Winter is almost here

It's that damp cold outside, but with Christmas sort of under control, we might go out and move some rock or put up some tree protection anyway. The two sheep appear to have eaten all the grass, and when the ladies come back from their visit with the ram, we'll need to put them on the upper pasture. And since at least one will go into the freezer soon, we want them to be eating...

Last week there was a low of 19 degrees, so the garden is a bit sad looking. There's still a lot growing; kale, lots of parsnips, turnips, beets, fennel, and carrots (for seed), plus parlsey and some odds and ends. Some of the lettuce doesn't look bad but when you get it in there's frost damage. But making dinner is much more work when you have to dig, scrub and peel roots. We have been enjoying the spaghetti squash very much. My expectations weren't high, but put some sauce on and it's actually quite good, and surprisingly satisfying. This was an excellent addition to our diet. This year I also starting making squash spoon-bread, which encourages us to eat squash, and oven-roasted tomato sauce, which is what we've been putting on the spaghetti squash.

The greenhouse is again really doing well. The floor isn't done, but I'll start back working on that... one of these days. With that cold spell, it did not give total protection; the basil and one pepper plant seems to be suffering from cold. But there must be 4 or 5 jalapeno plants (two from 2010 that overwintered last year) that are doing fine and covered with peppers, the bell has a pepper, the nardellos appear to be ripening, and even the tomato plant, although suffering, doesn't seem to have given up. The ripe yuzus are hanging on and the one orange is sloooowly starting to turn orange.

Any day now I want to start some onions, since it seems like the more time they have to grow the better. I got some shallot seed so we'll give that a try too. I keep forgetting about the daffodil bulbs (I don't think it's quite too late...) and it's high time to order fruit/nut trees. Once the river rock is removed from the area in front of the house I'll put in low-growing fruiting groundcovers, kinnikinnick and salal and wintergreen and wild blueberry.

Garden report 2011

We are winding down the summer garden - they are expecting rain the next few days, which is often the transition from a happy late-summer garden to an unpleasnt mess. The various roots and kales will be happy, though, and slugs will come out to be collected and fed to the ducks. So while it's not the end of the garden, really, it's coming on the end of the glamor part of the garden.

This was really a bumper year in the garden; possibly the best ever, although it was a slow start so maybe I'm getting the wrong impression from this late bounty.

The tomatoes were 2-3 weeks late, but I've NEVER had such perfect, beautiful specimens of the large heirlooms. Even on the last day of September there's hardly any cracked or rotten fruit. Chickens lose out... And we've been canning and canning and drying and drying and the freezer is full of giant bags of tomatoes.

We have been overwhelmed with melons. We had two hills of Haogen and one of Chanterais, and they are producing dozens and dozens of small melons. Most I've had before in a year was about 6, and that only in greenhouses! They are a bit watery, I think, but sweet and fragrant.

The cucumbers were very prolific, but the powdery mildew has pretty much stopped them at this point. The chickens did win out with cucumbers, there was no way to even hope to keep up. The Poona keera wasn't that great, and even Mideast Peace wasn't as delicious as I recall.

While the tomatillos did okay, the were particularly badly located between the rather aggressive melons and the peppers. So I haven't been paying much attention to them. Still short on good recipes to use them.

We are still picking green beans, in spite of more in the freezer than I had targetted. While I still love Rattlesnake the best, the other ones - I don't recall, Oregon Blue lake and/or Kentucky Wonder - were considerably more productive. A lesson: even when you think you have reached perfection, in bean variety or whatever, you still might be wrong.

The storage onions were a reasonable crop, although smaller than I'd like to see, but there was less bolting than usual. They went out late, but were really affected by slugs early on.
Sweet onions did very poorly; I tried a new ways of starting the seeds that did not work well, and they didn't recover.

I planted four types of potatoes; Yukon Gold (our old fav), Carola, German Butterball and a purple potatoe. While I did do some early harvesting, it looks like the yields from the yukon gold are so much lower than carola and butterball, and butterball seems to have yielded better than carola. The butterball was the latest, though, the vines weren't entirely dead when I dug the patch. I just don't know if Yukon Gold is really what I should be planting, except for new potatoes.

Corn did pretty well, the second planting was not nearly as good as the first. Not sure why. Possibly the giant borage plant was siphoning off the N. The bees sure loved the borage. We had to ripe it out so Sophie could get the vole that ate one of the squashes.

The winter squash plants seems to have done very well - we haven't eaten any yet - but there are a lot of squashes out there. The butternut started fruiting very late so I'm not sure if all of them are ripe. Several of the plants have pretty much succumbed to the powderly mildew. I damaged an unripe tetsukabuto so we harvested and prepared it as a summer squash and it was very nice, much more flavorful than zucchini. Been meaning to pick off the small butternuts and try... but there's too many tomoatoes.

We grew Costata Romanesco and Magda summer squashes, reputed to be delicious, but they were just another blah zucchini. I've never seem as large leaves on a squash as on the Costata, though. I had to hack it back to save some carrots.

A dud year for cilantro - nothing that didn't bolt immediately. But I've never got a good crop of cilantro in summer, so my aspirations are low.

The one area that feel really short was peppers. I think the cool weather - it was a very cool summer well into August - stunted them. And the slugs were serious problems, eating off the tops of several plants as well as ruining more peppers than we've been able to harvest.
The King of the North seems to be making a late play for a good crop, and the Cuneo that were under remay for seed saving are large. But otherwise it's been thin; no green chile relish this year. I did have enough green Jalapenos to figure out a jalapeno hot pepper sauce like the Tabasco one we love. I hope I can collect another pound of jalapenos to make another batch. They keep turning red.

Sustainable Food Choices

This is an article I wrote some years ago, but it's not on the SPRG website any more, so I figured I should make sure it's not lost.
We are up to our eyeballs in tomatoes - best year ever for heirlooms, although they are all very late.

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Sustainable Food Choices

This is an area where the individual can do a great deal. We all eat, and collectively our eating habits have a huge impact on the world. 10% of all the energy used in the US goes to producing, processing shipping, and cooking food.

Eating more local and more in season is the biggest impact. The average food item travels 1500 miles to your table. Eating out of season almost guarentees that the food will have come from far away - I've seen peppers from Israel and Apples from New zealand in the store, just in the produce section. Does our food need to travel more than we do?

It can be hard to find out if grocery store food is local; reading labels helps. Buying something made in Portland rather than New York isn't huge but it's going in the right direction. If you are inclined, asking the grocery store where items come from. Making it clear that you, the shopper, wants local food, will eventually push the stores to respond, although I'd expect the Co-op to be more responsive than Albertsons.

Buying from the grower's market and asking the farmer will assure you have local food with minimal transportatation. It will be fresher and therefor more nutritious. It supports the small farmer who needs it more than agribiz. You could also join a CSA and get a weekly basket of fresh vegetables - this is easier for the farmer who can plan ahead.

Even better, grow your own! That reduces the transport of your food down to a few yards. Grow basic crops in the right season and they are easy to grow. Again this is where if we all do it, it makes a huge difference - one lettuce plant isn't much, but if everyone in Ashland (pop. 26,000 or so) grew one lettuce plant each, that is a whole lot of lettuce.

Plus you know exactly how it's been grown. Even those so-called organic
standards now have loopholes you could thow a dog through. The most healthy food is the fresh food you've grown yourself and picked moments before eating. It's also the most delicious.

Speaking of organic, buying organic is a good thing. It may cost more but
voting with our dollars is important and food is cheap in the big picture. But don't feel too warm fuzzy about it in the big picture of sustainability and climate change. A lot of this organic food is grown on mega-farms where they use twice as much machinery and oil to make up for not using chemicals. It's certainly better for you to eat, and poisons the planet less, but a lot of organic food production isn't in any way really sustainable.

The less processed the food you eat, the less processing (which equals energy use and factories) is needed. This does involves changing our preferences - raw apples or applesauce or frozen apple pie? Making your own soup rather than buying soup is a tricker calculation, but eating more foods raw as nature provided, or barely cooked, is a sure win.

As an aside, you can make your own solar oven, or buy a nice one for about $250, which will bake and steam very nicely and not use any extra power at all.

Changing our preferences isn't fun, we like what we like, but we can do it if we think about the true costs. You can eat all the in season strawberries you like, but when they aren't in season you have the choice of trucking them from Mexico or processing. While strawberries are delicious, we don't really *need* to eat strawberries in January. Waiting for a special food to come in season used to be one of the special delights of the year. If you can always get them, they aren't special, right? So while it feels like giving up something we enjoy in life, it's also putting that something on a pedestal and perhaps enjoying it a little bit more as a result.

This applies to non-local foods too. Tropical foods like mangos are less special when you can buy then any time - so think of the airplane fuel and don't buy them. If you love mangos, buy them only for special occassions, you will enjoy them much more for the waiting.

Buy in bulk, too, whenever possible. Packaging is pure waste, even if some of it is recyclable, that doesn't excuse all the energy and materials that went into manufacturing it and printing all sorts of designs on it and shipping it empty, filling it, shipping it to the store... you get the picture. If you do have the opportunity to buy bulk, bring your own containers or bags. And of course bringing canvas bags whereever you shop means less packaging.

If you can't buy bulk, you can buy in larger containers - those individual small packages of raisins or juice have a great deal more package for the same amount of contents than a large single box. Usually the larger quantity costs less too, so it's win-win, as long as it's something you will use before it goes bad. Or freeze it.

Figure out how to not waste food. A study in Scandanavia found more than half the food that's purchased is thrown away. This seems to disagree with the buy large packages suggestion, but it's really depends on what you are doing now, where the easy wins are for you and your family - if a lot of food spoils in your fridge, maybe consider making some effort in this area. Observe your shopping and eating habits. Take a few things out of the grocery cart before you check out; supress your impluse to buy food. Make an extra effort to eat what is in the fridge before it goes bad. You can also get a dog, or chickens, or start a worm bin, or even just a compost pile, to deal with the waste - but far better not to have that food grown somewhere, shipped all around carefully refrigerated, handled in the store, and cooked: just for the worms.

Eating "low on the food chain" - plants rather than animals - is also good. There's an inherent loss in feeding a cow or chickens, they use a fair amount of the food to walk around and moo or squawk. Industrially produced animal products (including milk and eggs as well as meat) come from animals that are treated very badly and is neither sustainable, moral or healthy.

However, animals can also eat things that we don't care for (like grass) and scraps like carrot tops. Animals can lead enjoyable lives on small farms. If you eat meat, seek out animals raised in these more sustainable ways.

Learn to cook from more basic foods. For example, while canned beans are handy, it's not that much more work to soak and cook dried beans - just a matter of learning and practice. Baking bread isn't hard either, and the results are better tasting, cheaper and much more rewarding than store bought.

Try new kinds of foods - sustainable local foods - learn about native and wild edibles. Try unusual things in your salad; sorrel soup is a french delicacy that's made from a perennial weed. Try serving millet with dinner. Go wild and learn how to process acorns for food. I don't know that this is so really a suggestion for individual action for sustainability, but it's a way to get in touch on a whole new level with food and history and the land that supports us.

Lisa Almarode 2006

Paths and garden growing

One question I don't really see asked is how wide paths should be between raised beds. I don't actually have an answer. I like to use a 3' wide path, but once the plants start growing there is no path left. And this is just potatoes and kohlrabi. A 4' wide main path is wide enough for walking now (the zucchini only takes up about half the space), but that's partly since onions are well behaved and beets don't stick out more than a foot or so. In the tomato area, I left 5' between rows, and there's just about enough space to walk; at least half the plants have stuck branches several feet out into the path. I've done hard pruning of the tomatoes at the ends where there's a 3' path, so I can walk, but a couple of days later there's another branch in my face.

The squash of course have eaten the path, and are invading everywhere. All that plenty-of-space was nothing like enough. The cucumbers are invading the onions, the melons are overwhelming the tomatatillos, which are leaning over to menace the peppers; those poor peppers that have a 5' high wall of squash vines massing on their border.

But I'm happy that all the plants are happy, and we can eat as much zucchini as we want, the potatoes are ready, there's cucumbers, beans, beets, onions and all sort of good things to eat.

More on ducks and slugs

What a year it has been for slugs! Wow, they are big and everywhere. Not just us, either, almost everyone I've talked to says this is one of the worst years. I even lost a tomato plant to slugs - this was shocking; I didn't even know that would be a problem, earwigs never bother tomato plants. And tiny slugs were eating off the onions and corn seedlings, too (as well as everything else).

But there is a solution. Our ducks are 6 weeks old now. From day 1 (well, day 3) they have been eating slugs - I have to pick them off the plants for them, but they do the hard part. Even tiny little ducklings a few days old will tackle any size slug, although I worried a lot about choking when they were smaller. They can eat an awful lot of slugs and are always ready for more. I can't wait until they can start harvesting their own.

It would have been a very discouraging spring without the ducks... at least there is some up-side to the slug invasion. Picking slugs has some advantages over earwigs... low-tech, no vacuum needed; slugs don't run very fast; and they often come out before dark.

Other than that, we are up to 4 sheep, who are not keeping up with the grass at all; chickens are laying, meat chickens ready to go to the butcher; the garden is in and growing, and the slugs are really not too much trouble any more. Things really are beautiful and bounteous here!

Ancona ducks, from Boondockers farm, south of Eugene. From the left; Duckie, Bill, Donald, Cenk, Ping, and Ryan, and the 7th, Quacky, is not apparently in the photo. (unless I have mixed up Quacky and Ryan)

Seed companies

So, now that I'm living only 15 miles from Nichol's Garden Nursery, I have a chance to pop in. (It's actually much more inconvenient for me since we move - I used to drive past Nichols twice a month during daylight hours, and it was well positioned for a break from driving. Oh well). Anyway, I've been having less than warm feelings about Nichols since about 2007, when Monsanto bought Semenis and I took a strong position against Semenis seeds. I wrote to Nichols and they weren't very helpful, they were relucant to clarify sources on their various varieties. I had a little better luck with Territorial, perhaps since I stopped in their store in person when the product manager happened to be around and we looked up some varieties in his system.

Anyway, now I learn that Nichols is phasing out the Semenis varieties, that they are no going to be carrying them. The Semenis varieties are on a separate rack, away from the regular seeds. This is good; I feel much better about them and trusting them for something as important as the very source of our food!

And I think it's wonderful that we have seed companies so close! Oregon is blessed with many wonderful small seed companies as well as larger ones like Nichols and Territorial/Abundant Life. One I've found recently is Adaptive Seeds. These folks are pretty close to us (as the crow flies, there's some hills between). They are big advocates of seed saving and have a wonderful instruction book: Seed Saving 'zine.

I've also discovered that Tom Wagner, the seed breeder who came up with Green Zebra (as well as many other well-known tomato varieties), is around here, Washington state somewhere, breeding tomatoes and potatoes. Tom Wagner's blog He will sell an assortment of seed potatoes from his breeding lines. It's tempting, but we are so fussy about potatoes.

And finally short plugs for Peace Seedlings/Peace Seeds (I'm not sure why these are distinct) and for Wild Garden Seed.

I don't really need more seed this year, though, I already have more than I can possibly use

Ducks, cold and rain and slugs

Some years ago in southern oregon we tried raising ducks (it was during the period where Jay had to limit me to one new species per month). We got 3 Khaki Campbells and raised them in the master shower in the mobile home. They were very stinky. They were nervous and high-strung. They got moved to the orchard, where they messed up the tree mulch. Their wading pool water was always filthy. One lost to a hawk, one disappeared, so we got 3 Indian Runners. They were even more nervous, and at least two of them were males resulting in some inapproproiate behavior :-). Finally we gave them away to someone with a pond. It was Not A Success.

So, moving ahead 8 years and 200 miles, to the Willamette valley. I'm reading Deppe's book, "the resiliant gardener". She's in Corvallis, less then 30 miles from me, so her observations are more relevant to me than they used to be. She points out that ducks eat slugs. Hey, we have lots of slugs here, all over the greens! She notes ducks like rainy weather. Well, we have that in spades now! It won't stop raining! She claims not all ducks are nervous and unfriendly - well, we'll wait and see, but perhaps I've been unfair to duckdom. Hey, you can eat ducks! Last go round, I was still pretty much vegetarian; but now we've learned how to smoke poultry, which makes even fatty meat like turkey legs delicious.

Our ducks used to hide their eggs in the grass and they were always filthy, so I'm not that enthusiastic about duck eggs, but they are a bonus.

Jay has always liked ducks, and I guess he's on duty to change their water. Ducks do have the ability to hang out and be happy in a way chickens never are. I think ducks are type B personalities, while chickens are type As and are only happy when they have projects to work on. Perhaps I identify too much with the chickens...