Whipping Cream, Whipping Gardens

Whipping gardens back into shape, that is. I was on a tear yesterday and got so much done, and it felt so good! My energy levels have been kinda low lately between my allergies and cold of some sort I think, though it all just blended together. It felt great to really accomplish a lot.

My day started around 5:45 am with coffee, morning news reading, email and facebook play. Before going out to milk I got 3 pounds of butter made and kneaded bread dough for its first rise. I even got the kitchen mostly cleaned up. Then I went out to milk and feed the animals. Came back in to process the milk.

The rest of the day was spent trying to catch up on garden work that's been put off because of all the rain we were having. The ground finally dried out enough this weekend to get a tiller in the gardens and take care of some of the weeds and prep the soil for new plantings where I ripped out old.

Knowing the rain was coming again, I was a planting fool! We have another week of rain in the forecast, so I got as much in as possible. I planted the Amish paste tomatoes that had been languishing in seed flats. I don't know how they'll do at this point, but they've gotta be happier in the ground than in the seed tray. Here's the final tally:

• around 75 Amish paste tomatoes
  
• around 15 or so nasturtium plants
• half a row each of parsley, basil, and dill seedlings
• seeded half a row of cilantro
  
• 2 rows of edamame
  
• 3rd and final planting of sweet corn
• several rows of dent corn
• ~40 lbs of seed potatoes, the last yukon golds
• scattered amaranth seeds
• scattered insectary herb seeds
• 1 row of moon and stars watermelon
• 1 row of strawberry watermelon
• 1 row of Hale's best muskmelon
• 1 row of edisto muskmelon
• half a row of calendula
• half row of sunflowers
• oh, and the sweet potato slips—forgot those
  

Along with planting, I got most of the garden weeded. (We won't speak of the onions and carrots.) I was out there in my bathing suit, trying to get rid of this silly farmer's tan I'm sporting at the moment where I have tan stripes on my legs between the tops of my tall boots and bottoms of my shorts, belting out songs from my i-pod shuffle. It was the perfect day for working. Overcast, not too hot or muggy. Once I really started weeding and working up a sweat, the bugs were irritating, but that kinda goes without saying around here in the growing season.

I was too busy to take pictures, but I'll try to get some today if I can. Right now, I'm pleased as punch watching the rain come down and water all that in. A week of rain right now with moderate temperatures seems like a blessing for the garden and all the remaining lettuces. There was, of course, still more to be done before I collapsed in the shower at around 7:30 last night, but there's always more to be done. All work and no play makes Danielle a very cranky girl.

State of the Homestead Report

Mid-winter. Starving time. Full hunger moon.

A groundhog in Pennsylvania predicts 6 more weeks of the stuff, and though the days are getting longer, fresh food this time of year is often scarce. Time to assess food storage and adjust planting times, quantities, and varieties accordingly for next growing season. What worked and what didn't? What held and what didn't? What do you wish you had more of or less of?

Our food stores are holding out well here, and we still have plenty of home-canned goods.* We're starting to run low on raspberry jam, but hopefully it won't be too long before we have a fresh crop, so I think it will hold out. Strawberry and black raspberry jams still going strong. Plenty of tomatoes in all fashions—need to start using those more often. Still lots of peaches, though I'm sure those will be gone before peach season rolls around again. Salsas holding well, though I'd like to put up more hot next year. Soups going strong; need to nudge Jim to take more into work.

Onions are holding out well, though we're running low on red onions. Will plant an extra row of both yellow and red this coming year. Garlic still going strong. Still have several leeks. Hopefully all these alliums will hold out until the first harvestable batch of spring onions and garlic.

We're just about through all the red potatoes we put up, which are now sprouting and shriveling but still work for mashed potatoes. Yes, that's the bottom of the bin you see there. Our yukon golds still look great—will plant more of those next year, hopefully in an early and a later batch. They probably will not hold out until harvest time next year, though that would be a neat trick if I could pull it off. We do love our homegrown potatoes around here. We still have some fingerlings that are just starting to sprout, which I'm hoping to hold as seed potatoes for March. We'll see how they do.

Winter squash was a no-go thanks to the hordes of squash bugs during the 2008 growing season. *sigh* I've ordered some organic insecticides and will be moving to a pre-emptive spraying program for the squashes in 2009 as loathe as I am to do it. The problem is that as soon as you know you have a problem, it's often too late to address it with organic sprays, which don't tend to operate on the instant-kill model of conventional pesticides. I will also be trying several non-spray-reliant methods, including later planting and heavy composting, which will hopefully help strengthen the plants. Regular compost tea applications should help as well. We do use barrier methods while the plants are young, but as soon as we need to take them off for pollination, we get crushed.

Meat is holding well. Plenty of pork and chicken, though we've definitely made room in the freezer for a side of beef we'ree hoping to get from down the road. In 2008, we raised 100 broilers, about 25 of which we sold. For 2009 I'm planning to raise just 75 for our consumption, 25 for whole roasters and 50 for parts. That sounds like a lot, I'm sure, but for a family of five, that will feed us quite nicely for a whole year, allowing us to have some kind of chicken at least twice a week for dinner. We won't be selling chicken or pork for 2009; we just can't charge enough to make it worthwhile.

Frozen butter holding well. Bulk goods are doing fine in a normal rotation, and we're still lucky enough to be harvesting fresh greens and herbs from the high tunnels.

It will soon be time to start planting my seedlings!

*Yes, my dirty little secret: we use soft, bleached toilet paper. Sorry, we're just not willing to make that sacrifice yet. I could try to play it off as barter material in the event of a major emergency, but we all know that would be a lie.

++Editing to add that we also still have a whole refrigerator drawer full of turnips, and a very large bag of carrots. Definitely planting the Eliot Coleman hybrid "Napoli" carrot from Johnny's for next fall. It sized up very nicely compared to the heirloom "red core chantenay," which I'll still plant, but in the spring.

Doings

This is a tough time of the year for me... the kind of waiting game, knowing that I'm about to have a ton to do with planting, etc. but still not quite warm enough to be doing it. I'm chomping at the bit, looking for little projects, avoiding some others, waiting for bigger things to get done like the plowing, waiting for the weather to cooperate and the soil to be dry enough. Waiting. And trying to find little things to occupy my time.

But little doings add up, too, and it's not just the big stuff that keeps one ahead of the game come season. Of course, many of these things involve spending money rather than doing work, but still... here's a list of some of those little things:

• ordered bee hives:
  After much hemming and hawing over size, I ordered two standard deep hives from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm in North Carolina. A standard hive full of brood and honey can weigh up to 100 lbs, so I was seriously contemplating going with a medium hive instead, which will weigh around 60 or 70 lbs. Ultimately, I decided to go with standard equipment in the hope that it will make life slightly easier in the long run, although it seems nothing is completely standard in the bee world.
  
  Brushy Mountain offered free shipping to beginning beekeepers enrolled in a bee course this year, so I took them up on the generous offer. Unfortunately, things are backordered and they're running a bit behind schedule, so I'm hoping to have enough time to assemble the hives before my nucs are ready, around the 2nd week of May. I'm pretty sure that the only things I'll need to assemble are the hive frames, so it shouldn't take too long. Of course, there are 40 of those, so...
  


• ordered amaranth and quinoa seed:
  This year, we'll be planting three test plots of grains: hulless oats, amaranth, and quinoa. I was able to get my oats from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, my favorite local source, but I needed to do some shopping around for the other grains and ended up getting a pretty good deal from Wild Garden Seed out in Oregon. They're not local by any stretch, but they look to be a good company, and they sold the seed in bulk rather than by packet only.
  
  I ordered 1/4 lb of burgandy amaranth, an ounce of Hopi red dye amaranth, and 1/4 lb of red head quinoa. I also decided to try a packet of huauzontle, a grain I'd never heard of before, based on their description. A chenopodium like quinoa, it's related to lamb's quarters, but is an ancient Aztec green/ grain version that is supposed to be more reliable than lamb's quarters in addition to being a beautiful red color. I'm not sure yet how I'll grow it with regards to cross pollination, but I wanted some nonetheless; I may use it solely for microgreens and salad greens.
  


• ordered 25 tulip poplar trees and 25 hybrid willows:
  We live on such a small acreage that I've been searching for some way to produce at least a portion of our own wood fuel, and while these are both soft woods, making them less ideal than traditional hardwoods like oak, they also grow quickly—about 6' per year—making them good possibilities for a staggered yearly harvest. Willow, in particular, can be coppiced, the practice of cutting the trunk to the ground, allowing multiple side shoots to grow, which can then be harvested for firewood.
  
  Another advantage of planting these species will hopefully be to provide quick-growing shade in our pastures for the livestock, something we've been wanting to do since we moved in. Our land is primarily pasture, with a long hedge-row running along the back that provides some morning shade, but no afternoon shade. The pastures can be brutally hot during the high summer, often about 5-10° hotter than the house yard. The hedgerow, too, is overgrown with several invasive species, including honeysuckle and Chinese sumac, which we've been working to clear since we moved in to enable the native Eastern cedars and staghorn sumac to gain footholds. We're hoping to use our goats to help with some of this now that Jim's pulled the fenceline through the tangled mess.
  
  I opted to go with native tulip poplars rather than the faster growing hybrid poplar because this native species is such an important food source for wildlife like the Eastern swallowtail and my bees. In fact, both poplar and willow are great food sources for honeybees: the willow will provide one of the first important sources of pollen, while the tulip poplar will provide a key nectar source. So, my hope is to accomplish several things with these two species of trees on our property.
  


• transplanted and divided some ornamentals:
  This is just typical gardener fare, moving and dividing and tweaking the gardens up by the house. Nothing terribly exciting, but it lets me get my hands in the dirt and feel like I'm actually getting stuff done.


• trying to get hens to set on collected fertilized eggs:
  And not being terribly successful, I must say. The hens have their own ideas and timelines and seem to be completely ignoring mine. So, I may be ordering chicks again this year as I try to identify which hens will be willing to act as my broody hens next year. I think, too, that I'll do a better job keeping the roosters separate to prolong our fertilization window. Unfortunately, this year, one of the roos got out into the general hen population, messing up my careful segregation. Live and learn.


• over-seeded pastures:
  With our rotation, we pull all the animals off the pastures sometime after Thanksgiving, giving the land a chance to rest all winter long. This also gets the animals closer to the barn, making winter feeding and watering much easier. We'll be turning them out into rotation in the next couple of weeks, keeping them off the parts I over-seeded for another couple weeks. The drought hit the pastures pretty hard last year, so I'm anxious to see how the grass comes back. Right now I'm seeing the cool season grasses but won't see the warm season for a little while yet.


• continue to water seedlings in high and low tunnels:
  I have several sowings of radishes, as well as tatsoi, turnip, beet, kale and chard growing now. Our temps are still dipping into the 20s at night, so the plastic will stay on for at least another week.


• planted two rows of peas in market garden:
  It's been too wet to plow on the weekends, so I had Jim use the walk-behind tiller against the fenceline to allow me to get at least the first sowing of peas in the ground. Hopefully either this week or next, he'll get the whole garden plowed, and I'll be able to begin some serious planting. Our seed potatoes won't be shipped out until the first week of April, so we should be able to get them in the ground shortly thereafter. I need to get the broccoli, onions, and carrots in asap, though I do have a round of carrots maturing now for harvest in the next few weeks.
  

2007 To Do List

Out with the old and in with the new...

• build mobile coop
• pick up boar weanlings
• pick up gilt weanling
• pick up ewe lambs
• pot up tomato seedlings
• continue succession planting
• plant fingerlings
• build milking stand
• clean up strawberry bed
• finish cleaning out winter coop
• stake tomatoes
• figure out goatie pasture/milking routine
• continue hand-picking potato bugs/larva/eggs
• irrigate
• continue picking yellowed leaves
• figure out how to feed beans
• begin fall planting
• work out tunnel design and placement
• build tunnel and order plastic
• choose and order cover crops
• learn to make goat's milk soap
• find raspberries in upper garden
• prune berries in kitchen garden
• get burn barrel set up
• transplant fall seedlings
• continue fall planting
• order micro green trays and seeds
• clean out kitchen garden
• spread compost for winter garden
• make low tunnels from plastic
• move pigs into market garden for winter clean up