Snow, Ice and Seedlings

Somehow it is still winter.  We had a few warmish days and then we were sent straight back to the teens again.  I'm anticipating that the schools will be closed for tomorrow due to the snow and ice storm headed our way, I must check our inventory of hot chocolate and prep some cookies.  I'm sure that the sleds will be out and there will be lots of wet mittens and gloves tomorrow.

Despite the wet and cold, I look to spring.  My big box of seeds has emerged from the closet and I have given it a good clean out, anything dated before 2010 is gone, but that still leaves quite a lot.  I generally don't plant a whole packet of most things, so I have a bit of everything left each year.  If anyone local needs veggie seeds--don't buy any until you check with me, I might have half a packet leftover from the last couple of years. The seed marketing folks don't want you to believe that seeds can be good for several years, but they are, there may be a few more duds each year, but most are still good.

The seed box, before editing.

I looked back over my notes for my garden last year and realized that I put out my cool season greens waaaaaaaaaaay too late, which may be why they were ravaged by bugs and slugs.  So, knowing this, I pulled out my seedling heat mat on Monday, and the  mini-greenhouses and dove into the cool season vegetable world.  Kale (2 kinds), collards, broccoli, broccoli raab, mustard spinach (Komatsuna), Swiss chard (2 kinds), Chinese cabbage (for kimchi!!!) and two types of bok choy seeds went into the seed starting mix.  As of this morning, less than 48 hours later, there are many germinating  seeds just popping to the surface.  I'll be firing up the plant lights  in the garage tomorrow.  In about two weeks, I'll plant a bit more broccoli and broccoli raab.

Seedlings to be (I hope)

Despite the cold, I have been back to the horse rescue shoveling manure into tubs to haul home.  The top two inches are frozen, but after I break through the crust everything is shovel-able.  I've extended my long narrow front garden another five feet and will widen it when the daytime temps hover closer to the mid-thirties.  My husband, the plant doctor, says that he has been getting e-mails at work predicting more dry weather in California this year, which would cause much higher vegetable and agricultural product prices because of poor harvests.  He is encouraging me to keep the back garden because of this.  If he helps weed and water, I'm all for it.

It's time to pull out the wire fencing and leather gloves to fashion critter resistant cages, the battle with the squirrels and bunnies last year destroyed any hopes I have for ever raising uncaged okra, cantaloupes or cucumbers.  I'd put the cukes in and within a few hours the squirrels would have them uprooted, I'd put them in again and they would repeat the process until the plants died and I gave up.  They didn't mess with the pumpkins or watermelons though.  The cantaloupes and okra would be nice little seedlings with a few leaves in the morning and by afternoon they would be merely a tiny piece of stem extending slightly above the ground.  I'd replant and you know the story.

So, I'm off to get organized for the sledding, shoveling and pre-season gardening!

All this, for Pudding

Before I dive into my topic today, I just thought I would note that we were very happy to discover that the baby bunnies are alive despite all of their early trials.  My daughter and her friend spotted them hopping out of the zebra grass onto the lawn yesterday evening. 

Onto my topic:

I would really love to have a glass of milk, but at the moment I cannot.  A glass of milk will probably cost me in the neighborhood of $200-350, to start, and I will have to wait a year for it.  I haven't had cow's milk since 1995 when I discovered that the reason I was always sick was that I was flooding my system with a food that I loved, but sending my immune system into the stratosphere.  My sister's allergist suggested that she give up milk to see if it helped her and within a few days she was on the phone with me saying, "You have to give up milk, just for a few days, to see what happens!"  I did.  Within three days I realized that I was making myself sick with cow's milk, my energy returned, my skin cleared, my head stopped hurting, the fog lifted...it was a revelation.

I'm allergic to cow's milk and anything with the slightest trace of cow's milk.  It took a while in the early dark days of the internet to find all the secret names of cow's milk that appear on food labels and all the sneaky places that it turns up--canned tuna for example, who would think to check canned tuna for cow's milk products??? Frozen whole chicken breasts? Whole turkeys (injected with broth and whey for moistness)?? Pepperoni?  French fries? Salt and Vinegar chips??  It was goodbye to most of the processed foods in my diet.

To get real milk, I have to have goat's milk, which isn't easy.  The goat's milk and goat's milk powder available in grocery stores tastes like the smell of a male goat when the females are in season, "musk" is too nice of a word for it, "rank" and "stench" are getting closer. 

I know from experience that goat's milk directly from the farm can be glorious, in Florida it was pretty easy to find.  I just had to tell the farmer that it was for pets and/or livestock and they could sell it to me, in the state where I live now that won't work.  There are no dairies that have processing facilities in the area, so to have a glass of milk I am going to have to buy a goat.  Since we don't have the facilities or experience of raising goats and since we can't afford to buy two (or more) and equip a mini farm, I am buying one and it will board with a farmer not too far away.  She'll provide the care it will need and lots of buddies to hang around with. 

I'll get the milk.  I'll be able to make pudding that sets, a white sauce once in a while, my decaf will taste better and it goes really well with Oreos (thank you Nabisco for taking the milk out of Oreos a couple of years back, I had missed them) and big slices of cake (the couple of times a year that I have them).  I will make my own yogurt and cheese and not have to drive nearly thirty miles to the closest health food store.

I like the idea that it is not a highly processed food like soy milk and almond milk, that the calcium in it is not just calcium supplements ground up and blended into it.  It has significant protein, unlike rice milk and almond milk. 
Best of all it tastes like milk, cow's milk drinkers might disagree, but it tastes like milk to me, a person who hasn't had milk (on purpose) in 18 years.

My daughter, who has spent many of her weekends over the years on goat farms is ecstatic, she loves goats.  In Florida, it took about two hours every weekend to buy our milk. She loves the fact that we will go visit our goat regularly, she has been helping the farmer already trimming hooves and shaving them.  We haven't even picked out our baby yet, we need to look at some that have been born already on another farm and decide if we want one of those or one that will be born in September from one of the sweet and very pregnant goats we have met so far.  My daughter is all ready to show it in 4H, we just found a group nearby...this goat may take over our lives.  All this for pudding.

Baby Bunnies--The Conflicted Gardener

Finding a nest of baby bunnies turns everyone to mush, but upon reflection the gardener in me says, "Oh, no!!"

My sister and her husband came to visit for several days. After seeing the sights and kicking back they, usually busy people, suddenly needed to do something productive.  My brother-in-law keyed in on the over-grown mass of zebra grass that I had done battle with in May only to extract a tiny piece of it.  So, after dinner one evening he headed out back with a shovel and proceeded to dig out half of the mass for me.  It was only after we had removed one of the two giant clumps and used a pruning saw to chop it into three smaller sections did he head over to remove the second.  It was then he noticed the fluffs of fur, the little ears, the baby bunnies, who nested between the ginormous clumps.  Before he had started the project he asked about the variety of snakes that lived around us, but it never occurred to him to inquire about bunnies.

For the last couple of weeks we had noticed that around dinner time a good sized wild rabbit was hanging about near our back door.  Not usually a problem except for the good sized pointer who comes down the stairs every evening for her walk and bolts across the yard in frenzied pursuit of this bunny  with an unprepared human hanging on to the other end of the leash being jerked down the  three steps and across the lawn, struggling to get a foothold to pull the scent crazed dog back.

We had thought that maybe a neighbor had been feeding the rabbit, because it didn't seem to run whenever we came out the door, it just sat and watched us.  I started calling the rabbit Pierre, it was such a regular.  Well, now we know, I had it all wrong, this was no Pierre, Paige maybe, but not Pierre.  She was just guarding her nest and providing a diversion for the dog.

Standing over the little cuties we all started trying to figure out how to cover them up without hurting them and to encourage their mom to return.  We covered them with some of the straw mulch from an empty bed in the garden (where I had planted cantaloupe seeds only to find that something, probably a rabbit, had chomped the tops off of the two week old seedlings) to simulate the removed grass.

The chickens, sensing freshly turned soil, started scratching away, quickly removing some of our new mulch layer.  I set my daughter to pruning a lilac bush that had not had any care for probably a decade or two, and she laid the leafy branches gently over the nest.  Meanwhile I replanted the zebra grass on the steep hillside on the northwest side of the house to help reduce erosion.

Paige was seen in the yard this morning, not near the nest, but she is still around.  We haven't dared peek in on the little ones in case the worst has happened.  The zebra grass looks like it will take on the hill, I just need to water it a bit today. Now there is a known technique for getting the mass of grass removed and divided, my husband and I will remove the second clump in a few weeks when  the babies are grown and out.

After doing all this I laugh at myself, I'll probably spend the next couple of years trying to find creative ways to keep those little ones, and their babies, out of my garden. Dividing up the grass will create more bunny nesting spaces too!