21 Mar

Mild Wild Greens:the Siberian elm

Posted by wooddogs3 in greens, salads, Uncategorized, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .


There are some plants for which I have an intense and personal dislike, and the Siberian elm is close to the top of the list. It’s one of our more common trees, because it’s so highly adapted to invade and crowd out more desirable trees. The seeds come up everywhere, and their hold on life is astoundingly tenacious. Even as tiny seedlings, they have a deep root system. If you don’t get the whole thing out, they will come up from the root, they spread by root, and they produce, by scientific measure, a trillion skillion seeds per tree per season.

But this time of year, they have two good qualities. The first is that they cover their branches early in spring with bright lime green samaras, the casing within which the seed develops. They look fresh and green before anything else, which lifts my spirits toward spring. And, the samaras are edible and quite good, and available in mind-bending quantities. The samaras are round and paper-thin. Just pull them off the branches by the handful and add to salads or eat on the spot for a quick snack. Be sure to get them young, when fully expanded and a little over half an inch across but before the edges have started to dry and lose their intense greenness. Taste a few. If there is a “papery” feeling in your mouth, they’re too old. Use only those that are tender. The flavor is pleasant, mild, a little “green,” and very slightly sweet. They don’t have the texture or character to endure cooking. Just eat all you can, and if you have chickens, goats, etc., give them some too. There’s plenty.

Whenever you eat a food that is completely new to you, use good sense. Eat a little, wait a day, eat a little more only if you had no reaction to the first try. It goes without saying that you don’t put any wild plant in your mouth unless you are 100% sure what it is. For more on wild foods and foraging common sense, read anything by Samuel Thayer or John Kallas. Please don’t use my blog to identify plants, since identification is not my emphasis. You need a couple of good field guides for that. Start with Thayer’s Nature’s Garden and Kallas’s Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate and you may end up with an intriguing new hobby.

Addendum: when I wrote this post 6 years ago, I forgot to mention that the samaras are a great addition to spring salads, too. I had a little more to say about them this year, and you can read it here.

19 Mar

Green Gadgets: the Naturemill Composter

Posted by wooddogs3 in green gadgets, sustainable, Uncategorized, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , , .


When I first saw this composter in an upscale catalog, I thought of it as a symbol of our shortcomings as a nation. Why, I thought, would any sane person spend hundreds of dollars to contain and electrify a natural process and pretend it’s “sustainable?”
Well, I was wrong. This is a neat solution for people with no room for a compost pile, but even for people like me who have a large yard and a compost pile, the Naturemill can become an irreplaceable link in efforts to live more sustainably. Here’s why:
1. The Naturemill is compact and energy-efficient. The maker estimates that it draws the same amount of power as a small lightbulb.
2. The compost reaches high temperatures, with the aid of thermophilic bacteria. That means that you can compost meat, cheese, bread, and other things that I would never put in my outdoor pile. Yes, I know that an outdoor thermophilic pile can compost these items, but I can assure you that in the time before it composts completely, it will draw rodents and roaches, even in an off-the-ground tumbler. I consider it unfair to yourself, neighbors, and the groundwater to try to compost these items outdoors in a suburban area.
3. Virtually any food waste item except citrus rinds and bones can be composted quickly and neatly in any quantity that a home kitchen is likely to produce. People with back pain or other problems that preclude managing a large compost heap can compost with almost no effort. It’s as easy as scraping plates into the garbage, and all you do is add some wood pellets (included when you buy it, and then you can use the wood pellets sold cheaply for fuel) and some baking soda. A concise booklet comes with the machine that’s full of good info about how to avoid problems.
4. Pay close attention here: it can compost pet waste at temperatures that make the finished compost safe. Nationwide, enormous quantities of dog and cat droppings are going into landfills or sitting around endangering the quality of water. There are communities where it’s illegal to put them in the garbage. So what do you do with them? I have been looking for a household solution for a while, and have constructed pet septic systems and every other damn thing, and this is the best solution I’ve found. I hope it goes without saying that you don’t keep it in the house if you are going to do this. The unit is well sealed and under most circumstances you don’t notice any odor when it’s closed, but if you are composting pet waste, there is an odor when it’s opened that is nothing like fresh droppings but which I certainly wouldn’t describe as pleasant. The finished compost smells earthy and like other compost.

The best commendation that I can make is that someone as frugal, thrifty, and outright cheap as me spent $400 for the Pro XE model and considers it money well spent. Read more about it at Naturemill. If you buy one, please let them know that Heather at My Urban Homestead sent you.

6 Mar

Spring in the food garden

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, front yard gardening, greens, recipe, salads, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .


I’m not a winter person, so wherever I move, I always plant a patch of the early little species crocus “Cream Beauty” in my garden. When I see the first glowing blooms, I’ve officially survived another winter.

“Cream Beauty” is also a kind of floral nag, reminding me that there’s no time to hang around luxuriating in the sunlight; I need to be prepping and planting furiously. It’s one of the ironies of garden writing that, just when you actually have something to say, you have no time in which to say it. So here are a few spring tidbits in no particular order:

Last fall I coated all my “greens” beds thickly with horse manure, and dug it in as soon as the ground thawed in early February. Fresh manure needs to go on in the fall, but you can apply well-aged manure or finished compost now. Now the beds are ready to plant, and I put in three kinds of lettuce, several types of mustard, two kinds of spinach, snap and shelling peas, and a wide assortment of chicories, both leaf and heading. It’s important to get them in early so that they don’t fry in overly hot summer sunlight. Chard, parsley, and potatoes will be planted within the next week or two. Leeks and scallions were started in seed trays last month, and the multiplier onions, garlic, and shallots planted last fall are sprouting. I planted grey shallots once and didn’t find the bulbs useful- too small and too much work to peel- but they provide generous cuttings of sharp shallot greens every spring to season salads and soups. They are like chives but with a distinctly stronger flavor.

Every year I try a few things that are completely new to me, and one of my newbies this year is bladder campion, which, according to the catalog, provides young greens that taste something like green peas. It’s a common weed in wetter parts of the country, but here it needs some shelter and encouragement. Bear in mind that many plants which need full sun elsewhere prefer some shade from our high-desert sun. If you fail the first time, as I did with bladder campion last year, try giving a little afternoon shade.

Don’t forget to plant more peas than you need so that you can cut the sweet young greens for spring stir-fries.

If you’re going to try chickens this year, build the coop and make a brooder set-up now, BEFORE you buy the adorable baby chicks. I’m going to try a few meat chickens this year, so I’m building a large open-bottom cage to keep them in. It’s my first effort at carpentry, and I don’t think that there is a perfect 90 degree angle anywhere in it, but the chickens are unlikely to care. Make your chicken construction sturdy and raccoon-proof, not beautiful.

Gardening is a natural process, with all the entropy of any other natural process. Success does not pile upon success in an automatic fashion. Our freakishly cold snap is likely to result in some garden disappointments. My artichokes all seem to be dead, a sad event because they are offshoots of the first plants I grew from seed, many years ago. But that’s a reminder that nature is under no obligation to respect our sentiments. If you are very fond of getting your own way, gardening might not be for you. Nature offers some consolations too, like the glut of big brown eggs with deep orange yolks flowing out of the henhouse. There are a million ways to enjoy them, but while I’m waiting for the spring bulbs to bloom I enjoy eating what I think of as Daffodil Salad. The name comes from the colors, which remind me of the exquisite Poet’s Narcissus. Please know your edible flowers if you use them, and remember that daffodils are NOT edible.

To make a main dish, put three eggs per person in cold water, bring to a boil, simmer 10 minutes, and cool quickly in cold water. If you have your own hens, the eggs need to be at least a week old to peel cleanly. With store eggs this is seldom a problem. The ten-minute simmer gives yolks as shown, just barely solid in the center and a rich orange. Peel the eggs and cut them in half. Put the amount of salad greens you prefer in a big bowl; I use about three good-sized single handfuls per person. Toss with the dressing below or your own favorite vinaigrette. Pile on plates, top with the egg halves, and drizzle a little more dressing over the eggs. Scatter on some thin shavings of your best Parmesan and enjoy.

Spring dressing
1 small shallot or the white part of one scallion or the white part of one stalk of green garlic
juice of one lemon
1/2 cup best olive oil
2 tablespoons roasted hazelnut oil
half a teaspoon of salt, or to taste.
fresh pepper, about 15 turns of the mill
a small handful of chopped chives or about 2 tablespoons very thinly sliced shallot greens

Chop the shallot bulb, scallion, or green garlic bulb very finely and marinate in the lemon juice for fifteen minutes, with the salt added. Don’t skip the marinating step. After fifteen minutes stir in the other ingredients, shake in a jar, taste for seasoning, and use. Any not used immediately will last a day or two in the refrigerator.

20 Feb

Books Worth Reading: food gardening and the chicken micro-flock

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, edible landscaping, front yard gardening, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .


The New Food Garden is the newest volume by Frank Tozer, an author I admire for his complete and knowledgable gardening books that don’t seem to get the attention that they deserve. This book is about how to create an integrated property producing vegetables, fruit, and pleasure. He uses permaculture principles but doesn’t get dogmatic about it. There are good sections on garden design, fruit trees and trees generally, “hard drive” infrastructure garden stuff such as paths, buildings, and greenhouses, and lots of information about outdoor living areas that assumes you will want to live in and enjoy your garden as well as harvest food from it. There are brief but interesting sections on a variety of subjects that give you a good framework for more detailed reading, such as fencing, water features, and use of human urine and humanure. It doesn’t include much info on growing specific vegetables, because he’s already written an entire book about that (and a very good one, by the way.)
This and Mini Farming are my favorites of the scads of new gardening books that I’ve looked over this winter. What’s the difference between them? MIni Farming emphasizes very precise soil amendment techniques and concentrates on maximizing returns in small spaces. Tozer takes a more relaxed approach in which compost, mulch, and other organic techniques are used, parts of the property are used as living areas rather than producing a food return, and fertility builds at nature’s pace. Please also note that Mini Farming has very detailed info on integrating chickens into the small layout for meat and eggs, while Tozer is a vegetarian and includes no information on food use of animals. The best solution is to get both. They won’t go unused.
Best tip and best quote: “You probably never realized that you are a walking plant fertilizer factory and that every day you are literally pissing away money.”

City chicks is a very good collection of information for the chicken owner who plans to have a micro-flock of laying hens. There is lots of information about every aspect of keeping a few layers, clearly organized so that beginners can find what they need. If you plan to have a dozen hens or fewer and don’t plan to produce any meat, I would recommend this book above most others. Do be aware that there is zero information about butchering and meat production, so if you plan to replace your hens every couple of years to keep production up, you’ll need another source of information about how to get them into the stockpot.
Best tip: Use plastic laying mats inside the nesting boxes. These are like stiff artificial turf, and droppings don’t stick to them. They can be hosed clean. They keep the eggs clean and dry. The hens can’t scratch them out of the laying boxes as they will with other types of bedding. This matters, because they then lay on the bare floor of the box and the eggs can be cracked, which renders them useless and introduces the hens to egg-eating. They cost about $4 each. I got mine from Murray McMurray, but other hatcheries have them too.

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