mary-lou

Planting Our Legacies

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 11:17:18 GMT

I’m probably not the only one who is feeling discouraged these days. I know that I’ve felt helpless in making positive differences when politicians are acting with cruelty towards many, while also changing policies to accelerate climate change. But I have some good news after reading Doug Tallamy’s book, “The Nature of Oaks.” It certainly got my energy flowing again by giving me a way to help protect our beautiful world. I think it might help you smile more too. Let me share some of what I learned with you, with the hope you’ll also delight in his book and its possibilities.

First of all, Tallamy’s book is short and very “readable.” His deep knowledge of the natural world would have left me behind if his many photographs hadn’t been part of his explanations. As he takes us month-by-month through the year to explain oak’s contributions, I became increasingly amazed how many thousands of creatures rely on oaks for support.

The key to understanding why planting an oak tree is so important is that oaks are a “keystone species.” This means that oaks are essential to the life cycles of many wildlife species and therefore to the food webs that support entire ecosystems. Their leaves, whether green on the tree or later dried on the ground, are essential to hundreds of creatures. When we also consider the additional animals who rely on acorns, we see that oaks are actually essential to thousands of creatures. I admit to not having been aware of many of these species, but they are all essential to the web of life. Most of us recognize the oak trees’ acorns as being important to many species such as rodents, bears, raccoons, opossums, and white-tailed deer. But a single oak can host so many other creatures with their leaves.

For example, oaks support 245 species of moths (30%). After the woods around us were cut for pasture in the 1950s, it was mainly Tulip poplars that grew to replace oaks. But these poplars only support 17 moth species (2%).

Most of us are aware of at least some of the 1,000 kinds of moths and butterflies hosted by oak trees. But these “Lepidoptera” have lost from 40% to 90% of their population, and one of five of these species have disappeared over the last 20 years. Their importance in the web of life is far more essential than my delight in their beauty and appreciation in their role as pollinators.

These butterflies and moths’ dependency on oaks is mainly in nurturing their caterpillars. It’s not just the green, summer leaves that these offspring rely on, but also the dead leaf litter on the ground. This litter provides nourishment and protection, not just for many caterpillars, but also snakes, lizards, tiny wasps and spiders. These creatures are all linked to a vast web of life. For example, caterpillars, which are high in protein and fat, are essential in fueling migratory birds’ long flights. These caterpillars also provide nourishment for songbirds’ offspring. I was not aware of birds’ enormous dependency on caterpillars, nor the caterpillars’ dependence on oaks. It may have seemed cruel to have so many caterpillars eaten, but I now have a better understanding of their essential role in the entire web of life. According to Tallamy, there’s been a 45% decline globally in the number of insects since 1979. That is one important factor in there now being 3 billion fewer birds in North America than there were just 50 years ago.

After recounting how much wildlife has been lost, you might be wondering how this book “lifted my spirits.” But if we can plant an oak tree or two, we’ll leave behind a legacy that will support thousands of creatures. I have a source of seeds (acorns) because although the oaks in the woods surrounding the house were lost, there remains a majestic White Oak along the back fence-line. Mature trees are often spared on fencerows because neighbors don’t want to contest who might “own” these trees. Older growth was also spared on the steep and rocky hillsides where mature Red, White and Chinkapin oaks remain. One large, Red oak came down in last year’s hurricane. It was more than 180 years old—my best attempt at counting rings after it was cut to reopen our walking trail.

I have a dream of reforesting a three acre field that has been cut for pasture. Most people don’t have a spare field in which to plant large trees, but this should not prevent us from planting these precious, “keystone” trees. Oaks come in all sizes so you’ll be able to choose a variety that will fit your yard or any available space. North America has about 90 species of oaks, which are the genus Quercus. It’s not possible for many homeowners to imagine a 100 foot tall oak, with a crown spreading 120 feet, in their yard. However, there are many smaller oaks that would fit well in urban lots, like the dwarf chinquapin oak, bluejack oak, dwarf live oak and scrub oak. Tallamy’s book actually lists oaks by size—small (25 feet or less), medium (30 to 50 feet), or large (75 feet or taller). Just as importantly, he also lists what’s native to each area in the United States. We have to plant a native variety if we want to support local wildlife.

Some people might protest that they don’t want oaks in their yard because the roots might buckle sidewalks or driveways. Not true, says Tallamy. Except for varieties like the Willow oak, most oaks send their roots deep and are not a problem. In fact these roots spread far beyond the crown of the tree and are helpful in stabilizing soil and sequestering carbon.

I’m pretty excited about being able to help so many creatures and the environment far into the future, but where to begin? Nurseries provide ready-to-plant oaks in containers, balled-in-burlap, or bare-root trees. Bare root trees will need planting right after purchase in the spring. It is these bare-root saplings that are most affordable and have the best chance of surviving. But I like Tallamy’s suggestion of planting “an acorn or two in the fall.” When we know that an oak tree is native to our area, we can gather acorns and then get them growing in a safe place overwinter.

This autumn, I plan to collect acorns. White oaks drop their acorns in the fall and germinate almost immediately, and so need to be collected and planted then. For those of you on the same learning-curve that I am, white oaks are those whose leaves have rounded leaf tips, while red oak leaves have pointed leaf tips with “bristles” at the tips. Red oak acorns should also be gathered in the fall although they don’t germinate until after the following year’s springtime.

Bluejays certainly plant thousands of oaks directly into the ground, but rodents still find the vast majority of them. Instead of following the Bluejay’s method, Tallamy recommends planting acorns in pots for the winter. The soil he uses is a mixture of potting and local soil. To plant acorns, we’re to remove the cap and plant them about ½” deep with their pointy ends down. They’ll still need protection from mice, and if that puts them in a dry shed or back porch, they’ll need watering monthly. I confess that the Bluejay’s method seems easier to me, but I’m getting older now (aren’t we all?!) so I’d better go for higher success and plant acorns in pots. The White oaks will sprout earliest. The Red oaks will develop roots overwinter, and sprout in the spring.

When spring does arrive, I plan to cart these precious seedlings up to the meadow. Tallamy suggests planting two or three of these trees within ten feet of each other so their roots will entwine in the future for nourishment and support. It’s a hike to that future-forest, so I admit that establishing these oaks might be a challenge. Wire cages would help protect the seedlings from the ever-marauding deer. And they will need water carted to them that first year during dry spells. Oaks planted closer to home have the best chance of receiving this care and there are a couple of places for an oak or two in this yard that already has many trees. But I’ll consider it a success if even a few oaks can get established in the meadow. And for the oaks already growing in our yards, we now have the perfect excuse to not rake leaves in the fall. After all, we’re just taking care of the many little creatures that depend on the oak’s leaf litter!

You’re probably wise in thinking that I might be a bit over-confident of my abilities at my age. But if each of us can leave behind a single oak tree, we will be supporting an incredible amount of wildlife. I may only live to see their early years, but it makes me smile to think of songbirds feeding their young on caterpillars, butterflies and moths being here for our grandchildren, or bear and deer munching acorns. I can’t think of a better or more possible legacy that I can leave behind.

The Many Uses for Diatomaceous Earth

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 15:44:35 GMT

I don't know why some of my memories get stored in a permanent brain file, but one of these is from two decades ago when my husband brought home worming medicine for our two hogs. I can clearly picture him standing in the kitchen doorway reading off the ingredients when his eyes widened while reading the final sentence; "Be sure to bury any remaining medicine at least 18" deep in the soil." Oh my, this was not something we wanted around our homestead. Thus began our adventures with Diatomaceous Earth (hereafter written as "DE"). We used it first as a "wormer" and then for many other uses both indoors and on the homestead.

What is Diatomaceous Earth? It's interesting, at least to me, that DE comes from fossilized diatoms (algae) that have calcified and layered as sedimentary rock. In the United States, it is now mined from old lake beds which are mainly in Colorado and Nevada. It feels like a very light powder because each diatom is so porous, but each tiny diatom has jagged edges. This property is key to its function because rather than "poisoning" insects, it scratches their "exoskeletons" causing them to dehydrate. It doesn't affect us that way because all animals have interior boney skeletons, rather than insects' exterior shell. Food-grade DE is safe for us and our pets.

Food Grade DE: Unless you're buying filters for a swimming pool, the DE you want must be "food grade." This won't be contaminated with anything toxic and won't be dangerous to handle. You can buy the food grade DE at your local feed store, some nurseries and online. One brand for smaller quantities is called "Pure-Earth." Our 50# bags are called, "Perma-Guard." Now let's talk about why you might want to use DE.

Worming medicine: I'll begin by going back to the first year we had pigs. We bought two, older Red Wattle hogs, "Bart" and Lucky." That was when I learned to say "hog" instead of "pig" so I would sound like a real farmer. Like most new projects on our little farm, we learned by reading and there seemed to be strong recommendations that hogs need worming. That's when my husband bought a standard worming medicine at the local feed store, read the ingredients, and returned it to the store. It's not that we knew what the package's exotically -named ingredients were, but when he got to the part about burying any remnants deeply in the soil we knew it wasn't for our farm. Hiding poisons for future generations wasn't our goal. Besides, how could something that toxic be recommended for our animals or for what could potentially be our food?

After returning the unopened container, we searched online and found DE repeatedly recommended as a worming medicine. In the case of hogs, two tablespoons were to be given once-a-day, though we soon had it mixed in their bulk feed. Additionally, rosemary and garlic were given intermittently--a combination we love to mix in our own meals! Using DE for a worming medicine certainly feels saner than serving the pigs poison.

Distribution: Empty parmesan cheese containers work well for sprinkling DE in the garden and in the house. Having several of these containers both outdoors and in the house makes using DE convenient. Perhaps it’s because fifty pounds of DE last so long that I feel more self-sufficient than if I purchased several products with their multiple ingredients in plastic containers. It also feels good to know that DE doesn’t harm the environment. It’s much less expensive than buying various house and garden products while also being able to avoid more plastic containers.

Insecticide: DE is consistently listed as an organic means of controlling pests in the garden. Farmers have also used it for years in grain storage. It is a "mechanical" insecticide, so resistance to it can't develop. As it works externally on crawling insects by scratching their exoskeletons, it absorbs protective lipids which causes them to dehydrate. Because earthworms don't have skeletons, they are not harmed be DE. The main downside of applying DE in the garden is that it washes off with water and then needs to be reapplied.

DE is also recommended for indoor insects like fleas, cockroaches, ants, and bedbugs. I really appreciate the option of using DE instead of toxic chemicals. Additionally, resistance is growing to these chemicals and DE may now be more effective.

When a friend discovered bedbugs and hired a professional "exterminator," I vowed to use DE if and when bedbugs visited me. However, I've read that inhaling DE can harm the lungs, so although I remain casual about using it elsewhere, I guess I don't want to sleep with it.

Fly Control: I used to purchase "predator wasps" as an organic method of reducing the number of flies around our farm. Our Dutch Belted cows seemed especially tormented by flies in the summertime. Putting DE in all of our critters' food, (horses, miniature donkeys, pigs, turkeys, chickens and cows), meant the DE came out in their poop. As flies laid their eggs in the manure and their eggs developed into maggots, the DE was there to kill the maggots. It is thought to do this by scratching the maggots and causing them to dehydrate. Death occurs over about 48 hours and can make a big difference in reducing the number of flies This was definitely less expensive than purchasing predator wasps.

Garden pests:

This was the first year that Mexican bean beetles infested our dried beans. The photo shows the adults in the garden where I photographed them but did nothing to curtail them (like using DE!) because they were a novelty to me. After the beans matured and then were harvested and dried, I kept them in glass jars in the kitchen both to show off their beauty and to use them in soups and stir-fries.

When the little black beetles hatched out in the two gallon glass jar of dried, white "greasy beans," I was grateful to be able to pour the beans into a large container and coat them with DE. Unfortunately, I still have to skim off the dead beetles from the top of the chicken-and-bean soup, but at least they're dead, skimmed off, and gone before serving soup!

Use in poultry: I am grateful to use DE as an insecticide with the chickens. The chemicals available for lice are as nasty as the hog worming chemicals. DE works great, and I've set up boxes in the hen house so they can either dust themselves, or I can give them a good dusting. Even the dog gets an occasional DE dusting to handle fleas. The cat who had been to the vet repeatedly for allergic symptoms was "cured" by dusting him with DE. The pets' beds got a good dusting too. With any of the animals, I'm careful not to apply the DE directly on their faces so they don't inhale it.

Buddy, the sweet Dorking rooster

Use in Humans: I haven't yet told you how we make DE part of our diet, probably because I know I may risk your skepticism. For the last couple of decades, my husband and I have been eating a tablespoon of food-grade DE everyday in our breakfast oatmeal. That was the recommendation of the "old man" from whom we originally bought the bulk, food-grade DE. He praised DE for how it helped his arthritis. We're probably older now than he was then, so at least his advice didn't do us in. I have found studies recently to substantiate that silicon is important in bone mineralization, collagen synthesis, as well as contributing to skin hair, and nail health. Now that I'm in my late 70s, I'm grateful for "good joints." However, if given the option, I'd still like more help with my skin and hair! But studies also show DE's remarkable help with lowering "bad" cholesterol (LDL) while increasing the "good" type (HDL). Finally because there are heavy metals in some drinking water, DE is excellent at removing excess aluminum from our bodies. You can find better sources than my anecdotal stories online from sites like: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/what-is-diatomaceous-earth

Hydroponic: DE is like perlite or vermiculite and retains water and nutrients in the soil. Its porosity means that the soil will also drain well. This makes it great for potted plants. This same affinity for liquids makes it a good absorbent and it has been used to clean up toxic spills. I can think of a few not-so-toxic spills that it has also helped with on the farm. Incidentally, I imagine this characteristic is why DE is found in cat litter.

Mild Abrasive: Now you’re going to think that I’m stretching things, but DE is commercially used as a mild abrasive both in toothpaste and as a metal polish. We were mixing our own toothpaste for a few years to avoid both the extra chemicals and the packaging of the commercial brands. It was therefore only a small step to add DE to the baking soda and sea salt that we were using. This worked out well for us until our new and expensive dentist told us that our teeth were in need of fluoride and we returned to purchasing toothpaste. I still pull out “abrasive” DE for scrubbing things like indoor sinks where I previously used a purchased cleanser.

Thermal Insulator: I haven’t devised a means yet to take advantage of DE’s insulation properties,. Perhaps packing bags of DE around milk while it turns into cheese or yogurt would work well.

Filters: The porosity of DE means it’s used to make filters, including filters for our milk from the barn. I only mention this to be inclusive, because I haven’t created filters with DE.

I would be delighted to hear from any of you who have found other uses for DE in your homes or farms.

Advantages of Having Flowers in Your Vegetable Garden

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 15:53:27 GMT

We vegetable gardeners are pretty serious about getting our annual work rewarded with bountiful harvests. So serious in fact, that some of us hate to waste space for anything that won’t contribute to growing nutritious food for the dinner table. That’s probably why my desire to have flowers throughout the garden has met with some resistance at our little homestead. But that’s also why I have gathered some pretty convincing arguments that flowers contribute to having healthy plants and nutritious crops. If you or your gardening partner need some persuasion to include flowers with your vegetable plants, then please let me try to convince you.

The first resistance we may hear is that flowers will result in less space for vegetables. To see why this doesn’t have to be true, we may have to revise our notion of what our gardens should look like. There is wisdom in nature crowding both abundance and variety in “unkept” areas. When we do the same, we can end up with both bounty and beauty.

At our place, even the four-by-ten foot raised beds do well with marigolds bordering tomato plants. The cabbage and broccoli look great with nasturtiums draped over the edge of their bed. Imagine a larger garden that has roomy paths and a periphery rimmed with cut grass. Let’s revise that garden in our imagination to be surrounded with flowers rather than grass and the walking paths narrowed with borders of flowers. The wider paths may have allowed machinery into the garden, but that only compressed the soil and made it less welcoming for plants. Our revised garden will need less weeding and grass cutting as well as having improved insect-control, and more bountiful harvests. Let’s explore why the latter is true.

We can agree that it’s an asset to have beneficial insects and birds attracted to our vegetable gardens. These beneficials not only provide needed pollination, but they help reduce the number of harmful insects. The smell and color of some flowers are more likely than vegetables to attract helpful insects. Flowers then offer these beneficials the essentials of nectar and pollen.

The flowers that do this best include marigolds, nasturtiums, zinnias, cone flowers, calendula, sweet alyssum, borage, yarrow, and cosmos.

Nasturtiums

Flowers may add a bit of chaos to an orderly garden, but having cosmos drooping over cabbage, or zinnias sprawling across a path, also increases the number of beneficials in other ways. In general, beneficials prefer some shade and ground cover. Don’t cringe when I say that the good guys include not only insects, but also snakes, toads, spiders and birds. Over-all, it’s the bad guys, or crop-eating insects, that prefer clear ground and full sun. Additionally, many of the crop-eating insects take short flights from one plant to another until they’ve pretty much sampled everything. We can limit their range by growing an occasional higher row of sunflowers or hollyhocks between our vegetables.

More than just attracting and supporting beneficials, some flowers directly reduce the number of harmful insects with their scent and natural compounds. Nasturtiums will reduce the number of aphids around tomato plants. Marigolds reduce the number of white flies while their roots kill nematodes. Borage, when planted among tomatoes, squash, and strawberries, will limit the number of pests. Chrysanthemums actually contain pyrethrum which deter pests like spider mites and Japanese beetles. Lavender and geraniums are also known to discourage harmful pests.

Chrysanthemums

Here’s more “logic” that’s definitely appeals to me; flowers can reduce the number of weeds. Some flowers have roots that release chemicals that suppress the growth of bindweed and ground ivy. Many others serve as a living mulch. These flowers include nasturtiums, creeping thyme, yarrow, sweet woodruff, and creeping phlox.

I believe we should be prepared for one other argument; some people see flowers as an additional and unnecessary expense. To this I would respond that flowers don’t need to cost much at all. Purple cone flowers (Echinacea) and bee-balm (Bergamot) are perennials that stand as sentinels at the end of our garden rows. Most came as divisions from the first plants which I began from seed. Poppies and chamomile reseed themselves each year. Other annuals like zinnias and marigolds come from seeds that I save.

Bergamot

Some gardeners may still need convincing, so the fact that flowers increase the health of the soil and therefore the nutritional quality of our harvest, might be enough to convince most skeptics to plant flowers. Phacelia and clovers act as “green manure” and help store nitrogen in the soil. Sunflowers and borage have deep roots that help break up and aerate soil. These roots also pull up deep minerals in the soil so that our vegetable plants have access to these nutrients.

As I mentioned, when we look at unkept meadows or woodlands, we see that nature always creates great diversity in her plantings. Having more variety of plants in the garden will also result in more diversity of life in the soil. This creates a healthy soil-food web that is essential if we want our vegetables to be high in nutrition and flavor. When we see flowers snuggled up to vegetable plants in a garden, we know there will be more nutrition in that garden’s crops. The proof will be in the improved flavor in our produce because nature wisely combines higher nutrition with more flavor.

Phacelia

That logic may sound a bit complex, so it may not sell as well as this one; many flowers are edible! While gathering makings for a salad with the lettuce that has grown in the shade of taller flowers, we can also gather edible flowers to create salads that are both beautiful and nutritious. Honeysuckle, nasturtiums, violets, calendulas lavender, borage, hibiscus, and pansies are all edible.

The beauty of our salads can be extended with beautiful indoor flower bouquets throughout the growing season. In fact, this enjoyment begins in the garden when including cut zinnias and coneflowers in our basket along with tomatoes and peppers. Bringing the garden’s beauty indoors is a big bonus for me.

Violets

Speaking of beauty, having a beautiful garden greet us when we set off to weed or harvest makes gardening more pleasant. This pleasure isn’t only for the flowers’ beauty, but for the other creatures that these flowers attract. I remember picking beans while watching two hummingbirds follow Black swallowtail butterflies from one zinnia to the next. I was delighted when those two then came and hovered before me, as if I was to negotiate their differences (and hummingbirds always have differences). And when a hummingbird moth hovered on a Mexican sunflower, I was open-mouth stunned for never having seen one before.

Hummingbird moth

Even with no new discoveries, when our garden is full of a variety of vegetables, flowers and animal life, it becomes what feels like a sacred space to me. I may walk by a sidewalk’s flower bed, but I spend time actually observing while working in the garden. I gradually come to focus on the orchestra of busy insects and bird songs, the feel of the breeze, and the blend of spicy and sweet smells. It becomes a meditation to be totally in the moment without my mind buzzing to past memories or future concerns. Being in a beautiful garden feels good for my body and mind. So if flowers and all the life they attract entice me to spend more time in the garden, then both the garden and I benefit.

There will still be some “serious” gardeners who won’t buy my logic and who will frown at all the color and chaos in our vegetable gardens. We can smile in response because we know that following nature’s example of combining diversity and beauty will result in better health for our vegetables, the beneficials, the soil, and us. So let’s plant lots of flowers in our vegetable gardens!

Confessions of an Imperfect Gardener

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 14:02:44 GMT

I like reading about gardening tips that tell us the correct way to garden. However, when reviewing these suggestions, I also witness my internal dialogue arguing that following one rule often conflicts with a different rule or suggestion. I admit that I have this same struggle in other areas: I want to keep the bird baths filled with water but don’t want to allow mosquitoes to propagate, or I want to dead-head flowers to encourage more blooms, but also want them to go to seed for the birds. Life is complicated!

As for the gardening rules, I admit that different years bring different weather, while at the same time we gardeners are growing different produce with different soils and different growing conditions. But when one rule doesn’t “fit” with another, I often find myself saying “good enough.” Indeed, I am not the perfect gardener.

I’ve been outlining various gardening rules these past weeks from Edward Smith’s book, “The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible.” I thought reviewing his suggestions might help me see how I could improve. But even though I agree that these rules make sense, I can’t say that I’m doing each of them perfectly. Because I found this review helpful, I want to share his ten main suggestions below. But just to be ornery, I’ll then explain why I am having trouble reaching this level of perfection.

1: Wide rows should be used for permanent planting sites. Rows only got narrower than walking paths when people attempted to bring large equipment into the garden. Having wide planting spaces allows for “companion planting” which holds down weeds and therefore helps eliminate the need for rototilling. To judge the width of the beds, make sure you can reach to their center.

2: Deep beds are necessary for good root growth. A rototiller only reaches the depth of about nine inches, but plants’ roots can benefit from much deeper soil. When a new garden bed is being prepared, this may mean converting grass to topsoil by first rototilling and then loosening the deeper soil with a garden fork or broad fork. Not stepping on these beds after they are prepped means there is no need to go back again with a rototiller that would only disturb the soil’s many fungi, insects and microscopic creatures necessary to nurture our plants. The alternative to originally digging deeper is to annually pile on good topsoil or compost on each wide bed. We used the “pile on” method with our large Ohio garden when we had a constant supply of animal manure and bedding for the compost pile. Now we do it by having deep, raised beds where we are still adding topsoil.

3: Keep all paths narrow and mulched . Narrow paths give more room for garden plants. Having these paths mulched with organic material prevents the soil underneath from getting compressed so that our plants’ roots will then have even more room to expand.

4: Keep “family members” together . This rule makes sense because plants in the same family have similar nutritional needs and also contribute similar minerals to the soil. Additionally, they have similar problems with disease and insects, so keeping families together makes it easier to rotate them to a different area the following year as will be suggested below.

I admit that I can’t recite every plant’s family. A plant’s family cannot be found in its Latin name which only has the plant’s genus and species. But “families” are determined by their flowers and reproductive parts. It’s why carrots, celery, cilantro, fennel, and parsley all get put together in the “Apiaceae” family, while eggplants, bell peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes make up the nightshade or “Solanaceae” family. I’m not always sure which plants belong to which family, so I just try to follow the four year rotation schedule that I mentioned in the Summer, 2024, Farming Magazine.

5: Plants need at least six hours of sun a day . This rule mainly comes into play when we’re first deciding where to establish our gardens. Besides choosing a sunny area, it’s wise to choose one that has good ventilation and good soil. We also have to remember to allow at least six hours of sun for shorter plants growing by larger ones.

6: Interplant different species . I’m enthused about different species growing together because less bare soil certainly helps to control weeds. Different species can also offer physical support to each other as well as needed shade. Interplanting also helps to retain the soil’s moisture and provides mulch. The “Three Sisters,” consisting of corn, climbing beans and the squash family is often given as an example of interplanting different species.

7: Successive planting is probably something most of us do automatically. For example, after garlic is harvested in late June or by mid-July, spinach or Chinese cabbage can then be planted for an autumn harvest. When I’m aiming to assist the soil’s quality and aren’t looking for additional harvests, I can throw in buckwheat seeds or left-over pea or bean seeds. These plants add various minerals to the soil that nurture both plants and microbes. With successive planting, it’s suggested that we choose plants from a different family than what was planted in the springtime. This helps to avoid disease that may have built up from the first crop.

8 : Rotate crops annually . To do this, I depend on my three-ring notebook that has sketches of where each crop was planted the previous year. Rotation helps avoid diseases that may have accumulated from the previous year’s plants. For example, rotating vine crops away from where they attracted vine borers the previous year means that when the vine borers emerge from the soil in the springtime, the vines won’t be available for them to consume. Rotating crops also makes sense because each family of plants have different nutritional needs. For example, the vine crops, along with tomatoes and peppers, need more phosphorus that was deposited the previous year by the root crops. The “leaf crops” like broccoli require more nitrogen that the “fruiting crops” like vines or tomatoes deposited the previous year.

9: Give each plant enough space . Giving space seems like a wise balance to interplanting various species. It is possible to have three or four different varieties growing in the same row or bed as long as their leaves can get enough sunshine and air movement. Fortunately, roots can densely intertwine without any negative effect as long as they have space to grow deep and wide.

10. Meet the basic needs of each plant . The trick here is of course, that different plants have different needs. We can agree that plants need air, sunlight and room to grow roots. They benefit from soil and air temperatures within the range they’ll thrive. Their need for water is usually averaged to be about an inch a week. Finally, different plant families have different nutritional needs which an annual rotation helps to supply.

These ten rules are all pretty basic, so why do I fall short every summer? For starters, I’m already cheating during the winter when sketching the following summer’s garden. What am I to do with the perennials like rhubarb and asparagus if not to hop over them? And if the tall plants, like sweet corn and climbing beans, need the northeast side of the garden so they won’t shade the shorter plants, then how are they to rotate to a different space in a single garden?

But that’s just the beginning of my difficulties. Not long into a growing season, successive planting comes into play after the lettuce, peas and then garlic are harvested. Here we’re advised to put plants from different families into the space to help avoid disease, but having two families occupy the same space in one growing season makes the next year rotation more difficult. Okay—I admit to just doing my best with what needs to be planted and then going back to the same four-season rotation the following year. It’s what I call “good enough.”

The good enough rule applies once again when harvesting the climbing peas in the springtime and then needing that fence for climbers like cucumbers that belong to a different family. When I want to cheat on this, I rationalize that the “three sisters” concept allows the vines to climb on corn which combines different families. I imagine that the corn, vines and bean combination could be rotated to a new spot each year without much damage being done. That’s probably good enough!

However, I’m not done complaining just yet. Providing plants with about an inch a water each week shouldn’t be tough. Just check the rain gauge and make up the difference, right? But our heavy clay soil doesn’t soak up water well, although no water runs off the raised beds filled with compost. Yes, the plants in the clay soil do well with smaller amounts of water applied more frequently. The next hurdle is deciding the best time of day to water. We’re told we shouldn’t water in the morning during the hot summertime because much of the water will evaporate. However, if we water in the evening, the wet leaves may be more susceptible to fungal diseases during the night. Seems to me we’ll be watering during suppertime!

In truth, I’m smiling when confessing my failures in reaching perfection, because I’ve never perfected any area of my life! It didn’t happen in school or in the kitchen, so it’s not going to happen when attempting to work with the complexities of nature. But nature can also be very forgiving of my efforts as she allows our dinner table, canning jars and root cellar to be filled with beautiful produce. I’ll try to follow the “rules” listed here, but perhaps shift my focus to gratitude for each year’s harvest. Unfortunately, that’ll probably free my mind to fret about filling bird baths and dead-heading flowers. Life is just full of decisions!

Beginners Guide to Growing and Using Herbs

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 21:09:26 GMT

The many pleasures of growing and using herbs:

People have always depended on the many benefits that herbs offer. Decades ago, and in some parts of the world today, herbs serve as disinfectants, medicine or are used for food-preservation. We may think of them mainly as spices to enhance the flavor of food, and that may be reason enough to grow them. When you grow herbs, however, your enjoyment will be enhanced when you discover their beauty and fragrance. Next you might discover their benefit as a "companion plant," as they help to keep the "bad bugs" away from your precious garden plants. You might then enjoy creating a pollinator-friendly space where herbs serve as shelter, food, and even as host plants for butterfly eggs and off-spring.

We can't expect to grow everything we need the first year we garden. However, year by year we can add a few more herbs that we enjoy using. For example, we can sneak a few basil plants in by the tomato plants one year and then add a perennial sage plant by the house the following year. Most herbs can be started from seed, so they make an economical and pleasurable addition to our gardens.

Enjoy the pesto recipe below. It's easy to make and has spiced up many a meal at our house year-round.

Finding room for herbs:

Indoor growing space:

Herbs come in so many sizes and uses, that everyone can treat themselves to one herb or another. No outside space to grow plants? If you have a window that has direct sunlight five to six hours of the day, your herbs will thrive. Choose low-growing plants (so they don’t take over your home!) that you can use in cooking. Possibilities include thyme, marjoram, savory, parsley, sage, basil or chives. You can grow them from seed in small, well-drained pots and nurture them with water, dilute seaweed emulsion and sunshine. Pinching off the ends of branches (which you can put in the dinner meal) will help your plants stay bushy and provide you with fresh herbs for cooking.

Outdoor containers:

If you have some outside space, many herbs grow well in containers. The closer the herbs are to your kitchen, the more likely you are to use them, so keep that in mind when looking for a sunny place to grow herbs. Herbs benefit from having crowded roots thinned out, so if you know a neighbor with herbs, you might ask for some root divisions. Herbs that can be shared by division include chives, mints, oregano, rosemary, sage, tarragon and thyme.

Beautiful borders:

It’s fun to see photos of formal herb gardens, but even when done less formally, herbs make excellent landscape plants. Imagine your walkway lined with rosemary whose scent you can enjoy as you take a walk. Sage, thyme and chives also make good borders while rosemary or lavender can stand taller by a fence or wide walkway. All these that I just mentioned are perennials, and that makes your work a long term investment. Additionally, when pruning along walkways, you can use the clippings to flavor your meals!

Annual herbs:

Although annual herbs die when the winter's cold arrives, many are so versatile and delicious that they're worth planting annually. One advantage of doing so is that you can rotate the herbs along with your other garden plants not only to avoid disease, but to benefit the plants that they grow alongside. If you would enjoy eating some of them fresh in the wintertime, consider putting them in pots indoors.

Young plants from a nursery or a retail store are relatively expensive and so I choose to begin most plants from seeds. This will be your option with all of the following herbs.

Basil:

Growing:

As with all annual herbs, I begin basil from seed indoors in early spring. I usually buy basil seeds of both "Sweet" and "Genovese" varieties because I like the unique taste, appearance and smell of each. Basil doesn't tolerate below-freezing temperatures, so I baby the seedlings indoors until they'll be safe in the garden. Basil keeps predator insects away from our precious tomato plants, and so I always plant some of the seedlings between and around each young tomato plant. I like others to grow close to the house so I can easily gather some basil leaves for use in the kitchen.

Using:

Basil is used extensively in the kitchen for Italian tomato sauces, with salads, on top of pizza and, of course, pesto. I am so fond of pesto that I've included the recipe here. Basil plants only lasts year-round when kept indoors in containers, but its leaves can also can be stored dried or frozen. And speaking of storing in the freezer, when you make pesto from fresh basil, the pesto can be frozen overnight in ice cube trays and then popped out for the cubes to then be stored in freezer bags. When making "pesto-pasta" in the wintertime, just use one or two pesto cubes per serving. A taste of summer in mid-winter.

Health benefits:

Basil smells and taste wonderful. I often pinch-off some of the early flowers so that a few of the plants will put all of their energy into growing leaves. When pruning back leaves so the plants will bush out, I munch on some of the leaves while still in the garden mostly because I like the taste, but also because basil has a lot of health benefits. The Cleveland Clinic says that basil is high in vitamin K and antioxidants, that it helps to prevent cancers and helps to manage high blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar, as well as helping our memory, mood and anxiety. No wonder I'm in the garden munching basil!

Helping pollinators:

Another reason I enjoy basil is because its flowers attract honey bees and I enjoy doing garden work with happy bees humming around me. Because it's estimated that pollinator numbers have declined by about 60%, having "extra" basil and other plants for the bees and butterflies can easily be justified. I admit that I'm growing herbs for my own pleasure, but it feels good to be helping other creatures at the same time.

Basil leaves

Frozen pesto cubes

Pesto Recipe:

Ingredients:

Two cups fresh basil leaves

as much parsley as you like

3/4 cup olive oil

1/4 cup walnuts or pine nuts (I use "a handful")

1/2 cup Romano or Parmesan cheese

2 cloves of garlic

salt and pepper

Directions:

Blend all of these ingredients together in a food processor until creamy. To save for winter meals, pour the pesto into ice-cube trays. After frozen, pop the cubes into a freezer bag for storage.

Dill:

Growing:

Dill is an annual plant but it's come back each year in our hoop house by "self-seeding" itself. Of course you can start it annually from seed. The one caveat in growing dill is to distance it from anise. The two are so closely related that it’s easy for them to blend their flavors. That might give the dill pickles that you've canned a licorice flavor!

Using:

If the first thing that comes to your mind with dill is making dill pickles, you're certainly right. I had a large, covered crock in the basement where water, vinegar, dill and garlic sat waiting for cucumbers from the garden. I harvested the cucumbers every two to three days to keep them on the smaller size, washed them carefully and then put them in the crock where they wait until late in the season to be canned.

It's also easy to use dill frequently in the kitchen by sneaking it into cream and cottage cheese, omelets and seafood dishes.

Health benefits:

Herbs seem to have so many health benefits and dill is no exception. It reportedly is loaded with many nutrients that aid gut and bone health, improves diabetic control and reduces stress.

Helping pollinators:

What motivates me to have dill annually in the garden is partially because of its versatility in the kitchen, but I also delight in seeing Swallowtail butterflies use dill to lay their eggs on and for their caterpillars to eat. (They also use celery, parsley and carrots). Being aware of all the miracles going on around me makes gardening much more fun!

Dill leaves

Black swallowtail butterfly

Chamomile:

Growing:

Chamomile may not be familiar to many people except perhaps as a tea. But I enjoy its many benefits throughout the growing season and often sow it directly where I want it to grow after the danger of frost has hopefully passed. It does grow better in cooler temperatures than in the heat of summer, so beginning seeds indoors about six to eight weeks before your frost-free date is a good idea. If you need to give them more space before going outdoors, wait to transplant the seedlings until they have at least two real leaves. You can also wait until after the last frost to direct seed chamomile where you want it to grow. Give the seeds a light covering of straw, compost or vermiculate to help keep them moist.

Chamomile plants can make an attractive border in your garden or along paths. It also does well outdoors in containers.

Using:

The leaves of chamomile are excellent in many Mexican and Indian dishes and often is paired with lime. I don't use the stems. Chamomile leaves don't dry well, and if you have room in your freezer, you can freeze the leaves in ice cube trays, either in water or olive oil, depending on if you intend them for tea, or for example, in salsa. I also appreciate having the flowers for indoor bouquets.

Pollinators:

Bees love chamomile! Although the leaves grow better in the cooler spring and autumn, chamomile flowers best in the heat of summer. It is then that you will see the many types of bees making good use of your bounty.

Health benefits:

Similar to other herbs, camomile is treasured for its many vitamins including potassium and vitamin A. It reportedly helps with blood sugar regulation as well as brain health. Most sources also mention that it helps to decrease anxiety, and perhaps that is why chamomile tea is also popular for aiding sleep.

Chamomile flowers

Chamomile tea

Cilantro and coriander:

Growing:

Cilantro grows best without bolting if you plant it directly where you want it to grow. It's better not to fertilize the seedlings but, as with most seeds, you'll get the best results if you keep the soil evenly moist. If you want a continual harvest of cilantro, sow a few more seeds about every three weeks.

Using:

After being picked, cilantro doesn't do well in holding flavor, so harvest what you can use within a few days time. It's best to harvest an entire plant and the leaves are often used in salsas and salads.

You get a wonderful bonus if you let some plants go to seed because these seeds are the coriander spice. When the seeds are ripe they will have turned a yellowish brown on the plant. It's best to snip off several seed heads, band them together and store them upside-down in a paper bag. After the seeds drop to the bottom of the bag, you can sort out any debris and store them in a closed container. Coriander seeds will give any casserole or baked goods a mildly spicy flavor.

Health benefits:

As with other herbs, many health benefits are attributed to cilantro including the many vitamins and minerals that help with sleep, immunity, heart health and digestion. Traditionally, cilantro and coriander were used for treatment of colic, neuralgias and arthritis . The coriander seeds retain those health benefits, and are also ground and used as a paste for mouth and skin ulcers.

Helping pollinators:

Cilantro is very attractive to native pollinators as well as our honey bees. It's a double-win when allowing cilantro to flower for pollinators also results in coriander seeds for our kitchen.

Cilantro leaves

Coriander seeds

Perennial herbs:

Many annual herbs that you've begun one year can become "perennial" just by potting and bringing them indoors for the winter. That's probably only worth your work and space indoors if you will actually use them in the kitchen throughout the winter.

Other herbs like parsley are a ctually "biannuals," although I've listed it below with the perennials. Parsley is a biannual because it doesn't flower until its second year. If you live where the temperatures get into the single digits or below, even the true perennials will benefit with a cover of straw or leaves during winter's coldest temperatures.

Parsley:

Growing:

Your choice when growing parsley is whether you want to grow the "flat leaf" or "curly leaf" varieties--or both! The curly leaf varieties like "Riccio Verde" are used as a garnish to make your meals more visually appealing. The flat leaf varieties like "Italian flat leaf parsley" are more flavorful than the curly leaf varieties and are used for teas and a variety of recipes.

When growing parsley from seed, be forewarned that it is very slow to sprout in that it may take a seed three to four weeks to emerge. Starting parsley seeds eight to ten weeks before your frost-free date helps, but soaking the seed for 24 hours before planting also speeds up their emergence. After your frost-free date, plant parsley plants outdoors about 8" apart.

Using:

When harvesting parsley, pick the older and outer leaves to use in the kitchen. People use parsley for making tea, but I am more familiar with it in meatballs and poultry stuffing. Many dishes like potato soup will benefit from parsley by improving their appearance, nutrition and flavor.

Health Benefits:

Parsley has been used in teas to treat jaundice, coughs and urinary tract infections. Its nutritional benefits come from vitamin C, carotene, iron and chlorophyll. The latter contains many vitamins and minerals as well as antioxidants.

Helping pollinators:

Have you heard of the "parsley worm"? As with dill, the Swallowtail butterflies appreciate parsley on which to lay their eggs so that their caterpillars can mature by eating the parsley leaves. Swallowtail caterpillars can also thrive on celery, cilantro, parsnips and carrots. My solution is to plant plenty, for both them and us, while cheering them on. Pollinator numbers have decreased sharply since the 1990s and I want them to know they are welcomed in our yard.

Curly leaf parsley

Flat leaf parsley

Chives:

Growing:

Chives may be the one plant that might be best to begin with the purchase of a live plant because it takes about a year to mature enough to use. However, if I wanted quite a few plants as when bordering a path, I would probably begin from seed.

If you choose to begin chives from seed, plant the seed either on the surface or just barely cover them. Chives thrive in temperatures from 55 to 70 degrees F, so begin your plants outdoors in the spring or fall and thin the seedlings to six to eight inches apart.

Chives are related to onions, garlic, leeks and shallots, and it works well to plant them before or after where these crops have grown. They don't do well with beans or peas, but are good companions for carrots and tomato plants.

Using:

Chives impart a mild onion flavor and are great in early spring salads. When clipped into small pieces, they are attractive and delicious with sour cream, butter and cottage cheese. The flowers are also edible and can be diced fresh as a garnish or as a seasoning. The flowers can be eaten raw, pickled or deep-fried.

Chives belong to the genus Allium and their purplish flowers can also be dried on their stems and used in flower arrangements. I do this routinely to have flowers, even dried ones, indoors in winter.

Health benefits:

Chives are considered "nutrient-dense" because they contain vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.

Pollinators:

You probably already guessed this, but especially bees, and also butterflies, really appreciate chives' flowers for both nectar and pollen.

Clump of chive plants

Purplish chive blossoms

Sage:

Growing:

Sage needs two seasons to grow and so is often planted from a division from a friend's plant or purchased young to be transplanted to your garden, herb bed or larger pot. Allow a generous 18" apart when planting. Sage is quite hardy if planted in well-drained, rich soil, in full sun. Consider planting sage with other "Mediterranean spices" like basil, coriander, dill, parsley and thyme. It makes for easy harvesting when making pizza!

Using:

Sage is useful in the garden for repelling harmful pests. In the kitchen, its main use is as a condiment for meat, fish and Mediterranean dishes. Sage tea reportedly has medicinal benefits.

Sage leaves are most "nutritionally dense" when its flowers are just beginning to open, but you can certainly harvest and use them anytime. For winter use, you could bring potted sage indoors, but you can also dry the leaves and store them in airtight, dark colored containers.

Health benefits:

Sage is high in vitamin K, as well as containing the vitamins A,C, and E. It has magnesium, zinc and copper as well as antioxidants.

Sage is an ancient herb whose teas and infusions (leaves and flowers soaked in water) have been used to treat depression, nervous anxiety and liver disorders. Leaves also reportedly kill bacteria and so are used in gargles for laryngitis and as a mouth freshener.

Pollinators:

Sage discourages garden pests, but at the same time attracts

bees, butterflies and hover flies. You may even see an occasional hummingbird on sage.

Sage leaves

Sage flower with a butterfly

Thyme:

Growing:

Thyme takes two seasons to grow when beginning from seeds. However, if you know a willing person who has thyme plants growing, you can take cuttings in summer, root them in water and then plant them in well drained soil in full sun. You can also start plants in the spring if that person is ready to divide their plant in the spring.

There are several varieties of thyme, but you might want to consider planting "purpura" or "tricolor" because they are both pretty and aromatic. Thyme likes cool to warm temperatures and can tolerate light shade.

Using:

The leaves and flowering tips of thyme are the usable parts. These can be used fresh or sun-dried. The leaves have the best taste and nutritional content when the flowers are just beginning to open, but they can be gathered and used anytime.

Health benefits:

Thyme is high in vitamins A and C as well as many minerals. It is also high in phytonutrients so that this herb is promoted to aid vision and improve cardiac health. It is also said to strengthen the immune system and improve the health of our skin and hair.

Pollinators:

Bees use both the nectar and pollen of thyme and butterflies are also attracted to its nectar.

Thyme plant

Thyme plants used as a border

Efficient Time Management for a Sustainable Homestead: Tools for Balance and Enjoyment

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 16:54:56 GMT

My husband and I downsized our homestead two years ago. Although we don't juggle quite so many farm animals these days, I still follow this routine for managing time while we continue to grow our own food and enjoy learning new things.

This article was originally written for Mother Earth News' online blogs in 2014:

I’ve heard people say that they want to homestead but “there’s too much work for a single family.” I agree that an ideal situation might include two or three households farming cooperatively so no one has too much work and everyone gets vacations. But waiting for an ideal situation keeps people from taking the first step. A few time management tools can help a homestead run smoothly and enjoyably.

My husband and I grew most the food we ate on our 13 acre homestead with the help of our garden, orchard, bees, poultry and cows. I admit that it can feel a bit like a three-ring circus at peak season, but we figured out some tools for making our work both manageable and enjoyable.

Allow each season to be unique: Perhaps most importantly, we only did the work that best fit each Ohio season. Keeping each season unique allowed us to be refreshed by constant variety. In springtime, we realized our workload would sharply accelerate, but that came after a restful winter. It was a treat then to begin some of our vegetable seedlings indoors in late February. The orchard was pruned in March and the beehives examined. The first calves of our small dairy herd were born in April and the pace sharply accelerated as we began milking. At the same time, chicken and turkey eggs were hatching and the little ones were then cared for in their “brood houses.” Adding one or two new tasks each week allowed us to best fit them into our schedules.

Summer required the steady pace that we had rehearsed for over a decade. The planting and weeding in the garden was quickly followed by summer’s harvesting and preserving. We had meat chickens in one chicken tractor and the young heritage birds in others. We didn’t extract honey until all the calves were born and we could again sleep through the nights.

Summer's preparations made for easier winters. Cheddar cheese accompanied fruits and vegetables into storage. Butchering chickens, making apple cider and shelling dried beans belonged to the shorter days of autumn.

Winter provides a slower time for resting, visiting, hobbies and reading. We intentionally no longer milked, so the calves enjoyed having all of their mothers’ milk. We didn’t use the hoop house to extend the growing season for more than a couple of cool season vegetables. Instead, the food that was preserved in summer provided easy meals for winter. Remembering the slower pace of winter also makes it easier to keep going during the longer days of summer.

Then, after three winter months of short, slower days, we were ready for springtime to arrive with the return of moist soil and beautiful baby animals. Enjoying the seasons made homesteading much more fun.

Not only does each season have its unique work, but it also has its unique “treats.” We only made ice cream and fresh mozzarella cheese in the summer when milking. Likewise, summer is the only season we stand in the garden and munch on fresh vegetables. Hauling out the cider press goes along with the shorter days of late summer and autumn, and the smell of food cooking on the wood burner happened only in winter. I love all the seasons because of their uniqueness.

Have a weekly routine: Besides respecting the uniqueness of each season, I found another time management skill that continues to help me through each day and week. I’m sure I took this from Laura Wilder’s “Little House in the Big Woods,” but having specific tasks for different days of the week gives me the reassurance that routine tasks will get done without fretting about it ahead of time. It didn't always work out quite as I'm describing below, but this keeps certain tasks from being neglected. It also frees up my brain from making “to-do” lists.

On summer Mondays, after caring for the farm animals, I made cheddar cheese and did laundry. That still allowed afternoons for other projects. Tuesday is the day I attended to the garden’s needs which varied throughout the summer. The chicken and turkeys’ houses were cleaned on Wednesday. I came back indoors onThursday mornings to clean house so that the grass could get cut on Fridays.

Share tasks: Creating meals from garden produce takes more time than eating highly-processed food. To make best use of our beautiful produce, we fix one “big” meal a day, usually at noon. To give time for other chores, or to have more free time, my husband and I have different days of the week that we’re responsible for the noon meal. Having this variety to our days is fun. Besides, I love staying out of the kitchen until it’s time to eat on his cook days!

Time management tools are only helpful if they make work more enjoyable. Homesteading requires flexibility to fit with the animals, weather, and seasons, but time management tools also need to be modified to suit each of our personalities and situation. However we do this, there’s no reason to fear the work of homesteading when there are tools to allow the work to remain enjoyable and rewarding.

How to Grow, Store, and Use Ginger and Turmeric in Your Kitchen

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 15:34:34 GMT

It's always interesting to try something new, so this past year we planted ginger and its cousin, turmeric. Each of the steps from planting to preserving was a new experience to me, and although I'll probably modify how to do this in the years ahead, the crops were very successful. Because I'm now enjoying both in food and drinks, I want to share this with you. When something tastes wonderful and also has health benefits, it's a winner!

Health benefits:

Ginger smells and tastes wonderful to me so that I'm using far more now than when I just had a spice jar of dried ginger from the store. I'm glad that the Cleveland Clinic states that it's good for pain relief, blood sugar regulation and reducing nausea. Its support of the immune system and relief of arthritic pain is appreciated, and its anti-microbial properties may help us get better faster from bacterial or fungal disease. That it is also helpful in preventing dementia and heart attacks makes it a super-hero.

Turmeric is related to ginger because they both contain "zingiberene" which gives them anti-inflammatory properties. Turmeric's bright yellow color comes from "curcumin" which is why curry powder is yellow. In addition, colorful foods tend to have more nutrition, and this is also true of turmeric. John Hopkins University states that turmeric helps with conditions like inflammation, high cholesterol, anxiety, degenerative eye conditions, kidney health and muscle soreness after exercise.

It might be tempting to take turmeric or ginger supplements in pill form instead of eating the roots, but as our moms told us, too much of a good thing can actually be harmful. Stick to eating the roots!

Cure rhizomes before planting:

The ginger roots from the grocery store will actually work for planting your own crop of ginger. Both our ginger and turmeric roots (also called "rhizomes") were purchased from Fedco Seeds this past year.

When you get your rhizomes, be sure to separate and dry them before planting. Fedco will include a "Growing Guide" which tells us to use a knife which is sterized in alcohol between cuts. Ginger is cut into one to two inch pieces with each "finger" at its narrow base about 1/4" above where it connects to the main rhizome. Turmeric is simpler because we just snap off the larger "fingers." Both are placed on racks in a space with good air flow for about five days.

Sprouting rhizomes:

Ginger and turmeric rhizomes take a long time to sprout. We didn't do that previously, but instead just planted them after "curing" them. They took almost two months to emerge!

Wherever you live, attempt to begin sprouting the rhizomes before mid-April. As temperatures are warming and because we live in NE Tennessee now, we've actually begun sprouting the rhizomes by mid-March.

Prepare a well-drained tray or crate with 3" of good potting soil and place the rhizomes on top so that they don't touch one another. Next, cover the rhizomes with a few inches of the soil. In this photo, the ginger rhizomes, on the left, have already been covered.

These rhizomes are then kept lightly watered. In this case, it's better to keep the soil barely moistened. The trick then is to keep the temperature around 80 degrees. I cover the tray with a clear plastic cover with a growing light just above and a heating pad below. The temperature may not get quite to 80 degrees, but it's close!

Curing rhizomes

Sprouting rhizomes

Planting rhizomes:

Our soil is mostly clay and rocks and so growing the roots in containers allowed for better soil and hopefully larger rhizomes. Two containers were created from the halves of a white 55 gallon plastic barrel with generously-sized holes drilled in the bottom for drainage. Warmth is important, so if you live in the northern states, consider growing these in a hoop house or under cover.

Books tell us that both ginger and turmeric need eight to ten months to grow, and because we're now in growing zone 7b, we planted them in mid-April. Then we waited for them to emerge...and waited and waited. Both finally sprouted in early June and grew to have generous foliage. If you've seen decorative banana plants, the turmeric's large leaves looked like that to me.

Ginger leaves

Turmeric leaves

Harvesting:

Books tell us that both ginger and turmeric should be allowed to grow for eight to ten months, or until the foliage dries. However, as temperatures dropped below freezing at night in early November, we felt we had to harvest both while the their leaves were mostly green. This probably resulted in a reduced harvest, but there was still more than enough. Perhaps next year we can provide them with a longer season if we begin earlier with their containers in the hoop house.

Harvesting the rhizomes consisted of tipping the pots on their sides with one person holding onto the stalks while the other pulled the container away. The rhizomes were then pulled into smaller clusters while shaking them free from as much of the soil as possible.

Curing rhizomes after harvest:

I want to use both the ginger and turmeric rhizomes for months ahead. This requires "hardening" or "curing" them before storage. It may sound a bit technical, but curing is easy because it only requires putting them in a cool, dark place for a couple of weeks. This is enough time for the skins to harden a bit which greatly extends their storage life. The only preparation necessary before curing is to separate out the rhizomes and brush off enough of the soil so that the skins can be exposed to air.

Preparing the rhizomes for use:

I tried various measures for removing the remaining dried soil after the rhizomes had cured. Because I have a rag-bag filled with worn dishcloths and washcloths, I put a few to use rubbing the soil off of the rhizomes.There are so many nooks and crannies to clean that I sometimes separated the various nodules with a knife, or sometimes removed a small nodule all together. Rubbing with a rough cloth did a good job of cleaning off the dried soil and sometimes even took off a bit of the thin skin. My goal isn't to peel off the skin completely however. I use these rhizomes with their skin on because it doesn't provide any "off" flavor and it does contain nutrition.

Cleaned ginger, ready for storage

Preparing rhizomes for storage:

Harvest can only happen once-a-year, but we want to use the ginger and turmeric year-round. This means we have to find successful ways to store our harvest. Here are some methods that are working well for me:

Drying : I began storing a few of the cleaned rhizomes by slicing them in thin pieces and drying them. I used the electric food dryer, but putting them in single layers, perhaps on cookie sheets lined with paper towels, in sunshine would work well too. These dried pieces are then stored in small, air-tight jars and will be broken or crushed into small pieces for cooking.

Shredding: A zester works well for shredding the fresh roots into small pieces that can either be stored frozen or refrigerated in air-tight containers. I found that the electrical coffee bean grinder worked great for either dried or fresh rhizomes, although the turmeric turned our grinder yellow!

Refrigeration or freezing: Ginger supposedly lasts one month in the refrigerator or six months in the freezer. However, a friend states that she stores frozen ginger root longer than a year and that it still seems fresh. I'm content now to have plenty of rhizomes of each ginger and turmeric in the hydrator of the refrigerator and lots more in the freezer. Storing them in air-tight containers is important to get us through until the next harvest.

When frozen ginger is thawed, it seems "water-logged" and a big mushy. But that doesn't affect its flavor and it grinds quickly

in the coffee bean grinder, so it works as well as fresh ginger for drinks or dishes.

Fresh ginger ground in coffee bean grinder

Zester

Cooking with Ginger and Turmeric:

Now that our refrigerators or freezers are well stocked with these beneficial rhizomes, how do we use them? My solution is simple; because I'm not one for following recipes, it's easy for me to just put them in wherever they sound good!

For starters, both do well in tea, to which I enjoy adding honey from our beehives. In the summer, this combination of the shredded rhizomes plus honey in water makes a refreshing and delicious cold drink. I also add ginger and turmeric to everything from soups, to stews, to stir-fry to chicken dishes. Ginger is so versatile that it also flavors baked goods like gingerbread and ginger cookies. Candied ginger has always been a favorite of mine, and now we can make our own.

Turmeric by itself has equal versatility. Because it doesn't offer as much taste to a dish, I can sneak it into any meal...as long as I don't mind adding a bit of yellow! Black pepper makes a big difference in how much turmeric we actually absorb, so I attempt to also include pepper in any dish it might complement. This means that our chicken, rice or vegetables may be both spicy and a bit "jaundiced," but they now include additional nutritional benefits.

If you prefer following recipes, there are multiple ideas and recipes in cookbooks and online. You won't find as many for turmeric, but I encourage you to frequently add it into dishes for its health benefits.

Chopped fresh turmeric:

I'm glad that turmeric doesn't add a lot of flavor to any dish because that makes it more versatile. When I'm chopping vegetables for a stir-fry, or perhaps a Shepherd's Pie , I like to add turmeric. Black pepper does add its "heat," but it also aids our body's uptake of "curcumin" from the turmeric by up to 2,000% .

Besides its nutritional benefit, chopped turmeric retains its "crunch" which I think adds more appeal to baked vegetables.

I wish we could pool all of our ideas for this nutritious and versatile rhizome!

Natural Pest Management: Safeguarding Your Garden without Chemicals

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 19:24:45 GMT

We gardeners are willing to spend the majority of the year planting, watering, weeding and harvesting because we want food that is better than we get at the grocery store. We want more flavor and nutrition, and far fewer chemicals. However, we don’t intend the lack of chemicals to be an open-invitation to all the little critters to come eat our precious plants and produce! Let’s talk about how to avoid poisons in our garden while still being able to harvest beautiful and nutritious fruits and vegetables.

For starters, we want to begin with disease-free seeds. We’ll store our own saved seeds in a cool, dark and dry place. When buying seeds, we’ll buy from reputable dealers, usually within the USA. When there are diseases one year, we’ll buy disease-resistant varieties the next year. To do this, I’ve learned to look for the capital letter, “F,” to buy tomato seeds resistant to fusarium or a “V” to choose a variety resistant to verticillium wilt. If you do buy seedlings instead of seeds, be sure to examine them for disease before purchasing.

Begin with good nutrition:

Once in the soil, plants need good nutrition to avoid disease just as we humans need good nutrition to stay healthy. Plants get their nutrition from the soil, so we try to keep the soil undisturbed as much as possible. After all, nature has a perfect design for soil so that it is able to nurture plants. It does takes time to create good topsoil, so when gardening in a new plot, you might want to side-dress your plants with compost or fish emulsion. Compost can be the perfect nutrition, but if you don’t have enough, buying fish emulsion is a good option. Fish emulsion is a by-product of processing fish, and it contains NPK as well as micronutrients like calcium, magnesium, sodium, sulfur and chlorine. The downside? Fish emulsion indeed smells “fishy,” so you probably don’t want to add that to indoor plants. I tend to also forgo fish emulsion for any outdoor potted plants because raccoons are far too fond of its smell.

I use compost tea a lot early in the growing season. It's such an excellent nutrient suppliment and seems to make a huge difference in preventing diseases, including fungal infections of plants.

Barrier methods:

Even when crops have excellent soil for nutrition, critters can still manage some damage. Barrier methods are an additional way to help discourage both large and small critters. For example, squash vine borers can totally destroy seedlings, but they’re not difficult to outsmart. We’ve learned to wrap each young cucumber or squash stem with a strip of aluminum foil that extends a bit into the soil to protect the young plants’ lower stems. The foil tends to expand on its own and we don’t gather it until cleaning up the garden in the autumn. “Companion planting” marigolds between the early vines will act as an additional deterrent.

Protect from soil fungi:

A different concept of barrier works for fungal infections on our tomato plants. These infections usually come from spores in the soil which get on the plants after rain splashes soil onto their stem and leaves. A “splash barrier” will prevent this source of fungal disease. The barrier can consist of dried organic material like leaves or newspaper laid on the soil around the plants. It is important to keep these materials from touching the stem because straw or leaves will heat up when composting and injure the tomato stems.

Floating row covers:

Other barrier methods consist of putting row covers over vines, either with hoops or “floating” row covers. These will have to be removed temporarily when tending the plants, and then removed completely when the plants begin to bloom and need pollination. The majority of insects can be avoided in this way. Additionally, if you construct raised beds, a barrier of half-inch hardware cloth can be placed under the soil to prevent rodents from tunneling under and feasting on the precious sweet potatoes.

Electric fences:

The “ultimate” barrier method for large animals is an electric fence. At our place, this has seemed necessary to keep the deer at bay from the corn patch. When we have gathered enough corn for eating and preserving, we then remove the fence. The deer and raccoons are then welcomed to the remaining ears and stalks for their winter meals.

Traps:

Besides barrier methods, “traps” are also used for cucumber beetles as well as Japanese beetles. We only tried the Japanese beetle traps a couple of years, but were quite sure the scent was inviting more beetles into our garden than were trapped! We did learn to place the traps about 30 feet downwind from our plants, but we just weren’t impressed with any significant drop in the number of beetles. I would also take early morning walks around the fruit trees and grapes with a soapy bucket of water and knock beetles into the water. What finally seemed to do the trick was “Milky Spore.” It’s a one-time job to bury this powder in shallow holes around the most affected plants. Milky spore is actually a bacteria that continues to multiply in the soil for years. It kills the Japanese beetle grubs that mature in the soil from eggs. Because these eggs are deposited under affected plants, it only needs to be buried under the plants most affected. Although Milky Spore is relatively expensive, it seems to result in far fewer Japanese beetles within a couple of years.

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Milky spore:

Milky spore is a bacterium that kills the grubs of Japanese beetles.

Usually the beetles will go to specific plants such as fruit trees, grapes, and okra. It is applied by digging shallow holes underneath the affected plants and putting a tablespoon or two in each hole. The bacteria of milky spore will continue to destroy the grubs for many years, as long as there are grubs to feast on.

Some people think that it also is helpful with the larvae of the Mexican bean beetle. I hope that's true because these beetles have been very destructive to the late season bush and pole beans this year. Besides rotating these crops, milky spore will hopefully slow down and gradually eradicate these beetles.

Diatomaceous Earth:

Diatomaceous Earth, (DE), is another non-poisonous way of killing insects. DE is harvested from the sea from tiny organisms called “diatoms” that have died and accumulated. Diatoms are composed mainly of silica which actually has many health benefits for humans. But not to digress, silica is useful in the garden because it has sharp edges which scratch the insects’ exterior skeletons and causes them to “desiccate.” They then die over about three days. Be sure to buy “food grade” DE which is readily available at garden stores or even online in bulk. The downside of using DE is that it’s a fine, white powder that easily washed away with water and then needs to be reapplied. I keep a Parmesan cheese container filled with DE in the hoop house where slugs are especially fond of the cooler weather brassica plants.

Getting creative:

Sometimes we can concoct solutions using various methods of insect control. For example, our hoop house seems to be the perfect home for slugs who really love munching-to-death seedlings like lettuce and the brassicas. When fruits are maturing, snails then enjoy eating those like the ripening tomatoes.

Vine borers are another pest that is really tough on both the spring and summer seedlings. Even though the zucchinis don't seem quite so precious when August comes around, we are cheering for them in the springtime and hate when they get destroyed by vine borers.

Slugs and vine borers take different methods of control, but I begin with cutting yogurt containers into rings that get snuggled in the soil around each newly planted seedling. Then after each watering in the hoop house, I again sprinkle diatomaceous earth, the white powder, around the plants. This combination has made a powerful difference in helping our plants successfully reach maturity and having produce with fewer blemishes.

Clean out diseased plants:

Knowing that different “pests” are found on different plants allows us a couple additional methods to keep their numbers down. First, cleaning up the garden in the autumn doesn’t mean leaving the garden bare. In fact, cover crops provide living roots which sustain the microbes and fungi that will deliver nutrients to our crops the following summer. However, it does mean removing any diseased plants. You may even want to burn plants with evident disease rather than including them in your compost.

Rotate your crops each year:

The second method of reducing disease is to rotate garden crops annually. In the simplest form, “rotation” means not planting anything where it was planted the previous year. I do realize that’s not so simple when rotating around perennials or when we have the permanent hoops or fencing for climbing plants like beans. Sketching out a garden plan each year seems essential, especially if we keep the previous year’s plan for comparison. The biggest help I’ve found comes from Shepherd Ogden’s, “Straight-Ahead Organic” book. It suggests a four year rotation guide which will also allow us to place our plants where they will best benefit from what was planted there the previous year.

The best produce may still have a few flaws!:

After all this effort, I have to admit that some of our fruits and vegetables will still have imperfections. Therefore, the final solution has been to change my attitude! I realize we’ve been taught to expect flawless fruits and vegetables from the grocery store, but this perfection is most often accomplished with the use of pesticides. We can wash the outside of the grocery store’s apple or strawberry, but that doesn’t get rid of all the poisons that they’ve incorporated while growing.

In other words, our apples and strawberries may not be flawless, but they’ll be wonderfully nutritious, flavorful and free of chemicals. I especially like the fact that when an insect does damage a plant or its fruit, the plant pulls more nutrients from the soil for its defense. That means that produce with “flaws” is actually more nutritious! With this in mind, I just cut around the little “scab” on the apple skin before eating it and still enjoy a strawberry that the Blue jay has already sampled. I would not want the garden area to be void of other creatures, because a healthy “soil food web” consists of billions of creatures above and below ground. Let’s enjoy being part of nature, knowing that the pest management principles we use will keep the majority of our produce almost flawless, but also delicious and plentiful.

Harvest to Freezer: Preserving Garden Produce Through Freezing

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 14:29:17 GMT

Freezing our garden produce is a good option of storage if we have electricity, a freezer (or two!), and are able to consume what we eat during the following year. I like being able to freeze both fruits and vegetables because it's pretty easy and relatively fast. It also is a good option for retaining most nutrients. Proper packaging and airtight containers are crucial to prevent freezer burn , but zip lock bags have made this practical. Below is a simple outline showing how I prepared some garden vegetables for the freezer.

Sweet corn:

Sweet corn always comes at once! To get it at its peak sweetness, before their sugars turn to starch, we need to harvest it in a relatively small window of time. We also need to prep it quickly, because having a long time between harvest and freezing means the wonderful sweetness disappears into a starchy taste.

I favor the freezer for sweet corn instead of canning because, as a low-acid vegetable, it requires pressure cooker canning that can destroy some of the nutrients. In truth, I also don't want "mushy" corn!

Freezing sweet corn is a team effort at our homestead, so we harvest and shuck as many cobs as we can get into the freezer that day.

Blanching:

Blanching before freezing is more essential for vegetables than fruits. It helps to prevent loss of color and nutrients as well as not letting the texture or flavor change while in the freezer. Blanching can be done in a steamer or boiling water, but the vegetables will retain more vitamins if steamed instead of boiled.

There are steamer pots available, but I use a steamer basket. By placing it in a small amount of water, any vegetable can be steamed for a few minutes before processing further.

First you'll "shuck" the corn and remove most of the "silks," before steaming a few cobs at a time. Have a pan of ice water sitting next to the stove to then transfer each cob of corn in to cool quickly.

If you want to freeze whole cobs of corn, take the cool cobs from the ice water, pat them dry with a clean towel and get them into freezer bags and into the freezer.

I don't have enough freezer space for whole cobs of corn, and so (sour grapes!), winter meals work well for eating sweet corn off the cob.

Therefore, the next step is to simply cut off the kernels with a sharpened knife, going top to bottom around the cob. If you cut off the tip of the cob first, it's easier to anchor the cob in a vertical position which will keep your fingers safe from the knife!

I use a spatula to scoop the kernels into the freezer bags. Be sure to press out as much air as possible as you flatten and seal each bag. Before filling, be sure to label each bag with the name of the contents and the date. Your goal is to have frozen produce eaten within a year's time.

Okra:

Okra is done very much the same with first choosing tender pods, rinsing them off, then either leaving them whole or cutting them to the desired size and steaming them. Afterwards they will go directly into the ice water briefly to cool.

It's worthwhile to dry the steamed and cooled okra by patting them dry before bagging them in freezer bags.

Other Veggies:

The examples of how-to-freeze sweet corn and okra apply to almost all our garden vegetables: asparagus, beans, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, peas and peppers. These are now in quart freezer bags in our freezer and will allow us to eat chemical-free, nutrient-dense vegetables this winter. A quick "cleaning and organizing" of the freezer in the early summer assures me that last year's harvest gets eaten and that there is room to begin storing this year's harvest.

Alternatives to plastic freezer bags:

People ask me about alternatives to using plastic for storing food in the freezer. There are paper alternatives, but they only store food safely for weeks and not months. There's stainless steel options, but I store way too much and too much variety to make this useful for me. A generation ago there were quart containers that stacked in the freezer, but although reusable, that didn't offer an option to plastic. What I have always done is to have a drawer in the kitchen where I put the washed and dried freezer bags once used. Although labeled with "asparagus" or "green beans," I use these bags exclusively throughout the year as I refrigerate, store or share food.

I would very much like to avoid using plastic, so if you have an alternative suggestion, please let me know.

Storing your frozen bounty:

How satisfying it is to view the beauty and bounty of your harvest tucked away in the freezer! Depending on whether you have an upright or chest freezer, or perhaps just the smaller storage space of the refrigerator freezer, it's ideal to have your produce labeled and available when you're ready to prepare a meal. A year is long enough to store frozen food, so be sure to use your older produce first.

I really like being able to "file" the gallon freezer bags in the top trays of our little chest freezer. In late August it contains the springtime rhubarb and strawberries, and then the summer's precious green beans, chopped sweet peppers, chopped onions, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, carrots and lots of sweet corn. That makes for delicious winter meals that are easy to prep.

Drying the Harvest: Preserving Garden Delights for Long-Term Storage

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 20:46:08 GMT

Drying garden and orchard produce is one of the oldest ways of storing food. We update some of those methods today with the use of electricity, but the basics are to how our great-grandparents stored their summer produce for winter meals. Other cultures still depend on drying; when working in the Arctic in the summer, it was interesting to see salmon hung on elevated wooden platforms by the ocean where they were left to dry before the long winter began. Although drying meat was an essential means of storage in pioneer days, I rely on the freezer for meat and use different means of drying and storage for some of the fruit and vegetables that I describe below. After all, most of us have the luxury to choose preserving our harvests in many ways including canning, fermenting, freezing and drying. Let's talk now about drying our precious harvest.

Beans are fun and easy:

Summers can be so busy as we attempt to care for our gardens at the same time that we are busy preserving the daily harvests. That's why growing and preserving dried beans for winter meals delights me--it's so easy!

Most old-fashioned beans are climbers, so I let them climb away during the summer and into the dryer autumn. I then just gather the dried pods unless the autumn is usually rainy. If that's the case, I rescue the beans before they get mildewy and let them dry completely in the sun (or indoors) before shelling.

"Processing" the dried bean pods gives me big satisfaction with minimum work, which is why it ranks high on my list of favorite tasks. I wait for the beautiful autumn evenings, set up a lawn chair outdoors and a drink at hand. There's a bucket of dried bean pods on my left, a lovely gourd bowl to receive the beans on my lap, and another drywall bucket on my right that will hold the empty shells before they're transported to the compost pile.

The shelled beans will still need the bit of shell-debris "winnowed" or blown off, but otherwise they're ready for storage. Spreading out the beans on cookie sheets indoors allows me not only to remove and residual shells, but to pick out the very best heirloom beans for growing next year. That helps us be one step closer to self-sufficiency!

Dried beans are incredibly versatile when preparing winter meals. I now have fifteen varieties of beans that are beautiful to "show off" on their open shelves in the kitchen. Bean vary in their texture and taste when cooked, and I am gradually learning what beans work best for certain dishes.

I only have the space and trellises to grow two or four varieties of these climbing beans annually, and so choose the ones that have been most depleted during winter meals. I find that the beans that only get grown out every three or four years still have remarkably good germination.

You'll notice a small packet inside this jar of dried "Greasy beans." It's a " desiccant, " meant to keep the beans dried. I have only recently began using this, so I can't claim that it's necessary. It is made from silica, a pure form of diatomaceous earth . This means it is completely safe, so I thought I would just give it a try for now.

Potatoes and onions:

It's a bit like Christmas when we dig up potatoes or pull out the storage onions, not sure of how good or how bountiful our harvest will be. These are precious commodities that can often feed us until the following harvest if we can store them correctly.

The first project after hauling any root crop like potatoes or onions in from the garden is to "cure" them. Curing dries and hardens the skin so that the vegetables will store well without spoiling.

Potatoes: Our best place for a large number of newly harvested potatoes has been the floor of the garage. The car sits out for about two weeks that potatoes require for curing while the garage door is kept open a crack to allow ventilation while keeping the sunlight out. This also allows the potato sugars to change into carbohydrates for better storage.

Onions: Whether sweet or storage onions, these also need ventilation and shade. The onions in this photo wait their turn to be put on the racks above. Both onions and garlic require about one week of curing. Their tops are not trimmed off until they are ready to be brought in for storage.

Optimal storage conditions:

Root crops like potatoes: cold (just above freezing) and damp (85 to 90% humidity)
Pumpkins and squash: warm (~50 degrees F) and dry (50 to 70% humidity)
Garlic and onions: cool (40's degrees F) and dry (50 to 70% humidity)

Both a thermometer and hygrometer from the hardware store will help you adjust the temperature and humidity.

Root cellar storage:

A root cellar or storm cellar is invaluable for storing root crops, which seems like an obvious use for a root cellar! The photo shows the cellar my husband built in a corner of the basement. We previously had one dug into a hillside and ventilated with PVC pipes. The downside to it was that it was difficult to get it sufficiently ventilated or to protect the precious produce from insects.

A major requirement of root cellar storage is that it needs to be ventilated so both the temperature and humidity can be adjusted. The basement root cellar therefore had two 4" PVC pipe into the outdoors. However, they didn't create much air exchange until a small air conditioner with a separate fan were connected to be used intermittently. This not only allowed fresh air, but had the big advantage of dropping the temperature below 60 degrees and into the 40 degree range which was our compromise to store different types of vegetables. Humidity, the second major factor for storage, was also adjusted this way.

We've recently moved, so we're again exploring options for a storage place that is cool, dark and rodent-free. We need it not only for potatoes and onions, but also the winter squash. An insulated closet that vents to the outside would be good, and a back porch that doesn't get freezing temperatures would work. Attics also work well if we don't forget that our pumpkins are up there! People have even buried old chest freezers in the ground for winter storage. What we need is a place that is dark and cool, but never freezing.

Where's the fruit?

Storing unprocessed fruits like apples and pears is challenging because they emit an ethylene gas during storage that can decrease the storage life of the other vegetables that they are stored with. finding a separate storage place for orchard fruits that is both cold and humid would be optimal. A separate and small root cellar would be good, but what I usually do after setting aside what we can eat within a month is to dry and can fruit from the orchard.

Drying sliced produce:

Dried tomatoes or dried fruit from the orchard not only make good snacks, but excellent additions to your winter cooking. It's possible to use either a solar or an electric food dryer. For either way of drying food, you'll get the best results if you follow these suggestions:

Choose fruit with the least flaws
Pick fruit fully ripe
Minimize the time between picking and drying
Make each slice as uniform as possible
Pretreat the slices of fruit with a quick soaking in an acid like citric acid or lemon juice so they won't turn brown

The solar dryer:

This is one type of solar food dryer that my husband made following the directions in the solar food dryer book by Eben Fodor. If we were to do anything differently in the design, it would have been to angle it a bit more to allow the lower sun of later summer to dry crops that don't get ripe in Ohio until later in the summer.

We also found that tomatoes, even when sliced thinly, did not dry in a single day. We therefore added an incandescent lightbulb that we could plug in overnight to keep them from getting moldy. That's was probably cheating with a "solar" dryer!

Tomatoes in solar dryer

Apples in solar dryer

The electrical dryer:

I mainly use the electric dryer, or "food dehydrator," for drying both apple and tomato slices. Tomatoes are high in water content and so I choose an heirloom variety with small seed cavities. When one of these beautiful large tomatoes was given to me by a friend, he called it a Micki Crane . I have been careful to save its seeds each year so I can keep planting them.

The electric dryer shown is very basic but it does have a fan that allows each layer of fruit to dry at almost the same time. I originally had a less expensive version that didn't have the fan, but it not only required me to keep rotating the racks, but it rarely had the produce dry before bedtime. Not needing to get up at night to rotate those racks was worth the approximate cost of this "Nesco" food dehydrator. It costs around $40, but you can certainly get much more sophisticated and larger ones for up to $200. If I can harvest and prep the produce by mid-morning, it is almost always dry by bedtime, and that's my goal!

Not only can vegetables, lean meats and spices also be dried this way, but with the "vertical dryer" shown, you can always add or subtract the number of trays needed.

Obtaining slender slices:

Cutting tomatoes into uniform thickness is difficult, but beginning with firm but ripe tomatoes helps. I find that a sharp, serrated knife also helps to get the slices as uniform in thickness as possible.

Apples slices are easiest to get uniform with this inexpensive gadget called an apple peeler, slicer, corer. Although it's capable of doing the three tasks at one time, you have the option to not slice or not peel if you choose. I can therefore use it to can chunks of apples that I have just peeled and cored with this gadget. It's one part of food preservation that even a younger child can help with once the apple is mounted on the prongs. Heck, it's fun for even us adults to use!

Storing dried produce:

When each batch of fruit or vegetables is dried, we then need to store them in a way that keeps them safe from moisture. If there is room in the freezer, I find that the heavier duty freezer bags work well. I'd like to avoid the plastic altogether, but I at least try to reuse the bags several times for short-term storage of left-overs.

Jars that can be sealed tightly also work for storage as well as any container that has a tight fitting lid. It's best to be able to label each container with a date. I am finding that the silca packs, called "desiccants," will keep produce dried in glass jars which both saves freezer space and reduces the need for plastic.

In the middle of winter, it's such a treat to use these as snacks instead of potato chips! I also rehydrate tomato slices in red wine for use in pasta dishes. Apples rehydrated with juice are great for baking. Enjoy!

Mastering Canning: Preserving Garden Harvest with Confidence

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 15:40:27 GMT

We can can!

The summer harvest can be a bit overwhelming. If the weather has cooperated, the tomatoes come in by the bucketful, the CSA we belong to has a bumper crop of peaches, and the Farmers' Market has gorgeous apples. This is when you'll want to preserve all this bounty for eating in the wintertime. One method of preserving produce is canning, using either a water bath or a pressure cooker method. It's not rocket science to safely preserve produce by canning, and your reward will be beautiful jars of produce and nutritious produce to eat all winter.

The first essential for canning is the Ball "Blue Book." It's been the "bible" for canners since 1909! There are other books that will help us with the basics of drying, pickling, dehydrating or fermenting, but the Blue Book will serve you well through years of canning. I want to give you the step-by-step process of canning below so you can picture what you'll be doing. The Blue Book will tell you how long to leave different fruits or vegetables in the canner, how much pressure each vegetable requires and will even give recipes. It's fine to use your grandparent's Blue Book--the information never goes out of date.

Water bath canning:

Water bath canning requires the same preparation of the jars, lids and produce that pressure cooking canning does. The water bath container itself is less expensive to purchase than a pressure cooker, and some people feel safer not to be working with a pressure cooker--though I hope to get you comfortable with pressure cooker canning by the end of this article.

We can't safely can all produce in a water bath canner, however, because a "water bath" can't reach the higher temperatures of a pressure canner. I still use the water bath canner a lot however, because it safely preserves anything that is acidic: all fruits, jams and jellies made of fruit, tomatoes, pickles and fermented foods like sauerkraut are safe to can in the water bath.

A water bath canner holds seven jars of produce, whether they're in half-gallon, quart, pint, or jelly jars. Once you prep and put each jar on the rack, you'll lower the rack into the simmering water, put the lid on, and leave it for the required period of time.

How much time? Well, that's where the Blue Book comes in. It will tell you exactly how much time for various produce and for what size jars you are using.

Let's go through each step of this process below.

Equipment:

The equipment shown here is what I accumulated and have been using for years. They're easiest to purchase from a hardware store early in the summer as canning season is just beginning. A convenient option is to buy a " canning kit ."

Canning jars come in half-gallons (for large families), quart, pint, and jelly-jar sizes and have "regular" or "wide" mouths. For efficiency of canning fruit, I like to use quart jars. However, there is only two of us at home now, and so pint jars work best for things we use less of, like thick tomato sauce or ketchup. You can sometimes find canning jars available at yard sales, but make sure the top edge of each jar is perfectly smooth. The tiniest of chips can prevent a jar from sealing. If I were buying new jars, I would probably buy all wide-mouth because both whole fruits or sauces would easily be placed inside.
Canning rings come in regular or wide mouth and can be used repeatedly as long as they don't get rusty. I usually let the jars cool completely before I take the rings off and wash and dry them to be used again.
Canning lids are only used once, being discarded after the jar is opened. These of course also come in regular or wide mouth sizes.
Lid lifter: I use the long handled tool pictured to lift the lids out of their simmering water, but there are also magnetic canning lid lifters available.
Canning jar lifter will allow you to lift the jars out of hot water safely. It's the black and red tool shown.
Canning funnels are essential for getting hot produce into the hot jars. I like using stainless steel, but whether stainless or plastic, you should get one that works for wide or regular jars. You'll value how canning funnels keep the upper lid clean which is essential for getting a good seal.
A strainer or "skimmer" works well to get produce out of simmering water when you're blanching it or heating it to remove the skins. I'll explain how to use each of these tools below.

Where to begin:

When July comes around, there's usually plenty of tomatoes for us eager gardeners to work with, as well as lots of options what to do with them. I like to can some of the medium-sized "Amish Paste" tomatoes whole, to become part of winter's chili or stew. To do this, I usually put the tomatoes in simmering water for less than a minute, then run them under cool water so I can comfortable skin them before squeezing them into hot jars. The jars are then filled to the bottom of their necks with hot water or tomato sauce.

Because our household uses a lot of tomato sauce , I'll use this as the following example of how to can any acidic food in a water bath.

Getting set up:

I was fortunate to have a corner of the basement of our little farm house for canning. As you can see, it wasn't fancy, but it certainly worked well. Now that I am canning in a small kitchen, I use basically the same set up. See if you can settle in to something similar that can be your efficient workspace. In this set-up, I begin on the left:

To the left of the microwave and out of the photo is a sink where the jars get washed, rinsed and filled with water.
The jars are then filled with water and microwaved to get them hot enough to pack with produce. Heating the clean jars could also be done with water heated on the stove. By transferring the hot water from one jar to the next when filling a hot one with produce, I can minimize the amount of water and electricity used.
The blue bucket is used to collect the skins and seeds that have been removed.

Jump now to the blender where I pulverize the cleaned, whole tomatoes (from the pink plastic tub) to get them easier to remove the skins and seeds.
The food mill, sitting on a clean (but ancient) container, removes the skin and seeds from the tomato juice.
That big stainless steel pot on the stove in the previous photo is where the juice will be cooked down into a thick sauce before canning.

The food mill:

Let's focus for a moment on the food mill because it is a huge help in removing the skin, seeds and stems from produce. I believe it's best to purchase a good quality stainless steel one that will last for all your canning years.

Seeds and skins:

Seeds are high in nutrition, so when they become canning scraps, they can be a bonus for the chickens! If you or your neighbors don't have poultry, I hope you have a compost pile that will benefit from them. I try to spin this food mill until almost all of the juice and pulp are separated for canning.

I find it easiest to clean out the food mill into the scrap bucket frequently because it makes the work of separating the skins and seeds from the juice easier.

From Juice to Sa uce:

It takes some hours to cook tomato juice down into a sauce that thick enough to go on pizza or to serve as spaghetti sauce. Even with frequent stirring, I found it difficult not to get a bit of the sauce burned on the bottom of the pan. Even a small amount burned will add a burnt flavor the entire batch, and although I would attempt to use cute labels like "Smoke Sauce" on the finished product, canning is just too much work not to get a better result.

The key to hours of cooking without scorching is two fold: first, a high-quality stainless steel pot is necessary. I admit that I "borrow" the heavy-duty one that my husband uses for making beer, but it's necessary! If you don't have one accessible, do get the highest quality pot available. In this case, a second-hand store or garage sale may serve you well.

Prevent burning!

Besides having a heavy-duty, stainless steel pot, a heat diffuser is essential when cooking your tomato juice down into a thick sauce. Reducing the tomato juice to a thick sauce takes some hours, and without the heat diffuser, we would have to stand and constantly stir to prevent the sauce at the bottom of the pot from burning. This heat diffuser had to have its handle cut off so it would lie flat on these flat burners, so choose the model that is made for your type of stove: gas burners, glass top, or electric.

Now to get your produce canned!:

When you have your "assembly line" all set, the burners of your stove will be occupied with the following:

The large pot filled with produce ready to can
The water bath canner with its water being heated
Lids and rings kept hot in a large, shallow pan with water
When canning something like peaches that will have a syrup packed around them, the syrup will be kept warm on a fourth burner.

Obviously, this is not the time to be juggling the phone or company, but a good and helpful friend is always welcomed!

Filling each jar:

We're working with hot ingredients here, so I sometimes even use a stool to stand high enough to get the sauce from the deep pot into the jars.

The canning funnel is our best friend here because it will keep the lip of the jar clean. In addition, always give the top of the jar a wipe with a clean cloth before putting the lid on, because even the tiniest piece of produce will keep the jar from sealing.

Don't over-fill the jar! I stop at the base of the jar's neck because it makes it much less likely that the sauce will boil up during processing and prevent the lid from sealing. I put a lot of emphasis on getting these jars to seal and I know you will too!

No air bubbles!:

There's one more essential tip to make sure each jar will seal. After you fill a jar, there may be small air bubbles at the base. When the jars are heated in the water bath or pressure cooker, the bubbles rise, bringing a bit of produce with them which then gets deposited on the rim.

I realize you might be thinking that these jars are plotting a way not to seal, but I promise you that each step will become automatic and you'll get those precious jars of produce to seal every time.

In this case, always run a knife around the edge of the jar, all the way to the bottom. When canning whole produce, you'll actually be able to see the bubbles rise and disappear when you do this.

Capping and putting jars into water bath:

After assuring that each filled jar has a clean rim, immediately place a hot lid on top and then seal it with a hot ring. Here's another trick to assuring they will seal; twist the lid snugly . Not too tight and not too loose! I go back and forth a bit just to satisfy myself that it feels "just right."
Keep the rack attached to the rim of the water bath until you have as many jars on it as you'll be canning--up to seven in each batch. As you place each jar, you'll want to balance it with the previous ones so that the rack won't tip.
When all the jars are in the canner, lower the rack into the simmering water by both handles.
The water needs to be over the top of the jars by an inch or so. In this photo, I'd better have more hot water ready to pour over them. I usually do from the jars I've heated in the microwave and from the pan that held the lids and rims.
Now put the canning bath cover on, consult the Blue Book for how long they should be kept simmering in the water bath.
The key is to have the water simmering and not boiling. You don't want that produce to boil up onto that rim or to have the jars jostled sideways from boiling water.

When the jars have simmered for the required period of time--twenty minutes for these quarts of tomato sauce--the burner's turned off, the cover of the canner is removed, and you can elevate the handles of the rack to suspend the jars.

It's also perfectly fine to remove the jars from the canner with the jar lifter and place them on a countertop or table that can tolerate the heat.

This is the suspenseful or fun part, depending on your confidence! It feels so good to hear the little "pop" each jar makes as it cools and the lids seal. It's only after they cool completely that you want to remove the rings for washing and storing.

Although I had a friend who wouldn't leave the room until she heard each jar seal, that's really not necessary! When the jars begin to cool--and they can be set on a water-proof surface to do that, you can tell if they have sealed by tapping a fingernail or a spoon lightly on the surface. The dull sound is a good sound--they're sealed! I sometimes look at the tops "from the side," to make sure each one looks depressed and isn't still dome-shaped. Don't worry about this. A jar that hasn't sealed sounds distinctly different from the dull sound a sealed top makes.

Pressure Cooker Canning:

When we want to preserve vegetables that aren't high in acid like tomatoes, or that haven't been pickled to make them more acidic, the "steam-pressure canner" is used. The method of preparing the vegetables and placing them in jars is not different from what was described above for the water bath canner.

Vegetables you might consider canning by this method would include peas, okra, peppers, potatoes, or pumpkin .

When I am overwhelmed with veggies like zucchini, peppers, okra and onions, I like to dice them up and can them along with tomato sauce. It makes for strange-looking, but very nutritious "veggie sauce" for winter's spaghetti or lasagna sauce. When I do this, it's necessary that the tomato sauce is canned in the pressure cooker.

The pressure gauge on top of the cooker has the option for five, ten, or 15 pounds of pressure. The Blue Book will tell you how much pressure each specific vegetable requires. It will also tell you how to adjust the timing if you live above 2,000 feet in altitude.

Unlike the water bath canner, the water pressure canner only requires two to three inches of water in the bottom of the pan. After placing each hot jar inside, lock the cover on by fitting it snugly and twisting it to lock.

It will take some minutes on the burner for the steam to begin to escape. In this situation, it's necessary to be close-by because once the steam begins escaping and the gauge begins to "jiggle," you want to turn the heat down enough so that it only jiggles about three to four times a minute. Then relax for the required period of time according to the Blue Book.

When the time is up, remove the canner from the heat and let the pressure gradually fall to zero. I cheat sometimes by easing up the gauge, but this has to be done carefully because the escaping steam can be scalding--so the better part of valor is to be patient. Once no more steam escapes, you can remove the gauge and slowly open the lid to remove the jars. As with water bath canning, do not tighten the rings--just let the jars cool and seal.

Once your jars have cooled, the rings can be removed, cleaned and stored for future use. After testing each jar to make sure it's sealed, clean the top and use a marking pen to label each jar with the date and contents.

Canned jars are so pretty that I hope you can display them. One year's bumper crop of a fruit or vegetable can feed you for the next few years ahead.

Now congratulation yourself for becoming more self-sufficient!

Our Precious Water

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 20:20:00 GMT

This feels like a difficult time. We’ve been made aware of climate change and loss of species, and yet most of us don’t feel in position to make things better. Instead we see people who have power wage wars that result in more suffering or make decisions that will make life more difficult for our children. I’m getting old, and I don’t want to feel this helpless and joyless for the rest of my life. Like most of you, I want to find meaningful ways to make a positive difference. There’s nothing more basic that life’s need for water, and I can do my best in that regard.

Although clean water is one of the most basic of our needs, millions of people can no longer assume to have accessible clean water. The human population not only continues to grow, but our individual usage of water continues to increase. The National Geographic says that 40 out of 50 states are currently dealing with water shortages. Some of this is because climate change is resulting in less precipitation in some parts of the country, but much of this is also caused by aging infrastructure which leaves mainly poorer communities without safe drinking water. Farmers use 37% of our total water usage for irrigation. Southern Florida and the lettuce-growing Salinas Valley of California now have salt seeping into this water from over-extraction.

You and I are not in good position to affect the repairs to infrastructure needed by the government or to change the behavior of the large corporate farmers. But we can make changes that will help preserve sufficient clean water for our families, animals and crops. We’ve all been told not to keep the water running when we brush our teeth and to use water-saving shower heads. I agree those things make a difference, but my discouragement seems to need a bigger bandage, and I’m hoping these projects may help you too.

Saving rain water from roofs in a great way to begin. Each square foot of roof gives about .6 gallons of water that means that a 1,000 square foot roof will give 623 precious gallons for the same one inch of rain. We’ve done the simplest version of this by having the water from the small toolshed run into a 50 gallon barrel to which we have a hose attached for watering the garden. It’s pretty amazing how little of our large garden that this water covers, and so we went a step further and collected the water from the house, garage and chicken house roofs to drain into a 2,500 square-foot buried cistern. This cistern is made from cement and is below ground. The water therefore has to be electrically pumped from the cistern through plastic pipes to reach two elevated 250 gallon tanks on either side of the garden. From there, the water can be fed by gravity when needed by the plants. The cistern is important because when the rains do come, the garden doesn’t need ground water which can be saved, if needed, for the dryer late summer.

The most efficient use of this water is distributing it with a soaker hose. We were given a large roll of soaker hose which allows us to put it in place in the springtime and leave it on the rows as the plants grow. Little water is lost to evaporation or run-off this way.

We also have set up an additional two food-grade tanks that will each hold 250 gallons gathered from the hoop house roof. A small solar powered pump can then distribute this water to the far-end of the large garden.

Besides protecting topsoil and enhancing soil health, cover crops also have a role in preserving water. Plants capture water with their foliage and direct it to the soil rather than letting it run off. Keeping the soil moist allows the water table to be deeper as it preserves the moisture on our land. The forty acres of wetlands and grasslands behind the meadow provides a large area of year-round cover crops. It captures the moisture that the previous farm fields had run off in tiles because the bare and compacted farm soil cannot capture much water. This water is now not only held in the ground, but it is filtered of contaminants as it trickles into the stream that runs through the meadow.

The water table varies greatly with the amount of rain and how well this rain is captured. The same National Geographic article states that 165 million Americans depend on this water table for their water which means that climate change is further endangering the availability of water for the drier areas in the SW and western U.S.

This “water table” is defined as the area between saturated and unsaturated soil. Below that are found large aquifers on which 120 million Americans rely. There are five large aquifers in the U.S. An example is the large Ogallala Aquifer that extends from South Dakota and Wyoming down through Texas. Similar to all of our aquifers, the water in this aquifer is being rapidly depleted both by urban use and by agriculture. In addition, it is becoming contaminated with farm chemicals. My husband and I became concerned with our water supply when a new ethanol plant dug its deep well only about a mile from our farm. It pumps up to a million-and-a-half gallons of water a day to make ethanol. Perhaps, like the early settlers, the corporate world believes they is no end to the water supply.

The well for our house is only about 35 feet deep and we didn’t want to risk depleting it by having it also provide water for our cows and poultry. Therefore we had a 55 foot well dug in the meadow that is pumped by a windmill and carries water to seven different areas of the meadow. There remains evidence in the meadow of hand-dug wells from previous generations of this farm where individual wells would provide water for livestock. These shallow wells were pumped with small windmills into cement tanks around the meadow. Floats in these tanks would turn the windmill off and on as dictated by the water level in the tank. You may have seen elevated storage tanks by these windmills that could hold extra water when the wind blew. Farmers understood then that they were responsible for their water supply and could not depend on turning on the tap.

Some of you may have the good fortune of having a spring which can provide clean water. Gene Logsdon once suggested, if you’re fortunate to have an area lying below a spring, digging a culvert to direct the water down to a hand-dug pond to provide drinking water for cattle.

It seems to me that whatever the topic, I find trees part of the solution. The more trees we plant, the more water is soaked up from the surrounding soil so that the ground can hold more water. In addition, the trees’ roots break up compacted soil and allow the soil to hold more water and the water table to go deeper.

We all, including all species, need water to survive. It feels good to me to be able to conserve even a bit of this most precious resource.

Roundup is Making Us Sick

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 20:06:21 GMT

The world looked very different in the 1980’s, the decade I spent in medical school and family practice residency. Even though my job was mainly with the ill, people in general then seemed so much healthier than today. Back then, most cancers and all Alzheimer’s disease, autism and auto-immune diseases were rare. Why have they become so prevalent in the last three decades? For the last few years I have been looking through research to find answers. What I keep bumping into is the link between the introduction of Roundup and the increase in illness.

It’s not only physicians of my vintage that are alarmed at the rapid increase in previously-rare diseases. Veterinarians are witnessing a surge in livestock infertility and miscarriages. Dogs are getting cancers at an unprecedented rate. Plant pathologists tell of previously confined plant diseases, like bacterial wilt and fusarium, that are now rapidly spreading across the country. Although there are many poisons in our environment today, when we understand the history of Roundup and how it works, it becomes clearer why it’s a major factor in making us sick. We can then use this knowledge to keep ourselves and our families healthy.

Roundup’s history: Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, was patented as a “descaling agent” in the 1960’s by Stauffer Chemical Company. Its purpose was to clean industrial pipes and boilers by binding, or “chelating” residual minerals. In areas where the used-glyphosate was discarded, plants died. Monsanto Corporation quickly saw its herbicide potential and bought glyphosate for herbicide use in 1969.

The FDA and USDA required no independent safety studies before allowing glyphosate on the market. Monsanto’s convincing argument was that humans don’t have the chemical pathway that glyphosate interrupts in plants and bacteria. Therefore, in 1974, the sale of glyphosate began as “Roundup.” It was marketed to both farmers and homeowners as a weed-killer.

In addition to the mineral-binding component, glyphosate, Roundup also contains “adjuvants” like surfactant. A surfactant breaks the surface tension of water and allows Roundup to enter all parts of a plant. As you will see, surfactant also has a major role in making us sick.

Roundup’s use as a herbicide was limited at first because it couldn’t be used directly on crops without killing them. When Monsanto developed glyphosate-resistant soybeans and corn in 1996, the use of Roundup soared. This was also the beginning of previously rare diseases becoming common.

Crops that are genetically engineered to be glyphosate-resistant have come to be known as GE (genetically engineered) or GMO (genetically modified organisms). Most GE crops were developed to be used with Roundup and are called “Roundup Ready.” When these crops are sprayed with Roundup, they don’t die. However, Roundup does become “systemic,” or everywhere in the plant--including in what we eat. It’s now believed that GE crops are not harmful in themselves. Research shows that it is the Roundup in the GE crops that make us ill.

Roundup is everywhere: There are four main reasons there has been such a rapid increase in the amount of Roundup used since 1996: “Roundup Ready” soybeans and corn grew to become almost 100% of the United States’ market by 2014. Secondly, weeds rapidly gained resistance to Roundup; the first resistant weeds were reported in the late 1990’s. To counteract this resistance, the amount of Roundup used in each field has doubled since 1996. Thirdly, the number of GE crops has grown to include sugar beets, canola and potatoes in addition to the original soybeans and corn.

Finally, the use of Roundup is no longer limited to GE foods. It is now used extensively as a pre-harvest desiccant to “dry down” crops. Non-GE crops like wheat, oats, barley, and sugar cane are sprayed with Roundup about a week before harvest so their foliage will be dry and easier to harvest with a combine.

Monsanto originally told the Food and Drug Administration that Roundup did not stay in the soil or the crops. It’s become clear that this is not true; high residuals have been found in the soil and then in waterways after it rains. It also resides in the entire plant and grains that are harvested and we ingest. Because Roundup is in food and water, it’s should not be a surprise that it is found in human urine, breast milk, central nervous system and bone marrow. Urban dwellers are as vulnerable as their rural counterparts in this regard.

If Monsanto found it so easy to convince our government that Roundup couldn’t hurt humans or other mammals, then why should we be concerned? To answer that, let’s look at what is now known about what happens to our bodies when our food and water is contaminated with Roundup.

Roundup makes our food less nutritious: Besides pleasure, the main reason we eat food is for its caloric and mineral content. As we know from its history, Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, chemically binds to minerals and makes them inactive. When it binds the minerals in soil, these nutrients can’t become part of the plants which are our food. Roundup’s success at binding minerals was apparent when the USDA decreased the weight of a bushel of corn by two pounds since the use of Roundup began. That’s two pounds of minerals lost per bushel.

Fewer minerals in plants mean fewer minerals for our bodies. We’re familiar with calcium and phosphate for our bone structure, and potassium to keep our hearts beating. But our bodies also need a trace amount of other minerals, like manganese, iron, copper, zinc, magnesium, and selenium to serve as enzymes and co-enzymes for the hundreds of chemical reactions in our bodies. When Roundup is used on crops, these minerals stay in the soil instead of becoming part of our food.

A second way Roundup makes our food less nutritious is by killing the soil’s bacteria. These bacteria are an essential part of the soil-food web that delivers the minerals from the soil into plants. In 2010, Monsanto patented glyphosate as an antibiotic—and antibiotics kill bacteria. Glyphosate could never be marketed as an antibiotic because it only kills “good” bacteria and not the “bad.” But glyphosate’s role as an antibiotic continues in the soil, leaving our food with even less nutrition.

Besides reducing food’s nutritional value, Roundup has many direct effects on our bodies. When reading through published research, I felt a bit overwhelmed by these many mechanisms, and so gathered them together in the following categories:

Roundup is found throughout the body: Roundup’s harmful effects in the soil also occur in the human body when we eat plants and animal products that contain Roundup. Roundup has a free pass to go throughout the body because surfactant allows glyphosate to bypass the liver—the major organ that clears poisons out of the body. That is why Roundup has been found throughout the human body and has such wide-spread detrimental effects.

Roundup binds minerals in our body: Not only are there fewer minerals in the food we eat, but when Roundup binds the minerals in our bodies, these minerals can’t perform their myriad of functions. The body becomes unable to clear toxins, repair damaged DNA or even generate energy.

Roundup kills the bacteria in our large intestines: The last five feet of our intestines is known as the large intestines, or colon. It is here that the vast majority of bacteria are found in the intestines—tens-of-trillions, in fact. Back in the 1980’s our knowledge of these bacteria was confined to their essential role in digesting food. We also learned that using too many antibiotics, which only happened in the hospital setting, caused the large intestines to be overrun with the bad bacteria, C. difficile.

Today, people who haven’t been hospitalized or put on any prescription antibiotics are getting this same dangerous and uncomfortable bacterial infection. Now that Roundup is incorporated in most processed foods, the majority of Americans are eating an antibiotic daily.

Another consequence of ingesting daily antibiotics is the surge in gluten intolerance. A more severe form is Celiac disease which has gone from being extremely rare to now being found in five percent of our population. The medical world tells those that suffer from these uncomfortable diseases that they should avoid wheat—but wheat hasn’t undergone basic changes. Wheat that contains Roundup, from when it was dried before harvest, is the difference.

The known consequences of killing these bacteria got even worse when scientists realized intestinal bacteria play many essential roles outside the large intestines. For example, ninety percent of serotonin, a chemical that is responsible for our feeling of well-being, is manufactured by bacteria in the intestines. Killing these bacteria can result in a depressed mood for us as well as big profits for pharmaceutical companies that sell serotonin as an antidepressant.

Glyphosate inserts itself in our body’s proteins: One of the more frightening aspects of having Roundup in our bodies was only recently discovered. In 2016, it was shown that the main ingredient of Roundup, glyphosate, is mistaken by the body for the small amino acid, glycine. Proteins are able to perform their unique roles because they are made up of amino acids linked together in specific order and size. Glyphosate is larger than glycine and therefore prevents proteins from folding into their normal shapes. When they lose this ability, these proteins can’t perform their required functions.

The wide-spread implication of damaged proteins is almost too much to imagine. Some proteins are part of the enzymes in our bodies that speed up all chemical reactions. Other proteins form hormones like insulin that regulate blood sugar. Proteins also serve to transport other substances such as hemoglobin that carries oxygen. It’s no wonder that scientists conclude that most diseases that have soared during the last three decades can be linked to Roundup’s ability to damage proteins. Let’s look at some of these diseases now.

It seems evident that having Roundup throughout our bodies would result in disease as it binds minerals, kills good bacteria and distorts proteins. The increase in the following diseases since the 1970’s correlates with the amount of Roundup in the environment and in our bodies:

Autism and Alzheimer’s have reached epidemic proportions: It’s frightening that autism and Alzheimer’s, that weren’t even in the medical textbooks in the 1980’s, have become household terms. Autism’s incidence has increased from two in 10,000 in the 1970’s to currently being 59 in 10,000 according to the Centers of Disease Control (CDC). Alzheimer’s disease was defined as “a rare, pre-senile dementia.” It is now more common than vascular disease as the cause of dementia. Different types of studies—laboratory models, correlation studies and biochemical models—strongly link both diseases to Roundup.

Cancer is now wide-spread: The incidence of cancer has also taken an astronomical leap from 1/100 in the 1970’s to one-of-two people today. Although I worked with an oncologist for three years in the 1980’s, I never saw a case of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, pancreatic cancer or lung cancer in a non-smoker. These cancers are now so common that most of us know of someone who’s had them. Since sugar cane workers in Central America have been exposed to Roundup, they have been dying in their 40’s of renal tubular carcinoma—a disease that was not previously present.

Based on both Roundup’s link to cancer and many international studies, the World Health Organization declared glyphosate a “probable carcinogen” in March of 2016. Shortly after, four farmers filed a lawsuit against Monsanto saying that their exposure to Roundup gave them Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In August of 2018, the Superior Court of California awarded a large settlement to a former school district groundskeeper who stated his Non-Hodgkin lymphoma was caused by prolonged exposure to Roundup. Although Monsanto is contesting this, many other lawsuits have been filed.

The list of diseases continues: Besides autism, Alzheimer’s and cancers, Roundup’s ability to kill bacteria, bind minerals and distort proteins is linked to diseases as varied diabetes, obesity, asthma, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, lupus, neural tube defects and infertility.

When we read about how pervasive Roundup is and how it damages our health, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. When things feel too big for me to handle, a dear friend’s advice comes to me—just keep chipping away at it. Protecting ourselves and our families provides the motivation we’ll need to make continual small changes in what we eat. Here are some suggestions that have helped me:

Eat organic foods when possible: The organic label is the only label that guarantees no herbicides or GE ingredients. That means no Roundup in plants via GE crops or dried-down plants. Meats, dairy and eggs that are “certified organic” cannot come from animals fed with any food containing Roundup. When you know local farmers who grow food sustainably and without herbicides, you’ll want to support them even if they’re not officially “organic.”

Avoid all GE foods: Even if GE foods haven’t been found to be harmful in themselves, all GE foods are “Roundup Ready” and may contain Roundup. Unlike 64 other countries in the world, the United States does not require GE labeling on its food. Congress passed a bill in 2016 which required GE labeling, but since then the USDA has only suggested bar labels that can be read with smart phones or a deceptively smiling sunflower with a “BE” (“bioengineered’) on it. “Bioengineered” is not a common term for GE food. This attempt at deception means we consumers need to keep aware.GE foods include soy, corn, canola, sorghum, sugar beets and potatoes.

Avoid non-GE food that may be dried down with Roundup. If not organic, it’s best to avoid all wheat, oats, canola, flax, peas, lentils, safflower, barley, rice, sunflower seeds and cane sugar.

Avoid processed foods: Over 90% of the food we Americans buy is processed, so this is indeed a tall order. But because flour and sugar may contain Roundup, we might begin by buying these ingredients as organic. I appreciate that even our rural grocery store now carries organic brands of both flour and sugar and many other ingredients. If bread and cookies are part of the family’s fare, we can bake our own! Processed food is convenient, but it is not convenient to be ill.

Grow what food we can: Michael Pollan has been encouraging us for years to convert our lawns into gardens—bit by bit. As urban, suburban and country folks gain knowledge about the contents of corporate food, it may now seem more feasible to begin or to continue growing our own food. Those who haven’t begun may start with some tomatoes and basil plants around the house or in patio containers. Adding a raised bed for vegetables in the lawn may be the next step. When increasing the size of your garden is taken in annual increments, your knowledge and pleasure will grow along with the amount of home-grown food on your dinner table.

Use vinegar for weed control: Here's a handy weed control method that, unlike Roundup, does not promote weed resistance, does not contaminate our food or environment and works great! Vinegar can be found in hardware stores that is 30%. I add just a bit of liquid soap to the vinegar and spray it directly on weeds and grass that I don't want encroaching on the garden. It works within hours!

The corporate food system gradually elbowed its way into our kitchens by promising to make out housework easier. Perhaps we didn’t see how processed food would take over our dinner tables or perhaps we trusted corporations to give our health priority over their profits. When we read about how damaging something like Roundup is to our health, we can feel either victimized or empowered. I believe I alternate between these feelings depending on my mood. But in gathering and sharing this information, I’m hoping we will all be better able to take back control of keeping ourselves healthy.

Some Resources for Roundup/Glyphosate Information

Studies from scientific journals (results online):

The Lancet (British medical journal) prints scientific research from around the world including articles on human and rat toxicity, cancer-causing effects, pneumonitis, effects on red blood cells, toxicity on genes, surfactant’s toxicity on lungs
Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology/glyphosate
International Journal of Toxicology: “Glyphosate-based herbicides are toxic and endocrine disruptors in human cell lines”.

(Gasnier, C)

Interdisciplinary Toxicology: “Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac Sprue and gluten intolerance” (Samsel A)
The Lancet Oncology: WHO’s classification of glyphosate as “group 2A probable carcinogen to humans.”

Scientists or online sites who publish and/or summarize studies for the public:

Stephanie Sineff, PhD from MIT: papers, talks and PowerPoint relating glyphosate to autism.
Dr. Nancy Swanson, epidemiologist, studies relating increase in chronic disease to glyphosate’s effect in immune system, gut bacteria, DNA
Beyondpesticides.org/glyphosate
Dr. Don Huber’s (plant pathologist) Acre’s talk: The Shocking New Science Behind GMO’s and Herbicides.
Art Dunham, DVM, links glyphosate’s chelating ability and antibiotic role to increased problems in animals and humans
Dr. Gilles-Eric Seralini (French) professor of microbiology publishing laboratory studies showing Roundup toxic to cells and an endocrine disruptor
Rodale Institute: online articles periodically summarize research on Roundup
Thierry Vrain, PhD. Canadian molecular biologist: his online talks good summary of available studies on GMO’s and Roundup
Elaine McFadden, MPH, RD: Monsanto convinced EPA to label “secret” early studies linking glyphosate to cancer.
Anthony Samsel, PhD and Sineff: “Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac sprue and gluten intolerance”
Dr Monika Krueger (Danish), Study published in GMO Evidence:“Glyphosate is Toxic to Dairy Cows”
Samsel & Sineff in Surgical, Neurological International: “Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases III: Manganese, neurological diseases, and associated pathologies."
Lawsuits involving Roundup

Roundup's relationship to cancer

https://www.consumernotice.org/environmental/pesticides/roundup/

https://www.consumernotice.org/legal/roundup-lawsuits/

Keeping Safe and Sane When Selling Your Farm Produce

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 20:34:15 GMT

In the 1950s, millions of Americans supported their families by selling produce directly from their farms. Today, corporations grow most of our food and small farmers are required to juggle many legal hurdles to even sell excess produce from their farms. This produce is often superior in nutrition and flavor to what can be purchased in grocery stores, and when we buy locally, we support both the farmer and our community. If you are wanting to sell produce, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about keeping “safe and sane” when selling produce directly from our small farms and backyard homesteads.

Milk: On our 13 acre farm, my husband and I only intended to grow food for ourselves while helping to save endangered breeds of farm animals. However, when our first two Dutch Belted cows together gave ten gallons of milk every day, we quickly needed other outlets for this bounty. The pigs and chickens were glad to help by consuming excess and I made lots of cheese for us. But raw milk is such a beautiful and nutritious food that we did want to share. Besides, some friends and neighbors were eager to have access to this raw milk.

“Sharing milk” sounds innocent enough, but the federal government doesn’t see it that way. Currently, raw milk cannot be sold for human consumption, no matter which state we live in. However, some states allow consumers to buy “shares” of a farmer’s herd and thus access raw milk via “herd-shares.”

I might have found navigating the legal system overwhelming if a national group hadn’t been formed just as we were puzzling over our excess milk. The Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund was founded in 2007 to help small farmers keep legally safe when selling produce from their farms. This national organization provides the basic knowledge of state-specific laws, contracts, advice, customer information and even access to its lawyers, if needed. The annual fee varies for farmers, consumers, artisans or co-op; it is a great bargain to keep our small farms safe.

Here is some of the “legal-speak” that they taught us for doing herd-shares. Rather than buying milk, customers buy shares of the herd. These “owners” then pick up the amount of milk weekly that is equivalent to their share. For our share-holders, one share cost $50. For owning one share, a customer got a gallon of milk-per-week. An individual could buy a half-share, a single share or more than one share. That money was refunded when they no longer wanted milk or when we no longer wanted to do herd-shares.

We were not the owners, but the “agisters,” or care-takers of the herd. The way we got paid for our mucking and milking duties was a monthly fee. You can base the amount of your monthly “agister fee” on what you want to charge per gallon of milk. That fee varies by how many shares (or partial shares) an individual owns and therefore how much milk they get. We charged $28-per-share each month. People picked up their milk weekly on their designated day, but paid monthly at the barn’s entrance while checking off their name for that month. Remember, if there happens to be five Fridays in the month of March, the person who picks up their milk on Friday still pays the same monthly agister fee. In this way, the customers get pleasure with this rare bonus, and we stayed safe with the law.

Besides doing things legally, the other aspect of keeping safe is to have a safe product. That’s nothing different than any of us want to provide for our families, so we only need to hold that standard when increasing production. Raw milk does demand a higher standard of cleanliness than ultra-pasteurized, deadened store milk, but raw milk excels in safety and health because the “good” lactobacilli keep bad bacteria in check. Our job is to keep the bad bacteria in low numbers.

A brief summary of how we keep our milk safe begins with cleaning any dirty teats with sanitary wipes and then dipping each teat in a 2% chlorhexidine mixture. We keep the udder dry to prevent bacteria from dripping down onto the teats. We found it easier to use disposable latex gloves when milking than washing our hands between cows. Our milk buckets are stainless steel which allows us to sanitize with a food-grade iodine solution after a hot soap-and-water wash. The milk bottles are glass and so they are sanitized with a less-expensive diluted bleach solution. Milk is filtered twice and put immediately into a cold refrigerator. We did change from hand-milking to a bucket-milker when the first two cows became three, but this was meant to help our aging hands as much as keeping the milk clean.

Let me share one more thing about safety with herd-shares. When we sought advice from another couple who had begun herd-shares a few years before us, they stressed how important it was not to attempt to “sell” our product. They offered this advice after reading my very enthusiastic, two-page handout on the many health benefits of raw milk. They kindly stressed not to try to “sell” people on how great raw milk is, but instead to allow well-informed people, who truly wanted this product, to find us. This has served us well because having supportive customers who wanted us to succeed made our lives and work much easier. These customers were also less likely to look at raw milk as the culprit if they got a stomach ache.

Although I put safety before sanity, keeping sane while having herd-shares isn’t so difficult either. For us it meant keeping things as simple as possible. The barn was set-up to allow customers to pick up their milk and leave payments without our assistance. This was accomplished by having the milk refrigerator and payment container by the front door of the barn. When originally signing contracts, each customer was given a handout on how to clean and sanitize their own milk containers. They were responsible for leaving these empty and labeled bottles when picking up milk. It seemed obvious that “keeping things simple” meant sharing the work!

Not carrying milk into the house was a great labor-saver too. We turned the barn’s tack-room into a wash-room, complete with a small water heater on a twice-daily timer. The wash-room is just across the hall from the milking stalls and contains a double sink, plenty of counter space for drainage racks and shelves for equipment. A used, restaurant-supply store was our source of the entry-way refrigerator and the wash-room equipment.

Although we really enjoy having raw milk, we don’t enjoy it enough to milk year-round. We found that we could freeze some of the milk for winter consumption while also enjoying the cheddar cheese made during the summer. So part of our sanity was to give the cows and ourselves a break during the winter months. The herd-share members were good sports about viewing their milk as a seasonal food.

Eggs and honey: Having herd-shares also made it easy to sell other seasonal produce when it became more than we could use. Cartons of eggs were put on the top shelf of the milk refrigerator and jars of honey on the adjacent shelf. A sign listed prices and this money would find its way into the same money container that held the agister’s fees.

With the sale of eggs and honey, we had unintentionally entered the world of “cottage food” sales and therefore came under both federal and state cottage food laws. Again, the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the online Cottage Food laws (different for each state), and the local County Extension office can give the required preparation and labeling of produce for each state. Fortunately, my artistic niece loved making colorful labels that not only included the information required by law, but added some pizzazz to the barn’s produce display.

The purpose of our sales was to sell seasonally excess produce. Of greater consequence, small farmers today are attempting to sell directly from their farms as a means to keep financially viable in a world of corporate food. The most successful I’ve seen have begun small and grow their skills and workload as they increase their customer base. One model may begin by selling produce seasonally at a local farmers’ market or road-side stand. This allows you to meet supportive customers who then become the basis for a CSA (community supported agriculture). As the CSA gradually grows, having a designated “farm-market” building at the farm allows produce to be sold to an even larger customer base. This may require both a larger financial and time commitment, but small farmers have a better chance of remaining on financially secure ground when they’ve grown to this stage slowly--slowly enough to keep things financially manageable, but also slowly enough to keep their lives both “sane” and enjoyable.

Kitchen produce: You’re correct if you’re thinking that selling a larger variety of food involves more laws. Fortunately, most states’ Cottage Food laws agree that it’s legal to sell “non-hazardous” foods that are produced in our kitchens. These usually include jams, jellies and baked goods that don’t require refrigeration. Before you begin, check online or with your county’s extension office for what’s required in your state.

Meat: Selling meat is a bit trickier, but not so much so. As with all produce, there are both federal and state laws governing meat sales. When our cows' herd grew to six and some years gave us a majority of bull calves, we sold excess meat. Because we had plenty of time between birth and butchering, it was easy to find customers by word-of-mouth and from previous customers. These people, who bought ½ or whole steer, became the “owners.” This designation was necessary because the facility we use is USDA inspected and approved, but doesn’t have an inspector on site. Therefore, after we bring the steers to the butchers and then get their “hanging weight,” we call the owners and they paid us per-pound of meat. In this facility, the meat is marked “NOT FOR SALE,” with the owner’s name on it. The owners were responsible for picking up their meat and paying the butcher’s fee.

The above method is called “custom slaughter” and works well for our small farm and known customers. However, when you want to sell meat to the general public, you need to use a processor at a “fully-inspected plant.” These facilities in our state had an inspection program that results in each package being marked to allow it to be re-sold anywhere in the state, including directly from the farm. It’s perhaps easiest to unravel which facility does what by going to the nearest meat processing plant and let them advise you where and how to proceed.

Selling meat from chickens has fewer rules than red meat and allows butchering to be done on the farm. For example, Ohio allows processing up to 1,000 birds without an inspector, processing in “open air” and selling directly to the consumer—all without a license. Joel Salatan discusses his method of butchering and selling poultry on the farm in his book, “ Pastured Poultry Profits. ” Having a dedicated team and a mechanized chicken-plucker sure does help!

Keeping Sane: The above guidelines on selling produce and meat directly from the farm is about keeping safe. It’s equally important that we keep “sane” by enjoying what we do and having what we do be profitable.

Both enjoyment and profit are directly related to the size of our operations. If we grow too quickly or too large, profits will actually decrease along with our enjoyment. It amazes me that well-meaning folks—usually those who have never done the work of farming—have so many suggestions for what else we could be doing! We’re wise if we don’t take the bait. Growing slowly, if at all, along the path you’ve chosen is necessary for success.

Every farm family varies in their interests and resources so it’s logical that there’s a wide variety of farm-sale models. After just warning you not incorporate every suggestion you’re given, here’s a suggestion I can’t resist sharing! When displaying your farm’s produce, consider increasing your customer-base by enabling other small farmers to sell their home-produced items at your farm. You might agree on receiving ten percent of their profits for displaying their beeswax products, jams and jellies. At the same time, the increase in your inventory brings you more customers. It feels like a “win-win” if we can effortlessly increase our profit-margin while helping neighbors.

A final part of keeping sane when selling produce directly from the farm is getting a fair profit. It’s obvious that we can’t compete with the corporate food system on prices; it’s that system that is bankrupting small dairy farmers. Perhaps the wisdom of my herd-share mentors applies here: let well-informed customers come to you. They will appreciate the improved nutrition and flavor of your products as well as your humane treatment of the animals that provide their meat and eggs. There’s no need to apologize that a fair price, which includes your labor, is higher than the supermarket’s.

The survival of many small farms may depend on our ability to keep both safe and sane when selling produce directly to the consumer. Small farmers today have the knowledge, ingenuity and work ethic to succeed. Their success in a world of corporate food allows consumers the choice of healthy food. Their success also preserves the land, knowledge and genetics that will make small farms possible in the future.

Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 20:03:28 GMT

The world we have created is a product of our thinking.

It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

Albert Einstein

Many years ago I saw a newspaper article about protesters at a pharmaceutical company. They were contending that drugs were being introduced for human use without sufficient lab testing, but what caught my attention was a photograph of a young woman holding a sign that said, WE ARE NOT ANIMALS! Well, I’ve had a very good time chewing over that.

My enjoyment came from telling myself that I am certainly not a vegetable or a mineral, so I must be an animal. My brain liked discussing that birds, amphibians, reptiles, and most certainly mammals, fit with us humans better than a carrot or a piece of granite. In fact, I didn’t feel that I had much at all in common with any plant or mineral. Since then, whenever I hear animals put in a different category than humans, I feel somewhat smug in thinking that yes indeed, we are animals!

My brain has gone on to explore just how much we have in common with other animals. I might have my hands occupied with preparing a meal while my brain is busy discussing this relationship. “Just look at the other animals that use tools,” I’m thinking. I later look this up to confirm that indeed, chimpanzees, crows, orangutans, elephants, dolphins, sea otters, gorillas and octopuses are all on the list. Of course, my brain then gets side-tracked on what an octopuses’s tool box might look like. Other times I might dwell on a magazine photo that shows other animals demonstrating affection, such as elephants mourning their dead. Our pets make easy comparisons to us humans; a cat might never admit to liking us, but dogs certainly seem to enjoy some of their kin as well as their people. So much pondering after seeing that one photo.

I have to admit that our relationship to other animals has a less glamorous role, which I have not dwelled on. I even suspect that scientists added the additional kingdoms of “fungi, protist and monera” to distance us animals from those smallest of all creatures. After all, the not-so-flattering side of these connections is how much we are literally made up of them. These microscopic organisms actually outnumber human cells in our body by ten to one, living within us and providing vital functions for our survival. DNA sequencing of microbes in our mouth, nose, skin and intestines conclude that they are critical for our survival and actually aid in the digestion of food and its absorption into our bodies. My brain says that’s pretty wonderful, but I understand my great-nephew’s statement that it’s “sort of icky.” Either way, we humans are deeply entwined with other beings.

Nevertheless, my rumination on how much we have in common with other animals has actually gone on for years. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to realize how we humans, although animals, are also intimately connected to all plants and minerals on our planet. The first chapter of Vandana Shiva’s book, “ONENESS vs the 1%,” has opened the door for me to feel this connection. Unlike the delight I enjoy with our relationship to other animals, this realization feels both more tenuous and essential if we and this beautiful planet will survive.

It was easier for me at first to relate to plants than to minerals. We agree that plants are essential for the oxygen we breathe, but what pleases me is that we animals are essential for the carbon dioxide that plants breathe. Plants, by converting this CO2 into sugars, carbohydrates and starches, are then able to grow. The next step, of course, is that these sugars serve as an exchange with the soil’s microbes for the minerals that our bodies need. When realizing our dependence on others, it feels good to me that at least we have CO2 to give in return!

Contemplating our interdependence with plants makes our connection to the soil’s minerals also apparent. The “Periodic Table of the Elements” contains 118 elements, most of which our bodies need, though some only in trace amounts. Yes, our complex human bodies are made up of not only the animal (and fungi and protist and monera!), but also the mineral kingdom. And our bodies couldn’t survive without the fuel and building materials that plants provide.

I admit that feeling cocky about our human role on the planet was enjoyable to me, but I am coming to feel a deep awe in recognizing our total and humble relationship to all of life. Even more than this enjoyment, I can now see that acknowledging our connections to all others on this planet is essential if we humans are to survive. In the animal kingdom, I have seen that other species don’t feel separate from us, so why should we?

I mention that connection because I’m eager to divert this discussion to tell you of interactions I had with other animals when in Juneau, Alaska. Although I was there to work, June’s long daylight hours allow time for both working and walking. When I was hiking paths away from other people, unconcerned ptarmigans, Alaska’s state bird, would forage for food around my feet. A marmot, described as a “small ground squirrel,” won my heart when he or she kept advancing closer to hear my human talk. Repeatedly getting down on all fours to come closer, then standing at sweet attention until we were only a few feet apart. Another time, a small songbird sang while following me down a path until she did a final circle, touching my cheek with her wing. And when a black bear and I were startled to face each other on a steep ravine’s path, our mutual fear changed to curiosity as I talked softly and he got down on all fours to sniff while I was negotiating passage. That moment still feels sacred to me and I hold it with deep gratitude.

How did we humans come to feel so disconnected to others? Acres magazine recently had an article stating that scientists are surprised to learn that trees work cooperatively with smaller neighboring plants for their mutual benefit. Have we instead been looking at all of life as if it’s as competitive as our culture? Perhaps the industrial age had a huge role in separating us from the earth and each other when nature’s inert matter became raw material for exploitation. Did this also allow white settlers in the new world to kill for profit and sport rather than just survival? Similarly, how can today’s corporations and farmers use chemicals and GMO’s that destroy our planet’s soil, water and biodiversity? When we humans feel separate from all other life on this planet, we do irreparable damage. If we could instead change our thinking and realize that all life on earth is as intricately connected as a single spider’s web, I believe we could save ourselves and our beautiful planet.

Becoming aware of our essential connections is how we begin to honor Nature’s complexity. This change of thinking would have the wonderful outcome of us humans being able to feel compassion for all living things as well as each other. We would commit to the future by caring for our seeds, air, water and soil. We might be living in an age now called the Anthropocene, but as we become aware of our need for biodiversity, we help to preserve all life. We do need to eat and to have shelter, but we would learn to enjoy Nature’s gifts with gratitude and without exploitation or accumulation. We would also become aware that divisions between human groups, based on gender, race, religion or wealth, are meaningless. We humans must learn to work cooperatively with all life on this planet, including each other.

This might be the awareness that allowed Indigenous People to both survive and sustain their environments. I was taught by a Lakota Sioux friend to say, Mitakuye Oyasin . This translates as “We are all related.” I admit that I’ve only recently understood that “all” means “everything” on this planet. Now it is with both joy and obligation that I recognize we are indeed intricately part of the animal, vegetable, mineral (and those other tiny kingdoms) web of life. Living with more connection and sustainability is far more joyous and survivable than feeling like a smug and isolated human animal.

See One, Do One, Teach One

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 15:20:48 GMT

I thought medical school was the most intense learning period of my life, but that was before I began homesteading. The knowledge it takes to grow food and care for the land and animals certainly rivals that which is required to become a doctor. Unfortunately, I began learning homesteading skills with an older brain than when in school, but in either situation the phrase, See one, do one, teach one , has served me well.

We’ve all been told that making mistakes is part of continual learning. Well, my subconscious must believe that if I’m to judge by the number of mistakes I’ve made. I do regret turning off all the valves under the windmill and breaking the windmill shaft. I recently learned that not removing the placenta after a cow’s birth resulted in her aspirating it, which resulted in pneumonia. I believe the phrase is, “Wish I knew then what I know now.” But the better way would have been to have a mentor explain these things beforehand. Or to have me bright enough to ask about those things beforehand.

That’s where see one, do one, teach one becomes helpful in avoiding mistakes. I’ve become immune to the mistakes that only damage my pride, but similar to when I never wanted to hurt a patient, I now don’t want to hurt an animal or break equipment.

When we are intent on learning, being able to “see one” gets our full attention. If we then can do the same task under close supervision, we’ll better remember how to do it the next time. If the next time is when we have someone by our side who is learning, we will reinforce our own learning so that it becomes part of our permanent memory. That’s just as true when helping the delivery of a human baby or reviving an exhausted calf. Books and YouTubes are helpful, but there’s nothing like on-the- job-training.

After decades on our farm, my husband and I are still learning more about the orchard, bees, soil, crops, pasture, cows, chickens and turkeys. The animals and garden also require the know-how for growing hay, nutrient-dense food, butchering, processing and preserving. No wonder this rivals medical school for our need to know.

I enjoy sharing and teaching, so therefore I thought I’d be good at it. Unfortunately, I discovered that I often fell short of my

intent. When I felt we had “mastered” most of our homesteading skills, I invited interns to the farm for the summer. I wanted to teach them everything from starting and tending plants to harvesting, cooking and preserving their produce. That’s when I learned that being a teacher is tricky. Beginners in any field may hesitate to ask questions that seem “stupid” or they may hesitate to ask something they thought they should already know. Kari, one of my favorite interns, was different. She used “sign language” to indicate when she had no idea what I was talking about. One time, after gathering vegetables from the garden, we stood around the kitchen counter preparing a stir-fry. When I asked her to cut the vegetables to the size we would need, Kari simply gave a clap of her hands before extending them out palms up accompanied by a puzzled look. She was right. First we need to “see one” before we can “do one!”

What I showed Kari that day was what my dear brother-in-law, a chef, had shown me. “Big Jim” would kindly offer a suggestion as he passed through the kitchen. What he shared has become important in my otherwise limited kitchen know-how. Now that he has died, I realize what any of us offer in our lifetimes may ripple out to others long we have gone.

I’m finding that I still take too much for granted when I attempt to pass on skills. My wonderful niece, now 22 years-old, spent a decade of summers with us beginning with her pre-teen years. She was competent, enthused and a fast learner who began with decorating egg cartons and collecting the egg money. Her interests gradually increased to cheese-making, gardening, some cooking and preserving food. When she came for a visit last spring before camping with her friend, I gave them a quart of peaches to eat with their meals. She later returned it unopened because they didn’t know how to open the lid without “breaking the canning jar.” She knew how to grow, cook and preserve food, but I had sent the poor girl back to the city before winter when we ate the preserved food! It’s the simplest things sometimes that become unnecessary obstacles.

Sometimes, I get enthused and don’t take into account what can be absorbed by children. They certainly have the intelligence and often the attention to learn, but of course not the vocabulary that took me years to acquire. For example, I was pretty enthused to explain how bees are important for pollination to a young neighbor as we knelt by the buckwheat watching bees. He finally turned his large and alarmed eyes to me and said, “It’s not nice to throw trash around!” There was a long pause before I realized that he understood “pollute” but not “pollinate.” Of course, that still makes me chuckle.

Occasionally, it’s better to teach by just doing rather than talking. The power of “seeing one” was brought home to me when I watched our eleven-year-old granddaughter in the kitchen. She doesn’t work “solo” in the kitchen at home, but I’m quite fascinated watching her skills when she’s unleashed in our kitchen. To her grandma, she is amazingly competent at chopping, grating, mixing and cooking. The cleaning-up part must be the toughest because she hasn’t quite mastered that yet! However, by just watching her mother at home, she’s become quite the cook. “Seeing one,” is so important.

I admit that I have the most trouble with putting my own agenda aside when someone stops by to ask for help. Yes—I want others to do that for me, but it is sure inconvenient for my Type-A personality who is on a schedule! In truth, I inevitably find it an enjoyable experience to share with others who want to learn. It’s not only energizing for me, but I usually learn something in return that I hadn’t questioned before.

Teaching others may sound very altruistic, but there’s a whole lot in it for us. Learning one new thing a day is supposed to be good for our brains. And it’s fun. The one new thing may be putting together a new recipe, identifying an unknown insect or figuring out how to use a new tool. It could even be learning a new vocabulary word—like pollinate! And teaching gives us connections to others which we humans require for a meaningful life. I believe that See one, do one, teach one, is an important key to a happier life for ourselves and others.

What Native People Taught Me

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 15:01:31 GMT

Friends talked of using the time of social distancing during Covid to “clear the clutter” at their homes, so as winter arrived and farm chores decreased, I decided to do the same. Unfortunately, my attempts quickly involved more reminiscing than decluttering. High on a closet shelf, I rediscovered the fifty-year-old aerograms that I had written home as a twenty-year-old in Peace Corps. Those blue, single-sheet letters from a West African village in the Sahara contained so much joy that I became motivated to dig out letters and photos from a later time which also felt joyful to me.

That later time was when I joined Indian Health Service in my fifties, and worked with Native Peoples’ tribes in the southwest United States and Alaska. This winter of reminiscing has helped me to remember why I could feel so at home with people living in such extremes: the desert’s heat or the forty-below temperatures of the arctic.

In retrospect, what seemed to give me joy when living with either the Hausa of Niger or the Inuit of the arctic was their strong sense of community. I felt embraced in cultures where community is defined more by how people think and act than by location. For example, these Native Peoples had very few personal possessions, and yet individuals didn’t strive for more; food, clothing or money frequently flowed from one household to another. I witnessed Hausa people in Niger not thanking each other when gifts were exchanged; they thanked God that they were able to either give or receive. Rather than claiming ownership or striving to accumulate wealth, they simply expressed gratitude for being able to share.

Examples of strong communities also abound in the arctic. When Inuit men go out on the ocean with their small seal-skin canoes, they know others in the community will take care of their families. When these hunters return, all the villagers go down to the ocean to help butcher the whale or seal. No money is exchanged when the meat is divided among the entire village, including the elderly and the disabled. They all survive together.

If an individual has been able to accumulate money or goods, a “potlatch” is held. This is where those who have more than others are honored to give away what they don’t need. I was able to attend a potlatch in Bethel, Alaska and it was a festive occasion where the person being honored was the one giving the gifts. With everyone in this Yup’ik community dressed in their best and in high spirits, it resembled a “backwards birthday party” where the guests received rather than gave gifts. The gift was given or received with the same high enthusiasm whether it was a woven basket, tundra berries preserved in seal oil, dried salmon or even a seal fur.

A century ago, a missionary wrote home from that same community telling how “stupid” the native boys were because it took him a year to teach the children to play baseball. What he did not understand is that cooperation is essential for any community to

survive; competition results in winners and losers and a true community does not have losers. As someone who has always rooted for the underdog, that was an easy lesson for me to absorb.

It is not only these kinds of communities that I miss. I was taught the Lakota phrase Mitakuye Oyasin by a Lakota-Sioux friend who lives in Ohio. These words are usually translated as “we are all related.” This concept, which seemed universal to the different communities I lived in, feels natural to me. Not only do I like being “connected” to all life on this planet, but working on a farm makes it evident that nature’s laws apply to all species, including us.

There is a delightful story told to me by an Inuit man that takes this connection even further. Before going out on a whale hunt, the native people of the arctic have a “blanket toss,” where one person is thrown into the air to look far out to sea. I always assumed this was done to see if there were whales present. “Oh no,” an elder told me. It was to let the whale know that they needed its meat. “How else could we, in our small seal-skin canoes, ever capture a whale if it did not give itself to us?,” he asked convincingly. Well, how else indeed? At home, our meal-time prayer is one of gratitude to our homestead’s beautiful animals that provide our food. They depend on us to survive as we depend on them.

That we are “all one" is also exemplified by the Tsimshian people in Metlakatla, Alaska. They each inherit their “totem” animal from their mother: killer whale, raven, wolf or bald eagle. These animals, and others, are referred to as their brothers and sisters. I was delighted to learn from a Tsimshian friend that being one with all living things included not only other animals, but plants. When I was told to turn right at Grandfather tree, I no longer feared getting lost when hiking. It makes me smile to remember that “Grandfather” actually had a spur pointing the correct way. I’ve had a lifetime of wanting to touch, embrace and talk to trees. Being with people who openly felt a kinship to trees felt like coming home.

In addition to Native Peoples’ concept of community and their sense of being related to all life, I also value that many of these people take into account the welfare of “seven generations to come” when making decision. For those of us who strive to leave our corner of the world a better place than we found it, it feels irresponsible that some in our culture prioritize wealth-building above the welfare of future generations. As we watch our planet being plundered, species becoming extinct, topsoil disappearing and precious water contaminated in the name of profit, we have to ask, “Don’t these people also have children and grandchildren?”

So, here I am, living in one culture while trying to incorporate the values of other cultures. This time of reminiscing has allowed me to see that I don’t need to live with Native People to live in harmony with what they taught me. We who are close to the earth—gardening, tending animals, caring for bees, nurturing an orchard—are already doing many of the things that helped Native Peoples to thrive.

Realizing that these concepts are already woven into my life has been empowering to me and makes these years richer in many ways.

One important realization is that, like Native Peoples, I have a caring community. We depend on our neighbors as we help each other during haying season, a difficult calving, an unexpected surgery or with excess garden produce. Not exchanging money means the neighborly exchanges continue, and that is community.

Perhaps my husband and I aren’t doing so badly either in recognizing that “we are all one.” We’ve been able to create habitat for other species by planting wide fencerows and restoring a conventionally-farmed field into wetlands and grasslands. Our neighbor is probably correct when he calls our farm animals “spoiled,” but if each of us has but one precious life, then perhaps a bit of spoiling is okay—especially when it brings us enjoyment. We are “all one” in many ways.

I’ve also come to feel better about our ability to plan for seven generations to come. Like many of you, we work on regenerating topsoil and helping to save heirloom animals and seeds because that seems critical for our children’s ability to grow food. We also want them to have a stable climate, so I became alarmed two decades ago when I witnessed climate change already evident in the arctic. Even though individual effort may seem like a drop in the bucket, we had solar panels installed and I became more faithful about using the clothes line. My husband dug a cistern to contain rain water from roofs for the garden. We want future generations to not only have soil to grow their food, but also have drinkable water and a stable climate.

It’s probably time for me to incorporate a potlatch into our routine because our house still has its share of clutter! Even so, this time of reminiscing has allowed me to appreciate that we don’t need to wait for our culture to change in order to live what we believe. This is true for us whether we live in a city, suburb or farm; we do have the power to live by the values that will make things better for ourselves, future generations and all life on this planet. It’s not just what Native Peoples know. That wisdom is deep inside each of us.

Helping Children Find Joy in Nature

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 14:28:31 GMT

We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment.

To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

(Jack Gilbert)

I love being outdoors. I’ve no doubt that the joy nature gives me was first fostered when I was a child and had the freedom to wander the fields, woods and marshy lakesides of rural Minnesota. I was also fortunate to have parents and other adults share their love of nature with me.

I want today’s children to also witness nature’s miracles and to care about the natural world. People need nature—and now more than ever, nature needs the support of people. If we can help children to find joy in nature, nature will benefit from their advocacy.

To maintain a bond with nature, it’s essential to enjoy it. Enjoyment happens when we slow down and closely observe the natural world around us. It’s also human nature to avoid the feelings of sadness and hopelessness such as when we read the following facts:

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered
Dozens of songbird species lost more than 50 per cent of their populations between 1970 and 2014
One-third of America’s wildlife species are at increased risk of extinction

If we human beings are wired to spend time with what gives us joy and energy, then these facts won’t motivate us to spend time with nature. Instead, let’s give priority to enjoying nature. When we include children in this enjoyment, we enhance the quality of all our lives. Equally important, we increase the number of people who actively support nature. Even though what I’m talking about is fun and allows all ages to participate, it may still seem difficult to know where to begin. After all, how can we add more projects when we and our children are so busy?

Beginning is actually easy, not only because it is fun, but it can be quite simple. For example, we could begin by joining our children in the backyard and watching an ant colony. It may seem like there isn’t much to see at first, but the more we learn about ants, the more exciting we’ll find their world. If the biologist, E. O. Wilson, spent his forty-year career studying only ants, there must be something special happening in the ant world. He said, "Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans." That makes them worth an afternoon’s observation! We can gain a deeper understanding of the ants’ world with children by reading together Judy Allen’s book, Are You an Ant?

Observing and identifying songbirds can involve all members of the family in a convenient and year-round project. Bird feeders positioned close to a house window allow all ages to report what they see. As children get older, they can enter dates and bird names in a tablet shared by all family members but when the preschooler shouts, “red bird, red bird,” it behooves us to come quickly and with equal enthusiasm. Our excitement nurtures our children’s life-long love of nature.

Of course there’s so much more to explore in nature. Teaching an older child to use a magnifying glass or even a microscope opens up complex worlds. A bit of pond water and enthused adults result in memories a child will hold forever. Even though we might not know protozoa from arthropods, it’s wonderful for children to see adults excited about learning new things. To help us out with pond water, Peter Loewer and Jean Jenkins have written, Pond Water Zoo: An Introduction to Microscopic Life.

I find that both enjoyment and learning are increased when nature is brought temporarily indoors for close and continual observation. Don’t worry—I’m only talking about temporary quarters and little, contained critters like caterpillars and tadpoles! The excitement is contagious when eggs are maturing into frogs or when caterpillars transform into butterflies. Our porch table provides a convenient, temporary home that is frequently seen by the entire family as well as neighbors.

Frogs are pretty amazing at any age as they develop from eggs to tadpoles to frogs. By early April, a large puddle by our wetlands usually contains “frogspawn” or large groups of eggs. A few eggs in a glass bowl allow the family to watch their development as the eggs transform into embryos that then escape their clear-jelly eggs as tadpoles. These tiny tadpoles swim with tails and breathe through gills as they develop legs and lungs. It’s a big day at our house when they are then ready to go back to their pond. Details of their development are easier to observe after reading Anna Milbourne’s children’s book, Tadpoles and Frogs. It has beautiful photographs and information we can all enjoy.

Does being aware of nature always promise such an idyllic experience? The answer is a definite no, but realistic outcomes tell us a lot about nature too. When my daughter was six years-old and already an animal lover, we faithfully carried fresh pond water to “our” tadpoles in their fish bowl as we watched them develop into small frogs. It was with great ceremony that we carefully carried their bowl across the meadow to the creek. Ever so carefully, we lowered the bowl into the water to ease the baby frogs into the creek, when snap, snap, snap-- fish came out of nowhere and rapidly ate them! I hope I said something wise at that time, but I only remember the two of us kneeling there wide-eyed and mouths agape.

When spring turns into early summer, we get another chance to test our courage by observing the butterflies’ complex life-cycle. This project is also easier to observe indoors by the one-time purchase of a butterfly enclosure. People in the eastern United States often focus on the monarch butterfly because of its easily-identified beauty and endangered status. Even urban folks now plant milkweed in their yards as food for the monarch’s five “instars” or caterpillar stages. Children learn to watch adult monarchs who hover around milkweed before laying their eggs. Their younger eyes excel at spotting the tiny, white eggs on the under-side of milkweed leaves. Bringing a milkweed leaf indoors with an egg or tiny caterpillar begins four weeks of observation as an egg changes to caterpillar, then to chrysalis and finally to butterfly. During lulls in the action--and when not busy fetching fresh milkweed leaves--young children will know what to anticipate if we have first read together Deborah Heiligman’s book, “From caterpillar to Butterfly.” Every stage of the monarch’s growth is so beautiful and miraculous that we adults are also easily kept in awe.

The outdoor journey of a caterpillar to maturity is as precarious as that of the tadpole to mature frog. It’s estimated that only one out of ten caterpillars survives to become a butterfly. I don’t think our lesson is that all tadpoles and caterpillars need rescuing. I do have to chuckle, however, when I realize my brain wants to label all predators as “bad,” and their prey as needing to be rescued. I have to admit that the fish weren’t evil because they ate our little frogs and the beautiful songbird isn’t bad when she feeds caterpillars to her young.

Our human brains automatically categorize and label new things to make sense of the world and so we often label things as either good or bad. Perhaps then, our most important lesson from observing nature is to humbly recognize how complex and inter-related all living systems are. The elimination of wolves in Yellowstone Park demonstrated this on a larger scale than our backyards. Without predators, deer and elk proliferated and the land became overgrazed. River banks became eroded and birds, beavers, mice and bears disappeared. When we attempt to eliminate what we see as “bad” in nature, entire ecosystems unravel.

On a smaller scale, ecosystems unravel in our yards, gardens and farms when we attempt to eliminate “bad” weeds, insects or predators. Taking time with youngsters to look closely at nature will hopefully give us the awareness needed to respect nature’s complex interrelationships.

This awareness might, for example, result in habitat for hundreds of species if we were to substitute native plants for sterile, manicured lawns. Chemicals disappear as we begin to understand nature’s delicate balance. We become skilled at avoiding milkweed when mowing the meadow and have a great excuse for planting flowers in our vegetable gardens. Viewing our environment through nature’s eyes may also entice us to provide additional habitat with wider fencerows or even setting aside some farmland as wildlife habitat. Our children’s enthusiasm may someday influence their entire communities as they share their love and knowledge of the natural world.

Living a life where nature fills ordinary moments with joy and gratitude can make every day special. These shared moments of excitement and awe create a relationship with wildlife that will enrich our children’s entire lives. In return, we of all ages cannot help but support nature when we have come to treasure its beauty.

The Ultimate How-To for Home Poultry Processing: Balancing the Practical and Emotional Aspects

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 20:32:51 GMT

We enjoy our heritage breed chickens and turkeys so much that some people question how we can butcher them ourselves. We've raised them from babies, delighted in watching them grow, named those that we can identify by looks or personalities, and tried to give them a safe and enjoyable upbringing. But inevitably, 50% are boys and not only does adolescence mean fighting, but there's no way we're going to help save their genetics by having a geriatric flock. So our option is either to send the excess males and unproductive hens off to the butcher or to butcher them ourselves.

I do understand why some people say they cannot kill the birds they raise. But I do not want them going through such a frightening process of transport only to be treated like inanimate objects on an assembly line. Because my husband and I had help in making butchering more humane for the birds and more tolerable for us, I want to share that with you. Additionally, I want to show you our set-up for making the butchering easier for us.

Borrowing Native People's Attitudes and Ceremonies:

When I worked as a family practice doctor with Native People in the southwest and in Alaska, I admired the way they related to other animals, especially those they killed for food. Rather than pride, they express both gratitude and reverence towards the animal who gave their lives so they and their community could live.

I was glad that the first time my husband and I butchered chickens that a native friend, David, who has Lakota-Sioux heritage, offered to help. He first "smudged" the working area with sticks of sage and as he gently handled each chicken, he would say, Mitakuye Oyasin , or, "We are all related." I may no longer use sage, but I repeat this phrase when holding each bird to remind myself of our mutual dependency. Just as I had cared for them, they now provided food so that we can live.

David also added a bit of levity by telling some of the cockerels with a wink that there would be "really cute chicks where they are going!"

Through the years, we have maintained the "reverence" for handling our animals when it's time to butcher. Turkeys are so large that we carry each one in our arms. We carry the chickens in a homemade crate that comfortably holds about five birds at a time, bringing them from the chicken house or chicken tractor. They sit in the shade and peck on grass close to the butchering area. My role is to take one bird out at a time, moving slowly and talking softly. By tucking its head under my cupped hand while holding the chicken in my other arm, I sway back and forth gently while saying Mitakuye Oyasin , or sometimes just "thank you." The chicken remains calm, almost "hypnotized," as we then gently invert it into a cone.

Even with these rituals and attempting to give the birds a "good death," we are emotionally exhausted after a couple mornings of butchering and then take a few days break from butchering.

Step-by-step set-up for butchering:

The cones:

Cones can be purchased locally at stores like TSC along with other poultry processing equipment. We chose to have five, perhaps because that's how many chickens could fit comfortably in the crate. We also have one large cone for the turkeys. If you make your own, take care not to have sharp edges.

Both safety and ease of butchering are facilitated with a heavy duty poultry shear and at least one very sharp knife for each person. We had to stop and resharpen our knives after every couple of chickens.

The how-to:

Chickens are gently placed in the cones one-by-one. Using one hand to stretch the neck, make a quick cut with a sharp knife across the neck. The blood is caught in a dry wall bucket below each cone. The blood and all the feathers are later buried in the compost pile.

A cable clamp that will hold their legs together is conveniently hung by each cone. We place one around their ankles as soon as they're placed in the cone. After the head is cut, the clamp keeps the chicken from coming out of the cone during their "flopping around" movement.

Scalding:

There are certainly fancier set-ups than ours, but buying a 13-acre farm, that had belonged to so many generations before us, meant that we could scrounge some equipment from the barn loft and the outbuildings. The large scalding pot is made of aluminum, but of course any large pot, such as stainless, would work. Never hesitate to get used equipment locally from Craigslist or even online from eBay.

After the birds have "bled out," their heads are removed with shears and they are then held by the legs and dipped in and out of the hot water until the feathers can be easily pulled out. Not having the water too hot is important because you don't want their skin to tear. A long-stemmed thermometer will help you keep the temperature between 145 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

Our thermometer is an analog thermometer that I use for cheese-making, but I can see that a digital one would work really well.

Plucking:

When we've scalded our chickens properly, they will pluck easily without tearing the skin. An electrically powered chicken plucker sure helps, and our homemade plucker is a Whizbang plucker made with instructions and parts. There are similar pluckers that can be bought from local stores.

If you are only butchering a few chickens, hand-plucking, after scalding, is certainly feasible. In truth, I am only repeating my mother's memories of growing up on a small farm where a single chicken was butchered for Sunday dinner. I'm pretty spoiled by having a plucker when doing more birds!

Gutting and cleaning:

Once the chicken is plucked, it's carried to the near-by work table for "eviscerating" and then immediately put into a large cooler with ice water.

We began learning about how to clean a chicken from YouTubes and books. However, not being in a rush and having good tools (make sure those knives are sharp!), really helps. I admit that we still haven't learned to eat the liver, gizzard and heart--but these innards provide our dog with her favorite food. Most of the other innards are buried in the compost pile.

Our work table is a used countertop from Craigslist. By working under the lean-to in front of the barn, we're in shade by mid-morning. This location also gives us access to running water (the hose hooks up to the sink!) and electricity for the plucker.

The "inedible" parts:

In the buckets below the cones there will be quite a bit of blood. Below the plucker there will be a pile of feathers. In the buckets below the "butchering tables" there will be both feet and innards like the intestines, heart, gizzard, lungs, and gonads. How do dispose of what we don't want to eat?

Neighbors taught us that we could be eating more of the birds, and my farming grandparents with their seven children would certainly have agreed. The liver, gizzard, and heart are certainly "edible" and nutritious. I certainly respect those who "waste not."

Because we have two dogs, we "waste not" also, b y sharing with them! I cook the necks, livers, hearts, and gizzards (which first need their inner lining removed) and use them for dog food through the winter. We recently saw dried chicken feet for sale at the farmers' market which were being sold for rather expensive dog treats. Because the feet are clean after going through the plucker, I simply give them about ten minutes on a cookie sheet in a 350 degree oven and then cool and freeze them. The dogs now rank them as one of their favorite treats!

We could bag the rest of the innards, blood and feathers for the landfill, but because we are surrounded by woods and not people, we carry all the "wastes" into the woods where it disappears overnight. The chickens are not wasted while feeding many.

Into the freezer:

Once the large cooler is filling with clean birds, its time to get them dry and into freezer bags. Benches behind the work table are draped with towels and the birds are taken out, one-by-one and dried thorough inside and out. Large and medium-sized freezer bags are kept in a storage container that we use from one year to the next. After placing each bird in a bag and twisting the top shut, air needs to be removed from the bag. My fancy method of doing this is to insert a straw through the narrow opening, being careful to not touch the chicken, and suck. I then quickly withdraw the straw and do a final twist to close the opening. I can imagine you wrinkling your nose at this primitive method, but I know no better way!

After each couple of birds are done, I get them as quickly as possible into the freezer.

Your reward:

Processing a live chicken or turkey involves both emotions and a learning curve that are not easy, but it allows us to produce our own food in an ethical and sustainable manner.

A practical aspect of cooking a heritage breed bird , as opposed to a quickly raised Cornish Cross chicken, is that heirloom breeds need to be cooked slowly on a lower heat. Because the old breeds take about 18 weeks to mature instead of the hybrid's eight weeks, their protein is more complex and flavorful. Depending on the chicken's size and age, you'll want to keep the oven temperature below 325 degrees for about 25 minutes per pound.

I am grateful to have such nutritious food from the beautiful farm animals. Our grace before eating has become one of thanks to our birds for giving their lives for our meal.

How to Have Your Own Milk Cow and Why You Should Consider An Heirloom Breed

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 17:18:39 GMT

My experience with having cows is only with the rare Dutch Belted breed that is considered a milk rather than beef cow. Therefore, before discussing the basics of having your own cow of any breed, I will just mention why we found these cows to be a wonderful fit for a homestead.

Why we chose a heirloom breed of cows:

You'll notice that all the photos you see are of a "Oreo cookie cows," so I confess that in addition to these Dutch Belted cows being listed as "critically endangered" by The Livestock Conservancy , I chose them for their beauty. My husband and I had never even been around cows before we launched this new project, but we were delighted to learn that all heirloom breeds also have many other advantages to the corporate milk or beef cows. Here are some that proved important to our homestead:

The old breeds of cows that survived had easy births, a trait which proves to be an economic and time-saving asset.
Heirloom breeds are basically healthy and don't need the frequent veterinary interventions that modern cows rely on.
These cows remember how to keep their heads to the ground and graze, a trait that "modern" cows have lost.
Their compost and straw bedding provided the compost which was essential for the gardens.

Benefits of having cows:

In addition to the above benefits that heritage breeds offer, cows in general enhance a homestead and your dinner table in many ways:

I learned to love fresh, raw milk not only to drink, but from the cheeses and ice cream that are made from it.
Beef from the cows that are grass-fed gives us affordable steaks which are highly nutritious and delicious.
Manure may not sound like a benefit, but when it turns into beautiful compost that grows our vegetables, it's a huge asset.
Cows are delightful to be around--trusting (when treated kindly), curious and mostly cooperative!

Good forage for healthy cows and nutritious produce:

Grazing without grains:

It's important to us that our cows eat well. We know that large dairies feed a lot of grain and our neighbors with cows did the same. It makes no sense to us that these old breed cows, or any animal with a rumen, eat grain and not grass. Good forage meant that we drilled forbs and clover into the meadow as well as into the hay field. Our reward was not only having the cows stay healthy, but it resulted in delicious and highly nutritious food for us.

Having a small tractor and buying equipment to bale hay (another steep learning curve!) was part of the process of making the farm sustainable. We next learned about rotational grazing and used electric wire to divide the pasture into sections and "rotated" the cows so that they didn't exhaust the forage.

Once we were baling our own small bales, we purchased a bale unroller that we could pull behind the Kubota when the pasture was dormant. How fun to have the cows kicking up their heels and chasing after us! This kept their poop and urine distributed in the meadow while their hoofs worked in all the organic material to enrich the soil.

Having cows means having milk:

Equipment:

We got our first two cows, Addie and Annie, when they were within two weeks of giving birth. Although we had worked to get the old barn ready, we had no experience with cows. We had found stanchions in the loft and made mangers for two of the stalIs. We had to guess what height to hang the stanchions and the cows were good sports about adjusting to our version of a milking stall.

We were happy to have access to their raw milk, but knew how important it was to keep everything as sanitized as possible so we wouldn't introduce "bad" bacteria into the milk. We therefore bought stainless steel milking buckets and two ten-liter stainless steel containers because they could be washed and then sanitized with an iodine solution. Filters were purchased for when we transferred the milk from the buckets into the larger, closed containers.

Skills:

We knew that the cows would need milking after giving birth,

but we had never even seen a cow be milked, and so had to learn quickly. I have a clear memory of sitting at the kitchen table with Joann S. Grohman’s book, Keeping a Family Cow , while my husband and I practiced the hand movements we would need to tease milk out of a teat. The cows hadn’t seen a stanchion before and we hadn’t seen a teat, so at least we were on equal footing while we worked things out!

Since that early beginning, we’ve been on a constant learning curve aided by books, neighbors, and seasoned members of the Dutch Belted Association . Having experienced neighbors who help with each new challenge has been essential for us. It seems that the best learning is done when the situation requires it and I certainly appreciate the help we’ve received.

Our milking didn’t stay simple for long. The first two Dutch Belted cows are so rare that they are "bred up" from holstein cows. Our first cows were still 25% holsteins and between the two of them, gave us ten gallons of milk a day with twice-a-day milking. That’s a lot of milk for the two of us. So, we drank a lot of milk and enjoyed the obligation of eating ice cream. The chickens and pigs drank a lot of milk, and we ate a lot of cheese. I studied Ricki Carroll’s, Home Cheese Making book and we ate mozzarella, yogurt and even made and stored cheddar cheese for winter. I enjoyed the ease of making “clabbered cheese,” which only needs to sit in its sanitized, stainless steel, ten liter container in the warmth of the sun to separate into curds and whey. Clabbered cheese has a "tang" that goes well with a bit of honey from the beehives. The first few months after birth while the calves were small, we had a whole lot of milk!

Artificial Insemination:

AI:

While the rest of the world was learning about "artificial intelligence," we were learning about "artificial insemination," or "AI." Because the Dutch Belted cows are remain so rare, we needed to use AI instead of a bull to get them pregnant. Keeping pure Dutch Belted semen is part of our commitment to protecting this rare breed.

Our neighbor lets us keep the semen in his liquid nitrogen tank and we share a skilled person to do the insemination. We built a "head-gate" in the barn's lean-to where a cow can be bred. A cow should have two months of being “dry” before she gets pregnant again. For us, that means our kitchen calendar looks like we have a full social life; but actually it’s full of the dates of when each cow should come into heat. “Heat” may present as a lot of mooing and the cow “standing” while another jumps on her. Other times, especially when the weather is hot, it’s difficult to even see that much action. We’ve been using scratch-off heat detectors to help us know when a cow has been jumped on by another.

Birthing:

Nine months after successful insemination comes the birth. Such a large mammal to share the same gestation time as a human! Some people with cows are pretty relaxed about the births and let the cows stay out in the pasture with the herd. I’m just not the laid-back type, and so my husband and I alternate two hour checks during the nights when a cow looks ready to calf. Having an old breed means they usually have easy births, but we did learn to call the vet if the bag of water breaks and the calf doesn't appear within the next 15 minutes or so. What’s helped me the most is finally getting brave enough to put my hand up the birth canal to determine the position of the calf. If I can feel a nose and a couple of hoofs turned upright, everything should be fine. The majority of time, we are grateful for these cows’ easy births.

Mixing pleasure with profits:

Our farming neighbors have accused us of spoiling our cows but perhaps that's more than okay if "spoiling" means truly enjoying them. Yes, we do have the calves stay with their moms until the natural weaning age of nine months, but our busy homestead makes that easier for us to manage everything. It also means we've never had a sick calf. At nine months of age the steers have to go to the butchers to become "grass-fed, milk-fed, baby beef." The heifers are separated from their moms for a couple of weeks or more until weaned.

The cows give us so much in addition to milk and meat. They certainly make this little homestead more “productive” and “sustainable.” The meadow has thrived from continually drilling in more varieties of forbs and grasses. The cows’ grazing, pooping, and lightly tilling the soil has made a remarkable improvement in the forage and soil. Their compost seems essential for our garden. We’ve learned to grow and bale good hay while keeping the herd small enough to feed even during drought years.

We’ve also met interesting people and made money when selling calves. And of course, our diet has been greatly enhanced with the milk and meat that they provide. I guess we could say that cows provide a challenging learning curve while improving both our health and the health of the farm.

Raising Your Own Poultry to Enrich Your Life and Help Preserve Rare Breeds

Tue, 30 May 2023 20:29:17 GMT

Why have poultry?

Why bother?

It doesn’t take much land to produce both meat and eggs, so even city-dwellers can fit them in a small space.
It gives you and your children a “farm” experience without a huge investment.
They can be easier to care for than a dog (at least our dog!).
Chickens are entertaining and make good pets.
You can enjoy their eggs without having a noisy rooster.
The eggs and meat you get from your own chickens can be far healthier than what you get from the store.

Chickens or turkeys?:

We were able to have both chickens and turkeys on our 13-acre farm, but many of you will find having just chickens more feasible. However, the Narragansett turkeys we had were a joy. Even the toms are friendly and the hens are wonderful mothers. When we hatched out their eggs in the incubator instead, the babies are adorable. Baby turkeys are not as fearful as the chickens became after the first few days of age. The downside of friendly babies is the real possibility of "imprinting" them so that it's impossible to be outdoors without them underfoot! But for me, enjoying these beautiful animals is a big reason to have them.

My intention with the following is to focus on raising chickens, but you'll find that this article also applies to turkeys and ducks. Enjoy!

Newborn Narragansett turkey poult

Choosing the best breed for you:

Heirloom or hybrid?

What you want to do with your chickens will be the biggest determinant of what breed you want. We wanted birds that would be good both for eggs and meat and we also wanted to help save old breeds. We became members of the Livestock Conservancy and choose the "critically endangered" Dorking chickens. It's fun to think that Julius Caesar actually brought this breed to England!

Besides choosing the breed, you'll enjoy choosing what variety you want. We were originally able to get the Silver Grey Dorking chickens from Murray McMurray Hatchery . When we decided to go with the rarer "Colored" and "Red" Dorkings, we were able to get them from members of the Livestock Conservancy. It was enjoyable after that to be able to share these chickens' genetics with others who wanted to raise them.

If you're mostly concerned with raising meat birds, the short-lived Cornish Cross birds that are butchered at two months of age work well. They are what we buy in the grocery store, so there is a lot of meat per bird and they easily cook to give tender meat.

If it's high production layers you want, Leghorns are excellent. Many of this type of bird can be found at farm stores or TSC in the springtime.

Red, the red Dorking rooster and two of his hens

Why have a rooster?:

We've always had a rooster, but I realize that city-dwellers may not have that option because of ordinances that don't allow them. Without roosters, you will still get those precious eggs and the delight of having hens scratching around for bugs in your yard. But, of course, what you won't have are fertile eggs.

The upside to eggs not being fertile is that you'll never have a "blood spot" on the yolk from an egg that was left under a hen for a day or two. That blood spot is the beginning of a baby chick and so it is a sign that there's a rooster around that is doing his job.

The hens seem to like having a rooster with them, and perhaps because of the breed or because our roosters were raised on our homestead, they were always friendly

"Buddy," the Silver Grey Dorking rooster

Housing:

Purposes of shelter:

When we plan housing for our poultry, we want to keep in mind what purposes it has:

Shelter from extremes in weather
Protection from predators, especially at night
A place to roost
Nests of proper size both for laying eggs and for sitting weeks while hatching eggs

When we moved to our 13-acre homestead, all the outbuildings were in disrepair. The former chicken house was coming apart at its seams and was used for storage of unused farm equipment. Restoring it so that it was predator-proof required elevating the entire building using several car jacks and pouring a cement foundation. The building was then reroofed and sided with metal. Windows were made to provide cross-ventilation on hot days.

The chicken house in the foreground has exits for the chickens into divided, fenced yards. This allows us to have two varieties of Dorking chickens while keeping the roosters and their hens separate. They then alternate days that they get to explore the entire farm. When they stay in their yard, they have either a tree or Jerusalem artichokes for shade and protection from hawks.

Floor plan:

Keeping the two varieties of chickens separate in order to save these rare breeds also determined the interior design of the chicken house. The turkey house and the yards are also divided in two so that we can have two toms with their hens.

The aisle is large enough to have a metal covered can to hold the food as well as having their nests open into the aisle to make egg gathering easier. In truth, it's never really easy if the hen doesn't want you to have her egg!

Roosts:

Poultry survived originally by sleeping in trees, and both the turkeys and chickens still think that's a good idea. It's why we like to be home at dusk to escort them into their homes and shut the door.

It also means that they like to roost off the ground and having a chicken roost allows them to do this. It also allows me to clean out the poop and straw once-a-week and carry it to the compost pile .

Each side of this roost has a cortec board underneath that pulls out, sort of like a cookie sheet being pulled out of an oven. I then just use a handful of clean straw to scrap the soiled straw into a bushel basket before carrying it out to a cart and then the compost pile.

The turkey house roosts can be folded up against the wall for cleaning the floor. What motivates me to clean the poultry houses weekly is that flies lay their eggs in the manure and the maggots hatch out in about a week's time. A neighbor warned us that maggots can actually penetrate a chicken's flesh, and I don't want to chance that. Besides, our chickens are worthy of a clean house!

Chicken house roost

Turkey house roost

Nests:

The chickens' nests are 12" x 12" boxes about two feet off of the ground, The turkeys' nest is a larger platform where they usually lay their eggs on the top, but it's sometimes worth getting on hands-and-knees to discover more eggs underneath.

The Dorking chickens proved to be very "broody girls," and as we get into summer, one after another gets "broody" and stops laying eggs. Instead they sit, filling the nests until we thought we had to build more. The joke was on us, and indeed, five nests for ten to 15 hens is plenty.

Safety first:

There are times when it's helpful to have an extra place to put the chickens. When we hatch out eggs in the incubator there are, of course, as many males and females--or "cockerels" and "pullets." They guys all get along until about 18 weeks of age, and so when it's warm enough outdoors we transfer them to a homemade chicken tractor.

The two advantages of having them contained there is that we can move them to fresh grass twice-a-day and we can keep them safe. This safety comes with an obligation on our part to plug in the electric wire each evening that surrounds their tractor. It's with guilt that I share that when I forgot, there was one less chicken in the morning without any sign of a break-in. When the neighbor's dog caught a mink in their yard, we blamed it!

Feeding your flock:

Many options:

We began by buying bulk food from our local feed store.
When we learned that Purina sold organic chicken food , we switched to buying that. If we "are what we eat," then we are certainly what our poultry eat!
We next learned about Fertrell's Nutribalancer supplement and began adding that to their food.

Food fit for royalty:

Once we learned about Fertrell , we found our way to optimizing the poultry food. We bought in bulk organic corn, oats and soybeans and bought the other supplements from Fertrell. Having dealers across the country meant accessing these supplements more easily, and getting the organic grains resulted in enlarging our community of like-minded homesteaders.

One room in the barn was walled off to be "rodent proof," and not only held most of the ingredients, but also a Craigslist small cement mixer for mixing their food which was made fresh about every five days. The grains were also ground fresh with the small Bravo food grinder.

It took some years before we made this investment of money and labor, but it was wonderful to feel our chickens and turkeys the very best--not only for their health and enjoyment, but for the excellence of the food they provided.

There is one more aspect of poultry nutrition that I believe is very important. Not only is having the option to be outdoors a humane option for poultry (and all farm animals), but it can contribute greatly to their health and nutritional status. Birds are great foragers of insects and insects are made up of high quality protein. It feels foolish to me to purchase more food for our poultry when they enjoy foraging for themselves. It's why when store eggs are advertised as "vegetarian fed," I know the poor chickens were confined to the indoors and their eggs cannot be of the quality we want to eat.

Sustaining your flock and the breed:

For those of us who don't want to go out and buy more birds every few years, hatching out fertile eggs is a "sustainable" way to keep your flock going. Our Dorking chickens are very "broody" girls, and are more than willing to stop laying eggs and simply sit on their fertile eggs for three weeks. The Narragansett turkey eggs require four weeks of incubation, but these old-breed birds are willing to do that.

I don't know how their predecessors managed to stay safe in the wild while incubating eggs, but I don't trust the raccoons, fox and dogs not to find them where they huddle in a fence row. Instead, we've made a predator-proof corner in the barn where we can quietly move the broody hen and her clutch. She gets room and board there without other hens to attempt adding their eggs or even sitting right with her. In return, we get to watch her hatch out and care for her chicks.

Broody hens:

Depending on a hen to hatch out her chicks is probably sufficient to maintain a small flock. One hen which we simply named, "Mama Hen," somehow made it up to the barn loft daily until she had at least ten eggs to sit on. After three weeks, we would start to hear them peeping as they hatched out and would usually end up doing a treasure hunt through the hay bales to locate all the chicks. We constructed a half-sized chicken tractor just for her to care for the chicks when they were very small. They would then move together into the chicken house and become part of the flock. The boys (cockerels) got sorted out later when they got to the adolescent stage and began fighting.

We were very fond of Mama Hen, so it makes me sad to say that after four years, a raccoon made its way to the barn loft and killed her. However, she was seemed so happy being independent that I'm not sure if we would have done things differently.

Incubating eggs:

Incubating eggs each springtime--when the birds are laying the most eggs--allows you to have more control over the number of off-spring that will be hatched. It's not 100%, but if you're wanting to keep your flock growing or get enough cockerels for eating, or get enough chicks to share with others, I believe an incubator works best.

Attempting to mimic incubation under a mother hen means regulating the heat, humidity and even turning the eggs. How much of this is automated and how much you have to be responsible for depends on the quality of incubator you buy. I do believe that to incubate a few in order to give children (and us big kids too!) this experience, a smaller incubator than what's shown here works fine.

Sharing endangered breeds:

If you have an old breed of poultry that is in danger of going extinct, besides raising them, it's very important that you are able to share their genetics with others. Belonging to The Livestock Conservancy makes you part of a community that will be eager to share with you--both for finding the breed you want and to make it possible for others to raise the breed you have.

I have never attempted to mail chicks, but every spring I send off eggs to at least a couple of new owners. I've met delightful people this way and have never had anyone less than eager to pay for the eggs and shipping. In truth, I don't charge much for the eggs which seem to belong more to nature, but I leave that up to you. Keeping our homesteads sustainable sometimes means making an income!

A mama hen takes at least ten days to establish her clutch of eggs, and so I attempt to get the eggs to their new owners within a week of when they were laid.

I cushioned each egg with tissue paper and wrapped each dozen in bubble wrap before adding wadded newspaper and extra protection around them. UPS usually did a good job in getting them to their destination unbroken.

We had never raised chickens, ducks or turkeys before we began homesteading in our fifties. We therefore depended on a couple of basic books to help us out. Although I attempting to include some basics here, it's difficult to include all the little glitches that occur. I'm thinking about things like a hen with an obstructed crop, having a houseful of broody hens, parasites, or pecking order disputes.

We used the book, "Chickens in Your Backyard," though I see there are many similar books available. "Raising Chickens for Dummies" always informs and never insults me! "Story's Guide to Raising Chickens" is also excellent.

Besides giving you superior eggs and meat, I hope that your birds will give you great enjoyment.

Enriching Our Own Lives and the Future by Raising Heirloom Breeds of Animals

Fri, 26 May 2023 21:02:40 GMT

Homesteading with rare breeds:

When my husband and I began homesteading on our 13-acre Ohio farm, we chose to raise old breeds of animals that were in danger of going extinct. Genetic preservation of farm animals, similar to saving heirloom seeds , has become important because corporate farming uses only uniform-sized, high-production, hybrid animals. If we and future generations will have the ability to raise our own food, more of us must have a few rare breeds in our backyards. Fortunately, there are many delightful bonuses to having these animals.

The advantages of heirloom animals:

Old breeds of animals survived because they are hardy and not bred for the corporate's world fast growth and "turn-over." For example, our Dutch Belted cows could live up to 20 years while a confinement dairy cow's longevity is less than four years.
Old breed animals know how to graze and forage and don't live on GMO corn and soy beans!
Old breeds have easier births because those are the ones who survived through generations.
Old breeds are good mothers, which is a delight to observe and a lot less work for us.

Creating a sustainable homestead:

"Sustainability" doesn't mean to me that we don't need our neighbors and community. It simply means that we don't have to keep buying lots of inputs.

Heirloom farm animals made our little farm more "sustainable" in many ways:

The farm animals provided us with eggs, meat and milk.
The animals' manure and bedding created wonderful compost that created a healthy soil-food web which provided us with highly-nutritious food from the garden.
Connecting to other people when sharing these precious genetics and their produce gave us a supportive community.

Where to find old breeds:

The Livestock Conservancy has always been our resource for finding our cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs and ducks. They list current owners of these animals who are members of the conservancy. This allows you to get in touch--and others to be in touch with you in the future--to share the genetics as your hens or herds increase in number.

I also found it helpful to see how close to extinction each breed of animals is by seeing what category it was in: "critical," "threatened," "watch," "recovering" or "study." Of course I chose the "critical" category of Dorking chickens, Narragansett turkeys and Dutch Belted cows. It was rewarding to see both the chickens and turkeys increase in number so that they rose to the "watch" category during the first decade that we had them. The wonderful Dutch Belted cows, however, continue to be close to extinction.

What heritage breed animals are available?

The Livestock Conservancy features these species of animals so you're sure to find something that will "fit" your space:

cattle
chickens
donkeys
ducks
geese
goats
horses
pigs
sheep
rabbits
turkeys

The bonus is the fun!:

I admit to really enjoying these animals and caring for them as I would our "pets." It does mean I'm conscientious about cleaning their houses and barn, and it was difficult to learn that saving their breeds would mean butchering the males when it was time. But I love being around them and their trust in my husband and me is rewarding.

They have enriched our lives in so many ways, that I hope you can share this experience both for the fun of it and for helping to save their breeds.

Pruning 101: A Beginner's Guide to Fruit Tree Pruning

Mon, 22 May 2023 19:16:35 GMT

Why Pruning Fruit Trees is Important:

Fruit trees grow whether we prune them or not, but a properly pruned fruit tree has a much better chance of avoiding disease and giving bountiful and beautiful fruit.

Pruning keeps fruit trees healthy be removing diseased limbs, crowded branches, or branches that grow with narrow angles.
Pruning dense outer branches allows fruit buds to avoid fungal disease by providing them plenty of sunlight and breeze.
Pruning is critical to maintain the size fruit trees you want. A tree’s rootstalk largely determines each fruit tree’s potential size—whether it is a dwarf, semi-dwarf, or standard tree. However, annual pruning is also crucial in maintaining size.
Pruning mainly determines if a fruit tree's shape will be a central leader or vase-shaped .

Basic Tree Shapes:

The two basic shapes for fruit trees are either the central-leader or the vase-shaped (open-center). The central leader tree will create a smaller tree with less fruit, but easily allows sunlight to all branches. The vase-shape allows a tree to grow larger, but the upper canopy must be kept pruned to allow sunlight and air to reach the center.

It’s best to envision the basic shape you want fo your fruit tree the year you plant it because you’ll begin with a gentle pruning then. When choosing between a central-leader or a vase-shape, consider not only how much elbow room your tree will have when mature, but the type and character of your tree. For example, pear trees naturally assume a central-leader shape, but peach trees seem to insist on a vase-shape. One apple tree may easily form a central-leader, while another seems destined to be a vase-shaped. Your pruning ultimately determines a tree’s shape, but your work is easier when you allow a tree to express its individuality.

Central-leader tree

Vase-shaped tree

Tools for Fruit Tree Pruning:

Good pruning tools are important to avoid damaging your fruit trees and to make pruning an enjoyable task. Basic hand-shears are necessary for the youngest trees. As fruit trees grow in size, you’ll wan to add pruning loppers and a pruning handsaw.

The best pruning tools are made by Felco. It’s not a surprise that they are made in Switzerland where quality knives are also made. Good hardware stores carry Felco bypass pruner and Felco loppers. They can also be found online . The online site is also helpful in explaining what pruners will best fit your hand. Felco’s sharpening tool is also necessary to keep your tools working well.

When to Prune Trees:

Fruit tree pruning takes place during the winter and very early spring, when fruit trees are dormant. For growing zone six and above, late winter is the best time to begin pruning. Start your pruning with apple trees so you can delay pruning the more cold-sensitive trees, like peaches, until late March or into April. Pruning should be completed before fruit buds show their first pink and the sap is running.

The exceptions to this completion date are the unwanted growths of waterspouts and suckers. Waterspouts are often caused by stress and are recognized by growing at right angles or their parent branch. Suckers grow up at the base of the tree from below the graft line. Both deplete fruit trees’ resources and should be pruned off when they appear.

The Two Basic Cuts of Fruit Tree Pruning:

The thinning cut:

Thinning cuts remove entire branches or limbs. This cut is made just beyond the “collar,” or circular bark, at the base of the branch you’re removing. A tree heals over this cut area if the collar is not injured and if a stub is not left extending beyond the collar.

The thinning cut is used to:

remove branches that are crowded, diseased, or weak.
When branches are still small, the thinning cut is also used to remove any that have narrow angles. Maintaining branches at ten and two o’clock angles (picture an analog clock!), will give them the best strength.
Finally, use the thinning cut to eliminate any branches that grow towards the center of the tree.

The heading cut:

Heading cuts are made just beyond a bud.

Make your heading cut at a 45-degree angle and about ¼” beyond an outward-facing bud.

Heading cuts are used for:

changing the direction of a limb is growing
shorten a branch.
stimulate the buds just before the heading cut so they will grow out into branches the following year.

How Much to Prune Annually:

A good rule is to not prune more than 1/3 of any tree annually so you don’t damage its long-term health. When pruning an older neglected tree, it may therefore take three to five years to achieve the shape and size you want.

Some trees, like peaches, are such vigorous growers that they require a fourth of their growth to be removed each spring.

Young trees should be only gently pruned, but removing unwanted growth when it is still small benefits fruit trees in the long-term.

Thinning Fruit:

You’ll barely be done with early spring pruning when it’s time to thin the small new fruit. Thinning each blossom cluster to one fruitlet allows the tree to have a good number of blooms the next season. I usually choose the apple that is both largest and without flaws as the "keeper."

Subsequently, thinning the remaining fruit to about six inches apart allows each fruit to reach maximum size without their weight breaking branches.

You'll want to use a scissors with narrow blades to remove fruit without disturbing the single fruit that you want to remain. Chen scissors are a good choice for this.

Chen Scissors

Fruit trees do survive our mistakes as we learn to prune, so feel confident in pruning with these few basic concepts as your guide. You’ll not only have healthy truit trees and fruit but will gradually become a confident and competent fruit tree pruner

Chemical-Free Home Orchards

Fri, 19 May 2023 14:42:18 GMT

The challenge of having good fruit without chemicals:

By planting our own fruit trees, most of us hope to have the best fruit possible--beautiful, nutritious and chemical-free. But with so many diseases and “bad bugs” out there, how can we grow organically and not end up with worm-infested fruit? The number of threats to our fruit is daunting; I counted 26 viruses, eight bacteria, and 26 fungi—and that list doesn’t include those called pests: maggots, moths, beetles, caterpillars and borers!

Before giving up or arming ourselves with dozens of chemicals, let me reassure you that it is possible to have healthy trees and beautiful fruit without poisoning ourselves and our environment. We wouldn’t believe this possible if we look at how commercial fruit is grown--nectarines, apples, peaches, pears, and cherries are all so laden with residual pesticides that they are included in the 2023 USDA’s Dirty Dozen list . Apples alone contained 47 pesticide residues.

WE DON'T WANT POISONS!

Prevention works best:

When practicing medicine, I found that preventing disease worked a whole lot better than trying to make people healthy with drugs. Likewise, preventing diseases in our fruit trees can be done with similar measures that we use to keep ourselves healthy.

In our orchards, we’ll first reduce the level of disease around our trees. We do this for ourselves by washing our hands and avoiding people who are sick. Fruit trees can also keep themselves healthy when they’re not overwhelmed by the “bad guys” or pathogens. Secondly, we’ll help our trees boost their own immunity. Just as good nutrition heightens our resistance to disease, healthy soil and holistic sprays will boost the immunity of our trees.

Let me first mention a couple methods that sound good, but won’t get us to our goal of being chemical-free:

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) includes concepts like phernome traps. These alert the orchardist that specific pests have arrived and it’s time to spray insecticides. That may be a good method to reduce the amount of chemicals used for a commercial orchardist, but it’s not my goal. I simply don’t want any poisons for our families or our planet.

Disease-resistant cultivars of fruit trees also sound like a good idea and could be considered an IPM method. However, in the 20 years my husband and I have experimented with both heirloom and disease-resistant trees, the fruit of the disease-resistant varieties still had many flaws until we began using holistic sprays. My conclusion is to go ahead and choose what varieties we want based on their flavor and what we want to use the fruit for. All trees benefit from proper pruning and holistic sprays, so let’s choose the varieties that we enjoy eating.

Organic insecticides sound like a good idea, but being labeled “organic” doesn’t make them harmless. Pyrethrum is a chemical derived from chrysanthemums which works by paralyzing insects. Copper sulfate, used for fungal and some bacterial infections, is also certified for organic orchards. However, it is “highly lethal” to bees and earthworms. If something is labeled “insecticide,” it will kill pollinator bees, beneficial wasps and butterflies—even if it is also labeled “organic.”

Both IPM and organic insecticides focus on disease and using chemicals. Let’s focus instead on preventing disease in fruit trees by reducing pathogens in their environment and helping to boost their immune systems.

Reducing the level of disease is our goal:

Proper pruning , which is discussed here, increases air-flow and sunlight for fruit trees. This is an excellent example of making it difficult for fungal disease to thrive. Healthy trees can handle smaller amounts of fungi, bacteria and pests without us intervening with chemicals.

This photo shows apples growing with little breeze or sunlight in an unpruned tree which has left them susceptible to fungal infections. When we haven't prevented this from happening, we can at least remove the infected fruit quickly to reduce pathogens.

Japanese beetles: Sometimes pests are overwhelming but can be handled in ways that are harmless to other animals. A few years ago, Japanese beetles were doing extensive damage to nearly-ripened fruit. I spent many summer mornings and evenings--when coolness made it more difficult for beetles to fly--knocking Japanese beetles into a bucket of soapy water. This seemed to help diminish their numbers, but what also helped was Milky Spore , a host-specific bacterium fatal to Japanese beetle grubs, which survive and grow underground. Milky Spore multiplies itself and so only needs to be put in the soil once. This seemed to do the job because the Japanese beetle damage is no longer significant in our orchard.

Physical barriers are another simple method to lower the pest-load. Barriers include tree guards around trunks which prevent the bark from being damaged by a rodent or a weed-whacker. Other barriers include nets over cherry trees to keep birds from getting the entire harvest, electric fences to keep out deer, and even disposable shoe-store socks to keep insects off precious peaches. Pest damage can be eliminated if these “footies” are placed early in the fruit’s development.

Pruning and cleaning: The amount of disease our trees have to deal with can also be reduced by removing diseased wood from the orchard. Each autumn, transferring old fruit from under trees to a compost pile will reduce the amount of fungal disease around trees.

It also makes sense to enlist nature’s help to reduce orchard pests. To do this, include a variety of plants in your orchard to provide habitat for songbirds and beneficial insects. Comfrey and clover entice more pollinators to our orchard while birds build their homes in blackberry and hazelnut bushes that grow along the fence.

These songbirds feed dozens of caterpillar and other “pests” to their young, according to Doug Tallamy, the author of "Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens." I delight in having the company of these birds when working in the orchard and appreciate their help in decreasing insect damage. It seems only fair to share a little fruit with the birds for their services and their good company!

Improving Fruit Trees’ Immune Systems

If we want healthy fruit trees and beautiful, abundant fruit—all without chemicals—then holistic sprays become an integral part of orchard-management. Routinely using holistic sprays results in much less disease and way-more fruit. This abundance of fruit will necessitate thinning fruit in the springtime so each fruit is at least six inches from its neighbor. Thinning allows each fruit to become large and prevents branches from breaking from the fruits’ weight. Consider this additional task as a sign of your success!

Holistic spray:

Michael Phillip's book, The Holistic Orchard , has been my guide for caring for our fruit trees. I wish it was formatted as a simple reference book, but I still find it invaluable. I've made note cards with the "recipes" I need for the essential holistic sprays that help immensely to boost our fruit trees immune systems and help them ward off disease.

The recipe and spraying schedules are below:

Basic Four-Gallon Recipe:

2.5 oz. need oil (double for first spray)

1 teaspoon soap (double for first spray)

10 oz. liquid fish (double for first spray)

3 to 4 tablespoons molasses

3 tablespoons mother culture (I use compost tea)

5 tablespoons liquid kelp or 0.5 oz. of dry seaweed extract

Add water to make 4 gallons spray

Schedule for Holistic Sprays:

SPRING:

Week of quarter-inch green: (fruit buds are green from tip to halfway down bud). Choose a warmer day and thoroughly wet branches, trunk, and ground.
Week of "early pink": (fruit buds first show pink--never spray on open flowers).
Petal fall: spray to point of run-off.
First cover: This occurs 7 to 10 days following third spray.

Reminder: Thin the fruit within 40 days of "petal fall."

AUTUMN:

Single spray when 40% to 60% of leaves have fallen. Liquid kelp can be omitted.

After the first few years of using holistic sprays, I was already delighted with the results. However, it’s challenging to find time to spray four times each spring and once again in the autumn. Here are some hints that help us:

Spraying should be done when it’s not windy or raining and when blossoms aren’t open. All these conditions are difficult to meet, so do the best you can. The trees will benefit even if you can’t get all four sprays completed. (Michael Phillips didn’t say that—I did!).
The four springtime sprays are scheduled by the maturity of the fruit buds. However, the buds of different varieties are not in the same stage of development at the same time. To complete four applications, we call it “good enough” to spray them as a group. The one time we don’t spray is when any blossoms are open. We have beehives in the orchard as a reminder to protect pollinators.
Don’t worry if you can’t avoid a breezy day and get caught downwind of the spray. You won’t be poisoned—just a bit sticky and smelling of fish!
Liquefy the neem oil by placing its container in warm water shortly before mixing the spray. It liquefies quickly and makes spraying much simpler.
Always strain the mixture before putting it into sprayer. Not having to repeatedly unclog the nozzle is a great time-saver.

Preparing your fruit trees for winter:

Besides a single autumn holistic spray and removing old fruit, there are a couple additional tasks before winter to help protect your fruit trees from cold temperatures, rodents and even the sun:

Mulching fruit trees with a thick layer of organic material will protect the roots from severe cold weather. Because fruit trees naturally grow by the edge of forests where the ground is littered with branches and leaves, using similar high-carbon mulch is best. Wood chips, straw or leaves will protect the trees’ roots during winter. It’s also okay to use compost—just balance it with an extra amount of these brown materials.

To protect the trees’ roots during cold winter months, the mulch should be at least six to eight inches deep and placed all the way out to the drip line of each tree. Mulching gives you a head-start next spring by reducing competition from grass and preserving moisture for the trees’ roots. As mulch decomposes, it gives the soil a high-fungal and slightly acidic pH that fruit trees require for their best growth.

Protecting fruit trees’ trunks is especially important in winter to prevent rodent or sun damage. Rodents and rabbits kill trees by chewing on the bark through the cambium layer. The winter sun damages the trunk’s bark by heating its dark surface during the day and then rapidly cooling it at sunset. This causes the bark to split and be open to disease.

To prevent damage to the tree trunks, keep mulch at least six inches away from the trunks. This will make it less convenient for rodents to munch on the trunk’s bark. Tree guards also help to prevent rodent damage, and if these guards are white, they will reflect the sun and prevent the bark from heating and splitting.

One form of trunk protection is a length of black drainage tile with a linear cut that will allow it to expand. The easiest tree guards to use are probably the white, spiral variety sold through tree nurseries and online. Not only can I put them on without damaging the bark, but if I forget to take them off, they expand as the tree grows.

White latex paint is an alternative to plastic guards. When used full-strength on tree trunks, it helps prevent both rodent damage and sun scald. At our homestead, we use tree guards when the trees are young and then paint their trunks as they mature.

The last secret to growing delicious and nutritious fruit without chemicals is to not expect perfection. I certainly don't mind if a bird or insect has sampled a fruit before I got to it--as long as it was a small bite! Perhaps that is the best sign that our fruit is free of poisons. Also, I like to believe that any injury to a plant results in it increasing its phytonutrients as a defense. These phytonutrients are indeed nutrients that boosts both the flavor and the nutritional quality of the fruit.

Lets therefore learn to prune correctly, keep putting up physical barriers and boost our trees' immunity with holistic sprays. We don't want the food we eat to be poisoned.

Getting Your Fruit Trees Off to a Good Start

Mon, 15 May 2023 17:55:25 GMT

Getting a new fruit tree in the mail or from a local nursery is like welcoming a new family member. It makes me smile to know this “baby” tree will be a part of our homestead for years to come. However, a new tree requires immediate attention during an already busy season if it’s going to both survive and thrive. After decades of a few failures and some slow starts, I believe I can give you a recipe for getting your new fruit trees off to a great start.

When Your Fruit Tree Arrives:

Whether you’ve purchased your trees through a local nursery or through the mail, I’m hoping you were able to find bare-root or recently-potted trees. Not having your new trees root-bound by being too long in a container will be important to giving them a healthy start..

Trees arriving in the mail have the habit of showing up at inopportune times. If you can’t get them planted in a day or two, it’s best to leave them in their box, in a cool place. When you are ready to plant your bare-root trees, soak their roots in water at least one hour to overnight. A drywall bucket works well because it can then be carried out to the tree’s new home, water and all.

Giving Your New Trees a Home:

Dig the perfect hole: Begin by digging a custom-designed hole for each fruit tree. That means looking at the diameter and shape of its roots and digging the hole to fit the roots rather than pruning the roots to fit the previously-dug hole. Is there a long tap root heading off one direction? Then dig an asymmetrical hole to accommodate that root. It truly helps a young tree to keep all its remaining roots.

The depth of each hole is determined by the tree’s graft line. This line is recognized by a change in the bark color or by a diagonal scar in the bark. This graft line must remain just above soil level. The part above the graft line is the scion; it determines the variety of fruit. The part below the graft-line is the fruit tree’s root-stalk; it helps the ultimate size of each tree. The root-stalk is the only part of the tree that should be in contact with the soil and allowed to form roots.

Because our homestead has clay soil, we originally lost new fruit trees when their roots sat in water. We thought filling the holes with topsoil would help the roots grow, but light topsoil in a clay-basin resulted in water being held around the roots. Our solution has been to mix topsoil together with the deeper clay soil before returning the soil to around the tree's roots. The cardboard box that a tree arrives in makes a good working surface on which to mix these soils. Another help in getting water to drain away from the roots has been to score the clay sides of a hole with the edge of a shovel before the tree is planted.

Getting trees into their new holes is easier when two people work together. One person holds the tree centered and upright with the graft line a couple inches above the soil-line. The other can then concentrate on gently filling the soil back in around the roots. Stepping on the ground around the fruit tree’s trunk is necessary to remove air pockets, but don’t let the graft line sink below the soil line when doing this.

Immediate care: Don’t walk away yet! Your newly-planted tree still needs gentle pruning, staking and watering. A newly planted fruit tree should be pruned to about three feet in height this will help balance the above-ground scion to the loss of tiny rootlets that occurred when your tree was dug for transport. If your little tree has branches, you can begin training them to angles of ten and two-o'clock with wooden, spring-type clothespins.

Staking is done through a fruit tree’s first year until it gains stability by expanding its roots. Dwarf trees are the exception because they need to be staked long-term. Use a firm rope attached to a sturdy stake which is braced at a slight angle away from the tree. The stake is placed on the windward side—the direction from which the wind usually comes. Protect the tree trunk from rope damage by running the rope through a short piece of hose where it will touch the tree’s bark.

Keep watering: Make sure your tree gets about one inch of water each week for its first year. Dwarf trees will need this attention long-term.

Care of the young tree's vulnerable trunk:

Protect the trunk of your fruit trees as soon as you plant them. Rabbits, voles, and mice use the young fruit trees’ bark as food. Even a small bite to the bark provides an entry-point for pathogens, and if bark is removed around the circumference of a tree, it will die. Sun can also damage tree trunks in the winter when heating and cooling cracks the dark bark. These cracks, called “sun-scald” provide an entry point for pathogens.

Tree guards: There are various solutions to protecting a young tree’s trunk. Surrounding the trunk with six-inch drainage tile prevents damage from small animals. Alternately, vinyl spiral tree guards come in two-foot lengths and can be left in place for years because the expand with the tree’s growth. Because the vinyl is white, it also prevents sun-scald by reflecting the sun.

Paint: Another method of preventing sun-scald is to simply paint the trunks of your fruit trees with white latex paint. Half-strength with water or full-strength paint prevents sun-scald, but some people find that full-strength latex paint is also effective for discouraging damage from mammals like mice. I gave our fruit tree trunks the full-strength paint job a few years ago, and they continue to do well.

Mulch is important:

Begin to mulch as soon as your tree is planted. Mulching the ground around fruit trees is essential both to protect the trees’ roots and to allow the roots to reach deeply into the soil. Mulch that is composed of brown substances like leaves, wood-chips, and straw will gradually acidify the soil and create a high-fungal environment that allows fruit trees to thrive. Make the mulch thick enough to kill the grass all the way out to the “drip line,” or as far as the tree’s branches reach. This mulch will keep disappearing as it composts into beautiful soil. At the same time, the tree’s branches will continue to reach out farther as the tree matures. In this way, we’re guaranteed job-security because our fruit trees will always need more mulch!

The original care you take with new fruit trees will translate into protecting your investment by having healthy trees and fruit for decades to come. It pays to dig their holes well, begin their pruning early, and protect their young trunks and roots.

Look here for how to have wonderful fruit without chemicals. For pruning basics, look here .

Choosing Perfect Fruit Trees for Your Home

Mon, 15 May 2023 14:27:45 GMT

Beginning to plan for your tree or orchard:

As you begin to plan for your fruit tree or trees, it's really enjoyable to curl up with a catalog featuring fruit trees and imagine yourself raising your own apples, plums, peaches or cherries. In only two to five years, your investment of time and money can reap delicious, chemical-free fruit. Each new tree may cost between $30 and $40, but it can contribute to your health and enjoyment for a lifetime. Begin now to decide which fruit trees your will plant.

If you don’t have a catalog, order a free one from a nursery like Stark Brothers or Schlabach’s Nursery . You can buy fruit trees wherever you like, especially from a local nursery, but it’s a great education—and also fun—to have a catalog to help imagine your new trees.

What type of fruit will you most enjoy?

What fruits do you like?:

To choose the trees that will be best for you, do a bit of daydreaming to figure out what you’ll enjoy in the long-term. First of all, what fruits do you relish?--apples, cherries, peaches, pears, plums, nectarines? Living where there’s frost may mean we have to forgo bananas and citrus fruit, but we still have a great assortment of fruit trees to choose from.

What varieties suit you best?:

After deciding what fruits are your favorites, it’s time to figure out which variety of each fruit would be best for your home. If you have in mind what you want to do with the fruit, it’s easier to choose a variety from its catalog description. Do you envision canning or freezing your precious harvest for winter consumption? Or perhaps your mouth is watering for a slice of warm cherry pie? What about drying your wonderful fruit for nutritious, chemical-free snacks? Does pressing apples for cider sound like a fun autumn activity?

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with just eating fruit right off the tree. Imagine plucking a fully-ripe peach, soft enough to barely indent with your thumb. When you take a bite and have its warm sweet-tart juice fill your mouth, your efforts will have been rewarded!

What varieties suit your location?:

After matching specific fruits and then varieties to your likes and needs, it’s time to explore what fruit trees are practical for you to plant. That included choosing varieties that will grow well in your geological location, how much room you have and what varieties are available to you.

Hardiness Zone is the term used to tell what plant can grow in your area based on average minimal winter temperatures. For example, Ohio is now almost entirely zone six. Catalogs or online sites will then tell you which varieties of fruit trees will thrive in your hardiness zone. Wishful thinking won’t allow you to grow fruit successfully that need a warmer environment or longer growing season. We’ve learned that the hard way when watching a mature peach tree bloom profusely earlier than the final frosts in our growing zone seven. The tree survives, but the blossoms freeze and can’t produce fruit.

Small, medium or large?:

The potential size of a tree makes a difference as to what will “fit” at your home. The height a tree grows to—dwarf, semi-dwarf or standard—depends on its rootstock, but also how you prune it. All sizes of trees grow full-size fruit and most will produce fruit in two to five years from when you plant it.

If a small, front yard is the only potential site for your fruit tree, plant a dwarf tree. You will be the envy of your neighbors by keeping it pruned to a beautiful “vase-shape” or a space-saving “central leader” tree. Fruit tree pruning is described here.

If your backyard could use some shade, then plant a semi-dwarf or standard fruit tree. If you have a lawn, plants several trees and have an orchard instead! Caring for fruit trees is a great alternative to mowing grass; you’ll be investing in your own health and providing habitat to wildlife.

Heirloom or hybrid?:

Your next choice is between heirloom and disease-resistant fruit trees. Some believe that growing disease-resistant varieties is necessary to grow beautiful fruit without chemicals. After growing both heirloom and disease-resistant fruit trees, I’ve found that both can result in healthy trees and beautiful fruit when we use the holistic methods described here.

The down-side of the newer cultivars is that they may be bred for other qualities than flavor. It’s tough to beat the taste of heirloom apples like Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and Cortland. Newer varieties of fruit trees are bred for disease-resistance, but also for other characteristics we home orchardists don’t value—like having fruit that ships well. For example, peaches have been bred to turn pink and look ripe for shipping before being fully ripe. This doesn’t contribute to their taste and makes it more difficult to know when our backyard peaches are fully ripe. You probably can tell that I prefer heirlooms.

Pollinator trees:

Finally, be aware if your fruit tree needs another tree for pollination. Not all fruit trees do, but as someone show has waited seven years for our first pear, I wish we realized sooner that it needed a pollinator tree!

Apple trees often need specific pollinator trees too, but interestingly, crab apples will pollinate most other apple trees. If you don’t have a specific pollinator for your apple tree, plan a crab apple tree within 100 feet of graft a branch from a crab apple tree to your tree. This will keep your apple threes bearing well.

Bare roots are best:

It is important that you buy your fruit trees from a knowledgeable source. You want the right fruit trees that are in excellent condition for a healthy start and long-term success. You may live with your trees for decades, so your original choices are important.

Purchased trees that have been in a pot or burlap container for over a year will be root-bound and slow to start growing. Therefore, resist the convenience of buying potted fruit trees from a chain store. A bare-root tree from a reputable nursery will grow faster and have a better chance of success. I have no local fruit tree nursery, but have had decades of success from Stark Bro’s. If you live by a smaller nursery that sells healthy, bare-root trees with known root stalk, you certainly want to support them.

Planting and caring for fruit trees requires so little effort compared to the decades of pleasure and fruit they provide. How to plant and care for your new fruit trees is discussed here. Enjoy beginning this adventure knowing you will be reaping rewards for years ahead.

Maximizing Harvest: Techniques to Extend your Growing Season

Tue, 09 May 2023 20:59:47 GMT

Why grow food more months of the year?

Many of us eat from our garden year-round because our summer's work makes this possible. We dry, can and freeze our garden produce. We even tuck pumpkins, apples and onions into a root cellar, similar to squirrels preparing for the winter ahead. It is wonderful in mid-winter to make meals from our summer garden's harvest. However, it is also wonderful to begin harvesting earlier in the springtime and continue harvesting after the first frosts. If you have the energy, and you enjoy continuing the harvest for a longer season, you'll find some fun possibilities in the methods that I've used and am sharing here.

Methods for extending the growing season:

Row covers: Some crops growing in the garden can be covered in the late autumn or early spring to extend their growing time. If crops are covered to protect them from the cold, some cold-tolerant seedlings can be planted during spring frosts. Other crops can have their growing time extended into the first autumn frosts and even winter.

One simple cover is the fabric row covers. These covers appear gauze-like and are made from spun-bonded polyester or polypropylene. They are supported by wire hoops that can be left on throughout the year. When a cover is needed, it can be held in place with plastic clamps. These row covers have allowed us to grow tender plants like lettuce more months of the year. However, it only takes one night of temperatures falling into the lower 20’s to lose a precious crop.

Cold frame: We constructed our cold frame with a wooden frame and an old glass window for its lid. It is a bit more sophisticated than the row covers, and has been hauled here and there in the winter garden by handles attached to each end. It is wonderful for protecting lettuce and carrots from frosts and cold winds. The sun poses more danger than the cold, because a sunny day with the temperatures only in the single digits can quickly cook the lettuce plants if the lid is not propped ajar. I do admit that diligence is a small price to pay for fresh lettuce when there’s snow on the ground!

Sometimes, less technology works best. Last winter we ate root crops like carrots, beets and turnips throughout the winter, simply by giving them a good cover of straw. One other trick was to dig up a few heads of cabbage in the fall and invert them into their hole with their roots sticking up to mark their locations. In February, it was simple to dig them up, remove the dirty, outer leaves and have beautiful heads of cabbage.

Lean-to greenhouse: Our big project, both in money and my husband’s labor, was a lean-to greenhouse. It’s wonderful to have winter fresh lettuce, chard, spinach, parsley and peas to supplement the canned and frozen vegetables. The floor is made from compost with wood-plank walks. Because we lived at 40 degrees latitude, the tempered, insulated glass is positioned at a 60 degree angle to absorb the low winter sun. A sunny, below-freezing January day will raise the interior temperature quickly into the 80’s. We then depend on bi-metal openers to assure auto-ventilation. Water-filled plastic jugs, painted black, hold some of this heat into the night. Two water-filled, black, 50-gallon barrels collect and release heat more slowly.

The biggest secret to successful winter crops is choosing cold-tolerant plants like lettuce, chard and root crops. All the information to build and use this project was obtained from the book, The Food and Heat Producing Solar Greenhouse by Bill Yanda and Rick Fisher.

The concept of choosing a southern-facing wall and providing a wind-barrier does not need to be this elaborate for successful winter crops. A frame with plastic walls can provide crops through the winter, providing the crops that you choose will tolerate cool nights.

Hoop houses: Hoop houses can be less expensive than either a free-standing or lean-to greenhouse. Our first hoop house was made from a kit which we purchased from Farm Tech for about $2,000. It was 24 x 28 feet and we made four wide beds in it. Ends were added to enclose it, but besides being able to open both ends for ventilation, the sides rolled up when additional ventilation was required in the summer. Non-treated wood was used to border the beds which were filled with compost. Watering was done with a hose, though water from the roof was also collected in fifty gallon drums to gravity-feed to the plants.

Since moving to a small homestead in NE Tennessee, we’ve built a 12’ x 20’ hoop house without purchasing a kit. It is made with six mil greenhouse plastic and one-inch PVC pipe was used for the hoops. Both ends allow for ventilation and the sides can also be rolled up. There is one central path inside with a bed on either side.

By planting vegetables appropriate to the season, we were able to extend the growing season to include most of the year with both hoop houses.

Plant successive crops: If you want to extend your growing season, don’t plant and harvest everything at the same time. Here are some ideas for keeping your garden going longer by planting outdoors seeds more frequently. The following is calculated for a mid-October frost date:

In the springtime , plant tomatillos and parsnips for a late harvest. Both will survive after a frost, and the parsnips will actually taste better.

After solstice , or about June 20 ^th , plant winter leeks in a shaded spot. Give them heavy mulch and fertilizer, and harvest them around New Years. Rutabagas and turnips can also be planted at that time. Rutabagas are a new food to me, but they are a cross between a cabbage and turnip, and have a higher nutritional value than turnips.

Twelve weeks before the first frost, or about the end of July, plant brassica, like cabbage and Brussel sprouts, for a late harvest.

Ten weeks before frost, or about August sixth, you can plant endive and winter lettuces, like “Winter Density” or “Rouge d’Hiver.

Seven weeks before frost, or towards the end of August, plant kale and collards.

Five weeks before frost , or about September 10 ^th , plant arugula, chard, mache ("corn salad") and a spring-spinach, like Winter Bloomsdale.

Three weeks before frost, or towards the end of September, plant lobe radishes for late fall and early winter harvests.

Two weeks before frost , or about the first week of October, plant garlic cloves which will be harvested as full heads of garlic the following early-July.

Many herbs are perennials. Mulch sage, rosemary and thyme—you can harvest them during the winter, and they’ll be ready to grow again the following spring.

Animals are a big help: Finally, our animals give a big boost to year-round food from our farm. The meat, eggs, milk and milk products supplement the garden produce and help create winter banquets. The animals also provide valuable compost which is necessary to grow nutritious food. Bees pollinate the crops and provide honey.

A Dutch Belted cow with her new calf

Despite our best efforts, not many of us can grow most of the food we eat, even when we extend the growing season to most of the year. I also understand that not everyone can have livestock in their backyard! But when we buy what we can't produce from local farmers, we help make our local communities more sustainable. When we also focus on using and saving the genetics of heritage breed animals and plants, we help not only our community, but we're also helping future generations to be able to grow their own food.

How to Build Raised Garden Beds for All Ages and Locations

Sat, 06 May 2023 20:39:55 GMT

Advantages of raised garden beds:

Raised garden beds or containers can be found in many different situations because they fulfill various needs. Here are some reasons for gardening in raised beds:

We've recently moved to NE Tennessee where the soil is either very rocky or dense clay. Building raised beds allows us to rapidly improve the soil.
Raised beds are easier to work in for handicapped or older folks.
Small mammals can't access our root crops quite so easily!
They drain well.
The soil warms earlier for spring planting.
Weeds like crabgrass won't have easy access.
They look "tidy" and so are suitable for suburban and urban front yards.

Planning for construction:

The first decision was determining what height to make them. Although raised beds can be as short as twelve inches in height, they also can be high enough for kneeling or higher yet for sitting when gardening. What feels right to me is about eighteen inches in height with a wide enough top-edge to sit on.

Besides personalizing the height of these beds, we also need to be able to reach the entire bed from the edge. For example, if I can comfortably reach a couple of feet when sitting on the edge, then the bed should be no wider than four feet so I can access all of it.

Before beginning the actual building of the beds, we needed to choose the best location for them. At our place, we’re delighted to be surrounded by many large trees, but that meant we had to look carefully for a location that would give plants at least six hours of sunlight a day. Not only do we want plenty of sunshine, but when planning for more than one bed, we wanted to make sure we could walk comfortably between the beds. We also need a wide enough path that allows us to access all the beds with a cart or wheelbarrow. Finally, as with any garden, we had to figure out a convenient way to access water.

Constructing the raised beds:

Materials:

Once our perfect-as-possible site was chosen, it was time to choose the material to build them. This decision was easy for us because stacks of metal were left here from torn down tobacco barns. This galvanized steel’s virtue certainly isn’t good looks, but it will have longevity. If you find your front yard is best suited for a raised bed or two, untreated wood is attractive but won’t last as long as other materials like steel, cinder block, brick or stone.

After deciding on the design, location and material, the building of our raised beds began. The 18” high steel walls were at first held together at right angles with two short pieces of wood positioned catty-corner from each other. More of the scrap steel was then cut and riveted to the outside of each corner to give longterm stability to the beds.

We had one more task before beginning to fill the beds. The many holes in our yard forewarned us that we are sharing this homestead with moles. Actually, there’s probably an extended family of moles, judging by the number of holes. These moles were here long before us, so I admit they have first dibs on the yard. However, I feel pretty strongly about not sharing our future sweet potatoes with them. We’ve found that placing 1/2” hardware cloth at the base of each bed gives us the power to keep them out, and that seems fair enough to me!

Hugelkultur:

With the hardware cloth in place, it's time to add soil. The 18” height means it’s going to take a lot of soil to fill each bed. If you have cows, chickens or turkeys, you may have a lot of compost. Most of us don't, and an option might be mixing 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 compost. With five beds, that option would be expensive. That's why you might want to consider “hugelkultur.”

This German term, hugelkultur, literally means a mound bed or mound culture. This method of gardening makes raised beds even more practical because it doesn’t require as much topsoil or compost. Most plants are happy with 12” of topsoil, and so placing other organic material up to this level works well. This layer can be logs, sticks, straw and leaves. Having this organic material under the topsoil will ensure drainage and help hold moisture. It also creates heat for the plants as it breaks down. This layer also provides many fungi and bacteria for the soil-food web which helps insure that food grown here will be tasty and nutritious. We’re fortunate to be surrounded with woods and so have plenty of organic material.

We used hugelkultur when moving to a "new" homestead and wanted to begin growing our own food ASAP. We didn't have compost at first to use for topsoil, and using hugelkultur helped fill up the raised beds. The soil sank a lot by the end of the first growing season as the wood biodegraded. But being able to grow food right away gave us one year to create more compost and we were able to "top-off" each bed at the end of the growing season.

When the raised beds were new, there was a lot of space between the limbs and branches. Autumn leaves were not yet available, and we didn't have that much topsoil. Therefore, we hauled loads of sawdust from a local sawmill to fill in the spaces between branches. On later raised beds, we used wood chips for the hugelkultur which didn't require as much "filler."

Topsoil:

After the wood "hugelkultur" layer is complete, it's time to add topsoil. If you have an active compost pile, this certainly is the best topsoil or "humus" available. This compost will also serve to "top off" the bed each spring as the organic material decomposes and settles. If you get your compost from a farmer, make sure that the manure or grass being used hasn't been treated with a herbicide. That compost could kill your precious garden plants.

The topping on this garden lasagna could be a layer of mulch while waiting for the beds to “settle.” but because the nutritional content of food is dependent on the soil’s bacteria and fungi, planting multiple species of cover crops will not only increase the nutrition and flavor of your produce, but also sequester a lot of carbon into the soil. We might as well let the soil get "settled" while improving the health of its soil food web at the same time.

Coverings to extend season:

Another helpful addition is to have permanent high or short hoops over some of the beds to allow an extended growing season into the cooler months or for shade in the summer.

When we want to extend the season, we may purchase white “frost blankets,” though I sometimes use old sheets instead. What’s important in November is that the plants still get air and light while staying warm enough for below-freezing nights. Having the cloth reach the soil is important to capture the soil’s warmth, but this becomes easier when covering raised beds.

For vegetables that want shade in the summer, use cloth that blocks about 30% to 50% of the sun.

Hoops over spring garlic

Enjoyment:

Whether you're building one or many raised beds, build them so that you're comfortable when gardening. You may want to sit on the edge of the bed, so make the edges broad enough to be comfortable.

Raised beds can be attractive! If your front yard is the sunniest area you have, put those raised beds there. If your urban building has a flat roof, that'll be perfect for your raised beds. The can border your patio area and be conveniently located for getting dinner greens, or they can line the walk through your deep backyard.

Raised beds are also perfect for vacant city lots. Attractive paths can be constructed around the beds while there's no worry about the plants and produce being contaminated by what might be in the soil or paved area where you build them.

Enjoy!

Seed Saving for the Home Gardener

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 15:12:21 GMT

Why save seeds?:

I've saved certain seeds from our garden for the last couple of decades. I find it not only enjoyable, but also empowering to be somewhat self-sufficient. There are many other reasons for saving seeds from our gardens, for example:

Some plant varieties are no longer available through seed catalogs. If we enjoy their produce, then they're worth saving.
Saving seeds given to us by friends feels important because the seeds maintain a cherished connection through our life-times.
Since 1900, 94% of seed varieties have been lost . For the sake of our future and future generations, let's protect the precious heirloom seed varieties that remain so that we are not totally dependent on corporations for our food.
During a pandemic like Covid, many people began gardening and it was difficult to buy the varieties of seeds we wanted. If we begin saving some seeds from our gardens now, our gardens will be more sustainable and we'll always have enough seeds to plant.

Some basic do's and don'ts:

Jump on the learning curve:

Seed saving can be a pretty complex topic. Suszanne Ashworth wrote a beautiful book on seed-saving called, Seed to Seed. It is inclusive and well written, but in truth, it was a bit overwhelming when I began learning the "how-to's" of seed-saving. Therefore, I want to give you the basics of seed-saving here. This information will allow you to successfully save and share seeds. Then if you're ready for more information, I encourage you to explore Ashworth's book.

Heirloom versus hybrid:

First of all, don't save seeds from hybrid plants. Hybrid seeds will not grow offspring like their parent plant. You might come up with something interesting and that could be fun, but you won't be able to depend on a worthwhile harvest. It's best to remember that only heirloom plants will breed true.

One reasons for choosing hybrids:

Do I ever grow a hybrid plant? Yes, despite not being able to save their seeds, I justify buying one variety of bush beans because, rather than having to trellis it as I do all the heirloom varieties that I grow for drying, it's a bush bean that reaches 18" and is very tender and delicious. Smaller plants are certainly easier to work with.

Ditto for tomatoes. I grow and save the seeds from an heirloom cherry and a large paste tomato that are incredibly prolific and flavorful, but their bushes are huge as they throw their "arms and legs" all over. When there's a smaller planting area, the better-behaved hybrid bushes are appreciated!

Cherokee Trail of Tears beans are heirloom beans that are easy to grow and easy to save their seeds while also providing winter meals. They do take staking to grow however!

Perfect flowers:

Secondly, only plants whose flowers have both the male and female parts (called “perfect flowers”) are able to pollinate themselves. You can trust their seeds to grow plants and produce like the parent plant.

This flower, from our dwarf lemon tree, has "perfect" flowers. This means that each flower has both male and female parts and that fertilization can occur within each flower. In this photo, we see the female "stigma" (which is part of the "pistil"), in the center surrounded by the male "anthers" (which is part of the "stamens").

Imperfect flowers:

As you begin to look closely at the flowers in your vegetable garden, you'll see that many have “Imperfect flowers.” Because this means that they contain either the male or female parts, but not both. To be fertilized, they will need cross-pollination. This is usually accomplished by insect pollinators or the wind.

Examples of garden vegetables that have "imperfect" flowers, are

peppers and all vine plants like zucchini, squash and pumpkins.

If one of these flowers is cross-pollinated by another variety, the seeds from its offspring won't produce the same variety. For example, a pumpkin can grown from a blossom that was cross-pollinated. That pumpkin, whether hybrid or heirloom, will look and tastes like its parent. However, the seeds from that pumpkin won’t breed true the following year.

These zucchini plants have imperfect flowers and grew in our lean-to greenhouse. They couldn't be cross-pollinated by other varieties when isolated in the greenhouse, but without wind or other pollinators, I enjoyed being the pollinator by taking the stamen from a male flower and pollinating the female flowers.

If you do want to save seeds from your summer or winter squashes, then you’ll have to tape shut the female flowers and fertilize them with an “anther” from a male flower. That’s one way to isolate them. As crazy as this procedure sounds, it’s both possible and fun to do.

Avoiding cross-pollination:

There are other ways of saving seeds from plants that could cross pollinate. Large seed companies use cages to isolate different species of the same plant. Another option they have is to plant them at enough distance that they can't be cross-pollinated by wind or insects.

We home gardeners can us simpler methods, such as isolating one l ettuce species which could cross-pollinate. We usually don’t like lettuce to “bolt” because it then begins to taste bitter. However, if you allow only one type of lettuce to bolt or go to seed, you can save that seed. Choose a different species of lettuce each year so you can keep several in stock.

Exceptions:

Finally, when saving tomatoes, cross-pollination only occurs in varieties that have potato leaves. "Potato leaves" have smooth and not serrated edges. However, if we only plant one variety of tomato that has the "potato leaf," there is no worry about cross-pollination.

Potato leaf tomato plant

How to save seeds:

It's easy:

You'll be glad to know that "how to save seeds" is much simpler than the above discussion about what seeds can or cannot breed true. I cherish the heirloom tomatoes that I've kept through the years by saving their seeds annually. How to save their seeds will apply to other heirloom crops too, so we'll use tomatoes as an example.

Choose large, well-shaped and fully ripened fruit of each type of tomato you want to save. You only want the genetics from your best produce, because these seeds can be past on to future generations. For years I saved tomato seeds by simply separating a dozen or so seeds of each variety on a separate and labeled paper towel. They stick to the paper when dry and I then fold the towel and keep it in a cool and dry place—usually in a zip-lock plastic bag in the refrigerator or freezer. If I’m sharing more than one variety of seeds with friends, I have each variety on one square of paper towel, each labeled with their name.

Nature's way:

Nature, however, adds an additional step to save tomato seeds for the following spring. When a tomato falls to the ground and rots, its seeds under-go a fermentation process which prevents microbial infections. This fermentation also allows the seed to sprout more readily the next year. To mimic that step, put the seeds in water in small paper cups (with the type of seed written on it), for about three days. After the water appears foamy or gets a scum on it, pour the seeds into a small strainer, rinse, and then transfer them to a paper towel to dry completely. Any seeds that float when put in water are non-viable, and you will know not to bother planting them.

For eating or planting:

Beans are another easy-to-save seed. They will always breed true for you. Let them fully mature and dry on the plant. If it’s a wet autumn, take the plants to a protected area so the beans won’t mildew. You can later sit with friends and shell and talk, and you’ll have beautiful beans for cooking in the winter and for planting in the spring.

After shelling, I put beans indoors on cookie sheets which are first covered with labeled paper towels. While leaving them to fully dry on the back porch table, I gradually pick out any shriveled beans and debris. Then, before putting the beans in covered glass jars for winter use, I pick through them like jewels and choose the prettiest ones to be planted in next year’s garden. As with all the seeds you save, choose the ones that are the largest and healthiest looking. In this way we can actually choose the genetics we want to grow, and improve our seed stock each year.

Longevity:

Nature sometimes saves seeds in the ground for several years before the conditions are right for them to sprout. Therefore, I sometimes plant seeds that have been stored in the freezer for two or three years or more. The seeds' viability will not be quite as good, but the vast majority sprout to become another precious heirloom plant.

The sustainable practice of seed saving will help us and future generations continue to have some genetic diversity with heirloom plants. Planting, saving, storing and sharing these seeds is a huge contribution to future generations.

Keep learning:

If seed saving sounds overwhelming, then pat yourself on the back when you get some tomato seeds saved this year. However, if you find saving seeds interesting, then Suzanne Ashworth’s “Seed to Seed” book will be worth your $25 investment.

Planning Your Garden for Healthy Plants and Produce

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 21:00:35 GMT

Our Goals when Gardening:

We all have different situations for our gardens. Some of you are wanting to begin gardening. Some only have a balcony that is heavy with pots of vegetables and flowers. Others have a raised beds in the front or back yards. Those will more land might have a large garden that produces some or most of their food.

Whatever our situation, we growers mostly agree that we want to maximize our harvests as well as the flavor and nutrition of our produce. At the same time, I think we agree that we want to reduce the time we spend weeding and also minimizing plant diseases and garden pests without using harmful chemicals.

What is most surprising when listing these goals is that there is one main rule to achieving them; do not plant the same plants in the same place two years in a row. This simple rule of crop rotation is the basis of keeping plants disease-free without chemicals as well as producing delicious and nutrient-dense produce.

Reasons for Crop Rotation:

Rotating our plants each year will be a big step in becoming successful gardeners. It increases the quality and quantity of your produce and decreases your work for the following reasons:

Rotation reduces disease and insect pests. Each crop has particular diseases and pests that are attracted to it. These will build up in the soil if the same plants are grown there each year. The result is a steady decline in how much plants produce. An annual change in the location of each crop keeps their production high without the use of harmful chemicals for pest control.
Rotation also makes it easier to control weeds by preventing them from becoming established. Different crops have different depths to their roots and require different types of tillage. They also attract different types of weeds. Weeds can’t get established as easily when crops are rotated.
Another big reason for rotating crops is to balance their nutrient demands. Some groups of plants need high nitrogen in the soil, while others donate nitrogen. Other groups need potassium, while others crave phosphorus. Plants can be rotated to an area each year where they are assisted by what grew in that place the previous year.

General Principles for Rotating Crops:

Let's first talk about how to group our plants for rotation. Then we'll talk about the practicalities of making this happen.

Vegetable plants can be divided into four groups that do well when planted together. This is one aspect of "companion planting." Planting them together, and rotating annually in this order, keeps nutrients balanced and also gives natural pest control. I have a three-ring binder in which I keep the following chart each year so I can remember what plants get planted where the following year. Each group is planted in a specific order in relationship with the other three groups as follows:

#1 Leaf plants need high nitrogen, as from compost. These include: lettuce, salad greens, spinach, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale and kohlrabi.

#2 Fruiting plants need high phosphorus. Compost with animal manure supplies phosphorus, as well as bone meal and fish emulsion. These plants include squashes, cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants.

#3 Root plants need high potassium. This is the rotation that we might add ashes from the wood burning stove. These include onions, shallots, garlic, scallions, leeks, carrots, beets, turnips and radishes.

#4 Cleaners and Builders include the "cleaners," c orn and potatoes as well as beans and peas which are considered considered “builders” because they increase nitrogen in the soil.

To make this practical, in the late winter I take out my farm journal to begin planning for the next year's garden. I redraw it for what plants will go where in the coming season.

Although we can add soil amendments like ashes, this rotation actually allows the plants that were in the previous year's rotation to nurture this year's plants.

One year's garden plan in my farm journal

Rotation in raised beds:

There are no set rules for how to achieve this rotation in the correct order. However, for raised beds, I've just gone left-to-right in four linear sections. If you have more than one raised bed, just use your farm journal to keep track of what went where the previous year!

This photo shows two of our four raised beds. We can not only rotate what is planted in each bed annually, but also by season.

Where do perennials go?:

We certainly aren't going to move our perennials annually. The precious rhubarb and asparagus take some years to get established and now produce enough for generous harvests. Even strawberries can be perennials when the shoots are allowed to root.

My solution in the large garden is to just leave perennials in place and plant the different annual plants around them in their correct rotation. I admit that the strawberries occasionally get moved to various homes--in a raised bed or even the hoop house.

No one is grading our efforts, so let's do what works best for us and the health of our gardens!

Balancing different sized plants when rotating:

There’s another difficulty with crop rotation; all quadrants don’t take the same amount of space. For example, squash vines never fit where the little root crops did. My answer to that is to go back to the simplest rule—don’t plant the same thing in the same place two years in a row. It’ll fit somewhere—just don’t plant it where it was the previous year! Having the garden journal insures that I know where things were the previous year.

Another solution is offered in the book, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible . To allow shorter growing plants to get sunlight, trellised plants like tomatoes, beans, peas and cucumbers, along with corn, are located and rotated separately in the northeastern side of the garden. In this way, plants that grow tall won't shade the smaller plants.

Making Room for Humans:

Walking paths:

If you've planted around your home, pathways or in raised containers, you can easily care for your plants without stepping into their space. But for larger gardens, separate trodden paths and growing areas provide a permanent arrangement for your garden. This also prevents topsoil from becoming compressed as we walk through the garden.

Consider making your paths from 12 to 18 inches wide. Twelve-inch wide paths are sufficient for walking. Our garden paths are 18 inches wide because I’m more comfortable with kneeling when planting or weeding. There are no set rules for your design, so create a garden that suits you best.

You don’t want to spend time and energy weeding paths. Instead, cover paths with newspaper or cardboard and then layer them thickly with straw. These materials will gradually break down to become organic material for your garden. Layer them thickly and they’ll service you through the growing season.

Growing space:

I’ve talked about walking paths, so now let’s discuss growing space. Thirty inch-wide beds, between walking paths, work well for plants. These beds will gradually become “raised beds” if you add compost each spring. This method reduces or eliminates rototilling, and so improves soil by not disturbing it.

Growing-areas that are 30 inches-wide work well because they accommodate plants of different sizes: Tomato or cabbage plants fit well in a single row, or you can plant two rows of medium-sized plants, like beans. Finally, this space is perfect for three rows of smaller plants like onions or beets.

Can you picture your garden now? Permanent paths lessen your work and allow you to walk comfortably without compressing the plants’ growing space. Be imaginative when laying out the paths and beds. Your garden doesn’t have to be a rectangle--a circle, triangle, square or elongated garden may be fun and attractive in your yard.

You want to enjoy being in your garden, so make it a welcoming space. Flowers will entice beautiful and beneficial insects in like butterflies and pollinators. I enjoy watching the hummingbirds and swallowtails on the zinnias and delight that goldfinch enjoy the sunflower seeds.

Why not add a bench for you and a bird house for your feathered friends? We put a pergola in the center of our large garden and rotated the four quadrants around it. It's true that somedays I may spend as much time sitting and enjoying as I do weeding, but that's probably okay too. We're feeding our spirits as well as our bodies!

How to Make and Use Compost Tea

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 18:16:57 GMT

The Role of Compost Tea

Compost tea is for any of us who would like more compost than what your kitchen scraps provide, because it's a great way to multiply compost.

However, before any of us want to begin another new gardening project, we want to know that it'll be worthwhile. Here's my sale's pitch: I have found that compost tea makes a big difference in improving the health of plants and boosting the nutritional quality of the food we grow. It is part of what is called "regenerative agriculture," because it, along with cover crops, no tilling, rotating plants and using compost, helps to bring the soil food web back to life. This is our goal because we want our food to be nutritious, delicious and disease resistant.

The great thing about compost tea is that you can multiply a small compost pile into an unlimited amount of fertilizer. Unlike the store's "NPK" fertilizers, it contains everything your soil needs to deliver nutrition to your plants and food. You can't use too much, it doesn't smell bad at all, and once you've gathered supplies and equipment, it doesn't take much work or money. For all these reasons, I find compost tea one of the biggest assets to growing healthy plants and nutritious food.

What is Compost Tea?

By definition, compost tea is the water in which compost has been soaked. Compost tea can be made by soaking either compost, or deeply rooted plants, like comfrey or dead nettle, in water for several days. The problem with the "soaking" method is that the millions of living organisms in compost don’t receive oxygen with this method. Without oxygen, the anaerobic or “bad” microbes multiply and can cause plant disease. Besides, it smells pretty bad!

Just as creating good compost requires frequent turning in order to supply oxygen to living organisms, making compost tea requires constant oxygenation to multiply the microbes and arthropods that will create your healthy soil-food web. Oxygenated compost tea is what I'm talking about here.

Equipment Needed:

One clean, five-gallon bucket: A lid will eliminate light, but lacking that, you can always place a hand towel over the top of the bucket.

Aquarium air pump and stones: A trip to a pet store will be necessary to purchase these items. Get a pump large enough to run two sets of air stones. A battery aquarium air pump can be purchased for less than twenty dollars and gives the versatility of making compost tea anywhere. I use two larger stones and two smaller ones, as shown above.

Tubing and fittings: You’ll also want about eight feet of air tubing. All this is available with the aquarium equipment at the store, including the "T" fittings that connect the stones to the tubing.

Bag for compost and string: The bag that contains compost will need to be porous. The most practical I found was a paint-strainer bag from the hardware store, though some people still have panty hose available to use. The bag needs to be large enough to hold the compost with enough additional room above to be tied. About two feet of sturdy string is also needed.

Ingredients for Compost Tea

The recipe I use for compost tea comes from Lowenfels and Lewis’s book, Teaming with Microbes . The recipe for a single batch looks like this:

4 cups compost--without any chemicals
2 tablespoons uncultured molasses
2 tablespoons liquid kelp
3 tablespoons liquid fish
About 4 gallons unchlorinated water (If you don’t have access to unchlorinated water, oxygenate the water for two hours before adding the other ingredients, or use a charcoal filter)

Sources for ingredients:

Compost can be easily carried from your compost pile in a container such as a quart yogurt container. Be sure to use it shortly after you contain it so it doesn't sit without access to oxygen.
Molasses can just come from your kitchen cupboard, but if you want to have larger amounts on hand, consider getting non-GMO molasses.
Kelp can be bought in quantity and saved for several year's use.
Liquid fish can also be purchased from Neptune Harvest as organic.

The role of compost and molasses in this recipe is to multiply the beneficial bacteria in the soil-food web.

The role of kelp and liquid fish is to greatly increase valuable fungi in the soil-food web.

How to Put It All Together:

I think the trickiest part of assembling the equipment and ingredients is not getting water to back up into the tubing and then into the pump. All this equipment will last for years when making multiple batches of compost tea, unless water gets into the pump. But if we attach the two sets of stones to the tubing first, we only need to keep the other ends up when assembling this!

I start by putting the four gallons of water into the five gallon clean bucket. Next, place the two small stones, attached to their tubing, at the bottom of porous bag. This will assure that the microbes in the compost get plenty of air. Put the quart of compost on top of the stones inside the bag and then tie the bag tightly at the top with one end of about two feet of sturdy string. This string suspends the bag with compost and I hold it in place by tying the other end to where the handle is attached to the bucket. Don't let water get into the tubing while you do this.

The two larger stones are then placed at the bottom of the bucket, again keeping the other end of the hose higher. I don't attempt to anchor these stones to the bottom with tape.

Hints for ease and success:

I'm pretty casual about measuring ingredients when making compost tea. I figure nature doesn't have the same balance of ingredients in the soils of the planet, so if I use "glugs" of molasses from its large container, rather than measuring it in tablespoons, that works. What is needed is enough molasses to feed the microbes for the length of time the tea is being oxygenated.

What I am fastidious about is keeping the pump higher than the water. Therefore, contrary to the sketched dia gram, I always place the pump on a higher shelf than the bucket. I've used an indoor sunroom for making tea because there is no bad odor involved. Since moving, I now use an outbuilding that has electricity. A battery operated pump would allow even more flexibility.

To insure maximum success with your compost tea, make it at room temperature and out of direct sunlight. Because we are dealing with living organisms and an aerobic process, bubble oxygen through the mixture from 24 to 36 hours. If you get side-tracked and don’t use it by that time, the microbes will run out of food. Once complete, use the tea within a few hours of completion so the microbe won’t run out of oxygen. We want the microbes to stay moist and to thrive on both the plants and ground, so apply the tea out of direct sunlight—early or late on sunny days is best.

Make Large Quantities:

This five gallon recipe is perfect for a gardener’s use, but a large compost tea set-up can be purchased or made for farm fields. This method rapidly enhances the health of the soil especially when the other methods of regenerating soil are also practiced. These methods include keeping the soil covered with a variety of cover crops, grazing animals, not tilling, and applying compost. Compost tea speeds along this process of enhancing the soil-food web be being able to both feed the foliage and get into the topsoil.

Applying Compost Tea

Applying compost tea to the plants’ leaves creates a barrier that protects them from disease. Dousing the soil with compost tea brings the soil to life which quickly results in an improved exchange of nutrients between plants and the soil microbes. When applying the tea, remember that it contains billions of living organisms, so don’t spray the tea with too much pressure or speed.

The tea can be watered from a sprinkler can, sprayed from a four gallon backpack sprayer or from a tractor-drawn and powered sprayer. Because we used it for both our large vegetable garden and the orchard, we used a combination of these methods.

How often to apply compost tea:

Unlike purchased fertilizers, you can not apply too much compost tea. Most fertilizers contain NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) so that adding too much will block the plants' uptake of all of the other minerals. But compost tea is just enriching the soil, especially the topsoil that interacts with the plants. It's the quality and aliveness of the topsoil that determines the nutritional content of our produce, and we can't overdo that.

What seasons to use compost tea:

Once our seedlings get their secondary leaves, the seed itself can no longer supply all the nutrition that the new plant needs. That's the time to begin watering with compost tea. When the seedlings have been transplanted to larger containers, they can soak up quite a bit and, for the number of seedlings we grow, I make compost tea almost weekly. Once the plants are in the garden, it usually takes more than the five gallon batch and so I can make compost tea as frequently as every two to three days.

I continue to use compost tea when the garden plants are mature and we are harvesting their produce. What motivates me is that it seems to make the plants so much more disease-resistant. Our heirloom "Heinz" tomato plants routinely got a fungal infection in July, but using compost tea has eliminated this. I'd certainly prefer using a natural fertilizer to a chemical fungicide. Watering the leaves as well as the soil helps to make the difference.

Because compost tea doesn't have a bad odor, don't hesitate to use it to boost the health and growth of all potted plants as well as both perennial and annual flowers, and your lawns and shrubs. Finally, by making your own fertilizer rather than buying it, you're making your home more sustainable!

Individual and Community Gardening: Cultivating a Shared Vision of Food Sovereignty

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 18:16:33 GMT

Why Grow Food Locally?

You’ve chosen to peruse this blog for a reason that must include either beginning or continuing to grow food-- beautiful, nutritious, and bountiful food. My husband and I have been able to grow most of the food that we eat without chemicals and without continually buying inputs like fertilizers. This has been an ongoing and enjoyable learning curve that I now want to share with you.

How I began Growing Food:

I began as a family doctor who stressed preventive medicine. That’s not easy when so many of us eat fast food or processed food from grocery stores. So now I’m a “farmer” of sorts. But it’s the type of farmer that any of us can be on some scale. What makes me want to share is for your good health, but it's also because growing food is satisfying and so much fun.

We Each Have Many Reasons for Wanting to Grow Food:

To begin this topic, let’s list all the reasons we might have for growing our own food:

We want tasty and nutritious food.
We want an outdoor project and perhaps an excuse to get our hands in the warm earth.
We want to avoid food that’s been shipped a distance, both for the sake of the planet and for having higher quality food.
We want to avoid the excess packaging of store products.
We don’t trust the current food system to continue.
We want to help others in our communities to have access to healthy food.
We want to foster social connections.
We want to provide opportunities for education and skill-building around sustainable agriculture practices.
We really enjoy learning new things!

You probably identify with one or two of those incentives but just don’t have the space to grow food? Let’s set all of our brains to dreaming with the following scenario and then, in future blogs, we’ll get to the business of how to do these projects. Okay—let’s daydream possibilities for our futures:

Growing Food in Suburbs and Towns:

Instead of residential tidy lawns in the towns and cities, there are “cluttered” areas of green. We smile to realize that these disorganized spaces are actually plants of many heights and various shades of green. The boulevards have miniature fruit trees surrounded by a variety of herbs, beans, and tomato plants. Front yards are a beautiful jumble of flowering plants, beans on trellises, and cucumber vines extending over steep banks.

In the backyards, we find an array of activity. One yard has chickens clucking and scratching under cucumber plants that climb a trellis. A few feet aw ay, squash vines grow along a winding path which leads to a fence covered with climbing beans. Hazelnut and berry bushes grow along the other fences, creating food for people and habitat for birds. What bounty in this small space!

A “French intensive garden” adorns the center of the yard. It has the appearance of a beautiful quilt whose various shades of green are made up of lettuce, herbs, and root crops. By the back porch four large rain barrels step down from the downspout. A hose on the last barrel snakes through the yard to provide water for the garden.

A woman brings a small bucket to the chickens-pen where she tosses eggshells, coffee grinds and vegetable peels onto the deep litter. This causes several chickens to come running with excited chatter. It’s fun to watch them scratch and eat. We know that their activity is turning this “deep litter” into compost for the garden.

At the far side of the chicken yard, there are three bins where leaves, weeds, and older garden plants are also becoming compost. Three other hens are enthusiastically contributing to that composting process. Another couple chickens are scratching and pecking under a raised cage in which rabbits are munching on greens. The rabbits’ manure drops through the wire-mesh floor and provides more nutrients for the soil while the chickens keep the area clear of insects.

A neighbor then walks into the backyard and brings both garden produce for the chickens and tomatoes for the woman. He also gives her a jar of honey and receives eggs in return. Now we’re curious to see what’s in his backyard!

We don’t find chickens here, but there is again a beautiful garden. This garden uses the water from the roof in an interesting way; it receives rain water through fast-flowing soaker hoses whenever it rains. In this way, the size of a rain barrel doesn’t limit the amount of water available to the garden. The small yard also has fruit trees, a compost tumbler, and two beehives. We notice a bin for earthworms, called “vermiculture,” in a shady corner. Food and soil are being grown everywhere!

Growing Food in the City:

We’re impressed by the variety of amount of food that can be grown in people’s yards, but we also want to investigate the downtown area. Here again we are surprised by what we see. Areas that used to be lawns or sites of decrepit buildings are now crowded with plants. Not only are there fruit trees, berry bushes and beehives everywhere, but raised beds and gardens flourish even in the smallest spaces. Rooftops not only have beehives, but various-sized containers filled with beautiful vegetables and fruits.

Some vacant lots are utilized for compost materials. People bring branches from pruned fruit trees, grass, weeds, old garden plants, leaves, and food scraps. Many depart with composted soil for the gardens they tend. It’s satisfying to witness the happy hum of relaxed people talking, sharing, and working together. People even look healthier now their bodies seem full of joyful energy.

City parks have exchanged expanses of green lawn for concentrated growing areas tended by people who laugh and talk together as they work. In some areas there are raised beds densely green with growing fruits and vegetables. The source of their soil is evident as there are many rectangular chicken tractors where busy hens create compost by scratching through leaves, wood chips, and food scraps. They even provide eggs while making raised beds for next summer’s community gardens! We also notice irregularly-shaped hills on which fruit trees and berries are growing. This is called “hugelkultur,” and is a popular way to grow food with less water. Rotting wood, that would otherwise be wasted, is buried to provide heat, water and nutrients for the plants growing above.

Next we investigate the many greenhouses. Some are “lean-to” structures on the south side of existing buildings. The slant of their glass maximally captures the winter’s sunlight. Black barrels and smaller black jugs contain water to hold the sun’s heat for winter nights. Additionally, these greenhouses heat and humidify their attached buildings.

Some greenhouses have dozens of hangi ng plants inside with tubes extending below to tanks with water. These tanks contain tilapia fish which are an important protein source for people. This system of “aquaponics” uses the water with fish manure to fertilize the plants, and in return, the plants purify the water for the fish. We notice that all the people we’ve seen look content and happy, Is it because they feel productive and successful when working with nature?

What Food Is Grown in the Country?

Touring this city is fun, but we also need to see what’s happening in the surrounding countryside. Once there, we’re gratified to find people growing food for their families using many of the same techniques as in the city. Apparently, a “beautiful lawn” is no longer defined as grass, but by having homes surrounded by densely growing food.

Additionally , the thousands of acres that had grown mono-crops have evolved into pastureland and small fields of grain. Spelt, wheat, and oat fields are being worked by horses. Cows are outside on pasture again, looking content while producing healthful milk and meat. Even without large tractors, there are plenty of grains, meat, and milk products to supplement peoples’ individual gardens.

Whew—that was quite a tour! But when we begin a new venture, or delve deeper into what we’ve begun, it’s helpful to have the energy of a dreamer. With that energy, and with our motivation, the future “growing local food” blogs will take us step by step into being part of this enjoyable and necessary new world.

How to Nurture the Soil to Grow Nutrient-Dense Food

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 12:33:38 GMT

Healthy Soil Produces Nutritious, Delicious Food

Before the blogs about how to grow our food, I like to look into the reasons behind the "how's." Understanding how alive the soil is, as well as the exchange of nutrients between the soil and plants, gives us an understanding behind the why of what we do .

One reason for growing some of our own food is to eat better than what the grocery store has to offer. By “better,” we usually mean food that ranks high in flavor and nutrition and doesn't contain chemicals. To get these results, we first have to create healthy soil that will feed our plants.

For those of you who want to jump right in and begin projects that will give you the quality food you're after, let me ask you to pause the length of this article. When we begin to understand the complexity of the soil and plants as well as their interaction, everything we'll be doing to grow food will make more sense and bring more success. So please buckle up for the following explanation of the miracles that take place between air, plants and healthy soil. Then we'll get to work!

Why Focus on Soil?

I bet that I’m not the only one who dreaded seeing the “Periodic Table of the Elements” at the front of a high school chemistry class. We might have all said a similar prayer--that we wouldn't have to memorize it! But as we now glance at these 118 elements that are found on our planet, it is pretty amazing to know that our bodies depend, to some degree, on each of these elements.

To keep healthy and have our bodies function well, we need these elements to be in our food. To replenish them in our bodies, it makes sense that food needs to get these elements from somewhere, and that “somewhere” has to be from the air and soil.

It’s true that some elements are needed in only trace amounts, but these tiny amounts are vital for the millions of chemical reactions going on in our bodies. Eating only "fast food" while taking vitamins cannot provide what our bodies need to maintain health.

If nutritious food is our goal, we'll need to focus on soil. Having nutrients present in the soil doesn’t mean, however, that these nutrients will be transported to the plants that feed us. To have the happen, we indeed need “healthy” soil that interacts with the plants' roots. If part of your reason for growing food is to have nutritious and delicious food to eat, then let’s talk about how to make our soil healthy.

Besides Elements, What Comprises "Healthy Soil?"

Just as the planet has billions of living creatures interacting and co-dependent in our visible world, the world of healthy soil is just as complex and interactive. Because the underground world is constantly interacting with what we see on the surface, this exchange is called the “soil food web.” As I learned about how essential and complex this interaction is, I've had to discard my simple “good-guy, bad-guy” categories of actors in this web. Even the birds and small mammals, that I saw as competing for “my” produce, play a part in keeping the soil food web healthy. I also see how wrong I was to apply a “bad label" to nematodes, fungi and bacteria. Without these microscopic creatures, the entire system would break down and plants would no longer be able to extract nutrients from the soil.

How Do Nutrients Get from the Soil into Plants?

I do admit that my drawing may be a bit primitive, but in return, I hope that you’ll admit that what it portrays is pretty much a miracle. Joseph Campbell said that we have many miracles around us everyday, and I have to rank this one right up there towards the top.

It does seem a miracle that plants can take carbon dioxide in through their little stomata (“mouths”) on the underside of their leaves and with water, turn it into the sugars and then more complex carbohydrates and starches. Fortunately for us and the entire planet, they then use these sugars as "exchange currency" with the billions of microscopic creatures in the soil.

The plants' sugars are exchanged with what the soils' microbes have to offer. The electron microscope reveals that this relationship is as intimate as some fungi and bacteria actually accomplishing this exchange right inside the plant's roots. What they're giving to plants is no less than all the "elements" from the soil that our bodies rely on for health. These are the vitamins and minerals that we cannot live without. If we put a plant in dead soil (“dirt”), there is no exchange and our food has no nutrition. We can add products like “Miracle Grow” with their simple ingredients of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium), but that’s certainly not adequate nutrition for plants or people. Just look at "The Periodic Table of the Elements" for everything we'd be missing!

Let's celebrate the complex soil-food-web that feeds us. It's actually pretty amazing that we don't need to eat the soil itself to get the nutrition that we need; healthy plants, along with their fruits and vegetables, surely taste better! What a shame then that grocery store produce is often grown in "dead soil," or "aquaponics," where there is no active soil-food-web. That's true for some home gardeners too, but that's not how we'll grow our food.

We'll be nurturing a healthy soil food web as we talk through the "hows and whys" of what we can do to optimize the flavor and nutritional content of the food we grow. I'll discuss everything from what we want to avoid: chemicals, deep tilling and bare soil, and what we want to foster: compost to cover crops, hoop houses to preserving produce, fruit trees to herbs, saving rare breeds of animals to heirloom seeds. The learning curve is fun in itself, but the rewards of healthy food are pretty great too.

Making Good Compost for Growing Great Food

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 20:16:35 GMT

Why Begin with Compost?

Many of you may have attempted to compost kitchen scraps before but perhaps gave up because the end product was slimy "compost." Others may have better luck by throwing kitchen scraps into a backyard pile, or use a compost "tumbler" or faithfully turn a pile of farm animals' manure and bedding. When we are successful at creating good compost, what we end up with is wonderful "humus," or topsoil. When we add this to our garden, our reward is food that is high in nutrition and flavor.

To be successful in making compost, we can look at how nature does things. New life is constantly being created, but when plants and animals die, nature doesn’t throw them in a landfill. Instead, she "composts" them to help nurture new life. Nothing wasted and everything used.

So many gardens and farm fields today are now without topsoil. Repeated tilling, soil lying bare in the winter, and the use of herbicides and pesticides all result in no living topsoil and crops with depleted nutrition. Our alternative is to copy nature's model of recycling. We have everything necessary: all of us have kitchen scraps, many of us have yard wastes like leaves, branches and dead plants, and those with farm animals have manure and bedding such as straw. Whether you live in the city, suburbs or rural areas, you not only have the makings for compost, but compost is necessary for the wonderful produce that you will be growing.

Basic Ingredients for Composting:

1. Organic material: This is our main ingredient. Strictly speaking, “organic” means "made of carbon," and we can think of carbon as coming from any living source. Successful composting requires a ratio of about 25 to one; that's 25 brown-carbon to one green-carbon source. “Browns” are brown because they’re dried out or older, like dried leaves and grasses, dead plants, wood branches or hay and straw. “Greens” are fresher items like grass clippings, vegetable and fruit scraps from the kitchen, and manure from the chicken house. If browns don’t exceed greens by a large ratio, sloppy and “yucky” compost results!

2. Air: Almost all living beings need this essential ingredients and so it’s obvious that the millions of microscopic creatures in our compost pile do too. Without air, harmful bacteria (the “an aerobes”) proliferate and we end up with a stinky compost pile. That’s why the commercial “compost tumblers” of all sizes come with screened openings and handles to allow frequent turning of the ingredients. Compost in backyard open bins need to get turned with a fork, though building these piles around empty drainage tiles allows not only air to get in, but also water when necessary. Large compost piles on a farm get turned with a tractor—thank goodness.

3: Water: This essential ingredient allows the necessary chemical reactions to take place during composting by keeping microbes alive and active. Some people build their compost pile around a perforated drainage tile so they can water the pile through the tile during dry times. Others water their pile when they turn it. Compost with lots of "green carbon" items usually have enough water. Your composting material might need water if it appears dry, no longer heats up, or crumbles rather than having the consistency of a damp sponge. Compost that is too wet can be diagnosed by a bad smell because air can’t permeate the compressed material. You will also be able to squeeze water out of composting material when it is too wet.

4: Heat: H eat is integral to composting because it comes mainly from the chemical reactions taking place during decomposition. Warmer ambient temperatures do speed up composting though, and that’s why compost tumblers are painted dark colors to speed up the composting process. I find it fascinating (because I’m a bit of a science nerd) that there are both “mesophilic” and “thermophilic” bacteria that operate at different temperatures. They simply go dormant when the temperature isn’t optimal for them. Hurrah for successful composting even when we aren’t aware of all the nuances!

5: Microbes and minerals: Essential microbes proliferate in our compost if we don’t use pesticides. These microbes and minerals come from ingredients that include manure, leaves, grass, old garden plants and produce. Adding leaves from deep-rooted plants like comfrey and trees add even more microbes and minerals. Microbes are essential players that consist of bacteria and fungi, as well as nematodes and protozoa. Because we’re dealing with living creatures with microbes, we want to give them a good environment in our compost.

I have recently been using a " Bokashi " mixture of bacteria that I add directly to the compost pail that is kept under the kitchen sink. This has worked so well for rapidly breaking down the kitchen produce even before I carry it out to the compost tumbler. Bokashi is actually a mixture of bacteria that helps to ferment the kitchen scraps instead of actually composting them. The result has been a much quicker way of creating soil that can actually be applied directly to the garden.

Hints for Creating Great Compost:

Manure, the good and the bad:

For those of you who aren’t farmers with livestock and don’t have rabbits or chickens in your backyard, it’s still helpful to find a source of manure to add to your compost. Manure is packed with the microbes that were necessary in the animals' intestines to digest their food. These same microbes are extremely helpful in speeding along the composting process.

I used to encourage people to source manure from a farmer who might have extra. However, during the last decade a surprising number of farmers have begun using products like “Grazon” to kill broad leaf weeds in their pastures. Because these herbicides persists in the manure of these animals, the manure will kill our garden plants too. I’m rolling my eyes as I write this, because after having both horses and cows, I know that not only do broad leaf “weeds” contain many nutrients, but that animals seek them out to add to their grass diets. Even if I don't understand the logic behind farmers using these herbicides, it's best to avoid manure from animals where any herbicides have been used.

If having animals isn’t an option, then we human animals can make some pretty good manure too! When we had interns on our farm, it was fun and convenient to put a compost toilet in the old outhouse. Commercial compost toilets cost from $1,000 to $2,000. I admire folks who make their own from a five-gallon drywall bucket with a recycled toilet seat on top. Dry sawdust or wood chips at the bottom of any style of compost toilet helps to absorb moisture and odors. A sense of humor can even make this fun.

Make composting easy:

You’re not going to feel like focusing on compost every day, so try to make composting as easy as possible by weaving it into your daily routine. I keep a small bucket under the kitchen sink that receives produce like banana peels, tea bags, egg shells, coffee grinds and inedible parts of garden produce. Every few days, when I head outside for another activity, I can carry the bucket out to the compost tumbler, add some sawdust, and give the tumbler a few spins. After rinsing the compost bucket out with a hose, the job's done.

I am spoil ed by having a compost tumbler. Without it, I would need to use the garden fork to turn the compost weekly to aerate it. I did that when younger, but although I still use bins for bulky organic produce, a compost tumbler sure works well. Compost tumblers range in size from about 30 gallons to 100 gallons. It's handiest to have them divided inside. Although both sides turn together, one part can age while more items are added to the other side. Additionally, I keep a five-gallon bucket of sawdust from a nearby lumber yard beside the tumbler. This is the “brown” ingredient that I scoop into the tumbler every time I add kitchen produce.

Avoid all chemicals:

I’m afraid that it’s not just farmers who are supporting chemical companies. Herbicides that kill broadleaf plants may be found in grass clippings from roadsides or residential lawns. If you get straw or hay elsewhere, make sure it hasn’t been “dried down” with Roundup or treated with any insecticide or fungicide. To create living soil, we need all the living organisms that are part of the soil-food web.

The smaller ingredients the better:

Nature’s first step in composting is the work of the many creatures that shred large ingredients. Likewise, we can speed up our composting process by shredding leaves with a lawn mower or having the chickens shred kitchen scraps by eating them. What comes out their other end is then ready for the compost pile. At our farm, we discovered that running the cows’ straw bedding and manure through the manure “shredder and spreader” as it goes into the compost pile greatly reduces the time it takes for the pile to turn into beautiful compost.

Avoid wet or smelly compost:

The main reason I’ve seen people give up on composting is that their product was consistently wet, goopy, and smelly. Remember that you need twenty parts “browns” to one part “greens” for good compost. Having plenty of straw, wood chips or dried leaves to balance the wet produce from the kitchen will solve this problem. In the autumn, the dying garden plants also make excellent “brown” ingredients.

If your pile smells bad, it may be too moist, but bad odors can also be caused by the ingredients themselves. If your kitchen scraps go directly into the compost pile, bury them a few inches into the compost so they won’t smell as they decompose. This will also help keep the neighbor dogs away!

Using your beautiful compost:

After a few months, you will have organic material in all stages of decomposing. The younger compost will still have recognizable kitchen scraps, but once aged with air and moisture, the older organic material will have become “humus,” or the organic material worthy of nurturing your plants. Far from “deadened soil” or dirt, this compost can be layered on your garden each spring. It is alive with microbes and insects that will interact with your soil and plants to bring nutrition from the soil to your produce. You can also use compost for potted plants or for “topdressing” plants that are already growing. In addition, we use it extensively in the hoop house to nurture our crops.

Benefits of Compost:

I wish there was a way to measure the nutrient content of food, because compost increases the "nutrient-density" of food as judged by how flavorful the produce grown is when grown with compost. Currently, "BRIX" is used to measure the sugar content of produce which is assumed to parallel the nutritional content. I've used a brix meter , but find it easier to use the "taste test" on our produce. Studies have shown that the higher the nutritional content of food, the move flavor it has. My conclusion is that composting to create topsoil is not only worthwhile, but essential for the taste and nutrition of the food we want on our dinner tables.

Currently, the Bionutrient Food Association is working on creating a meter that we can bring to the grocery store, Farmers' Market or use with our home-grown produce to see how "nutrient-dense" our food is. Even without being able to measure its nutritional content, I believe you'll be pleased how much more effective and sustainable compost and compost tea are than any commercial fertilizer in producing nutritious and delicious food.

Brix meter for testing sugar content of produce indicating its nutritional quality

A How-To Guide for Starting Garden Plants Indoors

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 23:51:48 GMT

Why Start from Seeds?

Growing our garden plants from seeds takes time, effort and materials, so it's fair to ask, "Why bother?" But for those of us who enjoy getting our hands in the soil while it's still cold outside, we know it's a great therapy when the winters get long. Our practical sides also know that saving and buying seeds is far cheaper than waiting for the frost-free date and then buying plants at a store or nursery. Beginning plants as seeds also gives us the option of far more varieties. Another big reason for many of us is that we want to save precious heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables. The corporate world has reduced hundreds of varieties to only a few, and we who grow our own food can help save rare, heirloom varieties for future generation. I'll admit that growing heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables also gives us some incredibly flavorful food. For all of these reasons, let's begin some of our garden plants indoors from seeds!

Where to Find Seeds:

In the midst of winter, the seed catalogs begin to arrive in the mail. If you haven't ordered seeds before, consider looking online for what various seed catalogs have to offer. Treat yourself also to ordering a catalog or two. Catalogs allow us to enjoy dreaming of our gardens while it's still cold outdoors.

I like ordering from companies who give priority to heirloom seeds as well as organics. Fedco and Johnny's Seeds are a couple of my favorite. If you know of local seed companies or others that support your values, order from them.

Nature saves her seeds over-winter, and I also enjoy doing that. That's why you'll find seed packages from previous years stored in moisture-proof containers in our freezer. I also label and saved seeds from the previous year's harvest of vegetables, flowers and fruits. I usually go through these before buying what I still need from those pretty seed catalogs!

Basic Equipment

Pots and trays:

I begin by gathering the variety of containers that have accumulated through the years. Most seeds will be started in 12-by-22-inch flats before they'll be transplanted to divided containers. These containers are usually four, six or eight "cells" that will fit in the larger flats. It's handy to purchase clear plastic covers for the flats, though I've also used saran wrap. By covering the seeds when they're first watered, they'll stay moist until they sprout and will then be uncovered for ventilation. Inside your home, it'll also be helpful to have non-porous trays underneath the containers to collect excess water.

Recycled containers:

If this is your first year of starting garden plants from seeds indoors, you may not need to buy lots of extra containers. Our organic yogurt and peanut butter containers are not recyclable and so I save these to use for containers. The 32 oz. yogurt containers are too tall, and so I cut about 3" off the top. These tops are used as protective barriers around small plants when they are first put in the garden. The bottom halves, and other shorter containers, are used for transplanting seedlings from the flats. Transplanting isn't done until the seedlings have their "true" or secondary leaves.

Be sure to put holes in the bottom of each container to allow for adequate drainage. I do this by using a soldering iron on the up-side-down containers.

I notice that many sources recommend sanitizing previously used containers with a 10% bleach solution, but I leave that up to you. I don't want "bad microbes" to hurt the seedlings, but can’t see the logic in sanitizing the containers. Using one part bleach to nine parts of water is the same strong concentration that is used in hospitals, and it doesn’t seem fitting in the natural world where nature places her seeds in the living soil. Therefore, most years the containers I use are “cleaned but not sanitized."

Soil: Although our precious compost is essential for growing nutrient-dense produce, the seeds themselves do best in seed-starter planting media because it has a very fine texture and it's disease-free. You can also mix your own seed starting soil with:

1 part sphagnum peat moss (or coco coir, which is the more sustainable choice)
1 part perlite
1 part vermiculite

The reason that you start seeds in different soil is because they don't need any nutrients at first. They're self-contained little miracles with all the nutrients they need to get started. The first "seed leaves" and the young tap root will entirely grow from the nutrients a seed contains. When the seedlings are transplanted into individual containers, that's when you'll use soil which is either sifted compost or a purchased growing mix. If I have plenty of the seed-starter soil, I will then just add nutrients as explained below.

Heating pads: Warm season plants, like tomatoes and peppers, will germinate best at temperatures from 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit. If the room where you're beginning your seeds stays within this range, a heating pad will not be necessary. But if the room is often cooler, such as at night, a heating pad with give you much better success with these seeds.

Cool season crops include lettuce, onions and the "brassicas" like cabbage and broccoli. These vegetables will sprout better at cooler temperatures and usually don't require a heating pad.

The standard sizes for heating pads are 10x20 inches or 20x48 inches. What you choose depends on the space you have available and the number of warm season plants you want to grow. Each pad comes with a probe that is inserted into the soil for monitoring temperature. After the seeds have sprouted, the heating pad is no longer required. In fact, leaving it on will result in "leggy" plants.

Grow Lights: Grow lights are almost a necessity if you're growing more plants than will fit on a sunny windowsill. I was spoiled by previously having large, south facing windows that reached to the floor. After recently moving, I regretted not immediately buying grow lights for the first spring's seedlings. What I quickly learned is that plants grow tall and "leggy" without sufficient light, and many don't survive.

Depending on how many lights you need and what you can afford, grow lights can be assembled or bought as a full system. "Plant grow bulbs" are a sure bet when creating your own grow area, but cool-white fluorescent bulbs can also be used. Always allow 24 to 36 inches between the tops of the plants and most lights. Purchasing a complete set-up can give you the size and spacing between plants and lights that you need.

Your precious seedlings will require from 14 to 16 hours of light per day after they've sprouted and before going outdoors.

The seedling flats in this photo are sitting on heating mats made just for this purpose. A thermometer inserted into the soil keeps the soil's temperature in a comfortable range for the seedlings' roots.

Let's Begin Growing

When to begin: Moving from our homestead in central Ohio last spring to northeast Tennessee has made this challenging. It's simple to look up our USDA Hardiness Zone for our address to find out that we have moved from hardiness zone 6a to 7a, but what does that mean for when we begin our indoor planting? Climate change is also a challenge as many of us this spring have bounced from below freezing to the 80s and back again.

The general guidelines that I've used is to begin plants from seeds about six weeks before they can be planted outdoors. In Ohio, our "frost free date" was mid-May, so I'd begin most plants that can't be directly seeded during the last week of March. To make adequate room indoors, my husband would begin the onions and shallots about a month before. These then get moved out to the unheated hoop house at the end of March to make room for planting the other vegetable and flower seeds.

Cool season plants like kale, spinach and chard can be planted directly outdoors a couple of weeks before the frost free date in your area.

How to begin: Once you've set up your work area, go ahead and gather your seeds, soil, heating pads and containers.

Before beginning to plant, you'll want the soil to be moist, but not soggy. The dry potting mix will need two or three waterings before planting seeds in order to get it thoroughly moist. If the soil condenses down with wetting, add some more growing mix so that your seedlings will sit high in the containers where they’ll get plenty of ventilation. Now, after all this preparation, the real pleasure of hands-in-soil can begin.

When determining how far apart to place each seed, it’s helpful to plant fine seeds 1/8” apart, medium seeds 1/2” apart and large seeds 1” apart. You can meticulously space the seeds, or else come back after they've sprouted and thin them. Tiny seeds are tough for old eyes, so that’s made thinning seedlings after they've sprouted easier for me. To do this, I use a tiny scissors to clip out the extra plants. I don't want to pull the extra seedlings because that would disturb their roots.

After planting and before the seedlings sprout, containers are covered with saran wrap or clean plastic covers to keep the seeds moist. These covers stay on until the first seedlings emerge when it becomes important to open the containers to allow air to circulate.

From Seed to Seedlings: Seedlings are precious and to keep them healthy we need to manage not only ventilation but also their temperature and light. Our sunroom has an over-head fan, but on nice days, an open window helps. Seedlings don’t need a consistent temperature—surely nature doesn’t provide that. They don’t even continue to need the higher temperatures that germination may require and so a south-facing window will do the trick.

Finally, it’s also critical to keep the seeds and little plants moist, but not sopping wet. A spray bottle works well for watering, but you can also set their containers in warm water. On the other hand, be extra careful on sunny afternoons so that they don’t entirely dry out.

Your seedlings’ first leaves are called “seed leaves,” and will not look like the plants’ real leaves. It’s okay to thin the seedlings at any time, even when they have only their seed leaves. When the remaining seedlings have their real leaves, it’s time to transfer them to larger, individual containers where they will grow until they are planted outdoors.

Transplanting into larger pots:

Before transplanting, be sure to pre-moisten the soil in the plants’ new containers because this wet soil will settle. Seedlings can be planted a bit deeper in their new pots but keep the soil high enough to give the plants good ventilation. During the transfer, try to handle the plants by a leaf rather than a stem. They can always grow another leaf if one is damaged. Also, keep as much soil around the roots as possible by using a very small spoon or a popsicle stick when transplanting each seedling. Popsicle sticks can be purchased at a craft store and are also useful as labels for the seedlings. It certainly helps me to have plants labeled if I want to again grow a variety that performed well and tasted great.

When our little plants get their secondary leaves, it not only signals that they're ready to be moved to their individual containers, but that they also need additional nutrition. Half-strength liquid fertilizer can be used about every ten days, although my preference is to use homemade compost tea.

Transitioning to the outdoors

After nurturing our plants so carefully, we want to make sure they make a safe transition to the outdoors. Plants started indoors are delicate and won’t tolerate the sun and wind if planted directly into the garden. When night temperatures are at least in the mid-50’s, they can be moved outdoors to a sheltered area. Over several days, they can be gradually exposed to more sun and stronger breezes. Although I’m pretty eager to get them into the garden, taking it slower often results in a less stressful transition for the plants and an earlier harvest for us. If you’re like me and realize you’ve gotten too eager as nights get cool or breezes get stiff, you can haul them back indoors or give them some shelter either with milk jugs anchored over each plant or by protecting them with a low-tunnel. It’s nice to have these alternatives as the weather gets more unpredictable.

As you gather your seed-starting equipment and seeds in the late winter, enjoy the process. Each year will offer new challenges, but we'll reap many rewards as long as we grow plants and our food with a sense of adventure and joy. Keep your sense of humor when things don't go well. Many things get easier each year despite the challenges of climate change. Enjoy the planting, the nurturing, and the outdoor time with your hands in the soil. Delicious and nutritious harvests await you!

Packing for a long ride

duda@cloudpotential.com (Joe Mckenna) — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 23:46:29 GMT

Prepare yourself with what you'll need

Lists are great ways to stay on track. Write down what you'll need and what you'll want to have, and you'll be ready to go.

Check the list regularly

Don’t forget to check in and see how you’re doing. Just because you don’t achieve the big goals right away doesn’t mean you’re not making progress.

Reward yourself

When you succeed in achieving a goal, be it a big one or a small one, make sure to pat yourself on the back.

Think positively

Positive thinking is a major factor in success. So instead of mulling over things that didn’t go quite right, remind yourself of things that did.

mary-lou

Planting Our Legacies

The Many Uses for Diatomaceous Earth

Advantages of Having Flowers in Your Vegetable Garden

Confessions of an Imperfect Gardener

Beginners Guide to Growing and Using Herbs

The many pleasures of growing and using herbs:

Finding room for herbs:

Indoor growing space:

﻿ Outdoor containers:

Beautiful borders:

Annual herbs:

Basil:

Growing:

Using:

Health benefits:

Helping pollinators:

Pesto Recipe:

Dill:

Growing:

Using:

Health benefits:

Helping pollinators:

Chamomile:

Growing:

Using:

Pollinators:

Health benefits:

Cilantro and coriander:

Growing:

Using:

Health benefits:

Helping pollinators:

Perennial herbs:

Parsley:

Growing:

Using:

Health Benefits:

Helping pollinators:

Chives:

Growing:

Using:

Health benefits:

Pollinators:

Sage:

Growing:

Using:

Health benefits:

Pollinators:

Thyme:

Growing:

Using:

Health benefits:

Pollinators:

Efficient Time Management for a Sustainable Homestead: Tools for Balance and Enjoyment

How to Grow, Store, and Use Ginger and Turmeric in Your Kitchen

Cure rhizomes before planting:

Sprouting rhizomes:

Planting rhizomes:

Harvesting:

Curing rhizomes after harvest:

Preparing the rhizomes for use:

Preparing rhizomes for storage:

Cooking with Ginger and Turmeric:

Chopped fresh turmeric:

Natural Pest Management: Safeguarding Your Garden without Chemicals

Barrier methods:

Protect from soil fungi:

Floating row covers:

Electric fences:

Traps:

Milky spore:

Diatomaceous Earth:

Getting creative:

Clean out diseased plants:

Rotate your crops each year:

The best produce may still have a few flaws!:

Harvest to Freezer: Preserving Garden Produce Through Freezing

Blanching:

Okra:

Outdoor containers: