Solar dyeing test run

When running the stove in the heat of the summer seems a bit goofy I decided, as a test, to set up 6 jars with 50 grams each of dye-stuff I harvested last year. (madder frozen old dyebath, nettle flowers, onion skin, black walnut husks, crushed, goldenrod flowers, late season and birch bark) , 

Then added water up to the top, gave them a stir and set them in the sun for a few days. Inside, I made up a dish of alum-water for mordant, 2 tbs bulk barn alum to added water and added 6, 10 gram skeins of Belgian linen, 6 strips of silk and a 6 meters or so of cotton and wool each divided into 6 lengths.

I mordented the fibers inside 'cold' for two days and then added the fibers to the jars with the plant matter still in the dyebath on day 3.

The birch was looking really weak so ran that on the stove for and hour at a boil to get some more colour out of the bark and then all of them went outside again. The only one that smelled bad at this point was the nettles, kinda awful, but dyers were not known to smell like roses!

I soaked the fibers in the jars in the sun for 4 days, then strained out the fibers and the dyestuffs and dried the fibers. 

 The nettles were SOOO rotten and the colour so 'meh' that I didn't save that dyebath, but the rest smell more or less like they started, so not too bad. The goldenrod still smells like heaven even after 7 days in the sun! 

ready to strain

birch bark

goldenrod flowers, late season, 2011, dried

onion skins

nettle flowers, dried, 2011

walnut husks dried and crushed, 2011

Walnut on linen,cotton, wool, silk. Madder on same, Onion, Goldenrod, Nettle, Birch

I will be adding more fiber into the dyebaths in a few days once it's mrodented, and leaving it longer ( 2 weeks maybe?) to see how they dye/ how much colour is left in them.

Building a cold-frame to extend the seasons

So, normally for my neck of the woods, gardening starts just after the first weekend in May.  There is sometimes the odd frost after that, but only rarely.    Garden centers around here call the May 24 weekend the best planting weekend but really, that only leaves 4 months of growing season till fall equinox.

Ok, but of course I want more, so I start my seeds indoors and beg my husbands indulgence for why the flats are taking over the kitchen and every spot in front of a window except on top of the server (somewhere has to be off limits I suppose).

But there are better ways to go about this, like, say a greenhouse, or it's smaller more cash friendly cousin, a cold frame .  I have been planning to have one for years but this spring I had all the things in hand to make one to fit my 5'x5' raised beds.

First I would like to give a big thank you to my mom and dad for renovating their second bathroom and not giving me a hard time about storing the old shower doors for a few years for me.  Next I would like to thank my old squashed shed for giving up some of it's timber and side pannels to help make a frame for my cold frame and lastly to my local TSC for having all the hardware I needed to make the above parts able to be dismantled in the summer.

Now some plants are just not going to hack the cold weather no matter how much protection  I give them, and light levels are going to be lower in the shoulder seasons so I should stick with perrenial or leaf crops to make the most of what little light there is.   

Some however were built to withstand the cold and erratic weather on either side of summer.  Plants like Swiss chard and broccoli which were alive and kicking last January are tops on my list along with peas onions and spinach are all on my list of things that are extra hardy.

 Due to this not being a fully pre-planned adventure I have some garlic planted in the center of but on the up side I had chard from last year ready to go in the corners of the bed.  It was rainbow chard but the white seems to be the hardiest of all the colours and is the only type that survived into February.

Late February I put all the parts together and covered it all over with the shed siding. Lined the inside back and side walls with the foil backed building insulation to bounce the light around inside of the box.  Then waited for the soil to warm up.  It didn't take long, on one sunny day I temped the soil surface at 35' C .   Next I added a trough of water near the back to add some thermal mass and to help level out the temperature swings from day to night and then finally seeded in some greens,  mixed greens and lettuce and beets and carrots all went into their allotted square feet with one empty row for tender seedlings to live in.

From then on all I've had to remember to do is to ventilate the box by lifting the glass a bit on warm days and to water regularly.  

I've thinned the seedlings down t their proper spacing and go figure, for the first time in a month we will have a few days with temps below 0'C.   Which means the seedlings had to go into the plastic mini green house and all the tender plants scampered back into the house.  The bay trees and the lemon will just have to tough it out for a few days. It's been a very strange "spring" but I can't remotely complain. Warm sunny days and way above average temperatures can't last forever, so I guess I'll just roll with it.   








 

How Did My Garden Grow?

Well it had a few things all in a row, but mostly the vegetables were done in a square foot gardening method and I was quite pleased with it on the whole, for getting a lot of food out of a compact area with next to no weeding required.

  I built the boxes 5x5'each, in untreated 12x2" spruce and that went rather well.  Filled them about half full of soil and then I ran out of energy time and money so I figure to fill them the rest of the way, early next spring.   The soil mix is about 1 part peat, 2 parts compost, 1 part vermiculite that is placed on top of the existing soil which had been tarped off all winter to kill the grass.   Drilled some holes to run the marking string through put up the tomato spirals and planted away.  Everything was seeded in place except for the peppers and tomatoes and basil.

I netted in the front two beds because the squirrels were digging around in them. the plus signs on the bottom two are filled with flax.

All these beds are thinned to the correct density in each square foot at this point, and there are baby greens aplenty for salads.

Ok now it's really going, the tomatoes are wilting due to too much water, the zucchinis have exploded and I'm finding the daikon quick to bolt and set seed.

The above shot was taken in early sept... the sunflowers along the fence are all cutback and there are tomatoes dropping like rain so I'm sunning them on the side tables of the bbq in the background.  The flax was pulled up in August giving the broccoli lots of room to fall over in the bottom left bed. 

Dec 31st Leeks and broccoli are still going... 

As is the rainbow chard

Though I pulled them all up and turned them into soup that afternoon.

My tenderly harvested garlic decides it's time to sprout in my basement, fine, I say that means you are getting planted!  All 79 cloves of you, in various corners of the gardens.  A fine way to end 2011!

Spreading the seeds

So it's finally beginning to look like winter here in this strange season....
   After dropping off the face of the planet to attend to the dreaded 2 months of Christmas consumerism.   Which I am forced to be a part of due to working retail and another 2/3rds of a month to decompress. I'm back to feeling like starting new projects and documenting what I've been up to again.

A week or so ago I began sorting all of the seeds that I had harvested last summer and over the season had thrown willy nilly onto random, unused, window screens in the basement near a fan to dry or stuffed, when dry, into ziplock bags.

Now they are all neatly sorted with descriptions of what where and when they were harvested.  

   Most seeds will keep for many years (5+) only slowly loosing their viability over time.  When you buy a package of seeds they may give you hundreds of seeds when you only really need a dozen or so. Yet with other varieties you may only get 6 seeds in a package, hrmph!

I kept the seeds and the packages from previous years crops and cut out the descriptions and put them all in plastic baggies that I can now quickly flip through.   This is only one years leftovers and harvesting.   Nearly everything I planted grew well enough to set seed for me to save.  A few like dill, I let self seed in place but most I harvested and dried so that I can share my bounty.  All in all, it was a good year's harvest.

Saving seeds is very easy and to my mind, essential to providing sustainability and diversity to my garden.   

So it all has to begin with seeds or plants from somewhere.  

So lets say you like sunflowers... they are pretty, tall, undemanding and I paid 10cents for a year old package at a surplus store last spring.  There were about 12 seed in the package, that's less than one cent per seed, a really nice price.  Usually they would be about $1.25 a package.

I planted them along the fence behind my new rhubarb and strawberry transplants and watered them as needed for the first month and then stood back to watch then grow.

so many wee plants!

and then, they grew...

and grew...

and were pollinated...

Then I cut their heads off to foil the tree rats... (some nibbling is already evident)

Then I dried them in the heads till the seeds were loose enough to fall/ be wiggled out onto a spare window screen like the rosehips above are on.

then after a month or so I poured them into large pickle jars

So now, I have far more than the first 12 or so I started with.  I did set aside a bag with thirty or so of the largest, best filled kernels for my next two years plantings, but the rest just went into the jars, I have a few leads on people to gift more to, but I will just raid the jars as I need more.  Down the road, whatever doesn't get planted can get eaten so long as I save 24 seeds or so, that gives me enough for two years worth of crops failing to give me more seeds (highly unlikely).

Many plants are just as easy as I showed above, most plants have seeds that are best dried on the plant unless you have competition for them in the way of wildlife or if you have a short growing season.   So all those types really need is to be collected, left in the open air until fully dry and hard and then jarred or bagged up somewhere cool and away from any light.  

 Tomatoes can and other fruits can be eaten and just set the seeds aside to dry on some parchment paper.  All of the squash family have many nice big seeds, but watch out if you are growing your own because they readily cross pollinate and you may get some interesting things that are not much like the parent plants.  However if you got your pumpkin out of the pumpkin patch where for many tens of meters around it are only other pumpkins, there are good odds that your seeds will grow a pumpkin. Apples and pears suffer the same problem, not to say it's not worth trying if you have a LOT of space and ten+ years of patience.

Now I know that finding plants or buying fruit, identifying them and harvesting their seeds is ideal, but lets face it, it takes a lot of time and planning and even then not everything goes reliably to seed or ever grows any where near your home to begin with.  Also, not all of us have friends who seed-save, but you might be surprised  how big a bag of seeds a few well placed questions and complements will get you later in the season if you start looking early. 

Outside of those options, there are many good and responsible seed suppliers.  There are also some that are only 'friendly' looking divisions of larger, often less responsible, agra-business.  The place I have used most often in the past for my starter seeds and plants is http://www.richters.com/  My first purchase being about 15 years ago and my last seeds (to fill in a few holes in my supply and new varieties to try for this year) just arrived last week.

 I still remember some of what was in my order 15 years ago, because most of it is still living and -hem- invading the lawn in my parents back yard to this day.  Herbs are just like that.  A friend of mine bitterly refers to all members of the mint family as "Land Carp"

  Even now I can hear my father teasing me when my order arrived "You spent how much for three blades of grass?"  Ok, so it's true, it worked out to a dollar a blade, which was paid out of my own pocket, but from tiny acorns, mighty oaks do grow.  I have given braids of sweet grass and passed on tiny plants to many of my friends over the years, so that they can enjoy as much as I and then pass it on to their friends and family.

A wild harvest gone bad.

And by "wild harvest" I'm literally talking about food that grows on trees, often neglected and generally thought of as a nuisance to home owners. Apples, pears and other fruit tress will grow on long after the original owners who planted then have moved on to other dwellings.  Often leaving no one to care for or prune them and yet, many hardy varieties will keep on for many years growing tall and gnarly but toughing it out none the less.   In my area I found four good sites in only one afternoon, driving around the back roads earlier this fall.   All the places I found were directly on the roadside, though I've seen many trees on lawns and some small, old, orchards.   I have yet to get up the nerve to visit the owners of these sites and ask if I might take some of their fruit off their hands, and frankly this year I wouldn't have had the time to process it all anyways.

So to begin, I had found the fruit, but most of it was out of reach. So next. I had to dive into my basement of many wonders and with some scavenged parts from a display my workplace was throwing out, the wire portion of an election sign, a screw, a torch, some copper wire, paperclips and an old sheet I made a make-shift, if perfectly serviceable expanding pole picker.  It has a long "sock" attached so that the apples can roll gently down the length of the fabric tube to the ground and into a bag at my hip... it keeps them from falling on my head and from getting bruised in the process.

Now because these apples were ripening a bit at random I had to freeze a bunch that were going to go too mushy on me, but once I had what I thought was "enough" it was time to really get to work.

The work planned is cider.... hard cider.  Now I have made a few different hard ciders before and the cost per carboy 5-6 gal is usually in and around $35-$65 depending on where I have sourced my cider from.   In Ontario, Wellesley cider is one of the few that is sulphate and sorbate free, which is essential if you want to go and turn it into an adult drink.    This time the aim is to buy/make all the gear needed for less than that.   In effect to turn my yearly costs into a one time cost without going over budget. 

Now... to be fair, I already own a small press used in jewellery and metal forming.  It is a very solid steel frame with plates that move up and down in it, under the power of a 20 ton car jack... I have seen similar setups made in wood, using a car jack that you often find with your spare tire in your trunk.   Commercial cider press' can be found new online from about $200, so, for now that is just not an option.

Now to convert my small press to make the most of its space and to suit me I went with a style of pressing that involves stacking fabric enclosed layers of ground apples.

So I made the frame out of 1/2" x 1" pine about 7"x8" rectangle, a board of the same footprint for the top of the press and I cut a bit of 2x4 to fill in the center to distribute the weight of the press across the board. With some aluminum I had kicking around I formed up a pan to fit all this, with an open side formed to make a spout. Then I hunted down the last of the fabric that I have made the pole picker from and tore it into three squares with a bit left over.    Excellent, so with the gear prepared, now back to the free produce.

So food processor at the ready, I split and pulverized my first batch, 5 lbs seemed good.  A pound at time made a nice batch and all of it filled a juice jug to the 2L mark.

Now step by step here's how it went for me.

Lay down some plastic craft sheet the kind kids use to "sew" patterns on. 

this let me shimmy things a round a bit so all the layers lined up and allow the juice to flow through.  On very large cider presses they use slatted wood frames to do the same job, but this is all about what I had on hand in the basement and this one sheet cut down perfectly in for pieces and it was a leftover from my last soapmaking workshop.

line frame with  cotton sheet, centered

fill frame with apple mush

fold over left and right then bottom and top

lay down another piece of plastic

put frame on top of first one and repeat

lay board on top, no pressure is being added yet

now a bit of a squeeze, slow and steady means less blowouts of the cotton bundles

Now a bit of a note on blow outs... if your cotton starts to stretch or bulge unevenly, go slow... heck go slow anyway.   But when you do hear a pop and see your apple mush go flying in one direction or another don't stress.  Just make sure the next time you use that piece of fabric that the tear needs goes under the where the apple mush (pommace) will go and then lay a scrap of cloth over the tear before you add in the mush. This essentially patches the problem putting the tear somewhere where there is no more stress on it.  I could have washed and saved this fabric when it was done but honestly by next year I will invariably have more sheets and such that will have been retired to rags and I will have "fresh" ones for next year.

had to add another board

needed a bigger cup this is one L and it was only halfway to done

nearly all the juice is out

pomace left over, it was dry and compressed 

a stack of a days hard work

I tried a meat grinder from pricess auto for $25, to see if there was a power free way to do this and although the pieces were very big it made nearly the same volume of cider per batch so it seems that the pressure is more important than the fineness of the ground apples.

1.52 on the hydrometer means that if/when it brews dry it will be about 6.2% abv 

Total weight of apples and pears 51lbs, 16 L cider. 

 I pitched a package of lavlin ec-1118 champane yeast into water and then mixed it in and now a day later the little yeasty beasties are burping away happily turning sugars into alcohol and CO2.  They will keep on doing the hard work for a few more weeks and then I will likely be doing parts of this batch as a spiced seasonal and the rest finishing in the bottles as a sparkling cider.

total in new purchases = $38.85

wood $2.15

meat grinder $25

yeast $0.75

new hydrometer (the last one broke in the move) $11

Not bad all in all and next year, this should only cost me .75 cents or so plus, lets be honest, a fair bit of time, but it's been more than worth it for me this year.