Adventures in Eco-Living

We awoke yesterday morning to discover one of our favorite hens, Little Lady, had passed away. Though we had expected this, as something had very clearly been wrong for quite a few days, it was quite sad nonetheless.

She was our tiniest hen, and quite friendly- even the larger, more aggressive hens tended not to pick on her like they did with the other girls. She just had this personality that spoke: “I’m just here minding my own business, don’t mind me.”

Lady has had a rough year. She lost ALL of her back and tail feathers (except for a scraggly two or three) due to our very large and aggressive rooster finding it necessary to copulate with all of the hens multiple times a day. Those poor girls are always running from him (unless there is some kind of danger, and then he is their best friend!). Speckles the rooster is more than twice as large as Lady, and when he jumps on her back, he tends to do some damage. Ever since we’ve had a rooster, I’ve always jokingly warned my friends: if you are bad in this life, you will come back as a hen! Poor girls!

So about a week ago, I noticed Lady just sitting inside the coop on the perch, staring at the wall. Very unusual. The hens usually race out of the coop in the morning when we open it up for them. Then the next day, she stayed inside the coop again, staring at the wall, this time on the floor. When we went to close up the coop late that night, she was just standing there outside the coop, unwilling to move. Something was definitely wrong.

My first guess was that Lady was eggbound. This can happen when a hen’s egg gets stuck inside her. It will cause the chicken to lose interest in anything, including food and water, and ultimately, to die if something is not done.  Unfortunately, the “something” involves such measures such as giving the chicken a warm bath, massaging her abdomen, and making her warm oatmeal with a vitamin supplement.

That night we skipped the warm bath, and focused on massaging her abdomen, trying to feel inside her for an egg that might be stuck. Unfortunately, she was so bony that it was hard to tell what we were feeling exactly. I made her some warm oatmeal with nutritional yeast, kelp meal, and raw milk, and after some hesitation, she ate it.

The next morning we found an egg right next to Lady, and hoped that had done the trick. She came out of the coop and even ate a little bit. She seemed to be on the up and up, but by the following day she was back to the same uninterested, sickly looking Lady.

This routine went on for nearly a week, and as I said, ultimately ended in tragedy. Honestly, she had become so scraggly without her feathers that we hadn’t expected her to make it through the winter, so we are not surprised that Lady is the first of our hens to die. She was secretly one of my favorites, and so today we are remembering Lady, the wee little hen.

Oh dear! It’s been ages since I last posted. Spring has a funny way of slipping by like that…. We wait impatiently all winter for a little warmth and sunshine, and at the first drop of sunny wonderfulness, our days suddenly become a blur. It’s wonderful to be busy again, but as usual, I find myself thinking that we’ll never get to all our grand plans once again. I think that’s the beauty of life- there is always next year, and the dreams we have that get put on hold keep us planning, preparing, and anticipating.

So here’s what we’ve been up to so far:

• We bought another eight fruit trees to start building our orchard. It’s not very many, but we figure we’ll add another eight or so each year until we have a sizeable collection. Last year we purchased our trees from Menard’s, and unfortunately, 3 out of the 5 never blossomed. By the time we realized that the trees were dead, Menard’s would no longer take them back. So we certainly won’t be making that mistake again! This year we found a great local organization to support, the Van County Conservation District, through their annual Tree Sale. The trees are all healthy and doing great, and at $17 a piece, they were a pretty good deal. No matter where you live, there should be a local conservation district that you can visit, and chances are they have some sort of plant or tree sales. If you live in or near Van Buren County, MI, you can check out our local Conservation District here: http://vanburencd.org/archives/category/shop-online
• I’ve planted the potatoes, snap peas, regular peas, radishes, carrots, onions, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, and cabbage. Unfortunately the chickens keep sneaking into our garden and nibbling on my lettuce. As spring progresses, they usually find other stuff that interests them and stay out of the garden, but this early on, they can’t seem to resist the tender green leaves of my heirloom lettuce. Arrrgggghhh!
• Our chickens have also been wandering over to our neighbor’s house, and the neighbors are not happy about it. Chickens can kick up and make a mess of your landscaping very quickly (which doesn’t bother us, but of course our neighbors are not pleased at all), and our rooster is becoming quite aggressive. So the chickens only get to free-range in the evening until Alex has the time to install a border fence between our property lines to keep them on our side. In hindsight, we should have placed the coop on the other side of our property, which backs up to the woods rather than a neighbor’s house.
• We are anxiously awaiting the arrival of our four piggies for this summer. It seems our pig farmer is busy planting his hundreds of acres of corn (there is no rest for real farmers this time of year), so we will just continue to wait.
• It’s been four years since we added a big load of manure to our garden plots, so we will be doing that again this year. One of our neighbors raises organic, free-range cows, and has all the composted manure we could ever want. Be careful if you are planning to add manure to your garden- make sure it has been composting at least over winter, so that you do not “burn” your plants with the high levels of nitrogen. You also want to add your manure as early in spring as possible, a good 120 days or so before harvest (the more composted it is, the shorter that time period can be) to avoid any bacterial contamination.
• I am helping out this year with a Victory Garden project at the Bangor Alternative High School where I teach high school completion evening classes for adults. The high school students working on the garden project are so excited, and they are even making a documentary about their work. It’s so neat to see the movement toward fresh food and community gardens springing up in schools around the country!
• Finally, we have some wonderful news: we are expecting a little helper on the farm! I am currently 23 weeks pregnant with our first baby. Not too sure how this is going to affect my ability to garden this summer, but I’m ready to take it all in stride. We have cut back a bit on the amount we are growing, though I do still want to have a fresh supply of food for both me and my baby come fall. This also means that we will be expanding our store line of baby products, now that I will have a chance to really test and review them for myself. We’ll keep you updated on our adventures and discoveries!

Wherever you are, whatever you do, I hope that spring is bringing you many enjoyable days and a summer to look forward to!

Aquaponics. The wonderfully sustainable combination of aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (growing plants in a soil-less water medium). What a brilliant idea! We are looking into this as our next sustainable agriculture adventure in the upcoming year.

Check out this cool video:

But why hydroponics? We haven’t had a lot of experience with this type of growing, but from what I have learned recently, there is a big future in hydroponics. For one, it uses 10% of the water that conventional (soil-based) agriculture does, so that right there is a huge savings, particularly as we progress into an era when water conservation is going to become a top priority. Also, conventional, and especially big corporate-based, agriculture is costing us to lose precious top soil at an alarming rate. A soil-less growing method that requires no top soil is going to be so important as many of the world’s growing regions become depleted and others become arid. Finally, hydroponically-raised plants grow faster, because you can so directly control the nutrients being fed to the plant, and because the plants have constant, direct access to those nutrients.

And aquaculture? Well, think about. Raising fish creates an inevitable byproduct: fish poop. That fish poop just happens to be an excellent, perfect, organic plant fertilizer. In a properly balance aquaponics system, the hydroponic plants would require NO other fertilizers other than the fish poop being siphoned from the fish tank to the plants. Amazing!

Some of the more common aquaponics systems use goldfish, which are incredibly hardy and can survive the extremes of temperature that are inherent in northern climates, even within a sheltered greenhouse. We are most interested in a system that would raise tilapia, which you could then eat!! We are talking a whole-survival system here, providing protein (fish) and all of your veggie needs. In fact, many developing countries are implementing these systems because of the incredible results and the small amount of input needed. The most expensive part would actually just be the start-up.

Aquaponics is catching on around the country. Though it certainly is not new, this national spotlight is. It’s the perfect melding of time and opportunity: people are interested in sustainability because it presents a chance at self-sufficiency and affordability in uncertain times. What is sustainable is often not only healthier, but also cheaper. And aquaponics, excluding the initial start-up costs, is a cost-effective way to grow your own healthy, organic food.

The NY Times just recently ran an article on aquaponics:

“The Spotless Garden”

Check out this cool website about how to build a basic backyard aquaponics system within a small greenhouse:

“Aquaponics, An Ecocircle in Action”

And here are some links to more articles and blogs to learn more about aquaponics:

The Aquaponics Gardening Blog

“Aquaponics: The Urban Food Revolution”

“Aquaponics Raises Fish & Vegetables Sustainably”

“NY City’s First Hydroonic Rootop Garden to Produce 30 Tons of Food Annually”

Finally, if you search “aquaponics” on YouTube.com, you will find all sorts of great how-to videos. Good luck!

As the ground quickly becomes blanketed in snow, it becomes harder and harder for the chickens to find anything other than their scratch and layer crumble to eat. In summer, greens and bugs galore filled their tummies, without us having to do much at all. Now, however, we have to make a point to help them find some healthy goodies.

We noticed at the end of summer, when we finally let the chickens in the garden to clean everything up, how much they liked plants in the brassica family (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower). So as we were cleaning out the garden and pulling up the debris, we purposefully left all cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower plants in the ground. You can see them reaching out of the snow here, their leaves amazingly still not totally frozen:

About once a week, I pull up a plant, roots and all, and toss it into the chicken pen. By leaving the plant intact, it is easier for the chickens to pull off the leaves. This time of year, these greens are a delectable treat, and they devour the whole plant!

By the way, we no longer let our chickens free range, as we have had a number of nights when the chickens did not return the coop, for some odd reason. We suspect that a possum may have gone in their, trying to bed down in the hay, and spooked them. Regardless, searching for chickens after dark with a flashlight, in over a foot of snow and freezing cold weather, is not fun, neither for us nor them. So they are currently remaining inside the pen.

We also make sure the chickens get plenty of scratch. The cracked corn in it is a bit like junk food for chickens, without a lot of nutrients, but it does help them to produce more heat, apparently, so is good for those bitter cold wintry nights.

I still make my chickens their oatmeal, yogurt, kelp meal, nutritional yeast breakfast once in while, and they just love it. The kelp meal is chock full of micronutrients and a wonderful natural supplement for just about any animals. If you are not able to find the kelp, please email us. We have some available for sale here at The Greater Green as a special order item.

We also added a brighter light on a timer in the coop, in an effort to keep our chickens laying a bit longer. As the days shorten, the internal clocks of the hens signals that it is no longer a good laying season. By setting a light to go on early in the morning, and stay on for at least 14 hours, we “trick” the hens into laying throughout winter. It is not good, however, to leave the lights on all night. That is what they do in factory farms, and it causes the hens to overlay, shortening their life and stressing their bodies.

It came early this year. Cool, damp weather, chilly nights, blazing red and orange foliage, the need to light the wood stove and sip on hot cocoa while the wind howls outside…. There is no doubt now, with November steadily approaching, that winter is coming.

As easy as it is to forget about the garden this time of year, there are a few things you can do to help overwinter your garden and make life a bit easier come spring. Many of you may have already done these things, but if you haven’t, it’s not too late!

• Remove larger vegetable stalks and stems, diseased leafy material, and decaying vegetables. Diseased plant material should be either burned or put in a separate “dirty” compost pile- adding this material back to the garden might infect next year’s crop. Remove any weeds that have gone to seed (try to keep them out of the compost pile, too).
• Till under remaining plant material. This will add some organic matter to the soil, and it will have months to slowly decay, providing spring nutrients.
• Cover garden with a mulch. If you live in a warmer climate, there may still be time to plant a green manure cover crop, such as annual rye grass or clover, which can then be turned under in the spring. If it’s too late for a cover crop, consider adding manure and a mulch to your garden to protect and enrich your soil over the winter. Strong winds can cause serious erosion over bare gardens, and a top layer of straw, shredded leaves, or some other mulch can help tremendously.
• Did you plant garlic? Even if autumn snuck up on you, it’s not too late! Our garlic is just going in (though in truth, it should have gone in a few weeks ago!). Garlic is easy to grow, requires little maintenance, and provides early spring garlic scapes- the zesty green tendrils that are a great addition to any dish. Simply till up your rows, and plant cloves 1-2 inches below the surface, pointy end facing up. Cover loosely with soil, and then cover your rows with a layer of straw mulch about 2 inches thick. And voila! You will be so grateful you did come next summer!
• Remove any remaining stakes from the garden (we used a ton of t-posts for tomato and pepper support and for pea trellises). If any of your plants developed diseases (late blight, leaf spot, etc), then mix up a weak bleach dilution and spray the plant supports thoroughly to kill any residue. Doing this now will save you a ton of work come spring, and will prevent diseases from overwintering amongst your tools.
• If you didn’t do so in early summer, make a map of your garden and where you planted all your vegetables, so that you can start planning next summer’s garden, taking proper plant rotation into consideration.
• Move any small trees or shrubs that you’ve been intending to replant. Now would also be a good time to put in blueberry bushes or other fruit tress and bushes.
• Water any perennial plants. They won’t be getting much moisture from here on out, and will need it to store up energy for the winter.
• Rake up fallen leaves and put in a compost pile. If you are planting potatoes next summer, here is a great trick: potatoes grow well in composted leaves. We have chosen a new spot this year, just outside of the main garden, where we will grow our potatoes. We are piling the leaves there now, to smother and kill the grass beneath. Come spring, we will simply plant the potatoes in the giant leaf pile, about a foot or so beneath the surface. The beauty of this method is that not only do the leaves’ acidity create excellent growing conditions for the potatoes, but they will also be incredibly easy to dig up (remember “swimming” through leaf piles when you were a kid?). It’s so easy, it’s almost like cheating!
• Finally, order some great winter reading for the slow winter nights spent indoors. For beginners, some great books are Rodale’s All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening and Burpee : The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener : A Guide to Growing Your Garden Organically. For more advanced organic gardeners, Eliot Coleman’s The New Organic Grower is wonderful.
  

As our tomatoes loom tall and stout, evil forces are gathering in the midst of all this greenery. Mother Nature has created a sinister villain capable of tomato massacres and total devastation, and it is now our mission to stop its advancement at all costs, if we are to have any tomatoes to savor….

Never mind that this sinister creature is only a mere caterpillar- don’t be fooled into thinking that no damage will be done! Hornworms can devour half of a tomato plant in a matter of days if they are not found and destroyed. They are voracious little buggers, so large they look more like an animal than an insect, with radioactive green guts that ooze out in copious quantities when squished.

I know it’s time to start searching for the little monsters when our tomato tops rise above the stakes and cages. Those tippy top branches are usually where you will find your hornworms, since caterpillars have a tendency to climb up, up, up.

Here’s what you will need on your hunt: a bucket, and preferably, a scissors to… terminate… them. The hornworms can be squashed under your foot, but you’ll get green gooey guts all over your shoe. If you are incredibly brave and of true superhero stature, you might be able to squish them between your fingers. But that is rare and takes exceptional courage…. so a scissors does the job quite nicely, snipping them right in half. And actually, we cut them up into bits because our chickens won’t eat them whole, oddly. (I have yet to try giving them to the pigs… I wonder…..)

As you head out into the garden, you are looking for hornworm damage. Search for stray branches that are stripped of their leaves, usually towards the top of the plant. You can see in the photo that the hornworm worked its way right down the branch, chomping everything in its path.

Here are the branches I found yesterday as soon as I walked out into the garden:

Once you have found some hornworm damage, the next step is to locate the nearby hornworm. They are fast (for caterpillars), but not that fast. You should be able to follow the route they have taken by following the damaged branches until they seem to end. Another big clue is a bundle of hornworm poop, which looks somewhat like a small black mulberry. Where there is poop, there is hornworm, usually right above the poop.

It didn’t take me long to find some incriminating poop near the damaged branches. I tried to take a photo of the poop, but it didn’t come out so good… if you look very closely, you just might be able to see it, there in the center.

So now I knew there was definitely a hornworm in the vicinity. The hard part is spotting the villain- they are one of the best examples of perfectly matched camouflage that nature has created. Additionally, they hang on the underside of the branches, so you have to bend down and twist your head and crane your neck, looking up, to really spot them. After about 10 minutes of searching (yep, it actually took that long!), I finally spotted this little dude:

Can you see him there in the center, hanging on the underside of the branch? He was actually quite far from the damaged area- as I said, they can move fast. During my first encounter with hornworms, I found myself unable to squish them, and so piled them up instead in the center of the garden. At one point I walked away for about a minute or two, and when I came back, they were all gone! I found one of them a good 20 feet away, making his dash for freedom.

Here’s a close-up shot, where you can get a view of those power-munching jaws. If you were bug-sized, I imagine this thing would look like Godzilla!

Now the tough part- they must be killed. In our case, I feed them to the chickens, who will only eat them if I cut them into small pieces (don’t ask me how I figured that out). So I drop them in my bucket, and cut them into about 3 or 4 small bits. It’s not pretty. Deal with them as you will, but don’t imagine that you can just move them elsewhere- they will return.

Another successful hunt! I’ve been finding about 3 per day, and they are getting larger each time I find them, which means more damage… it’s time to step up the patrol!!

This year we opted to plant acorn squash instead of butternut squash- the acorn variety is easier to cook the way we like (baked or grilled and filled with a brown sugar, butter,cinnamon, and raisin mixture). The smaller size makes it easier to dole out individual servings, too- each person gets half.

But I do like butternut squash, and nothing beats the scent of Carmelized Butternut Squash roasting in the oven on a cool wintry evening. Imagine my surprise, then, when I walked back to the compost pile (which I have been neglecting for quite some time), only to discover a giant butternut squash plant weaving its enormous leafy vines around the pile, with three fairly large squash already on it!

The plant must have sprouted from a rotten squash that was added to the pile last fall. Go figure. With no care, no planting, no watering, nature has carried on the way she usually does, turning seeds into plants and plants into fruit.

That is the natural order of things, after all. It was a gentle reminder that I am not really master of my garden, that in fact, I don’t really do the growing at all. I am just the designated caretaker, the custodian, of nature’s greater plan.

Sometimes it’s nice to marvel at the beauty of it all…

As the summer harvest begins to roll in, we start to run into the same dilemma as always: we spend so much time gardening, harvesting, planting, freezing, and canning that we almost forget to EAT our harvest!

See, I’m so tired by the end of the day, it’s easy to forget how much I enjoy cooking with fresh vegetables and herbs, how aromatic and uplifting it is to fill the house with the delightful scents of fresh herbs and veggies simmering on the stove top.

Sure, it’s great to preserve a bunch of our harvest so that we can enjoy our organic veggies later on in the year, but frozen zucchini just can’t compare to a fresh zucchini roasting on the grill. Canned green beans just don’t measure up to fresh beans sauteed in olive oil with a bit of garlic. And dried basil is well…. so much blander than fresh.

So this is the time to savor the most delicious food that we will eat all year. So why do I keep working outside so late in the evening that I find myself too tired to cook anything more than a simple meal???

Today I decided to find an easy pasta recipe (as it turns out, in the latest issue of Hobby Farm magazine) that utilizes most of what is ready to eat in our garden: eggplant, tomatoes, basil, peppers, onions, and garlic.

Above is a photo of some of those veggies that I picked for dinner tonight, including purple onions, Mark Twain tomato, Goldie Yellow tomato, Black Diamond eggplant, Orange Banana Paste tomato, and a Jimmy Nardello sweet pepper. Yum!

The recipe is fairly simple. After sauteeing the veggies together with some garlic, a bunch of fresh basil is tossed in, and the whole affair is eaten over penne and topped with a ricotta-mint mixture.

Since the recipe called for some ricotta cheese, I decided to try making some (for the first time) from our farm-fresh raw milk, which we buy from a local dairy. HERE is the recipe for ricotta- which, as it turns out, is so super easy, there is almost no reason to buy ricotta from the store. Who would’ve thought??!

Making the ricotta was fun! Here’s a photo of the ricotta cheese after the curd has formed but before straining:

And finally, nothing goes better with pasta than a loaf of fresh-baked bread. But (if you are a tad on the lazy side, like me) who has time to bake bread?? YOU do… If you are making No-Knead bread, that is.

Check out one of our previous posts here that describes this fantastic bread and gives some great links, including one to a video that demonstrates how to bake the easiest, and possibly most delicious, bread you have ever eaten!

Now that our harvest is really kicking in, I thought I would try to post some photos of the myriad of different heirloom/open-pollinated varieties we grow. So here are two of the cucumbers I picked yesterday, side by side: Japanese Suhyo Long, and Super Zagross:

The Japanese cucumbers are longer and skinnier, and covered with spines (which I removed before taken the photo). If you do not trellis them, you might end up with some very curvy cukes (this variety, when grown properly, should be straight- notice mine is not!). The seeds are smaller, and the skinny size is great for salad slices.

Super Zagross is a very prolific Iranian variety, with no spines, and juicy sweet, bitter-free flesh. The cucumbers are of the very standard shape and size, and will keep on delivering a harvest right up until frost, if taken care of.

Both of these varieties are wonderful for fresh eating! Yum!

I made a vow this year to pay closer attention to summer’s song. To be aware of the slight changes in color, in smell, in temperature that signal yet another season ending and a new beginning. Spring comes and goes in a blink, though her gifts are many, if you are quick enough to catch them. Spring salad, crunchy radishes, snap peas, rhubarb, asparagus, strawberries….here and then all too quickly gone….

I distinctly remember venturing to the edge of our clearing last July and discovering the dried remnants of a bountiful harvest… wild raspberries come and gone. Just like that, I had missed the harvest and would have to wait another year. On top of that, I discovered two or three young mulberry trees, which we did not realize were there, already stripped of their fruits. What a bummer!

But not this summer! Shoko and I ventured out last week to see how the raspberries and mulberries were faring (actually, we have been checking on them twice weekly or so), only to discover the first morsels of black raspberry goodness and mulberries galore. A heavenly treat for a hot summer’s day! (who would’ve thought we’d be in the upper 90s in June??).

Wild raspberries can usually be found on the edge of woods, as they need pretty much full sun, but grow like brambles. Look for arching branches rising above the weeds, but be careful- they are loaded with thorns and, at least where we live, seem to grow in sync with lots of other prickly weeds. I would definitely wear pants and long-sleeves, if at all possible. The berries shoot off of the thorny branches in little clusters, with the top berry usually ripening first. They are quite a bit smaller than commercial raspberries- but that is often the case with wild strains of fruits and/or veggies.

The berries in the photo are not quite ripe yet, as these are black raspberries and will turn a beautiful deep purple when ready. You’ll know they are not simply red raspberries if you go to pull off the red ones, and they are still hard and quite stuck to the plant. The ripe black berries will come right off when you pull gently.

Though the harvest has just begun, and we didn’t fill but a pint-full, it feels good to know that we are just a little more in tune with the ebb and flow of nature’s gifts this year. We are learning so much about each season and how to appreciate its short bounty, by trying to eat only fresh produce, homegrown or local- which means some of our favorite foods in the world have only a small window of availability. But somehow, waiting for fresh strawberries, juicy blueberries, or sweet asparagus all year makes them oh so wonderful when they finally appear!

And nothing beats having a stockpile of frozen black raspberries, picked with our very own hands, in the freezer, waiting for our next smoothie session….