Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Wintertime “Fun” at Fixettwell Farmlet: Attack of the Air Potatoes!

While Bea was having such a great time with her crop-planning, I had a different idea of what constitutes fun.  I decided to get outside and attack some brush!

When we moved our first load of stuff down here back in October, Bea & I took a walk through the back yard, day-dreaming about where we might site all her various garden infrastructure.  She quickly determined that pretty much every plant growing back past our south lawn was an invasive species of some kind or another, and that if we wanted to stop these plants from spreading up into the useable section of our yard we would need to apply some major brute force.  Bea also has some half-baked idea about growing shitake mushrooms back in the woods, some day once we can actually walk into them.

Fast forward to mid-November and we finally got some decent photos that we could use to try to ID these invasive plants and figure out the best way to remove them.  We’re not weed experts by any stretch, so please correct us if we’re wrong!  Here’s our best guesses:

Blunt-leaved privet:



Japanese Honeysuckle:



Saw Greenbriar (Smilax):





Air Potatoes, aka Chinese Yams:




Still not sure yet:




The Process


My first tactic was to take loppers and cut everything off about waist height.  For the privet, this left stumps that we could use to pull them up from the roots.  For the vines, this at least gave me something fun to swing from while trying to pull them down from the treetops!

Step two of this plan was to take our fancy new Brush Grubber chains and attach them to our lawn tractor.  This tactic was highly successful at tearing up grass, but a complete failure to pull out any brush.  Note to self: lawn tractors are really only for cutting lawns.





Next tactic: find a clearance sale on cheap come-alongs and buy one, plus a tree strap.  Wrap the tree strap around (you guessed it) a tree and then voila – two long minutes of cranking to pull out a middling stump clump!








Several stumps and one very tired arm later, at Bea’s urging we proceeded to our next tactic: purchase a clearance sale electric winch.  We asked advice from a store employee, who looked at us like we were insane to try and take out shrub stumps with this product, despite the fact the box clearly showed the winch hooked up to a huge old tree stump.  The employee simply said, “Well, I can’t really say I could recommend that idea.  If it breaks loose, it could kill you.”  Undeterred, we ended up back at home with this winch.  Here’s how it went:





Our weakly winch could only pull the smallest of clumps, and it still took way more time than when Bea just dug the puny ones out with a shovel.  When we tried hooking it up to a larger stump, the winch started smoking and soon shut itself off.  Apparently the photo on the box only showed the winch hooked up to the tree stump, not actually removing it from the ground.

Next we tried hooking up the hitch on our cargo van directly to the brush grubber chains.  We made some really nice tire tracks in the lawn and in fact got the van stuck in the ensuing mud ruts for a good long while; apparently vans aren’t meant to be used as tractors either.

Chris barely visible through our privet disaster
So many invasives!
Tangled mess...
Bea asked some friends who are well-versed in invasive weed removal and they pretty unanimously suggested getting goats.  While that might be in the cards for the future, we were hoping to make a decent dent in the brush removal project this year before everything leafs out in spring.  Plus the privet clusters are over 8’ tall, so the shorty goats we plan to get won’t be much use on the plants that are already established!  (It’s also been said that privet-fed goats make poisonous milk!)


Somewhere along the line of researching the price of replacing the weak winch with a better one, we came across an amazing product: the snatch block!  This little device will double your pulling power, and hopefully either give our electric winch enough power to be an effective member of the team, or save my right arm from endless amounts of cranking.  However, by the time we placed our order apparently this product is now back-ordered so we’ve been waiting for it to ship.

The right tools make any job easier!
So meanwhile, I’m back to my original tactic: cutting and pulling by hand.  After a couple weeks of lopping, Bea’s grandpa’s ancient loppers finally gave out and I had to turn to alternate tools.  Bea found an old hatchet under the seat of her truck (kept for those emergencies when, you know, you find yourself alone in the wilderness and only have a hatchet) – this was helpful at cutting some of the larger vines.  She also turned up her grandpa’s machete which is a lot of fun to wield against the smaller vines.  And today we finally replaced the broken loppers with some compound bypass loppers – way nicer to use on the thicker privet branches.

Overall, I have to say, manual brush removal is a great form of stress relief and exercise.  To paraphrase Thoreau: the brush will warm me twice – once when I clear it and once when I burn it.

Before!
After -- not quite the same angle, but this is the same section of woods!



Stay tuned for an epic bonfire and house-warming party sometime this spring!



Wintertime “Fun” at Fixettwell Farmlet: An Ode to Spreadsheets

Our front steps have disappeared!
Hoophouse held up decently under the snow
This past week we got our first major snowstorm of the season.  This storm wasn’t especially ferocious or anything, we didn’t lose power and our pipes didn’t even freeze this time – but the storm brought cold temperatures and the kind of snow that has a hard crust of ice on top and sticks around covering everything for a week or so, making it hard to walk off the porch or get a car out of the driveway (we still don’t have 4x4).



Too deep!
Chris has bravely donned his warm coat and boots each day and wandered to the back of our property to continue his battle to save our small stand of trees against the invasive brush.  More on that another day!


Bea has less bravely donned her slippers and joined the cats by the fire, drinking cup after cup of hot tea, and playing with spreadsheets to plan out our crops for the 2014 season.  We are still about a long day’s work from being able to close in the hoophouse so unfortunately at the moment all of our gardening is still being done in the electronic/hypothetical format.  We are getting very uncharacteristically organized though, and appreciate these cold winter months to provide the opportunity to sit still long enough to plan things properly!



First, we sorted out all the seeds we already have on hand, which is a kind of ridiculous amount due to the fact that Bea was “paid” for a past internship in free seeds [she literally worked for peanuts!].  While seed companies aren’t allowed to sell seed packets past their stamped sell-by date, most seeds actually retain their viability 5-10 years past this date – so you can use old seeds, you just might want to double-seed to anticipate lower germination rates.  We split all the seeds up into families and then types, then varieties, and then catalogued these in a spreadsheet as we Ziplocked them together for way better organization than Bea’s previous method (throwing everything jumbled together in a single large bag).  Ultimately, we figured out that we hardly had to order any seeds compared to which crops we wanted to grow – yay for knowing (and using) what you have on hand!

Spreadsheet I made back in 2000
Bea’s aside: thank goodness for Microsoft Excel!  Once upon a time, I thought that Excel was a tool only useful for making calculations that you might just as easily use a calculator for.  It might be helpful if you needed to make a graph or as a makeshift contact database, but otherwise I didn’t really ever have any reason to open this software.  Then a few years ago while working on a project together, a good friend asked to see my contact spreadsheet; I wasn’t prepared for his eyes to bug out in embarrassment for me and my poor Excel skills!  He quickly taught me about borders, shading, formatting, and the importance of having your documents actually appear presentable & understandable “just in case” you’re asked to share your data.  Now Excel is just about my go-to application for any purpose I can squeeze out of it – in this case, after cataloguing all our seeds and crop list, it’s now serving as my graph paper!

Our planned Hoophouse 2.0 layout -- click for larger version
So here’s our floor plan for our hoophouse, which will feature 136 square feet of bench space where someday we’ll be able to start way more plants than we intend to grow to maturation ourselves (i.e., for sale or trade).  The benches will be built atop a series of 55-gallon barrels which will also serve as our primary water source for the hoophouse.  The open space near the barrels will be where we park our stationary bike which will be hooked to a water pump, with irrigation lines being distributed to each side of the hoophouse.  The beds along the sides are designed to maximize the amount of in-ground growing space while still being manageable for one person to tend by hand.  For now, we’re also going to have a compost pile and some storage shelving in the other end of the hoophouse, although in future seasons we’ll most likely find less prime real estate for these purposes elsewhere on our property.  This first growing season is admittedly an experiment, so we purposely wanted to leave some space underutilized so we can grow into it in case we find there is in fact a market for our veggies or plants besides ourselves.

Our in-ground growing area in the hoophouse will be home to our spring crops:  Leeks; Onions; Broccoli; Brussels Sprouts; Pac Choi; Cauliflower; Cabbage; Kohlrabi; Kale; Asian Greens; Mustard; Shiso; Swiss Chard; Lettuce; Spinach; Arugula; Mizuna; Peas; Fava Beans; Carrots; Turnips; Parsnips; Radishes; Beets; and a variety of herbs.  We’ve done a lot of math to figure out how much of each crop to grow and how to stagger the planting dates so in theory we will spread out our harvest – Bea’s getting really antsy for more warm weather to get here so we can finish the hoophouse, start some seeds and actually implement any of these plans!

Our new garden site with all its various obstacles
Meanwhile, once it warms up again, we’re also going to be installing a large kitchen garden over on the other side of our house – our plan is to enclose a little more than 1800 square feet in deer fencing and then fill that area with our summer crops.  This area is not the absolutely ideal spot for a garden, although it’s the spot that will get the most consistent hours of sunlight and is closest to the kitchen where it will be convenient to turn our harvests into sustenance.  So what’s not ideal?  The area is constrained on each side by various obstacles: on the north side we have a large potentially dead tree, on another side a shed, a laundry line running through the 3rd side, and a power pole on the far side.  For this first year, we’ll be using temporary fencing so that we have the option to move it and expand the garden in future years if desired.  For instance, in winter, it’s impossible for us to tell how much of the tree is actually dead and we don’t really want to take it out if it’s still partially alive.  We’re also not really sure about the legality of enclosing a power pole inside of deer fencing even if our property line goes past that.  For now we’ve decided to make a bit of garden art out of the laundry pole and use the natural run of the laundry lines as diagonal pathways to break up the growing beds.  And the shed will be enclosed in the fencing too and house the garden tools, so that works decently.

Anyway, this space will allow us to grow: Artichokes; Broccoli; Brussels Sprouts; Cauliflower; Cabbage; Corn; Pickling & Slicing Cukes; Cantaloupe; Honeydew; Watermelon; Beans; Dry beans; Soybeans; Lima beans; Tomatillos; Sweet & Hot Peppers; Eggplants; Tomatoes; Potatoes; Okra; Summer Squash; Winter Squash; Pumpkins; Peanuts; and Sweet Potatoes, plus an herb spiral of sorts installed around the laundry pole.
Basic crop layout for our 1st season's kitchen garden

We’d love to install more fruit, herbs, and perennial flowers as an entry garden into the hoophouse, but we’re trying not to plan more than our budget or our muscles can sustain for 2014 – and we think we’ll already be pretty busy in turning all these colorful pixels into fertile soil and thriving plants in the two spaces we have cut out to tackle this year!




Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Make your own Yogurt “Cheese" Spread!

When I (Bea) worked on a farm back in 2005, the farmer I worked for didn't sell at producer-only markets and so we would buy up a bunch of products from other farmers and then sell them for a markup in DC.  We used to drive many a mile to purchase wholesale Amish “Yogurt Cheese" in large tubes, like it had been formed in a Sonoform -- and then we farm workers would spend evenings chopping it into ~1/2 lb half-moon-shaped blocks and bagging it for resale at various farmers' markets.  So that was my introduction to the concept of “Yogurt Cheese," which initially just sounded entirely disgusting & bizarre to me.  However, as low-paid farm workers who had “room & board provided" [meaning, anything left over that hadn't sold by the end of our markets, we could eat ourselves], my coworkers & I became accustomed to this stuff.

After that farm season, I promptly completely forgot about it until recently when I was looking up basic cheese-making, and this recipe popped up for Yogurt Cheese that said it only takes 5 minutes.  Well, hell.  I can take 5 minutes to make cheese!  I told Chris it was time for a science experiment and he happily rushed to the kitchen to see what I had up my sleeve.  Science is a big motivator in our household!

You'll need:


  • Plain yogurt
  • Salt (optional)
  • Cheesecloth
  • Strainer
  • Bowl that the strainer fits into
  • Towel or plastic wrap
  • A day's worth of patience (or a bad memory!)

To Make the “Cheese":

Step 1:

Fold your cheesecloth in half or quarters and place it in the strainer, which should be set into the bowl.

Step 2:

Scoop out some plain yogurt into the strainer; the final volume will be less than what you start with, so we used half of our quart of yogurt as a trial run to make about a cup's worth of yogurt cheese.  We were still a bit skeptical!



Step 3:

Cover the whole thing with the plastic wrap or towel, and refrigerate for 24 hours. 





Step 4:

The next day, lift the strainer out of the bowl.  The whey will have drained out of the yogurt and be caught in the bowl underneath, while your yogurt cheese remains in the strainer!  It's sort of like the consistency of cream cheese or sour cream.

Step 5:

Pour out the whey and save it to use in baking projects, or discard if you don't want to use it in the near future--it won't keep too long.





Step 6:

Salt the yogurt cheese, if desired.  Scoop it into an airtight container & store in the fridge.



Step 7:

Healthier “sour cream"
YUM!


Chris has enjoyed the yogurt cheese on a croissant with strawberry jam.  Bea enjoyed it topping a “burrito bowl" (her term for a bowl full of burrito filling, but without the tortilla).


Chris's Aside:

This “cheese" is not actually CHEESE!!!  Bea fooled me.  I told her you can't really make cheese in 5 minutes.  This stuff was pretty good though, you just have to make sure “cheese" is in “quotation marks" so people know it's not really cheese.

The final yogurt “cheese" spread








Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Hoop, there it is (remix)!

NFI & MOG's hoophouse in Winter 2011
Back in the DC area and back in 2010, Bea & her friend Josh hatched a plan to build an enormous shared hoophouse that would provide enough bench space for both the Neighborhood Farm Initiative & My Organic Garden to start their seedlings.  This hoophouse project became a huge pain in the rear (understatement of the century!), ultimately involving plenty of contentious arguments, lots of blood-sweat-and-tears, being stalked at home by our landlord, being evicted after the thing was finally built, and finally an ER visit.




Lots of plant babies growing in Spring 2011
Josh is pretty good about knowing to cut his losses when he's behind, but Bea is stubborn as all get-out and determined to resurrect this structure “someday, somewhere, somehow."

Well folks, that time is now & that place is here, the Fixettwell Farmlet!  Bea traded a couple of months of free labor in exchange for owning this monolith outright, and so we included our hoops in determining the size of moving truck we would need -- THE LARGEST ONE POSSIBLE!

handymath.com is a brilliant tool!

It worked out surprisingly well, with the hoops fitting perfectly along one side just like the math said!  Who ever said geometry class has no real-life applications?!

Winter 2011 after a long, COLD workday at the hoophouse 
Back on Hoophouse 1.0, we began construction the weekend after Thanksgiving and finally had everything closed in by the end of January, with all the benches built up & functional by mid-March.  We were working around a bunch of conflicting schedules at the time, so the workdays were set in stone and not weather-dependent -- meaning there were a whole lot of REALLY COLD workdays that winter!  When we set about to start building Hoophouse 2.0 this January, I promised Chris that we wouldn't ever work on the project if it was below 40°F.  So that means we're using every scrap of daylight on the random nice days we've had lately to get this thing constructed in time to start our transplants!  It's been surprisingly easier the 2nd time around, despite only having the two of us as laborers.

Hoophouse building supplies -- yes we moved all this here!
After moving, our hoops spent a couple months hanging out at the chicken coop for no particular reason...
We learned some things the first time around, and we also decided to make some modifications to improve the design as we rebuild.  Since it's January, of course most days have been below 40°F and so Bea has somewhat single-mindedly spent hours researching best practices for hoophouse-building and come up with some hopefully cool & functional ideas to make our hoophouse more useful as a year-round growing space.

As we rebuild, we'll be adding:

  • roll-up sides (our first hoophouse just had top vents--really ineffective!), 
  • double doors on each end wall, 
  • automatic heat-powered vent windows, 
  • a rainwater collection & distribution system, and 
  • a bike-powered irrigation system!
We're excited to share each improvement as we get them built out.  For now, we've just completed the bare bones structure so we'll start with sharing that.

How to Build a Hoophouse Part 1

Our skeleton of Hoophouse 2.0 is the same as 1.0 so some of these photos are from 2010-11.

Step 1: Site your structure.

The first step of any building project is going to be figuring out the best spot to put it.  This should involve calling the county/Miss Utility to figure out where any underground utilities, well, or septic tank may be.  This also should involve scoping out how much sun your site gets -- you'll want at least 6-8 hours of full sunshine, and don't forget that your trees will be shadier in summer when they've got leaves on.  In an ideal site in the northern hemisphere your hoophouse would be oriented with the long sides running east-west in order to maximize the southern sun exposure.  Other factors to consider could include the direction of prevailing winds which could influence ventilation or if you live somewhere with very strong winds, might mean orienting it accordingly so that the structure doesn't catch the wind and blow away.  Yet another consideration is building the structure on as level ground as possible.  Or you could do what we did, and just go with what will look coolest on Google satellite maps.

In any case, you want to spend a significant amount of time staking out your corners and ensuring they're square.  Remember Pythagoras' theorem:
Our tapes measuring both diagonals -- perfect!
a^2 + b^2 = c^2\!\,
Have a couple of tape measures longer than your hoophouse -- in our case, our dimensions are 20'x50', so we have (2) 100' tapes.  This makes it a lot easier to measure the diagonals and square everything up.  In our case, 20x20 + 50x50 = sq root of 2900, or ~ 53.85', or 53' 10 1/4" (across the diagonals).  Approximately.

Once you get your corners set, pound in a scrap of rebar or another sturdy stake that you can tie string to and measure off.

Step 2: Install ground stakes.



Our ground stakes are cut to about 3' long out of a long tube of 1" galvanized steel toprail -- usually used in installing chainlink fence.  You'll need twice as many ground-stakes as you have hoops since each end attaches to one stake.

You'll need to acquire a very large-headed carriage bolt so that as you pound in your stakes you won't squash the top edge.  You put the bolt in the top of each post, and pound them in about 5'-6' apart -- in our case, we're doing 5' spacing so that our 11 hoops end up covering 50'.  Set up a string with a line-level attached between your corner stakes, and also a long tape measure pulled taut so you make sure the posts remain in a straight line, since where you pound them in will determine the shape & placement of your entire hoophouse.

Use a post pounder upside-down once it gets too close to ground level, or you can use a sledge hammer if you have good aim.  A level with a magnetic strip was helpful in making sure the stakes remain plumb while pounding.  The stakes should have at least 12" sticking out above ground when you're done.



Step 3: Install self-tapping screw stops.

While you still have your level string set up, drive a self-tapping hex-head screw (rated to cut through steel, not just sheet metal) approx 12" from the top of each stake -- or along the level string if your ground isn't level.  The hoops will slide over the stakes and their weight will rest on these screw heads until they're attached.

Step 4: Bend your hoops.

Volunteers work on bending the hoops for Hoophouse 1.0

In our case, this was done in 2011 and so we didn't have to redo this.



Chris was the only full-time hoop-bender!
Basically, the hoops are 30' long (to make a 20' wide hoophouse) and come as 1 3/8" 14-gauge pipes.  So you build a jig that has the correct curve (google this) and then feed the straight pipes through the jig, bending as you go.  When you're done bending, the hoops ideally all have the same angles to make a nice quonset shape.  In our case, there was a team of volunteers subbing in and out of the hoop-bending process, so some are overbent and some are underbent.  Eh, you get what you pay for!

Step 5: Install hoops.


In 2010, it was all hands on deck to get the hoops installed
Slide each hoop over the groundstakes -- this sounds a lot easier than it may actually be.  In 2011, it involved teams of volunteers contorting themselves into weird configurations trying to bear all their weight down on the hoops, or alternately standing on logs to raise the other end up into the air.  Unfortunately it was all-hands-on-deck so we don't have any photos of this amusing process!

Our volunteer laborer, Sir Ratchet Straps.
I think he did about 90% of the work.
This year, just Chris & I and some indispensable ratchet straps were able to get all the hoops over the stakes.  Ratchet straps are definitely worth about half a dozen team members.  The hoops should slide down all the way so that they're sitting directly atop the screws.

11 hoops in place & it's not even dark yet!


Step 5: Install more self-tapping screws.

Once you get your hoops in place, drive another self-tapping screw through both the hoop and the ground stake behind it.  Chris becomes enamored with his Christmas present, an impact driver.

Bea is a little nervous about ladders.
She says it's a fear of heights, but this
ladder only gets her about 3' off the ground!

Step 6: Install purlins.



These are 1 3/8" 17-gauge galvanized steel tubes that are connected to the hoops to help give the structure stability.  One goes straight down the center at the top of the hoops -- you attach it using cross connectors generally used for chainlink fencing.  We also installed one purlin on each side, 5 feet down from the center.  As you connect the purlins, measure that your hoops are in fact 5' on-center apart (or whatever spacing you used when installing your ground-stakes).  Sometimes they don't sit quite plumb and may need encouragement from a sledge hammer.
The straps came in handy for revising the bend
of some of the more misshapen hoops

Since the purlin pipes are usually 10' or 20' in length, you need multiple pipes for each 50' run.  One end of each section has a male “swedge" built into it (a 6" section or so that's a smaller diameter) which you slip into the female end of the next pipe.  Then attach a self-tapping metal screw through both pipes to hold them together.
All 3 purlins successfully installed!




You want all screw heads and connectors to point down/inward so that they don't stick up into the plastic covering.  Expect to be standing on a ladder for a few hours working upside down above your head installing all these connectors!


Step 7: Install base boards.




Around the base of your hoophouse, install 2x8s as baseboards.  This gives you a solid base that your plastic can either attach to or rest on if you have roll-up sides, and it provides stability for the whole structure.  

Use galvanized heavy-duty plumbing straps to wrap around the hoop and screw into the base boards on each side.  Do the same thing on the corners.


For Hoophouse 1.0, we had an 8' opening on the side so two 6' boards coming in toward the center that we'll use to build the endwalls off.  Despite reworking the framing for the endwalls, we kept the placement of the 6' boards to build off of.
All baseboards installed!

Step 8: Tie on monofilament.

Monofilament helps support plastic between the metal frame
This step is optional if you have a single enormous piece of greenhouse plastic that you'll be using to cover the hoophouse.  For us, Hoophouse 1.0 had top vents and so we have 4 overlapping shorter pieces of plastic.  For best results, we'd purchase a new single piece of greenhouse plastic, but when we unrolled what we had it still looked totally functional, and a new roll costs upward of $300, plus given that the plastic only lasts for 4 years we decided to stick with what we have until we have to replace it in a couple of years anyway, at which point we will purchase a single piece.



Luckily, back when we demolished
Hoophouse 1.0, Bea thought of tying
individual strands of monofilament
into loops with bread ties, which
made untangling 1,000 times easier!
We used a variation on a
hangman's knot drawn through an
extra loop.
So for now, we need the monofilament which will help to support the plastic over the span between hoops.  A single piece could be pulled taut enough it doesn't need monofilament, but since the middle two overlapping pieces will only be attached on the sides, you gotta spend a few hours tying this stuff on to the end hoops.


Bea continues getting over her
fear of ladders
This monofilament is no regular fishing line; it is super heavy duty -- 2.5mm thick!  The goal is to tie each line onto both end hoops as taut as possible with approx 3-6" spacing between lines.  Before, we covered the whole hoophouse with lines of monofilament, but this time we stopped 5' from the ground since Hoophouse 2.0 will have roll-up sides.  This also worked out great because when we disassembled Hoophouse 1.0 in a hurry, we had to cut some of the lines & wouldn't have had enough left to run as many lines as last time.


Steps 9 & 10: Build end walls & cover with plastic!

We haven't gotten these done yet because it's super cold again!  We also will be changing up how we build the endwalls, so that seems like another post for another time!




Hoophouse 2.0, January 2014