1cubic foot greenhouse

I'm in a little friendly competition with my seed co-op for earliest produce. (Actually, only one person accepted the challenge so far, but I have a long-standing tendency to compete hard against myself, so it doesn't really matter.)

In the spirit of early greens, I built a few little greenhouses. I cut a strip of chicken wire, 1 ft wide by 4 ft long. I folded it in four and then hooked the ends together. Then I cut a piece of plastic drop cloth and wrapped the wire "box" like a Christmas present without a bottom.

We have forecasted temperatures in the 20s for several nights this week, but maybe when this string breaks I'll give these a try. For the cost of a few seeds I can't really lose.

Tulips are up!

They are the only spring bulbs we have so far, and I'm so glad I slipped them in last fall.

A compost tumbler!

Last year my sister, Susan, and I had a long phone conversation on the pros and cons of purchasing composting containment.

We grew up with a system that seemed to work well with not too much effort. Two 3 ft diameter cylinders of fence wire, sitting on bare dirt. We'd fill one up one year, turn it over into the other one where it would sit for the next year, and then turn it onto the garden. (I'm using the term "we" very loosely, this was my dad's realm.) My dad was good about layering grass clippings, fall leaves, kitchen scraps, and ash from the fireplace. One year the compost pile even ignited itself it got so hot!

Doug had a wooden slat compost bin built in along the back fence that has been collecting everything from the kitchen for years. But turning it is a pain, and there's no place to turn it to, and thus, the bottom is beautiful compost, and the top never gets wet enough or warm enough to turn into anything.

So I was too tempted by the promise of easy turning, and I bought a compost tumbler. My plan will be to continue to stockpile materials in the wooden bin and keep some open piles of grass clippings or leaves as we have them, and then put a good mix together in the tumbler which will get turned every couple days. This way we won't end up with mostly finished compost that still has last night's potato peels raw.

After some research (especially this excellent article in Mother Earth News), we settled on the Lifetime 80 gallon barrel composter. ($165 on Amazon and eligible for prime shipping.)

So we'll see. It's still cold, so I don't expect miracles, but I'll load it today and post pictures of the compost when it's ready.

Say, that's some cute compost already!

Plant tags

Cut straight down the sides of a 32 oz yogurt cup, then cut around the bottom, then angle off the ends.

Garlic

As of Saturday, March 12, the garlic was up! Chives too, in about the same state.

The ambitious beginnings

Doug and I generate some kind of positive feedback wherein dreams and aspirations spiral out of control.

As evidence, we are attempting, in one season, to farm a 600 square foot area. In the past 3 years no more than 150 square feet were tended. Should be interesting!

We have a variety of motivations for this project:
1. We kind of just think it's a good idea to grow your own food, to some extent. It's a skill we want to cultivate.
2. Solidly good, locally grown food, is a chunk of change every week. Ours might turn out more expensive yet, considering the time, but we want to see how a garden balances our grocery budget.
3. I have grown vegetable gardens in every yard of every rental house I've inhabited since 1995. Having a garden to invest in year after year is a dream come true.

My sister keeps a garden blog, which is a great read. She is a much better writer than I am, but she long ago pointed out the value of a photo journal for year-to-year documentation so I'm going to try to copy her. This too is overly-ambitious.


Here's our garden on Saturday, March 12.

The soil was barely thawed. There were a couple clods of ice crystals left in the southeast corner under the spruce tree. Artesian springs popped up all over Boalsburg on Saturday, including 2 inches in our basement (whoops) so the ground is WET. It has never been easier to work it with a shovel.

Doug is working on post holes so we can build a base for the sink (foreground) which has been an uncharacteristic piece of lawn art for three years since he took possession of it from a friend, unwilling to let such a nice piece of countertop go to waste. It will be a great place to rinse dirt off veggies, and a hose splitter mounted on the base will be the irrigation hub.

The little picket fence is our only rabbit protection right now, so it needs to be reinforced. Rabbits are our primary pest. Masha does her best but she's really only a deterrent for groundhogs, which she can mostly keep under control.

At this point the garden has a strawberry patch (~20 plants thanks to my friend Emma) and a garlic patch (~100 heads thanks to my parents help last fall) and that's about it.