Welcome to my new series: how to suck at gardening and still feed your family!
One of the greatest disappointments we face when producing our own food is a scrawny, mangled harvest.
Mangled berries are still edible!
It’s important to keep trying, and not let your spoils, well, spoil.
Those mangled berries are edible, so use them! They are great in shakes, fruit leather, jams and syrups.
A.k.a., what to do with all the unripe tomatoes when cold weather hits.
Chop green tomatoes. Add diced garlic, diced red onion, hot peppers (another “harvest before it freezes outside crop”), and cilantro (also salvaged pre-freezing weather). Let stand for a few hours, stirring occasionally. Add additional seasonings to taste – more of any of the ingredients, and / or salt, pepper, lime juice. Whatever you like, it’s your salsa after all!
This spring’s lesson: don’t repurpose excess Dixie cups for starting seeds.
Man that’s gross
Seriously. Ewww. The last thing we want around baby plants is this much mold.
Now, emptied K-cups make a great holder for the hydrated peat pellets – they even have a built in hole, whereas I had to (carefully) punch a hole in the bottom of the water cups. But they were very small and all my baby plants quickly out grew them, making them almost more hassle than it was worth.
Maybe some year I’ll break down and buy some “professional” seed starting equipment… Naaaah, probably not.
Funny how sometimes you don’t realize you have a dream until someone else is living it.
This week, I learned that person is Daniel Markovitz.
OK, not literally. I don’t actually know Mr. Markovitz is, or what his life is like. But I learned of his book, Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance, and I wanted to cry. With joy at finding such an awesome book, and with despair at realizing I wanted to write that book.
And it’s a good book so far. I can’t even pursue the “well I’ll do the same thing only better” angle. Sigh.
This blog is not “supposed” to be a garden blog, nor a recipe blog, even though that seems to be what I post the most! So this morning: a gratuitous post about “Lean”, specifically the Lean in Lean Six Sigma which inspired the name of this blog.
Lean is a production / manufacturing approach which focuses on eliminating all waste, e.g., anything (in terms of time or material resources) which does not contribute to the creation of the final product. This actually translates well into personal productivity, in terms of removing all the “stuff” from your life or work which does not deliver any value. (The hard part is defining what value actually means to you…but that is a whole separate post!)
The classic seven “wastes” to be on the look out for (as identified in the original Lean process, the Toyota Production System) are as follow:
1) Overproduction
2) Inventory
3) Waiting (idle time)
4) Unnecessary movement of material
5) Overprocessing or incorrect processing
6) Motion
7) Defects
The one which seems to drive me most is #3 – Idle Time. This goes beyond “idle hands make the Devil’s work” – I can’t stand to stand around, doing nothing. I’m always looking for some little task to do to fill up moments when I am waiting for something else to happen. This actually has a negative affect, in that this often leads (for me personally) to multitasking, which is its own form of waste. (The fine balance between “idle time” and “set up time” is another post brewing in the back of my mind.) In addition, I often start new projects before the old ones are finished, which means I end up with multiple works-in-progress (WIPs) in the system (aka my value added activities) which often leads to 5) incorrect processing because I lose track of what I’m doing and therefor 7) defects. I’m starting to research kanban systems as a way to preemptively limit WIPs. But that brings me back to my original problem – sometimes in a process (baking, gardening, etc) you just have to wait.
And I hate waiting.
Getting in touch with my inner hunter-gatherer this evening…
Wineberries and blackberries from wild patches in our yard. The blackberries have never been this good before – usually our area has serious rain shortages this time of year. But now we’re inspired to better mind the plants and run a soaker hose asking the plants next year. In a week or two, we will have more blackberries than we know what to do with!
…p.s., finding wineberries in the yard was much more charming before someone used the words “invasive species” to describe them to me. Too bad all invasive species can’t be useful!
So I don’t mean to keep posting about gardening – I’ve actually been contemplating some real Lean / Lean Six Sigma-applied-to-life type posts – but hey. Eliminating waste is part of Lean, and much of my gardening is about not-wasting.
Enter: today’s random bounty. While mowing, my husband spotted this weed growing under some other weeds. Only this weed looked, well, like something that might be cultivatable. (No, that is probably not a real word!)
This turns out to be a source of these:
Japanese wineberries! Random, weird, wonderful. This goes along with the wild blackberries, elderberry, and highly unanticipated mulberry tree which have all turned up in our yard this year!
Can I actually make wine of them? No way to know! They’ve all been eaten already!
