The storm that spawned this red rainbow also spawned grape-sized hail near Busby Alberta. Watching the clouds roll over our house was fascinating yet somewhat alarming since they were some pretty nasty clouds! It’s tornado season here, so whenever the storm warnings pop onto my cell phone, I have a look at the radar if I’m near a pc with internet, and then take a look at the skies. Since I got my new camera, I try to keep it handy for neat weather events etc.
Here we have some more dog pictures – The dogs are inseparable!
Looking out the window at Darren
Lying down exhausted among boxes being unpacked, after an afternoon of wrestling and chasing each other. Notice Lexie is hugging Hera!
Here we have my plants on the back deck, some still in the beer cups they were transplanted to as seedlings. I really have to get those in the ground!
The first ground cherries produced this year. They tasted really good!
ground cherries
blue mini peppers
blue mini peppers. there are 3 plants in this large pot.
One of my new grape vines is producing grapes!
Ground cherries, 3 in a 3 foot container beginning to produce alot.
from back left to front right: Zucchini, Peppermint, Lemon Balm, Parsley, Ground Cherries in plastic Costco beer cups, a cucumber and several tomatoes mixed in the front.
the Zucchini plant. It’s an F1 endurance variety
The first fruit on the F1 Endurance Zucchini plant. We already picked it and it was great!
Borage! Cape Gooseberry on the left, and I can’t remember what other herbs are with it. I’ll have to look at their tags.
The marigolds are thriving, and the other flowers not so much. they keep wilting on me.
mmm lettuce
tomato pot #1
Tomato pot #2
Basil, misc other herbs and some mixed cuke seedlings
Here we have some final pictures from the old place as we were moving out. Good riddance to small spaces!
Small space I had for a front yard at old place. not much room or sun for plants.
Lexie’s half of the old yard. Notice how the grass got worn away despite our best efforts to get it reseeded. There is actually alot more grass there now than at the beginning of the season. The soil is pretty rock hard and compacted in that spot.
Well, our move to the new farm is finally complete! All of the plants I had growing outside our old place in town are really loving the new digs and flourishing. We are getting regular occurrences of rain to keep things watered and our rain barrel is always overfull. One of our many things on the new to-do list is to get a few more rain barrels and add gutters on the 3/4′s of the roof that don’t have any. right now, only the front porch has a gutter and the amount of rainfall captured on it is always overflowing the one rain barrel that is there. I’m going to put a 2nd one beside it with either a swiveling downspout & float device to switch to the other barrel when full, or connect the 2 barrels with piping further down to fill the 2nd one by way of gravity feed/siphoning. It depends on what’s going to be the best solution and most economical all around. Here is a link with some diagrams I welcome your comments on this idea to help me decide!
I’m definitely going to be installing gravity-fed drip irrigation everywhere on the farm I have plants in containers or in the ground. The system we are testing in our Mundare garden works quite well and the plants are generally happy with it.
We’ve had a new addition to the family by way of a 2nd dog. Her name is Hera and she’s a 1 year old shepherd husky cross. We felt that with the new bigger space for Lexie to play in that she might get lonely and wander off into other people’s farms if she didn’t have a friend to play with. The two are getting along really well together and they are exhausted from playing at the end of each day! I notice now after the other dog has been with us about a week, that Lexie doesn’t yelp at us when she’s outside in the dog pen and we go to the other side of the house as she now has someone to keep her company. Also she doesn’t jump up hardly at all now either. Both are good things! Here is a picture of Hera:
There are some nice flowers established in the front flower beds of the house and they look like this:
This weekend I am going to get my compost bin started. I have found a triple-bin plan I like and I am building it from reclaimed pallets that I salvaged from various places. 3-bin plans Here are some other links for compost bin plans:
A 2-bin system Page with some great plans listed
Pretty looking composter, single bin.
I also saw a really intriguing thing on the Geek Farm Life website recently relating to composting and using red wiggler worms: You can put the red wigglers under your rabbit cages and they will process the waster from the cages! What a phenomenal idea! It’s definitely something I’d like to try when we get some rabbits. Aside from that, I found some good plans to convert a rubbermaid tub into a red wiggler bin so will use that idea to get a bin started for over the winter.
While we are thinking along the lines of household waste, I have discovered the dump is a great place to find things you can recycle. So far I’ve found fencing for making trellises and metal poles for such, good pallets for bins, and miscellaneous bits of things for making cold frames for the garden. In terms of actual garbage produced by our household now, it is minimal for people just moved from the city. We are producing maybe a 3/4 full bag of garbage per week during the move while we used disposable plates and cutlery when the dishes were packed. I expect the amount of waste will go down to 1 bag every 2 weeks once we separate out the compostable items. This makes me really happy, and garbage duty not so much of a chore!
Well, that’s all for now folks. Stay tuned for developments later in the week! (especially the pictures of the red rainbow I captured with my camera during the thunderstorms over last weekend!)
Well, things have been silent on the blog for good reason! All this past month we have been in the throws of moving to…..A FARM!!! W00-HOO!! After many years of dreaming then planning for it, we got the chance of a lifetime to jumpstart our plans 5-10 years ahead of when we’d planned to be able to get a farm. We found one for rent that we should be able to buy in a mere couple of years time! So we are mostly moved onto it now, and this weekend is the big push to get the last stuff out of our old place and the once-over for cleaning before we turn the keys in.
The farm is a 5.7 acre farm setup for horses and small animals, with plenty of space for kids and dogs and greenhouses and gardening! It’s everything we had hoped it to be, in a size manageable for city-people just starting out. Later on we might also be able to buy the adjacent property which would have it at 12 acres total, but that’s a plan for the future.
I have everything planted in the Mundare and Camrose gardens that will get planted this year due to our unexpected time constraints, and am eager to get back to them and check on their progress as I haven’t been able to get to them since the first week of June pretty much! I have also planted various squash and peppers at the new farm, and have zucchini in a pot plus some herbs and lettuces in pots. The neat addition to the farm is flowers – there is a huge permanent bed for them running the length of the driveway and around the front porch up to the front door. I have started to weed them and plant seeds as the last tenants let them overgrow.
Now that we have the farm, the blog is going to change it’s nature a bit with the addition of audio/video podcasts to chronicle what all is going on at the farm. Naturally, the new podcast is going to be titled “TechCowboys!”
We’ll be setting up a regular release schedule and have recurring segments like many radio shows to keep things lively and intriguing all the time. Darren is keen to cover all of our alternative energy projects and gadgets, his Steampunk radio build and other Steampunk mods, and general pc geekery; and I’ll be covering the agricultural geekery things like the gardening, animal husbandry, and food preservation/cooking topics etc. We’re excited that we’ll finally be able to try out and document our journey into sustainable farming!
Like other shows we’ve been inspired by (Geek Farm Life – Farm phone Rocks!!! 206-202-GOAT) we’re going to have the ability for listeners to leave us feedback in various different ways: voice phone calls, mp3′s, blog comments etc. We believe that the community aspect of Smallholder/farm life is really important so we’ll be seeking your feedback all the time!
And now, some pics of the new farm!
Wow, has May been busy. Running 2 gardens both an hour away from my home (plus training for a marathon in august) makes for one incredibly busy schedule on top of the usual working and family life.
We’ll start with experiments for the front yard this year:
Mini-Greenhouses: I bought 2 of these from Home Depot, they are about 4 feet wide and deep enough to hold a seed tray lengthwise. I can fit 4 seed trays per shelf. I got the shorter 3 shelf version of the greenhouses as they were on sale! In one of them I put an electric heater with a thermostat on it so it keeps the air at a minimum temperature which is really nice since our weather and temperature can be quite erratic. (we got about 30cm of snow in mid april accompanied by a plunge of temperature, all after 3 nice relatively warmer, drier weeks. All of the tomatoes, peppers, ground cherries, and various herbs and flowers in them have now been moved out either into their places in the gardens or into the yard to get full sun and wind.
Lexan Coldframes: I have the prototype assembled for this, and within about 36 hours of initial assembly I discovered the unit decided to be “self-venting” ie, the lexan shattered. I’m pretty sure it was not due to impact damage from the neighbourhood soccer balls, but more think I had the angle of the top curve on the unit to be too much. I’ll be slicing off the broken parts and getting a smaller rectangular piece of lexan to cover the resulting gap.
I have enough material to make another one the same, but will have to change the design a little so nothing shatters. I think I’ll cut the next piece of lexan into 3 and use silicone caulking to fill the 2 cracks, thereby avoiding this first shattering issue I’ve seen. I may even try to find the technical specs on the lexan I bought in case there is a datasheet that has the acceptable bend angles for the stuff. It’s a lot of money to keep breaking those panels at $85 a pop, so I’ll take a few more precautions with the next one.
The final components of this coldframe design are the solar panel, fans, and thermostat which have yet to be wired in and all affixed to the side of the frame. In testing the frame without the electronics, it works pretty well but needs to be tipped up to provide venting space to avoid cooking the plants. The tomatoes living under the frame are currently pretty happy, though 1 of them hadn’t survived the transplant process and got discarded.
Here is a picture of the Coldframe:
I haven’t yet had time to install the thermostat, solar panel, fans & carrying handles, but the plants really like it in there since there was the break in the lexan. I may have it so the replacement piece has the fans embedded in it and hinged to be able to swing down for even further venting.
Raised benches: We have built a raised bench for the various plant containers this year, in order to protect them from the plant-eating lawnmowers brought by the landscapers. So far, it works beautifully and gets the plants that much more sun than if they were sitting at the base of the fence.
Box of compost getting ready for transport
Zucchini hardening off
Supervisory Garden dog!
Here are some pictures of the Mundare garden this year. The only things left to do there now are plant the beets and onions and finish the trellising. We installed a gravity-feed drip irrigation line we bought from Lee Valley Tools and are testing it out this week on my tomatoes and peppers. It looked very promising and had no leaks when we finished installing it. I figure it should take about 2.5 days to drain the barrel it’s attached to…
south east corner view after amending all the soil
west side after applying landscape fabric – am not happy with the brand i bought this year – it lets too much light through and there’s some weeds under it!
looking west
looking southeast before trellising went up
west end of garden
Showing this year’s row spacing, lots of room for wheelbarrow!
Potatoes coming up
Siphoning water to rain barrels, wasn’t working until darren got a mouthful of dead flies from the hose. eww yummy! protein! bleh!
West end of garden, tomatoes visible in middle row.
Cuke row planted and watered
Vine Tomatoes
Bush tomatoes just planted
row of squash
Squash and corn in this row, corn on the far end
Sunscald
Covered tomatoes – they got no windburn. sunscald on the other hand…
Covered Peppers, they like it warm in there
Cuke sprouting
Cuke grown at home
Lettuces just planted
Rain barrel aka garbage can for gravity feed irrigation system test
Potatoes coming up!
Gravity Feed…
Close-up of drip head feeding a tomato plant
Drip heads
Drip line
Drip head
Pumpkin!
Canteloupe grown in the house, hope it survives!
Peas ‘n Beans go here, need to be trellised.
And here is how the Camrose garden is looking:
during cleaning up from winter
during cleaning up from winter
during cleaning up from winter
Onions go here!
Tomatoes with soaker hose line marked
Peas
Cukes
Squash
Here are the missing final shots of the Camrose Garden for 2007!
I have just finished up my propagation & planting calendar for the upcoming growing season! The completed calendar can be viewed via my Google docs account at:
Check out the coloured dates and you’ll see descriptive pop-up comments as to what I’ll be doing with the plants on a given day. I’ve documented the days I’ll be starting seeds indoors, accounting for germination times, then the dates to begin hardening off the plants in cold frames or temporary greenhouse, and then planting out days, with a few succession planting days.
Today I get all my trays and such organised, as well as the new gadgets I’ve started collecting. I got a light meter to ensure my light levels are ok, and a soil/compost thermometer to ensure soil temperature is ok. I’m experimenting with capillary mats for watering this time and am going to make some over the next week.
Drip irrigation is very high on my list of things to fine-tune this year, starting with inside the house. with the square footage so much larger this year, I need to be really efficient in all aspects of the growing process.
Raised beds are still on the build list for Mundare, though i need to re-budget since I bought a new truck (instead of renting one) since my old blue 1986 240dl Volvo Station wagon died in the severe cold a couple weeks back. So the truck is really expensive on the monthly payments, but it sure is nice to drive, and it gives me the ability to haul a decent trailer and carry loads of compost and gardening tools around!
There are new re-usable gadgets available at Lee Valley Tools to make the creation of the raised beds in the Mundare plot a -much- easier prospect. Here is the link for them:
More to come as the plans progress. I’m now working on the planting layout maps for both garden plots.
Well after an incredibly busy fall which brought many unexpected things outside of gardening, I’m finally getting back to the blog. I’ve yet to tally up the final numbers for everything, but we did really well on the Tomatoes with over 200lbs! There was lots of squash – zucchini, pumpkins, and spaghetti squash – totaled, these came in at over 100 pounds. I spent many days with the pressure canner putting away the tomatoes for the winter into various sauces.
Next month, after my next major exam at school, I’ll have some time to sit down and review what cultivars we’ll be using next season and will get those published with a full summary of what we learned this year.
We’ll be running the Camrose plot again next year and adding a second larger plot in Mundare. The challenges will be new at the Mundare plot since there is only well water at the site and what can be captured in rain barrels. We are going to experiment with a few different technologies to solve this issue and give our plants as much water as they need without tapping the well.
Efficiency and automation technology will be the name of the game since both Camrose and Mundare are an hour outside of Edmonton in different directions with an hour between them too. So getting to each garden more than twice per week will be hard at times. We’ll be using the landscape fabric again for sure to eliminate weeds, and building proper coldframes and vented, solar, mini-hothouses for much of the crops. we have alot of ideas going down on paper we need to sit down and work into a concrete plan of action.
I’m sure we’ll have a good number of weekends of building the hardware offsite at home during the winter since I want to be ready weeks before the last frost to get everything installed and warming the soil so we can have a much earlier start. If I want to grow things that need 120 days to mature, we really need to get the soil warmed in April!
I’ll be starting all the plants I can in the house under lights again and understand better the timings of when to start them so they are the right age to plant out. Everything should be easier this season! and I’ve so learned my lesson about hardening off the plants properly!
Currently I have several pepper plants growing in the house under the lights just to see how they do in a full cycle. One has a 3 inch long pepper on it and another plant is just starting to put out a pepper!
Well that’s it for now. A full report with all the missing pictures from the season end to come soon!
The weather has warmed up…relatively speaking for the past week. With luck we’ll get a couple more weeks of it before the frost comes. The tomatoes are starting to turn to their mature colours now. In the millwoods garden the tiny tims are coming along as well as the Ultra Sonic tomatoes. The rest appear to be at or very near the mature green stage. I was able to harvest a few from the Millwoods garden from the tiny tims, ultra Sonic and Tiffany plants. From the Camrose garden today we harvested a tomato from the Park’s Whopper, some from the Sub Arctic Maxi and a couple from the Early Time plant. I also pulled some of the final beets and got a few cucumbers. The garden looks drier than I thought and it seems the soaker hoses got accidentally turned off sometime during the week. There was only 2 zucchini’s ready today, but we’ve collected a total of 7 in the past week from both gardens. 5 from the camrose garden…The pupmkins looks great hanging from the trellises and we have some nice sized ones turning orange. I hope they can ripen before the end of season. The parsnips look great in both gardens too with fabulous leafy growth. I’m about 3 weeks behind on posting pictures, soI’ll be uploading them in the morning!
It’s been really cold this month so far with only 1 decent week to be had over 20C. There are tons and tons of green tomatoes maturing in all 3 gardens, and only a few starting to change to their mature colours. I’d've expected by now that I’d be swimming in ripe tomatoes but that is -so- not the case. I can only hope now they will all ripen before the first frosts coming in september. Our average first frost around here is Sept. 7th, so I may have to look into covering the plants for protection.
I know for sure my gourd plant will not have the fruits ripen in time, so I’ll leave it outside as long as I can and then bring it in the house under grow lights to mature the gourds. If all goes well with that, I intend to cure the gourds and make them into Shekeres, an African percussion instrument. Any extras I make will be for sale.
Ok so here’s the garden roundup report!
Front Yard: the landlord’s groundskeeper nipped off one of the growing tips of one of the cucumber plants with the lawnmower. God help that person if I find them, they are going to get a strip taken out of them for pushing the mower so close to the plants, and for mowing right after we’d put fertiliser on the lawn as the little pellets got flung everywhere! How frustrating!
Anyway, the cucumbers are starting to produce, the White ones are a bit behind the ones that were started in the house surprisingly enough. And even more surprising I’ve had 2 long green cukes off the one from in the house. There are plenty of flowers on the white ones indeed and I’ve cut several cukes from them on sunday for pickling.
Tomatoes: one of the branches on the right-hand Tiny Tim plant fell over and snapped since the fruit got too heavy and I didn’t catch it in time. I had to cut that branch off and took it inside and hung it upside down to attempt to ripen it as much as possible. If they stay green, i’ll fry up some mini fried green tomatoes. Otherwise the Tiny Tim plants are -really- loaded with fruit. I am very impressed at how well they do for a compact plant. My plants grew to about 2 feet tall and about 1.5 feet wide.
The Bush beefsteak tomatoes in the corner of the yard are producing as well. These are interesting because of the confined space I put them into and the 3 plants to a big pot. They seem to need more fertiliser than the other pots largely due to there being 3 plants in there. I will be measuring the harvested fruit and counting how many each produces. the foliage has adapted to the small space and appears pretty compact. The other pot of tomatoes with the yellow ones and the christmas grape are also doing well and have each set several trusses of fruit though the christmas grape has set fewer trusses. I have topped each of these vine plants and continue to prune the suckers to encourage the plant to develop the trusses it has and the remaining flowers.
The spices are doing great and I will harvest them at the end of the season, dry them and generally measure their output. I didn’t thin them at all so there’s lots of short plants. I will try growing some in individual pots to see how large the plants really can get.
Millwoods garden: We harvested all the beets since there seems to be a slug infestation going on eating them up. I also pulled the parmex carrots and silverskin pearl onions. the beans are still producing though we’ve gotten most of them picked now so I think the plants are starting to wind down as are the peas. the peppers here are really only just getting going now with tiny peppers visible. The tomatoes on the plot all have green tomatoes and some are showing signs of changing to their mature colour now too. The holy mole pepper plant has a few large peppers on it that are almost ripe and a neat chocolate brown in colour.
The zucchinis are coming along and producing zucchini, I am harvesting at least 1-2 per week. The plants were not planted all at the same time, so the smaller ones have begun to produce yet. The real impressive plant in the garden this year are the pumpkin plants. we have about 8 or so very nice looking pumpkins hanging on the trellis. The only thing to mar it is that i discovered what looks like powdery mildew on one of the leaves. I cut that leaf off and got rid of it but i don’t think that really got rid of the issue as it has been so wet and cool recently.
The cucumbers in this plot are starting to come along as well and I have harvested a few. the parsnips are looking great and I hope they yield a decent crop.
Camrose Garden: It’s a jungle out there! The squash plants are doing their best to overtake all the space around them and above them!. They have taken over the pathway between them and the peppers completely. Now I know which plants need 3′sq to exist and which ones are going to travel all around. There are about 10-12 pumpkins I think that I counted, and numerous white and yellow spaghetti and winter squash as well. The tomatoes are all doing well and only just starting to get a few change colour. I picked almost all the beets and thinned the carrots. the peas and beans are still producing, and the cucumbers are going crazy now as is the Zucchini plant. Even the sunflowers have finally developed heads and will bloom soon. The corn we thought would be ripe by now, but it isn’t yet after testing it. The strawberries are sending out runners and rooting well next to the parsnips.
Anyway, more later in the form of current pictures I took that still need to be uploaded to the blog!
The Camrose garden has produced 4 spaghetti squash now and a zucchini! They are growing very fast. there are little pumpkins doing well hanging from the pumpkin trellises too. They have grown so fast they have shaded out the watermelon, but I’ll know better for spacing next time around that the watermelon needs to go in front.
This past week has been very busy away from the gardens with visits every 3 days or so for watering and harvesting. The peas and beans are ready and being picked and the zuchini plants in both gardens are producing. So far the white zucchini plants have produced the fastest. The cucumbers are all begin to really come along and we have many green tomatoes everywhere. I’ve harvested on monday the parmex ball carrots from the Camrose garden and about 1/2 of the beets.
I’m definitely going to make more seed tape to control spacing better for the next round of plantings. I might be able to get in one more fast crop if I seed in the next couple of days. The Camrose garden produced a single head of romaine lettuce and the germination rate on that packet of seeds was awful!
I’m pretty glad I put the landscape fabric down in the millwoods garden so weeding is a non-existent thing just about (except in the pathways) since I managed to get my foot broken on a rafting trip over the weekend. It’s definitely hampering my mobility! I’ll have some new pictures up later on today of all 3 of the gardens. It’s nice to see them going full steam ahead now.
