Tomatoes and Green Beans

This is one more long update. Life is so full it’s tough to find a moment to sit and write it all down. But here goes…

Home-grown salads are a common fare nowadays: lettuce mix, beet “greens,” cherry tomatoes, onions, garlic scape dressing. I could throw in bell peppers too, but I’m letting them mature to red – one (from an overwintered plant)  is getting really close. We are also harvesting lots of tomatoes and green beans.

I took down all my favas. I had high hopes because the pods were so fat. But a 4′ by 2′ bed with about 20 plants yielded only 6.1 oz. de-podded and peeled favas: enough for one small appetizer!

I won’t be growing favas anymore, however delicious, and however interesting.  The following photo shows the mycorrhizal nodules on the roots of the plants when I pulled them (there were a few more blossoms, but the leaves and developed pods were developing a black spot).

Most of my brassicas bolted. Neat, a bolted cauliflower:

It’s like a space ship. I’m keeping it to see what happens next.

We’re also eating the scrumptious husk cherries, and we’re comsuming two gallons of mint ice tea (mixed mints) with honey a day. Then there are all the other culinary herbs, of which we use some immediately and dry the bulk. I’ll write about our drying setup soon – it’s our next big project.

I’ve also harvested quite a bit of propolis and wax comb from the hive, which is doing well. The top broodbox is heavy with honey. I put on the first honey super two weeks ago, with a queen excluder. The excluder is a grate through which only the worker bees can pass.  We put these between the broodboxes and the honey supers to keep the queen from laying eggs in the honey harvest. However, after 2 weeks the bees had drawn out no comb whatsoever, confirmation that they might be reluctant to do anything in there because of the lack of queen pheromone. So I removed the excluder for now, and will see what happens.

propolis and wax

As for the house, DH, my nephew and I put down a wooden floor on concrete footings in our previously dirt floor shed. The idea is to put up insulation and drywall and two large doors and it can be an almost-year-round woodworking shop. It’s great to have the table saw and lathe out of the porch. Getting all the stuff that was in there before back in, in an organized way, was my biggest challenge. You know how you end up with boxes and boxes of odds and ends…

And last but not least, we’ve also added one more member to the family: Amie’s grandmother has arrived from Singapore. This means lots of art is being made, about which later. And yummy Indian food!  So we’re five now: three adults, one teenager, one kindergartner. I  do love having a full house!

Raspberries and Other Harvests

Amie and I went to visit our new friends of the Freecycle comfrey, L and S, last week. Their raspberry garden was bursting with plump juicy berries. L helped Amie pick, she is so good with young kids. Amie was in seventh heaven, practically yelling with the fun of it. I chatted and picked and in less than 40 minutes we had gathered one pound and seven ounces. Later at Whole Foods I saw 6 ounces of organic raspberries for sale at $6. Wow. So:

raspberries from friends: 2 lbs (from two pickings)

We also picked our first strawberries. There are more ripening, I think in the end we’ll have about 100 berries. Amie again had a blast picking them after we removed the net.

strawberries: 3 oz.

We’re getting a good daily harvest of green beans every day now, from one 4×8 bed of Provider and Maxibel:

green beans: 1 lb 1 oz

I had to pull some pea vines because the chipmunks uprooted them. Still, incredibly – we hit 100 F yesterday – the remaining peas are still producing pods and even flowers.

peas (mix): 1 lb. 8 oz.

At the moment they’re straggling in one at a time, but the first big batch of tomatoes is on the verge of ripening and soon though there will be too many to eat day by day. Better get that solar dehydrator built.

tomatoes: 2.2 oz

cherry tomatoes: 6

Other harvests:

radishes: 4 edible ones (1 really good one)

garlic scapes: 10 (made them into Daphne’s salad dressin: delicious!)

garlic: 8 bulbs for eating, 8 for sowing

cauliflower: 1 tiny one, the rest bolted

carrots: 3 ounces of the baby kind, and a big bunch of green leaves that went into soup.

comfrey: 1 stuffed bucket for compost, though it looks like I should harvest it for skin salves.

The fava beans are in the pipeline, they are huge and kinda grotesque, but I’m waiting for a chance to make some Fool Mudamas to pick them. The onions have all fallen over and they are looking fat and juicy. I’ll be able to pull them soon as well, adding yet another empty bed. Time to plant Fall and Winter crops. Maybe the brassicas will do better in the Fall this year – all my brassicas, but (so far) the Brussels Sprouts, bolted.

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The borage is in bloom and the bees just love it. At my last inspection I found my queen – I thought she had been superseded. I tall looked well enough for the first  honey super to be added on. If we have some honey I will be happy, because local honey can help Amie’s respiratory trouble which – we think – is due to allergies to pollen. And how local can honey get!

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My nephew from Belgium arrived last Monday and he will be staying here for a month. He’s a strong and friendly thirteen-year-old who can help a lot around the house and garden, and he and Amie get along so well. He’s a teenager but he can still play. What a boon it is to have him here.

First Carrots, and Garlic

No, really. I already harvested carrots. Well, Amie harvested them:

No doubt you’ve noticed that these are baby carrots. Baby carrots.  I had let that bed go to weeds, and when pulling said weeds today found that  carrots have much less purchase on the soil than weeds do, and they too came up. So after weeding I called Amie over and she had a ball pulling the carrots (3 ounces of them, without greens), and then eating them. Crunch crunch. Delicious! The greens went into the vegetable soup.

I also harvested my garlic. I know this sounds too early too, but they were ready, many of them already browned and fallen over. Considering how well they were doing a month ago I had expected a larger harvest.

As you can see, the bulbs on the side of the tray- a softneck kind – are smaller and/or they mostly lacked the outer skin that protects the bulbs. Maybe I harvested these too late? They’re still good, and I’ll use them in cooking over the next few days. The bigger ones – all hardnecks, the  scapes of which were delicious – are just fine, and I’m curing those in my warm, drafty, dark attic.

They make for 8 x 10 cloves – give or take a couple. That’s enough for planting next September.

Riot for Austerity – Month 19-20

Riot for Austerity fist with Thermometer

Well, it’s again 2 months since I calculated our last riot. I’ll average May and June. Last year’s averages (calculated here) are mentioned as a baseline. I use this calculator.

Gasoline. 14.528 gallons per person (pp) in cars + 10 miles pp on public transport.

35 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s yearly average: 24.8%)

Electricity. Our electricity bills is back to normal: 352 KWH (all wind).

10 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s early average: 18.2%)

Heating Oil and Warm Water. It’s just our warm water that was heated now with 9.35 gallons of oil.

15 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s yearly average: 77%)

Trash. The usual: 10 lbs pp.

7% of the US National Average

(Last year’s yearly average: 7.3%)

Water. Our rain barrels are paying off but there were still many periods when I had to water the garden with tap water. Hence the still unusually high number: 1134.5 gallons of water pp.

38 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s yearly average: 16.5%)

New Pots

I was very happy with how this session’s pots have turned out, especially the glazing. I never seem to have any inspiration when glazing. This time around I went for a common theme: turquoise (which is matte,  as I found out last time) overlaid with a clear glaze (which makes the whole thing shiny).

Here is a video of my wonderful teacher, Lisa Dolliver. Her work is for sale at  her studio, Earth Changes, in Maynard, and her pieces are featured in the WGBH auctions (for which this video was shot).

First Tomato

This should have been a joyous day, a glorious day. Instead there was cussing. I don’t often cuss, so it was shocking. What happened? The chipmunks got to the first tomato of the season.

THE first tomato.

The ICONIC tomato.

The one you take a picture of:

Its good side

Its chipmunk side

They also got the second one, which wasn’t nearly ripe. There are, by my latest count, hundreds of tomatoes ripening in that hoop house. At this rate we’re not going to get to eat any of them.  The chipmunks have dug tunnels underneath the sides, so putting on doors will not help. What do you think? Coyote pee?

Flowering, Ripening, Growing

I drive the speed limit and blink even when I’m the only one on the street.

I pay my (one) credit card bill, my taxes, my library fines.

I smile, I make peace, I don’t gossip or speak ill.

But I am no goody two-shoes.

I am the most subversive person I know.

I grow my own food.

oregano

husk cherry

brandywine (?)

eggplant

cabbage

peas

squash

fava beans

and earth

Finished!

Happy Summer!

On this hot sunny day what did I do but seek out the two hottest areas of my garden.

First, the compost bins. They looked pretty tame, on the surface. Then I stuck in my fork and woosh, the temperature rise was immediately apparent.  I  persisted, turning, consolidating and sifting out the finished stuff. I do the sifting by hand – wearing heavy-duty gardening gloves – pushing and rubbing the stuff through the wire mesh into the garden cart, then scooping up the bigger bits and throwing them into the next bin. I love the sensation of the heat. I realize this is soil in the making, imagine volcanoes, tectonic shifts, geological eras…

And it smells so good, like my mushroom bed, actually, with a fresh, nutty smell. Could it be mycelia? (UPDATE: See two days later.) It’s a distinctly, wholesome fungal smell. There weren’t many worms in it and was dominated instead by the tiny creatures that collectively look like a white powder.

The compost in the Earth Machines (EM) smells very differently. It’s always too wet and a bit anaerobic, especially at the bottom, giving it a sour, rotteny smell. Still, it’s always loaded with earth worms and other large crawlers. It composts much slower. That might be a function not so much of the enclosure but of the raw materials: kitchen scraps, including meat, fish, oil and dairy, versus pure plant material in the garden bins.

In any case, today was the first time I moved the half-finished, smelly stuff from the EM to the open bins in the garden. Let’s see if the rodents start mining it for half-decomposed bones. I will post our home-made compost bin plans and the pictures of its construction soon, because I am quite happy with it, except for one aspect that we can easily change.

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As if I hadn’t sweated enough, I had to jump into the real sauna. I brought the finished compost, still warm, into the hoop house. It was a whopping 94 F  (34 C) in there. I rigged up a fan to circulate the air a bit. The tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and Chinese Lanterns in there (the latter confined to pots) seem to love it. I weeded, top-dressed each plant with three generous handfuls of compost, then watered it in. A couple of hours later, I swear, they all looked even happier.

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I used the rest of the compost on the berry bushes, then watered that in as well. They tend to get neglected a bit and I haven’t seen much growth since transplanting them. I don’t expect berries from them this year. I do from the strawberries up front, though. They have all had a chance to recuperate from being grazed by the bunnies/chipmunks, thanks to the netting I put over them.

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I hope to have more compost in a matter of days if I turn the new piles once a day.  Then the rest of the garden can partake of the black gold as well. Next up as well: trellising the tomatoes that are outside, as well as the beans.