Modern Geekery

Last year, I decided to plant fruit trees. Most folks would have chosen a nice dwarf apple and called that done. I wanted something a little bit different. After all, there are a ton of apple orchards in the area and we’re no strangers to them. One of the most delightful fruits that I’ve ever encountered happens to be one that is native to this area – the pawpaw. They’re like a tropical fruit that grows in a temperate climate. The better ones are large, custardy, and delicious, while the wild ones are highly variant in quality. None of them survive handling very well, which is why its next to impossible to find them commercially, unless you happen to be lucky enough to live near a farmers market graced by someone with a few pawpaw trees. The pawpaw is enjoying something of a renaissance, with a research program active at Kentucky State and several growers associations. After reading up on the fruit, I decided to try growing them.

Continue reading ‘Digging holes’ »

I’ve started digging the holes for my pawpaw trees. On the first hole, I got down maybe 4-5 inches before I hit asphalt. Yes, asphalt. I continued to dig, and eventually excavated an asphalt covered block of concrete and brick about 12″ x 8″ x 6″. My only guess is that it was a fragment of the house’s old driveway, before they upgraded the sewer line. I also dug out corroborating evidence in the form of about 3 linear feet of terra cotta pipe, in pieces. I also dug out the better part of a piece of automotive glass that was amazingly whole – at least until I hit it with the mattock – and several old shingles. Apparently, the previous owners of the house used the the back corner of the lot as a junkpile. Fabulous.

I called around yesterday to see if any place in the area had an auger that I could use when the fruit trees arrive. While I still have a vague sense that using a mechanical tool to dig the holes for the trees is somehow cheating, I’ve worn myself out two weekends in a row now trying to dig out the privet stumps that dot the area in which I want to plant. The auger rental is not terribly expensive – 75$ for the weekend – and the time saved may well be worth it.

That all aside, Elder Daughter and I had a good afternoon working in the garden. We extended the garden bed by another foot in width (east-west) and about 4 feet in length. This involved digging up and transplanting the grass, adding about a 40 lbs of mushroom compost, and then covering it over with a tarp to kill the remain grass and weeds. Then, we worked another scant 40 lbs of compost into half of the original garden bed and planted a row of radishes and a row of kohlrabi. We also mixed up compost and a little potting soil and filled several cell trays. In those, we planted more kohlrabi and radishes, to transplant into the new area of the bed later, and some of our flowers – zinnias, purple coneflower and statice. We also planted two different varieties of sunflowers into peat cups, since sunflowers don’t transplant so well. The cell trays went under the new cold frame, since its a bit early for all but the radishes and kohlrabi.

Once we got all the bed preparation and planting done, Elder Daughter played in the sandbox and around in the backyard while I dug out two more stumps. What I didn’t get done was sheet mulching the area in the west side yard that will become the flower bed. There’ll be time for that later.

Technorati Tags: garden

This year, I decided to build a cold frame to start seedlings in, considering the havoc that last year’s April freeze wrought. After checking out designs and plans across the ‘net, I decided that most people were way more ambitious than I was. I saw designs with storm windows built in and automatic louver adjusters connected to thermostats and more.

I decided that simple was best. I went down to the lumber yard and got 4 equally sized pieces of 1×8s – each piece is a hair under 4′. Then, I stopped by Lowes and bought a $2 polyethylene drop cloth, 1 mil thickness. Then, with Meg’s help, I used wood screws to fashion the frame and sealed it using a water-borne acrylic coating. At this point, the frame looked like this:

I let this dry and then used a staple gun to attach two layers of the plastic sheeting. I figured that by doubling it over, I could create a warm pocket of air between the layers that would provide good insulation for the plants beneath. The sheeting was pretty fragile to the staples, so I wound up having to roll up the edges of the polyethylene to get enough material to fasten. That seemed to work pretty well, though, and the result is this:

Now, I need to measure how much heat I can trap underneath it. I’ll borrow a thermocouple from work one day after it gets cooler and measure how warm it gets under there at the end of the day. With any luck, it’ll trap enough heat to keep the germinating seeds happy during the early spring chill.

Update: I added some corner supports to the frame. While I was going for the “cheap, simple hack” version, without the corner supports, it was hard to lug about. See this post for details.