where and what size

Gardening is a lovely experience.  It gets you outdoors and in touch with the rhythm of the natural world.  Sun, rain, shadow, and dry weather all become keys in your success.  All of these should be taken into account when deciding where to plant your garden.  Some plants favor full sunshine, some love a little shade, some won’t tolerate direct sun.  You must learn as much as  you can about the plants you want to grow.

Our garden is open to the east and south and has shade on the west.  This provides plenty of sunshine to the garden without summer’s intense late afternoon rays.  We have found this suits our gardening style perfectly.  I usually do the gardening early in the morning, but if a chore needs completing in the evening then I welcome the shade.

Our property is very wet.  We sit atop an underground spring and it shows.  Crawdads love it here.  Since we are squishy during the “muddy months” we located our garden on the highest spot in the backyard.  We have a gravel path from the back door to the garden (about 10 feet).  This helps keep us on top of the mud.  We also lined our garden paths with gravel.  This assures that we can get out there and work no matter when the last rain came through.   The paths are anywhere from 1 foot to 4 feet in width.  The central passage is wider so that we can get wheelbarrows through there.

When we began our raised garden we started with 100 square feet divided into 2 beds.  This was just about the perfect starter size.  That first year we had to build the beds, fill the beds, and plant the beds all at once.  It provided plenty of salad greens, green beans, and tomatoes for fresh eating.  We had enough cucumbers to make pickles and some spinach and chard to freeze.  Herbs in abundance poured into the kitchen.

If you plant intensively you can grow a lot of food on 100 square feet.  I recommend _Square Foot Gardening_ or _How to Grow More Vegetables . . ._ as references for intensive planting.  They both tell you when to plant, how closely to plant, and how long until harvest.  I believe the second book is the best.  It has wonderful charts that are worth the price of the book.

Each year we try to add some new beds to our garden.  Some years it may just be one small bed.  This winter we will be adding 5 beds that are 4 foot by 8 foot for a total of 160 square feet.  Early spring will see me trying to get another 5 beds in place.   I try not to add more beds than I can reasonably take care of.   With all our garden we still only use hand tools.

Kim

Rabbits in the garden

Here is another picture from the garden.  This is one of our portable ground cages for rabbits.  You can see that I have removed 2 protective metal sides of the cage to take the picture.  This cage is 4 ft by 4 ft.   It barely fits over our smallest beds.

Clover (white) and Clementine (brown) live here year round.  During the grassy months their cage is moved at least daily to fresh grass.  During the muddy months they live over the garden.  Their manure is responsible for our great harvests (with a help from the goats, sheep, chickens, and compost).

Kim

from dirt to soil

When we moved to our land in 1997 it was hard-pack clay that had been mono-cropped from World War 2 to 1995. You could still see the rows of corn stalks. Not pretty. Our first garden didn’t grow well. Cucumbers did great, but everything else was stunted. That lasted about 3 years while I began to research gardening and different method.

Lesson 1: Dirt is what you call it when the children (or dogs) drag it into the house. Soil is what you call it when you are trying to grow something in it. To me calling it soil separated it from the nasty stuff. Soil needs to be fed and cared for; dirt needs to be swept up!

Lesson 2: Build Soil. The best thing we did for our soil was to buy rabbits and goats. Goats and rabbits make a lot of manure. It comes in tidy little balls and is easily scooped up from the barn and carried someplace else. The someplace else is the garden, the compost heap, in the bottom of holes we dig for trees, bushes, and flowers.

Composting is a wonderful way of enriching your soil. Our compost is done in a heap. We layer old hay, manure/urine soaked straw, kitchen scraps, spent garden plants, ashes, wool, cotton, and mowed grass into a pile. It sits for 6 months then we turn it over. The next year it is ready to be added to the garden beds. You can speed up the process, but we aren’t in a hurry so we take it slowly.

Lesson 3: Building Beds. I believe the best way to garden is the easiest way. I don’t mind hard work. I do mind senseless work. Why till up a huge area so that I can weed huge paths? It just doesn’t make sense to me. So we build raised square beds. These are pretty cheap to build. We have some made of lumber, some made of bricks, and some made of cement blocks. As long as it holds soil and doesn’t leach chemicals it is fine. We dig out the grass, lay down a layer of cardboard, then fill the bed. We fill our beds with 6 cubic feet of peat moss, 3 cubic feet of sand, 5 cubic feet of compost, a sprinkling of lime, a sprinkling of minerals, and a sprinkling of wood ash.

Through out the gardening season we’ll fertilize each bed with a little manure tea as the plants come up to full production. At the end of each gardening season we top off each bed with a new layer of compost and place a rabbit cage over a particularly needy bed. The rabbits will add a wonderfully dark rich layer of manure in just a month and then they move on to the next needy bed.

Here is a picture of a finished garden bed.  It doesn’t look very pretty in December, but it just got topped off and now will have a layer of protective straw added.

Next up: Where to garden, how many beds to start, and a beginner’s garden.

Kim

Merry Christmas

We have been preparing to celebrate.

First came a S –fest in New Harmony, Indiana with most of my maternal family.  What a riot!  We are a largish family.  Granny and PaPa had 6 children, 6 sons/daughter-in-laws, 13 grandchildren, 13 grandchildren-in-laws, 25 great grandchildren, 1 great grandchild-in-law, and 1 great great grandchild!

We are home and have our small tree up, cooking today with our feast tonight.   Since my family history (at least the part I have finished researching) is Scottish/English/German and CK’s is English/German/Irish we have an evergreen (German) with tartan (Scottish) bows, and English bells.

I hope you all have a peaceful day and a very Merry Christmas.

Kim

Wow

The washer came today.  Wow!  It is incredible.  It uses only 207 kwh (based on 8 loads per week) per year and 10 gallons per wash.  It recycles the rinse water for the next wash.  I am so pleased.  The clothes came out so soft and nearly dry.

Along with the washer came a bundle of cardboard.  MA asked the delivery man if he could unload the all the cardboard from the truck.  He has now spread that cardboard over the ground where the next garden beds will go.  He probably put down 200 square feet of cardboard.  Over winter it will kill the grass, and begin to compost down.   Those space will make great garden beds.  Now what will I grow there?

Stay tuned.  I am fine tuning the planting schedule and list for Garden 2008!

Kim

laundry and other sudsy adventures

Laundry:  We are waiting for our new washer to be delivered.  It comes on Thursday and I could not be happier.  After doing all our laundry by hand since the 5th of December I have a new appreciation for my washer.  It will be the last electric appliance I will give up.  My hands are raw and hurting from all the time spent in the water.  We used more hot water because the cold was just too hard on my fingers.  We did opt for an energy star front loading machine.  It uses 69% less water and 60% less electricity than my old machine.  It will hold almost twice as much laundry too.  My old machine was a very small one.

Toothpaste:  We love the homemade paste.  It is the best.   The 6 oz I made on November 7 lasted 4 adults 6 weeks.   I just made a new batch and used tea tree oil and peppermint.  Wow!  Not that will wake you up in the morning.   I also put in more glycerin so that it comes out of the squeeze bottle a little easier.  I used the same recipe as given on Nov 7 except that I added 6 oz of glycerin, 1/4 tsp tea tree oil, and  1/2 tsp pepperming oil.

Dishes:  Dish washing is staying at the same low water levels.  Only now the hot water is free.  We keep a stainless steel bucket on the wood stove.  It keeps the humidity level nice and provides face washing and dish washing water!  I love it.

Kim

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

HM and I recently watched the documentary “How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” by The Community Solution.   I highly recommend finding a copy or viewing it on-line.  It is very  educational.  Cuba went through an artificial Peak Oil when the Soviet Union collapsed.  Their economy plummeted and oil imports dropped like a bomb.  They survived.  Some would argue they have thrived.  You’ll have to watch and see what you think.

We have been aware of the concept of peak oil for a while.  It is a term you run into when you start talking to sustainability people.  We were already working hard to make our little farm as close to self-sufficient as we could.   We like/love John Seymour’s work and book.   Learning a little about peak oil spurred us on to greater efforts.

After watching the documentary I realize how much more we need to add to our to-do list.   Things like: rain water collection, bigger garden, more perma-culture, and more sheep.  The biggest thing we need to do though is to build community.  You would think living in the middle of corn country that we’d  be set for food in an emergency.  Wrong!  I haven’t found a single neighbor who gardens or farms without tractors or tillers.  We are alone in that effort.   Square beds are easy to build, seed, weed and harvest by hand.   They aren’t typical though.

So my community building begins.  Most people around here are aware of both our environmental efforts and our homesteading efforts.  It makes it easy to strike up these conversations.  I have worked hard to make our home appear “normal.”  I have found that people are sometimes put off by what seems weird or too difficult.   So we need to keep is simple and effective.

Names that mean grace

HM’s first name means grace. That was a mistake.

She has the sweetest disposition (old word for personality, also an insight into her personality) of anyone I have ever met. She’d go to the moon to help out a friend. She loves to serve others. She is very domestic. She likes to clean, do dishes, and cook. She does all sorts of handiwork, and she does them well. I just dabble; she’s good. She revels in the care of our livestock (except chickens. She really doesn’t like chickens.) and our garden.

However what she is not is physically graceful. She is a klutz to be perfectly honest with you. I tried for years to teach her grace. We had balance beams, walking lessons, karate, and swimming lessons. None of them helped. Monday afternoon she went outside with her crocs on and stepped on an old rusty nail. As she says, “I impaled myself.” The first I knew of it was her question, “Have I ever had a tetanus shot?” I grabbed my purse, keys, and HM and we set off for the doctor. Several hours later (and having had a DTP booster, x-rays, and antibiotics) she was home and resting comfortably.

Keeping her there until she heals will be the tricky part!

Kim

Happy Birthday, MA!

MA turned 19 on Monday.  Here is a picture we took several months ago.  The main difference is that now he smiles more, has bigger muscles, and a lot less facial hair!  MA has really entered the adult world.  He has a job, a checking account, a savings account, his own health insurance and a bill to prove it.

His birthday post is delayed by a day because HM had a bit of an emergency yesterday.  More about that tomorrow.

Laundry: The Hard Way

We decided to finish the laundry the old fashioned way. I filled a rubber-maid tote with warm water and homemade laundry soap. I filled 2 other totes with cold rinse water. We used about 30 gallons for 3 loads.

Dirty laundry into the wash tub, let soak 1 hour (I got distracted by a phone call), come back and use the plunger to agitate the clothes. So far, no problem. This is pretty easy. Right up until I tried to wring the water out. Oh my goodness. I thought my fingers and forearms would break. Now into the first rinse water. Swish it around. Time to wring it out again. I almost gave up. Thankfully HM was there to finish the wringing and rinsing and wringing.

We had to hang the laundry on hangers over the tub. You have never seen such dripping clothes before. Water literally poured off of them–right back into the rinsing tubs. (This confirms my desire to own a wringer! Lehman’s catalog here I come!) Tomorrow morning if they aren’t dripping I’ll put them on the drying racks behind the wood stove.

Laundry done this way would appear to be a three day affair.

I’ll be sure and let you know when we get a new a washer. Until then I’ll be elbow deep in a rubber-maid tote wondering how my great-grandmothers ever got anything else done.

Kim

ode to my washer

Ah life.  My life seems to operate with a strange sense of humor.

Today is one of our laundry days.  I loaded the machine, talked nicely to it (a requirement at its age), and walked away.  I wrote a note to the 90% group and started one to my family.  Then I heard, “Why is there water in here?”  HM went to unload the washer only to find it never started the wash cycle.  We fiddled and fiddled, we tried bribery, and we finally decided the motor was shot.  Dead!  Dead with 15 gallons of water and a bunch of clothes in the tub.

So we rolled up our sleeves, bailed out the tub, turned the machine around and stared at the motor.  That didn’t fix it.  I muttered an oath.  That didn’t work.   I tried a different word.  Still not working.

I walked away to deal with sopping wet dirty clothes.  Oh man.  What a mess.  They are now washed, rinsed, and dripping lots of water into the tub.  I don’t have an old-fashioned wringer.  It is on my wish-list (because you never know when you might have a dead washer).

So now I am looking at my washer in disgust.  Traitor.  Doesn’t it know I already blew  the consumer goods budget?  Doesn’t it know I just drained the savings account to buy a new-to-us truck?

Then I paused to remember all the laundry that little washer has done.  15 years of MA’s jeans after working outside, digging, and now putty.  15 years of HM’s skirts full of whatever she carried and used her skirt as a bucket.  15 years of CK’s work clothes (first USAF uniforms then “corporate” uniforms).  15 years.  That is a lot of living.  That is a lot of clothes.

So thank you little washer.    May you live happily in the recycling center’s scrap metal heap until someone finds a use for you.

Kim

six months

Six months have passed since we joined the Riot for Austerity. Six months of big changes. Six months of analyzing everything. Six months of constant discussion about our numbers and how to lower them.

We have reached a place of calm in the midst of these changes. The measures we have implemented are now routine. Although, I still find I need to schedule time to empty the gray water buckets. Overflows have happened one too many times for this neat freak! We are pleased with our current percentages and have plans in place to reduce the final hurdle in our water usage.

Now begins the work of living. Living without constantly thinking about these things. I think this will be the real challenge for us. We have proven to ourselves that it is possible to consume 10% less than the average American. Now we need to prove it is possible to live happily consuming 10%.

As we have been talking to people around us I find most people are curious about these changes. They assume that it must have been terribly difficult or that it must be a real pain to keep up with all the “rules.” Most are surprised when I tell them how rewarding I have found it to examine all areas of my/our life, to make these changes, and now to live with these changes.

So now we enter the next stage of the conversation. Are you ready? It’ll probably be less number based and more experience based. Less learning and more mentoring.

But, lest you think I have forgotten, here is a brief look at our on-going monthly stats:

• Gasoline: Including the men’s commutes we are currently using 12.5 gallons/person/month compared to the 41.7 gallons/month/person that the average American uses. (30%)
• Electricity: Monthly average is 213 kwh (roughly 7 kwh/day) with the green credit figured in it is 54 kwh/month compared to the 900 kwh/month of the average household. (6%)
• Heating and Cooking: Heating–we heat with down or dead wood so it is considered carbon neutral by the Riot rules. We cook using a propane camp stove and use 1/2-1 therm per month for cooking compared to the average 83 therms per month ( less than 1%)
• Garbage: 7 pounds/person/month compared to the 135 pounds/person/month of the average American. (5%)
• Water: 30 gallons/person/day plus 20 gallons per day for the sheep, goats, rabbits, chickens, dogs and cat. American average is 100 gallon/person/day. (30%)
• Consumer Goods: $83 per month compared to $833. (10%) Then we add the one-time purchase of a used vehicle ($300 when we figure 10% for used goods). (13% at the end of the year unless we have another MAJOR need)

Kim