Lots of work, not so much produce

Spring is really here, and the warm weather makes me realize just how far behind I am! I don't have time to think, never mind blog... but here are some random garden observations.

I started almost 300 tomato plants (for about 18 people). Previous years it was in the 100 range. 300 is over the edge where the transplant-twice system works, and with so many people and so many varities organization is key. I'm organized, but not organized enough. I started starting on March 1 and the last ones were started on April 5. The early starts are nice and big, the late march ones are wimpy, the april 5 ones are teeny; although it's still some days short of the traditional tomato-safe day which is May 15. But I think for me, first week of March is ideal.

I ran out of pots (of course), so I tried newspaper pots again. Last time I wasn't too impressed. But this time I had lots in newspaper pots and pushed them close together, and the tomatoes did very well - I think since the newspaper stayed wet. The roots came right through the pots! I don't really like the official potmaker - I still need to tape the bottom about half the time. So any old jar will do just as well.

This year, like last year, I didn't have enough onions started. I started seeds in flats as early as January. Some of the early plantings were last years seed and didn't germinate well (onion seeds are like that). I think I need to start in December or something, though, if they are going to be large and robust by April.

"longkeeper" tomatoes lasted until April 1, at which time I said forget it and gave the rest to the chickens. Amazing.

For some reason the earwigs are late this year, and the chard is nice looking. We're eating a lot of chard. Well, to be honest, we're eating a lot of pizza, since we don't have time to cook :-) but when we do cook, there's just greens (and frozen, canned or dried stuff). There are a few potatoes left (getting sprouty) and some squash. We've had a couple of stalks of asparagus, but our bed is still young and the first shoots are like knitting needles (size 5). The first non-leafy-green I generally get is kohlrabi, which is just the stem of a green; we might be just a couple of weeks away for that. It takes forever for the carrots and beets to be ready and the peas are still only about 6" high. And there's rhubard, but that's not a proper vegetable.

Busy, busy - life as a dairymaid

Spring is still a couple of weeks away, but it seems like I'm already way, way behind. Behind on seed starting, tree planting, digging, you name it, I'm behind. I blame it on the goats - milking two goats and coping with the milk takes time - half an hour twice a day, plus making cheese (even with other things done in the elapsed time, it's at least an hour per gallon of milk/pound of cheese), then the laundry and dishwasher to keep the milking materials clean; it's a 10 to 15 hour a week part-time job. We are getting 4-6 pounds, twice a day; so about 9 gallons a week. We do enjoy the fresh milk; we used to go through about a gallon a week. Having lots of yogurt is nice; it's thinner than store bought yogurt, as expected (they do all sorts of tricky things to make yogurt thicker, gelatin and modified food starch and all that). It makes great lassi, though. You can drain it to make a type of cheese, but it's easier to just make cheese in the first place.

I make a lot of chevre. It's very easy; just add culture and rennet, let it sit for 24 hours, then drain. It's rather dull by itself, we try adding it to quiche and pasta sauce, but it remains plain. It really needs to be made into cheesecake :-). To get over the plainness, I've been experimenting adding garlic, herbs and things to it; Jay's a big fan of the garlic. The other type of cheese I can make reliably (well, usually - todays isn't looking good - if you forget to add the lipase before the rennet, just give it up...) is feta. I have been experimenting with a cheddar recipe; I'm not happy with the way my cheese press works, so I've not been even trying to get something I can age for 6 months! But every so often, my not-pressed-enough, lightly aged cheese is really delicious. I'm rather taken aback when I cut into one of the many rounds in the fridge and find a tangy, creamy, delicious cheese that works on a sandwich.

I used to make mozzarella a lot, but I haven't done it lately. I'd need to find time to make lasagna to use it up...

Last year I tried making butter from cream from our goat's milk. Goat butter is pure white. It also has very little flavor. It was like crisco, and there didn't seem much point in it for all the work. But the chevre often has a buttery flavor, so I added some chevre culture so some cream (just spooned off the top of the 6 quarts that went into the unlucky batch of feta), left it for a few hours, and the resulting butter actually has a buttery flavor! It's still stark white, but we can learn to live with that.

Permaculture

I first heard about Permaculture around 2000. I actually got the idea when I was thinking about planting my first fruit trees, and getting my first chickens - and the loop between the chickens eating the fruit and the poop being fertilizer sprang into my mind. As I went around telling everyone about this, I was pointed to permaculture and Bill Mollison's "Introduction to Permaculture". I think I photocopied half the book. I tried some of the ideas, mostly with rather indifferent success, and I didn't think about it too much.

I finally took the official PDC (permaculture design course) last year, in 2005. This did change my perspective quite a lot.

Since then, I've had some seemingly endless discussions about what permaculture actually is. It's kind of like arguing with myself before I took the course . Some things about permaculture, or at least the culture surrounding permaculture, really bothers a lot of people. And some of the techniques sound great, but it's unclear how practical they really are if you just want to feed yourself and others. And I can understand all this, since these same thing used to bother me. Now I can ignore the sillier suggestions, and ignore the "culture", and just apply permaculture and use the skills, in as many ways as I can.

Permaculture is a way of looking at the problems and working on solutions that are nature-derived and inspired (water flows downhilll, bugs eat plants); rather than the rather determinisitic, authoritarian way that is embedded in our culture (the water will flow where I want it, or else! Kill all the bugs, no matter what the cost!). There is a simple ethic; and some principles (between 10 and 50, depending on who you listen to) that are useful thinking points (like each element should perform multiple functions, or edges are the most diverse and productive parts). That's what I use of permaculture. There are also any number of ideas and techniques, and many people seem to associate these techniques with Permaculture and insist these techniques are the by-all and end-all of it. But if that was all, well, they are fine and grand ideas but they must take quite a bit of tuning to get the technique actually working right.

It's been a year since my course, I was helping with registration for the 2006 course that's started, which has got me thinking about what differences the course might have actually made, on the ground. Most things are about the same, frankly - the biggest change was involvement in community, we met a number of interesting people who have similar interests, which is wonderful. I started a website for the local permaculture group (the siskiyou permaculture resources group): http://www.sprg.info; and a yahoo mailing list (sprg). I've tried a few more techniques, with indifferent success :-) Planted a lot of trees and plants in hedgerows. I feel more strongly about eating diverse plants and that weeds may be edible too. More encouraged to leave areas wild, rather than neatening everything up. I examine and care about various individual weeds. Some has been validation and deeper understanding of why some of the things we're doing already is good. The most useful part has been in thinking about the layout issues - deciding where to put the garden, where to put rainwater cachement tanks, how to handle drainage ditches, is easier with some design criteria.

And I'm more aware of this particular place, of Fairweather Farm, as an entirely unique place, not like any place described in any book, so I should observe carefully and consider what I see and experience as more important than what I read in books or find on the web. Who knows our soil, who knows the wind here, who really understand how dry it gets in summer? Even other parts of Ashland are quite different in soil and water and wind. We all have to observe our own gardens, and learn from them, there is no book or teacher that can replace that.

The Future of Food

There's a documentary out called "The Future of Food", which someone loaned to us recently. While I'd known about the creeping dangers of GMO and agribusiness, this documentary really makes it clear how systematic and organized the system is: the government, the courts, and Monsanto and the rest of agribusiness are setting up a system that will make it virtually impossible for farmers to not live indebted or owned by big chemical companies, and give us no choice about what's available for the consumer to eat. I have a renewed mistrust of any bit of food that I didn't grow myself; organic food is better, but it's still probably not a good idea to trust anything. And what about eating when I'm away from home? I don't eat fast food, but even at nicer restaurants: what's really in the corn chips or the tofu?

It seems to be much worse in the US than other countries; other countries have wisely rejected or required labelling on GMO foods. I think we are so out of touch with where food comes from, and have had our taste buds dulled if not killed outright by fast food (I read recently that one quarter of all meals in the US are fast food), that we are more vulnerable to the transformation of our food supply into something that does not fill the needs of healthy support for our bodies, nor healthy support for the land, and utterly ignores the future in favor of making a little cash today.

I strongly recommend everyone try to see this documentary, although it's pretty depressing. We all need to be aware of what we eat and vote with our food dollars against this evil.

Scaling up the garden

Our climate is mild enough that we can grow a lot of vegetables outside over the winter without much in the way of protection. But mere lack of single-digit temps doesn't mean that we get enough sunshine in winter to actually allow plants to grow and for example put out new leaves; what's there in mid-October is as much as you get. If your aim is to grow all your own vegetables, you have to make sure to plant what seems like an unreasonable quantity. For the average person (well, at least for me), 6 kale plants seems like an awful lot of kale - and it is, in April. But in December, you can eat them to the ground in a week or two, and then it's store bought veggies for the rest of the winter. In the abundance of midsummer, it's very hard to think ahead to the cold dark days where that kale plant will be precious, and make sure there's a nice, rich spot for them all that won't get too soggy in the rains.

This problem of scale goes for things like onions and potatoes - many (most) people have no idea how many onions or potatoes or garlic they actually eat in a year, and how much that is; yet if you want to grow your own, you need to think on that scale. And that means some awareness of how much you planted last year, so you can tell if you should plant the same next year, or if you need to plant more. And of course, even then, things change from year to year - our potato crop was low this year, my guess is that after replanting tubers for some years we have built up viruses. So new seed potatoes this spring (from Ronningers - organic heirlooms from a family business).
And we are already getting low in potatoes to eat - we're having to eat All-Blue potatoes (which did very well) in the chicken noodle soup, and the potato pancakes, making some dishes look a little surreal (they really are blue - very funky with carrots). We're also low on onions (I saw this coming in June, but the later planted onions did poorly - and interplanting with tomatoes didn't work, the tomatoes ate the onions for breakfast). Fortunately, we do have what appears to be a vast amount of acorn and sweet dumpling squash (from just two hills!). We also have plenty of garlic. Oh, and the jerusalem artichokes, there's no end of those . All we need, really, is the right recipes.

I'm not sure if assuring an even stream of vegetables, without the feast-or-famine, is even possible when gardening, or if someday I'll have that kind of skill. Partly it may be accepting eating the less appealing foods when the good stuff is gone (like those tasteless tomatoes ripening in the pantry, "Longkeeper", and the jerusalem artichokes). But thinking ahead, learning how much you eat, and planting it in spite of how much it looks, is a set of hurdles to overcome or skills to acquire in the process of taking control of your food supply.