Welcome Spring

Hello Gardeners!

Happy first full day of Spring! The vernal equinox occurred last evening (Sunday, March 20) at 7:21 p.m., marking the time when day and night are nearly identical in length—12 hours each—at the equatorial plane because the Earth is tilted neither toward nor away from the Sun. And was it not just the loveliest weekend for it? Being awakened by a bit of thunder and the accompanying rain this morning was also nice, although I hope not too many toads and salamanders begin their treks to vernal ponds just yet: it sounds like we’re to get some more cold before the final warm-up.
[Update: the spring peepers were peeping when I got home from work!]

My deep apologies for the blog silence. I’ve had a number of things keeping me occupied in my life, as well as being very busy at work (not something I would ever complain about in this economy!). But plans for the Learning Garden have been ongoing even though I have neglected to faithfully report on them.

A small group of gardeners have been meeting regularly to figure out what we’ll be planting and where so as to get the best effects of crop rotation and companion planting. We’ve figured out where we’ll get the seeds or seedlings, and when they need to be planted (roughly). We’ve ordered some large plant markers that will make a tour of the garden more informational to visitors. The plastic film has been ordered to cover our season extension bed, and the first work party date has been set: Saturday, April 2 at 9:00, when we will be installing that cover after applying compost. I’ll be sending out a notice via email to anyone who expressed an interest in playing in the dirt with us, but don’t wait for an invitation if you’re interested in helping.

With any luck, this covered bed will accelerate our harvest of greens and radishes and other spring plants enough that we’ll have produce for the first Millheim Market, which will be May 14. I promise to keep you posted so that you can…

Buy it locally grown

  or Raise your own!

Julie

Signs of Seasons Passing, Winter Edition

Hello Gardeners.

Wasn’t it something to wake up Monday morning to temperatures in the upper 40s? And the forecast is for almost 60° by the end of the week. Maple sap will soon be running in earnest, and the streams that have been more ice than water this year will start flowing loud and high. But what really lets me know that winter is starting to turn—ever so slightly—to spring is…dead skunks.

I saw my first road-killed skunk this past weekend, and another this morning. Poor things, although not true hibernators, they remain dormant most of the winter except when the males stir themselves from warm dens about this time of year to mate. They’ll range quite a bit in search of females, who often den in groups.

Granted, I’m often guilty of anthropomorphizing, but when I see those little bundles of black and white fur along the roadside, I can’t help but think of them as groggy and cold, hungry at a time of year when their natural diet of grubs and roots is locked in frozen ground beneath the snow, but forced by instinct to wander in search of a mate. I’m sure a few more become a meal for their one true predator, the great horned owl, as well, which the owls must look forward to after such a cold winter when many of their prey would be inclined to stay to their dens.

It’s a sad notation for me to make in my journal each year, when I spot the first one, but sad or not, it is still a sign of the passing seasons that I like to note, as much as when I first notice snow fleas in the snow around the base of trees where the sun warms the bark or when the first turkey vulture appears floating in the skies above our valley.

So. Winter’s on the wane. And we’re all rejoicing, right? Well, sort of. I’d be happier if I had more done. I still need to prune the fruit trees, start my onion seeds, and get my garden calendar made up. At least my seeds are (mostly) ordered.

But I have to be honest, although I listed those three to-do items like they’re a regular part of my gardening year, I’ve had fruit trees in the ground for going on 4 years without ever pruning them after the first “prune before you plant.” I have at least 3 years’ worth of really interesting onion seeds that I’ve never managed to get started in a timely fashion (so I end up buying sets or someone else’s starts). And although I first read about the idea of a garden calendar a couple years ago, if I get one done this year, it’ll be my first.

sigh.

My great idea this year is to write about these 3 chores as I do them. Nothing like a waiting audience to give one a little push! And you all have my permission to ask me about them if you don’t hear about them…soon.

How about you? Anyone else marking time by watching the natural world? Or getting your mid-winter chores started? I’d love to hear about it!

Julie

Sustainable Me

Hello Gardeners!

I’m back after attending last week’s PASA Conference at the Penn Stater Hotel. More specifically, it was the 20th Annual Farming For the Future Conference held by the Millheim-headquartered Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture.

For those of you who have never been to it, I can highly recommend the experience. I started as a volunteer at the registration desk, not even attending any workshops for the first few years, and I was amazed at how pumped with healthy enthusiasm I could get just being around these people. And they serve the best food! Much of it is donated by farmer-members, and all of it is prepared by chefs who work to bring local ingredients into their menus all year round.

After a few years, I started to get more interested in local, healthy eating (I stopped being a vegetarian around that time, deciding that I would rather eat meat I knew had been locally raised on grass the way they should be and humanely slaughtered than buy Archers Daniels Midland mass-produced soy products). I started attending a workshop or two. Then a pre-conference all-day program. And now, the Conference is the highlight of my winter and a time I can be assured I will learn something new and be inspired for the coming year. (If cost is a problem, they have a great system of volunteer hours for attendance.)

This year, I attended two workshops on holistic orchard health and one each on permaculture design, forage radishes, and silvopasturing. And, no, I didn’t know what the latter 2 even were before last weekend.

That is the beauty of the Conference: the workshops often have multiple layers of information, offering something that can be equally useful to farmers who have hundreds of acres or to market gardeners farming a few dozen or even to someone like me, who wondered how best to use the small woodlot on my 5-acre lot if I wanted goats to have access to it as well as to the “meadow” I have. That’s silvoculture; a fancy word for something that’s been done around the world for ages: an intentional growing of trees and shrubs with crops and forage. And I learned how to thin my trees to let in enough sunlight to grow forage under them, as well as what to plant under the trees and why it will be more nutritious for livestock than the same stuff grown in the heat of the sun. The right nut- or fruit-bearing trees in the mix, I learned, will reduce the amount of feed I need to grow or buy, and the shade in summer and windbreak in winter those trees provide will keep the animals more comfortable and healthier.

We hear the word “sustainable” a lot these days, including in that completely nonsensical pairing with “growth,” about which archdruid John Michael Greer says:

…there’s no meaningful sense of the adjective “sustainable” that can cohabit with any meaningful sense of the noun “growth.” In a system – any system, anywhere – growth is always unsustainable. Some systems have internal limits that cut in at a certain point and stop growth before it becomes pathological, while some rely on external limits, but the limits are always there, and those who think there are no limits to a given pattern of growth are deluding themselves.

PASA, though, is nudging farmers, gardeners, chefs, consumers, everyone a little closer to true sustainability. And I, for one, want to know how to get there from here. How to get from where I am as a cog in the machine that is the industrial age to a place where my existence causes as little harm to the planet I live on as possible while I happily and healthily work and play with my friends and neighbors. You all, in other words.

Julie

Corn Primer

Hello Gardeners.

As I mentioned in one of my previous emails, one of the rows we’re planning for the Learning Garden is of corn. We’ll have a small plot of open pollinated sweet corn, but the majority of the row will be taken up with flint, flour, and dent corn varieties. Prior to some winter reading (and I must give full credit here to Carol Deppe’s The Resilient Gardener for much of what I am going tell you in this email, but since I will be synopsizing, all errors will be my own), I could no more have been able to list those 3 names than I could tell you what the differences between them were. As the self-described “learning” part of the Learning Garden, if I thought about corn at all, I thought there were two basic kinds: sweet corn and field (cow) corn. I eat corn tortillas and the occasional piece of polenta or cornbread. I just never thought about them.

A few years ago, I acquired the DVD King Corn, which is the humorously told tale of the very big place corn has in our society (courtesy nowadays of high fructose corn syrup). And I can honestly say it caused me more than a little bias against the grain. But that was the story of agribusiness and its petrochemical-fueled, government-subsidized, practically inedible monoculture crop. Ours will be the story of the rich and diverse food that was raised by the native Americans.

According to Deppe, indigenous farmers did eat some of their corn green (sweet), but even then it was mostly dried and eaten rehydrated, not like the corn boils we think about today. Speaking of sweet corn: am I the only one (aside from Deppe, I was interested to read) that prefers their sweet corn raw? My mother cooked it 13–15 minutes, and we all slathered it in butter and salt and pepper. Then, as I began cooking for myself, I got to the point where I was cooking it maybe 3–5 minutes and skipping the butter (back when butter was the “bad” fat). The last few years, I just shuck it and eat it. I’ve wondered if it’s the new breeds of sweet corn that don’t need cooking to be good, or maybe it’s that I get my corn much fresher from the farmers’ market or stands than my mother did. Thoughts?

Back to the native Americans and their wonderful varieties of corn: the 3 types of corn have different makeups of endosperm, which is the part of a corn kernel that holds the nutrition the embryo of the seed (called the germ) would use as it began growing and what makes the grain nutritious for humans as well.

All corn kernels have 2 types of endosperm, flinty (hard and glass-like) and floury (soft). Flint corn has more flinty endosperm, flour corn has more of the floury kind, and dent corn is a mix. Dent corn kernels, in fact, get the classic dip at the top from the fact that the flinty endosperm forms a ring around the core of floury endosperm, and the dry structures of the two types are different.

Flour corn was grown by the Indians of the American Southwest, although some varieties were grown further north. It grinds easily into a soft flour that can be substituted readily for wheat in breads and desserts. It is also used as parched corn (another new vocabulary word for me, at least in this context). To parch corn, you brown dried corn in butter. Some of the kernels may pop, but unlike popcorn (which, like sweet corn, is a special variety of flint corn), most will stay whole. From the look of the pictures I’ve seen, it reminds me of those packaged corn “nuts,” and it’s considered a great high-energy snack.

As I mentioned, flint corn includes those varieties we use for popping and eating green, and when dried, it takes much more work to grind. Even ground as fine as possible, it retains a gritty texture. This makes it perfect for making polenta, Johnny cakes, and puddings.

According to Deppe, dent corn has too much floury endosperm to taste fully cooked as polenta, and too much flinty endosperm to be used in fine-textured breads and cakes. Feed corn is a dent variety, and most of the commercially available (coarse) corn meal and polenta is also dent, but with the flinty endosperm mechanically removed for the latter, which, she claims, is “yet one more tasteless, nutritionally stripped travesty of the agricorn industry.”

Obviously, this lady really loves her corn! And from what I’ve read, she (and we) have good reason to. Much the way I’ve learned to appreciate the taste of locally grown, heirloom tomatoes and local, pastured meats, I look forward to discovering what real corn tastes like.

Bloody Butcher dent. Mandan Bride flour. Oaxacan Green dent. Abenaki Culais flint. Mandan Parching Lavender flour. Hopi Blue flint. Exciting, isn’t it? Another opportunity to

Buy it locally grown

  or Raise your own!

Julie

Welcome to the Learning Garden Blog!

Hello Gardeners!

Is there a better time than the depths of winter to learn a new skill? That's what's going on here, as I (oh so slowly) figure this blog-thing out. But I am highly motivated by the desire to continue to share with you all plus have you be able to share with each other.

I get some great replies to my emails, and I've always been torn between the desire to forward them on and the worry that I'd be clogging up your emails. So here's your chance to read as much or as little as you like and to contribute. I'll continue to email you to let you know when I've added a new post, and the notices of meetings and work parties will still go out via email. Hope to hear from all of you with whatever's on your mind.

On my mind is...spring. All evidence to the contrary, it will come faster than you think possible, and we had our second planning meeting this past week. Oh the glorious plans for the Garden! Greens and melons and brassica, beans and peas and roots, herbs and grains and fruits! Assuming I figure out  how to do it, I'll post a plot plan for drooling purposes.

At home, I'm reading the best book: The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times by Carol Deppe. I have learned so much with such enjoyment, and I can hardly wait to put into practice my new knowledge of seed saving and (minor) plant breeding.

At work "up the college," I walked to Schlow library today and happened to notice that the downtown Farmers' Market is making its winter home in the lobby of the Borough Building on Allen Street. I took the opportunity to acquire 2 gorgeous, fresh trout from Dan the Fish Man. Tomorrow at the Old Gregg School market, I will be picking up some Cow-a-Hen Farms ham ends to make ham and bean soup for the weekend. Guaranteed to warm us up!

Bundle up and stop by to help warm the hearts of our hard-working farmers and remember to always...

Buy It Locally Grown

    Or Raise Your Own!