New perennial edibles

We've been busy establishing perennial edibles that will feed us for years to come once established. Here are a few of the plants we've added this spring: 

Ramps! Some are in their second year, some are new transplants.

Sea kale. Perennial with edible shoots, leaves, florets.

Perpetual Sorrel.

Sylvetta, or perennial arugula. Delicious.

Blueberries!

Beach plum.

Huckleberry and wintergreen.

Gooseberry.

Before and After: Custom Built Pantry

There was evidence of a past pantry off of the kitchen in our house. An improperly repaired floor showed us where a wall used to be, and the worn floorboards next to it evoked years of walking back and forth to retrieve dry goods from storage. But when we bought the house, those old footsteps led...straight into a wall.

 

Behind this door is a wall, where a doorway used to be. 

So, I did my favorite thing--exploratory demo. What I found was a shoddily covered doorway, filled with a piece of sheet rock. In fact, the frame was still exposed, just painted to match the wall. We decided to rebuild the old pantry a little differently than the original. Rather than a long, skinny wall that would have blocked off a south-facing window, we made a smaller closet. 

The pantry-to-be.

Once we got to this stage, I panicked. My vision of a beautiful walk-in pantry with counter tops seemed impossible--it was so much smaller a space than I imagined. We spent a couple of days hemming and hawing, measuring and drawing, and eventually, inspiration struck. 

Don't worry, it's just the lens. We may be amateur builders, but we're not THAT bad with a square.

We used salvaged bookshelves that we got in bulk from the local EcoBuilding bargains, which required an enormous amount of sanding and cutting, but they look great and saved us a bundle.

 

We measured everything we anticipated would go in the pantry. We made single-wide shelves just big enough for pint or quart mason jars, put in a counter-top outlet for the bread maker, crock pot, and various other appliances and an under-counter outlet for our large dehydrator. The space beneath the lowest shelf is high enough to accommodate the dehydrator and a carboy of beer with a water lock. The top shelf is big enough to hold larger counter top appliances that we don't use as frequently, like the stand mixer.

The result is a pantry that's the perfect size to store all our dry goods and some of our preserves (the extras will go in storage in the basement). It's also a functional prep space, especially good for fermentation projects that need a dark corner to sit in and do their thing. It's done wonders to keep ongoing projects from cluttering our precious kitchen counter space.

I love working in tiny spaces; it's such a challenge to make the most of an area with design constraints. I supposed that's why we focused in on this tiny pantry when we have a whole big house to renovate. Once you're used to building tiny, it's hard to go back.

How not to make maple syrup at home

What follows is a summary of our first attempt at making maple syrup from our backyard silver maples:

Step 1: Get up early. Place 5 gallons of collected sap in your biggest lobster pot.

Step 2: In the cold, build a makeshift fire pit out of random bricks. Make a fire out of brush you have lying around. Place pot over fire.

Step 3: Talk excitedly about how cool it will be to have homemade maple syrup in a few hours.

Step 4: Wait around for a while, stoking the fire, wondering why it's still not boiling after two hours.

Step 5: Get distracted. walk away and build a pea trellis, roast some coffee, whatever.

Step 6: Realize the fire has almost gone out. Restart it. Still not boiling.

Step 7: Repeat steps 4 - 6 until it is nearly dusk.

Step 8: Build a rocket stove. Hope it will get hot enough to boil the sap.

Step 9: At dusk, give up. Transfer pot to outdoor gas burner.

Step 10: Give up for the night. Turn off heat, cover pot.

Step 11: Resume boiling the next morning.

Step 12: Once enough liquid has evaporated, despite the lack of boiling, bring reminder inside to finish on electric stove.

Step 13: Rejoice! It's finally boiling!

Step 14: Despair! It boiled over! Your stove is now covered in proto-syrup and a not insignificant portion of your already tiny yield is gone. (Regrettably, I do not have pictures of this step.)

Step 15: Rejoice again! 30 hours later, you have made 1.5 cups of homemade maple syrup. It's not much, but it's all yours.

So yeah, our first attempt at home scale maple syrup production was kind of a disaster. But we did get delicious, backyard harvested nectar of the gods out of it. We learned some important lessons--mostly that you can't boil such large quantities of liquid over a fire without more surface area, and also that you can't get bored and walk away from a fire and expect it to magically boil your sap.

We are still collecting sap from our trees and will do another boil this weekend, because we are gluttons for punishment.

Backyard sugaring

While or house didn't come with any sugar maples, it came with two large silver maples. Silver maples can be used for syrup, they just have a less ideal sugar to water ratio. But I've heard that they may be more well adapted to continue producing as climate change threatens the maple syrup industry.

Being Vermont-raised, the prospect of backyard syrup production is pretty exciting. I ordered some used equipment for cheap on eBay, and we tapped our trees about a week ago. The three taps have yielded 5 gallons of sap so far, which will likely make about a pint of syrup.

Today we have beautiful spring weather, and we are boiling the sap down outside in our fire pit. I'll be sure to post an update when it's done!

Prepare to graft

There is a cherry tree in a parking lot near us that produces delicious little sweet cherries. Sweet cherries are more difficult to grow in our area, so this well adapted tree is somewhat unusual.

We happen to have an ornamental, flowering cherry tree in our yard. Not being much for ornamental fruit trees, we plan to graft it over to a fruiting cherry, using scion wood collected from the above tree.

We collected pencil sized pieces of last year's growth, labeled them, and stuck them in the fridge. When the stock tree is leading out this spring, we will attempt to graft these branches on. It will be our first experiment with grafting. If it works, we will have a fruiting cherry in less time than it would take if we planted a new tree, and it'll be of a variety we know grows well in the area.

Mushrooms from local waste

Some of our local cafes offer bags of their used coffee grounds to take at the door. This is ideal because here lies a prepasteurized growing medium already at the perfect dampness for mushroom cultivation and prepackaged in bags just like you would do normally preparing a growing medium - all that's left is to add the spawn.

Here are two bags I started today with some oyster mushroom spawn we ordered from Fungi Perfecti. I'll keep you posted on their progress as they colonize and hopefully fruit!

I will have to rig together some kind of container to put them in when it comes time for fruiting to keep the humidity high - especially in these dry winder conditions here in New England.

New girls

We answered a Craigslist ad for three hens in need of a new home. Our flock was decimated this year by a series of unfortunate events, and we went from 6 to two hens. Now we're back up to five, assuming the introduction goes well.