Greenhouse is in!

Greenhouse came in the other day.  It was a happy day at the Zydeco Ranch.  The nice Amish guy had to take all backroads to cross the valley so he wouldn’t have to get the oversize permits.  At least I think he may have been Amish.  He had the straw hat, garb, and the beard to fit the part.  His brother-in-law had similar outfit on, but drove the truck, and the BIL’s wife was in a polo shirt and worked at the co-op, so I wonder how much Amish they are.  I was hoping they would bring it on the back of a buggy, but whatever. 

They did a heck of a job on it.  They matched my roof metal trim to the building and even stained the wood to match the cabin’s wood.  They came, dropped it off, moved it about 10 feet to get it into the proper position, and even wrote up a work order and informed me that they didn’t charge sales tax, but they paid sales tax on all of the material.  Very ethical. 

It’s hot in it.  HOT.  Without the window open or the screen open on the door, it got painfully hot in there during the day.  I was extremely impressed.  I am hoping it takes minimal heat in the winter to keep it above freezing so we can grow veggies in it when it’s -30º outside. 

Beautiful wife thinks I should reconsider putting the chicken coop in there.  I was thinking of using the north face to enclose an area for the chickens.  My idea behind it was I could properly store the food in the greenhouse, I could heat the house for the chickens and plants using one heat source, and it would use the area under a proposed shelf, so no dead space in there.  Further, if it got too bad outside, I could let them roam free in the greenhouse for a day without freezing them.  She doesn’t want me to cut a hole in the side of the greenhouse.  She doesn’t like wasting space for chickens in there.  She’s worried that the chickens would get loose in there and eat our plants and roost at the top of the greenhouse.  But mainly worried that I would destroy the greenhouse by putting in a halfass chicken coop mess in there.

She wants to move the chickens to the barn.  Replace the tack room area with some nesting boxes, and hang some feeders.  I don’t know.  My issues about that are I have the chickens for their eggs.  If I let them run like that, they may find a better spot for the eggs.  Now I have to have an egghunt every day for my breakfast.  Further, my dogs can jump the fence into the goat pen.  That means now I have to count the chickens each day to make sure they are still around.  Even if we insulate the barn better, it will still be ice cold in there.  (The goats are happy all the way down to -10º before they get cold.)  It just seemed less work to put the chickens in the greenhouse. 

I think we may come to a compromise.  I might move the existing coop that is built against the house and move it to the chicken run near the greenhouse.  Got some extra logs that I can use for the back wall.

Our house, from where the greenhouse is.

The garden I have so far.  In the foreground is the old dish for TV.  They put in a new one and left the old on the ground.  Might use it to make the crazy neighbor think we have hidden cameras along the driveway.

Greenhouse, as seen from the porch.  We moved it after this pic so it would be lined up with the fence.

Inside.  It's 12x16 in the inside, 192 sqft, 8 shy of having to buy a $500 building permit.

Floor bracing, so it will stay square.  Good construction.

Wheat field coming in

Since the Beautiful Wife asked if we could grow wheat, I have been working on getting a plot of land near the house, in the "new" garden area, to accommodate a small field of winter wheat.  The soil here is mostly a sandy loam, with chico and greasewood as the predominate plants (you can see them in almost all of my pictures.  They stretch for miles and miles)

This picture shows the start of the project.  As you can see, I started by throwing the muck from the barn onto the top of the hardpan soil.  This will keep the soil moist when I start to water it.  Usually, the water just evaporates off, or soaks the first inch and then no further.  And it adds nutrients to the soil when I plow it under.

Another view, showing the rest of the field.  After mucking the barn, I had only enough muck to cover 2/3 of the field.  Next week, I hope to have most of the covered field tilled and will be able to finish throwing muck on the field.  Keeping it wet is important, and I have been outside, watering the hay, at least once every hour until I can till it under.

Even after soaking the field several times, the water only penetrates about 4 inches.  This makes the first 4 inches a pleasure to dig in, but after that, it's almost like concrete.  To help it along, I drive my shovel in as far as I can to make an opening, then soak the field.  From the picture above, you can see the shovel marks on a patch of field.

After a hot afternoon, this is all I've done.  It takes a long time to work my way across.  I water the field every morning in the hopes that the water will penetrate and stay in that first foot of soil.  We finally put some fence posts in to surround the entire garden and discovered that the groundwater level right now is only 4 feet below the ground.  Good news if I decide to put a sand point well in the new greenhouse.  

Update on the Garden

Here are some pictures I have been hording of the garden.  It's been growing like crazy over the last few months, mainly because it gets watered twice a day.  However, over the last week or so, we have been getting rain every day.  That in itself doesn't say much, except out here 6 inches of rain a year is a lot.  Just one reason I miss the wet south.  

This is the first egg I found out there.  I'm so proud of my chickens and my ability to not kill them.  I have five hens that I got from the feed store before Easter and I am getting one good size egg every afternoon now.  I am hoping to get more chickens this fall, move them to a larger coop and give the eggs I don't need to my neighbor that has dairy goats.

Don't remember planting sunflowers in my garden.  But they are really taking off.  I am hoping to plant many more next spring and build a press to extract the oil.  This would come in handy post-SHTF for fried chicken.  I don't know what is growing behind the sunflower, but the neighbor mentioned that some of it is oats.  My problem is that I didn't compost the droppings and debris off the bottom of the goat barn before I planted my garden.  I just tilled and tilled and watered it until I got a nice layer of mush.  The soil here is very alkaline and sand, so nothing grows out here except greasewood and a few desert grasses.  Tilling in the hay and poop helped the soil, but allowed for whatever grains the goats didn't digest to sprout.  Not that I am complaining, just an observation. Next year will have a better composting program on site to fix this problem. 

Inside the small chicken coop.  It's about 4 feet deep and well used.  You can see the egg in the background. I had to get a garden rake to reach in to get the darn egg.  I have nesting boxes, but the girls like to watch me suffer.  I'm hoping to have a much bigger coop for them real soon and I might take out this coop.  Beautiful Wife hates that the coop is "attached" to the house, but c'est la vie, she gets used to it.  Keeps me outside so she can have some "her time" away from me.

Eggs and the Garden

I got 6 chicks the month before Easter and have managed to lose only one (my own fault, had a gap between the house and the coop and she fell out and wandered on.  She may still be out there rogue in the chico bushes).  So several months later, I had a come-to-Jesus meeting with them over being moochers.  I was severely tempted to hang up a sign counting down the days until I started eating them, one by one.  I figured that I was going to eat some kind of protein from that coop, one way or another.  Lo and behold, last Thursday, someone laid an egg.  A small brown egg, not in a nesting box, but in the coop nonetheless. 

The chickens pulled a Spartacus on me and refused to announce which one of them is laying the eggs.  So they all get to live... for now.  I have been getting an egg every 24 hours or so.  The next egg was dropped in the run.  Someone wasn’t feeling like they should go in the coop to lay one, so there it was.  The third was laid on top of the metal garbage can that holds their food.  They also seem to like to sleep on top of it at night.  With all of them there, someone else must have stepped on it and crushed it overnight, leaving a yolky mess on the lid.  I put an end to that and moved the can out of the run.  Now they sleep on the ground where the can was.  I don’t understand why.  The coop is elevated, roomy, ventilated, and lined with fresh shavings once a week.  They rather outside where the 60+ mph gusts blow through.  At least they are safe from predators, as my Great Pyrenees Sam does a good job keeping the coyotes away. 

The garden is coming along, kind of.  Sam discovered that he can hide in the tall grasses and make a bed.  He’s gone as far as dug out a bedding area that water collects in for drinking and laying in.  The one strawberry plant in all the tall grass is doing really, really well, with several strawberries on it.  The carrots are getting bigger and hopefully we can harvest a few this year.  The one corn plant that grew is over 5 feet and starting to grow an ear or two.  The big story, though, is all the weeds in the garden.  I created this growing space by using the droppings of the goats and straw from the barn and tilling it into the ground.  This led to all of this grasses, sunflowers, and hybrid corn stalks growing all over the garden.  Like weeds.  I didn’t know what the grasses were until the neighbor came over and noted that I had oats in the garden. 

So evidently I can grow stuff on the homestead.  But instead of just cutting it down and composting it, I noticed that the chickens love it.  I got a sickle to cut some down every now and then to feed it to my girls.  I hope I can get the hang of it so I can cut the winter rye I plan to plant next month. 

Sadly, the tomato plant is about 5 feet tall in the living room by the window, but has yet to produce.  I cannot threaten to eat the plant, so I patiently wait for it to start producing. 

Weekend Gardening

So today I got the Beautiful Wife to help me week the garden a bit.  But first, some background on the garden.  The ground here is mostly sand and sandy loam with a high pH and sand.  Did I mention sand?  I picked an area just outside the south facing windows between the house and the propane tank.  I put in 2 cords of firewood to the west as a sort of wind block to keep the insane winds here in some sort of check  I then poured droppings from the goat barn and hay into the area, keeping it wet and tilling it into the ground for weeks.  The result is a smelly, wet, fertile mess.  Now I made rows and planted several crops at the top of the rows.  Beautiful wife helped by putting seeds in the ditches.  She's got a point on that, sadly.  Her seeds grew like weeds.  And now in June we had what could charitably be described as a grassy area. Which is a Christmas miracle, considering there are no grasses on the property, just sand and chico brush.

So here is the garden around the potatoes after we weeded it.  We are really proud of the potatoes and will have a raised bed just for them next year.

The grasses and weeds to the bottom of the picture is what the entire garden looked like.  The top row is garlic and onions (we think) and the center is potatoes.  We may have pulled plants that were veggies, but looked like weeds.  We will have to work on this in the future.  

Corn.  I was sad to see only a couple of stalks growing until Beautiful Wife pointed out that the garden was littered with them.  I think some of the goat feed was mixed in their hay and got composted into the garden. Or elves snuck into the garden and planted it.  Either way, it was too much corn all over the place, so we had to thin it out.  But not to worry, we took all the grasses and plants and put them under the east facing window in the hope that it will take to the ground and spread grass underneath the window.

Then we had the strawberries.  I noticed that the one plant that did well in the season was strawberries.  I think it has something to do with the sandy soil here.  Either way, I was pleased to see how well it did.  I decided to start making raised beds to help with the garden for next year.  I put in a raised bed, based off of Patrice Lewis' plans from her blog (Rural Revolution).  I think it turned out well.  The milk jugs are keeping the wind out of corn stalks and sunflowers and the wood fencing is blocking a little of the wind from the plants.

I am hoping to add about a dozen more of these raised beds, along with a 5 foot high fence, chicken coop, greenhouse and apiary to this in the next year to start producing some serious food.