While in the city, I resented the weeds. Purslane in the garden was a demonic plant and dandelions, unforgiving. I hacked, chopped and dug those offenders and still they came in hoards. No herbicides were ever used in my garden, so it was a physical war on the weeds. 
One of the goals I set for my sojourn on the Fat Ewe Farm, was to be self sufficient. That included eating locally available food. I also concerned myself with the 'what if' there was no locally available food. What if there was a fire and the roads were impassable for a long time and trucks were unable to deliver produce? What if people would kill in order not to starve and feed their families? Those are likely far fetched stories that I hope never ever to experience, but stil....
So I began to learn to find food on the land. After all, the indigenous people who lived here were able to survive without grocery stores and gardens. There is a multitude of goodness available at my fingertips for the picking and harvesting. Much can be dried for winter use. I continue to learn about the bounty, but this missive is about eating the weeds. 
Sure, I planted lettuce. Who doesn't if they have an available space. The truth is, domestic lettuce does not have half the food value of the weeds we wage war on growing beside it. 
For example, here there are two extremely vigorous weeds that stand out. One is common malva, also called cheese plant by the locals, because the seeds form in a little whorl reminiscent of a round of cheese. I guess. The other is pigweed, also lamb's quarters, chenopodium album. This weed is miraculous in its growth without any inputs, including water. One of the what ifs was, what if there was a drought? What would I eat then? Lambsquarters will grow in low moisture conditions, not as lush or as fast as when the habitat is optimal, but it will still grow. 
Today I weeded the lettuce bed, which was filled with young lambs quarter, amaranthus (a wild weed that produces a ton of edible seeds that can be used as is or ground to a flour) and malva. The whole reason I was weeding was to have lunch! So from a row of young mesclun I was able to garner about a half pound of young, tender greens. I brought them in, of course, washed them in cold water to remove any bugs, but they add to the protein. I just do not like to eat them, YET. 
I put a huge dollop of butter in a cast iron pan, added some Hawaiian black salt and Saigon cinnamon (you can certainly leave it out or add other seasonings or spices) and mixed it into the butter, then tossed in the greens and sauteed them for about 4 or 5 minutes. I was aiming to evaporate the juice really, or most of it. Just before it was ready, I added a freshly grated clove of organic garlic and stir fried that for a minute or two so it would blend with the delicate flavour of the lamb's quarters.  
The greens were ready and so was I. The delicious aroma of garlic and cinnamon reminded me of Lula's Greek cooking when I worked at Cosmos Greek restaurant in my late teens. Fabulous! I love these greens, oh my. So tender and tasty, I snarfed them up in no time. 
These are not the only greens I have eaten, but they are the most plentiful and the best tasting. Very young amaranthus is awesome as well, but gets tough quickly as it grows, so must be harvested under 4 inches. I want to try eating the cat tail roots since I missed the shoots and the young seed fronds, which turn into the cat tails. They are thought to be like young corn on the cob and I happen to have a beaver pond full of them. Stay tuned but in the meantime, love your weeds! Yum!

Growing potatoes is very easy. You just put a potato in the ground and it will grow and reproduce and you will have ten or more potatoes from the original one. But you do not need a whole potato to grow more. Just an eye will do. You can recognize the eye of the potato by the indentation and belly button like appearance. Potatoes can be cut in half or in quarters and there will usually be at least one eye in the cut. 

In traditional gardening the soil is tilled and weeded and then potatoes are planted in holes in the ground at least 4 inches deep or more. They are covered with soil and as the potatoes grow they push the soil upward and some will become exposed. Then 'hilling' the potatoes is required, which is to collect more soil surrounding the potato plant and hill it over the top. Potatoes exposed to sunlight become green and produce a chemical that makes the tubers inedible. 

But that is not how nature grows anything. Tilling is never done, nor is digging. The acorn falls on the ground and if it is fortunate, leaves will cover it and provide some microclimate that keeps moisture in. The potatoes do the same thing. The plant will produce seeds in a long enough growing season, which will fall to the ground, survive the winter and grow the next spring. We can mimic nature with potatoes too. 

First select a sunny location or at least half day sunny spot. If there are weeds or grass there, simply lay down two layers of cardboard first. Place the potatoes on the cardboard and cover them with at least a foot of straw. The potato patch must then be kept watered. A miracle happens. Potatoes grow! They will send roots down through the cardboard as it deteriorates gleaning nutrients from the soil. No hilling or weeding will be required thereafter. Once the plants have withered, the potatoes can be harvested simply by moving the now composted straw out of the way. 

This year I had some left over small potatoes from last year. In the area that I use as a compost, I put down some straw first, then strew the potatoes around over it and added another foot of straw over the top. Thus, kept watered, beautiful, clean potatoes were produced. In one area I did put down cardboard instead of straw because it was full of long grass and this also produced wonderful potatoes. 

It is a common thought that too rich of soil will cause potato scab, an unsightly though absolutely harmless potato disease. There could not be much richer an area than a compost pile, but grown in the straw method, no scab was evident. The potatoes require little in the way of washing as well. There had been a lot of rain this summer, so watering was not even necessary. When potatoes are too wet they can crack, but these were very wet and there is no cracking. Perhaps those ideas of too rich and too wet need to be challenged? 

Anyhow, the potato harvest is perfect from the straw patches. I planted some in the ground in another area and they are scabby, but then they are also a different variety. These are Russet and Yukon Gold originally from the organic section of the grocery store. 

I do encourage you to try growing potatoes in straw next season. It is so easy and yum! the potatoes taste amazing. 

Oh my goodness, there is nothing like good old fashioned flavour in a tomato, or well, anything for that matter. But in a tomato, That tangy tart and a little sweet, with just the right amount of flesh to seeds, that cannot be beaten. It so very much reminds me of sitting in the garden with my father and his salt and pepper shakers, which I still have and am using daily in my own kitchen. We would pick the ripe tomatoes and salt and pepper them generously as we ate them like apples, sun warmed and fragrant, right in the garden. I have never found a tomato since then that was a good as what we grew there and then. Until now, that is. 

This tomato produced about 20 pounds of fleshy, amazing, so ugly they are beautiful tomatoes, with exactly that flavour I remember, and eating them with salt and pepper from those vintage shakers, there is a melting of my heart with fond memories and sweet flavours. There is nothing like it. 

The name of this tomato is Cherokee Heirloom Carbon, Lycopersicon. It is also known as the Cherokee Purple tomato and is supposedly dated back to the 1800's. It is not a pretty fruit, as we are used to perfect red orange orbs or a uniform size. It is purple brown and green and anything but uniform or orb shaped. But one plant produced over 20 pounds of tomatoes and they are incredibly delicious. I am going to try to ferment some seeds and dry them to grow next year. Yum!. 

I also grew 6 other varieties of tomatoes this year, but the tags disappeared from most of them. There is one that is sort of strawberry shaped and sized, but the flavour is somewhat lacking for my taste. The Beefsteak is good, but does not compare to the Cherokee Purple. The Sweet 100 will be good, as always, once the tomatoes ripen. I recall one day in my garden when the kids were preteens that they had a war with my Sweet 100 green tomatoes. I was furious, but can laugh at it now. They must have been the perfect ammunition, soft enough not to really hurt and the right size to hurl at the opponents. KIds!

Look for the Cherokee Purple tomato if you love that old fashioned tomato flavour. I certainly will be planting these next year, lots of them. I bet tomato soup from them would be spectacular. Want some?

What a great day it was! 

Two young fellows from the closest town, Elk Point, were here helping clean the yard after several contractors and just the farm debris too. They were good workers and put in a straight 7 hours. I am grateful for their help (paid, but nonetheless, help). We got a lot done. Everything from the contractors was picked up and the first load was hauled to the dump. On Tuesday I will make a second trip and hopefully that will do it. 

Tomorrow the geese are getting picked up to get butchered. It is a hard decision who to send and who to keep. I would love to keep half of them, but I do not need 10 geese, so I think 5 will do. There are three Sebastopol's, one from this year's hatch and the two original ones, male and female, that I flew in from Ontario. But there are such beautiful crosses that it breaks my heart to eat them. I have tried to sell them on various sites, with no luck. Good bye beautiful geese. 

After the clean up, which I was a part of all along, I did the chores and then harvested some of the garden. There are at least 20 spaghetti squashes and only a few immature kabocha squash, my favourites when they are ripe. We have had two light frosts and the squash vines are all black, so I doubt there will be much more growth. I harvested a row of potatoes, but some varmint has been eating them. I suspect mice, because the dogs do not really let many things come into the yard. They have a strict sense of order of where critters should be and their yard is not one of those places. I also picked a small patch of the squaw corn, a dense lovely multicoloured old variety, mainly for grinding and flour, but fine when eaten fresh at this stage too, though a bit chewy. The last cucumbers were harvested. The crop was poor this year. The first seeds were scratched up and eaten by the chickens and the second ones were too, except for about three plants. I will have to turn on the electric net fence next year! 

Yesterday I made a gallon of red sauerkraut, some with jalapenos and some not, pickled turnip, pickled Daikon radish, dill pickled cukes, honey garlic and I meant to do some green tomatoes today, but ran out of steam. After harvesting the squash, potatoes, corn and a few tomatoes, I made supper from the squash and potatoes and decided to wait until tomorrow to pickle the green tomatoes. All the preserves are fermented, that is lacto fermented with only salt as in the kraut, which is a dry ferment, and salt and water brine, which is a wet ferment for the rest of the pickles. Green tomato pickles are a wet brine ferment too. Once the pickles are fermented to a crunchy fizzy sharp bite, the lids are screwed on tight and the preserves are put somewhere cool and dark, only I don't know where that is. If I use the wood stove in the winter, the basement is cool and dark, but if I use the furnace it is warm and since I am installing a sink and counter down there, I will want it warm when I make soap and sew and stuff. I guess I will have to figure it out. The porch is cool, but it froze last winter. There are new windows so perhaps it will be cold this year, but not frozen! 

Tomorrow two cleaners are coming to do the rest of the bed and breakfast house and then I can finish the decorating and call for the inspector. Yay!! I have about 20 boxes left to unpack and hopefully the grand reopening will be on time for September 31! Keep your fingers crossed. 

There is a lot more to harvest and put up too. Last year there was well over 100 pounds of potatoes. I bet there will be at least 30 pounds of carrots, possibly more. Some herbs are already drying, but there should be another harvest of parsley and thyme. I am thinking of freezing the kale and swiss chard for the winter, though I like fresh, but fresh organic here is anything but fresh and my organic is much more organic than any store bought products. I am missing some dehydrators too. Only 1 out of 5 came back and they said they have nothing more. 

I am thinking of increasing the garden size next year to sell market garden produce at the farm gate. I wonder if people will stop? It is not like it is at home, where roadside stands can run on the honour system. I did try that with eggs and not only the money can and money was gone, but so were the eggs. Hmmm. What do you think? I won't have the extra work of setting up the bed and breakfast next year, so there will be way more time! I am looking forward to that! 

More harvest tomorrow. Stay tuned for the green tomato fermented pickles and recipe. Til then....

Here in the frozen north, many perennial herbs must be grown as annuals. Some of my favourites, such as oregano and sage, do not survive the cold winters. I will pot the thyme, oregano and mint this year and winter them over and continue to add to the herb garden over the next years. Then in the very early spring cuttings can be taken indoors and started to give a quick start to the new plants. 

This year there are mint, oregano, thyme, basil and parsley. The parsely did exceptionally well and I clipped the lovely leaves so just in case we do not get an early frost, there could be an additional small harvest. The herbs were spread on old window screens to dry in the sun, but we did not get much sun yesterday and certainly have not seen it today, so they are in the shed for now. I do have dehydrators somewhere still packed in the fiasco move from the aftermath of the flood at the bed and breakfast. This year they are not available in time. 

I use dried parsley in soup and stews a lot when I have it. Oregano is a must on Greek salads and thyme is lovely with pork. The mint is for tea in winter and for soap and lotions infused in oils. It makes a good headache salve, but I never get headaches, thank goodness. 

I also harvested a few potatoes. I was distressed to see heavy scab on the purple potato grown on the berm garden, but the ones from the straw bale area were perfect. I gave them to the man working here, along with some baby carrots and a few runner beans. The beans are producing nicely, however, exactly on this day last year the first killing frost came and the entire garden was wiped out, or that is everything above ground was. The tomatoes are lovely though very green still. I picked them green last year and they ripened perfectly in the house. 

The garden is grown organically without the use of any chemical inputs whatsoever. What a delicious treat to harvest something from my own land and enjoy it for the cold season to come with great anticipation of planting again next year. I have always loved to garden. Now I have much land and can play to my heart's content. 

Wouldn't you love some fresh zucchini? There is a ton of it and I cannot give it away! It is a good thing the animals love it too. They get the greens that are discarded and the birds will be allowed to forage in the garden once the harvest is done. The guinea hens do go there now and glean the bugs for me, keeping the pests to a minimum, plus the design of the garden is permaculture style, so pests do not decimate any one crop.

Isn't nature so grand? I am grateful for my land and the food grown thereupon. I am deeply thankful for the abundance in my life. And today of all days, I am grateful for being alive 62 years!  

​Want what you have and you have what you want.
 
I wanted a yard chock full of roses and perennial flowers, with fruit trees and bushes bursting with bounty and permaculture gardens teaming with food and pleasure. I wanted a little cottage with pink window boxes and lovely woodstove. I wanted a farm full of animals running around with their young, so I could raise my own food, naturally and organically. I wanted to make all my personal care products and share them with others. And I needed an income, so at this stage of my life, I wanted a bed and breakfast where I could meet amazing people and listen to their stories while I served them.
 
And, I have all this and so very much more.
 
I do not need to be somewhere else. I need to be here. A new opportunity may be opening up, a connection with only a handful of organically minded local people, which will allow me to vend my grass raised lamb and goat, rabbits and eggs and maybe even soap and body butters and the herbal products I love to make. We shall see.
 
My heart is filled with gratitude. How many can say they are truly content and have what they want and want what they have? I am blessed. Very, very blessed. 

Along with being the farmer, which entails caring for the animals, fixing fences, getting supplies, and so on, I have been busy at the bed and breakfast painting. First I painted the whole house except over the stairs and my lovely friend Gail, who is a professional painter, did that little section on her pro ladders. Then I stained almost 1500 board feet of moldings. I did have help with half of that, too, from the Mormon Missionary boys, who come now and again to give me a hand and learn about the farm. Now I am painting the kitchen cupboards! But, today, I painted a pine sleigh bed instead. It will be for my room because the bed frame I have will go back to the bed and breakfast master bedroom. 

And, in between all the duties and chores, I planted a garden, some of it twice, because the chickens scratched the seeds and ate them the first time and painted window boxes and planted them, plus yesterday, I planted 40 some bushes, potentilla and rugosa rose. A neighbour wanted them out of her yard and I was more than pleased to be able to have them. Unfortunately, the dirt was shaken off the roots and many of them do not look very well. I am hoping they will grow, even if I lose the growth that was established this year. That was a LOT of work! 

But of all the things planted, I must say the flowers are my favourites. I even eat some of them. The roses are great in a salad with some peppery Nasturtiums, marigolds, pansies and day lilies with a beautiful raspberry and hemp oil dressing. Mmmmm! I have always loved flowers. When I owned a flower shop, it was a delightful occupation giving flowers to folks, who even in the tears of sorrow would muster a smile for a bouquet handed to them. They brighten my days immensely and I would have roses everywhere if I could. Come to think of it, if the Hansa Rugosas take off, I can! Things just have a way of working out! What do you think of the garden so far?

When I lived in White Rock for nearly 50 years, I was an avid gardener. Everything that I could grow was in my yard, from Turkish figs to Kiwi fruits. There were grapes of different varieties, large cherry trees, and flowers galore, especially roses. I love flowers and at one time was a florist with my own flower shop. 

But here, it is different. It is hard to garden right where I am. The early and late frosts in my little valley microclimate make my growing season extremely short, and it has taken me a long time to figure how to get some results. The tomatoes must be picked green. There is no alternative and although who doesn't love vine ripened in the sun tomatoes, we just do not get a long enough season for that to occur. I think this year I have found a corm variety that will actually give me corn. It is 70 days from seeding to harvest, an ancient variety of squaw corn that can be eaten young and fresh or dried for corn flour and such. I cannot wait for some of those fresh cobs off the stalks! The corn comes in different colours and is quite small, but if I can actually grow it here, I am still delighted. 

Today I planted some herbs, Kabocha and spaghetti squash, swiss chard, beets, two varieties of carrots, scarlet runner beans, lots of flowers, some roses, and nasturtiums. I have cucumbers, zucchini, potatoes, and that corn left to plant, and more flower seeds to scatter. I used to do lots of hanging baskets, but bedding plants are two arms and a leg here. At home they were 99 cents and here the same plant is $3.99, so I only have a few baskets planted. Later in the season, the local grocers sell their baskets for under ten dollars, but I buy some and plant them in the ground. They are already overgrown and do not do well as baskets, though look lovely and grow well in the ground.

I have to fence off everything I grow from marauding chickens and geese, not so much the ducks, and the dogs. The dogs love to dig in the cool moist soil, huge large holes and plant themselves in them. I use electric net fencing and did not electrify it last year. It worked fine, but this year I may have to electrify it because of the rabbits. We shall see. 

I brought the sheep in when I saw the storm clouds approaching, around 9 pm and called it a day. A little shower was expected and the clouds began to roll in. I managed to get in the house just before the first raindrops fell. How timely it was for my freshly planted garden! Hopefully tomorrow will see the garden completed and fenced in and then I can start painting the bed and breakfast house. There is a screw up there with the drywall and the new shower, but the drywallers do not answer calls on the weekends, so tomorrow they will have to rip out and repair the mess they made. That will only delay painting the bathroom, but I can complete the rest of the house without worrying about anything more. I cleaned it up yesterday and got ready to paint, but thought the garden should come first. Once it is complete, the painting can start in earnest. 

There is a pot of Kabocha squash chicken (actually a rooster) soup, with garlic and ginger,  on the stove waiting for me. Then a nice warm bath and finally around my usual bedtime, midnight, I will turn in and tomorrow will be another day. Hope you are here then. 

Two years ago, I created a berm garden. I dug a trench in the lawn down the hill and then filled the depression with rotted manure. I then put the sod and topsoil on top of that and then layered another layer of straw and manure. The year after I stirred it up with the skid steer bucket. The first year the only thing planted were roses and 5 of them have survived. Last year I planted some wild flowers, elder trees, and potatoes. 

This year I planted potatoes and onions and wild flowers. The roses and elder trees are growing too. It was easy to weed and finally, I found worms, lots of earth worms. The grass had been sprayed with pesticides and herbiscides and there were no worms to be found anywhere. Even last year there were so few, but his year, there were lots of worms, big beautiful worms. 

The idea of the trench is to collect the water from the rains as it runs down hill. The berm is in a depression of the land naturally and does get sun most of the day. So being protected and sunny, it is idea for growing. The potatoes last year did very well there. I also planted 200 onion sets so I will see how they grow. 

I was excited to notice some green leaves coming from the cardboard retainer around the base of the dead plum tree. I didn't know if there were leaves on the tree or shoots or it was another plant entireley different growing. After removing the cardboard, the leaves were easily seen and are from the tree! Yay, the plum tree, the $75 plum tree was alive! The entire trunk had died, but the shoots came from the well protected base. In time, the tree will grow and produce fruit I hope. The apple trees survived and so the the pear. 

After planted the potatoes and onions, I scattered wild flower seeds on the berm and under the plum and apple trees. Tomorrow I will water the planting and then the rest is up to the seeds. I have a small flower bed with the tomatoes in it that needs weeding desperately and I do plan to mow the lawn. Two weeks of growth with lots of rain means it is almost a hay field,even though I have allowed the geese and ducks to be in it. They eat what they can, but cannot keep up. Geese live on grass it seems. 

It feels good to be done with the planting. Now I am at the mercy of the seeds and weather, but I am a happy gardener just the same!

I dont know a whole lot of folks who love to weed the garden. I don't recall hearing anyone say, "Oh, I just can't wait to go out and bend my back and dirty my knees and weed the garden!" Nope, I can't recall that ever in almost 61 years. 

Me either. I am always looking for ways to avoid weeding. Masanobu Fokuoko, a Japanese natural farmer, says we should not pull weeds. He says that weeds come for specific reasons and they have a great purpose. It is interesting. I put some 2 year old sheep manure on some flower beds last year and this year, lambs quarters have sprung up in hoards. Lambs quarters are edible weeds, highly nutritious and very good for animals and humans alike. I made a delicious salad of them the other day and plan to stir fry some tomorrow. They are better than kale or spinach, even. Anyhow, if you follow Mr. Fukuoko's way of thought, the weeds come to heal the soil. Lamb's quarters are shallow rooted, but lambs quarters grows prolifically where the soil is already rich in nitrogen. That makes sense since I enriched it last year with a huge dump of manure.  By turning lambs quarters under before it goes to seed, that nitrogen remains available in the soil for the plants to come. 

So, in the garden, I scraped off the sod, and what little topsoil there was  and put down well rotted manure, then fresh composting straw and then the soil and sod. I later hand picked and raked most of the sod out, leaving behind the little bit of topsoil that there was. It is enough to plant a garden. 

The new composting hay will provide warmth and the well rotted manure will provide nutrients, but only for deep rooted plants. Dandelions have deep roots. I dont like weeding the garden so I will leave them if they do come, and besides , they are good to eat and the root is great for many herbal treats too. I have even contemplated making dandelion soap! 

I planted a variety of heirloom and non gmo seeds from various seed exchanges, all ordered online. There will be watermelons that ripen in 75 days, two varieties of corn, 3 varieties of carrots, lots of different lettuce, peas and beans, 2 kinds of cukes, several types of beans and squash, mangels and beets, turnips, rutabaga, oh, I am sure I have forgotten some. There are also herbs scattered through out and broadcast over the vegetable plantings. I recall self seeded dill in the garden of my parents and it just sprung up everywhere. It is necessary to make fermented dill pickles. Yum! On the edges inside the bales, I placed potatoes a friend gave me from his last year's garden that he did not eat. I left them outside so they would get a head start and start to sprout and they did. They were laid on the soil and covered with rotting straw. As they grow, more rotting straw will be laid around them. That is a clean and easy way to grow potatoes. Just remove the straw and voila!

Tomatoes are planted on the south side of the house where it remains hot and sheltered. Now, if we don't happen to get frost the first week of September, I might just have some delicious tomatoes this year. There are flower seeds scattered in the garden too, because the flowers attract pollinators and are pretty to look at. 

Depending on the success of the garden, there might be enough to sell even, at the farm store. Wish me luck and rain. We got some rain yesterday evening, about an inch and a half, or 3 centimetres. Everyone was praying for rain, because the area is so parched. It was what I was waiting for to plant the garden and more rain is expected in the next two days. Perfect!  To sing an old song, " Inch by inch, row by row, I'm gonna make this garden grow." Yup, I am.