Spring Fever

There may be snow flurries in the air, but we've got spring fever...

"It's spring fever. 

That is what the name of it is. 

And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, 

but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!" 

-Mark Twain

We've got some little sprouts shivering under the low tunnel on the raised bed, we're hoping they'll make it through.  There are lots of bright, healthy delicious looking greens standing tall in our cold frames.  With the recent rain it is a perfect place for slugs to feast and last night we pulled several big plump ones from our lettuce leaves.

Our field has been tilled and the construction of our many raised beds is underway.  My shoulder is aching from all the shoveling and shifting of soil but the work is rewarding.  The salvaged wood that we got for free from the lumber yard is all cut for the beehive.  I'll finish sanding it today before adding a coat of boiled linseed oil to act as a natural weather protection.  We've got to get the hive built and baited with lemongrass oil to attract a swarm.  I'm not sure when the best time of year to do that is but I think with all the new flowers and budding trees it wouldn't hurt to get it out sooner, rather than later.

We bought a few 10' lengths of piping to construct another more stable tunnel for one of the other raised beds we'll be working.  We'll use this second tunnel to start seedlings in flat in preparation for some warmer weather.  I'm sure the warm weather is just around the corner...right behind the snow.

Litter, litter everywhere.

I read an article today in USA today analyzing the 7.4 million pounds of marine debris collected by The Ocean Conservancy in just one day.

Here's the list:

 

2,189,252 Cigarettes/cigarette filters
1,126,774 Plastic Bags
943,233 Food wrappers/containers
912,246 Caps, lids
883,737 Plastic bottles

 

This only provides a snapshot of the type of debris and the quantity of particular items that find their way through storm drains, into waterways, and out to the ocean.  The report by the Ocean Conservancy states that 60-80% of marine debris starts out on land and that the United States yields the greatest amount of debris by far than any other country: 4,253,650 pounds! 
 
 We should be ashamed of ourselves, but instead we're busy throwing our cigarette butts out the window while drinking soda from a plastic bottle, carried from the store to our car in a plastic bag. 
Does this disgust anyone else?? Please remember, what we do in our communities has a global impact.

a 5 gallon bucket is a (wo)man's best friend!

This week we finally completed our humanure toilet.  You can get an idea of what we built by looking at this design. We modified the design a bit, adding a 2nd chamber for sawdust storage and possibly a separate container for diverting urine in the future.  Here are a few pictures:

For all intents and purposes, it looks and feels just like a normal toilet.  We've been using it for a few days now and so far I have no complaints.  Instead of flushing gallons of water down the drain every day, we just use a scoop of non-kiln dried sawdust from un-pressure treated trees (collected from a local sawmill for $2.00/trash can) as an organic cover material to control any odor.  Then, when the bucket is mostly full, we dump the entire contents onto the compost pile. 


In preparation for the first full bucket, we dug out the base of the first bin in our 3-bin compost site and put down about of foot or so of straw and leaf mulch (collected last fall).  There, the worms and bacteria and other organisms do their work--over time turning our humanure into viable compost.  Of course there's a little more too it than that, and you want to be careful to follow all the steps carefully when it comes to creating and properly aging your compost.  But those are the basics.  If you're interested in learning more, read The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. You can down the entire book for free in PDF form here: http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/

While at the sawmill we were also able to sort through a pile of scrap wood to scavenge for bee hive building materials.  Hopefully we can piece together our top-bar hive from these scraps and end cuts of boards that we diverted from the landfill and got absolutely for free. If you need something, always go straight to the source. When you cut out the middle-man (in this case, Home Depot or Lowes), you never know what you could get for next to nothing--or nothing at all! 


In the garden we took a few risks.  Last weekend, when the weather was warm we decided to plant a few cool weather crops in a permanent raised bed in the front of the house.  Sadrah's parents established these beds several years ago, so the soil is great and was already loose, fertile and ready for planting.  We added a bag of compost left over from last year to the soil and mostly planted seeds leftover from the fall planting in the cold frames.  We planted Rhubarb Chard, Mustard Greens, Winter Radish, Endive Escarole, Buttercos Romaine, Bloomsdale Spinach, Napoli Carrots, and Purple Top Turnips.  We were probably a little over anxious here, since last night the temperatures dropped down around the freezing mark and a few snow flakes drifted through the air.  The weather can be very unpredictable in our climate this time of year, but we gave it a shot hoping to get a jump on the season.  We covered the bed with a small, plastic-vented hoop house to give it a little more protection, and then added a layer of reemay (row cover) yesterday.  This is how we learn, and I'm glad to report that so far the turnips have sprouted.  Hopefully we'll see other little sprouts coming up soon.

Everything that survived the winter in the cold frames is doing well.  We've been picking a bit of mache and some other greens 1-2 times a week for wonderful salads. Today we cultivated the top layer of soil where we could and thinned our 2 rows of kale.  Thinning is a tough task--it's like killing off one of your children so the others will grow big and strong.  But it must be done or they'll all just smother each other and nothing will grow. Meanwhile, our garlic planting from last fall is showing amazing growth since we pulled back the straw mulch about 2 weeks ago.  We also covered that bed with some reemay just too give it a little protection against the cold and wind for the next few nights.  You can see the garlic plants below.



We've decided to have the main garden tilled again, so hopefully our friend down the road will be up with his little Kubota tractor in the next few days, weather permitting.  This will help dry out and loosen the soil so we can start building our raised beds and finally get to planting.  Our onion sets and potato tubers have finally arrived, so we're getting very excited to start getting things into the ground!

On our way back from the sawmill this week we happened upon a great little place called Harvest Home Organics in the Owasco Valley. Rose and her husband Doug have a beautiful 8-acre organic farm out there that we hope to visit again and learn more from all their years of experience.  We only had a few minutes to chat before rushing off to work, but I already have more questions about wind energy (they have a small windmill in their backyard) and planting schedules.  If you live in our area, definitely check them out at the Skaneateles Farmers Market this summer.

Spring is here, so now what?

We've been eagerly awaiting the passing of winter for the past 5 or so months and it seems that the last bit of snow has finally melted from our field. So now what?  I feel like I got caught up working too much and haven't made adequate plans for the impending spring which is now upon us. 

There's so much to do and oftentimes I feel like I don't even know where to start.  For the most part I feel like the point we are now at can not be taught by reading another gardening book. Now's the time to dig in, literally, and it scares the crap out of me.  It's our first full growing season independently and although my motto is more or less, 'put it in the ground and it will grow', what if it doesn't?

The snow has barely been off of the field two weeks and the deer have wasted no time helping themselves to the winter rye we planted in the fall. It hasn't had the opportunity to do much growing so now we're left to wonder whether to till it under mechanically with the aid of our neighbors Kubota tractor or if we'll be able to turn it over by hand and work it in while making the garden beds.

This brings us to our next concern. Though the ground may be workable enough to plant some of our earliest crops, our garden is not yet prepared.  As the space was only cleared of brush in the fall we have no established beds made.  Our plan is to make an informal 'raised' bed garden.  We'll start by settling on the positioning and size of the beds then use sticks as stakes to rope off the area where the beds will be.  We're planning to turn the loose soil from the 'paths' into the beds, essentially lowering the pathway and raising the beds.  We hope this will work.  I'd say we could get to work on this immediately once we solve the till/no-till problem, but it's awfully wet out.  Can this type of work be done before the soil dries up and becomes more workable? Will any damage be caused to the soil structure if we do decide to brave the mud and work the field?

Then there are the deer. Pesky and persistant they will be competing with us for the food in our garden.  Part of me says that the deer will find a way to eat some of the crops no matter what kind of deterrant you install and it's just a part of growing your own vegetables. Pots and pans clanging from tree branches glinting in the sun probably stand no chance when pitted against deer which aren't afraid of much of anything anymore.  So how do we combat this?  Of course we'll trying pots and pans and shiny objects, dryer sheets and any other wacky method we read about, but what else should we/can we do?  Row cover certainly will help while also providing added protection until the weather is stable. But what about fencing?  How high would it need to be and would it actually be worth the potential investment/effort?

Most importantly is the planting. What to plant, when to plant, where to plant.  What is the sun's pattern over the field and what does that mean in terms of where to plant the crops that like partial sun vs. full sun.  Which plants grow best when interplanted along with others? What types of trellising to we need? How do we manage succession planting, etc?

It's all very exciting and very overwhelming and this only scratches the surface of the running farm to-do list that tear through my brain like a frieght-train.  I quit one of my two jobs today and in doing so took the first step towards simplifying my responsibilities and focusing on accomplishing the aspects of my life that I really want.  With less demand on my time from 'work' I can put more effort into my real work which right now is figuring out how to navigate the spring-time challenges of the first year farmer.

Cold Frame Mold Factory

We continue to have more above-freezing days and more sunlight has been been shining on the area where our cold frames are located.  The only problem is that the cold frames were nowhere to be seen.  Our most recent, and only storm to speak of this season, dropped close to 2 feet of snow and our cold frames were buried somewhere beneath it.

There was so much snow up on the hill that I had trouble even locating the first cold frame.  When I finally did get it uncovered I noticed that the top pane of glass had a big impact wound that spread out into the opposite corners.  I figure I must have damaged it while digging it out.  Mike soon joined me in the digging and it wasn't long before 5 of the 6 frames were uncovered without any further damage.  But where was the 6th frame?

We dug and dug where we thought the frame should be and then we dug some more.  We struck dirt but no frame and were both quite confused.  Neither of us could remember with certainty where the 6th frame was.  I sent Mike inside to look back at our 'map' from the fall.  Amazed at how easily we managed to forget something as simple as the placement of our cold frames reminded us of the importance of keeping accurate records... much to my dismay.

Once the bulk of the snow was removed it didn't take long for the sun to melt the remaining powder that covered the tops of the frames.  Most of the vegetables inside looked decent with the mache continuing to be the real winter star, just as Eliot Coleman had promised. 

Most of the greens continue to do well and some even appear harvestable despite the consistent cold and snow cover, but others are being conquered by mold.  The mold is mostly on the dirt itself but there are several areas where patches of mold look like it is taking over some otherwise healthy leaves.

We're not sure why this is happening or what to do about it.  Is it due to a lack of sunlight or daylight in general - too much time buried under the remnants of the last storm?  Is it a result of excess moisture in the frames coupled with a warmish environment thus causing hospitable breeding grounds for mold? When the weather was warmer we did notice a lot of condensation build-up on the insides of the frames.  Maybe it's a matter of airflow and circulation inside the frames.  We're not sure.  For the time being while we're getting some nice sunny days we're experimenting with venting the frames, not so much for temperature regulation, but for air-flow.  If this doesn't seem to impact the mold at all maybe we'll just try removing it to see if it comes back.

In other news, today we finally finished cutting the pieces we need to construct our saw-dust toilet for humanure compost.  Check out the simple and affordable design we're building here.  There's an alternative to dumping 5 gallons of otherwise drinkable water along with incredibly nutrient rich material down the drain every time you flush. Read the book that started it all (for FREE).

Resilient Greens

So I've got a bit of bloggers block.  There are lots of things I'd like to write about: the challenge to select seeds for our first season of planting, new gardening/green organizations we've found in the Syracuse area, and a review of different natural products we've tried and have now regularly incorporated into our lives, among other topics.  It seems that I have put blogging on the back burner as I enter into the 3rd week stretch without a day off between my two jobs.  Those topics will make it here, eventually, once the blog block has passed.

In the meantime, here are a few photos to keep things current.  We haven't been hit with any of the mega-storms that have buried the east coast with snow.  But in CNY the snow is a constant and an inch or two every day quickly adds up.  On a rare day in January when the sun decided to shine I decided it would be a good opportunity to dig out the cold frames and see if anything was surviving underneath. 

Under the heavy blanket of snow that covered our cold frames we happily found some resilient greens.  I'm hesitant to say that they were thriving, but they were certainly existing.  Even if they are a little too icy to harvest, the hope is that they will remain alive, though dormant, for the rest of the winter and bounce back as the weather starts to warm in the spring. 

There is a bit of frost evident around the edges but they still look very green!

Now it's late February and the sun returned for a fleeting moment.  We went to check out the frames again and though they are still surrounded by two feet of snow, through the windows we can see signs of life.

Mostly everything still looks as good as it did in January and some things, like the mache actually appear to have grown some.  I think it's pretty awesome that we are able to maintain our little winter garden even here, in the winter tundra of Skaneateles, NY!

The Barnheart Diagnosis

We've recently learned that we've become infected with a disease. It started as a mild case, early on-set you might call it, however our symptoms have become progressively worse and no longer something we can ignore. I also fear that it may be highly contagious.

Though we cannot trace the exact source of our infection I do believe it struck me first and after months of direct contact I passed it along to Mike. I think it's something I picked up in South America, although I have most likely been a carrier of the disease all my life. Maybe I should have been vaccinated, but I do not believe that even toxic vaccinations could have prevented this infection.

It's called Barnheart. I know, it sounds serious. And it is. It is a sharp depression and feeling of longing, coupled by irrational thoughts and the desire to tread softly on the soil, rather than pound the pavement. Though it is just starting to receive notice from the medical community I urge you to read more about our illness, diagnoses, and treatment. Sadly, no research has been conducted on the cause or prevention of Barnheart.

How to buy organic produce...and afford it!

We all want to eat more organic produce.  We can cite many reasons to want to make the switch; personal health, environmental preservation, better taste and nutrition rank among some of the most popular.  But even we struggle when we find ourselves wandering the grocery aisles.  Trying to rationalize the gross price discrepancies between organic and not is a tough task.

Mike and I often find ourselves in the produce section staring down a chemically sprayed pepper grown in a mono-crop system for $1.99/lb and an organic pepper, grown using sustainable methods for $5.99/lb.  It's a glaring financial difference, and while we definitely understand that organic produce takes more time and care to plant, maintain, grow, and harvest sometimes money wins. 


So, we stick to a few little strategies that makes the purchase of organic produce affordable AND  make us feel much better after a trip to the grocery store:

First, stop using plastic bags.  Seriously.  I think that this above all the other 'green' changes you can make is one of the most important.  I could write another whole post about the evils of plastic, but that's a topic for another day. In the meantime, consider a personal ban on plastic bags.  We bring our reusable grocery bags with us which are fine for transporting our food from store to car (bike, bus, train) to house.   But what about bagging individual produce like brussel sprouts, beans, etc. that are tough to carry loose in the cart?

We need to give up that waste too.  Use reusable grocery bags or just learn to deal with a "messy" cart.  When the clerk stares at your loose potatoes rolling down the conveyor belt, stare back at him.  If you feel you must, explain that you don't use plastic bags.  The clerk and the people waiting in line behind you might be a little annoyed, but they'll deal with it.  Now I know you don't directly save any money  by choosing to purchase these items loose, but without plastic bags and pre-weighed and printed price stickers (like they use at Wegmans) we're one step closer to discovering organic affordability.

This leads us to our next step, which we discovered totally by mistake but now make a practice.  Of course, pick the organic vegetable that looks best, but make sure it doesn't have a sticker.  You know, the little stickers with the 4-digit product code that the clerk uses to ring in the price at the register.  We've never had a hard time finding sticker-free food, and haven't yet gone so far as to peel the stickers off.  It may take a little extra time and work, but in that pile of organic sweet potatoes you will most certainly be able to paw through until you find all the potatoes you need without stickers.

Without the aid of a coded sticker when the clerk goes to weigh your produce,  he will never think to ask whether it's an organic potato or a caustic one.  In our experience, they will almost always use the cheaper, non-organic code to calculate the price.  Now pile all those veggies back into your reusable bags and you've not only saved money, you've also reduced waste.  If you then compost your food scraps from these veggies (hopefully for use in your home garden in the spring) then you're completing the life cycle of those vegetables as beneficially as you possibly can.  And that's really our goal here--to reshape the commercial, industrial systems at work in the grocery store and return them to a more natural, wholesome system.


I'm sure this topic could raise all kind of ethical debates on the merits of 'stealing' from Danny Wegman or whoever owns Whole Foods.  But as far as I'm concerned, the organic farmers are still getting paid and Danny Wegman isn't hard up for cash.  Until our garden thaws and can offer up fresh produce at an affordable price we will keep up my little routine and now you can too.

Fall Recap

Time to play catch-up on a couple exciting projects, tough choices and tasty treats we neglected to mention in the blog over the past few months.

La Rusa - "In Soviet Russia, car drives you!"
Buying a new car is always a tough, long, stressful process. But buying a new, used car can be even tougher and more stressful. So when Watson, our trusty old man of a minivan failed NY State Inspection two times over, we knew we were in for a challenge. We had to buy a car, and we had to do it quickly. As much as we would love to avoid owning a car, as we had for the last several years living in the city, bikes and feet were no longer going to cut it. When you live 13 miles outside the nearest town and 30 miles outside the nearest city, a car is an inevitable necessity. Pile on a few inches (or feet!) of snow and you've really got no choice. We needed a car, and more than likely we needed something with AWD or 4WD.

After much shopping around we settled on a 2001 Honda CR-V that we found for sale by a private party in a town nearby. When we first got the car the RPM's were running really, really high. The car was idling up around 2000-2200 RPMs, so when it was in gear the car was more or less driving itself. As a nod to the old Yakov Smirnoff joke, "In America you drive car. In Soviet Russia car drives you!" we named her La Rusa, or "The Russian" in Spanish. Seeing as she's a Japanese car, I really have no idea how this makes any sense whatsoever.

We had to have the throttle plate cleaned and the cable adjusted, and slapped on some new tires, but otherwise she's running well. Now I just have to learn to drive a stick shift, which is a whole other battle all-together. All in all, we think we got a pretty good deal for the condition and the mileage, and so far she's done us pretty well. Really, the whole deal was more than worth it for the sweet spare tire cover we got!

2. Thanksgiving 2009

Thanksgiving is definitely an all day, food-centered event in the Schadel house. The day started with amazing homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast. There's nothing better than fresh, warm baked goods, and they were topped with a simple sweet icing and a sprinkling of walnuts that would have converted any Cinnabon customer in no time.

Later there was beer & Pictionary (Sadrah and I had a variety pack from UFO, Sadrah's brother's stuck to Miller High Life) followed by bread bowl dip and various other appetizers and snacks.

For dinner Sadrah's parents got their turkey from a small, local, pasture-fed, antibiotic free farm called October Rose. We also buy eggs from this local farm-- at $2.50/dozen they're not too expensive, and they definitely beat the tasteless unethically raised eggs in the grocery store. For our dinner Sadrah prepared a
homemade vegetarian "turkey" a few days before. Made primarily from seitan (made with vital wheat gluten) and slowly roasted in "no chicken" stock, the loaf made for a tasty substitute. The texture would have come out better if she kneaded the dough a bit longer, and it tasted a bit more like stuffing, but it sliced like a real turkey and tasted yummy to me.


For dessert there were 3 different kinds of cake & pie. One was a traditional apple pie, the next an apple crisp (both with local apples from Beak & Skiff) and finally one of Sadrah's Dad's famous cheesecakes. The pumpkin flavoring in the cheesecake didn't exactly work out as planned, but it was still damn tasty. Both apple creations were also wonderful sweet treats. I hardly had room for dessert that night, but there's always plenty of time for leftovers over the next few days.


3. The power of nature

We get most of our heat in the house here from a single Vermont Castings wood stove in the living room. That might be a surprise to most of you, but it's true. Sure, we also have a supplemental propane heater, and a few electric space heaters for the upstairs bedrooms set on timers and used on particularly cold nights. But there's no central heating system, per se--the wood stove is the main source of heat. And you know the best thing about heating your house with wood? The shrunken heating bill!

Sadrah's parents usually buy a few cords of firewood every year, but the price pales in comparison to fossil fuels AND it's a local, renewable resource. They also head right out the back door and into the woods to take down some old trees or cut up logs that were downed the previous year. This is totally free fuel, and there's acres of supply. All you need is a chainsaw, a strong back for hauling wood and a wood-splitter. You don't even need the wood-splitter (an axe and a sturdy stump will do) but it sure makes the whole process much quicker and easier. We've already spent a few afternoons under the front porch, splitting, tossing and stacking wood--that is after we've gotten the temperamental engine started.

But it's an easy process, and it's sort of neat to be so connected to your own survival. You cut the wood, and in turn the wood keeps you warm in the sub-freezing temperatures of Finger Lakes winter.

A Wormy Winter Wonderland

The snow started to fall in mid-December, and aside from a short break around Christmas, it has hardly let up. It coats the ground, beautifully clings to tree branches and drifts across country roads. I knew it got cold up here, but a wind chill that feels like -5 is a new thing for me. Of course I've felt cold like this before, but I've never lived in it, day in and day out. I'm still trying to get used to it, but some new waterproof snow boots are helping tremendously. It's not like it doesn't snow in New Jersey or Philadelphia--it just doesn't snow this much, or this constantly. We just keep wood on the fire, keep warm under 5-6 blankets and day-dream of the warm summer days in the garden to come.

All this snow and cold not only leaves us with extra time to plan for the spring, but also to focus on other projects we're really excited about. One of these is vermicomposting. Vermicomposting is very similar to the kind of composting you might do in a backyard bin or container, except we're utilizing the power of the worms (in this case Red Wiggler Worms, or Eisenia foetida) to speed up the process. First, we ordered 1000 worms online for about $26. They should take 1-2 weeks to arrive at our door, which gave us plenty of time to get the bin set-up and working.

We bought a simple $5 Rubbermaid bin at Target. Then, we needed to make some bedding for the worms to crawl around in and munch on. Ripped or shredded newspaper, shredded cardboard, straw, peat moss, a little dirt and fallen leaves are all tasty treats that the worms will love. You want to keep the whole thing fairly moist, similar to a wrung-out sponge. Worms don't breath air like we do, but breath through their skin and keeping proper moisture is essential so they don't suffocate. But add too much moisture and they can drown. You need allow for some air-flow to avoid anaerobic conditions which stalls the composting process and can lead to nasty odors as well. We drilled several 1/8" holes in the bottom, sides and lid of our bin to let air flow in and out as well as provide drainage. We propped up the bin on bricks and placed an upturned plastic lid underneath the bin tocollect 'compost tea,' the nutrient-rich drippings of excess moisture. The houseplants will thank us.

To get the bin "warmed up" and ready for our worms' arrival, we added a small pile of kitchen compost to the bin (egg shells, coffe grounds, banana peels, and various vegetable scraps...but go light on the citrus or your bin will become to acidic). Simply lift up some of the bedding, drop in some compost, and cover it back up with bedding. What a simple system!

Next time just add compost to a different section of the bin. There should be no odor, so this kind of composting can easily be done indoors during the winter months. We have ours set up in the basement root cellar right now. Once the worms arrive, we should see some fresh, nutrient-rich compost within 2-3 months.

Our next big project will probably be building our humanure toilet. I'm sure this project will gross some people out, but it's a wonderful way to harness a powerful resource that most of us dismiss and literally flush down the drain. We've purchased the wood we need and we have our design. Now it's just a question of where to set up our saw and build indoors since the winter cold and snow pretty much prevents us for working outdoors without our fingers falling off.

Also, we desperately need a name for our little farm. Any suggestions??