Farming and Orchard – Page 2

Building a greenhouse from old windows

I have been collecting windows for some time with the intention of building a greenhouse out of them. I have all the old wood windows from my office, all the windows from our house and the stray window that was given to me by this person or that person. They have all been sitting in our lean-to being broken upon occasion by activity around them. I really needed to get this greenhouse going.

Last year I was given metal roofing and that was the final piece in my greenhouse puzzle. I had always intended to build the greenhouse in a lean-to style. One wall full windows while the opposite wall was solid. Now I had all the supplies I needed (- the wood for framing it all in).

We had a lot of debate about location. I needed it to be close to a water source which led to problems as all the water sources are close to large buildings which would block the sun. I also needed to access the greenhouse fairly easily.

So, the greenhouse is in the yard. 8 feet wide, 24 feet long and 8 feet tall. The greenhouse comes in 4 feet under the county requirement for a permit. Wohoo!

Our wonderful family supplied me with gift cards to Home Depot. I calculated how much wood I needed and off we went to purchase it. Thankfully husband was with me as I had left out the need for cement to keep the entire thing from blowing over.

I could only work on the greenhouse nights and weekends so a lot of digging and planning was done in the dark.

Husband dug all the holes for the posts. Then I realized we miscalculated them and all of them had to be re-dug. We did them one hole at a time, erecting the walls in between to make sure the greenhouse was square and the posts were in the proper place. I am terrible at measuring things so it was important to do one wall at a time for this.

The back walls are simple frames. Nothing fancy. Then I made boxes out of 4 2×4’s for the sides and front walls. I laid them on the ground and began placing the windows and doors in them and framing around them. Some of the windows needed screwed in before the walls could be erected and put in place. Others could easily be stapled in after putting the walls in place. Husband had to help me a lot. Building a heavy window greenhouse while halfway through pregnancy is quite a strain.

We kept the stairs from the front of our house. I always intended to use them as greenhouse shelving. I think they are perfect!

Roofing and siding is going to take quite awhile. It’s been windy here lately and moving metal sheeting in the wind is just a really bad/dangerous idea.

The kids bopped in and out to help here and there through the process. They enjoyed digging for about 5 mins. They like using the tape measure. Daughter likes acting as building foreman and informing me how disappointed she is in the size. Son loved using the staple gun.

I’ll be sure to post again when the entire thing is completed.

Sainfoin Year 4

Every year we eagerly await our sainfoin bloom. Acres of pink flowers blowing in the breeze. The sound of bees buzzing and watching butterflies flit from flower to flower fills me with joy. The sainfoin, it’s a success.

This year the pigs set out every morning to much their way through the field of growing sainfoin plants. I find how the pigs graze on the sainfoin quite interesting. They’ll take a bite of the top of a plant and then move on to bite a different one, leaving tracks through the fields as they explore all the plants with their mouths. It is also a very sustainable way of grazing. As they never eat an entire plant there are always flowers left to bloom and go to seed.

The field in it’s beginning growth this spring being grazed by our boar.

I don’t believe the sainfoin is as tall this year as it was last. It was a weird spring though, with snows into June and warmer weather in between. It killed many a plant and tree with the instability of the weather. Still, the field was tall enough that I lost the pigs in it entirely several times and freaked out thinking they’d wandered away or been taken.

We wandered through the fields many an evening trying to determine if the field was thickening and spreading or not. It has been determined that it is indeed spreading by seed beyond the original planting area. We can tell because we planted right up to the fence line and there are many plants on the other sides of the fences now.

We also have new critter activity in the area. We’ve had a badger going crazy digging holes everywhere, even in the sainfoin field. I’m interested to see what impact that has on the sainfoin around it next year.

Also, if you are wondering if it’s nutritious, enjoy this picture of Tu-Tu who clearly isn’t missing anything in her diet.

PawPaws round 3, 4? Too many attempts

The weather here has been crazy! I thought for sure that storm would hit us but it missed us, thank goodness. Still lost power for about 30 minutes.

I have been determined to grow pawpaws. So determined that I think this might be my 4th attempt in a new location. I’ve had some success in the kraters but they get eaten back every year and eventually die. Near the pond was nice but they were squished and eaten by farm animals.

So, onward to location 4. The newly transformed orchard garden. The barn shades a portion of the area for quite a bit of the day. That is where i planted these pawpaws.

I had some troubles with this order. The delivery was a rough on a couple of the trees. Branch breaking rough. I planted them anyway but thought they would die. At the very least they look pathetic. Enjoy my children holding the damaged trees for documentation.

I received my trees from One Green World. I generally love all the things I order from them. In fact most of the living orchard trees are from them. I ordered the pawpaw tree bundle which was a sale of 4 different trees. I should have written down what the tags say because at the computer right now I can’t remember what they are to save my life. I know they didn’t have 2 of the varieties in the bundle and I told them to just send me whatever they had.

I have really long grass in this area as I haven’t planted anything else here because of the shade. The grass has been fantastic actually. It insulates the pawpaws from the mornings scorching sun and has kept them all looking well. There is some insect damage, more on some than others, but they’re looking good so far.

Vegetation in general is very tall this year. Can you see my daughters head walking back to the house?

Other planting methods

I come up with lots of somewhat entertaining ideas for planting. The newspaper weed barrier idea being one of them.

So how to plant the squash and other seeds? Well I decided to make some hills out of compost and plant into them. I intend to mulch around them as soon as the plants sprout.

Hopefully this works!

Newspaper weed blocking part 2

Newspaper as weed blocker- it sucks

Part 1 here

My second method of paper laying went a wee bit easier than the first. I planted the tomatoes and onions first and then laid the paper around them. This eliminated the obnoxiousness of trying to dig a hole through paper.

The same frustrating problem existed, the breeze. Trying to wet the paper before it flies away. So frustrating! I managed to squish a couple tomatoes in the process.

I also managed to not get a single picture. I rock! I mulched over the top with hay from the barn. I thought it would be more nutrient rich for the tomatoes.

Let you know how this works out for me!

Jumping into home brewing by growing it all

After watching a rather inspiring Jamie and Jimmy’s Food Fight we decided we just had to brew our own beer. Jimmy made it look easy peasy and we had a lot of things growing we could flavor our beer with. Fresh honeycomb from the bees. Lemonbalm. etc etc.

Obviously I decided we should grow 100% of what we needed to brew. I started researching barley. I decided on trying Calypso barley for winter planting. Now, we have no idea if it will grow. It’s winter tolerant in Michigan, we have no idea about here. We bought seed from Schmidt Farms. They send us a bushel of untreated Calypso seed with the promise of Odyssey barley to try in the spring.

I never do anything “normal” and growing barley is no different. I planted a nice amount of it in the fenced off garden. I even watered that. I suppose that is my back up barley plan. That barley is likely to grow and succeed. The other plantings, who knows. Fascinated to find out! Some of it is going to be planted in the tree line. I’m interested to see how it does there. Some has already been planted in the un-planted kraters. Then we will plant a few of the bare spots on the land to see if it grows there. May go throw some in the dam area to see how it does there. Based on what grows where we’ll do our spring plantings maybe a tiny bit more structured.

So how am I planting it? Well that varies as well. In the garden I did till. *gasp* I know. Unfortunately the garden keeps getting broken into by chickens and ducks and they’d obliterated the mulch. We had A LOT of weeds growing in the garden and I’d done nothing about them. I could have mulched again but that wouldn’t help us horribly much when I wanted to plant immediately. So we borrowed a tiller and tilled it up. Then I spread the seeds around by hand and raked them in. Then watered. I’ve already chased the stupid ducks out once. I’m trying to keep the annoying creatures locked up. I have no idea how they are escaping the pen. It’s just a few of them that have figured it out, the smaller ones. Probably squeezing under the gate. Anyway, so if the darn birds don’t eat all the seed that one is a sure win for growing.

The kraters were planted by hand. I simply used my new weeding hoe to scratch a trench. Then the kids sprinkled seeds in and I covered it over and stomped it in.

I have no idea if this will work but hey, we’re experimenting here people!

The rest hasn’t been planted yet. We really need to get on it. Unfortunately the tractor battery was dead, dead, dead. We replaced it and now I just need a minute to go get the stuff ready for planting. We are going to plant the rest of the barley like we planted the sainfoin. Use the grader/scraper to rip up the top of the ground, sprinkle the seeds and then grade over it again.

Taking a little planting break with the pup.

Getting her out of the bucket is the hard part.

Coming soon is our hops plant which I believe I will keep inside until spring where it will hopefully be planted on our new pergola by the swim pond.

Wheat isn’t something we don’t have to plant. We get enough seed blowing over from the fields around us that we can just harvest wheat without effort. Now if the wheat grows like that, fingers crossed for this barley!