Independence Days update, 6-11-12

Above: this year's pale purple, glade, and yellow coneflowers in glorious bloom.


Today we are experiencing the first decent rainfall in the last month. Since all the rain barrels filled to overflowing from being empty, it appears that a half inch or more has fallen since the rain began. Considering that I had measured only about a quarter inch of rain in the preceding month, today’s rain is a big help. Combined with rather cool temperatures forecast for the next few days, at least for June in St. Louis, it means very little watering outside of the container plants will be needed this week.

Mike and I have been watering for multiple hours each day for the past couple of weeks (me the vegetable gardens and a spring-planted perennial border, him the mycelium-inoculated mulch piles and logs), in order to keep plants and mycelia alive and growing. We are fortunate that St. Louis has a steady water supply from the Missouri, Mississippi, and Meramec Rivers available to permit us to do this. We also collect roof runoff in six 55 gallon drums sitting under our downspouts, used primarily for watering container plants and also as a backup source to drain into the rain garden during drought periods. The rain garden receives its water as overflow from one set of two linked barrels and also directly from half of the roof over our front porch. This weekend I noticed that the great blue lobelia and jewelweed plants in the rain gardens were wilting from lack of water, so I emptied the two sets of two linked rain barrels into the rain garden. Each was around half full, so the rain garden received something in the vicinity of 150 to 200 gallons of water. The water in the other two barrels fed some new trees, shrubs, a grapevine, and chocolate mint plants I added this spring as well as the collection of subtropical and tropical plants in containers. I had just used up the rest of the collected water two days ago, so today’s rain is most timely!

Planted: hull-less pumpkin seeds. I noticed that some self-seeded bok choy plants have appeared in the butternut squash bed. These are progeny from last year’s bok choy plants. This week I’ll move some of them to where the current bolting bok choy plants are, to become the fall bok choy crop, and leave a few others to be companions to the squash plants. I’ve successfully raised bok choy seedlings over the summer for fall planting in the past, so I have reason to believe this strategy will work. I’ll collect seeds from this year’s bolting plants as well.

Harvested: garlic, potato onions (a type of perennial multiplying onion, tasting like yellow onions), topset onions (another type of perennial multiplying onion, also called walking or Egyptian onions), lettuce, bok choy, snow peas, shell peas, dill, nasturtium flowers, plums. I’ve held off on harvesting collards and kale so far, but this week I’ll start on them.

Preserved: I froze some more plums.

Waste not: we are doing just fine so far without air conditioning, though I will note that it hasn’t gotten real hot yet. The house has not gone above 83F, and that was a couple weeks ago during the hot spell the last weekend of May. This weekend we left the house open rather than close it up it the morning when the high was forecast to be around 90F. My theory has been that the house would warm up more slowly if we didn’t let the hot outside air in, waiting until after sunset when temperatures cooled to re-open the windows. Because we’ve had the house sealed, the effect has been to also keep generated humidity in the house. It felt better, we discovered, to allow low-humidity air to keep moving through even if it may have raised the interior temperature a degree or so above what it would have been if we’d closed the windows in the morning ... and I’m not sure it got any hotter after all. We’ll have to try this when the dewpoints are in the 60Fs or even 70Fs, more typical of St. Louis summers, rather than in the 40Fs to 50Fs that they have been this summer, to see if it holds true then as well.

Want not: we bought a used fruit press, a small one suitable for home tincture pressing and wine-making, and another used 5 gallon glass carboy for wine-making.

Eat the food: more homegrown salads and more stir-frys with the homegrown bok choy and snow peas. We also shelled and ate the shell peas sauteed in butter (delicious!). We’ve been enjoying fresh plums as dessert, removing inhabitants beforehand as I described last week.

Build community food systems: nothing particular this week.

Skill up: I’m mulling over how to attach a chicken coop to the south side of a garden shed and construct the coop in such a way as to use solar heat to keep the chickens more comfortable in the winter. Basically the coop would be designed as a small solar greenhouse. Constructing the two will be a fall project. I already have a location in mind.

Independence Day challenge, week ending March 21

Anyone who lives in the Midwest knows this has been an extraordinarily warm March. My apple trees are blooming. That's right - apple trees that don't usually bloom till mid April. Most leaf buds have broken open and the leaves are beginning to expand. Our last frost isn't generally until sometime in April, but the way things are going, we might not get another frost. Still, I'm keeping to my usual garden schedule. This is the Midwest, after all, and anything can happen.

Here's a photo of our front yard. You'll notice the redbuds blooming on the left (west) side. In a normal spring the redbuds would not be blooming for another two weeks or so.

Here is my Independence Day report for the previous week. Check out Sharon Astyk's blog for more on the Independence Day challenge.

Plant: two different varieties of potatoes, a total of 200 square feet. I've also been pricking-out seedlings into larger quarters.

Harvest: a couple of pounds of asparagus; shiitake mushrooms; and one bluegill from the pond in the nearby county park.

Preserve: my DH cooked up some of the stored sunchokes and froze them, as we need to use them up before they sprout.

Waste not: used corrugated cardboard and rotting wood from a former cold frame as mulch liner to kill some of the grass inside the newly-fenced portion of the vegetable garden. Re-used 100 feet of old fencing so we only had to buy 50 feet of new fence, and re-used posts so we didn't have to buy any new posts. Re-using cell packs for the pricked-out seedlings (and the cell packs were trash-picked to begin with).

Want not: purchased 50 pounds of organic flour from a mill in the upper Midwest. Finally purchased the latest version of Office that our computer's OS will accept, to add a few years of usefulness to it (and got the software on sale at that). Piped up the rain barrel overflow to the rain garden, and buried the drainpipe this time so larger critters won't be able to tear it up to get at the smaller critters that hide in it.

Eat the food: asparagus; the remaining unplanted seed potatoes; sunchokes and radishes from storage; shiitake mushrooms; (tiny) fillets from the bluegill.

Community food systems: doing my best to get the veggie garden planted and the whole yard looking as good as possible by May 20, when our yard is included on a local garden tour.

Skill up: nothing specific this week.

Independence Days 2-10-12

We had a lot of rain, a little snow, some cold weather (for this winter) and not much sun this past week. Tomorrow is likely to be the coldest day yet this winter. Unlike last week, I didn't do any yard work. But I got a lot of other needed work done.

Plant something: I planted seeds of cabbage, bok choy, kale, collards, broccoli, mustard greens, calendula, dill, parsley, cutting celery, thyme, and sweet marjoram in a flat and put the flat on the enclosed front porch. Enclosing that porch was an excellent idea. Granted, it hasn't been that cold this winter, but it's been like April (mid-spring here) all winter long on the porch. The rosemary plants and a calendula, grown from a seedling I potted up last fall, are in bloom! See them below.

Harvest something: well, no. Maybe next week I'll harvest the lone kumquat from the plant on the front porch.

Preserve something: I brought the last four winter squashes into the kitchen so we remember to cook and eat them.

Waste not: the usual composting and saving eggshells separately (I may grind them to sprinkle on the garden in place of some of the limestone we'd otherwise purchase). A friend gave us some of the foam wrappers that surround commercial packages of ice cream cones. We're thinking of ways to use them - maybe to stuff into our old, flat pillows to improve them.

Want not: nothing particular this week.

Eat the food: cooked and ate some of the homegrown sugar beets. Included stored winter radishes and sunchokes in the stir-fry. My DH is making black bean soup from our homegrown beans to take to a potluck tomorrow.

Build community food systems: answered a friend's question about when to direct-seed onions into the garden (answer: second half of March, as soon as the soil thaws. That is, if it freezes again. Which it will probably do this weekend. But how long it stays frozen, I don't know.)

Skill up: learned how to make caramel fudge this week due to a friend's request, and it actually turned out well! It's the first time I've made a candylike material from scratch.

I'm planning a post or so on seed-starting next.

Celebrating Independence Days in 2012

Sharon Astyk, one of my favorite writers, has just announced the beginning of her Independence Days challenge for 2012. I’ll be playing along and reporting here. Now I did say that my next post would discuss how I actually garden ... and it will ... but since Independence Days focuses on food, and we like to grow as much of our food at home as we can, it’s closely related to gardening. At least it is to me, and it’s my blog, after all.

What are Independence Days? Astyk borrowed the expression from Carla Emery, author of The Encyclopedia of Country Living. One of Emery’s goals was to feed her family as much as possible from her own labor. To do this, she tried to plant something every day from late winter to mid-summer, so they would have a wide choice of foods to eat over an extended period of time. By mid-summer some of the crops were ready to be harvested and put up, so from then through late fall she tried to do a little of that every day, to ensure her family had some home-grown food in winter and spring. During the winter and for as long into the following spring as possible, she and her family made it their goal to eat some of the stored food each day. For Emery, Independence Days were the days, or perhaps just meals, that she could feed her family from just what they grew. Independence Days represented a struggle, but one that was worthwhile for her and her family. Astyk, in adopting the term for her family and her book Independence Days, reminds us that in the midst of the economic, energetic, and environmental difficulties of our time, one of the best ways we can respond is to make the growing, preserving, storing, cooking, and eating of locally-grown foods a central part of our lives. But she also knows that many of us don’t have the skills we need to preserve, store, and cook unprocessed foods in low-cost, low-energy ways. Hence her book, and it’s a good overview of a big subject, enough to get you started if you haven’t done much or any of these before. Later on I’ll suggest some other books that go more in depth into some of the topics, for those of you who want that info.

Astyk runs the Independence Day challenge not for competitive purposes, but so we can see and note the positive steps we take each day toward our own Independence Days. Perhaps you think you haven’t done enough if you haven’t spent all day digging up your garden or canning quart after quart of produce. It’s not that concentrated efforts like these don’t make a big difference - they do - but doing a little bit every day is easier for most of us and will end up being a big accomplishment when seen over a whole year. Looking back over your week and noting all the little things you did helps to keep you focused and looking forward.

The categories Astyk set up and the reasons for them can be found here (see the Feb. 1, 2012 entry). I may as well get started with what I did this week, since it’s Friday and she suggested reporting on Fridays. For those of you who live in the St. Louis metro area or other areas with similar climates who want to know what gardening activities are good to do at various times, you’ll be especially interested in the first two categories.

Plant something: I started onion and leek plants in flats and put the flats on the glassed-in porch. It’s still too cold to put anything in the cold frame, but the porch is warm enough to start seeds.

Harvest something: nothing this week, since I don’t have any hoop houses or other enclosures over the outdoor garden. It is winter, after all.

Preserve something: nothing this week, see above.

Waste not: I started drying the egg shells rather than just reflexively tossing them into the compost pile (not that composting them is a waste, but I have ideas for other uses for them). I checked the various stored veggies to ensure they are OK when I removed some to eat.

Want not: nothing particular this week.

Eat the food: homegrown butternut squash, storage radishes, beets, turnips, sunchokes, and kimchi; sun-dried locally grown peaches, Mike’s homemade wine from home-grown elderberries.

Build community food systems: this blog post would be it.

Skill up: I’m sowing seeds according to the biodynamic calendar this year for the first time.