Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
last husk cherries
hoop house tomatoes and peppers, and some rhubarb
celery and parsley drying (yeah, they got mixed up)
other drying herbs (safe, rosemary, marjoram, thyme, lovage) destined for the Excalibur
potted up herbs, Amie and DH
the Freecycle chipper now works! (just needed some oil and the eviction of a mouse)
All from the garden (tomatoes, cucumbers, red and green peppers, onions, tiny eggplants). Not the steak, which is however local.
The Columbus Day weekend is going to be sunny and warm, a welcome break from the incessant rain of the last week. I’m also feeling much better, though my voice still registers an octave lower than usual. We’re going to get a lot of garden work done!
solar drying celery leaves before they go into the dehydrator (stalks went into mirepoix)
Well, we had a gorgeous weekend. DH and my parents put the roof up onto our toolshed. It only needs a tarp now as an enclosure and we’ll fix it up nicely with a floor and siding come Spring. DH and my Mom also pulled all the weeds in the lower front garden.
I was missing in action because of this darned cold/laryngitis. I was cursing, because I had big plans: transplant the Winter seedlings, cover them with row cover, hang doors on hoop house, slash down the goldenrod that never flowered, harvest and dehydrate, etc. With the weeds down in the front I can also rototill that place, layer on all our left over compost, and then cover with our cardboard sheet mulch and the straw that’s hopefully coming via a friend.
But no, I’m in bed, coughing and sniffing, napping and reading herbal medicine books (and LOTR). And it’s raining again.
Tiny harvest on 2 October
As you can see I am alive and doing things, like playing around with my new dehydrator. Let me tell you, it was a bad idea to keep the apple skins on, and to start the process at 4 pm. Live and learn!
I’m waiting for the rain to stop so I can put my Winter harvest seedlings in the ground, though first I’ll have to rake about a million acorns out of my raised beds. I’m identifying trees that need to go down on my property if I am ever going to get enough sunlight to grow a large tomato and all those medicinal herbs I want to grow. DH and I are building a garden tool shed, and need to make work of the doors for the hoop house.
I’m struggling with a persistent cold, or rather, low immunity. I’m studying herbal medicine in the evenings after Amie goes to sleep and rewriting/finishing my novel in the mornings when Amie is at school.
I’m coping (sometimes not so well) with the news (old news) about climate change and peak everything. The political outlook of this country is getting me down – and I don’t even watch TV or even read any news. I just feel it…
Mostly it’s good, but I’m not in a space to blog much. Maybe if I get these constantly recurrent colds out of my system, or even just get a good night’s sleep!
Speaking of which…
I’ll just come right out and say it: of all the garden work, I love turning and sifting compost most!
Yesterday was Amie’s first extended day at Kindergarten and the weather was glorious to boot. That left me with five (5) whole hours in the garden. I filled milk bottles with rain water as biomass for the hoop house and, while placing them, noticed that the plants were looking a bit glum. Time for the last compost dressing of the season, and then a good soak.
I eyed the 3 compost bins in the back of the garden, where I dump garden waste and coffee grounds from Starbucks. They’re 3 x 3 x 3 each, 2 of them were 3/4 full, 1 was still empty. Opening up the front of the first bin (we built the composter that way), this spilled out:
… a lot of good, finished compost from the center of the pile.
I shoveled most of this soft, small stuff through my mesh, over into the third, empty bin, shoving the leftover bulky stuff into the middle bin.
When bin 1 was empty, I moved most of the bulky stuff now in bin 2 into bin 1, and sifted the rest of bin 2 into bin 3. The bulky stuff ended up in bin 1. It was an elaborate and no doubt illogical process but I ended up with bin 3 full of finished compost, bin 1 half full of unfinished stuff. As you can see in the first picture, all but the centers of the heaps had become too dry, so I made sure to saturate the new unfinished bin with rain water. After this good turning and soaking I hope it will finish in a week or two, at which point I’ll sift it again.
Bin 3 now held 2 wheel barrow loads of fragrant, fluffy compost. 1 load has already been distributed among the tomato, pepper and eggplants, the herbs, carrots and peas. I put 2 handfuls around the base of each plant, then water it in (with rainwater, of course).
I covered bin 3, so yesterday night’s rain won’t leach the compost too much. One Straw, by the way, has an interesting post on soaking up the leached nutrients with biochar. Following his advice on my own much smaller scale, I put whatever leftovers of charcoal at the bottom of the bin.
Today (weather and soil humidity permitting) I’ll work the other load into the empty beds so they’ll be ready for the Fall and Winter seedlings. Time to get out the hoops, the row cover and the plastic. And the gardening books.
Hoop house biomass
The one surviving cabbage: enough for Sauerkraut?
Today’s harvest
Next month’s harvest
It may still, officially, be Summer, but the day I put on my woolen socks is, to me, the first day of Fall. That was yesterday.
Last night the temperature dropped to 47 F and my mind races to what we need to get done before the frosts come. Give our hoop house a “spine” (a cross beam) as well as doors. Turn the compost and a week later distribute the finished soil on the beds that will be in action over the Winter. Then transplant the Fall and Winter seedlings into those beds and cover with small hoops and, when the tomato and pepper plants are spent, move the hoop house over the 4 chosen winter beds.
Stock the bird feeders {DONE}. Buy new straw and burlap for wrapping up the bushes.
Fall also means, each year, a cold or flu. Amie was the first to get it and to recover (she literally burned it out with a 102 F fever). But she seems to have picked up something new. She is pretty sad about it, because today is the second day of Kindergarten and she so intensely enjoyed the first day.
Most aptly, my side of the big bed – Amie wants me near and anyway it’s Sunday – is covered with books on herbal medicine. I subscribed to HerbMentor.com and it has got me going. So far I’ve studied, on paper, Dandelion, Licorice, Elder. I’m making a first pass through these herbs that we might need most often in the next few months, the cold, flu and immunity herbs. Then I’ll purchase them from a herbal supply store, because I’m not growing them yet, and don’t yet have the local and herbal knowledge to wildcraft them.
The plants in their wisdom also know that Fall is coming. They are redirecting their energies and nutrients to their roots and seeds, the parts of them that have the most chance of surviving the Winter. I am waiting for a nice day to harvest the flower heads of what I do have growing – chamomile, feverfew, calendula. Then I’ll use my new Excalibur dehydrator, which arrived a week ago, to dry them. And at the Farmer’s Market this Wednesday I will buy lots of local apples, to dry as well. We still have apple sauce that I canned last year: it’s just not that popular in our house.
Tricolor pepper harvest
Fat buds and flowers on my two Sochi tea plants.
Mushrooms in my schroom bed, but are they the anticipated King Stropheria?
~
I did a quick inspection of the hive today and found an amply supply of honey, nectar, and brood in all stages of development. There were lots of newly hatched worker bees – pale, small, their wings still stuck together. A couple of hours later I witnessed a flurry of orientation flights in front of the hive.
My only concern is that the broodnest is divided between the two boxes. Over Winter, bees eat their way up, (preferably) starting out in the bottom box and ending, by early Spring, in the top one. I asked for advise on the forum of my beekeeper’s club and will do some research. I think the bees (should) know what they’re doing, and am averse to interfering.
While gathering kindling in the woods behind the house my mind turns to the future. There is enough wood that is down and dead to heat a household or two, perhaps, but not more. It could sustain many more households in kindling, but again we’re not talking of the feudal forests that could trip up Hansel and Gretel, or the massive forests of a bygone America. This is a narrow woodlot – belonging to the State – in a suburb of Massachusetts.
Once in a while we meet neighbors jogging, or walking their dogs, and we make light of our “cargo”. They move on – invariably they’re faster than we are – and I wonder if our exchange will stay as friendly, as lighthearted, as the times change. Will we encounter more people gathering “free” wood? Will there be axes? Or worse? Will we discuss our rights to gather? Or will we just take?
I want to gather kindling every day as the weather allows. It’s good physical exercise and it stimulates Amie’s imagination – not always verbalized for me to partake of. It kindles my thoughts as well, summoning a dark picture that is fuzzed, though, at the edges, by the knowledge of how easily these smooth, dead sticks will catch fire in our wood stove, come the cold days.
