Mid-April Update

I haven't written in two weeks, but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing things.  I have to say I was a little stunned by the response to my last post.  For a few days there I was getting ten times my previous all time high traffic level.

The yurt is turning out to be very handy.  I've got my cot, my folding chair and table, a trash bucket with lid, some cooler clothes if I need to play in the sprinklers, thermometer, clock, lantern, and a sheet of plywood as a hard, clean floor.  I write here, both for personal and work reasons.  I take naps when necessary.  I sort seeds and keep records.  I change bandages on my injured rooster.  I keep water bottles in the shade.  I keep tools out of the rain.  I even slept out here overnight last night.  What I still want are some wall and ceiling cloths, because it's a little bright in here when on the computer in bright sunlight.

Beyond the success and comfort of the yurt, I guess there are three main things to talk about:  Spading v. Mulching, Irrigation, and Planting Progress.

Spading v. Mulching:

I think I've said that I'm focusing my efforts on sections 11 to 14.  Section 11 had corn in it last year, with the idea of doing Three Sisters.  Then I hurt my back, so it turned out to be thin hills of corn and lots of weeds.  The corn was planted at intervals along mounded ridges.  This spring, the chickens have done their best to tear those ridges apart, doing a lot of weed control in the process.  Something about that system discouraged the rhizome grass too, so that area is fairly clean.  It's biggest shortcoming is the comparatively low level of soil carbon.  It needs organic matter.

Section 14 is my most worked section.  I've dug, cultivated, picked weeds and rocks, and planted.  It's in good shape.

Top, beds 1 & 2.
 Middle, beds 3 & 4.
Bottom, Beds 5 & 6.
 All looking south from the central path.









Section 13 is in progress.  I'm almost through digging it all up, shovel by shovel, and turning it over.  I'll still have to do a lot of cultivation and rhizome picking, and then it could use more soil carbon.

Section 13, mostly dug.

Section 12 is in the worst shape.  It's coming up heavy in rhizome grass.  If I get it within the next week, I should be able to control it, putting it in the same boat with section 13.

 Section 12, coming up grass, and the windmill needs fixing.

I was reading on line where an old guy was talking about how 70 years ago, his father would hire someone to come in and spade up the garden.  Then they'd rake it out, form rows, and plant.  He pondered how nobody spades their garden any more.  This prompted a discussion of what's the right and wrong way to manage soil.  Opinions ranged:  Dig, double dig, dig only every couple years, never dig, turn weeds and cultivate, mulch with cardboard, mulch with old hay, rototill....  Clearly there are diverse opinions.  One zealot devotee of Elaine Ingham even stated that digging your soil will damage the Soil Food Web for years. 

My take is that your methods have to suit your resources.  In my situation, double digging is hard and useless work.  (I hear it was invented by a Calvinist.)  Excessive digging will not help my heavy clay soil, and neither will (or has) mechanical cultivation.  The biggest argument that organic methods won't work is that farms will never be able to get enough organic mater to maintain soil carbon, and it's true that this is an issue, but not an insurmountable one.  I'm able to get carbon, just not quite as quickly as I'd like.

So what am I going to do?  Well, I need to disturb the rhizomes.  They're too thick in sections 12 and 13 to simply fork over like I did in section 14.  They need to be cut up.  Yes, every cut section will be capable of re-sprouting, but there's not much else that will let me make headway, so I spade the soil.

Section 11, with about 8 cart-loads of wood chips.

In section 11, I don't have to spade so badly.  As a stopgap before I get to it, I've added the rest of my wood chip pile to it instead.  That was about eight garden cart loads of half rotted chips.  The chickens continue to work on it.  I'm still trying to decide if I need space now (and section 11 would be easier to do next) or I need grass control now (in section 12).  Maybe I need to be going to the co-op and getting cardboard.  (Never come home with an empty truck.)  I can soak it and lay it out as a semi-solid cover.  That won't stop the rhizome grass indefinitely, but it will hold it in check.  So, spade or mulch?  Both!

Either way, I guess I think of these things as being for fallow time.  Once I start growing things, I mostly want to be able to cultivate as they get going.  If I'm short on mulch material, I'll use it where I can suppress weeds over a large area, rather than fiddle with it, making a tight collar around a plant.  It doesn't look like a problem this year, but some years mulch is too much of a cover for slugs.  The couple things I would like to keep mulched if I can are garlic and potatoes.  Garlic needs it over the winter, and if I can get another layer over it in the spring it helps.  I still have to pull weeds coming up through it, but it helps.  And mulch is the only thing I've found that stops potato beetles, in addition to keeping the new potatoes from growing out of the ground.

Irrigation:

It's the middle of April, and we're down on precipitation, since the first of the year, over 40%.  This has worked really well for me in some ways.  I can go dig in dirt instead of mud.  Weeds laid on the surface dry out and die.  It's been really beautiful.

However, plants are going to need water.  The grapes, rhubarb, and raspberries need water to get leafed out.  As I've started planting things, I need to be watering seeds in.  I have no electrical power on the garden side of the road, nor do I have pressurized water.  So I need to have an irrigation system, and I need to water with a watering can when I'm doing a small area, which requires a handy place to dip out of.

This town has an unusually high population of plumbers, per capita.  When I first got here, I thought used black plastic water line was a hard item to come by, but eventually I learned better.  Plumbers don't like to re-use it.  It's awkward to throw away too, because you have to cut it up into chunks before it can be hauled off, so the two biggest outfits in town both have piles of used poly pipe hidden in the bushes near their shops.  I found that all I had to do was ask for it.

I've had a series of pumps to work with too.  The first one was a bladder-piston trash pump, which pumped in spurts, about 20 per minute, and each one made the hose creep just a little.  I used a briggs powered impeller pump, which used to be a fire pump on a passenger boat, but the motor gave more and more trouble.  I used a belt drive pump, which had the advantage of letting me change motors fairly easily, and the disadvantage that it'd throw the belt and I'd have to hunt for it in the tall grass.  What I use now is a 2" honda powered impeller pump.  I think I had to give it about 8 pulls to get it started this spring.  Not bad.

The pump draws from the long pond, which is actually a dammed section of a small brook.  There's a swamp upstream that used to be a meadow.  It used to be a meadow because of cycles of beavers that would dam it up, so the water is shallow and the vegetation makes the water slightly brown.  At the downstream end is a dam, built by the former owner of this place.  The pond and stream are the property line, and I don' think either my neighbor or I have any great interest in re-building the dam, even though it's on it's last legs.  There'd be too much bureaucracy.  But it's a wooden dam and one of these years it's going to go.  This year there are beavers "improving" it.  This raises the water level in the pond, and I'll have to watch out so that the pump doesn't end up under water.  It did make the pump prime easily though.  Generally I try to keep the pump 50' or so back from the water.

So the pump pushes into a 2" poly water line, which goes up the field, through the fence, and into the middle of the garden.  From there it splits four ways, which is a bit of a plumbers nightmare.  Four 1" lines lead away.  I have a good collection of 1" hose, and I once got a big bag of 1" plastic barb elbow fittings for $2.00/pound at the notable surplus and salvage place.  These work great because you can hammer them in and out, where a straight barb fitting has to be shoved and pulled on, and is much more work, especially when the water is running and you're getting sprayed in the face.

2" line from the pump.  Its about 300' from the fence to the pond, and a 20' rise.

2" pipe feeds four 1" pipes.

1" barb elbows connect sections.

With the 1" line I can get to anywhere in the garden or nearby.  For the final section of line, I use some that I've drilled 3/32" holes in every 1 1/2', so it acts as a long line sprinkler.  Some have caps in the end and some have a factory sealed pinched and melted end.  This has worked well, although I think I need to add some T-fittings so that I have multiple emitter ends on the hoses.  The beds are 4' on center, and if I had an emitter hose ever three beds it should keep the ground wet.  My topsoil is loose, but my subsoil should limit the water going down.  I should be able to set up hoses and leave them in place most of the summer.

That reminds me of eight years ago, when we'd (meaning I'd, with direction) drag 1 1/4" poly water line around trying to water, dragging it over lots of things by accident.

Anyway, that takes care of the bulk watering, but I still need to be able to hand water rows of newly planted stuff.  So I need a dip-tank that I can pull watering cans out of.  Over the years I've managed to get my hands on several used above ground metal swimming pools.  These are medium weight sheet metal, slightly ribbed, and are either three or four feet wide, and long enough to enclose a 12' or 16' pool.  That seemed too big, so I cut one about in half, giving me enough for a 6'ish pool.  I joined the ends with a wood 1x2 on either side and a galvanized deck screw every 2" up the seam, lined it with an old carpet and an old piece of greenhouse plastic from a previous cistern.

Cistern, as full as it will stay.

When I filled it up I found out there are some small (1/8"-ish) holes, so that in a few hours it drains down to 3/4 full.  Maybe I'll patch those, but 3/4 full is good enough, so I'm happy with it.  I did patch one larger hole with zip-tape, which is supposed to be for taping the joints on a type of pre-painted OSB sheathing.  I've been using it to patch small holes in the yurt too.  Handy stuff.  For the pool, I just cleaned the area with rubbing alcohol and a paper towel first, then slapped it on.  It's rubbery, 3" wide and about 1/32" thick.

Planting Progress:

The way it's going to work, mostly, is that I'll have six 4' beds per section.  I go back and forth on bed spacing.  I try to maximize growing area and minimize path size, but if I have 30" beds and 18" paths, that seems workable.

A couple years ago I built myself a weeding cart.  I lay on it, face down, and it suspends me over the growing bed and a comfortable working height.  It stretches my shoulders a little, but ergonomically, it's better than being bent over for the same amount of work.  I just have to take breaks.  The wheels are 36" on center, so if I'm careful, it'll work with the 32" wide beds.

 Weeding cart, built mostly of old bikes.

So at this point, bed 1 (west edge of section 14) is garlic, and I planted some lettuces in three rows in the last 6' of it.  Bed 2 is kale and chard, planted several weeks ago and coming up slowly.  The chard is a little spotty, but the kale has good germination.  Bed 3 is garlic.  Bed 4 is a few dahlias (all the same dark red) and about 75 gladiolus, then three rows down the bed of spinach.  Bed 5 is three rows down the bed, parsley (curly and flat leaf) peas, and beets.  I'll be putting up trellis down the middle for the peas soon.  Bed 6 is almost ready to plant. It might get carrots and endive, but I'm not sure yet.  I'd like to get in another bed or two or garlic.

And then it's dig, dig, dig.  Control the grass, make beds ready to plant, and watch it get warmer.

Daffodils for cutting, starting to open.

Daylilies sprouting.

 Section 10:  Thin grass.

Section 9:  ridges of thick rhizome grass.

Section 7:  Last year's leftovers.

Onion sprouting from last year's unharvested crop.  I hope for seed.

New Garden Architecture

As I finished up last time, I talked about building a new garden structure, a small yurt.  Well, I did it.

I spent several days trying to figure out what to do about a platform.  Most yurts these days seem to get up up on platforms, which is kind of funny.  The original design is of course Mongolian, even though there are plenty of variations.  But it's designed to be a house for nomads, yet it gets set up on a platform.  The platform is heavy, not mobile, and removes the mobility of the structure.

So in the end, I got a shovel and roughly leveled the ground where I wanted this thing so it's not 6" taller on one side than the other, then I brought in two cartloads of wood chips and raked them level.  Then the chickens un-leveled them.

I had originally built this thing about five years ago as a small smithy for my hand-cranked forge.  My wife came on the scene soon after that, and ever so gently convinced me that the back yard was a poor place for it.  (She was right.  It wouldn't have looked good there at our wedding.)  So I took it apart and stored the pieces.  And a yesterday I hauled out those pieces, which were basically two stock panels, 16 rafters, and a door frame. 

I marked out my site before leveling it, so I had a circle the size I knew I'd end up with.  Last time, I used quick links to tie the two panels together, overlapping by one 8" interval between verticals.  This time I cut off the end vertical on opposite ends of the panels, then I used 9" sections of old copper pipe as sleeves.  I should have had 13 of them but I only cut 10.  Oh well.  It works.

 

I bent the other ends around and tied them together temporarily with some thick soft wire I picked up at the dump a while back.  Then I set up the rafters.  One of them split and broke, but I figured 15 would be good enough.  The upper ends are cut so that they're vertical when in position.  The lower end has two vertical sections, the upper one 1/2" out from the lower, so that that short horizontal can bear on the top of the stock panel.  Both ends have holes drilled a few inches from the ends.

I started by wiring the upper end together and spreading the bottoms to make sort of a tipi.  Then I lifted one bottom end at a time and wired the ends to the top horizontal of the stock panels.  With three up, it looked like a pile of rafters hanging vertically from a tripod.  One by one they went up, and then I had to reposition all of them, one by one, so that they'd be equally spaced.  The way they come together at the top still isn't quite right, but I'll live with it.  It's good enough.

  And then I used heavy fence staples to attach the door frame.

I wrapped the wall in a few strips of old greenhouse plastic, and covered the top with some old white plastic tarp. There are a few holes in both of these that I'll want to tape up, and I need to arrange doors, but overall, I'm happy with it.  It'll be a place to store tools, get out of the mist and wind for a break, work on my computer in a quiet place (I haven't tested to see if wifi reaches.) and maybe take a nap out of the sun in the summer.  I'm still considering a floor.  If I get around to it, I'll lay down more plastic on the ground and then have a few sheets of plywood over that, as a hard clean surface, good for sorting seed packets and such.

I've got some shutters in the barn.  Maybe a pair of them will work as double doors to keep the chickens out.

UPDATE:

Last night I did as threatened and found some shutters in the barn.  They're 47" x 14", which is just right for the 48" x 29" opening.  They had half hinges already, so I drove in some large finish nails and then bent them up to serve as hinge pins.

 

This shot shows the fold in the roof tarp.  I'll probably need to tape that down somehow.

Here's a detail shot of a rafter butt:

And here's my lantern, which meant that I had more light than if I was just working with my flashlight in my mouth last night:

First Post of Spring!

Last Wednesday it was up to 80° here.  This morning it's snowing.  It's just light flurries, but there it is.  I can't complain.  A late March or even early April snowstorm is to be expected as often as not around here.  The ice is gone from the ponds and you have to really hunt to find a little bit of snow that hasn't melted yet.  The Canada Geese are grazing in the field below the garden every evening.  Two nights ago I heard spring peepers and wood frogs.  Crocus are in full bloom and a few daffodils are open in front of the sun porch. The grass is starting to green up.

Of course in the garden, controlling the grass is one of my highest priorities.  Section 14 is pretty well under control.  I still need to root out some rhizomes on the downhill (east) side of it, but it looks good.  I planted more garlic and got a fence around the section.  The fence is none too soon, as the chickens were scratching a dust bath area in the first garlic bed, and I may have to re-plant a few there.

Toward the bottom of the picture there's a horizontal line of damp soil.  That's where I stopped planting garlic.  The last few feet are still open, although it seemed like a good spot to tuck in some short rows of lettuce.

I'm working with a general pattern of beds four feet on center, which should usually come out to 30 inch growing beds and 18 inch paths, but I crowd the paths a little.

I want lots of garlic, but I also want to have things mixed in so it's not just a solid block.  I planted the next bed space with two rows.  One is chard and one is curly kale.  These are both fairly cold tolerant.  It's supposed to go to the low 20's tomorrow and Wednesday mornings, but they aren't up yet so they should be fine.  It occurs to me that if I can round up enough scrap boards (half rotted is fine) to set on top of the rows, that will keep the frost out of the seedbed.  I've been watering them lightly on the warm days.  The national weather service says we're in a light, short term drought.

And then there's the third bed, which I planted to garlic again.  There's about 100 cloves that are well sprouted transplants from the section 7 bed where I grew garlic last year and didn't get quite all of it pulled out.  Their leaves are about 4" tall already, showing me how far behind the stuff I'm planting as less sprouted cloves is.  But it's an early spring, mostly, and there's time for it all to do well.

Here's the third bed in the center, just before planting all the garlic.  The poultry net fence is set up around the section, but not electrified.  On the right, I keep digging and pulling out rhizomes.

I think the fourth bed will be spinach, but I'm not there yet.

As I move through and watch the grass starting to sprout, I know I can't be too fixated on one spot.  I'm going to miss stuff, and it'll have to be dealt with again later.  The goal is to keep any one spot from getting too bad to deal with later. Were the grass is sprouting fastest, I go in with the digging fork and turn over the most advanced areas, shaking their dirt onto the green grass around them as a mulch.  Instead of being meticulous about working down a row, I look around like a grazing animal, cherry picking the most lush clump to go after next.

Sections 13 and 12 are going to be the hardest.  The grass and the rhizomes are thickest there.  I did some experimental digging and the spading fork isn't going to work.  It's too dense of mat.  Instead, I'm going to turn it all over with a square point spade, cutting the rhizomes into little bits, all of which will sprout.  Then I'll go through it repeatedly with other tools and slowly pull out the little bits.

Section 11 had corn hills in it last year, and was supposed to get squash and beans but that never happened before I hurt my back.  The corn had been planted on ridges, and this seems to have discouraged running rhizomes.  The soil needs more organic matter, but the weed problems are going to be from annuals that can be controlled with normal cultivation.

Section 4 looks promising.  There are some rhizomes, but there's a lot of organic material in there, including lots of year old wood chips and crab shell.  Digging is easy.  Using my hit and miss method of going after the most noticeable grass sprouts, I've turned a lot of it over somewhat. already.

I've recruited one other gardener, who's going to take on the west half of section 7.  That's about 1000 square feet.  That area had a lot of hay added a few years ago.  I paved most of the section and let it rot there, and then last year I had a lot planted there that the weeds took.  Again, with normal cultivation for weed control, it should do fine.

So, weed control and cultivation tools:

I've been using the spading fork a lot, and it works fairly well.  I notice it has a crack in the fiberglass handle, and I'll have to watch that.  New handles are something that I shouldn't need for most things if I'd only take care of them.

The handle of my square point spade was treated last year with "Boat Soup", which is a mix of melted parafin, turpentine, linseed oil, and pine tar.  It probably should get another coat, as should many of my tools.

I've mentioned the three tooth cultivator from Glasier.  It's due for the treatment.  The nice thing about that handle is it's just a conical point, and if it breaks, I can make a replacement easily enough.

My largest hand cultivation tool is my broadfork, which I got from the dump.  Amazing what you can get there.  I've put it to heavy use and there are a few repairs visible if you look closely.  I think the reason it was at the dump was that the tines bolt on with one bolt each, and they turned too easily.  I welded them so they don't turn.  I've also broken one of them off and welded it back on with a reinforcement, and I've nearly ripped the whole thing in half and welded the cross bar back together.

And then there are the wheel hoes.  I've got one that's an old Planet Jr., and I have multiple attachments for it, but it doesn't get much use.  It needs the handles replaced and some things tightened up.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it seems like most of the tools aren't very well suited to my soil.  They tend to get caked with mud and fine roots and then they don't cut.

The wheel hoe I use is one I made myself out of old bike parts.  It's propped up at an awkward angle here, but you can see the geometry well enough.

The tool bits attach to a holder from an old commercially made wheel hoe.  I got that bit at a junk shop for $5.  It's bolted on to a bike handlebar gooseneck that's designed to clamp into the head tube with a wedge and bolt set up.  The idea was that I could pop that out and change tool heads easily that way, but instead I've been bolting and unbolting tines from the holder.  The holder can take five tines, and I can make tines from any small square stock.  The originals were 1/4", but the one that's in there now is extra long and made from 3/8" stock.  This is the first useful thing I've made on my little hand cranked blacksmith forge.  If the soil was loose it'd be about right, but because I've run into some heavier clumps with grass root balls, I bent the tine.  I was able to bend it back without heat, and then I added the wire as a reinforcement.

The original tines were almost vertical in the soil.  I intend to forge a set that will run horizontally in the soil the way the ones on the three tine hand cultivator does, not too deep.  The stock for these will have to be much longer than the originals to work right.  I actually tried using hose clamps and attached the three tine cultivator to this wheel hoe.  That worked well.  Of course bike parts are cheap and I may just build a variety pack with different tools on each one.  Because of the welding, it's impossible to change  a tire once the thing is put together.  The tire on this one is actually flat, but it doesn't seem to matter much.

The last thing I have to talk about is how I want a new garden building.  Call it Nominative Determinism.  My last name actually means "small house".  For the last several days I've had the Eze-Up market canopy set up low in the garden, and I've got a low table/cart and a folding chair there.  I've had to take it down today because of the forecast wind.  What I want is something durable that I don't have to take down.  Several years ago I had a small yurt set up, made from two 16' stock panels.  I still have the parts.  I just need a level platform to set it up on.  It would be just inside the gate, 11' diameter, and give me a place to get out of occasional showers, as well as a place to stretch, keep a few tools, a water jug.  And it'd have to have a door to keep out bugs and chickens.  The trick is finding the time, between the garden work I need to do and my day job.

Finally, Some Garlic in the Ground.

So a while back I overhauled my garlic, which was poorly stored, and put the stuff that seemed to be holding well into an improvised root cellar and put the stuff that had started sprouting into a cold frame.  The stuff in the cold frame hasn't all sprouted, but a lot of it has.

I think I could transplant a lot of this at this stage, but where?  It's so far along that I think it could get cold damaged easily unless it went into a larger cold frame.  So I'll ignore it for now and concentrate on the stuff that's been in the pit.

I pulled the blue bucket out.  That's the stuff that got tipped over when the pit flooded.  A lot of it looks like this:

Healthy white roots and an inch or two of top growth.  Since I'm planting them a few inches down, the whole thing gets buried.

I got my bed prep done the other day.  This bed is 40' long.  The board in the foreground is my planting pattern board.  It's a 2x6 that has a notch every 6" on each side, but the notches are offset so it will make a regular triangular pattern.  The boards on the left are temporary, there to guide me.  When I did this for last years crop, I didn't use that guide and things wove back and forth some.  Since I plan on several beds of this with even pathways, I'd better use the guide.

As I got ready to plant, I did have one concern:  Chickens.  I'm going to have to work up more area in an even more irresistible manner, and maybe put some kind of cover over the bed as it sprouts.

So here's how I plant.  I use the board as a guide and use a small hand tool called a ho-mi, also known as a Korean hand plow.

I dig a trench along the side of the board...

... put in the sprouting garlic cloves...

... roll the board over, which should advance it 7"...

... and use the ho-mi to dig a new trench along the side of the board, burying the previous cloves in the process. 

I try to rake both away from me and toward me with the ho-mi to cover the cloves evenly.  When digging for a row that starts 3" from the near end of the board, I try to dig my trench a little long, so that the final clove goes in 3" beyond the far end.  That means 6 cloves per trench.  That should give me about 400 cloves (eventual heads) in my 40' bed .  I intend to put in three or four of these beds.

The chickens enjoy this greatly.  I occasionally have to move one out of the trench or push them off after they peck at my wedding ring or something.

This spacing worked well last year, but was there over the winter with a heavy hay mulch on it.  This makes me think grabbing some of that ancient hay from the barn might not be a bad idea at this stage.  I wonder if that will make the chickens even more likely to scratch at it though.

Otherwise, I have to add that it was an amazing day, weather-wise.  The historic average high for March 12th is 37°F, with a low of 19°.  The previous record high was 52°.   We had a high today of 61°, and our forecast low is 37° for tonight.  I can here Canada Geese squabbling back in the swamp, establishing their nests.  The ice on the long pond at the bottom of the field has large holes in it where the pickerel weed remains gathered just enough more heat from the sun to melt those spots first.  I need to remember that this is not normal, and that anything I plant out due to irrational exuberance will need protection at times, because we will most likely have a few more cold nights, maybe as low as 20°.  Still, I wonder when the spring peepers will come out.

Rats, Plan A revisited.

Plan A for rat control is a metal barrier all the way around the greenhouse, deep enough so they won't dig under it, and tall enough to discourage them from climbing to the top and chewing throught the plastic.  I got this task done on three sides several years ago, but never got that last side done.  Tonight, it's done.

I lifted up the plastic on the east side and stapled it temporarily to keep it out of my way.  The board on the ground was holding the plastic down, but clearly not keeping things out.

In the center of the wall, where two baseboards meet, there was a clear hole where they'd been going in and out.  To the right of that was more area that they could get through easily.  And at each corner there was a spot where they'd obviously been moving through.

I dug along with a square point spade.  It was easy enough until I got to the last three feet.  There, the soil was frozen.  So I got the mattock.

That seemed to be working fine, until my poor care of it came back to bite me and the handle split.

Luckily, we seem to stock hockey tape.  Pink seemed like a good color for something I didn't want to keep leaving out.  I don't know how long it will last, but I noticed later that I have a spare handle in the shop.  So, back to digging.

Here you see the northeast corner, not quite fully excavated.  The rats went in and out to the left of the foundation post.  To the right of it you can see the 1" blue foam, the greenhouse plastic coming down outside of that, the sheet metal outside of that, and then the corrugated drain line, which, if connected to a ditch that isn't filled in, will drain water away from the north side.

In the trench I noticed this hole going into the soil under the greenhouse.  I should do some cleaning and cultivating inside.

Here's the ditch all dug out.  It's about 14" below the bottom of the bottom board.

16" tall, 8' long, 1" thick blue expanded polystyrene placed in the ditch.  I had to add a scrap of 2" at the north end.  Apparently, where the foam is, the greenhouse is just a little over 16' wide.

Then I tuck the plastic down over the foam as neatly as I can.

This is old metal roofing from a mobile home that I got off the metal pile at the dump several years ago.  It's beat up, but it's galvanized and 30" wide.  They're not quite 10' long, which is plenty to cover the foam.

And here they are fit into the trench.  I bent the ends over slightly to make rat proof corners.  You can also see that before I backfilled, I took a length of that drain line and put it in the bottom of the ditch.  The circle of the opening is down there at the corner.  I should probably cover that with hardware cloth, and backfill the whole area with loose stone.

I looked around and found the southwest corner is a little loose too.  I'll need to move some debris out of the way, dig it out, and put a folded 90° piece of metal around the corner, but for the moment, I've got a handleless shovel blade in front of the hole, so the whole thing should be tight now.  Next I need to clean out inside and make sure there aren't any still hiding in there.