Winter Garden Projects

We recently checked out Joel Salatin's book You Can Farm from the library.  Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms has become a bit of an icon in our house lately. We devoured his book. He gives much needed inspiration and practical advice to people with a dream to make a living from a small sustainable farm. A few basic bits of advice stuck with us. The first being, start now! Wherever you live, whatever level of experience you have, if you don't start with what you have, you'll never get anywhere. The second--good enough is perfect! No need to make everything look pretty as long as it's functional. So with those nuggets as antidotes to our lingering inertia and perfectionism, we (meaning mostly my husband Dan) have done a few projects to improve our little city lot garden in the past month. We've had mild temperatures, so the ground is workable still. The first project was to expand our backyard vegetable growing space into the front yard.

Not gorgeous or perfect, but certainly good enough and functional! (And inexpensive and time-efficient--Dan was able to complete these boxes in a couple of hours with wood he had on hand). In the past we have imported soil from large landscape suppliers because our soil is so poor (nearly solid clay!). But this time we're going to experiment with using what we have and amending with plenty of organic matter (thus the leaf mulch on top) and some nutrients that tend to be lacking in our area. Steve Solomon's book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades has been our most visited source for learning about soil and growing conditions peculiar to our part of the country. I'll try to update with more details as this project progresses.

 

We also added a gravel path from the front walk to the driveway so we won't have to slog through mud during these long winter months. 

The second project was just completed today. It's an addition to our compost bin so that we have a space for one batch of compost to decompose fully while we add new raw materials to the first space. 

 

Again, maybe not beautiful to the untrained eye (the chickens think it looks DELICIOUS--worms worms worms!), but sturdy enough and functional.  Dan spent a lot of time and a fair amount of money building our first compost bin out of cedar. But we're realizing this really isn't necessary. For the addition, he got pallets for free from a local feed store, and spent about an hour setting it up and moving it into place. This is quite a revelation for us! 

 The bin on the left was the first bin that we've used for about 4 years. We never made enough compost to really use a second bin, but with the chickens we're producing a delightfully large amount!

 Who says rotting plant matter isn't beautiful and appealing?

 Yum!

Bottom's up!