Comfrey

Comfrey, Symhytum officinale, is a large rooted perennial with large rough hairy leaves. As you can see from the pic it has purple-blue bell like flowers in clusters. It can have pink or white flowers depending on the variety. Comfrey is a widely used medicinal plant but one with a bad reputation. All though comfrey contains allantoin, which is known to promote healing, it also contains compounds that may be carcinogenic. In it's defense, a cup of comfrey leaf tea contains less carcinogens than a beer. A real danger with fatal consequences is mistaking the first year rossete leaves of Foxglove (Digitalis) for comfrey. The plants in the pic are decedents of plants my grandfather put in for grazing his sheep. It persist despite my uncle's continued efforts to eradicate it. I dug up a few of the offending plants several years ago and now have several patches of this versatile healer established. As with any plant you may decide to use for medicinal purposes, study the plant, respect it, research it, and don't get the foolish notion that natural necessarily means safe.

Strawberry Season

Yesterdays picking from the strawberry patch totaled up to 8 gallons. The patch is approximately 50 by 25 or 1250 square feet. The plants are all second year mothers and their daughters. The rain we finally got last week really made a difference, the berries are much larger  than they had been. Ann has already made 30 pints of strawberry jam and also dried some berries from previous pickings. She is going to make more jam and will make fruit leather from some of these. We will take a few gallons along to the Wild Food Summit we are attending later this week. Certainly not a wild food but every one brings a dish to pass for the first nights meal and we thought strawberries and fresh cream would make a great dessert. We have been eating our fill for about two weeks now and should get at least two more big pickings from this patch. At current you-pick prices our patch has produced about $350 worth of berries so far this year. That is at non-organic prices. Most strawberries are not organic because strawberry plants don't do well if the weeds are not kept out and the only way to do that organically is to pull them by hand. Ann spends several hours a week keeping our patch weed free.
Here is a admittedly fuzzy pic of a fuzzy visitor we had last week. I took the pic through the window screen so it didn't come out very clear. He had one messed up ear. He was not terribly worried about us talking only 30 feet away so I hope he doesn't turn into a problem bear. We will keep anything he might consider food put up so he does not develop a habit of visiting us! He is probably a cub from last year, about 90-100 pounds I'd guess.

High Tunnel

We have been busy as little bees here this week. We finally got in the last of our tomatoe and pepper plants on Tuesday just in time for a frost Wednesday night. Since we have over a acre and a half of garden we couldn't cover everything so we took our chances and didn't cover anything. Bad decision. Frost got a lot of my squash, most of the cucumbers, and about half of my tomatoes. I finally got the plastic over this high tunnel Wednesday morning which saved the fifty or so plants in there. This was a great project for a tightwad like me. The frame is made from two yard barn size canopy type frames. I got those from my sister-in -law after they had been wrecked by the wind at their house. I made a base for them by putting in post every eight feet and then cutting them level. I then nailed a landscaping timber across the tops of the posts. The frame was then fastened to the landscape timber with screws. Since the frames are spaced rather far apart I was worried there would not be enough support for the plastic sheeting. I used plastic baling twine to make a support grid between the metal frame, after the plastic sheeting was on I put another grid of twine over it. This seems to have done the trick as the cover stayed on Thursday night despite the 35 mile per hour winds we had.

Looking inside you can see I laid plastic sheeting on the ground to keep the grass down. This is scrounged material too. It is empty silage bag which is some TOUGH plastic. Then I set in my scrounged plastic buckets and we were good to go. I put some pallets across the ends to act as wind breaks. I am hoping this will give the tomatoes and peppers the extra warmth they need to mature a little earlier. This year I just used common construction type plastic sheeting . I plan to replace it with regular greenhouse film next year. It has UV inhibitors which extend it's life considerably. This project cost me less than $100 . Landscape timbers$40, Plastic sheet $25, Twine $25,1" Conduit to repair frame $8= $98.00

Here is a pic of the flax in bloom. It is not as tall as we thought it would be but we have not had much rain. It may grow more while in bloom too, we have not raised it before so we don't know. Guess I better get busy and build Ann the various tools she will need to process the fiber.

Seasonal Eating

We like to try to eat with the seasons. With strawberries starting to ripen that will be no problem for a while! Despite a couple of frosts it looks like we will have a decent crop. Strawberries are a great home gardener fruit. They are relatively easy to grow and produce a nice size crop for the amount of space they use. I was hoping for a excess  of berries this year since strawberries make great wine but I don't think that is going to happen. We don't have a irrigation system and we haven't had as much rain as we could use. When you start carrying water in buckets ,only the newest transplants get as much water as they want. We are looking at several types of pumps to irrigate with but haven't found what we need yet, at least not at a price we can afford.

Peas will be ready in a day or so also. I love them fresh from the garden and eat a lot of them right on the spot. Those that do make it home get frozen. I do not care for peas that are canned. We have been having spinach salads from the garden for a couple of weeks and will have lots of lettuces soon. The radishes are very nice this year and I will put in a second planting of them and spinach today. I will put a floating row cover over those after they sprout to help keep both of these cool weather plants in the shade. Bugs of several sorts are turning into a problem early this year, especially the Colorado Potato Beetle. We are picking those by hand  now but will begin appying thuriside and diatenaceas earth this week to help control them. We would prefer that the insects do their seasonal eating elsewhere!

Apple Tree Grafting

My grafting experience this year went fairly well, producing twelve new fruit trees at a cost of $25.00, the approximate cost of one tree at the nursery. The grafting stock was  from limbs I pruned out of my older trees during their annual spring pruning. I stored the limbs in damp sphagnum moss in my root cellar until I was ready to graft them.I bought 25 root stocks but only had enough scion wood to make twenty grafts. Of those twenty grafts, twelve took. Of the remaining eight that I tried to graft but failed,  seven sent shoots up from the roots. These, plus the five I didn't use, will be planted in the orchard and grafted on to next spring.  The root stock was all EMLA 26 apple rootstock from Raintree Nursery (www.raintreenursery.com).I went together with others to buy a larger quantity for a better price but prices are reasonable for even small amounts.  In the pic, ungrafted root stock on the left, growing grafts in the center, bad grafts that sent up new shoots on the right.

Organic Herbicide

We have fencing around the area we are starting our orchard in to prevent deer damage. Since it is an electric fence with a solar charger I need to keep grass and weeds from growing up on to it. This year instead of spending a lot of time clipping the weeds once every week or so I am trying something different.The brown streak of dead or dying weeds shown under the fence was caused by spraying it with vinegar. This was regular food grade vinegar with a small amount of common liquid dish soap added. The pic was taken about 48 hours after I had sprayed. There is quack grass, june grass, canary grass, clover, golden rod, ox eye daisies, and plantain along the fence line. The vinegar seems to have knocked them all back. I don't know yet how long this will last but it is a lot easier than clipping under the fence so I'll be using it again. I used one large squirt of dish washing soap in one gallon of vinegar. I applied it with a small pump up type hand sprayer and probably used about a quart total under about 800 feet of fencing. I don't think it will eliminate the weeds entirely but it certainly looks like it will help me control them. I have no idea if this is certified for organic use but it seems like it would be. Maybe you would have to use organic soap in the mix. I think it is a reasonable choice for anyone wanting to eliminate the more toxic chemicals from use on their property.

Dead Squash

 This is a tiger swallowtail, Pterourus glaucus, feeding on chive blossoms. There are a lot of them around this year and unlike a lot of other butterflies, they sit long enough for me to get a pic! I have seen a lot of butterflies earlier than normal this year which I suppose is because of the warm weather in March. As usual, Wisconsin weather is making life interesting. The weather forecasters predicted frost overnight  Wendsday so we spent a hour covering any thing that might be damaged. The actual low temp. here turned out to be 41 degrees F. There were not any frost predictions on the same channels Thursday and the low temp. was predicted to be 43 F., so needless to say, we did not cover anything. As you can guess, that was a mistake. There was enough frost to kill all of our squash  transplants. They seem to be the only thing that got it so I guess I shouldn't complain. Our green beans are up and they are not very frost tolerant either. I do have part of a flat of squash that were still in the green house so we will have some to set out. I am not sure if the peas, which are blossoming, were effected. Fortunately, the strawberries, which are starting to ripen, don't seem to be hurt.