Simpler Living

Season in Review

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:52:00 +0000

This was a bad year for the garden. The heat killed most of my plants, and also prevented me from going outside and weeding.

Here are the results:

Failures:

Tomato (may get a few in the fall - we'll see)
Squash
Cucumber
Rosemary (one potted Rosemary is left, and it doesn't look like it is growing)
Worms - I had a nice worm bin going, but the heat killed them, too!

Almost Failures:

Canteloupe (had 3 good ones, ants took the rest)
Carrots (never got long)
Oregano - have some growing in pots and should do something with it

Successes:

Peas (early in the season)
Green Beans (early in the season)
Sweet Potatoes (I think - haven't dug any up yet)
Lettuce (3 varieties - Romaine, Webb's Wonderful, and Simpson Elite) - had several cuts from each, and now saving the seeds!
Leeks (saved seeds)
Garlic
Mustard Greens
Radishes (though seed-saving was a failure)

Now it's time for fall planting. Planning to plant:

Replanting lettuce from gathered seeds
Kale (Red Winter and Siberian)
Swiss Chard (white and red)
Broccoli (Early Fall Rapini)

I noticed that Amazon sells seeds really cheap ($8/lb for most seeds!) It amazes me that anyone can make money at that price! Seed production simply takes a *lot* of garden time. I wish I had a bigger plot of land to do this on!

I'm also trying growing wheatgrasss without special equipment *or* soil. We'll see how that works.

By the way - my favorite lettuce so far is the first cutting of Simpson Elite. The lettuce seems to get more bitter with each cutting.

Interesting web articles about fall planting:

Random (2011-05-18)

Wed, 18 May 2011 18:54:00 +0000

Here's some random stuff open on my browser today:

Notes from the Garden - 2011/05/14

JB — Sat, 14 May 2011 18:33:00 +0000

I learned several things this year. First, the "days to harvest" on a seed packet seems to be *after* sprouting, but it never explicitly says that. Second, at least in my garden, I need to give the plants another week or two or three after that. Apparently seed packet writers are optimists.

Very little of the tomatoes that I intentionally planted have done anything, except the Silvery Fir Tree tomatoes. A few of them are doing well. We went ahead and bought some tomatoes from The Tomato Man's Daughter. We also have lots of volunteer tomatoes, though I have no idea what variety they are.

The Mizuna lettuce has *already* bolted and gone to flower. It did not get nearly as thick as the package indicated. The package made it look like it might somewhat make a head, but before any major leaf growth we got flowers.

We also got bok choi flowers already. I think that's because the bok choi is supposed to be in a cooler zone. I harvested the non-flowering ones and left the flowering ones for seeds, and planted our purchased tomato plants around them.

The turnips that we planted in the late fall and kept covered with milk jugs through winter are flowering. This might be an easy way to get turnip seeds, and I'm not sure I even need the coverings. This is my first year harvesting turnip seeds (and it was an accident at that), so I'm not quite sure how long I should wait until I harvest the seed pods.

The peas are doing well. They did well unstaked, except that in a high-wind situation, they fell over. I might just add a single stake or two next year so they can grab onto that instead of getting blown over. It doesn't seem to be hindering production, but who knows.

The beans are doing very little.

The leeks from the winter garden look good. I can probably harvest them anytime as I have need for them. I also tasted one of the leaves - yummy!

I pulled up one of our last four garlics from the winter planting. I think they are ready.

The lettuce has been going gangbuster this year. We are eating very well from a variety of lettuces. I have Simpson Elite, which is doing well, a green Romaine lettuce that is doing well, and a mixed Romaine that is doing well. It seems to only take a few days from when you cut the lettuce to when it grows back!

The lettuce I ate over winter has bolted and is about to flower. Yay! Not the best-tasting lettuce, but if you can harvest lettuce three times over the winter, I'd say that the lettuce is worth keeping, no matter what it takes.

I have several sweet potatoes in the ground, and they seem to be doing well, and several more that I need to get in the ground.

I want to do some guerilla-gardening this year, but need to figure out what to plant. Maybe my sweet potatoes would be a good way to guerilla garden.

I've been trying my hand at propagation techniques. I tried to propagate a whole bunch of bush/tree type plants using a rooting hormone. The only ones that successfully rooted were the Rosemary bushes.

My carrots seem to be doing okay, though they are growing very slowly.

When I harvested my radishes, they were kind of small - I think I need to give them a few more weeks. I left three out for seeds, and they got *huge*. We'll see what next year's stuff looks like.

My beets were beautiful in the backyard, so I transplanted them to the front yard. Now they are ugly. Go figure.

My cabbage has started to actually do some growing. It was basically dormant for a while.

I need to get some pepper seeds and see if germinating them late will give me a decent crop at the proper time.

It's looking like I'll need to plant a bunch of stuff in three weeks - I should have my peas and beans in, my lettuce will probably have run its course, and my turnip seeds should be harvested. That will open up more than half the garden for new planting. And, I might have gotten my Leeks harvested, too.

What your weeds are trying to tell you

JB — Mon, 02 May 2011 04:41:00 +0000

I found this link and thought it interesting. The idea is that you can tell what your soil is like based one the weeds growing in it:

What Your Garden's Weeds are Trying to Tell You

Winter Gardening Review

JB — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 22:40:00 +0000

Okay, since spring is arriving, I will do my winter gardening review and my plans for next year. Check here for my winter garden setup.

I planted several things for winter: lettuce, spinach, garlic, leeks, swiss chard, bok choy, turnips, and beets.

What Worked

The lettuce worked great. I planted Webb's Wonderful Lettuce. My wife doesn't like the taste (it is bitter), but as a plant, it worked perfectly. I had at least three harvests from it over the winter. I certainly will grow it next year, but probably try out other lettuce varieties and see how they work.

The garlic appears to be doing well. It has a long growing season, and letting it grow over winter seems to be helpful. However, I haven't grown it at any other time to compare.

What Failed

The turnips and beets were total failures. The turnip plants grew, but did not produce any bulbs at all. The beets didn't grow at all. I may have had more success if I seeded them earlier, but I doubt it. I think that, if you want, you can leave beets and turnips in the ground over winter to store, but you shouldn't expect them to grow.

What Didn't Worked As Well As I Hoped

Everything else produced *something* but nothing quite what I wanted.

The spinach is only just now getting ready to eat. So, that means there was no real benefit of winter gardening - it was just sitting there dormant waiting until the weather got warmer to continue its growing.

I planted the bok choy and swiss chard when it was about to freeze, so I shouldn't be surprised that I haven't gotten much from it. The few bok choy plants that sprouted are almost ready to harvest, but the swiss chard is still in its infant state. Hopefully we'll get a growth spurt soon.

I don't know what I should expect from leeks. They are taking a long time, but doing okay otherwise. I think they have a long growth season anyway, so we may have saved time. I'll leave them in the ground and see how long it takes to get a full leek.

What I'm Trying Next Year

I think next year I will try:

Celery - I've actually heard that December is the optimum planting time for celery
More lettuces - I'll keep Webb's lettuce, and add in a few others
Garlic - if the garlic matures soon, I'll certainly add mroe in next year
I might try growing a "January King" cabbage
Kale and Collards
Just read about Mache which looks interesting
I might try producing a few crops of radishes

Anyway, it's been a fun experiment. Right now I'm waiting for my lettuce to bolt so I can collect some seeds. Hopefully it still has enough umph in it to produce some seeds for me :)

Growing Potatoes Vertically

JB — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 02:10:00 +0000

This is something I want to try this year. Apparently, you can grow up to 100 pounds of potatoes in just 4 square feet of land! How? By growing them vertically in a box.

Basically, you build a box with removable panels. As the potato grows, you add panels, and then fill it in with dirt. If you buy a late-season potato, it should produce potatoes all through the box as it grows.

Details are here (also here). And someone had an extended blog entry about their own experiences here.

In short,

You have to keep on top of getting the dirt on the plant, or it won't grow more potatoes
Practical experience says most will only get 25-60 pounds of potatoes in a realistic garden, but that's much better than the 10 pounds you would probably get from a more traditional setup.
Some recommended varieties of potatoes are Butte, Yellow Fin, and Bintje

Snow Ice Cream - Easy Recipe in Under 2 Minutes!

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 00:34:00 +0000

This is a new blog category - Nature Hacking. Nature hacking is going to be a collection of techniques to leverage nature in interesting ways. The first one is using snow to make ice cream. This takes 2 minutes!

Ingredients:

1 gallon of snow
2 cups milk
1 cup sugar
1 heaping tablespoon of cocoa powder

Steps:

Put all ingredients into a large bowl
Mix thoroughly
Serve!

Seriously, that's it, and it tastes great!

Returning to Localism

JB — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 14:33:00 +0000

Some people are skeptical of the coming economic disaster. I am not. I don't know when it will happen, but all signs are pointing to some time soon. Before I sketch out my solution to the problem, I'd like to briefly say why I think we the economy is headed to disaster.

We are Rapidly Devaluing Our Currency

The US government has been recklessly spending for decades. Most people don't realize what a disaster this is for our economy. When the government borrows money, that devalues every ounce of savings for everyone. In addition, the added debt load makes it harder and harder to repay the debts.

We haven't seen the effects of this because we just borrow more money to pay back the money. Or print more money to pay back the money. But this doesn't last forever. It has lasted longer than usual because of one fact - the US dollar is the world's reserve currency. It is the standard used in international transactions, especially in oil. Which leads us to our next point.

The World is No Longer Standardizing on the Dollar

We thought that our position as the standard currency was unbreakable, so we made dumb fiscal decisions. But those fiscal decisions have caused several changes that will soon be felt:

If more nations follow in this trend, this spells trouble. What happens when everyone dumps the US dollar? Imagine if, overnight, everyone's salary was cut in half, or even quartered? That's the impact of having the dollar dumped - it raises prices so that the buying power of your salary goes down to half or a quarter of what it was, almost instantly.

Not only that, the fed recently issued new rules that means that it can never run out of money.

So, in short, I think that a currency crisis is coming soon. But there's more: the US could easily also lose its AAA rating in the bond market. Rating services have said that if our interest payments rise to 18-20% of our federal spending, we will lose our AAA status, and that will probably happen somewhere between 2013 and 2020. Then, why would anyone use us as a reserve currency? This will lead to a massive dollar dump, plus the government will get higher interest rates for its loans, meaning that it will need to print more money to pay them back. Thus, a vicious cycle in which the dollar goes more worthless every day.

How To Stop the Cycle

I have no hope that our government has the capacity to solve this crisis. So the best wisdom I can come up with is to unplug from the system, so that when disaster strikes, you are not very impacted. How does this work? By going extremely local and small-scale.

Enable small-scale commerce. This is the only one that requires the government. We need to remove all government regulations from microcommerce. If a mom bakes an extra cake, she should be allowed to sell it to her neighbors (this is currently illegal without permits, a commercial kitchen, and thousands of dollars of investment). We need to wake up to the reality that the large-scale commerce of the US may come to a grinding halt, and, unless we have enabled small-scale commerce, we will be fully sunk. The fact is, regulations are largely irrelevant for small-scale commerce. Regulations are to help keep people who don't know each other from exploiting each other. Such regulations are usually not needed when transactions are between individuals in the same community.
Engage in small-scale commerce. We all need to find little ways in which we can, as individuals, benefit each other. This may wind up being the only employment we have for a while.
Value Capital Assets over Money, Trinkets, or Consumables. The money we have will probably be worthless. However, capital assets - land, housing, and things which produce things, will be helpful. I have a dehydrator, a grain mill, and a backyard which I have been improving to grow crops. I wish I had an acre or two of land. The next years, we need to stop spending money on stupid things, and focus our spending on capital assets.
Store Food. We need to start being prepared so that if the food in the economy runs out, we can still get by.
Create Public Gardens. We need to have in place plans at the local level for converting all the grasslands within our cities into public, community farmland.
Imagine Yourself Unplugged. Imagine that tomorrow, all public utilities are turned off. Are you ready? Do you have what you need? I doubt they will be turned off, but they may be too expensive to use. Do you have enough blankets for winter? Do you have candles for light? Do you have seeds to grow food? Chickens for eggs? How well can you manage when all the lights go out?

I hope that when it all hits the fan, that conditions will not be so dire. In any case, if they are better than I fear, the preparations will still be of benefit, no matter what the outcome. Being unplugged, local, and prepared is helpful in any situation, and helps hedge against economic problems. But, if things get bad, you will wish that you had prepared yourself.

I am not fully prepared, but have been working towards it.

Cheap Year-Round Gardening

JB — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:10:00 +0000

This year, I'm trying to garden year-round. It's a first attempt, and it may not turn out well, but I thought I'd share my experience so-far. I am, first and foremost, extremely cheap. So the idea of spending a lot of money so that I could garden in the winter just didn't appeal to me.

But it turns out it doesn't cost as much as you might suppose.

Here is my current setup:

As you can see, I've just got two half-inch, 10-foot PVC pipes stretched over each other. I tied them in the middle with some twine. They aren't really anchored to anything, just pushed down into the dirt next to the raised bed frame. It's then covered with 4mil plastic sheeting cut to 10x12 sheets, and then anchored down with bricks and logs and whatever I could find.

Anyway, hopefully this will allow enough protection to keep growing well into the winter. Anyway, it was worth the cost.

Here's the total breakdown of costs of each raised bed and the winter protection:

Raised bed (6'x3' using 5/4"x6" boards) frame - $15
First load of dirt - $15
2 PVC Pipes - $3
Plastic sheeting - $8

So, the beds themselves were $30, and the winter covering was $11.

Don't Buy Green! Buy Crunchy Instead

JB — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:37:00 +0000

One of the things that irks me more than just about anything is the current "green" label that is being slapped onto everything. Everything is saying "buy green!" "buy green!" You might be surprised that as someone who likes gardening and simple living, I have no love whatsoever for the "go green" movement.

The green movement, to me, seems to be about buying consumer goods to save the planet. I don't like either of those - buying consumer goods or saving the planet. Our current spending spree is precisely our problem, and I'm sure that God made the planet good enough so that it will survive whatever we are doing to it. I'm not pro-trashing-the-planet, but I don't go crazy about "saving" it, either. We can save our community. The planet is in God's hands.

My philosophy, instead, is to be "crunchy". Crunchiness is about living simply. It's about resurrecting many of the traditions of the farm home, modernizing them, and inventing new ones in the same vein. Green is about buying green stuff. Crunchy is about being wise and loving in your whole life. It's about making investments rather than purchases, and about caring rather than carefree.

Let's take an example - diapers. I have seen the "green" diapers. I'm sure I've even used some on my children. But, ultimately, "green" diapers are a disposable consumer good. You buy them, you use them, you throw them away. Sure, they did a good job making them a little more pleasant to the landfills and the groundwater, but nonetheless it is the same mentality that gave us pampers to begin with. It's spend, spend, spend our way into living.

Crunchy families, instead, often go the cloth diaper route. Cloth diapers are wonderful because they don't go in the landfill, ever. Cloth diapers actually cost us more upfront, but they last forever. We used many of the same diapers on all 5 of our children, and then handed them over to other friends and family! In fact, not only that, my wife and her mom made some of the diapers we used on our children. So, not only were they wearing diapers that would last longer than their shirts, they were wearing their mother's love, poured into making them wonderful diapers.

"Green" is about replacing still-good-items with new versions. Think about the "Cash for clunkers" program. That was a totally "green" phenomena. They encourage people to spend-spend-spend their way into harmony with the world and each other. I can't imagine a dumber approach. A crunchy approach would be to learn to do without. To learn to have fewer cars, use the bus more often, ride your bike more often, carpool with friends, and telecommute. Buying new cars and trashing old ones just makes more junk. A better (and crunchier!) approach is to keep what you have, learn to take care of it, and learn to use it less. We probably don't have the car with the best mileage, but our wise use of our cars mean that we consume less fuel. (I have to admit - on the car front, I'm not doing very good personally, but it's on my list of things to correct)

"Crunchy" isn't anti-purchasing. It is about prudent purchasing. It is about purchasing investments which produce more rather than purchasing consumable products which just get trashed after a single usage.

To give you an idea of what this looks like, let me tell you about a few of the crunchy purchases we've made in the last year:

an industrial-strength mixer, to make large batches of bread dough
a grain mill
a food dehydrator
a used sewing machine

All of these things add value to things that we purchase. When I buy grain I can make flour. When I buy or grow fruits and vegetables, I can dehydrate them and store them. My wife can take cloth and turn it into clothing.

What's interesting is that any of these could be a business if we wanted them to be. We are adding real value to the world with the things we purchase. Buying lots of items at Whole Foods (aka "Whole Paycheck") doesn't make your home one that adds value to the world. Buying processing equipment, so that you can make your own snacks from raw materials, does. In addition, we are doing so with the care that comes from being part of a family. Even if we sell things as a business, we make them as a family, and that's a huge difference.

As far as consumables go, you can't sell used pampers or used packaging, but you can sell used cloth diapers and used mason jars.

Buying "crunchy" isn't about the price, or the "green"-ness, or any other single-dimension analysis. It is about wise purchases that transform your home from an endpoint of consumption to a building-point of provision, which stamps the character of your family on everything it creates.

The Tomato Experiment

JB — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:06:00 +0000

Today I embarked on a little experiment. I noticed last year that if you let tomatoes sprawl out, they would grow roots along the stem. I wondered if that meant they would easily re-root.

This year, after chopping down the pole beans (which didn't produce *anything*), I decided to devote the space to my tomato experiment. What I did was trim a bunch of my tomato plants, and plant the trimmings in my new bed. Having heard that honey can encourage rooting, I dipped many of them in honey. I also took some longer cuttings and some shorter ones. We'll see how well they all do.

I'll try to post pictures as I go along.

Books I Have and Want

JB — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:42:00 +0000

On my "to buy" list:

Books I think you should read:

The Backyard Homestead - my all-time favorite book on the subject - everything you need to inspire you and get started!
Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting - an excellent guide to doing more with less.

Wide-Row Planting - My New Favorite Gardening Technique

JB — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:23:00 +0000

Last year I had really bad output from my garden, as well as the year before that, with the small exception of some tomatoes that grew well. This year, the garden is much more successful. I attribute that to three factors:

I started gardening much earlier this year. I started growing things from seed in my garage in February, and planted mid-March.
I used raised beds for several of my plots. This keeps the weeds out, and keeps the plants from drowning in our sometimes torrential rains.
I used wide-row planting.

What is wide-row planting? Another, slightly more descriptive name for it could be "massively overplanted garden beds". This year, I threw out most recommendations for plant and row spacing, and just flooded the garden beds with seeds.

The results have been phenomenal:

Grow more in less space
Don't have to stake pea plants
Less bother with weeding

Less maintenance - more food!

Here's my wide-row planted pea plants:

You might be saying, "but you do have stakes in there!" That's true, only because I got scared at the last moment and said, "what if they all fall over!?!? However, let me assure you, that the peas prefer to hang onto each other than the stakes - almost no pea plant is attached! My pole beans are another story - they like the stakes, though I am curious how well they would do without them.

In any case, these peas required no staking whatsoever - they just attach to each other and hold themselves up. And they are producing tons of peas. I actually think that I under-seeded it, as there are several spots where I didn't get a pea plant, and feel that the space is under-used.

Here is my massively overseeded lettuce:

I didn't overseed my collards, but I think I should have.

Here are my overseeded beans. On the left I have pole beans and on the right I have bush beans:

Next year I'm just doing bush beans, and leaving the stakes in the garage. The pole beans haven't produced anything, while the bush beans were wildly productive.

And then, here are two more beds:

The bed on the right has peppers. It is overseed but not massively so. I'll have to correct that next year :) The bed on the left is fairly well overseeded. It is a 3'x3' bed, and has 6 tomato plants and 3 cucumber plants. All of which are doing very well (I already got to make pickles from these guys, and the tomatoes are just about ripe).

I also overplanted my radishes, but I've already discussed those.

To get an idea about just how many seeds I planted, for the peas I used a single Burpee 4oz Value Pack for both beds (each 3'x3'), and for the beans I used one value pack for each bed. I'll probably do two packs for the peas next year, or at least spread them out better. From looking online, a 4oz packet of seeds will probably have about 300-400 seeds.

Anyway, why waste garden space? Sprinkle your seeds liberally. Using 3' rows with a decent walkway between rows will allow you to reach in anywhere you need, and give your plants plenty of companions while they grow. Consider wide-row planting (i.e. massive overseeding) for your garden next year!

Being Nice to the Bunnies

JB — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:39:00 +0000

Everyone I know who has the garden fences it off to keep the animals out. That seems a little unneighborly to me. Certainly, if some critters are decimating your garden, you should take some action. But, so what if you have to make do without 10% of your garden? Is it really worth the extra trouble? And, perhaps, is nature doing something that you don't realize?

I've never spent too much time worrying about pests. The neighborhood bunnies, last year, had their way with our tomatoes, so much so that I had to pick them while they were still green in order to get anything to eat.

However, a wonderful thing happened. Because the bunnies had eaten so many tomatoes, they had also spread around hundreds of tomato seeds! So, this year, all over my yard, tomato plants are springing up! Now, a lot of these are weeds - they are growing in a spot being used for some other purpose. But I'm going to let a lot of them go, and be thankful for the bunnies who ate last years tomatoes, but whose appetite actually multiplied my abundance of tomato plants this year.

This year, I've expanded my garden quite a bit, and added collards. Well, so far, the bunnies have left everything else alone - even the lettuce - and focused on the collards. I let them have them - if they take one crop and leave the others, why not live in peace? And, I found in the last few days that the collards are now growing strong. The bunnies knew how to eat the collards so that they kept growing well!

So, the bunnies, rather than being a pest, are actually helping my gardening efforts. Perhaps we would be wiser if, instead of trying to find ways to cage our plants away from the bunnies, we thought of ways to channel the bunny-power into spreading our seeds where we want them to. Maybe we should teach ourselves to live with nature, not against it.

The Amazing Radish

JB — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:14:00 +0000

This year, I decided to try growing radishes. Why, you ask? Because, as a computer programmer, I like things to happen instantly. Unfortunately, gardens don't grow instantly. However, radishes grow in 30 days, which, in gardening terms, is a blink of an eye.

So I decided to grow a garden bed of radishes. Therefore, I decided to do some radish research, and found out several amazing things about radishes. The first thing I learned was that you can eat every part of every radish in every stage of life! You can eat the root, you can eat the seedlings, you can eat the leaves, you can eat the flowers, and you can eat the seed pods. Not only that, you can use the remains of the plant as food for other plants.

(Flowering Radishes)

So, here's what I did, and so far it's worked out really well:

I overplanted my bed - way overplanted
I thinned out the extra seedlings into a plastic dish (leaving plants about 2 inches apart), and used the seedlings as sandwich sprouts
I then harvested 3/4 of my radishes at harvest time, and kept both the leaves and the roots
I used the radish roots in salads and stir-frying, and I used the leaves in soups. I'll post my recipe later, but it's really easy. You could probably also use the leaves in a stir-fry, but wouldn't want to eat them raw.
I let the rest of my radishes go to seed. However, I found out that radish plants get really, really tall - about 4 feet tall. I added some supports, but even then most of them fell over.
I plucked the bean-looking pods from the radish plant, and - wow! - they had the texture of a green bean and the taste of a radish. You can use them just about anywhere, and the radishes were absolutely loaded with these things. I would guess that each plant had about 30 seed pods on them. And, while it doesn't have quite as much taste, the root is still edible.
I planted the radishes about March 16, and it's now June 8th, so it was about 84 days.

(Radish Seed Pods)

I think next year what I will do is, rather that just keeping the back row to go to seed, I'll just thin the radishes at the root stage from being a few inches apart to being a few feet apart.

But, that's not all. It turns out that radishes have one more trick up their sleeves. Because they have such a long root, they can actually pull nutrients from way down underground to the surface. So, you can use radishes as a "green manure". Plant them about 2-3 weeks before the first frost, and let the winter freeze kill them. They will bring nutrition from the sun and from below the soil to the top of the soil, then the winter freeze will kill them off, and they will nourish your soil over winter.

They actually have specialized radishes for this (fodder radishes), but really, for the small home gardener, any kind can be used. I imagine that the deep radish root will also be useful in breaking up clay soils.

Simplifying Sandwiches and Salads

JB — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 03:03:00 +0000

What can be simpler than a sandwich or salad? Isn't a salad itself the essence of simple living?

Kind of. The lettuce you can cut right from your garden. The onions you can pull out of your garden (though mine didn't grow this year). But there's one thing that doesn't grow in your garden - salad dressing.

I have to admit, I'm a sauce kind of guy. Sandwiches and hamburgers are usually dripping with mustard and ketchup (and sometimes mayo) and salads are usually drenched with dressing.

But then a fascinating thing happened - a few friends of mine started eating salads without dressing. For me, this was a shocking idea. Salad without dressing? Absurd! But then I started thinking about it. What parts of a salad are simple and what parts are not. Well, the dressing isn't. It's also the worst part for you, and the part that is the greatest distance from the garden.

But here's the deal - I can't do dry lettuce. I just can't. So I had to find a simpler way.

And then it dawned on me (you all are probably smart enough to figure it out - I'm a city boy, and these things take some thinking for me).

Strawberries.

Strawberries are one of the closest things that nature has to a sauce. They are juicy and sweet, and most importantly, liquidy. So, I tried to make a dry salad with only lettuce, onion, and sliced strawberries. And you know what? It worked! I had to use several strawberries, but, as long as I got a slice or two with each bite, the salad tasted pretty good!

If you were too desperate for a sauce, you could probably go a little further and actually crush the strawberries into a sauce, but I found that just having them there, sliced, was sufficient.

So there you have it - lettuce, onions, and strawberries - a royal, and simple, meal. Little or no preparation, just pulling things out of the garden and into a bowl.

This same concept also works for sandwiches. For sandwiches, I also like using avocados the same way I use strawberries. They are themselves a sauce. In fact, just a little rough handling of avocados is basically all it takes to make guacamole.

And who doesn't like a guacamole sandwich?

Tasty... and simple.

Super-simple pickle recipe

JB — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 02:48:00 +0000

I don't like cucumbers, but they are very easy to grow. However, I do like pickles, but a lot of people made pickling sound hard. However, it's super-easy and super-quick with the right recipe. This is a modification of this recipe.

I got two small cucumbers from the garden. They were probably half-sized. I only picked them because I was impatient to wait for the rest of them. I then sliced them thinly. I also sliced a half of a small onion. I put these things in a small jar.

I then took 1/2 cup of vinegar and mixed it with 1/2 cup of sugar, and added just a little bit of salt, mustard seed, ground turmeric, ground cloves, and dill. I then boiled it until the sugar disappeared.

Once the sugar was dissolved, I just poured my stuff over my cucumbers, closed the lid to the jar, and stuck it in the refrigerator.

24 hours later...pickles!

I wonder, however, if all of the spices are needed. I think next time I'm going to go super-simple and see what it tastes like with just vinegar, sugar, and salt.

Welcome to the Blog

JB — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:34:00 +0000

This blog is the log of an ongoing personal experiment - to see about living a simpler life in the suburbs. By simple I don't necessarily mean easy, at least according to the modern definition. By simple, I mean some combination of the following:

A shorter distance between needs and production
Less B.S. in my day
Living *with* God's creation rather than against it
Living in deep community with others
Appreciating the process as much as the results
Being able to live without modern advances
Being able to unplug from the constant daily electronic whirring machine without it or you falling apart

In short, living sacramentally. Being thankful to God and to others for everything we have, we eat, and we do, and doing everything in a meaningful way that also enhances community. It doesn't mean eschewing all things modern - I still make my money as a computer programmer - but it does mean ordering your life so that you could make it without them.

The first and most obvious thing to do is to start a garden - both to eat from and to learn with. So most of my first posts will be about gardening and making stuff with my garden.

And, a lot of this is just fun - I like to experiment and make stuff. It comes from programming computers where I never have really *made* anything at the end of the day, so this gives me the chance to be a part of the real world of making stuff, and experimenting with making stuff.

I also like to be minimalistic. I like to experiment with recipes and see if I can shave off ingredients and still get a decent result. Can I get something tasty with just two or three ingredients? Or with easier-to-find ingredients? Or something that just grows straight out of the ground?

In the long run, I expect that this style of living will decrease my annual costs. However, depending on what you do, it may require some capital expenses.

In any case, I hope you enjoy my blog, and enjoying with me my experiments and learning in this.

Also, I'll probably use this space as my personal blog, too, since that's part of community as well.