Hi Sandy, I’m making plum jam right now and just finished another 1/2 gallon of applesauce. Do you have a golden plum tree? The spiced jam sounds great. I FINALLY just broke down and bought the ball book of home preserving but there were only a few intriguing recipes in there, one of them was a spiced plum jam one. Are you local (Seattle)? I’d gladly swap some of anything in my cupboards for a jar of your jam!

All the beautiful tall perennials I planted (hollyhocks, delphiniums, echinacea, lupins, verbascum , etc.) didn’t get a chance to shoot more than a few new leaves, they were doomed. I think sunflowers are like ice cream for groundhogs.

I will never understand these stupid animals. You’d think they’d eat a few leaves and move on so that the plant can recuperate. Nope. They “terminate” plants! And when the fancy “salad bar” is gone, they just go back to eating clover. ((

Growing food indoors sounds neat but, unless you have some kind of solar energy system, your electricity bill may go up dramatically. An acquaintance tried a new “energy saving” set up with LEDs last year, which was costly to begin with and did not save much electricity (looks like much of LED input power is wasted as heat which is not radiated towards the plants but conducted away into the LED mountings and cooling fins).

You know, I just looked up aronia… I’ve seen something that looks like that in my backyard, near the tree line. I’ll have to investigate (lest we wind up poisoning ourselves! ).

There are lots of low light things you can grow – strawberries, huckleberries, lettuces, many herbs, celery and celeriac and probably a ton more if you google. Aronia, Currents, Serviceberry, some plums…that might be enough sunlight for root crops, peas, etc.

I was just reading something last night about growing food indoors in the winter. I’m trying to figure out a setup so that I can bring my basil, lemon verbena, lemon tree and mint plants indoors and it would be great to grow lettuce in here too. I don’t know why I never thought of that before! Move over, houseplants…

And you even deal with rats without freaking out like I would. Hats off to you!

I hope your laptop recovers soon.

Where I live, veggie gardening can be difficult (not enough hours of direct sunshine due to thick tree lines, lots of groundhogs, etc.). My second year here, I tried winter sowing and got what could’ve been a glorious perennial garden started. I planted 978 seedlings, most of them took and that year I enjoyed the most beautiful plants (I’m not much of a gardener but when I start something, well, you know… ) but the following year a family of groundhogs ate 75% of my beautiful plants.

We finally got rid of the hogs this summer. I will try again next year (much smaller scale, for sure). I don’t think I’ll be able to grow veggies because it doesn’t look like there’s a spot on our property that gets more than six hours of direct sun.

Stay groovy and thanks again for that wonderful bread recipe.

I left you a note here: http://sustainableeats.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/homemade-100-whole-wheat-bread-swoon-worthy/#comment-256