Growing Flax

Flax seed has been an important part of our diet for a number of years now and we always seem to find room for a patch of it somewhere in the garden. Our golden flax is supposed to be an extremely rich source of omega-3 fatty acids. These acids can be obtained from various sources: fish, purslane, nuts, and one of the very best sources is flax, having up to twice the amount as fish oil. The beneficial aspects of this seed are too numerous to mention in any detail. Let's just say that there is more than enough evidence to support the fact that these essential fatty acids are a very important part of a healthy diet, thus we grow flax, purslane, and eat both fish and nuts upon occasion.

But... there is always a but isn't there? A lot of controversy surrounds the facts about whether or not the average person can break down the constituents of flax, or any plant based omega-3, into the beneficial nutrients it provides as easily as with fish or nuts, especially those individuals who are not healthy to begin with. Me? I don't worry much about such things. We simply attempt to partake in all of these foods rather than concentrating on only one as a source of nutrition, hence a well balanced diet.


For us, flax has been a relatively easy crop to grow. After the last frost we plant ours a couple inches apart in a series of rows that run the width of the bed, we do it this way so that we are still able to weed in between the plants. Once our flax reaches a certain height the plants tend to fall over if we do not provide adequate support for them, support is provided by putting up a simple grid of twine that helps to hold the plants in place. One of the downfalls of having a sandy soil is that everything seems to need a little extra help remaining vertical. They grow well for us in partial sun with fairly rich soil, although I have seen many a stray volunteer thrive in the worst possible locations.


Perennial golden flax produces lovely sky blue flowers that will readily re-seed themselves each year if left to their own devices. We harvest ours when the vast majority of the seed heads have turned brown. The stalks are cut just below the last seed branch and set aside to finish drying for a few weeks at which point the seed is easily threshed out. The seeds are then stored in glass jars in a cool area with low humidity as flax has a tendency to become rancid due to the high oil content, especially once it is ground into flour. Ground flax can be kept in the freezer for a couple months or the refrigerator for a few weeks.


One of the more interesting things about flax is it's many and varied uses that stretch far beyond it's dietary supplementation. The plant via it's seeds and stalks can be used to make linseed and vegetable oil, paper, insulation, dye, hair gel, soap, thickening agents, fabric and the list goes on.

I really got to thinking about this the other day when Stefani from http://siciliansistersgrow.blogspot.com/ was kind enough to share a fellow bloggers brilliant post about the importance of textiles - http://abbysyarns.com/2007/10/should-everyone-spin-another-yarn-manifesto. In thinking about that post it dawned on me that in growing flax I have a source of textiles right in my back yard. We may indeed have to experiment with this aspect of flax in the future. Also, I found this most interesting essay on how to grow your own bowstring using flax stalks. This gives one a vision into how easily this plant material could be turned into a rough fiber that would have a wide array of applications that are directly related to the self sufficiency facet of our lives. -http://www.primitiveways.com/bowstring.html

Sweet Tomato Pie

Every once in a while you come across a really great recipe that just calls out to you "try me," and once you do you're hooked. Here is how we made a sweet tomato pie with some of our extra tomatoes.

Pre-bake your favorite homemade crust and add two layers of tomatoes and herbed seasoning

Add cheese mixed with kefir (or mayonnaise)

Layer with some carefully sauteed (caramelized) onions and garlic

Top with a few red or green peppers and more seasoning

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes

Enjoy dinner as if it were dessert

This most delicious recipe can be found at - http://cookingupastory.com/tomato-pie.☺

Cabbage & Kohlrabi

As the chilly fall weather causes the ground to thaw and freeze ever more deeply I finally decided it was time to liberate our cabbage from the trench they have been hiding in for the past several weeks. The root cellar is now complete as the cabbage join the rest of our edibles in a state of almost suspended animation awaiting their turn at the table.

With the weather, a couple weeks back, dropping into the high teens for a few days and the root cellar still a tad too warm at that time (45-50°) I dug a trench and laid out our cabbage between layers of straw and covered with a few spare pieces of plywood with dirt on top. This thirty minute procedure allowed me a grace period of almost three weeks. Theoretically, cabbage can be stored this way for many months if your trench is dug deeply and the insulation (straw, leaves, soil) is thick enough. Unfortunately, unless I want to tunnel into 100" of snow (packed), which is what we received this past winter, entrenching my cabbage is not a viable solution for us. We always struggle with the storage of our cabbage and I really want to keep them as a reliable food source for as long as possible this year since we did have quite a few, so I am hoping that bringing them into the cellar after it has cooled will make a difference.

Blink your eyes and summer's over, it seems as though we just finished planting our little brassica seedlings and now they have come full term. We pulled the majority our kohlrabi a couple weeks back and have them stored away. I grew three varieties this year and one called Gigante did surprisingly well for us, as large as some of them got they still remained tender and crisp under their bumpy skins. Over the years kohlrabi has become a staple in our diet, usually grated raw over our salads. If you have never grown them before I highly recommend you try as they will thrive anywhere cabbage and broccoli can be grown. If they receive plenty of water and are grown in a loose composted soil even our large ones do not seem to get woody but remain tender and sweet.

June kohlrabi, all leaves and no body

Kohlrabi, trimmed and ready to be tucked away into the root cellar

Most of our storage cabbage were red varieties as they always seem to keep the best for us. We are in the process of turning the green ones, mostly Late Flat Dutch and Danish Ballhead, into sauerkraut. This year we canned some of our kraut for the first time as a test to see how we liked it "cooked" but the rest will be eaten in a more raw state throughout the winter.

The kraut on the left just came out of the canner and the fresh stuff is about to be cut up for a more natural, crisp kraut.

Some of the smaller cabbage are still in the field and actually weathered the cold spell quite well. Every day or so I pick a couple that are still in good shape. The Ruby Ball seems to be especially tolerant and has so far managed to survive the cold and even a bit of snow this year. The smaller kohlrabi that were left behind were pretty much ruined (frozen solid) but still able to provide us and our chickens with very fine greens once they had thawed.

Our first snow day, (six hours of falling slush) hit about a week ago, this is one of many little cabbage left out in the weather. Still perfectly edible.

"Eat my dahlias?" she yelled...

"Eat my dahlias?" she yelled, her face contorted with a look of horror as I innocently walked through the door proudly displaying a bowl of the tubers. "Well yeah hon, I read about it in Mother Earth a while back, remember? I told you all about it" I said with a sly grin. My wife, looking at me in utter disbelief, questioned my sanity and reminded me that we had enough roots and tubers scattered about and that perhaps I should focus my attention on them and leave the poor flower bulbs alone.

"And just how do you plan on eating them?" she demanded, shaking her head in obvious dissatisfaction. "Well dear, if you remember correctly, it was I that convinced you to plant them in the first place, that said, we will grate them raw into our salad tonight" I proclaimed with smug disregard for her flowery sensitivities. "No problem Mike, you go right ahead and try them just don't expect me to get sick along with you" she responded walking out of the kitchen. "Foolish man wants to eat flower bulbs does he, well go right ahead" I heard her mumble under her breath from the other room. Pushing my luck, I couldn't help but call out a gentle reminder "they are not bulbs sweetie, they're tubers."


Anyway, it went something like that. Well, perhaps that is "quite" a bit of an exaggeration and perhaps I am a bit foolish, but in the end we both tried and enjoyed the new found spicy but subtle flavor of grated dahlia that adorned our salads. Enjoyed might also be a bit of a stretch, let's just say we reveled in the fact that they were indeed edible. All dahlia tubers are edible and so are their flower petals, I did refrain from dining on the flowers being content to simply gaze upon their beauty. No doubt eating the flowers would have seen me booted out the door with suitcase in hand. You can only push a flower gardener so far before she snaps.


Now while I am certainly not going to make a habit out of eating dahlia tubers I suppose it is good to know that if times were tough a person can have their blooms and eat them too. Dahlias like sunchokes, scorzonera, salsify and endive roots contain high levels of inulin, a healthful dietary fiber. It takes a body some time to adapt to this as inulin does not readily break down in the stomach.

The inulin in these foods has it's benefits. It can help increase the absorption of calcium and is also considered a prebiotic, helping to stimulate the growth of bacteria in the digestive system. Which, while a good thing, can cause a bit of stomach discomfort to those who have not adequately adapted to inulin rich foods. So starting out with the consumption of a small portion of these foods might be a wise choice. Don't worry, you will know if you ate too many.:)

Here is a link to the article on edible dahlias in "Mother Earth News" -

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/Edible-Dahlia-Bulbs-Recipes.aspx

One Thing Leads to Another...

You might see Spooky, the cat, in many of our photos, for the most part it's not that I'm trying to include her in the pictures so much as she includes herself. My sister-in-law found her as a small kitten roaming a busy city intersection on Halloween in 1995, and she has been our constant companion ever since.

Formal introductions aside, Spooky and I picked the last of our turnips yesterday. We saved out the best greens for the night's dinner, but as so often happens, instead of a simple salad the greens became the genesis, if you will, of another pretty darn good home grown meal. This is a fairly common occurrence around here. We will be working in the garden and a particular vegetable or part thereof will strike our fancy and even though it might only be the smallest ingredient of a meal the whole regale will be based solely around that one simple component. It's interesting how that tends to happen.


Pasta was made from last year's hard red spring wheat that included a secret ingredient that was the extra chaff. It can be hard to remove all of the chaff when winnowing grains but, once ground, you would never know it was there. We'll just call it fiber...


With this neat little contraption, a pasta maker that my better half picked up last year brand new at a garage sale for $3.00, I was easily able to turn that same wheat, ground and mixed with a few eggs, into thick delicious fettuccine noodles that made my wife laugh. She laughed because she knew, as is usual, that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. It took me a few tries to master the funny little machine but I was soon almost as accomplished as her at it.


Of course, we used leftover sauce from the previous day's canning adventures and into the same pot went diced eggplant, pepper, onion, and garlic. At the last moment I added the turnip greens and a few of the garden's remaining sprigs of broccoli. We had a most wonderful dinner and the best part was that every single ingredient minus the sea salt was from our own little garden. What more could a person possibly ask for in a meal? Thank goodness for turnip greens.

We'll Work For Food

The southeast corner of our food production facility in early June ↑

It's really pretty amazing how much time and effort goes into raising one's own food, vegetables that is. Take the common carrot for instance. We painstakingly plant thousands of seeds a few at a time in mid-April being careful to do so while the weather cooperates so the tiny seedlings are not washed away by harsh weather. Then there are always those few that need to be replanted for reasons usually unknown.

When June rolls around, we proceed to carfully thin and weed them for the first time. We weed and water, weed and water, continuously nurturing them until the end of August at which point there is often some rain and our constant battle with the weeds has been won...leastwise temporarily. We can then take a short breath before diving into the late September harvest, which requires us to pull, sort, and box them up for storage. A few months into storage they need to be checked. Is the soil damp enough for them? Are there any bad ones that might spoil those layered underneath? Carrots are a bit of work and they are also one of the most carefree crops we grow.

May carrots poking through the earth in our slightly raised beds

Same carrots, over five month later. We love the Lunar and Belgian whites.


So considering the amount of effort involved, why on earth would we choose to grow our own food rather than buying it from the stupermarket or better yet eating out at a restaurant or local fast food joint? Simple, we do it for the immense satisfaction of knowing that what we are putting into our bodies is of the highest possible quality. We do it for the pure pleasure of playing some small role in the development of these extraordinary edibles that nourish us body and soul. But mostly, for the empowerment that goes along with knowing that we can feed ourselves without relying upon others, having long since lost faith in the so called powers that be to do so for us.

My question is, why on earth wouldn't you want to know how to feed yourself? It's really not how much you grow so far as having the knowledge to do so if you ever had to.

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

-- Thomas Hardy

Is Thomas Hardy right, will simple daily tasks and passions outlast all else, or have we already forgotten how to fulfill our most basic needs? Surely as long as we live agriculture will continue, but in what form?

A Little Help Potting Endive

Penelope giving my lovely wife instructions on how to properly pack endive roots ↑

With a little help from our trusty assistant and self-proclaimed Master Gardener, Penelope, we were finally able to get some of the endive pulled and packed into pots for storage. Little red headed Penelope has been a step ahead of the rest of the flock since day one. We can take her into the garden without worrying about what she'll get into as she just likes to keep us company. This never works out too well with the other birds who immediately seek out the garden's forbidden fruits. They must be very jealous of her as they are only able to watch from afar as we dote on her. She is a very affectionate girl, the minute you kneel down she will hop onto your leg seeking attention...chicken love, it's a Northern Idaho thing.☻ If these crazy birds ever get setty I hope it's her as she is by far the most intelligent of the bunch, and that's not saying much.

After carefully pulling the endive so as not to break the roots, we cut all the greens off and put them into a large pile slowly feeding them out to the chickens over the next few days. Piled up like this the waste greens will stay fresh for over a week in fall's cooler temperatures and provide the birds with a valuable source of nutrition. The roots are then layered into small pots for storage. I finally figured out that if you lay the pot on it's side it is much easier to place the long rooted endive into them...it was Penelope's suggestion of course. I will take these pots out of our root cellar and into the much warmer upstairs one at a time and enjoy the forced greens in the middle of winter. The roots can also used as a coffee substitute - Poor Man's Coffee.

Forcing = the art of raising plants, flowers, and fruits at an earlier season than the natural one, as in a hotbed or by the use of artificial heat. In our case this applies to winter salad greens - Forced To Provide.

A substitute for this root, both for forcing greens and a sorry cup of dried root coffee, is the common dandelion.

The Pepper Room

Adding a vivid montage of colors, the "pepper room" as we refer to it, helps to brighten up the normally drab root cellar. This is where we are able to keep the last of our fresh and soon to be dried peppers in good condition all the way into December...the smaller ones anyway. Larger bell and Italian pepper varieties will store fairly well down here for a good month and the smaller mini, pepperoncini, and banana will keep much longer than that. We simply make sure to pick the ones that have started to wrinkle a bit and use those first. Some of the peppers are left in their summer pots, their leaves will begin to shed in the dark but this will keep the peppers fresh longer than if they were removed from the plants.

These hanging peppers will be brought upstairs a few at a time to dry when we begin using our wood stove in November.

We string and dry some of our peppers in the greenhouse but never have enough warm dry weather to complete the task.


I try to maintain a cool temperature of around 40° with fairly high humidity as this seems to be about perfect for the peppers and apples stored in this room. This is also where we keep fresh tomatillos, cucumbers, and larger zucchini to use as needed for the next couple months. Most of our green tomatoes are ripening upstairs but a few, especially our Burpee Long Keepers, are kept in the root cellar to slow down that process. The Burpee tomatoes can be used well into February this way. The flavor dissipates with storage age but they are still a worthy rival for any store bought tomato. So as not to lead anyone astray, the Burpee tomatoes don't really taste all that great even in their prime and are grown solely for purposes of storage. Peppers on the other hand not only continue to ripen but also become somewhat sweeter with age.

We also froze a few gallons, and have made an incredible amount of zesty chipotle salsa since the ingredients include a large amount of peppers. One of my goals for next season is to grow jalepenos and make my own chipotles inspired by this great post on Smoking Chipotle Peppers. I absolutely love the smoky hot flavor but balk at the purchase price...it's past time we grew our own.