Frugal living tip #20. May 18, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in Ben Franklin, chickens, critters, gardening, homesteading, pets, wit and wisdom.Tags: creative newspaper recycling, uses for old newspaper
5 comments
Silence Dogood here. It’s Monday, and as faithful readers know, our goal here at Poor Richard’s Almanac is to provide a Frugal Living Tip every single Monday through 2009. This week, I was torn (a pun you’ll soon understand) between two things I read in the newspaper. One was a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal called “Sites Let You Swap Till You Drop.” The other was in our local paper, The Morning Call, about a woman who was trying to save money by using shredded newspaper to line her hamster cages. Guess which one won.
All right, I promise to tell you about the swap sites next Monday. But I was tickled by the idea of a newspaper suggesting frugal ways to repurpose… a newspaper. Our friend Ben and I use newspaper to line our birdcages. It’s really an enormous source of satisfaction to put a sheet of newspaper featuring someone or something you despise in the cage, knowing its inevitable fate. Talk about cheap thrills! We also use shredded paper to pad our chickens’ nestboxes and keep the floor of their coop soft and dry. And we mix it with damp coir to make baseline bedding for our earthworms in their earthworm composter.
What else can you do with a newspaper (besides read it)? Well, you can use it to smother weeds and grass and make a path, covered with mulch or wood chips. You can use it to make fire starters. People say you can use it with vinegar to get glass shinier than any commercial glass-cleaning product. (But I’ve never understood how that could be—what about the ink?!) Of course you can use it to wrap breakables for transport or storage.
You can add shredded paper to your compost pile to balance high-nitrogen materials like grass clippings, chicken manure, and kitchen scraps. This little trick works in your garbage can, too. Combat smelly garbage by tossing a little crumpled newspaper in the can. Or use newspapers to wrap green tomatoes while they’re ripening indoors in winter so they’re separated from the other tomatoes. If one goes bad, it won’t rot them all. Many people make transplant pots from newspaper rather than using peat or plastic pots for their growing seedlings.
I use layers of newspaper to separate my boxes of canning jars so the weight of the next box of jars is distributed more evenly over the lower one. (Uneven weight can break the jars’ seals.) I also use them when I’m pressing leaves or flowers to separate the layers of plant materials from the weight on top and to absorb extra moisture. You can even use the Sunday comics section to wrap presents.
How do you use newspapers? Please let us all know!
‘Til next time,
Silence
Potato update: curious. May 17, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in gardening, homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: growing potatoes, growing potatoes in bins, Wood Prairie Farm, Yukon Gold potatoes
8 comments
In my previous post, “Tower of (potato) power,” our friend Ben described how I was growing ‘Yukon Gold’ potatoes in a cylindrical bin to save precious bed space for other crops. I’d alternated layers of straw and soil in the bin, and planned to continue piling up alternating layers as the potato shoots grew to make sure I got the biggest possible potato harvest once the tops die down in fall. (Potato plants will form tubers all along their buried stems, so it pays bigtime to keep burying the stems as they grow. My plan is to keep adding layers of straw and soil until the shoots reach the top of the bin, then allow them to sprawl at will until they die back.)
This is, of course, something of an experiment. I figured we had nothing to lose, since our CSA will provide us with plenty of potatoes if ours don’t produce a crop. Still, our friend Ben was as nervous as a new father, checking the bin every day to see if there were any signs of the much-anticipated shoots. Had I put too much straw on top of the seed potatoes? Could the shoots push through? I began fluffing up the straw at the top of the pile, surreptitiously checking for any signs of life. Finally, this past week, I saw shoots stretching up through the straw. And then, yesterday, green leaves poking up through the top layer. Hallelujah!!! They’re alive. Now I just need to keep adding layers of straw and soil to keep up with the leafy shoots as they continue to grow.
Our friend Ben is greatly relieved that our ‘Yukon Gold’ crop is doing its stuff and I didn’t screw everything up. But this isn’t the curious part. What’s curious is this: Last year, our friend Ben planted some wonderful seed potato collections from Wood Prairie Farm (www.woodprairie.com), a family-run organic seed and potato company in Maine, in one of our veggie beds. I’d chosen the Wood Prairie Farm Experimenter’s Special and The Organic Potato Blossom Festival, which includes six varieties noted for their blossom beauty and fragrance as well as for producing wonderful potatoes. How could I resist?
Now, here’s the curious part. It’s not easy to harvest every last potato in your bed unless you’re really thorough or you’re growing them in a bin (as we are this year). Doubtless, I left a few in the ground last year. This is not a good thing, since winter turns in-ground potatoes to soggy mush. So you can imagine our friend Ben’s astonishment as our puppy Shiloh and I were inspecting the bed to check on the progress of the lettuces and mesclun mixes, strawberries, sugar snap peas, radishes, onions, bell pepper, pickling cuke, and summer squash plants, and I saw that some very vigorous potato plants were coming up!
The thought that seed potatoes could survive a Pennsylvania winter was news to me. (It’s never happened before through many years of potato-growing.) Now I can’t wait to see which potatoes they are! Guess I’ll have to be patient ’til harvest time, though. And then I’ll have another experiment on my hands: Comparing the yields of the in-ground potatoes to the ones in the bin. Stay tuned!
What’s in a name: Shiloh May 17, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in pets, wit and wisdom.Tags: Hebrew names, Judy Collins, Messiah, Neil Diamond, Shiloh
2 comments
Silence Dogood here. Before I ever saw her, I knew our puppy would be Shiloh, just as when I saw the Pioneer German Shepherds website, I knew she would be there, and when I spoke to co-owner Gennie about their current pups, I knew which one she’d be, even though I knew another couple was coming to pick out a pup before we could clear our schedules to make the long trip down. Each time, I just had a feeling. Call me funny that way.
Of course, our friend Ben was another story. He wanted another golden retriever like our dear Molly. He didn’t have a clue why we’d want to call a dog Shiloh. “How about Antietam or Bull Run?” he joked. “Or what about naming her for a Civil War general? Beauregard? Ulysses? Tecumseh? Stonewall?” Grrrrr. Yes, Shiloh was a famous Civil War battle, in which both North and South distinguished and disgraced themselves. But it wasn’t the battle per se I was thinking of when the name came to me.
The town of Shiloh is located in Tennessee, our friend Ben’s and my home state, which certainly seemed appropriate. But I think what brought it to mind was Judy Collins’s haunting rendition of “In the Hills of Shiloh,” which I often sing when I’m out walking alone. (I’d assumed it was a traditional folksong, and was astounded to discover when doing a bit of background for this post that it was actually written by the children’s book author Shel Silverstein.)
Mind you, I did have a few reservations. I was steeling myself to be given endless grief by our friends: “I can’t believe you named your dog for Brangelina’s daughter!” But I grossly overestimated family and friends’ contact with pop culture. Maybe none of them had even heard of Brad and Angelina, much less little Shiloh Jolie-Pitt. Instead, what I did hear took me completely by surprise: “Did you name her after the Neil Diamond song?” Oops. Neil Diamond did write a touching song about his imaginary childhood friend Shiloh, but yikes, I’d completely forgotten it when I chose the name. It was the Judy Collins song I remembered.
Suffice it to say that Ben also fell in love with little Shiloh at first sight, and, though she’s acquired a number of nicknames in the course of our first two weeks with her (including The Beast of the East, The Mad Cow of the Serengeti—she bellowed rather than cried that first night in her crate—and The Little Fruit Bat), he’s calling her Shiloh pretty regularly now. Whew. I was hoping her name would simply become a given and lose any associations not directly connected with her.
Then I got an e-mail from my dear friend Huma. “Loved the photos of Shiloh. And the name has really interesting meanings.” Uh, meanings? You mean Shiloh means something beyond a Tennessee town, a battle, a couple of songs and a celebrity child?
You can bet I headed to my old friend Google PDQ to see what Huma was talking about. And what I found was mind-boggling. Too bad I don’t know my Old Testament as well as I do the New, or I’d have known that Shiloh was a town in ancient Israel in the Old Testament as well as a Bibilical name for the Messiah. The translation is usually “His gift,” though I also found it as “Gift from God.” How completely appropriate for the puppy who came to heal our hearts after the terrible loss of our beloved Molly. A gift from God indeed.
Other meanings I found included “charmer” (that’s certainly true!), “tranquil” (we can only hope, some day), and “pacificator” (one who brings peace). The town Shiloh was described as “a gathering place and sanctuary,” “place of rest.” In the town context, the name was defined as meaning Tranquility Town, Fair Haven, or Pleasantville. (A dreadful irony in light of the Civil War battle, in which more soldiers, Northern and Southern alike, were killed than in all the previous American wars combined.)
As OFB and I run ourselves ragged keeping tabs on Shiloh so we can praise her for doing something right and try to make sure she doesn’t do too much that’s wrong, thoughts of her and tranquility seem far apart. But she is certainly a gift from God, a gathering place to bring people together as they fuss over her, a sanctuary where our love can root and grow and our broken hearts find peace. We can rest in our love for her, our little gift from God. His gift: our Shiloh. Amen.
‘Til next time,
Silence
Scavenging spring bounty. May 16, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in gardening, homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: home gardening, seasonal vegetable gardening, spring vegetables, spring veggies, veggie gardening
2 comments
Silence Dogood here. I’m actually not referring to roadside scavenging, Euell Gibbons-style (anyone remember Stalking the Wild Asparagus?), especially since we now know that eating anything that grows anywhere near a road will give you an overload of heavy metals along with your foraged fare. But if you live in a more northerly area, as we do here in Pennsylvania, you may be getting very eager to start eating your garden’s bounty, even though it’s not yet exactly bountiful. Here are some favorite spring gleanings to tide you over while you wait for a real harvest:
* Radishes. If your radishes are coming in, you can enjoy them French-style, sliced and served on a round of crusty, buttered baguette with a sprinkling of salt. Yum! We love this, but as a treat at cocktail hour rather than for breakfast, which we understand is when the French eat it (thus, those famous ‘French Breakfast’ radishes). Or turn them into a crunchy, spicy spread. I first wrote about this last year in the post “Revolutionary Radishes” (check it out if you’d like to know which radishes Thomas Jefferson grew and how you can get them), but in the interim, of course, we’ve tweaked the recipe to suit our tastes. It’s super-simple and super-delicious—if you enjoy radishes, you simply have to try it! Here’s my current version: Mince or grate a bunch of radishes (or to taste). Slice three large scallions (green onions) fine, including the white part (but not the roots or top inch of greens). Mix these into softened cream cheese or yogurt cheese to make a thick, crunchy dip. Add any combination of salt, black mustardseed, cumin, and/or oregano to taste. Add shredded mozzarella, Swiss, or sharp white Cheddar, if desired. This makes a great dip for raw veggies or tortilla chips. Or try it as a sandwich spread in a pita or on multigrain bread with some crunchy Romaine leaves. If your radishes are just now coming in and you need to thin them to make room so the ones you leave in the ground can shape up, don’t forget that you can add those spicy thinnings, leaves and all (washed, please!) to your spring salads.
* Scallions. Scallions, aka green onions, are abundant now. Besides using them in the radish dip, I love to add tons to salads to up the flavor ante. I find that they add heat without it being the burning hot-pepper kind of heat. I also add them lavishly as a topping for refried beans, pizzas, and Chinese-style tofu dishes, as well as folding them into egg and potato salads. And believe it or not, you can put whole scallions (roots and top inch of greens removed) on the grill to give them a delicious smoky flavor. But often in spring, our friend Ben and I enjoy a simple crudite plate with a glass of red wine. I’ll make a platter of radishes, red, orange, and yellow bell pepper strips, scallions (again, roots and top inch of greens removed), baby carrots, and cheese wedges. Including the radish dip I just mentioned is a wonderful way to enjoy all these veggies—and if I do, I usually include Romaine, endive, and/or raddichio leaves on the platter as well, since they’re perfect for dips and so much healthier than chips!—but it’s definitely optional.
* Arugula. Ah, arugula, our favorite green! We love the rich, meaty flavor of arugula, and it’s not only easy to grow—just toss some seeds on your garden bed, water, and wait—but if you let a few plants go to seed, it will volunteer and give you more arugula spring and fall. I love adding arugula to salads and sandwiches, and in fact am perfectly happy to eat a whole salad of arugula, shaved Parmesan, and minced sweet onion, with a simple olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing and a sprinkle of salt (we like Real Salt). Yum!!! But arugula can also add its luscious flavor and high vitamin and mineral content to soups, stews, stir-fries, sandwiches, dips, and bean dishes like refried beans, dal, and black bean soup. I also love adding it to a simple pasta sauce: Saute diced sweet onion, minced garlic, diced orange or yellow bell pepper, and sliced mushrooms in extra-virgin olive oil. Add salt. (You can also add oregano and/or basil, if desired.) Toss in freshly washed arugula and cook until just wilted, then serve sauce over spaghetti or fettucine with a sprinkling of flaked Parmesan, if desired.
* Asparagus. We never seem to get a big crop of this favorite spring veggie, but we both love it. I’d like to stretch the harvest by adding chopped asparagus to stir-fries, pasta sauces, omelettes, and sautees, but our friend Ben only likes asparagus served on its own. So we typically eat it cut in one-inch pieces, boiled ’til just tender, drained, and then shaken gently while still hot with butter and a splash of lemon juice. This will probably come as a shock, but OFB and I had to actually train ourselves to enjoy green asparagus. In our native South, we’d only eaten white (blanched) asparagus in cream sauce on toast. We still think this is one of the most divine dishes on earth, and have been beyond thrilled to see fresh white asparagus turning up in our local groceries in recent years, since we’re not about to try to blanch our own. (Want to try this treat? Boil white asparagus spears, bottoms cut off, until tender. While they’re cooking, reduce heavy cream, butter, salt, and white pepper on very low heat until thick and creamy. Make toast and set on plates. Drain asparagus spears and place them on toast to cover each slice, then top with cream sauce and serve.) Green asparagus tastes quite different from white asparagus, but it has many more nutrients and of course it’s also delicious! Too bad our ancient asparagus bed (we inherited it with the house) doesn’t give us more to work with.
* Mesclun, lettuce, and other greens. We love to broadcast seeds of various spicy mesclun mixes, as well as seeds of heirloom lettuces, on our shady beds, and we also plant out beautiful heirloom lettuce transplants when we can find them. While we wait for our transplants to grow to harvest size, we need to give those abundant salad seedlings room to grow to adulthood, and that means ruthless thinning. Thank goodness the thinnings can go right into our salads! We feel much better about eating our excess rather than composting it. We often find lamb’s-quarters seedlings volunteering with our mesclun and lettuce mixes, and we simply add them to the salads as well—this modern “weed” was once a cherished salad plant. Ditto for purslane, but we don’t often see it in the Hawk’s Haven beds.
* Garlic scapes. Our friend Ben and I have a dense, healthy stand of garlic in one of our veggie beds, but we tend to resist digging up the actual bulbs. Instead, we let them return year after year and harvest their bloom spikes, aka garlic scapes, instead. The time to harvest these is while the buds are still enclosed in their green casing. Cut the bloom stem off near the base, then bring your bounty inside, mince the stems and blooms, and add them to stir-fries, sauces, casseroles, omelettes, or anywhere you’d like a subtle garlic flavor. OFB and I aren’t wild about garlic breath, but since the scapes are much milder than the cloves, it’s never a worry—one reason we’ve fallen in love with garlic scapes. You will, too!
* And more. Apparently, the British add raw pea and broad bean leaves to their salads the way we Americans toss in nasturtium leaves. I can see why they’d be good, but OFB and I need every last leaf to pump food into our snow and snap pea pods, so we’re not planning to try this! Our violets are in abundant bloom now, and we gather that candied violet blooms are big with edible flower folks. Us, we try to avoid eating flowers. We’d rather enjoy their blooms in the garden. One thing that’s coming up bigtime now is our pokeweed, and we think it’s one of the most underrated decorative plants ever. Poke sallet is a classic spring dish of the South, involving fresh-picked new poke leaves cooked with their pot likker and some fatback or ham hocks. But we’ve never had it and don’t suggest that you do, either, since older stems, leaves, and etc. of pokeweed are poisonous. We’ll just enjoy the way it looks, thanks. Ditto for dandelions. Young dandelion greens are relished in these parts, served wilted, as we understand it, and topped with a bacon dressing. But we’re not fans of bitter, a word much associated with dandelion greens. We’d far rather uproot our dandelions and feed them to our dandelion-craving chickens, who apparently embrace the bitterness and benefit from the dandelions’ super-high vitamin and mineral content. One weed we do enjoy in our salads is garlic mustard, which is abundant here and adds a nice lightly garlicky taste when mixed in with the other greens.
Well, it’s a start, right? Soon we’ll have more veggies coming in than we know what to do with. For now, let’s try to appreciate the beginning of bounty.
‘Til next time,
Silence
Color progression: yellow and purple. May 15, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in critters, gardening, wit and wisdom.Tags: cottage garden blooms, May blooms, yellow and purple blooms
5 comments
Truth be told, this time of year, our front garden here at Hawk’s Haven always takes our friend Ben’s breath away. The huge island bed and the borders are a symphony in yellows and purples. Form and color echo each other in great, glorious drifts across the yard. Cars slow down as passersby take in the show. Neighbors gawk. You’d think some genius landscaper had masterminded this display.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t us. Our predecessors in the rustic Pennsylvania cottage Silence Dogood and I share loved flowers, but didn’t have much money to spend on them. So they apparently accepted extras of spreaders (or, more politely, cottage-garden plants) from folks who couldn’t wait to get rid of them. Over the years, these plants have lived up to their name, and serendipitously, the perennials we’ve deliberately added echo the yellow-and-purple scheme just at this season as if planned.
A stroll through the front yard presents an abundance of red-violet honesty (moneywort, Lunaria annua), its flower color echoed by the lilacs in our border and our beloved Lamium maculatum, which looks up at the lilacs from the ground below. The buds of the dame’s-rocket (Hesperis matronalis) are just beginning to open, promising to prolong the purple theme a few weeks longer. Purple-black columbines (Aquilegia sp.) self-sow through the beds as well, with the occasional red-and-yellow-flowered wild columbine (A. canadensis) turning up among them, promising hummingbird visits.
Geraniums also lend purple tones to the beds, from the pink-purple of wild geranium (Geranium maculatum) and herb Robert (G. robertianum) to the deep purple-black of ‘Samobor’ dusky widow (G. phaeum ssp. phaeum ’Samobor’). They form a color bridge between the rose-pink of the bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis) arching above and the blue-violet of the periwinkle (Vinca minor) below.
Speaking of color bridges and violets, purple and yellow violets raise their cheery faces to the sun throughout the lawn and borders, weaving the yellow-and-purple theme together. But the boldest burst of yellow comes from the celandine poppies (Stylophorum diphyllum) abundantly scattered through the beds. Also known as yellowroot because of the persistent dye that gets all over one’s hands when trying to uproot them, celandine poppies were regarded by our friend Ben with suspicion if not outright hostility for years, and I had the yellow-orange stains on my hands to prove it. But a funny thing happened: As they spread among the purple flowers, they made such a wonderful combination that I’ve reconciled myself to them. Almost.
A couple of years ago, my brother gave us a collection of heirloom bearded irises that we planted along the side of our parking square that faces the front yard. Those irises are also in bloom now, and they, too, are in delicious shades of yellow and purple.
But our yellow and purple tour isn’t quite over. Discreetly suspended from a shrub over our island bed are two tube feeders. We decided three years ago to leave them up year-round, filled with black oil sunflower seeds, so the birds would come near Silence’s home office window while she was working. As I write, they’re covered with brilliant yellow goldfinches and rosy purple house finches.
We couldn’t have planned it better ourselves.
What to eat with corn? May 15, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in recipes, wit and wisdom.Tags: corn, corn on the cob, what to eat with corn on the cob
7 comments
Silence Dogood here. We get all kinds of reader searches here at Poor Richard’s Almanac, which our host, WordPress, gives us the opportunity to see. In the past few days, we’ve had a few doozies: “greensleeves syphilis,” “can you eat unpollinated zucchini,” “sir richard’s almanac,” “what is college?” and the ever-popular “raccoon vinegar” among them. (Zucchini questioners, here’s your answer: An unpollinated zucchini is a squash blossom, and yes, they’re considered delicacies, whether dipped in raw egg white and fried or stuffed and baked. But you won’t get an actual zucchini unless that flower is pollinated!)
Sometimes we get a question that kind of tugs at my heart strings, though. One that came in a couple of days ago was “What goes well with corn on the cob?” Being Southern born and bred, the thought that anyone would need to even ask made me feel sad. I was tempted to answer “Everything!” but of course that isn’t true. (I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer not to eat corn on the cob with my pizza, spaghetti or curry, thanks just the same.) The short answer, butter and salt, is true, but I don’t think our reader was wondering what to put on his corn on the cob, but rather what to serve with it. So, dear reader, here are some favorite things to eat with corn on the cob. I envy you the experience of tasting them together for the first time!
* Barbecued anything: chicken, pork, beef, you name it. This includes all barbecue-related foods, including ribs, Buffalo wings, and Sloppy Joes.
* Fried chicken. Probably the most classic way to eat corn on the cob is with fried chicken, cole slaw, and sliced ripe tomatoes, with huge glasses of iced tea and slices of chilled cantaloupe (muskmelon) or watermelon for dessert. Yum!
* Hamburgers. Think retro cookout, with Dad in his apron at the charcoal grill.
* Cole slaw. That’s just “slaw” to us Southerners. The essential companion not just to fried chicken and corn but to barbecue of all types and stripes.
* Beans. Green beans and lima beans both go perfectly as side dishes with corn on the cob. Yellow wax beans do, too, but unless you’re eating white corn—the only kind worth eating, just FYI—you won’t get much color contrast. We solve that problem by mixing yellow wax beans and green beans. Add a rich red sliced tomato and you have not just a beautiful color medley but a meal!
* Tomatoes. Like corn on the cob, tomatoes are an essential summer food. Make a simple but beautiful Caprese salad of sliced ripe tomatoes (all red or mix red, orange, yellow, and green-ripe for a specially gorgeous presentation), fanned out on Romaine lettuce leaves with slices of fresh mozzarella and big fresh basil leaves separating the halved tomato slices. Top with a pinch of salt (we like Real Salt) and a drizzle of olive oil, serve with hot buttered corn on the cob, and you’re good to go!
* Summer squash. Summer squash is another essential summer staple. I’ll often boil sliced yellow crookneck or straightneck squash with sliced onions ’til tender, then drain and toss with butter, salt, and black pepper or a little oregano or basil. It’s a simple but flavorful side dish that goes with lots of summer fare. But my favorite way to serve summer squash and corn is to cut the corn off the cob and add it to a squash casserole. Yum! (See my earlier post, “Super summer squash recipes,” for that recipe and others.) While I’m talking about corn off the cob, I should note that here in PA, fresh corn pie, traditionally served topped with hot milk, is an Amish specialty.
* Shish kebabs. While you’re grilling your shish kebabs, add some corn on the cob to the grill. Eat them together for a wonderful pairing.
*Fajitas. Same as above.
* Stuffed peppers. Whether you enjoy the classic version with ground beef or a vegetarian version (we love peppers stuffed with cooked rice and lentils, sauteed onions and herbs, and maybe a little shredded mozzarella mixed into the stuffing before it’s topped with tomato sauce), corn on the cob is a great side dish. Add a crunchy salad and you have a perfect weeknight dinner!
* Fresh salsa. No, I’m not suggesting that you smear salsa on your corn on the cob! (Though you can add corn, cut off the cob, please, to black bean salsa.) But the flavors of fresh salsa—the chopped tomatoes, peppers, onions, cilantro, and lemon or lime juice—are just perfect with corn on the cob. Top baked chicken breasts with salsa or make a salsa-topped taco salad and enjoy your corn on the cob alongside. (Note: Eating corn chips with salsa and corn on the cob is double dipping.)
There are so many other ways to enjoy corn on the cob, too. What are yours?
‘Til next time,
Silence
Isn’t it just the light? May 14, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in chickens, gardening, homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: African violets, bloom season, houseplants
3 comments
Silence Dogood here. My gardening friend Leslie was bragging last week about her beautiful African violets. Now, I’ll admit to a weakness for these humble houseplants, with their velvet-green rosettes of leaves and shiny satin blooms. I confessed that mine looked healthy as all get-out but hadn’t bloomed in ages, even though they were under the kitchen skylight. “Oh, just give them African violet food and they’ll bloom in no time,” Leslie said.
Hell no. It’s not that I’m against giving my poor plants any food, but we’re organic gardeners here. I’ll add liquid seaweed and SUPERthrive to their water, and maybe even water them with old aquarium water if I remember to, but chemicals are definitely out.
Then, this week, something interesting happened. Maybe they were so terrorized by all the talk about chemicals that they decided they’d better start earning their keep, but sure enough, I noticed buds peeping out from the foliage of two of my African violets.
Secretly, though, I’m convinced that it’s all about the light. Our orchids are furiously sending up bloom spikes in the greenhouse. The amaryllis are all producing their fat bud stalks on the deck. (Yes, they revert to a normal bloom season for us, since we don’t force them in fall by inducing dormancy.) Nothing has really changed except the seasonal progression and the ever-strengthening light.
Perhaps strong light in the dark months would keep them in bloom all year. Or maybe that steroid-kick of chemicals would jolt them back into bloom when they’d otherwise be resting up and gathering strength for another round. But surely there’s a price to be paid in the health and longevity of the plants themselves. As with our chickens, I want my houseplants for the long haul. I’m not prepared to shorten their lives by insisting on egg or bloom production when they want to recoup between seasons. I think it’s worth the wait!
‘Til next time,
Silence
The world is not enough. May 14, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: blog visitors, international blog traffic
5 comments
The world may not have been enough for James Bond, but it’s more than enough for our friend Ben, Silence Dogood, and Richard Saunders here at Poor Richard’s Almanac. Our SiteMeter shows us where in the world people come from when they arrive at our blog, and we are awed and honored to see just how far these cybertravelers have come. We realized that it had been a good long time since we’d thanked our distant visitors for dropping in on us here in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, and we’d like to make amends for that.
Of the most recent visitors who have come to our blog today, in addition to all of you from across the U.S., we have honored guests from the following countries: Canada (Whitehorse, Yukon Territory; Burnaby, Vancouver, and Cumberland, British Columbia; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Toronto, Mississauga, and Ottawa, Ontario); the United Kingdom (Brighton, East Sussex; Crewe, Cheshire; Coventry; Northampton, Northamptonshire; Slough; Dartford, Kent; London; Aberdeen; and Salisbury, Wiltshire); Australia (Brisbane, Queensland; Adelaide, South Australia; and Melbourne, Victoria); Ireland (Galway and Louth); Sweden (Skvda, Vastra Gotaland); New Zealand (Auckland); Romania (Hunedoara); Latvia (Riga); Italy (Rome); South Africa (Johannesburg and Pretoria); and Egypt (Cairo). That covers quite a bit of ground!
Thanks to all of you for making us part of your day. Whether you’re as near as Bethlehem, PA (less than an hour from here) or as far as Guatemala, Sweden, or Egypt, we’re delighted to have you, and hope to see you again soon! The world is, we find, so very much more than we’d ever imagined.
Our friend Ben, Silence Dogood, and Richard Saunders
Poor Richard’s Almanac
But would you watch your kids? May 13, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in pets, wit and wisdom.Tags: doggie daycare, dogs and people, puppy webcam
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Silence Dogood here. If you want a happy dog, you need a well-trained dog. You especially need a well-trained dog if, like our Shiloh, she’s going to grow up to be 120 pounds of what would look to the casual bystander like a black wolf. Right now, Shiloh is small and lovable, with a goofy expression and sloping ears that give her more the look of a fruit bat than a German-shepherd-to-be. Everyone loves our Shiloh. We want to keep it that way.
So, on our vet’s recommendation, we’ve signed her up for puppy preschool at nearby Cold Nose Lodge in Alburtis, PA (www.coldnoselodge.com). Last week, I took Shiloh over to check out the premises and to make sure she was okay with lots of other dogs, since I didn’t want her disrupting classes when they start June 9th by barking at her classmates. Rayne Reitnauer, Cold Nose’s owner, quickly laid those fears to rest when she introduced Shiloh to six playmates of all breeds and sizes. But she suggested—and I agreed—that in the runup to the start of class, it would probably be a good idea to drop her off at puppy daycare one morning a week to make sure she was well acclimated to other dogs.
Today was Shiloh’s first half-day, and I’ll admit that I felt a pang to see her go, especially when she wept to be parted from our friend Ben at such an early hour. (Of course, once she arrived, she was fine.) We’d gotten her settled in and I was about to leave when Rayne mentioned that I could go to the Cold Nose website and watch Shiloh on puppy cam. O…M…G. Puppy cam! For a Luddite like me, this was not just over the top, it was such a stroke of brilliance I was dumbfounded. What a great way to reassure working dog owners that their precious pups were really okay and having a good time even when they couldn’t be with them.
When I got home, I went to the website and—screaming for OFB to come watch—clicked onto the webcam in the small dog room. Hmmm, it looks empty. Wait—there’s a dog! There are two dogs. Look, there’s Shiloh!!! Ben’s eyes rolled before he departed to take his morning shower, but it took me a good five minutes to tell myself I really had better things to do and click off the site. I’ll probably go back to look for the little furball again before I can pick her up at 12:30, hopefully happy and exhausted, and bring her home.
Meanwhile, as I marveled over this latest development in human/dog relations, I had to ask myself: If there were a webcam set up in your kid’s classroom, would you watch it?
‘Til next time,
Silence
The container tomato trial. May 13, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in gardening, homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: container gardening, growing tomatoes, growing tomatoes in containers, tomatoes
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Our friend Ben was very interested to read a recent post by Vanessa Richins at TomatoCasual (www.tomatocasual.com) called “Dwarf Tomato Plants.” Vanessa was reviewing a number of tomato plants that were small enough to grow in containers, including ‘Micro Tom’, ‘Micro-Gold’, ‘Red Robin’, and ‘Tiny Tim’. She also mentioned The Dwarf Tomato Project (http://dwarftomatoproject.net/), a venture spearheaded by tomato lovers in Adelaide, South Australia and Raleigh, North Carolina who aim to breed smaller tomato plants for containers and limited spaces.
Our friend Ben was especially interested in all this because my vegetable bed space is limited, but my appetite for homegrown organic tomatoes isn’t. In addition to the heirloom tomatoes I’d planted out, I’d decided to trial one of my favorites, the hybrid orange cherry tomato ‘Sungold’, in a container just to see how it fared. Then, in one of those serendipitous occurences that occasionally bless us all, Silence Dogood and I stopped by the nearby Rodale Institute on Saturday to check out their plant sale. Silence was keen to see if they had any cardamom plants (jackpot!), and our friend Ben wanted to check out their tomatoes. To my amazement, they had seven different varieties bred especially for container growing!
I don’t suppose I need to tell you that I snapped up one of each. The Hawk’s Haven container tomato trial was officially underway. Rodale’s offerings would have been interesting even if I weren’t obsessed with container culture. They had ‘Maskotka Cherry’ (a red cherry tomato), ‘Vilma’ (a blackish-purple cherry tomato), ‘Smarty Cherry’ (a red grape tomato), ‘Husky Cherry’ (a red cherry tomato), ‘Polbig’ (a red roasting tomato), ‘Heartland’ (a 6-8-ounce red tomato), and ‘Little Sweetie’ (an elongated red cherry tomato). In addition to these, our friend Ben bought ‘Pride of the Trial’—or at least that’s what I thought the sign said. The tag in the transplant turned out to say ‘Pride of the Trail’, a rather different concept, and I’ve been unable to find anything about it online. Does anyone know anything about this variety? This one apparently wasn’t a container variety, but I thought I’d try it in a container anyway so poor ‘Sungold’ wouldn’t get lonely.
Back at home, while Silence was planting her coveted cardamom in the greenhouse bed and adding a few herbs to one of our outdoor raised beds, our friend Ben took the tomatoes out of their 4-inch pots and put them into the biggest utilitarian pots I could put my hands on, which ranged in size from sort of big to ginormous. I planted the tomatoes in a mix of potting soil and mushroom compost. My method was far from scientific: I put the biggest transplants in the biggest pots I had on hand and worked my way down to the smallest plants in the smaller pots, figuring that I could pot them up as I was able to acquire bigger pots. At least they all had room to stretch their roots in good soil. I also have some spare tomato cages to stick in the pots if any of the tomatoes show signs of getting out of hand.
Let the tomato trials (or, ahem, trails) begin! With our current nights in the 40s (?!!!), I have the pots in the greenhouse, but once it finally warms up, I’ll move them to a sunny spot outside. I’ll add liquid seaweed and SUPERthrive to their water, but probably won’t do anything else in the way of fertilizer since they already have the benefit of the mushroom compost. Unless, of course, they start looking miserable, in which case I’ll add some organic fertilizer—maybe a little guano or even some of our own homegrown chicken manure.
If anyone else out there is growing tomatoes in containers, I’d love to know what you’re growing, how you’re growing them, in what size pots, and how it’s going!
