Dehydrating Herbs

I am having great fun with my Excalibur brand food dehydrator.

Have you ever grown something that looks and tastes so good, you want to preserve that goodness for the long term? My mint grows beautifully in the spring, for example, but I know it will look cruddy when the summer heat hits, or after it flowers. But right now it's gorgeous.

I took a great class on dehydrating taught by my friend Lanette Lepper through the Virginia Urban Homesteaders' League. Until then I had always thought of dehydrating most foods as a last resort. But her class, especially tasting the samples she brought, opened up a whole new world for me. I discovered that dehydrating is one of the oldest, safest, most economical, and most nutritious methods of food preservation known to humankind, and that many foods actually taste better after dehydration.

I had tried dehydrating a few years ago using a cheap dehydrator and discovered I didn't have the patience for it. What I learned in Lanette's class is that an Excalibur will save the time and trouble of swapping out trays to keep the drying even, it has a thermostat that you can set, and that certain models are big enough that you can use them to make yogurt or proof homemade bread in. I was hooked.

So far I have successfully dehydrated bananas, lots of stawberries, some strawberry and mulberry fruit rolls, vegetables like kale and arugula from my CSA from Farm Chicks Produce, and lots of fresh herbs. The herbs taste amazing and are 20 times better than anything you can buy in the store. Here are some pictures from my efforts at drying herbs, including sage, marjoram, oregano, thyme, mint, dill, and lemon balm, today.

Preserve your mint when it looks most inviting!

Lemon balm ready to dry on a tray of the dehydrator

The 9-tray Excalibur has so much room, you can even make yogurt in it!

The Excalibur comes with a great manual and a starter recipe book. But not everything is best dehydrated. Basil, for example, loses a lot of its flavor when dried. Some foods rehydrate better than others. But I am finding this process useful enough that I plan to keep it up. I can't wait to enjoy my own mint in the smoothies I make this summer and in the mint herb teas (tisanes) I will enjoy all winter long.

Chicks at the Beach? Why Not?

These children gave us a warm welcome!

Virginia Beach residents have been involved in an ongoing struggle to get backyard laying hens legalized in residential areas. 4 Virginia Beach Hens has organized this effort. Our grassroots community group, 4 Chesapeake Hens, got up to six laying hens legalized on all single-family lots in our community. The Virginia Beach group asked me to speak in front of its city council regarding my personal experiences since our laws here were changed. Here is the text of my speech:

Mayor Sessoms and Members of Council:

My name is Mary Lou Burke. I live at on about ⅓ of an acre in the Greenbrier section of Chesapeake. Backyard chickens have been legal in my neighborhood since November 20.  I am speaking here today at the invitation of Virginia Beach residents who wish me to share with you some first-person experiences with *legal* residential laying hens.

I am an avid gardener. We have a secure yet portable chicken tractor for our flock, rather like a rabbit hutch. We move it to a new location every other day. This gives our hens fresh pasture to graze. Our lawn gets the benefit of their valuable manure. Between seasons, the hens clear out unwanted vegetation from our garden beds, and they weed, till, and fertilize for us, all without the use of chemicals or noisy machines. We compost the manure from their coop year round. Our hens convert organic layer pellets, kitchen scraps, caterpillars and other pests, yard and garden waste, weeds, and weed seeds, into valuable fertilizer and the tastiest, freshest, most nutritious eggs we have ever eaten. None of it goes to the landfill. I repeat: the city has to *pay* for none of this to go to the landfill. And if the city loses power due to a natural disaster, our hens’ daily eggs will still be available to us. We will never go hungry so long as our hens are alive and laying.

I cannot express how much pleasure or satisfaction we have derived from our new pets. Our birds are quiet, clean, and inconspicuous. My husband built our chicken tractor in our front driveway. We have a chain-link fence for our backyard but no privacy fence. Despite this, we had to point out our new flock to the neighbors on either side of us. They were shocked. They said they had noticed the building project out front, but they had no idea we had chickens until we actually pointed them out. And they are thrilled with the fresh eggs we share with them. We even entered our chickens in a local coop tour in April. We had a steady stream of families come visit us, including many who had never seen an urban micro-flock. Visitors consistently told us our birds were odorless, extremely quiet, and beautiful animals. Everyone told us that they would have no objections to hens next door even if they didn’t currently want a flock for themselves.

Backyard hens are a growing movement both nationally and regionally. Besides Chesapeake, Portsmouth is extremely close to legalizing them. My friend, Wendy Camacho, recently made a presentation about backyard chickens for the Hampton Roads Realtors’ Association. Her presentation was very well received by the Realtors, who seem to understand hens will do no harm to our region’s  property values. The motto of “4 Virginia Beach Hens” is, “chicks at the beach,” and our response to that slogan is, “why not?”

**Update 8/25/13: After this original post, Portsmouth legalized backyard laying hens with a permit and certain restrictions. So did Hampton, Virginia.

Garden update for August

The garden is looking pretty this August. I wish it were more productive. We are not getting enough sun for the fruiting plants like tomatoes and peppers. Don promises to take down more of the offending tree(s) when the weather gets cooler. I wish he'd done it in the spring!

I picked out a rotten log and put soil in it. I planted basil, radishes, and lettuce seeds in it, both to hold the soil and to look pretty. These plants have pretty shallow roots, so I am hoping they will survive there.

The asparagus is thriving, but the bush beans have gone by. I've planted more. They grow fast, and Don loves them.

The asparagus looks pretty

 Our experiment with trellising butternut squash turned out OK.

Trellising butternut squash to save garden space

Land Lobster?

My garden is doing splendidly this summer, despite a lack of sun. I have harvested enough Romaine lettuce for two huge, tasty bowls of salad for our family of three, I have given some away to two neighbors, and I still have some left to harvest. I have already planted more!

The squash plants are taking off!

The squash, pole beans, bush beans, and nasturtiums are doing great, too. I still have a few radishes left. All the amendments we added when we built the beds seem to be paying off. The weather has been hot and getting drier, but the soil still seems moist and the plants don't seem very stressed.

A recent mystery was a hole near one of my asparagus beds. I was afraid it was the entrance to a rabbit burrow. Something had been nibbling on my young pepper plants recently.

Don tried plugging up the hole to the burrow, but something kept digging up a new entrance every night. He finally got tired of it and dug the area up, but there was no sign of rabbits or a rabbit den.

Don's Hole

The mystery was solved this morning, when he saw what looked like a small lobster in the bottom of the hole. He killed it and put what was left of its corpse in a pail.

Yikes! Looks like a small lobster, but what is it?

After a little research, we determined that it was a crayfish. I always thought they lived in water, but there are some species that live on land, too, including the swampy areas of nearby North Carolina. This one apparently failed its geography lesson, or land crayfish are more widespread than people think. It's hard to find information about them, even online. If anyone knows of any good sources, please leave us a message below.

*** Update on 6/14/12: I have received a few emails about the crayfish from crayfish- and crawdad-lovers all over the country. Apparently, these "land lobsters" are common in other parts of the U.S., and I am told they are good cooking and eating if you are patient about picking out the meat.

I am a vegetarian, so I'll pass on that.

They are generally harmless except for the annoying holes from their tunnels around the lawn and garden. They actually tunnel down to the water table. They come out only at night and are opportunistic feeders and eat decaying vegetation and occasionally worms and bugs. In some areas they are called prairie crayfish. According to one website the latter are red and live in the grasslands of Missouri, so I doubt ours was that species. Texas prairie crawdads apparently include some rare species. If I learn any more about the species that live in Virginia, I'll post an update. I have also just learned that chickens love them and will gobble them up if given the chance. Since I want my own chickens, this is useful information. One reader says they will eat plants in nearby gardens, but I am not sure they can climb. The plants damaged in my nearby garden were in a raised bed, so I won't be quick to blame the crayfish. (The same reader later assured me that they can climb).

In the meantime I have requested of Don that if he finds any more of these interesting and colorful critters, he leave them be.

The Little Tomato That Could, End of May

The Little Tomato's first fruit

It's been a month since I've updated my posts on the "Little Tomato That Could." This is a little plant that came up as a volunteer in one of my outdoor pots in November of 2011. Don Burke, my then-fiance, now husband, likes to rescue forlorn-looking creatures, and I've rarely seen a plant that looks as pathetic as that poor tomato did last fall. He stopped me from pulling it up. He nurtured it all fall and winter with reluctant help from me. The plant has gotten a little brittle, and the last time Don moved it, about half of it broke and fell off. Ever the optimist, Don took one of the broken vines and stuck it in some dirt in another pot. That part is still alive, but I'm not sure for how long.

The original "Little Tomato" has bounced back from the rough handling. It is even producing one early and large tomato, which is in that green-turning-yellow stage that tomatoes reach as they begin to ripen. I hope it turns red and that it avoids blossom end rot. The moisture content has been hard to manage in the pot that Don has been growing the plant in, especially with our summer weather so hot and dry. I don't have high hopes for it. I already see a little sunken area in the green tomato that looks like the beginning of the problem.

The Little Tomato That Could

The Little Tomato last fall

More Reasons to Grow Your Own

Some states have greatly tightened the noose on illegal immigration. The result is that crops are left to rot in the fields for a lack of skilled workers:

http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/05/15/farm-labor-shortages

Growers are moving toward more mass-commodity crops that can be harvested mechanically and away from organic, sustainable methods.

Even with the high unemployment rates, Americans are not stepping up to take these jobs:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44981872/ns/us_news-life/#.T7OOEFKqa25

They cannot make decent money at it, they do not have the skills, and they are not physically fit enough to work like a skilled farmhand.

These farmhands have skills because many have been toughened by farm work since they were seven or eight years old.

That's right!

Children have been working in the fields with their parents to provide income for their families. While most of us in the U.S. have children who go to school most of the year, the migrants' children are in the fields, harvesting our produce, making less than minimum wage, and facing pesticide exposure and other dangers we wouldn't THINK of exposing children to. Farm work is one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States. An estimated 400,000 children in the United States face these abuses, and it's perfectly legal due to an outdated law from 1939.

A new documentary, "The Harvest/La Cosecha," is bringing these abuses before the public's eye.

These are yet more reasons to eat locally, seasonally, and to grow as much of our own food as we can. One of the foods left to rot for lack of workers was asparagus. Well, let's grow asparagus in our own back yards and take control over our food supply and the conditions under which we grow it!

How to Grow Gardening: Paying It Forward and Local Foods

"A food desert is any area in the industrialized world where healthy, affordable food is difficult to obtain" (Wikipedia). I checked the U.S. government's Food Desert Locator, and to my surprise there are food deserts located not far from where Don and I live in Chesapeake, Virginia.


I am a local-foods enthusiast, so I have been wanting to play a role in helping other people grow fresh, local, sustainable food for themselves. If the people I help are in need, so much the better. I very much admire the work that Will Allen and his Growing Power has been doing in major cities, and I wanted to do something similar in some small way here. I also remember when I first moved into my previous house in North Carolina, a divorcee with lots of needs and barely two dollars to rub together in my pocket. I wanted a vegetable garden because gas was $4.00 a gallon and I wanted to avoid driving to Walmart for veggies I could grow at home. At that time members of the Freecycle community there took me under their wing and shared cuttings, seeds, and advice with me.

But how to start here? I am new to Chesapeake, and I know almost nobody in town.

My answer came in the form of a plea on the local Freecycle list. This particular request was for vegetable seeds, flower seeds, cuttings, and anything that could help someone who knew very little about gardening to get started. The request came from South Norfolk, an area of Chesapeake that is needier than other parts of the city.

I exchanged a few emails with the sender of the message. I learned that "Grace," as I'll call her, is disabled and hasn't been able to work in a few years. She wants to garden but has very little money to spend. She has a few pots but nothing over 8".

Today I got to "pay it forward" when I arrived with potting soil, seeds, cuttings of mint and oregano, some tools, a helping hand, pots of various sizes and shapes, gardening magazines, and advice. Grace and her housemate are lovely people, and it felt good to help them in some small way. I finally got the chance to play a role, however tiny, in spreading the local foods movement and to do it in in honor of all the gardeners and Freecylers who have helped me over the years. I also had a chance to clear some unused flower pots and containers out of my yard.

I will be on alert for other opportunities to grow gardening and local foods in my area. The world will be a better place if others will do the same. I'd love to see more towns with the giving, grow-your-own, self-sufficient spirit of the quaint little Todmorden in England.

Wool "Natural Growers Pack" for Container Gardens

Portulacas thrive in hot, dry conditions (source)

I bought another impulse item from my online local-foods coop this week.

My understanding husband has taken in stride my purchase of red wrigglers for vermicomposting and wool dryer balls to replace fabric softeners in our dryer. But this week he actually raised his eyebrows and looked askance at me. There's a first time for everything, I guess.

The $8.00 purchase was a "Natural Growers Pack," a "sheep manure compost fertilizer and water retention system" from Breeze Hill Farm of Powhatan, VA. What arrives is a gallon zip-lock bag filled with unwashed, untreated sheep's wool and a small packet of composted sheep manure to use as fertilizer. It is meant to be used in container gardens. According to the packet:

Our product reduces the need to water the plant 

and provides one of the best all natural organic fertilizers 

available to feed your plants for the entire growing season.

I always have trouble keeping outdoor potted plants sufficiently watered in our hot, dry Virginia summers, so I am hoping the sheep's wool will help. And anyone who reads my blog knows I'm a big fan of composted manure! The directions are to line the bottom of the container with the wool, mix the sheep compost in with the potting soil, add the soil on top of the wool, then add the plant. 

That's what I did, except I sprinkled some seeds on top of the soil in my flower box instead of transplanting plants. The seeds are for dwarf phlox plants and portulacas, also called moss rose. Both are hardy, and I am hoping they will grow in the same container. The sheep's wool took up so much room that I wonder if there's actually enough soil in there for the plants. I'll provide an update on how the system works after my flowers are established.

Update on 7/21/12: The wool does seem to keep the planter moist for more time than I would expect, especially in our unbelievably hot summer weather, but my plants have failed to thrive. the phlox has all died. I am not sure if it is something I am doing wrong that is unrelated to the wool "growers pack" or not. If others have any experience with this growing system, I would appreciate the feedback.

 Update on 8/25/12: I moved the flower box into full sun, and the portulacas are thriving and blooming beautifully. I wish I'd planted more of them. And the soil does stay moist longer than I expect. I'm not sure what happened to the phlox, but the moss rose seems to be making up for it. Overall I'd say the experiment has been a success. I'd try it again.

Phlox (source)