bringing in the harvest!

We have started to harvest the first vegetables from our raised garden bed! It was with more than a little pride and a lot of bragging that I cut a bok choy and a lettuce late this afternoon. I had to hurry a little as a storm was coming in, with the full lightning and thunder chorus, but it was been weeks since we have had any rain, so it was a welcome sign. It did rain, but not as much as we would have liked. Maybe more tomorrow.

We had the bok choy for dinner tonight, and the lettuce will be part of my lunch tomorrow. Fresh, organic loveliness!

Retaining moisture in your garden

Moisture retention is becoming more important as the cost of water increases and the availability decreases.  Climate change is likely to exacerbate these issues. Building humus in the soil becomes the most rewarding strategy to reduce moisture loss.

Humus improves soil structure and seriously increases your moisture holding capacity, If you can increase the humus levels by just 1% then every square metre of the soil can now retain 17 litres more water.

Composting is an excellent way to build humus, but you might also consider green manure crops whenever there is a chance. When green manure is dug back into the soil, the organisms convert the organic matter into humus. My strategy is to use Instant Humus, to encourage humus production.Yes, it is a product we sell, but it works so well! 

The most successful commercial composting system in the world is called CMC composting and it has some important lessons for the home gardener as well. It has been found that the addition of  10% clay has proven to produce a form of stable humus that can continue offering benefits for up to 35 years!

If you can’t access a friable clay, then you might add some soil or Soft Rock Phosphate.

More from The Dirty Life

Excerpt from The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball (page 58)

By the time we’d gotten to Essex, his notion of a whole-diet CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] was complete. He wanted to build a farm that was so diversified it could supplant the supermarket, the kind of farm our great-grandparents’ generation grew up on, but built big enough to feed a community instead of a family. We would produce everything our members needed, beginning with the edible – a variety of meats, eggs, milk and dairy products, grains and flours, vegetables, fruits and at least on kind of sweetner- but expanding, eventually to all the other things a farm could provide, like firewood and building materials, and exercise and recreation. The farm itself should be a self-sustaining organism, producing as much as possible, its own energy, fertility and resources…He still liked the idea of a cash-free economy, but he recognized the need for capital, in the start-up phase at least. Members would pay us one price up front, and there would be a sliding scale for low-income members that would slide all the way down to zero.

My vegetable garden: my ultimate wellness tool

My vegetable garden is my ultimate wellness tool.

Access to nutrient dense, chemical free food which can be consumed within minutes of harvest is not only incredibly beneficial to our health, but also nurtures our spirit and mental well being. We can spend a lifetime building financial security and making plans for the good life, but if we don’t enjoy good physical and mental health it is all for nothing.

Additionally, nothing can compare with the forgotten flavours and extended shelf life linked to the “champagne food” that we can produce in our very own backyards.

Honestly, one of the greatest joys I have in my life is working in my garden. I can leave the stress of the world on the other side of the fence while I work with the good earth.

Sorry if I sound like an evangelist, but I am a true believer in home food production for a number of reasons, and not just for the health benefits.

• Food security is very topical these days and a home garden, no matter what size, is one form of self reliance. Additionally, we have all experienced rising food prices recently, especially since the floods earlier this year, and the home vegetable plot is one way to combat the increasing pressures on the food budget.

• The family that gardens together grows together! Introduce your children to gardening and you will have gifted them a lifetime of pleasure and well being, not to mention a healthy lifestyle that includes good food, exercise and sunshine! Our own children have very fond memories of working in the garden with their grandparents and that is something precious that no one can ever take from them.

• Building the levels of organic material (humus!) in your own backyard can be an important personal contribution to combat global warming. A 1% increase represents 20 tonnes per hectare of carbon dioxide that is now stored in the soil, rather than in the atmosphere!

• Every 1% of organic matter we build in our soil equates to an increased water holding capacity of 17 litres per square metre. Better humus is the secret to drought proofing our gardens and reducing our water consumption. Now is the time to prepare for the next drought!

how does my garden grow?

Our vegetable garden is progressing leaf by leaf, tendril by tendril. All the plants have experienced some growth. The beans and peas have really zoomed ahead, but all the plants appear very strong and healthy. I have just watered them every second day, all they respond with strong green growth.

Isn't nature wonderful? We just give a little loving care and look how we are repaid!

There is new life in the soil for every man. There is healing in the trees for tired minds and for our overburdened spirits, there is strength in the hills, if only we will lift up our eyes. Remember that nature is your great restorer.CALVIN COOLIDGE, speech, Jul. 25, 1924

starting a new project

The raised bed kits were on special, so we got two for the usual price of one! Twice the excitement!
I wanted to race and set them up, but Sunday had other things marked in its diary, so it may need to wait a day or two. However, the project can't be postponed too long, because I may have already a few things to plant...

Heirloom tomatoes : Black Russian!

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

Don’t play with your dinner; or how to pluck a chicken!

Chickens roaming the back yard in their chicken tractor is quite the fashionable thing for many a suburban garden these days. We all know how the chickens eat insects and provide us with lovely chicken poo for our gardens.

However, few people stop to think about other uses for these chickens  - chicken meat. Poultry. Sunday dinner.  It is the one way to really know that your chicken is organic!

As I child I was quite familiar with my Dad plucking the chicken that was to be our dinner the next day as my parents kept a chicken coop for most of my childhood. We soon learned not to get too attached to the fluffy little chickens that arrived on a regular basis. Lesson number one : Don’t play with your dinner!

These memories all came flooding back today as I was browsing through our bookshelves and came across a little book titled, Back in the Day by Michael Powell as he devotes two pages to the procedure of plucking a chicken.

Powell starts with a warning that plucking a chicken is “messy and smelly”, and I must confess that I can still smell the chicken and feather aroma after my father had dipped them in hot water. A necessity if one wants to raise chickens for the table  

Procedure for Plucking a Chicken

1. After killing the chicken, hold it upside down by the feet and submerge it in a container of very hot water for between five and ten seconds, making sure that you soak all the feathers thoroughly (any longer and the bird will begin to cook), This loosens the feathers so that they can be plucked more easily.

2. Grab handfuls of feathers and pull to remove. The flight feathers on the wings and the tail feathers are the most difficult to remove, so begin with these and then move on to the rest of the bird.

3. Some birds are easy to pluck and can be stripped back within minutes; others may have many pinfeathers and take longer.

4. An old bird needs to dipped longer than a young bird. When plucking a young bird be careful not to rip its skin, which is more tender than in older birds.

5. Killing birds before the cold weather sets in is recommended as they will have less pinfeathers.

6. Wearing textured rubber gloves will give you more friction with which to grab the feathers.

7. Singe off the most difficult pinfeathers by passing the bird over an open fire.

Powell suggests skinning the bird taking off skin and feathers at the same time as an alternative, but this can lead to a dry chicken when cooking.

Powell provides no recommendations as to how to “wield the axe” to arrive at the dead bird, nor does he provide further instruction on gutting and preparing the bird for cooking.

Some things are best left to the imagination, I think! I buy my organic chicken from the butcher!

Back in the Day: 101 things everyone used to know how to do by Michael Powell, pp54,55.

Finally got out to the fruit trees and picked the lemons and limes. It has been our best season yet for lemons. I must have picked about 3 dozen very large lemons and there are more on the tree yet to ripen. The limes are steadily ripening on the tree, but the crop is not as big as last year as we pruned the tree back hard as it was getting too tall for a suburban yard. It is wonderful to know that no chemicals have been used on the fruit, and the only water used was rain water or grey water from the washing machine. We feel a real sense of achievement in our small crop.

So I guess I should turn my mind to …. marmalade