Quote of the Day: Toby Hemenway
“Of course, we want to live in an attractive landscape. But if we can go beyond what plants look like, and examine what they are doing, we can begin to create gardens that have the health, resilience, and beauty of natural ecosystems while yielding abundant gifts for people and for other species.”
-Toby Hemnway Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition
Earlier this week I mentioned planting nitrogen fixing plants in the ornamental gardens for the benefits they bring to the other plants. There’s also a group of plants called dynamic accumulators that bring up lots of nutrients from deep within the soil. Whenever I plant a garden bet I try to add a few of these to my garden, comfrey is my favorite.
Comfrey is not only a wonderfully beneficial plant for the garden, it’s also beautiful as well. The bees LOVE it. It just so happens that many of my comfrey plants came from my grandmother’s house. They were passed on to my mom who passed them along to me. I use comfrey leaves for lots of things, not only do I use them as mulch around plants, I also put a few in the planting holes of anything I add to the garden. They are supposed to help the plants by feeding them and by stimulating root growth. I also dry comfrey to feed the chickens all winter. Comfrey is also nice because it’s easy propagate so you can have it growing all over the garden easily and inexpensively.
There are all kinds of dynamic accumulators, in fact many of the plants we call weeds are in this group. If you are interested in learning about this kind of companion plants I highly recommend the book quoted above. I checked this book out of the library so many times I finally purchased one for my library.
What’s your favorite companion planting group?
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Feeling Right at Home
“Littles” as she’s being referred to is starting to feel right at home. There’s still some occasional hissing, but overall it’s been a smooth transition.
Having a new pet in the house reminds us how much work we put in training our current pets. It’s also been a long time since we’ve had a young cat in the house. She’s tearing around getting into everything.
Next week she’ll go outside and we’ll see what happens. It’s always a gamble when you let a new cat outside.
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Friday Favorite: Patriotic Holidays
For some reason I really love a patriotic holiday, not sure why, it’s just something I’ve always loved. Perhaps it’s because I like see flags so much. I hope if you are here in the US you enjoy a nice celebration whatever that means for you. Mr Chiots is off cooking chicken for the fire department barbecue.
We’ll have good food with good friends and we might even see a few fireworks. Truly the perfect way to celebrate!
What’s your favorite way to celebrate summer holidays?
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In My Harvest Bowl
This time of year it’s really nice to head out to the garden instead of the grocery store. Since we have a freezer full of pork and venison, I don’t even need to go for meat. One of our meals is stir fry. It’s easily adaptable to whatever vegetables you have on hand and can be made vegetarian or with any kind of meat. In the winter we enjoy stir fries with carrots, parsnips, onions and mushrooms. In summer it’s filled with squash, cabbage, peas and broccoli. My basic recipe has a ginger sauce and can be found over on Eat Outside the Bag.
This week some of my broccoli was ready to harvest as are my golden peas. Garlic scales are coming on by what seems to be the hundreds as well. The onions in the garden are bulbing up enough to start using them as well. I also had an orange in the pantry so I added orange zest and orange juice to the stir fry sauce – a delicious addition that I might put in the recipe. It’s certainly not a bad way to eat vegetables from the garden!
What’s your favorite adaptable meal to use your garden or CSA produce?
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More Nuggets
Exactly eight weeks to the day, broody hen hatched out another batch of nuggets. This time there were four that she hatched and two pipped eggs remained in the nest. I put them under a damp towel and a heat lamp inside and one little one hatched out. I snuck it under broody hen that night and the next morning it was running around with the rest of them.
If we’re lucky she’ll hatch out one more batch before the cold weather starts to hit. We’ll keep the hens for our laying flock and one rooster, the remaining roosters will become meat birds. This is a good reason to have dual purpose breeds, then the extra roosters make find roasting birds. At the moment we’re thinking in her previous brood there are three roosters and two hens and they’re Wyandottes so they should make a meaty roasting bird.
There’s also another broody hen sitting on a nest of eggs we got from a friend. We’re hoping she hatches out a good number to add some new varieties of chickens and fresh genes to our flock. I checked yesterday and she had three pipped eggs. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that she’s as good a mama as the original broody hen is.
Any new life in your garden?
