Hoop House 12/8 Update

Fall is going out with a vengeance this year. With 8" of snow on the ground from 3 2"+ snow events since Thanksgiving on top of some bittery cold nights (Wed AM was -4 F), this is proving to be a fantastic year for learning's for the aspiring Four Season Gardener. At least that is how I am choosing to categorize my demolished radishes.

2 weeks ago I had added about 150 gallons of water buckets to the hoop house. I had two solid reasons for this. First the water line running from the owner's farm house would not be open forever and I wanted some water on hand, and second I was hoping to add a degree of thermal mass to the interior of the Hoop House to help mitigate the temperature swings. Saturday morning was not warm-only 4 degrees, but it was partly sunny for the first two hours after sunrise, before descending into the more typical overcast. I had not been to the house for 10 days and the fact that the door was frozen shut did not help my trepidation of what I would find.

Good news-the spinach, mache, and claytonia are all virtually unscathed. The Black Radish , which I was gambling to get to harvest size before the bitter cold, are a complete loss
, and the bok choy is wounded, but may recover. Despite exterior temps at 3 degrees, interior was a balmy 28. To better illustrate the weather that had done in the radishes, the 5 gallon buckets of water were frozen solid. Now my thermal mass was working in reverse... But even here I incurred a learning. In addition to the dozen buckets, I also had a large black plastic garbage can I had also filled with water. It too was frozen, but only an inch or so thick. I just need more mass in my thermal mass, and the black helped with solar gain. This bucket was also full of a bushel of Comfrey Cuttings that I was letting stew into a slow brewed compost tea (make that iced tea), once it thaws I will have a nice shot of nutrients for my seedlings. This is my first attempt at compost brewing, and I am looking forward to it!

Everything has its first set of true leaves, and the spinach and bok choy are going on #2. And a huge win is that the Deep Freeze has leveled the weeds that I had missed so it looks decent. This may be small comfort when I look up at the 1/16th inch coating of ice on the inside of the plastic, but I knew I would harvest more experience than greens this year anyhow.

Tomorrow I will bring out two of my home fab "cloches" from last years season extension attempt, and I will attempt to source 2 trailer loads of fresh manure to build a compost windrow over the deceased radish. The thought is that the hot compost will add a significant amount of nighttime Btu's to give the bok choy a chance.


I had hoped for a slower start to winter, but the wonderland that the kids get to play in makes up for it. This year is a great counterbalance to last years non-winter (06/07 didn't get cold until mid January-I took root cuttings on 12/28/06) that provides a good dose of reality to the unpredictability of nature that we are aggravating with Global Warming. My hope now has switched form fresh greens on Christmas to the First Salads of Spring as I seek to overwinter the mache and spinach!

-Rob

Stumble It!

October Planting

I had hoped to have a litany of informative pictures in place to detail my mid fall planting, but the camera went on the fritz-another issue with being 10 miles from home. Without pictures to prove it, you wil have to take my word for it: I had a very productive afternoon!

Moving the Hoop House

Last Monday I finished prepping the beds, but there was still the little item of getting the house over said beds. I brought along my 5' steel prybar and we rummaged around to find some "rollers" to help us out. The thought being we would lift up the greenhouse with the prybars, put some rollers under it and then push the Hoop House onto the prepared beds 25' to the south. We found some old fence posts and got out a chain saw to hack them up into 6 18" chunks. We also came across some planking which we put under the rollers to make it easier. The 5' prybars made short work of the lifting with proper fulcrums and once on the rollers, the whole apparatus pushed quite well-the only exception being that we drifted East repeatedly on the uneven ground. Some redirection with the prybars and we had the house moved all 25' in about 3o minutes-without using a tractor!

Seeds!

The owner had said he "might even have some seeds" when I proposed planting some winter greens. He wasn't kidding! In 2005 the property had hosted a 25 family CSA-and it turns out that the left over seeds are all still there! One of the most beautiful things about CSA's is the diversity of the produce, which is necessary to provide a half bushel of produce to each family-every week for 20 weeks. "Some seeds" turned out to be 2 5 gallon buckets of commercial size seed packets from Fed-Co Seeds. The CSA really drove the variety of cultivars-I found 5 varieties of spinach alone-many in 8-16oz packets. I think I could plant 3 acres in spinach alone! Between this stash, and E4's bounty I am set for next year with the exception of dry beans, seed potatoes and some tomato varieties that I am finicky about. For a planting this late I set a strict limit of veggies that are harvest able from direct seed within 50 days. Given the short day factor of fall planting, I figure a 30% addition on that. This limited the planting to, well, about what Eliot Coleman recommends in Four Season Harvest. In the buckets I found (in addition to the spinach) mache, black radish, claytonia, bok choy, and arugula. Even these stalwart plants should have been in the ground 2-4 weeks ago, but I am giving it a go anyhow.

Earth Way Seeder

I have dreamed of what I could accomplish in time savings by stepping up to "commercial" grade tools. The owners had 3 Earthways hanging in the shed, with another 3 tied together to plant 3 rows simultaneously. I was excited to try it, but the reality completely blew me away. What an elegant tool!! Assuming you have a prepared bed, in one pass the seeder cuts a furrow, plants a seed to the spacing you have chosen in the planting wheel (10 sizes on site), fills in the furrow with the dragged chain, and then lightly tamps the soil over the seed with the rear wheel. Dear god is this easy!! Even planting 6 different varieties, I had both beds planted in 15 minutes. The tool is so simple and easy to push that my 5 year old literally seeded two rows himself. Wow, wow, WOW! These seeders are available new for $110 and if you plant more than a few beds it is worth every penny in time and back pain saved. I planted the beds with 3x the seed needed-with the low temps and 2-3 year old seed I want to hedge my bets.

I then soaked the beds thoroughly, and drenched the wood chip paths with the intent of getting a significant amount of moisture into the house before I close it up for the week-given the temps I am not worried about mold.

This week I would like to purchase a thermometer that will allow me to tract high and low temps to see how much benefit the hoop house is netting me, and help me to determine if/when I need to add the cold frames.

Fingers crossed that I get germination in week 1!

-Beo

Stumble It!

Winter Greens?

One of the seemingly unending perks of the partnership with the local hobby farmer is that he has a small (12'x25') hoop house that is currently sitting unused. 2 weeks ago I proposed the idea of prepping some beds for some winter greens. As the owner was very enthusiastic, and even has the seeds on hand, we are giving it a go. The plot and hoop house have been unused for 2 years, so I have my work cut out for me. Still, the tools on hand are fantastic, and make the task less daunting. Plus a excuse to get dirty in the crisp October air is most welcome!

Here's the beds 2 weeks ago...

The owner has a 48" PTO driven rototiller so we cut 2 beds to the south of the Hoop House. The house is on 4x4 skids so once the beds are prepped we will put the house on some log rollers and drag the it over the prepped ground ala Eliot Coleman. This weekend I discovered a large patch of Russian Comfrey (one of my all time favorite plants) that was overgrown and got permission to cut it down for soil prep. Here is a shot of a 3x25' bed filled with .5 cu yards of comfrey cuttings (high in minerals and a great soil builder) and lined with a 1' wood chip path. The soil is so friable that you sink 2" into the tilled ground without it!

Worms...Come and get it!

On another part of the property there are 3 windrows of 3yr old leaf mold of extreme proportions: 6' tall, 12' wide and 75 yards long! This past year, another family grew squash and cherry tomatoes on them (below), next year I will most likely put potatoes on one of them.

500 yards of compost anyone?

The compost is about 200 yards from the hoop house, but 5 trips with Archimedes (my 10 cu ft barrow) and I had enough to cover the comfrey with a 2" layer to coax the worms to the feast.

Black Gold!

Rain was starting and the temps were dipping into the 40's so it was none to soon when the last load was raked flat. The beds will rest until this weekend when a few friends and I will attempt to move the hoop house over the beds. The owner assures me that 4 guys can lift it, I think we'll need the tractor. Regardless it will soon reside over the now finished beds.

Just waiting for seeds!

The beds are gorgeous, and in the 2-3 weeks it will take for us to move the Hoop House, plant and get the seeds to germinate, the comfrey should be mostly worm manure. Next year we will start a month earlier and have transplants on hand to give us a jump. Given how late we are starting, I give us a 50-50 chance of actually getting edible greens this season, but the learnings will be legion.

Now I just have to cull the hoop house of weeds:

Time to order a Scythe!

-Beo

Stumble It!

Sheet Mulch : Building Soil Nature's Way

I had the oppurtunity this weekend to take a significant amount of lawn, 1000+ sq ft, at a client's house and begin to turn it into a perrenial bed. Round-Up is not an option in my world, so I pitched Sheet Mulch and it sold. Here is a photo how to for a simple, effective 3 ingredient Sheet Mulch with materials that are locally and readily availible here on the rural fringe of Suburbia: wood chips, cardboard pallet sheets, and horse manure.

Step #1 Prep the Ground

This plot had not been mown in months, so it took several passes with my electric mulching mower to knock down the turf grasses with the great result being a 1/2" thick layer of mulched grass. The owner called them weeds, I called it a Green Manure crop!

Step #2 High Nitrogen "Starter"

In this instance there was a horse farm literally a block away from the home, but the edges of suburbia are speckled with horse farms. Some neighborly conversation can get you access to a trailer load of manure prebasted with straw/sawdust for near perfect carbon:nitrogen ratio. It sounds nasty, and it can smell alittle ripe, but use a long fork and you will be fine. I spread it about 2" thick, but feel free to go as much as 4". More than that and you might go anerobic. 2" deep for 1000 sq ft will took about 5-6 yards or 3 loads with my trailer. That's alot of forking, but you can't beat the net returns!

Step #3 Weed Barrier

I like to use pallet sheets. Most warehouses, and some retailers-especially those carry alot of pet food or other bagged product, will have these in abundance. Again, do some calling and make nice to see what you can turn up. Newspaper 4-7 sheets thick works great too, but pallet sheets are ink free, and don't blow around as much in the wind, plus each sheet covers 16 sq ft so you cover ground quick. I overlapped mine at least 6" on all sides so it took the better part of 100 pallet sheets. The manure is thick with oat and hay seeds, this layer will keep them and the turf grasses out of the bed.

Step #4 Weed Free Mulch

Every muncipality out here has a free mulch pile for its residents. This municipality even had a backhoe on hand to fill my trailer with 2-3 yards of chips in about 5 minutes! I made 5 trips in 2 hours. Check out that windrow!! And, yes, my shoulders will be unuseable tomorrow... The garden will get a 6-7" layer of this that will settle to 5-6". Spoiled hay, straw, etc would also work, but spoiled hay is alot harder to find if you aren't Ruth Stout, and straw typically costs money. Wood Chips take longer to break down, but they don't blow around much and are a perfect medium for innoculating with edible mushrooms!

Putting it Together

When sheet mulching I find it to be much easier to not let any one step get to far infront of the others. Get too much manure down and it starts to dry out, get too far ahead of the woodchipping with the pallet sheets and they start to blow away. Sheet mulching is a very satisfying to do, as the ground is covered very quickly and the sense of accomplishment is huge.

Tools of the Trade

I did this job solo in 10 hours start to finish, with the exception of having 60 of the pallet sheets on hand prior to starting. Here is a short list of some tools that saved me massive amounts of time, all of which are pictured above

1. Utility Trailer. Mine is 5x8', cost under $700 and turns my Forester into a "pickup truck" extraodinaire, able to move 3 yards of light mulch with ease, or 2 yards of manure. Plus a trailer's sides are 3' shorter than a pickups so schlepping manure into it is much, much easier. Besides, when I don't need a work horse I take the trailer off and the Forester goes back to getting 32 mpg vs a pickups 14! I love my trailer!!


2. Wheelbarrow. I purchased a mulch barrow for this job. $95 at TSC and it holds 10 cu feet. Even overflowing with manure I could lift it with ease-the balance is more Vermont Cart than traditional wheelbarrow with alot of the weight past the wheel's fulcrum helping you lift the wieght. I have named it Archimedes, but often call it Hubris... A barrow this big is bound to get me in trouble...
   
3. Coal Shovel and Compost Fork. The Coal Shovel can move over a cu ft of mulch/manure at a scoop-mulch is light so it pays to move as much per scoop as possible. I picked it up at Menards for $16 as quality/design seemed simple. The Compost Fork is from Earth Tools and imported from Germany. It has a balance and feel that far exceeds anything you will ever find in a hardware store, and is worth every one of its $40.


4. Helpers! Many hands make light work; I had my uber energetic 5 yr old with me. True, the amount of work done by Sprout was minimal, but the diversion of someone to talk to was priceless, and mad props to him for keeping us both entertained for a full day as "Mr. Stone" keeping the cardboard from blowing away, or squealing anew everytime I dumped him out of the wheelbarrow on the return trip to the mulch windrow. Regardless of their age, someone to keep the weed barrier from blowing away is always a good thing!
   

The end result of a single days hard work will be taking 1000 sq ft of very sandy loam and covering it with an 8" layer of organic matter. Through fall and into spring the soil's ecosystem will kick into high gear with the manure's nitrogen and eat away at the cardboard. The chips will also begin to decay-I see about a 25% decomposition annually in my paths at home. The net result by June should be a 2-3" layer of ecologically alive compost covered by 4" of wood chips-ready to plant!

Sheet mulching can be a great way to relatively easily turn lawn into garden-as long as you have several months before you want to plant. Those months are worth it if you can spare them: in addition to killing the sod, you keep the topsoil of your lawn, with all its ecology, intact, and add 2-4" of topsoil in the process.

-Beo

Stumble It!

Ruth and I Tuck In My Beds

This weekend the air finally turned crisp-we had our 2nd frost of the season-and it was time for the vegetable gardens to come down. The crazy thing about it was that I picked another gallon of green peppers, and another 20lbs of tomatoes-on Oct 13. We lost track of our total harvest when our harddrive crashed this past week, but total take was in the 4-500lb range -with an incredible 50 lbs of that being romaine. With the sunchokes yet to come in 500lbs will be a sure thing.

We delivered the last load of lettuce to the coffee shop, pulled up the remaining beets, cilantro, and carrots and then reached for the scuffle hoe and hand kama to prepare the beds for winter. Once the tomato vines were down, I then ran my electric mulching mower through it to chop it up into itty tiny bits for the critters to eat. Having read Ruth Stout this past year , there can be only one thing to do next: I layered on one small square bale of straw per 80 sq ft bed. This may not be thick enough as it is only about 2" deep, but total mulch including the green matter is about 3-4".

I am an incredibly firm believer in the philosophy that we need to start thinking of ourselves as Soil Farmers, i.e. as sustainable growers we must cultivate the health of our soils to produce healthy pest free crops. My soil was dirt when I started-clay, sand and cobblestone sized rocks that the developer trucked in froi ma nearby quarry-organic matter content was in the fractions of a percent. My answer has been to double dig in about 2 yards of compost per 100 sq feet of bed to start, and then add organic matter yearly for the past 2 years. This past Spring I needed to take some severe anti Quack grass measures and meticulously turned and hand pulled rhizomes to attempt to rid my gardens of this plant (Quack Grass is about the only plant I term a "weed" in my gardens). But hopefully that will be the last major disturbance the beds will see. Going forward I hope to no till them and use heavy mulches and a cover crop rotation to keep organic matter and soil life high, and invasive weeds down.

I added 3 new beds this year for the purpose of keeping 4 beds in production and allowing the remaining 3 to set in cover crop for a season to rebuild. The more I read about cover cropping the better I like it. Historically, and by that I mean 60-70 years ago, farmers would use cover crop mixes with upwards of 30 different plants in them to create a lush, diverse soil ecosystem for their cash crop the following year. Thus far all I have used is a rye/vetch mix (pictured), but I am hoping to experiment with annual clovers, oats, and buckwheat next year. Both heavy mulches and cover crops help mitigate the harsh winter conditions for the soil--if it is as mild as last year I could have active life for much of the winter. The plan is to save the mulched gardens for the spring plantings, and the cover crops for the May/June warm weather crops.

On a separate, but very exciting note, the market garden will be trying an experiment in 4 season gardening. The owner has a 20' hoop house on skids that we will be moving to cover two beds we are cutting this weekend to grow spinach, mache, and endive. He also has dozens of sheets of triple pane glass from a business that was to be demolished, so I intend to cover the beds with simple straw bale cold frames as well.

Wish me luck!

Stumble It!

Market Garden Plans

To the surprise of no one that knows me, the fact that I now have 10,000 sq feet of garden to plan has my gourd in overdrive. The bed layouts are set-the tractor that we are cutting the field with has a 48" rototiller on it-add a 1' path between each bed and that nets me 20 beds 4x100.



Let that sink in for a minute-I grew alot of food this year in my seven beds. We fed our family to a large part, canned gallons and gallons, and sold about $500 in surplus. Each of my beds is about 80 sq ft and 2 were fallow. So my working garden this past year was about 400 sq feet. That is equal to only one of the 20 beds I am planning next year. Odin's Burning Beard that is alot of space!

The original plan was to plant only 3-4 of the beds and those only with crops that need little attention-like root crops that only need to be harvested once. The spirit of that is still alive, but I am expanding to fill the beds quickly. Here is my rough plan:

6 beds of potatoes!

Actually it will be 3 spring and 3 summer, but it will take 6 total as the summer bed with have a spring legume crops, and the spring crop will have a winter cover of rye/vetch. This should net me about 2000+lbs of potatoes. I have about 1000lbs pre sold to friends and neighbors if the quality holds. Plans are for Purple Viking and Yukon Gold. Price of organic potatoes right now is about $1/lb, and my overhead for these beds will be about $400. You won't get rich on potatoes (look at the Irish), but a 5:1 return ain't bad either.


Cash Crops
Only 2-3 of the beds will be for direct sale-looking to fully support one restaurant for at least a month with all their lettuce, tomato, and cucumber needs. This plan will be the first to be nixed if time is tight. The tomatoes will be a mix of Roma's, Cherries, and a wonderful cultivar from Seed Savers called German Pink that was completely oblivious to drought, floods, and lack of calcium this year. We were getting $5/lb for our lettuce, $2-3/lb for our tomatoes, and about half that for the cucumbers. Overhead for these beds will be less than the potatoes, with a much better return. Of course you have to work them about 20x more...



Storage Crops

We are starting a small informal partnership with a couple up the hill that also happens to have a root cellar and enjoys eating local, so in addition to 400 heads of garlic and the ton of potatoes, I will also put in a bed of dried beans trellised over carrots and beets, and another of winter squash. I think I can build a 100' long (and 6' high) gale proof trellis for 2 rows of beans for under $100 that involves alot of baling wire, jute twine and some 2x2 cedar. Expect a How To post next year!

Cover Crops

In between each of the above beds (all of which will be under a cover crop when not in production) I will have a bed of buckwheat (6-7 total). Buckwheat attracts alot of beneficial insects, and also smothers quack grass effectively- and we are basically planting in a field of quack grass now so it will be needed to out complete the rhizomes. Plus I like to make pancakes!




I am still deluding myself that this is doable along with running a side business and working a full time job as an executive. It will mean alot of time weeding and harvesting with the kids after work, but it will also mean that I am living my dream. No doubt some of the above crops will fail due to neglect or farmer burnout, but I will learn an immense amount of hands on knowledge, build relationships with the owners and the local market gardening community, and all around get myself closer to our Someday where we are running a working farmette and deriving a significant amount of our income from it.



If I can break even I will be very pleased-if I can pay for some cool new tools I will be thrilled. But regardless, if I can pull it off I will have made a huge impact on the amount of food grown in our village and sold in our resturaunts.

Be the Change!

Stumble It!

It begins

This afternoon I finally met with the local small farm owner to discuss using some of his land. On several sides it is better than I imagined. The plot we agreed on is about 1/4 of an acre and which will make about 20 beds (4x100 with a path)-I will probably only use 5 at most the first year.

• One-its free. Yes you read that right-at least as money is concerned. I will be sharing the produce, helping with some with chores, and I wouldn't be surprised if a rain barrel doesn't show up at their home, but no money will change hands.



• Secondly they owners will prep the beds for me with a tractor mounted rototiller. The tiller will make 50" beds with 18" paths in between that I will cardboard mulch and layer with wood chips. This is especially good as the area was allowed to fallow and the quack grass is thick.



• Thirdly, I have access to water, wheel cultivators, and a storage shed/root cellar to store the produce in. They even have fencing for me to use to keep their gaggle (well over a dozen) of geese out of the garden.



• Finally, I have the invaluable oppurtunity to learn innumerable things about farm steading just by being on a working permaculture farm. Just today I helped the owner use hand tools to skin a huge 40' log he felled this week that will be used to make the second story of his home in a year or two. Sound difficult? It only took about 20 minutes using some heirloom tools he bought at an old estate sale. It was incredibly beautiful to see those old tools put to use again.

So it begins. My path down the road to small scale ag couldn't possibly have started in a more optimistic way-sharing labor, tools, land, and knowledge with neighbors and nary a contract or check in site. They have the land -we share the passion- and I supply the labor and seed. Together we will make something special that was not possible without our community and one generation of small farmers helping the next.

It will be an adventure as I learn to scale my thinking from gardening to farming. Last week, I was excited about the daunting prospect of planting 400 cloves of garlic-they will be putting in 800 sq feet in about a month-even at the 6" spacing they use for ease of weeding, that is something like 6000 cloves of garlic-enough for over 100 families!!!

Stumble It!

Mother of all Rain Barrels

We had a mother of a drought in July of this year. We went almost 6 weeks without rain-which meant daily irrigation of our gardens-even the established perennials needed a weekly hit. We have 5 oak rain barrels on property which will hold about 300 gallons but that was soon drained and we were taking from the local city water to irrigate our permaculture plot which rankled me as it went straight against my "zero input" plan.

Now thanks to the beauty of Craigslist I may have a solution:

I am guessing the dog doesn't come with, but 2000 gallons with the drain aready installed for $200 seems like a steal. I have no idea how I would support the base (we are talking 16,000 lbs of water!) and I would need to surround it with something lest the neighbors mutiny but I am pretty stoked. If I can work out the logistics of tranporting it here this just might happen.

Wonder if I could get Koi in there...

-Beo

Stumble It!

The Blessed Bulb

As we wind down the summer of 2007-with its droughts and floods- we begin to plan both our Fall gardens, and the gardens of 2008. Now is the time to plant fall crops in our locale, and our gardens are obliging by making room with the passing of the corn, melons, and cucumbers. Into those beds will go Kale, Spinach, and Carrots. The spinach for a touch of freshness as the days shorten, and the kale and carrots to keep us in vitamins deep into winter. I do so enjoy messing with the heads of our Thanksgiving guests by picking vegetables for the feast!

Back to the 2008 planning. Our #2 bed first gave us 45# of potatoes, and is about ready to finish with carrots (crop#2), cilantro (#2), beets (#2) and lettuce (#2) and the final 1/3 is currently planted with a rye/vetch mix. As the carrots and cilantro come out we now have the final phase of this bed on hand. Garlic!

Garlic is great-there is nothing easier to save "seed" from, it stores incredibly, is freaky good for you and makes most of the meals we enjoy much, much better. We love garlic. It is also very easy to grow, and you can put a sick amount of garlic into 100 sq feet as most varieties will take a 3" spacing in beds. That is about 16 cloves per sq ft. Quick math gets you up wards of 1600 cloves in one my 100 sq ft raised beds. Damn! Mia, being significantly more level headed than I in such things put the kibosh on 1600 heads of garlic, so we compromised and purchased a total of 53 heads from 5 varieties. After splitting off the cloves it should be about 4-500 heads for next year! We eat about 50-60 a year and plan to sell/give the rest to local restaurants and friends. At $1/head that is about as lucrative as you can get in a bed.In our research we had become quite smitten with a cultivar named Music: Mia loved both the story of returning to the homeland and the simple, beautiful name. I am partial to large cloved garlic, but we doubted that our small vendor would have this rare garlic. However Gaia provides! The 5-6 cloves are almost ridiculously large (below), and have a firm feel and pungent odor that hints of a pleasant flavor without being too hot.

We also scored more traditional varieties: Chesnok Red, Chrysalis Purple , and a few soft-neck varieties for Mia to braid into wreaths. These will all be stored for another 3-4 weeks and then planted with my latest tool and covered with a 3" layer of straw to sleep soundly until spring. The straw prevents Mom Nature from heaving the bulbs from the earth over winter, and then doubles as weed suppression come spring!

Garlic is not only one of the easiest and most lucrative crops for the home market grower, it also lends itself perfectly to sharing the bed with a fall lettuce crop. As the garlic is done in late July, its harvest will till the soil and Aug wk 1 is just about prime time for fall greens planting here as the nights cool again and the rains return.

Formerly I had thought of gardening in annual terms focused on the August Harvest, but as I begin to implement Coleman's Four Season Harvest, I am coming to think of it as more of a constant flow of produce broken breifly by the "catalogue season" of January/Febuary where the soil rests. This year we will have fresh picked produce from April through (hopefully!) December through simple crop selections (radishes, kale, etc) and some simple season extenders like cold frames. Not bad for Zone 4/5! On top of that each of my 7 beds saw at least 2 crops-and all of them saw 3 if you count the cover crops I overwinter on 5 of the seven (Garlic and Kale are left alone).

Happy Planting!

-Beo

Stumble It!

An Organic Perspective

One of the most common, and utterly ridiculous, criticisms of "organic" methods of agriculture is that they can't keep up in quality and volume with conventional chemical methods. I am prone to picking fights, and this one gets me spitting mad. It takes forms as benign as my family condescendingly nodding their heads as I describe my deep mulching to make my own fertilizer (while all the while musing about all the money I am throwing away when my perennials die), to the much more damaging argument that a switch to organic methods would doom the world to starvation-we can't "feed the world" without Big Ag. That is a load of hooey, and my .1 acre project is hell bent on proving that. So here are some "Where's Beo" shots of my gardens to lend some perspective, literally, on organic methods.

Right, so that is my ugly mug about 2/3 of the way up my Golden Bantam Sweet Corn. I am 5' 7". All of these shots will look weedy, but that is due to the polyculture plantings-in this same bed is also basil, beans, and melons.

One of my 7 Tomatoe Teepees (4 plants each). This one is some of the freakishly vigorous yellow pear plants from Seed Savers. The plants have easily climbed over 6' tall in less than 2 months! The teepees are so sturdy that I didn't lose a single plant in a particularly vicious storm front last week with 50mph winds and 3-4" of rain. This bed also contains 1.5 dozen pepper plants and has an understory (waaaay under these days!) of white dutch clover for weed suppression, insect attraction, and nitrogen. The teepees also offer fantastic habitat for our black and yellow garden spiders which are superb general predators taking the edge off any pest invasion.

This is a shot of one of our native beds. Not a prairie as it was planned primarily for aesthetics but all plants are native to Wisconsin. The cupplant I am behind are only 3 years old and are well over 8' tall with leaves the size of dinner plates. This bed has seen no fertilizer other than deep mulching-and the droppings from the numerous voles, sparrows, finches, and chickadees that frequent it!

The key to any gardening regime is meeting the plants needs-the heavy feeding corn, melons, and tomatoes got a very healthy dose of horse manure (1-2"). In addition the tomato bed was cover cropped with a rye/vetch last fall, and the corn bed was the bottom of the massive sod based compost pile of last year's prairie restoration. The beds also had prep with green sand for trace nutrients, and periodic applications of either composted chicken manure or fish emulsion. With the exception of the fish emulsion and green sand, all of the inputs to these beds are readily accessible on any well balanced (livestock+diverse plantings) small farm-the way 90% of farming was done in Wisconsin 90 years ago when my grandfather was supporting a family of 10 doing it. I will put my yields up against anyones-and this is on only 3 year old gardens on top of a soil made up of a sand/gravel/clay mix from a quarry used as backfill in our subdivision.

"Beyond" Organic Farming works amazingly well-my 8' corn has impressed the heckfire out of me. I got 40#'s of potatoes off of 100 sq ft-that works out to about 9 tonnes per acre which compares very favorably with conventional yeilds... and that is with a lower yeilding Purple Viking strain v. the typical Russets.

Be the change!

Stumble It!

HOA Permaculture

The trees came in last week! Of course they came 22 hours before I was set to leave on a 1300 mile trip to marry off my best friend, so time was of the essence. I was able to get them in the ground with a modicum of marsh hay mulch before we left for Missouri, and was distracted most of the trip praying for rain while we were gone (unanswered, though the wedding was almost canceled due to tornadoes!). Upon our return I spent the next day sourcing materials to finish the beds on my back-hauls from delivering Rain Barrels to clients. The picture above shows the prep work as I left them last Thursday: on the right is the Speckle Pear with a Paw Paw on the other side of the bed and a pair of Hardy Kiwis on the fence. Edible Landscaping was unable to meet my order on the Paw Paw and only had 1 gallon trees on hand-hence the 18" tall "tree". What is impossible to see in this shot is the 3 French Sorrel, 2 Russian Comfrey, 2 perennial Clovers, 2 New Jersey Tea's, and 2 Hazelnut Shrubs that are also part of this polyculture. The grass surrounding this planting will be sheet mulched this month in preparation for more plantings next year.

At left is another of the tree guilds, this time anchored on an Asian Hosoui Pear Tree. This guild butts up against a 300 sq ft native planting that will provide a significant degree of diversity in both soil and insect life. This picture was taken after I had added a 3" layer of 9 month old leave compost from our village yard. The pile was steaming when I forked it into my trailer so the soil ecology will get a nice jumpstart of microorganisms! This bed includes New Jersey Tea, Comfrey, Nodding Pink Onions, and Garlic Chives in the understory, with another dozen or so prairie plants within 10 feet. In the background can be seen some of my compost bins and the tandem rain barrel set I am moving from the front yard to make room for a new, larger system I installed last week.

The bed at right has the second Paw Paw mini tree and the usual suspects in the understory. This demonstrates about how the beds look "finished" with another 4" of wood chips from the village yard on top of the 3" of compost. In the front yard I have the 2 peach trees in similar guilds, though one gets a mulch more elaborate understory complete with multiple nitrogen fixers and a bastion of beneficial attractants from still more native plantings and our large rain garden. I am lavishing plants on these guilds in my respect for the impending pest pressure that the peach trees will undoubtedly experience.

A few more thoughts on my prep. I took the unusual permaculture step of ripping the sod off. This is typically a no-no as you deplete the soil of its organic layer and much of its ecology. However, my sod is rife with quack grass and I had no interest in giving it a leg up in my forest gardens. Their rhizomes laughed at the 1' overlaps of 4' pallet sheets under our play system with shoots coming up in a nice 4' checkerboard. I have a strong dislike of that plant that borders of hatred, but I cannot deny its evolutionary chutzpa. So the rhizomes were removed leaving only the subsoil back-fill.

Without a year to add a topsoil layer through sheet mulch, I purchased 8 yards of a topsoil mix (Peat/Sand/Topsoil) that I layered on about 18" thick and then lightly tamped (ok I walked on it) and into this I planted the trees. I did break up the subsoil compaction considerably with a mattock (it scoffed at my digging fork and fancy imported spades) before planting. My intent was to mirror a forest soil strata as much as possible, so starting with my subsoil back-fill and placing topsoil on top of that, I then applied the 3" layer of mostly decomposed leaf litter from last years leaves. This simulates the micro-organism rich layer immediately beneath the surface in a true forest-the layer that feeds 90% of the plants in the forest. On top of this, the wood chip layer mimics the carbon rich mulch found in any forest-consisting of fresh leaf litter, twigs, and fallen branches. This is the layer that will provide the fuel for future generations of my soil ecosystem, while also protecting the soil from compaction and the suns rays. All trees were also inoculated with mycorrhizal fungus spores prior to planting to give the beds a more balanced soil system.

Next steps will be ensuring that the trees survive the ordeal of being shipped half way across the country and transplanted, and then to sheet mulching the rest of the lawn in this section to prepare the way for next years plantings. Only other additions planned for this year are some gooseberries and perhaps some strawberries as ground-cover and fungus inoculant to encourage decomposition of the mulch layers.

Will it work? Can I grow a suburban orchard "beyond" organic-with virtually no future inputs besides mulch? The next 3-5 years will tell!

-Beo

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HOA Permaculture

If you haven't picked up on the recurring theme of the past several months, I am planning a small scale forest garden something bigger than a permaculture fruit tree guild but certainly less elaborate than the ones Robert Hart created almost 30 years ago that have received some coverage of late. I guess I am thinking of linking about 6-8 tree guilds into a mini ecosystem. Perhaps Orchard Gardening is a better term, but I won't belabor the point.

I have a few goals in this experiment:

Tidiness Alright I may be accused of snobbishness here, but I am trying to "bioneer" a system that is replicable in suburban homes across the US, and if it looks like the weed fest that Mr. Hart grew no one is going to be on boarding anytime soon. I know his Forest Garden was brilliant in many ways: self sustaining, productive, and groundbreaking, but I am looking for something that will pass the HOA police. To that end it needs to be structured, functional, and well tidy. That means I will need to add more inputs in weeding and mulch rather than letting succession do the work for me, and I want it to ramp up fast so it will entail alot more prep work instead of waiting for nutrient accumulators and legumes to enrich the soil for me. I figure my garden club attending Mother will be a decent measurable here-if she approves I have passed.

Natives Right, so this may have already nixed my goal of readily identifiable species, but I want to make these guilds decidedly Upper Midwest in Character by including natives to fill niches when possible. This goal is rough to begin with-apples are imported, peaches shouldn't grow in WI, etc but I want to give it a go. So at least in the understory I will be incorporating natives as I go. For every niche if I can find a native to do the job I will be giving it a try. This will only be a partial win as productivity suffers without hybrids and "domesticated" plants but I will be giving it a shot.

Enjoyable, not just Edible This goes back to Mia's euphemism that "just because you can eat something, doesn't mean you should..." So I will be sticking with "normal" edibles as much as possible. Peaches, pears, apples (okay and Paw-Paw but its native) will be the anchor trees in the guilds. Strawberries will be a ground cover of choice, raspberries, kiwis, chives, sorrel, and other familiar plants will be in attendance. I want to be able to serve produce from these guilds without explanation to guests-and then spend the explanation time on the beauty of a (mostly)self sustaining garden instead of driving home that, yes, indeed, that dish is edible.

Some wins to date:

New Jersey Tea I first noticed this plant in the Prairie Nursery's catalog as one of the few native shrubs, and then started seeing it virtually every where I turned in my winter reading: Noah's Ecology, Edible Forest Gardens, Gaia's Garden. Mostly it is mentioned for one of two reasons. 1) The cute anecdote that the colonists used the leaves of NJT as a Tea substitute post Boston Tea Party... planting this shrub is Patriotic! 2) Hummingbirds apparently can't pass it by-they capture some of the pollinators to feed their young. Cool. So it was going into the guilds already for its nativeness, tea-ness, and beneficial attracting-ness, but then came the coup de grâce... this bugger is a nitrogen fixer!

This plant just rocketed to my Top 5 along with Russian Comfrey, Goumi, Sunchokes, and Black Locust Trees. I bought 9.

Nodding Pink Onion I have a few of these in my perennial beds, and I knew they were a native allium, but it took Edible Forest Garden's freaky useful appendices to dial home that this native was a great onion substitute (can you call it a substitute if it is still an onion?) They might not bulb up like a Walla Walla, but they are perennial, can be divided annually, attract beneficials and emit enough chemical odors that they can mask more susceptible plants from pest pressure. I'm in for a half a flat.

Misc Natives some others that will be included: New England Aster for a late season benifical attractant, Bergamot (beneficals and more good tea), Leadplant (N-Fixer), Alpine Strawberries (edible ground cover), Indigo (N-Fixer), and about a dozen other native perennials will be about 8' away in a 500 sq ft prairie transplant bed as a beneficial insect haven to try to keep the Curculios off my apples.

Other plants that will be in attendance in force will be Russian Comfrey and Chives (both great nutrient accumulators). French Sorrel (great snacking green), some Dill, Miner's Lettuce, hardy kiwi, edible mushrooms breaking down the mulch, some clumping native grasses like Prairie Dropseed, and I plan on tucking in traditional annual veggies like peppers, tomatoes, etc to harness some of the wicked good soil.

I know I have given this alot of press lately, but I have eaten my nails down to nubs waiting for Edible landscaping to get me my trees and kiwi (3 week delay!!) and I have to burn the energy off somewhere: Mia is about ready to burn the Edible Forest books if I mention edible fungus or nitrogen fixers more than once an hour.

This week's task will be finding a source for 5 yards of compost (I actually ran out and used all the City's...oops this will probably come on a truck), tearing up the sod, finishing the irrigation swales, and sourcing 3 yards of wood chips. Like I said-I am going uber input to get it up and running!

-Beo

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Garden Detail

So I wanted to break down my gardens in a little more detail. When I describe everything I am growing in my yard a common first question is "do you have any lawn left?" I do-alot. While the lawn as an expanse is dwindling annually, it will always be there for the dogs and our children. Plus I like bocce ball and while playing in a forest garden would be challenging, the buzzkill from squashing a sorrel plant would ruin it for me right quick. So here is a short rundown of gardens in the ground followed by a short blurb on plans for June:

Right now I have 3 main areas: Small Fruit, Veggies, and Sunchokes with some intermixing.

Small Fruit

This started in yr 1 of our home (even before the lawn) with 125 strawberry plants from Nourse farms. Not organic or sustainable, but dirt cheap. I split the 125 into roughly equal parts early season (earliglow) and midseason (sparkle) for their dependability and resistance. Each type is in a bed to themselves. The first year I debudded them all (while shedding tears) and got a healthy harvest in yr 2. Peak during the overlap week was about 1-2 Quarts a day. This was enough to put a little by-but only because my daughter eats small fruit voraciously. These beds take up about 80 sq ft each and I leave them to their own devices only trimming runners when they escape the beds which anchor two ends of a mixed prairie/perennial bed that also houses 2 comfrey plants (for compost) and my sole Apple Tree. Nearby are our 2 Currant bushes. These are just coming into production and are used for pectin for making jams.

Veggies
We currently have 5 vegetable beds each approx 5x20'.
#1 contains: 24 potato plants on a staggered 2' spacing, along with a grape trellis and 5 raspberry plants on the north side. Tucked in some gaps are also 3 lettuce plants and some mache I had left over.
#2 contains my heavy feeders: 24 tomato plants on 2' spacings to be trellised to 7' bamboo teepees for height. In the other 2' of this bed on the North side are about 16 peppers. This bed is also underplanted with about 1/4 ounce of white dutch clover seed for a living mulch ala Fukuoaka.
#3 is the spring bed and has a 20' double row of peas on trellis (using jute twine so I can compost the whole lot) on the south side and then 3' deep bocks of lettuce (8'), beets (4') carrots (2') and radishes(2') with about 3' set aside last year for this season's garlic (about 20 bulbs). This bed will be continuously replanted as harvest continues to stay in production (with coldframes) until Thanksgiving.
#4 is about 7' wide as 3' of it houses 12 more raspberry brambles. The other 4' contains 4 more tomatoes (1 teepee), 2 zucchini, and 16' of cucumbers in one row. This is a very new bed that is only partially composted sheet mulch-results will not be great.
#5 is my "3 Sisters" variation. Basically it has 4 melons on 4' spacings with 30 or so corn plants on very wide spacings interplanted. Pole beans will go in soon. On the south face are 6 basil plants for easy picking and wicked pesto.

I have a 6th bed I am turning under right now for the remainder of my peppers and lettuce that buts up against the sea of Quack grass that the DOT maintains on the other side of the fence. Keeping out that any rhizomes is futile so I have enlisted some allies. Enter the Sunchokes.

Sunchokes
Quack grass is my nemesis here at Someday Gardens. I have pulled out rhizomes over 6' long and they laugh at my stone rubble raised beds. I have spent about 20 hours this year meticulously turning over my beds and sifting them to get as many of the rhizomes as possible and then weeding with a vengeance to rid my beds of them. But the Quack Sea on the other side of my fence has limitless rhizomal resources that belittle my efforts. So I am choosing to fight an aggressive pioneer with an aggressive native: sunchokes. Now part of me feels like Roosevelt in 1941, but hopefully I can do better at living with the Sunchokes than we were with Stalin. Bordering my beds to the west and north and separated by mown paths are 3' wide strips of Sunchokes about 30 feet in length. The Sunchokes offer both insidious tubers and a mild allelopathic effect that seems to keep the quack grass at bay. The upside is that this living rhizome barrier also supplies me with about 40 gallons of tasty tubers a year and beautiful sunflowers in August. Now if they just don't take over Europe and SE Asia in the next 30 years...

That is about it for edible gardens right now. In some perennial beds I have 4 Goumi Shrubs that will produce if the rabbits ever stop eating them to the crown each winter, and I just put in 3 blueberry shrubs as well. It isn't much, but with a more normal spring, at least half the beds get 2 crops, and they all do if you count the winter cover crops. I also have an Herb Spiral with Chives, and most culinary herbs. Out of this I will be eating from May through the winter (Sunchokes keep like potatoes) and producing enough to sell to a sandwich shop to pay for next year's seed and supplies.

June/July Plans

En route from Edible Landscaping: 1 Housi Pear Tree, 1 Seckle Pear tree, 2 Paw Paw (pushing the zones here) a hardy Kiwi, and 2 Red Haven Peaches. Nourse will contribute 2 gooseberry shrubs, and I have 3 hazelnuts from the Arbor Day Foundation in the fridge. All the above will be incorporated into a "guilded" orchard that I have been planning for about 8 months on and off. In the guilds will also be more strawberries, sorrel, more chives, some edible native onions, mulch plants, and much, much more. The absolute beauty of the guilding is that in the same space as a loosely planted orchard I will have everything in this paragraph and more driving the production of this 30x50' area to huge heights. In the same 8x8 area I will have a fruit tree, 1-2 fruiting shrubs, an edible groundcover, edible vines, and at least a half dozen edible and medicinal herbs while edible mushrooms decompose the wood chip mulch. All in a system that creates its own mulch, fertilizer, nitrogen, and attracts its own pest predators. Buya! There is much, much more to this frankenstein (including an engineered soil/swale irrigation system fed by my blueberry bog and raingardens)-look for an well documented install over the next month!

I have a .5 acre lot, but I am only using about .1 to do all of this leaving the rest for a typical landscaped front yard, a playsystem for the kids, and enough lawn for 160lbs of greyhounds to frolic in. Most lots, even true Urban lots have that much. On the flip side this approach can also easily expand up to 1-2 acres by losing the raised beds for 5x100' beds, adding zeros to the quantities of the fruit trees and enlisting a gaggle of ducks for slug patrol without getting so big that 1-2 people can't maintain it part time. Hello permaculture market garden!

This is starting to feel like hubris, but fingers are crossed!
-Beo

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Garden: June Wk 1

Right. So the Big Mission this year was control for the backyard. Last year we left for a 2 week trip to Alaska in Mid June, only to return to a jungle of weeds that we never got in front of. The backyard was not a pleasant place, and we have vowed to make a better show of it this year. So here are some shots of the garden in June. I know, all gardens look great in June, but I am taking solace in how well they are doing thus far.

Here is Bird taking her time picking the Forellenschluss lettuce from Cook's. Bird is an enigma. She'll take carrots over cookies, apples over ice cream and will eat her salad, heck even plain lettuce, completely before touching mac and cheese or her PB & J. Like her Father, she is especially smitten with this variety for its appearance and taste. The leaves are large and firm which makes them a dream to harvest as leaf lettuce and they are heading up nicely. We have about 12 plants going right now that I transplanted out 2 weeks early (Mia's pic below) and they have kept us in salad for 1-2 meals a day for 2 weeks, and are still going strong. We have 2 more rounds of this lettuce to go (I started the seed all at once, but staggered the transplanting which is having a similar effect on harvest times. My "nursery" bed is very low on nutrients due to neglect which essentially puts the transplants on hold until they hit the garden-they stay alive, but don't thrive.

Once we got back from Yellowstone I quick put my transplants from Seed Savers (my starts were murdered by yours truly when I left them out on a windy spring day...) into the garden. Last year I had 14 tomatoes and had used large wire cages for all my indeterminate heirlooms. It was an unmitigated disaster because I didn't prune them and had them spaced to tightly-I basically had a tomato "hedge" that became weedy and suffered from lack of sidedressing

during July. I spent the winter keeping an eye out for an alternate method of growing my heirlooms and stumbled across the idea of Tomato Teepees in Cook's Catalogue. They used 7'

bamboo, and bamboo sounded alot better than my ugly wire cages! Unfortunately my local independent nurseries only had 6', and even Local Harvest (which I use like a sustainable Amazon) came up empty. I was preparing to resort cobbling together mine out of firring strips from Menard's when I stumbled across these beauties at K-Mart of all places! Beautifully stained (I will not ask what with...) and a full 7' long. They came in packs of 6 for a very reasonable $5. I bought them out.

The idea is to space the plants in a 2' square and then prune the vines to a more or less single trunk that will be tied to the bamboo. This should allow me to grow almost double (24 v. 14) the plants in the same area due to going vertical almost twice as much (6' v 40") with commensurate increases in yields. Time will tell!

I also broke with my desire to stay with only one variety of Tomato for seed saving. With me now marketing veggies to the local coffee shop, I needed to grow Roma's and Yellow Pears for them, while also keeping with my Amish Pastes for our sauces-in all I have 6 varieties. Ditto for the peppers-we went from one (Anchos) to 3 to include an early and late red bell for the shop. I hope to still collect seed from my radishes, peas, carrots, and lettuce though for practice!

Here's to the optimism of June in the Garden!

-Beo

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Tree Hugging Dirt Worshiper

So the newest breed of livestock farmers are starting to refer to themselves as Grass Farmers, and many Organic Farmers are proud to claim a bio-intensive form of agriculture-farming with nature rather than fighting it. And now one of my favorite bumper stickers (the title of this post) is taking on a new meaning now that I have finished Volume 1 of David Jacke's Edible Forest Gardens.

I know I have stated that in something like my last 3 posts, but forging through 350 pages of what is essentially an Ecology Textbook takes some doing. Don't get me wrong-the book was incredibly enjoyable and I learned an immense amount about, well, Edible Forest Gardens. It did get rough at times, as I was looking for a "how to" for temperate permaculture, which Vol 1 is not (though it looks like Vol 2 [en route] is). Vol 1 is rather a statement of the vision and theory behind forest gardening (creating self-sustaining perennial agriculture) while giving the reader (student?) a more than cursory understanding of the principles of the science of Ecology. The book is valuable if for no other reason than their incredibly thorough appendix titled their Top 100 Useful Plants. Wow.

As I stated in my last post, the biggest take away for me was in the 100 pages or so that deal with ecology. That is a good thing, because after 100 pages on ecology you need a tid bit or two! I will try to paraphrase my aha! here. Many of us aspiring orchardists have heard that a grassy understory can be detrimental to apple trees. I have heard numerous reasons why, but the main reasons center around resource squabbling between the shallow rooted apple tree and the shallow rooted turf grasses. That kind-of made sense, but it never felt truly right to me-too simplistic. Jacke clues his readers in on a relatively new frontier of soil ecology- the ratios of bacteria to fungus in the soil horizons as another possible reason.

Without getting too technical, grass or freshly disturbed areas typically have a very high bacteria to fungus ratio-there is typically little carbon material in the soils for the fungus to feed on and bacteria are more flexible on the relatively higher nitrogen levels in the organic matter in either disturbed sites or under sod. However, trees, and even shrubs and many perennials, have evolved to live in a mutually beneficial existence with various fungus and one (mycorrhizal) in particular is turning out to be one of the absolute powerhouses of the forest. Basically the fungus lives on or near the roots of the trees and in an exchange similar to rhibosomal bacteria in legumes, gives nutrients and water to the tree for sugar intensive root secretions. Sounds neat and all but why should we care? Here is the tidbit that blew my mind: take a table spoon or two of really good old growth soil. In that dollop of soil there may be as many as 40 miles worth of mycelial "hairs" and, in the soil, nutrient uptake is all about surface area. Dang!

But here is the kicker: the fungus is sensitive-every know "-cide" has shown to be damaging to it including the more innocuous ones like Round-Up. So if you live in a new subdivision like me and have dead subsoil, or are living in virtually any other developed soil on Earth you almost certainly have a soil dead to fungus. This is essentially forcing our trees and gardens to try to soldier on alone uphill with one leg chained to a 50lb chunk of lead. Not only are we missing an essential component of the decomposer web in our soils, we have also hamstrung our gardens by taking away one of their staunchest allies.

So I will be running an experiment in my lawn and some of my gardens this year. I have ordered mycorrhizal fungus inoculants for both my veggies and my lawn from Fungi.com and will keep you posted on the results.

Speaking of Fungi.com, they offer an immense line of fungus products allowing you to grow your own edible mushrooms. Some, like the Shitake, need a log to be inoculated and then placed in contact with the soil, but several others would like nothing more to live in (and aggressively decompose) the wood chip mulch in your perennial beds. In return they will give you a harvest every year for the next several years or more. Loathe turning your compost bin and have some time on your hands? Inoculate the pile (or a round bale of straw!) with their The Garden Giant™ (Stropharia rugoso-annulata) and sit back as you harvest some utterly immense mushrooms while the fungus turns the carbon into compost. Fukuoka would be pleased!!

I plan on inoculating the mulch layers of my sheet compost with the Stropharia and perhaps some others as soon as the beds go in next week if for no other reason than to see a 3' mushroom!

-Beo

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Sheet Mulch: Spring Edition

Not sure if you noticed yet, but we have a propensity to add perennial beds at a pace that is almost concerning. Last year that meant I spent alot of time, effort, and profanity cutting and hauling sod. The kicker with removing all that sod is not only the effort expended, but also the fact that it includes about 50% of my topsoil. That I paid for. True I am composting the sod, but it seemed wasteful-and in terms of time and energy it certainly was.

So if you have followed some of my earlier posts about this years plans, we intend to get into orcharding. Not huge, but 4-8 trees. Alot of this is in pursuit of my goal of growing 1 ton of food on our suburban lot in Zone 5, another goal is to finally plant some real permaculture guilds from the ground up. The picture at left is my first real foray down those paths.

The first picture is my laying out of about 15 cardboard slip sheets that I got from our local organic feed store (yes, we have an organic feed store-have I mentioned I love WI?). The slips protect bags of grain from damage and typically are recycled, but they are also the perfect size for sheet mulching. Any local business that deals in palletized freight should have plenty for you-just make sure they weren't shipping pallets of Diazinon...

I also collect about 20 gallons of organic waste from a local coffee shop each week. That raw material has been building up all winter in a compost bin-to the tune of almost 2 cu yards. I opened up that bin and trucked it to the front yard to spread it about 8" thick across the cardboard-I know it was damp because 2/3 of the pile was still frozen!

Once that was rough leveled with a rake, I top dressed it with a 3-4" layer of chips from our local village yard as seen in the final picture. By mid May when I want to get my trees and guilds in, the raw organic material will be 75% composted and teeming with microbial life with all its goodness. So instead of removing 50% of the topsoil I built it 6" deeper!

Here is the best part-doing this the traditional way would have taken at least a weekend of toil. Instead this took less than 2 hours-and that includes going to get the chips from the village lot. The benefits of letting Gaia do the work for you are legion: better soil, less effort, and more time to devote to other tasks. Plus the chance to lay out fetid masses of "garbage" in your front lawn and then take pictures of it while my neighbor's watched was priceless!

Want to sheet mulch yourself? It is crazy easy:

• Sprinkle a high nitrogen fertilizer over the area to be converted to garden to jump start the process. Raw manure is great, I used pelletized chicken manure due to lack of livestock. Seeds in this layer are fine. Sprinkle lightly with water if needed to get it moist.
• Lay out your weed barrier, ensuring at least 6" overlap at the seems so the sod doesn't try to creep through. I prefer cardboard as it doesn't blow away as easily and is readily availible, but 3+ layers of newspaper work well too. Even jeans or natural carpet would work! Keep this layer damp.
• Cover this with compost materials at least 4" thick, but 8" is better. Remember that this will be you soil material and it will break down to 50% of its original volume. Anything that would go into your pile is fine, but avoid noxious invasive weed material like Quack Grass rhizomes. Ensure entire layer is moist.
• Top dress with at least 4" of weed free mulch. Wood chips, marsh or spoiled hay, straw, etc are all fine. This is the layer that keeps the weeds seeds below from ever germinating and can be as aesthetic as you need.

That's it! You can sheet mulch around existing plants by cutting holes in the weed barrier, or pull the mulch back when you want to add plants. remember to give air space between the mulch and the stems to avoid vole and fungal damage.

Congrats! You have just created a haven for microbial life, built literally tons of life sustaining humus and you proved to the world that you don't need a rototiller to make a garden!

Be the Change!

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Tools of the Trade

I am a Tool Guy. That is a fact that I have come to grips with over the past decade or so. Now, in my defense, it is primarily through a deep respect for quality instilled in me from my father that was honed to a razor's edge through my adult life by rapping my knuckles against car chassis when an inferior tool broke, or wasting an entire day on a job that literally took 30 minutes once I broke down and bought the correct tool for the job.

I no longer spend my weekends under cars sacrificing my money and blood on the altar of speed, but the tool thing is still there. I am hard on tools. I have little, um, finesse and typically average 1.75 digging forks a season... don't get me started on hoes and spades. While it is almost entirely the fault of the crappy "tools" at today's hardware store's, I accept the fact that I am asking them to do work that most of my generation is using either Skidsteer's or Rototillers for. I am committed to carbon free gardening, so I was setting myself up.

Frustration built to a climax last year when I put in our mini-prairie and cut through almost 1000 sq ft of established quack grass sod by hand. My tools were poorly balanced and refused to hold an edge once I tried to sharpen them. I vowed to change this year. With revenue coming in from our cottage rain barrel business I took the plunge this week. At left is $225 (shipped) of the pinnacle of hand gardening equipment available. I didn't get a digging fork because I have one that I am rather fond of and haven't broken (yet).

I stumbled upon Earth Tools last year when researching walk behind tractors for a market gardening project, and then went nutso for their DeWitt line of English Spades. Some guys read Maxim-I read Earthtools. That may also be why Mia and I just celebrated our 8th anniversary this week, but I digress. I could try to explain the feel of the tool, but I will let Joel at Earth Tools speak for me:

All DeWit spades are forged to a hardness of approximately 60 rockwell;
incredibly tough. DeWit spades feature a more rounded cutting edge than the
English or American spades; the radius helps slice through tough root material,
crust, etc. with less effort.... All feature typical Dutch ‘T’ grip at the top
of the handle, which we have found to be overall more durable than conventional
‘D’ grips.

They start with the frickin rockwell rating for crying out loud! What is almost impossible to explain is the way the handle tapers to the blade, the balance of the tool, and the solid, yet supple feel of the handle.

I was also dumbstruck by their Rogue Hoes line from Kansas. Literally made from the steel of old plow discs these hoes are farm tough. One of my main uses for hoes is chopping, and the Menard's hoes frankly suck at that-which is why I end up snapping them. As shown at right, these hoes come with a razor edge on 3 sides with enough steel in them to last a lifetime of resharpening. The welds are beefy, and all the weight is in the head-this tool packs a whallup! These tools are so sharp we had to hold a family meeting with the kids to instill that they are to never touch Daddy's tools!

For lighter weeding work I also got their scuffle hoe designed to cut on the push and pull stroke and to float on the soil-disturbing less weed seeds for later germination. I got the smallest one with eyes on my lettuce beds which will be difficult to mulch.

Some of these tools are expensive (the spade is $70) but my children will use them in their adult gardens and at my historical breakage rate will pay for themselves in one season. Perhaps even more importantly they can actually be sharpened and will make my hobby more enjoyable and less like work. But most of all, I simply love the feel of a well designed tool.

I would be remiss if I didn't plug Earth Tools even more. In one morning I had 3 phone calls with them fine tuning my order, despite primarily being an implement dealer, they were more than willing to take the time to answer my questions, and ask their own, to ensure I got exactly the right tool for my intended uses. On top of that I ordered the tools on Monday noon and they were on my door step literally less than 48 hours later. Joel and his team are simply top notch: they sell quality and back it with amazing knowledge and service.

Happy Gardening!

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Mache

So I have officially kicked off the 2007 gardening season! Here in far northern Zone 5 planting outside on March 1 is new to me. But using the successful coldframe design of 2006 I trudged through the 2' drifts to my gardens, scratched two rows into the pleasantly warm and moist soil and planted 20 mache plants.

Now back to that zone 5 part. Last week we had some 40 degree days, enough to inspire me to order 2 packets of Vit from Cook's Gardens. While they were en route, I decided to moisten the soil in the coldframe. How? I shoveled it full of snow of course! Temps in the frame are hitting 75 degrees on the clear 40 degree days and the snow melted in days. Of course now that I have seeds in soil nighttime temps are back down to the single digits...

Unfortunately the pic is not from my garden, look for updates in a month or so!

Stumble It!

Plant Propagation Update

So a month ago we were in a sobering warm spell that had me restless. The incredibly warm temperatures were adding alot of energy to my need to get our gardens more self sufficient. I know (hope?) that Global Warming will have a lesser effect here (though we are already warming in a Big Way-the Arbor Day Foundation just moved Zone 5 100 miles north in WI from just 15 years ago) than in coastal regions or the western Mid-West (which should become much drier), but I still felt the need to do something. With the weather warm, I chose to go out and take root cuttings from one of my 3 Comfrey plants.

I took those cuttings and packed 2-3 into good seed starting mix and some nice decorative pots that we had left over from some indoor plants I had killed last year (my green thumb turns brown indoors). I kept them moist, but time marched on. And on. And then three weeks went by. I moved one to the front window hoping that perhaps the sun would help warm the soil over the 65 degrees we keep the house at during the day. Then a month had passed with no growth. I consoled myself that the roots were probably sinking feeder roots, or that perhaps taking cuttings on Dec 30th wasn't exactly a recipe for success.

Then about 4 days ago a miracle happened. Comfrey leaves poked through the mix on the window pot, and yesterday the other 4 pots had shoots emerging as well. Success! I now have at least 6 new plants, and am expecting another 4 within the week. Enough to provide Grow Your Own Mulch for the 4 fruit tree guilds planned for this spring.

If these work out I will provide them via my Someday Gardens site hopefully by June since not even Forest Farm and their 500 page catalogue offers them. Readers that are interested just shoot an email under Someday Gardens "contact us" link and I will hook you up cheap-barter or plant exchanges encouraged!

Stumble It!