Tag Archives: urban homesteading

First Days of Summer

The Apothecary’s Rose is supposed to have a strong scent. For me it has never had more than a mild sweet scent. Even so, I am completely taken with it’s history as one of the earliest cultivated roses and its well known medicinal uses. When it comes to getting the best medicine from roses you want to get as close to wild roses as you can. The absolute best rose variety for use in medicine is the dog rose (Rosa Canina) (but good luck finding a nursery that carries this one and if you do, for god’s sake- tell me where you found it!) but this rose is the next best thing to species roses. I am not generally a fan of the single roses but this is one of the exceptions.

Borage is charming. It has uses. It’s edible. It’s medicinal. I confess I like it because it has starry spikey blue flowers that look like they were designed by a ten year old into science fiction. I haven’t had any in my garden for a long time. So many things blooming right now are old friends.

You are dying to ask me if my hands are freakishly small, aren’t you? (What would you say if I said YES?!) These strawberry leaves were normal sized when I planted them last year. My secret fear is that someone (poison-man from next door) dumped some toxic waste on my garden and now these plants have superpowers. Do other people have such enormous strawberry leaves lurking in your garden? Please share, cause I’m a little freaked out.

In contrast to the leaves, the berries are normal sized. There are lots of them! In a couple of days we’ll be able to pick our first bowlful. One of the things I love about living in Oregon are all the berries. I realize that California has them too. But they’re not as good. I kid you not. Especially if you like to grow them yourself. I could never get any strawberries to thrive in my California garden. I couldn’t keep the ground moist enough to get anything but tiny little berries. Here, all I have to do is plant them and wait. They ripen just as the summer sun comes out (there’s little spring sunshine here) and so I don’t even have to water them to get fruit. The blueberries here are phenomenal and prolific as well. So are the blackberries and the –

Speaking of berries coloring up- the red currents are turning too! I’ll have enough of them to make about a quarter cup of sauce. Maybe. I’m so excited about them, even if I just had one bunch to eat raw, I couldn’t be more pleased. I love tart food!

This is my most beautiful kitchen utensil. Mitch made it from black walnut wood. From a walnut tree that grew here in my county. I never knew a spoon could make me so happy.

Philip has submitted our HAMP loan papers, this time to actually be looked at by an underwriter with the bank. We should know in a month if we get to stay here. If we do, we’re going to be really broke again. I think it will be worth getting to stay right here. Looking down from my eyrie of an office on my monastery garden full of California poppies, lupines, calendula, columbines, nasturtiums, vegetables, and feverfew.

There is such a chaos of beautiful, edible, and healing things planted all around me here. I want to be here.

Eggplant Spinach Pasta with Kalamata Olives

This pasta was made mostly from things in my pantry. I have given directions and ingredients as though you have a fresh eggplant and celery because you can make this dish in the summer when these ingredients are in season. However, I grill and freeze eggplant and if you do too this is a great recipe to use them in. I also blanch and freeze celery when I can get it in season locally and I don’t buy it any other time of year. If you’re using frozen eggplant and celery, as I did here, you skip sauteeing the eggplant and just saute the onions until translucent and lightly browned and add the celery and eggplant at the same time as the tomato sauce. I defrost the eggplant ahead of time because it’s safer to dice them once thawed, but I don’t defrost the celery, I just add it to the sauce and let it defrost as it cooks. I used my home canned tomatoes and if you have them use 1 quart of diced tomatoes (and their juice) and 1 pint of tomato sauce. I like to serve this with Parmesan but feta is very good with it too. Happily, if you don’t eat cheese, it’s wonderful without!

When I’m impatient for summer produce this is the dish I make.

Ingredients:

serves 6

1/4 cup olive oil

1 onion, diced

1 large eggplant, diced into 1/2″ cubes

3 stalks celery, chopped

28 oz can diced tomatoes in their juice

15 oz can tomato sauce

8 oz spinach, roughly chopped

3 garlic cloves, finely minced (or you can press them)

1/2 cup red wine

6 oz bottle of Kalamata olives, drained

1 lb pasta (rotelli or penne would be good choices)

Method:

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet on med/high heat and saute the onions and the eggplant until the eggplant is lightly browned. Add the celery, diced tomatoes, and tomato sauce and stir well together. When the sauce begins to bubble, add the spinach, garlic, and wine. Turn the heat down to med/low, add the olives and let cook, stirring to keep from sticking, while you cook the pasta.

Bring a big pot of salted water to a boil and cook the pasta in it until it’s done. Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Take it off the heat and serve.

This dish is Vegan

This dish is Gluten Free IF you use gluten free pasta

Flowering and Fruiting in the May Garden

Lilacs are something I didn’t see that many of when I lived in California but here in Oregon the landscape is covered with them and May is when they flower. I have several in my garden but since I didn’t plant them myself I don’t know what kinds they are. I have two white ones and this is the first time this one has put off more than a couple of blossom clusters since I’ve lived here. I love it. Philip isn’t crazy for the scent of lilacs in the house, he thinks they’re overwhelmingly soapy. I love it. The scent on this one isn’t particularly strong, a disappointment to me, but at least it’s beautiful.

This is the first time my red currants have produced any berries. The plants (I have two) spend an awful long time in their pots so it’s not surprising. Now that they have a good deep spot of soil to reach into they are much happier and I’ve got several clusters of berries on them. Not enough to do much with but it makes me happy anyway.

Borage is an amazing plant to have in the garden. Bees love it so it helps the pollination of everything else to have it growing near all your fruiting plants. This one’s very small but they do get enormous and they’ll seed freely. Some people think this is a nuisance but I don’t.

This is my bed of tomatoes and calendula. I’ve got: 3 Siletz, 2 Jaune Flamme, and a Sungold. I need to have black tomato varieties too. So I’d better get another bed cleared of quack grass. Yeah, no problem. I’ll get right on that.

I’ve never done square foot gardening but my mom is giving it a try in this bed. She’s got it marked up and soon will plant it out with seeds.

It’s good to mulch your strawberry beds. My mom covered ours with straw and with the sunshine we’ve been getting (not a lot, but enough) and the slightly warmer temperatures have given them an enormous boost of growth and though you can’t see it well in this picture, they are blossoming. This is a bed of ever-bearing which means it doesn’t produce quite as large a berry or as large a June crop but will continue to produce for a few months. Last year I was getting berries through October. Just a few here and there. If you want to make jam or pies with your strawberries you’re better off planting June-bearing varieties that tend to produce large amounts in a single crop and often the berries are of larger size.

Not pictured is my 8×4 bed of pole beans- the first few bean sprouts have emerged. I love green beans and I don’t think you can have “too many” because if I can’t keep up with fresh eating I love to marinate and can them.

What’s going on in your own garden right now?

Getting Back into the Garden with Mom

Most people clean their gardens up (and “put them to bed”) in the fall. The reason they do this is so that when spring finally hurls itself at them, they can simply dig in and plant their earliest crops without first having to remove all of last year’s dead tomato plants or weeding the quack grass that was allowed to root itself in firmly. It’s a great tradition. I haven’t done it for years.

It is taking so much work to do this ritual cleaning now, in the spring, that we are in danger of not having enough beds prepared for planting this year!

In spite of being so far behind in all my yard maintenance (roses haven’t been pruned in two years) it is shaping up and looking better than it has in a long time, thanks to my mom. My mom has a way of getting me out in the garden even though I’m just embarking on writing the third draft of my novel. I have barely been out in my garden for a year. My mom moves in, I say “Hey, even though we might have to move this year, we should plant some things anyway.” and she takes up the idea and before I know it Philip is digging holes, I am wrestling with quack grass, and she’s planning and plotting for our next best garden move, without us knowing quite how it all happened so fast.

I love this about my mom. She is whipping us into shape without actually bossing anyone around. It has felt so good to get out there, to see what’s growing and changing every week rather than hiding out in my eyrie of an office looking down at it from a distance. It’s not that I ever forget how much I thrive by getting my hands dirty and being around my plants, it’s more a question of finding the energy, the motivation, and of keeping in the habit. I’m still tired all the time from parenting a special needs kid, writing a novel, working for money, and trying not to drop every other ball in my life, yet I am now also spending more time in my garden.

Some of the things we’ve been doing:

Cutting back the rampant brambles.
Fighting the good fight against the heinously encroaching quack grass.
Mulching the strawberries.
planting pole bean seeds (Helda, Lazy Housewife, and violet podded stringless).
Transplanting mullein volunteers.
Pruning the fruit trees.
Mowing the lawn (a big deal because Philip and I LOATHE lawn but can’t afford to get rid of it until we can afford to hire a rototiller and the materials to plant the vast lawn with other things-not a project to undertake if we’re going to have to move in the next year).
Planting herbs (finally got some comfrey and planted it, among other herbs)
Putting down cardboard and straw between the raised beds.

That’s quite a lot for people with little energy and a lot of distractions! Yesterday my mom informed me that this coming fall we’re going to properly put the garden to bed and avoid all this hard work in the spring that we’ve been doing. I just know she’ll get me to do it, if she says it’ll happen it’ll happen. So how does she do it? Easy- she is not in great health and has limited energy and battles with vertigo so seeing her out there mowing the lawn in the surprise sunshine makes me realize that if she can get out there and do that, then I can get out there with my shovel and other dastardly tools of quack grass destruction and put in at least a half an hour! (Yes, it’s guilt at its gentlest and most effective)

I have at least five more 8×4 raised beds to clear of solid quack grass and top up with dirt. That’s a lot of really hard work. Quack grass is a formidable foe, in case you haven’t encountered and don’t know. If you don’t recall, last year I broke my shovel on the stuff. I think a nice blessing to bestow on a new born child is “May she/he grow strong like quack grass!” (translation “Should he or she grow as strong as quack grass he or she will outlive all nuclear events in the future! Mazeltov!”)

The more I do out there the more I want to do out there. I try to have modest garden goals (just a bed of beans and a bed of tomatoes will be plenty for a modest year of gardening) but I always get carried away. I want a big section of beets, carrots, pickling cucumbers, slicing cucumbers; plus I need lots of my own summer squash and winter squash and…

I forget that I can get all these things from the farmer’s market too. But nothing, I think most gardeners will agree, is more satisfying than going out in your own garden to see what’s for dinner. I want it all. Oh, right, forgot about all the dark leafies I need and the lettuce and…

No matter how much or how little I get planted or harvest, the important thing is that I’m out there to see the lilacs budding up and then opening, that I see the ladybugs flood the yard like they do every early spring, and that I see the shape of my monastery garden re-emerge.

Thanks mom!

Dried Thyme Yield for Spring 2011

I harvested over 2 lbs of thyme from a total of 8 thyme plants and yielded 6 oz of dried thyme. I had wanted this report to be more accurate but I had a minor setback because I dried batch after batch of tyme but failed to dry the final (much smaller) batch. I should have weighed what was left but I didn’t. Instead I let it sit in the fridge in a paper bag. For a week. I made a curious discovery by doing this:

Thyme kept in a paper bag in the fridge for a week will dry itself.

However, not to my satisfaction. I would have kept it if I’d been desperate for dried thyme and that was all I had, but it was dry yet still slightly supple making it hard to remove leaves from the stems. I could have put it in the dehydrator to dry it out more thoroughly, but I was lazy, and threw it out.

Please don’t throw rotten potatoes at me!

The amount that was left I estimate to be approximately 4 ounces. Even though my numbers, this time, might not be precise I think it’s still useful information. This is the first harvest of 2011 and there will be at least one more this year. I have more than 8 thyme plants but at least 2 of them are dying and need replacing. What I love about growing and drying my own thyme is that the quality is superior and though it isn’t particularly expensive to buy dried thyme, it is a fraction of the cost to do it yourself. My thyme plants are two years old and have given me at least 6 big harvests already. If you keep harvesting them regularly you keep them from becoming too woody. Plus they look nice in the garden if you do a nice job trimming them.

Although I use a pretty wide variety of herbs and spices in my food, thyme is the one I use the most. I especially like it in a French style lentil soup.

Stitch and Boots