Ellen Schwindt

My tasty Permie garden
grows "weeds" as well as food I eat.
I love all the plants.

I would like to second the question of camelina growing. I have planted some as a cover crop with crimson clover. I won't know until spring if it survives my zone 3 winter. Right now it's 15 degrees F and no snow cover, so maybe not, but maybe.  I'd love to figure out the oil question..... Anybody else got growing experience with camelina?

Thanks for that book list and inspiration, Gina!

I want to read a lot this winter, too, but I have been hunting around for the just-right books.

As for my winter projects, I have a fleece to wash, card, and spin in small batches, lots and lots of flax tow to comb for shorter flax fibers, lots of fiber to spin, and lots of plans to make for growing more flax and small grains to be planted in the spring just after the snow goes.

There's no snow yet, and that's good, because I still need to stack the lumber from our torn-down decrepit chicken house, try to get 1000 square feet of cardboard laid down as a cover for the ground where I'll be growing flax and small grains, and one more fence made for my three-sided chicken coop. I thought (chuckling can be heard here) that I'd somehow have gotten all that done already.

Oh and there's a string quintet (different kind of string) to finish, practice, and perform, along with about 25 music lessons to teach each week. Well, nobody ever expected me to be lazy in the winter!

When somebody learned how to balance all the rich threads of life, I do wish they'd teach me. In the meantime, I'm so glad there are so many options.

I'm always trying to relate Permies conversations to my own experience. I have had great luck making hugels out of downed wood from the wooded (and for a long time) area on my property. This year, I had a sapling spring up in one of my first hugels. I decided to let it stay as a builder of soil and as a sort-of unplanned guild member. So far so good: it's still little, but I'm able to grow around it. I'm thinking next year I'll try to grow some pole beans or other viney members of a guild around it.

I don't exactly test my soil, but it is full of life and not very full at all of pesty beasties. I'm thinking this is bringing a tiny bit of the forest soil complexity into the area where I'm developing food forest plants. I also think I'm years and years away from seeing the food forest project to something like completion, and I love the idea of looking at the whole project as a succession partly managed by me and with a future that goes on beyond my management.

This is a very helpful conversation to me. I'm trying to establish some small (mostly about 10'X10') plots that I can rotate through small grain production and flax production. My main goal is to get the soil healthy after it was under plastic to kill off an "invasive" species. I have a couple of these plots that are very weedy. I originally prepared them by using a scythe to cut all vegetation off at ground level, added a bit of hand-weeding to eliminate as much crabgrass and blackberry as I could, then planted a cover cover crop of oats which winter-killed. After that I planted the whole lot to flax. I got a pretty good crop of flax that first year of desired harvest--that was 2022. I also planted rye that year and then followed the rye plot with flax in 2023 (this year). That plot had way too much weed pressure and though I did harvest some flax it was a lot less than ideal for flax production, even at my tiny level. I want to be able to plant either fall rye (with a legume and a mustard for companions) but I fear that the weeds have filled in too much. I'm curious about whether anybody is using cardboard to terminate vegetation, then planting without tilling and what results you've had. Perhaps I should start that as a thread, but it also seems like a relevant question here.

I make the smalles bales imaginable with a milk crate. I just cram the hay in and tie twine around it. It stores nicely in my shed. It's on a tiny scale, but I like feeling that I've baled a little bit of hay.

I didn't quite believe what James Freyr said in this thread until the other day. That was when I caught our new and not very bully-ish rooster named Randy sitting on the nest the girls had lately been using. Sure enough, under him were three eggs! Chickens certainly are weird. Thanks James for keying me in to the amazing possibilities of weird chicken behavior.

So, two years after your original post, Raven, I come in from the not-so-hot sun where I've been pulling flax for a drink of lemonade and a break and I see this post. I guess I am engaged, at the moment, in just what you suggest, growing your own clothes. I would be interested in sharing flax-growing information with anybody growing flax. I'm about to embark on something like research to see if I can design a seven-year rotation which will be good for my land, will grow some small grains and legumes I can eat AND grow flax every seventh year. All that and I want to use a Fukuoka-inspired method for the growing.

And in roughly 1 week I'm going to plant some perennial flax to see if I can make that work for growing fiber.

Skill-sharing I'm totally up for! And I would certainly check out any course offerings you come up with. I've used your book on flax a lot and passed out a  picture from it along with the bibliographical info on it at a craft fair where my daughter and I were demonstrating processing flax.
Then there's using foraged fibers--I've got some nettles retting in a barrel right now, but I haven't really figured out how to get the fiber out of them easily enough to want to pursue it.

What types of small grains have you been growing besides Rye? Is the Sepp Holzer Rye its own variety? How do I get my hands on some? I've grown Rye successfully, and even harvested and ate it, but I'm really interested in increasing my involvement with all sorts of small whole grains. I live in a very very different climate--Northeast New England in the foothills of the whites. I feel your pain about the heat, though as I grew up sans air conditioning in Central Kansas in the 80s.

Any info on your grain production/sowing/harvesting/using would be gobbled up by this permie!
Thank you for your posts--especially of the kitties.
-Ellen

Hello Vera,
   I'm really enjoying this thread. Partway down you talk about a can of beans you found. It made me want to tell you a story.

My husband got freaked out about food some years back and started keeping a "bunker." The word "bunker" was my word for what he was doing--buying all kinds of canned food and storing it on shelves in the cellar. The shelves themselves came to be during the 50s scare about Nuclear War--I think most particularly the Cuban Missile Crisis. We live in the house where my husband moved to when he was 5 years old!

Anyway, husband cleared off some shelves and began stashing canned goods there every time he came home from the store. At that time, I didn't do the shopping as I was working full time. I DID do some canning every summer and will admit to sometimes not eating all of what I canned.

So flash forward a few years and we realize that we actually need to eat that stuff because, well, you know time goes by. What I have learned is that beans, anyway, don't really go bad for a long time. I've eaten cans of beans 3 years past their best-by dates and it's been fine. I'm less sure about the peas--which generally end up going to chickens because I can't bear to eat them--certainly not plain, anyway. I have found that they make an okay addition to an egg dish occasionally when nothing better is available.

Thanks for this thread--I'm always trying to save food, but I've recently become super grateful for my chickens because they will eat anything!
-Ellen from New Hampshire