Things are growing

So maybe March 13 wasn't too early to plant my seeds! Things are growing wonderfully this sunny spring and I couldn't be happier that I took the gamble. The previous two years I planted on April 1st and was utterly disappointed. That could partly be attributed to my chickens scratching a lot of things up, though!  The peas look wonderful; they're about 4 inches tall, and I have others, planted later, that just emerged. I've always been bad at succession planting peas, but this year I already have three batches going. I plan on planting another patch in the middle of May and another mid-June to see what happens with fall peas.

The spinach was the first thing to emerge and they're still going strong. This is the first batch, planted 6 weeks ago; batch number two is 3 weeks old and is in cotyledon stage.

I love garlic greens! I planted the garlic on the left in a hoop house in March to eat for greens. On the right is the garlic I planted outdoors in the fall for bulbs.

This is my first year doing turnips. Back in Northern Maine we call them naveau, which is supposed to be French, but when I looked it up just now, it's apparently navet. I guess that's a dialect for you! Anyway, these guys are hardy! After this photo I thinned them out and transplanted the thinnings to an uncovered bed.

Here's an onion from last year's stash. I had buried a bunch in late fall to eat, root cellar-style, in the winter. This one got left behind and is now leaving the newly planted onions behind! I haven't figured out how to get big bulbs yet, but I sure do enjoy eating the greens! The over-wintered kale has new, tender growth. A couple of days ago when I was doing my first round of weeding for the year, I found a fresh, fat, carrot, which was delicious. I definitely am going to plant a large bed of carrots in May to root-cellar in place for winter eating.

And my amphibian project.....it's coming along! I was amazed when I went up to the garden in the pouring rain today to see the stream was going full force! I put in some large flat rocks at the lower end of this and they make a cool little water fall. I need to get some better pictures when it's not pouring, but here's what I could get. I've been doing a lot of natural (wild plants) gardening the past few days.  More on that next time.....

 

A Personal Farming History

Where my Pepere (grandpa) grew up

 If you want to go to the beginning, the plot of land my parents live on has been in the Ouellette family since the 1840s. It's in a small northern Maine town full of Acadians who fled the British and settled along the St. John River. Potato farming was the mainstay but, like many families, mine opted out of farming in the early 1970s.
 
My grandfather, who was also our neighbor, always had a large garden when I was a kid. My experience was quite simple and peripheral. I planted big seeds--cucumbers and peas--because I was small. He wouldn't let me walk barefoot in the soil because he said it would give me warts. I loved crawling under his bed to fetch more green tomatoes to put on the windowsill to turn red. And to bike over to his house and eat salted cucumber slices by the bowlful. To pull carrots from the sand-filled barrel in winter, to dump bucketfuls of potatoes into the trunk of his car. I planted, picked, and ate. It was all so easy then! In high school I also spent a few weeks each year commercially harvesting potatoes, as school was let out so kids could work.
 

At my kindergarten graduation I said into the microphone that I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up. That soon vanished then resurfaced when I was 18 and sitting behind a computer writing essays for my college classes. My second semester I enrolled in science/agriculture classes and by summer I had a job at Rogers Farm, UMaine's farm site for sustainable agriculture research. I worked for a weed ecologist and a soil scientist for 3 summers collecting data. I decided I wanted to be a farmer but could do that without a degree. I kept working at the farm and changed my major so I could become a teacher "when my back wore out." I grew three crooked rows of produce my last summer there, but I never harvested it because I packed up and moved to Juneau on a whim after I broke a boy's heart.

I had a plot out at the Community Garden for my first two summers here. I cursed the ground saying, "This is just sand! How can this be called soil?" I added lots of spent brewers grain and composted manure to my plot, and I grew two bountiful gardens. Blessed was the sun those two summers!  

Enter and exit a few vagabond years of no gardening at all. I will say that I did pick berries, fiddleheads, and chicken of the woods though!

I've been living at my house for less than 4 years, and most of that time  has been putting up the actual garden infrastructure as there was no garden when we got here. I built a small compost bin, a chicken coop, and maybe 7 raised beds the first year. Since then I've built three rabbit hutches, a couple of rabbit runs, a small barn (my husband did quite a bit of this one), 7 more compost bins, a turkey coop, a smoker, various livestock feeders, stands, nest boxes, 3 greenhouses, and 54 raised beds of various sizes.

Huck on the Muck

Our first Chicks

I've come a long way from that first summer where literally not even weeds would grow. After that summer I looked back on my two years at the Community Garden and realized that the sand was what I was missing. The muck that got dumped out of the dump truck-- yes the entirely full dump truck--looked like soil but just packed into an impenetrable crust devoid of pore space and was inhospitable to all life. At least the chickens were fun and laid lots of eggs.


So the second year I decided I needed to build soil. I mixed the muck together with lots of sand, sea weed, ground up shells, horse manure, leaves, and chicken coop litter. I think I filled six raised beds for that second summer and built more as I had time that summer and fall. They take a long time to fill. I've hauled a dump truck load of "top soil" in buckets, 10 gallons at a time up the hill behind my house. All 20,000 pounds of it. 13,000 pounds of sand. 10 gallons at a time. Maybe 100 totes of seaweed and leaves. 100 gallons of rabbit poop. Hundreds of totes of barn muckings. Twenty cubic feet of finished compost. Everything up the hill, 10 gallons at a time. You'd think I'd have bigger muscles....I guess that year I did. I also added more chickens to our laying flock, started the meat rabbit thing, raised four "guard" geese (which we promptly ate), two Thanksgiving turkeys, two sheep for wool, and two goats for milk. We loved eating and sharing the 75  pounds of juicy meat we got from those zany turkeys. I liked the sheep okay, but sustainability was an issue, so we passed them on. The goats gave delicious milk, but, again, they rang the bell of unsustainability.  I also didn't like being so tied down to the milking routine. We ate one and passed one on.  It was a great year of sorting through what worked and what didn't in our our situation.

I had 40 roses on this tiny first-year plant!

My third season I focused on covering almost all my beds with hoop houses. I also planted perennials and flowers, which I had never done before. I wanted both so there would be habitat for birds and bugs. I want my garden to be a ecosystem, not a plot of annuals for part of the year and a barren wasteland for the other. I also did some experimenting with growing stuff in pots in greenhouses. Lots of stuff grew. Some things didn't. Some things were going well then went bad due to my own errors. Lucky for me, it's all in my logbook and on my map.

I look forward to a new season. I put together a tiered shelf and installed movable lights so I can start some plants--my first experiment of the season. My focus this year is on succession planting the crops that worked for me last year. I'm also going to try and get the kinks out of zukes, cukes, summer squash, and strawberries. I want it to be the year of spinach and cilantro. I am going to try potatoes. I definitely won't plant a single string bean or tomato as I need a break from those battles. I'm going to plant more kale, carrots, onions, and hardy micro lettuces later in the summer to really pump up the fall/winter volume. I could go on and on but I'd rather just go work on it!

Wonderful start!

The sun is so amazing! It is so great to work in the garden in a tank top and be sweating at the beginning of April. Though the thermometer says 40 down by my house, up at the garden--in the sun--it says 80. Inside my hoop house it says 88 and I'm blasted with that greenhouse heat and smell when I stick my head in. The soil is up to 48. The seeds I planted mid-March are starting to make appearances:  Peas and spinach are an inch tall and the turnips and onions have started to sprout. No word from the chard, kale, radishes, or lettuce yet. The crocuses, tulips, rhubarb, strawberries, sorrel, gooseberries, garlic and chives have all waken to greet spring. It's such an exciting time!

spinach in hoop house

sorrel - outside

I built 7 new raised beds this spring and have 2 filled, ready to plant. Filling the beds is a slow process of collecting and hauling many ingredients up the hill and mixing them to form a semblance of soil. For this batch I used leaves, seaweed, rabbit manure, sand, muskeg muck and one bag of potting soil. I really need to find a bulk "topsoil" provider! I've been digging out a wet area of the garden and drying out the resulting muck to use as my base, hoping the other ingredients will balance it all out. I'm mostly digging the stuff out because I'm trying to make an amphibian habitat though. The area is like a shallow muskeg pond with a seeping trickle of a creek. When it rains there's actually a decent flow. I've been making the whole thing deeper, and I'm going to transplant some aquatic vegetation . I'm hoping that if I build it they will come...meaning toads, salamanders, and newts. I'm not sure how they would know about the new habitat, but I'm hopeful.  In 2003 Discovery Southeast put together this interesting report.

This week I raked the paths, collected fallen winter debris, and removed winter mulches . I stabilized my pvc hoops with actual conduit brackets and cinched up the plastic.  I'm still hauling brush and rounds from the downed trees.The garden is looking good. I have 5 of my annual beds planted to vegetables. In the next few days I hope to plant three more and get the greenhouses going. I'm going to line the greenhouse floors with flat rocks to act as heat sinks, which should help the nighttime temperature drops. I'm also trying to design a new greenhouse on posts with a grated floor to build over my heat-radiating compost bins. I'm going to have to step my carpentry skills up a notch for this one! Get out and enjoy spring!

April 2012 Composting Co-op News

Wha-hoo for spring and the thawed out hose! It's great to rinse buckets outside.

After 185 buckets, we've kept 1194 pounds of food out of the landfill! Thanks for doing your part to eliminate waste and cycle nutrients into our soil!

If you haven't heard already, I started composting for Rainbow Foods. Their staff has graciously loaded up buckets, and after one month we've kept 1015 pounds of food out of the landfill. I'll be expanding to pick up their paper waste in the very near future. I'm so happy to be working with wonderful people who are willing to make composting work in the workplace!


Housekeeping:
Please, please, please remember to take the plastic stickers off your produce. They really are plastic and really don't decompose. If you have trouble remembering, try pealing them off before you eat your fruit! It will be very tedious for me to pick thousands of produce stickers out of the finished compost.

If you forget to put your bucket out I will no longer be able to leave you a new one. The co-op is up to 20 members, and I can't keep track of who has multiple buckets. If you want to bring your missed bucket by my place you are more than welcome to, but please understand that I can't run around doing pick-ups on multiple days. Monday is the day. If you want to keep composting but your bucket is full, simply use your own (labeled) bucket.

Remember that any food or drink except for meat can go in your bucket, cooked or raw. Paper napkins, towels, and tissue are welcome! Also, if you add a scrap piece of paper or egg carton to the bottom of your bucket it makes cleaning so easy for me!

If your pesticide-free yard generates leaves, grass, or weeds, bag 'em up!



If you're interested in helping out with the project, there are a few simple ways you can:

1.  Score some buckets & lids! When you're at Costco ask at the deli--they usually give them out two at a time. You can use them when you forget to leave your bucket out, or leave them for me at pick up to give to new members
2. Tell your next-door neighbor about the co-op! Wouldn't it be neat if your whole apartment building or street composted? Most of time I spend on this project is the actual pick-up of buckets. If I can pick up two or more buckets at the same stop I can efficiently expand my services!
3. Consider composting at work! If your office/place of work is interested in composting, consider being the bucket person! I can provide you with a bucket (5 gallon if need-be) then pick it up from your house.

Thanks so much for making composting in Juneau work! If you have any questions or comments about the project, please feel free to contact me. Feedback can only help the process. Keep up the good work and have a great day!