Suburban Growing

Spring is about to spring, but it ain’t here yet. This is still the season for winter vegetables, and even those are hard to get if you’re eating local grown…

This is a recipe for cauliflower pizza that I discovered and we really enjoyed this winter. While you start your seeds and nurture them through the remaining cold weeks and months, stir up a little evening pizza. This is grain-free, dairy-free if you use vegan cheese, and delicious. Possibly better with a tiny bit of gluten-free flour to thicken things up. Bon appetit fellow gardeners! Here’s to lengthening days. ♥️

Recipe swiped from “Oatmeal With a Fork”

Dairy-Free Cauliflower Pizza Crust

My Note: this is very heavy egg content- also very wet – maybe better if 1Tbsp gf flour were used, and less egg??

Ingredients

8 ounces chopped cauliflower florets about 1 tightly packed cup of ‘riced’ cauliflower

½ cup water

1 large egg

⅛ tsp sea salt

½ tsp Italian seasoning

Instructions

*Make your cauliflower rice: grate the pieces using a cheese grater or pulse florets in a food processor until finely chopped.

*In a small saucepan, bring the water to a boil.

Add the cauliflower rice to the pan.

     Turn the heat off (leave the pan on the burner), and cover the pan.

      Let the pan sit covered for 10 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

*Remove the lid from the ‘rice’, and dump into a clean dish towel. Squeeze the excess water out (there will be quite a bit!).

In a bowl, mix the egg and seasonings & add in the cauliflower. Mix well.

Pour onto a parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

Spoon & spread the mixture out into the shape of a small, round pizza ( about 1/3 of an inch thick). Create an edge crust, if you like.

Bake the pizza crust for 25-30 minutes or until lightly golden.

Remove it and add toppings.

Bake for 6-8 more minutes until toppings have cooked through.

Remove the pizza, cool, and enjoy!

The weather report said two nights of low 30s, and we figured it was time. So in come the potted lemons and caldomin oranges, the olive tree and friends. For the next few months they will only huddle and peer out at the brick pathway along the house’s south side, where they basked all spring, summer, and fall. Hopefully they are beefed up enough to survive the spider mites and scale that trouble them in dry indoor heat.

Just look at how they grew! Bodacious! We humans may be challenged to share space with some of our potted friends. Hopefully lemons and oranges are to follow. And although the produce is safe from munching birds, I may still have to net these indoor trees to get my fair share. Owen has sharp eyes, and often gets there first.

We have made the decision to put a small orchard in at the back of the house. Where the rise of land looks south and west should be a perfect spot. This morning I took the plunge, ordering two each of cherries, peaches, and pears from our old friend Stark Bros. I wanted to buy local, but the supply wasn’t there this late in the season.

Edward already planted a fig. We are waiting for delivery of blueberry bushes. The blueberries we did find local (Dimeo Farms, in New Jersey) and organic, for a good price too. I still want to find kumwats… I am dreaming about a variety of citrus that is winter hardy. I want food independence! And I want local, organically grown! So in spite of creaky knees and aging backs, Yes, we are returning to Suburban Growing our own food.

The decision is comforting. After all the uncertainty, all the struggles to make this Pennsylvania house clean and mold-safe, it looks like we are staying. We will always have to be careful with the house’s humidity levels, and cleaning, but more each month we are nestling in, and putting down roots. Thankfully.

It’s been just over two years since we left our Maryland gardens behind, and moved to Pennsylvannia. After 14 months of a torturous, CoVid-complicated, mold-complicated renovation, we have a year under our belts in this new home. The next natural step is to start building gardens. Right?

Only our love of gardening is at conflict with aging knees, shoulders, and increasing desire to “be still.” The property is surrounded by an established “lawnscape,” beautiful mature trees, and existing shrubs. We don’t have to do this. But will we be able to stop ourselves?…

It was fairly easy this spring to put some drift roses, lavender, and Shasta daisies in under the blue cypress out front, in time for our daughter’s June wedding. Adding a few Oriental lilies along the patio was an hour’s work in a raised bed. (Imagine being able to grow lilies! without voles??) We hired help with weeding this summer, and heavy mulching helped us cope. Weeding is still something Edward still loves to do, despite troublesome knees. The gardens look good.

But what about the stated purpose of this blog, to grow our own FOOD? We started the prosess. Black locust planks purchased to build raised beds lay all summer in a pile of overgrown grass on the south side of the house. Black locust doesn’t rot, and we got a great deal on the lumber last spring. But we couldn’t summon strength to deal with those heavy boards.

A lot has changed about our bodies since 28 years ago, when we moved into a new house, and created brand new gardens, improved heavy clay soil, and raised kids and vegetables, dogs, cats, and chickens together. The process of “getting rid of” that our move required of me is catching. I like it. I love it. So my question is, how much of my old life do I really want to take up again?

The winter squash didn’t wait for me to make up my mind. It sprouted and sprawled happily all over the compost pile that we have planned eventually to be a blueberry bed. The summer squash Edward threw in in May seemed to thrive on neglect, producing abundantly. As the vine borer discovered and killed one stretch, another vine took over and carried on. (This success was likely thanks to the manure, dirt and leaves I layered on the beds last fall.) Even with deer and groundhogs and rabbits helping themselves, and no watering, we harvested plenty of yellow squash and a couple cucumbers, and a colander of little potatoes. No tomatoes, the deer gobbled those, fruit, leaves, and stalks.

For so many years my query has been: How can ordinary busy people raise a significant part of the food they consume? And, how can more people get access “organically” raised, that is to say nontoxic, food? First of all they would need to see the value in it…. Too few Americans will discover the startling difference between say fresh Lima beans (with butter and salt and pepper!) and the limas you get frozen. Or between a local grown peach and any of its cousins who sit on supermarket shelves, trucked in from far away places. How about the richness of eggs from pastured chickens, compared to pale sad eggs from large egg farms. It isn’t a subtle thing.

Maybe the answer to the gardening vs aging body challenge lies in barter: what can you offer in trade for what you need? Our youngest moved home for a bit this fall, and is willing to lend us his muscles and building expertise in exchange for bed and home cooked meals. Suddenly those hunks of lumber that lay fallow in the tall grass all summer are raised beds. Two beds are even full of dirt — the problem of the lack of a pick up truck solved with a tarp laid in the back of my Toyota RAV.

This fall I picked up an old favorite, Animal, VMiracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver writes about her own experiences with growing, and the value in locally grown food for the economy and for the world. I don’t see raising turkeys on my horizon, but her enthusiasm about varieties of plants and eating local is always inspiring…. Maybe it’s time to sign up for some seed catalogues.

Looking ahead to 2023, my new outlook will be “Suburban Growing for People Growing Older!” I plan to raise the beds higher. Drag a strong-backed helper along to harvest muck and leaves to build up soil this fall. Compost scraps right in the garden bed. Mulch like no tomorrow. And focus on plants that relish neglect. 2023 here we go.

Lately, I have been trying to un-aquire stuff. Trying to peel down, through layers of accumulated possessions, that grew up around us in our 30 years of marriage. The layers that moved with us from MD to PA last summer, and currently fill FOUR storage units and our apartment. Yes four. It’s embarrassing. I had no idea the homestead contained that much stuff.

Now to be fair, CoVid is partly to blame — when we were boxing up and clearing out, Goodwill etc were non-operational. Plus people felt weird about handling secondhand goods. Its been a relief to start to tackle the problem, to find happy homes for that pile of acquired possessions. It’s uphill work.

But let’s get real. Those large objects are only the most obvious examples of our explicit and intentional generation of “stuff” — the things we meant to buy. What about all the things we didn’t even mean to buy, the things that are such a part of modern life

Even when nothing is growing in suburban gardens, stuff is growing in suburbia. Mounds of stuff. You know. Plastic cups, dishes, masks, laundry bottles.

But yesterday, I found myself staring into wastebaskets. Have you ever taken note of a restroom trash can? Washing hands is a very good thing at any time in human history, never more so than with a pandemic hovering over our shoulders. But all this washing hands yields an enormous unintentional harvest.

The photo documents half a morning’s worth of my paper towel. About two hours. In and out of bathrooms at the gym, and at Panera where Owen and I write. A small mountain, with much more to come. All day long.

Waste baskets and waste baskets and waste baskets mostly full of paper towels. Damp and mostly clean (since you already washed your hands), single use paper towel. And every basketful encapsulated in the plastic trash bag that transports it.  The plastic bag that prevents contact with water, air, and sunshine that would degrade the paper and return it to soil.

I can’t take it anymore. So I am stuffing the wet and basically clean paper into my pockets. It won’t hurt me there (joining who knows what all else).  I can add it to our compost bucket at home. 

I know this is a micro problem in a world of BIG problems. But I have better things to grow than garbage, even in a suburban winter. The cleanest of all garbage: Dirt.

For any gardener in Maryland last week, your dreams were of rain. Wasn’t it just a few months ago that we were soaking, gross and saturated? WAY too much rain? Mud in my chicken run was so deep I worried for the health of my baby chicks!  But now those chicks are teenagers and experiencing days of 90-100 degree heat, burnt up grass, baked hard ground, and hot sticky nights.

Same for the gardens, where once lettuce was so lush, loving all that rain. So, Hooray for my hose! SUN + WATER = FOOD!! There is not much I can do when weather is too wet to help plants fight back the attacking mold and rot. But in the bright, sunny, too hot I can supply mulch and water – and voila!  Even in last week’s heat I added pepper, tomato, and herb seedlings into our front walk flower bed where squash vines already ramble. Thanks to lots of light fluffy leaf mulch (leaf pro or leaf grow, from my local nursery) and my hose they have survived their roasting first week looking good.

I have also been using the hose to BLAST the hoard of proliferating junior SQUASH BUGS off leaves and vines. Not sure yet if this is enough to get rid of them. Squishing them is best of course, but takes a lot longer. While I am there, I check both sides of the leaves for EGGS, scraping or ripping them off.

Everything likes to eat squash plants. Squash bugs, caterpillars, winged bugs I cannot identify but detest… it’s a birth-place, bar, and restaurant in one. All that juiciness.  High heat is stressful. Plants, hens, bugs, everything gets cranky and aggressive.

Getting enough water is prevention and cure for many garden woes.  The plants I keep watered are the ones that thrive, I remind myself, and keep producing food for us. True, water is a precious resource, and I have a bad habit of forgetting to turn off the hose…. We are lucky in this part of the globe to have a hose to turn on at will, when in many parts of the world getting the daily water is a challenge and chore. But eating from the garden means watering. Why do I so often get busy and forget to maintain the gardens in midsummer? Note to self: 1. yes, be grateful, but 2. go get that hose!

The same holds true for chicken health in the heat – mulch under foot and plenty of clean water. My two month olds are happy, healthy, and independent, not too picked on by the older hens. I rotate the flock between 6 paddocks, which includes the front and back grass. Edward is not at peace with chickens on lawns. On the lawns means access to garden beds. Chickens usually make a mess, raking through the mulch at the garden bed edges, uncovering roots, intent on their constant search for BUGS. But, wait…wait. Wasn’t I just complaining about bugs in the garden? So you see, it’s a trade off. This is supposed to be a bad year for ticks. Our tick tally is up to four so far this season.  I would rather have to pull the gardens back together than have a husband with Lyme disease. So — RELEASE THE CHICKEN PATROL!!  One more great reason to keep chickens (did you need another?) is vigilant insect management.

PS – Have you ever tried Dragon Tongue Lettuce? This is a great plant. True to the brag on the back of the seed packet, this lettuce still tastes good in heat, and it does not hurry into bolt mode! (Note: I could not find this seed again. Still hunting)

PPS – we finally got some rain in a thunderstorm yesterday!

PPS – we got a weekend of pounding rain and thunderstorms.

PPPS – Looks like a week of rain ahead. Oh-oh. Shelve the garden hose. Post the blog anyway. Dream of sunshine.

My lettuce seedlings accuse me. I skitter past the trays under the grow light where limp green straggles out over the  edges of a plastic pot, overcrowded and desperate for soil and sun. Or more water, to be honest. More water would do it.

“Soon,” I think to them. Guilt, guilt, guilt.

I love this crazy slightly manic time of year, with more and more sunlit hours per day, and the incredible energy of the sun feeding gardener and plants alike. I didn’t know until recently that I (like so many modern folks) am “low for vitamin D.” Maybe this is why my gardening hours leave me energized, even if my back hurts from overdoing.  My back recovers easily over night, ready for more the next day. (Shout out to Edward here, since my spinal health is largely due to my kind husband, who gives a great deep tissue massage even as he is falling asleep.)  I am sorry not to keep up with my writing up as I do in the colder seasons. But being outside is tonic for the soul, mind, and body. My chiropractor sees more of me the more hours I spend at a desk. Lack of varied activity seems far more injurious than the strain from pushing wheelbarrows, hammering stakes, yanking weeds, or hoisting clumps of heavy Maryland soil.

My lettuce seedlings may not look too great but the lettuce and kale garden is going gangbusters! These were plants I couldn’t resist buying way back in March. The bugs and snails haven’t found them in this new location. Yet. The chickens have been resentful but prevented. And the evil bunny rabbits can’t get in either. My kale leaves are yet un-chewed. Very satisfying. Two salads so far from these luscious leaves.

This success has made me bold. I put the  broccoli sprouts out in the back kitchen garden, surrounded by an army of marigolds. However, now that I think about it, last season that bed of baby broccolis had kale in it… kale that was completely skeletonized by unknown forces. Marauding hordes of slugs, snails, chickens??? We never got a bite.  Broccoli is kale’s cousin – so these poor broccolis are far less likely to thrive. The attackers will be back for more. Damn. EVERYTHING – except humans – LOVES TO EAT KALE AND BROCCOLI.  AND CABBAGE. Maybe I can pull them out today, and stick them in the middle of the garlic bed, where the chickens got in and pillaged and made a space….

I am trying to learn more about grouping my plants, companion planting they call it, the way nature does it. I will have to check that kale and garlic are friends.  (They are.) Fascinating that some plant species like each other, and grow better in each other’s company.  And that other plants actually inhibit each other’s growth. Just like people — didn’t I hear somewhere that plants and humans share more DNA than they don’t?

But the really big news from the Simons Gardens is the new chicks under our broody golden Maran. Yesterday I went with daughter Freya and picked out five one day old chicks at Gambrills Feed Store, three of a new breed, blue hens from the Czech Republic. The little gals are a beautiful blue gray fuzz for now. They are supposed to lay lots of blue eggs. And then two good old Buff Orpingtons. I am a sucker for Buff Orpingtons, sweet tempered, good layers, and excellent mamas.

I wish I had captured a photo of the five chicks last night, but now you will have to wait, since once those chicks go under mama (stealthily traded for the eggs she sits on, in the dark of night), that hen keeps them close to her until they are all bonded and she feels all is well. Chicks have to kept 95 degrees warm. My other adoptive mothers have known just how to manage letting the chicks go, calling them back to get warm, teaching them to forage for bugs – so I am hoping for another success. Photos soon!

For now, it’s time to dig! Out into the gardens this beautiful cool morning, to set some lettuces free.

 

Too many eggs. YES. This is a problem I can LOVE. After months of pitiful laying, my flock is cranking out eggs even before spring begins, as the hours of sunshine per day increases. I removed two of the mean hens from the flock, who were drivingthe other girls away from the food. (Butchering them was Saturday’s project; they are in the freezer now.) with two fewer hens I am getting more eggs, so i think that was the right call. Plus I have been encouraging them with extras: organic grains and groats, kale, and occasional yogurt. I am also encouraging their G.I. health (my hens are prone to vent gleet)(yes, still)  by adding livestock probiotics, brewers yeast and garlic powder to their feed (thanks to Lisa at Fresh Eggs Daily for that info!).

Yes, they are laying well – but this time I will not be fooled. I will not get excited and start giving away or selling the extras! No no. I am gonna save them for the fall/winter when nature tells the layers to lay off.  Twelve to ten average layers can generate enough eggs in a year for a family of four, but only if you preserve the extra egg while you have it, in spring.  And yes, you can freeze eggs.

I may not love the plastic of modern life  (see my rant Are Your Clothes Killing You?), but I do LOVE GOOGLE SEARCHES. While I waited for the red traffic light to change yesterday, I plugged into my cell phone  “freezing spring chicken eggs.”  (Of course I parked the phone as soon as the light changed! tush! How can you ask!) My Google quest lead me through a series of methods of preservation, from old-fashioned (which sound scary) by storing in tubs of salt, or by rubbing fat on the shell, or preserving in wax, to a backpacker who dehydrated eggs successfully, and found them functional on the trail.

Bear in mind that clean eggs that have not been washed are ok all by themselves at room temperature for a loooong time, contrary to what a modern refrigeration-dependent Amercian might think. Eggs come out of the mama coated with a protective substance — which American egg industry industriously washes off, thereby rendering the egg defenseless to bacteria. (sigh) In Europe and South Africa eggs are stored in baskets, not refrigerators.  How else could eggs in a farmyard sit under a mama in a nest of dirty straw for weeks, and not go rotten, thereby poisoning the embryonic chicken inside, waiting to be hatched? You can’t leave then in a mud pile, not in the full sun, but room temp is not a problem.

The Egg preservation answer I WANTED was: YES DEAR WYSTAN! YOU CAN LAZILY JUST POP THOSE BEAUTIES INTO A ZIPLOCK IN THEIR NICE CLEAN SHELLS!!  However, this appears NOT TO BE TRUE. Or at least not to be approved. The FDA advises against freezing eggs in shell, worried about the possibility of transmission of bacterial contamination from shell, when freezing eggs crack. And freezing eggs do crack – I already know that. Another reason not to freeze in shell is egg yolks do not always play nice after it is thawed. The yolks can toughen up and refuse to mix with the whites, they say.

So most Experienced Chicken Egg Freezers stir the whites and yolks together,  sometimes adding a little salt ( 1/2 tsp per cup – I used 1/4 tsp per cup) and store in a tub or a ziplock in the freezer MARKED for quantity. (Be sure to mark what it is!) Then when ready to use, thaw slowly in fridge. They say the frozen egg prepared this way, can be used for baking and eating just fine.

 

Since I have been avoiding evil plastic touching my food as much as possible these days,  I will try freezing some in glass, and some in plastic in case that doesn’t work.

But I am also going to try freezing some whole eggs, because I am stubborn. Seems to me that nature usually has these things figured out, and having eggs protected by their own clean shells, cracked or not, seems preferable to eating egg that has been sitting on and absorbing plastic all summer long. Right? (PS. update – they crack badly, and expose the yolk. It probably isn’t going to work…)

Let me add here that what the FDA doesn’t seem to know about food safety would fill a large book. Like most government agencies, they are worried about law suits and C.Y.A. and the stupid factor: what is the worst possible scenario here? The FDA does not give accurate advice on the subtleties of growing and eating your own food in a small controlled setting (ie not a factory farm).  Intelligent and educated people READ UP, therefore know better than to store a dirty egg, or to consume the eggs of sick chickens. Right?  The eggs of small flock chickens properly kept are generally healthier and certainly tastier than anything you can buy in any store anywhere, organic or not.

However there are some dumb people keeping chickens.  I have seen some very sad small flocks, standing in small muddy, unmulched enclosures, without access to grass, or bugs, or sun. We need the FDA regulations and suggestions.  And we need to educate ourselves to do BETTER.

I will let you know how thawing and eating my frozen crop works out…next fall!

More sources for you:

Fresh Eggs Daily

The Prairie Homestead

The Spruce.com

Huffington Post