Monday, April 20, 2015

How to build a raised bed and grow food in your backyard

How to build the raised garden bed for your home Part 1


We were fortunate to have access to woods and timber for building our raised beds but if you don’t have that kind of access here is an idea for building your own. 
http://www.gazatimber.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Raised-Beds-Made-Easy.jpg


The above concept is a basic concept that can be built in a day. Note the type of wood used; cedar or redwood will be the best wood for this project. You should not use treated wood, you don’t want the chemicals from the treated wood getting into your tasty vegetables! Something this plan does not show but definitely worth considering, take and place 3 pieces of ½ inch pvc piping on the side of each wall (on the inside), attaching them with 1” galvanized tube straps.  You can place each piece of pvc at a corner and one in the middle on each side.  Having these tubes in your beds will allow you to add a hoop over the bed for extended growing, creating a mini hoop house. The first step before building is to select the area in your yard where you are going to place the raised beds. Select an area that will get optimum sunlight and access to water.  The second important step is preparing the ground where the bed(s) are to be placed. You want the ground underneath to be level and it is advantageous to clear the area of grass or other growing matter.  Contrary to what the above diagram shows; dig 4 holes where you are going to place the beds and instead of having the corner post stick up by 7 ½ inches place the bed with those corner post going into the holes you dug. This will help to secure the bed.  The next step is to gather the soil, compost and other soil building nutrients for your garden; by doing this you will be able to fill your raised bed as soon as it is completed.
Soil
Good soil comes from a variety of ingredients but first and foremost is compost.  Did you know you probably throw away every day a lot of compostable material? Contrary to what most people think; a compost pile does not smell when handled correctly. Even more importantly there are barrels available that turn on wheels and are somewhat sealed up; these are efficient for quickly turning your household waste into great compost!
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Good-Ideas-EZ-Wizard-52-gal-7-0-cu-ft-Hybrid-Composter-with-Rain-Barrel-EZWHGRN/202071533?cm_mmc=Shopping%7cBase&gclid=COz5sMPo_8QCFQwDaQodQSwAUg&gclsrc=aw.ds



The significance of building great nutrients in your soil cannot be stressed enough! The beauty of a raised bed is that those nutrients you are building will not wash away in a heavy rain or in the watering process.
Starting the soil process in the beginning with an empty bed, can be part of the process to having good soil in future growing seasons.  The first layer on the bottom of the bed can be some larger or more difficult items to break down under normal composting conditions. This can be wood from branches off of a tree, or dried leafy material. You want to create layers throughout your soil something like this:
·         Start with cardboard by placing it on top of the wire mesh screen at the bottom of the bed
·         Next lay down some newspaper
·         Next some larger carbon matter such as limbs from branches or woody fibrous material
·         Now if you have access place hay or straw
·         Now add cured, dried manure (if you have access to manure from a local farm make sure it has sat for a year and is dry. Fresh manure is not good to use and aside from being too strong it can present other unsafe problems.  If you cannot be sure, you can create an area in your yard to store the manure, covered tightly and allow it to sit for a year.
·         More hay or straw
·         Soil mixed with compost
·         Finally once the garden is planted add mulch, I like to use hay for my mulch but if you don’t have access use straw.
From this point forward you can now add yearly compost, manure and more mulch. At the end of each growing season you might want to consider a winter cover crop or setup your hoop house and continue your growing during the early cold months. Once it becomes too cold cover the bed completely with mulch.  The importance of adding nutrients to your garden cannot be stressed enough, if you add natural nutrients and stay away from chemicals you will find yourself learning about good soil building and have a further understanding of producing safe food for your family.  Learning about cover crops is another key to adding great nutrients to your raised beds; cover crops can reduce unwanted weeds, manage some pest and provide pollen for those pollinators!  Cover crops give back much needed nitrogen to the soil and assist in the managing of the beds.  Some examples are found in the legumes, like rye, winter wheat, alfalfa and even buckwheat!  
Once you have built your beds and filled them with nutritious soil and other great matter it is time to plant! Think about growing vegetables that your family enjoys and start with what you can manage for eating once they are harvested.  The latter is important as you will need a plan for all of those vegetables as they come to harvest! 
We rent out a house near us and this year we are have asked our tenant if they would like a raised bed garden? They have agreed to the maintenance of having a raised bed garden so we are going to build one or two for them and set them up. I will document our project for my blog and thus you might find yourself wanting to do the same! The upside for them will be fresh veggies for the house and at the same time they will be learning a very important lesson in how to have your own food plot in a small space! 

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Preparing the garden beds

After two years of intensive composting,  mulching and spreading horse and chicken manure the soil is taking on a rich color. When we first put a standard row garden in this part of the property the soil was nothing but Brown sand. Today we have 6 raised beds built out of logs and filled with soil containing brush, and nutrients from the last two years. The importance of this project has been to reduce water usage, heavy mulch and brush hold the water thus using about 50 percent less water, and soil retention,  allowing those nutrients to break down and feed the garden. 
This year we are going to take three of the beds out of production and plant legumes; they will add nitrogen to the soil and will be harvested to feed the chickens.  We will now rotate the beds every year in this manner.
Choregraphing the garden to build better soil requires a little planning but when we do the planning, the results can be incredibly satisfying at the end of the growing season. 

Friday, April 3, 2015

Our first attempt at tapping and cooking down sap for syrup



This year I decided it was time to learn to tap our trees on the farm for syrup. The inspiration for doing this was twofold; the first was from a recent trip to Vermont while visiting family and driving by the many “sugar shacks” and wanting to do the same back home and the second reason was having a local farmer hand me a tap last year to test tapping a box elder tree.  Understanding the type of trees you can tap and how to tap a tree for syrup is an important start. Let’s start with identifying the soft maples:
Bigleaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum) Comparing sizes of a human hand and a bigleaf maple leaf. Photo by Joe Nicholson, Nature photographer, Bugwood.org.


Box Elder (Acer negundo) https://www.extension.iastate.edu/forestry/iowa_trees/trees/boxelder.html








Red Maple (Acer rubrum) http://www.equmed.com/?p=314













Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) http://www.untamedscience.com/biodiversity/silver-maple/

 http://www.untamedscience.com/biodiversity/silver-maple/
Striped Maple (Acer pensylvanicum) http://www.hubbardbrook.org/image_library/view.php?id=422












The two types of hard maples are the sugar maple (saccharum) and the black maple (nigrum).
Sugar maple compared to the red maple and silver maple. http://uptreeid.com/Species/maples.htm











Black maple http://fineartamerica.com/featured/black-maple-al-bourassa.htmlption

















Being a novice at the art of tapping a tree for its sap I needed to do some research on just exactly how does one go about tapping a tree for its sap?  Through several websites I found enough information on what I needed to do and when I needed to start tapping our trees. 

“Generally the sap starts to flow between mid-February and mid-March. The exact time of year depends upon where you live and weather conditions. Sap flows when daytime temperatures rise above freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit / 0 Celsius) and nighttime temperatures fall below freezing. The rising temperature creates pressure in the tree generating the sap flow. This is basically a transfer of the sap from the tree above the ground and the root system below the ground. The sap generally flows for 4 to 6 weeks, with the best sap produced early on in the sap-flowing season.” http://www.tapmytrees.com/taptree.html


The first tree we tapped was a box elder; the box elder didn’t produce a huge amount of sap but Sara and I both thought the flavor was absolutely tasty! It had butterscotch like flavor and when eaten with pancakes it was, well, to die for!  Unfortunately we did not get a lot of the sap and therefore we did not end up with a lot of syrup.
The next tree we tapped was a nearby silver maple.  Now this tree produced a lot of sap and it is this tree that I shot a number of short videos cooking down the sap.  Our final reduction of sap ended up giving us about 3 quarts of syrup.  Some of the characteristics of the silver maple were light in maple flavor but rich in amber color and despite lacking in the maple flavor it was quite good.  You can view the cooking process by clicking on the link below.

Amber Syrup from our silver maple


To see the video on our first attempt at syrup cooking click on the link below.

https://youtu.be/bxBUGj98nos

The hunt for syrup

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