B is For Beans- #AtoZChallenge

A Golden Haricot bean pod, just developing.

You've all heard that school yard chant:
"Beans, beans, the magic fruit; the more you eat, the more you toot! Pfffth!"

*snorts* Yeah, sorry. I have the sense of humor of an eight year old sometimes. I could regale you all with truly juvenile tales about beans and their effects (most of them I blame my father and brother for... you know how it goes), but I'll save you that experience and just jump straight to the point: Day 2 of the A to Z Blogging Challenge is all about beans.

A flat, smooth green pod protects its developing seeds on this
Golden Haricot bean vine.

What can I say about beans, apart from the fact that they're used in cooking and give you gas (and bad jokes)?

I know they're an acquired taste (I love green beans! My husband? ... Not so much). Dry beans make my favorite foods, such as spicy beef chili and refried beans (Taco Tuesday just isn't the same without the refried beans, you know what I'm saying?) Dried bean seeds come in an amazing array of colors, sizes, shapes and patterns, so much so that half the time, you just want to display them in glass jars, because they're so pretty.

The first Roger's White Runner seed.

There are many varieties of beans, but all beans are legumes, and belong to a larger family of plants that include alfalfa, clover, peas, lupins, lentils, mesquite, carob, soybeans, peanuts and tamarind. If you want the scientific jargon, check it out at Wikipedia, but I'm trying to keep it simple. 

Of the legumes, beans are very useful plants to us as gardeners and farmers. Most notably, they provide food in the form of young green pods, which can be prepared in numerous ways to make them tasty. The also provide the bean seeds which, when dried thoroughly, store for a long time, making them a perfect bulk food storage option. Both dried beans and pods are components in countless recipes in cultures around the world, and have been for generations.

The flowers are the typical red and white of a scarlet runner
variety- you don't know there's anything special until you
collect the seeds.

Beans are also nitrogen fixers. This means that colonies of special bacteria live on their roots, called nodules, and these take nitrogen from the air and, through a complicated series of chemical reactions, convert it into a form that can be fixed into the soil, which in turn benefits crops that are planted after the beans (or other legume variety). As a result, they're used as a rotational crop, to restore soil nutrients, before the land is sowed again with another type of plant. 

Broad beans, a type of legume that have thick, free standing stalks, and long fleshy pods with large seeds, are commonly used as a green manure crop, allowed to grow tall before they're chopped, dropped and tilled in, to break down and add organic matter to the soil. (A related legume, peas, are grown until they dry out, before they are baled up as straw, for much the same purpose- mulch and compost. Seeing as they're so closely related, I cannot see why beans couldn't be used as straw as well).

One of Roger's White Runners, when it was still in it's pod.

When growing beans, you can choose from several varieties that have three basic growing habits.

Bush beans are squat but productive little plants, requiring no trellis for support, great for kids or very short people who don't have far to bend for the harvest, or for growing in tall raised beds, where bending has been factored out. They grow maybe to knee height- because of this, they are probably my least favorite type to grow in ground. I had several rows of bush beans a couple years ago, and I got real tired of paying homage to those plants, I can tell you. So, personally, I've been phasing my bush bean varieties out in favor of the climbing beans.

Clockwise From Top left: Trail of Tears, Golden Haricot,
Lazy Housewife, and Black Runner

Climbing beans are exactly what they say they are on the packet: they climb. They need a strong string or sturdy trellis to climb up, and given enough water and sunlight, will grow as tall as they can get, which is pretty tall (I reckon some would happily grow 20 feet if you didn't keep them in check).

Broad beans have the third growing habit: free standing. They have thick, rigid stalks which allow them to grow up without need for support. However, this doesn't mean they are indestructable- a strong wind can severely damage your broad beans, tearing them at their joints and knocking them down. Even though they can be grown free standing, I always think it's better to give them something to lean up against for extra support.

I trained my special runner beans up on a trellis,
and yes I am growing them in pots!

My personal garden project this year was to grow a few rare varieties in order to save the seeds for the seed bank project. I planted two types of scarlet runner seeds: a white seed with brown speckling, which I'm calling "Roger's White Runner" (got it from some guy named Roger, obviously); and a pure black seed, which I'm calling the "Black Runner", for the sake of simplicity. I also have a variety that I'm calling a "Golden Haricot": a stunning brown and caramel colored bean.

Unfortunately, we had a heat wave this year that kept them outside of their prime fruit setting temperature for several months (the prime temperature for them to set fruit at is 10C). As a result, my beans were not that successful. Currently, the scarlet runners are putting on a few pods (I have literally harvested one Roger's White Runner seed so far), and the Golden Haricots are just starting to dry out a couple of pods, so I haven't even started collecting them yet.

I do look forward to seeing how many I can grow this autumn though, so there will likely be a follow up post when that time comes. Until then, I'll wrap up this post, and hope you all learned a little something from this blog. :)

C you! (Get it? "See" you? Because the next blog starts with "C"-- yeah, never mind...)

A is for Art- #AtoZChallenge

Woohoo! The first blog for the A-to-Z Challenge, starting out with "A is for Art"! I am so stoked, because to get this month started off right, I'm going to share with you my favorite side hobby: Drawing!

I have been a fan of drawing and coloring for as long as I can remember. The most exciting moment of my 6 year old life (apart from getting my first bike) was being given the Big Box of Crayola Crayons, which I used to carefully color in the mermaids, princesses and animals displayed in my many coloring books. It wasn't long either, before I went from straight coloring to traditional drawing. I distinctly remember, in the 3rd grade, drawing a huge dragon on a piece of notebook paper, flying through the air carrying a heart shaped wreath covered in flowers (it wasn't nearly as sophisticated as it sounds, but for an 8 year old it wasn't a bad composition- I sort of wish it has survived the years).

I've experimented with many techniques of artistic expression over the years, but my long standing absolute favorite, and the one I'm most skilled in, is simple black and white pencil. It's probably the easiest and cheapest, because you literally only need a #2 pencil (or a mechanical pencil- I like those a lot too), a good eraser (the white ones work best) and a piece of paper (I've used a lot of materials for paper- napkins, place mats, lined paper, scratch paper, copy paper, card stock, etc). Nowadays, I use sketchbooks, with fine grained white paper designed for pencil.

Before I got into the technology game, I would draw something, take a picture of it, and upload that into the computer to be processed, at first in paint, then in a Photoshop knock off program. When I got married, I moved up in the world into the system that I use today: Draw a picture, use a flat bed scanner to get it into the computer, then use the mouse and the graphics tablet and stylus to do what I want with it.

What with the rise of "adult" coloring books, I found my inspiration to create my own coloring page designs, as they slotted perfectly into my prime skill zone: pretty patterns, pencil drawings, and black and white images.

People saw my images, became interested in coloring them, and I started getting offers to buy my art. So, a few months ago, I started a page on Facebook called >>Paw Print Works<<. Through that page, I display and sell my art, both the black and white images and the colored versions that I digitally colored and enhanced myself. Friends buy the designs for their kids and themselves, and I love it when they share their finished coloring pages. 

Drawing is sometimes a slow process, and inspiration is often a fickle beast, so I don't have many designs published yet, but if you are interested, check out my page, like, comment, share with your friends, and help support an artist (me!)

Not only that, but through a friend of mine at >>8th Dimension<<, I have my art "published" as apparel and housewares art on RedBubble. << Check out that link and buy something cool and unique.

Also, check out >>14th Street<< on Amazon and buy a shirt or two; they're displaying my art as well. There you can find "Scorpio", "Phoenix", "Serpent Crest" and the "Chimera" patterns, in a variety of tee shirt fits, sizes and colors.

Now that I'm finished shamelessly selling my work, I just want to add that every purchase goes towards my income. My hobbies are my job, and that means my art, soaps, hand crafts, the vegetables I grow, and even the seeds I collect, all benefit from their sales. All money is put towards production and further development of what I hope one day will be a booming business.

Until tomorrow then-
Cheers!

The A-to-Z Blogging Challenge 2016

Guess what? For the first time ~EVER~ Living and Learning will be participating in the A-to-Z Challenge in April!

What does this mean?

It means you can look forward to 26 days of interesting and hopefully educational blogs on a wide variety of subjects. Most will apply to my usual range of subjects regarding gardening, sustainability, crafting, etc, but I may even throw in a few opinion pieces, and show you snippets from my life outside of the blog-o-sphere I live in when writing posts. 

When does this Challenge begin? 

April 1st. And that's no joke!... -yeah, okay, that one was pretty bad. Sorry. Anyway- I'll be writing a blog every day but Sundays (because I need some time to regain my sanity after all the writing, of course!)

I hope you all enjoy reading my posts, and please comment, like, and share on your favorite social media sites.

Live, Learn and Love!

Self Sufficiency: The Real Work Put Into Your Bread

Last year I spread wheat straw over my garden. Much to my pleasant surprise, there was enough seed leftover in the straw to sprout, and it grew several promising clumps of wheat. I can't say what kind of wheat it was (any baker worth her salt knows there are several types), but I was able to gather just under 50g of ripened grain, and thought, why not experiment? I have chickens, and they LOVE whole wheat for scratch grains, so why not try growing it?

Ripened wheat "ears" the seed heads of one of the most
popular grain crops grown in the US.

Then I got to thinking. What if I grew the wheat for myself? I'm a baker at heart and by training; I could make my own bread, free from pesticides and other gunk associated with industrial wheat and commercial bread making. However, that would mean buying a flour grinder, because I don't currently own one. In my journey towards a more self reliant lifestyle, I've always wanted to try grinding and using my own flour. It gave me pause, and really drove home to me just how difficult being self sufficient really was. 

Lets have a simple meal like, oh... bread, cheese, and salami, for example. Easy to prep and eat, right? Just make a visit to the local deli, grab a plate, slice some stuff, serve. Presto! Easy meal. And if you run out, the grocery store is just down the road, isn't it?

Not so, however, if you're producing the same meal as a totally self sufficient person (the keyword here is 'totally'.) Google provides a straight forward definition of the term:

Self-sufficiency (also called self-containment) is the state of not requiring any aid, support, or interaction, for survival.

That's a pretty hardcore concept when you consider how dependent so many of us are on the local and global economies, and the collective brainwashing of capitalism pushing us to buy, buy BUY! all the stuff we supposedly 'need' to survive daily life.

A totally self sufficient lifestyle is pretty impractical, and impossible for a large percentage of people these days, sadly. But when the world population was smaller, back before machines and other technology arose to do things for us, our ancestors did many of the same things that we do today, the big three being eating, drinking, and procreation (we'll just stick to eating for now).

So, we're totally self sufficient, and we want to bake a loaf of bread. What do we have to do? Bread at it's most basic is yeast, water, salt and flour.
 
Water
This can be as simple as dipping a bucket in the local stream or other body of water. Or, it means someone has dug a well, or built a rain collection system, or has otherwise devised a system for water collection and/or storage, so that we can make our bread, wash our clothes, and quench our thirst. Water- easily done.

Salt
Salt is fun one. The most common source for salt is the ocean, right? So to get our salt, we have to collect sea water, which means we have to get to the ocean by some means, collect the water, and then find a way to evaporate it. We could leave it in the sun in shallow pans, or maybe boil it in a pot. Or, you could try extracting it from other sources, such as from hickory roots. Salt- sorted.

Yeast
Our bread is sourdough bread, which uses wild yeasts, instead of dry, instant or fresh yeast bought commercially. It's pretty sustainable on its own, just flour and water, and can live for months or even years so long as you tend to it regularly to keep it alive. It is an easy to maintain resource for a self sufficient kitchen. Starter is simple to make: just a mix of flour and water set out for a few days until it starts to bubble and smell sour. Eventually, it'll collect enough wild yeast to create a colony, and will stabilize to a few strong local strains that make good tasty bread. Sourdough Starter- ready and waiting.

Flour
Oh, wait- to make the starter, we need the flour, don't we? That's the hard part.

Bread is commonly made from wheat flour, so for the sake of simplicity, I'm using that as our example. Wheat is a grass crop, one of the more popular grains grown industrially in the United States. I won't go into all the details that involve how much acreage to crop yield you need- lets just say you need a block of land large enough to grow a decent amount of wheat for the year (I assume you like daily bread). So: a piece of land.

Wheat needs to be able to grow without much competition from weeds, so you need to prepare the land; this means plowing some how. Since we're truly self sufficient in this example, this means we're not relying on petrol driven tractors (seeing as the tractors, the fuel and the gear associated with them have to come from outside our self containment). What are our options? We can plow the entire field with a foot plow (a huge amount of work for one or several persons, which would take days to accomplish) or an animal drawn plow, which would speed the process considerably, and take just one or two people to do in a few days. (Never mind that we also have to care for our horses, oxen or whatever animal is pulling the plow, and someone is needed who can make and maintain the plow, and so on.)

Now that we've plowed the field, we can plant. These days a massive tractor fitted with a special attachment can sow the seeds in perfect lines with computerized accuracy, but not so for us SS farmers. We have to sow the seeds in a less mechanized manner, either by using another animal drawn device meant for this job, or by broadcast sowing (basically, casting handfuls of grain leftover from last years crop over a wide spread area). There are small hand cranked devices that can scatter grain as well. That ideally wants a few people to pull it off in a reasonable amount of time, with plenty of grain, because we have to take into account that the birds will get at it even as we sow it. Now it's a matter of tending to it just enough to see that it grows well. 

Ripe wheat seeds

When the grain is ripe, you have to harvest it. This means either collecting the seed heads by hand as you walk through the field, or cutting the crop down by sickle or scythe (that has the added benefit of collecting wheat straw, which is useful in many other areas of an SS farm). The wheat has to be properly dried before you can thresh and winnow the seeds to free them from their husks, and finally, you need a place to store the seeds until you can get around to grinding them- so that's a shed or cellar or other storage area that someone had to build. Overall, you're looking at a lot of work for quite a few people, and we haven't even made the flour yet!

The flour itself (finally) needs to be made. We have to grind it into a fine powder suitable for bread, and we have a few tools available to us. We can go the way of the native Americans or other tribal peoples around the world, and use a mortar and pestle, or a round, hand cranked grinding stone. This is extremely labor intensive, but was used to grind a small amount of grain or other food to create a daily allotment. Every day more was ground for that days ration of bread. If we want a larger quantity, for a bigger community, we can build a mill. A mill is, generally, two large grinding stones powered by a windmill, a waterwheel, or an animal, such as a donkey, horse or ox. Of course, this means people are needed to design and build such a mill, and the resulting large quantity of flour needs to be bagged and stored- which means someone making flour sacks; the fabric for flour sacks is also needed (never mind growing the fiber to make the fabric... see how much work this SS stuff is?)

Finally, though, we have our flour!

Baking the Bread
Oh yes, it's not over yet. We've mixed our ingredients, and now we have to bake the dough. We can do this in the coals of the fire in a cast iron pot- so someone has cut the wood and forged the metal- or in a bread oven, which would typically be constructed from brick or stone, with clay mortar. 

Once we've baked the bread though, we can finally eat it! Let's get the cheese and the salami and -oh. We have to make those too, don't we?

A Lot Of Hard Work
Self Sufficiency is put on a pedestal as some kind of idealized lifestyle, but the reality is that being properly self sufficient is very much a community venture, because it's a lot of hard work. All that labor would be completely over whelming for a single person or a small family. This is not to say that you shouldn't strive for it; if you can pull it off, or at least as much as you can manage with your current situation, then more power to you! You have my respect and admiration.

I hope this blog worked to walk you through the exhaustive process of getting the loaf of bread that we so take for granted in this age of modern convenience, and hopefully I've even encouraged a few of you to think about how you too could be a little more self sufficient or self reliant.


As always, please continue to live, learn and love, and have a great time, no matter what you're doing!

Thoughts For The Year Ahead

As I sit here, pondering what to include in the content of this post, I am sorting calendula seeds from the chaff (the rest of the flower head that isn't seed). Once these are sorted I'll replant a new batch of calendula, so that I can continue to grow myself a nearly year round stock of calendula petals to dry for my  hand made soaps. I've already done this process with broad beans and wheat grains, and have started sorting the chive and cat mint seed as well. It's that time of the year here you see; all of these seeds will be going towards next years garden.
 
Now, before I get too belated with it: Happy New Year, everyone. I know it's way late, but I've been busy and since it's still January, I think it still counts!

It's already been a tough year for some of our favorite actors and band members, but how about that weather, eh? Unseasonably warm winters in the Northern Hemisphere, except in the places where winter has finally decided that it's going to be winter all at once in the same weekend. Locally, Tasmania is seeing an extremely dry summer, and as a result we've got 80 or so bush fires burning all over the state, many still uncontrolled, with a thick haze of smoke lying over us all. We have had so little rainfall that these fires are now threatening our precious ancient rain forests; they've even flown in inter state fire crews to help. We are in no danger, where we are but, for the first time in my 5-going-on-6 years living here, Launceston has put in place a stage 1 water restriction.

That's not very severe at all; it basically means certain watering systems water between certain times, and anyone with a hose and a trigger nozzle can water whenever they want, but it got me thinking that I was very glad I'd spent as much time building up my raised beds as I had. Also those layers of dried leaves, corn and tomato stalks, veggie scraps, wheat straw, worm castings, sheep and horse manure have been paying off. I not only have raised beds that are drought resistant, thus requiring much less watering, I have raised beds that are living ecosystems too. It's like having very large worm beds; they are alive with red wrigglers who are happily turning the plant matter and manure into healthy soil rich with nutrients.

Which is good as my actual worm bin suffered a catastrophic die off. Oops!
Ah well. Live and learn is my motto (usually), and why I started this blog. So my main concern for 2016 is to not only continue this blog (by posting at least once a month; I know, I'm such a slacker) but also by going out and trying to live and learn as much as I can this year, so that I'll actually have something to share with you here. I have lots of goals to reach, and many things to explore, including but not limited to building a cold smoker, setting up a rain catchment system, designing a grey water filtration system, and even getting my drivers license. 

There will be plenty of that and more where they came from in the coming months. Right now, I've been expanding the house garden into a proper veggie patch by putting in new no dig garden beds, working on drought resistant growing methods as I mentioned above, and by expanding my container garden in order to grow bramble berries and bulb flowers. I'm seeking new, free sources of food for my chickens by collecting live snails from the gardens, by growing seed grain, as well as collecting vegetable scraps from the kitchen for their consumption. I aim to gather fruit and nuts from foraged sources to begin my second season of Chookie Block production, and am discovering which herbs I can cut and dry to help keep their coop fresh and pest free- or at the very least, pest resistant.

So with all those things in mind, I'm going to sign off, and wish everyone a great evening. I look forward to all the great things that can be accomplished. Happy living, happy learning, happy loving to you all.