of Pie Bread, sorghum and gardening

Two bits of the broom corn I've planted this year.


White popping sorghum, fresh from garden
I think I picked this too early... need to research more
There is more out there.

a good post about sorghum grain
definitely harvesting mine too early...
but if we had chickens they would still like it.


red sorghum broom corn
picked too early as well, but dried now
more of this out there, too


we go wheee on swing

We all went to the library this morning, and the grocery store. It was a nice day out. Mark found another Land Before Time DVD and now Esme is engrossed between that and Commander Keene Atari game. She has been out to the garden with me three or four times today, helping me plant and look at me use the 'bug salt' and draw in the sandy patch she has found. I told her the Sevin was 'bad bug salt' and she should not touch it so she would not get sick.

Esme and I made pancakes today - well, she helped me do some of the measuring and mixing. I told her it would be a pancake, and she said 'man cake?' I could tell she was thinking about a gingerbread man. When she saw the first one on the griddle frying up she said 'no man cake. you make a pie.' I let her taste some. 'It is bread. Pie bread. It is good.' So pancakes are pie bread. And it is one of the few things I've made on a whim that Esme has eaten all of what I gave her.

I was craving apple and carrot and garlic... so I made another 'Mama soup'.

1 small red delicious apple (Fuji would have been better), cored and diced
half a can of sliced carrots
a cup of fresh field peas and snapped green beans
basil, onion powder, 2 cloves of garlic
I wanted to put some green split peas in it but didn't want to wait on them.. should have done it.

I ate half of that without the broth alongside several pancakes. It was a good combination and there is the other half (and the broth) in the fridge with two more leftover pancakes. The dogs really enjoyed the pancake mix leftover which was mixed with some water to clean out the bowl and poured over their dry dog food.

Out in the garden I found lots of beans and field peas. There are enough of them coming in I am trying to freeze some now. I planted more dent corn and beans and also some garlic from my spice drawer. I need to put in the Sandhill order very soon so Grandma will get her garlic soon! I also put some Sevin dust on the garden, which I had hoped I wouldn't have to do - but I need to protect the small ones until they get big enough to survive all of the chewing insects.

I also bought a yard of purple fabric for a long-sleeved dress for Esme. That is in the dryer and I'm waiting on it to finish.

//candid photos Mark caught last night after I crashed. Esme crawled up into our bed and crashed down beside me after that. He snapped the picture before he picked her up and put her in her own bed.



like mother, like daughter...
That is our favorite warm wooly blanket with the diamonds on it...

fall bugs and foxtail grass

Something is eating all of the new beans as soon as they put their heads up - and is now starting to put holes in the purple hull pea leaves as well, apparently they aren't quite as tasty, but they'll do. I had expected the new squash plant to get eaten when it came up - as those bugs are still prevalent out there. But, I hadn't expected the new beans to be eaten as soon as they put their heads up. There are a lot of things nibbling on the beans but it has not done anything to really stunt those plants yet. I'm going to need to put chemical on the garden for the second time during the entire season... if any new bean is going to survive. Hmm...

And my one lonely cornstalk is up, from the one lonely dent corn seed I put in the ground. They are very viable.

I was collecting interesting seed from some grass out by the roadside. The closest thing I can find to it online is yellow or green 'foxtail' grass. It has small seeds in a fuzzy caterpillar like head. The seeds become dry and fall off at a gentle touch or can be coaxed off in a threshing like process. I collected a small tin of them. Then I read that dogs often get the seeds in their nose, eyes or ears and have terrible complications from sniffing and burrowing around in it. Our dogs were right there next to the grass - and didn't seem the least interested in it. I am on the fence about spreading it around behind our garden, which I was going to do because of it's interesting 'grain' like potential and the fact that we have quail and turkey living back there now. It is liked by wild game fowl as a food source - which I could tell just by examining it in the wild. I would hate our dogs to get a problem from lodging seeds in themselves - but they seem smarter than that. It might be different if there was a whole field of it...

I need to look into other grains at our co-op tomorrow. I want to get a grain crop that I can grow for chickens and other animals - but that could also be threshed without terrible difficulty to store, either for livestock or for an emergency food supply. It is always nice to have something on hand that has multiple purposes. I have found a few good sources to buy seed online if our co-op does not have the hull less varieties of the barley or oats that would serve as that multiple purpose grain. Hull less oats would be the best choice, because it is easily digestible by humans, dogs and other livestock and is a good keeper, as well. I was also thinking about sowing common rye grass in a few places only for the fowl and livestock. It would be nice to get some of that growing wild out there.

early morning garden clowning around

The sad little fall garden... inside the weed overgrown but
still producing larger garden!

It was 53 degrees outside this morning at 7:30 am. Esme and I dressed appropriately and went out to plant a small row of radishes and check on the state of all of the 'seed babies' in the garden.

Rodale article on black radish, with really good writing. Just as I am thinking about ordering a packet for next year's fall planting, and trying another set of radish out in the garden this fall as well.

I didn't get much done out in the garden this morning, just the row of radishes planted. I noted that the Esme cranberry bean is the only one of the three experimental 'cranberry' type beans up at the moment. Those were planted on Thursday. I chalk that up to it being 'wetter' ie: fresher, than the other two, as it was from this season's seed.

The lentils are looking interesting on day 8 from planting
This is similar to what the garbanzos looked like in this Gardenerd article.


The lemon marigolds are blooming beautifully.


The purple hulled peas on day eight


Esme had me draw Pocoyo, Ellie and Pato in the dirt the other day. It is still there, and I took a picture for her.

And there was lots of clowning around in the garden.


Look up... uh... not that much.


It's a leaf!


Hats off, go West young man
I have no idea how I got this shot - I love it.

fall garden notes

The radicchio is also coming up now. That makes for everything planned to come up there is now showing some sign of succeeding. I found about a dozen more dry pinto beans on the vines and put them in the dry storage area. It is amazing what shows up when you just sit there and really look at a plant in the sunlight. I would never have seen those dry pods hanging there if I hadn't really been looking for them. There was even one dry pod underneath the plants in the dirt that stood out just on one edge in the mud - I opened it and found three dry beans inside it that were seed quality. As I was sitting on the ground looking at the lentils sprouting I saw one dry pod hanging off of the otherwise dry and withered sticks of the Provider green beans. The seed was not in excellent condition, ie: not something I would have put in with the 'good' seeds for next year. I found a place to plant it in the fall square and if it grows, it did not go to waste.

The new lima bean pods that came on are filling out slowly. They really needed the hot weather, but there are flowers on the vines and if they produce more it will be welcome.

I'm nearly ready to go up and bring Grandma some of the 'fruit of the labor' of the garden, mixed cowpeas and green bean snaps in a container, as well as some more dry seed and nearly half of the Blue Jade sweet corn seeds we received. She gave us some watermelon seeds :) and the Sandhill catalog. I need to get our order together early next week.


from top to bottom:
Lina Sisco, from seed savers
cranberry type from a soup mix
'Esme' cranberry type grown from a soup mix bean last year

I put these in the fall planting as an experiment, to see if they will produce plants that are more similar than dissimilar. The 'Esme' is planted nearest to the lima trellis. I have a suspicion that they are all just slight variations on the same thing. The dry pinto beans I've been getting from the same plants have about as much variation in them.

I found a dry gourd in the valley and pulled seeds out of it. It was a 'volunteer' growing in the grass from seed we bought several years ago.

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Also, thinking far ahead to a time in the future. Esme would be a little older then, and would be able to take more responsibility and help out on a 'farm' that might have some goats and chickens. Several people at my work keep 'a few' goats and cows on their property. They use a local butcher in Puryear to process the meat at a certain time of the year. We could save corn and grains and pumpkins and other things to feed to a dozen or so chickens, and let the goats graze in the valley and clean up all other leftovers. Grain and forage could be saved and fed to the goats and chickens over the winter. The chickens would produce eggs, and we could mix other vegetables and grain and eggs together to make a supplemental dog food, to reduce but not eliminate how much store bought food we rely on. If the goats were processed at the local butcher we could use the 'excess' in that way, as well. We already get bones and trimmings from the butcher, and give them to the dogs sometimes, when we buy our own food.

We also make a pot of 'glop' once in a while for them now - out of any fat we have leftover from our own meats from the store, a cup of cooked dry beans, and cooked oatmeal or rice and mixtures of leftover veggies. Mark says I should throw a can of tuna in it when I make some today, as we have one nearing it's expiration date on the shelf and fish and/or fish oil is also important in dog food recipes. Even with three times the work to make/keep/store a supplemental food but a third less storebought food it would still be a success. I bet leftovers would freeze for a few days at a time. There is a lot of work to do before the chicken idea would happen - fencing for one. But I count learning how to grow these different grains/plants and getting used to tending, gathering and storing the produce as necessary preparation work.
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A shout-out to three blogs I've been reading lately:
Hard work Homestead
Subsistence Pattern Food Garden
Down on the Allotment (UK)

Not that we will ever go as far as all of these... but I'm learning a lot.
Oh, and the dog glop turned out just fine - I need to use a bigger pot this next time and boil the beans a little longer before I put in the rice.

A bit of color after the rain

A bit of color
Knitpicks Shine Sport in Crocus
I won't say what this is an attempt at knitting yet, because if it doesn't succeed it will just be another soft cotton washcloth ;) The rain has finally stopped, if only for this morning, and I was able to take a walk again (with a sweater - it was a little chilly still).

This baby girl is giving me more signs that she is wanting to come sometime soon - but still no promise of when. It could be days or weeks. Many more 'interesting' feelings coming and going and an alternating feeling of wanting to get things done and being very tired.

Going to the health store today to get some Red Raspberry Leaf tea, as the doctor said we are 'full term' and my grandmother always reccommended it as 'the woman's tea' I would help her gather raspberry leaves from our bushes, fruit, clovers, rosehips and other things from the woods and garden near our house in Minnesota. I was very little then, and she said it was a 'big woman's tea.' I found out later what she meant by that. This article says conflicting things about drinking RRL tea in pregnancy....

This is a really good article about Red Raspberry Leaf Tea prepared by midwives in an email group I belong to. It has some studies that were done in Australia and a better description of dosage (how much to drink in pregnancy and when) etc...


A complicated little sketch
in pens and colored pencil

Linky: A blog post from I live on a farm with pictures of beautiful 'natural fall things' she has gathered near her house.