It's Easy Being Green

It’s been a wild spring around the Half-Acre Homestead. The weather has been nothing but weird with our lack of winter and early warm-up. Following the tornadoes we had to dodge in March, we’ve been struck by two hail storms recently. The hail pelted our plants that emerged from their winter slumber early but luckily didn’t leave too much damage behind.

Panic set in again at the Half-Acre Homestead this week as we got a late season Frost Warning issued for southwestern Indiana. Just a week before, our normally conservative agricultural extension agent had given the all-clear signal that people could go ahead and plant their precious seedlings and begin the gardening season.

Mother Nature had a different idea though when she ushered in some colder air from our good friends up north. We literally had just replanted a wave of rogue tomato seedlings and some rogue pumpkins that have sprouted up around the yard. To make it even worse, we planted them on the hillside out by our little pond which gets a considerable amount of frost compared to the protected confines of our square foot garden.

Luckily, with a 7 month old in the house, we have a stockpile of baby food jars in the garage. We never know when these might come in handy so we always keep a basket or two of them around. We were able to turn a basket full of baby food jars into an easy, DIY cloche that would protect our seedlings from two nights of frosty temps.

If an early season frost sneaks up on newly planted seedlings, turn a baby food jar into an easy DIY cloche to protect them.

After two nights of frost, we were able to lift the jars on Friday and found all the seedlings had survived. Safely tucked away in their jar, warmth and condensation helped them through the night. Well, most of them. Our Darling Daughter Everly thought the already dead raspberry cane out by the pond needed some extra help so she loaded it up with baby food jars.

While it wasn’t useful in protecting the long-departed raspberry cane, it made for a nice rustic art installation on the Half-Acre Homestead. We shall call it “Bottle Bush”. In the meantime, try to track down a friend, neighbor or relative who has a little one and get your hands on a basket of your own, easy, do-it-yourself garden cloches. Enjoy!

Everly's art installation out by the pond was created using a dead raspberry cane and several baby food jars. I think the effect is rather rustic, almost primitive.

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With some gentle prodding from Homestead Hottie, I finally ordered our seeds for the 2012 gardening season. Yes, it does seem a tad late to be ordering seeds but technically our average last frost date here in southwestern Indiana doesn’t hit until mid April. This year I’m pretty sure the last frost was back in early March!

Image courtesy Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

Replacement seeds and of course some fun new ones were ordered through Baker Creek Heirlooms this year. We love all the wild new offerings that appear in the Burpee catalog and the others that stuff our mailbox each year. However, we really want to try and keep as many open-pollinated varieties as possible so we can save seed from year to year. We also want to avoid seed that is genetically modified or tainted with GMO genes. Luckily Baker Creek can fit both those requirements and host one of the largest collections of heirlooms from around the world.

Here is what we ordered for the spring and summer growing seasons (yes, there will be another order in the fall):

Tom Thumb Lettuce
Mignonette Bronze Lettuce
Amish Deer Tongue Lettuce
Merveille des Quatre Saisons Lettuce

Amish Deer Tongue Lettuce. Image courtesy Baker Creek Heirloom Seed

You can never be too sure what variety of lettuce you’re going to end up liking best so I always think its better to buy more than less in lettuce seed. The flavors and textures are so wide ranging so its better to try several different varieties at the same time. I’m really excited about the Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce. Dating back to the mid 1800’s, this French heirloom lettuce is a good grower in every season except freezing weather. I can’t wait to try the buttery leaves in our first homegrown salad of the year.

Di Firenze Fennel
Purple Podded Pole Bean
Red-Seeded Asparagus Bean
Garden Huckleberry

Purple Podded Pole Bean. Image courtesy Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

We have never grown fennel before so we’ll try our green thumbs with this licorice-scented bulb that is a favorite amongst Italian cooks. I can smell it already! The Purple Podded pole bean will replace a pole bean that didn’t do much around the Half-Acre Homestead last year while providing a pop of edible color that will not only look beautiful in the garden but provide some fun on our dinner plates too. While it’s not hard to get Everly to eat her green beans, purple pods should prove to be even more enticing.

Red-Seeded Asparagus Bean is an Asian “yard long” bean that is said to be both highly productive and beautiful. The very long pods grow to a freakish 24″ long but are said to be stringless and have small seeds. They’re said to be very resistant to heat, humidity and insects all while producing a bumper crop of tender and tasty pods. We can never have enough berries around the Half-Acre Homestead so we’re going to try our hand at Huckleberries.

Patisson Golden Marbre Scallop
Bennings Green Tint Scallop Squash
Bowling Red Okra
Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach
Polish Linguisa
Basil – Lime
Stowell’s Evergreen Sweet Corn

Bennings Green Tint Scalloped Squash. Image courtesy Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

We like pattypan or scallop type squash so we’ll finally add a green and yellow version to our garden this year. Bowling Red Okra will replace our current outage of red okra seeds. The burgundy colored stems, okra pods and tinted flowers are stunning in the vegetable garden or flower bed. We are continuously struggling with spinach from year to year. Perhaps its the variety of seeds we have but they never seem to grow right and are often sloooooowwww growing. Bloomsdale Long Standing is supposed to be heat resistant and a large leaf spinach. It sounds better so hopefully it will turn out that way. Polish Linguisa will round out our tomato collection as a sauce tomato. Lime basil just sounds flavorful enough to through on some chicken this summer and Stowell’s Evergreen Sweet Corn will be our protest against GMO corn this year.

Of course we have a whole box filled with seed still but I won’t bore you with all that. Undoubtedly you’ll get to see the results of that over the course of the summer. I was able to keep this seed order around $33, down from a first tally of $69. I slashed and burned my list because if I could spend $500 on a yearly seed order, I really would. Now its time to start saving my own seed and slash the seed bill even more.

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As you round out your seed orders for the 2012 vegetable garden, have you considered adding any heirloom vegetables or fruits to your shopping list? This year we are making the push to dive even deeper into heirlooms and I encourage every gardener and homesteader to do the same.

Heirlooms are open-pollinated varieties of plants that are often 60 or more years old. Most date back 100 years or more. Heirlooms are the truest plants, often showcasing eyestopping individuality and some of the finest flavors you can get in a fruit or vegetable. Aside from sticking it to large agri-business based seed companies who deal in hybrid or Genitically Modified seeds, heirloom seed can be saved and replanted year after year. You can read more about it here.

If you’d like to learn more about heirloom gardening, you should pick up a copy of a brand new book on the subject. The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Heirloom Vegetables: The 100 Easiest-to-Grow, Tastiest Vegetables for Your Garden by Marie Iannotti.

If the 250 pages of scintillating photographs of heirlooms don’t have your taste buds watering and your green thumb twitching, I’m not sure what will. Iannotti gracefully shares her 100 favorite heirlooms, treasures that should be kept under lock and key. She also shares the wonderful stories that round out the unique history of each featured heirloom.

Don’t let the title fool you either. This book should also be a prize for any gardener with more advanced skills. I give it two green thumbs up!

Now you can win a copy of the book along with a spectacular heirloom garden prize pack including 35 packets of heirloom seeds and a bareroot tree! Click the link to head to Timber Press and enter The Heirloom Garden Giveaway

What’s your favorite heirloom fruit or vegetable to grow?

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You are what you eat. We’ve all heard the phrase before but have you ever wondered if there is actually any truth to it? Believe it or not, your diet is the key to your overall health and well-being. Good, healthy foods can promote the growth of healthy cells throughout your body, repairing damage. Bad foods, mainly those that are processed and far from what you’d pluck out of your garden, can actually injure your body’s cells, causing damage and disease.

As you pull out of that fast food drive through or pull the frozen dinner from your oven, have you ever stopped to wonder how your grandparents ate? Over the course of the past 100 years our diet has rapidly changed to include processed food, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and a host of additives and preservatives not known until recently. Eating has become less about keeping us happy and healthy and more about the pleasure of quick and tasty foods. Take a look at this scary comparison:

Here is what the average person ate over the course of the year in 1900:
- 131 pounds of homegrown vegetables
- 5 pounds of sugar
- Consumed small amounts of oil
- Didn’t drink soda

Now compare that to the average diet of a person in the year 2000:
- 11 pounds of homegrown vegetables
- 200 pounds of sugar
- 30 pounds of refined oils
- 53 gallons of soda

Evansville was recently named the "Fattest City in America" and its no wonder why. This town loves its fried food and even hosts a week-long festival based on two city blocks of fried food booths.

If that comparison doesn’t just make your stomach reel I don’t think there is much hope for you or your future health. The Western diet is out of control. We see it on our once a month trips to Sam’s Club where the fattest of the fat are lined up at each sample cart, stuffing their faces. Then they waddle down the aisle and throw in the most processed box of junk they can lay their pudgy little fingers on. With each bite, Americans are killing their families more and more.

Evansville, the city closest to our Half-Acre Homestead, just received the most glamorous title of the “Fattest City in America” in 2011. That’s right, we have more overweight citizens per capita than any other city in the United States. No wonder its so hard to find good, wholesome food in this town. With a McDonald’s on every corner (and literally I’ve never seen so many fast food joints in my life), the food conglomerates just keep raking in the dough while they make people fatter and sicker.

If you haven’t watched the documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, you should. During our recent trip to visit family in Arizona, we sat down to watch this with my in-laws. It was shocking but inspiring all at the same time. If you’re worried it might be dry, don’t worry. The creators made sure to punctuate their points with entertaining snippets of animation. It proves that you can make changes to your diet and see almost immediate improvements in your health and well-being.

We need to make some serious changes in this country. Food needs to be more than just a passing thought better left to big agribusiness and corporate conglomerates that devise ways to generate the most amount of “food” for the least amount of money. We don’t have a lot of land on which to grow real food here at the Half-Acre Homestead. The little bit that we do have is productive and this year the goal is to make it even more so. Homestead Hottie and I are at a loss with our winter diet right now.

We introduced Everly to fresh fruits and vegetables from the moment she started on solid foods. She has grown to appreciate fresh, homegrown foods even more, often acting revolted with processed foods.

We can’t wait for the bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables that will soon be bursting at the seams out back and spilling onto the dinner table in our kitchen. Our life and our health depends on it and yours should too.

Will you be growing some of your own food this year? What do you plan to grow?