Category Archives: food plants

Our Hot Summer Yard

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The heat hasn’t let up. The plants that have enough water seem to love it though! The greenhouse is of course a jungle once again. Kitty, Schnoodle and the chickens hang out outside all day and always find the shadiest places to rest.


Kitty resting by the garden


When chickens are hot they breathe through their mouths


Since we planted watermelon, cantaloupe, squash and cucumbers, I am not exactly sure yet which this one will be


We have a ton of plums and peaches growing! Yum!!


In about a week we will be inundated with ripe cherry tomatoes!

 

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How to Harvest Flax Seed

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We put down a mixture of dryland wildflower seeds when we re-did our front yard flower garden area. We saw quite a variety of wildflowers the first year, but this year, there has been one clear dominator: flax. It is very pretty when it is in bloom; little periwinkle flowers steal the show. They are super-hardy and don’t need much water at all to survive. We see them growing wild around here in Colorado all the time.


Close up of flax flowers

When the  knock-out flower show is done, they turn into little ball seed pods and we noticed they were littering the flax seeds all over our driveway.


Flax Flowers in Bloom


This is what a flax plant looks like when its seeds are ready to be harvested


The small flax seeds reside in this tiny little pod

So we decided that instead of letting them all fall, that we would harvest a few of them. First, pick a plant that is ready to drop its seeds. Then cut it down with scissors or a knife (it’s a tough plant). Next, shake it vigorously over a sheet or some other type of drop cloth. (A towel would work, but it might get the little seeds stuck in the terry cloth material.) Check out this video for a demonstration:

 


A cut bunch of flax

Once you have all the seeds and other things shaken out of the bunch, pour it into a bowl. Then use a sifter or a colander to separate out the seeds from the leaves and pods that also shook into the mix.


Mixture after shaking the plant out


Sifting


Flax seeds after sifting -with a few other things still, but pretty good

Flax seed is very high in Omega-3 fatty acids which is great for your heart and brain. Some studies have shown flax seed helps prevent and/or treat cancer, stroke, diabetes and heart disease. It’s also a great food in general and can be added to everything from cereal and bread to chili and meatloaf. Additionally, it’s a great additive to your chicken’s food to help increase the omega-3’s in your chicken’s eggs.


I gave the chickens a few to try and saved the rest for us

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Selling our Garden Bounty

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One thing we love to do in Colorado and that we are excited to try in Puerto Rico, is growing things and selling them. I sell our chicken eggs to a friend year round and I have some other people who like to buy them from time to time in the summer months when we get 5-6 eggs a day (or almost 3 dozen a week!). But when all of our plants start coming in, we also like to sell those, or the fruits from them.


At the Greeley Farmer’s Market a few years back (Selling tropical plants, but of course!)

We used to sell some of our plants at the Greeley Farmer’s Market, but now they require all sorts of expensive insurance and crap, so small backyard growers like us have been pushed out. But there is one great marketplace still around: Craigslist! We love Craigslist and use it to buy things we may need and we list our rentals as well as things around our house and from our garden and greenhouse.


One of our comfrey plants


Tomatoes and lots of other plants in the greenhouse this year


We are finishing up with the strawberry season at our house, but had a bumper crop this year!

Just tonight we sold some tomato plants that were overtaking our greenhouse floor. We also have some people interested in buying some of our comfrey plant crowns. We love doing it. I like writing up the descriptions and waiting for people to contact me. Britton is good at digging up plants and making them look good. Selling our garden bounty feels more like fun than work! We would be working in the garden anyway and so when we get paid to do it and we see how happy people are with our plants, it makes us all the more pleased.

For instance, the woman who bought our plants tonight had had all of hers torn apart when we had that hail storm a few days ago, so she was super excited to be able to start her tomato garden up again -and for way less than it would be to replace them with plants from Home Depot or a nursery.

Britton says lately he has been having dreams of planting an acre or so of our land in Rincon with rows of pepper plants. I am not sure how well peppers grow there, but I would imagine fairly good. And in Rincon, we would still be able to sell them -and eggs, palm trees, coconuts, mangoes, etc, etc- at the Farmer’s Market! There’s so much opportunity everywhere you look. We are really excited and summers in Colorado make us all the more ready to live a summer-lifestyle year-round.


At the Rincon Farmer’s Market

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You’re Living in the Wrong Place!

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It’s one thing to say something to yourself, and it’s another to hear it from a complete stranger. We currently have two medical students staying with us in our spare bedrooms. I was welcoming them, showing them around and introducing them to the animals and showing them all of our tropical plants in our living room. “…This is the coffee tree with coffee berries that are turning red!”

And this is the banana tree, and the avocado trees, and the citrus collection, and pomegranate, and the Dracaena palm and the aloe vera, and the orchids and this here is our latest collection: a pineapple plant with a mini-pineapple growing on it:


Our pineapple plant we got at Home Depot in Greeley

After I finished with our little botanical tour in our tropical hotel lobby of a living room, one of them exclaimed, “It looks like you’re living in the wrong place! You should be living somewhere tropical.” How right she was. It is funny to hear a stranger point out the most obvious thing you’ve been working for. I suppose our house and lifestyle here really do point to our desire to live in the tropics with lots of warm-loving plants, chickens roaming about and people hosted at our home in the style of a guesthouse. We do it as best we can in Colorado, so I am sure when we move to Puerto Rico we’ll be ready to do the real thing in the right place. In the mean time, we’re starting to amass quite the collection of all things tropical right here in the wrong place! 🙂

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