Soil blocks experiment

In an attempt to streamline seed starts, we’re experimenting with creating our own soil blocks (they look like brownies in this photo).

While the literature touts this as a great way to eliminate those little plastic seedling pots from your life, I’ve not found them to be such a hassle. We salvage them from local nurseries and they store relatively compactly. Yes, they are made from oil, but so is the big plastic tub in which we’re mixing our soil blocks. At least this tub will last forever; the seedling pots are quite flimsy.

They real problem I’m trying to solve for is transplant shock. By using a series of soil blocks from mini -> small -> in the ground in conjunction with our growing environments of grow lights -> cold frames -> in the ground, I’m hoping to eliminate transplant shock completely.

With soil blocks, you “pot up” a smaller block into a larger block, and eventually into the ground itself, all without ever removing the seedling from it’s surrounding soil.

Shelling pea trellis

Hat tip to Modern Victory Garden for the idea behind our new shelling pea trellis.

Made of all salvage materials, we altered the design a bit to have it fit one of our more steep beds in the food forest. Since you harvest the shelling peas all at the same time, you do not need access to the interior of it for continual harvesting.

Given how many bags of frozen peas we go through in the winter, we may try to get two full growing cycles out of the trellis this season.

Benefits of cover crops

I’ve been reading a lot of Wendell Berry recently again. Of all the places I lived as a child, I lived in Kentucky the longest, and have a natural affinity for Berry and his family farm there.

A reoccurring theme in his books and essays is one of simply needing more farmers. We need more farmers so we can pay more attention to the ground, and not just during harvest. He (wisely) laments the lack of cover crops in the typical agribusiness farm and notes it’s direct contribution to the loss of topsoil.

I took that to heart last year and began using cover crops as a way of not only retaining our topsoil, but adding nitrogen and other material to the beds more quickly and effectively with this green manure. This photo is last year’s potato patch – this year’s shelling pea patch – with the cover crop in process of being cut down and turned into the soil.

Manure Machines

We added three bunnies into our food production chain this past winter.

No, we’re not eating them, but using them to process our kitchen food waste into manure pellets that can go directly onto our veggie beds and fruit trees. Rabbits are one of the few animals with manure that is not “hot”. Hot manure requires composting for a few months, else it will scorch your plants.

With a salvaged rabbit hutch from a friend, a cheap bale of Timothy hay, and free Craigslist bunnies, it is a low cost way to improve your garden soil. We sexed them to insure we would not walk out one morning to find 3 had turned into 30.

The kids love them, the German Shepherd herds them, and petting them for just a few minutes lowers your stress, too!

How to use coffee in your gardens

I have a local friend who owns a coffee company. Two outputs from the roasting process is chaff and *lots* of burlap bags, which he was more than happy to part with. I’m going to try several experiments with them.

For the chaff, we used it this winter in our compost and sheet mulching for the new blueberry beds. For the burlap bags, we’re using them to line the pathways, and then covering them with free wood chips from local arborists.

After the fact, I found other folks doing similair experiments:

• Mother Earth News
• Ann Lovejoy
• Upcycle Northwest

For a family that only drinks yerba mate, this is more coffee than we’ve had around for years!