Rippling Flax

Our flax has dried in the shock long enough. It made a good size load after it was all put on. This is from a 50 foot by 50 foot patch.It seems like a quite a bit from that small area.Removing the seed pods is the next step. That is done with the Rippling Comb. This is our first time growing flax and I am building all the tools as we go, so this will be interesting.

Here is the rippling comb in action. Mounting the comb on the box seems to catch the majority of the seed pods. After using the comb this way for a while I took it back to the shop and added legs to raise it up about two feet. I need to add some weight to it or stake it down however as you have to pull quite hard to take off the seed pods and the whole thing wants to move around.I should have welded the nails on rather than brazing them. The nails bend if I get to enthusiastic pulling and if they were welded on I could heat it up on the forge and temper them a bit.I can't do that with the braze because the brazing compound will melt and let go before it is hot enough to temper.                                  

Here is the flax laid out to ret or rot the "glue" that holds the stalk and fibers together. This is called dew retting and will take about two weeks. The flax has to be turned over a couple times during that period. You can also ret by submerging the flax in water.This is much faster, only about a week I guess. We will probably do some that way too so we can compare the results.Right now I have enough projects going that I am in no hurry.

Companion Planting

Flowers are a nice addition to any garden. While many people might think of them as simply decorations,I make use of some of their other characteristics.These Nasturtiums for instance are edible and both the flowers and young leaves are a nice spicy addition to a salad.I plant them for the other benefit they bestow on my garden which is their ability to repel aphids, squash bugs, and most importantly, cabbage moths. I think they are very effective inter-planted in each row. Their biggest draw back is that they do not transplant well and the seed is expensive.
Another very decorative and useful, though not edible flower, is the common marigold. It definitely helps repel some of those harder to control type bugs such as cabbage moths and mexican bean beetles. Marigolds also are known to repel nematodes, a type of microscopic earth dwelling organism that can cause several  root diseases.
 There is a fairly long list of flowers as well as herbs that can help the organic grower in the everlasting battle with insects. The practice of inter planting for these characteristics is generally refered to as companion planting. To be effective, there must be a fairly dense population of the flowers.In my experience each flower will help protect those plants adjacent to them but the protection does not extend much beyond that. Still, once planted the flowers will not only brighten your garden, they will help protect it 24/7.

In Praise of Mulch

Here is a pic that shows what mulch can do. This row of cabbage and broccoli has been weeded once since I planted. The benefits of good mulch go way beyond fewer weeds. Continuous cover preservers and protects your soil from erosion, both from wind and rain. It limits water loss from evaporation, very important in a drought year like this. If it is organic it improves the tilth of the soil and adds valuable nutrients as it decomposes. You can walk in your garden soon after a rain and not get muddy feet! And, as you crawl down that row of green beans, harvesting the bounty, you will be on nice soft mulch.
  There are disadvantages with mulch too of course. In a wet year, mulch will harbor slugs. You can trap and remove them by placing old wooden boards on the soil. The slugs hide there during the day and you can then remove them from your garden. You can also drown them in nearly empty beer cans set almost flush with the soil. The beer attracts them. Another problem can be introducing weed seeds to your garden from the mulch. I  use well rotted hay or let piles of grass, cut green ,heat up to destroy weed seeds before applying it to the garden. Mulch can tie up nitrogen in the process of decomposing but I view that as a benefit  since I normally have plenty of nitrogen and this keeps it from being lost. It is available to the plants after the mulch has broken down sufficiently. For mulch to be an effective weed barrier it must be THICK. I view 3-4 inches as the very minimum and try for 6 inches. Long hay that is not well rotted will be a problem if you rototill your garden.  I prefer chopped mulch as it makes a denser cover and will still till under easily. It is organic, it is sustainable, and I like it.

Purple Coneflower

 Purple Coneflower, Echinacea  purpurea, is a nice perennial that is ornamental and a well known medicinal plant. It is generally considered a immune system stimulant and is widely used in Europe. There are two other very similar coneflowers, the Narrow Leaf Coneflower , and the Pale Purple Coneflower, all three being native North American species. Many color variations have been bred for the nursery industry over the last few years. I don't know if any of those would retain the medicinal qualities. If used medicinally most herbalist recommend that it not be taken continuously. A routine of two weeks on followed by two weeks of is often recommended. Both the above ground parts and the roots are used although the root preparations are considered better.
  I started my plants from seed over ten years ago. They will naturalize and can even out compete grasses with little help.  It started about two weeks ago and will continue to bloom until frost here. Tough plant, looks nice, useful, I like it.

Slim Pick'ins

I guess this pic fairly well sums up our berry picking expedition. The blackberries were not any where near ready and they are badly in need of some rain. This bunch looks good compared to most that we saw. If we get a decent rain in the next few days there will be a very nice crop. The berries will be smallish but there are a lot of them. There were a few nice late season raspberries but someone else was already picking those. The big disadvantage of a easy access berry patch, other berry pickers! Our next stop was our patch of gooseberries.

I left the camera in the car because this patch is not easy access so the only pic you get of the goose berries is the 8 pints of jelly Ann made with our pickings.These were the smooth gooseberry but that name definitely only refers to the fruit. Those canes had thorns on their thorns! The patch is on a nice river flood plain of old soft maples and thorn apple. Mixed in with that was a lot of saw briar and, as if that was not enough, a very generous growth of wood nettle. It made for very interesting picking conditions.
After we felt we had accumulated enough thorn pricks and nettle stings we gave up and went for a walk on the river bank.The river was very low. Lots of american hazel nuts along that stretch of ground. The burr oaks we looked at have some acorns on but nothing like last years crop. We checked out another flowage for wild rice and were pleased to see it looking well along. Will probably be a early ricing season. That got us so excited that we  went yesterday and bought our rice harvesting permit just so we will be ready!

Berry Picking

We are off to spend the day berry picking. Both black berries and goose berries should be ripe. We have several berry patches scouted out. Last year some kind of cane boring insect hit all of the blackberries in our patch. The canes, which were hanging with green fruit, just dried up. It was very disappointing. This seems to be a good year for all sorts of insects so it may be the same this year. We did see a lot of berries on the canes earlier in the year though. While we are out we will check on the american hazelnut crop.We use them a lot when we have them, especially with wild rice and cranberries for breakfast. We will also check out the burr oak acorn crop. I like the acorn flour pancakes Ann makes and while we have a fair cache of acorn meal from last year, a basket of fresh acorns would be welcome. The pic above, which I threw in for lack of a better one, is of a local lake that has wild rice. The bright green along the edges of the lake is wild rice. Hopefully, Mid August will see Ann and I out there harvesting some of it.

Harvest Time Begins

The big harvest crunch is beginning. Ann pulled this garlic a few days ago. Peas are all gone. I want to try a fall planting in a few weeks. We have started to pick green beans. We will have no shortage of them this year and will have lots to sell . Broccoli is starting to produce nicely. Kohlrabi are almost done, just a few left. Cucumbers are almost big enough to pick. I love cucumber, onion and tomato salad. Don't think I'll have a ripe tomato for a couple more weeks though. We have been selectively pulling an onion or two as needed now for a while. New red potatoes, yum. We just reach under and steal a few without disturbing the plant. They are actually getting quite large now but they still have that delicious new potato taste.Northern Wisconsin sweet corn is still a couple weeks away at least. Ours is tasseling now. The peppers in my high tunnel seem to like the extra heat and all have set lots of fruit as are the tomatoes. I will definitely be building more high tunnel for next year. The only draw back so far is that you have to be very attentive to watering.The higher heat causes the plants to get thirsty quickly. Well worth the extra work though.

Flax Tools

I have been making progress on building the tools Ann needs to turn her flax into linen . The blue box  holds a Rippling Comb inset along the front. This is used to remove the seed pods after the flax is dry.I added it to the box in the hope that most of the seed pods will end up there. Do you like that lovely blue color? Yard sale paint! Ann has all of her flax pulled and in shocks drying now. After the seed pods are removed the stalks go through a process called RETTING which rots the glue that holds the fibers to the stalk.  The stalks then are put through the FLAX BREAK , the saw horse like device in the pic.

The stalks are pulled through the breaker while smashing them between the upper and lower teeth shown in this pic. This breaks the stalk into pieces but leaves the fiber intact. Next the wooden SCUTCHING KNIFE is   used to remove the bulk of the clinging pieces of stalk from the fibers. The fiber are held against a up right board in one hand and scraped downward with the scutching knife. That is the scutching knife leaning against the breaker. Setting on top of the breaker is a FLAX COMB, one of two that will be needed. This is the course comb. I still need to make a fine comb.

 The fibers are pulled through the combs to remove the last of the stalk pieces and to separate the fibers. At that point the fibers are ready to be spun into thread.
Here is another view of the break. It is hinged on one end and you just chomp the stalks as you slide them through.Weather or not any of my tools will do what they are supposed to remains to be seen. The flax will be in the shocks for another week or so and then we will try using the rippling comb.

Rocket Stove

I built this contraption last week. It is called a rocket stove and you will find thousand of sites with hundreds of variations on the internet, most on survivalist sites of one sort or another. I am not into the survivalist thing to much, my main reason for building it was coffee. I am a certified coffee addict and I drink it regardless of the weather or temperature. When it is 98 degrees F. in the house, lighting a fire in the wood cook stove is a poor option. We have a propane stove also but, as regular readers will know, I am a tightwad and gas for the stove has to be bought. We often build a fire in our fire pit to make coffee but you use up a lot of wood just to make one pot of coffee. As a tightwad, using up so much firewood  bothered me but my addiction to coffee is stronger so it has won out, until now. Having read several articles  about the efficiency of this simple device, and having checked to see that I won't have to buy anything to construct it, I went ahead and built one. As usual for me, this is a use what ya got project. Ann wanted to try it out and cooked bacon and eggs on it. Works fine but there is no low setting on this puppy!

I had several used pieces of stove pipe and selected two that are 7 inch diameter for the basic unit. It is that simple, it is a tee. I cut a hole in the longer one and cut the shorter to fit snugly against it. Two sheet metal screws on each side hold it together. I tested it just like that to see if it was going to work before I continued. I just pushed the bottom down into the dirt a bit and lite it up. Stick some small twigs into the horizontal part, set them on fire, and it creates a draft in the vertical part neatly focusing almost all of the heat produced on the bottom of your coffee pot! Since it seems to work well I added the base , a metal plate with two up rights and a bar to hold the horizontal section. I thought adding the slightly small second section inside the larger section would make it even more efficient. It just slides down inside and helps prevent some heat loss through the main pipe. I have a small grate I set on top to prevent sealing it off.

I did a actual test to see how well it really worked. I started with two quarts of water at 70degrees F. in a small pan. It took 8 minutes and 52 seconds to bring the water to a full rolling boil. I used 24.2 ounces of wood . It actually used less wood than that since I had just added a hand full of wood when it started boiling. The best part of this is that these were twigs that I normally would have used as tinder to start a real fire! I LIKE IT.

Cheap Help

The Eastern American Toad, Bufo a. ameriacanus, is a organic gardener's true friend, eating as many as 10,000 pests, such as slugs, a season. Toads will not cause warts but they will give cats or dogs that bother them a nasty surprise. Toads secret a toxin, bufotoxin, from glands on their back just behind the eyes. While it is not usually deadly it certainly seems to get the message across and very few pets bother toads a second time. Toads will also puff up some times  and will pee alot. Apparently this also taste bad to predators. Toads, which hibernate during the winter, are mostly nocturnal hunters and spend the day dug into the soil. They dig in butt first using their back feet to push dirt aside. They lay their strings of eggs in shallow water every spring. The tadpoles eat vegetation while the adults are strictly carnivorous. That's the part I like! I'll be moving a few more "guests" into my gardens whenever I spot one.. This is as cheap as help gets.

Shocking Flax

These are shocks of flax set up to dry. This is the first step in a long process to obtain linen. We will also have seed for our next crop plus seed to use as feed or to extract oil from. Flax seed is 20% oil so that could yield a fair amount. The oil was traditionally used as a lamp oil as well as a furniture finish. The flax is pulled rather than cut in the traditional manner and then bundles are made. Each bundle is a handful and is tied with several stalks of flax as shown in the bottom pic.After there are 20-30 bundles made up they are stood, leaning against each, other to form the shock.

They will be left in these shocks to dry down. After they are dry the seed pods, each of which contain about 10 seeds, will be removed. Every plant has multiple seed pods. The pods then will be crushed and the chaff winnowed out. The bundles will then be retted to break down the "glue" that holds the fiber to the stalk. The fiber is about 10% of the stalks bulk. Removing it is a many step process that uses many specialized tools. I am in the process of building those tools now and should have some pics soon. So far I have the first tool we need done. It is

called a rippling comb and is used to remove the seed pods from the bundles of flax. I made mine with 22, 31/2 inch long nails brazed to a piece of angle iron. The nails are spaced about 1/4 inch apart. I attached it to a box to catch the seed pods. I will see if it actually works when the flax is dry. This is all learn as we go so you never know.

Grape Vines

Despite several late frost it looks like my new grape vines will provide enough grapes for at least a small batch of wine this year. This vine is only three years old so I am happy it is doing so well. If you know anything about how grape vines are supposed to be trained you will know from this pic that I haven't done very well at it. I started out with good intentions but time did it's thing to my schedule and well, you know how it goes. I am not to concerned as I have grown grapes for years without the benefit of pruning. It is true that properly pruned grapes produce bigger ,fuller, clusters. I guess I am just willing to except what I get without pruning. These are all a concord type grape as that is about the only type reliable here in zone 3. Some are clones from a vine my Dad planted 40-50 years ago. I'm not sure where he got it but it is certainly hardy enough for our climate. I've also started a couple of other cultivars from a nursery. I will have to see if they survive when we get a hard winter. There seemed to be a lot of die back
this winter and it was fairly mild.                                  
Here is a pic of wild blueberries starting to ripen. Unfortunately the wild turkeys seem to enjoy them and I'm not sure how many we will get before they do.

Chicken Choices

Here are our new choices in chicken breeds. The white ones are Light Brahmas ,a heavy dual purpose breed. The reds are a meat, broiler type called Freedom Rangers.  We have been trying different breeds of chickens for several years now in a effort to find the perfect breed for our farm flock.
 The Freedom Rangers are a replacement for the standard White Rock-Cornish cross broilers we usually get. While those guys grow fast they need a lot of expensive grain to do it. The Freedom Rangers are a much more active bird and should do better with a least part of their diet being pasture. Time will tell.I hope to get them on pasture tomorrow
 The Light Brahmas have the traits we think we need for our farm flock. Dual purpose, small comb and feathered feet for our cold winters and not so improved that they are never broody. The light part of the name refers to the color rather than the size. We put them in their chicken tractor last week. They seem to like it and really hunt for bugs and tastier bits of greens when we move them.

Scouting Trip

On our scouting expedition yesterday we were intent on picking linden flowers. Linden, A.K.A.,  basswood, are large trees so in order to pick their flowers you have to find young smaller trees that are blooming. Usually the ones on the edge of a wood where they get more sun bloom young. We know of just such a spot but no luck, or not much luck anyway. The big mature trees have lots of blossoms but the smaller bushy trees that we can reach were  almost devoid of blooms.Oh well, that is the way of foraging.  We did harvested these medicinal and tea plants however. Left to right, sweet flag, wild bergamot, yarrow, and st. johns wort. As for the scouting part we were checking out several areas where we harvest wild rice. Right now it looks like a decent crop but that can change of course. We saw lots of hazel nuts and nanny berries but no black cherries. Red oaks look like they will have a moderate crop of acorns this year.

We needed a much larger dehydrator to hold some of the plant material we harvest. This year I started building the beast pictured. All very low tec, use what ya got, sort of contraption.Big pallet with a crate attached forms the base. Then I added a frame to hold a piece of sheet metal. This was painted flat black and then covered with some surplus storm windows.Warm air rises and enters the crate, as it cools it settles and is pulled back into the heat exchanger area. Couple of bars in the crate let us hand plants in the box to dry. I will be adding some cleats to hold trays which I have to build yet. With on and off sunshine and a slight haze temps in the middle of the crate were hovering around 120 F.I have two small solar panels I am going to add to power a small vent fan . I have to make a actual door instead of the piece of plywood leaning against it and caulk a few joints which should let it reach a little higher temps. I'm shooting for 130-140F. which will let us dehydrate veggies and some fruit too.
On a side note, this is post #101!
( What do you think Wilma?)
                       

Heal-All

Here is a great medicinal plant I am going to gather today. It is Heal-All,Self-Heal, Prunella vulgaris.
It is a perennial of the mint family which is indicated by it's weakly square stem and the shape of it's flowers. Research shows it contains ursolic acid which is a antitumor compound. Some research suggest it possesses antibiotic ,and hypotensive  properties.One traditional use that I like is using a leaf tea as a gargle for sore throats and mouth sores. It is used in traditional Chinese medicine also. Used in reasonable amounts, there does not seem to be any toxicity issues. As always do not use any plant you can not 100% positively identify, and of course, this is a description of traditional uses and not medical advice!

On a different note, here is a view of our main garden. Every thing is doing fairly well but the insects are out in huge numbers this year. I have been dusting with diatomaceous earth ( DE ) on a regular basis. It has been dry enough that slugs are not to bad. They can be problematic with deep mulch during a wet year. The deep mulch is great weed control and most of the garden is fairly weed free. I actually am leaving some weeds grow, both as bait a crop for the bad bugs but also as habitat for good bugs. I don't let the weeds go to seed but being totally weed free in a organic setting is not practical nor desirable. Besides, a lot of those "weeds" are great food!

Suckering Tomatoes

If you live in an area with a growing season that just manages to provide 90 frost free days like I do, removing suckers on your tomato plants is a worth while task. It is especially helpful on some of the old  open pollinated indeterminate varieties. They seem to put on suckers as fast as you can pinch them off but pinching them off forces the plant to put it's energy into maturing the fruit already on the plant instead of growing more shoots.A sucker is the shoot that grows out of the junction of a limb and the main stalk like the one my knife blade is resting on. I just pinch it off with my fingers. I also like to stake my tomatoes rather than using cages. I tie them up with stripes ripped from old tee shirts. I tie the strip to the stake and then make a loose loop around the main stalk of the plant.

Here on the left is a recent pic in the high tunnel. I have the stakes fastened to the frame of the tunnel so they can easily support the tomato plants. So far they seem to like the extra heat they are getting although if this heat wave continues it won't matter. We have had to start watering the garden and new trees and shrubs again. It is hovering around the 90 degree mark which is nice compared to what much of the country is getting but still enough to make plants suffer quickly without enough rain.
 The pic to the right is interesting because of those bees lined up with their butts in the air on the right edge of the landing board. They are on fan duty, moving air into the hive to help cool it. Notice how the rows alternate spacing to maximize the effect. Amazing creatures!