Greater Hartford Area Vegetable Gardens and Backyard Homesteading

This is my new Big Project.  I got tired of not having any Real Life people to talk to about gardening stuff.  Not that I have no one, but everyone I know who is really interested lives too far away to get together on a regular basis.  As in, usually, several states away.  I started looking for local gardening groups to join, but they all seemed more interested in flowers and landscaping.  Flowers are pretty, but I want to grow FOOD!  I decided to try and start my own.

It's a lot harder than you'd think.  Granted, I'm really only into my second day of trying to get the word out, but so far it's been terribly disheartening.  Stores don't let you put up signs in their windows like they used to.  A few have "community bulletin boards," but those are usually a) tucked away in a corner where no one notices them, and b) so crowded with other announcements that you'll be lucky if yours is noticed amongst all the visual noise.  the exceptions were Whole Foods, where they date-stamp all announcements and rotate them out when they get old; Starbucks, where they only allow non-profits to post, and it's right in the front of the store; and the public library, which has theirs in a glass case so they can decide whether the posting is appropriate.  Thankfully mine passed muster!

Here's what I'm aiming for:
I'd like to be able to get together with real people, in real life, on a semi-regular basis to discuss food gardening and related topics.  While I want the focus to remain on food production, I don't want things too narrow either.  There are a lot of subjects (sustainability, Peak Oil,reduced energy usage, Big Ag, conventional vs. organic, etc) that tend to lie on the fringes of backyard food production, and I expect anyone interested in this group will have opinions on one or more of these issues.  I'd like it to be a place we can discuss these ideas as well. 

I'm hoping to establish a community of gardeners who are willing to help each other out, not only with advice, but with the occasional "work party" for someone breaking ground on a new garden.  I'd also like to establish enough trust and goodwill within the group to feel comfortable sharing tools with people just starting out.  For example, I doubt I'd feel comfortable loaning my pressure canner to someone who posted an ad on Craigslist, but I'd be happy to lend it to a member of a group I was part of.  Someone might have a rototiller they only use once a year, or a Weed Whacker they don't need on a particular weekend.  Sharing material resources like this will help us all.


Finally, I would like to give something back to the community.  There are many low-income families where the adults have jobs, and finding the time to install a garden and learn how to tend it may be out of their reach.  I see this as the classic "Teach a man to fish" opportunity.  These families may not have time to install a garden on their own, but they would probably have time to tend one if they had help setting it up.  This would provide almost-free healthy food to the people who need it most.  Also, there are many disabled people who think that their disability prevents them from growing their own food.  I'd like us to eventually be able to help plan and install appropriate gardens (e.g. wheelchair-height raised beds) for people who thought they couldn't have one, and to help with regular maintenance (weeding, watering, etc) to those who have gardens already, but whose health conditions now prevent them from maintaining them.

I've never done something like this before, so I really hope someone who knows more than I do about establishing a non-profit will join and help out!  In the meantime I'm just trying to get exposure.  I've set up a Facebook page and a YahooGroup, and even though my primary goal is to make local Real Life connections, I also recognize the value of long-distance online participation, discussion, and advice, so I hope people will join the online groups just to talk gardening and local food production!  I'll have links to both groups in the sidebar of the blog.  Any help I can get in making this an active community, both online and IRL will be greatly appreciated!

Garden update (finally!)

I feel like I've gotten surprisingly little accomplished in the last few weeks.  This is partly because I had my annual booth at the Westville Artwalk this past Saturday (which I will talk about in my other blog), and spent the two weeks prior eating, sleeping & breathing jewelry.  No time for much garden stuff (for me) at the end of April.

I have managed to plant out everything I had started under lights, including the tomatoes, which I put out a couple of weeks earlier than I did last year.  They're still very small, but for the most part they look green and healthy.  I can't wait til they get a little bigger - the squirrels keep burying them!  Eventually I will fence in the open side of the garden.  It won't keep out any truly determined squirrels, but it will deter the ones that are just casually wandering into the garden in search of goodies.

My broccoli is doing beautifully!  I expect to have a lot more of it this year.  It's the one garden vegetable that I can count on everyone enjoying, so I'm trying to plant more of it.  I may even try for a fall crop this year.

The mizuna and lettuces i've planted alre coming along nicely, but I really need to start some more.  I sowed some carrots a week or so ago, but no sign of them so far.  I have terrible luck with carrots, but I keep trying!  I'll get it eventually.

The long spate of rainy weather we had really slowed down my efforts to dig up new beds.  So far I've only finished two of the six new beds I've got planned.  Now that the craft show is over I should be able to devote more of my dry weather time to digging up sod.  That said, I'm devoting a lot of my child-free time to another major project lately, but that's going to be another post.

The herb bed is still looking a little sparse.  The mint has popped up in at least three different places, and I'm going to have to decide which one I'm going to keep.  The thyme is coming along slowly, but the oregano is going great guns!

 Last year I planted four shiso plants.  I didn't bother to start any this spring because I was told they reseed easily.  Apparently this is correct.  All these little seedlings with heart-shaped leaves are shiso!  I'm going to have to thin them aggressively - I only had four plants last year, and that was more than I needed!

Tripling the size of my garden

This will be the fourth year for my vegetable garden.  Every year I learn something new about what works and what doesn't.  I'm getting a better feel for what vegetables it's worth my while to plant and which ones aren't.  For example, even though everyone in the house likes peas, it takes up more space than it's worth to me to plant more than one or two meals worth.

One of my goals with this garden has been to grow and preserve my own tomatoes.  It's been slow work trying to figure out how many plants I need to get the harvest I want.  It didn't help that the first year I had tomatoes in the garden was the year of the Awful Tomato Blight, making it difficult to separate my mistakes from other problems.  Last year I came to the conclusion that I just needed a bigger garden.  Yesterday we had a rare combination of warm weather, and my son having a half-day while my daughter did not, so I had extra help rearranging the garden fence!  The new fence arrangement will give me about three times the garden space!

 The bottom right corner with all the dead leaves is the old garden space.  You can see the fence near the house - this is all now new garden space!  I'm going to spend most of this afternoon measuring out and removing sod from the new plots.

One of my beds has morphed into a perennial herb plot.  I cleared last years leaves away, and look what I found!

Oregano

Thyme

Sage

I didn't harvest any of these last year because the plants weren't that well-established.  It looks like at the very least I'll be able to start using my oregano soon!

I have green growing things!

OK they're very tiny green growing things - but that's fine!  I finally got my broccoli started last week!  Thanks to Erin at garden now - think later! who sent me a ton of seeds, I will have three types of broccoli this year!  I now have Waltham and Purple Sprouting, in addition to the Calabrese Green Sprouting I already had.

I'm trying my soil-blocker again.  The seedlings I planted in soil blocks last year didn't do so well.  They sprouted and stayed green, but didn't ever grow to a useful size.  My best guess is that I compacted the blocks too firmly in my efforts to get them to hold together.  I think the perlite I used in the soil-blocker-mix was a little too coarse (it was the only grade they had!), and also in my attempt to downscale the "recipe" (I did not need 40 bushels of mix!) I may not have added enough dirt.  This year I added another bag of potting soil to my soil-blocker mix.

Because I only have one light, and I can only fit two trays under it, last year I was doing my germination in a third tray with a heat mat, but no lights.  I started compacting the soil blocks more when the ones with sprouted seeds started to fall apart when I tried to move them to the lighted trays.  This year I decided to skip the third tray (for now) and put the heat mat/tray directly under the lights.  Now I don't have to move sprouted blocks when their neighbors are still "cooking."  When it comes time to move them into larger containers, we'll see how well they handle being moved!

This Thursday we're supposed to get into the 60's!  There's no rain forecast right now, so that's when I'm going to attempt to rearrange my garden fence to give me a couple of new beds.  Wish me luck!

Second and third dyeing experiments - third time's the charm!

Here is attempt #2 at dyeing wool roving in this particular colorway.  I did kind of a no-no and changed two variables at once, But I'm pretty sure I still would've had to do #3 anyway, so no real time lost here. 

After having so much dye left over last time, I decided to try not doubling the dye-to-fiber ratio for dye painting, as recommended in Color in Spinning, and just go with the immersion dyeing ratios.  I also changed my method of applying heat for setting the dye.  In the first experiment I used the steamer technique, where you wrap your dyed roving up in a long piece of plastic wrap, then roll that "snake" up into a "snail" and place it in a steamer basket in a pot on the stove with water, and steam it for an hour at about 180F.  The tricky part here is trying to maintain the temperature.  If it goes much above 190F you can damage your fiber, and although the dye is supposed to start setting at 150F, it seems to take forever, and it's difficult to gauge the timing, so I try not to let it get below 175F. 

 I'd seen references to people setting dye in the oven instead, so I decided to try that in hopes that it would be easier to maintain a consistent temperature.  Several people had said they had good luck with an oven temp of 250F for about an hour, so that's what I tried.  What I should have done was stick my thermometer in the fiber to make sure it was getting hot enough.  I was lazy, and decided to "follow the recipe."  I still had my roving wrapped in plastic wrap, then I placed it in a plastic bag before putting it in a baking dish because I didn't have a pan I wanted to dedicate to dyeing.  It was impossible to tell whether the dye had exhausted without poking holes in the plastic, which of course would result in the dye leaking out.  When I rinsed the roving I found that indeed, much of the dye had not set, and while I was getting the charcoal grey that I was looking for, the blue and the blue-green were much more muted than I'd intended.

Here's the resultant yarn.  Again, very pretty, but still not what I had visualized.  I knew why I hadn't achieved the saturation in the colors that I wanted (the dye had not exhausted), but I was also disappointed that there still didn't seem to be enough distinction between the blue and the blue-green.  They were still blending too much in the roving.

In doing a little deeper research, I found that people who oven-dyed for their business tended to use oven temps closer to 300-350F.  Also, a lot of them were dispensing with plastic wrap entirely and laying their roving out in a zig-zag in a roasting pan, applying the dye, then covering the pan with tin-foil before putting it in the oven. For my third attempt, I went and got a cheap aluminum roasting pan.  When I applied my dyes, this time I made sure that the blue and the blue-green were never adjacent to each other, always having the grey between them.  I used my thermometer (the one I have has a cable that plugs into a temp readout, so I can shut it into the oven and monitor the temp from outside), and set the oven temp at 300F.  I still had to do a lot of tweaking with the temperature (turning the oven up and down, opening the oven door, etc), and left it in for a total of about an hour and a half.

Tah-dah!  This is what I was aiming for!  All the dyes exhausted, the grey has not turned black, and the blue and blue-green have not blended together - you can see that there are two distinct colors in this roving!  The roasting pan technique also took up a lot less space on my tiny counter, which, with my clumsy self, is a definite advantage!  I can see being able to fit probably two rovings per roasting pan of this size, and I should be able to fit four pans in the oven at once.  Eight at a time is not bad!

Here is the yarn from this last roving.  Still fairly subtle, still some blending in the yarn, but that's OK because that's where I want the blending to occur.  But you can see three distinct colors, not just blue and grey like the second yarn, or blue and black like the first.  It's all about control, and being able to get the results you were expecting.  I'm sure I will still get lots of unexpected results, but at least now I seem to have the biggest variables (more-or-less) under control.  Now I can start thinking up some different colorways!  I'm really glad this only took three tries - I was going to get really tired of this color combo if I didn't figure things out!

Experiments with painted roving

 So I've started experimenting with painted roving.  Yes, technically it's not roving, it's combed top, but since "painted roving" has become the generic term for this product regardless of whether it's actual roving or top, that's how I'll refer to it.   It's very pretty, but not quite what I was going for.

In dyeing, the intensity/darkness of your final product is determined by a ratio of dye to fiber, by weight.  If you want a lighter color you use less dye, if you want a darker color you use more.  Sounds logical and reasonable, right?  This relative intensity of color is referred to as Depth Of Shade, and is generally abbreviated as DOS.  If you want consistency and repeatable color (e.g. professionals and perfectionists), you will not just toss everything in a pot and see what comes out - at least not without keeping very careful notes! 

If you want consistency and repeatable color you will use a formula to tell you what ratio of dye to fiber will give you a certain DOS.  The current dyer's standard (as far as I can tell) is to use a scale that generally starts with DOS .25 (very pale) and ends at DOS 4 (as dark as it's possible to get for that color).  In immersion dyeing, where you are dyeing everything one solid color, if you want DOS 1 you use a 1:1 ratio of dye to fiber.  A DOS .25 would be .25:1 dye to fiber, etc.  You then add enough water for the fiber to move freely and "cook" everything at the appropriate temperature until all the dye in the water has been absorbed by the fiber.

With dye painting it's a little different.  You have individual cups of dye that you apply directly to the fiber.  You place the color exactly where you want it, and have some degree of control over how much the colors blend where they meet.  There is also an optimum amount of liquid that can be applied to roving for dyeing. If you use too much, everything blends together a lot more and you have less control.  Too little, and you end up with undyed spots where you don't want them.

According to Deb Menz, when you are doing painted roving, you should use double the amount of dye to get the desired DOS.  I'm not sure why or how this is necessary, or how much of it is just "fudge factor."  I wanted the test roving at the top of the page to be a medium grey, a medium navy, and a dark forest green.  Even though I know I did all the math correctly, I ended up with way too much liquid!  While she provides good Three Bears examples (too much, too little, just right), she doesn't say "You may not need all the dye you have mixed to achieve this."  By the time I had applied the blue, the green, and half of what was supposed to be dark grey, my roving was sopping.  I stopped adding dye because I knew this was way too much, and decided to see what I would get with what I had.

What I got is at the top of the page.  The grey is still black (not dilute enough), the blue is darker than I was expecting, and they both have pretty much swallowed up the green.  Obviously I had more dye than I really needed, and I can't afford to rinse color down the drain for the sake of "fudge factor."  I will try this again with some modifications, and we'll see what happens!

That said - it still made very pretty yarn!

"Dyeing" to figure this out

dye tests in water bath

Several years ago when Color in Spinning by Deb Menz came out, I dipped a toe in dyeing.  It didn't stay dipped very long - I was still working full-time, and this was also after Scarlett was born, so time and sleep were at a premium.  This is one of the projects I let go.

Color in Spinning is pretty much the guide to using professional dyes (as opposed to Kool-Aid and Rit) on natural fibers intended for handspinning.  It's a fantastic resource, and has great step-by-step detail on every aspect of dyeing both protein and cellulose fibers.  There are instructions for dyeing big fluffy "clouds" an even, solid color, and instructions for painting dye onto tops or rovings (which are essentially long thick "ropes" of fiber) for producing variegated yarn.

These "painted rovings" are very popular among spinners because no matter how much you love spinning, miles and miles of the same color can be very boring!  The color changes in a painted roving add some variety, plus you never know quite what the finished yarn is going to be like, which also adds some excitement!

I still had the dyes from my first attempt, so I decided that now would be a good time to try this again!  The first step in this process is to make color samples.  Color in Spinning starts with a set of eleven colors of dye, and then gives formulas for another 56 colors that can be made with those original eleven.  There is no color card, so if you want to know what those colors look like, you need to mix them up and dye them.

bits of dyed wool drying on top of my bookshelf, out of Scarlett's reach

I decided that 10 grams of wool was a good sample size (nice and easy to measure), but at that relatively small weight, I would need to measure certain chemicals used in the process in fractions of grams.  I knew that this was my downfall the first time around.  At the time I only had a triple-beam balance scale.  While it was incredibly accurate, it was also extremely tedious to use, and took a lot more time than I really had.  Now I have a nifty little digital scale that has made that step so much faster and easier!

 I have been working on my sample notebook.  I'm using binder pages meant to hold business cards, and I put a little piece of fluff or yarn in each pocket, backed with a piece of cardstock that has the color name and formula on the other side. Each side is also labeled with the number of the dye formula as given in the book. It's really nice to be able to just flip pages and see what colors I might want to use.

I'm more than halfway through the 56 colors.  Unfortunately I've run out of Sun Yellow.  As you can see, the page with my yellows and oranges on it is looking a little sparse.  My page of greens, sadly, is in a similar state.  I am waiting for the Goddess of Fortune to smile on me (IOW - waiting for someone to buy something from me!) so that I can get more dye.  In the meantime I'm going to explore painting roving with the colors I've got.  I bought 5 lbs of Romney top with my Christmas money - should be enough for 20 or 30 different color experiments!