Blogging, Life and Gardening. Also, Priorities!

Alrighty then, it's been a while. 

I'm baaaaaack. Maybe. 

This post brought to you by my (very) occasional contributions to Lehmans, here's the link.

I'll put my original further down, because this post is actually about my realization how freaking awesome my editor is. 

When I submit something, I send it as a draft, with the understanding and expectation that things will be changed. And by that I mean the kind of change between the Lord of the Rings book and the movies. That's what I'm expecting when I send stuff over. 

What I get is something much, much better. 

When I see my contributions on the Lehman's Blog, I have caught myself thinking 'hey, that person sounds sort of like me, only better and funnier and she's writing about this thing I have done and that looks almost like my picture...pause...read a bit further, check the tag line...hey, that's my article. AWESOME'. 

That's what a good editor does. They take the original voice and they amplify it and make it clearer, without distorting it. I have that editor. And she rocks :D

Here's what I originally wrote for the article linked above, make your own decisions:

May 19, 2014

For us this year so far has served as a reminder that we are not in charge of our garden and how things will work out.

Despite months of planning, re-arranging, re-planning and, let’s call it, dreaming about the perfection that will be this years garden, we are now officially 3 weeks behind, we have harvested a grand total of three (you read that right, 3) radishes, and they were minuscule, because everything is either languishing or bolting to seed before setting full roots.

Bolting Radishes

The peppers and tomatoes went in on May 19, 2014, the latest I have ever planted anything, and it’s because I didn't want the poor little plantiwuzels (totally a word) to freeze in the ground, but I had to get them in, because they were starting to not like being in pods. 

And don’t even get me started on the sunflowers just poking their little leaves out, because those are the support system for the cucumbers, so those JUST got seeded out. Slackers all around me. I NEED cucumbers and cherry tomatoes, fresh from the vine, for my continued happiness. Does Nature not understand my needs here? And no, buying them is not the same, I have been forever ruined for hothouse produce. Starting to get scurvy here and rapidly going through my last little stores of pickles from last year, this is completely unacceptable. Where do I lodge a complaint? Just kidding, this is actually what makes gardening fun, having to adjust and go with how things run, not really having control. And there is a core deep happiness and sense of thankfulness and accomplishment when I pull one of the canned jars from last year or the year before off the shelf. That is something that no one could ever have explained to me, that sense of ‘YEAH, we did this, despite torrential rains, despite season-long droughts, despite insect invasions that had me picking bugs for days. Nothing quite like it :D
Potatoes, lettuce, peas, carrots and radishes, cucumbers vining their way up an ornamental trellis: PRETTY. Delicious. Win-win.

I do plan my garden to basically give me a 2 week break in the middle of summer, because we go on vacation, completely non-negotiable and we are not in charge of when that happens. Having everything come into fruit just as one leaves for two weeks is frustrating at best and definitely heartbreaking, so after doing that for a few years I started checking the days to harvest and planning the garden around those dates. Apparently I learn by pain association <wink>. And note, that’s me planning, not how things actually work out, because never fear, nothing will go as planned :D

With this years spring showing me whose boss I will definitely have to do some serious juggling and shifting of plant dates and even some re-arranging of where things will be planted, because the radishes that were supposed to be gone by now are still in situ where some of the peppers were planned, so those guys have to move and that will create a ripple effect in my plan, because they have to go where the corn was scheduled to go, which will have to be bumped by a few weeks (thank goodness for long growing seasons), which means the beans will be bumped along with them. To give a concrete example of one that didn't work out for me: The buckwheat I put in as early as I could only poked their little baby leave up a little bit before they all drowned (and were immediately replaced by dandelions, grump).

The carrots are clinging to life with a ferociousness I never thought I’d see in a humble carrot, because they have now been drowned, parched, nearly frozen and munched on by slugs, the letti (lettuces? Oh, if only I’d paid better attention in English vocab) is pathetically small, but at least they haven’t drowned (I was worried there for a few days) and they are being little troopers about not bolting (see above about the slackweasel radishes), so I am actually really impressed with those little guys, can’t wait to eat them :D

 

Carrots, trust me

On to further happy news: Despite being broiled, frozen and drowned ourselves and see-sawing between fanning ourselves and lighting fires in the fireplace to warm up the house, the garden is ready. Broadforked and augmented with compost, weeded,  desluggified (it’s a word, trust me), because those little suckers will actually drink cheap beer (no, I’m not letting them drown in home brew), sprinkled with crushed eggshells and diatomaceous earth and now it’s all about the weather forecast. So here’s hoping that it’s accurate and I didn't just plant almost 200 seedlings, only to have them all die in a late frost. Pray with me :D

June 15, 2014

Done at last, done at last, goodness gracious, we are done at last.

With the spring/summer planting.

A whole month behind schedule.

My schedule that is, because as we all know, *I* am not in charge and there is simply nothing I can do about that and it’s sort of glorious, isn’t it?

Here’s where we are as of today:

Carrots(Dragon, and I simply can’t wait to see them in all their red glory :D)  going strong and being all bushy and looking inviting. Make you just want to nibble, don’t they? Grow, grow, we want to eat you!

Carrots, told you to trust me

Little Potato cucumbers, these guys are being sprinkled with diatomaceous earth regularly, so that nothing nibbles on them when I’m not looking (as are all the other plants, that’s the little whitish specks you see in all of my pics)

Three head lettuce, this is one of the last ones around, because we ate the rest already and only left a few to go ahead and bolt, so we can seed save them for the fall planting. And they are kind of pretty when they bloom, so I get double duty out of the deal. Can’t complain about that, now, can ya?

It is for that reason that I plant a lot of lettuce in the front of my house, where one would expect to see flower beds. I know that I get strange looks when I am out there, harvesting lettuce and herbs for dinner with a big ole colander, but I just can’t bring myself to waste all that space on things I can’t eat.

Note to self: Don’t plant corn in the front flower beds, it doesn’t look right.

Lazy Housewife beans, also pretty and can vine their way up an ornamental trellis. Or, as in this case, be in the garden and be purely functional. That is something that is on the list, pretty trellises for the garden, it just hasn’t happened yet. It just so happens that the beans really don’t care what they climb. I’ve used sunflowers, corn, sticks, a discarded porch swing frame, the side support of my clothes line, you name it, beans will climb it. Hooray.

The only limiting factor for me is what I want to have to look at in my yard all summer, so I strive for pretty. That garden is supposed to feed more than just our bellies, after all :D

Last, but definitely not least: Black Cherry Tomatoes.

 I’m informed by a reliable source that these are delicious and candylike (me, I am that source, I had them last year) and will not make it into the house. And since the hubbin flat out refuses to eat raw tomatoes of any kind, they will be mine, all mine. And there are 11 plants, so maybe, just maybe I will be able to dehydrate some or can them for the winter, because these things are sooooo jummy,  and dehydrated they are like tomato raisins (tomaisins?). I would show you a picture, but there aren’t any, because I used up all my self-control to put a handful into the dehydrator, there was none left for taking pics before devouring them.

I have limits. A lot of them. I embrace them and when it comes to delicious, homegrown foods without preservatives (OK, salt in some cases), I see no reason to restrain myself.

That’s all I have for now.

Happy Pinching.

P.S.: Tomatoes LOVE used coffee grounds, and eggshells, so don’t throw those out. And the coffee grounds and eggshells also act as a deterrent to some pests, so there’s another win-win.

Last of the summer harvest (frost advisory for tonight)

Clockwise and spiralwise (is that a word?), starting with the pile of three, upper left:
Green, ripening to a deep oxblood red sweet pepper, that has such a rich, flavour that it's simply indescribable. I keep opening the dehydrator and popping some chunks into my mouth. There's a reason you are not seeing a pile of them, I had to beat the hubbin off with a stick to be able to let them get ripe enough to seed save them. They are called Sweet Chocolate and it's kind of true.
Next up Ancho Pablomas, these babies are HOT HOT HOT and have a smoky flavour without having seen a smoker, which is a good thing, because I don't have one :( ...yet.
Black Hungarians, medium hot, with a sweet lead in that slowly builds up to a nice, warm crescendo with practically no burn. Probably my favourite hot pepper and not just because they are black, ripening to a deep, rich red :) on nice, compact plants and look lovely.
Black Hungarians, last years open pollination, it worked :).
Sweet little pepperlings, don't know what they are called, but they are really, really sweet, the candy of peppers, and simply adorable on the plant. Upright habit, and you can't really see it here, they go from a creamy white to purple to orange to deep red and are probably the most ornamental peppers I've ever planted.
I call the next set jalapeno looking sweet peppers, they are very flavourful, sweet and mild with no heat at all, very nice, they are from seeds I saved from a pack of sweet peppers from Sams Club if you would believe it. Experiment: successful, so far, let's see what happens next year :D
Then we have White Bullnose, they ripen from a creamy white through purple streaks to a deep red and the flavour changes from buttery to this very rich paprika flavour I've never experienced in a fresh pepper.
Purple peppers that are white on the inside, want to say they are purple beauty, but could be wrong, open pollination from last year, seed from one lone survivor of the drought, and the taste is completely worth the effort of nursing that one through :)
Basic green pepper, except these are a heirloom variety (Emerald Giant, didn't quite make it to red) as well, and I can tell the difference. The pepper flavour is complex, there is a sweetness to these that I have never tasted in a commercial pepper and they are more fragrant than anything I could buy at the store.
Then black jalapenos, they pack a punch and again, the complex flavour is worth dealing with the heirloom for this one, it was a new one for us this year and we'll be planting it again along with all of the varieties you see here. I will be trying a few other ones next year, just to add a bit more variety to the pepper game, but ultimately I want there to be 10 to 12 varieties.

I'm saving the seeds out of all of these, and for peppers that's easy to do: cut open the pepper, take out the seeds and dry them until a seed breaks when bent, then store them away, I keep my hoard in jars in the freezer :D. Make sure you lable your seeds well throughout the entire process, or you might wind up like me, calling your seed packs 'pretty little pepperlings' ;)

We've gone from this

 to this. Fall is well and truly here.

That's all I got for now,
Happy Pinching

HEY, what smells good? Could that be nameless item of a food-type variety?

Looks good, too, and smells simply divine, but then I might be biased...

What we have here is

one dozen eggs, beaten into complete submission ($1.32 because I get them in bulk)

8 medium potatoes (free-ish, grown from ones I would have thrown out because they had gone all soft and sprouty, which is *SO* a word)

a few leaves of chard (definitely free, because I've been harvesting that one head of chard since May, so that one seed has DEFINITELY paid for itself)

some onion greens I cut off the bunching onions that are finally popping in the garden (slackers and let's call it free, the onion bulbs are still there, after all)

a few leaves of herby yumyum out of the garden, two kinds of Basil and some strawberry spinach that self seeded itself in a pot (Not entirely free, I did buy one of the Basils as a microscopic little plantling, so call it $0.05 for the 4 leaves I plucked off that one)

Spices and home made ranch mix (call it $0.50, even though it's probably closer to a few cent)
-a few pinches of black pepper, a few of ground fine oregano, a sprinkling or 5 of ground garlic, basically seasoned to taste and in our case to repel vampires, it is October...

an hour and a half in the oven, so maybe another half a buck? ($0.50 but it's probably much closer to the national average of $0.11)

at least 6 meals for $2.37, let's be fair and amortize the cast iron enameled crock and the miscellaneous items I am counting as practically free and call it an even $2.50, which is still only $0.42 per meal, and that's if we absolutely gorge ourselves. There's a lot of food in that pot, and it's really quite filling.

Calling it a win. Especially because those potatoes were in danger of following their 'parents' in becoming soft and sprouty (we've had this argument, it's completely a word, trust me), so this is actually mostly a braggathon about using something up that was in danger of going over to the dark side.

I don't have a name for this dish, because let's face it, not only did I make it with stuff I had laying around, I also probably will never re-create it exactly like this ever again. It's kind of how I cook.

The basic underlying principle here is that you take some eggs, season them up in a way that you know will appeal to your palate (if you've never done that, go easy, you can always add more, taking out is a bit more difficult), then beat them like they cut you off in traffic, add some cut up potatoes (the smaller the pieces the faster this will cook), some other veggies you have on hand (chard, peppers, onions, green beans, zucchini, asparagus, you get the idea), cut those up into manageable pieces and stir the whole thing, then pop in the oven at 350 for an hour and a half, or less, depending on how deep your dish is (mine is pretty deep and it's kinda full) until the potatoes are tender and the egg has set, a toothpick is rather helpful in determining this. No eggy goo and goes in nice and easy: It's ready to devour, which trust me, you will want to :)

That's all I got for now.
Happy Pinching

Things found in the basement closet we didn't expect and couldn't immediately identify...

Can YOU???

How about now?

Yup. That's Potatoes.

Neither one of us wants to admit to sticking them in the closet, but between us we have definitely figured out that whoever put them there and then put a box of empty canning jars on top of them (finger pointing is still happening, but since it worked out in a weird, cool way I might take credit ;) ) did so in early fall of 2011.

I'm gonna let that sink in for a moment. It's OK, I'll wait.

Yes, your math is correct, that's about two years ago. We're pretty awed, actually. I mean holy macaroni, that's two years of sitting there.

I THOUGHT last year that I was missing some of my seed potatoes. I just figured that they had been eaten or something. I do know that this years seed potatoes are going straight into that closet.

To quote a movie I have liked since it first came out: Nature will find a way.

That's some staying power right there.

We're planting these babies tomorrow and we will be coddling and nurturing them through the winter (I'm thinking the window next to my desk with a grow lamp). I NEED those genes to perpetuate themselves in my garden, so I can eat their offspring for many, many years to come.

Two years of sitting in my basement in a closet, under another box, with no light, no water, limited airflow and these things are alive and going. Can you tell I'm pretty amazed?

Also, apparently we have a pretty good root cellar environment going on there. This makes me happy.

And not to be forgotten: Hubbin pulled out that box of quart sized canning jars, just in time for this years potato harvest (these guys second cousins? How does that work?), so what doesn't go into the (apparently magical and conceivably linked to Narnia) basement closet will be dried, then stored in jars. Want to know how, check here.

K, that's all I got for now.
Happy Pinching.

Why we need a bee hive

Market more, white wonder and sikkim cukes

I desperately need them to lick my plates clean. No, wait, that's what one gets dogs for. Or is that teenagers? I forget.

No, the reason is that between the roughly 40 cucumber plants, the 12 butternut squash plants, the 10 zucchini plants and the 14 acorn squash plants, all of whom are healthy, vigorous and producing scads of both male and female flowers, this is what I am harvesting. Note the shriveled, sad little nubs at the blossom end of the cucumbers? That's an indicator that they are not being completely pollinated. And what you are not seeing here are the tiny infant fruit that just wither up and fall off the vine, never to see the inside of a pickling crock or delight my tongue in other ways.

I see some bees flying in, I get to pet the bumble bees (mostly because it freaks the hubbin out), but it's looking like there is not enough pollination happening. And what I'm not seeing is the vast number of honey bees that I have seen in years past, swarming and almost obscuring the plants during the warm afternoons, adding their happy buzzing to the soundtrack of my back yard.

Even more worrisome is that this is not just our experience, I am hearing it from most people I speak to. No midnight drops of surplus zucchini, no cries for help on how to process the half ton of cucumbers that ripened over night, not seeing/ hearing/ feeling it at all.

So the plan for next year is to not only plant tons of pollinator attracting flowers, but to also have a hive in residence. Hubbin is allergic (think epi-pen) to bees, which has been the reason we have not done so yet and this will be something he cannot help me with and we will have to be very careful where we place the hive, but this year is the final straw. No bees means no harvest. No harvest means no food.

Have you hugged a bee (keeper) today?

On a (circuitously) related note: The chickens went to live elsewhere, there's a few posts in the making about lacto fermenting and it's been kinda crazy here, so my apologies. Look for more posts soon.

Happy Pinching

Mosquitoes and Catnip

We have both in abundance. Only one of them on purpose.

Catmint/Catnip flower, purdy, ain't it?

We also have quite a few vanilla beans on hand at all times (hey, vanilla, how can one go wrong?) because we like to throw them in when brewing...

So, here's a little recipe I use to fend off the mosquitoes when I do a half hour of yard work. That's about as long as this concoction is effective and I do small increments of work to break up the larger tasks, it all works out.

Catnip (also known as Catmint for reasons that elude only those who have never seen the plant next to spearmint), a few handfuls of mostly leaves.

Vanilla bean if you have it, vanilla extract if you have it, has to be the real thing and probably shouldn't be sweetened. (Don't use the vanilla flavoured coffee sweetener you have in the cabinet, it doesn't work. At all.) This is optional and smells good, the main thing is the catnip. Also, for the vanilla, a little bit goes a long way, think drops for a quart of infusion.

Alcohol. You can use cheap vodka or other cheap, clear, unflavoured distilled alcohol that is at least 50proof/100%, but I personally consider this alcohol abuse, so I use rubbing alcohol of the 91% variety. Significantly cheaper and since noone will be imbibing this it's all good.

Cut the catnip and vanilla beans (if you have them, if you are using extract you would add that to the final infusion) into small pieces, you want to get a lot of surface contact without creating mush. Put the whole shebang into a container, add the alcohol and shake it up.

Every day or so. We keep it on the kitchen counter by the coffee, so we don't miss it ;).

For at least two weeks, but longer is better.

catnip infusion, better late than never, right?

Mix this infusion 50/50 with water in a spraybottle and apply just before exposure to mosquito infested areas (Amazon jungle, Mekong delta, Michigan/Florida, my back yard). You'll be good for about 30 minutes, after that you will want to re-apply or go back inside and eat ice cream while the bloodsuckers bang on your back door, pretending to sell girl-scout cookies.

For the price of rubbing alcohol and a spraybottle and if you so chose a bit of vanilla you have all natural mosquito repellent that actually works. How cool is that?

That's all I got for now,
Happy Pinching :)

What's going on at Pinch Manor? And Quick, quirky quibs about quality quinoa.

Weeeeeell,

This. This is what's been going on at Pinch Manor. Planting and weeding and harvesting and coddling and fighting the mini invaders, and more planting and more weeding and andandand...on to other things:

This is what quinoa looks like before it winds up at your local grocery store :D. Purdy, ain't it?

I've been trying to grow this stuff for the last 3 years, and this is the first time it's not simply laughing at me right before falling over and dying in infancy. It's actually blooming. I'm gonna have quinoa from my own garden.
.
.
.
In a few years. This year I'll get just enough to save seed, but that's OK, I finally figured out how to treat these recalcitrant little buggers.

First off, seed them out RIGHT after the chance for your last frost has passed, and make sure that you have your weeds under control, they do NOT like to be smothered. And then keep them weeded. Then weed some more. They seem to do fine in the location I put them this year, a fairly even mix of clay and sand, with plenty of compost, future years will tell if they have a preference.

Once they are actually established and going, they can handle quite a bit of abuse (like absolutely no weeding for a solid 2 weeks), but don't let your S.O. rip them out, thinking that they are fat hens (a common weed that they are actually very closely related to and look a lot like and WILL cross pollinate with, at least according to every source I have been able to find).

So far I have not had to support these guys, and they are now about 5 and a half feet tall. As the seed heads mature this may change, so we'll see.


As far as harvesting goes:

So far we've brought in some garlic, a few quarts of raspberries, a small handful of blueberries (they hate their location and will be moved once they go dormant in the fall), three honeyberries (yeah, 3, you have something to say?), quite a bit of mint and chives, more loose leaf lettuce than we could eat, radishes (they have now all gone to seed, which I am not at all upset about), several meals worth of asparagus, one paltry carrot (I will not be defeated by a root vegetable), about a quart of peas that are going right back in the ground this summer for a fall harvest we can actually eat and a few handfuls of buckwheat, again enough to go right back in the ground so we can hopefully have a harvest worth making pancakes with.

I'm forgetting things, and that's OK.

Oh, yeah, some of our corn has tassels (YEAH!) and the peppers that went in the ground about a month late are setting flowers (YEAH! again).

That's all I have for now,
Happy Pinching :D

Procrastination and why I'm not beating myself up over it this week

According to the Farmers Almanac we should have had our last frost on or before April 28th. So basically and according to that I am currently about 3 weeks behind schedule on planting and transplanting.

We had a frost warning for the 12th of May. Hooray for procrastination, 'cause if we had had all of the little plantiwuzels in the ground that would have sucked mightily. So my procrastination and the fact that my plants are still very much mobile worked quite well for us and I'm completely shamelessly taking credit for that.

It's also why I don't ever put the hot weather plants in early. I wait at least a few weeks after the last average frost date before planting them out, because this is the Midwest. Don't like the weather? Wait 5 minutes, it'll change.

Also, look: New cat we are trying to integrate into the household, so that instead of lethal injection he can have a forever home. Doesn't he look just miserable?

That's it for today, because it is still planting season ;)

Happy Pinching

Quick post, because it's raining and I'm not actively grubbing around in the dirt this very second

I've said this before and I will likely say this again (a few hundred times), it's planting season at Pinch Manor. 

This means that basically if I am not sleeping, eating, doing the things that happen surrounding the eating of food, taking care of the chickens or scrubbing half of my yard off my skin, I am either digging, pulling, planting or otherwise engaged in the garden. Unless it rains. A LOT. As in, yesterday evening I stopped planting stuff because the lightning actually came close enough to scare the hubbin and he came out and yelled at me. 

The reason for this seemingly inordinate amount of work is the layout of our garden. Not big enough to use farm equipment (not that we would or could afford to), but big enough that planting one of our 37 defined beds takes about a days worth of time. Hand weeding, broad forking, raking, soil amendment, seeding out or planting seedlings, then in some cases mulching and trying to keep the weeds and pests down continually, and sometimes re-seeding when something flubs. It's the decision we made to trade our time and labour for money we do not spend on motorized tools (does that make my salads handmade and artisan? YOU BET!)

Peas and Garlic a few weeks ago *

That actually sounds like more work than it is, but it definitely is exercise. It's also fun and really incredibly rewarding when you can go into the back yard and pull a ginormous amount of fresh leafy greens and vegetables and chow down on a dinner that was still in the ground a few minutes (hours, tops) ago.

Nothing tastes quite like that.

And frankly, yes, it's a bit of work, but it's being done after the day job is over and by about end of May it's basically going to be a waiting game as things grow and do their thing. Weeding, squishing bugs and occasional watering will be all we have to do between end of May and beginning of August, the time we lovingly call 'benign neglect season', which is a needed recovery period before what is known as "OH DEAR G-D, why is everything ripe all at once", accompanied by frantic cutting and canning and dehydrating and freezing and lacto fermenting and eating things while they are still warm from the sun and generally reveling in the glory that is a productive garden, while at the same time replacing the spent summer crop with the fall plantings for the next round.

It's an incredible feeling as case after case of canning jars are filled with produce grown right here, by us, knowing that we will eat this well into the next year, until the garden produces again. Being able to re-connect to this cycle of nature has been more than a learning experience, it's been a healing journey.

Because 6 years ago I killed mint. Forget about keeping a tomato plant alive. I am now on my 4th generation of one particular variety of tomatoes here, saved seeds and cloned cuttings and all :) And if I can do that, so can you. It helps to remember that plants want to grow and basically know what they are doing, so let them. And now, when I look at a seed, I no longer see an adversary to be conquered, I see a tiny little miracle, all the ingredients for a giant, green, lush plant contained in something the size of a pin head, an ally in our quest to be self-sufficient and healthy.

And on a sadder note: Sorry little strawberry seedlings. I left you out in the rain and most of you drowned. I'll try to do better by your follow-up crew. 

That's another part I finally understood: when something dies in its little plant infancy, that's not a failure or a disaster (unless it was the last bit of seed of one variety and I now have to buy more to start over, that I tread like a majour catastrophy, talk about white whine), not every seed survives in nature to become a plant and reproduce in turn, that's why plants produce hundreds and thousands of seeds every year. One tray of strawberry seedlings didn't make it. I'll seed out another one and go from there. There will be strawberries, even if it's not this year :D

That's all I have for now,
Happy Pinching

*Yes, that's twigs for the peas to climb on (FREE and we can burn it when we're done) and that's a whole mess of dandelions dotting the  grass next to it. No harmful chemicals at Pinch Manor, so we have a colourful yard with wild violets, dandelions, some as yet unidentified white flower that creates a simply stunning white carpet effect for about a week in spring, red, white, purple and pink clover (I'd love to find some blue clover, but alas not yet), and clumps of chives throughout the grass. No green, poisoned and poisonous desert here.