Have you ever had peas fresh from the garden? There is no taste quite like it. The canned and frozen peas at the store aren’t even close to how much flavor they have just picked. If someone asked me what the color green tasted like, I’d say peas. Firm, not soft. And dry, not mushy. Sweet, but not sugary. And shelling the peas, so much fun. You gently squeeze the end of the pod and it pops open. Then you stick you finger in and carefully unzip it to reveal the fat peas inside. Hold the open pod over a bowl and run you finger down each side to dislodge the peas. Eat one now and then. Put the pods in a bowl to take out to the compost bin when you are done and save a couple inside to feed to the red wiggler worms in the bin. And while you are doing this, think about doing it again tomorrow and the next day and the next and then wonder why you didn’t plant even more peas in May because peas are the best and you can never have too many.
In my tiny, difficult to grow anything, south side of the house, hot and dry and partly shaded garden, last year I planted
lovage. Lovage is a tall perennial herb in the apiaceae family, a family that includes dill, fennel, parsley, parsnip, carrots and celery. It was too new and small to bloom last year but this year, it has grown up to about three feet tall (just shy of a meter) and is blooming with yellow umbel flowers that look kind of like dill but are bigger and sort of spiky. When I went to take a photo of the flowers, I discovered ants really like the flowers. The leaves can be used in salads or soups and the roots can apparently be dug up and eaten like a vegetable. If it turns out to be a big spreader, perhaps I will try the roots sometime. As for the leaves, they are supposed to taste like celery. So I nibbled on one. It definitely had a celery flavor going on, but very sharp and sort of smokey at the same time, sort of cumin-like. Which makes sense now because cumin is also in the apiaceae family. I am not sure I would ever use the leaves in a salad and if I did it would be just a tiny snip. They’d probably go better as a spice/flavoring in salad dressing. I can imagine it would taste good in soup, maybe a stew of some sort? So there you are, all about lovage. It is a good plant if you have a hot, dry, partly sunny (6 hours sun) corner of the garden and you want something tall but not too bushy.All the gardening I’ve been doing for the last week and half has been performed in my new gardening capris from Duluth Trading Company. These pants are so wonderful I wish I could wear them all the time. I learned about these pants on a gardening blog about two weeks ago and decided I had to have a pair (they come in capri and full-length). I got moss green and went for the capri length because I have taken to wearing my wellies every time I go out in the garden even when it isn’t wet. Before these garden pants I’d just wear worn out tan cotton pants that quickly became even more worn out and stained especially at the knee. What’s so great about my new garden pants? They have so many pockets, and deep pockets at that. Plus they have pockets over the knees into which you can insert specially designed kneepads, which I also bought when I bought the pants. No more carrying around a foam kneeling pad. The kneepad inserts are comfortable and bendy and I hardly notice they are there. In addition, the fabric of the pants is a soft cotton/nylon blend that breathes and is durable while also being dirt, stain and water resistant. I have never bought anything from Duluth Trading Company before but after discovering these pants and seeing what good quality they are, I plan on eventually getting a work shirt or two for wearing in the garden.
I found out recently that much of what I am doing in my garden falls under a growing movement called “urban homesteading.” It isn’t only about gardening and producing food. It also encompasses an approach toward living in as sustainable a manner as possible, reducing your carbon footprint, self-sufficiency and community. It turns out I am already doing quite a lot that falls under the urban homesteading rubric without actually having known I was doing it. I read a really good book recently called The Weekend Homesteader. It is a start-where-you-are sort of book that offers simple projects you can do in a weekend to get you started on the homesteading path. A lot of it is about gardening but there is also seed saving and canning, baking bread and putting up a clothes line.Homesteading and even permaculture gardening, generally also includes livestock: chickens, ducks, rabbits, bees. The bees: honey and pollinating. The chickens and ducks: manure, eggs and meat. The rabbits: manure and meat. As a vegan I would never dream of having livestock for meat or eggs (though if they were my own poultry they’d be more like pets and I would seriously consider eating their eggs but only their eggs). I considered rabbits for manure and thought, hey I could get longhaired rabbits that I could brush or shave twice a year and use their fur to make yarn for knitting. When I brought up the idea to Bookman he wasn’t keen on it. He doesn’t want to have to worry about more animals to take care of and he thinks it sort of cruel that the rabbits would be pretty much living in a cage all their lives. I see the point. But bees, now that is a possibility. We are going to have to knock down our slowly leaning garage in a few years and build a new one. We already decided we would do a green roof on it. Now we are thinking we could put a beehive on that roof too. This is something that won’t happen for at least five years but it is good to start thinking about these things now so when the time comes we know exactly what we want. Of course, I have also thought of knocking down the garage, building a small tool shed, removing all the concrete and extending the garden. I wonder how many things I will imagine before it comes time to actually do something about the garage?
We made a trip to the home improvement store to get supplies for our next project. This coming Friday is Independence Day and we have plans of the no fireworks related kind. There will be apple pie made from our own apples and Bookman has perfected his vegan hot dog recipe. It will be all-American. Oh and the project? It is a garden project that involves metal stakes, zip ties, and chicken wire. It will be a bigger, better version of something we already have. What could it possibly be?
It might be a “folly” or a “tuteur”.
saw GARLIC SCAPES at a recent
garden tour and thought of you!
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booksandbuttons, did you surreptitiously snip off any of the garlic scapes to take home and eat? I would have been so very tempted! No, nothing as fancy as a folly or tuteur. We’ll be building a “two-room” compost bin 🙂
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Oh, tonight we are having purple hull peas and cornbread, but we didn’t grow the peas. Farmers Market. I’m trying tomatoes in the back garden again, but the squirrels usually get them. Our cabin garden yielded some broccoli and onions, but we didn’t get to the cabin as often this spring to get stuff planted.
Yeah! for urban gardening! You two are a great example!
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Jenclair, oh that sounds delicious! The Farmer’s Market is the next best thing to growing something yourself. Those pesky squirrels! Good luck with your tomatoes. You may not have gotten much planted at your cabin, but broccoli and onions are two pretty good things to have managed!
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I do like peas, and the ritual of getting other people to shell them with me. We had a pet rabbit for ten years, and he was a delight. I worried about him living in a cage all the time, but he got to come out of it and hop around for at least 10-15 minutes every day, and usually would hop back to the hutch when he was ready to go back in, so we believed he didn’t mind living there. It was a really big hutch, though, with room to hop from one side to the other. I designed it myself and had it built at a sheltered workshop near where we live.
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Jeanne, heh, yes, shelling peas with someone is fun. Bookman joined me and, well, let’s just say the peas began to go a bit wild. Thanks for the information about your rabbit keeping! It gives me something to think about.
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Yes, we have grown peas a decade or so ago before a long drought put an end to our veggie garden. The drought has broken but so has hubby’s heart for veggie gardening! I’m still hoping though. Love the look of your gardening capris. They look great. Did you go for black or raspberry?
I would love some chooks for eggs, but their care, and protection from feral foxes would be a worry.
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whisperinggums, droughts do sort of make vegetable gardening hard. Maybe your husband will regain his interest eventually? My gardening capris are actually moss green which in reality means a medium muted green that is almost olive but not quite. I have a friend with six chickens and a rooster and they are all names after characters from Battlestar Galactica. She likes them a lot and manages to take care of them along with three big dogs. It is a lot of work though. I’ve never seen a fox though I’ve heard they are around as are coyotes.
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Oh green – my favourite colour. Lovely. Unfortunately I have seen several foxes – mostly as road kill but occasionally live. They were brought here in early days by the English for hunting and are now a serious problem. Many people have lost chooks (as we call them here, anyhow) to foxes and have to create very secure pens.
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Oh dear. Foxes as invasive species. They do sound a problem and not just for chickens!
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They are – for a lot of native animals, which is worse of course.
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My father-in-law used to get his honey from a woman who had rooftop hives in town. She was in her 70s or 80s and in the best of health. She swore her good health came from beekeeping. If you and Bookman decided to do a hive, I’m sure you’d have lots of fun with it.
I wonder what project you’ll be working on? Can’t wait to read all about it!
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Vanessa, there is something so fascinating about beekeeping, so many myths and stories. I can well imagine that beekeeping kept the woman healthy for some time. My only worry is bee stings. My sister became suddenly allergic to stings when she was in her teens and I haven’t been stung since I was a kid and with all my allergies I have to wonder a little of bee stings might now be among them. I suppose if we do decide to go down the beekeeping path I will have to talk to an allergist and be prepared just in case!
Shall I tell you the project? It will be an easy one: a two-room compost bin. Not the most exciting thing in the world but It will be so much better than our current plastic bin.
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Oh yes, talk to an allergist first. I hope bee stings aren’t in your list of allergies.
Compost bins are pretty exciting to me! That sounds like a fun project.
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Thanks! I hope they aren’t too! I’m glad there are other people who think a new compost bin is exciting!
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Yes, go for the bees! I think it would be cool to keep bees–and a natural choice for gardeners. My favorite vendor at the farmers market is a honey place–they sell jams too that are sweetened with honey (where I get my gooseberry jam!!). I just bought a pair of jeans from Duluth so will be trying them out this week! I should check out their gardening pants–just to wear around the house since my house is old and it never properly cools off inside and I always feel sticky–not a pleasant way to spend the summer. And the weather you have now is how it has been for at good week or so here–it has finally given way to lower humidity today (thank goodness–yesterday was totally unbearable). It won’t last but the coolness feels so much better. Your peas sound yummy–I bet everything tastes so much better from your garden compared to store bought. You’ll never be able to go back now, will you!
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Danielle, it would be fun to have a hive. I’d have to get permission from my neighbors for the permit and take a class but I’m always up for learning something new. Let me know what you think of your jeans. I’ll probably need some new ones soon and shopping for jeans is one of my least favorite things to do. Did the cool front reach you? It arrived here yesterday afternoon and took away the humidity and the heat. So nice! Oh yes, the garden makes me spoiled when it comes to store bought food. It can never taste as good!
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It’s one of my favourite childhood memories – picking fresh peas. Not many of them ever made it to the cooking pot!
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pining, heh, Bookman laughed at me last night. He used some of the peas in what he made for dinner but I didn’t think he had used enough so I added more. I was hoping we’d get enough to freeze but clearly they aren’t going to last long at all!
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