MamaStories

Turns out we won’t be replacing our old, rotting, dirt-floor small shed with a new and larger, insulated workshop/pottery studio. The previous owner had an unwieldy septic system put in, and some digging today confirmed that part of that system lies within 10 feet of the corner of the old shed - and closer than 10 feet we may not go. We’ll try to appeal to our Town’s Board of Health, but I’m pessimistic.

My idea now is to keep the old structure, to reorganize its shelving, and to build a platform for a floor so DH can still have a small workshop in it. We might put up a small potting shed nearer to the vegetable garden.

Well, at least we saved $13.000 today! Should this make me feel better about that pending $400 order from Burn Ridge (for paw paws, hardy kiwis, rosa rugosa, elderberries, among others)? The $350 for the hive and accessories? Shall I throw in some extra mushroom spawn too?

~

Then we have the root cellar. The asbestos tiles were removed so we’re a go. But since our future in this place is (dare I say it) not as certain as it once was (aargh), we may not go ahead until we know that future better (more news at the end of April). Let’s just say that taking a large chunk out of a basement room that could be finished as a tv room (gack), so as to install a root cellar (a what?), would not be a good “investment decision” (in case we sell).

That of course also makes the bushes and trees order and the spawn order problematic.

The hive and the bees are movable.

I stopped reckoning our food consumption for the Riot a long time ago: the Riot way of calculating our food consumption and production was never clear to me. And so, though the growing and storing and preparing of food are almost constantly on my mind, I haven’t kept track, which made me feel at a loss. The challenge over at Not Dabblng in Normal is a great occasion to take stock.

For me the issues are

1. processing (preservatives, food coloring, pesticides, and simply the amount of steps from field to fork)
2. packaging (especially plastics and styrofoam)
3. food miles

(+) I’ll first discuss those points we’re already making progress on and are improving as we go. (+/-) Then there are the points that we still need to get started on, that need work but that can be done. (-) Then the ones we can’t do much about in either the near future, or ever.

Lastly, why are we doing this? Three words: health, resilience, thrift.

1. + EGGS: We’re eating a lot of eggs (4-5 eggs, each, a week), which we buy locally at our Winter’s Farmers Market or through my raw milk buying club. The cartons are being reused by the farmers, and I’m keeping some for when we have chickens ourselves. I still hope to have those chickens soon.
2. + SWEETENER: Hopefully we’ll also be getting our bees soon (end of April). The idea is to start using more honey for sweetener than sugar. (We decided, BTW, to go ahead with the bees even if we can’t have honey: for the skill, the pollination, the wax - the potentially poisoned honey will be returned to the hive for winter feeding.)
3. + VEGETABLES/BEANS: Compared to last year, our vegetable garden will be expanded, in time (we’ll have a Spring season this time), size (double, at least), and yield (thanks to my higher position on the steep learning curve).
4. + HOME-PROCESSED FOOD: We’re still eating well from our canning pantry: jams, jellies, chutneys, pie filling, apple sauce, peaches in syrup, etc. I can’t wait to start adding more and more variety to that in a few months.
5. +/- FOOD STORAGE: Tomorrow marks the removal of the asbestos tiles in our basement, which prevented us from installing a root cellar or “cold room”. Then we’ll start drawing up plans and we hope to have a cold room by the end of Summer, when the big harvest comes in.
6. +/- FRUIT: We will be planting berry bushes, kiwi vines and paw paws this Spring, but it will be a while before we will be able to harvest a good amount.  No room for apples or pears, our staple fruits, but we buy them locally and organic when in season and eat them processed at other times.
7. +/- FISH: We don’t eat a lot of fish” two or three times a month. To be honest, looking at the selection at the grocery store (Whole Foods), I don’t know what to buy anymore: farmed, wild caught? We’re planning to have a small pond in which we might grow tilapia or some such (haven’t researched it much yet) which we will harvest and freeze for special treats.
8. +/- MEAT: We also eat very little meat: once a week, if at all. When we do, we buy it at Whole Foods: no antibiotics, etc, and usually quite locally sourced, but still, to be minimized. The allowances from the meat CSAs are too big for us: we’d have to stuff ourselves with meat, by our standards. They’re also pricey. The thing to do here is to keep our meat consumption down and to enjoy only as a special treat the occasional chicken from the backyard.
9. +/- DRINKS: We don’t drink soda at all and rely mostly on water from the tap, which we filter. We do love a good cup of coffee and tea, or two - especially in winter, when it’s 58F in the house. I am going to experiment with tea plants and maybe, with a good homegrown tea, I could kick the coffee habit. As for juices, what little comes into the house is for Amie, and I hope to make our own come berry time.
10. +/- BAKING: This is a weakness of mine. I know I can bake a bread and that it doesn’t take a lot of time or hassle. I know that with just a little more effort and dedication I can make perfectly good bread (and cookies, cakes, crackers). But baking just isn’t in my blood. I hope we get to make that Earth Oven: it’ll be a kick in the butt. Imagine how much processed, bagged foods I could ignore at the store if I did this! (As for food miles, see GRAINS).
11. +/- DAIRY PRODUCTS: There is also, really, no reason why I shouldn’t be making my own yogurt, butter and cheese! As for the raw materials for those:
12. - MILK: The raw milk is as unprocessed as it gets, and it comes in glass ball jars, so the packaging isn’t a problem. But its has a lot of food miles on it: it comes from 100 miles away. And at its price, $4.50 for half a gallon, we can afford only 1 gallon a week, but we consume about 3 gallons. The rest I buy from Organic Valley at Whole Foods. Nothing much I can do about this, as yet. There are cow shares around that I know of and that would be affordable. But the plastic bottles I will reuse either as hotcaps for early transplants,  or for emergency water storage if I ever get round to that.
13. - GRAINS/RICE: I have no room in my garden to grow my own grains, let alone rice. Most grains on the market come from over a 100 - probably a 1000 -  miles away. The only thing way I can do, for now, is to buy them dry and in bulk.  I’d love to get a grain mill and buy whole grains, then grind them, but that would be for later and would not solve the issue at hand. I’ll look into ways to eventually replace conventional grains with other sources of carbs and starches.

Well, the hoophouse almost kicked the bucket, again. Yesterday night we experienced 50 miles per hour gusts of wind that got through every crack and gap in the hoop house and almost lifted it up off the ground. Almost. When I woke up this morning after a pretty fitful sleep it was still there, but only just.

Our hoophouse skeleton is made entirely of flexible pvs pipes and rigid pvc connectors, and it is covered with 6 mil landscape fabric, attached to the ribs by pvc clips. It is anchored to the ground by sideways (squeezing) pressure on its base, through galvanized stakes hammered in the ground on one side and the two wooden boxes of the garden beds on the other.  There is one small cable inside that is mainly for correcting the top from leaning over too much, because the whole thing sits on slightly sloping ground.

Our initial door design very quickly proved a bust, and we never even  installed it, so now the entrance is simply a flap of plastic that we clip and unclip as we go in. This is a major gap in the structure. There are also big holes along the covering of the side walls.

When I walked out this morning to set things aright before the big snowstorm - we know how the house, even in its better days, performs under snow loads! - I found that it had jumped all of the anchors but one. It had jumped over all of the stakes and even one garden bed (a foot high!). Only the corner of the other garden bed and the tight  (now too tight) plastic covering held it in shape and in place.

In short, in a place where it gets windy and snowy, I would not recommend going with this simple design, or even this choice of materials. It is simply underbuilt.

We decided to add wooden frames on its short sides. In one of those we can place a more convenient and air tight wooden door, and in the other we can stick a window that can open for cross-ventilation.  We’re also contemplating a low wooden wall all around its base for the now sliding off. We’ll replace the ripped and punctured cover with a more transparent and durable one.

We’ll rebuild it in the Spring, before we move it to its Summer position. The idea is still to have it be mobile, but instead of picking it up in one piece, we’ll make it modular.

That said, I am glad we made this house. It got us going, we’ll be able to use most of its materials, and it taught us a lot about good (and bad) design.  Also, all the plants inside survived the calamities so far, and I think it won’t be long before we can harvest some lettuce and mache and replace them with new seedlings growing in the basement as we speak.

Caught two more mice. Bought more covers in case there are more mice. Gearing up to do a huge planting over the weekend. Got more seeds too, mostly chard and spinach. How could I possibly have enough of those!

I’m ready to start sowing in my basement light setup. I checked it and everything still works. I just received the first batch of seeds from Fedco. We also found a great deal for a 4-flat heat mat with thermostat, so jumped on it - and that has arrived as well. I bought my seedling starter (I splurged on a huge bag of Country Cottage Seed Starter). So here’s the plan for this weekend:

INDOORS: start seedlings in basement

1. short term seedlings destined for cold frames: lettuce, mache, chard, spinach, some brassicas
2. long term growers: onions, celeriac, many herbs

I also need to figure out how to make seedling flats. I don’t feel like using those plastic plugs anymore (except for those seedlings that really enjoy their own space). I’ve saved up a lot of plastic containers, but I am thinking I might build some flats out of scrap wood, maybe making them so I can easily remove the sides when it’s transplanting time…

OUTDOORS: prepare Spring Garden

The weather is cold (28F max) and gray, but there’s no snow or rain. I’m wrapping up to do some outdoor work as well. Here’s a map (made with Plangarden) of the early spring garden (click on it for a slightly larger image):

1. plant carrots and most hardy lettuces in beds 10 and 15 inside hoop house (indicated by red crosses)
2. start fitting and making extra box plus windows for on top of beds 3, 5 and 10 (circled in frosty blue)
3. put black plastic on beds 8, 12, and the one in front of the house, to start warming the soil (circled in camo green)
4. clear and check ground that will become bed 11 (circled in brown): this is located inside the hoop house so the soil might not be frozen, in which case I could start digging on one side - the compost bin is standing in that spot, but I doubt I’ll get to that side

I also want to walk the property and take some serious measurements so I can start placing the pond, the channel that will take the rainwater runoff from our roof there, the chicken coop, the studio, the beehive, and take some decisions about potentially getting some more trees removed.

~

In the image, hardy crops that will be ready for harvesting when most Summer crops go in are in in bright blue (after last year’s bolting incident, I’m planning on freezing a lot of spinach this time!). Crops in darker blue are already in there (mostly overwintered in the hoop house). Crops in light green go in early as well (favas, peas and carrots), but they will stay in throughout the summer. Crops in pink are also longer term (brassicas) or succession crops (more lettuce, etc.), but their beds aren’t ready yet.

I have two of these maps: one for Early Spring, one for Late Spring/Summer, each with most of the crops I want to grow fitted in. I’d love to show them, but I need to find a better platform to show them along with my spreadsheet.

My first Beekeeping class this evening! I’m very excited and plan to report in full.

I realized that with all the soil (clay) we’ll be digging up to create the pond, we’ll be able to make an earth oven. There might even be enough to build a small adobe structure around the oven. We’ll just have to lug it all up the hill…

I also realized that I might have to hold off on buying the elderberry and blueberry shrubs, because chances are we won’t have their part of the garden (the flower garden up front) prepared by the time they are shipped. But I do have a wonderful space in mind for one or two hardy kiwi vines, and I’m sure I’ll be able to get that ready.

Be sure to scroll down to Part 7 of the Calcium in the Soil and Plant series.

It’s scary out there. First it snowed: big, heavy, sticky snow. I went out every two hours to clear the hoop house with the big broom. The bare trees are loaded with snow, the branches that have leaves or needles on them droop precipitously. Then it stopped snowing, the clouds blew away, and all that white fluff flash froze to a crunch. Then, wind. Loud too, like jets suddenly flying over low, and the rumble of large objects hitting and rolling around on the roof.

I went out one last time - it was already dark - and the tiny flying ice scratched up my face. I had to put large boulders on the two ends of the hoop house where the plastic had been jerked loose. I couldn’t go into the house to pull them into place because the two clips holding the door flap closed were frozen stuck.

Tomorrow and the day after it will be sunny and bitter cold: wind chill as low as -10, and gusts of wind as high as 41 mph.

If after those days the hoop house still stands, and no tree has fallen on our house or our electricity lines, I’ll be very grateful!

Brrrr, looks so cold with that new banner!

The hoop house beds get an airing

Inspired by Rob of One Straw, I went out into the cold, bright air yesterday  - gloves, woolen cap - to move the compost. The idea was to transfer it from Earth Machine no.1 behind our house, which receives our daily kitchen scraps, to the Earth Machine no.2 in the hoop house.

Right before our warm spell, when it was below freezing, I measured a balmy maximum of 64F in the hoop house. So, 64F inside while outside it was 30F! The observed inside minimum, however, was 20F - the outside minimum was 7.

The low nighttime minimum is explained by the lack of a heat sink. The only mass is the beds, covered with white row covers. Earth Machine no.2 is black, but it was empty, so not much there to retain the daytime heat.

Now no.2 is full, almost to the brim, with food scraps from the past weeks, fresh straw (as insulator, aerator and carbon) and actual compost - complete with worms!

What a surprise! I had expected some of the mass in no.1 to have barely started decomposing several months ago, and most of it not to have had a chance at all. And surely it had been too cold for worms. But no, the top half was teeming with the Red Wigglers that I had observed in my compost last Fall, before the cold set in. The quarter below that was almost finished compost. The bottom quarter had decomposed  somewhat, but it had ice crystals in it, so I left that in no.1.

All the rest I transferred to no.2 in the hoop house, where it will temper the indoor climate at night and where it might just get ready to go on the beds in early Spring.

These are veggies I hope to keep a little warmer:

An assortment of lettuces

Last year’s parsley, still very yummy

A whole bed full of greens and tiny broccoli, growing slowly but surely

This is the scene outside. We’re supposed to get new snow today.

~

(On a side note: Firefox seems to be having problems with the Flickr badges: it keeps on loading them. If this taxes your connection, press the X - stop loading this page - button. I hope they solve it soon…)

I enjoy nothing more, in winter, then sitting by the big window with a cup of steaming tea and a good book or chess game, and observing the birds at the well-stocked feeder. We have the usual flock of juncos, who love playing in the snow. They are having it out with a flock (the same size, 6 or 7) of passerines.  Then throw in a couple of titmice and a pair of wrens. Add to that two cardinal pairs, as well as an assortment of downy woodpeckers, among them the one Red-Bellied Woodpecker. And then there’s this fellow:

He (she?) is new: an American goldfinch. Here’s another view. Such gorgeous coverts, and that yellow muffler!

~

Yesterday I wrote about the warmish weather and watching the rain wash away the snow. Then the rain turned to ice.

It was still sleeting this morning when we woke up to a hoop house dangerously weighed down by that snow that has a bluish tint. Read: high slush content. By the time we had mobilized, the situation was dire.

The moment I touched the structure, the precarious balance gave and the whole thing started caving in. The pvc pipes creaked, something on top cracked, and clips that hold the cover to the pipes were literally flying all over the place as the plastic pulled loose. Luckily DH was there to jump inside and prop the whole thing up while I cleared away the snow. We got away with only one of the connectors on top breaking and a couple of tears in the plastic cover. What do you think: redesign?

Plangarden and Gimp are handy tools for moving things around in the garden without too much back ache. This is a preliminary map for the Spring 2010 Garden - not the veggies yet, but at least the structures.

1. The hoop house will be moved from its present position (light blue) over beds 8, 9 (still to be dug), 11 and 12 as soon as the cold weather veggies in those beds can do without it. If need be I’ll put cold frames over those beds.
2. The hoop house will move over beds 2, 3, 4 and 5, destined for hot house tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, so the soil there can start warming up early.
3. I framed in pale green those beds that still need to be dug.
4. I am still debating on whether to create raised beds or field rows in the south-western part of the garden (bright green). I will use the soil from last year’s potato towers there - these beds will hold lettuce and shade crops, so no fear of blight.
5. The old potato towers will become a large compost system.
6. I’m not sure if the north-west corner will become home to a small shed yet. It might be a good place for either the chicken coop (opening into the fenced off garden to the north, not to the veg garden, of course) or the beehive (would that be too close to human activity?).
7. The bright blue circles indicate rain barrels. The two barrels up front will overflow into pipes (blue lines) leading down to a  brook/wetland that will drain into a fish pond at the bottom of the front garden.

To do this week:

1. plan Spring and Summer garden
2. inventorize left-over and saved seeds
3. read all the gorgeous seed catalogs that arrived while we were gone
4. order new seeds
5. figure out a better seedling “hotbox” - buy seed mats?
6. enroll in bee school, chicken class, and pottery

The plants under row cover in the hoop house have stopped growing, but they are all alive and well, just waiting it out. I am planning to get some fresh horse manure from my neighbor and creating a small “hotbed” in the hoop house for some early spinach. It would be interesting to compare the growth of those plants to the ones under the row cover, and to what extent the decomposing horse manure heats up the hoop house.

I am out there twice a day to clear the snow off and away from the hoop house so light can penetrate and the structure isn’t too stressed. I am happy to report that the hoop house has withstood heaps of snow and  gusts of wind, so our reinforcement of the top connectors seems to be working.

I managed to finish both volumes of Edible Forest Gardens when I was in Belgium and my first project will be to thoroughly re-assess our property. Digging holes and staking out areas will have to wait until the two-foot-thick blanket of snow has gone, but I will have to eyeball some of it and decide on some bushes and small trees.

It’s great to see the juncos play in the fluffy snow and vie for a place at the feeder with the cardinals and the passerines.