Update on the Comfrey Experiments

I posted earlier this year about two related projects to do with the comfrey plants.  The first goal was to get rid of the comfrey in the garden proper, because since it was planted the garden has expanded and the comfrey is no longer holding down the corners, but mucking up what I'd like to have as a pathway.  The second goal was to create a comfrey hedge along the northern edge of the garden with some of the rootstock I was trying to get rid of.

I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the hedge is a success.  The tiny pieces of comfrey root that were transplanted in late February got very little help, and yet they've grown into a row of thriving plants.  I did use a hand scythe a few times to cut back weeds and grass that grew up alongside the comfrey in spring and early summer.  By mid-summer the comfrey clearly had the edge and was able to hold its own.  I don't anticipate that it will require any further care.  From now on, and for years to come, the comfrey hedge should hold the line on any grass or weeds that would otherwise encroach on that garden border.  I've run the lawn mower right up to that edge of the garden several times, shredding large comfrey leaves that hang down.  As expected, the comfrey shrugs off such incidental abuse.  I'm definitely thinking about where else a comfrey hedge would be of use.

The possible downside that I worried about - that rodents would make themselves at home under the protection of the comfrey foliage - has come to pass.  A few times I've seen rodents darting between the comfrey hedge and the raspberry canes.  But I haven't noticed any significant crop damage that I can attribute to them, and we have a prodigiously talented hunter-cat.  I know he's keeping all sorts of rodent populations in check (when he's not stoned, of course).  So I'm content to let that ride.

As for the eradication part of the project, that's going about as I expected it would.  I have cut back lush growth in the original locations at least five or six times this year.   It keeps sending up leaves, just a bit slower and less abundant each time.  I didn't expect to get rid of the comfrey in a single year, and clearly I haven't.  I'm perfectly fine with that.  I'll keep on with the reaping next year.  If it manages to hang on to sprout after that, it surely won't have much oomph in the third year of the eradication project.  I'll keep you posted.

If you need more information about why I'm growing comfrey in the first place, read about its wonders.

Incidental Potato Harvest

Here's a picture of most of the potatoes that came from "volunteer" plants that came from potatoes I missed during harvest last year.  They're laid out to dry in the garage for a few days, and then they'll go into crates and stay down in the basement where it's quite dark, if not yet all that cool.  There are still a few more volunteers to bring in, but this prodigious bounty weighed in just around 34 pounds (15.4 kg).  I'm rather amazed at what we got for doing basically nothing, and from one of the smaller garden beds.  It certainly brightened what was looking like a day of weeding drudgery.

Last year after this potato bed was harvested we lasagna mulched heavily.  The lasagna mulch wasn't for the potatoes of course, because we never guessed we'd overlooked so many.  The intention was just to improve the soil there and hold the weeds down.  My surprise at the number of potatoes that poked up there this spring had as much to do with the plants (apparently effortlessly) punching through heavy layers of cardboard and a generous amount of wood chips as it did with having missed so many spuds at harvest last year.  Obviously the lasagna mulch treatment meant that those potatoes that escaped harvest had some primo soil to grow in and a nice cozy layer of protection above them.  Many of these harvested spuds were surprisingly deep in the soil.  Which convinces me that I probably missed some this time around too.  And we just lasagna mulched there again.  Which suggests there might be a repeat of this event around this time next year.  That would be fine by me.  It's wonderful to have potatoes this early in the year.

The main crop of potatoes from those I planted deliberately this year remains to be harvested.  They need another three to four weeks, I'd say.  I like to keep them in the ground until the weather has cooled a bit so that they store for a longer time.  We'll see if the stuff I deliberately planted produces as well as the inadvertent spuds.

Rainy Days and Stalled Plans

It seems we're getting all the rain we missed in June and July in August and September.  It's been overcast and rainy here for what seems like weeks.  We have hurricane Lee, way down in the Gulf of Mexico, to thank for this particular storm.  It strains credulity that a hurricane half a continent away could send us this much rain - six inches or so over the last few days.  Given the thorough soaking that Irene left us with not so very long ago, the standing water in the low spots, soggy turf in the high spots, and road closures all over aren't surprising.  The hens and broiler chickens don't seem too happy with the wet ground, though they have enough shelter to keep their feathers dry.  Apparently the Cuckoo Marans hens have the benefit of being bred for fairly wet conditions.  I do my best to situate all of them on what high ground we have, but it's tough when I need to move them every day.  We could use a let up in the rain now.

It's all so frustrating on the one hand - this should be the tail end of the massive summer harvest, and I'm holed up inside instead.  And there's our hoop house project which has been stalled by one thing after another this year.  We've made a start on it, laid out the footprint, built some raised beds, and gotten them mostly planted.  But if we don't actually build the structure around those beds very soon, it'll all be for naught.  The plants won't survive the winter unprotected.  And winter is coming.  On the other hand, I have to admit, it's refreshing to have a weather related excuse for indolence and moping.  There was certainly a dearth of those earlier in the summer.

To top it off, the rain check excuse coincides with a much more serious reason why the hoop house project is stalled: my husband broke his thumb a week ago.  He took a tumble on his bicycle while coming home from work on wet roads.  It could have been much worse; he wasn't hit by a car and he was wearing a helmet and biking gloves.  But he's very sore and his left hand is out of commission for at least the next few weeks.  There's still no firm timeline on when he'll have full use of his hand again.  At least he's right-handed. 

The rest of the hoop house construction really needs two people to complete.  It's far from ideal that we put the beds in before the hoops were in place, but the plants had to be planted at a certain time in order to mature before winter sets in.  That seems to be the way projects go around here - everything done at the last possible moment, and therefore done imperfectly.  We'll see what we can accomplish with three hands once the weather clears up, and then see if we can corral some friends to pitch in with what we can't do by ourselves.  This would be a nice time to have WWOOF volunteers beating down our doors, but I haven't had so much as a nibble in quite a few weeks.

I'll quit moping now, even though it's raining again.  And I'll try to have a more upbeat, more useful post out soon.

On Nature's Wrath and Windfalls

It's been quite a week; earthquake and hurricane alike in a region not known for either phenomenon.  The earthquake was at least as palpable as any I experienced in 14 years of living in California.  I was staggered to learn how far we were from the epicenter.  In the moment it felt to me like a very local event.  We took the hurricane seriously and prepared by clearing the yard of potential projectiles, storing water, getting all the laundry and dishes done, filling the empty space in the chest freezer with bottles of water, keeping the oil lamps and matches handy, and taking showers a few hours before the storm was due.  We came through unscathed, with only a brief loss of power.  We're near a major hospital and I suspect our grid is somehow "privileged" because of that.  Our power loss may have been only a second or two; it happened while we slept.  We got about as much rain as predicted, roughly seven inches (18 cm).  The chickens weren't at all happy about the extremely waterlogged backyard, but the sun shone beautifully today and chickens have very short memories.  All signs point to the ground drying out fairly quickly.

Hurricane Irene gave us a jumpstart on the apple thinning that our old apple tree usually commences in late summer.  These apples are still undersized and have developed nothing of the sweetness they will hold in a couple of months.  (We don't know the variety, but it harvests exceptionally late.)  For the past couple of years I've collected the early drops and donated them to my farming friend for her hogs.  We typically can give her as many as ten or twelve buckets-full over the course of a six weeks or so.  The pigs don't mind the incredible tartness of the apples apparently, and my friend is happy to accept free food which she knows has not been sprayed with anything.  Though her farm is not certified organic, she has a good relationship with her customers which is based on trust and integrity.  She'll accept any sort of excess garden produce she has confidence in, as well as acorns or hickory nuts for her pigs.

I am happy to provide the unripe windfalls to her.  At the cost of very little effort to myself, these sour fruits can provide value as food, if slightly indirectly.  I don't even have to take them to her since her husband passes our home on his way to work.  He picks up the buckets on his way home and returns the empties later in the week.  I see this as another instance of something from nothing.  This is a prominent aspect of my homesteading mentality - making an effort to prevent waste and finding a way to get value out of what would otherwise be useless.

Of course, it doesn't hurt at all that farming friend often donates to me the hog jowls that her customers disdain.  We have no formal agreement on this, and I always offer her half the jowls back after I've turned them into guanciale.  I definitely feel that I get the better end of the bargain.  But the reality is that both of us are making an effort to reduce waste, and we both benefit.  I cannot recommend it highly enough to aspiring homesteaders: make friends with small-scale local farmers!  It's good to know other gardeners too, but farmers and homesteaders can benefit each other in many ways.

I'll mention also the other use of unripe apples that fall from the tree, even though I have only theoretical knowledge of it.  Apples are very high in pectin, and the more so the less ripe they are.  Before powdered or liquid pectin was commercially available in stores, underripe apples were used to thicken jams and jellies.  Just as with most old domestic arts, this one is still viable today.  If you have your own apple tree and were so inclined you could use early windfalls and drops as a free substitute for store bought pectin.  I've no doubt google would furnish you with the details.  If I ever become so ambitious, I promise a blog post will be forthcoming.

My Cat, the Stoner

For a variety of reasons, I planted a lot of catnip this spring.  It's a useful and mild medicinal, reportedly good at repelling flea beetles from garden crops, and most famously attractive to cats.  I took some pains to protect the tiny live plants I ordered from Richters.  I asked for a dozen of the smallest, cheapest plants, figuring that if I had many of them there was a better chance that at least some of them would survive.  After planting about ten of them near each other, I laid the chicken greens feeder over them to keep the cats from either eating them whole, ripping them out of the ground, or simply rolling them to death.  They had a few inches of protected headspace, but any part of the plant that grew taller than that was subject to feline depredations.

It worked.  At least seven of those ten plants survived, and it didn't take too long before I was able to remove the protection of the greens feeder.  Being a hardy mint family member, the catnip can now stand up to whatever abuse the neighborhood cats can dish out.

I find our cat Mojo lying between the fence and the catnip quite often.  It's one of his favorite hangout spots, for good reasons: it's sunny, he can hide himself behind the herb and still have a commanding view of the whole yard, and if startled can slip under the fence to the neighbor's property.  Mojo is one of the most resolutely cheerful cats I've ever known.  Unless made nervous by strangers or a strange situation, he's always in a good mood, a regular Mr. Bliss.  So he hardly seems the type to need routine self-medication.  Or maybe I have it all wrong and he's so happy because he has such easy access to kitty dope.  Maybe he'll get cranky and go into withdrawal when the plant dies down for the winter.

The thing I've noticed though about catnip is that its effect on cats seems inherently self-limiting.  No matter how drugged out cats get by smelling or ingesting catnip, it only seems to last about 15-20 minutes.  Repeated exposure after that has little effect. Yet Mo' will hang out in that spot for hours on a nice day.  Maybe he just has wholly positive associations with that place.  Or maybe he doesn't want to share with other cats, so he guards his supply.

I'm not much for recreational drugs myself, but my stoner kitty does make me ponder several questions.  Is there any sense in making a plant - a natural living thing - illegal?  Do cats have more self restraint than humans when it comes to psychoactive herbs?  Do the ills of human society lead to addictions where a more balanced existence would allow us to use natural drugs recreationally without such complications?  Or is it the added complexity of the human brain as compared with a cat's brain?  Or is our tendency to synthesize natural substances into more potent drugs the real problem?   I can't see that my cat comes to any harm, or creates any harm, by indulging in a profound high fairly frequently.  Granted, he's not pregnant, and I have no idea how catnip would affect feline fetuses.  Also, he doesn't smoke catnip, or take synthesized tabs of 'nip at a kitty rave.  And perhaps if he did, the drug would affect him differently.  All he can do is eat it or roll in it.  Either seems to work for him.  I think animals have their own wisdom sometimes, and I'm still puzzling out the lessons of cats and catnip.

Anyhow, it's nice to know I've got a homegrown supply of kitty happy leaf and that my cat can get stoned frugally.  Next year I'll have enough catnip to derive some benefit from it myself.  And yes, if you were wondering, this post is at least partly just an excuse to display pictures of the cat.

Harvest Meal: Chicken in a Pot

I never posted about the source of the main course of this harvest meal.  It was a runty broiler that my farming friend gave me when it was half-size to the rest of her broilers, which were ready for slaughter.  Something was definitely off about this Cornish Cross bird, because it took me more than two additional months to raise it to a size that looked sort of ready to harvest.  I finally decided on the slaughter date (Sunday) only because our own broiler chicks really needed the extra room provided in the poultry schooner, which is still in service.

Monday night's method of preparation...well, that was an experiment for which I had to work up my nerve.  "Experiment" only in the sense of trying something entirely new with a precious bit of homegrown meat.  I'm usually loathe to branch out too far with high value ingredients, and no food is so scarce as meat raised on less than an acre.  But this Chicken in a Pot came from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table cookbook which I found on the new arrivals shelf at the library.  Greenspan is no slouch in the kitchen.  The rustic appearance of this mundanely name dish appealed to my peasant cooking propensities.  (But trust me when I say the cover photo of this dish is far more beautiful than the one above.)  So I took a risk, and I'm glad I did.  Basically, the chicken steams itself inside a cast iron dutch oven sealed air-tight with a ring of simple dough.  The bird and the accompanying vegetables are pre-browned to ensure some color, but every drop of juicy goodness collects in the dutch oven.  Everything turned out super moist, super tender.  For copyright reasons, I'm not going to reproduce her recipe verbatim.  But I will tell you what I put in the pot.

Our broiler chicken weighed just under 5 and a half pounds.  Had it been any larger I don't think it would have fit into our standard size dutch oven.  Aside from the bird, I put in homegrown purple potatoes, garlic, shallots, rosemary, thyme and a few boughten carrots.  I browned the bird and all the vegetables except the potatoes in a mixture of bacon fat and olive oil.  The dough was just water and flour, though I did add some of the leftover fat from browning the ingredients.  The rest of the fat went into the dutch oven.  I enjoyed the challenge of tucking as many potatoes as I could around the chicken, without stuffing it so full that it wouldn't cook through.  Greenspan called for adding both white wine and chicken broth to the pot, but I omitted these, largely because I was moving 100 miles an hour on Monday and only scanned the recipe well enough to get a general sense of it.  At serving time there were plenty of juices in the dutch oven; I think it would have been a swimming pool of liquid had I been more faithful to the author's intention.

The only tiny disappointment of the meal was the crust that sealed the chicken and vegetables into the dutch oven during cooking.  I was surprised to find that Greenspan's recipe made no reference to it after the chicken was cooked.  I wondered whether it would be worth breaking up and soaking in the abundant juices in the bottom of the dutch oven.  I can't abide the thought of wasting the flour, you see.  Not only did my crust end up just this side of well charred, but it also had little flavor or texture.  We tried the juice soaking technique and found it really only made the crust marginally edible. If I were to repeat this dish in the future, I might try sealing the dutch oven with a loop of good yeasted bread dough.  If the dough started out well chilled I can imagine it forming a beautifully browned and scrumptious ring, the perfect vehicle for dunking in roast chicken juices.

It was incredibly satisfying to tuck into a meal that was almost entirely homegrown.  The carrots might have come from the garden if it hadn't been for the few that I had hanging around in the fridge, the leftovers from a spate of morning glory muffin baking.  Other than that, the only ingredients that weren't produced right here were the fats, salt and pepper.  This bodes very well for our six broilers, which are coming along nicely and are now out on the "pasture" full time, in the poultry schooner.

By the way, if any of you are raising birds for the table, or mulling it, and are planning to do your own slaughtering and processing, you may have pondered the same questions I did.  How soon does rigor mortis set in?  How long does it last?  Does it adversely affect the dish to cook a bird in rigor mortis?  And if so, what are the windows of opportunity for cooking the bird?  The basic answers to these questions are that rigor mortis sets in very quickly with poultry, and yes, it's best to avoid cooking a bird in rigor mortis.  Fortunately, it doesn't last too long.  Either cook a bird immediately upon slaughtering and processing, or refrigerate the bird and wait about 24 hours for the rigor mortis to dissipate.

Some of you have asked for a pictorial guide or even video on my slaughtering process.  So far we haven't had any clean hands available to hold a camera on slaughter day, but I'm keeping it in mind for the broilers we are raising at the moment.  If I can corral an innocent bystander with enough intestinal fortitude into taking some pictures or video, I will certainly post them later on.