Gearing up for a new growing season

I was inspired by the onions I recently dug up from my covered raised beds. Apparently I hadn't buried one deep enough, and it had a shoot about an inch long, mid-February. I brought it in and potted it. It probably grows an inch a day. I keep clipping, and keep eating. I have since planted an indoor pot full of onions and one of garlic for the greens.







 I've also started up the Bioset sprouter that I bought last year. I'm not convinced on the system itself, but the peas are starting to grow....we'll see. I've had great luck with sunflower sprouts growing in soil and plan to start up a pot of those this week.

Last year I tried starting seedlings for transplant and failed miserably. Maybe it wasn't the right light setup, or maybe it was because the house sitter didn't water them, or maybe it was the brown-thumb voodoo spirit that resides in the interior space of my house. In any case, I'm giving it another whirl. Everything looks pretty lanky, but I'm going to wait a month then plop it all in my raised beds and see what happens. I have all my seed packets sorted by planting date, inside and out, and can't wait to see what becomes of it all. I was sure to get extra seed to accommodate the extremes of my experiments. 

While we had some rain I went poking around the garden a bit. Some of the plots I have covered with hoop houses are dry and ready for plants. Others, whose covers blew to shambles while I was out of town, are frozen solid. The herb bed surprised me with a green flush of oregano. I was outright astonished by the terra cotta pot of green oregano, which had been placed on top of the raised bed's soil in the fall. I brought it inside, trimmed it up, and now I've got the best marinara sauce around.

 
The Chicken Flop

 For three years I've raised chickens have have been selling eggs. When the darkness came I kept a light on them and always had eggs year-round. Until this fall. I got busy and didn't notice the dark before it was too late: they stopped laying. All I had was an outdoor halogen, so I put it in. A month passed and still no eggs. I changed the bulb to a CFL--still no eggs. I finally threw down some 60 cents and bought an incandescent.  Tah-Dah! I now get 6 eggs a day from 8 chickens. Chickens don't need much, but if they don't have it you're out of luck!

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Bunnies! Eleven bunnies were born on February 16 and have been doing well despite some frigid temperatures. When they were about a week old a few finally poked their heads through the fur blanket their mother had so graciously plucked. I took Huck up to see and in excitement he said, "Awww, I'm going to eat them!" It was a hilarious display of amazement paired with the reality of being an omnivore.

Local Food Reality in a Temperate Rainforest

I think it's important to recognize that our food production is limited in some ways, but then steam ahead full-force anyway. Almonds and avocados don't make sense. Okay, that's fine. Apples and kale don't make sense in South America--so what! There are two ways to look at it depending on how extreme you want to be. One, you can buy what you can't produce and work really hard to produce and gather what is available here. Two, you can choose to opt out of the things you can't produce, i.e. instead of buying oranges eat berries. I prefer a mix of the two scenarios. While I pick and store enough berries, apples, and rhubarb to supply us with various forms of fruit year-round, I'll admit that I love bananas and I'm not ashamed! I also know that I can't grow wheat for my bread or rice for my...rice. I'm okay with supporting farmers who can produce those things. What I don't like is paying someone to grow, package, and ship something that I can grow myself. I'd love to see the day when the grocery stores do the Juneau Sprout thing. I want to see Juneau kale in every store. Juneau chard. Juneau lettuce. Juneau rhubarb......

I stumbled upon a squirrel cache this week and was completely enamored by it. There were hundreds of pine cones piled against a fallen tree and at one end was a pile of the spent peelings. It really struck me how vulnerable we have made ourselves by always counting on the grocery store to be there...or for it to have food...or that we'll have money to buy food...or a way to get to the store......There really are so many ways it could all shatter and we could starve. It makes sense to have a cache, even if you don't fear the world collapsing. Why give up the ability of a squirrel?

 For my stash I:

Freeze: blueberries, rhubarb, kale, chard. spinach, smoked salmon, and any of the various meats from our hunting forays. We only eat wild meat, so in the fall we really get out and hunt. We also raise rabbits, which we freeze and eat fresh.




Dry: Apples, blueberry leather, meat, fish.


Can: Meat, whole blueberries, various goulash jams, beets.

And bypass preserving by the Live and Fresh Method!

Many things keep in the garden until October, and some things go beyond.  Rosemary, chives, oregano, and garlic tops can go in indoor pots. Kale, onions, and carrots stay put in the hoop houses outside, ALIVE AND WELL at New Years and beyond...Chicken eggs and rabbit meat year-round.

And realize that this is just a start! I've only had my garden for three summers and I feel like I haven't put much effort into trying to grow extra for preservation--this season preservation is one of my missions!

So what food can Juneau produce?

Here's my list of successes. Many of my failures I don't consider final, so I won't call them un-doable here. I'm sure other people have grown and gathered many other things in addition to these, so set up your own experiment!

Wild for the Gathering:

Deer, Moose, goat, ptarmigan, grouse, ducks, geese, salmon, trout, cod, halibut, crab, shrimp, bull whip kelp


Blueberries, strawberries, salmon berries, crow berries, cloud berries, currents, cranberries, and crab apples

Dandelions, chickweed, chicken of the woods






Cultivated:

Arugula, mustard greens, spinach, lettuce of many varieties, swiss chard, kale, beet greens, thyme, tarragon, cilantro, oregano, rosemary, nasturtiums (to eat), carrots, peas, onions, chives, bunching onions, string beans, beets, radishes, garlic, broccoli, brusselsprouts, cabbage, gooseberries, and sunflower sprouts. Limited success but showing promise for cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, asparagus, raspberries, and strawberries. 

Eggs, rabbit meat, turkey meat.




Look at all that food! If you eat a lot of each of these things you really can whittle away at your shopping cart. I eat salad pretty much every day from June to October and feel satisfied for the year. Why bother buying California lettuce for several winter salads a week when I just ate fresh homegrown salad every day for 5 months?! The change of fare is welcome by that point.

It doesn't take much space to get yourself eating locally either. Try a hanging basket of nasturtiums--you can eat the leaves and flowers in salads, burritos, or in dressings and sauces. A window box of lettuce goes a LONG way. A pot of garlic adds mild garlic flavor to anything and everything--just snip the greens as you need them. Anyone can find a berry in Juneau. Carry a mug and fill yourself up whenever you're out. It's amazing how a little can go such a long way in pancakes or muffins. Take little steps and before you know it you'll be running like a toddler. It's really that easy once you give it a try!

The Nutrient Cycle is your Friend

Acknowledging nature's wisdom is key in just about anything--especially gardening. Nature is the original and best recycler. Where do all those fall leaves go? Shed animal antlers and winter coats? Spawned salmon carcasses? They all get recycled into the system. Nutrient cycling is amazing and ever-present, even in urban settings. Think of all the rotting pine needles in your gutter that support a growth of moss and tiny hemlock trees. An alder rooting through the asphalt, an algal bloom in a shallow pond, the greenest grass above your sewer. Just about every living thing eats and produces waste, and in the beauty of nature one thing's waste is another thing's food. Without the waste there is no food. Acknowledging that waste is a necessary and valuable part of the nutrient cycle is key in gardening.

You can't constantly take away from the nutrient cycle without adding to it. If I harvest nutrient-laden produce year after year in my garden, will I always have nutritious produce or any produce at all? Nutrients have to come from somewhere. As they are extracted from the soil in the form of food, their availability in my garden decreases. Something's got to give--I need to add fertilizer or buy all my food. Buy fertilizer or buy food? Most people will see that buying food is cheaper and easier than buying commercial fertilizer and proceed from there. Here's where tapping into the wisdom of nature will lead you to find free fertilizer to make almost-free food.

The thing that excites me so much about composting is that it literally transports nutrients for free. We all eat and have food scraps. Those scraps contain nutrients from their native soil--whether it be from the mountainside, the sea, or the agricultural lands of the Americas....or elsewhere. By composting we extract nutrients from foreign soil and put it into our own. In a place where soil is scarce, this is a dream come true!

Nature has a cycle for producing that involves the changing of forms. We all know the basic buffalo scenario of yesteryear--they ate the grass, pooped on the grass, and the prairie was fertile and bountiful. The buffalo always had food because they always gave the prairie food. By globalizing our diets we've severely altered this cycle. We take nutrients from a Midwestern corn field and throw them into the landfill via a cob.  We take nutrients from Ecuador and throw them into the landfill in the form of peels. We excrete nutrients into "waste water" facilities and into the ocean. It goes on and on--all this "throwing away" of soil-building materials--every minute, every day, and what we have to show for it is the growing mountain of Lemon Creek, our local landfill. I prefer plate tectonics for my mountain builder.

Eating locally isn't enough to call our food production sustainable. Soils have to be fertilized, and as long as that fertilizer comes in a box or bag from somewhere else we're still dependent on a global diet. I had a goat dairy for 8 months, and while the milk and yogurt were phenomenally delicious, all I was doing was a trade. Instead of buying milk I was buying alfalfa. And to top it off, I wasn't saving any money or cutting out any shipping transportation, and I was certainly eating up a lot of my time. I accepted the fact that I don't live in a place where a dairy makes sense economically or sustainably. I'd rather buy milk from a place where cows eat grass and poop on it and spend my time catching a fish. At least that way I can throw the fish head overboard and feed a crab that might find it's way into my pot. 

    (Huck was super-stoked on his new skiing helmet 

                               and wanted to wear it fishing.....)

Composting News

Wha-hoo for the first full month of composting for the Fourth World Living Composting Co-Op! I thought I'd post some notes on the project.

First off, I'd like to say THANKS SO MUCH to those participating! This is really going as smoothly as I optimistically expected it would!

Great News! All the yucky scraps have livened up my compost pile and I now have Hot Composting! Cold composting works but takes a long time. Hot composting is quick and happens when you have plenty of greens to keep the microorganisms working hard. They produce heat, so the more heat you have the more breakdown you know is happening, and it's all at a rapid rate. There is steam coming off the pile, and the center of it is 150 degrees F!

 

Wonderful News!

We've kept 463 pounds of food out of the landfill!

....and there's going to be fertilizer in return!

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I keep a logbook of everything, partly from my own curiosity and partly because I think there might be some useful data that can be extrapolated from it all. I note how many buckets I collect, the volume and weight of actual material collected, and the temperature of the pile. I also keep track of all my time.

Based on what's going on now, I anticipate the decomposition rate to be exceptionally fast. This is good because quick results are always welcome, but also because I won't need as many composting bins as I thought. I was expecting to have many bins slowing composting at once, but now I think I'll be harvesting one bin while the second is aging and the third is being added to. If this is in fact the case I will be able to add quite a few more members to the Co-op this summer!

I'm also finding that it doesn't take that much time. In just over two hours a week I'm collecting, weighing, dumping, and covering material; washing buckets; and recording data. If I wanted to become an entrepreneur about all this I could charge each member a few dollars a month and I'd make a decent wage for the time put in. The thing that really excites me about this is that it shows promise for being a feasible neighborhood model. If someone on each street, subdivision, or neighborhood did what I'm doing, we could create part-time jobs, keep food out of the waste stream, and create fertile soils for Juneau!

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So far so good is all I'll say to avoid being jinxed!