Growing Food In An Off Year Of Weather

August 28, 2022 Sarah

To say the growing season of 2022 was trying…is putting it lightly. As I have talked about since mid winter in early 2022, this winter/spring and into mid summer was cold and wet (see a post I did end of April “The Cool Spring“).

Trees didn’t bloom at all for some. The bees came out weeks late and missed some flows on other trees. Seeds didn’t want to sprout. I keep pushing and went into growing season fingers crossed. Finally in July the sun started showing up and it warmed up into summer. And we have had a garden, and grown food – but not at normal levels. For example, we have taken in about 1/3 of the tomato crop as we normally do. Shelling beans are at the level we will only have seeds for next year, not any for eating. But we do have food, to eat, and to put up for the winter.

And well, I was able to grow tomatoes still. And even some big ones.

It taught me more lessons, maybe ones I needed to hear. That every year will be different, and if it isn’t working, stop, and try another way. Immediately.

One thing was our greenhouses were FULL until end of June, into early July. No planting tomato and pepper plants on Mother’s Day Weekend in May this year. I kept holding back. The plants were huge, but I had no choice in it if I wanted the plants to survive.

When I did take the items out, I wrapped the fencing on each bed with 6 mil thick plastic sheeting (find it in the painting section). This blocked the wind, and kept the soil warmer.

It made a huge difference and is why I feel most of the tomato plants survived and thrive.

We had to wrap one of the coops as well, for there was a mama and her 3 babies in it. They often spend the first weeks downstairs, and the wind howled through, chilling them. Oh the irony – all 3 turned out to be roosters. Gotta love the chances on that.

We used zip ties to connect. Due to the many windstorms out of season I had to replace them periodically.

Another bed wrapped.

So remember the 5 Gallon Bucket method I decided to do for my peppers?

Poblano Peppers, actual big ones.

Red bell peppers. Thick walled and proper size.

In early July I moved the 5 gallon buckets outside and let them reside in one of the main beds, in a line, next to the tomatoes in the ground. They got protected from the wind coming up from the water, and got well watered all summer.

Thick walled, full sized green peppers. The wrapping of the beds made all the difference.

The onions thrived in the no-wind-more-heat way as well.

Overall, it’s been OK. But some areas we were truly hit hard in. No pears, no plums, only one apple tree bloomed on time. The apples, which I removed half of, won’t be good enough to eat (the chickens are happy). The peach tree thrived oddly, and I got a handful of cherries. Oddly the fig trees have done well this year. But swiss chard bolted constantly, as did the lettuce and spinach (not normal here). Carrots and beets grew at half the rate of normal. Peas came ready 4 weeks late, but were ample and delicious. The kohlrabi grew to massive size, the broccoli did well, but the cauliflower bolted and the green cabbage went to seed (and looked like it was sprouting snakes out of the top). It was just so random in what did well, and what did not.

September is around the corner and while it will be warm here for a couple more weeks, summer ends in 3.5 weeks and fall will slip in. A third La Nina winter has been promised (not normal). It leads to promises of a long, cold, and wet fall and winter. Fall crops may be well trying, but I will see that the garlic gets in the ground (that crop grew this year, but was ugly as could be when harvested. Still, it will be fine to seed with this fall.).

~Sarah

Air Drying Herbs and Flowers

July 7, 2022 Sarah

Drying herbs and flowers is easy to do, and takes little work to put away a years worth. And you don’t need a dehydrator either. My method is very simple: Take a clean brown grocery bag outside and pick, tossing into the bag as you do. Then fold over the top to keep light and dust out, and let air dry. I gently shake the bag(s) daily to move the flowers and leaves around. You get a nicer color this way, and no heat means all the natural essential oils stay. Heat can destroy them.

Once dried I store the smaller items in mason jars.

Larger items, such as Comfrey leaves I store in plastic storage bags, gently placed in so they don’t crumble.

Best use is to store out of light, in a dry area that doesn’t overheat in summer. Use within a year for best quality.

Pick Chamomile early in the day, before the sun hits it.

Chamomile is not only great as a relaxing tea, it can be brewed and used as a hair rinse for blonde hair.

Calendula flower.

Rosemary can be brewed strong, cooled and used as a hair rinse for dark hair.

Sage flowers.

Sage being picked.

Comfrey. Bees love the flowers.

The back of Comfrey leaves are fascinating in the patterns. Dry it and save for making strong brews to soak skin in, if needed.

Dry what you grow, or friends grow, and dry what you use – both in culinary and medicinal uses. Then you won’t ever have to to buy herbs where you don’t know where they were grown.

~Sarah

Homesteading · Prepping · Preserving

Dehydrating Mushrooms

June 22, 2022 Sarah

Overall I prefer freeze-dried ingredients for long-term storage over dehydrated, but there are a few things i far prefer dehydrated. Mushrooms are one of those things. The act of dehydrating changes the structure of the mushroom. Freeze-drying mushrooms leaves them intact and raw, but when you dehydrate them, the heat slowly cooks them. It removes the water (of which mushrooms are high in) and in the end the umami flavor becomes dense.

You can dry whatever type mushroom you prefer, I usually do button or crimini mushrooms. My method is to go to a restaurant supply store and buy pre-sliced. I can get 2.5 pound containers for the same price as whole there, meaning one less thing to do. All I need to do is spread them on the dehydrator trays. It’s also a great project when a local grocery store runs some crazy deal like “10 for $1”. Buy when cheap, and preserve.

The main thing is: if you slice them, keep them the same size. Makes for easier drying.

Drying on the dehydrator.

I use a L’Equip dehydrator I have had for a very long time. I bought it in the mid 2000’s, and it’s been solid from day 1.

Spread your mushrooms on dehydrator trays, at first spread them out thin so the air can move around, to speed up the drying. I dry around 155° on my dehydrator. Every hour or two I move the trays so each tray gets a chance to be closest to the heat source. Keeps drying even that way. As they start to shrivel up and darken, you can condense the trays a bit. I find it takes around 12 hours or so to dry a load.

When the mushrooms are leathery dry – and you can’t feel any tacky spots – turn off, take the lid off, and let them air cool. Then pack them loosely into mason jars. 2.5 pounds fresh will fit into 2 quart mason jars.

Preserved for the season – and for winter dishes.

How to use?

When I making stews and stroganoff or similar, I place a cereal bowl full of them, cover with boiling water, and let hydrate for 15 or so minutes. I drain them, reserving the broth created. Saute the mushrooms as you would fresh ones. Use the broth in your recipe. It’s got an incredibly deep flavor and aroma. Unlike fresh mushrooms, the dried ones will have a pleasant chewy texture and never be slimy (my kids love the dried ones in meals, but complain about fresh).

The bonus? You know where your mushrooms come from. Most dried ones sold commercially are processed in China and can be years old. And often are rather dusty/dirty, so the soaking broth isn’t usable.

~Sarah

Homesteading

May On The Homestead

June 2, 2022 Sarah

It was cold. It was wet. But even then things grew. And if anything, it has been lush due to the cooler month of May that was. The hours of daylight increase even if it doesn’t seem as strong this year.

Tiny stalks of aspragus.

Apple trees blooming.

The first bell pepper blooms.

Tomatoes in the greenhouse.

My spirit animal right here. She was soooo tired of the rooster at that moment.

Mother’s Day weekend is normally when we plant the tomatoes outside. Not this year though. I did pull them all out, and started staking them up.

Back in the greenhouse, and the peppers potted up to grow inside where it is warm.

Tiny bell pepper.

Chicken eggs in the morning.

The green items grow well in the cold.

May was the month of broody hens. Two went broody. The one in the back was a mom twice over. The one in the front isn’t even a year old. They spent the month fighting over a clutch of eggs, to the point of sitting on top of each other. It was a mess overall.

The sun would come out, but it wasn’t hot by any means all month.

But things did grow.

I will talk about this later on, but much was done here.

Potatoes coming up.

Of the 17 eggs the hens sat on 6 hatched. 2 died after hatching, kicked out of the clutch. They never dryed out. A 3rd one we saved but something was wrong with it, and it passed away 2 days later. Of the eggs 3 more hatched successfully. The 3 chicks the experienced hen mother claimed them. I grabbed her and the chicks and moved them to a coop alone – to ensure there was no more fighting. The other hen sat on the remaining eggs another day and then suddenly popped her being broody. We tossed those cold dead eggs far away. She is now back to normal. Just hoping no one else goes broody for awhile.

Lupine grown from seed last spring, in bloom this year.

The berry bed.

When it’s cold, you start wrapping beds with plastic wrap to increase temperatures.

Rosemary in bloom.

On the last day of the month. There is still snow, fresh snow, on the Olympic Mountains, in the distance. Somethings have not faired so well. Our Lilac tree did awful – it barely bloomed and is only half leafed out. It looks sad and sick. A few blueberry bushes from last summer’s heat wave took a huge hit from the 100+ temps and may well not make it. I watch it to see what will happen.

There is much to do on the homestead.

~Sarah

Gardening · Homesteading · Prepping

Growing To Eat Versus Growing For Hobby

May 29, 2022 Sarah

One of the things I do yearly is test my boundaries. The boundaries of growing plants. To see what can I push to the edge, and still work.

But to explain it, not that many years ago we were urban homesteaders, living off the luxury of having our mini-farmstead right out the back door, with the greenhouse was just a few steps off the back deck. The luxury of having electricity, and even water, right where we needed it. Life was linear, I happily grew our plants under grow lights, snuggled in with a toasty heater running to stave off the cold chills. We grew food as a hobby, even when we started our first urban farm there. Because it was a hobby, I wasn’t watching how much it was costing us. And to be honest, I was following conventional wisdom about gardening. “Do this and you will get good results”.

Where we live now, we had none of the infrastructure in place when we moved in, in spring of 2018. 4 springs later we have some of that in place. We have water. We have irrigation in much of it. But electricity? We could do it, but it’s just not that important in the grand scheme of things. For now, growing to eat became far more important.

I realized in the first year of living on the island my goals would have to change. And they did. I took everything that was “set in stone” about our grow zone and tossed it out. And came of the mantra of “Either you survive, or you don’t” because…in the wilds, mother nature would do that to us humans. I was moving 600 feet of hose back and forth daily to just keep the plants growing. It was not sustainable, year in and out.

One of the first things I truly noticed after we moved back to the island was plant sellers on the island. They kept them in greenhouses, under lights, fully heated for a very long time. They were showy, of course, but was it a good thing? For were we teaching ourselves to grow as a hobby, or for survival? A summer garden will feed you, but it won’t let you survive if you needed. We need dense plants, shorter, but built for handling late chilly nights. Plants that don’t need pampering to survive. Living in the north means you must work around the lack of light in winter and early spring. It means you must wait. You will have time. But you must have patience.

This may well change how you grow in a microclimate as well.

Plant your seeds far later then you see others doing it. It’s OK. You are not in a race with them. You might see on Facebook or other social media that one person, who has a huge greenhouse full of plants, that are huge. In March. Or April. It only means they started their seeds inside, under grow lights, and with a mat heater under them…in January.

But here is the thing:

They cannot plant those plants outside.

They would die quickly. Being pampered they are delicate. The leaves would be sapped within a night or two, and the plant would die. It has no hardening off. It lives in a gilded cage of fake light and warmth.

And that’s totally OK if they want to grow for show, as a hobby. That’s their thing.

For us, (mostly me) I had to step back and not seed in January. Nor February. Only in mid March did I do the first things.

And then there are “the years”:

This spring has been brutal for patience. It’s cold. It is rainy. And it has barely let up. We many weeks behind. Our goal is growing to eat, so we must wait till the time is right enough – that we won’t waste seeds or time to see the crops fail, over and over.

It is May 29th and it was 48* last night. It is continuing to be this cold many nights. It just won’t stay about 50* at night. And worse, it keeps raining (which is good for the long term, I won’t argue that, but it is frustrating none the less). It is sunny at times but holding in the 50’s many days. Even in the low 60’s the plants cannot surge. They need a full day’s worth of sun. Not clouded over till the afternoon. Or worse? All day long. Grey stretches on, for months now.

I have my views on this. I feel it is happening because of Tonga’s volcanic explosion in January, and it recently waking up yet again this past week. Tonga is easy to ignore, for it sits in the middle of nowhere, far away. It is near Fiji and American Soma. It reminds me of the winter after Mt. St. Helens blew when I was a child. It was a cold summer and just never felt right. Say what you will about global warming, all it takes is 1 very large volcanic explosion to set all that back. The thing is, our spring and summers have become hotter this past decade, and spring happens earlier every year. But this year? It is far, far different. All the local growers (both farmers and gardeners) I know see it…but the media is pretty much silent on it. Does it not fit their narrative of global warming crisis? Cold wet springs don’t help the narrative of an eternal drought, and withering hot temperatures (which last summer were horrible around the 4th of July).

This is a year where growing for hobby will not happen for many in the Pacific Northwest. They will give up as their seeds don’t come up, or if they do, they are scraggly and barely making. Their tomatoes will not thrive for now. If summer comes, it may change, but the crops will be smaller, and we will run into the issue of blight in September with the rains, and the crops won’t be ready to pull.

This is the year to ask:

Am I growing to eat, or as a hobby?

If it is to eat…..you need to get serious about covering your crops to ensure more warmth. Be it hoop tunnels, greenhouses or wrapping fences in plastic wrap to block winds. This is the year we must work on it.

Today I am wrapping 2 fenced beds with 6 mil plastic (for painting) to push the temperatures up in the beds. I want to eat. Hobbies don’t feed you full time.

~Sarah