Natural fertilizer

So, as we harvest some of the winter crops, we have to prep the garden beds for the Spring garden. For now, this entails mowing down any weeds and plants, and sprinkling liberally with rabbit manure, which we have in abundance.

Rabbit droppings are one of the new animal manures that you can apply directly to the garden. It isn't "hot", so it won't harm anything, and it's very effective as a plant food. Plus, it is already in pellet form and is quick and clean to gather. It's one of the many reasons we love our rabbits.

It's raining at the moment, so we'll let the bed get good and wet. Then, we'll put a tarp over it, in order to kill any new weeds coming up. After a few days, we'll be able to loosen the soil and plant the new crop.

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Natural fertilizer

Turnips

The turnips are starting to be ready, so the other day, we harvested some of them. We filled two crates, and only collected about a third of what's out there.

The wonderful thing about fresh turnips is that they are kind of sweet. As they sit, they turn a little more bitter, but for now they are wonderful. And of course, there's always turnip greens too.

Judging by the size of our harvests, it looks like we'll be eating a lot of turnips in the coming weeks!!

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Turnips

Cabin windows

The cabin already had four windows as part of the original shell, however we wanted to add a couple of extra, especially as our neighbor gave us a bunch of old windows (thanks, Michael!).

We installed one large window on the east wall of the living room. This adds a lot of extra light and will help with air flow. We also needed a small one in the bathroom that we're making.

We had to cut out the studs and wall that were in the way and then reframe the space to accommodate a window. We now have the windows installed, although we still lack the outside trim.

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Cabin windows

Garden Giants

Back in the Fall, we inoculated a bunch of wood chips (both in a garden path and in a large pit) with the mycelium of a mushroom called Garden Giant. This is an extremely hardy and aggressive mushroom. It does not need sterilized substrate, unlike many other fungi, nor does it need any other special treatment or coddling. It produces an extremely large mushroom, that does well outside, especially in gardens.

We plan to use the substrate from the large pit to inoculate all of the garden paths. Each season, we'll let at least one mushroom from each path open up completely, so that it will "reseed" the path with its spore.

At the moment, the pit is filled with "little" mushrooms poking up through the substrate. We have already eaten several, and they are delicious! You cook them a little more than you would other mushrooms, browning them all over. The flavor is very similar to fried potatoes, but with none of the carbs and an awful lot more protein! I have to say that I have really missed eating home-grown mushrooms, and am delighted to have them back in our diet.

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Garden Giants

Cabin wiring

Last week, we did a bunch of the cabin's electrical system. We installed all the plug, light, switch, and breaker boxes. We then ran wires to everything, going either through the studs or up in the rafters, depending on the location of the box.

We'll wire up the actual plugs and switches once the insulation and walls are finished.

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Cabin wiring

Winston Churchill

"Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong." - Winston Churchill

Starting seeds

It's cold out today, so we figured we'd work inside on a couple of seed related projects.

The main job was prepping seeds of various nitrogen fixing trees, namely Black Locust, Mimosa, Palo Verde, Bird of Paradise, and Esperanza. These are needed throughout an orchard to help feed the other trees and plants, and they also provide food for animals. The problem with most nitrogen fixers is that their seeds need to pass through the digestive tract of an animal in order to germinate. You can replicate this effect using acid (similar to the acid found in the stomach), but we prefer to nick the outer seed casing by sanding or grinding it. So, we got out our Dremmel tool (useful for so many jobs!), and used it to grind into the harder seeds. We then put them into a tub of hot water and will soak them overnight before planting them in cone-tainers.

The second task was planting some annuals in flats, which will later be transplanted into the garden once the risk of a freeze is past. These include things like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, cucamelons, tomatillos. This is a much easier and faster job, but it did require that we braved the outside for long enough to fill the flats with soil!

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Starting seeds

Nursery

We are going to need so many trees and shrubs for the acres that will become our orchards that it would end up costing an absolute fortune. So, we figured out a way to take the financial burden off our plans: have a nursery. We can buy plants in bulk, and then sell half of them to fund the ones we want for ourselves. Anything we don't sell can always be kept and sold next year as a bigger tree, or planted into our own orchard. Win, win.

We bought a kit for a tunnel greenhouse, which is 50' x 14'. Once it was assembled, we laid a weed barrier down on the ground and then started to fill the space with plants. We bought everything as either a plug or bare-root, and then had to transplant it all into pots and bags. Next step will be to set up an automatic watering system, but for the time being, Abe is kind of enjoying walking up and down the paths with a hose, watering his babies by hand.

All of our selections so far are adapted to our area, and produce some kind of food, whether for us or our animals. Here's the current list:

 

• 100 x Chinese Chestnuts
• 240 x Pineapple Guava
• 50 x Loquat
• 50 x Stone Pines
• 10 x White Mulberries (the other 90 were planted directly into the ground)
• 80 x Apples (Anna, Mollies, Granny Smith, Ein Shemer)
• 80 x Plums (Methley, Santa Rosa, Damson, Scarlett Beauty)
• 60 x Peaches (Lafeliciana, Loring, Redskin, Suwanee)
• 144 x Fig (Texas Everbearing, Celeste)
• 144 x Blackberry (Arapaho, Natchez)
• 144 x Grape (Alachua, Dixie)
• 144 x Blueberry (Palmetto, Farthing)

There's a few other odds and ends in there too (like roses and gojis), which brings us up to a grand total of 1300 plants that we have bagged and potted in the past two weeks.

We have plans for a whole bunch of other stuff, but they're going to have to wait for a month, as we are running out of space in the greenhouse! Once it warms up a little, we'll be able to move a bunch of these outside, and then we can start round two!

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Nursery

The Cabin

On our place, in between the house and the workshop, is a cabin.

It's 32' x 14', with a small porch to the north. It's a framed building, with painted siding on the outside and unfinished on the inside. One of our tasks is to turn this shell into a guesthouse, with a bedroom, living room, and bathroom.

This week, we framed up the bathroom, which is 8' x 6'. We haven't put the door in yet, although it's ready to hang (in its frame) once we have the bathroom interior done.

Because it's planting season, we won't have much time to work on the cabin over the next couple of months, but we hope to spend a day or two on it each week.

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The Cabin