The REAL baby's breath

Occasionally, when walking between the cloche-covered beds, I get a whiff of pure, sweet pea breath. Blooming plants give off a wonderful aroma, very sweet, very breathable. Yesterday as I pulled back the covers on the cloches to water, I got a blast of that springtime scent. Above is a picture of mustard greens coming up.

And these are some green onions with their little black heads, I assume frozen dead from the recent snowing. They look strong enough to pull through. These cloches are like magic. What's decidedly not magic though, is slugs.

This little bugger was in the peas, and had left a long trail of iridescent slime throughout the bed. I tossed it to the chickens (which they loved). I'm going to check the beds now on every decently warmish day, maybe sprinkle some beer cups in the beds. I assume those are little tomato plants coming up - the single-stalk, two-leaf things.

Wednesday Potluck: Homemade Pizza

I've missed the last couple months of potluck postings, but since we just set up a Google Group to manage the announcement emails, I only thought it right to continue to post about the aftermath of each week.

This week was home-made pizza to celebrate Sarah's pitifully short Spring Break. She's back at Legacy Emmanuel hospital here in NE Portland starting next week. I made two pizzas, one with tomato sauce, spinach leaves, cheese, zukes and green peppers and the other one with tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni and mushrooms. Both came out very scrumptious with a generous application of pecorino romano cheese on top. We also had a nice butter-leaf salad with hearts of palm (exotic!), some pinot noir, and a chocolate crumble cake with ice cream for dessert. Yum all around.

Next week is some kind of lentil goulash that Sarah is planning.

Cloche is French for "bell"

About two weeks ago, I put cloches on two of our raised beds. The cloches protected the soil from excessive rain, which allowed the beds to dry out pretty quickly. I got very lucky since we had a spate of sunny days which rapidly increased the temperature inside the beds and thus warmed up the soil. Garden books recommend a "soil thermometer" and while I don't think a regular thermometer will work, my meat thermometer does a great job getting a quick reading.

Within a couple of days of planting, the peas were sprouted and by now, they're a couple inches tall. I think I got close to 100% germination so we're definitely going to need to do some thinning. I've been watering every couple days (more like every five days).

We also have carrots, leeks, mustard greens and parsley planted under the cloches, all of which have sprouted. It appears that some volunteer tomato plants are coming up. I think I'm going to let them grow big and transplant them to another bed rather than just plucking them all.

The cloches are made out of 1/2 inch Schedule 40 PVC pipe with 4 mil translucent builder's plastic stretched over the hoops. The pipes are slipped over 3/8" rebar (1/2" rebar is too thick to chance it) which is pounded into the ground. I used some 2-foot rebars, some 4-foot. Something like 3 feet would be perfect, but either works. My beds are about 4 feet wide.

I experimented with two different construction plans. On one frame, I made the hoops out of two pieces of 5ft long pipe joined with a tee (or a 4-way cross for the middle two hoops). In between each hoop, there is another piece of pipe that connects each hoop to the next hoop in the bed. That turns the whole frame into a single unit, and prevents the outer two hoops from being pushed in to the middle by the taut plastic. This is definitely the preferable method. You can see the pipes holding the plastic up at the apex of the hoops on the left bed.

The second frame just consists of four hoops being 10ft long pieces bent over. I had intended to chop these in half and build it like the other frame, but the tees and crosses aren't tight enough since there is an incredible amount of pressure at the apex of the bent pipe, right where the tee is, so they just slip out. I bought these pipes from a different store than the first set. After staying bent for another couple weeks, I should be able to chop the 10-foot pieces in half and put in the tees and crosses like the other bed. Of course I could have used some PVC cement/glue, but then I wouldn't be able to disassemble the frames for storage. You can see this frame on the right of the picture - just four hoops, no top pipes.

In both cases, the plastic stretches across the frames and is secured by some very large rocks. When you pull the ends tight and put a heavy enough rock on the end, the system holds up well to high winds and heavy rains. Now if I could just figure out a way to make it warm all the time...

Bring on the raccoons!

After losing the last flock to raccoons, I'm determined to foil every kind of fowl hunter short of a human with tools. Some people say that, given enough time, a hungry raccoon can get into any chicken house. But the logician in me says that simply cannot be true. I mean, give me a frickin' break, they're not little Houdini animals!

Anyway, my design and construction criteria with regards to the chicken run and hen house have been to make the whole thing stout enough to prevent a human from getting in without tools. So I'm treating a hungry raccoon as if it were a hungry human. If either one wants my chickens bad enough to bring along and use tools, then, well, I guess they can have them.

The major design flaw in the previous coop was that I only stapled the chicken wire to the wood frame. There were numerous places where the raccoons simply ripped the staples out of the wood and pulled back the chicken wire. To overcome this, I re-stapled the chicken wire, but this time I added a strip of wood (1/2" PT plywood or strips of cedar boards) on top of the staples, screwed or nailed down. This way, no amount of pulling on the wire will separate it from the wooden frame. The raccoons would first have to remove the wood strips (meaning they'd need a square-drive screwdriver or drill and a prybar or claw hammer) to separate the chicken wire from the frame.

Another design flaw which the raccoons didn't need to explore was that I didn't bury the chicken wire too well under the fence. With a few inches of digging, a raccoon could go under the fence. To remedy this, I dug a large trench around the entire perimeter of the run and buried two feet of chicken wire, backfilling with gravel and dirt. I'm confident that a raccoon cannot simply dig down two-and-a-half feet, to go under the wire because at that depth, you're into compacted gravel laid down by the Missoula Floods. Again, tools are needed to defeat that security measure.

The final design flaw was the latch system on the run and the hen house. For the run, I've never used locks, but I do use two sliding latches, one near the top, one near the bottom. Both of them have to be open for the gate to move. It's possible a raccoon could climb up the fencing to open the upper one, but if I ever notice that one has been opened, I'll use some locks. It also helps that the door is a little out of plumb so you have to kick it open even after the latches are opened since it sticks on the frame a bit. Lily can't open it, so I think the coons will have a hard time. The hen house latch is still just a long pin, held in place by the friction of the latch flap. I want to put in a small locking carabiner (one of those fake ones you can pick up at the counter at REI) on that latch, which should be a reasonably sufficient deterrent.

All in all, it was about three full days of work to get the place up to snuff enough to move the chickens in. I've got two infrared heat lamps on in the nights since it's been hovering around freezing recently, and they're fairing well. I didn't move them in until they were fully feathered. They've eaten all the grass in the run, and stripped the few blackberry brambles of their leaves which is pretty effective for keeping the blackberries at bay. We cleaned out the freezer recently and found some ugly cranberries left over from Thanksgiving which the chickens really enjoyed.

I'm looking forward to the eggs!

My worm friend, Rousha

Today we double-dug the other split raised bed to loosen the soil which has been used for the last couple years. In John Jeavon's How to Grow More Vegetables he recommends ongoing double-digging, not just as an initial soil preparation. Definitely a lot of work, but I did notice significant compaction of the bed after just two years. I removed about four wheelbarrows full of dirt from the bed, which, when you think about it, means I added about four wheelbarrows full of air to the bed.

During the aeration, I mixed in some fresh compost from kitchen scraps. The entire time that I was digging, Lily was out there with me, with no shoes on, playing with worms. She's generally not afraid of getting dirty, but until today, she hasn't been too excited about touching worms. For some reason, something clicked today. She insisted that I give her all the worms I found so she could take care of them. Whenever I would dig up an especially large specimen (that avoided being sliced in half by the shovel) I would toss it over to a designated worm drop-off point. She'd come by and collect the worms from the pile, find another spot in the finished bed and gently bury them in the dirt. She did this for every worm I gave her, except for one, which she named "Rousha" and carried with her the entire time. It was a big worm, probably 8 inches long when fully stretched. She carried the poor bugger around for about 10 minutes, never mixing it up with the other ones. Eventually we had a discussion about how worms don't like being held for very long, and at that very moment, Rousha let out a big worm turd.

Now I had my share of playing with worms as a kid, but I cannot recall ever seeing a worm poop. Charles Darwin believed that all the world's fertile soil has been through the gut of a worm at some point, but it really hit me that worms make soil when I saw this little critter poop out a roundish slice of, well, dirt. Looks like dirt, smells like dirt, feels like dirt, probably tastes like dirt, it was dirt. Very educational for her and me both. Afer finishing its turd, Lily gently buried Rousha back into the bed. Something makes me think she wouldn't learn that in preschool.

The deck is almost done... for now

In the last couple weeks, I've gotten all the deck boards on, and am almost done with the railings. The boards worked out pretty well. Half of them were reused from the old deck. They were originally "Outdoor Wood" 2x6s which means they were just dipped in the preservative agents instead of having the chemicals squeezed into the wood. The preservative nature of that wood doesn't last too long, and it was all gone on my deck board. So I flipped the boards over, sanded them, tossed about half of the boards and reused the rest.

The other deck boards were about half bought from Parr lumber which had a sale on cedar boards and from craigslist, used cedar boards. They look pretty good intermixed, and will probably look even better once a layer of stain and sealer gets applied. At the very end of the deck, I had to sub in two 2x4 cedar boards because it was too long for a single 2x6 and too short for two 2x6 boards. But two 2x4 boards worked just great. The price of cedar has shot through the roof in recent months, why I don't know. But the effect is that it will cost incredibly more to build a cedar deck this spring that it would have last year, if you pay retail price for all new wood. The Parr wood I bought was about 88 cents per linear foot (2x6s @10ft) and the craigslist wood was 75 cents per linear foot (2x6s @16ft). I could have used a single 2x8 for the last run, but Parr wanted almost $50 for a single 2x8 @ 16ft long.

I wrapped the 4x4 posts with cedar 1x wood, and reused the 2x2 railing balusters. Of course, there is some 2x4 pressure treated wood in the mix too, which was reused from the old deck. The railings, balusters and posts will all get painted white once things are complete.

All that's left is one more railing, and adding the ramada beams. That will wait until I get the chicken coop upgraded. They're getting BIG and need to move into their final home.

Sow your peas by President's Day

"Sow your peas by President's Day", so sayeth the Seattle Tilth folks in The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide. We're about two weeks late this year, but we've both been a little busy. Me, namely building a new deck and sealing up the basement and foundation. And Sarah, catching about a dozen babies and nearing completion of her last quarter in school. And of course Lily is always too busy what with the doctoring and building, painting and drawing and -gasp- even some computer gaming.

Nonetheless, we rallied this past weekend and did a major overhaul of our raised beds. For the last couple of years, we've had two 24" tall raised beds. But this year, we split the 2x12s and made two shorter beds (now 12" tall) from the one tall bed. This fall, we'll do the same treatment to the remaining tall bed. I single-dug the soil beneath the new bed, mixed in some loamy topsoil that was scraped during the foundation and deck work and amended it with some homemade compost made from kitchen scraps. The soil is wonderful in that area and I expect the peas to be very happy.

Lily planted six rows Petit Pois shelling peas (bushes, not climbing), about 8 feet per row, very densely spaced. She loves fresh peas and two summers ago, she ate lunch in the garden most days. She'd be really quiet for about 20 minutes and we'd come outside to find the deck littered with pea pod shells. The petit pois should be good height for her to harvest.

We also planted some snow peas, which we all like to eat with hummus and in salads. They were from Fedco, called "Sumo Snow Peas" and were multi-colored like red, orange, green, blue, gray. Should be big, we hope.

Next up: carrots, leeks, mustard greens, lettuces, all in a cloche (which is on the To-Do list for this weekend).

It's starting to look like a house again

Finally, the basement is sealed up, backfilled with gravel and looks like a real foundation. So, on to the next project! This time, it's slightly more fun since it requires less digging (not "none", but "less") and since the end result will be something we can enjoy.

The first step was to lay out the plans with Sarah and anyone else who would listen. Then I translated those plans (layout of the footprint, steps, how it attaches to the house and back door, etc) into concrete footers sunk into the ground. And that part required digging. I borrowed my friend Jeff's post hole auger, which is a truly amazing manual tool. Dig down about two or three feet, tamp it, fill with some gravel, make premix concrete and pour it into the holes. The hard part was getting the concrete-to-wood anchors to stand squared in line with each other and plumb. Considering that the deck is about 20x12 feet, I think I did pretty well. The deck framing showed about two inches of slop on one post (easily shimmed) and only about a half-inch of slop in the other direction over a total of 9 poured footers.

My friend Wayne came down from Olympia to get a jump-start on the deck. It was great having him here for two days since he has about 30 more years of carpentry experience than me. On those first two days, we built the upper deck and half of the lower deck. Crucially, we also got the stairs cut to connect the two decks. Cutting stair jacks is always so hard, but these turned out nice.

I was able to reuse almost all of the wood from the old deck. All of the framing lumber (2x8 pressure treated stuff) was in good shape and good lengths to incorporate into the new deck. Since we changed the footprint a bit, I had to buy some new framing lumber, but not much. Also, the deck boards were pretty rotten from the old deck, but I salvaged about half of them. We bought new (on sale) cedar boards for the upper deck and stairs, and just last night I drove out to boonie-land to buy recycled cedar boards to fill in the lower deck. I think the total expenditure was about $800 for all the wood (labor was free) for a 12x20 foot deck.

I spent the next day putting the decking on the stairs and building the wrap-around part of the stairs, the "Grand Staircase" we're calling it. That required some abstract thinking to connect the two sets of stairs.
At this point, we have half the decking on, no railings, good stairs and all the extra footers in place. Maybe today I'll get the rest of the decking on, ready for BYO Meat on the grill at tomorrow's potluck.