MamaStories

The garden, that is.

DH and I worked on the backyard the entire day: grading it with sifted soil, evening it out, then adding 1 to 2 inches of our composted cow manure. We still have about 1/3 to do, and I’ll try to finish that by my lonesome tomorrow, because DH needs to go into work. Then we sow the grass seed and keep our fingers crossed.

The tomato seedlings are getting too big for my setup in the basement. They still fit under the lamps, but (1) they’re shading each other out and (2) they’re holding up my next big seeding.

Now the reason why we have a (movable) hoop house  is to extend the season. The issue is when to move it to its Summer location, where the tomatoes will grow, among other things. In its present, winter location it is no longer in its right place. Witness all the Winter and Spring veggies that are bolting in the 80-90 F heat:

Honestly, these (Mache, Claytonia and Minutina) would have bolted with or without hoop house, and I’m letting them because I want to save the seed.  The spinach, kale, and lettuces are all loving it in there. But anyway, what’s the holdup?

At first we thought we would redesign it, but budgetary issues and the fact that the way it is will do fine for Summer, made us postpone Hoop House 3.0 till Fall. Now we need 6 well-coordinated people, at least, to move the thing. Those people haven’t shown up yet…

Well, in any case, what to do with the tomato seedlings? The temperatures in the hoop house during the day are great  for them, and the light is diffuse, and a recent study shows that the quality of a tomato depends more on heat than on light. However, NOAA predicted a low of 36F. tonight, and a couple more such nights.  So this was the solution – with a nod to One Straw:

This compost bin (inside the hoop house) is going full steam, and I’m hoping it and a row cover will keep my seedlings warm overnight.  We’ll see. It’s quite nerve-wrecking!

Last but not least we had a well-deserved dinner of rib eye steak on the grill: its first firing of the year. We eat meat about 4 times a month, and then it’s always a feast. With that we had homegrown kale and a homegrown salad, all from the hoop house. That thing may be in the wrong place, but it’s still doing what it was made to do: extending our season.

{UPDATE} look here for the finished product!

Like I said in an earlier post, I would not recommend our present hoop house design to anyone who has gust of wind and lots of snow. It has served the purpose of getting us going, of experimentation, and we are still hoping for a Winter Harvest (I’ll be sure to harvest something before March 20). But the idea is to have a movable hoop house, and to move it on our last frost date (predicted by yours truly to be 1 May) to its Summer position. And before we move it, we want to redesign it.

We want it sturdier, more wind and snow-proof, more airtight, with more ventilation possibilities, and a sturdy tight door (or two). We’d like heavier, more durable and more transparent poly (this one looks good but it’s expensive).

To get all this, the new design will involve some wooden and metal parts (where at present the whole thing is pvc). And because we still want it to be movable in the sense of pick-up-able (so as to avoid soil and pest problems), we will have to make it modular. It will be made of pieces, fit together, that can be taken apart and moved and refitted by 2-4 people in the span of a couple of hours.

We are copying some ideas from this design (which is not movable).

So here is the first draft:

• 20′ pvc pipes for the ribs, so they will be 1 piece across, so no breaking connectors (definitely the weak points in our first design).
  Rebars are pounded into the ground and the ribs are fitted over them so they are tensed in an arc.
• Along each long side of the house a wooden baseboard (of no less than 1 foot high, to guide sliding snow away from the base) is  attached to these “rebarred” ribs by brackets. This will prevent these 2 long baseboards from warping and will anchor the whole structure to the ground.

• To these 2 long baseboards are fixed (in a removable manner) (*) to the end walls.
• These end walls are made of plywood. They will probably be the heaviest components. In each are cut two holes, for a door and a window.
• These windows are opened either by automated arms or are fitted with fans that vent when it gets too hot inside.
• The doors can be homemade of light wooden frames with poly stretched over it, or freecycled doors, preferably with glass in it, and frames, in which case they need to be easily removable by lifting them off their hinges.
• The cross brace on top is 1 piece of rigid metal or pvc (probably pvc as that would be lighter). The apexes (apices?) of the ribs are fixed to this bar by ties.
• Also this cross brace is fixed (again in a removable manner) (*) on either side to the end walls by brackets.
• The poly is 2 big sheets bonded or glued (still have figure this one out) so it makes 1 seamless sheet.
• The poly is stapled (permanently) to 1 of the wooden baseboards (call it A). On the other side, it is (permanently) stapled to a long wooden piece that gets screwed to (and can be unscrewed from) the other baseboard (call it B).
• Along the end walls the poly is stretched over and around and fastened to the end ribs with the pvc clips we have at present (they’re pretty sturdy and handy). These end ribs are then fastened to the end walls with removable brackets.

So you get the idea. When we move the house, we

1. detach the end ribs from the end walls (unscrew)
2. detach the poly from the end ribs (undo the clips)
3. detach the poly from baseboard B and move it over the ribs, setting it aside next to baseboard A to which it is still attached.
4. detach the top cross brace from the ribs (cut the ties) and from the end walls (unscrew the brackets) and move it aside.
5. detach the ribs from the baseboards (pull ‘em out of their brackets and off the rebars).
6. pull the rebars out of the ground.
7. detach the baseboards from the end walls and move the end walls aside (possibly remove the doors first).
8. move the baseboards (poly still attached to one) to the new position.
9. reverse process.

We’ll be playing around with this. We also need to figure out how to make the 6 crucial structural attachments – (*) of baseboards to end walls and of top cross bar to end walls. A simply click system would be great, or some kind of bolting system. All removable screws and bolts need to be durable enough to stand up to repeated bolting and unbolting.

We still want this thing to be inexpensive, but we know that, with a better poly, the venting system, the wood and the hardware, we’ll be looking at something twice the price of what we have now. What we have now cost us about $200 – and we’ll reuse it as a shelter for our woodpiles.

Let me know what you think!

~

I’m also playing with some potting shed designs…

{UPDATE} look here for the finished product!

So I did all that canning last year and ended up with a little more than what you see in the picture above. So far we’ve eaten half the tomato sauce, a lot of apple sauce and blueberry jam (but not half, not by a long shot), a quarter of the peaches, and some of the fig preserves. We liked all of those.

We did not like the green peppers (bitter, metallic taste, is that normal?) and the green beans, of which we have, sadly, a lot (good for a soup, or a casserole?). Those two veggies are going into the freezer next year!

Tomorrow I’m making split pea soup with two of the many pounds of dry split peas that I bought in bulk and store in the chest freezer. I’m also going to make an apple-peach crumble with store-bought apples and my canned peach pie filling.

My attempt, a while ago, of “root cellaring” store-bought (organic) potatoes on some stick on top of a bucket of water inside a large black plastic bin in the coldest part of our basement… resulted in all the potatoes sprouting in record time. Wha? They were in total darkness! Very strange. Could it have been the plastic? Maybe I should try a metal bin next time.

~

And here is the promised peek inside the hoop house. These pictures are from when it was still freezing.

All kinds of lettuces, mustards, and spinach, doing well

Russian kale, Swiss chard and broccoli (in back) lying down a bit but surviving. Can’t wait to harvest those carrots (to the right)

In the third bed the parsley is also laying low but surviving. The mache and claytonia that I sowed there way too late have germinated and the seedlings are tiny but fine, waiting it out.

I haven’t been in there since the thaw started (we’re in the 40s now during the day, and at the moment it’s raining all the snow away). I’ll have a look tomorrow, when (if it stops raining) I will move the compost from the Earth Machine that’s close to the kitchen (it’s too cold for the kitchen scraps to decompose, so that bin filled up really fast) to the empty one in the hoop house.It would be great to have some finished homegrown compost by the beginning of Spring.

We readied the basement area where I will start the seedlings again. I can’t wait to turn on those lights! We decided I’d stop mucking around with  various hot germination box designs, and buy a large seedling mat (with thermostat). If you have a particular one that you’ve have tried and like, let me know…. soon.

~

Don’t forget to scroll down for the second and, may I say, most riveting installment in the “Calcium in Soil and Compost” series, published a few hours ago.

Last weekend we finally got the plastic on the hoop house, just in time too, before the first big snowstorm.

A couple of days after the storm something did not look right. Several of the “ribs” were no longer bent. A quick inspection revealed that the snow that had accumulated against the bottom had pressed against the ribs, making them bend in more, tightening the arch. This had put too much force on the pvc cross connectors on top, and several of these had broken.

The house still stood by virtue of the connectors still in place, the plastic covering (which did not tear even at those point where the loose ribs were poking into it), and the milder weather. Yesterday DH and I had a chance to go out and fix it.

The cross connectors can’t stand up to that kind of pressure because they are made of rigid pvc, which may get brittle in the freezing temperatures. Not being able to bend, they just break. So we reinforced each connector with a metal rod. The pressure of the arch is now on the metal rod inside the joint and on the much more bendable pvc of the ribs where the rod’s endpoints press on them.

Hopefully this will do the trick, but to prevent the pressure from building in the first place, we are also creating a cross brace on the most vulnerable side of the hoop house. This will at least give us some extra time to clear away the snow. (More on this later.)

I peeked underneath the row covers and everything is doing well, though the Russian kale looked a bit peekish – next year I will be following the Matron of Husbandry’s tips on winter hardy veggies. I also had the chance to harvest some of our first winter harvest:

Swiss chard, harvested mid-December. So good!

Bed under row cover: lettuce and spinach

Fat broccoli under row cover

Lettuce and escarole

Dead wood expedition

A good haul

Woosh!

Amie cans a quart of water

The Indian summer came, went, and came again. Last Friday we hit 37 F – cutting it pretty close – but yesterday it was 70F. It’s going to get cold again soon, though.

Plant. Moved (replanted) the 2 rhubarb plants, because in the end we chose their first bed as one of the beds to be covered by our winter hoop house. Planted 50 or so garlic cloves (3 varieties) next to the rhubarb. Sowed peas and planted onion sets for overwintering and early spring germination in outside beds. I’m investigating more winter sowing in containers here.

some onions at least made it to scallion stage, the celery is thin but tasty, the carrots are small but super sweet

Harvest. From plants still going strong: Swiss chard, kale, peas, green beans, potatoes, parsley, basil, scallions, carrots and all the culinary herbs. Last ones: cucumber, eggplant, cherry tomatoes. Pulled most of the celery for mirepoix (with own and Farmers Market carrots and Farmers Market onions).

Mirepoix in the Dutch oven

Preserve. 6 quarts of green beans, 3 pints of pickled cucumbers, 6 pints of peach pie filling  making the (preliminary) total of jars to 101… PLUS (just in) 5 pints of Caribbean peach chutney – and that’s the end of the peaches. So 106. Froze 5 lbs of mirepoix (I first cook it in butter, until just soft; I just love chopping it up; and I could cook it every day just for the smell of it). Froze 2 quarts of vegetable stock made form scrap (mainly celery leaves).

Waste not. We had a largish party, during which I was planning to do an experiment: I was going to set out paper napkins and cloth napkins and see which were most popular. Then I noticed I was out of paper napkins, so cloth it was, and the defunct experiment was the talk of the evening. We also used metal cutlery and recycled and compostable paper plates. The ashes from the 7-hour ribs went into a ash-bin for the compost and soil improvement. Filling a large bag of veggie “waste” (e.g., celery leaves) in the fridge: once I have enough I’ll make veggie broth and freeze or can it. For the rest, we continue on with our usual stuff.

Want not. Bought more canning jars (for some reason there weren’t many 8 oz jars in my Freecycle/Craig’s List hauls) – they were on sale this time. Our toothpaste was on sale too, so now we have enough for a year. But nothing else. It’s pathetic – I really want to be better prepared, for flu or power outage or whatever, but my self pep talks on the issue fizzle out so fast. I wish I had a buddy nearby to do this with.

Build community food systems. Chatted with farmers at the Market, getting on a first name basis and getting nice discounts too – I never ask for them, and when they’re offered, I always ask: “Are you sure? I know it’s not easy for you…” Some tell me about how they are just scraping by, and I also get to see how competition among the farmers at the market plays out. It’s very educational. I also went to a Transition Town meeting, and local food is of course a large part of Transition (more on that later).

100% homegrown "shepherd's pie" filling, to be topped with homegrown potato mash

Eat the food. Ate most out of the garden and whatever is left over from canning – one evening when it was just Amie and I, I had only green beans for dinner, almost an entire quart of them. Amie was so impressed: how can anyone eat so many vegetables!? We’ve eaten nothing from our canned stores yet: it will be special, cracking open that first jar.

"See, I can do this, Mama, because I've seen how you do it!"