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.

My No-Cost Keyhole Bed

  I learned about keyhole beds from Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway, an awesome permaculture primer.  The keyhole bed morphs the customary rectangular garden bed into a pleasing circle, with a narrow path to the center.  This layout maximizes the growing space by minimizing the area need for pathways.  I've been wanting to try it out, the berry bushes in the back were begging for some special treatment and they were already conveniently planted in a circular arrangement.
   A large part of my low-cost experimentation consists of gathering materials, so when i say my keyhole bed was no-cost, what i actually mean is that i spent no cash but lots of time.
  Let's get into the process:

• My first step was laying out the circle, which i did by pounding a bamboo stake in the center of the berries and tying another stake to it 6ft away. Then i traced a rough circle through the grass and removed about 6 inches of grass around the periphery.
• Next i began the process of sheet mulching (also called lasagna gardening).  Basically, with sheet mulching you're composting in place to produce friable soil.  There are lots of reasons to sheet mulch instead of tilling.  First of all, tilling is a major hassle, i don't like it.  Second, our soil is a complex ecosystem composed of creepy-crawlies, microorganisms, fungi and nutrients. Tilling disrupts this ecosystem. I prefer the long-term benefits of letting nature work the soil over the short-term benefits of tilling or digging, but of course there is a balance.  I will double-dig some beds once to loosen heavy clay soils if it's needed, but usually it's not if you plan ahead enough to afford yourself a little patience.
•   The first step in sheet mulching is to lay down a layer of cardboard or newspaper.  This helps to kill grasses and weeds by blocking light and it invites our worm friends up from the nether-reaches to feast on the organic material you lay on top.  A warning: don't use cardboard or newspaper with colored inks.  Colored inks often contain traces of toxic substances that can leach into the soil over time.  Blank cardboard is best, black ink is second best (now usually soy-based ink).  I gather cardboard whenever workers in the dairy section of the grocery store are restocking (Saturday afternoon at my store).  Don't be a jerk, ask nicely for the cardboard and take it all, colored ink or not. This saves the workers from having to take out the cardboard, so they'll be grateful, and you don't seem like some sort of yuppie cardboard snob while you're in their way picking out only the cardboard you want.  When you get the cardboard home, remove any tape or glue, cut off blank cardboard from the boxes with colored ink (usually one or two little flaps), and put all the colored ink sections in the recycling.  I've found it's best to soak the cardboard in a pail of water before you put it down. If you use newspaper, you want to lay down 10-15 page thick sections, and definitely soak them or they have a tendency to drift off. 
•   So, i've laid down my cardboard, making sure to overlap lest any beastly grasses should rear their ugly heads.  Now i've gotta start adding organic materials. I start sheet mulches the same way i start compost piles, with a layer of carbon-heavy material like leaves, woodchips or straw.  In this i case i used an oak branch that fell into my yard.  Next i add kitchen scraps, more leaves, grass clippings, anything close basically.  I also tossed in my nearly finished compost. 

 Generally, when you sheet mulch in the fall, you moisten the bed the same way you would compost, so it has the consistency of a wrung-out sponge, then you cover it with black plastic and let it all cook down until you're ready to plant in the spring.  This, however, is an experiment. So instead of covering my little baby, i'm going to continue adding organic materials throughout the fall.
  My keyhole bed is going to be my perennial polyculture experiment, meaning the focus will be on plants that don't require annual plantings (i'll probably have some self-seeding annuals in the mix), all mixed in together.  I've ordered egyptian walking onion bulbs that i'll plant by digging through the mulch and planting in the soil as soon as they arrive and i'll get some medicinal/edible plants like borage, comfrey, bee balm, garlic chives, tarragon...who knows?  This is the bed that will likely determine it's own planting based on what i find when... thanks for coming.
Want one?

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.