Companion Planting and a Flashy New Trellis

The tomatoes are in. The bed in the photo is 4' by 18'. There are eight tomato plants (a little less than half our stock) in the bed, which I know isn't very many, but they will be sharing the space with four varieties of poling beans, red onions, leeks, and a shit load of basil. Well, maybe not a shit load, but a fare amount none the less.

We're really happy with how well our new trellis turned out. The design is mostly from something Meg found on the internet and in the latest issue of Organic Gardening. However, the modifications are all Future House. It did take us a few hours to build, but it's nothing more than bamboo from our property and salvaged string (the whole thing didn't cost a cent). I'm certain that by the end of this year I'll be able to tie knots like a sailor (which is fitting, because I tend to curse like one).

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.

In Every Home

I have a little exercise for you all to try out. I want you to go into your refrigerator, grab a bottle of beer (or soda), and search your entire kitchen for a piece of furniture or cabinet hardware with which you can open the bottle. There is one in every home and a majority of the time it's in the kitchen.



We lucked out with the cap catching drawer. In the last place I lived, the opener was a hinge on the refrigerator and the handle on the screen door. I don't believe this knowledge will reduce our carbon emissions, nor is it a measurable forward step towards self sustainability; but I can guarantee that you will gain a few cool points with at least a handful of your friends. Cheers.

Doin' whatcha can

When Meg and I started doing this whole quest for sustainable living thing, our primary mission was to live simply and be happy. As we began to explore the blogosphere to resource like minded folk, we were encouraged by the diversity of all the homesteaders, backyard gardeners, tiny farmers, and kitchen witches. There's a polyculture of knowledge out there.

For a bit there we were under the terrible misconception that what we had to strive for was some sort of collection of the whole. Thankfully we learned real quick that logic like that has no logic at all. What we've learned is that if we all do what we can, collectively we're making a big difference.

There have been a lot of posts floating around lately about what compromises and sacrifices people make in their personal quests to be a little bit greener. However, beyond the personal, the collective has been providing some creative solutions that are certainly making our world a better place. Maybe because there's not a lot of outside planting going on right now, many of these posts have been focusing on non-botanical environmentalism: using cloth bags, recycling plastic bottles, and salvaging sinks. I'm salivating at the thought of what inventiveness this new growing season will bring and how much better we will all be for it.

In the Kitchen

"[I]t was evident once again that, as a nation, our amnesia regarding how to cook is wasting food and costing us - and the environment - dear."

This is a line I swiped from a post I read a week ago on Hedgewizard's Diary. The post has to do with free-range chickens (which we obviously support), but I was really intrigued with this statement. Everything that we do in our gardens comes to fruition in the kitchen. I don't think Meg and I have really given the power of cooking enough attention when considering what we plan to harvest from our garden. Maybe because it's something we take for granted. I don't know. Shortly after I read Hedgewizard's post and went to the Pollan reading, we started talking about our cooking interests and habits.

Quite honestly, we don't use cooking books all that much. A lot of what I learned came from hanging out with family while meals were being prepared and working in restaurants while I waited for academia to produce something. We do love food. Food in our house is just as much for the experience as it is for the fuel, but we just have no desire to spend all evening cooking (unless it's slow cooking in the oven). The keys for us are simple recipes with fresh ingredients. Two books that I reference on occasion are The Professional Chef, 7th Ed. and the Food Lover's Companion. I mainly use the FLC when I run across ingredients that I'm not familiar with in TPC. The most helpful attribute of TPC is that the recipes for sauces and stocks are designed to be made in bulk. When we get into livestock and start to prepare our own meat, there are also some great tips for butchering and preparing these meats in large amounts. Putting Food By is a book we picked up last year in anticipation of doing a whole lot of canning and freezing this year.

I'm beginning to have a great deal of interest in food blogs lately and Meg and I plan to start adding them to our blog roll. I received a great recipe for rabbit from Steven at Dirt Sun Rain; I have been blown away with his knowledge in the kitchen, thanks Steven. The more we read, the more we learn about what we can do with food. So often I'm concerned with watching that I'm using less and not being wasteful, and I realize that a good deal can also be done if we pay attention not just to what we eat, but how we eat it. Meg and I are hoping to grow some amazing things this year and I can't wait to see how they turn out in the kitchen.

Vegetable Varieties

You know how seed catalogues never use quite the same language to describe plants and you have to re-read and go back and forth and back and forth to make sure you know what you're getting? Just me, then? Well, bear with me anyway and check out this pretty cool site that Craig from Ellis Hollow linked to a while back—I believe he played a part in putting the site together. It's got an index of thousands of seeds, and it's part of the Cornell Cooperative Extension:

Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners

It's like the Wikipedia of seeds, sort of. You can register with the site, and that will let you add reviews and varieties that aren't in the system. You can search for something as broad as "Tomato," and the site will return a list of every variety of tomato they have, which you can then sort by different criteria; or you can search a particular variety of vegetable, like "Brandywine Tomato," which will give you a specific plant description, a list of seed sources (with links!), and reviews of the plant. They also have growing guides that give you temperature and soil preferences, potential problems, germination time, and more for tons of different kinds of plants.

As we continue to peruse our seed catalogues and try to narrow down our choices, we're doing a lot of browsing around this site. I can see us checking in at the site for the rest of the season, too, as some of our plants will inevitably deviate from schedule or start to die in weird ways and we of course will need to run to the internet to see what we did wrong.