Author: Anna

Anna Hess is the author of The Weekend Homesteader, plus a variety of other books. With her husband Mark Hamilton, she blogs as The Walden Effect.
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Summer harvest tips: Peppers, chanterelles, tomatoes, and beans

July harvest

It’s harvest season! Mostly, this post is just pretty pictures I couldn’t resist snapping while bringing goodies in out of the garden and woods. But here are a few tips to add redeeming value:

  • Go ahead and start those peppers early! Last year, our lunchbox peppers (started inside two months before our frost-free date) had only given us a bit of color before the fall frosts nipped them. So this year, I moved things back another three weeks. Sure enough, we’re already harvesting our first orange peppers in the middle of July. Success!
  • Assertively fling the dirt out of mushrooms. I thought it was really clever to outsource cleaning wild-harvested mushrooms to Mark, but since you all can’t do the same I asked him for his secret. He told me he assertively flings dirty chanterelles into a white bowl. Most dirt flecks will pop off (and be easy to see against the white). Then he scrapes any remaining dirt off with a knife.

Summer bounty

  • Save tomato seeds while making sauce, soup, or juice. Do you have enough tomatoes that you’re starting to cook them up? Set aside an extra minute to save seeds from your favorite varieties in the process.
  • Freeze a bit at a time as you cook dinner. Another thing that’s easy to put off is food preservation. But if you just steam a handful of extra beans every night then sock them away in the freezer, they add up fast!

How’s your garden and pantry growing?

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Gooseberry Fool taste test

Bowl of gooseberries

Fourteen years ago, Mom sent me her family recipe for Gooseberry Fool. Foolishly, I waited over a decade to give it a try. I also tweaked the ingredients a bit based on other recipes on the internet (and on Mom’s memory that the Fool she ate as a kid was thickened with an egg).

The recipe I used:

  • 1.5 cups of gooseberries, washed but with the stems and tails still on (plus a few raspberries)
  • a bit of water
  • 1 Tablespoon of sugar
  • 1/3 cup milk
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 cup whipped cream (ours was homemade, but I assume you could use the stuff in the can)

Cook the gooseberries and sugar over medium heat with just enough water so they don’t burn. Once the berries burst, remove them from the heat and send them through a foley mill (or use another method to get rid of the skins and most of the seeds).

In a separate container, mix the milk and egg well. Pour the eggy-milk mixture into the gooseberry puree and return to the heat, stirring constantly until it bubbles and thickens.

Cool the new mixture completely, then stir in whipped cream. Top with a raspberry if you have any left.

Gooseberry fool

Then it was time for the taste test.

Anna: “It’s okay, but I like the raw berries better.”

Mark (who’s only so-so on raw gooseberries but hates to complain about food I put in front of him): “Hm. It’s… Um… Did you say there’s also the option of chocolate cake?”

I guess there’s a reason Gooseberry Fool isn’t a mainstream recipe any more…

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Garden experiment updates

I’m sure you’ve been waiting with baited breath to hear how various experiments panned out. Wait no longer! Results are in.

Quirk cucumbers

Quirk cucumber

Of the new vegetable varieties we’re trying this year, the Quirk cucumber, has already proven itself a winner. They’re sweet and tender and at least as productive as our other cucumber types. Just keep in mind that they mature quite small, so pick when you can still see the dried-up blossoms on the end.

Highly recommended! We’ll definitely be growing these again next year.

Overwintering a garden under a pool cover

Weed-free spring garden

Remember how my mothers-in-law laid down an old solar pool cover over their garden beds last fall? They didn’t plant until around the frost-free date this spring and left the pool cover on until just before planting.

By the time they took it off, nearly all of the maple leaves they’d topdressed the beds with had melted into the soil and the entire area was completely weed-free. Even weeks later, they’re only seeing very mild weed pressure, suggesting that seedlings sprouted under the pool cover then died. (My mind is blanking on which garden writer recommends a similar technique, but using black plastic. Maybe you can refresh my memory in the comments?)

 

Planting spring vegetables early vs. late

Planting spring broccoli early vs. late

This experiment involved planting some broccoli seedlings early enough that their tops got a little nipped then setting out seedlings started inside at the same time considerably later. The expected tradeoff was that the early planted broccoli would grow more roots at the expense of their tops while the later planted broccoli would grow more tops at the expense of their roots.

The results are a little more mixed on this one. The early planted broccoli gave me the results I always get (because I usually plant at the first possible moment). They headed up at various sizes — some huge, some tiny, many medium. In contrast, the late-planted broccoli were more regular in size — all on the small side of medium — and they headed up one to two weeks later than the early planted broccoli.

When thinking of this in terms of overall yield, it’s important to note that we keep picking side shoots for a long time from our spring broccoli. That’s a data point in favor of the early planting, even though some of the early broccoli made teensy little initial heads.

That said, it’s nice not to have all of my excess broccoli needing to be frozen at once. Which is an argument for hedging my bets by planting both ways in future.

 

How about you?

Any garden experiments you’d like to share results of with the with the world at large?

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How and why to garden for moths

Moth diversity

I usually focus on food gardening instead of ornamental gardening both on this blog and in life, but I couldn’t resist sharing some of the pointers I learned at a fascinating library talk last week. Jim McCormac, one of the authors of Gardening for Moths regaled us with a hilarious, beautifully illustrated, and inspiring presentation about why and how to attract moths to our yards. I was definitely sold!

 

Gardening for MothsWhy moths matter

Jim started off by pointing out how important moths are to parts of the ecosystem many of us care about deeply. To start with, lot of those pretty birds I spend so much time photographing enjoy moth caterpillars as a large part of their diet. In fact, moths suffer about 99% mortality between the egg and the adult stage, proof that caterpillars are close to the foundation of lots of food chains. Then, as adults, moths become a favorite food for bats (who will help clear up your mosquito problems, so you definitely want them around).

Moths are also important pollinators, especially for orchids. Any time you see a flower with a long tube or nectar spur, that’s a hint that it’s pollinated by one of the long-tongued pollinators — hummingbirds, butterflies, or very likely moths.

Moth diversity is also astounding. The book covers five states and parts of three others, an area that contains a couple of hundred species of butterflies and a whopping 10,000 species of moths. And since many moths are small and/or active only at night both in adult and caterpillar forms, new species are being found frequently enough that even that huge sum is likely an underestimate.

 

How to encourage moths

Chickadee with insects

If you want to encourage moths in your yard (and you should if only to feed all the pretty birds!), the simplest way is to plant native species in your flower beds. Like butterflies, many moth caterpillars are host-specific, so they often turn up their noses at plants we bring in from other continents. In contrast, some of our natives are especially heavy hitters when it comes to caterpillar munching — white oaks, native grapevines, sugar maples, and redbuds are great species to start with if you want your local moth population to explode.

Like fireflies, moths get confused by lights at night, so turn off unused exterior lights to give them a wing up. Finally, leaf litter is an important habitat for moths along with lots of other native critters, so don’t rake in the fall (or at least set aside some wild areas as reservoirs for the natives).

One big warning, though: once you start paying attention to moths and their caterpillars, you’ll get sucked in by the colors and patterns. If you get hooked on lepidoptery, it is not my fault!

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SharkBite connectors for amateur plumbers

Fixing a plumbing leak behind a washing meachine

We got a good deal on our current trailer in part because the pipes had been allowed to freeze over the winter. Our first round of plumbing repairs seems to have held up great, but a new leak popped up behind the washing machine recently.

I love small spaces and Mark hates small spaces, but he’s the DIY pro while I’m a rank amateur. So he figured it was worth splurging on two SharkBite connectors to turn the project into child’s play.

This child didn’t push the new pipe into the top of the bottom connector hard enough the first time, so I got a big spray of water in my face. But a little more elbow grease did the job and, in the end, I was very proud of my accomplishment.

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Harvesting the first hairy vetch for mulch

Hairy vetch starting to bloom

Remember my disappointment in summer-planted hairy vetch? Well, that patch kept growing slowly throughout the fall and winter, then took off like a rocket this spring. I needed some mulch this week and didn’t mind the vetch bed staying in cover crops for another year, so I actually cut when only the first few blooms had appeared. Harvest was extremely simple — a lot of stalks ripped out easily by hand then I used a toothed sickle to cut through the rest.

Rolling a ball of vetch

For the first bed that was entirely vetch, I rolled my cut cover crops up into a big snowball of greenery and pushed them down the hill to the broccoli, who have been treated with worm castings but still need more nitrogen (plus mulch). The vetch covered up an area about three times as large as the original spot it had been harvested from, although we’ll see how much the greenery melts down as the stems die and dry.

 

Co-planting rye and vetch

Vetch and rye cover crop coplanting experiment

Next up was taking a look at a rye-and-vetch co-planting. Like the other vetch bed, this patch of garden soil needs serious improvement (thus the focus on a nitrogen-fixer like vetch). Unlike that other bed, I planted in fall instead of summer.

In this area, I wanted to determine which did better — rye planted solo or rye interplanted with vetch. So I divided the bed up into stripes, the first one vetch and rye, the next one rye only, etc. The idea is to make sure any difference I saw between plantings wasn’t due to the part of bed they were planted in.

Conclusions? First of all, it’s clear that rye does much better in excellent soil than it does in poor soil. When we’d planted it in Virginia, our rye used to grow to my shoulder. These beds barely make it to my waist.

The vetch, in contrast, did quite well here (although only about 60% as well as the summer-planted vetch-only bed). The bands with vetch produced about twice as much total biomass as the rye-only bands did. Would a vetch-only band have produced yet more? Hard to say since my vetch-only bed was planted earlier in the season than the rye-and-vetch bands. Sounds like we’re due for another experiment this fall.

 

Moving hand-harvested mulch around

Homegrown garden mulch carrier

As a side note, the firewood tote carrier we no longer use turns out to be awesome for moving cover crop mulch around. If you’re hand harvesting, you can lay clumps into the carrier as you cut them, then the tote bundles them up nicely as you wander across the garden.

Homegrown garden mulch

And here’s about a third of the area I mulched with handcut cover crops over the course of a bit over an hour. Yes, I did yank up blooming arugula and cut some comfrey leaves also to round things out. I’m now tuckered out but very pleased with my free mulch.

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Growing and cooking homegrown asparagus

It’s asparagus season and high time for an asparagus post! I’m not going to regurgitate the information you can find in any book or website about giving your plants a few years to get their feet under them before starting to harvest, keeping the weeds at bay, etc., though. Instead, I thought I’d share a few observations I’ve made over the last decade plus of growing our own asparagus then gorging on the harvest.

Handful of asparagus

Our favorite variety

Don’t buy purple asparagus expecting it to look pretty on your plate. As soon as you cook them, purple spears turn green.

But do plant Purple Passion! Mark’s mom gave us five plants the same year we planted our main patch and they’ve turned out to be the earliest producers and the heaviest producers in our garden.

 

Early harvests

For the earliest harvests, rake back the mulch and any top-dressed compost a couple of weeks before you expect to see spears. This will let the ground warm faster and will buy you perhaps a week over your non-raking neighbors’ plots.

Of course, that opens you up to freeze damage which will melt your delicious veggies into goo. So, when you expect a freeze, head out and pick every spear in sight. Well, almost every spear. If an asparagus plant is less than three inches tall, I’ll instead take a leaf from my mom’s book and drop a handful of that raked-off mulch back over top for freeze protection. No need to remove it after freeze danger passes either. Pointy asparagus will push right on through.

 

Cutting up asparagus

Delectable roast asparagus

Unlike grocery-store asparagus, ours tends to come out of the garden with some tiny spears and some huge spears. If they go into the oven all different sizes, the smallest spears will burn before the bigger ones turn sweet. So if you’re like us and crave the caramelized sweetness of asparagus roasted in olive oil until the edges go brown, be sure to cut up your spears to make them evenly sized.

That’s all there is to years of delicious harvests. Enjoy what we consider one of the easiest and most dependable crops!

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Should you plant your spring garden early?

Water droplets on a pepper leaf

I don’t have a plant problem…yet.

Potting up spring seedlings

But I did pot up my indoor seedling shelf (left photo) into an outdoor seedling table (right photo) this afternoon. Which will be great…until the next low in the 30s, forecast to show up in six short days.

Broccoli seedlings

The reason for all this potting up is that I started some of my seedlings — peppers, tomatoes, and the first round of cucumbers — earlier than usual this year. That means they need to be potted up and/or put into the ground earlier than usual. I’m on the fence about how smart it is to really push the spring garden envelope this way, so I’m doing a side-by-side comparison in my broccoli beds.

The broccoli story began when I set out most of my broccoli seedlings on March 21, covered them up during a cold spell that dropped into the high 20s, and watched what always happens happen again. The broccoli plants got a little nipped but not so bad that they won’t produce.

Meanwhile, I had another eight plants that I wasn’t able to fit into the designated space, which I kept inside for an extra two weeks. The indoor plants quickly outpaced the outdoor plants in size and I thought to myself, “Why not rip out some of the outdoor plants and replace them with bigger indoor plants to see whether I would have been better off not jumping the gun?” On April 3, the second round of plants went into the ground.

In the photo above, one of the indoor-longer plants is on the left. On the right is the outdoor-longer plant I’d just pulled out. I’ll try to remember to make another post in a month or two once it becomes clear which set of plants is doing best.

First asparagus and garden cat

In other garden news, we picked our first three asparagus spears Sunday! Dandelion, our garden guardian, predicts many more will head into our bellies soon.

How’s your garden growing?

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The best time to prune raspberries and blackberries

Pruning raspberries

I’ve pruned our black raspberries, everbearing red raspberries, and blackberries in spring, summer, and winter and the plants really don’t seem to care what the calendar said. So nowadays I prune at a time that works for me.

In my opinion, the toughest part of pruning brambles that have primocanes and floricanes is figuring out which canes have gone through their two-year cycle and are dead. Second toughest is figuring out where the dead tops of everbearing raspberries start.

The solution to both of these puzzles is to wait and prune once the leaf buds have started expanding. At that point, it’s obvious at a glance which canes (or parts of canes) are alive or dead.

The bonus of pruning at this time of year is that it gives you an excuse to be out in the garden on stunning days without encouraging you to plant annual crops too early. (This is a case of do as I say, not as I do — we already have lettuce and peas and parsley and broccoli in the ground. Most of it is sitting there giving me the stinkeye for planting too soon!)

 

Soil-first gardeningOn an unrelated note, Mark and I just added half an hour of cover-crop content to our Soil-First Gardening course. If you already own a copy, you can simply log in and enjoy the new videos. If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, now’s a great time since you can use this coupon link to get 67% off through April 1. Enjoy!

 

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New chicken books

Proof copies of chicken books

Do you have friends jumping on the chicken bandwagon this spring? Then I hope you’ll point them toward my Getting Started With Your Working Chicken, entirely free in ebook form and dirt cheap even as a (brand new!) paperback. I think of this title as a bit like the bare-basics books at pet stores intended for folks impulse buying a new type of animal. The goal is to bring new chicken keepers up to speed in half an hour so they don’t get overwhelmed by the deluge of options right off the bat.

Want to help me out by spreading the word about the paperback release (and possibly win a copy)? You can enter our rafflecopter giveaway here.

Building a DIY Chicken Waterer

Adding a clear roof over a planter boxMeanwhile, we’ve been hard at work coming up with a new ebook in the Permaculture Chicken series. Building a DIY Chicken Waterer will launch next month, and you can preorder the ebook for a buck off. (There will be a paperback too, but I’m still working on it. As you can likely tell, the font size needs increased. Stay tuned for a preorder announcement soon!)

And, finally, the third chicken book on my plate this year is an update to Thrifty Chicken Breeds. Want to share your wisdom and win a free copy of the ebook? Just comment below with your favorite breed(s), a photo (which can be emailed to anna@kitenet.net if it’s hard to leave in the comment), and a short writeup of why you prefer the one(s) you prefer. If I use your info, you’ll get a free copy of the revised ebook once it’s ready to go.

(Oh, and in case you’re curious what Mark’s up to this photo, it has nothing to do with chickens. He’s adding a clear roof to his newest porch planter box to prevent roof runoff from swamping our crops. I’m hoping this will also make for an even lower-blight situation for tomatoes this summer. Stay tuned to find out if it works!)

DIY chicken waterers

Update: Building a DIY Chicken Waterer is now live in print and available to preorder as an ebook!