The New Coop

So here's a project that's taken up far more of our spring time than I would have imagined.  It's our spankin' new chicken coop.  As you can see, it's an A-frame and a rather large one.  The seed ideas for the design were mostly mine, but in the course of constructing it with the help of our WWOOF volunteer, design became very much a collaborative effort.

Our previous coop-and-pen system was our first attempt at providing mobile housing for our laying hens.  It served reasonably well for four years, but we built in plenty of flaws because we didn't really know what we were doing.  We had to build chicken housing before we'd ever kept chickens.  Some of these flaws were remediable, and we fixed what we could; others not so much.  My two biggest complaints were that the coop wasn't easy to clean out and that both the coop and the pen were quite heavy, making it hard for me to move them by myself sometimes.  A lesser issue was that we had no way of providing a dust bath for our hens in a mobile system.  So they tore into our grass to cool themselves down in summer, thus leaving significant divots in the lawn.  I didn't care so much about the aesthetics, but rolling a heavy coop and pen around was hard enough to begin with.  When the wheels fell into some of these divots, it became really difficult.

So the new design had to eliminate the difficulty of cleaning, shed excessive weight, and offer dustbathing possibilities for the birds.  I also wanted easier access to the interior, and room for at least two nest boxes.  We started with one nesting box for four hens, which was reasonable, especially since the box could hold two hens at a time if need be.  But over the years the number of hens we've had at one time has varied considerably, with nine being the upper limit.  This resulted in the occasional queue for the nesting box, and the occasional egg laid outside the nest.

Here you can see the elevated dust box in the back.  Since it's raised up this way it doesn't take away any area of the lawn.  This also shows the articulated door, which folds down so I can access the feeder and waterer, or throw treats to the girls without giving them too much temptation to escape.  When I need access to the inside of the pen, I can open the entire door and get inside without much crouching or discomfort.

The nesting boxes are situated towards the peak of the new coop.  The girls don't seem to have any aversion to laying their eggs so far off the ground.  Since they have to make three jumps from the ground to the nests, their feet seem to be cleaner.  The eggs I've been getting have been mostly pristine.

Here are a couple of pictures of the wheels and the slight advantage we gained by not placing them at the very back edge of the bottom frame.  You'll notice that they're on a lever bar that can be propped into place when it's time to move the coop.  The rest of the time the frame rests almost in contact with the ground.  By moving the wheel slightly towards the front of the coop, the weight of small portion of the coop behind the wheel acts as a counter balance to the rest of the weight.  This makes it easier for me to move.  I don't quite have the technical vocabulary to describe this, but the idea was described in an excellent article about the Chinese wheelbarrow in the Energy Bulletin a short while ago.  The article will fill you in on the principle, if you're interested.

Here you can see the lever bar positioned to raise the coop off the ground to make it easier to move.  We're still tinkering with this a bit since our smallest hen scooted right under the coop while I was moving it one morning.  We have a few ideas on how we might fine tune the system.

Here's a shot taken after the main construction was done that shows most elements of the interior.  We have diagonal bracing in a few areas to strengthen the wooden framing.  After painting was finished, the whole thing was sheathed in chicken wire.  Then an old billboard was used to cover the sides/roof and most areas of the gable ends.

I've already been asked, "Why purple?"  My standard response is, "Why not?"  My tendency to splash bright colors around my garden is already on record.  It helps curb the impulse to paint something loud on the walls of our home.  Deep purple was one color not yet represented in the garden.  It all looked so pretty until it was time to put that used billboard on as roofing material.  I'm hoping that I can find an artistic soul who might paint something attractive on it.  After all, it looks like nothing so much as a blank canvas to me, just waiting to be filled up with something whimsical or chicken-related.

I will say this for the ugly billboard.  It is very sturdy stuff, designed to be out in all weathers.  The white backing of the advertisement should help keep the coop from heating up too much in full summer sun.  Oh, and it was free, by the way.  The billboard companies give them away for nothing once they're taken down.  I know a man who used this material in lieu of roof liner when he built his own home.  I expect the billboard to hold up extremely well, and thus protect this coop from the elements for several years at least.

The only thing missing from our new coop is a clever name.  My husband calls it the "land yacht."  I sometimes refer to it as the "purple menace."  Neither moniker seems to really capture the mixture of charm and clunkiness of our new coop.  So what say you, readers?  Got a clever name for this behemoth?  I have no prizes to give away and make this a contest, but I'd love a snazzy label for our newest piece of homestead infrastructure.  All suggestions will be gratefully received and considered.

Resurfacing

Apologies for the long radio silence.  And thanks to those of you who sent kind inquiries about my absence.  All is well at the homestead.  While spring is always a busy season that gets in the way of writing, that's not my excuse this time.  The difference now is that my husband is more or less retired, and thus home all the time.  This is almost entirely a good thing.  The only exception to that is my habit of writing when I have the house entirely to myself.  The writing "mood," as it were, comes to me most easily in solitude.  I find it very hard to reach that state with distractions around me.  So, if this blog is to continue, I'll need to figure out a routine or a method that will provide verisimilitude for being alone at home.  This will probably be a challenge, but I'll work at it.  If I manage to find time to write, it'll probably mean I find a way to catch up with many of your blogs as well.  I've missed keeping tabs on what many of you are up.  There's so much inspiration and so many cool ideas in the gardening/homesteading blogosphere!

In the meantime I should provide some thumbnail sketches of where we're at and what we've been doing.  First off, my husband's "retirement" is really the loss of a job.  Since we've known this was coming for quite a while, we could plan for it, which I know is an advantage many people don't get.  Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.  Our advance notice let us, just barely, pay off our mortgage entirely before his employment ended.  So we are now without an income, but also debt-free.  Mostly that's not scary at this point.  It feels pretty good, I have to tell you.  We've taken a few extra efforts here and there to shave expenses in an already pretty frugal existence. 

We've already hosted a number of WWOOF volunteers this year, and our first one brought with him an impressive amount of construction experience.  He helped us build a new mobile chicken coop to replace our clunky and deteriorating pen and coop system, which served honorably, if inelegantly, these past four years.  The new rig is an A-frame that provides a bit more area to the chickens and should require almost no cleaning, ever, since there's no floor. All the poop ends up directly on the lawn. The girls seem to have taken to it quite happily.  I think it's just about the most awesome chicken coop ever, if I say so myself.  I'll try to get a detailed post on this one up soon.  (Yes, I know my track record with "soon" is execrable.)

Other recent efforts have entailed a lot of digging and planting of rootstock.  The hedgerow project got moved way up the priority list by last year's Halloween snowstorm from hell.  The storm took out a major section of our fence in the backyard.  We're going with the strategy of leaving what remains of the old wooden fence where it is, and replacing what came down with livestock panels and the plants that will form the hedgerow.  Frankly, this looks ugly at the moment, and doesn't provide any of the privacy of the wooden fence.  But eventually, the livestock panels will be mostly hidden by the plants, which will give us privacy, and should look a lot better than the wooden fence.  Should we ever decide to use that space for dairy goats, the dual-element hedgerow will constitute a real barrier to the animals, while looking pretty and offering some browse.  So far our hedgerow plantings include rugosa roses, Siberian peashrub, cornelian cherry, a dwarf willow tree, and a golden elderberry.  It's likely that our black raspberry patch, which sort of backs into the property line, will become a hedgerow element too.  I have three tiny hazels and a ginseng plant that will be coddled for another year or two in containers before being added to the hedgerow.  We lucked out with the goat panels, finding them used for a small fraction of the price for new ones, which is considerable.  Right now a picture of the hedge project wouldn't really show much.  I'm hoping that by late summer or fall a second picture will provide an impressive contrast.  We'll see how it goes.

We also planted several new fruit trees, bushes and vines this month.  We're starting both table grapes and hardy kiwis on trellises, and experimenting with a new growing technique for several fruit trees.  The technique is called Backyard Orchard Culture.  The good folk at Root Simple blog wrote about it, and you can check out a summary at the website of the tree nursery which developed it.  Basically the idea is to cram normal fruit trees into places where they either won't have enough space to develop to their normal mature size, or where such full growth is undesirable.  Then you radically prune the tree as it grows to keep it very small.  Planting multiple fruit trees very close together is another part of BOC.  Doing so forces the trees to compete for resources, which helps keep them small.  While trees maintained in this manner will obviously never produce as much fruit as trees which realize their full growth, there are other advantages.  Having many small fruit trees means you can have a succession of harvests that are each just large enough to keep you in fresh fruit for a fortnight or so, without providing any pressure to preserve the bulk of an enormous harvest.   The six Asian pears and two extra apples we just planted in this way should (eventually) give us modest quantities of fresh fruit over a three-month span from mid-summer to early fall.  (We'd ordered two more apples which would have extended the season through mid-fall at least, but they were sold out.  We may add them next year.)  Since BOC trees are kept very small, maintenance and harvesting are very easy.  There's no need for ladders.  I expect that when I'm another twenty or thirty years older, the ability to do such work with both feet on the ground will be very appealing.

We've got a few broiler chickens going already this year.  My feeling is that last year we let our batch of six go far too long.  I wanted to use up the second bag of feed that I'd purchased for them, and that meant letting most of them live for ten weeks.  It gave us bigger birds, certainly.  But it also meant that by the end I had to move the birds three times per day just to keep them out of their own filth.  The Cornish cross breed that accounts for the vast majority of chicken meat in this country isn't genetically modified, but judging by how fast they grow, they may as well be.  At nine and ten weeks of age, even broilers that were kept on grass, not fed for 24 hours per day, and allowed plenty of space to move around, pretty much couldn't and didn't.  The speed at which these birds grow is an undeniable advantage for those who want to fly under the radar with backyard meat production.  You can finish the birds before anyone notices they're there.  But it's pretty much their only virtue.  This year I'll raise two batches of four birds each, and only until each batch finishes off an 80-pound bag of feed.  I expect that to mean slaughter at roughly seven weeks old.  Thus smaller birds, but more of them as compared with last year.

Finally, we've just started work on a tiny frog pond to be added to the center of our garden.  This is the only suitable spot we could find for it - one that's not on a footpath or directly under a large deciduous tree that will dump too many leaves into it in autumn.  Work sort of stalled with this after the hole was dug, as mild weather brought on many spring tasks very early.  But I want to get this done soonish, so that it can provide many benefits to our growing space this year.  I know for a certainty that adding a bit of water to the garden will bring a great deal of additional biodiversity, which can only be a good thing.  What I'm really hoping for though are some toads, which are supposed to be fantastic for slug control.  The lasagna mulching method I'm so fond of does tend to encourage slugs, though we've had such dry conditions the last couple years that it's sort of been a wash.  The plan is to stock the pond with duckweed for multiple uses, and probably a few goldfish for algae management.  If frogs or toads don't show up on their own, I may go looking for some tadpoles.  I know where to find some of these locally in the correct season, but I'm pretty sure that window has closed for the year. 

Hope spring is treating you all well.  Drop me a line and let me know what's new with you and your garden.

More Hoop House Details

I promised another post on the features of our hoop house.  Despite the fact that it's still not quite complete, the hoop house is doing well and demonstrating its productivity.  Typically, protected growing space is some of the most expensive in any garden or on the farm.  Our hoop house was definitely no exception.  I don't have a figure for what we've spent on this project, but I'm guessing it's close to $1000 all together.  That makes it about $10 per square foot of growing space.  And given that our laying hens are occupying one-third of that, the productivity of the remaining two beds is under a lot of scrutiny.  I know we'll get many years of use out of the hoop house, and thus the cost can be amortized.  But I'm still very conscious of needing to maximize the value of that space.

The seeding of the hoop house, like everything else associated with this project, was a day late and a dollar short this year.  Mostly it got planted at the end of September and very early October.  Nonetheless, most of what I planted seems to be doing at least tolerable well.  I experimented with turnips (planted a little too early, if anything), cylindra beets and some piracicaba broccoli (probably a tad late), catalogna dandelion (doing very well, wish I'd planted more), many transplanted volunteer lettuces and cilantro from the main garden (all looking happy and gorgeous), tatsoi (happy, but seems to be beloved of whichever pest found its way into the sheltered space before winter arrived), carrots and scallions (very happy and well timed) a few snow peas (rather small, but seem to be hanging in there), some sort of Asian brassica that I got on sale from Johnny's (nice cooking green, another one I wish I'd planted more of), as well as a few perennial herbs which seem to be biding their time.  So I'm well rewarded by the sight of happy plants each time I go out to the hoop house.  That said, I mostly want to show off a bit of the infrastructure today.

The hens are once again overwintering on deep bedding.  As usual the bedding is primarily free wood mulch from the yard waste facility in our township.  This year I also put some fallen leaves in there.  These high-carbon materials will absorb and balance all the manure (high in nitrogen) laid down by the chickens during the four months or so of their winter confinement.  In my experience during the last two years, the litter never smells bad and the girls constantly scratch through and mix their wastes into it.  In the spring what is left is a rich, inoffensive, bioactive, nutrient-packed fertility mulch for my fruit trees.  I was asked whether this didn't pose a risk to these trees, since excessive nitrogen can lead to fire blight on growing trees. I haven't seen that on the pear and apple trees that have benefited from previous years' litter treatment.  My feeling is that because there is so much microbial life in the litter, most of the nitrogen and other nutrients are bound up in the bodies of living things, and thus only become available to other organisms where the litter is laid down very gradually.  This is a far cry from what happens when sterile chemical fertilizers are dumped into the ecosystem of the topsoil.  I will be watching the bedding closely however.  We've got more hens this year, and less square footage per bird.  The rule of thumb that Joel Salatin proposes is a minimum of four cubic feet of deep litter per bird.  Supposedly at that stocking density the litter will never turn nasty.  We're right up against that number, so we'll see what happens.

There are a few major benefits of the hoop house over the shed, as far as winter housing for the hens goes.  The first is that we didn't have to sacrifice one third of the space in the shed to them this year, and won't ever have to again.  The second is that the deep litter bedding in the shed, being raised up off the soil, sometimes froze solid, despite the carbon-nitrogen balance that should have provided for enough microbial activity to keep the pile generating its own heat.  This required me to get into the bedding and turn it over with a pitchfork from time to time, otherwise the manure built up on the frozen surface.  It's certainly true that we haven't seen the worst of the winter weather to come.  But given that the lack of air space under the bedding, I very much doubt the bedding will freeze inside the hoop house.  The other main benefit is the added light and warmth of the hoop house compared to the shed.  The doors of the shed face north, so the hens got no direct sunlight at all in previous years.  I did open the doors all day in all but the worst weather though, so the temperature was always cold in the shed.  The hoop house gets cozy warm inside on sunny days, even when the temperature is well below freezing.  This saves on feed costs for me, since the girls don't need so many calories to keep themselves warm.  Whether the deep litter is actually generating heat as well, I couldn't say.  I don't have a compost thermometer, so I have no way of distinguishing the sources of the heat in the hoop house.

Given the overall cost of the hoop house project, it was important to me to pimp out the hoop house for as little money as possible.   Most of the following tricks and accessories cost very little money.  While some of these were doable largely by making use of fortuitous chance, I hope some of them at least will be useful to others who have or are considering a hoop house.

In the center of the hoop house I've place a truck bed storage box - one of those things that sit across the bed of a pickup truck and provide a lockable compartment akin to the trunk of a car.  (The garbage can sitting on top of it holds the chicken feed safe from dripping condensation and rodents.)  This one came with our beater pickup truck, but we didn't need it.  I thought it would make a pretty good seat between beds.  More importantly though I noticed that it was black and that it could hold water.  Black things absorb solar warmth, and water has a high thermal mass.  So I filled the bed box with as much water as it will hold (with some soap and salt added to make sure it doesn't become a breeding ground for mosquitoes).  Now it's doing double duty as a bench and a heat sink.  The other use I might want to turn it to one day is as a large vermicompost bin.  I suspect it wouldn't be great for worms in the summer time, but I'm mulling it as a possibility for next fall and winter.  That could provide a nice homegrown source of protein for the chickens next year.

My next trick is one I've used before in the garden - reflective material along the north side of the hoop house that maximizes the natural light the plants receive.  This time I've added a cheap space blanket that I found at a 99-cents sale.  I got one for each car and our emergency kit at home, plus one for the hoop house.  Now I wish I'd gotten two for this project.  It's highly reflective and it probably also acts as thermal insulation.

Then there are the low hoops over each growing bed.  These were invaluable while the hoop project was still under way.  They were the only protection the plants had from frost for a while there, before the sheeting went on the big hoops.  Now the low hoops give a second layer of protection, keeping the temperature in the beds even warmer overnight.  In fact, on sunny days I need to get out there and raise the plastic off the low hoops lest the plants get cooked.  Fortunately, with the hens in the hoop house, daily maintenance is built into the schedule.

Predictably, before the house was completed and before the winter weather even got too severe, some rodents took up residence on the margins of the hoop house.  There were plans to place 1/4-inch hardware cloth around the perimeter of the house at ground level.  Our delay on that part of the construction allowed the mice, or voles, or whatever they are, to move in.  It's still the plan to install the hardware cloth.  In the meantime, I knocked together a trap box based on Rob's vole motel, but so far I haven't figured out what bait will snare them.  Either that or the neophobia (fear of new things) common to many rodents has kept them safe.  I know they've been through my box; the dirt tracked into either side confirms this.  If the peanut butter bait still hasn't worked in another week, I'll try something else.  So far my carrots don't seem to have taken any damage, at least not at the surface where I could spot it before harvest.  Who knows what's going on underneath though.

Here's one I'm rather pleased with.  I built myself a weeding/harvesting board with an extra cross piece that extends my reach across the beds quite effectively.  This was a scrap piece of the 2x6 cedar wood that we used to construct the raised beds.  I tricked it out with some risers and braces underneath so that it is stable on the edges of the beds and doesn't completely flatten the growing plants.  The sitting board allows me to easily reach the far side of the beds.  When I rest the cross piece on the sitting board and far edge of the bed, I can lean way out for wider access across the beds.  I put some wood sealer on the boards, a useful measure given how humid the hoop house is.

Okay, more tricks.  To use every bit of space that possibly can be used, and to eke out as much productivity as possible, I scrounged through the pile of stuff we've pulled out of construction site dumpsters and came up with a simple shelf.  I hung it from the purlin on the north side of the hoop house.  With the sun low in the sky from fall through early spring, the shelf doesn't cast a shadow on the raised bed below it, so no light lost to the growing space.  Right now I'm only using the shelf to store oyster shell for the hens and a few other items.  Come springtime, this shelf and others like it will increase my growing space.  They will be ideal spots for vulnerable seedlings in trays, keeping them well out of reach of our unwelcome rodent guests.

Our hoop house has lighting too, which is for the benefit of the hens rather than the plants.  We happened to have an extra fluorescent hanging lamp lying around in the basement, and it just so happens that the previous owner of our home ran electricity out to the shed.  So rigging the lamp from the ridge pole of the hoop house and running an extension cord to the shed was no big deal.  As I have done the previous two winters, I am lighting the hens with the help of a timer to keep them productive over the winter months.  It took quite a few hours of lighting them at first to bring them back into laying.  Right now we have mostly heritage breed hens, and they had all stopped laying for the winter season.  Now that we're getting a decent number of eggs each day, I may try slowly cutting back the hours and/or removing one of the two bulbs to save on the electricity bill.  My understanding is that it would require an enormous amount of lighting to make any difference to the growth of the plants.  That's not something I'm interested in paying for.  As far as I can see, the fact that the plants are practically in stasis is one of the main benefits of winter hoop house growing.

An indispensable accessory for the hoop house is the common broom.  A pair of brooms helped us coax the plastic sheeting over the large hoops.  It also allows me to gently push up the sheeting from the inside to coax  accumulating rain and snow off the sheeting.  I keep one in the hoop house at all times.

A not so cheap aspect of the hoop house are the multiple self-ventilating windows.  I had intended to content myself with just one of the expensive piston openers when I spotted them on sale at Johnny's.  Unfortunately, I didn't communicate this to my husband, who spotted the same sale and purchase two for me as an anniversary present.  We decided to indulge ourselves and not return any of them for a refund.  So our hoop house is going to be very well ventilated when my husband finishes installing them.  The way these work is that the piston contains a temperature-sensitive fluid that expands as it warms and condenses as it cools.  So as the temperature increases, the piston opens the window automatically, then closes automatically when the temperature drops.  It sure is a nifty trick and I admit that it saves me the need to pay a lot of attention to what's going on in the hoop house.  Still, even on sale, these things weren't cheap, and I would have contented myself with fewer of them under different circumstances.

The final feature I want to mention is one that I can't take a picture of.  We built this hoop house and arranged the beds directly over the surplus heat dumping coils for our solar thermal array.  We actually requested the placement and configuration of those coils with the hoop house project in mind.  Right now we're not shunting any heat whatsoever to the coils, because it's wintertime, and we need every bit of heat we can collect from the solar array.  So presently we have an unheated hoop house.  But come the shoulder season in spring, when our heating demands go down in the house, we will be able to divert some of the heat from the array into the ground underneath the hoop house.  The same could be true in the fall shoulder season as well. It remains to be seen whether or not this will provide any advantage.  It may be that by the time we have excess heat to vent from the array, the hoop house will already be quite warm enough.  There is an alternate heat venting system that we would use in that case.

I expect having the hoop house will change the growing routine around here quite a bit.  I'll be able to start plants earlier in the year, and keep a small number of them carefully manicured in there year-round.  I'm thinking about implementing some proper square-foot gardening in there to really max out the potential of covered beds.  I'll need to learn how best to use the extra heating that should be available in spring and fall; an unusual set-up in hoop houses that have heating available.

Native Bee Boxes

With the arrival of intermittent spring weather, I've been very busy lately.  The outdoor projects have begun in earnest and my hands and forearms are feeling the strain of that work.  Typing doesn't help much.  So excuse the recent lack of posting. 

But here's something I wanted to write about: nest boxes for native bees.  My husband made one of these a few years ago and put it up on our shed.  We've already observed that the sealing walls constructed by mason bees last year have been dismantled, and a new generation of bees is checking out the nest holes for deposits of eggs.  So early in the year!  It seems there's so little in bloom yet for them to feed on, but the warmth has them up and about.  The nest box consists of a block of wood with deeply drilled holes in various sizes.  They serve as shelter for the eggs of several kinds of bee.

We have a huge three-bay garage that came with the house.  Its footprint is larger than the house itself.  It's great for storing all kinds of stuff pulled out of dumpsters and projects in progress, which means it gets packed to the point of becoming unnavigable.  On rainy days I've been working to triage some of the ungodly mess that has piled up in there over the last six months.  I found a short length of 4x4 post and decided to turn it into more nest boxes for native bees.  Small pieces of scrap wood furnished roofs to keep off the worst of the rain.  These will be mounted on the scaffolding for our solar array.  I'm sure they will soon be fully occupied.

Our foray into keeping honey bees last year resulted in unmitigated failure.  Our longest surviving colony didn't make it through the winter.  We're going to try again this year, and we hope that we'll have more success with some hard lessons under our belts.  Seeing the help our efforts provide to native bees offers some consolation. These bees are under the same environmental stresses as honey bees.  The human race cannot afford to lose the free services of pollinator insect species, and bees are preeminent in this work.  As it turns out, some of our native bees are even more effective pollinators than honey bees.  Keeping honey bees requires a significant commitment of time, labor and monetary outlay.  It took me all of two hours to build these two native bee nest boxes at almost no expense whatsoever.  I paid for four screws, a tiny bit of silicone sealer (leftover from energy efficiency improvements for our home) and the electricity to run a power drill.  My work for the native bees ends the moment these bee boxes are mounted. 

I mentioned recently how last year there was a sense of my garden and homestead finally beginning to come together.  If anything, that feeling is increasing this year.  When we bought this house the backyard was a monoculture of open lawn, with a border of conventional, uninspired landscaping.  Now it's stocked with dozens and dozens of perennial plants, and we grow a wide variety of annual vegetables there every year, both of which supply food and habitat for numerous insects, which in turn provide food to birds and other wildlife.  That's biodiversity that simply wasn't there before.  Putting up these boxes for the bees is another effort towards that cause.  It's the inter-species connections on this tiny piece of land that are going to make what we do here sustainable over the long term.  I'm convinced that every additional species I can encourage is a strength for my homestead.  I don't even know exactly what these native bees are doing here.  I'm sure they venture off my property as much as they conduct their business on it.  But they are a knot in the living tapestry I am making of this place.  I want them here.  With some scrap materials and a couple hours of labor it's easy enough for me to make this place attractive to them for decades to come. 

One way of looking at this is as a token gesture of atonement for the environmental damage my actions have caused, and continue to cause; a tiny way to give back to the world that supports me.  Seen another way, it's self interest.  Monocultures are fragile things.  By encouraging as much biodiversity as possible, I get more resilience, healthier soil, lower pest pressures, better pollination of our fruits and vegetables, and less work for me.  That's what I'm talking about when I say things are coming together.

If you're interested in helping populations of native bees, you could build your own bee boxes.  You could even salvage the materials from a dumpster on a construction site, thus diverting useful stuff from a landfill and saving yourself some money.  For guidance on this simple project, check out this fact sheet (pdf) from the Xerces Society, a wildlife conservation organization.  On their website you can also find lists (tailored to each region of the US) of beneficial plants to for native bees, including many edible plants.

Making It

It hit a surreal 78 degrees (25.5 C) here almost two weeks ago.  Too hot in the sun to even lie in the hammock, let alone do any work.  Last week was grey and miserable, with high temperatures in the 40's, and a dump of the dreaded "wintry mix" precipitation.  We've had sub-freezing temps overnight ever since, and this week is sunny but cold.  Sigh.  Where'd my spring go?

I'm trying to make the best of it and have been quite productive lately.  I got a lot of outside work done during that warm week, while the sun shone.  Now there are many seedlings to attend to indoors.  And I spend a little time outside during the warmest parts of each sunny day.  Otherwise I've been keeping my hands busy inside while I bide my time, however resentful of the vanished warm weather.  Here's a rundown of the projects I've been working on lately.

I painted the nesting box we made all from scrap wood.  Bright colors of course, because if the wood needs protection from the elements, I might as well use colors that make me happy.  Now that we're more or less set up for the broody hen, I'm eager for her arrival.  Still no firm date for that yet.

I finished two new two planting templates - a cool looking hexagonal one for the three sisters planting, and another one for the garlic planting on 6" centers.  I've been using an 8" planting template for the garlic, but after getting carried away with some 350 garlic plants last fall, I've rethought my spacing for this crop.

I also worked on finishing a few projects started with the help of our WWOOF volunteers.  The first is a greens feeder for the chickens.  The idea here is that you plant greens the chickens like to eat under the feeder.  The plants then grow up through the caging and the girls can eat what pokes up.  But they can't tear the roots out of the soil, so the plants in theory should re-grow and continue to feed them for a long time.  Since we move the hens daily throughout most of the year, I plan to use this in the yet-to-be-constructed hoop house which will house the girls next winter.  In the meantime though I'm also hoping it will shield some tiny catnip seedlings from the ravages of cats - both ours and the neighborhood ne'erdowell toms.  The caging for this project was repurposed from a tomato cage that will be replaced with a trellising system this year.

The second is my solar cooking station.  This still needs a bit more work, but it's good enough to supercharge our seedlings with tons of sunlight at the moment.  It mounts to the scaffolding for our solar heating array.  A piece of rebar supports a wooden countertop from the back, and a wooden upright supports it in front.  It's reasonably easy for me to set it up or remove it by myself.  I'm hoping that the solar array doesn't completely shade it out in summer.  I'll watch this, and if need be, lower the station a bit to get it out from under the shade.  All of these projects - templates, nesting box, greens feeder and solar cooking station - were made with salvaged lumber and other free materials.  Only the paint, screws, nails and some other hardware were, in some cases, purchased.

Hand carved wooden spoon and a spoon blank

I carved a wooden spoon (from a spoon "blank") using the awesome woodcarving tools that my husband received recently as a gift.  It's a rather addictive occupation, despite being tough on novice hands, and definitely one best pursued when the weather is fair enough to allow all the shavings to fall outside.  Last year we broke our last two wooden spoons, so it's nice to be able to make some for ourselves.  This one isn't very large, but it could be used with smaller cooking pots.  I put a nubbin on the back of the handle end so it won't just slip into the soup if I set it against the rim of the pot.

Based on a good tip from The Urban Homestead, I made a baking soda shaker from a glass jar with a metal lid.  This is for dish washing, as baking soda is a mild and non-toxic abrasive.  Just take a nail and make lots of holes in the lid, then fill with ordinary baking soda.  The gaffer's tape bands around the jar were my own tweak.  They're there to provide a better grip to wet hands.

Also, a couple of knitted dishrags.  These are made from cotton butcher's twine and based on a pattern for a baby blanket I made many years ago.  Look for large spools of this stuff in a restaurant supply store.  It's much cheaper than buying the small rolls of a thinner gauge kitchen twine in a supermarket.  I recommend you get a couple of spools.  Keep one someplace clean for kitchen uses, and the other one with your garden tools.  You'll find a thousand uses for it outside, but it's not easy to keep the twine clean if you take it to the garden.  These dishrags can be made fairly quickly on days when you're cooped up inside.  They don't wear out as quickly as scrubby sponges, and if you throw them in with the laundry they won't abrade your clothes.  Also, they're thin enough to sterilize just with sun exposure.  Google for a thousand pattern options.  And I'm sure there are crochet patterns as well if that's your fiber art.  I may experiment with dying these later as I have a dying project in mind and these could just be added into the soak.

Pelmenyi.  These are meat dumplings from central Russia.  I've been meaning to make them for ages now.  Some unpasteurized whey graciously donated by Sandy, defrosting my freezer, and unfriendly outdoor temps, were the impeti to finally undertake the project.  And they are a project, believe me.  It would be much more fun and go so much faster to have another set of hands to help with assembly.  But I'm on my own this week.  My recipe uses the whey plus one of our eggs in the dough, and three kinds of ground meat (pork, veal, and lamb - discovered while defrosting the freezer, and all local and pastured, of course) plus onion and spices in the filling.  Traditionally these are kept in huge sacks on balconies over the many months of the Russian winter where there's no danger of thawing or spoilage.  They are boiled and then served either with vinegar, or with the super high fat content smetana, to which our closest equivalent is sour cream, though it contains only roughly half the fat of smetana.  Green onions are sometimes added as a garnish with either topping.

Unfortunately, while working on the greens feeder I manage to bash my thumb with the hammer.  I've never been unlucky or clumsy enough to do this before, and I can assure you that it's an experience I neither recommend nor care to repeat.  It didn't seem like that hard of a bash, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.  It hurt like the dickens, and still requires a lot of caution when doing everyday tasks.  I'm really hoping that I don't lose the nail, 'cause that would seriously screw up the fast approaching heavy spring workload.

It's very satisfying to see a few things made with my own hands that will endure and be useful for many years, mostly with very little expense.  My head is full of little homesteading projects I want to undertake this year.  Last year about this time I had the sense that things were finally starting to come together on the homestead.  And indeed, things did run better last year; more things turned out the way I hoped.  I have that sense this year too.  It's a good feeling, though hard won.  If my productivity holds up (and I freely admit that it's extremely fickle), it could be a great year for progress on the homestead.  We'll see.

I will probably do a post on the three sisters' template around planting time.  If you simply must have more details on any of the other projects, leave me a comment and it may inspire me to get into the nitty-gritty.

An Aha! Moment

Homesteading is equal parts experimentation, failure, and learning to actually see what's right in front of you.  At least, that's the definition I give you today.  Over this past year I've been eying the wooden fence that almost entirely encloses our small property.  It's old, and not in good shape.  I'd been thinking that next year we might have to scrape up some serious money to have it fixed or replaced.  In other words, I was thinking conventionally, and not at all like a homesteader.  It still happens.

The strong wind storm that visited much of the northeast this week toppled one of the panels of our fence.  It might well have toppled a few others at the same time, but the wind contented itself with making just one ten-foot gap in the fence line.  I sighed, and wondered whether I should call some fence guys right away, or just wait for spring.  Clearly, the wooden support posts on the entire fence are reaching the ends of their useful lives.  I expect to see them fail one by one in the coming years if nothing is done to remedy the situation.

Then my husband went out to take a look at it and came back inside with the obvious and fully brilliant idea of scrapping the fence entirely and replacing it with a hedgerow.  A hedgerow.  A hedgerow!  It hit me like a thunderbolt.  Why hadn't I seen it?  How could I have missed such a neat solution to so many problems?  All the years we've been on this property, I've looked at that fence and only seen it as demarcating space we can and can't turn to production.  It's not as though I'm unfamiliar with the amazing benefits of hedgerows.  They do enclose space, true enough.  But they're often more productive than the spaces they enclose.  They require little maintenance while providing abundant food and habitat for wildlife.  The wildlife, in turn, improve the fertility of the surrounding soil by adding their manure and their dynamic contributions to the immediate area.   They provide privacy and often are more attractive than fences.  Not least significantly, they cost less to establish than a new fence, have a much longer lifespan than any fence, and don't generate any waste or pollution in their construction.  Also, this section of the fence partly defines an underused space on our property that I've been wondering about.  Specifically wondering whether it might ever sustainably support a few miniature dairy goats.  It's a shady area with marginal soil, so it currently doesn't offer much food to livestock.  If it were bordered by a hedgerow instead of a fence however, that could change dramatically.

A hedgerow that replaces our fence could answer all the functions of that fence while dramatically increasing the amount of food that is produced here.  I've been coddling a pair of hazelnut plants in containers this year, because the open space I've been planning to put them into is significantly shaded.  Now I see that I could have a hedgerow with several hazels in it without sacrificing any open space.  We could have so many hazel plants that I could retire my concern about the squirrels robbing us of all of the nuts before they even ripen.  We could afford to be open handed with the bounty of our little piece of land, rather than fighting wildlife for every morsel.  It's hard to believe that I could have missed something so obvious and so awesome.

Now the challenge is to figure out how to do it.  This is where experimentation comes into homesteading.  There are no tidy guidelines for planting a hedgerow.  All sorts of factors conspire to force me to do my own research: our soil type and climate, the fact that I don't want the hedgerow to grow high enough to shade our garden, and our personal tastes as far as diet go.  The challenge is greater because I'm in Pennsylvania, not England.  I can't tap a local expert on hedgerows, or pick up amateur advice from the neighbors.  A hedgerow should be a densely grown mixture of shrubs and vines.  But we have to decide what those should consist of.  Of course, if you have no preferences and just want any old sort of hedgerow, there's an easy way to go about it.  String a line of barbed wire or other fencing where you want the hedgerow.  Wild birds will perch there, poop out the seeds of things that grow well in your area, and after a few years' benign neglect, you'll have your own hedgerow. 

Obviously, we're going to be a bit pickier when stocking our hedgerow.  I plan to start with just the section of fence which collapsed.  If I can establish a few suitable plants there in the near term, I'm guessing I'll be able to propagate from those plants as more gaps in the fence line appear over the coming years.  When the plants grow larger, we could remove the panels to either side of the existing gaps if they're hanging on, and encourage expansion to either side.

So, I'm now doing research to see what plants will meet our requirements.  We'll need plants that won't grow too tall, aren't fussy, and some that tolerate partial shade.  Those that provide food for livestock, fix nitrogen, or propagate easily are going to get extra points.  Candidate plants near the top of the list include hazels, elders, black raspberries, Siberian pea shrub, muscadines, and wild cucumber. If you know a perennial or reseeding annual productive plant that is hardy to zone 6, doesn't grow above 12 feet/4 meters, and is suitable for hedgerows, I'd love to hear about it.

The Backyard Chicken Coop - Year 2 Modifications

In April of 2008 we added four laying hens to our wannabe homestead. It might well have been the event that changed us from wannabe homesteaders to budding homesteaders. To prepare for our new arrivals, I designed and my husband and I built a mobile pen and a mobile coop, capable of docking together. Both pen and coop were designed with the aim of making them easy for me to move each and every day by myself. This allowed our hens a fresh patch of our untreated lawn every day. It also meant that no part of our property was stripped of vegetation, overloaded with chicken manure, or hard packed into barrenness.

We tweaked our pen and coop in several ways while we had the girls last year. We added better wheels to allow for easier moving. I'm a little taller than the average woman, with only average strength for a woman. Sometimes after heavy rains moving the pen and coop took a lot of effort. After observing the pen and coop in use for the better part of a year we had other ideas for modifications that had to wait until the girls were gone. (We'd planned to slaughter them, but they ended up going to another farm with better housing for the coldest winter months.)

I thought I would use the opportunity to talk about the design of our coop and pen, and to highlight what worked well and what we have improved upon. Our design began by closely imitating this ingenious mobile coop and pen system used for a very small backyard flock. The coop was built with 2x4's and plywood, some of it pulled out of dumpsters. The footprint is 2' by 4' and about 4' tall from floor to the base of the roof. This is really taller than it needs to be, but I wouldn't go any smaller on the footprint. The 4-foot roosting bar that runs the length of the coop is long enough to hold our four fully grown hens comfortably. They seem to like to snug up together when it's chilly outside.

Keep in mind that this tiny coop with its single nesting box housed just four hens. Four two-year-old hens kept us in more than enough eggs for a family of two adults. We were able to barter some eggs, and to freeze some for the winter months. But if you want a larger backyard flock, you will likely need a larger coop as well.

Our coop has two wheels at one end, and wheelbarrow type handles at shoulder height on the other end. Inside are a couple of roosting bars and below them a little roofed nesting box. The nesting box roof is hinged and rests on struts along the side walls. It protects the nest box and the eggs from droppings and gives the girls a sense of seclusion to encourage egg-laying in that location. The hinge of the nesting box roof allows me to take it off its supports inside the coop, fold it flat, and pull it outside for cleaning.

One thing I would do differently if I were building this coop over from scratch is use 2x2's instead of 2x4's. We had free 2x4's from the dumpsters, but they make the coop quite a bit heavier than it truly needs to be. I wouldn't mind a lighter coop on many mornings. I also wouldn't build the coop quite so tall. I really didn't know what was needed for the girls before I got them, so I erred on the side of generosity. I think we could easily have shortened the coop by 8" and perhaps even by 12". Again, that would make for a lighter coop.

This spring we sealed the inside of the coop, including the roosting bars, side walls, and the nesting box lid with deck sealer. This will make the wood less absorbent and easier to clean. I also replaced most of the floor beyond the nesting box with hardware cloth. I came across this idea in Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest book, when he talks about the design of his "Duckingham Palace" - his duck coop. The hardware cloth floor will allow some of the chicken poop to fall through directly onto the earth, and make the weekly cleanings go faster. But it also makes walking over chicken manure on a daily basis unavoidable.

The other modification I made was to reverse the hinges on the door that the hens use to go from coop to pen and back. Last year it was a drawbridge-type door, hinged at the top, that they walked up and down to enter and exit. But it also became another surface that they pooped on; another surface that I had to clean. And because the hinge was on the bottom of the door, it was often difficult to close because hay and other debris got stuck in that area. This was true for the access door to the nesting box as well. So we changed the door so that both of them are hinged on top. This makes it just a little more tricky to get to the eggs. I now have to open the door farther to see if there's a hen on the nest. Before I could just crack the door, peek in and leave her to it if she was occupied. There's also a little more risk that a hen in the nesting box could hop out when I open the door, but so far I'm managing.

As you can see, the roof of the coop is simply hardware cloth covered by plastic sheeting. The hardware cloth provides security from predators, and the sheeting keeps the girls mostly dry when it rains. I say mostly dry because we don't cover the gable ends of the roof with plastic. That means they have lots of good air flow, and a nice view when they're perched on their roosting bar. This ventilation is important for the girls in the summer months when it's hot out; the open gables allows them to catch cooling night breezes, and prevents the top of the coop from getting stuffy and hot during the day. The plastic sheeting also lets in almost 100% of the available daylight, which encourages egg production. Even if I'm late for my morning chores, the girls have plenty of light as soon as the sun rises. When the weather got cold last fall, I covered the whole roof overnight with a heavy sheet to protect the girls from the worst of the chill and any wind that might have come through the gable ends. They were never sick, so I guess this system sufficed for them.

Too Busy Doing to Write

With high summer in full swing, I've lapsed on the posting.  This seems to be my perennial conundrum.  When I have time to write, there's not much doing.  And when I'm doing lots of things that might interest other people, I'm too tired at the end of the day to do much writing.  So if pictures are really worth a thousand words, then I figure I can catch up on the writing really quick with the following.

Lasagna mulching.  I don't think the garden has ever looked quite so respectable in August.

Second cold frame.  Recently cobbled together with scavenged materials and ready to plant any day now. (Okay, it's really overdue for planting, but that's gardening.)  Isn't it just darling?  I want to plant nothing but Napoli carrots in it.

Elderberry-pear jam.  These will have to stand in for all the other canning I've been doing lately, including tomato sauce, chicken stock, and grape juice concentrate.  This jam is the prettiest of them all by far.

"Kimchee" made with Tuscan kale (instead of cabbage) and other vegetables from our garden.  Still fermenting, but already pretty tasty, especially the Hakurei turnips.

Homemade ancho chili powder. I may do a separate post on this as there was definitely a learning curve to preparing this stuff.  Smoked over our own apple wood chips, it smells so much richer and fruitier than store-bought.  We use quite a lot of ancho powder.

Solar hot water.  Admittedly, it's not my personal achievement, but it's finally - finally - on-line.  This will heat our house this winter and reconfigure our relationship to washing our whites.  We plan to situate a hoop house over the line that dumps excess heat into the earth - a project for next year.

Very Devious Am I

I like hacking things together, coming up with my own ways of getting things done, and generally making things work without resorting to purchased solutions.  But sometimes I'm not above paying for a partial fix.

Though it didn't make my formal list of goals for 2010, this was meant to be the year of experimentation with lacto-fermentation.  I actually started last year, trying to make some sauerkraut in a half-gallon glass canning jar.  It probably would have worked, except that I had trouble keeping the top of the kraut submerged below the surface of the liquid.  So the part sticking up above the liquid got funkier than I was comfortable with.  I tossed the whole batch, which really disappointed me.  I later learned I could have just scraped off the funky part, and the kraut underneath probably would have been fine.  More disappointment.

Now, there exists a brilliantly designed, patented, and well-marketed solution to this problem of top spoilage with sauerkraut.  Which is to say: an expensive product.  Like $100+ expensive, and that for the smallest model in the product line.  They're ceramic fermentation crocks and they're made in Germany.  They have a neat fix to hold whatever vegetables you put in there below the liquid, and a neat-o liquid airlock as well, which allows gas to escape the fermentation chamber but not get in, supposedly preventing contamination.  Since they're patented, they can't legally be copied here.  And since they're made in Germany and very heavy, they have a very high carbon footprint when brought to the area I live.  But here's the thing - I don't care about the airlock, because from what I've read, the lacto-bacillus will outcompete just about any other organism if you give it suitable conditions.  I don't really care about the aesthetics of glazed ceramic either.  All I want is something to keep my vegetables submerged while they ferment.

So a while back I went to a local potter with a one-gallon glass jar and asked him to make me simple, unglazed, half-moon weights that fit snugly inside the glass jar.  I have several of these glass jars, bought cheaply at our local bulk foods store.  These will be my new fermentation crocks.  The ceramic pieces will hold my vegetables down below the waterline, where airborne stuff won't have a chance to spoil it.  At less than $3 for the glass jar and $16 per pair of weights (tax included in both cases), that's less than $20 per gallon-sized crock.  That's a huge savings over what I'd pay for the ready-made crock.  Not only that, but since I have several of the glass jars, my weights can be moved from jar to jar as each batch finishes.  I couldn't do that with the weights from a purchased set.  If I were still a student with access to a pottery class, I probably would have tried making these for myself.  You could certainly do that if you have access to a wheel and the use of a kiln.

The embodied energy of these simple pieces of ceramic is still quite high.  After all, the clay was almost certainly not local, so it was probably transported in a wet state, and clay is heavy.  Pottery kilns consume an enormous amount of energy.  But at least my money went to support a local craftsman practicing an important skill.  And these are tools that will help me with the lowest energy method of food preservation for years or decades to come if I'm careful with them.  Indeed, the ceramic will never wear out, though they could break.  Potentially, these could still be in use centuries from now.  Ask an archaeologist what the most common artifact is worldwide.  Even if the weights should break, chances are very good that I could simply continue using them in a broken state.  I think that qualifies as appropriate technology.

I put three types of cabbage in the garden for a fall crop, two dozen plants all together.  Though I'm eager to get started, waiting isn't such a bad thing in this case.  Lacto-fermentation is best done at cooler temperatures.  I plan to try at least a few different recipes, including one with caraway and cranberry.  I'll let you know what my favorites turn out to be.  In the meantime, if you have favorite lacto-fermented recipes, I'd love to hear about them.

The Poultry Schooner

Ta-dah!

This is our new lightweight poultry pen.  We call it the Poultry Schooner.  It measures 3 feet wide by 10 feet long, which means it provides exactly the same area (30 square feet) as our mobile chicken pen that we use for rotational grazing in the backyard.  I'm very pleased with it for a number of reasons.  First of all, it has two handles on the purlins (click the picture to biggify) that allow me to move the pen entirely by myself if it came to that.  I prefer to move it with help, but in a pinch I can do it alone.  Secondly, it's designed to fit over our newly established permanent beds in the garden, which are all three feet wide.  I'd heard the idea of building mobile chicken housing to precisely fit the dimensions of garden beds, but it didn't make any sense to do it until the dimensions of our garden beds were fixed and known. Now that the beds are established, a pen fitted to them makes all the sense in the world.

Still, the more pressing reason for getting the Poultry Schooner built was to provide housing to our growing turkey poult.  In our state of unpreparedness for a new species, we've kept him in the crudest pen you could imagine - a length of 36" chicken wire bent into a tube - during the days for about two weeks.  He (-we're hoping it's male, but we don't really have any clue) is rapidly getting too big for such a small and flimsy pen.  Now the turkey has as much space to roam as the chickens do, and less company.  He does really like to be near the hens though.  He'll start up his distress call if he's outside and can't see them.  They took an interest in him at first but mostly now seem pretty blasé about his existence.

In the fall, the chickens themselves will be put into the Poultry Schooner and placed on our garden beds after the harvest.  They'll scratch around, dig up grubs to eat them, aerate the soil, add manure, and, if we throw in some of our semi-decomposed compost, they'll happily speed that process along for us by scratching and pecking at it.  Thanks to the dimensions of the pen, they'll do it all neatly, bed-by-bed, as I chose.  I recycled the simple nesting box from the girls' '09-'10 winter quarters.  I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to steal good ideas from myself.

Down the line, after the turkey is just a fond memory of a good meal and a few quarts of turkey stock in the pantry, I have homesteading tailpipe dreams of adding quail to our livestock portfolio.  This is all in the theoretical stage; I've done only cursory research on raising quail.  But I designed the Poultry Schooner so be suitable for multiple species.  If we put quail in there, we'll have to refine the nesting box-bucket, since the opening where I reach in to get the eggs is plenty big enough to let a quail out.  That would be an easy fix though. I have heard that one can put quail in an active garden bed and the birds won't destroy the plants the way a chicken would.  A thirty-square-foot pen could house a fairly impressive number of quail at a humane stocking density. But we'd probably make do with a dozen or so.  Anyway, it's all speculation at the moment.

The Poultry Schooner was built much along the lines of a mini-hoophouse, only with as lightweight materials as possible. The frame is made of 1x2 lumber, and the purlins supporting the hoops of 1x1.  We used chicken wire here because I've never seen any raccoons on our property.  I was warned against using it where raccoons are a concern because the holes are large enough for a raccoon to reach through.  But I was also prioritizing light weight, and this is certainly lighter than hardware cloth.  The hoops are made from 7' lengths of somewhat stiff black plastic hose, and though they are lightweight as well, they lend a surprising amount of structural support.  They attach to the bottom frame with a single screw running through each end, plus a bracket sold in the plumbing aisle for supporting pipe.  They also attach to the 1x1 purlins at the top, providing extra side to side stability for the whole structure.

It's hard to say what our expenses were for this project, since we had some materials lying around (chicken wire, the plastic hose, whitewash paint, staples for the staple gun, some of the 1x2, and 1x1), but we spent at least $50 for new materials just for this project as well.  I'd guess the total came to over $100, which seems extravagant to me.  So I figure we'd better get more use out of it than just housing our Thanksgiving turkey.  Guess I'll be doing some reading up on quail.

Birthday Loot

I really like having my birthday in June.  In childhood, it often meant final exams on my birthday, but even then I appreciated the fact that it was six months from Christmas - the other time of the year I got presents.  A six month spread seemed like a good thing then.  Now I just like that I can count on fairly nice weather for my birthday.

I got a pretty sweet lineup of gifts this year.  Garlic scapes and the first tiny zucchini of the year.  Last year the only gift I wanted was a full weekend of my husband's help on a project.  We got the rocket stove built over that weekend.  I liked the gift-project idea a lot, so the only thing I asked for this year was this project:

Why, yes.  How observant of you!  The mailbox does swivel.

This is our new hand tool depot at the entrance of our main garden bed.  Out of all the materials that went into this project, only the concrete and the paint were bought new.  The huge mailbox was a craigslist score, with a busted hinge that my husband repaired.  The post we pulled out of a dumpster a couple years back, and the hardware to make the whole mailbox swivel was lying around the work table in the garage.  All told, our costs came to about $25.  I think the mailbox-for-garden-hand-tools idea was first published in an old Rodale book a few decades back.  Just goes to show that good ideas stand the test of time.  I had fun with the colors, as you can see.  I'm not terribly creative or talented as far as visual arts go, but I do like color.  I guess painting the bee hives earlier this year got me on some sort of paint kick.  It seems with the mailbox I was thinking Mediterranean.  Or something.  I love seeing the bright colors in the garden; it makes me happy. Now I'd like to tear out the hideous wallpaper in both of our bathrooms and splash some riotous colors around those rooms.  Alas, calmer heads will probably prevail on that front.

Having storage for my tools right in the garden itself will not only clear up clutter in the shed, but it will shave several minutes off my gardening routine on a daily basis.  I am all about making the task of food production easier and less time-intensive.  Invariably I end up making several trips to and from the shed to retrieve and put away tools as I need them and finish with them.  I could use a few extra minutes every day, couldn't you?

Even though the hand tool depot was my only requested gift, I also got a breakfast of waffles topped with our own black raspberries, plus the large garden hod I've been coveting for the last few years.  Pretty sweet!  My husband definitely knows my tastes.  Thanks, honey!

Food Production in Small Spaces: Fig Trees in Zone 6

I know the posts on my backyard food production challenge have been rather thin on the ground.  But I hope to make up for that somewhat with this post and a few others I have up my sleeve.  The technique outlined here pushes the edge of the envelope not only in terms of food production in limited spaces, but also in terms of cultivating plants outside of their normal hardiness zone tolerances. 

The hardiest figs are generally considered to do well in zone 7 or higher.  I'm in zone 6b.  Early last spring a hardcore gardener in my area showed me his Brown Turkey fig trees that he had planted in large tubs and pulled into his garage over the winter months. Though fig trees can reach 6 meters in height, these were only 2 meters, at most, above the level of the soil in their containers.  I was impressed and fascinated, enough so that this concept made it on my official list of goals for 2010.  Having taken up the challenge of feeding ourselves as much as possible from our own production, while also making a conscious effort to reduce our food miles and eat locally, some of our favorite items of produce have become rather scarce in our diet. We've lamented the fact that we could not grow avocados, mangos, or figs. Until we saw this method for keeping fig trees, that is.

I'm going to walk through this technique as logically as I can, though I'm not sure the pictures I have are going to make it flow very well.  Bear with me, and click on any of the pictures for bigger scale.  The basic idea is a large planting container with a water reservoir at the bottom which is kept filled as constantly as feasible.  The soil and the roots of the plant are held up above this reservoir with the use of wire mesh and burlap.  The burlap also serves to wick moisture up to the soil as the level of water in the reservoir falls away from direct contact with the soil.

The gardener who showed me his fig trees explained that one key issue was to make sure that the container the trees were planted in was UV resistant, otherwise the sun would make the plastic brittle enough to crack and break easily after very little time.  Having handles on the containers is also a really good idea, since they will need to be moved twice a year and will get quite heavy indeed as the plant grows.  He was using slices of large diameter PVC pipe to create the water reservoir at the bottom of the container. But this site (which includes designs for a different but similar self-watering container) argues against the use of PVC in container gardening, because it leaches harmful chemicals, including endocrine disruptors. Good to know, but who knows what's in the plastic planter itself.

I broke down and bought feeding buckets for large livestock at Tractor Supply to use as the containers.  Rather than using PVC for the water reservoir, I asked friends to save a bunch of dog food cans for me. Any tall can would do just as well, but it's important that all the cans in a given container be of identical or nearly identical height.  To allow water to move freely within the reservoir, I drilled a hole towards one end of each can on the side and another on the bottom, and arranged them all upright in the barrel. A few cans were made such that a can opener could be used to remove the bottom of the can as easily as the top.  Where I could, I did so.  The cans also have the virtue of not costing me any extra money.

Over the layer of cans goes a piece of hardware cloth, to help support the soil in a tidy layer. The hardware cloth was cut using a cardboard template traced from the bottom of the container.  After tracing and cutting the cardboard, check to make sure it's a good fit within the container over the top of the cans before cutting the wire to fit.  Over and around the wire netting goes a piece of burlap. The burlap must be sized to overhang the wire netting by enough to reach the bottom of the container. Burlap also has the virtue of turning up as packaging for various items. If you buy basmati rice in those 10-pound bags, there's a source of burlap that you won't pay extra for. If you can't find any for free, burlap is one of the cheapest fabrics you can buy. 

An overspill hole is needed at just the level of the hardware cloth netting.  This is to keep the roots from getting waterlogged.  I first drilled a normal hole and then used that hole as a guide for a mandrel drill bit which significantly enlarged the hole.  I wanted something that would allow me to easily check the water level with my finger and accommodate a garden hose.  Since I'll be sticking my finger in there fairly often, and since the hardware cloth is right at the level of the overspill hole, I took the precaution of crimping back the sharp ends of the wire so my fingers aren't at risk.

A watering tube is an option for filling the reservoir if you don't want to fill through the overspill hole.  This is a tube that sticks up above the soil in the container and empties into the water reservoir.  You could use bamboo if you have access to an aggressive stand that needs thinning. You'll just need to punch through the interior segments to make it work as a pipe. The bamboo will rot fairly quickly in damp soil, but it is non-toxic and cheap enough to replace each year if need be.  To make sure that the water flows easily into the reservoir, the bottom of the bamboo pole should be cut at an angle.  Angling the top in the same way also makes filling a bit easier.  However, I'm opting to forgo a watering tube entirely.  Instead, I'll be adding the water via the hole I use to monitor the reservoir levels.  Given that I'll have only a few containers to monitor for water reserves, I think this is fine.  If I had dozens of such plantings, I'd probably opt for the watering tubes.  I was told that a fig tree grown to full size for such a container will empty a such a reservoir in two or three days of hot weather.

I was also told that the roots of the potted fig trees will need to be pruned back severely about every three years, as the plant grows out and fills the container.  The guy who sold me the fig trees said this could even be done with a chain saw!  I suppose this root trimming works along the same lines as bonsai cultivation does. Pulling out a fig tree whose root ball has managed to fill a twenty-odd gallon container is going to require two people, no doubt, even with the container laid on its side. But it will also be an opportunity to check that the burlap is still intact, and to add some worm castings to the container to feed the tree.

So last Friday I came home from Flemington, New Jersey with three one-year-old fig trees: one each of the Neri II, Sicilian, and Verte varieties.  Fig trees like an alkaline soil in the 7.5-8.0 range, so I added finely crushed eggshell (a homegrown product) to the garden soil and compost mixture that I made for the fig tree containers. This study shows that pound for pound eggshells are nearly as effective as garden lime at lowering the pH of soils. Eggshells affect soil pH a little more slowly, but the effect is longer-lasting.  I was told to expect a small crop of fruits this year. The trees have shown really dramatic leaf production in the few days I've had them in their large containers.  We'll see how it goes as far as a harvest is concerned.

Aside from the fact that I'll be able to pull my fig trees into our garage for protection from winter weather, planting them in containers means that they can be placed on a driveway, porch, or any other space not otherwise useful for food production.  When we try to maximize what we produce in limited residential spaces, we need to use all available space, whether it looks suitable for cultivation or not.  Container gardening is one of the most versatile means of doing so.  Theoretically, these trees in large containers could be moved if we were to relocate. I don't expect we will anytime soon. But if you aspire to food production in a rented space or if you anticipate moving in the near future, this self-watering container for fruit trees is one you might consider. Just be aware that containers of the size I show here will weigh a couple hundred pounds when full of soil and a tree grown to the limits of that container.

I'm posting this technique at just the moment I'm trying it out for myself, because I've seen first hand that it works for this particular tree in my immediate area.  There may be a few tweaks and modifications I will recommend in a year's time.  But I wanted to get this idea out there for those of you thinking about what can be done in small spaces or in a cold hardiness zone.  Also, for what it's worth, it's apparently not too hard to grow new fig trees from cuttings.  So if you "invest" in a fig tree or two now, you could in theory have figs for the rest of your life, or share the wealth by passing on new trees to your community.  That's my kind of investment.