Summer Gardening

Summer really shifts in to high gear now that the garden has started to produce vegetables for our table. We have already picked beets, green beans, squash, onions, and lettuce. With the abundant rainfall it is certain we will be busy harvesting more crops within the next few weeks.

Today we harvested two rows of Roma green beans. After giving some away, we still canned and processed 16 pints- not bad for the first picking. One cabbage head also made 6 pints of sauerkraut. The yellow squash was steamed, cooled, and frozen in quart bags. We pickled the beets.

The outdoor sink was very useful in washing our produce before bringing it in the house. The beans were rather dirty after all the heavy rainfall. All the water we used to wash the vegetables was caught in a bucket and recycled back into the garden. Hopefully we will soon have a shed over the sink to give us some shade from the hot summer sun.

Queen Ann's Lace

Believe it or not the Queen Ann's lace is actually a member of the carrot family. In fact it is  sometimes called "Wild Carrot".  Take a moment and smell the taproot and you will notice the carrot aroma. The flowers resemble lace with a single purple dot in the center. The leaves are feathery resembling the domestic carrots' leaves. The taproot has a high sugar content only second to another root- beets. In fact, the Irish sometimes used it as a sweetener in things such as pudding.

There is a poisonous hemlock growing in swampy areas that could be confused with Queen Ann's Lace. Before you eat any part of the Queen Anne's Lace, make sure you know the difference between it and the poisonous cousin, Water Hemlock.

Queen Ann's Lace is a biennial. The first year it simply grows and the second year it blooms.

Shed

We have several different structures around the farm. This shed is one built almost exclusively from materials off the farm. This shed uses cedar collected on the farm as well as shingles made from fallen oak trees. Over the past few years we have lost so many nice oak trees in the woods. The soil here is red clay and dries out quickly. We are just assuming drought did the damage to the trees, but we try not to waste them when they die. The only materials purchased for this shed were a few pieces of wooden lath (1" x 4" lumber) and roofing nails.

The simple design uses two forked cedar posts to hold up a ridge pole. The cross braces attached to the post hold up perlin poles on which rafters rest. The Y braces add strength. A very simple but effective design made of all natural materials.

Right now we are using the shed as additional storage for winter firewood. There are future plans to use it to house a syrup pan for the making of sorghum cane syrup. A fire would be built under the pan to heat the cane sorghum juice to make syrup better known in the south as "sorghum".

Butterfly Bush

Butterfly weed (Asciepias tuberosa) is a flower loved by butterflies and caterpillars. The reason- it produces and abundance of nectar- just what butterflies thrive on. Most are bright orange and can vary from yellow to red. You will find it listed in the milkweed family, but unlike other members of the milkweed family, the sap of this plant is not milky white. You find it in open fields, roadsides, thickets, or railroad banks. We have successfully planted it, but it is very difficult to do. The taproots go very deep, and you must dig up the entire root system in order for it to survive.

After the flowers bloom, the seed pods form. They are four inches long and canoe-shaped. When
they open you find what appears to be cotton. The cottony threads are attached to seeds. The cottony material helps disperse the seeds when the wind blows.

Native Americans chewed the tough root for treatment of pleurisy and other pulmonary conditions such as pneumonia and whooping cough. You may hear it called by its common name, "Pleurisy Root". It was also powdered and mixed into a paste for sores.  Beware, it is poisonous if taken in large doses.