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.

Now welcome, somer

Now welcome somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!

- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Fowls

Maybe it's not quite summer here yet, but the long black nights have been driven away.  The daylight hours exceed the dark.  I'm trying to see April in a positive light, but it's a tough sell.

April is a month of anxiety, injury, and anticipation.  First I fretted about the asparagus, which didn't show any signs of life until a few days ago.  Had I killed it with the fall pruning, which some gardeners claim leads to water getting down into the hollow tubes of the stalks and rotting the crowns?  I dug around in the heavily mulched raised beds, looking for little nubs of asparagus stalks.  They eluded me, and I had to curb the overwhelming urge to check the bed every. single. day. Then I worried about the ramps that I planted in the shade on the north side of our shed.  Were they goners?  I've been patiently waiting three years now for them to reproduce themselves by division, so that I can eat some of them.  They were very slow to emerge too.  And I still judge that there are too few yet to harvest.  Another year of postponed ramp harvest.  We may yet this year receive some more ramps for transplant donated by a relative.  In any case, I'm determined that we'll harvest some next year, whatever their reproductive rate.  Maybe some of the seeds set last year will result in more ramps too.

And the injuries, yes.  Plenty of those.  I posted about my bashed thumb, which has stopped hurting, and mercifully hasn't cost me my thumb nail.  But I now sport major bruises in all sorts of inconvenient spots, and my right hand and wrist are still strained from not working carefully.  Spring garden work is awfully tough on a body softened by winter's indolence.  This is not a season conducive to rest and recuperation.  I'm getting my calluses back fairly quickly.

Oh, and rain.  April's rain is proverbial.  I try to see it as beneficial to the garden, and all the seeds that I've sown.  It does make for easier weeding, but somehow that's not my favorite chore. And between the all too frequent downpours, we've been seeing near record temperatures in the last week or so.

So enough whinging.  Spring is here, even if we're not out of the woods yet with the risk of frost.  That could come back and bite us where the sun don't shine well into May.  But the spring blossoms have started, and it's a joy to watch the trees of the neighborhood put forth their various hues.  The maples start with a gossamer veil of red, whatever color their leaves will eventually take on.  The plums are blooming pure white, while our two different magnolias have lush blooms of extravagant pink and white.  The neighborhood redbuds are lovely with their thick purplish-pink blooms. Our young pear curtsies to the older pear across the way, with synchronous buds of palest pink.  It's nice to see that our pears will not lack for pollination services.  Other trees put their leaves on first, starting with a yellow-green haze that seems to float around the still bare branches.  Our figs and hazelnuts are slowly leafing out.  The irises (pure ornamentals for which I have a secret weakness) planted near the front door look like they'll blossom this year.

To prevent a repeat of this month's anxiety over various crops, I've finally started keeping a garden journal.  I had thought it would be tedious, which is why I didn't start years ago, as I should have.   But I find I enjoy jotting notes on what I'm doing and observing in the garden.  It makes me more aware of the daily changes that happen so quickly in spring - all in a seeming blur if I don't pay attention.  These notes will give me reference dates for events such as the first robin of the year, or when the violets bloomed, our last snowfall - a handy tool for next year and in all subsequent years.  I can see how comparing this sort of data could become a bit addictive once you have a few years of documentation to play with.  But even one year of data will remind me not to expect asparagus in early April.

Spring Harvest Meal: Cream of Lovage Soup

The temperature is gradually warming up, but the weather has been grey and damp and dreary lately.  The herbs are all coming on strong, and the asparagus are just breaking ground in their raised beds.  I got my spring haircut, so the nape of my neck is bare, which only means I don't have a great desire to be outside more than necessary when the sun is hidden. This is all a roundabout way of saying it's soup weather.

So today I whipped up a bare bones, easy-peasy cream of lovage soup.  Cream soups were a staple of the curriculum at culinary school.  There we were taught a formula and a methodology rather than individual cream-of recipes.  Pretty much, you can make a cream-of soup out of any ingredient.  Now, having told you there's a formula, you might reasonably expect me to tell you what the formula is.  Sadly, the exact proportions are lost in the mists of time, at least to my mind.  What has stuck are the ingredient list and the methodology, which is admittedly a bit fussy in the sense that too many pans get dirtied.  It is after all, a French recipe.

When I was in culinary school "lilies" were shorthand for anything in the onion family.  I believe at one time all onion relatives were classified in the lily family by botanists.  In any case, the chefs just referred to "lilies" in a formula, while an individual recipe would specify which lily was called for, such as onion, shallots, leeks, ramps, scallions or even garlic.  Lilies are one cornerstone of a cream-of soup, and the other is the main ingredient.  Then of course there's the cream.  Since this is a French recipe, it goes without saying that multiple additions of butter are also involved, one of which is likely to be roux.  Roux is just a cooked mixture of flour and butter.  (Enough divagations yet?  Can we move on?)

So my cream of lovage soup recipe took advantage of my three-year-old lovage plant, which is up and at 'em very early in the year.  Convenience came into it in other ways as well.  There were those salvaged and precooked leeks hanging out in the chest freezer, and scrumptious canned stock made from our home raised turkey.  Also there was some parsley butter (a convenient means of preserving last year's herbs) in the freezer.  Those four convenience foods made this soup a snap to pull together in no time.

The prepped leeks were roughly equivalent to one medium leek, already chopped up and partially cooked in butter.  These went into a soup pot to thaw over medium heat.  When thawed, I added two bay leaves, a good pinch of kosher salt, and half a pound of lovage - the chopped up stalks first, the leafy tops initially reserved.  There was enough butter in the leeks to handle the lovage stalks too.  When these were nicely sweated and softened, I added the leafy tops, a quart of our smoked turkey stock, and about 2 tablespoons of the parsley butter.  While that warmed through, I cooked a very thick roux with a couple tablespoons of butter and three heaping tablespoons of flour in a separate pan. I went to the hassle of straining the solid ingredients from the liquid (removing the bay leaves) in order to puree them.  The strained liquid was gradually (to avoid lumps) mixed into the roux, and then the pureed solids returned to the pot.   (A wand blender, if you have one, would get you close enough to the same effect with less bother and cleanup.) From there I added a good glug (1/2 a cup or so) of cream, tasted to adjust seasonings, and then warmed the soup through for serving.  It was very nice, but light enough to need some toasted bread for extra ballast

If we'd had any potatoes left, they would have been a perfect addition to this soup.  They'd give it some heft, turning it into a far more substantial meal, and would be a satisfying way to use up the last of the winter stores by pairing them with a bright new flavor from one of the earliest spring crops.  Another option that suggests itself to my tastebuds is the addition of wild rice to this soup.  I think the complex flavor of the lovage would complement the dark nuttiness of wild rice very nicely.  And fully cooked wild rice is an excellent thickener when pureed.  With the addition of either potatoes or wild rice, the roux could be omitted, making the dish gluten-free.

I suppose I should talk about lovage, since it's not the most familiar herb to modern palates.  The taste of lovage is commonly likened to celery, but I think there's a great deal more to it than that.  While I certainly taste the kinship to celery, lovage also reminds me strongly of cardamom.  The later in the season, the more the celery taste recedes, and the more the cardamom flavor predominates.  But lovage has something else all its own that is neither celery, nor cardamom.  It's hard to describe, but lovage is a big flavored herb, far stronger tasting to my palate than self-effacing celery.  The stalks of lovage are round and hollow, so some people apparently use them as straws - particularly for bloody marys, which benefit from the celery-ish taste imparted by the stalks.

As a plant, lovage has many virtues too.  It's perennial and hardy to zone 4 or 5, depending on whom you believe. On my homestead it tolerates half a day or more of total shade, and actually requires partial shade in warmer zones than mine (6b).  It is reputed to improve the health of many other crops when companion planted, and it provides habitat for beneficial insects, especially hoverflies.  Though it can become bitter and tough in hot weather, you can cut it back hard in summer to encourage the growth of tender new stalks with milder flavor.  Like many herbs, lovage is unfussy about soil type, water, and temperatures once it has established itself.  In the second and subsequent years it gets tall by mid-summer - up to 5 or 6 feet, but is not an aggressive spreader.  This is an herb that I have utterly ignored except for an occasional shovelful of compost side-dressing once in a while, usually in fall.  It comes up reliably for us and is much appreciated at this time of year, when we crave green things.  It can be propagated from seed or root division, which we plan to try next  year.

So that's the run down on lovage.  If you've got a shady spot that has gone begging, you might consider giving it to this early, delicious, and easy to grow herb.  If you already grow and cook with lovage, I'd love to hear what you do with it.

Something from Nothing

Today is absolutely gorgeous.  Gorgeous.  The temperature outside is as warm as inside - in the middle of March.  The sun is shining, and the breeze is so gentle.  This weather is insane, but you know what?  I'll take it.  I puttered around outside most of the morning, just finding stuff to do rather than spend time indoors.  I pulled the covers entirely off the cold frames, planted some burdock, smoked the bacon I'm in the process of curing, admired the purple crocuses, watched the cats chase flies, set the hammock up, and generally basked in the finest day of the year so far.

A pile of grapevine trimmings has been hanging around since my husband did a severe pruning a few weeks ago.  I'd been meaning to check them out, but what decent weather we've had lately has been devoted to more pressing chores.  But today - ah, today.  Any excuse to be outside would do today.  So I made these.

Now I know they aren't exactly works of a master craftsman.  But I was pretty pleased with them.  For an hour's mucking around on a balmy day, a few snips here and there with hand pruners, and not a clue as to how to go about making a wreath, I'd say they turned out fair enough.  Maybe it's just that I get a kick out of making something from nothing, out of finding a use where other people only see garbage or something to be gotten rid of.  It tickles me every single time I manage to pull something like this off.

If I'd had more grapevines, or longer grapevines, I could have made more wreaths or bulked these two out a bit.  Many pruned vines were too short to be useful.  The vines were clearly starting to dry out a bit; if I'd worked with them a few weeks ago I think they would have been more flexible.  Still, the vines and especially the curlicue tendrils were surprisingly resilient.  Given my total ignorance of the proper way to construct a grapevine wreath, it was a very forgiving medium to work with.  Next year I'll encourage my husband to make the cut pieces as long as possible, and then see what can be done with them when they're freshly cut.

Not sure what I'll do with these yet.  The nice thing is that if I decide I don't have any use for them, they can either be gifted away, or composted!  Okay, now I'm heading back outside.

P.S. to those who entered the homesteading books giveaway, I haven't heard back from one winner.  So stay tuned.  If I don't hear from her by tomorrow evening, I'll draw another number.  You still might win!  And if you entered but didn't check to see if you won, well check it out.

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.

Natural -and Homemade- Rooting Hormone

 Originally uploaded by peter-rabbit

Hey!  This is important!  I just learned that it's really easy to make a DIY version of rooting hormone solution.  Rooting hormone is used when gardeners and orchardists want to propagate plants from cuttings.  I've never used it, mostly because I've never really wanted or needed to grow plants this way.  Not to mention I'm suspicious of most chemical things sold for use with plants.  But cuttings are one of the best ways to obtain - or give - plants cheaply.  Sometimes it's the best way from a genetic standpoint too, since not all plants produce offspring which share the desirable qualities of the parent plant.  Obviously, I'm no expert at plant propagation by cuttings.  I'm pretty sure that some plants do a lot better than others with this method though, and I know cuttings are made from various parts of different plants (stem, leaf, etc.)  So do a little research before relying on cuttings and rooting hormone for any critical propagation.

So...here's all it takes to make your own rooting hormone dip.  Find a healthy, vigorous willow tree and take several cuttings of its branches with plenty of fresh green leaves on them.  Any variety of willow will work.  Where I live, willows leaf out just ahead of almost any other tree in the spring, so if you don't have a willow tree of your own, keep your eyes open in spring to locate some in the wild or in parks.  Look near running water or in swampy areas.  Spring is a good time to propagate things from cuttings too, so it seems fortuitous that willows are conspicuous at this time.  Strip a small pile of leaves from the willow branches and chop them up finely as you would a culinary herb.  Including some of the very soft willow branches in with the leaves is fine.  You should have 2 cups (~ 0.5 liter) of well chopped willow material.  Put it in a large non-reactive container, such as a stoneware bowl.  Cover with 1 gallon (~ 3.8 liters) of boiling water and let it steep overnight, up to 24 hours.  If you can't boil water, room temperature water will do, but let it steep for a full 24 hours.

That's your rooting hormone dip, ready to use as you would any commercial rooting dip.  After it has steeped you can store it, tightly covered, in the refrigerator for up to two months apparently.  But if you have easy access to willows, it's probably best to make up a fresh batch each time you want to propagate from cuttings.  This willow rooting solution has the added benefit of retarding fungal, bacterial, and viral infections in the cutting.  So you can soak your stems in the willow solution immediately after cutting them if you need to get your pots and soil ready.  Pretty nifty, I'd say, for a product that's free for a pleasant hour or so of effort.

Being able to make your own rooting hormone dip is a great tool for permaculturists, frugal gardeners, and doomers thrivalists alike.  So get out there and get yourself some cuttings, and share some with friends and neighbors!

Other news: honey bee arrival has been delayed by yet another week.  Came home yesterday with fig trees and will get them into their large containers within a few days. Post coming on the figgy details.

Tiny Tip: Chitting Seed Potatoes

Just for the record, few of the tiny tips I share on this blog are of my own invention, and even those have probably been figured out before by many others. I discovered this one in The River Cottage Cookbook, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who I believe has become a hero of mine in the last month or so. Hugh has done just about everything I am doing, everything I would like to do, and much more besides, in pursuit of food sovereignty. And he did it all at least a few years ago.

One of his little tricks is to take seed potatoes and set them up in empty egg cartons for the chitting (or pre-sprouting) before planting. This makes a lot of sense. The stability provided by the egg carton will allow all the sprouts to grow straight up, giving each potential plant a head start. Sprouts are fragile and liable to break off if the potatoes are allowed to do their chitting in a bag. Not only do seed potatoes in a bag get jostled on the way to the garden, but retrieving each piece from the bag presents difficulties with long sprouts, as I know from past experience. Having them stabilized and out in the open simplifies things considerably.

Hugh goes so far as to remove all but two of the sprouts so as to concentrate the vigor of each plant. I probably won't be quite so meticulous. Each potato can be cut into several seed pieces, so long as each one has a sprout on it. If you want to chit your potatoes (not everyone does), they like plenty of air, a moderate amount of light and moderate indoor temperatures.

I've got two and a half pounds each of four different potato varieties to plant this year. I'm abandoning the fingerling La Ratte which we grew the past two years, even though the flavor is superb. We simply don't enjoy scrubbing so many tiny potatoes to prepare our meal. I'm also giving up the ever reliable Kennebec, though probably only for this year. In their places I'm giving space to the Carola, which rumor says will produce additional clusters of tubers higher along the main stem if the plant is well hilled during growth. And we're going back to the All Blue potato we grew two years ago. It was an easy to harvest spud, and we found we missed its cheery purple color over the winter months. We'll continue on for a third year of growing the silken, creamy-textured Sangre, and our 2009 new trial, the German Butterball, which became an instant favorite with my husband.

I'll post about this year's potato bucket experiment just before planting time in my area. Stay tuned.

Are you planting potatoes this year? What varieties? Any special techniques?

Minor Miracles

Spring is the season of quotidian miracles. It is always a wonder to me that tiny little seeds, tucked into dirt with a little daily watering, will grow into living green things. Later comes a second miracle. Those plants feed me, and really, really well.

But I'm getting ahead of the seasons already.

The first miracle of the moment is that an entire month of snow cover is almost completely melted away in a luscious March thaw - and it hasn't produced the spring mud. We've had a week of dry days, with temperatures getting into the low 50's F (~11 C) each day. Little by little, the snow has retreated to the shady sides of buildings and the ground has absorbed it all. There isn't even any water standing in the basement. We may yet get our mud season from the proverbial April showers. But at the moment, things look gorgeous.

I did a garden inspection as soon as the snow melted away and found the earth springy and fluffed up from the action of the frost heave. It almost breaks my heart to walk on it. This is how nature repairs the damage of compacted soils, at least in my part of the world. Another miracle. My intention for this year is to get the garden laid out into permanent beds, with permanent pathways between them, so that I never again have to walk where I intend to plant. And so that compost can be concentrated where it is most useful, while the less valuable mulch and straw is used to just keep down weeds in the pathways.

Today I'll use the warm, dry weather to start priming and painting my beehives.

How are things looking in your part of the world?

Honey Bees Are Coming Soon

My packages of bees are arriving on March 28th! I'm not ready for them, and there's a lot of work to be done before I will be ready, most of which would be a lot easier if the temperature were about 15-20 degrees warmer. They're predicting 8-12 inches of snow in the next 48 hours. We weren't expecting the ladies until sometime in mid-April, so I was sort of counting on getting all the priming and painting done in early April, when we could reasonably expect to see some days in the mid-50s F. I may actually need to fire up the heater in the garage to get this done. I'm not even sure we have kerosene in the tank, as we hardly ever heat the garage. We also need to figure our exactly where on our little property the hives will reside and build some stands to keep them up off the ground. Oh well. At least we have all the equipment we need (I think).

I've been reading books and online articles on beekeeping, speaking with local beekeepers, and attending classes to learn about keeping bees. There's an enormous amount to know. What becomes obvious very quickly once you dip your toe into the world of beekeeping, is that - aside from the myriad hard facts - there's a bewildering range of opinion and practice among beekeepers. It's rather intimidating for a first-time beekeeper to sort through and make decisions. Of course, I come to the table with my own set of beliefs and inclinations - not about beekeeping per se, but about how much chemical/medical intervention I'd like to use to support my colonies. If you've been reading here for any length of time, it's probably no surprise that I plan to follow natural/organic/low-intervention/biodynamic practices with my bees. I know I run the risk of losing my colonies by not routinely dosing them with drugs. That's a risk I'm willing to take.

Thus far, I'm drawn to a hodge-podge of different practices that don't fall into any established beekeeping approach that I know of. Here's a run down of all the decisions I've had to make before my bees even show up.

Hive type: Langstroth. This is the typical hive type of squarish boxes which stack up on top of each other, with movable rectangular frames inside each box. For each colony I have two deeps and two shallow supers. The shallow honey supers will be easier on my back, weighing in at only 35-45 pounds when full of honey. The alternatives just sounded heavier than I wanted to deal with. Back injuries are very common among beekeepers. I'd rather take a pass there.

Foundation type: none, just starter strips. This is probably my most controversial decision as far as established, conventional beekeepers are concerned. Top bar hive beekeepers, on the other hand, take this for granted. My objections to foundation are that it's either far too labor intensive for me, or that it introduces what is likely to be contaminated wax into a new hive. Also, I'm convinced that letting bees draw their own comb, with the cell size they want to draw, is better for the long-term health of the colony. There are obvious down sides. One is that my bees will have to work a lot harder to produce all of their own wax, which takes energy and time. Another is that they may not draw perfectly straight honeycomb, which will make it far more challenging for me to move and remove frames as I work the hive. It will also mean work for me to install the starter strips as opposed to using wax-coated plastic foundation, and this work needs to be done soon.

Feeding: Reluctantly, I plan to feed my bees on arrival, at least until they have a few frames completely drawn out with comb. Package bees arrive with no frames, having been fed only sugar water for sustenance during transport. I have a frame feeder - meaning a feeder which takes the place of one or two frames and sits directly in the hive. I plan to feed them with dilute honey from a local producer who follows organic practices. I know that everyone feeds bees sugar syrup, but it just doesn't feel right to me. I am especially concerned not to feed my bees sugar made from genetically modified sugar beets. (Most white sugar in the US is now made from these GMO beets.) I could, of course, buy cane sugar and avoid the GMO issue, but I will feed them dilute honey at least until I run out of the "clean" honey I have in my pantry. Also, I will add a little chamomile tea and a tiny amount of salt to their feeding syrup, as recommended in the Demeter standards(pdf) followed by biodynamic beekeepers in the EU.

Medication/treatment: Unless something drastic changes my mind, I'm going to fall on the non-toxic, low intervention side of things here. If you're not a beekeeper or aspiring beekeeper, you may not realize just how besieged the honeybee is by various parasites, and bacterial or fungal diseases at the moment. It is an exceptionally challenging time for Apis mellifera. Ultimately, my view is that bees need to develop their own resistance to various pests and regain their health through a cleaner environment and good breeding, rather than having weak colonies propped up through chemical intervention by humans. My opinion is that, in relying on chemical controls, beekeepers are simply breeding parasitic mites and bacteria that are resistant to those treatments, just as we are with E. coli in factory meat farming. To that end, I will try to support my bees by not introducing chemical insults into their hives, by following non-toxic treatments and practices that will aid them in ridding themselves of parasites, and by providing as much nectar and pollen forage, uncontaminated with pesticides or herbicides, on my property as I can manage. I plan to use many of the preventative methods described in Natural Beekeeping, by Ross Conrad, a book I highly recommend to aspiring beekeepers.

Races and queens: I have ordered one package of Italian bees and one of Russian bees. The particular strengths and weaknesses of races of honey bee are a little too detailed to go into in a blog post, but suffice it to say I felt like trying more than one race as a newbie beekeeper. I have chosen to have my queens marked but not clipped. Marking means that my queens will have a dot painted on their backs so as to make it easier for me to find them when I open up the hives. I hesitated over this because I assume the paint itself is a chemical insult. But as a brand new beekeeper I also see the value in being able to find the queen quickly so as to disturb the hive for as short a time as possible each time I open it up. In future I don't plan to have queens marked; there are other ways to ascertain that the queen is present and healthy within the colony, even if I don't become very skilled at finding her quickly. Clipping is the practice of cutting off at least a part of the queen's wing. I find this abhorrent, and much akin to declawing a cat. I would never do it. Clipping prevents the queen from flying, so that she cannot leave the colony with a swarm. This is feasible only because queens that arrive with package bees are already mated, and so don't need to fly to mate. Because my queens will be capable of flying, I may lose part of a colony to swarming. I'm reconciled to that possibility. Swarming is the only way nature has of forming new colonies of honey bees. If my colonies do well enough to swarm, so be it. I will consider it a job well accomplished, since only a very healthy and well established colony will produce a swarm. Not that I won't try to catch that same swarm if I can. But given the choice between wanton injury to a queen and the possibility of losing part of my investment, I'll avoid the unnecessary cruelty.

Honey harvesting: none this year, destruction method thereafter. This is another area in which I will follow an unconventional approach by the lights of most beekeepers. I don't plan to have anything more than a taste of this year's honey. Since my bees will need to draw all of their own comb, and since I will not feed them continuously, I would be surprised if they manage to produce more than the bare minimum of honey they'll need to get through the winter here. Even if they did, I would not harvest more than a spoonful. (I can't deny myself entirely, can I?) Next year, if things go well, I will harvest honey from a shallow super or two, using the destruction method. This sounds bad, but it's a low-tech method that doesn't require me to invest in a centrifugal extractor. To see how destruction harvesting works, check out this video from the Backwards Beekeepers.



I believe that destruction harvesting will work well for me as a backyard beekeeper because it's rather a simple process. I can do it in smaller batches than beekeepers working with extractors prefer to, because the extraction process is quite involved. If I had many colonies scattered across many locations, it might make more sense to get all the harvesting done in one fell swoop by means of the extractor.

I just want to wind up this post with a caution. Keep in mind, when reading this, that I have exactly zero experience in keeping bees at the time of this writing. I'm still very much in the learning stage with bees. What I've outlined above is only the best guesses I've come to after doing as much learning as I can in a short time. I strongly recommend that other beginning beekeepers do their own research and come to their own decisions about how they will keep their bees. I will certainly report on how the beekeeping project goes, and I'd be happy to discuss theory or practice with any other beekeeper, at whatever level of experience. But don't take anything I've said here as authoritative, because I most definitely am not an authority on honey bees.

Late Frost and Tender Seedlings

Here I am gardening in hardiness zone 6B. Depending on whom you believe, our average last frost date is either May 5th or May 10th. It's May 19th and there's frost on the grass outside as I type this. I watched my neighbor cover up his tomato seedlings yesterday evening, as I brought my tender heat-loving seedlings indoors for the night. I'm not going to gloat. I hope his seedlings made it. He built some beautiful wooden trellises this year to support his plants. But I am going to take this opportunity to throw my own piece of two-bit advice into the marketplace of gardening ideas.

Don't plant your tomatoes as soon as your last frost date has passed. Don't even plant at a certain amount of time after that date. I'm not saying this simply because of the chance that a late frost could surprise you. The thing I watch for is the day when I can be reasonably certain that overnight temperatures will no longer fall below 50 F (10 C). I know this will come at least a week or two after our average last frost date, and possibly three weeks later or more. I watch the five-day weather forecast, and I won't plant until I see five solid days of overnight temps above 50 degrees. If the predicted overnight low a few days out is exactly 50, I wait. If I see an overnight temperature of 51 or 52, I might plant with a row cover. But mostly I wait.

Why do I use this temperature as a guideline? Because tomatoes are essentially tropical plants. Yes, they've been bred to survive in our northern climes. They'll live through 40 degree nights. But they won't thrive. In my experience, any tomato fruit which has ever been exposed to temperatures below 50 degrees will never develop a good tomato flavor. Even if that fruit is a tiny green bud that has just shed its blossom. And what are we growing our own tomatoes for if not for superb, better-than-candy flavor? Tomatoes need heat and are completely allergic to cold, especially at the beginning of the season. Other gardeners get earlier tomatoes than I do. But the fruits aren't worth a damn, in my opinion.

Even my earliest fruits don't compare to those that mature during the three golden weeks of August. Those fruits probably never know temperatures below 60 or even 65 F. Now those are tomatoes worth eating. They're also worth waiting for. That flavor is the reason why I gave up buying fresh tomatoes at the grocery store, no matter what it says on the sign. "Vine-ripened," "hothouse," - whatever; I don't care. Once you've tasted a real tomato, you won't see the point of eating those red globs of cardboard that are offered for sale 52 weeks out of the year.

All of this goes doubly for pepper plants. They are even more heat-loving than tomatoes. As a rule of thumb, I aim to have my tomatoes in the ground on June 1st, and my peppers in the ground in mid- to late June. That's what works for me in my area anyway. Just don't let your tomato or pepper seedlings get rootbound as you are waiting for the temperature to cooperate. Repot them in larger containers if you need to. Rootbound plants seldom recover to do well in the ground.

I'm sure that seasoned gardeners have their own habits and preferences based on long experience, and I don't intend to start any argument. Direct experience is the best teacher, and it should not be lightly set aside on any authority. My recommendation is offered however to novice gardeners, and I understand that there are many people taking up gardening for the first time this year, due to our lousy economy. It's very easy to get discouraged when our first attempts at any new enterprise fail. So if you're new to gardening, don't necessarily follow what your neighbors are doing. Gardeners can be notoriously optimistic about frosts and planting dates. Everyone is dieing to get that first homegrown tomato. You may do better to wait it out with your heat-loving plants.

Gardening can be an extremely frugal hobby. But it's only frugal if you manage to keep your plants reasonably happy and productive. Losing plants you've grown from seed is absolutely heartbreaking. So take rules of thumb about planting dates with a grain of salt, and beware those late frosts!

Nothing Much to Say for Myself Lately

It is so obviously springtime here. Even though I've been fairly busy outside, I feel like I have nothing to report. Evidently I'm not alone. Half my blog reading list has gone stealth in the last couple of weeks.

We're still working on hauling away the debris from cutting down three evergreen trees a few weeks ago. Surprising how fast the bed of the beater pickup truck gets full. Plus my husband ripped out a fair sized stand of forsythia to make more room for things that will feed us. All that had to be hauled away as well. Now we're sort of debating which berry to put in that spot. The soil looks none too great.

The comfrey is up and starting to grow rather quickly, and the one I moved under the apple tree last fall seems just fine. The oregano and thyme evidently made it through the winter, because they are putting out tentative green leaves. What's more surprising, and therefore more exciting, is that the ramps we transplanted last year are coming up. We were sure they hadn't made it. The leaves keeled over and apparently died shortly after transplant. Even the even spacing and location of the leaves didn't convince me. I had to break one off and sniff it. No question that stuff is in the garlic-onion family! So now we have a few ramps poking up. I've never eaten them before, and there are only 8 or 9 of them out there. So fill me in, please. Should I let them just do their thing this year so that there will be more to harvest next year?

Our seed potatoes arrived, and I've started them chitting (pre-sprouting) in a dark, moderately warm spot inside. Also our two cherry and two pear trees, along with our asparagus roots. We don't have the raised beds built yet, don't even have the materials for the beds. So typical of us. This was something I had hoped to get to before the plants showed up. The weekend after this one I have to go pick up my four blueberry bushes from the Extension Office sale.


On top of everything else, the weather has been crazy. It snowed on Wednesday this week when it was 42 F outside. I know; I didn't think that was possible either. But it is. I had to look it up, but it can happen, and it did. About 10 days ago we had hail large enough to destroy the glass on my coldframe. The plan was to do some chipping last Saturday, but it was so windy that the chips simply blew away when they came out of the chipper. And then there's been the odd 63 F day sprinkled in there among all the cold and gray ones. The temperature has fallen below freezing overnight a few times, but never on the nights that it was predicted to. I like spring, but the mercurial weather (no pun intended), I could do without. Since we have clay soil, all the rain we've had is making it very difficult to get an opening to plant. Planting trees (or anything really) in clay soil that's wet is a Bad Idea. The soil gets all compacted and loses what little microbial life was in there.

We've been modifying the design of our chicken coop, a project that has been moving at an agonizingly slow pace. Part of this - but only part of this - delay can be chalked up to the weather again. It was either too cold or too rainy for quite a stretch of time to do any priming or painting. The painting is nearly done now, but we have a much more serious design issue to overcome. I plan to blather on about my mobile coop and pen in a lengthy post, TK. In related but sad news, we heard one of our hens died while at winter camp. I was sort of prepared for this, so I'm not too upset. At least we didn't have to kill her, and she wasn't killed by a predator. Just dead one morning. We'll see how the others are doing just as soon as we get our act together with the chicken digs.

We discovered a huge cement slab in the process of extending our garden. What fun! Too big to move, and right where the potatoes were supposed to occupy long, uncrowded rows so different from last year. Nothing to do about it, couldn't find the bottom of the slab even two feet down. It was going nowhere. I attempted to do a little biochar trial by filling the space all around it with twigs and stuff. You know, for carbon sequestration and soil improvement. Bloody weather once again - the wood was all pretty damp. I'm going to file that one under "nice idea if you happen to have a lot of seasoned twigs lying around."

What else? Oh, yes. I bought some durable row cover and have set out some lettuces. As soon as the cover went up about a thousand volunteer seedlings popped up. I would have ripped them out, or some of them anyway, but they were more or less in areas where the ground cherry volunteered last year. In case you're curious, I'm pretty sure we had "clammy" ground cherries, Physalis heterophylla, and no, that doesn't refer to the texture of the fruit. It refers to the slightly sticky stems. I'm about 80% convinced that that's what these are, so I'm leaving them for now. I have a spot in mind for them where they'll be able to grow year after year, under our new fruit trees. Turns out, the plant will form a rhizome and regrow from that. So, a little more time and we'll know for sure whether that's what we've got.

My garden is probably at its ugliest in early spring.

I pushed my luck again today and planted out a few leeks and shallots. I will probably need to cover them. I just couldn't stand looking at a mostly empty garden anymore, plus I'm running out of room inside for seedlings. By this time last year, I had harvested a small pile of baby Tuscan kale leaves. This year, with a cooler spring, the surviving kale plants are just barely starting to green up.

Other than yardwork, I've been spending my time madly researching forest gardening after watching this amazing video. I don't know why permaculture or forest gardening didn't interest me when I first heard about it. But it's got my full attention now. Which means tons of reading and pondering, and inter-library loan requests of course.

I keep hoping that one of these years we're going to have a spring that isn't insanely busy, one where I don't feel like I'm behind schedule all the time. Just once, I'd like that. Next year, if my husband still has a job, I'm going to lobby for two weeks' vacation in April.

That's all I got.