Introducing the Actual Garden.

I'll have been here ten years at the beginning of March.  There came a point early on when we got a double bottom International Harvester sulky plow, shined it up, put new shares on the bottoms, new rubber on the wheels, and put it behind the Ferguson.  I got out there as soon as it seemed like plowing might be possible that spring and gave it a whirl.  Sometimes I dug deep and had to back up slightly to get out of the anchor hold the plow had on the ground.  Sometimes I went too shallow and the shares skipped along the grass instead of digging and flipping the furrow.  Sometimes I got a furrow turned for a distance, hit a bump, and watched the long strip of sod fold itself back into the furrow it came out of.  It was a very heavy sod, with clay under it.  It didn't help that I had no idea what I was doing.

Once I'd plowed it, it was still long strips of sod, impossible to plant in.  I tried to plow it a second time at a right angle to the first plowing, hooked the first strip of sod, clogged the plow, and dragged the sod strip a good distance out of it's furrow.  That clearly wasn't going to work.

Plan B turned out to be a "bog harrow".  We got it through Uncle Henry's (Maine weekly classified ads).  I knew I needed to harrow somehow, saw the add, and called.  I asked what a bog harrow was and was told it's a heavy disk, single gang, with four notched disks on each side throwing outward.  It seemed perfect.  We went and got it, put it behind the Ferguson, and dragged it around for a while.  It left a very uneven field, with broad furrows and ridges, and big lumps of sod instead of strips.

That year we planted with a small pick/mattock.  I also put up a fence around the area I'd plowed.  That fence still defines the garden.  The red lines show where the fence is, more or less.  This satellite picture is about five years old.  Some of the patterns you can see are still there, and some have changed.  Our original PVC hoophouse defined the southern half of the west side.  I paced out where I wanted to put the garden, rather than measuring and using my transit, so it's not quite square and the sides aren't quite even.  There were areas where we tried to work with the slope and areas that seemed flatter where we arranged things in different orientations.  The garden is between 160' and 180' on a side.  There's some wasted space near the fence nearly all the way around where the sod has never been fully brought under control.

We had delusions that if we let it sit fallow for a while, the sod would break down (it did, mostly) and the soil would mellow (it didn't).  So the next year we plowed up a larger area to the east of this and planted cover crops in it.  You can see four swathes of this, sections of 50' rows running north-south, to the right and upper right in the picture.  The reason they're dark is that at the time, I hadn't abandoned them back to pasture and had spread several large loads of seaweed (rockweed, a.k.a. bladderwrack) on them.  The year after that fallow, we planted the "regular garden" in all that, with a 3-dimensional electric deer fence around it.  It was miserable.  The year after that, we went back inside the fence, thinking we'd switch back and forth, cover cropping one while we had production in the other.  In the end though, I stayed inside the fence for most things.

We also bought in four loads of sawdust from a local mill, which explain the band of tan on the east end of the north side.  Perhaps I should mine that still, or maybe use it as a planting area in the future.  It got crab shell mixed into it at one time to help it break down, and has grown some of the thickest pasture grass on the whole farm.  It's mostly rhizome grass though, and would need thorough sifting before being moved into planting areas.  (Not that those planting areas don't have their own bit of rhizome grass...)

Over time the  character of the soil has improved from the seaweed, picked out crabs, sawdust, stable cleanings, wood chips, and whatever else I've thrown at it.  It's still heavy and weedy at times, but better.

Two years ago, the southeast quarter was very wet.  It's about the most level part of the garden, and it didn't drain well.  I had added enough organic matter that what I started to see were plants I'd associate with an organic bog.  I can't name these plants, but the thin grasses and mossy look of the soil surface told me something about what was going on.  I dug ditches with a square point spade every 20' to 30', about 8" deep, and connected their south ends with another ditch that runs east, out of the garden.  That took the excess water out of the top and made the soil look pretty good.

The result of all this is a garden of sections, each with it's own unique history, each somewhere between 24' and 40' wide by 50' to 70' long.  It may not look like much in winter, but let me start the tour.

In the northeast corner, quite some time ago, we planted three varieties of Jerusalem Artichoke.  I lost track of which rows were which long ago, and besides that, they've probably moved around some.  The thought was that if we needed to, we could just pasture pigs on top of them to get them out.  Now I'm not sure that would work, but I haven't tried to get rid of them yet either.  They are spreading slowly.  I've dug some in the past, but they're a pain to clean and they give me wicked gas.  Maybe if I build a root washing machine and slow roast them, they'll be worth both cooking and eating.  Meanwhile, the dead stalks are all you see in the winter.

In 2005 the rows looked like this, looking south at them:

They've grown a lot since then.  Now you can't tell one row from another and the patch is twice that wide.

Another long term feature is that the south side of the garden has raspberries to the west and a more or less unused area to the east.  The unused area has been tried out for several things, but seems to be doing well right now as the site of the hen house.  The reason it exists is that we originally put east-west rows in both the southwest and southeast quarters.  In the southwest, the first several rows got re-spaced and planted to three rows of raspberries, about 6' on center.  In the southeast, a row of day lilies forms a permanent divider that the current north-south rows haven't disturbed.  With the chickens in place, I was worried their traffic would set the day lilies back, so I put short trellis cages around them.  This has worked pretty well, providing weeding services outside the cage, and room for growth within it.  Here they are at present:

Stepping back, you can see the hen house in the strip between them and the south fence.  There's also the smaller roofed box that was originally built as a duck house, but used for turkeys last summer.  The ducks walked out last winter, so I'm out of the duck business.

Looking west from near the duck/turkey box, you see the raspberries.  The gambrel plastic dog house top in the foreground is also visible from a very different angle in the picture above.

In the northwest corner, the slope is steepest, so the old layout followed the contours more.  High-bush blueberries box in a triangle in the corner.  That's been fallow many years, but in the last two I've tried getting some potatoes in (successfully) and out (unsuccessfully).  The blueberries are currently inside an old plastic greenhouse tunnel frame, with the plan being to put bird netting over it all so that we get a crop.  The frame just needs minor repair on the near end.

To the right of that (east) is a bed that's one of the best amended in the garden.  There's currently a 6'x12' mini-tunnel sitting there, as well as a smaller 4'x10' wire covered mini-tunnel there.  The 4'x10', as well as the wheeled dog house sized box in the background, housed the chickens when they were very small.

Next downhill from that is the grape arbor.  Not all grapes survived, so there are gaps, but others are just about tearing down the wires.  King of the North seems to be the strongest.

Next, again to the right (east) is a triangular patch that fills in between the grapes and the north-south rows of the northeast corner.  This area is planted with daffodils.  I'd like to get it filled in with other bulbs too, all intended for cut flowers.  It's not much to look at in winter:

The rest is filled in with growing areas suitable for annual planting.  Some have been planted more recently than others.  Here's the view looking north from the hen house.  To the right, the section has tall weeds, lots of rhizome grass, and will probably be a struggle to control.  Straight ahead is a section where the weeds have been controlled by chickens digging over the crabs repeatedly.  It has a thin cover of what I think is an annual grass.  In the far section straight ahead, the remains of last years most productive section remain, not properly cleaned up.  There's a poultry-net fence too, which was supposed to keep the chickens out of the active section.  It's partly taken down now.

To the right of that is an area I wanted to do corn-beans-squash in.  I got the corn planted before I ripped a muscle in my back late last spring.  All there is to show is dug rows, which were going to be hilled more, and white flags marking where the corn hills were.

Finally, uphill to the left from the corn, are two or three indistinct sections that run into each other.  The top most has been partly dug and spread with crabs.  The next down was spread with crabs but not dug.  I think of dividing lines being there, because there were areas where I had some weed control two years ago and areas where I never got the grasses fully in check.

  

Also visible in this picture are the gate, the large rock that defines how far west a bed can go in the southwest corner, and the cross bar of a steel bed frame, used as a row end stake.  In the satellite view, the rows ran east-west, but now they're north-south.  There was also a greenhouse tunnel frame in one spot in the satellite view.  I think that's the frame now over the blueberries.

And that's the basic geography of the space inside the fence.  There are more stories to tell, but I'm on battery and it's almost dead.

Is it spring yet?

According to Accuweather, the coldest historic average day around here has a high of 27° and a low of 7°.  (That's average.  Extreme lows get much lower than that, down to about -15° to -20°.)  There are actually about fifteen days with that average high and low, the middle of which was about five days ago.  This is our coldest time of the year, however the thermometer made it up to 47° today.  It was already 43° when we woke up this morning.  I keep waiting for the clouds to clear too, because the forecast was for sun.  Yesterday, this scene was covered with a couple of inches of snow.

My day is about half done, I suppose.  At least it's 1:48 and I've got plenty of time to do more things.  But I've just come in from the woods where I feel I got a decent cardio workout and I feel like sitting foe a few minutes, so I'm writing.

I went to the country store and greenhouse operation two miles down the road this morning where I'd gotten salvage greenhouse plastic last summer.  They have two more 100' long, circular arch, 20' wide high tunnels that were damaged in the snow storms a year ago that they've never taken down.  I figured that because it's an early warm day, I should ask now if I want more plastic.  They didn't want to take the plastic off these yet, but he did give me a couple of old chunks that were folded up and stashed out of the way.  I haven't measured them yet, but he said one is 32' x 28' and the other is a similar size.  I'll use them for various things, from more greenhouse to just laying on the soil in the early season to get it warm and dry quicker.

Then I got in a couple of cart loads of firewood from the drying shed into the basement.  I started the year with six tiers, each 11' x 6' x 16-18", plus blocks of stove wood.  I now have four and a half tiers out there, one of which is new.  I also have a cord of slabwood left in the woodshed behind the summer kitchen.  I started with 1 1/4 cords of that.  And I have about 3/4 cord of little ash blocks from Peavey Mfg. Co. in the drying shed, and another cord of them in the old sheep hay shed, which is another bow top greenhouse type structure.  I'm good for this winter.

Next winter I'll need more.  I did some cutting a year ago in the woods to the east of the house, and I need to get all of that out and dry before it rots.  I got about six cart loads out, got good and sweaty, popped a cart tire by poking the valve stem with a branch on the ground and ripping the valve stem loose, and now I'm writing.

I noticed a few things though when I was poking around closer to the greenhouse this morning.  Firstly, of the seeds I planted two weeks ago (lettuce, kale, carrots, leeks, beets, cilantro, endive, and a few more that I can't remember) there are sprouts in the arugula.

Not much to look at, but there are three sprouts, each by a finger tip.

Not even in a cold frame, a volunteer catnip is doing okay.  I throw that scrap of plastic burlap over it at night to help it along.

And finally, the peppermint is sprouting.  This is outside, up against the south wall of the greenhouse.  It's unprotected, except that when it snows, the snow falls off the greenhouse and the peppermint is the first thing that gets buried.  When it melts, being up against the south wall gives it a little warmth and protection too.

Alright.  It's now 2:40.  I've had one business call while I've been writing, so no, I haven't wasted a whole hour at this.  But I'd better grab a dry shirt and get back to it.

Why I chose this name for this blog.

A friend of mine wrote a song called "Farming Is The Hard Way", which includes things like plowing with a three legged cow.  I don't plow with oxen.  I don't really plow with a tractor.   I don't use a rototiller.  I do occasionally use a small rip plow, sometimes called a subsoiler, that reaches a narrow tooth down about 12" and loosens the soil without churning it.  I use that on a small tractor, and I try to avoid running machinery in the garden if the soil is at all soft.   I'm "farming the hard way" in that I'm focused on hand digging my beds.  Because my soil is a heavy clay loam, it's easily damaged by excessive machinery use.

I'm also aware of our future using less petroleum products.  I'm trying to grow without putting more fossil energy into the garden than I get out as food energy.   I'm not sure I'm succeeding, because I do still use fossil energy to import things.  The tree trimmers who have generously given me several loads of wood chips certainly use petroleum, as does the plastic greenhouse film, the lumber mills, the tool makers, and all that.  But I hope that what I'm doing makes my garden more robust and reliable against global economic weirdness.  I'm trying to garden in a way that will be possible regardless of what the world throws at me.  Sometimes that means a more labor intensive initial approach.  I hope that in the long run, it makes it easier.

As for the URL, what I started with was heavy clay and weeds.  I've seen progressions of weeds over time and I've seen the soil getting easier to work, but I know it will fall back into it's old pattern without proper attention.

Finally, when we were first dating, my wife introduced me to her family as "Dan the Farmer".  The youngest of her siblings' kids still calls me that, as one word, when he greets me or wants to get my attention.  Sometimes, when I've been doing poorly in the garden, I'm a little embarrassed to be called that.  It seems like it shouldn't apply to me because I'm not that good.  But just now, I feel like I should embrace it and try to live up to it.

Plus the first few titles I thought of were already taken.

Root cellars, sort of.

When I first moved in here, there was a root cellar in the basement.  The basement was drafty as all hell, and damp too, so that kind of worked, except that a basement should not be drafty and wet.  I've had various ideas of digging a "proper" root cellar into a hillside, but that's a lot of work and I've got other priorities.

So I haven't gotten my garlic planted yet.  That should have been done in October or November, but...  So I had a garden cart full of garlic in the barn, and some of it got a touch of frost damage and some of it started to sprout roots in the dirt in the bottom of the cart before I took it all out to the greenhouse one cold night, threw it on the ground in there, threw what mulch I had at hand over it and covered it with a tarp.  A few days ago I went through it and sorted it into the properly dormant stuff and the stuff that had rooted or frozen.  The rooted and frozen went into a cold frame, got buried under and inch of dirt, and hopefully a bunch of it will sprout for transplanting in a month or so.  The dormant stuff went into buckets.

Then what?  Well, I dug a pit, lined it with an off-size cold frame wall, and put the buckets in it.  I covered that with a bit of metal roofing (from the dump) and then heaped the mulch hay over it.

Today I opened it up to check on things.  There's frost in the soil, but the garlic in the buckets looks good.  I left it open for a few hours to warm slightly.

Also, right next to that, in the northwest corner, I've got a barrel half buried and I've got a bunch of sprouted potatoes in it that I got free from the Co-op.  If they can hold in there, I'll know it will store good potatoes, and I'll be able to plant these out come spring.  If they freeze, no great loss.  What I see so far is that the few right at the front, just where the cold air leaks into the barrel, have had their sprouts frozen.  Two inches back from that, they look good.

This gets closed with an old wash tub with mulch hay stuffed in it as insulation.  There are mulch wood chips over the top of the barrel, and the whole thing gets tarped at night for one more level of thermal radiation barrier.  I'm considering my options for closing it up tighter with a wood cover to prevent the airflow that's freezing those ones at the front.

The tub fits just inside the barrel, and it's a pain to get in and out of there too.

The Greenhouse

It's been a mild winter, globally maybe the mildest in 120,000 years. Locally, we're supposed to be zone 5, but last night was the coldest we've had and it only hit -5°F.  Not bad really.

When I first got here, I put up a high tunnel made of 1" plastic electrical conduit.  It got crushed by the snow.  I braced it back up after doing some repairs, and it lasted a few years, but when the plastic went on it, it wasn't worth re-covering.  Part of the reason for that was that we'd gotten a 52' x 28' steel pipe greenhouse frame, so we had plenty of space.  It was annoying though because the gable roof wasn't shallow enough to shed snow, and I had to go out there and rake it off during storms.  At the winter solstice three years ago, there was a snow storm that dropped 16" of heavy wet stuff on us in the middle of the night.  The southwest corner of the greenhouse got seriously bent, and some of the frames broke.  There was still enough to re-constitute, but I didn't want a greenhouse susceptible to snow that way.  I traded it with another farm for a pinwheel rake and a mostly worn out baler.

In the spring three years ago I built the current greenhouse, which in today's terms is properly a "high tunnel", because it isn't heated.  It's made of wood strapping, scrap 2x4 blocks and other scavenged lumber, cedar foundation posts that I cut from my woods, and the plastic from the previous greenhouse.  I spent about $100 on wood strapping and screws and got a 16' x 24' greenhouse out of it.  It sits on part of the footprint of the old steel pipe greenhouse where I'd amended the soil fairly well, and of the three greenhouses I've had here, it's the first one where the soil was tilled up before hand rather than sod.  Tilled before hand is good.  A year after I built it, I dug around the foundation and put 1" foam insulation down 16" on the north, west, and south sides.  I still need to do the east.  I put in sheet metal (scavenged) to keep rodents from tunneling through as well.

So today I was out working in the greenhouse.  It was 93° in there when I first went out.  The thermometer says that it was down to -5° last night, and the soil was frozen a little in places, but I'm going to pretend that's not going to happen any more.

Inside the greenhouse I have a bunch of cold frames.  These are just 1x8 board rectangles, each sized to an old triple track storm window set over the top of it.  Most are 30" x 54".  In one I have a whole bunch of garlic that started to sprout and may have gotten slightly freeze damaged.  I don't expect it all to grow, but I think a lot of it will and it will need to be transplanted later.  In the next ones I planted kale, spinach, lettuce, cilantro, beets, leeks, endive, and carrots.  There are just a few short rows of each.  As soon as I see them sprout I'll plant more.  It's good to have succession.

I also tilled up the middle area today.  I spade it with a digging fork, mostly to dig out any rhizome grass that may have made it's way in.  I've covered some with a scrap of old greenhouse plastic.  I'll cover the rest with some lumber wrap plastic in a few minutes when I go out to close the cold frames.  I'll also cover the cold frames with plastic.  With all that in place, the soil should stay a little warmer and be good to plant cold hardy stuff in shortly.

Well, to begin with....

It's January of 2012.  I'm starting a Blog.

They say that record keeping is important for the garden.  Some say that's how writing began, but honestly, I'm bad at record keeping.  Way back when I first got here, I made a practice of writing every day.  It was a short narrative of what we'd done here.  And I made a practice of sending that out to various people, but somehow I lost the habit.  Now, I'm going to try again.

I live in a small coastal town in Maine, not too far from Bangor (the big city) or Acadia National Park.  It's a three mile walk to the end of the Warf Rd. where you can put your toes in the salt water and see Penobscot Bay.  It's a shorter walk to salt water the other way, but that water is further up the estuary from the open ocean.

I've lived here for ten years, or at least I will have in a little over a month.  I live here with my wife and cat.  The house is about 170 years old.  It's a hybrid timber/balloon frame, with lath and plaster walls (where they haven't been re-done) and a field stone foundation.  Bit by bit I'm tightening it up, and I'm burning about five cords of wood this winter to stay comfortably warm.  I came here thinking I was going to be a market gardener, and was for a while but not a financially successful one.  It turns out that my soil is not as inherently fertile as I'd hoped, and sometimes it's just no fun to be out in the heat, the rain, the bugs, or the mud.  I've gotten a day job but I continue to work in the garden as much as I can.

My soil is a heavy clay.  We could go from soup one week to concrete then next as the soil dried out in the spring.  We had grand plans, and many of them were hard work with no real reward.  There came a point about five years ago when I started hauling in everything I could enrich the soil.  I got seaweed and stable cleanings.  I put out a sign that said "Wood Chips Wanted".  And the soil has improved considerably.

I love digging in the spring.  I love the promise of the soil when I set out a row and put in seed.  It's the follow-through that I'm still working on.  The reason for writing this blog is to have a record of what I'm doing, and maybe to share that record with others.  And hopefully it will keep me honest about getting out there and keeping the garden in a condition I can be proud of.