Freedom and Unity

We made it!  I've been trying to write this post for a few weeks now, but whenever I sit down to do anything, the boys make me get up to play with them or go for a walk.  Yes, I'm blaming my procrastination on the dogs.  

The boys love the weather, the landscape, and the house.  They have a lot more energy, and Miles' skin problems and ear infection have completely cleared up.  Must be the air.  

Miles has his own little apartment here, so he no longer has the opportunity to antagonize his brother.  But don't worry, Miles won't be lonely in there.  He said he'd lease one of the rooms to me for a sewing studio.  Thurgood is enjoying the rest of the house, and he spends his down time stretched out on the bed, occasionally lifting an eyelid to look out the window.

Thurgood Morsel

Ben and I start our new jobs on Monday.  Though we'll be working outside of the home full-time, we'll still be able to let our freak flag fly on weekends and holidays.  Luckily, both of us are thrilled about our new careers.

Now let's get to the fun part.  Our new home place has about two dozen giant old apple trees scattered about.  We arrived just in time to harvest some of the later varieties.  Two of our loveliest new neighbors helped me pick (Thank you so much!).  We ended up with four bushels total.  If we had picked all the apples, we would have enough to feed two Asian elephants for an entire year.  

Most of the apples are tart, and some are sweet - a great combination for hard cider!    There are a lot of great resources out there for the home cider maker, so I won't give you a how-to (as I rarely do anyway).  I looked to the Alaskan Bootlegger's Bible, The Homebrew Helper, and Home Brew Hard Cider from Scratch on Instructables.com.  We don't have a cider press yet, so we used our juicer.

This is our first go at hard cider, so everything is an experiment at this point.  The process is not much different than brewing beer or making fruit wine, and all of the equipment overlaps.  

Oh yeah, I never gave a final review of our fruit wines.  Both the dry and sweet strawberry wines were decent and drinkable, but not really good enough to share with the world.  The blackberry wine was a little too good to share, and our blueberry peach wine is still aging in bottles.  

If you ever get a wild hair up your ass, I strongly recommend fermenting your own beverages.  It's not rocket science, but it can make you feel like a genius.  If you can read, you can brew!

Just so you know, we haven't just been sitting around on top of our thumbs watching airlocks bubble.  We managed to plant everything we brought with us!  That's seven varieties of garlic, 105 blueberry bushes (some are in nursery rows), six pawpaw trees, and five Asian pears.  Thanks to Ben's hard work and planning, we've begun a new micro-mini farm here in Vermont.

Baby blueberry bushes

We have a lot of work to do on the house.  Luckily, the majority of it is cosmetic.  Carpet is not a good idea when you have two St. Bernards, and the kitchen counters and some of the walls are pink!  The list goes on.  I'm looking forward to chipping away at these projects.  For now, our living room is our bedroom until we paint and change the flooring upstairs.

I'm looking forward to lots of new adventures, and meeting new people.  So far, I love everything here.

We miss our friends and family, but we don't miss the stinkbugs - they came with us!

Have YOU Ever Seen the Rain?

Boy, have I seen the rain!  It has rained eight days this month, and it's only the ninth day of the month!  It rained fifteen out of thirty days last month.  

Though the rain destroyed almost all of our strawberries (we only had two weeks of harvest), it has been quite a lovely thing for the blueberries.

 We grow about half a dozen blueberry varieties.  The first to ripen are a true treat.  They have delicate vanilla undertones that give them rockstar status around here.  We'll do our first harvest this Friday!

So, how do we know when they're sweet?  The berries are ready to pick when the base of the stem turns blue.  As you can see, the berries above are preparing themselves for market on Saturday.

Much to the birds' delight, we don't use wildlife netting on the blueberries.  We have so many bushes that it just wouldn't be practical.  Luckily, the birds have been kind enough to share the bounty with us.  Unfortunately for the deer, we do have an electric fence to keep them at bay. 

While watching the berries ripen, we've been keeping ourselves busy harvesting, drying, and cleaning garlic.  I've had a lot of fun making braids this week.  The garlic braids will be tagging along with the blueberries this weekend at market!

A Nice Start

All is well in the blueberry patch.  The bushes are dripping with buds, and we're looking forward to a fruitful season this year.

I expect that the bushes will be in full bloom by mid-week, and there will be some very happy bees!

The strawberry plants are also just beginning to flower.  I better prepare my lower back for the torture that will ensue when strawberry season arrives.

Just about everything is coming up roses - even the garlic.  We planted eight varieties last fall, and all of them are growing vigorously.  We will soon have scapes!

It will be months before we harvest blueberries, strawberries, or garlic.  However, Fat Bear Farm will have spinach, sweet potatoes, seedlings, and perhaps a bit of asparagus available at the next Saturday Cobblestone Farmers Market.

Third Time's a Charm

We had a fine time planting garlic this week.  This is our third try at it, and we're growing eight different varieties.  Here's the rundown of what went in the ground this fall.

Purple Glazer

Softneck

Mother of Pearl:  We ordered 1 lb. of this variety from the Organic Garlic Seed Farm in 2011.  It produced well, and we planted about 5 lbs. of saved seed this season.  The skin is iridescent and really does resemble mother of pearl.  It has a mild flavor and each bulb contains numerous small cloves.

Kettle River Giant:  This is our first season growing this variety.  We ordered it from OGSF, as we have been extremely pleased with the quality of their products and reasonable prices.  We planted 5 lbs. of it.  This variety is also true to its name, as each bulb is comprised of a handful of very large cloves.

I like the way I feel like I'm recklessly littering as I plant garlic, with white papery skins thrown about the landscape.

Hardneck

Chesnok Red:  This seed was first ordered from OGSF in 2011.  We planted 1 lb. of it last year, and it produced well.  The cloves are large, and the heads are tight.  We put 5 lbs. of saved seed in the ground this season, and I look forward to planting it again next year.

Georgian Fire:  We first planted this variety in 2010.  We had ordered 1 lb. of seed from Seed Savers Exchange.  It was an incredibly strong producer for us, so we were glad to plant it again in 2011.  It seems that each time we've planted Georgian Fire, the bulbs and cloves increase in size.  I guess it is true that garlic slowly acclimates to its new home over time.  This is my very favorite hardneck variety. The bulbs are comprised of about five to seven tightly-bound cloves, and each clove is enormous.  The flavor is intense, and the skin is a gorgeous red.  We planted about 5 lbs. of saved seed this season.

Georgian Fire, my current favorite

Purple Glazer:  I love this variety.  We planted 1 lb. purchased from OGSF last season.  It was very prolific.  This is a great garlic to roast.  It has large cloves and great flavor.  The skin is perfectly purple.  This is my second favorite hardneck.  We planted about 5 lbs. of saved seed this season.

Purple Glazer, ready to roast

Persian Star:  We purchased the seed from OGSF and planted 1 lb. of it last fall.  It produced very well.  The appearance is similar to Purple Glazer, but the cloves are a bit smaller and more numerous. We planted about 5 lbs. of saved seed this year.

Music:  I've heard a lot of garlic growers rave about this variety, but it was the poorest producer for us.  We ordered  1 lb. from OGSF in 2011.  The seed looked fantastic, but we ended up with only a couple pounds of mature garlic this summer.  So, I saved it all for seed, and it is now in the ground.  Maybe it will begin to acclimate, so I'll be patient.  The cloves are large, and the heads are beautifully white.

Elephant

We ordered 1 lb. (only 2 heads) of seed from Seed Savers Exchange in 2010.  It did quite well that season, but it the results were even better this summer.  We saved all of the seed, and it was enough to plant a 50' row this fall!

For more on our garlic history, check out these posts:

2011 Harvest

2011 Planting

2012 Harvest

We've upgraded from a 100' row of garlic in the asparagus field, to an ocean of garlic in the main production field.  We planted thirteen rows that are about 50' long this year.  How far we've come!  Now, we just need to get some straw on top of those rows...

Staving Off the Vampires

We last planted garlic seed just a little under nine months ago.  We planted both seed we had saved from the previous season's harvest and some seed we had purchased from The Organic Garlic Seed Farm.  In total, we put seven different varieties in the ground:  "Chesnok Red," "Elephant," "Music," "Mother of Pearl," "Purple Glazier," "Persian Star," and "Georgian Fire."  The "Georgian Fire" and "Elephant" garlic were the varieties planted from seed we had saved.

All fared well, except for the "Music."  I think they succumbed to the resident ground hog's abundant holes.  I shed no tears.  I learned a long time ago that it's always a good idea to plant some to share with Mother Nature.

Garlic is such a joy to grow.  Sure, it's a heavy feeder and takes the length of an normal human pregnancy to reach maturity, but the investment of nourishment and time are well worth it.  The manure and mulch do most of the work, and the seed becomes stronger as it acclimatizes to it's new home in your garden.

Garlic is so much fun to harvest.  Quite a departure from the monotony of the everyday asparagus harvest or the tedium of picking any sort of berry.

We decided to hang the garlic under the car port to dry this year.  The Elephant garlic will hang for a month, and the rest for two weeks.  We'll be saving almost all of it for seed.  In addition to the seven varieties mentioned above, we'll also sow several pounds of "Kettle River Giant" this fall.

We should be safe from all those pale-faced, suspiciously attractive, well-dressed creatures of the night for the next month at least.

My Fingers Smell Faintly of Garlic

Today was another cool, cloudy, all-around-grey day.  A perfect day for planting garlic.  Rain is in the forecast for the next several days, so it was good timing.

We ordered our garlic seed from The Organic Garlic Seed Farm in Oregon, and it arrived a few weeks ago.  The seed looked beautiful, and I would recommend this place to anyone.  They had some of the best prices we could find, and it's organic!  I also just like supporting (fellow) farmer-hippies any way I can.  We ordered one pound each of five different varieties: 

We also saved about a pound each of Elephant and Georgian Fire garlic seed from when we harvested garlic this summer.  We had ordered these varieties from Seed Savers Exchange in 2010.

Some Elephant garlic harvested this summer.

I had seven pounds of garlic seed to plant.  I added a few inches of aged horse manure to the bed where we had just harvested our sweet potatoes, hoed it up, and popped the seeds in.

Left to right: Music, Purple Glazer, Persian Star, Chesnok, Elephant, Georgian Fire, and Mother of Pearl.

I was so very pleased that the seed we saved ourselves looked healthy and vibrant.  Saving our garlic seed is the plan going forward.  It's easy to do, and it will be one less thing we have to buy.  We just let the bulbs dry for a few months, then they went into paper bags.  Too easy.

 Elephant garlic

I covered the row with a thick layer of straw, and now I wait for the rain.

Three of My Favorite Things

As I was poking around in the greenhouse this morning looking for signs of new life, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the hops is coming up.  We put in three varieties last year, and all of them did very well in the greenhouse.  Hopefully, they'll start producing this year.  It would be so awesome to use our own hops in an IPA.  I couldn't get a good photo of the little guys this morning, but I've included a pic of two varieties as they were last year.

Willamette and Nugget Hops

We ordered most our seeds from Seed Savers Exchange this year.  Previously, we had gone with Johnny's Seeds and Seeds of Change, but we really liked SSE's varieties and prices.  I think we made the right choice.  So far, all of the seeds I've used look extremely healthy.  Actually, I've never seen such robust-looking seed before.  They're very clean and have an all-around fresh look.  We ordered our garlic from SSE last fall, and it's doing really well.  We chose Georgian Fire and Elephant garlic for a contrast of flavors.  Garlic seed is pretty expensive, so we won't be eating any of it this year.  We'll plant everything we harvest.

Georgian Fire or Elephant garlic.  I can't remember which we planted where.

In other news, I got to see a Big Brown bat this morning.  I love bats.  My neighbor was cleaning out his basement when he found the guy.  We know it was a Big Brown bat because my neighbor is a member of the Bat Conservation Association.  I wish I had taken a photo, but I missed my chance.  The bat was still in hibernation mode when he was discovered, but he came to his senses and fluttered away into the forest in a matter of minutes.  One point for the Bat Conservation Association.