It is raining, raining, raining. A good time to chronicle the birth of the gardens for this year.

Last year, all produce was grown at my parent’s house where the main gardens are kept. Great space, water access, etc., however this also meant that every time I wanted to make a salad I had to drive a mile down the road to stock up. So, this year the plan is to maintain main gardens at 1219 (the folks’ pad) for canning, freezing, possibly even selling, but each sibling house starts their own house garden.

On May 2nd, thanks to the sweat and labor of Annie, Joe, LJ, Brian, myself and even Parker… the raised bed gardens of 1605 were born.

We began the work of transforming this:

To this:

This involved cutting, laying out and affixing landscaping fabric to the bottom of the bed, cutting and wiring the cedar pieces together, then filling with compost, topsoil and finally mulch. Let’s just say that our out-of-shape early spring limbs were quite sore.

The following weekend, we were off to the farmer’s market to start buying the plants. First to go in, the herbs.

I had to take the girls to a birthday party, so Brian coaxed Mom and Dad into helping him plant the herbs. Later, mom apologized for taking the pleasure of planting the herbs away from me. Clearly she was unaware of just how much was going to have to be planted.

Now remember, this is the northeast. Even though we’d had temperatures in the lower 90’s the last week of April, and the National Weather Service had declared the last frost date as no longer valid, Mother Nature had other plans.

On 5/19, evening temperatures dropped to 33 degrees. We covered everything with tarps, sheets and buckets and thanked the heavens that we hadn’t started planting the tomatoes. Everything survived. Friends who own a farm in Berne were not so lucky and ended up replanting entire vegetable gardens.

With the last frost out of the way (hopefully) it was time to return to the farmer’s market for the big buy. This is where we purchase flats of seedlings to start the main vegetable gardens as well as our house gardens.

Oh, that’s right, we ALL go to the market. Even the 93 year old grandmother (check the sweet ride wheelchair) wants to get her say in on what will be planted this year. My sister watches the girls while breastfeeding the baby, and my mother peruses the perennials and flowers. I bark out orders from the list while the boys march about hunting down the best flats and my dad wanders around trying to sneak in extra plants that he wants but hasn’t told anyone.

Perhaps now would be the appropriate time to point out that we’re part Italian.

After the big acquisition, it is all hands on deck to plant, plant, plant. What’s that? You have to breast feed your baby? Slap on that sling and suit up Holly Hobby, we’re going Amish.

We didn’t get it all in before the rains came. We never do. Sometimes we end up planting in the rain and sometimes we have flats of stuff just waiting for some direction in their life, wanting to grow but not knowing what path to take. Reminds me of some of my relatives.

Attention ends up switching to water: the preservation and the importance.

After collecting water (for the chickens and the gardens) in three 32 gallon rain barrels, Brian bumped up our system to catch into a 100 gallon watering trough, which overflows into another 100 gallon watering trough, which flows into several containers. Let’s not forget the trash barrels that we still catch water in. All are filled with goldfish and now, our latest pet, a Koi. With all of this water you would think that we’d be able to catch up on laundry and dishes during our dry spells… but we can’t. Don’t think I haven’t thought about bathing with the Koi when our well gets low.

In between planting, we put up our high tech pest deterrent systems: pinwheels and string fences with pie plates and blowing plastic garbage bags. And we had some fun…

This is one of my estate sale pillowcases that was too worn to be of any indoor use, so I’ve turned it into a manure tea bag. I fill it with chicken manure, soak it overnight in one of the garbage cans of water and voila! Manure tea!

I owe a whole post about my chickens. For now, I’ll just regale you with their ability to poop something that is tea-riffic and the incredible amount of dust that they kick up. We raise our littles on the back porch in a brood box. When they are tiny yellow peepers, they don’t contribute too much air pollution. However, leave them until they get all their feathers and… well… one day you wake up and a room of your house is suffocating under a straw yellow haze.

It took 6 hours of pulling every single thing off of my porch, washing it down, sorting through it and then putting it back.

You would think that after the third hour of hauling my crap back and forth that I would take the hint and start purging my world of material goods.

Nope. It was a call to hit another estate sale.

While Brian was building up the chicken pens to include the Easter flock and a grand aviary for HeyZeus, there was one particular casualty: a hen that got stuck under foot and perished. So, we did what any good farm would do. We called some friends and had a chicken BBQ.

Now that we’d settled into the rainy season, we needed something to keep our mind off of the drowning tomato plants. If you haven’t figured out by now, we love to live by the motto, “If a little is good, then more should be mandatory.” So, with weeks of storms riding in on the horizon, Brian cooked up a new catchwater scheme.

Yes, that is my husband hammering into his private stock, if you will.

SOLSTICE UPDATE

Today is the Summer Solstice, as well as Father’s Day. We have spent the day eating and ignoring the gardens, the chickens, and unfortunately the dogs who, incidentally, ate an entire pizza when no one was looking.

The gardens about the farm continue to upkeep the idea that we are not exactly in control. Check out these plants lined up OUTSIDE of the garden’s wall…

We have sunflowers growing up all over the yard, thanks to the sloppy chipmunks and squirrels. I liken them to the sparkly fairy stickers that have appeared on the clothes dryer or the tropical fish stickers that are now permanent fixtures on the bathroom countertop. Wasn’t exactly something I wanted to happen, but now that they are there, they offer surprising beauty and have become my favorite parts about my living space.

The gardens are not exactly flourishing in the ways that I would like, but alternatively exploding in other areas that make me proud. A bunch of my stuff has taken a turn towards Yellow Town and are not growing but surviving. I suspect a lack of nutrients in my soil and a lack of sun in the sky. I have fertilized and now cross my fingers and hold my breath.

My seedbed is a runaway train of arugula. After I planted all of my seeds in a very well planned and orderly fashion, I failed to cover the area with straw. A nice steady, hard rain was kind enough to wash my seeds into another planting plan of Mother Nature’s liking.

Lately I’ve been weighing whether or not I want to start selling stuff at a farmer’s market, or dig out the farm stand. Neither idea really appeals to me as I would have to spend hours on set-up, labeling and even standing post. I’m not exactly sure how to manage my 2 little kids and find time to stand around for hours on a Saturday. I can barely update my blog, which I know connects me to all of the friends of The Accidental Farm.

So, I end up batting the ideas back and forth, usually at 4AM, and hope that some solution comes walking down my driveway. Fear of failure is an painful thing, but fear of success is downright paralyzing.

Like everything else on the farm, I know that, at some point, we’ll just hold our noses and jump in with both feet. This is how we ended up with our beautiful best friend of a dog, how we ran away to Ireland once upon a time and why we now have 2 children. Don’t think about it. Thinking is the death of every great idea.

Don’t wait for the clouds to pass because you can never guarantee what is on the other side.

Tags: Family, Farming, Friends, Gardening

Many times I screw up, here on The Accidental Farm. I don’t always show you. Behold!

Seems that our root cellaring skills need a little help. What you are looking at is a box of frozen, moldy squash. While we appropriately put the butternut squash harvest into a bin filled with straw, we did NOT place said bin into 40-45 degree space. Instead we put all the bins (carrots, potatoes, squash and apples) on the back porch. Most years this probably would have worked out just fine since it serves mostly as a walk in cooler in the winter months. However this year, with our arctic temperatures, we just ended up with frozen squash that eventually went moldy when the temperature allowed them to thaw just a bit.

Now, I am a little bit on the anal side when it comes to waste. The day that I found these left me more than a normal amount of upset. This was mostly because I could have donated this food as opposed to leaving it to rot on the back porch. I even tried to cook some of it (not the moldy ones) but Brian caught onto me and refused to put up with ingesting something akin to dumpster food. Thankfully we have the birds to gobble up such mistakes.

I think that my issues around waste (and by contrast, saving things) come from the fact that I was born under the sign of Cancer. Load on top of that that my grandfather was a junker (he ran a mini junkyard in the back of his garage to sell scrap metal) and that my Nona Kaye patrolled garage and estate sales as if they held the secrets to the mysteries of the universe, and you might get a clue to the forces within me that I’m up against.

In the winter, I literally cringe every time I have to throw out coffee grounds and tea bags because it is just too hard to compost. As it is we feed the chickens all vegetarian and grain scraps, the dog gets just about all our meat scraps, burn all paper and cardboard and rewash the ziplocs (unless they have something nasty like hot dogs in them.) When we eat out, I even order vegetarian dishes made without dairy so that I can bring home my scraps for the chickens. Really? Is this totally necessary?

But then, I think about it this way…

Did you know that every grocery store has a box (sometimes referred to as “the yellow box”) that they put out into the garbage filled with produce that is still edible, but simply wilted or browning and deemed unattractive to the consumer?

According to the US Department of Agriculture, up to one-fifth of America’s food goes to waste each year, with an estimated 130 pounds of food per person ending up in landfills.

The next time you are at a farm stand/farmer’s market ask the farmer what they do with the produce that is bruised. Most farmers say that they feed them to the chickens/pigs/etc., however some do not.

When I lived in Brooklyn, Red Jacket Orchards from the Finger Lakes region, would sell apples, pears, grapes etc. at all the markets around NYC. One day I noticed them tossing bruised peaches into a box underneath the table. I asked what they did with them and they told me they just threw them away. I asked if I could have them. I took home about 5 pounds of peaches that simply had a brown spot or was a little mushy… for free. I made something like 4 deep dish peach pies (I didn’t know how to can then and my freezer space was the size of a bread box) and about 8 cups of jam. So next time, if the mush and the brown doesn’t scare you, save yourself some money and some landfill space.

And hey, if you don’t want it, grab it for me. I’ll make you some jam for your efforts.

Tags: Chickens, Gardening, Winter