This is a short video showing chickens harvesting azolla from a kiddie pool. Azolla is a tiny water fern that is popular as a supplemental chicken food in the Philippines and India. It’s high in nitrogen because it has symbiotic bacteria that gather nitrogen from the air, like alfalfa and other legumes. This pool is one of three in my garden, and the chickens seem to love the stuff. It reproduces like mad, but I still never seem to have enough.
Since I made the previous walk-through video of my comfrey-fed garden, I harvested my first batch of tomatoes, shown below, and there’s plenty more green ones on the vines. I also gathered six or seven nice big Yukon Gold potatoes from under one of my plants, but I didn’t take a picture. I just ate them
First Tomatoes
Below is a photo of a few ripe mullberries. They have a stem inside the berries, unlike blackberries and other “normal” fruit. Some people think they’re too sweet to taste like much, but I like them. They do stain your hands when you pick them, and you certainly wouldn’t want them growing over a concrete patio – unless you like big dark purple spots. I might try to see if I can use them to dye some wool one of these days. (The ripe berries are almost black in the photo. The red ones will be ripe in a few days. They continue to ripen all summer long – my kind of tree.)
Mulberries
The next photo is a close-up of achocha flowers, slightly out-of-focus. The flowers are tiny but there are thousands of them. As you can see, the bees have found them, but the flowers aren’t turning into fruit. It would be nice to get one or two – they’re supposed to be “slipper-shaped” fruit that tastes like cucumber. Considering the number of flowers and the rate the vines are growing, maybe I shouldn’t wish too hard for fruit – I could end up buried in achocha…
Achocha Flowers, with Bee
And finally, here’s the garlic I dug a few weeks ago. Most of the shallots are still in the ground. Both the onions and garlic did extremely well this year – in fact, I may need to find homes for some of my Candy and Walla Walla onions, since they don’t store very long and I can only eat a few a day.
My original goal was to see how close to self-sufficiency I could get on my small city lot, and I think I came close with the spuds, garlic and onions. I probably have enough corn for three years of corn bread, since that has never been my favorite food. (But maybe I’ll like it better with my own home-grown corn). The squash is still a big question mark – but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I seem to have one of the largest gardens in town, which surprises me, considering the economic situation. Maybe next year people will start planting a bit more.
Garlic
Next on the to-do list: turn the little shed into an aquaculture experiment. I think I found the system I want to try – using fish water for wicking worm beds (large PDF). The fish will take up the center aisle, with a board-walk on top. I saw an article in an old Mother Earth News that had a similar setup, but I haven’t seen it for years. Funny how some ideas stick with you, waiting for the time when you can play with them. As with all my experiments, a bit of luck will probably be needed to make it work.
