Spring is here…

Written by karen on April 21st, 2013

And we’re spending a lot of time outdoors. This weekend, I finally finished prep’ing the last of our six new beds. (The rock walkways between each bed were made from rock filtered from the dirt in the beds. We have lots of rock in our soil here.)

Our compost is finally going really well. I sifted out three big wheelbarrows full today. I think that some factors in the success have been: putting it in a big pile instead of the spinning composter, which never really worked (large mass seems to be a key), more water, and the addition of a microbial solution.

Our starts are thriving, and I’m getting anxious to get them out of the house and into the garden. Two more weeks and then everyone out! We’ve been eating asparagus, and of course, lots of lettuce, and we have our first tiny strawberries.

My winter rye has formed seed heads. (This was a green manure cover crop planted to enrich the soil and retain moisture.) It grew well, so we’ll save the seed and plant more in the fall.

Lastly, our hedgerow has been started. So far we’ve put in holly hocks, penstomen, gaillardia, salvia, Jerusalem artichockes, and sunflowers. They’re all very tiny right now, but stay tuned.

I can’t wait for the next step of getting seeds and plants into the ground!

 

Book nook

Written by karen on March 25th, 2013

For a long time, I’ve had a plan to build a few built-in bench seats to be book nooks for reading. The first one is now (mostly) done.

As with most wood working projects, we started by carefully selecting the wood and preparing it. We glued these boards together the same way we did the new doors, with routed channels and small pieces of plywood to add strength. Here is the wood after it was glued and sanded, but before any finishing.

And here’s the (near) final product.

The windows here face the mountains in the west and offer a great view. There is storage under the seats. (Note the charging station plugs with USB and regular outlets.)

I think we’re going to cover the front of this with the same material we use for the kitchen bar…hopefully distressed corrugated metal if we can find some we like.

Oh, and we finally found that pesky electrical short. Fortunately, it was behind the part of the wall that is still just OSB, not behind the brick. Good news!

 

Seed libraries on the natl. news

Written by karen on March 23rd, 2013

What a great story! This was shared with us by one of our fellow seed librarians. Nice to see something positive on the news.

 

A day we’ve been waiting for!

Written by karen on March 13th, 2013

The daytime temperatures here have been warming up, and we’ve been eagerly anticipating this:

The first shoot of asparagus!

We put in a lot more plants last fall, and so we’re hoping soon to have more asparagus that we know what to do with.

The lettuce and broccoli continue to thrive, and my conference table is full of tomato starts. This is a great time of year here.

 

A dusting of snow

Written by karen on February 21st, 2013

We had a bit of snow last night. Most of it burned off by noon, though it’s still cold. It’s been a cold winter here, relatively speaking (lots of nights in the teens).

These are the garden beds, hoops blanketed with snow.

Gardenwise, my lettuce has been doing great, and broccoli is ready to eat. And all my starts (still inside) are progressing nicely.

We just got back from an organic farming conference in New Mexico. We learned a lot about cover crop, no till farming, recommended varieties for our area, year-round growing, and soil health.

We also recently finished our annual soup making sprint (fundraiser for our local fire and rescue). This year we made cauliflower cheese, garlic potato, potato leek, and cheddar beer. Yum!

 

Take a walk

Written by brad on January 27th, 2013

Karen and I drove up into Horseshoe canyon and took a hike today — off roading I call it. We dress for climbing through weeds, the occasional cactus etc. on days like these. It’s funny how nice and smooth things look from a distance and how rocky and scratchy they can be up close.

There’s a nice panorama here.

I decided to try out a new google app called Tracks. It tracked our walk, including time, elevation change, distance and the path we took. In the end we got this cool map of our walk.

 

There is a way to see the walk in Google Earth — it was amazing, but I can’t see anyway to share it.

 

 

Seeds

Written by karen on January 27th, 2013

We had our first meeting our local seed library on Saturday, and it was a great success! There were 10 people there, and we met for about two hours, exchanging growing tips and, of course, seeds. From just the first meeting, we now have 15 types of seeds available. Everyone was very enthusiastic, and I am looking forward to future meetings and educational gatherings. (I’ve already learned a lot.)

In my own garden, we now have little broccolis…and unfortunately, some green worms as well, but I’m working on that. So far they’ve only eaten some holes in the leaves and have left the actual broccoli flowerettes alone.

I also have about 80 little starts planted. (They are taking over my office.) And on Friday, the first tomatoes sprouted. They are Georgia streaks from seeds I saved.

Spring can’t be far away!

 

Garden plans for 2013

Written by karen on January 11th, 2013

It’s weird to think about gardening when it’s supposed to get into the low teens tonight, but it’s already time to be planting starts inside.

Here is my garden plan for this year. Lots of new beds to fill!

I’m trying lots of intercropping this year (planting complimentary crops together in a bed). I’m also paying attention to crop rotation and trying to plant cover crops (including legumes) in the winter or in alternating years.

I’ve ordered my new seeds, but am ordering fewer this year due to seed saving last year. (By the way, our local seed library is starting! Here is the web site.)

And it is so nice to still be eating fresh arugula and lettuce in January!

My broccoli is seeming very healthy, but no actual broccoli heads yet. Soon, I think.

 

And then there were three

Written by karen on January 10th, 2013

Here’s a picture that shows the clerestory windows….

And this shows the whole height of the room (main entry in bottom right corner)…

Two more to go!

 

Upward

Written by karen on January 6th, 2013

#2 accomplishment for this week: we got the first viga up!

It’s always hard to imagine exactly how this stuff will look when it’s finally done.

You might remember that these large timbers have been sitting about five feet or so below the ceiling for the past 5 months. Now with the ceiling getting finished, it’s time to put them up. (And all of this needed to happen before adobe brick could go much higher, since the brick will sit under one end of the viga.)

We’ve both been worrying about this step quite a lot, me especially. The vigas are quite heavy — too heavy even for both of us to lift one end. Brad devised a way to jack these up into place, but I was wary. As it turns out, the whole thing was really quite easy. There were no scarey, death-threatening parts. (I mostly try not to write here about the scarier stuff we try, but there is some. :)

What we did is jack each side up a bit (e.g. 10 inches or so) and then put a header and trimmers (side studs) under it to secure it. Then we repeated on the other side, etc. etc. until the vigas were all the way up.

Of course, the vigas are quite high so we had to put the jack on the scaffolding at one end and on one of those big timbers at the other. Then we used a series of gradually taller 4x4s to reach the beam.

Quite clever. Good thinking, Brad.