Eighth of an Acre Bounty

I know, posts have been few and far between lately. And this post is mostly to say that I won’t be posting for the next few days. We are actually leaving town to get some camping and exploration in. We will be camping in western Montana with friends for a few days but plan on taking the slow way back to check out Northeastern Washington (Okanogan county). I’ve never been up that way and land is still affordable there from what I have seen. Of course in Washington, if land is still affordable, you can be assured it is most likely under water for half the year, or never sees water (in the case of Eastern WA). In any case it seems like a good opportunity to wander around a bit.

A good deal of Washington’s cherry harvest comes from that area and I know there is a significant snow pack in the winter so I am holding out a little bit of hope! I am also hoping that we can get in on the asparagus harvest in Eastern Washington as we make our way to Montana, and with any luck there may be some Morels hiding in the woods. It has been years since we’ve gone camping so I am actually pretty excited to get out there.

It is still hard to leave home at the height of planting/chores season. We have so many unfinished projects right now. I never got the beans planted, we still have to construct trellises, winter squash needs to be planted, potatoes need to be hilled again, etc, etc and ugh. That, and leaving all of the fresh greens that are pumping out of the garden right now after we waited all winter for them is a bit disconcerting. I’d probably be laughed right out of camp if I brought one of my lettuce flats, right? Picture me rocketing across Washington, Idaho and Montana with my safety lettuce in the back of the truck? (Don’t worry, I won’t really do it – but the thought did occur to me!). Hopefully my wild edibles identification skills are sufficient enough that I’ll be able to cobble together some green stuff for dinner without taking the garden with me. Mark that as one of my goal this year, to become much more proficient at wild edible plant identification.

This winter I purchased a one pound package of “chicken lettuce” from Wild Garden Seeds. This mix is made up of seed that was passed over for inclusion in regular seed packets due to rain stains, excessive chaff or lower germination rates. But it is cheap – a one pound package was $19 (do you know how many lettuce seeds fit in a one pound package)? Imagine one and a half quart size ziplock bags filled up tight. On a whim, while starting seeds for other things this spring I took two nursery trays with drain holes, filled them with soil and broadcast seeded the lettuce mix over the top.

Fast forward to about 3 weeks ago when I started harvesting. As I’ve mentioned before, space is at a premium around here. While I did pull off several seedlings from the trays to transplant into wider spaced rows in the garden (for full head lettuce), I left the grand majority of the lettuce starts in the trays and just placed them on the patio table which is functioning as my potting shed at the moment. Round dinnertime when I am wandering the yard in search of green things to put in a salad I take a pair of shears and snip off handfuls of the baby lettuce about an inch above the soil level.

The picture above gives a good idea of the cycles of regrowth. The center area had just been snipped for a salad, the area to left has already been harvested once and is regrowing, and the area to the right of the tray is lined up for tonights dinner. This has been a fantastically easy (and space saving) way to get a greater variety of lettuce greens. The only thing you really have to keep an eye on is to make sure you are watering. Having so many plants so densely spaced means that water is at a premium, but the seedlings usually give you a heads up by looking a bit wilty when they need water.

In other news, I completed my first permaculture class session last weekend and am positively amped about it. I will have to dedicate a separate post to the topic to treat it fully, but suffice to say it is everything I had hoped it would be and I have the feeling I will walk out with a much improved skill set and framework through which to filter all of my endeavors. I also just finished a welding class and arrived home late last night with a brand new garden gate. We still need to set the posts to hang it, and I am debating whether to powder coat/paint it or let the rust set in.

The rain has been coming down in sheets for days now. I am hoping it lets up enough to allow me to construct the bean trellises. The full weekend of class time last week made me realize how much I depend on weekends to get major projects done around here. I feel a bit behind the ball now and hope to catch up this weekend with numerous additional seeds to put in. The knotweed and blackberry over at the land still awaits me as well, although I did manage to clear a 14×10 area the week before last. TIme to get some seeds in over there too!

Just a quick note in case any local people were unaware of the recently created Seattle Urban Farm Co-op. In their own words…

The Seattle Urban Farm Co-op is a community-based project to start a co-op to purchase supplies for urban farmers in the Seattle area.

Our focus will be on obtaining supplies such as animal feed, fertilizers, mulch, seeds, etc., from local & organic sources. We are also promoting the ideas & values of sustainable living. We hope to collaborate with organizations such as “Urban Grange” & “Seattle Tilth” by providing a place for tool & resource sharing, educational classes, community information, etc.

The Co-op is having a meeting at 6pm this evening at the Columbia City Library. We plan on attending and hope to see you there!

The Co-op also has a Yahoo Group and can be found as a group on Facebook.

The first of this month was my birthday. Our dogwood in the backyard always tends to bloom within a week or two of my birthday every year and puts on a chorus of color with the emerging lilacs, tulips and iris. Although May tends to be a generally soggy month in this part of the world, the flowers are all emerging and it is a gorgeous time to be alive.

This birthday in particular marked a half-way point in my life. This year I turned the same age that my mother was when she had me. I am reminded regularly of how fortunate I am with the family that surrounds me and the friends and partners I’ve encountered and kept. I was a bit of a blubbering mess at my birthday dinner with Gary and my parents, but it was all borne of love and gratitude and there were (are) no better people to fall apart around.

Gary colluded with my parents on a present which was very fitting and far too much. The result is that I am putting just a fraction of the total cost toward the Permaculture class I mentioned a few posts ago. I was (and am) overwhelmed by the gift and will be studiously dreaming up ways in which to return the magnitude of their generousity.

This month also marks a year from when I made some major changes and moved toward working less, commuting less, eating out less, buying less, wasting less and earning less money. I gained so much more of my life back in this process and I honestly wouldn’t trade the time I’ve regained for the world.

I’m really not a very sappy-sweet, nor chipper person. My sense of humor runs more to sardonic than slapstick and I tend to identify with those that see the clouds rather than the rainbows. Although I still am gravely concerned with the trajectory of the world in general (and our country in particular), I can’t help but feel incredibly grateful, thankful and even a little bit hopeful when I witness the people I am lucky enough to call friends and family and the folks I have met through this blog.

Meet my new love, the Weed Wrench. No, this little hottie hasn’t replaced Gary – in fact I am pretty sure that Gary is ok with my new relationship.  At the end of last week I drove downtown to visit the fine folks at King County’s Noxious Weed Division and they kindly loaded me up with the aforementioned tool for a weeks use, absolutely free of charge. You’ll recognize my joy if you have ever found yourself hacking away at a project with the wrong tool and then that moment occurs when you are handed the right tool and your entire life suddenly seems a gazillion times easier.

Don’t get me wrong, pulling out the forest of scotch broom on the land is still a lot of work (I was a pretty stinky and dirty mess when I got home). But compared to hand digging these giant shrubs (several are around 12-14 feet) this was a cakewalk. I spent the better part of Thursday afternoon over there and was amazed by the excellent sunlight it got, even after 6pm.

In this picture you can see the meadow area I am working on clearing between all of the fruit trees. If you look close you can still see a few stubs of the scotch broom that had filled this entire clearing (all gone now!). The tree to the left is an apple, with another apple to the right, a plum directly ahead and what I believe to be a cherry to the left in the back (hiding behind tons of overgrown blackberry at the moment).

This is the same general area, but from the opposite vantage point. Where the grass ends and the bramble/unidentified invasive plant begins on the right is where I plan on putting in the first garden beds.

This is the next battle. I have no idea what this plant is that has taken over (in coordination with the rampant and ever present Himalayan Blackberry). I already cleared the dead stalks of it from last year (over 12 feet high) and at that point it was still barely above ground, three weeks later it is around 3 feet tall. But it will need to come out and the blackberry crowns chased down and dug up before they get much more spring growth on them.This area definitely has the best soil and of course presents the most challenging clearing job but if I can get at least a portion of it under control I think it will be a great spot.

The pictures above are just a fraction of the available land, but I am just one person and the remaining land has a ton more blackberry, scotch broom and overgrowth. I had hoped to get some of the fruit trees trimmed a bit before they flowered, but the apples beat me to it. I can’t really complain about beauty like this keeping me company while I sweat though…

The spinach I planted in the cold frame way back in February has turned into a bumper crop. In addition the girls have had numerous 3 egg days recently so this household has been rolling in the greens and eggs. What better way to celebrate the emergence of true spring than Spinach pasta?

Tuesday night we had our beekeeping meeting and had to eat quick before we were out the door. I prepped the pasta dough a little earlier in the day and used leftover chopped up green onion, red pepper and mushrooms from a pizza making session over the previous weekend. Threw in some garlic and fennel sausage and we were ready to eat. This was my first attempt at making a pasta dough with anything added in, and it turned out quite well. So well that I believe we will be having spinach noodle lasagne on Saturday night with guests!

In my earlier posts this week I forgot to mention that I had a minor WordPress freakout earlier this month which resulted in many of your comments (and my replies) being sent to the WP spam folder. Due to the insane amount of spam comments I get each day it is going to take some time to parse through the entire list and try to ressurect comment threads. I just wanted to make a quick note of that so no one thinks I’ve intentionally deleted their comments. I’m just working out some technical difficulties on this end. I love comments and keep em coming! Hopefully I will get around to unearthing the ‘dissapeared’ comments soon.

I’ve been reluctant to write about this until it all actually came to fruition for fear of something going wrong. But as everything seems to be in the clear now I’ll go ahead. As many of you know (by virtue of the title of this blog) we are on a very small city lot here. It is approximately 1/8 of an acre in total and that includes a house footprint of about 800 feet, a concrete patio and several very shady spots under the Crimson Maple and Douglas fir that hold down either side of our front yard.

We have done a lot with what we have. This year we have finally eradicated the last of the lawn and completed what is likely the last major planting bed in the backyard (if there is to be another, I have no idea where we will fit it). We’ve planted several perennial crops – Walking onions, Rhubarb, Raspberries, Blueberries, Chives, Plum and Apple trees, numerous herbs. And regularly cram as many annual crops into our small yard and short growing season as possible. My ideal would be to get us to the point where we produced for ourselves somewhere around 90% of our vegetable diet. We get a good protein supply from the hens eggs and I am fine with purchasing our meat from small local producers trying to make a go at sustainable and humane production.

I’ve been on the hunt for a bit of extra land in the neighborhood to use for gardening. Some of you might recall that I made an arrangement with a friend that has acreage 2 hours south of here to use some of her land to grow longer season crops like winter squash. But the more I thought about it, it seemed an difficult arrangement.  I would either be putting the onus on her to keep an eye on my crops, watering and weeding them etc or I’d be driving two hours each way numerous times over the course of the summer to raise my “locally grown(?)” food.

Back in March I started sending out letters to owners of bare lots I had identified up here on the hill. And earlier this month I received a response from one . My original letter had inquired about use of the land for gardening ideally in exchange for a box of fresh produce during the growing season, but alternately that I was willing to discuss a rental arrangement as well. The owner that responded to me lives up north, she indicated that she would be happy just to have somebody taking care of the land like her father did when she was a child (no rent or produce necessary). She did ask that I sign a release of liability in the case that I injure myself while working on the land (perfectly reasonable in my mind). Oh! And that I not grow any illicit substances!  (I assured her that the closest we would get to illicit would likely be some vaguely pornographic tomatoes).

We had actually gone to look at this piece of land a few years ago when it was on the market (it never sold). It is undeveloped and just over an acre. It was obviously at one point a well developed garden and orchard, attached to the property of a house it has since been subdivided from. When we went to look originally there was a golden plum tree loaded with fruit and several apple trees and a cherry as well. All of the orchard trees were unkempt (and still are, even more so). The windstorms of the past few years have not been kind to many of the trees on the property and the blackberry and scotch broom are slowly swallowing everything.

I spent this past Saturday battling blackberry vines and topping scotch broom in the upper (flattest) portion of the land. The majority of the land is on a south facing slope and is covered diagonally by the immense electrical lines that grace our fair hill, bringing power to the richer masses (with higher property values and underground power lines). The scotch broom is VERY hard to dig out and after some research I came across the Weed Wrench, a (I am hoping) miracle tool designed specifically for the woody-stemmed invasives like tamarisk and scotch broom. I also found out that the King County Noxious Weed Division owns several weed wrenches that they loan out at no cost. So – I now have a date with the weed wrench on April 30th!

As I was clearing it was fascinating to uncover the vestiges of a garden past. I saw a few struggling vines of what look to be some sort of raspberry cane, surprise patches of daffodils blooming bright yellow under the blackberry brambles, 4 gorgeous cedar trees, a pacific yew, all sorts of ornamental bushes and shrubs, and clumps of day lily peeking out. There are numerous other things coming up that I have yet to identify as well, no doubt I will once again call on the skills of you readers!

There remains a lot of work to be done before I can begin to plant anything. The blackberry fight has only just begun. I also am in the process of trying to devise some sort of quick-setup, impermanent rainwater catchment on the land as there is no plumbed water. If I can get a few rain barrels full during the still-wet month of May I should be in good shape (with judicious mulching). I also hope to get a trim in on the long-neglected orchard trees before they start budding in the hopes that they rebound a bit. Though from the looks of the still-rotting fruit underneath them, they are still productive and we should see at least a small harvest.

I will try to take a few pictures the next time I am over there. I should have done a full set of “before” shots before I went in with the clippers last weekend. My current agreement with the owner only extends to November of this year, but I am hoping we can renew again next year (and that nobody buys the land to build condo’s or a $500k house on it!).

The bees have been enjoying the nice weather as much as we have lately. We checked them last Thursday (1 full week after installing the package) to both confirm that the queen was still there, and ideally to confirm that she was laying. Well, we found the queen but could not find any eggs (this more likely due to our novice status than her lack of work). If a queen isn’t laying you have a pretty short amount of time to replace her before your hive dies out, so I’ve been stressing about it a bit.

Today we decided to break into the box once more to see if we could find anything, and also to check on thier progress. Our girls have been busy! The picture up above is of brand new comb that must have been built within the past 5 days. They have added on to the existing comb in 5 of the frames and are guzzling and storing sugar syrup like mad in between thier rapid foraging trips. And….we have eggs! Or more appropriately we have larvae! The eggs that we didn’t see last Thursday have matured into coiled little white larvae at the bottom of the comb. The picture below shows a frame with a good bit of capped larvae. Toward the outer ring of the capped larvae are uncapped cells containing larvae as well. Who knew I’d ever find the sight of slimy little wormy things so relieving and darling at the same time?

There appears to be a good brood pattern here, all in the center and radiating outward (one of the things we are instructed to look for). So all in all this little adventure is going swimmingly. Todays pictures are courtesy of Gary – who is also completely captivated by these golden winged creatures.

Yesterday, I received the Tilth email newsletter and in it, about halfway down the page there was a quick blurb for a 6 month Permaculture Design class put on by Seattle Tilth and taught by Toby Hemenway (author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture). The class is from 9-5:30, Saturday and Sunday every second weekend of the month from May through October. Total cost is $900. I waffled, I whined, I instant messaged Gary about how I need a rich benefactor for all my gardening, animal husbandry and land desires, I slept on it. This morning I decided to do it.

$900 isn’t chump change. A lot could be done with that money, that is a whole months mortgage payment for me*. But as I sat there spinning on the possibility, I realized that I haven’t really taken any intensive classes since I got out of school. In addition this is something I am really interested in, and aside from one real-world friend who shares my interest in gardening- I mainly rely on all of you out in the blogosphere to function as my plant growing, chicken raising, beekeeping buddies.

And then I did the actual math. 12 full days of instruction breaks down to $75 per day, or less than $10 per hour. I paid more than that for a two day intro to welding class that totaled 4 hours a few years ago. There is no doubt that Toby Hemenway is the go-to guy in the area of permaculture and I might very well meet some people in the class with similar interests while learning a bunch and having the experts at my side to question.

Excuse all of the rationalizing above. I’m a bit of a tightwad when it comes to money I have traded my limited time on earth for – so I think I just had to lay it all out there. But this post also has an ulterior motive to see if any of you PNW bloggers may be interested in the class as well.

*My half of the mortgage payment, that is. Oh how I wish our whole mortgage was just $900!