Permaculture Certification

  Summer has pretty much passed me by. Between working on the rental house we bought in May and trying to keep up with life I barely had time to go out into the garden and look at the plants this year.
  Some things grew marvelously without me. Other things really needed my attention and, therefore, were not as strong as they could have otherwise been. Here are a couple of pictures:

From Garden

From Garden

Pretty nice, right? And this is what it turned into:

From Garden

From Garden

Jungle...

  I have learned a few things this season, which makes up for the lack of success I achieved in the beds. I think the first lesson I am drawing from this year's garden is that my tomato plants need a bed of their own in which they can just consume all the space. 

  The best thing to come from this summer was my completion of the first of my certifications in Permaculture Design. I was hesitant to take a course online due to the lack of hands on experience. But then in March, Geoff Lawton offered an online certification that promised to be incredibly comprehensive and worth the money. I have to say, it definitely was.

  I submitted my final design on September 26 and I haven't heard anything to tell me there were issues so I'm hoping that means I have a certificate coming in the mail from Australia. I'll post the design elements in my next update.

  So now I have to tear the garden apart and start several large batches of compost from the green materials in the garden and the dead leaves that will shower my yard in the coming weeks. 

  I almost forgot to mention that I also finished a Master Composter class through my local county this summer. So I know everything there is to know about municipal yard waste composting. Fun times!

Garden Progress

It seems as though I can never get the garden started at the time I'd like to. This year, that worked out in my favor.

I've never been really keen on forcing my plants to survive events that they couldn't normally survive on their own. This includes covering for frost. Now, to be fair, I didn't plant any of my cole crops during the proper time in which they should have been planted. I also didn't get my tomato or cucumber seedlings transplanted until a few days into June. This all turned out to be a very good thing because we got one last frost here on the Sunday before memorial day. The community garden where I have a few things planted this year lost a lot of crops due to the very late frost. I got lucky because I was too busy to plant anything until June 3rd!

Here are a couple of updated pictures of the garden in my back yard. I still have one bed to cut and prep which will host my beans and corn and some root veggies. The largest bed in the photo is half sewn with buckwheat and amaranth and the rest is tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, basil, celery and peppers. The 5x5 that you see in the photos has been prepped and contains lettuces, spinach, herbs, garlic and onions.

From Garden

I double dug the half of the garden which would have the food crop in it. Double digging is probably the hardest garden-related activity I've ever performed. The digging is relatively easy, but my beds were littered with roots and so moving one trench into the next was a chore. The roots held everything together except the top layer, which would landslide into the trench ahead or behind. The whole point of double digging it to loosen 24" deep while maintaining soil structure and I found that to be a very difficult thing to do well. Maybe I'll try again in a couple of seasons.

From Garden

I found some info online about "trench planting" tomatoes. I had a couple that had grown a bit wonky so I tried the trenching method. Of the 8 plants I put in, I trenched 3 so we will see how well they do.

From Garden

The final step was to layer about 1.5" thick of compost on top of the beds. This step is crucial, as compost has an amazing water retention factor and acts somewhat like mulch with water. The only hard part about using only compost is that it is amazingly suited to grow things, which means any kind of weed or grass seed that ends up in it grows amazingly well. Compost added every year also greatly helps the structure of your soil. Layer after layer builds up to be a lovely high structure of organic matter and nutrients.

I began building the beginnings of my new composter a while back. Here are some images of that. I still have 2 more frames that same size to build, as well as a door for each and a lid.

From Permaculture

From Permaculture

I ran out of leftover cedar for the side with one plank to go! I have some more on standby now until I have some time to cut it and install it. This container is about 3 cubic feet, the size required to successfully hot compost all compostable materials (including vegetable cellulose plastics). The next 2 units will attach to this one and will also be about 3 cubic feet. I also plan on building another unit near the chicken coop once that is completed to allow for the composting of manure for fertilizer.

I suppose that is enough for this post. I will be updated more and more as the summer progresses and my projects get more complicated. I am thinking I'll also highlight some of the tools I use from time to time for reference material.

I need to work on a new sign off. Stan Lee calls everyone "true believers" and most newscasters say something like "stay classy San Diego". I need a little quip to end with. I'm thinking something like "Until next time, keep growing!" but anything I come up with sounds stupid in my mind...so just check back here frequently this summer for more updates.

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

It's finally time to plant

Just a quick update, as it is about 2:30 in the morning. I planted the first round of seedlings tonight. I had a Hydrofarm brand seed starting kit left over from last year and one of the principles in permaculture is "produce no waste". So instead of chucking the thing, I choose to make use of it. I put in 18 spanish onions seeds, 10 roma tomatoes, 14 Rutgers tomatoes, 18 brussel sprouts, 16 straight 8 cucumbers and 5 strawberries.

I picked a few of these based on length of time to maturity and the rest I just randomly selected. Tomatoes tend to survive transplanting better when they are large. I also found out a new method to plant my tomatoes this year, which may lead to larger yield. It is called "trench planting" and you can read more about it here. Basically, you lay the seedling flat into a trench to get a better root structure from the plant. I can't wait to try it out.

I have made significant progress in the way of chickens as well. I have the area where the coop/greenhouse will be placed leveled and prepped. I also dug the holes for the cement footings of the coop and I'm now ready to mix some concrete and get the posts anchored. I haven't gotten very far on the framework yet, but I'm still holding out hope to have the project done by the end of May.

My next step on the gardens is to get all 3 beds prepped when we have some warm weather. I was offered 2 plots at the GNG and I have my 102 sq ft holding in my back yard. I still have some work to do with the expansion behind the house, but it should be relatively simple considering I won't be building any new raised beds, but will be transferring the ones already built to the additional spaces. The beds at the GNG seem to be in relatively decent shape and I was able to get 2 next to each other. My only issue there is that my bed spaces run north and south of each other so I won't be building any trellises for pole beans or peas.

I realize now that I still have some seeds to purchase: peas, comfrey, herbs for the spiral...etc. I guess I better get on that. I got my potatoes in the mail a few days ago and realized I could have just gone and bought a 5 lb. bag at the grocer's. At least these are certified organic and I know that they haven't been riddled with pesticides and weed killers.

I will be sure to post a couple of pictures of the coop footings and other things as I go. I also hope to do a tutorial on both composting and double-digging garden beds in the near future on this blog. I might even venture into video this summer, who knows?!

Simple Project: Waterproofing Canvas Shoes

Waterproof? Well, maybe more like water-resistant...but still.

When you are vegan, you don't buy leather. One major downside to this is that most canvas shoes are not coated, which means that you have to shop carefully to find the shoes with a rubber covered toe or, at the very least, something with some substance to it.

We recently upped our hipster cred by getting some Toms brand shoes. The vegan version is essentially a piece of canvas attached to a recycled rubber sole. When it is wet outside, they absorb water almost instantly. Thanks to the wonder of the internet, however, we have discovered a method for keeping our feet dry. Since I did this myself and took these pictures during my own process, I will not be crediting another site or blog for this.

Check it out:

Step 1 - get a small chunk of beeswax. Most natural food stores carry this in little bars. Take the wax and rub it against the canvas HARD. You need to deposit a lot of wax on the canvas for this step.

From Simple Projects

Step 2 - Cover the whole shoe well. Make sure you get in all the little cracks and crags. The place to overdo it is along the seam between the sole and the body of the shoe.

From Simple Projects

Step 3 - Now take the shoe and run your hairdryer on high and hot all over the shoe. Move slowly over each part and make sure the wax melts and absorbs completely into the canvas.

From Simple Projects

Step 4 - Test out the final product. Run the tap over the toe. Does the water soak in or does it roll off? Hopefully it just rolls off.

From Simple Projects

It's a beautiful thing! Try it for yourself. Now, these are Toms and I haven't tried this method on other brands of canvas shoes, but the premise is solid and should apply to pretty much any canvas shoe. I will try it on some of my other shoes soon and report back on my findings. In the meantime, if you have Toms, this works!