garden – Page 2 – Peacock Orchard

Mulching the garden, my positive and really negative experiences

My beautiful niece and nephew came over to assist with some farm chores for cash. I picked a terrible one for them. I tend to pick pay tasks by how little I actually want to do them. I have a 5 year old hay bale in the lean-to I’ve been picking away at over the years. I finally want it out of there and moved to the garden areas for mulching.

I love mulch for it’s ability to suppress weeds (as I’m a lazy gardener) and it’s ability to hold in moisture. I’m terrible at watering too. My tomatoes and peppers are valuable to me. There is nothing like home canned spaghetti sauce and salsa. I need these things to really take off. So mulching them is worth paying for, and not hauling hay, more so.

I am nervous about this though. I mulched our largest garden last fall in the hopes of suppressing a lot of weeds. What we got instead was an infestation of ground squirrels. When dead babies started showing up we actually worried about the plague. That garden has been completely abandoned at this point. It did have a high point though. One snowy day we looked out the window to find this:

Isn’t it the most glorious stoat you’ve ever seen! That little stoat spent a week murdering every ground squirrel it could find. We haven’t seen one in that garden since. Hasn’t stopped me from abandoning the garden though. The ground squirrels will repopulate the tunnels, it’s just a matter of time. Still, we have some anti-squirrel around and that feels pretty darn amazing.

So you can see why I would be rather nervous about mulching the new gardens. It is done though, or at least part of it is. The tomato and pepper part at least.

Nice in progress picture. It’s a tire surround and makes the entire thing a raised bed. Tomatoes in the middle and peppers in the tires. Nice soaker hose running through the entire thing.

I made sure to leave plenty of room around my tiny plants. They would be larger but I prune off most of the leaves and plant them as far up the stem as possible. I had amazing results with it last year and I’m not messing with success!

Stay tuned for a story about the sleep over hysteria that followed this mulching chore!

Indoor seed starting once again.

This years seed starting is a bit different form last years. For one it’s more low key than last years flurry of excessive seed planting. My set up is a bit different too.

Last year I planted in egg cartons, then moved to toilet paper tubes and then to plastic cups. This year I planted the big things right into the plastic cups and saved the toilet paper rolls for the thinner plants, like the leeks.

This year I’m starting in the fish tank as well. Last year the plants ended up there as I ran out of window space. Now that I know it’s a great space to start seedlings I’ve set them up straight away in it. The tank is also in the basement now, as the wall it used to sit against is now gone.

Fancy set up. Ancient fish tank, fluorescent lights, card table. Whoo boy! Works though.

Few pics of the planting session:

I suspect there is more dirt on the floor than in the cups, but they had fun.

I can’t remember if I shared my seed saving method last year. Well here it is. Coffee filters with pen. That pen didn’t stay very well. For the most part I’m guessing. This one is clearly “drought tolerant tomato”. These seeds are from the tomato I never watered. It made great sauce and I’m growing it again to see if it’s just as successful.

Lovely cups all labeled and nestled in their home.

Nothing germinated yet. Frankly I’m rather interested to see if any of the seeds I saved will germinate. It’s my first real attempt at it after all.

Stay tuned!

Big snow!

Yes, another picture post of our snow harvesting.

The snow was deep. About 8 inches. The kids really loved it. Mostly

I was totally impressed with my snow collection though.

That’s a 3 foot deep krater filled to the top.

And the swales are even with the berms. So about 3 feet of snow collection there as well.

Earthworks are a total success!

The commercially farming neighbor isn’t keeping any of this moisture.

Mini-Krater gardens first snow.

I’ve been intensely interested in how much snow our Kraters may collect. They’ve done pretty well with rainwater collection and I assumed they’d fill with blowing snow, but wasn’t sure. The results are in after our first snow.

Deepest Krater with pawpaw island. Had about a foot of snow all around.

Largest Krater in circumference. Snow only collected on one side.

Goji Krater, did the absolute best. For some reason this Krater is just in an ideal location. It always collects the most water, the plants here did the best and it collected the most snow. I’ll have to think and observe why this krater has done so well.

Just for fun here are a few more pics of our first snow collection and fun:

This is our newly renovated driveway drainage ditch. Filled about 3 feet with snow.

This is another driveway drainage earthwork and the path from the garage to the ditch filled pretty well with snow. Enough for the kids to enjoy fully!

As you can see from this pic the snow blows and sometimes we will have 0 snow on large amounts of the property as there is nothing to catch and keep it. We experimented with our earthworks, which work well, and also selective mowing of our incredible sweet clover sections. Selective, on contour mowing harvested a ton of snow. It was far from the house, and the kids were happy where they were, so I didn’t get pics of this. I’ll try to later on.

My kids are so adorable!

I convinced them to go to the barn to feed the pigs and they did this while I was busy doing chores.

Our akbash is such a weirdo. He doesn’t know what to do with the pigs. He just stood there wagging his tail and doing this high pitched whine that the pigs didn’t like at all.

Such cute little piggies! Getting friendlier every day.

Meanwhile, thanksgiving dinner keeps threatening me.

Best ever pizza crust recipe and Wine Review: Colimoro Montepulciano D’abruzzo

Years ago, 11 to be exact, I married my amazing husband and began my experimentation in the kitchen. I have developed a large variety of go-to recipes over the years but none surpass my amazing pizza crust recipe. I experimented with SO MANY recipes before settling on this particular one. It’s so versatile and so forgiving. Plus it didn’t need to rise in the fridge, which is great since I once forgot I had a crust rising in the fridge and it kind of became it’s own entity that took forever to clean out. I don’t remember where I discovered this recipe. I haven’t used an actual recipe in years and years. I go by look now. I have a basic recipe that I change depending on our mood. We’ve added honey and different seasonings and it’s still been an amazingly well put together crust. So, without further ado, here is the recipe:

Easy Pizza Crust

2 ¼ tsps yeast
1 tb sugar
1 cup warm water
3 tbs olive oil
1 tsp salt
3-5 cups flour
Your choice of seasonings to taste (I use Italian seasoning, paprika, garlic and onion)

Pre-heat the oven to 420 degrees. In a medium sized bowl mix the yeast, sugar and water. Add seasonings to taste. Then add the salt and olive oil. Next add the flour until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Set aside to rise while the oven is pre-heating.

When the dough has risen spray your hands with cooking oil and shape the dough as desired, add toppings and cook for 20 minutes.

Note: I live in high altitude. A longer cooking time may be necessary in lower altitudes. Just keep an eye on it.

Our usual toppings are pepperoni (deli pepperoni and the regular old bagged kind you find in the store), olives, onion, bell pepper, meunster cheese and mozerella cheese. The taste is sublime. Love it!

A pizza baking experience would not be complete without at least one child demanding ingredients. Daughter demanded cheese, cheese and more cheese. Then, when all the cheese was gone she moved on to demanding pepperoni. I also have a few very loyal “please drop something tasty” dogs waiting in the wings.

Now, I usually just use a plain pizza sauce, no seasonings, on top. I figure the crust is seasoned well enough it doesn’t need added flavor. However, we had an amazing tomato harvest this year which has led to a LOT of canning. So, we made our own pizza sauce while the dough was rising. It was pretty amazing. I am going to share that recipe next week.

We usually sample a wine on Friday nights. It’s an enjoyable, relaxing time for us as a couple. But…I really wanted to fine a great wine to go with our pizza. So off to the liqour store where I asked the amazing wine guy what wine would go best with pizza.

That is how we ended up with this wine:

Colimoro Montepulciano D’abruzzo

Description: [from the wine makers website] Colimoro Montepulciano d’Abruzzo is bursting with aromas of dried cherries accented by a hint of spice. Medium in body, this is a fruit-forward wine balanced by moderate acidity and soft tannins. Aged in large Slavonian oak casks for 6 months, this is an easy-drinking wine best enjoyed young with everyday meals.

The back of the bottle explicitly says it pairs well with pizza.

Wine Review:

This wine has a really strong flavor in my opinion. It has a nice scent, very “winey” for lack of a better term. It is rather dry, and thus, bitter, but not bad. I enjoyed my first few sips. However, even though it is specifically to be paired with pizza and pasta I thought it over powered every flavor. We tried this first with the pizza and again, later, with some home made spaghetti. Still, too strong.

I did start out thinking this wine was pretty great. I had a few sips before I started eating and thought it had a pleasant flavor and that it was going to be a “whole bottle” kind of wine tasting. It wasn’t. I just had the one glass. I like to taste my pizza and this just didn’t afford me that luxury. Also, I felt it grew more bitter when paired with the food. So I had my 1 glass and was done, both times we tried this wine.

I think I’m going to find a nice chianti and try that with the pizza.

Straw as mulch in the garden

This years garden has been a pretty good success. Some failures but mostly awesome success. So I want to expand. I want more, always more. Our soil is a problem and so are weeds. The soil I imported for this years garden was infested with lambs quarter. That has been a real challenge. I have used straw in the raised bed with good success so I wanted to do it all with straw this fall and plant into it this spring a la Ruth Stout.

The problem for me is finding straw. The straw I bought for my straw bale garden may have possibly been sprayed with something, leading to it’s failure. I didn’t want hay because of the seeds, of course. I thought I wanted wheat straw. As an organic wheat selling mega house state I knew I could find that. In fact it’s stacked up in front of our house some years. Wouldn’t it figure that the only seller I could find was in Colorado then. What a trial.

We decided we’d drive down and grab a bunch of straw for our driveway (that will be another post) and my expanded garden areas. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive. It’d be about an hour round trip which isn’t too bad if you don’t have to take 2 toddlers with you. So, about a mile from our house has been sitting an estimated 8 large round bales of straw. They have exploded everywhere and been abandoned for a little over 2 weeks. They obviously fell off of someones truck and they decided it wasn’t worth it to pick them up. Luckily, it’s worth it to me. I grabbed the kids this Saturday, put all our rubber boots and work gloves on (yes my children have adorable tiny work gloves) and a tarp and set off in our SUV.

I did 6 loads on Saturday (2 without the kids) and 3 loads today. I have accumulated a nice stack of straw in one of my garden areas. TONS more to pick up still. It’s almost free (I’m counting gas as a cost) and it’s AMAZING. It’s chock full of bugs at this point which thrills my birds. It amuses the kids to grab a few loads and I couldn’t be more pleased with someone else’s misfortune. Now to finish grabbing what I need and spread it around evenly.