Renee Wilkinson's Blog, page 3

February Homestead Chores

February is beginning to look less like winter and more spring every day! There are still lots of chores on my to-do list before the month is over. Here is a rundown of what we should be working on at this time of year. Assuming you are not still under a foot of snow, that is…

Compost

We will all need more compost in the coming months as we plant out the spring crops. This is a good time to give your compost pile a big stir. I use a three bin system, so I will be out there rain or shine with a pitch fork mixing up the piles. This sends fresh oxygen into the mounds, reinvigorating those microbes to keep breaking things down.

Read more about How to Setup a Three Bin Compost System.

Harvest

I have several crops from this past fall that are ready to come out of the beds. Carrots left in the beds need to be pulled before they start to regrow. My winter leeks and kale are ready to eat. The arugula has already started to bolt, so it needs to pulled and fed to the chickens.

Water

It might seem silly to water in winter, but some areas of the homestead still need a drink. Our indoor citrus trees get watered about once a week. And two of our raised beds are covered in greenhouse plastic, which doesn’t allow rainwater to filter through. If you’re going through an unusual dry spell, even young dormant trees and containers still need occasional watering.

Read more about How to Cover Your Raised Beds in greenhouse plastic for early spring planting.

Prune

One of my favorite winter gardening activities is pruning the fruit trees. I wait for a break in the weather, when that crisp sun comes out for a brief visit. I then dash into the backyard to snip a few key branches to keep our trees growing in the right direction. If your trees are just waking up, now is a good time to trim off any dead branches.

Read more about some Fruit Tree Pruning Tips.

Plant

We can’t plant much outside today, but it is high time to start indoor vegetable seeds. If you live in Portland, check out the seed starting calendar from Portland Nursery. I’m already behind on starting mine and the season has barely begun!

Read more about Seed Starting Basics.

What are you working on in your garden this weekend? Or are you still staring at a winter wonderland from the safety of your cozy armchair?

2016 Vegetable Garden Plan

This year my vegetable gardening plans are bursting at the seams! I poured over seed catalogs this winter, put in a huge seed order from my favorite suppliers and spent way too much time planning out every plantable inch of our homestead. The result is this colorful diagram that shows what will grow where this season in our raised beds.

Our 2016 Vegetable Planting Plan (for raised beds that are each 4′ x 8′)

It’s important to take the time to layout your garden to scale. You could use trace paper, but I use Adobe Illustrator – an expensive graphics program that I use for my residential design work. Having a scaled drawing will make sure there is enough room in your beds for all the crops you want to grow. It also helps organize your crop rotation – the practice of moving crops to new locations each year to minimize nutrient loss in the soil and reduce plant diseases.

Juniper with some of her favorite veggies: a small bucket of cherry tomatoes and freshly pulled carrots

This year I increased the number of Juniper’s favorite crops, like cherry tomatoes and broccoli. I also increased the number of low-protein vegetables to accommodate River’s PKU diet, like carrots, eggplants and cauliflower. I am maintaining a good number of sauce tomatoes and interesting heirlooms. We rely heavily on canning those crops to get us through winter.

Companion-planting crops will help me maximize my garden space. Carrots and radishes don’t need much space above ground, so those will be planted between the tomatoes that take up lots of above-ground space.

Bolting spinach gets pulled right when the warm-season peppers and eggplants will go in.

Cool season crops are timed to come out when warm season crops take their place. Lettuce and spinach may seem crowded in between the peppers and eggplants, but those greens are for the cool season. They will be pull before the larger eggplants and peppers go in. I will replant the greens in late summer when the shade from the tall peppers and eggplants can keep them from bolting.

I didn’t decrease any plantings, but rather moved them to better places in the garden. The onions are getting planted along plant bed edges, along with my regular shallots and garlic. Additional broccoli plants will get tucked into sunny pockets between our existing blueberry plants.

Sprawling crops like winter squash grows under our fruit trees among berry bushes and strawberry groundcover

Sprawling plants like summer squash, winter squash, potatoes, cucumbers and pole beans all get planted throughout the garden. They climb up Juniper’s teepee or snake along the ground under our fruit trees. I’ll amend the soil where they are planted to give them a nutrient boost, since they don’t have access to the good soil I imported into our raised beds.

This might be my most ambitious year yet! More and more of our edible trees, shrubs and groundcovers will produce fruit this season. And I’m already planning how we’ll preserve the vegetable crops to get us further through next winter.

Interested in what I’ve planted in past years? Here is a list of older vegetable garden plans:

2015 Vegetable Garden Plan
2014 Vegetable Garden Plan
2013 Vegetable Garden Plan
2011 Vegetable Garden Plan (irregular sized planting area)

Do you typically layout a garden plan before you plant? Why or why not? How is your garden plan this year evolving over years past? Tell me about it in the comments below!

2016 Seed Order

I spent the cold dark days of winter pouring over my seed catalogs and dreaming of spring. The flowering quince are just ready to bloom, which tells me it’s time already to start seeds (Portland is in USDA zone 8).

Making my list and checking it twice #seeds #homesteadplanning

A photo posted by Renee Wilkinson (@hipchickdigs) on Jan 30, 2016 at 10:14am PST

Here’s a rundown of the seed varieties I ordered this year:

Beans, bush – Dragon Tongue does well as either a green bean or dried bean, giving me versatility in case I neglect harvesting it on time
Beans, pole – Scarlet Runner is a favorite of mine because it’s tasty and those bright red flowers are lovely in the garden. Blue Lake is an excellent green bean here in the Willamette Valley
Beets – Bull’s Blood is a rich heirloom; Golden is a new one for me this year
Broccoli – Calabrese is an Italian heirloom that produces good side shoots, extending the harvest season
Cabbage – Cour di Bue is early to mature and compact for our small family
Cauliflower – Snowball has been tried-and-true for over a hundred years
Celery – Utah Tall is tried-and-true as well. You haven’t tasted celery until you’ve had homegrown celery.
Carrots – Nantes is sweet and quick to mature; Purple 68‘s color runs to the core
Cucumber – Tendergreen Burpless is quick to mature and good all-purpose (fresh or pickling)
Eggplant – Diamond Eggplant produces smaller fruits faster than others; Listada de Gandia is gorgeously striped and delicious
Kale – Nero di Toscana is my absolute favorite with great flavor and thin leaf stalks
Lettuce – Green and Red Caesar Duo, Flashy Trout and Buttercrunch for a lovely mix
Melon – Petit Gris de Rennes is sweet, perfumed and quicker to mature (85 days); Blacktail Mountain watermelon is great-tasting and quick to mature (70 days)
Peas – Sugar Daddy is stringless and sweet
Peppers – Emerald Giant has heavy yields; Golden Cal Wonder is good for northern climates
Radish – French Breakfast, Daikon and several other stray varieties. They are all fun, ripen so quick and I just mix up which ones I replant all season
Pumpkin – Rouge Vif D’Etampes is my favorite heirloom for both looks and sweet flavor, also called the Cinderella pumpkin
Spinach – Bloomsdale is a classic heirloom
Squash, summer – Black Beauty Zucchini is prolific; Green Tint Scallop is adorable
Squash, winter – Spaghetti, Delicata, Waltham Butternut all perform well
Tomatoes – Sungold cherry for the kids; Orange Oxheart is dense and delicious; San Marzano is my paste of choice; Black Krim is a new one for me this year

I like buying seeds from Territorial Seed Company, Baker Creek Heirlooms and Seed Savers Exchange. I occasionally pick up seed from Renee’s Garden and Botanical Interests as well. I try to balance my selections to include a mix of well-known heirlooms, rare seeds to increase plant diversity, early to mature varieties to fill the harvest basket early and usually a couple new-weird-unusual things I’ve gotta try.

Harvest baskets of late season veggies

We are increasing the amount of low-protein vegetables in our garden this year to accommodate River’s PKU, which requires a low protein diet. I’m growing crops I don’t often include, like cabbage and cauliflower. I am growing a lot more carrots, summer squash, eggplants and broccoli. He’s just starting to try solid food now, so I’m hoping to pack the freezer for next winter when he’s eating a lot more.

Late summer harvest mix of heirlooms and classic fruits and veggies

There will be follow up posts over the coming weeks that show my vegetable garden plan for the year and a planting chart I have been working on. I’m excited to share those with you soon.

In the mean time, tell me what you are planting! Any new varieties? Sticking with the basics? Tell me about it in the comments below!

Book Review: The New Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook

Is there anything cozier than a cold winter morning curled up with a mug of tea while you pour over recipes from a good cookbook? That is how I have been spending my weekend mornings this past month. I borrowed several cookbooks from the library, but one in particular has stolen my heart: The New Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook, by Ellen Brown.

I am not getting compensated for this post/review. No one recommended the book to me. I didn’t see it in a magazine or anywhere else. I simply had the winter-blues and went looking for inspiration at my local library and fell in love almost as soon as I flipped it open. As an author myself, some of my favorite reviews come from everyday people who found my book Modern Homestead on their own.

I started cooking with cast iron almost a decade ago when Jay and I inherited some well-used skillets from an old relative. We washed them incorrectly. I burnt some stuff. But I stuck with it and eventually transitioned to using almost exclusively cast iron for cooking. (You can read about how to care, or even repair, your cast iron pans from Lodge)

What delighted me the most about this cookbook is the range of recipes. There is a whole section just on breakfast and brunch, which includes lots of egg recipes to use up our never-ending supply from our hens. There are the usual meat-centric main dishes, but the section on Little Dishes includes a good assortment of veggie plates. Additional sections cover breads (tortillas, rolls, soda bread, etc), side dishes and desserts.

Even though I use my cast iron skillets all the time, I realize now that I’ve actually been limiting their use. It never occurred to me that I can bake sticky buns or a fruit tart in a skillet.

The pictures in this post are from Ellen Brown’s recipe for Chicken Potpie with Cheddar Biscuit Topping, which I made for a gathering a couple weekends ago. Most of the vegetables in the recipe and all of the fresh herbs came straight from our backyard. The pie finishes cooking in the oven, allowing enough time to clean up the kitchen before our friends arrived. It was just as tasty as it was pretty.

I’ve already bought my own copy of this book, so I can return my library copy before I get it too splattered from cooking the recipes. I expect these recipes will lead to years and years of new use for my old cast iron pans.

Do you have any cookbooks that are inspiring your winter kitchen? Please tell me about in the comments below!

Building Soil Quality with Leaves

Most of us are constantly working on increasing the soil quality of our gardens – both the soil nutrients and the soil structure. Either we’re starting a new garden on less-than-ideal soil or we’re trying to build the soil quality back up after previous crops sapped nutrients from the ground or winter rains compacted the soil. In this post, I will discuss how to enhance the soil structure of your garden with dry leaves. Increasing soil nutrients will come in a later post.

The rich humus garden loam we’re all after! Spongey, light, fluffy and packed full of nutrients

Soil structure refers to the actual solid parts of your soil and the open areas in between. We have hardpan, heavy, dense soil and that’s bad news for plants. Here are a few reasons why that makes it difficult for plant life:

Limited air pockets prevent storage of oxygen and water (both needed for plants to thrive)
Limited space for micro organisms, worms and other microbes to live
Difficult for plant roots to dig down and get established.

Heavy, clay hardpan soil

I use the dormant season as a time to add lasagna layers to the garden to help build our soil quality. Tilling would expose weed seeds, destroy what little soil life exists and is difficult to avoid disturbing existing plants. And it’s otherwise pretty quiet in the garden, giving me enough time to tackle big soil issues.

This year, we collected a couple truck loads of dried leaves to use as “leaf mulch” throughout the garden. We spread them about 6-8″ thick, but pulled the leaves back from the base of trees to maintain good air circulation around the trunks. It seems like a thick, fluffy layer once we were done, but by late spring they will have decomposed down to just a couple inches.

Thick layer of freshly spread leaf mulch

The dried leaves have very little nutrients left in them, but they decompose quickly which will help increase the structure of our soil over time. They will invite earth worms up to eat the leaves and leave behind nutrient-rich worm castings. Leaf mulch is also excellent for increasing water retention. Once decomposed, it leaves lots of air pockets throughout the garden. The perfect place to store water, oxygen and house microbes.

We have a few more homestead chores to tackle before spring planting to help build our soil quality: harvesting compost, turning not-yet-ready-compost, and topping off our plant beds with fresh wood chips for water retention and weed suppression.

Finished compost ready to spread in our garden before spring planting

I have to admit I feel behind on everything, which sounds silly since it’s only January. This is still a newer homestead and there is a lot of work we need to devote to cultivating this new space. The kiddos are keeping me busy, but I’m optimistic I can still find a few hours this winter to get digging.

I would love to hear how you are managing, or not managing, it all this winter on your homestead! Am I the only one who feels a little behind already?

Year of Gratitude

As 2015 draws to a close, I can’t help but acknowledge what a tremendous year this has been. I feel cheesy talking about being blessed, since it’s becoming such a cliche. But as my friend Brigitte says, “it’s not like your favorite kombucha is on sale and you feel blessed… your mom is alive and you have these amazing children.” Well said, Brigitte.

My Mom

My beautiful mother

Some of you may recall that my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer a couple years ago. They told us the average life expectancy was less than a year when we learned her cancer had metastasized to her brain.

Christmas-time high tea

That was 18 months ago. Since then she has held my hand next to the birthing tub as I birthed baby River. She comes over twice a week to help watch the kids. We treated her to high tea during the holidays and made Christmas cookies together. Some day cancer may catch up with her at last (and we still have rocky patches with her health), but what a gift this year has been.

Babies!

Baby River is teaching me so much every day. I’m giving up more and more control over how orderly my life is and I’m just adapting. I’m not getting nearly enough sleep, but he makes up for it all and then some with his easy-going nature. Have you ever made cinnamon rolls from scratch? His cheeks feel just like that dough.

Baby River on a winter hike

Juniper grows an inch a day, but she’s forever my baby. Her three-year old tantrums push me to the brink of sanity, but her cuddles and goofy nature make me forget all those trying times. She’s a loving, supportive big sister. This little girl is a chicken-tamer, berry-gobbler and adventure-lover. She’s a force of nature and one hell of a sous chef.

Juniper and I making yet another unnecessary, and totally delicious, chocolate cake

Meaningful Work

I spent the better part of this year designing nature playgrounds for Learning Landscapes Design. I’m consulting for an ecological design firm, a high-end residential firm and still doing my own projects. I get to say yes to projects that interest me and still maintain the flexibility I need. It’s pretty dreamy.

Out sourcing my design work

A photo posted by Renee Wilkinson (@hipchickdigs) on Mar 29, 2015 at 5:15pm PDT

My Hubs

Jay and I celebrated our ten year anniversary this year. Can you believe it? We’ve made it through rocky patches, eight years of combined graduate school, two children, thousands of miles of roadtrips and too many garden projects to count. Yet we still love the heck out of each other.

Celebrating our ten year anniversary with the empire we’ve built: these two lovely babies

2016

This year had taught me to stop planning. Juggling kids, homesteading and design work has forced me to just roll with it. I have some dreams for next year: more fun design projects, bigger harvests, expanding the homestead. It’s been a beautiful ride so far and I can’t wait to see what’s in store in the year ahead.

Juniper and River on Christmas night

 

Celebrating the Solstice

Celebrating the Winter Solstice is my escape from the holiday frenzy that reaches it’s peak about this time. I am excited to see my extended family come together for Christmas in a few days, but the Solstice reminds us to slow down, savor and celebrate the simple aspects of our beautiful life. Here are some ideas on how you can celebrate the darkest day and longest night of the year on December 21st/22nd.

Our 2014 celebration with crab, a hearty salad, bread and cheese

The main structure to our annual celebration is sharing a meal. We center our Solstice meal around what is seasonally available. It’s not a perfect match, but rather a guiding theme. In and around Oregon winter brings us delicious Dungeness crab, oysters, clams and mussels.

We pile up some combinations of those goodies and round out the meal with simple sides – arugula salads, winter squash, hearty breads and cheeses, dark beer and full-bodied wine. And we’re not above importing some delicious items from our neighbors in California, like avocados and their winter citrus crops.

Whatever you choose to eat, keep it simple and somewhat seasonal and you’ll be on the right track.

Searching for the best winter beers to grace the Solstice table

I love incorporating a little ritual into the meal and encourage you to do the same. It could be a prayer, a poem or simply holding hands around the table and making a silent wish for the year ahead.

We each blow out a candle as we think about the darkest moment of the year we’re leaving behind: a struggle, loss, heartbreak, etc. Then we each take a turn relighting our candle as we direct our hope to bright moments ahead: a new baby, friendship, travels, whatever the case may be. The Winter Solstice, after all, means that tomorrow there will be more light ahead.

Winter hike from 2014 in Central Oregon

In addition to a beautiful meal, get outside to embrace the darkest day of the year. Some years we have taken a wintery hike on the Solstice. Other years we have just spent some time in our wintery garden puttering.

Winter is a powerful time of year and one that can be just as stunning as the light of summer, if we only look closely enough.

Our small Winter Solstice meal from 2013

Above all, my favorite part of celebrating the Winter Solstice is the magic that happens when you gather loved ones together. Some years we have a boisterous crowd of merry-makers. Other years it’s just our small family celebrating quietly. But always it’s spent with people we cherish making memories that keep us warm through the winter.

However your Winter Solstice celebration takes shape, I hope it’s a day filled with brisk air, warm food and tightly-knit loved ones. I would love to hear more about how you celebrate the day, so feel free to share your story in the comment below!

Winter squashes

 

Holiday Solstice Tree

Our holiday traditions have evolved over time, as they should. The childhood season of presents has turned into a season of simplicity in adulthood – quiet hours, comfort foods, making warm memories with family and friends. It’s less about the “stuff” and more about celebrating the season of the Winter Solstice. Our annual holiday tree is a reflection of that evolution: transforming what was once a traditional Christmas tree into a serene Solstice tree.

The Winter Solstice on December 22nd marks the shortest, darkest day of the year. Yet among that fading light we see grace, strength and hope. Our tree now displays a collection of the nature-inspired beauty that surrounds us.

Vintage glass birds perch on the upper branches. They appear to be fluttering around the simple ornaments that mark the milestones of our lives: baby’s first Christmas, handmade treasures from a loved one who has passed, the simple silhouette of the historic church where we promised to love each other forever.

The lower boughs have plump, felted birds. They remind me of the many critters I catch fluttering from one seed head to another in our garden at this time of year. Wooden owls keep watch between twinkling white lights. Juniper has been having so much fun arranging, then rearranging, their locations.

I found these adorable pine cones at World Market, but I love the idea of making more of these as an activity for small hands. Juniper and I are now keeping our eyes peeled on neighborhood walks for more pine cones. It would be especially fun to collect them from some of our favorite places around Oregon.

The top of the tree is home to a funky, 1950’s copper star. I bought this from an estate sale for my first tree when I lived alone in my early twenties – before Jay, before kids, back when my windowsills were crowded with potted herbs. What a journey it’s been since those days.

We purged lots of holiday items this year before putting up our decorations, which felt great. We are holding onto what we love most and parting with objects that don’t hold meaning.  Every little thing on this tree is something we adore about our life together, our homestead and this special time of year.

How do you deck your halls at this time of year? Is it subtle or sparkly? An explosion of fancies or a curated selection? Looking for a simpler way to mark the solstice? Check out the Solstice Swag we put together last year and how you can make your own!

Goodnight Garden

Raised beds prepped for winter. Two covered with bird netting to protect them from outside cats and squirrels. Two beds covered with greenhouse plastic to make row covers that will keep our vegetables warmer.

Juniper and River were both sleeping inside as Jay puttered around the house, so I seized the moment by taking solitary refuge in the garden. We have had a handful of cold, hard frosts now as fall makes way for winter. What a wonderful way to spend my Thanksgiving, working outside on the homestead to clean up leaf piles, pull the remains of the growing season, fill the compost bins and rake the pathways clean.

Last season’s beets and carrots

I collected each and every rotten tomato from the raised beds to prevent “volunteers” from sprouting next season. Then I tackled the rangy vines that had blackened from the cold, taking care to shake off any loose soil into the bed. The wheelbarrow was filled to brim as I tossed it all into our compost bins.

Winter kale

The neighborhood squirrels and cats would love to still use our garden beds for their own use – burying walnuts for the squirrels and as a litterbox for the cats. I reattached the bird netting to the top of two beds, which only have a handful of cold-hardy crops growing, plus a few last carrots and beets to harvest. That keeps the critters out, but lets the sunlight and rains in.

Winter crops under greenhouse plastic row covers

The other two beds are packed more densely with winter crops – spinach, kale, beets, fava beans, leeks and arugula. They won’t grow much with this cold weather, so I covered them with greenhouse plastic. That will keep the vegetables a bit warmer and hopefully encourage more growth so we can eat them through the winter.

Next season’s buds on our Asian Pear tree

There is something just magical about being in the garden at this time of year. It’s so peaceful and so serene. If you look hard enough, you will see little glimpses of life in the tiniest corners. It restores my spirit and fills me with a sense of hope and wonder. Happy Thanksgiving friends.

Preserving Chanterelle Mushrooms

This fall I spent more time hunting chanterelle mushrooms in the woods than I spent in our own garden. The combination of foraging for wild food, hiking for hours and simply being outside among torrential rains and giant trees made me feel more than alive at an otherwise sleepy time of year. I ended up with baskets full of mushrooms – more than our family could eat fresh – but thankfully preserving mushrooms is super simple.

Mushrooms drying overnight after being cleaned

PREP ‘EM

I have always been strict about not letting water touch my mushrooms, using a dry cloth instead to brush off any spots of soil. That seems like a fine method for store-bought mushrooms, but when it comes to cleaning freshly picked mushrooms I have changed my tune. There is way too much dirt and forest debris for a dry cloth to handle, unless you want to be there for hours on hand. Also, these mushrooms have been soaking up steady rains for a couple months already, so they are already pretty plump with water.

I don’t submerge them in water, but I do use a wet cloth to clean the harvest. I even ran mine until a light trickle from the faucet while brushing them, which was especially helpful for the really dirty ones. Once clean, set the mushrooms out on a cooling rack so air can circulate all around them. About 24 hours later, they are just dry enough to cook or preserve.

FREEZE ‘EM

The idea of freezing mushrooms sounded really nutty to me at first, but this has become my go-to method of preserving chanterelles. The mushrooms are cooked prior to freezing, so they are all set to eat when you thaw them. I really like being able to throw them directly on a pizza or toss into fresh pasta.

Mushrooms rendering liquid

Cook the chanterelles in a large frying pan with about a tablespoon of butter over medium-high heat. After about five minutes, the mushrooms will render their water and the pan will become really soupy. Keep cooking them for an additional five minutes, until almost all of the water has simmered off. It concentrates the mushroom flavor to let that excess water evaporate off.

Alternatively, you could stop cooking them after they render their liquid. Scoop out the mushrooms, but reserve the liquid. You can freeze that liquid to use later as mushroom stock.

Mushrooms frozen into 1/4 cup increments

Once cool enough to handle, pack the sauteed mushrooms into muffin tins or mini muffin tins. Regular-sized muffin tins equal about 1/2 cup each and the mini muffin tins are about 1/4 cup a piece. Then pop them in the freezer.

Mushrooms packed for the freezer, individually frozen into 1/4 cup balls

It only takes a few hours for them to harden, but feel free to leave them in overnight. Remove the tins and pop them out of the muffin holes – you might need to loosen the sides with a butter knife to do this. Then toss them all into a gallon freezer bag and put back in the freezer.

Now you have perfectly measured, pre-cooked chanterelle mushrooms ready to go as needed. No wrestling with a large, frozen mushroom brick every time you need a bit for a recipe.

DRY OR NOT DRY?

Many wild mushrooms dry very well, allowing you to add them as needed to soups, stews, casseroles, etc. But I have heard that the delicate flavor of chanterelles can get lost and they become rubbery when reconstituted.

This year I am experimenting with a variation of drying. Instead of drying them in big chunks, I have pulverized the dried mushrooms into a coarse powder. I’m thinking if texture is the issue, this might be a work around. And I’m hoping there is enough flavor there to provide some earthiness to a future nice chicken stew. I’ll let you know how it goes!

My experimental dried and coarsely pulverized mushrooms

THOUGHTS?

Do you cook with wild mushrooms? Do you have another favored preservation method? I would love to hear about it in the comments below! Likewise, feel free to share what excuses you are finding to get outside and enjoy the wilds on these darker days.