Modern Geekery

Between the garden and our CSA share this year, we have been just overflowing with fresh vegetables. One thing that we have been getting in our CSA basket that has been just phenomenal are the mustard greens. Crisp, light, and sinus-clearingly spicy, they have wound up on my sandwiches and in my salads. Today, I built a salad around the mustard. I added sugar snap peas, also from the CSA basket, and some of the foliage from the fresh fennel I bought at the farmers market this morning. (My own fennel isn’t big enough yet.) Add to that some nasturtium leaves and a nasturtium flower from my garden and some shaved daikon radish, from the farmer’s market. The overall effect was deliciously sweet and spicy and with a touch of acid from some apple cider vinegar in an oil/vinegar emulsion, a great salad for dinner tonight. The rest of dinner was also largely local. A pasta dish with Russian kale from the CSA and locally raised pork sausage, with white beans and a carrot-kohlrabi bake, with carrots from the CSA and kohlrabi from our garden.

I’m leaving Monday for Chicago again. We’ve decided to lease an apartment up there for the summer, since sublets are fairly cheap now. One of my teammates will be relocating for 2 months, which will mean a lot more work will get done in the lab in Chicago. It will present a logistical hurdle, one that we’ll certainly overcome. For the amount we’re saving, both in total dollars and in dollars per man-hour, it’s a win-win situation.

HeavyPetal has a quick HOWTO on plugging shiitake logs. Her version includes the cheese wax step, with picture, which I didn’t bother with, so I highly recommend checking her post out. My guide to plugging a shiitake log is, of course, here.

• Mowed yard, composted the clippings.
• Mowed clover in the garden area, mulched in place.
• Planted lettuce, basil, sunflowers, transplanted various seedlings
• Installed the last bits of the new hardwood floor in our craft room with my father-in-law
• Hiked about 2 miles with the family
• Weeded around the pawpaw trees
• Started research on a new idea for a self-directed research project at work.

Not too shabby.

Tonight’s dinner is a salad containing thin strips of red-leaf lettuce mixed with thin strips of fresh sorrel from my garden, topped with a fresh radish from my garden, thinly sliced vidalia onion tops, almonds, and a homemade vinaigrette. Excuse me while I have my foodgasm.

Last year, I had to have a dying hickory in my yard cut down. While I paid to have most of the trunk hauled off, I still have a pile of the limb wood. I had decided a while back that I would plug these logs with shiitake spawn and make shiitake logs. Its best to do the plugging after the last hard frost, so I waited until yesterday to do the work.

I ordered my plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti, a neat company near Olympia, WA. They’ve got spawn for lots of different strains of mushrooms, but I love shiitakes and shiitakes love hardwoods. The spawn arrive in a little bag like the picture on the right. The spawn themselves are small dowels, about 1.5″ long, with a spiral groove cut into the side. You can clearly see the white mycelia from the shiitake in the groove. There is also some grain in the bag as well, which I surmise are how the dowels were inoculated.

I had ordered my spawn about a month ago, so by the time I pulled the bag out, there was plenty of mycelial growth in the bag, which you can see in the picture on the left as the white matting around the dowels. According to the instructions, this is normal and probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d used the spawn more quickly. Fortunately, no mushrooms had begun to bud, so I didn’t have to pull those off.

Continue reading ‘Shiitake logs’ »

After a a couple of months of moving the cold frame around, the structure had gotten a little less than sturdy. When I started putting it together, I figured that this would be the failure mode, since without corner supports, only the thickness of the wood would support the screws holding it together. I’d been looking for some untreated 2×4 or 4×4 scrap for a while to make the reinforcements, in keeping with my theme of “cold frame on the cheap,” but I finally broke down and bought an untreated 2×4. ($2.70 at Lowes.) Cutting the appropriate length pieces from it, I took the frame apart and reattached them properly to the supports.

And just in time too, since its supposed to be right at freezing tonight and tomorrow night.

When I started my small garden plot last year, I was appalled at the state of the soil. Looking back at the blog post, I didn’t say much about it, but I recall loosening the soil and discovering a thin layer of topsoil over greasy red clay. I worked some leaf compost into the plot and went from there. I also noticed that in digging up the roughly 80 square feet of garden, I found only a couple of earthworms.

At the end of the growing season last year, I seeded the plot with crimson clover as a green mulch and leaf mulched the swiss chard in hopes of having some of it survive the winter. This spring, when I started planting, I noticed that the soil seemed much healthier - black and a bit deeper, and nicely crumbly. Most excitingly, when I was digging up some of that weird 6-leaved running ground cover that had crept in from the edges, I found that I couldn’t lift a spade of soil without turning up at least one earthworm. Fantastic!

Garden potential
Fingers buried in the dirt
Ah, simple pleasures!

Last year, I decided to plant fruit trees. Most folks would have chosen a nice dwarf apple and called that done. I wanted something a little bit different. After all, there are a ton of apple orchards in the area and we’re no strangers to them. One of the most delightful fruits that I’ve ever encountered happens to be one that is native to this area - the pawpaw. They’re like a tropical fruit that grows in a temperate climate. The better ones are large, custardy, and delicious, while the wild ones are highly variant in quality. None of them survive handling very well, which is why its next to impossible to find them commercially, unless you happen to be lucky enough to live near a farmers market graced by someone with a few pawpaw trees. The pawpaw is enjoying something of a renaissance, with a research program active at Kentucky State and several growers associations. After reading up on the fruit, I decided to try growing them.

Continue reading ‘Digging holes’ »

I’ve started digging the holes for my pawpaw trees. On the first hole, I got down maybe 4-5 inches before I hit asphalt. Yes, asphalt. I continued to dig, and eventually excavated an asphalt covered block of concrete and brick about 12″ x 8″ x 6″. My only guess is that it was a fragment of the house’s old driveway, before they upgraded the sewer line. I also dug out corroborating evidence in the form of about 3 linear feet of terra cotta pipe, in pieces. I also dug out the better part of a piece of automotive glass that was amazingly whole - at least until I hit it with the mattock - and several old shingles. Apparently, the previous owners of the house used the the back corner of the lot as a junkpile. Fabulous.