Edible Perennials
Wordless Wednesday: Summer Sweetness
Categories: Edible Perennials, environment, food, frugality, Gardening, Health, Life, Nutrition, Self-Sufficiency, Wordless Wednesday
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Gardening, Carpet Plague, Calves and Music
I know, I’ve abandoned my poor blog again. Life is simultaneously busy and tranquil — my favorite combination! — and I haven’t felt the need to write in a while.
This time of year gardening takes up most of my time. One of the biggest reasons I’m shifting my focus to edible perennials is so I won’t have this frenzy of replanting every spring, but of course in the short-term it makes my spring even busier as I create new permanent beds and put in asparagus, sunchokes, currants, a bay tree, various perennial herbs and some unidentified “berry” bramble suckers someone gave me that I think are blackberries. But the strawberry bed I put in last spring is producing in grand style this year, and Saturday I enjoyed the first ripe strawberry of spring, and there’s a gazillion more coming along behind it. So that’s a good reminder that the results are totally worth all the work involved, even if it takes a while to see them.
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Another thing that’s been gobbling up a ridiculous amount of my time is The Battle Of The Creeping Spot.
Dude.
So three or four weeks ago our cats suddenly decided to spurn their litter box in favor of one corner of my computer room floor. We’re talking deep plush carpeting here, not some easy-to-clean laminate or hardwood. I ungraciously disposed of the piles of poop, but it gradually became evident that the real problem was the steadily-intensifying aroma of Eau de Cat Pee. I took way longer than I should have to attend to that (see: spring planting time, above), but finally one day I attacked that corner of the carpet with everything I could think to throw at it. Rug shampoo, spot cleaner, pure baking soda, a special “pet stain” removal product, the works.
The next morning that corner of my (very orange) carpet had turned a dark purple.
Clearly something had gone very wrong here.
I went back over the corner with more spot cleaner, and when that didn’t get rid of it I tried putting laundry detergent into my rug shampooer, and then I tried diluted dishsoap and then I just went over and over it with plain water until it was mostly gone.
But the next day The Spot was back, and twice its previous size.
I won’t go into all the tedious details of this battle. Suffice it to say that for nearly two weeks I used almost every cleaning product I could think of on this spreading purple abomination, alone or in combinations, and some days I would win and other days the Spot would win. It was like something out of Dr. Seuss, but evil. At its largest it was about six feet in diameter, and I was doing a pretty convincing Lady Macbeth impersonation.
Guess what the culprit was. Go ahead, guess!
Give up? It was the baking soda. Apparently when you put baking soda on my orange carpet and then get it wet, there’s some sort of freak chemical reaction that causes a dark purple stain to appear.
Guess how I finally figured this out.
It looked like I had just about defeated The Spot, there was only the faintest shadow left and I was confident that another hour or so of going over it with clear water would finish it off. But by then the carpet was beginning to smell just a bit mildewy, and I decided that the whole room could stand a nice deodorizing.
So, I filled my rug shampooer’s receptacle with clear water and a little baking soda, went over the whole room, and then focused on the spot in the corner — shaking some more baking soda directly onto it and scrubbing it in — until it appeared to be vanquished.
The next morning my entire computer room carpet was covered with purple smudges and the original corner was a solid, hateful dark purple swath.
I was ready to burn it.
Instead I spent most of another week going over and over the carpet, sucking all the baking soda out of it. As I type this I think I have just gotten the last of it out, but I won’t know for sure until tomorrow morning.
The good news is that the cats appear to have lost interest in recontaminating the war zone.
Or possibly they’re just waiting for the carpet to finally dry out so they can start over.
BUT my computer room doesn’t smell mildewy today, it smells WONDERFUL, because yesterday Luke and Elizabeth gave me the best Mother’s Day gifts I have ever received. They made them in Sunday school. They are apples with lots and lots of cloves stuck into them and silk ribbons tied around them to hang them with, and now as I write this the air is perfumed with the heady scent of apples and cloves. I LOVE it!
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In other news, a third calf has been born at Trinity. I need to buy some livestock panels so I can set the branding pen back up and set a date for my summer roundup. I may also spring for a calf table, since none of my new friends know how to rope (and neither do I) and it seems like a useful thing to have anyway if one isn’t of the Large Strapping Male persuasion.
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Speaking of things my new friends don’t know, they are also all tragically unacquainted with the awesome thing of immortal beauty that is Star Trek. Not a single Trek fan in the entire bunch (except for Pastor Bill who can’t go see the new movie with me because he’s married and that would be a little odd). Hello, this is CULTURE, people!! I was going to have to go see the movie all by myself, but my friend Jenny took pity on me and agreed to go with. So I think that’ll be Thursday. I can’t wait!
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Being a part of my church worship group remains one of the brightest joys of my new life. It’s amazing how fundamental singing with friends apparently is to my general sense of fulfillment. I don’t imagine that I’ll let anyone take that away from me ever again.
The group is still kind of finding itself. We had a magical combination for a while — two guitars, bass, drummer, three vocalists — and it was heaven. But then we lost our best guitarist and our male vocalist within a couple weeks of each other, and we’re feeling the loss. But there’s this nice sense of fellowship among the rest of us, a sweet sort of feeling that we’re all in it for the long haul and that one way or another the people we need will find us and the group will eventually be complete again, and meanwhile we still have this wonderful core group of friends to sing and play and worship with.
Tell you what though, last time we sang in church it was a train wreck. There’s a young boy who is learning to play the bongos, and from time to time he likes to join the group onstage. It’s not been a problem before, but this last time two things went wrong. One, the bongos had just been tightened so they were louder than usual, and two, he set them up between the drummer and our remaining guitarist, so they couldn’t hear each other well enough to stay in synch. It…wasn’t pretty. We have learned our lesson. Bongo Boy is still welcome to play with us, but from now on he goes down at the other end by the vocalists.
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I wanted to talk about how the Sunday school teaching thing is going, but I think that’s going to get its own post somewhere down the road.
So I guess that’s it for now. Life in my little green corner of the world is blooming, and keeping me busy. If that Spot is still gone tomorrow morning I will have nothing much to complain about.
If it’s back I may have to rethink my decision to give up profanity, because I have nothing else left to throw at the blasted thing.
Categories: Animals, Cats, Christianity, Edible Perennials, food, Friends, Gardening, kids, Life, Self-Sufficiency, Star Trek
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Sharing The Wealth
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
~Howard Thurman
I was maybe five or six years old the first time I heard the story of Johnny Appleseed. I’m sure it was a watered-down version of John Chapman’s life that had been vastly oversimplified for young children, but I remember well the way it lit up my imagination and filled my dreams with new, childishly idyllic ambitions. THAT’S what I was going to do when I grew up! Just wander across the country, communing peaceably with wildlife and planting stuff. Perfect.
(I was also going to marry Bambi when I grew up. Life’s possibilities are very flexible when you’re six.)
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In February I started getting together with the Pastor of my church once a week over lunch or breakfast at the local diner. It’s sort of a spiritual counseling session, and it’s been more helpful to me than I have words to express. I’ve been sitting here just now trying to think of a way to explain the whys and hows of the profound value these talks have had for me, but I’ve finally decided that it would take up too much space and I probably wouldn’t get it right anyway.
During our very first lunch together the Pastor said something that I quite frankly wasn’t ready to hear. He said I was a healer, or was destined to be one. At that time I was firmly in the grip of a personal upheaval, and my own spiritual (and mental and emotional) health felt as fragile as an eggshell. The last thing I wanted to think about was being around other unhealthy people on purpose.
I told Pastor Bill as much, and then pushed the whole idea to the back of my head, where it sort of dug in and put down roots and started to grow, and maybe a month later I realized that I did in fact feel a desire to help others who, like me, were seeking wholeness. But I couldn’t picture myself doing what the Pastor does: talking to spiritually needy people about their spiritual needs day after day, week after week…the mere thought makes me feel like crawling into bed and pulling the covers over my ears.
And then one morning a couple weeks ago I woke up from an intense dream with the answer filling my head and heart with absolute certainty, like the voice of God Himself. I’ve forgotten the dream (I guess I should have written it down), but the certainty is still with me.
Johnny Appleseed was onto something.
Of course, Anza already has more than enough apple trees. You can’t throw a rock in this town without hitting an apple orchard. But I look around at all the scared, struggling, unemployed or soon-to-be-unemployed people in this town, people who can barely afford to buy groceries anymore, and I think, “That would be me if I didn’t have all this food growing on my property.”
And I realized: they should have it too. All of them. There should be grapevines and strawberry patches and raspberry canes and sunchokes in every backyard.
And I can help make that happen, at least locally. I can give away cuttings and sprouts and suckers and roots and bulbs and tubers until the whole valley is supplied. It won’t cost me anything, other than a bit of time and effort. Most edible perennials are easy to propagate and simple to grow.
This isn’t something I can start doing, like, today. I’ve just started growing things like strawberries and sunchokes myself, and they need to get better established before I’ll have enough to give away. But just having the goal in my head makes me feel alive and purposeful. I can make a real, tangible difference in this town. Sure, growing conditions are less than ideal in Anza. The poor soil, the arid climate, the altitude…these are challenges that I learned to overcome by trial and error, and I can share all the things I’ve learned. I can turn my own property into a kind of test kitchen, to find out what can be grown here and what can’t, and let people come and see and taste the possibilities for themselves.
This is a purpose I can put my heart into. I’d been planning to turn my property into a self-sufficient Eden anyway, but the thought of helping everyone else who wants to do the same is what has really fired my imagination.
Next winter I’ll start handing out rooted grapevine cuttings. The first step in what I hope will be a new and productive journey.
It feels really good to have a solid long-term goal again. I can’t wait to get started.
Categories: Christianity, Edible Perennials, environment, frugality, Gardening, Life, Self-Sufficiency
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Edible Perennials: Garlic And Onions
By far the most-used vegetables in my garden are garlic and onions. It’s hard to picture cooking without them — I can’t imagine spaghetti or soup or stir-fry or, well, almost any evening meal without the life and flavor they add.
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GARLIC:
I grow more garlic every year, but I have yet to plant enough: we keep running out. So it hasn’t really been functioning as a perennial for me (since there’s no carryover from one season to the next), but hopefully soon that will change as I figure out how much space I really need to devote to it.
In my relatively mild climate I can plant garlic just about any time and it will immediately start to grow. When my supply is running low I just buy several bulbs of organic garlic from the grocery store, break them up into individual cloves and plant the cloves two or three inches apart. They sprout right away. Within a few weeks I can begin using the young little plants like scallions in my cooking, green tops and all. Delicious!
If your goal is to plant a year’s worth of garlic at once AND have bulbs left over for supplying next year’s crop, you need to plant in the fall, because it needs a good cold spell before it will form bulbs at all. September is an ideal time to plant a nice big plot of garlic if future bulbs are your aim. But don’t feel like you have to wait until the bulb stage to use them as needed; remember, they can be chopped up tops and all and added to any recipe where garlic is called for.
ONIONS
This will be the first year I’ve tried planting perennial onions. I’ve always grown standard biennial varieties before, but like the garlic I’ve always ended up using them in the green stage and then running out before they have a chance to form bulbs, so it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
There are several different varieties of perennial onions to choose from, most of them difficult to come by here in America. I had planned to grow potato onions or Egyptian “walking” onions, but the few nurseries that offered those had already sold out. I settled for shallots and evergreen bunching onions. Bunching onions never form bulbs, they remain in the “scallion” stage and reproduce by growing into clumps that can be dug up, divided and replanted to make more clumps. Last week I planted one bed of those from seed, and for this first summer I don’t plan to harvest them at all, beyond the initial thinning. By the time they begin to form clumps I’ll have a whole new bed ready for them over in the newly-started “perennial” side of my garden, where they won’t be disturbed by the annual spring planting upheavals.
Shallots and potato onions form bulbs, and then clumps of bulbs. They should be allowed to die back to the ground before harvesting, just like regular biennial onions.
Egyptian onions produce small bulbs on top of their stalks. When mature the stalks fall over and plant new bulbs for next year’s crop, hence the nickname of “walking onions.”
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Garlic and onions are heavy feeders and should be grown in rich, well-drained soil with plenty of organic material worked in. Don’t let them dry out, keep the soil moist. Some folks say you shouldn’t mulch bulbs, but I always have with good results. Either way, keep your beds weed-free: onions especially don’t compete well with aggressive plants.
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This is a continuing series about improving your self-sufficiency by growing edible perennials.
Previous posts on this subject:
Self-Sufficiency: Not Just For Tree-Hugging Hippies Anymore!
Categories: Edible Perennials, food, frugality, Gardening, Life, Self-Sufficiency
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An Invincible Summer 