our homestead: planting a winter garden on my windowsill

It's that time of year again: the time to start tomato seeds. A Pacific Northwest tomato's life cycle is kind of interesting if you think about it...or at least my and my family's involvement with the whole process. Seeds are started in January, then planted out to the greenhouse in March. From late June through October, fruit is eaten, shared and canned up. The greenhouse goes to bed for the next few months. Then, as soon as the New Year rolls around, it's time to start thinking about tomatoes yet again and the cycle repeats itself. I'm not quite sure what I'd do with myself if I stopped starting tomatoes in January. It's just something I do and hope to continue up through when I'm an old great grandmother with cataracts and a bicycle.

Normally I start and grow at least three or four varieties of tomatoes, but this year I'm scaling back a little since I already foresee a busy summer. I did, however, want to grow my saved tomato seeds from the funky, fruity rainbow chocolate tomatoes I grew unexpectedly this year. It will be an adventure seeing what these babies turn into. I plan to keep on selecting from their fruit to tweak my own variety. Science! Anyway, every year I fill a few simple, black seed starting trays 3 inches deep with Dr. Earth Organic Vegetable Garden Planting Mix. It gets the job done.

Then I mix in some sexy microbes. You can read more about these super heroes here.

Once the soil is good and ready, I gently draw 4 shallow rows across per planting tray and carefully drop a tomato seed every half inch to an inch or so.

Then I smooth over the dirt, making sure to cover each seed with just a little bit of soil and sprinkle all of the trays with filtered water. 

This year I'm also experimenting with growing a tray of lettuce for micro-greens. Hopefully it'll work and my husband and I will be able to enjoy a little bit of a fresh baby lettuce in a few weeks. I get desperate for fresh, local greens in the cold winter. I'm not seeking huge results. No leafy giant salads. Just a few tender, sweet leaves to eat as part of a garnish perhaps. 

And furthermore, I have the best success with starting tomato seeds if I use seed heating mats. I found all of my heating mats at my local hardware store. They gently warm the planting trays to encourage the little seeds to germinate. Tomatoes will grow on a windowsill without a seed heating mat, but it can take up to a month for them to sprout and emerge from the soil. I expect to see tiny tomato starts in about a week or so since I'm using the heating mats. 

 

our homestead: a winter tour of our property

It was another cold, yet bright and blue-skyed day, and I was in the area, so I stopped by our property to explore its winter state. I walked down to the lake and noticed it was completely still as the water had been frozen over with a thin layer of ice. Then, I crunched through our frozen maple leaf coated property and was pleasantly surprised to find that while the dormant, leaf-less brush (mainly salmon berry) within the property was easier to walk and see through, the cedars and brush lining the perimeter of the property maintained winter privacy from our neighbors. I had planned on heading out here in the winter to see how the property could change in the winter months, and seeing that we still have a nice nature buffer, it will be easier to pick a building site for the home. Our 2.17 acre property is shaped like a fat "L" and we currently plan to build our house almost to the very back of the property, to maintain privacy from the road and to preserve the majority of the standing timber. Anyway, here's a slew of photos I took today from my mini-adventure. 

1. Rules of the lake.
2. The frozen lake.
3. The lake and you can see a mountain peek far off.
4.Winter sun rays on the lake.
5.Our neighbor's driveway across the road. We'll probably have a long gravel driveway too.
6.The view you'd see if you'd just stepped into our woods from the road.
7.Crunchy frozen maple leaves everywhere.
8. The front woods.
9. So many old stumps with character on the property.
10. A top portion of our property. We'll probably put the driveway on the other side of these trees.
11. Ferns everywhere!
12. My favorite cedar grove towards the middle-back of the property.
13. I would love to have a bench set up here.
14. This path leads to the very back corner of our property where it's more cleared. Good garden site.
15. Can you see our neighbors houses?
16. An old shed used to be here. Possible vegetable garden site as ample light hits this area.
17. A maple tree nest at the back of the property.
18. Sun peering through the trees near the middle-back of the property.
19. A giant V-shaped maple.
20. A creek down the road.

our homestead: raised beds filled and gojis planted

My husband shoveling compost out of the truck

My husband and I planted our goji berries today. On Saturday, my husband built two raised bed frames out of pine boards for them, so all we had left to do to get the berries planted was to fill the frames with soil and compost. After breakfast, my husband and I set out in our truck to a family farm in our area that runs a compost business. When we arrived at the farm we were surrounded by steaming mountains of black compost. A worker came over to us and we told him to fill up the truck bed. He hopped in his construction loader, scooped up a big pile of compost and dropped it in the bed. We watched our truck suspension at work as the truck instantly dropped six inches down as it was filled with compost. We also saw the beauty of our V8 engine as we hauled the load on home.

Once we were back in the yard, my husband and I set about filling the beds. He shoveled compost into our wheelbarrow and then I would push the loads down to the bed frames (we put them near the bottom of our yard where they'll receive the most sunlight). It wasn't too hard to roll the compost down the hill as the weight of the wheel barrow and the tilt of the hill made for some nice momentum. Banjo also enjoying frolicking beside me as if he was racing me. Anyway, we ended up with some extra compost, so I spread some in the greenhouse and underneath the hardy kiwis and the honeyberries. 

Once the raised beds were filled, I dug three deep holes in them; two in one bed and one in the second. We're anticipating the arrival of three more goji plants in April from a different nursery, so we'll have to build another bed. Our plan is to plant two gojis per bed. I loosened the soil at the bottom of each hole and added lime (to raise the pH of the soil as gojis prefer alkalinity). The lime smelled very sweet...almost like  Lucky Charms cereal as weird as that sounds.  I then tossed in a few handfuls of compost, followed by soil and more compost and planted the gojis. I was starting to get a bit tired at this point, so I made a quick bamboo  pole and bird-netting fortress for the double goji bed and just tossed the extra bird netting on the single goji bed. I'm not going to lie...I did not enjoy working with bird netting. I seem to have a knack for tangling it. Hopefully it will keep the deer away from my vulnerable goji plants as they spend their first night in their new  home. I plan to build a more functionable enclosure for the gojis soon. I'm happy we were able to get them in the ground before they break their dormancy and I'm looking forward to seeing how they grow this spring.  Now I'm off to curl up on the couch with a cup of tea with honey and read about soil microbes with my sleepy pups at my side. Aww, the life! 

DIY almanac: My favorite way to cook kale

My co-op was just delivered some beautiful, beautiful mixed kale braising greens from Highwater Farm of Mt. Vernon, Washington. Their kale is so very fresh and  flavorful- you can almost taste the rainwater and the soil minerals that helped it grow. I brought home a pillow-sized bag of it...and it's empty already. Kale is so good when cooked in a hot pan with a little olive oil and minced garlic, or when transformed into a hearty winter salad with chopped fuji apples and steamed beets (mmm!). Kale chips are amazing too- whether baked or dehydrated...I'll be sure to post a recipe someday, but for now, here's my very favorite way to cook kale. So simple: 

First, you'll want a good few handfuls of kale.

Then you'll want to bring chicken stock, the juice of one lemon and parmesan into the mix. 

Warm your chicken stock and lemon juice in a nice sized pan over medium-low heat. Then toss in your kale.

Lightly cook and stir until just al dente. I like my greens to still have a little bit of crunch left to them. 

Serve with a generous garnish of parmesan and enjoy your brothy kale goodness. 

our homestead: snow and seedlings

Snow on the slough

 It was sunny with blue skies today. Quite a stark difference from the wintery weather we had this past week. We had buckets of snow cloak the whole area...up to 6 or 7 inches at my house and nearly a foot or more at my mom's. My cousin from Spokane is in town right now as well, so she's been my partner in crime these past few days as we've been trying to evade getting cabin fever. I heard they received a few feet of snow on her side of the mountains too. I spent my snowed-in days by walking along the river with my dogs (this was Banjo's first snow), concocting far too chocolatey hot cocoa on my stove, stealthily sledding down my neighbor's hill at night and rolling up giant snowmen with my cousin and watching a marathon of movies while feasting on crockpot stews. 

Even with snow on the ground, I've also been busy taking care of baby tomato seedlings! Yes! I have tomatoes once again growing on my windowsills, except this year I've invested in heating mats to speed up their germination (ooh lala!) and am growing them in some fancy-schmancy certified organic potting soil. These seedlings originate from the very same seeds I saved from the tomatoes I grew last year: heirloom pink brandywine and evergreen. I'm nerdily ecstatic that they are actually growing as funny as that sounds...although that's usually the same reaction I have every time something I plant in the ground starts peeking up out of the soil with its green little nose. Never gets old for me. I'm awaiting some 'cherry fall' trailing tomato seeds to arrive in my mailbox. I'm going to experiment and  try to make some hanging baskets this year with them.

My cousin visiting Mercedes at my mom's house

My cousin's snow man...check out that mustache

Banjo and Oswald playing in the snow

An apple tree peeking over the levy

Baby tomatoes

our homestead: a winter walk on the slough

I took my boys, Oswald and Banjo, out for a dusky walk on the slough today. As I headed down a ridge and looked below, I noticed my woodcutter neighbor now has three small brown pigs in a pen made of wood pallets. These pigs are replacing the giant pig that used to lounge in this pen. As I continued on, another neighbor's cattle (most of them are black but there are a few shaggy long-horned ones) were out grazing by the road, moo-ing at us as we passed. Me and the pups walked all the way to the river, to have our path crossed overhead by a triangle of swans, followed by my neighbor driving down the road on his red tractor.  He was heading over to feed the cows and they all came and swarmed him as soon as he entered the gate to the field. Oswald, Banjo and I relaxed on the river bank for a little while, watching the water slowly move past. We always look for otters peaking up when we come down here...saw two last time. Didn't see any today though.

our homestead: goals and non-goals

Here are a few small scenes from our garden this year:

Our garlic patch 

Celery growing in the greenhouse

Sugar snap pea blossoms

Potato blossoms

One of our many sunflowers

With 2012 just around the bend I thought I'd take the time to write about some of my "homestead" non-goals from 2011 and some of my goals for 2012. I borrowed the idea of non-goals from my sister-in-law, Rachel. You can read her post from her blog here: Nickel Images goals and non-goals. Non-goals are things you might have accomplished or enjoyed or are motivated to continue. Here are my non-goals from 2011:

1) I started my own tomato plants on my windowsills in the wintertime and saw them through harvest.

2) I had a hoophouse built and was able to grow lots of tomatoes, celery and cucumbers in it.

3) I learned how to brew nettle tea for my tomato plants.

4) I completed another farmers market season selling produce for Frog's Song Farm. Every year I learn more and more from the markets in regards to the business of farming. This year I was also able to sell a lot of my farmers' produce at our local co-op, granting them another outlet for their labors.

5) I grew so much this year! Peas, potatoes, turnips, spinach, beets, kale, garlic, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, celery, brussel sprouts, sunflowers, marigolds, sunchokes, corn, pumpkins, winter squash and more.

6) I canned jams and fruit butters and made lots of pickles, using homegrown or market procured ingredients.

7) I saved lots of seeds from my garden for next year's garden, acclimating these plant varieties to our area.

8) I established more planting beds in my yard.

9) My husband and I finally brought home the second dog we'd been talking about getting forever. We love our little Banjo and Oswald's quality of life has increased now that he has a playmate and snuggle buddy.

10) I ground my own cornmeal from corn I'd grown and dried myself.

11) I learned how to make soap with my mom. The old-fashioned, saponification-of-oils-with-lye-and-six-week-curing-process-style.


And on to the fun part! My homesteading goals for 2012:

1) To establish rows of interesting berry plants including: goji berries, honeyberries, gooseberries, lingonberries and hardy kiwis. We have already pre-orded three goji plants, due to arrive in April. We'll probably have to build some sort of trellis...but that means I can also throw a few more hops into the yard.

 2) To raise a small flock of chickens, perhaps a duck or three, in the spring. I grew up on fresh-from-the-backyard eggs and nothing beats the flavor. I'm still lucky enough to be able to bring home eggs from my mom's house, but I'd like to learn how to take care of my own hens.

3) To grow even more than 2011! This year I really want to learn how to grow broccoli, cauliflower, fennel and leeks, and  melons in the greenhouse. I've also already ordered red brussel sprout seeds...it'll be fun to see how these turn out. Joe has his heart set on doing a giant lacinato kale patch too. I'm also looking forward to seeing how my saved tomato seeds fare.

4) To grow a massive sunflower patch. Why not? I saved so many sunflower seeds this year that I just might have to grow a big plot of sunflowers to nap underneath. I want it to be so big that you can see it from the road below my hill.

5) To make more soap!