Category Archives: Growing Groceries – Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips

Simple Lives Thursday – April 28

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Annette Cottrell| 2 Comments

Welcome back to Simple Lives Thursday – a time where we share simple living tips, tricks and projects that we have going.

The two rules for linking to the blog hop are…

1. If linking real, traditional and simple recipes, please make sure all ingredients used are whole — such as whole grains, vegetables, legumes, meats, even sugar. In order to keep the integrity of “nourishing” food, we will delete any recipes that utilize processed, packaged foods. We are definitely not going to be ingredient policemen! But, please note that this is a hop hosted by advocates of the real, local and sustainable food movements.

2. Please link your posts back to one of the hosting blogs. This is a common blog hop courtesy. This link helps build the Simple Lives Thursday community by sending your readers to all of the other participants’ posts. We all end up sharing and learning from each other.

Now the fun part. Each week, we will be choosing five posts from the previous SLT to highlight each week. Those chosen will be promoted and linked on all five host blogs. We — Wardeh, Diana, Alicia, Mare and I — will select five posts each week that resonate with us and that we feel all of our readers should read. As a highlighted post you will also have the chance to win in special giveaways that we will be starting soon — another great reason to link up and share all that you do to live a simple and intentional life.

Featured Posts

1. My Small Steps Toward Sustainability by Seattle Seedling
For many, living a sustainable life can seem daunting and overwhelming. Stacy shows us her journey beginning with small, natural steps.

 

2. Homemade Produce Bags – Forget the Plastic by The Improbable Farmer
These produce bags are made from recycled t-shirts! They look awesome – and the blogger herself said she just learned to sew, so how hard can they be?

 

3.Understanding Your Soil with Weed Indicators by the morris tribe
What’s the quality of your soil? This blogger shares how weeds can indicate the fertility and overall health of your soil.

 

4. Fettucine with Walnut Basil Pesto and Slow-dried Cherry Tomatoes by Mummy, I can cook!
We love how simple this dish is. She dried her own cherry tomatoes and made the pesto, PLUS homemade sourdough pasta… how much more nourishing and delicious can this dish get?

 

5. Eggshell Seedlings by Hounds in the Kitchen
A great way to compost your eggshells… plant seeds in them. All natural and your kids will love it to!

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips, Simple Lives Thursday

Tagged

Meet My New Best Friend, Brix

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Annette Cottrell| 14 Comments

I’ve had a refractometer for awhile now but haven’t yet found the time to dig it out. It might seem like an excessive purchase but I want to know if all this gardening is really worth the effort and resources and opportunity cost. Is my home grown produce really more nutrient dense than anything I could buy, say, at the grocery store? Or the farmer’s market?

And while I haven’t fully answered all those questions YET I made a small start a few weeks ago. We signed up for the Laurelhurst Science Fair and set about measuring some carrots.

  • I dug up carrots that had overwintered in my garden, peaking around last September and have been leaching nutrients out all winter long,
  • My son brought home carrots from the cafeteria at school,
  • My neighbor send down some snack carrots,
  • and some floppy carrots from the grocery store that had been hanging out in her fridge since she couldn’t remember when

We juiced them, then measured their brix and recorded the results.

What, you may ask, is brix?  Brix is a measure of total sugars, minerals, and other dissolved nutrients in a liquid.  The more ripe and nutrient dense, the higher the brix reading.

Here are the scores:

rubbery grocery store carrot = 4

cafeteria carrot = 6

snack carrots = 7

overwintered carrot=8

I can’t wait to measure a garden carrot that hasn’t been leaching OUT nutrients for five months…but that will have to wait until Junish.

→ 14 Comments

Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips

Two Weeks and Counting

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Annette Cottrell| 12 Comments

On April 15 our book will be submitted for printing, hopefully in stores by mid October. Here is a teaser for you. Mona the goat got top billing (rightly so!), just to the left of my grain grinder and the back of my car loaded with Skeeter’s squashes on its way to the Seattle Farm Coop Fall Barter and Fundraiser. That’s about all I can say now because I need to get back to editing!

→ 12 Comments

Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips

Updates at Last

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Annette Cottrell| 15 Comments

I’ve put off writing this hoping that I would have a real answer but that’s taking too long so I’m spilling the beans now. We’ve made it past the first hurdle and have a negotiator assigned so I’m hoping the offer we made on 10 acres goes through. What that means is we are getting ready to put our house on the market (as if I don’t have enough going on right now!) SO if anyone is truly interested in a fairly dialed in urban farm in an off the beaten neighborhood please let me know.

Some years ago, while living in a tricked out Greenlake house with 3 toilets (two of which were in the same bathroom the size of a bedroom) we watched a documentary on the Lost Boys from Africa. It moved us deeply watching them progress from boys coming to America who wanted nothing more than to attend school and live peaceably to boys who were lured by the dream of commercialism and material goods. In the end many of the boys the crew followed dropped out of school to get jobs in order to buy cars and clothes and toys. We decided to sell our crazy house and buy one with a smaller footprint, not to fill it with things but instead to do more with less.

We insulated the walls and attic, replaced the old single pane windows (which had been painted shut so many times they would not pry open), replaced the old oil furnace and all the other appliances (some of which were from the ’40′s), took the bathroom down to the studs, finished the basement and made cosmetic improvements. Then when that was done we set about turning the overgrown canopy of ivy and legacy shrubbery into an edible oasis. Our little 1/5 of an acre now sports 22 fruits and nut trees, a chicken forage bed, and intensive orchard, extensive raised vegetable beds with drip irrigation on a timer, in-ground compost cans, and a chicken run and coop.

There is also a large grass playfield, fort with sandbox for kids and a cedar shed. If the fort were removed there would be room for mini dairy goats, honeybees and there is room in the chicken run for a rabbit setup.

End house sell here…

In other news we are moving on to final edits on the book this week so I’ll probably be hiding again until 4/15. I’ll try to post but it’s been really hard convincing myself to write blog posts this winter while forcing myself to meet this aggressive book deadline too.

In the meantime I’ll leave you with the planting schedule I would be following if I knew we were going to be here all summer. This year I had intended to plant by the moon phases so these dates follow that line of thought:

Beans 4/15 – 4/17; 7/1 – 7/14
Beets 3/20 – 4/2; 8/15 – 8/27
Broccoli 3/7-3/19; 8/1 – 8/13 (start indoors)
Brussels Sprouts, Cabbage 3/7 – 3/19; 4/3 – 4/15 (start indoors)
Cauliflower 3/7 – 3/19; 7/30- 8/7 (start indoors)
Carrots 3/20 – 3/31; 7/15 – 7/29
Collards 3/7 – 3/19; 4/3 – 4/7
Corn, early varieties 4/3 – 4/17; 7/7 – 7/14
Cucumbers, Melons 4/7 – 4/17;5/2 – 5/15
Eggplant (minis) 4/7 – 4/17; 5/2-5/15 (start indoors, plant out under tunnel with tomatoes and basil)
Kale 3/7 – 3/19; 4/3 – 4/7; 8/28 – 8/31
Lettuce 3/4 – 3/19
Peas 3/7 – 3-19; 8/7 – 8/13; 8/28-8/31
Pumpkins 5/2 – 5/15
Spinach 3/15 – 3/19; 4/3 – 4/17; 3/1 – 8/13; 8/28 – 9/12
Squash 4/15 – 4/17
Chard 3/15 – 3/19; 4/3 – 4/15
Tomatoes 4/7 – 4/17 (started indoors in January, would plant out under tunnel at this time)
Watermelon, early varieties 4/15 – 4/17; 5/2 – 5/7 (under tunnel with melons)

The farmer’s almanac is predicting 3/10 as the last frost date for us, with some rain/snow next week and overall a drier and warmer March and April but a MUCH cooler May than normal so use your best judgment when planting things out. Using frost-protective Reemay or milk jug cloches will get you a few more degrees and the Reemay will help prevent your seeds from washing away in April showers. Just be sure everything is anchored down because April tends to be blustery! Happy gardening!

→ 15 Comments

Posted in Planting by the Moon, Spring Gardening

Tagged ,

Full Circle Farm

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Annette Cottrell| 4 Comments

A few weeks ago Full Circle Farm gave me a CSA box to test drive.

I had been distracted by the last fall bulk buy and canning swap when I should have been planting more winter lettuces and kale and as a result we’ve been eating a lot of dandelions and sprouts this winter so it was a welcome change of pace.

I have to admit I was a little surprised to see some of the ingredients in there: tangerines, tomatoes, mushrooms, leaf lettuce, kiwi and cilantro in the middle of winter. The idea of these things out of season is foreign to me now. Those tender items came from California, Mexico or BC. But there was an insert inside the box that listed the name of each farm and it was evident these partnerships were carefully selected.

There was a newsletter including crop reports, partner profiles, recipes and specials. You can order local items to be delivered with your full circle box – jams, yogurt, eggs, juices, teas, meats, seafood, milk and bread from Macrina Bakery. So while my first impression was skeptical because of the distant reach of their partnership circles and obvious large number of employees where I prefer to directly support small farmers they are a great local and caring alternative to something like Amazon Fresh or shopping at QFC.

I would much rather use their service than head to the store. If you normally do that I think this would be a great option for you.

Related Posts with Thumbnails

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips

Tagged