Resurfacing

Apologies for the long radio silence.  And thanks to those of you who sent kind inquiries about my absence.  All is well at the homestead.  While spring is always a busy season that gets in the way of writing, that's not my excuse this time.  The difference now is that my husband is more or less retired, and thus home all the time.  This is almost entirely a good thing.  The only exception to that is my habit of writing when I have the house entirely to myself.  The writing "mood," as it were, comes to me most easily in solitude.  I find it very hard to reach that state with distractions around me.  So, if this blog is to continue, I'll need to figure out a routine or a method that will provide verisimilitude for being alone at home.  This will probably be a challenge, but I'll work at it.  If I manage to find time to write, it'll probably mean I find a way to catch up with many of your blogs as well.  I've missed keeping tabs on what many of you are up.  There's so much inspiration and so many cool ideas in the gardening/homesteading blogosphere!

In the meantime I should provide some thumbnail sketches of where we're at and what we've been doing.  First off, my husband's "retirement" is really the loss of a job.  Since we've known this was coming for quite a while, we could plan for it, which I know is an advantage many people don't get.  Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.  Our advance notice let us, just barely, pay off our mortgage entirely before his employment ended.  So we are now without an income, but also debt-free.  Mostly that's not scary at this point.  It feels pretty good, I have to tell you.  We've taken a few extra efforts here and there to shave expenses in an already pretty frugal existence. 

We've already hosted a number of WWOOF volunteers this year, and our first one brought with him an impressive amount of construction experience.  He helped us build a new mobile chicken coop to replace our clunky and deteriorating pen and coop system, which served honorably, if inelegantly, these past four years.  The new rig is an A-frame that provides a bit more area to the chickens and should require almost no cleaning, ever, since there's no floor. All the poop ends up directly on the lawn. The girls seem to have taken to it quite happily.  I think it's just about the most awesome chicken coop ever, if I say so myself.  I'll try to get a detailed post on this one up soon.  (Yes, I know my track record with "soon" is execrable.)

Other recent efforts have entailed a lot of digging and planting of rootstock.  The hedgerow project got moved way up the priority list by last year's Halloween snowstorm from hell.  The storm took out a major section of our fence in the backyard.  We're going with the strategy of leaving what remains of the old wooden fence where it is, and replacing what came down with livestock panels and the plants that will form the hedgerow.  Frankly, this looks ugly at the moment, and doesn't provide any of the privacy of the wooden fence.  But eventually, the livestock panels will be mostly hidden by the plants, which will give us privacy, and should look a lot better than the wooden fence.  Should we ever decide to use that space for dairy goats, the dual-element hedgerow will constitute a real barrier to the animals, while looking pretty and offering some browse.  So far our hedgerow plantings include rugosa roses, Siberian peashrub, cornelian cherry, a dwarf willow tree, and a golden elderberry.  It's likely that our black raspberry patch, which sort of backs into the property line, will become a hedgerow element too.  I have three tiny hazels and a ginseng plant that will be coddled for another year or two in containers before being added to the hedgerow.  We lucked out with the goat panels, finding them used for a small fraction of the price for new ones, which is considerable.  Right now a picture of the hedge project wouldn't really show much.  I'm hoping that by late summer or fall a second picture will provide an impressive contrast.  We'll see how it goes.

We also planted several new fruit trees, bushes and vines this month.  We're starting both table grapes and hardy kiwis on trellises, and experimenting with a new growing technique for several fruit trees.  The technique is called Backyard Orchard Culture.  The good folk at Root Simple blog wrote about it, and you can check out a summary at the website of the tree nursery which developed it.  Basically the idea is to cram normal fruit trees into places where they either won't have enough space to develop to their normal mature size, or where such full growth is undesirable.  Then you radically prune the tree as it grows to keep it very small.  Planting multiple fruit trees very close together is another part of BOC.  Doing so forces the trees to compete for resources, which helps keep them small.  While trees maintained in this manner will obviously never produce as much fruit as trees which realize their full growth, there are other advantages.  Having many small fruit trees means you can have a succession of harvests that are each just large enough to keep you in fresh fruit for a fortnight or so, without providing any pressure to preserve the bulk of an enormous harvest.   The six Asian pears and two extra apples we just planted in this way should (eventually) give us modest quantities of fresh fruit over a three-month span from mid-summer to early fall.  (We'd ordered two more apples which would have extended the season through mid-fall at least, but they were sold out.  We may add them next year.)  Since BOC trees are kept very small, maintenance and harvesting are very easy.  There's no need for ladders.  I expect that when I'm another twenty or thirty years older, the ability to do such work with both feet on the ground will be very appealing.

We've got a few broiler chickens going already this year.  My feeling is that last year we let our batch of six go far too long.  I wanted to use up the second bag of feed that I'd purchased for them, and that meant letting most of them live for ten weeks.  It gave us bigger birds, certainly.  But it also meant that by the end I had to move the birds three times per day just to keep them out of their own filth.  The Cornish cross breed that accounts for the vast majority of chicken meat in this country isn't genetically modified, but judging by how fast they grow, they may as well be.  At nine and ten weeks of age, even broilers that were kept on grass, not fed for 24 hours per day, and allowed plenty of space to move around, pretty much couldn't and didn't.  The speed at which these birds grow is an undeniable advantage for those who want to fly under the radar with backyard meat production.  You can finish the birds before anyone notices they're there.  But it's pretty much their only virtue.  This year I'll raise two batches of four birds each, and only until each batch finishes off an 80-pound bag of feed.  I expect that to mean slaughter at roughly seven weeks old.  Thus smaller birds, but more of them as compared with last year.

Finally, we've just started work on a tiny frog pond to be added to the center of our garden.  This is the only suitable spot we could find for it - one that's not on a footpath or directly under a large deciduous tree that will dump too many leaves into it in autumn.  Work sort of stalled with this after the hole was dug, as mild weather brought on many spring tasks very early.  But I want to get this done soonish, so that it can provide many benefits to our growing space this year.  I know for a certainty that adding a bit of water to the garden will bring a great deal of additional biodiversity, which can only be a good thing.  What I'm really hoping for though are some toads, which are supposed to be fantastic for slug control.  The lasagna mulching method I'm so fond of does tend to encourage slugs, though we've had such dry conditions the last couple years that it's sort of been a wash.  The plan is to stock the pond with duckweed for multiple uses, and probably a few goldfish for algae management.  If frogs or toads don't show up on their own, I may go looking for some tadpoles.  I know where to find some of these locally in the correct season, but I'm pretty sure that window has closed for the year. 

Hope spring is treating you all well.  Drop me a line and let me know what's new with you and your garden.

Harvest Meal: Chicken in a Pot

I never posted about the source of the main course of this harvest meal.  It was a runty broiler that my farming friend gave me when it was half-size to the rest of her broilers, which were ready for slaughter.  Something was definitely off about this Cornish Cross bird, because it took me more than two additional months to raise it to a size that looked sort of ready to harvest.  I finally decided on the slaughter date (Sunday) only because our own broiler chicks really needed the extra room provided in the poultry schooner, which is still in service.

Monday night's method of preparation...well, that was an experiment for which I had to work up my nerve.  "Experiment" only in the sense of trying something entirely new with a precious bit of homegrown meat.  I'm usually loathe to branch out too far with high value ingredients, and no food is so scarce as meat raised on less than an acre.  But this Chicken in a Pot came from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table cookbook which I found on the new arrivals shelf at the library.  Greenspan is no slouch in the kitchen.  The rustic appearance of this mundanely name dish appealed to my peasant cooking propensities.  (But trust me when I say the cover photo of this dish is far more beautiful than the one above.)  So I took a risk, and I'm glad I did.  Basically, the chicken steams itself inside a cast iron dutch oven sealed air-tight with a ring of simple dough.  The bird and the accompanying vegetables are pre-browned to ensure some color, but every drop of juicy goodness collects in the dutch oven.  Everything turned out super moist, super tender.  For copyright reasons, I'm not going to reproduce her recipe verbatim.  But I will tell you what I put in the pot.

Our broiler chicken weighed just under 5 and a half pounds.  Had it been any larger I don't think it would have fit into our standard size dutch oven.  Aside from the bird, I put in homegrown purple potatoes, garlic, shallots, rosemary, thyme and a few boughten carrots.  I browned the bird and all the vegetables except the potatoes in a mixture of bacon fat and olive oil.  The dough was just water and flour, though I did add some of the leftover fat from browning the ingredients.  The rest of the fat went into the dutch oven.  I enjoyed the challenge of tucking as many potatoes as I could around the chicken, without stuffing it so full that it wouldn't cook through.  Greenspan called for adding both white wine and chicken broth to the pot, but I omitted these, largely because I was moving 100 miles an hour on Monday and only scanned the recipe well enough to get a general sense of it.  At serving time there were plenty of juices in the dutch oven; I think it would have been a swimming pool of liquid had I been more faithful to the author's intention.

The only tiny disappointment of the meal was the crust that sealed the chicken and vegetables into the dutch oven during cooking.  I was surprised to find that Greenspan's recipe made no reference to it after the chicken was cooked.  I wondered whether it would be worth breaking up and soaking in the abundant juices in the bottom of the dutch oven.  I can't abide the thought of wasting the flour, you see.  Not only did my crust end up just this side of well charred, but it also had little flavor or texture.  We tried the juice soaking technique and found it really only made the crust marginally edible. If I were to repeat this dish in the future, I might try sealing the dutch oven with a loop of good yeasted bread dough.  If the dough started out well chilled I can imagine it forming a beautifully browned and scrumptious ring, the perfect vehicle for dunking in roast chicken juices.

It was incredibly satisfying to tuck into a meal that was almost entirely homegrown.  The carrots might have come from the garden if it hadn't been for the few that I had hanging around in the fridge, the leftovers from a spate of morning glory muffin baking.  Other than that, the only ingredients that weren't produced right here were the fats, salt and pepper.  This bodes very well for our six broilers, which are coming along nicely and are now out on the "pasture" full time, in the poultry schooner.

By the way, if any of you are raising birds for the table, or mulling it, and are planning to do your own slaughtering and processing, you may have pondered the same questions I did.  How soon does rigor mortis set in?  How long does it last?  Does it adversely affect the dish to cook a bird in rigor mortis?  And if so, what are the windows of opportunity for cooking the bird?  The basic answers to these questions are that rigor mortis sets in very quickly with poultry, and yes, it's best to avoid cooking a bird in rigor mortis.  Fortunately, it doesn't last too long.  Either cook a bird immediately upon slaughtering and processing, or refrigerate the bird and wait about 24 hours for the rigor mortis to dissipate.

Some of you have asked for a pictorial guide or even video on my slaughtering process.  So far we haven't had any clean hands available to hold a camera on slaughter day, but I'm keeping it in mind for the broilers we are raising at the moment.  If I can corral an innocent bystander with enough intestinal fortitude into taking some pictures or video, I will certainly post them later on.

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?

Chicks

Back in early spring there was an offer of a broody hen from a local farmer I know.  I got all excited and built a nesting box for the broody girl and her eggs.  When late spring rolled around and we weren't hosting a hen, I put the chances of that project playing out at slim to nil.  Farmers get real busy once winter is over, and with that in mind I wasn't willing to nag him about anything.  Besides, if he didn't have a broody hen at the moment, he couldn't exactly produce one.  In any case, I've got the nesting box all ready to go, so if and when he has a broody hen in a non-frantic part of the year, I'm ready to accept her on a moment's notice.

But having psyched myself up to host some little chicks, I reconsidered my lack of interest in getting chicks from a hatchery.  In the end I asked my farming friend if I could buy a few chicks from her the next time she started another batch of broilers.  She gets Cornish Cross chicks from a nursery that is fairly local to us, though they're still delivered by mail.  So just over two weeks ago when her order of chicks came in, I went to her farm with the WWOOF volunteers we were hosting  and picked up six day-old chicks.  Our volunteers at the time were vegetarians, but surprisingly accepting of my plan to raise these birds for our table.  I encouraged them to handle the chicks as much as possible, wanting the birds to become accustomed to being picked up by humans.

My setup for the brooder was pretty simple.  I just covered a large storage plastic bin with garden caging and filled it with a few inches of wood shavings.  Our volunteer constructed a little wooden frame with fine mesh across the top to hold the waterer.  This serves to catch any spilled water in a limited part of the wood shavings, and to keep the chicks away from the wet bedding.  When the chicks are very tiny, they don't tolerate getting even slightly wet as they must stay very warm indeed.  I had set up the brooder with an incandescent bulb hanging from the caging, since my chick-rearing guide warned me that they need 95F (35C) temperatures in their brooder the first week.  But these chicks arrived in the midst of a summer heat wave, when indoor temperatures were 80+F (27C) during the day.  I turned on the bulb for the first few days and left it on overnight.  From observing the chicks it was obvious they didn't need the extra heat.  The bulb was positioned in the middle of the brooder, and they scattered to the four corners to sleep.  So I happily turned the light off and let them bunch up for warmth if they felt the need.  The crazy heat has passed, for the moment, but the chicks still don't seem to need any extra warmth.

You may notice in the picture above that I've been providing weeds to the chicks from day one.  Every day I hang some purslane (which is rampant in the garden right now) from the caging, and dandelion or other weeds when they come easily to hand.  The chicks seem to like the dangling plants.  They jump for individual leaves and tear off what they can with their beaks.  Anything that encourages exercise in these chicks is a good thing.  Cornish Crosses are, in my opinion, overbred.  They are noted for a growth rate so rapid that it causes leg problems because they cannot support their own weight.  It's also not uncommon for their bodies to outgrow their organs.  Heart failure is a feature in this breed which is typically slaughtered at six weeks when raised industrially.  Because we're not lighting them at night, our broilers won't eat 24 hours a day.  So they'll grow a bit more slowly and have a few more weeks of life.  It should also help prevent organ failure and leg problems. 

Last week, when the chicks were less than two weeks old, I started moving them for part of each day to "daycamp."  This is just a wire mesh enclosure with their food and water.  I place it on a fresh, shady patch of grass and let them hang out there whenever the weather is fair and I'm at home.  This wouldn't be feasible for two-week old chicks in spring or fall, but it works in the summer. Fortunately our cat shows absolutely zero interest in the chicks.  I'm not complaining about this or anything, but it is odd since he's such an accomplished hunter of chipmunks, baby rabbits and smaller rodents of all kinds.  Perhaps the chicks smell to him like our hens, and the hens being clearly out of his range so far as hunting goes, the chicks get sorted into a non-prey category in his little feline mind.  The broilers grow very fast indeed and this simple pen is going to be a bit crowded for all of them in a very short time.

I'm guessing it'll be slaughter time in another six to seven weeks.  So far the broiler chicks have been very little bother at all.  If the rest of the process is this easy I may plan to raise two batches of six birds each next year.  That would represent a very significant portion of all the meat we eat in a year - probably something like a third to half of our total meat consumption.  Knowing that we can do that much for ourselves on less than an acre would be huge.

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?

Book Review: The Resilient Gardener

I've just finished reading something excellent and thought I'd share.  It's Carol Deppe's recent book, The Resilient Gardener.  If you think you might one day want to feed yourself without recourse to purchased food, then I cannot recommend it highly enough.  It's one thing to grow a garden for a few years, and even come to rely on it for a significant portion of your calories and nutrition.  It's another thing entirely to really give up purchased foods, especially the cereal crops that make up such a huge portion of our western diet.  And when I say give up, of course I have in mind a time when it may not be a matter of giving up, but of being unable to obtain them, for one reason or another.

Deppe is allergic to wheat, gluten, and dairy.  Yet she feeds herself by concentrating most of her efforts on five crops: corn (maize), potatoes, squash, beans, and eggs.  She chooses these crops for their caloric and nutritional values, storing ability, proven reliability, and resilience in the face of unpredictable weather or even the lack of attention from the gardener.  It seems to me that anyone trying to feed themselves in a very large part of the world (certainly most of the US) would do well to devote much attention to those crops too.  I love my wheaten foods, but there's little chance that I'll ever be able to produce even a fair portion of the wheat I would like to continue to eat.  Corn is not my current starchy staple, but it's the most reliable grain in my region.  We already produce our own eggs with a tiny flock of four laying hens.  The other three crops consistently do well in my region too.  Greens, other vegetables, and fruit are all nice for supplementing, but Deppe has clearly identified one year-round "crop" and four long-storing staples that would do the heavy lifting if we should ever need to provide all our own food.

The Resilient Gardener is not a broad book, but a deep one.  And it's not a basic gardening book, but an advanced one. Deppe assumes her readers have read countless paeans to compost and mulch, and refrains from rehashing these topics.  Instead she caters to those with at least a few years of gardening under their belts.  Her dogged focus on these five crops allows her to recount a wealth of detail that will save many a backyard enthusiast from both errors and unnecessary effort.  And I mean the sorts of errors that even an experienced gardener might make.  Her long-term experimentation with many varieties within her five chosen crops is meticulous and scientifically rigorous.  If you've ever asked yourself a question about one of these foods, chances are that Deppe has provided the answer in her book.  She answered a few handfuls of mine.

I appreciate that Deppe discussed not just how to grow the foods, but how to store them and eat them too.  While I already eat all of the foods she writes about, I don't rely on them to the extent she does.  Since starchy staples tend not to be fungible ingredients when it comes to cooking, it helps to have some guidance with basic recipes.  Changing one's diet is rarely simple.  Even more do I appreciate her frank admission that not everything is worth doing well, or even doing at all.  What she terms selective sloppiness appeals to my sensibilities.  This is a book that will help you find the sweet spot between maximum productivity and minimum labor.  If you want advice on how to make your gardens a beautiful, weed-free show place, this isn't it.

Although she lives and grows these crops in the Pacific northwest, the information she presents is largely relevant to most other areas of the US.  The exception is her chapter on eggs, or the laying flock.  Here Deppe concentrates on ducks rather than chickens.  She explains her choice on logical grounds: ducks make more sense than chickens in her climate, so she has more experience with this species than with chickens.  Moreover, there are numerous books on small-scale chicken keeping; Deppe prefers to cover new ground, and does so with her usual level of gritty detail.  I don't think that backyard ducks are likely to rival backyard chickens in popularity anytime soon, but her contributions on the former nonetheless fill a niche.

Another very minor criticism I have is that Deppe addresses the issue of feeding the poultry flock in hard times largely by sacrificing to them portions of the other crops she grows.  I think there are many other alternative feed options for those with very small flocks, even when pasture is marginal or free-ranging not feasible.  Deppe's suggested feeds will certainly work for those with enough acreage to produce the extra crops.  But they still put livestock in competition with humans for the same foods, as well as turning eggs into re-packaged versions of the other staples in Deppe's dietary paradigm.  This would raise concerns for me about nutritional diversity and completeness. If feeding poultry from resources internal to your homestead is an important issue for you, I strongly recommend you look for Harvey Ussery's forthcoming book The Modern Homestead Poultry Flock.  It'll be published later this year.

Such minor issues aside, The Resilient Gardener is truly an invaluable addition to the bookshelf for those interested in food self-reliance and preparation for a low-energy future.  Due to the necessities of her own dietary restrictions Deppe has done work and research that can benefit anyone looking to produce their own food from a fairly small area and in uncertain times.  I'm thankful that she has chosen to share what she has learned. 

Running the Numbers

Recently I've been leafing through Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre, which I found on the new arrivals shelf at my local library.  I gleaned a few interesting nuggets of information, as I usually do from most gardening books.  But the passage that captured my attention involved using the US Department of Agriculture food pyramid guidelines to project the needed weight in fruits and vegetables for the proverbial average adult's healthy diet.  Now, I have issues aplenty with the USDA and their recommendations.  But still, it seemed an exercise worth considering.

Turns out the average adult should be consuming 456 pounds (201 kg) of vegetables, and 365 pounds (166 kg) of fruit per year to eat a "healthy" diet by the USDA's lights.  Leaving aside the complicating issue of fruit juices and dried fruits, let's just look at those numbers.  That's exactly one pound of fruit, and over a pound of vegetables per person every single day.  I gotta tell you, I don't eat that much fruit and veg.  I know this because I know roughly what we produce ourselves in the backyard, and that we don't buy a whole lot of extra vegetables or fruit.  We don't drink juice other than our own apple cider or grape juice.  I do buy dried fruits - raisins, cherries, apricots, dates, etc.  But these don't make up a major part of our diet.  Other than things like ginger and onions year-round, and some local greens in winter, the odd bag of organic carrots, we just aren't buying that many vegetables either.  Last year, we produced just over 600 pounds of food from our backyard.  Divide that among two adults, and we've got 300 pounds per person last year.  Evidently, we're way below our recommended consumption, even figuring another 100 pounds per person from purchased sources.  Less than half the recommended 821 pounds, total, for each of us.

But Mini Farming then went on to describe how to produce that much yourself, and what sorts of yields could be expected from various perennial plantings.  And this is where the projections began to astound me.  A standard apple tree at maturity can give 300 pounds of apples per year.  Check.  That's roughly what we got this year from our mature apple tree.  A sweet cherry can also deliver 300 pounds per year, and a sour cherry, 150 pounds.  We have one sweet and one sour cherry back there which have only just begun to bear.  Four hundred and fifty pounds of fruit from them in the coming years?  Zoiks!  And then there are the pear trees.  We have one dwarf and possibly one standard.  Since the dwarfs will apparently give 120 pounds of fruit per year at maturity, we're looking at 240 pounds if they're both dwarfs, and 320 pounds if the second one is a standard.  Oh, and we're putting in another apple tree next year.

So just counting on our three varieties of fruit from six trees, we should expect - conservatively speaking - 1230 pounds (558 kg) of fruit per year, eventually.  That doesn't even touch the blueberries, raspberries, black currants, elderberries, potted figs, or our citrus trees, let alone any nuts we might get from our hazels.  Oh, and next year we'll begin a long term project to replace our wooden fence with a hedgerow stocked with edibles.  More than half a ton of fruit from the backyard.  Yes, the numbers are beginning to freak me out a little bit.  Am I going to be able to handle this much food without letting it go to waste?  I'm thinking three things.  One, we can always turn fruit juice into hooch.  (Alcohol is good.)  Two, we need to get a good system of bins together for the root cellar before such harvests start coming in.  And three, we may well be able need to help feed other people from such bounty.

We've got all these trees and plants on 2/3 of an acre, plus raised beds for asparagus, with 2800 square feet of garden space for annuals besides.  That's with at least half the property being essentially useless due to driveway, house, huge detached garage, and massive shade trees around the house.  So really, we're talking all that production on about 1/3 of an acre, more than half of which is off-limits because of the annual garden area.  So maybe really only 1/6 acre available for perrenials.  Turns out, the stocking density we've got is nothing to write home about.

In perusing the website of a local orchard we occasionally buy from, I noted that their most recently planted orchard has a stocking density of more than 300 dwarf apple trees per acre.  A little poking around turned up the claim by Gennaro Fazio, director of  an apple rootstock breeding project in Geneva, NY, that an acre of good land can support as many as 485 dwarf apple trees.  That's a mind boggling number of fruit trees.  What does that scale down to?  A tenth-acre backyard with as many as 48 dwarf apple trees.  Say that with a one-third acre working space, like us you're only willing or able to devote half of that to fruit trees.  You could, according to this theory, squeeze 80 dwarf trees into that parcel.  Back garden of only 20 square meters?  That still gives you ample room for two trees.  Fazio also claims that yield and fruit size are the same with standard and dwarf apples, so you're not sacrificing production by choosing a smaller tree.  I find this hard to believe, but even if dwarfs yield half the crop of standard trees, that 20 square meter back garden could give you almost all the fruit one adult needs per year.  That's nothing to sneeze at.

This is good.  It gives me hope for the future.  Not just for myself, but for my immediate environs.  I live in a low density development area, and all the mcmansions sit on what was formerly prime farmland.  The good earth is still there, though now in the custody of folks most often doing nothing better than dousing their grass monocultures with pesticides that kill honey bees, and herbicides that run off into our waterways.  Most of them have a lot more than my 1/6 acre to work with, should they ever wish to do so.

Bottom line is this: any little bit of yard ("garden" for you Brits) you've got can produce more food than you probably suspect.  We need more fruit and nut trees planted on residential lots.  Even on a tenth of an acre, and under far from ideal conditions, you could probably put in two dwarf fruit trees, at a minimum, and still have room for a decent patch of annual vegetables.

As Rob so eloquently said, we can do this.

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.

The Backyard Chicken Coop - Year 2 Modifications

In April of 2008 we added four laying hens to our wannabe homestead. It might well have been the event that changed us from wannabe homesteaders to budding homesteaders. To prepare for our new arrivals, I designed and my husband and I built a mobile pen and a mobile coop, capable of docking together. Both pen and coop were designed with the aim of making them easy for me to move each and every day by myself. This allowed our hens a fresh patch of our untreated lawn every day. It also meant that no part of our property was stripped of vegetation, overloaded with chicken manure, or hard packed into barrenness.

We tweaked our pen and coop in several ways while we had the girls last year. We added better wheels to allow for easier moving. I'm a little taller than the average woman, with only average strength for a woman. Sometimes after heavy rains moving the pen and coop took a lot of effort. After observing the pen and coop in use for the better part of a year we had other ideas for modifications that had to wait until the girls were gone. (We'd planned to slaughter them, but they ended up going to another farm with better housing for the coldest winter months.)

I thought I would use the opportunity to talk about the design of our coop and pen, and to highlight what worked well and what we have improved upon. Our design began by closely imitating this ingenious mobile coop and pen system used for a very small backyard flock. The coop was built with 2x4's and plywood, some of it pulled out of dumpsters. The footprint is 2' by 4' and about 4' tall from floor to the base of the roof. This is really taller than it needs to be, but I wouldn't go any smaller on the footprint. The 4-foot roosting bar that runs the length of the coop is long enough to hold our four fully grown hens comfortably. They seem to like to snug up together when it's chilly outside.

Keep in mind that this tiny coop with its single nesting box housed just four hens. Four two-year-old hens kept us in more than enough eggs for a family of two adults. We were able to barter some eggs, and to freeze some for the winter months. But if you want a larger backyard flock, you will likely need a larger coop as well.

Our coop has two wheels at one end, and wheelbarrow type handles at shoulder height on the other end. Inside are a couple of roosting bars and below them a little roofed nesting box. The nesting box roof is hinged and rests on struts along the side walls. It protects the nest box and the eggs from droppings and gives the girls a sense of seclusion to encourage egg-laying in that location. The hinge of the nesting box roof allows me to take it off its supports inside the coop, fold it flat, and pull it outside for cleaning.

One thing I would do differently if I were building this coop over from scratch is use 2x2's instead of 2x4's. We had free 2x4's from the dumpsters, but they make the coop quite a bit heavier than it truly needs to be. I wouldn't mind a lighter coop on many mornings. I also wouldn't build the coop quite so tall. I really didn't know what was needed for the girls before I got them, so I erred on the side of generosity. I think we could easily have shortened the coop by 8" and perhaps even by 12". Again, that would make for a lighter coop.

This spring we sealed the inside of the coop, including the roosting bars, side walls, and the nesting box lid with deck sealer. This will make the wood less absorbent and easier to clean. I also replaced most of the floor beyond the nesting box with hardware cloth. I came across this idea in Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest book, when he talks about the design of his "Duckingham Palace" - his duck coop. The hardware cloth floor will allow some of the chicken poop to fall through directly onto the earth, and make the weekly cleanings go faster. But it also makes walking over chicken manure on a daily basis unavoidable.

The other modification I made was to reverse the hinges on the door that the hens use to go from coop to pen and back. Last year it was a drawbridge-type door, hinged at the top, that they walked up and down to enter and exit. But it also became another surface that they pooped on; another surface that I had to clean. And because the hinge was on the bottom of the door, it was often difficult to close because hay and other debris got stuck in that area. This was true for the access door to the nesting box as well. So we changed the door so that both of them are hinged on top. This makes it just a little more tricky to get to the eggs. I now have to open the door farther to see if there's a hen on the nest. Before I could just crack the door, peek in and leave her to it if she was occupied. There's also a little more risk that a hen in the nesting box could hop out when I open the door, but so far I'm managing.

As you can see, the roof of the coop is simply hardware cloth covered by plastic sheeting. The hardware cloth provides security from predators, and the sheeting keeps the girls mostly dry when it rains. I say mostly dry because we don't cover the gable ends of the roof with plastic. That means they have lots of good air flow, and a nice view when they're perched on their roosting bar. This ventilation is important for the girls in the summer months when it's hot out; the open gables allows them to catch cooling night breezes, and prevents the top of the coop from getting stuffy and hot during the day. The plastic sheeting also lets in almost 100% of the available daylight, which encourages egg production. Even if I'm late for my morning chores, the girls have plenty of light as soon as the sun rises. When the weather got cold last fall, I covered the whole roof overnight with a heavy sheet to protect the girls from the worst of the chill and any wind that might have come through the gable ends. They were never sick, so I guess this system sufficed for them.

Counting Lemons Before They're Hatched

The Meyer lemon tree I ordered early this year is blooming.  Actually, it first bloomed during the summer, and while I noticed it, there was a ton of other garden stuff occupying my mind.  So much so that I forgot that lemons need to be hand pollinated in my part of the world, since whatever insect normally performs the service for lemons doesn't live where I do.  When I remembered that I was supposed to be a proxy in plant sex, it was too late, and I was sad to see that no fruit had been set.

So I was pretty psyched to notice little buds all over the tree when it was time to pull it inside for the winter.  The tree was giving it another go!  Now I'm servicing the blooms once a day with a tiny paintbrush.  They are amazingly fragrant and sweet-smelling.  Being a novice at sex surrogacy for lemon trees, I'm not too sure of my technique.  Do lemon blossoms like it rough or delicate?  Are they chaste (prefer pollen from the same blossom), or lascivious (pollen from as many blossoms as possible, thank you)?  I'm hoping that what I lack in finesse and experience I can make up in diligence.  Also, I'm pampering the tree with good nutrition by regular feedings with worm tea from our worm bin.

It's pretty thrilling to look at all the buds on the tree and imagine that even half of them may turn into lemons.  Which reminds me of the old adage about unhatched chickens.  Still, it's hard not to be a bit giddy about the prospect of homegrown Meyer lemons.  It also makes me think about seasonality.  I think lemons normally ripen in late winter.  So strange to think of a fruit, especially the lemon, ripening at that time of year.  I associate lemons so much with lemonade and summer drinks.  Just goes to show you how out of touch we are with the food we eat.  Lemons in winter?  Guess that'll mean lemon curd. 

I'll definitely let you know if we get any fruit from the tree.  In the meantime, if any of you have lemon trees I'd love to hear any tips you have for keeping them happy and productive, and what time of year you get a harvest.

Fig Trees Have Come Along Well

Remember the fig trees in containers I posted about back in early April?  I got them as one-year-old plants, and they were all just a bit more than 12" high.  Well, they've been roaring right along this year.  Just thought I'd post a picture to show you how much their pampered existence in the self-watering containers has agreed with them over the last five months.  (Click above to see what they looked like in April.)

Although I was told that small harvests of about a dozen figs per tree were possible this first year, we've yet to eat our first homegrown fig.  As you may recall, I bought three different varieties of fig.  The Verde set no fruit whatsoever.  The Neri began growing exactly one fig rather early, and it looked like it was going to a big one.  Then the fruit dropped off long before it ripened.  The Sicilian teased us by setting more than a dozen little figs rather late.  But they too all dropped off without ripening.  Sigh.  At least all the trees grew an impressive amount.  I wasn't really counting on any harvest at all until next year at the earliest.  From that perspective, even one ripe fig would have been an unexpected bonus. 

Fig trees can take light frosts.  These plants were outside from early April onwards, and we had several frosts that month.  They didn't even notice so mild a chill.  It's possible that the containers themselves provide enough retained heat to keep the leaves from frosting over.  Or perhaps it's the slight elevation that keeps the top of the plant above the coolest layer of air.  Our first frost of the fall usually comes in the first half of October, and these frosts can be harder than our late spring frosts.  So far we've dodged the frost bullet, but tomorrow night looks likely for our first.  I plan to pull the trees into the garage by the end of the month at the latest.

For most of this year the potted figs sat out where they got plenty of sun all day, but they weren't sheltered from any wind.  Now that our passive solar thermal system is finally completed, we have them snugged up to the south-facing wall of our garage, which does shield them from the wind. This will be their permanent home during the growing season from now on.  The shelter of the wall, the southern exposure, and a little extra reflected light will make them as happy as they can be in this climate.  We should see a decent crop next year if all goes well.

So far I'm pretty pleased with the fig tree experiment. They've been low maintenance, survived the heat, and have done well in containers.  I don't plan to allow them to much more than double in size from their current state.  And I imagine they'll reach that size by this time next year.  At that point the highest branches will still be within arm's reach for me.  So I think we can count on having three productive fruit trees in a very small space, and in a colder climate than would normally be possible for fig production.  If next spring isn't excessively crazy, I'll try starting some new saplings from the cuttings I make (plus the willow branch rooting hormone) during spring pruning.  It would be a kick to be able to offer fig seedlings to friends and family.

I'll update again next year, in spring if I try the seedling experiment, and certainly when we get our first harvests.  I can hardly wait!  I would certainly encourage others in the cooler hardiness zones, and those for whom only container gardening is possible, to consider the potted fig.

Big Carrot Love

One never knows how big the carrot is until it's pulled from the earth.  All in our household were instantly smitten by this one.  10.6 ounces, in all its glory.  Went well with garden eggplant and tofu with toasted sesame oil and ginger.

Homegrown Ancho Chili Powder

I suspect that everyone who cooks on a regular basis for many years on end develops some favoritism in the spices and seasonings department.  I certainly have.  I'm extremely partial to garlic, fresh sage, cardamom, and ancho chili powder - though they rarely all make it into the same dish.  I've been chipping away at the garlic gap for a few years now, and have seen harvest of ten pounds or more for the last couple of years.  Fresh sage is only in season for about six months of the year, though preserving it as a compound butter does help extend the joy.  Cardamom is entirely out of my hands, but ancho powder has been tantalizingly near since I started gardening seriously.

First, a definition.  An ancho chili pepper is botanically one and the same as a poblano chili.  It becomes an ancho chili when it is smoked and dried.  Additionally, I'm pretty sure that the chili only classifies as an ancho after it has been allowed to ripen on the plant from its early green color to a deep red.  Only then is it smoked and dried, and, at times, powdered for ease of use in the kitchen.  Poblanos/anchos are quite mild as chili peppers go.  They are noted more for their marvelously rich flavor than for powerful heat.  This means you run no risk of dispersing mustard gas-like irritants into the air while drying them.  However, you should still wear gloves when cutting them up.  They pack enough of a punch to let you know about it should you get the oils on sensitive skin, or worse yet, eyes or mucus membranes.

My first attempt at making ancho chili powder came last year.  It was an utter failure.  I duly waited for the chilies to turn red, then smoked them whole and strung them up to finish drying in a cool dim room of the house.  Big mistake.  Though they looked fairly well on their way to drying when they came out of the smoker, there was still sufficient moisture inside to allow them to molder from the inside out.  Compost.  Our climate, at least last year, wasn't hot enough to allow chilies to dry down unaided inside the home.

This year I started with a different approach.  I left the peppers whole, but cut several long slits in the sides before putting them in the smoker.  This helped speed the drying somewhat, and also allowed for better penetration of the smoke.  But it still took far too long to dry the peppers.  And I found the seeds of the chili made for a rustically uneven texture after grinding.  Scratch that approach.  So for my second batch, I cut the peppers entirely open, removing most of the ribs and leaving only a small number of seeds intact to add what heat they might.  This worked well. For smoking material, the apple wood chips from our own apple tree give a marvelous flavor.  But other fruit or hardwood chips would probably work just as well.  Can you imagine it?  A patchwork quilt of homegrown chili powders across the land, each one imbued with distinctive terroir!

The smoked pepper slices needed about 24 hours of further drying in a dehydrator.  This was accomplished over two days, with the dehydrator situated on the driveway.  The Excalibur dehydrator has a temperature control, so I figure I save energy by placing the box where it's already pretty hot from the sun.  The fan still needs to run of course, but I doubt much energy is required to nudge the temperature up to 125 F, which is about optimal for the peppers.  When done drying the peppers should be just barely pliable.  They lose about 85% of their weight through trimming and dehydrating.

From this state, some sources recommend "toasting" the dried chilies in a dry skillet, to crisp them up just a bit more before pulverizing.  I omit this and simply put the freshly dried chilies into a food processor.  This produces a coarse grind.  After that, it's a question of my patience and free time.  I have a spice grinder which can take the relatively coarse results from the food processor down to significantly finer powder.  But if I want to be really finicky, I have to screen that powder through a very fine mesh and reprocess whatever doesn't pass through the screen.  I've troubled myself to make only a very, very small quantity of this finely textured ancho chili powder.  And I rarely cook anything in which the exact texture of a powdered spice is going to affect the outcome of the dish.

My homemade ancho has a much stronger aroma than any powder I've been able to purchase.  It also has a tendency to clump a bit; so I wonder whether commercial products add an anti-caking agent, or whether they simply use a different processing technique.  I use ancho powder in bean dishes, on quesadillas, and even to flavor the butter I drizzle over our homegrown popcorn.  (I know you popcorn purists will cry, "Sacrilege!"  But give it a fair shake at least once - that's all I'm saying.)  Sometimes I'll even sneak it into futomaki in place of togarashi; ancho's flavor combines very well with toasted sesame oil.  From a pound of whole poblano peppers I get about 1/3 cup of finished chili powder.  I doubt we'll generate a year's supply from the three plants that have done well in this year's heat.  I estimate we'd need double that number in a good year to keep us in ancho powder till the season rolls around again.

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!

Food Production in Small Spaces: Beans on a Fence

This year I promised to discuss food production in small spaces on my blog.  A lot of people wouldn't consider our 2/3 acre residential lot to be a small space, and I have to admit that I don't really feel cramped here most of the time so far as food production goes.  Between the huge detached three car garage and three fully grown shade trees that dominate the front yard, plus the house itself, we're left with about 1/3 of an acre to really work with.  Three years into our serious food production project we still haven't fully utilized all the space we have available to us, and what we do use we haven't used to maximum effect.  But I'm working on it year by year.

One of the crops that I've enjoyed growing is pole beans.  We're not big fans of green beans, so we select varieties that produce good soup beans.  Beans are amazingly unfussy plants once they have established themselves.  They aren't too picky about soil quality since they make their own fertilizer by fixing nitrogen from the air.  Since I don't have to harvest beans that I intend to dry at any particular time, I can ignore the bean pods as they form, plump up, and then shrivel and dry.  I like a plant that doesn't demand harvesting when there are so many other things to attend to.  Pole beans, as the name indicates, like to climb.  For the space-constrained gardener, there are upsides and downsides to this trait.  On one hand, they don't require much in terms of (horizontal) square footage in the garden; on the other, they are quite capable of shading out things behind them if you plant them densely and give them the support they want.  I've found though that the harvest of dried beans from one bean plant is fairly small.  So I gave some thought to expanding the number of plants we could grow.

This is how my comparatively generous land allowance brings me to strategies for small space growing. I'm guessing that many people with limited space for food production have fences or other structures around the space they do have.  (Fire escapes, perhaps?)  Fences make great support for pole beans, and the beans won't do wooden fences any harm.  They only latch on to the surface of whatever they climb, rather than drilling into it, as ivy will.  If you have a slatted fence or any fence that is not perfectly tight, such that no light passes through it, pole beans will love it.  Obviously, you can use the fence line that is pole-ward (the fence on the north side of your property, which faces south - if you're in the northern hemisphere, and just the opposite if you're in the southern hemisphere).  In that case, you would plant the beans right up against the fence, but still inside your yard.  Any shading issues would be your neighbor's problem, though fences already cast shadows, so it's probably no issue at all.

A good trick though is to also use the fence line that is sun-ward.  That means planting just on the outside of your fence line, and it will mean the beans cast a heavier shade from that fence onto your property.  Provided that you have good relations with your neighbors and physical access to the outside of your own fence, this shouldn't be problematic.  In the US, at least, it is likely that the little bit of space just beyond your fence line belongs to your property anyway, since most zoning codes require a small set-back when fences are erected.  That means that if you plant right up against the fence, even though you're outside of your own yard, you're still working your own property.  I hope this all makes sense for you, spatially speaking.

Since I'm writing about some of these space-saving techniques the same year I'm trying them myself, I don't have any pictures that really show what the techniques might achieve.  But I don't want to wait to write about this until my beans are tall, and twined around the fence and bearing their purple pods.  I'd rather share this now and hope that some of you might get your beans into the ground this year.  It's not too late in most parts of the US at least.  The picture at the top of my post shows the fence enclosing our property with little bean seedlings beginning to grow.  I'm standing on my neighbor's long driveway, and through the slatted fence you see a bit of our backyard.  This is the south-facing side of the fence along our south property line.

As the seedlings grow a bit more, I'll begin to train them to the fence.  All they'll need is the suggestion of where to grow.  I'll just tuck a tendril from each plant between a gap in the fence, and the plant will begin to grow up the vertical surface, twining around and around each upright board in the fence.  My guess is that the plants will put most of the bean pods and leaves on the south side of the fence to maximize solar exposure.  The picture above only shows a short stretch of beans I've planted this year.  I've found in past years that it takes quite a few plants to produce a good quantity of dried beans.  So when I planted I put two beans in most of the holes.  I think the plants that germinate and survive will be able to share the space nicely.  I'll try to post an update later in the summer when the beans have grown up the fence and I have a sense for how this project is working out.

Of course, if you prefer green beans to dried beans, you can use the same technique.  You'll get a larger volume and heavier harvest weight with green beans, since you'll be eating the whole pod and harvesting when they're still full of water.   If you have a slatted fence that would present problems for a climbing plant, you could consider hanging netting on or over the fence, or placing a length of hardware cloth or wire caging along the fence to give the beans some purchase.

If you're using this technique for beans or any other crop, I'd love to hear about it.  Please let me know.

More food production in small spaces:
Honey bees
Fig trees in containers

Hard Work

We had an overcast and coolish day on Friday.  It only got up to 77 F (25 C).  So I worked my butt off outside, moving mulch, planting the last few transplants that needed homes, watering, weeding, weeding, weeding, hilling potatoes, and generally doing much of the stuff that hadn't gotten done because the unseasonably hot temperatures had been driving me inside for too many hours each day.  We're now out of cardboard and newspaper.  It all got used up in lasagna mulching, and there are still pathways in the garden that haven't gotten the treatment.  I had to finally do a spit and shine on my filthy car, since I'd agreed to drive to the strawberry picking farm.  Then I spent a good chunk of time in the evening cleaning up some filthy canning jars I'd picked up for very little money through craigslist and trying to triage the kitchen mess.  It was a long day, was Friday.  After a shower I was more than ready for sleep but had to wait on the girls to retire for the evening before I could fall into bed.

Yesterday I was up early, getting my large containers ready for strawberry picking.  Serious gardening friend and I carpooled over to the U-pick farm, where I zipped through a little over 16 pound's worth of picked strawberries.  My lower back informed me that the strawberry picking felt an awful (and I mean awful) lot like gardening.  After that we nipped over to a tiny farmer's market organized by farming friend, where we found we were too late for asparagus or rhubarb. We consoled ourselves by grabbing evil baked goods for lunch (pecan-brioche sticky bun for me), and I picked up some raw milk cheese, spinach and scallions that were half way to being proper onions.

Back home by 1:30, I spent the next four-and-a-half hours processing my strawberries into 15 pints of jam and three half-sheet pans of frozen berries.  Amazingly, all the jam set up beautifully.  The secret, I found, is to simply follow the directions exactly.  (Well, except for skimming off the foam; I can't be expected to follow directions that lead to either waste or sugar overdose.)  This whole do-it-the-way-they-tell-you thing is surely obvious to other, saner people.  I'm just not much of a direction-taker in the kitchen.  I'm slow that way.  Anyway, we ended up with five well-set pints each of three different types of jam: straight up strawberry, strawberry-balsamic, and strawberry-ginger.  One special jar of the strawberry-balsamic also got several twists of very finely ground black pepper.  The quality control testing indicated that they were all delicious, though there wasn't any extra of that last black pepper variation.  That'll have to wait until we open that jar.  Of those we sampled, I think the strawberry-ginger may narrowly edge out the other two for our top pick.  We'll see.  This supply of jam had better suffice for the next year, considering how much sugar disappeared into those pint jars.  We should have some to give away as gifts too.  Now I kinda wish I'd put some into half-pint jars so that I could be generous, but you know, not too generous.

Around 5:30, my husband decided he wanted to make ice cream after all, so he snagged some of my frozen berries.  When that was done we improvised a very late dinner of hot dogs grilled with the oversized scallions, and washed them down with homemade strawberry ice cream for dessert.  It wasn't a day marked by the healthiest of meals, but as I've said before, executive decision making authority about what constitutes dinner is one of the few perqs of being an adult. I fell into bed and slept like the dead.

I'm glad to have gotten the jam made yesterday, when the temperature only flirted with 80 F (27 C).  Today it's going to flirt with 90 F (32 C).

Just as I was writing this post and loading the images, my husband killed a rabbit which he caught in flagrante delicto in our garden, using nothing stronger than a BB pellet gun.  I skinned it, gutted it, trimmed it, washed it, and had it inside before breakfast.  (Sorry, no pictures.  Next time.)  Since it's a wild rabbit, it's very lean and weighed in at only 1 pound, 10 ounces once reduced to the main edible portions.  It's going to be dinner, one way or the other, tonight.  Suggestions are welcome.

But for a morning and evening putter in the garden, plus dinner preparation, I'm resting today.  I may fold the mountain of clean laundry in the hampers.  I may lie under the ceiling fan and read escapist fiction most of the day.  I feel like I've earned it.

Crunch Time

It's that time again.  Days of running from one part of the garden to another, coming inside for more seeds, wondering how all those weeds got so big in just a few days, scavenging newspapers for lasagna mulching, dragging the hose around to water the newly sown beds and the seedlings still in pots, squeezing in just one more plant, cold drinks, the need for a short haircut, and trying to fob off my extra tomato seedlings on other gardeners.  Tomato seedlings in late May are like zucchinis in mid-July.  No one needs or wants any.  I may resort to setting them out on the curb with a "free" sign.  Evenings bring a second round of work in the cool of twilight after quick dinners.  The calluses are building up on my hands.  We've spotted the first fireflies of the year and gotten our first mosquito bites.  The piles of mulch and compost on the driveway have been growing and shrinking over the last two months as we replenish them on the weekend and use them up during the week.  We got to the bottom of the compost pile last night. 

Yesterday I was feeling so incredibly optimistic about the growing season, and happy with the garden plan for this year.  In the afternoon I planted out starts of winter squash, bush zucchini, melons, lavender, eggplant, parsley, sunflowers, basil, mint, onion starts, and sowed more carrot and turnip seeds.  Then I got the news about incidences of late blight already cropping up, and one of them in my state.  Talk about a downer.  I spoke with our serious gardening friends last night, and they said they're going with the copper fungicidal spray for their tomato plants (approved for use in organic farming).  I may follow suit.  I just don't think I could handle another year of total loss in the tomato department.

In better news I'm also going with serious gardening friend later this week to a U-pick organic strawberry farm.  If I pick more than 10 pounds of strawberries, the price is a mere $2.50 per pound!  I think we could do with some strawberry jam this year, plus some frozen for winter time fruit crisp indulgence.  I have to check on my supply of small canning jars.  I probably don't have enough. We plan to go to a community-wide yard sale in my area the weekend after next.  Specifically I wanted to look for canning jars, plus a few other items.  I may break down and buy a few new ones sooner than that if my supply is very low.  The alternative would be to freeze the strawberries until after the big yard sale, in hopes that I can pick up the jars for a song.  But we're in for some cool-ish weather in the latter part of this week, so it would be nice to get the canning done right away.  Which means that if I want her expert help at making jam, I also need to find time to clean my kitchen some time very soon.  Sigh.

Still to plant are leeks, more chard, more onions, more lettuce, pepper starts, celery and celeriac, a rhubarb transplant, and more seeds of spinach, beets, carrots, arugula, and beans.  It's a good time of year, but man, am I tired.