Two women and three dogs looking for a tree to drill -- It's Spring!

Hello, all.

The snow is still deep on the ground here in NW PA, but you can feel that things are starting change. the air is still cold, down into the low teens each night, but up into the 30’s and even the 40’s during the day. The sun feels hot, and the roads are losing the coating of ice and snow and patches of bare ground are starting to spread. We have two. One right by the house and one near the pond where a tree broke up the wind and didn’t let a drift form. It’s exciting.

The other week, we made soup for lunch, and I dug last year’s bolero carrots out of the mulch and used them for the soup and also for a snack. It worked really well. Note to self: a flag or a stake to mark the carrots still in the ground would help a lot, especially as we have a bout two and a half feet of snow on the ground still, and the garden was difficult to locate!

Also, it is seed time again. I am working a different silly job now which pays a lot more than my previous silly job, even though with this silly job I’m going to be laid off soon. My previous silly job was in a call center, and this is in an office, but definitely the lowest man on the totem pole type stuff where I literally spend about eight hours a day pulling the staples out of packets of paper, scanning them into a computer, and stapling them back up again. Needless to say, I have been spending inordinate amounts of time thinking up seeds. Unfortunately, my mom who was supposed to be my voice of reason, is not my partner in crime and has been requesting that I add certain seeds to the list. I have a lot of things to plant.

So far, it is a little too early to start many things. I did start a flat of lemon grass the other day, and there are always things that need cold treated. I have hellebore, santolina, inula elcampine (which the dye worthiness of I have never yet been able to determine, as the natural plant dye lady had never heard of it and it was not in any dying books at all, though supposedly the flowers will yield yellow dye and the roots blue) and angelica. There are a few things I am excited to try, but will hold off until they actually sprout.

Started a new venture today! Maple syrup. I may or may not have mentioned that my sister took a family visit to Vermont over the fall and returned with a sap bucket as a present. Last fall, I combed the hillside for a likely sugar maple, and found exactly one within easy walking distance of the house. All our back area has been planted with evergreens, and the majority of the rest of the area is overgrown cow pasture. There is one wooded stand, though, with older trees. There is a fantastic oak, a majestic ash, and a mostly dead sugar maple. So, this morning, my mom, the dog, and I took a little hike and I hopped the barbed wire fence to hand the sap bucket.

I have made maple syrup one time before. My grandfather made a spile out of an elderberry stick split halfways up and hollowed out, and we boiled down the sap, but I remember it being a big pain in the butt and also kind of sugared. Hopefully this time, I will have more patience and do a better job!

I just read an article in the paper about collecting sap. and the gentleman in the article said the hold does not have to be more than an inch to an inch and a half deep. The sap bucket that we have comes in four pieces: a little metal spile, a hook, the bucket and a lid. The spile goes in the hole, the hook fits around it, the bucket hangs and leans against the tree and the lid makes a little tent on top. To make the hole I also followed the cue of the article in the paper and brought along one of the my cordless drills and a fat drill bit.

After almost getting barbed wire in a place that barbed wire should not be, losing (and finding) the hook, and getting the rubber mallet away from the dogs, the hole was drilled, the spile was pounded, the hook was on backwards, the spile was removed, the hook corrected, the spile replaced, the bucket hung, and the lid installed. Now, all we do is wait and check back in a day or so to see if any sap is running.

By the way, this is the perfect weather for maple tree tapping. The temperatures during the day need to be about freezing but it needs to get below freezing at night. This makes the sap run faster due tot eh fact that sap, like water, expands when it freezes. As the upper parts of the tree thaw, the moister within the tree contracts, creating almost alike a vacuum within the tree which brings more sap up into the tree. Then that freezes and thaws and the sap runs more and more. Eventually, they trees bud, and the sap is not good for syrup any longer. According to the newspaper, there will be a short season this year because it took so long for the temperatures to get above freezing.

Over the next few weeks, as the snow melts off, I’ll get a chance ot assess how the gardens did for the winter. I put in a variety of bulbs, and also my mom added perennials to the “hitching post” area and made a new rock garden near the pond that we’ll need to do some more work on. Then there was the new raised bed we added last year. The rock siding on the house will be finished, which will allow the herb gardens to get a little better back there. It’s so hard to wait, but at least seed starting's just around the corner!

Happenings, Dealings with Bugs, and Some Nut Recipes

Hi!

Well, here it is all the way at the end of November and we are finally getting some snow. It’s coming in waves over the hills from the north and west and beginning to coat the grass and the mud on the road.  Yesterday, we had our usual Sunday thing with my aunt and my grandmother and the leftovers from Thanksgiving. The weather was beautiful, low 50’s sunny and breezy. My uncle and one of my cousins and her little boy came up and we cut three Christmas trees and pulled them up to the house from the bottom where the nicer spruce trees are. Last year, we ended up just cutting trees from the verge of the frog pond as there was about thigh deep snow on the ground and it was too hard to get them from down below.

It’s the first day of deer, and I’ve been stuck keeping the dogs on lead. There are a lot of people out hunting, and even on our little spatch of land out back, I wouldn’t recommend going down below to avoid any hunters.

A couple of weeks ago, my mother took the dogs out just before sunrise and got into a tangle with a very large, very aggressive raccoon. She got bit right through her tall rubber boot and the dogs all got bit. Luckily, our oldest dog Sally pinned it down while mom brought the rest of the dogs back to the house, got a feed sack and the go-devil, hiked back out the field, pinned down the raccoon and drowned it in a puddle and brought it back to the house. My sister is a respectable career woman who usually gets a lot of milage out of the stuff we get into down here. She had this whole story published as a “You know you’re a redneck, if...” joke on her facebook page before I had the mud off the dogs. My mom of course had ot go to the emergency room for tetanus and rabies shots, but because she managed to find it and bring it back, I was able to take it up to the health department vet in Erie where they determined it was not rabid and she was able to not get the rest of the shots which would have been about 8 shots every week for the next four weeks. Then, the dogs all needed shots, too but our vet is great and whisked us right on and only charged a regular office call for all three dogs.

Bruce (who tipped the scales at 99.5 lbs. during his last vet visit) has been limping off and on for the last few weeks, He seemed to have a sore shoulder a couple weeks ago and it got better for a few days, but he seems to have reinjured it. Hopefully a few days on lead during hunting season will help him heal up a little. The boys are very energetic and Spencer is also pushing 90. Little Sally is so tiny compared to them and she is still over 50 pounds!

I am getting 2010 seed catalogs and already eagerly planning next year’s garden, which could hardly be worse than this year’s garden which is cause for optimism. I should hardly complain, though, since I am still getting yummy carrots from the garden and had snow peas through the end of October and my calendulas and bachelors buttons are just now spent.

I have my houseplants inside including some herbs that I am trying to winter over, but I am in the middle of battling more (!) bugs. I believe they are thrips and they have eaten up my thyme and my French Tarragon. I checked a whole bunch of books out of the library about healthy houseplants, blah, blah, blah in addition to my four thousand books on gardening. I like the whole organic philosophy that you just leave things as they are until there is a problem, but I have problems! So, the first thing I noticed is that things in a rich soft container garden mix were just infested, including my wandering jew and my herbs, and things that were in the sandier, packier potting mix were okay. Also citrusy things were okay. I tried sprinkling leaves from lemon coleus on infested plants, diatomaceous earth, laundry soap, and then a truly hellacious mixture of fels-naphtha and garlic infused olive oil. The pineapple sage seemed to stage a quick recovery, but the thyme and the tarragon were eaten to the dirt level.

Right when I was about to give up, I came across an idea in the houseplants books which said to dip the plants, pot and all, in hot water (about 140 degrees but I’ve read higher, too). I went one step beyond and prepared a pot with the sandy dirt that the bugs don’t seem tot like as much and completely washed the plant, roots and all with hot water and repotted into a clean pot that had been sitting in the garage for a few months. So far, the plant seems to be sprouting back up and no bugs have bitten it, but I am also misting it and dusting with DE regularly.

Speaking of bugs, I found a very nice old paper back called “The Bug Book” by Helen and John Philbrick with lots of old fashioned anti bug advice. Just out of curiosity, I looked up pill bugs (also called woodlice or sow bugs accourding to the Philbricks). My melon patch was absolutely devastated by these little guys this year, and to that point I’d hardly seen then as pests at all, more like little visitors in the wood pile. Accourding to the bug book, however, they are drawn to goat manure, which of course, I had packed into each hill of melons. So, hopefully next year if I switch to compost or kife some cow manure from the neighbor’s field, I’ll get more than masses of swarming pill bugs in my melon patch.

What with being stuck inside and the chilly damp weather and all, I’m baking. I made two loaves of white bread and three of multi-multi which smell very nice, but always fall in the oven and have a very unsatisfying crumb, and while grain breads are fun to concoct, it’s very difficult to have a good result. White breads are so much more pleasing!

Anyway, I have some fun recipes. These first two are from this little fundraising book called “Gifts from the Kitchen” which was a fundraising thing that my sister’s kids’ daycare sold a few years ago. They are these little fliptop books with nice little recipes for things like cookie and soup mixes in jars. This one has pickle and jelly recipes and even soap making with lye. The first recipe is very easy and will spoil you for ever paying too much for those fancy almonds at the fair:

Glazed Almonds (tho’ recipe originally called for pecans)

1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
2 tsp. unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
Dash of salt
3 cups almonds (or pecan halves)

In large saucepan, combine ingredients. Boil 3-5 min, tossing and stirring. (Boil dry)
Spread on a waxed paper lined cookie sheet to cool. Store airtight.

Spiced Vanilla Pecans (more work - 1-2 days to prepare)

1 lb pecan halves not broken or chopped
6 c. water
1/2 c. superfine sugar
3. Tblsp. melted butter
1 Tblsp. corn syrup
1 Tblsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. each: salt, coriander, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice
1/8 tsp. pepper

Boil pecans in the water for a minute. Drain well. Mix butter, syrup, vanilla, and sugar in a large bowl. Add hot pecans and stir to coat. Cover and sit for 12-24 hours. Next day:
heat oven to 325. Put nuts and sauce on a rimmed cookie sheet. Cook 30 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes. Mix together spices in another large bowl. After nuts are cooked, toss in the bowl with spices. Cool in single layer on a cookie sheet. Store air tight.

And this is a recipe I tried because I recently raided the outdated section at the grocery store and lucked into a few bags of slivered, blanched almonds. I also made ghee with the butter sticks that were softening for cookies and the dogs bit them, but I couldn’t bear to feed all the butter to the dogs and I couldn’t actually throw it away either! (Is that too much information?)

Samsa (Tunesian almond pastry, from Countryside magazine March/April 2008)

1 1/2 cups blanched almonds (you can do this at home or buy blanched, but you will pay for them! Unless you buy bags of outdated nuts at the local store. Which I recommend, because blanching almonds is a pain in the behind!)
1 1/2 cups white sesame seeds (the dark unhulled ones won’t cream up, don’t try them!)
1 1/2 cups clarified butter (ghee) (do this at home or buy already made from the specialty shop, very expensive!)
1 package (1lb) filo dough (let thaw at room temp accourding to directions)
1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cups water
2 Tblsp. lemon juice (bottled is fine)
2 Tblsp. orange blossom water (come on, now, just use OJ)

In a 350 oven spread almonds and sesame seeds in a shallow pan. Stir occasionally until just browned. Pulverize the almonds and seeds in a blender (handy chopper, magic bullet, or a really clean electric coffee grinder all do well) and set aside. Butter 9x13 cake pan. lay down the filo 1 sheet at a time, brush with the clarified butter. Lay down 1/3 of the sheets, buttering each layer. Spread out half of the nuts and seeds. Lay down another third of the sheets. Put on th e rest of the nuts and seeds. Put on the last of the filo (butter every sheet, the whole way through!). Brush top with remaining butter. Cut into diamond or square shapes. Bake in 400 oven 5 minutes. Lower to 300 and bake about 30 minutes more until sides are light brown. While the pastry cooks, make sugar and water in pot for ten minutes, stirring over medium heat until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat, add lemon juice. Place back on the heat, boil. Take off heat and add OJ, keep warm. Put the pastry under the broiler in the oven a few minutes right before removing to brown up the top. Turn to keep even. Broil until golden brown. Remove from the oven. Pour hot syrup evenly over the top. Cool and serve.

So there it is, a selection of easy to medium to downright complicated recipes that use lovely nuts just in time for the holidays!

Fall's Here, Here's a Fall Jam Recipe!

Hello!

Well, the year is winding down, and I’ve been working full time while everything else suffers. I suppose that I can’t complain because with two incomes, we’ve actually been able to have some fun and make some much needed improvements around the house. Our flooded basement problem which had been ongoing for about a year and a half has been resolved by a nice, actual plumber who came and blew out all the drains in the basement with a high pressure hose. A large pile of dire, junk and wood chips popped down in the swamp, and the basement is not only well-drained, it isn’t even damp any more!

When the basement was so easily resolved, we got really bold and got a new roof on the house, too. Both of these have been great decisions, as we were starting to get concerned about the number of shingles we were finding the yard after every wind storm, and it does get windy up here. In each case, we had people who gave us estimates for the work that were very drastic. People wanted to jackhammer the basement. We dug a six foot deep hole in the yard. A Lowes contractor gave us an estimate for doing the roof that was about $1700 more than we actually had it done for. I advise going local, working with a bank for loans, using family and friends as a contact for finding people to do work around the house. Our roofing team was made up of one of my aunt’s nephews from her side of the family, a grandson of a guy my mom graduated high school with and one of their friends. They were actual contractors, but it seemed like people we didn’t know were more expensive and less reliable.

With the basement nice and dry, I could get some work done on the wood stove which had been mightily abused since it’s been wet down there. I tipped it on its side and sanded off all the rust and mud and splashes of hydraulic cement and caulk from my failed attempts to patch the floor. I repainted with Rustoleum high temperature paint. I don’t recommend it. There are other stove black paints that seem to stick to the metal better, but when I refired the store after using the Rustoleum, there were a lot fewer fumes than with other paint brands, so it wasn’t all bad. So I have a nice, clear freshly painted stove and lots of hickory wood to burn in it, too!

This year was just a terrible year for the garden, but there were some nice things. I have actually planted fall peas, and they are actually doing better than the ones from the spring. Even though you can’t save the seeds (even from supposedly non-hybrid seeds!) I recommend Burpee’s snowbird snow peas because you don’t have to stake them, and you get edible peas very soon. If I had been thinking, I would have also put in more lettuces so we could have a late fall salad of greens and peas. Carrots were good, but I have decided that Nelson-type carrots have a strong, soapy taste that I don’t care for. Luckily, they grew really well. It was also a great year for all kinds of berries even though I believe that my blackberry patch may be on the way out. The Caroline Raspberries that my sister got me as a present my first birthday here are still producing, and the berries are as big as blackberries and taste like koolaide they are so sweet! Not enough for jam, though, and it seems like every time I have a day off it’s either Sunday or raining, so I have not been to pick raspberries this year.

I also have a little patch of groundcherries that are still producing. Now, these are little tomatoes which grow in husks and look like little yellow tomatillos or those orange Chinese lantern plants. They are all related, part of the nightshade family, actually. Groundcherries have this lovely golden color and tiny seeds and a taste that is part citrus and part butterscotch (I think.) they will produce up to the frost, and the book that I read a while ago called “Little Heathens” about this family growing up during the Great Depression has a lot about them, actually. Apparently, they used to pick a lot of them still unripe to save them from the frost. Then, they would lay them out even just on the floor of the upstairs rooms that were buttoned up and closed for the winter. They would keep and also ripen slowly and could be used for pies and snacks until they were gone.

I don’t have a lot of places to lay things out like that in this house. (Though I grew up in a house that was large enough that we did close up one bedroom and one living room every winter so we did not have to heat them.) And every single recipe that I have for ground cherry jam takes about six cups of them. That is a lot of space in the garden to get that much fruit, and usually goatastrophe strikes at least a couple of times a year, reducing the amount of groundcherries I have on hand. (Goats love them!)

I did find out good recipe that used ground cherries that I tried this year, though. It’s from the Farm Journal Freezing and Canning Cookbook, and despite the warnings of the nice Home Extension ladies that taught a canning course I attended this year to never use canning recipes from before 1994, I tried it, and I’m going to share it.

Autumn Cherry Conserve:

3/4 cup ripe ground cherries
1 13.5 oz can crushed pineapple (1 2/3 cup)
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Grated peel and Juice of one orange
5 medium apples, finely diced
1 cup cranberries
1 pack powdered fruit pectin
4 1/2 cups sugar

Hull, wash and prick ground cherries. Combine with Pineapple, lemon juice, grated orange rind and juice and apples, add cranberries.

Bring to a boil, add pectin and stir while bringing to a boil.

Add sugar, stirring constantly. Bring to a full, rolling boil over high heat, boil hard one minute, stirring constantly.

Removed from heat. Skim and stir alternately for 5 minutes.

Pour into hot jars, seal. Makes 5-6 half pints.


Okay, when I made this one, I got closer to 7 jelly jars and one little ittybitty. I also put all the juices into the pan and then chopped at added the apples so they didn’t get brown.
I also followed with 5 minutes in a boiling water bath and used the “modern” method of just getting the jars hot instead of sterilizing them ahead of time. You’ll want the apples very fine, because with just a little boil at the beginning and a minute long boil at the ned, I didn’t feel they got smooshy enough. Also, pop the cranberries as soon as they get juicy and hot because they will not burst on their own, and a whole cranberry on toast is a bit tart. Substitute 2 tablespoons of lemon juice for the juice of a half lemon.

This recipe smells like Christmas in a jar, and it was a good one, too, because it uses just odds and ends. My mom goes to the next town over to do med checks for people and usually hands out fruit as a “thank you for coming to your appointment” present. I only had to buy cranberries and a can of pineapple special since I could use up all her leftovers from her patients for the rest of the fruit in the recipe.

One last thing:

You heard it here first. OK, this is the official weather prediction for the year. Remember last year when all the bees and hornets were building their nests up in the high branches of the trees, and didn’t we get going on 250 inches of snow, including our first 18 inches about a year ago this week? This year, we had our neighbor brushog the little acre field at the back of the lot, and he had to stop to get out two nests of ground bees. This is just unheard of in a year that is this wet, because ground bees will get downed out with all the heavy rain. And then, we also had remove a nest from right inside the basement. The easiest winder we ever had up here, there were little nests in the scrub hawthorns and one under the lowest branches of the spruce tree were use for our Christmas tree every year. This year I haven’t seen any up high nests and the bees are actually nesting the the ground. I have a good feeling about this, except for the whole thing where we had a giant fricking yellowjacket nest in the basement next to the washing machine!

Ah, to be in NW Pennsylvania, in the Springtime...with goats!

Hello!

It’s spring, and everything is bursting with life, kind of. It’s actually been very cold and wet and here we are a few weeks before when the gardens are supposed to go in, and I haven’t planted most of the stuff that says “plant in spring, as soon as you can work the soil”. The soil has been constantly wet, and with the high content of clay we have in the soil, it’s better not to touch it. I did rent a rototiller for a day and got the main gardens turned over. I wanted to break up some sod to add a wildflower patch, but it rained the second day I had the tiller and that was that.

I like having the truck, because I never would have been able to just on a whim decide to throw a tiller in the back of the car. Also, we bought a load of bulk mulch which was so cheap it was practically free, but again with the car, you need prebagged and they won’t just dump a yard of topsoil in the back of the car with a front loader.


A properly concealed garden border

We had just enough nice weather to complete a new garden project. When we moved in, there was this decorative rail fence right next to the driveway. There were some rose bushes and a few flowers there, but mostly it had been overrun with some angelica that had been used as some kind of ground cover. I’ve been fighting with that darn stuff, but also the garden was too close to the drive, and gravel was wandering in and and topsoil was wandering out. I’m fairly shy of garden edging, because I’ve seen too many gardens where the edging was not place into the ground deeply enough and was there, just flopping around on the surface. I gave in, though and we placed some garden edging around what we now call the “hitching post” to keep it straight from the snake rail fence that we put in on the other side of the yard. A lot of the plants, like tulips and daffodils were kept in place. Last year, I reduced the among of angelica and pulled up a lot of roots, but I need to get going on that. So, right now, we have a mix of mostly bulbs and the garden is probably going to keeps it’s role as an overflow for any annuals that don’t fit in with the strictly annual garden at the side of the house.

My plants are doing quite terribly. The cold weather kept them indoors much longer than usual, and when I finally got the greenhouse pitched, we of course had a patch of the only warm weather we’ve had since last September. We had 80 and 90 degree temperatures and high winds which caused the plants to tip over because they were all spindly and weak from not enough light inside, and then the sun baked them. The biggest loss was some red onion plants which ha been damping off and the polygonum which luckily had enough seeds in the pan that had not sprouted that have sprouted since then that I will have plenty to dress up the rail fence garden with this year.

Since then, the weather has been quite awful. Cold and windy. Last Saturday my greenhouse actually blew down with a lot of plants inside. Only a few things were a total loss, but some of the peppers were scrambled and the cabbages that I replanted after the hot weather killed them were also smashed. Ah well, maybe this fall. I need a permanent green house, but I’ll have to get it someone impractical, possibly in the same area we are clearing for the orchard, mostly because I don’t want to block the view from the upper yard.

We’ve had an ongoing battle with some kind of upper respiratory infection with our cats this year. The poor things are so inbred they don’t have good immune systems and the four new kittens are all suffering. One of last year’s cats died, but everyone else seems to be suffering from the snuffles and that’s it, except one of our house cats Boots who has been sick off and on. But the puppies are healthy and big and getting better behaved all the time. My sister swears little Spencer is my old dog Zora reincarnated, but think that Weimaraners have a distinctive personality, and even though he’s a mix he has that great prance and that not so great constant hypervigilant thing going on where every noise is something he needs to either chase after or stare at, poor little guy.




We also got the goats sheared, which is always a task. Here’s Matty with his new short coat. He's a little knicked up, but the spots on him are red kote and not blood, which is like industrial strength Bactine plus dye for livestock. The goats are usually pretty easy to take care of except for shearing. They weigh about 120 pounds apiece and they do not want to get sheared. My sister’s husband’s cousins just got some goats and asked if I would shear them, and I said I would loan them the shears and cheerlead. I talk to goat people all the time, and they make it seem like shearing angoras is not a big deal, but I’ve also discovered that my goats are a smidge bigger than average. I have runty cats and giant goats.



A lot of people get into goats kind of by accident. I know that we did. The idea was to get some to eat down the brush in our friend’s horse pasture. You’d need a lot of goats to eat down that much brush, though, and the goats like landscaping a lot better. They are little escape artists, too. Mostly you just have to feed them, but they also need to have their hooves trimmed, ideally about once a month. Unlike horses, goat hooves can be done without calling in a professional. you can even do them with a good pair of garden trimmers, though we also keep a set of hoof nippers.

if a goat’s toes get too long, the stress on their joints can give them arthritis You can also control foot problems by giving the goats some rocks to stand on an walk on in the pasture to grind down the hooves a little. Other than catching and holding the goats down, the hoof trimming is not that much more than trimming your own toenails.


Around here, it’s so wet the goats constantly battle hoof rot. In the case of hoof rot, trim away as much of the rotten and damaged hoof as possible, even to the point where the hoof may start to bleed. There are a lot of hoof rot products on the market, you just need something with a drying agent and a little antiseptic. The stuff we use comes in a bottle with a little spout you can shoot right up into the hoof. If possible keep the goat in a dry, clear area for a while after treating the foot, and do it daily until there’s improvement. After the foot is trimmed back, I usually give the goats sa snack on the driveway and just shoot hoof rot treatment on their feet while they’re standing around and don’t bother to try and throw them down.

Goats are nice little creatures with lots of personality. They can do some damage to your favorite trees and flowers and the plants in your garden and your house plants and your car. they also live a long time, about 10-15 years. I would much rather someone get a cat or dog on a whim than a goat because of the difficulty of getting hooved animal rescue, but I do like the goats, and they are a great pets because they are low maintenance in the main and getting an ill advised goat is loads better than getting an ill advised horse!

Come on, Spring!

Spring is coming slowly to Northwestern PA this year. Usually, there are a few days between February and April that warm up into the 60’s and 70’s, but that has not really happened this year. It has been wet and cold.

Surprisingly, the damage from the winter has not been too great, considering we had almost two feet of snow the week before Halloween. I had some carrots which ended up over wintering in the garden. Most of them were not really storage carrots so they were no good, but some Bolero carrots went just fine with a pot roast just a couple weeks ago. I’m planting those for sure again. Also, I never got my strawberries mulched, and it seems they are not going to make it this year. that is also fine, because I never like the location they were in. they were a permanent feature of my lower vegetable garden that had started on the edge but had somehow gotten into the middle after a couple garden expansions. My neighbors are nice kids, but they use herbicide between the little row of arborvitae they have planted as a property line marker, and my strawberries suffered mightily from deformations cause by herbicide blow off. Not sorry to see them go, though I still have not decided where a new strawberry patch should be placed.

Seed starting season is here. I have a good selection of really fun sounding plants this year. I ordered from a lot of different sources. One of the seed companies I order from sent the order really late along with a note of apology. It seems they needed to hire a bunch more people because so many people were ordering garden seeds this year. I feel like my orders were really conservative, actually, about equivalent to last year, though I also ordered a fancy potted plant which was a splurge. I’m working full time. I should have a fancy dwarf pomegranate, right?

Right now, all I have started is my onion plants and some slow to germinate herbs and flowers. I’ve never started onion plants indoors before, but that is how they sell them at the farm coop, in big clumps of pre started plants. You can get sets, too of just really normal types of plants, but for specialty things like sweet onions, they sell plants. My onion plants are for red onions which are also supposedly good storage onions. I am a little tired of never having red onions for summer salads, so this is plan C 2.0.

We are getting into some landscaping plans this year. I have a raised bed I’ve never been happy about, and this is the year it gets new sides, a fresh load of topsoil and compost and hopefully a new lease on life. Right now, it’s full of stove ash, and the cats have been using it as a littler box. Except for the one kitten my old dog Zora chomped, we still have all of last year’s kittens. The girls Bili and Boots have been moved into the house and spayed. Our regular vet has turned out to be a great advocate of kitties and is willing to accept the wild cats from the garage for spaying a neutering as long as we can get them in. One of the cats has already been spayed. We kept it in the house right after the surgery to keep it clean, but it appears to be a combination of very scared and very stupid, and hasn’t gone back outside yet. I’ll be going downstairs in the middle of the night to take care of the fire and I’ll see it crawl up into the ceiling of the semi finished basement room or it will fall out of a closet when I go to hang up clothes. We keep leaving the basement door open for it, but no luck.

Speaking of pets, I took the plunge after saving up money all winter for another Weimarnaner puppy. I had a couple of kennel visits lined up and more cash than I needed to get my truck last year. By chance, I was at the bank and one of the neighbor girls who just moved to a house down the road from me mentioned she was getting a puppy, and I said I wanted a puppy, and the other bank lady said her son just got puppies, and I said I wanted a Weimaraner, and she said, these were Weims, at least their mom was, and there were a lot of them, and they were cute.

So a couple days later, I went down to see some half Weimaraner and half chocolate lab puppies. Interestingly enough, some of them were female and dark brown but most of them were black with a little really dark brown on the ears and male. One of the little brown females was still there and, she was really pretty. According the the lady we got them from, the last of the little brown females was actually going to some relatives in Texas.

One of the males, a kind of chunky labby-looking boy crawled right into my mom’s arms the second she knelt down by the puppies, so I had to get that one for sure. Then, I picked the prettiest one I could find who looked most like a Weimaraner despite being almost black! That was also a male, so I’ve spent the last month and a half having my house torn up and laughing my rear end off at these crazy boys!



Spencer is the little goofball on the left, and Bruce is the handsome “angel” on the right!
I wish one as the good one and one was the bad one, but mostly, they just take turns! It’s good having young dogs again! I actually use my back yard now to make the dogs run around. I barely walked back there for months!

Other than puppies, not a lot going on right now. We went to the outdoor show up in Erie a few weeks ago, and that was nice. you can always visit with land management people, but I missed the retriever demonstrations. My mom chatted up a guy who sells deer plot who recommended clover and chicory as a good seed for our wet back field. I found yet another taxidermy person, but this time we were actually able to get my uncle’s tiny bear skin to him. I personally love fur and would probably trap or shoot something for fur except it grosses out my mom, so I only get to indulge myself at things like outdoor shows or fur trapper re-enactors. There’s this newer arts festival they’ve had out in Russell the last few years which I consider like a “man” craft show with lots of furs and blacksmithing and things like that. Possibly an idea for a future entry!

Also, I can’t keep my mouth shut about a couple of issues in the news I’ve seen recently. One was under the headline: “Alternative energy quest threatens birds” and was about how domestic energy production like growing crops for fuel and windfarms threaten birds’ lives and habitats. Lumping in with this, bafflingly, was mountaintop removal coal mining. Now, logically, you can look at a toll of birds randomly hitting obstructions at wind farms, or habitat displacement due to more corn farming for ethanol as a change that will have a toll on birds, but none of these could possibly compare to the complete destruction of mountaintops in WV and KY and the filling in of miles of streams in the valleys in terms of habitat loss. And when did coal mining become alternative energy anyway? I’m not against even strip mining in a lot of cases. You can fix that once you get the coal off the top layer, but the tops of mountains can’t be put be back on and no one but no one is going to do the work to restore the streams once they’ve been filled in. And I know the Obama administration’s EPA has recently put on hold a lot of these permits to do his mountaintop mining, but it was also the Obama administration’s EPA that grouped mountaintop removal mining with wind farming as a threat to habitat.

From the EPA to the FDA: There is no stopping a proposal that has been floating around the FDA and the Agriculture department to have all farm animals marked with microchips and RFD tags. People who keep livestock, eventually at any scale, ae going to be required to report on the location and condition of the livestock using electronic monitoring and questionnaires on the internet. All of this is going to be done at the owners’ expense, which will be considerable for small “homestead” type farmers and basically only benefits big producers. The idea is the keep the food supply safer by tracking livestock from the farm to the slaughterhouse. It’s of course vastly counter-intuitive since most of the contamination takes place in the slaughter house after the individually monitored animals have been mixed with hundreds if not thousands of others. This is basically expensive window dressing to relieve factory farms of liability for who knows what, but it is also looking to add significant costs in money and time to small farmers who possibly only produce meat for their own consumption.

No time today for links to either of these issues, but google both of them, and you can see that it is real, AP news type outlets which are reporting on these and not just conspiracy theory people, sitting in little houses, in the middle of nowhere, trying to decide how many tomato plants to start this year because we’re getting lulled into sheep-like complacency by government agencies which dictate the sugar content of processed food to guarantee a certain amount of sleepiness, obesity, and disease in an increasingly failing effort to distract and occupy the rich, vital energy of our people!

Saying Goodbye to Fall

Hi!

It’s been while since I did this, and of course a million things have happened that I could go on and on about. I’m still cleaning up the tail end of my gardens. The other day, I fenced in some of my landscaping trees and bushes to avoid their being eaten to death by bunny rabbits, which almost happened the first year I had them because I thought the rabbits would not be so bold as to come up into the year area and snack on the tree. I was wrong, and I did not exactly lose my fancy Siberian quince bush, but I lost a good portion of it. Luckily, the rabbits went in on top of the deep snow and instead of ringing it at the base, they got the top portion of the tree instead. The rest has been recovering nicely for a couple of seasons now, but I’m still putting wire fence around it this year.

My berry bushes got a little neglected this year. We had a lot of blackberries, but they mostly went to snacking and a lot of them didn’t get picked. The rule of thumb on all kinds of blackberries and raspberries is to cut the spent canes as soon as they bear. I’m not sure if I’m repeating myself about berry bushes, but if I am, bear with me.

Trailing berries like blackberries and raspberries grow in a two year cycle. The first year, the canes are called “primocanes”, and they sprout and grow over the summer. The second year canes I just refer to as the fruiting canes, because I can never remember what they called. I know it’s not “fruitocanes”, though. When the canes bear fruit and are done, they die off. It is very important to trim off the spent canes and dispose of them. “Garden Magic” says by burning. Don’t put them in the compost. Berries are too susceptible to disease, and you should not let spent canes and fruit lay in the patch and decay.

The one exception to this rule is the “everbearing” varieties of raspberries. An everbearing raspberry actually gets a small crop of fruits on the tips of the first year canes, right up until the frost. A lot of books about berries will tell you to plant a patch of traditional berries and a patch of everbearers. Use the traditionals for your summer berries and the everbearers for year fall crop, lop off the canes as soon as they both bear. I think it is sufficient to just trim the tips of the everbearing first year canes in the fall, though. The spent tips should still be burned, but the middle and lower parts of the canes will bear fruit in the summer. I would guess that the same holds true for ever bearing raspberries as it does for strawberries. You get the fruit at two different times, but all added together, the total amount of the harvest is about equivalent to the same as you would get with a traditional plant that bears all at one time.

In the fall, when I trim off the spent blackberry canes, I occasionally notice a few of the new canes that have a lot of thick, bunched up leaves:



Last fall, there were quite a few of these. I trimmed off most of them and experimentally left a few. This year, I have been very aggressive with them, however, since I did find orange rust on some of the canes. The only thing you can do for orange rust is chop out the effected berries and burn them. The crinkly leaf problem is like one of those corollaries: not every plant with crinkly leaves got orange rust, but every plant with orange rust had crinkly leaves. I’m not sure whether the leaves area preliminary of orange rust or the rust took advantage of a weakened plant that had another problem, but pruning back plants is kind of like deciding if you want to have a man around. If you’re not sure, the answer is probably no.

There are still a few more berry patches n the lower part of the yard I think I can fence in. Why am I just sitting inside and typing on the computer when there is all this yard work to be done? Because we are in the midst of our second major lake effect storm of the year. I think the weather has arranged itself to be extra terrible since I have to drive out to Jamestown for work now. This is a picture from our first major storm of the year, which was actually a few days before Halloween:



I have fooled the weather, however, since the first thing I did when I had money from my job was not shop for clothes or buy videogames or even sign up for broadband by satellite internet. I went a got a big truck. With big mud tires. Which of course my mother drives every day while I get stuck in the snow. But, one of these days, I’m going to read the weather report before heading off into the dark, snowy night to listen to people from Hawaii complain that their broadband internet is not broadbandy enough (oh, boy is this definitely not the kind of job that you take home with you and worry that you did well enough!), and I’ll be able to use the truck to get home and actually make it up the hill. It just hasn’t happened yet. Though that night I spent in the parking lot at the public library wasn’t too terrible, considering. And I had a rental car with these crazy performance tires on it that were absolutely impossible on anything but dry road. Because I’ve already hit a deer this year and had my car in the shop for a couple of weeks. I literally have not had to ever do the radiator flush and fill winterizing thing on that car, because the front end has been bashed out by deer twice now.

The same week, we got snowed in for the first time, I also had to have my dog Zora put to sleep. I’ve had her for more than 12 years, which is impossibly old for a Weimaraner. I almost lost her about a year and a half ago when she had a horrible hepatitis. As a younger dog, she was just hell on wheels crazy and lots of fun, too. Since she was about seven, she mellowed out and really got (for her) affectionate and cuddly. In the last few months, she had a little neuropathy in her feet and couldn’t hear very much, but she still went for walks with my mother for miles just about every day. She must have had a stroke overnight, because she was having trouble standing up, and that’s why we decided to call it a day, but even the day before, she was barking and hopping around and picking up my yarn and throwing it at me, so I can’t really complain about that. I’m looking to get one or two Weimaraner puppies to take her place. Right now, some of the garage cats have moved into the house, and I’m about ready to throw them back out again.

I took this picture about a week before Halloween which is when we had to take her to the vet:



I know all about the whole don’t buy from pet stores or breeders, get shelter dogs, they’re just fine thing, but I’m a little shallow about these things, and I want a pretty dog, not some goofy looking stray. Weimaraners are the prettiest dogs, and Zora was the prettiest of the pretty, and someone else can have a bug eyed hound-pit bull-jack russel mix that came to us here at the shelter because it ran away from home and was too dumb to find its way back, thank you very much. I’m getting the one that looks nice and was bred by insane perfectionist Germans to be the all around best dog in the field there is. Weimaraners are miles smarter than labs. They have better stamina, they point and retrieve, and they are physically sounder. Labs are better in the cold, but that is the one advantage. And labs are just not as pretty.

Beyond that, though, I’m going to have to do a couple entries here about using over the counter remedies and first aid tricks for dogs, since, between Zora and her naughty sister Peaches (who was a very pretty yellow lab but so phenomonally stupid she’s now legendary) who ran away into a summer’s night last year never to be seen again, I have a whole arsenal of things to do that can reduce trips to the vet for any number of injuries and incidents.

On a happier note, it is getting around toward holiday time again. Every year, I always come up with whatever the trendy crafty present is and make a ton of them for my nieces and younger cousins. A couple years ago it was those tie ended fleece blankets. I made a pile of those, they were really fun. This year, it is felted “Lucy bags” from “Two Old Bags” yarn patterns. Those are those bit, round purses with a short strap that flips over the long strap and holds it closed. I bought the paper pattern from a local yarn shop, but I know they have a web site, too. Hopefully, the next time I sit down a the computer to type mindlessly, I will have some examples. One is done but not felted, the other, I just started.
Speaking of which, Martha Stewart is on, and I’m going to knit and watch Martha! What else is there to do on a snowy day?

First Frost, Garden Wrap-Up, and a Woodstove Primer

The first frost of the fall season was the other night. I was coming home from my incredibly silly job, and there were quite a few cars parked out on the street with a lot of frost on them. It seems very counterintuitive, but on those clear, still nights in fall, the cold air just lays in the valleys and they get a harder frost down there than we do here. It was 29 when I passed the bank at 3:30 AM, but I think it was a hair warmer up at home, because I was able to get my plants moved in off the porch without them getting frost damage.

In my Three Sisters garden, most of the pumpkin leaves withered up and called it quits. I only have a few pumpkins down in there, though I was still picking ears of corn. We had some with Sunday lunch yesterday, and it was okay. I planted “Incredible” this year, and it turned out really nice. My grandmother planted some freebee corn seed I got for ordering early from a seed company. They sent peas and beans and corn and cukes and something else which I can’t remember. Oh, yeah, tomatoes! All the varieties were really good, small and tender. Unfortunately, they were just labeled “Early Experimental” so unless they come out and say what they were that was that for those.

Tomatoes have been over for a while. I still have some corn standing, and it seems that the goats have eaten my popcorn, so I won’t be trying that this fall. Three are still some peas and spinach in the garden, both of which have not bee affected by the frost. I need to dig potatoes and carrots, but I haven’t resolved my carrot storage issues from last year. That, and I dug a whole bunch of carrots for a snack a while ago, and one of the kinds I planted tasted just like dish soap. Awful! I need to find out what they were and make a black mark in my garden notebook about that one.

I don’t know what the problem is with the pumpkins. I have had no kind of luck with them. next year, I’m going to just have to load the hills with every kind of manure I can find. I’m also thinking about getting bees, and if I do, I’ll park those hives right by the pumpkin vines. The vines got lots of flowers, and on vine crops like that, you can see the little balls that will become fruit at the bases of the the female flowers. The baby pumpkins on my vines just got yellow and fell off, though. Just like they did last year and the year before that and the year before that and the year before that. I think this was a difficult year for pumpkins and for pollinators, though, since it was hot early and when the growing season actually started kicking in, it was cold and wet, then hot and wet, and then very dry and neither hot nor cold in August when things should be growing out really well. When the weather is wet, understandably, things don’t get pollinated like they should because bees and other pollinating critters are hunkered down in their hives and hidey holes.

My uncle has been bringing firewood a lot this fall. Ever since we moved here and started heating with wood, we’ve been kind of silly about it. We just kind of pop off into the winter all half cocked and end up running out and having to do things like go down to the swamp in three feet of snow and cut damp snags or make a run out to the sawmill and bring loads of slabwood home in the back end of the station wagon. i know a lot of people are thinking about heating with wood this year, because everything is going up, but it is something that needs more planning than a lot of people are used to. I mean, if you’re going to use gas or electric, you just turn it on and hope you can pay your bill. With wood, you need to actually go out and get it or find some one to bring it to you or you don’t have heat.

We have a plain firebox that can be used for coal or wood. You can get stoves that are either EPA rated for emissions or not. The rated stoves are more expensive, but according to my stove guy, the difference between them it the rated stoves are approved for a longer burn time, and the non-rated ones just have a few extra draught holes drilling in the door so they burn faster and don’t have to be EPA rated. Of course, we don’t care what the EPA says (just kidding) but we do want to be able to leave the stove for eight hours and still come back to a live fire. To get around the cost issue but still get a longer burn time, you can try to go through a dealer that also stocks repair parts and have them sell a non-EPA rated stove with a replacement door with no extra holes.

A lot of people are putting in pellet stoves, which is kind of a nice choice. They burn these little pieces of pelletized sawdust that you can have delivered by the ton or get a few hundred pounds at a time. The town where I used to live has a pellet manufacturing business, and they are absolutely thriving. With pellets, you don’t have to chop wood. They’re clean. They are also regulated so that you get a specific amount of heat from a specific amount of wood. When you are burning raw wood, you get vastly different amounts of heat from different kinds of wood. Also, most pellet stoves have an electric hopper that feeds a controlled amount of pellets into the stove which regulates the temperature and keeps the fire going when you’re not home. You can even get a little adaptor which allows you to run the electric hopper off a car or boat battery for several days in the case of power outage or national emergency when nefarious government forces cut the electric in midwinter to freeze the rebellious population into submission.

The drawback of pellet stoves it that they only burn pellets. A few winters ago, when the pellet stove craze really took off, there was a bad pellet shortage, and a lot of people were stuck with no way to get fuel. Similarly, there was a big craze that year for corn burning stoves, which has backed off a lot since corn has gone up so high. Another problem with corn burning stoves is their propensity to Explode! if the chaff isn’t cleaned off the corn and the dust builds up inside the stove. This isn’t just one of the things that “they say” can happen. My sister’s husband works with a guy whose corn burning stove blew up, luckily with no injuries.

There are also these outdoor stoves that look like little outhouses which you can hook up like a boiler. You can use them to pipe heat into multiple structures, but they are not cheap, they use a lot of wood, they take a lot of electricity to move the heat, and you still have to have a backup furnace installed in your house to get insurance. I have also read a couple different places (and this is a “they say”) that outdoor furnaces can burn up and still take your house with them, that some states won’t give you insurance if you have them, blah, blah, blah, but I think that might be kind of like conspiracy theory stuff. (ha.)

You can get really nice and fancy stoves. Really pretty ones that also have like built in cook tops and brass picture windows so you can see the pretty fire. You can also get stoves that look like a plain old heater but they open up and have a fire inside. You can get really high tech ones like the “woodchuck” that, if I read the literature right, will completely vaporize the wood at high temperatures and convert every bit of that wonderful stored solar energy into heat for your home. You can get blowers and thermostats and everything that you expect from a regular furnace but just have wood as your heat source. I don’t have any of that. I have a box with fire in it that sits in the basement. Warm air goes up stairs and up through a vent in the floor of one closet. It works for me. Of course, it has only frosted once or twice and daytime temps are still in the fifties and sixties, so I haven’t needed to run the stove, have i?

In our next episode, I’ll talk about what types of wood to use in a wood stove or fireplace. And it really does matter!

Food From the Late Summer Garden

Hello!

It is a cool and misty morning, and we are trapped between a slow front that is the end of Gustav and the fast moving rainstorm of Hannah. Hannah is a palindromic name which is cool. And it am pretty cheery, as I’m getting some days off this weekend. And I’m using this time to get what I can out of the garden!

This time of year, that means tomatoes!



Let me explain this photo: There are various tomato activities which can take place at this time of year. The large white bowl is filled with ends from sauce tomatoes which are oblong and not actually very good to eat. Sauce tomatoes are usually hollow and dry and don’t have a lot of seeds. They are good for sauce because the flavor is really concentrated, and also there is less juice so there is less boiling down to get thick sauce. The big saucepan is full of quartered sauce tomatoes which have to cook about ten minutes before they are soft enough to strain for sauce. In this case, I’ll take all the cooked tomatoes and dump them into a different bowl and clean the stockpot. Then, I dip cooked tomatoes out of the bowl and into a sieve and let the juice and pulp go back into the stockpot. I like to stir the cooked whole tomatoes around in the sieve with a metal spoon to really squeeze the liquid out of it. I guess those saucers and ricers are really great for this, but I’m here to say a sieve is fine.

In the teacups are seeds which are being saved. I’ve written about this before. Things to remember: no hybrids, soak in water a few days to loosen the pulp, good seeds sink, bad seeds float. Seeds still need to be tested sometime over the winter to prove they’ll sprout. This year, I put a good amount of space between my tomatoes rows to avoid any chance of cross pollination.

In the little china serving bowl are two kinds of salad or slicing tomatoes I grew this year. The pinky pink ones are called “Momotaro” and this was the first year the seeds were available from Japan. The red ones with the yellow ring around the top are “Cosmonaut Volkov” a Ukrainian heirloom which I grew because I loved the description on the seed catalog and I’m Ukrainian on my mother’s side (with a little Georgian, and I’m Irish on my dad’s side, so people just need to watch out!) Cosmonaut Volkov tomatoes are really red underneath and yellow around the stem. They are really fleshy and have few seeds and a lot of juice. Just a surprizing fruit.

I didn’t put these in the sauce because we’re having lunch at my grandmother’s house tomorrow, and one of my cousins is going to stop by. So, I’m going to make a very special tomatoes vinaigrette which it will I share here:

Apple Cider Vinaigrette

Stir together:

1/2 tsp. dry mustard
1 1/2 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. white pepper
1/3 c. cider vinegar
1/3 c. veg. oil
1/3 c. olive oil
a few Tblspn. puree fresh herbs (or just use parsley)

I like to go for a walk and pick a nice handful of different varieties of basils, oreganos, and parsley, even a lovage leaf or two would be okay. I throw them in the little mini chopper and then just add as much as I feel like having to the vinaigrette.
Cut tomatoes into bite sized pieces and let them sit in the sauce for a while before serving. You can throw more tomatoes in after they get eaten, and reuse the vinaigrette for a day or two.

I’m going to quit writing now, because I have things to do other than mess around with the computer. Though computer messing is quite fun. I need to pick some corn from the three sisters garden. Very exciting. I got an article from one of the local newspapers were a gentleman planted a three sisters plot at the Wilder Museum in Irvine, PA. Tho’ he used manure instead of fish. He had manure. I have fish. That’s why you pick what you pick!

Speaking of which. Don’t microwave corn. It’s a travesty.

Cook corn like Betty Crocker says:

Husk out corn. Put in a pot and cover with water till it floats. Add a few tablespoons of sugar and a little lemon juice. My aunt Teena just squeezes a whole half a lemon right in. I use bottled juice. Bring to a boil and boil two minutes. Turn it off and sit ten more minutes. Eat it. It’s good!

Speaking of which, and this is the last speaking of which: Freezing corn is almost exactly like freezing beans. Blanch the corn for a couple minutes while still on the cob. Run under cold water to stop cooking. Take a serrated knife and slice off the kernels. Toss them in your handy dandy sieve. (People should not have to go through life without a wire sieve, I swear, I use mine twenty times a day.) When the corn is drained, pack into zipper freezer bags and freeze. You can’t can corn without a pressure cooker. It will just rot in the jars and get you really sick. Corn relish is different, though, and you can just use a recipe and a boiling water canner for that.

Bad Beans and Black Locust

Hello!

I can’t believe its late July already. This is the week where reality set in for me in terms of what is going to grow and what isn’t going to grow. The good news is, my three sisters garden is thriving. I only had one hill where some pumpkins didn’t come up, the rest at least have some. The random gourds I threw around between the sunflowers and the broom corn are also growing great. The main garden is okay, but my fancy onion sets are disappointing. I may even write to the company I got them from to mention that they were disappointing. My onions from seed are coming along slow, too, but they also didn’t cost like those sets cost, and I’ve already gotten my money’s worth from just green onion tops and little baby onions.

My sister’s husband planted carrots and onions in flowerpots this year, and they’ve been eating fresh onions and carrots for weeks and teasing one of uncles about it mercilessly. They just used potting soil and any old seed from Home Depot and leftover pots from the hanging plants my sister kills every year, and, viola, instant carrot snacks. I work and work, and my uncle has a garden you could take a picture of and put in a magazine it’s so nice, and neither of us have seen a carrot yet this year. It’s kind of funny. Just recently, I was having a conversation with a gentleman who lives and works on an organic farm in Panama, New York, and we were talking cropping systems and raised beds and soil building techniques and cover crops and all that stuff, and another girl joined in and was really proud of her garden, too, and she was like: “I just put miracle grow on it! It works really well!” So, there’s more than on way to skin a cat!

Unfortunately, it looks like all of my melons are going to be a wash this year. Nothing wanted to grow! They have little tiny buds on them , but I just don’t see how the plant is going to be big enough ever to support fruit. That is a shame because I had lots of heirloom type melons I was trying, and I ‘ad ‘opes, I tell ya. I ‘ad ‘opes. But I’ve never had anything like luck with pumpkins before, and it looks like they are going strong.

Speaking of dashed hopes, it looks like my beans are also too damaged by bunny rabbits to bear this year. Luckily, I saved the seeds for my fancy French beans that I didn’t plant. Bean seeds should last three years, so I probably won’t have to rebuy French bean seeds, though I’m going to have to start over with bush beans. I tried a new variety last year, and, unlike the original beans I planted my first and second garden years, the seeds didn’t breed true. They were Burpee Kentucky Wonder, and they bore well last year, but the saved seeds were no good. I have noticed that Burpee seeds don’t even keep from year to year in the package which is why I don’t have any salsa peppers this year. I had a whole half package of them, but they never grew. Makes me reconsider whether I will buy many Burpee seeds next year.

Anyway, my large task of the day was to cut back and clear the black locust sprouts away from the pond edge. When we moved in here, three years ago, the previous owners had allowed the pond edge to grow up in black locust. They also let the landscaping escape, and trees that should have been trimmed back to shrub size had really sprung up.

The problem with having trees on your pond dam is pretty simple. The roots infiltrate the dam. In the short run, they hold back erosion and the trees keep the pond from getting too hot, after the trees get big, the roots start breaking things apart. And if you cut the trees or the trees die or fall down, the decaying roots can weaken the dam.

For this reason, maybe it was a mistake to cut the locust trees around the pond, but they were also obscuring the view, which is very nice. When we first came to look at this house, my mother figured there would be a view, but it took imagination.

This is a picture of two of my many cousins fishing by the pond the first year we got here:



This is a picture I took this afternoon after chopping down the sprouts off the tops of the locust stumps:




For clearing brush, I use a pair of by-pass loppers, and I would say get a good pair of by-pass loppers, but I’m now convinced that there is no such thing. We started out with Fiskars, and they were okay. They chopped a lot of stuff and had a lifetime guarantee, which was good because my mother destroyed her first set inside of a year. We’ve had them replaced twice, but we eventually gave up. They have a design flaw where the handle just keeps breaking, and instead of fixing it, they just started making them in China. The loppers wore out and broke quicker, and they just made them cheaper so that they were cheaper to replace rather than making better loppers. We gave up, and I’ve been using a pair of Martha Stewart loppers with solid wood handles. They don’t that well, but there are fewer parts to break!

Anyway, I have at least one more day of chopping to get the sprouts from the swamp side of the pond, and I ended up with about a truckload of branches to give the goats. I’ll wait until they eat down what I gave them a little.

Other than messing up the view and possibly ripping the pond dam apart, I think that black locust is one of the best trees you can grow. It’s a fast grower. We counted the rings on the trees we took down, and most of them were less than ten years old. I don’t know if the locust was deliberately planted around the pond, but it does spread really well and has these pretty, feathery leaves. It also has really wicked thorns, but that is beside the point.

Most fast-growing trees, especially ones that grow in wet or less than ideal areas are just junky, but locust is a pretty hard wood. You can use it for firewood after it dries, but the best use for locust is as fence posts. It grows nice and straight, and when you cut it, you can peel the bark right off like a banana peel. If you miss the really wet stage though, it will com off easy after it completely dries, as well. Locust fence posts will last anywhere from twenty to forty years in the ground with no chemical treatment whatsoever.

We got a lot of use out of the locust trees we cut that first year. Most of them went into the snake rail fence that appears in some of my other posted pictures, though we did burn some. Even though the sprouts are a nuisance, they make good fodder for the goats. One year, before I had hay and snow was setting in, I drove the goats into the swamp and had them eat the leaves still on the locusts for their roughage.

One of these days, I’d like to have a locust stand farther down the hill where they won’t be in the way, but right now, the woods are almost all evergreens.

Midsummer Day's Dream

Hello!

We’ve kind of reached that point in summer where the hard work is really over and the rest is just trying to keep everything balanced. The greenhouse is empty and down with plants either plunked into empty places in the gardens or tossed into Plant Heaven at the edge of the yard. I’ve been staking tomatoes and tying up vines and of course weeding, weeding, weeding.

Right now, my biggest problem is varmints! Something, probably raccoons, has been raiding the compost pile. We’ve been eating a lot of those cute little seedless watermelons, and the rinds have been irresistible to critters. I’ve tried burying the pile in tons of hay and straw. I put wire over the top. Nothing works. The wire is always peeled back or the little guys just drag stuff out right through the wire! I’m going to have to raid the scrap lumber from the goat shed to make a sturdier, non peeling-back cap for the pile. I’m a bad builder, but I’m going to have to get over that, because the old particle board closet that was left behind here that I moved into the basement and have been using as a storage cupboard is on its way out. The damp down there has finally gotten to it, and it is bowing out, and the shelves have started to drop.

Speaking of critters, I have finally taken care of a bad muskrat hole in the walkway on top of the dam on the pond. Muskrats will dig in at the water level and then build a big den uphill from the entrance. A lot of times, this will cave in, and that’s what happened here. It was getting treacherous to go over the top of the dam with the lawnmower, so I was working on getting some better drainage around the garage by chopping down the sod and regrading the yard off the cement pad there and ended up with a couple three hundred pounds of dirt and sod. I wasn’t aware that the hole was so big, but almost all that dirt and sod went into making the walkway flat again and building up the side of the pond. I always keep a good amount of grass seed and cover crop on hand to use when I do my yard repairs. It is easier than running into town every time I throw some dirt around, and they don’t always have grass seed at the feed mill. I refuse to pay what they charge for grass seed at Tractor Supply. My A-Number-One money saving tip for saving money is never buy anything there. Don’t even set foot in the store to look. Everything is overpriced, and everything is made in China.

The last thing I bought at Tractor Supply was a hose nozzle, and it was too expensive and didn’t work. How can a hose nozzle not work? Then, when I was looking for an exchange for it, I found the exact same thing in the sale bin for five dollars less except for the one that I was returning was tied to a card and the cheaper one just had a sticker on it. Same manufacturer. Same weight and features. I just returned it and went someplace to purchase a reasonably priced, made in America hose nozzle. I know they cheat people by charging too much for stuff you can get at real farm supply places, but this was a little too far, and I haven’t been there since.

Anyway, I’m lucky that the muskrats seem to have abandoned the pond. The only way to get rid of them, really is to off them, and I’m not quite ready to do that. Though, I might shoot some bunnies here very soon! They are really doing a number on my lower garden away from the house, and I really like beans. The rabbits are cute, though. They play little jumping games on the yard in the mornings, and maybe a cat will eat them and I won’t have to try and actually hit anything with my gun, though I bet I could get my sister’s husband to do it. She had a raccoon in her garbage right in town the other evening, and it was all she could do to keep him from shooting it. He really wanted to. It would have been perfectly safe. He’s a firearms instructor and a good shot, but it would have been just too hard to explain if they had actually got in trouble for shooting in the city

My uncle who was born in Kansas in the ‘40’s said that they used to catch rabbits in sacks in the summer when they mowed hay. They would mow in a square and the rabbits wouldn’t run out of the long grass, so they could just pick them right up and pop them into feed sacks. They ate rabbit all summer to the point where they couldn’t even look at rabbit, but a lot of times, that was all they had for meat in summer.

We have stray cats out the ears right now. Two mother cats brought their kittens ot the garage. Three of the kittens are really gentle and nice, and the four from the other litter are wild. We’re going ot have to figure out what to do about all those cats, but I’m hoping they keep down the mouse problem. Last year, I was on the verge of getting a few cats from the farm where I buy milk. They have really pretty cats. A lot of calicoes. However, I have ten garage cats right now and one house cat. My cousins named the older little all weird names from comic books, but the nice cats are Boots, Smokey, and Billi. Billi used to be named Whitey, because he has more white than any of the other cats, but we decided he needed a less culturally fraught name, and so I called him Billi which is Whitey in Ukrainian. My grandmother always has grey cats and they are always named Sivvi, which means “grey”. She’s on about Sivvi IV or V by now!

That’s about everything going on here! I’m going to start fall crops of broccoli and cabbage very soon and the lettuces are about over until it cools down a little, too. I paid a visit to my other uncle’s garden the other day, and I may change my mind about using black plastic , since the cool weather has really slowed down my melons and peppers and he says the plastic keeps the soil warm as well as cuts down on weeding. I’ve done two batches of strawberry jam and two batches of currant jelly, and my kitchen is starting to fill up with jars. hopefully, the bunnies will leave me some pickling cukes because I’d like to try that this year.

I need to go and hang out a load of wash which is another great way to keep the electric bill low over the summer. I even hang out clothes in the basement over the winter next to the wood stove. In Ontario, they have actually made it illegal for planned housing communities to write bylaws that don’t allow people to hang out wash in an effort to keep down the drain on the grid. My sister runs central air in her very large house all summer but hangs out her clothes, and her bills are the same in summer as they are in winter! That dryer costs a lot to run! Interestingly enough, the yearly report from the power company says the peak draw for our area in 2007 was actually in February when the weather was so cold. My cousins from down south can’t believe how few people in PA have AC in their houses. We actually have an air conditioner. It’s one of those ones that hang out the window, and it’s still in the box it came in. Up on the hill, it is consistently 10 to 15 degrees cooler than it is in town, and there is always a breeze. We bought the air conditioner for my brother who was too lazy to install it even though he was living in my aunt’s upstairs apartment which was melting hot, and it’s just been passed around between different family members, none of which have actually used it!

The Last Week of Spring!

Hello!

What a busy time it’s been this month!

Basically, the gardens are done, though there are some more tomato plants that still need to go in, a row of peas or two, strawflowers to plant, I’d like to get in more sunflowers and some broom corn. Pumpkins still need to go in, but it was cold, really hot, and now cold again! So no use rushing those! Same with the melons which are doing fine in the green house for now. But most of the tomatoes, the green peppers, beans, cukes, carrots, cabbages, onions, lettuces, and corn (sweet and pop) are all in the grounds and growing along with some gourds and most of the sunflowers plus annuals and herbs and all good things like that. The birds and critters did not eat the corn seeds out of the ground, and it looks like the sunflower seeds will remain undisturbed, as well.

I have also been up in Erie almost every week day baby sitting my niece and nephew. I also made a trip to Buffalo to hear the finals concert in the guitar concerto competition they have up there every other year. I’ve gone up twice, and both times I’ve been rooting for the soloist who played the Castelnuovo-Tadesco concerto to win, and it never happens! I love that piece. But that’s neither here nor there. I only had to worry about using up too much gas, since the weather was so bad, there was no way that I could work outside. I love going to hear the Buffalo Philharmonic play. If I ever get rich, I’m going to have a little apartment in Buffalo so I can go and hear concerts and go to hockey whenever I want and not have to worry about weather! But I’d still spend most of my time here. Or the south of France. With French cooking utensils.

We have been having our usual Sunday afternoon get togethers. Sometimes in winter, we get snowed in and have only my grandmother and sometimes an aunt, but in summer, we get swamped every Sunday. Last weekend, we had my grandmother, my aunt, my dad, my sister and her husband and their kids plus my mom and I. My mom has been on a strange mashed potatoes and fish kick. That’s all she ever wants to eat, and my sister brought cedar planks and a giant salmon steak. My sister hates fish. I find this hilarious because her husband is a fisherman and works in law enforcement for fish and boating. She was really brave and tried to wrestle this almost four pound piece of salmon out of the bag and prepare it, but she just couldn’t do it. I handle stuff I don’t plan on eating all the time, since I’m veg-veg but I’ll cook anything, so she yelled instructions from out of fish-smell distance, and we got it done.

I guess it was good, because everyone but my dad liked it, and he only likes plain and mostly canned things. So that’s where I get it from. Basically, you can get short little cedar boards, about ten inches long, six inches wide, and maybe three quarters of an inch thick. My sister got hers at Linens and Things, but you can get them at grocery stores with good seafood departments, too. You soak the planks in water for about an hour, and get the grill heated up to about 375. (You can also do this in the oven, but I would guess the taste is not as smoky.) While this was going on, we put olive oil on the fish and used one of those spice rubs. Then you put the fish on the wood, skin side down, and put the whole thing right on the hot grill for about fifteen to twenty minutes. Keep a water bottle handy to put out the plank if it catches fire! The fish is done when it starts to flake.

Theoretically, you can reuse the plank, but I found that hard to believe after seeing how charred it got.

The planked salmon went over really well, even though our family is pretty spoiled because we have smoked steelhead in the fall and fresh perch that is just breaded and fried in a pan. That works on the grill, too. All you need is a deep cast iron pan. Junk shops and estate sales and yard sales are great places to find cast iron cook ware. You don’t have to buy the new stuff which generally comes from China and isn’t of the greatest quality. If you get a really gunky old cast iron pan, just toss it in a campfire or the fireplace and let it burn clean. Wait for the fire to get cool, scrub off the pan, rub it with cooking oil or fat and call it good. You can use a heavy cast iron pan to fry things in oil on top of the grill and keep the house from getting too stinky and smoky. Afterwards, though, I always play a little game called “Where can I dump the fish fry oil where Sally Ann is not going to roll in it and then jump in my bed?” I usually lose, and the dog ends up in my bed with greasy cornmeal stuck all over her.

This year is just going to be a crazy bumper crop year of all things berry. Something really drastic is going to have to happen to mess this up. The strawberries are ready to ripen, there are more currants than I have ever seen. The black raspberries are loaded, and even the troublesome blackberries are having their best year at least since the first year I had them. Even with all the pruning, there are going to be just mounds of grapes. I have been struggling to keep bird netting on the currants. We get a mighty amount of wind up here, and the netting just doesn’t want to stay at all. With the strawberries, I just tack the netting down with poultry fence staples and reach under to pick. When the netting is on the strawberries, it is better to go barefoot in the garden, because the netting catches on any kind of shoe tread, and button up shirts also present a problem. My strawberries are also about a week and a half behind the ones closer to the lake. The lower temperatures up here really make a difference. And I probably just jinxed myself and my berries since it is getting pretty chilly out there. I don’t think it’s going to frost or anything, but it will be in the forties the next three nights or so.

Speaking of weather, the National Weather Service finally released the snow total map for the season. We were right on the line between the color for 120-140 inches and that for 140-160. I thought we had a little less snow this year than last, when we had 180 inches. We ran out of wood bad this spring, though. I need to get on the ball with that, since our backup propane tank is almost empty, and with everything going up, filling it is falling farther down the list of priorities, especially since we have a nice new wood stove. Though, we did stretch the tank through three winters just with what was in it when we moved here. Little did I know that was going to be like getting a thousand dollars free with the house! We had our 36th coldest spring on record, and I’d like to think that if we’d had a little closer to normal temperatures and not so much rain that I could have either not run out of firewood as quickly or been able to get another load, but it never happened. I have a little bit of a jump on it this year, though, since my uncle brought a partial load as a Mother’s Day present, and I got another partial load from my aunt’s yard where a big piece of her cottonwood tree fell down.

That’s all I can think of which I’m just sitting around waiting for it to quit raining.

It's Garden Time!

Hi!

It’s a busy time here. After Memorial Day is the unofficial time when the last frost is past and the plants I started and the direct seeds need to go into the garden. My upper garden which is the one that was here when I got here a few years ago is already full, and I’m spreading out to the newer patches.

In my upper garden, back in April, I put in yellow and red onion seeds plus a mixed greens patch. I never have the rights sized patch for salad. Either there is a ton and it doesn’t get eaten or not enough, and there is just enough for nibbling a leaf here and there. Right now I have a nibble sized patch of lettuce, but I have more greens planted in the ends of some of the rows.

The most recent additions to the upper garden were some more red onions -- sets this time to have some ready sooner, Cosmonaut Volkov tomatoes, three kinds of carrots, some cabbages and broccoli which actually survived, momotaro and roma tomatoes, lettuces, spinach, a couple varieties of cucumber, peas, bush beans, popcorn, and a few hills of gourds. One of the gardening books I read (can’t remember which one) showed a layout for the garden that included little hills around the edges for melons and gourds which I think is a good idea, because I have a lot of melons started and putting things like that in the middle of the garden, when space is a premium, is kind of silly. The idea would be that you just need enough dirt for the roots, and the vines and fruit can take off and run out into the yard. I can deal with not having to mow a little right around the garden.

My “three sisters” garden is actually progressing well. I caught some of the fish myself, and had kind of a nasty afternoon braining carp and then cutting them up to put in the hills. Carp are hard to kill outright, and I don’t like to leave them gasping, so things were pretty gory. And there are reflexes and nerves in a carp that have nothing to do with whether or not that fish is actually alive. I’ll just leave it at that.

Anyway, my brother in law would fish a puddle, and when I asked for fish, I got fish, and I only need enough fish for about seven or eight more hills of corn. Which is just an hour or fishing and a little bit of digging, and phase one will be over.

In my upper garden by the house, things generally get left alone, but down below, I lost every single pumpkin I planted to critters and birds last year. I was concerned about birds being able to peck out the corn as soon as I planted it, and I also want to make a sunflower forest up in the unused half of the newly turned garden. I battled animals over the sunflower seeds, too. The corn and fish plan seems actually to be going quite well, though, as I put the fish down about six inches and really heaped the dirt over top. When I planted the corn, I shoved it in as far as my thumb. It seems to be germinating, even with being a little deeper than the recommended planting depth. But then again, I also have short thumbs. So far, the only animal that has tried to dig the fish out is my naughty little dog Sally Ann who has an affinity for stink which cannot be stopped!

My lower garden with the strawberry rows is probably as big as my upper garden after having expanded it a couple of times and consolidated the berries. The berries should be in their prime right now, but the honey berries which were supposed to be so great have been unproductive and disappointing. The row of “sparkle” strawberries is really full of blossoms, and in a week or two, I’m going to cover the row with bird netting. The robins did a number on them last year. I already have the currants covered. Barring drought or too many bad animals, I should have a ton of berries this year. I’m also pinching back the grape vines which came through their aggressive pruning this spring very well, thank you. There should be only one bunch per little stem, and there are at least two on every stem and sometimes three or four. the bunches really look like little bunches of grapes, just about an inch long.

My trouble with the blackberries is continuing, however. They were started to get blossoms and green up and look like they were also going to have a great year. Then, there were a wilted looking patch which came out with bright, bright orange color on the underside. This was on both the fruiting canes from this year and the new canes which are just coming up. I’m baby-sitting my niece and nephew these last few weeks of the school year, and I’m not home enough to keep an eye on things minutely, so I just chopped the orange canes down.



it turns out I did the right thing. My encyclopedia of organic gardening says that is called, surprisingly enough, orange rust, and the only way to get rid of it is to burn out the plants, even the roots. I haven’t gotten to the roots yet, and I’m closely watching the rest of the patch to make sure the disease hasn’t spread.

One Month and Counting to Planting Time

Hello!

Right now is the middle point of one of the busier times of year. I’m turning over the gardens and getting things ready to go in the ground. The greenhouse is set up, and all of the plants are out in it. I’m also trying a new experiment with some “cold frames” which are actually just three sections of glass fronted book shelves laid out in the yard. I put broccoli and cabbage plants in them because I don’t think it would be too big a loss if it didn’t work! I’m not just picking on two of my less well liked vegetables. Both broccoli and cabbage can be started again from seed in July and planted out in the cooler weather. So, if this batch doesn’t quite work out, it’s okay. There will be more later.

Seed Starting update: As I said, everything is in the greenhouse and started, even the melons which is exciting, because they are started three and four weeks before the last frost. I ran out of peat pots a couple weeks back and could only find one of those “mini greenhouses” which is basically a covered salad pan like you get from the grocery store or when a restaurant caters something. Hint, hint: If you have a family member in the medical field and you want a good planting container, wait until the drug reps bring lunch and save the plastic containers they brought the meal in.

I bought the mini greenhouse thing, because I needed the cups out of it. I suppose I deserved to get fleeced because I went to Tractor Supply, which is almost as bad as the Devil’s Playground (AKA Walmart) to get planting stuff. I usually don’t get hung up on having to get the exact right thing, especially if it’s overpriced and encased in a completely unnecessary piece of plastic. BUT I have been very unhappy with the plants that I started in flats. It was fun and all to just dump seed starting soil into whatever and chuck in the seeds, but I really had trouble after that. Because:

1. The seeds planted in flats too up too much room. It just seemed inefficient. I either had to plant rows of different seeds in the flats or hog up one whole pan for just one kind of seeds.

2. When I gave in and mixed seeds, different things were ready to transplant and different times. You generally start pulling things apart when the real leaves sprout. The first little leaves that come out of the seeds are are really generic. It’s so exciting to see the real leaves. They are different colors and jaggedy or feathery or hairy or spiky. The plant starts to look like a real plant. Then, you pop it into a cup by itself. When I mixed plants in flats, I’d be ready to transplant some while others were still immature. Then, I had even less room, see complaint about flats No. 1.

3. It’s hard to water flats. Sure, at the beginning, I’d just mist away enough to get the seeds going, but young sprouts generally need to be watered from the bottom. There was no good way to do this without just dumping water in and exposing some of the roots. Meanwhile, every time you move the plants, the surface shifts and cracks open, and more roots get exposed. In cups and pots, you just water through the bottom, and the water just kind of osmoses gently up to the plant.

4. The seeds just didn’t start good in flats. I didn’t skimp on seed starter. I made the flats nice and deep, and still, compared with things started in peat pots, my plants started in flats were spindly and slow to develop. Eventually they stalled, and I just started transplanting things too early for their own good. Which led to :

5. TRANSPLANT CARNAGE!!! There is no neat way (at least for me) to get the plants out of the flats. In cups, I rip off a cup, wiggle out the things I’d like to transplant, and pop them into the new pots and cups. In the flats, things were getting ripped and tangled and mauled and buried under the soil thrown up by other plants, and it was awful. And because the plants were spindly and under-developed, the stems snapped very easily. A lot of plants that looked like they had made it through okay were just withered away by the next day.

So, peat cups. Even though a lot of the books and things say flats. I like peat cups. Are they cost effective? I’d say yes, since, I have three living broccoli plants out of about two dozen I tried to transplant and another couple dozen I tossed out when picking which plants to transplant, and I’ve also lost quite a few flowers and herbs that were started in flats, too.

Other than the fiasco with the flats that consumed about a third to a half of my cosmos, calendulas, and gallardias plus most of the first crop of broccoli and cabbage, seed starting has gone fine. I have some tomatoes which could have been started earlier but weren’t due to the peat pot shortage. The strawflowers are late, too. Some hot pepper seeds I did not plant last year that I saved and tried to use this year didn’t come, and I wasn’t able to find a good replacement for them, but nothing horrible. I started more seeds and more kinds this year than ever before, and I even needed to add a new shelf to the greenhouse. I haven’t let anything freeze yet, and things are going well.



Everything is just sprouting its head off. I put in three new currant plants a couple weeks ago, and they won’t bear for a year or two, but the other currants are loaded with blossoms which are like little green flowers. Currant jelly is the jelly to have in my family. In the fall, I’ll sell strawberry, I’ll sell elderberry, I’ll sell grape, but I would get killed if I didn’t dole out the currant to my mom, aunts, and grandmother. At the house where I grew up, we had an old fashioned berry patch with gooseberries, rhubarb, and currants, and I remember learning how to make jelly by picking the berries with my grandfather and then moving into the kitchen and helping my mother and grandmother with the cooking and canning. My mom doesn’t care to make jelly, and my grandmother doesn’t like to get bothered with it anymore, but I usually combine my currants with the ones from her bushes and get about two batches a year.



I “inherited” an asparagus patch from the lady who had my house before I lived here. Asparagus are some of the longest-lived plants there are. You can grow them from seed, but most places will sell roots. Asparagus are one of those weird plants that has a funky chemical in it that some people can taste and other people can’t. Kind of like rolling your tongue. Elderberries are the same way. About ten to twenty per cent of people are deathly allergic to a chemical in raw elderberries. When you cook elderberries to make wine or jelly, that chemical is broken down, and they are perfectly safe, but I have read about some people getting poisoned from drinking maple sap from elderberry spiles. For the record, when I was a kid, we did maple syrup one year and used elderberry sticks which hollow out really well to make the spouts. No one got sick, but I don’t remember drinking the sap before it got boiled.

Back to asparagus. I don’t care for it, because I can taste whatever funky chemical that is, and I don’t like it! However, just about everyone else love asparagus. You can munch them raw or steam them. They are kind of an ongoing difficulty for me, however. Like I was saying, you get the roots, you put them in the ground, and they take a few years to get going. After that, asparagus can grow for decades.

These asparagus are planted in a raised bed that I have to mow around all summer. I understand the appeal of a raised bed, but I don’t like them. They are like special little weed factories that grow big, healthy weeds. I got rid of the strawberry pyramid last year, because it grew weeds and grass better than it grew strawberries. And every year, I vow that I’ll keep the asparagus patch weed free, and every year, I lose.

At first, I didn’t weed it that well, though, because I wasn’t sure what was growing there. When weeds came up, I thought they might be the asparagus, and I didn’t pull them out. Now, I know better, and I know that asparagus looks exactly like it does in the store, just sticking out of the ground.

In any planted bed like strawberries or asparagus, weeds are a problem. Because the plants stay in the ground and grow in the same place year after year, you just can’t cultivate and weeds the same way you can in a garden with annuals or vegetables. Strawberries don’t stay in place as long as asparagus, so after a few years, you just start a new patch and start out with a clean slate. Not with those darn asparagus!

So, I caught a reference in my favorite book “Garden Magic” that said something about dressing the asparagus beds with salt in March or April. Now, I’ve heard a lot of different things about weird stuff to put on your garden. And my grandmother says you should sprinkle epsom salt on the tomatoes when you put them out in the garden (along with a cup of manure tea) but that asparagus reference was a little too brief and too vague for me to just go pitching salt around.

I checked all my other books and found nothing about salt and asparagus. So, it was off to the internet, which is less fun than you’d think. We have a running joke that in the post that marks the underground phone lines, there is actually just one of those pre-historic woodpecker birds that like carve out the grocery receipts on the Flintstones. Every few minutes, it stops to say “I gotta get a new job!” And that’s our internet access. It’s just heck, I tell you!

Basically, since there have been asparagus patches, people have been dealing with how to keep the darn weeds out. Asparagus are native to the salty coastlines of the Asian Pacific (or something) and they tolerate salt well, even though the weeds in the garden do not. So, to keep a weed free asparagus patch, sprinkle a little rock salt around to burn up the unwanted plants, and it should not hurt the asparagus.

I tried that with a few plants, and I haven’t noticed a dramatic reduction in weeds or anything. But, I wasn’t too keen on just salting the earth out there in the raised bed. Last year, I used the raised bed as a kind of overflow area for tomato plants, and they did really well, and the asparagus was doing better than it had the year before, at least until the goats ate it. Two years ago, the plants were really buggy, but they seemed fine last year.

By chance, I read a book called “Carrots Love Tomatoes” over the winter which gave some scientific reason for the things I kind of noticed anecdotally. Apparently, there are chemicals in the roots of tomatoes which chase away the bugs that eat asparagus most, and there are chemicals in asparagus that tomato-living bugs just can’t stand!

There are some other kinds of hints in that book, too. Like: other plants just hate fennel. That one, I’m not sure about, because we had a lot of fennel growing here when we first go here, and the lower level plants did just fine all mixed in. I’ve tried to migrate the fennel other places, but it takes a while, because you need to just wait for the old fennel to go to seed and rip it up and start seeds elsewhere because fennel does not transplant well.

Another one I thought was funny was the advice to scatter a little lovage in amongst the garden beds because it has some kind of insect repelling qualities. Now, I have lovage I also inherited, and it is not a “scattery” kind of plant. Lovage looks like what would happen if flat leaf Italian parsley mated with bamboo. It smells very strongly of celery and grows about seven feet tall. It has a mighty root and will spread and grow back every year too. So, I’m not going to take that advice, but I will mix tomatoes with my non-salted asparagus this year.