Propagating Strawberries

For some reason, strawberry plants love my farm. They grow well and reproduce vigorously. They also produce berries but I lose most to birds and slugs. So I'm planning on trying to raise them in the pallet boxes so that I can better protect the berries. But first I need to grow some robust plants for transplanting into the boxes. 

Right now the strawberry bed is busting at the seams with runners. The runners produce new little plants. In the photo below you can see the white pipe delineating the bed's border. The runners have escaped the bed and are growing right into the pathway. 

Here's a close up of a plant sending out runners. The runner goes out about 10 inches then makes a tiny plant, which in turn sends out a runner and makes a tiny plant. I've seen three plantlets growing on one runner. So each main plant can reproduce plenty of plantlets. 

So I ripped out some of those runners in the pathway. Quite the tangled mess, I'd say. 

Armed with a pair of scissors, I snipped off the little plants from the runners. This is what I ended up with...

Now where to grow them temporarily. I choose a section of the garden that I had open. It's a spot where I have been mulching with grass clippings since May, attempting to kill the grass off. Most of the grass is gone although a few hardy plants are still struggling to survive. So besides these few grasses, most of the area is weed free at the moment. When I applied the first layer of grass clippings I had used a handpick to remove any surface rocks. So this area already has a start on becoming a garden. 

To get it ready to plant the baby strawberry plants, I used a shovel to flip the 2-3" of soil, burying the mulch. I didn't bother to try to dig deeper because first, the baby plants didn't need it, and second, there are plenty of rocks. Just digging 2-3" down was a chore! I just removed the rocks that interfered with using that top 2-3" of soil. I ended up with a nice pile of rock that I'll use somewhere else. 

Finally I planted to strawberries. This is just a nursery bed, so they are planted close. When they grow into sturdy plants I'll move the best of them to pallet grow boxes. I'd like to have at least 3-4 pallet boxes of strawberries so that I can experiment with different ways to prevent the birds and slugs from stealing the sweet red berries. 

Drivel - 4.0 Earthquake

Felt an earthquake about an hour ago. It's been awhile since we had a decent quake, and this one was a "four". We're 8 to 9 miles from the epicenter, but still got a good rattle and shake from it. It was a nice test to see how my new kitchen shelving would handle the size quakes that we've been accustomed to here. Everything passed with flying colors. Between the anti-slip shelf liners and the anti-fall lip on the shelves, nothing tipped over. So I can't post any photos of broken glasses for you. 

Small quakes are common. Every once in a while there's a big one, but not too often. I don't mind the small ones, in fact I actually like them. It's a reminder that the earth all around me is "alive". Someday when Mauna Loa erupts, my area will experience some really big quakes. Don't know if that will happen in my lifetime, but it surely will eventually occur. That, my friends, will surely test my kitchen shelves! I fully expect any efforts on my part to prevent stuff from flying off shelves to utterly fail. 7 to 8 quakes are super shakers. 

Look What They've Done To My Food, Ma!

Food fraud is running rampant! Egads! Food alteration is everywhere! Yikes! 

With the advent of DNA testing, curious investigators discovered that cheap "trash" fish is being passed off as the higher priced, popular varieties. And the fraud is extensive, occurring in lots of countries. So unless you bought the fish whole, you may not be getting what it is labeled. And you'll never know. Someone between the fish man and your kitchen is making a heck of a profit and the consumer is paying for it. 

Same with meats! Yup. European countries exposed a massive meat fraud. Tons and tons of intentionally mislabeled meats. The news media has been reporting this meat switch going on for years in the orient, so now it's been going on in western countries too. Suddenly people noticed. And it the DNA testing that revealed the fraud. 

With food labeling laws in the USA, the public knowingly accepts fakes. Imitation crab. Supposed scallops in those frozen boxes. Read the label and the buyer learns that those scallops are not real even though they are indeed seafood. 

The bottom line is to make a profit. Buy low, sell high, even if it's fraud. Managers of farmers markets are aware of the problem. It's rampant in many popular markets, especially those that require truth in labeling. A New York City market requires all produce to be local. They must maintain their own investigators to check on vendors, often uncovering cases of blatant fraud. At our own local farmers market which doesn't require labeling, I've witnessed vendors misleading buyers by implying that their products are something other than they are. Organic? Often not. Chemical free? Some I know for a fact are not. Locally grown? Not always, to be sure. 

Organic? Trust the label? I wouldn't. I've talked with food distributor employees who have firsthand seen cases of fraud. So not to lose their jobs, they keep their mouth shut. It's happening right here in my island, so I would bet it's happening everywhere. And a bit ago some organic milk produced on the mainland was tested. Tests revealed that the cows were being fed GMO feed, a no-no for organic milk. 

GMO free? I don't believe it 100%. Consumer Report just DNA tested some corn chips listed as GMO free. Turns out that 75% of the corn in them was GMO! So much for truth in labeling. 

So you trust the local farmer? I watch who I trust. Locally not all our farmers follow the rules. My own rule? Get to know my farmer! 

And I'd like to extend that to....trust your slaughterhouse? Many people in my area highly question the honesty of remote slaughter facilities. Some do not believe that they are getting back their own meat from their own animals. I believe in home slaughter for the humane aspect, but doing it to avoid fraud is another good reason. Boy, it would be real nice to have a mobile slaughter facility in my area! Extending my thoughts on this....recently the news media announced that our government approved the sending of chicken carcasses oversees (to China to be specific) to be processed, then returned for sale in the US with no labeling indicating that China was involved. The food legally can be listed as an USA product. But would I trust that all the returned chicken meals are really all US chicken meat? Sounds like a great opportunity for fraud and profit to me. 

With food fraud being everywhere, it's another reason for me to try to produce my own foods or to get food from sources I deem reliable. That's the gist for my rant today. I'd rather grow my own that be subjected to the fraud going on in the food industry. 

Garden Atop Concrete

My kitchen taro garden is atop a concrete pad. For real!!!! And I was told by many that it couldn't be done. Ha! 

The concrete pad is actually to top on the cesspool. No ick factor here because nothing, zero seeps out of the cesspool top...ever! Very little goes into this large cesspool, nor does it fill with water. So it's chance of overflowing in my lifetime is virtually nil. But the cesspool top takes up a large section of the yard outside my kitchen. Rather than staring out the window at a cement slab, I decided to cover it with compost layers. 

Everyone warned me that I'd never be able to use it for a garden and that I'd be lucky to get grass to grow there and stay green. Initially I did grow a lawn there, but I'd rather be growing food. So the grass was flipped and I planted taro. It thrived. 

I've harvested quite a but of taro from this garden atop solid concrete. Ha, told ya so that I could do it! It just took very fertile compost/soil and water. I'm constantly adding discarded fruit, weeds, and grass clippings. Plus a light layer of volcanic cinders to keep things from getting too mucky, gloppy. 

Today I harvested some of this organic "soil" from between the rows. 

I scraped it right down to the concrete, so you can see how shallow the dirt is that the taro grows in. The color of the material is quite dark. It's moist and a bit gloppy because of the rain. 

And it was loaded with worms! I'm transferring this "soil" to a bed that is being created for growing gourds. The gourds should really love it. 

The trenches between the taro rows are now empty. I'll spend the next week filling them up, thus starting the cycle all over again. It's a great way to utilize discarded fruits, weeds, lawn clippings, manures. It fertilizes the taro at the same time. 

If I didn't have a gourd project that needs this new "soil", I would have just shoveled the material onto the taro rows. It would have made the dirt deeper for the taro to grow in. But alas...so many projects, so little soil. 

Rabbit Update

The rabbits are now 6 months old and ready to start being bred. So I examined each one individually, checking their physical condition and reconfirming their sex. No sense putting two females together and wondering why you're not seeing anything happen! Well, I found out that at least I got all the sexes right. That's a start in the right direction! Don't laugh. If you've never sexed a rabbit, you don't know how easy it is to guess wrong when they are young. None are wearing pink or blue booties to give you a hint. 

Everybody looked good as far as being normal. No dental problems, no lumps and bumps, no other abnormalities. Everyone looked healthy. The only issue I discovered was that some of the females were too lean. Even though they have assorted fresh foods and alfalfa hay cubes in front of them 24 hours a day, some of the females weren't getting enough energy foods. 

Since it will take time to be able to grow higher energy foods for them, I'm temporarily going to resort to feeding them small quantities of commercial grains. Feeding grain to rabbits can be tricky, so I'll start out by giving them one spoonful of cooked corn/oats mix each morning. I plan to weigh those individual rabbits each week to gauge their progress then adjust the grain amount accordingly. 

Rabbits being fed pellets or hay normally meet their energy requirements without needing grains. But when fed predominantly fresh foods, the water content is high, thus limiting the amount of feed (thus energy) they can consume in a day. My rabbits with the bigger appetites appear to be doing well on the fresh diet, but those that are lighter eaters are thinner. From a breeder/farmer point of view, these light eaters will be candidates for being replaced in the future with aggressive eaters. I won't do it now, but eventually they will go into the freezer. 

One other thing I will try to determine --  are those thinner rabbits the bigger or faster growing ones? Quicker growth and larger size is a plus, so I may have to take that into consideration if they are the thinner rabbits. I don't want to cull out rabbits that have desirable growth traits just because they need a bit more energy while growing. Perhaps I should be weighing my rabbits weekly and do some basic body measurements so that I can get a better handle on which ones to keep as long term breeders and which ones would be better suited to the dinner table. 

Drivel - Blood Moon

Last night was our second blood moon of this year. While I stayed awake to watch the last one, this time around it was beyond me to successfully force myself out of bed at 1 am to see the moon. Since I woke up this morning still muscle sore, my desire to stay glued to my sheets may have been a good one. I've been fairly physically active these past weeks and its catching up to me. 

Anyway, hubby got up to view the moon. And with our camera that is totally inadequate for the task, proceeded to photograph it. Besides the wrong camera for the job, the sky was misty, a mix of moisture and vog. Pretty poor settings for sky photography. But he did manage to get a couple of pics. 

Fuzzy , yes, but what does one expect from an iPhone? 

Special events, such as this lunar eclipse, serve to remind me that there are wondrous things going on around me. 

Feeding Pigs, Homestead Style

The people who know I'm really into DIY and self reliancy have been asking what I'm doing about feeding my two piglets. Using pig chow is the easy way out, and also the most cash expensive way. It's definitely not self reliant. So I've been doing some exploring. 

The piglets when they first arrived were eating moistened pig chow with some chopped veggies mixed in. So I continued that until they were settled in. Then I started experimenting. First, I built a small pen with only a little bit of grass. They quickly outgrew that. So the next pen was 15' x 15' with grass about 6 to 10 inches high. They devoured that grass and rooted up that pen within a couple weeks. So then I built a 20' x 20' pen where the grass was waist high. That pen lasted them longer but they have finally consumed every blade of grass, every weed, and rooted the whole place up. Of course I was still feeding them twice a day, not expecting them to survive on just the grass. 

The first thing I discovered was that these two little guys have different preferences. Porkchop (aka Chop Chop) likes fruit and meat while Hamhocks (aka Hammie)  pigs out on rice and cereals (har, har....pigs out! Ooh, that's bad!) Chop Chop wants his food cooked while Hammie will eat things raw or cooked. Neither likes stringbeans unless I chop them up, then they'll eat them all. They both will eat lilokoi but only if it is raw. Won't touch them cooked unless they get blenderized in with other foods. Chop Chop likes his sugar cane cut into long thin strips while Hammie won't touch the strips. She wants hers chopped into small bite sized chunks. Funny, fussy pigs. I never knew they could be so fussy and be so different from each other. 

So here's a list of what I've tried so far on them. They will eat--

Sugar cane, fresh and cut up

Pipinola leaves and fruits, raw or cooked

Tomatoes, raw or cooked

Stringbeans, cooked and chopped

Beets and greens, cooked

Pumpkin if cooked and blenderized

Lilokoi, raw. Blenderized if cooked. 

Bananas, raw, peels included

Pineapples, raw

Mangos, they both love these any way they can get them

Sweet potatoes, raw or cooked, including the leaves

Cabbage, kale, bok choy, carrots...raw or cooked

Potatoes, raw or cooked

Radishes and daikon, cooked and chopped into thin slices

Cucumbers, raw

Watermelon and rind

Macadamia nuts

Cooked rice

Popcorn

Spagetti and pasta, cooked or uncooked

Bread, crackers, cookies

Dry dog food and cat food 

Any meat scraps and bones, cooked (I haven't offered them uncooked meat) 

They don't like taro even if well cooked. Won't touch chopped up banana trunks. Won't eat alfalfa pellets or cubes. 

And of course they like commercial feed such as pig pellets, chicken feed, wet or dry cob though they like the wet best because it is sweet. They only get a handful of this sort of stuff, just to keep them friendly and willing to come when called.