Use Re Use and Use Again

Here in South Florida, our vegetable growing season is drawing to a close.  While those of you in the South and up North are planning and starting your gardens, we are winding down.  We really only have two seasons here, dry and rainy.  We grow our traditional vegetable gardens in the dry season that starts in October.  Many of the vegetables that you have been eating this winter were grown in far south Florida, far south Texas, and southern California.  Our rainy season usually starts no later than the 3rd week of May.  Once the rainy season starts, temperatures soar, humidity rises, and it rains at least once a day.  Now that doesnt mean that it rains all day long.  It means it usually rains sometime around lunchtime and then again around 3 or 5.  The rain doesnt last long, but that rain along with the heat and humidity is enough to discourage most vegetables from growing.

So, we are busy planting our okras and southern peas because they are about the only edibles that can survive. However, there are lots of non-edibles that keep a gardener busy in the rainy season.

As I go through the season transition process I am taking things down and finding new uses for them.  For example, this tomato cage is no longer needed for its Mr. Stripey resident.  I will be using it again in the fall when I start my soil tomatoes again but until then it is out of a job.

Re-Purposed Tomato Cage

Or maybe not!  As I was walking to put it away, I thought why couldnt this cage
support one of my ground orchids that started to run out of control.  I recently
thinned out my ground orchids and put some of them in pots (keep reading to
find out about my re-used pots).  One of them was so gangly I wasnt sure what to do with it.  It was healthy, so I hated to toss it, but it had a terrible growth habit.  I potted it up and sat it where it could lean on a plumeria while it got its act together.  So, enter Mr. Stripeys tomato cage.  Instead of putting the cage away I paused with the cage in my hand as I walked past that pot.  I ended up putting that cage around the pot with the gangly orchid in it.  So, that plant has all rainy season to get its act together and get some roots long enough to support it.  Come fall that cage has got to get back to its real job of supporting a tomato.
Use as designed, re-used off-label so to speak, and then use again for its original purpose.  Works for me!

Basket lined with fronds

Another thing I have been doing is lining hanging pots with dried palm fronds.  I have way too many palm trees.  This means way too many palm fronds.  I used to buy liners made from coconut hair for my hanging baskets.  Then I decided why should I do that when not only did I have palm hair but I had an excess of palm fronds in my yard.  I found that through trial and error that the fronds from robellini, cats paw and areca palms made the best liners.  It was simply a matter of cutting the main vein from the fronds and then forming them inside the basket.  I trimmed off any excess frond to make it neat.  Then all I needed to do was fill with soil and plant.  The fronds hold in the soil.  Just like to coconut hair, they slowly decompose.  When they are done, all you have to do is dump them in the compost pile and they are already partially decomposed. 

Frond line basket

Lastly, if you didnt notice in the ground orchid picture, I use pots over and over and over again.  I have been known to buy a plant on "Death Row" (the discounted plant rack) just because I want the pot.  Even the cheap plastic growers pots are great for starting out plants.

And of course almost all components of our aquaponic gardens are off-label.  We have used cement mixing containers for grow beds and Rubbermaid storage containers for fish tanks!

What crazy ways do you re-use things in your garden? 

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Grain Mill Strikes Again Grinding Sea Salt

We ran out of store-bought salt the other day, right before we were about to do some baking.  We had some big salt rocks in one of those hand grinder things (like the kind that the waiters use to grind pepper onto your salad at fancy restaurants like Olive Garden), but when were baking and we want a teaspoon of salt, its hard to tell how much weve ground up.  Its much easier if we have a container of pre-ground salt that we can take from.  So, we got our grain mill out again this weekend to take our salt rocks and turn them into salt grains.  (For what its worth, weve now used our grain mill on eggshells, sugar, and salt, but not yet grain!)

This is part of a batch we collected off Mount Desert Island in Acadia National Park, Maine.  From one gallon of sea water, we got about 75 g salt (around half a cup).  Since the salinity of seawater in that area is 31-35 g/L, we should have gotten ~118-133 g of salt, so our yield is curiously low, unless we used some of it for other stuff we cant remember. (Which is totally possible.)  We dried it in a 9 x 13" pan on top of the fridge, and finished it off in the oven.  Kind of cool to watch the crystallization process.  In an earlier batch, we dried driving off the last of the water in a plastic container in the microwave.  DO NOT do that...it took less than ten seconds for the plastic to melt and stink up the kitchen!

Anyway, the granules here are much bigger than wed like.  In the photo, were trying to sieve it after grinding it with a mortar and pestle.  The old M&P didnt work very well for the single crystal chunks.

But those crystals are no match for the grain mill!

When all was said and done, we had a nice bowl of white powder. Our home-dried sea salt stuck in the mill a little more than the other salts we tried (we found a container of large-grained pink Himalayan salt in the cupboard also), so maybe we didnt get it quite as dry as we thought we did.  [Ooh!  Here comes Katie!] Hey Katie, grab a spoon!  Want to try some of this fresh-ground sugar?

Post-grinding, back into the canning jar from whence it came.  We made sure to clean up the grain mill real good afterward because chloride ions and steel dont get along very well.

One other bit of info we discovered while following our curiosity on this post is that sea salt doesnt have much iodine in it. (i.e., its I content is way lower than iodized regular salt.)  Thats kind of disappointing because we were hoping that if we took a trip to the ocean once a year or so to make our own sea salt, we wouldnt have to buy salt at the store and could still avoid catching the goiter (or other iodine-deficiency disorders).  But it looks like well have to collect the seaweed and fish, too, to make that happen.  Or eat plenty of cranberries, which seem* to have a high iodine content despite being mostly grown in the middle of the goiter belt.  Possibly because the region theyre grown in has a high organic matter content in the soil, which is very good at capturing atmospheric iodine (e.g., as CH₃I) and storing it in a plant-accessible form.





*Many online sources claim that cranberries have up to 400 ug iodine per 4 oz serving, but we couldnt find the original source of that number.  A paper from 1928 gives a value of 35 ppb iodine (ppb = ug/kg), which works out to 3.97 ug iodine per serving:

Wethinks someone may have done a faulty conversion of units along the way, which was then propagated by less-than-diligent authors.  Another reminder to take internet-based information with...a grain of salt.  A more recent source gives 100 ug I /kg cranberries, or 11.3 ug/serving, which is on par with eggs, freshwater fish, and other fruits--and still nothing to sneeze at, accounting for ~7.5% of the recommended daily intake (RDI).  Since three cups of cranberries = 12 oz, at that rate, all youd need is 2.2 pans of yuletide strata per day to completely satisfy your iodine RDI!

 
 How do you cover your salt (and iodine) needs on the homestead?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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