Wheat

Last fall and winter I grew out some wheat seeds I obtained from a Seed Savers Exchange member who also runs Sourcepoint Seeds, a small seed company offering rare and ancient varieties of food crops.
This wheat variety is Rouge a Bordeaux and, according to growseed.org, is a "winter bread wheat preferred by French artisan bakers."
I started making artisan-type bread last year and thought it would be nice to try a wheat variety that is suited to such an endeavor.
I received a small packet of seeds in 2008 and planted it that fall. I did not have many plants, but the idea of Seed Savers Exchange is to share small amounts of seed and have other gardeners grow them out to make more seed. It helps expand the distribution of heritage seeds.
I harvested the wheat in the late spring, when it was looking dry enough to cut. I cut the shafts long and left them in an uncovered box in my warm, dark office, to dry fully.


Today I finally got around to threshing and winnowing the wheat. It wasn't too big a deal since I had such a small amount. I cut off the long straw so I only had the seed heads, then I rubbed the seed heads together to separate the wheat from the chaff. I then dropped the seed and chaff onto some row-cover fabric that I placed in front of a fan on low speed. The chaff blew away and I scooped up the seed.



I'll plant this seed in the fall and expand my stock further. I'll repeat this until I have enough wheat to grind into enough flour to make bread. Fun no?

Ripeness in Siberia

This tomato variety is called Siberia and has finally started ripening in the last week or so. These are small tomatoes with a nice, sharp tomato flavor (lots of acid). When my other tomato plant —called Cappuchino— starts to ripen, I'll be slicing these Siberias in half and drying them in the solar food dehydrator. Sun dried tomatoes are delicious.

From the Melon patch

I found a promising discovery on a melon plant (Delice de Table).
A nice melon forming under the canopy of leaves. I grew this variety because I liked the Seed Savers Exchange description:

French heirloom listed by Vilmorin in 1885. Translates as “Delight of the Table.” Ribbed fruits have sweet orange flesh and weigh about 1-2 pounds. Very hard-to-find, almost extinct. 85-90 days.


Also under the canopy of leaves, and about a half-gopher length away from the forming melon was a gopher hole.

Seems that gophers like to feed on the fruits of melons. Much to my dismay, another loss to those underground pests.


My permaculture training suggests I don't have too many gophers but too few enemies of gophers. Should I import gopher-snakes to reduce the population? The local cats are not doing their part, and birds of prey have little chance with all the cover my garden offers to gophers.

Too many heartaches from gophers eating my garlic, onions, potatoes, hollyhocks, and pea plants (to name only a few), led me to trapping.

I have kept count of the gophers I trapped. Nineteen gophers in as many months is what I consider an infestation. I still have a few gophers working the garden, but 19 is ridiculous.

In any garden some crop loss is expected—to birds or bugs—but last year gophers took more of my garlic crop than I got and they would have taken it all if I hadn't dug it up. They destroyed an entire fig tree by eating its roots all the way to the trunk, until the tree just wilted and flopped over. They have eaten the roots of mature hollyhocks, have eaten many plants worth of potato tubers, and taken down mature leeks just at their peak.

I observe their activity, and will trap when I take too many plant losses in an area. This melon still needed weeks on the vine to ripen, and it takes such a long time to even get fruit on some melon plants. In times like this it is difficult to not get discouraged.

Eliot Coleman, in his latest book The Winter Harvest Handbook, writes about a crop-devestating problem he had with meadow voles, and how the only solution he found was trapping.

Eliot Coleman writes "Although I am a mild-mannered sort and show great kindness and respect to wild creatures in general, I admit to a strong aversion to voles in the winter greenhouse."
"I know from my records that one year I trapped over fifty voles in the vicinity of the greenhouses during August and September, and a neighbor's cat probably got almost that many. Come winter it didn't seem as if we had even made a dent."

Knowing that Eliot Coleman, the organic gardening and farming guru of our time, traps meadow voles made me feel less monstrous in my own trapping efforts.

I hope I am able to grow some of these melons to maturity so that I might taste such an old variety and also that I might participate in saving and sharing the seeds of an amost extinct food.

Basket of produce

Today we picked some conadria figs, lemon cucumbers, a tomato, and yellow peaches.
Also pictured are some red torpedo onions and some other onions that have been curing in a warm, shady spot outside for several weeks.

Olives

I planted three olive trees in January 2008. The first olive fruit came this year and is on a tree that gets the least amount of water and attention.
Olive trees can live many hundreds of years and are evergreen. I planted the olives along the back fence to provide some greenery in the back yard during the winter when other plants have gone dormant. I chose olives because they are drought tolerant, live many years, and can produce a useful fruit. I planted two Maurino and one Taggiasca olives. The fruit is on a Maurino, which is a Tuscan oil type.