Harvesting Fava Beans

We harvested a few rows of fava beans and are quite happy with how well they filled out this season. For the most part we use these as dried beans in soups, bean dishes, and their subtle flavor makes them great for re-fried beans. After shelling they are placed on racks in the sun to dry, once dried they are stored away in glass gallon jars until needed. Of course a bucket of the nicest looking pods are always shelled separately for next year's seed. Because of their extremely cold hardy nature they are our absolute favorite bean to grow and the remaining debris are an excellent amendment for the soil in our gardens.

Jostaberry

I picked and froze the last of our jostaberries the other day, jostaberries being a cross between a black currant and gooseberry. Our oldest bush and the parent plant of numerous others is now around 4-5 years old and starting to produce fairly well. I think we picked almost gallon off it this year. We have many more "starts" ranging from 5 months to 3 years old and are excited at the prospects of reaping ever increasing harvests going forward.

Perhaps my favorite thing about this plant when compared to our gooseberries and currants is that the fruits, in our garden, ripen much later helping us to avoid any problems with currant flys that so often plague the latter two. The flavor can best be described as sweet and tart, I have a feeling we will enjoy using it in various recipes in the future. It is not as tasty as a goosberry but if you take into consideration it's lack of pest issues the flavor gap becomes less noticable. One other thing I like about this particular plant is that the fruits do not fall off everytime the wind blows like our currants tend to do. The berries are firmly attached, almost too firmly.

Gooseberry >


Jostaberry >

What is a Weed?

But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else. In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit. Weeds are people's idea, not nature's. ~Author Unknown

One of the many challenges we face in growing our own food is in that of competing with the plants (weeds) native to this area. In our gardens we have chosen to "try" and view our weeds as an asset to the garden rather than a hindrance, working with them rather than against them as much as possible and using them as a valuable source of nutrients for our vegetables. Lambs quarter, pigweed, wild sorrel, mallow, chickweed, wild mint, dandelions, plantain, and various clovers make up the majority of common weeds that inhabit our gardens.

In the videos below you will hear the thoughts of Hellen Atthowe of BioDesign Farm and see how she, in her small produce farm in Stevensville Montana, focuses on working with her weeds and clover cover crops, using them to not only nourish but also help create a more natural and beneficial system for her amazing peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants. I found these videos to be most informative, especially in regards to Hellen's ideas on some of these weeds, "self-established" mallow in particular, being an surprisingly excellent additional source of slow release nitrogen in conjunction with her more commonly used nitrogen fixing leguminous cover crops.

Our rows are kept very narrow, practically disappearing around this time of year, allowing us to not only use every inch of space available but also more easily manage the weeds.

We have been trying to apply, on a much smaller scale, somewhat similar methods of weed control in our own gardens. Instead of a tractor we use a hoe, shovel, and push mower, but in the end the results are the same. The weeds are allowed to grow in our isles but not go to seed or take over in the actual rows, they are then chopped up and eventually worked back into the vegetable rows as we weed and hoe and mow, thus, over time, comprising a large part of our soil's fertility. As I have mentioned in a previous post this also applies to our fall crop residue;

"I am once again focused on enriching our soil through a form of sheet mulching. Before winter I pulled up all of the remaining plant materials and broke them up a bit to be distributed amongst the garden rows. According to Emilia Hazelip plants synthesize from light and only receive a small portion of their mass from the soil. The rest comes from air and light and if left in the garden to decompose will give back much more to the soil then they take out."

I would add that living plants such as mallow, dandelions, strawberry spinach, plantains, sorrel, chicory and so forth with their deep root systems are supposedly able to "mine" nutrients from farther down helping to bring them to the surface where they will be more available to our shallow rooted garden vegetables. One of the things that I have been working on over the past couple years is growing out certain plants that I know will easily re-seed themselves and actually become "weeds" in the garden. In doing so I am, in a sense, at least partially in charge of what weeds we do and don't have. For instance, last year I overwintered and let go to seed a large amount of biennial Belgian endive and kale, sprinkling some of the seeds throughout our gardens in the fall. These plants are now growing in little clumps anywhere that I allowed them to but are also easily removed from where I do not, if I am diligent in doing so before the roots take hold.

Note the kale growing in one of our tomato rows, by the time I need to pick tomatoes this kale will have been harvested.

This year I am doing the same with a row of Italian chicory, I received a few seeds from a friend some time ago and have now established an entire row that will be allowed to re-seed itself.

Many of these so called weeds are also a valuable source of nutrition for farm animals, chickens in our case. As an example, extremely hardy chickweed and the various forms of chicory/endive help us provide the birds with green food all year around while lambs quarter fills in some of our hot weather gaps when certain greens are not as readily available to them. And where do some of the vitamins and minerals from these weeds end up but in the eggs that we eat and the compost that is spread throughout the garden. Not only that, but we eat them as well. Almost daily a few of these unsung super foods find their way into our salads.

Perhaps our garden walkways will only look pretty a couple days after I hoe them but in my mind it is much less work to use the weeds to our advantage rather than trying to constantly remove, suppress, or exterminate them which, where I live, is a losing battle anyway as they thrive in the woods around our gardens constantly spewing forth seed with reckless abandon.

Another alternative method for providing soil fertility and controlling the weeds is through the use of heavy mulch such as leaves or hay. This is something that we do in certain areas of the food garden but as our garden is fairly large we have yet to find a practical source for the amounts needed. That, and there is always the issue with it providing a nice place for voles to hide out. You can read a fellow gardeners interesting post on mulching your garden beds here.



Speaking of mulch, in the second video you will notice that Hellen discusses the use of a black plastic mulch that helps her to achieve such early and prolifically fruiting peppers in a colder climate. I will be trying this in my own garden next year with a couple of my pepper rows. You can see from my pictures below how much better some of my potted peppers planted in a black containers look when compared to the same peppers planted directly into the ground. All of my peppers are growing in a similar manner this year, the ones in pots far outpacing those in the ground even though the potted plants were started a couple weeks later after I realized the possible consequences a cold dreary spring would have upon these heat loving plants. Hope you enjoy the videos, I did.:)

Jalapeno →
Red Belgian →

A Few Rambling Thoughts on Wild Edible Herbs and Berries

This past weekend we took a drive up into the mountains to see how the huckleberries were progressing this year...not so great. Berries were few and far between possibly due to the lengthy rainy weather this spring affecting their ability to pollinate properly, so we only picked a few to be used fresh this week. Hopefully we will have better luck higher up in the mountains later this summer in a few of our favorite spots. All was not lost though as we quickly switched gears and focused instead on gathering elderberry blossoms and the flowers of St. Johns Wort that were growing wild nearby.

Thanks to a couple of wonderful posts here and here from Diane over at Peaceful Acres we recently and inadvertently discovered that St. John's Wort grows wild all around our area. It can be fairly easily identified via the purplish dots that appear to perforate the leaves and flowers which is where this plant gets it's name Hypericum perforatum. So after reading her posts we are now happily following suite and making our own herbal salve.

We have also been picking and drying clover, violet flowers, chamomile, and even a few huckleberry leaves that we use fresh or dried in various potions and teas.

A light and refreshing sun tea in the works comprised of clover, huckleberry leaves, rose petals, mint, and lemon balm.

Various herbs drying in the greenhouse.

Drying North Idaho tea plant (huckleberry) leaves for winter use.:)

We recently identified this plant as Split-Lip Hemp Nettle (?), a member of the mint family, growing in our area. Not sure what we will be using it for as of yet...might be poisonous.(?)

In the Garden - Tomatoes & Peppers

"This was going to be the year we cut back on how many peppers and tomatoes we grow due to the glut of fruits they provided for us last season," He says chuckling to himself. Well those plans went out the window with this year's seemingly never ending cold and rain. What do you do when the weather does not cooperate? Well we changed all of our gardening plans at the last minute, focusing on quantity of plants over quality. I am growing twice as many peppers and tomatoes this year under the assumption that we will no doubt have a much lighter crop come fall. So each plant only needs to produce half as many fruits in order to provide us with a similar harvest as last season. That's the idea anyway.

We also scrapped all of the many plans that were formulated this past winter for numerous varieties of both bush and pole beans focusing instead on the cold hearty fava and my old reliable runner beans, both to be used as dry beans. We have a few other varieties of beans planted but nothing like I had originally planned on growing.

We need all the sun we can get this summer so most sunflowers and any tall fences of climbing plants besides those on the outskirts of the garden are pretty much out of the picture. I even had to sacrifice my wife's beautiful elderberry bush as it was shading part of our tomato patch, no worries though as a good pruning will make it thrive even more next spring.

While the vast majority of our tomato and pepper plants are planted in the ground every extra spot of space is filled with potted peppers and tomatoes...lots and lots of them. I figured that the peppers in black pots would outperform the ones in the ground this year and I am right so far. Potting a bunch of our plants will also allow me to usher them into the greenhouse if September's weather does not pan out. This is what I enjoy the most about gardening, the challenge of making it happen no matter what. A few of the smaller dwarf tomato varieties are even starting to bear fruit.

Husky Dwarf tomatoes

Totem

Red Alert

A tasty Tumbling Tom

A ridiculous amount of caged indeterminate tomatoes

Cali Orange tomatoes in pots

A gifted Coastal Pride Orange all staked up ~ A friend grew and babied a number of these plants from seed out of a tomato we gave her last fall. Thanks Paige!

Potted Bloody Butcher tomatoes starting to form

Margherita

Patio and Husky Dwarf tomatoes planted in the greenhouse

There are even tomatoes in the Orchard

Black Pearl Pepper ~ (looking good Randi)

Our first cayenne pepper...and that's my clean hand you should see the other one.:)

Jalapeno and cubanero peppers in pots

and pots

and pots
And more pots - Now all that's left to do is sit back and cross my fingers that time will be on our side and hope for a very warm August and September because come October it will all be over for any of these fair weather plants that are not lugged into the greenhouse.

Harvesting Peas with Gimpy

With a little help from one of my trusty assistants "Gimpy" I began harvesting peas yesterday afternoon. Gimpy has a re-occurring leg injury and has been allowed to follow me around the gardens of late in order to get a little break from her mean sisters. She is also a member of a small party of "well behaved" chickens that are involved in my experimental currant fly/maggot eradication program. Currant flies emerge from the soil in April - May and lay their eggs in the fruit. When the fruit drops, the maggots enter the soil and so the vicious cycle begins anew. My thoughts are that if the chickens eat the fallen berries and any maggots that have already entered the soil it should help control the numbers of these nasty little bugs going forward.

Anyway, we harvested a nice little haul of Afilia peas and kale out of this bed and replanted more Afilia peas and fast maturing Roma bush beans in their place that will both hopefully be ready around the first part of September. I did leave a 6' section of peas at the far end of the bed to dry on the vine for next year's seed supply. While my bush peas have been planted, harvested, and replanted a small patch of our pretty purple podded pole peas (try saying that really fast) are just now in full bloom. With any luck the weather will be favorable for the next couple of months and another fine crop will be had.