Starting Plants Indoors, 2022

 A couple weeks ago, we decided to start a limited number of plants indoors, under a grow light in our living room/my office. It's a smaller set-up than in years past, focused mostly on semitropical plants that need a head start but are difficult or expensive to buy at nurseries. 

The Easiest Vegetable Garden Ever, Part 3: Watering, Weeding, and Fertilizing

(Reposted from last year.)
(Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.)

So, you built (or bought) some great soil, and you chose what to grow and planted it. Now what? Maintenance! If you're looking for a good harvest, you have to care for your garden consistently. Plants are like us: they need water and food. Unlike us, though, they can't run away when another plant is invading their personal space and sucking up resources, so it's your job to give them some room by removing weeds.

The Easiest Vegetable Garden Ever, Part Two: What to Grow

Got 150+ pounds of food from the garden last year even though we did literally nothing to tend it.

(Republished from April 2020. Read Part One here.)

All the way back in November, I urged you to start thinking about a garden. It seems that these days more people than ever are considering growing their own food, and that is awesome! In addition to this series, I'm always happy to answer (or try to answer) any gardening questions you have, so feel free to drop a comment with your questions.

The Easiest Vegetable Garden Ever, Part One: Dirt

Finished compost for top-dressing the bed in our front yard

(Reposted from 2019)

Did you know that autumn in the Midwest is the perfect time to start a vegetable garden? If you've ever wanted to try growing your own tomatoes, turnips, or taco toppings, now is the best time to start!

This Week (Month? Decade? What Is Time?): Mending, Gardening, and Seed-Saving

A monarch butterfly enjoys the zinnias in our front yard 

As you may have noticed, it's been very quiet on the blog lately. Part of it has been me just utterly losing any motivation (again) to write anything— not sure what caused that, but I haven't had the will to fight it— and part of it is this mental block I get when I'm trying to write about a trip and I feel like I can't write anything else until I finish "the story." So I have a big fat draft about the Olympic Peninsula tidepools/rainforest sitting in a document on my desktop, but finishing it feels like an impossible task, and OF COURSE I can't write anything else until I publish my overly-adjectived mind-dump about the glorious riot of life among the acorn barnacles and ochre sea stars. 

So this is a blog post to let you know that I'm still here, and I'm doing okay, and to let myself know that it's okay to write things out of sequence and I will eventually get around to the tidepool blog post.

In the meantime: 

Homestead Update 5/13/20: Wave After Wave of Foliage

The April-to-May transition is one of the most stunning in St. Louis. Despite unseasonably cool weather (including two frost warnings), the garden, in the words of farmer and poet Wendell Berry, ‘Like a tide it comes in/wave after wave of foliage and fruit/the nurtured and the wild". 

Homestead Update 3/28/2020: Spring Is Not Quarantined

The kale is a-growin'!

I don't have to tell you it's been a crazy month. The whole global pandemic thing is not only causing death and throwing a serious wrench in everyone's plans, but stirring up a giant cloud of anxiety and helplessness and paralysis that often feels suffocating. All too often I find myself glued to social media, willing my stress and anxiety to make things better.

Nectarine blossoms— our tree was covered in all sorts of bees and wasps today!

Fortunately, though, my garden has other plans for me. More than ever, I've been struck by what an incredible privilege it is to have a bit of earth to garden. A place to grow food, a place to play in the dirt, a place to sit and watch birds picking at my compost pile and squirrels digging holes in my garden beds. Our fruit trees are green with buds, and the nectarine tree has unfurled pink blossoms. The elderberry is sending up shoots. I'm finding mint poking up several yards from where I planted it. Our stinging nettle (a tasty wild green) has propagated itself all along our side yard. Our little suburban homestead is bursting with abundance, even with very minimal tending, and I don't think I've ever been more grateful for that.

Elderberry

Yesterday I gave a snapshot of what our backyard looks like, so today I thought I'd start with a quick panorama of our front yard. We have big plans for this lovely patch of earth!

Empty garden bed (still need to figure out what to do with it) with an asparagus bed at the end. Chives are growing nicely! See next photo to hear about the very green grass...

Our bed of winter rye cover crop— it's been this color all winter! (Plus some volunteer kale.) We're hoping to plant summer crops here in May (perhaps a Three Sisters guild of corn, beans, and squash).

The northern side of our yard, with our hardy fig, lots of volunteer kale, a smattering of spring greens, and two hazels.

Our elderberry and strawberry bed

Other things we've been up to…

Digging a pond

Zach has been wanting to make a pond in our yard for multiple years now ("But where will I grow my tomaaaaaatoes?!" I've been whining), and a couple weeks ago, he finally dug one in the southeast corner of our backyard! It took him a couple hours and he hit some sort of water pipe (even though the utility guys didn't mark anything there), but we now have a pond-in-progress! We decided against using a plastic pond liner, and Zach's been experimenting with using clay to seal it off, with limited success. In the meantime, we're running rainwater from our garage roof into the pond, and will be getting some water plants soon to fill in the edges. I'm excited to see how the biodiversity in our yard will increase when this is up and running!

Spring crops!

My spring crops have sprouted, and some of them are getting tiny true leaves— maybe I'll be eating some fresh chard, spinach, carrots, and radishes soon! In the meantime, I'm making good use of the perennial greens: kale (which survived the winter), dandelion, violet leaves, clover, and henbit have all made their way into my pesto this week, and soon I'll be able to harvest plantain, stinging nettle, and (hopefully) asparagus. We're hoping to add more perennial crops to our garden this year, but they are surprisingly hard to find online, and the shipping is very expensive. So we're trying to figure out another source. (If you happen to know where I can buy sea kale, skirret, perpetual sorrel, Turkish rocket, or Good King Henry, please let me know!)

A polyculture in between the clover: some mixture of kale, radish, spinach, chards, and peas

Spearmint emerging from its slumber!

Comfrey, an important mulch/biomass plant, is coming up nicely in several places.

Stinging nettle— the cooked greens taste like spinach and are waaaay easier to grow!

Indoor summer seedlings

Our seedlings indoors have really taken off— tomatoes, peppers, flowers, valerian, lovage, St. John's Wort, tomatillos, sweet potatoes, and a few others are making good progress! Some we'll plant as soon as the last frost is over, while others (such as the tomatoes) will need to wait until early- to mid-May. I've been growing them in 4" pots— I've tried growing them in smaller cells, and I had to repot them halfway through, not to mention that they dry out and die much more easily. But growing them in the larger pots seems to be working well so far!

Propagating plants

I've been trying my hand at dividing some of my perennials to plant elsewhere/give away. So far I've tried stonecrop sedum, oregano, thyme, and mint: I just dug up some of the roots, pulled them apart, and stuck them in moist soil. We'll see if any of them survive.

What have you been up to lately?

~~~ 

Our Yard: Early March vs. Late March 2020

(To see last year's garden, check out this post!)

I thought it would be fun to post pictures of our garden in progress— thanks to mild weather and lots of rain, March has been an amazing growing season for us so far! It's wonderful to see how much the yard has grown in just a few short weeks. I'll be posting a full homestead update tomorrow, but in the meantime, enjoy!

P.S. If you're interested in learning more about any of these plants, or gardening/permaculture in general, please don't hesitate to leave a comment. I'm not an expert but I'm slowly gaining experience, so I want to be as helpful as I can!

March 1st: Our cherry, elderberry, and false indigo trees, with raspberries in the foreground and the mulberry to the far right

March 27th: Look at all that lovely clover! You can also see comfrey coming up.

March 1st: Mulberry, hazel, and pear trees. Our old chicken coop still had Jerusalem artichoke stalks in it

March 27th. We cleared and harvested the Jerusalem artichoke, and build a new two-chamber compost pile (to the left of the old coop)! You can also sort of see our new pond on the right (pics of that coming tomorrow).

March 1st: Pear trees, false indigo, apple

March 1st again

March 27th: Bulbs along the fenceline are up (not sure what they are, they never bloom), and some comfrey and mint are coming up!

This Week (Leaves and Snow, Water Kefir, and Pasta)

(Well, past couple weeks— but who's counting?)

Anniversary trip

Zach and I have been married seven years now, which kind of boggles my mind! We took a mini road trip (in our electric car!) which involved hiking during peak leaf season as well as visiting Cahokia Mounds, the largest ancient earthenworks in North America (I'd only visited once when I was a kid, and was not impressed— coming here as an adult, I was completely blown away!).

Pere Marquette State Park

Monk's Mound at Cahokia

View from Monk's Mound: see the St. Louis skyline in the distance?

Dismantling the compost pile

After two years of "cooking," our compost pile was ready to be taken apart so we could get some of the goodness inside. We pulled apart the pallets, raked off the woody stuff, and excavated more than a cubic yard of beautiful black soil! We hauled this to our front yard and covered half of it with a new layer of compost, into which we seeded some winter rye. The rye didn't get a chance to sprout, though, because sub-freezing nights and then an inch of snow hit soon afterward— crazy weather for this time of year! (We also harvested like three sunchoke plants and already had more tubers than we knew what to do with.)

Zach trimming our 15-foot-tall sunchokes

Getting started on the front yard!

First sunchoke haul of the year

Sunchokes pickling (bottom right) next to some daikon and carrot (bottom left), and sauerkraut and pickled beets up top

Water kefir

We got a new fermented pet— water kefir, which is a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) that feeds on sugar water, and with some care can produce a sweet carbonated drink. I'll write a more detailed post on it later, but suffice it to say that it tastes like soda with a fraction of the sugar, so Zach is very happy to be working with it!

The "grains" we got in the mail

Homemade pasta and experimental lentils

I'd been wanting to try pasta-making for quite a while, and in the past couple weeks I've tried it out three different times, with success! My favorite recipe is this one because it doesn't require eggs (meaning I'm more likely to have the ingredients on hand to make it), although I used an egg-noodle recipe to make pierogis. Other kitchen adventures included lentil burgers and lentil loaf (like meatloaf), both of which turned out pretty well. We have a ton of lentils in our pantry for some reason, so I'm looking for ways to use them up!

What have you been up to this week?

 

Pierogis: mashed potatoes, cheese and sauerkraut tucked into a pasta wrapper and boiled, then fried in butter. YUM.
(May I also draw your attention to that delicious red-cabbage-apple-beet-ginger sauerkraut. Also yum.)

Lentil loaf with sweet chile sauce, quinoa, and sauerkraut

~~~

Our Yard: April vs. July vs. July

Why yes, that is a 12-foot-tall forest of sunchokes behind me...

A couple weeks ago, I was able to spend a few packed days in St. Louis after my tour with Insomniac Folklore. It was wonderful to catch up a little (though not enough!) with family and friends, and as a bonus I also got to visit our yard to see how it looked after a summer of basically no inputs. 

As you can see, the result was a bit stunning. 

For contrast, I've included photos of the yard from when we first planted it in April of 2018, then photos from July 2018, and then photos from July of this year. Enjoy!

 

April 2018: Bare sticks of cherry, hazel, and currant, with some cover crops.

July 2018: Corn and squash, with the addition of elder and false indigo.

July 2019: Hibiscus, cherry, false indigo, huge elders, tons of vetch.

April 2018: The *sniff, sniff* chicken coop.

July 2018: False indigo, elder, mulberry, hazel, volunteer squash.

July 2019: Elder, mulberry, ridiculous forest of sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes), including several in the foreground; a never-ending carpet of turnips, kale, and vetch.

April 2018: Pear trees, apple trees, nectarine.

July 2018: Volunteer squash, sunchokes, tomatoes, with all the above trees.

July 2019: Same as before, but with an ungodly amount of turnips and kale, massive comfrey plants, and volunteer groves of black-eyed susans.

April 2018: More of the same, from a different angle.

July 2018: You can see the edge of the "pond" we made here, as well as the wildflower garden.

July 2019: See how big the nectarine tree is! Also a volunteer maple tree and a mess of comfrey.

 If a food-shortage apocalypse comes, y'all better head to my house.

~~~