Free Seed Cabinets for our community.

One more gardening thing, and then it is time for lunch...

When planning your vegetable and flower gardens do not forget to check out the Free Seed Cabinets at Cooperative Extension this time of year! I am sure I blogged about this before, I love the program! This program is until supplies run out, in addition to the previously blogged Community Seed Swap coming weekend.

http://ccetompkins.org/garden/help-gardeners/free-seed-cabinets#sthash.to5Rgm2A.dpuf
the Free Seed Cabinets

Each year, staff in our Home Horticulture program write to various seed companies to request donations of seeds that are leftover from the previous year, but still viable.  CCE-Tompkins receives many generous seed donations in response to this appeal (including many organic seeds) from vendors that have included Ithaca Agway, Seed Savers Exchange, FEDCO, Burpee, Heirloom Seeds, Seed Saver Exchange, Select Seeds, Harris Seeds, and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, for example.  There is a cabinet for flowers, and another cabinet for vegetables and herbs.

How It Works

Seed packets are organized in 2 cabinets, one for flowers, another for vegetables and herbs.  Everyone is welcome to come and take some seeds for free, but to keep the system fair, we've had to put these GUIDELINES into place which seed-takers must follow:  ONLY 1 VISIT PER MONTH and a LIMIT OF 10 SEED PACKETS PER VISIT.

So that we can track the success of the free seed program, we ask those taking seeds to write down their name, email and number of seeds they have taken.  Seeds generally are available starting in late January until the supply is gone.

We ALSO invite gardeners to contribute accurately identified and dated seed (date of seed collection) to the Seed Cabinet for others to share.  We have small envelopes here, or you may use your own, but be sure to put the year of seed collection on the envelope, as well as the name of the plant. NOTE: all donated seeds should be given to Pat Curran, our Horticulture Educator, for review before we make them available to the public.

The Seed Cabinets are located in our Agriculture/Environment office and may be visited weekdays from 8:30am-4:30pm.  Tompkins County Cornell Cooperative Extension is located at 615 Willow Avenue in Ithaca (Dey St. exit from Route 13).

some greenhouse thoughts...

My new gardening goal for this season is to try and really extend our season by start planting our greenhouse much earlier. I normally preseed tomatoes and bellpeppers sometime mid April for planting Memorial Day weekend, but since most of those now life indoors I will preseed them with my leeks and brassica in mid February. Yes, we might get a cold snap, but it is easy enough to run a small heater in the greenhouse at night and it warms up really fast during the day.

Plus, I prepared the bed ahead of time to seed some lettuce and other leafy greens real early. Last season I sowed bok choy early with not much success, but the greenhouse might still have been to chilly for them. This year I'll use more cold hardy seeds like mustard greens, and lettuce mix, which I noticed seeded itself in my cold frame and came up the next year with no issues at all!

 Instead of mulching with organics as I do in the rest of my gardens - the greenhouse does not get enough moisture for quick decomposition in winter - I remove the top couple inches of spent dirt and replace it with 2 year old composted horse manure I then dig in. Plus I do not like the tomatoes etc to seed themselves out each season and removal of the top layer also removes the seeds. I like having a couple wheelbarrows of soil to play with, either to dump & raise swamp hiking paths or to pot up suckers and seeders for a quick sale in spring! One can never have enough dirt...

Might I have mentioned I've got gardening on my mind today?!

Community Seed Swap

Community Seed Swap & Guidelines

Bring your home-saved seeds (or surplus purchased seeds) to share with others, pick up some seeds for spring planting, learn how to clean seeds, and get tips on starting plants from seed for next year's garden. Cost: $5.00 donation, or free if you bring seeds to share! See below for guidelines if you plan to bring seeds to share. Contact Chrys Gardener at cab69@cornell.edu if you have any other questions.

Seed Swapping Guidelines

- It's ideal if you can pre-package small seeds in individual envelopes. Sometimes with small seeds, people don't realize how much they are taking. By pre-packaging there will be more to go around.  Write the name of the variety and the year collected on the envelopes. Large seeds (corn, beans, etc) can be loose for people to package themselves.
-  People will have questions about the varieties you are swapping - how tall does it get, how many days till harvest, what's the flavor like, etc. Know your varieties, and if you want to save yourself from repeating the same information you can make an index card with information for each of the  varieties you are swapping.

Home-Saved Seed

- Be sure that you saved seeds from plants that were open-pollinated varieties, not hybrids, otherwise they will not come 'true-to-seed' for the next person that grows them. If you bought the plants from a garden center, the tag may say if it's a hybrid. If you started the plants from seed yourself the seed packet will say either open-pollinated or hybrid
- Some vegetables will cross-pollinate with other related plants, for example many types of winter and summer squash can cross producing sometimes inedible results in the next generation. Some plants are self-pollinated and are easy to save 'true' seed from without any isolation techniques - tomatoes, lettuce, peas, and beans are all generally considered 'fool-proof'. If you saved seeds from other types of vegetables without avoiding the possibility of cross pollination, just state that on the seed packets (eg. 'Possibly crossed with other squash').

Purchased Seed

- If you have extra quantities of purchased seed that you want to swap, you can bring both open-pollinated and hybrid varieties. Just make sure they are clearly labeled as such so that people who want to save seeds from them  know which is which.
- See more at: http://ccetompkins.org/calendar/13/11/06/community-seed-swap-guidelines#sthash.uIGajFUy.dpuf

I feel like gardening... it is sunny outside and it might be in the single digits and everything covered in snow, but from behind my computer it looks great! So I am thinking gardening thoughts instead... which brings me to the Cooperative Extension Community Seed Swap coming Sunday February 2nd from 10am to 3pm. I already sorted and bagged my seed surplus, and are ready to go, how about you?!

Community Seed Swap

Bring your home-saved seeds (or surplus purchased seeds) to share with others, pick up some seeds for spring planting, learn how to clean seeds, and get tips on starting plants from seed for next year's garden. Cost: $5.00 donation, or free if you bring seeds to share! See below for guidelines if you plan to bring seeds to share. Contact Chrys Gardener at cab69@cornell.edu if you have any other questions.

It's ideal if you can pre-package small seeds in individual envelopes. Sometimes with small seeds, people don't realize how much they are taking. By pre-packaging there will be more to go around.  Write the name of the variety and the year collected on the envelopes. Large seeds (corn, beans, etc) can be loose for people to package themselves.

See more at: http://ccetompkins.org/calendar/13/11/06/community-seed-swap-guidelines#sthash.uIGajFUy.dpuf

Celebrating New Year in style - dutch style that is!

And I do not mean the fireworks we picked up in Pennsylvania... no, I mean our famous Dutch Fried Dough we like to make around New Year's!

A little background on the Dutch Doughnut:
Oliebollen are said to have been first eaten by Germanic tribes in the Netherlands during the Yule, the period between December 26 and January 6. The Germanic goddess Perchta, together with evil spirits, would fly through the mid-winter sky. To appease these spirits, food was offered, much of which contained deep-fried dough. It was said Perchta would try to cut open the bellies of all she came across, but because of the fat in the oliebollen, her sword would slide off the bodies of whoever ate them...

For centuries the Dutch ate olykoek ("oil cake"), an old name for oliebol. The oliebollen visible in an Aelbert Cuyp painting from around 1652 are very similar to today's oliebol. During the nineteenth century the word "oliebol" started to be used more. These oil balls or early doughnuts were simply balls of dough fried in pork fat (Belgium) or rape oil (Dutch) until golden brown and liberally sprinkled with powdered sugar.  

Throughout the holidays most Dutch downtowns will have a temporary Oliebollen Kraam (Fried Dough Vendor). Since 1993 Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad has held an annual highly publicized oliebollentest at the end of each year, testing the skills and recipes of these traveling oliebollen salesmen! And customers do keep track of the results...

The Doughnut Shape
As Dutch immigrants began to settle in the United States, they continued to make their oliebollen, and influenced by other cultures it morphed into what we call doughnuts today. Because the inside of an oliebol does not cook as fast as the rest, problematic oliebollen (a.i. too large or undercooked) could have an uncooked center. One solution to this gooey center was to stuff it with fillings that did not require cooking but Hansen Gregory, an American ship captain, had another solution. In 1847 Gregory solved this problem by punching a hole in the center of the dough ball. The hole increased the surface area, exposure to the hot oil, and therefore eliminated the uncooked center (plus he could impale a doughnut on the ship’s steering wheel handles so that he could use both hands to steer!).

http://foodreference.about.com/od/history_myths/a/The-History-Of-Doughnuts.htm & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliebol and a little by yours truly.

new bunnies; twice!

The two angora bunnies from my friend Angelika grew up to be real friendly, but also became two boys... and they grew loads of hair... I had a hard time remembering they needed to be combed, again, and again, and again and felt pretty bad about that, especially when one got a little matted so I combed him out well but almost left him naked! I was a little too focused on removing the matts I forgot to check how much was coming off, and that in early spring... Angelika had room again so she took her two boys back. I do still have a couple containers of angora hair but found it did not even work real well for felting... so much for that idea.

I did learn I like to have bunnies, especially for the amount of weeds that go in and the piles of poopies that come back out, but are no good with high maintenance breeds. A friend of mine came across an older meat breed doe, a Giant Chin (chinchilla, as in similar color) and I ended up buying her. After a lot of looking and asking around and visiting the Buffalo County Fair and the Syracuse State Fair, I was unable to find her a buck, any meat type buck, anywhere! I happened to mentioned this unfruitful search to a tin can rally friend of ours, who laughed and said he had just started breeding his own meat bunnies a few years back and to come on over anytime. He lives like two blocks down our street...

 So that's how our Giant Chin Anabel had a very enthusiastic date with this black New Zealand buck, 30 days later resulting in these two precious little bundles of fur...

Anabel is not with us anymore, she developed some sort of cancer and died late fall, but her daughter Clarabel and son Albert are still with us. For a short while they lived side by side in the bunny bungalow until I realized - Clarabel was hopping around with a hay mustache - that that wire middle partition might not be as much of a procreation hurdle for bunnies as I assumed... so now Clarabel lives with her six kids in the sunroom and Albert is by himself, at least until the boys are old enough to be sexed...

nesting geese in January!

It's winter, so time for some blog house keeping! And geese are on my mind, as I found out yesterday the reason why my gander Kristopher has been so paranoid in the run recently... the darn things started a nest! In January! While the temps are below single digits and worse! I ended up removing six frozen and cracked eggs and hope they'll either stop laying, or keep on laying in the same spot so I can keep an eye on it. I like them making the nest in the side run, as we can lock that up at night, but worry repeated egg harvesting might scare them off somewhere else...

Let's see, last time I posted we had received five goslings from my son's incubating program at school. The brooding goose managed to hatch another eight (!) which is our record. If I remember correctly there were only one or two unhatched eggs left in the nest. From talking to other goose and duck enthusiasts we deduced that the hatching rate last Spring was high because the average humidity was high; we had a lot of rain and drizzle (and mud).
Goose eggs need moisture to develop correctly which is why a lot of waterfowl need access to a pond for successful hatching; the brooders swim occasionally and thus bring back moisture to the nest by their damp breast feathers. We do have a large rubbermaid container for them to poodle in but don't really see brooding mommy make all that much use of it, she hangs around closer to home. But she is not on the nest at all times, so next season I plan to mist the eggs occasionally and see if that makes a difference. The previous year we had three goslings from 7+ eggs. That was an above average dry spring, so it would be great if we can increase their hatching rate with just a little spritzing!

All five school goslings ended up being adopted by the larger brood and within a month or so the whole group was walking around together. We sold three of the school goslings; since I kept a close eye on them as they lived in the sunroom I was able to see sex differences and tagged them accordingly. We kept a boy / girl couple ourselves and sold the others as breeders.
Two of the eight brooded goslings quickly got separated at night and died from exposure (they squeezed thru the run/side run wire partition but did not have the thinking to walk around to the door and loop back - I put a strip of smaller diameter fencing around the side run to prevent this from happening again), the other six made it to adulthood fine. We butchered those, for our and our friends' freezers. Feedback was that it tasted the best when deep fried, but then, what doesn't!

It was nice having a large group of geese strolling the yard and garden. It looked so homely (and apparently scared the wacky neighbors, another plus!). Even tho we had a bumper crop of fruit and apples this year we had hardly any problem of rotting fruit on the ground! I had already put a wood snow fence around the chicken yard for our fox problem, which in early season kept the fox out and in later season the ever hungry geese. We'd kick the geese out in morning, feed the chickens, and then let the geese back in at night - otherwise there'd be no feed left! We ended up not feeding the geese commercial feed for about 4 months, stimulating them to graze and gather for themselves as they grew to a respectable weight of about 6-8 pounds dressed - and apple & leftover marinated :)