ceelove

I wish I could make screenshots of my thermometers from various points in the last few days. I've been attending closely to the brutal cold, mostly because of how it might affect the greenhouse. Even when the low temp was down to 13 outside, and with no solar energy available to collect, just geothermal energy kept the greenhouse above freezing.

But last night, when it got down to -4, the greenhouse came down to 23 degrees. Oh noes, Cee, will it kill your plants? Maybe; but they're cold-hardy broccoli, leeks, carrots, Asian greens - it's not like I'm trying to grow tomatoes in there - so I'm not rushing in with a space heater, I'm just noting the data. And right now, the temp in there is back up into the 60s - while we're at the today's high of 16.

There's tinkering yet to do - I bet in years to come, I can do even better at trapping the heat - but I believe I have made my point.

Oh, and just because it amuses me: the broccoli was intended purely as an experiment, to teach me when I would need to plant it to get a yield. But now, in January, when it gets a mouthful of sunlight a day, it's producing heads. With salvaged glass and lots of insulation, I have turned the seasons on their ear.

There is nothing like spending the morning preparing the garden for a heat wave to make one grateful.

As I got gross and sweaty setting up the watering system, it made me appreciate just how good I've got it, that I have the advance warning and the resources to mitigate the heat's impact - and that then I can escape into a/c. Even more than biking across America made me think on the settlers, gardening makes me think of the many who didn't (and don't) have a choice about toiling in the heat or lugging water around by hand to save the crops. Especially slaves: I spent my youth in the South, I know how miserably hot it gets there.

So even though I'm cranky from being gross and the watering system being broken in several ways and my fingers being cut and sore, I also feel humility, empathy, the urge to be kind for the sake of the billions who have it so much worse.

Now I'm going to go greatly appreciate another shower.

Fellow (Somerville-area) gardeners! My herb spiral yearns for many more things to be planted in it. Before I go searching to farmer's markets and online and such, can anyone give me cuttings (or seeds) from:

bearberry, bee balm, betony, chamomile, chervil, lemon balm, mint, oregano, penny royal, rosemary, sage, tarragon (French), or thyme?

A quickie, I think. What I've picked as of today, in absolutely no order:

garlic
"walking" onions
raspberries
blueberries
strawberries
carrots
several kinds of tomatoes
basil
chives
leeks
four kinds of beans
three kinds of cucumbers
beets
chard
kale
bok choi & tatsoi
lettuces
mustard greens
scorzonera and salsify
peppers
corn
peas
parsley
cilantro
scallions
many winter greens
husk cherries
flowers for the table
raspberry leaves for tea
comfrey leaves for a poultice to soothe a yanked-up toenail (worked great!)

Whee!!

Also, the backyard looks about as good as it ever has right now, given that it was greatly tidied for the arrival of a crew to film an episode on open marriage there. That was several flavors of surreal. Also also, I set up the rain barrel! Go me!

I could say, you know it's verging on summer when we're getting multiple things from the garden, but, um, no. Now that's true all the way through the winter.

( A few data points on the garden thus far: )

And here's the tally of what I've harvested already this year:
- winter lettuces, mache, claytonia, minutina
- old-world root crops of scorzonera (liked from last year) and salsify (don't like)
- pea blossoms and tendrils
- kale, chard, cilantro, chives (all returned from their roots)
- spring lettuces and mustard greens
- peas
- straaaaaaawberries
- bok choi, tatsoi, baby kale from the polyculture
- endless smiles

It's strange, how quickly my ideas about gardening seasons have shifted, just by adding the cold frame last winter. Now I expect that there will be salad greens ready for picking in a month or two, which I hope will be available through the winter and early spring again. And then we could be eating the scorzonera and salsify (two old-timey root crops) in May that are just poking up now.

For now, there's chard, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, broccoli & romanesco, and raspberries still going, plus a bin of potatoes and basket of garlic dug up and cured. And the food we preserved? There are still beets to pickle, but apart from that, here's the tally, from our garden:
3 pints of pickled beans
3 cups dehydrated tomatoes
1 pint dehydrated husk cherries (believe me, this represents a huge amount of work)
3.5 quarts of roasted tomato sauce
1 quart of pesto
1 quart tomato-beet sauce
2 quarts green tomato & husk cherry chutney

And from local produce:
9 quarts of peaches
10 quarts of applesauce
1.5 pints sauteed mushrooms
4 baking-sheet sized rolls of fruit leather from foraged "autumn olive" berries

Oh, and almost 100 pounds of grain from our grain share: wheat, barley, rye, oats, spelt, and popping corn, with milling corn and several varieties of beans to be delivered when fully dried. So far, the grain share has its ups and downs: we had a lovely trip out to Belchertown, talked with the farmers about this first-year CSA attempt, got a personalized hayride, fed calves and a tsunami of 5-week-old chicks by hand (o god the tickle!), went foraging. But, this being their first year, there have been glitches, like about 12% of the oats not relinquishing their hulls and having to be picked out by hand. And of course, it'll be a big adjustment, storing and using these grains when I haven't previously cooked with anything like this much. But I'm excited, for increased nutritional value and hopefully flavor, for eating locally and seasonally, for exploring another avenue of playing with food.

For people who like numbers, here are a few from this season:
- 8 pounds of peas
- 17 pounds of beans - the plants produced for about 4 months
- one day, I picked 12 ounces of husk cherries, over a pound of beans, and 12 pounds of tomatoes, of which over 5 pounds were the little plum Juliets
- another day, 6 pounds of cucumbers, of which 4 1/2 of them were lemon cukes

So I'm feeling a goal shaping up for this winter. I want to eat at least one thing every day, and ideally every meal, that we preserved, that we obtained locally, or that comes from our garden. Half the time I have a little mental tally going anyway, so it shouldn't be that difficult to notice...

So, you know that rule of thumb for growing corn (and who doesn't?), "Knee high by 4th of July"? What does it say that ours is, uh, chest high?

The tomatoes are already sprawling, by which I mean the vines are 5 feet long. Given that the sungolds have grown up to 10 feet in past years, I think we need to get up some trellises. And a watering system. Meanwhile, the first husk cherries will be ripening this week. Yes, really.

Peas are all done. Not that I've ever kept track before, because it wasn't really worth it, so I have nothing to measure against, but: this year I picked about 8 pounds of peas off the plants, and another 10 ounces of the tiny tender buds and tendrils at the end. Even more importantly, I finally identified what's plagued them several seasons here: fusarium. I am edjumacated.

Beans are covered with flowers, cucumbers taking off, kohlrabi/kale/broccoli/romanesco likewise getting mighty, four kinds of basil wonderfully aromatic. And I've had four solid months of all the salad greens I can eat.

And, having foisted it off on others six times already, we still have All the Bok Choi Evar. Take it!

ETA: I lied. We had Most of the Bok Choi Evar. I believe it is all quite spoken for now. :)

The course I took in Northampton showed me how social change (or stasis) is interwoven with my personal/ecological choices. It also showed me how a lot of my choices already reflect that concept, how I just didn't notice the connection. I'm happiest when sharing skills with my community: learning how to grow, cook, ferment, can, and pickle food, and then gather with others to teach each other or pass on our surplus. For my birthday last year, there was a "grubbing bee." Soon, there'll be a grain mill to share around. And of course, there are other examples, like throwing massage parties, which aren't about how we relate to food, but how we relate to our bodies and each other.

Now, what does permaculture matter to you? More than you might imagine, actually. There's a good chance you're recycling resources back into your community, like at a clothing swap, or sharing them, as in a group household. Pooling childcare. Attending bodywork & energy shares. Group art. Passing along sourdough starter. Teaching someone to knit. Selling each other local eggs and meat. Really, whatever things we do to put ourselves into our connections with other people and our surroundings, instead of handing a credit card to a faceless corporate fictional entity.

Yes, permaculture can get vastly more esoteric, simultaneously back-to-basics and cutting-edge. Yes, I'm excited about the idea of taking raw land and starting an edible forest garden, which might be years or forever away. Yes, I want a graywater system and a pond with fish and a root cellar (and a pony). I'll settle, though, for all the new perennial plantings (which, I didn't mention, will involve sledgehammering concrete to install), the rain barrels, a clothesline Carl's been building, remaking the compost pile for optimal performance, digging up and rebuilding our first depleted raised bed with a bunch of permacultural ideas, and designing a solar greenhouse for use next year. Well, okay, maybe I'll settle for a lot less, given all the annual crops to play with too. And, y'know, the vagaries of the universe.

My favorite example of permaculture-at-work in my life, right now, is the results of the cold frame, this first year of use. It has outperformed my wildest hopes. We had claytonia and mache, little salad greens, until February, of this winter. Then they sprang back in March, as did some of the winter lettuce that died off in December. Sylvana has been nibbling them like a bunny, and I've handed off large bags of greens to friends. Surplus to share in April. Meanwhile, the overwintered kale and scorzonera are thriving, getting a huge head start on the seeds planted in March/April. And next year, I expect we'll be doing a lot more winter harvesting, now that I know what's possible.

I'll leave this with a couple of recommendations, if your interest has been piqued. Gaia's garden is awesome as a means of understanding and applying permaculture at a small, even urban level. It's beautifully written and accessible, and I'm happy to loan mine around.

And if you'd like a taste of the overarching, holistically-different thinking that the course was trying to inspire in us, here's Andrew Faust, my favorite guest speaker. He spoke without notes for a couple of hours, tying ideas together in rapid-fire succession, so none of the clips available is going to do him justice, but they'll at least demonstrate how different a paradigm permaculture advocates, and what a shift in thinking it can require.

It's been an amazing year for the garden - especially given that without modern plumbing, it would have been a horrible, parched year. ( And we're nowhere near done, even. )

Ye gods, starphire and I are doing a lot this year. And enjoying a good bit of the work of previous years. Of note thus far:

- a lovely succession of crocuses, irises, daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths now gone by
- strawberries covered with blossoms
- 53 garlic plants, about a foot high
- so many little lettuces, mustard greens, and bok choi that the last thinning provided a small side salad
- peas 6" and trellised
- fava beans a foot tall
- kohlrabi, purple potatoes, and shallots taking off
- something like a hundred raspberry canes up
- leeks and some of the tomatoes recently transplanted
- blueberries, lilacs, and hydrangeas all happily sprouting leaves in the front yard
- wax beans, beets, and spinach not yet doing much
- many trays of cumin, basil peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, broccoli, and tomatoes seedlings yet to plant, plus many more seeds
- two vanloads of compost lugged from Saugus, one more to go
- diseased plum tree transformed into gigantic hole and nearby mound of dirt (endlessly attractive to small people), on the way to being two more raised beds
- diseased cherry tree discovered to be dead, RIP poor beleaguered thing; oh well, more space for raspberries and such next year...