The Girls Get A Day Out!

The chickens got out today. The wind blew open the coop door while I was collecting the eggs. They are outside every day, but in their big fenced area that we have covered with snow fencing. We do, occasionally, let them free range for an hour or so before bed when we are out there. They don't go far and come back inside the coop as soon as it starts to get dark.

This is the picture I usually get when the chickens are out and I come outside. They stand around on my feet begging for treats and attention. They are quite spoiled!

Today they got out in the morning and went exploring.







I quickly fenced off my ripening Queen Anne's Pocket Melon and cilantro seeds.








I wandered around with them for awhile, doing some light garden chores. I saw Rocky the rooster start to eat a sweet william I grew from seed. He called the hens over and they ate some of it too. I was getting worried when they left it and moved along to something else.


















They came to the new Russian sage. I was prepared to rescue it but they just ignored it and kept going. I hoped they wouldn't notice the 'Intense purple' amaranth ripening nearby. They didn't pay any attention to it, thank goodness!

They took a few bites out of the new aster I got in a trade. It has just now begun to bloom and is the most beautiful and bright shade of pink. They were soon bored with that. They tasted the snowball hydrangea and liked it but didn't eat much.

Since they sort of loosely follow me around (just like a dog does), I took them to the nasturtiums where they could have a good snack and not cause any real damage. They liked the nasturtiums!

I started to pick the ground cherries nearby drawing the attention and curiosity of the girls. They came around, cooing and chatting with me and asking me what I was doing.I had a small pile on the ground but thought it prudent to rescue them before the chickens discovered how good they are to eat!

I put them all in my shirt bottom. Looks like a good bit for the few plants we have.

With the chickens outside for awhile and beautiful weather, I decided to take this opportunity to shovel out the chicken house. Using shredded computer paper with the deep litter method like we do, it only gets emptied every few months. The wood based litter absorbes the nitrogen as it decomposes and they compost together in the chicken house so there is no ammonia smell. That waterer is empty. It leaks but I just haven't removed it yet.

Here it is all cleaned out with fresh new shredded paper.

I put it all on my new lasagna garden to be raked out evenly on another day. I was going to make this lasagna garden quite a bit larger but have decided to make two separate ones about this size instead. The other one is behind the chicken house.

We both had to work a few hours in the city during the afternoon, so we put the girls back into their safe fenced area. We lured them in with bread crumbs. They are so easy to manipulate and so sweet too!

Fried Green Tomatoes

Frost! We had frost last night! It took most of our tomato plants and left us with many, many, many green tomatoes. They will ripen off the vine, most of them anyway. The ripe San Marzano and Ailsa Craig tomatoes will be used for seed, since we will be growing them again next year.

We had so many green tomatoes tat we decided to fry a few of them.




First I sliced up some green tomatoes and some zucchini. I used San Marzano and Ailsa Craig tomatoes. I think the Ailsa Craigs were juicier and just better for this particular purpose.









I mixed up some cornmeal and flour, about half and half, added salt, pepper and onion powder. In another bowl I mixed a couple of eggs with some water and beat them until they 
were foamy.
















I put the slices into the egg, then into the cornmeal-flour mix. Some people (hubby included) like to "double dip" for frying. "Double dipping" is putting the wet veggie into the the egg and flour twice - egg, flour, egg, flour. I don't like to do this as it fills the eggs bowl with dried stuff and just makes a big, goupy mess.




Turn the slices over and fill the holes with the dry mix. Put them into the hot oil in the pan.













Fry the battered tomatoes and zucchini in the oil until they are a golden brown. Fry them as long as possible to cook the vegetables until tender.











Mmmmm! Fried green tomatoes and fried zucchini!









Let them cool a bit before you try to eat them. They will be very hot!! You can pick them up right off the plate and eat them with your fingers, or you can be fancy and eat them with a fork on their own little plate. You can also serve them as a side dish with dinner.

Saving Seeds

Autumn is my favourite time of the year! I love the cool, crisp weather and the wonderully diverse, bright colour scheme. I also like the lack of thick undergrowth and weeds. Late summer and early fall are the time of year when the plants decide it is time to reproduce for next year. I try to prevent this stage in the weeds, but get excited when my favouite flowers seeds are ready to harvest.

In order to have flower seeds, a plant has to have flowers. No flowers, no seeds. The flowers also have to stay on the plant to develop into seed pods. If you cut off the flowers for bouquets or cut off the dead flowers, you won't have seeds. I know it looks a bit messy with dead flowers aging in the garden, but it is necessary in order to have seeds from those flowers. If you want pristine gardens, perhaps you should have your "seed gardens" somewhere out of sight where the long dead flowers and stalks will not 
be seen.

I also like to save my special vegetable seeds. We grow a very sweet and fat cucumber that we like a lot. We have grown it from our own seed for a few years now. Cucumber and tomato seeds need special treatment in order to germinate the following spring. I will describe how to do that later in this post. This year I hand pollinated my squash to get more produce. I should have tied the male and female flowers closed before and after I hand pollinated them to keep the seed very pure, but I didn't. I will do that next year.

While I love my flowers and gardens, I also love seed collecting. Sometimes I have to remind myself that having a large and diverse collection of seeds is not the goal. I should be actually planting the seeds in order for them to be of any use. I not only plant the seeds for more plants in the garden, but use them for trading as well. This way I can trade all over the world for things I cannot buy here. It is very exciting to grow something rare and spectacular from a seed acquired by trading with another gardener from another country or even another continent.



I have a large unused field by the road that I plan to use as a repository for old flower seed. If the seed gets to be a year old and I still have it, I will scatter it in that field in the fall. This will be the first fall that I have done this. I am hoping for a field full of flowers next spring. I have a lot of cosmos, feverfew, calendula, peony poppy and pink yarrow seeds from 2008 to scatter in there soon. All are prolific reseeders. I am sure many will grow. I won't be using these old seeds for trade or sell, as the germination rates will not be as good as the 2009 seeds, but I can reap the harvest that does grow from those seeds for use the following year.

I started a seed bed this year for direct planting of seeds and to hold seedlings I started indoors until they are big enough to hold their own in the flower bed. I have helleborus seeds in there now, planted in July. They will need at least two months of moist warm summer temps planted in the ground and then two months of cold before they will germinate. I will be looking for these seedlings next spring. I did, also, plant some in trays on the front porch to bring in after their cold spell. I will put these indoors on the windowsill in Jan and hope for some tiny helleborus several weeks later. These are special seeds and must be sown while fresh, immediately after harvesting from the plant. If they are allowed to dry for very long, it will take several warm-cold spells to break dormancy and can take a long time. The seeds that I have were sent to me directly from the plant in a small plastic bag in damp perlite.

My flowers have been producing seed for a few weeks now. I have harvested many from the flowerbeds. These are the peony poppy seed pods drying. Each plant is labelled in the garden so I know what colour the seeds are, even though they are open pollinated. With seeds, you never know what you are going to get. With special seeds from a trade, I will plant all of them.

The poppy seed pods are cut to dry when the leaves turn brown and the plant starts to die. There is no point in trying to ripen the seeds 
any longer.



These are cranesbill geranium seed candles. They tend to pop when the seed is released and the seed will fly out of the container and into other seed containers drying various types of seed, so I keep them covered. The plant is covered with them now, but they are still green. Seed pods should not be picked until the pod turns brown to ensure that the seeds are ripe. Some seeds will ripen off the plant, but most of them need to grow into maturity on the live plant in order to be viable. There are many exceptions to this rule of thumb, of course.






I have just begun to get ripe ground cherries. This is the first year I have grown them and I will grow them again next year for jam. I think they are delicious! I will be saving my own seed from these this year. I have already used one ground cherry for seed harvest and dried them on a paper towel. I have read that they are prolific reseeders, so I expect most of the seed to germinate next spring without any 
special preparation.



I also save the seed from our cucumbers as these are the best cucumbers we have found. They are big around and great for sandwiches. They are ripe when they are yellow, turning a bright orange-red when over ripe. When they are ripe, they are very sweet. Cucumber and tomato seeds need special treatment to be viable the following year. The fruit needs to ripen completely before the seed is harvested. When it is ripe enough on the plant it can be picked and left at room temperature to ripen further. It should be left to ripen until it is soft and mushy before the seed is harvested. The seed is then put into a glass container and left to ferment even further for a few days. After another 2-3 days of fermentation, the seed can be washed, dried and stored for the following year.

Some seeds need a winter in the ground before they will germinate. These seeds are either planted in the ground in the fall or planted into flats and put on shelves on the front porch. They will have a month or two of warm weather, then they will be exposed to the fall and winter temps. I will bring them indoors in Dec-Jan and put in the south seed window to germinate. I have tried leaving them outdoors until spring to germinate in their containers when the weather warms up, but have had poor success with that. You can also put them into baggies with a little damp soil and put these into the freezer or the fridge for a couple of months, then plant in flats or pots for indoor starting.

All seed need to be dried before storing. I dry mine on an elevated screen on the front porch. The tiny seeds and smaller amounts I dry on a thin paper towel in a container with holes in it. A strainer or a plastic berry box from the grocery store are good containers for this. I always write the name of the plant on the paper towel or on a piece of paper drying with the seed. Seeds can take weeks to ripen and dry completely and I will forget what plant and variety they came from if they are not labelled.















After the seeds are completely dry, you can store it in a small plastic bag or glass jar. I prefer to store mine in labelled paper envelopes in a basket, ensuring that they stay dry and do not rot or mold in storage. Do not store them in the refrigerator or freezer unless the seed requires this for germination but do keep them in a cool, dry spot. On top of the refrigerator is too warm.

Squash Harvest

Yes, this is my picture above. It is a picture of the squash we harvested today! After a summer of carefully tending the squash, we picked them all today. They will need to age in a warm and dry place for about a month before we cut into one, but we're ok with that.

Squash can be left to age in the field in the sun, after frost has taken the leaves. I think they cure faster this way than in the house as long as you get them inside before the very hard frost damages the rind. You can tell when a squash is ready to be picked by the curlycue nearby. If they have begun to shrivel and turn brown then it is ready to pick but still needs to be cured. You can also tell by the stem. If it is turning brown and no longer green, then the squash is ready. We just picked them all before the frost. The slightly immature ones will not grow any bigger but they will ripen over the winter, off the vine. We had to leave a few babies behind but we had a lot of good squash anyway.

The very large light blue ones are hubbard. Those have to be cut with an axe, but produce the most lovely, sweet, not stringly squash. The long ones with the bulb at the end are the butternut. Those are best for making squash soup, or so I hear. I have never grown butternut before and have used the buttercup and hubbard for everything. The orange ones are ambercup, a buttercup of a different colour. The green ones are nutty delica. I have never grown or eaten delica squash before. They are a Japanese Ebisu hybred that are suppose to have a nutty flavour. We will see.

They are aging for now, but when we do cut a few open, we will judge for ourselves which ones we like the best.

Next year I will also grow Hopi pale gray and Hopi black squash.

I grew acorn squash in the back pasture this year, but have not checked on them yet. I believe there was only one that sprouted. I will have to see if there are any acorn squash very soon.

I have seed to try many other types next year, but we will always grow hubbard.