Early Spring in the Garden

 During those unseasonably warm and lovely almost summery days in early April, I got 3 of the 4 raised beds cleaned up.  I removed any remaining plants that I'd left from last summer, weeded them twice.  There was some volunteer garlic growing in one bed, so I dug up a couple of clumps and transplanted it into one of the beds.  I wasn't going to grow garlic this year, but free and unexpected plants!   The bulbs should still have time to develop.   

I took some of the lettuces that had germinated in the winter sowing containers and transplanted them into the garden and covered them with plastic cloches.    I have some woad almost big enough to transplant and some Japanese Indigo which is ready to move into the garden, but it's still too early.

We've had snow and below freezing temperatures for the past couple of days.   The daffodils flowers are bent over from the snow and the cold.  They'll pop back up when the weather warms up, but they look so sad.   I had just started transplanting the winter onions from the main garden to this raised bed.  It snowed the next day, so they didn't even have a chance to settle in.   They're pretty hardy though.  I don't imagine they'll have a problem.   I've more to move over.  I want to till that part of the garden this year, and the over wintering onions will just get in the way.  Plus these ones are almost sweet and a lovely addition to a salad or stir fry.  I don't want to lose them.

I read a couple of books on Straw Bale gardening and decided to experiment with it.  This part of the garden gets dug up by the chooks and because of the proximity of the surrounding pastures, is difficult to keep clear of weeds.

I laid down a lot of cardboard and put the straw bales on top of it.   The bales need to be conditioned so that the insides start to compost before planting them.  Both seeds and starter plants can be used.  Most of the bales won't need to start being conditioned until May 1st.  I conditioned two of them early so that I could plant onion sets, beets and chard, which are all safe to plant in cooler weather. Plus I wanted to start playing in the dirt, so an early start for some of the bales allowed me to do that.

While I could see subtle changes in the straw bales that were getting the water and nitrogen, I wondered if it was really working.  The instructions say that the centre of the bale will warm up.   It was just above freezing and the unconditioned bale inside was the same temperature as the ambient air temperature.  The inside of the conditioned bale was over 10 C degrees warmer.   Once our cold and snowy weather moves on, I'll put a bit of potting soil on the top of the bales to hold the seeds while they root, and plant the onion sets on the outside edges of the bales.  The beets and chard will go in the middle.  I've seen so many photos and read so many reviews of this method that show amazing gardens, that it was worth the bit of start up costs to purchase the bales and nutrients to get started.   The cardboard was free though and I've had great results using cardboard as a mulch.  By the end of the summer, it's starting to break down and it's composted completely by the spring.

Dye Plants-  I have a bunch of mature Madder which needs to be dug and used.   There will be a load of woad seeds later this summer and I have lots of woad seedlings to plant.    I have Japanese Indigo seedlings as well.  I'm thrilled that there is a surviving weld plant.    Last summer I stopped watering the raised beds because we had weeks of hot weather and no rain.   I didn't want to over burden our well with watering both the raised beds and the regular garden, so the raised beds were sacrificed  as they needed watering 2 or 3 times a day.   Having a weld plant which will go to seed this summer means I will have weld to play with next summer.   Plus a friend gave me some of her extra weld seed, and I've got some planted for seedlings.  The rest I'll scatter in the weld bed. My Dyer's Greenweed is totally planted in the wrong place, but it's at least surviving.   I don't really have another place to put it right now, so I'll leave it where it is.  At least the bunnies didn't eat it this year.  Last year they gnawed it practically to the ground and the poor plant had to regrow completely.

Singing the Blues

 I started the Japanese Indigo seeds in February, in hopes of getting some seed.  I planted it in the garden a bit early, putting it under plastic cloches from the dollar store.   I planted a couple of plants without the cloches to see what difference they really made.   The Indigo plants under the cloches were definitely happier, with more growth, larger, and noticeably more lush.   This enabled me to do a small dye vat the other day.   I cut 550 g of leaves and stems.   I took some of the leaves from the stems, but I'm not horribly careful about it.  It's a lot of extra work and I don't think it makes a lot of difference.

I set up a double boiler system with my dye pots, putting some water in the larger one and then setting the smaller one inside it.   This makes it much easier to keep the Indigo leaves from getting to hot.    I put the leaves in the pot and filled it with lukewarm water.   I use a candy thermometer to keep an eye of the temperature.   It needs to cook for about 2 hours, getting up to about 160° F, and no higher than 180° F.

Every once in a while, I stir and squish the leaves  to make sure every one of them gets time covered in the hot water.    It's also important to keep an eye on the water level in the larger pot, to make sure the water level doesn't drop too low.

When the temperature gets warm enough and is there for a bit, the leaves start to look a bit wilted and a scum forms on the top.   This is a good thing as you know the pigment is being released.  The scum is a brownish colour, sometimes with a bit of blue or green in it.

When the 2 hours of cooking time is up, it's time to drain the leaves into another pot.   Using rubber gloves, squeeze the hot leaves to get as much of the brown liquid as possible.  They are really hot, so I take very small handfuls, which are easier to squeeze out anyway.    The remaining leaves can be boiled up for a second colour, but I`ve only ever done that with Woad leaves.  Because the Japanese Indigo has so much more pigment, I`m usually ready to clean up when I`m done with dyeing blue.

Anyway, take the brown liquid and add some soda ash or baking soda.  You can also use ammonia, but it smells.  Baking soda works just fine.   Then you need to aerate the liquid by either pouring it back and forth between two buckets, or I use a dedicated stick blender.  It`s permanently dyed blue, so easy to know it`s not for blending foods.

When I`ve aerated the liquid from Woad plants, I usually get little specs of dark blue sitting on top of the foam.  With the Japanese Indigo, the foam often just goes a pale blue, greenish colour.

The final step is to add a reducing agent.  I use Thiourea Dioxide (Thiox).   It`s neat to watch the foam break down and disappear almost immediately after adding the chemical.  You can use spectralite as well, but thiox is available more readily around here.

You need to let the vat sit for a while while the air is worked out of the vat.  A metallic looking scum will form on the top and the vat will turn green or greenish brown when ready.

I had put some fibre in a tub to soak part way through the initial heating time, so it had been soaking for over an hour.   I put it in the vat, let it sit for a few minutes and then pulled it out, carefully squeezing out the excess liquid near water line, just as the fibre came out of the dye.  This supposedly helps eliminate excess oxygen getting into the vat.  

It comes out green and as the air hits it, it starts to turn blue.   If you want darker colours, you need to use multiple dips with airing time in between each dip.

Eventually, I ran out of fibre and the vat was giving lighter blues, taking several dips to get to where I wanted the colour.    Indigo doesn`t need a mordant.  Although it is a little bit of a fussy process, it`s fairly simple if you follow the steps put out in most of the natural dyeing books.  I like Rita Buchannans  A Dyer`s Garden.   Look at the pretty blues!

Hodge podge of "stuff".

 This is my newish Weld patch.  I planted it last year with a little tub of plants dug up from Shannon's garden.   One of the plants was tall and she didn't think it would survive.  It did however, and produced much seed.   One of the smaller plants also grew up to produce seed and it produced a lesser amount of seed.  All of that seed though, ended up in the little 2' x 4' space in raised bed #3.   There were 3 weld plants which survived the winter.  I pulled out the weeds and shortly thereafter, all sorts of things started growing.  I didn't know what they were, so I left them.  Today I weeded the little patch again.   I think that most of those little plants are baby weld plants.   Once I am certain about it, I'll thin them out  so they are happier.

The Woad and the Japanese Indigo are happy.  The Indigo is thriving in the plastic cloches.   The Woad is taking it's sweet time to grow.  Considering the plants were so small, really too small to transplant, when I stuck them in the ground under the green cloches, it's actually doing quite well.

We had a hearth cooking class at Westfield.   We were in the Inn, which has 2 hearths.  The other side is larger and there was a boiled rice pudding and a soft gingerbread, which is cake there.  In the small hearth was fresh pease soup and cocky-leeky soup.  The pease soup was good and very spring-like.   We couldn't puree it properly, as we didn't have the right equipment.  The cocky-leeky soup was stupendously delicious though.   It's definitely a keeper recipe.  That's for another post though.

 I found a skein of fuzzy blue acrylic in a thrift store which I used for the weft of the 2nd scarf.   I think it might be a short scarf though, as at 33 inches, I'm a bit over halfway through the skein.  I like how the blue is a bit more subdued than the black weft of the first scarf.

FOOL was a great event, although it kind of had a quiet end to the weekend, when huge winds blew through and threatened rain.  This caused virtually everyone to pack up and head home early.  It was a great weekend though.  We had a paper making tent set up where much cotton lint paper was made.  Here it is drying.   We did spend a bit of time racing around picking it up every time the wind picked up though.