The Bee Oasis - Permaculture in Action!

The Bee Oasis garden in transition from summer to a fall garden,
along with a solar oven in foreground!

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to attend one of The Bee Oasis workshops, led by permaculture guru of the east valley - Don Titmus.  His home is a great example of living a sustainable lifestyle, which we can and should all learn from.  Don is a master at sharing his practical knowledge and explaining the principles of permaculture.

Overturned metal mesh waste baskets from the dollar store serve as cloches
to protect young plant starts.  What a great idea!

Don has 40 years of experience in horticulture and has lived in Arizona since 1981.  With 14 years of experience in Permaculture (teaching, design, consults and implementations) he is your man if you need a consult on how to set up or improve your garden, lay out a home fruit orchard, or to implement rainwater harvesting features.  As Don puts it - he's out to help heal the Earth one home-site at a time!! I can hardly think of a more noble pursuit.

A sturdy set of hand made tools at
the ready to prepare the fall garden beds.

Don demonstrated his method of prepping fall garden beds, using a "low-till" instead of "no-till" method.  He loosened up just the first six inches or so of the soil before adding amendments, allowing nutrients to get down into the soil without disturbing the beneficial micro-organisms living happily in their own levels within the soil.  I like this concept and am giving it a try in my fall garden beds. 

Hanging herb drying rack with velcro closure, lets air in and keeps
bugs and birds out.

 The fall garden prep demo was followed with a great presentation indoors on the principles of Permaculture.  I love networking with other organic gardeners and got to chatting with two from Aravaipa Canyon - home of the infamous 100-plus years old Aravaipa Avocado tree.  Interestingly, they had also tried to grow one of the off-springs of this tree, and failed.  

Other interesting tidbits of information I picked up were that -

Arbico Organics sells worm castings by the truckload!

Maricopa County Cooperative Extension offers free soil and water testing!

Using black strap molasses in your compost speeds up the composting process!

Rainwater harvesting tank at the Bee Oasis collects water from the
home's metal roof for use in the garden, with overflow going to a
nearby lush shade garden.

The next Bee Oasis workshop is on Rainwater Harvesting.  Participants will get to see firsthand how Don installed his rainwater tank and how he incorporated berms and swales into his landscape to slow the rainwater and allow it to soak into his soil rather than letting it run off into the street!

Homestead Garden Series - Rainwater Harvesting, Saturday, October 14 at 8:30 AM - 11:30 AM - Sustainable strategies for Harvesting the rain for garden and homestead resilience. From the top of your watershed.....Slow it, Spread it, Sink it. Store in the soil or in tanks for later, all this and more are demonstrated at the Bee Oasis.

The Bee Oasis holds classes monthly and has great upcoming topics -

2017

November - Soil Building
December - Pc Sectors [with a focus on cold/chill/freeze]

2018

January - Composting and more
February - Spring Garden, plan and prep
March - Bee Blocks for Pollination and the Natural Mozzie Trap.
April - Chickens and more
May - Climate, Microclimates and Inner climate
June - Garden Shading and more

Bee Oasis FB Page https://www.facebook.com/beeoasis/

 

Sage Garden at EcoVillas Olive Harvest

Jason Trotter of Sage Garden EcoVillas giving us the basics
about growing and harvesting olives in Arizona

On Saturday September 9th, Jason Trotter of Sage Garden EcoVillas kindly opened his yard and home to hold a workshop on how to pick, cure, and finish olives. There was a great turn-out for the olive harvest, everyone young and old, curious to learn how to harvest these little gems.  Some had made the mistake (like me) of picking an olive fresh from a tree and taking a bite - DON'T!  It won't kill you, but your taste-buds will be very unhappy.  Olives fresh off the tree, green or black, are extremely bitter.

Olive tea was available to sample.  Made from the
olive tree leaves, it has a nice mellow flavor.

Tarps were laid out to catch the falling olives and attendees jumped right in on picking the olives using small plastic rakes attached to extension poles.  Even the youngest gave harvesting a try!

It was great to have such a family-friendly event.  These kids did a great job harvesting, learned where olives come from (not just from a jar), and had fun outdoors instead of being glued to a screen (computer, tv, phone, tablet).

It turns out that both black AND green olives come from the same tree.  The black ones are just riper than the green ones.  Accordingly, the green olives need to be cured longer than the ripe black ones in order to remove most of the bitterness. 

The black and green olives were separated into 2 different buckets for curing.  In the curing process you keep the olives submerged in water and check each day to see if they are ready for finishing.  After about a week you move on to the finishing process where the olives are soaked in a brine.  For details and recipes, check out Sage Garden's FB page, or attend the next workshop!

 There is another Olive Harvest Workshop on Saturday, Oct. 7th from 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.  Participants will be picking both green and black olives, preparing them for curing, and starting the curing process.  Sign up on FaceBook at 
EcoVilla's Olive Harvest Workshop

Olives: Finishing Recipe courtesy of Sage Garden Ecovillas

http://www.sagegardenecovillas.com/

This recipe covers just the finishing process.  Before finishing, the olives should be cured, to remove the bitter chemicals that naturally occur in them.

Materials:
 - Air-tight heat-tolerant containers (such as canning jars)
   - I always use at least one small-sized jar (4 or 8 oz) for tasting
 - Stock pot or sauce pan
 - Stirring spoon

Ingredients:
 - Cured olives
 - 1 gal water
 - 1 lb (or 1 1/2 cu) non-iodized salt (such as pickling salt, sea salt, or kosher salt)(or 1 1/2 cu)
 - 2 cu vinegar (I prefer malt vinegar), can substitute 1 1/3 cu lemon juice
 - Olive oil (optional)

Steps:
 - Place the cured olives in the containers.  Leave at least 1/2 inch of space at the top of the containers.
 - Start heating an amount of water equal to half the volume of olives.  If your olives fill a gallon jar, you'll need 2 quarts of water.
 - Add salt and vinegar (or lemon juice) using the proportions above.
 - Stir until the salt is dissolved
 - I continue heating the water until about the time when "steam" is visible.
 - Pour the hot finishing solution into the containers of olives.
 - Optionally, you can add a layer of olive oil on top.  Note that the olive oil will solidify when refrigerated and it will look like a layer of wax.  This is normal.
 - Close the containers and keep refrigerated.
 - After one week, I open a small container and taste the olives.  If they are too bitter, I cure them further:
   - Leave at room temperature for 1 - 2 weeks to cure further.
   - Empty and replace the finishing solution, re-seal, and refrigerate

For the Kalamata Style Recipe see Sage Garden FB page  

Summer Harvest 2017 - Epic Fail!

Everything in my summer garden seemed so promising in May.
The zucchini plants were spreading and budding -

The squash plants had big beautiful blooms - 

The passion fruit vines were flowering and already had a few fruit -

My Red-Flame and Thompson Seedless grape vines had survived the bout of powdery mildew and were loaded with their first year grape clusters.

My carefully selected tomato starts that I grew from seed indoors, of varieties that I knew would produce here in the desert - Super Souix, Pineapple tomato, Stupice, Cossack Pineapple Tomatillos, and Cuastralee Beefsteak tomatoes had hardened off well and were starting to set fruit.

Though quite ugly and hogging up space, my volunteer Matt's Wild Cherry tomatoes were constantly producing.

But as the heat of summer set in, the bugs and countless other critters came out, and they behaved as though they were simultaneously starving and dying of thirst.  Anything containing moisture got eaten.  The grapes seem to be abducted by aliens overnight - they were small low-flying creatures with feathers, remarkably similar to what we here on earth call "birds".

We tried everything possible to keep the alien birds from our tomato bounty - scare tape, bird netting, taffeta bags,  jingling wind chimes, the fake owl, surly looking garden gnomes and even the neighbors cat.  Nothing worked.

To add to the agony, by June the tomato plants started suffering from curly top virus.  So one by one they were removed in a futile effort to thwart the spread of the disease.  My pepper plants in a nearby bed produced nothing but little mutant peppers.  I now know it was likely due to the curly top virus, likely spread to my peppers by beet leafhoppers (left here by the aliens who abducted my grapes).

Yields were extremely low from all the summer veggies I planted - cucumbers, zucchini, squash, okra, peppers, and tomatoes.  I'm still holding out hope for the watermelon and eggplants.  The passion fruit vines, with over 40 blooms only produced 3 fruit!  The acerola cherry bloomed and bloomed and is still blooming but has never set fruit.  One would think that I didn't have enough pollinator-attracting plants, but that wasn't the case.  The garden is still full of flowering basil, wild sunflowers, borage, lantana, and in early summer had blooming citrus buzzing loudly with bees, nasturtium vines, bee balm, calendula, marigold and hollyhocks.

So, as in life, things don't always go as planned and we must look at the positive side of things.  My garden successes were that all of my young fruit trees survived the summer - peaches, apples, plums, mandarin orange, bearrs lime, and mulberries.  The pomegranate has a ton of fruit. Other successes were -

My bee balm plants were gorgeous!

 

My 3 year old lavender bush bloomed for the first time!

My Red Chard lasted well into July, protected by big bushes of basil, peanut plants, and a few okra stalks.

My Moringa trees are doing great, producing tons of pods to eat, and more leaves than I can ever consume.

My sweet potato vines and malabar spinach are sprawling out everywhere, providing lots of leafy greens for salads.

While being trapped inside because of the sweltering heat, my wild sunflower jungle has provided us with endless hours of entertainment watching the goldfinches feeding on the seeds.

Now that is one happy bird!

So what have I learned from my summer garden debacle?  That it's just too dam hot in the summer for me to properly tend to so many plants.  Even with my night owl, Bugzooka-carrying brother patrolling the garden late into the wee hours.  Next summer I will stick with easy heat-loving plants that need little attention such as sweet potatoes, malabar spinach, egyptian spinach, and okra.  My focus will be on my fruit trees, herbs, and vines, and just a few hardy perennials like artichokes, tree collards, and gherkin cucumbers.

Powdery Mildew Blues

Last year my grapes were attacked by skeletonizers, this year its powdery mildew!  Ewww!  It sounds as if I'm a bad housekeeper or something.  It started with just a few leaves with white dusty patches and some with brown spots, both seen in the photo above.

The powdery mildew advanced quickly. In just a week or so big patches of leaves were curled up, brown at the edges, and nearly dead.  The literature on powdery mildew says it is not fatal to a plant, it just severely weakens it and ruins its appearance.  But I say this grapevine is on a death spiral.

I tried a popular method of slowing down the mildew growth by spraying a mixture of baking soda, liquid hand soap and water.  The treatments seemed to have little to no effect on the ravenous mildew.

My amazing garden assistant and vegan chef Amy Flemming, chopping
down mildewed grape vines.  We carefully disposed of these without
shaking and spreading the mildew spores.  We also gathered up all of
the fallen grape leaves, everything went in to our Green Barrel and NOT
the compost bin.

So I made the decision to take her down, sorry Miss Thompson Seedless.  I sacrificed you to save your neighbors, Mr. Red Flame, and your sister Ms. Thompson Seedless.

The severe pruning of the most mildewed vine seems to have helped.  The other 2 grape vines are flourishing and producing grapes!  This will be my first grape harvest.

Below is a picture of the terrible little skeletonizer caterpillars that I had last year on my grape vines.  We sprayed organic Bacillus Thuringiensis (BT for short) to eliminate the little monsters and it worked!

Western Grapeleaf Skeletonizer - Scientific name: Harrisina brillians
Photo from The World of Insects

This is what a grape leaf looks like after the skeletonizers hit - 

Next year I will be proactive and spray the new leaves as they emerge in the spring, as suggested by my friend Ruth Brown.  Maybe spray with BT one week, then a neem oil mixture the next week...?  I'm not sure, I'm just learning as I go :-).

On the other hand there is Jay Barringer of Phoenix Fruit Growers who knows exactly what he is doing!  Jay recently did 2 very informative videos on the problems you can encounter while trying to grow grapes here in the valley.  He shows the damage that Leaf Hoppers and Katydids can do to grape leaves.  Jay's incredible food forest is featured in most of his videos which are chock-full of valuable information!  Subscribe to Jay's YouTube channel Yes It Will Grow Here. 

What is Blooming in the Garden

Chocolate Flowers - they really smell like chocolate!

Orange Sunflower

A few Nasturtiums are still hanging in there in the
shadier parts of the garden.  These only get morning sun.

Wild Sunflower

Lemon Bee Balm (Monarda citriodora)

Passion Fruit Flower

Echinacea - Purple Cone Flower

Blackberry flowers

Lavender, not sure of species, it doesn't have
much of a lavender scent.

Harvesting Chard

I recently harvested most of my beautiful rainbow swiss chard plants, leaving just a few that I thought might make it through the summer.  It would require some creativity in the kitchen to actually use all of this chard.  Neighbors had already had their fill of my chard bounty through the winter and spring.

A few of the chard plants were survivors through the previous summer and had huge roots.  The roots turned out not to be woody so we roasted them just as you would beets or other root vegetables.  Though you wouldn't think so by looking at them, they were actually very tasty!

Most of the chard we blanched and froze, to use later in sautes or soups.  We blanched and froze the stems separately.  For the next few days we had chard salads, chard wraps, chard falafel, and even made chard pesto!  We tried out a "chard chip" recipe found on the internet, hoping it would be a close second to the popular "kale chip", but it didn't even come close.

We still had more chard than we could eat or freeze so we pickled the chard stems and the chard roots.  I use it as relish.

So now I'm waiting to harvest some of the seeds from my best red chard plants that have bolted.  I will post more on harvesting chard seeds (a first for me) as the seeds dry on the plant.  Right now they are still green and kind of pretty to have in the garden!

I still haven't given up on the "chard chips", here's the next chip recipe
I will try - Spicy Swiss Chard Chips