Wood chips make me chipper.  What can I say --- some women like roses, but I like mulch, even if it won't be properly aged until several months from now.

We spent most of the day Saturday over at our neighbors' helping them chip the biggest pile of saplings I've ever seen.  Sunday afternoon it was our turn.  One neighbor drove the chipper over to our place with his amazingly huge tractor, and then we chipped up a storm for about four hours before giving in to exhaustion.

Despite being pleased as punch about our wood chips, I have to admit that I think the chipper rental won't be an experiment we'll be repeating.  Once I put on my wrist braces, my carpal tunnel simmered down, but it was still an awfully wearing weekend for about as many chips as we could get for free if we hunt down the utility line guys.  Add in a few hours drive to pick up and drop off the chipper, and we might have been just as well off to buy mulch.

On the other hand, we did clear up some brushy edges that needed work, and I have my wood chip piles segregated into partially decomposed (for mulching with this year), fresh pine (for mulching the blueberries next year), and fresh box-elder (for planting mushrooms in.)  The control freak in me is well pleased.  And, look, the year's first crocus!!

Last fall, I raked leaves out of the woods to cover nearly all of my vegetable garden beds.  My hope was that the leaves would keep weeds from growing over the winter, expedite spring planting, and also rot down to fertilize the soil.

Those leaves seem to have done their weed-killing job admirably.  The photo above is a bed which didn't end up getting mulched --- it's now completely covered with dead-nettles and chickweed.  The bed below was mulched --- notice the bare soil where I raked the leaves back to give me a spot to plant poppies.  The soil under the leaves was also unfrozen and I glimpsed a spider scurrying around, which is in stark contrast to the lifeless permafrost atop the un-mulched bed.

I was a bit disappointed to see that the leaves hadn't decomposed much at all, but in a way that's a good thing.  We'll add manure before planting to boost the fertility of the soil, and will push leaves back around plants once they come up to keep the weeds at bay.  I can already feel the year's weeding being cut in half.

Little house in the suburbs dot com is hands down the coldest automatic chicken waterer I've seen so far.

I can't prove it, but I feel like all chickens can appreciate the simple comfort of a cool drink on a hot summer day.

We've got side by side Avian Aqua Misers and one day last summer I put a handfull of ice in one of them and noticed how our Plymouth Rock hens favored the colder water.

I know it's not a scientific test, but maybe I can expand the parameters next summer to see if there's any truth to this crazy hypothesis?

As I mentioned before, Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming helped inspire the permaculture movement, but I ended up being drawn in a different direction by his experiences.  I've been struggling to develop a workable no-till system for my garden over the last three years, and my constant problem is lack of sufficient mulch.  We mow all of our grassy areas and add the clippings to our garden beds and even rake leaves out of the woods to top things off, but I still end up with bare soil and way too many weeds.  So you shouldn't be surprised that my epiphany upon reading The One-Straw Revolution had to do with mulch.

The organic gardening and homesteading movement has us all growing our own tomatoes and broccoli, but I'd say that 99% of us have never even considered growing our own grains.  And yet, grains make up a huge percentage of our diets.  Clearly, they also made up a huge percentage of Masanobu Fukuoka's garden.  Perhaps the solution to my mulch problem is to return to a more holistic gardening method.  If we grew all of our own grains as well as all of our vegetables, I'd never be in need of mulch again.

Fukuoka says that his method of growing grains uses one hour per week per person, a figure that sounds remarkably manageable.  Could we tweak his system a bit, perhaps trading buckwheat, sorghum, or corn for rice, and replicate his success?  I'm suddenly determined to find clover seeds, buy a bit of straw to prime the pump, and plant my hull-less oats in a do-nothing test plot rather than in a traditional garden bed.

One of my favorite bloggers posted about the new plants she'll be trying out in her garden this year, and I thought it was an interesting meme.  So, without further ado, 2010's experiments and additions:

• New mushrooms: Winecap (aka King Stropharia), White Morel (reported to be a crapshoot, but I feel lucky), and a summer fruiting Oyster Mushroom --- just ordered the spawn from Field and Forest Products!
  
• New woodies in the forest garden: Osage-orange (for hedges), honey locust (for forest pasturing), and Korean stone pine (for pine nuts).  I'm starting them all from seed, the first two from seeds collected in the wild and the last from seeds I bought on ebay.  All are experiments!
• New fruits and veggies: Alpine strawberries, hulless oats, soybeans (labeled as edamame for fresh eating), garbanzo and urd beans (the latter for sprouting), Afghan sesame, Hungarian breadseed poppy, manna de montana amaranth, and temuco quinoa.  All are from Seeds of Change except the strawberries, soybeans, and poppies from Renee's Garden.

And, of course, there's the usual trial of new varieties of common fruits and vegetables (most of which I buy from Jung.)  What's new in your garden this year?

(This image, by the way, shows the osage-oranges I collected slowly rotting down to seed pulp for the spring.  They're already quite mushy and stinky.)

Next week, I'll continue my summary of the techniques Paul Stamets uses to cultivate mushrooms in a commercial setting.  But I wanted to take a break and talk about my own experiment.  If you haven't already, you can read how I sandwiched oyster mushroom stem butts between layers of wet cardboard in a flower pot --- this is the cloning stage of the operation.  After a week, I saw mycelium running across the cardboard, so I expanded it by putting the mycelium between more layers of wet cardboard in a bigger container.

And then I messed up.  The electricity went out and the trailer's interior temperature dropped pretty low --- nearly to freezing on the floor furthest from the wood stove where I happened to have my spawn.  When I checked on it, my mycelium was just sitting there and some of it had died back.  Drat!  I'm hoping that the cold temperatures just put my fungi into temporary hibernation, so I've moved them to a warmer location and will report back in a few weeks.  If I don't see growth by then, I'll go back to the beginning with new mushrooms in the spring.

My dream is to develop a relatively simple method of propagating oyster mushrooms on the home scale, without petri dishes, autoclaves, or even storebought grain.  Wouldn't it be great if mushroom-keeping was as easy as building a worm bin and if those mushrooms could be fed with your junk mail and cardboard, turning waste into food and garden soil?  In case you think I'm living in an ivory tower, check out this website where the author turned cardboard and junk mail into mushrooms --- it is possible!  I just need to work a few kinks out of my system.

In response to my post on easy to grow grains, two of you asked whether I was concerned about amaranth being a weed.  I decided to do a bit of research and disentangle fact from fiction.

The word "amaranth" can be used to refer to any plant in the genus Amaranthus --- 70 species total.  Some species are weeds and some are useful foods dating back thousands of years. 

The weed species are generally known as pigweed and include Amaranthus albus, A. blitoides, A. hybridus, A. palmeri, A. powellii, A. retroflexus, A. spinosus (the one that wreaks havoc on my bare feet in the summer), A. tuberculatus, and A. viridis.  I wonder whether any of these plants were also grown by Native Americans for food, accounting for their widespread growth across the U.S.?  Unfortunately, I couldn't find any data on this.

On the other hand, A. caudatus, A. cruentus, and A. hypochondriacus are grown as food plants, with the latter being the species most often grown in the U.S.  Amaranth was grown by the Incas, the Aztecs, and various Native Americans in what is now Mexico until the conquistadores came and nearly wiped amaranth out of existence.  Nowadays, you can find the seeds of the edible varieties for sale from some of the more heirloom-inclined seed companies.

We opted to buy some Manna de Montana Amaranth from Seeds of Change --- I'll let you know how it goes as the growing season progresses.  Meanwhile, I splurged on a few more experimental crops --- Hungarian Blue Breadseed Poppy, Temuco Quinoa, Urd Sprouting Bean, Black Kabouli Garbanzo Bean (since we have to drive an hour to get these in the store), Hullless Oats (thanks for the tip, Sena!), and Afghani Sesame.  I figure at least one or two should work out and make it onto our list of regulars!

Most vegetable and annual flower seeds are pretty easy to grow --- just throw them in the ground at something close to the right depth at the right time of year and they sprout just fine.  When you start trying to plant tree, shrub, and perennial herb seeds, though, propagation techniques often get a bit more tricky.  I always stumble when I'm told to scarify or stratify seeds, but both techniques are actually quite easy, as I discovered when I started looking up information about growing honey locusts and persimmons from seed.

Persimmon seeds need to be stratified before they will germinate.  People try to make stratification more difficult than it actually is, telling you to put the seeds in a pot of dirt or in a ziploc bag with a wet paper towel and leave them in the fridge for a certain length of time.  In practice, I've discovered that native plants have evolved to stratify quite nicely in the garden.  Just plant the seeds in the fall and they'll be exposed to plenty of cool temperatures and will germinate as usual in the spring.  I tried this with persimmons a few years ago with good success and am trying again this year.

Honey locust seeds, on the other hand, need scarification to germinate.  The problem is that many seeds evolved to be eaten by animals and to pass through the gut relatively unharmed.  Seeds need thick coatings to survive the stomach acids, but these thick coatings are often impenetrable to water, meaning that your seed won't sprout unless it's scarified.  The natural way to scarify seeds is to pass them through some animal's stomach and let the acids break partway through the seed coating.  Barring a handy animal, people will drop the seeds in a vat of acid or hot water, or will manually damage the seed coat (hopefully without damaging the seed inside.)  I tried to file my honey locust seeds with no luck, and instead ended up snipping through the edge of the seed coat with fingernail scissors.  This is my first attempt at scarification, so I'm very curious to see whether it works!

The farm got an inch of rain while we were away --- perfect conditions to test out our new swales.  So far, I'm quite impressed by how they're working.  The ditches (swales) have filled up with water, but the surrounding ground seems firmer and less waterlogged than usual.

Unfortunately, I don't think the swales are quite big enough since the soil downhill still has some standing water.  Next time I'm working in that area, I'll decide whether to deepen the swales, add a berm, or just add more swales.

We had a slight problem with one of the retaining walls for the refrigerator root cellar. It seems like a sturdy metal bracket will be needed to secure the wall to the side of the refrigerator.

You might notice a faint circle of melted snow around the chimney output. This was more noticeable a couple of hours ago, which is a nice way to illustrate how warm the air must be that's coming out.

There are many secrets to cultivating mushrooms, but the technique that seems to be most employed if you want to increase your yield is to use the glass jar method.

This involves using something like organic brown rice or brown flour, staying away from anything with preservatives that will work against mushroom growth.  The trick is to keep the mixture sterile, with about 1/4 cup of distilled water. Most people seem to think a pressure cooker is needed at 15 pounds for an hour to guard against contamination, once it's cool it acts as the perfect environment for your spawn to multiply in. It would be interesting to compare Anna's  wet cardboard method with the jar trick and see just how much more you can expect for all that extra fuss.

 

Lawrence Weingarten was kind enough to share his oyster mushroom cultivation secrets in an easy to understand web page with plenty of pictures. He starts by shredding up a bale of wheat straw and then cooking it in water at 160 degrees for about an hour. You've now made your own pasteurized substrate. Drain it and carefully mix in the proper amount of spawn, which is mycelium growing on grain or cardboard. Stuff it all in a tall plastic bag and hang it up somewhere safe. Follow his instructions on humidity and temperature levels and you'll have a serious harvest of fruit to enjoy in less than a week.

 

Anna's mushroom post this morning sent me on a research trail that led all the way to a Fungus farm in Singapore. These nice pictures illustrate how one can make their own man made logs out of a simple plastic bag. I imagine the bag is filled with some sort of saw dust.

We've been thinking of trying something like this in the refrigerator root cellar to see if we can achieve mushroom production on a year round basis.

 

A little over three weeks ago, I started propagating our oyster mushrooms from stem butts.  Two weeks ago, I saw that the mycelium was starting to run.  But I was still shocked when I peeked this week and saw fuzzy, white threads of fungus engulfing most of the cardboard in my flowerpot.  Time to move our experiment up a notch!

I soaked a lot more cardboard and found a much bigger container.  Since it worked so well last time, I crumpled up the flat pieces that peel off either side of the corrugated cardboard and laid them on the bottom of the container to keep the spawn out of any standing water.  Then I alternated layers of freshly soaked cardboard with layers of innoculated cardboard as if I was making a lasagna.

If our spawn keeps growing at this rate, I suspect we'll have to divide it again a few more times before the weather is right to innoculate logs.  I feel so empowered --- like growing tomatoes and broccoli from seed rather than relying on seedlings from the feed store!

Temperature is the real test of a successful root cellar, with optimal temperatures from 32 F to 40 F, but with temperatures from 40 F to 50 F considered quite good.  I've seen quite a few fancy root cellars constructed with vast quantities of labor and cash which fail the simple temperature test.  Can our $10 root cellar do better?

We won't know for sure how our root cellar holds up until it has to deal with really hot days and really cold nights, but so far it's running great.  Over the last few days since Mark completed the fridge root cellar, it has held a semi-steady temperature between 40 F and 52 F.  I'll keep you updated on the temperature variations as the year progresses.

If you missed parts of the construction details, you might want to read back over our old entries (linked below), or watch the video here which sums it all up in a two and a half minute nutshell.  I hope that some of you are inspired to eschew the fancy root cellar craze and make your own root cellar for cheap.

 

The refrigerator root cellar is now generating a cool and damp atmosphere which needs to be protected from insects looking for the perfect home to ride out the winter.

It was easy to secure down the lower vent screen with several small dry wall screws. They drive straight into the plastic without the need for a pilot hole.

The top vent was just as easy. Cut some scrap screen material to the desired length and use some electrical tape to fasten it down.

 

The gaskets on the refrigerator root cellar are old and don't quite seal up the two doors. A simple screen door latch is all it takes to solve that problem. I installed them a little on the tight side in order to pull the door firmly closed with no gaps. The refrigerator latch required a piece of scrap wood behind the handle for the eye to bite into.

This might work for a low budget fix to a working refrigerator that has a weak gasket. I've often heard a new gasket can cost nearly as much as a good used refrigerator.

I was almost going to buy one of those heavy PVC caps for the refrigerator root cellar chimney, but when I walked past a foam faucet cover I stopped in my tracks, looked at the PVC cap in one hand and the foam cover on the shelf and weighed the coolness factor of the foam geometry along with the fact that it was only a buck compared to the 6 dollar price of the PVC.

Anna thinks it adds a sort of mother ship look to it and I agree.

The next step will be to drill some holes in the side towards the top of the chimney and then attach some screen material to keep out any unwanted bugs.

 

It took both of us to lower the refrigerator root cellar into its new home below the earth. Once it was in place I decided to make some side panels from a couple of 2x4's and some scrap wood. It seems to be helping by keeping the dirt away from the hinge and door opening as I begin to bury it.

 

Two drill holes and a few minutes with the jig saw was all it took to create the new chimney hole for the refrigerator root cellar.

I also removed the foam and plastic barrier that separates the freezer from the rest of the refrigerator. One of the metal shelves slid right into its place, which will provide plenty of open space for the cool air to flow while at the same time working as a sturdy surface to store apples on.

 

After thinking about lowering the refrigerator root cellar into our new hole I decided to see just how hard it would be to strip off the metal coil from the back of the unit. It turns out it only took about a half hour to take everything off including the compressor and wiring harness. I think it's going to make sliding down the hole a bit smoother and safer.

I'm planning on mounting some screen material over the new holes in the bottom. The good thing about this approach is that it will be easy to add more holes if we think the air flow needs to increase.

 

We decided to dig the refrigerator root cellar down a bit deeper to accommodate a large cinder block in each corner. I thought two post holes in the middle might help to increase the cold surface area that will hopefully stream a steady flow of cool air up through the refrigerator and out the soon to be installed vent pipe.

The new chipper/grinder seems to have a problem with sticks and branches any bigger than what you see here in this short video. It's sort of a hassle to stop everything and flip it on its side to reset it once you send something through that's too big.

It still might find a place here on the farm, but today the verdict is too small and wimpy for the level of mulch production we are looking for.

 

The old gas powered chipper/grinder got moved up to the front of the get fixed line this week in an effort to increase our mulch production. Its 50 year old Briggs and Stratton engine won the first battle yesterday afternoon, but today I figured out exactly what to do with that stubborn motor.

Delete it.

The first step was to remove the four bolts that hold the engine to the frame. Then it's easy to lift out. Next fabricate some sort of vibration plate for the electric motor to be attached to, I used a scrap piece of 2x6. Once you get the pulley lined up secure the whole thing down to the frame and wire up a switch.

 

The Spud Buddy is a device that gets mounted to the side of an old broken freezer or refrigerator and uses a fan and a steady supply of water to keep the inside temperature and humidity where it needs to be in order to function as a root cellar.
 
I've never seen one of these in action, but the concept seems solid enough to work. Expect to spend about 160 bucks on the unit, and maybe some extra pennies per day for the additional electricity.

A clever solution for someone with limited time and space who wants to turn their old broken refrigerator into a functional root cellar.

While researching the refrigerator root cellar I came across an interesting concept known as a spiral root cellar. This design is for folks with very little space who want to have easy access to their chilled products. Most versions seem to be installed in the kitchen floor with a trap door for access. This solution seems to be only available in Europe, and it's not cheap. About 12 thousand dollars, which in the long run would be cheaper than an expensive wine cooler thanks to the fact that it uses the earth for cooling. Of course I'm wondering if some modification can be made to be able to build one yourself, but I think we will be sticking with the refrigerator root cellar design for now.

 

Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing pointed me to an interesting collection of fallout shelter designs that the Department of Defense put out back in the early 1960's. Not sure if I would want to stay too long in something so small and confining, but the image above got me to thinking about a modified version as a root cellar. Those big culverts are expensive, but if you already had one laying around this might be a good way to provide protection against the bad things out there while at the same time creating a place to keep food from freezing.

The new plan for a root cellar is to bury the old refrigerator that stopped working. I still need to modify it to take advantage of the chimney effect so that cool air will flow from the bottom and out through some sort of PVC pipe.

I'm still working the kinks out of my garden bed mulch plan.  Leaves are awesome (when you can get enough), but they really need an input of nitrogen to decompose well.

The method I used while away on our honeymoon worked pretty well.  We filled the chicken tractors up with leaves and let the hens shred and fertilize them, then shoveled the resultant goop onto garden beds.  The downside of this method is that it requires two rounds of leaf movement, and I'm always trying to handle our soil amendments as few times as possible.

Lately, I've been trying a different method.  I've been letting the chicken tractor sit on a bare raised bed for a few days, then moving the chicken tractor on and covering the poopy soil with freshly raked leaves.  I hope that the unshredded, unmixed leaves will still decompose due to the high nitrogen poop under them.

Of course, the real problem is that I want my garden completely covered ASAP, at least within the next few weeks.  And I just don't have enough chickens to poop on each bed in that time period.  Drat!  What shall I do?

Some of you may remember that I experimented with propagating morels this spring.  Paul Stamets made it seem so simple --- snip off the mushroom's end, put it between layers of wet cardboard, and wait a few months.  Mushroom propagation might be that easy in the Pacific Northwest, but even during a very wet summer around here, our cardboard had plenty of time to dry out.  My stem butts shriveled and no spawn formed.

When we got our second flush of oyster mushrooms, I resolved to try again.  Oyster mushrooms are supposed to be some of the easiest to propagate, and I've learned a bit from my mistakes.  This time, after soaking the cardboard, I ripped off the flat layers on either side to leave just the corrugated part behind.  I sandwiched my stem butt sections between layers of corrugated cardboard inside a flower pot, and stuck it under the sink where I can check the moisture content periodically.  If all goes as planned, we might have spawn to expand our oyster mushroom collection in the spring.  Or maybe I'll keep experimenting and learning.

Lisa Katayama from Boing Boing had an interesting post pointing to the January 1938 issue of Popular Science where they spotlight an Ohio farmer who used a metal mold to form this surreal image of a face onto a pumpkin. Ohio farmers really were ahead of their time when it came to thinking outside of the box.

Richard Twedell is the president of Vegiforms, a company in Ohio that offers a few different plastic molds that might tickle your fancy and satisfy your vegetable sculpting urges. He claims his heart shaped zucchinis sell for 3 bucks to a local restaurant, which could add up to some real money if it caught on as some sort of new holiday trend.

I've always been curious about pine nuts, but never took the time to research them properly.  Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) is the European response to producing pine nuts, but is really only good to zone 7.  Instead, Jacke suggested Korean nut pine (Pinus koraiensis) for our region since it is tolerant of cold weather and makes high quality nuts.

Planting a nut pine is an experiment with a capital E.  The trees are huge, so we'll be cutting a gap in the pine forest on the south end of our garden to plant them in rather than using up precious garden space.  Some folks say Korean nut pines bear in 3 to 8 years.  Others warn you that you'll need to wait 40 years.  Hmmm....

The seedlings are pricey, so I decided to try my hand at germinating seeds bought on ebay.  (Don't try to just plant the pine nuts you'd buy in the grocery store --- without their protective shell, these rot in the ground.)  Stay tuned for updates on this experiment...over the next 40 years.

It's always a nice bonus when Lucy gives a project a few sniffs and then announces her seal of approval.

Our chickens are pretty self-sufficient as long as the temperature doesn't get too far below freezing.  We've been known to leave them for up to four days with just an extra automatic chicken waterer and a few scoops of feed sprinkled over the ground.  The only problem with leaving them alone for so long is that they scratch the ground up pretty badly, and in rainy weather the soil turns into a morass of mud.

Before heading out on our cruise, I decided to try a different tactic.  I begged Mark to rake me up a bunch of leaves, and I filled each tractor with a mountain of organic matter.  When we returned a week later, each mountain had sunk to a mole hill of shredded leaves well mixed with chicken poop, but the ground wasn't muddy despite an inch and a half of rain.  I'm emulating the traditional Guatemalan method of using this combination as a well-balanced soil amendment, though I plan to use the poopy mass as mulch on my garlic beds rather than working it into the soil.

 

Yes.....a couple of the mechanical deer deterrents failed recently due to some simple hang ups. It took me a few attempts before I came up with what I call the supporting arm structure for the clanging surface.

The support provides more adjustment choices when fine tuning the swing and helps to secure this deer deterrent contraption even during heavy winds.

Is a failure like this frustrating? Heck yeah it is, but the feeling of knowing we are one step closer to a better solution helps to ease the pain.

 

A friend of mine gracefully brought to my attention the fact that I was ignoring the 6 inch freeze zone when I was laying the ground work for our new building project.

I decided to experiment with some posts from the large cedar tree I cut down last month. It's easier for an amateur like me to use this method compared to leveling out the cinder blocks.

Nights have started dropping into the low 40s this week --- time to get serious about freezing the last of the summer crops.

Now that we suddenly have enough summer squash to preserve, I decided to try to find a mush-free way to freeze them.  Last year, I steam-blanched the squash then froze them, and the thawed squash turned out watery --- okay in a spaghetti sauce, but not so great otherwise.  A friend of mind grills her summer squash before freezing them with great results.  I decided to slice the squash lengthwise and broil them in the oven rather than firing up the grill.  The result was certainly tasty in the short term --- we'll have to wait and see how they thaw out once winter hits.

Guatemalan farmers harvest vast quantities of fallen leaves (broza) out of nearby woods to incorporate into their soil.  Wilken estimates that farmers rake up leaves from 5 to 8 acres of forest for each acre of crop they cultivate, although he hastens to add that farm fields are small.   Some farmers just hoe the leaves directly into their soil, while others use the leaves as animal bedding for a week, then incorporate the poopy bedding into the soil.  The latter method is especially effective since nitrogen in the manure and urine offsets the nitrogen lost during the initial stages of leaf decomposition.

Leaves are an especially intriguing soil amendment for our farm since they improve soil structure and water retention/drainage in clayey soils.  In fact, Guatemalan farmers use leaves primarily in clay soil, while they tend to lean toward manure in sandy soils.

Last year, I begged my city-living family members to scavenge bags of leaves left on the curb, and we ended up with 31 big garbage bags full.  I used them as mulch around our berries and trees, but I could have used about ten times as much leaf matter.  Since we've decided to buy firewood this year, maybe we'll have enough free time to rake masses of leaves out of the woods and use them as soil amendments.  I may experiment with using our chicken tractors as leaf-shredding and manure-amending factories, or may try to harvest the nitrogen in our urine by peeing on our leaves.  Stay tuned for lots of leafy experimentation this fall and winter!

Soon after we united our two weakest hives, the weather turned cool and wet --- bad bee-checking conditions.  Finally, I got impatient and went out to inspect the bees between showers.

Outside the hive, a fringe of newspaper was clearly evident between the merged hive sections, so I figured I'd need to remove the paper divider.  But when I took off the super from the weak hive, I saw that the industrious bees had carefully eaten away the entire newspaper up to the wooden hive walls! 

The hive merge is complete and very successful.  While our other two, formerly strongest hives are still filling up their first super apiece, our newly merged hive is starting to store honey between hatching brood in the big top super!  I can only assume this means that the queen from the weak hive has been assassinated and her workers assimilated into the population.  Although I probably wouldn't repeat my frame swap experiment, the hive merge is going to be added to my toolkit.

Note: Mark hasn't been posting because he's a bit under the weather.  I expect him to be back online in short order, but until then you'll just have to put up with me.  If you miss his ingenuity, go visit his homemade chicken waterer site and his homemade deer deterrent site.  There, don't you feel better?

 

I was describing my new home made frame perch tool design to a friend and he furrowed his brow when I mentioned how I used wood instead of metal. He was concerned about a full frame of honey being too much weight for such a "light duty" structure.

That possible problem was fixed easily with the next size down L bracket being secured in each corner. You might need to chisel out a groove for the bracket depending on how much wiggle room your frames have to move back and forth while still staying snug.

Our number 5 deer deterrent got hung up today due to some cracks in the metal flashing. No doubt the increased banging was the cause. I replaced it with some thicker metal salvaged from a junk pile. I then moved some longer flashing towards the back for it to absorb the second hit, which provides a unique vibration and some added motion for any potential 4 legged garden poachers out there who have yet to get the message that our vegetables are off limits.

A variable speed drill with a conventional cord turns out to be a good and cheap option for the locomotion of our mechanical deer deterrent contraption.

A quick search of E-bay shows that several can be had in the 10 dollar range, and new ones go for a bit over 20 at the big box stores.

I wonder if a lamp dimmer switch would be strong enough to provide a variable speed option for drills that only have on and off and nothing in between?

I used up our last extension cord last week when I installed the first Black and Decker deer drill deterrent which meant I had to unplug units 1 and 5 to get my share of electricity for a drill press project I was doing this afternoon.

Well....I got busy doing something else and forgot to plug deer deterrents 1 and 5 back up....so that makes about 45 minutes of down time. I looked out our living room window in shock to see the ugliest deer I've ever seen munching down on a few sweet potato leaves like it's nobody's business!.....I quickly ran out the door and chased after the four legged monster to show it who's boss around here.

Now I know the local deer population is so bad I can't take a brief pause even during a sunny day from the new mechanical deer drill deterrents without being munched on.

 

We decided to merge the weak hive with a stronger one today using the newspaper trick. You place a layer of newspaper between the two hives and cut a few slits here and there. It takes the bees a few days to eat through the paper...giving them time to acclimate to a new frequency of the same hive mentality.

I did a few experiments today on using one of the 10 dollar Black and Decker drill/drivers as a turning force for the next generation of home made deer deterrent.

It spins a bit on the fast side...but with some adjusting and tinkering it might just do the trick as a more easily constructed do it yourself deer deterrent.

A video montage of all 5 home made deer deterrent noise signatures back to back inspires me to dream up the next level of mechanical deterrence for the garden.

 

I almost bought one of those fancy metal frame perch tools the other day at the bee keeping supply store. What stopped me was my cheapness. I thought there might be a less expensive way to make one with a couple of L brackets, some scrap wood, and no welding.

 

I made a slight improvement to the home made frame perch tool by drilling an additional hole on the L brackets for another screw. It's more solid and has less wiggle room between the frame box and the tool.

It did the job with no problems today during its first field test.

I tried to find something like this in the pet department of the big store I was in last week and struck out.

It's just a compilation of 5 scrap pieces of wood and a folded over flap of screen material. A notch on the right side with a dab of glue seems to be enough to anchor it to the screen frame. I hope our cats are smart enough to adapt to a proper pet entrance which can be easily closed down at night by shutting the window.

One of our sweet potato plants started blooming last week, clearly illustrating the plant's relationship to morning glories.  I'd never seen sweet potato flowers before, so I poked around on the web to see if I should cut off the blooms the way you do with garlic.

It turns out that sweet potato flowers are extremely unusual, and are actually in pretty high demand.  Since sweet potatoes are propagated vegetatively, it's hard to develop new varieties.  Blooms add an element of randomness to the plant's reproduction --- a lot of the seeds will probably turn into shoddy or mediocre plants, but one of the seeds might just turn out to be the next best thing in sweet potato land.

Scientists have tried a lot of tricks to get sweet potatoes to flower, and one of the most effective seems to be high humidity combined with damp soil.  Check!  Another method they've tried involves clipping off the ends of sweet potato vines, hoping to stimulate apical bud growth.  Since the deer got in and nibbled our sweet potatoes once before we added a deer deterrent to that part of the garden, we accidentally used that method too.

I plan to collect the seeds from our sweet potato flowers and give them a shot next year.  Maybe we'll develop a new variety of sweet potato and name it after Huckleberry!

Shame-faced plug: To me, the best part of the Avian Aqua Miser is that it's an automatic chicken waterer.  If you put a couple in a small tractor, you won't have to worry about water for days on end.

 

It was a smooth transfer from the chicken tractor to the mini coop.

We picked 15 of the best looking fertilized eggs for our Cochin to adopt as her own. Now we wait a few weeks to see how dedicated she is to bringing in the next generation of egg layers and broilers.

Remember my ambitious plans to construct a forest garden between the baby fruit trees near the barn?  I planted a couple of beds, then the normal gardening season started and the project got pushed onto the back burner.

Since then, I've started a slightly less ambitious method of forest gardening, one that fits in the scanty time gaps between vegetable gardening.  Instead of trying to create an entire forest garden in one step, I've been creating "forest islands" by slowly extending the raised beds around each tree.  Whenever I pull weeds and don't have anything better to do with them, I'll dump a wheelbarrow load against the side of a tree's raised bed.  A few weeks later, the weeds have rotted down into rich soil.

My oldest peach tree has been receiving this treatment (albeit in a more willy-nilly fashion) for nearly three years now.  Wednesday, I pulled out another mass of weeds and poked around at the humps of soil which now expand out in two directions from the raised bed.  White threads of fungi, a startled toad, and a brilliant centipede all turned up --- signs that my little ecosystem is healthy.

A little judicious shoveling and transplanting later and I've created a forest island there.  I planted comfrey and bee balm under the peach's canopy, and fennel, echinacea, rhubarb, and Egyptian onions further out from the trunk.  My primary goal with these plantings is weed control, with a secondary goal of strengthening the soil using dynamic accumulators, and a tertiary goal of feeding hummingbirds and parasitic wasps.  Of course, I also chose the plants because I have masses of them that need to come out of other parts of the garden.  I'm excited to see how this new forest garden island will take hold!

Shame-faced plug: Create your own unique chicken waterer with our DIY instructions.

Its been over 2 weeks now since we've had any deer damage to the garden.

We've got all 5 deer deterrent devices running 24 hours a day now due to the cloudy days we've had lately.

The experiment will continue till the end of our fall growing season, at which time we should know if this is indeed a cheap and long term mechanical solution for the deer problem.

 

Microhydropower.com has some exciting new products that allow the common guy to harness the power of a small stream for the purpose of generating electricity.

Their setup will cost you about 3 thousand bucks...and then you'll need to figure out how to store it and get it where you need it.

Not a bad solution for home made electricity if you live close enough to a steady stream of water.

Hae-Jin Kim has an interesting idea to harness the waste heat generated by a typical refrigerator. It's not quite enough to function as a hot plate, but 150 degrees might be able to dry a pair of socks or keep a burrito warm? I wonder if this heat could be channeled to a small green house structure for a steady flow of warmness as long as the refrigerator is on?

Remember how I experimented with chemical versus organic methods of acidifying the ground for our blueberries?  The results are in, and I'm afraid the chemicals won.

I only had a dozen data points, so the results of my paired t-test weren't significant.  But there was a definite trend toward better health among the blueberries grown on sulfur-treated soil versus those grown on pine-needle-treated soil.  The photo to the right shows one of the stressed plants --- yellow leaves with green veins are a textbook sign of iron deficiency due to high pH.

I guess I'll probably buy some more elemental sulfur to drop the pH in the short term, but will also keep applying pine needles as more of a long term fix.

We added anti-deer machine#5 to the upper garden to cover a another weak point in our perimeter. I had to use the cat bowl to get a more full dinging sound. Sorry, Huckleberry....

Just found out today from a neighbor that a large black panther* has been spotted less than a mile from us. Maybe this shield of noise will send a signal to this new player in the woods to stay away from us and our chickens?

*"Panther" is the local word for Mountain Lion. Although Mountain Lions are usually light brown, the half dozen sightings we've heard of locally in the last two years have all been of large, black cats.

 
Emily Cummins is a 21 year old student/inventor who has come up with a clever and simple way of using the sun to cool things like perishable food and temperature sensitive medications. The concept works with no electricity and can be built with materials like cardboard, sand, and recycled metal.

It takes advantage of conduction and convection to create an evaporative cooling effect. You place what you want to keep cold in the interior chamber and either some sand, wool, or soil in the outer chamber that gets saturated with water. The sun warms the water soaked material...the water evaporates, reducing the temperature of the inner area to 43 degrees Fahrenheit for days at a time. To recharge you only need to add more water once your material gets dry.

We had another deer invasion last night. Some minor damage to the sweet potato leaves on the far end of the garden. I'm coming to the conclusion that these anti-deer contraptions have an effective range of about 50 feet.

The 4th contraption was built today with a bonus sound. After the tin smashing sound we now get a thunk or a clink when the golf ball hits the new steel cup which is the same one Anna took around the world during her Watson fellowship.

Maybe now this will cover our entire garden perimeter...time will tell.

  

I like Chris and Keri's automatic chicken door solution for several reasons. The design is simple, solid, and cheap to do for under 20 bucks, and they have detailed pictures with videos, and a wiring schematic to make the process easy for someone who might want to follow in this direction.

I've been looking at several different versions of these automatic doors on the internet and this is one of the first to use limit switches, which might come in handy for future experiments.

This is a plan I would favor because of the low cost and easy to follow directions. Thanks for sharing Chris and Keri.

While we're on the topic of automatic chicken care, check out our homemade chicken waterer which gives your birds clean water for days.

Remember how I piled up weeds on some fallow beds a few weeks ago?  My hope was that the weeds would rot down into a mulch, killing the weeds on the bed and protecting the bare soil --- a sort of no-till cover crop.

This week I'm due to plant peas in those beds, so I went to poke at them.  The result --- it's a good technique, but needs a bit of tweaking.  The beds which I covered three weeks ago were nearly ready to plant into, but I had to pull a lot of weeds on the sides of the beds, making me think that I should have poured weed mulch there as well as on the bed tops.  I scraped back the mulch with my hands to open up two rows of bare soil, planted my peas, and sprinkled some of the mulch lightly over the soil-covered seeds.

Unfortunately, the weeds which I'd dumped on beds a week and a half ago weren't ready to be planted into yet.  I carefully picked through the weed mulch on one bed to remove any weeds which still showed color.  On another bed, I just gave in and yanked all of the weed mulch off.  I figure in the future, I should plan to leave the weeds at least a month to rot down before I plant.

 
Another deer made it into our perimeter last night, although it was the section not protected by the 2 noise generators. He even left a pile of droppings as a not so subtle comment on how he feels about the new anti-deer contraptions. The garden suffered some serious damage to one of the best producing beds of strawberries we have.

The short video clip above is the 3rd generation model in action. I used a small metal fence post for this one because there was no trellis post to take advantage of in this new location.

It occurred to me last night when the sheet of tin fell off the first anti-deer contraption due to excessive wear. It was all backwards.

I'm using a golf ball with a wood screw threaded through the middle suspended by some 14 gauge brace wire. That functions as the new banger, and now the tin is what it crashes into.

Now we get the initial clang followed by a rubbing sound. The tin has a small indentation that holds the golf ball every 5th hit or so for just a few seconds, giving us that random effect that will be more effective in sounding unnatural and dangerous to the deer.

Remember how we're experimenting with foundationless frames to control varroa mites in our honeybee hives?  Traditional beekeepers put chemicals in the hive every fall to control the mites, but even the chemicals seem to be failing.

The USDA Agricultural Research Service has discovered what may become a solution to the varroa mite problem.  Since varroa mites find their hosts by smell, the scientists impregnated sticky paper with bee odors.*  35 to 50% of mites in a hive with this sticky paper let go of their host bees and head to the paper, where the mites get stuck and die.  The product is still in the testing stages, though so far the honeybees seem unconcerned by the impregnated paper.

To read more about the study, check out this quick summary in Scientific American or this longer version on the ARS's website.

*I'm simplifying here.  The "smells" are not necessarily smells --- they might be more like pheremones.  The scientists call them semiochemicals, which just means a chemical that carries a message.

  

After several rounds of adjustments the latest incarnation of mechanical deer repellant is working without fail.

Now that it's working I think I'll try my hand at dressing it up a bit to see if we can't make it look less trashy.

I've been perfecting my raised bed technique for a while now, and last week I added a new twist.  For those of you who haven't been reading along, I make wall-less raised beds for my vegetable garden by mounding up topsoil, then I mow the aisle between beds as lawn.  This method works extremely well in established garden areas, but requires tilling the first time the beds are established.

This spring, I made a few new beds without tilling the ground, by piling old asparagus and and flower stalks on some paper and then adding a little topsoil.  This method worked well too, especially since a few of the asparagus seeds came up and started to grow.

My newest experiment, shown here, is meant to increase the height of some established raised beds without disturbing the grassy aisles.  I tossed several wheelbarrow loads of seedless weeds onto beds which were currently bare, to be replanted with peas in a month.  I'm hoping this will be a no-till version of a cover crop --- I love the idea of cover crops, but don't like the necessity to till the plants into the soil.

The question is whether the weeds will die down into a nice mulch so quickly.  I suspect they will since I made several raised beds this way a couple of months ago, planted comfrey into them a week or two later, and watched the comfrey take off.  In a worst case scenario, I can always remove the dead weeds when I plant the peas.

I made our motorized mechanical smasher to streamline a step in the Avian Aqua Miser building where the wire hanger needs to be squeezed. This way is over twice as fast compared to using channel locks and saves a ton of wear on my wrists.

The Skil 7.0 amp drill is a perfect match for this application due to its adjustable trigger speed and easy to reach reverse switch. Its 1/2 inch heavy duty chuck locks down on the Wilton drill press vice handle with the right amount of clearance. Watch out! I'm sure it will smash fingers if given the chance. This is not a toy.

  

The experimental deer contraption let us down the other night due to the hanger breaking off. We lost a few sweet potato leaves but learned a valuable lesson.

All future hangers will be at least 14 gauge wire or thicker. The smaller stuff seems to break after about a week of pivoting. I shortened the length of tin by about a third, which seems to have eliminated the possibility of jams. It's still vulnerable to a heavy wind, which is a factor I'm taking into account for the next generation of anti-deer, noise making, kinetic, garden sculpture.

Six weeks ago, we had a late frost and I covered everything I could with row covers.  Unfortunately, I only had enough fabric to go over one of my two watermelon beds.  At first, there didn't seem to be a big difference between the lightly nipped bed and the protected bed, but now the beds couldn't be more different.  The unprotected bed is only about a third covered with vines which are barely starting to bloom.  In stark contrast, the vines on the protected bed have filled up all of their space and are heading out into the aisle...and look at the cute little watermelons!

Next year, I'll have a better idea of which plants are top priorities to protect from late, light frosts.  For example, the unprotected canteloupes are still sitting there doing nothing, while the unprotected cucumbers, butternuts, and beans bounced right back as if they were never touched.  The nipped okra bed was significantly behind its protected counterpart until three weeks ago when the deer browsed the previously covered bed --- now both deer- and frost-nipped beds are neck-and-neck and getting ready to bloom.  Live and learn!

For around 60 bucks you can get a device that combines motion detector technology and sprinklers in a way that might work for some folks with a deer problem in their yard or garden.

The CR0101 motion activated sprinkler seems like it would keep a wide array of varmints from your precious plants, but like with any new product the knowing is in the testing and proving that it works under real world conditions.

This might also be the perfect and humane way of keeping small children from entering your yard to retrieve their ball or Frisbee.

The rain has been good to us lately, but this week it came up a little short.

We had to make a small change to the creek pumping system by adding a separate line from the pump.

This provides a more direct path to the sprinklers and has increased the pressure by a noticeable degree.

The picture shows one of those large plastic storage units at the bottom of the creek that provides a nice place for the pump to rest. The intake is towards the middle, so it helps to prop the hose end up on a brick.

The deer have stayed away from the garden since the nightly banging has begun.

I discovered that making a curve out of the tin at the bottom helps it roll off the stick and prevents a situation where it gets stuck.

Adding a couple of timers was Anna's good idea.

Now we don't have to worry about forgetting to switch the things on before bedtime.

The first contraption I built was not loud enough to be heard in the garden by the barn and as a result the deer have had their way with our defenseless sunflowers the past few nights.

This second unit went into testing the night before last and seems to be doing just as good of a job as the first one.

I have a dirty little secret.  I'm an organic gardener, and I don't compost.  Ssh!  Don't tell anyone!

Every organic gardener I know is obsessed with their compost pile, with the perfect mix of browns and greens, the perfect temperature, the perfect moisture content.  But I'm lazy, lazy, lazy.  I take my food scraps and I toss them to the chickens, then I let the chicken manure drop straight into the soil.  I only harvest the results two times removed when I mulch with grass clippings.  I also truck in horse manure from a neighbor and use pulled weeds to build new raised beds.

My worm bin does create compost from the few food scraps chickens won't eat, but only a gallon or two at a time.  Just right for our potted citrus, but not for much else.  Lately, I've been experimenting with ways to increase our output, and my newest experiment is to soak cardboard and add it to the bin.  I've been looking for a good use for our junk paper and cardboard --- so hard to recycle when you live an hour from the nearest recycling center.  It's early days yet, but I have high hopes that the cardboard will add to our vermicompost.

On the other hand, if you want to go the traditional composting route, you might want to check out this page of composting pointers which Everett put together. It's got short, sweet, and to the point articles about why and how to compost.

It seems like the noise is doing its job of keeping the deer at a safe distance from the garden. The pivot points needed some adjusting due to it getting hung up on the third night of operation. I just increased the hanging loop size and moved it out a few inches.

You would think a noise like that would be hard to deal with in such an otherwise tranquil setting, but the opposite is true. When I wake up in the middle of the night I now listen for the metal scraping on metal, which gives me an odd sense of comfort knowing that we have an invisible cloak of noise protecting the garden.

What happens when you combine a small motor with some scrap tin and a power source? Hopefully a new type of contraption that will make the deer think twice before they enter our perimeter.

I noticed the first Japanese Beetles in our garden yesterday --- three shiny, metallic insects sitting on the top of our dwarf lemon tree.  I've actually been looking forward to their arrival this year since I want to try out a new control technique I recently heard about.

When the first Japanese Beetles emerge from their underground grub stage, they find a plant they like to eat and then emit congregation pheremones.  As other beetles emerge, they follow the scent to have a Japanese Beetle party.  According to a few sources, all you have to do to protect your plants is be extremely vigilant at this time of year and handpick the first few beetles off the plants you like.  The beetles you leave on nearby weeds will attract all of the newly emerging beetles to harmless beetle parties.

Japanese Beetles are exremely easy to handpick in the morning when they're sluggish from the cold.  Fill a cup partway up with water, hold it under the beetle, then tap the leaf slightly.  Scared Japanese Beetles naturally let go of their perch and fall down, right into your cup.  Once I've done my rounds, I toss water and beetles into the chicken tractors where the beetles are quickly consumed.

One of our future goals is to grow enough sunflower plants to turn the seeds into cooking oil.

I'm not sure if the effort is worth the reward, but thats what experiments are for. Once you harvest the seeds they need to be dehulled.
 
It takes about a pound of hulled seeds to produce 3 ounces of oil. I've read an area of 2500 square feet can provide a family of four with enough cooking oil for the year.

There's even talk of it being used as a bio-fuel.

I noticed the feed store had some 40 pound bags of the oil variety for 12 bucks so folks can keep their backyard bird population fed. I might end up experimenting with one of those bags once we figure out the best way to build an oil press.

Some of the sweet potato starts graduated to outdoor living today. They might need some supplemental water for the first few days if they show signs of wilting.

If you're crazy about sweet potatoes then you might want to add the Tater Day festival to your calender for next year. It's the first Monday in April, and the only place in the world that honors the sweet potato with its own parade and celebration.

George Washington Carver did some interesting work with sweet potatoes back in the late 1930s. He figured out a way to make a corn syrup substitute that leaves behind a sweet potato sugar. The process can be done at home and the link has all the info.

This might be a good experiment to do in the fall.

I'm starting to get a handle on foundationless bee frames.  I've tried three methods, a good one, a mediocre one, and a bad one.

The mediocre one was the one I started with, which you can see to the right.  I cut each sheet of foundation into five pieces, sandwiched one foundation piece between the wooden strip and the rest of the frame, and nailed the wooden strip into place with vertical nails.  The bees built down from the foundation piece just fine, but the foundation tended to slip loose before they started building on it.  I had to reattach about a third of the foundation pieces in the first week, after which all was well.

Read more about my experiments with foundationless honeybee frames....

This is just over 2 and a half minutes of our fourth bee package install yesterday. The frames in this box have no foundation material. Instead they have a beveled edge for the bees to begin building on. The way I understand it the artificial foundation prompts the bees to make bigger cells, which provide more honey. Building without this mechanism may yield less honey, but a stronger colony. Experimenting is a big part of the fun.

I wonder if people who keep bees tend to be more experimental?

While I was finishing up the ditch digging project I noticed a significant population of grubs, which got me to thinking about the possibility of raising meal worms for a chicken feed supplement.

As usual the internet has quite a lot to say on the subject of meal worms, but I found the Sialis website and all was made clear.

It seems like a bit more work than raising worms, but once you read the Sialis information you'll feel like an expert.

You should be ready to wait around 3 months for your first harvest, and most folks recommend a group of 1000 to get started, which can be had for around 20 bucks. This could be an excellent way to raise the quality of your eggs if your hens live in a coop and compete with a large flock for juicy insect snacks. Stay tuned to see if I can figure out a way to cut back on our store bought chicken feed with the help of a well planned insect community.

While you're improving your chickens' healthy, you should make sure they have clean water, an easy task with our homemade chicken waterer.

Remember how I wrapped our two peach trees three weeks ago to keep them from freezing?  Tuesday, I noticed that a few tiny peaches are popping out of withered flowers on the bigger tree, but I still don't know if the wrapping did any good.

There are only about a dozen peaches forming, but is that because it's the peach's first year to fruit and it knows better than to bite off more than it can chew?  Or is it because the other flowers got nipped by the frost?

Are the fruits coming out of flowers which opened after the frost?  (There were a few late-bloomers.)  Or did my swaddling and water treatment do some good?

Next time I protect plants from a freeze, I'll keep better notes.  For now, though, I'm just excited that we may get to taste a peach or two from our own soil this year!

Around here, folks guard their morel-hunting grounds with as much secrecy (though less firepower) than they use on their moonshine stills.  I distinctly remember a friend of mine telling me about the bags of morels ("dry land fish") he hauled out of the woods one spring, adding that there were so many present that he left behind over half of the mushrooms.  "Where are they?" I asked naively.  "I'd love to gather some morels."  "Oh, up that holler there aways," he said vaguely, pointing his chin toward two or three valleys in the distance.

Mark's friendships are obviously stronger than mine.  He came home on Monday with a little mess of morels which he and his friend had gathered together.  I was ecstatic because I'd been dying to try out my mushroom cultivation techniques, and now I have the raw material to do it.  I cut the stem butts off and slapped them between wet cardboard.  Another fun experiment!

I've often wondered how long it will take to have smart enough robots for practical everyday chores.

The folks at MIT's artificial intelligence lab are making me believe that day may be sooner than I imagined.

Their robots are constructed from modified Roomba vacuum robots, which might not handle the real world gardens out there, but the concept has a lot of potential. They have a promising project that uses a swarm of robots working together to tend to an experimental tomato garden. I think a weed pulling robot could be very handy and fun to watch, but that day is most likely in the very distant future.

With the overshadowing trees down and the ground dry, I finally put our wedding blueberries into the ground Wednesday afternoon.  Their new home is on a bit of a slant, so I dragged some decaying pine trunks out of the woods to form an erosion barrier on the downhill side of each row.  I'm hoping that the rotting wood will provide nutrients for the blueberries and acidify the soil a bit, too.  Since pines and blueberries are often partners in nature, it's possible that some helpful fungi will come along for the ride and pep our little bushes up.

With my last few gasps of energy, I planted parsley, carrots, and poppies in the garden.  My various clients all need computer work done ASAP, so I guess it's a good thing it's supposed to rain tomorrow and keep me indoors....

Spring is in the garden --- we've eaten our third salad of the season, are eying the asparagus shoots we're not allowed to eat this year, and are watching the first peas twine up out of the ground.  Meanwhile, I transplanted the broccoli and cabbage seedlings we started indoors into a cold frame, wishing I'd started them there from the beginning.




Our sunken cold frame experiment is ready to analyze --- no hard data, but these photographs speak for themselves.  The lettuce in the normal height part of the bed is about a week ahead of the lettuce in the sunken portion.  I guess that light, not temperature, is the limiting factor for lettuce in the early spring.

A mass of blueberry bushes arrived in the mail on Friday afternoon --- thank you Heather and Kira!  They've been heeled in while Mark and I prepare their new homes, a process that may take a few days since some box-elders have to come down to provide light and I have to acidify the soil, which is currently too wet to work.

Soil acidification appears to be a more contentious topic than I knew.  Most people add sulfur to lower soil pH before planting blueberries, but I've read a few reports that the sulfur gives the berries a bitter taste (and I'm always leery of chemicals.)  Other people suggest modifying the soil with tea bags and citrus peels, both of which we have in profusion.  Or peat moss (which I'm morally opposed to, so won't use) and/or decayed pine needles (which we have plenty of up on the hill.)

Luckily, my friends picked out two plants of each variety, so the solution is obvious --- a paired experiment where I acidify the soil for one set of plants chemically and for the other naturally....

Based on the wetland and eventual canopy locations, I filled in plant groupings on the map above.  This was a pretty complicated step, which I'll go into in far more detail than you'll care for.  First, I listed all of the plants I was interested in growing, focussing mainly on plants which will increase fertility of the soil but throwing in some nectary and edible plants as well.  Then I narrowed the plant list down to those which I can get my hands on for free (primarily on my own property), or which I'm willing to spend money on.

Next, I grouped the plants of interest into categories based on disturbance intensity, sun/shade, and moisture level.  The categories are as follows...

I took advantage of the last few hours of frozen ground yesterday to haul in a load of composted wood chips to add to the sheet mulch.  The wood chips have been sitting in our parking area for about three years now, I think, and as I shovelled them up I felt they were almost too good to lay down on a path.  Many of the chips had decomposed into rich brown dirt, and the nearby trees had begun to sneak their roots up to steal the bounty.

I suspect that may be our last trip in the golf cart for several days.  I'm thrilled by the forecast warm weather, but it's going to turn the driveway to goop before the ground starts to dry.  No driving for a while!

The original super splitter repair managed to keep the maul head from flying off at the handle after several hours of repeated use, but the space in between the maul and the handle has increased along with a wiggle action that seems to be getting worse.

I used about half of each tube in a Devcon two part epoxy kit. This stuff is very strong, but I've never tested it on such extreme pressures as what it's about to go through once the chopping starts back up. Stay tuned to see if it's strong enough to hold up under real world conditions.

The next step is to create a base map showing the current conditions at the site.  The area I'll be working with is bounded by the driveway on the south, the barn on the north, and a major thoroughfare on the west.  Young fruit trees and grapevines are surrounded by clay soil which ponds during rains.  A three year old brush pile is slowly rotting down, but is still a major feature of the landscape.  The site is mostly sunny, though the hill on the south side shades it on winter mornings.  We don't get any wind to speak of back here in our holler.  Read more....

For this week's lunchtime series, I thought you all might enjoy seeing the initial planning stages for our new forest garden.  This photo shows the area we'll be working with --- the worst part of our garden, full of weeds and waterlogged clay soil.  The book recommends first articulating our broad goals and the specific factors we hope to use to achieve those goals, speaking in the present tense from five or ten years in the future when our goals have been met:

The specifics...

As Mark puts it, once the gardening year really gets going, it's like riding a full speed locomotive --- good luck slowing it down or changing course.  I can already feel the gardening locomotive picking up steam, with 32 beds slated to be planted in March.  (We plan to plant about 125 beds of annual veggies this year, with the vast majority going in on our frost-free date in May.)

This week, Mark and I went over to our neighbor's house to collect some horse manure.  We sell the neighbors veggies, and they throw their peels and tops into a pile with their horse manure, which we then collect in late winter to put back into the garden.  Thursday I raked 11 beds, removing the weeds and working the half-composted manure and kitchen scraps into the soil.  It would be better to let the manure compost all the way, but at the rate of 2 gallons per 20 square feet or so, the worms make short work of any organic matter.  (I'd love to double up on my manure application, but those horses will only give me so much!)  Read more....

Today was a good day for cutting down trees.

It's that time of year when fresh sycamore logs are needed for shitake mushroom inoculation.

Some folks use oak trees, but we had excellent luck last year using sycamore.

The two medium sized trees came down with no troubles, and I thank them for their sacrifice. Anna had me leave a taller than normal stump to encourage new sycamores to sprout out in the future.

We got them cut up into three foot sections and hauled to the kiddie pool area where they are patiently waiting for the next step.

I've been reading Harvey Ussery's permaculture articles in both Mother Earth News and Backyard Poultry Magazine with glee, and this article about creating a forest garden really caught my fancy.  I detest wasted space, and about half of our growing space right now feels wasted to me --- it's open, weedy areas between young fruit trees.

I've planted vegetables and berries between the trees in one half of the young orchard, but the other half has soil so terrible that I figure by the time I get it enriched enough to grow anything worthwhile, the trees will have closed in over my beds.  The area is also chock full of Japanese Honeysuckle and wild blackberries, making it difficult to grow anything.

Sunday afternoon I got a bee in my bonnet and decided to experiment in that awful soil area.  I'm trying three different methods (which you can see above.)  Read about the three beds....

These 7 windows have been salvaged from an old high school and with a little luck will be part of our future experiment in making a small green house.