Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to make things rot. The soil, straw, wood chips, radishes, sourdough starter, and a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (aka kombucha SCOBY). Some have been a success, some an utter failure, and some… a work in progress.
Last year was our first garden season at Fox Hollow. The soil wasn’t stellar. We’re situated somewhat on a hillside, with fields that aren’t completely flat anywhere, really. The dirt is full of rocks and dense clay, and the previous residents kept things mowed and horses occupied the fields, further compacting the dirt. We didn’t move here because it was prime farmland, but because we knew it needed work to be a productive farm. We expected challenges like this. Surprisingly though, as we’re in the throws of our second garden season, we can see that things have already improved significantly. The soil is nowhere near perfect, but with our constant care and addition of good organic material wherever we can find it, it’s doing a lot better than even this time last year.
The weather has been much more hospitable to plants and people this summer and I know that has a lot to do with this year’s success too. Last year, we went on vacation for about a week, and despite having a family member water daily (sometimes twice daily), we came back to a drought that had drained the life from a large part of our gardens. I took that as just a “Welcome back to Oklahoma… sucker” from the universe. Luckily this summer has been wet and though we’ve had a few weeks of nearly-or-above 100°F, it’s been cooler than last year for the most part.
The soil has been rotting pretty well, but the radishes, sourdough, and SCOBY? I’ll start with the failure and end with some success. A dear family member was kind enough to share a SCOBY that she’s been brewing with for nearly ten years. It was huge, taking up the entire bottom of a five-gallon jar. She carefully packed it away, guarding it from direct sunlight or anything metallic, and got it to me with some starter tea. I brought it home and with extreme caution for this ancient creature, I tucked it away in a dark cabinet and waited to brew with it. When I had the time and was ready, I found a YouTube tutorial on *exactly* how to brew kombucha and followed it to the letter. After brewing the tea, adding the sugar, and transferring the creature to its new jar, I left it for a few days to work its bacterial magic. On day four, I checked on the thing, only to discover the most awful blue-and-green rings of mold had formed on top of the tea.
Apparently there are a few things that can kill an ancient SCOBY beast, one of the most fatal being mold. “Don’t even try to salvage it” and “get rid of it IMMEDIATELY” were among the results of a quick “is my SCOBY ruined if it has mold on it” internet query. So, there went my first batch of kombucha, rotting away in our compost to at least hopefully nurture the soil some day.
This story is made even more ridiculous when you consider my other attempt at making kombucha. I was given a tiny SCOBY by a sweet friend, and moved it from its plastic bag to a glass mason jar. Since we drink primarily out of reused mason jars, my partner dumped it right down the drain when doing the dishes… Maybe I’m not cut out to be a kombucha brewer. I don’t care, I’m going to keep trying because I love kombucha and in this economy, I can’t be spending $4 on 16 oz of it. I am thinking this is a “third time’s a charm” situation… right?
I know I’m late to the sourdough party. In 2020, everyone discovered sourdough as a way of connecting and passing the time, but for me, that time was spent still working, tending to our community garden plot, and watching Tiger King. Now, in 2023, I’ve decided to delve into it. I love the idea of not having to buy yeast to make bread, since the starter acts as the leavening agent. I also love the idea that it grows and grows and I can share it with others. I have several industrious friends and family members who spend some of their time doing things like making jam, canning applesauce, and the like. My sister-in-law shared some of her starter with me, and I’m just keeping it alive in my refrigerator until I have the time to go through the meticulous process of prepping and making bread with it. I’ll share my sourdough adventures when the time comes, whether it’s a ridiculous failure or a great success.
Vietnamese food with its rich sauces, meats, and rice paired with fresh and pickled vegetables is probably my favorite cuisine. In vermicelli bowls and lots of other Vietnamese dishes, daikon radishes are shredded with carrots and pickled, then served with rice noodles, meat, fresh cucumber, lettuce, and peanuts. This is one of my favorite dishes, and since we live in a climate with very hot, wet summers and have compacted clay soil, we wanted to try growing these long, carrot-like radishes. We scattered seeds around the garden and waited. In late June/early July, they had grown big, beautiful leaves and the white tops were sticking out of the ground. We harvested several pounds of them, and even planted another round of them for the late summer harvest. We rinsed them and chopped them into long, thin strips, made a brine with water, sugar, salt, and white vinegar, canned them up and set them in the fridge. They were SO good. I’ll be growing these every summer from now on! Add that to the list of things I’ve been rotting intentionally.
In the garden, our echinacea purpurea is blooming strong, we finally got cucumbers, the tomatoes keep coming, my perennial herbs look better than they ever have, and the calendula is still very prolific. We’ve had a constant supply of bell peppers as well as way too many serrano peppers to keep up with. On the negative side of things, squash bugs took advantage of all of our mid-season cucurbits, including the kabocha that was growing so well that I was so excited to try, and watermelon plants that were looking really good, too. Squash bugs are abundant around here, which is unfortunate because I love all things squash-related. These bugs show up from the soil below throughout most of the growing season to seek and destroy all the cucurbits you love.
In the early spring, I set up a raised bed around the chicken run to help prevent erosion there. The compost we added to it was apparently loaded with last year’s pumpkin seeds, which grew heartily throughout the spring and early summer, completely unperturbed by squash bugs. We were able to harvest a good deal of pumpkins before the pests found them, fortunately. But find them they did, and it was only a matter of days until the vines shriveled up. I haven’t found a good solution for squash bugs other than trying to get a crop early in the growing season before they come, or waiting longer to plant in hopes they’ll be gone. We’ve planted this bed with pumpkins in hopes that the squash bugs have had their fill:
Another August undertaking has been mushroom beds. Last fall, we planted up oak logs with shiitake mushroom spawn and have been tending those, waiting for a harvest. In the meantime, we’ve also built two beds for red wine cap mushrooms. These require only straw, wood chips, and water to grow. This means that while the beds sit, they’ll be slowly turning into soil while nutrient-dense mushrooms grow at the same time, contributing their mycelium goodness (more on the benefits and necessity of mycelium in soil later).
The most exciting news this month is that our two guineafowl, Chicken and Pepper, brought back keets (the term for baby guinea fowl)! I woke up one Saturday morning, got the coffee brewing, and looked out the back door to the garden. I saw Pepper and thought, “oh, good, she’s back” as she had been away sitting on a nest and I was worried one day a predator would find her before we did. Then, as my sleepy eyes adjusted and I focused a little more, I saw something moving speedily around her feet and realized that the tiny turbo speed creatures were her brood! They followed her around the garden, foraging and peeping happily. My excitement was immediately followed by worry, because fully grown guinea fowl are highly susceptible to predators, let alone tiny, defenseless keets. I knew I had to get them somewhere safe or they wouldn’t survive our plentiful predators. We were able to catch each one and put them safely into a guinea nursery of sorts, but not without Pepper slamming her body full force into Damien as he bravely got each babe. I’m proud of her strong maternal instinct, because I’ve always heard that guinea mothers tend to abandon their young.
I believe that the best way to raise baby animals is to let nature do its thing and let the mamas take care of them. So, we got Pepper into the pen with her babies to take care of them and keep them warm. This worked well for a few days, but it got extremely hot here in the Ozarks (heat index of 117°F!), and after losing one of them I decided to scoop them up and put them in a more controlled brooder. Both mom and babies were extremely unhappy at first, but it wasn’t long before everyone was a bit more calmed down and Pepper went back to foraging contentedly without the responsibility of motherhood.
While I am certainly thankful for all the garden food, fun times, and hard work summer has brought us, it’s late August now and I am ready to accept summer’s end. Fall brings more time for creativity, time with friends and family, and rest— and pies.
With thoughts of warm spices, fresh bread, and apple cider,
Allyson
*Originally posted on August 29, 2023 on Substack
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