Modern Geekery

Somewhat belatedly, I got the last of the summer crops in and planted the last of my fall crops. My four basil plants, which never really flourished, got snipped, and the leaves are even now sitting in my dessicator on their way to being dried basil. In the past, we’ve had an annual pesto making party, but this year there wasn’t really enough basil to make pesto. I also pulled the last two fennel bulbs and now have two bags in the fridge – one for the bulbs and one for the foliage.

Just like the beds I planted earlier with fall mustard greens and sugar snaps, I went through where the fennel, basil and tomatoes were and dug the bed. In a slacker version of John Jeavons’ recommendation, I simply went along with a spade and loosened the top 20 cm or so of soil. Jeavons would have recommended pulling that dirt out, then using a broadfork to loosen the subsoil. I didn’t have time for that, so I didn’t go to that length. Since I still have very little topsoil, most of what I loosened up was huge chunks of clay. I added about a centimeter or two of compost, most of which came from my own compost bin, and mixed that into the top layers of soil as I broke up the giant clods of clay. Once I got that done, I inoculated an envelope of fava beans and planted them in the loosened bed. I’m still of two minds about the favas. Half of me wants to till them under in the early spring to add organic matter to the soil on top of the nitrogen they will be fixing all winter and the other half wants to have fresh favas in the spring. No need to make a decision at this point, though.

My peppers are producing like mad, and I still have blossoms. M. and I harvested three gorgeous Nardello peppers on Friday, one of which we ate on the way back to the house, another wound up in a breakfast omelet and the last wound up in a veggie quesadilla along with some fresh shiitakes from my CSA share. The Cuban peppers are putting out another flush right now, which should be ready in a week or so, and my red bell peppers are a few days from being picked. Identical plants that I gave to my back door neighbor have been producing like crazy for the past two weeks, so I’m taking that as a sign that my soil is a bit tapped out right now.

HeavyPetal has a quick HOWTO on plugging shiitake logs. Her version includes the cheese wax step, with picture, which I didn’t bother with, so I highly recommend checking her post out. My guide to plugging a shiitake log is, of course, here.

Last year, I had to have a dying hickory in my yard cut down. While I paid to have most of the trunk hauled off, I still have a pile of the limb wood. I had decided a while back that I would plug these logs with shiitake spawn and make shiitake logs. Its best to do the plugging after the last hard frost, so I waited until yesterday to do the work.

I ordered my plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti, a neat company near Olympia, WA. They’ve got spawn for lots of different strains of mushrooms, but I love shiitakes and shiitakes love hardwoods. The spawn arrive in a little bag like the picture on the right. The spawn themselves are small dowels, about 1.5″ long, with a spiral groove cut into the side. You can clearly see the white mycelia from the shiitake in the groove. There is also some grain in the bag as well, which I surmise are how the dowels were inoculated.

I had ordered my spawn about a month ago, so by the time I pulled the bag out, there was plenty of mycelial growth in the bag, which you can see in the picture on the left as the white matting around the dowels. According to the instructions, this is normal and probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d used the spawn more quickly. Fortunately, no mushrooms had begun to bud, so I didn’t have to pull those off.

Continue reading ‘Shiitake logs’ »

After a a couple of months of moving the cold frame around, the structure had gotten a little less than sturdy. When I started putting it together, I figured that this would be the failure mode, since without corner supports, only the thickness of the wood would support the screws holding it together. I’d been looking for some untreated 2×4 or 4×4 scrap for a while to make the reinforcements, in keeping with my theme of “cold frame on the cheap,” but I finally broke down and bought an untreated 2×4. ($2.70 at Lowes.) Cutting the appropriate length pieces from it, I took the frame apart and reattached them properly to the supports.

And just in time too, since its supposed to be right at freezing tonight and tomorrow night.

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.

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.