Weary

Early October is just a frantic time of year, because every free minute is taken up with the total changeover of the garden. I’m nearly done, now. I’ve only got two beds left to plant - more garlic and more shallots. Then Tom and I will cover them with floating row cover, and we’ll call the winter garden complete.

The top of the piano is full of fruit waiting to ripen and/or eat and/or preserve. It actually felt good to chop out the tomato vines, haul bags of compost, and put fresh seeds and starts into the ground.

The greenhouse is empty once again, and the green bin full of compostable cups and popsicle stick labels. The last of the peppers have been sliced up and frozen. More sriracha has been made and is fermenting on my kitchen desk. Next to it are some seed potatoes on which I’m waiting for more sprouts. Next to that are seeds drying on paper towels - Delicata squash and Shishito peppers, bought at a roadside farmstand this past weekend (they were delicious and I want to grow them next year in my own garden). Next to that is the jar of beans I’m slowly adding to as the bean vines dry. My desk is full of non-desky things.

Some flowers are in their element - zinnias, tithonia, rudbeckias, cuphea. Others are starting to dry up and produce seeds, such as the native sunflowers I grow in my woodland garden.

I started a new herb bed near the blueberries and bought (and planted) some Eryngium planum, common name Sea Holly, which I recently found on a school field trip. I’ve been looking for this plant for ages. It looks like a blue thistle, but it isn’t quite as ouchy as thistle, and the bees adore it.

I’m pooped, but the winter garden is in, for the most part. Now the weather can change and we’ll be ready for it. Meanwhile the warm days and cool nights are perfect for all the greens and brassicas and root veg, which will get a good start now and then overwinter beautifully. As soon as the fall rains come, I’ll sow the spring wildflower seeds in the pollinator beds. I’ve already started planting sweet peas.

I haven’t even had time to make the October wreath - I’ll get to that as soon as I’m able - I think I’ll use trimmings from lemon verbena and culinary sage.

Community Seed Library

The other day I picked up a copy of Edible East Bay magazine. There were lots of great articles, as usual, but one really stood out to me - a story about a man in Berkeley who had recently opened a Community Seed Library in front of his house. His drive to make this project a reality, and the possibilities about making this a true seed-sharing movement, really struck me. So I emailed the owner, Charlie, to see if I could come and visit his seed library and have a conversation about it.

Charlie responded with enthusiasm and invited me to come to his yearly tomato tasting. Charlie lives in an historic property (which is named MariLark) on the edge of Tilden Regional Park; what a location! My friend Nils, also a suburban farmer and beekeeper, came along with me. I brought four of my tomatoes to add to the tasting, and Nils and I enjoyed trying all the fruits on display. Lots of them had been grown by Charlie, but many had been grown by friends, family, and neighbors, and it was fun to see all the different varieties represented. There were no doubles - somehow everyone had brought different kinds!

It was a beautiful sunny day, but Charlie has growing challenges with the often-present cloud cover due to our local celebrity, Karl the Fog.  He still manages to have a really wonderful garden, filled with greens, tomatoes, flowers, and herbs, over a large terraced property. He also is growing an enormous pumpkin!

I enjoyed chatting with Charlie about the design of the seed library and his mission to grow the movement and have a seed library in every neighborhood. I've wanted to have a seed library for quite some time now, but I have logistical concerns, especially in the very hot summers and direct sun experienced in my garden. Optimally, seeds are stored in dry, chilly temperatures. Our chilly weather is often wet, and our dry weather is often bloody hot. So I'm not sure how viable the seeds would be after six months in the sun, or four months of rainfall. Charlie and I discussed how to get around that issue - maybe make mine seasonal, or do some sort of finagling to make full-time shade in a certain spot in my garden. Ideally I'd like it to be right next to our Little Free Library, but that might not be the best place for it. Charlie would like to have a 'sister seed library' and is hoping I am game to provide it. It's going to take some thinking, first.

There's a lot to like about the library in Charlie's yard. My favorite thing is the pull-out writing table, so you have a place to sort and label your seeds. Charlie provides the envelopes and pens. He has gardening books inside, too. Other folks have left notes such as "free native plants to a good home" and an email address. The seeds themselves are on the bottom shelf, placed in boxes, far back in the shade, in an insulated area. We discussed how to make some sort of shade cover for them in there - special film? A removable cardboard cover? Nils suggested that we put these library boxes on pivots, so that you can pivot it toward the shade, with instructions how to pivot it around to get inside. All good ideas. Hey, you engineers out there, weigh in on this please.

After all this, I realized I had forgotten to bring seeds to share, so I'll have to go back. This is a really neat idea, and I want to visit often. 

Do you have a seed library that you visit? If so, please tell us all about it in the comments.

Rolling Along

Summer is rolling along, and with it the kind of daily chores that mostly involve putting up food for winter. I'm so glad I've had this month off of work, as it really helps to have extra time to process the harvest. 

a type of coreopsis, I think

I'm doing lots of odd jobs that, by themselves, don't really make for an entire blog post. For instance, I noticed almond trees blooming this past spring up the street near our neighborhood pool, so I put a note in my calendar to check them again this time of year and see if I could harvest some. Sure enough, I was able to reach a dozen or so and bring them home. They haven't cracked open yet. As I understand it, on big farms, they wait until the outer shell cracks open, then use a specialized piece of equipment to shake the almonds out of the tree. I didn't want to wait until they cracked, because by then the squirrels would have gotten them all. So I brought them home and put them in our outdoor drying rack and we'll see what happens.

I've been using this same drying rack to dry hot peppers (Piccante Calabrese), almost constantly. As soon as a handful of peppers become ripe, I slice them in half and pop them in the dryer. The jar of dried peppers is growing. Unfortunately these peppers are about the size of quarters, so it's going to take a lot of peppers to fill up this jar. Oh well. We don't eat all that many red pepper flakes. (Except for Adam, he really likes them on pizza.)

It's been quite warm, and I decided I wanted to protect the tomatoes from the late-afternoon, western sun pounding on them. So I clipped up some row covers to give them just a bit of shade on that side. These particular row covers block out 10% of light, so the tomatoes are getting plenty of sun. I've noticed the leaves looking a little crispy, which isn't unusual this time of year, but anything I can do to help the tomatoes keep producing is a priority.

There are always a lot of tomatoes ripening on the piano. This batch is going to be made into tomato paste, or BBQ sauce, I haven't decided yet.

I took out my food mill in order to start on this project...

... and promptly broke the plastic thingy that torques the base down to the counter and suctions it, so that it won't move when you crank it. It is unfixable. I was pretty mad. So I have to wait until the new one I ordered arrives (hopefully tomorrow). I decided to go with the old kind, you know with a crank at the top, the kind that's been used for a hundred years. Hope that one lasts longer than one year.

phacelia

I've been saving some tomato seed. I don't know why I was so intimidated by this in the past, it's really quite straightforward. You just squeeze the tomato into a jar, juice and pulp and seeds all together, then let that sit on your counter for 4-5 days until mold grows on it. That means the seeds have fermented a bit (which removes an anti-germination coating) and are ready for drying. Scrape off the mold and carefully drain the liquid. Good seeds sink to the bottom. Give them several rinses of water and then spread them on to a paper towel to dry. Easy.

It's also time to start thinking about the winter garden. I won't be actually putting anything into the ground until October, or even early November, depending on the weather (our first average frost date is December 15). I've got the seed packets and plans out and it's fun to figure out what will go where.

You may remember that last year I had a little trouble with 'heading' vegetables, like broccoli and cabbage. I think what I'll do this year is start those seeds indoors (or maybe even outdoors under the shade structure) in early September. Then they'll be ready to go in the ground in October.

found this in the local open space while the kids were hunting Pokemon

So, yes, trucking along here, just preserving as things come ripe - tomatoes, peppers, beans, cucumbers. Our first ripe cantaloupe went to a pregnant friend who is craving melon. :) The next one is mine, though. Watermelons are not far behind! 

Seedpods, Fruit, and a Shaker Peg Rail

I've been on a seed saving spree. (Say that five times fast!) I've always tried to save some seed from our annual flowers, but this year I'm really enjoying finding new seeds to save. If I can put a dent in our yearly seed budget, that would be delightful! And of course it is a more sustainable practice than buying every year, and it has the benefit of a zero carbon footprint. 

Today I cut, dried, and saved Love-in-a-Mist (or Nigella). (I must say something about these photos. I used, as always, my phone (iPhone 6). I zoomed in quite a lot. Please please please forgive all the detail of my very dirty, work-hardened hands. Please concentrate on the seedpods, not my yucky fingers. Next time I will figure out a way to photograph with a piece of construction paper behind the desired item.)

a slightly squashed seed pod

From the top looking in, you can see the seeds. Isn't this seedpod lovely?

With the top pulled off

The seeds inside

Here's a California Poppy. Not quite so lovely. But then this is a hardscrabble flower, meant to survive severe drought and still bloom. It can't afford to have a nice balloon shape. It makes me think of the word 'sere.' 

Here's one still closed, not dry enough to pop open yet

and here's one sprung open, the seeds all in a row

I also collected quite a few nasturtium seeds. I use nasturtium everywhere in both the flower and vegetable beds, as it attracts beneficial insects (and hummingbirds) and repels the ones I don't want anywhere near my delicious veg. Saving these seeds will help me an awful lot in future.

They tend to grow in a group of three

These will dry and harden further, then they'll be ready to plant. 

And this year we finally have enough Forget-me-Nots to collect some seed. These seeds are the annoying kind that inspired the inventor of Velcro.

sticky, but beautiful

Today (and this whole week) has been enormously hot, so the routine has been: go out to the garden for an hour, then come inside and drink a gallon of hibiscus iced tea, then go outside for an hour, then come inside and have a little lie-down under a fan. I have to say the fruit just loves the heat and is bursting out everywhere. The plums are just a couple of days from eating, as are the peaches, and the tomatoes are clustered all along the stems of the plants.

This is a Santa Rosa plum we planted a year ago, last Spring. We have three plums on the tree this year, which I call a success. They are gorgeous and I can't wait to eat them.

The peaches are numerous and glorious. We have dreams of frozen peaches for smoothies, peaches for pie, peaches to eat out-of-hand, and of course peach jam. About three times a day we go out and squeeze them, or see if they come off easily in our hand. That will be our cue to start eating. We must stay ahead of the squirrels and birds, though we have so many, we can share.

Tomatoes. Can't wait.

We have slicers, paste, and cherry tomatoes all rivaling to be the first ones ready to eat. I'm trying new things with growing tomatoes this year, and I'll write about that in a different post. So far, I really like where things are headed.

Something else hot weather brings out, and they're not as welcome as the fruit, are flies. Gosh they are annoying. But today I noticed flies pollinating both a yarrow and the cilantro, so they're not all bad.

And oh my goodness the cilantro is just a hotbed of activity, I noticed 8 different kinds of pollinators on it at one time today. This is absolutely one of those crops you should let bolt and go to seed. Pollinators really seem to love this kind of flower - an umbel - and cilantro is another one of those flowers that attracts the good guys and repels the bad guys. 

Our garlic harvest was so robust this year that I asked my father to make us another hanging rail for the braids. We have four pegs on our canning shelf, and those are occupied by two garlic braids, a mesh bag of shallots, and a mesh bag of fingerling potatoes. I had six more braids of garlic, and we really don't want to try to fit everything on those four pegs because we need to increase the airflow around the produce if we want it to last longer. So Dad made us a Shaker Peg Rail, and it looks nice in a dark corner by the piano.

Two more pictures to share. I bought a Humboldt Lily at the Watershed Nursery back on Mother's Day, and it's blooming. Spectacular. Why didn't I get more of these?

This is California's drought-tolerant answer to the Leopard Lily

And I just love the way this Scabiosa atropurpurea 'Scarlet' (pincushion flower) looks as it builds up to bloom.

Isn't that something?

Hope you're all having a marvelous weekend!

Some seed saving, and a turkey problem (or maybe not)

Each evening lately, after the sun goes down, I've been working on cutting down flowers and saving seed. I've done this in the past with annual flowers, but I had always been haphazard about it. This year I knew I wanted to get as much seed as possible, so I've been keeping a close watch on the flowers. 

One of the annuals I really enjoyed this year was Breadseed Poppies. I had two varieties, "Cupcake" and "Orange Chiffon," and both were gorgeous. When I saw the amount of seed they both produced, I knew I would want to save some for next year.

Orange Chiffon

Cupcake

Cupcake seed pods

When I noticed most of the flowers were done blooming and seed pods had formed, I cut down the plants and put the seed pods in a separate bin. There, I left them to dry for a couple of days. When dry, I split the pods and shook out the seeds. This yields thousands of seeds, not counting the ones that already self-sowed in the same spot.

some chaff on top

I've been doing the same with Clarkia, both "Mountain Garland" and "Farewell-to-Spring." These seed pods are much, much smaller and it takes a lot more time to collect the seeds.

Mountain Garland are the flowers on tall stalks, Farewell-to-Spring are the shorter, cup-shaped flowers.

Mountain Garland seedpod

seeds and chaff

I'll store these in our garage refrigerator; the clarkias can be sown in late Fall, and the breadseed poppies in late Winter. 

My eye is carefully trained on some cilantro that is blooming right now - I'd like to collect seed for both planting and for canning. We use a lot of coriander when we make pickles.

I also have my eye on some Love-in-a-Mist and some California Poppies. It's hard to get things at just the right time!

Now, about the turkey problem. The past few days, this turkey hen has been flying in to our yard and hanging out near the chicken coop.

She's not a wild turkey; those are everywhere around here but travel in very large flocks, and they are dark grey and black. This seems to be a Bourbon Red, which is a breed of domesticated turkey. I think someone in our neighborhood is raising turkeys and has lost this one. She is always alone. She is always hanging out near the coop. And she is always noisy. And - she is always hard to chase out of our yard. I've posted her appearance on our Nextdoor site, but if no one answers, I'd rather like to figure out if there is a way to catch her and keep her. Our chickens really don't like her; they get very agitated when she is near. And I certainly don't want her free-ranging in my vegetables. So we'd have to build her her own coop. But here's the conundrum: Do we spend time building her an enclosure of some sort, and then hope she comes back again? Or do we try to catch her, keep her contained, and knock together something on the fly? And doesn't she need company? And would she be a good Thanksgiving turkey, or would we want the eggs? The questions are numerous. Please do make suggestions.