Wendy has been neither weeding nor wandering much lately. This summer I spent four weeks camping with my daughter as she built a 17ft. sea kayak at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. Then, I came home, was cleaning out the pick-up camper, got dizzy and fell off the tailgate. Ooops. The next morning I woke up early and went out on the sod roof of my underground house to pick the biggest, most luscious blackberries you have ever seen. I had about a half gallon when I got dizzy and fell over. Really ooops! The blackberry vines twined around my ankle and there was a sickening snap. As I lay there in the dirt, still protecting my precious jug of berries, my leg was pointing in a strange direction. I yelled for help. My partner carefully saved the berries and called 911.
Yes, I'm good and broken! And bionic! I dislocated the tibia and broke the fibula in several places. So much for gardening! My fierce independence had to give way to asking for and accepting helpa humbling experience. Despite all that, this was one of the best summers of my life. The farm hosted 6 twenty-something year old young folks. They lived in a yurt, a camping trailer and a converted school bus. Every nice weather evening, they gathered around the campfire to drum and play their didjeridus. It was magical.
Here in Vermont, the 80* days quickly change to cold days and freezing nights. The couple in the school bus left their bus here for the winter and set off hitching towards the Pacific Ocean. They plan to spend the winter in Hawaii. The couple in the trailer hung on as long as possible, then rented a nice, warm house for the winter. The couple in the yurt have double insulated it and added a wood stove. They want to hunker down and stay as long as possible, perhaps all winter. The maximum-minimum thermometer in the field has been 40* below zero some winters. Brrrr.
The young folks in the field kept the 98 garden beds weed-free and picked. I hobbled around in the house, preparing the garden bounty for freezing, canning, drying and root cellaring. The garden provided daily food for all of us and plenty to put away. Bonne, the yurt dweller, had at least an acre garden for the 10th year of Peace and Carrots CSAher first as the gardener. The orchard yielded its first bumper crop of plums. What a great year!
The 2nd. Annual Peace and Carrots Homestead Party for Labor Day was fun. Many great folks showed up to learn new skills and share their expertise. We pressed cider, made rope, learned to make salves and herbal teas, toured the gardens and underground house, talked and ate and talked some more. It couldn't have been better.
For even more excitement, this year we replaced the crumbling north wall of our underground home by putting in an addition there. When the house was built in 1985, it was a quick and cheap way to provide shelter for the winter. As time and money allowed, all the other walls were replaced and were waterproofed with a skin of Carlisle rubber (like a sheet of inner tube rubber), then styrofoam insulation and 6 mil. plastic. The original wall was just waterproofed with plastic. Tree roots, moles and sharp rocks put holes in it. Snow started sticking the first week of October this year and that makes preparation for winter a prime consideration. I'll be very happy when the addition is closed in.
The addition will almost double the 14x15ft. kitchen. Since I keep inviting folks to settle here, we need a big table and more food preparation space. The now-bedroom will become the living room and the addition will also give us a 10x12ft. bedroom. It is purposely small, only big enough for a bed and closet. I'm guilty of covering the bed in quilts or books or other projectsI'm supposed to cut that out with the new space.
Having a broken leg does have a silver lining. I had plenty of time to read and plan. I went over all my homestead plans and dreams, arranged the house on paper, worked on crazy quilts and organized my sewing/computer room. Another unexpected bonus was seed saving.
If you are serious about seed saving and the purity of saved seed, the best plants in your garden should be singled out. The earliest and best cabbage, beans, corn, etc. has to be allowed to go to seed. Some plants are annuals and they go to seed the first year, such as corn, lettuce, tomatoes, beans, marigolds, poppies and cosmos. Biennials are plants that take two seasons to produce seed. They include cabbage, carrots, parsley and beets. Here in Vermont those have to be over-wintered in a root cellar and planted out the next spring. Otherwise, the cold often kills them or the deer paw them up for winter sustenance. Farther south you have the luxury of mulching well and wintering them over in the garden. Another chore is digging up canna lilies, gladiolous and dahlias before the ground freezes. It's also time to dig or pull up remaining carrots, horseradish roots, Jerusalem artichokes to be eaten before spring, tender bay and tarragon plants and the herb roots that will be used medicinally such as echinacea and elecampane.
My seed saving was sort of an accident. I plant mostly open pollinated seed that is the best for seed saving, but sometimes don't get around to the saving part. I didn't save the earliest and best of everythingsometimes it was plants like the peas that were too prolific and eventually abandoned. We saved lots and lots of peas! I was better with the tomatoes, snagging some of the best ones. To save these, squeeze out the seed into a jar, add water and let ferment. When there's some nice scum on the top and all your friends and family have been properly grossed-out, , rinse the seeds well, throw out the floaters and put the sinkers on a plate to dry. Don't forget to put a label on each jar and plate! Tomato seeds all look like.welltomato seeds. You can save peppers the same way.
Pumpkins and squashes can be grown together and the harvest is just fine. Those seeds inside might be a strange cross, though. Every year the compost pile grows gourd-like zukes, bumpy pumpkins and other weird mutants. If you intend to save these seeds and want them to breed true, the ones that cross must be separated by space or flowering time. Corn is the same way.
Garden flowers are easy to save. Just let the flower heads go to seed and dry them. Make sure you pick the seed heads before they shatter or blow away. Most seed heads are opened up and the seeds then roll out or are easy to separate. Make sure the seed is good and dry, then pack, label, date and store in a cool, dark place until next season.
Somewhere out there I've heard it rumored that there are absolutely conscientious and perfect gardeners. They plan precisely in winter, label without fail, plant out everything at just the right time in the best soil. They harvest at the optimum stage and immediately preserve the food using impeccable technique, never leaving a forgotten bucket or mound of food to moulder. Yes, I'm convinced they are out there, but myself, I'm not even close! Sure, I fill 30 cubic feet of freezer space and an 8x8ft. root cellar, eat fresh from the garden for months, and admire the jars of beans and bags of dried corn, popcorn and shallots around the house and the large shelf of winter squashes and pumpkins in the greenhouse. What am I complaining about? Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. As I look at all that was done right, I also think of the holes in the deer fence and the munched cabbage and beet beds sampled by those deer. I remember the garlic beds that never seemed to be weeded enough. The geese got loose and kept the bean plants pruned, and the visiting dogs trampled some flowers and Swiss chard. The grapes wait for the arbor that we meant to put up for the last eight years. GeeI even bought new cedar posts for it, then snitched the posts to make the platform for the masonry bread oven in the field.
I've been thinking that life and gardens have a lot in common. Our dreams keep us going. It's probably a good thing we don't know what's in store for life or the garden. Neither can be totally planned or controlled. Some good intentions fly out the window. Serendipity takes over to offer unexpectedly beautiful flowers or vegetables and entropy happens, introducing chaos and compost. Isn't it great??!! The little things become the most important and the grandiose schemes are tempered by reality. Compost happens and Serendipity rules! By spring we will be anxious to do it all again. See you in the new year.
Wendy S. Martin, PO Box 69, Calais, VT 05648 IM4Farms@aol.com
