Clouds are lifting! (In more ways than one) - Growing Challenge

Well, to say it's been stressful around here this past month doesn't even come close to telling it like it is. But things are looking up.

The winter seems to have finally decided to "take a hike" - at least for a little while! We found our first snow crocus blooms today, and it was a real boost to our mood. The yard is a mess from not cleaning things up properly last year, but I think we're all on board with getting it cleaned up as soon as possible and then keeping it in better shape this year.

I opened the doors today to let in the warm, fresh spring air - and cleaned up my funny little balcony off the living room. It's the weirdest thing, I've rarely seen anything like it - it's only four feet wide but over 20 feet long, and hangs out over the garage on the level below. We really didn't know what to do with it the first year we were here. But the second year, it occurred to me that it would make a lovely "Hanging Garden" of sorts, so I tricked it out with a bunch of my potted plants that like to spend the summer outside anyway. Then I bought a small table and a cheap umbrella. Then I noticed that there was an outdoor outlet on one side. And that our wireless reached out there, too....Viola! My own Internet Cafe! And so it has been every year since.

It's still way too early for my potted menagerie to go out on the balcony, but it sure was nice to sit out there today and enjoy the sunshine. But then I noticed that the "view" wasn't all it could be - the driveway and flower beds below were filled with winter's trash - leaves and twigs, mostly, that had blown in over the fall and been covered by snow most of the last three months. So I got off my duff and got a fair bit of that cleaned up, and the rest is scheduled for tomorrow.

Then I toddled off to the side yard and had a go at the cloche. I pulled out all the dead onion leaves - the Evergreen White Bunching onions were still going strong, even after spending the entire winter uncovered and un-cared for. I'm going to pull them out tomorrow and plant them temporarily in a couple of buckets until I can get the garden tilled, and then they will go in their own little corner out there somewhere to live long and prosper. I love this variety, because they don't bulb - they just keep dividing at the base like humongous chives.

Speaking of chives, we noticed today that mine are peeking up through the mats of mulch in the herb garden, so I need to go clear that area out, too. I promised my very good friend Atomic Wombat some starts this year if she wanted them, so I'll probably go ahead and pull a few nice clumps out and pot them to give to her later this week. Goodness knows I have plenty. My chive bed, which started as maybe a dozen or less quarter size plugs and a few seedlings four years ago is now about four feet by six feet long. Chives are something that apparently do really, really well here. Maybe it's all the potatoes. *snicker*

So, slowly but surely I'm clearing away last fall's mess and waking up the garden to this year's spring. And I'm finding that as I do so, the clouds are fading away and the sun is shining more brightly. The weather isn't looking too bad, either. ;-)

Salad Table, Day 31: Growing Challenge

Well, the first of the transplants for the salad table are doing very, very well. I think it's looking quite likely that I will be able to harvest a small Valentine's Day salad for my sweetie and me.

I changed the setup I had planned (again) by recycling some foam peanuts into a draining medium and water reservoir for the grow bags I actually planted the salad greens in. I was trying to keep it on the cheap by using stuff I already had on hand, especially stuff that might otherwise need to be thrown out. So I snugged each growbag bottom into an about four inch layer of peanuts, making sure that some of the drainage holes on the side were kept free and clear and above the intended water line.

Here is a picture of one of the lettuces, close up! I can't wait to have our first home grown salad of the year!

What's going on in the kitchen this weekend?

Homebrewing: I have two fruit wines and a simple sweet mead that need to be bottled. I have another bottle of concord grape wine in the storage room that may also be ready to bottle, but if I can get the three I have upstairs racked and into the little single serving size bottles I bought, then I'll be doing well! (Update: the plum wine apparently isn't ready to bottle yet, once I brought it up into the warmer house, it began to bubble again! So, I guess that one will wait for another couple or three weeks. The mead and raspberry wines are bottled, though, and I even "prettied up" a few bottles for a picture!)

Salad Table: I will have transplanted nearly all the salad starts by the end of this weekend. They are actually doing pretty well! The lettuce is about three inches or more tall. The shallots are sprouting like mad and should be ready to start cutting by next week some time. With luck, the lettuce will be ready for a first light picking in a couple of weeks. Maybe I can serve my sweetie a home grown salad for Valentine's Day. Keeping my fingers crossed...

Cheesemaking: I decided to go for broke and make a batch of Cambozola. It's a Gorgonzola/Camembert hybrid that we just love melted on fresh, hot bread. Since we have fresh hot bread nearly every day now, I figured I'd give that a try. It's also a cheese we can rarely find here in the grocery stores, and when we can find it, it's generally 12-14 dollars a pound. So economically, it's a very good candidate for home cheesemaking. If it works, I should be able to make a little over a pound of it for just a bit more than the cost of a gallon of milk.

Dark Days Challenge: I am still trying to settle on my DDC meal to document for this week. I'm leaning towards oriental food (something we eat a lot of and love) but I can't decide between chicken or pork based dishes. We have both local pork and chicken in the freezer right now, so I could do either. My sweetie is nursing a cold this weekend, though - so I think chicken would be a good idea. I can make him bunches of chicken soup (the roasting chicken we got from a local source here is about an 8 pounder, dressed, so there's plenty for several meals on that one!) and still have lots of meat left to make other dishes.

At any rate, I'll have pictures for all of this up at intervals over the weekend. I have some step by step on the Chicken Udon Soup I made tonight, but it's been a long day with the mead and wine bottling and nursing a sick husband, so it may have to wait till tomorrow!

Salad Sprouts, Day 7

Things are moving along pretty well with the (hopefully) future salad patch. Nearly all the seeds have sprouted, and most are getting their first true leaves. Some of the sprouts were getting a bit tall, so I took the cover off both seedling starters and moved the lights down to just about 2 inches above the tops of the leaves. I also set up some simple reflectors with aluminum foil to make sure the seedlings get all the light they can. I'm not too worried about the longer stems - I'll just bury them up to their leaves when I transplant, and all will be well.

This weekend I decided to finish getting my freezers cleaned out. We had a really busy summer this year and although I managed to keep up with some of the fruit processing, a lot of it just got cleaned, de-seeded and put into freezer bags. As a result, our freezer was starting to run out of room! So I hauled out bags and bags of frozen fruits and made purees, jams, syrups and canned whole fruits over the weekend. We now have about 100 jars of various fruit things on the counter. It was worth it, though, if only for the fact that I found four one-gallon bags of Idaho Huckleberries we hadn't eaten yet from the last time we went pickin'. Huckleberries look like blueberries, but the flavor is many times more intense. Think of the most luscious blueberries you've ever had, and add to that the flavor of the very best, sun ripened blackberries, and you'll come close. If you've never had Huckleberries (REAL huckleberries, not the so-called "garden huckleberries" you can buy seeds for in the catalogs) then you are seriously missing out. Take my word for it - you must fix this - and the sooner the better. Huckleberries are one of the very best things about living in this part of the country.

With what I canned this weekend, plus all the jarred fruit stuffs we already have in the storage room, I think we probably now have enough jam to last us about three or four years. I'm going to have to seriously find new things to do with some of our fruit this summer, or we'll soon have a jam backlog that no amount of biscuits can fix.

Wow, that was fast!

It's been just three days since I started some cold-season greens for the salad table I"m working on, and already sprouts are poking up out of the seed starting cells! The lettuces and the chinese cabbage seem to be the first out of the gate, followed closely by the Bright Lights Chard. For onions, I dug through our very last of the shallots from Fall 2006, and found many that were still firm and sproutable. So I took a couple of dozen of them and pressed them lightly into some moist potting soil so they could begin to take root while I finish putting the main planting boxes together. I checked today and found they are almost all sprouting new white roots - I can't believe these things are over a year old. I'm beginning to think this project just might work out after all!

I've been doing some research, and have decided to modify my setup a bit. I'm going to put a couple of shallow storage tubs on the plastic table, and inside those tubs, set four rows of cut pvc pipe with drain holes. That's to form a water and air reservoir for the grow bags I'm planning to set on top. Each bag will straddle a pipe, with the perforated ends of each bag sagging/dipping down over the perf pipe into the water. The tubs I'm planning to use are clear, which might cause an algae problem after a while, but will also make seeing which tubs need refilling a bit easier. I'm using grow bags because I can swap them in and out of the table and light setup as needed, as plants become too tired to produce or try to go to seed on me - that way what is under the lamps is always fresh and at its peak. If I planted directly in the tubs, I'd have to dump the whole thing and replant, and that's harder to do, messier, and lowers overall productivity.

I have four kinds of spinach, 8 kinds of lettuce, some Red Russian Kale, Bright Lights Chard, and Tah Tsai chinese greens in the seed starting units. As soon as these are out, I'll likely start some herbs. The salad greens should be ready to transplant in a couple more weeks. By then, I should have the table, watering reservoirs and lights all set up and ready to receive them. I figure with luck, a month after that I'll be eating home grown salads again. Crossing my fingers, and I'll be sure to post pictures and updates as things progress!

The Iron Gardener

Our garden this past season was a mess. Every adult in the house was suffering from a serious lack of free time this year, so we didn't do a lot of the gardening things we normally do. One of those gardening things was to plant winter salad and braising greens under a cloche in the back yard in early fall. When we do that, despite our seriously cold and long Idaho winters, we generally have so much produce we are begging the neighbors to take some so it won't go to seed. But we didn't do that this year, and dang, I miss it!

So I'm seeing what can be done this late in the season to remedy the lack of home-grown greens. I'm going to go out the next day it's above freezing and see if I can clear out the cloche area and put up a new plastic cover. I'm starting some salad and cooking greens indoors under fluorescent lights to transplant out when I have the cloche ready. I'm also thinking about doing something new - trying to grow a salad table indoors in our sunroom. We have a bank of fluorescent lights and a plastic table that are currently not being used, plus compost and potting soil and enough garden seeds to supply a half dozen families. Instead of building a very shallow wooden planting box to put soil into, I am going to grab a few shallow unused rubbermaid tubs from the garage and set them on top of the table, with wicking material hanging into a five gallon bucket of water underneath. All the components I need to do this project are here at hand; the task will be seeing if they can be combined into a system that can relieve my craving for local fresh produce in the absolute dead of an Idaho winter! I figure this will be an acid test - an Iron Gardener challenge.

Stay tuned!