Yeah, pretty much....

Wow, has it really been that long?

Once again I am a slacker.

Then again, I've worked three weekends out of the last four (and I only got the one off because I was having surgery...) and a number of evenings - and this from a job where the major selling point was no nights and weekends because we have off shift staff.

Since my last post, the cherry trees have bloomed, as have the daffodils, the forsythia, the vincas, some ornamental pears and crabapples... next up should be magnolias, more apples, redbuds, dogwoods, tulips... Next thing I know there will be leaves on all the trees.

There's something about the beginning of spring that I just love. Those cherry trees are so boring and unremarkable fifty weeks of the year, but oh man those two weeks when the cherry blossoms are out make up for all the rest.

I haven't gotten much done lately - between work and my lame foot, I haven't been much use to man or beast. But I have had a little time to do some reading, some learning, even some YouTube surfing for new gardening experiments to try.

I'm not at all confident that the soil here is going to burst forth with vegetable glory. Some areas are reddish-orange clay, other areas are sandy and gravelly. There's a good bit of organic matter in places, but there's also tons of shade and roots to compete with. It's not that I don't think there's anything to work with, I just have to learn what this ground is capable of. At some point we have plans to clear some trees - but not too much. But then you throw in deer, possums, birds, squirrels, and who knows what else (mosquitoes, chiggers, ticks), and it's not the blank garden slate I had in Ohio. Plus, it's much drier here and the summers are longer.

In short, I have a lot to learn.

So my plan for this year are not overly ambitious. Let's just put this dirt through some paces and see what works and what doesn't. Since we have a lot of rotting wood laying around the property, I want to try a hugelkultur experiment. I also want to try growing some crops in self-watering containers. In fact, the only things I'm definitely going to grow in the ground are potatoes, corn, squashes, and melons. Well, and let's be honest - I will end up sticking tomato plants in every leftover space.

Unfortunately, though I'm eager to get started, I haven't had the time or mobility to actually do much yet. And the one flat of seeds I did try to start was dumped by Amelia within a half hour of finishing. I was too disheartened to replant them. I will probably do that tomorrow. And since I'm already behind when it comes to seedlings indoor, I may end up buying some in the end...

Despite all that, the trees are popping and it's only the beginning of March. I'm ready to get some dirt under my fingernails one way or another...

--

Hoop house picture

Here you go Madcap...


For the record, this amount of snow in central North Carolina is headline news. They say this is the first "white Christmas" in decades.

--

Time off at last, and putting it to some good use

During the first half of this year, I didn't take many vacation days. Scattered days off here and there, but not much. Then I got a new job. The unused vacation turned into money, which was much needed. But with the new job I lost the ability to take time off for the first three months. That was tough, especially while trying to relocate, unpack, settle in, learn our way around, and generally adjust to a whole new life.

But now, at long last, I have some actual leisure time. These short days are a bit demotivating, but I still feel like I'm finally getting a chance to whittle away at various things. And with a milder climate, I'm appreciating the ability to make sporadic progress outside.

Because deer are so abundant on our property, I'm trying a different garden strategy. I don't have any pictures yet, but I'll try to get some at some point.

We put in a five-foot chain link fence in our back yard. That wouldn't stop a hungry deer by any means, but it's something. So, I dragged a cattle panel (yes I have an unnatural love for cattle panels) to one corner of the chain link fence. Using the fence as a brace, I bent the 16-foot panel so that it formed an arch about 6 feet tall, and 8 feet wide. Then I pinned the side away from the fence it into the ground. I arched another panel next to the first one. Then another, and another, essentially creating a welded steel tunnel. It's now about 36 feet long if I counted correctly.

I then went back with some fencing wire and tied the arches to each other, since many of the panels had their own ideas about what constitutes an arch. Tying them together made the tunnel somewhat uniform.

On top of the abundant unraked leaves, I'm putting a layer of packing paper from our moving boxes. Then the boxes themselves get deconstructed to make up the next layer. On top of that will go another layer of leaves. (I'm still in the stage where I see the leaves as a huge blessing, after spending years with barely any leaves.)

Anyway, leaving a narrow path down the center of the tunnel, that should give me at least a couple hundred deer-free square feet to work with.

Plus, I can cover it with plastic for an instant greenhouse, or cover it with shade cloth at the height of summer, or grow vining crops up it, like a trellis. Hmm, I could grow vining crops in the sections where I want summer shade and skip the shade cloth. And if I want to get a little creative, I can probably turn it into a winter chicken run to get some free weeding, tilling, and fertilizing.

Sometimes I think planning and plotting and scheming is half the fun of gardening...

--

Container gardening

I've never really done much container gardening. I guess when you have almost 9 acres, it seems weird to be constrained by containers. It always seems a little forced or artificial to me, and I didn't want to bother with it if I didn't have to.

I'll still put some of the bigger crops in the ground - potatoes, corn, tomatoes - and I'll probably skip a few things this year. But after last year's roaring success with carrots in containers, I am getting in deeper. In addition to the carrots, I've added onions, parsnips, spinach, swiss chard, various lettuces, radishes, and dill. I plan to add a bunch of herbs once we get a little farther into the season.

And the beauty of it? I can take my garden with me if we do ever sell this house.

--

Fresh inspiration

As I've whined too much already, it's hard to garden from Limbo. Everything is either tentative or hypothetical. I'm not ordering any seeds this year as I have such a large stockpile and a lack of motivation to try new stuff. Most of my winter garden reading attempts have tended more toward frustration than inspiration.

But I've found a wonderful exception: The Permaculture Home Garden by Linda Woodrow. It's a bit hard to come by here, since it's out of Australia. I'm not sure why it isn't more widely available. I got mine from a third-party seller on Amazon.com for about $35.

I love some of the ideas that permaculture strives for, but you almost have to be an expert botanist to pull off some of the techniques. They're often heavy on cool concepts, but light on detailed examples. Other techniques require loads of labor or money or resources up front (teams of workers, earth movers, materials, etc.) that aren't always feasible.

Where Woodrow's book shines is that she's come up with a system that implements the concepts of permaculture in a way that:
- works on a home scale
- doesn't require a huge up-front investment (probably comparable to starting a traditional garden from scratch)
- incorporates lots of familiar annual vegetables, fruit & nut trees, and chickens (these are a few of my favorite things)
- can be adapted to use a worm farm if chooks aren't a good fit for your site
- can produce an amazing quantity of food from a relatively small space
- is small enough to fit in most suburban yards, but that is modular enough to scale up quite well
- is aesthetically pleasing enough to work almost anywhere

The basic unit of the system is a circle. These are combined to form a larger building block she calls a "mandala". A mandala has a circular bed in the middle, surrounded by six more circles. These circular mandalas can even be made into a sort of "super mandala" if you're feeling really ambitious or want to make a living from it. (My inner geek loves the "fractalness" of it all.)

Each circular keyhole garden is 2 meters across, and after adding in paths, a full-sized mandala is about 15 meters across - or 20 meters if you extend out to the eventual drip lines of the small fruit & nut trees. I think not being in Australia, I wouldn't plant trees all the way around the circle. We don't get nearly as much sun. But trees around the southern edges might work. Then again I'm all about the trees, so I might push the limits myself.

Woodrow uses a clever adaptation of the chicken tractor to make a "chook dome" - a circular chicken pen 2 meters across (and about 2 meters high at the apex) that covers up one circle. The pen moves from circle to circle through the season with the chickens taking on the tasks of tilling, fertilizing, pest control and waste management.

But if you don't have room for a 15m mandala, there's no reason you couldn't break it into 2m circles and rearranging them to fit your space. And there's no reason you couldn't have less than 7 circles. You'd lose some of the benefits, but it seems modular enough that it'd still work pretty well.

So no matter where we end up or even if we stay put, I can while away the hours soaking up the details of her system, making minor adjustments to account for the climate differences, and being able to plop it all down as is in almost any location. Not to mention scouring the internet for people who have tried this system to see how it worked, what changes they made (like the geodesic chook dome)

I still can't necessarily start doing it, but it's enough to get me through the rest of winter with my sanity intact.

It's probably a little iffy to recommend a gardening book that uses unconventional techniques that you've never tried which were designed for a different climate (and a different hemisphere) that you haven't even finished yet.

But I don't care. I highly recommend this book. I've danced with many of these concepts before. I've just never seen them put together into a system that is so elegant (in every sense of the word).

One last note - as I was reading the book I was entertaining my brain by always converting metric to non-metric, north-facing to south-facing, east to west, etc. Well, until I realized halfway through the book that while Australia is a long way off, the sun does still rise in the east and set in the west there. The Southern Hemisphere doesn't rotate the other way around. Duh...

(Oh, and Linda has a blog that I will be devouring perusing shortly.)

A few images from others who have tried some of this stuff:





--

One Local Turkey

We managed to get a local turkey from a nearby farm. The kids got to pet some big fluffy rabbits, feed some goats, and chase some poultry. Our turkey was (formerly) a Royal Palm, which I'd never encountered before. They're really beautiful birds.

We also had some potatoes from our garden. We were going to have sweet potatoes from our garden* as well, but the yield wasn't really enough to work with. I also used some carrots from our garden**. We forgot all about our home-canned cranberry sauce.

* By "from our garden" I mean "from our fill dirt pile where I stuck them when I couldn't find a better place."

** By "from our garden" I mean "from a giant plastic flower pot filled with sand, peat, and compost." I never, ever have luck with carrots in the ground. Probably because they're slow to germinate and I'm slow to weed. And I've always lived where there's heavy clay soil. But this year I decided on a whim to try the flower pot, and I'm really excited about the results. I did virtually no weeding or watering, and I got some baby carrots, but quite a few the length of my hand and as big around as a quarter.***

*** You know, you've got a smutty mind.

I'm thinking next year I'll plant carrots in 5 gallon buckets. I've heard that if you're storing carrots in a root cellar, you should keep them in sand. So after a frost or two (Eliot Coleman is right, they're sweeter if you don't harvest until after a frost), I can just pick up my buckets, move them to a sheltered area, and pull them as needed all winter. If any are left the next spring, I can just take them back outside and let them go to seed in their second year.

I'm really way to excited about this whole carrot thing.

Meanwhile, I've got other priorities to attend to, so I may not be posting much here for the next couple weeks.

--

The Beginner's Guide to Hoeing

So you want to learn how to hoe? It's not for everyone. You think you've got what it takes? Are you willing to get down and dirty? Do you like getting all hot and sweaty? Do you, um.... do you know when to push and when to pull, and how to perfect your stroke? And.... uh.... hmmm....

Ok, I give up. That's all the tacky innuendos I can come up with. It's harder than it looks. (That's what she said.) And a big welcome to all future Google-based degenerates.

Now on to working that tool....

If you want to keep the weeds out of your garden, the earlier the better. I mean, if you get to this point, the best hoe in the world is not going to get you anywhere:
Now, there's a point somewhere before that where the hoe is useful. And there's probably something to be said for getting out your aggression by whacking the ground Psycho-style with a sharp metal implement. But I really couldn't say first hand. Much like the native birds of New Zealand, I have almost no natural enemies. And I certainly don't have any frustrations or challenges in my life to work out.

My favorite pointy-tipped hoe is great for this kind of aggressive weeding. But really, the best time to hoe is before the weeds are even visible. The time to attack is when the tiny little weedings are still below the surface, plotting their invasion.

This is why, as my garden has expanded, I've converted from Square Foot gardening to the more traditional long row gardening (though my rows are both long and wide, for whatever that's worth).

I also converted from small plastic row markers to 3-foot lengths of rebar (or small garden fenceposts) stuck in the ground at either end of the row, with string or twine strung between. I actually put the posts in and run the line before planting the seeds. Then I use an Earthway seeder to plant the seeds, using the string as a guide. That way I know right where the planted seeds will emerge. It also allows me to hoe right along side the rows without fear of digging up my crops.

Hoeing frequency varies depending on the weather, but generally I try to get out there a couple times a week in the spring. I use the grass growth rate as a guide. If the grass is growing quickly, I try to hoe more often. As long as there are still no visible weeds, it's a pretty simple task.

(A third advantage is that the posts are good at keeping hoses from dragging across tender little plants. The downside is that I can't write on the posts, so I have to remember to write down what I planted where after I'm done. At least I have a record of it beyond little plastic markers though.)

Once the crops I planted are established, I don't worry quite so much about the weeds. The garden plants can hold their own much better once they're over six inches tall. I may try Eliot Coleman's trick of planting cover crops like clover underneath my main crops in early July to act as a mulch and a green manure at the same time.

Of course, this whole gardening thing is always a work in progress, but that's the strategy this year. I can definitely tell the difference between where I've been keeping up on hoeing and where I haven't.

Let's take a closer look at what I'm talking about....

Here's a close-up of some dirt that's just been hoed:
Looks like dirt, right?

Now let's look a little closer at the center of this picture, with a little color enhancement:
THAT is what we want to get rid of. That little guy was going to be a weed. Not any more.

Now let's zoom back out to the original photo. I put red arrows next to all the other little wanna-be weeds. That's at least nine visible (former) weeds in just a tiny patch of dirt. And they took a sweep or two of the hoe to eradicate.
Actually I was only trying to take a picture of the one in the center. I didn't even notice all the others. But once I got it on the computer and enlarged it, I could see them all over the shot.

So that's what we're after. Now go out there and get hoein'.

--

Favorites, Part 1: The awesome hoe thingy

I thought I'd write about a few current favorites around the homestead. (I adjusted the wording in that first sentence a little so you wouldn't start thinking about raindrops on roses...) So I started writing these in a single post, but as I am long-winded and have no editor, I decided it was best to split them up into separate posts.

Up first, a mystery hoe.

--

I bought a few sturdy-looking garden tools at a yard sale last spring. I was also able to take a some old garden tools from my grandmother's toolshed after she passed away. Unfortunately, last year's garden was a total wash. We had flooding. We had a baby. We bought a dairy cow. I made a valiant attempt to plant some stuff, but if you don't keep up with the weeds, you're not gonna harvest much (...which is why we signed up for a CSA last year too.)

Anyway, so I didn't really get to try out any of the new (old) tools last year.

This year, I'm taking the garden more seriously, and giving it a very high priority. I'm honing my techniques. I'm staying on top of it. So far, at least.

And I've fallen in love with one tool in particular. It probably has an official name, but I don't know what it is. The closest thing I can find is called a ridging hoe, or sometimes a pointed hoe. But I don't know who makes or sells ones like this. If you do, let me know in the comments.

It's like a standard long-handled hoe, but instead of a rectangular head with a flat edge, the head is arrow-shaped:


Why do I like it so much? Well, keep in mind as you read these points that we have some pretty gnarly clay soil. Working clay soil is almost always a workout, so anything that makes a job a tiny bit easier is welcome, and any tool that can deal with it well is a blessing.

If you're going after a big weed with this thing, that pointed tip will penetrate the soil a lot more effectively than a flat edge. When my aim is good, I can even pop a pretty good sized clump of grass out with this. Chop hard right behind it and the head digs in an cuts the roots underneath. Pull on the handle and out pops the unwanted green stuff. When my aim is bad and I miss, the hoe goes to one side or the other, and the edge slices that side of whatever I was aiming for. Not a bad consolation prize.

If you turn the hoe to one side just a bit, the edge can cut through the top layer of dirt like an ordinary hoe (though the angle is better than my other hoes). If your arms get a little tired from repetitive motion, you switch hands, flip the hoe around and use the other edge (which gives you about twice as much sharp edge to a normal hoe). If you need to make a furrow to drop some seeds in, just drag that point through the soil. (In fact, I suspect this was the initial purpose of this design.) If you need to push or pull a little soil to cover a seed or shore up a seedling, that pointed tip gives you a lot of precision in tight places. And so far the tool seems tough as nails.

A good garden tool is a wonderful thing. Thanks Grandma!

--

[ UPDATE: Apparently it's called a "Warren hoe" (or sometimes a "planting hoe"). Mine appears to be made by Union Tools, but I'm not positive. What remains of the writing on the handle is pretty hard to decipher. ]

Independence Days

I've decided to participate in Sharon's Independence Days Challenge this year. It was interesting reading all the participants' regular updates last year, but more than that, it'll hopefully keep me honest, inspired, and motivated. I know a lot of people found it really helpful last year.

The goal of the challenge is to do at least one thing every week in the following categories:

1. Plant something - This one will be easy for a while. This week I planted potatoes (Butte, Caribe, and Yukon Gold), and onions - generic yellow onion sets from the garden center. I've got some Jaune Paille Des Vertus I started from seed that I'll be transplanting as soon as they're hardened off, but I've had bad luck with onions from seed in the past. Thus the hedging with boughten onion sets. I also transplanted some comfrey, and Lori planted a bunch of stuff in her part of the garden.

2. Harvest something - We harvested a bit of asparagus. After the agonizing three year wait from planting until the first harvest, I'm dying to finally try some. And eggs. Always eggs.

3. Preserve something - Ummm.... I've got nothin'.

4. Reduce waste - This is a bit of a cheat, but we got a SodaStream Fountain Jet, for making soft drinks at home. No longer will our soft drinks consist of pulling ground water from somewhere else (drought-troubled Atlanta?) and energy-intensive high-fructose corn syrup (with its possible links to diabetes) and shipped across the country. Reusable bottles, our own water, no HFCS. I'm hoping to experiment with some home-made flavor recipes.

5. Preparation and Storage - Lots of good stuff here. Got a copy of Small Scale Grain Raising by Gene Logsdon, and The Winter Harvest Handbook by Eliot Coleman. Haven't had a chance to read them yet. But Lori and I have both been working our way through Coleman's The New Organic Grower (me for a second time) with thoughts about another garden expansion next year. Also, found a local guy to help me with small engine repair. He seems to know a lot about a lot of useful subjects. Got one step closer to true rotational grazing with some reworking of our fences. There's more in the works here, but I'll save it for next week.

(And just for the record, I'm taking full credit for the new edition of Small Scale Grain Raising. I described here in this very blog my plea to the author two years ago for a re-release of this hard-to-find classic....)

6. Build Community Food Systems - Bought a couple frozen chickens from a neighbor. Sold surplus eggs at the office. Mailed seeds to a fellow gardener. (Anyone else need some?) Bought a few heirloom seedlings from the Adena Mansion Plant Heirloom Plant Sale. Talked gardening and offered encouragement to a neighbor.

7. Eat the Food - Ate some home-grown eggs. Ate some home-made banana bread (does that count?), and getting ready to eat some home-made pumpkin bread from home-canned pumpkins (that's a little closer....). Looking forward to that asparagus...

A question for gardening experts...

You're not supposed to use wood chips as mulch on your plants unless it's been aged. The explanation given is that as the wood rots, it will (initially at least) leach nitrogen from your soil that your plants would otherwise be able to use.

You're also not supposed to use manure on your garden unless it's been aged, because it is too high in nitrogen and can burn your plants.

So what if (hypothetically) I have wood chips and chicken manure mixed together that haven't been aged. Say, like bedding in a chicken pen. What if I cleaned out our chicken pen and used the bedding directly as mulch? Could the two pieces of conventional wisdom above cancel each other out?

Two points, before you answer:

1. This is non-edible landscaping. Shrubs and such.
2. I already did it.

What can I say? I like to live dangerously.

And on a side note - the old riding mower I bought last week is already dead. The curse lives.

--

Green grass, blue skies, brown eggs, and purple flowers...

I'm excited that I can finally, I think, get some planting done this weekend. We've got sunny skies and nice temperatures forecast for the weekend, and a couple days without rain leading in, to dry things up a little. It's always hard to go to work on a beautiful spring day, but somehow working from home makes it even harder. I can see the garden, the sunshine, the things that need to get done. They're right under my nose! Not that I'm complaining. I wouldn't trade it. But at this point it has surpassed the kids running around making noise as the #1 distraction.

I'm also excited that we're getting about 4 dozen eggs a week already. Probably more, in fact, but the chickens do love their secret nesting spots. I think (though I may be wrong) that this is higher egg production for this time of year than we usually get.

I'm excited that the redbuds are starting to bloom. My favorite tree blooming always coincides with my favorite time of the year.

I'm excited to hear news this morning about possible high speed rail service in Ohio. But rail service of any kind in Central Ohio would be a nice option. Columbus is the second largest US city (after Phoenix AZ) with no passenger rail service of any kind. The nearest non-industrial rail lines are about 70 miles away. Personally, I'd be willing to lose the "high speed" prefix. It sounds like we'd need to lay all new rails and build & pay for expensive trains. I'm probably naive, but I'd love to see them try to use existing rails and technologies. I'll hold most of my excitement until I see anything actually happen, but talking about it is a good start.

And finally (and I never thought I'd say this), I'm excited about mowing. It won't last, but for now, it sure is nice to be able to cut down the waist high dried up weed stalks filling our pastures. I'm scattering weed seeds everywhere in the process, but what can you do? At least the grass has a head start. It's amazing how much greener the fields look after cutting (or at least knocking down) the dead stuff. I've got some plans to make some minor fencing adjustments to make rotational grazing easier, so hopefully I can find a couple hours to do that this weekend as well. (Have I mentioned how much I love cattle panels? It makes fencing changes so much easier.)

Yet another positive post. Must be spring...

--

Things that are awesome

There are a lot of things that suck out there right now, and sometimes I get fixated on them. But today I want to fixate on the things in my life that Don't Suck. So here are ten (count 'em, ten!) awesome things from our world.

1. Owen is taking his first steps. He also managed to touch a chicken for the first time. They were gathering around him in the back yard in hopes that he had something edible to share. He swatted at one and brushed its wing. Then he cracked up. It was funny the second time, and the third, and so on until the chickens figured out to keep their distance. Owen also had a long conversation with Meadow, which also made him giggle.

2. Lori helping with the gardening this year. She's helped in the past, but this year she's really digging in. She's taking a shot at Square Foot Gardening for out seasonal, herbal, and kitchen needs. This has left me free to focus on a shorter list of high volume pantry crops. Fun for all concerned. She was out there shoveling topsoil into the newest raised bed with a baby on her back! If that's not dedication, I don't know what is.


3. Lori's chicken-resistant garden beds. (You probably can't see it, but there's bird netting draped over that frame. It could also be draped with clear plastic for a mini-greenhouse, or shade cloth to keep greens from bolting too soon. Or canvas for that Oregon Trail look. )


4. Off-duty hours. Lori and I revived an old tradition from when the twins were little. Each of us has designated hours during the week, where we can go off and do what we want - read a book, work on projects, do something frivolous, etc. - guilt free. The other person's job during that time is to wrangle three crazy kids while retaining as much of their own sanity as possible. Raising a special needs kid, a high maintenance kid, and a baby while trying to learn about small scale farming from scratch, while also holding down a day job in the midst of an economic crisis, can get to be a bit much sometimes. This is a great safety valve to get time for what you really want every now and then.

5. Craigslist. Picked up a dirt cheap riding mower. Well, one and a half actually. The guy had a spare parts mower of the same model, with working engine, larger mowing deck, etc. that he begged me to take away. The back end of it is missing. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but hopefully I can swap out for the larger mowing deck. In my spare time. I do hate the thought of having yet another old engine to maintain, but it does increase my odds of having at least one functioning at any given time. It cost less than a new push mower. I still can't understand how people can spend $5,000 - $8,000 on a zero turn mower - especially when all we have around here are giant, flat, treeless empty lawns. But I digress.

6. Lack of illness. It's been at least two weeks since anybody in our house was sick. It's about to change, based on e5's cough, but still.... After a long winter of colds and infections and viruses (and hospital bills!) it's nice to have a breather.

7. The YMCA. It's fun to stay at the YMCA... for swimming lessons for the kids, beginning karate lessons for me, for the fundraising they did for Amelia, and so on.

8. The Anti-Coloring Book. It's got a bunch of creative coloring ideas for kids, with very limited designs and lots of blank space. "You've just discovered a new planet. Design a flag for your new world." (E5 drew a modified American flag. One star (since it's a new planet and doesn't have states yet), with vertical red/white stripes. "You just discovered a new bird in the jungle. Draw a skecth of the bird to send back to the museum." (E5 drew a remote-controlled robot bird.) It kept him busy during Amelia's recent visit to the genetics specialist. On the blank dinner plate, he drew a brown blob, with a yellow rectangle next to it. He whispered to me that it was poop, with pee to drink. Ahh, five-year-olds. But later when the doctor asked him what he was drawing, he looked sheepish, and then told her it was meatloaf, with a glass of lemonade.

9. Spring peepers. Here's a little audio clip recorded on my front porch one night. Sorry that the audio quality is not great...

10. Amelia taking the term "garden bed" a little too literally.

A new challenge

Well, after the rousing success(?) of my Easiest Challenge Ever, I'm raising the stakes. In the words of frequent Presidential candidate Pat Paulsen, "I've upped my standards. Now, up yours!"

But instead of posting it here, I'm using a more credible platform. And so, my wise and brilliant readers, please click on this link and join the fun. Spring is coming up fast. Well, unless you're in the southern hemisphere. In that case, I guess you'll need to come up with your own challenge....


--

Just to counterbalance the freakin' rainbows...

...I give you... the Rat-Tailed Maggot:

What five-year-old boy could resist such a disturbing little wriggler? Not ours. And I challenge you to find a critter with a greater need for the services of a PR firm.

They're like a cross between a regular maggot, a legless unborn rat, and a fleshy mini-cucumber with a long tail. Oh, and they're semi-aquatic. A lively garnish for your morning beverage maybe?

And also, since Sharon Astyk posted about garden doom, and Greenpa followed up with more good info, I thought I'd pony up and show you my real-life example. You think you've got weeds? Try this recipe:

- Spend a couple years building up already good soil with organic dairy compost, leaves, straw, chicken bedding, char, and any other organic matter that turns up.

- Till the soil and then plant a bunch of different seeds and plants.

- Join a CSA in case you can't keep up on the garden this year

- Have a baby

- Buy a dairy cow

- Get cooler-than-average temperatures and regular rainfall a couple times a week all the way into July...

- Refrain from weeding, hoeing, or other forms of cultivation.

What do you get?

Well... the pictures don't do it justice, but when the weeds start looking back at eye level, you know you're in a bad way:


See, what I'm actually doing is not neglecting my garden. Oh no. I'm embarking on an ambitious breeding program to create weed-tolerant garden crops. Yes, that is exactly what I'm doing. And also generating lots of biomass. And yeah, and some short-term carbon sequestration. It's aaaallll according to my plan...

--

Finally catching up...

Help! It's going to harvest my brain!!!

AAIEEEE!

A lot has happened in our lives over the past few weeks. Some good, some not. So this post may be a bit like drinking from a firehose.

Let's see...

- We had one late night emergency room visit (for something neither serious nor interesting)

- Our 20+ year old cat Pepper was put to sleep. He had a good, long life.


- One of our chickens died - not from predators, but some other malady. The rest seem fine.

- Our cow got mastitis. She got it pretty bad and we had to medicate her and dump her milk for about 10 days. (A big thank-you to my wife for playing vet.) I was actually surprised that it hadn't happened earlier, what with my inexperience and all. But still it's a pain. As with many bacterial problems these days, it flared up again after the medication wore off, so we're back to new medicine and dumping milk for several more days.

- I took the twins to the county fair over the weekend, where much fun was had and my wallet was beaten to a pulp. And Amelia tried to escape that ride where your back is against the inside of a giant rotating drum, which then tips up vertically. Her escape attempt was basically to sit down, but that put the little safety strap above her head. My brain knew enough about physics to realize she wasn't in any danger, but I still held her arm with a death grip until the ride was over.

- Our hay was cut - though our neighbor who was doing the cutting couldn't fit his equipment through our 10-foot gates. Another neighbor stepped in and cut it for us. Unfortunately it's been rained on like five or six times since then. So, uh... hooray for compost!

- We harvested our first blueberries! They don't really grow well here because they are so picky about acidic soil. But I have such fond memories of picking blueberries with my grandfather in Connecticut (and my grandmother's endless blueberry concoctions) that I had to plant some. So I got three dwarf varieties and planted them in a big planter box full of peat moss and mulched with pine nuggets. Mmmmm. I hate to say it but they're even better than my grandparents' berries...



- Our gooseberries are almost ripe. Let's hope we get some before the chickens eat them all. The blueberries have bird netting over them. I may need to do the same for the gooseberries. And the currants. The grapes are coming along nicely. We'll have to wait another year (or maybe more) before we get apples, peaches, blackberries, or raspberries. Probably two more years for cherries. I'd guess even longer for any of our nut trees or paw paws.


- On the other hand, our "garden" is literally knee-high with weeds. I guess between the baby, the cow, and all this other stuff, something had to give. Thank you CSA for providing our garden veg, since my own efforts are doomed.

- I decided to abandon our worm bin. The chickens end up getting most of our kitchen scraps rather than the worms. A neglected worm bin generates fruit flies and the like.

- Speaking of which, I moved our "compost bin" (quotes because the chickens eat it all so I never have any compost) from it's old location between the house and the barn to a new spot right under the kitchen window. So now when cooking is done, you just crank open the window and dump the veggie scraps out. The chooks didn't have any trouble adapting to the new location.

- We saw our first eastern bluebird today. They might be my favorite bird, just because they're so rare at this point. Here's a really poor photo...



- We made strawberry jam for the first time. We got about 7 pints. Then we followed that up with five pints of black raspberry jam. Oh. My. Goodness. My mouth is watering as I type this.

- Our cow's been bred (artificially) to a Jersey bull. Our neighbor with the loaner Angus was taking too long. We're already a month or two later than we'd like. At this point I may be milking well into January. Next time we'll know better.

I did see something rather interesting the other day. I wandered out to the pasture to find Meadow. Usually when I go out to milk she's already waiting for me, with her head in the stanchion, looking expectant. But for some reason yesterday she wasn't around. I soon found out - she had a new friend. There was a red-winged blackbird perched on her back, gobbling up flies.

The flies have been a nuisance. but the home remedies didn't do anything, and the store-bought fly spray didn't do much either (and is a possible suspect in our chicken death). So instead of spraying anything, I've switched to closing up the barn to keep it as dark as I can get it. I also try to shoo the flies off her before she comes into the barn. Of course that doesn't work if she's already in there tapping her hoof waiting for me. I also hung some 3-inch wide strips of screening material in the doorway (which will make more sense after a future post). The idea was that as she walks through the strips, the flies are brushed off. It does seem to help a little, but I didn't have enough strips to go all the way across the doorway yet.

Another trick that Meadow came up with the other day, which was pretty successful, was to gallop and buck a little while swishing her tail, just before she runs into the barn. The flies all take off and she runs out from under the cloud. It's interesting what can happen when you leave the work to Mother Nature.

Speaking of which, I was talking to the vet about her mastitis problem. She said one thing that can help is to run cold water on the udder - it can get very hot and feel feverish. I thought, well, that explains why Meadow's been in the pond so much - right up to her udder.

And finally, a photo I took of Amelia one day while Lori was out all afternoon with the boys.

I call it, "Bad Father":
--

...a needle pulling thread

So this year, knowing we had a baby on the way, I didn't figure on much of a garden. Oh, I hoped for a garden. I pined for a garden. But realistically, I couldn't be sure I'd be able to pull off a full-blown garden.

So we decided to join our local CSA. We didn't actually know this existed last year, but we eventually found it. So it should be interesting, especially since this year they've added strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, and peaches. So we are ensured a steady supply of fresh fruits and veggies from June to October. (Meanwhile, I'm hitting our favorite farm market to feed my local cider addiction, local meats, and for whatever else they might have.)

So I guess I'm going to start every paragraph with the word "so" today.

So anyway, due to some creative scheduling, it looks like I'll have my produce and eat it too. I managed to plant the garden anyway. So far I've got garlic I planted last fall, along with onions, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, chard, bell peppers, jalapenos, a couple cauliflower, a few cabbages, popcorn, pole beans, winter squash, and carrots planted. Still to go in the ground are a variety of bush beans, some summer squash, cucumbers, melons, herbs and flowers. And maybe some other stuff that I forgot about.

So I also think I may actually get to try my grand field corn experiment, planting up to a half acre of it depending on how far my seed corn goes. I'll probably fill the rest of the tilled area with sunflowers. Assuming I get the tractor running long enough to turn over the soil.

So if that's not enough, I've also got a whole mess of nut trees and a few cherry trees that I'm going to plant over the next several days or weeks. So that'll be fun.

So in case you are wondering, it's amazing how much you can accomplish with one hour first thing in the morning before the kids are up, and one hour after dinner in the evening.

So... I can't decide whether to reveal the big surprise project yet or not. But I will tell you that my muscles are sore, my hands are somewhere between leather and sandpaper, my tools are scattered, and I have to be on the road at 4:30 tomorrow morning. I guess you'll have to wait for my next post.

So I'd better get to bed.

--

Warmth and Happiness and Light...

...at least in a hypothetical sense.

The more involved I get in gardening - specifically food-oriented gardening - the more I yearn for a small greenhouse. Or at least some good cold frames. I even scouted out what kind of materials my dream greenhouse would be made from, drawn up plans, the whole nine. I wasn't planning anything too elaborate - maybe 4' x 10', but even so, I could never get it high enough on the priority list to allocate any funds. It wouldn't even take a ton of money to do what I want if I supply the labor myself, but other things have always taken precedence so far.

But sometimes, where there's a will, there's a way. So after a year or more of keeping my eyes and ears open, my evil plan is finally coming together. And practically for free.

I got a few dozen salvaged windows from a campus house that was being renovated, at no cost.

I got a pile (actually a few piles) of cinder blocks from some guy's barn when he wanted to clean it out. Also at no cost.

I got some food-grade plastic barrels - perfect planting bench height, cool-season thermal mass and warm-season irrigation - from a trucker up the road. Not free, but cheap. (Nothing says "rainwater cachement" like the scent of Apple Schnapps flavoring...)

I bought some pressure-treated 4x4 posts a while back in anticipation of this project. I had to pay for those. I've also got a bunch of scrap lumber leftover from various other projects here and there.

And I'm pretty sure I've managed to arranged for some free labor. Well, not precisely free, but bartered.

The plan is to build it off the south side of the pole barn, right about here:

(You like our high class chicken shelter on the left there?)

Now I just have to see if my hired (bartered?) hands and I can turn these pieces into something functional once the weather breaks. Of course, this is from somebody who has had an unfinished grape arbor of the simplest design standing unfinished off the back of the house for the better part of a year. But still...

Here are some ideas I'm kicking around. Feel free to laugh, point, and tell me how foolish I am...

My hope is that the rainbarrels can catch water off the roof, and store up some heat on sunny days in late winter and early spring. The idea is that if I put a little platform on top of the black-painted, water-filled barrels, the sun-heated water will provide a little overnight warmth for seed germination.

Of course, in reality, I'm almost certain the barrels will freeze, because it'll be cloudy every day and I'll have started too early. So maybe some cold-frames as backup. And maybe only one or two water-filled barrels as an experiment.

I'd like to include that window on the pole barn inside the attached greenhouse, so that I can use it as a vent to let warm, humid air into the barn on cool, sunny days.

I thought about bowing a cattle panel over the still-mostly theoretical greenhouse, to act as a trellis for some climbing annuals, so the glass would be shaded by high summer. I don't remember hearing of this being done, and there's probably a good reason for that, but I don't know what it is.

It's also been suggested to me that I put some hardware cloth or similar over the glass to protect from hail damage, since this is actual, real glass. That might make cleaning the glass difficult, depending on how it's done. I wonder if I can somehow combine the arbor idea with the hail protection idea. I don't remember the last time I saw any serious hail, but it'd only take once.

Hopefully I can find uh, well... a window of opportunity to make this happen. If nothing else, it'll give the chooks a place to hang out where there's daylight and not too much wind.

[Speaking of wind... I've probably mentioned that it's always windy here. Ridiculously windy sometimes. I often have to fetch trash can lids, and sometimes empty trash cans, from a quarter mile away. Our west-facing fence lines are like big trash nets. And when a nasty storm came through the other night, it took the neighbor's trampoline - one of those big deals with the netting around the outside - across their yard, over their fence, and into a crumpled mess a few hundred yards away in the other neighbor's back yard.]

Anyway, so that's my evil plot, more or less. I'll let you know if and when it happens...

Wish me luck.

--

Question

Which is weirder: To steal bagged leaves from somebody's front yard, or to knock on somebody's door and ask them if you can take the bagged leaves from their front yard?

I'm on a never-ending quest to add all kinds of organic matter and nutrients to my garden soil, to the extent that I may need professional help. So far that has included organic dairy compost, Com-til from the local wastewater treatment plant, hay, straw, ashes, charcoal, cardboard, newspaper, shredded paper, goat/donkey/chicken manure and bedding, garden crop residue, wood chips, dried molasses, and now, leaves.

You see, we don't have any mature trees on our property. We have a few beech trees and a thicket of willows growing around the edge of the pond, but as this was cropland just a few years ago, most of the trees are the ones I've planted, and few are taller than me.

So while I was in town running some errands, I snagged some bags of leaves. (I asked, in case you're wondering. I didn't want some nice old lady calling in my license plates to Circleville's Finest.)

A secondary benefit to this particular facet of my little organic matter problem (I can quit whenever I want) was that my kids, for once in their lives, got to play in a big pile of leaves.




The chickens didn't really need to be introduced to the scratching potential of the leaf pile, but e5 was more than happy to show them around anyway.

Six garbage bags of leaves in a big pile, and within an hour our feathered friends had spread them in a nice even layer across the whole garden expansion area.

Hello, my name is e4, and I'm an organic matter addict.

--

Four season gardening

We planted eggs in our fall garden, and look what sprouted!


Actually, they're just taking some dust baths in the soil, now that I've pulled the last crops out and tilled the ground up a little. They do love their dirt.

--