Compost Bin and Smoker

I like my two Earth Machine composters in that they’re contained and so inaccessible to animals, which makes me unafraid to throw in meat, cheese, bones, etc. They’re also, of course, portable, and not too bad to look at. But for those reasons they’re also a pain to turn, and just the two of them won’t give me the quantity of compost I need. I want to add horse manure, grass clippings, more coffee shop coffee grounds and perhaps even some kitchen scraps from neighbors.

So I am in need of something more extensive and easier to turn. Something like the  one at Drumlin Farm. DH helped me make it come true. He made his own design and we put it together, the two of us, over the last couple of days. Here is the almost finished product in situ, off to the side of the veg garden:

It really is huge: 3 boxes 3′ by 3′ by 3′.

It still needs a three-part lid, which we’ll make out of scrap lumber and the old fiberglass roof we ripped off our porch. Time and use will tell if we did well. If it holds up well, I’ll put our plans online.

I’ll still be using my Earth Machines for the kitchen scraps that the wild animals would love to get at, because even with a lid this one is not tight – for one, it has no bottom. So the Earth Machines stay behind the shed, close to the kitchen, and this one will receive their composted and half-composted contents once in a while.

~

I also lit my bee smoker for the first time. I gathered a bucket full of dry pine needles, dry rotten wood and old leaves from our garden, stuffed some of that into the smoker, and lit it on fire. It smoked really well for 20 minutes with only a few puffs. Success!

Goings On In The Garden

DH and I have been hard at work on our compost bin, based in part on the one from Drumlin Farm, which you see below:

More on that soon, once it’s finished (tomorrow?).

In the garden I sowed fava (broad) beans, more peas, lettuce, beets, radishes and a quick growing onion. I transplanted out the brassicas (cabbage, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts), onions, chives and kale. I moved all the huge tomato seedlings to the big window window in our guest room, where I think I can keep them for another week, by which time our hoop house should have moved – or rather been moved as, no, it doesn’t (yet) move itself – to its Summer position.

Getting those  seedlings out of the basement cleared some space for new seeds: squashes, pumpkins, zucchini, cucumbers and garbanzo beans (chick peas), all in coconut fiber pots – which I have come to like more than peat pots, because they take up water so much faster and seem to lose it slower, and because they’re more sustainable. I also sowed basils, more cabbage (don’t ask me why), marigold, elecampane, yarrow, sunflowers and sorrel. I have a long list of what else needs to be started, but I am again full up downstairs. I’ll start sowing a lot in flats in the hoop house.

Pickup of my bee package has been postponed to the beginning of May, due to cold weather in Georgia, where they breed them. Maybe it’s for the best, because so much else is due to arrive at the end of April: some twenty berry bushes, hazelnuts, paw paws, kiwi vines, cherry tree, mushroom spores, asparagus, new hoop house poly…Which means we need to clear and grade land, build trellises, planters and arbors, dig holes, put together sawdust and wood chip beds…

1 May is of course also – according to my wager wit the weather gods –  my Last Frost Date, at which most of the seedlings will find themselves hardened off and out there. Oh, what a glorious time is Spring. Mmm, and that smell when you fill up the hose that’s been stored away for winter…

Gardening Buddy and Gifted Plants

Via Amie’s school I met a nice woman who lives a ten minute walk from here, and who loves to garden. We met for the first time today and discovered how different we are. She has a green thumb, comes from a family of gardeners and does almost everything by experience and common sense. I am a book learner, with no experience.We complement each other.

She showed me around her garden and dug up some plants for me: Columbine, Coneflower, Raspberry – of which she has many volunteers, which she will dig up for me when I am ready for them. She also gave me a lot of a (to my eye) umbelliferous plant which attracts a lot of bees, which she has all over, and doesn’t know the name of.

Does your mudroom look like this? It started pouring before I could put them, I’m thinking they might drown in their pots if I leave them out there. {UPDATE: I planted them out, mainly along the large herb bed up front.}

I offered her some Hosta divisions – she’ll come and help me divide them – as well as veg and herb seedlings for her small veg garden.

This is the mystery plant (along with a raspberry shoot).

Any ideas?

The Tomato Seedlings, They…

Survived!

The thermometer has been reading a minimum of 49-50 F. Not bad for 35F nights. They’ll be hardened off, though, don’t you think?

I scored two loads of cardboard for more sheet mulching, one load from a friend who was happy to free up some real estate in her basement, and one, the larger load, via Freecycle. I think I have enough to cover the beds up front and half the entire front area.

I potted up the two sweet pepper plants from last year. I brought them inside last Fall to be houseplants,  until now. One is already growing flowers! I buried them in their new pots up to their bellies, so hopefully they’ll put on more roots and grow thicker stems. I put them out in the sun during the day but bring them inside for the night.

We’ve finally finished grading and preparing the backyard and sowed the grass seed this evening. I also cleaned up and limed and put compost on all the veg beds except for those that are planted (those in the hoop house and the garlic and rhubarb bed).

I wanted to get  this done before the rain that will be falling over the next couple of days. It might even snow on Saturday, can you believe it! At least it makes me feel good about sowing the (cold loving) fava beans so late (today, actually). It also makes me think that the hoop house is, after all, in its right place still. But I might have to bring the tomato seedlings in, in case that compost bin stops burning. I wish I had one of those gimmicks that tells me the temperature remotely, with an alarm on it…

I caught the 13th mouse in the trap in the basement. Luckily it had gone straight for the peanut butter, bypassing the seedlings.

My hands hurt at the end of the day, which is why I’m not blogging so much.  I have spent three days in a row shoveling and sifting wet soil and wet manure and wheelbarrowing them all over. The rest of my body no longer hurts, only my hands feel stiff and crampy.

Yes, Of the Same, Again

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.

More Garden Works

This weekend we tackled the backyard. We’re installing a small lawn around the new patio and path. There will also be a border for culinary herbs with a herb spiral at the center, lined up with the stone circle, where the wild lilies are now coming up.

The permacultural ideal is to close all the loops and, for instance, to use only on site materials. We’re succeeding in this with the top soil, as we’re reusing the material that was excavated for the patio and path. That soil was of course seeded with stones, which we first need to sieve out. For this we quickly created  a new setup: the sieving table.

We constructed a table for our old soil sieve, which just sits on top of it, high enough so the big wheelbarrow fits underneath it. We just scrape the stones off the sieve with our shovels, into the garden cart. It works great, saves us a lot of time, hassle, and backache.

With regard to the compost, however, we had to have some brought in. I just didn’t make enough of it myself, even with the occasional ten pounds of coffee grounds from the local Starbucks and my neighbors’ pumpkins. Though, really now, I should ramp up my composting operations. But, for now…

I was so disappointed with the stuff we got last year from one of these “landscape depots” – basically semi-composted brush, leaf mulch and wood chips  – that it took me quite a while to decide on this year’s product. I chose Great Brook Farm’s composted cow manure. They’re not far from here (Carlisle) so it was good to get it locally, from a family owned business, and from one source – their 130 Holsteins. It is twice as expensive as the landscape depot stuff ($40 vs. $21 per yard) but, I was assured, also four times as effective. And we won’t have to sift out the stones. And it won’t turn to cement on us…

The farmer brought 12 yards yesterday and the moment he opened the back of his truck I knew we had made the right decision. It’s odorless, crumbly and fluffy. We have it all piled up on the side of our driveway, in our “materials depot,” next to a pile of red oak wood chips for our Oyster mushrooms.

We chatted with the farmer about compost and he made a great observation. He said the compost and loam business is a lot like the drugs business: they cut it and cut it and cut it.

This stuff?

Uncut.

Wild Turkeys and Seedlings

This morning started with shooing a couple of wild turkeys away from the veg garden and the hoophouse (which stood wide-open). Luckily it was just the two of them, not a whole flock.

I brought the seedlings up from the basement and watered and fed them seaweed emulsion to get those root systems nice and strong. It takes ages to do this: sixteen trips up and down the stairs, the feeding of sixteen trays of seedlings in two watering trays, sixteen trips down and up the stairs again when the air gets too nippy… Let’s just say a lot of other stuff gets done while they sit and drink.

The tomato seedlings are looking nice and sturdy, much better than they did last year. I credit the early potting up. I potted up many of the herbs as well, so now my “bank” downstairs is truly full. There is no room for new seeds, and I want to start squash and zucchini, and a slew of other things. I’d transplant some out but the weather is too variable – 90F yesterday, 34F tomorrow night.

Tomorrow there’s 90% chance of rain. I hope there will be a dry spell when I can run out and plant more peas, and favas, and some flower seeds. But mostly I’ll be designing the earth oven and the herb spiral and making the final drafts of the new hoop house.

Sheet Mulching the Herb Bed

The large 4 x 24 foot bed up front will be for the medicinal perennial herbs. (The culinary and the annual ones will go in the herb bed in the back, near the kitchen door.)

This bed was started last Spring. First we did some deep tilling (with rototiller), then we installed the boards and evened it up. We added a thick layer of compost and loam and sowed two rounds of buckwheat on it. Below is a picture of Amie in the buckwheat, July of last year.

We tilled in the last buckwheat in September (before it went to seed again) and followed it up with a season of winter compost (fava, vetch, wheat and rye).

Yesterday, in 90F weather, I forked in what overwintered of that winter compost mix (a rather pathetic sprinkling of mostly fava), along with a dusting of limestone and some MooDoo. The soil was at least a fork deep and very light and fluffy, and full of critters. Good stuff.  I am so happy I took my time, and gave it time, to build up and mature.

I raked it even and covered it with cardboard. In the picture you see, in the background: the hoop house, the garlic bed (which is so fragrant now – I love “tidying” it up), then the fence, then a pallet. On that pallet the  beehive will sit.

I only mention this area because that’s where all the cardboard was headed on a gust of wind. Run!

Okay, I found an intermediary use for all the big pvc pipes that  will sometime go into the ground for our rain water catchment system. Then I wet the whole thing down and covered it with about an inch of sifted loam, with a little MooDoo mixed in.

That bed looks good enough to take a nap in! Come planting time, in a few weeks, I will cut X-s into the cardboard – if it still hasn’t broken down – and plug in the herb transplants I am growing in the basement.

The idea with the sheet mulch was  (1) to keep the weeds from taking over the bed and (2) the soil from eroding and/or compacting under rain while it sat in its very sparse clothing of fava seedlings. And (3) to give it one last boost of soil building activity by inviting the worms to dig in the cardboard. I want to do this to the five beds (four of them 4′ x 8′ and one 6′ x 8′) that terrace the slope up front, which will become home to strawberries and several more herbs.

New Pots

Yesterday at the beginning of a new pottery session I got back the ten pieces I made during the last session. The glazing turned out totally different from what I thought it would be. Fortunately this ruined only one pot, as the glazing of its lid turns out not to match it. My first handbuilt piece – “a platter for garlic etc.” – is also a disappointment but then I didn’t make it with the right mindset in the first place.

I like the lidded pieces (except for the glazing on the one), and the “urn” (first picture), but for the rest I feel I am stuck in a rut, which my teacher generously calls my “voice”.  This session I promised myself to be bolder!