Spring? Already?

Getting out in the (finally) sunshiny weather to do some homestead chores had me covering three full seasons today, and seeing some rather disquieting signs of a fourth. Bring in a 2-day (and night) supply of wood for the wood stove, because it’s still in the 30s at night and mornings are decidedly chilly. But days are in the high 50s to mid-60s, and absolutely glorious with the whiff of spring. Even as I finished (finally) harvesting beets and digging potatoes from last fall’s crops. Which didn’t manage to get harvested before the holidays descended upon me but weren’t in any real danger of destruction during what has been one of the mildest winters in all my 20 years here.

Basket and garden fork in hand, I wended my way to the bottom tiers from the bricked herb and rose garden below the grapes. Noticing how green the mints are, when they’re usually nothing but scraggly sticks in January. When they’re not under an accumulated couple of feet of snow. The thyme is brown, but the oregano has fresh green leaves low on the plants. The rosemary is still thick and green, thicker even than when I cut it down to nubs in November. Every single one of the sages is putting out leaves, including the potted sage I forgot to bring indoors to keep me company. The chives are still standing, and here’s new leaves on the parsley too. I’ve never seen that anywhere north of Florida.

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Another Autumn Goodie: Rosehip Syrup

My daughter went a little wild this year “trimming” back the grape vines that wandered over the fence that badly needs repair (rather than simply repairing the fence), so diminishing the ripening fruit that we got basically nothing from them this season. Ah, well. Happens every so often. They should be back in bulk next year, and I’m fixing the fence over the winter so she won’t be tempted to prune out of season. What she didn’t manage to trim into oblivion this year are the wild roses (sweet briar) bushes on the up-ridge side of the driveway. They can get out of control pretty easy, and always want to drape down into the driveway to cause scratches (and sometimes blood) to people who park too close.

So I’m the one who did the pruning this year, and I was very careful to hardily discourage growth on the driveway side, while encouraging growth on the ridge side. That allowed for a pretty good haul of rose hips this past weekend by my grandson. In previous years I’ve simply put the little hips – sweet briar hips are about half the size of dogwood berries, not the fat wild persimmon sized hips of garden roses – into a jar in the freezer to add to teas made over the winter. Especially the colds/flu tea we drink a lot of to keep the viruses away. But this year we made rose hip syrup, and I’m definitely a convert as I drink my morning coffee sweetened with it.

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Some Sun-Dried Tomato Recipes

The rush of big heirlooms and romas were processed in August, most dried in the solar unit out on the front (southside) deck. Weather’s back up into the ’70s during the day after a couple of nights of high-30s and frost warnings, looks like the peppers and grape tomatoes survived to finish up before Halloween – more sun-dried tomaisins! I keep making them, they keep disappearing faster than they’re coming in. I’ve found they’re not just great on crackers (with fresh basil, red bell peppers and feta cheese) and pizza, but add lots of zing to pasta and rice dishes as well. Mostly, though, the kids eat them as late-night snacks by the handful, right out of the jar.

As soon as it’s too cold to garden any longer, I’ll be using some of the dry-dried tomato that I’ve turned into powder to make tomato, basil and rosemary fettucini. Fresh pasta is fun to make and freezes very well, great to pull out and cook up quick when unexpected guests drop by. For the leathery half-dried tomatoes I had to go looking for recipes beyond “the usual” diced and tossed into/onto stuff. Discovered Valley Sun, a California company that specializes in sun-dried tomatoes. The linked page offers some general ideas about adding dried tomatoes to just about any recipe for meat, poultry, seafood and vegetables.

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Another New CSA and a Change of Herbal Heart

Autumn has come to the mountain just as spring did – one ay it was perfectly clear, close to 80º and comfortably into the mid-60s at night, the next it was barely up to 60º at mid-day and into the high 30s at night. Not only are we seriously behind in the necessary wood supply for heat, I’ve been having to scramble to bring in the remaining peppers and last of the tomatoes. Poplar leaves are already yellow and dogwoods are getting a ret tint on their leave to complement their quickly ripening bright red berries, and the crisp air fills with leaves whenever the breeze blows.

Luckily autumn is my favorite of all seasons. In three weeks from now the lush greens of summer will have turned into impossible corals and day-glo oranges and deep reds and yellows bright enough to light up the night. The smell of leaf-fall is heavenly even though it means endless raking in November, a necessary task to ensure resistance to spring fires. And of course the usual foot-deep winter covering once I’ve cleaned out the garden terraces and tossed the remains of their summer bounty on the compost pile. But it’s raining right now, so I’m shivering inside not daring to use any of the scant locust we have left from last year’s wood supply before nightfall, when it’ll really be needed.

In my last post I talked about a new centralized organizational outfit for connecting CSAs [Community Supported Agriculture farms] and ass orated organic suppliers with customer bases in their area via the internet, for promoting healthy, local food and food products and changing the way we eat. In my wanderings about the web, I discovered another kind of CSA that sounds like something right up my alley.

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Fall Plantings: Garlic

With the Harvest Moon just a couple of days past, the last of the summer crops will be coming in over the next month to be properly stored and/or preserved. The big pears are finally falling, providing more than enough for as much pear butter as I can possibly make even as the deer and turkeys work hard to eat more than their share before I can gather. The pumpkins are good and orange now, but can stay on the vines until first freeze warnings before I have to harvest and process. Winter squash is looking to be a good harvest at the same time, and the peppers are quickly turning red in rushes. Grape tomatoes are being sun-dried to “tomaisins,” as many as I can fit into the solar dryer at a time and always many more waiting to be picked. They’ll keep right on coming until first freeze.

At the same time, as the beds are cleared from harvest they must be prepped for fall plantings. More kale and collards (which will keep going all winter into spring with plastic tenting on very cold nights), peas, lettuces and spinach, and of course garlic. Today I’m talking garlic, because it’s one of our most favorite garden goodies.

Garlic is a member of the onion [allium] family. It has powerful antibiotic properties, and is well known as a “blood purifier” and digestive stimulant. Legend has it that garlic is an effective vampire and werewolf repellant, but I haven’t heard that it will prove to be all that useful during the coming Zombie apocalypse. For that, you should follow the advice in The Zombie Survival Guide instead.

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Food Waste: Compost or More Food?

Following a useful group series called Living Simply: Zero Waste has me thinking about what goodies from the kitchen gets tossed into the compost pile and how much of it might be useful for some other purpose. The series deals with all kinds of waste, of course, the things that go into our trash cans versus what goes into recycling, etc. And readership includes mostly people who live in urban environments. Things like food packaging and general trash items, getting those down as far as possible by recycling things like used batteries, those ‘planned obsolescence’ disposable electronics, plastics, glass, etc.

We homesteaders who have to haul our own trash and recyclables to the “Inconvenient Center” whenever we’ve got time while the darned dumpster station is actually open are pretty good at doing the separating. Especially for things like metals that can not only be recycled, but which we get paid for by the pound. But the question of food waste is quite pertinent this time of year, as crops start coming in and spring beds are cleaned out for fall crop planting. Which I definitely need to do, and would have already done by now if it weren’t so blasted HOT. At any rate, let’s look at the various compostables for what they might be put to best use for, considering how valuable compost actually is for purposes of growing things.

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A Busy Midsummer Day

Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The sun will rise over the Heel Stone at Stonehenge on June 21st to mark the Day The Sun Stands Still. Here at my homestead, looking directly east from the back porch (the cabin is cardinally oriented), it will rise above the peak of the springhouse roof before beginning its six-month journey toward the railroad’s gigantic wall, the precise middle of which marks the Winter Solstice’s sunrise.

In the Pagan world Midsummer is sometimes called Litha by moderns, taken from Bede’s De temporum ration, or The Reckoning of Time. Because the Solstice may come any time between the 20th and the 24th of June, it also coincides with the Christian’s feast day for the nativity of John the Baptist, also called the Feast of Saint John.

Despite Shakespeare’s most memorable fantasy play about fairy queens and woodland glamours, Midsummer is somewhat of a misnomer in that the Solstice actually marks the end of spring and the beginning of summer, not the middle. But there are certain things my household will be busy doing that will continue well into the rising of fireflies from the bottomland through the ferns after dark to mark this day the sun stands still, the longest day of the year.

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Milk Thistle Harvest – A Powerful Herb

Today I managed to get out into the garden before noon for a little clean-up and prep. Took out the last of the early peas and radish pods from their nifty PVC tent with twine, the peas being well past done and the pods perfect for harvest. I’ll need to clean out the bed thoroughly to replant with pole beans, and I will replant radishes down below in a bare well-composted spot next to the potatoes (which are blooming great guns!).

I also donned leather gloves and de-headed the milk thistle [Silybum marianum]. They were as tall as me by this time, falling over from heavy heads to make it difficult to get past them to the rest of the garden. Those dry pods are spiny like you wouldn’t believe, as if the leaves weren’t bad enough, but all spring the leaves make great additions to salads and pot greens, very pretty variegated thick foliage you have to trim the spines off of before adding to anything. The flower heads – the usual pretty purple thistle flowers about the size of a golf ball – produce seeds that are readily marketable to herb dealers in our region, but we end up using most of them ourselves for skin treatments, general systemwide cleansing, etc.

This stately and strikingly pretty plant has been in use for more than 2,000 years as a remedy for all sorts of ailments, most notably liver and gall bladder problems. There have even been medical studies of milk thistle as a remedy for liver damage caused by pain medications such as acetaminophen. Its flavonoid Silymarin is antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, and its action on the liver appears to be stimulation of new cell growth in that organ.

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Onions, Onions Everywhere!

At right is the first rush of the bunching onion harvest, prepped for drying in my wonderful (but quite ugly) solar food dryer! These are just the whites – grown from seed – that have been seriously overrun by volunteer grape tomatoes. I decided to let the volunteers grow because the celeriac I’d put where they are all got washed away by torrential rains all spring. Unlike my Abe Lincolns up top, these actually are turning red about a month late. Rain and cool weather all the way through July has kept the Lincolns green-green for way too long, don’t know if they’ll ever ripen.

Seems that’s the story up and down the Eastern Seaboard this year. Cooler than normal, and wet enough to make swamps. I hear New Jersey and other states are having tomato issues, as are all my neighbors, so I’m not alone. Potatoes are taking a big hit as well, rotting in the wet ground or turning black with blight. Both crops may be total commercial losses this year, which means it’s even MORE important that mine come in and get preserved. That’s where my food dryer comes in!

I have so looked forward to not having to buy lids, boil jars, hard-prep and then water-bath this year. We don’t have AC in the cabin, since there’s no point for the perhaps 3 whole weeks of summer when it’s so hot we have to go sit under a tree instead of stay in the house, but it does get sticky and uncomfortable in the extreme when canning, even though I’ve learned to do the water-bath out on the gas grill.

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A Delicious, Immune-Strengthening Herbal Tea

Concerns about how the fall and winter are going to be shaping up with the “Novel H1N1″ version of swine/avian/1918 human flu is going to turn out. It’s already full-fledged pandemic, is less deadly so far outside of Mexico than originally feared, but is unstoppable and there is no effective vaccine on the horizon. It could do an instant replay of the 1918 pandemic, from which the human DNA elements of this novel strain are derived, meaning it will incubate as not-too-deadly all summer, then come back when the seasons turn to wipe out tens of millions.

That’s not guaranteed, of course. It could as easily piddle out and mutate itself into something not even infectious. Yet so far, that isn’t apparent either. I figure it’s better to be safe than sorry, so I’ve gone looking for the most effective natural ingredients for an immune-booster with likely antiviral properties that will also make a good day-drink just because it tastes good and is good for you generally. For regular cold viruses, bronchial/lung inflammations, sore throats, coughs, fevers, chills, etc. High in vitamins and minerals and antioxidants, plus some indications of anti-tumor agents.

Now, medicinal claims for natural herbs and such are strictly illegal per the FDA these days, so take it all with a grain of salt. Yet at the same time, many traditional herbal remedies have been and are being studied because they do appear to be effective. Many modern medicines are based upon traditional herbal remedies, even if they’re just the alkaloids artificially synthesized. First thing I did was go Googling for herbal “antivirals.”

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