"A larrapin garden is where everything is delicious to someone..."
Edible Landscape • Homesteading • Backyard Chickens • Wildlife Habitat • Permaculture
Bees in January…er, what?
Wait, it goes beyond blooms because there’s one of the golden girls having a great time with those early blooms!
A flower and a bee: the perfect combination.
While I’m happy to see the bees, this too-warm trickery winter can be treacherous for them. The warm weather lures them out to fly around and burn up too much energy when there’s very little for them to find to eat. Plus, they may start raising young bees too early, only to have bad loss when the weather snaps back to real winter, which is more likely then not. So I hope they will sense somehow, that this warm weather is fickle and not to be trusted….
…unlike Hearld the metal chicken, which can be trusted to keep an eye on things, even a flowering quince blooming a couple of months too early.
—A Larrapin Garden. Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Please subscribe to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook page or following on Twitter.
Dig In Food & Farming Festival
Are you in the Northwest Arkansas region? Please join us for the 2nd annual Dig In! on March 2nd & 3rd. It’s going to be great fun with films, an info-fair, free seed swap, and classes on gardening, backyard chickens and more. Please check out the website at www.diginfestival.com for more info and sign up for email updates there!
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“Good Lord what humus!” So true…
I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers;
he is a man who cultivates the soil. He is a creature who digs
himself into the earth and leaves the sight of what is on it to us
gaping good-for-nothings. He lives buried in the ground. He
builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the
Garden of Eden, he would sniff excitedly and say:
Good Lord, what humus!- Karel Capek, The Gardener’s Year, 1931
(Photos from Fall 2011, Larrapin Garden)
—A Larrapin Garden. Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Please subscribe to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook page or following on Twitter.
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Great Quote by Carol Deppe
“One of the most joyous things we can do is to find our place,
the land we fit into, the land where we belong.
Having found our place, we snuggle into it, learn about it, adapt to it, and accept it fully.
We love and honor it. We rejoice in it. We cherish it.
We become native to the land of our living.”
—Carol Deppe in The Resilient Gardener.
—A Larrapin Garden. Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Please subscribe to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook page or following on Twitter.
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Stuff I Learned Gardening Last Year: Seeds & Bees
When you garden, it’s a sobering fact that you only have so many practice runs (gardening seasons) in a lifetime. A musician might get to practice a particular song hundreds of time to get it right. Unless you are remarkably long lived, gardeners my age might only have 20 or 30 more times to get really good at it and that’s if you happen to get really lucky in life too! Things like summer-heat-domes, spring floods, or a season off with a bum shoulder can be a real setback. So I’ve found that doing a lot of different things in the garden—things that cover different seasons, or add to the garden in different ways, mean a lot.
As have mentioned in posts past, I paid more attention to seed saving in 2011 than ever before. The photo above shows seeds of New Zealand Spinach collected just before our first killing frost. The top ones were already dry and hard when I collected them. They look like the seeds in packets I’ve bought. The green seeds have since dried out, but I’m not sure if that affects germination. I’ll find out this Spring I hope.
One great thing about seed saving over time is that you end up selecting for plants suited to your very particular setting. This is what makes heirloom seeds so special. You also get to see natural variations in the seeds you grow out like the Larrapin Kale I’m working on. Below is another photo of this gorgeous leaf that appeared among the grown out seeds I saved. Around it you can see the more typical “Ragged Jack” leaves.
Next year I plan to let only these particular wide-leaf plants go to seed, then collect seed again to see if I can get a kale that consistently shows this leaf. A garden is nothing if not an experiment! And who will be helping me cross pollinate those lovely plants — why the bees of course! I cannot even describe how much joy having beehives at Larrapin has been. Words fail me, but the determination to become adept at beekeeping, is securely on my bucket list…
I’d love to hear your comments. You can click here to comment and share your garden news.
—A Larrapin Garden ~ Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Don’t miss any—please subscribe by Email here to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook fan page atwww.facebook.com/larrapin.garden. We’re even on Twitter athttp://twitter.com/LarrapinGarden.
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Wassailing the Orchard Back in 2010 [Encore Post]
- A Howling Good Time [Encore post from January 16, 2010—We'll be doing this again at Larrapin this year!]
The highlight of early January was wassailing the orchard. It was our first experience (and slightly adapted version) of a very, very old custom that hails from the apple growing regions of England. I ran across a reference to the custom years ago while writing an essay on apples and have been fascinated with it every since.
In order to ensure a good harvest, it was believed, you must wassail the orchard. Apparently the men of the village went out to cheer the apple trees and shout shout away the bad spirits and shared toasts of drink as well as pieces of toast with the tree. All to bring a good harvest and a way to ‘wake up Spring.’ This rollicking good time, the sources said, happened on or around “twelfth night.” Suggested wassailing dates seem to vary by which calendar you are using, with January 5, 6 and 17th apparently all being options.
Now that Larrapin has the beginnings of a tiny orchard, seemed like we were in need of a wassailing! After a little study on the traditional components of an orchard wassail, we were ready. We ventured out on the frigid night of January 6th, sang cheers to the fruit trees, banged pots gleefully to scare away spirits unfriendly to fruit and rang bells to welcome and express gratitude for future fruit. Then we toasted the trees with our version of wassail. And finally, we tied pieces of bread in the branches of the young trees around Larrapin Garden to complete our first wassailing-the-orchard experience. The toast is to attract robins, the story goes, those heralds of spring and blooms and the fruits of summer. But since our robins don’t arrive till February, many other birds have enjoyed the toast!
We used this version of the tradition song, just so we could have the delight of yelling “holla boys, holla!” No wonder it’s also called a “howling.” So we went a’howling with:
Stand fast root, bear well top
Pray God send us a good howling crop
Every twig, apples big
Every bough, apples enow.
Hats full, caps full, full quarter sacks full
Holla boys holla!
The process is traditionally reserved for the oldest apple tree in an orchard, but since our orchard is just at the toddler stage, we toasted all the little apple trees, then the tiny pear and peach trees as well. And the persimmon & fig for good measure. (After the temps we’ve had last week, the fig needs all the cheers—and prayers—it can get.)
Pictured above, our wassailing supplies: Sparkling apple/pear juice (stand-in for hard cider), pieces of toast with yarn to tie them in the branches, special pitcher for toasting and sharing the drink with the tree. Not shown: the red bell we used for ringing and the saucepan and wooden spoon used for noisemaking. Now that was fun!
So this new twist on an old tradition is going to have a yearly spot in my gardening calendar!
To read more about it:
Post on Wassailing Orchards with the cheers
http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/wassail.htm
A BBC article on Wassailing preparations in a village:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/somerset/hi/things_to_do/newsid_8439000/8439726.stm
Wiki’s Article on Wassailing the Orchard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassailing#The_Orchard-Visiting_Wassail
Thanks for dropping by A Larrapin Garden, where no one is unhappy that the cold week has gone! Here’s to waking up Spring with a good night of wassailing!
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Garden Glance: The Larrapin Kale Development
Happy New Year 2012! Here’s to a better-than-ever gardening year for all of us!
One of the most intriguing and enjoyable new things I tried in the 2011 garden was doing some seed saving. I hope to do some posts on all that, but wanted to show you one of the fun developments. Some of the kale plants that grew from the 2010 seeds have a soft, extra-wide leaf (on left) compared to the usual ones (on right). Some are even more dramatically wide than the one pictured. The mother plant is a Ragged Jack/Russian kale I got from Baker Creek that I’ve grown out and saved seeds from a couple of years now.
Anyway, over the winter, I want to learn how to “select” for this wide leaf since it’s so tender and gives you more kale per leaf… So I’m adding: Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties—The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving by Carol Deppe to my winter reading list.
I should probably add that another fun thing from the 2011 garden was actually getting some fall crops planted: kale, spinach, garlic and multiplier-onions. So that’s why I have this lovely kale still going strong through December under nothing more than a sheet of row cover. While that may change when winter truly arrives this month, I sure have enjoyed the supply of delicious greens so far.
Have a wonderful first-week in the new year. What’s going on in your winter garden or winter garden planning? I’d love to hear your comments. You can click here to comment and share your news!
—A Larrapin Garden ~ Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Don’t miss any—please subscribe by Email here to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/larrapin.garden. We’re even on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LarrapinGarden.
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New Home! www.larrapin.us & Chix Holiday
For the holidays 2011, I decided to finally move the blog over to its own domain: www.larrapin.us. So here we are! Gradually I’ll figure out how to link to all the material over at the old blog. I plan on staying settled here, so please bookmark or better yet, please re-subscribe so that you’ll get the posts by email. It’s a two step process, click and enter your email and the letters shown, then click “subscribe.” Step two is to check your email box and click that long “confirm” link that you really want to the get the now once-weekly posts.
Meanwhile, for the holidays I let the chickens ramble on the cover crop in the garden for snacks and greens. They were supervised, lest they devour the kale and spinach under the frost protection or scratch too deeply in the garlic and multiplier onions. They did pretty good with only one or two stern “move-alongs.” Mostly I cut or pull up greens out of the cover crop to toss into this area. But it was a holiday…
Despite being Christmas, it was warm enough that the bees came out to stretch their legs and buzz around a bit. The gardener was delighted to sit on the bench in the sun and dream of next year’s garden, while the chickens happily munched and explored. Happy holidays to all of you!
—A Larrapin Garden ~ with a new home at www.larrapin.us
Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Don’t miss any—please subscribe by Email here to get the posts in one new weekly email.
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