Potager Constructions - Day one, Rock, Paper, ...Digger?

This was the day when the paper hit the pavement (or in our case the grass.) All the potager plans we have been noodling with are about to become a reality.

First we marked out the plan.
If you look closely you can see the red flags and the orange marking paint.
Next we checked the level to see how much dirt needed to be moved.
(Note the little yellow digger in the background. I REALLY want one of these!)

Committed
(C is pretty sure I should be!)

It's a big job but I have lots of great help.

This is what it looks like now.
Time to go do chores.
(Sorry the picture is a bit fuzzy. It's starting to get dark.)

Tomorrow we get to finish digging and deal with 15 tons of crushed limestone. That all has to be spread, leveled, and compacted. Should be a fun day. Hope it doesn't rain!

My new favorite tool - I hope I never own one.

Finally got the last of the drywall up. This was a life saver. It's a Drywall Hoist, or Panel Jack.

It can hold up a sheet of drywall all day without getting tired.

Perfect for high ceilings and short crews.

Zen and the art of deer deterring

The other day, Diana, Garden Master at the Providence Zen Center in Cumberland, RI, contacted me for some advice. (No, I'm not so well known that people from around the country seek out my advise. She found me through a mutual friend, from my days as the Bearded Lady of Grailville.)

The first on her list of problems is deer. They seem to be eating more than their share of things. When people bring up deer problems to me my first thought is EAT THEM. We created this problem by removing all the predators and increasing their food supply (the way we clear land, plant bushes and young trees, create forest edges, and never let anything mature to the old forest stage provides tons of food for deer and increases their population) We, collectively, have the responsibility of dealing with the problem we created. One way to do that is to increase predation. Since reintroducing wolves into suburban America probably wont be view as a good idea, we will have to take on the predator role. That said, hunting and eating them is probably not a good option for an organization devoted to peace, a contemplative life, and vegetarianism. My second thought is usually getting a dog. A dog living in the garden usually does a good job keeping deer and other intruders out. Dogs, to be an effective deer deterrent, need to live in the garden all the time. This requires confining them in some way (usually a fence) and comes with it own level of inconvenience and damage. They tend to dig, tromp, sleep in, and poop on things you wish they wouldn't. Not as much damage as deer (usually), but still quite a bit. They keep the deer away by their presence and by barking (usually all night long). If you live out in the country and a ways away from the garden, that isn't such a problem. But at a meditation center... The sound of one hand clapping might be a good thing to meditate on, but the sound of one dog yapping makes finding peace a bit difficult.

That brings us to barriers, both real and imagined. (I've tried all the scent products, and they don't work.)

Fences tend to be expensive, ugly, and most of them are only somewhat effective. I've tried the double fence, which is supposed to keep them from jumping. It only works when they are coming straight on. If they are coming in at an angle they jump one and then the other. They also take up a lot of space and are a nightmare to maintain. I've tried the single fence with a cantilever top. They works fairly well, and I would recommend them for a large area. Use woven wire on the bottom and light weight electric on the cantilever. The cantilever needs to extend out at least 3 feet and up at least 3 feet. It is probably too much for a small garden, and visually leaves the space looking rather like a maximum security prison. The best fence I've seen for small spaces is an 8 foot high fence made of bird netting. If you put it up right it almost disappears. You have to flag it so the deer don't run into it and get tangled, but once they learn it is there it works quite well. FarmTek sells a complete system for a reasonable price. I have found that deer are pretty selective in what they eat. Many things we plant in the garden they won't bother. Another very effective way to protect things is to use bird netting on hoops over the individual beds that need protecting. This leaves the rest of the space open and more accessible while providing a good measure of protection for the most vulnerable crops. The same hoop structure can be used with floating row cover to protect from flea beetles, caterpillars, and other pests. That is what I would start with. If it doesn't do the job then I'd move up the scale.

We would be interested in hearing what works for any of you other gardeners out there in deer country.

Secrets of an amateur drywaller

Planning the Potager has been great fun. It's still in process and as the details are finalized I'll post more. Reality here is that the ground is still frozen under 6 inches of snow and ice. That doesn't look like it will change any time soon. Not to likely to get much done on the garden projects for a few more weeks.

Most of my time this past week has been spent on my least favorite activity. No, not taxes, though those run a close second. I've been drywalling the rooms we had to fix after our little water adventure. Now that it is mostly done, I am mudding. Not fun. I am getting better, and thought I'd share some of the bits I've learned (most of you probably already know this stuff, but it was new for me and learning it has made drywalling more successful if not enjoyable.)

1. If you can get a competent crew to come do the job for a reasonable, price hire them. Competent is key. Lots of folks do drywall on the side. They show up when it suits them, and they arent any better at it than I am. Not worth my money. But folks who know what their doing can bang out a job in short order and do it better and faster than I can. If you can find them, use them. If not...

2. Tools - get good ones. Wide mudding knives. Wider is better. A mud box. Sharp utility knife. Long straight edge. Rent a drywall jack to do the ceilings (you cant hold a sheet of drywall over your head and put in screws. Trust me on that one.)

Wide Knives and a Mud Box

3. Screws are better than nails. They hold better and you damage the boards less putting them in. Get a dimpler. It sets the screw at just below the board surface without tearing through the paper. Well worth the $12.

Dimpler

4. Buy good mud. The cheap stuff you can get at Walmart or Big Lots or where ever isn't worth the hastle. It doesn't go on smoothly, dry evenly, or save you any time or money. I like light weight joint compound. It is easy to work with and drys quickly.

5. Sanding is not your friend. Put the mud on thinly. Two or three coats to build up to a smooth surface is faster and better than one thick gob sanded down. The thick stuff takes a long time to dry. It cracks, and you never get is sanded down properly. When you paint over it you will see exactly where it is.

6. Don't hurry. Mud needs to be dry before you sand, topcoat, or paint. Give it time.

Living with Tools

I've been living with tools the past few weeks, and I noticed them today. That happens when something fails. My circular saw died today. NOT A GOOD THING! I knew when I bought it that it wouldn't last long. It was cheap, and I got what I paid for. Fortunatly I was almost done, and able to finish with a hand saw. When you buy tools that you know you will use a lot, buy the good ones. Yes they cost a a bit more, but the long term life and reliability is well worth it. If I had bought the right saw the first time, my now defunct saw would be on its way to the manufacturer to be fixed or replaced. Lesson learned again.

Here is a picture of tools I live with all the time.

I love the roll around scaffolding. It is adjustable up to 4 feet high which is perfect for working with my tall ceilings. It comes apart and folds up for easy moving and storage. WAY better than a ladder in the house. I use it for everything in the house, green house, even painting out side. I love it! (I should be getting paid for tool endorsements, but I don't have the marketing skills or the site traffic. If you want to know what kind of tools I love you will have to ask me specifically.) Since I am doing drywall right now I also love the giant t-square for drawing straight lines. If you don't ever cut sheet goods you wouldn't want one, but if you do they are great.I also find that I am constantly using my drill and a variety of pry bars, pliers, and hammers. A good drill is worth it's weight in gold. I'd also recoment the best/most powerfull cordless drill you can find. The one I bought was a bit on the cheap side, and it has long since died. My extention cord collection only reches about 300 feet which isn't far enough on our farm. A cordless is priceless.
A Sawsall is also a most usefull tool. Anytime you have old buildings you want to fix or modify, being able to cut through everything short of concrete is very useful. Get a good one and lots of blades.
My mostly defunct circular saw, and in the background a set of wrenches and sockets. The wrenches/sockets are very important. Get good ones. I like the Kobalt line from Lowes (they should be paying me for this). Made by Snap-On. Great quality, good price.
A good tape measure, a "tonker", a monkey wrench, and a life saver. The funny green pen is a circut tester. Hold the yellow end near an electrical connection, touch a light socket, stick it into a plug, and if there is power it flashes and beeps. Saved my butt numerous times. Well worth the price.
My favorite tool. This is the one I have with me all the time (except at the Airport where I would be arested.) NOT a Leatherman. It is made by Gerber. Better quality blades, and the handle doesn't hurt your hand when you try to use it because all the bits are inside. I wear mine everywhere, even to church. (Father Bill has sought me out when he needed a screwdriver just before a performance, becauce he knew I had one with me.) Don't leave home without it.

Cream

New tools tested. We used the separator today. One gallon of whole milk from our wee Dexter cow yielded one pint of heavy cream. It took an hour to clean, oil, and re-assemble the separator and four minutes to process a gallon of milk. Tomorrow we will try goat milk and butter making.

Warming the milk. Apparently it separates better at 96 deg F.
All set up.
R turning the crank.

New Tools

We acquired some new tools today. Should make it possible to do some more interesting things with all the milk with which we are blessed, like making butter and ice cream. We have been looking for them for a couple of years now, but they are pricy. These came available from someone cleaning out their basement. The price was very good, and after a bit of a clean-up, they seem to be in excelent condition. Over the next couple of days we will put them to the test. Fingers crossed and spoons ready.

cream separator and butter churn

Beans

Bean harvest is in full swing. We picked about 1 1/2 bushel off one row this afternoon. Some of them will be lightly steamed and frozen, the rest will be snapped, and bottled. We will probably be completely over run by beans.

In the past beans have been a challenge. They are a challenge for a lot of people I know in our area. The reason is the Mexican Bean Beetle. They are voracious eaters of all things bean. They multiply very quickly, and if you don't use some pretty aggressive chemical interventions, you wont get much past the first picking. The strategy that has worked best for me in the past was garlic spray almost daily and multiple successions. Not fun, but it works. You pick the beans once or maybe twice if you are lucky and then pull the plants and burn them. With good planning and a lot of luck your next planting will be ready about the time the first ones croak.

Last year I didn't notice much bean beetle damage, but we didn't plant many beans and I thought it was probably a fluke. This year we wanted beans, and I knew how to ensure we had them. (Our friend George, who lives up the road from us, raises all his for his CSA in poly-tunnels to protect them. I didn't want to go that rout if i didn't have to.) So I planned to use the methods which had worked for me in the past. "Fortunately" for us, we haven't had a bean beetle problem this year. I've only found a couple, and they were pretty easily controlled by hand.

Our lone bean beetle baby just before its untimely death

After talking with some of the big bean producers at the farmers market, I think I have found an answer. Calcium. Several old timers told me that if you put down lime in the rows before the beans blossom you wont have any problem with bean beetles. I hadn't done this, but I have been aggressively working to get my garden soil into chemical balance (it's a bit complicated so I'll save the how for another post). One of the first things I did was add a large quantity of calcium , as directed by my soil test results. I guess it reduced the plant stress enough that the beans weren't attractive to the bean beetles any more. Something I'm going to have to explore more.

To deal with the very large quantity of beans and other produce arriving in our kitchen to be processed we had to add a new tool. We can process 7 quarts of beans in 19 minutes with this pressure cooker. It's a bit intimidating (if you do something wrong it can explode), but we have been assured by the canning gurus in the area that this is the way to go.

The RIGHT Tool

We got invited to pick cherries today! What fun! We got home a bit after noon with several lugs of pie cherries. After lunch I went scrounging in the utensil drawer for a cherry pitter (growing up there had always been several cluttering things up in the utensil drawer.) I guess in my mind they were something that always existed at the back of the drawer. Unfortunately, none were found. While we were picking I had explained to J and R how a cherry pitter worked, and how we would clean the cherries first, then pit and bag them in pie sized quantities to be frozen for later. They were all excited to get started, but alas, no pitter. We had a 4 H meeting later in the afternoon in town, so we stopped at all the usual stores looking for a pitter, but, no luck. We called all the neighbors who can fruit and no one had one. What shall we do? We can get the pits out with a knife, but it is messy, slow, and very inefficient. The right tool would really make a difference.

C says I use that as an excuse to buy new toys, but it is true. Having the right tool for the job makes everything work better, faster, and as a result everyone is happier and more gets done.

One of the other tools I am loving right now is my mini-blocker. As the temp rises, it gets harder to get things to germinate. When this happens I switch from direct seeding to seeding into mini-blocks. Its pretty fast, doesn't take up much space, and if I keep it in the house where I can control the temp better, germination is pretty good.

Friday-Making blocks

Sunday- Germination

Tuesday- Every thing's up (sorry about the bad pict)

Wednesday-Just about ready to plant out or pot up

You could do this in big pots if you had the space and soil, or in a flat if you had the time to pick them out and pot them up, but this is really fast and very efficient. Nothing like the right tool for the job!

Berries have arrived

Our shipment of berries from Miller Nurseries has arrived!!! Since today was mostly on the beautiful side (not too warm, but not cold; not raining, but cloudy; not filled with other obligations, PERFECT) I set about getting them in the ground. Of course, the beds which were initially prepared last fall (after a summer of cover crop) had just been through a winter of chickens. The cover crop was shredded, which is good. The weeds were mostly nonexistent, save for the odd dock and poke weed, which is great. The beds themselves only existed in my mind. Chickens seem to be great levelers.

Bed Preperation

I spent my morning (after milking, putting the animals out to pasture, feeding the bottle babies, and taking the children to school, and while leaving laundry in the washer and dishes stacked on the counter) with my two favorite tools, my Johnney's 5 tine broad fork and the digging fork I brought back with me from New Zealand. By noon the beds were reformed, amendments incorporated (with a little tiller help. The beds were a bit too wet to do it all with a tiller, but it did a bang up job on mixing the top layer. I should get one of those minis that clicks onto the weed-eater motor. Maybe if I make some money this year.) and things were ready to plant. After a pause to feed all the babies and eat a bit myself, I was back at it.

Blue Berries in Bed

All together I planted a dozen blue berries, two dozen raspberries, 100 strawberries, and 100 asparagus crowns. We wont see any kind of harvest until next year at the earliest, but it feels great to get them in the ground.

Kale in the green house

In the green house things are progressing. The lettuce and kale from the house that I transplanted last week are doing great (except some kind of creature keeps eating the lettuce. Maybe I need to park the cat in there over night. Except he tends to shred the plastic when he wants to get out. I've already had to do two repairs this year because of him. So, maybe some traps...) The section of bed I seeded with salad mix is sprouting. I think that some of them are NOT weeds. I've also started an experiment with tomatoes which seems to be working. Tomorrow will be the test, it should get near freezing tomorrow night. My unheated green house gives me about 10 degrees advantage without any additional effort. That should get my tomatoes through.

Salad Mix Sprouting

My experiment is to see if I can get more than a month head start on tomatoes by planting them in my green house. It would be great to go to market with tomatoes a month before everyone else. If I open up the ends in May after the temps have settled a bit, they won't taste like green house tomatoes, but they will benefit from the added heat.

Experimental Tomatoes with Waterer

A second part of this experiment is using semi-porous ceramic pots for watering. I read about this in a Peace Core article (when I find it I will post a link), and I've been wanting to try it. One of the "treasures" we were blessed with when we bought this place was a pile of ceramic drain tile. I plugged one end with hydraulic cement, buried it to the rim between my two tomato plants, and keep it filled with water. The theory is that the water will wick through the ceramic as the soil dries, keeping the plants watered. If it works it could be developed into a low cost, gravity fed watering system for widely spaced plants like tomatoes or winter squash. I'll keep watching and post my results.

Planting inside and out

It's gorgeous out. Warm, sunny, nice breeze. Perfect day for garden work. Except, of course, we had rain yesterday so the ground is still pretty squidgy. I was able to get some planting done in the beds I had prepared earlier. The peas are finally in! I'm sure the local deer and woodchucks will be happy. Since I couldn't do any more work on the beds in the garden I started on greenhouse work. It did get a bit warm in there, but I was able to get some tomatoes and peppers seeded, and plant a plot of salad mix.

The tomatoes and peppers I planted in 2 inch soil blocks. I really like using soil blocks rather than pots for things that will be transplanted soon. The plants do much better. They don't become root-bound if you need to wait a bit longer to transplant them. It also saves on the piles of plastic that you end up with using pots. Block makers cost a bit up front, but they are really worth it.

The mix for soil blocks is a lot like muffin mix. It needs to be just wet enough to hold together. don't over work it or over water it.

Putting blocks in the tray. The air space between the blocks keeps the plants from growing into another block or from getting root-bound.

A full tray ready to plant. The little dimple in the top is for the seed. Cover the seed with a bit of fine compost if needed. There is also an attachment that changes the dimple into a cube the size of a mini-block. Makes transplanting easy.

The blocks hold together quite well. There is always a corner in the flat needing one block. If they are made right you can just pick one up and fill the hole.

Another favorite tool. I use landscape rakes on my raised beds to do the fine prep before seeding. Some short lengths of pvc pipe make great row markers, and you can easily change the spacing. This is for a block of salad mix.

Fun and Frolic

Patty and Molly frolicking in the pasture with the big goats. They spent the day in the sun and seemed to really enjoy it.




The chickens got moved out of the gardens today. They are back batting clean-up for the goats and cows. They do a better job than a harrow. They are a bit slower, but they eat the weeds and the bugs, and they fertilize as they go.

The elephant garlic jumped out of the ground this week. Guess it was holding out for a bit of heat. All the garlic looks good. I'll really have to work on marketing this year.

I started preping some of the garden beds now that the chickens have moved out. I was cruising along with the broad fork, my favorite bed prep tool (it's the two handled thing standing in the picture above) when I hit a rock. Usually it just pops the odd rock out of the bed with out any trouble, but this one bent one of the tines and didn't budge. After 45 minutes of serious digging(with a spud bar no less) I realized that there were the remains of an old farm building buried under one end of my garden beds. The picture shows my bed prep tools and the pile of concrete and stone I dug out of the last 5 feed of the bed. The next bed was no better. It does explain the dry spots in the beds last year.

A finished bed. Now that I've made it, perhaps I should lie in it.

We launched our egg hatching project today. Rowan was home sick today, so he did most of the work. I'll be posting the happenings soon. Right now I'm too tired, and I still have evening chores to do.

A break in the weather

The sun finally came out today. The wind has died back a bit, only blowing about 9 mph now. The temp looks like it will get well into the 50s. We should get something done outside.

Our grazing system seems to be working quite well. The goats have adjusted to moving down the ally way and are thriving on the new grass. The neighbors think I am crazy. They don't understand why I would be moving fence every day. It is a bit of work, but everything seems to be responding well. The paddock fence I am using is just large enough for six goats. When we get a cow we will have to increase the paddock size. If I add another section of fence that should give me two days grazing before I have to move the fences. The good grazing has boosted milk production. I'm going to have to get serious about this cheese thing. A lot of people are interested in getting cheese from us, I just need to wade through the legal mire so we can do it without getting in a lot of trouble.

The chickens are doing an excellent job on the neglected part of the pasture. After two days in one spot it looks like it has been bush-hogged and de-thached. Looking back at places they were 2 weeks ago is amazing. The old shredded grass has mostly broken down and the new grass is jumping out of the ground. I expect that in about 2 weeks they will be linked back up with the goats. They will follow about three days behind to clean up anything the goats didn't eat and to eliminate the fly larva from the goat droppings. With them out on pasture I have been able to cut back on my grain ration some. That is helping with the cost, but I must figure out an economical way to produce more of their feed here. Otherwise we won't be able to stay in the egg production business.

With the weather on the upswing mowing is going to become an issue. Last summer I tried to keep up with it using a small push mower. It took a lot of time and I wasn't able to ever get it all done. Eventually we hope to eliminate some of the mowing by planting gardens, but that's a ways in the future. The debate going on right now is weather we should get a used riding mower, or try to make it through another summer with the push mower. The rider conflicts with our energy goals, but it would really reduce the amount of time needed to accomplish that chore. Eventually we could convert the rider to electric, which we could produce ourselves. So the question is what moves us closer to our goal; using more fossil fuels and having time to do the other projects we have; or using slightly less fossil fuel (our push mower is gas powered too) and having less time? Right now I am leaning towards the rider. It's not a great answer, but in the long run I think we can make it work.