GREENHOUSES!

 

I was so excited to score these little, three-shelve greenhouses on clearance from Big Lots at the end of spring last year. They have been sitting in my garage waiting for when I needed them. This winter has been so mild, they were unnecessary. Until now!

I got my spring seed order in the mail from Baker Creek yesterday, and I am ready to get some seeds started. It is supposed to freeze here this weekend, (if it happens, it will be our first freeze of the season) so my seed starts are going to need some protection. Time to dig out those greenhouses!

They were super easy to put together. No tools required! They wouldn’t be sturdy or warm enough for someone with serious winter weather, but they will do very well for those of us in the lower Southeast. Now I got to get to planting some seeds!

We Skipped Winter and are well into Spring

Well, we seemed to have skipped winter entirely here in Florida. I no sooner got my Fall/Winter crops planted before I realized that I need to start thinking about spring planting! My bok choy, daikon radishes, collard greens, mustards, and lettuces are all doing really well, though some have already begun to bolt! Our cold season was so mild, that my tomatoes from last summer all set new fruit and I have been eating garden fresh tomatoes in my salads all winter long. I can’t complain about the bountiful winter harvests, but I know it also means that this summer will be an unbearable mosquito (and other garden pests) season.

I’ve been canning up a storm here because our Meyer Lemon tree just exploded with fruit this year. Our little tree probably had over 100 softball sized lemons on it! We had to bungee cord it together to keep it from breaking under the weight of all that fruit. I canned dozens of half pints of delicious Meyer lemon marmalade, and also made some absolutely decadent lemon curd. It tastes like candied sunshine!

I’ve also been working furiously on a spreadsheet of my seed catalog and a method of organizing them. I think I am finally on to a winning method. I’ll write more about that soon.

And lastly, I am reading a great book about the grassroots food movement called, Reclaiming Our Food by Tanya Denckla Cobb. I heard about this book on Twitter and am so glad that I picked it up. It is so inspirational! If you have ever wondered how you could get involved in community-based or local food, this is the book for you. Seriously, pick it up for no other reason that to get inspired about your own neighborhood.

I’ll be updating again soon as I get my seedlings started. I have two small greenhouses I will be constructing this week to get the seeds started. I am so looking forward to this year in the garden, and I hope you are too.

Meads and Melomels

For the past year or so, I have been experimenting with fermentation. I've made my own beer, cider, fermented pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchi. So far everything has been a success, so why not try something new?

I recently discovered an apiary near my home (Biggers Apiaries). I purchased a gallon of Orannge Blossom honey with the vague notion of making mead with it. I attended a class on making medicinal meads at the Organic Growers School Annual Conference this year, so I pulled out my notes for review and watched a couple of mead-making videos on YouTube. (Allow me to recommend the videos of "Craigtube" and "EpicFantasy".) It looked almost too easy. I couldn't wait to get started.

Since I've made my own beer and ciders, I had all of the equipment that I needed. I was going to make gallon batches, so I needed gallon carboys, stoppers, airlocks, a large stock pot, 4 cup measuring container, cooking thermometer, and a funnel. I filled the kitchen sink with hot water and Star-San sanitizing solution. I sanitised all of the equipment while 6 quarts of water heated in the stock pot on the stove. (Bleach can be used to sanitize the equipment, but be sure to rinse everything VERY well.)

The basic formula for mead is 3 parts water and one part honey + (wine) yeast. I decided to make 2 gallons of regular mead, and 2 gallons of berry melomel (fruit meads are called melomels). So I heated 6 quarts of water and 2 quarts of local orange blossom honey in the stock pot. Heat the water and honey to 150 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes, stirring periodically. This will pasteurize the honey. After 30 minutes I poured the must (the water and honey before fermentation) into two carboys. The must is too hot to pitch the yeast at this point, so I kept the bottles in a cold water bath in the sink to bring down the temperature. I also took a potential alcohol measurement with a hydrometer. The reading came to 13%. So if all goes well during fermentation, the mead should have an abv of 13%.

While I waited for the must to cool, it was time to make the second batch. Again, I heated 6 quarts of water and 2 quarts of honey to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. After the must had been at 150 degrees for 15 minutes, I added one cup of dried, organic elderberries and two cups of previously frozen blueberries. As the must cooked for another 15 minutes, the whole kitchen started to smell like blueberry cobbler.

As with the mead, I funnelled the melomel must into two 1 gallon carboys and set the carboys in a cold water bath to cool. The cooling process took a long time, and next time I believe I will only cook half the water with the honey and add the other half as cold, bottled, spring water to cool the must immediately. I took a hydrometer reading of the melomel must, and got a potential alcohol reading of 12%.

Once the musts were cooled to less than body temperature (I waited until mine was at 80 degrees Fahrenheit) they were ready for the yeast. I used Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast. One package of this yeast is good for 5 gallons, so I mixed the yeast with one cup of warm water, and poured 1/4 a cup of the yeast mixture to each carboy. I also added a handful of raisins to each carboy to act as a yeast nutrient. I capped the carboys and gave them all a good shake to make sure everything was well mixed. Then I replaced the caps with drilled (#6) rubber and (homemade) cork stoppers and airlocks.

Twelve hours later, the carboys are bubbling and the airlocks are gurgling.

 I plan to allow the musts to sit in these carboys for a month.  Then I will siphon them off of their lees (dead yeast and fruit) and into new, sterilized carboys to sit for another month or two. At this point, I may decide to add a little additional honey, spices, or fruit to the musts. After the secondary fermentation is done, the meads will be ready to bottle, where they should sit for another four months (minimum). Meads age very well, and the rule of thumb is that a mead made in Spring will be ready for Christmas.

This is a super easy and quick way to enjoy mead all year long. As long as you have honey, water, and yeast, you can make a delicious honey wine. Skal!

Cider Started

I decided that it was better late than never to start my first batch of hard cider. Living in the deep south, we do not have the luxury of vast apple orchards from which to press delicious and unique ciders. So I made do with Motts Natural Apple Cider, which has no preservatives or added vitamin C. It wasn’t easy to find a bottled juice that was simply “apple juice.” (Martinelli’s is another brand that makes a “nothing added” apple cider.)

I made my recipe up after reading a couple of books on the subject:

• 2 64oz bottles of apple juice
• 1 cup of granulated sugar
• 2/3 cup of sorghum molasses
• 1 tsp of acid complex powder (you can get this from most brew shops)
• 1/4 tsp of dried tannin powder (also available at brew shops)
• 1/2 a packet of Red Star Champagne yeast
• 1/4 cup of dried elderberries.

I poured the juice, sugar, molasses, acid powder, tannin powder, and elderberries into a one gallon glass carboy. Then I mixed the dried yeast in 1/2 cup of warmed apple juice to wake the buggers up. Once the yeast was bubbly, I poured half of it into the carboy.

Then I gave it all a good shake, installed the stopper and the blow-off tube, and set it in a cool, dry, dark place.

I’ll keep the blow-off tube in place for a couple of days to make sure I don’t have an over-flow. After that, I’ll install a simple airlock. The cider will ferment in the carboy for a month or so. After that I will siphon it off into primed bottles and it will complete a second fermentation in the bottle for another month or so.

Fingers crossed that it’s not too warm in the season to get a good hard cider out of this.

Garden Bed planted March 1st

It’s felt like the last 30 or 40 days have sped by in fast forward motion. Spring sprung and hightailed it toward summer before I even had all of my seeds started. I’m not sure what this unusually warm and dry weather will mean for my garden in the high summer months of July and August, but for right now it means I have had to speed up my efforts to get the garden growing.

In late February Max built me a raised bed and I dug it out, weeded, and laid some cardboard down to inhibit weed growth.

Then I filled the bed with tons of composted cow manure.

On top of the cow manure I added some locally-sourced, composted horse manure. The horse manure helps to keep the soil moist in addition to adding some great fertilizer to the mix.

Once that was all complete, I was ready to plant my most advanced seedlings. From the top of the above picture to the bottom, I planted rows of Cherokee Purple tomatoes, Dragon Tongue beans, Shallots, Sweet Yellow Onions, Purple Tomatillos, and Green Cowhorn and Burgundy Okra.

These seedlings took off immediately upon being planted in the bed. I had blossoms on my dragon tongue beans only days after getting them in the raised bed.

This first bed took off so well, we’ve decided that we need a second one to build for more beans, peppers, eggplant, etc. I’ll have a post up soon about the next bed.

Worms Will Be Eating My Garbage

I checked "Worms Eat My Garbage" by Mary Appelhof out of the library so that I could prepare for starting my own worm farm. I am expanding my gardens this year, and with Florida's sandy soil, I need to find ways to supplement it. I've read that vermicomposting is a great way to produce nutrition for a garden, and that Mary Appelhof is the #1 expert on the subject.

This book could definitely use an update. It was written in 1982, before worm farms were commercially produced, before the internet, and at the start of interest in the US in recycling. I would love to see the resources section updated for the present times, and I would like to know Ms. Appelhof's opinions on the new commercially produced worm bins.

That being said, I still learned a lot from this little book. Appelhof's information on worm ecology, biology, and care is detailed and easy to understand. Her section on the other critters that are likely to live in your worm bin was also very informative.

Thanks to "Worms Eat My Garbage" I feel fully prepared for the arrival of my Worm Factory 360 and my 1800 Red Wigglers.

Grow It Forward

I just won free heirloom seeds from Baker Creek Seed Company in the Your Garden Show "Grow It Forward" contest. I can't wait to get my seeds and find out what else will be going in my garden!