Garden Planning

My housemate has sort of moved in, although she is sleeping in the guest room because we don't have her rooms ready yet.  We have moved most of the stuff that needed to be moved, and reorganized most of our house, from books to food storage, and given away a truckload of stuff, but there is still work to be done. 

At the same time, we are working on outdoor projects while we still can.  Our garden this year was haphazard, and next year we need to do much better.  Our soil needs a lot of help.  It needs organic matter, fertility, drainage, shading for perennial weeds, and pest control.  Unfortunately, it is too late to plant most cover crops this year.  We just got some rye in the ground, which is marginally worthwhile at this point, according to what I've read.  Yesterday my housemate tilled about 800 square feet of heavy clay soil with her medium-sized tiller and my mini-tiller (when the larger one overheated and quit), then came inside and baked an apple pie.  I tried to keep up with her by raking, picking out Bermuda grass and seeding rye, but I collapsed in a heap of exhaustion mid-afternoon.  My housemate is easily twice as productive as I am (and eats half as much - does that make her 4 times as productive?)  We have started buying materials for a 12x12 shed with a full-size loft, which we plan to use for shared household and garden storage, a goat shelter, hay loft and "treehouse" for the kids.  Then, we plan to put up a privacy fence around what is currently an area of brush and small trees, and get a couple of milk goats.  Livestock of any kind is illegal here, which is why we need the privacy fence.  We've already put up a second-hand iron fence for her hens and hung tarps on it so they won't be visible from the street. We are planning to put up a low tunnel and plant some late greens in it, in addition to the small fall garden I managed to plant on time.

I go through periods when vegetable gardening feels kind of lame.  Fruit trees, animals, and other projects seem more glamorous and appealing, although I know deep down that the vegetable garden is the heart of the homestead.  Maybe it's seasonal cravings for protein, or sweet things.  Maybe it's just a rut.  But at the moment, I am in love with vegetables.  I'm looking forward to this year's seed catalogs quite a bit more than any of the holidays that come first.  I'm going through last year's catalogs and marking things I want.  I'm reading gardening books and making lists and plans.  Instead of feeling tired of the garden, this year I feel like I didn't get nearly enough of it.  

So far, our plans for next year's garden include growing enough tomatoes for our yearly consumption, carefully planting potatoes and sweet potatoes and hopefully having better luck with them, planting seed pumpkins in a row of sheet compost I'm currently assembling, making a hugel and a wet rice paddy, growing 3 types of corn using time isolation, growing most of our animal feed, using summer and winter cover crops, using season extension, growing heirloom vegetable starts for market, acquiring a beehive, growing some new things like sesame, loofah, artichoke, peanuts, and edamame, and asking the neighbor if we can rent or sharecrop part of his backyard to grow some heirloom popcorn for market.  My husband thinks we're crazy for wanting to plant rice, and he might be right, but we want to experiment and we have a suitably low and damp yard for it.  I also want to experiment with grain sorghum, but probably not this year because we're planning to grow a sorghum Sudan grass as a cover crop.  Other priorities, for me, will be planting fruit trees and perennial vines and doing a much better job of growing berries and medicinal herbs.  Even expanding to use all the usable parts of our yard and some of the neighbor's yard, I anticipate we will run out of space, but we will also run out of energy (some of us more than others) and time.  I don't know how much of the above will actually get accomplished, but it sure is fun to plan.

My housemate also may be getting a part-time job working at the local-foods market nearby, which is great for our food security outlook, and also makes it easy for us to sell a few small cash crops there.

Protests

I don't watch or read the news that much, so my information about the Occupy Wall Street and the spin-off/solidarity protests is mostly second-hand.  Here in Richmond we have a protest coming up in a few days.  Many of my friends are supporting the movement, if not actually participating, and I've felt some peer pressure to join in, but I have been reluctant to do so.  Reading a few comments on an online news story (why do only mean, ignorant Conservatives comment on online news stories?) made me want to run and join the protests, but it was a temporary effect.  It took me a while to put my finger on what bothers me about these protests.  The "99%" slogans don't appeal to me.  I've always been an anti-elitist (or a "reverse snob"), but never a populist.  Being part of a huge majority doesn't feel like something to aspire to or boast about, to me.  If they brought back "Eat the Rich" I might be more sympathetic.  But it goes beyond the slogan.  I find myself wondering, why now?  Who are these people who are just waking up to the inequalities of our systems, the lack of effective socioeconomic leveling mechanisms in our culture?  I guess they didn't care about it until it affected them personally.  Can they possibly be serious?  What do they want to happen?  

I don't believe our problems can be neatly blamed on the 1%.  The 99%, the collective majority of Americans, has a lot of culpability in the situation.  I'm not talking about individual debt, it goes much deeper than that.  Are the protesters making real changes in their lives, other than easy ones like moving their money from banks to credit unions?  I suspect the majority of them want reform, not revolution, and certainly not a radical change in their own lifestyles that would take power back from the CEO's and politicians in a meaningful way.  Being a leftist movement, I'm sure they want to transfer some power from corporations to government, which is not a goal worth fighting for in my opinion, any more than the Tea Party's effective goal of transferring power from government to corporations.

I am working, in my own life, to transfer power from both corporations and government to myself and other individuals.  I have a lot of room for improvement, but I am working hard to meet more and more of my family's needs by producing things myself, community-building, buying locally grown, buying handmade, buying used, buying from small family businesses, buying from socially and ecologically responsible companies, consuming less, transacting in cash, and avoiding taxes whenever possible.  These activities take time, energy and money, which I feel is better invested than it would be in political action, and pays better dividends.

Failures

We are in the midst of a whole-house purge and reorganization, while simultaneously remodeling a bathroom and assembling our little greenhouse.  I am even more overwhelmed than what has become normal for me, and longing for a couple of days off.  You know, the kind of days off I used to get before I had a child - sleeping until 10, doing no work at all, maybe not even making my own meals.  

I just sold something I said I'd never sell - my recumbent exercise bike, the first big thing I bought new for myself as an adult.  It takes up too much space, and owning it for the these past 7 years hasn't magically made me lose weight, although at times I have been motivated enough to use it to treat a chronic weakness in one knee.  Making the house ready for more occupants has pushed us to do all kinds of things we were meaning to do for a long time, and some things we otherwise would not have done, but will someday be glad we did.

I just finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and family.  If you haven't read it, you must.  I found myself moved to tears by nearly every chapter, not because the book is sad, but because it rang so true for me.  I loved the recipes, and I kind of wish I had made notes as I read about their planting and harvest times, since they garden right here in Virginia and seem to have a much better idea what they're doing than I do.  It's a library book, so I won't be able to refer back to it later.

Even with a few years experience and many gardening books read, I still feel like a beginner.  Our small sweet potato crop, like our Irish potato crop, was a complete failure.  My garden failures this year alone are too many to mention.  This year's garden was unplanned and poorly executed, since we had decided not to grow a garden this year at all in order to focus on remodeling the house.  All our gardening so far has been somewhere between recreational and compulsive - try though we might, we can't resist planting - but I'm ready to get much more serious about it, especially with another serious gardener moving in.  When I try to make a garden plan for next year, I feel so confused, because all the books I've read contradict each other in the most basic ways, and I can't decide which system to trust.  Do I plant my beans in a compost pile, or in a three sisters guild?  Do I mulch or not?  Plant clover in the paths, put boards over them, or eliminate the paths altogether?  Plant rows, blocks, or willy-nilly? 

And my failures aren't limited to the garden.  Every vegetable ferment I made this summer failed, although I had made some successfully in previous seasons.  Every jam and jelly I've ever made has failed to set, but I want them to work so badly that I keep trying, with decreasing hopefulness.  

I'm a smart person who generally can accomplish whatever I set my mind to.  Failing at such simple tasks as growing potatoes and making jam, despite sincere efforts, is difficult to accept.  But I am trying not to be resentful about it.  We are making progress in some directions, and we have accomplished some worthwhile things, and other things seem much more possible than they used to.

Heritage Harvest Festival

The Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello was this past weekend.  I talked M. and B., urban-homesteading and homeschooling friends, into going and giving me and my son a ride.  We camped two nights, as they are avid campers and had access to a pop-up.  I am not a huge fan of camping.  M. thought it strange that I want to live off-grid, but find it awkward to cook a meal at the campsite; but it's really more about familiarity and convenience (e.g. having running water at the sink) than the electric stove.  I also find all the packing and unpacking tiresome.

I got to take two brief, paid workshops on herbal medicine on Friday while they watched my son, but on Saturday I didn't get to do much because my son won't stand still.  Honestly, I couldn't stand still either, because it's all so overwhelming.  There are so many things to dream about doing.  Home dairying, fiber production and spinning, permaculture, beekeeping, solar dehydrating, heritage breed pigs, et cetera, et cetera.  I lose focus and end up just wandering around.  Which goes hand in hand with a conclusion I have reluctantly reached; that before we try to go in any new directions, we need to do a better job at the things we're currently doing.  We need to focus more on soil fertility.  We need to slow down, and do the hard and unglamorous work, and prioritize our projects based on real needs rather than shiny temptations.  We need to use the things we've already bought and the skills and advantages we possess.  And we can not do it all ourselves.  I dream of having enough land and freedom to raise all kinds of animals, as many people do.  Every time I throw food waste away, I wish I could have a pig or even some chickens (legally) that would eat our table scraps, and I constantly wish for a dairy animal.  But I also know that there is so much more I could be doing even without that, and land is not the most important limitation.  Child care, or child distraction, is a critical need.  Lack of physical stamina is a close second, if not the primary limitation for me personally; as lack of time is for my husband.  And lack of funds is obviously a concern.  

I'm trying to stick to my no-food-buying challenge, but it is really hard.  We are eating a lot less meat, because my meat stores in the freezer were a bit low when I started this challenge.  This weekend I bought some fast food on the road because we were starving and unable to access our packed food.  The retail farmer's market I buy from emailed me to say they had finally found me some pigs' feet that I had requested a while ago, so I'll have to buy them now.  My spouse is not on board for this challenge; he doesn't get the point of refusing to buy even an onion or a carton of eggs.  A friend wants to can some peaches with me this week and I find it difficult to say no to that, having become somewhat addicted to preserving.  And I still have 3 weeks to go!  I'm going to do the best I can.  Hopefully, even if I don't do it perfectly, I will accomplish most of my goals, and form some good habits like I did with my food preserving challenge. 

New Challenge

I made a trip to the mountains to visit Edible Landscaping (www.ediblelandscaping.com).  I have wanted to try pawpaws for several years, and they were ripe, and I've wanted to buy some plants from there for at least as long.  I didn't end up buying anything I would regret if we move soon, which is looking a great deal less likely than before.  I got a couple of small outdoor plants and several potted tropicals.  I got a coffee plant, which was probably foolish, since we'll get, at best, one small pot of coffee a year from it.  If I plant the seeds, in a decade or so maybe we'll be up to a pot of coffee a month.  At least it is a nice houseplant, requiring little light.  I also got two citrus, a Persian lime and a Ponderosa lemon.  So, while I've been needing a greenhouse for a while, now I urgently need one in the next 60 days or so.  I've decided to go with a commercial greenhouse kit, the kind with aluminum frame and hard plastic walls, and Sam's Club has one for just under $500, including the thermal vent opener.  I think the sheet-plastic-covered tunnel kind are just too ugly to set one up 10 feet from my neighbors' yard, since my kid is always at their house and I'm trying to stay friendly.  And the lovely greenhouses that can be made with recycled windows are permanent structures by necessity, and would have to be left behind if we moved.

  

Unfortunately, my husband just changed jobs again, and my unemployment payments are irregular, and we are currently broke.  So, my new 30-day challenge is to buy no food at all until October 11.  This will serve other purposes besides saving money.  It will force me to clean out my pantry.  It will be a good test of my disaster preparations.  And it will force me to attempt baking bread again, which I had given up on.  I didn't prepare for this, I just decided to do it, so there will be some suffering involved.  We will soon run out of real coffee, milk of course, tea, and honey.  I'll also be forced to give up my diet soda addiction, at least temporarily.  Caffeine headaches will probably push me to the emergency supply of generic instant coffee and powdered creamer, which I added to our preps after the hurricane.  I have herbs in the garden I can make tea with.  We have plenty of instant hot chocolate.  Am I obsessed with beverages?  Maybe, but it's probably just that I'm not remotely worried about actual hunger.  I did just finish a 30-day food preserving challenge, after all.  I will run out of onions soon, and I'll have only my Egyptian walking onions, which are very tiny and currently sprouting in the garden.  My son is going to complain when there's no more spaghetti, chicken nuggets, or bacon in the house, and the only milk is powdered skim, and I'll have to be creative to appease him.  Luckily he likes baked goods.  Oh, and eggs, I need to go freeze a few so my husband doesn't eat them because I'll need them for baking.  But mostly this will be an exercise in creative substitution for me.  Do you think I'll be able to do it?  Could you do it?

A reader recently pointed out that the comment "button" is hard to see.  It's the orange "0 comments" below, if anyone else is looking for it ;)

Tortilla Love

I think if you ask people what their idea of comfort food is, you'll learn a lot about how they grew up.  My comfort foods are things like American cheese slices, canned spaghetti, and Pop-Tarts.  I wonder what my son's will be.  I cook a lot more than my mom did when I was growing up, but I cook so many different things.  I don't know if that will change, if at some point, my cooking will settle into more of a predictable rhythm.  Because I try to cook flexibly with what's locally abundant and cheap, and because I cook nose to tail, and maybe because I have too many cookbooks, there aren't many dishes I repeat often.  My husband, on the other hand, is a creature of habit.  I suspect my son's comfort foods will be things like scrambled eggs with tomatoes, beans and rice, and of course, corn tortillas. 

Corn tortillas have been a problem for us for a long time.  All the pre-made ones, and almost all brands of masa harina, are made from GMO corn.  We have some non-GMO dried whole corn, but it's not the right kind of corn for tortillas and only works so-so, and nixtamalizing and hand-grinding corn is more work than I'm willing to do on a daily basis.  Even making them from masa harina was too much work when I was employed outside the home, but now I've committed to making them this way, so I did some Googling and found the Bob's Red Mill masa harina, which is not organic but is GMO-free.  Not being able to find it locally, I ordered a 25-pound bag, which cost less than the shipping.  I was a little wary about buying such a quantity without having tried the product.  Could it be as good as Maseca, or passably close?  I was thrilled to find it superior in every way, from the smell, to the workability of the masa and easy puffing of the tortillas, and it got very good taste reviews from the household expert.

Here are some pictures of the tortilla-making process.  If anyone wants instructions to go with these, let me know.

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I know I've mentioned before my love of purslane and my frustrated attempts to grow it.  This year I didn't plant any, but we built a raised bed for herbs (most of which also didn't germinate, after planting them twice).  We filled the raised bed with compost and soil from our garden.  Among the weeds that grew there were 2 purslane plants, no doubt from seed my plants shed last year.  One of them was totally consumed by leafminers.  This is the other one:

I am patiently waiting to collect seed from this apparently leafminer-resistant plant.

August Food Preserving

Technically, my food preserving challenge is over.  But I can't bring myself to stop.  Today I'm planning to make some pickle relish, and I still have a couple of jellies to make that I didn't get around to yet, and some beef stock from the bones in my freezer.  But, I have to start winding down because it's time to move on to the next thing, and catch up on the things I've neglected while focusing on this.

This is what I preserved in August.

Canned:

gingered peach preserves, 4 12-oz. jars

halved peaches, 5 qts.

ketchup, 6 12-oz. jars and a half pint

salsa, 9 pints

apple pectin, 3 qts and a pint

bread & butter pickles, 3 pts.

watermelon jelly, 4 half pints

watermelon rind pickles, 4 pints of one version, and 3 and half pints of a second version

whole tomatillos, 4 qts.

salsa verde, 3 pts and 4 half-pints

plain tomato sauce, 2 qts and a pint

tomato sauce with onion and garlic, 8 qts

lamb stock, 5 qts.

froze:

3 pints tomato paste in a variety of re-used jars

a quart of lamb tallow

several large jars of chopped green peppers

dried: 

several bunches of cayenne peppers

about 10 pounds of green beans, "leather breeches" style (on a string)

some basil and some lemon balm

lacto-fermented:

pinapple vinegar, which I then used to make encortido (Latin American sauerkraut)

habanero hot sauce, which I'm not sure is edible - it smelled funky, but it's not something you can just taste a spoonful of.  My husband thinks its okay though.

I lost several ferments, including two attempts to ferment tomatoes, and two attempts to make cucumber pickles.  I was very discouraged.  I don't know if it was the summer heat, or if there's some bad bacteria strains in my kitchen, or I've just lost my touch.

I'll tell you a little about the lamb tallow I froze.  I skimmed the fat off my lamb stock, and rendered the fat still clinging to the meat, then filtered it.  It is a very hard, white tallow, and I think I'd like to make soap with it, if I ever get going with my soapmaking.  If not, I'll use it for cooking.  I try not to throw away animal fat in my kitchen.  (In fact there are several mystery jars of gelatin-topped fat in my fridge that I suspect were the juices from roasting chickens, which I saved but neglected to label.)

Surprise favorites: salsa, and watermelon rind pickles (both versions).  Another surprise: I reluctantly hauled out and used my Victorio-type food food mill, which I've had since 1999, and found it works much better than I thought it did.  It made such efficient work of saucing tomatoes that it was well worth the set-up and clean-up.

Seed saving is kind of like food preserving too.  I'm going to harvest a mature yellow pickling cucumber in my garden for seed today.  I saved seeds from 3 types of tomatoes, none of which I know the names of.  One was a volunteer in our corn patch which produced nice tomatoes with no water or fertilizer.  (My husband planted corn and field peas without thinking about how he was going to water them.  The corn didn't make it.)  The others were from the farm market, but obviously heirloom types, and I liked them for canning.  I took pictures of them for my own reference, though I have little hope of ever identifying them, with so many tomatoes in the world.