Posts Tagged soil
Making Firewood
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Homesteading, Uncategorized on March 4th, 2010
This is the first two truck-loads of firewood that I brought home. The stuff sitting on the ground, not the stacked stuff. Well, it ain’t firewood in the picture, but it is by now.
Notice the difference in the height of the right-hand stack? That’s what used to be that wood. I estimate it’s about a rick, which is about $65 in the bank by my math, or about $50 if you take into account that I picked it up vs. having it delivered. I focus on the money, because it’s obvious, but there’s no price I would put on the idea that I’m providing for myself a fundamental and life-sustaining need (heat, during the winter).
Splitting wood is fun, which is an odd thing to say given how much work it is. My hands and arms have been very tired from swinging the maul, and my back and legs are tired from moving the big hunks of stump after I cut them off the log with the chainsaw. Still, hitting a solid chunk of wood with a12-lb piece of metal and having the wood split into two pieces and go flying has a certain visceral pleasure. KA-POW! It’s kind of like working a heavy punching bag, but with a fire at the end.
The neighbor has offered to let me borrow his gas-powered splitter, but I’m not interested. I have enough things in my life that a gasoline engine turns into nothing harder than a button push. I’m happy to have something so valuable come out of nothing more than a stick, a piece of heavy metal, and my body. That’s not to say that I’m not also happy to have a riding mower for the field, or a gas tiller (that thing was a damn life-saver; I can’t imagine doing all that work by hand), just that here’s one thing I can do by hand, and I like doing it, and there’s no need to turn it over to Almighty Petroleum just because I can.
Currently, we have at least 3 cords stored up, but some of that is going to be burned on what’s left of this winter. I estimate we may need about 5 cords to get through a year, so I’ve got a lot more work to do before I’m “done.” The truth is that I may never be “done,” because it’d be fantastic to have at least two years’ worth saved up. One year is the absolute minimum for seasoning hard-wood, but two years is usually better.
And, even if I had two years saved up, seeing good wood rotting on the ground just looks like a waste to me now. But of course, that’s not true either. Bugs live in the wood and eat it. The wood itself rots and turns into soil. I suppose if I gathered up enough firewood, eventually the soil in the woods would be less fertile, but I doubt that little-ol’-me is making that much of a difference. If everyone in Knox county heated their homes with wood, then we might have to worry about how many trees were getting cut, but as-is, I can pretty much heat my entire house for a year on what other people would just leave lying on the ground. It’s nice to be in a situation where I can be reasonably confident that my ecological impact is low. Hopefully I can increase the number of those as this homesteading adventure, also know as My Life, continues.
Garden Update: Baby Plants!
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on February 15th, 2010
I built a light stand for my baby plants out of PVC.
It’s pretty rudimentary. 3/4″ PVC and some fittings. Didn’t even really glue it, as friction seems to be doing the job okay so far. Since I took this picture, I even hung some aluminum foil curtains from the lights to reflect more light on the plants and less into the room.
This little plant right here is going to grow up to be broccoli some day.
As a side note, the grow lights make wonderful photography lights too, as long as the camera and lights are both about 6″ or less from the subject.
These here are the onions and leeks.
I actually started the first batch on the 12th, and most of them didn’t germinate. I may have planted them too deep in the soil, or maybe the seeds are just no good, because they are left-over from last year. I put in a 2nd batch of seeds, and if those don’t start, I may chuck the whole batch and open the new batch I ordered this year.
I have also started some lettuce and carrots.
First Seedlings of the Year
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on February 4th, 2010
The first seedlings, onions and leeks, have been started, and a few are even poking their heads up to get some light.
It’s really early in the year to be starting seedlings, but onions are a slow starter,and as near as I can tell, late January is actually the right time to have them ready to go into the ground by April.
Especially with the trouble we were having with the wood stove, the house has been very cold. 50 degrees in the morning, and seldom higher than 60 throughout the day. Putting on thermal underwear first thing in the morning has become routine, although hopefully that’ll resolve itself now that the stove seems to have been fixed. (New gaskets. Where, by, “new,” I mean, putting in gaskets that somehow were not present at all.)
They say that the soil needs to be above about 60 degrees for the seedlings to germinate. This is a bit of a mis-statement. Many plants will germinate at lower temperatures, even down to freezing. They just take a good long time to do it, and the whole point of starting seedlings indoors is to use the warm, protected environment to get a jump-start on the year’s crop.
Additionally, I have found that, with starting seedlings in a windowsill there’s just not enough light and they get very spindly. This house is especially well shaded. Although it has a south-facing front, it also has a porch, and the sun is usually shaded from the windows.
So I decided to get some grow lights and a heat mat for my seedlings.
You can spend a lot of money on grow lights, and perhaps the high-priced lights are better, but for my purposes, I’ve decided to see what kind of results I get with fluorescent shop lights. You can buy them at your local hardware store for about $20 each, and a pack of ten bulbs is about $20. All told, I spent $50 for two lights, which I estimate will be enough to light all of my seedlings.
In the photo above, the lamps are resting on the greenhouse boxes. I plan to build a stand out of PVC. It’s nice to have a stand so that you can adjust the height of the lamps. As the plants get taller, you raise the lamps so they’re consistently just a few inches above the plants, maximizing the light the plants get.
The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.”
Heat mats, you can buy online all day long, but finding them in stores is harder. Even Mayo, the local lawn and garden center didn’t have any in stock. Luckily, Ferry-Morse makes a heated greenhouse kit that comes with 72 peat starter-pellets, a mini-”greenhouse,” and a heat mat, and Home Depot carries all variety of Ferry-Morse products. The kit is about $24, which, if you were going to buy the greenhouse at $7 anyway, is a fair price for the mat.
One of the problems you can run into with a heat mat is overheating the plants. The heat mat will keep the plants about 10-20 degrees warmer than ambient temperature (mine is doing about 22 degrees, so it’s a bit of an overachiever). For my house, that’s no problem, as they hover around 80 in the kitchen. For a typical American house, it would put the temperature in the 90’s, which may be too hot for some seeds. You can buy a digital temperature controller for about $30, but I suggest simply putting the heat mats on a $10 timer.
The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.” The nice thing about this timer is that, if I wanted to, I could put the heat mats on the timer and do 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off, all day long. If the timer had removable plastic tabs, I would only be able to turn on and off four times a day.
In order to monitor the soil temperature, I have stuck a kitchen thermometer into a peat pellet that hasn’t been planted with anything. I set it so that 80 degrees is straight up and then I can quickly check the temperature through the moist plastic of the greenhouse.
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