This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://blog.applejackcreek.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://blog.applejackcreek.com/feeds/posts/default.

Independence Days update

It’s been awhile, so here we are with another update on the Independence Days project. :)

Planted: At long last, it is time to start the planting! I have done a lot of work planning and preparing for planting season, and I’ve finally got a few things started. A few tomatoes are in (and sprouted!), the one lonely garlic clove I had that was growing a green tip got put in dirt and it has grown beautifully, several cabbage plants were started in newspaper pots and just yesterday I noticed one had come up. There’s also a couple of Italian sweet peppers poking heads above the soil, and the catnip and lemon basil finally sprouted. I also have an experiment with some tea plant seeds (yes, the shrub that black and green tea grows on): they can be grown as house plants here, so I’m giving that a try. Oh, there are also apple seeds in dirt in the freezer, stratifying.

Harvested: Eggs! Finally, we have eggs again. That is all for harvesting, unless you count the 1 cm leaf of garlic greens that fell off the plant and I nibbled. (It is delicious!)

Preserved: Nothing at present to preserve. Oh, I did dry some orange peel for Gram when we had a pile of oranges on the counter awhile back. That counts.

Waste Not: The dried greens from last summer have been brought inside and we’re feeding them to the bunnies, and crumbling some for the chickens as well. Leftovers are being fed to humans or animals, as usual, nothing particularly exciting on this front.

Want Not (Preparations): We have eggs in the incubator preparing to hatch (it’s always good to be able to ‘grown your own’ of anything!), and I think the documentation I’ve been doing for the garden journal probably falls in this category as well (having the information you need in analog form is a good idea in case of extended internet outage, for instance).

Community Food Systems: The Boy worked at the WECAN food distribution centre last month, and is volunteering again next month. While he was there, he told some of the other volunteers about our meat and had some potentially interested customers. :) We continue to have interest in lamb meat sales, and are finally able to sell eggs again.

Eat the Food: Eggs, of course, we managed to get through the ‘egg strike’ without purchasing store eggs at all. I have realized that next fall I need to freeze a few eggs to get through the dark days of winter, as I really don’t want to have to buy store eggs at all! We’ve been using up our squash (which has stored beautifully) in soup, we made salad from our WECAN food basket lettuce and carrots, and a pureed vegetable soup from potatoes, carrots and celery (also from the WECAN purchase). Gram’s cranberry-crabapple jelly is a standard feature of my oatmeal breakfasts (a spoonful of jelly added to quick oats and hot water is a great way to start the day).

Counting chickens before they hatch

Well, we aren’t actually counting the chickens … just candling eggs to make sure the ones in the incubator are viable – having rotten eggs explode at 100 degrees Fahrenheit is really, really smelly.

The Reluctant Farmer received a Hovabator for his birthday, and we gathered up some eggs to put in for a ‘first run test’, now that the hens are once again laying eggs. The eggs have been in the incubator for a week now, and the Hovabator is wonderfully stable – it’s much easier to keep the temperature right at 100 F than it was in the home made Eggabator (although it did work, to TRF’s credit), and the mesh wire floor over the water reservoir is easy to work with. We did run a piece of tubing through one of the holes in the lid so that we can fill the water reservoir through the tube, rather than opening the lid, as it takes a while to warm back up once you take the lid off. We also roll the eggs around by tilting the entire incubator gently, rather than precisely turning each egg by hand. Yes, we risk a few cracks, but so far, it’s working. (I’m quite certain the automatic egg turner add-on is on The Reluctant Farmer’s wish list for future gift-giving occasions.)

Today the eggs have been incubating for a week, so I got out the flashlight (cowled with a rubber band for a better seal against the egg), found a dark corner, and checked the eggs. About half were duds, which wasn’t really a surprise – we used some eggs that had been stored in the fridge, which usually bodes ill for hatching, and we only have 2 roosters right now for quite a lot of hens.

However, candling showed quite clearly the eggs that were empty, one that was filled with some really unpleasant looking splotches (that one takes my vote for “most likely to erupt in a sulfurous mess”, so I’m glad to have found it), and one with the telltale red ring indicating an infection in the chick (something I didn’t know about until I read this wonderful posting). The coolest thing, though, was seeing the little unhatched chicks moving around on their own inside the eggs! I had no idea they did that – although it makes perfect sense. It’s neat to watch.

So, we have 7 eggs with confirmed chicks inside, and 2 more that were too hard to see, so we left them in and will check again later.

A garden journal

I love my piles of gardening books. I have a wide variety of references, and I mix and match strategies to suit what I’m growing and where. Given our steady supply of composted manure and ready access to waste straw, hay and wool for mulch, we are fortunate to have the full set of gardening strategies available to us – we aren’t reliant on chemical fertilizers to keep our garden beds in good shape, we just add manure every year, and we have plenty of it. It’s taken quite awhile to get the entire garden area ready to come under cultivation, but I think, finally, this year we are there.

I use Mel Bartholemew’s Square Foot Gardening for most of my root vegetables, and I do love planting my carrots and beets in little squares inside the big one foot squares marked off by yarn in my wood-sided raised beds. However, I also follow the advice of Steve Solomon’s Gardening When it Counts, which is pretty much the antithesis of the intensive strategies of the square foot method, for other things. Solomon’s strategies work really well for larger plants like potatoes, corn, and tomatoes, and this year I’ll be attempting the wide short row strategy he recommends for some of my other plants. I also hope to incorporate some of the season extension strategies described by Eliot Coleman in the Four Season Harvest, a lovely gift from Theresa at Pondering the Myriad Things. In addition to these major resources are the books on the medicinal uses of herbs, books on natural plant dyes, and assorted general garden reference books.

Trying to find the information I need among all these amazing resources can be a real challenge sometimes, so I decided to create my very own garden journal, combining all the key points I needed in one spot.

I sat down at the kitchen table with my piles of books and a new, untouched journal (a gift from my wonderful husband a few years back, which I’d been saving for something special: this is it). I also dug up a calendar (this one is the STARS fundraising calendar – The Reluctant Farmer has helped load people into the STARS rescue helicopter more than once in his role as volunteer firefighter), and my stash of seeds.

First, let’s talk about the seed stash. Normally, the seeds live in a lovely binder that The Boy got me from Lee Valley (where else?) that protects the seeds from moisture and keeps them nicely organized. However, come planting time, I need them out where I can quickly rifle through them to get to the ones I am after – so, I took a regular cardboard box, chopped off the lid flaps, and sliced them so that they fit into one another to divide the interior into seed-packet-sized sections. The seeds are sorted into the sections based on when I need to deal with them – the ones that are going to need stratification and indoor starting are in the first sections, those that need to go out early (as soon as the soil can be worked) are up next, and the sensitive ones that need the frost well behind us are at the very back.

This also got me started on the journal itself.

Each plant is listed at the top of a page, which is cross-referenced on a table of contents at the beginning. The herbs are all at the beginning of the journal, vegetables and fruit plants are at the back. All plants have information about where and how they need to be planted, if they need stratification and indoor starting or if they go straight outside, what kind of watering requirements they have, how much sun they want, and so forth. Then, herbs have additional information about their medicinal properties and which parts are harvested, and any plant that is useful as a dye plant has the colours and any instructions for use listed as well. The information is gathered from all the relevant sources – so, if this is a plant I put in square foot blocks, I wrote down the density per block, if it’s one that I plan to follow Solomon’s spacing guidelines, I wrote those in. I make a note in the margin to indicate which book the information came from, so I can go there for more detail if I wish.

The journal still isn’t quite complete, but I have basic information for just about every seed I have in the collection, plus the few I have still coming on order. As time passes, I can update it with specifics about what works well here, in our specific microclimate, which is why it is called the Apple Jack Creek Garden Journal. It’s specific to here. There’s no need for me to write down that carrots can be stored in the ground over the winter if you mulch well with straw … that is true in some places, I am sure, but not here, not by a long shot (even under a layer of straw, the ground is quite thoroughly frozen all winter: you’d be chipping out frozen carrots with a pick-axe if you tried that here). Most of the information about “a second planting for a fall harvest” is not relevant either – our growing season is too short. however, that might change, with climate change and season extension, so I’ll leave some blank space and add to the book as I learn.

The calendar is the piece that is most specific to this year’s plans. The ‘official last frost date’ is marked, as is the date we actually had our last frost last year (which I know because I wrote it on my garden calendar from last year, and it was a whole month after we thought we were in the clear … not a good spring, 2009). Using those dates (and the dates of the full and new moon) I work backwards to figure out when things need to be started indoors, or when we should be planting things outside. Family tradition says you don’t plant outside until the first full moon after the May long weekend, and this year, for the tender plants, I’m extending the target to the first new moon after the first full moon in May – we’ll see how that goes, and if it works, it may be incorporated into the family lore.

As each seed is documented and it’s needs are determined, that information goes onto the calendar. Several of the herbs, for instance, require stratification, some for six weeks, some for four, some for one or two. The calendar makes it easy to determine when I want to have “seed starting day for herbs” – knowing that they take about 2 weeks to poke their heads out of the dirt and need a few weeks indoors to grow and turn into actual plants before being set outside. Given a starting date for seeds, it’s a simple matter to work backwards to list which varieties need to go into the freezer when. I wrote that detail on the seed packets, too, for those that didn’t mention it, as well as making sure it’s in the journal.

The calendar is the best way to track what really happened, which will, of course, help for next year. For instance, I remember that last year that late frost killed a whole lot of things I’d put out too early (all my tomatoes, for instance) although I wasn’t careful about documenting when each thing was planted, and I want to do that this year. I also remember that I had too many seedlings indoors for too long – I started them too early, and they outgrew their little pots before I could get them in the ground – so this year, I’m trying to time things a little better. I do still have the ‘optimistic planting’ dates marked – hey, you can put a few seeds in early, and if they grow, well, awesome, and if not, well, not a huge loss. Same for the started plants – I finally put a few tomato seedlings in dirt yesterday, because I just couldn’t stand the wait any longer, but the bulk of the tomato plants won’t be started for several more weeks.

Planning the garden is a great thing to do in late winter – it makes you feel like spring really is coming, and it saves a lot of headache later on if you take the time to do the research before hand (I now know why a bunch of my herbs didn’t do anything last year – that whole stratification thing matters!)

Maybe a garden journal is just what you need, too.

Pizza from the pantry

We couldn’t quite decide what to have for dinner tonight, but we all wanted something easy, simple, and familiar. Pizza fit the criteria.

Okay, the next question was whether or not we had the ingredients:

Mozza – yup, in the fridge. Pizza sauce – yup, leftover spaghetti sauce and leftover tomato paste mixed together would do. Mushrooms – yup, canned, in the pantry. Green and red peppers – yup, dehydrated, also in the pantry. Just soak in water while the dough rises, and they’re good to go. Sausage – yup, in the freezer. Pizza dough – easy.

Wait – pizza dough is easy? You bet.

I use the breadmaker all the time to mix up bread dough – I can do it by hand, but I like using the machine when I’m busy doing other things, which is always. All you need to do is make regular bread dough, with a more generous-than-usual shot of olive oil, and add some spices. Our bread recipe looks like this:

• 1 cup of water
• 3 cups of flour
• a shot of sugar
• a few sprinkles of salt
• half a lidful of yeast (trial and error has shown this to be the correct measurement – and using the lid from the yeast jar to measure with is terrifically convenient)
• a generous shot of olive oil (round and round the breadmaker container about 3 or 4 times)

That’s it. Put it on the dough setting and let it do it’s thing. If you forget it in there (yeah, it happens) and it’s too puffy when you finally do remember, just restart the dough cycle and let the machine knead it just a wee bit more before you take it out.

For pizza dough, we added Greek seasoning, garlic powder and oregano.

Once the dough cycle is done, take the ball of dough out and cut it in half. Use the rolling pin to shape the dough to fit your pan (we use a rectangular pan, so we make rectangular pizza), top with tomato sauce and your toppings. Shape the remaining half into bread sticks and pop the two pans into the oven at 500 degrees for about 12 minutes.

Voila – dinner!

Okay, THAT was a surprise!

I got a message on MSN this morning from The Boy.

Mom?

Yes..

Ewen  (the calf) is in with the sheep, and the wether is in with the cow, and Jaws has a lamb.

A lamb???

We didn’t even think Jaws was pregnant, never mind due!

As for the rest, well, Ewen does jump the fence to visit the sheep sometimes. We get him out of there, so that nobody gets hurt, but he was not fussing and he jumped back into his own pasture as soon as The Boy went outside. The wether was encouraged to return where he belonged, and once outside, The Boy discovered that Jaws not only had one lamb, she had twin boys!

He got them into the barn, fed their mama, got her some water, and trimmed up her (really awful) shearing job so that the lambs could locate their milk. I called to see how things were going and heard “Mom, this sheep has no udder. I can’t even FIND it!” Jaws does have a rather oddly shaped udder, the teats are farther to the side than on most sheep, so he had a bit of work to get the wool tags cleared out so that he (and the lambs) could find the business end of things, but all is well and the babies are happy and nursing well. He’s calling them Fred and Frank (this is an F year at our house – I know, we’re not in line with the ‘official naming alphabet’, but it works for us.)

I was met by a grinning Boy when I got home. “We have three lambs now!” Who else? Cherub, of course! The only 2 non-seasonal breeders we have here both had their lambs today, thankfully a very warm and reasonably dry February day (for Alberta, anyhow) and my amazing kid just calmly took care of all the details and got everyone where they needed to be. Cherub wasn’t doing a good job of cleaning off her lamb, so he handed the lamb to Bob the dog who took care of that task. Bob is now snoozing in the barn, just outside the pens where the sheep are. Bob loves lambing season.

Sheep are great.

We *should* have peace and quiet on the lambing front until Easter now – the Icelandics are strongly seasonal breeders and lamb much later in the spring, and based on what we saw in the pasture last fall, we are expecting more surprises nearer to April.

Then again, sheep like to surprise you, so I guess we’ll just keep checking out the window and see what happens!

Life’s too short to spin nasty wool

I am ruthlessly sorting the wool in the fibre room.

Good bits are pulled off for washing, yukky bits are sent to the compost pile with no regrets. I used to try to wring every bit into something functional, but you know what? There’s plenty more wool where this stuff came from, and if I’m gonna spin, I’m gonna enjoy it.

It’d be different if I paid for the stuff, if there was a limited supply of fibre, or if every bit of wool was destined to clothe my family or something. However, given that none of those are true … only the best stuff gets to stay. Everything else goes outside!