First Garlic Harvest
Days have been busy with this, that and the other thing. Waking up at 4:30/5 in the morning means I’m able to accomplish an incredible amount in the early morning, but tired for the rest of the day if I don’t remember to have a nap.
I’ve been helping my sister paint trim for her husband and weeding away at the garden. Everything has started to hit it’s lush, constantly ripening, constantly needs harvesting stage.
Tuesday I bottled all of the early fruit and flower wines - Chervil and Lilac, Lilac and Agastache and White Clover, Wild Strawberry and Pineapple Weed. I forgot that the Clover wine was supposed to be sparkling and didn’t add the sugar last minute so it will be flat. Not that we can’t add club soda to it for some fizz, if we want to.
The Lemon Balm and Mint beer are still bubbling so I’ll wait until they have finished fermenting before bottling. I think I’ll put them in wine bottles anyway, glass beer bottles are rather expensive and we can only drink so much Grolsch at a time.
Wednesday I let the last batch of chicks outside for the first time with the hens. I love watching the tiny chicks follow their mums around, scratching and snapping up bugs before anyone else can get them.
If there is a particularly large bug, or long bug, like a worm, it instigates a game much like football where everyone attacks the guy with the ball running. Sometimes pieces come off and everybody gets something, sometimes there is a fumble and it’s fair game and sometimes the quarterback actually runs it all the way down the field and gobbles the bug up all by themselves.
There have been no more broody mamas and Tosca has started laying again so we might be able to regain some sort of equilibrium in the coop again. I sold three of last year's hens to make room for some of this year's girl’s eggs which should all be varying shades of green.
Funny enough everyone still loves Blanche’s (our Cream Legbar hen) eggs best - the blue ones - whereas I prefer Tosca’s (mix of Black Copper Maran and Ameraucana, though she didn’t get the fluffy face???) - the slate green ones. I should like to have all green eggs and then start selling pork and call ourselves Green Eggs and Ham, but Josh says that name is already taken.
Coming back from the coop in the evening I chanced upon the hollyhocks at the perfect moment, glowing golden in the setting sun.
Thursday was garden weeding and tidy up.
The mulch that we put down in the paths of the Potager has broken down quite a bit, improving the soil, but now allowing weed seeds through. Grass and dandelions and plantain are growing through everywhere along with a healthy number of self-seeded Calendula and Chervil.
The Chervil immediately goes to seed once it gets warm so I tried to shake the seeds back into the garden beds they are supposed to be living in and then uprooted and shook the plants through the chickens section. When they start to grow this fall the chickens will enjoy the taste.
I never expected the Calendula to seed so well because I had been constantly picking and drying the flowers last year and then collecting the seeds to sow this year. They have, however, multiplied all through the garden and now there must be a cull before they possibly take over. My sister found this device that plays the music of plants (based on notes assigned to the electrics, I’m assuming) and I know their’s is some kind of all-conquering victory march through the Potager - I might start calling them Li’l Alexanders (blond that conquered the then known world), they’re getting quite thuggish. But we do love their cheery little sunshiny faces so they are allowed to stay on. In restrained amounts.
Both plants attract so many beneficial insects and parasitoid friends (Parasitoids perform an important ecosystem service by suppressing pest populations.) that they more than make up for their sprawling-through-the-walkways proliferation.
As a sidenote: Here’s another reason we want to limit our insecticide use.
The three main ways to increase your super-beneficial parasitoid population:
Limit insecticides use as much as possible because they are toxic to many other beneficial insects.
Improve the local plant habitat for parasitoids providing a wide variety of adequate nectar sources.
Release of parasitoid species when pest densities are low so that they have a sufficient amount of time to establish themselves and deal with the pest population before it gets out of control.
Insect Parasitoids: Important Natural Enemies of Pests
by Nathan Mercer, Laboratory Technician
University of Kentucky College of Agriculture
I was also able to make some garden medicine concoctions. I like understanding the beneficial components of the herbs in my garden; and seeing as raw, local honey and organic apple cider vinegar help with so many things, I often make them into a shrub. Many are used to the little brown, dropper bottles at the health food store but if you are looking for an alcohol-free option there are more than tinctures available. Herbal Academy has a post with several options. This week I gathered mullein flowers, oregano leaves, sage leaves, sprigs of thyme and violets. Pretty, delicious and supportive.
Friday my Dad and Mum helped to put up the rose arbor that he made for me for the entrance to the new Rose Garden. I can’t think about it too much because I have to wait all the way until December 6 before I can order my roses - Palatine is a small, family run business and I suppose ran out early this year of all the good ones. But wait I shall. I It will be glorious!
That evening was the first garlic harvest, quickly done because I was very tired and piled into baskets for cleaning and sorting.
Saturday had a stunning sunrise that I thoroughly soaked myself in.
I started a new book - Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx - about the construction of her house on 640 acres of wetlands and prairie that was owned by the Nature Conservancy.
It is a personal history in part and a history of place.
She writes that:
“History seized me a long time ago. I am like Luigi Pirandello’s character Dr. Fileno, who thought he had found an efficacious remedy for all human ills … it was a method consisting in reading history books from morning till night and practising looking at the present as though it were an event already buried in the archives of the past...”
It reminded me of something I read by Alexander (now I wonder if he’s blond?) Bevilacqua - The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture - where he explains:
“The virtue of reading like a historian, then, is that critique or disavowal is not the primary goal. On the contrary, reading historically provides something more destabilising: it requires the historian to put her own values in parentheses.”
“The call for empathy might seem theoretically naive. Yet we judge people’s intentions all the time in our daily lives; we can’t function socially without making inferences about others’ motivations. Historians merely apply this approach to people who are dead. They invoke intentions not from a desire to attack, nor because they seek reasons to restrain a text’s range of meanings. Their questions about intentions stem, instead, from respect for the people whose actions and thoughts they’re trying to understand.
Reading like a historian, then, involves not just a theory of interpretation, but also a moral stance. It is an attempt to treat others generously, and to extend that generosity even to those who can’t be hic et nunc – here and now.”
I appreciated the perspective.
I have learned two new words so far.
Inchoate: just begun and not fully formed or developed, rudimentary
Peripatetic: traveling from place to place, in particular working or based in various places for relatively short periods
She speaks of her time in “Centennial, a tiny town on the east slope of the Medicine Bow range in the southern Rockies”.
Here the forests of economically profitable Lodgepole Pines showed the danger of monocultures, especially of the same age. Between fire suppression, weather pattern changes and the invasion of the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) most of the forests are now standing dead.
I also learned a new concept via negativa - essentially the study of what not to do (with theological origins of how to explain God by what he is not).
An interesting article by Thomas Waschenfelder - Via Negativa: Improvement By Subtraction - explains it thusly:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb gives us a more general definition in his book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder:
Via negativa: In theology and philosophy, the focus on what something is not, an indirect definition. In action, it is a recipe for what to avoid, what not to do—subtraction, not addition, say, in medicine.
In The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, he says:
“I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.”
Taleb has a phrase for this he calls “subtractive knowledge: You know what is wrong with more certainty than you know anything else.”
This inversion perspective can be an interesting lens to view the world through. Loss aversion is more market savvy.
Why I can never be a minimalist. And always seem to need more space.
The afternoon was rain, then pouring rain, and then cats-and-dogs rain.
The front field didn’t flood though, that’s usually only during the spring melt. I’d plant willows but apparently there are weeping tiles.
Why not weeping willows? A whole riparian zone?
An essential natural habitat disappearing all too quickly to produce dry fields earlier and earlier without thought of the plants that need a little flooding and the specialist insects that need them to survive.
Rainy days are perfect reading days. I’m halfway through the book and thoroughly enjoying it.
The turkeys and chickens however, did not enjoy the rain.
Soaked feathers aren’t fun.
