Low-Cost Raised Beds...

   Buenos Morning, Internet.
             I've found it's generally more productive to set up new growing beds over the fall and winter for spring plantings.  For one thing, it allows any soil amendments to filter their way into the dirt, and the alternating freeze & thaw seems to help open up the soil - a great way to utilize natural cycles to minimize human labor.  For another thing, it helps to keep me focused on my production goals through the winter, with the added benefit of keeping the winter blues at bay.

handicrafts & small victories

   Work finally picked up again and, in the home repair and remodeling business, when it rains it pours so i've been a little busy, but we finally got the camera.  It must be made of some kind of magic because even i can take a clear picture with it.
   My bamboo t.p. holder still isn't finished-finished, but we're using it anyways, and here it is:

nifty, n'est pas?

     I also got a little wild for pizza night the other week and made myself a pizza peel out of a scrap of birch plywood.  I tried a new kind of dough: slow fermentation.  It's the best pizza dough i've ever made and the best part is it holds up as a frozen pizza. For less than $10 we were able to make 5 pizzas (could of been 6 but i wanted one big one). We ate 3 with friends for pizza night, and the other 2 i tossed, topped and froze.  Delicious home-made frozen pizza was the result, 10 minutes on the pizza stone in the oven at 450degrees satiated my insatiable craving for convenient pizza action.  The flavor and the cost made it a winner. I'm making it again later in the week so i'll take pictures and post the recipe for my soon-to-be-famous Paper Plate Pizza.  In the meantime this picture of my pizza peel will have to tide you over.
 
In other news, me and my neighbor are the proud parents of lots of seedlings, pretty much everything we put out in his yard has sprouted.  See our baby broccoli:

we were a tad liberal with our sowing, so all the plants need thinning out.

  Last but not least, I have finally achieved hot compost!  I made a temporary compost bin a couple weeks after we moved into the house...once we had too many kitchen scraps basically. As you can kind of see from the pictures, it's 4 straw bales sitting on a 3-tiered grid of bradford pear prunings.  The branches raise it of the ground enough to allow airflow but not so much as to separate the compost from the earth, where all the beneficial microbes are already living.  The straw bales insulate (and provide airflow) so you can make hot compost without having to fill the 3feet cubed dimension that most folks say is required for the compost to heat up (which breaks down organic matter much quicker).  The result of this slap-dash composter after 2-3 weeks is amazing. I wish you could smell it...it smells like summer in the woods, with tree nymphs and everything. I guess since i can't upload olfactory hues a photo will have to do...

now that's what i call black gold.

If you can believe it, that was a pile of grass clippings, leaves, coffee grounds, eggshells and vegetable waste just a few weeks ago.  I love facilitating decompostition.

Call me Planty McPlantpants.

This is my wild-card seed drop:
   Still haven't made it back to Ma's.  What    a            jerk.
   Work's been unexpectedly slow recently, but i've been keeping myself busy.

• the Workshop is essentially functional.  Some organization is required, but it's the kind that organically organizes itself, seemingly spontaneously, as various projects are undertaken in the space. 
• Rainwater collection has begun!  i went out and paid too much for a 275gallon tote and rigged it up at the potting shed before the runoff from tropical storm Lee hit us.  That thing was halfway full by the time we saw sunshine again:)
• my first bamboo project is nearly complete.  As part of a general push in the direction of building things instead of buying crap, i built a toilet paper . . . (rack?stand?dispenser?_ _ _) . . . thing for our bathroom with Joe-Knee playing resident 3-D consultant.  I have a little bit of finishing work to do on it, but it's functional now.  Should be done by the time we get a camera, then i can show you.

• A windfall salvage day fell into my lap.  One day brought me 5 buckets from grocery-chain bakeries; 2 metal trash cans, a wedging table (for pottery) and two wooden pallets from the dumpster of the local university; and around 300 decent bricks and a dozen or so cinder blocks from a house that got demolished in the neighborhood.  While i may have tendencies leaning towards hoarder-hood, i will put all of this to work soon. 

  A couple days ago i planted out some fairly old snap pea seeds.  There's 8 in containers and a random sowing around the mail box and along a low brick wall near the honeysuckle bush.  In our porch container, i cleaned out the sad little tomato and basil, added some more soil (because my filler materials are composting down) and planted dill, cilantro,  bibb and butterking lettuce... and left a small spot open for a succession.
  Today i went over to my neigbor's house to help plant the bed he keeps in the front yard behind his pitcher plants (awesome, right?).  Earlier in the week we pulled up a bunch of turnips he grew this year, so today we cleaned up the bed a bit and planted some seeds i bought during the garden-supply store mid-summer lull.  I was a little concerned about not amending the soil prior to planting, but i'm also concerned about planting too late.  Maybe I'll top-dress with compost when the seedlings start coming up.  We split his bed (maybe 3'x18') into 6 roughly equal sections (measured by stride length) and planted:

• Beets, Tall Top Early Wonder
• Radish, Cherry Belle
• Cabbage, Early Jersey Wakefield
• Kale, Red Russian
• Broccoli, Waltham
• Georgia Collards
• Pak Choi
• Mesclun Salad Mix

  The radish is sown among the beets, so we'll get a small crop of them in October, then the beets can fill in.  These are mostly cold or frost tolerant varieties once they're established.  My thinking is that should we get some frosts before they can reasonably handle it, we can just coddle them a bit with some plastic protection.  We're planning on just splitting the harvest and sharing surplus with other neighbors.
   My mama says that food gifts go a long way for the suburban grower (whose compost may smell for a day or two before it heats up, or grows food instead of grass, or might want some outlaw laying hens and wants prior consent of potential tattle-tells) and, after knowing her my whole life, i'm inclined to believe her.

P.S. After some research, i've amended my hypothesis about our unripened figs. While i still believe that they're not getting enough sun, i think the hot, dry weather this summer probably stunted their fruiting cycle.  There's not much i can do about it now, but i can direct more rainwater to their root systems during the dry spell next summer.