Dropstone Farms

It appears that, if you’re rototilling a garden that’s gone to grass and blackberries for the past six years, watering prior to tilling makes it easier to remove the vegetation. It looks like a softer, wetter soil allows the tines to pull plants bodily out of the soil instead of chopping them up but leaving the rhizomes. Of course, when you’re tilling mud the tractor gets stuck more easily. If, like me, you’re running a walking tractor it’s not a problem but just takes some muscle to get moving again.

Of course, I still hate rototilling and want to find an affordable, labor-efficient, and less intrusive method of soil preparation.

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So it’s Spring and the chickens are sleeping in the coop and are still in the sacrificial paddock when the fence keeps them in and free-ranging when it doesn’t. I prefer to think of it as a Sacrifice Zone but that’s because I’m a nerd.

The result is that we’ve got a mess of tomato starts potted up in 4″ soil blocks and a shortage of space in the greenhouse and a spare chicken tractor. In the best idea I’ve had in a long time, it occurred to me to remove the blue tarp covering the tractor and replace it with clear plastic. Ta-daaa! Instant greenhouse.

In use, the tractor is partially covered with a blue tarp to let the ladies to get out of the sun or rain, depending.

Because of the poultry cloth on the tractor we couldn’t clip the plastic to the PVC hoops as is our usual custom. Instead we attached the plastic by laying it on top and zig-zagging twine over the plastic in the manner we learned during the Tilth Producers farm walk at Terry’s Berries. This has proven to be faster and more reliable that the clips with the added bonus that the greenhouse can be vented by sliding the plastic up without fiddling with any clips and potentially tearing the plastic.

So, yeah, I’m pretty pleased with myself.

Here is the tractor greenhouse with the plastic fully deployed for maximum heat.

Here is the tractor cum greenhouse with the sides pushed up for venting. Noticing how much easier this is than farting around with clips?

Look how happy the tomatoes are in their roomy new soil blocks. I'm pretty sure we started them too late but, you know, first year farming.

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So, thanks to a great post at Civil Eats about Petaluma, CA, I became aware of a tool called a “short hoe.”

Stolen shamelessly from the Smithsonian.

The short hoe is a particularly brutal piece of equipment that forces a farm worker to bend double in order to use it for weeding.This offends me on a number of levels.

As a gardener, I’m pissed off because Cesar Chavez’s hoe (the one shown above) is a piss-poor design of a hoe that’s no good for any sort of weeding. As a human being, I’m pissed off that someone would willingly force their employees to use a tool that is so debilitating and cruel. What do you think is going to happen when you force a grown person to work bent double all day? And that’s an agricultural day, not a white-collar day.

I remember when I did two-and-a-half years of a four-year stretch in Walla Walla (what others would call my undergrad) and I saw farm workers bent double in the fields cutting asparagus. I have never since been able to eat asparagus without thinking about the labor that it takes to bring it to my table. And I’m extremely privileged. I don’t eat asparagus until it’s locally available and, in all likelihood, harvested by a hard-working upper-class graduate of Evergreen University’s excellent agriculture program. But still…

In our neck of the woods, the farmers’ markets have started handing out bumper stickers that read “No Farms, No Food” which is absolutely true, but at the last Tilth Producers of Washington conference I saw a bumper sticker that read “No Farmworkers, No Food,” which might be even more true. We owe the food that we eat to the mostly Mexican, mostly immigrant people that labor for our food. The business plan that Lauren & I have right now doesn’t involve employees, but if we do have to hire someone it’s going to be a real challenge to do right by her.

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Mundane news

• Neighbor Claire brought over some rhubarb roots today; she was dividing and moving her patch, growing mostly unattended in the middle of the yard, to her new garden area. The rhubarb we transplanted last year didn’t take, sadly, so we were happy to have some new.
• Started some herb seeds today — seven cells each of sweet basil, Genovese basil, cilantro, dill, oregano, and scallions (I know, not an herb, but my last cells didn’t germinate yet so I tossed some more in this batch).
• I made pasta from scratch for the very first time today. Proof-of-concept pasta, we are calling it, because it wasn’t super wonderfully delicious, but it was good, and we both decided it’s worth learning to do better. We tossed it with homegrown leeks, homegrown Brussels sprouts, and homemade sausage, and garnished with imported parmigiano reggiano and the zest and and juice of an organic, non-local meyer lemon. (I can’t wait for my lemon trees to start doing things and making lemons for me.)

Proof-of-concept pasta, with homegrown leek and Brussels sprouts, and homemade sausage, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Fantastic news

• When we were considering moving here, a friend told us about the Trust for Working Landscapes, which manages some city-owned designated farmland that has been waiting for people to farm it; that possible opportunity was part of our decision to move here. So, a few weeks ago we met with some of the board members from the trust, and last Monday we finally turned in our application. Wednesday we met some board members out at the proposed site. Apparently, the whole process seems to be more informal than I thought, because instead of having a several-week process to review and approve our application, we spent an hour putting stakes in the ground where we wanted the corners of our plot to be. We also got the go-ahead to start buying equipment and seeds, so I guess it’s a go? I guess. Yay! If all goes well we will be selling veggies, maybe eggs, and maybe chickens at our farmers’ market and maybe at an unstaffed farm stand.
• As part of the aforementioned equipment-buying, Garth promptly went out and bought a BCS 720 walking tractor. I don’t really understand it completely, but as far as I can tell it is pretty awesome.
• Araucanas are coming in at our feed store this Friday, so we’ll be getting two more chickens, for an even twelve total, ten laying brown and two laying blue/green.

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We got an email off a farming list the other day stating that a nearby greenhouse owner was moving and she was having a greenhouse sale of all the now-superfluous equipment. So I fired the truck up and went to see if I could find a bargain. I managed to pick up:

• A 55-gallon compost tumbler
• A smallish garden cart
• Six greenhouse table tops
• 12 brackets for building tables from 2×4s
• A hula hoe
• 12 large seed-starting trays
• Six tomato cages
• A mess of domes
• A billion seed flats
• A mess of small seed-starting trays

All for the princely sum of $87. I am awfully pleased with myself. In the spirit of giving back to the gardening , I offer up the following jpg.

Sources close to the Obama administration assure me that this is Tom Vilsack's own farm in Iowa.

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So the other day the girls laid only a single egg. It was bizarre. Then, the day after, we got five eggs. We normally get between three and six eggs per day, so having an egg-free day out of the blue was kind of bizarre. Everything seems to be back to normal. I guess they needed a break.

In a perfectly reasonable segue, I built a new anvil stand today. My old stand was built of a mess of 2×12s glued and bolted together (see figure 11 on this page). It was unstable on uneven ground and I never felt really good about it. Also, even with a mess of silicone caulk on top my anvil, being an old Peter Wright, rang loud enough to require earplugs. So I built a new stand out of 2×12 by screwing together four lengths and making a box with either end open. Then I filled it full of dirt.

The silver-grey stuff is scale that forms on iron when it's being worked. It then flakes off and makes a mess. I don't know if the resolution is high enough to see the earwig that ran out when I moved the anvil, but it's there.

I call it my Rammed Earth Anvil Stand on account of I compacted each layer of dirt with a chunk of 2×4 and a sledge. It came out rather well, I think. It’s much more stable than the old one because the dirt inside conforms to the grass and soil it’s resting on. Also, the much greater mass means that my hammer blows move more metal and the anvil doesn’t hop around when I’m working. Best of all, the column of dirt damps the anvil and it’s not so freaking loud all the time. As a further upside, I can tell the relative temperature of the iron by the changing sounds as the metal cools. Nifty, eh? Also, very cheap.

This is my anvil. You can see the dirt it's resting on. It's like a raised bed for metalworking.

My only concern it that the weight and the hammering will cause the screws holding the whole shebang together to pull out. If this happens, I’ll just run some bands around the outside for strength and hope it holds.

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Inspired by Throwback at Trapper Creek’s straw bale root cellar, we’re going to take a crack at building our own to store potatoes and all the apples that blew down in last night’s windstorm.

We went to the feed store and picked up “as many straw bales as will fit in this truck”* and I asked Lauren if I was allowed to buy a hay hook because, well, I am no longer twenty and bucking bales does not come as easily as to once did. She said yes but, due to lack of hay hook at the store, I was foiled.

And then I remembered I have a forge! And a pile of iron! So after I got home I cranked out the following local-heritage-artisanal hay hook (Appellation My Backyard).

I am reasonably pleased with it. I hammered and twisted it, aligned everything perfectly, and quenched it in water to test if it was the right shape. I was pleased with it and decided to anneal the tool. The process of annealing is used to soften a piece of metal. When I quenched the hook in water to check the fit (*ppsssshhhhh*) I set the molecules and it became brittle. To cure this, I needed to heat the metal up and let it cool down slowly.

So I returned the perfectly aligned tool to the forge to let it heat up. Unfortunately, I left it in the heat to long and it got all saggy and crooked. Oops. Oh well, at some point I’ll heat it up and straighten it out again. In the meantime, I can report that I’ve got a perfectly functional tool, if somewhat lopsided.

* Six bales in a Toyota pickup with a topper. Topper, for the record, is what Wisconsinites call a canopy. Also, we eat frozen custard.

April 2009 UPDATE: We noticed a lot of folks are finding this post via Google, so we wrote an update on the success — lack thereof — of the straw bale root cellar. Read it here.

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So, network issues at work provided my with a day to research various greenhouse options.

We’ve had such success with the hoophouses that I’m really fired up to get a real greenhouse going in the spring. My first inspiration came from the Westside Gardener whose site is full of Cascadian goodness. Minus incidentals, this is $110 for the frame of a 10′ x 20′ greenhouse. This is awesome. I’m a little concerned about keeping plastic attached in our periodic windstorms and I don’t relish the thought of coming home and finding a springs worth of starts wind damaged. Can’t beat the price though.

What I really want, however, is a shiny, pre-made Solexx greenhouse. I mean, Solexx! It’s got *two* Xs which makes it twice as cool as competing coverings. The deal with solexx is that it’s a semi-rigid double-walled plastic that diffuses sunlight and provides insulation. It’s also fairly expensive at almost $600 to cover a 10×16 greenhouse. It’s got an 8-year warranty though, and I count myself lucky to be able to reuse plastic a second year. Actual greenhouse plastic might last longer though. Plus, solexx wants braces every 16-24″, which means more costs for the frame and more time invested in building the structure.

A third option is clear plastic corrugated panels which cost $30 each. They do have the advantage of being permanent but I haven’t spec’ed out the costs of building a structure robust enough to support a rigid panel that can’t flex in the wind like plastic or Solexx.

My biggest question revolves around whether it makes sense to spring for Solexx? It may be that, in our mild climate, the amount of sunlight is going to limit growth much more than temperature. I’m not planning on heating the greenhouse but I’ll expect to run growlights for seedlings. The other constraint is that I want a semi-portable structure. Lauren and I need to be able to drag the greenhouse around out lot depending on need, soil rotation, and available light. I don’t want to get into anything that would allow justify purchasing one of those tractors I’ve had my eye on.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Requests for starts?

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Like many, I have a weakness for spending entirely too much money on tools* and equipment because, in my apparently vivid imagination, it seems like the next tool will be the ones that solves all of my problems. Sometimes I’m right. Sometimes I’m wrong. Let’s talk about those instances in which a tool performs so well and is so useful that one is foolish not to have it.

Things that are awesome:

• The Broadfork
• Drip Irrigation
• 3-Tine Cultivator
• Hoop Houses
• Chicken Crate
• Garden Cart
• The Scythe

The Broadfork

This is a tool that jams into the soil and, when you lean on it, aerates and fluffs the soil. Minimal tillers feel that this is an adequate alternative to double-digging or tilling. I’m not convinced that the broadfork replaces digging and tilling, but it allows one to aerate 8-10″ below the soil you’ve dug as well as punch through a plow/tiller pan. This is good. And, if you’re tearing up sod or uncultivated ground, the broadfork will tear up the thatch and make digging or tilling easier. I love it. Not cheap, but not easily manufactured or omitted.

Drip Irrigation

So I went to Bainbridge Gardens to investigate drip hoses for our squashes and tom. Why? Because I’m lazy and wanted to water by flipping a switch in addition to keeping sensitive leaves dry. An extremely helpful employee named Steve spent about an hour with me explaining the ins-and-outs of a low-flow irrigation system and showed me how to assemble everything and decide where I needed to run lines. I spent $54 on hoses and fittings and irrigated 40′ of tomatoes, 10′ of cucumbers, and 10′ of assorted squashes. And had spare parts left over. Why didn’t I do this earlier?

Hoop Houses

What do you get when you combine $15 worth of PVC Pipe, $4 worth of plastic sheeting, and some plastic clips? Awesome tomatoes, that’s what. It’s been a cold, raining spring, but our tomatoes are coming along well. The hoop house keeps the hot weather crops several degrees above the ambient temperature, which isn’t far from what an unheated greenhouse would do.

Three-Tine Cultivator

I call it “The Skritcher.” Lauren keeps telling me that no-one knows what that means, but now that I’ve written this it’ll clearly enter the lexicon at large. Why do I like this tool? Have you ever looked at a bed that you wanted to plant and asked for an easy way to fluff up the soil, mix in compost and fertilizer, and kill whichever tiny weeds have taken root? This is how. Plus it breaks up dirt clods. And you can use it to shake the dirt off a wad of thatch prior to using it as an enormous atlatl for hucking the aforementioned thatch at the dogs.

Chicken Crate!

It’s just awesome! You fill it with chickens and carry them from their coop to their pen. I showed my mom and she said, “Oh, just like in Egypt!” This is also notable because the wooden, handmade crate from the Amish supply company costs $40 less than the ugly plastic crate from FarmTek.

The Garden Cart

I’ve written about this before. It’s still great. The only thing it needs is a bottle opener mounted to it somehow. It’ll get there.

The Scythe

I am a lazy lawnmower. As a result, the grass is about three feet high. One cannot really deal with this with a reel mower. And I’ve spent the past 3-4 weekends in the equipment shed with battery chargers, starter fluid, and carb cleaner trying to get the string trimmer and riding lawnmower that came with the house running. As the kids on the internets say, FAIL. So I borrowed an electric mower and an electric string trimmer from my Mom and her husband. There have been a couple weekends of grinding away at the grass and, in fairness, some progress has been made. And I like that you can only use an electric tool for a half-hour or so before the battery dies.. I like breaks.

However, I wasn’t getting anywhere and the grass threatened to engulf us all. So I finally broke down and ordered a scythe from Lee Valley Tools. It arrived Friday afternoon and, dang, why did I wait so long?

The scythe is not like the one that hung in my grandfather’s garage as a child. (Actually, I expect it’s still there…) It’s of European manufacture and, blade and all, weighs less than five pounds. As far as performance goes, it’s faster and easier than a string trimmer. Not as even as a mower, but if I cared about that my grass wouldn’t be three feet high in the first place. I’m so pleased with the performance of the scythe on grass that I’m going to spring for a brush blade (scroll down) for hacking up blackberries.

Oh yeah, the name of the company is awesome too.

*(I do have to say that the hammer I linked to *is* entirely worth the money. You’ve never felt a 3.5# hammer that feels so light, makes my elbow so happy, or pushes so much metal around. If you don’t blacksmith, you don’t care of course. I just love my hammer is all.)

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It turns out that a garden cart is significantly less than $400 when purchased directly from the factory. Who knew?

The decision was spurred by an anecdote from a friend whose father passed away from a heart attack that resulted from poor health and inactivity after he injured his neck and back carrying a 50# bag of chicken feed. I reflected on the fact that I am no longer twenty and decided that saving my back is something I should prioritize. But I still want the shiny, shiny iPhone.

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1. A secondhand cookstove

2. An extra large garden cart

3. A practice set of Uillean pipes (Pronounce “Illin’”)

4. An iPhone.

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