence entirely and replacing it with a hedgerow.  A hedgerow.  A hedgerow!  It hit me like a thunderbolt.  Why hadn't I seen it?  How could I have missed such a neat solution to so many problems?  All the years we've been on this property, I've looked at that fence and only seen it as demarcating space we can and can't turn to production.  It's not as though I'm unfamiliar with the amazing benefits of hedgerows.  They do enclose space, true enough.  But they're often more productive than the spaces they enclose.  They require little maintenance while providing abundant food and habitat for wildlife.  The wildlife, in turn, improve the fertility of the surrounding soil by adding their manure and their dynamic contributions to the immediate area.   They provide privacy and often are more attractive than fences.  Not least significantly, they cost less to establish than a new fence, have a much longer lifespan than any fence, and don't generate any waste or pollution in their construction.  Also, this section of the fence partly defines an underused space on our property that I've been wondering about.  Specifically wondering whether it might ever sustainably support a few miniature dairy goats.  It's a shady area with marginal soil, so it currently doesn't offer much food to livestock.  If it were bordered by a hedgerow instead of a fence however, that could change dramatically.

A hedgerow that replaces our fence could answer all the functions of that fence while dramatically increasing the amount of food that is produced here.  I've been coddling a pair of hazelnut plants in containers this year, because the open space I've been planning to put them into is significantly shaded.  Now I see that I could have a hedgerow with several hazels in it without sacrificing any open space.  We could have so many hazel plants that I could retire my concern about the squirrels robbing us of all of the nuts before they even ripen.  We could afford to be open handed with the bounty of our little piece of land, rather than fighting wildlife for every morsel.  It's hard to believe that I could have missed something so obvious and so awesome.

Now the challenge is to figure out how to do it.  This is where experimentation comes into homesteading.  There are no tidy guidelines for planting a hedgerow.  All sorts of factors conspire to force me to do my own research: our soil type and climate, the fact that I don't want the hedgerow to grow high enough to shade our garden, and our personal tastes as far as diet go.  The challenge is greater because I'm in Pennsylvania, not England.  I can't tap a local expert on hedgerows, or pick up amateur advice from the neighbors.  A hedgerow should be a densely grown mixture of shrubs and vines.  But we have to decide what those should consist of.  Of course, if you have no preferences and just want any old sort of hedgerow, there's an easy way to go about it.  String a line of barbed wire or other fencing where you want the hedgerow.  Wild birds will perch there, poop out the seeds of things that grow well in your area, and after a few years' benign neglect, you'll have your own hedgerow. 

Obviously, we're going to be a bit pickier when stocking our hedgerow.  I plan to start with just the section of fence which collapsed.  If I can establish a few suitable plants there in the near term, I'm guessing I'll be able to propagate from those plants as more gaps in the fence line appear over the coming years.  When the plants grow larger, we could remove the panels to either side of the existing gaps if they're hanging on, and encourage expansion to either side.

So, I'm now doing research to see what plants will meet our requirements.  We'll need plants that won't grow too tall, aren't fussy, and some that tolerate partial shade.  Those that provide food for livestock, fix nitrogen, or propagate easily are going to get extra points.  Candidate plants near the top of the list include hazels, elders, black raspberries, Siberian pea shrub, muscadines, and wild cucumber. If you know a perennial or reseeding annual productive plant that is hardy to zone 6, doesn't grow above 12 feet/4 meters, and is suitable for hedgerows, I'd love to hear about it.

Honey Bees Update

Now that we're settling down into some properly autumnal weather, with temperatures dipping below freezing overnight, I think it's finally time for an update on the honey bee experiment that began in April.  The short version of the report is: we lost one colony early, and the surviving one is understrength going into the winter.

Izhevsk, our colony of Russian honey bees, looked good all through the spring and into midsummer.  But sometime during late July they ate down just about all the honey they had stored, and have basically been limping along ever since.  They appear to still have a functioning queen.  We've seen her clearly, as she's marked with a blue dot.  No signs of supersedure cells, so the workers apparently think she's healthy and capable of performing her duty as the reproductive organ of the colony.  And yet, we've seen precious little brood since July.  Many experienced beekeepers reported starving colonies this year, apparently due to the exceptionally hot and dry summer here in the east.

There was no question of taking any harvest of honey whatsoever.  We've been feeding them sugar syrup, which I don't like to do.  But there's little doubt they'd long since have died without the help.  They have two full feeders' worth of the syrup at the moment, but if temperatures are cold enough they won't even travel within their own hive to get at the food.  Honey bees have been known to starve to death in the center of a hive, with full frames of honey mere inches away.  Right now the colony is mostly huddled into a single medium box.  That's likely not enough bees to generate sufficient heat to make it through winter.

We added a thick insulation layer of rigid foamboard to three sides of the hive, and black tarpaper to the south-facing side, in an attempt to help them along.  We cut plenty of space around their reduced entrance, so that they still have a front door landing pad. The idea is for the insulation to prevent windchill and the black paper to provide a little solar gain.  But we've also left the bottom completely open except for the built-in screen on the bottom board.  We also added a few spacers to increase airflow from the top cover.  Condensation and moisture in the colony is more of a risk than cold temperatures - at least for a strong, well provisioned colony.  Izhevsk is not strong however.   It seems almost futile to insulate the sides of a hive while leaving so much airflow, but such is the received wisdom.

It's possible the bees may survive this winter, and the milder it is, the better their odds.  I figured this first year of beekeeping would be a major learning experience, and it has been.  Experience is one of those things you get after you need it.  Sadly, the bees paid dearly for our year of learning.  If we lose Izhevsk, we'll certainly try again next year, and I believe, make fewer mistakes.  I put in quite a few perennial plants this year with a view to providing bee forage.  They'll be larger next year, and so provide more nectar to them.  In any case, we're likely to try again with an Italian colony next year.  We're not giving up on beekeeping.

So that's the report - ambiguous but definitely not rosy.  It's unlikely we'll check on them or feed them again unless we happen to get a particularly warm day before spring.  Until then, all we can do is hope the golden ladies make it.

Potato Bucket Results: Disappointing

This year I tried a variation on the potato buckets that did so well for me last year.  But 2010 was a very different growing season than 2009.  In fact, you could say the two years were opposite extremes.  And the method that worked well in 2009's conditions performed poorly in 2010's.

June of 2009 was a month of rain that was nearly Old Testament in its lack of moderation.  That led to all my potato plants in the ground developing late blight in early August.  But the potatoes in buckets, with their better drainage and higher elevation leading to better air flow around the plants, resisted the blight for an additional month after all the others were finished.  I saw pretty good yields out of those buckets. 

Not so this year.  We had hardly a drop of rain all summer, which is quite unusual for this area, plus heat that was higher than average.  I discovered that potatoes don't particularly love the heat.  The ones in buckets fared especially poorly.  In the beginning of the growing season I had situated them on the driveway.  My thinking was that I would be getting some production out of an otherwise unusable space. Of course, I couldn't know at the time what sort of summer was in store, but this was a bad move.  And I should have corrected the mistake by removing the buckets from the blacktop once the heat set in.  But - and I won't bore you with excuses - I didn't.

The yields I saw from these buckets were too embarrassing to report here.  Really abysmal.  Suffice it to say I'm glad that we had potatoes in the ground as well.  That said, I don't think the new design of my self-watering buckets was at fault.  I suspect the water reservoir was the only reason I got any harvest at all.  Had I avoided the foot infection that kept me from watering for several of the hottest days of the summer, yields might have been a bit better.  My feeling is that my real mistake was keeping them on the blacktop when it was clear that they were struggling with the heat.  Chili peppers or tomatoes might have fared better there.

I will certainly try potatoes in buckets again next year.  The harvest remains as easy as ever: tip the bucket into a wheelbarrow and pick out the spuds.  It's even possible that I might position the buckets on the driveway again if we were to have another atypically cold and wet year.  But in an average or hotter than average year in this region, my observations suggest they'll do better somewhere else.

Sustainable Cooking: Curried Chickpeas with Tomato

I've made very little progress towards my goal of using our rocket stove and solar oven more frequently this year.  Of course I have excuses, and they're semi-legitimate, but they boil down to the universal excuses for everything that's wrong with our culture: I'm busy, and it's not convenient.  I'm working on making it more convenient to use either the rocket stove or the solar oven, but in the meantime, I need to just suck it up and cook out there anyway.

It helps that the heat has been infernal lately.  Who wants to cook inside with such weather?  So on Saturday evening I soaked a bunch of chickpeas.  On Sunday morning, I cleaned up the solar oven, and added a bunch of seasoning ingredients to the chickpeas.  The day was blazing hot and sunny almost all the time.  The dish didn't come out perfectly: I'd left a lot more liquid in with the beans than was really needed.  But they cooked through quite well and were tasty.

I wasn't working with a recipe, but here's what I did.  First I drained the soaking liquid the chickpeas were in and then recovered them with fresh water.  I chopped up about five cloves of garlic, and minced about an inch of a fat section of fresh ginger.  These were added to the soaking liquid along with a palmful of dried minced onion, and some spices, roughly in descending order of quantity: cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper, cayenne, and amchoor.  I also added a good drizzle of oil and a coarsely diced fresh tomato.  This left my cooking pot for the solar oven absolutely brimming.  It went into the solar oven around 9am, and as I checked the temperature in the oven throughout the day it varied from 150-255 F (66-124 C) as the outdoor temperature climbed to 94 F (34 C) and clouds occasionally scudded across the sky.  I only added salt when the chickpeas were done cooking.

Towards the end of the day I put some basmati rice to cook in the steamer out on the porch.  I also went out to the garden to rustle up a quicky relish to go with what is essentially a beans and rice dish: roughly equal parts fresh cilantro (including soft stems) and spearmint (leaves only) along with a whole scallion, a pinch of salt, and a bit of lime juice.  Everything whizzed together in the food processor, with the sides scraped down a few times between bouts of whizzing.  This crude relish isn't shown in the picture but it added a lovely bit of green both visually and taste-wise.  Very refreshing it was too, on a hot evening.  I think adding a zucchini or two to the chickpeas for the last hour or so of cooking would have added a nicer balance of veg too.

I'd make this again but definitely reduce the amount of liquid that goes in the cooking pot.  It worked as a somewhat soupy dish because the rice could soak everything up.  But more concentrated flavor would be better.  Cooking in a solar oven is definitely an experimental endeavor for me.  It's a bit like baking in that you have to set things up and then relinquish the possibility of intervention once the actual cooking begins.  Because the cooking containers are very nearly airtight, I'm having to learn how much liquid to add.  And this is an iterative process.  Also it seems to me that flavors in solar-cooked dishes are more mellow and more diffuse than I would expect from conventionally cooked food.  The flavors in this dish reminded me of leftover curry that had been cooked a few days previously - all the seasonings had spread themselves out and reached a point of equilibrium among all ingredients.  So I might also learn to be a little heavy handed with the seasonings as I continue with the solar cooking goal for this year.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Solstice!

An Unanticipated Addition to the Homestead

Farming friend has this wonderful knack of calling me up and saying, "Hey, do you want _____?"  What she's offering varies wildly, but it's always awesome, and always something I've never considered before.  Last fall it was the unloved bits from her hogs, which went into making my first batch of guanciale, or cured hog jowls.  They turned out really well, and I was sorry when they were gone.

This time she outdid herself.  She called me twice on Sunday with two of her characteristically amazing offers.  The first offer I'm going to hold in reserve, and write about it later if it works out. But secondly, she asked if I wanted a three-week-old turkey poult.  Now, as you know if you've read my blog very long, I have a policy of not turning down free handouts, which I think has a lot to do with why these offers keep coming.  However, farming friend's offers this time around were a bit of a challenge.  While I didn't want to say "no" to either offer, neither did I feel ready to say "yes" on the spot.  We'd never considered getting a turkey, so I really hadn't the slightest idea how to make that work.

This poult had either arrived as a hatchling at my friend's farm with a deformity, or had been abused by its flockmates.  In any case, it ended up blind in one eye, and was being picked on to the point that it was going to take some serious damage or be killed outright.  So farming friend isolated it in a separate brooder box, but didn't want the added chore of dealing with a single poult when there were so many other animals to attend to on a daily basis.  Of course, in principle I'd love to raise my own Thanksgiving turkey.  But I had so many questions!  Could the turkey stay with our laying hens?  (Not at such a young age.)  Do turkeys roost at night?  (Sometimes.  Our coop is very small, and the turkey will get pooped on by the hens if it's not up on the bar with them.)  Can it eat what the laying hens eat?  (Apparently not immediately; it'll need a higher protein feed for a while.)  Will the turkey take until fall to reach a good size for slaughter? (Pretty much.)  Will it be able to hold its own with the hens?  (Probably, once it reaches a certain size.)

Farming friend assured me that she would bring all that was required to take care of the poult for the next few weeks.  And that if it just didn't work out for us to keep it here, she'd take it back. With that sort of offer, I couldn't see any reason to say no.  So I said yes, and she came by Monday afternoon.  So now we've got a poult upstairs.  In a room with a door that latches securely (young cats in the house, you know).  It'll go outside in a week or two, in its own makeshift pen.  Right now it still seems to want the warmth of the heat lamp in its brooder box, despite the sultry summertime weather we're having.  When it's quite a bit bigger than it is now, I may try keeping it with the hens.  Farming friend figures they'd eat the turkey at this stage if they had the chance.  I don't know how fast it'll grow, but by its looks I'd guess it needs at least a month before it's bigger than the hens, maybe two.

This turkey is a Bourbon Red heritage breed turkey, so it'll put on weight slowly compared to the industrial standard, the broad breasted white.  We don't know yet whether it's male or female, which makes my decision not to name it that much easier.  I might - might - relent so far as to start calling it Thanksgiving.  Sex characteristics should begin to show in another four to five weeks.  Provided nothing goes wrong, we've got the main course for my favorite holiday meal all squared away.  I'm glad we've some experience slaughtering chickens already, because I don't think I'd want to start on a turkey.  If all goes well, I'll be able to try out Novella Carpenter's branch lopper execution method. 

A turkey was not in the homestead plan for this year, but what the heck!

Taking a Crack at Lacto-Fermented Ketchup

Back in February I sampled an astounding fermented ketchup at the PASA conference.  Although I was told by the woman who made it that she was willing to share the recipe, she never came through.  So I've been left to my own devices to experiment as I see fit.  The only thing I know for sure about that mind-blowing ketchup was that it contained smoked chili peppers.  That's probably half the reason I loved it so much.  Smoked foods are some of my favorites.

So, I'm going to play around with lacto-fermented ketchup. After all, I'm pretty DIY oriented, and professional culinary training ought to qualify me to perfect my own ketchup recipe.  Actually, recipe development is exciting enough that I'm sort of glad I wasn't given a recipe. Below are a double handful of variables I came up with after reading a few different recipes online and asking what sounded good to me.  Perhaps some of you would like to run your own experiments concurrently, and share the results either on your own blogs or in the comments section here.  Of course, in developing this recipe, we'll be relying on our own infallible but entirely subjective taste buds to produce something we like.  You might prefer something else.  So experimenting for yourself would be the best option for everyone.

Lacto-fermented ketchup - recipe development variables

tomato - roasted? simmered/reduced? concassé?
minced onion vs. scallion vs. shallot
ratio of tomato to onion?
tomato paste - yes/no?
smoked chili pepper - ancho vs. chipotle vs. others
cumin vs. allspice vs. both
white pepper vs. black pepper
molasses vs. maple syrup vs. no sweetener added
fish sauce - yes/no?
garlic - yes/no, roasted vs. raw, how much?
vinegar - balsamic, cider, none?
salt - how much?

Given these multiple variables, I estimate that I'll make upwards of 28 different batches of ketchup to find what we like best, just within these parameters.  Obviously, they'll be small batches.  The one constant in this recipe testing process will be the use of yogurt "juice" from live culture yogurt for the inoculant.  That's the liquid that shows up when you take a scoop of yogurt out of the container, leaving a little well.  The best I can do there is organic store bought yogurt.  I may eventually be able to track down a supply of local raw whey from a goat dairy.  If so, I may try working with that instead.

The basic method for the recipe is to combine all ingredients and let them sit in a covered jar at room temperature for a few days, then refrigerate.  I can't really be sure, but I suspect that the ketchup I had in February had been happily fermenting away since late summer.  Lacto-fermentation is an active and evolving process.  So it's possible that the depth of flavor I found in that sample was a product of aging, like you'd see in fine cheese.  It may be that my recipe testing will fail to produce anything remotely like what I tasted, unless I allow my ketchup to hang out for several months.  All I can do is run my trials and see what combinations appeal most to us, and then see what the aging process contributes.

I've started with this process well ahead of our own tomato harvest, so that when the absolute best tomatoes are available, I'll have a pretty good idea of what I want to do with them.  Of course, this means buying local hothouse tomatoes.  These are not great tomatoes, by any stretch of the imagination.  I don't usually bother buying any sort of fresh tomatoes, at any time of year.  But in the interest of developing this recipe, and maximizing the value of my own crop this summer, I'll make that sacrifice. As proper tomato season approaches, the quality of tomatoes available should only improve.  So I'll have to remind myself that some of the quality that develops in the ketchup batches is due to better tomatoes rather than my own skill.

The first batch is to test the method of preparing the tomatoes themselves, while holding all other ingredients constant.  I expect the ways of dealing with the tomatoes will have slight effects on taste and texture.  Concaséed tomatoes are certainly the simplest, lowest-energy, and closest to raw of the three methods I'm trialing.  So I'd prefer it if that one produced the best flavor.  Sampling the batches in the pre-fermented state showed that even very mediocre tomatoes can taste pretty good after all the other ingredients are added.  Now the lacto-bacillus get to work their magic.

Will keep you posted.  In the meantime, if you have a favored ketchup recipe, especially if it's lacto-fermented, please share!

Update:  Got the original recipe from the source.