Kate Muller

So it has been over a year since I have posted here on Permies.  It has been a hard year and my garden has suffered for it.  I managed to break the spacer in my replaced knee 9 months before we figured out why my knee joint was so loose and painful.  As a result much of my late summer and fall garden work never happened.  My knee revision surgery happened in May.  
We scaled back the  garden to just fresh eating for the season with a few small exceptions.
I managed to get the greenhouse planted before my surgery.  My husband and a friend planted out the 4 small raised beds in the main garden for me 2 weeks after the surgery.
We installed drip irrigation in the greenhouse and everything had to survive just with the automatic drip irrigation for at least 2 months.  My wonderful husband is a really good engineer and a good landscaper but he isn't a gardener. With having to take care of me while working full time the garden had to thrive on it's own.  

Things were going well and I started getting back into the garden after 2 months. Mostly to harvest.  We realized that we will need wider foot paths between beds so I have an easier time walking with a crutch or a cane in the future. Not only will this make for safer walking but the pathways can be mowed now that most local sources of free wood chips have dried up in our area.

At the 3 month mark of my recover I managed to trip in my garden and fall. I sprained the newly replaced knee, broke 2 bones in my ankle, and tore a ligament.  This happened less than 3 weeks after I was cleared to drive from the knee replacement.  So I am on crutches and can't put any weight on my ankle.  Being out of commission during the 6 busiest harvest weeks has not been fun.  

The upside is my husband is becoming a much better cook.  Beyond that running the entire homestead, taking care of me, doing all the house hold chores, driving me to appointments on top of  his day job has been very stressful for my sweet and wonderful husband.  He now has a much deeper understand of all I regularly do on a day to day basis. He is building me a beautiful raised bed with a cold frame to fit it.  It will go in front of my front porch near my herb bed. I will be able to garden while sitting on the porch or on the paver covered pathway on the other side.  

We have hired a young friend of ours  that has recently started his own landscaping business to clear out a bunch of the invasive weeds.  We have also been having him clean up and tarp our annual beds for next year.  This way in the spring when I have 2 good legs in the spring I can focus on getting the first plantings in and getting the rest of the garden back into shape.  

We are reevaluating  how we will design things in the future since my ability to dramatically damage my joints is not going to get better as I age.  Every repair, upgrade, improvement and farm expansion will all be designed to reduce the work load and improve access.  

While this has been a hard year I will recover and I will appreciate the garden even more next year.

The 1816 Year Without a Summer hit New England hard.  Living here now I am grateful that greenhouses, hoop houses, cold frames, and row covers are far easier to obtain and use than they  were in 1816.  

Living in a cold wet climate on the side of a hill we have been developing our homestead to handle wet rainy weather.  We have raised beds  and keep adding organic matter to the glacial sand that we have instead of topsoil. The greenhouse has been amazing for keeping us in fresh veggies for a most of the year. This allows us to focus the main garden for food mostly food preservation crops, perennial fruits, nuts, herbs, and veggies.  

Future plans include more fencing, food forest, a better honey bee housing, and meat production.  Of course this may not help if we have a major climate disrupting event but it will help with our goals of retiring early.

Denise Cares wrote:I agree with what Kate Muller has said about reasons for having supply on hand.  My problem is how to prevent those pesky grain larvae from getting into everything. Even buckets with tight lids do not keep them out. They get into glass jars too. I'm missing the secret. Maybe need to remove the oxygen as many describe. Putting the whole bag of grain thru the freezer before sealing in a bucket would be difficult as freezer space is very limited. So even dividing up the 25 lb sacks would pose a major logistics issue. Multiply that by several large sacks - not feasible. Once a single moth finds "where you keep the goods" (pantry, shed, garage, closet), it's nearly impossible to keep them out thereafter.

We solved the lack of freezer space problem by stocking up on the few grains we use in January.  That way we can freeze the grains in the coldest part of the winter.  We put them in buckets, seal them for storage, and then set them on the bulkhead steps of our basement for a week.  It is cold enough to freeze everything and also critter resistant.  A shed, out building, or porch could be used to freeze the gains if you have enough of a cold snap to freeze it all the way through.

junaid ahmed wrote:It seems like the grain storage problem has already been handled by the local grain elevator, and doesn't really benefit by home storage methods. Flour also seems like a problem that is best solved by the mill. Is there a reason why you want to store more than a month worth of dry grain or flour? Am I missing part of the goal? Or is experimenting with different preservation techniques the goal?

Here are some reasons a household may want to store large quantities grains, legumes, and other shelf stable ingredients.  

Food allergies and dietary restrictions.  If you have to be very careful about which grains you can eat buying in bulk saves money and insures you have the ones you can eat if the supply is seasonal or inconsistent.

If you are growing your own grains, legumes, and other seed based crops you generally harvest the crop all at once and need to store it.  Ideally so you can use it till the next year's crop is ready.

Some households are large and it is a time saver to buy in bulk when you are cooking for larger number of people.  It saves you time to go and get the supplies if you do once every few months or twice a year.  

If you live in a rural area and the local supermarket is a 45 minute drive buying in bulk reduces fuel consumption. If you also produce some of your own food it make sense to buy in bulk for the things you do not produce to reduce long car rides to get supplies.  





 

Pearl Sutton wrote:....when thrift store shopping is fun because the employees either ask "what IS that thing? We wondered!" or say "Oh neat, you know what that is! We were wondering if anyone would know and buy it!"
And the other half of it, when you can text permie friends pictures of odd stuff at the thrift store, and they reply "Yes please! All of them!!" or "ooooooh! YES!!!"  

I had this experience at a Boy Scout yard sale.  I found an Erathway Seeder with plates for $6.00.  They asked me what it was since I was so excited to buy it.

I am just harvesting my celeriac now.  I start my seeds under lights and they take the same amount of time as parsley.  I start them indoors in late February and transplant them out in late May.  I harvest them in October and I have found they will take a few fall frosts.  The greens will be damaged but the root base  part is fine.  

I try and get to harvesting them before the tops are damaged so I can dehydrate the leaves.  I tend to not water them enough so the stems are hollow so I give those to the chickens.  Harvesting them is a bit of work because the roots are great at holding onto compost.  I have a washing station outside so I can keep the soil in the garden.

I have harvested them in November and kept them in a cooler on my porch for a couple of weeks.  Some are stored in zip top bags in my fridge and the rest are chopped,  blanched, and dehydrated to use in soups, stews, and sheppard's pie.  

Pearl Sutton wrote:When, due to health stuff, the garden is not planted yet, some of the beds were not even cleared last fall, none were done the way I want beds done in the fall to be ready for spring, so everything needs work before I can even find the dirt under the weeds to amend and plant it.
BUT!!
The main weeds out there are brown eyed susan, ox eye daisy, buttercups, yarrow, lots of asters as tall as I am...
You know you are a permie when you say "I'm not coping, but at least the bees are happy!"

I am feeling this so hard right now.  The garden is getting overrun with runner grass right now but there is also so many wildflowers, herbs, and random veggie volunteers all over the place.  

Your Money or Your Life.  

A classic book that has a great approach to analyzing where your spending is going and tracking it so you can focus on how you are spending your money.  It talks about not only paying down debt and saving but also making sure you can spend money on things that mean the most too you.  It plays well with permaculture principles.

I need to reread it so I better focus on my long term goals.

You know you are a permie when you host your FRC robotics team's end of season party and don't get to sit and eat because you keep having to give garden tours, answer gardening questions, dig up excess volunteer plants to send home with people, and share raise beds design plans.   While everyone else is eating the salad from the garden or watching the frogs in the garden pond I am running around showing people all the plants, pond, earthworks, solar, chickens, greenhouse, and other  projects we have at the moment.  They want to have another party at the end of the summer to see how all the projects are progressing.