The Unwoven Rainbow

I added pics to the gardening album. Scroll down to those pics with September or later dates.

The gardening initiative continues, with mixed success, and is expanding. Some pics here.

So far the deer have been held away from my original veggie patches, though I did change my protection approach recently. The covers I made for the squares themselves (picture) worked ok, but made harvesting a pain (taking the thing off of each square every day was a hassle). Given that, and the fact that I was planting a bunch of perennials (brambles, kiwi, fig) near the veggies, I decided to fence in the whole area (picture). I like the fence much better — once a day I open a cheapo ‘gate’ and get access to all the plants on the south side of the house for watering and harvesting. Pretty soon I’m going to try expanding that fence to include some new planting area behind the house.

While deer are certainly capable of jumping a 5′ fence, I guessed that they wouldn’t be comfortable doing it into a small area. And so far, no sign of deer in there. We have had some smaller animal — presumably either squirrel or chipmunk, both of which we have in abundance — occasionally dig a hole or uproot a plant, but nothing too bad.

Elsewhere the deer are still a challenge. I need to put wire cages around many of the smaller trees I’ve planted, or the deer chew them up.

Some of the learning on the gardening front is just me absorbing stuff I’ve read (umm yeah, if you plant spinach in the middle of the summer here, the heat will cause it to go to seed very quickly). Other stuff I still don’t understand (what is causing my brocolli to grow so slow and scrawny?).

Some of the plants (tomato, summer squash) are starting to take off; I’m very curious to see how well they produce.

Interestingly, one of the bigger successes is sheep sorrel, which was a volunteer from the wild. All I do is water it occasionally and harvest — yum! In a way this makes me happy, because it lends weight to the ideas that foraging from the wild and using natives may be some of the easier ways to obtain food.

At this point the permaculture work is all investment ($ and planting effort) and no payoff (food). Since I’m starting with small plants, it will be several years before that situation even starts to turn around.

This whole effort certainly confirms my earlier notion that obtaining food in ‘the real world’ (that is, without the benefit of ultra-cheap energy) is a quite a bit of work. I probably average over 7 hours a week watering, tending, harvesting, etc., and here I am approaching peak season getting maybe 2% of my daily calories for my trouble.

Earlier I talked about my interest in foraging wild plants for food. Since then I’ve taken my first baby steps.

Here are the wild plants I’ve actually eaten. Warning: Before you try this yourself, you’d better know what you are doing. See Thayer’s book for sound advice. And before ingesting any wild food in quantity I not only follow the steps outlined in Thayer, I also subject it to an edibility test similar to this one.
* Wild onion (grows in patches in the woods behind our house). Pretty strong, you don’t want to eat too much of this at once.
* Garlic Mustard (lots of this in the woods). Fairly strong taste, but good as an addition to salads.
* Spring Beauty (grows in some large patches in the woods). Greens and flowers are good (mild) additions to salads. We’ve only dug up very small roots, which when cooked like potatoes tasted pretty good.
* Sheep Sorrel (grows in a few patches around the yard). Yum!
* Chickory (scattered around the yard and in the woods). The early greens are good, and can be added to salads (more mature ones tend to be bitter). We’ve also tried roasting and grinding chickory root for coffee substitute, with mixed results (sometimes tastes ok, sometimes has a very bitter aftertaste).
* Dandelion (anywhere you are trying to grow grass  ). All the leaves we’ve tried have been fairly bitter.

Plants I’ve found but haven’t yet eaten:
* Ramp, or wild leek (saw large stands of this in a park we sometimes walk in).
* Mayapple (tons are popping up in the woods behind our house — I can’t wait until they fruit).
* Thistle (there are a bunch of plants along the W&OD trail on my ride in to work, and some near Matthew’s soccer field).
* Cattail (in numerous swampy areas nearby).
* Pecan (in a nearby park).
* Walnut (nearby park).
* Paw paw (nearby park).
* Acorn (woods all over!).

More pics here.