garden | KW Homestead

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Homemade Homestead Pizza!

In my post about some of the differences between living in the country vs the city (which include thinking that anywhere other than rural Stokes county = the city), I mentioned that it took us a whole year before we found a pizza place that would deliver to our house. While delivery pizza is great for nights you just don’t feel like cooking, nothing beats a homemade pie crisp and fresh from the oven.While we haven’t yet made our own pizza dough, we do use either frozen pizza doughs from the store, or more often, tortillas.

a fresh tortilla, with sliced cherokee purple tomatoes and california wonder peppers is a great base for garden pizza

But the best part about homemade pizza is that you get complete control over your toppings. No having to split, or compromise with friends or significant others about meat lovers vs. veggie supreme. This especially holds true with tortilla, “personal pan” pizzas, where each person gets their own pizza to create and eat.

add some jalepenos…

and some onions and chorizo…

Some of our favorite toppings are the ones we pick fresh from the garden. Tomatoes, basil, bell peppers, mushrooms, onions, and jalepenos all make great pizza toppings. Add some sausage, or chorizo, and some garlic olive oil, and your in for a fun night.

add some olive oil, cheese, and salt and pepper to taste, than bake until golden brown at 375

We use thick slices of homegrown cherokee purple tomatoes instead of tomato sauce, and a light sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. A little salt, and a drizzle of oil really brings it all together, and makes it all but impossible for any leftovers to survive.

yum!

Garden pizza! A delicious way to save some some money and get a full helping of nutrient dense veggies form the garden! No, the chickens won’t be eating any of this pizza!

Trellising Cucumbers in the Garden

July 24, 2014 / jason / 2 Comments

Our garden is in full production right now, potatoes, tomatoes, and jalapenos are coming in, while the sweet potatoes, oca, and greenbeans are thriving. But one of our most exciting crops this year has been the cucumber. This year we planted three different varieties of cucumbers, Arkansas Little Leaf, Suyo Long, and White Wonder, and they are all doing great in our raised beds on trellises.

Growing cucumbers on trellises, or tomato cages, is an efficient and attractive way to garden.

We grow cucumbers on trellises for a few reasons. First, cucumbers are vining plants that love to sprawl and wrap their tendrils around anything they can reach. If left to wander the ground, they take up a lot of space, but by training them vertically, up a trellis, they take up less of a footprint in the garden.

We plant 4 or 5 seeds in a circular depression about 18 inches in diameter. This depression catches rain and irrigation, ensuring that our cukes are always deeply watered. We use the same technique that we use for tomatoes, a cage made of woven wire fencing staked into the ground. We then train the young cucumber plants up onto the cage where they twine and vine their way to the top.

This has a few distinct advantages in addition to being able to fit more plants in less space. By keeping the plants off of the ground, airflow around the leaves is improved and the mildews and diseases that often plaque cucumbers are kept at bay.

These Arkansas Little Leaf cucumbers have a tendency to stay low and spiral on the trellis, whereas the Suyo Longs grow straight up.

Training the vines upwards also leaves room around the base of the cages to plant herbs, flowers or other vegetables. These interplantings can act as companions to the cucumbers and help to confuse pests. We have sweet potatoes, clover, basil and sage growing under our cucumbers.

By growing cucumbers upwards, on a trellis, we can achieve higher yields, with less pests and diseases, and even grow other crops at their feet. So, next time you’re planting some cucumbers, consider growing them vertically, up a trellis or tomato cage, and make you’re garden more efficient and productive.

First Potato Harvest Taste Test of 2014

July 15, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

The other day we harvested the first of our 2014 potato crop. We planted 9 different types of seed potatoes, and we figured it was time to check on 2 of our early varieties, Cobbler and Early Ohio. The vines still had some life to them, but we decided to check on their progress anyway and dug up 1 plant of each. We jumped the gun a bit, but between the 2 plants, there was enough for a nice side dish of boiled new potatoes.

Early Ohio potatoes on the left, and Cobbler on the right.

The Cobblers were noticeably larger, and the plants had just begun to die back, whereas the Early Ohio’s were tiny, and they were many more pea sized potatoes that were still in the process of growing. We harvested some of the bigger tubers from each plant, and then replanted and watered in the rest to give the tiny tubers some more time. All told, we got 3/16 of a pound of Early Ohio, and 5/8 of a pound of Cobblers.

After a quick rinse and scrub, we cut the cobblers into pieces about the size of the tiny Early Ohio potatoes, and boiled them in salty water. Fresh potatoes cook much quicker than store bought ones and in almost no time we began our first of many potato taste trials. The two early white potatoes were similar in flavor and texture but still different. I enjoyed the sharpness of the Early Ohio, while Emma enjoyed the more potatoey flavor of the cobbler which is better suited to boiling and steaming.

Because these early potatoes still needed more time, I fertilized all of the potatoes today with a mix of bone meal, alfalfa meal, and greensand. I for one can’t wait until we have all 9 varieties harvested, and can review and compare them all at the same time!

outcome of the rain dance post!

June 20, 2014 / our ochre way / 2 Comments

today we saw different weather than we’ve seen for the past few days!

yesterday, jason posted about wishing for rain. he hoped that by posting about it, perhaps it would work as a rain dance and we would finally get some precipitation.

watch the video below to find out if his “rain dance” actually worked…

.:.

Sweet Potato Slips: The Start of Something Great

June 10, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

Last year’s sweet potato crop was a great one. We are still eating them to this day, and have a few dozen more to go through. This will probably coincide nicely with the first round of early potatoes from the garden, which is exciting because that means we have not had to buy any sort of potato or root tuber since we harvested our potatoes last September, and our sweet potatoes last November. This is definitely one area where even a small homestead can achieve self sufficiency.

jason, placing freshly dug sweet potatoes in a box

Some of last years harvest

In that regard, I tend to favor sweet potatoes as a self reliance crop. They store better, are healthier, are more adapted to our humid summers, are more tolerant of drought and pests, and they are easier to propagate. To start a new crop of sweet potatoes, you must produce slips, small green shoots that sprout from the tubers. These shoots are then pinched, cut, or slipped off and transplanted into the garden. 1 small tuber can produce over 1 dozen slips, and will do so readily in many conditions. Compare this to Irish potatoes, where you plant seed potatoes. These are small potatoes, or chunks of larger potatoes with at least 1 eye. These must be stored from last year’s harvest, and we have found it much easier to store sweet potatoes, which seem to only get better with age, than Irish potatoes, which want to shrivel up and grow numerous long, creepy, eyes.

a tire makes a nice place to start some sweet potato slips

Last year, Emma’s father got some sweet potatoes from a local farmer, and started the slips for us. This year, we tried a few different methods on our own and are now overrun with sweet potato slips ready to be transplanted. Some of our slips were started from tubers planted horizontally in tires filled with garden soil. The black tires absorb the heat from the sun, and stimulate slip production and growth. These slips are nice because they are already partially hardened off to the outside world, and are growing roots from the parts of the shoots that are under soil.

The shoots growing out of the tubers are the the slips.

We also started some slips in mason jars. We picked small tubers for these and jammed them together in the jars making sure that about half of the tubers were over the top of the jar. A few toothpicks helps to keep everything in place. We then filled the jars with water and placed them in a sunny window. By keeping the jars inside, the temperature never got too cold and was often in the 70-80 degree range that triggers slip production. Slips began to form in about a week, and when they were 5-8 inches long, we separated them from the tuber by pinching, nipping, or cutting it off at the base, and then put them in water to produce roots.

Store the slips in water before transplanting so that they start to grow roots.

These slips, along with some given to us by Emma’s dad, will be transplanted soon. Some will go into the new hugelkulture woody beds we are in the process of making, some will go into other beds in the garden, and I want to experiment with some as a ground cover around the fruit trees in our new food forest. I know that this is often done in the tropics and sub-tropics where sweet potatoes are perennial, so I don’t think its too far of a stretch to try it in our temperate climate as an annual herbaceous support species. Either way, we hope that this year’s will match last year’s sweet potato harvest, and we look forward to dining on sweet potato ginger soup, sweet potato fries and hashbrowns, as well as roasting and adding them to hearty stews. Mmmm….

Wood Wool and the Magic of Mulch

May 20, 2014 / jason / 2 Comments

I love mulch. It makes me smile when I see a bed or fruit tree covered with a thick layer of mulch. Mulch hold in soil moisture and reduces irrigation needs, protects soil microorganisms from temperature extremes, blocks weeds, and slowly adds organic matter by breaking down and feeding the worms.

We mulch with leaves, sticks, paper plates, coffee grounds, palm fronds, and any other organic material we can find. But recently, we scavenged a bunch of wood wool, or excelsior, and this wood byproduct makes awesome mulch.

It’s basically shredded aspen wood used as packing material, and it’s some of the best mulch we have ever used. It looks good, stays in place, and is easily applied around vegetable plants. We’re in the process of putting it on all of our raised garden beds, and if there is any left over, we may put some around our fruit trees also. I love mulch.

meet the homestead’s happy seedlings!

May 7, 2014 / Emma / Comments Off

i recently wrote about all of the plants we started from seeds in pans and trays. i wanted to provide an update about how some of these guys are doing and show you what some of our plants look like in their infancy:

the four lettuce varieties that we chose this year: speckled bibb, anuenue, bronze arrow, and sweet valentine.

baby sage plants!

“thyme” for growing!

three delicious treats: jupiter red bell peppers, golden california yellow peppers, and tomatillos.

our spicy pepper tray: jalapeno, cayenne, and aji.

thriving paste tomatoes: black plum and san marzano. anyone ready for homemade tomato sauce?

black cherry tomatoes (right) and watercress (left). watercress is so cool… it can be grown in running water, i.e. a stream!

and the star of this season’s seeds… erlene’s green cotton plants.

i’m not really sure yet what i’ll do with the cotton once/if the plants are fruitful but i am so excited to have green cotton! wow!

the lettuce and the cotton need to be transplanted into the ground soon, while the tomatoes and peppers will be transplanted into larger and deeper pans so they can grow a little tougher and larger before we put them in the ground.

and the other seedlings needs a little more time to grow in their current locations before they graduate up the “food chain.” just thinking about it is making me hungry!

.:.

Unique and Rare Potato Varieties for 2014

May 6, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

The seed potatoes that we were waiting on arrived the other day, and within 48 hours we had them in the garden. In total, we planted 9 varieties and we’ll buy 1 more type at the supply store soon to make 10.

We tried to keep the number of plants relatively even, so that we can compare yields among varieties, in addition to flavor, store-ability, and disease resistance. We did this by cutting larger seed potato pieces into smaller pieces, but making sure that each piece still had at least 1 nice eye to grow from. Seed pieces the size of an egg, a chicken egg that is, we planted whole. We ended up planting 176 seed potato pieces, which in a perfect word would make 176 plants. We’ll see….

Seed Potatoes ready to be planted in the garden.

Most of the varieties we planted are either rare heirloom potato varieties, or delicious gourmet varieties. Here’s a brief rundown on what went in the ground.

Of the early potatoes, we planted Early Ohio, an heirloom from Vermont grown since 1871 with a nutty flavor, and Cobbler, another heirloom from the 1800’s that is said to have been discovered by an Irish shoe maker.

We planted a few mid-season varieties, including Carola, a German potato with a creamy yellow flesh, Kennebec, a popular and high yielding variety grown all over the country, and Purple Majesty, a beautiful purple skinned and fleshed variety high in anthocyanins, an antioxidant found in blueberries, currants, and aronia.

Purple Majesty seed potatoes. Check out that color!

The late season varieties were Bintje, a Dutch potato from 1910, German Butterball, a delicious yellow fleshed gourmet type, Katahdin, a high yielding and long keeping variety from 1932, and Red Pontiac, the red potato we grew last year that knocked our socks off and made us potato snobs.

We also planted a fingerling variety named Ozette. This potato has the best backstory of all the potatoes we planted this year. The Ozette potato, unlike every other potato grown in the US came directly from South America by Spanish Explorers in 1791. They brought it with them form the Andes, and it was planted in a small garden outside of a fort in the Pacific Northwest. When the Spaniards abandoned the fort, the Native Makah people found the Ozette Fingerling potato, and have planted, and relied on it as part of their diet every year since.

Ozette seed potatoes. This Andean heirloom has a story behind it that matches it’s amazing flavor.

All other potatoes were first taken to Europe, where the Irish, Prussians, and the rest of the Continent developed new varieties, and then brought these varieties to North America when they immigrated centuries later. The Ozette potato is said to be one of the tastiest potatoes around, and having tasted more than a few Peruvian potatoes myself, I can’t wait.

Ready and Waiting for Potatoes

April 16, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

Spring has arrived and many of our garden crops are either in the ground, or started in trays awaiting their turn in our raised beds. Many, but not all. We are a little behind on one cool weather crop, and it’s one of our favorites… the potato.

Last year’s potato crop, harvested the day Jason proposed to Emma.

This year we are planting at least 9 different potato varieties in our garden, about 2.5 pounds of seed potatoes for each. The reason we haven’t planted them yet, is that we haven’t received them. Because we are planting such a diversity, and many of the types are rare or heritage and heirloom varieties of potatoes, we ordered from an online supplier. They should come any week now, and we can’t wait to get them in the ground.

Last year, we did very well growing red Pontiac potatoes, which lasted well into winter and were delicious baked with sausages, peppers, and onions. This year I’m excited to try out the Ozette fingerling, a variety that ended up in the U.S. hundreds of years ago after a ship washed ashore on the way back from Peru, the birthplace of the potato.

Last year’s lush potato vines, in the height of summer.

Potatoes grow best in cool weather, and because they are in the nightshade family, you should take care not to plant them where you grew tomatoes, peppers, or eggplants the year before. We are actually digging a whole new series of hugel beds this spring to house our potatoes. Sepp Holzer often plants his new hugelkulture mounds with potatoes as they are light nitrogen feeders, and give the wood core some time to begin the decomposition process.

After our seed potatoes arrive, we’ll try and get them going as soon as we can, because once you’ve experienced homegrown potatoes, it changes you. It turns you into a potato snob, and makes it impossible to eat store bought potatoes ever again!

Using Chickens to Make Sauerkraut

April 1, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

We moved our chickens to new paddock this weekend, which is in line with our goal of rotating them every 2 weeks to fresh pasture. Because the early spring growth wasn’t very lush, they scratched it up pretty well and left behind a nice 16 ft. by 32 ft. plot of weeded, tilled, and finely mulched earth that was begging to be planted. Who are we to turn down such an offer?

partly planted flat of cabbage and broccoli seedlings.

A few weeks ago I started some broccoli and cabbage seeds in a flat of potting mix. They germinated well and after many nights of ferrying them in and out, protecting them from freezing temperatures and dodger’s butt, a good many have survived and aren’t too spindly. I planted these in long rows, about 12 in. apart in the freshly prepared soil.

Following the chickens with vegetables crops makes good use of the fertility the chickens left behind, both the nitrogen rich manure, and because we feed rock minerals every week, a healthy dose of plant ready minerals ready to rejuvenate the land. The chickens also weed and scratch out most of the grass and weeds that would compete with the crops, and also do a great job of breaking pest cycles that could reduce yields.

It’s also important to fill this new space with something, whether it’s cover crop, trees, grass, mulch or veggies, before some of the nastier weeds come in and take hold. This makes following chicken tractors, or any livestock, with productive species a great multi-functional farm strategy.

permaculture vegetable gardening chicken tractor

transplanting seedlings after running chickens is a quick and easy way to stack functions and obtain a yield

All this should help increase our chances of a nice cabbage crop, and the best part of a nice cabbage crop is sauerkraut. Lacto-fermented sauerkraut actually, but we’ll talk about that later. For now, that’s a quick run down on how our chickens will help us make sauerkraut!

KW Homestead

Pasture Raised Poultry & Edible Landscaping Plants Since 2013