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!

midwinter

Hi!

It's hard to believe but this is about the easiest winter that we have had in a few years. We've had a lot of show since Christmas, but up until then , there was just about nothing and we're getting into a patch of clear weather that should make things a lot easier. Needless to say, our house a smidge buried right now under about three and a half feet of snow, and some of the places down in Crawford County had between four and five feet of snow just since New Years.

It's seed catalog time again, and I am looking to get back on the horse and get a good garden growing. One of the only bright spots from last year was that I had a patch that I grew melons and pumpkins that I used black plastic mulch, and the ground is actually now weed free, which will create a new vegetable garden up closer to the house. I anticipate fewer bunny problems this year, however, because of lots of cats, young energetic dogs and my dad gave me a gun that belonged to my grandmother for my birthday if all else fails. Is that too northwest PA that I got a gun for my birthday or is it the fact that is not the first time I have gotten a gun for my birthday?

Got a different job which is horrifyingly boring, but still better than my job in the call center. At least now while I am doing mindless office tasks, I don't have to actually deal with the public and I can listen to music, which just highlights how little new music I have purchased in the last few years. I went looking for some CD's to throw on my ipod. and I found out the '90's are not gone, they are still alive and well and in the bottom of my closet!

Speaking of music, I caught a few songs from the "War of the Worlds -- Live!" on PBS the other night. I'm a borderline PBS hater anyway, mostly because the PBS station in Erie sucks, and now I'm totally against it. People are so passionate about PBS, both pro and con, and it's such a political football, and people write letters and give money and campaign and fight for PBS, and what do we get: The prog rock extravaganza "War of the Worlds -- Live!" I mean, who is the target market for this? People who think that Transiberian Orchestra was a little too modern but that Lawrence Welk could be edgier? I'm thinking of flying a decent antenna and giving up on American TV altogether. Except for Glee.

A New Craft: Ukrainian Easter Eggs

Hello!

As has been the usual case the past month or two, the weather is quite awful. We had sixty degree temperatures Monday and I had to work, of course. Luckily, the basement did not flood because of rapid melting. You know it’s wet when you live at the very top of a hill and your basement floods. This time the garage flooded. Twice. And there was another ice storm. Now, we’re having high winds and snow with ice all over everything. The township truck actually came through really dumping cinder. Usually, they don't put a lot down, but today they're not fooling around.

We did manage to get one tree cut on Sunday and spent a couple of days moving wood into the basement to dry. We haven’t been able to switch over from the propane furnace, however, but looking at the weather for the next week or so, it looks like we’ll have plenty of opportunity to get one going. Unfortunately, my almanac/calendar does not have any fair weather posted until the last week of the month. March did come in like a lamb, though, white and fluffy with the worst snow and deepest drifts so far this year!

When things are horrible outside, though, there’s nothing like starting a new craft. I wanted originally to try and sew some cute clothes for my nieces for spring, but my good sewing scissors are currently misplaced. So I’m also not able to work on the quilt I promised my sister ages ago, as well. I suppose I could do more of the actual quilting on my own quilt that has been held up for a while. You don’t need sharp scissors to cut thread, but I was looking for something fun to do, and that quilt has been really boring for me!.

Luckily, I was at my grandmother’s house the other day, and I got to looking at her collection of pysanky. Yes, I am Ukrainian. And Irish. It’s why I’m always right. My grandmother doesn’t really do eggs anymore, but she always made nice ones the whole time I was growing up, and one of my aunts does them, and she’s a real artist. Everyone in the family has at least played around with making them, but I decided that I would try a new craft this week and actually work on getting good at making Ukrainian Easter eggs.

Luckily, I dont’ have to start from scratch, and I was able to borrow everything from the stylus to the dyes from my grandmother. She has a plug-in stylus which is really nice because you don’t have to stop and fire it. She also has a great book called “Eggs Beautiful” by three Ukrainian ladies and published by the Ukrainian gift shop in Minneapolis. It has step-by step instructions for making eggs which are done kind of like batik with melted beeswax that comes out of a little “pen”. There are wonderful diagrams of each step and what order to put them in the dye.

Just because these little mysteries are clarified does not solve every problem. The eggs are curved, and you have to work hard to make even lines and keep things neat. A lit of it is feel and guessing. You need to kind of brush your finger over the surface of the egg to make sure you have the dye in the right place, and once you mess up, you can’t really “erase” or go over it.

So, I followed the directions for the first egg, and the picture is of my egg, on the right and one of my aunt’s eggs on the left. Someday, I hope to have that steady a hand. I have been practicing, and trying a few different styles of the easier step-by-step eggs, but I haven’t bothered finishing any of them since they were just practice.

A few things it is nice to know about making Ukrainian Easter Eggs:

1. Dyes: Obviously dark black is not a typical egg dye color. I made up a few dye colors with special powdered dyes I got from my grandmother who must have mailed away for them or gotten them at a Ukrainian store. I guess she went to one last year when she was in Chicago. With the internet, finding all of these things is a lot easier than it used to be! Some of my dyes are regular old liquid food coloring, though. I followed the instructions to make concentrated egg dyes right on the box, and they work quite well, even if the really dark colors are not available. Put dyes in old pint jars and put the lids on. You can save the dyes and use them for many many dozen eggs before you need to replace them.

2. Stylus: this is the little pen that puts the wax on the eggs. Again, the best place t find one would be a Ukrainian store. Though I have seen the ones you heat with a candle just at regular craft stores before.

3. The wax: the wax has to be beeswax. I get beeswax usually directly from “bee people.” I suppose they have beeswax in craft stores, too. Before quilting thread was polyester coated, you used to have to run it through beeswax to get it slippery enough to pull through layers of batting and cloth, so they still sell small lumps of it in the sewing stores, too. I use it for waxing up the drive cord on my spinning wheel to keep it from sliding on the whorls. Apparently, the high melting temperature of beeswax is just right for making eggs (or anything else with resist dying) because the warmth of your hand won’t melt the wax once it’s on the eggs and make smudges!

4. Eggs: You do not need to drill a hole in the egg and “blow it out.” I’m not sure where the idea came from, but it’s not a good idea. You need to have something in the egg while you’re working on it or the shell will crack. A long time ago, I remember my grandfather getting it into his bean that he would drill a hole in the end of a finished egg and blow it out like people say to do. To get the insides out of the egg, you need to drill to holes in your beautiful finished egg, and “blowing it out” is hard. Don’t do it! All you have to do is wait, and the insides of the egg will go away on their own. If you’re afraid of cracking the egg and having it smell rotten, that is good motivation to not handle the eggs in the first place.

5. Finishing the eggs. “Eggs Beautiful” recommends dipping the eggs in varnish. I’m not sure that we have had good results with that. It doesn’t stop the eggs from drying out, but it does add to the steps you need to do it and also gives you the risk of having discoloration because of the finish. Maybe some of the newer water based polyurethanes are okay for this, but we have never put coating or finish on the eggs.

Now, I wanted to try more eggs, but I already used up all the eggs in the carton! Some of them I dyed and other I just drew on with pencil and others I just drew on with the wax to practice. To get rid of the eggs (and some milk I’ve had since Sunday without opening) I decided to make pumpkin pie. It was kind of fun to crack the squiggled and dyed expirimental eggs into the bowl!

In northwest PA and western New York State, we get Lakeshore Pumpkin which is really great, really deep orange fresh smelling pumpkin that is packaged in Buffalo with no preservatives or anything like that in it. Every fall, giant displays of Lakeshore Pumpkin are set out in the grocery stores. I usually buy about five or six cans of it, and one can makes two pies. It gets harder to find as the winter goes on and almost impossible in summer.

Now, on the cans of the pumpkin is this recipe, so even if you can’t get that kind of pumpkin, it’s still the best recipe:

Lakeshore Pumpkin Pie Recipe

for two 9 inch pies

Make a hot oven: 400 degrees.

Put the crust in the pies -- don’t bake before filling!

Mix together:

4 eggs
1 can pumpkin (29 oz/822 gram)
1 1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. allspice
2 cups milk

Bake for 45-50 minutes. It’s done when you can stick a knife in halfway between the center and the crust and the knife comes out clean.

Okay. It usually takes me closer to an hour to get them all the way baked, but that’s just me! Also, I’ve been substituting raw sugar for white sugar, and it’s been delicious. But I don’t recommend doing it unless you can buy raw sugar in bulk or it will be too expensive. And to make it really good, it has to be whole milk. Never bake with skim or two per cent. Your baking needs fat to stand up and stick together. Needless to say, you don't use premade pie crust in my family. My sister did it once, and was badly teased by about three generations worth of pie makers. She is now an expert pie crust baker and her pies are hits in both her workplace and her husband's. I know a lot of people like the really creamy, custardy pies with condensed milk and all that, but this is just the best pumpkin pie ever. Really.

Seed Saving, Part 2

Hello!

Now that the holidays are mostly over, we're getting into that long stretch of winter. I was the happy recipient of some old peanut butter yesterday. We cleaned out the cupboards at my grandmother's house and got old nuts, fruit, seeds, and some lard, so I think I have all the stuff I need to make suet cakes again. As if I didn't have enough things to feed already, yesterday I took the deer block my mom gave me for Christmas down into the field below the house. It weighed 25 pounds, and I should have put it in my packback, because today my arms are sore from carrying it. I'll need to go and peek in a few days to see if anything has found it. I saw a wild turkey the other day, and I know there are still deer down there.

On Christmas morning, we saw about an eight or nine point buck the size of a cow just a couple miles from the house, and there are lots of tracks out back. Those hunters are slacking! I like the new combined deer season because the hunting season gets over and done with sooner and I don't worry so much about going out in the woods, but it seems like fewer people are hunting and fewer people are getting deer. I know a lot of people think hunting is cruel, but I'd much rather see a deer on someone's table than have to wrestle the dogs off deer carcass all winter long if when one dies out back. And I really, really am in favor of anything that get people up and out of their houses doing something active and real. Espcially if it involves making people appreciate the outdoors and also participate in getting their own food.

People always think it's a little funny that the first day of deer season in Pennsylvania is like a holiday. There is no school, and I made the mistake this year of thinking the farm co-op would be open on the first day of deer! I also remember that in sixth grade, as part of science class everyone at my elementary school took the hunters' safety course. If you think about it, it was a good idea because to hunt at that age, you needed the course, and, also a little firearms safety never hurt anyone. It wasn't like they actually did in class demonstrations.

For me, this is a really exciting time of year. The seed catalogs are coming! I lived in an apartment for the first ten years of my adult life, and some times it seemed like I would never get out. I kept a few houseplants and a little herb planter on the porch, but I always loved gardens. When I was a kid and we lived in a house with a big yard, my mom always grew flowers, and we had a lots of different gardens. Shade gardens, annuals, perennials, bulbs. We usually didn't bother with vegetable gardens. Though we did have a really nice old fashioned berry patch with gooseberries, currants, and rhubarb. The college where I went had a lot of amazing gardens which were tended by a retired English professor who showed up in lots of different classes to talk about the art of garden design. I was always very interested, as I had grown up in a gardening family, but I never had the opportunity to do any gardening for a long, long time after I was out of school.

When we moved to our place out of town, it was in the middle of summer and too late to plant anything. There were a lot of established herb patches, asparagus, some raspberries and currants, and a blackberry patch that bore really well. I was able to make a lot of blackberry jam that year, but that was about it. It took a lot of work just to "reclaim" some of the gardens that year, and the following spring, which is unbelievably three years ago this coming spring, I started a new strawberry patch, and planted a vegetable garden for the first time in the established garden up near the house.

This year, at the end of the season, I kind of dived head first into saving seeds from my heirloom varieties. I've been reading a little about it since I actually collected my seeds, and I'm kind of worried about cross pollination.

In the first place, the book that I was using as a guide just said, don't allow it, and didn't say why and also just had a section of cross pollination and didn't really mention it again except in a chart that said what would cross pollinate. If anyone is interested, the book is Seed Sowing and Saving by Carole B. Turner, and it's a really good book. It has a lot of information about how to handle seeds like cold treatment and how to test for germination and things like that. It even says how to make your own hybrids by hand pollination and has a great list of open pollinated seeds and sources.

To find out more about cross pollination and whether or not I should worry about the seeds I collected at the end of the season, I turned to a different book: Heirloom Country Gardens by Sarah Wolfgang Heffner. Now, Sarah explains cross pollination a little better, and also includes in a section on each type of vegetable how to avoid it. This is very useful, as there are really big differences between how different plants need to be treated if you are trying to save a particular variety for seed. Different varieties of tomatoes for instance, need to be kept only about twenty feet apart, and they probably will be safe from cross pollination. Peas need to be kept only five to ten feet apart. There are four varieties of squash, and within those varieties, they will cross pollinate, but not without. Unfortunately, just about every kind of pumpkin or squash or gourd that is common is Curcurbita pepo, meaning seemingly very different things like pumpkins, summer squash, and gourds will all cross pollinate, and the seeds are no longer pure. Sarah Wolfgang Heffner, who is not dramatic about other things, suggests that if you are growing squash specifically to propagate a particular seed variety, plant only one a year to ensure the seed remains pure.

There are some kind of fun facts in the Heirloom Country Gardens book, too. Carrots and onions are biennial seeders, meaning they will only bloom and make seed the second year. They need to be dug up in fall and replanted in spring, and if you are saving onions for seed, you can only plant one kind or they will definitely cross polllinate. And the onion has to be a mile away from other varieties to absolutely ensure seed purity! Also, though peppers really only need about five feet apart between varieties, if a bell pepper does cross pollinate with a hot pepper, the hot taste is dominant, so you can end up with hot bell peppers.

Now, I was not careful last year about keeping my bean plants away from each other, but even Mrs.-Super-Cautious Carole B. Turner says bean plants only need limited isolation. I saved Kentucky Wonder bush bean seeds and green and yellow French beans. The Kentucky Wonders are first year, but the French beans were grown from seeds I saved two summers ago. I might have some concerns for my tomatoes, which were planted even more freely than I usually do things, and my bell peppers were definitely planted really close to my salsa peppers. And I'm still looking for a good answer on my watermelons. I have a lot of seed from sun, moon, and stars watermelons which I planted mixed in with some funny French melons which were not even in the same species or genus. Most books just say "melon", so I don't know what is going to grow, if anything, if I throw those melon seeds in the ground.

In the middle of rounding up my million and a half seed catalogs -- I'm a heavy user, all the seed companies want me! -- I've been getting ready to test the seeds I did save to see what I need to order and what I can try and grow from saved seed. Seed testing is kind of fun, because it is almost like that wonderful time just thirteen short weeks from now. That would be eight weeks before the predicted last frost when seed starting starts!

Testing seeds is a pretty simple process, and like anything to do with gardening, labeling and documentation makes things even easier. First, pick out the seed and count out a good number of them. I usually go between fifteen and twenty, but I'm testing ground cherry seeds this week, and they are tiny and slow germinators so I picked out fifty of those. I use tin foil cookie sheets as a work surface, but real cookie sheets, cake pans or even a plate or a dish will do, but it should be waterproof. Get a paper napkin or paper towel and lay the seeds out neatly. You can draw grids on the towel and count the grids and just put one seed per space if you don't want to count seeds, but I like counting seeds. Make sure you label what it is you are testing and you should really put the date on, also. Cover the seeds with another layer of paper towel and mist with water from a squirt bottle. Cover the seeds with a sheet of plastic wrap and place them in a warm, light area. I live in Northwestern PA, and there is no warm, light area, at least not until the middle of May or so, so I use a shoplight with a grow lamp that I just clamp into place wherever, a few feet above the trays of seeds I'm testing.

Keep up with this set up fir about three weeks and note the number of seeds that germinate. At the end of the period, you need to do a little math, but it's okay! Devide the number of seeds that actually did something by the number of seeds that were tested. This will give you a percentage. If fifty per cent or more grew, you are in good shape. If anywhere from fifty to twenty five per cent germinated, you might want to sow a little thicker than you normally would to make up for the number of seeds that will not germinate. If fewer than twenty five per cent of the seeds germinated, you should probably toss those out and start over with purchased seed.

Some seeds need special treatment before they will germinate. Most of the time, that means they need to be exposed to cold for a period of time. Generally, these are flower or herb seeds that if they were growing in the wild, they would just get dropped on the ground. If the seeds germinated directly, they would be used up before winter. Since I like to touch on "useful" as opposed to "pretty" plants, I'll just mention that bee balm and echinecea both need to be chilled before they will germinate. To do this, you can package up the seeds and actually bury them in a trench for the winter, or refrigerate them for a few weeks. You can cold treat (also called "stratification") right when you plant by getting the seeds into flats and getting the planting medium nice and damp. Cover this with plastic and refrigerate the whole thing. In the interests of not filling the entire refrigerator with seeds flats, a basement window or stairway blocked off from the heat will do the trick, and I stratified polygonum on a shelf in the garage for a month or so in the spring, and that worked very well.

I saved quite a few alpine strawberry seeds which need to be kept in the freezer for about four to six weeks before they will grow. The Polygonum -- also called "Prince's Feather" or "Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate" -- is just a tall, strange flower that looks neat planted next to the snake rail fence in a little area which is starting to become the tall, strange plant garden, apparently. I mention it here because it needs both scarfied and stratified. That means, the seed coating needs to be sanded (with sandpaper) before it gets planted and chilled. Think of the seed getting eaten by a bird in the fall, passing through the bird, and sitting somewhere chilly all winter.

Right now, I have two trays of seeds getting tested. One variety of beans, three tomatoes, the watermelons, ground cherry, bell peppers, and broom corn. I'm also making plans to use my lower garden patch at the growing space for things I want to save for seed. Between seed saving and regular crop rotation and my congenital inability to measure anything in a straight line, my garden planning this year is looking pretty complicated. Luckily, I expanded my lower garden patch this year and really tried to work the soil a lot with compost and green manure before I even tried to grow anything in the new areas. Luckily, all I need to do for more space is grab my shovel and get working!

And one more thing! All these fancy and expensive books that I leaf through a grab one or two pieces of information out of and never really have to look at again? I'm getting them out of the public library. I just read a great news report that young adults ages 18 through 30 are the heaviest libary users. For gardeners, there is no better resource, since there are usually incredible tons of garden books in every public library. Lots of people give memorial donations to libraries, and they tend to ask for books that the people they are commemorating would like. At my local libary, there is an amazing collection of books on weaving and fiber all in memory of one person. There are the garden books, of course. The library where I used to work was like a fantastic repository for all things fish, to the point where if I had another request for a memorial book about fishing, I had a hard time finding one the library didn't have already. I had to laugh, because when I went to the library I use all the time now to pick up books on fish over the summer, I didn't find very many, and I had just kind of grown to think that all libraries had a whole shelf of books dedicated to fishing.

I digress! The point being, the public library is a fantastic resource. Even just the website for the public library is a great source or really good information. And you get free access to a lot of things that you would never expect. I'm currently using Rosetta Stone to learn Chinese. For free! At home on my own computer! There are also databases on periodicals, geneology, marketing, car repair, full texts of books from novels to really cruchy scholarly things. Even downloadable audiobooks. And if your local library doesn't have it, they will get it for you! They are remarkable people with limitless resources! Get your library card and go and learn something, already!