Spring update

Posted on May 29, 2016 by BigDuke6

It’s been a busy spring, not much time to post and just working on getting all the plants pruned/in/maintained. I have two gardens, one at work and one at work so they’ve kept me hopping. I’m still on the path of planting all the various crops I’d need, and then getting them to yield and produce seed for the next season. And figuring out how to store and process them.

Here’s the highlights:

Berries

I have blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries all in big pots. This is working well so far, the only difficulties are keeping them watered in the summer and protecting them from pests. Everything else is well-documented on the web, the need for fertilizer and pruning, and various diseases (all which I’ve encountered). The pests are a big issue, I had to build a wood frame with plastic bird mesh to keep the catbirds out. They take every single mature blue and blackberry, but don’t seem to care about raspberries. That worked for the birds, but I had squirrels wiggle under the mesh and trample one of plant’s canes. I added a 48″ fence, but they raised that up and did it again, unbelievably. So, they had to go the hard way which I’ll leave to the imagination. The far left plant has yellow leaves due to the broken canes, grrrrrr…If you look closely, you can make out the black mesh but it’s nearly invisible.

Berrypatch

Since using fruit fertilizer, all the plants have borne a heavy crop of berries and I’ve been able to eat them every day as well as freeze enough for cobblers. It is very satisfying, and I’d say if I had room for nothing else I’d grow berries.

Potatoes

Recall I had a few fall plants growing from seed, those all croaked BUT one produced a 1″ diameter tuber than ended up sprouting. This dude is doing well in the wet, cool weather:

It’s a lot leggier than the reds I have at work, but we will see how it yields. I started it in 3″ of soil, then added the rest as it grew. I will probably just see how this one fares before going nuts with the potato tower idea. Work spuds are rocking, the 8 I planted overwintered and came up in April just fine. In fact they are everywhere, so with luck they yield and I can try to finally save ’em in a mini fridge for fall. I plan on packing them in moist dirt at 40 degrees, that seemed to work great last winter.

Garlic

Last summer I had some grocery store garlic that was sprouting, so into the dirt they went. Big hit, they came right up and overwintered and are huge. I’m anxious to see how the bulbs form, it can be hit or miss but they sure look healthy. There’s bunching onions and Valencias mixed in, those all did well too. The fence is to keep out the rabbits, which ATE THE ONIONS.

Garlic

Seed production

The chives finally bloomed (beautiful purple flowers), I got a small quantity of seed which I’ll fridge for the fall. Oregano and celery are forming, so those ought to be ready soon. I think that was everything I planted, it all went to seed but took 2 years in some cases.

Corn

I have 32 Tophat sweet corn plants at work, I got them in early this year and they are about 2 1/2 feet tall. I’m hoping they will produce fully formed ears, I hit them with shots of nitrogen at sowing and again recently. That seems to the be the key, it definitely made the wheat head out.

Impeller pressed sunflower oil, DIY

Posted on January 22, 2016 by BigDuke6

Background

With the recent cold and rainy weather, I finally had time to try out making my own sunflower oil. Using the press I built (see the older post on sorghum syrup), I followed the instructions on this site: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/oilpress.html

I used oilseed purchased on Amazon, spendy but I got a load of seed for experiments and for fridge saving over a few years. There’s enough to sow a large plot with enough plants to generate a years supply of oil. My biggest issue was pests, mostly finches but also deer and squirrels. Once you have a large enough plot, there’s not enough pests to get the whole thing, assuming you put up a fence to keep the 4-legged critters out. Birds will eat as much immature seed as they possibly can, they are voracious pests so plan on loss unless you can add plastic mesh overhead.

The process

Starting with cleaned black oilseed, use a kitchen blender to shred the whole seeds until it turns into coarse flour. You can only do about a half quart at a time, once the flour forms the whole seeds stop getting to the blade. Heat the flour up in the oven until it gets to about 150 F, this allows the oil to become less viscous and flow out of the slug inside the press. Don’t be afraid of overheating it, it cools down quickly and you really need a hot press to get the oil out. It will help to preheat the press itself, it will keep the slug warm. You will also want to add heat to the press with a heat gun, to keep it from cooling off.

Load the press full, then compress it by hand to pack as much in as you can. The sleeve will compress 3-4 times in volume, so expect that. You will also need a very large force, I used a 2 ton hydraulic press for the pressure. This was just adequate, the press was binding and at the limit of what I felt comfortable with. Still, it worked very well but could use refinement.

Towards the end of the pressing

I initially got nothing out of the slug, I was thinking “this is a bust” but it finally began flowing out the ports. It took a while, applying heat, cranking the press, and letting it rest. It eventually compacted to an end stage where no additional oil flowed, that’s time to collect and filter the oil.

The spent slug (turd to some LOL)

Looks like wood ash, but it’s just the flour. It is as hard as a rock, and requires a large screwdriver and mallet to break free from the press sleeve. Lots of people complain about this, the little screw presses are really tough to clean from what I hear. I’m also not sure they generate enough force to clear all the oil from the “cake”.

Collecting and filtering

I heated the pan, and poured the hot oil into a coffee filter lined funnel on top of a 25 mL graduated cylinder. I wanted to accurately measure the yield, and I got just about 50 mL from a quart of loose seed (not flour). This seems to be about the right yield, looking at reference site’s numbers. It looks great, nice and clear but took overnight to clear the last of the oil through the paper filter. Coffee filter are around 15 microns, this is too small for a gravity filter and especially oil. I will get a 25 micron mesh and see how that goes, I don’t recommend paper for an oil filter unless you pressurize. Next steps are to fry some stuff in the oil, it’s in the fridge waiting for the test. Supposedly oil will turn rancid quickly at room temps, so I’m being cautious.

Winter time harvest

Posted on January 15, 2016 by BigDuke6

Wheat Bread

I finally got around to grinding the wheat I grew, then making bread. I used an Oster bread maker, it worked quite well but still needs improvement. I didn’t know about the need to use less yeast and let the dough rise for 3 hours, that avoids the collapsed top common to the heavy wheat flour. I also skipped the multiple knead/punch/rise steps, I found it’s better to just do a single 12 minute knead and then a slow rise. It makes the loaf a lot lighter. Here’s the result:

This was a 1.5 lb loaf, as you can see it was pretty decent in terms of the rise and the density although I kick myself for not letting it rise to the top of the pan. I was worried it would collapse, but I don’t think that would have happened. It tastes great, it was the Oster manual recipe and no complaints about that. Pretty cool, I went from a handful of seed to actual bread. I’m out of homegrown wheat, so I am using the Emergency Essentials cans to continue the breadmaking process improvements. I hope to eventually make first class bakery style bread, but this is perfectly acceptable for survival.

Potatoes

Recall the red new potatoes I put in the planter? Well, those grew like mad until Christmas and then died. They did make a fair size crop of new tubers, I was so excited to see the little guys buried in the dirt:

I boiled these and we ate some with butter and thyme, then the rest fried. They had a very delicate flavor, I’m not a big potato guy but they were as good as the store. Win there too.

Things have settled down now that cold weather is here, not much to do outside just waiting for the last heavy freezes to pass to plant again. I’ll probably try the wheat bread again, and see how much better I can make it.

The winter garden

Posted on December 21, 2014 by BigDuke6

It’s almost Christmas, and the carrots and broccoli are still green and outside. This was an unintentional experiment, I was too lazy to move them indoors but now it’s fun to see what happens. Average overnight temps are in the mid to high 30s, and it can get in the 60s during the day.

The broccoli has flowered already, and doing it again which was a treat. Delicate yellow flowers in the late fall and winter, they are what comprises the broccoli heads before harvesting. Mine were tiny and hardly worth cutting, but they made great blooms.

Onions, peppers, and berries are in the garage and are producing but very slowly. I enjoy getting berries in December, and the peppers will probably ripen in the spring when the temps go back up.

Berries!

Both the Caroline and Heritage plants made a third crop, these are the berries. Blackberries are outside overwintering.

Onions making seed pods

I got a ton of green onions from the other pot, this one was an experiment to see how long I could stretch it and still get usable produce. Seeds pods were a mulligan… Mild hot peppers are in the background, creeping along.

Other developments

I harvested seeds from just about everything, they are in paper envelopes in the fridge being dormant. I will plan these guys next spring, fingers crossed I’ll get plants despite them being hybrids. Winter wheat went in last week, I learned to plant the correct density and to add the correct top dress nitrogen fertilizer at sowing. This is what the farmers do, I’m learning agonizing slowly what they all know. Apparently spring wheat isn’t too common here due to the heat, mostly winter wheat which I was about a month behind on getting in. The summer/fall crops I put in were stunted and moldy, lack of nitrogen and bad timing. But they did make wheat berries, which will get planted come March. I could have three wheat crops, just about evenly spaced in time but the late summer would be iffy.

Sunflower oil

Here’s some of the seeds I got from my sunflowers.

PITA to get the seeds off the plant. I found a link to a homebrew oil press, and got the steel pipe to fab the outer housing. Looks like I have to stick the seeds in blender and then heat and compress the pellet to extract the oil.

http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/oilpress.html

These seeds weren’t the kind you see in the store, they are less robust and the husk is tightly bound to the kernel. I have about a 3/4 quart of oil seed, hopefully I can get some oil to see if it’s worth a damn. If not, I can buy some seed to test the press and then fool with the sunflowers later. I will eventually need to build or buy a huller, apparently they are very uncommon and don’t work worth a hoot. The principal is simple enough, a rough rotating cone working in a tapered bore with a feed slot and adjustable spacing but they execution is bad. I can fab a cast iron model but I might try to score an antique off Ebay to save time.

Flying Pests

Look closely. Fargin’ goldfinches pillaging my plants, so a lesson is to factor that in. I figure a 50’x50′ area will produce way too many for a few birds to make a dent in. Bees LOVED these, which offset my fury at the finches. But who can stay mad at them, they are just too darn cute.

Mini-garden pics

Posted on June 22, 2014 by BigDuke6

Compare the original “just geminated/planted” pics to these.

Bell Peppers, Hot peppers (see the red ripe one..)

The bell peppers are just starting to peek out from the flower buds, teeny weeny things right now.

Jalapeno Peppers

Yielding like a mother, just had one. OMG. They are so tasty, just the right heat. Got 25 seeds from one slice, I’ll see if it germinates.

Broccoli. Rocking in the woefully small pot, no heads yet.

Here’s everything else:

Onions,Carrots (made almost 100% and are now transplanted), Front sunflowers (to the right next to the curb)

Frontsun

Rasperry, deck sunflowers (babies)

The bad bunny ate some of the back sunflower plants, so they are up on the deck. Ordered two more raspberry and Darrow blackberry plants, they will be here soon. I’m hooked on having these berries every day, I just walk out and pick some and drop ’em in my cereal. I only get a few every other day, but I should be getting loads with 5 plants going. I’ll need to T-trellis them next year, but they are manageable now.

Spring Wheat

If you look closely, you can see the green wheat berries and head on the taller stalks. The crop is a lot shorter than I thought, Ag sites says 2-4 ft but I recall it being way taller. Maybe it’s going to grow more, but to be heading out is odd. I saw some winter what that the combines were just getting ready to go into, it was really short too so maybe that’s what we get here.

All of this (except the wheat) is being grown in planters in minimal space, it could fit on a balcony or even in a sunny bay window. I think someone could have a decent amount of produce in a 6’x6′ area, especially if they build a rack like a gym bleacher or step ladder to use the volume.

Pretty amazing, really. And I’m just going through the exercise of growing everything on my Day366 list to make sure I can do it for real if needed. It ought to be just a matter of scaling it up then. I’m a ways off from getting through the list, this was the easy stuff and I’ll be doing more exotic things like vertical potatoes, sugar cane, rice, peanuts, beans, and sorghum later.

Odds N Ends

The lettuce has ended, started another round of Simpson leaf in a planter but zero germination. Not sure what happened, but going 1/8″ deep this time to see if I can get it going mid-summer. Trying spinach again, 5 of 10 came up in partial shade so reseeding that at 1/8″. Kale is kicking it, 4 of 4 and sprouted in 3 days. Replaced the original lettuce with Jericho (warm weather variety) , and started a pot of Orach which is some Asian green that likes it hot. All this is an effort to make salad year round, need that green leafy veg. Supposedly fall is another time to grow all this but I’m skeptical, it seems to only like cool weather with rain and overcast.

The mini-garden at 60 days

Posted on June 13, 2014 by BigDuke6

Results

We are now eating some of the mini-garden produce, so far just Romaine lettuce and raspberries. TOTALLY WORTH IT!!! I never had off the vine berries, oh man they are good. So this effort is paying off aside from any emergency planning aspects.

The goal of this project was to plant everything intended for the long haul, to see:

How each seed came up and how robust the plant was in our climate
How much area was needed for each plant
Any special considerations (amount of light, water, pests)
What was the yield per foot
If the plants could be successfully propagated, i.e. hybrid seed recovery/storage/germination

I should have a good idea of 1-4 this fall, bullet 5 next summer. I’ll also plant the fall stuff to see what happens, although the containers will complicate things. It’s not the same as being in the ground, I’ll bring them inside so they won’t freeze but no idea if that will interfere with the natural cycle. Probably not, we’ve had strawberries winter over that way and be just fine next spring. Hopefully that’s the case with everything else.

Lessons learned and other tidbits

Pests

Definitely needed rabbit fencing. My first round of sunflowers nearly got mowed flat by bunnies, the little ones seem to be the culprits. Putting up 24″ high graduated rabbit fence fixed that, so any garden that is accessible will need to be fenced in. You will need to acquire enough rolls to go around the vulnerable plants, with stakes. May need to bury it 6″ to keep them from tunneling under, although I haven’t had that happen yet. Cabbage worms infested the broccoli, we picked them off but it’s wise to have the Bt or other spray on hand. They would have stripped the plants had we not seen them soon enough.

Containers

I’m leaning towards long planter boxes as the best solution to container growing. They are light, cheap, volumetrically efficient and stack for storage. Pots are OK, they look good (we have a bunch of really nice ceramic decor units) but are cumbersome and waste precious space. I’m contemplating making up some wooden stands, sort of like bleachers but with treated 2x2s. I think you could get a TON of planters in a small area, it would be mostly vertical up to 5 ft. A 60 degree angle would minimize the footprint. That’s next year’s work though.

Sunlight

All the seed packets say “likes full sun”. Maybe that’s full sun in Norway, but down here it nukes the plants. Lettuce and spinach need partial shade, as do the bell peppers. They seem to want the light but need misting in the afternoon to avoid wilting. Everything else is OK so far, it might be that I started the peppers as nursery seedlings didn’t harden off enough. The ones I grew from seed seem to be holding up better.

Onions have risen from the dead

I was planning a wake for these guys, they were all dejected and droopy but have rallied. The initial shoots looked awful, but they took off after I stopped fooling with trying to trim the shoots and moving them around for best lighting. I figured they either lived or died and there was nothing else I could do. I put a few in the ground, they are good but I need to figure out how to get the seedlings out of the starter pot and separated. I went overboard with seeds, I only needed 3-4 but I have an onion forest. Good problem to have I suppose…

Successive plantings

I’m going for round 2 on the lettuce and carrots, I want to see if I can stage them to produce the rest of the season. Also trying the spinach again, this time in a planter box and in shade.

Kale

It would be tough to get enough calcium without dairy, turns out kale is high in that. We have seed on hand, so a planter of that went in. It’s with the rest of the greens, hopefully it makes it. I’ve not eaten it raw, no idea what’s it’s like.

The spinach bolts..and the need to try things out

Posted on May 28, 2014 by BigDuke6

The wheat is now 6″ tall, it looks just like fescue and seems to be doing well. Sun flowers all came up fine, BUT some of the babies got scythed down by the multitude of rabbits roaming the ‘burb. I sprayed ’em with hot pepper solution, it didn’t really do much except to stain the leaves and make them sad looking. Some survived and have decent stems, I think the rabbits only liked the new growth ( mature stalks are really tough). I went ahead and planted 8 each in long planter boxes on the back patio, it gets 5-6 hours of sun and is pest-free so maybe they will do better initially.

Onions are being difficult. My starter pot is full of spindly babies, they supposedly love light but seem also to fall over in full sun. I’m trimming them to 4″ to foster stem girth and basically pampering them full tilt. I have 5 more started in the ground, out front by the sunflowers, so it’s Darwinism time. They may need to be outside in dirt from the get go, we will see.

Lettuce is small and slow growing, they are getting there but they might bolt before I get enough to make a small bowl of greens. Spinach is over, bolted, so we are eating what’s left and letting the rest go to seed. I discovered spinach likes cool weather, so that means I get like 2-4 weeks after the last hard frost and bolting (spring), and who knows in the fall. This area flips to hot and stays there until October, so salad greens may be highly seasonal or just a buttload of small stuff when I can grow it. Hot peppers? Hell yeah, they are booming so there’s gonna be plenty of fiery “apocalypse produce”. That was supposed to be a occasional spicy treat, not sustenance but I’ll take it. Thank God something’s actually yielding. Broccoli looks good so far, carrots OK but small, bell peppers in the Jalapeno category i.e. rocking. Those were seedlings, but I also have seeds coming up as well.

The lesson is to ALWAYS TRY THE PLAN BEFORE THE CRISIS. There’s so many things that go wrong, there was no way I could simply dig up my yard and plant random Home Depot seed and expect a cornucopia to blossom forth. Yeah that sounds retarded but seeds are a part of most survival packages, sort of pointless really without the practical experience of actually growing things. I’m learning a TON of things about gardening, I grew up on a farm and we had one but I didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on. I actually was more into my Mom’s activities, pressure canning and sewing but i didn’t pick up that much there either. More than gardening, sadly.

Last random topic: sugarcane. I was thinking about how to make sugar, checked into bees and decided that was a bad idea. But, you can raise sugarcane here and it grows like weeds. You cut the stalks, press, then cook the juice and voila it is syrup. I’m trying this next year, along with raising rice in a mini-paddy. This is a lot of fun, plus I get valuable survival skills just in case. And it baffles the neighbors.

Small scale planting results

Posted on May 12, 2014 by BigDuke6

Vegetables

I finally got around to planting a few vegetables, a tiny plot of spring wheat, and sunflowers. I have very little spare area, it’s all landscaped so I did the vegs in pots:

Onions, carrots, Bell/hot peppers, lettuce, spinach, and broccoli. All seeds sprouted just fine, they will be cramped in the pots but we will see how that goes. This is about cramming crops in small spaces, most of us won’t have a lot of area in a crisis. I need to build potato towers for the root vegetables, got the storage figured out (sand boxes and net bags) but nothing to put in them yet.

Wheat

Nothing to see on the wheat, hasn’t come up yet but here’s the seed:

5 pounds of hard spring wheat. I hand broadcast versus the standard row/seed drill method, should give me the densest plot and yield. If I’m super lucky, I can make a small loaf of bread when it’s done in the fall. The soil here isn’t really what I was used to in the Midwest, more clay so it may not yield the same. It’s tilled down to about 8 inches and augmented with organics, weather is the same so maybe it will be OK. I found an idea online for a thresher, it’s a section of threaded rod with two chain flails driven by a drill motor. All that sits in a 5 gallon plastic bucket, they dumped the wheat heads in and churned it up until it was all threshed. Winnowing was with a fan, pouring it on a tarp. Good idea, but I immediately though of improvements. I want to mount the axle in bushings, add more flails, a screen to catch the stalks and big chaff, a hole in the lid to feed the wheat stalks, and second bucket below with a fan blower as the winnower. That will wait until fall, nothing to test it on….

Sunflowers

Nothing to see here, ’cause just put them in. I planted a variety that produces the highest weight of oil seed per acre, and a few dwarf ornamentals to keep it from looking like Wierdo Beardo’s commune (although my wife differs). Once these come in, they will get go in a homemade press for sunflower oil.

The point of this exercise is to gauge how much seed and area I need to produce a given amount of grain and vegetables. I also want to let things go to seed and see what will come up the following year, the seed is hybrid and won’t grow true but should do something. One thing I did find is how viable seed is in the fridge, we had some Batchelor Buttons from 2008 that all sprouted. So, seed seems to be a low-risk factor and you can buy a load of it for very little money. It’s great insurance against a food shortage assuming you can hang on for the time it takes to grow.

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