Plans for 2015

Things are always in flux, and I really like to think out loud. It especially helps me while planning, because I can easily see the flaws in my ideas once I tell someone else about them. With that being said, some of the things that Naomi and I were planning for 2015 as of a couple of months ago have changed somewhat. We're also trying to focus on what we can do based on time, money and resources in the coming year. The following are some of the things Naomi and I have been discussing as of late. Naomi may have a few more, but this is what's on my mind:

• Geese, not sheep
• rabbits
• mobile chicken coop
• worm bin
• refine duckponics
• gutters on the house
• attempt to replace one rotten windowsill

Geese- I had been talking about getting lambs in the spring because we have SO much lawn. Mowing it takes time, gas, and mower maintenance. Sheep would turn that grass into something productive- meat.  Well, the summer was very dry, and when October rains came, I realized just how wet some of that backyard lawn really is, which makes it totally not suitable for sheep.

I had also been interested in getting some geese, but thought I'd save it for a later year. Once I decided sheep were out, geese seemed like an easy decision. They're much much cheaper to obtain, I can stock them in a higher density, they also eat grass, and they would love it when the backyard gets a little wet. Pretty sure that's a done deal. I'm going to try to figure out how to still use the polydome I got from our neighbor to house the geese in. They might need a little ramp and some ramp training like Penelope got when she was a baby.

Rabbits- Rabbit might be one of my absolute favorite foods in the world. They existed in such abundance at our apartment that it seemed silly to try to raise domesticated rabbits. While we saw a few here in the end of summer/ early fall, they certainly weren't in abundance. Aside from shelling out for some infrastructure and stock costs, rabbits don't seem too tough to pull off this year. I had originally planned to knock this out during the end of winter, but I've sort of hit a design flaw and I'm focusing on some other stuff at the moment, mainly music. Rabbits are reasonably easy to take care of, not cost-prohibitive in regards to feed and care, and can add a significant amount of extra lean protein to our diets. Plus, they're cute and fluffy.

Mobile Chicken Coop- I've been talking about this quite a bit lately. I want to build another coop similar to our existing one, but on a trailer platform and be able to move it around the property. I want to fence the chickens into small paddocks with electronet, or even just non-electrified fence in the beginning so that I can focus their efforts where it will do the most good, and spread them across the landscape rather than keeping them in a fixed location- which usually turns into a mudhole. Again, this is a moderate expense, but if done right, should last a long time and its benefits will outweight the cost long term.

Worm Bin- A few years back I had wanted to start a worm bin, but couldn't find an appropriate place to site the bin while living in our apartment. Our basement now seems to have a very consistent temperature, and would be a great location for a worm bin. What little amount of food scraps we've been generating have been going straight into the chicken run, but it's never enough volume all at once to get some good aerobic compost going. A big part of our tiny volume of food scraps is that with the ordeal of moving, we didn't produce nearly the amount of veggies from our garden as in previous years. We just can't afford to buy the kind of produce we're used to producing ourselves. Just this morning we were debating over the best use of our shredded paper, and it hit me again- WORM BIN. So, this is a relatively new idea, but seems easy enough to get going, especially considering we have most or all of the parts needed. We just need for the ground to thaw a bit and find some appropriate worms.

Duckponics- This is Naomi's area of expertise, but she mentioned some adjustments and upgrades she's planning on for this year. I'll let her tackle that when she sees fit.

Gutters- We dearly need gutters on our house. They would fix so many issues that we're having like basement infiltration, exterior rot on the house (see windowsills), foundation stuff, and water supply issues. I'm really hoping I can slam this one out before next fall. I haven't even begun to research the cost of this, but we've got so many water issues I can't NOT get them.

Windowsills- Most, if not all of the windowsills on our house are rotten. Like sponge-soft. It's easy to see where water sheets off the roof, hits the house, and then hits the windowsills. I need to do a lot of work on the windows other than the sills, too, (reglazing, new storm windows) but it doesn't make sense until the water issue is resolved. I am, however, planning to try replacing one windowsill and see how it goes. If it isn't too much of a nightmare, I will then plan on doing the others. I'm hoping to replace the sills, eventually get new storm windows, and otherwise rehabilitate the existing wooden-sash, double-hung windows because they're beautiful and fit the style of our home very well.

A little history

In 2010, we had our first garden together.  It was about 9'x30', and in the shade of 3 or 4 mature oak trees.  We grew some OK greens.  I especially remember the swiss chard.  We had some tomatoes, and a couple cucumbers.  We had broccoli that actually made little heads.  We grew about 6 softball-sized cabbages and I made sauerkraut from them.  We tried growing onions and potatoes for the first time, at least for me.  Both of those were total failures. I  remember getting less than a dozen marble-sized potatoes.  We then proceeded to tell the landlords that we wanted to tear out the whole lawn the next spring.

In 2011, the landlords granted us access to "the big garden."  We were fully unprepared to deal with this.  I bought far, faaaar too many seeds, laid out a plan that tried to stretch a tiny garden over a large garden plot.  Everything was way too close together, and we ended up with large fallow areas because we had no idea about spacing.  And it was unbelievably weedy, partially due to having laid fallow for well over 5 years.  We learned what mugwart was, and started to loathe it.  We grew lots of tomatoes, really good squash (mostly by accident, as most people tend to do with squash) and some really fantastic corn.  The corn was also a total accident.  There were some cucumbers in there, and we failed miserably at keeping track of greens.  The woodchucks also totally ravaged everything.  I started killing them, but just buried their bodies under the crops.  On the suggestion from a friend that I teach her how to shoot a bow so she could bowhunt (which predictably never happened- her fault, not mine) I signed up for a bowhunter safety course, since I had been looking for a reason to start shooting again.  I hadn't touched a bow in about a decade at that point.  At that point, we dipped into eating meat again, both of us for the first time in a really long time.  The neighbors were very generous with sharing venison with us.

In 2012, we got married, and Naomi claims that I put all my wedding stress into the garden.  This may or may not be true, however.  I started to get some ideas, understood how environmental forces acted on the garden site, and read some books.  I read some garden basics stuff, since I had never previously done that.  I also got accidentally turned on to permaculture, and read a couple of permaculture-related books.  I staked out beds in the big garden, and did my best at a very amateur attempt at hugelkultur. I mostly used moldy waste hay, and a bunch of small branches.  I made my mounds something like 8-12" high- which turned out to be enough to keep the beds from flooding, which had happened frequently prior to that.  We grew garlic for the first time.  We had our first success with potatoes, which we stopped trying to grow in a trench in heavy soil!!!  I experimented with growing mushrooms, was baking bread in full swing, and finally found some wild edibles, mainly fiddleheads and ramps.  We got chickens!  I build the first hoophouses, and experimented with season extension to some degree of success.  I successfully grew onions and spinach for the first time.  We had parsnips, beets, and celebrated the first official Harvest Night as a reflection on the previous year's experience.  To date, 2012 was our most successful and bountiful year across the board. 

2013 was a hard year, but also a good one.  Penelope came to us in the spring, along with many more chickens than we had expected.  I got cocky with my garden that year.  After the wild success of 2012, I thought I was an expert.  It turned out that I didn't quite do things the way I should have.  This was a year of further experimentation too.  I tried growing tomatoes in a weave for the second time, but planted them out much later than usual.  It was an attempt to push off harvest closer to cool weather in order to get maximum storage.  Also in an attempt to further protect the soil, we mulched EVERYTHING, which brought on a mice/vole problem that we didn't expect.  In spite of all the mulch, we didn't mulch the potatoes as much, and the harvest suffered there as well.  At this point, we weren't certain of the future of our garden there.  We began taking steps to get out.  I think this contributed to the way we put effort into the garden as well, letting perfect be the enemy of the good.

Now in 2014, we are finally in a place of our own.  It's been a hard road thus far, and our growing season was mostly a loss.  We did get a good potato yield, some OK garlic, a bunch of rye (yay! finally a grain success) and some other smaller stuff from "the big garden."  We've managed to create a few garden beds here so far, although much smaller (8'x6') which seems much more manageable so far.  I got all new seed stock for garlic, and we're already back to eating our own salads almost every night.  

And I think 2015 is going to be a good year.  We have a lot to learn here, but we have more experience than ever to deal with the new conditions.  I also have some great plans for the spring.  The chickens will be moving out of the static run and hopefully into a mobile coop of sorts.  I'm working toward getting some lambs to raise on our excessive lawn.  I really hope Penelope can get some friends finally, and I'm going to get some rabbits hopefully.  All of this will be in addition to getting back to our normal schedule of vegetables and fruits, plus our newly-acquired apple and pear trees, plus a handful of blueberry bushes and wild grapes.  As this year's growing season is winding down, our gears are already turning to launch into an even better year next year. 

Sprung

The first photo above is of our garden on May 22, 2011, and the second picture is from today, May 20, 2012.  It's quite a different place.  For a further comparison, see the header of this blog page.  We're doing some things differently this year.


First of all, we're implementing a more effective wide-row system this year.  I actually dug out paths between the beds and used that soil to create raised beds.  This garden plot has a tendency to flood or hold water in heavy rains because it's so close to the river, and the soil is very silty.  So far, these beds and low paths in between have helped irrigate water on their own.  Last year I tried to make wide beds, but didn't implement it well enough.

In the second picture- this year's picture, dead ahead you can see a strip of green.  This is annual rye grass and clover.  I planted it between a few of the rows to suppress weeds, hold moisture, create biomass for mulching, habitat for insects and animals, and beautify the garden so it would look like one lush green mat.  There is much more planted in the garden than it looks from the picture.  Off to the far left is where most of the action is.  There's a ton of garlic over there, as well as some peas.  The potatoes have really shot up in the last 2 weeks too.  I need to find time to hill some soil on them, as it's about that time.  Previously, I've tried starting the potatoes in a trench, and filling in the trench as the plants grow.  The problem that I found with this is that our soil is much too dense for that, and leads to further compaction, which of course the growing tubers don't like.  So, this year we're going to hill them.

Radishes are coming up, as well as corn and beets.  The jerusalem artichokes are coming up very very fast.  I hope that I like them, because I think we're going to have them for years to come.  Our spinach is coming along, despite the warm weather we've been enjoying.  The weeds are starting to overgrow the onions, but I started to remedy that today, and should finish in the next day or two after work rain or shine.  I still have quite a bit to plant, but it will happen as I can get around to it.  Sunflowers are coming up, and the wheat is starting to get going finally, too.  Hopefully in the next week or so, I'll get around to describing in more detail about the specifics of starting some of these plants.

As Naomi and I were weeding this morning, I was moving around some wooden boards that I haven't made into tripods yet, and I dropped a whole stack of them making a loud CRACK sound.  Instantly, I heard a turkey gobble in response, so I pushed over another stack of boards with the same result.  I had the camera with me, so I crouched down and headed in the direction of the sound- the river bank.  I looked across the river, and there he was...

Happy Spring!

I really wanted to post last week on the first day of spring, but I spent all last week hustling to get my hoophouses finished, which they now are. The picture above was taken before I really fixed up the plastic to a more permanent state. I tucked the plastic under on all sides and then buried the frame because yesterday after work, I came home to find the plastic flapping in the 20mph wind gusts like a flag. Now it's all secure. Today after work, I put down black weedblock fabric inside both houses. It was 80 degrees inside around 4:00PM, when the outside temperature was about 50.

Later this week, I'm going to move some seedlings inside. I should also fill it with manure or compost, but I may just do that later, since everything inside will most likely be in trays for now. Once the plastic isn't needed for the summer, I'm going to put construction fence over the hoops and use it as a trellis.

Saturday saw a significant drop in temperatures to the nearly-80 degree highs we had last week. Last night it was in the low 20s, and tonight should be about the same, accompanied by the 20+mph winds again. The rest of the week will be cool, but not as low as yesterday and today.

It's probably a bit too early, but I'm getting anxious about putting out these onion seedlings that I started before the year even began. I may move the trays to the hoophouses, and put some in the ground to see how it goes.

This week, I started trays of spinach, broccoli, cabbage, collards, arugula, chard, basil, marigold, kohlrabi, and spearmint. Some are experiments, like the basil that I didn't even thresh out of the seed pods. I want to see what will happen. The marigolds are really early, but I want to see if I can get them a head start to an earlier bloom with the heat inside the hoophouse. The spearmint will go straight in the ground and I'll worry about it spreading later. I'd rather have something I like spreading than the mugwort and knotweed. I guess we'll have to see what happens. I'm going to start a few more trays of seeds tonight and put them into the hoophouse tomorrow. I still need to do a few things for the hoophouses, like get something to clip the plastic back when I go inside, and some boards to hold down the ends of the plastic so I don't have to cover/uncover out of the dirt every time.

There's also a mountain of manure to spread, and some tilling to do. I'm finally starting to get the no-till message, but the soil needs a lot of work. I'm going to work my way up with cover crops, green manures, and composted manure until I can start to see some progress past the compacted red mess that I have now. I should have planted a cover crop before winter, but it didn't work out. Now that the ground is workable, I've got LOTS to do. Hopefully I can get it all done in the next few weeks, and take a breather to get married.