Thinking Like a Homesteader

I saw my doctor today and a portion of our conversation went like this:

He said, "Crucifers are really good for that, broccoli especially, you should be eating a lot of broccoli."

I said (while mentally going over the rows in my garden), "I have kale and collards right now, my broccoli isn't going to be ready for another two weeks."

He said, "Watercress is another one that is really good."

I said, "I was looking at some watercress in a creek when I was out for the walk last week and thinking 'is this safe to eat or not?'."

He said, "You don't want to eat that. You could run into serious problems. You could grow it in your garden you, know, you'd just have to keep really wet."

I said, "Actually you don't need to keep it damp, it will grow just fine in regular garden soil. (I did grow it a couple of years ago so I know it will grow.) I think I will go grab a few plants and plant them in my garden."

He kind of just looked at me.

Then he said, "Broccoli sprouts are really good, too. They are one of the best."

I thought, Hey, I've got that like 8 ounces of kale seeds that I saved last year. I could sprout those! What a great idea! (I didn't say that out loud). I also think, I'm going to need to let some of my broccoli go to seed so I can sprout it.

I said (still thinking about my out of control seed stash), "What about mustard and stuff like that?". (I'm mentally rearranging my fall planting that I am going to do next week. I can see myself planting more arugula, kale, mustard, pak choi, and collards and less lettuce and spinach. Or I could just plant more of everything and have an excuse to plant more seeds.)

He said, "Mustard is one, cabbage is another."

(I don't grow cabbage, I think to myself--I like it, but it really doesn't do well in my garden--so in in my head at the moment, eating cabbage is out of the question. Mustard I can manage though, this year I found a very mild type called spinach mustard that is ready with baby greens two weeks from planting).


About eight hours later, when I'm home I realize that he was probably thinking I ought to go buy some broccoli, broccoli seeds, and watercress to eat. I was in two stores after the my appointment, and it never occurred to me to even look at broccoli or watercress or cabbage or any other crucifer in the store. I haven't bought vegetables since May. In the summer, with the exception of sweet corn, if I can't grow it, I don't eat it. It is not that I am opposed to buying vegetables, it is just that when I have vegetables in the garden, I'd much rather eat my own vegetables. Buying vegetables just isn't part of my life in the summer! It does not enter my frame of thought in any way, shape or form.

I had to laugh at myself, I'm thinking so much like we did on the homestead. If you want broccoli sprouts, you let your broccoli go to seed and harvest it. If you want cheese, you raise a cow, milk it, and make your cheese from scratch. If you want an omelet, you get some baby chicks, build a coop, and wait for the eggs. If you can find something growing in the wild that is free for harvest, no work involved, like the watercress, all the better!

Though come to think of it, I really should try to find some broccoli seeds to sprout. I am planning to let one of my broccoli plants go to seed, but is will be several months before it is ready and broccoli sprouts actually sound pretty good....mix them with some alfalfa sprouts and put them on a tuna sandwhich....in the meantime though, I will get those kale seeds sprouting. At this point in time I have enough kale seeds to plant 10 acres , but not the 10 acres to plant.

Today's harvest

Jade green beans, yellow nugget wax beans, pickling cucumbers, nantes half long carrots, and chioggia beets.

Tomatoes in July?

This time of year one starts to wonder...will the tomatoes ever ripen? Seriously, I don't know why I bother to worry. Even if I don't get tomatoes in July, I will end up with far more than I can possible keep up with come August! These are Glacier, which I started from seed in April. They are my earliest tomatoes, usually with a few ripening in July. The race is on! We'll see if they come in first as usual!

My babies are growing up!

We finally have something of a chicken coop built. Well, it is still lacking a real door and a roof, and looks pretty hillbilly-ish at this point, but a least it is secure, and big enough to give my chickens some room to run around and stretch their wings while I'm at work.

This is the first time that I have had animals that I personally have to take care. Yes, I grew up on a homestead with lots of farm animals, but they weren't my responsibility. Yes, I did have a cat that I called mine, but she more adopted me, rather than me adopting her. I basically fed her once in a while and like most farm cats she pretty took care of herself. I've never become attached to an animal. I wasn't sure how I would respond emotionally to my chickens. Yes, I was fully prepared for the responsibility of caring for them, and I was sure I would enjoy them. I wasn't so sure that I would actually come to love them, but that is what is happening. I love to watch them interact with each other. When I let them out of their coop they follow me around. When I want them to go back into the coop, all I need to do is go in my self and in a few minutes they will come in. They are very cuddly with each other and will not go far from the flock. I love watching them interact together. I think this breed is very elegant. Maybe it is just that "love covers all flaws" thing, but to my eyes they never went through that awkward, gangly teenager stage that a lot of birds go through.

I can't believe how fast they are growing up! Compare the picture of the day we brought them home at a week and a half old with one I took today.In both pictures they are perched on the bird feeder that holds their feed. Isn't that little one tiny! These birds seem to HAVE to perch in order to sleep. When we first put them in their coop, they didn't realize that we had made them a perch, it was just up a whole lot higher than the one they were previously used to. So all five of them tried to perch on the bird feeder. It was hilarious to watch--kind of like watching an elephant balance on a little ball in a cartoon. They all managed to get on the bird feeder, but they didn't seem comfortable, so I finally had mercy on them and put them one by one on the perch. They quickly flew off, but they did get the idea. In less than 5 minutes they had all flow back up and where getting settled for the night.

I am happy that my birds love greens. I grew extra for them, hoping that they would develop a taste for them. Their very favorite thing is wood sorrel--which is a very abundant weed in my garden, lettuce is a close second and swiss chard and mustard also get gobbled down quickly.

Ramblings in the garden on a "feel bad" day

It is one of those days when I just don't feel good--exhausted, achy, listless. I feel "heavy" and just want to sleep. Not too long ago I felt this way nine days out of ten. In March my doctor put me on a bunch of vitamin and mineral supplements to support the adrenal glands. They must be doing something, because since the end of May I have been tending to have more good days than bad days.

On these days when I just don't feel good, I try to keep going, and get something accomplished, even if it is something very simple, like washing the dishes, folding laundry, pulling a few weeds. Giving in to my deep desire to sleep just makes me feel worse and sets off a vicious cycle. Trust me I know. I spent most of last summer, fall, and winter sleeping. It didn't make me feel any better. I would wake up even more tired and just want to sleep some more. I would get depressed because I felt so awful and wasn't doing anything. My garden was full of weeds, my house was a mess. This spring and summer, I have been doing better on the days when I feel exhausted. I know rest does not help the situation. At least if I get up and do something, I feel better about myself, and my garden and house look better, even if I don't feel better physically.

So today I started by weeding the front flower garden. Usually by this time every year, the front flower garden is a weedy, dried up mess. Now that it is actually mine, I determined to keep it looking pretty after the bulbs were done blooming. For the most part, I'm doing that. The wintersown marigolds and zinnias are blooming full force right now. I'm so thankful for wintersowning...if I had bought these plants they would have cost me at least $150...and probably more (the four flats of impatients that I put in the little garden by the garage cost $75). The garden is pretty right now, but it is lacking definition. It needs something bold to help it make a statement. What exactly it needs, I'm not sure. It is a challenging place to garden.

There is a tree on the far end (sorry, you can't see it in these pictures), so one side is really shady, and as a result the ground is usually dry. The end in this picture is right next to a dirt road (like two feet away), and gets really hot, dusty, and dry. On some summer days you drive down our street and all the bushes and bushes and plants are covered with a thick coating of dust. Not the most conducive thing in the world to growing a lovely flower garden. If anyone has bright ideas for redesigning this flower garden, let me know. I'm open to suggestions. By the way, it is a very petty bulb garden in the spring. I just need to figure out what annuals and perennials will grow best and look best in it once the bulbs are done.

Here is a shot of what it looked like this spring. I so love white daffodils with grape hyacinths!

Then I went out and pulled the garlic. Harvesting garlic is a nostalgic task for me. We always grew several 100 foot rows of it on my parents farm. Harvesting it was an all day event that involved all my brothers and sisters. It started with harnessing the horse and hauling many 5 gallon buckets of water out to garlic beds. Then we would work as team--someone would pull garlic, someone would wash it, someone would trim the roots, someone would bundle it, then at the end of the day, it would all be loaded on the stone boat and be hauled to to barn to be hung up to dry. We ate pounds of garlic and sold some it. The smell of garlic is comforting to me.

I love growing garlic! It gets planted in the fall...here in Michigan I've been planting it about the first of September, but we would plant it in August in upstate New York. It will start growing and get its roots ready for the next year. In late fall we cover it with a thick mulching of leaves to prevent it from deep freezing. It is very important to get those leaves off first thing in the spring so the garlic plants don't suffocate! This is what my garlic patch looked like on April 8th this year.
Garlic is pretty finicky about what type of soil it grows in it. It needs to be light and rich. I always add sand and lots of compost to my garlic beds. One thing I love about it is that it doesn't mind being grown close to my pesky black walnut tree that kills most vegetables that I plant near it.

I sure got a nice garlic harvest this year! There are some really nice big bulbs. I wish I could bundle and hang my garlic to dry like we did on the homestead. I don't have a good place to hang it. The basement is too damp and the garage---well I don't think Terry would put up with garlic hanging among his tools. So I just snipped the bulbs off and laid them out to dry on newspaper on the kitchen table. Of course, now the whole house is strongly perfumed by the scent of garlic! I'll leave it there and let the wrappers dry for about a week, then I will sort it into planting garlic and eating garlic. The biggest, plumpest cloves will be planted in September, and the rest will get stored in a basket in the pantry in the basement. Garlic keeps about 10 months in good eating condition if kept in a cool dry place. It starts to dry out or sprout after that, but can still be planted. I usually take my left over garlic from last year and plant it really close together to get some small bulbs for when I just want one little clove for a personal salad or something.

My garlic harvest all laid out and ready to be washed and trimmed.

Crazy Calendula

These huge, weirdly double calendula blossoms made me smile when I found them in the garden today.

The Evolution of a Flower Bed

There was a little space up near the garage that was a tumbled pile of rocks and weeds. I've been eyeing it for a couple of years with the plan to make it a flower bed. Finally last fall I cleared out weeds, sorted the rocks, dug out the dirt, and built a little two tiered rock wall.

I mixed the earth I had dug with compost and filled the beds inside the rocks with the mixture. The I planted spring bulbs. Crocuses to bloom early...

Daffodils and tulips to bloom later...

When the daffodils and tulips were finished blooming this spring I filled the beds with impatients in white and shades of pink...

Whole wheat pasta with blanched baby zucchini and fresh pesto

Start with a couple of handfuls of fresh basil, a bulb of garlic pulled only a moment ago from the garden, and several baby zucchini squash.

For the pesto:
1/4 cup parmesian cheese
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 large cloves garlic (adjust for your taste--I like things garlicky!)
A couple of handfuls of chopped basil

Blend all ingredients for a minute in a food processor. Set aside.

Pasta and Zucchini:
Cook one cup of whole wheat pasta following directions on package and drain.

Cut zucchini into inch long (or so) chunks. Bring a pot of water to a boil. When water is boiling, throw in the zucchini and blanch for one minute. The zucchini should be tender but crisp. Drain zucchini.

Combine zucchini, pasta, and pesto. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot and enjoy!
This was dinner tonight and much enjoyed by all.

Summer in the garden

It is that time of year when my garden starts looking like a jungle, with plants crowding each other and spilling into the pathways. I have this compulsion to cram as many plants as I possible can into my garden. I plant things much closer than recommended and my paths are narrow. Then of course, I've got to cram lettuce, herbs, beets, and other greens in between the bigger plants that are already too close together. I have basil, kale, and collards in between the tomatoes, buttercrunch lettuce and dill between the cucumbers, chiogia beets, spinach, and and a oriental greens mix between the broccoli. The good thing about cramming everything in close is that the weeds don't have any space to grow.

This has been the best growing season we've had here since I've lived in Michigan. Lots of rain, not too hot, and very few bugs. The flea beetles that normally destroy my early crop of kale and mustard were no where to be found. I haven't seen a cucumber beetle or squash bug. And there are only a few Japanese beetles. The only thing I quite quite figure out is why half the cucumbers are wilting and my yellow nugget wax beans have some kind of disease that is causing most of the leaves to turn brown and fall off. I'm debating whether or not I should pull these out and replant with with something else, or leave them and see if I get a crop.

Yesterday I pulled out the snap peas and spent this morning digging up the beds and working in several buckets of rabbit manure. This weekend I will plant lettuce, spinach, and green beans for the fall.

I let my chickens out to play in the garden while I am working in it. They are such great gardening companions. This morning I unearthed an ant hill and they went crazy pecking up the ants. They stay withing the confines of the garden, even though it isn't fenced in. Most likely it is because the larger plants offer shelter and make them feel protected. They will follow me around the yard, though when I leave the garden. They are still staying in their little wire cage and I bring them into the house at night. However, they are starting to wear out their welcome. Every morning I start my day by sweeping up all the chicken feed and dropping that somehow managed to get out of the cage. For all their cuteness, chickens are very messy birds! Then off course, there are all the tiny down feathers that they are shedding and filling the house with. This weekend my main project will be building them a coop.

Photo of the day...

Grasshopper on an oriental poppy seed head.

Dear God,

Thank you...for making flowers.


Amen.

First raspberries!

I picked raspberries for the first time yesterday. They are ever bearing raspberries, Fall Gold and Fall Red (very uncreative names!). Ever bearing raspberries bear a small crop in the summer on last years canes, them later in the season, bear a larger crop on the new growth made this year. The Fall Golds are the sweetness raspberries I have ever had...pure sweetness. In the past two years the flowers were demolished by Japanese beetles, so I never really got a crop. I haven't seen a Japanese beetle yet this year--that's a good thing! The Fall Reds aren't quite so sweet, but have loads of flavor. The two combined are heavenly on vanilla ice cream which I bought special just for the raspberries.

One of my favorite things.....

Yellow foxgloves. These began blooming in early June and are still going strong. The plants are very healthy in spite of being so near to my black walnut tree whose roots secrete a poison that kills many plants.