Archive for March, 2010

A person on Craigslist was giving away wood from downed trees in her yard, so we went and got a couple of truck-loads.

This may not come as a surprise to you, but using a chainsaw in a big pile of downed trees is a bit trickier than using it on solid ground. Yeah, I know: you’re supposed to pull the trees out and then cut them up. Well, I haven’t got a tractor, you know! Anyway, I still have all my appendages.

We got a truck-full of wood before the chainsaw cut out and wouldn’t go anymore. It turned out I mixed the fuel with too much oil and it was fouling the plug.

Then we went to Tractor Supply Company and got fencing and pig feed.

Baby plants are getting tall. I’m glad I got such a jump on the onions. Some of them are, only now starting to get thick and sturdy.

The lettuce is scheduled to go into the ground this week, but I wasn’t paying attention to the schedule, and didn’t start hardening it off, so it’ll probably be next week. Likewise for the broccoli. Broccoli and lettuce are supposed to be cold-weather plants, but it’s still getting into the high thirties at night, and I’d like it to be just a tad warmer before I put them out for good.

What you see above is only a fraction of what I’ll eventually plant, but I ran out of peat pellets, and so I’m a bit behind on starting. I’m not too worried, though. Whatever I don’t start inside, I’ll just start outside in April. If you’re interested in getting a look at my whole-garden plan, you can see it at Google Docs here.

I built a cold frame at about 24×48″, to match a piece of lexan that I got at the hardware store. Almost immediately after we got home, Issa found someone giving away a piece of 40×48″ glass on Craigslist, so I built a second cold frame to match that piece. I built the 2nd one with a non-sloping lid because I needed the extra height for the burgeoning seedlings. I didn’t want them touching the moist glass all day; it didn’t seem good for them.

Years ago, the owner of this house remodeled the entire kitchen and stacked all the scrap lumber against the back of the barn. I scrounged some of that to make the cold frames. Free Wood! Pulling out the nails by hand is a small price to pay to reuse something that would otherwise be trash, and cost money to replace.

Here, you can see me starting the first of the “southern” beds, to the left of the garden. The poles are also in for the rabbit-fence. The southern beds get nearly full sun, while the northern beds are shaded a bit by the trees. I’ll be planting the same thing in the north and south beds to compare performance. It’ll be a shame if the northern beds are too shaded to be usable, but I bet that won’t happen.

There used to be some cedar trees in the area where the southern beds are now. I know, because I had to dig out the stumps. Now that is some hard damn work.

Here, you can see the four southern beds have been tilled and Issa and I are starting to spread compost over them. There are also some hay bales to the left of the garden, which will be used for mulch.

My garden is about 1000 square feet: 8 beds at 4′x30′ each. It turns out that 3 cubic yards of material equals almost exactly 1″ of depth spread over 1000 square feet. That’s a useful short-hand for buying mulch, compost, and other materials that go onto a garden and are sold in cubic yards. My truck will carry one cubic yard, but not two. In order to make the division easy, I decided to buy four truck-loads and divide them each between two beds, so each bed gets 1/2 cubic yard of compost, which is a bit more than an inch.

There just happens to be a landscaping company literally five minutes down the road from my house, so that’s where I bought the compost. They have enormous piles of various types of mulch and compost just lying around in a yard, with massive front-end-loaders zipping around between them. You pull up your truck and they dump a load onto it for you! I guess it’s pretty mundane to folks in the business, but it was pretty novel to me, so I asked Issa to shoot a video for y’all.

The video doesn’t really communicate what it feels like to have one of those big loaders zipping at your vehicle at what feels like far too fast a speed, and then have it dump 1,000 lbs of compost onto the back of the truck.

Opinions are varied as to how much compost to put on garden beds, but at $30 a cubic yard, I’m not tempted to push it. The soil has never been gardened before, so it should be relatively fertile. I hope I can tend it in such a way that massive amounts of compost aren’t required to keep it fertile.

The southern four beds are now spread with compost, but it has not yet been tilled in because it’s been raining and the soil is wet. It’d just clump up. I’ve got a third truck-load ready to go onto the northern beds, but I have to pull the mulch off of them that I put on in the fall.

While tilling the southern beds, I realized that those patches of “grass” that look like green onions… were actually green onions! These are growing wild all over my front lawn. We made a salad of the thinned lettuce plants and some wild onions from the yard.