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.