The baptisia in full bloom attracts hummingbirds an butterflies.
It’s January now and all the highs and lows of the 2019 summer season are having their sharp edges whittled away by time. We’ve seen snow, a melt, more snow and yet another mild spell in the last six weeks. Our lifestyle orbits around heating with wood, winter chicken chores and keeping the lane snow-free.
It wasn’t that long ago that the meadow was lusciously green and we were harvesting armloads of veggies for the farmers’ market. Looking back through our photos twigs my memory of the past season. Here’s a short and sweet list of three things that stood out.
Dusk in the onion patch mid-July. The no-till beds are working well.
Best Move: Converting the Market Garden to No-Till
Over the past few years we’ve worked to reduce our tillage in the gardens. Exposure to a series of books, articles and podcasts convinced us that a no-till/no-dig system would really benefit us and our shallow, heavy clay soil. Continue reading “Reflecting on Summer 2019”
“It’ll take twice as long, and be twice as expensive.”
This is a frequently heard adage when you reveal a dream to build any structure bigger than a chicken coop. And the last chicken coop we built proves that such adages can overestimate a builder’s skillset and underestimate their budget. Having built five structures with footprints ranging from 70 to 2070 square feet, we should’ve known better.
Many hours from March to May were spent getting the arches and bases assembled
But we didn’t. By buying a kit for a greenhouse made by someone else, we assumed that the building process would be more like raising a tent than raising a barn. The truth lies somewhere in between. I spent days drilling over 1000 holes in wood and metal. I spent some sleep-deprived nights dreaming up solutions to seemingly intractable problems that apparently few people in the greenhouse world had pondered before. And I spent all my spare time from March to May constructing framing and preparing for the Big Day. The Big Day would be the day when we would sheathe the greenhouse in a protective skin of plastic.
I assumed that because I had spent so much money and time and brainpower to that point, all we needed was a hired hand, our family, and a calm day to slip the gigantic pieces of cling-wrap over the metal frame. We waited for the right day. We assembled the family and hired our friend Mark. We called our friend’s the DeJongs just in case, because they had shown interest in helping out.
Getting the plastic over the arches required fastening a golfball to one edge and throwing it over the top. It took several tries…
I thought we might be done by noon. When Brian and his daughters showed up late in the morning, we were far from done. When Brian’s wife Anita showed up in the afternoon, we were far from done. But the wind was picking up, tempting our huge plastic pieces to channel their inner kite-ness. Despite my planning and our hard work, without the DeJong’s, the plastic still might not be on the greenhouse.
Putting the plastic on the hoop house was a huge undertaking.
Everyone had a job, but only one person was paid. Friends like me sometimes cost other people money. Others like the DeJong’s are priceless.
