April 23, 2011
This past week I have been really busy in the garden and I am experimenting and playing with ideas and observing. After all I do come from a lan background in another life. My little plants seem to have plenty of water and the weeds and grass are very minimal but they look a little pale. I started a bio-brew Monday with what I had, which was not what the recipe called for but you do what you do with what you have, right? I also made some homemade fertilizer from horse compost, chicken manure, woodash and worm castings.
For the bio-brew compost tea: I put chicken manure that was mostly sand, worm castings, horse manure and some karo syrup (really didn’t want to do this but it was all I had, I have a huge problem with high fructose corn syrup) into a 30 gallon drum and set up my fish aquarium pump to make it aerobic.
On Tuesday morning after 24 hours, I had some serious action going on so I feel it must have done what I set out to do. I decided to test a few areas. First I used the sludge to put around some cucumber plants. Then I diluted it more than half, screened out the big stuff and hay with cheese cloth and put the liquid tea on a few rows. Yesterday Noah and I had a long discussion about checking the nitrogen with the capsule test kits before I did this but I did it anyway.
Soil is the most important factor in permaculture. If you have used conventional gardening practice for years and it was passed down to you by your family, it can be hard to change the way or find a reason to change your gardening practices. This is one reason I am doing this all as a test project. In theory it makes sense to amend our garden soil.
Our soil is mostly sand, but since the garden area is only four years old you would think it would have retained some of it’s goody, but to look at the soil it appears to be dry and lacking life. My hopes are to only use organic materials and hope for nature to give it her best, but when you look at your neighbors garden, that is plowing and tilling the soils 3 to 4 times a year, pouring fertilizer and spraying gallons of water into his lush green plants thriving and flowering. It does make you ask what are you working your ass off for? With my projects, I intent not to produce commercial grade vegetables that you see in the grocery store, but I will feel better that me family and I am are not ingesting chemicals or dumping them into my water source or saturating the ground with pesticides and herbicides.
Today we harvested honey from our hives. We took 13 frames that were full of capped off honey to our neighbor, David that has an extractor. The honey was rich and sweet, early spring wild flowers give us a light honey. We got almost 4 gallons from the 13 frames. I got stung while I was scraping off the caps, only the second time I have been stung in the three years since we have kept bees and it just a small nip, didn’t even swell.
Leslie and Summer, our daughter and granddaughter sat in the screen house as we extracted and strained the honey an took photos.
Yep that is me scraping frames Noah and David spinning the frames in the extractor.
This past week I have been really busy in the garden and I am experimenting and playing with ideas and observing. After all I do come from a lan background in another life. My little plants seem to have plenty of water and the weeds and grass are very minimal but they look a little pale. I started a bio-brew Monday with what I had, which was not what the recipe called for but you do what you do with what you have, right? I also made some homemade fertilizer from horse compost, chicken manure, woodash and worm castings.
For the bio-brew compost tea: I put chicken manure that was mostly sand, worm castings, horse manure and some karo syrup (really didn’t want to do this but it was all I had, I have a huge problem with high fructose corn syrup) into a 30 gallon drum and set up my fish aquarium pump to make it aerobic.
On Tuesday morning after 24 hours, I had some serious action going on so I feel it must have done what I set out to do. I decided to test a few areas. First I used the sludge to put around some cucumber plants. Then I diluted it more than half, screened out the big stuff and hay with cheese cloth and put the liquid tea on a few rows. Yesterday Noah and I had a long discussion about checking the nitrogen with the capsule test kits before I did this but I did it anyway.
Soil is the most important factor in permaculture. If you have used conventional gardening practice for years and it was passed down to you by your family, it can be hard to change the way or find a reason to change your gardening practices. This is one reason I am doing this all as a test project. In theory it makes sense to amend our garden soil.
Our soil is mostly sand, but since the garden area is only four years old you would think it would have retained some of it’s goody, but to look at the soil it appears to be dry and lacking life. My hopes are to only use organic materials and hope for nature to give it her best, but when you look at your neighbors garden, that is plowing and tilling the soils 3 to 4 times a year, pouring fertilizer and spraying gallons of water into his lush green plants thriving and flowering. It does make you ask what are you working your ass off for? With my projects, I intent not to produce commercial grade vegetables that you see in the grocery store, but I will feel better that me family and I am are not ingesting chemicals or dumping them into my water source or saturating the ground with pesticides and herbicides.
Today we harvested honey from our hives. We took 13 frames that were full of capped off honey to our neighbor, David that has an extractor. The honey was rich and sweet, early spring wild flowers give us a light honey. We got almost 4 gallons from the 13 frames. I got stung while I was scraping off the caps, only the second time I have been stung in the three years since we have kept bees and it just a small nip, didn’t even swell.
Leslie and Summer, our daughter and granddaughter sat in the screen house as we extracted and strained the honey an took photos.
Yep that is me scraping frames Noah and David spinning the frames in the extractor.
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