Have you ever wondered how far out your pet roams during the day and at night?

Thanks to a cat named Mr Lee it is now possible to track your animal on a plug and play level.

The low end gizmo records up to 30 hours of prowling and needs to be downloaded via USB cable. 44 dollars.



The high end version transmits live data through GMS cel phone technology.
125 dollars.

Both interface with Google maps and claim to be easy to use.

I could see this being handy for goats and sheep or just about any level of livestock bigger than a chicken.

It would be interesting to see where Lucy spends her time, but I predict Huckleberry's map would only consist of him going from the couch to the chair to his basket with multiple trips to his food dish.

You can barely make out where the left rut here has several cinder blocks laid next to each other in an attempt to harden up an area that sometimes has running water passing through.

It's been over 4 years now and the cinder block mini ford has proven itself to be a long term workable replacement to big gravel, which has a tendency to spread out and sink even deeper under these conditions.

The only problem was a 20 degree tilt over time as heavy trucks and golf carts weighed heavily on its outer edge. I think the angle might even help some of the tires grip easier in wet conditions, but it's never been a problem.

Harbor Freight in Johnson City is an awesome store!

The manager was in a good mood and gave us the additional 2 year warranty on each solar power kit along with the portable power packs.

Stay tuned for more details as I unbox and set up this new technology.

sk1ppy14 from somewhere in the United Kingdom has done a fine job fabricating this automatic chicken coop door closer/opener from an old gate opener.

These medium sized gate openers will sometimes get weak over years of heavy usage and require replacement. What a great way to extend the usefulness of this farm gadget.

After carefully snipping butternuts off the vine and felling towering sunflowers with a single blow, it was time to harvest our experimental beans.  First came the garbanzos --- aren't they lovely?  The only problem is that what you see in this photo is nearly the entire harvest.  I'm not giving up on the variety, though, since a reader commented a few months ago to let me know that the extremely confusing instructions on the seed packet were really trying to tell me to plant the garbanzos at the same time as peas.  I planted them at the frost free date instead, so I'll have to give the crop a more fair shot next year.

Next stop "shelly beans", as folks around here like to call beans that you grow for drying.  The harvest in this bed was much better, despite the fact that bean bugs ate the plants down to nubbins...then moved on to my delightful Masai beans.  I'm tempted to blame the arrival of this new garden pest on the shelly beans, but I suspect that it just took the beetles a few years to find us.  Next year, I'll add the Mexican Bean Beetle to my list of bad bugs to squash weekly, and maybe all of our beans will do better.

Although the quantity of pods from the shelly bean bed was good, I discovered that I should have picked the drying beans much sooner.  Many people leave beans for drying to harden on the plant, but our climate is just too damp for that sort of harvest.  By the time I picked them, many of the older pods had begun to mold, and over half of the beans were discolored.  Next year, I'll harvest the beans when the pods are still slightly green, then allow them to dry inside, out of the weather.

Finally, I came to our Urd Beans (a variety of sprouting bean.)  I thought this bed was a goner after the deer nibbled it nearly down to the ground...then repeated the maneuver a week later.  But the Urd Beans have a saving grace --- bean bugs don't like them.  Despite the name "Bean", Urd Beans are in an entirely different genus than Phaseolus vulgaris (which includes green beans and the green-bean-like shelling beans I planted.)  Instead, Urd Beans (Vigna mungo) are in the same genus as black-eyed peas, a group that seems to be of little interest to our current crop pest.

I was also pleased to see that Urd Bean pods are hairy, a feature that seems to repel moisture, keeping the seeds inside dry even after the pods turn black.  I harvested half of the pods, leaving the green fruits on the vine to be picked at a later date.  The only problem I foresee with Urd Beans so far is their size --- shelling these little guys by hand would take all day.  (For a sense of scale, that's my thumbnail on the left side of the first picture of urd beans.)  I'm hopeful, though, that after I let the pods dry for a week or two, they'll be brittle enough that I can thresh them and then blow the empty pods off the seeds.

So, to sum up what became far too long of a post --- garbanzos need to be planted in early spring, shelly beans need to be harvested before the pods turn brown, and Urd Beans are my new favorite experimental bean.

While weeding the mule garden this week, I discovered an unintentional polyculture.  I had pulled out all the seed potatoes from my fall potato experiment because they weren't sprouting --- or so I thought.  It turns out that one potato was overlooked, and it popped up between the leaves of a watermelon I'd planted at the end of the bed.

Meanwhile, my primary purpose for the bed was to plant fall carrots.  I seeded three different beds with carrots this summer, but very few seedlings came up in two of the beds.  However, in my polyculture bed, the watermelon took off and ran across the carrot area, shading the soil and retaining enough moisture for the seeds to sprout.  All three vegetables seem to be growing quite happily together so far, though I recently moved the watermelon tendrils aside to give the baby carrots room to grow.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that the carrot seeds in the other beds may have had shoddy germination rates because they were a different variety than those sown in the polyculture bed.  I usually have very good luck with Jung's Sweetness hybrid carrots, but the pack this year seems to have been a dud --- germination was low in our spring carrot bed too.  Next year, I might change my loyalties to one of the seed companies recommended by Steve Solomon.

The dry season makes for good conditions to catch up on some minor ford maintenance.

The do it yourself cinder block ford hasn't really needed much repair in the past 4 years. This  turns out to be a low budget creek crossing solution that continues to work.

Our buckwheat experiment is not what I would call a success.  The best thing I can say is that our bees did really enjoy the flowers.  And the plants do bloom, as promised, a scant month after planting.  But all of the biomass that was supposed to be ready when the plants bloomed?  Nope, not so much.

Buckwheat doesn't like heavy clay soil, which is the precise kind of soil I was asking it to rejuvenate, so I shouldn't blame the failure entirely on the crop.  And, to be fair, a deer came through for a midnight snack a few weeks ago and clipped the tops off plants in a couple of beds.  Those buckwheat plants never recovered, and weeds quickly sprouted up to fill in the bare soil.

Still, I would have expected a bit more growth out of the cover crop.  When I mowed down the buckwheat, it seemed like the succulent stems disintegrated into a mere handful of plant matter --- and that was in the beds that escaped deer damage.  I may give buckwheat another shot in the loam of the upper garden, but our troublesome back garden is going to need another cure.  Next try --- hullless oats.

I decided our driveway was in a good enough state of dryness to see if the parts Festiva had what it takes to help tow out the golf cart for some expert repair.


It only got stuck once, which was quickly fixed by modifing the ruts to fit the bigger wheel base.

I'm pretty sure this is a once a year opportunity and when the rain kicks back to a more regular schedule the flood plain will earn its name back. In the meantime it's nice to have a back up to our much valued golf cart.

One of the casualties of last year's big winter storm was our high fence to keep deer out of the mule garden in case one of the deer deterrents fail.

I finally got around to repairing the damage last week and decided one of the upper gaps was big enough for a deer to jump through. An experimental solution was to use some of this orange marking tape to deter any possible breach.

I know a deer could rip right through this thin plastic ribbon material, but if he or she does the evidence should be obvious, and then I'd know if this was a failure.

If it does prevent deer from thinking of jumping, then maybe someone else could use this as an ultra cheap fencing material that could be installed within a few hours depending on what type of posts or trees get incorporated.

Remember how I told you that the deer ate our experimental beans?  It turns out I spoke too soon. 

I finally took a close look at our garbanzos and saw that they were liberally sprinkled with tiny pink flowers that are swelling into balloon-like fruits.

Meanwhile, our urd beans bounced right back and are now decked out in the fascinating pods to the left.  I assume I should leave both beans on the plant until they dry out, so I'm just watching them grow at the moment.

Another experimental crop also seems to be doing well --- our sesame.  Several of the plants have oddly twisted leaves that I suspect is the result of some sort of pathogen, but they're blooming and setting pods anyway.  It looks like at least three of this year's experimental crops will be successful.

While researching tomato blemishes, I stumbled across a piece of data that seems unbelievable to me --- vine ripened tomatoes taste no better than those picked at the first hint of red and ripened indoors.  Chuck Marr, the horticulture program leader at Kansas State University Research and Extension, says:

Marr says that you can avoid most of the cosmetic problems I discussed in this lunchtime series by picking your tomatoes early and ripening them in your kitchen out of direct sunlight.  The blogger who tipped me off to this process notes that storebought tomatoes taste awful not because they were picked too soon, but because they are a variety bred to be tough and easily transportable.

I think it's time for a taste test!  I've picked a couple of blushing tomatoes to ripen in the kitchen, and will report on our taste test in a week or so.  I hope some of our loyal readers will try it at home and report back too.

We killed the rest of our broilers this week, and while we were at it we deleted our three Plymouth Rocks for failing to meet their egg quota.  The farm feels very quiet without them.

We've learned a lot from this year's broiler experiment, mostly things we want to change for next time.  Our chickens were tastiest and cheapest per pound (and least wiley) when we slaughtered them at 12 weeks, so we'll be killing broilers young in the future.

We also plan to raise two or three smaller batches next time rather than one large one.  After spending two mornings this week covered in blood, my gutting skills have improved, but I feel like I also became a bit numb to the process.  We strongly believe that if we take a life, we should respect the animal and be entirely in the present, which means killing no more than eight chickens a day and killing them no more often than once a month.

Of course, that means we have to start hatching out our own chicks.  We're saving this year's Rhode Island Red chick and will breed him with our doughtiest Golden Comets next spring.  A hybrid of a hybrid is a strange direction to go for chicken breeding, I know, but our three oldest Golden Comets have proven to me that their genetics are exceptionally sound.  At four years old, they still lay nearly an egg a day apiece, and they're the only ones I trust to peck up a cupful of Japanese Beetles before the insects disperse back into the garden.  If raised by a mama hen rather than spending their early childhood stuck in a brooder, I have high hopes that these chicks could be prime foragers.

Yesterday's roof roosting prevention tin worked well to persuade the remaining pasture flock to sleep in the coop last night.

Now the mother hen and chick have the whole place to themselves and we have enough farm raised chicken to last most of the winter.

The problem with chickens roosting on the roof at night is that the roof gets fertilized and the chickens avoid the small coop where a guy like me has a fighting chance at catching one for dinner the next morning.

Maybe this sheet of tin will keep them off tonight?

Thanks to everyone's great advice, I'm starting to narrow down our choices for our power outage solar backup system.  First of all, Joey and Roland (and the web) helped me figure out what size system I should be looking for.  I added up two hours run time on our laptops, router, and two lights and came up with 150 watt-hours per day.  Using Joey's math, or just dividing by the 3 peak sun hours our area is rated to receive in the dead of winter (from the map above), we would need a 50 watt solar panel to achieve our goal.  Since it's bad business to discharge your batteries more than halfway, we would need to buy two Duracell Power Packs and two 25 watt panels to reach this level --- total cost roughly $450.

For comparison's sake, I followed Daddy's advice and gave Backwoods Solar a call.  The salesman there was happy to walk me through my choices, even though he clearly wasn't going to make much money off me.  Here are the components and prices he quoted me for a 50 watt system:

• 50 watt solar panel - $275
• charge controller - $33
• 400 watt inverter - $45
• 2 RV or marine batteries (bought locally) - $180
  

He also mentioned buying a tilt mount ($68), which would let us adjust the panel's orientation seasonally for slightly higher output.  Assuming Mark could make our tilt mount, but that we would have to buy some connectors not on the list, the total would come to around $600.  On the other hand, I suspect I could shave around $100 off the cost by hunting down the components elsewhere on the web.

In other words, the plug and play version and the real DIY version have a comparable price tag.  But do they have comparable longevity?  I asked the Backwoods Solar salesman what he thought of using a 600 watt Duracell Power Pack as our battery, controller, and inverter.  "That would probably work," he said (and I paraphrase), "if you're just going to use it very ocassionally as a backup.  However, if you'd like to take the laptop and lighting loads permanently off the grid and run your solar system daily, you would be better off with a different battery."

Now, I trust that he knows what he's talking about, but I don't quite understand why he would be right.  My research shows that AGM batteries have a rated lifespan of 4 to 7 years while marine batteries have a lifespan of 1 to 6 years.  In addition AGM batteries are sealed, which means no need for us to fuss over them, worry about fumes, or freak out when I accidentally knock them over.  Finally, they can be shipped, so we can shop around and buy the ones at rock bottom prices on Ebay.  As far as I understand it, the main disadvantage of an AGM battery is price, but the cost of the Duracell Power Pack seems to be roughly comparable to a marine battery when you consider that the former includes a charge controller and inverterter.

So, I'm opening up to questions and answers again.  Can anyone think of a reason that the Duracell Power Pack would have less longevity than a different system?  Currently, I'm leaning toward trying out one 25 watt plug and play system, doubling it later if all goes well.

This seems to be the best do it yourself solar dryer design out there.

You can thank the good folks of Appalachian State University for the design and testing.

We plan on building one in anticipation of our upcoming tomato harvest.

ASU has put this thing through many testing situations with documented data available as a PDF download.

I've had my eye on our oldest tomato plant for weeks.  (This is the one that volunteered in our lemon tree's pot this winter and which I set out in the garden on April 21, babying through cold spells.)  The plant swelled up huge fruits, then kept swelling more and more fruits, none of which changed color.  Last week, I saw the tiniest hint of red on the oldest fruit, and crossed my fingers.  But I was looking in entirely the wrong spot for our first tomato.

Wednesday morning, I caught a glimpse of orange from the tomato bed on the opposite side of the naughty butternuts.  I peered closer and saw a fruit nearly ripe!

A few years ago when we splurged on seeds for several heirloom tomatoes, I picked out Stupice as a very cold-tolerant and early variety.  Sure enough, it looks like the Stupice tomato will probably be the first one on our plate, perhaps by the end of the week.

To be fair, though, this mini-experiment doesn't prove that tomatoes started in a cold frame and set out at the frost free date ripen just as quickly as those started indoors and transplanted out three weeks earlier.  I have absolutely no clue what variety my volunteer belongs to, and I suspect it might have been the seed of a storebought tomato that made it into our neighbor's compost and thus to us.  At this point, though, I'm at the who-cares stage --- as long as I get a sun-ripened tomato shortly, experiments will fly out of my head.

This year, I decided I was going to wean us off Bt even if it meant a squashless season.  Maybe it's a fluke, but we've actually had a much better cucurbit year than ever before.  My new secret is succession planting.

Notice how the cucumber vine on the left is starting to wither up?  This time last year I would have been pulling out my hair, but now I simply shrug my shoulders and look at the bed of three week old cucumber plants nearly ready to bloom.  I plan to seed a third bed of cucumbers this week so that we'll have a final glut of cucumbers around the end of August.

I did even better with the summer squash.  Our four spring plants gave us nearly two gallons of fruits to go in the freezer (with who knows how many eaten and uncounted), but now the squash have collapsed into a mass of vine borers, squash bugs, and disease.  No worries --- check out our month-old youngsters who just gave us their first fruits.  Again, I've got more squash on my succession-planting list for this week to take over when our second planting bites the dust.

To be fair, succession planting isn't my only innovation this year.  I'm growing a different variety of cucumber (Diamant) and of summer squash (Butterstick Hybrid.)  I also gave our cucurbits quite a bit of extra compost so that they'd grow quickly and give us produce before disease and pests struck.  And the weather has been perfect --- droughty weather with us irrigating regularly.  Still, I think succession planting has been key in this year's success, and I suggest giving it a try before spraying Bt.

In searching for more low budget do it yourself cooling options I came upon this cooling tower design.

It seems like one of the more expensive solutions out there, but might end up saving money in the long run. The tower should be at least 6 feet square, 20 to 30 feet tall with as much insulation as you can muster.

I wonder if this concept could be scaled down for just one room instead of an entire house?

Image credit goes to the thefarm.org which has a well written article on this method of sustainable cooling. They've also got a good section on permaculture in Tennessee.

We went a little overboard with experimental beans this year, and now we're starting to get an idea of which ones like our garden.  First of all, I should note that our old standby Masai Beans are still plugging right along.  We already have a gallon of delicious green beans in the freezer, with many more to come as my later-planted beds start to bear.  Masai Beans are really the best green beans I've ever tasted, and they're stringless, so preparation is a breeze.  Plus, you can save the seeds --- we haven't bought green bean seeds in three years.

On the experimental side, a friend of mine mailed me a few of her favorite dried beans to play with --- Yellow Indian (pictured above), Allubia Criolla, and Cayamento Cranberry.  My goal here is to find a dried bean that will capture even Mark's interest, and I'm willing to try as many varieties as it takes to reach that point.  Currently, the pole beans are happily running up their trellis, blooming like crazy, and setting big pods.  I won't really have information for you, though, until we run a taste test.

Our garbanzo beans are less happy.  I planted Black Karbouli Bush Garbanzo at the end of April, but later learned that garbanzos like cool weather and should be planted at the same time as the peas.  No wonder a third of my plants dried up and the rest have luxuriant foliage but no signs of blooms.  Even if we get nothing out of this experimental bed, I'll try the garbanzos again next spring, planting in a more proper time frame to see what develops.

We also planted Urd Beans (for sprouting) and some Endamame Soybeans (for endamame).  The two types of beans seemed happy as little clams...until the deer came in and ate them.  We had a few minor deer incursions this summer when deterrents went down, and our four-legged f(r)iends seem quite partial to my experimental crops.  So, just like with our garbanzos, if we fail to get a crop this year, I won't despair.

Now that we've done everything wrong that we possibly can with beans, I'm hoping next year will be a stunning success.  For the sake of comparison, oilseed sunflowers were one of our big experiments last year, so the deer ate them down to the ground.  This year, the sunflowers were no longer experimental, so the deer left them alone and the plants are now towering over my head.  Clearly, there is a moral here, if I can only figure it out.  Maybe the deer are bored by my experiments posts?

I'm searching for a cover crop that:

• is reliably winter-killed in zone 6 (meaning that I don't have to till it in or pull it out)
• is non-leguminous (so that I'll get lots of organic matter rather than lots of nitrogen)
• will survive in our problem spots --- dense, clayey soil with a high water table
  

So far, buckwheat and oats seem to be my top contenders.  I've been slipping buckwheat into gaps in my rotation this month, beds where spring crops have been pulled out with nothing to take their place for at least six weeks.  Next month, I'll plant oats in empty beds.

If all goes as planned, our cover crops will turn into a heavy mulch that will partially or entirely decompose in time for spring planting.  It's even possible that the buckwheat will die in five or six weeks when I mow it down at bloom time, allowing me to plant garlic under the green manure a few weeks later.

Do you have a favorite no-till cover crop?  I'm open to any and all suggestions since this year is our first trial.

This was my first attempt at the latest automatic bucket waterer. I think it once held cooking oil.

The main problem with a container like this is the thickness of the plastic. Two of the nipples screwed in fine, but one of them didn't seem to have enough plastic to bite into and ended up leaking.

Has anyone ever tried gleying a pond?  Gleying seems to be an old Russian method that mimics the way ponds sometimes form in nature.  The goal is to produce an anaerobic layer in the soil underneath the pond, which somehow prevents water from percolating through (perhaps due to slime on the anaerobic bacteria.)  Here are tips for gleying a pond, compiled from various websites (none of which feels very definitive):

Create a six to nine inch layer of fresh compostables.  Some sites recommend using a layer of animal manure covered by a second layer of high carbon waste material such as paper or cardboard.  Other sites note that grass clippings can be used in place of the manure, and still others leave out the high carbon layer.

Get your compostables wet, then seal out the air.  Most people recommend adding a layer of soil on top and tamping it down, but others mention putting plastic over the pond to keep air out completely.  Still other sources seem to consider the cardboard layer to be the one that seals air out.

Wait two to three weeks.  During this time, you shouldn't allow your gley to dry up, but you can't fill the pond yet.  After the wait, your pond is supposed to be permanently sealed...or sealed for a couple of years (depending on who you talk to.)

I'm a bit leery of the technique because I can't find anyone who mentions that they have tried it personally, although second and third hand reports abound.  I'm also curious to know whether anaerobic pond muck from the alligator swamp would provide instant gley.  If I hauled out a few bucketsful and used the muck to line a little indentation in our forest garden, would we have a mini pond?  Or is the anaerobic layer something that forms in place and can get disrupted by digging?  Clearly, gleying a small pond is going to have to be added to my post-growing season experiments list!

(As a side note, I couldn't find a single picture on the internet of gleying a pond.  The closest ones were these photos of Sepp Holzer's pig method of sealing a pond.  As usual, click on the image to view the source website.)

My beekeeping mentor told me that he waits until June to plant most of his potatoes, which means he doesn't have to store the mature tubers during the heat of the summer.  Since potatoes are primarily a storage crop and have a limited shelf life, planting them as late as possible makes sense.

However, when I went shopping for seed potatoes at the beginning of June, all of the feed stores looked at me like I was crazy.  Instead, I decided to see whether I could just plant some of my halfway matured spring potatoes in new beds for a fall crop.

I was so happy with the Ruth Stout method of potato planting last time around that I decided to take it a step further this time.  I simply spread manure on a freshly weeded bed, plopped down the seed potatoes, and covered everything up with a thick layer of grass clippings.

Since then, I've been waiting, and waiting, and waiting.  Nothing has happened.  When I poked around under the mulch, I discovered that very few of the seed potatoes had sprouted.  In fact, all of the small new potatoes that I had put in the ground whole were sitting there, while only the few potatoes that were large enough to be cut in half had begun to grow.  I've read that some companies sell new potatoes as seed potatoes, but I clearly haven't discovered the trick yet.

Since the beds are well mulched and growing no weeds, I'm going to let them sit for another month or two even though I now have small hope of a fall potato harvest.  I'll let you know if anything exciting happens, or whether I end up just digging the seed potatoes to eat.

Some people give their hives just one deep brood box apiece (plus several supers), but I've read that if you provide the bees a second deep brood box, you'll have a larger colony and can harvest more honey.  Last year I didn't know any better, but this spring I decided to give the double deep method a shot.

In the middle of May, I added a second brood box to our middle hive, checkerboarding the drawn brood frames with empty frames so that the bees were using both deep boxes to raise their young.  After extracting a bit more honey Tuesday, I added up how many frames I'd taken from each hive --- 2 frames from the east hive, 4 frames from the "mean" hive, and 20 frames from the double deep middle hive!

Since I've been extracting all of the capped frames of honey I see this summer, I figure these statistics are a pretty accurate assessment of how hard the hives have been working.  If anything, I think the middle hive has produced even more honey than it seems --- the second brood box has a lot of honey in it that I've just left alone.

Now all three hives are converted over to double deeps.  I don't expect it to do much good for this year, but now I'll be ready for the queens to lay like gangbusters next spring.  In fact, barring another serious honey flow (and both basswood and sourwood are now past), I think I'm going to let the bees save the rest of the year's honey for their own consumption.  Four and a half gallons of honey --- not a bad haul for three hives in year two!

The refrigerator root cellar is being over taken by weeds due to its low position on the "list of things to fix before winter".

Digging it out and installing a roof over the top will most likely be a winter project.

Davia asked me if I'd ever heard of Hugelkultur.  I thought the answer was no, until I googled the term and discovered that hugelkultur is very similar to the mounds I built last fall using dirt tossed over decomposing branches.  Putting a name to the method really expedited my research and turned up a lot more information than I thought was out there.  Thanks, Davia!

The idea is pretty simple --- adding wood to a raised bed acts as a sponge, evening out soil moisture so that the ground doesn't become waterlogged and also doesn't dry up.  As the wood rots, it turns into wonderful organic matter a lot like the stump dirt I rave about.

However, I think I made a few mistakes with my hugelkultur beds.  If you research the technique, you'll discover that the correct way to make the beds is to bury the woody material at least a foot or two under the earth.  I just built up piles of partly rotten branches and shoveled dirt in the gaps, a method that worked okay for the hazels and wildflower mixes I grew there, but that wouldn't have worked for vegetables.  I'm sure the branches are locking up nitrogen out of the soil as I type, but everything I put in the beds is extremely resilient and seems to be surviving.

The real problem is that my beds are too dry.  The wood hasn't rotted down enough yet to act as a sponge, and the loosely shoveled clay has a lot of air pockets that let water drain right through.  Granted, I located the mounds in an area where the groundwater is so high nothing will grow there, so this "problem" isn't so bad --- it made a nice spot to put in rosemary without ending up with root rot the way my rosemary plants usually do.

Problem number two is also related to my haphazard construction.  I left bits of branches sticking out around the edges, which made Mark very leery of mowing up to the sides of the mounds.  Add to that the fact that my mulch mostly blew away over the winter and I forgot to refresh it or weed the mounds, and the result is a weed thicket.  Surprisingly, the thickly seeded wildflowers seem to be holding their ground against the weeds, and the honeybees consider this area their second home, so all is not lost.

Now that I know more about the technique, though, I want to try hugelkultur again as another winter project.  This time, I'll bury the wood deeper and plant a cover crop to add fertility for the first year or so before planting anything important.  I'll be curious to see how quickly the rotting wood starts benefiting my plants.

Our hardy kiwi plants sulked for the first two years, but as we begin their third summer, they're suddenly acting like vines.  Each plant has put up multiple stems, the longest of which has twined for five feet along its trellis wire.  At this stage, I want the kiwis to focus their energy on one main trunk, so I clipped off the extra shoots springing up from each rootstock.  Time to propagate!

Hardy kiwis are best grown from softwood cuttings, which means cuttings taken from new growth during the summer.  (In contrast, grapes are best grown from hardwood cuttings, which are the dormant, woody stems pruned out in the winter.)  I clipped the excess kiwi stems into six inch lengths, cut off the growing tips, and then clipped each leaf in half.  Although people who want 100% success often root softwood cuttings under misters using rooting hormone and applying bottom heat, I prefer a simpler method with a lower success rate --- put an inch of water in a jar, drop in the cuttings, and ignore for three weeks.

And now, look --- little roots all over the ends of the cuttings!  Once the roots expand enough to feed the cuttings, I'll put my new kiwis in the ground in a permanent location.  My original kiwis arrived in late July two years ago, so I assume the nursery used the exact same tricks I did, and that these new cuttings will really take off in the summer of 2012.

Getting started with perennials is always pricey --- our three hardy kiwis came to nearly fifty bucks.  But if you're in it for the long haul, you can turn that initial investment into a large orchard.  I'll bet at this time next year, I'll be giving baby kiwi plants away to everyone who can fit one in their garden.

I'm sure you've all been perched on the edge of your seats for the last couple of weeks wondering: Will cardboard mulch retard water penetration and harm our plants?  A couple of days after I posted about our cardboard mulch, Mark had the great idea of poking a bunch of holes in the cardboard with a pitchfork.  Even so, I was a bit concerned that the perforated cardboard would keep the soil too dry.

Rather than waiting to see if our vegetables started struggling, we bought a $10 moisture meter from Lowes and took some measurements.  As you can see, the perforated cardboard actually kept the soil wetter than either whole cardboard or bare soil, especially in the top inch of the soil.  Whole cardboard, on the other hand, was a loser --- I headed out with the pitchfork to perforate the overlooked bed right after taking these measurements.

Some days, I wish I had about ten acres of research farm and three or four interns to turn my little play experiments into real experiments.  I'm well aware that three data points for each treatment isn't enough information to draw any scientific conclusions.  But the numbers were remarkably uniform, suggesting that perforated cardboard mulch is definitely a plus when it comes to water retention.

We dispatched the first third of our cockerels Tuesday morning.  They were quite small at 12 weeks old, dressing out to only 2.25 pounds apiece (not counting the necks and giblets), and they clearly don't compete with grocery store prices at $5.64 per bird.  Of course, we didn't set out to save money with these broilers or we would have stuck to the traditional Cornish Cross.  The real test will be flavor --- can we tell a difference between our pastured chickens and storebought?

We're going to kill another third of the cockerels in a month, and then the last third at 16 weeks old, testing to see how the price per pound and the flavor of the meat changes over time.  Although everyone is in agreement that Cornish Crosses should be killed at around eight weeks, the internet lists widely varying maturity dates for the Dark Cornish, and I like experimentation.

On the other hand, despite enjoying the experiment, I don't think we'll be raising Dark Cornish again.  They didn't live up to the hype of being good foragers --- they mostly sat around and waited for their feed, even going so far as to run away when I tossed grubs into their pasture.  Instead, I'm torn between several alternatives:

• Cornish Cross --- This is the traditional way to go, but raising these grain-only-eating broilers at home is little better for the environment and our bodies than buying grocery store meat.  Also, since they're hybrids, we would have to buy chicks every year, which doesn't pass the sustainability test.
  
• Freedom Rangers --- Many small growers swear by this breed, reporting that Freedom Rangers are good foragers (although they said that about Dark Cornish too.)  The major downside is that we couldn't create our own breeding flock since Freedom Rangers are a cross of carefully bred parental lines owned by European corporations.
• Create our own Cornish cross --- We could save back the biggest cockerel and cross him with our Plymouth Rocks to create our own Cornish Cross.  We might get hybrid vigor, but I can't quite see where the foraging ability would come from, and I'm bound and determined to grow chickens without such large inputs of grain.
  
• Eat the roosters from our layer flock --- Traditionally, farmers used to just raise dual purpose breeds and eat the roosters from their flock along with the old hens.  We've been well trained to think we want big breasts and tender meat, so I'm not sure if we could stomach this option.  But it would definitely be the most sustainable, and probably the best for our health if we stuck to a good forager like Rhode Island Red.
  

What do you think?  Have you given some of the above options a shot and think they've got merit (or should be avoided at all cost?)  We won't be raising another batch of broilers until next year, but we need to make a decision soon about whether to save back one of the Cornishes from the chopping block.

The squash vine borer will be hitting our farm shortly --- I know because the first brilliant flowers have come out on the summer squash.  With the impending collapse of our plants looming, I've resolved to find a better solution than Bt.  Bacillus thuringiensis is rated organic but is still a relatively broad spectrum insecticide, which means it may be doing more harm than good by killing beneficials that would otherwise wipe out the borer.  In addition, try as we might to spray once a week and after rains, Bt doesn't seem to be preventing the total destruction of our summer squash crop each year.  We're both willing to do without summer squash for a year or two, if need be, while we figure out a better option.

This year, we're keeping our experiments simple.  I'm planting a new bed of summer squash every two weeks to give me an idea of the timing of the infestation.  In the north, you can just plant your summer squashes late, after the fourth of July, and the vine borer will have finished its flying stage.  In the south, though, the vine borer has multiple generations, so I'm not sure how early I can plant squash and still miss the insect's depradations.  A planting at the beginning of August 2009 netted us a bounty of summer squash...for about two weeks before the frost hit.  I'm hoping to be able to plant a bit earlier than that and still miss the borer.

Other options to try in later years if the easy route fails include:

• Planting a more resistant summer squash variety such as Summer Crookneck
  
• Using a floating row cover over the plants to physically exclude attack
• Wrapping something around the stem (panty hose and aluminum foil have both been used) to keep the larvae out
  
• Mounding up dirt over the stem at intervals to promote rooting (which would require a different squash variety since we've been planting bush squash)
  

When we first started this irrigation project the budget was a bit limited.

I'm sure it breaks every law of proper electric wiring, but sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do.
                                                                                                                                            

It's basically four 100 foot extension cords cobbled together and wired so each pole is carrying 110 volts. I'm pretty sure this is close to the maximum distance you should think about stretching these cords. Electrical tape works well for sealing up the junctions where each cord is plugged into.

We're going on the third year of this setup. There was a problem in the beginning with the pump connections, but I solved that by figuring out how to make the contact points waterproof.

If you feel like you're testing the limits of safety try picking up the cord in question to see if it's giving off much heat while you have your pump working. It's this heat that can be dangerous and must be dealt with by making the distance shorter or the electrical cord thicker.

When we first started using the large well pump to supply water to the irrigation sprinklers I was timid about how long it should be used at one time.

I was concerned that too much continued pumping might damage the motor, but little by little we kept using it for longer episodes. Now it's not uncommon to see them going for hours at a time.

Every now and then a sprinkler head will get clogged with some creek debris, but it only takes a minute to unscrew the hose and remove any offending algae or sand.

What's most challenging is getting 220 volts from the trailer to the creek. More on that in part 2 of this creek pumping series.

I made the mistake of storing the flock block in a place where it could get wet, and about 1/5 of the top portion started to mold.

It seems to be a hit with the boys once they figured out what it was.

Over the last year and a half, we've been experimenting with three different forest gardens.  My ambitious plan to turn the nectarine-plum-apple area in front of the barn into a forest garden in one fell swoop has been going as slow as molasses --- I've mostly been spreading comfrey around for fertility and building a few mounds here and there to raise plants' roots out of the waterlogged soil.  My low maintenance plan to subtly tweak a nearby area of young woods to encourage edibles and nectaries is in the growing stage, with little active management needed.

The star of the forest gardening has been my third variation on the theme --- a little forest garden island outside the kitchen window, an area that receives our concerted attention twice a day as we gaze out the window while eating meals.  As a result, I'm often reminded to spend two minutes pulling weeds or raking back the mulch to throw some flower seeds on the ground, and the result is a mass of color and fertility that the central peach seems to enjoy.

While the concept of creating a forest garden whole cloth seems pretty daunting, slowly expanding a forest garden island has turned out to be easy and fun.  A heavy leaf mulch on the compost mounds from last year resulted in a weed-free area to sow cosmos, marigolds, zinnias, and other easy flowers this spring.  The self-seeded poppies I transplanted out of the vegetable garden last year are now in full bloom and the extra Egyptian onion bulblets I tossed beside them are in just the right spot to make it easy to snip a few leaves for our dinner.  I snuck in a few Good King Henry plants --- a perennial green that will bear in partial shade --- and randomly poked some giant pumpkin seeds into the ground.

Underneath the peach's canopy, comfrey continues to grow in the shade, ready to be cut back to feed the tree's roots.  A mass of wood chips innoculated with King Stropharia spawn gives me an easy spot to sit and enjoy the view of swelling peaches.  In my nook under the peach, I feel like I'm immersed in the woods, but with edibles and flowers within reach.  No wonder our visiting songbirds like to perch in the peach's branches before flying out into the vegetable garden in search of bugs.

If you're intrigued by the idea of forest gardening, but are daunted by the extensive planning and initial work load, I highly recommend starting with a little forest garden island.  A few minutes' play can turn that tree in your yard into the cornerstone of a vibrant ecosystem, feeding you and the local wildlife.  As the tree grows, so will the understory, and soon you'll have plenty of perennials to spread under the enlarged canopy.

Is that a baby stone pine?  Hmm, I don't know.  What do you think?

The problem with my stratification method --- toss the seeds in a garden bed and wait over the winter --- has become clear.  I very rarely mark anything in the garden because I write down which bed I've planted seeds in and I know how to distinguish vegetable seedlings from weed seedlings.  But what do you do when you've planted seeds that will turn into unknown seedlings, like the stone pine, honey locust, and persimmon seeds I popped into the garden to stratify this winter?  By definition, these guys need extensive time in the ground before they'll sprout, which means I've been scared to weed those beds for the last six months in fear I'll pull out my tree seedlings.  Now I'm left wondering whether a few odd seedlings are the ones I've been waiting for, or whether my carefully collected seeds came up and choked amid the weed patch.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but winter sowing would have come in handy here.  That's actually how I started my first persimmon seeds --- I popped them in a pot of soil and forgot about them until seedlings miraculously sprang up many months later.  Maybe I'm going to have to start this experiment over next year, keeping better track of where my slow-to-germinate seedlings are located?

Last week, I detailed the results of my first summer mulch experiment, noting that cardboard is a potential winner.  Meanwhile, Mom found a stash of huge boxes being thrown away and snagged them for my continuing mulch experiments.  I'm trying the cardboard out on some cucurbits and okra, as well as on two troublesome, weedy beds that need a kill mulch.  Sister cucurbit and okra beds are being left bare for comparison.

Despite the fact that I soak the cardboard well before using it as a mulch, I'm a bit concerned that it might be too slick for easy rain penetration.  I'll keep a close eye on the cardboard-mulched plants and perhaps add some organic matter on top of the cardboard or punch small holes in it to increase water penetration.  As Mark pointed out, if I can work the kinks out of cardboard mulch, there's a neverending supply in nearby towns and it's much easier to transport than other mulches.

In other mulch news, last year's newly transplanted comfrey patches are now big enough that I'm cutting them biweekly, adding the low C:N mulch to select garden beds.  So far, comfrey seems to be equivalent to grass clippings as a mulch --- providing fertilizing power, breaking down quickly, but letting some weeds through.  I have to mention that the bumblebees continued to feed from the cut flowers for over 24 hours after they were detached.  Another reason to plant comfrey in your yard...as if you don't have enough reason already!

It's been months since I've talked about our do-nothing grain experiment, but what can I say, I've been doing nothing.  You may recall that I let the chickens churn up a couple of areas in the yard, then threw down hull-less oat and red clover seeds in early March.  For a while, the weeds seemed to be growing faster than the grain and clover, so I figured the experiment was a failure.

I mowed down one plot accidentally, but remembered to mark off the other small plot with cinderblocks.  And suddenly the oats have overtopped everything else and the clover is starting to outcompete the weeds.  This is all with no tilling, no kill mulch, and no weeding.

Granted, this first incarnation has too many flaws to be considered a success.  There are only about a dozen oat plants in my three foot by three foot plot, presumably because I didn't cover the seeds with anything and hungry critters made off with most of them.  Fukuoka prevented this predation by wrapping the seeds in balls of clay, but I suspect just raking them into the soil a bit better or covering them with straw might do the trick.

There are also plenty of weeds mixed into the plot, but I consider this less of a problem.  The clover and oats are clearly doing better than the weeds, and I think a few generations of do-nothing gardening might clear out the unwanted visitors in the plot. 

I'm gearing up for a second do-nothing grain experiment shortly, using the buckwheat/wheat rotation that seems better adapted to our climate.  Mark fenced our cockerels out of two thirds of the chicken pasture last week, and the flock is finally starting to denude their remaining space.  In a few weeks, we'll rotate the chickens out, rake up the ground, and sow some buckwheat and clover seeds for do-nothing experiment part two.

I hope you'll bear with a second lunchtime series of experimentation.  If you're bored, say so and I'll try to cut back on future lunchtime series about experiments.  Meanwhile, I've got a book-related series on comfrey coming up, so stay tuned.

Last summer when the blight hit, I was faced with several empty beds in August.  Even though it was a bit late for planting most fall crops, I decided to seed carrots and parsnips, and the umbellifers did grow beautiful ferny leaves to replace the blighted tomatoes.  However, when cold weather approached, I had to face the fact that my crops hadn't been in the ground long enough to thicken their roots, so I decided to cover them up with mulch and see what would happen in the spring.

I uncovered the carrots and parsnips at the same time I uncovered the strawberries, and the plants took off, once again turning their beds into a jungle of leaves.  I was so hopeful...until I pulled a few up.  The parsnip roots had gone woody inside while the carrots had paled in color and turned bitter.  They were just barely edible enough to use in soup, but I would have been better off eating the small roots last fall when they were sweet and crunchy.

I haven't gotten around to pulling all of the parsnips out yet, and they're starting to send up flower stalks --- the one positive result of overwintering a biennial.  I don't know if I have enough plants to prevent inbreeding, but I'll at least let them bloom since umbellifer flowers are beloved by beneficial insects.  And if I need something to fill garden gaps in August, I'll stick to a late planting of summer squash.

The last experiment I want to talk about this week is our summer mulch experiment.  You'll remember that I've been testing out lots of different mulches this spring, including grass clippings, autumn leaves, newspaper, and cardboard.  How are they doing a month later?

When I laid down the mulches, I was hoping I could put them directly on top of small weeds rather than taking the time to weed each bed before I mulched it.  Newspaper and cardboard did an admirable job of smothering the weeds, but the naughty plants grew right through the grass clippings and autumn leaves.  In the case of the former, I couldn't even tell that the bed had been mulched a month later and just weeded as usual, but it was quite difficult to pull weeds from the autumn leaf mulched beds without taking half the mulch away with them.

I was a bit concerned that mulches with a high C:N ratio would retard the growth of my plants by locking up nitrogen in the soil, and three of our pea beds do seem to have some problems.  Rather than growing lush and green, the peas are yellowing at the base and barely growing.  Interspersed broccoli is huge and luxuriant in some beds, but puny and purple-tinged in others.

But is there a correlation between mulch and plant health?  I can't be sure.  All three of the sad-looking beds were mulched with a combination of paper with colored ink and autumn leaves, but some similarly mulched beds are fine.  My best guess is that the puny plants are reacting to something in glossy paper, but I didn't keep records of which beds got glossy and which didn't, and the paper has decomposed enough that gloss is no longer visible.  It's also quite possible that some non-mulch-related variable is at work, but I'll play it safe and keep glossy paper away from my plants in the future.

Although the grass clippings didn't do much for weed control on already weedy beds, they did keep weed-free beds from growing new weeds.  In addition, the grass clippings seemed to work as a light fertilizer, resulting in plants that were big and healthy.  If I have time to weed first (and enough grass clippings to go around), grass mulch seems to be a winner.

I only mulched one bed with cardboard, but this mulch seems to be a winner as well --- cardboard is a great weed retardant, has no ill effects on plants, and doesn't blow around the way paper did for the first few days before it melded to the soil.  I'm not surprised since I learned in Steve Solomon's book that corrugated cardboard has a C:N ratio comparable to straw rather than to paper due to the nitrogen in the glue.  I'm mulching several more beds with cardboard this week and will give you an update in a month or two on positives and negatives.

Last year, I thought I had sweet potato slip production figured out.  My method was quite simple --- submerge about a third of the potato in water, put the containers on a heat mat, break off sprouts once they form, then put the slips in water to grow roots.

My only complaint was that starting the potatoes in early April meant I could only plant one bed at the frost free date and had to put out the rest of the sweet potatoes a bed or two at a time until early July.  So this year I started my sweet potatoes near the end of March...and the tubers sat there doing nothing for a few weeks before over half of them rotted away.  We're still on schedule to plant a bed of slips this week and will fill in all of the parts of the garden I'd allotted to sweet potatoes, but we didn't get the jump on the season I'd hoped for.  Maybe March is just too early to start sweet potatoes?

I also think I blew it by focusing on big tubers for sprouting, compared to the small tubers I used last year.  Various extension service websites suggest that the optimal sweet potato for sprouting is only an inch and a half in diameter.  Next year, I'll bypass those chunky monsters and use mini-tubers as seed stock.

If I remember, I'd like to try another alternative technique next year as well.  The pros start their sweet potatoes in hot beds of moist sand, and I think I can mimic that on a small scale by putting a seed starting tray full of sand on the heat pad instead of jars of water.  I suspect the sand would prevent this year's molding problems by keeping the tubers moist but not wet.

On the plus side, I discovered that chickens really enjoy half rotten sweet potatoes.  Maybe once we work the kinks out of our propagation method, sweet potatoes will be a component of farm-grown chicken feed?

When we started our hives last year, we had to take a stand in the great excluder debate.  A queen excluder is basically a screen that you place between the brood box and the honey supers to ensure that the queen stays down where you want her and doesn't head up to lay eggs in the honey frames.  Some folks swear by excluders, but other people point out that excluders make your hive more likely to swarm since your brood box can get congested in the spring.  We opted to join the anti-excluder camp primarily because I knee-jerk in favor of anything that sounds more natural, and because I am too cheap to buy equipment we don't really need.

Last year, our lack of an excluder caused absolutely no problems.  Our bees were working hard to build up their hive, and the queen had no time or inclination to lay eggs in the honey supers.  This year, though, I noticed that two of our hives have a bit of drone brood at the bottom of the lowest honey super.  Which brings us to beekeeper debate number two: are drones a drain on the hive or an asset?

I won't go into bee biology too far, but you need to understand that there are three kinds of bees in a honeybee hive.  There's the queen --- one per hive, who lays all of the eggs and does nothing else.  There are the workers --- many, many per hive, who do all of the work from foraging for pollen and nectar to cleaning the hive and raising the babies (brood.)  Then there are the drones --- the only males in the hive, whose sole purpose is to head out every day in search of a mate.  Since the queen only has to copulate once in her life, you can see that keeping a bunch of drones on tap is wasteful --- they eat like crazy and don't pull their weight.  As a result, many beekeepers try to keep drone production to a minimum.

Drone management comes down to managing the cell size in the brood box since the queen decides whether to lay eggs that will become workers or drones based on the size of the cell.  Big cells are for drones; small cells are for workers.  When drones reach their pupal stage, they're too big to fit into even their extra large cells, so workers build a little domed cap to seal the drone pupa in rather than the flat caps they build over worker brood.  As a result, it's pretty easy for us to take a look at capped brood and know at a glance how much of it will turn into workers and how much into drones --- the photo here shows the domed caps of drone brood (along with some drone larvae too young to be capped.)  Beekeepers who want to limit drone production will cut out drone-sized comb and replace it with worker-sized comb so that the queen will lay the latter rather than the former.

Now we come back to the queen excluder.  Without the excluder, when the brood box starts filling up but the queen still feels like laying eggs, she'll move up into the first honey super to lay.  The problem is that honey cells are large, so the queen lays all drones up there --- a drain on the hive.  On the other hand, a fascinating article by Walt Wright makes the point that natural hives keep 20% of their brood area in drones and that the hive will build all kinds of jurry-rigged drone cells if we prevent them from laying that 20%.  He concludes that it's better to go ahead and let the hive produce drones rather than running the risk of lowering honey production with a queen excluder.

I'm still in the learning stages of bee management, so I'm taking a bit of a wait and see approach.  If there's a lot more drone brood at our next hive check, I'll probably put a super of foundationless frames beneath the brood box, letting the hive build more worker cells for the queen to lay in.  That way, the queen will get to keep expanding the worker population, which will mean more nectar brought in from the field and more honey for the winter.  On the other hand, if there's still just a bit of drone brood at the bottom of the first honey super, I'll figure the hive deserves their boy toys and leave it alone.

The tomato blight of 2009 left me close to tears last summer, and with a serious craving for red sauce this spring.  This year is also a tomato seed turning point.  I last saved seeds in 2007, assuming that I could collect more in 2009, but I didn't manage to harvest any tomato seeds before the blight hit.  This spring, my three year old seeds had low germination percentages, so I absolutely must have ripe tomatoes to save seeds from this year or I'll have to rebuild my collection of the tastiest and most utilitarian tomato varieties from scratch.

So I'm experimenting with spacing, location, and timing in search of a blight-free tomato harvest.  The goal of the first two experiments is to allow lots of sunlight and air movement around the plants so that they'll dry off quickly after rains.  To that end, I've planted all of our tomatoes in the sunniest part of the garden, and am doubling the spacing between plants to three feet.  In addition, we'll be individually staking the plants and pruning off the suckers to promote even speedier drying.

Meanwhile, I'm trying three different planting times/ages.  I've discovered in the past that young seedlings started in a cold frame then transplanted to the garden do better than leggy tomato plants that have been struggling on a windowsill for months.  So the majority of my plants have just been transplanted out at the two sets of true leaves stage.

On the other hand, my neighbors believe in buying big transplants and putting them out earlier, covering the plants with bottomless milk jugs during cold spells and hoping that they will bear at least some harvest before blight sets in.  A volunteer tomato came up in our lemon pot in the sunroom this spring, and I decided to transplant it out into the garden on April 21 to see how its growth compares to that of my younger transplants --- it's currently big and hefty, with about six pairs of true leaves.

Finally, my father likes to tell me that he once direct-seeded tomatoes into the garden after all danger of frost was past and still got harvests nearly as quickly as from transplants.  So I filled the last tomato spot with ten seeds and will weed the seedlings down to the strongest one once its up.  Will it catch up with its transplanted siblings?  Only time will tell.

If all else fails, I have one last trick up my sleeve.  One volunteer tomato plant survived the blight of 2009, and I carefully saved its seeds to add to my collection.  I have high hopes that at least this one variety will be resistant enough to give me a crop.  Here's hoping something works!

When we were in South Carolina last month, Daddy gave me eleven fertilized Rhode Island Red eggs to try to hatch out.  I brought them home and started preheating the incubator, only to discover that the cheap brand we'd gotten at the feed store only works if you keep your room temperature very constant.  So I made a spur of the moment decision and popped the eggs in the brood coop with our White Cochin instead.

Regular readers may remember that we tried a similar experiment last fall, with the result that our hen killed the only chick that hatched.  But I wanted to give our hen another chance before putting her on the dinner table, figuring she may have killed her first batch of chicks because their color made it obvious that they weren't her own.  Rhode Island Red chicks are pale, so color wouldn't be an issue this time around.

I added a lip to her culvert nest so that none of the eggs would roll out, then I threw the hen in the coop.  I'd heard her make a broody moan the week before, but she wasn't really broody yet and it took her most of the week to decide the eggs were worth sitting on.  By then, I figured our chances of getting a hatch were close to nill, so I didn't even post about it, but I left the hen to sit on the nest since I figured I might as well get the broodiness out of her system.

Saturday morning, I dropped by to toss in a bit of feed...and saw a fluffy chick running in and out of the Cochin's feathers!  I moved the automatic chicken waterer into the culvert nest at chick eye level and tossed in some chick feed, and the peep immediately followed the mother's lead, eating and drinking.  It seems quite healthy, and the Cochin has clearly accepted it, so the only question now is...will it be a new layer or a broiler?  And have I finally learned enough that next time we'll get a good hatch rate?

Since the do it yourself golf cart dump box is working out so well we've decided the Heavy Hauler garden cart can start its new carreer as a large outdoor worm bin.

It took less than an hour to scrounge around for the parts and put it all together.
The spigot was salvaged from a thrift store drink dispenser. (Thanks Mom)

I used a couple of 2x2's cut to 30.5 inches for the bottom support and modified a portion of the willow wall to function as the floor. A small gap at the bottom helps to prevent the spigot from clogging and worms from drowning in their own tea.

Being on heavy wheels makes it easy to manuever and tilt for the most effecient drainage

In looking for ideas to expand our outdoor worm farming I found this clever use of a discarded bathtub as a medium sized worm bin at the pleasant lifeboat.co.nz.

We've decided to give this approach a try along with a few others so we can determine which one is most trouble free.

If you've got a good source of horse manure then you really need to put a small army of worms to work on that manure to speed up the composting action and take advantage of that wonderful worm tea. It's one of those things we neglected to set aside time to build back in the beginning, but sometimes it takes a while to wake up to the wonders of worm assisted home grown compost.

This nose high strand of electric fence wire will help to keep Lucy out and any other stray critters that might be a potential threat when she takes her random naps.

A solid 25 pound brick of chicken yummyness was acquired in the big city today for about 13 bucks.

Stay tuned for a full report on how the new chicks respond to the Purina Flock Block.

Ever since I read that traditional Guatemalan farmers use young elderberry leaves as mulch around their vegetables, I've been aching to give it a shot...and to figure out why they focus on elderberries rather than on other trees.  The answer to that question may be a combination of early leafing, compound leaves that are easy to pull off the trunks and quick to decompose, and elderberry's inherent resilience.  I've been mowing over some elderberry sprouts in the mule garden for three years now, and they just keep coming back up (and spreading), so I'm not concerned that I'll harm my shrubs by pulling off a few leaves.

Tuesday I decided to strip the patch of elderberries by the barn as part of my neverending search for more mulch.  The big leaves broken off quickly and easily --- if I had a good-sized plantation of elderberries, I might not need any other source of mulch.

After I ran out of elderberries, I moved on to the box-elders that are still sprouting up from stumps along the garden edges.  These leaves took longer to harvest, but not by much.  I just closed my gloved hand around the base of a small branch and pulled my way to the tip, stripping off all the leaves in my path.  The result is a little bin of leaves that densely covered a couple of raised beds.

My winter leaf mulches were a wonderful success.  They kept the weeds down admirably, and seem to have improved the soil quality in the process.  While transplanting broccoli last week, I was stunned by the moist, crumby structure of the soil in the loamy upper garden, and by the ubiquity of worms and other good soil critters.

Unfortunately, I can't just keep the leaves in place for the summer.  Some of the mulch has blown away or rotted into the ground, while the big leaves left behind are prone to move onto small seedlings and drown them out.  I raked a few dozen beds bare in March to plant peas and greens, and now weeds are already starting to crowd my vegetables.  Time to experiment with some summer mulches:

• Grass clippings.  Last year, I learned that grass/clover clippings make a great summer mulch since they are high in nitrogen and feed the soil while drowning out weeds.  We did make a mistake and mulched two beds with clippings that had already gone to seed, with predictable results, but all of the other beds mulched with grass clippings are happy and healthy.  The downside of grass clippings is that they decompose very quickly and need to be refreshed within a month.  Since we get about 32 beds worth of clippings per month, I figure we have nearly 200 other garden beds that will soon be in need of mulch.

• Newspapers.  My father has had good luck with wetting down newspaper and using it as a weed barrier around his plants once they're large seedlings.  We don't subscribe to the newspaper, but we do get some catalogs made of newsprint.  I soaked the catalogs and ripped them into segments about ten pages thick.
  

• Cardboard and junk mail.  Last year, I put a lot of cardboard and junk mail in our summer worm bin, but the worms just didn't have the gumption to eat it once the paper and cardboard matted down into damp layers.  I teased the layers apart and am using the wet cardboard as a mulch. 
  

• Tree leaves.  I figure that tree leaves will work as a mulch around more established plants, like our peas that are already several inches high.

I'm trying all four mulches around our peas in the back garden, and will report back in a month or so once I can tell how they're doing.  I'm a bit concerned that the newspaper and cardboard will dry up and blow around since I didn't put anything on top of it, but it's worth a shot!  Anything that reduces our garden's weed pressure makes me a happy camper.

I transplanted two beds of broccoli last Thursday then three more a day later.  As expected, it frosted both Friday and Saturday night --- I can't tell you how cold it got since our exterior thermometer is still inside the collapsed refrigerator root cellar, but I'd say it got into the high 20s.  All of my broccoli seedlings got nipped, but the ones transplanted on Thursday were only midly damaged while those transplanted on Friday ended up on death's door.  See for yourself --- here is a typical Thursday seedling:

And here's a typical Friday seedling:

I suspect that the Friday seedlings were still dealing with the worst of their transplant shock when the frost hit, while the Thursday seedlings were in prime condition.  If I had it to do over again, I would have transplanted earlier in the week to give the seedlings more time to get situated.  I wonder if the seedlings wouldn't have been damaged at all if they'd had a few more days to get their roots under them?

Good thing I've got spares!  I replaced all of the badly nipped seedlings and put out a couple more beds' worth Monday evening.  No frost is forecast for the next week, so they should do fine.

Although I can't make them fit into my do-nothing grain experiment, I want to try three other grains for human consumption this year: oats, quinoa, and amaranth.

Oats are a cool season crop, but are unlikely to overwinter successfully here in zone 6.  They require 90 to 120 days to mature, and should be planted "as early as the ground can be worked in the spring."  I really detest this designation, since some winters our ground can be worked every month of the year, while other winters the ground can't be worked until March....

I planted a test plot of hull-less oats combined with red clover on March 8 in an area where the chicken tractors had sat for a month, killing most of the perennial weeds.  I suspect I should have given the grain its own garden bed instead, but I wanted to try the easiest method possible first (and was afraid of planting a perennial like clover in my vegetable garden.)  So far, a few of the oat seeds have sprouted, but so have some of the perennial weeds that the chickens didn't managed to scratch all the way up.  On the off chance this experiment actually works, I'll let you know, but chances are I'll have to try again in a less weedy spot next year.

Amaranth is an easy grain that I posted about previously.  I bought some Manna de Montana Amaranth from Seeds of Change since pale-seeded varieties like this one are supposed to have better flavor than the black-seeded types.  I plan to put our amaranth seeds in the ground on June 1 when the soil is thoroughly warmed up, and I may try it in my do-nothing plots in place of buckwheat next year since amaranth matures in a similarly short three months.  Like buckwheat, you can't leave amaranth heads on the plant too long or the seeds will fall to the ground, so harvest when two thirds of the seedhead is mature.  Be sure to cook before eating since the raw grain blocks absorption of nutrients.  Amaranth can be eatend whole, flaked, ground, or popped, and the young leaves can be eaten like spinach.

Quinoa is a cool season crop that is not winter hardy, much like oats.  But you plant quinoa later, in mid April to mid May, and refrain from watering after germination since the plants are adapted to drought conditions.  Harvest in 90 to 120 days, then wash the seeds to remove saponin and grind them into flour.  Or use the seeds as a rice substitute, toasting first to enhance the flavor.  Just like amaranth, quinoa leaves can be eaten like spinach.  If quinoa finds a permanent place in our garden, it will have to be in separate garden beds like oats.

My long-term goal is to grow most of the grains Mark and I eat using Fukuoka's do-nothing farming --- utilizing heavy straw mulches from previous crops and a groundcover of clover to fertilize the soil and prevent weeds from growing in the field.  Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any definitive information from people who have translated this Japanese method to the United States, so I'm prepared for the first few years to be dismal failures.  Here's a rundown on the current incarnation of this experiment.

Wheat is our winter grain
The first step in a do-nothing rotation is finding a winter grain.  From everything I've read, if you live in a climate colder than zone 7, your choices are slim --- wheat or rye.  (Barley is another option if you live further south.)  I'm not a fan or rye, so wheat will be our winter grain.

Winter wheat should be planted early enough in the fall that the plants grow 5 to 6 inches before going dormant (which equates to 8 to 12 weeks of growth), but late enough that the Hessian fly has died back for the year.  From browsing extension service sites, it sounds like we should plant our wheat in early to mid October, after the first freeze.

There are half a dozen different types of wheat, so I expect I'll be talking about seed choice in more depth in a later post.  Here are the main decisions you have to make when choosing a type of wheat for your garden:

• Soft wheat, hard wheat, or durum wheat.  Soft wheat has less gluten and protein, and is great for baking biscuits and cakes.  Hard wheat is high in protein and gluten, so it makes great bread flour or all-purpose flour.  Durum wheat is also high in protein, but is low in gluten, so it is primarily used to make pasta.
• Winter wheat or summer wheat.  This is pretty self explanatory --- one grows in the winter and one in the summer.  This distinction does not necessarily relate to the other distinctions --- winter wheat, for example, can be soft or hard and red or white.  Clearly, we'll be choosing a winter variety.
  
• Red or white wheat.  Among the hard winter wheats, you can choose between the widespread red wheat or the newly trendy white wheat.  I'm actually intrigued by the latter since it has just as much nutritional value as red wheat, but results in bread that is paler, less bitter, and softer --- sounds like just the way to complete Mark's conversion to whole grains.
  

Buckwheat is our summer grain
The summer grain in a do-nothing rotation should be of a different genus than the winter grain so that diseases and pests from the winter crop won't ruin the summer crop.  In addition, the summer grain needs to mature relatively quickly since the winter grain usually eats up over half of the year.

My top choice for a summer grain is buckwheat.  This "grain" is not even in the grass family, so it shares no diseases with wheat, and it can be planted as late as mid June and still produce a good crop.  I have to admit that I've never actually eaten buckwheat, but the grain is supposed to have a complete set of amino acids (unlike other grains, but like meats) and blooms for at least a month, making it a great nectary for honeybees.  Buckwheat flour is often used in pancakes, but the seeds can also be sprouted or cooked whole (or fed to the chickens if we hate it.)  On the negative side, buckwheat is not a good choice for bread and the hulls must be removed before cooking.

Buckwheat likes warm soil for growing, but cool nights during bloom and seed set, so it is best planted two to three months before the average fall frost free date --- July or August here in southwest Virginia.  Unlike many of the true grains which can be left in the field to dry, buckwheat needs to be harvested before the frost so that the seeds don't fall to the ground.

One of my goals for this growing season is to experiment with grains.  As I mentioned in my series on small-scale grain-growing, I'd eventually like to be growing most or all of the grains that we humans and our chickens eat.  But my goal for the first year is far less ambitious --- I just want to experiment with a half dozen types of grain to find out which ones like our climate and fit our lifestyle.

I got Sara Pitzer's Homegrown Whole Grains on interlibrary loan to round out the information I've been compiling.  The book is very handy because it provides a lot of specifics I've been unable to find elsewhere about planting dates and growing zones.  That said, quite a bit of the information in this week's lunchtime series has come from previous books and websites I've read on the topic, so don't expect to pick up Homegrown Whole Grains and find it all.  Still, the book has lots of pretty illustrations and is a quick read, so I recommend it.

Biochar (aka terra preta) is the new darling of organic gardeners.  Everyone's talking about it, and no wonder since terra preta in the Amazon has turned poor ground into high fertility soil that seems to last hundreds of years without any additional input of fertilizer.

What most people don't realize, though, is that biochar is more than just charcoal buried in the ground.  Amazonians probably stumbled upon the mixture accidentally when they combined human waste, crop residue, charcoal from their cooking fires, animal bones, and plain old trash in their midden heaps.  Scientists aren't quite sure why the resulting mixture is so good for plant growth, but until a biochemist tells me otherwise, I'm going to assume that all of the traditional elements are necessary to create true biochar.

Mark and I have decided to experiment with our own biochar composting toilet as a method of adding fertility to our young forest garden.  Our first incarnation is simply a four foot pit dug in the ground.  We'll poop in the hole and intersperse our humanure with leaves, charcoal and ashes from the woodstove, and the poultry bones we need to hide from Lucy.  Presumably, the nearby fruit trees will begin to send their roots into the terra preta as it ages and will get a good meal.  Meanwhile, our system won't require us to handle the humanure at all, unlike most composting toilet systems, so there's absolutely no risk of contamination.  Maybe the biochar composting toilet will replace composting toilets in the near future.

 

Bio char toilet composter is just a fancy name for a portable out house structure in a strategic location near a fruit tree.

The bio char element comes into play by having a bucket of charcoal and leaf matter on hand to be mixed in the composting section for maximum fertility.

Stay tuned for a more detailed break down and the final construction pictures.

Before picking up our latest load of mulch I lined up all the 5 gallon buckets we had in the center of the bed.

I was a bit curious to know if they would stay in place or get knocked over by the force of the load.

Now that I know it works we plan to add another 10 buckets before the next load.

Wood chips make me chipper.  What can I say --- some women like roses, but I like mulch, even if it won't be properly aged until several months from now.

We spent most of the day Saturday over at our neighbors' helping them chip the biggest pile of saplings I've ever seen.  Sunday afternoon it was our turn.  One neighbor drove the chipper over to our place with his amazingly huge tractor, and then we chipped up a storm for about four hours before giving in to exhaustion.

Despite being pleased as punch about our wood chips, I have to admit that I think the chipper rental won't be an experiment we'll be repeating.  Once I put on my wrist braces, my carpal tunnel simmered down, but it was still an awfully wearing weekend for about as many chips as we could get for free if we hunt down the utility line guys.  Add in a few hours drive to pick up and drop off the chipper, and we might have been just as well off to buy mulch.

On the other hand, we did clear up some brushy edges that needed work, and I have my wood chip piles segregated into partially decomposed (for mulching with this year), fresh pine (for mulching the blueberries next year), and fresh box-elder (for planting mushrooms in.)  The control freak in me is well pleased.  And, look, the year's first crocus!!

Last fall, I raked leaves out of the woods to cover nearly all of my vegetable garden beds.  My hope was that the leaves would keep weeds from growing over the winter, expedite spring planting, and also rot down to fertilize the soil.

Those leaves seem to have done their weed-killing job admirably.  The photo above is a bed which didn't end up getting mulched --- it's now completely covered with dead-nettles and chickweed.  The bed below was mulched --- notice the bare soil where I raked the leaves back to give me a spot to plant poppies.  The soil under the leaves was also unfrozen and I glimpsed a spider scurrying around, which is in stark contrast to the lifeless permafrost atop the un-mulched bed.

I was a bit disappointed to see that the leaves hadn't decomposed much at all, but in a way that's a good thing.  We'll add manure before planting to boost the fertility of the soil, and will push leaves back around plants once they come up to keep the weeds at bay.  I can already feel the year's weeding being cut in half.

Little house in the suburbs dot com is hands down the coldest automatic chicken waterer I've seen so far.

I can't prove it, but I feel like all chickens can appreciate the simple comfort of a cool drink on a hot summer day.

We've got side by side Avian Aqua Misers and one day last summer I put a handfull of ice in one of them and noticed how our Plymouth Rock hens favored the colder water.

I know it's not a scientific test, but maybe I can expand the parameters next summer to see if there's any truth to this crazy hypothesis?

As I mentioned before, Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming helped inspire the permaculture movement, but I ended up being drawn in a different direction by his experiences.  I've been struggling to develop a workable no-till system for my garden over the last three years, and my constant problem is lack of sufficient mulch.  We mow all of our grassy areas and add the clippings to our garden beds and even rake leaves out of the woods to top things off, but I still end up with bare soil and way too many weeds.  So you shouldn't be surprised that my epiphany upon reading The One-Straw Revolution had to do with mulch.

The organic gardening and homesteading movement has us all growing our own tomatoes and broccoli, but I'd say that 99% of us have never even considered growing our own grains.  And yet, grains make up a huge percentage of our diets.  Clearly, they also made up a huge percentage of Masanobu Fukuoka's garden.  Perhaps the solution to my mulch problem is to return to a more holistic gardening method.  If we grew all of our own grains as well as all of our vegetables, I'd never be in need of mulch again.

Fukuoka says that his method of growing grains uses one hour per week per person, a figure that sounds remarkably manageable.  Could we tweak his system a bit, perhaps trading buckwheat, sorghum, or corn for rice, and replicate his success?  I'm suddenly determined to find clover seeds, buy a bit of straw to prime the pump, and plant my hull-less oats in a do-nothing test plot rather than in a traditional garden bed.

One of my favorite bloggers posted about the new plants she'll be trying out in her garden this year, and I thought it was an interesting meme.  So, without further ado, 2010's experiments and additions:

• New mushrooms: Winecap (aka King Stropharia), White Morel (reported to be a crapshoot, but I feel lucky), and a summer fruiting Oyster Mushroom --- just ordered the spawn from Field and Forest Products!
  
• New woodies in the forest garden: Osage-orange (for hedges), honey locust (for forest pasturing), and Korean stone pine (for pine nuts).  I'm starting them all from seed, the first two from seeds collected in the wild and the last from seeds I bought on ebay.  All are experiments!
• New fruits and veggies: Alpine strawberries, hulless oats, soybeans (labeled as edamame for fresh eating), garbanzo and urd beans (the latter for sprouting), Afghan sesame, Hungarian breadseed poppy, manna de montana amaranth, and temuco quinoa.  All are from Seeds of Change except the strawberries, soybeans, and poppies from Renee's Garden.

And, of course, there's the usual trial of new varieties of common fruits and vegetables (most of which I buy from Jung.)  What's new in your garden this year?

(This image, by the way, shows the osage-oranges I collected slowly rotting down to seed pulp for the spring.  They're already quite mushy and stinky.)

Next week, I'll continue my summary of the techniques Paul Stamets uses to cultivate mushrooms in a commercial setting.  But I wanted to take a break and talk about my own experiment.  If you haven't already, you can read how I sandwiched oyster mushroom stem butts between layers of wet cardboard in a flower pot --- this is the cloning stage of the operation.  After a week, I saw mycelium running across the cardboard, so I expanded it by putting the mycelium between more layers of wet cardboard in a bigger container.

And then I messed up.  The electricity went out and the trailer's interior temperature dropped pretty low --- nearly to freezing on the floor furthest from the wood stove where I happened to have my spawn.  When I checked on it, my mycelium was just sitting there and some of it had died back.  Drat!  I'm hoping that the cold temperatures just put my fungi into temporary hibernation, so I've moved them to a warmer location and will report back in a few weeks.  If I don't see growth by then, I'll go back to the beginning with new mushrooms in the spring.

My dream is to develop a relatively simple method of propagating oyster mushrooms on the home scale, without petri dishes, autoclaves, or even storebought grain.  Wouldn't it be great if mushroom-keeping was as easy as building a worm bin and if those mushrooms could be fed with your junk mail and cardboard, turning waste into food and garden soil?  In case you think I'm living in an ivory tower, check out this website where the author turned cardboard and junk mail into mushrooms --- it is possible!  I just need to work a few kinks out of my system.

In response to my post on easy to grow grains, two of you asked whether I was concerned about amaranth being a weed.  I decided to do a bit of research and disentangle fact from fiction.

The word "amaranth" can be used to refer to any plant in the genus Amaranthus --- 70 species total.  Some species are weeds and some are useful foods dating back thousands of years. 

The weed species are generally known as pigweed and include Amaranthus albus, A. blitoides, A. hybridus, A. palmeri, A. powellii, A. retroflexus, A. spinosus (the one that wreaks havoc on my bare feet in the summer), A. tuberculatus, and A. viridis.  I wonder whether any of these plants were also grown by Native Americans for food, accounting for their widespread growth across the U.S.?  Unfortunately, I couldn't find any data on this.

On the other hand, A. caudatus, A. cruentus, and A. hypochondriacus are grown as food plants, with the latter being the species most often grown in the U.S.  Amaranth was grown by the Incas, the Aztecs, and various Native Americans in what is now Mexico until the conquistadores came and nearly wiped amaranth out of existence.  Nowadays, you can find the seeds of the edible varieties for sale from some of the more heirloom-inclined seed companies.

We opted to buy some Manna de Montana Amaranth from Seeds of Change --- I'll let you know how it goes as the growing season progresses.  Meanwhile, I splurged on a few more experimental crops --- Hungarian Blue Breadseed Poppy, Temuco Quinoa, Urd Sprouting Bean, Black Kabouli Garbanzo Bean (since we have to drive an hour to get these in the store), Hullless Oats (thanks for the tip, Sena!), and Afghani Sesame.  I figure at least one or two should work out and make it onto our list of regulars!

Most vegetable and annual flower seeds are pretty easy to grow --- just throw them in the ground at something close to the right depth at the right time of year and they sprout just fine.  When you start trying to plant tree, shrub, and perennial herb seeds, though, propagation techniques often get a bit more tricky.  I always stumble when I'm told to scarify or stratify seeds, but both techniques are actually quite easy, as I discovered when I started looking up information about growing honey locusts and persimmons from seed.

Persimmon seeds need to be stratified before they will germinate.  People try to make stratification more difficult than it actually is, telling you to put the seeds in a pot of dirt or in a ziploc bag with a wet paper towel and leave them in the fridge for a certain length of time.  In practice, I've discovered that native plants have evolved to stratify quite nicely in the garden.  Just plant the seeds in the fall and they'll be exposed to plenty of cool temperatures and will germinate as usual in the spring.  I tried this with persimmons a few years ago with good success and am trying again this year.

Honey locust seeds, on the other hand, need scarification to germinate.  The problem is that many seeds evolved to be eaten by animals and to pass through the gut relatively unharmed.  Seeds need thick coatings to survive the stomach acids, but these thick coatings are often impenetrable to water, meaning that your seed won't sprout unless it's scarified.  The natural way to scarify seeds is to pass them through some animal's stomach and let the acids break partway through the seed coating.  Barring a handy animal, people will drop the seeds in a vat of acid or hot water, or will manually damage the seed coat (hopefully without damaging the seed inside.)  I tried to file my honey locust seeds with no luck, and instead ended up snipping through the edge of the seed coat with fingernail scissors.  This is my first attempt at scarification, so I'm very curious to see whether it works!

The farm got an inch of rain while we were away --- perfect conditions to test out our new swales.  So far, I'm quite impressed by how they're working.  The ditches (swales) have filled up with water, but the surrounding ground seems firmer and less waterlogged than usual.

Unfortunately, I don't think the swales are quite big enough since the soil downhill still has some standing water.  Next time I'm working in that area, I'll decide whether to deepen the swales, add a berm, or just add more swales.

We had a slight problem with one of the retaining walls for the refrigerator root cellar. It seems like a sturdy metal bracket will be needed to secure the wall to the side of the refrigerator.

You might notice a faint circle of melted snow around the chimney output. This was more noticeable a couple of hours ago, which is a nice way to illustrate how warm the air must be that's coming out.

There are many secrets to cultivating mushrooms, but the technique that seems to be most employed if you want to increase your yield is to use the glass jar method.

This involves using something like organic brown rice or brown flour, staying away from anything with preservatives that will work against mushroom growth.  The trick is to keep the mixture sterile, with about 1/4 cup of distilled water. Most people seem to think a pressure cooker is needed at 15 pounds for an hour to guard against contamination, once it's cool it acts as the perfect environment for your spawn to multiply in. It would be interesting to compare Anna's  wet cardboard method with the jar trick and see just how much more you can expect for all that extra fuss.

 

Lawrence Weingarten was kind enough to share his oyster mushroom cultivation secrets in an easy to understand web page with plenty of pictures. He starts by shredding up a bale of wheat straw and then cooking it in water at 160 degrees for about an hour. You've now made your own pasteurized substrate. Drain it and carefully mix in the proper amount of spawn, which is mycelium growing on grain or cardboard. Stuff it all in a tall plastic bag and hang it up somewhere safe. Follow his instructions on humidity and temperature levels and you'll have a serious harvest of fruit to enjoy in less than a week.

 

Anna's mushroom post this morning sent me on a research trail that led all the way to a Fungus farm in Singapore. These nice pictures illustrate how one can make their own man made logs out of a simple plastic bag. I imagine the bag is filled with some sort of saw dust.

We've been thinking of trying something like this in the refrigerator root cellar to see if we can achieve mushroom production on a year round basis.

 

A little over three weeks ago, I started propagating our oyster mushrooms from stem butts.  Two weeks ago, I saw that the mycelium was starting to run.  But I was still shocked when I peeked this week and saw fuzzy, white threads of fungus engulfing most of the cardboard in my flowerpot.  Time to move our experiment up a notch!

I soaked a lot more cardboard and found a much bigger container.  Since it worked so well last time, I crumpled up the flat pieces that peel off either side of the corrugated cardboard and laid them on the bottom of the container to keep the spawn out of any standing water.  Then I alternated layers of freshly soaked cardboard with layers of innoculated cardboard as if I was making a lasagna.

If our spawn keeps growing at this rate, I suspect we'll have to divide it again a few more times before the weather is right to innoculate logs.  I feel so empowered --- like growing tomatoes and broccoli from seed rather than relying on seedlings from the feed store!

Temperature is the real test of a successful root cellar, with optimal temperatures from 32 F to 40 F, but with temperatures from 40 F to 50 F considered quite good.  I've seen quite a few fancy root cellars constructed with vast quantities of labor and cash which fail the simple temperature test.  Can our $10 root cellar do better?

We won't know for sure how our root cellar holds up until it has to deal with really hot days and really cold nights, but so far it's running great.  Over the last few days since Mark completed the fridge root cellar, it has held a semi-steady temperature between 40 F and 52 F.  I'll keep you updated on the temperature variations as the year progresses.

If you missed parts of the construction details, you might want to read back over our old entries (linked below), or watch the video here which sums it all up in a two and a half minute nutshell.  I hope that some of you are inspired to eschew the fancy root cellar craze and make your own root cellar for cheap.

 

The refrigerator root cellar is now generating a cool and damp atmosphere which needs to be protected from insects looking for the perfect home to ride out the winter.

It was easy to secure down the lower vent screen with several small dry wall screws. They drive straight into the plastic without the need for a pilot hole.

The top vent was just as easy. Cut some scrap screen material to the desired length and use some electrical tape to fasten it down.

 

The gaskets on the refrigerator root cellar are old and don't quite seal up the two doors. A simple screen door latch is all it takes to solve that problem. I installed them a little on the tight side in order to pull the door firmly closed with no gaps. The refrigerator latch required a piece of scrap wood behind the handle for the eye to bite into.

This might work for a low budget fix to a working refrigerator that has a weak gasket. I've often heard a new gasket can cost nearly as much as a good used refrigerator.

I was almost going to buy one of those heavy PVC caps for the refrigerator root cellar chimney, but when I walked past a foam faucet cover I stopped in my tracks, looked at the PVC cap in one hand and the foam cover on the shelf and weighed the coolness factor of the foam geometry along with the fact that it was only a buck compared to the 6 dollar price of the PVC.

Anna thinks it adds a sort of mother ship look to it and I agree.

The next step will be to drill some holes in the side towards the top of the chimney and then attach some screen material to keep out any unwanted bugs.

 

It took both of us to lower the refrigerator root cellar into its new home below the earth. Once it was in place I decided to make some side panels from a couple of 2x4's and some scrap wood. It seems to be helping by keeping the dirt away from the hinge and door opening as I begin to bury it.

 

Two drill holes and a few minutes with the jig saw was all it took to create the new chimney hole for the refrigerator root cellar.

I also removed the foam and plastic barrier that separates the freezer from the rest of the refrigerator. One of the metal shelves slid right into its place, which will provide plenty of open space for the cool air to flow while at the same time working as a sturdy surface to store apples on.

 

After thinking about lowering the refrigerator root cellar into our new hole I decided to see just how hard it would be to strip off the metal coil from the back of the unit. It turns out it only took about a half hour to take everything off including the compressor and wiring harness. I think it's going to make sliding down the hole a bit smoother and safer.

I'm planning on mounting some screen material over the new holes in the bottom. The good thing about this approach is that it will be easy to add more holes if we think the air flow needs to increase.

 

We decided to dig the refrigerator root cellar down a bit deeper to accommodate a large cinder block in each corner. I thought two post holes in the middle might help to increase the cold surface area that will hopefully stream a steady flow of cool air up through the refrigerator and out the soon to be installed vent pipe.

The new chipper/grinder seems to have a problem with sticks and branches any bigger than what you see here in this short video. It's sort of a hassle to stop everything and flip it on its side to reset it once you send something through that's too big.

It still might find a place here on the farm, but today the verdict is too small and wimpy for the level of mulch production we are looking for.

 

The old gas powered chipper/grinder got moved up to the front of the get fixed line this week in an effort to increase our mulch production. Its 50 year old Briggs and Stratton engine won the first battle yesterday afternoon, but today I figured out exactly what to do with that stubborn motor.

Delete it.

The first step was to remove the four bolts that hold the engine to the frame. Then it's easy to lift out. Next fabricate some sort of vibration plate for the electric motor to be attached to, I used a scrap piece of 2x6. Once you get the pulley lined up secure the whole thing down to the frame and wire up a switch.

 

The Spud Buddy is a device that gets mounted to the side of an old broken freezer or refrigerator and uses a fan and a steady supply of water to keep the inside temperature and humidity where it needs to be in order to function as a root cellar.
 
I've never seen one of these in action, but the concept seems solid enough to work. Expect to spend about 160 bucks on the unit, and maybe some extra pennies per day for the additional electricity.

A clever solution for someone with limited time and space who wants to turn their old broken refrigerator into a functional root cellar.

While researching the refrigerator root cellar I came across an interesting concept known as a spiral root cellar. This design is for folks with very little space who want to have easy access to their chilled products. Most versions seem to be installed in the kitchen floor with a trap door for access. This solution seems to be only available in Europe, and it's not cheap. About 12 thousand dollars, which in the long run would be cheaper than an expensive wine cooler thanks to the fact that it uses the earth for cooling. Of course I'm wondering if some modification can be made to be able to build one yourself, but I think we will be sticking with the refrigerator root cellar design for now.

 

Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing pointed me to an interesting collection of fallout shelter designs that the Department of Defense put out back in the early 1960's. Not sure if I would want to stay too long in something so small and confining, but the image above got me to thinking about a modified version as a root cellar. Those big culverts are expensive, but if you already had one laying around this might be a good way to provide protection against the bad things out there while at the same time creating a place to keep food from freezing.

The new plan for a root cellar is to bury the old refrigerator that stopped working. I still need to modify it to take advantage of the chimney effect so that cool air will flow from the bottom and out through some sort of PVC pipe.

I'm still working the kinks out of my garden bed mulch plan.  Leaves are awesome (when you can get enough), but they really need an input of nitrogen to decompose well.

The method I used while away on our honeymoon worked pretty well.  We filled the chicken tractors up with leaves and let the hens shred and fertilize them, then shoveled the resultant goop onto garden beds.  The downside of this method is that it requires two rounds of leaf movement, and I'm always trying to handle our soil amendments as few times as possible.

Lately, I've been trying a different method.  I've been letting the chicken tractor sit on a bare raised bed for a few days, then moving the chicken tractor on and covering the poopy soil with freshly raked leaves.  I hope that the unshredded, unmixed leaves will still decompose due to the high nitrogen poop under them.

Of course, the real problem is that I want my garden completely covered ASAP, at least within the next few weeks.  And I just don't have enough chickens to poop on each bed in that time period.  Drat!  What shall I do?

Some of you may remember that I experimented with propagating morels this spring.  Paul Stamets made it seem so simple --- snip off the mushroom's end, put it between layers of wet cardboard, and wait a few months.  Mushroom propagation might be that easy in the Pacific Northwest, but even during a very wet summer around here, our cardboard had plenty of time to dry out.  My stem butts shriveled and no spawn formed.

When we got our second flush of oyster mushrooms, I resolved to try again.  Oyster mushrooms are supposed to be some of the easiest to propagate, and I've learned a bit from my mistakes.  This time, after soaking the cardboard, I ripped off the flat layers on either side to leave just the corrugated part behind.  I sandwiched my stem butt sections between layers of corrugated cardboard inside a flower pot, and stuck it under the sink where I can check the moisture content periodically.  If all goes as planned, we might have spawn to expand our oyster mushroom collection in the spring.  Or maybe I'll keep experimenting and learning.

Lisa Katayama from Boing Boing had an interesting post pointing to the January 1938 issue of Popular Science where they spotlight an Ohio farmer who used a metal mold to form this surreal image of a face onto a pumpkin. Ohio farmers really were ahead of their time when it came to thinking outside of the box.

Richard Twedell is the president of Vegiforms, a company in Ohio that offers a few different plastic molds that might tickle your fancy and satisfy your vegetable sculpting urges. He claims his heart shaped zucchinis sell for 3 bucks to a local restaurant, which could add up to some real money if it caught on as some sort of new holiday trend.

I've always been curious about pine nuts, but never took the time to research them properly.  Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) is the European response to producing pine nuts, but is really only good to zone 7.  Instead, Jacke suggested Korean nut pine (Pinus koraiensis) for our region since it is tolerant of cold weather and makes high quality nuts.

Planting a nut pine is an experiment with a capital E.  The trees are huge, so we'll be cutting a gap in the pine forest on the south end of our garden to plant them in rather than using up precious garden space.  Some folks say Korean nut pines bear in 3 to 8 years.  Others warn you that you'll need to wait 40 years.  Hmmm....

The seedlings are pricey, so I decided to try my hand at germinating seeds bought on ebay.  (Don't try to just plant the pine nuts you'd buy in the grocery store --- without their protective shell, these rot in the ground.)  Stay tuned for updates on this experiment...over the next 40 years.

It's always a nice bonus when Lucy gives a project a few sniffs and then announces her seal of approval.

Our chickens are pretty self-sufficient as long as the temperature doesn't get too far below freezing.  We've been known to leave them for up to four days with just an extra automatic chicken waterer and a few scoops of feed sprinkled over the ground.  The only problem with leaving them alone for so long is that they scratch the ground up pretty badly, and in rainy weather the soil turns into a morass of mud.

Before heading out on our cruise, I decided to try a different tactic.  I begged Mark to rake me up a bunch of leaves, and I filled each tractor with a mountain of organic matter.  When we returned a week later, each mountain had sunk to a mole hill of shredded leaves well mixed with chicken poop, but the ground wasn't muddy despite an inch and a half of rain.  I'm emulating the traditional Guatemalan method of using this combination as a well-balanced soil amendment, though I plan to use the poopy mass as mulch on my garlic beds rather than working it into the soil.

 

Yes.....a couple of the mechanical deer deterrents failed recently due to some simple hang ups. It took me a few attempts before I came up with what I call the supporting arm structure for the clanging surface.

The support provides more adjustment choices when fine tuning the swing and helps to secure this deer deterrent contraption even during heavy winds.

Is a failure like this frustrating? Heck yeah it is, but the feeling of knowing we are one step closer to a better solution helps to ease the pain.

 

A friend of mine gracefully brought to my attention the fact that I was ignoring the 6 inch freeze zone when I was laying the ground work for our new building project.

I decided to experiment with some posts from the large cedar tree I cut down last month. It's easier for an amateur like me to use this method compared to leveling out the cinder blocks.

Nights have started dropping into the low 40s this week --- time to get serious about freezing the last of the summer crops.

Now that we suddenly have enough summer squash to preserve, I decided to try to find a mush-free way to freeze them.  Last year, I steam-blanched the squash then froze them, and the thawed squash turned out watery --- okay in a spaghetti sauce, but not so great otherwise.  A friend of mind grills her summer squash before freezing them with great results.  I decided to slice the squash lengthwise and broil them in the oven rather than firing up the grill.  The result was certainly tasty in the short term --- we'll have to wait and see how they thaw out once winter hits.

Guatemalan farmers harvest vast quantities of fallen leaves (broza) out of nearby woods to incorporate into their soil.  Wilken estimates that farmers rake up leaves from 5 to 8 acres of forest for each acre of crop they cultivate, although he hastens to add that farm fields are small.   Some farmers just hoe the leaves directly into their soil, while others use the leaves as animal bedding for a week, then incorporate the poopy bedding into the soil.  The latter method is especially effective since nitrogen in the manure and urine offsets the nitrogen lost during the initial stages of leaf decomposition.

Leaves are an especially intriguing soil amendment for our farm since they improve soil structure and water retention/drainage in clayey soils.  In fact, Guatemalan farmers use leaves primarily in clay soil, while they tend to lean toward manure in sandy soils.

Last year, I begged my city-living family members to scavenge bags of leaves left on the curb, and we ended up with 31 big garbage bags full.  I used them as mulch around our berries and trees, but I could have used about ten times as much leaf matter.  Since we've decided to buy firewood this year, maybe we'll have enough free time to rake masses of leaves out of the woods and use them as soil amendments.  I may experiment with using our chicken tractors as leaf-shredding and manure-amending factories, or may try to harvest the nitrogen in our urine by peeing on our leaves.  Stay tuned for lots of leafy experimentation this fall and winter!

Soon after we united our two weakest hives, the weather turned cool and wet --- bad bee-checking conditions.  Finally, I got impatient and went out to inspect the bees between showers.

Outside the hive, a fringe of newspaper was clearly evident between the merged hive sections, so I figured I'd need to remove the paper divider.  But when I took off the super from the weak hive, I saw that the industrious bees had carefully eaten away the entire newspaper up to the wooden hive walls! 

The hive merge is complete and very successful.  While our other two, formerly strongest hives are still filling up their first super apiece, our newly merged hive is starting to store honey between hatching brood in the big top super!  I can only assume this means that the queen from the weak hive has been assassinated and her workers assimilated into the population.  Although I probably wouldn't repeat my frame swap experiment, the hive merge is going to be added to my toolkit.

Note: Mark hasn't been posting because he's a bit under the weather.  I expect him to be back online in short order, but until then you'll just have to put up with me.  If you miss his ingenuity, go visit his homemade chicken waterer site and his homemade deer deterrent site.  There, don't you feel better?

 

I was describing my new home made frame perch tool design to a friend and he furrowed his brow when I mentioned how I used wood instead of metal. He was concerned about a full frame of honey being too much weight for such a "light duty" structure.

That possible problem was fixed easily with the next size down L bracket being secured in each corner. You might need to chisel out a groove for the bracket depending on how much wiggle room your frames have to move back and forth while still staying snug.

Our number 5 deer deterrent got hung up today due to some cracks in the metal flashing. No doubt the increased banging was the cause. I replaced it with some thicker metal salvaged from a junk pile. I then moved some longer flashing towards the back for it to absorb the second hit, which provides a unique vibration and some added motion for any potential 4 legged garden poachers out there who have yet to get the message that our vegetables are off limits.