Repurposing Wool Fibers

Despite my interest in frugality, I'm relatively new to thrift stores.  Generally I don't enjoy shopping, but there are a couple of Goodwill stores on routes I travel regularly, so I've been stopping in there and browsing lately.  Naturally, there are some amazing deals to be had.  Probably one of the most surprising to me have been the 100% wool sweaters that sell for as little as $2, when they're on markdown.  It simply defies logic that these pure woolen items, some of them brought all the way from Scotland or Australia, end up being given away for a song. Of course, the vast majority of sweaters at the Goodwill are made from synthetic yarns.  But that only makes it a little more of a treasure hunt to seek out the wool.

I'm an occasional, largely seasonal, and not very gifted knitter.  One reason I haven't done more knitting is the incredible expense of the yarn.  It's always much, much cheaper to buy a sweater than to buy the yarn to make one yourself, even if you're paying the full retail price for the sweater.  But those occasional thrift store finds change that equation.   When woolen sweaters sell for so much less than the cost of the constituent materials, I've met my price point.  Mind you, it's not every sweater that can be taken apart by hand, so it pays to know what I'm looking for.  I learned what I needed to from this link. 

Taking apart a knitted item to recycle the yarn is a somewhat tedious task, well suited to wintertime, endless cups of tea, a BBC radio stream, and the company of a playful cat, brisking about the life.  It's amazing how much yarn comes out of a small sweater.  I cut a few cardboard pieces to wind the yarn around as I unravel the sweater.  Binding it in this way helps to stretch out some of the bends the yarn assumed when it was first knitted.  There are steps you can take to further relax the kinks in previously used yarn.  But they take time and effort, and my creations aren't so magnificent that I worry about minor issues such as slightly pre-kinked yarn.

In principle, you could take apart a knitted item made from any sort of fiber.  For my time and money, only wool or other animal fibers would make it worth my while.  I did scoop up an alpaca sweater from the thrift store, and it's waiting to be taken apart.  It's white but slightly stained.  I may decide to dye the yarn if I can't get the stain out. The beauty of acquiring these materials so cheaply is that it gives me free rein to experiment with them and learn from mistakes if I must.

I've knitted one pair of my chunky fingerless gloves, and am currently working on a second pair, both to be donated to the fundraising auction at the PASA conference, which is only days away.  These gloves are knitted with double strands of yarn, which makes them extra warm.  For both pairs of gloves I'm using the repurposed yarn as one strand.  It's satisfying to salvage and re-use this material.  The color of the sweater is such that I wouldn't choose to wear it myself, but in a double stranded item, I think it turns out quite pretty.

I'm off to the conference on Wednesday, presenting on Thursday, and enjoying myself thoroughly on Friday and Saturday.  After I'm home, I'll give my usual summary of the conference highlights, and with a little luck, relocate my writing mojo, which has been scarce of late.  Hope winter is treating you all well.

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.

Further Thoughts on Lasagna Mulching

It's fall and my thoughts turn to lasagna mulching the garden beds to retire them for the year.  I've had the chance to observe the effects that a few years of lasagna mulching have had on our garden, and wanted to share those observations with you.

First off, let's review what lasagna mulching, also known as sheet mulching, consists of.  The basic practice is to cut down any vegetation to the soil line, but leave all plant material lying in place.  You might not want to do this if there are lots of obvious seed heads on weeds.  While lasagna mulching certainly curtails weeds, I don't like to incorporate weed seeds, which can lie dormant for ten years or more, into the soil any more than is unavoidable.  Any vegetation other than seed heads is great - just extra organic matter. The next step is to add soil amendments.  These should be tailored to what your soil needs.  I use finished compost obtained from our township, wilted leaves of comfrey grown on site, our half-finished compost, a bit of greensand to help loosen our clay soil, and sometimes fresh manure laid down in situ by our laying hens.  Next comes a covering of paper, newspaper, or cardboard. If using any kind of paper, it should be thoroughly soaked before or after being laid down, to help it conform to the contours of the soil.  The heavier and thicker this layer, the longer the weed suppression will last, and the less frequently you will need to repeat the entire process.  Finally, a good layer of wood chip mulch covers the paper.  Again, the more of this you can pile on, the longer it will last and the better the weed control.

Some gardeners will actually repeat these layers in one go - thus, multiple layers of compost, paper and mulch laid down on the same day.  I have never had the luxury of having so much material to work with.  But if you have a small area and sufficient materials to do so, why not?  On the other hand, I omit the soil amendments when working on areas that I never intend to plant in, such as walkways in the garden and border areas where I only want to suppress weeds.

My first motivation for lasagna mulching was exactly that - weed control.  This is something that the technique accomplishes with great success.  There are a few weeds that can make their way up through even a freshly laid section of lasagna mulch, and some airborne seeds that will land on and germinate in the wood chip layer, but those few are generally easy to remove by hand.  What I wanted to discuss today though are the additional benefits of lasagna mulching.  There are several of them that I've observed so far.

Significant soil improvement is one of them.  This isn't exactly surprising; it's routinely mentioned as the "other" benefit of the technique besides weed control.  But knowing intellectually that it would help the soil didn't quite prepare me for the fat earthworms I've been coming across.  They're not inordinately long as worms go, but they are rotund.  Wider than a pencil by a long shot; embonpoint, even.  I hope it's not the case that the obesity epidemic has now spread as far as earthworms.  But clearly these worms aren't going hungry.  Their presence is both an indicator of healthy soil as well as a guarantee that the soil will be even better over time.  Every earthworm is a mobile factory of soil fertility, and I count each sighting as a blessing.  I also see, year by year, healthier plants that are better able to withstand the vagaries of stressful growing seasons.

The other benefits of lasagna mulching all have to do with what I believe are leading indications of the changes that global climate weirding are going to bring to my region.  More than one model of climate change that I've seen predicts routine summertime drought across much of the US.  My immediate region is forecast to escape the worst of this trend, but still the summers could still be drier than they historically have been.  The last two summers here certainly have been that way, whether or not they were part of an emerging new pattern.  Mulching and good organic content in the topsoil are critically important for plants dealing with water stress.  Mulching because it curbs evaporative loss of moisture.  And high organic content because organic matter acts like a sponge, soaking up water and releasing it slowly as plants need it.  Lasagna mulching provides for both of these.

The flip side of the dry spells predicted under the climate change models is a pattern of more violent storms.  This may seem contradictory, but it really isn't when you look at the meteorological explanations.  Namely, a more energetic (warmer) atmosphere that is able to carry and move more water vapor.  And in any case, whether it makes intuitive sense or not, this is exactly what we saw this year: About ten weeks of rain too insignificant to help the garden crops followed by a hurricane and a tropical storm that washed out roads, flooded farmlands, wiped out crops, and carried topsoil straight into the waterways, not to mention killing a few people and destroying a few homes.  Our garden certainly took damage from these storms, and we had standing water in the portion of our backyard that is just barely lower than our garden.  But careful inspection of the garden itself proved that we lost no topsoil at all to the heavy rains.  Again, I believe credit goes to the lasagna mulching.

Phallus rubicundus (yes, really), red stinkhorn mushroom

It wasn't just that the paper and wood chip mulch protected the soil beneath them.  Within a few short weeks of laying down these materials I can find evidence mycorrhizal mycelium colonizing the entire area.  These are networks of fine hair-like structures, the fungal equivalent of roots.  The white threads are easily seen near the surface, knitting the soil together in an enormous net.  I know by the wide variety of mushrooms that fruit out of those networks that we have at least a dozen different species of mycelium at work in the top layers of our garden soil.  I take this as a spectacular indicator of biodiversity and the increasing health of our soil.  Although I started lasagna mulching for weed control, the practice would be worthwhile even if the mycelium were the only benefit.  If you wonder why I think so highly of mycelium, I refer you to Paul Stamets'  eye-opening, jaw-dropping book, Mycelium Running.  Fungi of all types provide invaluable services to other life forms in the topsoil.  They mitigate stresses on plants, break down tough organic matter into materials accessible to other organisms, move critical soil nutrients from areas of excess to where they are deficient, and can even bind up harmful substances (such as salts) in a waxy coating so that they become inert in the soil.  Truly, mycelium is a blessing in the garden, and observation has convinced me that lasagna mulching equates to laying out the welcome mat for the fungal kingdom.

Unknown mushroom.  Enlighten me?

Finally, there's the fact that lasagna mulching entails a bit of carbon sequestration.  That means, on balance, that we're taking carbon that could otherwise end up in the atmosphere (where it could do us further harm), and locking it into organic material in our soil (where it can do us some good).  The amount of carbon that I manage to store away on our property may seem trivial.  And in fact, it is.  But the truth is that an acre of topsoil is capable of holding more carbon than all the air directly above it, all the way to the outermost edges of our atmosphere.  But that carbon has to be stored up by and in living things working with plenty of resources in healthy soil.  If the project were undertaken on a wide scale, boosting the organic matter stored in our topsoil and the living woody plants above it could go a long way to ameliorate the carbon emissions wreaking havoc with the climate; earth is populated, after all, by carbon-based lifeforms, and that's what organic matter is.  My infinitesimal contribution is to do what I can with the soil I have some control over.  You could do the same.  I believe we will never solve the many problems stemming from industrial society's waste streams (and there are obviously many) until we look at the "wastes" we generate as resources so valuable that people compete for access to them.  It's a challenge for me to lay my hands on enough cardboard, newspaper and wood chip mulch to cover all the areas I would like to, and this despite the fact that several people save their newspapers for me, and I know where to get cardboard and mulch for free.

Having outlined the benefits as I see them, I'll share a few tweaks I'm making to the way I use lasagna mulching.  I've tried planting seedlings into a freshly lasagna mulched bed in the spring and found it problematic.  While the plants survive, they don't grow particularly well without a great deal of hand-watering.  The layers of paper soak up so much water that relatively little of it reaches the roots of the plants.  The dry summers the last two years haven't helped.  I have to water directly into the hole I punched through the paper layer to plant the seedling.  This entails far more work than I would like.  Fortunately I find no such difficulties in beds that I lasagna mulch in the autumn.  By spring the paper layers have broken down enough to let water pass more easily through them, although they still provide something of a barrier to weeds. So I'm going to do my best in future to lasagna mulch my garden beds in fall, and the borders and pathways in spring or summer.  I'm also sold on letting the chickens participate in the lasagna mulching process as often as possible.  They enjoy their carefully orchestrated visits to individual garden beds that I'm done with for the year, it saves me that first step of having to clear the weeds, and they boost soil fertility by lightly tilling in their own manure.

One possible drawback to lasagna mulching is that the moist conditions it fosters just under the surface can be a boon to slugs and snails.  This was apparent in 2009, the last wet year we had.  The past two summers have been quite dry for us and I saw very few slugs anywhere in the garden.  If I lived in a wetter climate I might look for some other technique to build our soil.  Here in Pennsylvania I'm comfortable using diatomaceous earth to control what slugs and snails we have in wet years.  And if the climate change models are correct, we're not going to be contending with wet summers very often.

Well, there are my reflections on lasagna mulching, after using this technique in my gardens for about three years.  I think it's making enormous contributions to the health of my garden soil while saving me a lot of effort in weeding.  I'll do my best to keep that in mind as I try to get all the mulching done this month.

Cyathus striatus, fluted bird's nest mushroom

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.

Sneaky Leeks

I've mentioned before how I love leeks.  That's me brandishing a few prized specimens in the top left of the banner collage.  Leeks take up real estate in the garden for a long time, but they are very unfussy plants, and they have the virtue of harvest-ability at that part of the year when it's very slim pickin's in the garden.  I've also just recently figured out how to store leeks for a short time by freezing them.  But the bottom line is they just taste wonderful.

So I'm starting an awful lot of them from seed this year, and I thought I'd share a little technique I've come up with.  It starts with the knowledge of how leeks behave.  That part of the leek which is below the surface of the soil will grow straight and white, and be the tenderest part of the leek.  Perhaps the sweetest part too.  In other words, you want to bury the seedling as deeply as feasible without completely covering it.  Leeks and potatoes are the only plants I know of that respond well to hilling.  But it's not really practical for me to plant leeks in a trench and then gradually fill it in over the season.  That technique works beautifully, if you want to pursue it.  I'd just rather not plant leeks in a single line and then tend to them that much.

Instead, I'm working on forcing my tiny seedlings to grow tall before I set them out.  At this stage, they are fairly easy to "hill."  Besides, leek seedlings are so floppy as they grow that they can use the support of repeated partial burials.  Some sources advise clipping the tops of the leek seedlings to avoid this flopping over, but that seems counterproductive to me.  I'd rather support the seedling than trim it.

My idea was to save several half-gallon milk cartons for seed starting.  Leek sprouts are so tiny that they can easily be crowded into a very small space.  So I use the carton in its upright position, with the top cut off and several drainage holes poked in the bottom.  I also cut most of the way down the corners of the carton, so that only a small portion of the carton will hold potting soil at first, and fold the sides down to allow plenty of light to reach the seedlings.  The waxy surface of the carton interior can be labeled in crayon or with a wax lumber pencil.

As the seedlings grow I progressively tape up a bit more of the sides of the carton, add more potting soil, and make another crease to keep the unfilled portion folded over to give the seedlings light.  Adding more soil to densely planted and flimsy plants is somewhat delicate work, so I use a spoon and dry potting soil that scatters easily.  If the potting soil bends any of the little seedlings as I fill, I just very gently pull them upright and the loose soil repositions itself around the stalks.  Only then do I water with a mister.  In this way I'm both supporting the seedlings, and encouraging them to grow long and tall well before it's time to put them in the ground.  When the sides of the carton are completely taped up and filled with potting soil, the seedlings will be more than 4" (10 cm)  tall. I'm betting that by the time it's warm enough to transplant them they'll be long enough to just plant quite deeply and leave it at that with no further hilling. I think the technique is sneaky.  It's a way of shifting most of the work needed to raise superior leeks into the relatively calm period before spring has properly arrived.

The picture above shows leek seedlings and their milk carton containers in several stages of development. Just planted seeds are on the right; those on the far left are the oldest.

P.S.  The homesteading books from the giveaway were mailed on Monday.  Winners, you should have them in your hot little hands very shortly if they haven't reached you already.  Thanks to all who entered.

Update: this technique didn't work out as hoped.

Farewell to Fresh Garlic

While our first WWOOF volunteers of the year were here, one of our indoor tasks was to process what remained of last year's garlic crop.  Preserving what remained involved peeling all those individual cloves, cutting them open to remove the sprouts (which are slightly bitter), slicing them finely, and dehydrating all the slices.  It's a rather mindless, tedious job - one that would have taken me all day in the kitchen if I'd had to do it entirely by myself.  Two extra people pitching in made the work go very quickly, and I was extremely grateful for the help.  Our volunteers genuinely seemed not to mind, and to be interested in the process of dehydrating foods.

We did better with last year's crop of garlic than with any previous harvest in terms of storage.  Some of it lasted until this month, though much of it was sprouty.  In late December of 2008 I was already processing that year's crop because it was at the end of its shelf life.  Mostly I think the improvement in shelf life is attributable to storing it in the cooler temperatures of the root cellar.

One tiny tip that I don't think I've shared here before is a way of repurposing what might otherwise end up as part of the waste stream into a convenient way of using up the dehydrated garlic chips.  Some spice companies are now selling whole peppercorns (including black and white organic peppercorns) in disposable jars that are also pepper mills.  These can be re-used as grinders for any spice of the right size, including dried garlic chips.  When all the pepper has been consumed, the lids of these mills can be screwed off and both the jar and the grinder-cap washed.  When both pieces are thoroughly dry, I fill the jar with my dried garlic flakes and keep it with my other pepper mills.  The rest of the chips will be stored in a cool and dark place until needed.

I rely on this dehydrated garlic much more heavily during the garlic drought months of the year - those months between processing the last of the garlic (now), and garlic harvest (early summer).  I use it in soups, pasta dishes, and have even been known to grind some directly onto a leftover roast chicken sandwich.  An especially nice winter use for the ground garlic is in a cup of hot chicken broth with a small dab of white miso stirred in.  Bone-warming goodness, that is.  The whole chips work well in some soups and stews too, as well as meatloaf, in which it rehydrates by absorbing and holding in the juices, and long cooking dishes such as polenta or risotto.

I sent our WWOOF volunteers on their way with our old, cheap dehydrator and many explanations as to its design faults and shortcomings. I suggested they bear with the crummy version for a season or two, to see if they would actually use a dehydrator.  If so, they could bite the bullet and purchase a good quality dehydrator, such as an Excalibur.   I asked them that either way - whether they upgraded to a good dehydrator, or decided it wasn't for them - they pass the dehydrator on to someone curious about this method of food preservation.  It's a nice thought to imagine our first el cheapo dehydrator out there in the world, helping people learn a skill and preserve homegrown food.  I vastly prefer giving a not-so-great appliance away with full disclosure and a pay-it-forward agreement to trying to sell it to someone while concealing its many flaws.

Now I've got a very short breather before our next WWOOF volunteer shows up tomorrow.  Good to have the extra help; it certainly keeps me on my toes!

Scrap Cedar for Squash Vines

It seems my reputation for welcoming stuff other people regard as useless is now well established.  My parents refurbished their deck over the summer, replacing the old boards with rot-resistant cedar planks.  My dad had set aside all the end pieces he trimmed off, none of them more than about 12 inches long.  There were about two dozen of them.  He asked me recently if I wanted them.  I said yes immediately and with such enthusiasm that he asked me what my plans for them were.  With this year's winter squash crop failure much on my mind, I'm already dreaming of a bumper crop next year.  Good pieces of rot-resistant wood will be ideal to place under next year's developing squash fruits.  They take such a long time to reach ripeness that moisture from the ground has plenty of opportunity to hasten spoilage.  These little pieces of cedar wood will be just the right size for tucking under next year's crop as they grow.  Redwood would do nicely too if you happened to come across it.

Cedar is expensive, and I'd never buy a new piece of wood just for the purpose of cutting it up into short lengths.  But the chance to put this scrap wood to good use was far too good to miss.  I love all the many ways that the garden turns trash into treasure.

Converted any trash to treasure lately?  Do tell.

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!

Drying Comfrey

This seemed utterly unremarkable to me.  I wasn't going to post about it.  But my husband thought it was nifty-clever.  So.  Here's how I dry comfrey leaves: between two old window screens.  We have a pile of these that we hauled out of a dumpster, or maybe somebody gave them to us when they redid their windows.  Can't remember.  The storm windows had more the more obvious application of covers for cold frames (mostly yet to be built).  But the window screens hung out in the garage for a while before it occurred to me to use them this way.

The screens allow good air circulation for quick drying, prevent the leaves from blowing away in a slight wind, and make the leaves dry down very flat, which is handy for storing them after drying.  Plus it's a low-tech, grid-free, cheapskate way of drying. Yes, it works even when laid on grass, though it's faster on the driveway.  If rain threatens, I can pick up the screens and stick them in the shed, regardless of the degree of drying so far achieved.  Having the screens hang out somewhere prominently outside is also a good reminder to me to keep cutting more leaves for drying.  I use the dried comfrey leaves steadily over the winter as a feed supplement for the hens.  And it's best to have the comfrey thoroughly dried if I want to use it as fertilizer with garden seedlings.  The plant is so damn vital that cut leaves will simply grow new plants if put into the ground without first being well dried.  I suppose it might not be a bad way of drying leaves if you wanted them for medicinal purposes as well.

Besides, a steady harvest of leaves from comfrey plants helps keep them from total world domination.  We've got six comfrey plants on our 2/3 acre, and two of those in the main garden, so this is a real concern.

Further Preparations for Honey Bees

It seems like half the bloggers I read regularly are starting bees this year. So I figure there are even more people out there interested in the process of getting ready for the first arrival of our bees. With less than a week to go until our packages arrive, we're hurrying to finish up our preparations.

This weekend we painted cinder blocks with used motor oil. This is almost as gross as it sounds, but there are - allegedly - a couple of good reasons for doing so. We're going to set our beehives on top of these blocks. The oil coating will apparently help minimize the wicking of moisture from the ground up to the wooden boxes of the hive. Also, it's supposed to deter ants from climbing up to the hive in search of honey to rob. A full colony of ants can overwhelm a honey bee colony, and that's one of the many things I'd like to prevent. The other tip I heard about keeping ants and other ground insects out of the hives is to use a water moat around whatever the hive stands on. But that would have to be either a pretty big moat, or four smaller moats for each hive. And besides, I just know that I'd forget to fill it, or a branch would fall in and create a safe passage. So we're trying this. I don't know if it will work for the insects, but it at least seemed plausible for reducing the transfer of ground water. I'll report later on whether it seemed to work.

Also in the interest of preventing rot, I put a couple coats of primer on the bottom of the bottom boards, which will be resting against the cinder block stands. We're using screened bottom boards for improved ventilation, and as a non-toxic partial control for varroa mites. (Any mites that fall off bees in the hive will theoretically fall through the screen and out of the hive, never to return. Apparently they neither fly nor crawl very well.) The other advantage of the screened bottom board is that it gives us a little more leeway in getting the hives level. A solid bottom board catches rain and condensation, which requires the hive to be tilted ever so slightly towards the opening in the bottom board. We don't need to worry about that with a screened bottom board. We'll just do the best we can to make the hive level and leave it at that. Having the frames fairly plumb is important as the bees will do their best to draw perfectly vertical comb, and I'd sure like that comb to be more or less neatly inside the frames.

Yes, we got a little whimsical with the painting. Just wait till you see all the boxes stacked up together.

We also laid a very large sheet of synthetic felt on the ground where the hives will be placed. This was part of the packaging that our passive solar heating system shipped in; so a good instance of re-purposing. The idea is that it's heavy enough and densely matted enough to prevent anything growing up through it. (Of course, old carpeting or new carpet remnants would work just as well.) That means that I don't have to mow or weed in the immediate area of the hives. Less maintenance, and I can keep a respectful distance with the lawn mower, not to mention, a little more lawn eradication. Bees really, really don't like any knocks or direct vibration applied to their hives, so keeping a decent margin that needs no yardwork is a good idea. We situated this in an area where the grass wasn't growing all that well anyway due to being shaded for much of the day. The hives will get early morning sun and very late afternoon sun, but be shaded during the hottest part of the day.

By the way, we had to choose between conflicting recommendations for situating and orienting the hives. Our first instructor recommended morning sun and shade for much of the rest of the day. Summers in our area are usually quite hot. Wax can actually melt in the hive if the temperature gets too high. Plus, bees will expend energy trying to keep the hive cool if it gets too warm. So the hive boxes need to be painted in light colors and all day sun is a risk. But morning warmth gets the bees going early, which can give them a competitive edge with other nectar- and pollen-collecting insects. On the other hand, our last instructor mentioned that colonies situated in full sun seem to have some advantage in fighting off varroa mites. In the end, we found the logic of the first instructor more compelling than yet another factor in the varroa war. But if you're in a cooler climate, it might make sense to put your hives where they'll get sun all day long. As for orientation, everyone seems to agree that the entrance of the hive should face southeast. On the other hand there's also the theory that bees will first follow a path straight out of the hive entrance in search of food. Since I know my property hasn't been treated with any nasty chemicals, I'd like the primary flight path to be over our land. That direction would be almost due west. So that's a decision we're going to have to make pronto.

I spent a few hours carefully nailing the side bars of 120 frames to the top bars of said frames. If you're a beekeeper, you know what the equipment looks like. If not, don't worry about it. Basically, it's just insurance to keep the frames from being ripped apart by me during hive inspection. Bees sometimes glue things together in a hive with propolis, their house-made glue. It's a very strong glue, more than capable of keeping the majority of a frame in the hive while the top bar is pried off. The work was a little tedious, but not as difficult as I had feared.

We still need a little preventative protection from the one honey bee predator common to this area. Skunks will approach bee hives at night, scratch the hive body, and wait for guard bees to emerge to investigate. Then the skunks eat the bees, leaving few if any indications of their visit. Obviously, this drains the lifeblood of the colony. There are a number of options open to the beekeeper to protect the colony from skunks. One is to raise the base of the hive more than 18" above the ground, placing it out of reach of the predator. Top bar hives accomplish this as an element of their design. Another is to use no bottom board on the hive at all, which allows the bees to emerge en masse and confront the skunk in strength. This is feasible for a strong, well established colony. A weak or new colony of bees cannot adequately defend so large an opening in the hive from other insects that would rob out the honey. The last option is to place a nail bed in front of the hive, creating a decidedly unwelcome mat for any nighttime marauder. This is the one we've decided on. It just needs to get done.

We're also still short an entrance reducer for one of the hives. We'll make do by stuffing a piece of cloth in the opening until a wooden one arrives. Entrance reducers are used to narrow the hive opening for small colonies, until their numbers increase so that they can adequately defend their honey stores. Of course, early on, my colonies won't have much to defend so this shouldn't be all that critical.

Last minute preparations will include mixing up a feeding solution for my packages. I'll get this done either the night before they arrive, or first thing in the morning before I go pick them up.

I've got to say that getting ready for the honey bees has been a lot more work than I had anticipated. Partly this is due to the type of hive I chose, the Langstroth. This is by far the most common type of hive in use in the US. A topbar hive might have saved me a good deal of this work. But then, there may be other drawbacks to that style that I'm unaware of. In any case, I'm way, way behind on getting my seeds started this spring. Frankly I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed. I'm playing catch up as best I can, but I'm probably going to succumb and opt to buy some seedlings as well.

Homestead Happenings

The lovely gash I put on my finger while dealing with blighty tomatoes put a crimp on my posting for a while there, but now is healing up nicely. I thought I'd catch up on a few projects I've been meaning to post about for a while, but have never found the time to do. We've got some new toys: one purchased, one homemade for nearly nothing, and one made with some relatively cheap materials and an instructional class.


The first is a Tulsi-Hybrid Solar Oven. I broke down and bought this several months back and have been trying to learn to cook with it ever since. I have to say that this has been a challenge. We're far more likely to have a few clouds scud across the sky than wholly sunny days. While a few clouds are just fine when it's blazing outside, it's just not feasible to cook in a solar oven on a cool spring day with partly cloudy skies. This reflects a lack of really thinking this purchase through on my part.

When I have cooked things in the solar oven, it's taken quite a bit of experimentation to get things to turn out right. Also, the Tulsi Solar Oven has no mechanism for leveling itself, which is an issue when cooking with liquids. The best place for solar exposure on our property is non-level patch of lawn, so I've had to take measures to level the oven when setting it up for cooking. This wouldn't be so bad if it were once and done each time I cook. But since I need to turn the oven occasionally to track the sun, that means re-leveling it with each turn. Hassle. Now I think we need to add a solar oven table to our list of projects for next year. It would be nice to have a level staging area with a bit of "counter space" for the solar cooking I do.

Using the solar oven definitely requires me to be on my game early in the day when it comes to meal planning. I've had best results when I get my food into the oven by 9am. Quiches and strata have turned out fairly well for me. On a sunny day, I've been able to get the oven up to 270 degrees F (132 C) in a couple of hours when the outside temperature was 84 (29 C). Obviously, ongoing experimentation is needed on my part.


Next up is our first proper cold frame. We built this from a wooden packing crate for an industrial sized air conditioner. Our neighbor is an HVAC contractor, and so periodically discards such items with the use of a "FREE" sign on his front lawn. Most convenient for us. It was open on one large end, evidently where a lid had been ripped away. This wasn't best quality wood, but it had a great shape for a cold frame, and that open side seemed perfect for the bottom of the frame. I first chose a spot where it would be located, on the southern side of our garage, which is currently the last best sunny spot on our property. I parked the hens in one spot for a week to allow them to destroy the turf there. Then I added a bucket of half-finished compost from our pile each day for another week. The hens happily scratched through the compost to find bugs, breaking it down for us, while adding their manure to the spot I had chosen for the cold frame.

Building the cold frame took about a day, and mostly involved figuring out how to make a safety glass window salvaged from an old storm door fit the box. I'm hoping the safety glass will stand up better to the occasional hail storm than my first attempt with the hayframe, which used regular glass. The dimensions of the box and window were close, but not perfectly matched. After a lot of calculating and reckoning, we cut the closed end of the box at an angle to maximize sun exposure, and rigged up a few supports for the glass, including a lip to hold it in place at the front edge of the frame, and a cross piece to support its weight across the span. After that I added deck sealer all around to protect it from rot. We situated it carefully to face solar south, which is different from magnetic south, again with the aim of maximizing solar exposure. (To do this you need to find your local magnetic declination and use a compass. If you're in the US, you can use this government website to find the precise adjustment for your locality.)

I added some aluminum foil inside the frame to bounce sunlight around inside of it, and then filled it with a rich mixture of compost and our local clay soil. Leaving the box tightly sealed up on a few sunny days will, I hope, bake any incipient weedy seeds or seedlings. I've ordered a few more seeds specifically for cold hardy and compact vegetable varieties. The cold frame gives us about 9.5 square feet to plant in. I'll be starting seeds in the frame towards the end of the month, after the hottest days are over. I've found very useful guidelines for planting dates in Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest, and The Winter Harvest Handbook. I highly recommend them both to anyone thinking about season extension.


Last but not least, my husband took a class on rain barrel construction and was shown exactly how to do it. He even came home from the one-hour class with a finished barrel. I was surprised that our county was promoting rain water harvesting, since we live in an area with abundant precipitation. Apparently the concern around here isn't drought, but contamination of streams and rivers from runoff carrying nasty chemicals from roads and driveways. So capturing the water and releasing it more slowly protects our fresh waterways. Our plan is (eventually) to chain many barrels together to collect the precipitation from our rather large garage roof. I have been using the rain water harvest from this single barrel to water a few garden plants here and there. It saves us the small amount of electricity I would otherwise need to run our pump. And it's nice to know we have that water available, even if we should lose electricity. (If you have questions about the rain barrel, I'll see if I can persuade my husband to answer them or write a post about it. But it won't happen immediately.)

Well, that about wraps up our recent outdoor projects. I'll post soon on some of the yummy things I've been doing with our garden produce and some gleaned fruits.