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October 13th, 2007Growing Things
October 11th, 2007It is wonderful to be planting seedlings out in the spring garden and watching them take off. Here are some of the vegetables that have been planted out recently:
*Carrots, Scarlet Nantes and Nutri-Red (a red carrot variety). I finally gave up trying to direct-seed carrots in the garden as the tiny seedlings were all being annihilated by pests. I’ve started these last two batches in flats and transplanted them — fiddly work, but it’s very satisfying to see how well they are growing now.
*Burdock We’ve not tried growing burdock before, and I’ve only ever eaten it in Japanese restaurants, so this is a bit of an adventure for us.
*Kohlrabi, a variety called “Early Purple Vienna.”
*Salsify
*Scorzonera (Black Salsify) — Planted with the carrots as it is reputed to help repel carrot fly. We’ve also sprinkled coffee grounds around the carrot beds to help repel slugs and carrot fly.
Dalmatian Climbing Beans — Our favourite green bean variety from last year, with lovely purple streaks on it. We are going to try succession planting the green beans this year, in an effort to get a more staggered harvest. We’ll see how this works out.
Black Beauty Zucchini — Cropped well last year over a very long season, so we saved seed to keep growing it
Bull’s Blood Beet, Jerusalem Artichoke, Yacon, Chinese Yam, Woodland Strawberries, Onions (Pukekohe Long Keeper and Stuttgart Long Keeper), lettuces, peas and heirloom potatoes. The whole garden is filling up and taking off!
In planters by the living room window sit lots of little tomato and pepper plants, along with the first cucumbers, squash and okra. We’ll be transplanting them into the garden as they get big enough.
The vegetable seedlings are not the only things growing on the farmlet. Herman Beefsteak and Henrietta Hamburger seem to be getting bigger, fatter, and cheekier by the day. Coco’s milk supply is increasing as the grass gets sweeter and greener. Grapes vines are greening up and beginning to cover the garden fence. And of course my belly is getting bigger and wrigglier all the time. The baby has been stuck head down for over a month now. Exciting to think that in just over a month a new little person will be here with us!
Becky observing the realm
Coverlet
I’ve been keeping up with sewing and general baby preparations as the belly continues to grow, making more muslins and some baby wraps out of cotton flannel with crochet edging. All but the very last of them are now sewn up, washed, and folded, ready for the baby to arrive. As well as preparing for our own baby, I finished a gift for a cousin’s baby who was born recently — a big, healthy baby girl. I have to confess that I started making that little coverlet for the birth of their first baby (now 3 years old), and have only just finished it in time for the second. Just as well they decided to have another baby!
100kg of Maize!
October 6th, 2007If we are looking at producing our own grains in this bio-region, maize (field corn) is obviously one of the best suited for our particular conditions. Kevin and I are starting an experimental crop of Indian Flint Corn this season, in hopes of starting ourselves down the path of producing our own grains.
In preparation for producing and processing our own maize, we thought it would be a good idea to start practicing with some bought maize. It was amazingly difficult to find a source of New Zealand whole kernel maize for human consumption. Finally, through a friend, we found a way to get hold of some 50kg sacks of maize for a reasonable price. It wasn’t easy, but now we finally have 100kg of whole-kernel maize (a yellow dent variety) here on the Farmlet. 100kg is a lot of maize! Still, since the price of grain seems to be going nowhere but up these days, we figured we might do well to keep a little stockpile! We hope this supply will tide us over until we are producing enough maize of our own.
50KG sacks of maize (left), 25KG sacks of hard wheat berries (right)
Maize is much more nutritious if it is “nixtamalized” (soaked and boiled in an alkali solution) before being eaten, so that is what we want to do. We are full of plans for trying to make our own posole, tamales, and grits.
I had a first try at nixtamalising some of the maize yesterday. As per the instructions in “The Encyclopedia of Country Living,” I soaked it in a baking soda solution and then boiled it for quite a while to loosen the skins. They came off much easier than the book said they would — but I think that was because I got distracted and left the pot boiling longer than I should have. Oops! It was good that the skins came off easily, but the kernels had become very fragile and some were rather falling to bits! We have a lot to learn about this matter! After a great deal of rinsing, I further boiled the resulting product. It tastes a lot like the posole (hominy) that we used to be able to buy in a tin in the USA, except it’s yellow rather than white, and the kernels are falling apart rather than staying intact. I don’t know why it failed to turn white as I believe it ought to. Perhaps the alkali solution wasn’t strong enough?? Is it because of the type of corn we’re using? Since the kernels haven’t turned white, I’m not sure if we can actually say that the corn has been nixtamalized successfully. This is all very perplexing! Still, we are going to try some of this corn product for dinner tonight — trying to eat it as a polenta/hominy-type hybrid. It seems like it will taste ok, even if further experimentation is still needed to get it just right. (I made a bunch of it, and am hoping it tastes good enough to merit freezing in meal-sized batches for “fast-food” dinners!)
Plans for further maize-preparation experiments:
*Try using lime water or lye (if I can find any lye around here) to soak the maize instead of baking soda.
*Try the cold-soak (no-boil) method mentioned in “The Encyclopedia of Country Living.” This takes a lot longer, but would be much more energy-efficient
*”Nourishing Traditions” gives a recipe where you first grind the maize, and then soak it in lime water before cooking. I’d like to grind some of the maize in our grain mill and see how this recipe works out as well.
We hope that with time and practice we’ll learn which methods of preparing the maize are easiest, tastiest, and most nutritious.
Update:
We had some of the corn mixture for dinner, cooked up with a little salt, butter and rapadura. We served it with beef chili and cheese, plus a green salad from the garden, and found it very tasty.
Corn chili meal
Planting Seeds
September 28th, 2007Planting seeds and raising seedlings are two of my favourite springtime activities. Little tomato and pepper seedlings are already raising their heads, along with heartsease, calendula, basil, parsley, tomatillo and numerous others.
These are the tomato varieties we are growing again for a second time this year:
Moneymaker — a medium-sized red tomato that cropped really well for us last year and proved pretty blight resistant. Delicious flavour!
Russian Red — another medium-sized red tomato. Last year it also proved tasty, a good cropper, and pretty blight resistant. It’s semi-determinate and fairly compact, which means less work delateralling.
We are also trying the following varieties for the first time this season:
Gardener’s Delight (also known as Sugar Lump) — a cherry tomato that is meant to bear prolific crops of sweet and delicious fruit.
Green Zebra — a green stripy medium-sized slicer. I grew this one in California for a couple of years, and found it delicious and hardy. The fruit also look beautiful. We’ll see how it fares here in our much more humid conditions.
Humboltti — I got this packet as a freebie from Koanga Gardens. The fruit are meant to be small and yellow with pointed ends, and great taste.
The Farmlet wizardress in action
There are so many wonderful-looking tomato varieties listed in the seed catalogues that it’s hard to choose which ones to try. I struggle to exercise a bit of restraint and to stay mindful of how much space we actually have in our garden! I hope we’ve made good choices for this season. Now we are busy clearing and preparing garden beds so that we’ll be ready when it comes time to transfer the little seedlings to the garden.
Peas and lettuces have already been planted out. The lettuces are doing well, and we have just enjoyed the first leaves for our dinner — in a salad with beets and corn salad (also from the garden). I have finished erecting protective tent-like canopies made of marix cloth over the rows of peas. Now we hope they will be able to recover from the damage done to them by the large family of brown quail who like to visit the garden.
Creatures on the Farmlet: Live Ferments, Quail, Possum, Rattus Fattus
September 23rd, 2007The batch of sauerkraut made from the first of our red cabbages turned out well, and I’ve now got a second batch ripening in the kitchen. It is fun to make lacto-fermented condiments from our own vegetables. This ancient and ingenious method of food preservation actually increases the nutritional value of the vegetables, and the red cabbage sauerkraut comes out a fabulous purple-pink colour. These days, our kitchen sports a lineup of live ferments on the bench. As well as the fermented cabbage, we are making kefir and Caspian Sea yoghurt out of fresh milk from our darling Coco, and water kefir using lemons from the garden. A kombucha “mushroom” grows happily in the dark of a cupboard, producing a delicious drink for us. We enjoy having all these creatures living in our kitchen and sharing our food with us. I like to call them my pets.
Purple cabbage pet
Just outside the kitchen window are some more creatures with whom we are less happy to share our food. For the last few weeks, varmints have been raiding our lemon tree, and eating the skin off a whole lot of lemons. We suspect possums, and Kevin has been lurking around at night with the rifle hoping to catch them in the act. So far, no luck. These creatures are mighty stealthy. Kevin also set the possum trap under the tree. To our annoyance, the critters have taken little interest in the trap — apart from using it as a step ladder for reaching more lemons. Finally, a couple of nights ago, Kevin went out and saw the dead body of what he thought was a small possum in the trap. On closer inspection, he found he’d caught no possum, but a very plump and healthy rat: Rattus Fattus. We hoped this might be the end of our problems with the lemons, but the raiding continues (whether by rats, possums, or both) despite the presence of traps and continued forays with the rifle. Very frustrating! We had no such trouble last year.
Other creature trouble involves our newly planted crops of spring peas. We looked out the window one day to see that the marrowfat peas had been almost totally defoliated. I suspected snails, and was out in the garden in the rain that very night, trying to hunt down the culprits. Our search yielded surprisingly few slugs and snails, and we retired for the night feeling rather perplexed. We didn’t have to wait long to gain a better understanding of the situations. Looking out the window yesterday morning, we saw a whole family of fat little brown quail flocking through the garden beds, pecking and nibbling at the tender leaves of our greenfeast peas. We love watching these round little birds playing in the garden, but they are not welcome to trash our whole pea crops. After scheming for a while about inviting my parents’ cat out here for a vacation, or making quail casserole, we resolved to make row covers out of some salvaged marix cloth that we have stashed away in the garage. That way, we hope to continue sharing the garden with our little quail friends while protecting the young pea seedlings from their ravages. The peas look very sad and pathetic, and we hope they will recover from the attack!
AS WE GO TO PRESS: Kevin here. A little while ago, Becky called out and said that she heard a possum. I grabbed the .22 rifle and went outside. Locked and loaded, I scanned the trees with my flashlight. Maybe 20 metres from our kitchen window, there he was: Possum, destroyer of worlds, in a tall eucalyptus tree. He let out his call/bark for good measure.
“Tonight, you die,” I replied.
He won’t be getting any more of our lemons.