May Photo Update

Visit the PHOTOS page to see images of May - the good, the bad and the pesky.

Sweet on the Sour: Our Lemon Trees

THE SEEDS
Once a month our local UU church hosts a recycle/book swap Sunday. Members can bring in items like electronics and batteries to recycle and items like books to swap. Inevitably, items besides books appear on the swap tables. Those tend to catch my eye.

In February, I spotted a beautiful piece of wood on wheels.  As I picked it up and pondered what it might be, I noticed a woman at the other end of the tables waving her hand to get my attention. "If you want that please take it, but if you don't, I would really like to have it," she said sweetly. "What is it?" I asked in earnest. It looked a lot like the scooters I used to race around on in elementary gym class. "I think it's for moving large plants around," she answered. It made sense, and all of a sudden I wanted it. I didn't need it though, and judging by the look on her face, she was going to put it to good use right away.

As I walked towards her to hand it over, she continued to explain her intentions. "My lemon tree has grown too large for me to move in and out on my own. Having it on wheels would be so helpful."  She had me at lemon tree. My facial expression must have given me away because she continued to tell me about hers - how she grew it from a seed - how it produces quite well and oh, by the way, would I like her to bring me some seeds?

YES.

I was floored. A few weeks later she handed me a baggie of seeds from the very last lemon of the season. They were still in the juice; seven perfect little seeds.

THE HUNT
I intended to plant them right away, but of course, that didn't happen.  The baggie hung on the fridge for a week or so before I tossed it in to the fridge hoping the coolness would prolong their life. Eventually enough was enough and I came home on my lunch break with a mission to plant those seeds. I grabbed the baggie and went to the greenhouse to select my pots, my gloves and a hand trowel.  Then I walked to our potting soil mixing table in the yard, prepared my pots and reached into the baggie for the seeds. It was empty.

I panicked. These were the last seven seeds of the season and I had squandered them.  I was surely being punished for not planting them right away.  With my lunch hour ticking away I started micro-hunting - retracing my steps through the grass to the greenhouse and sifting through the huge table of potting soil. This was ridiculous, I told myself over and over. I was never going to find them, but I couldn't give up. Even if I could find just one...

I carefully turned the greenhouse inside out and there, tucked in the lip of an upside-down tub, I spotted a seed. I had to get tweezers to fetch it out. Thinking the rest had to be close by, I worked my way down into the 55 gallon trash can of empty potting containers. By the time I reached the bottom I had found five. Five was good enough, I told myself, but I couldn't stop hunting.  And good thing, because after a few minutes, the final two were plucked from the overgrown mess of clover under the trash can. The world felt right again.

I planted those seven seeds after loving on them with a photo-shoot. Something I should have done in the first place. Somehow I made it back to work on time with little to no residue from the chaos that had just occurred.

The woman said it would take a while to sprout them, so I waited.  Four long weeks went by and nothing happened. A voice inside kept nagging me to give up and throw them out, but my desire for a lemon tree persisted.

THE SPROUT
Six patient weeks later, the first sprout appeared. The next day it was gone - eaten for lunch by some unknown evil. The stump of the stem remained level with the soil looking sad and dejected. It had worked so hard to make an appearance.  The second seed sprouted to find a similar fate and my hopes began to fade.  I tucked the pots away on a lower shelf in the greenhouse just in case things took a turn for the better.

And turn they did.  Last week I discovered all seven pots boasting healthy seedlings. I don't know what made the difference, perhaps they just needed more time and a little less attention.  All I know is that I am proud to host them in my greenhouse (now alongside two grapefruit seedlings also from the same woman) and look forward to whatever is to come...hopefully in the shape of a pie.

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!