Catch Up and News!

I love autumn.
There's things to do that just can't be done any other time of year, the air smells different and there's an urgency that doesn't feel the same at any other time. The to-do lists are different, the days get shorter and you really need to watch your step on the back steps!
Here, our leaves have passed peak, we've had a couple of snows and more than a few frosts. We've harvested tomatoes, one of us ate peas fresh from the pod frequently, beets and we're pretty pleased with the showing of pumpkins. (We got 2!)We've made plans for crop rotation for next year, I've dug two more garden beds with hopes to get a couple more in yet, and we planted one bed with red clover as a green manure crop. I had plans to have 7 new garden beds dug, but a money making opportunity and weather worked against my plans. Oh well, modify and adapt, as Betty says. My to-do list has changed. Now is the time to weather-proof windows and doors. So the big picture window in the living room is on the agenda for today I think. Maybe even a couple of the basement windows. Next time we go to town I have to have measurements for two doors  and the windows in the craft room that need heavy plastic, since they'll be covered outside. Also on today's list is to start cleaning and organizing the pump room. Cleaning out the mud room comes after there is room in the pump room. This coming spring we'll be taking down the old mud room and building a newer, bigger, brighter and better one.

That money making venture I talked about? Picking hemlock. Quite a few people up here pick it and sell it to a neighbor, in turn, he sells it to a medical lab. Eastern hemlock is being used by many to treat cancer. So we were doing that whenever we could, and then the weather turned nasty. Which is why I didn't get more garden beds dug.

As if all that isn't enough, two days ago we got a new puppy!

His name is Harley and he is of "mixed heritage" Kind of sounds like a questionable tomato one has found in the garden, lol.
So, now you know why I've not been around much. With the cold and damp settled in though, and Harley, at least I'll be closer to home.
Are you getting ready for winter?

No Soil, No Veggies

It's always been an interest of mine to see what other people do on their land, including design, functionality,  Then I come back and look at my piece. I used to get a little depressed about our gravel-laden, mossy, weedy yard. (That's it there to the left) Then I turned my thinking around to realize the potential it has. I certainly don't need to worry about drainage! I don't need to worry about putting a shovel into it and coming up with construction trash (like our last home). I can do whatever I want with our piece of land...mostly. Because the front yard is where the septic tanks and weeping field is, I'm going to plant most of our vegetables in the back. It's logical, larger and by growing crops in the back, I'm not tempting Murphy (of Murphy's Law fame).

My first issue to address in the back is the soil. As far as I know, there is only one way to grow anything in this soil, and that's to amend it. Many of you know I am a big fan of organic gardening and farming. Some of you know I believe whole heartedly in growing food and not grass. I know we have the potential here to grow a butt-ton of food, using a combination of square-foot and bio-intensive methods. But first things first, something has to be done with the soil.

We have two composters here on the property, and they get used, tended and mixed quite often. One of them had sat in the same location for a couple of years until just recently. When I moved it, I was happy to see that there was enough finished compost for me to use in a few spots around the yard. Those spots will be herb beds next year. (With what remains of this growing season, I will be focusing on building garden beds, growing herbs and lettuce indoors and of course, soil improvement.) The composter that I moved had a lot of wet items in it, what the composting gurus call "green" matter, but it wasn't real high in "brown" stuff. Before I confuse you, let me explain.

What you put into your composter has a lot of influence on  how quickly  the raw materials break down, as does the size of these items. If you fill your composter with only sticks and dry leaves, they're going to take longer to break down. The same can be said of vegetable trimmings. The trick is find the right ratio. The organisms that do the work in a composter need four things to work properly; carbon (this is where dry plant matter comes into play such as small broken up twigs, dry leaves and straw), nitrogen (in order to make new and more of the aforementioned organisms to oxidize that carbon), oxygen to help decomposition, and water (to help maintain organisms without giving too much moisture and creating a stinky situation). Now, if you remember that fresh, juicy, wet materials are usually "green", it gets easy to think of "green" compostables. Apple cores, grass cuttings, banana peels, feathers, manure, tea leaves, potato peelings, watermelon rind, coffee grounds and so on. All of these are high in nitrogen as well. Now the "brown" ingredients are easier to identify as well. Dry leaves, shredded corn stalks and cobs, wood chips, small sticks, grass cuttings that have dried on the lawn, peanut shells, straw, bedding from all kinds of animals from gerbils to horses ... you get the idea, right? Remember, the smaller the pieces you put in, the faster it will all break down. I've heard of a lot of people acquiring worms and dumping them into the compost pile. Proponents of vermiculture say there is only one kind of worms to use, and that's the red wiggler. I don't know this for sure myself, but I know that it's now possible to order them through the internet! Google is so useful...

So, compost is a key element of organic soil amendment. No matter how much I want to hurry it along, it takes time. Depending on the style of your composter and what you put in it, and how often it's mixed; it can take either months or weeks to get finished compost. Or so the experts say. I've never had compost in weeks. Apparently if one has a tumbler style composter (this one looks like a barrel with a handle), the drum can be rotated every week or so and therefore better mixed. There are composters that look like a drum that gets narrower at the top. I've never been able to see why this design is better than any other, but if you ever get the opportunity to go look at composters for sale, this may be the most common design. Another design is the three bin system, with each bin holding progressively more completed compost. I have never tried this style, but with six of us in the house, I am faced with the possibility of making a three bin system soon! I think design comes down to the preference of the person composting. What's more important is rebuilding the soil, and giving back to the planet instead of taking away.

So what's in your composter, you might be asking me... We eat a lot of fruit and veggies here, and the fresher the better. So we have a lot of vegetable trimmings. Potato peels, watermelon rind, cucumber trimmings, and beet ends Small twigs and dry leaves from my ongoing battle to not let the forest take back our property, dried straw, and coffee grounds. This week I'm hoping to acquire a source of goat and chicken manure that I can mix into the composter as well. Before you start wondering about the smell, let me assure you that if a composter is managed correctly, there is no smell. I had a 5 gallon bucket that I had put small holes into at my former home, an apartment, that I put all our kitchen waste into, as well as dried leaves and sticks and some small amounts of soil from a local ravine. (The soil came with the dried leaf matter on the shovel. I wasn't digging holes in the ravine, in case you wondered) As long as I was conscious of the ingredients of my bucket, and kept an eye on things, (or should that be nose?), and kicked the round bucket around the yard to mix it all up my neighbors never smelled a thing. In fact, many didn't believe me until I showed them the compost.

So, to wrap up, compost is the first step to any soil amendment, and definitely my starting point. It's not as overwhelming as it first seems when you break it all down. Pardon the pun. Plants are better off for the time and effort put into compost, the soil will be richer for it, and in the end, the vegetables grown with it will be all the healthier for it.
Do you have a composter? If you do, what style do you have? Is it a barrel or three bin system? What do you put into yours? If you don't have a composter right now, is this something you plan on doing?
Let me know in the comments section; I love learning what everyone else is doing!

We're Not So Urban Anymore

I'm very pleased to report we all made it safe and sound! We're now Northerners! This isn't the first time for me, or the 16 yr old, but for the rest of the family, this is new. I'm relieved that everyone seems to be settling in well. The youngest has even expanded his palette of acceptable foods! The dog also seems to have found himself.  He's become quite the explorer, if only of his own yard.
We made crabapple jelly today, albeit a very, very small batch. But we learned some things and it apparently turned out tasty, so it was not a complete waste of time. First thing I learned; ignore the recipe when it tells you to put the jelly juice on to boil before the jars. Get the jars warming first, otherwise the jelly is ready before the jars. Bad. Also learned; no matter how often you think you have enough, it isn't. Keep picking. But above all, look for the beauty in your day. Today it was in a sunbeam through a full jar of crabapple jelly. Can't wait to make more!

There's a lot of work to do here, but I expected that. There's garden beds to lay out and make. Lots of space to do that in though. There's a few piles of junk that can be sorted through, reclaimed and re-purposed. The composter needs to be emptied, repaired and moved. There's lots of weeding, lots of trimming and bush-whacking to do. It seems as if the woods have been pretty determined over the past 12 years to take back the yard. I shall prevail. I have to learn about pumps since the one we have is like a cranky old man determined to ruin everyone's day. I don't think it's big enough, but then again, I doubt I'm qualified enough to have an opinion. It seems all we ever do is cook and do dishes.  You would think that at some point we'd get ahead of it, but no.
I have visited a website once or twice that's written by Amish women (I think), and they share recipes they've enjoyed when they've cooked for crowds of 15 or 20. I think perhaps it's time to revisit that website! I need to re-learn how to cook for a crowd!

So in the spirit of Sharon Astyk's Independence Days Challenge:

Plant something: not yet, but tomorrow is peas, mesclun and lettuce
Harvest something: beets the other day
Preserve something: made crabapple jelly today
Waste not: well, nothing to report there I'm afraid

Not much else to report for this week. It's been so hot that just thinking about working outdoors has made me break into a sweat!

Shifting Agriculture Could Change Everything

My partner and I were talking about our future one day when she made a statement that still has me thinking weeks later. I was telling her about my plans for the not-quite-an-acre property, and how I plan to eke as much food from it as possible. She nodded and said, "Your job will be growing the food and mine will be preserving and cooking it" Now, obviously there will be more to it, but she has the essence of it right. With the core of our new roles put like that, I realized I can't take a break from learning all I can about agriculture.

John Michael Greer talks about two agricultures in his blog entry, Two Agricultures, Not One dated August 18th of last year. He talks about how the mega-farming as we know it today is an industrialized and chemicalized version of the intensive farming that fed our ancestors, and he also shares the opinion that intensive gardening is going to help us pad our food shortfall,
"A team of researchers at pioneering organic-gardening group Ecology Action found, on the basis of extensive tests, that it’s possible to feed one person year round on a spare but adequate vegetarian diet off less than 1000 square feet of intensively gardened soil... In the more troubled parts of the future ahead of us, some of us may have to do just that; a great many more of us will need to be able to garden in order to pad out potential irregularities in a food supply that’s desperately vulnerable, over the short term, to fluctuations in the price and availability of fertilizer feedstocks and fossil fuels. The victory gardens of past wars are likely to be a useful template for the survival gardens of the deindustrial future." 

I completely agree, and I've begun to see it already. All of that only frustrates me on another level, because here, I can hardly grow anything, facing north and being in shade. So on one hand, I could sit and whine about it, or I could shut up and DO something. Months ago, I chose the latter. So it has become my secondary job, if you will, to learn everything I can about growing as much as I can on very small acreage. Starting with the soil. I already knew that compost is better than any chemical fertilizer we can manufacture. It's better all round, for the plants and for the environment, and it goes hand-in-glove with the various micro-environments in one's garden. I've been learning exactly how earthworms break down plant matter, how plants use the nitrogen from the air and how the no-till method is better than churning up our soil every spring and fall. I've also learned quite a bit about why seaweed is a better fertilizer than one that relies on ever diminishing oil supplies. Did you know that plants require not only the big three (nitrogen, phosphorus and calcium), but also micro-nutrients? Without those micro-nutrients, the plant cannot grow to it's true potential, and the resulting food lacks in nutrients also. Hence the mystery of the tomato with less Vitamin C.

So, the answer then I think, is to go back to farming, or at least gardening, the way we used to. Those that can need to turn away from chemical fertilizers, away from row gardening, away from the way 90% of all gardening books tell us it should be done. We need to learn all we can about organic gardening, intensive gardening, square-foot gardening, composting, vermi-culture, soil tilth, extending the growing season no matter where we live, and the value of the old-style farmsteads. The inter-relations of soil, air, food, animals, trash and what our culture has done to our planet cannot be over stated. But in the end, we will all come to a point where we must put down the books, turn away from the computers and do something about it. More of us need to focus on food production in a way that will not poison ourselves and our environment. We need to get back to basics, we need to take that first step.

Once we take control back over our food, we can begin to take more control over our lives and hand less of ourselves to the government. Once we get back to basics, many of us will need less and be happier with less and realize the folly of our culture's demand for the latest, best and fastest gizmo of the week. (I write this while admitting I spend more time on my computer than I probably should) I also admit that getting back to basics will inevitably improve our health, give us clearer vision when we look at what's going on around us, and in many cases, shift our priorities.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, it's true. We all need to start thinking about what's coming and how we might each be responsible for changing our corner of the world.
What do you think?