Category — Daily Toil

The past weekend saw us dashing into the yard between the rains to be continue with the spring clean up. The weeds, of course, are almost the first plants coming up from the ground, but we also have impressive rhubarb, baby horseradish, some asparagus, lovage, and some herbs making a show. Leaf buds on the currants, the apple tree, and the roses assure us spring is coming, albeit slowly.

On Sunday, we indulged in a favorite motorized gardening past time: making leaf mulch. Last fall, the Leaf Thief bagged up most of our leaves as well as some of the neighbors’. We packed our leaves in those large paper lawn bags and stored them in the upper floor of our barn, where they became super dry over the winter. We brought the eight full bags down from the barn attic for a leaf shredding party.

We own a very fun, noisy, and handy tool handed down to us from friends who up-sized (Thanks, Gloria and John!)– an electric leaf shredder. Our model is actually called Leaf Shredder and is made by Craftsman. It’s a light-weight, easy to use tool that can sit on the ground or, even better, atop a plastic garbage can in which we store the extra mulch.

Jim did most of the shredding and therefore got covered with the most dust. Shredding leaves is a slightly messy enterprise, but leaf mulch is a lovely thing to have on hand for the garden so it’s very worthwhile. The shredded leaves help keep down the weeds but tend not to mat down as much as whole leaves do. The shredded leaves also give a more uniform, finished look to the beds. Like all organic matter, leaves add nutrients to the soil.

We did a quick weeding behind the rhubarb plants and applied a generous layer of leaf mulch. The rest of the mulch is stored in plastic cans until the weather warms and we can move on planting the rest of the garden.

For the last couple of weeks, we have spent some of our 20 minute garden sessions gathering leaves from our yard and some of our neighbors’. Some bagged leaves are keeping dry in our barn for use next season, and some leaves have gone directly into our compost bins. A nice thick blanket of leaves now covers most of our garden beds. They will nourish the soil as they break down over the winter and discourage some of the weeds from popping up in the spring.

Here’s a handy technique we use for keeping those leaves we have rounded up in the garden bed. When we are planting in the spring, we usually put a ring of marigolds around the edge of our large bed, which is a circle 12 feet in diameter. Marigolds are one of Jim’s favorite flowers, and we both like the look of the ring of flowers. They provide a bit of color early in the growing season and develop into a pretty hedge surrounding the vegetables by mid-summer. We have also read that marigolds provide some natural insect repellent due to their not-so-attractive fragrance.

In the fall when we remove the spent plants in the garden bed and compost them ourselves or put them in yard bags, we leave the marigold ring standing. The marigolds serve as a natural fence for keeping the leaves corralled on the bed. In a couple of rains and frosts, the leaves start to mash down enough that they are no longer in danger of blowing away. It’s another sign that the garden is almost ready for a long winter’s nap.

A beautiful sunrise turned into another great fall day and a good opportunity to follow-through on a last minute garden scheme—to plant some garlic. We grew garlic some years back, but we didn’t continue to do. Jim recently read about Carolyn Herriot’s book Zero Mile Diet, which puts an emphasis on organic gardening methods, edible landscaping and growing more food at home, and we’ve talked about how we can increase our production. We use a lot of garlic in our cooking so we decided to give growing garlic another go. My only concern was that we had left planting too late.

A little research convinced me that planting garlic today, November 2, is certainly worth a try. I consulted the website of Diane Dyer. She and her husband are local garlic gurus who operate the Dyer Family Organic Farm, and I read that they are almost finished planting their garlic — to the tune of 14,000 cloves. They are planting varieties with names like Romanian red, Creole red, Purple Italian and Silver rose, which sound both beautiful and delicious and like something I will want to try next summer when they bring their harvest to the farmers’ markets.

With a little planning, I could even be planting some of those more exotic varieties myself. Since I waited until the local supplies of garlic sets have run dry and far too late to order, however, I instead planted separated cloves of some more common variety of organic soft neck garlic. Next year will be different, as the gardener’s mantra goes.

One problem we had in our previous garden bed was that the garlic got ‘lost’ among similar looking plants. This year, we decided to put the garlic all by itself in one of our raised beds to keep a better eye on it.

Planting garlic is a pretty straight forward operation. I dug a row about 6 inches deep in the soil, and then I planted a line of garlic cloves about 4 inches apart. Points up, root side down. I covered the rows with dirt.

One issue this time of year is the heavy presence of squirrels in our neighborhood. They like to dig and search around the yard and garden, especially on newly turned soil. Jim’s suggestion is a little organic blood meal sprinkled around the area. He hopes that perhaps it sends a chill of fear down the spines of the squirrels and makes them think ‘something bad happened here!’ as they scamper away. Regardless it adds nutrition to the soil and gives the gardener the illusion of a preventative action.

The weather is cooperating so if you want to try growing a little more of your own food, it’s not too late to plant garlic. Frosty days are coming soon so hurry up– who knows how long the possibility will last.

(20-Minute Jim) I hadn’t planned on brewing today mostly because the forecast I had seen called for temps in the 40′s and precipitation in various formats. I was pleasantly surprised by a nearly sunny morning, but by the time I really started to believe the weather and not the weatherman, it was already 1:00 PM. Not too late too brew.

[Read more →]

(20 Minute Jim) Little in this world reminds me of the limits of my know-how like an apple tree.

Apple trees trigger fond memories for me. We had an apple tree in the backyard of the house where I grew up. Most specifically, my dad planted an apple tree as soon as he and Mom bought the place because he wanted me to grow up with a tree to climb and fruit to pick. And I did hide in the canopy of its leaves on more than one occasion, especially in high school. I knew just about as high as I could climb before the limbs would groan under my weight. The fruit was less predictable. One year we’d get absolutely nothing. Then the next year we’d have hundreds of tiny apples, maybe an inch and a half in diameter. It was my duty to rake them up before they soured on the ground and attracted a yard full of hornets. Apples this size, however, were perfect ammunition for battles with the neighborhood children.

Occasionally that tree gave useable fruit… sort of. As I raked them up, I would gather any windfalls that had the blush of ripeness and that didn’t have the spots of worm or hornet sting. Often they yielded a bite or two. Sometimes, I was able to gather enough for Mom to make a quart or two of apple sauce — rather tart apple sauce, as I recall. The year she moved out of the house was the best year for the apple tree. Mom canned several quarts of “Climb my Branches” apple sauce that we brought over to our cellar pantry.

The last few years there, I had started fertilizing and pruning. I fertilized with tree spikes hammered into the ground within the drip zone of the tree’s branches. Fertilizing helped the tree produce that bumper crop of tiny fruits every season not just every other. Pruning helped it produce slightly larger fruit, occasionally three inches in diameter. I don’t know if this correlation is common.

I asked a friend of the family who’d majored in forestry to show me a thing or two about pruning. One January afternoon — a couple decades ago now — we walked around the tree. To the extent that I know anything about pruning, I learned it that afternoon. I was more than daunted by the task, and I was glad I had a knowledgeable friend. I had grown up with the tree my entire life and now I was preparing to lop off parts of it. Sure, I’d trimmed branches that had been cracked in a storm but I was preparing to make deliberate cuts. I was literally dwarfed by this semi-dwarf. I didn’t really have the proper ladder and I only had a bow saw and a pair of hand snips.

Cathy started simply enough, telling me to walk around the tree and just look at it. Once you learn to see the tree, its shape, the way it grows, the easier it is to see which branches just don’t belong. That apple tree seemed to have a tulip shape, like a champagne flute rather than, say, a single poled ladder. I made a few tentative cuts. I started to see the tree a little better.

Cathy taught me to respect the “collar” around a twig or a branch when pruning. The collar is a slightly raised, well ah, collar, and it’s where the tree stores all the necessary ingredients to help a wound heal over when a branch or twig is removed. Though a branch should be removed as close to the collar as possible, it’s important not to nick or damage it.

This story isn’t one of those sudden revelation tales where I became a pruning master in one swoop of inspiration. We worked for awhile, ’til we got cold I bet. We cut away some dead wood and some water sprouts, cleared a little way for light to shine into the center of the tree. I still didn’t have the proper ladder reach up to the high branches which needed the most work. I gather it’s important not to prune away too much at any given time. I’d made a start. And I wish I could say I was diligent about pruning a bit every year. I remembered a few times, I know that, and the harvest grew at least a little better because of it. I never did get a better ladder.

In fact, I can’t even claim that I prune the tree in my backyard on a regular, annual basis. However, I did today. I donned steel-toed boots, leather gloves and a warm jacket and grabbed the bow saw, the folding ladder and the hand nippers. And at least I made an effort. I still don’t really “know” what I’m doing. But I tried to prune away the twigs the were on a collusion course with other twigs. I lopped off a good sized branch that had started to scrape against the barn. I nipped off a few water sprouts. And when I started to get cold, I came in. As I look out the back window, I *think* I can see the results of my handiwork but it’s not exactly that kind of a task, I don’t think.

And save the wood. It’s great for a smoker.