My ever expanding universe

I have been making some big changes around the garden. I'm adding a new bed and expanding the existing garden space to make a total of about 100 sq ft. I'm also double digging at least one of the spaces to Grow Biointensive standards.

I've uploaded some new pictures into the garden album to show before and after.

In addition to all of this, I'm also in the process of preparing the windows I scavenged to make the greenhouse/chicken coop. I have them mostly cleaned now and I have to replace some of the broken panes and then scrape and seal the entire window. Each one is about 35" x 45", so I figure if I turn them on their sides and stack them vertically, I'll be about half a window too big. Luckily, I have other ones of various sizes that I picked up earlier this year and I think I might just be able to patch them together. The bonus to all of this is that I don't have to purchase any new windows for the entire coop because I have enough for the greenhouse wall as well as the sides of the greenhouse area and the sides of the coop.

My seedlings are doing exceedingly well in the basement under the lights. Too well in fact. I needed to transplant them a week or two ago. I've been hardening them off slowly, but lucky for me I didn't plant them in the beds yet. We frosted for (hopefully) the last time a few nights ago and I have been too lazy to get everything into the ground so nothing of mine died. Some of the members at the GNG weren't so lucky.

I have one of my 2 plots at the GNG prepped and potatoes planted. I attempted to save some strawberry plants that were in the bed already, but the severe heat and no rain we've had this month did not favor them. I think maybe 1/3 survived so I guess we will see what comes of that. I also have strawberries in PVC tubes at the homestead, so we won't be without this year hopefully.

I'm taking my PDC online this summer. I know how oxymoronic it sounds to take a class on permaculture design over the internet, but it was a good deal and Geoff Lawton is teaching it. I'm into the third week now and I have to admit, there is a lot about the subject that I don't know yet. I've been independently studying this for over a year now, but permaculture is still an amazingly complex philosophy.

Here are a couple of before images of the garden:

From Garden

From Garden

The window situation

I may have mentioned before that I am building a chicken coop with an adjacent greenhouse space to serve multiple purposes. The greenhouse will be a geothermal heating room for the coop, a place to propagate my seedlings in the spring and a storage area for garden tools and supplies. I'm going to build the window wall from old windows.

This morning I met with a lady I met at the Eastern Market Antique store who told me she had a "warehouse full of windows". Little did I know what she meant was that she had a warehouse with windows that I had to cut out of the walls... either way, I am getting enough old warehouse windows to do my whole greenhouse.

I also had purchased a few windows from random places, and I had one or two in my basement. So I guess I'm building several cold frames now as well, which is good because I know people who can use them.

I go to pick up the warehouse windows Tuesday. Hopefully the guy who is taking them out can get them without breaking them. We shall see. I'll post some pictures when all is said and done.

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!