Carrot Catharsis

I have come to grips with the fact that the satisfaction I feel watching carrots grow heavily outweighs any satisfaction I feel after a productive day at the office. Ten minutes a day with three small rows of dragon carrots is enough to clear my head and make me smile inside. Though I admit that they are part of a larger picture which is growing up healthily around them, and all of it contributes to my "have a good day" in the morning and my "welcome home" at night.

So here's to my first time growing carrots...I can't wait to eat you!

Old-Fashioned Egg Dying

Over the years I have managed to suppress my need for a Cadbury creme egg, but Easter still brings on undeniable cravings for egg salad and "robin eggs" (malt chocolate candies).  The candies were a staple in my Easter basket as a child and the eggs were a part of the day's festivities.

Unlike the eggs we hunted for at church or school (which were filled with candy or money), the eggs we hid around the yard at my house were filled with whites and yolks. This was acceptable because it meant two things: 1) we got to decorate them before the hunt, and 2) we got to make them into egg salad after the hunt. The Easter egg hunt was a compilation of tradition, art, food and party games. All things I love dearly. 

Normally my egg dying habits consist of food coloring from the store and watercolor resist techniques gleaned over the years. This year, while preparing to dye Easter eggs with the youth group at church, my husband sent me the following link: 

http://graciouslivingdaybyday.com/2010/04/03/coloring-easter-eggs-in-onion-peels/

Complete awe. I was so taken with the photo that I couldn't sit still long enough to read the entire text. With a lack of onion peels at home, I proceeded with the method using pickled beets and chopped basil to create the dyes - the two things I had on hand which seemed to have prominent coloring. A little bit of vinegar in the water was something my mom used to do for our dyes when I was a kid, so I was happy to see it paralleled in the woman's article. 

I used three eggs to conduct the experiment.  Two white eggs and one brown one.  Since our farm eggs come with a variety of base colors, I wasn't sure how well the natural dyes would work. From the yard I gathered wild green onions, some clover, a dandelion head and a small frond of leaves. Using cheesecloth or pantyhose to hold it tight, I pressed the natural items to the surface of the eggs and then dropped them in the pot of dye. 

From here I boiled them as I would normally cook a hard-boiled egg. Instead of draining them after the cooking time was up, I let them sit.  The color was there, but subtle, so we went out for dinner and a movie and returned to find them a much darker shade. After gently unwrapping them, we were impressed by the preciseness of the patterns left behind. The method was very effective on both white and brown eggs.

Turns out you don't have to press the leaves super tight. Just get it snug.

The dye has to dry before handling. You can see where it rubbed off. 

With three novice successes under our belt, we headed to church to lead youth group. Hunting for leaves and flowers around the church was a fun part of the process. While the eggs soaked, we led the lesson, and the day wrapped up by unwrapping the eggs. 

Our dyes included beets, black beans, and green tea.  We also tried the onion peel method from the link (we bought onions at the store making a point to load the bag with stray peels in the display area). Simply wrapping the eggs with onion peels and tying it up with cheesecloth produced the most fascinating designs and vibrant greens, reds, oranges and yellows. 

I am eager to try this again using what I have learned from the first two experiments. Using onion peels was so incredibly simple. Even without the fine motor skills required to secure cheesecloth, impressive results can be achieved by simpler means. Also, in the onion and garlic drying areas of farms that I've seen, there is no short supply of peels laying around. Needless to say, I will never go back to my old way of dying eggs.

I think a Roetzel Easter tradition has just been born.

Eggs dyed by the youth using onion peels, beet, tea and black beans.
These eggs were pre-cooked and only sat in the dye for an hour.

The Moods of March

March is going...going...gone. I fear that most of it was eaten alive by my cubical, but in spite of my indoor confinement, spring sprung.

The weeks of March flew by in gusts of moody magnificence, bringing every type of precipitation imaginable to Arkansas. Rain, hail, sleet, snow and fog accompanied temps from the 20's to the 80's. We became vigilant of the weather forecast and did our best to accommodate the extremes.  A string of hot sunny days prompted me to rip the entire covering from the greenhouse entrance way.  The three-sided tunnel which remained was a perfect home for the plants to stay toasty and get a nice breeze. A few days later, when the temperatures plummeted below freezing, the plastic cast-offs from the greenhouse became the perfect covering for newly sprouting seeds in the garden bed. We tromped through house each morning and evening with flats from the greenhouse, trying to keep them at a desirable temperature.

All in all, we survived the moods of March.

The cold frame boasts four healthy tomato plants, new rows of beet and carrot seedlings and a continuous supply of lettuces.  We've been told that the lettuce will start to get bitter after the third cutting, so it may be time to start eating from the lettuce in the garden bed and use the space in the cold frame for something else.

The cold frame as of a couple weeks ago.

The greenhouse hosts an odd assortment of things these days including brassica seedlings, varying maturities of tomatoes, peppers, onions from seed, and newly seeded flats of okra and basil. We also have fruit trees on the rise. The fig tree suckers are budding; a mystery branch Mike decided to pot already has leaves; seven peach pits (planted last fall after canning) have sent up healthy-looking shoots (left); and seven Meyer lemon seeds are keeping us in suspense. We've rehung the shower curtain door so as to keep the temperatures in there a little warmer now that the weather has stabilized on April-showers mode.

A fig branch showing off its new leaves in our kitchen window. 

The "flower bed" is rapidly being remodeled to be more of a garden bed.  Bulbs are being dug up and sequestered to the shady patch in order to maximize space for a small amount of spring crops.  I plan to push the limits of our small area by following intensive square-foot gardening and companion planting principles.  At this point, the bed is mostly full of lettuce, greens, cabbages, a variety of peas, carrots and beets.

In all of our areas we are following the up/down/up/down planting concept.  This is simply a way to maximize your space by growing root veggies in between crops that grow above ground. For example, our rows go something like this: bok choy, beets, lettuce, carrots, greens, beets, etc. Aside from utilizing the space well, the plants help each other out, hold down the soil and provide a nice leafy canopy for ground cover.  Just make sure you are providing them with plenty of nutrients and that you time their sprouts so that one does not shade the other out.

Other progress includes the rapid return of red clover in the back yard. When we moved into this house the yard was mostly hard clay with very little growth.  Treatments of compost and seeds have paid off and we love having healthy green growth in both the front and back yards. My bare-feet are especially thankful for the soft clover.  We enjoyed the surge of bees to the yard last year when it started blooming, but this year we made a point to cut it before it bloomed so as to maximize nitrogen levels in the soil.

While progress at the house puttered along during March, progress at the farm idled. Without a place to stay, we were hesitant to put in our irrigation system or plant too much in the ground. But with too many brassicas getting root-bound in the greenhouse and the itch of the growing season passing us by, we threw our hesitations out the window and spent April 1st at the farm planting. Rain was in the forecast for the rest of the week, so irrigating crops wouldn't be an issue.  Two hundred feet of potatoes, 75 feet of onions, 50 feet of broccoli and 25 feet of hardy root vegetables later, I woke up with soreness in my legs beyond any roller derby aftermath. Our main goal is to get our soil loosened and working, but vegetable bi-products are very welcome.  And if the whole thing flops...April Fools, I guess!