We’ve hauled in a big load of green tomatoes from the truly dead plants, but the area that I over-planted and didn’t trellis still has green leaves in the matted lower layers, so we’re leaving a bunch of fruit on the off chance it might ripen on the vine. (See, this was not neglect, it was a frost survival tactic!)

Unlike the tomatoes, the squash plants are completely done. This was a huge zucchini plant just a few days ago:

There were still flowers on some of the wilted zukes, and I couldn’t help messing with this one in Photoshop a little…

We hauled in the last of the delicata squash, even though many are far too young to finish ripening inside:

These poor little infant delicata went straight to the compost:

…as did their vines:

Cabbages are still going strong:

And so are the aphids on this half-forgotten kale plant (rather, they were until a few minutes after this photo was taken):

Basil seed is plentiful:

and tobacco is pretty in a red sunset. The leaves turn yellow from the bottom up, and are harvested continuously as they turn…picked green, they’re unlikely to ever cure into a mellow smoke.

Finally, the flowers that I hope will provide seed for next year’s tobacco plants – and a little friend:

This shouldn’t be discouraging to anyone setting out to grow/can/brew/etc; with so many projects going on, many of them first tries, these “learning opportunities” are inevitable, and far outnumbered by the successes.

Some notable failures in 2009:

• two 5-gallon batches of undrinkable beer. The prime suspect is over-hopping with a hops rated at several times the bitterness of what I normally use
• 3 out of 4 bottles of Oregon Grape wine, and 1 bottle of blueberry wine exploded during aging. Likely cause: bottled too soon, before the yeast had eaten all the sugars, and/or reusing corks and hammering them in with a rubber mallet instead of getting a corker
• potato yield this year looks to be only about twice the weight of the seed potatoes I planted in spring; plants grew well for a few months, then started yellowing and dying. A few survive, but are weak. Possibly underwatered out of fear of creating a moldy mess in the straw mounds, possibly a fungus. Next year, all taters will be planted on the other end of the property, just in case.
• About 1/3 of the biggest, healthiest onions have disappeared. Varmints are supposed to stay away from such strong-smelling plants, but not our little moles/gophers/whatever the little @#$%ers are, oh no, they devour the entire onion and you find the onion tops protruding from a hole in the ground
• blueberry bushes: 2 near-dead, 2 totally gone. Moral: if you want to plant small blueberry bushes, don’t do so where your chickens are hanging out; the mounded, mulched earth is apparently irresistible for scratching.
• 3 of the 4 goat babies have scurs (irregular horn growth after unsuccessful removal). We went with the popular wisdom for this first batch, which is to dehorn (“disbud”) them while very young. Basically you sear and cauterize the little bumps that would become horns. It’s a few seconds of pain and then they’re back to bouncing around, so it it worked flawlessly we might continue to do it, but when it doesn’t work you just get small, deformed horns, and we’ll probably let future generations keep their natural headgear. It’s likely that I was too worried about burning the kids’ heads and didn’t do a thorough enough job of it, but I’ve seen plenty of goats disbudded by far more experienced goat keepers that still have scurs.
• 1 baby chick taken by rats. I poured a couple of inches of concrete for the chicken coop floor, but I left enough of a gap in one corner that rats managed to squeeze in and steal a chick.
• You’ll notice we haven’t posted about our honeybees in a while. they’re gone, and it’s still kind of sad. maybe next year
• liquid cheese – I was making a batch of quickie-faux-mozzarella recently. All was going well; it was almost done when I @#$%ed it up. One of the final steps is to soak long pieces of the half-finished cheese in 170 degree brine and stretch it like taffy. It started firming up a little sooner than I wanted, so I grabbed the teapot and splashed in just a little boiling water. The cheese immediately dissolved, and no amount of straining, cooking, etc. could make Humpty Dumpty edible again.

I’m sure I could find plenty of other screw-ups and strokes of bad luck, but this could get depressing…I think I’ll have to go sample one of the wines that DIDN’T explode…

In the garden

Fairytale Eggplant – delicious, 3″ beauties:

Blue Lake bush beans are starting to flower:

The tobacco experiments are going better this year. The tallest of these is about 5′ now, because it’s in the raised hay-bale bed filled with pure composted goat bedding/poo:

Watermelons are enjoying the poo-bed, too:

Here it is from the end…zucchini closest to the camera, with 2′ long leaves:

…but even in rather poor soil, zucchini plants just keep cranking the food out like nothing else we grow:

Lemon cucumbers are struggling a bit, but producing well despite whatever I’m doing wrong:

Our little fig tree is going strong:

Delicata squash – one of my favorites. We saved seed from our Wintergreen Farm CSA boxes last year, I’m really glad they grew:

The peas have been wonderful this year, making new pods as fast as we can pick them for months, and are just slowing down now:

Summer is nothing without tomatoes…we have probably about 50 or 60 plants, mostly Brandywine red, seen here:

Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes break our no-hybrids rule, but they’re 6′ tall and LOADED with fruit:

Although 1 good zucchini plant is enough for a small family, we have the two giant ones int he pure poop, plus a few more seen here keeping the cantelope vines company:

Beets are about ready to harvest, and we’re planting more. We both love beets, they store well, you can make dye from them, and if all else fails, they’re good goat food:

Black oil sunflower seeds are great livestock feed…they’re scattered here and there, but next year we’ll probably plant a large field of them:

Finally for this segment – apples! Many of the trees lost their buds in a late freeze, but for some reason this tree is as apple-y as ever:

Infrastructure report

The construction never, ever stops. The goats are now enjoying another 1/4 acre of pasture that I’ve fenced off, and we’ve enclosed about 1500 sq ft around the chicken house so they can still enjoy some freedom on days they don’t have the run of the whole property.

They’re perfectly capable of flying over the fence, as one does every morning to lay her egg in our woodpile, but so far they haven’t figured out that the flying over the fence trick works in both directions. Chasing and flapping ensue.

Since we started milking our goats this spring, we’ve been doing it under a rickety “just for today” tarp arrangement that’s not much fun when it rains:

…but soon, we’ll have a nice, snug 8′x8′ milking shed:

The big old red truck has some problems that I don’t have the time to deal with, and 8mpg isn’t very good even for something that only goes on the road a few times a month. A friend gave me a nice deal on his old truck, a much more reasonably sized Mazda b-2000. Only the perspective makes them look similar in size.

Cuteness

No blog post would be complete without a goat picture…here’s Drama about to eat my camera:

Sherazi tobacco curing in 2007

In 2007, I impulse-bought a packet of Sherazi tobacco seeds, and this hardy Turkish variety survived my bumbling first year of outdoor gardening, growing to five feet tall. Inexpert curing left this already very strong variety almost unbearably harsh, and the part that turned out best was only smokeable mixed in with some American Spirit. Most of it ended up getting mold on it as I shuffled it in and out of the house in the late fall, when the outside humidity is about a zillion percent and the inside humidity, thanks to the wood stove, is pretty much a negative number.

In 2008, I tried a variety called TN86, which is a more mild one similar to what is used in American cigarettes. The seedlings all died in the inadequately sealed greenhouse. Twice.

March 2009, with the greenhouse a bit tighter, I started a bunch of TN86 using commercial seed-starting mixture in 4″ pots, and some Sherazi from seed produced by my first crop. Germination was terrible with the 2-year-old Sherazi seed, but there are five of those now in the garden, along with about 25 of the TN86. They seem to be doing well.

I got my TN86 seeds from Victory Seeds, an Oregon company that specializes in preserving open-pollinated heirloom seed varieties. They have a basic tobacco growing guide here, and there’s plenty of information available online, so I’ll just relate my own observations that may be of help to someone trying to grow it in our damp, mild region.

• it has to be started early; March seems to work for me, but you MUST start it indoors or in a greenhouse this early; it will not tolerate freezes at either end of its cycle.
• sterile seed starting mix must be used – the seedlings are tiny and can take up to 3 weeks to come up. If there are any weed seeds in your mix, they will completely overcome any wispy little tobacco seedlings.
• Thinning – ok, this goes for all plants, but it is vital; you don’t get 2 half-size plants if you crowd them, you get two stunted and asymmetrical ones
• full sun – even in the greenhouse early on, the ones that were partially shaded showed it.
• be ready for silly questions; many people in our area have licenses to grow marijuana, but are surprised to hear that growing tobacco is legal.
• Tobacco REALLY likes loose, fertile soil. I know, what plant doesn’t? But see the photos below…

Tobacco planted in soil worked for the first time this year, with minimal compost worked in:

Tobacco planted in soil that’s been worked for two years, with a moderate amount of compost mixed in:

Tobacco planted in soil that’s been worked for three years, with a moderate amount of compost mixed in every spring:

And finally, monster tobacco growing in a foot-deep layer of composted goat bedding in a hay-bale raised bed (circled because it’s being crowded by zuccnini plants):

Feed your tobacco well!

(images below are scaled-down; click each one to see full size
or click here to expand them all)

The Asian Pear tree has leaves as lovely as any other’s flowers.

Cover crops of clover and cereal ryegrain are so pretty it’s almost a shame to till them in when planting the next crop. In some places, I’m experimenting with just opening a hole in the clover cover and planting into that, cropping the clover surrounding the transplant to let in light. Might mean less weeding, which is always a good thing.

Radishes…fast and reliable, they really lift your spirits when you’re looking at everything else you planted and wondering where the heck it is. These were planted from last year’s seeds. Several radishes were allowed to complete their whole cycle undisturbed, and when they died in the fall it was an easy matter to strip the seedpods off into paper bags. I crushed the pods in the bag with a beer bottle and sprinkled some of the resulting mixture here about a week ago. The greens, being early and abundant, are almost worth more to us than the spicy little radishes themselves.

Turnips and Kale are having a riot in the cold frame. We’ve been taking several large helpings of kale every week, along with some turnip thinnings – the greens are a little sandpapery when raw, but wonderful steamed.

Purple flowers by the house…this is our third spring, and I’m not sure I ever saw these in that place before. There are always surprises waiting here!

This is a close-up of pollen settled onto the Letsgo…for a few days, everything had a yellow haze around here.

Random decoration from a previous tenant.

Garlic plants are looking great!

We have about 26 hops vines going, thanks to a friend who let me dig some rootstock from his patch. An essential beer ingredient, we are currently paying about $4/ounce for the dried flowers, so this may be one of our more practical plantings.

There was recently a 2,200% tax increase on the tobacco I like…these TN86 tobacco seedlings are my response to that. It’s a shame; of all taxes I pay, a sin tax that is largely spent on medical care is one of the most palatable, but with close to half my salary going to taxes, tolls, and other government fees, I don’t feel the urge to pay more.

Ahh, spring!

And so are the dandelions…

…and these tiny little purple flowers that are everywhere…

…and the snowdrops have already come and gone (this photo is a few weeks old).

The trees are budding…

…and the Indian Plums already have flowers.

And in the garden, we’ve planted pea starts…

…the garlic we planted last fall is thriving…

…last year’s kale in the cold-frame is going crazy…

…and there’s more starts in the greenhouse waiting to be planted (from left: blueberry, onion, and more peas; not pictured: another type of onion starts we planted last weekend, our new rhubarb plant, dormant asparagus roots, and seed potatoes, also all waiting to go into the ground – not to mention our large box full of saved seeds from the last two years and our enormous seed order on the way from Victory Seeds).

Snail sex, I think…

A dog enjoying the sunshine (complete with fresh gooey turkey poo stuck in his fur – he loves to roll in the stuff – it’s the black stuff on his neck on the right side of the photo)…

…and the cat with the biggest eyes ever, enjoying her own patch of sunshine.

This is going to be a raised bed with straw-bale borders. The inside is filled with old goat bedding and other compostables. Soon I’ll remove the tarp, letting water in to start the composting process. The plan is to put a layer of soil and finished compost on the top and plant into that, hoping that the warmth of the compost action beneath it will help get early plantings off to a good start.

Yesterday, our neighbor and I planted a hundred baby fir trees along the property’s roadsides, to eventually decrease traffic noise and provide privacy. They come in a bag about three feet long:

I expected the trees in there to be tiny, but they were mostly about two feet long, and very healthy looking.

This kale is actually the remains of last year’s that got harvested, then eaten down to stubs by goats, then transplanted into the cold frame, where it’s thriving.

Turnips are starting to sprout in the cold frame as well. It’s not the ‘right’ time of year to plant them, but with the mild climate here it seems worth trying.

This garlic we planted a few months ago is looking well:

…as is this garlic, which we planted about a year ago. It died down pretty young and I never dug it up, but it’s returned as a volunteer. (since everything is so green out here, I removed color from everything but the garlic plant to make it visible)

Pregnant goats!

Here’s a 55-gallon steel drum (used once, to transport maple syrup) set into the ground to serve as a root cellar. We haven’t experimented with putting food in it yet, but the thermometer I have in there seems to stay in the 40s no matter what’s going on outside.

With Western Oregon’s mild climate, we will be trying our hands at winter gardening. I’ve replaced the leaky, opaque roof on the greenhouse with “sun-tuff” – corrugated plastic panels – and used some of our old windows to make a cold frame (the 2′ high glassed projection on the front). We hope to grow kale and a few other greens in there, after getting them started indoors and gradually acclimating them to outdoor life.

Outside the greenhouse there’s still plenty to do. Cover crops of clover, cereal ryegrain, faba beans, and vetch have been planted in last year’s beds:

Here’s a 40′ double row of garlic, about 1/3 planted. We’ll be doing three different varieties, with different storage life and flavor attributes. In our mild climate, the garlic will (we hope) grow slowly through the winter and burst into life in the spring, with harvest coming in May and June.

Perhaps inspired by Halloween festivities, these sunflowers have gone goth.

Goats, of course, don’t take a break in the winter as most of the garden does. Stand by for gratuitous cuteness:

Next year, the goats will enjoy another little pasture area. I’m putting a lot of radish seeds in there, because goats love the greens, which grow early and fast. Here’s the door from their current enclosure to the new pasture. The door is of course made from old shipping pallets.

In non-farming news, visitors will be happy to see that the deadly mudslide down to our fire pit now has steps.

And finally, the Yamaha saga. I found what seemed like a good deal on a mid-size road bike, and bought it with dreams of 55mpg dancing in my head.The wiring and tires were a mess, but I’ve fixed that and a few other things. The title was lost, but the previous owner’s widow filled out all sorts of paperwork that should have helped me get a title.

Finally the day came – I went to the DMV and all my papers were in order, but there is a lien on the bike from the 1980s, and I’m currently navigating a voicemail maze at the finance company in question to determine whether the lien is satisfied. Oh well, it’s raining all the time anyway now, but I hope to get this thing on the road for next spring. For now, it just sits there looking cool (as cool as it can with the ill-fitting Harley seat, slated for replacement with a stock one)

Nothing.
Is this thing growing?
Nothing (repeat for several months)
Tomato. Tomato.
Tomato tomato tomato!
TomatotomatotomatatomatoTOMATOMATOMATOMATOMATOMATO!!!!

Notice how the repetition eventually makes the word’s meaning slippery? You have to step back from the fray, breathe, and remind yourself what it means.

These critters can come in a flood that makes zucchini look lazy, and for the past month and a half “can more tomatoes” has been constantly floating around on my todo list. I just saw the photos below and remembered to be grateful for all the stews and sauces that will start with a jar of our own tomatoes this winter.

Here are some “Willamettes”:

…and here are the striking “Purple Calabash”:

This tomato got soft in our hanging basket, and was almost on its way to the compost bin when we noticed something funny…seeds sprouting right through the skin! No waiting till next year for this one:

Impressed by its determination, we decided to stick it in a pot and see what happens. I don’t know if a tomato plant can really survive in the see-saw climate of a rickety old cottage with woodstove heat, but we’ll see…who knows? We haven’t thinned the seedlings; it’s become a bit of a natural selection experiment: