How do you know if you're on the right track?

“How do you know if you’re on the right track?  When resources start to gather around you.”

We came across this quote by Toby Hemenway this week and it perfectly sums up how this weekend went for us. 

First, I have to revisit something from my last post.  The picture of the beetle (large timber framing hammer) Jeremy made last week just didn't do it justice.  This one gives a much more accurate representation of his handiwork!

Jeremy and the Beetle

It was a three day weekend for us (I took Friday off) so the work started as soon as we dropped the kids off at school on Friday morning.  As mentioned before, the greenhouse plastic was in desperate need of replacing, so that was the big job for this weekend.  Friday and Saturday were predicted to be very calm with major wind kicking up Sunday and Monday.  We started by removing all 3 layers of the old plastic and dragging it far enough away from the hoop house to not be in the way.  Then we had to remove all the old hold down channel for the plastic and add some more tape/padding to a couple of edges that had rubbed on the old plastic.  Then we unrolled the new plastic next to the greenhouse.  All of this took until 3:30 or so.  This is where the first resource gathered around us. 

Pulling off the first 2 layers of plastic.

So here we are looking at 128 lbs of plastic (a 40'x105' piece) and a 12' tall hoop house, getting ready to do battle.  Having already done this before by ourselves, we have some idea of the ordeal this is going to be and we have some doubts about whether we will be able to do this by ourselves.  Last time we were able to pull it over an existing layer of plastic which helped immensely.  We had no such bonus this time.

One thing we've learned from all of the things we've done is that sometimes you just have to make yourself do it even when you don't think you can.  So we were mustering our courage, taking a deep breath, getting our last drinks of water and generally preparing for a major ordeal.  Then my brother drove up unannounced!  Hallelujah, the cavalry had arrived!  It is impossible to express how much help it was to have an extra set of hands in this process.  It took about an hour and half, but we got the plastic pulled over the hoop house and locked into the ends on Friday.
 
Saturday morning we were at the farm at 7:30 (yes, AM) to lock down the sides of the plastic before the wind started blowing.  It was a bit chilly with frost on the ground and running the cordless drills made all our fingers get a bit numb, but we got it done.  The plastic looked wonderful - perfect tension and everything.  There were a couple of holes to patch from where it snagged on some loose staples, but they were quickly taken care of.  Excellent!  We got to cross this project off our list!

Then more resources showed up!  Scott came by again around 9:00 and brought presents.  He had some shelves and pegboard he had torn out of a house he's remodeling that he was going to throw on our brush pile.  Instead, we will be repurposing most of it into our soon to be work shop space!  Can't beat that!

At 10:00, our friend Jeff showed up again (we knew this one was coming, but his help is still such a gift).  Saturday he helped us fold up the old plastic to be used on some future project and then he helped start building our new chicken tractor.  The plastic was quite a chore to fold - 3 pieces at 128 lbs each makes for a lot of muscle moving! 

Folding old greenhouse plastic

The chicken tractor, on the other hand, was a bit more technical.  We first had to disassemble some large pallets to get the framing lumber.  We tried the first one with hammers before quickly moving to the sawzall.  The people assembling these things must have been paid by the nail!  It was absurd how many nails were in every piece.  Once we had enough framing pieces, we started cutting and assembling.  Jeff is a carpenter by trade and he made short work of getting the pieces ready and making sure that everything went together correctly.  It was a privilege to work with him and learn some of the tricks to really getting it right.  We managed to get the whole frame together on Saturday before he had to leave. 

Jeff and I and a chicken tractor in process

By the time we got everything picked up and wrapped up, it was 5:30 and we were pooped.  A 10 hour day at the farm is not for the faint of heart.  This was also when we realized we had made a tactical error when pulling the greenhouse plastic.  We did it when it was too cold.  In the 70 degree air on Saturday, the plastic expanded to the point that it was very definitely too loose.  We were too tired to pull off all the side boards and re-tension it on Saturday though.   It was definitely time for showers and some rest!

Sunday was a light day.  We intended to go tension the plastic, but the wind was too strong.  While it has been moving a lot on the frame, it doesn't appear to be any worse for the wear at this point.  We will have to wait for a day that is both warm (60-70 degrees) and still(er) before we will be able to take care of the problem.  Instead we kinda putzed around a little bit and then went to go see our friends Doug and Bayliss for a bit.  ;-)

Later Sunday afternoon, we got to go visit the baby goats!  They are truly adorable little doelings - full of spunk and very lovable.  They are going to be a great addition to our farm in another couple of months.

Kids and kids...

Lastly, on Monday morning we put the finishing touches on the re-organization of the shed!  Jacob put in the lion's share of the work on Saturday while the adults worked on other things, so we just had a few things to finish up.  Check out the before and after!

Before...

After!  :D

Some projects coming up for this week include: 

• continuing to move dirt in the garden and finally finish getting all the beds ready (that project has only been on the list for a year now...). 
• Pull out the cedar limbs from the garden fence behind the blackberries and thread the blackberry canes through the wires.  This should keep them from taking over the aisle again.
• Mulch the raspberries
• Get the next set of beams laid out for the house so that joinery can commence
• finish the chicken tractor

There are some other planting/transplanting things to do too, but they may wait a bit.  This is enough for now! 

A post about mulch!

Mulch is a favorite topic of mine.  It does so many things for a garden - it really is a cure all for most of what ails us!  Here is a short list of the benefits of mulch in a garden:

• Reduces weeding by smothering weed seedlings
• Reduces watering by shading the soil to reduce evaporation
• Keeps soil cooler in spring and warmer in fall
• Adds organic matter to the soil as it breaks down
• Increases soil life by providing a perfect environment for microbes and beneficial insects
• Prevents rain splash on leaves which dramatically reduces leaf molds and diseases
• Looks nice in the garden
• Reduces erosion from heavy rains by dispersing the force of rain drops

So what kind of mulch should you use?  Generally, you want something that is pretty fine and that will break down in the garden within a year.  An exception to this would be mulching perennial herb beds.  A longer lasting (wood chip) mulch on those beds will work just fine. 

A word about wood chip mulch:
A wood mulch in your annual vegetable garden can also work if you are careful to pull it back at planting time.  If the wood gets mixed with the soil then it can reduce the nitrogen available to your plants and it's chunky nature can make it difficult to plant seeds.  Some sources will say that you should never put wood mulch on an annual vegetable garden because it will tie up all the nitrogen in the soil.  What research has shown is that the very top inch or so of the soil will have its nitrogen taken up by the wood as part of its decomposition.  However, deeper in the soil (where most of the plants' roots are) will not be affected.  Wood chips provide a more lasting mulch and as they decompose they provide a much wider and more balanced organic matter to the soil than the other mulch materials often used (grass clippings, hay, straw).  So, the moral of the story is that you shouldn't discount wood chips but you do have to take special care if you use them.

Ok, back to other mulches!  Most of us will end up using an easy and inexpensive mulch like grass clippings or straw.  Old hay can work well, but make sure its partially decomposed or you'll be planting a hay field in your garden.  This can happen with straw too if it wasn't harvested well.  Then you end up weeding wheat out of your garden (been there).  You want whatever it is to be reasonably finely chopped.  Grass clippings will come this way.  You can chop straw or hay by putting it in a bucket or barrel and running a string trimmer in it.  Be careful because this will make a lot of dust and little bits of stuff may come flying out!  Safety glasses are a must!

There are 2 basic categories of things that you will mulch in your garden.  The first includes the big plants - anything that you space a foot apart or more when planting qualifies.  For example: peppers, tomatoes, corn, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatillos, cucumbers, squash and potatoes (sweet and regular).  For transplants, you'll mulch as soon as you put them in the ground.  If you're starting from seeds (i.e. corn, cucumbers, squash), you'll want to wait until the plants are several inches tall to avoid smothering them as they start.  Potatoes are an exception - they have enough energy that you can mulch them from the get go and they'll still come right on up.

The second category is the small stuff.  These are almost all started from seeds and usually have a much closer spacing.  Many of these will be planted close enough together that they will create their own mulch once they are a few weeks old.  Beans, peas, carrots and block planted lettuce all fall in this category.  If you're planting them in traditional rows, then you can mulch the sides of the rows and the aisles as soon as the plants are a few inches tall. 

The next question is how much mulch to use?  The answer is LOTS!  A light covering of mulch does almost nothing.  In order to really suppress weeds, it needs to be 6" thick or so.  Even at that, you'll have to top it off halfway through the season to maintain the moisture retaining and weed suppressing benefits.  As you can tell, this means you need a LOT of mulch material!  For some scale, in our garden in town we mulched aisles and beds with a combination of old hay/straw and grass clippings.  We went through 3 round bales of straw/hay each year (roughly 3000 lbs) plus at least a truck load of grass clippings picked up from the neighborhood.  That is for a garden with about 8,000 sq. ft. of annual vegetable growing space including aisles.  I would have used more too if I had it.

Ok, that's the skinny on mulch in your garden.  Happy gardening and keep that soil covered!

Timber Framing and spring gardening!

As the weather has warmed up, we've definitely gotten more active!  We've been hard at work on the cabin of late.  First, we moved all the timbers up from the hoop house to the building site.  This lets us use the nice flat, level pad as a work space and gets everything close to where it will end up.  We were very fortunate to have a friend, Jeff Bloss, come help!

Jeremy and Jeff on one of the completed timber stacks

Then we started doing the lay ups.  A lay up is where you precisely position every part of a plane of the building and then very precisely scribe all the joints where they belong.  This ensures that everything will (theoretically) fit together just right when we go to assemble it.  So far, we've gotten one of the East-West planes done and one of the North-South planes.  That leaves 8 more planes to complete.  Fortunately, only one of those needs to be done before we can get back to joinery for a while. 

One plane set and time to begin scribing

Other than requiring lots of unique steps, timber framing also requires some unique tools!  Jeremy has been hard at work making 2 custom hammers - one smaller one for chiseling and one large one (called a beetle) for "persuading" timbers into the right place.  This one is BIG!  The square in the picture is 12" on a side for some scale.

The BIG one...otherwise known as a Beetle

But wait!  That isn't all we've been doing!  We also planted about 400 onions and 3 beds of potatoes.  Our tomatoes, peppers, herbs and okra are growing nicely and getting almost ready for transplant into their own pots.  The cabbage and broccoli are doing well in their pots on the balcony despite the cold snap and we have a host of sweet potato slips growing.  It's feeling like garden season around here!

Onion starts along the fence

Tomatoes and peppers growing happily

Sweet potatoes and cabbage

Jeremy has been adding soil from the topsoil pile to some of the beds that didn't get enough last year so that they'll be ready to plant.  We've also signed up for a pilot study of biochar in garden soil.  We will have 3 different test crops (tomatoes, potatoes and cabbage) that we are planning to divide into the following test groups:  control (no additions), compost & minerals (we will add compost and a sea solids solution), biochar with compost and minerals, and a half dose of the mineral and biochar.  With these we hope to demonstrate what effect each component has on the overall growth and productivity of the plants in the beds.  We plan to post updates on here as things grow, so keep your fingers crossed that we manage to keep track of this while building a house this summer!

We have some joyous and some sad news to share.  First the good news!  Our future goat, Peaches, gave birth to 3 beautiful daughters about a week ago.  The girls are healthy and active and positively adorable!  The bad news is that Peaches did not survive the process.  Triplets are really hard on a goat (twins are the norm), especially a yearling, and these 3 were all tied up on the way out.  She survived long enough to provide colostrum for the babies and then passed.  She was a very sweet animal and we will think of her every time we look at her wonderful daughters.

Peaches' three daughters curled up for a nap

The last thing going on right now is that we will have to recover our hoop house in the very near future.  For those of you that don't know, we had 2 large rips in the white plastic cover show up last October requiring a midnight recover of the hoop house with the old plastic we took off of it at its old home.  Luckily we kept the plastic or everything in the hoop house would have been ruined.  Sadly, the old plastic is...well...old, and isn't going to last much longer.  We have been trying to nurse it along until warmer weather, but its about done.  After repairing with duck tape, gaffers tape, epoxy and super glue, we have resorted to this contraption to hold it in place for a few more days.

Epoxy and strapping...not a long term solution!

This means that one of the days this weekend will be spent covering the greenhouse again.  Luckily, we have new plastic on hand so hopefully it will all go much more smoothly than last time!  If nothing else, we've had some practice.

Ok, I think that catches us up!  Hope you're enjoying your spring!

Garden beginnings 2014

Planting season has begun for us, albeit a little late this year.  Normally, I would have planted onions in January, coles (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower) in February and tomatoes and peppers in March.  I missed January and February, but the tomatoes, peppers and a selection of herbs are now germinating away (we hope).

Herbs and Rhubarb

 

Tomatoes and peppers

We weren't willing to give up our cabbage and broccoli, so I stopped by my favorite garden center, Pines, and picked up a flat of them.  The kids and I then potted them up into 3" pots so that they can continue to grow until we put them into the garden.  Although this week is supposed to be wonderful, I don't trust winter to be over just yet!

24 broccoli and 48 cabbage growing happily on the deck

We'll be working on the chicken tractor and getting the garden ready for planting over the next week or two.  Pics and updates will be forthcoming as time allows!

Pallets, pallets everywhere

Well, what can we say?  Opportunity knocked again.  Now that we are adopting livestock, we need housing for them.  Housing generally involves wood of some sort which usually involves money.  We're short on that due to the whole house thing, so when my work decided to unload a large number of very large pallets, we said we'd take them.  Each pallet has 3 long 2x4's and some amount of 1x lumber, so its a substantial amount of free framing lumber.  After 4 trips with the trailer and some stacking, we now have 68 twelve foot or longer pallets at the farm.  If you're wondering what that looks like, here are some pictures:

Half the pallets

This is how the travelled from work to the farm

 

The other half the pallets

 

Sometime soon we'll start building the chicken tractor for the 8 laying hens and rooster.  It is based on the plan shown here:  http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/a-classy-a-frame-tractor  although we're making some modifications.  With a little luck (and some warmer weather) we'll start disassembling pallets to get the framing lumber for it in the next week or so.  Then we'll get to start on the buck's house.  The sheep, fortunately, is small enough to live in a dog house we picked up last year for the other goats, so no construction required there.

In other news, we're starting seeds again!  We hadn't planned to have much of a garden this year, but we changed our mind (nothing like a severe winter to make you dream of a garden).  I started sorting through our seeds tonight to figure out what we already have.  Tomatoes, peppers and herbs will be getting planted soon.  Does this not just look like a winter gardener's paradise?

Seeds everywhere!

Unfortunately, the bucket of soil to start the seeds in is still frozen, so seeds won't actually get started until tomorrow.  :(   That's ok - it was enough fun to sort through all the seeds tonight!  There's one happy gardener in this house tonight.