How to Survive the Occasional Garden

You may know that I garden in the soil and using aquaponic techniques in South Florida.  Our climate and pests can make gardening in zone 10B a real challenge.  But it is not the largest challenge in my gardening life.  My largest challenge is maintaining the gardens in my North Carolina mountain cabin.

I may be there one week a month, three weeks a month, or not at all for months on end.  Just because I am not there on a regular basis does not mean that I accept that I cant have beautiful gardens.  It just takes lots of planning and dependence on some old, time-tested plants and a few new ones as well.

The first challenge in my North Carolina mountain garden is that it sits at 3,200 feet in a mixture of clay, rock, and some pretty good soil...it just depends on where you dig.  It sits in USDA Zone 5B and I have spent my life gardening in Zones 8, 9, and 10.  In other words, a totally different part of the south where winters are milder and you almost never see the mercury plunge below freezing for long.  So the first thing was learning to garden out of my comfort zone.  I depended quite a bit on regional gardening boards, the University of North Carolina, and the gardening column in the local weekly paper.

My second challenge was to find plants that could thrive in the sunshine in the spring when there are no leaves on the trees, the dense shade in many areas once the leaves are on the trees in the summer, and the brutal cold of winter with the first snowfall happening in October or November.

I realized within the first year that annuals are pretty much out of the question, except as accent plants. My go to plants became the ones that are either hardy evergreens (like boxwood) or plants that become dormant in the winter and resume growing in the spring.  Bulbs are great for this!

Hurray for daffodils, crocus, tulips, iris, daylillies, gladiolas, and hostas!

Daffodils in Snow

These bulbs/corms can provide a procession of color in a bed without much fuss or muss. They dont need heavy fertilizing and can thrive on neglect.  Just a little dividing every once in a while and a covering of leaves in the fall are about all the attention they require.  The crocus and daffodils begin the procession of color.  They will even sprout and bloom through the snow.

Daffodils without Snow

Daylilly

 

Next come the tulips and iris to end the Spring season.  Come summer, the daylillies, gladiolas, and hostas  provide colorful foliage and pretty flowers.  The daylillies are particularly handy when you are planting on a slope and need good roots to prevent erosion. 

Hydrangeas are a great bush for the occasional gardener.  They grow and bloom each year from the prior years growth.  The dont need any sort of pruning unless you are looking to simply control the size of the plant.  My experience is that few pests want to eat the plant but the birds and butterflies love them.  Because they are dormant in the fall and winter months, you dont have to worry much about them freezing.  We have had below zero temperatures and the hydrangeas didnt seem to mind a bit: they just slept on.

Oakleaf Hydrangea

Other great bushes that are fairly fuss-free are azaleas, buddleias, and camellias.  I have been told that camellias can have pest problems but that has not been my experience so far.  If you are in a cold zone, just make sure that you select a camellia that is cold hardy.  Some are and some arent.  I learned the hard way.  Another great blooming plant that can take the cold and neglect is the rhododendron.  It will bloom in the shade, part-shade or even the sun.  Its cousin the mountain laurel also prefers to be left alone, making it a great choice for the occasional gardener.

Speaking of plants that want to be neglected, no occasional garden would be complete without a knock-out rose or two or three.  I love roses, but can only grow them in pots in south Florida because of our nematode problem.  In North Carolina, they can be grown in the soil but require care

Knock Out Rose

enter the patented Knock Out Rose.  I have both single and double types and both perform beautifully.  Come winter you just know they are dead because they dont have a leaf on them, but in spring they start to grow quickly.  Because I have such shady areas, it is important to have plants that arent prone to mildew problems.  I havent had a bit of mold problem with these roses at all.  Makes me think about replacing the ones I have in my full-time garden!

If you notice the one thing I have not mentioned in the occasional garden is the presence of grass.  Having a lawn is labor-intensive.  You have to feed it to encourage it to grow and then turn around and mow once you are successful in getting it to grow.  If you arent going to be around on a regular basis, you arent going to have a great lawn.  My approach is to let the grass that wants to grow go ahead and grow and I pay someone to mow all three acres that has some form of grass on it once a month once the weather is warm, and weed eat the non-mowable areas every few weeks.

Hosta

Whether you own a vacation home and are looking for gardening tips or you just want a beautiful garden without putting much work into it, I hope you will use these ideas to create your own garden that only needs your occasional attention to survive.  If you want to visit the Smoky Mountains and see what is blooming in my garden, go to Cabin On a Creek and check availability.  Its the occasional gardeners place where peace and quiet come together.

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Vertical Aquaponics Grow Pots

Six weeks later the vertical grow pots are doing fantastic. There is so much space this is saving and running on my 650 litre system does not increase the load on this system. This system is still running at 50% capacity in my opinion. I can easily add another few more vertical grow pots and two more regular grow beds. Periodically I have been adding a little seaweed extract which seems to take care of some of the micronutrient deficiency. Compost tea is the next addition which I will be trying soon.

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Family Promise Founder to Speak at Grand Opening of New Day Center in Albuquerque

Karen Olson, the founder of Family Promise, is the featured speaker at the grand opening of the new home for the organizations Albuquerque affiliate on Sunday, November 1, 2015, at  3:00 p.m. You are invited to come hear her amazing story and to celebrate Family Promise of Albuquerques new space and expansion at 808 Edith Blvd NE (map).  For more information, call 505-268-0331.

Below is a speech that Ms. Olson gave at the  University of Arkansas Clinton School of Service in May of 2011. 

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Hunger No More

Reprinted from the Looked with Compassion blog, (Dec. 12, 2015 post)

By Rev. Greg Henneman

There are many injustices of our culture that we tolerate as normal. We assume that the way things are is how they have always been and how they will always be. Although the human spirit continually shows potential for amazing things, we limit our creativity when we simply accept poverty as normal.

Yesterday, nearly 200 people came together to no longer accept situation normal. Leaders of faith communities, non-profits, and medical systems raised their hands in a commitment to end hunger in Ohio.

Yes, end hunger. Why not?

David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, shared the story of recently visiting Bangladesh. He had previously lived in Bangladesh and saw a noticeable improvement in the homes people lived in, streets, infrastructure, and health of the children. Beckmann stated that since 1990 the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty fell from two billion to one billion.

This led me to wonder, if noticeable change can happen in Bangladesh, why not here?

Ambassador Tony Hall shared the story of Mother Teresa grabbing his hand and showing him that with his five fingers he could remember five words: for the least of these. Hall described hunger as a political issue. That the effort to end hunger is not a matter of finding the resources but the will to end hunger. 

With 48 million food insecure people in the United States, Hall asked shouldn’t this be one of the most important issues? What are you doing about hunger?

Ending hunger is not a matter of food supply. We have plenty of food. Nearly 40 percent of the food in America is wasted.

Hunger is a health issue.

Hunger not only results in billions of dollars of medical costs, but real people and whole communities who experience diabetes, hypertension, and low birth weights because of our lack of creativity to end hunger.

Will you raise your hand to end hunger in our country, your state, your community? In 2015, no one needs to go hungry. Hunger is a basic human right.

Next time your hand brings a piece of food to your mouth, remember the words of Mother Teresa, “for the least of these.”

How are your hands being used so no one else’s hands shake with hunger?

(Editors note. There was a similar conference in Albuquerque in May 2015. Read more here)

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Big commercial Aquaponics farm

Big Commercial aquaponics system

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Aquaponics Tilapia Harvesting

Aquaponics Tilapia Harvesting 

This video shows how to harvest, clean, and fillet tilapia from your aquaponics system.

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Rendering Beeswax

 In our neck of the woods, spring is definitely in the air.  Chives and new growth on the strawberries poking through the mulch, grass in protected areas starting to green up, birds returning from the south side of things... That means its time to start getting set up for the spring flurry of activity around the homestead!  On our list this weekend was the bees.  While we dont know exactly where were going to site them in our new place, we know what weve got to do to get the hives ready.  This year, its mainly scraping out old boxes and wiring in foundation.

The catch is that we had a place to keep bees three years ago, then not for the last two years, and now again yes!  So all our equipment has been sitting idle for two years.  When we cracked it open, we found some of our old brood comb had some damage from something thats been eating the honey (not sure what, but there were little grubs that looked like small hive beetle larvae in there), and some frames had the telltale scent of fermented honey (but not good mead, just to be clear).  There were also some frames that hadnt had comb drawn out, but that had the foundation busted up.  What to do?  Looks like its time to take the unusable comb/foundation and render it down into beeswax!

The rendering process for beeswax is pretty similar to the process we use for other fats, like tallow and meat trimmings.  Except this time, were not going to make cracklins out of the leftovers.  (Although maybe the leftover pupae wouldnt taste too bad...)  Its also pretty similar to the process that Don uses in his YouTube videos (which we found out after the fact!), but we dont have the luxury of dedicated equipment that doesnt have to be thoroughly cleaned.  (So well share a couple tips we figured out in that regard, too.)

Note: this is a cautionary tale and contains more information on what not to do than the best way to do this.  But, in case your intuition and forward-thinking skills are in a lull when you have some beeswax to render (like ours evidently were), let this be a lesson...

Heres the victim: nine frames of unusable wax and/or foundation.  Some of the combs are pretty dark.

We broke everything up so it would fit in a pot (with about six inches of water in the bottom) and started heating.  The darkest comb isnt shown in this picture.

The frames and wires got set next to the door so they could be quickly taken back outside before Katie found out what had inexplicably happened to the kitchen.  In retrospect, the comb-removal operation should have been done outside.  EDIT: Katie says the entire operation should have been done outside.  New house rule!

While its cooking, we brought some of our misshapen foundation inside to flatten out in the warm kitchen.  We were pretty glad we saved the wax paper between the sheets!  We put a stoneware cookie sheet on top to weigh it down.  Theyre not perfectly flat yet, but were not in that big of a hurry.

When all the meltable stuff is melted, there are four (or five) layers.  At the very bottom is a thin layer of dirt and other heavy stuff.  Then comes the water and all the water-soluble stuff.  At the interface of the water and beeswax is stuff like propolis and lightweight dirt.  On top of that is the beeswax, and at the very top is a bunch of dark-colored floaties.  The floaties are things like pollen chunks, dead bees and pupae, and other stuff from the bees junk drawer.

When it looked like nothing else was melting, we scooped off the floaties and stacked them as tall as possible in a glass bowl.  A lot of wax ended up coming with them.  If we had another big vessel to add them to like Don did, we could have filtered through a t-shirt or something.  But we thought a kitchen strainer would be very hard to clean.

As it was, we poured what wax we could back into another bowl, but still werent happy with how much we were losing. So, we filtered through a t-shirt anyway, dripping the liquid into the new bowl.  We figured out that if we put the floaties in the middle, and twisted on either side that we could squeeze out more wax without burning our hands.  (Coincidentally, this is also the point where the term diminishing returns starts to be an adequate description of getting more wax out of the floaties.)  The t-shirt might not ever be wearable again, but it will make some good candle wicks!

In retrospect, pouring back into the pot would have been a better idea.  (Katie rolls her eyes.)  But we got two thin cakes of wax instead of one thick one, and two is better than one, right?  Next time well find a bigger second vessel and strain through an old t-shirt.  All the hot water coming through the t-shirt will send most of the wax through anyway, and well avoid this messy step!  We set the pot outside to cool down overnight.  Then we added some water to this bowl, heated in the microwave until everything was melted, and set it outside to cool down overnight.

After the first melt, both cakes of wax were kind of dirty, like this.  So we put them back in the bowl with some water, and heated them in the microwave until everything was melted.

We repeated the process of adding water, melting, and cooling until the wax was clean enough for our standards. (It took three times for this batch.)

We werent quite sure what we want to do with the beeswax yet (so many possibilities!), so we decided to store it in some canning jars until we have a better idea.  Looks a lot better than the dark brown mess we started with!

Now for the cleanup...we didnt take a picture during the process, but what we found works fairly well is almost-boiling water and dish soap.  Beeswax melts at 140-150 °F, so boiling water definitely melts the wax, and the soap helps solubilize it in the water.  For utensils like the slotted spoon, just pouring very hot water over it was enough to melt the wax and wash away any residue.  For the pot and glass bowls, we scrubbed them down with a dish cloth wrapped around a spoon.  Insulated rubber gloves or the hand part from Iron Mans suit would also work, but we didnt have either handy.

There was a thin residue that didnt show up until dry, but its not likely to hurt anything and will wear off over the next few uses. (Or when Katie decides to scrub it the next day...)  Who couldnt use a glass bowl with some extra waterproofing? For the stove and counter top (and floor and walls and inside of the microwave...), we were able to scrape off the wax with a hard piece of plastic, and wipe up any residue with the hot wet dish cloth.  No residue when dry.  Yay!


Whats your process for rendering beeswax?  What do you do with it once you have it purified?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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