Look At My Loot

Seven Years Gold Compost

As Christmas drew near a  friend asked if I his Christmas gift had been delivered. I said no deliveries and then waited every day for my treat to arrive. I did get a Package Too Big notice from the Post Office and picked up this bag of compost that had a mailing label right on the bag. I assumed it was some sort of sample from the Seven Years Gold company, although it did seem an odd time of year to be sending compost samples to Massachusetts.  But when my friend arrived for dinner after Christmas he said he couldn’t wait any longer to tell me what was on its way to me – horse manure!  Seven Years Gold wasn’t a sample it was my friend who paid attention when I said one of the best gifts I had gotten for my first vegetable garden 40 years ago was a load of rotted horse manure. Friends like this are not easy to come by.

Christmas Books

Of course all my friends and family know I love books – and that high cooking and baking season lasts all winter. The stove helps keep the house warm. I was familiar with Nigel Slater (British) from his many inspiring and useful cookbooks, but Yotam Ottolenghi was new to me. Nigel Slater was prompted to write Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch this latest book by his new(ish) passion for gardening. Yotam Ottolenghi’s book, Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi, takes a vegetarian approach. I have already made his flavorful Mushroom and herb polenta. Delicious and easy.  Although I had never heard of Ginette Mathiot or her cookbooks that are considered  the Joy of Cooking of France, I am ready to delve into The Art of French Baking (The definitive guide to home baking by Frances favorite cook book author). I must say the recipes look very easy. We shall see.

Finally, there is a book for bedtime reading. Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is not the anthology of selections I first thought. There are snippets from each of the authors mentioned from Thomas Jefferson and Gertrude Jekyll to humorists like Karel Capek and artists like Robert Dash, but Rogers gives us a sense of the life and personalities of each. I am savoring each section.

Now here is a question. Although not apparent from a photo, two of the cookbooks, Plenty and The Art of French Baking have padded covers. Is this a new trend? A new style in books? Does it make the books more wipe-able?  Any ideas?

Christmas Trees at Kringle Candle Company

This Christmas may be over, but all these gifts, including a candle from the Kringle Candle Company, will keep the memory alive for many years.

ADDENDUM – One way or another I have gotten comments and questions about horse manure – and I found interesting information and comparisons here.

We Love to Eat – Blog Action Day 2011

Heath Schoolhouse Museum

I live in a ruraltown of 750 souls in the western corner of Massachusetts that sits on the Vermont border. On the Fourth of July in 1981 I happened to meet two other friends at the spinning wheel in the town museum. We were celebrating the holiday, but got to complaining that we never went out to dinner, we  couldn’t afford to, and besides there were no good restaurants closer than 40 miles. Actually there were no restaurants  at all closer than 25 miles. So, on the spot, we invented the Heath Gourmet Club that has been meeting ten times a year ever since, beginning that September. We don’t meet in August because we are all too busy with the Heath Fair, and we collapse the November/December dinners into one.

Gourmet Club Anniversary

Here we are celebrating again. Each month the host picks a theme and lets the other four couples know the entree. Then, Sheila, our record keeper, assigns us each a course, appetizers, bread and soup, side, salad, and dessert, or whatever combination suits the meal. Hosting and courses rotate so we all get a chance to do everything.  This keeps down the individual labor and cost for each meal, some of which have been really spectacular. Salmon Coulibiac, Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourginnone, Mock Turtle Soup (made with muskrat), Peking Duck, and many many more. Spanish, Italian, British, African, Japanese, Indonesian and more, especially French. I love French. Sometimes we have Guest Eaters who feel themselves really lucky to be invited.

Obviously we all love to cook and try new things, but we also like to use local produce. Long before we heard of the 100 mile diet we raised our own pork and chickens and eggs, bought good Heath blueberries, apples and milk. We gardened and grew and put up our own vegetables.

Minestrone

We don’t think every meal has to be fancy, but anything made with good healthy ingredients is a pleasure and delight.

Seeds of Solidarity Farm

We have all been able to buy fresh produce at local farms and orchards, but over the past years the number of small farms has increased selling their produce at farmstands and through this new thing called a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture which allows all of us to share in the risk of farming, the unpredictability of weather and pestilence, and farmer’s markets. This increase in the production of local food is good for the farmers, good for the environments, good for the community and good for us of us eaters.

Seeds of Solidarity Farm is a working farm, specializing in greens and garlic, but Ricky also teaches garden workshops and his wife Deb works to create school gardens, and get fresh produce into institutions like schools and hospitals.

Garlic and Arts Festival - The Festival that Stinks

Along with neighbors, Deb and Ricky founded the Garlic and Arts Festival that takes place the first weekend in October. This is a solar powered, grease mobile run, festival. Who cares if it stinks? After the 10,000 people leave and the field is cleaned up, there is only three bags of trash to dispose of. Everything else is composted or recycled. They have proved that we can live more lightly on the land that we usually do. Then they sell some of the compost at the next Festival.

Organizations like CISA have grown up to help farmers be better businessmen and involve all of us in supporting local agriculture.

Annual Harvest Meal in Greenfield, MA

Every year our larger community celebrates the bounty of our area with a giant FREE Harvest Meal. Farmers donate the produce, restauranteurs donate their labor, musicians come and play and we all celebrate. You can make a donation of course, and that money goes to fund vouchers that are given out at the food pantry, to be used at the farmers market. Everyone deserves fresh healthy food. This year 800 people gathered for this feast, some making generous contributions, and others enjoying the meal freely. $4000 was collected for food vouchers.

And everyone deserves to grow their own healthy food. Just Roots is the new Community Farm that has been form on the site of the Greenfield Poor Farm. This is a wonderful opportunity for many people who don’t own land and who like working with others – who can be a real help with advice.

We are fortunate in our area to have Greenfield Community College which is offering a new course this fall on food systems. It is oversubscribed! Read about that here. It is a joy to see the support given to potential farmers.

We wish our good food fortune to everyone. Bon appetit!

For more about Blog Action Day click here.

Weeding and Compost

A 40 foot Herb Bed lies in front of our house where lilies and roses vie for space with rue, parsley, basil, variegated sage and thalictrum at  the west end of the building

past the Welcoming Platform where you can see yarrow, golden marjoram, sage, tarragon, rosemary, Ashfield black stem mint and chives

to the end of the Bed where there is more basil, horseradish, lemon balm and dill that was knocked down by the rain that fell briefly last night. An Herb Bed in August is not a lovely thing because herbs are not neat plants. I have seen photographs of beautifully pruned herbs in simple and symmetrical beds or in complex knotted designs, but I have never seen one in the flesh. I am willing to believe such herb gardens exist, but for the cook and gardener who is only interested in using herbs the herb garden is much more apt to be unruly, but productive and useful.

Today, after at least three weeks without weeding (Life interferred in the most delightful ways) I set to. I filled a wheelbarrow with all manner of weeds, some of them embarrasingly large,  but I am not done yet.  When I have a large amount of biomass which includes roots and seedheads I grit my teeth as I toss the load in the compost pile. I fear that those weeds are not totally dead and will infect the pile. This doesn’t happen, but I get nervous every time.

Birrell Compost Bin

When I visited the Birrell garden in Seattle and saw this compost bin I was instantly struck with compost bin lust. Anyone can make a big practical wooden bin with two segments – and fill both of them, BUT no bin I have ever seen has this unique removal system. Note the bottom two boards with hinges and locks.  When it is time to remove the compost you just lift the locks and open the bottom two boards, making it easy to remove finished compost. What an idea!

Norm and his Can-O-Worms

Norm Hirscheld

Twenty-seven years ago Norm Hirscheld of Greenfield visited a permaculture farm where he met his first red wigglers (Eisenia foetida). “I was awestruck by how you could get rich black compost from vegetable scraps right in your house,” he said.

He decided right then to become a worm farmer himself and built a wooden box, providing holes for ventilation, and put in a sufficient amount of wet shredded newspaper for bedding. He sent away for his pound of worms, but said that first shipment didn’t do very well. He ordered and added more worms: after that they were fine.

Hirscheld faced two probems. First there were fruit flies that found the fruit peels that he put into the bin. He also found that he needed to keep stirring or fluffing up the bedding otherwise there would not be enough oxygen and the bin would begin to smell.

“Marsha was very patient with me and the worms,” Hirscheld said of his wife Marsha Stone. “At times there were so many fruit flies I would have to get out the vacuum and suck them up.”

Eventually he bought the Can-O-Worms system which has worked well for him, though he still has some trouble with fruit flies. To solve this problem he takes a little lemon grass oil and mixes it with water which he periodically sprays over the top of the worms and their bedding.

Can-O-Worms

With the Can-O-Worms system, the worms in the fresh food scraps (no meat or dairy) that are being eaten by the worms are separated from the worm manure, or vermicompost, which is the point of worm farming. Vermicompost is an excellent fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium, potassium and magnesium. Worm castings (manure) also contain humic acids which condition the soil, has perfect pH balance and encourages plant growth the same way seaweed does.

The Can-O-Worms also collects the manure tea that is produced by the worms, the liquid residue. Hirscheld uses this liquid to fertilize his houseplants.

There are systems other than the Can-O-Worms, but they work on essentially the same principles. They are all made of food quality plastic which should be kept indoors, out of the sun. Hirscheld keeps his worm bin in his basement where summer temperatures are 65 degrees, and winter temperatures do not go below 55 degrees. Red wiggler worms need temperatures that do not go below 50 degrees.

He harvests the compost about once a year and uses it when he does his planting in the spring.

Recently Hirscheld has been making compost tea. He takes three or four gallons of chlorinated Greenfield water in a bucket and, using an aquarium aerator and an ‘air stone’ which disperses the pumped air, he aerates it for a full day at least to get rid of all the chlorine. Then he puts a cup or two of the vermicompost in an old nylon stocking and soaks it in the water for about 24 hours. He also adds about a quarter cup of molasses and some kelp concentrate or fish emulsion. Precision in measuring ingredients is not necessary. These extra ingredients help good bacteria grow over the next 24 hours. The mixture will need continual aeration.

After 24 hours the mixture needs to be used right away. Hirscheld strains the compost tea through another old stocking into a hand sprayer. Then he can spray his vegetable plants, or even the lawn. As a foliar spray, the nutrients are taken into the plant through their leaves. Hirscheld told me of experiments that showed that a foliar feeding of vermicompost tea encouraged grass roots, and presumably other plant roots, to grow two or three inches deeper into the soil which cuts down on the need for watering and makes the plant less troubled by dry spells.

Hirscheld uses this foliar feeding two or three times a season on his garden.

Hirscheld and I compared notes on our personal worm farms. At one point I was complaining to a friend about having fruit flies and she suggested I stop giving them fruit. That was an answer that worked well, but I did like giving the worms overripe bananas, one of their favorites, so it was not a total answer. I took to laying several wet sheets of newspaper over the worms and bedding. I think this has helped by covering the surface where fruit flies could lay their eggs.

Of course this raises the question of where the very first fruit flies come from, but I cannot answer that question. I’d love some one to explain that mystery to me.

Another mystery is the little white worms that appeared in my bin. I thought they were baby worms, but one of my Franklin Land Trust tour visitors, and Hirscheld, explained that these are entrachyadids. I have the same question – where did they come from?

Entachyadids will not harm the red wigglers, but they do indicate acid conditions. I’ll have to sprinkle and mix a little lime into my bin.

With the current trend towards using local agricultural produce and products, Hirscheld and I are taking this another step, and let the worms produce rich compost all year long. During the short summer season my bin lives outside in the shade: in the winter it sits in my kitchen. Fertilizer can’t get any more local than that.

Between the Rows   July 23, 2011

Faster and Faster

The Holiday Weekend started for me on Friday afternoon when I visited the Heath School’s Garden Day. The classes have been working before now, of course, but on Garden Day, the whole day is given over to planting, weeding, mulching – and learning.  I am impressed with their energy, which I expected, but also with the quality of the child-sized tools they are using.  Many hands make light work was certainly the motto on Friday.

You may wonder what is with all the stones and stone -like things in  the Shed Bed, but you have to remember that the Shed Bed is right next to the hen house and for the past couple of months the chickens have considered this their personal Lido for taking dust baths.  First I kept the chickens in the hen house today. Then I finished weeding and edging, dug in some nice rotted manure and lime, and planted the little annual salvias that edge this bed every year. This is the way I fudge not being able to grow a lavender hedge.

You can’t really tell, but I also put tiny annual dianthus along the west edge of the Lawn Grove, as well as nine cosmos seedlings.  The big task was planting the weeping cherry that I bought at Home Depot.  I hope that was a wise decision.  It’s been watered and mulched with wood chips. You can see a small hardy azalea blooming on the far side of the grove.  Lots of weeding.

Guan Yin Mian

The garden is progressing faster and faster.  Everytime I turn around something new has come into bloom.  This tree peony is so lovely. The translation of the name is Guan Yin’s Face.  Guan Yin is the Goddess of Compassion and surely hers is the most beautiful of faces.

Boule de Neige and Rangoon have been slowly opening, but with temperatures in the 80s for two days they came into full bloom in the shady bed next to the Cottage Ornee.

Last year I found this rhodie forgotten and languishing in the weeds at the edge of the ‘orchard.’  I dug it up and this time I transplanted it properly, “Keep it simple, just a dimple,” as my rhododendron expert says. I think it is Calsap. What a lovely surprise to have it survive and put out new growth and bloom!

The lilacs are blooming and perfuming the air.  We even spent some time enjoying the beauty and fragrance of the garden: we opened the Cottage officially and entertained two friends who we see all too infrequently.  A perfect weekend.

Monday Record 5-23

Earth Oven at Katywil

There isn’t much to report about progress in the garden. This report is full of  rain, showers, downpour, drizzle, rain, spitz and fog.   Fortunately a showery day did not deter the Yestermorrow crew who came to Katywil to hold an Earth Oven Building workshop.  The stone foundation had been completed two weeks ago and Saturday was going to see building of a wood fired oven. The workshop participants had to get deep into the mud (earth) and muddy straw so a little water from the heavens was not a problem. I will have more about this project soon.

Pollen cloud

While I was watching the oven construction a great cry went out. “Look!”  And then we were all looking down and across the hills a a great wind blew up and sent clouds of green pollen across the valley. None of us had seen anything like it.  No wonder allergy sufferers are having such a bad year.

Yesterday was the first day in two weeks that we could do anything substantial out in the garden. The grass was still damp, but Henry mowed. Now I have to rake.  I will not put these clippings in the compost, because my pile never gets hot enough to kill all the dandelion seeds. So I guess this chore isn’t quite done.

My to-do list included pruning the roses and weeding along the Shed Bed, Rose Walk and the Rose Bank.  I collected two wheelbarrows full of prunings and weedings, but I think there is more to do. I don’t like to rush into pruning winterkill, in case a branch is just a lazy leaf and still alive. I can’t cross this off my list yet either.

However, before the bugs drove me inside to get busy roasting a chicken, and getting some blueberry muffins into the over,  I did do a bit of weeding in the front garden, and put in a second planting of spinach and Tango lettuce.  It is not often I get such a good photo of a completed job.  Actually, its not often I actually complete a job to photo-worthiness.

Worm Farm Review

In July of 2008 my grandsons and I put 1000 red wigglers into a bin we had prepared. We were worm farmers. I wanted worm castings, considered very fine compost, to use in my garden.  The process of making that compost has been a slower process than I expected.

Red wigglers are not earthworms. They need to be kept warm – at least warmer than 50 degrees to thrive.  I did not want to keep the worm bin in my kitchen so when fall came I moved it to our basement where the temperature is a constant 50 degrees.  A few worms survived to be put outdoors when spring became warm enough in 2009.  In September 2009 I took a very modest harvest of vermicompost and set the worms up with new bedding.  The worm population increased during the summer, but another winter in the basement did it no good.

There was no vermicompost harvest in 2010.  We did dump out the bin and check through in July when the grandsons were again visiting, but we saw very few adult worms and little tiny white things that we thought (hoped) must be baby  worms. We put them all back in the bin, along with damp peat moss, which a vermicomposting neighbor said he used, in addition to wet shredded newspaper. In the fall I gritted my teeth and kept the bin in our kitchen.  The fruitflies I dreaded did not appear. There was no smell, but I did not expect that.  Clearly the population has increased because they are going through much more kitchen waste than they ever have before.  This is especially appreciated since I haven’t been able to use the outdoor compost bin for about a month now.

Yesterday I dug into the bin to take a rough population account.  The verdict is A Lot!  That means there will be a good harvest, just in time for spring planting.

While the worms are luxuriating in the warmth of our woodstove heated living/dining/cooking space -

this is the kind of weather we have been enjoying outdoors at the End of the Road.

Garden Technique Mash-up

New Front Garden 11-21-2010

One of  the best ideas I had this year was to put a small vegetable garden right in front of the eastern end of our house which faces due south. The soil here drains very well and thaws out very early in the spring. If you want to see the ‘lasagna garden’ method I used on April 4, click here.  The planting bed next to the house included a yellow loosestrife and ‘Terra Cotta’ achillea next to the front door steps (never used) and clumps of pink cosmos and more yellow loosestrife on the other end. In between I  planted Ruby and Emerald Duet lettuces, red and green, from Renee’s Garden. These lettuces are quick to grow, tender and beautiful.

A cardboard-topped-with-woodchips path separated that planting bed from another lasagna bed that I planted to broccoli and nastursiums. The nasturtiums were right on the crest of the bank that is now the daylily bank. I was harvesting broccoli out of this bed right into November. Can I find photographic records? No. But this is how I’ve prepared the bed above for spring.

Because the lasagna method worked so well, even though it doesn’t keep out air borne weed seeds during the growing season, I began by laying compost on top of the cleaned bed. Then I laid feed bags on top of the compost topped bed.

When I visited Daniel Botkin at Laughing Dog Farm he showed me how he planted in rotting hay, which fed the plants, and smothered all weeds. I had rotting hay left from my failed experiment of planting right in haybales, and thought I would use it here, instead of covering the feed bags with soil.

I had just enough rotted hay to put a deep layer on the bed next to the house. I gave it a watering, but happily for me it rained the next day. That not only wet the hay, but the feed bags and the compost and soil below.  All ready  for planting early in the spring. I’ve mashed up the lasagna technique with the  rotten hay technique, which is not so different, because I wanted to make best use of that hay.  We’ll see how it all works in the spring. And we’ll see if I can file my photos more effectively.

Elise Schlaikjer

Elise Schlaikjer

Elise Schlaikjer has named all the houses she has lived in Phoenix House, but when she moved to Greenfield, just two years ago, the name was especially apt. It took a fall and a head injury, but Schlaikjer decided that after 23 years in Michigan it was time to move nearer her daughter Laura, in Greenfield. At the age of 73 she was ready to start a new life, like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, reborn and full of new energy.

The energy may have been renewed but it was an old passion for gardening that she carried with her from Michigan. The energy and the passion are evident in the gardens Schlaikjer has created during her first two years in Greenfield. She has chopped down great pines that threw too dense a shade, grubbed out a big area for a vegetable garden, berry patches and flower gardens, built a deck, and a stunning labyrinth with a tiny temple at its heart.

She has planted those favorites of mine, roses and lilacs. One border contains Wild Spice rugosa, Topaz Jewel rugosa,  Souvenir de Malmaison and those David Austin hybrids, Gertrude Jekyll, and Graham Thomas, as well as the climbers, Golden Showers and Pearly Gates.

Throughout the perennial gardens she has planted lilacs from Greenfield Garden Club sales, as well as the beautiful double white Beauty of Moscow to the single dark purple Yankee Doodle, and President Poincaire, a double magenta lilac, all with delicious fragrance.

Elise's fenced vegetable garden, mid-September

In Michigan she had big edible gardens that helped feed a retreat center as well as herself, and founded a farmer’s market that continues on without her, offering music, workshops, a newsletter, and fresh local produce to shoppers, as well as the support that all small farms need.

Here in Greenfield she has planted and fenced a 30 by 30 foot vegetable garden as she learns how much to plant for her own household and the new friends she is making.

The vegetable garden had to be her first project because “I feel strongly about being self sufficient, being able to feed myself.” Building that garden took compost that she bought from Martin’s, and Bear Path Farms, and help to build the raised bed frames. Still, “My back attests to the fact that I did most of the work myself,” she said.

She has also planted blueberries, a type of currant that does not host pine rust which can threaten pine trees, raspberries and elderberries. She even has a small chicken coop built behind her garage to house four laying hens.

Vegetables, berries and hens are all a part of her self-sufficiency plan, but Schlaikjer knows that our spirits require more. On the eastern side of her garage there is an ornamental garden filled with perennials, and stumps of old trees. She has covered these large flat stumps with the stones she removed from the soil as she prepared this planting bed, making them platforms for bird baths. I have never seen anyone turn rubble stones into a beautiful element in the garden the way she has.

Other perennial beds flank a gateway to the labyrinth. It is clear that Schlaikjer has a real affection for stones, because the most stunning part of her landscape is a stone labyrinth with a tiny temple in the center.  The labyrinth was laid out with the help of her dowsing pendulum which also located the center of the labyrinth.  When workers dug in preparation for the building of what was originally to be a gazebo they found a huge boulder of white quartz, a stone that is considered to be able to transmit energy.

With the discovery of the quartz boulder, Schlaikjer decided that the gazebo would become a temple that would receive energy from the earth and from the heavens. The main furnishing of the temple is an extraordinary  throne-like chair, carved out of a maple tree trunk by a Michigan friend of Schlaikjer’s, depicting many wild creatures like a turtle, bear, squirrel and others.

Many of the stones that make up the labyrinth have been given by friends and visitors to the garden,. She wanted to make the creation of the labyrinth a community affair, instead of a solitary effort. “Also because, like a spider web, every stone becomes an energy connector between each contributor and the labyrinth…….. letting love and healing energy flow among us all.  I do ask each person, when they lay their rock, to lay it with an intention or prayer.  It is my place of prayer and meditation and I try to walk it every day,” she said.

Being a part of a community means that one gives and receives. When I asked Schlaikjer what advice she would give to a new gardener she didn’t only talk about starting small, making compost, and no till techniques. She added that “ a sense of adventure is important and not getting discouraged by things not working out as planned.  I look at the adventure as a learning, a gift that teaches if we are open, and also a source of fun.   And, yes, there are some things that feel very painful, like an invasion of grasshoppers, but that too, can give us a greater appreciation of what farmers have to deal with.”

I think Elise Schlaikjer is a gift we can all learn from. ###

Between the Rows   November 6, 2010

Nasturtiums: biomass for the compost pile

To see what else needs no words, checkout Wordless Wednesday.