Feathered Chain Gang

When Meg and I are in the garden we bring the chickens along to do some weeding and bug hunting. They never work where we want them too, but they're always good for a few laughs.

500 Gallons of Water

Yesterday we had a good rain come through. The amount that came down was enough to top off our rain harvester and set us up with 500 gallons of water for when the rains aren't as plentiful.

The photo on the left is the top of the front barrel that is closest to the filler tank. When the water doesn't drain back into the vent hole, then we know the barrels are at their limit. What's amazing is that we are utilizing very little roof to fill these things. The second photo is a pretty good shot of the area we are gathering from (just the bottom section of roof, not the top end too). That tiny section of roof keeps the rain falling on our garden whenever we choose all season long.

This is our second year with our harvester and it has been the best improvement we've brought to the gardening experience. What's great is that they are easy to set up and extremely cheep. Just recently Ali and Dan over at Henbogle just set up a few harvesters for this year's crops. They actually found plastic barrels, which will last a lot longer than our steel drums. I give them high-fives all around.

If any of you have any questions about setting up a low cost harvester, please feel free to give us a shout.

Holy Garlic Stink, Batman

Last night, we went through with our plan to turn some of our green garlic into pesto sauce. I cleaned a small handful of garlic—roughly the same amount as bunch of green onions from the grocery store—and chopped off both the roots and the grassy tips. I threw the garlic in our trusty Magic Bullet, along with some olive oil, a little salt and, to thin it out a bit, some water from our cooking pasta.

We put it in a pot to heat up and added some romano cheese. It looked very, very, green and it smelled deeeelicious.

Then we tasted it, and we fell to the ground and started to cry. It was insanely, tongue-burningly strong. It was intense.

Note to anyone making sauce out of green garlic: No need to use a ton of the stuff.

We poured about half of the sauce into a container to use some other time, and added a boatload of cheese and cream to the remainder with hopes of mellowing it out a bit. That did the trick. It tasted way good on pasta, and we'll zap up the rest of our early garlic crop and freeze it (in teeny tiny portions) so we can throw it on food throughout the sumer.

I kept getting whiffs of garlic today because my bookbag, which was in the kitchen while we were cooking, reeked of it.

Dogwoods

There are a large number of trees on the three and half acres where we live and we have become quite familiar with the lot. We've come to expect their changes though the year as a way to kind of catalogue time. The dogwoods have recently come into bloom.

Of all the varieties of trees on this property, the dogwoods are my favorite during all seasons. In the summer they are a spectacular source of shade. Their leaves in the fall are always colorful and enduring. During the winter their branches bend and twist in all kinds of peculiar directions. And in the spring, just like the fall, they provide an array of colors that are both vivid and long-lasting.

Food!

Let the record show that this, the fourth weekend of April, 2008, marks the first time this year that we ate actual food from our garden.

This lettuce was planted last fall and survived the winter with only a couple of frostbitten outer leaves. Due to the lack of an appropriate harvest basket we jammed it into this coffee mug. It (the lettuce, not the mug) made an excellent salad for dinner last night.


This garlic was planted a year and a half ago, got swallowed whole by weeds and never harvested, and re-emerged this spring as a million little clusters of green garlic. Some of it made an appearance in our soup tonight, and the rest will be pesto by tomorrow evening.

Is "Strawberry Fields" too obvious for a title?

When we picked up our strawberry plant for 99¢ at Home Depot last summer, it was the saddest looking thing you've ever seen.


Now it's big and bushy and sending out runners all over the place. We got pretty many strawberries off of it last year despite its scrawniness, so I think we're set to have a decent harvest once again.

The Cover Up

The brassicas are officially on their way. The cloches did absolute wonders for the indoors to outdoors transition. I swear they doubled in size. We hung up the cloches, which are in great shape, and will utilize them again with the squash, peppers, and tomatoes.

The row covers are in place. We're not sure if we'll make frames or just leave them directly draped. I think it will be determined by the amount of time we have down the road. I'm sure either way will be fine and any decision we make will not make too big of an impact on the health of the plants.

This magnolia flower

...looks way too tropical for Pennsylvania.

Earth Day Cop-Out

We didn't do anything notable for Earth Day. We had organic, shade-grown coffee and took the train to work, but we do that every day and it's definitely not worth a blog post. So, I will re-direct you all to Katie's very nice Earth Day post, where she talks about organic ketchup, biking to work, and other green things.

Save an Iceberg, Plant a Vegetable

Yesterday, the New York Times published a new Michal Pollan piece. It's no secret that we're big fans of Pollan's stuff and this new article, "Why Bother?" is just as good as the rest. In it, he writes about the kind of hopeless feeling of doing too little in the way of being environmentally responsible. What's the point of changing a lightbulb or walking to work if some dude in China is chowing down on Big Macs while he drives his unregulated emissions car to his job at a coal mine?

Pollan's argument, essentially, is that you should feel good about making environmentally friendly choices, however small, because small changes are what catch on in society. After all, it was only a hundred and fifty years ago or so that some doctors bought into a crackpot theory about germs and started to regularly wash their hands, and we all know how that turned out. If we each turn off lights, plant a garden, or save gas, the outcomes will be positive even if they're initially tiny.

Basically, if you drink Al Gore's Kool-Aid, you're not going to hurt anything and you just might be the beginning of something big.

Here is something I've always thought about: What if everyone grew just one thing? A bed of lettuce, a tomato plant, some peas. Think about how much we'd save in resources if we put a small dent in the amount of produce that gets shipped around the country. What would happen if every single person with a porch or a plot of dirt planted cucumbers this year? So what if your cucumbers get demolished by squash bugs or eaten by nasty groundhogs? As long as one of your neighbors has a live plant they're going to have about a million and half more cucumbers than they can eat, so you can have some of theirs. American cucumber consumption in the 1990s was at about 10.3 pounds per person annually. What's that, like 20 or 30 cucumbers? You can grow that in one week in July.

Granted, a lot of the cucumbers in that figure are imported from South America or wherever in the middle of the winter, when most of the country can't produce their own fresh ones. Leaving aside for a moment the argument that no one needs fresh cucumbers in January, say each person is still responsible for coming up with half the cucumbers they eat each year—that's 1.75 billion pounds of cucumbers that aren't being trucked around. FedEx would charge $427 million to ship that from Florida to Pennsylvania, and that's with crappy 3-day ground service.

I'm not trying to bring down the cucumber industry or anything, but just think how much fertilizer, gasoline, emissions, road ware, traffic congestion, little "Cucumber 4062" stickers, and plastic produce bags we'd save if we all grew half our cucumbers. Hmm.

What the hell is this?

After witnessing the fantastic results of Meg's pruning the other day, we thought we would scope out any other trees that need some lopper love. On our journey we spied a mass of eggs left by some kind of insect mathematician. They're cool looking, but if it's bad I want to squish it. Chances are it's a pest (that's just the way this place works), but if it so happens to be a pest eater, well then I think we may want to let it live (I'm convinced that God is a gardener).

If any of you know what in the blazes these damn things might be, before they hatch, please send us a shout.

Bring out your dead.

The beautiful thing about spring is that it is so much easier to identify dead branches for pruning. If I haven't led on to this earlier, Meg is extremely talented with a bow saw and a set of loppers.


On a number of occasions we have shared with you stories about the nightmare of an orchard that is festering in our backyard. Recently Meg has said to hell with the landlord and has started to do some preventative maintenance to these poor neglected trees. What she did was look for any branch she could reach that didn't have leaf buds and removed it. Over all the project took her about three hours. I think the before and after shots are pretty damn impressive.

Where was I during all of this? Well someone has to weed the garden and our lettuce needed a sun screen. Besides, we only have one saw.

*We would like to make an apology to those of you who have left comments this week and have yet to receive a reply. Meg and I have been totally busy lately with student needs, garden needs, need a full time job with benefits needs, and whatever else this wonderful life has to throw at us needs. We love the comments and please keep them coming; I get worried that you might be dead in some ditch if we don't hear from you once in a while. We'll back at you soon.

Calcium Boost

We have just about one more month until the tomatoes go in the ground (though with the 85° temp we hit today, maybe we should bump our target date up a little). Our seedlings were started a few weeks ago and there's no way they'd comfortably make it four more weeks in their little six-packs. So, today was re-potting day. I upgraded the largest of the seedlings to slightly bigger containers using the Future House Farm Surefire Method for Wicked Hardy Tomato Plants.*

First, I made myself an enormous omelet.

Kidding! I actually took a bunch of eggshells we'd been saving and smashed them in to wee little bits.

And mixed them into a bucket of potting soil.

The eggshells are because tomatoes need to have a lot of calcium available so that they can regulate their water intake, or something like that. Last year our tomatoes and our peppers seemed to like having some eggshells, so we figured we'd try that trick again this year.

The real key thing to re-potting tomatoes, though, is to bury them deep. All those little hairs on their stems can develop into roots, so we pull off the first leaves towards the bottom and stick them way down deep in their new pots.

That way, only the top couple of leaves will stick out and the buried stem will grow new roots.

Tomatoes are really affected by water fluctuations, so both the extra calcium and the really deep roots help a lot. Every time we replant the tomatoes, whether in new pots or out in the garden, we bury them at least halfway. They always look a bit pathetic afterwards, but being able to access so much extra water makes them grow like crazy soon after they settle into their new home.



*I just made that up. Our tomato plants were actually killed by a black walnut tree last year.

Flower Show

It's fun to watch and wait for trees to flower. One of my favorites on our property is the magnolia. Does my affinity have anything to do with the Grateful Dead's Sugar Magnolia? Maybe. Or, they're just big meaty flowers and I love them.

The next tree on my list of wait-fors is the dogwood. All year round the dogwood puts on a very unique display of color and form. But for now we can wait, because the magnolias are out and they deserve their turn.

Fingers Crossed

The same onions that looked huge in their little 4-cell trays now seem tiny compared to the garlic behind them. Already, though, they're bigger than any sets we've grown have ever gotten.

Brassicas and Homemade Cloches

Our brassicas have found their way into the garden. In the bed at the top of the photo we have six broccoli and six white cabbage and in the bed at the lower portion of the photo we have six Brussels sprouts and six red cabbages. We grouped them together like this for both protection and production purposes. If we can, I think we may try to squeeze some sage in there as well. We'll see.

Last year cabbage worms destroyed our brassicas, leaving very little for us to actually harvest. This year we purchased floating row covers to keep out the moths that lay the eggs that eventually become the kraut eatin' worms. From what we've read in books and heard at the farmer's market, row covers are extremely effective. However there is one set back and that is they also keep out beneficial insects that are necessary for pollination with some plants.

Luckily brassicas don't need to be pollinated to produce the goods. We figured that if we kept all the brassica beds free of plants that need pollinating we wouldn't need to worry. ( I know, we're doing rocket science over here.) Sage is also a deterrent of cabbage moths so we may plant some of it around the edges to discourage any insect sneakiness.

Another bit or protection we are looking for is against the elements. Although we hardened our plants off, we wanted to play it safe in case there were any surprise temperature drops in the next couple of days. Since the end of last year's growing season, Meg's parents have been saving water and milk jugs for us so we could carve them into cloches.


After we finished planting and had a little lunch, I set to work with our trusty utility knife and cut the bottoms off of twenty four jugs. It is now three days later and they are doing awesome. Our average lows at night have been around 38°. We figure that by Thursday the plants should be completely hardened off and we can remove the cloches and save them for our tomatoes and peppers.

On a bed of greens

This is our third growing season together and consequently it's our third year growing lettuce. The first year we didn't get to the spring planting in time, but the fall harvest was a boom. The second year saw results that were the complete opposite; the spring planting was on time and plentiful, but the deer and rabbits had their way with the fall sprouts. What has been consistent is that every planting has been direct seed.


This year we reinforced the fence, said to hell with consistency, and started some of the seeds indoors. We were really surprised at how well they did. Out of a tray of 72, only two didn't sprout. If I knew the names of the varieties [Buttercrunch and Black Seeded Simpson --Meg] I'd tell ya, but Meg's at work and she's the wiz at keeping that shit straight. I usually learn food names by consumption. (and I digress) Last week we hardened off our sprouts and Saturday we put them in the ground.

We're pairing this particular bed of greens with poling peas (the ones that survived at least). Last year this bed was a mix of fabulous carrots and failed parsnips. As I was digging the trench to put in the plants and fresh compost I discovered a carrot that managed to go unnoticed last fall.


We made short work of the carrot that evening. It was tasty.

It's been two days since we transplanted our future salads and everything looks great. Hopefully this weekend we can return to consistency and direct seed a bed of lettuce and also get our spinach going as well.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Squawks and Freaks Out

Although our chickens usually keep themselves quite busy in the compost production department, this weekend we put them on weed-eating duty in the garden. The idea was that, since the chickens generally try to eat everything in sight, we'd let them loose in the garden where they could chomp on weeds and bugs until they put themselves into food comas.

That idea didn't really pan out. Even though the garden is about 1200 square feet, the ladies chose to hang out in the same 4x8 bed that Kelly and I were working on. Bertha, specifically, thought that she could provide the most help by tap dancing in the tray of compost we were using to fill in the holes of our transplanted seedlings. That was actually no help at all.

We decided to change our approach. It became obvious that we should have built a chicken tractor to keep the ladies on task. As a weak substitute, we dragged out a big cage that we built a few years ago to keep a groundhog from eating our cucumbers. The cage only had room for one chicken to comfortably move around inside and Stella, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, got volunteered for the position. She was really pissed and she strutted around the cage with her chest puffed out, making noises like she was going to attack someone. We ignored her and hoped that she would calm down and start eating bugs.

She didn't. Instead, she just stared forlornly at the other chickens, who were still running around like idiots.

Stella ate no bugs, and she became increasingly pathetic as she stood and watched the other chickens enjoying their freedom on the outside. I didn't know that chickens had enough emotional complexity to become despondent, but apparently they do. It was clear that Stella wasn't going to get any work done, so we let her out after a couple of minutes.

Interestingly, she seemed to be scared straight by her ten minutes in confinement because soon after her release she was leading the other chickens on a weed-eating expedition.

Yarrr!

Back in business.

We took advantage of the 75° weather and got lots of work done in the garden today. We planted, dug, raked, weeded, watered, transplanted, composted, and started what will soon be spectacular farmers' tans. But, despite all that work, this was the biggest accomplishment of the day:

Seedling Boot Camp

Our seedlings have had a relatively cushy existence so far. They live under grow lights, close to a heater, and they get lots of attention and regular water. They are sissies. They would get their asses kicked out in the garden.

Therefore, we need to toughen them up before we let them out into the world. For the past week we've been letting them spend more and more time outside, so that they can build up a tolerance for the sun and the wind. I believe that our cabbages, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, lettuce, onions, and herbs are sufficiently hardened off, so they will all get planted this weekend as long as the weather cooperates.

Chores and Chickens

Last year we extended the garden, tilled, and double dug all of our raised beds. Thankfully all of our hard work paid off, because the only planting prep work we've had to do is pull weeds. What's especially fantastic is that the number of beds that actually need to be weeded are few. Last year this was our potato bed and it is now lined up for green beans, which will be planted in about a month.


The chickens, the nosy ladies they are, sought a suitable spot for inspection.

What's Eating You?

One of the many things we've learned since we started gardening is that with the great joys there are also extreme aggravations. This property can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. Our recent bit of fury comes from a mysterious pest that is eating the pea sprouts.

I think we can rule out groundhogs, deer, and rabbits. There is just too much fence for that to be a possibility. Meg thought perhaps that is was the work of squirrels, but what ever it is, it left the seed. Actually there doesn't seem to be any mammal amounts of digging at all. I did see an ant colony, but it was in another bed all together. I know they're industrious, but would they really travel that far for a little green grub?

If you can't tell, we are at a loss with this one. Now I know the photo of the eaten sprout isn't the best, but it was the best I could do. If any of you have a theory about what it might be, please send a remedy our way.

Aha

Recently, Kylee at Our Little Acre posted about cedar-apple rust, a disease that lives alternately on cedar trees and apples trees. The trees take turns re-infecting one another via airborne spores that look like rust. We have lots of cedar trees, and we also have lots of totally messed up apple trees. Hmm...

Even though the tree funk in Kylee's post didn't look like anything I had seen around here, I had sort of a lightbulb moment after I saw the pictures and did some more research. Turns out that cedar-apple rust can take various forms, all of which involve some kind of strange, orange growth on trees in the cedar family. One of those forms is that of a freaky alien brain.


Looks like we're growing our very own tree brain. The little spikes are rust spores, which swell up and float away from time to time, especially after a rain. The spores then attach themselves to nearby apple trees, unless you're lucky enough (as Kylee is) to have rust-immune Red Delicious trees. As far as a plan of attack, our options are either to:

1. Cut down every cedar tree in at least a two-mile radius (will not happen)
2. Remove and dispose of every tree brain we can find (might happen, at least a little)

The apple trees here always get a fairly large amount of rust on the fruit, though no one has ever done anything preventative in the past. It will be interesting to see if our attacking the tree brains this year has any effect on the apple crop. We're keeping our fingers crossed.

The first signs of life

And then there was hot sauce.

Some Blog World Activities

Well, we were hoping to get in another solid day in the garden today, but no such luck. The weather was just a little too miserable for yard work. Our next outside hurrah will be to plant our brassicas in their respective beds and erect the new bamboo flagpole. Hopefully we can get to it on Friday.

In the meantime, there are a few blog activities I wanted to give a shout for.

The first is actually long overdue. Kelly at Her Able Hands is putting together a project involving photos of your hands and a narrative to go along with it. I don't remember end result she is looking for when she has collected the submissions, but what ever it is, we gardeners have a very special relationship with our hands and I thought it would be cool to see those stories collected in some fashion. Meg and I are trying to get our submission together, but midterm grading and job searches have rudely gotten in the way. I don't think she has a time frame for any kind of deadline, but I'm sure she doesn't want to sit on it indefinitely. Kelly, if it's not too late we will get one out soon.

The second activity involves the Mouse & Trowel award, which Path to Freedom reminded us about on their journal. Meg and I are having great fun with the challenge of posting every day and we have had even more getting to know all of you. So, if you feel like giving a shout to some of your must-read blogs, this would be a wonderful way to do it. I usually don't believe in awards, I'm a mild socialist, but Path to Freedom has been a positive force for us in the garden blog world and any award they feel fit to promote is alright by me.

No Varmints Allowed

Last year we learned that rabbits can squeeze through incredibly small spaces. Unfortunately our lesson had to be made at the sacrifice of our entire soy bean crop and a good amount of our fall peas. I can say with vexed determination that I hate those wabbits.

To avoid further fury, Meg and I added a section of two-foot high chicken wire around the entire perimeter or the garden. The space between the wires of the original fence is about two inches and the chicken wire is, well, chicken wire. To add some extra protection we left a few inches of the fence at the bottom to bend out and away from the garden. We're hoping that this will deter burrowing.


The project took us a couple hours. My hands got all nicked to hell, but I'll live. Tomorrow we plan to plant our brassicas and I am confident those bastard varmints will have to forage elsewhere.


The chicken pen shares a fence line with the garden so we had to barricade their little play area, too. They took an invested interest in everything we did. I'm sure they could give two shits about their increased safety; they were more intent on pecking at anything that moved.

Pea sprouts! ...But not where we expected them.

At the top of our stairs is a gigantic bamboo plant that I've had for about four years. It's in a nice, big pot and in the morning I'll sometimes dump coffee grounds or eggshells or other compost-y stuff in the dirt. Last month, when I shelled the peas we'd been drying since the fall, I threw all the stems and leaves and empty pea pods in the bamboo pot.

As I was coming upstairs today, I saw this:


I guess I missed some peas.

New Toy!

Last year we grew big, beautiful cabbages and broccoli that were filled with big, horrendous cabbage worms. It was pretty gross, and we hardly got to eat any of it. Since hand-picking the dumb bugs off did not work, we decided to try a new approach: