Category: The land

Winter rye grass

Back in October, I used the tiller to work 650 pounds of organic fertilizers into the garden area, then I sowed winter rye as a cover crop. The rye grass is doing well. Not only will it make a nice winter cover crop, it also should serve as a great source of winter greens for the chickens. Each morning when I let them out of the chicken house, they immediately start eating grass and clover. They have a craving for greens. I’m pretty sure that it’s the chlorophyll that gives their egg yolks such a deep orange color.

Beets

The beets and turnips have survived the light frosts and freezes we’ve had so far. I want to let them grow as long as possible, but I’ll have to pull them all the day before the first really hard freeze is forecast.

A frostbitten young fig tree

Patience, looking shabby

One of the hens, Patience, has been moulting. She lost her tail feathers. She looks pretty shabby at present, but I can see the new feathers coming in. She’ll need those feathers soon enough.

It’s acorn season. I’ve long been curious about foraging for acorns, learning how to prepare them to be eaten, and seeing what they taste like. During October, a small troop of children probably could gather bushels of acorns in the woods around Acorn Abbey.

I’d like to find a good anthropological history of the acorn, if such an opus exists. It would be fascinating. For those of us whose ancestors are from northern and western Europe, or from North America, acorns are in our DNA. Acorns as a foodstuff were critical to migration and survival. If you go into the woods today and gather acorns for a while, it’s easy to imagine how the acorn economy would have worked. The gathering, almost surely, would have been children’s work. Then I can imagine the whole tribe sitting in the afternoon sun and cracking out the acorn meats as they talked. A huge amount of labor was involved, but acorns also are an abundant source of food that come just at the right time, before winter sets in. The gathering actually is a weeks-long process. You go out and gather every day during acorn season, so that you pick up the acorns soon after they fall. If they stay on the ground too long, they’ll become wormy, or the squirrels will beat you to them.

I’ve posted in the past about going foraging with Euell Gibbons many years ago. Gibbons’ now-classic book Stalking the Wild Asparagus has a section on acorns. I have other books on foraging which include sections on acorns. The Internet also is rich with how-to articles on acorns. The problem with acorns is that they contain tannic acid. There is so much tannic acid in some acorns that it would injure the kidneys if you ate the acorns without removing the tannin. There are two basic ways to do this. You can boil the shelled acorns for a couple of hours, with several changes of water. Or you can grind and soak the acorns in cold water. The American Indians used to put their acorn meats into some kind of sack or skin and leave them in a cool, running stream for a few days.

I’m planning to process my acorns with cold water. Though it takes longer, less energy is involved, and I feel sure it was the method that our ancestors used. After I’ve done this and eaten some acorns (that may be a week or two), I’ll post again.

Every year at this time, I discover more wild persimmon trees that I previously hadn’t noticed. Persimmon trees are easily spotted this time of year not only for the persimmons hanging on them, but also because the leaves redden and develop interesting spots and patinas. I found this young tree just today at the edge of my woods. I flagged it with red tape so that I can clear around it this winter and give it room to grow.

Above: Ken sowed beets, turnips, and mustard in the raised beds before he went back to school. The greens are now almost big enough to start harvesting. Former colleagues of mine from the Winston-Salem Journal, who live about five miles from me and who have been gardening in this area for over 30 years, say that February is probably the only month that they’re not eating fresh foods from their garden. I’m quickly beginning to realize the importance of the early spring garden and the fall garden. It’s more fun to work early and late gardens, because the work doesn’t have to be done in the heat of summer. Also, the rain here generally falls more reliably in the spring and fall. This year’s fall garden will have beets, turnips, mustard, the greens from those three, and some sweet potatoes.

Above: Mustard.

Above: The raised beds. And, yes, I hang my laundry on the side porch. I still don’t have a dryer. It hasn’t come up on my priority list, and I haven’t felt any great need for a dryer. I greatly prefer air-dried clothes. And air-drying them is free.

Honeysuckle

Above: After Ken and I built the garden fence last June, we planted climbing roses on two sides of the fence. The roses are coming along well, but it probably will be two more years before it looks like a rose-covered fence. On the other two sides of the fence — uphill from the abbey in the work area, and the side of the fence that’s up against the woods — I’m letting nature take its course. It’s the honeysuckle, of course, that seizes the opportunity to grow on a fence. In several spots, the honeysuckle has already climbed six feet up the fence. I hope I don’t regret letting honeysuckle grow on the fence. Its vines are extremely aggressive. But it sure does smell nice.

That’s young turnips in the raised bed.

It’s amazing how fast that half an inch of rain that fell Wednesday dried out when the 90-degree heat returned. When I started tilling in the garden area Friday morning, the moisture was barely noticeable. The new tiller is very aggressive, though, so in spite of the sticks and rocks I made a pretty good first pass over the garden area.

It’s good to know something about the history of one’s soil. Two and a half years ago, my garden area was the floor of a one-acre area covered with mature pine trees. The trees and stumps were removed in the early spring of 2008. Then everything having to do with the garden went on hold for the next year and a half while all my time went into building the house. To make matters even worse in the garden area, that’s where the loggers put the heavy machine that stripped the limbs off the trees and loaded them onto a truck parked out of the road. The garden area was packed by the heavy machinery, and there were sticks and bark everywhere. Much of that has rotted in the last two years, though.

The pine trees that I took down in 2008 had been there since about 1965. Before that, my acre of land that is open to the sun was a farmer’s field, worked mostly with a mule. My land is too sloped and too irregularly shaped to be easily worked with a tractor. Maybe the mule died, or something, and someone decided to give it up and plant trees in the field.

The good news from my morning of heavy tilling is that the garden soil is in better shape than I thought. There is more humus and less clay than I was expecting. My task this fall is to work as much compost and organic fertilizers into the soil as possible, then plant winter rye as a cover crop. I’m hoping that I’ll have fairly decent soil by spring. And of course I’ll do everything possible to improve the soil each year.

I’m planning to be strictly organic in the garden area. I don’t mind using fertilizer on my grass, and I used fertilizer in my straw-bale experiment, but I don’t use herbicides and insecticides anywhere. I take that back. I used a bit of poison-ivy killer a couple of years ago.

The tiller, by the way, is not a large tiller, but it is one of the fancier models with counter-rotating rear tines. This type of tiller does a better job, and it’s easier to use. The front wheels are driven by the engine and pull the tiller forward. The tines try to pull the tiller backward as they churn. But somehow the machinery is made such that the tiller creeps slowly forward as it grinds up the soil inside the hooded area that covers the tines. Generally one hand is enough to manage the thing.