A Must Have Tool For Any Small Gardener

I am not usually one to push products but I will admit I have found one that I do really like.  You really can't go wrong having your own personal little greenhouse on hand to start seedlings you can't find in stores or maybe you just enjoy the whole process of starting a plant from seed.  I have found one of these to be tremendously easy to use and very easy to set up. Everything just snaps together quickly and it stays together.  The only real complaint I have about the greenhouse is how light it is.

Where I live we frequently get some very strong winds which would blow one of these away or simply destroy is it before you can go oh &^%*.  Luckily that can be easy to get around by simply placing it in a sheltered location or weighting it down as needed.

If you live in a very windy area I would suggest both just to make double sure as you don't want your greenhouse and what it has in it to fly off.  Other than the weight/wind issue this is a must have item for anyone wanting to get the jump on summer gardening.

Seedlings are coming along nicely.

To date I have successfully started Popcorn, Roma tomatoes, cantaloupe Pumpkins, and Winter Squash in my handy 4 tier green house.  The seedling are coming along nicely and very soon I will be placing them in the garden proper.  I am thinking next week on my next set of days off I will be at least planting the popcorn, winter squash and pumpkins in the garden but will have to wait yet on the tomatoes, peppers, and watermelon seedlings yet.

Unfortunately depending on how you look at it I am now having to regulate the temperature in my greenhouse more now the the weather is warming up.  The hitch with this whole thing is I am gone from my greenhouse and garden 4-5 days a week so that makes daily management an issue.  Hopefully a solution will present itself sometime in the next few days to this dilemma.

That is all I got for now so enjoy the pictures

Grow Popcorn Grow

Making Everything Grow

Welcome to the real world pumpkin

 

So I didn't kill my plants and my cob beds are done

I received my first confirmation today that I am not a failure as a gardener.  To date I have confirmed sprouts of radish, turnips, and kohlrabi.  Lets just say I relieved that they finally sprouted.  I was getting concerned that the cold snap we had in my area combined with the rain/snow mix it dropped would have somehow affected the seeds in the soil.  But it looks like all it did was slow things down a bit at the beginning of the season.  Just look at those little guys poking there heads above the soil.  For me that is one of the most exciting parts of spring when the seeds you place in the ground finally come up and you know that spring is really here.

Ok so not only do I have plants coming up but I also finally completed my cob garden bed as least as far as I am going to complete them. They ended up having an average height and width of about 5-8 inches.  It definitely was a learning experience throughout.  I thought I had a good soil right of the bat because it displayed a good ratio of clay to aggregates and my initial block test was promising.

I was so wrong...

So I started shaping the walls in the morning and by the afternoon they had cracks in them an inch thick.  I saw this and I thought to myself what am I doing wrong.  Well after consulting my resource Building with Cob and online sources as well it became obvious that I did not have enough sand and other aggregates.  So off to the wholesale soil place I went to pick up construction grade sand.  With sand in hand I made some test balls of clay sand mixtures.  It turns out after it was all said and done I needed 1 five gallon bucket of sand per 3 five gallon buckets of sub soil to make a cob that cracked less.

I also discovered along the way that drying speed and compaction were also critical to cob holding together. So I started stomping on and otherwise beating the crap out of my walls with my hands, feet and boards to really cement the layers together.  The extra compaction along with the slower drying courtesy of my tarp will produce a better, stronger cob.

Hopefully....

I am honestly still in the drying process of this whole thing so its at the point of wait and see.

Well that's all I got for you for now.

Oh here are some pictures too.

Beating the cob into submission my poor hands

Some cob blocks I tried making using forms, not my most successful endeavour

Making it look pretty

Getting Started for the summer

Ahh you know spring is in the air when you get your cool season veggies like spinach, beets, and kohlrabi in the ground and then it snows two days later.  But never fear they shouldn't take any harm from getting a little snow on them considering they haven't even started growing.

But it really reminds a fellow just how temperamental the weather can be in my neck of the woods.  You never really know from day to day whether it is going to be nice or not.  All you can do really is just plant and hope for the best.  It also doesn't hurt to plant things that have a known tolerance for cold and as such wont really be bothered by a few swings in temperature.

It was funny though to be out and about town today though and seeing all the stores that have home and garden centers and outdoor plants for sale just scurrying trying to cover plants up or bring them inside.  It did give me a certain amount of pleasure know that my plants were safe and suited to the climate.

But the time has come for pictures and for me to stop jawing on about random things.

Here we have my new finally crafted raised garden bed made from recycled lumber that has been filled with around 8 inches of soil and compost to make a nice fine growing medium.  When I got done building this and patting myself on the back for a job well done I then realized oh crap now I have to fill this thing.  About 4 trips later to pick up soil and compost I finally had it filled up enough to plant.

Lets just say my next raised beds aren't nearly this high so they will need much less soil to fill.  While having less high quality topsoil may affect my production it also defiantly doesn't hurt my wallet as much.

What you see above are my vague attempts at building with a adobe/cob in a attempt to make a garden bed that is both durable (wont rot like my wood one will) and easy to remove when it needs to be.  The nice thing about building with them (providing they hold up) is that when the time comes to move on they can be broken up soaked in water until they fall apart.  The remnants can then be spread on the yard will nothing to worry about.

The Benefits of Deep Mulching

Houston we have a weed problem

That my friends is a whole lot of weeds. Now you can spend hours digging, tilling, pulling and sweating or you can smother the little buggers with some mulch. I mean who really wants to spend time sweating in the garden when you could sit back and relax and just watch your garden grow. To help clarify what exactly deep mulching is I will be throwing some pro's and con's at you along with a basic method on how to create successful deep mulching.

The pro's of deep mulching are many and very useful. For starters you have the obvious benefits of,

• weed suppression 
• no hot sweaty labor 

But there are many other side benefits that don't come across as obvious at first glance you have,

• better moisture retention in the soil 
• adding organic matter and nutrients to the soil 
• proving habitat for beneficial soil organisms e.g. worms 
• looks better than bare dirt 
• watering is easier 
• no mud when you are working in the garden 
• can plant right away in spring, no tilling needed 

With the benefits of deep mulching it is hard to believe that there is actually any detractors at all but alas there are a few.

Con's of Deep Mulching

It can be a fair amount of work in its own right. In order to successfully use deep mulching you have to be able to source enough material to cover your garden space. This can be tricky sometimes depending on where you live, what resources you have available to you and how ambitious you are in your mulching practices. Another thing to take into consideration is what may be on the material you are adding to your garden.

Take lawn clippings for example; if you source lawn grass from an area that has been heavily sprayed with pesticides or herbicides you could accidentally be adding harmful chemical to your garden. This in turn could affect your gardening success and what you are able to grow for years to come.

One of the other con's to deep mulching is also ironically one of the pro's to the system as well. Since you so handily providing a home for beneficial organisms you can also provide a home for harmful one like nematodes and slugs which can decimate a crop very quickly.

Getting Started With Deep Mulching

Now there are as many ways and materials to use to start deep mulching as there are gardeners out there. One of the most common methods that I am familiar with is as follows,

• Start with a weed free or very small weed garden bed that is loose and friable.
• Take brown corrugated cardboard that is free of staples, glues and tape and lay on the garden bed wherever you will not be planting crops. 
• Cover the cardboard at least 12 inches, but you can go up to 24 inches deep with an assortment of mulching materials. (straw, leaves, grass clippings etc.). 
• Water the area heavily and let sit for anywhere from 2-4 weeks before planting. 
• After the mulch has cooled from its first composting session you are now free to plant your garden. 
• Maintain the mulch thickness by adding material as needed. 

Deep mulching can be a very useful tool in any gardeners tool bag. It comes with many benefits and just a few detractors and can be a great addition to your gardening regime. If you give this method a try let me know how is works for you so we can continue to learn more about deep mulching and whether it is effective in your particular area.

My First Steps Building With Earth

So today I embarked on what will most likely be a long but hopefully fruitful journey with earthen building.  I am starting out small and slow with using a adobe/cob technique to build the walls for my raised garden beds.  I will just jump right in here and say that I have taken shortcuts and done somethings just completely wrong.  For example the walls do not have any foundation to speak off but their only going to be 12 inches tall at the most so good foundations are not really a must.  I am also going to leave part of the walls completely unprotected to the elements.

I do this out of a perverse sense of curiosity of wanting to see how long it will take for the walls to break down and fall apart.  This will be a good teaching moment for me as it will give me hands on insights on what I am doing wrong when I am mixing and setting the earth.

The garden beds will be made/finished in 3 separate ways,

• Straight earth mixture shaped and applied like cob and left exposed to the elements
• Traditional cob mixture with straw or other fibers mixed into earth mixture and left exposed
• Tradition cob mixture with straw and other fibers mixed into and plastered with a earthen/lime render

Now historically the most durable will be the last one as it will have the most strength elements and protection incorporated into it.  By doing 3 separate types of building I will learn how to build with cob by making a lot of mistakes on the way.

Even though I have only been at it one day I have already learned to apply bread making techniques to cob mixing.  Making sure you have enough soil and water on hand to balance each other and get a nice stiff cob mixture that can be moved and shaped is a good way to go.  Plus even though I have a background dealing with soils I still manage to mess up this first batch of building.  According to tests I had done I had a good soil for cob build around 21% clay to 79% aggregate materials.  So I figured ok I can just go ahead and start building without adding any more aggregates.

Well I was so wrong....

As you can see in the picture despite my best efforts I have extensive cracking in my cob walls right off the get go.  This is occurring because I have to much clay and not enough sand/aggregate in the mixture, at least that is what the literature is telling me.  So now I have to start over from scratch and start testing various mixtures with more sand mixed in.

Wish me luck