Longleaf Breeze

Planting By the Full Moon

Gardening Shops Shouldn’t Stink

Lee — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:18:01 +0000

Amanda and I visited a garden shop in Montgomery yesterday, an unremarkable event. Take a woman who loves to shop and who has discovered recently how much she loves to grow things, and it’s a natural fit.

Also unremarkable was the pungent odor of poisonous chemicals that greeted us when we walked into the store. Not only did the counter of poisons produce the strongest odor; it also enjoyed the front-and-center position that any retailer recognizes as the sign that these are the high-profit products in the store’s inventory. They’ll sell you plants and seeds and shovels and hoes if you ask, but they make the REAL money selling poison.

Parenthetically, it’s striking how much money gardeners spend on poisons of every kind and description. There are weed poisons, insect poisons, rabbit poisons, and probably poisons for just about any critter you can name. But of course, that’s all a sham. All poisons are poisonous. Period. And when we spray our squash to kill insects, we’re deciding to ramp up the amount of poison we eat and that we will feed to those we love.

We gardeners need to be more obnoxious when we walk into garden stores and say, out loud, something like “Wow, I smell poison!” Say it loudly enough for the manager, the clerk, and the other customers to hear.

Garden shops should be selling things that nurture and replenish the earth and the creatures that call it home. If they did, we’d all find them more pleasant places to be.

Podcast #45 - Beginning Master Gardener Classes

Lee — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:06:54 +0000

If part of expertise is understanding what you don’t know, we’re practically professionals. We’re painfully aware on a daily basis of how little we know, so we have high hopes for all we’ll learn in the Master Gardener program.

Also: who’s in the class, how master gardener works, lack of organic focus, first harvest of sweet potatoes, finishing the muscadine trellis redo, new grass on the Blueberry Strip, simple way to freeze tomatoes, Row 6 (fall garden) stem to stern.

Listen - 20:05

Retrofitting the Muscadine Trellis

General Links:

(Yet Another) Way to Trellis Tomatoes

Variety is the Spit of Life

Lee — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:22:37 +0000

When she was a child, our daughter Adrian and her female cousins loved to spend the night with their Gran, my Mom. Every time they did, they ate the same food, slept on the same pallet on the same spot in Gran’s bedroom, watched the same movies (Sarah Plain and Tall and Anne of Green Gables), and ate the same breakfast the next morning. We marveled that they found this monotony pleasant. Why didn’t they get tired of it?

I didn’t realize it as a young adult parent, but I am beginning to grasp in my mid-50s what my mother and my child knew instinctively: variety isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The modern industrial economy has sold us a bill of goods, and if we ever peek behind the curtain we will realize it.

I write about this now because we traveled away from the farm to our suburban home, and I missed my cup of tea yesterday morning. It is my routine - and you already know I am nothing if not a creature of routine - to fix Amanda’s coffee and my tea and bring them to her in bed, where we start the morning slowly by planning the day’s work and play, and generally catching up on who needs to do what.

We still have a good bit of food in the pantry, and Amanda collects tea with gusto, so I foolishly assumed I would be able to find the makings for a good cup of tea somewhere. I found saffron tea, spice tea, green tea, and “afternoon” tea. I don’t know what that last one is, but I can assure you that what it is not is good plain tea.

Our modern growth-obsessed economy needs us to buy and buy and keep buying, even when our souls long for nothing more than for us to do good work, to eat good food, and to spend time with those we love. So it has become important that we convince ourselves that we don’t need just good, plain tea. We need 16 varieties of tea. It’s not enough to have a good pair of shoes, or even three. We need 25. Perish the thought that we should relax at the same place where we vacationed last year. We must see something new! It would be utterly unthinkable, of course, to remain at home and read a good book. How boring.

As peak oil arrives and economic growth disappears, we will see these multiple choices disappear, and many of us will be unable to cope. We will assume that what we are experiencing is just a bump in the road, and we will search for someone to blame for it so we can get rid of them and get things back to “normal.” But “normal” is going to be a shrinking economy, failing employers, disappearing jobs, increasing energy costs, higher food costs, and many, many fewer choices.

Life is going to be harder in the decades to come. We’re about to find out, though, that this doesn’t necessarily mean we will be less happy. We may find the blistering clarity of this age we are entering (”How can I get fresh water?” “Where can we stay warm and dry?” “Where can we find a few more calories of food?”) to bring a fresh tingle of life lived on the edge. Our ancestors lived this way, and it’s the way we evolved. We may actually find it pleasant, with or without saffron tea.

Planting By the Full Moon

Lee — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:56:54 +0000

It was one night early. “Official” full moon isn’t until tonight, but you could’ve fooled us. It sure looked full enough as we reveled in it last night, watching the moonshine play with the ground-bound objects that have become so familiar to us here at Longleaf Breeze.

On a night like that, you begin to understand why our ancestors learned to start young plants to coincide with the full moon. They knew the extra measure of light would benefit the tender shoots as they reached for the sky. We haven’t started scheduling our planting yet around the full moon yet; right now we have our hands full figuring out when the first frost is due. Soon, though, I bet we’ll begin subtly shifting our planting so that we take full advantage of the full moon.

150 years of cheap fossil fuels have allowed us to ignore silly little things like the extra boost of a few lumens of moonlight. As the age of petroleum abundance wanes, we will all pay more attention to the moon, the stars, the wind, and yes, even the weather.

Until (as) we do, we can always enjoy nights like last night (and tonight, and the next night, and the next . . .), particularly during this season when the brutal heat of summer in Alabama is finally at least contemplating a conditional surrender to fall.

Retrofitting the Muscadine Trellis

Lee — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 10:17:03 +0000

Muscadines grow wild here at Longleaf Breeze, so we have high hopes for cultivating them on Veg Hill. I did a poor job of designing their trellis, however; not enough strength.

We planted two Dixie and two Cowart muscadines in early April, after letting them sit around in pots for 2-3 weeks. It was high time to get them into the ground, so we did what we had to do. It was more than a month later that we finished the trellis for them. The trellis standards - set 20 feet apart - are nice and stout, each consisting of two 2 x 4 x 4s glued and bolted together as a lateral, bolted to a treated pine 6 x 6 x 8 sunk in concrete or hard clay. I opted for a double curtain trellis to spread the branches out and allow each muscadine more access to the sunshine. It has two parallel trellis strands positioned 4 feet apart.

At the time I decided we didn’t have room for a dead man at either end of the trellis because we had to put the posts so close to the deer fence, so I used metal hooks screwed into the 2 x 4 laterals. The line was 1/8″ aircraft cable originating at the north end with a turnbuckle, running through holes drilled in the laterals, pivoting on pulleys at the south end, and terminating back at the north end with another turnbuckle. I figured that was strong enough to hold the weight of the muscadines.

Then a couple of weeks ago Amanda and I stopped in at Petals from the Past, and for the first time I studied their mature muscadines. It was a revelation, and not a pleasant one: I had underestimated the weight of a healthy muscadine with ripe fruit. Multiply that times seven (the number of bushes we plan to have), and my little hooks seemed woefully inadequate.

First the dead men. Thursday afternoon I dug two holes about 15″ deep at either end of the trellis and planted a 4″ solid concrete block in each hole with a 5/16″ chain wrapped around it. I could have gotten by with lighter chain, but that’s what I had on hand, so I used it.

Yesterday Amanda and I braved the mosquitoes that have suddenly appeared on Veg Hill to restring the trellis lines. I began by disconnecting the four muscadines from the existing trellis, which required that I clip four of their little tendrils that had already wound around the aircraft cable. (Now you know the reason we’re doing this now; we knew that the longer we waited the more traumatic it would be for the muscadines.) Then I first loosened and then unscrewed the cable from the hooks I had been using. I drilled a hole through the northmost and southmost standards where the hook had been attached, and then ran the cable through that hole to a turnbuckle attached to a quick link attached to the dead man chain. There was room on the south end for the dead man to fit inside the deer fence, but the dead man on the north end is outside the deer fence and runs through a tiny hole to connect with the cable from the trellis. The aircraft cable had a longer run in the new configuration, so I added an extra 40 feet of cable I had recently purchased at Tallassee True Value.

The trellis has much more strength now; I think it’s up to the task of supporting heavy muscadines. So now our task is nurturing our little plants and helping them become the ponderous berry-laden behemoths that demand the kind of support the trellis is now able to provide. After finishing the trellis, we carefully reintroduced the muscadines to the trellis and did a little light pruning. Our first frost in central Alabama is mid-November, so they should have nearly three months of growing season to stretch out and get accustomed to the new digs.

The video runs about 3:40 and shows the retrofitting and the pruning.

Podcast #44 - Trellises, Trellises

Lee — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:28:06 +0000

One of the things we’ve learned in our brief farm education at Longleaf Breeze is that you want your plants to get vertical if you can, so they can make better use of the light and stay well ventilated. For us, that means trellises. We’ve learned what crops need trellises, what kind of trellises work best, and when it’s best to set them up.

Also: retrofitting the muscadine trellis, disappointing tomatoes, we’re using a little air conditioning, our reorganization is done, good to have books handy, and using plastic to kill weeds.

Listen - 21:41

Shelves and Storage - (old post from June of last year describing how we planned to do this)

Can We Survive Summer Without Air Conditioning? (again, how we planned to do this!)

General Links:

First Use of the Clothesline

Podcast #43 - Organizing for a Coherent Farm Life

Lee — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:17:52 +0000

We can’t keep saying we’re moving in when we’ve been here for more than eight months. We need to get all that stuff we brought here organized! In the process, we have loved living more simply, avoiding accumulating things we don’t care about. We’ve set multiple but identical shelving units on rollers in the storage room and shop.

Also: waiting too long to down trees, regular routine with the clothesline, hardening off veg for the fall, first sign of purple hull peas.

Listen - 19:07

Shelves and Storage - (old post from June of last year describing how we planned to do this)

General Links:

Podcast #42 - Thank God for Okra

Lee — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:16:25 +0000

It’s that brutal time in central Alabama when the extreme heat slows everything down. Most of Veg Hill is nearly comatose, but not the okra! It just keeps popping up and producing. Every day it’s producing new pods ready to harvest, and we know from experience that okra produces better when it’s “well picked.”

Also: squash bugs, the height of melon season, superstar sunn hemp, coping with the heat, and the extension of the drip irrigation system to the West Bed and the Microclimate Bed.

Listen - 21:18

General Links:

Cutting Sunn Hemp for the Fall Garden

Podcast #41 - Fall Garden Prep Time

Lee — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:40:51 +0000

We keep hearing there’s less of a problem with bugs for the fall garden, and of course we expect fewer struggles with the punishing heat of the central Alabama summer. But we can’t wait too long!

Also: seed starting is different in the summer heat, cutting sunn hemp on row 6, should we use clear plastic to kill weeds?, we must not overdo it, and the great report on our wood stove inspection.

Listen - 17:48

General Links: