Local food year round

An abundant harvest shouldn't be a bad thing, but at times it can be overwhelming. I was just reading a blog post by Gene Logsdon where he passed on the wisdom of years that taught him not to overdo things by planting more than you can deal with. I've given up on my pickling cucumber bed in the vineyard because I can't handle the amount of food coming out of it. Next year I'll plant far less. This was an experimental year in large scale farming and although I was cautious, I didn't anticipate the level of productivity a little bit of manure could yield. Even the sweet corn is getting overwhelming and I only planted two 30 ft beds of it. I've canned about 25 pints already! And after so many jars of salsa (fireroasted is the best kind), pickled cucumbers, corn, sauerkraut, and tomato sauce, I'm sick of canning.

This is the time when I start fantasizing about having a couple pigs to feed all the oversized summer squash, cucumbers I can't sell, and rotting, rain-cracked tomatoes. I could also feed them all the byproducts of my canning projects, grape pressing, and crop waste. I really want to make that a reality one of these days.  On top of that, there's the tons of whey from cheesemaking I could be feeding them; nothing like turning food waste into more food.
 

But isn't it nice that there are crops you don't have to eat fresh that store easily without any canning and the associated energy consumption and hassle? I have really grown to appreciate crops like flour corn, popcorn, sweet potatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, winter squash and dry beans.  Winter squash, garlic, onions, and sweet potatoes just need a dry place to be stored.  I was using last year's garlic all the way up until I started to get the first harvest of this year's crop. Storing it at room temperature hanging up in braids or in a mesh bag keeps it halfway through the winter until it starts to get drier, then I move it to the root cellar so that it can retain moisture and experience cold temps to keep it dormant.

The Cutshort Bean

 

You've probably never heard of it, but you've heard of dry beans and green beans. Well, the cutshort, or “greasy” bean, is like a cross between the two. It used to be grown extensively in the South, but now it is less known. The cutshort is a type of bean that is unique in its ability to maintain a tender hull far into its development. As such, it can be harvested well after its seeds have swelled to the size of dry beans, and its hull will remain tender long after a green bean's hull would have become tough and inedible. Green beans also have very little nutritional value or flavor compared to cutshorts.
 

It's funny because the cutshort is kind of the equivalent of the sugar snap pea, a relatively new and quickly adopted version of the shelling pea that features an edible pod. The sugar snap pea made it so you didn't have to spend so much time shelling your garden peas to be able to enjoy them. Of course, slightly different from the cutshort, the snap pea became much more of a raw finger food perfect for snacking, while the cutshort is simply a richer, and faster cooking version of the dry bean.
 

Cutshorts are ideally harvested when the seeds inside the pod have swelled to a very large size and the hulls are beginning to pale. Unlike dry beans, but like green beans, they are eaten fresh (unless you string them up for Leather Breeches, which I'll get to) The pods do have tough strings along the seams, but with a little effort you can remove the strings and everything you have left is perfectly edible. This makes for a much bulkier harvest than dry or green beans, and because the seeds inside are so much more developed, a pot of cutshorts is far more nutritious and filling than a pot of green beans. Green beans are fine for a side dish, but cutshorts make a respectable main course. The final product ends up tasting a lot like a pot of green beans and dry beans combined, with the hulls adding a satisfying mouth feel to the dish.

 

This season: a review

 

Pug the pug visiting my house and looking for handouts

 

I haven't really been posting much this season because I've been concentrating on other things, but I do have a lot to talk about now. I've been gradually finishing projects on the house and am now pretty much done with it. There are a few other finishing touches to add, like a stove for the kitchen, the first floor ceiling, a bit more soffit, and the railing for the stairway, but pretty much everything else is done for now.

 

I had to spend some time resurfacing the earthen floor since the light clay straw insulation sort of failed and had sunk about an inch all around and was cracking in many places. I'm hoping the floor had sunk all it was going to sink, so that when I added the layer on top it wouldn't sink again in time. We'll see, but everything looks fine so far. If it doesn't work this time I'm going to tear it up and put in foamboard insulation.   The picture above shows the entrance pad with tile laid into the earthen floor in the higher traffic area.  I also laid tile into the kitchen area part of the floor.

 

 

I finished all my curtains myself in the early spring and got them all up.  It was good to refamiliarize myself with a sewing machine.  The warm windows fabric does make it a lot easier though.  I'm really happy with how they turned out and how they work!  They make the place have much more contrast and give me a sense that I'm in some other country, which is what I was going for.  The picture above also shows the wood rack I built for my firewood, with bin on the bottom for the big stuff and shelves for kindling above.  Of course I've only lit a couple fires so far this year because the weather has been either warm or sunny, and my thermal curtains are keeping the cold out.  I reorganized this part of the downstairs for the winter, complete with comfy chair for sitting by the fire.

The roof is on

We've continued with work on the house. It is definitely our highest priority and taking most of our time though we still try to fit in a little canning on the weekends. The weather lately has been ideal for building.

We've made a lot of progress on the framing and have finished tinning the roof. The house has fully taken shape. We have wired it as well and Mary Beth is insulating the south wall with light clay straw. We started the baling in the last few days, and have made some progress on the first floor. The cistern went in as well and I'm working on the plumbing to it. I don't have time to update this blog fast enough to keep up with our progress. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we will have the house ready to live in by the winter. We would like to take our time and make sure we do it right and there is really too much to do before winter to get it ready to live in.


These clowns have been helping us build our house lately. They are Dan and Danielle, new residents of DR. They do performance art and Dan is a trained clown. They are fun to have around.


We've also been finding some time to continue canning veggies. Lately tomatoes have been the major crop. Sauce, salsa, juice. We are stocked for winter.


I haven't shown the chickens lately so here are a couple pics of them. I think I've decided to keep most of them through the winter so we can have eggs next year. I'd originally planned to eat the chickens before winter, but now I'm thinking I'll like having eggs.

Ironweed blooming

You can mark the change of season here by the types of blooming flowers on the land. Right now Ironweed, with its purple flower clusters is everywhere, along with white-flowered false boneset. Soon goldenrod will be the dominant flower, meaning winter is not far off. It and purple aster are the last to bloom here. Below is also a Whorled Milkweed.

Work has continued on the house, though slower than hoped. It seems there are always many delays here preventing us from making progress. The recent monsoons have made some things difficult lately. August is usually unbearably hot and dry, but the only unbearable weather came in June. Last week we got 5 inches of rain in a 12 hour period.

We put up the second floor joists a few weeks ago. We are doing 2x6s between the oak beams and orienting them north-south over the cantilever so the joists will be holding some of the weight of the second floor south wall that will hang out about a foot and a half beyond the first floor south wall.

You can see the 6x6 knee braces on the bottom of the two middle beams that will help transfer some of the weight of the cantilever onto the wall. There will be four of these eventually.

After putting up the joists we put on a subfloor of reclaimed OSB and plywood.

Next, we put on the north wall second floor posts and a girt to connect them.

We added the other two knee braces on the cantilever.

This is the view of the garden and backyard from our second floor. It will be a great view to see every morning.

Then we started on the second floor south wall. It will be a stick framed wall like on the first floor. I think the house looks best from the south. The other villagers won't see the best side, but we will from the backyard.

With the floor on the second floor blocking the sunlight we were able to see how the cantilever will block the high summer sun. Even at this time of year, there is no sun coming in the south side windows. Of course, that's good because we want shade in August and for most of September.

We also walled in the future root cellar, which we'll be able to access through our kitchen floor. We are now continuing with the rafters and roof. The house is really starting to take shape.

The wet season has been good for the garden overall, but after last week's rain, my carrots were rotting in the ground. Most plants have benefited from the rain. I planted eggplant and peppers in the bed that had the chicken tractor over it early in the season and they are the best eggplant I've ever grown. I love eggplant, and we've got plenty of it now.

We started pickling some veggies. My hot pickle mix of hot peppers, carrots, and cucumbers is one of my favorites.

I think I've finally mastered the art of growing beets. This year I planted a few successions and hope to have a bunch to store in the root barrel over the winter. These we turned into pickled beets, following the recipe of Alline, a DR member who with her husband has just opened up the Milkweed Mercantile and B&B here at the village.

Since I don't have much space in the garden, but I like sweet corn, I planted just two rows of it. Normally you would want to plant a larger plot of it so the ears get well pollinated, but instead I just hand pollinate the ears. It works really well if you have limited space and a small number of plants. We probably got about four dozen ears off my small bed.

The rain was really good for the garlic. We got a really big harvest this season and the heads are hanging up in our house.

Things are looking good at Wisteria Lodge this year too. The wisteria vine is way past the top of the arbor and has sprouted many new shoots now that it's reached the top. I think it will have taken over the whole thing by next summer.

The finishing touch: Putting siding on the house

Now that things have cooled down a bit and the days are much shorter, I haven't been doing quite as much outside.

This is the winter sun coming into the house through the south facing windows. When the sun is at its lowest at this time of year we get the most sun in the house. It will heat the house to near 70 degrees on days when it is below freezing outside, even if we haven't used the wood stove since the night before.

Our first really hard frost came about two weeks ago and I went out the evening before to harvest celeriac, beets, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and chinese cabbage.

The carrots are mulched but I'll probably pull them and put them in my root barrel. Up until last week we were still eating fresh tomatoes we picked before the first real frost that happened in late October. It's been nice to have these fall crops. At Bobolink eating co-op, I think we are the only people in the village still eating dinners of lots of fresh local vegetables. We are enjoying salads of Chinese and regular cabbage tossed with carrots and scallions. We have root bakes of carrots, beets, and potatoes and soups of all these veggies combined. I love celeriac. It's a gnarly vegetable, but it sure is good in soup.

We were still in the process of reorganizing the house up until about a week or two ago. I got a new dresser from the demo I got my siding from. It was just sitting in this building I was taking down and it looked like someone had started stripping it with the idea of refinishing it, but they never finished the project. I brought it back, liking the fact that it was well made, tall, and spacious. After we cleaned it up and put linseed oil on it, we realized how pretty the veneer was, though the veneer is chipping off in spots. It just barely fit up through the door to the second floor.

Mary Beth brought a bookshelf back from her house in Kirksville and she organized all my books on it. We also brought upstairs a dresser we found on the curb on our visit to Madison. It is a pretty piece of furniture too, and we think it is from the early 1900s. We found a little stub from a train ticket for a Milwaukee intracity train from the '20s stuck in the top drawer.


We had a housewarming party last week that many in the village came to. We had around twenty people packed in the house. Many were getting their first glimpse of Wisteria Lodge in its more or less finished state. We decided it was time since we'd organized the inside of the house the way we wanted it.

This is the kitchenette we set up so that Mary Beth can make her meals since she is no longer in an eating co-op and so that I can make cheese. It's pretty makeshift, but it works for what we need it for.

This is a little shelf for some of our homemade wine and canned goods. We canned these pears we picked at a friend of Mary Beth's house in Kirksville. They are the biggest pears I've ever seen--and they taste good too.

The siding is the last thing that we are working on now, and it's almost done.

It's interesting to cover new ground in building and try my hand at learning new skills. I had practiced doing siding on my garden shed, so I did have some experience with that. But the soffits were something new to me. I was able to get some boards with shiplap, so they fit together and overlap, sort of like tongue-in groove. I had to do the soffits before I could do the siding.


The big challenge though in this project has been power. We had about two weeks straight of cloudy weather and I can only use my power tools when the sun is out or when the batteries are charged, and we were all on almost the very lowest power level by the time the sun came out finally. We've had sunny days for the last five or six days, some of them, like today, beautiful and temperate. Today I was working on battens. I just have trim around the windows, and the rest of the battens to do. As you can see, the house looks much better with new siding.


Mary Beth and I also had a visitor staying with us recently. Kyre the kitty stayed with us for about ten days and we were sad to see her go. She was very cuddly and really the perfect cat in every way. We were taking care of her for Mai'kwe while she was away.


I forgot to put up a picture of my solar panels mounted on the roof, so here it is. Unfortunately, my new solar panel that cost me $500 is now only putting out half power for some reason. I'm going to have to have it sent back, so at the lowest light time of year, we're at half power.