Pomegranates

These are the pomegranates I started from seed (yes, from seed) way back in January!!
I just re-potted them, and they are starting to look like something finally!
Apparently starting pomegranates from seed is sort of hit-or-miss as far as how good the fruit will taste, but my dad had a great pomegranate he had started from seed planted in their yard until it was killed by a fungus.  They were super easy, and I've got a bunch of them, so who cares if only a few of them are edible?  I'm sure someone around here will like them, even if it is only the pigs, and I can't wait to have loads of fruit trees growing everywhere.  I think this coming spring I'm going to attempt tons of fig cuttings, and maybe more pomegranates.

(I just had to show some scrap of growing success after the previous depressing post about the winter garden)

The fall/winter garden

This is a photo of the abysmal fall/winter garden taken in September.  It looks slightly better now.  See how there's nothing actually growing in it??  That's continuing to be a bit of a problem.

I started off this season feeling lost.  I couldn't remember what I was supposed to do, except start brassicas to plant on September 1st.  I think I was still burned out from the summer season.

It was an extremely hot and dry summer, and none of the brassica starts really took off.  In fact, they mostly withered and died.  They would sprout right away, and then languish and dwindle, despite being watered properly (not too much, not too little), given a little boost of kelp emulsion after they were turning yellow, moved into the shade, moved into the sun and generally babied.  They just weren't happy.

I soaked and then direct-seeded the peas, thinking it would be just like the string bean success of the summer, but alas, no.  In the photo you can see the long row of peas only because of all the notermelons I used to weigh down the weed guard paper and keep it from blowing away.  They mostly rotted or were eaten by ants.  Freakishly, only one part of the row grew, although I can detect nothing different about that particular spot.

I think it was just too brutally hot for them.  Anyway, things are looking slightly better now.  Most of the fall pumpkins I had planted in August were attacked by creepy little flying aphids that made them wither up.  Oh, and squash bugs.  Strangely, nothing could be seen of the stem borer moths that were so common in the spring.   They were an easy pest to deal with if I was diligent about stalking up and down the rows of squash daily, picking off the little brown eggs.

The little flying aphids, however, were not easy.  They would fly smugly away in a little cloud when I swooped down on them with soapy water.  Eventually I abandoned the pumpkins to slowly die, which most of them did.  It does look like we might get a few, if the weather doesn't get much colder.  All I want is one pumpkin for Thanksgiving dinner.  If we get just one, it will all be worth it.

The other failures included direct-seeding all the Asian greens and only having eight rows of mustard come up (short rows, luckily.  Even so, we and the cows are getting tired of it already), and a very desperate struggle with the weedguard paper.  They make it look so easy on their website, but it's like wrestling an alligator.  An alligator who gives you paper cuts.  For some possibly supernatural reason it always becomes windy when I decide to work with it in the garden.  I could be thinning the turnips and there won't be a breath of wind until I get the weedguard paper out, and then it just won't stop.  Maybe it offends the wind gods or something.

Actually, half the battle with the fall/winter garden was troubleshooting the weedguard paper.  The other half was failing to keep anything except mustard and weeds alive.  (not to mention the situation with Alachua County Feed and Seed talking me into buying a "cover crop" for my garden that has now become a hideous and inextinguishable nuisance.  I still don't know what the plant is called, but at least it fixes nitrogen, although  with the cassia and the crotalaria, I'm not sure we really needed another nitrogen-fixing pest.)

So, next fall/winter season, if I am still gardening and haven't given up in despair, here are the following notes to myself:
-Start Asian greens first, in pots (which is what I eventually did this year), and transplant September 1st.

--Start peas in pots and transplant September 1st (yes, there are peas growing out there right now, and only because I bought more seeds and started them in pots, which will probably sound ridiculous to people who are used to gardening in much more fertile places.  Interestingly, they are the same height as the unfortunate peas who survived the first direct-seeding, although planted a month later)

--THEN start cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, kale, etc.

--The best way to deal with the weedguard is to cut it to the length of the bed, soak it with water, lay it out and cover it with old hay or mulch to weigh it down, and then it can be planted through.  This saves the trouble of trying to find where all the little starts were planted under the paper or struggling to mulch around the starts.

Anyway, I hope to post a better picture soon.

It's kind of gruesome, but this is Mirin and Rose's notermelon baby they made.  (It was actually cute in real life, but in the picture it looks like a zombie).  The kids started with a notermelon that Mirin had hollowed out to make one of his drinking gourds for me (very refreshing to drink from one when you are planting the fall garden in the hot late summer sun).  They found a little one and carved the face with a butter knife they found in the milking basket, and stuck it all together with wet sand.  The yellow cap is a funnel that was lying around.
Since we just didn't manage to grow our own Halloween pumpkins this year, we are planning to have notermelon luminaries lining the driveway.  Not that anyone comes trick-or-treating in our neighborhood any way, but we're hoping the sheer number of notermelon jack 'o lanterns and the dug-out-of-the-compost-real-pig-skull candle holder will discourage pumpkin smashers this year.

Fred E. Pig

This is Fred Pig.  He was the runty one of the last batch of pigs.  Being slightly smaller than everyone, he got pushed out of the way by his seven companions and was still way too small to eat last spring when it was cool enough to slaughter.  We kept him for us and let him grow all summer, and with none of his other companions around to push him away, he has grown enormous.  He's just huge.

He's a good pig.  He's happy and healthy.  When we come out to do the chores he runs alongside in his paddock by the driveway.  A few days after it rains he becomes a black pig.  He's got a wallow in the woods somewhere.  As it dries up he gets pinker and pinker.  We'll come out and he'll have only a pink butt, where he didn't quite fit in all the way, or just his sides will be muddy.  I love watching him leap over logs and squeeze through the trees, making  the "woof-woof" sound that pigs make when they're excited (strangely, I've never heard a pig say oink).  He's amazing agile for an animal his size.

It's been so nice to have a pig on the farm this whole time.  Usually we would have gotten new piglets by now, but we really need to make some changes and improvements to our pig set-up.  Fred and his friends were in a large wooded paddock the whole time, and they did a great job of clearing out the overly-dense underbrush.  It used to be so thick you couldn't see the large trees, but now you can see them clearly (and they look kind of relieved.  It's not good for large trees to have so much underbrush beneath them).  I'd like to give the land a rest.  I wonder what will grow there next year in the space left from all the little laurel oaks.  I wonder if we'll get some new wildflowers, like after a burn.

We need to finish the rest of the pig paddocks before we get another pig, but I so hope someday to have a sow and have our own little piglets.  Having babies on the farm is just so much fun.  There's so much to look forward to every day, to see how they've grown.  (The baby rabbits are hopping out of the nest box now, they are so cute!).

 Mirin got a real bow and anrrows for his birthday this year. 

 He's been so excited about it.  Ethan used to teach archery as a summer camp counselor before we got married, so he's been teaching him.  Out at the Farm, Mirin sets up a firing line and a wild watermelon (we call them Notermelons, because they are not watermelons--they are bland like cucumbers and very seedy--we feed them to the animals).  He's actually a pretty good shot (better than I am).  He's very careful about how the arrows are handled and about finding them all when he's done.  Luckily he only has six and they are brightly colored, because the grass is at it's longest right now.

Strangely, having a real bow has set off an even more obsessive phase of making bows and arrows out of sticks and all kinds of things.  I don't have a picture of it, but two days ago he found a hacksaw and cut and trimmed a long piece of oakleaf hydrangea and made a long bow that shoots shockingly well for being strung with cotton twine.  He also fashioned arrows out of palm fronds.  He also had a little crossbow he made with a rocket balloon.

Baby Bunnies

The big news around here is that Lily finally had a surviving litter of babies, and they are pretty much the cutest things ever, especially now that they have fur and their eyes are open.  (They resembled naked mole rats at first).  While the photo is not the best (they are looking a little demonic with the glowing red eyes) I assure you that in real life they are unbelievably cute and it's all I can do to keep myself from picking them up and snuggling them every day.

So, the story about the rabbits is that they were given to us.  We originally got two females and a male, Lily, Magnolia and Peter.  I honestly don't know anything about rabbits at all.  I really need to buy a book about it or something.  Our neighbor has a really nice rabbit set-up in his backyard, where all the waste from the rabbits goes into an earthworm bin.  Occasionally when I catch him walking by in the afternoons I can ask him questions about it.

Lily has had four litters before this that didn't survive, and a lot of that had to do with the nest box we were given.  It was just a square of wood, with no bottom.  It might have been totally great for in town, which is where they came from, but it just didn't work out in the wilderness of Fox Grape Farm.

The first time, I messed things up because our neighbor told us we should pick up the babies so they'll be used to being handled.  That  freaked Lily out and she stopped taking care of the babies.  The next litter she over night ate all of the straw I had put in for her to make a nest with and had the babies on the wire floor, and they died.  The third litter I put cardboard down on the bottom, then some straw, and she ate the straw and the cardboard and had the babies on the wire and they died.  The fourth litter (and I was feeling pretty awful about the whole thing by this time) I put extra layers of cardboard down, and straw, and she made a nest in it, had the babies and they got eaten by ants.

I was in despair after this, so I left her alone for awhile.  I finally realized it was time to spring for a new nest box, so I did, and it's made such a big difference.  This time, right around when she was due I bought some bag balm and smeared it on every possible place that ants could get into the cage.  And so, a year and a half after getting rabbits, we have our first surviving litter!

The Roselle is blooming!  I've been drying bunches of it.
It's the first year the Roselle has survived long enough to produce anything.  And it really has survived.  I haven't watered it at all since the rest of the summer garden died back, I think in late July.  And then when the animals were in I had put up a strand of non-zappy electric netting fence to keep everyone off the Roselle and just eating the weedy old garden.  But guess where we found Miss May's head stuck every single day they were in there?

Every day we would come out and hear a miserable "Maaaaah!" and see May stuck, once again, in the netting around the Roselle, surrounded by luscious green things to eat on the outside of the netting, but determined only to entirely devour the forbidden plants.  (She's lucky it wasn't electrified!)

One day she peed for nearly 5 minutes after we had struggled to free her little empty head from the layers of fence, I guess she hadn't been able to all day while she was stuck.  You'd think she would have learned, but no.  Weeks later we put the animals back in just for one day because of a crazy fencing problem we were having, and sure enough, May was stuck again.  She managed to strip a bunch of the plants, but they came back and are blooming, along with the unscathed ones.

Dent Corn

 This was the dent corn harvest.  It's not the loveliest corn.  I think it needed to be in larger blocks, away from the sprinklers and needed more calcium...and is it boron that is important for the kernals?  I can't remember.  This year we grew Blue Jade, Strawberry Popcorn (the cute little red ears at the top right), Oaxacan Green Dent, Daymon Morgan's Kentucky Butcher corn....and I think that was it.  Memories of the summer garden are fading fast.  And then there's the massive Attack Zucchini on the left.  They look like jewels in the light.  I was hoping to grind them and make corn bread, etc, but unfortunately a scourge of weevils came into our house on some brown top millet and cow pea seeds I had bought from Alachua County Feed and Seed.  (We call it Alachua County Toxic Exposure)   I was shocked that weevils could survive the atmosphere of ACTE, where stacks of pesticides are kept handy by the register, but that probably means they're Super Weevils and are immune to everything.

The Fortress

Mirin and Rose spontaneously made a hobbit hole in the mulch pile the other day.  They've been playing in it ever since.  

They even used fence posts and made a roof.  They later piled more mulch on top.

It was a little snug, but a respectable shelter nonetheless, especially for a 6 and 3 year old to design and build themselves.  I agree with Ethan that it was a better shelter than anything we saw built at the Earth Skills gathering at Finca Mycol.

Toadstools and Fairy Rings

The rains have brought the fairy rings dancing all over the pastures!  I really want to re-name the farm Fairy Ring Farm, but Ethan thinks it's cheesy.  I've never quite liked Fox Grape Farm.  It was just the only name we could agree on.  Generally I liked to think of magical-type names and Ethan liked good and sensible (boring) names.  Fox Grape Farm reminds me of the story of the fox and the grapes, but the fox never got the grapes, and I am definitely in this to get the grapes.

It reminds me, I MUST set-up the garden oyster mushroom kit I had bought from Fungi Perfecti ages ago before it croaks.  Some day (when I have more time) I want to learn how to grow all sorts of mushrooms.
( Rose also thought they looked like boobies).

More Cucumbers, More Melons

 I promise that I'm running out of vegetable pictures.  I just think they're so pretty, I can't help posting them.

This is some of the Blue Jade corn.  It's a little dwarf corn that only gets about knee-high, and the cobs are only about four inches tall, but they're so cute and pretty....and they also were decently sweet and tasty--better than the neglected Golden Bantam, that's for sure.

And more melons!  I'm convinced you just can't have too many melons.

I wish I could have painted this.  Maybe next year.

Mid-summer Harvest

Again, these pictures were taken months ago (maybe in November I can post the photos I just took of our baby winter garden!).  That was a very good watermelon, I remember.  In the foreground is a Silverline melon, next to a Collective Farm Woman Melon.  Behind that is a single Ice Cream melon, with lots of the Golden Jenny melons.  Mmmm....I miss the melons.  I need to find a better way to plant them.  Every year the weeds take over and I lose melons because I can't find them.

This was one of the pumpkin harvests.  Lots of little lemon squash still, although these were too old to really eat.  The Winter Luxury Pie pumpkins were heavenly.  I still have one, although it's looking a bit old.  The Black Futsu pumpkins were a bit disappointing.  They were so tiny, and I guess they kind of tasted like hazelnuts, but not enough to be worth it.  I think they didn't like Florida, either.  The salmon pink warty pumpkins are the gorgeous Galeux Des Eysines ( I hope I spelled it right).  They are one of my favorite pumpkins.  I made the "Squash Cooked in a Light Broth" recipe with them from this book for when we were studying the Mayans for home school.

Sweet Corn

We did get sweet corn again this year, mostly the Country Gentleman.  It's shoepeg corn, so the kernels are not arranged in rows.  It was nice and sweet.  The Golden Bantam corn, unfortunately, I picked too late and it was chewy and not so good.

Summer Tomatoes

These were the tomatoes from the last big tomato harvest, probably in June.  Tomatoes are kind of a pain to grow--they must be started so early and coddled through the cold of the late winter and early spring, and then all sorts of things like to eat them, but I think it's worth it.  They are so lovely.  I was dreaming of huge, beautiful harvest of lots of different kinds and colors of heirloom tomatoes ever since we started growing things out at the farm.

I had planted Matt's Wild Cherry again this year.  I do like it, but next year I'd like to try a different red cherry tomato.  Matt's are so small, they are hard to pick.  No one wanted to help me pick them, because it's pretty tedious.  The Beam's Yellow Pear tomatoes are a different story, however.  Everyone liked picking those.  

This weekend we are putting in our winter garden.  The summer garden seems so far away now, and I have even forgotten exactly what kinds of tomatoes these all are.  I have the names of all the brassicas and sweet peas we are planting in my thoughts instead.

Mirin and May

As ornery as she may be, Mirin has decided that May is his goat.  (She is tied to the tree in the photo because back when we were keeping Paisley she would rip through the electric fencing and run along to eat all the food in the milking stand before Paisley or I could get there, the little devil).  While she's certainly not the brains of the operation (that would be Ellie), she is a dear little goat and still doesn't mind being picked up and snuggled.  Mirin is hoping to be in charge of milking her after her first kid(s).

Geranium's Surprise July Baby

I promise I would have posted much, much sooner, except that Ethan had all the photos on his phone, and it apparently takes two months to remember to put them on the computer (ahem).

When we bought Ms. Geranium, she was supposedly bred to calve in April. However, she had been transported first from Vermont to Wisconsin, and then after a few months was transported to Florida (That's a lot of travelling for a mama cow). When I wrote to her original owner, he was worried she had miscarried during her travels. I had no idea if she was pregnant or not, since she is a rather wide cow to begin with, and I don't know how to palpate to see if they are pregnant (I honestly don't think Geranium would have stood for that, anyway).

April rolled around, and the baby failed to appear. We kept on expecting through May, because there is a 20-day window in which a mama cow could calve. Into June, however, we had lost hope and were talking about having her bred in the fall. Then, suddenly, very close to the 4th of July, a new baby magically appeared. Ethan was the first one to see him. It was one of those very rare days when I was not out at the farm (of course), so I missed it.

He was small, but has grown fast. We began calling him Sebastian, but after getting to know him better, Ethan now refers to him as "Meat-head." He had to carry him (twice) out to pasture because the little booger wouldn't just follow the herd (or his mom). And he was peed on, so I can't really blame him.

Catching up: Easter

For Easter this year we made our own dyes. Yellow was turmeric, red was beets, blue was red cabbage and purple was mulberry juice. We also tried coffee, but that only turned them brown, making our efforts to save four dozen white eggs a little pointless, so we didn't use it very much. For green we tried nettle infusion, but it was a little muddy. I made some nice greens with the red cabbage and turmeric, too. I've never liked soaking the eggs in food coloring, but the artistic side of me loves the bright colors, so we've always done it that way. I didn't think natural dyes would be as pretty or colorful, but I was astounded at how lovely the eggs turned out. They were not as vivid as the commercial dyes, but they were more suited to Easter, being very soft and subtle and pastel.

The blue was an amazing robin's egg blue or a perfect spring sky blue, and the mulberries were a beautiful violet. You can tell the two eggs Mirin dyed at a friend's house with regular food coloring. The colors are very bright, but have a sort of chemical look to them next to the other eggs. I have to say, these lovely naturally-dyed eggs were hard to find. They easily blended into nature. The Easter bunny (ahem) had a great time finding flowers and fallen leaves that matched the egg colors perfectly.

After we were done dyeing all the eggs I soaked strips of white muslin in the dye for a maypole. They turned out so beautiful. I couldn't believe how intensely bright they turned out.

They've faded a bit in the months I've kept them. I crocheted a little mini rug out of them, since we will probably want to dye new ones next year. Maybe someday I will have a big rug of them if I keep adding to it.

Ms. Matilda

New cows!!

We have a new cow. Her name is Matilda. It's kind of my fault that we got her. I was just feeling so sad that we won't have much milk this year. Neither Ellie nor Geranium were pregnant (Geranium still LOOKS like she could be pregnant), and I just peeked at Craig's list to see if there were any Jersey cows for sale, and there were tons and tons. Matilda was the best one we found, and we're so glad to welcome her and her calf, who is a steer. I managed to convince Ethan because he had for months now been talking about finding a beef steer. She is a really nice cow, and her milk is really good. I didn't actually know there were nice cows out there until I met Ms. Matilda. Geranium is so evil-tempered (even without horns) and Isla is well-behaved only if there are oats involved.

Catching up--the cucumbers and beans

This was late in the evening, so the lighting wasn't great. It was just such a pretty collection of colors. I love the patty pan squash, they are so tasty and so pretty. I stuffed the squash blossoms with basil, garlic and ricotta cheese and battered them with an eggy batter and fried them.

This was our first beans, tomatillos and eggplant.

Do you see how many beans we got?? They were so pretty. One thing I didn't realize was that Tanya's Pink Pod and Red Swan beans are the same color. I was thinking of the Borlotti beans I grew last year when I ordered them. In the distance are the Suyo long cucumbers. They have such an interesting shape.

I wish I had gotten more pictures of the watermelons. We are still getting watermelons off the vines, but they are declining. I grew three different kinds this year: Yellow Moon and Stars (has yellow flesh), Strawberry (red inside--it's a Florida variety), and White Wonder, which has been my favorite. It has very crisp, white flesh inside and is really lovely. The rind is very thin, which must be why you never see any white watermelons in the stores. I made a beautiful watermelon salad with all three colors, and we are currently making three-toned watermelon Popsicles in the freezer!

I don't have any photos, but we also got a bunch of Golden Jenny melons, which look like little cantaloupes. They are orange inside, and very fragrant and sweet. We also got a bunch of Silverline melons, which are so pretty and silver-striped with sweet, white flesh. The Ice Cream or Green Machine melons were my favorite. They are greenish yellow on the outside when ripe, and not very fragrant, so it was hard for me to tell if they were ready or not. But the inside is sweet, green and crispy and strangely like the texture of ice cream. The Collective Farm Woman melons from Baker's Creek just got ripe. We've gotten only three so far. They are supposed to be an early melon, but have been the next to last to get ripe. They're from the Ukraine, I think, so maybe Florida just doesn't agree with them or something. They were very tasty. They looked like any old cantaloupe from the store, but were green and orange inside and very good, although the sweet part was mostly in the center. There are still the Delice De La Table melons, one of which rotted, tragically. I need to find a better way to keep the weeds down so I can actually find the melons. I'm thinking weed guard paper next year.

I've just been marveling about how amazing it is to be able to pick out unusual seeds from all over the world with varieties I had never seen or heard of and to grow them and get to taste them. I've been so enjoying my garden, almost to the point of obsession. When people ask about how my garden is going, I just can't help going on and on about it, and then I realize I'm boring everyone and manage to come to a stopping place.

Sunflowers

I planted the Seed Saver's Exchange sunflower collection this year. I love the variation in the different kinds of sunflowers. We've had bursting bouquets on our table since they started blooming. (The ugly metal-roofed thing in the back is the old cow shelter from the winter--we never moved it out).

Here is the left side of the garden, just before the pole beans.

And this is the corn, pumpkins and cosmos. It's been a very colorful garden this year.