Winterizing the Quick Hoop

I woke this morning to a delightful snowfall here in central Connecticut; a quick dusting that delayed the school opening and gave a taste of winter.  I peeked at the garden and noticed that the quick hoop low tunnel covering my beds of winter greens was sagging under the weight of very little snow. The tunnel, constructed of 1/2" PVC electrical conduit hoops draped with agricultural row cover, needed an upgrade to survive heavier snows to come.

Ag row cover quick hoops sagging under the weight of wet snow. The sagging material between the hoops illustrates the need for ridge support. This photo is from spring 2016.

A trip to the hardware store fetched me a 100' coil of 1/4" poly clothes line and a 100' roll of 10' wide, 6 mil thick polyethylene sheeting. I removed the row cover and stored it for next season. I then ripped a scrap of pressure-treated 2x4 stud into two sturdy stakes with the table saw. I pounded these in on both ends of the low tunnel, then proceeded to string the clothes line across the tops of the PVC hoops to create a ridge beam, so to speak.  The clothes line instantly frays at the cut ends so I found it easiest to pre-melt the area to be cut with a lighter, then cut in the center of the melted area. I then sealed the ends with an additional torching.

Cutting the clothes line in the middle of a pre-torched section to limit fraying. The cutting tasks went super quick with my new $10 razor sharp Mora sheath knife!

Finished rope end.

I tied the line to the first stake with a bowline, then fastened it to each PVC conduit using a clove hitch. 

Bowline attachment to the first stake.

Adjustable clove hitch on top of each PVC hoop.

I adjusted all the clove hitches so there was no rope slack between the conduits and then tied the line to the second stake using a trucker's hitch for quick tightening. The idea with this design is to structurally integrate the stakes, conduit, and rope to form a continuous support for the cover so that the weight of snow will not pull down the cover and bend the hoops towards each other.  

Trucker's hitch connection to the second stake

The low tunnel with clothes line "ridge beam". The rope appears slack because of the uneven heights of the hoops, but it is actually quite taught between the hoops and stakes.

I rolled out and cut the poly sheeting to length; leaving it a few feet longer on each end of the tunnel to follow the rope to the stake.  I weighed down the edges with rocks and called it a day.  The whole project took about 30 minutes and that included some time to harvest arugula, spinach, and radishes before covering them up! On a whim, I also seeded a few rows with the last of the spinach seed.  They'll either rot over the winter or sprout into super early spring greens. 

The finished product sheltering the winter greens. To the left is the garlic bed mulched with leaves and to the right is a stand of oat and pea cover crop that will winter kill leaving a mulched bed for spring planting.

The quick hoop seems fairly sturdy though I will still have to be diligent in brushing off snow; no sense in pushing my luck. I'll harvest greens periodically throughout the winter and hopefully there will be an early spring flush of growth.  Until then, time for wood stoves, Nordic skiing, and planning for next year.  Only another couple of months before it's time to sow onions indoors and start grafting apples!

New Adventures

My wife and I recently purchased 6.8 acres of land in northern New Hampshire with the goal of building a home and homestead and moving there full time within five years. Oh, and do it all with cash out of pocket without a mortgage. Ambitious? Unrealistic? Sure, and perhaps, but I’m up for this challenge!

What are my motivations for wanting to leave a comfortable home, good paying job, and established social circle? Well, it’s complicated! First and foremost, I love spending time outdoors. In my twenties, I expressed this love by partaking in backcountry ski tours and backpacking trips into the wilds of New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York and motorcycle trips all over New England and beyond. Over time those adventures grew repetitious and I progressed into more home-centric pursuits of gardening, food preservation and preparation, and simple woodworking. Having children certainly ushered this transition! Now nine years into my garden experiment, my ambitions and space requirements have grown beyond my quarter-acre suburban parcel. I need some space to try things out! My wish list includes: growing most of my family’s annual supply of grain and dry beans, establishing a fruit, nut, and firewood orchard, raising a flock of sheep for meat and pasture mowing, raising chickens for eggs and meat, and expanding the kitchen garden to increase the percentage of fresh home-grown foods consumed by my family. Still being the adventurous outdoorsman at heart, I want to do all this within a short drive of some real mountains with hiking, skiing, hunting, and fishing opportunities. Hence the selection of the property merely minutes from the White Mountain National Forest and less than a 30 minute drive to some of New Hampshire’s most spectacular mountain playgrounds.

I have other motivations as well. I want to provide my children with a foundation of essential life skills, a respect for physical labor, and a reverence for nature. I’ll break down these three concepts a bit further. By essential life skills I mean skills that are universal and transferable such as growing and preparing food, using hand tools, making basic repairs to homes and equipment, and proficiency in social interactions, among others. I recognize that these skills can be taught in any setting, urban and rural alike; however, the nature of a working homestead should be conducive to these lessons. Socials interactions may or may not be more difficult in a rural setting; neighbors are few and far between but schools and community groups such as 4-H can fill that gap. We currently live in a neighborhood with many children but most times they are indoors behind a television set since outdoor play is constrained by busy roads, property boundaries, and ill-defined fears of "danger". As far as the universality and transferability of skills, cooking, building, and fixing are performed in all parts of the world and are the basis for higher skills. If my children want to specialize in something more esoteric like computer programming or high finance, fantastic, but they will at some point have learned how to pluck a chicken. Should the job market for esoteric skills crumble, I hope my children can fall back on basic skills for employment. When it comes to physical labor, my goal is not to make them love labor, but to have done it and therefore respect people that labor for their livelihood. Basically, I want them to know that labor and laborers are not beneath them.  Reverence for nature is a fairly straightforward but deep-reaching concept. It is easy for urban dwellers to champion movements to combat distant environmental degradations because they don’t directly see how their own resource-intensive lifestyles are the root of such degradations. Living in and among nature on a farm adjacent to forest could offer a more direct pathway to see how our actions influence nature. I would like to teach my children how to pursue a lifestyle that regenerates ecosystems.

My third motivation for the homestead is rather ambiguous so I’ll just throw out some thoughts in an attempt to define it. I foresee a decline in the American standard of living; in fact, this decline is well underway. Our nation is no longer the king of the heap with regards to manufacturing prosperity and we are moving towards a service economy with severe global competition. Globalization is forcing down wages, benefits, and the quality of goods while shifting wealth to multinational corporations. I foresee the power of sovereign nations diminishing in the face of consolidating corporate influence. Perhaps most significantly, I am concerned that the current growth economy model will falter as we tap out finite natural resources. How will our 401(k) plans fare if the Ponzi scheme that is Wall Street falls apart? Someone will still get rich but it won’t be you and me. We have the illusion of wealth in the form of new McMansion homes and shiny vehicles but I suspect much of this is supported by unending debt. We as a society have decided that convenience is paramount, so we willingly hand over cash to purchase items and services that we could easily produce or perform ourselves. When we hand over cash we relinquish control, and that is precisely how corporations have gained so much influence. So how do we regain control over our finances and government?  DO IT OURSELVES! By “it” I mean as much as possible; build our homes, grow our food, participate in government, so on and so forth. A man unburdened by debt and obligation is not easily manipulated. So to wrap up this thought, my homestead can be thought of an experiment in independence, or perhaps a long-term safety net for my family should the economy really start to slide. Now, I am not a doomsday prepper or anything like that, but I think having a piece of land that produces food, fuel, shelter, and recreation is as valid and diverse of an investment strategy as a mutual fund, if not more so. Trees continue to grow during floods, droughts, wars, bear markets, and the decline of civilizations. So why not invest in trees?

All of this is grand philosophy until I can pull it off!

On Food and Religion

Any dedicated readers of this blog (all two of them, I fear) have likely gathered that I value food quite dearly.  More specifically, I value the concept of nutritious, whole, safe, right food.  Not just USDA-Certified Organic, which has become a marketing tool for a lucrative sector of international agribusiness, but local food grown by people who care about soil, body, and spirit.  To me, a sound interest in food is a gateway to health unparalleled by today's "advances" in medicine - the contrast of a proactive lifestyle vs. reactive treatment.  At least that's how I see things now, having been blessed (whether by genetics, lifestyle, or blind luck) with an existence free of medical issues.

My quest for sound food burns bright.  I want to spread the word, either by growing great produce for my wife and child, convincing my parents to adopt better eating habits, or blogging about gardens.  I can feel it; the intrinsic sureness that the power of community surrounding local agriculture is key to wrestling our economic, governmental, medical, and spiritual freedoms back from the exploitative corporate oligarchy that looms over us.  Our salvation from consumerist dystopia!

But then I take a step back and reflect on my passion for sound food and the words I use to describe it.  Blessings.  Freedom.  Salvation.  What separates me from the religious zealot who seeks to convert all to his mindset?  The proselytizer who is convinced that his absolute viewpoint is absolutely correct?  The power of God and the power of organic carrots...in the grand analysis....do the indifferent ears upon which the message fall even make a distinction?  Just more noise in a world where everyone is looking to sell their schtick?  I am not a religious man nor am I versed in theology, but I sometimes fear that my dedication to the food thing amounts to more than worshiping false idols.  Perhaps I should be focusing energies elsewhere...but where?  Nonetheless, I am guided (and reassured) by the sense that my passion is morally right despite the uncertainties of swimming upstream against the stiffening current of a consumer society that increasingly devalues such introspection.

To be clear, I use food as the centerpiece, but by no means the sole focus, of my philosophy.  My concepts of a wholesome lifestyle extend beyond simple nutrition.  Connections - to the earth, our bodies, minds, and fellow humans, are paramount and intertwined.  The religious man very likely holds the same values, with the obvious additions of the love a greater being and the promise of an afterlife.  Me, my anguish and dreams alike are rooted in the belief that this earthly existence is our one shot, so we better well make a damned good stab at it.  And if that means I must swim upstream, so be it.

Cover Crops in the Fall Garden

I have three species of cover crop growing in my garden right now.  I like growing winter cover crops rather than just covering the garden with leaf mulch for several reasons:

• Grassy cover crops grow extensive root systems that protect the soil from erosion.
• The plants uptake soil nutrients that otherwise would be lost to leaching.
• They inhibit weeds.
• The tall cover grasses increase soil moisture by trapping snow and shading the soil.
• Legume species produce their own nitrogen fertilizer.
• Cover crops increase levels of organic material in the soil.
• They're cheaper and easier than hauling in manure or compost and serve the same functions.
• I like looking out my window in mid-winter and seeing plants in my garden!

 

A well-established bed of rye and vetch sown after the potatoes were harvested.

I've sown winter rye and hairy vetch in most areas where I've pulled out the summer vegetables.  Rye and vetch are the most winter hardy cover crops for New England and will grow until the deep cold of January and February.  Vigorous growth will resume in the spring.  The spring growth will produce an amazing amount of biomass from the rye, and the vetch (a legume) will increase the fertility of the soil through nitrogen fixation.  The rye/vetch mix will have to be mown and tilled under in the spring.  The major drawback of rye is that the residues will inhibit the growth of other plants for at least three weeks after tilling in the rye.

Rye and vetch sprouting beneath the fall lettuce patch.

The tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant were undersown with oats around mid-July to provide a living mulch.  I'll pull these veggies once the first frost hits, leaving behind a well-established oat cover crop. The oats will die over the winter and leave a nice mulch on the soil to protect against runoff during the spring rains.  I can either plant spring crops directly through the mulch or till it under.  Similarly, I planted rye and vetch beneath some of the fall veggies like lettuce to let the cover crops get a head start.  I typically plant the winter cover crops no later than the second week of September; any later and the tender young plants will not fare well against the early frosts.

Oats were sown beneath the tomatoes in mid-July.

Next year I will experiment with more mid-season undersown cover crops using legumes such as dwarf white clover.  The clover will act as a living mulch that should reduce the slug problems I had this year using leaf mulch beneath the plants. 

Garden Successes and Failures

2013 was an interesting garden year here in central Connecticut.  A lingering and cold spring warmed into a very dry May that was classified as a moderate drought.  June brought heavy rains to the party, followed by a scorching July.  August was a blessing of a month; the warm days and cool nights enveloped us in the glorious remnants of summer while hinting at the splendor of the upcoming autumn.

Of course, the only thing normal about weather is that it is never normal, and we gardeners simply take it in stride and plant many varieties in the knowledge that some will fail and some will succeed.  So, I present to you, select garden successes and failures of 2013!

The Good

Delicious.

Eggplant!  Oh, the glorious eggplant!  This was the first year I grew the purple globes, and I was rewarded with two plants that just produced and produced some more.  The variety was Galine.  I'm growing these guys again next year.

Heirloom tomatoes...I grew Cherokee Purple and Pink Brandywine.  Cherokee wins hands-down for flavor, color and texture over any other variety that I have grown.  I will confidently state that one of my mid season Cherokees was the finest tomato I have ever eaten.  It totally ruined me in that I will never enjoy another store bought tomato for the rest of my life.  This tomato will be the garden dragon that I will chase for years to come.  Yup, that good.  Also, the Honeydrop Cherry tomatoes (not heirlooms) made a fine showing for the second season in a row with an endless supply of sweet orange/yellow fruits that were always eaten before they made it into the kitchen.


Snap beans, lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, and broccoli (finally!) produced very well this year.

The Bad (that's harsh...let's just say The Mediocre!)
The garlic crop came in early, small, and somewhat bland.  I can't complain because I received free seed last year.  I did make a sweet garlic braid, which I count as a success!

The Garlic Whisperer.

Spring-planted turnips performed very poorly, but the July planting made it to the table in fine fashion.  The rutabagas and cabbage took forever to get going, but the rains of June helped spur growth, and the results were quite tasty.

My first rutabaga.

I will not grow Cosmonaut Volkov tomatoes again.  The plants were slow to mature and prone to blight, and the fruits were somewhat bland with a weak red color.  That said, they were tastier than 95% of supermarket tomatoes, so it's all relative, folks.  But now I'm chasing that dragon, you see, and I have no room in my garden for this.  Life's too short to drink cheap beer and eat shitty tomatoes.

The Ugly
Peas, golden beets, and sweet corn were abject failures.  I made multiple plantings of each and experienced near total germination failures.  I understand the peas.  The poor seeds were subject to cold and rain and then total heat and drought.  By June, I mercifully pulled the few plants that grew and sowed a cover crop of buckwheat.  One or two plants produced peas.  Naturally, they were the sweetest and most tender peas I have ever grown...a pure tease of what could have been.

Rainbow chard...a pretty picture in the "ugly" paragraph.

I had a tough year for summer squash.  I ate exactly one patty pan squash and one zucchini before the plants fell prey to vine borers and powdery mildew.  Last year I was overrun with these fruits.  Funny how these things cycle from year to year.

My peppers all got worms before they ripened.  Oh well.  There is always next year.

The Take Home Message
I learned so much in the garden this year.  I tried growing eggplant, onion, leeks, parsnips, rutabaga, and turnips for the first time and got tasty harvests of each.  I finally beat the weeds by using hoeing techniques I read about in Eliot Coleman's essential garden book, The New Organic Grower.  I spent about 20 minutes a month weeding my 400 square foot garden, without having to bend over or pull a weed by hand.  I improved irrigation techniques and relieved a lot of drought stress that I believe my garden has suffered in years past.  I experimented with custom-made fertilizer mixtures that stemmed from a laboratory analysis of the nutrient content of my soil. I'm pretty excited for next year...I've expanded my garden by another 560 square feet and tilled in 750 square feet of my grandparents' backyard.  It's all growing a cover crop of rye and vetch right now and will be part of next year's grand experiment in gardening!  Stay tuned!

Some of it looks perfect.  Some of it looks funky.  But it's all organic and all tasty!

Garden Technology

I constructed some very simple garden tech this summer.  This equipment has really helped me out and has set the stage for next year's improvements.

My favorite tool this summer was a simple impulse sprinkler that I hose-clamped to a metal sign post.  I spent the money on an all-metal sprinkler because I was tired of breaking the crappy plastic ones.  The added height of the sign post allowed the sprinkler to cover more area with fewer moves.  That said, I found the effective watering radius to be about 15 feet.  I used a plastic rain gauge to accurately measure the amount of water I was putting on the garden.  I aimed for 1 inch of water every 4-5 days.  The rain gauge, of course, measured rain, so I was able to tailor my irrigation in consideration of the natural rainfall during a given 4 day period.

Next year I would like to hook up 3 or 4 of these in series to irrigate the whole garden with minimal effort.  The disadvantage of the impulse sprinklers is that there are water losses to evaporation, it is reliant on chlorinated tap water, and the plant leaves get wet and are more susceptible to fungal diseases.  I'm not (yet) willing to invest in a drip irrigation system, but I might be temped if I can increase the capacity of my rainwater storage system.

Which brings me to my next piece of garden tech, my rain barrel!  I've had a plastic 55-gallon barrel sitting in the garage for years, and I finally got around the constructing a rain catchment.  I used an electric drill with a hole-saw to make the cutouts for the spigot and overflow.  I used an electric jig saw to cut out the opening for the downspout.  I used simple PVC piping for the overflow.  I purchased a brass hose bib (spigot) from Home Depot and a plastic bulkhead fitting from Tractor Supply.  The bulkhead fitting is the key to a watertight connection since it has rubber gaskets that make a tight seal to the barrel and is threaded to accept the spigot.  Don't try threading the spigot directly into the plastic barrel or it will surely leak.  The debris screen is a colander that was sacraficed for the cause.  I assembled this in about 30 minutes.

  

I used the rain barrel mostly for field-washing vegetables from the garden (always followed by a tap water rinse in the kitchen), irrigating the blueberry bushes, washing out the compost bucket, and hand washing after yard work.  It would be easy enough to link together several barrels to increase my storage capacity so that I could experiment with a no-pressure drip irrigation system in the garden.

Click on the images below to link to Amazon if you want to buy some of the components and tools to build your own rain barrel.  Find the plastic drum locally, if you can.  The shipping will cost more than the barrel.  Just make sure the drum hasn't held toxic materials!!!

Rain Barrel Components

The last bit of garden tech is decidedly low tech.  My old pallet compost bin rotted away, so I made up a new one with four pallets and some baling wire.  Wiring the pallets together was much faster than using screws, and allows me the flexibility to easily open up the bin to shovel out compost.

What garden tech made your gardening easier and more fun this summer?  Please share your innovations!

Making Biochar

One of my garden experiments this year was to make biochar to increase my soil's capacity to retain nutrients.  Soils have varying abilities to hold elements such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, copper, boron, zinc, and manganese that are necessary for healthy plants.  Imagine that soil is the (-) end of a big Energizer Battery.  Most of the chemical nutrients are the (+) end of the battery.  Soil with a lot of stable organic material (humus), clay, or biochar (a fancy term for finely-ground charcoal) has more (-) battery ends and attracts more (+) nutrients and prevents the nutrients from leaching away during heavy rains.  Plants, a.k.a. nature's biochemical wizards, obtain their nutrition from this soil battery.  This whole battery concept is known as the soil's Total Cation Exchange Capacity (TCEC - a topic for another day...and for hardcore science/garden nerds).  It's all about nutrient dense gardening.  For more reading on TCEC and soil nutrients, check out Steve Solomon's book The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient Dense Food.  I sent a soil sample to an agricultural laboratory and found that my garden is a pretty weak battery.

So, in addition to the regular applications of compost, I will add biochar to the garden next season as part of my ongoing effort to build powerful soil.  My source of charcoal is the leftover briquettes from my last barbecue.  I grind the briquettes into a fine powder using a rock and store the resulting biochar in a 5-gallon bucket.

I also have quite a bit of tree bark left over from woodsplitting.  The bark makes a nice campfire and produces ample charcoal that is easy to grind (when fully extinguished, of course!).  I maximize the amount of charcoal by dousing the fire with water rather than letting it burn down to ash.  I think it's so cool that a byproduct from one operation becomes the input for another.  There's no waste...just resource cycling.

I layer biochar into the compost heap rather than adding it directly to the garden.  Based on my research, this step is critical.  Raw biochar has to be "charged" with nutrients and biological life in order to make it effective in the garden, otherwise it can inhibit plant growth for a year or two.  The compost heap is loaded with nutrients, bacteria, and fungi and is a great place to age the char for a year or two.

Biochar is also a simple way to sequester carbon, since the char molecules will persist in the soil for hundreds or thousands of years without releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  Pre-Colombian Amazonian farmers used biochar to fortify notoriously poor rain forest soils.  These ancient farmlands are still fertile as a result of biochar.  Let's see if it works in my garden!

Summer!

Zukes!  Yikes!

Three Sisters.

Colorful mopheads.

Gettin' bigger by the day.  AKA - dog's eye view of the garden.

Keep doin' your thang, little bee.

Food is good.

Book Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma

I recently devoured a terrific book by Michael Pollan entitled The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Now, this book was released in 2007 so I’m a bit behind the ball, but Pollan’s message strikes such a deep chord with me that I feel I need to spread it around.  Last summer, I crossed this great country on a motorcycle (read about it here) and, having never seen the Midwest except from the seat of a jetliner, was shocked and more than a bit dismayed to experience firsthand the American industrial agricultural machine.  I witnessed field after field, mile after mile, and DAY after DAY of nothing but corn and soybean!  Yes, I understand that we are a nation of 300,000,000 people and need vast amounts of food, but the utter lack of biodiversity across an entire region just confounded and contradicted every bit of knowledge that I have gained in my studies in biology and environmental science.  Now, I know that as kid from the suburbs of Connecticut, my critique of American farming may ring hollow in the ears of those living in the farm belt, but for crying out loud, do we really need to be injecting pure anhydrous ammonia into our soil to fertilize our crops?  How could we have gone so far astray?

Well, apparently I’m not the only one who pauses to think about our food in such a light.  In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan essentially investigates the various ways in which Americans produce, process, and consume food.  Naturally, he starts out with a bang and dives right into a dissection of the vast corporate agri-business that supplies the majority of our food, with the discussion centered on the exploits of the humble (or not so humble) corn plant.  Through the “miracle” of modern agricultural and food science, the corn plant has become the foundation of our processed food system in which a grain of corn is broken down into basic molecules and synthetically reassembled into much of the “food” available at the local supermarket.  Take a look at anything with a nutrition label and a list of ingredients – much of the stuff that you can’t pronounce is probably manufactured from corn.  I won’t even get into his descriptions of industrial meat production, but I’ve seen the feedlots in Kansas and can vouch for his tale.  Why so much corn, you might ask?  Pollan hints, no, jabs at various government policies and market conditions that drive farmers closer to the brink of financial extinction to supply large corporate grain processors with ever cheaper raw materials.  The unwritten message is, “Gee, I bet these processing corporations can afford to purchase some pretty influential congressmen on Capitol Hill”.  The written message is that the industrial agricultural system, with the backing of the United States government, endeavors to transform petroleum into food at the expense of fair economy, the environment, and our health.  Do heart disease, obesity, and diabetes ring a bell?  They're all linked to industrial food.  Pollan takes the stance not that of the typical tree-hugging enviro-conspiracy theorist, but of a horrified, intelligent observer looking into the system as an outsider.  Skeptical?  Read it.  Your library probably has a copy on the shelf right now.

Pollan ventures next into the burgeoning "organic foods" market, with a focus on the type of organic goods that you might buy at Whole Foods.  The results of his investigations are disappointing but not surprising.  As you might suspect, the organic food industry is, for the most part, just that - an industry.  Yes, lettuce may be grown without petroleum-based fertilizers and chickens may not be fed antibiotics, but the system still suffers from monocultured fields, crowded animal feed lots, and intercontinental transportation of foods (carbon footprint, anyone?).  Pollan cites the example of an “organic TV dinner” as the ultimate hypocrisy of the organic food movement.  There is redemption, though, in his exploration of the “beyond organic” food movement.  In the most enlightening chapters, Pollan visits a Virginia farm where one visionary farmer studies and applies the rhythms of nature to his cattle and chicken operation.  The farm, by Pollan’s description, is really such a beautiful ecosystem that I won’t attempt to paraphrase – just read the book already, eh?

The last chapter focuses of Pollan’s efforts to serve a meal entirely of his own creation, and by that I mean he hunts the boar, picks the mushrooms, grows the lettuce - you get the picture.  Delicious yet time consuming and, he admits, just as impractical for modern life as the industrial system is deleterious to the environment.  The compromise, he argues, should be somewhere in between. 

My overall take on the book is that it confirms what I already suspected about industrial food, but Pollan blows me away with his detailed research and engaging writing style.  The Omnivore’s Dilemma left me disgusted with the current state of affairs, hopeful with the promise of ecology-based local farming, and fearful of the government’s reaction to alternative food movements that challenge their corporate partners.  (In what backwards world do live when locally-produced vegetable, dairy, and meat is considered “alternative”?)  So what are your thoughts on this subject?  Do you eat?  (That’s a rhetorical question, folks…)  Do you know where your food comes from?  Are you a thoughtful consumer?  How do you rate the tradeoffs between nutrition and cost?  Would you be willing to support local farms?  Do you believe that your food dollars may be more influential than any vote you cast in a ballot box?

Farmer Hippie, How Does Your Garden Grow?

Two posts in two days, wow, kid's on a roll!

It's only early June but the garden beds at the Woods Hippie homestead are covered in lush vegetation and we've already enjoyed some of the spring crop.  I feel as if I have been working the garden for months, because, as it turns out, I have!  The early season bed was seeded in late March and early April with peas, carrots, radishes, chard, and lettuce...the usual cool season contenders.  The peas were content to stay snug in the soil until well into April when they all apparently got the memo and sprouted with vigor.  Now, the "bush" peas stand nearly three feet tall and I'm constantly pinching the growing tips to inhibit further upward growth and to promote flowering.  We've enjoyed several weeks of SPICY radish slices in our fresh romaine salads.  I will never voluntarily purchase a store radish again after tasting these little red delights, the flavor is incomparable.

The garden, circa May 16.

Starting to fill in!

The summer bed was seeded with bush snap beans and basil just after Mother's Day.  Around the same time, I prepared my very first Three Sisters garden, which is a Native American companion planting technique with corn, beans, and squash.  The theory has it that the corn provides a trellis for the pole beans (I chose runner beans), the beans provide nitrogen for the heavy-feeding corn, the corn provides shade for the delicate squash, and the squash, with their broad leaves and prickly vines, serve as a living mulch and critter deterrent for the garden.  For the squash, I planted a variety including butternut, pumpkin, zucchini, cucumber, and melon.  I started some seeds indoors under a grow light and planted some seeds directly in the ground.  The plants started indoors met with mixed results once hardened off and planted outdoors; I'd say 60% survived the transplant.  The direct-seeded plants were nearly universally successful, though the surviving transplants have a bit of a edge, size-wise.  The corn, as evidenced in the photos, have almost 18" of height at this point.

I am blessed in that I have two neighbors with green thumbs, both of whom cultivate heirloom and odd-duck varieties of tomato and gift me their extra seedlings.  I can't keep track of the varieties growing in my beds, but I think I have some Cherokee Purple, Sweet 100, Yellow Pear, Big Boy, and Better Boy.  The bigger plants are already flowering!

Perhaps a weedwack is in order, but those weeds are tasty Lamb's Quarters!

As you might expect from a guy who's blog moniker is "Woods Hippie", the garden is cultivated organically.  I apply quite a bit of compost every year, though this year I did add some bonemeal-based fertilizer to add some other nutrients, and I recently applied a hydrolized fish fertilizer.  The plants have responded well to the light fertilization, and I have yet to see any significant insect problems (knock on wood).

So, for now, things are looking good as the spring crop wraps up and the majority of the garden is settling in for the long haul.  The seedlings are now established, which takes off some of the initial worry, now just as long as everything withstands the powerful thunderstorms that have been rolling through and I remember to water every now and then, hopefully we'll be looking at a nice harvest in a few months!  

Grandma keeps an eye on the house in the form of a rose bush...

Have a great weekend!

Aimless Goals for 2011

Tired of winter?  Just go to Hawaii, right now.

About once a year, whilst locked in mid-winter’s icy grasp, I find myself daydreaming about the indelible pleasures of the other seasons – warm breezes wafting through an open window, falling asleep on a mountaintop in the sun, and, most importantly, not having to put on all my clothing to poop the dog.  Now is the time when I lay out my grandiose plans for the upcoming year; few of which ever come to fruition but all of which look good on paper in February.  The promise of warmer days always seems to fill me with energy for tackling various summer projects, but even as I type this I realize that some of this stuff is just plain work.  And, I always seem to forget that a crucial eight hours of most days are filled with another type of work that is necessary to keep the grocery spigot flowing.  Oh well.  Without further ado, I present my perpetual list of goals that I commit myself to every winter and never seem to follow through on during the summer.

Garden

One of the more successful garden years.

My wife and I have kept a garden pretty much every year since we bought our house, with varying results.  As with most things in life, the success of a garden is directly proportionate to the amount of effort invested.  I’ve learned that just throwing seeds in the ground once the last frost passes is not a great way to ensure a bountiful crop; I really need to focus on starting seeds indoors while simultaneously prepping the beds with compost and other amendments, and then keeping that focus to keep the garden watered and free of weeds.  This all sounds relatively straightforward, which it is, but these early spring tasks coincide with the spring skiing season in the North Country, arguably the most enjoyable time to be on a ski hill.  Also, the warming temperatures in southern New England signal the return of two of my other favorite distractions, bicycling and motorcycling.  Anyway, I want to devote some more time to the garden this year as I want to try canning vegetables.  That seems silly since commercially-canned produce is available at a fraction of the cost of what I’m going to lay out for a pressure canner and supplies, but there is something aesthetically-pleasing and anti-establishmentarian about producing my own food that tickles my anarchist sensibilities.

Fishing

The Woods Hippie on a Vineyard striper mission with Hoagie.

I have a veritable sporting goods store in my basement, including a practically unused 5-weight fly rod, two ultralight spinning setups, and a formerly well-utilized inshore saltwater spinning setup.  All have spent the last few years doing little more than putting out the fishing “vibe” around the house.  I live fifteen minutes from one of the finest trout streams in New England, and I could easily cast a few flies every day before work, but then again maybe I should be pulling weeds from the garden.  I also dream about rigging up a way to transport rods via motorcycle or bicycle because adding another sport just makes everything tastier.  The fishing aspirations may be the first ones to be realized, because Mrs. Hippie always expresses a mild interest in casting a line, so any opportunity to get her out in the woods or streams is a bonus.

Hunting

Mrs. Hippie ain't afraid to handle some iron, either.

I have always enjoyed wing-shooting and small game hunting but have not devoted much time to these pursuits in recent years, mostly because I've been obsessed with bicycling and trail running during the onset of hunting season.  I've already purchased my hunting license for this year and submitted my bid for Connecticut's lottery for shotgun deer season.  I have never killed a deer but I am excited to spend some good time in the pre-season scoping out terrain.  Most importantly, I'm hopeful for a freezer full of venison steaks and stew meat to carry me through the next winter.  I have a slew of delicious venison recipes that I've perfected on other people's deer meat, this year it's my turn!

Home Improvement

Yeah right.








Enjoy the rest of the winter folks, spring is coming fast.