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.