Monthly Archives: August 2009

Fall Plantings

Posted on August 28, 2009 by Annette Cottrell| 5 Comments

In addition to my canning frenzy I’ve been busy taking things out and putting things in lately. My brassicas have been under the grow lights for way longer then I care to admit, getting leggy and crowded and pleading for freedom.

I finally took the corn out the other night (braving rat attacks) and put them in, covering them with remay to protect the tender seedlings from what last few hot days we may have yet. I’m woefully behind getting a great many things in ground that I should have started either late last month or early August. I’m behind, even by my own fall planting plan but I’m really behind according to the biodynamic planting calendar.

I’ve been meaning forever to get a copy of the farmer’s almanac since I’m an urban farmer and all now but wanted to take things one step further since biodynamic is yesterday’s organic. I checked the BD planting chart and saw that everything should have been in pretty much by July 30th. Oops.

But then reading on I see that I should be “ashing” the skin and innards of rats to sprinkle around the garden when Venus is in the Scorpion as protection against future rats in the garden. Missed that deadline as well. Maybe I’ll skip the biodynamic teachings this year and stick to what’s working ok for me so far.

If you haven’t considered gardening year round in Seattle yet you really should. One of the books that inspired me to take this on is called “Four Season Harvest” by Eliot Coleman. It’s one of those books worth actually purchasing.

How about you? What plans do you have for growing anything fall, winter or spring?

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Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips

Tagged fall and winter gardening

Ratma Intact

Posted on August 28, 2009 by Annette Cottrell| 4 Comments

It turns out that my karma has nothing to fear. The rats are indeed healthy and active in not just one but two burrows. Why eat poison when you have 30 tomato plants to choose from? And it’s true what they say, 2 out of 2 rat families prefer heirloom tomatoes.

They’ve now taken out over half of my Cherokee Purple and anything with a hint of yellow on the Green Zebra. The romas I could care less about because I’m up to my eyeballs in saucing tomatoes but the heirlooms are breaking my heart. I don’t mind sharing but apparently rats do.

Note to self: Next year quarantine the heirloom tomatoes and build a screen hoop house over them that sits just inside the wooden bed borders so rats can’t dig in. I did this successfully with the eggplant (after losing 2 of them) which was easy since I only had 2 plants and they weren’t grown into the tomatoes. It’s too late for me to try and do anything like that with the heirloom tomatoes. The vines are hopelessly entangled together and sprawling over beds.

After email exchanges with someone I met through a local urban farming chat group who told me of her rat troubles – complete with a story of a friend who was a vet that contracted a nasty disease from handling a rat and ended up in a coma for two weeks – I’ve taken new measures to help keep the rat population from growing.

Twice a day now I’m going through picking any tomatoes with hints of red and bringing them into the house to ripen. They don’t taste that amazing sun-kissed tomato ectasy but they still beat the pants off anything at the store and you can’t tell the difference when making sauces anyway.

I’m being careful to not leave any food scraps in my little composting strainer just outside the door and to be sure the only thing I’m putting into my open composting pile are leaves and stalks, no fruit or grains. I’ve covered the chicken feeder with an overturned 5 gallon bucket overnight. I’ll be watching that for signs that something has burrowed under the bucket to get in and if I see them I’ll cut a piece of plywood to place the whole thing on.

All those corn cobs we’ve been chucking into the chicken pen after eating? Into the yard waste. It’s a shame because there was still quite a bit of corn left on some of them. Even our chickens are tired of corn this year!

I’m picking up dog poop at the end of the day. As gross as it is, I’m sure a rat would find those pesky piles tasty.

One other thing I hadn’t thought of previously – the grease drip pan on the barbecue. What a score for a rat!

By removing anything that looks remotely tasty those dirty rats are more likely to resort to eating their young, reproducing at a slower rate, or moving on to greener pastures.

I’m hoping that when we look at the back door we continue to see chickens trying to break into the house rather than rats.

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Posted in Chickens, Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips

Tagged rats and chickens

Canning Frenzy

Posted on August 26, 2009 by Annette Cottrell| 14 Comments

Saturday was the day I had signed up for 36 pounds of peaches from Rama farm and while I was at the market I thought it would be a good idea to pick up peppers to pickle. A peck of course. Then when I got home I realized we still had rat issues and I would have to pick as many tomatoes as possible which meant processing them. Boy did I bite off a bit too much this week!

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You are just seeing the top layer of peaches, in the top box. We ate as many as possible, I dried slices, made fruit leather, peach jam, froze several gallons and canned them. I meant to make peach chutney but the peaches were heading south by the time my counter freed up so I had to can the last of them pronto. I have another round coming in a few weeks so I’ll get my chance then. Of course Chicken Little has already eaten all the fruit leather so I’ll be making lots of that and hiding it this time.

The two stainless steel salad bowls you see full of tomatoes are but two of four I had to process over the weekend. I’m down to one but the vines are full of tomatoes for me to pick yet again tomorrow. They seem to be exhibiting signs of blight so maybe this will be the end of tomatoes. Like the zucchini, I think I’ll be ready to be done with them before they are done with me.

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On either side of the peaches you can see jars of hot sauces I made up. One was like a tapatio and the other was supposed to be like a tobasco that I made using cayenne peppers only I seeded them so it turned out no hotter then the jalapeno/tomato based sauce. They both came out great and we’ve been eating them all week on cheese quesadillas made with Wardeh’s spelt tortillas that I had in the freezer. It’s been great not cooking while I’m busy cooking!

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Then I had a brilliant stroke. I’ve been working on taking things out in the garden to make room for the fall crops that have been sadly neglected and are woefully behind schedule. I pulled out the last of the carrots and beets and remaining Swiss Chard that there wasn’t room for in the whisky barrel that had recently housed several bags worth of yukon gold potatoes over the spring and summer, picked some celery, parsley, basil, kale leaves a few shakes of crushed red pepper, salt and worscestershire sauce and used a few cloves of my garlic. I had to use a purchased onion for this since I didn’t plant enough last spring to even make it through summer. Then I rounded up a few gallons of tomatoes sitting on my kitchen counter evading the rat.

I simmered them all for about 40 minutes then ran it through my roma mill. It was delicious. I drank a glass around 11 p.m. when it finished and then had so much energy I buzzed about the kitchen, finally realizing it was 1:30 and headed to bed. Drat!

In the morning I gave some to Chicken Little who loves virgin bloody marys so much we call them bloody Max’s in our household. He gulped it down and asked for more. I made a few more gallons the next day then canned it all in the pressure canner which sadly turned it from beautiful ruby red to dull orange, just like V-8. But it’s safe in the cupboard waiting for winter. It will make fabulous soup or stew base should we not drink it all.

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Ever curious I made a small batch of 1948 Tomato Preserves which I promptly tried over homemade vanilla bean ice cream. It was really interesting and I liked it a lot but it was something you only wanted a small portion of – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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Did I mention I just canned pickled jalapenos and pepperocini, corn relish and salsa? In fact I’m so giddy from canning that I had to look at this picture to remember everything I had done after putting the kids to bed.

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Tonight’s dinner was rat-nibbled eggplant parmeson from housemade tomato sauce, Rubiano parmeson from California and housemade queso fresco.

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And lastly, while the water bath was processing I whipped up a batch of my granola with one of my favorite non-local must have items – coconut oil and coconut flakes. This will go fabulous with house made yogurt and dried sour cherries, peaches, blueberries or strawberries that we have in jars filling the breadbox along with a cup of coffee from Small COG Coffee.

Now, time to start dehydrating another round of zucchini…

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Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips, Preserving Food, Tomatoes

Tagged canning, homemade V-8, vegetable juice

Hush, hush, hush, I smell a rate close by…

Posted on August 23, 2009 by Annette Cottrell| 19 Comments

Wednesday around noon I checked on the garden then left for an hour. When I came back there were rat teeth marks in my biggest eggplant. Cringing, I picked it and then cut off the part that had been gnawed. After all, eggplants are rarer then a pink elephant in Seattle gardens.

An hour later I went back out. There were teeth marks in another eggplant. I repeated step one from above. Then I picked some mint and covered the remaining eggplants with it since I had read rats don’t like the smell of mint. I immediately ran to the shed to get my deer netting and covered the entire eggplant diamond, anchoring the netting into the ground with garden stakes.

By the time I got back a third eggplant had rat gnawings on it. I repeated step one from above. Then I noticed quite a few of the tomatoes had rat gnawings on them too so I hastily picked all the ripe ones.

That night I did some research online. I couldn’t find any information about whether it was safe to eat non-affected areas of food (i.e. after cutting out the gnawed parts.) These were my 3 biggest eggplants. I’ll probably never be able to repeat this success again. And freshly picked eggplant is a cat of a whole different class then even farmer’s market eggplants. I wasn’t about to chuck it in the compost.

And then is that even safe? If it’s not safe to eat, is it safe to compost? What I was able to find about rat-related diseases is that they seem to be spread specifically by rat urine in a wet environment. So swimming in the sewer or other stagnant water seems like a bad idea but probably even if a rat peed in your garden or on your compost pile you would be ok. Certainly cooking foods would be enough to destroy it, especially if you were going to pressure can it which takes things up to 240 degrees (the temperature necessary to destroy bacteria.)

Except I had no pressure canner.

And then just for grins I did some research on the side effects of botulism. Not pretty. Even with lipstick on it. So I freaked out and bought a pressure canner the next day.

I’ve always sort of prided myself on the fact that I didn’t own a pressure canner despite putting up massive amounts of food at certain points in my life. Honestly though, I think I feared the pressure canner. I’ve several times had my espresso machine blow off on me and it’s a little daunting. Not to mention difficult to clean espresso grounds off the ceiling, walls and cupboards.

So now I’m the proud owner of one 23 quart pressure canner. I’m pretty stoked too, reading through all that it can do. As we speak I’m making up my own version of V-8 juice for bloody marys without care for pH. My husband is going salmon fishing in Elliot Bay tomorrow and should he catch anything dag nabbit I can can it. Next year when the asparagus are producing (and they WILL, yes they will) I can can some.

And tomorrow when I’m sick and tired of freezing, drying, jamming, leathering and chutneying the 32 pounds of peaches I picked up today from Rama farms I can can me some. In short, I can can.

And now back to the rat…

Whilst on my internet journey the other night I read that if you stick a piece of Wrigley mint gum down their burrow they’ll move out. So I went to the store and bought quite a few packs. Two days later I’m still pulling off about 10 tomatoes daily with filthy little fang marks on them. So today I finally let me husband go the store and get some poison.

I made him buy some PVC pipe to stick it in so that our dog, stray cats or escaped chickens can’t get at it. He bought one T section with end caps for the two T parts so the rat could crawl deep in the burrow but nothing else could get in.

I hope I haven’t damned my organic garden here but if this keeps up there won’t be a garden left. There you have it. Rat: 34 tomatoes and 3 eggplant, me: karma down a notch.

Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass.