Cottage Farming

We knew that this first year of our garden would be a learning experience. We’ve already learned a lot about what to do, what not to do, and what to do better next time. Regarding this latter category, next time we plan to transplant a newly sprouted seedling into the garden, we’re going to make use of a cloche.

And what is a cloche, you may ask? It’s a low transparent cover put over young plants to protect them from cold. They take many forms, from an arched structure covered in clear plastic, to small bell jars over the seedlings. Gayla Sanders has a great “how to” on making your own seedling starter and cloche from clear plastic drink bottles.

While it’s possible we’ve already lost the seedlings we tried to transplant, we covered the struggling plants with just such a bottle as Sanders suggested. It’s still a bit early to say for sure… but I have a feeling we’re going to need to resort to purchased plants for this one. Lesson learned for next time.

We harvested our first lettuce leaves from the garden the other day. It’s one thing to know that a salad will taste better when it comes straight from your garden to your plate. It’s another thing altogether to taste the difference.

What a difference it is. The leaves had a snap to them and not-so-subtle flavor that’s entirely absent from salads purchased from elsewhere. Rolled up into the experience, of course, is the knowledge that you’re eating something you helped grow. So in addition to the fresh-tasting goodness is the satisfaction of something home grown.

Either way you cut it, we’re off to a good start… and now it’s harder to wait for the rest to be ready for the plate.

This may not be a totally original idea, but we came up with a way to easily water the garden without having to monkey with the hose every time. Since our hose is across the yard, each time we need to water there’s a process required that, while not onerous, is a minor barrier to ease. The solution was to fill up and leave a water sprayer next to the gardens.

Even though this was primarily a solution to increase the ease of watering, it turns out there are additional benefits. First of which is that plants grow better with water that’s warmed to ambient temperature, rather than the colder water generally coming right out of the tap. Leaving the sprayer out allows the sun to warm it throughout the day.

Second, and probably more important, we found we’re wasting a lot less water. When using the hose, we often let it run while we did minor work on the plants (e.g. pulling off dead leaves). Also, when using the hose we would be watering much more of the beds than was strictly necessary. Using the sprayer we only watered the area around the plants themselves, not the unplanted sections.

Finally… the kids love it, too, and they don’t get as soaked as they generally do when using the hose. Goodness all around.

Even though the weather wasn’t great, we braved the drizzle of rain to mix the ingredients to make our growing medium for the square foot gardens. In case you haven’t read Mel’s book, the Square Foot Gardener, the medium is made from equal parts (by volume) of vermiculite, compost, and peat moss.

Since most of the ingredients were marked with their weight, rather than their volume, we had to estimate the relative amounts to mix together. Fortunately, it looks like we estimated correctly as the final product appeared to be just what we expected.

Unfortunately, however, our overall calculation for the amount was off by a factor of two. For some reason we underestimated the total volume needed for all three boxes, so we’re going to need to do the exercise again (and mixing it together can most definitely be considered exercise) next weekend.

As we had enough to fill one and half boxes, though, we went ahead and planted the first one. While we’re still germinating some seeds inside, we got a jump start by purchasing a few starter plants. So far, we have a couple different varieties of lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower. Allyson also took over a couple squares to plant radishes and cucumbers.

Also, we found that while working around the boxes it could get kinda’ muddy. We opted to surround the boxes with large bark mulch so that we could walk around them without tracking too much of the mud back into the house. So far it worked out pretty well, plus it looks nice.

We did learn a lot about how to effectively mix the amount of medium we needed. I’m sure the next round will go more smoothly, and I’ll post any time-saving tips we come up with after having put them to the test.

As a side note from the “Coincidence Category”, I received a note from Steve Greenberg, my DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast co-host in response to a tweet over the weekend. Apparently, his wife is about a month ahead of us in the garden race… I guess we better step up our game.

We spent the past couple of weekends building the raised garden boxes that will be the foundation of our backyard gardens. We’re basing our approach on the technique outlined by Mel Bartholomew in his book, “Square Foot Gardening“. The basic concept is to build a raised garden bed, filled with a growing medium blended from equal parts (by volume) of compost, vermiculite, and peat moss. There are some subtleties in the types of compost used (ie. you’re supposed to mix at least 5 different sources of compost to increase the probability of a wide-spectrum of nutrients), but other than that it’s relatively straight forward.

The first step is to build the frames, which we’ve done:

The book is full of variations the reader can choose to adopt, or not, depending on particular situations. For our part, the yard is slightly sloped where we placed the frames, so we opted to dig down slightly in order to terrace them. We also lined the bottom of the boxes with a wire screen to keep out tunneling critters, then laid down a weed barrier:

Oddly enough, we found it relatively difficult to find large bags of vermiculite. After calling around to the various shops in the area, we opted to order a couple large bags from Uline, a packaging wholesaler, rather than purchase a dozen smaller bags. Doing so was easier, and was about half the cost.

Next up, when we receive the vermiculite, we should have all the raw ingredients for the soil. We hope to mix it up and load the frames next weekend. In the meantime, we’re planning out what we’ll grow and start germinating some of the seeds inside. We’re definitely a bit behind schedule on the germination, but we’re learning as we go… hopefully next season we’ll be much further along by this point.

More as it develops!

I’m becoming more interested in local harvesting by the minute. I’ve been predisposed to sustainable living since I ran into the concept of building Earthships while growing up in the Southwest. Layer on top of that reading the book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (my larder has gone through a radical restructuring since this book entered my house), and my growing interest in the concept of “food miles“.

Anyway… that’s all very well and good, but what’s a suburbanite like myself to do? Well, here’s a fun, sticky, and sweet way to start. A friend of mine has her own bees (and chickens), so we made a party out of this year’s harvest. Actually, we invited ourselves over to raid her honeycombs. It was totally fun interacting with the folks who descended on her place with jars in hand.

The feeling of local community harvesting was alive and well in her kitchen (especially since we used a an ancient honey spinner). The experience really got me thinking about what more we could do like this. I’m noodling the idea of a yearly “Harvest Party” where we invite the neighbors to a shindig where we share what we’ve harvested from our own land (or otherwise made using local resources). Social networking the old fashioned way.