Building with Straw!

No, not the house.  We spent an enjoyable day at the farm yesterday and completed several projects.  First, we disassembled the strawbale shelves in the greenhouse because they were leaning precariously forward.  We took the bales out to the garden area and made a fort for the kids.

Kids helping to build the fort

The finished fort

Then while the kids played with their friends in the new fort, I worked on more garden beds.  I put the first 2 layers on 2 more beds (straw and topsoil) and set out bales to start decomposing for all the rest of the beds.  You can now kinda see where everything is going to be.

Then, to finish the day off, we used more bales to build a temporary compost bin.  Every garden needs one of these and ours is no exception!

Straw Bale compost bin

Also, Jeremy was able to go out a couple of times this week and do some more clearing where the house will be.  He also cut some additional poles to finish off the garden fence.  Sometime in the near future we'll get to wrap that project up.

In addition to all these things, we have a lively debate going about exactly how big the garden is going to be for this year.  We did some math and figured out that we could fit 48 4x20' beds inside the fenced area.  That would make this garden roughtly 2.5 times the size of our former garden in town.  Given that we'll be busy building a house this year, it seems absurd to try for that much this year.  At the same time, we've had several people offer to come help out and we really miss fresh garden food.  I can say for sure that we'll have the 16 beds laid out in the pictures above.  What we'll have past that, I don't know.

In the meantime, our seed stand is full of baby onions and lettuce.  The stand is just a set of metal shelving from Home Depot with standard 2 and 4' shop lights. 

Onion seedlings

Lettuce seedlings

Each set of lights is hanging from some inexpensive florist chain so that I can raise and lower them by which link I hook on the hook.  We've been using this system for 4 years now and it has worked quite well for us.

The full seed stand

Chains holding the lights

Sorry for the less frequent posting!  Despite the days being short, they are surprisingly full these days. 

Clearing for the House!!

We spent a rather cold day today clearing out where the house will be.  While this clearly has to get done before we excavate for the house, it is a bit more pressing because we need more cedar poles to finish the garden fence.  Did I mention that the whole area is overgrown with cedars? 

Here's a look at where we started.  Pay attention to where the few little cedar bits are laying on the ground - its an important reference point for later.

before we started (mostly)

Jeremy started cutting down all the brush with the chain saw and I drug the cut bits into a brush pile.  Around 11, our friend Daniel Diliberto arrived to help (thank goodness!) and between the two of us we were able to keep up with Jeremy.  As we went, when Jeremy found a tree of the right size, he would cut all the limbs off and we would stack it in the "poles" pile.  Everything else went in the brush pile.  Remember the few cedar bits in the picture above?  Here's what that spot looked like when we were done:

And here are the poles we cut:

We managed to create a pretty nice sized clearing - about 45x50 or so.  It looks something like this:

Here's 2/3 of our work crew (I'm behind the camera) when we finally stopped for the day. 

You may be wondering what our kids were doing while the adults cleared brush.  They spent their time breaking rocks and building a pretty cool little fort!  I love that we spent 5 hours in literally freezing weather (the temp didn't go above 30 while we were there) and my kids not only didn't complain, they found productive uses for their time and had a blast!  Parental nirvana.

Catherine in the fort

This week we'll continue working on the garden fence and will likely do some more clearing.  Every day, little up, right?

What is Biochar and how is it made?

This is a question we've been researching and answering lately.  In short, biochar is pulverized charcoal that has been inoculated with something good for plants.  Biochar starts with pure charcoal - not store bought briquets (briquets have other chemicals added to make them bind into that shape, so it is not suitable for biochar).  The charcoal is then pulverized and mixed in a solution with plant food.  Some things that have been used successfully to inoculate are compost tea, sea minerals and urine. 

Why would you want to put biochar in your garden?  The biochar is almost 100% carbon and has a microscopic structure that is full of pores.  Carbon is very reactive and very stable, so soil nutrients bind to it easily and stay in place (less leaching).  The pores then form the perfect habitat for microorganisms that take the nutrients and make them available to plants.  Because of the stability of carbon in this form, it remains in the soil for hundreds of years providing this service.  Talk about a good bang for your buck!

If you want to see the potential for biochar enriched soils, look no further than South America.  The famed Terra Preta soils of the amazon were built from biochar and remain some of the most fertile soils in the world despite hundreds of years of farming.

So now that you're sold on adding biochar to your garden, how do you get it?  The short answer for now is by making it yourself.  Its not widely commercially available.  Fortunately, it isn't hard to make.  I would recommend this site:  http://biochar.info/biochar.biochar-production-methods.cfml  They have a pretty good resource for different ways to build a biochar stove/kiln.

Thanks to a good friend, Michael Morley, loaning us his biochar burner, we will be experimenting with making our own soon.  The process with his burner goes something like this:

1.  Load the burner with small diameter wood bits.

Brushy bits to break up

Michael loading the burner

2.  Build a small fire on the top layer and light it.

3.  Put the top on so that the draft begins up through the barrel.

4.  Wait for the fire to reach all the way to the bottom of the barrel then shut off the vents at the bottom and top to stop oxygen from reaching the fire (note the dirt piled up around the base now to block air flow).

5.  Let the wood sit in the very hot barrel and char for 20 minutes or so (longer if the pieces are bigger).  Open the vents and pour water in to quench the fire (notice the water on the lid and steam rising from the barrel).

 

6.  Dump out the contents.  Separate any unburned bits from the char ash (they can be run through next time to finish).  You have char!

We blocked the air to the fire too soon on this load - lots of things were left unburned.  We'll know better for next time!

Back in the saddle...er...mud

After a wonderful break for the holidays, we're back at it again.

We spent a glorious day at the farm working on the future garden spot.  This is actually the first step toward building the house for reasons that will become clear soon (hopefully).  It was a great day and we were serenaded by several hundred Canadian geese that were grazing and flying in the field next to us.  We also got to slog through some lovely mud, but the day was nice enough to ignore that.

see all the dark specs - they're geese!

We started by measuring and staking the corners of the future hoop house so that we had a reference point for both the garden beds and the garden fence (both of which have to allow enough room to erect the hoop house at some point in the future).

Me on one end of a 100' tape measure, Jeremy and Jacob on the other

Once we had that, we decided where the corners of the fence would be and Jeremy started digging the holes for the massive 10' poles that will hold the corners.  He also moved the large poles into each location.  Now, this presented one particular problem - some of these are large enough to be very difficult even for Jeremy to move.  What we needed was a truck.  What we had was a hatchback car.  Which leads to one and only solution...

Looking at the bottom of the last hole...is it deep enough?

Yep - that's deep enough (those would be the post hole diggers halfway in the hole).

Meanwhile, the kids and I measured and staked the locations for all the garden beds.  Jacob did an excellent job of pounding in almost all the corner stakes while I measured them out and started building beds.

After a short break, the kids shoveled topsoil into the wheel barrow so that I could spread it on the future beds.  We put some straw from our stash down first to add organic matter.  This ground has been run over with a large excavator to compact the soil (part of making a level pad) and its all clay subsoil from the hill behind the existing hoop house.  While that isn't exactly a recipe for a beautiful garden spot, it is no worse than what we started with in town.  We have been here before!  On the plus side, the topsoil is beautiful and not compacted and we have ample soil ammendments to help improve the clay.  The site is also right next to our water spigot and gets full sun all day which should help overall.

Kids tearing into the mountain of topsoil

We had enough time to dig all 4 corner posts for the fence and to put down straw and the first layer of soil on 2 and a half garden beds.  We'll keep working our way through it this week and see where we end up for Saturday!

Here are the first 2 beds with the rest staked out.  We finished putting the dirt on top of the straw before we left.

Rocks and seeds

We finally made it back out to the farm after the holiday break today.  We started by helping a friend put up another pole for his pole barn.  All went uneventfully thanks to excellent preparation on his part and we were all grateful.

Then we spent a couple of hours at our farm.  We walked where the house will go trying to narrow down from "around here" to "right here" for where it will be.  We also took a walk back through our woods to see how much easily available rock we could find (lots).  Then we dropped off some more accumulated building materials and picked up the light fixtures and seed trays for our seed starting this year. 

Most of the afternoon was spent at a seed ordering/discussion gathering where I learned about some new seed companies I'll have to check out and where I met (and re-met) some awesome people who are trying to grow more of their own food too.  Community is a wonderful thing!

This evening we assembled our new seed starting stand shelves (just wire shelves from home depot).  Tomorrow I'll make a quick run to pick up the chain we'll hang the lights from on the stand and we'll be ready to start some seeds!  With a little luck, our onions and leeks will be started before the end of the day.

I cannot express how happy I am to be starting seeds again.  It is such a joy to contemplate digging in the dirt again!  Soon spring will be sitting in my living room embodied in hundreds of little plants all reaching for the light.

Sorry for the lack of pictures - the camera came along but got lost in the excitement.  ;-)

2012 wrap up

In the spirit of the new year, I thought I'd take a minute to look back and what 2012 has brought our family.  It was quite a year!

• Dismantled and moved two 96' long hoop houses in January
• Found our 40 acres in February
• Closed on the farm in April
• Removed our city garden in May
• Purchased an RV and moved it to the farm
• Got the tractor running!
• Built the first hoop house on the farm in June/July
• Purchased, stacked, restacked and stored 200+ straw bales for a house
• Made 3 trips to Colorado to pick up logs and milled lumber
• Milled many logs at Tim O'brien's
• Cut and brought home cedar logs from Arkansas
• Found and moved 16 tons of rock (with much more of this to come)
• Transplanted many plants from town to the farm
• Planted first 12 fruit trees on the farm
• Had Bowen excavation level the pad for the second hoop house
• Moved into and out of 2 storage units
• Put the house on the market FSBO, listed it with a real estate agent and then took it off the market

That's quite a lot when you consider that we both have jobs, we have 2 kids with their own activities and we do sleep occasionally.  Here's hoping that 2013 will be just as productive!