Yes, I'm still Blogging

Should you come here looking for my continued blog posts, you can find them on my page on Transition Boulder at:
http://transitioncolorado.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?user=3bq3kofvpse5i
Transition Boulder is a sub-organization of a Ning social networking site called Transition Colorado and Transition United States. "Transition Initiatives" are a wordwide movement initiated by a Permaculturist in Ireland named Rob Hopkins. This is a response to the problems created by peak oil and climate change- essentially looking at ways in which communities can make themselves more self-reliant and reduce dependence on unsustainable practices such as shipment goods all over the planet. My garden is a large component of my personal involvement in reducing our carban footprint. Included in this a considerable change of diet and a great deal of learning about food storage and preparation. There is so much to learn!

Titles of posts since my most recent post here include:
Reluctant harvest and Local Quiche Recipe, Nov. 12, 2008
In my transition kitchen, Nov. 29, 2008
Under 10 hours a day- Greenhouse and Transition Kitchen report, Nov. 29, 2008
Trials and Tribulations of a Novice Greenhouse Keeper, Dec. 5, 2008
Greenhouse on Ice, Dec. 12, 2008
Birthday Tamales, Dec. 26, 2008

Greenhouse on the moon- kale, kale and more kale

Last week we had our first hard frost. Tonight we'll have another one, although it should be warmer than the 19 degrees we had last week. At that temperature, many things that had been hanging on, ceased to do so. Unfortunately I had failed to take in the last of the tomatoes, trusting the greenhouse plastic we'd wrapped the bed in. In the morning I checked a couple of tomatoes and found them frozen solid. Oh well, the end was inevitable. The total take for our tomatoes this summer was 79 pounds. I'll round up to 80. In my larder are 12 pints of dried tomatoes that I will try very hard to leave alone for a while.

On that very cold night the greenhouse got down to 25 degrees and everybody looked a little shocked I admit (although in about a day everything had recovered). I had strung up a string of mini Christmas lights inside, and this was the equivalent to a 100 watt light bulb. Looking at my huge wilting greens, I thought over my plan not to heat the greenhouse at all and I decided the following:

The greenhouse has in it a great deal of mature, tasty vegi.s that are now becoming important to us as Cure Farm has now transitioned to their winter share and as this is the equivalent to a medium share, we are scaled down from the large share (plus two fruit shares) of the summer. I'm also no longer volunteering there and the volunteer days brought home vegi.s as well. Therefore, the vegi.s in my greenhouse constitute local produce that would cost money and carbon to replace. I decided therefore, to put an efficient little oil heater out in the greenhouse for the coldest periods so as to maintain the huge greens until we've harvested them down somewhat. I think that plants with younger, smaller leaves may be more frost hardy (particularly of types of vegetables I have growing) than these plants with huge leaves, although this is all a learning experience for me. In any case, we've started eating greens from the greenhouse in earnest now. My current staples include several types of kale (Red Russian, Siberian, Dinosaur), Swiss chard in different colors, and the occasional lovely large beet with it's stalks and greens. I'm sparing of the arugula, spinach and the leaks, and the turnip greens are only now big enough to start harvesting from. I have a little pok choi and broccoli- one broccoli plant in the greenhouse is producing and I'm waiting on a couple others.

I have not been running into any references to planting for greenhouses this time of year, so I feel very experimental putting seeds in the ground. So far (within the last few weeks) I've planted bunching onions, field peas, garlic cloves and corn salad. All have come up and are growing slowly but without issues. I have gone to the Farmer's Market once recently, and I've added walking onions to the garlic I get from Jay Hill every other week or so. Last weekend I bought 60 lb.s of apples from Ella Family Farms when Russ and I visited the harvest festival at Full Circle Farms. Apple sauce, apple juice, dried apples, apples in the root cellar and the fridge. This week I'll stock up on squashes from Munson as I do every year now. Squash is good in soup with the kale....

Greenhouses don't build themselves

So here it is, the first cold, inclement weather of the fall. I'm delighted to sit inside right now and avoid the drizzle and the chill. It's just shy of 40 degrees F. outside, and it's 50 inside my greenhouse where I'm growing broccoli, several varieties of kale, Swiss chard, kohlrabi, turnip greens, bok choi, beets, bunching onions, walking onions, leeks, endive, arugula, cabbage and hopefully garlic greens (that is if the bulbs I planted send up shoots). It is possible that the approximatly 35 gallons of water I have stored in plastic containers inside, will help to moderate the climate in the greenhouse. I just finished it last week. Below is my account of greenhouse building.

As fall began to come in this September, seeing the changes in the light and in the length of the days, I decided that it was time to get serious about building that greenhouse. Certainly I must admit that I did not quite anticipate the level of effort needed for this project, or the number of days I would spend with such sore muscles as a consequence of my commitment, but certainly I'm not the first to take on a large project, thinking that it wouldn't be so very difficult. Doesn't this happen in construction all the time?

I think my mistake was perhaps to read in gardening books that describe the "simplest" of greenhouses that could be erected easily and quickly, and to actually believe that this was true. Relatively simple could describe the process I suppose. Perhaps the authors of these books do not live in places that present quite the challenges that one encounters in building greenhouses in Boulder. Maybe they none of them happen to be on the later side of 40 something....

In any case, my greatest challenges involved the necessity of building a structure that could stand up (I hope) to the velocity of the winds we get here in the winter. Certainly the solution to this involves investing more in the structural components and in anchoring them in the ground. Of course the minute one starts discussing anchoring anything in the ground, one must then consider the digging needed and the rocks and gravel to clear out in the process. Some folks just use a post-hole digger. Not in my yard you don't!

My plan was to make bows using PVC conduit pipes rather than PVC water pipes. Schedule 40 PVC conduit has thicker walls in its construction, and it's intended to stand up under UV exposure, so I decided to use that for the bows over the top. For the upright portions of the bows, I decided to use galvanized steel conduit. I installed these over 5/8 inch rebar that I buried approximately 18 inches in the ground and bolted to the sides of the two raised beds that would be enclosed by the greenhouse (see the picture above) and then bent at an angle as needed by the bows. I spaced these bows about two feet apart, which is recommended in snow country. Next, using a heavy gauge wire, I wired 10 foot sections of 1/2" rebar in the center top for the purlin and along the south side. By the time I had finished all this, the whole structure started to "hang together" somewhat and I felt more confident.

Next came the "end walls" with door frames and sills and the vents that I decided to put over the doors. Because I was using odd pieces of recycled lumbar and because I like to build in a rather organic, creative way, this was an entertaining and somewhat time-consuming experience. It also took longer because I decided to add a little root cellar, but that will be the subject of another post. My husband must receive credit here particularly because he volunteered his time and energy one day, and two 4 by 4's of cedar he'd been saving for something special, to build the East end wall pictured above. I also need to give him credit for coming out with the heavy iron bar and digging out the very nastiest rocks when I was fed up with them from time to time.

Once we had the end walls (just frames really) finished, I put up the plastic. This is 6 ml. UV treated greenhouse plastic that I decided to apply in two layers as it's more

durable this way. Cure Farm just replaced a similar plastic on their first hoop house and this had lasted 4 years. To hold the plastic to the bows, I used two diameters of black water hose that I cut into sections with a hack saw and slit longitudinally with tin snips. I positioned them over sections cut from old bicycle inner tubes to protect the plastic and improve their grip. It's important to have inner tube between the greenhouse plastic and the hose "clamps" because the hard plastic edges of the "clamps" can poke holes in the greenhouse plastic. Where the greenhouse plastic needed to be attached to wood, I bought fender washers and self-tapping pan head screws and these did an excellent job of both securing the plastic while distributing forces. It will be easy to take the plastic off in the spring if I want to. I'll see how well this arrangement holds up, but as I borrowed the idea from my observations of the greenhouses at Cure, I suspect we have a workable solution. Another solution I borrowed from Cure and in consultation with one of many references I've been reading, is a tie-down system to keep the plastic down for those really tremendous gusts of wind. I bought seat-belt webbing (you can buy this by the foot from Neptune Mountaineering in Boulder) and two short bungee cords. After installing lag screws in the bottom boards of the raised beds on either side of the greenhouse, I hooked on the bungee cords, ran the webbing over the greenhouse and tied it to the bungees. This is supposed to keep the plastic snug regardless of the natural shrinking and expanding it does with changes in air temperature.

So, after some weeks of struggle, the greenhouse is up. My favorite tools are now my hand-held jig saw, cordless drill, my level and measuring tape, a square, the pick axe and spade. I invested most in the greenhouse plastic and the hardware (lots and lots of carriage bolts, lag screws, washers and nuts in addition to the pan head screws and fender washers). This greenhouse is approximatly 10 x 12 ft. and cost considerably less than what I would have paid commercially. Next time I order plastic though, I will plan on looking for a supplier closer than the excellent resource I used on the West Coast. Shipping costs are rising fast and I expect they will continue to do so. It's not cheap shipping plastic.

I will be happy to take a little vacation now that the cold is upon us.

Finally a harvest picture

At last I have pictures, but with them I have technical problems, so we'll just have to swing with it. Here you see an example of my late summer harvest. The tomatoes are continuing, although with freezing weather threatening, it may not be much longer. Lots of green tomatoes to bring in. The total tomato take for the season is over 70 lb.s. Pictured to the right is my first potato harvest. This was devoured in one meal by my grateful family. To the right above are a native variety of bean (seed from Abbodonza). We have about a quart and are almost done with them out in the yard. Not bad...

Taking in the harvest

We are very, very busy these days. Having discovered just as the berries were coming ripe, that we have and Elderberry in our backyard, , we've been harvesting them daily, and making elderberry jam, elderberry fruit leather, elderberry juice, dried elderberries and frozen elderberries for the elderberry wine my husband and I will make this winter. Just as we've started getting a bit weary of the elderberry thing, our Concord grapes have ripened, so next will be Concord grape raisins, Concord grape juice, frozen Concord grapes for jam that I'll make later, Concord grape fruit leather, etc, etc.

Meanwhile, we've continued to harvest tomatoes. The pineapple tomatoes have continued unabated for weeks, as have the purple Cherokee. Now we're throwing in the San Marzano (a Roma variety) and the yellow pear tomatoes. So far we've harvested more than 40 lb.s of tomatoes. Meanwhile, Cure has been having a wonderful year for tomatoes and our weekly large share has included lots of cherry and heirloom tomatoes. In response, I give away tomatoes, encourage tomato-eating by family, and eat tomatoes (no kidding) at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I have never in my life had the opportunity to eat all the heirloom tomatoes I could possibly want for weeks on end, and I admit this is tomato heaven. Realizing though that we still have too many tomatoes and that we are going to miss then very much when they're done, I started experimenting with drying them in the oven a few days ago. The resulting dried tomatoes taste amazing- very sweet and tasty. They were so good in fact, that we decided to spring for a food dehydrator yesterday and will be drying tomatoes as fast as we can for as long as it takes.
Other projects in brief (I have to keep up putting up food in the kitchen...)
-I'm building a greenhouse frame to go over raised beds #3 and #4. Am about 1/2 of the way done with this.
-Digging out a section in the greenhouse, into which I will sink a plastic trash can that will have inside it a metal trash can with burlap bags for insulation between it and the plastic can. The lids will have insulation between them. This is to be my little root cellar! This is very exciting except for the digging part (that's about 1/2 done too). By the way, we needed the plastic trash can to keep out the water so the metal trash can doesn't rust out. We needed the metal trash can to keep the voles out of the food. Having the cellar in the greenhouse helps keep the cellar from freezing.
-Harvesting of potatoes (5 lb.s today), celeriac this week.
-Ongoing (daily) harvest of dry beans (scarlet runner, "trail of tears") , onions, beets, chard, New Zealand spinach, kale (several types) and amaranth. I get hungry, I go out and look around....
-Feeding chickens and ducks at Cure two times a week. This is particularly nice right now as the flock has really started to lay and we now receive eggs in trade for our labor. We've discovered how lovely duck eggs are...
-I continue to come help out on Thursday mornings at Cure. This is another source of food as we receive a bag of what's available in thanks for our efforts. It's getting pretty muddy now and I've finally waxed up all my shoes so I don't get wet feet. How not to get wet pants is another problem.
-New cooking skills include the food drying as well as first experiments with lactic fermentation. Although the pickled vegi.s are salty and I have to avoid salt, I can have these as a condiment in small portions and that's the intended use anyway. I'm very interested in figuring out how to make yogurt in quantities the family can use as yogurt is easy to make. I'm also interested in learning some cheese-making as this family loves cheese and we have no control over the milk used in the cheese we buy and the price is also going up. These activities will have to take a back seat to the greenhouse for the moment!

Wow, tomatoes and potatoes!

Ok, we had a period there with lots of rain and then some drainage issues because the farmer irrigating the meadow next to us had left the water running in the ditch closest to use for rather too long. I didn't have to water at all for at least a week, and certainly the garden looked a little oxygen-starved for a little while there. The rain stopped and the farmer was asked to turn off the water, and we have since been drying out. Unfortunately the combination of the water and the nice warm weather (in the low to mid 80's most days now) have been conducive to the proliferation of mosquitoes. Now when I go out to water, I'm watering my mosquitoes. Management has included getting well dressed before going out to the garden, dashing out for a couple garden chores such as harvesting and planting a couple seedlings, or just avoiding the garden altogether.



As the garden-avoidance approach has been the frequent choice, I found the first ripe pineapple tomato when it was past it's prime on the 26th of this month. I found two Purple Cherokee and two pineapple tomatoes (total weight of 3 lb.s 14 oz.!) that were ready to go on this date and I make a point of this because we have never had tomatoes ripen before October before. We've also never had tomatoes this large or this healthy. My thinking is that we got a jump on the season planting under plastic the way we did. This is also the first week that Cure has had any significant numbers of the heirloom tomatoes for the CSA, so I'm not far behind them.

We harvested our first fingerling potatoes (maybe a pound) this week and they were delicious! These were our first potatoes and the seed potatoes came from Cure Farm.

The New Bed and fall garden!

Finally we finished bed #4. Enthusiasm had flagged on all accounts, easily attributed to the mind-numbing heat for all of July, with the unfortunate addition of potentially West Nile carrying mosquitoes at the cool times of day when we would rather work, such as the early, mid and late evening. Certainly I neglect to mention the early morning, which would have potential, except that this household full of night owls hate to go to bed early, particularly when it's hot in the house by the end of the day and when we can't open up the windows and set up the fans to exhaust the hot air until 10:00 at night, we aren't getting to bed until after 11:00. Of course the really dedicated would be up at the crack of dawn and take a mid-afternoon siesta....

So the work schedule dropped off quite considerably, and as the time was coming to plant the fall garden, and as we needed the bed for the fall garden, we decided to put in a big push and get it done, and we pulled out the last big rock at about 6:30 pm on 8-8-08, picked up a yard and a half of "planter's mix" from a local garden supply, shoveled it out and wheel-barrowed it into the back yard and mixed it into the existing soil remaining in the bed minus the many rocks and gravel we'd removed. At about 10 pm, John and I were planting up most of the bed with seedlings we'd grown; watering, mulching with straw, putting in hoops and row cover for shade and hoping for the best, as we were leaving town for a week and would be leaving the garden in the hands of the boys. We finished up at about 11:30 pm and made our flight without difficulty the next day.

I talked with the boys daily while away, and Russ was watering every day with a little help from Brian. Nearly every seedling survived, although Russ did say that "Some things died..." the day before our return, and as I had no other information than that, I was a little nervous until I had a chance to go see for myself. I had taken the precaution of saving some seedlings in their seedling flats in the shade of the garden beds under the mature plants, and this was a good idea although I didn't have to re-plant more than two or three. The only other problem we've had since involved a rise in our local water table, flooding out the basement of a neighbor and causing the garden beds to stay saturated after a good two-day rain storm that dropped about 2 1/2 inches in two days. I had to go out periodically and dump out the water flooding the seedling flats, and although the established plants looked fine, the seedlings all looked a little oxygen starved for a couple of days. It's drying out gradually now, warm and dry again, and seedlings are perking up today.

Fall garden seedlings planted so far include:
Pac Choy, beets, 3 or 4 types of kale, chard (different types), orach, broccoli (2 types), and collard greens. More to follow as I can make room for them.

I'm presently watching the angle of the sun shift fairly rapidly, and planning the design for my green house. Soon I should pull out the remaining plants (except for Brussels sprouts) in former hoop house #1 and #2 and plant cover crops. I'm impressed with the rate of speed with which the garden changes in character as the season progresses.