Turkeys!

Turkeys? Really? (you may ask) Yes! (I say) dressing poultry is work, and I would rather get more "bang for my buck" as it were. Moreover, heritage breed turkeys are well worth preserving. And I delight in the thought of providing the thanksgiving centerpiece for our family holiday shindigs. So we went right ahead a got ourselves a pair of Midget White turkeys. I built their coop entirely out of salvaged materials from our land (just incase we decide we don't like turkeys, we haven't lost too much). To tell the truth, turkeys are fantastically entertaining. Grotesque, yet intensely amorous. We're quite delighted to have them here.

Holy Zucchini!

I do try to stay on top of the summer squash. I pinky swear that a couple of days ago my plants were just flowering - this morning I harvested 9 lbs. Fortunately for me I love zucchini, and can eat them every day without getting sick of it. Mr. High Tech seems to eat them willingly day after day without even noticing. Also fortunate: 8 out of 9 of those pounds are romanesco (the big striped one on top), the best tasting summer squash in the whole wide world. In addition to my usual fresh summer squash recipes, this year I'll be dehydrating the surplus for later use in soups and casseroles - a technique I read about in Carol Deppe's book the resilient gardener  

makeshift potato garden

I had already ordered our seed potatoes when I realized that we would be doing a smaller scale veggie garden (in the future herb garden beds) this year. 5lbs of russian banana (absolutely the tastiest and waxiest textured potato ever) is a lot more than we have room for in there. But people grow potatoes in all kinds of containers, right? So I scrounged through the junk on the property for old nursery pots and compost bins, and viola! It's not pretty, but I'm fairly sure it will grow potatoes just fine. Right now the seed potatoes are covered with a layer of rotted straw, and I'll continue to bury them with whatever we have handy as they grow. Updates to follow.

Know your blogger..?

It has recently been suggested to me that I should provide a little personal background..

I didn't grow up in a rural area. In fact, as a kid I prided myself on my urban-ness. I had family in the country, but I thought they were uncool because they didn't wear jordache or listen to Madonna. In college when most people were experimenting with sex or communism, I was developing an obsession with... farming. I had moved to a rural area for school because it was cheaper, and at first I dreaded every interaction with "large animals" as they are called in veterinary medicine. However, certain utopic aspects of the agrarian lifestyle started to appeal to me. I began to garden on my patio, I started reading Wendell Berry, I became a foodie.. you get the idea. Since I was already committed to a career track at that point and needed to go where the work was, I spent the next 15 years or so working in veterinary specialty practice and gardening where I could. At night I read seed catolouges, Mother Earth News and other "farm porn". I worried about local food resilience and carbon footprint. I schemed feverishly about what I would do if I could get my hands on a little useable land of my own. In the midst of my self cultivation as a fanatically self reliant, solitary Luddite, I met my partner Mr. High Tech. I'm not kidding, this guy has a technology radio show. He thought that zucchinis grew under the ground. But good natured fellow that he is, he picked up a shovel to help out after only a couple of years. I've even heard him get on a soapbox about eating locally at parties. I'm so proud. While his first question while house hunting remained "what kind of Internet access can we get here?" the second one was "can we grow food?". So here we are, the yin to each others yang. Our daughter will know how to program a computer, AND how to graft an apple tree. We hope.

Soil

We tilled and cover cropped a section of the lot in December, hoping to use it as our veggie garden in '12. It was a last minute, impulse kind of a thing, and it was a mistake. There isn't time (or nice enough weather) for the seed to germinate and create enough biomass to significantly impact the soil there. So we have three choices: wait ANOTHER year to plant veggies, till under the tiny sprouts in the field and plant it anyway, or attemp to plant veggies into the decaying straw/compost in the herb garden beds. I'm going to go with option number three. I can't bear the thought of waiting another year, and I imagine the field should have several cycles of cover crop before we use it.

Weaving

Not farming, per se.. but a girl needs a winter time hobby.

Weaving is awesome. We all know this, and most of us also know that until we win the lottery we're not going to own one of those fancy weaving machines, the loom. Well guess again! Enter, the Tri Loom.  Actually, Tri Loom is a misnomer as it can be damn near any shape at all.  More on this later. You can essentially pound the right number of nails into an old picture frame and have a loom. Or – you know – you can buy some fancy hardwood and inlay material from a luthier, and dress it up a bit. The point being, even the fancy version is going to cost you $40 maybe $60 to make. Would-be weavers rejoice!

A note on construction: if triangular, this is a right triangle, not an equilateral. And each side will have the same number of nails, which means that the spacing on the hypotenuse will be different from the spacing on the short arms. If rectangular, the long side is (in length and number of pins) a multiple of the short side. That can be 1x1, or 1x100, but it can not be 1x1.5 if you want to do continuous weaving as you see me do here.

Orchard Planting

Planting fruit trees is a long term investment. It's a sort of act of faith, and a gesture of commitment to your location. It's a declaration of your intention to settle down. I ordered our fruit trees as soon as our bid on the house was accepted. All twelve trees in the "orchard" are semi dwarf, and we also planted 4 dwarf citrus in a separate area near the house. We have (in addition to two orange, a lemon and a lime) almond, cherry, fig, peach, nectarine, pear, plum, apricot, pluot and three apples. We also planted two hundred daffodils beneath the trees just for fun. Since I was still in a "delicate" state, our friends again came to our rescue with the understanding that if the doctor gave the the OK to have the baby at the last minute, I would run the machinery alone to bring on labor, and they could all just go inside and boil water or something.