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