Farmer's breakfast

First it was strawberries and lettuces, now it's sugar snap peas, cucumbers, and the first eggplant and baby broccoli crowns.

"Sugar snap peas for breakfast?" you ask. Sure! And cucumbers too, although we juice them with a few apples and carrots for a refreshing healthy breakfast juice.

And of course, a bunch of eggs we collected yesterday.

With sauteed chives, garlic and baby broccoli. Mmmm. This is the richness of the gardener's breakfast. Of course, it also matters what we didn't eat.

Do you see the two little cracks on each of the eggs? We can't wait to meet our newest feathered family members. To me independence is all about having having secure, safe and sustainable food and energy (here's looking at almost 14 megawatt-hours of solar energy generated). Happy Independence Day!

Strawberry Fountains Forever

Yesterday was planting day. Our shipment of fruit plants arrived on Thursday and we had to get them in the ground as soon as possible. I ordered 75 strawberry plants to begin my strawberry fountain, which I hadn't yet constructed. I planned to build it from 2" x 12" non-treated boards that were 12' long. With the outer box measuring 6' and the inner box measuring 3', there would be no waste. The idea behind the fountain is that you can better reach the berries to pick them, raise them up so they have warmer soil temperatures and separate them from other crops so you can give them nutrients separately.

Building it was a cinch and all of my corners squared up perfectly except for one where the wood was warped into a minor "C" shape. Kevin purchased a new Makita drill and driver for me and I love it! Not having to change out the drill bit and driver all the time made the job go really quickly. We decided to fill the bottom half of each level with 6" of composted wood chips and chicken manure. The compost was filled with worms and would be a nice layer of nutrients for the greedy strawberry plants when their roots grew through the topsoil. They should also help to hold some moisture in and break up the clay soil for better drainage. If we have another frost, I can sprinkle a blanket of straw on them for the night. Once the plants are larger, I will keep the straw bed on permanently to reduce weed growth and let the decomposing hay add nutrients to the soil.

The three types of strawberries we are growing are early glow, sparkle, and sure crop. Fortunately, while we wait for these to grow and blossom and produce their first crop (most likely next summer), we can still pick strawberries at our local apple orchard to make strawberry jam for the year.

Preparing the raised beds were a family affair! Savannah got her shovel and bucket to play in the soil and William fancied himself a backhoe, digging and pushing soil around. Perhaps he'll own his own landscaping company one day since he adores mulch, soil, and sand. Of course, now the hard part is going to be keeping him out of the strawberry fountain now that all 75 plants have been rooted there. I must begin building the kids' playset and sandbox so they have a safe place to play but I haven't even purchased lumber for it yet!

Poor Kevin, his job was to plant the new raspberry canes, of which I believed I had ordered 4. Turns out, I ordered 3 each of 4 types, 12 total! He had been working hard to prepare a small row for them by hand, which is very hard work considering how thick our rocky clay soil is and he nearly passed out when I told him about the mix up. Fortunately, his dad has lent us his tiller this year which is so heavy duty it does a decent job on our soil.

All in all a good day on the farm - 75 strawberry plants in, 12 raspberry canes in, 4 blackberry canes in and 1 additional blueberry bush. I also planted two peony clusters from my neighbor who thinned her beds and am really looking forward their lovely blossoms.

Garden planning

Just as the trees store their resources for the winter and enter their quiet dream state, so the gardener spends the winter dreaming. There may be white snow outside, but the gardener sees the loamy black devil's food cake baking away in the compost heap, preparing to nourish another year's worth of crops. I turned the compost pile yesterday and more than a dozen worms wriggled out of my first pitchfork full.

This year we are expanding our blackberry and raspberry patches and adding one more blueberry bush. We plan to add a strawberry fountain, which I am most looking forward to, even if the plants don't bear fruit until next year. Strawberries are somewhat finicky and can be nutrient hogs. By building them into a raised bed shaped like a fountain, they can receive the best soil, more sunlight and warmth and it's easier to pick them. I'm not yet sure if mine will be square or round, but I'm looking forward to building it and planting the 50 strawberry plants that will arrive sometime this spring. I often order my fruits from the local nursery, Miller Nurseries. I like ordering from a local company that grows and rates all of their plants for my area. It can be cold in NY state and I appreciate that they've already done the testing for me. They send out the plants you order right after your area's last freeze date, so they always arrive right on time, even if that's a different week or month each year.

I plan to test out the three sisters planting method that so many native peoples have used. The three sisters are corn, squash and beans. The idea is that the beans use the fast growing corn stalks as support and scaffolding to climb, while the squash quickly fills in the shaded underside, preventing many weeds from growing up. All three seeds are sown directly into the soil.

One of my favorite places to order seeds from is the Seed Savers Exchange. This organization saves and shares heirloom seeds, meaning these seeds will grow into plants that bear seeds so you can forever propagate your crops by saving the seeds they yield. This makes the gardener part of a long legacy as well as independent. Plus, it's exciting to plant seeds for crops you could never find in a grocery store. Last year we had heirloom organic black beauty zucchini, early fortune cucumbers and beautifully striped Amish melons with pale flesh. This year we are planting many new heirloom varieties. I'm especially looking forward to the yellow tomatoes that look like lightbulbs and the white and purple and white striped eggplants.

Eventually, we plan to grow some of the feed for our chickens. As was recently pointed out to us, even if you have chickens or other livestock, you're not a step closer to sustainability if you're not growing your own feed. I'm not sure how this fact escaped us before but now we can plan a feed garden for 2011.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day this week:

"You will never plough a field if you only turn it over in your mind."
- Irish Proverb

Solar energy

I love our photovoltaic system! We don't have to lift a finger and everyday it generates clean energy that it feeds back to the grid. We just hit the 2 megawatt mark, which is very exciting considering it has been active for only four months and missed the sunny spring and summer months. Having produced 2 megawatt-hours of energy is the equivalent of planting 15 mature trees and not driving 1,609 miles in a standard car.

Without the summer and spring we are just breaking even with our system so I'm hoping that a full year of PV will put us slightly ahead.

Solar laundry

Our photovoltaic system has been up and running for just over two weeks now. It's working very well and it's fun to read amount of energy in kilowatts we've generated each day, usually about 36 kW. The system also tells us (for fun!) how many pounds of carbon dioxide we've saved.

Now that we check the amount of energy we're producing every day, we think more about the energy we are spending everyday. So, finally, Kevin installed the clothesline he purchased many months ago. Really, its installation was a joint venture with everyone pitching in something - digging holes, mixing cement, stringing the line, etc.

My helper

According to DOE EIA statistics, 5.8% of a household's electric use goes towards dryer use. I'm not sure what percentage of our electric bill goes towards that since we have an energy efficient dryer and a washing machine that gets rid of more water during the spin cycle than non-front loaders. Anyway, hanging laundry is fun and it's one more chore that gets us outside.

One cute baby sock blows in the wind like a Tibetan prayer flag.

This interesting website (Project Laundry List) claims that if every American line dried their clothing, it would be enough to close several power plants. Imagine that! We are looking forward to the energy savings so our solar system will make a bigger impact.

Wood in

Last winter we had an energy efficient soapstone woodstove installed. It provides wonderful warmth and heat to two floors of our house. Instead of ordering wood this year, Kevin has been bringing it in himself every weekend in the woods behind our house. He goes out with his chainsaw and removes the dead hardwoods that fell in the ice storm, hauls them back behind the barn and chops them into woodstove-size logs. He also removes the pines and anything else that has fallen on the hiking and snowshoeing trails behind our house.

Today I went into the barn to see the progress. Here are two rows 16-18 feet long stacked 7-8 feet high.


And another short row.

And behind the barn two more enormous stacks of wood.

Someone has been very busy this season preparing for winter. Last winter we thought the weather was fine but everyone told us it was a long hard winter for the area. I think we'll be more than prepared for the upcoming winter and I'm looking forward to the family snuggles we'll share while keeping cozy and warm in front of the woodstove as the snow falls.


The girls love to keep Kevin company when he's chopping wood. The bark falls off and the girls go crazy for the bugs beneath. Long after he's stopped chopping, they continue to eat the buggies.

Nature's Bounty

We've been enjoying our first real yields from the garden. Must be the sunshine! When I finally got out to pick zucchini for the first time, they were nearly the size of baby William. We've been grating them into baked goods and fritters with grated onion and potato, sauteing them and slicing them into lasagnas and ratatouilles, etc. The zucchini are Black Beauty heirlooms.


The cucumbers are also delicious! We pick them and take a bite right out of them. They are Early Fortune heirlooms. In between salads, I've been slicing some up and placing them in a container in the fridge overnight with some vinegar and sugar for a little treat in the heat.


The squash, pumpkins and two varieties of melons are all doing well. So are the sweet peas but we eat them all right out of the garden so they never even make it up to the house.



Our blueberries have been slow and steady but we are enjoying them now for breakfasts on the weekends or for a quick "whenever" snack. Yum!

Strawberry fields

We try to eat as much as possible the fruits and vegetables that are in season in our local area. The first berry harvest to take advantage of is strawberries. We picked over 25 pounds of them this year, making one batch (8 cups) of low sugar jam, which wasn't nearly enough.


The idea was to make all of our own jams for the year and since my husband claimed to not like strawberry jam, I only made one batch. Turns out, we all love it! It's brighter in color and tastes very fresh like a cross between regular jam and the fresh fruit itself. We hope to do the same with blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.

Solar installation complete

We are now officially a solar farm (with the exception that the paperwork hasn't yet caught up to the work so the power we are generating now isn't being collected--ahh! bureaucracy getting in the way of "free" green energy!).


Here they are installing the panels. Even on a day this foggy, the test run showed it was collecting 4.9kW of energy on our 5.2kW system, pretty good!


I think the solar panels standing in a row of three arrays and turned up to the sun like sunflowers are beautiful, our own modern art sculptures. We plan to seed the area beneath with grass to keep the wild tall grasses and saplings from putting down root there.

The best part about this project? I haven't had to lift a finger, which is great because most days I haven't been well enough to do so. Instead I get to spend my time:

collecting laughs on my camera,

and first practices at tummy time,

and homeschooling this beautiful, smart, and rascally big sister.