Sunday, April 1

I've continued to buy useful tools. I feel rather shameless about it now, as they are useful, enduring things- many of which, I expect, will come in handy during the magnificently great(er) depression that I feel brewing just around the corner. I'll list some of them for you:
And so the wishlist evolves.

I've also been buying garden materials. I've already listed some tools above, but even more interesting are the living things. I've been scouring books and the internet for good local fruit tree and shrub nurseries and have had little luck. Right now, my best bet looks to be Stark Brothers, which is probably about an hour away by car. The next best selection in the midwest that I've found is in Michigan- Southmeadow. I'd love to find one with a really good selection in or just outside St. Louis city. I'll keep looking. In the mean time, I've gotten a little impatient and have already gotten some fruit bushes and vines from Lowe's. Specifically, a blackberry bush, blueberry bush, red raspberry, black raspberry, green grape, concord grape, and strawberries. So far I've held off on getting any trees from them. I'm also planning to grow some annual veggies and perennial herbs. In fact, I've just joined that community garden that's on the corner of my block, Fox Park Farm, and have a 5 by 16 foot raised bed to plant with whatever I want. I've picked up a lot of free seeds from Gateway Greening. Rotating seedstarting trays in my bedroom windows has now become a daily ritual. I can't wait to plant them out (april 15th is the area's last average frost date, but I don't know if I'll wait that long). Tomatos, sweet peppers, carrots, onions, spinach, broccoli, chard, beets, cabbage,collards, arugula, artichokes, peas, cucumbers, borage, corn, sunflowers, squash, melons . . . I won't have room for it all! Not in that one bed at least.

I've mail-ordered 2 pounds of red wriggler worms to unleash upon the garden and compost piles, as I'm planning to do no-till gardening. And with a combination of square foot gardening, companion interplanting, and mulching, I'm hoping to do no-weedpulling gardening. After studying up what I can find, my companion groupings, or guilds (to use a permaculture term for annual veggies), are
  1. tomato, pepper, carrot, basil, onion, borage
  2. cabbage, beets, spinach, chard, broccoli, onion (?- I've gotten mixed reports on whether to plant cabbage and alliums together), borage
  3. corn, sunflower, squash, melon, peas, cucumber, borage (borage is everything's and everyone's best friend)
I'm still mapping out my perennial herb and fruit garden. Not knowing what trees I'm going to get is partially holding that process up. I want to get two apples, and then an almond tree. And then peaches and plums and pears. And hazels and chestnuts and (black) walnuts. As long as I'm dreaming of a forest, I might as well add some paw paws, tart cherries, apricots, and nectarines. If there's a temperate fruit tree out there, it's on my wish list.

Also, I've recently joined a local food co-op, so now I can order bulk organic food and pick it up a couple blocks away instead of driving out to the county. They also supply local "clean" meat (uncertified but organic-ish, grass-fed) for cheap. I pay cost+15%, and then just work a 4 hour shift each month. It's a pretty sweet deal. My primary impetus to join was to find a cost effective way to buy a 50 pound bag of wheat berries, for grinding flour. I didn't want to do it over the internet because the shipping charges were nearly doubling the price. But now that I'm in, I'm excited about more fully utilizing this resource.


In the fermentation department, I'm experimenting with making ginger beer. I've started a batch of dandelion mead that'll be ready to drink by the end of the summer. And I just got the raw materials today to try to make my first batch of saurkraut (practice running for harvest time later in the year) and to pickle cucumbers. Once I get the hang of it, I'd like to move on to making kim chee. I'm staying away from the soy ferments for now, though. While I'm in love with yeast at this point, and I'm warming up to fungi, the idea of eating mold still freaks me out.


One final bit of random news before I end this nonsense. My computer is over four years old now and is kind of slowly dying. But I'm trying to breath new life into it by stripping down my uses of it (namely, no longer using it as my stationary ipod - putting that music on cds). And I'm playing around with linux puppy. Now, I thought that I needed an external modem to be able to get on the internet, but it turns out that after a bit of setup, my wireless works fine! So this post is being written while running puppy. And it's running veeerry quickly. If running your entire OS on your RAM sounds appealing to you, I suggest you give it a looksee.

4 comments:

  1. Finally! Some more posts.

    After reading this, I remembered someone else a few years ago mentioning the Berkey. So, I checked it out, and I will be ordering one soon. I like the fact that I can put pond water or whatnot in there and it'll filter everything out. That'll come in real handy in an emergency. Plus, I currently use a Brita filter with my tap water, but it still tastes funny. I'm thinking some sort of metal leaching out of the pipes, maybe.

    Anyway, I have made kraut. There's a post on my blog about it. I haven't gotten around to making any more, although I keep planning on it. Homemade kraut tastes like nothing in this world. It's transcendant. :-)

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  2. I remember that Starb Bros is one of the largest fruit tree nurseries in the country with a wide selection...it has been too long and I need to get growing stuff again.

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  3. While I'm in love with yeast at this point, and I'm warming up to fungi, the idea of eating mold still freaks me out.

    I forget to mention this in my last comment. Mold is a fungus. Yeast and molds are both types of fungi. There are even things called dimorphic fungi, which are fungi that exist as molds at a certain temperature (like less than body temperature) but then become yeasts when they are at body temperature. Sorry, the microbiologist in me couldn't resist. :-)

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  4. marcy- yeah i knew that yeast and mold and fungus (which i meant as mushrooms) were all different forms in the same family. but i did not know anything about dimorphic fungi! life- stranger (and more fascinating) than fiction...

    it's just tempeh. i've eaten it before, but i associated it too much with eating moldy bread for me to really enjoy it. plus, now that i'm not vegetarian anymore, i've thoroughly turned against any unfermented soy, and some of that sentiment crosses over to fermented soy.

    the berkey is pretty amazing. i'm very happy with it. although, i just got that new rain barrel, which formerly held olives, and the berkey is able to filter out food coloring, but oddly, my filtered water has had a vaguely (very very mild) olive oily taste. i don't know how that is getting through. but i'll take a little olive oil in my water over industrial fluoride waste any day.


    scott- i hadn't ever heard that about stark brothers. but they do have a very nice selection. i didn't even know they existed until i saw them in the resources appendix of a wonderful little book called the backyard orcharist, by stella otto. i'm getting an almond tree from them.

    i hope you are able to get growing again too.

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