Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
These olive oil crackers took me 15 minutes to make and were delicious. I topped some with pepper and Italian spices, others I left plain for Amie. I need to get my hands on some poppy and sesame seeds, maybe some pine nuts… But this was good too:
with homemade walnut pesto
tomato seedlings and lovage
I’ve been trying to get hold of comfrey – for compost. Neither Fedco nor Johnny’s carry the seeds, and the seeds I’ve found are expensive: $4 for 10, plus $3 shipping! I don’t think so.
So I put a request for a mature plant on my local Freecycle and within 12 hours had a response. I also put the big Mountain Laurel that’s in the way of my depots on Freecycle. Within 12 hours had no less than seven responses. I’d rather see this bush get a new home than cutting it down.
In the basement we’re still at full capacity because this crazy weather – in the upper 50s yesterday, melting snow today – has delayed the transplanting of lettuces, kale, chard and spinach. This weekend, hopefully, I can make the room and I start a whole slew of tomatoes and peppers for friends.
The seedlings are all doing well. No signs of damping off, even though I haven’t been generous with the ventilation this year. I just watered all of them and they slurped up about 10 gallons of (filtered) water.
Seed pod still stuck on spinach seed leaves
The seedlings are neglecting their seed leaves. Some have already fallen off.
Irises (probably) in the back yard
While I was spending money anyways I went ahead and ordered, from Burnt Ridge:
I would love to also get a ROSA RUGOSA – a rosehip bush – but the ones I’ve found so far are too expensive… The kiwis will go on trellises near the front balcony and in the vegetable garden, and the paw paws I’ll place on the edge of our “forest” on either side. So these won’t take too much work and won’t be in the way of the big works down up front. The hazelnuts, though, will have to go along the path up front, and the tea plants… I’ll figure it out eventually!
Tomorrow I’m ordering 14 cubic yards of composted cow manure – as much as the truck can hold – from Great Brook Farm in Carlisle, MA. It’s a great deal and it won’t be littered with stones and cement pebbles like the “compost” I got last time.
Mm, came home this evening from our last beekeeping class to a house smelling of pizza homemade by DH. In return I can tell him all about making that mead…
I went ahead and ordered the following from Nourse Farms, here in MA (I’m so happy to get them locally):
All of these will go into places that are either settled (beds) or will need only a little work to be prepared (backyard fence). I held off from ordering bushes that would have to go up front, because I don’t know if we’ll get that area ready by the time they ship. I’m struggling a bit – in a (still) fun way – with the design, but I’ll have to get it, and my orders, down soon.
~
The skies are clearing after two more days of rain. It’s going to be dry and rather warm (high 50s) until Thursday night, and on Friday we’re expecting snow, followed by a hard freeze (15F!) that night and the night after (27F). After that, on Sunday, daytime temps of 53F again. What a roller coaster! Should I wait to put in the fava beans and spinach and chard seedlings (these would be under Agribon and I could add plastic)? I’d hate for the spinach to bolt again.
~
Sowed inside (now we’re a full capacity)
In flats outside in coldframe:
On this rainy morning I potted up all the tomato seedlings that were spared by the 12 mice I’ve caught so far. I love that tomato juice smell! I used peat pots and Burpee’s coconut fiber seed starter and so far I give it a thumbs up. It’s a good thing I left room for two flats because these babies needed all that space. Except for a tray’s worth of room on the heat mat we’re at full capacity.
You may recall that last Summer I contacted the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture about growing Ribes on our property. He told me that I would need a grower’s license, which is a pain to apply for, and anyway the variances from white pine stands will probably disqualify our location. I asked about gooseberries, and he said this law applies to all ribes.
So I gave up.
Just last week a friend did some further probing and found out that it is only black currants that are banned. Red and white currants, as well as gooseberries, are allowed in most towns in Mass., except for certain towns on this quarantine list. My town is not on the list – neither is his. I called up Nourse Farms (in Deerfield, Massachussets) and they said that, yes, there is some bureaucracy involved, but it will not hold up my order if I make it soon.
I’m upset with the Dept. of Ag. It took me some calling around to find someone over there to help me with my question, and after I left him a message it took him another month to respond, only to give me this misinformation.
But I’ll let it go to enjoy the fact that I can fill up all of our shaded, ugly chain link fence with currant and gooseberry bushes. Now, which to choose…
We had a glorious weekend. After 5 days of noise and dust, the patio is finished. I’ll take a picture of it once the coming rains have washed it clean. The challenge now is to level the surrounding soil and clear it of stones, stones, stones, and to grow grass and plantings around it. I found that Home Depot has a neat little tractor for rent with a scoop, a leveler, a trencher and augers. It’s not too expensive and it will fit through our garden gate. It’s on our list for the next rainless weekend.
The seedlings (except for the brassicas and spinach) went out twice for some sun, the first time in the diffuse light of the hoop house, the second time in the morning sun on our balcony. I also fed them (fish emulsion) for the first time. Some of them are ready for transplanting, but I’ve been moving things around on my garden plan and haven’t settled on a place for them yet.
I also dug two more new garden beds (each 4 x 8′). The first one took 3 hours. The second one took about 10! It’s only the5 feet West of the first one, but the ground was full of glass, tree and other roots, marbles, small liquor and medicine bottles, broken tiles, and stones (bricks), stones (boulders), stones (slate).
In the picture below you see the operation. I dig half the bed, 1 foot down, dumping that soil on the other half. I place the screen (1″ and 1/2″ hardware cloth) over the hole and sift the soil from the other half through it. It takes some manouvering, especially in the end. That fills the hole, and for the bed itself (the extra 9″) I use the soil from the old potato towers and the excavation for the new patio (also full of rocks). It’s good not to bring in new (already sifted) soil and to use the materials on the property, but that material is quite a challenge.
What was best of all was Amie making herself at home in the garden while I worked. Here she is, writing secret messages in her diary.
Part of our plans for the front garden – the flower garden – is a pond system at the bottom of the hill that will catch the runoff from the hill and from our roof. The pond will be a wildlife pond, its overflow a wetland. The pond will not be for watering our garden – for that we’d need a pump, and we’d like to keep this as simple and non-automated as we can. We want it for wildlife, for the bees – honey bees need a source of standing water to process the honey – for (edible) fish and for relaxation.
But I’ll write more about the pond and wetland later. Here I am concerned with the “top part” of the system: the connection between our roof and the system.
We want to catch water on top of the hill because (1) that’s where our veg garden is and (2) that’s where our house is, and we take the water from those barrels to flush our toilet – the latter is still a simple bucket system but we’re looking for a way to hook the barrels to the toilet cistern (again, later). For that reason we bought four big rain barrels last year, and we might purchase a couple more as our Town now offers a good deal.
We could put 3 barrels up front, connected to 2 downspouts that take water from the biggest part of the roof, and 2 in the back, where one gutter takes an equal amount. The front part gets more barrels because they can service (by bucket) both the veg garden and (by gravity) the herb beds and the flower garden downhill – consult this (not recent) map.
We’ll put simple diverters on each downspout to get the water into the first barrel, which will be on a high platform. We want the simple kind of diverter because we found a cheaper solution to overflow. Once that barrel are full, its overflow pipes will guide the water to the next barrel in line (positioned on a lower platform for access to the tap). Once the last barrel on the line is full, its overflow pipe will guide the excess back into the gutter.
Here’s another sample of my atrocious (or just plain rusty) drawing skills:
In the back of the house, the overflow will disappear into the dry well which will feed it to the groundwater and so on to the aquifer that is under our neighborhood.
In the front we will connect the downspouts to underground pvc pipes that will “surface” on the rim of our hill. Where the underground pipe surfaces, in a patch we call the “woods”, we want to create some sort of brook bed that will take the water to the flower garden pond. We’re thinking we might saw a pipe in half, bury the halves and fill them with stones and pebbles, and plantings. But, about that part, later.
First lets get the downspout/underground system in place, so my herb bed plantings and the reseeding of the grass on the slope won’t be washed away by the rains that are sure to come (back). That’s our plan for this weekend!
1. Topped off the large new bed.
2. Sowed 60 peas (5 kinds) in it (along its entire length next to the fence).
3. Didn’t forget to inoculate them.
4. But forgot to chit them. I figure if I keep the bed wet till germination we’ll be okay. (Okay, this is cheating.)
5. Built frame for new bed (4 x 8′).
6. Watched excavator dig out the stump of a 50-year-old pine and (a) enjoyed renewed faith in these trees to stay upright in high winds, (b) dreamed about all the things I could do if I had a little machine like that! (this one’s for One Straw, really).
7. Tidied all beds and saw that the black plastic and the warm weather – today was 60F! – had done their work: no more frozen soil. We’re a go for many seeds and seedlings to go in.
8. Cleaned out hoop house.
9. Collected all the sticks I want to use in the windbreak for the hive.
10. Painted the hive with Amie’s help. I know, I went for just safe bet: white – read that it confuses the bees if you paint it different colors.
11. Harvested tiny carrots, mache, mizuna and two something-elses that I can’t identify from the hoop house. Unfortunately, when I put these seeds in at the beginning of Winter, I didn’t take notes. Any ideas? The second one has bumps, like goosebumps, all over the leaves. {UPDATE} The first one is Claytonia.
12. Took pictures of Amie loving the mache. She just pinched off the leaves and ate them on the spot. This is a miracle, for up until now she would not eat anything that is green.
13. Drove through my flooded town to bee class and learned that bears go after hives not for the honey but for the bee larvae and pupae. That puts Winnie the Pooh up there with Popeye (*)
(*) What’s that about Popeye, you ask? Though spinach contains a lot of iron, none of it can be absorbed by humans.
A neighbor was walking by when I was digging and filling the new garden bed (our side-yard veg garden is fully visible from the street) and he came up the hill to tell me: “You’re hard at work again! And always with a smile!” I smiled but refrained from telling him what I was thinking about that made me smile so.
I was wondering what I could learn from the taste or smell of the soil. A trained palette or nose should be able to pick up certain chemicals and chemical combinations, how wet the soil is, its temperature, its crumb. Crumb… mmmm. It sounded so yummy and enticing as I was running that thick, black soil through my fingers.
No, I didn’t taste it, I only smelled it. But I did go inside to plunge my hands and nose into the Real Food Challenge that stumps me the most: baking -Â anything with flour.
~
I made these tortillas. They’re easy, quick and yummy. Healthy, too, as I made them whole wheat and all eight of them contain in all 2 teaspoons of oil, and you cook them in a dry skillet. They’re Tex-Mex flour tortillas but I called them chapatis for the sake of combining them with this curried red lentil soup – equally quick, tasty and healthy. Amie enjoyed hers with peanut butter. We won’t be buying any more tortillas at whole Foods.
Also flour-related, this week I want to make homemade spinach pasta. A friend, hearing of my pasta cravings and despairing she’ll ever get round to making her own again, lent me her pasta machine: the real deal from Italy. I can’t wait to get those rollers going.
~
It has been promised that tomorrow the rain is finally going to stop. I plan to transplant chard, lettuce and spinach seedlings from the basement into the hoop house and to sow the peas. I also need to move the compost bin that’s closest to the kitchen, as it’s in the way of the stonemasons who are coming to redo our 20-year-old patio. I also want to try my hand at somehow constructing a windbreak/fence for my hive out of the sticks, branches and bark I’ve been collecting since we arrived here.
