Garden Prep and Seedling Transplant 2012

What a good week it's been, with a focus on seed planting and transplanting those started Feb 14. How quickly they mature.

We're planting every way possible this year. Up on the roof in the unheated greenhouse, I winter sowed some cress, tatsoi, and parlsey...and some Amish snap peas from Seed Savers Exchange. The greenhouse hits 80 when the sun is out, but otherwise it's cold.

See the peas starting to pop?

(yeah I know it's a rotten photo, but thrilling nonetheless)

A good February chore: cleaning the fabric tapes we now use in our SIPs to wick up water from the reservoir. First I brush off the dried roots and potting mix, then into the laundry with soap and vinegar.

The agretti germinated near 100% in a homemade portable microgarden sitting on a low-heat mat, which Art picked up for nada at a resale shop.

This week I started fennel, leeks, and chives in two portable microgardens, covered each with a produce bag, and nestled them together, vying for space with the agretti on the warm mat. At Root Simple, Nance Klehm shows an easy recipe for making coconut coir seed-starting mix.

Then it was over to Bruce's, where the seeds we planted Feb 14 were ready for transplanting. He's been tending and befriending them on his grow stand (shop lights+shelves).

I used screened compost to fill small recycled spinach containers (at right, with holes melted in the bottom for drainage courtesy of the ever-useful soldering iron) and pot up those fragile greens, which will buck up under Bruce's lights and be ready for hardening off in the next couple weeks. Then they'll go out into the cool spring air they love.

 This lacinato kale seed (Wild Garden Seed)

is from 2009, but germinated like a champ

Carl kept me going

with many kisses

I can tell I'm going to like this tronchuda cabbage (Bountiful Gardens)

Ready for transplanting:
Aztec spinach and the lovely chards, erbette and ruby red

Who started all these seeds!

Two Things You Can Do Every Day to Save the Planet

Fear and ignorance.

As the man says, those are the only things preventing you from doing this.

Originally, Nick wanted to do this talk on straight-up permaculture. But then he started thinking — what is the most pertinent metaphor for permaculture, the most glaring example of the problem being the solution? And he just couldn’t go past our most basic nutrient cycle.

When we first moved to Milkwood, we had to quickly make a choice of how to deal with our shit. We’d just read The Humanure Handbook, so the choice was pretty easy — to create a simple DIY composting toilet system.

So why are we still stuck in an archaic view that these nutrients cannot be the best thing ever for our trees, for our garden, when managed properly? Why do we persist with the idea that if it’s shit, then it will forever stink? Functional natural systems just don’t work like that.

Like anything, compost toilet systems can be done very well, and they can also be done extremely badly. Knowledge is the main barrier here. But guess what? We have the knowledge! It’s there! It’s been done! We’ve been making great compost with manure of many types for as long as we’ve been farming!

It seems entirely nutty to me that we as a society would choose to pump all this nutrient out to sea instead, where it does nobody any good, and many people and other organisms quite a bit of harm.

And then we instead manufacture, at great expense and with massive carbon emissions, our fertilizer, before trucking it all over the country and sending farmers broke with input costs while depleting our soils. When the best darn stuff is right here. Like right here.

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DeAnander, writing at Feral Scholar, has a nice introduction to the subject.

It might be the ultimate kapu. After all, everything from child molestation to necrophilia to bestiality to gang rape is now routine fare in online porn, and anyone who’s genuinely upset by that may commonly be mocked as an old-fashioned “prude”; but most Americans are still deeply shocked/upset by the idea of a composting toilet. In many municipalities you can’t get a permit for one — i.e. it’s illegal to operate one. In other countries however, such as forward-looking Sweden, the popular composting toilet called “Biolet” is being adopted by entire small towns/villages.

The association between flush toilets and Modernity, Sanitation, and Progress (not to mention class and race superiority) is very strong in Gringolandia. The “outhouse” and other non-flushing toilet concepts are a mark of the despised rural life for which urbanites often have a cringeing biophobic contempt (ironically, but perhaps inevitably, coexisting with a saccharine faux-nostalgia expressed in kitsch art); and they are a mark of third world poverty and “primitive” conditions. Flush toilets are right up there with SUVs on the list of “things those goddamn Greenies want to pry from our cold, dead hands” in the fulminations of online anti-environmentalist or cornucopian cranks. It is an outrage — nearly a heresy — to suggest that the flush toilet might not be such a cool idea after all.

Even those whose biophobia can be somewhat separated from their class, race, and national ego-extensions often remain convinced that human waste [I'll come back to that term later, to challenge it and the assumptions behind it] management is a highly technical problem which can only be solved by expert technomanagerial cadres and heavy technology — i.e. the way we’ve been doing it since the industrial revolution. Any less “scientific” and technocratic approach will, they fear, lead inevitably to outbreaks of cholera and parasitical infestation (conditions observed by Europeans among the poor of their own and other countries and “solved” by the introduction of centralised industrial sanitation). Basically, it’s caca and it’s dirty and we mustn’t touch it, that is a job for the Authorities; don’t try this at home, kids! Highly neurotoxic pesticides are available over the counter, for us to spray freely around our yards (and contaminate other people’s), cleaning supplies that mix into lethal chemical cocktails are readily purchasable without ID or age check, but we can’t be trusted to deal with our own — er — shit.

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After reading Joseph Jenkins' Humanure book (free online), and with the encouragement of our friend Nance Klehm, I've been "recycling" my "waste" since last summer.  Located in an inner city neighborhood, my humanure compost pile is five feet from a relatively busy sidewalk.  No smell, flies, rats, or complaints.

Talking about it on our blog is my way of encouraging others to give it a shot.

Just do it!

Healthy Hives for 2012

What a sight! The bees were absolutely crazy this morning, Feb 29 2012.  It's nearly 60 degrees F in Chicago before 9 am...spooky if you ask me. But we're delighted both hives look so robust.

ps: for new readers, the images in this vid come from the downstairs monitors, wired into our two hives on the roof. We hope to have a live beecam this spring.

My 80 pound lapdog, Carl

At 15 months, I'm not sure if he's done growing.

Thanks for taking the pictures H2.

Carl and the Hens...Fat Tuesday Edition

When you're in the coop offering the hens fruit and veg tailings, remember Carl likes his greenies too...

How to Plant Onions

Some tips on planting onions...

Seed Starting: Agretti and Onion Update

 

 

Here's a close up of Agretti seedlings just a few days old. They look like mini serpents! H2 grew her's in a cute mini travel SIP.

 

Planted in the soil they start to take on a new form.

 

The onions are coming along; they pop out of the soil folded in half then straighten up. 

Next seed starting project is winter sowing!