Yeardly Arthur

We're in the middle of Year 4 here in our little suburbrural patch on the hill. The first three years were spent watching and noting where water went, as rain flowed onto, across and into the landscape. This year has been spent just wondering where it went.

We have spent a great deal of time and effort collecting and distributing organic material, trenching, terracing and grading surface areas to capture and retain the ample rainfall this area normally receives. This year has been a test to see how well our theories might work, tested to their limits. In spite of being terribly disappointed to see so many of our crops sprout, grow, and flourish, only to watch blossoms fade and drop, and vines wither and dry, I have been pleased to see that the process has taken far longer than it should have. Even in the face of a single rainfall in two months, many deep-rooted plants have proven the benefit of hugelkultur and other water-retention techniques. The harvest may be sparse and small, but we're still finding something to bring to the table every day.

More important, the landscape is showing us where we need to do more of the same over the winter: More mulch. More trenches. More quality topsoil rescued from secret spots around the neighborhood. More collection of limbs others stack at the curb to run through our new-to-us wood chipper. More awareness that serious dry spells can visit us, and better plans for diverting and collecting whatever the clouds manage to squeeze out in the future.

Disappointed, yes, but more than hopeful for the years to come.

I'm sure there are moles here, likely kept in check by the feral cats nurtured by a kind hearted neighbor, but I have yet to see any. The cats certainly got rid of our chipmunks, and most of the squirrels. That leaves me with the other burrowers mentioned above, the worms and grubs which are welcome and encouraged to dig to their multiple hearts' content.

And ants. Yes, I am one of those misguided souls who intentionally seeds his garden areas with fire ants to plow, aerate, and fertilize all my growing spaces, to tremendous effect. If I had moles, I'm sure I'd put them to work, too.

Tereza Okava wrote:

Yeardly Arthur wrote: muffins

any chance of a recipe? those are some fine-looking muffins!

Sadly, no recipe. If I recall, these were made by adding more starter and an extra egg  to leftover pancake batter, plus whatever fruit was on hand.
Most of my cooking involves upgrading leftovers*. My wife always tells visitors to enjoy whatever I might put on the table, because you're not likely to see it again.

*Yes, I do have my mother's and my grandmother's recipe boxes. I peek at them now and then, always linking their handwriting with fond memories.

Thekla McDaniels wrote: The object is to have everything in an aerobic state, not an anaerobic putrid stinking mass ( though I understand many people utilize the anaerobic thing … maybe for the minerals?), so I guess either one has benefits.  

I'm still wondering what the benefit of adding aerobic organisms might be in soil that has grown, well, anything in recent seasons. Maybe alfalfa has something special on it  that might be lacking in your soil, or could be missing from mulch or compost, which are already teeming with all sorts of beneficial microbes.

As far as anaerobic nutrition goes, that's the whole point of spreading manure, isn't it? Anaerobic bacteria use enzymes to break down the cellulose in the alfalfa (grass, leaves, wood chips) into its component sugars and starches, which feed the germs making the enzymes.  Manure  is mostly bacterial mass, with lots of undigested plant fragments and nutritious compounds like sugars and urea (a.k.a. nitrogen fertilizer). The bacteria themselves are made up of proteins (nitrogen) and complex carbohydrates (plant food).

I don't have any animals to make fertilizer for me, so yes, I'm one of those guys with a row of stinky buckets lined up in back of the shed. They break down all the invasive grasses and vines, unwanted weeds, and even a little sawdust now and then added to keep the cultures going, keeping my fertilizer costs at zero. No outside yeast required.

I'm delighted to see that within this sourdough group, the "cast-off"... isn't.

We've kept our sourdough starter going since the lockdown, for over six years now. Since neither of us came from bread-making families, I'm entirely self-taught. That means I knew no better than to use the liquid part of the starter to feed my bread dough, leaving the thick stuff on the bottom of the jar to inoculate the next feeding. I have since come to understand that this is a terrible mistake, but I'm stubborn and lazy, and slow to change my ways.

So far this tragic error hasn't caused a problem. In fact, we're so used to my round skillet bread, we've stopped buying store bread completely. And yes - as previous commenters noted, my runny starter also makes wonderful pancakes, pizza dough, muffins, sandwich buns and cinnamon rolls. Next, I'll have to try my hand at crackers. They sound wonderful.

It never occurred to me to make artist charcoal (neither my wife nor I are particularly fond of the medium), but even after reading every post, I'm encouraged to try it.

Forgive me for falling into my own silly habits of trying everything just to see what works, but as soon as this drought abates and the fire restrictions are lifted, I'm pretty sure I'll be going around the lot trimming saplings of all species and sizes, and stuffing them into all the paint and coffee cans my wife ribs me for collecting. An honors graduate of the Fail Early and Often school of practical education, I've already compiled a list of a dozen different wood varieties growing on the property, and even thought of a way to incorporate the process into my BBQ grill/smoker so we can render a smoked beast out of the deal as well.

This sounds like the perfect way to waste a weekend now and again, with absolutely no downside. Whatever product failures might occur would go straight through the wood chipper and into the garden. As an added bonus, our rural community is home to a small college known for its art curriculum. There could be a ready market for inexpensive artist charcoal, locally produced.

Thanks for the prompt!

Years ago I was exploring a creek with the kids in the middle of our thriving North Carolina suburb, when we discovered a wide open field, four or five acres of wild land still hiding between apartment slabs. We had a ball learning about wildflowers, bird nests and bugs, found a huge mass of blackberry bushes, and hid out under an expansive thicket of fruit trees. By summer's end, those trees were loaded with small, sweet, yellow fruit that made great jam. I would later learn that these were Chickasaw plums, native to the entire southeastern United States, only now seldom seen (or even popularly known) due to habitat loss.

Since we started transitioning our little half-acre from invasive shrubs to native species, we have re-introduced them to their natural habitat. So far we've planted fifteen saplings; every single one has taken to the space and is thriving, even in the face of significant summer water shortages. The plan is to let them spread as they will along the borders of our woodlands, encouraging them to send out suckers while we continue to hack away at persistent thorny olive bushes. Hopefully in a couple of years we'll have a steady supply of fruit, without much upkeep.

Jay Angler wrote:I am reading Patrick Whitefields, How to make a forest garden. He talks about taking topsoil off the top of paths and adding it to the planting areas beside the paths, and then using the path to double as shallow drainage ditches for heavy storms. So Joylynn Hardesty is not alone in her solution to this problem.
We've been trending towards bigger storms, so managing slopes and *choosing* where to send unexpected water is becoming more important. Slowing it, so it is stored deeper in your soil, is an asset also.

I decided to dig 2 ft deep trenches into all of the paths between my terrace rows. I used the (mostly clay) soil to help level the terraces themselves, then backfilled with deadwood, charcoal, gypsum and compost, covered with a heavy layer of wood chips and sawdust. This allows me to collect thousands of gallons of rainwater with every storm, and may be the only thing that's kept my tomatoes alive through this long summer drought.

Whether we have too many (how many is too many peaches?) or not enough, I like to toss at least one peach and some extra butter into whatever meat is cooking in the skillet. Beef, pork, chicken, fish - doesn't matter. That little bit of sweet in the pan sauce wins every time.

Afterthought: I just visited the Apple Butter thread, where they discussed adding - or completely substituting - apples for tomatoes in ketchup. I'm a fan of adding apple to tomatoes for the sweet part of the ketchup. Same goes for peaches! Cook peaches and tomato puree down to a brown umami sauce, add spices to taste and bottle. I'd share a recipe if I had one, but for ketchup I always manage to find something online under "homemade ketchup" to get the right proportions of vinegar and spices.

Please and Thank-You and You're Welcome. A simple one, but profound:

Fewer and fewer people seem to be saying "Thank You" these days. Worse, even fewer (if any) respond with, "You're welcome."
Instead we increasingly hear "No problem".

This is a more telling issue than we realize. "You're welcome" means "I am happy to do this for you." It implies a service, a gift, willingly rendered in an active social exchange. "No problem" actually reverses the interaction. The act of service disappears, and the receiver is instead pardoned for interrupting a server who apparently has better things they could be doing.

This is a major generational shift in the understanding of service within the community, especially in the commercial setting, where customers and employees are no longer considered assets to a company, but problems that need to be managed. Workers aren't paid to positively interact with customers anymore. Instead, they are paid to manage issues presented by an increasingly entitled and disgruntled public. The job is a necessary inconvenience for them and the employer, and whatever service is provided is done so at a personal cost, one which the customer should apologize for demanding.

For this reason, I always try to make sincere eye contact when I say "Thank You", and I always respond to someone else's Thank You with a good-natured "You're Welcome."