Backyard Garden

So in the name of cutting back on sugar we bought 5 gallons of honey. My parents know a beekeeper and they picked it up for us at a decent price. Not many people buy honey by the 5 gallon bucket. When you open the cover the smell is intoxicatingly sweet with of flowers and spice. So the next step of course is mead! Just add water and...  The entire kitchen smelled of very good flavorful honey as Shawn stirred up the wort. He felt a little like a magician in a renaissance fair, so I fixed his picture up for him. We will post a recipe later and hopefully a nice picture of the terrific and "magically delicious" mead.

So for my birthday I got the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, and so far I love it. Although I question Shawn's motives because I think it was just as much for him as it was for me. I make bread every week and have for a while now when I decided I could make better tasting bread that cost less and had less garbage added to it. I also make my own pizza dough, and we have tried to get a sourdough started and failed. So this book has been intriguing to me, and now I know why. If you buy the artisan bread at the grocery this book it is. You can make all kinds of wonderful different types of bread and it is super easy. So far I have used it for pizza crust (which is superb), we made a boule (again superb), and sticky buns that were out of this world. I cannot wait to try the brioche (very eggy and honey sweetened bread) and some of the other options. In a nutshell you make a very wet batch of dough, it rises at room temperature, you put it in the fridge, and cut off pieces for d...

 So we were visiting today and dug up some ramps, we also came across some checker berries which are fun. They have the same taste as Teaberry Gum. Apparently checkerberries have an asprin like quality to them so I guess if you are hiking and sore you can eat them to help or use the leaves to steep a tea. Ramps are delicious in anything you would use onion and we used some tonight for some hummus instead of garlic, very mild and tasty. If you come across them keep in mind you have to dig well below the bulb to get it out intact which is about 4-5 inches down. Also keep in mind to leave some behind for the next year.

So now the seedlings have a light source to help the stay upright and not reach for the windows. I did contemplate the fact that we may be visited by the police because we have a fluorescent light out over a bunch of green on on front porch, but I doubt it. All they would have to do is peek in the window to see that it is nothing illegal. So any way I am running the light only in the daytime just to help the legginess of plants. Yesterday seemed to work already. Some of the seedlings are starting to get there real leaves and are starting to crowd each other out, just in time for our vacation next week when I break them up into separate containers...not sure I have enough room for that part though!

Yes we are a little crazy, but really how crazy is it to make the move away from processed sugars? We started thinking harder about our sugar consumption after reading Michael Pollan's book 'In Defense of Food'. Without entirely just consuming the same amount of sugar as honey we did want to move to more natural and unrefined sources of sweetness. Shawn woke up on Monday and decided that this was the week stop eating refined sugar.  So I pulled out an old 1970's booklet on cooking with honey to see what we could do for some sweetness. My father was a beekeeper in the late 70's and 80's, his hives were destroyed by mites and he gave up the hobby. At one point in my childhood we had a wooden sign hanging from a pole in front of our house that said "Honey for Sale", and a huge store of honey in the basement along with all the tools for extraction, which as you can image was my favorite part. I made the Honey Butter cookies form page 3 in the PDF and this...

I planted some more seeds today... some summer squash, zucchini (so it will be a little staggered from what is planted directly in the garden), eggplant, parsley, sage, honey bear acorn/winter squash just to get things started in case the season is not perfect. I need to do my marigolds still, but otherwise most of the rest of the seeds will be directly in the garden. Now is not a bad time ot start lettuces, kale, and spinach. Although the weather here is going to be cold (40 degrees F as a high this weekend). I will be planting those outside soon. Very exciting. The other seedlings are doing well, the cat took out some of my cilantro so I have to have a gate up in the doorway to the porch, but not too much damage. We still need to set up a light although the seedlings are not too leggy yet some are getting close, like the cilantro and brussel sprouts. Now off to cubeland.

Just in the last year or so we became more interested in what there is for wild plants here in Maine. Mostly up at my parents house because we are here in the city. Interesting none the less and actually there are some things I want to try this year if we have time and can find them. Last years fun discovery was that of ramps, or wild leeks. You pick them in the spring for the shoots, which are extremely flavorful for there tiny size and can wait for fall to harvest the bulbs. We will be searching for these scrumptious little things again this year. Fiddleheads will probably up sooner than usual due to the crazy warm weather and this year I want to go picking them before we get too many black flies.  To help with looking for new edible plants we picked up a seemingly decent book, I like the fact they show many of the plants in varied stages and seasons (so if you see something in fall you could still identify that you should get it in the spring). I have an image of a cover from a...

The seeds are coming up great, we need to get a light on them before they get more leggy. Hopefully it is not too late, tomorrow is Saturday and we should have time to get the light set up and hung.

other than the fact they need water the cabbage and morning glories are going very well! How exciting to see the new growth.

We undertook the semi big task of moving compost this weekend. Over the winter we left our summer compost alone and started a winter compost near the door and porch to ensure continued and plentiful composting. Now that the weather is so nice the winter compost was ready to be moved away from the door! I started by emptying the summer one out, and here is the winter compost. easy to take apart! when it was half frozen the vegetable clippings and hay were halfway up the structure. Just since the weather has been nice it decreased significantly. Shawn is hosing down the summer compost, it needs just a little more breaking down before we can use it in the garden. we will leave it in a pile and cover it with a tarp, this way we can turn it often and speed up the last stretch of composting. So I got half of the compost moved. The whole time I am layering the compost like a lasagna, a gross lasagna mind you. we had a high concentration of vegetable clippings and needed to break them up ...

Finally, I have been waiting for the nights to not be so cold so we don't have to heat an extra room to keep the seedlings going. Now just wait impatiently for the little green sprouts....

So here is another book for anyone who loves to garden, or is just curious about what it was like to garden in the late 1700s to early 1800s. This is not a historian it is a printing of this guys writings on gardening from that time. That in itself made it fascinating to me. The vegetables that he grows are interesting, and one of my favorite parts is on mustard, "Why should any man who has a garden buy mustard? Why should he want the English to send him out, in a bottle, and sell him for a quarter a dollar, less and worse mustard than he can raise in his garden for a penny?". He goes on to say that the mustard is full of unwanted fill like baked bones to make it cheaper. Can you imagine this guy out in the field with a plow?

I just finished Terry Silber's book "A Small Farm in Maine", which is the story of her and her family making the transition to a farm in Maine and living fully from their farm. The book is interesting because Hedgehog Hill Farm was in Sumner where I grew up. It was much drier than I expected, although I suggest it to anyone who gardens or is considering farming, and I believe she was a better writer when it came to teaching instructional things. I think this because I also purchased "Growing Herbs and Vegetables From Seed to Harvest" Terry & Mark Silber) which I have been pouring over and it is very thorough and well written. As a side note it is a little weird because I worked at Hedgehog Hill Farm when I was in high school. I loved it, and a combination of working there, my own love of plants, a short but full lifetime of gardening, becoming a vegetarian, and interest in medicinal quality of plants sent me in the direction of going to school for botany. I ...

Getting ready to start some seeds on the front porch. Here is what we have so far!

The beer is going well, actually. The garden did not do so well in the end of the season. I need to make some big changes to the soil composition for next year. I feel like it was stunted and I am sure it is the soil. I spent the later part of the summer working on what we had planted in my parents garden in Sumner to try to salvage some of the time/energy. We lost all our tomatoes to blight but had about 5-6 pounds of carrots from our garden here. all the squash was hit with fungus as well, but the zucchinis made it pretty far. We lost all the turnips to wire worms, and the rest was stunted. Hope next year is better!

We picked up the stuff to brew a dry stout yesterday from the Hop Shop in Grey. One can of hopped dark malt syrup and 3 pounds of dry malt for a richer brew. We started the brewing process last night after Honora was put to bed. Things went fairly well initially. Sanitized all the buckets and equipment, no boilovers, generally a good time. We filled the brew bucket with the water and wort and took the hydrometer reading to find out how much alcohol might be at the end of the process then walked the 95 bucket into the basement. Once in the basement I noticed the seal around the spigot was leaking. Some one tightened it a bit too much. Someone who thinks you can muscle everything just a little better. I couldn't reach my hand into the bucket to fix things so we had to move everything over to the glass carboy. In the process of moving everything to the carboy the hose we were using detached and began to spill future beer everywhere. We cinched off the flow of beer and began to clean u...

Still no new pictures, but all the new seeds we planted July 5th for lettuce, kale, spinach and mesclun salad mix are all coming up. I also planted more carrots and there have been no signs yet, although in their defense they take longer to germinate. The compost is going well, especially since we have had a couple hot days. I need to dig in and check on the worms. Also I need to add more nitrogen to it (probably a layer of grass clippings). The last stretch of weather has been perfect, just enough rain to water everything and just enough sun to keep it all growing. Some of the tomatoes are now flowering and have tiny green tomatoes started. Cucumbers and squash are gong to start spreading out soon which means I need to complete the rellis side of the raised beds so they can vine up. I need to reapply the aphid killer to the tomatoes, it has not wiped them out but so far it has been decreasing the numbers and the tomatoes look better for it. We have a couple of unexpected pests, these...

Well, a quick update on pests and the weather. Aphids are decreasing in numbers after hitting them with "Safer Soap" from Paris Farmers Union. An approved for organic garden option that appears to get approval from lots of people. Squirrels have been hiding out and not digging in the garden, probably due to the horrible weeks of rain. Which brings me to our worst "pest" so far, the rain! We lost our melons (there is still one pathetic looking vine, but I think it will not produce melons before it gets too late. We lost our kale, lettuce and spinach to the rain as well, just started getting yellow, it did not mature correctly and got bitter while still small. We tore it all up and stared new this weekend. Hopefully this will get us going into the next weather pattern ans we will get more sun and better looking crops. The tomatoes, basil, and peppers are looking a little weak as well, but the couple days of sun gave them a boost. Cabbages, broccoli, brussel sprout...

Here are a few pics of Jen and I removing labels from the bottles we will be using to bottle our beer. It was not fun and a word of advice; if you are saving bottle for brewing stick to Smithwicks and Bass as the labels come off with almost not work what so ever. Avoid at all costs Dos Equis and McSorley's as these babies are the worst. The Dos Equis has a metallic label that doesn't allow the water to soak through to the glue and the McSorley's glue is a rubbery mess that requires gloves to roll it off. We had to buy a 12 pack to get the 100 bottles we were looking for, but we have it now. Not the funnest part of the brew making process.

For my birthday I received a brew kit because a flooded garden and hunting ground hogs was not enough. This was our first kit.   And this is what it looked like bubbling. It is in the basement now waiting to be beer.