Old Days Gardening Part II

So then...step one, decide what you/family like. Eating fresh vegetables from your garden--the challenges and the rewards--are great.

Remembering Mr. O.B. Warren, and my mother's comment: Any one can be a...(in the first case it was a 'farmer', and mother's case it was a 'teacher') put together with my comment: Any one can 'diddle' at either of those occupations, but it takes more than diddling at something in order to put the adjective 'excellent' with either title.

My Adorable cousin and I are discussing 'plagues'. "About ten years ago we had a plague of grasshoppers...it kept getting worse for a couple of years. Then we had so many garden pests--they were even destroying my onions! Worms began by eating down the onion stalk and into the bulb...!" I tell her. "I did finally find something to stop the worms in my onions..."

"What was that?"

"Well, I went out and sprinkled diatomaceous earth on them..."

"What is that?!"

"Little sea creatures called diatoms..."

"How did you find out about that? Those...?"

"Well, I read..."

"Oh."

Gardening and gardening answers don't just fall into your lap, usually. We have tried to always use safe, organic solutions to gardening, and new developments (often just old ways of gardening/farming) come along yearly. We attend seminars and courses that help us learn. We try to keep an open mind to new technology, which as I've said is often old gardening, or farming methods just coming around again.

Step two is deciding if you just want fresh, or would you like to put some in the freezer or on the pantry shelf...how much do you want to plant? Many people over plant, and become so discouraged they stop trying at all. Since we live on a farm, I have room to produce sufficient amounts for canning, or freezing. If all else fails and as sometimes happens things get away from me, I can throw it to the pigs, or put it into the compost bin.

Some things work best canned, but items such as corn, rhubarb, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, okra and peppers goes in the freezer. Unless, in the case of okra, peppers, or cauliflower I pickle it.

Potatoes are a 'storage' vegetable, as is onions. There are several other storage vegetables, but I haven't had enough experience at storing some of them. I'm thinking of beets and carrots especially. Our potatoes will usually last most of the winter 'down cellar'. That means if you have a cellar or room with a constant cool temp all winter long you can dig your potatoes, (do not wash them)carefully load them into a potato bin in your cellar or cool room (I'd say about 40 degrees, but I haven't checked on the exact temperature required). As long as they are cool, dry, and dark they should store well. With the beets and carrots, I believe you would store them in sand.

Another note here about fruit. The old varieties of apples were bred for different uses. Most of us have never experienced the old varieties. There were early varieties, all the way through the seasons to harvest the apples. The colors were vast. I'm not sure about a 'white' apple, although I have seen some that were very light, and there was also a 'black' apple--no, no, not rotten. It was that color by design. And flavors! We have lost much of this culture. I don't know as much about other fruits, but I suspect this has happened to them as well. Some are attempting to bring these 'heirloom' varieties back as is 'Seed Savers Exchange' from Decorah, Iowa. I heartily applaud their efforts, but would like to see these varieties more easily available throughout the country to some of us 'backyard' orchardists. Some varieties were for storage apples (maybe other fruits also) that would keep 'down cellar' in barrels packed with sawdust all winter.

Going back to the last post and using beets as an example, putting a good gardening catalog and a good canning-freezing cook book together is almost indispensable to calculate how much/how many. In both cases these things are often not a hard and fast rule. In dealing with life there are times when my mother's old saying, 'figure long, figure wrong' comes home to roost.

The speaker from Abbe Hills Farm is giving us 'clues' on how she runs her 'CSA' (Community Supported Agriculture). "This broccoli variety reads: 48 days from transplant. One year I transplanted my broccoli--it wasn't ready in 48 days. It wasn't ready in 60 days...it was 90 days at least!" Well, you can see how frustrating this can be, but these are 'guesstimates' as I like to term them.

I hate to waste anything. We were taught not to be wasteful with the mother's warning, "Waste not, want not!" Consequently, I try to plan, and as I said, I have the option of preserving the items, giving them away, throwing them to the scavengers (pigs/chickens), or compost heap.

Not everyone can keep pigs or chickens, but if you have a back yard a compost heap is relatively simple. We have taken salvaged pallets to make ours from (no, I don't remember where we came across them, but they were free since the people/company was throwing them away.)

The fellows pounded steel posts where we wanted to put up the pallet then they tied the pallets to them in sections. We have three bins. One for collecting, when it is done collecting, it is set to composting, and we begin to 'collect' in the next bin. We just continue to rotate which one we are using out of. When we still had the animal manure--way before the pallets--we would make a manure pile/kitchen scraps compost heap. It did wonders for the garden.

Now, without a good steady supply of animal manure it is mostly kitchen scraps. Potato/vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, tea leaves, and that sort of stuff are thrown in as well as autumn leaves and occasionally we throw grass clippings into the mix, and once in awhile we add chicken manure. When the container is as full as you want, (it should be at least 3 foot high by 4 foot to ensure that the pile will 'heat up' sufficiently in the middle) cover it with dirt, spray with water, let sit for a month then 'turn' it. Take your pitch fork and 'turn' the conglomeration, mixing it well in order that at some point all of the mixture will spend some time at the center of the mixture where it is 'hot'. You can buy a compost mixer from hardware stores as well. It runs in my mind that it resembles a concrete mixer.

We use this to 'side dress' everything in the garden, around flowers, shrubs--it is a good all-around fertilizer.

I have a friend that has a very small garden, but there is often just her and her husband, so it is enough for them for fresh eating. They have just about everything in their small garden that I have in my large one. She enjoys the gardening and the rewards that she reaps. It is good for the body and the soul, as they say.
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Genesis 2:8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9) And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
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