Laundry to Lanscape Greywater Project Update

Last spring my wonderful husband installed a laundry to landscape Grey Water system in our backyard. It feeds three fruit trees (a peach, some raspberries, and a fig) at the front end, and waters the vegetable garden at the back end. So far I have been thrilled with its performance!

Here is part one, and here is part two.

Some changes we have made: Shortened the lines and added a plug.

We shortened the lines by lopping off the last two pots on each line. The directions said it could support up to 30 pots, but of course I tried to make it longer. The last bit never got enough water. That part of the bed also got too much shade, so I am converting it to a wild flower patch.

 

Back in the Garden

Today I was back in the garden again for the first time in a long time. This February has been the coldest and wettest that I can remember. We had a record 10 inches of snow while John was here on leave (of course.) Usually we have a lovely indian summer in February, but this time I was stuck indoors until now. Finally some pretty weather, but alas the garden is too wet to do any digging. I must get my onion transplants in!

Here is Garry, John and Claire with the snowman they made. For comparison purposes, Garry is 6'3''.

What I did today was rake back the leaf mulch from the area where I intend to plant the onions and I put an additional 6 subterranean waters (aka milk cartons) in the ground. I am going to plant my onions in large blocks this time, instead of long rows, in an attempt to save space.

I had such a good time being outdoors and looking over the garden. I picked a whole colander full of Brussels Sprouts! I also learned that it was not a good idea to cover the sprouts with a row cover. The B. sprouts that I left uncovered where fine, in-spite of the snows and freezing weather, but the ones I had covered with a row cover were full of aphids. They hadn't hurt the plants any and washed right off the sprouts though. My mustard greens are still going strong and my garlic looks good.

Brussels Sprouts

Here is a picture of the transplants I am growing for the garden. The set up is on the kitchen table and you can still see we have a few pumpkins left. I am growing tomatoes,  3 kinds of peppers, lettuce, two kinds of cabbage, and swiss chard. I found that I had no broccoli seed when I started this, but then remembered that I had a bag of seeds for making broccoli sprouts (for eating in the salad) so I only have one broccoli plant! I am only growing a few transplants because of space limitations, but this will give me a head start on the garden. When I plant these transplants, I will also plant seeds for a later harvest.

As soon as the garden dries a bit I can transplant the cabbage, lettuce and swiss chard.

Another indoor gardening activity has been to grow sprouts for our salads. I bought a little sprouter and some seeds for a mixture of sprouts and have had great success with this. Everyone loves the sprouts on a variety of dishes.

12 Frozen Cabbages

Well I played chicken a little too long with winter and had to run outside Wednesday night and bring 12 frozen cabbages inside. The big outer leaves were stiff and unbending, and very cold to hold in our bare hands. The cabbages covered up one side of my kitchen counter completely.

It was late and no time to do anything with them then. I just hoped that when they defrosted they would be fine on the inside and that I would be able to get some use out of them. The next morning I checked on the cabbages and they looked perfectly normal. No burned or wilted leaves. After school all three of us women got to work and started making cabbage rolls. We had never made these before and it was quite a bit of work, but fun.

There are tons of recipes for these on the net and we just picked one that we liked. We used the big outer green cabbage leaves to line the bottom of the pan. The big but light green leaves were used to roll up a meat and vegetable mixture (after blanching them in boiling water to make them pliable) and the tomato sauce was made from  my stash of ripening garden tomatoes. I used my vitamix so I did not have to peel all those tomatoes, just threw them in and blended with the spices. The tomato sauce was poured on top of the bundles and the whole thing was topped off by more big outer cabbage leaves.

The most work of this whole affair was cleaning and preparing the cabbage leaves for the dish. We had to clean off dirt, fallen tree leaves, moths and other dead bugs, plus a few live caterpillars. The kitchen was such a mess afterwards! We were left with a big pile of unusable huge outer leaves (that felt like a big waste throwing those in the compost) and twelve little round inner cabbages, about 5 lbs worth, (and water and dirt everywhere!) At least I can report that the dish was a success, yummy, and lasted us for three meals.

The next day we were gone to band until the late afternoon when we tackled the rest of the cabbage. We had decided to make homemade sauerkraut. This time only Anna helped me. We chopped and chopped and chopped until I got tired and got out my kitchen-aid attachment that would shred the cabbage. We shredded cabbage and carrots and an apple, we pounded and pounded, added spices and packed it all in a big sun-tea jar. We added whey from yogurt to start the fermentation process, and set the jar on our counter to start working. Now I need to go to the store to get some wide mouth jars to pack the sauerkraut in for storage. I stupidly got rid of mine last time we moved. I will write another post soon all about using lactic acid fermentation as a way of food preservation at a later date.

Sauerkraut in gallon jar. The cup on top is a weight to hold down the cabbage under the juice. Its hard to believe that 5 lbs of cabbage only makes half a gallon of kraut. In front are some pumpkin muffins.

I checked the garden today and the broccoli and brussels sprouts are still doing fine despite the freezing weather. I even have another broccoli to harvest and a few broccoli side sprouts coming along. The brussels sprouts are still only as big as my pinky fingernail so I dont know if we will get any of those before it gets really cold. The mustard is just fine. Next thing on the schedule is garden clean up and processing 4 more pumpkins ( I have to get them out of my kitchen before the big church Christmas party at my house this Sunday.)