WetKnee Books: Recent Episodes
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What if the plastic-milk-jug method of winter sowing isn’t the only way—or even the best way—to get a jump start on the garden year? While other gardeners were cutting up containers and buying potting soil, I tried out a simpler, cheaper approach that might actually work better….
Container winter sowing: Why I was skepticalIf you’ve been hanging out in gardening spaces online in the last few years, you’ve probably seen people glowing about winter sowing. Basically, the principle is that you start seeds outside far earlier than the soil temperature suggests is smart, counting on sprouting happening at the best time for the plants in question.
Most folks winter sow in plastic containers like milk jugs, cut in half so you can use the bottom as a pot filled with store-bought potting soil and the top as a mini greenhouse. I wasn’t interested in that method because of the cost of the soil and the fiddly-ness of the plastic containers. Plus, anything set on top of the earth is going to be chillier than the ground itself for most of the winter, which is a major downside when cold-weather gardening.
On the other hand…
Direct ground winter sowing: My experiment…I’ve been noticing how both kale and lettuce seeds that fall into my wood-chip-mulched aisles due to seed-saving efforts often come up better and faster in early spring than those I start in garden beds after the ground reaches each vegetable’s minimum germination temperature. What if, I wondered, I experimented with my own version of winter sowing by planting lettuce and kale seeds in my usual row-cover-fabric-protected caterpillar tunnels, tweaking my seed starting approach by sowing far earlier than I previously would have risked?
To cut a long story short, I did exactly that on January 30 in our zone 6b garden. We were enjoying a short break from a very cold winter in which multiple weeks have stayed below freezing in the afternoons then dropped into the teens through single-digit negatives (Fahrenheit) at night. The ground was still frozen solid below the top quarter inch, but I scratched seeds into that small thawed area. After a four-day break with more normal temperatures (high of 40!), the cold returned and I forgot all about my experiment.
Early seed starting success!Another thaw hit us at the beginning of this week and I opened up the caterpillar tunnels…to find both kale and lettuce seedlings pushing up through the soil!
The seedlings did seem to be doing better where there was more debris on the ground, suggesting that a very light mulch might improve winter-sowing success. But I’m highly impressed to see anything at all after three and a half weeks with such cold temperatures.
What other crops would I recommend winter sowing in this manner? Not peas — they tend to rot in the ground (or get eaten by hungry critters) if you don’t get them up and running fast. And not plants like broccoli, tomatoes, and peppers that need to be raised as inside sets if you want to time the season correctly. But maybe parsley and carrots? I wonder if even fickle spinach and swiss chard might sprout better using this technique?
No-cost winter seed startingThis method of winter sowing has a couple of benefits over the more mainstream version. Namely, I didn’t have to buy potting soil or transplant the seedlings after they sprouted.
Meanwhile, my version maintains the winter-sowing advantages of getting a jump on the growing season without requiring the use of grow lights. That’s a definite plus when I have other types of seedlings using up all of my indoor space.
I’ll be expanding my winter sowing experiments next season and updating with more results. Until then, happy growing!
The post New winter sowing method without the fuss first appeared on WetKnee Books.
When Mark and I moved to Ohio, I was excited to continue the strawberry plants I’d started growing in Virginia. Everything was going great until the chipmunks came along and ate my entire crop. After trying everything, I was ready to throw in the towel. Then Mark came along and said, “Anna. No. We’re not giving up on strawberries. I can fix this!”.
His solution was an ingenious critter-proof strawberry bed, outlined in full detail in my new book, Building a Better Garden: DIY Gardening Projects. Essentially a raised bed with a hinged cover, it works great not only for strawberries but also for melons and any other short plants critters like to nibble on. To build your own:
- Construct two rectangular frames out of treated decking boards, which will serve as the base and the cover for your bed.
- Under your bottom frame, attach a layer of hardware cloth. This prevents chipmunks from digging into your plants from underneath.
- Fill up your bottom frame with soil.
- Use two door hinges to attach your rectangular frames together.
- Attach a plastic mesh to the top of your upper frame using exterior screws and small washers. The mesh should have holes large enough to let in water, light, and pollinators but small enough to keep critters out.
- Plant your strawberries and enjoy your delicious, chipmunk-free harvests!
For more information on the critter-proof strawberry bed, as well as five other great projects to keep out pests and grow a bountiful organic garden, check out Building a Better Garden: DIY Gardening Projects, available as an ebook and in print. Plus, you can check out the video course for more hands-on construction details if you prefer that format over reading. Enjoy!
The post How to Build a Critter-Proof DIY Hinged Strawberry Bed first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Have you ever walked through a forest in autumn and wondered if those acorns crunching underfoot could be turned into something delicious? With a bit of know-how, these wild treasures can be transformed into versatile acorn flour for pancakes, tortes, and more!
I attended an excellent workshop yesterday at our local library on that very topic and could tell that Austin Cannon was speaking from personal experience. I thought you might enjoy seeing and reading the highlights.
Step 1: Gather acornsLeft: The white oak group has rounded lobes. Right: The red oak group has pointed lobes.While you can pick up acorns in the woods, Austin instead recommended looking for park situations where lawns are maintained below the trees. That makes it easy to gather the nuts (and also helps you compete with squirrels).
You’ll want to identify what type(s) of oaks you’re gathering so you can separate your haul. Species in the white oak group have rounded lobes — Chestnut Oaks are a great example with big acorns. Species in the red oak group have pointy-tipped lobes and include Red, Black, Scarlet, and Pin Oaks, among others.
White-oak-group acorns need to be processed or frozen immediately since they’ll begin to sprout in a matter of days. Red-oak-group acorns can be checked over (see the next section), dried, then stored in a rodent-proof location like a metal trashcan at room temperature for up to four years.
Step 2: Assess the quality of your acornsBad acorns to be discarded. Clockwise from upper left: Cracked acorns won’t store well (but might be fine if frozen); Insect burrow can be cut out; Weevil hole in shell means this nut definitely shouldn’t be stored at room temperature or the infestation will spread; Moldy acorn should not be eaten.The next step is to take a look at your acorns and toss any that are no good. Start with a float test — dump your harvest into a bucket of water, then discard any acorns that float to the top immediately since they have likely been infested by insects. One caveat, though: droughts can make perfectly good acorns float. So if most of your harvest rises to the top, it’s worth cutting a few open (see the next section) to make sure you’re not throwing out perfectly good nuts.
Another test is the cap test. If the cute little acorn cap is still affixed to the top of your nut, toss that acorn out. These are generally nuts that have been aborted by the tree and are not fully formed.
Once you start shelling the acorns (next step!) you might want to refer back to the collage above since I’ve labelled a fw other problematic signs to look out for.
Step 3: Shelling acorns safelyFreshly frozen Chestnut Oak acorn above. Dried and stored-at-room-temperature Black Oak acorn below.When you’re ready to start the multi-week process of turning acorns into flour, take some of your red-oak-group acorns out of storage or partially defrost your white-oak-group acorns by letting them sit on the counter for a few hours. Then you can decide how you’ll get the shell off.
A hammer works on acorns just like it does on walnuts. However, Austin prefers a quieter method: cutting each acorn in half longwise with pruning shears.
Caution: this can be dangerous! To save your fingers, put the acorn into the shears then remove your fingers before squeezing the handle.
Either way, you’ll have to peel off the shell next. This is really simple with red-oak-group acorns since they’ve been dried for storage and often fall right out. With white-oak-group acorns, you can use a nut pick, a corkscrew, a knife, or even your fingers to separate the meat from the husk.
One of our workshop participants bought his kindergarten-age daughter and she did a pretty good job prying out nut meats. So apparently child labor works too.
Step 4: Grinding acorns into mealThe next step is the easiest (as long as you own a blender). Put your shelled acorn halves into the blender, add water to a bit above them, then blend.
The goal is to create something with a smoothie consistency. Don’t blend too fine or leaching (the next step) will be problematic. You’re going for a fine meal rather than a flour. This step should only take a minute or so.
Now pour your blended-up acorns into a canning jar or other container. Leave enough room to add about twice as much water as acorn slurry. You’ve already begun:
Step 5: Leaching out tanninsRight: Fresh acorn slurry and water is tan-colored. Left: Older acorn slurry and water darkens as it oxidizes. Also, note the pale layer at the bottom — this slurry was ground too fine and created an impermeable sludge that isn’t leaching properly.The reason we’re not all nibbling on acorn muffins daily is because the nuts are full of chemicals that really mess us up, notably tannic acids and phytic acids. Both taste bitter, which is our taste buds’ warning that we shouldn’t ingest them. Luckily, all it takes is water and time to take these problematic chemicals out.
The easiest (but also slowest) leaching method is to let the acorn slurry sit in water for roughly two weeks (white oak group) or three weeks (red oak group). You need to change the water at least twice daily during this period by carefully pouring off the liquid on top then refreshing it. During that time, tannic and phytic acids will naturally seep into the water and be discarded.
You’ll know your acorn mush is done when it no longer tastes bitter. As I mentioned, this takes a while! You can speed the process up by having a higher proportion of water to acorn or by changing the water more than twice a day. Alternatively, you can speed up the process using wood-ash lye or heat, but I’ll let you read up on those alternative methods elsewhere.
Step 6: Storing and cooking with acorn flourOnce your acorn flour is no longer bitter, it’s time to strain more of the water out by pouring the acorn mush into a cloth bag and squeezing. Then you can either use the mush right away, freeze it wet, or spread it on a cookie sheet to dry before storing at room temperature. (This last method is best for baking that requires good measurements.)
We didn’t, unfortunately, get to taste any of the leached acorn goodness at the workshop I attended, so I can’t comment on that part of the process. Overall, though, turning acorns into food looked less active-time-consuming than I’d expected, although the two-to-three-week wait definitely means that if you start today you can’t have acorn pancakes for Thanksgiving!
The post How to turn wild acorns into edible flour first appeared on WetKnee Books.
We’ve been quiet over here on the blog because all of our new content at the moment is showing up in emails instead.
These monthly newsletters are full of timely tips, links to free books, and personal this-and-that. They’re also free, of course. I hope you’ll consider signing up and joining the club!
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Our deck planter box grape vine is on its third year of growth.
It looks like there might be grapes this year.
We went with a Reliance seedless grape mainly because it can usually fruit without the use of chemicals.
The post Grapes without chemicals first appeared on WetKnee Books.
I’m thrilled to announce that our incubation handbook is now in print! A very skilled intern helped buff up the text over the winter and the result is ready to make your next hatch a major success.
(The ebook is a bit spiffier also, with the same information but more polish and a fancier cover and title.)
Here are some of the reviews of the first edition if you need more incentive to check it out:
“I have had problems with incubating chicks, getting low to no hatch, and high hatch mortality. All of the info in this book makes great sense! This helped me a lot to fix ALL of my hatch problems.” — sunnyweller
“I especially found the “helping chicks hatch” section very helpful. Followed the instructions and saved two chicks!” — Keaokun
“My first attempt at incubating was a dismal failure. I only hatched 6 of 19 eggs. Two of those had facial and beak deformities. This little ebook was so helpful and I was able to pinpoint – many – things I had done wrong.” — V. Schafer
“Awesome book, well written. Not too basic nor too much extraneous detail.” — chem girl
I’m hoping to enjoy another round of intern magic this summer, so I’d love to hear which ebook-only title you’d most like to have available in print. Or perhaps you’d prefer us to turn our newest video course into an ebook and paperback? Please comment and let me know what you want!
The post Incubation handbook now in print! first appeared on WetKnee Books.
We’ve written in the past about our mushroom experiments, which mostly centered around using plug spawn in logs. So I was thrilled when our local library offered an opportunity to try something a little different — sawdust spawn.
(Yes, we do have the best library around. Yes, they did let us take home an inoculated shiitake log of our very own.)
Pros and cons of sawdust spawnAs best I can tell, the only real downside of using sawdust spawn is that you need to buy an inoculation tool. At $45 per tool, that means sawdust spawn makes the most sense for folks who intend to inoculate at least 36 logs (although you don’t have to do them all at once, of course). My math in today’s dollars:
- Sawdust spawn: about $1 per log in spawn cost
- Plug spawn: about $2.25 per log in spawn cost
In addition to long-term price savings, other benefits of using sawdust spawn include:
- Your logs will produce mushrooms faster (in 5 to 12 months instead of 9 to 18 months).
- I actually found inoculation with the sawdust tool gentler on my wrists (no hammering!).
Other inoculation innovationsOther than the inoculation tool, using sawdust spawn is pretty much the same as using plug spawn. But I thought you might enjoy seeing our teachers’ entire process since it is definitely better than ours!
First the infrastructure: They built tables with little wooden cradles at intervals to hold the logs in place. That means the only time you really need a second set of hands is when drilling the holes.
Also note the measuring stick with the spacing information on it. No laborious hand-measuring each log!
Another innovation is the use of an angle grinder rather than a drill gun. Mark shared a video in which you can see how much faster this is than what we’d done in the past.
(Do be careful though. I could see someone drilling through their hand with this setup.)
After the holes are drilled, it’s time to insert the spawn. Sawdust spawn comes in a block like the one shown above. You break it up with your hands then scoop some of the loose sawdust out into an empty yogurt container (or something similar).
Next, bang the inoculation tool into the container a few times to fill it with spawn. Place the tool over the hole and depress the button at the top to insert spawn. The goal is for the spawn to fill the hole up to about the bark level.
After that, all you need to do is wax over each spawn-filled hole. In the past, we’ve used beeswax from local hives, but apparently any food-safe wax works. Our teachers were using paraffin, melted then daubed on with cute little brushes. But they mentioned that there’s a new kind of wax, primarily used with plug spawn, that you can wipe on cold with your finger.
After that, it’s the usual waiting game (with the side note that, since we now live in an area with less extreme precipitation than we used to be located, we need to remember to water our log if we don’t get at least an inch of rain per week).
We haven’t had productive mushroom logs since moving to Ohio, but remembering how fun and easy inoculation was put the process back on my radar. Maybe next year we’ll push wildcrafting mushrooms onto the back burner and inoculate more logs.
About our teachersI want to end with a huge thank you to Soulshine Acres for sharing their expertise with us. They’re a frequent vendor at the Athens, Ohio, farmer’s market if you want to check some of their mushrooms out. Or just follow them on instagram using the link above to learn about their forest farm, full of over 400 mushroom logs.
The post Inoculating mushroom logs with sawdust spawn first appeared on WetKnee Books.
https://wetknee.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/NewShitakeTool.mp4Drilling holes in mushroom logs just got a lot easier and faster with this new shitake drill bit.
You will also need the angle grinder drill chuck adapter.
More details from a shitake log workshop will be ready for next week.
The post Shitake log inoculation video first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Back in Virginia, March was a prime spring-planting month. Since moving to Ohio, it’s usually been an impatient-waiting month instead.
Not this year!
A warm winter means my test beds of early lettuce and peas germinated well, so I soon seeded more.
Meanwhile, in proof of the winter’s extreme mildness, we’re starting to get tiny side heads on overwintering broccoli (protected by row-cover fabric over caterpillar tunnels).
To celebrate, rather than potting up this year’s broccoli seedlings (who are already slightly stunted from outgrowing their soil), I set out half on Monday. That’s a couple of weeks earlier than is recommended for our area, but the ten-day forecast looks good.
Overwintering vegetables from last year (if any survive) are always the first edibles coming out of the garden, and this year we don’t just have the broccoli pictured earlier. Arugula started feeding us even earlier despite a total lack of winter protection for the plants. They started bolting (sending up flower heads) weeks ago. I quickly snipped the bounty, steamed it slightly, then sauteed the steamed flower heads in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Yum! Those have been good for a meal or two per week for most of March, although they’re starting to come to their end now.
Luckily, kale looks like it will fill the upcoming gap, even though a droughty summer last year meant my plants went into winter on the small side. Hopefully by the time the arugula gets away from me, we’ll have another dependable source of greens to carry us through until the spring lettuce comes in.
Of course, weeds start growing just as soon as vegetables do. The garden beds are usually pretty easy to manage at this time of year — half an hour of yanking fends off long-term problems in our entire plot.
Aisles can be more tricky, but I’ve saved up cardboard all winter to hit the problematic areas. Purple dead nettle and chickweed are easy to yank, while grasses or ground ivy are better off kill mulched. I tend to hit the areas right around the beds I’m using just before planting so weeds can’t encroach on my seedlings. (I’m bound to run out of cardboard before I solve all my problems, which is why they keep coming back.)
March is also the time to count your tree fruits before they hatch. We’re finally back in that mind game, having set out a nectarine a year ago. My produce count for that tree is simple: zero. Not because it bloomed too early (although it likely did) but because I’ll be picking off any young fruits to ensure the tree puts more energy into establishing its roots.
And that’s it for our late March garden. How does yours look?
The post March in the garden first appeared on WetKnee Books.
We needed some more fruit storage when our old hanging basket broke.
These metal baskets can be mounted on the edge of a kitchen counter or on a flat wall.
The post Fruit storage first appeared on WetKnee Books.
When I saw the above teaser of a library program, I was instantly hooked by the reference to pigeon compost. And the photo Nandini Stockton shared of her manure piles was definitely intriguing. But are the feed costs and work worth the output?
To answer that question, I had to listen to the entire (wonderful presentation), the cream of which I’m including below.
Eating pigeon eggsIn addition to manure, pigeons on the homestead are a source of what Nandini referred to as a superfood. Despite their diminutive size, she claimed each pigeon egg contains as many calories as a chicken egg. I couldn’t fact-check this easily on the internet, but did find an article mentioning pigeon eggs’ protein levels, which are higher ounce-per-ounce than chicken eggs.
The downside of raising pigeons for eggs is volume, and not just volume of individual eggs either. Unlike chickens, you can’t keep ten female pigeons with no males around and expect eggs, and they don’t lay every day either. Instead, you need a mated pair of pigeons and each pair only produces four eggs per month. No wonder pigeon eggs are considered a high-dollar delicacy!
Raising pigeons for meatThe other homestead use for pigeons is meat. Nandini didn’t talk about this much since she clearly considers her pigeons pets. But she did mention that there are specific varieties of pigeons better suited to being used as meat birds. Squabs are often killed at thirty days, right around the time they fledge.
Keeping pigeons on the homesteadSo what kind of infrastructure do you need to keep pigeons? The coop (better known as a loft) is a bit like a chicken coop and it usually has at least a small aviary attached. Wood pellets are optimal bedding and pigeons are fed a mixture of grains. They also need special waterers with reservoirs at least 3/4 of an inch deep (but which the pigeons can’t poop in, of course).
Nandini keeps her pigeons entirely cooped up from early September to mid April since, otherwise, Cooper’s Hawks chow down on her flock far too easily. Starting in April (or whenever leaves are back on the trees to provide cover), she lets her pigeons out in the mid afternoon. They fly around, forage, and bathe in basins of water she places on the lawn before returning inside for the night.
I asked whether free-flying pigeons bother her garden, and she said they didn’t. But she also noted that her loft is located on the opposite side of her yard from her vegetables. She does plant sedums for her flock closer to their loft, which likely keeps them close to home.
Are we getting pigeons?Mark says no. After sleeping on it, I decided he was right — an extra worm bin would result in just as good compost at a fraction of the hassle. But if you end up getting pigeons (or already have a flock), I hope you’ll comment and let me know what you think of them as homestead livestock!
The post Pigeons for manure, eggs, and meat first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Daffodil flowers are usually one of the first signs of Spring for us here.
The post Daffodil delight first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Peas don’t like heat, so it’s a good idea to plant them as early as possible. But if you plant too early, you’ll end up with only a couple of survivors spread across a large trellis, wasting precious garden space. What’s the solution?
Early-planted peas can do well, but you need to stack the deck for success. First, soak your pea seeds inside for at least four hours, during which time they’ll plump up and wake up. You can actually keep them inside until they sprout, but you’ll want to pour off the water after twelve hours or so and cover the seeds with a humidity dome if you go that route. Sprouted peas also need to be handled more carefully to prevent the tender new roots from breaking, so I usually just do the four-hour-plumping-up soak.
Next, out in the garden, ignore the instructions that pea seeds should be spaced one to three inches apart. Instead, drop them into a furrow in dense clumps before covering them up.
(Of course, it goes without saying that you waited until the soil was at least 35 degrees Fahrenheit, planned for rain to keep the seedlings growing fast, and didn’t plant just before an extended cold snap.)
Finally, find some way to protect your pea seedlings from critters. The same sprouts that are delicious on our table are also a favorite of rabbits and other garden invaders. We use caterpillar tunnels over our spring pea beds, keeping the enclosure in place until the plants are tall enough to need a trellis.
After all that, it’s time to wait and hope. Fingers crossed for a copious, early crop!
The post Tips for early spring peas first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Industrial, rotating brushes are the latest trend in ultra pampering your favorite cow.
It seems as if someone has re-purposed some drive thru car wash technology to scratch an itch.
Could this increased level of stimulation help to make more and better tasting milk?
The post Spinning brush scratcher first appeared on WetKnee Books.
(Short answer — probably not.)
But who wants a short answer when you can read an Appalachian anecdote?
Where I grew up, the rule of thumb was to plant lettuce on Groundhog’s Day and peas on Valentine’s Day. Which makes very little scientific sense (even if you ignore the fact that I now live in a different USDA hardiness zone).
After all, what early spring crops are looking for is moist soil that’s not too cold. And February weather is so variable that a date perfect on some years is bound to be terrible on others.
So, yes, I definitely recommend you pull out a soil thermometer rather than planting by the calendar. But there’s also a fun alternative (at least for lettuce).
Last year, I meant to collect seeds from my lettuce bed, so I let the plants bolt and bloom. Unfortunately, it rained then stayed wet while the seeds were maturing. Rather than fighting the damp, I shrugged and figured I’d order my lettuce seeds next time around.
But when I went out to take a look at the spot at the end of January, there were already tiny lettuce seedlings poking up out of the earth! A soil thermometer would have given me data on whether the soil was warm enough right at that moment, but those overwintering seeds assure me that the average had been at least 35 degrees Fahrenheit for long enough to tempt overwintering lettuce to sprout.
Peas need about five more degrees of warmth than lettuce, so while I could plant some now I’m going to wait a little longer. (Pea seeds are also very tasty to critters, so unlike lettuce they’re not a good choice for wintersowing.) To soothe my itchy green thumb and commemorate Valentine’s Day, I’ll start a flat of broccoli inside instead.
The post Should I plant peas on Valentine’s Day? first appeared on WetKnee Books.
In 2012, Mark and I invested in two solar flashlights for camping and power outages. They lasted an amazingly long time, but eventually the batteries stopped holding a charge. Rather than crack open the plastic to try to replace the batteries, I decided to see how much a decade has improved the technology.
After poking around on Amazon for a while, I settled on the TOMETC Solar Power Bank. It had a lot of good reviews, a large battery capacity, and a large solar panel…all for under twenty bucks. Sounds like a winner, right?
Wrong! I’m guessing something about the frosting they put over the solar panel to waterproof it blocks light. Whatever the reason, two full days in the sun resulted in absolutely no change in the charge level of the battery. When I dug deeper into the reviews, it turned out I wasn’t the only one who had this problem, so it wasn’t a defective unit.
Meanwhile, the flashlight is way too bright for what I usually use it for (reading in my tent). An overpowered light drains the battery faster than it should. I estimate I got about eight hours of use out of a full charge. To cut a long story short, I sent this one back.
Next up, I decided to return to the model that served us so well for eleven years. Unfortunately, the original flashlight had been discontinued, but HybridLight has a replacement available. Their offering doesn’t look as flashy as some of the alternatives and costs $10 more than the competition. But they wisely included the option of a low-light setting so I won’t drain the battery bank too quickly while reading and their longevity track record speaks for itself.
How did the actual flashlight do in the field? I wasn’t as thrilled as I’d hoped to be. On low, I estimate I’ll get about twelve hours of use out of a full charge, far less than the fifty hours they promise but still better than the competition. Meanwhile, a day in the sun did little to top the battery up.
I’m starting to suspect that my goal — being able to set a flashlight in the sun for the day then read for a couple of hours at night using that solar energy — is a pipe dream. But perhaps I just haven’t found the right solar flashlight yet. Have you tried a different model with better results?
(For the record, I decided to keep the HybridLight flashlight. It works well charged from the wall and will presumably help us through power outages if left in the sun to trickle charge when grid electricity is available.)
The post A solar flashlight that actually works first appeared on WetKnee Books.
We got a late start on our deck grown tomatoes. A bit of a mix up on which variety this […]
The post Bite sized tomatoes first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Dear Walden Garden gods, My compost bin has been overrun with maggots and fat lizards🤢 I am sure that this […]
The post Maggots in the compost bin first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Are you swimming in summer squash like we are? While you can leave the excess on unsuspecting, non-gardeners’ porches, I’ve found […]
The post Spiralized squash marinara first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Anna and I assembled a Craftsman steel dump cart while visiting my Mom recently. The book says it takes 45 […]
The post 12 cubic feet steel dump cart choices first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Our berry enclosure has been unsuccessful at keeping out chipmunks but successful at keeping out birds. So we moved our […]
The post Propping up anti-bird netting first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Some of the problems with restoring a wheelbarrow is the damage around bolt holes which prevents the round headed bolts […]
The post Kohl Wheelbarrow update details first appeared on WetKnee Books.
It’s harvest season! Mostly, this post is just pretty pictures I couldn’t resist snapping while bringing goodies in out of […]
The post Summer harvest tips: Peppers, chanterelles, tomatoes, and beans first appeared on WetKnee Books.
The wheelbarrow repair was not as easy as it first looked. Holes in the wooden handles did not match up […]
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Fourteen years ago, Mom sent me her family recipe for Gooseberry Fool. Foolishly, I waited over a decade to give […]
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What about the Kohl lifetime warranty? Not so fast. Kohl tools have a generous lifetime warranty but Kohl products do […]
The post Kohl wheelbarrow demise first appeared on WetKnee Books.
I’m sure you’ve been waiting with baited breath to hear how various experiments panned out. Wait no longer! Results are […]
The post Garden experiment updates first appeared on WetKnee Books.
We used some green plastic mesh to add some walls to our woodshed structure. The Tenax brand of garden fence […]
The post Tenax green plastic mesh first appeared on WetKnee Books.
I usually focus on food gardening instead of ornamental gardening both on this blog and in life, but I couldn’t resist sharing some of the pointers I learned at a fascinating library talk last week. Jim McCormac, one of the authors of Gardening for Moths regaled us with a hilarious, beautifully illustrated, and inspiring presentation about why and how to attract moths to our yards. I was definitely sold!
Why moths matterJim started off by pointing out how important moths are to parts of the ecosystem many of us care about deeply. To start with, lot of those pretty birds I spend so much time photographing enjoy moth caterpillars as a large part of their diet. In fact, moths suffer about 99% mortality between the egg and the adult stage, proof that caterpillars are close to the foundation of lots of food chains. Then, as adults, moths become a favorite food for bats (who will help clear up your mosquito problems, so you definitely want them around).
Moths are also important pollinators, especially for orchids. Any time you see a flower with a long tube or nectar spur, that’s a hint that it’s pollinated by one of the long-tongued pollinators — hummingbirds, butterflies, or very likely moths.
Moth diversity is also astounding. The book covers five states and parts of three others, an area that contains a couple of hundred species of butterflies and a whopping 10,000 species of moths. And since many moths are small and/or active only at night both in adult and caterpillar forms, new species are being found frequently enough that even that huge sum is likely an underestimate.
How to encourage mothsIf you want to encourage moths in your yard (and you should if only to feed all the pretty birds!), the simplest way is to plant native species in your flower beds. Like butterflies, many moth caterpillars are host-specific, so they often turn up their noses at plants we bring in from other continents. In contrast, some of our natives are especially heavy hitters when it comes to caterpillar munching — white oaks, native grapevines, sugar maples, and redbuds are great species to start with if you want your local moth population to explode.
Like fireflies, moths get confused by lights at night, so turn off unused exterior lights to give them a wing up. Finally, leaf litter is an important habitat for moths along with lots of other native critters, so don’t rake in the fall (or at least set aside some wild areas as reservoirs for the natives).
One big warning, though: once you start paying attention to moths and their caterpillars, you’ll get sucked in by the colors and patterns. If you get hooked on lepidoptery, it is not my fault!
The post How and why to garden for moths first appeared on WetKnee Books.
What are these extremely small white particles appearing out of nowhere?
It took me almost a year to figure out some ants were making a home in a section of our styrofoam.
We don’t like toxic chemicals so I just removed the offending styrofoam and will have to replace it with some of the itchy stuff.
The post Styrofoam Ant Tunnels first appeared on WetKnee Books.
We got a good deal on our current trailer in part because the pipes had been allowed to freeze over the winter. Our first round of plumbing repairs seems to have held up great, but a new leak popped up behind the washing machine recently.
I love small spaces and Mark hates small spaces, but he’s the DIY pro while I’m a rank amateur. So he figured it was worth splurging on two SharkBite connectors to turn the project into child’s play.
This child didn’t push the new pipe into the top of the bottom connector hard enough the first time, so I got a big spray of water in my face. But a little more elbow grease did the job and, in the end, I was very proud of my accomplishment.
The post SharkBite connectors for amateur plumbers first appeared on WetKnee Books.
One challenge of our deck growing area is the shade it gets from close by structures.
The new experiment is to see what we can grow in this gutter area that escapes some of the shade.
A 10 foot section of aluminum gutter is about 15 dollars with another 15 on end caps and hardware.
The post Growing in the gutter first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Remember my disappointment in summer-planted hairy vetch? Well, that patch kept growing slowly throughout the fall and winter, then took off like a rocket this spring. I needed some mulch this week and didn’t mind the vetch bed staying in cover crops for another year, so I actually cut when only the first few blooms had appeared. Harvest was extremely simple — a lot of stalks ripped out easily by hand then I used a toothed sickle to cut through the rest.
For the first bed that was entirely vetch, I rolled my cut cover crops up into a big snowball of greenery and pushed them down the hill to the broccoli, who have been treated with worm castings but still need more nitrogen (plus mulch). The vetch covered up an area about three times as large as the original spot it had been harvested from, although we’ll see how much the greenery melts down as the stems die and dry.
Co-planting rye and vetchNext up was taking a look at a rye-and-vetch co-planting. Like the other vetch bed, this patch of garden soil needs serious improvement (thus the focus on a nitrogen-fixer like vetch). Unlike that other bed, I planted in fall instead of summer.
In this area, I wanted to determine which did better — rye planted solo or rye interplanted with vetch. So I divided the bed up into stripes, the first one vetch and rye, the next one rye only, etc. The idea is to make sure any difference I saw between plantings wasn’t due to the part of bed they were planted in.
Conclusions? First of all, it’s clear that rye does much better in excellent soil than it does in poor soil. When we’d planted it in Virginia, our rye used to grow to my shoulder. These beds barely make it to my waist.
The vetch, in contrast, did quite well here (although only about 60% as well as the summer-planted vetch-only bed). The bands with vetch produced about twice as much total biomass as the rye-only bands did. Would a vetch-only band have produced yet more? Hard to say since my vetch-only bed was planted earlier in the season than the rye-and-vetch bands. Sounds like we’re due for another experiment this fall.
Moving hand-harvested mulch aroundAs a side note, the firewood tote carrier we no longer use turns out to be awesome for moving cover crop mulch around. If you’re hand harvesting, you can lay clumps into the carrier as you cut them, then the tote bundles them up nicely as you wander across the garden.
And here’s about a third of the area I mulched with handcut cover crops over the course of a bit over an hour. Yes, I did yank up blooming arugula and cut some comfrey leaves also to round things out. I’m now tuckered out but very pleased with my free mulch.
The post Harvesting the first hairy vetch for mulch first appeared on WetKnee Books.
The last water hose splitter we tried was plastic and it only lasted 3 years.
What I like about this all brass splitter is the mounting holes that allow you to secure it to a wall.
Having the water hose hub at eye level is a lot easier on the back.
The post Easy water hose hub first appeared on WetKnee Books.
It’s asparagus season and high time for an asparagus post! I’m not going to regurgitate the information you can find in any book or website about giving your plants a few years to get their feet under them before starting to harvest, keeping the weeds at bay, etc., though. Instead, I thought I’d share a few observations I’ve made over the last decade plus of growing our own asparagus then gorging on the harvest.
Our favorite varietyDon’t buy purple asparagus expecting it to look pretty on your plate. As soon as you cook them, purple spears turn green.
But do plant Purple Passion! Mark’s mom gave us five plants the same year we planted our main patch and they’ve turned out to be the earliest producers and the heaviest producers in our garden.
Early harvestsFor the earliest harvests, rake back the mulch and any top-dressed compost a couple of weeks before you expect to see spears. This will let the ground warm faster and will buy you perhaps a week over your non-raking neighbors’ plots.
Of course, that opens you up to freeze damage which will melt your delicious veggies into goo. So, when you expect a freeze, head out and pick every spear in sight. Well, almost every spear. If an asparagus plant is less than three inches tall, I’ll instead take a leaf from my mom’s book and drop a handful of that raked-off mulch back over top for freeze protection. No need to remove it after freeze danger passes either. Pointy asparagus will push right on through.
Delectable roast asparagusUnlike grocery-store asparagus, ours tends to come out of the garden with some tiny spears and some huge spears. If they go into the oven all different sizes, the smallest spears will burn before the bigger ones turn sweet. So if you’re like us and crave the caramelized sweetness of asparagus roasted in olive oil until the edges go brown, be sure to cut up your spears to make them evenly sized.
That’s all there is to years of delicious harvests. Enjoy what we consider one of the easiest and most dependable crops!
The post Growing and cooking homegrown asparagus first appeared on WetKnee Books.
We had part of a clear roofing panel that got recycled into a small porch covering last week.
I almost missed the fact that only one side has UV protection.
This explains why some clear panel installations start cracking after only 4 years.
The post first appeared on WetKnee Books.
I don’t have a plant problem…yet.
But I did pot up my indoor seedling shelf (left photo) into an outdoor seedling table (right photo) this afternoon. Which will be great…until the next low in the 30s, forecast to show up in six short days.
The reason for all this potting up is that I started some of my seedlings — peppers, tomatoes, and the first round of cucumbers — earlier than usual this year. That means they need to be potted up and/or put into the ground earlier than usual. I’m on the fence about how smart it is to really push the spring garden envelope this way, so I’m doing a side-by-side comparison in my broccoli beds.
The broccoli story began when I set out most of my broccoli seedlings on March 21, covered them up during a cold spell that dropped into the high 20s, and watched what always happens happen again. The broccoli plants got a little nipped but not so bad that they won’t produce.
Meanwhile, I had another eight plants that I wasn’t able to fit into the designated space, which I kept inside for an extra two weeks. The indoor plants quickly outpaced the outdoor plants in size and I thought to myself, “Why not rip out some of the outdoor plants and replace them with bigger indoor plants to see whether I would have been better off not jumping the gun?” On April 3, the second round of plants went into the ground.
In the photo above, one of the indoor-longer plants is on the left. On the right is the outdoor-longer plant I’d just pulled out. I’ll try to remember to make another post in a month or two once it becomes clear which set of plants is doing best.
In other garden news, we picked our first three asparagus spears Sunday! Dandelion, our garden guardian, predicts many more will head into our bellies soon.
How’s your garden growing?
The post Should you plant your spring garden early? first appeared on WetKnee Books.
We noticed our first Snow Pea climber of 2023 a few days ago.
It seems to me that the difference between good and great climbers is a little nudge here and there to encourage upward growth.
My goal is to get them all to grow high enough to escape the afternoon shade that sets in.
The post Upward Growth first appeared on WetKnee Books.
I’ve pruned our black raspberries, everbearing red raspberries, and blackberries in spring, summer, and winter and the plants really don’t seem to care what the calendar said. So nowadays I prune at a time that works for me.
In my opinion, the toughest part of pruning brambles that have primocanes and floricanes is figuring out which canes have gone through their two-year cycle and are dead. Second toughest is figuring out where the dead tops of everbearing raspberries start.
The solution to both of these puzzles is to wait and prune once the leaf buds have started expanding. At that point, it’s obvious at a glance which canes (or parts of canes) are alive or dead.
The bonus of pruning at this time of year is that it gives you an excuse to be out in the garden on stunning days without encouraging you to plant annual crops too early. (This is a case of do as I say, not as I do — we already have lettuce and peas and parsley and broccoli in the ground. Most of it is sitting there giving me the stinkeye for planting too soon!)
On an unrelated note, Mark and I just added half an hour of cover-crop content to our Soil-First Gardening course. If you already own a copy, you can simply log in and enjoy the new videos. If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, now’s a great time since you can use this coupon link to get 67% off through April 1. Enjoy!
The post The best time to prune raspberries and blackberries first appeared on WetKnee Books.
If you have some broccoli seedlings maturing inside today is the day to set them free.
Broccoli is one of our biggest producers thanks to Anna’s careful planning and our new caterpillar protection method which blocks that seemingly harmless moth from making you nourish her young at the expense of beautiful broccoli plants.
The post Time to plant broccoli first appeared on WetKnee Books.
Do you have friends jumping on the chicken bandwagon this spring? Then I hope you’ll point them toward my Getting Started With Your Working Chicken, entirely free in ebook form and dirt cheap even as a (brand new!) paperback. I think of this title as a bit like the bare-basics books at pet stores intended for folks impulse buying a new type of animal. The goal is to bring new chicken keepers up to speed in half an hour so they don’t get overwhelmed by the deluge of options right off the bat.
Want to help me out by spreading the word about the paperback release (and possibly win a copy)? You can enter our rafflecopter giveaway here.
Meanwhile, we’ve been hard at work coming up with a new ebook in the Permaculture Chicken series. Building a DIY Chicken Waterer will launch next month, and you can preorder the ebook for a buck off. (There will be a paperback too, but I’m still working on it. As you can likely tell, the font size needs increased. Stay tuned for a preorder announcement soon!)
And, finally, the third chicken book on my plate this year is an update to Thrifty Chicken Breeds. Want to share your wisdom and win a free copy of the ebook? Just comment below with your favorite breed(s), a photo (which can be emailed to anna@kitenet.net if it’s hard to leave in the comment), and a short writeup of why you prefer the one(s) you prefer. If I use your info, you’ll get a free copy of the revised ebook once it’s ready to go.
(Oh, and in case you’re curious what Mark’s up to this photo, it has nothing to do with chickens. He’s adding a clear roof to his newest porch planter box to prevent roof runoff from swamping our crops. I’m hoping this will also make for an even lower-blight situation for tomatoes this summer. Stay tuned to find out if it works!)
Another advantage to using a planter box is how easy it is to cover delicate plants in hopes of surviving a dip down to 20 degrees.
I made a rectangle the size we needed and attached just one layer of Agribon fabric. The literature says only use one layer for optimum results.
We are hoping this new method in the planter box will help the Snow Peas make it to our table a little faster than last year.
I like to direct-seed leaf lettuce under a row-cover-coated caterpillar tunnel in early February, a holdover from gardening half a zone warmer than where we are now. Most years, those early lettuce either don’t sprout or sprout and perish. This year is the outlier that makes me keep jumping the gun. Lettuce planted on Valentine’s Day is well established now at the end of the month.
Meanwhile, the more dependable way to get a jumpstart on the garden year in our climate is by starting seedlings inside. I usually go for all-in-one flats, but Mark bought me a bunch of smaller containers that fit into a flat and I’m getting a lot out of the mix-and-match approach. This way, I can start a flat of veggies that germinate at different rates, leaving the slow germinaters (like parsley) behind under cover while pulling out the fast germinaters (like broccoli). Then I can start more seedlings to fill in gaps atop that all-important heat pad.
I’ve even gotten into starting peas inside, but those I do in fifty-section flats because the seedlings have to be set out as soon as the tops are up. Here, I’m planting the first flat into Mark’s porch raised bed.
Seedlings are fun, but what about goodies we can eat right now? Most years are so cold up here that, even under cover, leafy greens perish before spring. This winter, in contrast was mild by our standards. A few kale plants are hanging on under the row covers while uncovered arugula is already growing and putting up flower heads. Looks like we’re having sauteed arugula for dinner!
What’s going on in your garden?
One of our neighbors has a sawmill and he’s been making his own boards for his first chicken coop.
We offered him money for this truckload of firewood but he was more interested in getting rid of these end slabs that didn’t quite make a proper board.
I like to cut the pieces to fit our stove and hack up the thinner pieces for kindling.
If you have a solar pool cover lying around unused, it might be worth using to preheat your garden soil. We had the pleasure of seeing one in action this past weekend…
…and were impressed by the results. Under the pool cover, soil was 43 degrees on an overcast day. Outside, the soil in an otherwise-identical raised bed was 39 degrees.
Is that enough extra warmth to start your spring crops now? I’ve always tried to jump the gun using the absolutely minimum germination temperatures. Based on that, the soil under the pool cover is warm enough for most spring crops.
However, I generally get very spotty germination when I plant so early. No wonder since, I learned this week, peas planted at 42 degrees will take 36 days to germinate!
Source: https://sacmg.ucanr.edu/files/164220.pdfWe’ve gotten into starting unconventional seedlings inside as a result, but more on that in a later post. For now, that old truism about planting peas on Valentine’s Day — we won’t.
We chop wood on a slight incline and sometimes a piece tries to make a run for it down the hill.
Our new firewood catcher saves a little time and effort while also serving as a stack point for a new mini storage that helps to keep things dry.
The seed rush has started! My calendar tells me to start the first lettuce outside if the ground is warm enough on February 2 (which it almost never is up here) and the first broccoli inside on February 14. But Mark asked me to try romaine lettuce this year, which seemed like an excuse to go ahead and start a few lettuce seedlings along with the first flat of broccoli seedlings on January 30. I couldn’t help myself!
As usual, we’re trying a small selection of new varieties along with our tried-and-true and I thought you might like to see our experiments. We get our seeds from Johnny’s because their plants are (almost) always both productive and delicious, so you can find all of these goodies over there if you want to follow suit. I will admit that their seeds aren’t cheap, but I find that I get so much more out of each plant that it’s worth the extra cash, especially once you factor in time spent taking care of crops that don’t bear.
So, without further ado, four experiments!
Quirk produces tiny cucumbers that were just too cute to pass by when I saw them on the website.
Sunland is a run-of-the-mill romaine, but we’ve never grown romaine before so I’m adding it to the list. We’ll be starting a few seeds every week then transplanting them the way you would broccoli, a different technique than our dependable direct-seed-a-bed-a-month technique formerly used for leaf lettuce.
Adam Gherkin looks like a similar variety to my beloved Harmonie, which has been a delicious producer for years. Yes, 250 seeds is a lot, but the packet option just seemed too small. I can often eke out cucurbit seeds for two to four years, so if this variety is a winner that will only be $5 – $10 a year for our main cucumber crop.
Menuette is a new kind of parsley with very small, ferny leaves. We like to use parsley in tuna salad, but the bigger leaves tend to get tough in the summer. We’re hoping this variety will stay tender all year long.
How about you? Which new varieties are you most excited about trying? (I’m assuming your seeds are ordered, right?!)
I’ve been putting off a toilet replacement because the part where you lower the toilet onto a wax seal is just above my skill level.
The new style universal gasket is made of rubber and fits most size variations. If when you lower the toilet it does not fit on center you can try it again without destroying the gasket seal.
When I mentioned not wanting to turn our septic field into the traditional mowed lawn, Travis Sparks wrote in to share his impressive mini-meadow, started in 2017 atop his Maine septic field.“I mowed the area down as low as I could in late spring 2017,” he wrote, “spread a thin layer of compost over the whole area, broadcast a variety of both perennial and annual seed mixes over it, and lightly raked everything. I mowed it a couple more times that year (higher cut) to try to knock the competition back while things germinated, and then left it be.”“I just had sparse grasses and wildflowers to start (nothing woody) before doing any of this, so the competition wasn’t too strong early on. It was reasonably successful the following year.” (Image above.)Travis wasn’t entirely thrilled with wildflower establishment, though, so he repeated the process in late spring 2019 including “another very light top-dressing of compost since the leach field soil is mostly just sandy fill.” The results that year were even more inspiring as you can see in the photo above.And here’s the meadow at four years old, in 2021. Travis wrote that after the establishment phase, he hasn’t done anything to keep the meadow on track (although I suspect he’ll have to mow now and then to keep woody plants out).I’m so impressed by his success, which turns his septic field into habitat for pollinators and lots of other wildlife. Have you turned a blah septic field into an integral part of your homestead? If so, I’d love to hear about it!
Mark worked up this awesome video of the second half of our Trouvaille Farm tour. If you missed it, the first video looked at the larger picture of the farm business and ecosystem while this one zeroes in on their income-producing gigs: artisanal chocolate making and growing seeds for seed companies.
(Yes, I’m posting for Mark. He seemed to think it was more fun to rip out a stained old toilet and put in a new one rather than spend five minutes playing with a computer. His loss, my gain!)
Would you like to start 2023 with a little (or a lot) of homesteading inspiration? If so, I highly recommend this limited-time bundle of $285 worth of ebooks and videos, marked down to $35 for a couple more days. The massive compilation includes a Joel Salatin video, books I’ve read and recommended on the blog previously (including Understanding Roots and Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist), and my own Weekend Homesteader: Winter.
On an unrelated note, Mark and I are slowly figuring out how to live with a septic system instead of a composting toilet. Our health department comes out to inspect new systems every five years, and we got a B on our first report card. Apparently we need to tweak our flow levelers for more even distribution, to clean the filter under the outlet riser every six months, and to keep woody plants out of the leach field.
We’d mowed the septic field when we first got here, but we’re not lawn aficionados and I wanted to develop better pollinator and firefly habitat so I started letting things grow up. In lieu of mowing, we’re instead hitting the autumn olives, blackberries, and rose bushes with the chainsaw, figuring the same treatment annually might do the trick. It was either that or succumb to the always-present urge for goats…
We met a nice farming couple recently that gave us a fun and interesting tour of their operation.
Okay, so I know I promised you a farm tour video this week. How about next week?
Instead, here’s a bit of our journey through time for the solstice. Building a stone house in the early 1800s with unnamed guy and cat Woodrow…
Hanging out with the 1905 fire department. (Glad we didn’t drop by earlier since volunteers to the 1820 fire department were first required to purchase their own leather bucket.)
Then we were wowed by a wood-burning locomotive from the same era.
Yes, we did sneak away to enjoy the Portsmouth Floodwall Murals. Definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in southern Ohio.
Happy holidays!
I’ve written a lot in the past about critical temperatures of spring crops (especially flowering fruits), but I realized I don’t say much about what fall crops can handle. Usually, we’re down to the hardiest vegetables by the time we get a hard freeze. But this year, a very dry late summer meant some fall crops were running late, which was okay because we enjoyed a very long lingering autumn. Then the forecast suddenly called for the better part of a week below freezing with lows around 18 Fahrenheit, leaving me struggling to figure out what to harvest early and what to cover up. In case you’re ever in a similar situation, I thought you might like to see the results.
The image above is from the morning after the first hard freeze, broccoli I harvested early on the right and broccoli I chose to cover with a caterpillar tunnel plus row-cover fabric on the left. Everything looks pretty good, right?
Not so fast! Freeze damage usually doesn’t show up that first morning.
A couple of weeks later, the results are clearer. Uncovered broccoli pretty much bit the dust while broccoli under cover was damaged but kept growing in the warmer spell that followed. I’m not holding my breath about getting a crop from those last few plants though.
Recommendation: Harvest the broccoli early.
Elsewhere in the garden, I had two beds of lettuce, both under caterpillar tunnels plus row cover fabric. Both got nipped, but the younger lettuce (shown above) has since regrown. The older lettuce, which was starting to bolt, is now rotted down to nothing.
Recommendation: Age of the crop makes a different. Lettuce in its young prime can bounce back from a hard freeze if it’s protected but it’s probably a good idea to harvest anything that’s ready just in case.
My darling kale, of course, did pretty well both under cover and in uncovered beds. Some leaves were slightly nipped; others weren’t. We’re still happily consuming a couple of meals of kale per week, often in the form of Kale Pesto.
Recommendation: Kale is our most cold-hardy fall crop if it’s moderately mature. If you’re low on row-cover, you can wait to cover this one up.
Not that I was going to do anyting to protect my cover crops, but I thought you might like to see them after the hard freeze too. On the left — rye and vetch are thriving. Center — the oats are half-dead. Right — oilseed radishes are pretty nipped too. Of course, I wanted the oats and radishes to die and rot into the soil before spring, so this is actually good news.
What about carrots? I got spooked and harvested the rest of ours because we had so many and they were so beautiful that I couldn’t bear to risk it. But our new friends from Trouivalle Farm put theirs under a version of a quick hoop and are still harvesting as needed out of the ground.
Recommendation: Be brave! Try leaving at least some carrots in the ground under row cover.
(Stay tuned for next week — we have a fascinating interview from Trouivalle Farm’s proprietors coming your way once Mark edits it into shape!)
Our local farmer’s market has the most apple varieties I’ve ever seen, all harvested close to Athens, Ohio. As a result, I’ve been running taste tests over the last few years, picking new (and old) favorites. Before I go on, I should tell you what I like in an apple — a good blend of […]
We upgraded from a firewood tote carrier to this Wellmax shopping cart with wheels last year. Now we can carry twice the amount with less effort. The side spokes mostly popped out but weaving some steel wire or thin rope is an easy way to fix it. Once inside it provides a tidy way of […]
When your harvest looks like this: It’s time to cook this: Ingredients: 6 cups of cherry tomatoes (or 2.5 cups of stewed tomatoes) 1 chicken breast with bone in (or 3 cups of chicken stock and one cooked chicken breast) 1.25 cups of chopped sweet peppers 2.5 cups of carrots (or some combination of carrots […]
At least one of you didn’t quite understand Mark’s initial review of the Kindle Jack Jr. So we made this short video to show you the nuts and bolts of easy, safe kindling splitting. (Side notes: Mark lost his Uncle Thomas yesterday, which is why I’m making this post for him. Also, if you tried […]
Replacing a bathtub faucet turned out to be much easier than either of us anticipated. Turn off all water to the trailer, unscrew both hot and cold water hoses along with the hose leading up to the shower, then slip the old faucet out and the new one in. There’s nothing complicated going on with […]
We’ve had this new kindling splitter for a year now and it has really paid for itself in time saved. Making a bucket of kindling this way takes about 10 minutes and feels super safe. I’m a little embarrassed that it took me this long to get hip to using a hammer and splitter to […]
Where does a Venn diagram of werewolves and homesteading intersect? Nowhere…except me.* Yes, as some of you know, my pen name’s werewolf books have been paying the bills around here for years. I have a blast spending my mornings in fantasy worlds and my afternoons in the garden, but I usually don’t try to mesh […]
Frost pockets are real (and so are anti-frost pockets) Mark and I picked the last tomatoes and peppers today in preparation for what might be this fall’s first frost. But will it be? Back when we lived at the bottom of a hill in Virginia, we could count on cold temperatures dropping least as low […]
I had so much fun reading How to Grow Ginger by Leigh Tate. But before I dive into my review, I have to include an important caveat. Reading this book doesn't necessarily mean your mothers-in-law will gift you with a five month old ginger plant so you can experiment immediately...even though it totally did for me. (Thank you so much, Rose Nell and Jayne!)
Ahem, back to the point. I'd seen fresh ginger for sale at our local farmer's market, but I hadn't taken the time to figure out whether it was worth growing ourselves. The short answer: very worthwhile because the process is crazy easy. Basically, you put a store-bought ginger root in a big pot a bit after your frost-free date, keep the plant in partial shade and topdress with compost once a month, then harvest after the leaves die back in the autumn.
Or you can start harvesting earlier, the way I did. Each of the stems in your pot leads down to a single ginger root and if you have strong hands you can tear out a root the way you'd grub out new potatoes. I pulled out two roots and made pickled ginger (so easy and so delectable!) and lacto-fermented ginger (still in the works). I'm also looking forward to making candied ginger with honey for a family member who loves the treat but prefers to dine sugar-free.
If those experiments don't sound like fun, Tate also includes recipes for dehydrating ginger and turning it into the powder you put into cookies and cakes, plus a primer on making a ginger drink. I particularly enjoyed her section about peeling. Upshot: you don't have to peel if you're like me and prefer to leave skins on.
To cut a long story short, if you're interested in growing ginger you might as well jumpstart your process by checking out this excellent guide. Like everything else you grow yourself, fresh ginger out of your yard just tastes better than any you can buy!
A summary of our experience over the past 4 years using one of those greenhouses in a box to store firewood.
Awesome reader and cover-crop experimenter Craig wrote in last month with his questions and comments about planting cover crops between young fruit trees in mid Ohio. He promised me pictures and a followup, both of showed up in my inbox last week.
Craig's first experiment involved "hand-tossed rye seeds on my apple beds" in early August to replace a mature buckwheat stand. He noted, "I'm loving how the action of re-seeding a new green manure crop after buckwheat accomplishes multiple tasks: plants the next cover, provides an opportunity to weed (easily and satisfyingly) what didn't get crowded out by the last round of growth, and creates a mulch on the soil surface."
This has been my experience too! My best stand of oats is coming up where I treated a buckwheat bed exactly the same way. Definitely recommend!
Again just like in my garden, Craig's oilseed radish cover crop (which he calls "torpedo radishes") came up very strongly. We both overseeded since it's tough to get anything to sprout atop dry late-summer soil, and we both ended up with a radish stand thicker than was really necessary. No real harm done other than a waste of seed, but our lesson has been learned!
Craig promised me a followup this spring, so I'll be sure to keep you posted. In the meantime, I thought I'd spill some beans of my own. I'm hoping to find time this winter to work on a cover-crop video course and/or workbook. Both are intended to simplify the brain power involved in including cover crops in your garden, either through lots of hands-on visuals (video course) or through charts and pages that walk you through the decision-making process (workbook). If I don't have time for both, does one of those sound a lot more fun than the other to you?
Finally, I'd be remiss if I ended this post without telling you that it's not too late to plant rye. If you have garden beds that are going to weeds and that you know you won't need until next June, why not get a cover crop established to improve your soil while you take the winter off?
We invited a couple of stray cats to join us a few months ago.
Daisy and her playful son Dandelion.
I decided they need a proper box to relax in and actually ordered a cat box.
The box it came in was also close to the right height and size.
Daisy says it might take several days to figure out which is her favorite.
As the summer garden season winds down, I'm filling gaps not needed for cool-season veggies with cover crops. And, in addition to my old standbys, I'm running a few experimental plantings this year.
My focus is trying to find at least one legume I heartily recommend in a no-till system. Summer-planted hairy vetch, unfortunately, is not it. The flowers are just starting to pop up and they're quite pretty, but the cover crop grew so slowly during its early life that the bed is more full of weeds than vetch.
I'm hoping experiment 2 and/or 3 will yield better results. I interseeded crimson clover amid half of my oats last month on the theory that a grain will cover the ground fast enough to deal with the weed issue while the legume will still be able to find its feet and add nitrogen to the soil. On a similar vein, I'll be planting a mixed bed of rye and hairy vetch next week.
Stay tuned for results in the spring!
When we first experimented with black soldier flies, we thought black soldier fly bins had to be complicated. We bought one for our first try and even ordered some eggs to get our colony started. Turns out, none of that was necessary.
Up here in Ohio, Mark went ultra-simple. He drilled small drainage holes in the bottom of wheelie bins then added a few large holes near the top for adults to fly in and out of. Now we dump in food scraps and the black soldier flies arrive on their own.
Currently, the colony is so vigorous that yesterday's compost is completely gone by the time we head out to dump the next day's bucket. The bottom of the bin is a writhing mass of larvae hungry to eat our scraps and giving off so much heat they fog up my camera lens. You can see our complete composting system in action in our soil course. But if you just want to experiment at home, here are some tips:
Unless you go to extremes to nurture out-of-season black soldier flies, they're really a summer composter. Black soldier flies start showing up at our bins as early as June, but a colony doesn't hit full speed until around mid to late July. So if you're lazy like us, you'll only count on them for a small (but high-quality) portion of your composting year.
Also, black soldier flies don't live everywhere. They've been introduced outside their native range, but if you don't see a red dot near you on the map above, you're probably better off trying compost worms.
That said, we love the excellent compost black soldier flies provide for almost no effort on our part. These bins will definitely be a permanent part of our composting campaign!
(Note: Map and season chart are thanks to iNaturalist and represent data up until the date of this post.)
The deck planting box is turning out to be a good alternative spot for tomato plants.
We decided to delete the roof overhang section to increase sun exposure time.
It also opens up a space to add a smaller planter box.
Experimenting with using a thick salvaged window as one of the walls to get a peek at worm activity and water drainage.
I'm very excited to announce that our first video course is now live! If you use this link before the end of the day Friday, you should be able to snag your copy for half off.
Even if you're just curious, I recommend heading over there since you can watch five of the sixteen course videos for free in preview mode. You can learn why I love no-till and cover crops, how to topdress, and how dorky I look on video. What do you have to lose?