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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] May 24th Garden Diary
  • Date: Mon, 24 May 2004 20:59:58 -0600


"It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the
immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own
imagination as he can." -G.K. Chesterton, The Coloured Lands

May 24th Garden Diary
Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma City

http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/2004garden.htm

We harvested 201 garlic plants today, plus I left a few in the ground just to
see what would happen. Tomorrow I am going to pull a couple of shallots and
multiplying onions to see how they are doing. I also harvested the last of
the peas and pulled the plants up. Last year I harvested the garlic in
mid-June. My cousins in southwest Oklahoma tell me their wheat harvest is
early by about two weeks, and this was confirmed in last week's Daily
Oklahoman, which also reported that the Oklahoma wheat crop would be down at
least 14% from previous estimates. This is not good news, not for Oklahoma
farmers, and not for the world grain markets, as the world's grain harvest
has been shrinking for four years. World grain consumption is now larger than
the annual grain harvest, so grain storage has been reduced to only a few
weeks supply as stocks have been drawn down to meet current demand.

Had a great breakfast today. 100% whole wheat pancakes, scrambled eggs and
sausage, all Oklahoma products, bought through our Oklahoma Food Cooperative.
The pancakes are very light, even though they are 100% whole wheat, they are
actually lighter than my usual mix of white and whole-wheat flour. The flour
is from Springhill Farms in Kiowa County, Oklahoma, and is ground by the
Callen family. Here's my recipe:

2 cups whole wheat flour | 2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder | pinch salt | 2
tablespoons honey | 2 eggs, beaten | 2 cups milk | 2 tablespoons olive oil

Mix the dry ingredients, add the oil and mix, beat the eggs with the milk and
add to dry ingredients, stir quickly. Let sit about 10 minutes, fry on a
medium hot skillet in just a bit of oil. I fry it with a bit lower flame than
I typically use with white flour pancakes. For this morning's recipe, I also
had whole raw milk and used Honey Hill Farm honey. I made enough for 3 days
as if anything the pancakes are better the next day. I ate mine with homemade
mulberry jelly.

Which is another thing we've been doing, learning how to make jelly. Our
first project was mulberry jelly. To harvest the mulberries, two of us hold a
sheet underneath a branch, the third person vigorously shakes the branch. The
ripe mulberries fall onto the sheet, from there we put them in a basket.
Making the jelly was not rocket science. I used the recipe for blackberry jam
that came with the box of pectin that I bought. The jam jelled just fine, and
it tastes even better. Takes a lot of sugar though. I must learn more about
how to do no-sugar-added jams and jellies. Tomorrow we start our first batch
of mulberry wine. We are anticipating great harvests of sand plums, tree
plums, blackberries, and peaches. Dewberries and boysenberries are still a
bit stingy with their fruit, as are the clove currants, this is the first
year we've seen any fruit from them, and its just a few. Next year will be
another story. . . however.

The volunteer vetch is about past its prime in most areas. We have been
pulling it and running a lawn mower over it to shred it and then using it as
mulch. We nibbled on some of the green vetch seeds, and they were actually
quite tasty, just a bit of sweetness, but we didn't follow through with the
moderately tedious task of gathering and shelling enough pods to try them
cooked. The vetch got along just fine with the garlic beds, and doesn't seem
to have hurt the other alliums either.

We've been nibbling on strawberries and the occasional dewberry and I picked
the first boysenberry today, it had turned color but wasn't quite all the way
ripe.

99% of the bushes we planted earlier this spring are doing fine. There are 3
that seem to be struggling, and 3 that just haven't done anything. One of the
apricots took forever to wake up, and one of the apricots I planted last fall
has died. RIP. I thought we had lost the fig tree but it is coming on nicely,
it took forever to wake up this spring.

I am planting sunflowers, blackeyed peas, and purple hulled peas in the
spaces being vacated by the alliums (multiplying onions, shallots, garlic). I
have five heirloom tomato plants, 2 of which are cherry tomatoes, planted
along the trellis I put on the north side of two of the square foot gardening
beds I made last year.

Since last we spoke, I have planted more herbs: mother of thyme, orange
thyme, pineapple mint, winter savory, English thyme, and we have about 20 hot
pepper plants doing fine: habanero, Caribbean, jalapeno, cayenne. I also have
a bunch of parsnips. Now the interesting thing about them is that I planted
them last fall, but they didn't sprout. Now they are coming up in several
places, so we'll have some parsnips this year after all. The chard - rhubarb,
fordhook giant - is doing great.. The parsnip leaves, by the way, are very
attractive. People could plant parsnips just for the showy leaves, but they
taste good too.

The elderberries are in full bloom, and look very beautiful with their white
flowers. The first day lily opened up today, as have the first pink
coneflowers. The grape vines are loaded. Contrary to the typical advice given
to home gardeners, we have not pruned the grapes, because the most important
purpose of the trellis is shade along the west side of the house. The grapes
are an additional benefit. We may be sacrificing a bit of yield, but the
comfort the shady trellis provides is important since we don't use air
conditioning.

Speaking of which, we moved our cooking outside today. During the summer we
set up an outdoor kitchen on our porch. We use a gas grill, a 2 ring gas
stove, and an electric grill to do our cooking. This keeps a lot of heat and
humidity out of the house during the summer. This strategy also works if you
have air conditioning. When you cook inside, the AC has to work harder to get
rid of the cooking heat and humidity. My grandmother said that before they
got air conditioning, they generally cooked outside all summer long. This is
about 3 weeks earlier than last year's "outdoor cooking date".

We had a special treat for dinner tonight. Through the Oklahoma Food
Cooperative, we got a tenth of a beef from Cole Farms in Perkins. It weighed
about 45 pounds, and had steaks, roasts, and ground beef. His beef is all
grass fed, no grain, and we had rib-eye steaks tonight, with yellow squash
and cooked greens on the side. The greens (chard and kale) we got from Three
Springs Farm, and the squash from PDH Farms. The meat was very tender. If we
had gone to Cattlemen's Restaurant in Oklahoma City - which is probably the
best steak restaurant in town, located in the Stockyards business district -
we could have paid $50 a plate and not had a better steak than we had
tonight. The price? About $3.25/lb meat in our freezer. If I had gotten the
same amount of meat at say Wal Mart, I bet I would have paid more money. And
the Wal Mart mystery meat would have been of lower quality. I like knowing
the people who produce my food. I like growing some of it myself and I like
buying as much of the rest as I can directly from Oklahoma farmers through
our local foods cooperative. I know Fred Cole, we've had breakfast together
and prayed together.

I would much rather patronize my neighbors Fred Cole and Don McGehee than
support a giant corporation like Wal Mart. In the first place, let's not
ignore the fact that WAL MART DOESN'T SELL RIB-EYES FOR $3.25/LB, that's fur
sure. Why should I pay more for less? But people do that every day when they
drive to an ugly Wal Mart store, park, hike across the sweltering parking
lot, go inside, find what they want in the poorly organized store, stand in
line, pay, and then hike back across the sweltering, ugly parking lot to get
in their cars and drive home. We do this because we " know" Wal Mart has
cheaper prices. We know this must be true because Wal Mart spends millions of
dollars to tell us that this is so. My experience with Wal Mart is that they
do not always have the cheapest price, in fact, when I compare prices, I
often find that Wal Mart is NOT the cheapest price. And that calculation
doesn't include the value of my time. Even if you want "just one thing" it is
hard to get in and out of Wal-Mart in less than a half hour, and if you have
to get several things or the store is busy, it can be an hour or more. I do
monthly grocery shopping through the Oklahoma Food Cooperative in 20 minutes.
No sweltering parking lot, no long lines at the checkout counter.

Permaculture is about growing edible landscapes, that's true, but it is also
about creating sustainable local food systems. Indeed, a home permaculture
project is simply one aspect of a local food system. Other important factors
are people like Don McGehee and Fred Cole, and the 50 something other
producers who are members of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. And the
cooperative structure itself is a necessary aspect of a local food system, in
that it provides a market - a place where willing buyers and sellers can meet
and exchange value. It is a market whose core values are social justice,
environmental sustainability, and economic viability. Learn more about this
at www.oklahomafood.org .

To get back to the garden, tomorrow we are doing some more mulching, pulling
the rest of the vetch and shredding it with the lawnmower (pile it up on the
sidewalk, run the mower over it), harvesting shallots and multiplying onions,
and planting some more sun flowers and purple hulled peas. In June I am going
to try planting some summer squash. We've had failures with every cucurbit
we've tried to grow (except for butternut squash), due to squash bugs. One
strategy we found at the ATTRA site is to plant late, in June. Plus, we
didn't grow any cucurbits last year, so maybe they've gone away and any that
hatched out this spring have already died off for lack of sustenance. I am
also going to plant them in the middle of our mint beds, that was another
strategy suggested at Organic Control of Squash Bugs.

Y'all get the right eats and keep on bon apetìting, you hear?

Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma City






  • [Livingontheland] May 24th Garden Diary, Tradingpost, 05/24/2004

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