Where Are my Tomatoes?

I have so many green tomatoes. In this region, the weather is so inconsistent from year to year, you never know when tomatoes will ripen. We are also in a different microclimate from last year and got our plants in a bit late. I have asked around. Some neighbors have ripe tomatoes. The folks at the Bounty Farm on the other side of town have ripe tomatoes, so it is only a matter of time before we do.

I picked some cherry tomatoes this morning, which are almost there and sweet enough. I made the mistake the other day of trying to sample an almost ripe "fig" tomato. It did not taste like a fig, so now I am waiting for them to fully ripen. There are a few of these fig tomatoes just a few days away from ripe. Will they taste like a fig or a tomato? Or somehow like both?

I am also waiting on Italian paste tomatoes and something called a "pineapple" tomato (not sure if it is named for the color or the flavor), along with a few others. I guess it is only mid-August, so I should be happy with my cucumbers and beans. I just hope the tomatoes have the good sense to not all ripen at once.

Almost there...

Next:
Beans Beans!

More Trees

One of the first things we did outside when we got this place was to plant fruit trees, since they take so long to start bearing serious amounts of fruit. Along the north fence of the back yard, we planted an Emerald Plum, a Hachiya Persimmon, a Stella Cherry and a Fuyu Persimmon.

We got all of those trees bare root at Harmony Farm Supply & Nursery in Sebastopol. It must have been January or February and the clay soil was extra mucky as we dug it out to fill it with mulch and compost for the trees.

In addition to these trees we also have planted pomegranate, grapefruit, lemons, yuzu, mandarins, blueberries and kumquats which we have picked up from various other excellent nurseries in our area. A few of them are actually producing fruit!

This weekend we went to Harmony to get something else, because they had their fruit trees at 20% off. It turned out it was also "customer appreciation day" and we got free tacos, free "vegan" fertilizer and some seed packets. Our lucky day! We wound up picking an asian pear and a dwarf orange tree. We just need to figure out where to put them now.

We also found out that the best time to get a greater selection of the bare root (much better value) trees was the second week in January.

I can't wait til January. Oh wait, the tomatoes aren't even ripe yet!
Next: Where are my tomatoes!

Look At That S Car Go

It is the bad punchline to a bad joke about a snail buying a car. Cash for clunkers made me think of it. But seriously, the snails in our area are escargot snails brought here by the French. With their delicate shells it is amazing they survive in the wild. I tried escargot once but was not a big fan so I am not going to travel down the road of eating my pests. I let the chickens do that for me. They can use all the extra protein and calcium they can get and I don't have to spend weeks purging the snails.

I find an upside down flower pot is an excellent trap for them. They go in there to escape from the hot summer sun and I can just pick it up and shake it out in the chicken run. The chickens go crazy over them. I feel a little bad for the snails to meet such a brutal end, but hopefully it is fairly quick. It also means more greens to feed my chickens since the snails stay under control.

Alternatives to Alternative Energy

We want to make our "carbon footprint" as small as possible. Solar energy of some kind seems like I good idea. I always heard that solar hot water had a much quicker payback over solar electricity. There is a 30% federal tax credit available and the California Energy Commission is offering rebates and tax credits as well. In addition to all this, California's AB 811 is kicking in and is being administered on a county level. In Sonoma County it is SCEIP and it gives you a 7% loan that gets attached to your home's tax assessment, so it is not a personal loan and if you sell the house, the loan repayment goes along with the house.

We had a couple of contractors give estimates for solar hot water and then we did some math. One thing we had not really considered was that there are only two of us and we have done some things that make our gas bill and our electric bill pretty low already.

The cheaper estimate wound up being about $6600 after tax credits and rebates. When it is warm and we are not heating our home, we use gas for hot water (showers, sinks, laundry), the dryer and the stove. It is currently about $10 per month. We insulated our pipes and wrapped the water heater. In addition the water heater is turned to a comfortable setting, but it is definitely well below maximum. At this rate it would take us 55 years to repay this investment. If I went by the March bill, which included some heating, It would be closer to 13 years, but this hot water system doesn't heat the house.

Similarly, we figured it would take 40-60 years to repay a photovoltaic system. So no matter how sexy panels on the roof are, we are definitely looking towards efficiency improvements instead.

Fortunately, all of these rebate, tax credit and loan programs apply to less glamorous upgrades, such as windows, doors, insulation, cool roofs, etc. As I have written before, insulation is a very good bang for your buck. We spent $500 on materials and got $300 from our utility. I think we may be able to apply the federal tax credit to that as well.

One improvement we made that I do not think is covered by these programs, but is very exciting is the installation of high efficiency, long lasting LED recessed lights. We bought the Cree LR6 lights, which have regular edison bases and can be screwed into many off the shelf recessed light fixtures. We have been very impressed with the amount and quality of light these produce for only 12 watts. I wish they came in light bulb form, but they have these heat sinks on them, which makes them a little bulky for an ordinary lamp. They are a little pricey at $80-90 each, but they last for decades, contain no mercury and are dimmable. If you do the math, it has a fairly quick payback, even compared to CFLs. The only thing that makes me grumble is that they do a lot of stuff for the military (including installing thousands of these LED lights). The military is thinking ahead, though. The Pentagon issued a report back in 2004 warning of the chaos that climate change could bring. The military is also a big user of solar panels, etc. So many of the innovative products we will see will also likely have a military use. It's great that the military wants to reduce its carbon footprint, but we really need to reduce our military footprint around the world.

Other improvements we can make include upgrading our heat (currently gas wall heater) to a hot water radiator system, wearing sweaters in the winter, replacing our front door, air drying our laundry, DIY solar hot water heater (may be less efficient than commercial, but lower investment), re-roofing the leaky garage roof with a lighter color and insulation (cool roof) and so much more.

We have some more head scratching to do, but if we plan well, we can get our future energy bill savings subsidized now .

Next: Back to the garden!

A Scorcher

How hot was it? I don't think it was really 108 degrees, but that is what the car said when I got in it. It was sitting in the sun. I think it was more like 99 degrees. I am hoping this will push the tomatoes over the hump into ripe. And maybe some melons , too?

How hot was it? I bought a new seed starting tray and left the clear lid on with no dome in partial shade and it turned into a solar oven and melted the plastic.


And the chickens were hot.

But I was able to cook some potatoes in the old solar oven. I made it a couple of years ago and it gets over 200 degrees easily. Today it was around 250. I would like to build a better one. I know you can get over 350 in a well built solar oven.

Back Yard Garden

I wrote about the garden in the front yard. This is currently the most productive part of our garden, the more attractive part and the most chicken proof part. It is also the one people see when they walk by. The one in back, our "secret garden" is growing into its own.

This picture shows Lina digging out the grass and weeds several months ago.
In between the strips of cardboard behind her is where we planted two rows of asparagus. Since then, the chickens have dug through there several times before we had our fencing in order, so we may have to put in some more crowns next year. the cactus in the background is a nopal cactus that was already here. Since it produces edible pads and fruit, we are leaving it where it is.

The biggest chunk of this garden is corn. I am still learning how to tell when it is ready. I picked some that I thought would be ready but it was immature. It was still tasty.

To the left of the corn is a sad attempt at okra. I keep trying to grow okra year after year and I am determined to get it right. This year the ants are farming aphids on them and the chickens have already attacked them a couple of times. Behind the okra are spaghetti squash, kabocha (the third year I am growing it from seeds from a friend) and yellow crookneck squash. In front of the corn is a squash I got from Baker Creek Seed Company's new Petaluma store called Long Island Cheese. It is named after its cheese-wheel appearance, not the flavor, though that would be neat.

Behind the corn is a giant Persian walnut tree (aka English walnut). This whole neighborhood used to be a walnut orchard, so every lot has a walnut tree on it. Some of the trees have been taken over by the black walnut root stock but ours has the common larger walnut on it.

If we had picked some back in June we could have made nocino, which we did a couple of years ago after our friends Carleen and Joel brought by some walnuts they picked. We made a few different recipes and it was delicious. Anyhow, the reason I am writing about the walnut tree is that having it right next to a garden plot limits the types of crops you can grow. Walnut roots and leaves are toxic to all nightshade family crops, but I read that corn, squash and beans were OK and they seem to be. Also, black walnut is more toxic than Persian walnuts.

Compost Tea

Now that we have a compost system and a new batch of compost, I want to use it, but all the garden is in cultivation, so I don't want to mix it into the soil. Someone suggested I make compost tea, so I looked it up on the google machine.

I had most of what I needed, buckets and compost, but I didn't have an aquarium bubbler or tubing. I took a stroll over to my local stripmall and found a big chain pet store that had what I needed.

I followed the instructions I read at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and I was all set. Here is my first batch of compost tea bubbling away.

I just watered everything with it and the weather's getting hotter so we shall see what happens.