Rose Cottage

 This morning I headed out to the gardens, and gathered Comfrey and borage leaves for a batch of  FPJ - Fermented Plant Juice. This is a pleasant  (and less stinky!) way to use Comfrey  to enhance plant health in our gardens!   Comfrey and FPJ in Rose Cottage Garden Welsh gardener Huw Richards gives this description on his  YouTube tutorial on making and using FPJ for healthier plants and soil.  "Fermented Plant Juice (or FPJ in short) is a method developed from Korean Natural Farming, to help get better yields using local and 100% natural materials. "The whole goal in Korean Natural Farming is to use local resources to make mineral and biological amendments that not only improve results in the garden, but are kind to nature and helps close the waste gap in our modern culture." Nettles, dandelions, mugwort, or nasturtium are also great options for making FPJ. Perennial plants are especially potent bioaccumulators. Look for young, fresh leaves, a...

 This morning I used my little Cherokee dictionary to record some of the traditional plant names in my garden journal. I needed to look up one of the wild greens, Sochani, and was delighted by this  article  highlighting that following recent changes to laws, the National Park service now allows Sochan and other traditional food and medicine to be harvested by tribal members! The service is cataloging and monitoring plant populations in harmony with this shift. Sochan is one of many traditional foods and medicines which were wild-harvested, and the people have had limited access for decades! Cherokee Syllabary and Feast of Days I first read about Sochan's use in an article on edimental proponent Stephen Barstow's blog . "Sochan is documented as probably the most important spring vegetable of the Cherokee in the Southern Appalachians in Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany, which is probably where I first noted its edibility. It’s missed in Cornucopia II.  "The Cher...

  I *finally* got out to rework the garden bed Zander and I began summer of 22!  Matt tossed clover seed over the back several years ago as a ground cover. They have gardened on the back lot several times over the 15 years they've been here, and it's good soil, but more exposed to cold than near the houses.  Zander and his sis learned about food security and planted seeds each day at VBS '22 (vacation bible school), and we gave the marigolds, beans and sunflowers they started a home, along with tomatoes, peppers and pink celery. We used wood rounds and chicken wire around the bed to define it. Kale, chard and lots of clover When I moved across town last fall, I put in a couple of chard, Perennial kale, ( homesteaders kaleidoscope,  seed from Experimental Farm Network), plus garlic and Babington topset leeks. I've had the leeks a decade, after getting sets from Peace Seeds; whose founder Dr. Alan 'Mushroom' Kapuler recently passed.   Mushroom loved sha...