Home-Grown Dinner

Our growing season here is quite short so eating fresh from the garden is a big deal.  Yesterday was our first chance to actually harvest something from one of our gardens so I decided to try to make a completely home grown meal out of it.

My daughter Emma and I picked spinach, arugula, baby kale and radishes to make a salad.  No tomatoes yet, they are going into the garden this weekend.

I defrosted some elk sirloin from a nice elk harvested off our property last fall. Heated a bit of olive oil in my cast iron skillet and sprinkled a salt and fresh ground pepper on both sides.

 

Into the skillet they go for a pan sear.

 

Four minutes on each side, they were cut pretty thin and I wanted them pink inside.

 

What a great dinner that tasted even better knowing that it came off our place.  With the exception of the ranch dressing!

Just Working Around the Farm Today

We had wonderful, rainless weather today and we worked outside almost all of it.  But before I when out to work I had to take my batch of 17 Black Copper Marans eggs out of the turner and increase the humidity since they are due to hatch on Tuesday.

Garden #2 is almost completely planted today with the exception of one part which I'm going to plant sunflowers after the danger of frost has passed.  What I did plant was carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, parsley, dill and several types of lettuce.  As you can see, we started lining the walkway surrounding the bed with newspaper and straw but I ran out of straw.  I'll get more on Monday.

On my way to the barn, I noticed that some great-horned owls babies in a nest on our neighbors place have finally grown big enough to be seen.  They are right about 20 yards from our fence line very close to where my chickens free-range.  We have seen the parents hunting rodents out in our cattle pasture and they are yet to snatch one of my birds.  I'll be keeping my fingers crossed on that one.

Tomato Babies

Now what's that old saying?  You can't be too rich, too thin or have too many tomato starts....right? That goes for peppers, too!

Here in North Idaho I have learned not to put the tomatoes out in the garden until June 1st and still there are nights that I have to cover them up due to sub-freezing lows.  I usually start them from seed the first day of Spring. 

My favorite medium to start tomatoes and peppers in are those little peat pellets that you have to expand with water before they are soft enough to place a seed in them.  We have a very small shower stall in our basement bathroom and I put a small space heater in there.  It doesn't take much to heat the stall up to 90F degrees and that is where I place my tomatoes and peppers.  The germinate very quickly in this hot environment but you have to have them in covered containers like the mini greenhouses you buy at any big box store like Walmart or Home Depot or else they will dry out. 

As soon as the seeds emerge, I move them to a sunny, south-facing window sill.  Waiting to move them is not a good idea because in the darkness of the bathroom they will grow very long, and leggy QUICKLY.  Once they develop their first true leaves beyond their seed leaves I transplant them to larger peat pots which are about 4 inches tall and 4 inches wide.  I place the peat pellet at the bottom of the pot and then add seed starting soil until it reaches the base of seed leaves.

The plants develop great root systems in this soft soil and grow quite quickly.  On warmer days, I bring them outside to help harden them up.  I will leave them out all night as long as it doesn't fall much below 50F during the night.  By June, I have nice healthy home-grown starts which are not root-bound like a lot of the nursery-raised ones that I have purchased.  On average my plants are smaller than the ones I have bought at the store but once planted in the garden they grow faster than the store bought ones and end up producing more fruit, too.

It Really Seemed Like Spring Today!

 Black copper marans enjoying the sun

Today was the third day here since early October of 2011 that was actually in the 70s.  Not too unbelievable around these parts but all my family wanted to do today was to be outside either working or playing.

My daughter's friend had spent the night for a sleepover and this morning we went on a little walk in the back of our property.  My daughter caught a frog but seeing a young bull moose in velvet was probably the highlight of the day.  Of course I didn't bring a camera and of course the moose stood there for a million years because I am sure he knew as well that I didn't bring my camera.

But not getting a moose picture couldn't get me down so later in  the day after taking a break from chores I took a few pictures from around our place.

Our 60 foot compost pile

Having a lot of chickens has it's benefits:  a lot of stuff to compost for the garden.  Also, I have been clearing all the hay that the cattle had knock down into the ground from the hay feeder last winter.  You want to talk about hot stuff,  it compost better than anything I've ever tried and gets really hot very quickly.

First finished garden bed

We have three high-fenced vegetable garden beds.  This is the first one planted so far.  It's kind of strange location because it does get some shade but since it's on a slight slope facing due south, it's the first to heat up and lose it's snow.  The down side is that late summer, early fall it likes to shade up again so it is not great for planting things that take all summer to mature here:  winter squash, pumpkins, tomatoes and green beans are not a great choice to plant in this bed.  Greens, radishes and peas and other cool-loving plants love it though.

I love Ed Smith's "Vegetable Gardening Bible", it's the only book I refer, too.  It's also where I got the idea to cover the walkways with a layer of newspaper and then top it with straw.  Great weed control and it looks tidy.  In the fall, I add leaf litter and compost to the beds and then lay the straw from the walkways on top so the earthworms and night crawlers have a nice cozy bed to work and break down the leaf litter.

Bees....

more bees...

and more bees.

Bountiful Blessings

After having such a short growing season last summer, it's been such a blessing to have the garden producing so well this year.

Planting Fruit Trees...At Last!

Boy does time go by fast! We have owned our place in Northern Idaho for 12 years now and have never planted a fruit tree. Oh, we've talked about it many times but just never acted upon it. It just seemed kind of daunting to try to figure out what and where to plant. Also, we haven't had the greatest of luck on the few trees that we tried planting here due to the depredations of mice, gophers and deer.

Our home came with three fruit trees: a greenish/yellow apple of some sort that we thought might be a Granny Smith, a tiny plum tree that makes tiny plums and an apricot tree that bloomed so early that it generally got its blossoms froze off. The apple tree usually makes enough fruit some seasons to make a few pies and a batch apple butter.This year, with the encouragement of my brother-in-law Doug, we decided that none of us were getting any younger and it was silly to keep putting off planting fruit trees. Most fruit trees will take at least 2 years to be mature enough to produce any fruit so that even delays the wait for your reward even longer.
We ordered four trees from Stark Brothers: a Honeycrisp semi-dwarf apple tree, a Jonathon dwarf apple tree, an Intrepid standard peach tree and a Harglow standard apricot tree. Honeycrisp is our favorite apple and the Jonathon is a baking apple that blossoms at the same time so they can pollenate each other.
The apricot and peach trees were both described as late blooming varieties which will hopefully work well here. We are at USDA Zone 6 so our winters are not that cold compared to most northern states. But the springs here take a long time to get rolling. It is normal to experience frosty nights here well into the first week of June. I don't dare put our tomato plants in the garden until June.
The sight we picked for our "orchard" was the backyard. It slopes downhill towards the west and to the east is our house which we hope will help divert cold air around it as it travels downhill. The slope continues past the border of the backyard so there is no risk of cold air pooling there either.
Since these trees were bare root we soaked them in water for about 4 hours before planting. Each hole was dug about 2 feet wide and a 1 1/2 feet deep. We mixed the soil from each hole with Eco Organic Compost (1 part compost to 2 parts soil) and 6 TBS of Vigoro Timed-Release All-Purpose Plant Food which feeds up to 6 months. I never use non-organic fertilizers on my vegetables or raspberries but we made the exception this time because we wanted a time-released product to help get these trees well-established. The fertilizer will surely be gone by the time these trees produce fruit...I hope!
To address all of our predation problems we put a layer of defenses (or should I say fences!) around each tree. Before we back filled the the holes, we surrounded them with 2 foot wide hardware cloth to hopefully prevent an attack from the gophers. Then we cut the tops and bottoms off of 2 liter Coke bottles and wrapped the remaining part of the bottle around the base of each tree to deter mice from chewing on the trees at their base. To keep the deer and Greg's geese from nibbling the trees we placed a cylinder of welded 5 foot wire farm fence around each tree. These were stabllized by T post, too.
I'll keep everyone posted on how these trees do. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they make it!