Purple Dead Nettle or Red Dead Nettle (Lamium purpureum) is a common plant considered by most people to be only a weed. But recently I’ve been reading up on foraging and wild edibles and discovered that it’s edible, has medicinal properties, and is an important source of food for bees in early spring.
[The purple dead nettles are the taller plants with small pinkish flowers in the picture. Henbit and chickweed can also be found in the picture]
In an effort to save some money and be a little more self reliant, we decided to take a shot at making our own laundry detergent using a homemade laundry detergent recipe we found on the internet. The 3 main ingredients (washing soda, borax, and laundry soap) can be purchased at most farm supply (Rural King) or hardware stores for about $8. This is half the price of the laundry detergent we have been purchasing. I estimate that we should be able to make around 10 or so batches with the $8 worth of ingredients.
We double the amount of garlic we planted in the fall of 2011 to be harvested this summer. In the fall of 2010 we planted 16 ounces of garlic which was enough to fill on 3′x10′ bed. This year we ordered 8 ounces each of Persian Star, Chesnok Red, S&H Silverskin, and California Early. This filled 2 3′x10′ garden beds. Here in zone 6 we planted garlic around October 25th. Garlic cloves were planted 5 rows per bed with 6″ apart within each row.
We just recently used the last of our garlic harvested in the summer of 2011. We are hoping to use this years harvested garlic to replant in the fall for the 2013 harvest and have enough to use until the 2013 harvest. If not we will add another bed.
We sowed Mammoth Melting Sugar Snow Peas this past weekend (February 26) using this as a trellis for them. Our in ground raised beds are approximately 3′x10′. The pea trellis consists of (2) 7′ T-posts (5′ in height after they have been driven into the ground), some 4′x10′ green snow drift fence, and some zip ties. The snow peas were sowed in 2 rows 6″ apart down the center of the bed separated and parallel to the trellis. Pea seeds were sowed 4″ apart within rows.
I don’t have much experience growing peas that need trellising so 2 of the questions I hope to answer will be:
In a previous post on growing ground cherries and making ground cherry jam, I noted that the leaf, stem, husk, and unripe fruit of the plant were toxic. A comment on reddit questioned the validity of that statement and another comment to that post asked (in my own words), how toxic is toxic, or what would the effects be? I hope this post will at least point readers to some resources I found dealing with this issue.
[Photo credit: ground cherry/husk tomato, By annethelibrarian on Flickr]
We experimented some with polycultres in the 2011 vegetable garden. We’ve put together some polycultures in the past with varying results, but wanted to keep experimenting. Planning, experimenting, growing, and harvesting from polycultures is in my opinion what is needed to move us away from the typical monocultural way of thinking to a more sustainable horticultural way. This post will give an overview of some of the polycultures we used in the vegetable garden, provide some photos, and provide results on how well each polyculture worked for us.
The following are 3 simple diy home cleaning recipes you can use to save money and provide a safer and more earth friendly alternative to your typical chemical household cleaning product. And from what we can tell these work just as good or even better.
We recently purchased the soil cube tool from Deeply Rooted Organics. We have been starting seedlings indoors using Jiffy pots and pellets. This technique has worked fairly well for us but it has become more and more expensive each year as we have begun to start more and more vegetables, herbs, and flowers. After hearing about the soil cube tool on an episode of The Survival Podcast we decided that we would try it out.
[Soil cube tool with wooden tong]
I used the methods described in the article A Better Way to Fertilize Your Garden: Homemade Organic Fertilizer for a couple of years to organically fertilize our newly constructed vegetable garden. The article was published in Mother Earth News in the June/July 2006 edition and written by Steve Solomon. By using the recipe for this organic fertilizer I obtained very good yields and our vegetables were very healthy. I think this is a very good alternative to chemical fertilizers and a great technique for a new garden to give it an initial boost, but I would like to offer some sustainable soil management practices for soil building in the home garden that should eventually eliminate or greatly reduce having to add any fertilizer.
[Photo Credit, Soil by John!!! under Creative Commons License]
So where do you fall on the eco scale? Do you consider yourself an environmentalist or are you just and eco poser? Paul Wheaton’s recent post on Make it Missoula discusses a test that Paul calls The Wheaton Eco Test. It’s a simple test to measure one’s eco level. The test is simple. If you spend more money on electricity per year than the average American you can’t consider yourself eco based on the criteria of this test. I thought it would be interesting to see if our family passed the test.
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