Homestead Garden Class Tips

Zinnias bloom until the first frost!

A few interesting tips, questions and techniques emerged from our discussions during this week’s “Grow a Homestead-Style Food Garden” class. Since a lot of folks might have the same questions and ideas—plus I promised a gardening post today—here’s a sample!

Cover Crops

Cover crops, generally some variety of grains or legumes, can be a great benefit to the fertility of your soil. Also known as “green manures,” you sow the seeds in fall, the plants winter over, and you till in the mature plants in the spring. 

It’s a good way to avoid having bare soil exposed to the winter elements. And the plants will add lots of organic material to your soil. 

These mature grains or legumes can be a large biomass, though, and challenging to hand till. My best advice would be if you had a large space you could rototill, cover crops would be great to try. 

Shelling pea seedlings, a mini-cover crop

Otherwise, if you have small food garden spaces, you might try what I did this fall: after my shelling peas went to seed, I pulled up the pea plants, tore open the seed pods, and collected the seeds. Then I planted them in the empty bed. 

These seedlings won’t grow very much—probably only get a few inches tall, before they die off with the first hard frost. But in the meantime, the little pea plants will add a little nitrogen to the soil, and provide a bit of soil cover for winter!

Quick update later in October: the pea plants are now about 9 inches tall, and weathered our first frost well, which killed all the tomato and zucchini plants. So they’re continuing to improve the soil as we move deeper into fall.

Powdery Mildew

This is a fungus that generally shows up on some of your vegetable foliage, peas can be prone to powdery mildew, also plants in the squash family. One reason can be not enough watering. But if you have it show up in a well-watered bed, it could be the plant is simply nearing the end of its life cycle. 

With squash plants,  I just leave the plant in the ground, and let the killing frost do its job. Then I use the dead foliage as a bit of mulch on the soil, before adding another layer of mulch for winter. 

Plants for Pollinators

Lots of students were interested in this one—after all, there’s an entire host of food plants with flowers, that will need pollinators to produce a crop!

Native plants are always a beneficial choice—many natives around here bloom in mid-spring, while it’s still pretty chilly, like Indian plum and red currant; native bleeding heart will bloom in a limited way through the summer. 

One student sources wildflower seeds, tosses them right on the soil in early spring, then covers the seeds with cardboard, to prevent birds from scarfing up the seeds. After a few days, you removed the cardboard, and let the flower seedlings grow. 

By summertime, you’ll have lovely wildflowers—one of her favorite is lupin. Keep in mind that a lot of wildflowers will self-seed quite prodigiously: daisies, lupin (they *really* spread themselves around!), foxglove; fireweed produces seed fluff plus underground runners. So I wouldn’t sow the wildflowers too close to your food crops!

Cosmos will self-seed too!

If you’d rather stick to cultivated flowers, my faves at the moment are cosmos and zinnias, yummy food for pollinators. The hummingbirds are still visiting our garden, because of these late-summer bloomers!

Apple Trees: Dwarf or Semi-Dwarf?

One student asked which size you should plant. My experience is, we’ve had huge harvests from our dwarf-size apple trees—say, 300 apples per tree. 

To me, semi-dwarf varieties seem much more manageable for the home food gardener. Our semi-dwarf trees will still produce over 100 fruits per tree—plus they’re easier to prune if you’re not very tall!

If you want to go even smaller, there are “mini-dwarf” varieties. Our Queen Cox is a mini-dwarf, and if well-managed, will produce 40-50 apples per year. Since the tree about as tall as I am, it’s easy to prune, and to thin as well. I only wish more of our trees were mini-dwarfs!

Peppermint “Smoothies”

Here’s a cool tip to deter mice, offered by one student—and a great way to use lots of mint! Blend a bunch of peppermint (yes, in your blender), and add a little water. Then you apply the mint slurry to where you’ve seen mice predation. (I saw a fair amount of gnawing on my blueberry roots this summer, and yup, that’s mice.) This is one I’m going to try today!

We also discussed compost quite a bit—you can find a lots of compost-making tips right here at the Little Farm blog… Just type in the search bar!

Holiday Book on Sale!

Holiday Irish novel

Thursdays are typically blog days for me. But though I planned to cover a number of food gardening topics that emerged from my gardening class last night, a lot of unexpected stuff turned up today. 

So I’ll just share a bit of fun book news:

My holiday novel, The Hopeful Romantic, was chosen for Barnes & Noble’s fall-themed “Fall in Love” promotion!

Starting October 4, the book will be 50% off, not only at B&N, but at all ebook retailers. The sale lasts until Oct. 10th. 

A deeply tender Irish love story, much of The Hopeful Romantic’s action takes place around American Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’ll post the retailer links next week…

Watch for my “homesteady” post tomorrow!

Christmas Stories--Two New Book Covers!

I've been stuck on my laptop all afternoon...but with some enjoyable compensation: watching the robins perch on the huckleberry bush right next to the window, gobbling up the berries!

I used to get a bit tweaked, losing our huckleberries to the birds. But the last few years I've gotten more philosophical. John and I are managing  to keep our lavish blueberry crop all for ourselves (by extensive netting), so why not share the much-harder-to-pick huckleberries!

My desk work today has been dealing with book publishing tasks, which is more fun than it sounds when you get to be creative. It's kind of early for the holidays, but I wanted to share a couple of new covers for existing books, both with a Christmas theme.

The Christmas Visitor, a novelette-length short story, is a prequel to my brand-new Irish novel, The Fairy Cottage of Ballydara! (Details coming next time!)

And the second Christmas book, Morgan Carey and The Mystery of the Christmas Fairies, is a middle-grade novel for tweens. It's set in the forested foothills very much like where we live...except with real, live fairies!

(You can probably tell I'm a big fairy fan!)

For the Christmas Fairies book, the cover came before the story! I found the image of this magical-looking tree when I was creating the original cover for The Christmas Visitor. Since it's my deepest, secret wish to someday find a big tree with a door in it, I immediately thought, this tree needs a story.

So I'd always intended to write a children's novel featuring this amazing fairy tree, but I was busy with my books for grown-ups. And time flew by with me writing a word of it.

The plots for my books generally come to me slowly, over weeks or months. But not for this book: one day, a week before Christmas, the story came to me in one fell swoop, demanding "write me"!

You can find more about both books at www.susancolleenbrowne.com...But it's time to leave the desk: Miss Broody wants a snack, and the garden is calling!

Homestead Gardening Class and Free Gardening Book!

 “Grow a Homestead-Style Food Garden,” my community college workshop, is happening next week, September 28! We’ll cover lots of sustainable gardening techniques, as well as composting and natural fertilizers, and a handy timeline for your gardening activities throughout the year.

Accessing all the class information is easy…because all the course content and more can be found in my free ebook, Little Farm in the Garden. And speaking of…

People must be getting ready for serious fall gardening…I’ve just discovered this Little Farm book is having a moment!

The book was inspired by the aforementioned homestead gardening class, held every fall and spring at the community college. www.Whatcomcommunityed.com

Writing Little Farm in the Garden was hugely fun—a way to share lots more information than I can fit into a workshop. You can get the Amazon ebook by clicking on the cover on your right!

And if you don’t mind me tooting my own horn, here’s the latest from Amazon’s gardening best sellers…

And below, in another category…

Berryridge Farm has gotten short shrift this week—I’ve been madly finishing up my latest Irish novel. And this afternoon, a flurry of urgent family emails showed up.

But I’ll post some new garden pics soon! PS, if you prefer to read on your computer, you can also get a free PDF of Little Farm in the Garden at my website, www.susancolleenbrowne.com

Recipe for Blueberry Torte—Improvised!

 When it comes to heavy cream for my recipes, I’m kinda spoiled.

I always buy my favorite local brand, from just across the county. Packaged in a reusable glass bottle, the cream is made from Jersey cows, and is a beautiful golden color. It’s non-homogenized too, so the cream rises to the top—and you have to shake the bottle to use it. 

Just the way your grandmother probably had to do to use heavy cream, and her grandmother before her!

A few days ago, as our blueberry crop was winding down, I knew time was getting short: if I wanted to made my “Blueberry Bliss” torte—one of my all-time favorite desserts—I’d have to hop to it before the shrubs stopped bearing. 

The torte is very simple: a graham cracker crust filled with sweetened cream cheese mixed with whipped heavy cream, topped with blueberry sauce. 

Recipe from the 80s (or older!)

Here’s the original recipe (from the Browne family cookbook), with my updates/modifications. There’s a close-up photo below. You can find my original “Blueberry Bliss” post from August 2018.

So on my next trip to the Co-op, I went to the dairy aisle for the cream—and could hardly believe my eyes. They no longer carried my lovely brand of local, Jersey-milk heavy cream!

I’m guessing is, the management decided schlepping the used glass bottles back to the dairy had gotten to be too much of a hassle. 

In any event, all the heavy cream the Co-op carried was a national organic brand. The price for one pint was—hold on to your wallet—$7.89! I could hardly believe my eyes. 

Now, I’m sure this national brand tastes okay—but at $7.89, it had better be unforgettably yummy. 

The other thing is, this cream is ultra-pasteurized. Like almost all the heavy cream on the market.

Ultra-pasteurized means the milk is heated to 280 degrees, which basically kills all the bacteria—and gives the milk a much longer shelf life. The problem is, this process also kills the helpful bacteria in the milk, as well as the enzymes that give it flavor. 

Call me a snob, but I just won’t use that stuff.

Luckily, the little supermarket 15 miles away from our place still carried the local brand. So I approached the dairy section…and imagine my disappointment with all they had was milk and pint bottles of half-and-half. NO heavy cream!

Well, I had a decision to make. Miss out on my blissful dessert? Or try and make half-and-half work? 

The other advantage of the half-and-half: it was $2.99!

I conjured up my homesteady mindset—meaning, first, being thrifty…and second, dialing down my expectations of the perfect dessert and just making do with what I had. 

And decided to go for it.

Un-homogenized half-and-half

So I bought the bottle of half and half. As you see in the photo, it is actually half cream on the top, and what looks like low-fat milk on the bottom half. The only way to get the cream was to scrape it out of the bottle with a knife. 

When I’d gotten out as much as I could, I strained the milk to extract the last bits of cream. It was a pain, and made quite a mess. And all I ended up with was about 3/4 cup of cream. Not the 1 generous cup I needed for the recipe.

Well, 3/4 cup was better than nothing! So I whipped it up, and mixed it in with the cream cheese, and proceeded with the rest of the recipe.

The creamy filling ended up being not as abundant as the regular recipe—who knew that 1/4 cup of cream would make a noticeable difference. But it was still tasty. And John loved it!

Torte waiting for the blueberry sauce topping

And we got to experience our Blueberry Bliss dessert for this summer’s blueberry season!

You can also find my Blueberry Bliss post at www.susancolleenbrowne.com/blog !

The finished blueberry sauce, cooling

Miss Broody Rejoins the World

Bobcat at our place

I had given up hope.

Our one remaining hen has been on her nest all summer. She’d always been the broodiest of our flock of Buff Orpingtons, but I suspected this particular broody period of hers, which should have lasted maybe a few weeks, had become permanent.

I think she was completely traumatized by the last bobcat attack in June—so much so she would never recover. 

Up close, bobcats don’t seem that fierce, do they? But they are relentless chicken hunters. 

And when the cat carried off her chicken “sister,” our feisty Little Britches, our last hen decided to just spend the rest of her days in the coop.

Each day, I’d lift her off the nest—broody hens rarely get off their nest unless you make them— and put her in front of the waterer. I’d stick around until she drank, and coax her into having a little feed. Then, unless I blocked the hen door into the coop, she would run back inside.

This week, I figured I’d seen the writing on the wall. This poor little animal was eating just enough to barely stay alive. She was going to live out her days alone in the coop, pale and sickly, until she just gave up on life.

Of course she wasn’t laying, i.e., fulfilling her hen destiny. I figured she never would again, not without other hens and their laying-egg hormones around. But she also wasn’t scratching the ground, enjoying her feed, or chasing bugs.

Yet I was most concerned about her loneliness—hens are herd animals, meant to live with others. And without any other hen companionship, I couldn’t see any future for Miss Broody at our place—forever under the threat of a bobcat or other predators.

Two days ago, I was ready to ask some hen-keeping folks I know, who LOVE animals, if they would be interested another chicken—of course confessing that this one had quit laying. Or calling the Humane Society—maybe they knew of some people who ran sort of an old folks home for chickens past their prime.

I hated giving up on Miss Broody—but I was sure she’d be happier somewhere else.

Yesterday, I heard her chattering a bit—and wondered if she’d sensed a predator, which was nothing new. But I still had to yard her off her nest and get her to eat.

In the early evening, though, I peeked into the coop. Miss Broody was on the roost!

This was big—a normal hen behavior. And when I rattled her feeder, she actually came out of the coop and ate a little!

Today, I saw her out in her yard. This was really big! Of course, ever hopeful, I checked the nest. No eggs. If laying is indeed in her future, she probably has to regroup and eat for a few days before laying restarts.

Still, Miss Broody really has turned the corner—even if she's not laying eggs, she's come back to life!

For more about hens, broody and otherwise, I hope you’ll check out my past posts!

Copyright: Susan Colleen Browne

Photo credit: John F. Browne