Happy New Year!

I'm a week early, but the sentiment is real. Here's hoping 2020 brings you joy and contentment.

24 December at sundown, looking west . Ah, the days are getting longer now. A very good thing indeed.

Snow!

It snowed six-plus inches this week. I learned my lesson last year and shoveled five times over two days, so it was never a back-breaker. In fact, I enjoyed the exercise, because I get so much less in winter in this climate.

I have all of my seed catalogs in hand, but I'm not thinking much about gardening right now. I'm working, hard and fast, while I have so little to do outside. I'll put out my products I create in the four winter months over the ensuing eight months, and repeat that again next year. It's possible that next winter could be my last year of working for income, but I'll have to see how I feel then.

With growing/gathering/hunting for most of my own food, I need less money. The killer bill here is property tax. I could drop house insurance. I could even drop internet and use the library plus a cheap cell phone plan instead. I can keep most of the house turned to 48 degrees in winter and live in the bedroom. But that property tax is painful and unavoidable, so until I get to retirement age, I need some income.

Musing: Youtube gardening channels and the new internet culture of begging

I've learned a good deal from youtube garden videos, especially from two old ones.

And these do a good professional job, and give clear instructions, and that's great. Compared to people just farting around (like me, uploading a couple of crappy videos there just to insert here for a very few friends to see), they deserve to be paid, and they need some money to buy cameras, mics, and editing software to make that high-quality video. You can't do what they do with my $35 camera.

Lately, though, I've been thinking about comparative wealth. And when an active youtube channel has 100,000 subscribers, and some videos that have over a half a million views, you're looking at people who are getting far wealthier right now than I'll ever be. Should I be giving them more money, in any sense?

I also enjoyed the recent rant an English allotment gardener, Dave, let fly about people with Youtube garden channels who have Patreon accounts and Paypal buttons and GoFundMes for their new greenhouse. "If you want a new greenhouse," he said, "Go get a job and pay for one!" He made me laugh, and he also made me nod my head. A lot of people in the begging game with Patreon and GoFundMe and public Amazon wishlists are much wealthier than the people who send them ten dollars every month or buy them a new pasta maker. Some people would say that makes the rich folks clever, that they can both be rich and get money from begging or convincing 100,000 total strangers they're a close buddy. Others would say that it's sad or stupid that the poor are wasting money like that, sending it off to rich folks. I say, it's none of my business either way, but do excuse me if I don't play the donation/begging game from either end.

I could have a Patreon and PayPal button in my own line of work, and I don't. Like English Dave, I was raised to believe you work for your money. You don't scam for it or beg for it or take it from the government simply because that's easier than getting a job, like the people I've met in my life with fake disability claims. Dave and I may be dinosaurs in thinking that, but I don't mind being that sort of dinosaur.

Does money make you happy? Really and truly? If so, I don't understand that. If I have enough to eat and keep the roof intact, enough to buy a pair of shoes every other year and a pair of new eyeglasses every five years, I'm good. I do know this as well: my happiness definitely doesn't come from making the rich richer. So with that in mind, I'm going to limit my viewing there to mostly small, sincere, possibly not monetized channels. I wish the rich folks over there well. I'm just not going to be part of making them rich from now on (I have ad blockers, so I'm not doing much for them, but every view or subscription helps them qualify to earn.). Helping the rich get richer would make me seem sad and stupid in my own eyes.

We broke two weather records

At least two! Two days ago, it snowed nearly 2 inches.

And yesterday morning, it was 10 degrees F when I woke (-12 C). That broke a 108-year-old record. I think it may be the coldest on record for 12 November, period, but there's no reason to confirm that and depress myself further. I covered the winter garden on its hoops, and the plants look fine (though the thermometer in there read 13 when I woke), and I tossed a 3-mil plastic over the lettuce/carrot/kale bed. It wasn't all that secure at the edges, or held up at all off the plants. Just a toss over and anchoring it by yanking through a bit of each of four corners through chicken wire. My photo of kale looking okay was blurry, and no way am I running out there again today to reshoot! lol. Onions and leeks aren't happy, but I think if I harvest them in two days when the temps are up to 45, they'll be edible. But the lettuces are "maybe yes, maybe no" on surviving or being edible.

I'm guessing "yes," for a few of these, no for others, and I'm letting them sit in the sun again until 4 p.m when it will be a balmy 29F. 🙄 If they die, they die, and that's sad. I still have 28 heads in. It's not supposed to get to lettuce-killing temps regularly here until almost Christmas, so I feel mightily cheated. You order the seeds, you start the seeds in early September in the shade, you baby them through 95 degree temps in early October (also record-setting, but in the other direction) with only a few heads bolting, and then this happens. True, I'm getting a little tired of salads for lunch every day, but I'd hoped to have the option until mid-December.

And lettuce isn't something you can harvest and can or freeze to save your harvest. I have two heads in the fridge, which I'll be able to eat before it goes bad, but there was no reason to harvest any more. If it were to happen again--10 degrees is awful, and 4 degrees lower than they had said 36 hours before it happened--I might cut every head, walk down my street, and give lettuce away to people. Why not? At least someone would have been able to use it.


So, if anyone ever reads this, lettuce cold-hardiness to 10F, Winter Density with only light row cover did not make it. (It made 17 with no cover, though). Oak leaf, Grand Rapids, and Black seeded Simpson under 3 mil plastic (again, not secured at the edges, more like tossing a sheet over them at sundown before a frost) seem to have survived, barely. I can't quite tell about the speckled yet. It is low-growing, and that might have helped it.

Hope your weather, wherever you are, is better than this!

Fall gardening

(Which, considering all the days coming up with less than 20F weather, should be called "winter gardening!")

I have root crops, lettuce, and kale in the autumn garden. I harvested two heads of leaf lettuce today, speckled and Black seeded Simpson. Because of how unseasonable cold this month has begun, I will have to cover the remaining plants with plastic most of the next week to help them make it.

I've been raking/vacuuming leaves a lot and have 1.5 trash cans full of chopped leaves plus a full leaf mold bin. Next year, once plants are in the ground, I'll mulch them with this. Worms will eat it and turn it into soil. Until they do, it'll hold moisture and suppress weeds.

And I've put a similar cage around my artichokes and loaded it with leaves, hoping this makes them survive the winter. The crowns are well down in that leaf mulch. The plants are 3 feet tall and wide.

Though 6 of the next 8 days, it'll be too cold to do anything outside (except maybe jog from the car to a store's doorway), so other outdoor projects are on hold. Still, I have most things done out there.

 I've even covered the windows inside to save on my heating bill, which is more than I can really afford this winter with income getting pretty iffy. (My own fault. I haven't launched a new "product" in 8 months, and in this environment, that's glacially slow.) Can't wait to turn 65 when I'll collect Social Security and can quit worrying about income from writing. At that point, any writing income will be extra, and I won't care how little it is. Anyway, I've shut down three of the six rooms of my house entirely, and will only live in three and heat three this year. Sorry to complain about money, but it's part of the story. And making the land I own work for me and provide me most of my food is the other part of the story, a happier side.

If we get a warm spell, I'll post again when I accomplish something. Otherwise, I'll post about ordering spring fruit bushes and seeds, and about seed-starting again on February 1. Ciao!

video: getting mulch

autumn projects in the vegetable beds

I'm still growing food, like my half-bed of lettuces (with appropriately fall-colored marigolds in the back of them)

and there are artichokes and basil (in flower) still looking happy (even after one 33 degree night)

I've dug holes for the currants I will plant in spring, so that spring's workload will be less, and marked them with sticks. I've found a FREE source of well-rotted wood chips, that had been chipped into very small pieces last year, so I'm spreading it all over. Here is the area where the melons were this year, and where I think I'll try strawberries next year. (well netted against birds and squirrels, for sure.)

I've built a leaf mould bin and chipped two bags of leaves from this year, and the leaves that hadn't yet decomposed from last year:

The leaves from last year that had decomposed into nice leaf mould as of the first of October this year, I spread under this tarp I'm using to solarize the soil (that is, kill the grass and weeds beneath it so that next year, I can plant food into it). I tried both clear and black plastic for that, and black works far, far better (though the internet would tell you otherwise, oddly.) The photo is blurry, not your vision. By the time the worms are done with the leaf mold, it'll be a great place to plant melons and pumpkins next year, and they can vine all over down there in full sunlight.

Down the slope from my back yard fence, I have coarse wood chips from deliveries in December and April, and all the way down/right near the street, a thin line of the new free mulch I found, which you can see is darker and prettier, so I'll be bringing a lot more of that home. There's another black tarp uphill of that, and uphill of the tarp, I'm trying cover crops: small turnips and two kinds of radishes I'll let rot in the ground, lentils, and crimson clover. (Deer or rabbits have eaten a lot of the radish leaves.) By this time next year that whole slope will no longer be grass, so I won't have to mow. (I'd rather spend 8 hours weeding than 2 hours push-mowing, partly because I can weed when it's cool, and partly because I find it much more pleasant work. Also, food--or even nice perennial flowers--make more sense than lawn to me. What is up with the affection some folks have for grass? It's BORING.

I tell you, I'm damned proud of myself. If I'd done a better job of taking pictures of the perennial weeds and dead trees and half-dead bushes and poison ivy that was there when I moved in, you'd see how very much I accomplished in just 17 months. Give me 30 months, and this place will be both beautiful and a vegetable and fruit farm that produces more than enough for me for a full year. I had 20 square feet of veg garden space in Year 1 and 800 this year. In Year 3, I'll have over 3000 square feet I reclaimed from weeds and grass.

Thanks to my aunt, I have a pressure canner for next year. She bought it in 2001, used it once, and never used it again, and she gets some of my veg bounty, so that works out well for us both. Today I'm getting a fishing pole from my brother-in-law so I can provide more of my own food next year. He's also giving me venison this fall, assuming he bags one, so I might have to buy a little chest freezer next year.

I have another three or four weeks of hard work to do with getting more mulch and spreading it, but I love working in fall--it's dry, it's cool, the mosquitoes are gone, the gnats aren't biting, and when you sweat, it evaporates right away. It's still work, but it feels good to do it.

Best heirloom vegetables I grew this year

Dwarf  purple heart tomato -- the winner

My criteria for these choices is:

A) Tastes great. What's the point if it isn't one of the tastiest in your garden?

B) Not disease or pest-prone. I like 'em easy. Admittedly, tomatoes will never be easy, needing pruning, pinching, and tying up, and then swaddling with tulle or other netting to keep the birds off the fresh fruit, but some varieties are easier than other varieties.

C) One plant gives me a lot of food to eat.

D) They're open pollinated, so I can seed-save.

E) They're pretty to serve. Admittedly, a strange criterion to some people, but if something looks good on the plate, your brain makes it taste even better, I believe.

Without further ado…. (drum roll), the best plants I grew:

1) Dwarf Purple Heart tomato. From the Dwarf Tomato Project, a 4.5 foot tall plant, with the darkest green leaves you've seen on tomatoes, and good production of fruits that were all above 8 ounces. Almost no seeds or gel—it was great for eating, for BLTs (there weren't excess juices to make the bread soggy), and for sauce. A rich, intense, layered taste. While it got a bit of late blight, that's normal here. You will want to stake it, but a single sturdy stake of 4 feet is all a dwarf plant needs. (A t-post is ideal, and a 1 x 2 would work well, but a single bamboo stake would be a bit too wimpy once the fruits begin to mature.) If you like the taste of Cherokee Purple and so-called brown tomatoes, or if you only have a balcony or container, get some of these seeds from Victory Seeds in Oregon.
2) Ping Tung eggplant. Lovely plants from Taiwan, beautiful flowers, and then long slender fruits that made my aunt say "oh, I'd love a dress that color!" One eggplant is perfect for one person, which is a bonus for me. Not bitter or watery like normal grocery store eggplant. I even ate some raw, and it was fine that way. (Though Hunan stir-fried eggplant and eggplant Parm are too danged tasty to do anything else with these!) It's a bit of a challenge to seed-save eggplants, as you have to let one of the last fruit get overripe before frost sets in, but I'll do my best to time that right before my first seed packet runs out.

Pintung ready for Eggplant Parm

3) Suyo Long cucumbers. They taste wonderful—not a hint of bitterness, and the seeds take a long time to get big. Ugly, some might say, but not once you slice them, when their ribbed form makes a pretty slice. I pickled with these successfully too. If you like hothouse English cukes but don't want to spend a dollar per on them at the store, grow this easy plant instead, as it tastes very much like those (but better, because you eat it fresher). It does need staking (but for free, you can use fallen branches, three or four of them shoved into the ground in a teepee, and wound around with twine for the tendrils to grab onto), and once they start bearing, you'd better harvest every other day, but that's normal for cucumbers. When they come, they come quickly and plentifully.

4) Speckled lettuce. I bought this from Seed Savers Exchange, and it's not the romaine forellenschluss that is more familiar but this leaf one: https://www.seedsavers.org/speckled-organic-lettuce. It held out to June 20 without bolting. The leaves are tender as can be. When it does bolt, you leave the last plant or two and seed-save from it, and for one expenditure on seeds, you can have this lettuce spring and fall forever. (Or if you're in a marine-effect zone 8 climate like coastal Oregon or London, you can probably grow it all year round, for it'll take some frost.) I'll put it in my winter garden too, under one 6 mil plastic tunnel, and see how long it lasts there. But for sure, it's worth it for two seasons, Spring and Autumn, of beautiful salads on the plate. I often had that, green salad bowl lettuce, and oak leaf lettuces for my salads, and they were gorgeous together and had not a hint of bitterness.
5) Grocery store spaghetti squash. Of all my squashes, winter and summer, this one did the best. I wish I could tell you the variety, but it seemed to come true to form, so it must be open pollinated. (It might not be any longer, as I grew a number of squash plants, but I'll seed-save them all anyway and see what weird stuff I get next year.) Fast-growing.

Runners up:

Boxcar Willie tomatoes. Available almost anywhere as seeds, this is a solid, medium-sized red tomato with a balanced taste, on the sweet side, good production, and with good disease-resistance. Other heirloom tomatoes I grew that were productive, fairly disease resistant, and heirloom (so you can save the seed) were Mortgage Lifter and Kellogg's Breakfast.
Long Island Cheese Squash. A beige pumpkin. I only got three of these from a hill of two vines, but the biggest one gave me 7 cups of puree, which is enough for a couple pies and a big batch of soup. Delicate, tasty flesh from a big pumpkin.
Chieftain red potatoes (I think that is what they were because of their leaves and flowers, but can't swear to it as they came from the Walmart eating aisle, not from seed potatoes). I've saved all the egg-sized ones for next year's crop.

Red and yellow late potato harvest

Aunt Molly's ground cherries. No-hassle plants that give a whole lot of candy-sweet fruit in summer. It took me a while to get used to the taste, and I found I like them best cooked with a couple tablespoons of lemon. Worst aspect: they're a hassle to harvest (you end up crawling around on the ground, and you still have to husk them before you can cook with them).

Quick garden tour video

A glance around my side perennial flower bed and veg gardens: next year is in preparation mode, fall garden is in and growing, summer garden is nearly done.

Update on hives

I'm apparently not allergic to any food. I even eliminated all corn and soy to make sure. I read a terrific book about it, and I know a lot more about the topic than I did. The timing of my hives and anaphylaxis also makes me doubt I have a food allergy.

As I've had hives over six weeks now, they are either from sweat, water, mosquito bite allergy, or something else environmental. In length of outbreak, they qualify as "chronic idiopathic urticaria." that means "you've had hives for over six weeks and no one can tell why." But in Latin. 😉

I've done what a doc would do for me next (had I insurance to go see one), which is put myself on OTC antihistamines twice daily. All it's making me is chronically tired in addition to having chronic hives. So I switched them up today to a non-groggy one, crossing my fingers that it'll solve both problems. I'm hoping it's related to the season somehow, and after the first frost they'll disappear.

Hives can be from stress, but I'm not stressed. You have to be married, have kids, or have a job to be stressed! (lol, but true) I'm stressed a bit from the hives, I admit (it's wearying itching every damned minute of every damned day for weeks), but as I wasn't stressed until two or three weeks into them, that also can't be the cause.

On the yard and garden: Getting ready for my next-to last mowing right now, and Thursday I'll pull out most of the summer veg. Peppers are still bearing, and a few pumpkins need to ripen on the vine (though the vines look half-dead), so they'll likely stay in until mid-October. I have oodles of lettuce up and am nearly ready to start picking a leaf or two from every plant. Winter garden is planted as well (if it doesn't work, it doesn't, and I'll be okay with that).

I think I have enough vegetables stored, canned, and frozen to last me through March. Longer if I can get the winter garden to give me kale, lettuce, and carrots. I know what I need to do next year to grow enough so that I never have to buy a vegetable ever. It'll be fun to reach that level of self-sufficiency.

The date tells me we're a week and a day away from burning being legal again. I have piles of diseased leaves and plants to burn, fallen branches to chip, and the first of the leaves to compost.

Pix next time!

Harvesting and hives

I'm back inside this morning after a half-hour of checking out the garden and harvesting a half-gallon of this and that. We're in for four (and I hope the final) hot days, so I won't be doing much out there until Friday. Got the lawn mowed on Saturday and canned yesterday while it rained.

Good news first. I'm making headway on canning. Here's most of what I have so far, less what I've given away:

That's (naming from the back) tomato sauce, tomatoes (lots of yellow ones), bread and butter pickles, dill pickles, and ground cherry jam (or, as it didn't set terribly well, ground cherry syrup), Tomorrow I'll can some chow-chow, a sweet relish, with mixed veg: cucumbers, yellow squash, onions, peppers, and green tomatoes of a type I don't like when they are ripe (so this is a good use of them). I'll use up my half-pint canning jars on those. (I should have bought more pint canning jars! -- for a single person, that's a more reasonable size than quarts.)

I believe that will be the last of my canning, though. A lot of what's yet to ripen is "root cellar" storage. I don't heat my living room in winter, so it's the perfect root cellar for winter squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. The last of the tomatoes, I'll chop and put in zippered freezer bags for use in soup and chili.

And now the bad news. I've eaten so many of some vegetable or other that I developed an allergic reaction to it. At first, around Aug 10, it began as itching on my scalp (I thought for a while I'd grown allergic to my shampoo, but that wasn't the problem.) Then I got bunches of hives, and I'd often wake up around 1:00, itching like mad:

But I love my vegetables, and they're all ready for harvest, so I kept eating them. I was eating little meat, as I had so many other great dishes based around veg to eat, many with cheese as the protein. In no way was I trying to become a vegetarian, but I was eating fresh wholesome veg while I had it.

Then after four weeks, a few days ago I had not only hives but a swollen chin and lips. I figured I was one more dose of whatever away from being in the ER with anaphylactic shock, so I'm now on an elimination diet. NO VEG AT ALL. Just bread (which I hadn't had much of, so I knew wasn't the allergen), rice, and chicken. Gah. BORing. A few more days of that, and then I can try re-introducing first cheese and then the veg, a new one every three days, until I find the culprit. The possibilities are:

• Tomatoes. NO NO NO NO NO! I love tomatoes. I love tomato sauce. No more BLTs ever? Expect me to become seriously depressed if this is the one.
• Cucumbers. I like them but I could live without.
• Bell peppers. Doubtful--few are ripe yet, so I haven't had many. I love ripe bell peppers, and I'd hate to lose them, but I honestly don't think they're the one.
• Squash. Also doubtful, as I don't believe that I had any when this all began. I do now--I have loads!--but while I'd be happy to eliminate this food from my menu, I don't think it's the one.
• Eggplant. This is what I'm hoping for. For one thing, I've never eaten this much eggplant. I've had it, once a year as ratatouille, maybe every other year of my life for the past 30 years. But this year, for six weeks, I've been having it probably four meals per week. I could easily give this up, so I'm crossing my fingers that this is the problem veg. Eggplant doesn't particularly taste like anything--it just absorbs the flavors around it--so it's not something I even could miss a whole lot.
• A combination: Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes: those are all nightshades. It could be that I'm ODing on nightshades, or on one of the components in all of them added up. Nicotine, for instance, is in all those. Perhaps I've been taking in toxic levels of it. I might be able to eat some of those things, but not 2-3 times a day in big servings, as I have been doing this past month.

I'll probably have this mystery solved in a few weeks, and I'm hoping the solution doesn't make me cry. It might.

And yes, I appreciate the irony of obeying the "vegetables are healthy, so eat a lot of them!" instruction and ending up with occasional diarrhea (which high-fiber foods like kidney beans also give me) and now with hives. (Everything I've named we call a vegetable, but botanically they are all fruit.) Apparently, vegetables aren't THAT healthy. At least not as the primary basis for a diet, and not for me.

Sigh.

How did women farmers do this?

My garden is kicking my butt right now. It actually isn't the gardening alone--that, I could easily handle in  a half-hour per day. But when you have fresh produce, you need to cook from scratch, and you need to clean/hull/chop, and you need to preserve, and you need to run pies and food over to neighbors and relatives because you can't possibly eat them all. You invite people over for meals so someone else gets to enjoy your produce at peak flavor and nutrition, and you need to clean the house before they come and clean up after they leave.

I'm amazed at the women on farms who did this for decades while also raising eight kids. Seriously, how did they? I'm surprised they weren't all dead of old age by 35 or so.

Add the (useless, time-wasting) lawn to this with mowing and weeding, and the (purely decorative) flower garden and the weeding and mulching of it (I can't claim to be deadheading or doing any other task with the flowers because I simply cannot keep up!), plus all the dirt, leaves, and whatnot I end up dragging in, leading to more floor-cleaning, and it becomes at least a half-time job.

I put in the fall garden again, this time covering it all with tulle (bless that tulle sale. It was the best garden purchase I made, $10 for a bolt of tulle, which is saving my tomatoes and seedlings from birds). Let's hope this time the little seedlings grow up! If it works, I'll have eight kinds of lettuce, mache, and spinach for green salads (which I've missed since June), plus kohlrabi, beets, kale, and carrots.

In 2 weeks, I'm pulling up one of my big black tarps which I used to kill grass, and I'm planting in three kinds of radishes, crimson clover, and turnips. If I harvest the food in October, great. If not, it's all functioning as a cover crop. The root crops tops will die when it gets down to 25 degrees, the roots can rot in the ground, and it'll make for better soil next year.  As a lot of the seeds are 25-cent seeds, it's a low cost way to protect and improve soil.

I'm beat. And next year, I'm growing even more, with bigger potato and tomato crops and the addition of sweet potatoes and possibly peanuts. I bow to women like this 1940s Georgia woman and her year's canning.

Canned tomato sauce

I took a good deal of my tomato harvest until now and canned tomato sauce. Four hours to get two quarts and two pints. I'm sure in January, I'll very much think it was worth spending an afternoon at it. However, I can see why a person would say "You could buy six cans of Hunt's sauce and it'd taste pretty good and would only take you a few minutes to grab them off the shelf." True enough, I admit. The rest of the excess tomatoes that come in, I'll probably just core, chop and freeze, to use in recipes. I've had a break from BLTs for over a week, so I'm ready to go back to eating those for breakfast. It's really a lovely breakfast, a BLT.

ingredients

baked the sauce

Now I hope I don't die of botulism!

I am already a few days late on mowing (my grass doesn't grow fast, and I do it every 10 days) but tomorrow is the only nice day to do it, so neighbors will have to wait. Then the temps climb back up to the 90s again. Good for squash, bad for human beings.

Cucumbers are really starting to come in, so I've menus for lunches that revolve around various cucumber salads (or cucumber and tomato salads), but in a few weeks, I'll be canning pickles as well. I only plan on doing garlic dills and bread and butter pickles.

The Suyo long cucumbers are really good--tender and sweet. Very much like hothouse English cukes, but you can grow them in your back yard and they're no-fuss plants. It has been so long since I grew cucumbers, I forgot about the spikes. They scrub off super-easy, though, with a clean dishrag. Definitely one I will grow again next year.

I have the ingredients for ratatouille, which I've also taken to roasting instead of stewing. The advantage to making that and tomato sauce this way is that at about 20 minutes in, you can take the roasting pan out and ladle out the excess water. (I put it in my composting container I keep in the freezer and it ends up in the compost pile, but a person could also use it to make a vegetable stock with onions, carrots, and some other veg trimmings.) The roasting of sauce or ratatouille results in a much more flavorful, denser dish in the end, and in a shorter time than reducing on stovetop would take.

Tomorrow lunch I'm making eggplant parm again, using a cup of yesterday's sauce that was left over from canning. I tell ya, I feel totally spoiled by all this healthy and tasty food coming in! 

Lessons learned

I learned a lot of lessons this year. Here are some:

1) Lasagna gardening. By this I mean, you put down cardboard, and then you pile materials on top of that like straw, leaves, compost, grass clippings, in lasagna-like layers. Then you top it all with topsoil, plant into it, and the theory is that voila--weeds are suppressed and killed deep under the cardboard, and plants are fed, both.

Great theory. Not realistic for my situation.

If you have nothing but bluegrass or another tender grass and are converting that lawn to a veg garden, this would work really well. With the weeds I have, and with the grass I have, it was fairly disastrous. Weeds and grass pop through the cardboard and layers. Also, every source said pine straw was a reasonable organic mulch material to use too. IT IS NOT. It's alleopathic, the worms can't eat it, and almost a year later, I'm still pulling it out of my beds, 100% intact. Cardboard has rotted, leaves have rotted, compost has been incorporated, even thin branches left in the mix are half-gone, but the pine needles are going to be pine needles for years more.

Therefore, I've switched to killing via solarization, with six-mil plastic sheeting. Much more efficient. If you want to keep the worms alive and healthy, don't kill too big a patch at once. (15 x 20 feet might be about the maximum that allows worms to crawl out from under the heat, according to what I've read.) Still, at six weeks per 15 x 20 patch after the spring solstice, in a year you could develop quite a large garden out of your lawn, have your first garden patch done in time for tomatoes and peppers to go in, and be developing new beds right through fall planting time for leaf lettuce, turnips, and radishes. Weigh down the plastic well along the edges and here and there in the center (I used wood chips and two-inch-thick branches and bricks, though one could use soil, digging it up and tossing it onto the edges). When the grass and weed roots are all dead, take up the plastic and plant in, mulch with leaves (save them at the end of fall, and your neighbors' too!) and then wood chips, both free resources here, or with straw if you can get that cheaply. The plants will do very well.

2) Seed starting. I'm still working this out, timing and efficiency and which plants like being in cells first and which don't. Some issues I've worked with:

• lighting and space. Lights are expensive. If you have a five-shelf plastic unit with ten seed trays and five lights suspended above them, use aluminum foil as reflectors, and if you use those $20 LED shop lights you can get at Walmart rather than the $50+ official grow lights, you still have about a $250 set-up, but it'd work well enough. I'm sticking with my less expensive setup that allows two trays, and I'll double it to four trays by running the lights 24 hours (I'll put the trays away from light so they all get a 12-hour "nighttime" and a 12-hour day.)
• pests outdoors. While there are plants that might like being direct seeded and grown that way, the birds or slugs or whatever pests you have will eat them. So sometimes it's better to get seedlings up to four or five inches tall indoors before you put them in ground. Then birds leave them alone, slugs can eat a leaf or two and the plant will still survive.
• timing. I followed what many books and charts online said, but it wasn't really correct. Once I'd read some actual scientific research, I realized that most plants transplant better at four weeks of age. (They have fewer diseases and bear more fruit). Also, if you limit it to four weeks, you don't have to up-pot, so you're saved the expense ofextra potting soil. Example: If you start eggplant 12 weeks before frost, and eggplant doesn't want to go out for 4 weeks beyond that, that's too long. Start them inside 6 weeks before frost, and that timing works out much better.  However, that "last frost date" doesn't tell the whole story, so sometimes, the weather is perfect early and you have nothing big enough to go in ground, or you have plant starts beginning to be root bound, and the weather is too damp in late May to plant out. Dem's da breaks.

3) Pests revisited. I have, in addition to a normal range of insects, three large pests: birds, squirrels and rabbits. The rabbits, you have to fence against and make sure you aren't giving them habitat with bushes and spaces under deck or shed. Luckily, a not-too-expensive fence of chicken wire and t-posts, no concrete needed, does the trick. With birds, netting is the only solution, and wind can blow nets around. The more I secure nets, however, the harder it is to get to weeding and pruning and harvesting. Tulle is cheaper than row cover and easier to water through. I need to start tulling my tomato rows when the first color starts to show, or birds will get to my tomatoes. Squirrels are squirrels, and there's nothing to do about them that I can see. So I'll triple the sunflower plantings next year and see if they leave me any. If they don't, I accept, the way I accept them plucking an occasional cherry tomato It saves you wear on the enamel of your teeth to just accept that squirrels are who they are.

Moles, which I thought were going to be a pest, are not, beyond churning up the soil. I've not lost a single plant to them, and they eat grubs that do hurt plants and moles break up the clay soil deep down. Except for unsightly piles of dirt, I'm fine with moles.

Insects: I've sprayed neem oil (organic and edible), because squash vine borers are such a serious pest, and I've also sprayed something a bit stronger (but allegedly still not toxic to humans, not that I'd spray it on the part I'm going to eat) at sunset once a week. You'll want to wait until sunset to spray so the bees are bedded down. You need your bees! Other crops have been nibbled, but none destroyed by insects, so except for squash, I let the insects chomp away and not resent it. I planted red amaranth as a trap crop (it's so tasty to some bugs they'll hang out there first), and I'll do that again in the future.

4) Diseases. Last year, growing in bagged and thus sterile potting mix, and growing hybrids, I had no tomato diseases. This year, growing more disease-prone heirloom tomatoes in the ground, plus using what I think is infected bulk compost I had delivered by a garden center (which I won't use again!), my tomatoes have had every disease known to humans. Black spot was worst, but it was limited to the cherry tomatoes. Late blight is taking hold now on the big tomatoes, so I'm trimming out leaves and have begun spraying. They are all mulched, so I'm not getting much soil splashed up.

black spot on tomatoes

Next year, I'll definitely start spraying June 1, with baking soda or with hydrogen peroxide (1:6 in water), or some other innocuous anti-fungal spray. I hope this will prevent the diseases from taking hold. I'll also get ruthless with cutting out bottom leaves. Once a week, I'll take another 10% of bottom leaves on the plant. By July 1, all my plants will be stark naked for the first 24 inches. And I'll let one or two suckers grow from about 30 inches from the ground, but pinch the rest out, so that the trellis doesn't get too crowded and air can get through the leaves.

5) Random other lessons. Shelling peas is awfully time consuming for what you get. Probably in the future sugar snap peas will be my choice. I haven't found any green/french beans I like the taste of, so i need to try more varieties. While they'll warn you not to plant grocery store potatoes because of disease and so on, I planted three kinds and had three successes. I suspect those rumors are started by seed potato companies, which, in the US, sell potatoes for 10 times the grocery store price. I'll continue to plant Walmart organic bagged potatoes (and seed potatoes I saved from my own crop) in the future, grocery store garlic, and seeds from the herb aisle that are much cheaper than little packets of seeds.

I know I've learned more, but that's some of what is informing my next growing season.

A day of food self-sufficiency? How'd I do with that?

My veg garden is in its glory, so I decided to eat as close to I could to all home-grown one day, and to supplement the home-grown, I chose what I could grow even if I don't yet. Spoiler alert: I didn't get very close.

I'll go through the menu, though, and tell you what I ate, and what I grew, and what I could not have grown (considering laws, climate, funds, and other realities.) Every ingredient with an asterisk, I grew myself. Several others, I will produce in the future.

Here we go. Breakfast was an omelet.

2 Eggs

*handful of cherry tomatoes

*diced scallion

chopped artichoke heart

cheese

How self-sufficient was I at breakfast? By law, I can have five hens, so these could be, in a couple of years, my own eggs. Not today, though. Someone else owned those hens. If I had hens and wanted to be self-sufficient, I'd also have to grow grain for hens to eat (in addition to table scraps and bugs they could find), but I can't grow enough on the land I own. I can't have a cow or a goat, so cheese would be off the menu, were I only eating what I could grow. I have artichoke plants growing, but they are not yet flowering, and I'm not sure I can get them to that point before frost in this climate—and I suspect they will not over-winter here. I could substitute a different third veg, of course.

Lunch was this wonderful and simple kale salad:

*3 c dinosaur (aka Tuscan/Lacinto) kale

2 oz cheddar cheese

1 apple

olive oil

apple cider vinegar

honey

This is easy to throw together, but wow, was it good! (If you think you hate kale, try this variety—it might convert you.) I don't yet grow apples, but 2 apple trees are on my list of things to buy next year.

Again, the cheese is one part I can't do myself. People can do it, mind you, and folks make cheese at home, but I can't. To have a dairy cow, you'd need 3 extra acres, one for pasturage the cow grazes on, and two for growing grains for your cow and the hens. And you'd need to borrow a bull every year, or buy his semen, so you'd be dependent upon a neighbor for that, or you'd need a lot more land to have your own bull. And rennet? I haven't the faintest idea how you'd begin creating that yourself. As you can see, it's pretty complicated and land-intensive to get a wheel of cheese. It should cost ten times as much per pound, it's so complicated! Thank goodness for grocery stores, eh?

Vinegar is doable at home, and with little equipment, but I'm sure I'd feel it was a waste of perfectly good fruit I could have eaten instead. Cold-pressing any oil would take some equipment. You could invent a seed press if you're handy and have the tools and metal to do that, or perhaps you own a hand-crank oil press already. But olives don't grow here in any case. Sunflowers do, but how to keep the squirrels from eating every seed before harvest, I can't figure out. They ate every one I grew this year, that's for sure!  If you could grow avocado trees, that fruit could supply your dressing fat, but I can't grow them. Maybe peanut butter thinned with fruit juice as a dressing? I can grow both of those ingredients. I'd grow tired of that taste very quickly.

Supper:

3 ounces roasted chicken with hot sauce

*sautéed Swiss chard ribs

(cooked in oil, once again)

*steamed carrots (yeah, they're weirdly shaped!)

another few artichoke hearts

salt

Replace the hot sauce with a rub of home-grown hot peppers (dried, pulverized) and herbs, and if you were raising meat chickens, the main course would be easy enough. By law, however, I cannot raise meat (only laying hens are legal here). If I lived more ruraly, and had no other source of meat but chickens, I'd be eating half a chicken per day, so I'd need to kill and cook 180 per year. That is one whole heck of a lot of work. It's possible, mind you. People do it. Most people did it or something similar a century ago. But me? I admit, that's never going to happen. Nor will I have pigs or caged rabbits, the "easy" meat animals. Let's be honest: I cannot physically work with hand tools the number of acres of grain I'd need to feed meat chickens, much less more complicated animals.

Salt. Now there's another difficult issue. There are salt deposits in every region of the world, but I don't know where my nearest one is. Someone does, and in the case of a collapse of civilization, you can bet that's going to be guarded with guns. I'm not going to kill someone or risk death just to eat salt on my eggs and chicken and potatoes, so either I'd learn to live without, and/or I'd be very careful with what I had on hand. (strangely enough, right now that's 3 pounds because I have a brand new box for pickling later this season, but it usually isn't that much salt sitting around here.)

Snack:

Strawberries

And so…this is what I ate that one day. 1000 Calories (which wouldn't be possible to sustain for more than a few days, considering the physical labor the farm lifestyle takes without diesel tractors), 56 grams of protein, 73 grams of digestible carbs. A much smarter menu for getting those calories up to survival level would have been to eat 4 eggs for breakfast and half a chicken for supper, eat every single bit of skin on that chicken, and half the organ meat, and to have a big sweet potato at supper, some white northern beans in that lunch salad, and a medium white potato for breakfast. That brings you up to a bit over 2000 calories. You'd still lose some weight eating like that day after day while hoeing, harvesting, and lugging supplies around the farm, though you could survive on it. But I imagine you'd get quite grumpy in a few months from chronic hunger.

I came far closer than most people ever do to feeding themselves for even one day. And yet I failed abysmally.

What I'll realistically never produce myself: butter, cheese, vinegar, oil, and salt. What I can't by law produce any time soon: meat animals or dairy animals. What climate prevents me from producing: olive oil, avocados, my favorite nuts, and possibly artichokes. Also chocolate, coffee, black tea, bananas, and other foods I've been known to ingest on a fairly regular basis.

What I may produce in the near future: eggs.

What I will certainly produce in the near future: apples, strawberries, and honey. (I know someone who knows a bee guy, and he should put hives in my yard next year. I'll get a jar of honey in return, if he does. So the bees are technically producing it, but I provide the blossoms, and I'll get paid in honey.)

I don't grow many grains, so I didn't include them in this day's menus. Wheat, I could grow in this climate, and oats, and flint corn, and I could cut and flail the grain and even know how to, but all of these crops take up acres I don't currently have. For someone with less than 1/2 acre in my climate who is attempting to reach food self-sufficiency, the bulk of calories and carbs would need to come instead from these crops: potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, peanuts, cowpeas, and dried (shell) beans.

I've gardened in three locations, and I'm getting fairly good at it here in August of year two…but I'm fighting birds, rabbits, and squirrels for my food, so I'm not sure I could survive on my bit of land (even if no human tried to take it from me). I tell you this: the fantasy people have about surviving the apocalypse is just that for most of us, me included: a fantasy, not realistic in the least. If you aren't already a master gardener or homesteader in your own climate/locale, you're not going to learn how to grow food in time if the Stuff Hits the Fan, as some people seem to want it to, Goddess alone knows why.

If you don’t have the fruit trees, bushes, and nut trees already in place, you'll be waiting 3 years or more to harvest those things even if you can grow them from seed, and even if the wildlife leaves you any to eat. If you don't already own four acres per family member and have the staff and arms to defend it should civilization as we know it collapse, and if you don't already own the domestic animals that you'll need going forward, you won't survive an apocalypse. Simple as that.

However, that's not entirely bad news. A life without cheese, butter, coffee, chocolate, black tea, white flour products, salt, and your favorite salad dressing? A life of physical chores and random devastations of weather and pests? Not sure many people will want to live that life.

I am grateful I don't have to.

Bonus photo. The next night, I had Hunan pork/eggplant/scallion over rice. Healthy and my favorite meal since I made myself eggplant Parm,  but once again, I didn't grow the rice or the pig or the soybeans to ferment soy sauce.

Pretty big harvest

I wanted to clear out half of what I call the "big bed" (though I have bigger beds now!) to put in fall crops that I have started in cells. So this morning, out came five crops: potatoes...

...and dinosaur kale, green onions, carrots, and rainbow chard.

It took a while! Luckily the weather is just lovely right now, so the work was pleasant. I cleaned all the veg twice, and later today I'll set up the dehydrator, blanch most of the chard to freeze it for winter use, and cook some potatoes and carrots and kale for supper.

Harvesting, prepping the bed for replanting tomorrow, and cleaning everything twice was definitely work, and it took me almost five hours. But this is why you do all the rest of it--the seed-starting, the amending of soil, the weeding, the composting, and the watering. To get this nice harvest. And since the weather was so grand, I can't even complain about the work.

I also harvested a few tomatoes (not pictured), but I'm not getting the size of crop I'd hoped. I'll go back next year to growing a few Early Girl hybrid plants in addition to my heirloom varieties, because I think they gave me 200 tomatoes each, and I want enough to can, make sauces, freeze, and dehydrate so that I never have to buy any grocery store tomato, canned or fresh, ever again.. Keepers among the heirlooms include: dwarf purple heart, mortgage lifter, and Boxcar Willie. Kellogg's breakfast was pretty good and pretty prolific, but I'm going to try two other yellows next year: Dr. Wyche's and Hillbilly, and see which of those three I like best. The criteria are: denseness of flesh, disease resistance, taste, and production. I probably won't spare space for more than 2 cherry tomato plants, and those will be for snacking on when I work in the garden. But that's next year. We're not done with this year yet!

Fall garden planting tomorrow: starts of kohlrabi, two kinds of beets, two kinds of kale, two kinds of chard, plus carrots wherever I can sneak a few in. A week from now, I'll start lettuce and spinach indoors where it's cool. About September 1 I'll plant out them and (small white) turnip and radish seeds. A couple weeks after that, I'll pull out the cucumbers, which are planted where the winter garden (lettuce, spinach, and kale under cover) is going.  Some of what will go in the fall garden will probably last until late November too, as it can withstand a frost.

Fun times! Next year I'll have 4 times as much growing space, so I'll have a lot more to do, and a lot more food with each harvest. Give me until 2021, and I think I might be able to grow enough to feed myself veg and fruit year-round.

harvesting and eating

Today's harvest started in the back yard. I got tomatoes (big and li'l), many ground cherries, a couple of carrots, a scallion, the lettuce I'd let go to seed so I can replant the seeds this autumn....

and after I ate a carrot with lunch (a lunch that also included salsa), I went out front and found my first Ping Tung eggplant was big enough to harvest, so now I had this plus tomatoes for supper:

It took me a minute of staring at this, casting about in my memory for recipes, to remember that I had mozzarella cheese in the fridge, so I'll be making eggplant parmesan with home-made sauce (I'll grate half of the carrot into the sauce, which will make it sweeter, and I'll roast the sauce rather than cooking it on the stovetop, for more sweetneess). I have Italian sausage that's going in around the fried eggplant when I bake it. It's going to be so darned good!  My mouth is already watering.

The Dwarf Purple Heart tomatoes from the Dwarf Tomato project continue to be winners of my tomato variety trials. One double-bloomed tomato was 1.4 pounds, and if you think about that occurring on a dwarf plant, that's even more impressive!

Like 75% of my big tomatoes now, these are going straight into the freezer when picked ripe, that is, after I core them and pop them into zipper bags. When I have 10 pounds or more in the freezer, I'll do some canning. About half my cherry tomatoes are being dehydrated for eating this winter as snacks or in soups.


The spaghetti squash plant is setting squash like wild right now. Every day I walk out there and see another one. All other squashes--and the cucumbers--are still at flowering stage, but there are butterflies, bees, pollinating flies out there all day long. Soon I'm going to be eating cucumber salads, cucumbers dipped in whipped cream cheese, and pickling some as well. (Garlic dills and bread and butter pickles, both.)

I can see how August and September will be quite busy with "putting up" food. I know it's a lot of work, but it's fun, and there's something special about pulling down a jar of something you grew yourself from seed, nurtured, harvested, preserved, and having a taste of summer's bounty on a cold weeknight in January. Nature is good, isn't She?

this morning's photos

A cold front is coming, which means I will be very busy for the next three or four days, catching up on garden tasks and mowing the lawn. So I had best post some photos today!

I went out to harvest my daily 2/3 cup of cherry tomatoes and check for beans (none) and cukes (none yet, but flowers), two plants that you should check five times a week, minimum, so they don't get away from you (zucchini too, but I don't grow that.)

I had thought maybe a rabbit had eaten every leaf of a pepper plant, but now I think it was these little guys:

Funny how I'll cut a hornworm on my tomatoes in half without a thought (beyond "ick!"), but these guys are privileged pests. Munch away, dudes, and turn into lovely monarchs.

I have the fall garden started (beets, chard, kale) as little plant starts. I'm going to rip out the whole "big bed" on August 1, harvesting what's there, except for one kale plant and the leeks, and put in these starts. In front of them is the coriander seed I just cut down. It's now shoved in a paper bag, drying further, but there will still be a mess of little round seeds on my kitchen counter, I imagine. You can either plant coriander seeds which will grow cilantro for your salsa, or you can use them as a spice (and I will be, in some of my pickles).

And though I grew the sunflowers for the birds, I had no idea they'd sit on the flowers and go after the green seeds. Fine by me, but they'll want it more in January, I'd think. Their choice.

It also  remind me that all those articles/theories on how you can grow all the food you'd need for a year in 1500 square feet are nonsense. If you tried to grow sunflower seeds, you'd get about 10% of your crop here. If you tried to grow peanuts, you'd have a yard full of fat squirrels.  (So guns and squirrel stew would be part of the plan.)

some photos - flowers and veg

Sunflower first. The stalk is over 10 ft tall. Sorry about the power lines as background.

 Borage is to attracts bees

Crape myrtle--looks like I did prune it correctly this winter

Winter squash plant is doing well. (They all are--they love the heat)

Recent harvests

First, a photo of my pingtung eggplant plants, which I so seldom take a picture of. I re-did the chicken wire fencing around them because rabbits were eating the tiny eggplants. Now I hope I get eggplants.

A couple of days ago, I got my first big tomato, a Dwarf Tomato Project tomato called Purple Heart. As you can see, the tomatoes aren't dwarves, just the plants, which top out at about 4.5 feet. (so they aren't very dwarf either!) It was delicious, and I had most of it on my first BLT of the season, which was indescribably good.

A typical every-two-day harvest right now, cherry tomatoes, green peppers, and ground cherries. About two or three weeks delayed because of strange spring weather.

I harvested my bagged potatoes. I started with three large potatoes, two red (chieftains, I think), one white (mystery variety, all from Walmart grocery store organic potatoes), let them chit, cut them into three pieces each, let them sit another day or two, and then put them in grow bags in compost plus peat plus tomato fertilizer. The harvest from 3 seed potatoes was over six pounds! There are big potatoes on the bottom of this pile, and the little ones on top, the size of extra-large hen's eggs,  I'll save and use for seed potatoes next year, if they make it through the winter in storage.

Just finished mowing, which means I get ten days of not mowing! (yay!)

Update on the garden

I got enough cherry tomatoes I actually walked inside with a harvest. None of these are nearly as good as Sun Gold or Sun Sugar, so next year, I think I'll switch. The things in the front, in husks, are ground cherries. They taste odd to me--a bit like pineapple and nothing at all like tomatoes.

Also, it rained tonight. Glad the mowing was finished this morning!

pictures: garden tour late june 2019

Harvested two gallons of leaf lettuce, which was beginning to bolt. I'm having big salads for the next four days!

I have lots of tomato flowers. Here are two flower bunches on cherry tomatoes--I hope they all make tomatoes before it gets too hot here:

And here are some baby tomatoes still some weeks from being ripe: Austin Red Pear, tiny currant tomatoes (about the size of a cuff button on a man's shirt or even smaller) and a large tomato that ripens to green: Green Zebra tomato:

Rainbow chard and bush bean plants:

Carrots and green onions:

Ground cherries (related to tomatillos). They're starting to form little fruit but I'm not sure that the rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks won't get them all before I do.  And there's a sprawling weed there I need to pull up (We had six straight days of rain, so weeding had to be delayed).

The flower garden. Yarrow. Day lilies with petunias in the foreground grown from that 25-cent Dollar Tree seed. Also the large sunflowers are quite a bit over the fence now! If you drive down that street about 1/4 mile, you see the Mississippi River (you see it well over the River Road right now--can't get out that way, and haven't been able to for over a month.)

Really hot this next week, so I need to be done with gardening before 8 a.m. Mowing is going to be a pure misery from now until cooler weather.

A number of things I tried to grow didn't work--it might have been the wet spring, or that some of the organic matter I'd put over one bed hadn't decayed enough, or in a couple of cases, my BIL who grew up on a farm said "nobody grows those here in spring, just in fall," and there may be a good reason for that! So beets and turnips were a bust. And I could not stop spinach from bolting. I hope I can grow it over winter, under my low tunnel. If not, I might just grow it indoors in winter.