Port Potager

We've been enjoying a very mild weekend, and since we tapped our maple on Tuesday, we've collected three five-gallon buckets of sap. That means it's time to break into our wood pile and get cracking on boiling for the year: We decided to go all-in on a real woodpile this year, instead of cobbling together donations and those expensive packages of firewood from the grocery store.  What a difference a year makes in our sap storage facilities, though: Ordinarily we keep the sap buckets packed in a snow bank to keep it cold, but that isn't an option this spring. Almost every bit of snow has melted already! We didn't have much to begin with, and what we did have got washed away in the rain and melted by the nearly 60-degree day we had on Saturday. These are in the shadiest corner (note yet another broken fence section in view — even when winter doesn't deliver in snow, there's always plenty of wind ). Once we set up the maple sugaring...

It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...

If you're not interested in dirt, this might not be the blog post for you. But if you are, you might be interested in our fine-tuned chicken tractoring process. First, our fall-planted cover crop is winter rye: This is probably a much tougher cover crop than we needed in our raised beds, which don't face much of an erosion threat. I chose it mainly because we planted it pretty late and it was sure to germinate even in colder temperatures. Next year we will probably choose something with a much lighter root system so it will be easier to turn.  With the snow we've had, there are some intermediate steps about shoveling off beds to let the sun melt the rest of the snow and dry out the soil so the chickens aren't mired in mud, but in general the next step is to get the chickens on the rye grass in their portable run : Our chicken tractor is about four feet wide by eight feet long, and with four chickens in it for the day, we've discovered it take...

Over the weekend, we put a tunnel over half of our asparagus bed: To do this, Kirk hammered a stake into the dirt first to make some guide holes for the PVC. We don't normally need to do that, but this early in the season the dirt isn't thoroughly warmed and soft. The idea here is that the heat that is strapped under the plastic will trick our asparagus into coming up earlier than it normally would. This will hopefully extend our harvest by a few weeks, and we'll still have the other half of the asparagus coming up at its natural time.  Good thing we got that in place, because we are suffering all kinds of soil setbacks, with yet another day of snow yesterday. Here's what it looks like today: So at least half of our asparagus bed is protected and warming on this, the official first day of spring. As you can see in the photo above, we had to shovel snow off of the raised bed in the foreground. We didn't do that for the whole garden, but we did t...

Back in the fall we sowed some winter rye  as a cover crop in many of our raised beds. When we finally got around to making our planting plans for 2013 , we realized that we had some winter rye in a bed that we were hoping to get a very early start on — sowing salad greens the weekend of March 2. That's next weekend! It all seemed very doable back in January when it was kind of warm, and when our memories of winter were informed by days like this  from the warmest winter on record. But then it got really, really cold, and the ground froze solid.  That was a problem, because part of dealing with a cover crop is turning it back into the soil, preferably 3-4 weeks before you plan to plant anything in that soil. That leaves time for the cover crop to decompose and for the roots to dry out, as they are exposed to the air when you turn the soil. We had already gotten a jump on killing the green part of the rye grass by letting the chickens eat it all , but there was...

Last time I wrote about Abigail, she was quarantined in the workshop  with a taped up foot: Not a bad place to be during the blizzard , since the workshop is (minimally) heated, and she had a ton of space to herself. We just used the portable chicken run we built for turning rye grass, and made sure she had food and water. She slept in a clean corner and even was laying eggs (although that slowed down, since she's subjected to the limited natural daylight of February, whereas the henhouse has a light on a timer to simulate more spring-like conditions). Anyway, for a week or so Abigail got daily attention with her bandage (which we stopped using after a couple days) and daily applications of Silvadene cream  to keep her foot from getting infected while it healed over. That stuff is a fairly expensive prescription item, but it worked really well. I also made sure she had lots of protein and calcium to help her heal:  This is a scrambled eggs with...

This weekend was a classic January Thaw, and that gave us an opportunity to build a portable run for the chickens. Lots of people build all kinds of fancy-schmancy ones  like chicken tractors with wheels and nice paint jobs and stuff, but we already have a pretty chic (and ridiculously well-built) primary residence for our birds, so all we needed was a summer camp. So Kirk took a Christmas gift card to the hardware store and got us some Christmas 2x4s that he ripped in half and used to knock together this frame: As you can see, it is designed to fit right inside our raised beds (that is, just shy of four feet wide). It's two feet high, which is tall enough for chickens, but short enough to use two-foot wide chicken wire around the sides. It's eight feet long, which is the length of lumber that fits inside a Ford Focus.  After building the frame yesterday, we realized we needed a door to get the chickens in and out, so Kirk added a little bit of framing f...