The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

New leaves indoors

Gooseberry sproutEven though my fig cuttings kicked the bucket, things are starting to grow inside.  I went ahead and planted my tip-rooted gooseberry, but have been saving Mom's and Sarah's until I remember to bring their little plants to their new homes.  The seemingly-dead gooseberry cuttings have been sitting in a sunny window, and I just noticed that this little one is starting to leaf out!  That means it will have to wait to go into the ground until after the frost-free date, but also that it will probably have more roots and will bear sooner than if I had stuck it outside last fall.

Next door, another pot of sticks is sprouting leaves.  A kind reader (T) sent me some tindora --- tropical, perennial cucumbers --- to try out, and warm weather this past weekend tempted one to put out leaves.  I'm very curious New tindora leafto see whether this cucurbit will be worth babying over the winter in future years, but it sounds promising, with recipes available for baby fruits, ripe fruits, and leaves.

T explained that he developed this variety by crossing an all-male, ornamental variety with a female plant on his neighbor's fence.  The result was a sterile variety that he reports is non-astringent, with cucumber-like, small, green fruit that become soft, sweet, red fruits when fully ripe.  "In the summer, I cut it down in huge swaths to feed to the goats and birds," he wrote, adding that this variety of tindora "could become a really good forage for homesteaders and their livestock."  We're excited to try it!

Our chicken waterer keeps the flock hydrated between trips to the woods to hunt bugs and greenery.


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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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oooo, how exciting! Can't wait to try one of them. :D
Comment by mitsy (aka, sarah) Tue Jan 15 14:28:22 2013





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