Onions & Broccoli

Last week at the get-it-all store, I picked up a bag of Siberian iris roots, a bag of daylily roots, and a sack of onion bulbs.  I intended to plant the onion bulbs in the beetless end of the horse trough, but when I poked my finger in the dirt I discovered it was frozen solid about 1" below the surface.  I put the bulbs away until yesterday when the weather made me feel like I ought to be gardening.  I also set out the iris and the daylilies, and started a batch of broccoli seeds. 

That little bit of digging made my out-of-shape self a little bit sore in the get-along when I got out of bed this morning.  After breakfast, I decided the thing to do might be to work the soreness out.  So I put on my gloves and my hat and went outside to pick up limb debris from the ice storm, rake some leaves, etc.  The Husband came out with his chainsaw, and together we worked all day.

We are already regretting it.  Every significant movement is accompanied by an agonized groan.  We may not be able to get out of bed in the morning.

But the yard sure looks better.  The flower bed along the back of the house has been taken over by ivy, but I got in there and raked and ripped and pulled as much of it out as I could.  Now, that bed is down to bare, rich dirt.  If I can keep it that way until it's time to plant flowers, it'll be lovely. 

Crazy Weather

When I left off writing last week, I'd just spent a weekend doing outdoor gardening.  It was warm enough that I sweated without a coat.  About 4 p.m. Sunday, I looked out of my kitchen window to find ice forming on the trees.  By the next morning, the trees were so heavy with ice that they were bending and breaking. 

Monday afternoon, as I was in the kitchen, pondering what to do about supper, I heard a CRACK! like a pistol shot, and a WHOOSH! and a sound like a thousand martini glasses crashing off a shelf.  I ran to the window in time to see the last of the ice shards cascading to the ground, right on top of the crippled leaf sweeper I'd parked under the trees.  The leaf sweeper was flat as a pancake under a huge limb. 

It snowed Friday night, came down pretty fast for a while, but only piled up a couple of inches, altogether.  Today, the temperatures rose, the snow mostly disappeared, and we have been hearing ice raining out of the trees.

And I've just been piddling around the house, thinking about how all that good moisture is going to flatten the leaves I've piled up in the middles, and soak the straw and newspapers and alfalfa pellets I've put atop the rows, and make my garden a rich paradise by spring.  ;)

More Straw

It has been warm here for the past couple of days, but tomorrow the weather is supposed to get crazy (again).  I wanted to put more newspaper and straw on my planting rows before it starts raining.  My boss has been saving her newspapers for me, as has Nanny, and so yesterday when I got busy in the garden I had enough newspaper to finish using up the straw  I bought last weekend.  Those 10 bales of straw covered about 3-1/2 rows, probably 1/4 of the garden. 

Since The Husband was going to town this morning, I sweet-talked him into going to the farm store for more straw.  While he was gone, I hitched the lawn sweeper to my 4-wheeler and started gathering leaves from the yard to dump on the garden, thinking I'd rake it into the middles for weed control.  I made about 4 trips from the house to the garden before the sweeper quit working.  The Husband arrived back at home with a truck bed of straw about that time.  We took the sweeper apart and discovered that a plastic gear had cracked in two places, and some of the teeth were worn down, and it apparently doesn't have enough oomph to turn the brushes.  I searched online and called stores; evidently, replacement parts of this sort are not available.  Looks like we'll be shopping for a new lawn sweeper, and it needs to happen in time to let me get more leaves on the garden before spring arrives.

We unloaded our 10 new bales of straw and started distributing it down the rows.  Ran out of newspaper again, and quit.  The Sunday paper might finish up the straw bales. 

I Should Be Planning

My sister gave me a gardening calendar.  It says that in January I ought to be ordering seeds and starting seeds for cool weather crops.  I guess since it's almost the end of January, I'm already behind, eh? 

The priority right now is getting the no-till method cooking.  I ran out of newspaper before I finished even one row last weekend when the weather was nice.  Folks are saving newspapers for me this week, so maybe I'll be able to finish two rows this weekend.  It looks like it's going to take about 5 bales of straw per 75-ft-long row, so I'll have to lay in more straw, too.

I bet you're wondering how the pineapple upside-down kefir cake turned out.  It would have been better had I remembered to add baking powder and salt to the flour.   :\  The kefir had just enough leavening power by itself to make a dense cake with a texture almost like cheesecake.  But we're eating it!

Kefir

One cold, drizzly day last fall, a friend and I went to a butter- and cheese-making class at a local farm.  During a break, we overheard a gentleman telling another gentleman that he had been drinking some stuff called "kefir," and that since he had been drinking it, his blood pressure and cholesterol levels had gone to normal, and he had not had any trouble with heartburn.  My friend and I looked at each other with our ears perked up.  Both of us have been eating over-the-counter antacid tablets and capsules for years.  My friend even takes prescription-strength heartburn medicine.  We insinuated ourselves into his conversation, trying to find out what kefir was and where we'd get some.

It turns out that kefir is fermented milk.  The fermentation process begins with kefir "grains" - they're not a true grain; they just call them grains because they're grainy - little clumps of bacteria and yeasts.  The man said that we could order them in dehydrated form online, or he would give us some of his grains (they grow over time and produce enough to share).  I decided to order some grains and have been making kefir since October.

Kefir has a consistency that is much like buttermilk.  It tastes a little like buttermilk, too, or plain yogurt.  I kind of wrinkled my nose up at my first taste of the stuff but quickly got used to it.  I'm addicted to it now.

I can't personally testify to kefir's effectiveness in lowering cholesterol or blood pressure (there are studies online that you can read, both pro and con).  I CAN personally testify to almost complete relief from heartburn when I drink 1/2 cup of kefir on a daily basis.  I can also testify to a serious reduction in irritable bowel symptoms.

I can also testify to the fact that it makes KILLER cornbread.  Seriously.  KILLER.  Just use it in place of the milk in the recipe (you might need a little more kefir than milk to make the batter wet enough because the kefir is thicker).  The taste is not much different, but the texture is heavenly.  There are also recipes online for making loaves of bread with kefir.  I tried it, both with whole wheat flour and with all-purpose flour.  Because it has to sit for a long time to rise, the kefir flavors the bread much more strongly than it flavors the stir-it-up-and-cook-it cornbread.  Kefir bread is dense and tastes a lot like sourdough bread.  The crust is a little tough, but it's good.

Of course, cooking the kefir robs it of its probiotic properties, but it's a good way to use up surplus kefir.

In two minutes, a pineapple upside-down cake made with kefir will be coming out of my oven.  I bet it's going to rock.

The "No Tilling" Method Begins

This morning, I installed a shiny new trailer hitch on my Jeep, borrowed my son's 10-foot trailer, and headed to the garden center for straw bales and alfalfa pellets.  My intention was to buy 20 bales of straw, but The Husband said he didn't think I could get 20 bales on that trailer, so I just asked for 10 bales at the garden center counter.  (It turned out that I easily got 10 bales on the trailer, with room for at least 6 more.)  Bought two 50-pound bags of alfalfa pellets.

I took everything straight to the garden, unloaded the trailer, and started to work.  I laid sections of newspaper right over the existing debris, separated the straw bales into patties and laid them on top of the newspaper, then sprinkled alfalfa pellets on top of the straw.  I ran out of newspaper before I got the first row covered.  Two bales of straw did a little over half of a 75-foot row.  Looks like I'm going to need more straw.

Also, I can't help but suspect that the deer are going to come eat the straw and the alfalfa pellets before they get a chance to decompose.  We'll see.

The weather is supposed to be reasonably nice tomorrow, so I'll raid Nanny's newspaper stash and finish the straw-spreading job before it turns cold again.

No-Till Gardening

Last weekend, I went to a lecture on soil.  The speaker was a proponent of "no-till gardening."  You can google the specific hows and whys of no-till gardening, but the basic idea is to add layer upon layer of organic material on top of the garden soil to provide nutrients to the soil and condition the soil from the top down so that tilling becomes unnecessary.

I patiently listened to the lecture, visualizing my garden plot in my mind, wondering if the no-till method could ever work for me.  During the question/answer period, I asked him what specific things he would do to begin the no-till method on a garden like mine, a 75' x 75' plot of concrete-like soil that currently hosts debris from last year's vegetable garden (unpicked greens, frost-bitten pea vines, sundry weeds, okra stalks, all of which is blanketed with a couple of inches of leaves).  He said to scatter "a couple of bags" of alfalfa pellets over the mess to speed up the decomposition process, and begin piling more organic matter (shredded newspapers, coffee grounds, wood chips, leaves, grass clippings, etc.) on top.  When I asked how I was going to get the seeds and plants into the hard-packed soil come springtime, he said to use a "dibble" to poke holes in the ground for the seeds. 

Though I am skeptical, I think I'm going to try it.  It's probably going to be more work than running the tiller, but it may help solve the blight problem that I battle every year.