Outdoor Kitchen

At long last, here is the promised post about the outdoor kitchen...  

Back before the age of air conditioners, heating up your house in the summer was a bad plan, which meant cooking indoors was definitely out.  In the early 20th century it was common place to have an outdoor kitchen and an indoor kitchen which would allow you to switch cooking location depending on the season.  No doubt it was an inconvenience and when heating your house (by cooking) while simultaneously cooling it (with an air conditioner) became an option, the outdoor kitchen fell out of style.  If the last sentence sounds a little ridiculous to you, then you will understand where we were coming from when we decided we wanted to build our own outdoor kitchen.

Typically I am opposed to duplicating room functions.  Nothing drives me more crazy then having both a family room and a living room, for example.  But besides the major heating and cooling benefit or having two kitchens, an outdoor kitchen also allows you to drastically increase the amount of time you spend outdoors in the summer.

We had spent a few summers limping along with a lone barbecue as out "outdoor kitchen".  I made a valiant effort at cooking everything from cookies to stir fry on the barbecue, but it had some major down sides.  It doesn't maintain temperature, so if I was baking I had to watch it constantly (something I am terrible at).  If I had enough baking that I needed to cook on the bottom rack, the food was always burnt.  It only had one side burner and it tilted alarmingly every time you set something heavy on it (like a vat of canning).  And if it was raining, all bets were off.  And so, when a great outdoor gas stove complete with griddle and oven fell into our lap this winter the "outdoor kitchen" was born....or at least its vision.  (I have lots of visions.  They turn into lots of work for Gus.)

Vision:  We would cover the deck with a roof, so that we could continue to eat and cook outside even if it was raining.
Problem:   We want to put a lot of windows in the back of our house in the future to let in the light and beautiful backyard views.  A roof would destroy those.  Also, I wanted to grown my grape up over the deck and a roof would shade it.
Solution:  We put on a clear roof to let the sun through for light and for the grape.  And we sloped the roof toward the house (instead of away form it) to take in the nice backyard views.

You can barely notice the roofing in this picture, but it is there.
Building this was a bit of a challenge for Gus.  He made sure to screw on the
roofing on the upper edge when I was not around to have a heart attack. 

Result:  We kept the existing trellis structure to build the roof and the result was a big beam in the middle of our view....that's not so great.  Also, it doesn't keep the rain off as well as we had hoped.  We anticipated some rain would get in with a driving rain...but we figured we could sit near the back of the deck closer to the house.  We did not anticipate that in a hard rain, water would bounce of the house roof and into the back of our rain sheltered area.  So in a storm we have a 1 foot strip down the middle of the deck that stays dry.... Oh well...we will install a bar.

The view from the house.  Note the big beam in our way.

Patch job: We will stick more clear roofing along the back of the roof to prevent back splash and eat inside if their is a driving rain.

Vision 2: We would get the huge heavy gas stove up on the deck and hook it up instead of the barbecue.  Then we will build counters out of leftover materials to make a usable kitchen.
Problem: The stove was roughly the weight and size of a large elephant.
Solution:  We will push really hard when we move it and hope the stairs don't break.
Result:  This actually went well.  Gus and his dad got the stove on the deck and nobody died.  We built beautiful counter made from boards leftover from the old deck roof, left over concrete form plywood and metal drip pans we inherited years ago.  The counter were a smashing success and the gas elements and grill are amazing to cook with.  The oven doesn't work so well.  You can't tell what temperature its at and it doesn't regulate well....we are still working on that issue.

Counters and gas stove

In spite of the draw backs, the kitchen is a smashing success.  After the roof was built, we cooked and ate almost every meal outdoors (rain or shine).  The roof soars above us giving a wonderful airy feel and the new stove and griddle handles like a charm.  Too bad we finished it in time for the summer to be over....

Harvest

I guess this blog has worked, because this is the first year where my garden hasn't been a disaster by the time it hit September.  The regular rain helped...I hardly needed to water at all.  My son's enthusiasm for gardening was another bonus that kept me at it.  We actually managed to pull in a decent harvest this year.

Success:
- The herbs in the front garden are ridiculously large (and need to be dried/frozen for winter).  I have so much I don't think I could use them in the next 5 years.  The whole front garden wound up looking really amazing (I know I should have a picture, but I don't).  The landscaping isn't quite finished because we ran out of free compost, but it should be finished with pictures next spring.  The front yard also proved to be a good area for growing, with good sunshine until late August when the sun got to low on the horizon.  I have lots of plans to make better use of the space next year.

Crazy Herb harvest (and some green tomatoes).
These herbs represent only a small fraction of what is in my garden.

- My cucumbers were abundant and I even managed to have enough to can some relish.
- The tomato and pepper harvest has been modest (it was a pretty cool year), but the plants are healthy and continue to produce.
- The peas all did well and produced all season (because of the aforementioned cool year).  They would have done even better if Darwyn did not continually ravage them.
- The baby carrots did well and are delicious.  I wish I had planted more.
- The raspberries were reliable as ever.  They produced a bountiful harvest all July, much to my son's delight.  He was an excellent raspberry picker.  Hopefully he will stay that way as he gets older :)
- The strawberries did not produce very heavily, but they were delicious and a huge hit with the kids.  Next year I think I will decrease the amount of garden space spent on them and transition to only ever bearing varieties.
- The lettuce and spinach harvest was good, but short.  Next year I will need to make more effort to stagger my plantings and plant earlier.  The spinach was definitely planted too late.
- I wasn't sure whether the rhubarb was a failure or a sucess.  It got sick and died of the same thing that killed it every other year, but it lasted longer this year than any other year.  Also, everyone else's rhubarb died this year too.  Apparently it was a bad year for rhubarb.  I got some more plants which I planted in the front.  They have been attacked by the same fungus, but apparently they have been more resistant to it than everyone else's rhubarb...so perhaps that is a success?

Failure (although  this isn't completely fair because I still got a harvest off these plants):
-  I planted a variety pack of carrots in the front.  The carrots did well and look great to look at but they taste somewhat bitter, especially the peel.  If we peel and cook them they are still quite good, but I usually enjoy carrots raw and I was disappointed that these were not tasty without cooking.  Did I do something wrong?

- My beans and zucchini did not produce much, which is unusual.  The zucchini was ill, but actually the illness rained it in so we got just about the right amount of zucchini.  I'm not sure why the beans didn't produce much.  They are usually very successful and they look healthy.
- My onions were a total flop.  The spot I planted them in did not get enough sun and the onions never got bigger than a golf ball.  They made a delicious baby onion harvest though.
- I was really excited to try growing Florence fennel after I tasted it this spring.  My fennel is huge, healthy and gorgeous, but it has no bulb.  I'm not sure why...if anyone has any insight I would love to hear it.
- I was really excited about my grapes.  They grew large and beautiful and I had many bunches start to turn purple...but we left to visit my sister right about harvest time and when we returned a local raccoon had harvested half of them for us.  He came 4 times in the first evening we were back to visit the grapes again (much to my children's delight) and every time we had to scare him away with a broom.  I got concerned that he would polish off all my ripe grapes before I went to bed and so I went out and picked them all (save two or three hard to reach bunches) so that they could finish ripening inside.   Turns out grapes don't ripen off the vine.  I had a lot of unripe sour grapes on my hands....so we made raisins.  They were quite tasty, but they took 3 days in an electric food dryer to turn from grapes into raisins. And there were almost none.  The box you see pictured below made about 1/2 cup of raisins.  Oh well, at least the raccoon lost too.

I still have a planting of kale growing in the garden for harvest this fall.  I may have planted it too late in the season....we will see how it goes.  I loved the garden this year and I am already dreaming about what I will plant next summer, so I guess that is success enough.

Goodbye sunshine! I'll garden without you.

One way to tackle growing food in a yard with very little sun is to stop growing food that needs it.  Anybody who knows anything about gardening knows you need full sun, but that is only true if you are limiting yourself to the basics: tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, carrots, squash exc.  If you are willing to get more creative there is a whole world of things you can eat that (apparently) need less sun.  Of course, I've missed the boat on most of these things for this season, but I'm developing an exciting list of things that will make it into the garden next year.

The ultimate in shade gardening is mushrooms.  I have a book on how to grow mushrooms that I inherited for free from the library, but I have yet to read it.  Eventually, though, I think I will have to learn how to grow mushrooms.  They grown in shade and we eat loads of mushrooms.  I've heard they are tricky, though, so I might wait a few years until I am better at the basics.

For now, we'll start off with some simpler stuff.  In spring we can eat lots of rhubarb and fiddleheads, followed shortly after by honey berries (actually these berries are better in full sun, but they apparently tolerate part-sun quite well).  Next will be a compliment of shade tolerant herbs for cooking and teas including stevia, sweet cicely (I'm told you can also eat the roots of this plant like parsnips)  and sweet woodruff (all apparently sugar substitutes).  In fact, the list of herbs that will tolerate part-shade is very long.  I'm already taking advantage of that this year by exploring the world of homegrown teas.  Growing your own teas is great fun because you get to do a lot of experimenting with different combinations.  My favorites are the lemon teas (from lemon grass, lemon balm and lemon verbana).

The front yard continues to progress (slowly).
Notice the lemon grass and lemon verbana  in the center of the garden.

Honey Berries (also known as haskap).  They taste similar to a cross between a blueberry
and a raspberry.  They are also, apparently, hard to kill, frost tolerant, and early producers.
For those of you from Saskatchewan, these plants are from a breeding program at U of S.

I've also managed to get by with a few more traditional veggies in part-sun.  Greens will generally tolerate a little less sun, in fact, it is often good for them.  I've also found peas manage in less sun, but they produce less.  I'm told beets and kohlrabi do all right.  I will try them next year.

But if I need to go with some full sun plants, at the very least I should get lots of bang for my buck.  It turns out there are a couple of plants you can grow that allow you to eat all parts of the plant.  This year I planted fennel, my new obsession.  I recently tried fennel bulb for the first time in a recipe and fell in love.  It tastes like licorice.  So do the seeds and leaves.  I won't be able to harvest the bulbs until the fall, but I've already snacked on a few leaves.  They are like eating candy (ok, the texture is a bit different), but much better for you.  Once the plant produces seeds I will be able to harvest them for licorice tea.

Harvest of spinach and herbs.

Next year I plan to try planting chenopodium (also known as goosefoot).  While it does require full sun, you can apparently eat the early spring shoots like asparagus, the leaves like spinach, the flower spikes like broccoli and the seeds can be ground to make a thin oatmeal.  Now THAT is production :)

The best pest in the garden

Recently, I checked out the book "Pests and Diseases" from the library.  Every year I learn about a new disease when my plants die from it...this year I thought I would be more proactive and perhaps avoid some of the diseases.  I've scoured the book and its disgusting pictures absorbing information about slugs, fungus and every day garden pests such as bunnies...but the book does not cover the most formidable pests of all.  There is no deterrent for this type of critter.  Nets and fences will not trick them.  Pesticide use on this pest is illegal and they quite literally devour your crop before it even begins to ripen.  They are especially veracious consumers of berries of all types, although tomatoes, peas and carrots are also common victims.  They do not seem to bother leafy greens....  What pest is this?  Toddlers.   On the plus side, they are much more attractive than slugs.

Darwyn picks strawberries

As most of you know, I have two toddlers inhabiting my garden and their current victim is my strawberry patch.   Max has eagerly watched the baby strawberries form and pointed out every bee that entered their white flowers (a great opportunity to talk about pollination).  The instant the first berry developed even a hint of pink his eager little hands snatched it from the garden and he devoured it.  With some explanation I have been able to convince Max to pick only the berries that are pink all over (although they never get to deep red).  Darwyn, on the other hand, is not so easily convinced.  She was thankfully oblivious to the strawberries until they began to ripen and has grasped the concept that the completely green ones are not good.  But if they are white with the slightest hint of pink, she snatches them plus a handful of dirt, and plops both into her mouth.  When she can find no more berries that aren't hard and green she runs around the berry patch in distress declaring "Moi, Moi" obstinately and trying to snatch any berries her brother has collected.  At this point a vicious battle ensues where I attempt to ensure both kids have a fair allotment of unripe strawberries, with minimal biting and scratching.  Needless to say, I have not enjoyed a single berry for all my work.

Max after a strawberry snack....note to self:
 next time lose the white sweater before eating the strawberries.

Darwyn's elegant culinary techniques.

All of the knowledge I have acquired from my pest book about protecting berries from birds and bugs has proven useless.  Those pests don't stand a chance against my kids.... the berries are gone before the birds even realize they are there and the bugs don't seem to bother the kids.  They eat the berries, insects and all : (

Update on the garden

I have a nice long list of partially finished posts that I plan to publish any day now.  Until then, a photo update on the garden will have to do.

What is growing:

Note the grape flowers!

There is lots of progressing the garden.  The grape vine I planted years ago is finally starting to take over our deck railing.  Until now we've had very few grapes because our dog "helpfully" pruned the grape every year by chewing it back to a nubbin.  This year it was left alone (although Darwyn did chew it somewhat) and as a reward it is littered with grape blossoms.  They aren't much to look at, but I am anticipating lots of grapes!

I finally planted onions, peas and spinach (which are all up) and a bunch of seedlings (tomatoes, basil, cucumber).  The strawberries are littered with baby strawberries (all green) which the kids are itching to pick.  And the herb garden is starting to look more green and less like dirt.

New peas

New onions

The herb bed

Projects:

Awesome sand path

- I finally finished the sand path.  It looks awesome, but the newspaper instead of landscape fabric under the sand isn't working very well.  It did all right against the grass, but the burr plants and dandelions easily pass through it.  Fortunately it isn't too hard to weed those ones out.  I think I might have laid the newspaper down too thin....it might still have worked if I was a little more generous with the paper.

- I also threw together a poorly constructed pea bed as an experiment (you can see it sans dirt at the bottom of the photo).  The area is pretty shady for growing vegetables, but I have read that peas will tolerate a bit more shade than most other things.  If they do well in this spot then I will construct a more solid bed there next year.

Pathetic cucumber trellis

- I need to build some better trellises for these cucumbers.  So far I have found these generic tomato cages to be useless for supporting anything except maybe peas.  Any good suggestions for easy trellises?

- Gus has embarked on an ambitious project to cover our back deck with a roof.  The hope is to make the deck use able in all summer weather so that it can support an outdoor kitchen.  This project is so exciting that it is worthy of its own post.  Hopefully I will get to that soon.  For now, you can just take note of the ominous beam towering 16 feet above the garden!

New deck roof

Setbacks:

Infected rhubarb

So far setbacks have been few, although it is still a little early for my plants to start succumbing to disease.  The only plant showing signs of illness is the rhubarb.  I'm told rhubarb is easy to grow.  It is as hardy as a weed (my favorite type) and will tolerate partial shade (excellent for my garden).  It come up on its own and requires little maintenance.  Unfortunately, mine gets sick every year in June and is all dead by July.  Trust me to kill the rhubarb : (  After some time online I think I've determined that it is being killed by a fungus that kills the leaves and stems and also attacks the root.  Apparently the treatment is to remove all of the infected material as soon as it shows any sign of illness, and then hope that it doesn't come back next year.  In the past I have found hoping is largely ineffective.  Also, this means the lovely rhubarb in my herb garden picture likely won't make it until July.  If any of you gardening experts have better advice, let me know.

Harvest:
Harvest is still meager, but we have used some herbs (and quite a few chives), made some fresh teas, eaten a salad with the first harvest of lettuce and enjoyed a rhubarb pie.  It won't be too much longer before I add strawberries to the list!  I can't wait.  Gardening is definitely an exercise in patience.

Why I suck at gardening

To most people, the essence of the urban homestead is producing your own food.  I'm all on board with this notion.  I grew up in a family with a huge garden and my mother loved to cook and can.  Nothing sounds more exciting to me then making cheese and I already make all of our family's bread....so what's the problem?

Food production starts in the garden.  My husband regularly reminds me that I am the world's worst gardener.  He claims this largely because every year I start a garden and every year it is spectacularly unsuccessful.  I agree that this seems like compelling evidence for my lack of skill, but I blame it on the plants.  They have three major design flaws:

1) They need watering.  I don't mind watering when I can unroll the hose and spray everything in firing range until it is drenched, but Gus has it in his head that we should water everything with rain water.  I have nothing against rainwater...but I can't hook my hose up to the barrel.  So watering is an incredibly painful process that involves standing around while the water can fills and then lugging 20L or water to the nearest plant.  This process is REALLY slow and I inevitably get distracted.  Some years we get enough rain to compensate for my short comings, but last year was a drought....even the raspberries died....

2) They need sun.  I don't know why plants need to produce their own food from sun....sure it sounds good in concept, but what about those of us that have lovely wooded backyards with plenty of full shade?  I do have plans to tackle the challenge of learning to grow some shady crops, such as mushrooms, but until then my attempts at growing food have suffered from 6 hours of sun at best.  While I acknowledge that the watering thing may be my fault, the sun can hardly be blamed on me.

3) They are not very hardy.  They need to grow more like raspberries.  I don't really need to do much to raspberries (except water them in droughts).  They plant themselves, they are bigger and badder then the weeds and they don't seem to get any diseases...all I really need to do is pick and eat.  Sure the odd weed grows in between them, but it doesn't seem to bother them much.  Veggies, on the other hand, need to be planted, and coddled and regularly weeded, and in spite of all the genetic modification, if I even think the word blight, my tomatoes will be afflicted.

In order to be successful, the hopeless homesteader really needs a garden that looks after itself.  I'm pretty sure I could sell such a garden for a lot of money, but until then I need a plan to make up for my (and my yard's) shortcomings.

So here is the plan:
1) Sun problem:
         - Convert some of the front yard into a mixed garden and some pretty plants to please the neighbors     (hopefully even most of those will be able to be eaten).  This only partly solves my issue, because the front yard is not full sun either, but it does increase the area I have that gets part sun.
         - Garden using the deck.  My deck is the only place in the yard that has full sun.  We sit on it, bake and beg for shade, while our garden withers from lack of sun.  It really is a well thought out layout.  Before you get excited about this option, the deck (crappy as it is) is already heavily used.  My previous attempts at including garden beds only lead to over crowding.  This year I hope to use the outside of the railings to hang plants.  I'm also working on using the railing as a trellis for a grape.
        - Other stuff for down the road:  I've read a few tidbits about how to make vertical gardens and how to increase sun by using reflective surfaces.  This might be a little advanced to start, but I hope to go this direction once I master the simple jobs, like protecting my lettuce from the bunnies, sprouting my carrots and getting my tomatoes to survive the summer.

2) Water problem:  The good homesteader always uses rainwater.  Down the road we may invest in a system that allows us to pressurize the rainwater, but until then I may be using city water a little more than I should.  So far I have lugged the stupid watering can...but on the days where I just won't water if I don't pull out the hose....it will have to be the hose.  Also, I plan to petition mother nature for intermittent, brief hard rains.

3) Maintenance:
        - Convert a good chunk of the garden to low maintenance crops.  Gus and I already did this by planting a bunch of annual herbs, rhubarb, raspberries and strawberries.  This leaves only a small veggie plot for me to tend.  Hopefully I can stay ahead of it!
        - Cover path between raised beds with sand or gravel to cut down on weeds (I've started this too - see picture below).  If I get really energetic I may even cover some of the gardening surface with mulch.
        - Start a blog.  It might not be obvious how this connects to garden maintenance....its more of a moral support (or social pressure) way of forcing myself to keep up with the maintenance.  It is like getting a buddy to jog with or diet with....with the sense that someone might be watching my progress, perhaps I will progress :)

For those of you that are much better gardeners than I am, feel free to comment with any other ideas you think might help my gardening plight.  I will keep you posted (quite literally) on my progress.

Our small raised bed garden (and awesome clothesline)

The shade bed - It still grows rhubarb, herbs and greens

We just put in this bed as an attempt to get rid of the front lawn.
It doesn't look that great yet, but hopefully with some more plants and less
lawn it will start to fit in.

The sand path we are putting in between the raised beds.