I wanted to put out a really quick post today about using the space you have for gardening. There’s all kinds of Pinterest ideas and books about gardening in really small places. As always, I would recommend a gardening journal to keep track of your ideas, and results. Also, it seems to require a creativity and willingness to try things.

Myself? I’ve had LOTS of failures, but lets call them experiments instead. Does every experiment prove the theory? Does every attempt end up working exactly as planned? 

What fun would that be?

I’ll tell you a little secret; I plant things too close almost every year in my little urban farm. I choose not to berate myself about it because I’m just an ambitious gardener-I dream large and abundantly. (I'm sure my neighbors would back this up 😀)

This is part of our front veggie garden. Two raised beds 5'x10' hold dirt, bunny manure, and the following veggies grown from my seeds: strawberries, pumpkins, Zucchini, cucumber, tomatoes, eggplants, bush beans, peppers, and decorative corn. In the background from left to right are blackberries, pear trees, cherry trees, and an apple tree. True, I can barely get in there to prune the vines and harvest, but it pleases me to look at it and think about the jungle I've created.

These are my manure spreaders.

The squashes growing on the front fence have to be 'encouraged' to stay there every week or so. 

This is this morning's harvest. Squash vine tips are yummy stir fried with soy sauce and garlic. 

So I encourage the same for you. Dream as large as you dare each spring and see how that changes over your years. You might be surprised with what you are willing to try and the way that bounty, and sometimes the lack thereof, teaches you about gardening, soil, and yourself. 

Blue Skies

For those of you reading this who know me personally, you know that we are hoping to move our family and critters to a hobby farm inside of 2 years from now, hopefully less. I tell people that I’ve tried lots of things in my Saint Paul yard and that I’ve now outgrown my tiny lab and need a bigger one.

In the interim, in part because I get the comment frequently, “I can’t believe you do all this while you live in the city!”, I’ve decided to bend my blog to something with a little more focus. Exactly how much can my tiny portion of Mother Earth create? While I long to have the ability to do more than I can do while we are here, I’m still proud of what I have accomplished already and I think it would be interesting to showcase that.

So to that end, I’ll post some pictures of where we are now in the wheel of the year as we move into harvest season, and challenge myself both to see how much I can do and create, AND how much I can demonstrate and encourage.

My mom made this ceramic toad years ago and it graces my perennial garden.

 This is my back garden. 2 raised beds, 1 with things rabbits like to eat, and the other with overflow tomato and eggplant seedlings and a few herbs.

These are white currents growing in th front yard, next to the rhubarb and blackberries.

This is the view to the street out front. You can see the pumkins clearly in the begginning of world domonation. I hope we don't loose the mail carrier as she hacks her way thru the jungle 

to deliver our mail.

More of the front garden with: Cleome flowers free seeded for the humming birds, pumkins, zucchini, pear trees, cherry trees, and blackberries.

Front raised beds with: decorative corn, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, pumpkins.

King of the North grapes growing on the side fence. 

Seed starting; Go boldly but simply.

In the spirit of getting ready for the next season, I thought I would take the next couple posts to lay out some of my plans in the garden for 2017 and perhaps a rehashing of what worked and what didn’t in the years past.

A friend of mine recently asked about seed starting and what recommendations I had. I could likely have begun an expanded version of that conversation here in blog-land by stating my vast experience from when I owned and ran a CSA. However, the truth is, I’m sure I did do seed starting all wrong in those years for that kind of business. In that venture, what’s needed are proven varieties that grow in a wide range of conditions, mature predictably, harvest with good structure, and maintain their own post-harvest freshness and appearance. It’s not romantic at all but very effective.

What I wanted in those years was popping color, an array of unusual varieties, and amazing flavor. Oh yeah, I also had this vision of having the hours in the day to save my own seeds, which, among other things, necessitates the making of tiny, pollinator proof cages to house parent varieties that I would then get up at the crack of dawn and hand pollinate and then mark for later seed saving. I know, it’s OK to laugh at my ideas of how much time I would have. The amazing Hmong farmers I formed relationships with were polite enough to not openly mock me. They were, to a family, masters of a kind of efficiency I only dreamed of. Generations of hard-scrabble mountain farming in Laos left their elders with real knowledge of farming when what you grew might very well be all you had to eat. If you ever had dreams of learning the ropes, apprenticing even for a day of harvest with one of these families would never been time wasted.

But grow things, I did, and they were beautiful and bountiful. Now that I’m the master gardener of my city lot only, and don’t even sell very much, I could go whole hog with my seed fantasies. But falling on my face a few times a season running a small farm did teach me to marry the two visions and that I could have all the unique beauty, but temper my exuberance with a healthy dose of keeping things simple.

I have just a couple sources for seeds and sometimes, I just buy the darn plant, already well on its way. I buy seeds almost exclusively from Baker Creek (http://www.rareseeds.com/), hands down the best garden-porn in the catalog industry. They support heirloom varieties and put a great deal of time and effort into finding and rescuing our planet’s ancient seeds, tiny little treasures of culture that deserve a place. I also usually will buy a few from Seeds Savers (http://www.seedsavers.org/), Seeds of Change (http://www.seedsofchange.com/), and for market gardening varieties that work, Johnny’s (http://www.johnnyseeds.com/). And don’t start seeds inside unless you have an actual greenhouse of some sort to transfer them to more than 6-8 weeks before the last possible frost date for your area. It’s easy to get excited and plant them in early February, here in MN, but they run the risk of getting leggy and are prone to disease indoors.

I bought a small seed starting mat, like a heating pad for soil, and used a soil block maker from Johnny’s that would make the soil into tiny blacks to optimize my small area on the mat. It means you have to replant within a week or so of the tiny spouts emerging, but when your seed starting in your house in the kitchen counter, being able to take up a small space is important. I always had a small thermometer so I knew if the soil was too hot or not hot enough. There are charts for each veggie, but I shot for about 80 degrees Fahrenheit and that worked well because I had a mix of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, okra, strawberries, certain flowers that like it hotter to germinate. Sometimes I would have to mess around with covering the flat and plants with towels to get the temperature up and remove them if it got too hot. Then the little seeds would emerge and I would carefully replant them in flats with bigger soil plugs and try, with varying success not to mix up the variety tags. They would go into a shelf in my kitchen window with lights and then I boosted the efficiency of the light by using tin foil to reflect it back onto them instead of spilling into my kitchen.

The best thing about this whole process is that seeds, by their very nature, want to grow. The Mother has made that their only purpose and with a couple tools and careful attention, most of my seeds sprouted just fine. So rustle up your courage and order those seed catalogs. You’ll spend way more at the garden stores and never get the variety if you don’t start them yourself.

Blue Skies, All.

Poop, it's everywhere!

That's right, poop is everywhere in our tiny urban farm. And over the last few years we have come up with a pretty good system for cycling organic matter into poop and then into organic matter again. So let's talk poop.

First off I want to say that having chickens has really changed the way we deal with our kitchen waste because let me tell you, chickens will eat just about anything!

Into this humble container on our counter goes all our kitchen waste. This includes coffee grounds, yucky lettuce, onion skins, the crusts of sandwiches that my toddler absolutely refuses to eat no matter what goodness is on the rest of the bread, and everything in between. And, ready for this? Other chicken's bones and anything meat-like. Remember hearing that birds roughly descended from dinosaurs? Well, they will happily eat each other under the right circumstances without any hesitation.

(They will also catch and eat mice. See that mouse tail? Bet you'll never look at chickens in quite the same way again.)

So each day, one of us dumps the bucket into the coop for the ladies. Now, they don't eat some things, like coffee grounds. But they do dig through it and pick out what they want and this keeps happening every day, all day long, this digging. All those articles about turning your compost to get it to decompose faster? Momma aint got time for that, so I let the chickens do it for me. In the meantime, they are also pooping all over the place and digging that in, too, so it becomes a very hot mess. And by hot mess, I mean FULL of nitrogen and way too 'hot' to put on the garden or use directly, not to mention full of bacteria that's dangerous to have on things your going to eat. (Salmonella outbreaks on spinach from animal waste?)

So twice a year, my awesome husband digs it all out of there back down to the dirt (or so, it's not scientific at all) and it goes into one of those dumb round plastic round compost bins someone gave us a few years ago. In theory, your supposed to turn this compost, how? I have no idea, but we just let the hot mess rest in there for a full season. While it's in there getting rained, snowed and sunned on, the nitrogen amount leaches out some and it becomes safe for plants. Also, it magically fills with worms that come from...well, I don't have an answer for that, but they get in there.

From there, it goes into these awesome stack- able bins. This way, when it's ready, I don't need a forklift or husband to move it around. I just remove one from the stack and take it where I want to put it. Sometimes I dig it in and sometimes I don't bother and just top-dress. That cycle takes about a year for chicken waste to become safe and wonderful for plants. By the time it's done, it does not stink at all and we do screen it to get out the big twigs and bits that are too big to do well.

(An old crib mattress covered with hardware screen and secured with zip-ties works great. We dump in on in shovels full and push it back and forth across the screen with a rake into another of these bins.)

Then we got rabbits, and believe me, that changed the whole equation around here. If you've never experienced how much poop 3 adults rabbits can make along with their offspring, it's pretty amazing. And here's the real beauty of it. While they are much more sensitive to freshness and toxins than chickens, in the warm months thay eat a lot from our yard, maybe as much as 50% of their diet. Plus their manure is so mild, no resting period is required, it can go directly on the garden!

I researched on Pinterest, and this blog Rise and Shine Rabbitry, what kinds of organic matter is OK for bunnies. From my garden they get: mint, dill, parsley, french sorrel, lettuce, grass, raspberry and blackberry leaves and canes and twice daily clippings from my willow, which they eat leaves, twigs and all.

We set up this collection system under the main hutch to make it easier.

Another example of the way I started using their manure is in one of my raised beds. Last winter we turned this into a hoophouse and the bunnies spent the winter in it in their cages. When spring came, I pulled off some of the 12 inch layer of manure mixed with bedding straw and covered my front vegetable patch. But the rest we just left right where it was in the raised bed and I planted seeds right into it with great success.

You can see at the edges of this picture that we have left the frame of the hoophouse up since we plan to house bunnies in here again for next winter. I'm using it to trellis beans on for now and it just makes less work to take it down and put it back up all the time.


It's pretty clear that the greens in this picture: mustard, spinach, lettuces, chard and some Bull's Blood beets are very much enjoying this layer of composted manure to grow in. The jury is still out about how other, less nitrogen hungry crops like tomatoes and peppers, will like this, but I think winging it has proved fairly successful so far for us.


So until next time, keep winging it and enjoy summer!

Big Spring Shows up

Spring is in high gear around our place and we have a lot of exciting developments.

Both of our rabbit does have kindled, about a week apart, just like last time. The pictures show pretty clearly the developmental differences in just a week. 

Both does are caring for their litters really well so far and built very soft nests from their hair. I lined the metal baskets we are using for nests boxes with thin towels this time instead of the cardboard I used last time. I was worried about them getting too hot as temps climb and it seems to be working. I originally had them in there with just straw, but the basket has holes so wide the first litter of babies were actually wiggling out of the holes and onto the floor of their cage. Luckily it was a warm evening so they didn’t get chilled, but I was pretty surprised to come home at 10 PM to 3 babies out of the nests and one stuck midway. They are all safe, though and now that I lined their nest with the towel, all of them are staying in there fine. It’s a good example of making sure to really watch when any animals are little. 

One of the things that surprised me about baby bunnies is that despite their hairless, helpless appearance, they squirm around a lot looking for their momma. I still don’t ever actually see the mommas on the nests nursing, but now I don’t worry after reading that  they just don’t do that. They get on the nest and nurse in the night a couple times and that’s it; more might draw predators, instinct tells them.

The plants are all doing pretty well but I either need to pot them up into larger pots or put them in the ground soon. Weather isn’t that great this week with clouds and low temps, so I might pot some of them up tomorrow or alternatively I’l plant them and them cut some polyspun row cover fabric to cover them with. It’s works really well to keep the temps a few degrees warmer this time of year without going to all the bother of bringing them into the house on a cold night.

I’m increasing the size of the side garden a little this year, shocking  to no one, especially my husband. I just don’t see the point of trying to grow grass somewhere that gets that high of traffic. I think I might plan a mix of perennials, another fruit tree or two, and some hardscape for our patio table. I love to eat outside with the kids and write and have my morning coffee, so this seems like a perfect solution.

The fruit trees are doing really well and I hope to add a couple this year. Everything’s basically flowered already.

I was surprised to see some swelling flower ends on my Asian pear, indicating fertilized flowers. Pears don't fertilize well in general and it's not uncommon for small growers like myself to spend a little time hand pollinating with a paind brush. The stamens don't seem to have a lot of pollen and they also flower in temps that bees are pretty lathargic.Plus, my other Asian pear died last year and I didn’t think there were any other pears in the neighborhood. But sure enough, it appears as though I’ll get some Asian pears, so I’m excited about that. 

Neither one of the baby European pear trees flowered at all but they are growing precociously. I’ll have to start training the branches on the one because it’s growing really upright, so perhaps I will show a before and after picture for demonstration.

I’ll replace both of the Frost peach trees I had to cut down. The winter damage I got from the hard winter a couple years ago was just too much for them and I had to cut them down. I cried a little, and if you tasted my peaches, you would too! 

Anyway, I’ll replace those and add a tart cherry, a cider apple, and a plum with 3 varieties of Japanese plums grafted to the same trunk. I might also add some hazelnuts, but we’ll see. 

Until I get some pictures this weekend that's all for now. 

Blue Skies...

Trickier Jobs Need Helping Hands

In this installment I’m going to be fairly detailed about both the process of dispatching the rabbits and my feelings and thoughts about the process. If that’s not comfortable to read about, please go no further, but also go knowing that we were as careful and respectful as good stewards could be. I can assure you that it will give me a whole new meaning to saying a prayer of gratitude at dinner time.

So it was a busy weekend on the urban farm that culminated in butchering our first batch of rabbits. I thankfully had 2 more experienced helpers, so it was a fairly smooth process. I’ll try to detail the devices my dad made to hold the rabbit for the killing and the other device to hanging them while butchering. I know these were just prototypes and we’ll work together to create something that works more effectively.

Initially I had basic ideas of the processing taking place in 3 stations: dispatch, butcher, and cutter/bagging for the freezer. It did work out that way though I also wanted to make sure I was able to try each job. Having good light is essential and since we were working in my garage for discretions sake, we made sure to have portable lighting. That and an old shower curtain behind the stations kept the mess to a minimum were pretty key to making the job go as well as it did.

A few words about my help for the day. My father was present to lend his deer hunting and old time farm knowledge. He came with the tools he made to help with the job since I was not interested in spending the money to buy them. One was a steel device for holding the head of the rabbit and quickly separating the neck vertebrae and the other was a holder for the feet while skinning and cleaning. And a newer friend, Kevin, came with all the experiences of childhood farm and long- time chef. He also brought his travel chef knife set and a change of clothes, no doubt due to his past experiences with butchering, and his lovely family who were very tolerant of the chaos that reins at my house. 

I also want to take a minute and let readers know that I was more than a little nervous about doing this. It’s not that I don’t feel capable and I had taken reasonable pains not to coddle or otherwise befriend my soon-to-be food. Having said that, on any given weekend you might have seen me clipping blackberry canes and willow twigs because I have learned how much the rabbits care for munching on them. I didn’t do that over a sense of guilt at their upcoming demise, it was more out of concern and pride that I was giving them to the best of my ability a life that they were cared for and doing normal domestic bunny kinds of things. I did spend some anxious times leading up to this wondering how I would do, would I be sad, would they be hard for me to actually eat? I occasionally had visions of my family digging into delicious fricassee while I sat in sorrow with a salad because I got too attached to my charges.

To my immense relief, it was not that complicated. It’s like any of the things I have done that are perhaps somewhat out of the mainstream: Skydiving, Flying, oddly enough the Polar Bear Plunge –it’s different than what you imagine in your mind, and much more straight forward. It wasn’t that I was void of emotion about it. It was more that I said my mental thank-yous to them and left it at that. I did not actually end any of their lives, not necessarily because I didn’t want to, but more because the device we built for vertebrae separation did not work quite like we thought so it took a little more force than we planned for.  (Next time I will make sure to do this part of the job as well, just so that I feel like I have taken full part in this experiment.) But as soon as they were dead I was in there cleaning them and dressing them and it was different than I thought but I’m not sure I can explain. Certainly more businesslike  with a certain curiosity to learn a skill. We learned how to work as a team and while the first rabbit took us 45 minutes to dispatch and butcher, the last one only took us 10 minutes.

Based on their smaller size, I have decided to wait another 2 weeks or so to take care of the younger batch of 7 still in the greenhouse with the adults. They grew significantly slower despite only being a week younger, so I redistributed them in the cages so there are only a couple per cage. I have read that animals will grow slower in a smaller environment, so we’ll see how that does. I suspect my feed and other expenses  to meat/pounds is crap for this batch, but if I took out the long term expenses like cages and feeders it improves a great deal. Hopefully my own efficiencies will also improve as I learn what works best and how to do chores for their care faster.

I feel like I’m still processing what my thoughts are about all of this. For now I feel positive and encouraged that this was a good thing to embark on and will continue to add updates about it.

In other news, I have spent all the tears and worry I could over my peach trees with their fungus and just chopped the buggers down. We will burn the wood before spring so they can’t spread the fungus blight to other things in the yard. I’m also fessing up here that I have embarked on some destruction of public property by attempting to ring a lovely boulevard maple whose roots have competed hard enough with my Asian pears as to kill one of them and severely limit the growth of the other. I’m also getting started with seeds in a couple weeks and I’ll make sure to detail that along with the other preparation for spring.

I won’t post any of the more graphic pictures of our butchery this weekend, but I will post my helpers hard at work. It was great to have their knowledge and was a good example of many hands making for light work. 

Updated Bunny Pictures

I just wanted to give everyone a peek into the rabbitry. We hope you all have a great New Years and I'm looking  forward to new farm adventures in 2015. XO Blue Skies!

A Bloody Bunny in My Pocket

Now that the Yuletide holidays are over, I can finally get back to the tale of 3 bunnies I wasn’t sure I knew what I was going to do with.

After their first disastrous litters and me feeling generally like a horrible human and general failure, I ordered 3 very nice cages online. By the time they were shipped to me, my husband very kindly put up my small hoophouse and I had decided to keep them in there for the winter. For the most part, rabbits do very nicely outdoors in the winter but the critical part is to keep them dry and draft free. I figured the hoophouse was a pretty good option for those winter requirements.

To be clear, I don’t have a full size hoophouse in my city lot. It’s just a 5 x 10 raised bed that my husband screwed a PVC tubing skeleton to. It’s basically a spine with ribs arrangement that we cover with plastic and tack down at the bottom for season extension.

The real stroke of genius about putting the bunnies in here was altering the cages after they came to pull out their included manure tray. This allowed the bunny waste to fall down to the floor of the hoophouse, exactly where I would have had to shovel it anyway as fertilizer in the spring. I’ve always loved the way pasture stackers like Joel Saladin consider not just where they want the animals, but where they want the manure and how to get it there without work, and it was gratifying to put this into action.

Knowing that my lady bunnies were likely going to have their babies in the next few days, all the information I gathered said that it was time to add a nest box and fill it with cozy hay for them. It had also been much colder here than it usually is in November.

So the night I bought them, I went out to the hoophouse to get everything all set up. Clara, my more docile bunny, was farthest back in the enclosure and I dragged the nest boxes and straw back there to get started on hers first. Based on what I had read, if I put the nest box in there, she would explore it, line it with her soft fur pulled from her belly, and birth her kits warm and soft in about 4 more days. Plenty of time according to everything I had read. Bunnies gestate 30-31 days.

I opened Clara’s cage top that 20 degree November night to put in the nest box and she never hopped or moved. Instead, she grunted and a hairless, bloody baby bunny was born. Oh shit! Only 26 days!

I had my husband’s light coat on for evening chores and it was a good thing because the baby would have died of exposure in just a few minutes.  I picked the wiggling little thing up and put him in my coat pocket…and zipped it closed. You’d be surprised how much it was squirming around 1 minute after birth! I also had read that domesticated rabbit mamas rarely rejected a baby due to human scent, especially if it was the scent of their regular caretaker. Phew, one less thing to worry about.

Long story short, after a quick discussion with my husband, we decided to bring both momma bunnies in their cages down into our unfinished basement while they had their babies. It was the only way I could be sure I could help them if needed and that they would be warm enough while I waited for nature to kick in and motivate them to care for their babies. I carefully got them settled and put the cozy baby back in the nest box with Clara.

In the meantime, she had 1 more baby, sadly stillborn. I quickly did some online reading and most information said she would be all done or the babies would be dead if there was a long pause between births. Shit again. There was more blood in the bottom of her cage than I thought there would be and she still wasn’t making a nest for the baby recently freed from my pocket. I decided to collect some wool roving I had for knitting and fluff it around the baby to keep it warm and hope for the best. By this time it was 11 PM. I waiting another 30 minutes with no more babies and no change in her ignoring the sole survivor in the fluffy nest I made for it. I went to bed worried and sad, not sure if she would care for the baby or if she was even going to live. 

This seems like a good time to talk about the whole concept of eating animals, raising the ones you are going to eat yourself, and why caring for them does not preclude a thoughtful person from eating them. I’ll illustrate some of my thoughts with a recent conversation I had with a vegetarian friend. She is a thoughtful person and a good friend of mine, but perhaps not without her own ideas about why what I was doing didn’t make sense to her. Basically, she had a hard time listening to me talking about my care of the rabbits without challenging me about later eating of them. I know there are lots of people who feel this way and I completely understand.

 I don’t profess to know how this is all going to turn out, or even what I will and will not be able to do with regards to dispatching, butchering, and consuming the bunnies. I might not be able to kill them, clean them and then eat them, and I know even if I can do this list of things that I believe to be important life skills, I will not do it without some sadness and maybe other feelings I can’t foresee right now.

What I do know, without a shadow of a doubt, is that a thoughtful person can care deeply for the raising and care of an animal, can be fully invested and responsible for any outcomes, and still be satisfied with eating them. It is possible to have a marriage between those things and they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. It’s not to say that all of those feelings will rest easy all the time together. The older I get, the more I believe that it’s part of Life’s point to have things rub against each other; to be uneasy sometimes and further, that these are the things we shouldn’t shy away from if we can help it. They deserve some exploration. That is the belief that I am operating under. I hope it proves to be true.

I woke up in the morning and went immediately down to the basement. It was dark and I was glad I had brought a flashlight. When I hunkered down and shined it in Clara’s cage, her bright pink eyes shined back at me from her corner where she was calmly cleaning her feet. In her nest box were a half dozen squirming babies, carefully covered in the fur she had plucked from her belly. They were hairless, pink, and lovely, at least to me.

Our Urban Experiment Continues

I'm guessing I haven't mentioned that we are knee deep in an experiment in urban animal husbandry. Last July I got another crazy idea.

To begin, we've had trouble affording the kind of grass fed meat I would prefer. Not just for health reasons, but also to continue to support the kind of ethical farming I feel so strongly about. If we all are voting with our dollars, it upset me to put back the free range chicken and buy the factory raised because I just couldn't spend 20$ on it. So with that simmering in the back of my mind, I came across an article in Urban Farm magazine about raising meat rabbits. One thing led to another and I came to the place I do so often; if other people can do it, why not me? So I did some looking and found a man raising New Zealand rabbits not far from us and off we went to pick them out.

I chose 2 does and a buck, a little hesitant still, but the seller assured me that if I didn't like it or it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, I could just butcher all of them and my problems would be over. Hmmm...you can see why I might still be hesitant. Having never butchered an animal in my life, much less dispatching them myself, I did have some concerns. But, what one person can do, blah blah. My lovely husband took this all very much in stride, built me a large rabbit hutch without ever cracking a book about what they actually needed in terms of housing, and off we went. If you don't know us in life, we're well suited to each other in this regard. We just march ahead after varying amounts of research, safe in the knowledge that we've done other things similar so this will likely be fine.

They grew up as animals do, and by the time fall rolled around, they were full grown meat rabbits, weighing in the ballpark of 8 or 10 pounds and getting pretty irritated with each other about being all together. The females, or does, like deer, will not tolerate each other or their ardent male when they are fully grown, and will actually harm or kill each other.

The other thing that surprised me was that they are fairly destructive about moving things around in their cage. When it got cold, I rustled up these square kitty litter buckets and put them in there with the idea that they might like to sleep in them. Instead they usually flipped them over or sat on the top of it. When I tried to make it cozier in there by putting some straw in the bucket, they promptly made that their outhouse. Perhaps that's the reason why people like them as house pets; they are rather fastidious and prefer to make a single spot their potty corner. Clearly the folks who manufacture and sell the bedding in the pet stores meant for rabbits don't understand said bunnies are only looking for a spot to pee in.

Regardless, I learned my lesson and started zip tying everything down. My other concern by this time was that they were going to have babies when they were all still together. So we got them separated after some trial and error about how to do that. Having said that, it was a day late and dollar short because both of them had their first small litters on the bottoms of their cages without building any kind of nest for them. By this time, it was getting cold and all the babies died.

It goes without saying that I felt pretty crappy about my skills as a farmer by this time and by default, as a person. My husband and I got into an argument about spending time on their care and it struck me that maybe my husband wasn't as into this as I thought. I'm sure some of you are shaking your heads at my ignorance, but the truth is, being a farmer, vegetables or animals, gives me such a deep feeling of contentment, that is simply didn't occur to me that my long suffering partner might not care for this in the same way I did.

After some heated debate and an hour or so apart, I realized that this was my problem to deal with. I decided that I had bit off more than I could chew and that it was time to just butcher the bunnies and end the project. I laid awake most of that night trying to decide how best to dispatch the rabbits. Having never done that, it was important that I did it quickly and humanely. A bop on the head? Sudden jerk of the neck? I just didn't know which would be the best and spent a very anxious night. The next morning I called my dad, him having grown up on a farm, and asked for his help. I told him the situation and he said I could bring them out the following weekend, as he lives about 90 minutes from us, and he would help me.

The next weekend I put them all in a cage together, got the car and kids ready to go, and loaded them up to take them out to my dad's. I noted that my happy buck, Doug the Bunny, was fervently 'loving' his lady bunnies, but since we were going to butcher them anyway, it hardly mattered. But we hit a roadblock when I called my dad. He said he had hurt his leg and that he wouldn't be up to butchering help today. Well, crap.

I resolved the issue in part that night by ordering proper cages for them at a reasonable price with free 2nd day shipping. Internet shopping to the rescue! I still wasn't sure I was going to keep them, but I knew they couldn't be kept the way we had been. Housing them in a more convenient way was at least a temporary option and solved a couple of weather related issues as well because we had winter coming and the bunnies needed a dry place to live out of the wind.

So they stayed and I'll continue the update soon in my next post, "A Bloody Bunny in My Pocket."

Back to Blogging

Hello All,

OK, I’m back to blogging. What can I say? I had another kid and it’s taken me 3 whole years to feel  like I can commit to telling about all my urban farm misadventures. I have given up farming full-time and gone back to a real job for now, but I hope sometime in the future I’ll be able to live the farm-dream again. In the meantime, I’m gaining skills and setting financial things to rights and our kids are getting bigger and more independent. Keep your fingers crossed for us and I’ll continue to post about some of the things we try and adventures we have. 

Blue Skies,
Ellen and Family

A push for fruit trees

When I first started talking about planting fruit trees, almost everyone I mentioned it to wanted to make very sure I understood that I wouldn’t be getting any fruit for a long time. What does that mean, a long time? A couple years? Ten years? And more to the point, if it was in that 2-10 year window, I just kept mentally shrugging my shoulders when well-meaning people would tell me this thinking, “Well, I just had a baby and we owe a bundle of money to the mortgage company for this house so, we’re not exactly going anywhere.”

And so I carefully picked our first trees, nervous and excited, thinking about root balls, graft unions and last frost dates.  My game and hard-working husband dug out the grass across a 10 foot wide strip in the front of our yard up against the chain link fence that separates us from the sidewalk. One of the reasons why I love him is for his calm conviction that I can do anything. When I told him I wanted to plant fruit trees, he said where do you want them? When I told him I wanted chickens, he said ok, let’s look for a coop. And when I told him that it was silly to just dig up a small part of the front yard and that we should just rototill the whole thing, he said, "Good idea, it will save me from mowing around things." Bless his heart, if he has doubts he checks them and shows up with his shovel and I love that.

In a tall, triangle shaped cardboard box came my first fruit trees: two apples, two sweet cherries and a peach. They come bare-root, which is darn unnerving at first. Imagine a 4-6 foot long sapling, devoid of any leaves or buds whatsoever, with stubby, pre-pruned roots and straggling root hairs. They can’t be exposed to sunlight, so a cloudy day is best, but if it is sunny, the roots have to remain covered right up until the hole is dug and the pile of dirt waits close by to fill the hole back up and cover them up. A wet towel is a good cover while the digging is happening and it’s always best to decide BEFORE you get the trees where you are going to put them. Local nurseries will have trees in large pots, true, but they can’t beat the selection offered by bareroot shipping from places like Stark or Raintree.

So we, and by we I mean my husband, got the holes dug and I carefully put the tree in the hole. Eric backfilled the dirt while I held the tree at the proper height and fretted. Over what, you might ask, besides the fact that it very much appears that a dead stick is being planted. It’s very important that trees are not planted too far below or above where they are meant to be. There will be some vague indications on the trunk of where the dirt-line is, not because there is still dirt clinging, but because the bark looks slightly different on the part that’s been above ground and the part that’s meant to be below ground. 

A word about grafting--Adding to the newbie-orchardist confusion is that almost all the fruit trees you buy will have already been grafted. This means that two different kinds of trees with two different genetic growth directives are spliced together to create something that will have characteristics of both plants. Most applicable to the orchardist, fruit trees with the fruit we want are almost always grafted to a root stock that will direct the tree to grow shorter that it would otherwise grow, hence the term dwarf or semi-dwarf tree. They might also graft for increased or decreased vigor, resistance to various diseases or even twisted or weeping branches. 

If the tree is planted so the dirt-line is above the graft point, it could encourage the tree to produce sucker-type growth of the root stocks variety, not what we want to do. So usually, the dirt-line is an inch or a couple inches below the graft point. The graft will look like a scabby or bumpy line that goes all around the tree near the bottom and it gets easy to spot the graft with a little practice. The other thing that will help get the planting depth right is to have a hose on hand to water the soil as it is replaced. The dirt will naturally settle some, and it can lower the tree with it so your tree ends up in a shallow hole. Under certain circumstances you might do this on purpose, but most of the time the tree depth should be the same as the area around it. Watering the dirt as you replace it will keep this from happening and get your tree off to a good start. Don’t compress the dirt around your tree after it is moist as this will compact the soil.

I carefully inspected them each day and my little trees grew leaves in a month or so. I watered them well and fertilized them lightly, and while they didn’t grow any new branches that first year, they grew leaves on the branches they already had, and I knew important things were happening under the surface. The next year, the peach and the cherries each got a couple blossoms and while I picked off most of them to encourage the tree to put it’s energy into growing, I did leave a couple on to ripen. 

And I guess this last part is the point I want to make. The trees were worth something to me as an investment of fruit in the future, true, but they were worth something to me from the time I planted them until the time they regularly started bearing fruit.  Some of them are starting their 5th spring post-planting and I’m very excited to see how much I get this year. Last year my one peach gave me a bushel and a half of juicy, beautiful peaches, some of which I froze and we have been enjoying this winter. Between the two cherries, I got about 12 pounds of peaches and a promise of much more to come this year.

When I look back on people telling me it was going to take a super long time to get fruit from my trees I end up having two parallel thought-lines. One is that it didn’t take forever, it took two years. The other is that I loved caring for them even before they gave fruit, just for their own sake. And it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t get the big payoff right away. Maybe it comes down to faith.

So if you want an apple or peach or cherry or whatever, do your research and get planting. Urban orchards are here to stay and I’m so happy I decided to be a part of this movement.

Get dirty & Ciao!

Recipe: What the heck is French Sorrel?

You'll likely only see it this one time because it's fairly unusual, but it is a fun thing to add a little change once in awhile. Is it a green or a spice? Frankly I'm not really sure, but it sure does have a distinctive flavor. It's very lemony, in case you haven't ever nibbled it before.


To store, put French sorrel into a sealed plastic bag and keep in the refrigerator. Sorrel does not dry well, but it can be frozen successfully. Its leaves, rich in potassium and vitamins C and A, will keep its beneficial qualities and great taste for a long time, but they are especially good when fresh.
Slivered sorrel leaves add a tangy accent to fresh salads. Add its spunky taste to scrambled eggs and

omelets. Seafood, chicken, veal, lamb, pheasant dishes welcome its bite. Hearty meat stews like its acidic contribution. Shred into soups with a tomato or fish base. Add its pizzazz to rice and lentils. Make a sorrel based sauce; drizzle over grilled, sautéed or marinated portabella mushrooms. Fold into mayonnaise and creamy sauces. Tuck a shredded leaf or two in sandwiches. Experiment with this herb in savory dishes, adding a little at a time until desired taste is reached.
Use generously when cooking sorrel as it reduces greatly in volume. Pureed sorrel wakes up cooked vegetables. Pair with asparagus, green and yellow string beans, turnips, cauliflower and summer squash. Use less lemon and vinegar in recipes when including sorrel. Do not cook in aluminum or iron pans as sorrel will develop a metallic taste. Use a stainless-steel knife for cutting. Stems are tough and should be removed.




TUNA DIP WITH HERBS AND CAPERS

two 6-ounce cans solid white tuna packed in oil, drained well
a 10 1/4-ounce package soft tofu, drained
3 spring onions, minced
1 carrot, shredded fine
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley leaves
2 tablespoons drained capers, chopped
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice OR leaves of sorrel
Accompaniment: crackers or assorted crudites
In a bowl stir tuna with a fork until finely flaked. In another bowl whisk tofu until smooth. Stir tofu
and remaining ingredients into tuna until combined and season with salt and pepper. Serve dip with
crackers or crudites.

Recipes for Chard, Kale & other greens

Kale


 I know kale isn’t high on everyone’s list of favorite veggies, but I really think it’s hard to find a leaf that’s so good but also good for us. It can be thick and is usually cooked, it’s packed with vitamins, minerals, and, so we read, cancer-fighting chemicals. Plus, frankly, I think is among the prettiest vegetables and it’s nice to have recipes that highlight it’s texture and shape, in addition to the beautiful chartreuse color.
I use greens quick-cooked like this in dozens of ways. Stir a few beaten eggs into a skillet of sautéed kale, and you're on your way to a delicious omelet or frittata. I sometimes chop the leaves a bit finer (pre or post sauté), and add them to all sorts of soups and curries - you get color, flavor, and a nutritious boost. Puree the sautéed greens and you can whisk or blend them into yogurt, hummus, mashed potatoes, and dips. Any ideas from your end?


Keep kale unwashed (moisture speeds its decay) in a plastic bag in the coldest section of the refrigerator, which is usually in the back.
Kale is very high in beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin, and reasonably rich in calcium.
Because of its high vitamin K content, patients taking anti-coagulants such as warfarin are encouraged to avoid this food since it increases the vitamin K concentration in the blood.


Kale, as with broccoli and other brassicas, contains sulforaphane (particularly when chopped or minced), a chemical believed to have potent anti-cancer properties.
Kale Soup
4 large russet potatoes, peeled and quartered
4 links hot Italian or other robust sausage
1 large onion, chopped
1 bunch kale, ribs removed, chopped
3 quarts chicken stock or
veggie stock
1/4 cup hot pepper sauce
Whenever using kale, I always remove most of the thick stalk.
I sometimes lightly steam kale and eat it with a splash of good soy sauce or balsamic vinegar.
It can also be lightly cooked and drizzled with sesame oil and toasted sesame seeds and sea salt. Chilled after cooking it makes for a zesty salad.


Garlicky Greens
1 large bunch of kale, chard, or spinach
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
fine grain sea salt

5 cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped

1/4 cup Parmesan cheese (opt)

crushed red pepper flakes

To de-stem each leaf of chard/kale, grab the main stalk in one hand and strip the leaf from the stem all the way up with the other. I then tear the big leaves into bite-sized pieces, but you can use a knife for this task if you prefer. Wash the greens in a big bowl (or sink) full of clean water, rinsing and swishing to rinse away any stubborn grit and dirt. Drain, rinse again, and set aside.

Hold off cooking the greens until just before eating. Then, in a large skillet heat the olive oil. Add a couple big pinches of salt and the greens. They should hiss and spit a bit when they hit the pan. Stir continuously until their color gets bright green, and they just barely start to collapse - two, three, maybe four minutes, depending on how hot your pan is and how much structure your greens have. Then, just thirty seconds before you anticipate pulling the skillet off of the heat, stir in the garlic. Sauté a bit, remove the pan from the heat, stir in the Parmesan, and add a big pinch of crushed red pepper flakes. Taste, add a bit of salt if needed.

Emjoy! 

Kohlrabi and Green apple slaw

So this is an option for the weird looking round things in your box you will see a couple times this season. Basically, you can treat this healthy vegetable like cabbage, raw or cooked.

Julianne or shred the kohlrabi and green apple (s) until you have about the same amount of each. The dressing is 1/2 c. heavy cream, a blob or two of the mustard you like best, 1 tsp. of lemon juice, 1tsp. of sugar, 2 tbsp. chopped parsley, and salt to taste. Optionally, you could use horseradish in place of the mustard and/or dill in place of the parsley.
Yum!

Another short article about the strange veggie: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2010/10/five-ways-to-eat-kohlrabi/

Recipe: Zucchini ribbons with mint

This is a really easy and refreshing salad that pairs well with a heavier meat like pork or beef. Using a veggie peeler. slice 4-6 smaller zucchini lengthwise in ribbons. Yellow and green ones together look really vibrant together. Put the ribbons into a bowl with 1/2 tsp of course salt to draw out some of the moisture-leave for 10 minutes. Pour off the accumulated liquid and blot the ribbons dry on towels. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk 2 tbsp lemon juice and 1 tbsp olive oil; season with salt and pepper. Add 1/4 c. fresh mint leaves-they can be spearmint, or any of the many mint flavors available today- and 1/4 c. thinly sliced onion. Toss gently, and serve promptly.
Enjoy...

July 6, 2012 News from the farm

The heat has made things pretty challenging the last week or so, along with continued dry weather at our location. Some of the vegetables are doing well with the heat and some have completely stopped producing or skipped out and gone to seed in response to the soaring temps. Winter and summer squashes, tomatoes, peppers, okra, melons and eggplants are all doing pretty well and in the beginning of their production, so that's the upside. You've seen the zucchini and cukes in your boxes and while there are no ripe tomatoes yet, there are lots of tiny green ones and zillions of blooms. The peppers and eggplants are growing well and flowering, too. We are adding more irrigation equipment this week because while some areas have had too much rain, our farm is in an area that has been dry for 2 weeks and it's starting to show. Between the heat and no rain, most of the lettuce, spinach and snap peas are over until cooler weather returns for awhile, but other greens aren't bothered like kale and chard.
Blue skies...

Recipe: Basic Veggie Pie

Or Vegetable Gougere,as the Frenchies say:

This recipe is a really basic baked vegetable dish you could use in so many variations. It could be made to use spring veggies like asparagus, and garlic scapes, or later in summer with zucchini, sweet corn, and tomatoes, or even fall with squash, kale or root vegetables. Cooked ham or bacon is also a nice addition.

For the dough: 1 1/4 cups water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 1/4 cups flour, 4 eggs, 1 cup or so of shredded Gruyere or cheddar cheese, 1 tsp Dijon mustard, salt and pepper to taste.

For the filling: 1 can of tomatoes or a couple pounds of fresh. Other veggies as you desire.

To start: Preheat oven to 400-grease a baking dish. Add water and butter to a pan and when the butter is melted, add the flour and remove from the heat. Mix for about 30 seconds until the mixture is smooth. Allow it to cool slightly before adding the eggs, one at a time, and mix until it's smooth and glossy. Add cheese, mustard, salt and pepper and spread it into a baking dish, leaving a hollow in the center for the filling.

In the meantime: Blend or mash the tomatoes into a sauce and add water if necessary until you have 1 1/4 cups. Choose your other veggies and saute them with a little oil until about 1/2 cooked. Always start cooking the denser veggies first and add others according to how fast they will cook. Add the tomatoes and some dried or fresh thyme or basil. Cook only for a few minutes and then carefully spoon the mixture into the hollow of the dough in the baking dish. Cook about 30-40 minutes or until the pastry part is risen and browned nicely. Enjoy!

June 14 2012, Week 2

In the box this week:
-Carrots
-Bac Choy
-Swiss Chard
-Lettuce
-Garlic Scapes
-Garden Peas

Two additions of note this week are the carrots and the peas. I have taken the liberty of removing the tops from the carrots. You will often see them in markets with the tops on and that is perfectly ok. But it's important to remove them when you get home because the plant will actually suck moisture and nutrients from the root, the part we like, to keep the greenery, the part the plant likes, alive. The same is true for radish and parsnip.

The peas are perfect and very sweet, but don't forget that these are garden peas, not pea pods or snap peas,  so the pod is fibrous and the pea within is the part we are meant to eat. The are delicious in salad, pasta, or just on their own. My son loves to shell them with me and just eat them, and I'm guessing that's true for most kids.
*Enjoy*

June 7 - 1st distribution

Greetings to all. It was so awesome to get back to CSA distribution - seeing and speaking with the families partnering with me this year was great. As shown on the card included with your produce there was a nice variety of early summer produce and I look forward to being able to increase the volume as the season progresses. 

In your box this week:

-Salad Mix

-Spinach

-radish

-dill

-perennial onion 

-garlic scapes (flower stalks)

-cherries

For some of you, this might be your first introduction to the lovely garlic scape. It is the odorous bulbs flower stalk and mush be removed in order for the bulb to attain a generous size later in the year. But to many Europeans and North Americans, more recently, these are a delicious addition to anything that benefits from a light touch of garlic. I love it on pizza, in pasta or salad, or with eggs.

The cherries are obviously my pride and joy, as clearly indicated by my happy crowing on Facebook for the last couple weeks as I eagerly awaited their peak ripeness. A fine mesh net kept away the worst of the birds and squirrels and I was able to bribe the neighbor kids by promising them each a few - mostly anyway.

Blue skies...

Here they are! I am so excited to be able to offer these to my CSA families and we will likely have some left over for our very first West Side Farmer's Market. Our first CSA boxes will be ready Thursday afternoon and things are shaping up to be a great season. More updates to come this week and some great recipes on deck.