Free Food

Every spring I am rewarded for my laziness. While many gardeners and farmers clean up their gardens before the first frost, I become my usual slothful self and decide that I would rather spend what little energy I have left freezing and canning my garden's bounty and skip clean up all together.

It pays off in the spring.

But you have to be patient and pay attention.

All too often in the early spring, I would be in such a hurry to get the garden clean and tilled and ready to plant that I would miss all the food just waiting for me.  I would plow it under before it even showed itself.

Every fall, that lettuce that you didn't take the time to uproot....it goes to seed.
Those cucumbers that you neglected after you had enough pickles made and stored....they went to seed.
That spinach that bolted and became too bitter to eat....it went to seed
That somewhat rotten onion that you didn't want - it sprouted again and is now beautiful
The garlic that you didn't pull....it's back and bigger than last year.
The parsnip you forgot to dig up - they are sweeter than ever now and ready to eat.
And so is that carrot!

And not only that, but Mother Nature is the best almanac for when to plant things you will ever find.  In general, when seeds are naturally sprouting outside in the cold spring, it means those seeds can handle it, so if you want to start neat and tidy rows of food, you probably can - even though the almanac and the seed packets may say otherwise.

There are all kinds of wives tales about "what is the best time to plant _____?"  For corn it is when oak leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear.  I don't know how many people have actually even seen a squirrel's ear?  I tend to just wait for the random forgotten ear of corn to suddenly sprout into action.  Even after a long, sub-zero winter, it will happen.

This is, of course, provided you use seeds that haven't been genetically modified to only sprout once.  Heirloom quality seeds or organic seeds cost more, but they will more than pay you back in their ability to produce fantastic quality foods with minimal work (or in this case, no work), year after year .







So, while other enterprising gardeners are busy cleaning, tilling and planting, I am busy harvesting the fresh spinach and lettuce from the garden - the first crop of greens so long awaited in the many months of cold.

 What we don't immediately harvest and eat, I transplant into more recognizable and organized rows.  The transplanting slows it down a bit and extends the season for a few more weeks.

So many times while gardening I have marveled at man's belief that we know what we are doing and are "in charge" of growing food.  While it is true that we are the caretakers of the produce, Mother Nature already has the system down and knows the perfect timing and temperature for it all.

Black Gold

This was my breakthrough into organic farming.  While living in the city we had built a compost bin and then moved it with us when we came.  It was the starting point for us - from the dirt on up.  I have started and restarted this post about ten times now....not sure exactly why since it is quite possibly the best and most useful thing on the farm and one thing that I am constantly amazed by. But for whatever reason writing about it in any sort of understandable way is hard.  Most likely because it is entirely too simple.

Scraps of anything green and growing or dead and brown
Water
Air

Time

It's that simple. 

This is the recipe for dirt that Mother Earth has known for eons and we have since tried to make a science out of with no great success.  We make it entirely too complex.  You can spend a fortune buying organic compost at any garden store, or you can make it for free using all of the stuff that you throw out every day - the coffee grounds, the potato peelings, the apple cores, the old wilted flowers, the weeds that are the bane of every gardener's existence.  Just about everything that goes down the garbage disposal could be put to a better use as compost. 

Over the decades, since chemical farming came into vogue, scientists tried to figure out what the key ingredients were that plants needed to grow.  They came up with phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium as the three things that plants need to thrive and have since marketed it every possible way.  Nitrogen is the stuff that you see farmers carting around in the spring and spraying all over their fields and a mix of the three chemicals is what you will find in any bag of lawn fertilizer.  The thing they didn't realize is that even though they are supplying the three main ingredients, they are leaving out the micro ingredients that plants also need to survive. Micro nutrients are those small amounts of nutrients that plants (and animals) utilize to put the main nutrients to their best use.  We have slowly been depleting the soil of the micro nutrients for about 60 years now. 

It is similar to saying that all people really need to survive is fat, protein and carbohydrates without any thought at all to vitamins and minerals.  Without these micro nutrients none of the main nutrients get absorbed and utilized properly.  If you want an interesting and eye-opening breakdown of what I mean by all of this, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food is a good place to start or even just typing in the words - "whole food supplements" in any search bar is likely to get you some interesting reads.  We humans try to break everything down to it lowest form, we look for the exact chemical that is responsible for preventing scurvy or rickets, for instance, and once found (Vitamin C and Vitamin D) we take those chemicals in excess to help ward off these terrible diseases without really understanding how they work or what other smaller chemicals might be there to help the system along.   It is like putting only gasoline into a car without any understanding of what oil and antifreeze are there to do.  Whole foods - like a whole orange- has many chemicals in it and many chemical interactions that take place that we have absolutely no understanding of that make it the perfect packet of Vitamin C known and yet we take out the Vitamin C to put into tablets and throw the rest of the orange away.

The same thing has happened to our dirt over time.  We kept the Potassium, Nitrogen and Phosphorus and threw the rest of the beneficial stuff out with the trash.....literally.

Composting is perhaps one of the easiest things to do and one of the most beneficial.  It is the crux of sustainable farming - we pull nutrients, in the form of plants, out of the soil....we need to put nutrients back into the soil.  What better way to do this than to use the used up plants themselves?

Any, and I mean any vegetation or things that were previously vegetation are fair game for a compost pile.  The only rule that I stick to is that you can't put anything meat based in the pile - no meat scraps and no droppings from animals that have been eating meat.  The main reason behind this is that it sometimes takes on a bit of a foul odor and it can definitely start to attract the local vermin to the area.

You need to have a pile of some size to get the whole thing going.  3 square feet is generally considered to be about the right size.  You can hold it all together with a ring of woven wire, or a fancy compost bin....or you can just pile it up in a heap of at least 3 square feet and let it go.

Wet it down until it is about as wet as a well wrung out sponge.  In the early spring, or when it is dry in the middle of summer, I will add about 5 gallons to the pile periodically during a dry spell to keep it going.

Turn the pile every three weeks or so to allow air to mix with the pile and voila!  Dirt!

There are a few things that I have learned to do over the course of several years of producing the best black dirt imaginable. 

• The water is really important.  It may sound crazy to water your compost bin, but it definitely speeds up the breakdown process.  
•  A metal stake through the center of the pile will let you know if it is getting hot enough.  When a compost pile really gets going, the internal temperatures will be around 150 degrees and even weed seeds will get cooked beyond the pont where they will germinate.  My method, using the metal stake, is rather primitive but it works well.  I know that when I pull out the stake and it is too hot to touch, the pile is cooking. 
•  If your pile isn't taking off and getting hot - add dirt!  You will read that you need to go to the garden store and pick up bone meal or compost starter, blah, blah, blah.  Everything you need to get it going is already in the ground - all the enzymes, all the beneficial bugs, everything - just add a few shovelfuls to the mix and it will help to get it going.
• You don't need to mix it into the soil - this is what worms are for and they are good at it!  They will make short work of incorporating any compost that you put around flowers or vegetables into the soil.
• You know when it is done and ready to be used when you can no longer identify any of the stuff that you threw into it.  If you can identify a few things, simply take those out and throw them back on the pile for a little more time.

Over the winter, I let it sit and by spring the bottom stuff of the compost bin is gorgeous and ready to be spread around the flowers.  Then I add in leaves left over from the fall, grass clippings, vegetable scraps from the kitchen, coffee grounds and filters, egg shells and any weeds that have made an appearance in the garden.  Mix it all up and add water.  By the time the potatoes are peeking up in early spring I have another batch of the black gold to be spread around them.  And so it goes all summer long - using left overs to make more soil to make more vegetables which leads to more left overs.  Whole food nutrition for the garden- and not one chemical needed.

Like a Kid at Christmas

My favorite of all favorite catalogs came yesterday. It comes only once a year and I treasure it all year long. I cut pictures of from it to use in various places, I dream about all the fun stuff that lies within it and I drool over the pictures and imagine what it would be like to have one of each. I am worse than any kid approaching Christmas with a toy catalog in their hands.

It is my Seed Savers catalog. This thing is amazing!

Seed Savers is a company out of Decorah, Iowa that exists to provide heritage and heirloom seeds. These are seeds that will reproduce produce year after year that is of consistent quality.

There are other seed companies in the world, such as Monsanto and Novartis and many others that you will see with their names in very small print on the packets of seed that you buy in the stores-those seeds are raised to provide produce for one year only and if they do happen to come up the next year they are typically of inferior quality and will never make it to a third year.

They have genetically modified the seeds that are produced to be unable to produce viable seeds of their own (sterile seeds), thus ensuring that you will need to buy more seeds next year as well. It keeps them in business. Monsanto has taken this to the extreme and trademarked their modified genes. If any farmers are caught storing their seed, they are sued and not many small farmers can stand up to the agribusiness giant.

Seed Savers is NOT that type of company. They work to provide the best quality seeds they possibly can knowing that if they are saved by the purchaser, they will provide even more seeds for the future. They are dedicated to storing seeds of countless varieties of vegetables to protect them for future generations.

One of the most dangerous problems that we run into with producing crops is the loss of variety. We are turning into a monoculture of vegetables - corn. It is in everything! And much of the corn produced is Monsanto corn (at least in the Midwest). A single culture of anything is not healthy for the environment.

Think of this from a honey bee's perspective. Thousands of acres and only one plant for pollen....corn. And honey bees don't usually use corn for pollen. With the lack of other pollen options due to herbicide use, huge numbers of bees get lost. One day of spraying insecticide on the crops while the bees are busy...more bees wiped out, or worse yet, they take the insecticide back to the hive and pollute the hive with it. A bee, without options, will not do very well. Think of the bees as a the proverbial "canary in the mine"....if the canary comes up dead that is a good indication that the mine isn't safe.....the bees are coming up dead. Colony Collapse Disorder is becoming more and more of a problem - one in which they don't completely understand the cause, but regardless, I think we should be taking it as a warning sign that things are not looking good for the bees.....or us.

So, it is because of their business policy and their mission, Seed Savers is the only place that I buy seeds for my summer vegetable garden. I have purchased many of the seeds and saved many from year to year with great success, yet somehow I still feel compelled to try new varieties and new fruits and vegetables. Their seeds cost a little more, but if you consider that they send with them instructions on how to save them for the next year, it is really more of an investment.

This is the time that the garden starts. Now, while there is still snow on the ground and a ton more to fall yet this winter, while the days are way too short and the nights incredibly long....now is the time that the garden gets planned for the year. I pull out the drawings from the last few years for where everything was planted and I contemplate how much energy I may or may not have. I think about how many kids will need 4-H projects to grow and how much work I can con them into. I count how many seeds I was able to save from last year (or the year before) and contemplate the germination percentage. I read through my garden journal from last year to determine which crops were the best and which ones I should pass over.

Corn....I will need new and different corn. This is one of the problems with trying to raise heirloom quality seeds amidst and ocean of field corn. I had wonderful corn two years ago and I saved the seed. Problem was there was genetic drift from the field corn that first year so the second year that I tried to grow the corn, it had taken on some of the characteristics of the field corn and didn't produce as well. Chances are good that I had acquired some of Monsanto's trademark genes much to my dismay. Don't want them - they didn't do my corn any good.

Heirloom seeds tend to produce very vigorous plants and, if you stick with one variety you can keep your seeds very pure. When the varieties start to mix however, you can come up with some interesting crops....like the 'cuash' that I grew a few years ago - a cross between a cucumber and a squash. Needless to say, these are not typically the seeds that I keep.

And then there are the seeds that are hard to harvest - carrots, for instance, have to be grown for two years before they will produce seeds - this can be a bit of a trick and not something that I typically tackle. It has happened by accident now and then, but that is really more a process of chance and poor tilling in the spring.

This year we are planning to expand the garden. We have just cut into our last onion for the winter, so we will definitely need a few hundred more onions to plant for next year. Carrots we ran out of sometime in September. Trying to grow enough to supply a family of seven through an Iowa winter can be a definite challenge.

The potatoes that I picked out last year - German Butterballs - didn't produce very well and despite the fact that they are supposed to be excellent keepers, you can't keep what you weren't able to produce in the first place, so I will be switching back to Yukon Gold Potatoes because they produced bushel after bushel of potatoes that lasted through most of the winter, and they were huge!

One of my favorite of all crops to grow is tomatoes. I, personally, cannot eat a raw tomato....it's a consistency thing. But any and everything made out of tomatoes are my favorites. I toss them in salads, I make bruschetta, I make pizza sauce and can marinara for the winter. I usually manage to put up about 45 quarts of marinara every year using a recipe that I found in the wonderful book by Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I plant Amish Paste tomatoes that make a magnificent sauce and the seeds have kept and germinated nicely year after year. Typically 13 tomato plants is enough to provide a family of 7 with home made spaghetti sauce every week for the entire year.

I could go on for days about the wonders of the seeds contained within this catalog. There is no other seed catalog that comes that can match it....and trust me, I get a lot of seed catalogs. So, the wind may blow and the snow may fall, but I rest easy in the knowledge that spring is coming. How do I know it is coming? Because the Seed Savers Catalog is here.