Simple Projects to Make Life More Pleasant

I follow a few different blogs and one specific blog I follow talks about all the DIY projects you can do around the house to save money. I have decided to adopt some of this idea and run with it. This blog is the ideal place to display my findings, since we are talking about agrarian lifestyles and becoming more self-sustaining.

I am going to call this series "Simple Projects to Make Life More Pleasant". If you see a blog with the title "Simple Project" you will know there will be some sort of very good idea to make life work a little easier in that post.

When I get a few of these projects completed, I will start posting methods and results as well as ingredients. I have some friends who are doing something similar, so I will probably collaborate with them on this endeavor as well. Now that winter is upon us and I have to stay inside to do many things, I have to occupy my time with new ideas. Keep watching!

Rain Barrel Instructions

It has come to my attention that several people want to know just how I made my rain barrels. I think I have enough in the way of pictures to thoroughly explain this with little confusion, but just in case, I will take more pictures of the process when I get some new barrels and add them later.

To begin, you find a barrel. You cannot use just any barrel if you plan on 1.) keeping your plants alive and healthy or 2.) consuming the products of your specific plants. Basically what I'm talking about is getting your hands on "food grade" barrels. These can be 55 gallon blue drums that have held vegetables, pickles, water...or they might be brand new and have never contained anything. I prefer pickle barrels, which can be obtained conveniently nearby and are definitely safe to use.

There are just a few simple steps to consider before you are all set. Once you have the barrel chosen, you have to get a few parts from your local hardware store to make everything work. Since this project is purely objective, you can decide how best to make your barrel function. I choose to go cheap and simple so this is what I buy:

1 - "Food grade" barrel (55-58 gallons)

From Permaculture

1 - Brass 1/2" hose bib (faucet to get water out the bottom)

From Permaculture

1 - Brass 3/4"x1/2" hose adapter (overflow connector)

From Permaculture

2 - Electrical conduit nuts (To hold the faucet and overflow)

From Permaculture

4 - Reducing washers

From Permaculture

1 - Tube of silicone waterproof sealer

From Permaculture

1 - Can of spray on, non-toxic shellac

From Permaculture

Once you have all of this, you bore 2 holes in the barrel. Depending on where you want your overflow to go, you can either line these holes up (one near the top of the barrel and one very close to the bottom) or you can offset the overflow to redirect the runoff water. Since I was setting my barrels up in series to collect more water, I set my overflow 90 degrees to the left of my spigot.

From Permaculture

In this picture, you can see that once the barrel is up on the stand, the faucet will drop water away from the house, but the overflow will direct water from the top of the barrel into the one next to it.

The top of the barrel is also something to consider. Some systems I've seen have a sealed assembly to get water from the downspout into the barrel.

From Permaculture

The problem that I have with a sealed system is that I have a giant oak tree that canvases most of my back yard and part of my roof. If any amount of leaf matter was to fall into the gutter and go down the spout, it would be a task to take everything apart to clear a clog. I opted to have an open top system and to set my downspout to simply dump water onto the barrel's lid like this:

From Permaculture

By boring holes all the way around, I assure even drainage and collection and then I finished the lid by stretching some fiberglass screen underneath the lid before screwing it on. The water isn't "filtered" but it does come through quite clear of debris.

Now comes the tricky part: assembly. After you bore your holes for the faucet and the overflow, you take a washer on the outside and one on the inside followed by a nut on the inside of each. I also used the silicone to seal the washers so there was no leaking around the threads of the hose adapter or the hose bib. Finally, I spray shellac on the inside of each fixture to prevent any major corrosion of the steel nuts and washers. I only recently made this discovery after using my barrels for a season and seeing the terrible rust that these nuts and washers build up. They aren't made for this kind of wet situation so there is no coating or galvanization to them. You might be able to find these supplies in a stainless or galvanized version, but I doubt they will be as inexpensive.

Here is a picture of another barrel I did next to my garden:

From Permaculture

I aligned the spigot and overflow on this one since there were already holes in the tank. I also had no major plans to set this one up in a series, so it made sense to line them up. Here is a close up of the assembled hose bib:

From Permaculture

Not too shabby if you are careful when you bore the holes.

And there you have it. Now for the price. You can buy barrels like these or fancier starting around $50 or $60 and going up to as much as $200 or more. I paid $20 for the barrel and about another $10 for the metal supplies. The tube of silicone was about $4 and the can of shellac ran me $8, but remember that you use very little of both and therefore the total cost of such an item is negligible. 

So basically, for about $30 you can have a terra cotta like barrel containing 55-58 gallons of water to use on anything you need to water.

Now I will add some info to answer frequently asked questions.

You don't get enough pressure from these to run a sprayer. These barrels, even raised up a few feet are better for filling watering cans than for spraying a flower bed. The only system I have found to work reasonably well is to attach a soaker hose to the barrel. There is enough pressure build-up to force a small amount of water out of the soaker into a garden evenly. Think of it this way: your house faucet has between 40 and 60 psi coming out. For every 2.5 feet you raise a rain barrel, you get 1 psi. Raised 10 feet, you get 4 lbs of pressure...yeah.

In a heavy rain that lasts a couple hours, you can easily fill a 55 gallon barrel. This depends on the size of roof you are draining into the barrel, but most of the time, if you connect to a long gutter, you have a lot of water collection happening.

At the pace of 1-2 psi, it can take a pretty significant amount of watering to empty 55 gallons. When you are using a barrel to water your garden, you tend to be directing the water onto the most important areas, the base of the plants. This means no over watering or wasted water from a sprinkler, so the water tends to go a bit farther than you would think.

I raise my barrels up for both convenience as well as extra pressure. You also may have to take the grade or slope of your property into account when placing your barrels. If your garden is uphill from your barrels and you want to use a hose, you may run into pressure problems since the end of the hose needs to be lower than the connection to the barrel. You can build stands for your barrels like I have, or you can simply set them up on cinder blocks. The options are limited only by your imagination. I just saw this picture online, showing a really nice setup:

From Permaculture

So there you have it. I hope this guide is helpful and I will be updating the pictures soon to provide close up step-by-step images to compliment the directions.

New projects!

I have new pictures of the garden to add to the Picasa albums, but in the meantime I'll post a new project which I will soon be undertaking!

 Since the new child has been here, I've been attempting to keep everything maintained, but I'm getting to a point now where I can actually begin new things. I finished one of my lettuce boxes yesterday. I also drove a staple directly into my hand accidentally...yup.

My next small project (now that I have a router table) is going to be a shelf that also holds my bicycle. Here is the picture:

From Home Projects

This thing looks AWESOME. I'm still not sure how I am going to mount it so that it doesn't end up tearing half my wall down, but after I decide on a good anchoring system and an efficient place to mount it, I'm going to own one of these!

The garden turned out pretty good. I have a lot of work to do at the end of the season to prepare for next year, but for now things are really working out well.

We also bought a share of a CSA this season. The first drop off was today. Mostly just greens and a couple of beets, but this summer is going to rock with all the food I plan on making. 

My garden has already yielded a handful of pea pods and about 8 radishes. There are at least a dozen cucumbers already growing and about the same amount of roma tomatoes also on the vines. This should be a pretty decent year as long as the rains keep coming in the next few weeks. 

On a final note, I got the picture albums organized now so that it is easier to find all of the different projects and postings. More to come very soon!

One book down...

I finished Introduction to Permaculture this morning. What a life changing book. There aren't many you can say that about and really mean, but this one is definitely in the top 3 books I've ever read.

My next literary venture is Bill Mollison's Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlement. I also have Permaculture: A Designer's Manual being delivered tomorrow. My next move is to finish my rain barrels to completion and then I'll move on to more advanced elements.

From Stuff I Found

I planted nearly everything in the garden yesterday. This year, the list looks something like:
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Cabbage
Cucumbers
Peapods
Green and Yellow Beans
Sweet Peppers
Roma Tomatoes
Celery
Kohlrabi
Carrots
Parsnips
Radishes
White Onions
Green Onions

Not too shabby, if it all grows. I used some older seed when starting the tray indoors, but I bought some new stuff for the root veggies and other plants I started outside. I haven't had much luck keeping my seeds from one season to the next. Perhaps I need a better place to store them.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

Just a quick update here. I finally edited the albums in Picasa. There are 3 new ones and one or two of the older ones got a facelift. Now you can view all the garden images in the Garden album, the home projects in the Home Projects album and (my personal favorite), the permaculture projects in the Permaculture album. Basically, I made it easier to find what you may be looking for at any given time. Of course this totally ruins many of the previous links I had posted to images, so disregard those older posts that have links in them.

I'm nearly finished with Bill Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture which means Permaculture One is in my near future. So far I have learned many ways to adapt our current living situation into an ideal permaculture solution. The big problem with implementing many of these ideas is the money it will take to build things like greenhouses and chicken coops. We are getting the gardens and yard together now, so it shouldn't be long before we can concentrate on other things. One step at a time, right?

Finally, I finished the new vegetable garden beds. Here is a "before" and "after" comparison.

Before--

From Garden

After--

From Garden

It is a bit difficult to really get the idea of how the original looked, due largely to the fact that I took rather inadequate pictures, but you can kind of visualize it. Now I have 4 trough-style lettuce boxes to rebuild and hang from the 4x4 posts and I'm totally finished.

Natural weed control and cool sciency stuff

So I have a confession to make. I have no conviction.

Well, I guess that isn't totally true, I have strong conviction about many things. I have no conviction when it comes to social networking. Ultimately, I suppose I should say that I bend to peer pressure from my wife every time she gets into something new.

I fought Facebook for several years. Then my wife found "Scramble" and I "had to play it with her"... I have 117 friends on Facebook now. I didn't want to join Twitter, then my wife told me the singer from my favorite band always wrote really funny stuff...I have a Twitter account that I never use now. Most recently, it was Pinterest.

For anyone not familiar with Pinterest, it is basically a glorified virtual cork board where you can cut and paste any image and link from any website (except Facebook) to your "boards" to keep track of the things you are interested in. This used to be called "bookmarking" but that took too much effort apparently. The nice thing about the site is that you don't just "pin" the things you like, but you can also follow people and "repin" the things that you like that they like...(getting confused yet?) So I had to get a Pinterest account to see all the things my wife likes. And now I'm addicted to the "gardening" category. The problem with the site? When something is popular, it gets re-pinned a lot. When this happens, you are often browsing the exact same image 20 times in the category because everyone is pinning it at that time.

2 things I love about Pinterest: I can pin things from my own blog, potentially increasing my readership...(muahahaha!) and I have found at least 3 things that I can't believe I lived without before finding them.

So now that I have created an elaborate introduction for this blog entry, I will get to the point. I found an awesome natural remedy to weeds. Basically, all you do is mix a large quantity of vinegar (I used plain old, cheap white vinegar) with a splash of normal dish soap and BOOM, dead weeds. Since it is mostly vinegar, there are no harmful chemicals and it is 100% effective in one day. I just used a normal, dollar store spray bottle but you have to be careful not to overspray, as this will also kill grass and other plants.

Secondly, more science discoveries in the land of the vegan urban farmer! I found an awesome website for determining sun factors all year round. The site is Sun Earth Tools and it has a calculator for finding sun elevation in the sky, azimuth (the path of the sun in degrees across the sky) as well as solar noon and other factors related to the sun. For me, building a greenhouse soon will require knowledge of how high the sun is in the sky during winter (for the correct angle of the glass wall) and during summer (for the correct length of overhang on the South side of the house). I have been sketching my greenhouse for a bit now and this site has proved to be priceless for information on how to build. Check it out if you ever have time!

Plants!

So a quick update here:

I had 3 Roma tomato seedlings and 3 green pepper seedlings getting too big for the seed tray in the basement. This week I got the garden started, perhaps a bit prematurely. The tomatoes have doubled in size in just about 5 days and the peppers went in today. Next will be the 2 cucumber seedlings that already have vines coming in. Oh boy am I behind.

On another topic, I'm halfway through my permaculture book and I have totally changed my design for the chicken coop. I'll post the drawings when I get them done. Essentially I plan on building the same size coop and almost the same layout but it will also have an integrated greenhouse for geothermal heat radiation into the coop. This way, one structure serves multiple purposes and I don't need any electricity at the coop. Sketches soon!

- Posted using my iPhone

Project completion feels sooo good!

I completed the last 8 feet of the fence today. It's nice to be able to cross that off the list. The final piece doesn't match exactly, but I can't be too picky since I bought my supplies at different times from different stores. Like most of my projects, it isn't professional, but I'm satisfied. Now I have some grading to do to the yard near the fence and eventually I will attempt to grow grass back there.

I have a small part of the garden extension in progress now. I dug my root bed hole 10" deep and I built a cedar box to contain the amended soil. This, paired with the 8" high walls of the raised bed will provide 18" of good growing soil for carrots, radishes, onions and either parsnips or turnips this summer. I also just acquired a 5 foot tall upright chest freezer for storing all our frozen veggies at the end of the season. I got my grid set up in my primary bed and I transplanted the garlic that came back from last summer.

The next image updates will show the grid in the primary bed as well as the new raised beds I'm in process with now. In the meantime, I have to get some seed in the ground in the next week or so and then keep my fingers crossed for no hard freezes after the sprouts start. I have a couple of cucumber plants and about 7 tomatoes as well as a small variety of herbs growing under my shop light in the basement.

I think the seed tray warmer has been both a blessing and a curse. While it does seem to be making the plants grow well, it causes the moisture to leave the peat quite quickly, making it a bit of a chore for me to keep them all watered. I plan to find a way of rectifying this situation in the future, but for now I just check everyday.

Here are the pictures of the fence:

Before:

From Stuff I Made

After first section:

From Stuff I Made

Finished product:

From Stuff I Made

I am now 43 pages through the total 178 (not included appendices) in the Introduction to Permaculture and my mind is just swimming. There are events in life that cause a person to change the way they look at the world...reading this book is one of those events for me. Everywhere I look I see the layout of the landscape and think about how each element connects with it surrounding elements. Learning about this stuff has truly been life altering for me.

Fence Progress/Permaculture Study

  The fence is coming along swimmingly. I got 12 feet of the total 20 finished and leveled. I opted to do 12 feet all at once instead of splitting it up into 2 - 8 foot sections and a 4 foot section because I had 12 foot 1x6s already and I found it to be much easier to level one large piece than several small ones as I have done before on other fences.

  Once I get the 20 foot section finished, I will put up a gate perpendicular to the rear fence and I may even build a temporary fence across the 12 feet of cement left from the garage. Here are a few pictures:

From Stuff I Made

From Stuff I Made

  12 feet down, only 8 to go...and then possibly 4 more...and then possibly 12 more.

  My final note:

I recently decided to do some deeper research on this "permaculture" topic and found that there is a farm near Sydney, Australia that teaches the method during a 2 week course. In reading the farm's website I found out that they use a book called Introduction to Permaculture as their textbook for the course. Amazon doesn't sell this book, but some of the marketplace vendors do so I ordered it. It ran around $40 and I have to say, it was worth every penny. The author is Bill Mollison, the man who coined the term "permaculture" and the information within the book is simply mind-boggling. He has at least two other books devoted completely to the idea of building self-sustaining systems and this farm in Australia teaches his methods through practice. Anyway, here is a picture of me loving the book:

From Stuff I Found

  I haven't found a part of this book I don't like yet. My hope is to one day implement as much of this theory into my everyday practices as possible and maybe even teach it to local urban farmers and even possibly the environmental sustainability commission here in Ferndale.

  My next update will provide some information about the square foot gardening plan for this year. I've already posted images of my beds in the Stuff I Made album. I am getting close to splitting the albums up due to the variety of work I am doing around the house now. There was never a need to have things separated before, but I need to archive some old stuff and separate the house projects from the permaculture plan and the gardening. So that is what is coming.

Building a fence

So instead of a driveway, the last 3 or 4 houses on the block (ours included) have an alley that runs behind the houses. We used to have a garage and a full privacy fence that separated our yard from the alley, but the garage was torn down before we moved in and the renovators didn't bother to fix the fence in the back, just the one separating us from our eastern neighbors.

Last year in May we nearly had a home invasion incident and I'm not interested in having that happen ever again. So I'm building a new fence across the back of the lot to keep people from wandering out of the alley and into our yard. It's a private alley, so you wouldn't expect people to generally just end up going down there, but you'd be surprised.

I bought cedar fence planks from our local big box home improvement place as well as 4x4 posts, cement and 12' 1x6 planks as well. I'm using two 1x6 boards to hold the cedar together and then once I have the panels built, I will hang them from the posts. Here are some preliminary images of how the project is going.

From Stuff I Made

From Stuff I Made

As you can see, I leveled the posts and cemented them in. I have a bit of digging to do since the middle posts are in an area that rises up. I was going to build sections of fencing to fit each space, but now I'm thinking about just doing 2 pieces, one 12' long and one 8'. The cedar planks I bought won't fit perfectly within an 8' section and I've already set my posts. If I have to overlap using one plank and nailing it after the whole fence is hung, I think that would be easier than splitting those planks to fit or trying to piece something together.

I've never built a fence before so I'll be honest for anyone in my position. It wasn't easy, by any means. I used the 12' long 1x6s to attempt to get them all the same height. They aren't, by the way. The bubble on my level is within the lines on all of them, but there is one that is slightly higher than the others.

The hardest part was getting them all lined up straight. In the end I had to simply eye it to make sure all the 4x4s matched up. Then the leveling from the sides and the cementing went quick. I chose to ignore the instructions on the bag and only dump about 1/2 a bag of cement per post. This worked well since I also didn't dig my holes 3 times the diameter of the post. They will set for 24 hours and then I can hang the fence. You can sort of see the panels I'm lining up all the way to the right of the second picture. This project will be totally worth the effort as long as I get the fence up straight. I'll post new pictures as I finish.

Grow Lights and Seedlings: A Love Story

This post might be educational for some people. I know this information wasn't common knowledge to me before I discovered it.

I guess I should start with my conundrum. I started much of my garden from seed last summer. I didn't have a grow system, I barely had a starter kit. I didn't have any other place to keep the tray of seedlings so I let them grow on my kitchen table surrounded by windows.

The problem that I had with this method was that the seedlings would grow and the stems would get too long to support the weight of the leaf at the top. It made it difficult to transplant them when the time was right. Now, obviously I can't bring the sun closer to the plants, so this season I bought a couple of cheap shop lights (about $12 each at my home improvement store) and I plan on building a shelving unit to make this work eventually. In the meantime, I have set up a small table using plywood and sawhorses. I then hung the shop light from a pulley in order to raise and lower the light.

Here is the enlightening part. I originally went to my local garden supply store to look at grow lamps. They run about $80 for a small fixture, big enough to light a single planting tray. For almost a tenth of the price, I bought a stoplight, which I have read on many blogs will work just as well during the initial stages of growth as an expensive grow lamp will. You keep it close to the top of the tray and slowly move it up as the plants grow to keep the stems from getting too long. You also get the desired effect of having your plants grow directly upright instead of leaning toward the sunlight.

Here are a couple of pictures of the system I have implemented right now. I bought a jumpstart kit from the garden supply store and I hung the lamp with jute from an antique pulley I had lying around. Obviously, this is temporary until I can afford both the money and the time to build a shelving unit.

From Stuff I Made

From Stuff I Made

Project Update

I finished the indoor hanging planter made from mason jars. It looks pretty good. The final touch was to add a couple of picture hangers to the back of it and find the studs behind all the plaster to get the screws to hold. We already have a few little sprouts coming up and I'm sure there will be more soon. Here are a couple of finished pictures.

From Stuff I Made

From Stuff I Made

Another Beautiful Winter Day

So it has become apparent that Winter is passing us Michiganders by this year. I couldn't ask for anything more. With all the work I have to do before munchkin number 2 arrives, I need all the good weather and time that I can get.

I wasn't going to get started on anything important yet, since there is a high probability that we will get hit with snow in mid May! Instead, I let my anxious nature get the best of me and I got the backyard seeded. I also began working on my flower bed in the front of the house. As long as it isn't raining, tomorrow I plan on going to get a load of compost from the city yards to finish it off.

I think I need to make a checklist of the projects that I am planning to work on this summer. I need some sort of hierarchy of priority to get these things done, otherwise I'll be stuck with more than a few half finished jobs by the end of the season.

In the meantime, here are two more books I recently grabbed to help me out this summer.

From

This is how I plan to organize my raised beds this year. If it works, I'll keep doing it from now on.

From

This book has tons of amazing designs and projects in it as well. More structural stuff than gardening, but I think I have found at least 3 designs I want to make so far.

I recently came across a periodical that I am now subscribed to. I love print and I really love getting magazines in the mail. Since Readymade folded in June of last year, I've been looking for something new to fill the DIY void and this one really hits the spot for the moment. It also happens to (coincidentally) fall within the realm of everything I'm working on right now.

From Stuff I Found

It's called Urban Farm and it basically guides a person like me through all the best ways to grow a large garden in an urban environment, keep bees, raise chickens and just generally follow a sustainable farming model. While I have many of my implements already accounted for, this magazine has given me some new insights into things I might not have considered before. For instance, this summer I am going to plant all of my root vegetables in pots instead of in the garden. Not only will this save me space, but apparently roots grow tremendously well in pots.

This magazine started in 2009 and is circulated bimonthly, which is a little bit disappointing because I hate waiting, but it is worth it's weight in gold as far as I'm concerned.

I'm still looking for a really good DIY replacement for Readymade. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm open.

Chicken update

During the first council meeting, the Ferndale city council voted unanimously to approve an amendment to the ordinance banning chickens. Ferndale residents are now allowed to build a chicken coop in their back yard as long as it is at least 10 feet away from any residential structure.

I plan on getting my permit to build my coop and get it done before the end of the summer, but I think that getting the animals will wait until next summer. Between having a new baby in the house, getting the garden in order, taking care of my 2 year old son and working full time, I don't know that I'll have time to get started taking care of these high-maintanence animals. I doubt I'll want to even consider trying!

So, my plan is to have everything built and in order and then I'll see about getting some full grown hens or some pullets in the Spring of 2013. Building the coop will be a fun project for a few hot summer days when I'm not doing other things around the urban farm. And of course, I'll post pictures and instructions as I'm completing it.

Spring is here...maybe (part 2 of 2)

My indoor projects, which (in contrast to my gardening) are coming to fruition, are all relatively small and easy to do. I haven't fully determined how I'm going to build my indoor grow shelving, but I have purchased my lighting and timers to get it started. I hope to get everything in the dirt by the end of March so that it has all of April to grow and, weather permitting, I can begin transferring my starts into the garden by the second week of May.

Aside from the grow shelves and lighting system, I'm also working on finishing my pantry this weekend. It has been a long time in both planning and execution, but I should be able to make some real progress on it soon. After I'm done with the pantry, I plan on putting another built-in cupboard and shelf unit in my nook for all of my tea and kombucha storage as well as for displaying dishes.

Now, here is the part where I get to teach. I hope to use this blog as a teaching tool from now on, posting small, easy projects step by step that others can copy. My wife found this one online somewhere and pinned it in her Pinterest account.

From Stuff I Made

She wanted me to make one for her craft room, but the one I made had to be painted. So I got the pipe clamps from Home Depot. the mason jars I had were about 4" in diameter, but I wanted to make sure that the clamps would fit so I bought the 3"-5" clamps. I had plenty of room, but I am glad I played it safe.

From Stuff I Made

I used a piece of 1x6 from the planter boxes from last year. I cut it 18" long and got everything ready to assemble. The only major prep work I did was to drill one hole about 11/32" in each pipe clamp to get a screw through and into the board.

I painted the board and got my jars set into place. I then drilled pilot holes for the screws that hold the clamps to the board. I attached the clamps nice and tight and then slipped the jars through each and tightened them down. This is the final product:

From Stuff I Made

The color matches some Ikea shelves that hang in the craft room. When completely done, and hung, these will have a thin layer of gravel in the bottom, followed by a layer of peat or crumbled leaves for moisture retention. The top 2/3 of the jar will have potting soil added and we bought some short stemmed flower seeds (about 3"-4") to grow in these jars. 

And there you have it! The longest part of this project was waiting for the paint to dry. I used two coats to get it nice and covered, but one coat would have worked. In total, this project took me about 3 hours. Very simple and pretty cool looking. This is also a very inexpensive way to keep plants in the house all year long.

Spring is here...maybe (part 1 of 2)

So our lovely state of Michigan has graced us with a zero winter. We have had about 3 or 4 days of actual snow so far this season. The worst storm that we had lasted for about one day and then within two more days all of the snow had melted away because of a warm up. It is March 8th and we have 46 degree weather. Yesterday it reached 67.

All of this warm weather has been bugging me because I feel like I should be out prepping my garden, but I just know that we are going to get a late cold snap that will kill anything I have planted. So instead of getting things ready outside, I'm working on prep projects and other fun things inside.

My lettuce boxes were a miserable failure last year. They grew everything perfectly well, but the design was flawed. The side warped because of the moisture and the ends cracked because I didn't pre-drill for the screws. I also didn't plan the boxes properly to make sure they drained well. I drilled holes, but the ends were constantly dumping water. The other major issue I had was the fact that I never bothered to get the 2x4s hung on my posts so that the boxes could be elevated away from the garden. Basically, I never finished the garden plan.

This season, I'm building new boxes, reclaiming some of the lumber from the old ones and using some new. I plan to line the insides with 4 mil clear plastic to prevent warping and I'm redesigning the rest of the boxes so that there will be no structural failure. I'm also thinking about building 4-two foot boxes instead of 2-four foot ones. I still have to determine which would work better.

This season I also plan to expand from 2-4'x6' raised beds:

From Stuff I Made

to include 2 more 4'x5' raised beds that will lie perpendicular to the existing ones on each end. The 4x4 post in the picture is one of two that serve as the structure to hold up the lettuce boxes.

Wow, this update is already getting long and I have so much more to say. Maybe I'll split it into 2 entries for organizational purposes. See part two for the indoor projects I'm working on currently.