Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2016 i Grit

FEATURED COMMENT “I had a huge invasion of grasshoppers this year in my garden, and I have been looking for an environmentally friendly way of preventing them. I think I will follow your advice and get some turkeys, ducks, chickens and guinea hens in the spring to help rid my garden of insect pests.” — Jacqueline Ryckman on “Raising Chickens and Poultry for Home Pest Control” GRIT Bloggers We invite homesteaders, country cooks, doit-yourselfers, and folks living the rural life to join the GRIT online community and become a GRIT blogger. We’d like you to write about your experiences and know-how, and share it with others on their journey to self-sufficiency. Send an email to cwilson@grit.com for more details and to get started. Old-Time Tractors Not only are antique tractors…

As gardeners, we know that the success of our edible and ornamental plants is directly related to the health of our soil. Some of us even believe that as gardeners, we nurture and grow soil every bit as much as we do plants. Our soil is one of our most valuable assets, and it needs to be protected. The best way to protect and improve our soil is by keeping it covered with crops, whether that’s crops we’re growing for food or cover crops. At their most basic level, cover crops are exactly what they sound like: plants that cover the soil and reduce erosion and nutrient loss. Essentially, they are a living mulch. The first time I used overwintered rye in my garden to prepare a new garden area,…

Summertime: A time for flowers, sunshine, warm weather and cooking over an open flame. There is no denying that summer is the highlight of every child’s – and many adults’ – year; at least for schoolchildren. But nothing can spoil the summertime fun quite like a tick bite. Ticks are, unfortunately, a part of summer in all 50 states in the United States. It’s not just that these little buggers cause discomfort and misery, but they also pose a health threat. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Lyme disease transmitted by ticks is the most common vector-borne illness in the U.S. There are several other tick-borne illnesses, and they can cause allergies as well. Understanding your adversary is the first step toward defense. Seven common human-biting…

IT’S TRUE: Necessity is the mother of invention. I was reminded of that fact last spring, when I moved some apple trees outside for the season. Up until then, I had always grown newly grafted trees in 2-gallon nursery pots. These, however, were potted up in “deep root” pots – tall and skinny, designed to create an impressive root ball in minimal space. The pots did an excellent job of this. What they did not do well was stand up on their own. A 16-inch-tall pot with a base only 4 inches by 4 inches will tip in the slightest breeze. A new graft is a delicate thing. For the first year, a songbird’s weight or the force of a stiff breeze can snap off a graft union. Add to…

IF I COULD, I’d put every child within easy reach of a haystack in his or her early years. Today, long past childhood and far from the ranch on which I was born, I look out on a modern barn. Its 20-foot pole legs support a metal roof that shelters tons of hay, all baled. Yesterday a giant, motorized monster gobbled these bales from the field and stacked them, domino-neat, under the high barn roof. The process was quick and efficient. Neatly stacked bales, however, hold neither the challenges nor the dream-inducing fragrance of a mound of freshly cut alfalfa. And although country youngsters nowadays might enjoy any number of hayloft fort activities, those loose-piled haystack of yesteryear still hold a special place in my heart. When I was a…

Barn Quilts I was delighted when I received my May/June issue of GRIT, and it had an article on barn quilts (“Bridging the Gap With Barn Quilts,” Page 17). I, too, paint barn quilts. I have sewn and quilted many projects in my life, but painting barn quilts has been the most fun. I have painted more than 25, and have sold many of them. Two years ago, I remodeled a sun porch. It was painted in green, orange and yellow, and trimmed in dark gray. I have taken these four colors and painted 24-inch barn quilts for the wall. They are awesome, and each quilt is a different pattern. I am getting ready to do a 36-inch triangle pattern for the front of my house. It will have four…

FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF DECADES, heirloom tomatoes have experienced a revival of sorts. Talk gardening with any tomato grower, and you’ll likely hear the word “heirloom.” Today they thrive, yet at one point, these tomatoes were not heirlooms – they were just tomatoes. Their rediscovery – the renewed interest in great taste and buying locally – has spurred a new era of tomato breeding from professionals to amateurs, producing some pretty interesting results. By definition, an heirloom of any type cannot be new. Tomato authorities debate the exact delineation of an heirloom variety, and at times debate can be vociferous. The minimum age of an heirloom ranges from about 50 to 100 years, dating to before approximately 1950 when F1 hybrid tomatoes were widely introduced. They have often been…

You’ve been living that life out where the pavement ends now for a few years, and your machine shed is no longer empty. Daily life is a joy and, for the most part, pretty smooth, but now your tractor has sufficient hours to require service, the mower’s cut is really ragged, and the tires on the utility vehicle go flat overnight. In some ways, it feels like the party’s over – what can you do? If you’re used to taking your car to town for service every time it makes a new noise or the “oil change” light comes on, you might be tempted to drag the machines off to the local dealership for service. But when you pull the trailer out of the shed, you notice that two of…

I REMEMBER THE DAY my wife and I came home after signing the papers to purchase 80 acres of very rough land. It was something we had wanted to do for a long time, but the reality of knowing that we actually owned the land made me determined to be productive with our purchase. We sat at the kitchen table and discussed plans that night. I wanted to create an area that would attract wildlife and provide hunting opportunities for our family. I also thought about ways to use the land’s resources to help us make the payments that would be arriving every month. I had read about a growing market for locally produced table and wine grapes in our area, and over a celebratory glass of wine that night,…

Many of us have heard about the benefits of adding fermented foods in our own diets, including reduced risk of sickness, better nutrient absorption, and higher digestibility, to name a few. The same is true for your poultry flock and other animals. Fermenting feed for your flock is actually very easy, and the benefits range from increased egg production in winter to lower feed consumption. When I first inherited a flock of chickens, I fed them organic chicken pellets from the local feed store. I liked the convenience of filling a feeder once a week and not having to think about it. Then I added ducks, turkeys and guinea fowl, along with more chickens. That’s when I started to think about ways to increase the health of my flock and…

Share your visual perspective with the Grit community. Post your photos at Facebook.com/GritMagazine, Facebook.com/CappersFarmer, or tag us on Instagram (GritMag). We chose several images you see here from those platforms, and you can find more within the blogging community on our websites. Share your best shots, and we just might select one of your photos for a future issue of the magazine. To admire even more readers’ photos, visit Grit.com and CappersFarmer.com.…

A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP with food can take a while for a person to develop. Cultivating the same relationship for an entire community is even more of a challenge, but one that comes with enormous rewards. For Shawn Peterson, founder and director of The Green Urban Lunch Box – a nonprofit program based in Salt Lake City, Utah – the relationship between people and their food is of the utmost importance. Peterson first got the idea for The Green Urban Lunch Box when he started thinking about the food-consumer relationship in today’s society. He started wondering where our food comes from, what we’re really eating, and whether people have access to healthy, goodquality food. “The concern was how can we grow our own food, and how can we have better control…

WHEN WARM WEATHER ROLLS AROUND, you can often find me enjoying any type of activity that involves being outdoors, and this includes cooking. I’ve been stuck inside all winter, so I’m ready to spend as much time outside as possible. Why not take the kitchen with me? Growing up, my friends and I would spend most of our summer weekends camping and cooking hot dogs and s’mores in a spot hidden among the cedars on my parents’ property. As we grew older and the adults found out just how cool our camping spot was, everyone started to join in, which made for even more fun. This meant we had to up the ante on our campfire cuisine, though. My uncle, a handy blacksmith and avid cast-iron collector, quickly got us…

For me, gardening began as a child. During the summer, the majority of my days were spent at Grandma’s house. I was her gardening companion. Her gardening space was amazing. Everywhere you looked, something wonderful was growing – flowers, fruit trees, shrubs and fresh vegetables. Her home was a gardener’s paradise. One of my least favorite chores at her house was taking the compost to the garden. She canned a lot of produce and kept a bucket of fruit and vegetable peelings under the sink. When the bucket was full, it was sent to the garden to be dumped into a compost bin. The bin smelled and attracted all types of bees. (I had a fear of being stung.) This chore turned into me running to the garden, sometimes falling,…

IN TIMES BEFORE GARDEN SEED was available from stores, one job that was imperative to the pioneering household was that of saving fresh seed for planting the next season’s crop. A seed chest was carefully put together and guarded as a treasure of the household. Buying seeds each year is expensive, and over the last 10 years, prices of garden seed, even in small quantities, have increased substantially. A small packet often won’t yield enough produce for a large family garden, not to mention any leftover seed for replanting or for succession plantings. I have gardened for many years, and the process of learning sustainable practices helped me realize I needed to develop a better method of seed saving, which can be difficult with thousands of seeds. Saving your own…

THE EAGLE IS PERHAPS one of the most iconic and intricately woven symbols associated with the United States of America. Printed on currency and official documents and forms, the eagle is an enduring image of the strength and independence we associate with this country. North America is home to two species of eagles: the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos). Both are majestic birds of prey with wingspans that range from 6 to 8 feet, and body lengths varying between 3 and 31⁄2 feet. Females are larger than males in both species, and often have a slightly larger wingspan. Females of either species weigh between 8 and 15 pounds, while males weigh between 6 and 10 pounds. Their size – second only to the California condor…