It’s finally starting to get cold here and I wanted to save some edibles from my garden. On the left is lemon verbena and on the right is flat-leaf or Italian parsley. I washed all the leaves and they are on this wire rack to dry. I put the parsley in the freezer to use it in sauces. I dried the lemon verbena to use as tea. It makes a wonderful tea mixed with mint leaves. You can also chop up the leaves and put them into baked goods.
My chickens are in the final stages of their molt. At least all signs point to that. Chickens begin the molt on their heads and kind of work their way down to their tail and wing feathers. Edie looks gorgeous and fluffy instead of mangey like she did after her bout with mites. I’m not walking into their coop to find loads of feathers these days. I think they should be well insulated for winter with all their new feathers.
However, when I check their nest box all I find are little fluffy feathers. No eggs. It’s been about 2 months with NO EGGS. I have to buy eggs from the store, which doesn’t suit me at all anymore. So instead of staring at an empty egg holder, I have decided to fill it with the gorgeous grape tomatoes that are still coming out of my garden. They are getting smaller and smaller as the days get shorter and cooler, but they are still coming. Winter is a mourning time for me when I don’t have tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, so I’m enjoying each and every one of these little treasures.
The other day I did some work in my garden to prepare for the winter. I cut back and pruned a few bushes and cut down many of my tomato plants. I didn’t cut down my grape tomato plants because they are still producing. Fall is in full swing here in Brooklyn, so I took out my trusty Toro leaf vac/shredder and sucked up a bunch of leaves. The act of shredding the leaves makes them take up much less space than traditionally raked leaves. One bag of shredded leaves could be as much as 5-8 bags of un-shredded leaves.
I dug shovelfuls of beautiful compost that’s been cooking all summer and spread them out on my flower and vegetable beds. The soil looks so dark and rich, which is in contrast to the dry, lifeless, glass-filled soil that mostly exists in my yard. I still have straw and hay from fall scavenging, so I decided to add all of the shredded leaves to my compost bin. This is the one time of year when I have an abundance of “browns” in my compost bin. They will break down quickly though with the help of the amazing chicken poo. I swear that stuff is like steroids for the compost bin. I showed a friend my compost bin and she just kept saying, “Yeah, but where’s all the stuff?” She couldn’t believe she wasn’t looking at a bin filled with egg shells and broccoli stems.
I am not a compost maniac. I think that everything will break down on its own without a lot of fuss that many people suggest (shredding everything before adding to the bin, frequent watering, no cooked food, etc.) and my bumper crop of compost was evidence of my success. You can read my previous post about having an easy and successful compost bin.
My plants will be happy to have the added nutrients from the compost. I know my chickens were happy digging through the compost for bugs and worms!
We’re getting rain after about a month of dry weather. I’m happy about it because I planted some seeds (lettuce, spinach, kale and *gasp* grass seed) and I don’t really like to water the garden. It’s getting cold here, so I have to cut down the basil and make batches of pesto to freeze. I can’t remember what temperature kills basil, but it’s somewhere above freezing. We’re down to the 40s at night, so it’s cutting it close.
I bought some organic garlic and am going to plant some this fall. I’ve never planted garlic before, so don’t know whether to believe or ignore the hype about buying seed garlic. I’m choosing to ignore the hype and just got plain old regular organic garlic. I think I need to wait a little longer to plant it, so it’s in the fridge right now. I’ll probably put it in after I chop down and prune my plants. Goodbye tomatoes. How I loved you!
I also saved some tomato seeds from my plants. I didn’t really research the proper way to do that. I just put a bunch of seeds on a paper towel to absorb the pulp. Now they are a part of the paper towel, so I’m not sure if I should pry them off, or just cut up the paper towel and plant it along with the seeds in the spring.
With the cooler weather has come more baking and knitting. I just made nutty oatmeal cookies from Mark Bittman’s book Food Matters. I didn’t use the vegan options and used butter and eggs. The book is interesting (think Omnivore’s Dilemma lite) and offers weekly menus and recipes. I seem incapable of menu planning, so I’ve decided to try some of his menus. The book emphasizes healthy, mostly plant-based dishes, so I wasn’t sure if the cookies would be good or taste like particle board. I was pleasantly surprised. They had chopped up dried apples in them instead of the usual raisins that my family doesn’t like.
As for the knitting, I am making a raglan sweater for Neil from wool I spun ages ago. I’m crossing my fingers that I have enough wool to finish it. This weekend we are joining our friends for a weekend in Woodstock, NY and a visit to the NY Sheep and Wool festival on Saturday.
In case you haven’t noticed, I am very interested in native plants as an (easy) way to help out wildlife. There’s a really nice article in Oregon Live by Ruth Mullen about an exhibit at the Oregon Zoo. They have a “before” section which looks like the typical suburban lawn right next to an “after” section. The “after” section has native plants, a birdbath, a bugbath (itty bitty water source in a concave rock) and less lawn. The native section is teeming with wildlife compared to the sterile suburban lawn. Take a peek at the whole article here.
Here are some great links to give you tips on creating backyard habitats and landscaping to attract birds, butterflies, frogs (less mosquitoes!) and other animals.
I keep taking photos of the beautiful tomatoes I’ve been getting from my garden. I said taking photos, not posting photos. Argh. I’m so behind on sorting through my photos!! I was lucky not to have the tomato blight that wiped out so many people’s crops. I bought a 6-pack of heirloom tomato seedlings this spring, but the names weren’t identified, so I don’t know what they are. I know the ones on the right are green zebra tomatoes, but the beautiful persimmon-colored ones are a mystery. I want to find out because they were absolutely sweet and delicious. The little cherry ones were so sweet, it was like candy from nature.
We’ve been getting shorter days (sob) and cooler nights, so the days of tomatoes are coming to an end. I have basil that needs to be cut and turned into pesto and lemon verbena that I have some ideas for. I planted some salad greens (a mesclun mix, mache and spinach), which are already coming up, so I don’t feel as though my garden has come to an end. I love the weather at this time of year, but it always brings a bit of melancholy with the shortening days and the approach of the winter cold.
I learned something new in the Berkshires this weekend. There are male zucchini flowers and female zucchini flowers. The males provide the pollen and then drop off the vine. The females collect the pollen and then grow a zucchini.
See if you can tell which flower is which. I’m not giving any hints. I think you can handle it…
Tuesday, July 14th 2009, 9:39 AM
It’s a rural lesson in an urban jungle.
Students at 10 Brooklyn schools will be toiling in the soil this summer and fall, growing vegetables to feed their classmates as part of an effort to get student-grown foods into the school cafeteria.
“We want to eat the stuff we grow,” said Aidan Israel, 7, a student at Public School 107 on Eighth Ave. in Park Slope, who has been helping cultivate peas, kale and basil in the school’s yard. “It tastes fresher than the stuff in the store.”
With its fall harvest, PS 107 – which is in mobile “earth boxes” while its new garden is closed due to a school renovation – will join a program started last autumn by the Department of Education’s SchoolFood department and the state’s Department of Agriculture and Markets.
Dubbed “Garden to School Cafe,” it began with 20 schools citywide – nearly half of them in Brooklyn.
Next year, the program, which lets school cafeteria staffers put kid-gardened produce on the menu, will expand to about 25 schools as part of a broader effort to source school food locally, said Billy Doherty, who heads the program for SchoolFood.
“It’s something that’s important in terms of teaching the kids how to eat better and connecting them to farming, to help them have an overall healthy lifestyle,” Doherty said.
Last week, PS 29 science teacher Tina Reres and a group of incoming prekindergarten students gathered around one of four long gardening beds built behind the Cobble Hill school. They tied up tomato plants, searched for bugs and then lettuce shoots that, if all goes well, will be part of a meal the school’s students will get to eat in the fall.
“It’s a chance to learn where your food comes from,” said Kristin Berman as her daughter Julia, 3, dug in the soil. “City kids don’t really know that.”
Some of the schools – like the Urban Assembly School of Music and Art in DUMBO – are combining food-growing with culinary lessons. Students in the school’s Teen Iron Chef program grew parsley and mint for tabbouleh and demonstrated how to make it, said Lynn Fredricks of FamilyCook Productions, who runs the cooking program. “For them to actually create the food itself is pretty amazing.”
Pesto pasta from school-grown basil was a big hit with kids at PS 29 last fall, Reres said.
But whether getting locally grown foods will really get kids to eat more veggies remains to be seen.
Mia Espinosa, 4, turned up her nose at the peas she had excitedly plucked from the PS 29 garden.
“She won’t eat anything green,” her grandmother, Carmela Panico, said, sighing. “Maybe next year.”
from Detroit Lakes-Online, July 8, 2009
Increasing urban sprawl is creating more homes for people by taking away habitats for wildlife, forcing nature’s creatures to become vagabonds on the move or leaving them homeless on the streets.
In fact, according to The Biodiversity Project, a leading environmental advocacy group dedicated to conservation initiatives, one million acres of open space, including parks, farms and natural areas are lost to sprawl each year.
However, others are fighting to reverse this damage from development by providing food, water and shelter for evicted animals, transforming their own backyards into wildlife sanctuaries.
Detroit Lakes resident, Liz Ballard, lives in town not far from Highway 10. Entering her yard from the paved sidewalk one stets through an arch of native vines into a haven of ferns and wildflowers with birds chirping, bees buzzing and chipmunks running across the visitors’ feet.
Though Ballard said that she started her gardens when she moved into town for her own benefit as well — to use as an escape from the city.
“I’ve always been a country girl,” Ballard said. “I missed seeing the animals.”
National Wildlife Federation Ambassador for the Wildlife Habitat Program and sustainable garden landscaper, Mat Paulson, said that the trend of natural gardening is increasing in northern Minnesota as homeowners learn more about the many benefits.
Sustainable gardening attracts wildlife and also helps the environment reducing dependency on pesticides, improving air and soil quality and cutting down energy use on regular garden maintenance. Con
Paulson also said that natural gardening is beneficial for your pocketbook. As native plants and shrubs are already tolerant of Minnesota weather conditions, less care and cash needs to be placed towards watering and expensive fertilizers.
According to the National Wildlife Federation, attracting wildlife is a simple accomplishment:
• Food — This may include providing bushes with berries, flowers with nectar and pollen or supplemental bird, squirrel, and butterfly feeders.
• Water — There needs to be presence of standing water that wildlife can access for drinking and bathing. This can include seasonal pools, birdbaths, rain gardens or ponds.
• Cover — Wildlife need shelter from bad weather conditions and predators such as wooded areas, bramble patches, rock piles and roosting boxes.
• Places to raise young — Wildlife also requires special areas to bear young. Some examples include mature trees, dead trees, dense shrubs and nesting boxes.
Providing these habitat conditions will make your home a portal to the great outdoors. To learn more about sustainable gardening to attract wildlife, obtaining your backyard wildlife habitat certification and listen to Mat Paulson speak, attend the “Creating a Wild Backyard” workshop at Tamarac National Wildlife Refuge at 2 p.m. on July 12 at the visitors center.
I have been enjoying the beginning harvest of my little city garden. We’ve had spinach and salad greens for weeks, but now we’re getting bush beans, blueberries, tiny carrots and nasturtiums. It seems that I really went for the multi-colored veggie seeds. Probably wanting color when I ordered the seeds in the middle of winter.
This is the first year that I grew beans and that’s been a big success. I have a lot of light, but it travels between buildings, so technically I’m partly sunny.
It’s been very cold and rainy, which has helped extend the season of the greens. It has wreaked havoc on my basil because we seem to have a bumper crop of baby slugs. So the basil looks like swiss cheese. I pinched it back and already the new leaves look much better. Plus we’ve been having sun, so that should help as well. If I need to I will either put out some beer to lure the slugs or sprinkle some diatomaceous earth around the plants. The DE is made of tiny diatoms, which nick the slimey surface of the slugs and causes them to die. I think I’ll start with the beer though (if I can wrestle it away from my husband). I think the DE might harm the earthworms, which I really don’t want.
I have loads of tomatoes, so it will be interesting to see how they do. So far they look beautiful. I can’t wait for real tasting tomatoes!!!
