Ulla Bisgaard

The Infograph is very interesting, and can probably also be very useful, but the problem is, that it doesn’t show individual plant information including the Latin name.
When I read it through I found a plant called four o’clock which we have growing all over our homestead, so I took a look at it. It turns out the plant has two varieties.  One is Mirabilis jalapa, the ornamental four o’clock which is toxic, but a different variety also exists, as the species Mirabilis expansa (mauka) which are edible.
So if you want to use this infograph. I would find the Latin name of the plant you are interested in growing and research it, before starting to grow it.

Patrik Schumann wrote:Good to see you back Ulla!  We're also in SoCal, on a small inner-urban site, but every square foot possible planted to edibles.  Rain-water 1st, gray- 2nd, conveyed least, mostly perennials, trees, shrubs, vines around outdoor spaces, whatever else we can get going underneath as they're the only ones that get dry season irrigation.  We get a lot of grape, feijoa, pitanga, araça-uçu, guava, loquat, blackberry, pomegranate, mustard greens, arugula, fava beans, mint.  Good thing as we're a greens & beans family.  Squirrels, rats, birds get more than we do.  Everything else takes some effort.  Happy to have succeeded with turmeric, ginger, lemongrass; still working on fennel, onion, leek, garlic, rhubarb, brassicas, blueberry, banana, citrus.  Gophers kill a lot from below, skunks dig up new plantings.  There's never any end, though we reached a real plateau catching all our runoff & becoming self-sufficient in biomass.   Filling every gap that opens, seeding every disturbance, an hour a day, year round.

Hi Patric, good to hear from you. I never left permies, but has focused on the transition of my children moving out to start their new life. I have also, and are still working on my book, that has  the “working title”  The wild side of homesteading, a practical guide to permaculture in warm climates. It contains the planning systems I use to run our homestead. I am about 60% done now. All of the research, illustrations and things like that are done. The draft of first 8 chapters are also done, and and I am working hard on the rest.  The hardest and most time consuming parts, are managing the project as it grow lager.
I even have a method for dealing with gophers and other animals, but it’s a long explanation. For now, use metal gopher bags/cages on the root and stem of the plants you don’t want them to eat, then plant things you don’t mind the eating around the area. Like other animals, gophers will always go for the food, that’s the easiest to get to. I haven’t lost a single plant the last 3 years.

While I now live in Southern California, I grew up in Denmark. Growing up my family was poor, but we still made do. Large amounts of potatoes, carrots, beets, celeriac roots and parsnips and brassicas were grown in the summer, and saved for winter in a large pile of hay. Kale was left outside, since it becomes sweeter after frost, and doesn’t die. Onions, leeks, garlic and storage fruits were preserved in our cellar.
We also went foraging for nettles, dandelions, ferns, pine cones, pine needles, mushrooms, walnuts, chestnuts, rosehips, acorns, crabapples, berries and elderberries. Most of this was preserved with canning and fermenting, but a lot of food was also stored in salt.
The men in our family would go hunting and fishing, which was stored in salt or frozen. In our garden we grew lots of black and red currants, which was also preserved.
After leaving home, I kept this tradition, and while we don’t hunt or fish here in California I still honor the foraging and gardening traditions I grew up with.
A food forest, doesn’t have to be a place where all you do is forage for fresh food every day. Even here on our homestead, I depend on food I have preserved, while I also go and forage in our food forest.
In our food forest, I don’t “just” grow fruits. I grow a lot of herbs and spices plus collard greens, kale, tree collards, onions, wild garlic, pecan nuts, cabbages, artichokes, broccoli and cauliflower. I grow sweet potatoes in large deep and wide beds, where the high heat or frost won’t reach them. We then harvest when we need them, and they keep growing new from the tubers I don’t bring in.  For fruits, grow the ones that won’t go bad after being hit with frost, or grow storage apples and similar ones, for eating fresh or canned.
As for food preservation, make fruit leather, sun dried fruits and tomatoes. Use fermentation to make different kinds of kraut. Things like radishes that doesn’t do well when preserved by freezing or canning, store perfectly when fermented, and will give you the fresh crunch all through winter.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:The garden is also inspiring my thirst for writing. Creating our wild side gazette, has brought me so much joy. It contains a satirical and funny stories of what I experience on our homestead.

Ulla, this is brilliant stuff. How do I subscribe to the Gazette?

Not yet, but soon. Some of them are going into the book I am writing. I want to do a subscription service for the gazette, but we haven’t gotten that ironed out yet. That said, I will leave you with a few bonus ones and a thank you for liking it.

I like experimenting. This year I am growing Roselle hibiscus in a slightly shade subtropical bed, and in a full sun and heat bed. The comparison and observations are super interesting. I am also growing cassava in a woodland zone, in full sun, in a deep bed with full sun and in a more shallow bed with more shade, but extra long terms heat.
Once the results come in, I can use them to get the best possible placement.
I also love registrating new insects and birds that enter our ecosystem. Even though I haven’t build, our water system yet, I have 2 types of dragon flies hunting here.
I love creating art into our gardens, especially the food forest garden. Sculptures, wind chimes, area for sensory exploration, art hidden so only a child can see them as they walk around.
The biggest hobby is my collection of herbs and spices. I grow over 50 different kinds of herbs but some I don’t grow every year.
The garden is also inspiring my thirst for writing. Creating our wild side gazette, has brought me so much joy. It contains a satirical and funny stories of what I experience on our homestead.

May Gardner wrote:Not a DIY solution, but since powdering was mentioned here it reminded me of how I've used freeze dried fruit and/or veggie powders in ways those colorful sugars are often used. It works great and tastes so much better. They're also great on uncooked cookies too: cut fruit into slabs, cookie cut them into holiday shapes, dip or dust them with the powder. If you make funnels out of paper or whatever, you can direct the color to certain spots to do dots, lines, etc. as well. Freeze drying preserves the color better than dehydrating too so you can get really saturated colors. It you have a freeze dryer you could make them of course, but I don't so I used purchased ones.

That is my conclusion too. Only problem is, that my freeze dryer has broken down. It looks like the heating unit’s sensor broke. I did talk with the manufacturer and it should be fixable.
Until then, I am piling up herbs, fruits and flowers in my freezer. I do still have some flowers in stock so I could start now, but right now I am also juggling canning, and writing.
I will definitely try this with sugar though. I was thinking about using half sugar and half egg whites, with maybe a little water.

Megan Palmer wrote:Saffron has traditionally been used as a dye as well as a spice.

Good point. I actually have some old saffron, that I might sacrifice for the color

My plan is to make powdered food dyes, especially since turmeric doesn’t last when mixed with water. My plan is to juice it and then dry the juice and the pulp separately. Then I will test out the juiced turmeric for foods and the pulp for textiles.
My kids especially wants to be able to decorate Christmas cookies with colors, and while this is early for Christmas shopping, it takes time to grow plants for dyes.

May Gardner wrote:I was all excited about preserving my excess garden produce to store in a shelf-stable way, and had this idea that I'd be able to can things I grow in a basic and healthy way, but I keep running into roadblocks. The more I look into it, the less I think canning will work for me. I really want it to work, but it seems like it won't unless I change what I grow so that I grow things specifically for canning, and change the types of foods I'm willing to eat. I already was going to change the foods I would eat some for this, but now it's seeming like I'd need to change it too much. I'm hoping someone(s) will have solutions. Here are the issues:

First: I'm limited to water bath canning, canning-wise, since my stove is not suited for pressure canning, which I can deal with as I was thinking I could still water bath can (and dehydrate, freeze).

Second: I know it's recommended to use only lab tested recipes in order to be food safe. I know I can do something like refrigerator pickles without the recipes, but those aren't shelf-stable and the point for me is to have it last months beyond the season, not just weeks. The thing is, this severely limits what I can use in terms of the ingredients as well as the size of the pieces of ingredients... and I'm having trouble finding much if anything I actually want to eat or think is healthy (I guess it's a relative and subjective term).  More on that ahead.

Third: Is related to the previous one in that I don't like sweet pickles or relish, and don't want to have added sugar (or added sweeteners) in my jams, jellies, preserves, etc. or any food actually. It's partially because I don't think it's healthy, and mostly simply because I don't have that much of a sweet tooth and I get headaches from sweeteners, just don't like the taste (especially in pickles), and prefer to taste whatever sweetness (if any) of the foods without that. When it comes to pickles I'm all about the savory and sour, and ick to any sweet with that. When it comes to fruit things, I like the fruit itself without the added sweeteners.

Why is sugar in practically all of the water bath canning recipes, even pickling? I've seen in some places that you can skip the sugar as it's just a flavor thing with pickling, but in other places it says it's needed and none of the recipes have it as an optional thing. Even the recipes for special diets that can't have sugar still have a sweetener. Really? Can't we just have plain dill pickles without sugar or garlic? Which brings me to...

Fourth: I'm allergic to garlic, and somewhat sensitive to onions. I love dill and it's fine in foods... used to be allergic to dill pollen, but that seems to have resolved.

Fifth: There are way more limitations on ingredients for canning than I thought there would be, so like most recipes, I don't necessarily have the exact same ingredients ready to use at the same time and/or at all as the canning recipes. I'm fine with having to get specific canning salt, and get distilled vinegar, but when it gets into the realm of needing to buy produce that I'm not growing just to be able to preserve what I am growing, it stops working for me so much.

Take cucumber pickles for instance, the size of the cucumbers is an important food-safe part of the recipe as is whether you slice it and how. I usually don't grow pickling cucumbers specifically, and I was hoping to be able to pickle the cucumbers I grow when they are a bit younger than I usually eat them. The thing is I grow a lot of snake and Armenian types of cucumbers (which are actually a melon), little cucamelons (which isn't really a cucumber either), and various kinds of cucumbers that are meant to be eaten at a larger size (like slicers), none of which seem to be allowed except possibly the slicers in relish (which has sugar, garlic, onions, or all of those... and red bell pepper which I'm not growing).

I had thought I'd be able to grow things I like (and I do grow lots of varieties), and preserve what I wouldn't be eating fresh so that I could have it during the rest of the year too. I wasn't going to be depending entirely on canning, but I don't have unlimited freezer space, and freezers need electricity, so I was hoping the canning could take care of that. I can dehydrate things, and have been, but my dehydrator only has 5 trays and uses electricity, is not quiet, and it gets depressing having it on all the time in my living space. I'm getting the plans for the solar dehydrators here and we plan to build it, but it might not get done for this season, so I was thinking canning could make up for that. I was hoping to have canning as part of how I can eat food I've grown all year round on a regular basis, even after we have the solar dehydrator.

Does anyone have solutions for this, or should I just give up on water bath canning (at least until/if I adjust what I grow)?

I am sorry you feel that way, so let’s take them one by one and see if we can find something that will work for you.
For water bath canning, the most important thing is acid. Keep the ph under 4 (I aim for 3.6) and it’s safe to can. The only exception is proteins and fats. If you can’t pressure can on your stove, you might like to think about getting a presto electric canner. I have one and I love it. In broth alone, it paid off the price in savings within a year.
I also want you to think about using fermentation as a way to preserve. Brassicas can’t be canned, in fact they will stink up your house if you do it.  Radishes turn to mush if frozen and don’t do well dried, but they shine as a fermented food. I make 3 types of kimchi, 4 different kinds of sour kraut, and fermented lemons by the gallon. We eat it as a snack, in a salad, side dish and even in soups. All of your cucumbers, melons and similar things can be fermented, and you don’t need to add garlic. Add what you like to eat with them. My favorites are dill and onion, with a little grains of paradise. I have a jar with fermenting rhubarb, where I added lemon quarters, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Also note, that as long as your ferments have the right acidity they can also be water bath canned.
Feel free to send me a pm, if you have other questions.
When we have too much fruit I usually dehydrate them or make fruit leather.

I am 10 years in establishing a low maintenance food forest garden. If it can be useful, I can send you a copy of my field guide. It documents it pretty well.
I have also made comical versions of my experiences, from the field guide.
Send me a pm or an email and I can send you a copy, or we can talk on zoom.