The garden is blanketed in snow and the growing season is done for the year. Even the hardy herbs that held out for Thanksgiving have lost their leaves, but I still have dried herbs taken in the late summer and early fall to play around with. And lately, that has meant making herbal teas. Here is the most recent:
This is a mixture of 4 herbs: sage, mint, lemon balm and rosemary. I love the flavor. It is savory and complex, minty and full-bodied. It warms the body and the spirit on a cold winter day. The sage and mint together leave your breath smelling sweet after drinking. The mint will sooth the nagging stomach upset that comes with poor eating decisions this time of year, the lemon balm is relaxing, and the rosemary may act as an immune booster. All around a great combintation for the season!
I’m sharing a “recipe” for how I like to prepare this tea. Nothing about this is set in stone. If you don’t like one of the ingredients, reduce the amount you use or leave it out. If you love one, feel free to add more of it. This is how I like the tea – it doesn’t mean you have to make it the same.
Michelle’s Sage and Mint Herbal Tea
4 parts sage leaves, dried
2 parts mint leaves, dried (I used a combo of spearmint and apple mint)
1 part lemon balm leaves, dried
1 part rosemary leaves, dried
Break the sage, mint, and lemon balm leaves into small pieces – maybe a quarter inch across. This does not need to be exact. If you’d prefer a more uniform look, you could pulse them in a food processor or coffee grinder – I personally like the way they look when they are hand processed. Combine with the rosemary leaves and store in an airtight container.
To drink, steep for 10 minutes.
This is enough for one small pot of tea, but you can (and probably should!) put together more than one serving at a time. You can store the dried tisane in an air tight container so you have it on hand whenever you’d like a cup. Enjoy!
As a side benefit, Sage tea is said to be good for your skin, gums, digestion, and memory. Some sources say not to drink more than two to three cups a day, as it can induce seizures or kidney damage in high doses. If you have any left over after your 2 cups, consider using the rest to rinse your hair. It’s said to be a good natural dye for covering grey hair!
I’ve mentioned my under-the-window compost bin before. It sits just outside of our kitchen window, making it possible. in theory, to simply open the window and toss any kitchen scraps directly in, rather than maintaining a compost pail inside the house that has to be taken out regularly.
This is a view of the compost bin taken through the kitchen window today in the snow. When we first built the bin 10 years ago, we thought we might possibly be setting ourselves up for a rodent problem, having it so close to the house. As it has turned out, we don’t see many critters in it other than chipmunks (and one summer a mess of voles, but they did not stay long). We compost way more than we did when the bin was in a back corner of the yard, because it is so convenient. No one is tempted to just quickly clean the compost bucket into the trash to avoid walking across the yard, and there are no more complaints about a compost bucket sitting on the counter.
Here’s the problem, though – I’ve subverted our carefully planned compost system by having too many house plants.
What started out as a couple plants has grown into a miniature forest. It is no longer possible to open the window without knocking one or the other of these lovely friends over. I’ve subverted by own carefully planned and previously-very-effective system. I would move the plants to improve our access, but this is the only south-facing window in the house and they are very happy here. Time to come up with a more creative solution, but until I do we are getting clips of me like this on the trail cam.
We’re still composting, which is good, but I’d like to get back to a time when I didn’t find myself tiptoeing barefoot through the snow. And here is my warning – when you come up with a system that works for you, try not to be your own worst enemy by breaking it!
I think I’ve tried just about every type of reusable shopping tote out there. From the inexpensive synthetic ones you can buy at the checkout counter of your local grocery store to eco cotton and pricy rigid totes that are more like a crate than a bag, there are a lot of options and they each have their pros and cons. Since reusable totes are only beneficial if you are actually using them – and using them for at least a year to offset the energy and materials it takes to manufacture them – it makes sense to pay attention to which options are best suited for you and how you live.
I’ve got two current favorites at the moment. The first is the Baggu. Let’s start with the cons. It is not made locally (made in China) and while they do make a commitment to fair labor practices, it isn’t totally clear what that means. It is not made of a renewable material, and while it is made from recycled material, 41% of the material used to make the fabric is not recycled to keep their costs down.
But here’s what is great about it: It is huge when unfolded. It can carry up to 50 pounds of groceries, and really does hold as much as several plastic bags. Even though it has so much capacity, it folds up into a nearly flat 5″x5″ square that fits neatly in a purse or pocket. It comes with a cute little pouch that keeps it neatly folded. I’ve never been without a reusable bag since buying it, because it always goes straight back in my purse when I’ve emptied it. The nylon is very high quality. I’ve had mine for about six months now. I use it at least once a week and it still looks like new. When it gets dirty, it does right in the wash and comes back out looking brand new. Baggu does offer a recycling option when the bags do wear out.
My second favorite is where the renewables theme comes in. A favorite of healthfood stores everywhere, EcoBags Stringbags are another option that folds down small enough to fit in a purse (although you might not want to keep it in there all the time).
Although perhaps not as cute and stylish as the Baggu nor quite as large, they have the benefit of being made of a renewable resource (certified organic cotton) and being a fair trade/fair wage product. I’ve had two of these for at least a decade, but they sat unused in the bottom of a drawer for several years after they developed holes and I started losing as many groceries as I was carrying! I considered composting the bags, but decided to give repairing them a shot.
So glad I did! I had some colorful yarn scraps left over from knitting projects, and used the yarn to weave the spots with holes back together. The yarn is holding up beautifully and adds a little personality to an otherwise bland looking bag. Will I get another year out of them? Or another five? Regardless, the repairs were simple, free, and are keeping two bags out of the landfill (or compost pile) a little bit longer. A definite win!
So why am I writing about shopping bags on a blog about permaculture? Because permaculture is about more than just gardening. It is about rethinking every aspect of your life and home, finding the areas where you are wasting something which can be reused or buying “inputs” when you can use something you already have on site. Repairing what you have (like these lovely shopping bags) and composing them when they are no longer usable, means that you are limiting inputs and using every bit of the materials and energy it took to make the bags as possible. That’s what valuing renewables and closing the loop is all about.
It’s getting seasonably cold here in Wisconsin, and the little flashes of green that remain in the garden are rapidly fading. One of the last plants that is still plugging along is the Sage, which often manages to stay green and lovely through Thanksgiving, when everything else in the garden except for the evergreens has long lost its leaves.
Before it is too late, I’ve been cutting as much sage and drying it in the dehydrator as I can while still leaving enough out there for Thanksgiving dinner. The house smells lovely, and I’ve been dreaming up ways to use the beautiful gray-green leaves while their flavor is still at its best. I think I’ve finally found a favorite! Paired with dried pears that I put up from our trees and a little candied ginger, the sage makes for the perfect tea to warm up with as the days get colder. I find the dried fruit and ginger add just the right amount of sweetness to the drink, but if you like a sweeter tea you can also add honey.
Break the sage leaves and pear slices into pieces approximately 1/4 inch long. Mix together with the ginger pieces.
To drink, steep for 10 minutes.
This is enough for one small pot of tea, but you can (and probably should!) put together more than one serving at a time. You can store the dried tisane in an air tight container so you have it on hand whenever you’d like a cup. Enjoy!
As a side benefit, Sage tea is said to be good for your skin, gums, digestion, and memory. Some sources say not to drink more than two to three cups a day, as it can induce seizures or kidney damage in high doses. If you have any left over after your 2 cups, consider using the rest to rinse your hair. It’s said to be a good natural dye for covering grey hair!
“Greenpeace found that no plastic — not even soda bottles, one of the most prolific items thrown into recycling bins — meets the threshold to be called “recyclable” according to standards set by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastic Economy Initiative. Plastic must have a recycling rate of 30% to reach that standard; no plastic has ever been recycled and reused close to that rate.“
Read that again. Plastic is not recyclable. Oof. For those of us who take care to sort out our recyclables, this is hard news to swallow. I read this today and had to spend some time turning it over in my mind. What does this mean for each of us? What does it mean for the choices we make weekly on what to buy or not buy?
*****
Another shocking statistic: the Wisconsin DNR has found that farm and maritime operations in the state “generate 20.4 million pounds of recyclable plastic wrap each year.”
“A 300-head dairy farm using plastic silage bags may produce as much as 6,000 pounds a year of waste plastic.”
A few days ago, I grabbed lunch with my friend Ben. Ben is an organic blueberry farmer in Southern Wisconsin. Ben’s little slice of heaven is on his family’s farm in a rural area which is surrounded by farms but also by rapidly approaching suburban housing developments.
Photo by Ben Lembrich
Ben is the type of farmer who is trying to do everything on his farm in the best way possible for the earth. His way of farming is labor intensive and slow-moving. Before he adopts a labor-saving technology, he carefully weighs the pros and cons of adopting it. It isn’t that he is anti-technology or anti-progress; it is that his background in environmental science means he understands that none of these technolgies are without cost.
For his first 5+ years farming, Ben did everything by hand, but this year he no longer could keep up. After much thought, he opted to add drip lines and weed barriers to the long rows of blueberries.
Photo by Ben Lembrich
How did Ben come to the decision?
Weighing the Impact of Chemicals vs. Plastics. The blueberries on the farm are planted in mounds of pine straw which Ben collected and built into berms which he subsequently planted. In addition to acidifying the soil, the pine straw helps to keep the weeds down. But this year the weeds were still winning. Ben realized he’d either need to use chemical herbicides, hire a lot of people to weed, or invest in landscape fabric. Since he has worked hard for organic designation and isn’t yet profitable enough to hire labor, landscape fabric was the best choice of the options he had.
Researching Recycling Opportunities. Ben was able to find a recycling facility for the landscape fabric he purchased. He did this before he purchased the fabric to ensure that his plastic would become part of that pool of less than 30% of plastic that does get recycled. He has a plan in place and knows what it will take to transport the fabric to the recycler when the day comes.
Making a Pledge to Care for the Plastic. When we met last week, Ben was planning to spend the weekend removing the new landscape fabric. Why remove it after all of the time it took to install? We live in a harsh climate with cold, snowy winters and a lot of temperature changes. Plastic does not last long outdoors in this environment. By removing the fabric in the fall, storing it inside and replacing it each spring, Ben should be able to add a few more years of life to his landscape fabric, saving himself money and keeping it out of the recycling/garbage stream that much longer.
This last point is the one that got me really thinking about the “Use and Value Renewables” tenant of permaculture. What if the problem isn’t just that we need to value renewables more, but that we need to value plastics more? When we value something, we take care of it. We preserve it as long as we can. We think twice before buying it, because it often costs a little more.
Isn’t this how we should be thinking about plastics? Because, truly, they can be really amazing things. Plastics are light and can be durable. They are more difficult to break than their competitor glass. They can be formed more easily into complex shapes than wood or metal. They can be made in many colors and textures. In Ben’s story, there is no renewable material that will do as well at keeping weeds down as the landscape fabric,.
But plastics also persist in our environment for ever and ever and ever. So what if the answer isn’t to give them up but to use them more concientiously and deliberately than we often do? What if the answer is to value them more when we use them? To buy them conscientiously, take care of them and keep them for as long as possible to reduce their environmental impact?
TL;DR: Produce bags were a huge success. I highly recommend trying them as an alternative to spraying fruit.
September is when the fruit floods in. First come the Bartlett pears, then the Seckel pears and Honeycrisps, followed by the Chojuro Asian pears, and finally the Esopus Spitzenburg apples.
From left to right: Seckel pears, Chojuro asian pear, Bartlett pears
Bartlett pears are best picked when they are still underripe. Left to ripen on the tree, they get a mealy texture and brown around the core. Ripened on the counter, they are perfect.
Chojuros should be left on the tree until they are ripe and have taken on a beautiful rich, carmely color. The left side of the asian pear in the picture above is just starting to get this color. Leave them too long, though, and their skin will darken and the flesh will brown and take on a fermented taste.
Seckel pears and apples all stay on the tree until they are ripe. Spitzenburgs benefit from a few weeks of storage before eating – in my mind they are the absolute best eating apple around if you wait to eat them until 2-3 weeks after picking.
As I mentioned in Permaculture in Practice: Use Small, Slow Solutions, this is the first year I am using produce bags. There are many options, but I went with a synthetic mesh bag I found on ebay. I try to avoid synthetics when possible, but in this case – where the goal is to keep out insects without harmful chemicals – it seemed like the most effective option and a fair trade off. With any luck, I will get multiple years of use out of them, too.
The bags worked well on the peaches, but how did they do on the pears and apples?
First the Bartletts. Here is this weekend’s harvest:
150+ pears from one 12 year old semi-dwarf tree – not bad!
I sort my pears into 4 categories. We can call them “Grade A”, “Grade B”, “Grade C” and compost.
Grade A pears are practically perfect in every way. Even the pickiest pear eater who likes perfect store bough fruit will likely be OK with it.
That’s one beautiful pear! Grade A.
Grade B are almost perfect. They might have a dimple or two that are close to each other and need to be eaten around, but they are still lovely and perfectly edible and most people wouldn’t turn them down.
Those are cute dimples you’ve got there! Grade B
Grade C are the pears with a face only a pear sauce maker can love. They have dimples that are spread out across the surface of the fruit. They might have scars or a spot where the skin has broken. They will need extensive paring to use. Most people won’t be interested in eating them out of hand.
Grade C has a nice personality
Now for the numbers. I picked 102 usable pears without bags (a dozen or so ended up on the compost pile). 30% were grade A, 30% grade B, 60% grade C. Not bad for fully organic pears, but over half would need extensive paring to use and will end up being pear sauce or dried pear chips.
From left to right: 30 Grade A, 30 Grade B, 42 Grade C(not shown – a dozen or so that went straight to the compost pile)
Now for the bagged pears. There were 28 total. 50% were grade A, 46% were grade B, and only 4% were grade C. Wow! What a difference! Definitely worth the 10-15 minutes it took to tie all of the bags on earlier this summer.
From left to right: 14 Grade A, 13 Grade B, 1 Grade C, and the compost pile starved
How about the others? The bags did not make a huge difference with the Seckel pears. They are just starting to come off the tree, but every one I see up there looks good for eating, with or without the bags. I don’t think I will bother to use them on that tree next year. It’s possible I just got lucky this year, but the Seckel pears usually look great and it seems better to save the bags for trees where they actually make a difference.
With the apples, the bags literally made the difference between having apples we will eat and apples we will not. I am still picking them now, but I did not have a single edible apple without a bag, and the apples in the bag were almost all good enough to eat.
Honeycrips – without and with a bag
Spitzenburg – without and with a bag (to be fair, I will use the lower apple for sauce or dried chips, but will need to cut away a lot of the apple)
The bags are not foolproof. There was a limited amount of insect damage to some of the bagged apples. It may be I put the bags on too late, or that the insects found their way inside, like this little wasp.
I also lost a little fruit to chipmunks, who chewed holes in a couple bags to get at the ripening fruit inside. I suspect that it was only so few bags ruined because there were many more unbagged (and easier to get) fruits to choose from.
I don’t mind losing some fruit to the insects and wildlife. It’s important for us to take only what we need – even from our own trees in our own yards – and leave food for the wildlife. And I’m especially heartened to see things like this little ladybug walking safely on the harmless bag, when it would be just as likely to be harmed by sprays on the fruit as the harmful insects.
Sometimes we overwhelm ourselves. In an attempt to do everything perfectly, we end up doing nothing at all.
That’s what happened to me with produce grow bags. I’d read up on them and knew they could be used to grow nicer fruit without chemicals. But there were too many options (waxed paper, nylon bags, and one option that looked like sticky pantihose). And then there was the cost. I had so many fruit trees producing hundreds of pieces of fruit a year. Was it worth it? I didn’t spray my trees anyway, so wasn’t the carbon footprint of the bags worse than what I was doing already (which was essentially doing nothing).
Of course as I found myself having to pare around what seemed to be an ever-increasing number of wormholes and blemishes in my fruit, and figure out creative ways to use fruit that my family wouldn’t eat, I decided that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to finally try a few of the bags. And so I found a vendor on eBay and decided to try them. The bags I bought looked like this and were under $10 for 50 bags.
They come in three colors from this vendor: white, green, and orange. I bought 3 packages (150) of the green, thinking they would blend in nicest with the foliage on the tree and be least noticable.
When the bags arrived, they were not the natural olivey color you see in the photo above. They were the tackiest shade of bright Christmas green you could imagine. I balked at hanging them out in my trees, which are all very visible from the sidewalk. Finally, I decided to swallow any pride I had in how the garden looked and use them anyway.
After a few false starts, I found they were very easy to use. Slip a bag over an imature fruit (here in Wisconsin, I did it in late May/early June just after the late spring fruit drop), pull the drawstrings tight from either side, tie a small bow to keep the bag in place. I did not have enough for any one tree, so decided to spread them out across 2 apple trees, 4 pears and the peach tree; the most promising trees for the year.
They looked more like wonky party decorations than leaves. I kid you not – every group of pedestrians I heard walk by the yard commented on the bright green bags hanging in the trees. They could not be missed. It worked out to 10-20 bags per tree, with a few left over to share with a friend in the neighborhood. Why should my yard be the only one getting all of the attention after all?
The first fruits, the peaches, finally came ripe this past week. So what’s the verdict? They worked fantastic on the peach tree!
I’d thinned the peaches well this spring to give the tree a chance to rest after a bumper year last summer, so there were only a couple dozen fruits on the whole tree. Ten were in grow bags.
Of the fruit that was not in a growbag, about a third of the fruits were absolutely perfect and beautiful. 2/3rds were still delicious, but had significant scarring and blemishes. Of the fruit in the grow bags, 1 was blemished and 9 were perfect. A huge difference!
I will definitely be using them again on the peach tree next year, and will likely add to my collection of bags so I can protect more of the fruit on the tree. It was worth starting out small this year, but next year it is time to go a little bigger with an experiement that worked. It remains to be seen whether they helped with the apples and pears, too. If they were not as successful there, I can use all of the existing bags for the peach tree. I’ll keep you all posted as the apples and pears ripen!
By now, you’ve probably read about the dire situation for Monarchs. Maybe you’ve wondered what you could do to help ensure that 20, 30, 40 years from now we will continue to marvel at the annual migration these beautiful butterflies make?
5 years ago I made a commitment to allow milkweed to grow in my garden wherever it happened to pop up as one small way I could help. As you probably already know if you have a garden, milkweed doesn’t always choose the most convenient spots to take hold. Common Milkweed is a big plant. It often reaches 3 feet tall and seems to like the margins – the front of flower borders and gardens that are really much too small for them. It can take a shift in thinking to be comfortable with the aesthetics.
Tall milkweed near the front of a flower bedThis well-established clump chose a better spot near the back of the bed, but still flops over into the walkway from time to time
I think you’ll agree that if we weigh helping an endangered species against having a perfect garden, the endangered species should win.
Where I may have to make an exception to my rule of never pulling milkweed is in the veggie garden. What started as one small plant has become a huge colony in one of my raised beds. This is the bed I’ve been using for salad greens and snap peas, so when the greens are growing in early summer the milkweed does not get in the way. By late summer, when the weather is too hot for growing salad greens or peas easily, the bed is taken over by milkweeds and sunflowers (planted by the birds, since my birdfeeder is close to the bed). This system has worked out well so far, giving me something from the garden in early summer and the wildlife in our yard something in late summer. The balance is starting to tip, though, and the day is coming when I will not have enough space to grow my early season veggies here. I think I will need to thin the milkweed next summer.
This raised bed has a mix of milkweed, sunflowers, and gourds this time of year. In early summer, it holds lettuce and snap peas. Can you see the monarchs?
I’m under no delusion that my milkweed is enough to save the monarchs, but it is one small thing I can do to make things a little easier for them. My house is in between Glacial Drumlin School, which has larger patches of milkweed, and McCarthy Park, with its acres and acres of prairie. I like to think of it as a stepping stone that helps monarchs and other wildlife move between the areas that hold food and shelter for them. If enough of my neighbors recognize that their yards can be a critical piece in helping the other species that call our community home, imagine what we can do! And how about you? Can you make your own space a stepping stone for monarchs? Could you commit to leaving milkweed grow where it will?
Sometimes we have to remind ourselves to reflect on what is working and what is not. Sometimes our environment gives us no choice but to perform that reflection.
About 7 years ago, I planted a Northern Catalpa in our backyard. Northern Catalpas are native to the Mississippi River valley, just a ways southwest of here. They have big, beautiful heart-shaped leaves that are surprisingly tropical looking for a northern tree. They have interesting rough bark, and gorgeous white orchid-like flowers that cover the trees in late June. In the winter, they drip with long seed pods that look like foot long beans made of chocolate. They are not a boring tree by any means.
Unfortunately, my tree has avoided being boring not only with its stunning looks, but also by the way its unpredictable behavior keeps me on my toes. About 5 years ago, shortly after I admired its beauty and perfection to my dad as we talked on the phone, it started abruptly wilting. In was mid-summer and a little dry, so I picked up the watering, but the wilting was not helped.
I suspect the tree somehow contracted verticillium wilt. Maybe it happened when I knicked a root while digging nearby once. Or perhaps I did not cause the problem at all. I noticed a poorly made pruning cut when I first bought the tree, but bought it anyway because it was the only catalpa left by the time I went shopping for a tree. Could that have introduced the disease?
Whatever the cause, the tree is a roller coaster every year – sometimes looking devastatingly beautiful, other times looking droopy and sad. I’ve considered pulling it out more than once because there is no cure for verticillium wilt, but have read that some trees will overcome the disease eventually and so have held out hope that mine will.
This year it has really outdone itself, though, and lost nearly all of its leaves after a hot, dry spell in mid-July. I bring you the catalpa in June of this year just as it came into bloom and the same catalpa in July:
Now the hard part – listening to what this tree is telling me. I desperately want the tree to survive. It is in the perfect spot to provide a spot of shade in the summer. We’ve spend lovely afternoons sitting under its branches. Its flowers make me smile every summer, and its huge leaves are glorious. Just a month ago, we had tables set up under its canopy for my son’s high school graduation party.
Up until now, I’ve been able to believe that perhaps this tree would be one of the rare survivors. After all, it wilted every year in late summer, but came back as beautiful as ever in the spring. But I think it is more likely that it is telling me that it is time torecognize that this tree is not going to make it.
What do you think? Give it another year or cut my losses and take it down?
Even more importantly, what motivates you to do something that other people might think is too hard?For most of us, the answer is that we get back something, either tangible or intangible, that makes all of the hard work worth it.
That “something” is the yield. In many cases it is going to be something tangible. Heads of lettuce. Pounds of tomatoes. Fresh herbs. Eggs. Wool.
Sometimes it might be intangible. The knowledge that you’ve improved the habitat for wildlife in your little corner of the world, or have made a spot where a threatened plant thrives.
Regardless, the yield is important. It is what makes the effort sustainable for you. If it is a tangible yield, it is what cuts down on the outside resources you need to bring in to your life.
In the west, we tend to think of yields in terms of profit. Yield is something that is created and earned over and above the amount of energy that went into the effort. One person puts in 8 hours of work and gets back $100. Another puts in 8 hours of work and, almost like a magician pulling something from think air, gets back $10,000. We see the second person as more successful and their yield as better. Why? Where does that extra yield come from? Is it sustainable? Or is that person depleting other people or systems in order to get such an inordinately large yield?
It goes without saying, I think that the goal in permaculture is a sustainable yield. Instead of creating something out of nothing, permaculture attempts to create value while keeping inputs and outputs in balance. We try not to build a system that borrows value from other people or places, and we try to build a system that returns as much to the environment as it takes from it. We create energy loops.
With that in mind, here are some photos of my recent yields from the garden. Enjoy!
The pepper and tomato plants are growing strong! The tomato plants were all started from seed by my sister, whose dining room doubles as a greenhouse in spring. The pepper plant was purchased from a local garden center. Onions and cilantro (in a separate bed) and waiting for the salsa making to begin.
Calendula and dill reseed themselves in these beds every year and require absolutely no effort to sow or maintain. Calendula can be used as an effective salve and dill is delicious on just about everything. Obviously, it goes great in pickles, but also is delicious on potatoes, salmon, cheese, and can be added to stir fry or soup as a vegetable if you have large enough quantities of it. The cucumber vines are starting to grow up one of the makeshift trellises in the veggie garden. Growing the vines upward keeps the cukes clean and easy to harvest.
The Prairie Permie 