Roots and Fruits

So, for the past couple of years we've just kind of been growing random things without an overall plan; we've tried out new plants and bought things on a whim and stuck plants in the ground any old place without a whole lot of planning. This is more my fault than David's -- but we've both agreed after this year that this is high on the list of skills we need to work on next growing season.

Part of the reason for this is that we're pushing our luck on the tomatoes and peppers at this point -- we've had them in the same place for a couple of years now, and that's just asking for trouble. Another issue is that we suck at succession planting, so our harvest comes in all at once. Yet another hurdle is that there are some fairly basic things we've just not taken the time to learn how to grow properly -- like spinach and lettuce -- so things that could be an ongoing harvest have been overlooked in favor of things like tomatoes, and tomatoes are so much work that anything else that needs to be processed at the same time stands a chance of going bad while it waits for me to get around to it. And we should eat more spinach anyway, especially since I love it raw. So next year is going to be Back to Basics Year.

This doesn't mean I'm not going to plant anything new. It does mean I'm going to reign in my tendency to purchase fifty tomato plants, though. Next year we're going to focus on growing things we eat and that store well with minimum effort, like potatoes, carrots, and onions. We're also going to work on picking up some of those basics we've not paid enough attention to, like greens. And we're going to try our hand at a few new staples: beans are a given now that we've discovered what a joy it is to harvest them dry instead of trying to consume pounds and pounds of green beans, which we're indifferent to at best; the amaranth did well enough this year that I really want to give quinoa another go next year; and we've discovered that it is possible to successfully grow sweet potatoes in our climate, as the Amish who supply them to our co-op do so. We'll still grow a few tomatoes and a lot of peppers (the bells in particular are very cost-effective!), but since we end up buying most of the tomatoes for our big processing batches anyway, we'll take a year or two off the intensive growing to reduce the risk of disease.

The other thing we're going to do is pay more attention to our fruits. We've planted a frankly astonishing quantity of fruit on our small lot over the past three years, and we're finally starting to get harvests worth mentioning. This year we added a number of things, including two tart cherry trees and three grapevines, so next year should be even better. But at some point we need to take the time to do things like renovate the strawberry bed and learn to prune back our bramble-berries and the plum tree, so it might as well be next year. And I need to take the time to really clear out the persistent weeds sprouting around our fruiting trees and shrubs so they don't have to spend so much energy competing.

There's a laundry list of other things we've been "meaning to get around to" that will make our garden more productive, but which have been procrastinated in favor of shinier, more exciting things like planting my herb garden or getting the chicken coop started: we desperately need to clean up the yard waste "compost pile" (which is really more of a sod graveyard), rake up the mulch around the raised beds and put in thick cardboard to beat back seven or eight trillion of the quackgrass plants, take out hundreds of pounds of extra dirt back by the alley to start new raised beds, and deal with the mess that is our post-giant-stump boulevard, once and for all.

I feel like up until now, what I've been doing is building the bones of a great garden -- pulling out sod, planning a layout, getting a start on where things are going to eventually go, and just trying to keep it from being too hideously ugly. But at some point you have enough bones and you need to work on covering them over, or else all you have is a skeleton, a half-accomplished idea, and it's frustrating to always look out the window and see something that feels more like "incomplete project start" than "well-balanced work-in-progress."

Even so, it's going to be tough to resist the siren call of the Baker Creek Heirlooms catalog!

Thinking about goals.

I've written up my goal list for this year three or four times and not been happy with it -- maybe my first goal ought to be to decide on goals!

In the past two years, we've begun gardening, planted lots of perennial fruit plants (more on the fruit later), and ripped out much of our grass to create growing space and a permeable patio area. We've learned to can just about everything cannable (including milk and meat), dry food for later use, make basic cheese and yogurt, make candy, slaughter chickens, and bake all our own bread. We've set up a full-room pantry and begun stocking it with staples, built a vermicompost bin, and gotten two compost piles going. So I feel like we're making some good progress, but we're getting to the point where adding to our skill-set is more of a challenge.

Things we're working on now that could use some improvement:
-Cooking vegetables -- particularly greens. Both of us approach this as if they're likely to explode if we do it wrong, which is kind of silly. After all, the worst that could happen is they could turn into unbearably disgusting green slime, right?
-Seed-starting
-Trapping with snares
-Crocheting (Which I finally seem to have gotten the hang of, as of last night! Woohoo!)
-Sewing (I can do repairs and sew a straight seam fairly well, but patterns and cutting pieces out always seems to end in disaster)
-Cheese-making (As in branching out beyond ricotta and feta)
-Canning (As in planning for canning, which even though it rhymes is actually the hard part in this era of grocery-store food on demand. This is a great post on this topic.)

Things we're not working on yet that I'd really like to learn:
-Using our greywater in the garden
-Shooting (I'm a decent shot in archery, but I'd like to learn to hunt in general, if I can ever afford to do so.)
-Soap-making (Seems easy, but I can't find lye anywhere local!)
-Knitting (Because I should be making all of our socks by now. For shame, Angela!)
-Keeping chickens for eggs and meat (I've had them before, but there's a lot of planning and city approval and such to deal with to have them here.)
-Keeping rabbits for meat (The fact that we refer to the neighborhood bunnies as "Dinner" and "Lunchable" depending on their size suggests we won't have a problem with this.)

Projects that are started and not finished because I need to get off my rear and stop being lazy:
-Rain barrels
-Pulling out some of the shrubs our predecessors unfortunately left us with, including the evergreen that seems to be entirely composed of bird poop and ugly.
-Tearing out more grass so we can plant more useful/attractive/interesting things.
-Putting up the clothesline (though I have switched from using the dryer to hanging things up inside, most of the time).

Of these, I think this year we can manage to finish the unfinished projects and figure out at least a couple on the "like to learn" list. Seed-starting and crocheting were both on that list until very recently, so we are making some progress. The trick with a lot of this is finding cheap or free ways to learn the skills, since we have very little funding to put toward them. I'd love to get more skill shares going in the area to barter some of that, but I'm not really sure where to start. (I always end up feeling like we don't have anything to barter in return for learning the things we don't know, since what we do know is so basic.) I tried to get in touch with a local Transition Towns group, but they never responded, so I think they may be defunct. I will have to do some more digging to see what I can find.