Our Green Table

We’re having a community seed swap in Estes Park! Saving and sharing seed is a vital way to preserve and grow the biodiversity of our gardens and food. In a difficult climate like Estes Park, gardeners can greatly benefit from using locally adapted seeds. The Estes Park Community Seed Swap is a chance for local gardeners to meet, exchange seeds from plants that have been successful in local or similar high-altitude gardens, and learn from one another.

Attendees should come with seeds, root cuttings, or live plants packaged to share. Vegetables, flowers, herbs, shrubs, and trees are all welcome. There is no cost to attend.

The event will be held at the Estes Valley Library, on Saturday March 3rd from 12pm-4pm. If you interested in attending, please sign up at http://www.evlcalendar.org/events/index.php?com=detail&eID=7600. If you are interested in sponsoring or helping out with the event, please send me an email (philip dot magistro at gmail dot com) and we can talk about details!

Climbed a tree and picked apples. Made applesauce and apple pies. Got some local Palisade, CO peaches and canned those up. My boss gave me some cucumbers out of his brother’s garden; made some pickles. Baking lots of pies!! Put a coat of paint on our concrete stairs. Phil got pretty good tomatoes this year. You’ll also see pictures of the wheat crop.

Lots going on in the garden lately! After six years of killing plants, we finally have a decent garden at 7,500′ here in Estes Park. Everything is growing like crazy; we’re even getting vine ripened red tomatoes right out of the garden. No greenhouse, hydroponics, et cetera, just plants in dirt. Well, soil. Our success wasn’t due to any one factor, but rather a few changes. First, we planted everything in raised beds full of pure composted horse manure. Second, we watered a lot during dry periods (by hand). Finally, we tried to choose plant varieties suited to our environment. The tomatoes, for example, are “Silvery Fir Tree” plants that I grew from seed. (Contrary to other reviews, we’ve found that the silvery fir tree tomatoes taste great! Much better than the store bought tomatoes we tried them against last week.) We bought our seed from Seed Savers Exchange. Quick recap: snow peas, spinach, lettuce, kale, beans, sunflowers, tomatoes, red onions and wheat have all done great. Acorn squash, blue potatoes, and carrots are looking good but too early to tell for sure. Quinoa and chard have been a bit too thirsty for our hand watering. Radishes didn’t do anything for us.

The chickens are doing well, though it can be tough to coax a pose for the camera. Getting between 6 and 12 eggs per day from our fifteen hens. The “Red Broiler” hens are, evidently, fine layers as well. We’ve abandoned composting in favor of tossing every scrap of green waste (from weeding, kitchen, et cetera) to the birds, and they appreciate it. I spread the now six year old and not quite ready compost as mulch on some of the shrub beds around the house. The birds do a much much better job of turning scraps and weeds into protein and fertilizer….and they love it, as well. No onion peels, raw potatoes, citrus, or banana peels for those ladies, though!

The big new addition to the garden is a hive of bees, relocated earlier this week from Denver. It is a top-bar hive, made by the folks at www.backyardhive.com, and is full of thriving honeybees and their winter stash of honey. We’ll harvest their surplus in the spring. They wasted no time in locating all the flowering plants in the neighborhood, and bring back nectar and pollen to the hive. If the six foot wire and wood fence doesn’t keep the bears away this fall, we’re hoping that .6 joules of electric fence will. I touched it, and it doesn’t seem that bad…

After what feels like decades, we have our floor installed and finished.  We sanded, distressed, stained, and coated it with polyurethane.  A lot of the boards were imperfect, plus we anticipated the wear and tear from the renters, so we distressed the floor prior to staining with Zar Spanish Oak.  Click here for beetle kill pine floor installation photos.

Unfortunately, our kitchen plumbing is leaking so the project is still not over and we still don’t have renters in.   Money pit.

If anyone wants to check back in and find out what the floor looks like after a few weeks or months of wear and tear, feel free to shoot us an email and we’ll let you know how it wears.  We’ll try to post photos at the end of summer, but no guarantees.

As the next step in providing our own locally produced food, we’ve decided to pursue beekeeping. To that end, we are building a top bar beehive. Top bar hives are an alternative to the Langstroth hive that may be better for the bees. For one, in a top-bar hive the bees build their own comb each season. Fresh wax is less likely to concentrate pesticides and toxins from year after year of honey. Also, by specifying their own comb cell size, they may be better able to fight parasites in the hive.

On the practical side, anybody with a few tools can build a top bar hive from reasonably inexpensive lumber. We used scrap pallets and some 2×4 laying around the garage. We did borrow a table saw to cut the top bars. We used Philip Chandler’s free instructions on how to build a top-bar hive, but many plans are available.

Next step – find us some bees! If you happen on a swarm in Estes Park, drop us a line and we’ll give them a happy home.

These little ladies are getting into summer mode. Yesterday we got 9 eggs, today we got 9 eggs (so far). I designed this fancy egg carton label and on the inside of the cartons we have a hen profile such as, “Meet Ambrosia” and “Brown Egg Layers”.

We made this delicious skillet souffle with:
6 eggs
3/4 lb spinach
2 cloves minced garlic
3 oz crumbled blue cheese
1 diced onion
2 Tbs milk
1/4 C wild rice

Cook rice. Slightly beat eggs. Mix 6 eggs + blue cheese + milk. Meanwhile, cook garlic and onion in skillet with olive oil until soft on med heat. Add spinach to skillet and cook together for a little while (maybe 2 min). Turn on oven broiler.

Pour in egg mixture and stir until mixed. Sprinkle lightly with parmesan cheese. Let cook without stirring for 2-4 minutes (until egg on bottom does not move.

Without jostling too much, move from stovetop to broiler. Broil for 2-4 minutes. Enjoy!

It came out great. Definitely plan to make this again!