Bountifulness

Hummus might not be what most people want for Sunday dinner, but I didn't have enough energy after a full day moving greenhouses, etc. to make falafel, my orginal plan (I'm haven't got a good recipe or techinque, but I keep trying). But to go along with it I made a salad, a kind of spring-variant greek salad, and it was something special about going out and harvesting for this.

There's fresh garlic (chinese pink, a very early garlic) for the hummus, but most of the rest of that was purchased. I did soak the chickpeas and cook them in the sun oven.

For the salad, I picked snap peas, broccoli, a few carrots, a walla walla onion and some romaine type lettuce. It was a special pleasure to walk around the garden and put this and that into the harvest bucket! After so long when it seems like more goes in than comes out... although we did just eat the last of last year's potatoes for lunch today, so I guess I shouldn't complain. For the salad, the harder vegetables got steamed a bit, and then some cider vinger and olive oil. We stuffed all in homemade pitas, and the flavors really were wonderful.

There's bounty all year in the garden or from the garden, if you plan ahead and accept the differences that the seasons bring. There's a special sense of bountifulness in fall, when the vegetables are root cellared, or dried, frozen, canned; or waiting patiently in the garden for harvest. And even in early spring, the bounty of salad greens and delectable green shoots and leaves. But the bounty of summer, the abunance of plants growing passionately with the all the different varieties of textures and flavors and shapes, well, it's hard to beat. For me as well, this is a time where the abundance does not come with directly-related pressure. We eat peas, broccoli, and sweet onions only fresh, lettuce we don't save, and carrots and garlic can wait much longer before being dealt with - there's no looming chore of putting-by, just picking and eating.

Not that I'm not hugely busy - trying to save the squash and beans from the quintuple threat of striped cucumber beetles, earwigs, slugs, spotted cucumber beetles and squash bugs. But more on that later.

Wheat

I usually grow a little plot of wheat. You can get 10# of wheat berries from a 5x20 plot, it's not enough to live on, but that is a few loaves of bread, and it's quite fulfilling. I also try different kinds of wheat (winter wheat, spring wheat, kamut, stone age, etc.) and different ways of growing it (plug trays, broadcast).

The kinds I grow are fairly easy to tresh and winnow, although it's hard to get all the bits of stem out of the grain. I suppose it adds fiber... We use an electric grain mill to make flour and from that bake bread. It's perfectly nice bread, perhaps a bit dark and heavy, even using 100% home grown wheat. But we like dark interesting breads.


Tall, non-awned wheat

I believe it is SS 791 from Bountiful Gardens. This from saved seed that I grew out from 2005-2006 (I think). It germinated slower than the other.



And this is the shorter, awned wheat. This, I believe, Hard Red Winter from Bountiful Gardens. (I could have these backwards).
You can see a little of the tall wheat to the left.

The last time I grew these varities, I don't remember a differnence in the plots, but the non-awned was a little easier to thresh, the grains were a little larger, but the yield was a little less than the awned.

This year, the difference is dramatic. Both were planted in the same bed, same number of plants (transplanted from 244-plug trays), at the same time with the same spacing, and treated the same (i.e. ignored). The awned wheat is been yellow and unhappy, while the non-awned grows tall and green. I counted tillers (stalks with seed heads) on a particularly healthy looking plant of each; the non-awned one had about 20 tillers, while the anwed one had almost 80! If I'd heavily fertilized the awned wheat, it could have really gone to town with production.

I think this is the heart of the "green revolution", both the good and the bad. Yes, the right variety when treated optimally will give you a much better yield. But equally, if you can't give it all the fertilizer it craves and demands, perhaps the old traditional varieties have a use. It's too soon to see how they will yield.

And I would never have though two types of winter wheat would be so different. I wonder if they taste different?

Weather

The weather has been very weird this year. We had an unusually cold spell in spring (20 degrees in late March), and unusally hot spell in mid-May (broke 100). And this week totally unexpected heavy rain - the official tallies are too far away to apply, but we've had at least 2" of rain in the past week. We probably had half an inch today only - never thought I'd be digging drainage ditches on May 31.

Usually I have good luck with Feburary or March planted carrots, but I checked today and many of them are bolting. Well, who can blame them - it's been cold and hot enough to fool a vegetables (I'm confused too). There were a couple of ones almost big enough to eat - there is nothing like fresh garden carrots!

The reason for the ditches is for the tomatoes - tomatoes can get root rot in waterlogged soil. A few plants aren't looking very good after a week of downpour. Hopefully the new ditches will let the soil water level sink fast enough that they can recover. And a few dry days would help a lot.

Sitting inside (it was raining too hard even for gore-tex) I found a great site,
http://organictobe.org/. Who knew that Gene Logsdon had a blog? He wrote the Gardener's Guide to soil that my Dad gave me so many years ago, and the Small Scale Grains book (and many other books). And Roselind Creasy and several others who's names I'm not familar with.

Back to the garden - it's almost all planted now, the peppers went in today in between the rain showers, under shade cloth to keep them warmer. We got more of the flimsy little tomato cages - while silly for tomatoes, they work great for peppers, and support the shade cloth. The only starts left to plant are a two more tomatatillos, a couple of squash (maybe one's a cucumber), and a bunch of basils. And the upper beds got de-grassed and sheetmulched borders, so the invading grasses should be easier to eliminate. I might have time to move the broody hens to another coop, rig some nest boxes, and see if they can set some eggs decently. They are doing a very poor job in the regular coop.

Cooking fat and rendering lard

One of the problems of trying to produce all your own food is cooking fat. We do a lot of saute and stir fry; it seems like every thing I cook starts with saute an onion in olive oil. While I have two little olive trees, which have produced a few olives, I was baffled when I picked the olives to figure out where this olive oil might be. The olives produced a bit of whitish juice that did not much resemble olive oil. When the trees are larger perhaps with many more olives it will make some sense.

There are directions online for making a seed press from a hydraulic jack doing some welding.
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/oilpress.html.
You grind up your sunflower seeds, hull and all, and press. It would take a lot of sunflowers, though; a few plants yield a rather piddly amount of seeds. In a few years perhaps nuts will be a source.

We can make butter from the goat's milk, but it's not abundant (goat's milk is naturally homogenized so you don't get much) and we'd eat it up as butter rather than waste it on cooking.

I've rendered chicken (and turkey) fat but it has a sticky mouthfeel and a chicken flavor. It's not impossible, just distracting. Lamb fat isn't nice looking at all and doesn't smell nice. I don't even like it for soap making, the smell lingers.

But lard may be a good solution. This weekend I pulled out 10 or 15 pounds of pork fat trimmings that the butcher returned with our half-pig (not all from our half; apparently most people just let the fat be thrown away). I ground it up to extract the fat, lard. I'm quite impressed with how friendly this fat is; it's barely solid at refridgerator temperature, has little flavor, no stickiness. I got several gallons and froze much of it. I hear you can make the best piecrusts from lard. I heard that about chicken fat too, but I couldn't picture an apple pie with chicken-flavored crust. The lard might actually work.

I tried continuing the rendering process to make cracklings. This resulted in lard with a carmellized fragrance, a nice flavor for savory food but not for piecrust. It also resulted in a lot of unpleasant fatty cracklings. Perhaps I'm not doing it right but it wasn't worth it.

While it's hard to imagine us raising regular pigs (mature pigs grow to over 1000lbs), there is a endangered heritage breed of pig that says pretty small (topping out about 250lbs) and are more adaptable to pasture. Traditional pigs put on a lot of fat, since the lard was a very desireable yield back before Crisco. Modern pigs are bred to be leaner (and per "Animals in Translation" lean pigs are also nervous and poor breeders"). So an old breed, bred to be fat and peaceful and easy to keep, and smaller, bred for the old-fashioned multi-purpose farm.... it might be perfect again for the New Peasant.

Earth Day

Our Local Earth Day event is a big deal for the permaculture group. It's a fair held on the saturday closest to Earth Day. The permaculture group has a table and passes out brochures and we talk to lots of people about permaculture, and it's fun to see lots of people we know, there's an especially get to see a lot of people we know from other sustainability groups. Unfortunately, many years it's cold, windy and miserable outside and a exercise in endurance to spend the entire day there. This year was predicted to be worse than ever, colder and rainier; but as it turned out, the sun was out and wind wasn't too bad, although it was rather chilly. The predicted storm held off until just after the event; by 5:30 it was snowing fairly hard (for late April, even a little snow counts as extremely hard), and we woke up to a snowy view on Sunday.

The local seed saver's exchange idea is getting more and more concrete. Everyone I've talked to thinks it's a great idea... I got a domain (they were on sale for 8.95) so the draft is up at www.seedsave78.org. There are still a few people I'd like to talk to about it, and I need to do some legwork to collect information. Once spring is a little less intense, this should come together and we'll have a kickoff party.

On the real Earth Day (the 22nd, Tuesday), I traditionally plant a tree. There are at least a dozen trees in pots behind the greenhouse... I wonder if they will ever all get planted. It's like those odd items in the bottom of the laundry bin that never seem to get washed.